Michelle Goldberg has an interesting piece up at The Daily Beast about how Glenn Beck is using his haterade to create unity between Mormons and the traditional Christian right, which is mostly populated by evangelical Christians. If you really step back and look at what he’s done, it’s pretty amazing. Beck is Mormon, but you honestly wouldn’t know it from the general way he carries on, which is to imitate the tropes of right wing evangelical Christianity, with the weeping and the ranting and confessions. I don’t know a lot about Mormons, but I think they’re generally a little more buttoned-up than that. I’m sure much of his audience would agree. They probably think Beck is like them for weeks or even months of watching him before they find out that he’s a Mormon, and by then, they’ve decided he’s in the tribe. So they’re probably warmed up to Mormons by default.
I’ve always thought it was strange that right wing evangelicals and Mormons couldn’t set aside their differences when it came to whose made-up bullshit was the right made-up bullshit. After all, their actual real world beliefs that the made-up bullshit was made up to rationalize are identical: that men are superior to women, that white people are superior to non-white people, that patriarchy is good, that gay people should cease existing, at least out in the open. Also, they share a hostility to science and rationality that threatens the authority of their made-up bullshit, and a general suspicion of government policies that might undermine their core beliefs about the hierarchy of humans. But I suppose people that subscribe to different flavors of made-up bullshit are wary of each other. The existence of other religious beliefs is pretty much de facto proof that it’s all made-up bullshit. After all, most religious people believe that other religions are a bunch of made-up bullshit. If they ponder that too hard, they may be forced to conclude that their own made-up bullshit is also made-up bullshit. I’ve long suspected American evangelicals dislike Mormons because Mormons hold a mirror up to their face and they don’t like what they see. Evangelicals like to pretend their various theological beliefs are ancient and go back to Jesus, but in reality much of what they believe is recent and made up by Americans spinning bullshit. For instance, the belief in the Rapture is quite American, as is the general assumption that it’s Americans that are so important in their theology that the end of the world must be related to our empire’s peak.
Still, all along there’s been a strong potential for an alliance, because while the made-up bullshit part of the program causes animosity, the actual real world beliefs are there. It takes someone like Glenn Beck, who is such a charlatan that even he probably doesn’t realize that he’s a charlatan, to conclude that there’s no reason for fairy tales to get in the way of a political alliance.
In a way, this all was inevitable. It’s hard to say if the erroneous initial reports that the teabaggers were a secular movement were just mainstream media wishful thinking or a snow job being played by the teabaggers themselves. I think it was a little of both, honestly. Far from all teabaggers are religious, much less the religious right, and so the teabaggers were happy to play along with the “secular” narrative to reflect their bona fide secular members. However, the religious right will always be the backbone of these kinds of movements, because without the organizing power of the churches, you mostly have a bunch of individuals sitting in their houses stewing. Beck gets this, and I think he specifically set out to make the Jesus talk more explicit to pay tribute to the leaders of the religious right. Now that they’re fattened up with flattery, they’re ready to do his bidding and start moving their people where he wants them to go.
Coddling the religious right is really important, because I don’t think the workaday believers are necessarily a sure thing when it comes to political movements. They need constant care and feeding to give a shit. Evangelical churches recruit from two major populations, which are people who already have right wing beliefs they want to justify and organize around, and people who are emotionally needy and are attracted to the self-help and sob-heavy emphasis of the evangelical church. The latter group are your loose cannons. They’re reliable followers, which is good for the right, but they aren’t necessarily hateful and ready to respond to naked racist/sexist appeals, like you get with someone secular like Rush Limbaugh. If tomorrow their pastors started to go old school with talk about how they don’t need to be involved in politics, because that’s of the world, these are the folks that would probably not only burn their voter registration cards but be a little relieved to be out of it, so they can dedicate 100% of their time to loving Jesus and chasing kids around. So, these folks need constant flattery and feeding. The Tea Crackers can’t keep the momentum going at the ballot box without them.
There are a lot of interesting points made in this video from Rachel Maddow’s show on Monday, mainly about how blatant racism has been the go-to tactic since Obama was elected for conservative political operatives trying to gin up excitement in their base. The list of faux stories about evil minorities doing evil things that invariably turn out to be false or overblown is literally too long to be included in the segment. Rachel hits some highlights, but doesn’t have time to include the Skip Gates controversy or the stories about Mexican drug bandits supposedly taking over Texas ranches, to name a couple of stories sold to the wingnut public as evidence that ending white supremacy is a bad idea. It’s gotten so bad that even the usual suspects in the Village are having trouble denying that conservatives are being straight-up racist in an attempt to get enthusiasm behind Republican candidates and generally make life harder for Obama.
But one thing that really was new information for me in this video was Suhail Khan’s* description of what Pam Gellar and Frank Gaffney have been up to in general, which is finding Muslims who work as bureaucrats and “outing” them, i.e. targeting them for attack from the flying monkeys. I found the entire narrative behind this kind of action alarming, because the insinuation is that these people weren’t “out” as Muslim before. Which is a way for Gellar to reinforce the narrative that Islam is a subversive force that hides itself, basically the same narrative that flying monkey wingnuts used about communism in the red-baiting days. The notion that communists were hiding themselves and working undercover in the government made everyone suspect in the eyes of wingnuts, which is why John Birchers believed that Eisenhower was a communist agent. The parallels between the beliefs about Eisenhower/communism and Obama/Islam should be immediately apparent.
