The summer of the whales

Summer is rapidly approaching, and I'm making preparations to be spending large chunks of time watching killer whales in the Puget Sound, as I have in the past. For longtime readers, this is not anything particularly new, since I've filed a number of reports from these ventures (see here, here, and here,), not to mention some of my recent reporting work.

But this summer's work will be somewhat different in that it will be more detailed and focused. More to the point, it will be part of a larger shift of this blog into much more frequent discussion of environmental issues -- and particularly whales.

If my previous jaunts have been a little jarring for an audience somewhat accustomed to a focus on right-wing extremism and its various expressions in the mainstream, well, I expect this shift to be more in the way of a tectonic shift. I'll see if I can explain why it's occurring.

It might help to point out that, when I began writing about militias and far-right groups in the 1990s, it was only partly because I had a background in reporting on these groups and their activities in my background as a newspaperman. The larger part -- my chief angle as a freelance journalist -- was that I was an environmental reporter looking at militias specifically as a backlash phenomenon.

It all took on kind of a life of its own, however, especially after Oklahoma City, and that took me more or less to where I am today. It's important to understand why this happened: As I spent more time with the militias, it became clear to me that environmental and land-use policy was only one of many fronts through which they recruited. They also found openings on education, taxes, religious issues like abortion and homosexuality, immigration, and the whole right-wing "culture war" generally.

Much of the reason I've remained focused on the extremist right for these past several years is because they remain such a potent destructive force on so many fronts. This is why, I think, my work is valuable to people dealing with the toxic right in different areas, from the broadly political to scientific, religious, sociological, and civil-rights concerns. It's why I've kept at it.

Much of what has transpired in the past couple of decades to undermine the opposition from the left to this toxicity has been an unfortunate kind of balkanization among progressive factions: environmentalists do their thing, economists theirs, and political activists theirs, and only coincidentally do their interests intersect. I think what's needed is more of a pan-progressivism that unites, through networking and a recognition of mutual interests, the various factions into a potent whole.

A simple way of illustrating the problem is to observe that environmentalists are unusually obtuse about the threat to their interests created by the extremist religious right, and pay it, unfortunately, scant attention, except when they cross immediate paths. But generally, they leave that up to the civil-rights folks to deal with.

Likewise, it's been my observation that serious environmental concerns have mostly been the recipient of lip service from the political activist component of the progressive faction, with scant real action -- until, perhaps, recently, that is.

The growing realization of the real significance of global warming -- thanks in no small part to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth -- is bridging the gap. The political activists are realizing that environmental issues possess a transcendent quality that positively mandates action; and environmentalists, whose Beltway political pull has been on the ropes since 2000, are recognizing the political role they must play as well.

What they all have to confront, I think, is a political environment in which right-wing extremism's influence is mounting, sometimes subtly, but particularly in the knee-jerk rejection of the data on global warming from the mainstream right. Not only are mainstream media propagating nonsensical talking points, and talk-show hosts comparing Al Gore to Hitler, but of course Rush Limbaugh is piling on. Meanwhile, Republican students were hosting a fundraising party celebrating the onset of global warming. Bring it on, dudes!

Global warming is something of a pan-environmental issue itself: it affects air and water-pollution policy, it affects forest-preservation issues, it affects fisheries and marine-life issues -- including, most notably, whaling.

Whales are an especially powerful symbol of the environmental health of the planet, in part because they are simultaneously immense and enormously sentient, not to mention evolutionarily ancient compared to we humans. Global warming depresses and shifts their food sources, and so it affects them quite directly.

But in the case of whales, there are other, more immediate threats to their well-being. Specifically, there is the looming likelihood that the longtime moratorium on whaling by the International Whaling Commission is about to be overturned:

Japan and Norway, two nations that have refused to give up large-scale whaling despite widespread condemnation, are on the cusp of gaining control of the international commission that since 1986 has strictly limited whale hunting in an effort to rebuild the population of the world's largest creatures.

The impending shift, which will be on display when the International Whaling Commission convenes on the island of St. Kitts for its annual meeting June 16, has alarmed environmentalists and officials from countries that oppose commercial whaling, including the United States, Australia and New Zealand. They note that in recent years, Japan has recruited at least 19 countries -- many from West Africa and the Caribbean -- to support more whaling.

"Most Americans think the whales have been saved," said Gregory Wetstone, director of U.S. operations for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, an advocacy group. "These populations cannot sustain the kind of pressure that industrial-scale whaling can bring."

With 66 or so members -- the number shifts depending on which countries show up and pay their dues -- the commission has regulated whaling for more than 50 years. But for the first time, it may be narrowly dominated by countries that support greater whale hunts. Although it would take a three-quarters vote to end the 20-year-old international moratorium, a simple majority could push for actions that could strengthen the hand of whaling nations.

The real leaders in this are the Japanese. As greenboy at Needlenose explains:

The arrogant pricks are already acting as if the ban is already gone as it is, doubling (from last year) their so-called 'scientific' kill of whales while at the same time mocking the rest of the world by serving up the 'tissue samples' at Public Relations gourmet feasts.

One noteworthy aspect of Japanese whaling -- which has been increasing steadily in recent years -- is that its use of the "scientific kill" ruse mirrors, in an ugly fashion, the Republican right's tendency to distort science to support their preferred policies. And of course, one can expect little in the way of substantive American opposition to the Japanese effort to overturn the whaling ban under the Bush administration.

I expect we can look forward to a revival of the Greenpeace-style intervention tactics, which make for great drama but also have a polarizing effect that solidifies the internal political positions of the respective pro-whaling factions.

It's time, I think, to look at other ways of effecting political change beyond media stunts and dramas at sea. One of these is the power of political networking in creating cultural shifts.

It's important to understand that Japan's cultural resistance to the ban whaling, while still strong, has been eroding rapidly in recent years. As Jim Nollman notes in his excellent The Charged Border, whale watching is rapidly growing component of the Japanese tourism industry, and attitudes about whaling are starting to perceptibly change.

When I visited Paul Spong last summer at his OrcaLab on Hanson Island, I noted that three of his volunteers were Japanese. We befriended one of them, who was on her way home after a month on the island, and we gave her a ride south for a ways and chatter her up. I asked her about this, and she said that she believed that attitudes, especially among younger Japanese, about whaling were changing very rapidly.

Maybe, instead of ramming Japanese whale boats, someone should convince Hayao Miyazaki to make a film about whales. It would probably be vastly more effective.

But even more effectively (not to mention realistically) we can begin building networks based on a recognition of our mutual interests. This is true not just with regard to the whaling issue, but environmental issue generally. Those concerned about right-wing politics need to recognize that environmental issues are a central battleground, and environmentalists need to become wise about what they're up against. Where cultural gaps exist, building bridges may prove more effective than smashing hulls.

What we do know is that, if the IWC overturns the moratorium as expected, we can expect to see a return to mass slaughters of whales for sale on the Japanese and Norwegian markets, including any number of endangered species.

Recall, too, that there really is no humane way of killing them, either. Recall the description written by Dr. Harry Lillie, "a ship's physician on an Antarctic whaling trip in the 1940s":

Dr Lillie wrote: "If we can imagine a horse having two or three explosive spears stuck in its stomach and being made to pull a butcher's truck through the streets of London while it pours blood into the gutter, we shall have an idea of the method of killing.

"The gunners themselves admit that if whales could scream the industry would stop, for nobody would be able to stand it."

It is the looming threat of the lifting of the moratorium -- and it appears, frankly, to be a fait accompli at this point -- that has spurred me to shift, somewhat, the focus of Orcinus.

The idea isn't so much to stop reporting on the far right as it is to broaden the mission of the blog, in line, really, with my intent for it all along. There will probably be some reportage on right-wing extremism that will get pushed out in the process. Just in the past week, for instance, there have been a number of far-right-related news events that I haven't had time to comment upon: the anti-abortion extremist in the D.C. area arrested in a bomb-building plot; the leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance being arrested on civil-rights charges in Utah; the continuing spread of racial hatemongering associated with the immigration debate.

