Zimmerman getting out of the car

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby has been very upset over supposed liberal tribalism around the Martin Zimmerman trial. His close reading of media reports and his seemingly hyper-positivist outlook in doing so allow him to catch some important points.

But they also make him blind to how white racism operates in the justice system.

And more generally, as well. As I've noted in the past, Somerby seems to go on the assumption that if someone isn't yelling "Ah hate n*****s!!" on video and in front of multiple eyewitnesses that it's completely illegitimate to draw any inferences about their racial attitudes at all. The nudge-nudge-wink-wink commonplaces and the "dog-whistle" slogans don't count as anything other that the explicit text of the words.

Most people can walk and talk at the same time. Most people can understand that a trend that is visible over a large number of instances or cases may not be so clear in a particular instance. Most liberals, I would say, can manage to have an opinion on a case based on what they see of it and still support a defendant's right to a fair trial including those they find unsympathetic.

In approaching issues involving white racism this way, Somerby effectively favors the non-colorblind "colorblind" approach taken by Republican segregationists, including the Roberts Court's Segregation Five who just gutted the Voting Right Acts. Unless someone explicitly declares their racism and intent to discriminate, neither discriminatory results nor the most obvious, long-standing expressions of white racism can be taken as evidence of the same.

It's a variation of the elaborate segregation manners of the Deep South under the old segregation system, Segregation 1.0 we might call it. Saying "nigger" was low-class and evidence of crude prejudice, but the fact that not a single black citizen was registered to vote in your county wasn't the slightest evidence of white racism. No, the nigras could register to vote if they wanted to. They just don't want to!

In The New York Times’ latest hapless professor! 07/16/2013, Somerby plays the game of toggling between the specifics of the trial and the larger context of how racism operates in the justice system. He quotes a law professor, Ekow Yankah (The Truth About Trayvon 07/15/2013), talking about racial bias in the justice system who, among other things, says this:

The anger felt by so many African-Americans speaks to the simplest of truths: that race and law cannot be cleanly separated. We are tired of hearing that race is a conversation for another day. We are tired of pretending that "reasonable doubt" is not, in every sense of the word, colored.

Somerby highlights the last sentence, saying he finds it unclear. Which is telling. Even excerpted as he does, it's clear to me that he's talking about how racial assumptions that stigmatize blackness go into how jurors go about getting to a judgment on reasonable doubt in a criminal case. Having by his own account taken philosophy classes at Harvard, surely Somerby can parse this sentence of Yankah which he also quotes, "But what this case reveals in its overall shape is precisely what the law is unable to see in its narrow focus on the details."

In a later sentence Somerby does not quote, Yankah writes, "This is about more than one case. Our reasons for presuming, profiling and acting are always deeply racialized, and the Zimmerman trial, in ignoring that, left those reasons unexplored and unrefuted."

That seems pretty clear to me. Yankah is addressing the larger question of how white racism affects both process and outcomes in the real existing American justice system. He does not argue that the jurors made an incorrect judgment based on the evidence presented to them and their jury instructions. Nor does he specifically criticize the prosecution or defense for not making race explicit, or any other aspect of that specific trial procedure.

Somerby's closing of that post is worth quoting at length, because it is a good example of where this approach gets you in deal with the issue of racism in the criminal justice system, the issue Yankah is addressing very coherently, though Somerby in his introduction of quotes from the article says, "his column makes almost no sense — and the New York Times couldn't see that. So it goes as society's standards keep getting dumbed way down."

I can only suppose from his perspective, a serious and well-written attempt to address the real problems of white racial bias in the US justice system is senseless and dumbed-down on the face of it.

In his closing argument, Somerby toggles back to the specifics of the trial, which (continuing the courtroom drama theme), Yankah did introduce with a counterfactual example of a white man defending himself from an armed black man following him. Somerby (italics his):

What helped create reasonable doubt in the Zimmerman case? These elements, all of which have been disappeared from this professor's imagined account:

Zimmerman says he was sucker-punched by Martin.
Zimmerman sustained injuries before the shooting occurred. Martin did not.
The eyewitness with the best access told police that he saw Martin wailing away at Zimmerman, MMA style, in the moments before the gunshot.

In his imagined account of that white teenager, Yankah imagines several things which aren’t known to have occurred in the Zimmerman-Martin event. He imagines that the white teen-ager is "trying to get away" from the militant black man. He imagines that the white teen-ager only decides to hold his ground when he is "unable to elude his black stalker."

It isn't known that Martin behaved in those ways; the professor is simply imagining. Beyond that, he disappears several things which are known to have occurred.

He disappears Zimmerman's injuries. He disappears What John Good Said.

Is Professor Yankah competent? If so, he's being dishonest today. So too with the editor who decided to publish this crap.

But alas! This is the way pseudo-liberal elites have routinely behaved as they pretend to reconstruct the events of that evening. They imagine events not known to have happened. They disappear events that did occur.

Lord, how good it makes the tribe feel when our leaders deceive us this way! In the end, it only means that our moral standards are being dumbed way down. [my emphasis in bold]

Thus with tendentious close reading, Somerby converts a serious and focused introduction of the very real problem of how racial bias operates in our criminal justice system into "crap" characteristic of "pseudo-liberal elites" just trying to make "the tribe" (?!) feel good deliberate dishonesty and dumbing down of the issues.

So why did I title this post, "Zimmerman getting out of the car"?

Because this is one issue that Somerby usefully highlighted that numerous media narratives have been sloppy about reporting. But for anyone not addicted to Somerby's literalist, positivist approach (in which George Zimmerman's self-interested account deserves to be taken on its face and alternative scenarios more favorable to the only other eyewitness to the full event, the kid Zimmerman murdered, are dismissed as self-evident "crap") makes it difficult to get to Somerby's more legitimate points about the reporting.

And one point he emphasizes is significant for the case, the point of exactly when the police dispatcher told Zimmerman not to pursue. As Somerby delights in chronicling, a number of accounts have said that the dispatcher told Zimmerman not to get out of his car.

But here's the account as presented last year by Dan Barry et al, Race, Tragedy and Outrage Collide After a Shot in Florida New York Times 04/01/2012, an account which Somerby finds acceptable on this point and that was apparently established in the trial that just concluded:

Mr. Zimmerman told the dispatcher that the hooded figure was now running. He jumped out of his car to follow him, the beep-beep of his car, as recorded on the 911 call, announcing the instant that he moved beyond his understood mandate as neighborhood watch coordinator.

The wind could be heard whooshing through Mr. Zimmerman's cellphone as he tried to keep the visitor in view. Also heard is a garbled epithet that some have interpreted to be a racial slur, though his father insisted that his son would never say anything like that. Dispatcher: "Are you following him?"

Mr. Zimmerman: "Yeah."

Dispatcher: "O.K., we don’t need you to do that."

Mr. Zimmerman: "O.K."

He and the dispatcher arranged for Mr. Zimmerman to meet a police officer near the mailboxes at the development's clubhouse, and the call ended with a "thank you" and a "you're welcome." [my emphasis]

This doesn't change by basic view of the case, or my opinion that in recklessly initiating a sequence of events which culminated in his killing Trayvon Martin, the law should hold Zimmerman legally culpable.

But it is a point that some accounts get wrong. Not all of them, though. Ana Kasparian in this video statement of her reaction describes that same sequence of events as the Times article of which Somerby approves, in George Zimmerman Verdict on Shooting Trayvon Martin: My Reaction 07/16/2013:

Since we're emphasizing close reading in this post, I'll note that Ana stumbles a bit there on the role of Stand Your Ground in the Zimmerman case. It did play a role. Stand Your Ground was part of the jury's instructions and Juror B37 did tell Anderson Cooper that it played a part in their Not Guilty verdict.

Here's a report that gets it wrong, from Greg Botelho and Holly Yan, George Zimmerman found not guilty of murder in Trayvon Martin's death CNN 07/14/2013:

Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, spotted him and called police.

A 911 dispatcher told Zimmerman that officers were on the way and not to follow the allegedly suspicious person. But Zimmerman still got out of his car, later telling police he just wanted to get a definitive address to relay to authorities.

Sometime after that, Zimmerman and Martin got into a physical altercation. Questions later arose about who was the aggressor, about whether Martin may have seen or reached for Zimmerman's gun, and about whether Zimmerman should have had more injuries if he was pummeled, as he claims. [my emphasis]

Rem Rieder in Column: Media got Zimmerman story wrong from start 07/14/2013 notes some issues in the reporting of the Zimmerman case and his criticism generally is helpful to Zimmerman's image. But he also reports the sequence of the we-don't-need-you-to-do-that warning incorrectly: "It was his [Zimmerman's] reckless behavior that set this tragedy in motion. If he had stayed in his vehicle as he was told to do by the police, Trayvon Martin would be alive today."

Here are the kinds of lessons Somerby draws from this error in various posts.

Zimmerman directed to stay in his car again! Daily Howler 07/03/2013:

But good God! As everyone knows except MSNBC pundits, Zimmerman wasn't told by the dispatcher that he should stay in his car. The exchange in question came later, after he was out of his truck, following Martin on foot.

The claim that Zimmerman was told to stay in his car is a highly visible part of this case's propaganda. It’s a familiar, basic part of the misinformation cycle. It's astounding that the New York Times could still be making such basic errors at such a very late date. [my emphasis]

In CAN WE TALK: Al Gore was told to stay in his car at the Salem witch trials! Daily Howler 07/11/2013, he writes, "the Iconic False Statement: George Zimmerman was told to stay in the car!" Here, Somerby embraces the notion - which by his own literalist, positivist close-reading style we could fairly say is strikingly similar to that of Zimmerman's defenders like Newt Gingrich who rhetorically position Zimmerman as the victim of a Klan-style lynching:

George Zimmerman was told to stay in the car! In the pundit corps' current witch trial, that Iconic False Statement takes the place of their earlier hit, "Al Gore said he invented the Internet." It's the bogus fact all pundits repeat as they work to make the case against the current witch sound stronger.