The thing is, I doubt that anyone that is “outed” as Muslim was hiding this fact about him or herself. Or broadcasting it much, either. Barring a handful of Christian fundies looking to create stories about how they’re martyrs at the hands of secularists because they get pushback for disruptive evangelizing and/or hating on people that aren’t them, most people tend to keep religious discussions out of the workplace. Of course, aggressive Islamophobes deny that Islam is a religion, which is their justification for singling it out for attack despite our constitutional right to freedom of religion. Instead, they view it as a cult and/or a subversive ideology.**
This is why the “we don’t want to ban mosques, we just want that specific one to move” thing isn’t as innocent as it’s supposed to sound. Conflating all Muslims with the terrorists of 9/11 is a mandatory aspect of the argument, but it’s more than that. It’s about making Muslims officially second class citizens. Even if it’s just one place you’re not supposed to go in the public square, that’s already a form of segregation. If the presence of Muslims around the WTC somehow contaminates the area, then I don’t imagine the demands will stop with this community center. Do people who think there shouldn’t be a community center feel okay with all the Muslims who live and work in the area anyway? How many of the opponents of the mosque would support a program where Muslims have to be “outed” and made to wear badges so that their access to certain areas can be monitored carefully? It sounds crazy, but it’s the logical next step once you buy the logic of the people who are pushing this controversy, which is that Muslims are secretive and subversive, and the public at large needs to take steps to counteract that.
*By the way, why did he have to diss the Island of the Misfit Toys? They’re the good guys!
**Which I also think people have absolute freedom to believe. Laws barring communists from certain activities strike me as the sort of thing that really should be unconstitutional, too. But that’s a different discussion. The cult/religion distinction is clearly bullshit that was concocted in order to deprive certain people of their religious rights.
I have some more observations from this New Yorker article about the brothers Koch and the immense, scary influence they have on the political system. A lot of stuff in here isn’t that surprising if you’re paying close attention---the self-aggrandizing to distract from the immorality of libertarianism, the astroturfing, the racist history, the obscene amounts of money spent to manipulate the political system, the delusional rhetoric about global warming. But even I was surprised to read about the display at the Smithsonian.
The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, is a multimedia exploration of the theory that mankind evolved in response to climate change. At the main entrance, viewers are confronted with a giant graph charting the Earth’s temperature over the past ten million years, which notes that it is far cooler now than it was ten thousand years ago. Overhead, the text reads, “HUMANS EVOLVED IN RESPONSE TO A CHANGING WORLD.” The message, as amplified by the exhibit’s Web site, is that “key human adaptations evolved in response to environmental instability.” Only at the end of the exhibit, under the headline “OUR SURVIVAL CHALLENGE,” is it noted that levels of carbon dioxide are higher now than they have ever been, and that they are projected to increase dramatically in the next century. No cause is given for this development; no mention is made of any possible role played by fossil fuels. The exhibit makes it seem part of a natural continuum. The accompanying text says, “During the period in which humans evolved, Earth’s temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fluctuated together.” An interactive game in the exhibit suggests that humans will continue to adapt to climate change in the future. People may build “underground cities,” developing “short, compact bodies” or “curved spines,” so that “moving around in tight spaces will be no problem.”
This is part of an overarching strategy of replacing actual science with pseudo-science. What’s interesting to me is the “having it both ways” aspect of this---the Koches fund all sorts of global warming denialism, but then also hedge their bets by suggesting that global warming isn’t so bad. This is far from the only example.
David Koch told New York that he was unconvinced that global warming has been caused by human activity. Even if it has been, he said, the heating of the planet will be beneficial, resulting in longer growing seasons in the Northern Hemisphere. “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because far greater land area will be available to produce food,” he said.
This is, of course, pure nonsense. Growing food is about factors coming together, and heat is just one of them---it’s also sunshine and fertility. Increasing desertification of some parts of the planet will not have a corresponding effect of giving northern climates more sunshine, even if they do get warmer in the aggregate. The overwhelming evidence shows that rising temperatures will likely lead to mass starvation. Also, there’s no certainty that humans will always adapt. We can, you know, die off. It happens. Ask the dinosaurs.
But what all this points to is a very serious problem for libertarianism, whether Christian or secular. As I noted earlier, libertarianism tends to spring up when you start to believe human beings exist to serve systems and institutions, and not vice versa. But our system of government was laid out explicitly on the grounds that institutions serve human beings---basically, the founders were backed by a humanist philosophy. If you disagree, let me point you to the Declaration of Independence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
Assigned, must-read reading of the day: Jane Mayer’s amazing article synthesizing the political and “philanthropic” careers for David and Charles Koch. They are basically the funding arm of the Tea Party movement, secular libertarianism, and have their fingers all over global warming denialism. I put “philanthropic” in scare quotes, because while the Koches give lots and lots and lots of money to non-profits, they usually do so with their own self-interest in mind. Their self-interest is, of course, their enormous corporation Koch Industries. They’re oil billionaires, giant polluters, and they really don’t like environmentalists or the little, insignificant non-billionaire portions of the population.
