Fairly unbalanced

Al Franken is taking Fox's howlingly frivolous lawsuit in stride:

"I normally prefer not to be out of the country on vacation when I'm sued. However, from everything I know about law regarding satire, I'm not worried," Franken, who has not filed a response in court, said in a statement released Tuesday. He is vacationing in Italy.

...

In its court papers, Fox described the author and liberal commentator as "neither a journalist nor a television news personality. He is not a well-respected voice in American politics; rather, he appears to be shrill and unstable. His views lack any serious depth or insight."

Fox alleged that Franken was "either intoxicated or deranged" when he attacked the network and conservative host Bill O'Reilly at an April press correspondents dinner. The lawsuit also says that Franken has been described as "increasingly unfunny."

"As far as the personal attacks go," Franken responded, "when I read 'intoxicated or deranged' and 'shrill and unstable' in their complaint, I thought for a moment I was a Fox commentator.

"And by the way, a few months ago, I trademarked the word 'funny.' So when Fox calls me 'unfunny,' they're violating my trademark. I am seriously considering a countersuit."

Oh, I'm sure Al Franken is increasingly unfunny to the liars, half-wits and propagandists at Fox. I think half the world saw that look on Bill O'Reilly's face after Franken was done humiliating him at the press luncheon. Nor will we soon forget his witty rejoinder: "Shut up!!!!"

Character counts

Bob Somerby at the incomparable Daily Howler points up this bizarre tidbit from Chris Mathews on MSNBC's Hardball:

MATTHEWS: Talk to me, both of you, about the psychology of the Democratic Party which I find very depressing. If George W. Bush—let’s be honest about this. Everybody watching, conservative, middle-of-the-road, or liberal—if the George W. Bush had won the popular vote by 600,000 votes in the last election, and somehow didn’t manage to become president because he didn’t win the electoral college, fair or not, he would have walked around the country in Texas as some sort of stud. He would have been the stud duck of the country. Everybody would have looked up to him and applauded wherever he went. He would have been the guy who got the most votes. Al Gore looks and acts like a guy who really, really did lose. He really did lose. And why is that? Because you know that Bush would have loved it. Bush would have had the most votes. He would have said, sure the guy gets the job, but I am the most popular guy in the country. Why is that?

Well, gosh, Chris -- maybe it's because some people were saying this just before the election:

Al Gore, knowing him as we do, may have no problem taking the presidential oath after losing the popular vote to George W. Bush. He's lost popularity contests before. But how will the country take it?

How will a populace already turned off to politics react to the news that the guy who's gotten the most votes isn't getting the job?

Of course, it was being widely speculated then that Bush might win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College. This had the conservative press corps in a tizzy, as in this story in the Washington Times :

Vice President Al Gore's strategy to go after states rich with electoral votes raises a remote possibility that has not occurred in presidential politics since 1888.

There is a chance he could capture 270 electoral votes and win the presidency even if he loses the popular vote to Texas Gov. George W. Bush....

Mrs. Jeffe, the analyst from California...says a split decision between the popular vote and the electoral vote would make it hard for the next president to lead.

A presidential election "is about credibility — it's about legitimacy," she said. "It's not about words on paper."

Do you suppose the Times raised that concern after the actual outcome? Of course not.

That was just the start of it. Some of you may recall that in fact Team Bush had a plan in hand for the eventuality of a Gore Electoral College win. From Michael Kramer's column in the New York Daily News, Nov. 1, 2000:

Bush Set to Fight An Electoral College Loss [sample page only]

They're not only thinking the unthinkable, they're planning for it.

Quietly, some of George W. Bush's advisers are preparing for the ultimate "what if" scenario: What happens if Bush wins the popular vote for President, but loses the White House because Al Gore's won the majority of electoral votes?...

"The one thing we don't do is roll over," says a Bush aide. "We fight."

How? The core of the emerging Bush strategy assumes a popular uprising, stoked by the Bushies themselves, of course.

In league with the campaign — which is preparing talking points about the Electoral College's essential unfairness — a massive talk-radio operation would be encouraged. "We'd have ads, too," says a Bush aide, "and I think you can count on the media to fuel the thing big-time. Even papers that supported Gore might turn against him because the will of the people will have been thwarted."

Local business leaders will be urged to lobby their customers, the clergy will be asked to speak up for the popular will and Team Bush will enlist as many Democrats as possible to scream as loud as they can. "You think 'Democrats for Democracy' would be a catchy term for them?" asks a Bush adviser....

And what would happen if the "what if" scenario came out the other way? "Then we'd be doing the same thing Bush is apparently getting ready for," says a Gore campaign official. "They're just further along in their contingency thinking than we are. But we wouldn't lie down without a fight, either."

In retrospect, obviously, the Gore campaign did not conduct a campaign of subversion against Bush's legitimacy, as Bush planned to wage against Gore were the tables reversed. Oddly enough, no one in the press was bright enough to observe that. Nor did anyone at the time wonder what such plans suggested about the nature of Bush's character -- particularly his utter ruthlessness even at the cost of basic democratic principles. However, one certainly can easily imagine the sustained howls of outrage about his base character that would have arisen had Gore even breathed word he was considering such a strategy.

By the time we made it through the subsequent Florida Debacle, in which the scenario posed by the pundits was turned on its head, the public no longer had to speculate about the character of the respective candidates. It became clear then (as it has remained ever afterward) that Gail Sheehy already had nailed down George W. Bush's character in her incisive Vanity Fair piece, "The Accidental Candidate":

Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn't lose. He'll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him. "If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15," says [Doug] Hannah, now a Dallas insurance executive. "If he wasn't winning, he would quit. He would just walk off.... It's what we called Bush Effort: If I don't like the game, I take my ball and go home. Very few people can get away with that."

Indeed, one wonders where Chris Mathews was during the Florida Debacle, and the week after, when it became painfully apparent that George W. Bush was more than happy to steal away the presidency by eking out just enough Electoral College votes (through, of course, highly questionable means) in spite of Al Gore's wide-margin victory in the popular vote.

Oh, that's right -- he was still busy questioning Al Gore's character.

It continues even to this day, including this latest diatribe. What has become painfully clear is that for no one in the Washington press corps do George W. Bush's absolute ruthlessness and his unwillingness to win or lose by the rules of the game raise a character question. Instead, they look at the guy, Al Gore, who has made abundantly clear his willingness to abide by the rules, to play fairly and squarely at every turn, and deride him for his wimpiness in comparison.

This is a serious pathology in journalism.

Faith-based incompetence

Via Atrios I see that Jack Van Impe's office is referring to Condoleeza Rice as a "faith-based leader."

Gosh, that would explain why Rice didn't bother to read the entire 90-page National Intelligence Estimate that laid out the assessment of intelligence about Iraq (and included information that undermined the president's public case for war). She just had faith that they were right!

Rush, Newspeak and Fascism

[Parts I and II. See explanatory note.]

III: The Core of Fascism

One of the problems with the easy bandying of the term "fascist" nowadays is that, by being loosely attached to figures who are only conservative -- including people like Rush Limbaugh and George W. Bush -- it obscures the actual mechanism by which genuine fascism manifests itself. It also lends itself to a hysterical assessment when clarity and focus are what's really needed.

Let’s take a hard look today at the actual nature of fascism, by way of understanding not just who really fits the description in today's world, but how much danger to the nation in the post-9/11 environment they actually represent.

As I mentioned, a definition is much easier in the case of communism than it is for fascism. My friend and fellow blogger John McKay points out that the work of defining fascism has spun its own cottage industry of competing models:

Defining Fascism is a very slippery business. I spent most of a graduate seminar a decade ago studying and dissecting this question. There is no agreed upon and authoritative one-sentence definition for Fascism. In fact, fighting over one is a still-healthy cottage industry that provides employment for plenty of historians and political scientists. My own take on it is to emphasize two points that lead to this slipperiness.

The first is a point you already made: Fascism is mostly reactive in nature. It is more defined by what it is against than by what it is. First and foremost, it is anti-liberal. This is not necessarily the same thing as being conservative. We too often define political positions as a scale between two polar opposites, when reality is broader and sloppier than that. So, while Fascism is a thing of the right, it is not just extremism beyond normal conservatism. Next, it is anti-pluralist, which usually means nationalist, racist, and/or unilateralist. Fascists don't like to share.

Second, it is not just one thing. There have been many forms of Fascism. The popular image of Fascism is simply Nazism. Some scholars debate whether Nazism is one variety of Fascism or a separate (though related) phenomenon. I lean toward the variety school. During its heyday in the thirties, there were scores of Fascist parties in over a dozen countries. These evolved from earlier political movements and some survive in successor movements. The use of pronouns like proto-, post-, and neo- helps a little in sorting them out, but only a little. One reason for its persistence is its mutability. Most political societies can produce a fascism.