(Quick note: When sociopaths start dunking witches, this is always the way they do it. They've always dunked their witches this way. As Woody Guthrie wrote about Pretty Boy Floyd: "Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name.")

This is the way the sociopaths went after black people in the Old South. (Just reread To Kill A Mockingbird.) This is the way the sociopaths perform on cable today. [my emphasis]

In Your "press corps" is almost completely incompetent! 07/14/2013, Somerby presents an instance of misreporting this sequence as more evidence of a press "witch hunt" against poor George Zimmerman:

If the claim in question is false, why have so many people made it? Sadly, this is standard procedure when a witch trial begins:

Partisans start inventing false facts to make the case against the witch stronger. Pundits and journalists stampede to repeat the false facts.

Often, it is "journalists" who invented the false claims in the first place. No one invents fake facts more often than upper-end "journalists" do.

George Zimmerman was never told to stay in his car! Any newspaper worth its salt would have made a point of correcting this bogus claim long ago. [my emphasis]

Pundits and reporters who bungle the exact sequence of the police dispatcher's instruction to Zimmerman to stop following Trayvon are "sociopaths" who "start inventing facts" to promote a "witch trial"? And poor ole George Zimmerman is the target of this lynch-mob like witch-hunt carried on by The Media and pointy-headed professors from "the tribe" of the "pseudo-liberal elites"?

Please. Bob Somerby's up to more than close reading of court reporting here.

Tags: bob somerby, george zimmerman, trayvon martin, white racism

The Daily Howler's Tea Party crush Pam Stout - and what she's up to now

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby went from being an irreverent but perceptive liberal media critic to a cranky "concern troll" scolding liberals for not agreeing with Republicans.

Somerby was bowled over by the charms of a Tea Party activist named Pam Stout quoted in a New York Times article (David Barstow, Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right 02/15/2010). And he scolded George Packer, Kate Zernike and Steve Benen, and Digby for suggesting that the lovely Pam Stout might be anything more complex than an earnest citizen concerned about all the scary things these here libruls in Washington might be doin' to the country.

In the article that began the Howler's crush, Barstow wrote:

Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift struggling families with job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college.

But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated — even manufactured — by both parties to grab power.

She was happily retired, and had never been active politically. But last April, she went to her first Tea Party rally, then to a meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party Patriots. She did not know a soul, yet when they began electing board members, she stood up, swallowed hard, and nominated herself for president. "I was like, 'Did I really just do that?' " she recalled.

Then she went even further.

Worried about hyperinflation, social unrest or even martial law, she and her Tea Party members joined a coalition, Friends for Liberty, that includes representatives from Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project, the John Birch Society, and Oath Keepers, a new player in a resurgent militia movement.

When Friends for Liberty held its first public event, Mrs. Stout listened as Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff, brought 1,400 people to their feet with a speech about confronting a despotic federal government. Mrs. Stout said she felt as if she had been handed a road map to rebellion. Members of her family, she said, think she has disappeared down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. But Mrs. Stout said she has never felt so engaged.

"I can't go on being the shy, quiet me," she said. "I need to stand up."

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny. [my emphasis]

Barstow - and Somerby - should have known to be a little more reserved at taking Sweet Pam's self-description as a political neophyte when they saw that she was happily affiliating herself politically with the John Birch Society, the mother ship of most paranoid rightwing conspiracy theories for the last 50 years, and the Oath Keepers, a hard right outfit, which Barstow even noticed is part of "a resurgent militia movement." No one not already pretty accustomed to and sympathetic with far-right ideas and attitudes is likely to be instantly swept away by suddenly discovering such fringe groups.

Barstow:

Tea Party leaders say they know their complaints about shredded constitutional principles and excessive spending ring hollow to some, given their relative passivity through the Bush years. In some ways, though, their main answer — strict adherence to the Constitution — would comfort every card-carrying A.C.L.U. member.

But their vision of the federal government is frequently at odds with the one that both parties have constructed. Tea Party gatherings are full of people who say they would do away with the Federal Reserve, the federal income tax and countless agencies, not to mention bailouts and stimulus packages. Nor is it unusual to hear calls to eliminate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. A remarkable number say this despite having recently lost jobs or health coverage. Some of the prescriptions they are debating — secession, tax boycotts, states “nullifying” federal laws, forming citizen militias — are outside the mainstream, too.

At a recent meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party, Mrs. Stout presided with brisk efficiency until a member interrupted with urgent news. Because of the stimulus bill, he insisted, private medical records were being shipped to federal bureaucrats. A woman said her doctor had told her the same thing. There were gasps of rage. Everyone already viewed health reform as a ruse to control their medical choices and drive them into the grip of insurance conglomerates. Debate erupted. Could state medical authorities intervene? Should they call Congress?

As the meeting ended, Carolyn L. Whaley, 76, held up her copy of the Constitution. She carries it everywhere, she explained, and she was prepared to lay down her life to protect it from the likes of Mr. Obama.

“I would not hesitate,” she said, perfectly calm.

People in the John Birch Society orbit often describe themselvbes as "constitutionalists" and treat the Constitution as a patriotic icon. That doesn't mean they know or care about anything in it, other than the far right interpretations of the Second and Tenth Amendments. No, their notions of the Constitution would not "comfort every card-carrying A.C.L.U. member."

Barstow continues later in the piece:

Pam Stout wakes each morning, turns on Fox News, grabs coffee and an Atkins bar, and hits the computer. She is the hub of a rapidly expanding and highly viral political network, keeping a running correspondence with her 400 members in Sandpoint, state and national Tea Party leaders and other conservative activists.

Mrs. Stout forwards along petitions to impeach Mr. Obama; petitions to audit the Federal Reserve; petitions to support Sarah Palin; appeals urging defiance of any federal law requiring health insurance; and on and on.

Meanwhile, she and her husband are studying the Constitution line by line. She has the Congressional switchboard programmed into her cellphone. “I just signed up for a Twitter class,” said Mrs. Stout, 66, laughing at the improbability of it all.

Yet for all her efforts, Mrs. Stout is gripped by a sense that it may be too little too late. Yes, there have been victories — including polls showing support for the Tea Party movement — but in her view none of it has diminished the fundamental threat of tyranny, a point underscored by Mr. Obama’s drive to pass a health care overhaul.

She and her members are becoming convinced that rallies alone will not save the Republic. They are searching for some larger answer, she said. They are also waiting for a leader, someone capable of uniting their rebellion, someone like Ms. Palin, who made Sandpoint one of the final stops on her book tour and who has announced plans to attend a series of high-profile Tea Party events in the next few months.

“We need to really decide where we’re going to go,” Mrs. Stout said.

These questions of strategy, direction and leadership were clearly on the minds of Mrs. Stout’s members at a recent monthly meeting.

Their task seemed endless, almost overwhelming, especially with only $517 in their Tea Party bank account. There were rallies against illegal immigration to attend. There was a coming lecture about the hoax of global warming. There were shooting classes to schedule, and tips to share about the right survival food.

The group struggled fitfully for direction. Maybe they should start vetting candidates. Someone mentioned boycotting ABC, CBS, NBC and MSNBC. Maybe they should do more recruiting.

“How do you keep on fighting?” Mrs. Stout asked in exasperation.

Lenore Generaux, a local wildlife artist, had an idea: They should raise money for Freedom Force, a group that says it wants to “reclaim America via the Patriot movement.” The group is trying to unite the Tea Parties and other groups to form a powerful “Patriot lobby.” One goal is to build a “Patriot war chest” big enough to take control of the Republican Party.

Not long ago, Mrs. Stout sent an e-mail message to her members under the subject line: “Revolution.” It linked to an article by Greg Evensen, a leader in the militia movement, titled “The Anatomy of an American Revolution,” that listed “grievances” he said “would justify a declaration of war against any criminal enterprise including that which is killing our nation from Washington, D.C.”

Mrs. Stout said she has begun to contemplate the possibility of “another civil war.” It is her deepest fear, she said. Yet she believes the stakes are that high. Basic freedoms are threatened, she said. Economic collapse, food shortages and civil unrest all seem imminent.

“I don’t see us being the ones to start it, but I would give up my life for my country,” Mrs. Stout said.

She paused, considering her next words.

“Peaceful means,” she continued, “are the best way of going about it. But sometimes you are not given a choice.” [my emphasis]

But this did not make her an activist of the far right to Bob Somerby. Somerby was also impressed by her subsequent appearance on Letterman (Nikki Gloudeman, Tea Partier Appears on Letterman Mother Jones 03/31/2010; video of the interview is available there.) Here was Somerby's take on that performance:

We said we’d like to hear Stout’s account of the Tea Party movement—her account of her political views.

The silly children on MSNBC failed to jump to our tune. Last night, they played their schoolyard games as Letterman interviewed Stout! You can watch the bulk of the segment here, unless CBS has had the tape taken down. (The last few moments are not included.) We thought Letterman did a good job with the interview in certain ways. In other ways, his lack of political savvy showed.

But then, you’ve already grown accustomed to that if you watch our progressive channel.

Go ahead—take a look at that tape. If you prefer (and many will), you’ll be able to find some ways to insist that Stout is a snarling racist. (Though you’ll have to struggle a bit.) If you’re alternately disposed, you may notice that Stout could play the title role if some producer ever decides to cast Santa Claus as a woman. For our part, we aren't inclined to agree with Stout's views—at least, with the emphases she places. And the interview only ran nine minutes. And, of course, it only involved one member of a large movement.

Question: Can you watch that interview and imagine that Stout is a decent person? By now, many liberals quite likely cannot.

In his blast at Packer, Somerby described Sweet Pam this way:

“Government-run health care!” The sound of those words scares people away. Do you think our side [he means the Democrats, speaking in "concern troll" mode] has asked people why? Do you think our side has busted its keister trying to articulate sounder ideas?
We’re just asking.

