George Lakoff and value "frames" (1): Don't think of Tippecanoe

US President William Henry Harrison (1773-1841)

I heard a speech by linguist George Lakoff this past Wednesday in which he talked about his concept of "frames" and how they work in political communication. He said he illustrates the concept for his classes by telling them, "Don't think of an elephant." His point is that even when put in the negative, the word "elephant" creates a frame of concepts that makes you think of an elephant.

Lakoff has lots of interesting things to say. But I find his scientific linguistic discussions more persuasive than his attempts to apply them to political communication. He pointed out, as one example, that when people use hand gestures to talk about a progression of time, we strongly tend to use a gesture to our left side to refer to earlier, to our right side to refer to later, though the same pattern does not hold in speech. He also talked briefly about the neurological basis of metaphors, like referring to old age as "the autumn of life."

He also makes sense when he says that Democrats reinforce Republican frames of political issues when they respond in Republican terms, e.g., talking about "tax relief," which he says is identified with Republican anti-tax, anti-government notions. He did mention with obvious delight a recent example on the other side, from Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell (R-Tea Party):



By declaring "I'm not a witch," she was using a similar formulation to, "Don't think of an elephant." Rather than directing attention away from her somewhat embarrassing but otherwise inconsequential mention on TV years ago that she had dabbled in witchcraft before becoming a Christian, she instead called attention to it.

There is also some intuitive appeal to Lakoff's argument that the Republican and Democratic Parties each operate from one of two value sets that he says predominate in Americans' political concepts. The Republicans play the role of the disciplinary father, the Democrats the role of the nurturing mother.

And he argues that retail politics is all about values. He thinks the Democrats' great failure in communication is that they fail to connect the points they make with an identifiable set of values, and in particular "their" nurturing-mother set of values. Whereas the Republicans are generally good at relating their messaging to their disciplinary-father values. He did say that Obama was good about doing so during his campaign, not so good during his Presidency.

Jerry Brown has been offering what looks to me like the kind of appeal to values that Lakoff has been advocating for Democrats to use. Here he addresses the question of undocumented workers (Economic Pessimism Pervades Heated California Governor Race PBS Newshour 10/08/2010):

JERRY BROWN: There's also a question of values. How do you treat people? And this raises the larger question of the underground economy. There is a group of people, numbered in the millions, who are being exploited and who are vulnerable and our laws should protect. And if I'm governor, I will do precisely that.

(Yes, the California Governor's race has really been capturing my attention this past week or so.)

He also made an amusing but interesting point. Young Republicans who want to go into politics tend to study business, while aspiring young Democratic politicians tend to study political science or history. The Republicans learn to think about marketing, the Democrats learn to think in terms of reasoned discourse. The result is that Republicans are good at marketing their cluster of values. While the Democrats have an incredible tendency to argue points on the assumption that reasonable discussion is the best way to persuade people. I believe he even put it as bluntly as saying that facts don't matter in this context, only values do.

At this point, despite the interesting and perceptive observations, I've got doubts popping up all over the place about his point. Is there a solid empirical basis for his father/mother concept of the two broad clusters of values by which most Americans perceive politics? Or is he reading an interpretation onto the dualism that a two-party system like our produces that may be based on more dominant determining factors? Because the Democratic base has more working-class and minority composition than the Republicans', it's arguably a rational economic calculation for the Democratic voters to favor "nurturing" programs like unemployment insurance. But does that really connect to something meaningfully described as a nurturing-mother cluster of values?

If these sound like those Democratic rational-thinking questions Lakoff warns us about, I confess: I majored in political science in college. But then I studied business in graduate school, so I don't quite fit his Democratic model. Which brings me to another point. How much of an empirical basis is there for the intuitively attractive notion that Republican candidates have a better background in marketing than Democratic candidates? I would suggest that the Republicans, as the Party that represents billionaires who would prefer not to pay taxes, tends to pursue policies that damage the interests of the majority of the American public. And so they have to have better marketing to sell a bill of good like that in elections.

This phenomenon goes back a ways. When the Whig Party formed as the representative of the Money Power against Jacksonian Democracy, they soon figured out they would need a more downhome image than the old Federalist Party had projected. When Virginia aristocrat William Henry Harrison (Tippecanoe of "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too") became the Whig nominee for the Presidency in 1940 against Democratic standard-bearer Martin Van Buren, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. describes in The Age of Jackson what happened: "A Baltimore paper observed loftily that Harrison would be entirely happy on his backwoods farm if he had a pension, a log cabin and a barrel of hard cider." The Whigs picked up on the imagery and decided to turn it into a virtue. To make Harrison appear to be the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with, you might say:

Hard cider and a log cabin? . . . Yes,, the answer soon rang across the land, the Whig party is the party of hard cider and log cabins, and it will defend them to the end against all the sneers of the Democrats.