A large part of the problem is that, even as the evidence of right-wing extremism manifesting itself in the mainstream discourse mounts daily, it's starting to feel as though I'm just repeating myself. How many more ways can I point out, really, that the expansion of the extremist right's influence in the mainstream has had the predictable effect of empowering and emboldening them? (Fortunately, it helps that there are plenty of others out there bomb.html>who are picking up on the themes frequently explored here.)

It's also starting to feel as though the continued focus has become stale; the discussion is a lot less energetic these days, and the links are fewer and farther between. And frankly, it also feels like the focus is being mistaken for an obsession. I know it comes with the territory, but I'm a little tired of being thought of, even if ever so generously, as a bit of a crank.

Obviously, as the far right insinuates itself more and more in the mainstream, I'll continue to report on it, though I'll probably be more selective in how often I point it out. It's too important a trend not to stay on top of.

Still, you should expect to see a lot more reporting here on environmental issues, with a particular emphasis on whales and their plight, and a specific focus on killer whales. A large part of the purpose will be to encourage and implement communications and networking between and among environmental advocates and political activists.

With that in mind, I'd like to introduce you to Cetacean Action-Alert, a new Web site designed to facilitate networking among the various factions of whale activists and researchers, and the larger environmental movement as a whole. I'm hoping to cultivate the interest of the broader progressive community as well, because the issues being discussed, and the networking that's taking place there, have real importance in the broader perspective of combating the right on a broader scale.

I'll be posting at the Action-Alert and picking up news tidbits there. If it's something that interests you, sign up and join in. It's an experiment in the effectiveness of Web-based networking, and I'm hoping that it proves as rewarding as it is promising. [Full disclosure: The site administrator is my sister.]

Also note that I've created a new "Orca links" section to my blogroll.

I'm sure I'll lose some regular readers in this shift, though I'm hoping that most of you are coming not just for the right-wing loonies but the writing, too. I may not always write about topics you're interested in, but I hope, at least, to keep writing interestingly. Hope you all stick around for the ride.

Here comes the flood

I suppose that we shouldn't be surprised that people whose livelihoods depend on sustaining the old model of mass communications are so quick to misapprehend what's happening as that model crumbles around them.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd [subscription req'd], reporting from the YearlyKos gathering in Las Vegas, is only the most visible recent example of those from the punditry class who are teetering atop their crumbling heap and sneering at the waves lapping away at it:

As I wandered around workshops, I began to wonder if the outsiders just wanted to get in. One was devoted to training bloggers, who had heretofore not given much thought to grooming and glossy presentation, on how to be TV pundits and avoid the stereotype of nutty radical kids.

Mr. Moulitsas said he had a media coach who taught him how to stand, dress, speak, breathe and even get up from his chair. Another workshop coached Kossacks on how to talk back to Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. "One of my favorite points," the workshop leader said, "is that the French were right."

Even as Old Media is cowed by New Media, New Media is trying to become, rather than upend, Old Media….

Were the revolutionaries simply eager to be co-opted? Mr. Moulitsas grinned. "Traditionally it was hard to get your job," he said. "Now regular people can score your job."

What really aggravates pundits like Dowd -- who often earn their astonishingly powerful chunks of media real estate not so much through actual journalistic or writing merit but through a combination of luck and deviousness -- is that their influence is being diminished by people who, for heaven's sake, have no more qualifications than they do. And their evident success as opinion-makers based on their merits as writers and analysts, rather than their elite positioning atop the media heap, undermines everything that the pundit class is all about.

What Dowd doesn't get -- and which precludes her from comprehending what the hell this blogging thing is all about -- is why these bloggers exist in the first place.

And it's because of people like her.

Dowd is an examplar of the old Laswell/Lippmann model of communications, in which an elite class of "wise men" atop the media heap dispense wisdom -- and set the agenda for -- the masses from on high, and the rest of the media more or less fall into line. It was a model that more or less worked as long as (a) the elite institutions maintained their independence, both politically and economically, and (b) there was a broad diversity of mainstream media voices that could provide a conduit for information that was not disseminated from the elite towers.

Unfortunately, as media consolidation has shut down the diversity of voices, and empowered media ownership that increasingly began insisting on its own preference for a conservative bias in reporting and editorialization. As I explained awhile back:

Editors in particular played a crucial role in this, because editors directly affect not only how stories are covered, but which stories are covered. Traditionally, they also have acted as filters for bad information. And as long as there was diversity in the ranks of editors, they performed this function well.

But by the early 1990s, with diversity lessened and career tracks clearly geared for conservative yes-men, it became clear to me then that the "filtering" function of the mainstream media had become increasingly a bottleneck for information -- which was creating a real demand for the information the media failed to consistently report or emphasize.

There's a reality about this that I think most people in the mainstream media find upsetting: Information -- particularly good information, which is to say, it has factual integrity and real significance -- wants to get out; it creates its own demand for dissemination. If it's suppressed or ignored, in a democratic system, it will still find its way to the surface.

Blogging, in this sense, represents a kind of market response (that is, in the market of ideas) to the demand created by the information that wants to be disseminated. It's a way for information to get around the bottleneck. Obviously, this is as true for people on the right as for those on the left.

So really, blogs are just another communications medium, a way for information to be transmitted. Like any other medium, it has great potential for both bettering and worsening the national discourse.

What's special about blogs is their egalitarian nature: anybody can be a blogger. It represents a kind of democratization of the dissemination of information.

This is, I think, profoundly disorienting to traditional journalists, because it means their old model of the way communications is supposed to work has been upset.

That old model identifies communication with domination, as I went on to explain. The antithesis of this model -- networked person-to-person communication -- is in fact embodied, as close as possible, by the Internet.

So of course, bloggers depend on regular working journalists. So, for that matter, do editors -- and columnists. The difference with the Internet is in how the information moves -- laterally, rather than downward from on high.

Actually, the function in the old communications model that bloggers come closest to replicating is that of the editor -- not in the sense of being an overseer of writing and reportorial quality, but in setting priorities: deciding which stories are important and deserve greater attention, ascertaining which stories are reported upon.

A good blogger is not so much a journalist as a good editor (and remember, most editors are writers too). A blog is thus a kind of publication, and it attracts readers according to the quality of insight its editor brings to it.

But instead of a situation where increasingly we had only a handful of carefully selected editors who worked their way up the ranks by remaining loyal corporate yes-men, now anyone with a good news sense and a way with words can influence the course of our discourse. The Internet has shattered the old bottleneck. It has democratized how information flows in modern society.

What sparked the rise of Web-based political communication like the blogosphere was the behavior of people like Dowd. When she was named to one of the Times' cherished columnist slots, she replaced the estimable Anna Quindlen, a dependably thoughtful voice of liberalism. Dowd, in contrast, has operated more in the mode of a gossip columnist with snippy, personality-driven journalism that often becomes simply trite; while the Times' conservative columnists in the late '90s were singleminded in their pursuit of Clinton's impeachment, Dowd chose more often than not to chime in on their side, and likewise was a happy participant in the "Al Gore is a weakminded liar" theme that played out in 2000.

With that kind of voice representing "liberals" in the New York Times -- and folks like Joe Klein and Pat Caddell showing up on cable TV to represent the "liberal" side -- it's not the least surprising that genuine liberals felt the need to begin speaking up. Otherwise, their voices were not going to be heard. The blogosphere and Webzines became an effective way for that to happen.

Mind you, in some respects the blogosphere is replicating, almost out of necessity, some of the structural aspects of mainstream media: folks like Kos, Atrios, Instapundit, Malkin, and Josh Marshall all represent a kind of elite substructure within the blogosphere, built in some cases around their large communities, which function as the NYTs and WaPos of the blogosphere. But they in turn depend not just on regular journalists but on a broad network of fellow bloggers, some of whom -- like myself -- specialize in providing alternative reporting and analysis.

The effect is a real broadening of voices in our media, because the old media -- having choked itself off -- created the need for it. And those still toiling away atop their crumbling towers of influence are of course preoccupied with those egalitarian waves lapping away at them. Which is why they devote so much energy to dismissing them.