The first attempts to study fascism were largely conducted from a Marxist point of view, which predictably explained it primarily as a reaction against the "communist revolution." In many ways, that’s what it was -- though of course, it was also a great deal more. Many of these early studies, not surprisingly, reduced fascism to an aggressive form of capitalism. In the years after World War II, when fascism had largely been eradicated as a form of governance, studies of it expanded the definition considerably and created a far more realistic, nuanced and accurate understanding of it.

The bulk of these studies essentially defined it descriptively -- that is, as a series of various traits that were found to be pervasive among fascist systems. (This was the approach Umberto Eco attempted in his "Ur-Fascism" essay.) The best-known and -regarded example of this approach is Stanley Payne’s work, which offers a "typological definition" of fascism:

A. The Fascist Negations:

-- Antiliberalism

-- Anticommunism

-- Anticonservatism (though with the understanding that fascist groups were willing to undertake temporary alliances with groups from any other sector, most commonly with the right)

B. Ideology and Goals:

-- Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state based not merely on traditional principles or models

-- Organization of some new kind of regulated, multiclass, integrated national economic structure, whether called national corporatist, national socialist, or national syndicalist

-- The goal of empire or a radical change in the nation’s relationship with other powers

-- Specific espousal of an idealist, voluntarist creed, normally involving the attempt to realize a new form of modern, self-determined, secular culture

C. Style and Organization:

-- Emphasis on esthetic structure of meetings, symbols, and political choreography, stressing romantic and mystical aspects

-- Attempted mass mobilization with militarization of political relationships and style and with the goal of a mass party militia

-- Positive evaluation and use of, or willingness to use, violence

-- Extreme stress on the masculine principle and male dominance, while espousing the organic view of society
-- Exaltation of youth above other phases of life, emphasizing the conflict of generations, at least in effecting the initial political transformation

-- Specific tendency toward an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of command, whether or not the command is to some degree initially elective

Payne’s approach is useful, in the same way that Eco’s is -- it contains important descriptive information that helps us get a sense of the multifaceted phenomenon that fascism in fact is. (Payne’s typology is also a good deal more systematic and logically coherent than Eco’s.) But these approaches share a similar flaw -- that is, a number of the traits described in these systems also can clearly describe not only communism, which is by its nature the ideological opposite to fascism, as well as other political ideologies. In that sense, it’s clear these traits tend to be endemic to totalitarianism broadly -- they’re going to be woven into what is fascist, but they won’t be unique to it.

Much wrangling has ensued (Payne’s Fascism: Comparison and Definition was published in 1980). The long and short of it is that the consensus (and debate) since the early 1990s has tended to revolve around the work of Oxford professor Roger Griffin, who lectures on the History of Ideas at the school. His 1991 text, The Nature of Fascism, is considered by many to be the definitive work on the subject.

Griffin has essentially managed to boil fascism down to a basic core he calls palingenetic ultranationalist populism. (Palingenesis is the concept of mythic rebirth from the ashes, embodied by the Phoenix.) One of Griffin’s signature essays on fascism opens with this useful definition:

Fascism: modern political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as freedom and individual rights, and often presses for the destruction of elections, legislatures, and other elements of democracy. Despite the idealistic goals of fascism, attempts to build fascist societies have led to wars and persecutions that caused millions of deaths. As a result, fascism is strongly associated with right-wing fanaticism, racism, totalitarianism, and violence.

Griffin, of course, is an academic, but once you wade through the definitions and link it all together, it makes a great deal of sense, and actually provides some sharp definition to an otherwise murky phenomenon. In general, I’ve found all these studies, while often competing in nature, to be useful each unto themselves. (Another text I’ve obtained, an English translation of Harald Ofstad’s Our Contempt for Weakness: Nazi Norms and Values -- and Our Own, which is not generally available, has also proved very insightful and helpful, but it’s hard to recommend since few readers can get it.)

It’s clear that Griffin’s work gives the most concrete handle on fascism as a phenomenon, especially since he manages to drill down to its animating core. For the most part, other approaches to fascism mostly offer useful descriptive traits that clearly complement Griffin’s central concept. What makes Griffin’s argument so compelling is that the tripartite components of Griffin’s core -- palingenesis, ultranationalism and populism -- are nearly unique to fascism and appear mostly secondarily if at all among the other kinds of totalitarianism.

What is particularly useful about Griffin’s model is that it does not, like Payne’s and Eco’s, necessarily draw on the manifestation of a fully matured fascism for its examples. Thus, using these older analyses, we’re inclined to see fascism only as it replicates these older and mature forms. As Pierre-André Taguieff suggests, fascism will not return in a form we can readily recognize.

Griffin recently assessed the potential for a resurgence of fascism in an article in the British antifascist magazine Searchlight titled "Paper tiger or Cheshire cat? A spotter’s guide to fascism in the post-fascist era." He points out that if we look for fascism using the Payne or Marxist models, we’ll mostly be looking for it as a mature phenomenon:

Certainly any definition that stresses the style, policies or organisation of interwar fascist regimes -- the charismatic leader, the uniformed choreography of "aesthetic politics", the territorial expansionism or Kafkaesque agencies of ministerial propaganda and state terror -- makes contemporary fascism dwindle to practically microscopic insignificance.

But …

If fascism is defined in terms of a core ideology of ultra-nationalism that aspires to bring about the renewal of a nation's entire political culture, then the picture changes. The features so firmly associated with it in the popular historical imagination cease to be definitional. Instead they can be seen as external and time-bound manifestations of the central ideological driving force that is its only permanent feature: the war against the decadence of society and the struggle for national rebirth.

If we think of fascism in these terms, a much clearer picture of it emerges. For one thing, we can recognize its antecedents throughout history, while also perceiving how the forces of industrialization and modernization reshape these ancient impulses into the thoroughly modern creature that fascism is. More to the point, we get a much clearer picture of the actual presence of latent fascist forces at work around the world.

Griffin’s definition tends to confirm the characterization of Islamic fundamentalists as "Islamofascists," but makes clear that there is one important difference: while fascism has typically sought to achieve "national rebirth" by fusing a mythologized notion of "traditional values" with modernist idealism, Islamists are irrevocably antimodern in their worldview. (Of course, this could be, as it is among far-right Christian Identity extremists, more a pose to recruit and discipline the faithful than a core principle, and thus it may be discarded when no longer convenient.)

It also confirms that such forces are at work in the United States -- though not, importantly enough, in the form of such mainstream GOP figures as Rush Limbaugh and George W. Bush. We may hear Republican luminaries from time to time refer to the theme of national rebirth, but not frequently enough that it’s become a major theme (yet); and their nationalistic and populist tendencies are well-known, but both are mitigated to a great extent by their steadfast refusal to partake of the conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism and other forms of extremist thinking common to populists.

However, as the little Eco exercise demonstrated, there are enough similarities between these figures and the behavior of historical fascists to throw up a warning sign. And as we’ll see, they do indeed play an important role in the potential for a resurgence of genuine fascism in America.

Next: Tracking fascism

Oh, blogger me

My links are still bloggered. The post just below originated a couple of days ago with the post titled "Those compassionate conservatives". You'll have to scroll down to it till I can get these friggin things fixed.

UPDATE: Whew! They are finally fixed. Back to normal functionality. Thanks for your patience.

"What, me, compassion?"

John Cole at Balloon Juice seems to have a problem understanding moral vacuousness. So let's help him a little through this latest post on the ads attacking Bush's position on hate-crimes laws:

In other words, if you do not believe in the policy positions as they outlined by your political opponents, you are morally vacuous.

No, moral vacuousness, as we shall see in Bush's case, is comprised of many things, but above all, of this: pandering to hateful elements within your own party, while pretending, for national consumption, to be "compassionate."

Quickly, to review: Texas' 1993 hate-crime law was notorious within the legal community as an utterly unusable, unconstitutionally vague law that would never withstand court scrutiny, and thus was never used. (In this way, Republicans had in effect ensured that hate crimes in Texas would go unprosecuted, at least as bias crimes.) The chief purpose of the 1999 version was to resolve this problem, giving the state an effective law that actually enhanced sentences for hate crimes.

Along the way, of course, it also expanded the categories of bias crime to include sexual orientation, which means that gay-bashers would face enhanced sentences -- anathema, as it happens, to the moral paragons of the religious right. For George W. Bush -- who only a few months before had knelt at the feet of Council for National Policy (a "cultural conservative" power organization that pushes the religious right's agenda), and who needed that faction's full support in the coming presidential campaign -- this meant one thing: the bill could not survive. He could not afford to allow a law that "promoted the gay agenda" (as the right liked to put it) to pass in Texas on his watch.

