Some recent terrorist history - and our clueless punditocracy

Frank Rich, one of the more coherent liberals among the punditocracy but one sharing much of the limitations of the punditocracy of which he is a member in good standing, writes about domestic terrorist in The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged New York Times 02/27/10.

His column prompted me to think of some the major domestic terrorist cases in the United States in 2009.

Richard Andrew Poplawski: white supremacist and neo-Nazi cop-killer

A portrait of contrasts emerges from those who knew Poplawski by Rich Lord and Paula Reed Ward Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 04/12/09:

Accused of killing three Pittsburgh police officers in an incident that shook the city's sense of security, Richard Andrew Poplawski was sometimes described as intelligent and thoughtful, but he was prone to violence in relationships and racism in his writings that he hid even from those who had long known him. ...

Researchers at the Anti-Defamation League have pieced together what they believe, based on screen names and photos, to be postings by Mr. Poplawski, largely on www.stormfront.org, a "White Pride" Web site.

He posted what purports to be a picture of the woman he's writing about with "her next boyfriend," who is black. He also wrote of trying to chase down "groids," whom he accused of stealing his mother's car. ...

Mr. Poplawski's scholarly ambitions shifted from dentistry to computers. Mr. Carrano said he didn't pick up on any racism, though Mr. Poplawski did refer to the Haitians with whom he worked as "dirty people."

Mr. Carrano did not interpret the large eagle tattoo on his housemate as a sign of fringe thinking. In online writings in February of this year, the author believed to be Mr. Poplawski called the tattoo "a deliberately Americanized version of the iron eagle" -- a Nazi symbol used by domestic racist groups -- and "symbolic of freedom and nationalism."

A forest of lone wolves by Sally Kalson Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 06/14/09:

For lone wolves, these guys sure have a lot of company.

On April 4, white-power conspiracy enthusiast Richard Poplawski laid in wait for police to answer his mother's call to get him out of their Stanton Heights house. When they arrived, he shot Officers Paul J. Sciullo II, Eric Kelly and Stephen Mayhle to death in cold blood.

Friend of accused cop-killer Poplawski arrested by Jerome Sherman Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 09/05/10:

A man who has described himself as the best friend of accused cop-killer Richard Poplawski was arrested two weeks ago after saying he would "shoot any officer that shows up at his house," according to court documents.

Edward Perkovic, 23, made the statement during a drunken argument with his girlfriend Aug. 19 at a house in the 300 block of South Winebiddle Street in Bloomfield, an affidavit said. When police arrived, they found a loaded .45-caliber Colt long rifle in a closet.

In the days after three city police officers were killed in Stanton Heights on April 4, Mr. Perkovic spoke publicly about the views of Mr. Poplawski, the man who is facing murder charges in the case.

"He was really into politics and really into the First and Second amendment," Mr. Perkovic told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in April. "One thing he feared was the gun ban because he thought that was going to take away peoples' right to defend themselves. He never spoke of going out to murder or to kill." [my emphasis]

James W. von Brunn, Holocaust denier and terrorist murderer

CNN June 06/10/2009:

A rifle-wielding white supremacist entered Washington's Holocaust museum on Wednesday afternoon, fatally shooting a security guard before being wounded himself by return fire from other guards, authorities said.

Stephen Tyrone Johns, a six-year veteran of the museum's security staff, later "died heroically in the line of duty," said Sara Bloomfield, museum director.

Law enforcement sources identified the suspect as James W. von Brunn, an 88-year-old white supremacist from Maryland.

Follow-up CNN story 06/11/09:

An 88-year-old Maryland man with a long history of ties to white supremacist groups is the suspect in Wednesday's fatal shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, two law enforcement officials told CNN.

James W. von Brunn served six years in prison for trying to make what he called a "legal, non-violent citizens arrest" of Federal Reserve Board members in 1981 -- a prison term he blamed on "a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys" and "a Jew judge," he said on his Web site, Holy Western Empire.