'Scoop' and the internment camps

Atrios directs us to Mark Schmitt's recent take on Peter Beinart's lionization of Henry "Scoop" Jackson -- the Washington senator (or, as he was known in these parts, "the senator from Boeing") who ran for the presidency in 1972 and 1976 -- in his recent book, The Good Fight:

There are perhaps several bits of Beinart's history that I'm tempted to challenge, but I'll pick on just one of them here because it's been bugging me for years. It's a fairly small thing, just a few pages in the book, but it is an essential pivot point for the argument and, frankly, for the New Republic view of the world. And that is the counterfactual proposition that if only, if only Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson had been the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972 or 1976, all would be right with the world.

This is an essential myth to many of the liberal hawks, to the neocons when they still considered themselves Democrats, and to some extent to the predecessors of the Democratic Leadership Council. (the Schachtmanite Committee for a Democratic Majority). And it's central to Beinart's argument. But it's not just wrong, it's ridiculous. If I went around arguing that if only Bill Bradley, who I worked for, had been the Democratic nominee in 2000, the world would be better, I might -- in some unprovable sense -- be correct, but people would still laugh at me. Because he didn't get many votes. (And that was only six years ago, not 30.) Scoop Jackson wasn't robbed of a nomination that was rightly his, or shot to death after winning the California primary. He just didn't get many votes. He fell completely flat in 1972. And in 1976, he botched the tactics, unwisely skipping Iowa and New Hampshire and so by the time he won two primaries, Jimmy Carter had already consolidated the support of conservative Democrats while the liberals were split. Scoop Jackson's not the great lost hope; he's merely one of about two dozen capable, non-brilliant Senators since 1972 who saw a president in the mirror each morning, but couldn't persuade anyone else to see the same thing. Would he have won those elections, if nominated? Who knows? Nor was Jackson some sort of foreign-policy visionary. He was a classic Western New Dealer (the really, really big spenders), who also happened to represent the biggest defense contractor of his era. The unsustainability of his pork-barrel "Guns AND Butter" policy would have tripped him up in the 1970s as surely as it did LBJ in the 1960s. If there is a deeper legacy that Jackson represents, it is uniformly a despicable one, in the form of people like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz who used him as a vehicle for their emerging theories, and if their later careers are an indication of what a Jacksonian America would have been like, then we should be thankful he was a dud as a candidate. His dud candidacy deserves no more attention than those of Lloyd Bentsen, John Glenn, Fritz Hollings, and many others.

The "liberal hawk" fondness for Henry Jackson is terribly revealing, because it displays a kind of corruption of the values they supposedly espouse. Not only did so much of the neoconservative power cadre emanate from the Scoop Jackson worldview, but so did the entire prowar faction's predilection for indulging in grotesque historical mistakes and then refusing to either acknowledge them later or admit to any accountability afterward.

Consider, if you will, Jackson's history as a congressman from Everett in the 1940s, when he not only strongly advocated the internment of Japanese Americans, but actually agitated in Congress for worsening conditions in the camps and placing greater restrictions on internees.

While researching my book Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community, I spent considerable time poring through the archives of Miller Freeman, president of the Anti-Japanese League of Washington and one of the most powerful men in the state at the time. It included a file of his correspondence with Jackson, with whom he shared a friendly relationship, though Freeman was a Republican and Jackson a Democrat. Most of all, there was a great deal of correspondence on an issue about which the men were clearly like-minded: the "Japanese problem."

As I described in Chapter 6:

The absence of the Japanese from their longtime communities during the war had not necessarily made hearts grow fonder for them. Indeed, though the frequency of the hysteria was certainly lessened by the fact the Japanese were no longer present and visible, the war-born hatred of all things "Jap" had transformed them into demon-things in the popular mind, and the dearth of daily, real-life examples to the contrary only made things worse.

Headlines reporting on the war front regularly referred to the enemy "Japs" -- as did headlines reporting on events in the WRA's relocation centers. Consistent with popular sentiments prior to the war and during the evacuation debate, letters to the editor as well as political pronouncements made no differentiation between the citizens who once had been their neighbors and the foreign enemies their sons were fighting.

Washington's congressional delegation had a particular propensity in this regard. In addition to the damage already wrought by Democratic Senator Mon Wallgren, who had chaired one of the early congressional committees recommending evacuation in 1942, then-Rep. Henry Jackson, a respected Everett Democrat, took up the anti-Japanese cause with particular relish for the war's duration. Not only was he an enthusiast of the evacuation, he was a stern advocate of the campaign to keep the Japanese from returning to the Pacific Coast -- both during and after the war. He was often seconded in this regard by his Seattle colleague, then-Rep. Warren Magnuson, who had a habit of raising groundless alarms about an imminent invasion of the Pacific Coast by the Japanese.

But it was otherwise anonymous men like Joe Matsuzawa who spurred Jackson to headline-grabbing action. In May 1943, Jackson began protesting in Congress against the Army's policy of allowing Japanese-American soldiers to visit the Pacific Coast on furlough; apparently, wearing an American uniform wasn't assurance enough of Nisei loyalty. Jackson sponsored a resolution calling for a complete investigation of "the Japanese situation," and his congressional colleagues were critical of the use of any Japanese-Americans in combat. Rep. John Costello of California sounded the familiar refrain that "you can't tell a good Jap from a bad Jap."

Jackson penned a speech that he never delivered on the subject, but it was clear he was opposed to Japanese-Americans ever returning to his home district:

What is to be the eventual disposition of the Japanese alien and native ... is the second aspect of this problem of the Pacific. Are we to return them to their former homes and businesses on the Pacific Coast to face the active antagonism of their neighbors? Shall they again, as happened in World War I, compete economically for jobs and businesses with returning war veterans?

The House Committee On Un-American Activities chaired by Texas Democrat Martin Dies also joined in on the action, partly at the urging of Jackson and others. A New Jersey Republican named J. Parnell Thomas flew out to Los Angeles and, without visiting a camp, declared that the WRA was pampering the internees. Thomas also demanded the agency halt its policy of "releasing disloyal Japs" -- that is, end its policy of relocating evacuees in jobs outside the camps.

The Dies Committee hearings provided a steady stream of scandalous headlines for a few months, bolstered by the reports of the unrest at Manzanar and Tule Lake. The most sensational of these reports involved a former motor-pool driver named Harold H. Townsend -- described in press reports as "a former official of the Poston, Ariz., relocation center" -- who told the credulous congressmen that Japanese subversives were secretly conducting Army training drills inside the relocation centers so that evacuees could spring to the aid of an invading Japanese army when it attacked the coast. What the reports also neglected to mention -- besides the lack of a shred of evidence -- was that not only had Townsend been present at the violence in Poston, but had been fired for panicking and fleeing the scene.

Dies himself held press conferences demanding that the WRA bring back all the Japanese it had relocated out of the camps and keep them interned for the duration of the war, claiming he had evidence that race riots in Detroit the week before had been the secret handiwork of an officer in the Japanese Army. Subsequent headlines detailed more wild allegations, including tales of elderly Issei secretly plotting a kamikaze attack on local forests, setting the West ablaze; caches of food being buried in the desert in a plot to aid the invading Japanese; and claims that the Japanese internees were being fed better in the camps than were American G.I.s (which may have been true, since much of the camps' food source was the farms that were operated at each of the camps by evacuees). Dies wrapped up his exploration of the "Japanese question" later that summer by reiterating its demands the WRA alter its policies -- but besides making headlines in the press, these pronouncements had little apparent effect on the changes that were already in motion at the WRA. And the Dies Committee would soon be more stridently focused on the looming "Red Menace."

The interest groups chimed in as well. The American Legion joined in on the rising anti-Japanese sentiments with its denunciation of the WRA's policy of "coddling the Japs," and longtime anti-Asian groups like the Native Sons of the Golden West (whose demeanor historically suggested vigilantism) became active in agitating alongside newer groups like the Pearl Harbor League. Some of these groups distributed signs proclaiming: "We don't want any Japs back here -- EVER!" These signs gained prominence in places like Kent, in the heart of what had been a thriving Japanese community in the White River Valley; the town's mayor, a barber, displayed the warning prominently in his shop, and earned a Time magazine appearance for it, pointing at the sign.

