Rationally Irrational

"The Right" has been in freaked-out mode for what is getting to be a very long time now.  And I won't put up a big list of shit they're freaked out about, because it's a lot of trouble and anybody who's been paying any attention for the last 20 years should know at least a few of the items on that list anyway.

But I'll focus on one item - Iran - and use it as an illustration of what I think is going on.

The Neo-Cons are always on about the horribleness of Iran's efforts to get the bomb.  And they use it constantly trying to get some leverage on every issue having anything to do with the Middle East.  Pick anything you like - Lybia, Benghazi, Syria, Hamas, Iraq, Hezbollah, Chuck Hagel - eventually, they'll bring it back around to their belief that Iran is doing all of these terrible things in all of these dangerous places because the Ayatollahs want to fuck the Israelis.

From Balloon Juice:

The point isn’t that Hagel “favors” containment and deterrence. Like virtually everyone else, he’d much rather Iran not get a bomb. But by reminding Americans of the potential costs of preventive war, Hagel was implying that containment and deterrence might be preferable. He was suggesting that if the U.S. can’t stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons short of war, it should make the same tradeoff that Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy made when they allowed the Soviet Union and China to get the bomb. This horrifies hawks for two reasons. First, some of them, echoing Benjamin Netanyahu, claim Iran represents an existential threat to Israel. But were that their sole concern, they’d pay more attention to the near-consensus view among top Israeli security professionals that although Iran poses a threat, it does not pose an existential one, in large measure because Iran’s regime, while vile, is rational when it comes to preserving its own existence.

And there it is - I hi-lited in yellow so ya wouldn't miss it.  While the guys running things in Iran (eg) may talk big, they're not fuckin' stupid.  But in order to cut thru the Media Clutter, neo-cons have to make it sound like Iran is champin' at the bit to rain fire and destruction down on Tel Aviv.  If you can make your opposition look totally wacko, it can make your own insanity seem a little more palatable in comparison.  So you can do something completely irrational - like invading countries for bogus reasons - and make it look OK simply because enough of us are convinced the other guy is even more of a dick that you are.

Paraphrasing: In a world of complete assholes, the man who is just kinda of a jerk is king.

So, can we talk about the Wimpy-But-Reasonable Dems vs the Bat-Shit-Crazy Repubs thing now?  No wait - that's actually for real.  (just something to watch out for, y'know?)

The point is that ya gotta stay as rational as possible.  You don't want to become what you're supposed to be fighting against.

And from The Rude Pundit, here's the cherry on the top:

2/27/2013
Tweets About Elaine Chao: On the Left, We Treat Our Screw-Ups with Honor:
Here in Left Blogsylvania, we give a fuck. We give a fuck because we believe it matters to give a fuck. When someone on our side fucks up and fucks up badly, we don't automatically circle the wagons. We want punishment. Look at Anthony Weiner versus, say, David Vitter. We want apologies - real apologies, not apologies that go something like "I'm sorry if I offended you when I murdered your dog. It wasn't my intention to offend you but rather simply murder your dog."

So when an offensive tweet from Progress Kentucky, a not-really Super PAC devoted to defeating Senator Mitch "What the hell is that between your chin and neck? You should get that tumor checked" McConnell, was brought to everyone's attention nearly two weeks after it was sent out to the 2000 followers of the account, Left Blogsylvania went all Twitchy on its own. (If you understand what that last part of the sentence means, the Rude Pundit feels your pain. Let's jab needles in our eyes together.)

The tweet was about McConnell's wife, George W. Bush's Labor Secretary, Elaine Chao, whose record is worthy of criticism. But she's Chinese-American. And you can't link to an article about her, identify her as the Senate Minority Leader's wife (must...resist...urge to joke...about "Minority Leader"...), and say, "May explain why your job moved to #China!" See, that shit's just racist, whatever you intended, and we on the left understand that if we're gonna go nutzoid when someone on the right does it, then what's good for the motherfuckers is what's good for the progressives.