With tireless industry and bewildering resources Whigs everywhere rushed to doff their broadcloth and flaunt their homespun. Every speech, song and slogan held up the rustic and plebeian as closest to the Whig soul. The staid meetings of their past gave way to barbecues, clambakes, excursions and noisy processions. Raucous campaign songs echoed in the streets, as the Whigs marched by in disorder, shouting and staggering in the yellow light of torches: —

Farewell, dear Van,
You're not our man;
To guide the ship,
We'll try old Tip.

Log cabins were everywhere - hung to watch chains and earrings, in parlor pictures and shop windows, mounted on wheels, decorated with coonskins and hauled in magnificent parades. Large ones were set up in the principal cities, surrounded by barrels of cider, with the latchstring dangling out in welcome for all comers. ...

Wood engravers and lithographers were kept perpetually busy turning out pictures: Harrison, the Hero of Tippecanoe, astride a monumental horse; Harrison as Cincinnatus at the plow; Harrison greeting his comrades at arms at the door of his log cabin, with a long latch-string hanging down; Harrison as an Indian chief, paddling furiously toward the White House from which Van Buren ("the Flying Dutchman") was fleeing; Harrison as a boxer administering a thrashing to Van Buren, with Old Hickory, as Van Buren's trainer, looking on in gloom. Brass and copper medals were struck off, with a log cabin, a flag, a barrel and a cup on one side, Harrison on the other: "He leaves the plough to save his country." And always the din of songs. the blare of drum and fife, the hoarse voices of orators, the immense crowds, the endless processions, the barrel on barrel of cider, the torches smoking and flaring in the night.

As Arlo Guthrie once said, "Some things don't change, you know. Some things do." The Whig Party is gone. And television ads have long since replaced torchlight procession as electoral tools. But the party of the plutocrats is still selling itself as the downhome representative of Real Americans. Al Gore brings the story closer to the present in The Assault on Reason (2007), writing of the Cheney-Bush Administration:

The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals and then cloaks them with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the world. And in the process he convinces these Americans to lend unquestioning support for proposals that actually hurt their families and their communities.

A final concern about Lakoff's approach, for this post. He cited the health care reform fight as an example of how the Democrats' response to the Tea Party protests against the reform as an example of how they did bad messaging, responding to an appeal to values and emotion on the part of the Tea Partiers with lists of factual points.

The problem with that point is, the Democrats won the health reform battle. The Tea Party didn't derail it. In fact, a solid majority in the House voted for a health care reform including the public option, and 59 members of the Senate were prepared to do so. The omission of the critical public option was not a result of inadequate messaging. It was a result of the deal the White House had made with the insurance and hospital industry to leave it out. In other words, the messaging was connected to the policy: the White House didn't want the kind of messaging that would have gotten the public option approved.

A larger concern, which I'll discuss in a separate post, is the implication of Lakoff's argument that reason is largely if not wholly dispensable in democratic electoral politics.

Tags: democratic party, george lakoff, republican party

California Governor's Race/Jerry Brown: "I'm not an advertisement, I'm a real person"

The PBS Newshour of 10/08/2010 carried a decent report on the California Governor's race. The only weak part I noticed was some spacy, vague and fashionably cynical comments by columnist Dan Walters. Which surprised me, because he often writes good commentary and reports. For instance, this report of his on last Saturday's Brown-Whitman debate is pretty good: Debate No. 2 becomes a slugfest 10/03/2010.

The Newshour segment is online with a transcript, Economic Pessimism Pervades Heated California Governor Race 10/08/2010:



A report by Spencer Michels related to the Newshour segment is available at their website, California Governor's Race: a Hot Campaign Sans Obama, Tea Party 10/08/2010. ("Sans"?) Michels reports:

Another major issue in the campaign is jobs; California has an unemployment rate of more than 12 percent. Brown says green is the way to go, and he's promoting solar and other forms of clean energy. That, he says, will stimulate growth and provide employment. Whitman says her real world experience is in job creation. President Obama's fiscal policies don't seem to get much play in this debate -- at least in California, which has the 8th-largest economy in the world.

And a further point of disagreement is immigration. Focus on that intensified last week when it was revealed that Whitman -- who has advocated tough enforcement of immigration laws -- employed an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper for nine years. While the tea party has been active in the immigration debate, it appears that this dust-up is fairly specific. Brown accuses Whitman of hypocrisy; Whitman accuses Brown of exploiting the issue for political gain. Quite possibly, the whole dust-up could ease over the next month.