Jackson's definitive biography, Robert G. Kaufman's Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics, discusses this, noting that Jackson's senatorial colleague Daniel M. Inouye -- a decorated Japanese American veteran -- took a generous view of Jackson's wartime attitudes, noting that they were widespread and common. But Kaufman says [p.36]:

He is, however, too magnanimous. Jackson was not just an advocate of the internment, but an enthusiast, and he justified his attitude with a logic and rhetoric that still makes chilling reading:

We first heard much of Japanese infiltration tactics on Bataan and in the Philippines, but the Japanese had for many years practiced a different kind of infiltration -- infiltration into the vitals of our economic, political, and domestic structure. The principles of Bushido, by insidious and indirect means inserted themselves in a great many organizations in much the same fashion as the Nazis utilized their front organizations. In our great Pacific coast cities, they controlled much of the hotel and restaurant business although there was always a white manager who would front for them with the general public. They lowered the prices to their own countrymen in the fresh produce and vegetable field, ofrcing our their white competition, only to raise prices as soon as they had monopolized that sphere of business. Always they had prominent civic leaders as their attorneys, paying them on a retainer basis. Whenever a situation came up in which they were interested, they had only to contact these individuals with their specious reasons to have them immediately come forward in their interest. Investigations will show that the Japanese counsels in our large cities lavished expensive and sumptuous gifts on a great number of prominent citizens at Christmas and other appropriate occasions.

It's clear that Jackson's enthusiasm for the internment, as with so many of its advocates on the Pacific Coast, was directly predicated on the "Yellow Peril" mythology and its attendant propaganda. This isn't terribly surprising -- after all, FDR, whose administration was responsible for the internment, held similar views.

In all my research, I could, however, find no evidence that Jackson ever expressed any regret for his wartime activism against Japanese Americans, even as reparations were being discussed late in his career. He remained mum, hoping no one would remember his own role in the affair.

It is this propensity -- this refusal to acknowledge, or be held accountable for, the wrongs they've inflicted -- that sets the Jacksonites apart. Everyone can make mistakes, and Jackson's guilt would at least have been ameliorated later if he had simply acknowledged it. But he couldn't, which reveals a real blindness to the misery and suffering that politicians can intentionally inflict, and a gaping hole in their humanity.

Henry Jackson's politics represented a strain in the Democratic Party that has never gone away: a willingness to sacrifice core principles in the pursuit of an ephemeral vision of America as a benign global superpower. Because of that corruption, it's a vision doomed to collapse in a heap of hubris.

What's strangest, I suppose, is that these same people are the first ones to start talking about driving out the very factions of their own party who were right about their fearmongering all along.

Maybe they just hate being reminded of their mistakes. Or maybe they're just hoping it makes everyone else forget.

Endo v. Bush

Over at his blog, Eric Muller has been hosting a mini-symposium on Mitsuye Endo and her Supreme Court case that ended the nightmare of the Japanese American internment. The whole series was excellent, with Greg Robinson's thoughtful disquisition a real highlight.

But I was particularly struck by something Jerry Kang wrote in his excellent contribution:

Why does this interpretive dispute matter? First, in the law reviews, Endo is being remembered more triumphantly than Gudridge intended, as an example of the Supreme Court checking Executive Branch excesses, even during times of war. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Supreme Court should be blamed for its machinations, not praised for its backbone.

Second, in judicial opinions, Endo is being remembered without irony. Endo is now being cited for the "clear statement rule"--that in order to detain American citizens, the political branches must authorize such detention unambiguously. The argument goes like this: Just as the internment was not authorized back during World War II, see Endo, detention has not been authorized in the global war on terror. But this reinscribes a falsehood. FDR and Congress did authorize the internment camps. It's just that the Court declined to see to this inconvenient fact.

As a matter of history, Endo should be understood as dodging accountability. [emphasis mine] As a matter of doctrine, Endo should be treated in the same way that we treat Korematsu. Even nonlawyers know that the Korematsu case created the foundations of "strict scrutiny," which remains a critical component of our equal protection jurisprudence. In other words, as an abstract legal rule, Korematsu remains good law. However, how this rule was applied to the facts is universally disdained. Endo's abstract legal rule, demanding a clear statement, can also be preserved as good law. However Endo's application to the facts in World War II should be sharply rejected as deceitful.

If we don't, what will prevent the use of Endo to dodge accountability again? After horrific tortures in some detention camp are brought to light, low-level soldiers will be prosecuted but high-level officials will be absolved. After all, there was never any "clear statement" authorizing quite this sort of barbarism. See Endo.

This brings us to something I discussed regarding the Korematsu case, which, as Kang argues, must be seen in a similar light:

Put simply, the deference of the Court to the executive branch in wartime that Korematsu exhibited [particularly in its failure to hold the Roosevelt administration accountable for its actions] was predicated on deceptiveness from the Justice and War departments that in turn sought to obscure the nakedly racist nature of the claim of "military necessity." That is to say, when the Courts so abjectly defer to such wartime powers, the executive can expand all its powers to unimaginable heights simply on its say-so, whether truthful or not.

Probably the definitive word on this was Justice Robert Jackson's dissent in Korematsu:

The limitation under which courts always will labor in examining the necessity for a military order are illustrated by this case. How does the Court know that these orders have a reasonable basis in necessity? No evidence whatever on that subject has been taken by this or any other court. There is sharp controversy as to the credibility of the DeWitt report. So the Court, having no real evidence before it, has no choice but to accept General DeWitt's own unsworn, self-serving statement, untested by any cross-examination, that what he did was reasonable. And thus it will always be when courts try to look into the reasonableness of a military order.

In the very nature of things, military decisions are not susceptible of intelligent judicial appraisal. They do not pretend to rest on evidence, but are made on information that often would not be admissible and on assumptions that could not be proved. Information in support of an order could not be disclosed to courts without danger that it would reach the enemy. Neither can courts act on communications made in confidence. Hence courts can never have any real alternative to accepting the mere declaration of the authority that issued the order that it was reasonably necessary from a military viewpoint.

Much is said of the danger to liberty from the Army program for deporting and detaining these citizens of Japanese extraction. But a judicial construction of the due process clause that will sustain this order is a far more subtle blow to liberty than the promulgation of the order itself. A military order, however unconstitutional, is not apt to last longer than the military emergency. Even during that period a succeeding commander may revoke it all. But once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution, or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions such an order, the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.

A lack of accountability is the key, as with FDR, to the Bush administration's mad power grab in the wake of the Sept. 11 tragedy. At every step, the administration has short-circuited any serious scrutiny of its actions through a series of steps: badgering the Republican Congress into submission, threatening its critics and accusing them of treason and anti-Americanism, and, as Glenn Greenwald has exquisitely illuminated, avoiding any kinds of court challenges to its sweeping assertion of executive powers.

I'm especially enamored of Greenwald's new book, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok, which traces the origins of the NSA surveillance matter back to the Bush's decision to expand executive powers from his first days in office, but taking off with a vengeance under the banner of 9/11.

Most of all, Greenwald's book is a call to action in defense of bedrock American values -- values that are, in fact, endangered by the Bush administration's vision of a corporate America run by an all-powerful executive. It is a vision that is fueled and enabled by the environment of fearfulness, particularly a fear of amorphous terrorism, that Bush, with the full complicity of the media, has proven extraordinarily adept at fostering.

The folks at Firedoglake hosted two excellent discussions of the book, both of which are well worth reading for the many additional insights. And it was encouraging to read how many other people are becoming aware of the dangers posed by Bush's power grab.

In the comments, I noted one caveat with Greenwald's thesis:

I was very interested in Glenn's description of how he came to be concerned about the Bush administration's post-9/11 behavior, especially since he says he "was among those who strongly approved of his performance" after the attacks.

I have to admit I was far more skeptical initially. After all, it was my belief from having tracked Bush's record on antiterrorism work before 9/11 that his atrocious handling of the issue was not likely to change afterward. I too supported the decision to invade Afghanistan, but felt that even that was badly mishandled, and when the focus shifted to Iraq, I knew we were in trouble in terms of making serious headway against terrorism.

Still, I think my red flags went up at the same time as Glenn's (pp.2-3):

What first began to shake my faith in the administration was its conduct in the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested in May 2002 on U.S. soil and then publicly labeled "the dirty bomber." The administration claimed it could hold him indefinitely without charging him with any crime and while denying him access to counsel.

