Holiday viewing

On this Easter Sunday, many teevee channels regale viewers with such fare as Ben-Hur, King of Kings, and The Greatest Story Ever Told. My ladyfriend ignored all of that to watch Bride of Chucky, another fine film about a guy who survived the grave. I guess Jennifer Tilly plays a variant of Mary Magdalene.

One cable channel has run ads for an upcoming made-for-teevee remake of Ben-Hur. The commercials give the impression that A Tale of the Christ has been transformed into a movie about schtupping -- perhaps The Greatest Schtupp Ever Schtupped. In the 1925 silent film, there's an absolutely hilarious bit (presumably derived from the novel) in which Judah B-H loses his maidenhead to a first century vamp. The 1959 remake wisely removed that subplot, leaving viewers with the impression that Charlton Heston keeps his virginity. Believe it or not, the latest retelling is the fifth cinematic version of the story; Heston did the voice for a 2003 animated rendition.

Why does this story fascinate Americans so deeply? Most viewers/readers don't understand that this plot is really just an extended metaphor concerning Jewish assimilation, in which our hero must decide whether he wants to be called Judah or Arius. I always thought those names were a bit on the nose.

If all goes well, I'll be back a little later today with some weird stuff about Jesus. This blog has a history of posting such posts during this season, and the most notorious of those posts may be found here. (NSFAA -- Not Safe For Anyone Anywhere.)

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Bad Friday

The good folks in the Obama administration used this holiday to unload a story that they hope no one will read. Obama is serious about cutting Social Security and Medicare. Susie Madrak of Crooks and Liars wrote the piece at the other end of that link; she quotes from The Wall Street Journal. You have to subscribe to the Journal to read the original piece; fortunately, Madrak reprints the important stuff, as will I:

The White House is strongly considering including limits on entitlement benefits in its fiscal 2014 budget—a proposal it first offered Republicans in December. The move would be aimed in part at keeping alive bipartisan talks on a major budget deal.

Such a proposal could include steps that make many Democrats queasy, such as reductions in future Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security payments, but also items resisted by Republicans, such as higher taxes through limits on tax breaks, people close to the White House said.

These measures would come as President Barack Obama continues his courtship of the Senate GOP in an effort to thaw tax-and-spending talks. The White House's delayed annual budget is scheduled to be released April 10, the same day Mr. Obama plans to dine with a group of Senate Republicans to discuss the budget and other issues.

President Obama's inclusion of the proposal would be aimed at breathing new life into bipartisan talks on reaching a deficit-reduction deal.

Including entitlement curbs would be notable, as Republicans often have criticized the White House for offering such steps in private negotiations but never fully embracing them as part of an official budget plan.

People close to the White House believe a proposal to slow the growth rate of such benefits would use a variant of the Consumer Price Index to measure inflation. The new inflation indicator would cut overall spending by $130 billion, according to White House projections, and raise $100 billion in tax revenue by slowing the growth of tax brackets. The White House earlier called for an additional $800 billion or so in cuts on top of those resulting from the inflation adjustments.

"We and all of the groups engaged on this are starting to feel it may well be in the budget," said Nancy LeaMond, executive vice president at AARP, an advocacy group for seniors that opposes such changes.

C&L's closing comment:

Cutting Social Security and Medicare in exchange for small tax increases on the wealthy is like taking a bag of groceries from poor people in exchange for a cookie from a rich person. No, not even a cookie -- a crumb from a cookie. Good Lord, these people are insane.

I'll repeat the most important info given in that article: The White House switchboard is 202-456-1414. The comments line is 202-456-1111. You can email the White House by clicking here.

Please don't tell yourself that complaining does no good. Right-wing leaders mobilize their minions all the time -- and they get things done. You know what does no good? Defeatism.

I like lambert's line:

$15 trillion to the banksters, no questions asked, no strings attached, and now the Powers That Be are trying to screw $1000.00 out of some 85-five-year'old lady's $12,000 a year Social Security check with Chained CPI. Do they think old people years have only eleven months, or what?

I mean, why should she be eating catfood made from Genuine Chicken Parts when she could so easily substitute catfood made from Genuine Offal From Floor Scraping?

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman -- as is his wont -- has been fighting tirelessly against the presupposition that austerity is necessary or beneficial. There is no danger of a deficit crisis:

Basically, the numbers refuse to cooperate: Interest rates remain stubbornly low, deficits are declining and even 10-year budget projections basically show a stable fiscal outlook rather than exploding debt.

So talk of a fiscal crisis has subsided. Yet the deficit scolds haven’t given up on their determination to bully the nation into slashing Social Security and Medicare. So they have a new line: We must bring down the deficit right away because it’s “generational warfare,” imposing a crippling burden on the next generation.

Krugman goes on to make the classic argument that the debt is, in essence, money we owe to ourselves.

Trade deficits are down, not up, while business investment has actually recovered fairly strongly from the slump. And the main reason businesses aren’t investing more is inadequate demand. They’re sitting on lots of cash, despite soaring profits, because there’s no reason to expand capacity when you aren’t selling enough to use the capacity you have.

You don’t have to be a civil engineer to realize that America needs more and better infrastructure, but the latest “report card” from the American Society of Civil Engineers — with its tally of deficient dams, bridges, and more, and its overall grade of D+ — still makes startling and depressing reading. And right now — with vast numbers of unemployed construction workers and vast amounts of cash sitting idle — would be a great time to rebuild our infrastructure. Yet public investment has actually plunged since the slump began.

How long before we decide, finally, to take the obvious course of action -- the course that got us out of the Great Depression? This is not the time to rob Grandma. This is the time to invest in jobs. If we need to borrow money, we can pay it back when things are going well again.

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High surrealism

This blog has stayed away from the current debates over gay marriage, since the topic doesn't interest me much. I'm not against gay marriage; I'm against marriage period. Not my battle, this is.

What is my battle, and everyone's battle, is the fight for sane political discourse. And if this piece by Erick Erickson (blogger, radio host and CNN talking head) is any indication, that battle is lost.

Erickson dislikes the idea of gays getting married. Okay. Fine by me. I'm not going to fly into hysterics just because someone has articulated a viewpoint at odds with my own. What bothers me is the form of the argument -- if argument it can be called, and if it may be said to have any form whatsoever.

Here are some words. I would like you to search through these words to determine if they contain any kind of rational narrative. 

Once the world decides that real marriage is something other than natural or Godly, those who would point it out must be silenced and, if not, punished. The state must be used to do this. Consequently, the libertarian pipe dream of getting government out of marriage can never ever be possible.

Within a year or two we will see Christian schools attacked for refusing to admit students whose parents are gay. We will see churches suffer the loss of their tax exempt status for refusing to hold gay weddings. We will see private businesses shut down because they refuse to treat as legitimate that which perverts God’s own established plan. In some places this is already happening.

That's right: Even though a million people have stipulated a zillion times that civil weddings and religious weddings are two very different things, this nutcase actually thinks that gay marriage will lead to churches losing their tax-exempt status.

Churches, businesses, and individuals who refuse to accept gay marriage as a legitimate institution must be protected as best we can. Those protections will eventually crumble as the secular world increasingly fights the world of God, but we should institute those protections now and pray they last as long as possible.

The left cannot allow Christians to continue to preach the full gospel. We already see this in, of all places, Canada. Gay marriage is incompatible with a religion that preaches that the unrepentant are condemned, even of a sin the world has decided is not one. The religious freedom will eventually be ended through the judiciary.

Does any of this make any sense to you?

I'm not asking if you agree with Erickson. We may fairly presume that you do not, if you are a regular reader of this blog. There is no need for you to mount a counterargument or to offer a contrary opinion.

My question is more basic: Can any kind of logic be salvaged from this collection of verbiage? Does Erickson develop a point which leads to another point in a rational fashion? Do you see anything here that reminds you of those "How to write an essay" lessons you sat through in high school? Or is Erickson playing a fundamentalist variant of Mad Libs, with words like "gospel" and "sin" and "gay" and "Canada" tossed into his text at random? Has Erickson favored us with his own riposte to Noam Chomsky's famous observation that "colorless green ideas sleep furiously"?

I mean...just which leftists have disallowed which Christians from preaching the Gospel? When has that happened? Who did what?

For more insanity, glance at the comments section:

Great analysis! The goal is not gay marriage, the goal is the destruction of religious freedom. Once they accomplish that, then freedom of speech, assembly and petition are not far behind. Then the Third and Fourth Amendments will crumble and the rest of the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth will be gone, and other constitutional protections as well.

The Left are relentless in their desire to rule the rest of us like serfs, and they will stop at nothing, especially constitutional niceties, until they have won their goal. "Reaching across the aisle" is only hastening our own downfall.

So. The fact that I don't give a damn what people do in private means that I must be ruthless in my desire get rid of the First Amendment because I want to rule everyone else like serfs. That's like saying: "Eric Erickson drinks water, and therefore Hitler will rise from the dead and eat fried squirrel dipped in chocolate."