The Spencer Michels article includes this video, which focuses on one of the "horse-race" issues of which our star reporters are so fond. Jerry handles it well, I would say, making an attempt to tie his response back to a policy issue:



Tags: 2010 elections, jerry brown

Obama, immigration and the Latino vote

The ever-alert David Dayen relies on the information in this Homeland Security press release, Secretary Napolitano Announces Record-breaking Immigration Enforcement Statistics Achieved under the Obama Administration10/06/2010 to make an informed speculation about Latino voter skepticism about the Democrats nationally in Obama Administration’s Deportations of Undocumented Immigrants Hit New Record Firedoglake News Desk 10/07/2010:

Many pundits think that the reason for President Obama's softening numbers in the Latino community can be attributed to broken promises on immigration legislation. I think that's unlikely, actually, and the fact that the DREAM Act got a vote at the end of the session at least can make a plausible case that Democrats tried. What drives this much more strongly, in my view, is the sharp spike in deportations under this Administration. Communities are being ripped apart. ...

What's depressing about this is that Republicans continue to accuse the White House of being soft on the border and soft on "illegal immigrants." The facts don't matter whatsoever. Yet Latinos understand the facts all too well, they see it in their communities every single day. There's some evidence to suggest that the deportations fall more heavily on undocumenteds with criminal records, but the fact remains that a higher rate of people have been expelled from the country under Obama than under Bush. It's hard to say that has no impact on those Latino voter numbers, one way or the other.

Obama may be sending a thrill up David Broder's leg with this "bipartisan" policy, i.e., doing what the Republicans say should be done. But it's a terrible reminder of both a cruel, wrong-headed immigration policy and of the Obama Administration's unwillingness to actively pursue comprehensive immigration reform, a policy which would both be humane and sensible in itself, and also build the Democratic Party's base long-term.

That's the result of the kind of policy he's pursuing in this area. Why it's so is another question. But I'm sure it has a lot to do with Obama's pursuit of a phantom "centrist" vote, using the dubious assumption the Democrats have been applying for 20 years or more.

Returning to the subject of my previous post, Jerry Brown's approach is politically having a very different, and for the Democrats more positive, effect in his gubernatorial race against eMeg Whitman. See How Did the Armies of eMeg Blow the Nicky Story? Calbuzz 10/06/2010.

Tags: 2010 elections, comprehensive immigration reform, jerry brown

Jerry Brown: a Democrat willing to fight for Democratic principles

eMeg vs. Jerry

Despite being significantly outspent by his Republican opponent, Meg "eMeg" Whitman, Democratic candidate and former Governor Jerry Brown is somewhat ahead in the polls. And he performed very well in his debate with eMeg this past Saturday. And he performed well by doing a good job delivering the Democratic message, especially on immigration. Joan Walsh gives a good account of it in Meg Whitman's meltdown Salon 10/04/2010.

Joan's whole article is good. And she includes these quotes from Brown, showing how Democrats can and should approach comprehensive immigration reform:

I'm going to treat everybody, whether they're documented or not, as God's child, and my brothers and sisters.

Brown, who was a Jesuit seminarian for four years, can use religious language comfortably without being exclusionary and without looking for non-existent "common ground" with hardcore rightwing Christianists.

If I am elected governor, I'm the leader of the largest state in the union. I'm going to do whatever I can to get this comprehensive immigration reform ... There's a lot of politics now and the fact that my opponent is so strongly against the path, path to citizenship -- then what happens? Do we deport 2 million people in California, 11 million people throughout the country? This is a real human tragedy. It's a problem and these people are working for Ms. Whitman. They're working all over the place, in this university, in restaurants and picking the food in our fields ... What we need to do is to as Californians we need to demand that our federal government create a secure border, yes but a path to immigration and a way to handle this thing instead of just saying it doesn't exist. We don't know about these people. They're in the shadows ... so we can forget about it, it's wrong, morally wrong. [my emphasis]

Calbuzz also has a good piece on that same debate, Sabado Gigante! Jerry Smacks Meg in Fresno Brawl 10/03/2010. They also discuss the immigration issue in the debate:

We wondered why [Brown] didn't mention that [notoriously anti-immigrant] former Gov. Pete Wilson is chairman of [eMeg's] campaign. At least she didn't suggest she’d round 'em all up and deport them. Or did she?

"Illegal immigration is just that, it is illegal," she said. "And we need to make sure we have the workers that the economy needs to grow and thrive," Whitman said. "We live in a rule of law. There is a judicial process, and we have to abide by that. So I think the best thing that I can do to help the Latino community in California is as first and foremost, as I said, jobs."

Brown countered that it's wrong to bring workers in to fill labor shortages and then herd them home.

"This is about human beings. And you don't bring in temporary workers and then when you've used them up, you send them back. ... You don't just bring in semi-serfs and say, 'Do our dirty work,' and then we’re finished with you like an orange and just throw it away. That's after you've squeezed it. That’s not right."