I never imagined that such a thing could happen in modern America -- that a president would claim the right to order American citizens imprisoned with no charges and without the right to a trial. In China, the former Soviet Union, Iran, and countless other countries, the government can literally abduct its citizens and imprison them without a trial. But that cannot happen in the United States -- at least it never could before. If it means anything to be an American citizen, it means that we cannot be locked away by our government unless we are charged with a crime, given due process by the court, and then convicted by a jury of our peers.

I was alarmed by the Padilla case as well, and for the same reasons -- but from a somewhat different perspective.

I had spent much of the previous ten years researching the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, the results of which I published in my book Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community. And what I knew, all too well, was that American citizens have been imprisoned with no charges and without the right to a trial; I knew that the United States government had in fact abducted its citizens and incarcerated them without a trial, it had locked them away without being charged with a crime.

And it was all done, in fact, under the same circumstances the Bush administration was now claiming gave it free rein, namely, its powers as a wartime executive.

Before Strawberry Days was published, I explored this in some detail at American Street, using some of the material that later was published in the book:

What the Japanese-American internment revealed for the first time was a hole in the traditional checks and balances of constitutional powers. In wartime, the total deference to the executive branch would lend it nearly comprehensive powers. The post-Sept. 11 response has opened another dimension to this: If wartime — as in the "War on Terror" -- becomes itself a never-ending enterprise, then the executive branch's power becomes potentially illimitable.

Up to the edge of that hole in the Constitution, the Bush administration has driven a large bus called "enemy combatant status" and parked it. It now sits, idling.

As reporter Charles Lane explained in the Washington Post, the Bush administration's creation of this status actually created a parallel legal system with secret courts that ultimately are only accountable to the president himself: "For example, under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen's home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it."

Ultimately, the president himself would be the person making the call on just who qualifies as an "enemy combatant." And what would be the Bush administration's criteria for making these decisions?

"There won't be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end this," explained Solicitor General Theodore Olson in the Post. "There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances."

As Olson went on to explain in the Post piece, the only thing to restrain the president is the prospect of losing re-election:

Administration officials, however, imply that the main check on the president's performance in wartime is political -- that if the public perceives his approach to terrorism is excessive or ineffective, it will vote him out of office.

"At the end of the day in our constitutional system, someone will have to decide whether that [decision to designate someone an enemy combatant] is a right or just decision," Olson said. "Who will finally decide that? Will it be a judge, or will it be the president of the United States, elected by the people, specifically to perform that function, with the capacity to have the information at his disposal with the assistance of those who work for him?"

I explored this a little bit further in the American Street series:

The Padilla case remains in limbo -- though the public was recently given some insights into the government's reasoning in the case, thanks to a Wall Street Journal piece by Bradford A. Berenson, who served as associated White House Counsel under Bush. The key to the reasoning lies in this paragraph, and directly reflects Solicitor General Ted Olson's contention that the "enemy combatant" designation could be made at the whim of the president:

The president's power as commander in chief to do what is necessary to protect the nation in time of war is, as it must be, exceptionally flexible and robust. He can engage and subdue the enemy in any way he sees fit. There is no judicial check on his authority in this vital and sensitive area because there cannot be: As the Framers expressly recognized in the Federalist Papers, the 'decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch' that are the hallmarks of unitary executive power are ‘essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks.'

As Arthur Silber observed in response:

[I]f this idea were to be established and accepted, it would provide the framework -- in principle -- for an absolute dictatorship. No, that dictatorship would not arrive overnight, but history demonstrates that dictatorships can arrive slowly, by degrees and by increasingly authoritarian steps. It need not happen all at once. But under this "reasoning" and in principle, every United States citizen could be imprisoned for a lifetime. End of story.

I think this is the summation of the Bush Theory of the Executive: as a wartime president, he gets to call the shots, at his whim.

It's all about the Imperial Presidency. The principle -- just as it was for Nixon -- is the power of the president and his advisers to lie, fumble, and even break the law without consequence. Just because he's president.

In this case, we're not simply repeating history; Bush's initiatives exceed any historical precedent. But by remembering where the nation went wrong, once before, in granting the president extraordinary wartime powers, we can find ways to prevent it from happening again. It took real bravery to oppose it then; it may take equal doses of courage today.

The Divorce Amendment

MEMO: Saving the Godly Institution of Marriage
TO: Gen. J.C. Christian
FROM: Lt. Col. C. LeMay Thumper

Sir:

I know you've been watching with interest the progress of the ongoing valiant efforts to defend the sacred institution of marriage from pollution at the hand of vile homosexuals, and as your right-hand man (so to speak), I know how bitterly disappointed you must have been after its defeat by Satanic forces in the Senate.

Of course, we cannot be totally downcast. After all, our comrade-in-arms in the House, Majority Leader John Boehner, is going to bring it to a vote there. Perhaps their valiant example will inspire the Senate to reconsider. It might also help drive out the homo-Satanic element from within the ranks of God's Own Party as well and eventually leads us to the Promised Land of a Christian Nation.

However, I've also been pondering the bigger picture. It seems to me that that the gay-marriage ban is simply a defensive measure, designed to stop any further erosion in the War Against Marriage as a Sacred Institution. It only stops further decay -- but the War rages on.

Why not go on the attack? Why not try to do something about the real threat to the Institution of Marriage?

That's right: Divorce.

I realized this while poring through the Scripture and trying to unearth any obscure references to how Our Lord most assuredly hates the idea of "gay marriage," and how the Bible prohibits such a thing. I have to admit that such a thing was hard to find, though I did notice that some of the old prophets had twelve wives and a number of concubines as well, which sounds like not an altogether bad proposition. But anyway.

On the other hand, the subject of divorce seems to come up a lot, especially with the Big Kahuna Himself, right there in the New Testament:

"So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate." [Matthew 19:6]

"It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement: But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery." [Matthew 5:31-32]

"The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. They say unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away? He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so. And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery." [Matthew 19:3-9]

"And the Pharisees came to him, and asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? tempting him...And he saith unto them, Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery." [Mark 10:2-12]

"Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband committeth adultery." Luke 16:18

Now I realize that this leaves a "fornication" exception, and some later Scripture from St. Paul left a little more wiggle room:

"To the married I give this ruling, which is not mine but the Lord's: a wife must not separate herself from her husband (if she does, she must either remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband), and the husband must not divorce his wife." [1Cor.7:10-11]

All of this, in keeping with America as Christian Nation, is something that should be written into law immediately. I propose we start a 50-state campaign urging President Bush to sponsor a Divorce Amendment, marshalling all the forces of righteousness to ward off this real threat to the institution of marriage by banning it altogether, as the Lord Himself would want us to do.

Of course, it could be written to include the "fornication" exception, as well as Paul's exception for separation. Hell, I would also be in favor of an "if your wife turns into a fat dumpy nag" exception, but I haven't yet dug up the Scriptural justification for it. Give me some time, I'm sure I can.

As you know, I'm proposing this as a divorcee myself. But it has always been my feeling that if, you know, society prohibited divorce, and she had known that the consequences would include death by stoning, my ex would never have run off that hunky guitar player in the first place.

This is why I believe a Divorce Amendment is so vital. Otherwise, how will healthy white males, well within the Viagra Years, manage to retain the purity of our bodily functions? It's become much too easy for women whose minds have been polluted by the Satanic Feminist Movement to kick us out the door like dogs on the slightest of pretenses, including the normative husbandly need for relief of our precious bodily fluids on demand.

Time to marshal the Army, sir! Victory against the real forces of evil awaits.

Yours in manly Christianity,

Lt. Col. C. LeMay Thumper

The targets of the psy war

Craig Unger has a must-read piece in the most recent issue of Vanity Fair about the psy-ops component of the run-up to the Iraq war:

For more than two years it has been widely reported that the U.S. invaded Iraq because of intelligence failures. But in fact it is far more likely that the Iraq war started because of an extraordinary intelligence success—specifically, an astoundingly effective campaign of disinformation, or black propaganda, which led the White House, the Pentagon, Britain's M.I.6 intelligence service, and thousands of outlets in the American media to promote the falsehood that Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program posed a grave risk to the United States.

