|
Send Comments
and Tips to:
Bush Wars
March 2005 |
Sun |
Mon |
Tue |
Wed |
Thu |
Fri |
Sat |
| |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
|
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
31 |
|
Dec
Apr
Recently Posted:
Home
Who the Hell is Steve Perry?
CP Article Archive
Old Blog
Babelogue Index
Published By:
|
|
| Tuesday, March 15, 2005 |
PERMALINK: |
 |
|
| Bush Wars is dead; long live Blotter! |
|
A belated announcement
To those of you who still venture here from time to time even though I haven't posted regularly in months, I say thanks; it was a good run at Bush Wars--over a million page views since we opened up shop in 2003 (thanks in part to co-poster Mark Gisleson, now plying the blogger's trade at Norwegianity)--but now we're shuttering the joint, for the foreseeable future at least.
The spirit of BW lives on, however, and for a change I'll actually be posting items to prove it. In coming days I'll begin posting regularly on the Bush administration and media coverage of same over at Blotter, City Pages' new news-and-links blog. Take a look. It's in a primitive state as yet (read: we're still using the same old Manila blogging software), but before long we'll be sprucing it up; you'll be able to sort posts there by subject and author to get to the news and links you're after. |
|
# -- Posted 3/15/05; 6:05:29 PM
|
 |
|
| Monday, March 7, 2005 |
PERMALINK: |
|
|
| The Rise of the Boo-yaa's |
|
In your face, loser: the citizen as fan
Star Tribune, are you ready to rumble? The Belligerent Clown Posse is coming to your town for a very special edition of World Blogging Federation Smackdown! See Preacher Hewitt lead a tag team of conservatism’s finest against the legions of liberal media! Can the Star Tribune scrape Nick Coleman off the mat in time to avoid total annihilation? Tune in and find out!
When the Bush era is done, one of the puzzles left to history will be the seeming ease with which the recklessness and radicalism of the president's fiscal and military endeavors, not to mention his gang’s open contempt for democratic forms, gained the assent of tens of millions of Americans. The news apparatus and the putative opposition party will come in for very large dollops of blame, along with the precipitous decline of public schools over the past generation-plus (a thoroughly bipartisan effort: under Clinton, federal education spending as a share of GDP fell 24 percent). More abiding factors such as militarism, racism, and clericalism belong in the equation too. But there is something less obvious afoot in the style and attitude of the Bush brigade’s apologists, and right now we’re seeing it in our backyards.
As Paul Demko reports this week in City Pages, a California radio host and capo of right-wing bloggery named Hugh Hewitt has declared war on the Star Tribune, pledging his minions to the task of parsing the paper’s contents line by subversive line until they’ve stripped it to its bright red carapace and put the remains on public display. Hewitt’s fatwa seeks to rehearse the good fun his pals at the Power Line blog had a couple of months ago in lobbing invective at Strib columnist Nick Coleman. Because this battle was waged on the heels of their receiving Time’s blog of the year citation, the spat got more than its share of attention and wound up drawing blood when TCF pulled its ads from the paper. Hardly surprising, then, that it occurred to a compatriot of the Power Line boys to have another go at the paper. It doesn’t really matter, to Hewitt anyway, that it’s not so. It’s true that the Star Tribune’s editorialists have been among the most openly anti-Bush, anti-Iraq War in the entire country, and that the paper still has the effrontery to employ not one but two old-school liberal columnists. But neither of those elements has any bearing on the paper’s news pages, which Hewitt expressly targets as well. Complaints about the bias of the paper once known as the Red Star go back decades. But in the 20 years I’ve lived and worked here, it’s never been a particularly liberal paper. During the Roger Parkinson-Tim McGuire era, the paper richly deserved its status as a national laughing stock, but that’s not because it tilted liberal; that’s because it was lousy.
Since McClatchy purchased the paper, it’s become more professional and more coherent in its coverage, and published some of the best investigative and special feature work it’s ever done. But for all that, the paper is seldom a rocker of important boats. The main bias in its news pages is the same official-source-ism that colors most dailies’ beat coverage and causes it to tilt sympathetic to whoever the official sources of the hour happen to be. Right now in Minnesota, those official sources are mostly conservative. The paper is further inoculated against liberalism by the presence of political editor D.J. Tice, who was a let-them-eat-cake conservative as editor of the Twin Cities Reader in the 1980s and remained one throughout his days at the Pioneer-Press. A pretty good case could be made that if there’s a slant in the placement and packaging of the paper’s politics coverage, it’s already a conservative slant.