At one time, the only rightwinger who specialized in high surrealism was Steve Ditko, back when he drew Doctor Strange. At one time, conservatives who wrote articles for a mass audience tried to make sense. I may not have agreed with their opinions, but at least I could follow their train of thought. Things are different nowadays. David Lynch's Inland Empire is a model of clarity and simplicity compared to what passes for discourse on blogistan right.

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Is this "Carlos," the man who tried to frame a senator?

I had not intended to write about the Bob Menendez "prostitution" scandal, in which a woman in the Dominican Republic was paid to make false accusations against a senator. But take a look at this TPM story about the search for the mystery-man Carlos, who seems to have engineered the scam. My question: How on earth did Erich Lach of TPM manage to write that piece without mentioning either the Breitbart crew or James O'Keefe's "Project Veritas"?

Cah-MON. This stunt has O'Keefe written all over it. Did you know that O'Keefe has a particular grudge against Senator Menendez and has targeted him previously?

The O'Keefe crew love to sexualize their pseudo-stings, in large part because they are young guys who think about sex often, as young guys are wont to do. But I'm sure that they also grin and guffaw when online feminists (either real ones or sockpuppets) post comments presuming the guilt of anyone who, like Robert Menendez, has committed the crime of being born with a penis.

For a little more on this story, see here.

For a lot more, see here. Yes, "Breitbart Unmasked" is back, even though I seem to recall that the site had announced that the shop would be closing. A writer calling himself Xenephon suggests that "Carlos" may be a James O'Keefe associate named John Melvin Howting. Not long ago, Howting was a staffer for Republican congressman Thad McCotter.

Here's the photographic evidence:

Now, I know what you're going to say: Carlos has shorter hair and darker skin. Well...hair can be cut and/or styled with product. As for the skin...

While attending Miami University of Ohio, Howting led the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute on campus and invited O’Keefe to speak on campus. Fellow students reported that Howting once applied tanning oil to his face and tried to pass as a Latino liberal activist, which is precisely the sort of “dirty trick” O’Keefe acolytes aspire to perform. It’s no great stretch to see Howting growing facial hair and perhaps applying makeup in order to alter his appearance, and one fake mole and a haircut would be enough to make him look like “Carlos.”

(Emphasis added.) Here's more about Howting and his antics:

Howting’s name first appeared on the public radar when he attempted to pass himself off as a worker trying to organize a union while attempting to sting community organizers in Harlem. That operation was backed by an elaborate fake website, which is a common feature of O’Keefe’s shenanigans. Shortly after the Harlem episode became public, O’Keefe’s voter ID “sting” video hit the internet. In it, a man tries to obtain the ballot of Attorney General Eric Holder while wearing a hidden camera. Howting was later identified as the individual behind the camera, although to date no 100% positive match has been made.

I know you'll want more details about that. So here's a fascinating piece about Howting from the New York Times:

Young, bearded, a bit scruffy, a young man walked into a community organizing office in East Harlem, lugging a heavy bag. A little nervous, he said that his name was Melvin Howting, and that he worked for an environmental company in New Jersey and had a few questions about how to organize a union.

He wanted to know how to get higher wages.

And, oh yes, he had another question: If he formed a union, could his fellow workers join with the employer to shake down politicians for more money?

At this point, Rhea Byer-Ettinger, an organizer for Manhattan Together, felt her internal baloney detector go on red alert. “Beep, beep, beep,” she said. “I said to him: ‘Well, that’s not how we work. Tell me, why are you asking me about that?’ ”

This is the anatomy of a political sting.

Nothing this fellow said was true. Public records reveal that his real name is John M. Howting. He is active in the conservative movement and does not want to organize a union. His company — for which he built an elaborate Web site — and its officials do not exist. Ms. Byer-Ettinger suspects that he secretly recorded their conversation.

Mr. Howting, in fact, is a young conservative in a hurry. He matriculated at Miami University of Ohio, where he led the deeply conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute and invited James O’Keefe, the grandmaster of conservative undercover dirty tricks, to speak on campus. Mr. Howting was accused by fellow students of once slathering tanning oil on his face and trying to pass as a Latino liberal activist on campus.

While he was in college, a conservative radio show named him a top young conservative of the week.

For this scam, Mr. Howting apparently took his middle name, Melvin, as his alias. He constructed a fake Facebook page, where he declared his love for Franklin D. Roosevelt, President Obama and Chris Matthews, not to mention the rapper Kanye West. His site for the New Jersey environmental company boasted of a vice president who had attended Earlham College and a chief executive who had graduated from West Point with “highest distinction.”

A check with Earlham and West Point found no record of either man.

Officially, Howting was Representative McCotter's "scheduler." His monthly pay is listed here. McCotter claims that he had no knowledge of the East Harlem sting.

"Mr. John M. Howting has been separated from my Milford district office since February 15, 2012, when he informed his supervisor that he was taking a position working with inner city youth in Cincinnati, Ohio," McCotter said. "Since this time, our office has had no knowledge of Mr. Howting's activities."

Clearly, Howting is an impersonator, an ideologue, a wanna-be spy with delusions of competence, an arrogant young twerp and an all-around asshole. But is he our "Carlos"? I don't know for sure, but I would say that he shoots right to the top of our list of suspects. Let's put it this way: I wouldn't bet the rent money, but I'd probably bet the lunch money.

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More Syrian weirdness

This post is a follow-up to the one below.

Although most Americans aren't paying much attention to the Syrian rebellion, that situation will change if the following conditions are met:

1. The insurgents topple the Assad dynasty.

2. The new government is fundamentalist and harshly repressive, especially toward Syria's Christian community.

3. The new government offers any support (even if purely verbal) to jihad.

If and when those things happen, the conservative media will -- with some justification -- screech about how Obama "lost" Syria and helped an Al Qaeda-linked group attain power. The president will have handed his foes a propaganda coup roughly equivalent to Benghazi times infinity. Fox News will call for congressional investigations while the Breitbarters will scream that Obama aided jihadis because he's a secret Mooooslim. Sharia law in America! The caliphate's a-coming! Yada yada yada; you know the drill.

Right now, American conservative opinion on Syria is vague and contradictory, with neocons calling for direct intervention while classic libertarians call for caution or noninterference. But if Assad falls and Mr. Even-Worse takes his place, today's interventionist neocons will not hesitate to use Syria in its perpetual game of pin-the-blame-on-the-Dems.

Make no mistake: A good part of the blame should be pinned to that ass -- but only part. Much blame goes elsewhere. It's pretty obvious that America has been pressured into action by our friends in Israel.

One strange indicator of covert Israeli activity on behalf of the rebellion is the "Assad-is-dead" ploy. You may have noticed that the less-selective right-wing sites have published "scoops" indicating that Assad was killed by his bodyguard -- an Iranian bodyguard, no less. (Nice touch, that.) The New York Daily News also fell for this one.

This fake photo of Assad's corpse is a decent bit of Photoshopping. (I've reproduced the fake and the original photo to your left.) A hint of shadow under the head would have helped.

The motive for this disinformation exercise escapes me, but somebody somewhere is playing a very weird trick -- and when I say "someone," I'm talking Mossad. For a rather strong indicator that this yarn is of Israeli origin, see here and here. I don't think that the CIA would plant a silly story of this sort; their "let's try anything" phase ended decades ago. No, this is an Israeli thang; only Israel's spooks could convince themselves that a ruse like this might live longer than 24 hours.

But why'd they do it?

More importantly, is anyone involved with this game thinking more than two moves ahead? I can understand why Israel wants rid of Assad (who, let us be clear, is nobody's idea of an admirable leader). But do they really feel that they'll get a better deal from Nusra, the Al Qaeda-linked group leading the rebellion?

If the Syria regime change turns into a cock-up, it'll be a cock-up with much precedent. It has been said (and not just by Ron Paul) that Israel created Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO. Although the Jewish Federations of North America denies this charge, their explanation may offer some insight into the current situation in Syria:

The PLO was convinced that Israel was helping Hamas in the hope of triggering a civil war. Since Hamas did not engage in terror at first, Israel did not see it as a serious short-term threat, and some Israelis believed the rise of fundamentalism in Gaza would have the beneficial impact of weakening the PLO, and this is what ultimately happened.

(My emphasis.) By "some Israelis" read "Likudniks."

One can cite other examples. In the preceding post, we noted that America supported jihadis when they directed fire at the USSR; later, our fundamentalist "friends" turned out to be less than friendly toward us. Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega and Ferdinand Marcos used to be our boys. There is evidence that the CIA helped install Castro.

What continually astonishes me is not the shifting relationships -- "allies today, foes tomorrow" -- because that sort of thing falls under the heading of realpolitik. What bugs the hell out of me is the public reaction. Most average Americans remain ignorant of the way our alliances tend to morph; we prefer linear, melodramatic, easy-to-understand narratives in which today's Bad Guy was always a Bad Guy, just as Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Recall, for example, the events of 1988. When the media instructed the citizenry to hate Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, the American people (most of whom had never heard of the guy before) suddenly loathed him with a passion more purple than Pilate's toga. They got downright furious when guys like me tried to tell them that the U.S. had been, until recently, Noriega's sponsor and enabler.