But this required a trick, since it had become clear his campaign for the presidency would be predicated on a fuzzy concept called "compassionate conservatism." So instead of taking on the issue directly or forthrightly, Bush played both sides against the middle in public, mostly as a diversionary tactic while he and his staff, behind the scenes, ensured that the legislation died.

John characterizes Bush's behavior this way:

He was against the legislation- he has a legitimate position, and he stood for what he believed in- why should he be badgered into signing or promoting what he believes is bad legislation?

But that isn't at all what Bush did. First, when the legislation was introduced, he restated his traditional position: "All crimes are hate crimes." (More on this in a bit.)

But when it passed out of the Texas House, he was confronted with the possibility of having to either sign the law -- or veto it. Either way, it would be a national moment for him, and if he vetoed it (as the religious right would have demanded) it would have permanently stained his image as "compassionate," especially with the James Byrd killing so fresh in everyone's minds.

Officially, his stance suddenly changed. His spokesperson told reporters that Bush had not taken a position on the bill, and that he would consider it when it crossed his desk. Bush himself reiterated this a few days later -- though, somewhat cynically (as it turned out, given the extent his staff worked the Senate behind the scenes), he emphasized that first it would have to pass out of the Senate. It was widely reported in both the national and Texas press that Bush was considering signing the bill.

To this day, the Bush people stick to this story: Bush never made up his mind on the bill. He might have signed it. He might not have. Consider, for instance, this exchange with then-press spokesman John Sullivan after Bush's gaffe raised the issue in the 2000 debates, as reported by Salon's Jake Tapper:

Bush spokesman Sullivan says the governor never took a position one way or another on the bill: "Ultimately, the 1999 bill failed in the Legislature and never made it to Governor Bush's desk. It never made it out of the Legislature."

Would Bush have voted for the House version?

"The bill never made it out of the Legislature," Sullivan says.

What about reports that he would have supported the bill had sexual orientation been removed from the list of prejudices included in the law?

"The bill never made it out of the Legislature," Sullivan says.

What Sullivan's version of events elides, of course, was that the Bush team (with Karl Rove in charge) worked overtime behind the scenes in the Senate to kill the bill, including a half-hour briefing just before the decisive vote was held. It has become clear in retrospect that Bush was vehemently opposed to the legislation, but knew that public knowledge of this would severely damage his nascent national image.

After all, it didn't take much thinking to understand that Texas needed an effective hate-crime law. Laws do send signals -- and the notorious ineffectiveness of Texas' bias-crime law sent a signal, too, to men like Bill King and Shawn Berry. White supremacists, especially those with prison backgrounds, loathe hate-crimes laws, and are likewise perfectly aware when they are toothless or absent. A hate-crimes law may not have stopped James Byrd from being killed; but the state had put out a green light for his killers, and it was time it turned to red. The Byrd case brought this fact before the national consciousness.

Many people besides just gays needed a good hate-crimes law in Texas. Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Jews would have benefited from it as well. Moreover, as anywhere else, a hate-crimes law benefits everyone -- especially because they are an important sign of a community or state's willingness to stand up for basic principles of egalitarianism, equality and racial harmony, not to mention basic decency.

George W. Bush couldn't have cared less. His campaign for the presidency was at stake. It was more important to serve the interest of the national religious right than the actual needs of average citizens in Texas. So he found a way to smother the law in its crib while no one was looking.

And that is a picture of moral vacuousness.

John adds this:

Dave does note that Bush simply did not believe there was any need for Hate Crimes legislation (although he refers to Bush's position as a "mantra" -- remember, Bush is an idiot) …

You'll never find a post on this blog suggesting that Bush is an idiot. A crass, conniving and utterly narcissistic manipulator as well as a gross incompetent, yes, but not an idiot.

Bush's position, for anyone needing a refresher, is this:

"I've always said all crime is hate crime. People, when they commit a crime, have hate in their heart. And it's hard to distinguish between one degree of hate and another."

This meme -- favored by everyone on the right from Bush to Dick Armey to Jerry Falwell -- is partially a product of the confusion that arises from calling these crimes "hate crimes" (they are in reality "bias-motivated" crimes; "hate" quite literally has nothing to do with them, in the eyes of the law). But even without that misunderstanding, this notion is transparently baseless.

Only a little reflection, after all, can produce a long list of crimes that lack anything resembling a hateful element -- embezzlement or securities fraud, say, or drunken driving, or insider trading. I'm willing to wager that abandoning your Texas Air National Guard unit is a crime, and the only hateful elements I can see in that are an abiding contempt for your fellow servicemen and their willingness to live up to their commitments.

More to the point, the recognition that not all crimes are alike is a basic tenet of law. Bias-crimes statutes recognize, like a myriad criminal laws, that motive and intent can and should affect the kind of sentence needed to protect society adequately -- that is, after all, the difference between first-degree murder and manslaughter. Intent and motive can be the difference between a five-year sentence and the electric chair.

Attempting a sort of zero-sum analysis that makes the outcome (in the case of homicide, a dead person) the only significant issue in what kind of sentence a perpetrator should face (the death sentence vs. a prison term) would overthrow longstanding legal traditions of proportionality in setting punishment, effectively eliminating the role of culpability -- or mens rea, the mental state of the actor -- as a major factor. Or, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously put it: "Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked."

The "all crime is a hate crime" meme is one of the most transparent falsehoods trotted out by Republicans as they feverishly try to rationalize their desire to leave the doors open for gay-bashers. And it is evidence of the degraded state of our national discourse that they are not laughed off the stage for repeating it.

That is perhaps, because they have become experts at posing these kinds of transparent falsehoods as legitimate, constructed realities. (Remember hearing during the Florida Debacle how mechanical counts were "more accurate" than hand counts? I loved that one.)

John mentions this too, though from the other side of the funhouse mirror:

It is all about perceptions- not reality. In reality, Bush was right the men were all convicted, two sentenced to death. Justice was served.

This is a model of how it works: Focus on an irrelevancy and present as the sum of reality. Bush was right, indeed (well, at least, once he had corrected himself) -- the men were convicted. But justice was only served in that case. Justice in the large sense -- in which Texas had a hate-crimes law on the books that prosecutors were actually able to use -- was badly harmed when Bush killed the bill.

The important thing to remember about the Byrd killing is that it was not really representative of a hate crime -- typically, in fact, there are on average only about eight to ten hate-crimes murders per year, compared to an average of about 9,000 hate crimes in America annually. Moreover, murders are at the extreme end of the criminal scale, and hate-crimes laws frankly have little effect, since it is impossible to enhance a sentence beyond the death penalty (though in fact the hate-crimes elements can help a prosecutor push the penalty to the death-sentence level). But they are only a tiny fragment of the hate crimes committed in this country.

A look at the FBI's most recent hate-crime statistics for 2001 [PDF file] gives a picture of a fairly average year (hate crimes in fact have proven remarkably steady since statistics have been gathered). Most hate crimes are intimidation and assaults; out of 9,730 total hate crimes in 2001, 3,563 were cases of intimidation, and 2,736 were assaults. Only 10 were murders.

When conservatives like Bush point to the Byrd case and say, "See? Justice was done," they are ignoring the many cases (in a state like Texas, they may well annually number in the hundreds, and over the years, the thousands) that went unpunished, or in which the perps got off with a slap on the wrist, because there was no effective hate-crimes law in Texas -- all thanks to George Bush and his fellow Republicans and their deep-soaked animus toward anything that might benefit gays or lesbians.

It was in pursuit of just such a law for Texas that James Byrd's family sought to support the 1999 version of the bill, which was named in his honor. No one, either in the family or otherwise, was deluded into thinking the law could affect their case in any way.

What was important to the Byrd family, as it is to many families of crime victims, was that his gruesome death did not happen in vain. Their hope was that by advocating for the new law, Texas might have a hate-crimes law with some teeth. Future Bill Kings and Shawn Berrys might not see that green light.

Obviously, Renee Mullins, Byrd's daughter, could be faulted for some naïvete -- hate-crimes laws, on their own and without support from law enforcement, may only be marginally effective in combating bias crimes. Certainly she was naïve about putting any kind of faith in George W. Bush's fair-mindedness, notions of which she was quickly disabused on the day she met him.

Her pain, her family's pain, represented the pain of hundreds of families of hate-crimes victims in Texas. And Bush couldn't have cared less. He was callous and cold. Some politicians, even conservative ones, have genuine compassion and can find ways to tell someone that, even though they understand their pain, they won't support the cause they're after, for reasons they can explain. Bush was incapable of this.

That, too, is moral vacuity.

But even Bush was topped by the spinning, frothing, falsifying font of right-wing pundits who hopped all over the ad Renee Mullins subsequently made for the NAACP. There were two versions. The first, longer one, went like this:

I’m Renee Mullins. My father was James Byrd, Jr.