In our view, our side rarely asks people about what they’re thinking. This brings us back to recent profiles in the New York Times about those Tea Party adherents. These people lack our sound ideas—but why is that? In a more rational world, it seems that our side might ask.

In his lengthy profile in the Times, David Barstow, for whatever reason, chose to feature Pam Stout, a 66-year-old Idaho woman. It sounded like she has been influenced by Glenn Beck, though Barstow’s profile was sketchy.

How does Pam Stout see the world? What do others around her think? We’d be curious to see her interviewed. But within the aeries of High Manhattan, a high noble lord had a different reaction to Barstow’s report in the Times. At the New Yorker, his highness, the noblest Lord of Packer, condescended to ponder the mind of the hapless commoner Stout.

In a further blast at Digby, Somerby gave her a classic "concern troll" scolding, related to the fact that Sweet Pam professed to take Glenn Beck very seriously:

Digby doesn’t watch Beck a whole lot. Yes, he’s one of the biggest nuts and/or frauds ever seen on TV—but he can’t be dismissed quite that simply. Most of his work comes from fever swamps — but some of his work is quite erudite.

No, Beck is not erudite. Or honest.

Well, there's a new report out about what Sweet Pam's been up to lately: Devin Burghart, Tea Time with the Posse: Inside an Idaho Tea Party Patriots Conference (Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights) 04/18/2011. He writes:

An inside look at a recent Tea Party event organized by Stout shows a very different side of the Tea Parties, and highlights a disturbing direction taken by many local groups.

Little talk of repealing “Obamacare” or of modifying objectionable provisions of healthcare legislation took place at Stout’s “Patriots Unite” event, held March 26. The impending possibility of a government shutdown due to an impasse over the budget was hardly mentioned. Nary a word was spoken about bailouts or taxes. Instead, speakers at this Tea Party event gave the crowd a heavy dose of racist “birther” attacks on President Obama, discussions of the conspiracy behind the problem facing America (complete with anti-Semitic illustration), Christian nationalism, anti-environmentalism, and serious calls for legislation promoting states’ rights and “nullification.”

Stout, the Idaho state coordinator for Tea Party Patriots attracted around seventy Tea Party activists from Idaho, Montana, and Washington to the Coeur D’Alene Inn for the conference. The goal: to bring isolated Tea Party groups together.

Nothing that Burghart reports about that conference sounds erudite. Or pro-democracy.

Tags: bob somerby, daily howler, john birch society, pam stout, tea party

"Liberal" concern trolls: Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby

One of the more annoying of that brand right now is the Daily Howler, aka, Bob Somerby. He had a significant influence on the thinking of liberal media critics during the last decade. He's been cited favorably for his insights by Paul Krugman, Joe Conason, Gene Lyons and Joan Walsh, to mention some of the more distinguished ones.

But lately he's been spending a lot of time defending Tea Partiers from criticism over their manifestations of white racism coming from what he calls bigoted liberals who love to hate regular done-home white folks. So far, he's staying in concern troll mode, pretending to give friendly advice to those hate-filled, bigoted libruls. I'm not sure how long he can keep up the pretence.

One of the more clear signs that Somerby had warm and fuzzy feelings for the crackpot right was in his 04/09/2010 Howler when he said of Glenn Beck, "Most of his work comes from fever swamps - but some of his work is quite erudite." (my emphasis)

That statement is a real givaway, a "tell". Beck's work is not "erudite." It's hack conspiracy theory and Mormon fundamentalism. The use of copious footnotes and obscure references is a characteristics of far-right propaganda and pseudoscholarship. Somerby is certainly aware of this. He himself has pointed out that Mad Annie Coulter in her books uses lots of footnotes: it's just if you check them out, they often don't say what she is citing them as an authority for saying.

In making his praise of Beck's alleged erudition, Somerbye was defending the honor of his Tea Party mega-crush Pam Stout, a retiree and Tea Party activist who says Glenn Beck makes her think. He was enchanted with her charms as reported by David Barstow in Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right New York Times 02/15/2010:

Worried about hyperinflation, social unrest or even martial law, she and her Tea Party members joined a coalition, Friends for Liberty, that includes representatives from Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project, the John Birch Society, and Oath Keepers, a new player in a resurgent militia movement.

When Friends for Liberty held its first public event, Mrs. Stout listened as Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff, brought 1,400 people to their feet with a speech about confronting a despotic federal government. Mrs. Stout said she felt as if she had been handed a road map to rebellion. Members of her family, she said, think she has disappeared down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. But Mrs. Stout said she has never felt so engaged.

"I can't go on being the shy, quiet me," she said. "I need to stand up."

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.

Stout heads a group calling itself the Idaho Tea Party Patriots. They provide a link to a site called the Tea Party Journal that as of this writing features on its home page this article by Ron Miller, Restore Honor by Rejecting Racist Claims 08/27/2010. He agrees with Somerby that them thar libruls are full of hate and are very destructive:

In a few days, the "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial, headlined by Fox News personality Glenn Beck, will bring hundreds of thousands of people from around the nation to Washington, DC. This time, there will be no protest signs, only an outpouring of support for America’s heritage and its heroes, and a recommitment to its core values of individual liberty, free enterprise, and virtue.

But you wouldn't know it from all the screeching coming from the Left, especially the self-proclaimed black leaders who want to once again make the entire affair about race. Well, I’m done with these charlatans and criminals, who have never spoken for me and never will.

They have insulted my friends and neighbors with their baseless charges, and betrayed my black brothers and sisters across America with their evil theology, bankrupt ideology, and their frantic search for bogeymen that has them discovering racism in audio greeting cards.

Generations of black people are broken in body, mind and spirit, or they are dead, because these self-anointed leaders are more concerned with keeping resentment and bitterness alive than striving for grace, unity and hope.

In their hands rests the blood of untold millions of black children never born, or born without a father in the home, the thousands of young black men who didn't live long enough to see their thirties, the despair of millions trapped in schools and communities that deprive them of even the basic tools for survival. These men and women have no shame in rendering us wholly dependent on the very nation they accuse of being irredeemably racist.

Somerby evidently plans a series of posts to defend Beck's White Power movement. On Monday, he started off trashing Digby, which is getting to be an almost daily preoccupation of his.

Somerby regularly attacks liberals now for challenging white racist aspects of the Republicans' and Tea Partiers' political appeals. They, of course, would be glad to see it left unchallenged. President Obama missed yet another opportunity to challenge that demagoguery head-on when he first took a stand in defense of freedom of relgion in the Park 51 Community Center ("Ground Zero Mosque") case, then the next day came out and said he wasn't saying that it should be put there.

But racism, xenophobia, anti-Muslim hysteria and rightwing demagoguery are a reality in US politics. And Somerby's position on it is clear: any liberal who criticizes that conduct is bigoted and full of hate. It's hard to see how he can maintain the "concern troll" stance much longer, since he clearly is on the side of the Tea Party demagogues in this.

Tags: bob somerby, radical right, white racism

Summarizing the Howler on Democrats and race

Since I've been writing a fair amount on the topic, I thought I would recap my understanding of Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby's position of late on the topic of race in American politics.

Somerby's outlook as expressed in his writing is heavily reminiscent of the press conventional wisdom about race and American politics circa 1992. That view assumed that white voters' fear and/or hostility to minorities, especially African-Americans, was fatally damaging the Democratic Party's electoral prospects. And that to reverse that trend, the Democrats at a minimum would have to distance themselves from black and Latino "special interest groups." It was a deeply flawed understanding of the realities of 1992. It's even less realistic in 2010.

Somerby in his 08/11/2010 column makes the remarkable admission that he basically doesn't know how to perceive racism and finds it a not very useful concept. If we take his word for it, one has to ask why he bothers to talk about race at all.

I can't see his position there as anything but disingenuous, if not downright cynical. Race and racism, especially white racism, are very real factors in American life and politics. Pollsters and social scientists find it challenging to identify racism in voting patterns. But "challenging" does not mean impossible and there has been a lot of valuable work done in that field. Somerby's postracial epistemology gives him an excuse to dismiss all of it: if racism isn't a valid category for understanding the behavior of American voters or politicians at all, any survey results exploring its effects are by definition meaningless.

Somerby's often-bitter polemics on the topic of race focus heavily on attacking liberals for criticizing what they understand to be manifestations of white racism among Republicans and conservatives. In this, he mirrors the attacks made by conservatives, even though Somerby packages them in "concern troll" trappings.

One of the most disturbing trends in American politics today is the increasing "mainstreaming" of ideas, claims and attitudes from hardcore far-right groups of the Patriot Militia variety. And whether Somerby cares to recognize it or not, the Christian Right is a major influence in the Republican Party. These groups are not only pushing theocratic notions and weird conspiracy theories; some of them are inciting violence and promoting white racism and anti-Latino xenophobia. But these groups also use what to most people is quirky language. Without understanding something about their particular political vocabulary, you can't understand what they are promoting. For instance, when hardcore Christianists denounce the Dred Scott decision, if you think they are expressing anti-racist sentiments, you likely have completely missed their meaning. Somerby appears to be clueless about this whole very real aspect of American politics and today's Republican Party.

I'll give a few links here to a few of the more memorable work I've come across in recent times on white racism in American politics:

• Nicholas Valentino and David Sears, "Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South" American Journal of Political Science 49:3 (July 2005). They concluded that what pretty much everyone involved with politics assumes is actually demonstrably true: that appeals to white racism among Southern white voters played a decisive role in the shift of national voting patterns to the Republican Party since the mid-1970s. More than one conclusion for Democratic Party strategy might be drawn from this. The notion that Democrats can simply not talk about white racism while the Republicans beat them over the head with it is not a reasonable one.