In the same way (and here we return to our opening point), the same neocons who now demand that Obama oust Assad by any means necessary will be the first to blame Obama when Assad leaves and Mr. Even-Worse takes his seat. Propaganda and hypocrisy often share a mattress.

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Is the U.S. arming Al Qaeda?

Perhaps those seeking to understand the current situation in Syria should go back to a piece published by Seymour Hersh in 2007. The key quotes may be found here:

The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said.

The above link will take you not to Hersh's article but to a much more recent piece written by one Tony Cartalucci, whom I've never read previously. He argues that Obama has continued the Bush policy of arming Al Qaeda-related insurgents in Syria.

As proof, he cites this NYT story, headlined "Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From C.I.A.":

The airlift, which began on a small scale in early 2012 and continued intermittently through last fall, expanded into a steady and much heavier flow late last year, the data shows. It has grown to include more than 160 military cargo flights by Jordanian, Saudi and Qatari military-style cargo planes landing at Esenboga Airport near Ankara, and, to a lesser degree, at other Turkish and Jordanian airports.

As it evolved, the airlift correlated with shifts in the war within Syria, as rebels drove Syria’s army from territory by the middle of last year. And even as the Obama administration has publicly refused to give more than “nonlethal” aid to the rebels, the involvement of the C.I.A. in the arms shipments — albeit mostly in a consultative role, American officials say — has shown that the United States is more willing to help its Arab allies support the lethal side of the civil war.

From offices at secret locations, American intelligence officers have helped the Arab governments shop for weapons, including a large procurement from Croatia, and have vetted rebel commanders and groups to determine who should receive the weapons as they arrive, according to American officials speaking on the condition of anonymity.

There's much more at the other end of the link. Bottom line: The effort to supply these rebels is massive and ongoing. I'm reminded of the CIA in Laos.

And yet -- most passing strange! -- this story does not mention Al Qaeda or its Syrian offshoot, the Nusra Front. For a fuller picture, we need to turn to an earlier NYT story on the Syrian rebellion -- "Syrian Rebels Tied to Al Qaeda Play Key Role in War":

The lone Syrian rebel group with an explicit stamp of approval from Al Qaeda has become one of the uprising’s most effective fighting forces, posing a stark challenge to the United States and other countries that want to support the rebels but not Islamic extremists.

The group is called the Nusra Front. The U.S. wants to square the circle, aiding the Syrian rebels yet officially proclaiming the Nusra Front to be terrorists, jihadis, and Very Bad People.

"Bad" as in bad-ass. The London Telegraph confirms that Nusra pretty much is the rebellion by this point.

The group is well funded – probably through established global jihadist networks – in comparison to moderates. Meanwhile pro-democracy rebel group commanders say money from foreign governments has all but dried up because of fears over radical Islamists.

How can we reconcile this information with the NYT's tale of a massive arms flow to the rebellion? According to the New York Times, the CIA -- often working through fronts like Saudi Arabia and Qatar -- has been funding the rebellion. If the money for the democratic rebels has "dried up," then where did the funds go?

To Nusra, obviously.

And yet the Telegraph would have us believe that the funding comes "through established jihadist networks." Come off it. Who do they think they're fooling? I doubt whether Al Qaeda (on its own) has that kind of network these days. They certainly don't have the kind of money needed to topple a government.  

Let's get back to Cartalucci's piece:

It is now admitted that thousands of tons of weapons have been smuggled into Syria by the US and its regional allies. While the Western media has attempted in the past to feign ignorance as to where Al Qaeda's al-Nusra was getting their weapons from, it is now abundantly clear - al-Nusra's power has expanded across Syria in tandem with the CIA's ever-expanding operations along the nation's borders.

Also see here.

I'm getting a sick feeling about this. In the 1980s, the CIA justified working with jihadis in Afghanistan on the grounds that one must sometimes make deals with devils in order to combat even bigger devils. Yada yada yada. Obviously, that history is repeating itself.

The Afghanistan policy didn't turn out well. The Soviets left, only to be replaced by the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Even in the early 1980s, I suspected that we would one day regret forming an alliance with the Islamic fundamentalist "freedom fighters" who would occasionally appear on CSPAN when they came to DC to ask for more aid. Every one of them looked like a potential nightmare. Of course, back then I had to be very careful about voicing my views, because everyone presumed that the great game against the Russians trumped all other concerns.

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Same country, different planets...

The right lives in another world. You already knew that, of course. Every day I receive further indicators that many of our citizens think in terms that have only a tangential relationship with life-as-she-is-lived. Just today, WesternPac sent the following absurd headline into my inbox:

Senators Who Think the UN Should Control American Guns

I don't think that a single senator wants the United Nations to control our gun laws.

The reference here goes to the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, which is, of course, about the international trade in arms. In other words, this treaty attempted to make life harder for those who, like Viktor Bout, profit from selling machine guns to drug thugs and terrorists. The Western Pac email conveys the impression that this treaty was intended to allow blue-suited UN teams to come marching into into South Carolina and disarm citizens.

Morris dances. I had a look at Dick Morris' hilariously (and non-ironically) titled Here Come the Black Helicopters, which made it to the NYT bestseller list. I can't believe that this guy once had the attention of serious people!

An early chapter tries to convince the reader that UN-enforced gun control will soon hit America, just as the WesternPac email warns. But that's only the opening act. Morris has created a 21st century analogue to all of those crankish John Birch Society pamphlets I used to read -- the ones that talked about the dangers of the United Nations, about the conspiracy of "the globalists" who seek to snatch away our national sovereignty. Here are a few more chapter titles:

"No war without UN approval"
"UN supremacy over our courts"
"Toward a Global EPA"
"Taxing the US without our approval"
"Globalist conquest of space"

Books of this sort used be found discarded at bus stops alongside the Jack Chick comics. Now they are bestsellers.

The "globalist" meme goes back to the pre-1933 Nazis. They preferred to apply the term "internationale" to anything they didn't like, because that word, in German ears, had a greasy and threatening ring. One recalls the title of the Henry Ford's infamous book, The International Jew. Joe Stalin's preferred term for the same group was the cosmopolitans.

Once you decode the euphemisms, it's pretty easy to see what we're really dealing with here. Like the Birchers before them, Morris and WesternPac are giving us a repackaged version of the old anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. The J-word has been cut out and lots of I-love-Israels and I-hate-Islams have been tossed in. But at root, it's the same stuff, albeit with different Semites playing the globalist/internationalist/cosmopolitan villains. (Morris, I should note, is a Jewish convert to Catholicism.)

The people who actually buy books like these are, I'm sure, sincere supporters of Israel, and they would probably despise my criticisms of that nation's policies toward the Palestinians. And yet those who have bought into Morris' conspiracy theory can, I think, be prettily easily re-programmed to accept the "internationalist" conspiracy theory in its traditional form, as it was once expressed by folks like Elizabeth Dilling, Nesta Webster, William Guy Carr, Cleon Skousen and their pals. It's just a matter of dropping the other shoe.

Morris differs from the folks mentioned above in one key respect. He focuses on the UN (which, as all sane people know, has very limited power) but never talks about the pernicious influence of the Wall Street finance capitalists who have made life so miserable in Greece, Spain, Ireland -- and here at home.

When we talk about institutions like Goldman Sachs, we're talking about something real. We're talking about something that has nothing to do with race or religion, and everything to do with greed. Greed knows neither deity nor DNA. Morris won't mention the Wall Streeters -- genuine globalists with genuine power -- because some of those financiers toss money at the tea partiers who constitute the main audience for books like these.

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Mind-blowing

The Tea Partiers are boycotting Fox News because Ailes and Murdoch are too liberal.

Among the demands the protesters have is that Fox News “be the right-wing CBS News: to break stories, to break information, and to do what news organizations have always done with such stories: break politicians,” that the network have at least one segment on Benghazi every night on two of its prime-time shows; that Fox similarly devote investigative resources to discovering the truth of Obama’s birth certificate; and that the network cease striving to be “fair and balanced.”

“We need Fox to turn right,” said Hjerlied. “We think this is a coverup and Fox is aiding and abetting it. This is the way Hitler started taking over Germany, by managing and manipulating the news media.”

Speaking as a liberal, I certainly hope Fox devotes much more time to Benghazi. Indeed, I think the network should focus 24/7 on the two Bs: Benghazi and birtherism. Anything less than that would be a triumph for Hitler.

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Movement

Some may wonder how I can still be a Democrat even though I remain opposed to many Obama policies (mostly his foreign policies), and even though I scoff at the liberal-ish pundits now offering apologies/rationalizations for their former support of Dubya's war. A comment here sums up my feelings...

At least the Democrats have the decency to apologize! When will a Republican apologize for being catastrophically, unforgivably wrong?

To me, an admission of fault beats pigheaded arrogance every day of the week.

You may feel differently. I doubt that relatives of those killed in the "shock and awe" attacks are much impressed by any American's show of contrition.