I still have nightmares thinking about him, the day three men chained him behind their pickup truck and dragged him three miles over pavement.

I can see skin being torn away from his body.

I can hear him gasping for air.

I can feel the tears in his eyes, the struggle of his brain as images of his life painfully bang through his head as the links of a heavy chain clinched around his ankles dragging him bump by bump until he was decapitated. [pause]

On June 7, 1998 this happened to my father, all because he was black. I went to Governor George W. Bush and begged him to help pass a hate crimes bill.

He just told me no.

I'm doing this commercial to ask you to call Governor Bush at 512-X and tell him to introduce a hate crimes bill in Texas.

Let him know that our community won't be dragged down by hate crimes.

The second, shorter, read this way:

I’m Renee Mullins, James Byrd’s daughter.

On June 7, 1998 in Texas my father was killed. He was beaten, chained, and then dragged 3 miles to his death, all because he was black.

So when Governor George W. Bush refused to support hate-crime legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.

Call Governor George W. Bush and tell him to support hate-crime legislation.

We won’t be dragged away from our future.

The longer ad is quite clearer, but even in the second ad (whose meaning, frankly, is muddied by its shortness; the internal juxtaposition of Bush in close proximity to the words about Byrd's murder was fertile ground for all kinds of distortions) Mullins' meaning is fairly plain: Bush's callousness about the hate-crimes law hit her emotionally in the same place as the murder itself. (It should be noted that this kind of reaction is not uncommon among families of crime victims, especially those who dedicate themselves to causes related to the death of a loved one, notably when those causes fail or hit obstacles.)

But the larger message couldn't be clearer, either: Mullins was calling Bush, in essence, a phony. The whole "compassionate conservative" front a fraud. Because she knew, from personal experience, the man hadn't a compassionate bone in his entire body.

This was like a grenade being lobbed into the belly of the ship -- and Team Rove, to their credit (they are good, as Machiavellian bastards go), quickly lobbed it right back. It wasn't sufficient to merely refute the arguments in the ads -- that would have been difficult, since they were factually accurate -- they had to destroy the persons who created the ads as "reprehensible" for running them.

In short order, we began hearing the chief talking point -- that the ads had somehow "linked Bush to the murder of James Byrd." Soon we heard that that the ads implied "that George W. Bush killed James Byrd" or, in Kathleen Parker's formulation: "Bush, because he has opposed certain types of hate-crime legislation, is implicitly responsible for killing James Byrd."

Of course, these are classic "straw man" arguments: the ads say nothing of the kind. (Is that your guilty conscience talking, Ms. Parker?) What the ads say, clearly, is that when it came to the victims of hate crimes, George Bush lacked compassion. What they implied was that Bush was a phony who, contrary to his campaign image ("a uniter, not a divider") actually undermined efforts to effect social justice. But that is not a message that Bush's supporters could register or acknowledge. So they had to concoct alternatives.

John provides us with an interesting new version:

Dave may be capable of creating multiple meanings for Miss Mullins, but I think the message of the commercial is pretty clear -- a vote for Bush is similar to letting Byrd's killers off -- …

Read that anywhere in those ads, folks? Nope. But you have to admit that it is creative.

It has been during this phase -- which, clearly, continues to this day -- that the moral vacuousness of not merely Bush but the entirety of his ideological conservative-movement supporters has been on prominent display. It is now a token of conventional wisdom on the right that the NAACP "tried to blame Bush for James Byrd's death." But one can characterize the ads themselves in this way only by the grossest distortion (if nothing else, the most tendentious reading) of their actual content. The lines of blame that conservatives find in between Renee Mullins' actual words are their creations, not hers.

John contends:

… [N]o one is twisting "the words of a suffering family into an attack on liberals." Instead, someone used the suffering of a family and twisted the outcome of an awful, vile, senseless murder into a subsequent attack on George Bush. That someone was the NAACP.

No one "twisted the outcome" of the Byrd murder. That was settled in the courts, and had nothing to do with the Byrd family's advocacy for the laws. They understood the need for a hate-crimes law from firsthand experience, and argued from that position only. Their words were not twisted by NAACP -- rather, they were active and interested participants in the ads and their content.

Renee Mullins said what she really thought. No one twisted her words, except, unsurprisingly, those who could not abide them.

Rush, Newspeak and Fascism

[Part I] (See my explanatory note below.)

II: Understanding Fascism


"Fascism" has come to be a nearly useless term in the past 30 years or so. In many respects, leftists are most responsible for this degradation; it became so common to lob the word at just about anyone conservative or corporatist in the 1960s and 1970s that its original meaning -- describing a very distinct political style, if not quite philosophy -- became utterly muddled, at least in the public lexicon.

A recent example of this was the report at Take Back the Media that Rush Limbaugh had characterized antiwar protesters as "fascists and anti-American." Indeed, it was this report that inspired me to write at Orcinus about Limbaugh and the real nature of fascism. But the report was wrong. (Take Back the Media, to its credit, quickly corrected its quote.)

Here's the actual quote:

"It's beyond me how anybody can look at these protesters and call them anything other than what they are: Anti-American, Anti-Capitalist Marxists and Communists."

Limbaugh was clearly smearing the antiwar dissenters, and that was outrageous enough. But he wasn’t calling them fascists -- rather their ideological opposite.

It is clear that liberals are every bit as prone to confusing fascism with totalitarianism as are conservatives. The difference, perhaps, is that the latter often do so deliberately, as a way of obscuring the genuine fascism that sits at their elbows.

As "fascism" has been bandied about freely, it has come loosely to represent the broader concept of totalitarianism, which of course encompasses communism as well. Right-wing propagandists like Limbaugh clearly hope to leap into that breach of popular understanding to exploit his claim that those on the left, like Dick Gephardt or "feminazis," are "fascists." It's also clear as he denounces antiwar liberals as "anti-American" that he is depicting them as enemy sympathizers with the forces of "Islamofascism."

Most Americans have a perfectly clear idea of the basic tenets of communism (though in many cases it is fairly distorted), largely because it is an ideology based on a body of texts and revolving around specific ideas. In contrast, hardly anyone can explain what it is that makes fascism, mainly because all we really know about it is the regimes that arose under its banner. There are no extant texts, only a litany of dictatorships and atrocities. When we think of fascism, we think of Hitler and perhaps Mussolini, without even understanding what forces they rode to power.

At the same time, it’s important that Americans of all stripes -- liberal or conservative -- have clear view of what fascism is, because it is not an extinct political force, and it is above all else innately anti-democratic and anti-American in spirit. This essay is in some regards a plea, particularly to those on the left who have used the term willy nilly to score shrill partisan political points, to cease abusing the word "fascism," learn what it means, and apply it only when it’s appropriate. (I have absolutely no hopes of persuading those on the right, particularly since they are a large part of the problem.)

It has always seemed to me that Americans view Nazism almost as some kind of strange European virus that afflicted only the Germans, and only for a brief period -- this by way of rationalizing that It Couldn’t Happen Here. But it also seems clear to me this is wrong; that the Germans were ordinary, ostensibly civilized people like the rest of us. And that what went wrong in them could someday go wrong in us too.

I described some of this in the Afterword of In God’s Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest, reminiscing about a professor’s midafternoon lecture:

When he was a young man, he told us, he served in the U.S. Army as part of the occupation forces in Germany after World War II. He was put to work gathering information for the military tribunal preparing to prosecute Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. His job was to spend time in the villages adjacent to one concentration camp and talk to the residents about what they knew.

The villagers, he said, knew about the camp, and watched daily as thousands of prisoners would arrive by rail car, herded like cattle into the camps. And they knew that none ever left, even though the camp never could have held the vast numbers of prisoners who were brought in. They also knew that the smokestack of the camp’s crematorium belched a near-steady stream of smoke and ash. Yet the villagers chose to remain ignorant about what went on inside the camp. No one inquired, because no one wanted to know.

"But every day," he said, "these people, in their neat Germanic way, would get out their feather dusters and go outside. And, never thinking about what it meant, they would sweep off the layer of ash that would settle on their windowsills overnight. Then they would return to their neat, clean lives and pretend not to notice what was happening next door.

"When the camps were liberated and their contents were revealed, they all expressed surprise and horror at what had gone on inside," he said. "But they all had ash in their feather dusters."

That story neatly compresses the way fascism works: in a vacuum of denial.

The gradual mechanism by which this phenomenon gradually crept over Germany was vividly described in They Thought They Were Free, a book by Milton Mayer about "how and why ‘decent men’ became Nazis":

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

So if it could happen to the Germans, it could happen to us, particularly to the extent that we remain in denial about it. But how are we to tell if it is happening, since it seems to happen so gradually that the populace scarcely recognizes it?