• Spencer Piston, Political Behavior Online, "How Explicit Racial Prejudice Hurt Obama in the 2008 Election" 02/23/2010. Piston's conclusions could be used to make an argument for the Democrats downplaying race-related issues. But it's one of many examples of how racial prejudice in voting behavior can be studied. And a more reasonable application of his findings for Democrats would be that it's to their political advantage to stigmatize white racism and associate it with Republican-style Predator State governance.

• Chris Caldwell, Why the GOP Is Doomed Hoover Digest (4/1998). I commented on it in Let's not talk about the big white elephant in the room 09/19/2009

• Bill Moyers, Fred Harris, et al, Bill Moyers Journal 03/28/2008

• Mark Graber, The Conscientious Objectors Speak Balkinization 06/28/2007

Tags: bob somerby, white racism

The sad evolution of Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby has reached the point that I now regard him as a full-blown "concern troll", very often echoing conservative complaints but framing them as the advice of a concerned liberal, wanting to help progressive Democrats clean up our act.

In his Howler post of 08/09/2010, his sad evolution is evident. He defends Glenn Beck's allegedly perceptive analysis of education spending, being careful not to endorse or critique it. (Since Somerby writes frequently about educations issues, it's not clear what would be so difficult for him to check Beck's information.) Somerby defends poor persecuted Beck against the horrible attacks of that bigoted liberal shrew Joan Walsh, whose Salon he now describes as "smutty", when she objected to Beck's characterization of Obama's government as "Planet of the Apes".

As Walsh explains in the post Somerby targets ("It's like the damn Planet of the Apes!" Salon 08/06/2010), this has become a favorite them of white supremacist groups. Somerby doesn't seem to be bothered by such things. But he's very bothered when one of them thar horrible libruls criticized a fine white man like Glenn Beck for white racism. Weirdly, he says it's fine when Beck assumes a mock Southern accent but evil libruls condescension to sensitive white Southerners when Rachel Maddow does it. In a classic concern-troll formulation, Somerby writes of the evil libruls and their discussions of white racism:

... we hapless liberals only know one political play. This is all we know how to do; in truth, we have no other politics. In part, this explains why we liberals have been the loveable losers of American politics for at least the past thirty years.

I had a direct exchange with Somerby in the comments to a Digby post of 08/03/2010 at Hullabaloo. (The link is to my comments and Somerby's; at this writing I was unable to link Digby's post itself.)

Bob Somerby may have been Al Gore's roommate back when. And for years he was a staunch defender of Al Gore and the Clinton's, and a perceptive and funny critic of the very real failing of our Establishment press corps. But he's now reduced himself to patrolling liberal commentary that argues against white racism. It's a sad but also ugly development.

Tags: bob somerby, white racism

The Howler praises [gulp] David Brooks

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby is still so hung up on his admiration for the Tea Party that his columns are still sounding that "I used to be a liberal, but ..." note. The Tea Party just knocked Somerby off the tracks. He's still fantasizing, in defiance of all available public evidence and polling data on Tea Party supporters, that these conservative, more-affluent-than-average Republican white folks can be won to some populist left-right coalition. (Maybe if you're willing to declare the Constitution Party a left-right coalition.) He scolds those bad, bad liberals who mocked Sarah Palin over the BP oil catastrophe.

In his 06/30/2010 Howler, he heaps praise on a column by David "Bobo" Brooks, The Culture of Exposure New York Times 06/24/2010. Bobo is a faithful reciter of the Republican Party line, specializing in giving the Party line of the day in a calm voice, to convey thoughtfulness and reasonableness. As usual, he worked in the theme of that column for the Friday Times into his PBS Newshour Political Wrap comments of 06/25/2010 with Sleepy Mark Shields.

Bobo's column was a defense of poor Gen. Stanley McChrystal against that bad, bad Michael Hastings who did that (to the Beltway Village) infamous Rolling Stone piece that got McChrystal fired for his and his staff's contemptuous talk about senior civilian officials. Hastings, you see, exposed something newsworthy, and "the culture of exposure" is bad, at least in BoboWorld last Thursday and Friday.

Clearly not haunted by the shades of Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite, Bobo saw nothing but ill-mannered exposure of harmless good-ole-boy chitchat in Hastings' article:

General McChrystal was excellent at his job. He had outstanding relations with the White House and entirely proper relationships with his various civilian partners in the State Department and beyond. He set up a superb decision-making apparatus that deftly used military and civilian expertise.

But McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched. And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter. And this reporter, being a product of the culture of exposure, made the kvetching the center of his magazine profile.

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority. He took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him.

The reticent ethos [which Bobo contends once prevailed] had its flaws. But the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important. [my emphasis]

Bobo's defense of McChrystal was disingenuous, at best. In fact, McChrystal's whiz-bang COIN (counterinsurgency) strategy hasn't produced nearly the results he claimed they would. As Hastings article pointed out for any reader who cared to notice, the Afghanistan War is going poorly.

And for lesser analysts than Bobo, McChrystal's "superb decision-making apparatus that deftly used military and civilian expertise" in Hastings' article comes off sounding like a bunch of overgrown frat boys enjoying their testosterone highs but reinforcing their own illusions. That image may be seriously flawed. But Bobo's silly commentary reduces the whole McChrystal firing incident to a disreputable action by a reporter who reported on harmless "kvetching".

Like his Village buddies and good press stalwarts like Lara Logan, Bobo tried to trash Hastings' for his sin of committing actual reporting. Something that, based on the Howler's past commentary, might have drawn scorn from Somerby instead of praise. But Somerby in his 06/28/2010 column, where he also praises Brooks, plays dumb about the content of Hastings' article and writes, "in the course of his column, Brooks offered a history of American journalism over the past (perhaps) sixty years. Here’s the shocker: His portrait of modern press culture is quite unflattering - and it’s quite accurate."

Say what? Somerby's praise of Bobo's column is a good example of how the quality of his media criticism has taken a dive since he decided last year that he needed to scold those naughty liberals for not appreciating how sympathetic those Real Americans in the Tea Party movement might be to liberal causes, if those liberals could just stop criticizing any manifestation of white racism anywhere.

Bobo's column does not make a general criticism of the mainstream media, but rather claims that journalists fell victim to a vague "ethos of exposure" that supposedly "swept the culture" back when all those crazy hippies and rioting Negroes were running wild in The Sixties. "The culture of exposure has triumphed, with results for all to see," he writes.

But he is specifically criticizing one reporter, Michael Hastings, who he doesn't stoop to name, referring to him just as the "reporter." Before he swooned for the Real Americans of the Tea Party, Somerby might have suggested that Bobo labels Hastings as the Reporter as a term of censure, as opposed to respectable journalists like himself and Lara Logan, who know they can't embarrass their sources but, you know, reporting newsworthy things they say on the record, if they want to maintain Access to do their celebrity reporting gig. Somerby used to scold former investigative journalists Bob Woodward for his hagiographical books on the Bush administration, waiting until Bush's approval rating were in the toilet and until the Village had gotten bored with Bush's heroic image before he did a more critical book. But Brooks frames his whole column around attacking the Reporter for doing actual critical-minded reporting and writing a substantive news article instead of an adoring puff piece.

And Somerby somehow takes this as an insightful attack by Bobo on his own Village crowd? Please. In any case, Bobo's argument makes no sense as it stands unless one accepts, as Somerby implicitly does, that the controversial comments from McChrystal and his staff were nothing but trivial "kvetching and inside baseball," as Bobo puts it. President Obama certainly thought they were more than trivial. Marcy Wheeler has a much better judgment of the significance of the reported words and behavior of McChrystal and his staff, as well as of Obama's response, in Win One for Democratic Institutions Emptywheel 06/23/2010.

I do think that Bobo is setting a framework here to use in the future. But it's not about making substantive criticisms of his fellow celebrity journalists. My guess is that he's thinking about prominent Republican candidates this year, like Constitution Party fans Rand Paul (Kentucky) and Sharron Angle (Nevada), who have left a long trail over the years of descriptions of their far-right political outlooks that won't sound so appealing to their states' voters in the general election. Bobo's concluding paragraphs can be cut and pasted into later columns this year defending candidates like Rand Paul who are being criticized for overly-frank descriptions of their own views:

The reticent ethos had its flaws. But the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

Another scalp is on the wall. Government officials will erect even higher walls between themselves and the outside world. The honest and freewheeling will continue to flee public life, and the cautious and calculating will remain.

The culture of exposure has triumphed, with results for all to see.

And we wouldn't want to drive "honest and freewheeling" sorts like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle out of public life, now would we?

Tags: bob somerby, establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press

Two weeks of the Howler and Arizona's SB1070

Arizona's Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed the anti-immigrant SB1070 on April 23, and HB2062 that provided minor amendments to it, on April 30, both to take effect July 29. Latinos, civil rights groups and the public generally recognized that this law would produce increased racial profiling, despite Brewer's assurances to the contrary. This is a law in the Jim Crow mode like those of the segregated South that gave police various pretexts to hassle African-Americans citizens at a whim, or for more directed reasons to intimidate real or potential dissidents and activists.

I thought I would take a look at the daily posts by Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby, who for a long time now has been scolding those bad, bad liberals for even suggesting that white racism might play a part in the Tea Party movement. Here's how he dealt with the issues of white racism and Arizona's Juan Crow law in the two weeks after Gov. Brewer signed SB1070.

April 26, IT’S THE STUPIDITY, STUPID! A lengthy profile of Mike Allen reveals the world’s greatest problem: criticizes Keith Olbermann for eulogizing coal miners killed in West Virginia as "band of 29 roughneck angels." Claims Olbermann had previously somehow derided those same people as "teabaggers. Attacks naughty liberals for being partisan on their own behalf: "We tend to enjoy The Dumb when it’s aimed at Them, abhor it when it’s aimed at Us. Beyond that, we liberals like to pretend that The Dumb is a mark of The Other Tribe." Whether "we liberals" is an appropriate phrase for Somerby to be using these days is not clear.