On "path to citizenship" alone, Whitman dug in against a position that 90% of Latinos (and Brown) support. [my emphasis]

Tags: 2010 elections, california politics, comprehensive immigration reform, jerry brown

Obama and the public option

Tom Daschle's new book includes another reminder that the key reason that health care reform doesn't have a public option is because the Obama White House bargained it away early on in the process in secret meetings with "the hospital association, with the insurance (AHIP), and others," as Daschle put it in an interview with Think Progress. This is a major problem, a weakness that is likely to deprive the health care reform of much of its effectiveness, undermine public support for it, and give the Republicans and opportunity to reverse the parts of the reform beneficial to consumers.

Glenn Greenwald has a good report on the Daschle item, Truth about the public option momentarily emerges, quickly scampers back into hiding Salon 10/05/2010. See also Igor Volsky, Daschle: Public Option 'Taken Off The Table' In July [2009] Due To 'Understanding People Had With Hospitals' Think Progress 10/05/2010; David Dayen, The Deal with the Hospital Industry to Kill the Public Option 10/05/2010.

As Greenwald puts it:

What Daschle said here -- in his interview with Volsky and, apparently, in his new book -- is crystal clear, and is consistent with what has long been clear: despite its stream of public statements to the contrary, the Obama White House made no efforts to have a public option in the bill because their secret, early agreement with "stakeholders" was that no public option (and thus no real mechanism of competition with private industry) would be created.

And he's correct in saying, "one cannot argue that the White House did push for it, or even that they wanted it, since it was part of their deal with industry and its lobbyists from the start that it would not be in the final bill."

I would note that one very public indication of such a deal with the stunning admission by White House advisor Valerie Jarrett at her appearance at Netroots Nation in August 2009 that the White House had no intention of bringing any kind of pressure on the Blue Dog Democrats to get them to support the health care plan, which at that time still included the public option, which the administration was still claiming to back.

Her response was stunning. The question was posed to her by comedian Baratunde Thurston, who generally did a poor job of conducting the interview with her, which was the format of her appearance. He asked a reasonable question that was put in a melodramatic form, which gave Jarrett the chance to duck the actual question. Although she actually answered the real question about whether the President was going to pressure the Blue Dogs to get in line. This is from the transcript, though I've done some clean-up on capitalization, spacing, punctuation and paragraph breaks:

[Baratunde:] This question is from Facebook from Martha Elizabeth. Is the President going to call all the Blue Dogs in his office and give each a piece of paper with the amount of stimulus money and say, "I want your vote on healthcare? If you're a Democrat get in line. Otherwise any time you want money in juror [your?] district you can ask Jim De Mint for it?" Wow. Mary Elizabeth!

[Jarrett:] Mary Elizabeth. She has a fan club.

I was going to say. I'm jealous. I haven't got that kind of applause yet. my goodness. The fact of the matter is I know obviously that's hit a note here, and I know that there is a lot of frustration here and around the country, and I'm telling you, I am convinced this president has it right and he is going to continue to go along the way he's going.

He is not one to punish or do any of the kinds of things that perhaps you might want to do in a moment of span [?] the mayty [martyr] or anger but he'll count on the American people to put the pressure on their elected representatives because that's way the system works the best. it doesn't work for him to punish from the Oval [Office].

Since the most prominent target of criticism from Blue Dogs in the health care reform at this point and into 2010 was the public option, this was a very clear signal that the White House was not seriously committed to the public option. Baratunde had blundered his way into evoking a newsworthy answer from Jarrett. But he was apparently too clueless to realize it or follow up on it.

In fact, her response was so silly it was downright insulting. Even a high-school civics teacher wouldn't pretend that the President doesn't bring pressure on recalcitrant Members of Congress to get his bills passed. And we saw in 2010 when Obama started fighting against inclusion of the public option, he was certainly willing to bring pressure on House progressives to get them to support his position against the public option.

Jarrett followed up immediately with this, sounding like she was giving a pep talk to a group of Party functionaries:

When you guys get out there - and it's hard work but when you organize and when you, and not just form letters but when you call and - I met a person right as I came in going and having 60 meetings on the hill in the next few weeks with they're elected representatives. Meet them in the district. Go to the town hall meetings and make phone calls and organize your block and audiences and bloggers and put the pressure on them that way. That's how we'll get healthcare done this year. Not quite as much applause, but trust me. It will work. [my emphasis]

For the public option, it would have worked, if the White House hadn't already made a deal with the health insurance companies to oppose the public option.

Bill Clinton signaled the same thing in a less crass but more direct manner during his own keynote address at that event, making a point of telling the crowd that if the public option doesn't get into the final bill, don't do what "the left" supposedly did to him and criticize Obama for that result.

Recalling this is far more substantive than sour grapes from the Democratic base. It also means that it's unlikely in the extreme that the Obama administration has any intention at this point of pushing for a public option as an addition to the reform. And that's a substantive problem, both for the quality of health care reform and for the politics of preserving it from Republican attacks.

Tags: health care reform, obama administration

Progressives and Islamophia

When rightwing Republicans created a controversy over the Park 51 community center in New York - the Ground Zero Mosque as the FOXists preferred to call it - it was clear that Islamophia had worked its way higher in the Republicans' arsenal of ways to induce mass fear and hatred. So I've been paying more attention to it since then.