The main article at the other end of that link is one of those everyone's-talking-about-it pieces, from Ross Douthat of the NYT. I find his main contention laughable. He speaks of the collapse of Dubya's second term agenda (and by "agenda," he mostly refers to Bush's stabs at Social Security privatization):

This collapse, and the Republican Party’s failure to recover from it, enabled the Democrats to not only seize the center but push it leftward, and advance far bolder proposals than either Al Gore or John Kerry had dared to offer.

"Far bolder"?

Then why is Obama poised to give in on Social Security reform? Why are all Democrats grudgingly coming to accept chained CPI, something they never would have tolerated while Bush was president? Why, for that matter, are Dems tolerating a foreign policy which continues the Dubya approach, minus the more costly excesses of neo-con adventurism?

Douthat's general thesis is that the failure of the Iraq war laid the foundation for a new era of social liberalism. IEDs in Baghdad gave us gay marriage.

As The American Conservative’s Dan McCarthy noted in a shrewd essay, the Vietnam War helped entrench a narrative in which liberal social movements were associated with defeat in Indochina — and this association didn’t have to be perfectly fair to be politically and culturally potent.

In a similar way, even though Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney weren’t culture warriors or evangelical Christians, in the popular imagination their legacy of incompetence has become a reason to reject social conservatism as well. Just as the post-Vietnam Democrats came to be regarded as incompetent, wimpy and dangerously radical all at once, since 2004 the Bush administration’s blunders — the missing W.M.D., the botched occupation — have been woven into a larger story about Youth and Science and Reason and Diversity triumphing over Old White Male Faith-Based Cluelessness.

I don't buy this. For the most part, social movements have followed their own stop-start, back-forth trajectory over the past century-or-so. Throughout the 1970s, Vietnam tainted conservatism, not liberalism. For many years afterward, most Americans told pollsters that the war was a tragic mistake. Even Reagan did not dare to bring up the topic (much).

Most readers of this blog will probably agree with my contention that, over the past thirty-odd years, the primary obstacle to social progress has been fundamentalist Christianity. Was the rise of fundamentalism in America related to the Vietnam War?

A damned difficult question, that...!

Although many factors contributed to that rise, I'm inclined to point, first and foremost, to the failure of the counterculture of the 1960s -- a counterculture which was, to a great degree, a byproduct of the anti-war movement. The Vietnam debacle taught us that balding, greying white guys didn't have the answers that they pretended to have. But as the hippie era gave way to the tawdry disco-and-cocaine scene, we learned that the kids didn't have any answers either. We learned that the new generation was just as screwed up as the previous one. Maybe moreso.

Thus, many younger Americans turned to reactionary Jesusism -- to virginity pledges and Promise Keepers and DOMA and all of that. But many others continued to press for change.

So the story of social change in America is hardly a simple one. As I said: It's a stop/start, back/forth thing. Has been that way for a good long while.

Added note: Re-reading the above, I want to add to my point about America's collective memory of the Vietnam era. We can use Jane Fonda, and what she symbolizes, as an example.

As many now forget, lots of veterans supported Fonda after her trip to Hanoi. Many soldiers and former soldiers didn't hate her -- they hated Nixon and LBJ and McNamara and Westmoreland. They hated what was then called The Establishment. They did not hate Barbarella -- hell, they had her poster on their walls. (I recall that poster very well!)

Fonda continued to be popular, albeit controversial, throughout the 1970s. A growing number of reactionaries screeched and yowled whenever her name was mentioned, but the screechers and yowlers were never so numerous as to injure her career. Her movies did well: Coming Home, 9 to 5, On Golden Pond, Julia, The China Syndrome.

Reactionary Fonda-hate didn't become nigh-universal until 1990 or so. That's when she became unbankable. Everyone in the country suddenly decided that she was That Treasonous Woman We All Must Despise.

Oddly enough, at the same time, Donald Sutherland experienced a career renaissance. He was frequently cast in big movies as the Wise Old Bird. The entire country elected to forget that Sutherland had accompanied Fonda on that trip to Hanoi, and that he said and did pretty much the same things. If anything, his youthful anti-war activism had been more aggressive.  

Perhaps this story tells us something about our changing attitudes toward the Vietnam War. Or perhaps it tells us something about our attitudes toward women.

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Obama, drones and the Pol Pot precedent

This post began life as part of the portmanteau piece below. I have decided that this news deserves more prominence.

The news comes to us by way of Matt Taibbi, who, in his latest, relates a fact which startled the hell out of me: In making the case for Obama's drone programs, the administration's legal beagles cited the precedent of Richard Nixon's decision to bomb Cambodia in 1969-70.

Good God.

Youngsters may not know that the Trickster's monstrous war crime infuriated millions of Americans. I was quite young then, but I can still recall the headlines. I can still recall the "Are you shitting me?" reactions, even from people who had voted for Nixon. The bombing raids were "secret" at first, although you can't reasonably expect to keep a thing like that under wraps for long. When the truth leaked out, there were massive protests involving four million students. One such protest resulted in the Kent State massacre.

Of course, what we went through was nothing compared to what the Cambodians went through.

Before 1969, Cambodia had been a neutral country living a happy existence under a fellow named Sihanouk, whose great sin (from our perspective) was not taking sides in the Cold War. He occasionally made anti-American statements, but he wasn't a communist -- he just wanted us to leave his country alone.

During the war in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese established a supply line (called "The Ho Chi Min Trail") which ran through part of Cambodia's dense jungle near the border. Sihanouk didn't like that situation, but there was only so much he was willing to do to stop it. The jungle was, and is, wild and uncontrollable.

And so the friendly Americans showed up, eager to help as always. We bombed huge sections of the land, killing 150,000 peasants. We also covertly assisted a coup which replaced Sihanouk with a U.S.-friendly military dictator.

You can imagine how well all of that went over with average folk.

Before the bombing began, Cambodia had to deal with another problem, aside from (but related to) the North Vietnam supply lines: There was an indigenous communist group called the Khmer Rouge, led by a pretentious nutcase named Pol Pot. If you're a younger reader learning about this stuff for the first time, you must understand one key point: Before Nixon butted into Cambodia's affairs, the Khmer Rouge had around 400 members. (That's the number William Shawcross gives in his book Sideshow. I've put it in boldface because most current sources, including Wikipedia, go to great lengths to avoid giving you that important piece of information.)

Cambodia's home-grown "revolutionaries" had been little more than a group of starving wackos scuttling about in the forests -- pests, nothing worse. They struggled for survival while Pol Pot talk-talk-talked about his grand plans for the future. Sihanouk thought they were amusing.

Then came the Americans. Our attack on Cambodia -- and yes, "attack" is the right term -- inflamed the citizenry, swelling the ranks of the Khmer Rouge. Most of the peasants who joined the movement thought they were fighting to bring back Sihanouk; they didn't care about Marxist ideology. Later, when we lost the Vietnam war and the Americans pulled out of the region, Pol Pot came to power and instituted a truly insane and barbaric regime.

You may have heard about the "killing fields."

You want to know how the "killing fields" happened? Dick Nixon is how. He radicalized the region. He transformed 400 inconsequential extremists into a potent revolutionary force. Pol Pot would have remained a footnote figure if not for Dick Nixon.

Arguably, the bombing of Cambodia was an even worse decision than was the invasion of Iraq.

And that, my friends, is a bit of history that our textbooks neglect to tell you.

(They also don't tell you that Ronald Reagan's administration, for reasons of realpolitik, supported Pol Pot even after he had been toppled from power.)

It does not take much imagination to see how our past can become our future. If the bombing of Cambodia empowered a previously-tiny sect of anti-American radicals, then why should we expect a different result from Obama's drone program?

Update: I read Shawcross' Sideshow many years ago, and may be recalling the chronology incorrectly. This Wikipedia article on the Cambodian civil war gives the number of pre-bombing Khmer Rouge combatants as 4,000, not 400. A factor of ten is no small error, I must admit. Still, even the larger number shows that the Khmer Rouge was hardly a formidable force before the bombing and the coup.

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Plutocracy watch, Obama cribs from Tricky Dick, "Ripper Street" and more...

The rich have it their way. You already knew that. But this Los Angeles Times piece really drives it home...

Over the last two years, President Obama and Congress have put the country on track to reduce projected federal budget deficits by nearly $4 trillion. Yet when that process began, in early 2011, only about 12% of Americans in Gallup polls cited federal debt as the nation's most important problem. Two to three times as many cited unemployment and jobs as the biggest challenge facing the country.

So why did policymakers focus so intently on the deficit issue? One reason may be that the small minority that saw the deficit as the nation's priority had more clout than the majority that didn't.

We recently conducted a survey of top wealth-holders (with an average net worth of $14 million) in the Chicago area, one of the first studies to systematically examine the political attitudes of wealthy Americans. Our research found that the biggest concern of this top 1% of wealth-holders was curbing budget deficits and government spending. When surveyed, they ranked those things as priorities three times as often as they did unemployment — and far more often than any other issue.