There’s a couple of insights Mayer brings to her analysis of the brothers Koch that I want to pull out and expand a little on. By no means are these the sum total of the article, so please do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. But I want to talk about what I consider a major misunderstanding of the relationship between the peons who show up at Tea Cracker protests and read right wing blogs, and the big money people who spread a lot of cash around convincing the peons to be angry about things like scientists telling the truth about global warming. There’s a tendency amongst liberals to give rich right wingers too much credit, which shows that even as we decry classism, we still fall for some of the prejudicial fallacies, such as believing the rich to be more clever than ordinary people. A lot of liberals spin this story of how big money types like the Koches put together these ridiculous stories that they then feed to the plebes, who regurgitate stuff like signs demanding to see the birth certificate. We see them as puppet masters whose ideas are so silly that they couldn’t believe it themselves. But that’s wrong. While I think there are definitely political operators who are purely cynical, like Karl Rove, in general most wingnuts, even the rich ones, are true believers. And one thing I really get off this article is that the Koches are able to sell their ridiculous ideas to the public not just because they spread money around like it’s cream cheese, but because they themselves believe their own bullshit.
Indeed, the article is an interesting examination in how to create someone whose worldview is so screwed up that he believes he’s doing the right thing by screwing the needy and destroying the planet for future generations. The Koches’ father was a standard issue racist nut who bought into all the John Bircher nonsense, including believing that Eisenhower was a Communist. (No wonder it’s easy to rationalize believing this about Obama!) And he raised his sons in a way that is what I suggest you do if you want to distort their understanding of what life is all about:
Koch emphasized rugged pursuits, taking his sons big-game hunting in Africa, and requiring them to do farm labor at the family ranch. The Kochs lived in a stone mansion on a large compound across from Wichita’s country club; in the summer, the boys could hear their friends splashing in the pool, but they were not allowed to join them. “By instilling a work ethic in me at an early age, my father did me a big favor, although it didn’t seem like a favor back then,” Charles has written. “By the time I was eight, he made sure work occupied most of my spare time.”
He also spent a lot of time indoctrinating them, but I think this is perhaps more important. Depriving someone of a childhood to instill a work ethic in them is a great way to bring someone up who doesn’t understand the value of work or of non-work life. Marc and I were having an interesting discussion on the subway yesterday, about “Mad Men”. (Which I’ll have to post about tomorrow, sorry!) We got to talking about their portrayal of Conrad Hilton, which actually softened the real life man’s uglier, harder edges, if you can believe it. And Marc said that, in his eyes, Paris Hilton is by far the better human being. After all, she knows what money is *for*, which is in service of living. The rich, he argued, are better off being the idle rich than getting sucked into the crazed business of making more and more money just to do it. Is it really a “work ethic” if you start to believe that money is the end, and not just the means to an end? Not that running hotels is somehow evil, but the end game of making money just to make money is purely evil, since it disassociates money from what it exists for, which is in service of human beings. And once you do that---once you start to see human beings as existing for money and not the other way around---libertarianism, anti-environmentalism, and general hostility towards government and social services all follow. To call that a “work ethic” is to put a moralistic gloss on immoral behavior.
As the debate has endlessly worn on about the Park 51 Islamic community center, two things have become abundantly clear. The first is that much of our discourse in this country is fundamentally driven by a strain of Islamophobia tempered only by the fact that overt displays of violence are likely to end up on YouTube. The second is that the people seeking to protect Ground Zero have no fucking idea what the World Trade Center was, what Ground Zero is, where it is, how it’s perceived, or, likely, what the words “Ground” and “Zero” mean.
Imagine that there really were these fundamentalist Christian terror cells all over the United States, as the Department of Homeland Security imagines. Let’s say a group of five of these terrorists hijacked a plane, flew it to Mecca, and plowed it into the Kaaba.
Now let’s say a group of well-meaning, well-funded Christians — Christians whose full-time job was missionary work — decided that the best way to promote healing would be to pressure the Saudi government to drop its prohibition against permitting non-Muslims into Mecca so that these well-meaning, well-funded Christian missionaries could build a $100 million dollar church and community center a stone’s throw from where the Kaaba used to be — you know, as a bridge-building gesture of interfaith understanding.
McCarthy then goes on to ask what the reaction would be from Obama, the State Department, Saudis, etc. Because, as we all know, patterning your reaction to the construction of a religiously-influenced building on how it would play in Saudi Arabia is the exact right move. After all, America was founded as a totalitarian theocracy...and stuff.
But what struck me about this was the building used in the analogy. The Kaaba is the holiest spot in Islam, the central place to which all Muslims pray.
Now, granted, I was 19 when the Twin Towers fell, but I don’t remember bowing down to pray towards them every day. They were a workplace for thousands, a frequent backdrop in movies, a symbol of American achievement, a great landmark. But what they weren’t was some sort of national symbol of Americanism...until they were attacked. And that, I think, is the chief difference between those leading the opposition to Park 51 and those who remember that this is America. The former view themselves either as the answer to or the aspirational heirs of a Saudi or Iranian-style theocracy, and all Muslims worldwide as the unfair beneficiaries thereof.
The history of the opposition, as well as the effort to consecrate an abandoned Burlington Coat Factory as part of Ground Zero makes a lot more sense if thought of in this light. All Muslims, in this view, are agents of an oppressive theocracy who get to dictate how others behave, and all they do is wander around in blankets and drill for oil. The problem isn’t really that Muslims allegedly get to oppress others, it’s that red-blooded American patriots get all sorts of guff when they try to pull the same shit. And Americans are Americans, people, so we have to assume they’re better than Muslims.
Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith have an article up at Politico making the usual arguments about how Obama has managed to dodge one kind of culture war only to step into another. It’s the sort of thing that I believe misses the point, because it implies---incorrectly---that the hysterical right changes much when they shift their focus around. That they’ve moved their emphasis from anti-feminism to pro-racism isn’t really that noteworthy, nor does it mean the former goals are abandoned. It doesn’t mean the culture war has changed or is off.
Not that I’m saying that some substantial minority of Americans and even more substantial segment of the popular media refuses to recognize anyone besides right-wing Christian White Americans as truly American, but that is basically exactly what I’m saying and the insane response to a pragmatic moderate Democratic president has proved it.
He gets closer by seeing this for what it is, which is basically tribal warfare. The distinctions between different kinds of right wing fanatics are interesting from a sociological point of view, but the critical thing to understand is that they see themselves as a complete unit that’s opposed to who they’ve deemed the Liberal Elite. The notion that there are libertarians and then there are evangelical Christian right wingers, and that they’re at odds with each other, is just wrong. That was one of the things I was trying to expose in my article about Sharron Angle at Slate---Christian Reconstructionists concocted a theological rationalization for libertarian politics that fit in nicely with social conservatism, and it was adopted by many evangelical Christians. If you actually pay attention to their teachings, their beliefs about why the government should be up in your panty drawer but shouldn’t provide services or regulate business makes sense. Many right wingers are aspiritual people who are just mean, and they don’t care about all this religious blooey. But they support the religious right, because they see themselves as members of the same tribe, the ones they believe are Real Americans. And Real Americans are defined as much as what they’re not as what they are. And their political goals are structured around sticking it to the enemy.
The enemies list is long: racial minorities (especially non-compliant ones), immigrants, foreigners in general, feminists, liberals, poor people---yes, especially poor people, who haven’t known their place in like 100 years at least---men who aren’t completely wrapped up in non-stop demonstrations of proof they’re Real Men, gay people, college professors, activists who try to improve people’s lives, honestly you could go on.
They view politics as a battle for dominance. Policy should be aimed at making it clear that their tribe is better than everyone else. Policy wonks are loathsome not just because they hit college professor and activist notes (both being “accusations” aimed at Obama), but because they tend to believe that government exists for all people and policy should be crafted around that. Culture warriors believe government should be crafted around making it clear that they’re better than everyone else. Policies that enrich them but also enrich people on the enemies list need to be shunned. They are a classic example of folks who’ll live in a mud hut if that means their neighborhood lives in a shit hole. Which is why the ones that find Christianity boring and never darken a church door still associate happily with Christian right wingers they often secretly think are stupid. The Bible thumpers are a little slow, in their eyes, but they’re still members of the tribe and deserve support. They have the right enemies, after all. People who are members of the hated groups but make it clear they support the goals of wingnut dominance are allowed in the club, with conditional membership.
When they talk about the “liberal elite”, they mean white class traitors who find their tribalism stupid. Since you can’t tell white people apart just by looking at us, they invest a lot into singling out tribal markers of the liberal elite and shunning them. Which is why you have some wingnut showing up in my threads about my CSA here and bragging about how he eats McDonald’s all the time. The point is to make it clear that he would rather have a heart attack than associate with the class and race traitors who have what he considers feminized habits. But as Rick Perlstein has documented, this anger and hatred is spiked through with jealousy. Feelings of insecurity just cause more freaking out, which is why you get the “our women are hotter!!!!!” nonsense. It’s kind of the natural reaction when you’ve cast your enemies as people who lives lives of sensual pleasure and good health, lives that you shun but are hard not to want sometimes for the obvious reasons. So, defensive childish reactions.*
Trying to parse out the meanings of different culture warrior issues is missing the point. I dispute the notion that opposing gay rights or reproductive rights is substantively or philosophically different than opposing the rights of Muslims to build community centers or the inclusion of black people into the social contract or anger about immigration or getting absolutely furious every time they think about the fact that someone who is visibly incapable of being a member of their tribe. The supposedly deep moral values that lead to freaking about sexual rights are just the same old bigotry.
Take, for instance, the opposition to reproductive rights. It’s not substantively different than the opposition to health care reform. Both are rooted in the prioritizing of screwing others over doing better for yourself. The fact that these rights are being used by people, especially women, who they feel have no business having sex is enough to gin up opposition. That members of their own community also need these rights is deemed less important than showing those feminists who’s boss. Same story with health care reform. That universal health care will help them is considered unimportant. The idea that someone outside of the tribe---and therefore automatically undeserving---would access affordable, quality health care is considered too much to bear.
The culture war is like a piano. Just because they’re hitting one note right now doesn’t mean that the other notes are off the table. In fact, just as most piano players can play multiple notes at once, so can wingnuts. That’s what the “anchor babies” crap is about---it’s a chord that touches on resenting female sexuality, anti-immigrant racism, and anger that people that aren’t in the tribe still get to have access to a doctor. Trying to make these up as if they’re all separate or conflicting issues is like trying to pretend that a C and an F can’t be on the same piano.