David Strom of the Taxpayers League, rarely a voice of moderation in anything, got it exactly right in declining to enlist in Hewitt’s army: While the Strib’s editorial writers and its in-house poll may be repugnant to their crowd, there’s scant reason to complain about the way Strib reporters treat conservative sources. (Indeed, Strom assures readers of his personal blog that two of the paper’s front-line politics reporters, Pat Lopez and Dane Smith, “are friends of mine.” Do tell.)
The internet demi-monde of right-wing bloggers and chat boards is the purest expression of what has happened to political “dialogue” in the 15-year period bracketed by the rise of Rush Limbaugh and that of the Bush gang. Together the forces of radical conservatism have contrived an extreme makeover in the language of politics: They’ve turned it into the idiot stepchild of sports programming.
What I’m talking about is evident in matters of idiom--the countless times, for example, that “liberal” is invoked as a taunting slur, roughly akin to the way “cheesehead” or “the fucking Yankees” might be tossed off on a sports-chat board. It’s more than a matter of style; there’s a worldview lurking beneath it, and what the worldview entails is summed up in the (semantically challenged) old Vince Lombardi maxim that winning isn’t everything--it’s the only thing. Now of course electoral politics has always been about winners and losers in a very important sense. But has there ever been a political moment so openly defined by swagger and triumphalism for their own sake--the will to humiliate the vanquished, grind them underfoot for the sheer pleasure of showing them who’s boss? As a popular post-election sweatshirt hawked at the Drudge Report exulted, W is for Winner. Enough said.
What’s at stake here is the difference between the moral universe of the citizen and that of the fan, which is to say between that of the participant and the spectator. For the fan, the only crucible that finally matters is being on the winning side. To ask whether what’s being won is worth having, or in one's interest, or whether these victories may set the stage for future calamity, is about as interesting and sensible from the fan’s point of view as suggesting that the Vikings really ought to think twice about playing the Packers this year (or, more nonsensically still, that bad things may befall them if they beat the Packers). As for the current censorial tenor of politics chat, the most rudimentary piece of fan etiquette is that the spoils and the bragging rights accrue to winners. Trash talk from losers is not endured in good humor. Failing to shut up after your side has been put down is an outrageous bit of bad manners--or, when it’s politics we’re talking about, an un-American activity.
The mindset expresses itself in a variety of ways. There’s the reader who wrote to me shortly after the invasion of Iraq to ask, So what if Bush lied his way into war? It worked. Or the gleeful contempt with which the epithet “losers” was thrown around after the last election, as if it were the only word they could think of that was worse than “liberal.” And the party the Power Line crew is throwing itself tonight at the Center of the American Experiment to mark Dan Rather’s forced retirement. Will they rent Stuart Scott from ESPN to lead the room in his trademark winner’s jeer, “Boo-YAA!”? Whatever else you may say about Bush/Rove, they certainly didn’t conjure this impulse into being.
You see this streak of end-over-means, in-your-face triumphalism playing itself out in the political alliances now coalescing on the right, where anti-tax, government-off-our-backs libertarians are seen to lie down with religious conservatives who want a government at least expansive enough to make sure no one out there is doing anything of which Jesus might disapprove. Or consider the right-wing blogs’ dueling weapon of choice, a practice known as “fisking” that consists of reproducing whole stories from other media and yelling at them in hectoring, frequently disjointed asides until the fisk-er either reaches the end of the text or passes out from hyperventilating. It’s a performance whose outcome is fixed with a wink from the start, like professional wrestling or, more exactly, like the version of pro wrestling Rush Limbaugh brought to the radio so long ago now: heroes-and-villains political entertainment made in a controlled setting, with lots of ranting rhetorical takedowns and no fretting over questions of equal time or accuracy. It’s a show, folks. |
|
# -- Posted 3/7/05; 7:33:43 PM
|
|
|
| Monday, December 6, 2004 |
PERMALINK: |
|
|
| The Revolt of the Invisibles |
|
After years gone missing from the national stage, the other white America is out for payback and voting Republican
All the post-election blather about the composition of Bush’s base proves that Karl Rove and the Bush GOP are right: The entire Democratic party establishment, along with the “serious” news outlets (the broadcast networks, the prestige daily papers), have no idea what’s become of the white working class. None. They set it aside momentarily a mere 30 or so years ago and now they can’t find it anywhere. Maybe this is why they have tended to give fundamentalist churches all the credit for Bush’s victory: The Christian right is the only totemic explanation, so far, of where all the people who live off-radar have gone.