It’s worthwhile to begin by examining the historical record, because there, at least, we can get a reasonably clear picture of just what fascism really was and is.

In a historical sense, fascism is maybe best understood as an extreme reaction against socialism and communism; in its early years it was essentially defined as "extremist anti-communism." There were very few attempts to systematize the ideology of fascism, though some existed (see, e.g. Giovanni Gentile’s 1932 text, The Philosophical Basis of Fascism). But its spirit was better expressed in an inchoate rant like Mein Kampf.

It was explicitly anti-democratic, anti-liberal, and corporatist, and it endorsed violence as a chief means to its ends. It was also, obviously, authoritarian, but claiming that it was oriented toward "socialism" is just crudely ahistorical, if not outrageously revisionist. Socialists, let's not forget, were among the first people imprisoned and "liquidated" by the Nazi regime.

But fascism is more than just a reaction. It is a political force with a distinct set of characteristics.

One of the more popular recent essays on the subject was written by Umberto Eco, who is a cultural scholar, of course, though not what I would consider a genuine expert on fascism. Nonetheless, his piece, "Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt" is on the right track, and as good a place as any to start.

Eco identifies a series of traits that sum up the essence of what he calls "Ur-Fascism," that is, the beast that has always been with us and will always be. Now, although this piece was written in 1995, let's see how many we can recognize today:

The cult of tradition.

[Who are the folks who beat their breasts (and ours) incessantly over the primacy of 'traditional Judaeo-Christian culture'?]

The rejection of modernism.

[Think 'feminazis.' Think attacks on the NEA. Think attacks on multiculturalism.]

Irrationalism.

[G.W. Bush's anti-intellectualism and illogical, skewed speech are positively celebrated by the right.]

Action for action's sake.

[Exactly why are we making war on Iraq, anyway?]

Disagreement is treason.

["Liberals are anti-American."]

Fear of difference.

[Again, think of the attacks on multiculturalism, as well as the attacks on Muslims and Islam generically.]

Appeal to a frustrated middle class.

[See the Red states -- you know, the ones who voted for Bush. The ones where Limbaugh is on the air incessantly.]

Obsession with a plot.

[Limbaugh and conservatives have been obsessed with various "plots" by liberals for the past decade -- see, e.g., the Clinton impeachment, and current claims of a "fifth column" among liberals.]

Humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.

[Think Blue states vs. Red states.]

Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy.

[The very essence of the attacks led by talk-radio hosts against antiwar protesters.]

Life is eternal warfare.

[This perfectly describes the War on Terror.]

Contempt for the weak.

[Think both of conservatives' characterization of liberals as "weak spined," as well as the verbal attacks on Muslims and immigrants from the likes of Limbaugh and Michael Savage.]

Against 'rotten' parliamentary governments.

[Remember all those rants against 'big government'?]

Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.

[Perhaps the most noticeable trait in the current environment. The destruction of meaning by creating "empty phrases" combining opposite ideas has, as we have seen, become a prominent strategy deployed by the conservative movement.]

Now, I know a quick reading -- the kind Limbaugh prefers, prone to miscomprehension and mischaracterization -- might suggest otherwise, but this demonstration isn’t really an attempt to argue that Limbaugh is a fascist.

It is uncanny just how closely he and his conservative-movement cohorts fit the description provided by Umberto Eco’s 14 points. But therein lies the problem: Eco’s essay is useful, but not authoritative by any means, in no small part because the study of fascism isn’t really within his field of academic expertise. And it has some flaws, not the least of which is that some (not all) of the traits he describes as endemic to fascism could be ascribed to other totalitarian philosophies as well, notably communism. The truth is, a deep conservative might fit Eco’s description and still he might not be a fascist.

What this exercise reveals is not so much that Limbaugh is a fascist, but rather, that he is making a career out of transmitting the themes and memes upon which fascism feeds to a mainstream conservative audience. After all, in its developmental phase, fascism in many ways comprises relatively mundane ideas and behaviors, which isolated seem unremarkable enough, but which in combination are both potent and lethal.

In turning to history for guidance, it’s important not to confuse fascism as a movement with fascism as a power. If we think that we can only identify the rise of fascism by the arrival of its mature form -- the goosestepping brownshirts, the full-fledged use of violence and intimidation tactics, the mass rallies -- then it will be far too late. Fascism sprang up in fact as a much more atomized phenomenon, arising at first mostly in rural areas and then spreading to the cities; and if we are to look at those origins, then it’s clear that similar movements can already be seen to exist in America.

Fascism as we will see springs from very ancient sources; its antecedents have appeared throughout history. It adapts to changing conditions. As the French specialist on the extreme right Pierre-André Taguieff puts it:

Neither "fascism" nor "racism" will do us the favour of returning in such a way that we can recognise them easily. If vigilance was only a game of recognising something already well-known, then it would only be a question of remembering. Vigilance would be reduced to a social game using reminiscence and identification by recognition, a consoling illusion of an immobile history peopled with events which accord with our expectations or our fears.

What’s necessary for assessing the genuine potential for fascism in America is identifying the core components of fascism itself: the ancient wellsprings from which it came and which remain with us today. Then we need to see how we are doing in keeping those forces in check.

Next: The Core of Fascism

Some are more equal than others

Where have we seen this schtick before?

Katherine Harris Booed at Town Hall

The crowd's mood already was testy before the meeting began. Security guards and Harris' staff confiscated literature handed out by opponents that included the drug plan's details and a chart of Harris' voting record since she began her term in January.

The fliers were distributed during an earlier news conference staged in the parking lot by senior citizens to protest the Medicare bills.

"This is wrong," said Tony Fransetta, president of the Florida chapter of AARP, as he was asked to hand over fliers.

"We have never been restricted in what we could hand out at other town meetings," Fransetta said. "We have talking points that simply list questions that would help people better understand and articulate their concerns. They have been denied that right."

Connie M. McKee, a Harris staffer, said Congressional ethics rules made it illegal for people to distribute political information during a town hall meeting.

"All of the material is still here, and they can pick it up when they leave," McKee said. "They just can't take it into the hall. The ethics laws do not allow us to let them take it in. We have to be very, very careful that there are no laws broken."

But Harris distributed her literature to attendees. One flyer detailed how Bush's economic plans are restoring confidence and creating growth through fiscal discipline. Another highlighted the many benefits of Medicare reforms passed in June.

Wonder if Harris will be turning herself in for breaking these supposed laws herself? Oh, wait, I forgot -- it doesn't count if you're a Republican!

Sometimes you have to ask yourself just how dumb Republicans think the rest of us really are. Does Harris really expect us to believe that fliers are prohibited from town meetings? That this wasn't just a hastily concocted excuse not to have to deal with hard facts and a group of righteously angered senior citizens?

You know, I got a kick out of watching this game when Calvin played it. But I lost my taste for it during the 2000 Florida Debacle.

[A tip o' the Hatlo Hat to Maia Cowan over at Salon's Table Talk.]

What I hate

When my links are bloggered. Argh.

Those compassionate conservatives again

John Cole at Balloon Juice has revived a popular GOP meme that demonstrates, once again, the moral vacuity at the core of the conservative movement:

When not comparing the GOP to the Confederacy or making references to the Taliban, the NAACP has written, financed, and aired such charming 'non-partisan' commercials such as the following doozy equating President Bush's (then Governor Bush) actions to the brutal murder of an African-American:

I’m Renee Mullins, James Byrd’s daughter. On June 7, 1998 in Texas my father was killed. He was beaten, chained, and then dragged 3 miles to his death, all because he was black.

So when Governor George W. Bush refused to support hate-crime legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.

Call Governor George W. Bush and tell him to support hate-crime legislation.

We won’t be dragged away from our future.

- "Byrd Vote-TV," 30 sec. TV spot run in AR, GA, IL, KY, MI, MO, NJ, OH, PA and WI starting Oct. 25, 2000.

Let's review the facts of the case:

The hate-crimes debate in 1999, inspired in part by James Byrd's horrifying murder, included yet another effort to pass an effective law in Texas. The key player: George W. Bush.

Texas already had a hate-crimes law, passed in 1993 -- which was in fact the source of the problem. Passed amid a rancorous debate over the inclusion of sexual orientation as a bias category, it was watered down so that law defined a hate crime by referring to the selection of victims "because of the defendant’s bias or prejudice against a person or group." This language was so vague as to render the law constitutionally unsound and virtually worthless; a similar Utah statute was thrown out in 1999 by a state judge who called the law "incomplete" and "unenforceable." Consequently, Texas prosecutors rarely used the law -- and indeed, the number of cases pursued under the law in the ensuing years numbered exactly two.