On policy, it wasn't just their ranking of budget deficits as the biggest concern that put wealthy respondents out of step with other Americans. They were also much less likely to favor raising taxes on high-income people, instead advocating that entitlement programs like Social Security and healthcare be cut to balance the budget. Large majorities of ordinary Americans oppose any substantial cuts to those programs.

The wealthy opposed — while most Americans favor — instituting a system of national health insurance, raising the minimum wage to above poverty levels, increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit and providing a "decent standard of living" for the unemployed. They were also against the federal government helping with or providing jobs for those who cannot find private employment.

It's like they're a whole different species, ain't it? Or perhaps I should say "sub-species" -- accent on the "sub."

Iraq war revisionsim. The Daily Howler is on this like a coat of paint.

To our ear, Lawrence O’Donnell seemed to be trying to give the impression that he spoke out against the invasion. Ditto for his guest, David Corn. Ditto for John Judis.

Some people pretend that they spoke when they didn’t. Others punish the public with filibusters as they pretend to confess.

All the people we’ve mentioned have retained or improved their prior positions within the celebrity press corps.

The Howler goes on to point out that the marvelous Gene Lyons has not become a media superstar of similar fame over the past ten years -- even though Lyons was right about the war all along. Here's a juicy chunk of Lyon's piece:

Skepticism, however, was in short supply. Spooked by 9/11 and intimidated by the intellectual bullies of the Bush administration, American journalists largely abandoned that professional virtue in favor of propaganda and groupthink.

Among scores of examples, the one that’s stuck in my craw was allegedly liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. Reacting to Gen. Colin Powell’s anti-Saddam speech to the United Nations General Assembly—since repudiated by its author—Cohen wrote that “Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool—or possibly a Frenchman—could conclude otherwise.”

“War fever, catch it,” this fool wrote.

I added that to anybody capable of remembering past intelligence hoaxes, it wasn’t clear that Powell’s presentation answered any of the objections put forward by doubters like George H.W. Bush’s national security advisor, Gen. Brent Scowcroft.

“To any skeptic with a computer modem, moreover, it became quite clear why Powell’s speech failed to convert many at the UN,” my Feb. 5, 2003 column continued.

“Key parts of [his] presentation were dubious on their face. That alleged al Qaeda base in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq? If it’s what Powell says, why hasn’t it been bombed to smithereens? British and U.S. jets have been conducting sorties in the no-fly zone for months. Because it’s a dusty outpost not worth bombing, reporters for The Observer who visited the place quickly saw.

“The mobile bio-war death labs? Please. Even if [UN inspector] Hans Blix hadn’t told The Guardian that U.S. tips had guided inspectors to mobile food inspection facilities, anybody who’s dodged herds of camels, goats and sheep and maniacal drivers on bumpy Middle Eastern highways had to laugh. Bio-war experts told Newsweek the idea was preposterous. ‘U.S. intelligence,’ it reported ‘after years of looking for them, has never found even one.’

“Then there was the embarrassing fact that key elements of a British intelligence document cited by Powell turned out to have been plagiarized from magazine articles and a California grad student’s M.A. thesis based upon 12-year-old evidence.”

And how was Lyons rewarded for telling these truths?

My own reward was getting Dixie Chicked out of a part-time teaching job halfway through a series of columns about Iraq. Supposedly, Hendrix College ran out of money to pay me. My most popular offering had been a course about George Orwell. Oh well.

Matt Taibbi on Wikileaks, Bradley Manning and Aaron Swartz: This piece is well worth your time.

Then there's the case of Sergey Aleynikov, the Russian computer programmer who allegedly stole the High-Frequency Trading program belonging to Goldman, Sachs (Aleynikov worked at Goldman), a program which prosecutors in open court admitted could, "in the wrong hands," be used to "manipulate markets."

Aleynikov spent a year in jail awaiting trial, was convicted, had his sentence overturned, was freed, and has since been re-arrested by a government seemingly determined to make an example out of him.

Goldman isn't "the wrong hands"? 

Taibbi notes that the government has yet to toss a single banker in the pokey despite the flagrant lying, deception and manipulation which nearly destroyed our economy. Yet this administration devotes an incredible amount of time and energy to prosecuting people like Manning and Aleynikov and Assange. The only real "crime" these guys committed is attempting to tell us what's really going on.

But in all of these cases, the government pursued maximum punishments and generally took zero-tolerance approaches to plea negotiations. These prosecutions reflected an obvious institutional terror of letting the public see the sausage-factory locked behind the closed doors not only of the state, but of banks and universities and other such institutional pillars of society. As Gibney pointed out in his movie, this is a Wizard of Oz moment, where we are being warned not to look behind the curtain.

What will we find out? We already know that our armies mass-murder women and children in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, that our soldiers joke about smoldering bodies from the safety of gunships, that some of our closest diplomatic allies starve and repress their own citizens, and we may even have gotten a glimpse or two of a banking system that uses computerized insider trading programs to steal from everyone who has an IRA or a mutual fund or any stock at all by manipulating markets like the NYSE.

These fervent, desperate prosecutions suggest that there's more awfulness under there, things that are worse, and there is a determination to not let us see what those things are. Most recently, we've seen that determination in the furor over Barack Obama's drone assassination program and the so-called "kill list" that is associated with it.

And finally: Many of you are following the BBC's terrific series Ripper Street, a gruesome Victorian cop show set in the aftermath of the Whitechapel murders. (Not for kids.) Fans may not know that the main character, Detective Inspector Edmund Reid -- played by Michael MacFadyen -- was a real person.

And even if you did know that, you probably were not aware that, well before he became a police detective, Reid already had one astounding accomplishment to his credit: In 1877, he became the first person ever to parachute out of a hot air balloon.

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Capitalism is a plural noun

Michael Lind has an excellent piece in Salon which explains an important distinction. Americans are taught to think in terms of capitalism vs. socialism, but this dichotomy is simplistic. Just as there are good and bad forms of cholesterol, so too we must recognize the varying flavors of capitalism.

As Mike Konczal and many others have argued, profits should be distinguished from rents. “Profits” from the sale of goods or services in a free market are different from “rents” extracted from the public by monopolists in various kinds. Unlike profits, rents tend to be based on recurrent fees rather than sales to ever-changing consumers. While productive capitalists — “industrialists,” to use the old-fashioned term — need to be active and entrepreneurial in order to keep ahead of the competition, “rentiers” (the term for people whose income comes from rents, rather than profits) can enjoy a perpetual stream of income even if they are completely passive.

Rents come in as many kinds as there are rentier interests. Land or apartment or rental-house rents flow to landlords. Royalty payments for energy or mineral extraction flow to landowners. Interest payments on loans flow to bankers and other lenders. Royalty payments on patents and copyrights flow to inventors. Professions and guilds and unions can also extract rents from the rest of society, by creating artificial labor cartels to raise wages or professional fees. Tolls are rents paid to the owners of necessary transportation and communications infrastructure. Last but not least, taxes are rents paid to territorial governments for essential public services, including military and police protection.

In previous posts, I've used different terminology: Instead of profits versus rents, I've talked about industrial capitalism versus finance capitalism. The industrial capitalist makes things; the finance capitalist plays games with money. The industrial capitalist has to keep improving his product; the finance capitalist makes funny-money when house prices reach unsustainable levels and when those prices crash. The industrial capitalist has to go into the office every day to run the factory; the finance capitalist, once he has reached a certain level, may relax on the beach while his loot makes more loot.

This rent/profit distinction was recognized long ago, although an army of propagandists continually try to convince us that the two types of capitalist are really one and the same. Our beloved Kat Huff reminds us of one observer who, a century ago, understood that "capitalism" should be considered a plural noun. Say what you will about this fella -- I don't count myself as one of his fans -- but he did a pretty good job of predicting the punch that walloped us in 2008, and from which we have yet to recover:

I am consistently reminded in many of these conversations of Lenin who wrote a lot about banking. He said that the downfall of capitalism would come from the power of banks and their eventual destruction of the actual productive parts of the economy. I realize when I quote Lenin that I run a very high risk of being called all kinds of things by Republicans looking to demean academics. However, I read his 1916 Treatise Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in a comparative economics class in my senior year at the University of Nebraska. Let me tell you that the business school at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln does not harbor any communists to my knowledge and probably is not all that populated with Democrats, either. However, this is an important book to read to understand why the two Roosevelts were able to stop communism from taking root here. A lot of it had to do with the control and regulation of monopolies and huge banks that stalled a lot of what Lenin foresaw. I’ve pointed to this several times over the time I’ve been blogging, but it always bears repeating. Lenin had a point and does now since so much of these kinds of regulations have been removed over the last 30 years.

Lenin provides a careful,5-point definition of imperialism:

“(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”

Now, I’m not pushing Lenin’s view of what will happen once capitalism collapses, I’m only saying that he makes some really good points about how banks can play a huge role in bringing down market economies. I also think that Lenin never imagined a world in which nationalism may play a lesser role given the international flavor of bank havens today. Both Roosevelts did their share of trustbusting and bank regulation to make me believe that they saw a lot of the same problems with the JPM of their times that we’ve got with the JPM of our our time. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of Roosevelts these days.