As several news organizations have been reporting lately, such controversies are occurring in Europe, as well. On a recent visit to Austria, my wife and I were both struck by the number of people we heard repeating the most dubious claims about Muslims in Austria. We were especially disturbed at speaking to an attorney that we've known for years, who insisted on telling us about the impending takeover of Austria by Muslims and the imposition of sharia law (Islamic religious law).

The essential argument was no different from that we hear from American Islamophobes. He claimed that German courts were making rulings based on sharia. He pretended not to notice when I told him that I found that impossible to believe because German like (as in all EU countries) is secular. When I asked him for an example of a case in which this occurred, he couldn't cite anything, not a name, not a place, not a date. (And this guy is an attorney!) Nor did he seem to know anything at all about sharia other than that it was Muslim and scary and evil.

He claimed that second and generation Turks in Austria (Turks are the largest Islamic minority in Austria) harbored secret plans to overthrow the existing constitution and impose sharia. But he couldn't name any actual Turks or Turkish groups in Austria advocating such a thing. Nor could he name a single member of Parliament proposing replacing the Austrian secular law with sharia. If not one single member of Parliament is favoring such an idea, it's pretty obvious a threat so distant as to be downright delusional. If they had an Austrian version of FOX News, I'm sure it would find some Muslim kook living in Austria who advocates all sorts of hair-raising things.

He didn't seem to know that Turkey itself doesn't operate under sharia, in fact has been under strict secular law since Attaturk's rule in the 1920s. I can tell the difference in a conversation like this between someone who's prejudiced, someone who's well-meaning but poorly informed, and outright fanatics. This guy was clearly operating on fanaticism. And when you try to engage a fanatic on what he's actually saying, you get some strange conversation. He told a story about some lawyer he knows who left Iran after the 1979 Revolution who told him about how the Muslim theocrats imposed their rule, something that's hardly a secret one needs to learn by whispers from an Iranian acquaintance. And he said, "They want to do the same thing here." I asked him, "Are you saying that Persians are trying to take over Austria?" "No!" he said, "The Muslims!"

One of the things that's somewhat problematic for liberals/progressives to deal with when faced with Islamophobia. On the one hand, it's bigotry that rightwingers are using to promote fear and hatred, and to validate notions like waging an illegal, aggressive war against Iran. It's pretty clear in the actual American political context, where many Republicans are now convinced - speaking of fanaticism - that President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim revolutionary, in that context anti-Muslim hate-mongering is also a surrogate for good old all-American white racism, too. So it's not something that Democrats (of the capital-D or small-d variety) can ignore.

But, of course, there are real criticisms that Westerners have about some social practices in Muslim countries and communities that come in conflict with Western moral assumption and sometimes the law. Many of those have to do with women's rights and women's status. In public appearance, conservative Republican Christianists, many of whom also hold some troubling ideas and attitudes on women's rights, like to forefront the alleged evils of the "sharia" bogeyman in their anti-Muslim hate propaganda. That was a prominent feature of the impressive report Christiane Amanpour made this past weekend on ABC's This Week, 10/03/2010, in which the anti-Muslim polemicists made just that charge.

But there are legitimate criticisms to be made of real existing Islamic practices on that score, all of which are being made by Muslims themselves.

Michelle Goldberg, whose excellent Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006) is one of the best journalistic treatments of the Christian Right in recent years, addresses this dilemma of American progressives confronting Islamophobia in The Un-Reluctant Fundamentalist Democracy Journal Fall 2010. It is a review of the book Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010) by Ayaan Hirsi Ali,former member of the Dutch Parliament who now lives in the United States and works for the conservative thinktank, the American Enterprise Insitute (AEI), which is also known as Neocon Central.

For the right-wing think tank, landing such a brilliant, cosmopolitan heroine was a coup. The American right often alleges that liberals, full of mushy-headed cultural relativism, can’t even bestir themselves to defend their own values against reactionary Islam. The liberal intellectual establishment’s rejection of Hirsi Ali appeared, at least on the surface, to bear this out.

That’s certainly what Paul Berman argues in his new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals. "A more classic example of a persecuted dissident intellectual does not exist," he writes of Hirsi Ali, asserting that the left’s failure to rally around her is evidence of deep intellectual corruption. Pointing to her liberal critics, particularly the writers Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, he says, "The campaign in the intellectual press against Hirsi Ali seems to me unprecedented–at least since the days when lonely dissident refugees from Stalin’s Soviet Union used to find themselves slandered in the Western pro-communist press."