Bush, however, had already made clear where he stood: "I've always said all crime is hate crime," he told a March 1999 news conference. "People, when they commit a crime, have hate in their heart. And it's hard to distinguish between one degree of hate and another."

But the governor was on the verge of launching his ultimately successful campaign to capture the presidency, and he had already made clear he intended to present to the voters a vision of "compassionate conservatism" -- a platform that suggested some moderation on social issues. At the same time, any bill approved in Texas that would grant hate-crimes expansion to include gay-bashing, or might otherwise grant "special rights" to gays, was certain to attract the wrath of the Christian right, who comprised one of the Republicans' chief national constituencies.

So when State Sen. Rodney Ellis of Houston introduced a bill in the 1999 Texas Legislature to replace the state's weak hate-crimes law, Bush chose to take, officially, no position on its passage. Indeed, when it passed the House 83-61, Bush said he would consider the bill if the Senate passed it. Then, quietly, his office went to work to kill it.

The bill faced difficulties anyway; Texas legislative rules severely limit the length of time bills are allowed to linger between houses, and Senate Republicans promptly set about sidetracking the measure in the Criminal Justice Committee, where it remained. Supporters then turned to their trump card: James Byrd's family, who came to Austin in May to lobby Bush for his support.

Byrd's 29-year-old daughter, Renee Mullins, met with Bush on May 6 in his office. Accompanying her were a cousin, Darrell Verrett; state Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston; and a gay rights lobbyist.

Mullins later described the meeting to Salon's Jake Tapper: "I went in there pleading to him. I said that if he helped me move it along I would feel that he hadn't died in vain ... [Rep.] Thompson said, 'Gov. Bush, what Renee's trying to say is, Would you help her pass the bill?' And he said, 'No.' Just like that.

"He had a nonchalant attitude, like he wanted to hurry up and get out of there. It was cold in that room."

Of course, the issue returned during Bush's 2000 presidential campaign, partly because Al Gore raised it in their second debate:

GORE: And as for singling people out because of race, you know, James Byrd was singled out because of his race in Texas. And other Americans have been singled out because of their race or ethnicity. And that's why I think we can embody our values by passing a hate crimes law. I think these crimes are different. I think they're different because they're based on prejudice and hatred, which gives rise to crimes that have not just a single victim, but they're intended to stigmatize and dehumanize a whole group of people.

MODERATOR [to Bush]: You have a different view of that.

BUSH: No, I don't, really.

MODERATOR: On hate crimes laws?

BUSH: No, I don’t, really, on hate crimes laws. No, we’ve got one in Texas. And guess what? The three men who murdered James Byrd, guess what’s going to happen to them? They’re going to be put to death. A jury found them guilty. And I -- it’s going to be hard to punish them any worse after they get put to death. And it’s the right cause, so it’s the right decision.

... Well, what the vice president must not understand is we've got hate crimes bill in Texas. And secondly, the people that murdered Mr. Byrd got the ultimate punishment.

... But let me say to you, Mr. Vice President, we're happy with our laws on our books. That bill did -- there was another bill that did die in committee. But I want to repeat; if you have a state that fully, you know, supports the law, like we do in Texas, we're going to go after all crime, and we're going to make sure people get punished for the crime. And in this case, we can't enhance the penalty any more than putting those three thugs to death, and that's what's going to happen in the state of Texas.

A brief flap erupted in the press because Bush had clearly misstated the outcome of the Byrd murder trials -- only two of the three men had been sentenced to death. Several commentators also noted Bush's apparent glee in talking about the death sentences; a member of the audience, in fact, asked Bush about this in the subsequent debate on Oct. 17. And it was clear that Bush had misrepresented the debate in Texas and the state of hate-crimes laws there, adhering all the while to his "all crimes are hate crimes" mantra.

But the Gore campaign focused on the factual mistake -- for which Bush campaign officials issued a printed correction the night of the debate, with Bush adding at a post-debate press conference, "Listen, we all make mistakes" -- particularly since, as constitutional lawyer Lawrence Tribe pointed out, Bush's remarks suggested a prejudice in a case for which he was still responsible for deciding any pending death-sentence appeals. However, the issue gained little traction in the press, which had shown a marked preference for focusing during the campaign on Gore's alleged misstatements instead. Indeed, the conventional wisdom was that Bush, not Gore, had won the debate.

James Byrd's family was outraged but not surprised. Renee Mullins in particular was angry about Bush's performance, saying: "It was just another way of him misleading the public. He didn't have the statistics right."

The NAACP, which had supported the Byrd family's efforts in Texas, made a national campaign issue out of Bush's handling of hate-crimes laws, with the family in a starring role. It prepared a series of television, radio and newspaper ads questioning the governor's commitment to racial justice, featuring Renee Mullins saying: "I went to Governor George W. Bush and begged him to help pass a Hate Crimes Bill in Texas. He just told me no."

The Bush camp responded testily: "Throughout the process, Governor Bush has treated the Byrd family with a great deal of respect," spokesman Ray Sullivan said. "He spoke to them prior to Mr. Byrd's funeral. He gave 45 minutes of his time to meet with Miss Mullins. The governor's office helped to fund the prosecution of Mr. Byrd's killers."

But in truth, no one in the Byrd family could recall Bush phoning the family -- and in fact, he had stayed away from the funeral by suggesting that the atmosphere was too "politically charged," even though other top state Republicans (including Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison) had shown up. Nor was the contribution from the governor's office to the prosecution anything out of the ordinary -- $100,000, or about an eighth of the actual costs (the federal government, in contrast, contributed about $250,000).

Reality notwithstanding, Republicans in short order turned the NAACP's attack ads into a liability for Democrats, accusing the civil-rights group of "reprehensible" behavior for linking Bush to the Byrd killing. By the time the election rolled around in early November, it had become conventional wisdom in the press that the ads "implied that George W. Bush killed James Byrd." Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter featured the meme in her later book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, suggesting that Bush's support for the penalty should have mollified his critics, but instead, "they would not rest until the killers were found guilty of 'hate' and forced to attend anger-management classes.”

Cole, in his recent post, adds this, commenting on Renee Mullins' remarks:

Charming, hunh? Bush did sign Hate Crimes legislation, it should be noted- just not the bill the NAACP wanted.

The legislation he's referring to was a 1997 bill that attempted to tweak the 1993 law without altering its basic, unconstitutionally vague language. It was widely recognized as having even less impact than the '93 law.

The reality is that Texas conservatives, including George W. Bush, did their utmost to prevent an effective hate-crimes law for their state for most of the 1990s. (Freed of Bush's restraints, Texas finally passed, in 2001, a viable hate-crimes law.) The message this inevitably sent to the victims and their families of hate crimes was one of callousness, telling them, in essence, that their pain was insignificant.

This, of course, is what Mullins meant when she said that Bush's refusal was like having her father killed all over again. When Bush said 'No,' he was telling Mullins that Byrd's horrifying murder, and the pain he suffered, were for naught. Any good that the family might have been trying to create from the horror was wiped away.

Of course, Republicans have a hard time understanding this. Greed, selfishness and political Machiavellianism have a way of wiping the concept of genuine compassion.

But it's always fun to twist the words of a suffering family into an attack on liberals, isn't it?

Flyboy Bush to the rescue!

Yes, you too, kids, can get your own "Elite Force Aviator: George W. Bush -- U.S. President and Naval Aviator" action figure! Be the first on your voting bloc!

Coming soon: The AWOL version. Comes complete with full set of civvies, straw and mirror, and map of Chihuahua.

[Thanks to Rob Garver for the heads-up.]

[Update: Billmon has a nice pic of the AWOL version.]

Rush, Newspeak and Fascism

[Note: Yes, it's true, I'm rerunning the final version of my essay, which is available of course also as a PDF. See the post below for more details.]

I: Projecting Fascism

Rush Limbaugh likes to call himself "the most dangerous man in America." He offers this epithet tongue in cheek on his radio program, but the truth is, he isn’t kidding.

Over the decade and more that Limbaugh has ruled America’s talk-radio landscape, it has become inescapably clear that he is, if nothing else, certainly the most dangerous demagogue in America, maybe in history.

In terms of his breadth of reach as a political propagandist, he has no real parallel in American history. The closest might be the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, known to his radio audience of the 1920s and ‘30s as "Father Coughlin." Coughlin started out as an anti-communist firebrand, and by 1930, his weekly broadcasts reached an audience estimated at 45 million. (Limbaugh claims a weekly audience of 20 million.) He was a major supporter of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, but turned on FDR shortly afterward and became a severe critic of the administration through most of its tenure.