Left Blogsylvania and the actual liberal media condemned it thoroughly. Salon, Think Progress, Wonkette, Talking Points Memo, even Huffington Post, taking a break from all Anne Hathaway's nipples all the time, and the New York Times all posted variations on "That's some bullshit."

You know what you didn't see? You didn't see any of the major voices of theleft leaping in to defend Progress Kentucky. You didn't see Daily Kos writing posts about how, of course, Progress Kentucky didn't mean anything racist; they just meant to point out that Chao's tenure as Labor Secretary saw a shift in American jobs to China. If this had been someone on the right saying it? If it had been one of Karl Rove's Super PACs? The wagons would have circled like they were protecting American Jesus from the Lamanites. Rush Limbaugh would have devoted half a fuckin' show to blowharding about liberal political correctness. Bill O'Reilly would have blamed Obama. Laura Ingraham would have had Michelle Malkin on as an honorary Asian to talk about how it wasn't offensive at all, just true. They would have gone all Todd Akin. They would have gone all Richard Mourdock, trying to say what's wrong is the attempt to silence it. Somehow, guns would have been mentioned, for sure.

But we're not them because we're generally not dicks about such things (we're dicks about other things and have blinders on many more, but that's not what's being discussed today). We call out racism, sexism, and homophobia. We hope that those being called out will do the right thing. In this case, potential McConnell opponent Ashley Judd condemned the tweet, as did the Kentucky Democratic Party.

In fact, after at first trying to say it wasn't racist, Progress Kentucky issued a full apology: "We apologize to the secretary for that unnecessary comment and have deleted the tweets in question." You see how easy that is? 

Now, Progress Kentucky is a tiny, mostly worthless organization. It's easy to pile on it. But time and again, the left proves that it demands a devotion to truth and fair discourse.

Which, by the way, is why the right is able to walk all over us all the time.

Today's Tweet

From Jay Rosen, NYU:

I don't use expressions like LOL, but if I did... RT @natpkguy Democrats: 1+1= 2 Republicans: 1+1= 3 Media: 1+1= 2.5.
— Jay Rosen(@jayrosen_nyu) February 26, 2013

My Kinda Justice

I think this may be what a real US Supreme Court oughta look like.

According to CNN, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and another Justice took the rather unusual step to speak out over racist remarks made by a federal prosecutor in a drug case. The case is Calhoun v. U.S. (12-6142).

--and--

While questioning an African-American defendant in a drug case, Ponder asked: “You’ve got African-Americans, you’ve got Hispanics, you’ve got a bag full of money. Does that tell you – a light bulb doesn’t go off in your head and say, this is a drug deal?”

The first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, Sotomayor wrote that the prosecutor had “tapped a deep and sorry vein of racial prejudice that has run through the history of criminal justice in our nation.”

The question was “pernicious in its attempt to substitute racial stereotype for evidence,” she added. Sotomayor also accused the Obama administration of playing down the issue.

I hope Sotomayor's pointed criticism is a sign that she'll continue to stand out simply because she understands that the court isn't supposed to be a political or ideological counterweight.  It's there to keep the other 2 branches from becoming too powerful - just as the other branches are there to provide balance against the courts.

(from Addicting Info)

Yeesh

Ever notice how there's really no such thing as Conservative Comedy?  There's no Liberal Comedy either - because that's not how it works.  People laugh at different things for different reasons at different times.  The audience decides, not the performer.  And whatever you're trying to joke about, what you say has to have something kinda universal about it - something that most people can identify with - it has to have some kernel of truth to it.  So if Comedy seems to cut a little to the "left", doesn't that kinda hafta mean the majority of us are at least slightly to the left as well?