It’s also a formidable part of the answer. Two or three years ago I sat at a middle school baseball game and listened to one mom recount her afternoon. Someone else had given rides to the kids who usually came to games with her. “And it was so weird,” she said, “coming over here with their gear spread around the van but them gone. It was like the whole crew got raptured!” I didn’t get the joke immediately, but everyone around me did. Until then it never occurred to me that the language of end times was a comfortable facet of everyday life for people I encountered regularly. Of course I knew there were evangelicals aplenty in the land, but I thought they were somewhere else, sitting on hard pews in country churches, not in the bleachers at baseball games near my house. What shocked me was to realize how little I knew about my neighbors, or them about me, and how quietly the gulf between us had grown up. Class is culture now, I thought later, and left vs. right in the usual sense has nothing to do with it; it’s all about who’s on the inside and who’s on the outside.
And the most sorely inflamed outsiders in present-day America are the white working class. Over the past generation their lot has been erosion and instability, a state of affairs their country has commemorated by writing them out of the national story. To appreciate the magnitude of this disappearing act, let us try for a sense of proportion in the matter of winners and losers. While the national wealth grew in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the gains were passed to the top with a vengeance, so that in the end only about 20 percent of the populace actually made out as well or better from all the heralded expansion. During this time of supposedly boundless triumph, the other 80 percent have seen their real wages stagnate or shrink, with the brief exception of a few years during the late-90s stock market bubble. But since then, computer- and automation-driven productivity gains have only accelerated the thinning of ranks among middle and lower white-collar managers, a longtime redoubt of the white working stiff. The great majority of Americans now 25 to 54 years old are making out less well than their parents, a gulf they seek to bridge by working longer hours at more jobs per household and by taking on impossible levels of consumer debt. Their jobs not only pay less but have been broadly “re-engineered” to involve skills that are more limited and more fungible, and to skirt the necessity of offering employee benefits where possible: the temp-labor racket.
Yet in all this time, the crisis of average working Americans has never become a great political issue, and their image and outlook are no longer part of the American identity beamed back at us through media. Throughout the years of Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton, the country cultivated a boom-time mythology that exalted winners and rewarded them more lavishly than at any time in American history. From Reagan onward, market values routed all others; whatever the logic of maximum accumulation dictated was the way things had to go. When Bill Clinton and the Democrats came to power after 12 years of Republican rule in 1993, they offered the restive masses--lectures about personal responsibility. Eight more years of The New Normal made it seem a natural fact that you were a winner or a nobody, and in either case you were very much on your own. Mass culture followed the changes in political culture; the mundane, the merely life-sized, gave way to the glittering and fabulous. As for those other people--well, what other people? We don’t see any other people around here. Thinking about the welfare of others became déclassé, no to mention dangerous to one’s own standing.
To be an average, struggling white American in these years has been to feel untethered and neglected, dispossessed from your country’s lavish success stories--gains that, according to the old rules of economics and skin caste, you should have been enjoying as well. White working people did not have it as bad as non-white working people, but they felt their marginality much more keenly because they thought they had been promised it would never happen to them. (Left Behind indeed.) As the Bush campaign demonstrated, their sense of exclusion and of betrayal by “the elites” is very top-of-mind these days. While this may sound like a blow-for-blow description of the Christian right, it’s bigger than that, and better understood as a class revolt. The chattering classes have failed to notice that the religious fundamentalists are joined by a secular version of similar shape and vehemence, its sensibility honed not in the pulpit but at the sports desk. You can hear it on the radio every day.
Do you realize how much Rush Limbaugh and his progeny have done to reshape the way people think and talk about politics? It’s fairly staggering. Limbaugh had two seminal insights; they were not his alone, but he brought them to market. The first was that class resentment simmered in the land, and could be harnessed to the purposes of the right by naming “liberals” as the stifling, oppressive elite in their path. It worked because it conjured images of the usual suspects in white working class dislocation--uppity women, people of other colors or national origins, the highfalutin and out-of-touch in Hollywood and Washington D.C. The second was to change the rules of political chatter so as to give the folks a better show. Limbaugh’s forum was not a political talk show in the usual sense; there was no pretense to equal time or to respect for opposing views. Calls were screened meticulously, and Limbaugh did not venture into public to debate others in uncontrolled settings. Though it pretended to be spontaneous, his closed stage was part sporting ring and part theater, or in other words a drama not unlike professional wrestling. His métier was ridicule, the get-outta-here-with-that-nonsense! rhetorical body slam, a style that has come to define most of the radio and TV talk shows that are supposed to embody the urgent debates of the day. In Limbaugh’s wake, talking about politics has become a lot more like talking about sports, one consequence being that anything done in the name of winning, or harassing the opponent, tends to become its own justification. (So what if Bush lied to secure the invasion of Iraq? a letter writer scolded me shortly after the war’s start--it worked, didn’t it?)