Sarah Palin claimed that a “cackle of rads” hijacked feminism (in the same tweet, she also demonstrated a level of understanding of the word “ironic” that would put Alanis Morisette’s to shame!), implying that it’s up to conservatives to reclaim what feminism used to stand for. Perhaps this is the sort of old-fashioned “feminism” she’s talking about. After all, the suffragettes were known for marching down the street with signs that said, “Votes For Women, For Your Mother Finds Your Countenance Displeasing”. (Sloganeering has grown snappier since those days, making signs that much easier to carry.)
I fear, however, as a piece of political satire, this doesn’t quite work. I realize that humor is far from the easiest thing for wingnuts to handle, so I thought I’d, being a softie liberal, reach out and use this as a teaching moment on the subject of what humor is, and how to make it actually funny.
The main thing to understand about humor is that it should have a point. Even fart jokes, when viewed from the right angle, are a dark commentary on the weaknesses and humiliations of the human body. Dick jokes often mine similar territory, but with a focus on the absurd. Above all, good humor is rooted in a brutal honesty.
Let us examine what the point of this joke is. Calling someone ugly isn’t necessarily always a pointless non-joke. For instance, if someone is flailing around, calling their opponents ugly, it can often be funny to examine their own shortcomings in the hawtness department. But the joke there is on the lack of self-awareness on the part of the person flinging “you’re ugly” around. There are great comedians who mine self-deprecating jokes about their own looks, but usually it’s couched in some larger observations. And you can always joke that someone’s physical ugliness is the cause of their personality flaws, but in order to do so, you have to make a convincing and snappy case as to why this must be. I find that this is very nearly impossible to do, due to the brutal honesty requirements of humor. It just doesn’t seem true that ugliness of the face equals ugliness of the soul.
Perhaps this video is an attempt to illustrate Rush Limbaugh’s feminists-are-just-ugly joke that feminism was invented “to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.” This is a common premise of conservatives, that women’s sole source of satisfaction is to be validated by male approval, and that therefore women who seek other things (such as professional success and the vote) must be lacking in this department.
But alas, the video actually disproves this premise, as the hawt Republican women, with the exception of someone like Carrie Prejean, are quite obviously women who want to access the mainstream of society for reasons other than simply being on display for men or being Mrs. So-And-So. Sarah Palin is clearly not sitting on her laurels admiring her wedding ring. The idea that access to professions and equality only benefits the ugly is quite nicely shown to be false in this video.
At the end of the day, the only real meaning you can get out of this video is that it’s suggesting that conservative men are so insecure that they need to have fantasy trophies to establish their masculine bona fides. And that is funny, especially when you consider the dark pathos of a situation. After all, the men who enjoy this video are really stretching when trying to claim the hawt women as trophies. Sarah Palin isn’t going home with any of these dudes, you know? Watching a video of beauty queens and good-looking politicians and feeling more manly because they vote like you is even more pathetic than thinking you’re a badass warrior because you really enjoyed that Tom Clancy novel.
First Amendment. Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of the Christian religion; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. All but the first of the foregoing clauses may be refudiated in times of dire Emergency. Most importantly, the right of conservatives to speak without being criticized for their views shall be respected at all times.
Emphasis mine. Schlessinger made it clear she thought that her First Amendment rights were being trampled if people criticized her for yelling racial slurs at a black caller who had the audacity to think Schlessinger was a nice person who would offer advice. Of course, as Jamelle Bouie points out, everyone focuses on specific words to the detriment of noticing their context, and he dryly joked in his post title, “When Racial Slurs are the Least Racist Thing About Your Rant, It’s a Pretty Racist Rant.” I personally get bonkers when the focus is strictly on taboo words, because that means that bigots and misogynists get to claim innocence for promoting rancid ideas so long as they do so without stepping on taboo words. Often, they just do this by making up new slurs, as Mark Williams has demonstrated a lot of initiative in doing. It concerns me that Dr. Laura would have gotten off without much, if any criticism if she’d just avoiding the “N-word”, but said every other awful, racist thing she said to the woman who called her in good faith, asking for advice.
But I come not to repeat the same old condemnations of Schlessinger. I want to address something else Jamelle said in his post: “I was surprised to learn that Dr. Laura still had a radio show.” I was well aware that Dr. Laura had a radio show, because the feminist media pays attention to her while most liberal media focuses its awe and outrage on mostly male figureheads like Limbaugh and Beck that are overtly political. It’s interesting, because I think by putting most of our attention on overtly political talk radio, we’re actually missing out on a huge part of right wing media that is just as powerful---in many ways, more powerful and influential---than even the overt screaming political talk show hosts. To really understand the conservative movement, you have to understand the self help/religious/family-oriented media. They are the yin to the Limbaugh/Fox News yang. Without them, the conservative movement would be nothing.
Here’s why: They are extremely good at radicalizing the troops, in ways that even the more overt right wing media isn’t. They do so by positioning themselves as folks who are just trying to help. They’re probably even more instrumental than the Limbaugh types in allowing their conservative followers to imagine themselves as the salt-of-the-earth humble rural types they imagine that they are. The geographic stronghold of the right is the suburbs, of course, and that’s a way of living that is more isolated from your neighbors than either bona fide small town life or city life. You have a lot of conservative types who have big houses with no real front yard and certainly no porch to speak of. Most of their journeys outside of their home don’t even involve breathing the air around their homes---they hop into their car in the garage and pull out into the street, creating an actual physical boundary between them and their supposed communities at all times. While this isn’t the cause of their isolation, it really tends to drive home how isolated they are. But this actual, experienced isolation conflicts with their self-image as old-fashioned Americans with small town values. Actual small towns are places where everyone is up everyone else’s ass all the time, and there’s not a lot of being isolated from the community, for better or for worse. The old systems of enforcing sexual and social control through gossip are removed from the suburban existence. It’s hard to gossip about people you don’t know.