Lenin was clearly wrong when he said that finance capital and industrial capital would merge. If that were so, then why does American finance capital seem so vibrant while American industrial capital seems so cadaverous? To my eyes, the two capitalisms have more of a vampire/donor relationship. One is red in tooth and claw, while the other is pale, wheezy, and half in love with easeful death. To keep the donor alive, regulators must not hesitate to apply garlic and the stake.

Not only do libertarians fail to distinguish between "Goldman Drac" and his victim, the apostles of Hayek and Friedman also acknoweldge no space between FDR and Stalin. In this view, any attempt to regulate finance capitalism is indistinguishable from Bolshevism. In the early part of this century, I was pretty shocked to see so many conservatives speak as if there had been no appreciable difference between communist East Germany and slightly-socialist West Germany. I can recall a time when that difference was considered so important as to justify nuclear war. 

The libertarians who speak in this fashion have blinded themselves to the most important economic lesson of the previous century: Just as our roads would become useless if all traffic laws vanished, so too finance capitalism will murder industrial capitalism -- and ultimately murder itself -- if it has neither law nor leash. Franklin Roosevelt, for all of his faults, was the man who stopped our economic system from committing suicide.

In his day, as in ours, the enemy of capitalism was not the Marxist but the banker. In a previous post, I quoted a brief, accurate view of FDR's approach, as presented in a recent book called The Untold History of the United States. FDR was a regulator, not a radical; he was certainly less extreme than was much of the citizenry. This quotation deserves repeating:

Magazines began calling bankers “banksters.” The Nation observed, “If you steal $25, you’re a thief. If you steal $250,000, you’re an embezzler. If you steal $2,500,000, you’re a financier.”... In this climate, Roosevelt had pretty much a free hand to do what he wanted. Brain Truster Raymond Moley noted, “If ever there was a moment when things hung in the balance, it was on March 5, 1933—when unorthodoxy would have drained the last remaining strength of this capitalist system.” Senator Bronson Cutting concluded that Roosevelt could have nationalized the banks “without a word of protest.” Rexford Guy Tugwell, director of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and other advisors urged Roosevelt to do just that.

A run on a bank, February 1933. Between 1930 and 1932, one-fifth of U.S. banks failed. By the time Roosevelt was inaugurated, banking had been halted completely or sharply limited everywhere.

But Roosevelt chose a much more conservative course of action. He declared a four-day national bank holiday, conferred with the nation’s top bankers on his first full day in office, called a special session of Congress to pass emergency legislation, and calmed citizens’ fears with the first of his famous fireside chats. Congress passed and Roosevelt signed the Emergency Banking Act, written largely by the bankers themselves. The banking system had been restored without radical change. Congressman William Lemke remarked, “The President drove the money-changers out of the Capitol on March 4th—and they were all back on the 9th.”... Roosevelt’s solution to the banking crisis would serve as a template for how he would handle most issues. His instincts were fundamentally conservative. He would save capitalism from the capitalists. As Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first female cabinet officer in the nation’s history, explained, Roosevelt “took the status quo in our economic system as much for granted as his family . . . he was content with it.”... But the means he would use to save capitalism would be bold, visionary, and humane. They would transform American life for decades. Perhaps longer.

Though clearly not a radical, Roosevelt laid out an ambitious recovery program during his first hundred days in office.

Our current problems may be simply stated:

1. Where can we find another Roosevelt who will remind us of the difference between rent-seeking and profit-seeking? We've let the rent-seekers control our national debate for decades -- and as a result, we are now a country that doesn't make much of anything. Our healthiest industry is the financial "industry," which is a casino built atop a high hill of hallucination.

2. Is FDR's "cautious/bold/cautious/bold" approach even possible these days? Or has Obama's relative failure injured the very idea of moderation? Personally, I think about social and economic systems the way I think about clothing: Better to mend than to buy new. Most Americans, deep down, seem to share that attitude.

For now.

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History

Someone should write a proper history of the run-up to the Iraq war. We need a book. A documentary. Something.

We don't need another historical work which focuses entirely on the decision-makers in the White House. War is not just one decision; it is millions of small decisions made by millions of people. A good social historian should resurrect the public dialogue of that time, should help us understand why and how a country went mad.

Right now, many pundits are offering mea culpas for their advocacy (or at least toleration) of the Iraq war. Nobody wants to admit a hard truth: Democrats were scared, and with good reason.

A new McCarthyism had taken hold. In fact, the most prominent of the New McCarthyites, Ann Coulter, had published a book which tried to rehabilitate the Tailgunner himself.

We laughed at Coulter, but in our secret places, decent people felt genuinely fearful when she said that antiwar activists were traitors in the pay of Saddam, and that evidence to that effect would come out after the war. I, for one, expected to see that evidence -- planted, of course. When Coulter said that liberals needed to be physically intimidated, liberals snickered, or tried to. But the words themselves did much to intimidate, because we presumed that she gave voice to the sentiments held by the majority.

Ten years ago, the liberal blogosphere was embryonic. People who got their news online didn't understand that conservatives used sockpuppets to make their views seem more popular than they actually were. This false impression of numbers convinced us that the vast majority of our fellow citizens demanded war -- not as a sad necessity but as an outlet for their blood frenzy. Americans, it seemed, wanted to live in an action movie.

A totalitarian fog engulfed our media. Although conservatives may claim to despise totalitarianism, the social and media history of the first Bush administration proves that rightists will do a mighty persuasive impersonation of Uncle Joe Stalin if given unopposed power.

Even Stalin never dared to proclaim, as Karl Rove once did, that "We're an empire now." Yet Rove was hardly the only person to say those words. All of the forces that forge opinion spread the message: We are the new Rome. Bush = Caesar + teevee + the web.

We can't look back and point the finger of blame at Fox, because the spirit of Roger Ailes moved over all of television. MSNBC was not then what it is now.  Phil Donahue, in a recent chat with Amy Goodman, reminds us of what MSNBC was like in the days when the higher-ups replaced him with Michael Savage.

Yes, MSNBC replaced Phil Donahue with Michael Savage. Did you forget? In 2003, this country was so screwed up that we considered Phil freakin' Donahue to be an extremist and Michael freakin' Savage to be just an ordinary guy.

Here's an excerpt from Goodman's show:

PHIL DONAHUE: Well, I think what happened to me, the biggest lesson, I think, is the—how corporate media shapes our opinions and our coverage. This was a decision—my decision—the decision to release me came from far above. This was not an assistant program director who decided to separate me from MSNBC. They were terrified of the antiwar voice. And that is not an overstatement. Antiwar voices were not popular. And if you’re General Electric, you certainly don’t want an antiwar voice on a cable channel that you own; Donald Rumsfeld is your biggest customer. So, by the way, I had to have two conservatives on for every liberal. I could have Richard Perle on alone, but I couldn’t have Dennis Kucinich on alone. I was considered two liberals. It really is funny almost, when you look back on how—how the management was just frozen by the antiwar voice. We were scolds. We weren’t patriotic. American people disagreed with us. And we weren’t good for business.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Phil, the irony that MSNBC now is supposedly this liberal—

PHIL DONAHUE: It’s amazing, really.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —the liberal network now?

PHIL DONAHUE: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You wonder, though, if another—if another move to war came, how liberal it would remain.

PHIL DONAHUE: Well, you know, the coin of the realm is the size of the audience. It’s important to see this. When a broadcasting executive gets out of bed in the morning, before his foot hits the floor, his thoughts are ratings.

This exchange raises two questions:

1. Was it the case that the "American people disagreed with" Phil Donahue because of the lack of anti-war voices on the air? To state the chicken/egg problem another way: Did the (quite genuine) popularity of the war force the media to the right, or did a right-wing media make the war popular?

2. Will the next war play to a similarly Stalinized audience? Can it happen again?

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Double standard

Marcy Wheeler has made an excellent catch. When Bradley Manning was caught with a computer full of classified (but not  Top Secret) cables, they threw the book at him. Hell, they threw a bookmobile.

So why didn't they do the same to Robert McFarlane, the former national security adviser to Ronald Reagan? McFarlane was found with a whole buncha Top Secret -- not just classified: Top Secret -- documents about Sudan. And sure, the feds are investigating him -- but only to find out if he has been lobbying on behalf of the Sudanese government.

Why didn't McFarlane get the Manning treatment?

My fellow oldsters may recall that McFarlane was deeply involved with Iran Contra. He tried to commit suicide. His testimony was so bizarre -- so slow and soporific -- that many people wondered if he had been given drugs.

The same double standard applied then. Nobody tried to indict anyone on the Reagan team for the basic crime of selling arms to the Iranian government. At the time, anyone else helping the Iranians would have gone to the pokey.

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The Iraq war: Regrets and lies

Everyone's talking about Ezra Klein's apologia for supporting the Iraq misadventure. The Atlantic makes a game out of it. BooMan apologizes for not being more vocal in opposition. Salon argues that Twitter would have given non-hawks a stronger voice. (I doubt that.)