Coughlin, who was attracted to the Jewish conspiracy theories promulgated by Henry Ford’s 1932 anti-Semitic tome, The International Jew, became increasingly extremist in his tone and delivery, accusing FDR of being a tool of the evil cabal that secretly ran the world. He was a significant spokesman for the "America First" movement, which advocated American non-involvement in the growing strife in Europe and Asia. And he was an inspiration for a whole generation of anti-Semites who went on to found such movements as Christian Identity and Posse Comitatus.

Limbaugh, in contrast, has always carefully eschewed conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism. Through most of the first decade of his radio career, his primary schtick has been to rail against the government and its supposed takeover of our daily lives. This anti-government propaganda has served one main purpose: To drive a wedge between middle- and lower-class workers and the one entity that has the real (if sometimes abused or neglected) capability to protect them from the ravages of wealthy class warriors and swarms of corporate wolves.

Limbaugh likes to bill himself as an "entertainer," but he is more accurately understood as a propagandist. He shows no interest in actually furthering the public debate: opposing views are rarely if ever invited onto his show, and when they are they invariably receive the kind of ham-handed mistreatment that has become common on Limbaugh’s television counterpart, Bill O’Reilly’s Fox talk show.

And there can be little doubt as to the effectiveness of Limbaugh’s propaganda: In the intervening years, it has become an object of faith, particularly in rural America where Limbaugh’s broadcasts can often be heard multiple times throughout the day, that the government is in itself evil, a corrupt entity, something to be distrusted and feared, and certainly incapable of actually solving problems.

Now that the president he supported -- George W. Bush -- is running the show, however, Limbaugh’s anti-government bent has faded quickly and quietly to the background. After all, being anti-government seems practically anti-Republican these days, considering the GOP owns all three branches of government and virtually controls the Fourth Estate as well.

Mind you, in Limbaughland, there are still "evil" people in government -- but they’re all liberals. Indeed, the demonization of all things liberal has always been a component of Limbaugh’s routine. But now it has become his focus. And it is in that shift, taking place in a context of rising extremism, that he has become openly divisive, and truly dangerous.

Limbaugh has in recent months been one of the national leaders in the right-wing campaign to characterize opposition to President Bush's questionable policies as "anti-American," a campaign that is closely associated with broader conservative attacks on the underlying ideals of multiculturalism. But Limbaugh has taken the rhetoric another step by associating liberals with Nazis and other fascist regimes.

Consider, for instance, this essay, which appeared on Limbaugh’s Web site on April 17, 2003:

Little Dick Promises Fascism If Elected

Congressman Dick Gephardt (D-MO), a Democratic presidential candidate, wants to repeal President Bush's income tax cuts under the guise of helping employers provide health insurance to workers. Yes, if employers agree to pay 60% to 65% of health care costs, Big Brother will steal some money out of those employees' paychecks and give it to the company. Dickonomics sees the government funding and controlling private businesses!

That's fascism -- a term thrown around by people who don't have the intellectual chops to defend their ideas, but Gephardt's plan has features of that discredited ideology. Merriam-Webster: "Fas•cism: A political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition." [Italics added.]

This is a classic case of Newspeak -- diminishing the range of thought (it's telling that Limbaugh originally filed this under "Making the Complex Understandable") by nullifying the meaning of words. Democracy, according to Limbaugh, is fascism.

In fact, even as he ironically sneers at "people who don't have the intellectual chops to defend their ideas," he resorts to the notoriously inadequate dictionary definition of fascism in order to stand the meaning of the word on its head.

Observe how Limbaugh abuses the definition he gives here by only emphasizing a couple of its aspects (centralized government and economic regimentation -- neither of which are actually applicable here, no more so than they would be to a hundred thousand other government programs) and utterly ignoring those aspects of it that clearly are not present in Gephardt's proposal (exalting nation and often race above the individual, forcible suppression of the opposition -- traits which, in fact, are often present in Limbaugh's own diatribes).

Any serious consideration of Limbaugh's accusations of incipient fascism on the part of Gephardt will recognize that at the core of his argument is the suggestion that the current American bureaucracy itself, and indeed the bulk of Western civilization, particularly in its ability to tax and redistribute income, is "fascist" -- a claim that any reasonable person can see as plainly false.

Moreover, Limbaugh's "intellectual chops" notwithstanding, the many shortcomings of the ridiculously vague Merriam-Webster definition become self-evident when contrasted with a scholarly approach, as we shall see. Utterly lacking from the definitions are the definitive aspects of fascism as described by serious political scholars: its populism, particularly its claim to represent the "true character" of the respective national identities among which it arises; and its mythic core of national rebirth -- not to mention its corporatist component, its anti-liberalism, its glorification of violence and its contempt for weakness.

There is nothing in Gephardt's plan that even remotely suggests such behavior -- it is in fact clearly far removed from genuine fascism, especially if it were to live up to Limbaugh's rather absurd claims that it would ultimately lead to a wholesale government takeover of corporations, which is in any event a communist and not a fascist behavior (fascism, as we will see, has a clear component of open corporatism).

Rather, if we were to look for these well-established earmarks of fascism, we would find them in Limbaugh's essay and numerous other of his outpourings. Limbaugh, indeed, constantly claims to be the voice of "real Americans" and regularly calls for a rebirth of the "American spirit" to be achieved by the destruction of all things liberal.

In any event, this is not the first time Limbaugh has misused the term. One of his most famous epithets is "feminazi," which juxtaposes liberal feminism with Nazism. He has referred at various times to "liberal compassion fascists," and on other occasions has explained to his national audience that Nazis in fact were "socialists." This is, of course, the kind of twisting of terminology that is the essence of Newspeak.

Limbaugh’s rhetoric, in fact, is almost a model of how Newspeak works: It renders language meaningless by positing a meaning of a word that is in fact its near or precise opposite.

Conservatives, led by Limbaugh’s blazing example, in the past decade have become masters of Newspeak, the Orwellian twisting of language that not only propagandizes but actually distorts reality. As a character in 1984 puts it:

"You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right … But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party."

Another character explains its long-term purpose:

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."

Newspeak permeates the political environment right now. The core agenda of the Bush administration, mouthed by a hundred talking heads on cable TV, is now neatly summed up by two of the core truisms of Newspeak:

"War is peace." [The purpose of the Iraq war, and the War on Terror generally, is to ensure peace and security at home, we are told.]

"Ignorance is strength." [Consider the way Bush’s fumbled syntax and express anti-intellectualism is integral to his crafted image of homespun integrity.]

Newspeak serves two functions:

-- It deflates the opposition by nullifying its defining issues, and throws the nominal logic of the public debate into disarray.

-- It provides rhetorical and ontological cover for its speakers’ own activities and agenda.

Consider, for instance, Limbaugh’s evidently groundless claims that Gephardt’s proposal calls for forcible oppression of the opposition. Contrast that with one of the more recent on-air outbursts by Limbaugh:

"Tim Robbins, who thinks he can say any thing at any time . . . I have a question: How is it that Tim Robbins is still walking free? How in the world is this guy still able to go to the National Press Club and say whatever he wants to say?"

By carefully observing the machinations of the current spate of Newspeak emanating from transmitters like Limbaugh, however, it's possible to get a clear view of the movement's underlying agenda. This is possible when the meaning of Limbaugh's obfuscations are placed in their psychological context, because they constitute a fairly clear case of projection.

Indeed, one of the lessons I've gleaned from carefully observing the behavior of the American right over the years is that the best indicator of its agenda can be found in the very things of which it accuses the left.

This is known as "projection." One of the first to observe this propensity on the right was Richard Hofstadter, whose 1964 work The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains an important contribution to the field of analyzing right-wing politics:

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through "front" groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist "crusades" openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

Self-proclaimed anti-authoritarians such as Limbaugh thus adopt the language and style of authoritarians themselves, and engage in Newspeak-laden propaganda whose sole purpose is to appeal to persons with totalist propensities. The anti-Gephardt essay is a classic example.

Remember how during the Florida fiasco the GOP and its many talking heads regularly accused Al Gore of attempting to steal the election through court fiat? Remember how such moral paragons as Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Dan Burton and Bob Livingston (not to mention John Fund and Andrew Sullivan) roared in outrage over Bill Clinton’s supposed amorality? The list could go on almost indefinitely.

When the right accuses liberals of "fascism," it almost always does so in an effort to obscure its own fascist proclivities -- and it reminds the rest of us just whose footsoldiers are in reality merrily goosestepping down the national garden path.

Next: Understanding fascism

Experiment results

I'd like to thank everyone who has contributed to my little cause by donating in exchange for the "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism" PDF. It's been an interesting experiment in Web pamphleteering.

I wound up with some 150 donations, compared to a guesstimated 4,000 downloads of the PDF. However, the broadband costs so far have not been a problem. The donations I did receive have gone toward underwriting work on my current book, Death on the Fourth of July.