The Bush administration made other false charges about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.)—that Iraq had acquired aluminum tubes suitable for centrifuges, that Saddam was in league with al-Qaeda, that he had mobile weapons labs, and so forth. But the Niger claim, unlike other allegations, can't be dismissed as an innocent error or blamed on ambiguous data. "This wasn't an accident," says Milt Bearden, a 30-year C.I.A. veteran who was a station chief in Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, and Germany, and the head of the Soviet–East European division. "This wasn't 15 monkeys in a room with typewriters."

In recent months, it has emerged that the forged Niger documents went through the hands of the Italian military intelligence service, SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare), or operatives close to it, and that neoconservative policymakers helped bring them to the attention of the White House. Even after information in the Niger documents was repeatedly rejected by the C.I.A. and the State Department, hawkish neocons managed to circumvent seasoned intelligence analysts and insert the Niger claims into Bush's State of the Union address.

By the time the U.S. invaded Iraq, in March 2003, this apparent black-propaganda operation had helped convince more than 90 percent of the American people that a brutal dictator was developing W.M.D.—and had led us into war.

Unger's report is important because it confirms, from the inside, something that some of us observed from the outside fairly early on:

We have in fact known from even before the outset that the war against Iraq would prominently feature psychological warfare. Most people have assumed that this warfare would be directed against the enemy and the subject citizens. They have not stopped to consider that, by definition, it would also be directed toward the American public as well.

This reality raises a serious concern about the fragility of democracy during wartime. Because under the aegis of a seemingly eternal war, the American government has clearly been involving the public in its psychological combat, and has hijacked the nation's press in the process. The entire meaning of the Iraq war -- and by extension, the "war on terrorism" -- is inextricably bound up in the psychological manipulation of the voting public through a relentless barrage of propaganda.

This is why the both the runup to the war and its subsequent mishandling have been so replete with highly symbolic media events -- many of them played repeatedly on nightly newscasts -- that have proven so hollow at their core, from the declarations of imminent threat from Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, to phony images of Saddam's statue being torn down, to flyboy antics aboard airline carriers, to meaningless "handovers" of power. It also explains why certain important and humanizing symbols of wartime -- civilian casualties, the returning flag-draped coffins -- have been so notably absent from our views of the war.

The role of the media in this manipulation cannot be understated. The abdication of the media's role as an independent watchdog and its whole subsumation as a propaganda organ bodes ill for any democracy, because a well-informed public is vital to its functioning.

But the fact that the military establishment, in the context of the "war on terror," clearly views the American public as the subject of a psychological combat operation should give us all pause regarding the ability of democracy to withstand this kind of assault.

The intelligence expert Sam Gardiner made similar observations in Salon with a harder base of evidence:

The Army Field Manual describes information operations as the use of strategies such as information denial, deception and psychological warfare to influence decision making. The notion is as old as war itself. With information operations, one seeks to gain and maintain information superiority -- control information and you control the battlefield. And in the information age, it has become even more imperative to influence adversaries.

But with the Iraq war, information operations have gone seriously off track, moving beyond influencing adversaries on the battlefield to influencing the decision making of friendly nations and, even more important, American public opinion. In information denial, one attempts to deceive one's adversary. Since the declared end of combat operations, the Bush administration has orchestrated a number of deceptions about Iraq. But who is its adversary?

... The White House is also using psychological warfare -- conveying selected information to organizations and individuals to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning and ultimately behavior -- to spread its version of the war. And the administration's message is obviously central to the process. From the very beginning, that message, delivered both directly and subtly, has been constant and consistent: Iraq = terrorists = 9/11.

The president tells us that we are fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here in the United States. But I know of no one with a respectable knowledge of the events in Iraq who shares that view. My contacts in the intelligence community say the opposite -- that U.S. policies in fact are creating more terrorism.

As I observed at the time:

Nonetheless, the American public is largely oblivious to this fact, instead seeing Bush's "strong and resolute" actions as making headway against terrorism. As Gardiner explains, the "repetition of the terrorist argument is utterly consistent with the theory that one can develop collective memory in a population through repetition." This hardly the only time this technique has been used by the conservative movement, either; how many times have we heard talking points reiterated ad nauseam by conservatives (from "It's not the sex, it's the lies" to "Al Gore invented the Internet" to "Kerry is a flip-flopper") until they eventually become accepted as truth?

... It would be one thing if all this manipulation were actually for the benefit of the American public. But it has occurred in fact solely for the benefit of the conservative movement and its agenda -- an agenda that, at its core, is profoundly anti-democratic.

The danger of placing the capacity for employing these techniques in the hands of a movement whose entire raison d'etre is the acquisition of power through any means could not be more apparent. After all, we've seen it happen before, with disastrous -- even apocalyptic -- results.

The key to all of this, of course, is the behavior of the media, its reliance on storylines, and the dissemination of the information, all of which reflect an elitist, top-down model of communications. I think it's easy to predict that Unger's revelations will receive less discussion on the airwaves than the "immigration debate" and Bill and Hill's sex life, because it doesn't fit readily into the well-established storyline that the Bush administration is "well meaning."

Which leaves it up to us Webfolk to start talking about it.

The Coulter cloaca

Look, it's not as if Ann Coulter hasn't already revealed the quivering sac of pus she has for a soul, multiple times. And always, just when you think she can't crawl any lower, she turns around and does exactly that.

So her latest schtick in promoting her newest liberal-hate screed (titled Godless: The Church of Liberalism) really isn't any kind of surprise at all. It just means it's just time to fumigate again.

What she's doing is attacking the widows of the 9/11 victims who had the temerity to question Preznit Bush and, more horrifically, support John Kerry in the 2004 election. In the book, she writes:

These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was part of the closure process. These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband's death so much.

Coulter's Bizarro World Reverse Projection Mirror is on display here, to wit:

This self-obsessed woman seems genuinely unaware that there was a flesh-and-blood human toll taken on 9/11, people to whom it really happened, and vicarious watchers like Ann Coulter, whose experience of it came from watching it on TV, act as if it happened to them too. In fact, the entire country voluntarily marinated in their exquisite personal agony; the families had no choice in the matter. Apparently, granting Bush the status of a demigod, and accusing anyone -- including the actual victims and their families -- who dared question him of "treason," was part of the closure process for people like Coulter. More than that, it made her a ton of dough. But now she's a millionaire, lionized on TV and in Time cover stories, reveling in her status as a celebrity and stalked by cream-pie throwers, all because she can attract attention to herself by impugning, in the ugliest fashion, the motives of people who lost their husbands, wives, parents and children on 9/11. In fact, as long as they don't have to confront people like the family members, people like Coulter (see also Michelle Malkin) positively love to talk about 9/11 and the victims ad nauseam as justification for every little jot and tittle of their right-wing enterprise; indeed, I have never seen such a cluster of soulless hags and cads enjoying other people's deaths so much. (Can anyone say "trifecta"?)

The projection on Coulter's part, in this case, couldn't have been made more clear than in the fact that what the 9/11 families fought the Bush administration over -- having an independent commission investigate the intelligence failures of 9/11 -- was precisely the opposite of self-absorbed grief, and was in fact predicated on the crazy idea that maybe the government should look at what it did wrong in order to prevent another similar terror attack. So who, exactly, is self-absorbed here?

As ThinkProgress [via Atrios] reports, Coulter was on NBC's Today show with Matt Lauer today, and he tried to pin her down on this passage. Of course, she deflected by accusing Lauer of losing his cool, which he didn't, but Coulter is a master of avoiding the question:

COULTER: To speak out using the fact they are widows. This is the left’s doctrine of infallibility. If they have a point to make about the 9-11 commission, about how to fight the war on terrorism, how about sending in somebody we are allowed to respond to. No. No. No. We have to respond to someone who had a family member die. Because then if we respond, oh you are questioning their authenticity.

LAUER: So grieve but grieve quietly?

COULTER: No, the story is an attack on the nation. That requires a foreign policy response.

LAUER: By the way, they also criticized the Clinton administration.

COULTER: Not the ones I am talking about. No, no, no.

LAUER: Yeah they have.

COULTER: Oh no, no, no, no, no. They were cutting commercials for Kerry. They were using their grief to make a political point while preventing anyone from responding.

LAUER: So if you lose a husband, you no longer have the right to have a political point of view?