April 27, BROOKS & DUMB! In a clueless column, David Brooks rolls over and dies for The Dumb: It takes work to make a garbled criticism of one of Bobo's columns; that should be an easy target. But Somerby accomplishes it here. And managed to bring his point around to scolding liberals for talking about white racism: "Whether we’re talking about the Internet or cable “news” channels, when we scan the work of The Other Tribe, we often do so because it hurts so good—because we love to hate their (racist/elitist) work." Liberals "love to hate", he tells his readers over and over, including in this column.

April 28, THE USES OF PAPA CASS! On Glenn Beck’s show, Cass Sunstein loves Mao. Why won’t David Brooks say so?: Avoids race, but trashes Maureen Dowd for criticizing a cynical Goldman Sachs executive. Dowd does write some real howlers and sometimes seems downright disturbed, but Somerby's particular criticism of her on this point fall flat.

April 29, IT’S THE STUPIDIFICATION, STUPID! When S. E. Cupp sat down with the Lamb, The Dumb was all around: Bashes Paul Krugman for criticizing those nice white folks who support the Jim Crow-style SB1070 law. "Only a virally tribal person could compose such a ludicrous post," he says of Krugman. Bad, bigoted, libruls, bad libruls. Here he employs the standard Republican pitch that one should never make generalization about people on the basis of political party. The problem with that silly argument, of course, is that we have political parties because people do make distinctions between themselves and others on the basis of politics and policy.

April 30, THE REFUSAL TO SPEAK! David Brooks refuses to speak. E. J. Dionne gives him cover: complains that "the loonies and fools are on TV" and that liberal and conservative pundits aren't explaining it enough. Observes at the end that while we search in vain for examples of David Brooks or E.J. Dionne writing about that adequately, "Glenn Beck will tell his viewers ten times about [Cass] Sunstein’s vast love for Mao." But then in earlier columns, Somerby scolded Digby for complaining about his Tea Party crush Pam Stout, who declared that Beck provokes her to think. Somerby himself says that Beck, who raves John Birch Society conspiracy theories, is often "erudite." If it's wicked for us libruls to ever criticize Beck or the people who he suckers, does Somerby actually think it's a bad thing that Beck tells his audience "about Sunstein’s vast love for Mao"?

May 3, THE CULTURE OF FURY AND INSULT! When Tapper’s panel discussed that new law, an unhelpful pattern emerged: Somerby agrees with conservative New York Times' columnist Ross Douthat that liberals were mean in assuming that the motives of supporters of Arizona's Juan Crow law weren't pure as the driven snow. Bad liberal, bad, bad liberals! He also bitches about the This Week panel talking about an amendment to Arizona's SB1070 without describing what the amendment did; but the Howler doesn't both to explain it either. (See my post of 05/05/10 on that topic.)

May 4, RICH, LAZY AND DISHONEST! Does Rich ever know what he’s talking about? Liberals should be concerned: scolds naughty liberals for talking about racial considerations in the Arizona SB1070 controversy; says "white liberals love to accuse other people - specifically, white conservatives and centrists - of bigotry and racism", says this is an "especially noxious" trait of those bad white liberals. Suggests that liberals are "condescending dandies who can’t be trusted, elitists who sneer at valid concerns".

May 5, JUST ASK ROBERT BENNETT! The Tea Party movement hates white people too! Just ask Robert Bennett: how can we say Tea Partiers are racist when they hate some white people too? Plus, hey, look at all the black Republicans running for office! All that anti-immigrant and anti-Latino bile, the Tea Partiers in Washington chanting "nigger, nigger, nigger" at two African-American Congressman (an event on Somerby shares FOX News' skepticism that it even happened), why that's no sign that white racism is involved. It could just be the way these nice white folks are saying they don't like Big Business. Oh, and liberal leaders "simply aren’t very smart" and "tend a bit toward the morally bankrupt."

May 6, ENDLESS AMAZEMENT! We’re still amazed at the childish things our celebrity “journalists” do: Attacks some of his favorite liberal targets among the celebrity punditry - Keith Olbermann, Lawrence O’Donnell, Gail Collins, Frank Rich - over Sen. Lindsey Graham's complaints about the terrorism watch list interfering with the alleged right of people on it to buy guns and explosives. Somerby doesn't touch on race in this one. But he doesn't add much clarity to Graham's particular complaint, which on the surface strikes me as possibly one of those stopped-clock-is-right-twice-a-day moments where Graham may be making a valid point for a frivolous reason. Somerby makes it an example of liberal frivolity. He bridges Frank Rich into the complaint with this: "The 'watch list' story has special appeal [to liberal pundits] because it fits treasured New York Times themes about southerners, guns and religion." (New York City's Mayor Bloomberg thinks it's a real law-enforcement problem. Dibgy describes why she thinks Graham is being inconsistent in Tyranny For Dummies Hullabaloo 05/05/10.)

May 7, WHAT DIGBY SAID! In a remarkable pair of posts, Digby helps us recall the truth about someone’s favorite: after having blasted Digby in recent weeks for talking about white racism, he recommends a couple of her recent posts highlighted the dysfunctional nature of our national press corps and of Chris Matthews in particular. (Matthews is a mess, even when he's taking the Democrats' side; Somerby is right about that.) And Somerby blasts Salon's Joan Walsh for, apparently, giving some stock general praise to Chris Matthews when she appears on his show. He's also been blasting Walsh lately for the same sin as Digby, talking about white racism. He says here, "be prepared to get sick to your stomach the next time you see Walsh parade out onto Matthews’ show and tell him how great he is - how much his deeply seminal thinking resembles that of Joan herself."

Just how is Bob Somerby different from the standard white Republican rightwinger on the issues raised by SB1070?

One thing is very clear: he really, really, really doesn't like it when liberals or social scientists or anyone talks in public about white racism in a negative way.

To get an idea of the company in which that puts him, see Christine Schwen, Racial profiling? No problem, say conservative media Media Matters 04/30/10.

Standing alone, some of his columns, like the May 6 one, could read like a liberal contrarian take on our celebrity press corps, who really are generally painfully shallow. But taken in the context of his other columns cited here, even that one could also be read, perhaps more plausibly, as an echo of stock conservative complaints about the Liberal Media Conspiracy. He characterizes leading liberal pundits Keith Olbermann, Lawrence O’Donnell, Gail Collins as follows:

This are truly hideous people, the scum of modern, big-bucks corporate culture. But mainly, they’re amazingly childish. Collins’ column is stunningly clownish—and therefore, it’s pleasing for readers, and it was easy to type. In truth, these people will do and say anything to maintain the tribal game of the moment. And they seem to be sure that your low IQs won’t let you spot their game. [my emphasis in bold]

What rightwinger would disagree that Keith Olbermann and most other liberal pundits are "truly hideous people" and "scum"?

Tags: bob somerby, comprehensive immigration reform, white racism

Has the Daily Howler gone over to the Dark Side?

Shorter Daily Howler 04/09/10: No, no, Democrats shouldn't ever say anything against white racism! We'll lose for sure if we do that!

Catherine O'Donnell, Survey finds that racial attitudes influence the tea party movement in battleground states University of Washington News 04/07/10.

A new University of Washington survey found ... that those who are racially resentful, who believe the U.S. government has done too much to support blacks, are 36 percent more likely to support the tea party than those who are not.

The survey found that 30 percent of respondents had never heard of the tea party, but among those who had, 32 percent strongly approved of it. In that group, 56 percent of Republicans strongly approved, 31 percent of independents strongly approved and 5 percent of Democrats strongly approved.

Among whites who approved, 35 percent said they believe blacks to be hardworking, 45 percent said they believe them intelligent and 41 percent said they believe them trustworthy.

Whites who disapprove of President Barack Obama, the survey found, are 55 percent more likely to support the tea party than those who say they approve of him.

"Are we in a post-racial society? Our survey indicates a resounding no,"Parker said.

As evidence supporting that notion continues to mount, Bob "the Daily Howler" Somberby continues to insist that liberals are losing votes by talking about it. He focuses on particular instances, but generalizes broadly about the supposedly condescending attitudes of liberals toward those nice white folks actively participating in the Tea Party movement. Which of course is a stock rhetorical defense that racially prejudiced white people toss out to deflect any criticism of white racism. Somerby is very reluctant to share what he thinks would be an acceptable method of criticizing white racism. His real point seems to be: don't criticize it.

In the post linked above, he thinks Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen of Memphis should resign his Congressional seat because he criticized white racism in the Tea Party movement.

Somerby declares, generalizing freely, "how we liberals love our race-baiting!"

He says a column by Joan Walsh criticizing white racism in the Tea Party movement "should go directly to the Smithsonian, where it could live for all time in the display about the dumbest ways to do politics."

This Somerby declaration is just depressing:

Conservatives may want to “take the country back” from Obama, Pelosi, Sotomayor and Frank—but do they want to take it back from blacks, from women, from Hispanics and gays? Just this week, a large crowd of conservatives loudly cheered the idea of a Palin-Bachmann presidential ticket. (Palin and Bachmann are women.) When asked by Sean Hannity at that same rally, Palin said she supports Michael Steele. In Florida, Republicans have fallen in love with Marco Rubio; in the process, they’ve thrown away Charlie Crist, the whitest male pol on the planet. Do you know how dumb it is to keep insisting that they hate women, Hispanics and blacks when their biggest favorites are drawn from these camps? Do you understand the insulting message this nonsense sends to Walsh’s shocking “white people?” When we tell them they’re stone-cold racists—that their limbic brains don’t work right—we’re telling them to join the other side, We might as well send limos around to drive them to the tea party.

Somerby has descended into "concern troll" clowning with this kind of approach. By his own standards, why would he say that Sarah Palin and Marco Rubio are the favorites of Republicans? And if he seriously thinks that white people cheering minority spokespeople who echo the most conservative whites' ideology is a sign that white racism is no factor, then he's confessing that he knows practically nothing about real existing white racism.