Kevin Pezzi always make sure that none of the fake women shilling his products sport anything as unseemly as brown eyes.
In the past day, what was a pretty good week was topped off with an awesome incident where Media Matters exposed Andrew Breitbart’s newest writer (brought on the call Shirley Sherrod a racist), a great deal of laughing commenced, and Breitbart fired Pezzi and pulled down the posts he wrote. Even though Pezzi was exposed as someone who generally doesn’t try to establish plausible deniability before shooting off racist crap---and since playing the “who me?” game while promoting racist stereotypes is a critical part of the Big Government brand---Breitbart issued a press release denouncing Pezzi’s attitudes but embracing his “research”. Because we should all trust the guy who claims to have figured out the cure for cancer, to have invented a robotic chef, and who peddles penis enlargement nonsense.
Honestly, no wonder Pezzi was drawn to wingnut audiences. He likes them gullible and full of sexual anxieties, and where better to find those folks?
But for my money, the funniest part of this was how Pezzi was just as unvarnished in his misogynist, sexually anxious, just plain weird sexual inventions and ebooks. Unsurprisingly, he’s a big fan of the “women are all slaves to oxytocin!” theories. Some folks promote this on the woman-centered misogynist side to shame sluts, but of course, he’s all about hinting that men can use this to circumvent nasty little problems like women who say no.
In women, alcohol temporarily increases testosterone and, hence, libido. However, since alcohol also suppresses oxytocin, women who consume it are more likely to engage in sex, but less likely to feel good about it afterwards. They’re also less apt to feel attached to the man, and less likely to feel as if they’re falling in love. Physiologically-hip, conniving men can to some degree circumvent this stumbling block by remembering the effect of heat. Lounging in a hot tub, and then cuddling in a warm bed—or, better yet, vacationing on a warm, exotic island . . .
I’m beginning to think this cherry-picked obsession with pseudo-scientific theories about hormones is a way of conservatives saying that women simply don’t have minds, but instead are just biological machines whose responses can be induced by managing hormone levels, much in the same way you can tell your car how fast to go by managing the amount of gas you feed the engine.
Why are some vaginas better than others? Tightness is just one of the many factors. Learn how to make your vagina more gratifying.
Presumably, you’re just going to have to take his word for this, since you, the female reader, can’t really say that you have direct experience with one vagina being “better” than another.
Media Matters discovered that Pezzi had gone so far as to create most likely fake MySpace profiles of women claiming they love his book, and since they have giant boobs, their testimony means quite a bit in this department. Except, it turns out, that these non-existent women are perhaps not so well-endowed in the chest region in real life, though thankfully their real life faces are much better than the photoshopped ones Pezzi provided for them. Here’s an example of one of Pezzi’s photoshop jobs and the real picture he used:
Naturally, these fake women loved his writings! Since we know that Pezzi has no problem creating sock puppets, then I have to look at the endorsements on his website in a new, skeptical light:
Anyway, you can go to any bookstore, and replace the entire sex section with this book. Any sane publisher should jump on it, you can split the book into ongoing volumes.....
I assume from the size of the manuscript and the impeccable layout that you intend to have it commercially bound and published at some point. I hope so, because it is vastly superior to anything I have seen on the topic from a medical view.
And my favorite:
I guess you’re now close to age 48, yet your physical appearance looks to me (from the 2002 pics I saw from your webpage) like you’re in tiptop shape; your BMI, skin, your mind, etc. My girlfriend had a look at the 2002 pic where it says you were 44½, and she too admitted you have good-looking skin and looked young. I see people in their early 30s who look like they’re in their late 40s, so calendar age is definitely not the same as biological age. I may sound like I am layering it on thick, but I’m simply granting you what’s rightfully yours.
I’m sure his harem of photoshopped stock photos with agree with this surely-a-real-reader’s assessment that Pezzi is a sexy stud machine. I’m just surprised he didn’t reply to this totally real reader with an answer about how he has his Aryan genes to thank for his magnificent, manly appearance.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes is warning voters that Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s policies, particularly his efforts to boost bike riding, are “converting Denver into a United Nations community.”
“This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed,” Maes told about 50 supporters who showed up at a campaign rally last week in Centennial.
Maes said in a later interview that he once thought the mayor’s efforts to promote cycling and other environmental initiatives were harmless and well-meaning. Now he realizes “that’s exactly the attitude they want you to have.”
Yep, the argument is that programs that look like they’re about reducing emissions and reducing dependence on fossil fuels---as well as getting people to be healthier by getting more exercise---are in fact a liberal plot to have the UN take over our cities. Apparently, starting with those out West, because what you want when you’re plotting a takeover of a country is to go after cities that are well-armed and spread out. Though I suppose the paranoid right wingers could just say that’s why they have to take over the cities by stealthy hippyness, because warfare isn’t gonna get it done.