COULTER: No, but don't use the fact that you lost a husband as the basis for being able to talk about, while preventing people from responding. Let Matt Lauer make the point. Let Bill Clinton make the point. Don't put up someone I am not allowed to respond to without questioning the authenticity of their grief.

Actually, what galls Coulter about people like the 9/11 widows is that her standard response to Matt Lauer and Bill Clinton or anyone else who might possess the audacity to question in any fashion the Bush administration or conservatives generally is to accuse them of "treason" or, at worst, of "having forgotten what happened on 9/11." And that response, of course, doesn't work so well when you're talking about families of the victims.

So let's just find a way to lash them anyway. Paint them as they did Cindy Sheehan, as a left-wing, self-serving kook.

Coulter's not the first to do this; Rush Limbaugh, you'll recall, attempted a similar smear job against the widows.

What all of this obscures, of course, is the reality: that what the 9/11 families succeeded in doing was making the 9/11 Commission happen. That was the extent of their "treason." That, and backing John Kerry.

Moreover, I noted some time back, their story isn't one of partisan hackery. Several of the widows, including leader Kristin Breitweiser, were in fact Bush-voting Republicans on, and immediately after, 9/11. What turned them against Bush was how hard his White House fought even having a 9/11 investigation, as they explained when they came out for Kerry:

Gathering at the National Press Club in Washington on Tuesday, the widows announced their endorsement of the Massachusetts Democrat for president, a move made "in good conscience and from our hearts," as former Bush supporter Kristen Breitweiser told the news cameras. "In the three years since 9/11, I could never have imagined I would be here today, disappointed in the person I voted for, for president," she said. Added fellow Jersey Girl Patty Casazza: "It was President Bush who thwarted our attempts at every turn."

The widows made this political turn for one reason only: Bush fought the formation of the 9/11 commission for a year, and continued to fight its work throughout. Moreover, their intimacy with the details of the commission's findings led them to recognize the Iraq war for the abomination it is:

"Unfortunately, before the work in Afghanistan was complete ... this administration moved our most precious resources, America's sons and daughters, into Iraq, without the support of our allies. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and that is what we learned from the 9/11 commission's final report," said Lorie Van Auken of East Brunswick, N.J. "Sept. 11 was an enormous intelligence failure, and yet nothing was done to fix our intelligence after 9/11, and that same intelligence apparatus took us into Iraq. So it's doubly frustrating to learn that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11."

There was an added reason, beyond their bipartisan background, that the 9/11 families had so much credibility: they had been extraordinarily persuasive in their testimony to Congress, which was built not on emotional appeals but a devastating factual case regarding intelligence failures:

On Sept. 18, 2002, when much of the public was still sympathetic to the Bush administration position that the attacks could not have been foreseen or prevented, Breitweiser gave a statement before the joint House-Senate investigation into intelligence lapses; it may have changed the course of history.

In a concise, straightforward manner, she laid out the facts far more effectively than had any senator or representative on the panel. She asked how, for example, the CIA could fail to locate hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, who had entered the United States despite being on a terrorist watch list, when one was listed in the San Diego phone book and both roomed with an undercover FBI informant. The day after her presentation, the White House -- once firmly against an independent commission -- reversed itself and endorsed the idea. And it was the 9/11 commission that would later find no operational ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, one of the key reasons Bush gave for invading Iraq.

Breitweiser posts occasionally still at Huffblog, including a devastating retort to Karl Rove for his Coulteresque attack on liberals last year:

Karl, you say you "understand" 9/11. Then why did you and your friends so vehemently oppose the creation of a 9/11 Independent Commission? Once the commission was established, why did you refuse to properly fund the Commission by allotting it only a $3 million budget? Why did you refuse to allow access to documents and witnesses for the 9/11 Commissioners? Why did we have to fight so hard for an extension when the Commissioners told us that they needed more time due to your footdragging and stonewalling? Why didn't you want to cooperate so that all Americans could “understand” what happened on 9/11?

Since the release of the 9/11 Commission's Final Report, have you helped bring to fruition any of the commission's recommendations? Have you truly made our homeland safer by hardening/eliminating soft targets? Because, to me rebuilding a tower that is 1,776 feet tall where the World Trade Center once stood seems to be only providing more soft targets for the terrorists to hit. Moreover, your support for the use of nuclear energy seems to be providing even more soft targets. Tell me, while you write your nifty little speeches about nuclear power, do you explain to your audience how our nuclear plants will be protected against terrorist attack or infiltration? What assurances do you give that nuclear waste will not find its way into terrorist's dirty bombs and onto our city streets? And, how do you assure your audience that the shipment of radioactive material will not become a terrorist target as it rolls through their own backyards?

No wonder the Coulters of the world hate people like this. They have a tendency to shatter their Bizarro World anti-realities.

I'd kind of like to see Ann Coulter up on a stage with Kristin Breitweiser, but I'm afraid it might signal the end of the universe or something, sort of like anti-matter and matter: anti-reality meeting with reality. The problem is that Coulter, no doubt, would then just call out her thugs.

Border crossings

This is a picture of the Canadian border near Blaine, Washington, not far from where the Minutemen have been holding border watches this spring. As you can see, the border itself consists of an eight-foot-wide grassy ditch between two parallel country roads. Crossing it entails taking a short leap over the ditch.

It's in a remote part of the county and, though Border Patrol vehicles can be seen driving past from time to time, it's the kind of place where someone with a well-laid plan could easily slip over late at night.

There are a lot of places like this along the U.S.-Canada border, which at about 4,000 miles is more than twice as long as the 1,500 miles or so we share with Mexico. What's even more common, in sparsely populated regions of the Northwest especially, is large tracts of wilderness and open range where security is nearly nonexistent at worst and widely sporadic at best.

In other words, there are many more multiple opportunities for Islamist terrorists to enter the United States from Canada than there are from Mexico. Crossing the Canadian border in untracked areas, unlike the Mexican border, is neither terribly hazardous nor even particularly daunting.

However, most terrorism experts will tell you that terrorists prefer to travel incognito with fake papers and are most likely to try crossing through a regular port of entry with those papers. Remote border crossings are a real risk for such operatives because they become more exposed out in the open, rather than simply mingling in with the thousands who cross borders legally every day.

Perhaps more to the point, the presence of Al Qaeda cells in Mexico is virtually unknown, but the presence of Al Qaeda in Canada is very well established indeed, as the Ahmed Ressam case demonstrated vividly.

In other words, if you're genuinely concerned about terrorists crossing our borders, you'll increase funding for port-of-entry security and for monitoring open areas -- on the Canada border primarily.

So it seemed altogether fitting that on the day that the National Guard began its photo op, er, security mission on the Mexican border, the news from Canada came once again to remind us that, when it comes to the issue of border security as an aspect of the "war on terror," our top priority has to be the northern border, not the southern one:

Police said Monday more arrests are likely in an alleged plot to bomb buildings in Canada, while intelligence officers sought ties between the 17 suspects and Islamic terror cells in the United States and five other nations.

A court said authorities had charged all 12 adults arrested over the weekend with participating in a terrorist group. Other charges included importing weapons and planning a bombing. The charges against five minors were not made public.

The Parliament of Canada, located in Ottawa, was believed to be one of the targets the group discussed.

[Michael Stickings has more on the arrests.]

As I asked previously:

Why, if post-9/11 border security is such a suddenly serious concern, aren't we sending the Guard to the Canadian border? -- It is, after all our longest and most porous border, and its many open spots do not entail dangerous and potentially lethal desert crossings. Perhaps more to the point, the one terrorist who did try to sneak into the USA with explosives as part of a plot to attack a major metropolitan area was caught on the Canadian border.

The Ressam case was particularly revealing when it came to the presence of terrorist cells in Canada:

Ressam's plot was ultimately foiled on December 14 by Diana Dean, a U.S. border employee, but his capture would reveal that operatives were also inside America waiting to liaise with their counterparts across the Canadian border. Algerian and Brooklyn resident Abdelghani Meskini was the man supposed to meet Ressam in Seattle and was arrested a few days after the latter's capture.

On December 19, Canadian Lucia Garofalo was also arrested trying to smuggle an Algerian at a remote border crossing in northeastern Vermont. Garofalo was found to have contacts with Atmani and Meskini as well as high-ranking members of GIA cells in Europe. [7] Another Algerian with links to Meskini, Abdel Hakim Tizegha, was arrested on December 24 in Seattle, accused of being part of Ressam's group. In the weeks that followed, a number of Algerians were stopped and questioned in major cities and border regions across the United States and Canada.