Try watching Dennis Miller these days.  Since he went "conservative" it's so obvious that he's aiming everything at a certain audience with a certain ideological mindset that it's like sitting through a marketing presentation at work.  (I really miss the old Dennis btw; there was a time he didn't seem so scared and desperate)

Anyway, enter Michelle Malkin, trying (again, desperately) to poke fun at Michelle Obama's dance thing...



...and missing by a wide margin.  Of course, her audience thinks this is a hoot - in exactly the same way (and for exactly the same reasons) they thought Willard was gonna win the White House in a semi-landslide, and that Obama has launched a campaign to confiscate their guns, and is close to declaring Religion a mental disorder, and and and; ie: they were told to think that way.

But getting back to Malkin fer a minute, it's just like Jesus said in the Parable of the Blind Prostitute: ya gotta hand it to her. (hat tip = Wonkette comments)

And btw also too - that shit you just watched Malkin doing?  Here's a little eye bleach:



...because Barack and Michelle are forever cool, while Malkin and Miller and all the rest are forever lame - which is why they have to try so hard just to tear shit down.

The Dowager Pundit

The brilliance of Charlie Pierce:

It's past time for her friends, her family, or the spirit of JP The Deuce to descend on Our Lady Of The Dolphins and stage an intervention. Apparently, she believes that the president has a cauldron bubbling in the East Room from which he has loosed upon the land magic Kenyan Muslim Alinskyist spells that have stolen the souls of the American people. Either that, or it once again was two-for-one Harvey Wallbangers during Happy Hour at the Dowager Pundit's Club.

Further evidence of Charlie's brilliance is his link to No More Mister Nice Blog:

But that's not why I'm talking about Noonan. I'm talking about her because, in addition to believing that nonsense, she also believes that people aren't spending money in America at discount superstores because their animal spirits have been depleted by the evil Obama. I'm used to hearing right-wingers (and centrists) advance the (nonsensical) idea thatbusinesses aren't expanding because the confidence of CEOs has been undermined by "uncertainty" (there was Tom Freidman saying that again over the weekend, and here's David Brooks saying it again today) -- but now we're supposed to believe that poor and middle-class and lower-middle-class people aren't opening their wallets because of ... the national mood?

As opposed to not opening their wallets because, y'know, they're flat broke?

The Krugman's Graphs

A recession happens when Demand is low.  Krugman's been shouting in the wilderness for a long time that while the Deficit and the Debt are important - and will get to be moreso in time - we have to focus on continuing to boost Demand if we expect ever to get a chance to tackle any other problems.  

And BTW: the deficit is down significantly.  

And BTW also too: if you fix the Demand problem, then the Deficit problem kinda fixes itself; and once the Deficit problem is fixed, then the Debt problem practically evaporates before your very eyes.

The Krugman Speaks

From Krugman's blog at NYT:

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

I don’t know about the divines bit, but the little statesmen thing is completely accurate. Suppose George Osborne were to admit that austerity isn’t working. What, then, would be left of his claim to be qualified to do, well, anything? He has to stick it out until something turns up,no matter how many lives it destroys.

Pretty much the same thing is going on among pundits now stuck in what Jonathan Chait memorably calls the “fever swamp of the center”. Suppose that some pundit who has spent his whole career calling for bipartisanship, a compromise between the extremes of left and right, were to admit the plain fact that Obama is very much a centrist, who is in particular proposing deficit reduction through exactly the kind of mix of tax hikes and spending cuts “centrist” pundits demand — and that the GOP, by contrast, is an extremist organization whose extremism is almost solely responsible for the bitterness of the partisan divide. A pundit making that admission would in effect be saying that everything he has said and done for the past several years was not just useless but harmful, actively misleading readers about the state of the debate. He just can’t do it.

The point he makes on careerism is kinda what the whole thing ends up being about.  Once you've made it more important to maintain your position of power or influence within "the system", you've made the collapse of that system inevitable.  It can take lotsa time, but these things have an unerring mechanism for self-correction.

Re-read your Ayn Rand - Contradiction exists, but it cannot prevail.