Here's how Michelle addresses that charge:

But there is a problem with this perspective. Hirsi Ali is, in many ways, immensely admirable. But she can also be reactionary, glib, and sloppy, and judging by Nomad–a painfully disappointing book–these tendencies have gotten worse since she joined AEI. Nomad brims with attacks on unrecognizable straw feminists, bizarre statements about the United States, and, strangest of all, a tendency to romanticize religions outside of Islam. Hirsi Ali remains, she says, an atheist, but she’s developed an odd admiration for the Catholic Church, which, she suggests, should try to civilize Muslims through conversion. There is in Nomad a new concern for private property and a shout-out to gun rights. She ladles praise on her AEI colleague Charles Murray, author, most famously, of The Bell Curve, which purported to demonstrate the intellectual inferiority of black people.

Hirsi Ali attacks Islam in the name of liberalism, but she’s more than willing to jettison her liberalism for the sake of her anti-Islamism. Perhaps if she had found a home on the left, Hirsi Ali’s thinking would have developed in a different direction. One could blame liberals or feminists or mainstream intellectuals for letting her down, for driving her into the arms of the neoconservatives. But to do so is to condescend to a woman who has always taken responsibility for forging her own path. [my emphasis]

No one is constrained to think in simple-minded terms. Progressives can sympathize with the situation of a woman like Hersi Ali who fled her country after death threats from Islamic extremists but recognize it if she, as Michelle puts it, is "reactionary, glib, and sloppy" or "shows contempt for fundamental American values of freedom of speech and freedom of religion". Her claims have to be judged on their merits. She may reject Islam. But it sounds as though her attitudes about the so-called traditional family and her hostility to feminism are very similar to those of the Christian Right.

On Hirsi Ali's criticisms of Western feminism, Michelle writes:

To be blunt, Hirsi Ali has no idea what she’s talking about. Western feminists have consistently stood up for women’s rights in developing countries–including Muslim countries–inspiring endless polemics by both Christian and Muslim conservatives blasting “feminist colonialism.” Long before September 11, the Feminist Majority Foundation was a lonely American voice against the Taliban’s sexual apartheid, and today, the New York-based feminist group Women for Afghan Women runs domestic violence shelters in Afghanistan. The American feminist movement lobbies, fiercely and consistently, for family planning programs in poor countries, including Muslim countries. American feminists–including Muslim feminists–have set up domestic violence shelters that serve women trapped in violent homes in insular religious communities. American feminists have also played a crucial role in the global campaign against female genital mutilation, both by getting the U.S. government to exert its influence on countries reliant on American aid, and by supporting women working in Africa to end the practice.

In other words, liberals and anyone else concerned to counter crass hate-mongering against Muslims can reject falsehoods and demagoguery without becoming apologists for every aspect of every Muslim culture. Nor does it means soft-pedaling legitimate criticism of Muslim practices or Islamic religious beliefs. Nobody is compelled to be willfully stupid about the issues involved, in other words. And no one should be under any illusion that Republican Islamophobia is anything but poisonous to democracy.

As far as the Christian religion, promoting mindless hate is also inconsistent with honest Christian values. Christian leaders like Franklin Graham shouldn't be surprised or whine about feeling rejected if the value of their Christian teachings are judged in part by their deliberate and dishonest promotion of hatred.

Michelle reminds of something else that we should keep in mind when we hear Republican Christianists criticising real or imagined discrimination against women by Muslims:

American conservatives, meanwhile, have consistently attacked programs that help to liberate women in the developing world. They’ve slashed funding for reproductive health clinics abroad, and have put pressure on foreign governments to maintain restrictive anti-abortion laws. They’ve fought efforts to expand women’s rights in international law, helping to ensure that the United States remains one of the few countries that have refused to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women–putting it in the company of Iran, Sudan, and Somalia. In 2007, the evangelical activist Janice Crouse, a Bush delegate to a 2002 United Nations summit on children, attacked the Convention in explicitly relativist terms: "It is like the old colonialism. . . . [H]ere you have the UN taking up the same kinds of principles and saying to countries you have to do things my way. You have to do things in the way of Western nations."

Indeed, when it comes to women’s rights, American conservatives often ally themselves with the very governments Hirsi Ali decries. As Colum Lynch reported in The Washington Post in 2002, "Conservative U.S. Christian organizations have joined forces with Islamic governments to halt the expansion of sexual and political protections and rights for gays, women and children at United Nations conferences." He quoted a U.S. official saying, "We have tried to point out there are some areas of agreement between [us] and a lot of Islamic countries on these social issues."

Tags: islam, islamic law, islamophobia

Rick Warren on thinking godly thoughts

This is really kind of creepy to me. Michelle Vu, Rick Warren: Ineffective Christians Usually Fail Battle of the Mind Christian Post 10/04/2010. It sounds like in Brother Rick's conception that only severe sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder can be "effective" Christians:

The Southern California pastor, known for his innovative thinking [?!?], lamented over how few pastors train their followers on how to fight the battle of the mind even though it is so critical to the fight against sin.