Of course, the answer for dealing with this problem doesn't entail building fences, or placing National Guardsmen on the Canadian border, or setting up citizen border watches. Hell, we could place "moats, fiery moats and fiery moats with fire-proof crocodiles" on both the borders and it wouldn't work.

It entails giving the Border Patrol both the manpower and the surveillance technology it needs to adequately monitor the borders and stop foreign terrorists effectively and professionally -- instead of cutting their budget as the Bush administration has done.

So when the Minutemen and their fellow nativists start citing Sept. 11 and their fears about border security as the reason why they're really mounting their Mexico border watches -- surely, it has nothing to do with the fears about the loss of white "culture" that so many of them seem to want to talk about -- it couldn't hurt to remind them that what they're doing is far more likely to dilute a serious effort to bolster antiterrorist security where it counts the most.

And the practical effect of the nativists' border campaign so far? It isn't pretty:

It was early on a May morning, still dark, when Border Patrol agent Dan McClafferty first smelled death, its rich odor piercing the desert bouquet of sage, salt cedar and creosote. Following the beam of his flashlight, McClafferty looked under the thorny branches of a paloverde tree and found what he was looking for.

The body of the 3-year-old boy lay still, covered with a jacket and his arms crossed over his chest. His mother, found wandering along a desert highway hours earlier, had carried him there as she had tried to cross into the United States illegally.

The sad discovery was not unique. Since 1993, when the Clinton administration began a crackdown on border crossings in San Diego and El Paso, more than 3,500 people have died trying to cross into the United States through desert. And, as officials work to put more patrols and fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, immigrant advocates fear there will be more deaths among the tens of thousands who attempt the trip.

Most of the deaths so far -- 959 since Oct. 1, 2001, according to local government statistics and the Mexican government -- have been in Arizona, where the landscape comprises mountains, ranches, Indian reservations, military proving grounds and endless miles of cactus-filled desert. The boy, who was found on May 16 and whose name could not be ascertained from U.S. or Mexican officials, was one of the latest additions to the list.

This is why the current "immigration debate" is so misbegotten. As with most outbreaks of right-wing extremism in the mainstream, its eventual toll is unfailingly, inexorably, a litany of human misery and injustice.

The end of America

One of the remarkable aspects of the increasing interaction between mainstream conservatives and the extremist right on the immigration issue is the way the way they wind up feeding each other: the far right gives them talking points, the mainstream regurgitates them for mass consumption, which gives the far right the justification and affirmation it craves -- and fuels them to even greater rhetorical heights ... which then are eventually picked up and transmitted into the mainstream.

And what they primarily trade in is fear -- pure, unadulterated fear. That's why they're so big on conspiracy theories like Reconquista!

The core message is "Fear of a Brown Planet": "Look out, white people! The brown people are coming to take away your way of life! Aiiieee!!! Run for the hills!"

If you turn to the current front page at American Patrol (only click if you really have to) -- the white-supremacist border-control outfit run by Glenn Spencer of Reconquista! fame -- you'll see the following headline:

Senate Voted to End U. S. as a Nation
Surrender to Latin Invasion Now Clear

Follwed by links to a video from Lou Dobbs' CNN program of yesterday, plus a snippet from the transcript:

Lou Dobbs Tonight - CNN - June 1

Dobbs: The issue, as you said, that the nation would cease to exist, what do you mean by that?

West: Well, the kind of provisions that are in the Senate... and it will be mainly Hispanic. It will be mainly Mexican. -- And so, what the question becomes is, do we want to become a northern section of Latin America? Do we cease to become literally an English- speaking people, become bilingual, and / or Spanish- speaking? And with these questions, you really begin to get at the heart of the matter, a demographic, a newer demographic.

West is a columnist for the Washington Times whose recent piece on immigration was the center of discussion.

You have to see the whole interview for yourself to believe it, as Dobbs simply lets West broadcast her nativist nonsense unchallenged. West is promoting the crazed notion, as she put it in the column, that in its compromise immigration legislation -- which she dubs "the Dissolve America Now bill" -- the Senate voted to completely open its borders, that is, "to relocate the Statue of Liberty to the U.S.-Mexico border." In reality, the American Patrol headline isn't far removed from what West actually wrote.

Here's the transcript:

DOBBS: "Washington Times" columnist Diana West has written a provocative, disturbing look at the future of this nation and what would happen were President Bush to successfully push his amnesty program through. West writes that if amnesty were to become law, the United States would cease to be a nation altogether. She says it would become a honey trap, drawing millions of more illegal aliens into the country. Diana West joins us tonight from Washington, D.C. Diana, good to have you here.

DIANA WEST, WASHINGTON TIMES: Thank you, Lou.

DOBBS: I want to begin with something that you wrote, "a nation has borders and defends them." If we could put that up, "a nation has broken borders and defends them. 'We' do not. Otherwise, building a fence against an unprecedented invasion by Mexico wouldn't be considered a harsh and radical position in the mainstream otherwise."

Well, when the Senate passed that amendment on the immigration bill, sponsored by Christopher Dodd, put into the manager's amendments by Senator Arlen Specter. What was your reaction?

WEST: Disgust.

DOBBS: It's just amazing.

WEST: Amazement, yes. Yes. It's a situation where the United States Senate, in insisting on this ridiculous two-track bill, to have supposed security along with this incredible amnesty program, is signaling to the world that we really don't believe in the concept of borders, and that's actually what I really draw from this bill, which is extremely disturbing, because if we signal that to the world, they will come, and we really will be the world.

DOBBS: That is, the world, we're certainly going to be Mexico at this rate. Because...

WEST: That's the first part of the world.

DOBBS: ... the Mexican population, a country of about 100 million people, with an estimated 20 million of their citizens already living in this country -- many of them legally of course -- but 3 million illegal aliens crossing our borders, most of whom are Mexican citizens. The idea that this administration will not enforce the border, for national security reasons, leaving immigration aside, is to most of us, to most Americans, absolutely unbelievable.

...

DOBBS: The issue, as you said, that the nation would cease to exist, what do you mean by that?

WEST: Well, the kind of provisions that are in the Senate bill, for both legal immigration that we can try to project, and then illegal immigration that we can only imagine, has the effect of a demographic tsunami, and it will be mainly Hispanic. It will be mainly Mexican.

And so, what the question becomes is, do we want to become a northern section of Latin America? Do we cease to become literally an English-speaking people, become bilingual, and/or Spanish-speaking? And with these questions, you really begin to get at the heart of the matter, a demographic, a newer demographic.

DOBBS: The idea of a new demographic is to me, frankly, my reaction is, in terms of Hispanic, sort of what's the difference? Because we as a nation -- this is a melting pot. The issue of multiculturalism, however, and the issue of multi-language. That becomes a very serious issue, doesn't it?

WEST: Well, it does. I mean, I would say that we were a melting pot. I think that 30, 40 years of multiculturalism, however, have trashed that notion. We have been taught that that actually is not our design, and so we the people have become we the peoples. And when you import such a large demographic speaking one language, you have really altered the mix.

DOBBS: Diana West, I thank you for being here. We're out of time. I hope you'll come back soon. We're going to continue this discussion, obviously, on this broadcast in the weeks and months ahead. So please come back.

Part of what nativist hacks like West and Michelle Malkin do in their arguments is rely on a kind of Manichean rhetorical trick: assume, in the argument, that the only possible alternative to their proposal is one that is completely undesirable. Thus, they quickly label their opponents the "open borders crowd."

The fact is, however, that most of the people who are opposed to an immigration debate based on scapegoating, racism, or demonization of Latinos, or for punitive measures against those immigrants already here also happen to favor reasonable immigration reform -- nor do they argue for open borders, either. Read more here.

The Senate's immigration measure is, by any measure, ultimately only a band-aid for a systemic problem related to America's role in the global economy. But equating it with "the surrender of America" really suggests there's something in the Kool-aid they've been drinking.

But then, we kind of knew that already. We just didn't know how many mainstream media people were drinking it too.