The Winners Write The History Books

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Can't wait to see what the "conservatives" wanna do about the "dirty, Librul, 'Murica-hating leftists" because of this, from Smithsonian.com:

Bailyn has not painted a pretty picture. Little wonder he calls it The Barbarous Years and spares us no details of the terror, desperation, degradation and widespread torture—do you really know what being “flayed alive” means? (The skin is torn from the face and head and the prisoner is disemboweled while still alive.) And yet somehow amid the merciless massacres were elements that gave birth to the rudiments of civilization—or in Bailyn’s evocative phrase, the fragile “integument of civility”—that would evolve 100 years later into a virtual Renaissance culture, a bustling string of self-governing, self-sufficient, defiantly expansionist colonies alive with an increasingly sophisticated and literate political and intellectual culture that would coalesce into the rationale for the birth of American independence. All the while shaping, and sometimes misshaping, the American character. It’s a grand drama in which the glimmers of enlightenment barely survive the savagery, what Yeats called “the blood-dimmed tide,” the brutal establishment of slavery, the race wars with the original inhabitants that Bailyn is not afraid to call “genocidal,” the full, horrifying details of which have virtually been erased.

 --and--

“Yes,” he agrees. “Look at the ‘peaceful’ Pilgrims. Our William Bradford. He goes to see the Pequot War battlefield and he is appalled. He said, ‘The stink’ [of heaps of dead bodies] was too much.”

Bailyn is speaking of one of the early and bloodiest encounters, between our peaceful pumpkin pie-eating Pilgrims and the original inhabitants of the land they wanted to seize, the Pequots. But for Bailyn, the mercenary motive is less salient than the theological.

“The ferocity of that little war is just unbelievable,” Bailyn says. “The butchering that went on cannot be explained by trying to get hold of a piece of land. They were really struggling with this central issue for them, of the advent of the Antichrist.”

Suddenly, I felt a chill from the wintry New England air outside enter into the warmth of his study.

The Antichrist. The haunting figure presaging the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation plays an important part in Bailyn’s explanation of the European settlers’ descent into unrestrained savagery. The key passage on this question comes late in his new book when Bailyn makes explicit a connection I had not seen before: between the physical savagery the radical dissenting Protestant settlers of America wreaked on the original inhabitants, and the intellectual savagery of their polemical attacks on the church and state authorities they fled from in Europe—and the savagery of vicious insult and vile denunciation they wreaked upon each other as well.

“The savagery of the [theological] struggle, the bitterness of the main contenders and the deep stain it left on the region’s collective memory” were driven by “elemental fears peculiar to what was experienced as a barbarous environment—fears of what could happen to civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness...in which God’s children [as they thought of themselves] were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world around them. The two [kinds of struggle, physical and metaphysical] were one: threats from within [to the soul] merged with threats from without to form a heated atmosphere of apocalyptic danger.”

Any of that last part ring any bells?  Is it possible to substitute Iraqis or Afghanis for the American Aboriginals?  How about Muslims? Or Immigrants?  And can I imagine myself being seen as one of those 'pitiless agents of Satan' in the eyes of the American Taliban?  Sad questions with potentially very sad answers.

Parade Of Stoopid

So this has been making the rounds lately:

Jennifer Olsen is a GOP Chair at the County level in Montana, so the first thing is that  we can't make any real assumptions that her IQ is any higher than her SUV's gas mileage.  And since we can't make that assumption, we really can't say with any confidence that she meant this as a subtle and ironic dig at her constituents' prejudices, thinking she'd gently chide them blah blah blah.

Actually, whether or not they believe it themselves, they put out this kinda shit because they know there's a constituency for it. (if there's any attempt at damage control, the explanation is likely to be a lot of fun)

The truly sad part is that I think this really is a fair indicator of the intellectual horsepower of the local GOP rank-and-file right now.

Absurdity Today

From a while back.