There’s some jibber-jabber paranoid explanation for why bike programs are secret UN plots to destroy America.
Maes said in a later interview that he was referring to Denver’s membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, an international association that promotes sustainable development and has attracted the membership of more than 1,200 communities, 600 of which are in the United States.
Whatever the bullshit explanation is basically irrelevant, of course. The point is to stoke resentment against bicyclists, and then transfer that resentment to the Democrats. Bicyclists and pedestrians are easy hate objects, because they make car-dependent people feel insecure, especially if those car-dependent people are using their car even in situations where they know they could walk it or bike it. If you doubt this, I highly recommend actually getting a bike and trying to commute with it---even if you can’t go to work, try going to the store or to nearby occasions with it---and you’ll find that there are lot of mindlessly angry drivers out there who take your bicycle as an affront to their manhood or something. Yes, even if you obey every traffic law and are scrupulous about staying out of the way (which I was when I lived where I biked everywhere---now I just walk).
1And did a voice from a Tea Party rally come: 2”I will take down the lamed-stream media, from treetop to root, a corrupted branch; 3my sunglasses and blazer do not scream “douchemonster”. 4It is not the destruction of all I seek, only of my enemies, but I must be forthright. 5I assume all are my enemies, and will pay 100,000 gold pieces to whomever can verify that information. 6Look around at my followers, their plenty and their strength. 7Especially those three black people.” 8Currently checking on the identity of those three black people, but at least one is a police officer.
Rudy Giuliani on Muslims’ attempt to take over his favorite day by building a sharia Pilates room on the very ground where someone was standing on September 11th, 2001:
“It sends a particularly bad message, particularly (because) of the background of the imam who is supporting this. This is an Imam who has supported radical causes, who has not been forthright in condemning Islamic (terrorism) and the worst instincts that that brings about.
“So it not only is exactly the wrong place, right at ground zero, but it’s a mosque supported by an imam who has a record of support for causes that were sympathetic with terrorism. Come on! We’re gonna allow that at ground zero?
“This is a desecration,” he added. “Nobody would allow something like that at Pearl Harbor. Let’s have some respect for who died there and why they died there. Let’s not put this off on some kind of politically correct theory.
“I mean, they died there because of Islamic extremist terrorism. They are our enemy, we can say that, the world will not end when we say that. And the reality is, it will not and should not insult any decent Muslim because decent Muslims should be as opposed to Islamic extremism as you and I are.”
Everyone knows that after 9/11, true patriots sit back and let Rudy get his rage buffet on.
Here’s the main question: after Mullah Giuliani (Mulliani?) calls out his faithful to oppose the Muslim Community Center alongside the other elders of the conservative movement, who bears responsibility when some aggrieved person who has to be around Muslims throws a rock through a window? Or when little Muslim kids (and, let’s be honest, non-Muslim kids) are heckled and harassed and called terrorists when they’re just going in to play rec basketball? Or when they keep having to shut down programs because of “patriotic” bomb-threats?
Oh, that’s right - it’ll be Muslims’ responsibility. As Sarah Palin has said, it’s an ‘unnecessary provocation’. Which, of course, it is, because this is America and the people who deserve the most protection are the ones who are the most crazily xenophobic and prone to say and do insane shit because of a brutal lack of understanding of history or the proper functioning of civilization.
And no, I’m not talking about jihadists. They’re not decent!
On one hand, the Iowa Republican party declaring that they want to instate what they call the “original” 13th amendment in a sad effort to kick Obama out of office is about as classic as wingnuttery gets:
*It’s winking at racism without coming right out for it---the actual 13th amendment banned slavery, and so this is a way of suggesting that wasn’t a super important thing to do, certainly not on the level of stopping people from accepting titles from foreign rulers. Playing footsie with racism with plausible deniability firmly intact is one of the top three favorite wingnut things to do.
*It’s about creating implausible schemes to attack the President’s right to hold office for the sole purpose of riling up their followers, giving them more shit to mutter about angrily, particularly after they’ve had a few.
*They get to take a swipe at scientists, intellectuals, and the idea of peace itself without coming out right for it. The scheme is there to suggest that the Nobel prize is the equivalent of taking a title such as “Duke” or “Baron” from a foreign crown. They may play off like it’s just an unfortunate side effect that this would strip the citizenship away from the hundreds of American Nobel prize winners who have been rewarded for science, literature, and peace-keeping efforts, but make no mistake. If this scheme worked out, they would enjoy showing those smarty-pants what for thinking they’re so special.
*This is stupid, ineffectual, and kind of crazy---much like freaking out over fluoride or black helicopters. Whatever the appeal of that is to wingnuts, it’s obviously there.
But the “men on Journolist are so ugly!” nonsense is also fucking awesome, for many reasons.
I’m back! Sorry it took so long to get back in the saddle; we were in Vegas forever it seems. (The cats certainly think so.) I did see the premiere of “Mad Men” and should have thoughts on it later. But right now, I want to talk about this stupid story about how Senate Republicans are trying to get hearings---again---to look at this stupid New Black Panthers case. Greg Sargent asks a question that I’m sure he knows is just rhetorical:
But what some folks may not remember is that Senate Republicans already quizzed Justice officials on this very case several months ago, in a public hearing on Capitol Hill. So why do we need more hearings?