I've been most impressed by the generosity of the donors. Well over half the donations were in excess of the $5 suggested. In any event, I'm humbled by the lengths to which many people went to support a journalist they probably only marginally know. I'm hoping eventually to reward your faith by producing work that makes a real difference.

I'm also extremely grateful to the many bloggers who regularly sent their readers my way in pursuit of the essay. This includes, as always, Atrios, Avedon Carol, Ginger Mayerson, Hellblazer, Kynn Bartlett, Frog n Blog, Zizka, Gil Smart, Peking Duck, Hegemoney, and of course Stonerwitch, who made the PDF for me. (Apologies to anyone I accidentally omitted -- there were many of you, and it was tough to keep track.)

I'm going to be publishing "Rush" for the next 15 days here on the blog, mostly as a way of getting the edited and revised version online in HTML. It'll be a way of keeping the blog active while I finish up the book, which is due to the publisher Sept. 1. Aaaiiieeee!!

I hope those who weren't able to download the PDF enjoy the completed version of "Rush." And of course, I'll keep the tin cup out for those who feel like tossing a nickel or two my way. Independent journalism lives.

How Republicans empower extremists

I have argued at length in "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism" that extremists are increasingly taking up the rightward flank of mainstream conservatism. Alliances that 10 years ago might have been unthinkable between the GOP and the far right have been forming at a rapid rate in recent years.

One of the chief dangers of this, of course, is the rightward gravitational pull this exerts on the mainstream, dragging more and more conservatives into radical positions. The other, and perhaps more serious, problem is the way it enfranchises extremists, giving them real power in the political structure they might not have otherwise -- and, rather than mitigating their extremism, encouraging it.

Recent news from Washington has given us an up-close look at this phenomenon in action:

Northwest groups seek data on Rove's role in water policy

Environmental and commercial fishing groups asked the White House yesterday to explain the role President Bush's top political aide played in developing water policy in the Northwest.

The request followed the disclosure that White House political adviser Karl Rove briefed dozens of political appointees at the Interior Department a year and a half ago about diverting water in the Klamath River in Oregon to help nearby farms.

Republican leaders in the area wanted to help the farmers, a key constituency.

The Interior Department increased the water supply to drought-stricken farmland several months later despite environmentalists' complaint that diverting water from the river would kill threatened coho salmon.

What the story neglects to mention, of course, is that the policy that Rove appears to have "persuaded" (read: ordered) the Interior appointees to carry out resulted in the deaths of 33,000 salmon on the Klamath, one of the worst fish kills in the history of the Pacific Coast.

Perhaps even more significant, these same officials may well have violated the law in carrying out Rove's directives (from Oct. 27, 2002):

Federal biologist alleges law broken in Klamath fish kill

The federal biologist who led the scientific review of splitting water between farmers and fish in the Klamath Basin, site of a massive salmon kill, is seeking whistle-blower protection, claiming his team was overruled in violation of the Endangered Species Act.

In a formal disclosure to be filed Monday with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, National Marine Fisheries Service biologist Michael S. Kelly alleges his team's recommendations were rejected twice, under "political pressure," as the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation imposed lower water levels than were scientifically justified as part of a 10-year water management plan.

Of course, the ever-timid Office of Special Counsel blew off the allegations, hiding behind the cover of the Bush administration's own report saying the cause of the fish kill couldn't be determined.

Why this isn't a scandal of at least modest proportions is beyond me. Certainly the biologist's accusations deserve a fresh hearing.

What is even more likely to fly under the radar, however, is the connection between right-wing extremists and mainstream conservatives in this case. Because the most strident voices agitating for the water policy ultimately adopted by Interior belonged to the Patriot movement and its cohorts. Indeed, it was apparent from the start that the Klamath issue was being exploited by the Patriots, and it continues to be so.

Consider, for example, this report from the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report:

Conflict in Klamath: A battle over irrigation rights in Oregon becomes, for a time, the latest flash point for antigovernment activists

More than anything, though, the Klamath Falls protests fed the flames of far-right, antigovernment fervor. Militia activists, cursing the "U.S. Gestapo" in E-mails, volunteered to "fire the first shot at the feds." One poster on the hard-line Michigan Militia Corps Wolverine’s E-list wrote, "I know good and well that there are those of you who have access to airplanes and explosives. Common sense tells me that a nice little package dropped from the sky onto the gates that hold back the water will undoubtedly open the gates and let the water flow."

One man was arrested at the head gates for failing to appear in court to face illegal firearms charges; he claimed to be a "constitutional counselor" involved in "treason" charges brought in a pseudo-legal "common-law court" against Oregon public officials. In August, alerted by a series of Internet postings, convoys of antigovernment protesters made their way through Montana, Nevada, Idaho, Washington, California and Oregon and converged on Klamath Falls for a large "Freedom Day" protest.

Of course, as one might expect, this fish kill did little to help the handful of farmers it was meant to protect. Many of them are now anxious to trade their land back to the government. But in the meantime, the real bread-and-butter jobs in the Klamath -- the salmon fishing industry, providing some 4,000 family-wage jobs and $80 million a year to the region -- were severely trashed. Many of those businesses went belly-up along with the fish.

Of course, the Patriots and their mainstream cohorts now strenuously deny that the water plan killed the fish -- claims that, as usual, have been thoroughly debunked.

The recent revelations of involvement in this policy decision from the very upper echelons of the Bush administration, and the clear evidence that the choice was based on politics, not "sound science," are of course the most significant short-term issues related to this case.

But in the long term, Americans need to ask what the White House is doing by capitulating wholly to right-wing extremists who clearly did not represent the larger interests of working people in the Klamath Basin. And by capitulating to them, giving them real power.

Coulter vs. Moore

Carl Lewis writes in from Down Under, responding to the "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism" essay:

I live in Sydney, Australia, but of course we need to understand what the U.S. is up to like everyone else on the planet. The similarity of current U.S. regime and society to fascism always seems to come up but I had not read a decent exploration of this till now. I don't know all the historical theory which you go through, which made it hard to judge. I definitely started to worry when I saw a speech by Mr. Bush prior to the war to sailors at the USS Philippine Sea, which came off as a bit "Nuremburg Rally" style for my tastes.

No doubt you know (although it is not mentioned in the essay) that some conservatives have distanced themselves from Ann Coulter, including Andrew Sullivan, and there have been some negative comments in papers.

Anne Applebaum [in the Washington Post] writes:

As I say, it's easy to explain why this book [Coulter's Treason] is bad. What is much, much harder to explain is why so many people think this book is good, or at least why so many people are buying it.

I really wanted to know this too! Unfortunately Applebaum then wanders off the question and in the end seems to put it down to:

The real question, then, is not what makes so many people buy books by Ann Coulter, but what makes so many people lap up the Coulter-Bruce-Moore formula. Perhaps it's a longing for clarity, a reflection of the deep human need to find a straight path through the modern jungle of information. Perhaps it's laziness.

The "Coulter is the opposite of Mike Moore" meme (which Sullivan also mentions) seems to have some traction but personally I find it a bit limp in terms of explanatory power. The great thing about your essay it that it eschews this simplistic ideological interpretation and instead puts things into a framework that makes sense, and does go some way to explaining her popularity. There probably are some things to be learned from a Coulter/Moore comparison, apart from the obvious one of their preference for self-promotion over fact-checking, but I have yet to hear someone make the case.

I was asked about the Coulter/Moore comparison during the WNUR interview. It is, frankly, part of the kind of easy symmetry that conservatives love -- to wit, for every right-wing extremist, there's a left-wing one doing the same thing.

Of course, most of these analogies blithely overlook such things as volume, breadth, reach and influence of the respective extremists, not to mention the violence quotient. And in the Coulter/Moore case, there are even more significant differences.

Moore is not an extremist. He has never defended, for example, famous Communists or left-wing radicals. He has not evinced a sympathy for Ted Kaczynski, nor suggested he should have bombed the Washington Times. He has never transmitted extreme-left ideas, nor has he intimitated any sympathy for them. Coulter, conversely, is an extremist who is now attempting to rehabilitate Joe McCarthy's reputation, and who has repeatedly indicated sympathy for violent right-wing radicals.

Moreover, Moore makes errors -- about four or five a book, but sometimes serious enough to undermine his credibility. Coulter, at the same time, seems incapable of publishing a single paragraph without lying or committing an egregious (and after awhile, transparently intentional) factual error. That she enjoys any credibility whatsoever -- let alone is invited to appear on national TV with great regularity -- is evidence of the failure of nearly anyone in the media to concern themselves with such things as truthful reporting.

Michael Moore is a mainstream left-winger whose attention to factual detail is weak. Ann Coulter is a right-wing extremist who lies and commits factual errors at an astonishing rate.

Where, exactly, is the analogy in that?