The mind is always rebelling but Christians need to take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ, said Warren in his talk, titled "Thinking Purposefully for the Glory of Christ: Developing the Mind of Christ."

Taking control of the mind begins by not believing everything you think, Warren emphasized.

According to the popular preacher, many people think their thoughts are trustworthy because they originated from inside of them. But mental illness would disprove this argument. And everyone can be considered mentally ill because of something inside of them called sin, Warren said. This sin inside of people distorts what they believe and think to be true, he added.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right

Elizabeth Warren's prospects at the CFPB

I'm trying to see the cup half full, the Obama administration cup, that is. But they don't make it easy for us.

Bmaz in The (Liz) Warren Commission and Financial Reform Emptywheel 10/03/2010 points out that while it's great to have Elizabeth Warren as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the delay in her nomination related to the definition of the actual scope of the CFPB's authority, which was apparently accomplished without much input from her. And the prospects for her final confirmation are by no means certain.

On the related issue of the evaluation of the TARP financial-rescue program, Bmaz cites Gretchen Morgenson, Count on Sequels to TARP New York Times 10/02/2010.

Economist Simon Johnson gives his evaluation in TARP Is Gone – But May Soon Be Back The Baseline Scenario 09/30/2010, including the recently-adopted financial reform that is one of the Obama administration's signature accomplishments:

[B]y the time the administration put forward its financial reform ideas, the big banks were back on their feet – and ready to throw huge numbers of lobbyists and unlimited cash into the fight to preserve their right to take inordinate risk and to mismanage their way into disaster.

The administration’s proposals were weak to start with and were diluted by the House of Representatives (with a very few holding actions, most notably by Representative Paul Kanjorski). Surprisingly, and against great odds, the legislation was not gutted in the Senate – due primarily to the efforts of Paul Volcker (from the outside) and Senators Kaufman, Levin, Brown, and Merkley, the reforms became a little bit stronger. But the Dodd-Frank Act, while including some sensible consumer-protection measures, essentially does very little to reduce system risk as we move into a new credit cycle. In particular, there is nothing that ensures our biggest banks will be safe enough or small enough or simple enough so that in the future they cannot demand bailouts – the bailout potential exists as long as the government reasonably fears global financial panic if such banks are allowed to default on their debts[.]

Where do we stand today, with the Financial Stability Oversight Council meeting for the first time tomorrow? In a devastating speech last week, Mr. Volcker hit all the nails on the head – our financial system is badly broken. This will lead another runaway mania and another awful collapse. [my emphasis]

Tags: obama administration, us economy

Frank Rich and Sarah Palin's Tea Partying "Real Americans"

Frank Rich's weekend column is a Beltway Village classic: The Very Useful Idiocy of Christine O'Donnell New York Times 10/02/2010. On the face of it, Rich is doing a counterintuitive critique of the Republican Party in its "Tea Party" mode. But it also displays some of the typical political pathologies of the Village.

Before I complain more, though, I will say that Rich often makes liberal points and makes them well. And if you read to the end of his column, you'll see that he does do a decent job of explaining some of the big-money backing for the Tea Party activities. His basic point about the Tea Party is correct, that its a way "to camouflage a billionaires' coup as a populist surge."

The problem is that he buries those useful points under a stock Village presentation.

Since one of the requirements of being a star pundit is an inability to read or analyze polling data beyond the who's-up/who's-down horse-race ones - and even those not very well - it's not surprising that Rich's column ignores much the actual polling data on who the Tea Partiers are. And it lets him authoritatively declare one of the Village's favorite pieces of conventional wisdom: that rightwingers like Sarah Palin really do speak for Real Americans.

The O'Donnell template [for her public image as a candidate]... is Palin. It was Palin's endorsement that put O'Donnell on the map, and it's Palin's script that O'Donnell is assiduously following. The once obscure governor of Alaska was also tripped up by lies and gaffes when she emerged on the national stage, starting with her misrepresentation of her supposed opposition to "the bridge to nowhere." But she quickly wove the attacks into a brilliant cloak of martyrdom that positioned her as a fierce small-town opponent of the coasts' pointy-head elites. O'Donnell, like Palin, knows that attacks by those elites, including conservative grandees, only backfire and enhance her image as a feisty defender of the aggrieved and resentful Joe Plumbers in "real America." [my emphasis]

Uh, Frank, did you somehow fail to notice that Sarah Palin lost in her Vice Presidential bid? The postelection polling indicated that Palin was actually a drag on the McCain ticket (although I'm generally skeptical of the notion that the Vice Presidential nominee much matters in the final vote).

Since her 2008 loss, Palin has not been polling well among the general public. But part of the conceit of Village pundits like Rich is that they simultaneously speak for what the regular workin' folks and that those same Real Americans are basically conservative Republicans.