Answer: Because Republicans are doubling down on racism as an electoral strategy.
One of the great things of many great things about Netroots Nation this year is that they finally took on the influence racism still has over our political landscape in the U.S. It was an imperfect approach to be sure---I heard the “Urban Blogosphere” panel was a nightmare, for instance---but on the whole, I think the conference was really educational for a lot of people on the issue of racism and why it’s still a massive political issue on basically every level. Tim Wise was dropping truth bombs like a motherfucker during a lunch time panel convened by the organizers. His entire presentation was about something that doesn’t get talked about very much, which is how movement conservative opposition to social spending is all about race. They rarely say so out loud, but they don’t have to. Talk of “redistributing wealth” has the unspoken corollary “from white people to black people” attached to it. Since the 60s, this unspoken corollary has been modified to include Hispanic people, but the basic idea hasn’t changed a bit. When conservatives talk about lazy people on welfare, lazy people on unemployment, lazy people sucking up government health care? The faces they’re imagining are black.
What’s interesting is that what has been so implicit for so long that a lot of people don’t even perceive it is being made pretty fucking explicit recently. Republicans don’t trust that the euphemisms they’ve always used are going to provoke enough racism to get them the majority in 2010. The non-stop hyperventilating over “reverse racism"---which is a myth---is just a way to be racist while acting like some kind of victim. The targeting of black bureaucrats like Van Jones and Shirley Sherrod is about creating a narrative for the base, that Barack Obama tricked the white majority into voting for him out of racial guilt,* and now that he’s President, he’s trashing the country by appointing a bunch of white-hating black people to powerful offices so they can ruin the lives of white people while enriching black people in an overt act of revenge.
The problem is that our news media isn’t getting this, at all. Sargent, for instance, is on the side of right on this Black Panthers thing, but even he makes the mistake of using the term “Black Panthers” instead of “New Black Panthers”. This isn’t a minor issue by any stretch, because not making that distinction leaves the audience to believe that the assclowns who were legitimately trying to threaten voters have anything to do with the Black Panthers of old. As Denise Oliver-Velez pointed out during a panel, the real Black Panthers were anti-racist, and would have never deemed it appropriate to try to fight the oppression of black people by trying comically ineffectual strategies to oppress white people. The real Black Panthers still have quite a bit of esteem, so allowing people to believe that this whole voter intimidation scheme had anything to do with the real Black Panthers is to imply that the left really does tolerate this kind of behavior.
*Even though the majority of white people actually voted for McCain.
As I’ve looked over the reams of blog posts about the Journolist “controversy” (just Google the name if you’re unfamiliar with it) one thing keeps standing out: the conservative obsession with all the Jews on the list.
From the American Spectator to Free Republic, there’s an underlying conservative obsession with the Jews running Journolist, and therefore the media. The Bookworm post I linked above goes into further detail:
What’s also disturbing for me about the Journolist is the fact that so many of its members have Jewish names. You’ll notice my careful phrasing there. I don’t know if they’re actually Jewish or not. I don’t know if those who are Jewish actually practice the religion. And of those who practice the religion, I don’t know whether they practice the religion in a way that has traditional religious resonance, or is just the Jewish liberal bow to Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and the Sabbath candles. As to the latter group, assuming it existed on the Journolist, it’s easy to claim religion when you just go through the rituals. It’s a little harder when you try to align your Torah with the Democratic handbook and the Alinsky rules for living.
Look at all the Jews! Well, I don’t know how many of them are real Jews and how many are Jew-blood infiltrators. Either way, though...Jews.
Instapundit, of course, links to this, but focuses on the fact that Journolist is somehow composed of Jew-hating Jews who really like Oliver Stone, because of all their anti-Jew Jewishness.
Part of it is that a certain (and prevailing) conservative definition of anti-Semitism begins and ends with criticism of Israel - and by begins, I mean, begins at the point that you disagree with them in any way about Israel, American foreign policy towards Israel, or the particular shade of blue on the Israeli flag. The other part of it is that this same definition of anti-Semitism is often itself inherently anti-Semitic. As we see with the Journolist theories, it’s perfectly fine to theorize about secret cabals of powerful Jews out to pervert good Christian morals...so long as you can lump in a few other Jewish people and say that your Jewish conspiracy is actually aimed at your preferred set of chosen people.
The most important lesson to come from Journolist isn’t that a few hundred liberals talked to each other over e-mail. It’s that this simple and otherwise routine act of people in a given field discussing related issues with each other has taken on the specter of a religiously-motivated conspiracy to do...something evil, although we’re not quite sure what.
Michelle Goldberg has an interesting piece up at The Daily Beast about how Glenn Beck is using his haterade to create unity between Mormons and the traditional Christian right, which is mostly populated by evangelical Christians. If you really step back and look at what he’s done, it’s pretty amazing. Beck is Mormon, but you honestly wouldn’t know it from the general way he carries on, which is to imitate the tropes of right wing evangelical Christianity, with the weeping and the ranting and confessions. I don’t know a lot about Mormons, but I think they’re generally a little more buttoned-up than that. I’m sure much of his audience would agree. They probably think Beck is like them for weeks or even months of watching him before they find out that he’s a Mormon, and by then, they’ve decided he’s in the tribe. So they’re probably warmed up to Mormons by default.
I have some more observations from 
Assigned, must-read reading of the day: 