What bugs me about Klein's mea culpa is that it -- like the war itself -- is based on a lie. Shrift requires a ruthless honesty; if you're going to maintain a hoax, no absolution for you. To understand what I'm getting it, allow me to reprint a few paragraphs from Klein's piece. He references Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm and the former "go to" guy for liberal-ish hawks:

The lack of WMDs, Pollack continued, was a “complete surprise.” The intelligence community -- with the exception of United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter -- was simply wrong.

In a retrospective for Foreign Policy, Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national security adviser, said, “It never occurred to me or anyone else I was working with, and no one from the intelligence community or anyplace else ever came in and said, ‘What if Saddam is doing all this deception because he actually got rid of the WMD and he doesn’t want the Iranians to know?’ Now, somebody should have asked that question. I should have asked that question. Nobody did. It turns out that was the most important question in terms of the intelligence failure that never got asked.”

Of course, it wasn’t asked. “Everybody knew” that Hussein had WMDs.

Here's the most annoying bit:

But to Pollack, the Bush administration’s failures were also a shock. “Early on especially, I looked at this administration and I really thought it was my daddy’s Bush administration.

Yeesh. Is it really true that, ten years ago, Americans paid attention to should-we-go-to-war commentary written by a couple of youngsters who think of Poppy Bush as a president of their fathers' generation? Shouldn't fetuses like Pollack and Klein gain a little more maturity before we bestow any importance on their words?

That may be the real lesson of the Iraq debacle: Toss out all advice from commentators who lack grey hairs. Ten years ago, we needed to hear from some influential greybeards who might have reminded people of how LBJ ramped up the Vietnam War based on the Tonkin Gulf fraud. Nowadays, we've seen the ascendance of one group of jackass kids who consider themselves Der Supermen because Atlas Shrugged went straight to their underdeveloped little heads, while another group of jackass kids ruined the Occupy movement by insisting on "consensus" and "leaderless rebellion" and other ideas with a long track record of failure. The world would be a safer place if everyone under 40 were forbidden from expressing an opinion on any topic other than pop culture, sex or food.

If Baby Ezzie and Lil' Kenny had asked their elders about Daddy Bush, they would have known that Poppy was never anything but a devious, deceitful asshole. If memory serves, CIA veteran Miles Copeland once referred to him as "one covert motherfucker." Hell, the assassination of Letelier back in the 1970s should have taught the world to regard the Bush label the way one would regard an opaque brown bottle bearing the image of a skull and crossbones.

What we got from Dubya was precisely what we should have expected: A massive fraud perpetrated by the intelligence community.

And that brings me to the lie at the heart of Klein's piece. He stands with those who keep saying that the intel community "got it wrong." No, they got it right. Their job was to gin up a war the old-fashioned way: By paying a small cadre of pundits to repeat brazen government fibs. The spook battalions accomplished this task with admirable efficiency.

Here's the part Klein and his kin won't tell you: The spooks weren't deceived -- they were deceivers.

Fresh evidence is revealed today about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein's foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.

Tony Blair told parliament before the war that intelligence showed Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programme was "active", "growing" and "up and running".

A special BBC Panorama programme tonight will reveal how British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries.

It describes how Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, told the CIA's station chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq had "virtually nothing" in terms of WMD.

Sabri now denies the Panorama account, but plenty of evidence backs up the claim. Panorama is hardly a haven for conspiracy theorists.

The programme says that MI6 stood by claims that Iraq was buying uranium from Niger, though these were dismissed by other intelligence agencies, including the French.

It also shows how claims by Iraqis were treated seriously by elements in MI6 and the CIA even after they were exposed as fabricated including claims, notably about alleged mobile biological warfare containers, made by Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, a German source codenamed Curveball. He admitted to the Guardian in 2011 that all the information he gave to the west was fabricated.

There have been any number of articles indicating that George Tenet comprehended that Dubya was set on using lies to start a war. Contrary to popular belief, CIA never got into the conga line of people shouting "Beware of Saddam's WMDs!" Throughout 2002 and 2003, every official statement from the Agency on that topic was carefully hedged. The parsed language provided a mega-humungous clue as to what was really going on; we didn't need the Downing Street Memo to get the picture. Back in 2003, lots of well-informed people (not just Scott Ritter) warned the world that Bush was going after Iraq for reasons that had nothing to do with WMDs.

Hell, the Downing Street Memo itself upends Klein's contention that the intel community got it wrong. By this point, everyone should know by heart the key line from that memo: "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." There's a world of difference between intel that is fixed and intel that is wrong.

Ezra Klein: You and your fellow apologia-writers will get the forgiveness you seek -- the moment you start telling the goddamned truth.

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Student loans: Here's the solution

I just received the following from Progressives United...

If you have to take out some normal debt -- say a home loan or a credit card -- our government assures protection to make sure you don't end up owing your whole life to a predatory lender.

But, like so many Americans, if you took out a student loan to finance your education, you may be missing basic consumer protections that come with other types of debt.

That's because the private student loan industry lobbied Congress for a huge loophole in 2005, and President George W. Bush carried it the rest of the way.

As a result, private educational lenders got government-guaranteed profits -- while students working for their education got the shaft.

Take action today. Join our friends at CREDO and sign the petition telling your member of Congress to support the Private Student Loan Bankruptcy Fairness Act today.

Here's the shocking truth: Americans hold more debt from student loans than from credit cards.

New generations of students striving to keep up in our increasingly competitive economy are forced to take out these loans, even though they're devoid of protections afforded to holders of other kinds of debt. While corporate loan companies charge monstrously high and variable interest rates, hapless graduates are left to guarantee the lenders' profits regardless of the harm to their own lives.

The private student loan industry has been allowed to play by a different set of rules than other lenders, and it's fundamentally unfair.

But pressure is building behind a bill from Rep. Steve Cohen (TN) and Rep. Danny Davis (IL) that would curb these predatory loan practices: the Private Student Loan Bankruptcy Fairness Act. We can change the game this time around if we stay organized and pass this crucial legislation. The first step is getting our members of Congress on board.

Sign CREDO's petition to your representative today. Tell your member of Congress to support the Private Student Loan Bankruptcy Fairness Act.

The private loan industry used expensive lobbyists to get to this point, so we can be sure they'll take the same approach to try to buy their way out of this new challenge. We can stop them.

In case you missed it, here's the link.

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Sorry for the lack of posting...

I never knew making a movie for no money would be so hard. What's interesting is that the technology has reached a point where it is possible for one to do just that: Make a movie for NO money. Not "very little" money. Zippo.

Focusing on Lenny da V has kind of taken me away from the world of politics, but I'll be back later today (I hope) with some interesting stuff. In the meantime, check out Salon's piece on Brendan Hunt. He seems like a nice kid, even if he does believe in the Illuminati and has taken a leading role with the Sandy Hook troofer movement. There was a time, back in my 20s, when I might have become Brendan. Fear of ridicule was the only factor that stopped me from going too far over the edge.

So do Brendan a favor and make fun of him. It's for his own good. He might actually accomplish something worthwhile with his life, if he cleans up his act and learns a few things about standards of evidence.

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Why I'm still a Dem

Boy, the Dems really ARE the corporate party, aren't they? What I don't understand is why folks who are heavily invested in the stock market tend to vote R.

By the way, I didn't make this graphic. The typo is not my fault.

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Luke's Change

The destruction of the Death Star was an INSIDE JOB -- and you'll never guess who was responsible!

I prefer to call it the DWITHOP theory -- Darth Willed It To Happen On Purpose.

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Monumental

I was going to post a piece about the last years of Orson Welles, which a reader graciously sent me not long ago. But the day has been a busy one, too busy to retype that article. So I've decided, as a non-political Sunday treat, to share this short documentary about a monument which has fascinated me since I first saw a picture of it more than four decades ago: The Motherland statue in Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad.

God, I want to see this one day.

The second half of this documentary contains some truly amazing shots of the mountain climbers whose job it is to check the work for damage. If your jaw doesn't drop, it must be wired into place.

Although the statue is formally called "The Motherland Calls," it is also referred to as "Mother Motherland" (a title that makes more sense in Russian, I'm told) or simply "Motherland."

During the Cold War, I was always afraid to admit that I considered Motherland superior to the Statue of Liberty. The Russian work has that wonderful contrapposto pose. Drama. Passion. Schmaltz? I've heard some people use that term, but I can't agree. The thing is alive.

As for the Statue of Liberty: My feelings remain mixed. Sure, nearly everyone admires what she symbolizes. But step back and try to regard the NY monument from a completely objective, man-from-Mars standpoint: Is it really a success, aesthetically? She never looked quite female to me. She doesn't breathe. Despite her impressive size, a certain magic seems to be missing.

I still love her -- we all do. But I would have designed her differently.

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Ryan follow-up

Maybe I should just let it go. But I took another look at what Paul Ryan had to say, and the audacity of his lying continues to haunt me, like one of those bad commercial jingles that lingers in your memory even though you wish it would go away.

"We know where this path leads—straight into a debt crisis, and along the way, fewer jobs, fewer opportunities, and less security," Ryan said, painting a desperate image of rising interest rates and inflating debt payments.