Rich does give the Pod Pundit conventional wisdom a liberal twist:

By latching on to O'Donnell's growing presence, the Rove-Boehner-McConnell establishment can claim it represents struggling middle-class Tea Partiers rather than Wall Street potentates and corporate titans. O'Donnell's value is the same as that other useful idiot, Michael Steele, who remains at the Republican National Committee only because he can wave the banner of "diversity" over a virtually all-white party that alternately demonizes African-Americans, Latinos, gays and Muslims.

O'Donnell is particularly needed now because most of the other Republican Tea Party standard-bearers lack genuine antigovernment or proletarian cred. Joe Miller and Ken Buck, the Senate candidates in Alaska and Colorado, actually are graduates of elite universities like those O'Donnell lied about attending. Rick Scott, the populist running for governor in Florida, was chief executive of a health care corporation that scooped up so many Medicare and Medicaid payments it had to settle charges for defrauding taxpayers. Rand Paul, the scion of a congressman, is an ophthalmologist whose calls for spending restraint don't extend to his own Medicare income. Carl Paladino, the truculent man of the people in New York, grew his fortune as a developer with government handouts and favors. His California bookend, Carly Fiorina, received a golden parachute worth as much as $42 million from Hewlett-Packard, where she liquidated some 20,000 jobs. [my emphasis]

Hello, Earth to Frank! Earth to Frank! The millionaire reactionary, John Birch Society Liebling, and shameless shill for corporate interests, St. Ronald Reagan, also passed himself off to the non-millionaire portion of his voters as a champion of what BP's former CEO this year famously called the Small People. The Villagers got thrills running up their legs for years from George W. Bush, the so-far-most-destructive member of one of the richest families in the country, because, you know, he was the sort of guy that a Real American would want to have a beer with. Or, a near-beer, since Bush was a dry drunk.

Of course, much the same of what he says about the personal backgrounds of those various Tea Party candidates could be said about regular Republican and also Democratic Senate candidates. Because our election processes in America rely so heavily on private fundraising and because statewide campaigns are so expensive, most Senate candidates of both parties wind up being someone with business, family and social connections that generally reflect a higher-than-average personal income, to put it mildly.

The fact that the process selects heavily for particularly wealthy individuals for such candidates is problematic in itself. It means that the Senate is composed of mostly personally quite wealthy individuals who also have to rely on other wealthy people for much of the fundraising they will need for their next race.

But in terms of their politics and their willingness to fight for the platforms on which they run, their personal wealth is only one factor, and typically not the most important one. In the California Governor's race right now, Democratic candidate Jerry Brown is from a wealthy family and is himself wealthy. The Republican candidate, Meg "eMeg" Whitman, is personally very wealthy and has distinguished herself by the large amount from her personal fortune that she has injected into her race. But Brown has a long record as a pro-labor Democrat. eMeg is a rich Republican with conservative policies and no experience in government that would make her another failed Governor like Schwarzenegger, if not worse.

And look at Rich's description of the Tea Party: "struggling middle-class Tea Partiers" who are looking for "proletarian cred." (?!?) Of course, repeating polling has shown that those who identify with the Tea Party are more affluent, older people, more male than female, who are loyal Republican voters. But because Rich wanted to write a column about how that quirky Christine O'Donnell is just what Real Americans are looking for, he can just ignore that stuff and write his preferred script.

Tags: radical right,, republican party

One Nation rally

Dave Neiwert was at the One Nation rally in Washington and has been reporting on it at Crooks and Liars, The One Nation rally: A photo gallery 10/03/2010, along with Nicole Belle, Here's Your Enthusiasm Gap: One Nation Rally Draws More Attendees Than Beck's "Whitestock" 10/02/2010.

This is one of his photos that I especially like:


Dave writes:

-- And, um, so much for that Liberal Media Bias myth, eh? CNN barely covered it at all. Of course, Fox carried nary a word of it. None of the major networks -- CBS, NBC, ABC or Fox -- even bothered to report on it. And over at the WaPo, the story reported only "tens of thousands" attended -- when in fact the numbers clearly exceeded 100,000.

-- In stark contrast to the Tea Parties, there was relatively little kookery at the rally. There was a tiny handful of 9/11 Troofers encamped on the back fringes, and there were some far-left radical groups similarly parked along the edges of the rally. But the masses there were clearly representative of mainstream progressive organizations like the NAACP, AFL-CIO, SEIU, and NCLR. Nonetheless, expect to hear all about how the rally was rife with far-left nutcases from our friends in the wingnutsophere. [my emphasis]

David Dayen reports on the Los Angeles version in One Nation LA Rallies Thousands for Jobs and Justice Firedoglake News Desk 10/02/2010.


Tags: establishment press, jacksonian democracy

David Frost interviews Geena Davis on women in Hollywood films

David Frost did an interesting, substantive interview with actress Geena Davis about the role of women in Hollywood films and its possible cultural effects. From Al Jazeera English 10/02/2010:



Tags: geena davis