In this column, he's taken to discussing it the way the most conservative whites who are most opposed to civil rights legislation of any kind respond to any suggestions of racism in them or any of their supporters: relying on quibbling abstractions, accusing them libruls of being condescending and the real racists "how we liberals love our race-baiting!", arguing that, hey, some of their best friends are minorities and stuff.

He seems to be declaring Digby part of the enemy pundit camp in the following passage. (I've discussed his recent debates with Digby in several posts the last few days.)

We’ll admit it—we didn’t know! We never could have imagined how nasty and dumb we liberals are — how much we love to play race cards, how much we love to mock teabaggers, a term Digby applied to Pam Stout again, just yesterday. (Darlings! Glenn Beck makes her think! She gets more like Sally Quinn every day.) Just a guess: Digby doesn’t watch Beck a whole lot. Yes, he’s one of the biggest nuts and/or frauds ever seen on TV — but he can’t be dismissed quite that simply. Most of his work comes from fever swamps — but some of his We’ll admit it—we didn’t know! We never could have imagined how nasty and dumb we liberals are—how much we love to play race cards, how much we love to mock teabaggers, a term Digby applied to Pam Stout again, just yesterday. (Darlings! Glenn Beck makes her think! She gets more like Sally Quinn every day.) Just a guess: Digby doesn’t watch Beck a whole lot. Yes, he’s one of the biggest nuts and/or frauds ever seen on TV—but he can’t be dismissed quite that simply. Most of his work comes from fever swamps — but some of his work is quite erudite. People who aren’t quite as bright as the self-admittedly brilliant High Lady Quinn-Digby may not always see the problems with Beck’s claims. They will be much less likely to see the problems when nasty, name-calling “Quinn lite” types keep calling them naughty names.

Our side is nasty, brutish and stupid. (And short — in attention span.) We seem determined to lose at politics, as we so skillfully did four decades ago, the last time we pretended we cared. Some of us were raised by racist fathers, against whom we grandly recoil. Just a question: Is there any chance that the “my tribe and no other” gene of the fathers may be swimming around in the daughters? The fathers ridiculed The Other on the basis of race. The daughters also love to exclude. And we love to play our own race cards! Just go back and review the work of the honorable Mr. Cohen.

Liberals are "nasty, brutish and stupid"? Some of Glenn Beck's "work is quite erudite"? Compare that to what Dave Neiwert, someone who actually knows a lot about the real existing Radical Right has to say about Beck: Maybe the scummiest Glenn Beck show ever: Smears Obama's parents, says Mom 'abandoned' him for 'Marxist political theory' Crooks and Liars 04/07/10.

I suppose it's possible that Somerby has been so immersed in analyzing the flaws of mainstream pundits and reporters that he's just unfamiliar with the nature of Radical Right pseudoscholarship. But he gave quite a bit of attention in 2004 to how the media dealt with the Swift Boat Liars for Bush slanderous "scholarship" against John Kerry. It's hard to even imagine that he's actually unaware of the obsessive footnoting and citing of real and imagined authorities that is typical of crackpot pseudoscholarship. And that's exactly the nature of Beck's supposed erudition.

I'm thinking that the Howler's 04/09/10 post may well be his personal declaration of, I used to be a liberal, but .... Sad to see.

Tags: bob somerby, daily howler

The Howler, white racism and the Radical Right

Laura Bush: adored idol of the downhome reglur folks?

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby is easily my favorite media critic. No one is better at cutting through the show-business mystification that has grown up around our celebrity pundits and reporters, especially those on television. On the one hand, it's not hard to see how goofy a lot of their reporting and commentary is. But without some meaningful framework in which to place their dysfunction, it's all too easily to be sucked into their often-bizarre scripts. Conservatives have the Liberal Press Conspiracy framework, which is so little reality-based these days that it's hard to see how that's not worse than having no way to frame the strangeness of our national press. Somerby isn't an ideologue. But he's constructed a narrative that does give all of us outside the Republican Party bubble, where Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are taken seriously as political analysts, a meaningful way to understand the massive clown show our national press has become.

Pilar Marrero of La Opinión gives a good statement of a major aspect of the general problem in Ya está bien de la misma historia 12/08/09. There doesn't seem to be an English version, but she gave this quickie summary on Twitter: "My column. Tired of Tiger Woods, fed up with the White House Crashers, sick of balloon boy, etc" She talks about how it may well be a good marketing decision for an individual news service to give play to such stories that are entertaining but have no particular value in terms of public policy or anything else but pure titillation and gossip. But when all individual news providers start doing it, the market segment that wants substantial reporting on policy issues starts getting undeserved. And the social function of news businesses in informing the public of information we need to be good citizens and informed voters falls away.

But Bob Somerby also suffers a bit from the self-selected purity of focusing on the failures of major media. He's actually been trying for a while to focus more specifically on the more liberal/progressive media, which he sees as the main hope right now for reconstructing a news media based on journalism rather than pure entertainment. But the "purity" part comes out sometimes when he takes liberals to task, usually with good reason, for condescension and arrogance. If those sound like typical conservative buzzwords, that illustrates part of his problem.

Somerby doesn't exactly know how to approach the issue of white racism. And, in a closely related problem, his literalist/positivist approach to evaluating what people say is sometimes inadequate to understanding Christianist religious figures or secular far-rightists, who often use cult-like alternative meanings for common words and often pursue "stealth" strategies of deliberately concealing their conscious political aims. I've e-mailed him a few times about his overly-credulous approach to such characters as John Hagee, for instance. Preachers can be very slick about putting on a benign face for reporters who don't know how to ask them probing questions about their faith claims or their political activities, even if they were interested in trying to ask probing questions.

His columns this week have illustrated how Somerby bounces around the horns of this dilemma. On 12/07/09, he makes the plausible point that the Beltway Village denigrated Clinton and Gore in part because they were Southerners. Plausible - but that doesn't explain why the same crew mostly swooned at the manly manliness of George W. Bush, who played the Good Ole Suthun Boy role to a far greater degree than Clinton or Gore ever did.

On 12/08, he was harshing on Rachel Maddow for seemingly showing class snobbery toward voters uninformed about health care. But in the process, he himself makes the case that white racism is likely behind much of the opposition to health care reform:

Why did European nations pass national health systems in the late 1940s, while the U.S. failed? In The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman asserts (with limited documentation) that our failure at that time represented a racial breakdown—that southern members of Congress balked at the notion because they didn’t want to integrate southern hospitals. We have no idea if that’s true—but it’s certainly plausible. But even now, in 2009, we remain a much less homogeneous society than the European societies which passed national health plans in the late 1940s. Presumably, this can affect the societal drive to extend benefits to all. In a non-homogeneous society, dreams of The Other bloom, killing the generous impulse. ...

In her longer statement, [Melissa] Harris-Lacewell began by focusing on the motives of senators and members of Congress, rather than on the views of voters. But we would guess that her overall picture may well be accurate. It has been harder for our society to achieve consensus about national health care due to its racial/class/ethnic diversity. Most likely, due to its regional diversity as well.

So it's pretty clear here that Somerby is saying that it's very likely that white racism, and particularly the Southern political culture in which white racism has played a distinctive role historically and in the present, plays a major part in opposition to health care reform.

And yet he doesn't seem to think anyone else can say that without being a sinfully condescending liberal snob. And for that matter, he typically savages pundits who make such broad claims as he makes on this issue without citing more substantial evidence.

On 12/09, he was back into outrage mode at snobby liberals who sneer at reglur folks and hurt their feelings and make them vote for Republicans. Okay, I'm characterizing it a little ungenerously, but I'm linking it so you can read for yourself. But he really misfired on this one:

Over the past fifty years, part of the liberal world’s “messaging” problem has involved the tendency among certain liberals to exacerbate distinctions of class and region - elements of fragmentation which make social progress much harder. It was true in the 1960s, and it’s true again now: A certain type of pseudo-liberal has always loved to mock the (white) rubes who live in red-state America. The pattern is familiar: First, we mock their rube-like ways. Then, we marvel at the fact that these rubes won’t accept our own brilliant views! Over the past fifty years, this class condescension has made it harder to build consensus for certain kinds of progressive ideas.

It’s part of the liberal world’s “messaging” problem: A certain kind of pseudo-liberal has always loved to mock the rubes. (Their limbic brains don’t work right, we say. They’re a bunch of redneck racists.) And at present, no one seems to do this more than Rachel Maddow, the host of last Friday night’s program. What’s the matter with (voters in) Kansas? In part, the problem may lie with the type of sneering Kansas voters have long heard from us!

He goes on to chide Maddow for trying way too hard to come up with a criticism of Laura Bush, the former First Lady, for speaking at what was apparently a charity fundraising event. He seems to be making a good point about Maddow's carelessness of her reporting on the story.

But as an example of mocking the reglur white folks as "redneck racists", criticizing Laura Bush doesn't really qualify. Good grief! This is the former First Lady, a woman who has for most of her life been part of the Bush family, one of the wealthiest and most powerful families and political dynasties in the United States or anywhere. Sure, it might tick off Republicans to hear Laura Bush criticized. And, if his description is accurate, it probably made a lot of viewers groan at the sloppiness or triviality of the report.

But criticizing Laura Bush is an example of insufficient respect for downhome "redneck racists"? Please.

On 12/10, he seems to be thinking both ways at once, which is a quality I admire but can be confusing. He's talking about blog posts by Digby (12/07/09, 12/08/09 and 12/09/09) and Paul Krugman (12/08/09) in which they speculate about what the emotional appeal of climate change denial may be:

Liberals often seem to have a hard time processing this kind of information. Over the years, we keep failing to come to terms with the nature of the electorate. We keep being surprised by the things the American public believes—and we tend to react with expressions of ridicule. In our view, these expressions may tend to make our political problems worse.