By "this path" he means higher taxes on the wealthy. Note that he does not explain why jobs were so plentiful in the 1940s and on up through the Reagan years, even when the top tax rate shot beyond the 90% mark.

But what really sticks in my craw is the reference to "rising interest rates." Say what? I was under the impression that interest rates remain at a historic low.

Conservatives have a strange obsession with economic problems that don't even exist. Throughout the 2009-2012 period, the right warned us the real issue confronting America was inflation. Not jobs, not outsourcing, not foreclosures -- inflation. Remember when Fox News relentlessly pushed something called the National Inflation Association, which turned out to be a scam run by a couple of young scallywags, one of whom was the notorious Jonathan Lebed?

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The writer's life

"Oh, he wrote that only to make money!" You hear those words whenever someone wants you to dislike an author, no matter what the book and no matter who wrote it or why. In the world of non-fiction, those words are flung at all writers who take a non-conventional view of history, science or society. If a would-be author even attempts to research a work about current events, he'll run into that phrase on repeated occasions. "All you care about is the almighty dollar..."

Here's the truth. A writer is very lucky if he makes $5,000 from a book -- and if he writes a heavily-footnoted work of non-fiction, the work may take years to complete. Greeters at Walmart do better.

Wanna be a writer? Jump on in; the water's fine.

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Ryan and the three goals

Although his own budget plan met with an unenthusiastic reaction, Paul Ryan remains with us. After all, he's the chair of the House Budget Committee.

"Our plan lets Washington spend only what it takes in," he said. "This is how every family tries to live, in good times and in bad. Your government should do the same."

Yes, he went for that cliche. Ronald Reagan used it all the time in 1979 and 1980. Then he got into office and ran up a deficit worse than all previous deficits combined.

The BULLSHIT ALERT sirens should blare any time a Republican spouts this line. In truth, most households in this country owe a horrifying amount of money. Hence the power of the GOP's favorite cliche: It appeals to the unspoken guilt felt by householders who feel overwhelmed by their personal debts. I believe that shrinks refer to this psychological phenomenon as projection.

Let's get back to Ryan, whose talent for double-speech has become genuinely profound:

Ryan took aim at President Obama and Senate Democrats, saying the tax increases in a proposal from Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) only "fuel more spending."

"We know where this path leads—straight into a debt crisis, and along the way, fewer jobs, fewer opportunities, and less security," Ryan said, painting a desperate image of rising interest rates and inflating debt payments.

No, a higher tax rate for the wealthy leads to higher taxes for the wealthy. More revenue should help achieve the stated goal of Washington spending only what it takes in.

Higher taxes on the rich do not "fuel more spending." Y'know what does fuel more spending? War.

Take the wars Bush started: That was a couple of trillion bucks right there. And now the neo-cons hope to engineer another war in Iran, a hideously expensive idea that doesn't seem to bother Ryan at all. (If Ryan were a proper Libertarian, he'd be as anti-war as he is anti-entitlements.)

During his VP debate with Biden, Ryan defended the idea of lowering taxes to balance the budget. Remember the petulant tone in his voice when he said "It's been done twice"? His reference went to JFK and Reagan.

Ryan refuses to remind his audience of a fact mentioned earlier: Ronald Reagan ran up massive deficits. Reagan did not create a balanced budget -- quite the opposite.

Most people don't know that JFK's tax plan also increased the debt. What's more, such was Kennedy's intent. He had inherited more-or-less balanced books, and thus felt that he had some room for experimentation.

(Here's another fun fact: In the early 1960s, much of the business community opposed the idea of lowering the top tax rate, on the grounds that such a move might upset the economic equilibrium. Different times...!)

So our present budget battle isn't really about the deficit. It's about other things. That's why Republicans fixate on the national debt only at those times when no Republican inhabits the Oval Office. That's why Ryan keeps pushing ideas designed to make the debt worse.

Here are the three goals Republicans really want:

1. Lower taxes on the wealthy.
2. Robbing entitlements through privatization.
3. Making sure Obama does not have a single good year.

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It's Frank!

The first clue was the white smoke. Then the cardinals all paraded out of the Sistine Chapel wearing little "I voted" buttons. The choice was Jorge Borgoglio of Argentina, a decision nobody predicted. As I've been saying for more than eight years: Don't trust Diebold.

The new Pope is a Jesuit. They're the smart ones, and they're also the ones most likely to cause the Alex Jonesian paranoids to go into full-body conspiragasm. That I dig. Even better, the new Pope took the name Francis I as a nod toward St. Francis, the epitome of humility and poverty.

I'll probably have more to say about Things Catholic a little later. Right now, let me express a view that many of you will consider unfathomable: The Pope isn't important.

Even within the Church, he isn't nearly as important as the news media will have you believe.

Both traditionalist Catholics and fervent anti-Catholics conspire to promote silly ultra-Montanist fantasies which picture the Pope as an all-powerful temporal leader -- a prince, a sultan, an emperor, Darth Vader, the Queen of the Borgs, the ultimate programmer of the robot factory. Bullshit. All bullshit. People keep telling me: "But...but...you can't say the Pope unimportant. He has HIS OWN STATE!" Yeah, and that state is about one-third the size of the Los Angeles Zoo. Vatican City can't even provide its own electricity and garbage pick up. The Church isn't rich, despite popular fantasies.

My point is this: We no longer live in medieval times, and in today's world, nothing the Holy Father says can truly affect the laws of any country (other than Vatican City, which is really just a big art museum). I know that the previous sentence will infuriate people both inside and outside of the Church Everyone Loves to Hate, but it's true, and your hallucinations to the contrary simply do not matter.

The Pope's main job is to keep the world's Catholics on the same page theologically, a task at which all recent popes have failed miserably. You'll find far more rigor, and far less tolerance for novelty, among the Southern Baptists. The Catholic Church has liberal and conservative wings, while the Baptists are all conservatism, all the time.

Take, for example, the issue of keeping abortion legal in the United States: Catholics are split nearly 50-50, the same split we see in the country as a whole, give or take a few percentage points. Meanwhile, nearly all Baptists are anti-abortion. Yet when advocates of legalized abortion want to screech against the malign influence of religion, which denomination do they target for special hatred? Which denomination do they talk about as if it were An Extremely Powerful Entity foisting unwanted dogmas on everyone else? You got it: The Church Everyone Loves to Hate. That's because anti-Catholic fantasies are an acceptable form of bigotry.

Pope Francis looks to be quite conservative. Don't expect any changes when it comes to clerical celibacy or the ordination of women. Besides, even if Francis I were disposed toward liberalism, the Pope's personal opinions have little significance, because he has very little room to maneuver. Believe it or not, the leader is manacled by the laity. In the Catholic Church, as in American politics, conservatives gain the upper hand by constantly threatening to revolt or to secede. The Church's conservative wing prevails because the long-simmering sedevacantist rebellion scares the Vatican hierarchy, while the snarlings and sneerings of outsiders or disaffected liberals pose no threat whatsoever.

Liberals who have drifted away from the Church won't drift back if the rules are changed to allow (for example) the ordination of women. Liberal ex-Catlicks may say they'll come back, but they won't, and everyone knows that they won't. On the other hand, allowing the ordination of women would cause the conservatives to scream and yowl and exit en masse. They'll find new homes within those ultra-right-wing sedevacantist enclaves -- the wacky breakaway churches that gave us Mel Gibson -- and pretty soon sedevacantism will become more popular (and infinitely more dangerous) than anything offered by the "official" Church in Rome.

We've seen the same pattern elsewhere. A similar progression happened within the Nation of Islam, when Farrakhan's ultra-conservative splinter group became far more popular than the more "bourgeois" Nation run by Elijah Muhammed's son. (Most people don't know that Farrakhan was not the chosen successor.) In the Protestant world, ultra-conservative fundamentalist churches -- once considered fringe -- became extremely popular during the '70s and '80s by preaching Hellfire, creationism, political paranoia and Apocalypse-any-day-now. Meanwhile, mainline Protestant denominations suffered from Empty Pew Syndrome. 

So you should expect the Catholic Church to change at a glacial pace, if it changes at all. Does that situation bug you? Then do as I do and don't attend services in a Catholic Church. Problem solved.

As I said: The Pope has no real power. The Church is a purely voluntary association. No-one has a gun to his or her head. Yes, I know that many of you want to pretend otherwise. That's because many of you are delusional haters.

Because I know that certain topics cause certain knees to jerk in certain ways, I can guess what you're dying to tell me right now. And that's the problem: I can guess every word of it. After the age of 50, one puts a lot of effort into avoiding discussions that one has had a zillion times in the past. So don't expect me to publish any comments filled with cliches (or puerile ad hominem attacks). Disagreement is fine, but say something new. Astonish me.

(Also, please do me the honor of responding to what I've actually written, as opposed to what you imagine I've written.)

Otherwise, read Roger Ebert's piece here. It's the only intelligent thing I've recently read about the faith -- by a man who no longer seems to have much in the way of faith.

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