But if the secular, talk-radio right is not really synonymous with the Christian conservative crowd, there is one encompassing sentiment they share: that the world has been hijacked from beneath their feet, taken from them contrary to God’s plan or the founding fathers’ promise (choose one). They intend to take it back, and they are in an exceptionally nasty mood regarding terms of surrender.
“In your re-election,” the Rev. Bob Jones wrote to Bush on November 3, “God has graciously granted America--though she doesn’t deserve it--a reprieve from the agenda of paganism…. Don’t equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ.” A former major league pitcher turned radio evangelist named Frank Pastore wrote in an LA Times op-ed, “In the weeks and months to come, we will hear the voices of well-meaning people beseeching the victor to compromise with the vanquished. This would be a mistake. Conservatives must not compromise with the left.”
In other words, the appointed villains of the uprising (be they liberals, minions of Satan, or both) face the same Manichean spirit visited on the mass of average working folk for a couple of decades now: You’ll be one of us, or nobody at all. |
|
# -- Posted 12/6/04; 4:40:41 PM
|
|
|
| Wednesday, November 17, 2004 |
PERMALINK: |
|
|
| Meet the New Dems |
|
How's the reinvention of the Democrats going so far? A Bush Wars translation guide
weholdthesetruths.org
1: What is it the Democrats need to do, James Carville?
The purpose of a political party in a democracy is to win elections. We're not doing that well enough. And I think that we can't deny that the problem exists. I think we have to confront the problem. And by and large, our message has been we can manage problems while the Republicans, although they will say we can solve problems, they produce a narrative, we produce a litany.... These guys had a narrative — we're going to protect you from the terrorists in Tikrit and from the homos in Hollywood. That's it. I think we could elect somebody from Beverly Hills if they had some compelling narrative to tell people about what the country is....
The underlying problem here is, there is no call to arms that the Democratic Party is making to the country. We've got to reassess ourselves. We've got to be born again.
Translation: Beats the fuck out of me. Could be we need to talk prettier.
2: Who's going to run the DNC?
An AP dispatch last week named Howard Dean as well as "Govs. Tom Vilsack of Iowa and Mark Warner of Virginia, and former Gov. Roy Barnes of Georgia. Harold Ickes, a New York lawyer who was a White House aide in the Clinton administration and has close ties to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., has a large following, especially in the Clinton wing of the party. Ickes is a passionate advocate and successful fund-raiser, but his Clinton ties might work against him among Democrats backing other candidates. Other names being circulated: Inez Tenenbaum, South Carolina's education superintendent and unsuccessful Senate candidate; and Simon Rosenberg, founder and president of the centrist New Democrat Network."
Incoming Senate Minority Leader Harry "I always would rather dance than fight" Reid has gone on record touting Vilsack, a colorless party hack who, with a little luck, could be another Dick Gephardt someday.
Translation: We gotta find someone who will play ball with the cash clientele. We can't give donors the idea we're going a whole new way here.
3: Where's the silver lining in this latest rout?
According to contributors at DailyKos and other pro-Dem bulletin board sites, it's that some moderate Republicans may jump ship and become Dems. Here's a few excerpts from one such thread:
I will repeat what I have written several times: If you are a moderate Republican, the message is clear. Your party does not want you. But, thanks to the conservative group Concerned Women for America, you no longer have to take my word for it. Their chief counsel has made that abundantly clear.
heck yeah, we want them! incumbents are hard to beat! but more to the point, i think we need to take these seats back to Dem either by changing the candidate's party or by getting our candidate in.
Why wouldn't we want them? There's nothing inherently evil in fiscal conservatism (see John Kerry's record), it makes sense in a lot of ways, we just happen to disagree. Heck, even on Kos we've been talking about increased states' rights etc (end red state welfare and all that). I say, it's good that the moderate of the GOP are starting to see things as they are. We need to make this more and more about the loonies that are still with Bush, after all this. This is even a good meme, even normal republicans (not neocon/religous wackos) are with us!
I want them too. I think it's become a matter of semantics - that 'liberal' somehow doesn't equate to 'mainstream'. The democratic party is mainstream, we just let the pubs frame all the issues in ways that make the it sound like we're on the fringe.
And so on, ad nauseam.
Translation: When the Democrats have absorbed enough alienated Republicans to make themselves resemble even more thoroughly the pre-Bush Republican party, the Democrats will be victorious again--booYAA, Republicans!
So there's your DNC post-election roundup: craven, false, same as it ever was. |
|
# -- Posted 11/17/04; 10:56:19 AM
|
|
|
|
|
|