Simple fact: Tens of millions of Americans voters are very “non-scientific.” They don’t believe in evolution; they don’t believe in global warming. They do tend to believe in a series of portraits about society’s sneering elites - the kinds of portraits they constantly hear advanced on programs like Hannity’s. But then, they have heard these portraits advanced, quite aggressively, over the past fifty years.

These people are your neighbors, your fellow citizens. It’s their country too. They vote - and they won’t be going away. Their beliefs are a fundamental part of American political culture, and will be for decades to come. If we want to effect certain types of “progressive” change, we have to work with those beliefs—for example, by trying to change them.

On our side, we constantly seem to be surprised by the things these voters believe. Fun is fun, and there’s nothing like scratching an itch. But aren’t we being a little bit clueless when we keep being surprised?

These people are your neighbors—your fellow voters—and no, they won’t be going away. One final note: If you want to know why someone thinks something, there is a traditional approach:

You sit down with that person. You ask.

Here he's saying that it's silly to not realize that many voters are misinformed, underinformed and/or wrongly informed about some important public policy issues. But then he says that those naughty liberals shouldn't be condescending about it. Which is fine as far as it goes. But if you sit down with a global warming denier and ask why they take that position, it would be gullible to just take their response at face value without getting some idea about their level of information about the issue and what related political and/or religious assumptions they may be bringing to bear on it. Because good old fashioned fanaticism may well be at work.

And while he recognizes that it's part of the conservative schtick to say how all them thar libruls are lookin' down on all us reglur white folks, at the same time he doesn't seem to recognize that they don't need actual condescension to make that claim. As a professional comedian like Somerby knows, there can sometimes be a fine line between respectful mocking and insult. But some level of scorn is also what it will take to get some people to even begin to re-examine their premises about some issues like global warning. If you're stuck with strong beliefs rooted in fear - if I believe in evolution I'll go straight to Hell, if we don't torture Arab prisoners the turrists will kill us all in our beds - it normally requires some mitigation of the fear for people to reconsider. Ridiculing the ridiculous can help mitigate those fears.

I would also say that just humoring people who are telling you crazy stuff to your face and trying to get you to agree with it can also be a form of condescension. What good does it do to pretend that someone who's telling you Obama isn't really an America but Kenyan instead is expressing a position worth considering seriously? They're just lying in your face, even if they happen to believe it themselves. You don't have to call them stupid white trash. But you don't have to pretend you think that claim is just as valid as any other, either.

Tags: bob somerby, radical right, republican party

Bob Nietzsche Somerby on reporters exposing "lies"

Bob Somerby's Daily Howler column often reminds me of reading Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Anyone that has spent some time wrestling with Nietzsche's work has encountered passages that seemed at first glance to be wild polemics that, on closer inspection and in the context of the larger work, are actually well-thought-out analysis. His concept of Judaism and Christianity as being based on "slave morality" comes to mind.

Somerby is in full Nietzschian mode in his post of 06/25/09 as he undertakes rhetorical jihads against Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Eugene Robinson for a frivolous obsession with stories of sex and adultery ("We're all Ken Starr now") and at Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen for failing to take into full account the state of our national press corps during the 1990s.

And he makes some great points in the process, though someone not really familiar with his work might be taken aback by his polemics against such well-known liberals and, in the case of Glenn and Jay, outspoken critics of the Establishment press.

Anyone who has read a few consecutive posts of mine knows that I quote Glenn Greenwald every other day or so, normally with approval. He's been great on the torture accountability and NSA spying issues, for instance.

But Nietzsche-Somerby in that column touches on one of the weaknesses of Glenn's approach in criticizing the national press is that he often frames it in lawyerly abstractions about the press catering to power. What Glenn sometimes misses or at least understates is the way that the dysfunctions of the national press more often than not benefit the Republican positions on issues of the day. Or, as the Howler puts it in full-throated Nietzsche mode:

What makes Glenn’s work so mushy? He walks away from some profoundly basic distinctions — distinctions which have been universally observed for millennia. As Froomkin tends to do, he draws no distinction between "false statements" and "lies." Everyone in the western world has observed this (important) distinction, for several millennia. But we progressives have become so ardent that we now tend throw this distinction away. In the process, we seek a world where "objective establishment journalists" should be empowered to tell us who’s lying.

But guess what, dumb-asses? Establishment journalists have felt quite free to make such judgments in recent decades. ...

Can we talk? Establishment journalists have felt quite free to identify "LIARS" in recent decades. The problem is this: To the extent that they’ve had this freedom, they have kept calling Democrats LIARS. Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton were endlessly described as the world’s biggest LIARS. And uh-oh! In the future, this is likely the way the mainstream press corps will work - to the extent that they’re given this power.

In fairness, Professor Rosen knows nothing of this, being newly arrived from Pluto. He think the press corps’ problems began under Bush - and only because these elite professionals lacked imagination to deal with his outlier ways. (They were doing their best.) But if we continue to have an establishment press corps, it will be very unwise for liberals or progressives to task them with telling us who are the LIARS. Their track record on this point is clear. The establishment press is a tool of power. They will tend to call Big Pols of the more liberal party LIARS. They’ve done this for the past twenty years. Once financial regularity returns, they will likely resume this practice as the looting starts up again. [my emphasis in bold]

It can be very misleading to try to interpret the national press dysfunction as partisan or ideological; a lot of it is just plain weird. Their deference to power is primarily a deference to economic and corporate power which often does not translate into deference to the Democratic President and Congressional delegation, even when they are at a high tide of popularity as of the current moment.

Three defining features of today's national press corps are their deference to corporate power; their general practice of their profession as infotainment rather than as anything that deserves to be called journalism; and, a locker-room-style groupthink that strains at a gnat and swallows a fly (to borrow a famous King James Biblical phrase). Mix that all together, and you get Maureen Dowd writing about how Obama's cigarette smoking is like Silvio Berlusconi's sex life, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann trashing Hillary Clinton so hard a year ago that both would up apologizing on-air for their excesses, and leading celebrity press figures stewing in outrage because Obama called on a writer for the Huffington Post in his press conference this week. (Bush's people hiring a male prostitute to act as a ringer at dozens of his press conferences? Not so much.)

Tags: bob somerby, glenn greenwald, nietzsche

MoDo madness, Wednesday edition

Maureen Dowd's public collapse into stark raving lunacy continues with today's nervous breakdown, Two Against The One New York Times 08/20/08.

I certainly couldn't add much to Bob Somerby's deconstruction of it in his Daily Howler post for 08/20/08. He introduces it by saying, "Maureen Dowd has been visibly disturbed for a good long while. Despite this fact, the New York Times has kept her in print. As we can see from her column this morning, their conduct borders on evil - and that’s a word we rarely use."

This is also an on-point observation:

It has long been an utter embarrassment, watching the Times allow this crackpot to pimp these gender-nut themes. But when it comes to issues of gender, Maureen Dowd is a stone-cold nutcase. And must we state the obvious? In Dowd's work, these themes are aimed at Democrats only. Every Dem wife is some version of bitch. Have you ever seen her say a word about the Wife of McCain? (my emphasis in bold)

He also has this more general comment about the state of our so-called press corps' conduct:

In the past dozen years, Major Dems have been relentlessly demonized—and Big Reps like McCain have been turned into saints. (Until he finally destroyed the known world, George W. Bush was “plain-spoken,” “a different kind of Republican.” Until he repulsed the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire, Rudy Giuliani was endlessly praised as “America’s Mayor.”)

bob somerby, maureen dowd

McCain's 100 Years War and the bad, naughty, wicked Democrats who criticize him

I was inspired in the last few days to write a couple of e-mails to Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby taking partial issue with a couple of his more literal readings of news commentary. I was reminded of this by Marigold2's post on the bold Maverick defending his 100 Years War position against those nasty Democrats.

Bob "The Daily Howler" Somerby in his 03/27/08 post scolded unnamed culprits for reinventing, massaging and improving the Maverick's statement on staying in Iraq for 100 years. The original quote from which the 100 Years War line was taken goes this way (Somerby's version of 04/01/08):

QUESTION (1/3/08): President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years—

MCCAIN: Maybe a hundred. We've been in South Korea. We've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That'd be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. Then it's fine with me.

The Maverick defends his comment by pointing out, accurately, that he referred specifically to Americans staying there in conditions where they were "not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed".

This is the text of the e-mail I sent the Howler on that one:

Bob,

I'll take up your implied challenge when you wrote, "By the way: Some of you will now compose e-mails. You'll insist that McCain didnt say what he so plainly said, or that he plainly meant something different."

Now, I know you did not say it was a challenge. But I'm inferring that from my own experience and understanding of speech patterns in American English.

Which relates directly to your literalistic comment about McCain's now-famous, "Maybe a hundred" about the length of time he would be content seeing American troops stay in Iraq, followed immediately by his specifying that he meant, "as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed".

Here, I won't bother to interpret his remark. I'll stick to literalism. And in the literal words that came out of his mouth, he did not address how long he envisioned leaving American troops in Iraq if they are still "being injured or harmed or wounded or killed". Every quotation I've seen from him on the Iraq War leaves the time frame open-ended.

What he has not said is how many ones, or tens, or dozens of years he's willing to continue to have Americans "being injured or harmed or wounded or killed" in the Iraq War. One might interpret his statements as implying that would be something less than 100 years. But I haven't seen him quoted as saying that.

If you report that a Lexux/Nexus search turned up an occasion on which he specified some more specific time limit for continuing to have Americans "being injured or harmed or wounded or killed", I will stand corrected.

Somerby returned to the theme in his posts for 04/01/08 and 04/03/08. In the 04/01 post, he observes, in the process of verbally scourging Eugene Robinson for doing a similarly sloppy piece of reporting on the Maverick's statement:

It may well be Robinson's opinion that what McCain envisions will never occur. Robinson is hardly a foreign policy expert - and even experts lack crystal balls. But if Robinson thinks McCain is dreaming when he pictures an outcome like this, he is of course free to say so - and to explain his view.

Somerby is right that reporters and columnists - and even bloggers - should take care to be accurate in such things.

But in terms of using the "100 Years War" line against the Maverick, it's perfectly valid for the Dems or the netroots to do so. Because - for other Howler fans, this is my interpretation coming - McCain's use of the hundred-years line both then and in his defenses of it later, serves two purposes. One, for hardcore war fans, it lets them hear an in-your-face response to a war critic, with the Maverick saying it doesn't matter how long it takes to win it, you disgusting hippie, we'll fight for as long as it takes.

But by defending the line then and later by emphasizing he meant that only in a situation where Americans weren't being hurt, he ducks the question of how long he's willing to see the fighting go on. Instead, he and his fans can whine that his in-your-face response is being misquoted by those liberal meanies, another example of the "Liberals are liars! Liberals are liars!" phenomenon.

In fact, the Maverick insists on leaving the question of a time frame entirely open. Since our Savior-General Petraeus who the Maverick adores and supports has said counterinsurgency wars can easily go for 10 years or longer, voters can legitimately conclude from his vague insistence on Victory that the Maverick wants an open-ended commitment. Especially when he's tossing around dates like 100 years, 1000 years, 10,000 years, and so on. Yes, even though he tosses the alibi qualifiers in.

This is the letter that appeared in the 04/03/08 San Francisco Chronicle (scroll down), defending the Maverick on that comment:

McCain's words in context

Editor - I read almost daily in The Chronicle claims that Sen. John Mc Cain wants us to remain in Iraq for 100 years. The latest is by letter writer Fernando Feliciano (April 2).

The 100-year quote by Mc Cain is only half of what Mc Cain said and this quote is being taken completely out of context.

Here is the full quote by McCain:

Question: "President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years ..."(cut off by McCain).

McCain: "Make it a hundred. We've been in South Korea ... we've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea 50 years or so. That would be fine with me. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. It's fine with me and I hope that would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world."

McCain clearly means that our long-term presence in Iraq would be as a policing, peacekeeping force such as the United Nations, not as an active, fighting, military presence.

This is a completely different meaning than the spin the Democrats and liberals are putting on his partial quote.

I think it is a cheap shot.

NANCY DEUSSEN Palo Alto

The incomparable Daily Howler would presumably observe that the letter-writer also does a bit of mind-reading on the statement herself when she says that what the Maverick meant was "that our long-term presence in Iraq would be as a policing, peacekeeping force such as the United Nations".

But Dems and the peace movement should not let the Maverick get away with this dodge. His Iraq War plan so far represents open-ended war. We need to remind as many people as we can that such is the case. "100 Years War" is a vivid and appropriate image for that.

Juan Cole in Rich, McCain, and the Coming Heartbreak Ridge Informed Comment blog 04/07/08 discusses McCain's comment and the debate that has developed over them. Among other things, Cole looks at what it might mean if we take McCain's Korea analogy seriously. Making policy by bad historical analogy is one of the biggest plagues that affects American foreign policy and has for a long time.

The Republicans are trying to make a case of "Liberals are liars! Liberals are liars!" We shouldn't forget some important points in connection with the 100 Years War concept:

McCain has never specified any projected time line for the end of fighting in Iraq. Petraeus' own position on counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare says that a major COIN effort could take 10 years or more of active fighting. Does McCain think we're in the middle of 10 years war?

The Maverick does not acknowledge that the involvement of the United States in protracted warfare is itself a major problem and risk.

The Straight Talker's expressed position on the Iraq War does not spell out any strategy other than continuing the approach we're currently following.

The bold Maverick now says that we are "no longer staring into the abyss of defeat" in the Iraq War. Will he have any "straight talk" to offer to his fellow Republicans who have called critics who pointed out just such a thing happening in the past defeatists, unpatriotic, even traitors? Shouldn't McCain "distance himself" from those Republicans by name, no, denounce their wicked slanders? (Obama shouldn't be the only one apologizing for and denouncing his own supporters.) Come to think of it, did you ever hear the Maverick himself say that we were "staring into the abyss of defeat" at whatever time he now says such a thing was happening? Me neither.

McCain's 100 Years War (or was it not-war?) comment seemed to assume that permanent US bases in Iraq are a given. This has been a controversial proposition, here and abroad - not least in the Middle East - from the start. The pursuit of permanent bases is in itself a major factor that could prolong the already-prolonged combat in Iraq.

Finally, Juan Cole is more generous than I would be to Frank Rich's column Tet Happened, and No One Cared New York Times 04/06/08. In fact, this supposedly stalwart liberal writer opens his column with these two paragraphs:

REALLY, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of themselves for libeling John McCain. As a growing chorus reiterates, their refrains that Mr. McCain is "willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq" (as Mr. Obama said) or "willing to keep this war going for 100 years" (per Mrs. Clinton) are flat-out wrong.

What Mr. McCain actually said in a New Hampshire town-hall meeting was that he could imagine a 100-year-long American role in Iraq like our long-term presence in South Korea and Japan, where "Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed." See for yourself on YouTube.

Yes, Rich clucks about McCain's deficiencies on the Iraq War, proving that they are so glaring even a Big Pundit can notice them. But what really, really, really bugs him are Vile Hillary and Libelous Obama criticizing St. McCain over his 100 Years War crack. Does Frank Rich give a flying [Cheney] if the fighting in Iraq goes on for 100 years or not? I seriously doubt it.

And the great Straight Talker is certainly not "the crazed militarist portrayed by Democrats", Rich assures us. Now, I certainly hope there are Democrats out there calling our Greatest Living Saint (next to Savior-General Petraeus) a militarist, because I sure have been. I can't recall hearing Obama, Clinton or any member of Congress call him a militarist, though. Even I haven't called him a "crazed" militarist, though I'll probably be calling him worse at some point. Is "warmonger" worse than "crazed militarist"? I'm sure an above-the-fray sage like Frank Rich would disapprove of both.

I wish we did have to worry about the Democrats having so much fight in them that they risked going overboard in their furious criticism of the bold Maverick. Hey, I'll sign up to be one of the ones ringing alarm bells when an excess of Jacksonian democracy starts becoming an urgent political problem for the Democratic Party.

Rich's column is just full of groaners:

So far his bizarre pronouncements have been drowned out by the Democrats’ din.

Oh, I see, Rich is watching the Presidential race in one of those alternative universes where a reincarnated Andrew Jackson is the leader of the Democratic Party.

Iraq’s sects have remained at each other’s throats since their country was carved out of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

Um, not so much. As Patrick Cockburn explains in his new book Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq, tensions between the Iraqi Shi'a and the Sunnis were dramatically increased by the Baathist coup in 1968 and even more radically by the aftermath of Old Man Bush's Gulf War of 1991.

The electorate doesn’t want to hear much anyway about a war it long ago soundly rejected.

Big Pundits routinely assume that their own heads reflect the majority opinions of the public. Actually the public remains very interested in and concerned about the Iraq War. But our compliant corporate media has insisted on de-emphasizing coverage of the Iraq War, which I first naively thought was the point of Rich's column's headline. But it's against Big Pundit law to say that its the Establishment press like the New York Times that have decided to shirk their responsibility of covering the war even more than they have in the conflict's earlier years.

But while Rich's own mind reflects the majority opinion, we shouldn't forget that Big Pundits rise above the pettiness of the dirty masses:

For the majority of Americans who haven’t met any of the brave troops who’ve been cavalierly tossed into the quagmire, the war is out of sight and mind in a way Vietnam never was. Only 28 percent of Americans knew American casualties in Iraq were nearing 4,000 last month, according to the Pew Research Center. The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that by March 2008 the percentage of prominent news stories that were about Iraq had fallen to about one-fifth of what it was in January 2007. It’s a poignant commentary on the whole war that Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the nonpartisan advocacy group, was reduced to protesting the lack of coverage.

That’s why it’s no surprise that so few stopped to absorb the disastrous six-day battle of Basra that ended last week — a mini-Tet that belied the “success” of the surge. Even fewer noticed that the presumptive Republican nominee seemed at least as oblivious to what was going down as President Bush, no tiny feat. (my emphasis)

That "lack of coverage" that a veterans group found the need to poignantly protest is due to the lazy, out-of-touch public, you see, not to our train-wreck of a press corps.

After shoveling this kind of hooey for the first half or so of his column, then he gets down to criticizing the Maverick for his crazed militarist sadly mistaken Maverick views on the Iraq War. Given the sloppiness of the first part of the column, even I wouldn't rely on his accounts of what the Straight Talker actually said.

By the way, consistency is the hobgoblin of lesser minds than those of Big Pundits. After scolding those wicked Democrats for their rude, nasty, extremist language against St. McCain, he writes of the Maverick's unimpressive policies of continuing the Iraq War indefinitely, "As the old saying goes, doing the same thing over and over again and hoping you’ll get a different result is the definition of insanity."

Oh, I get it! It's horrible and naughty and stuff to call the Maverick "crazed" but okay to suggest he suffers from "insanity". Of course, there's a huge difference between the two. At least in that alternative reality where Frank Rich is observing the Presidential race.

But let's not forget, what's really, realy bad and horrible and a world-historical shame for American democracy are those wicked Democrats, Vile Hillary and Libelous Obama, who are so out of control as to criticize the bold Maverick in ways not pre-approved by Frank Rich:

The Democrats should also stop repeating their 100-years-war calumny against Mr. McCain. There’s too much at stake for America for them to add their own petty distortions to an epic tragedy that only a long-overdue national reckoning with hard truths can bring to an end. (my emphasis)

How did we wind up in the Iraq War, the worst strategic disaster in American history? How did we wind up with the Cheney-Bush administration, the worst Presidency in American history? We couldn't have done without the immense assistance of our corporate press corps.

Tags: bob somerby, daily howler, establishment press, frank rich, mainstream media, mainstream press, mccain