Scott Roeder, Christian terrorist and murderer

Slaying Raises Fears on Both Sides of Abortion Debate by Peter Slevin Washington Post 06/02/10:

In Wichita, dozens of mourners left flowers outside Tiller's clinic, where an American flag flew at half-staff. Across town, the man accused of killing the doctor awaited formal charges in the Sedgwick County jail.

Scott Roeder was arrested on an interstate a few hours after an assailant fired a single bullet from a handgun at Tiller at Reformation Lutheran Church as he handed out church bulletins. Roeder, suspected of acting alone, has emerged as a fierce abortion opponent once arrested with bomb components in his car. ...

Fellow abortion opponents described Roeder as a foot soldier convinced that killing an abortion doctor is not a crime because it saves the lives of unborn children. In a 2007 Internet posting, a person identifying himself as "Scott Roeder" said Tiller is "the concentration camp 'Mengele' of our day and needs to be stopped."

There were other instances of particularly dramatic violence in 2009 in the US, of course. Four policemen were murdered in Oakland, though the shooter who was killed in a shootout seems to have been running from the law for non-political crimes and seemed to have no political motive, unlike Richard Poplawski in Pittsburgh.

And Maj. Abdulhakim Muhammad went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas, in what may very well have been a crime motivated by political goals, his anger over US military actions in Muslim countries. But the Pentagon has kept a remarkably tight lid on news about that case. It seems like that his crime was also a case of domestic political terrorism, but until we see more actual evidence in the public record, we can't be sure. As Glenn Greenwald has documented, our media now tend to apply the label "terrorist" only to Muslims who attack Americans, not politically-motivated far-right terrorists who have seemingly clear political motives involved in their attacks.

I hope we don't see it, but if we do have some instance of actual leftwing domestic terrorism - like some radical ecology group bombing the offices of some company whose environmental record is a particular target - I'll be curious to see whether our pundits and star reporters will be willing to use the "terrorist" label for them.

Since being anti-Muslim is a major preoccupation of our xenophobic and often heavily Christian-Identity-influenced violent far right in the US, probably a lot of the public and certainly many ideological conservatives consider Islamist violence as "left". But that doesn't really make sense in political terms. With their theocratic aims and super-conservative family and sexual politics, they are rightwingers by almost any measure; it's just that they religion is Islam, not Christian.

What is striking about Frank Rich's column is that he writes as if he hadn't noticed that there might be a problem with far-right domestic terrorism and with the eliminationist rhetoric of even some "respectable" Republicans until the far-right anti-tax protester Andrew Joseph Stack III flew his suicide mission against the IRS offices in Austin, killing one employee and causing considerable damage. Rich writes:

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a "Tea Party terrorist." But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.

Rich sounds like he just woke up from a long sleep that began sometime before Obama took office as President. And when he does try to write about how current Tea Party and Republican rhetoric may contribute to far-right instability, he does it in such a painfully sloppy way that people sympathetic to his general viewpoint may wish he hadn't even bothered. I can't even quite get my mind around what he might mean by this:

But in place of the typical portrait of a terrorist driven by ideology, Mr. Stack was described as generally easygoing, a talented amateur musician with marital troubles and a maddening grudge against the tax authorities.

“I knew Joe had a hang-up with the I.R.S. on account of them breaking him, taking his savings away,” said Jack Cook, the stepfather of Mr. Stack’s wife, in a telephone interview from his home in Oklahoma. “And that’s undoubtedly the reason he flew the airplane against that building. Not to kill people, but just to damage the I.R.S.”

I really don't know what to make of this. There's always someone who will say that the mass-murderer next door seemed like such a pleasant guy and they would never have expected such a thing from him. And gullible reporters seem to be endlessly willing to take it down like good stenographers. How much special training would someone need to ask a couple of questions about such comments, like: Who ever wants to think they have a terrorist or serial killer living next door? And isn't it possible that anyone acquainted with the person might feel inclined to pretend they didn't have the slightest clue about the accused's violent leanings?

And Rich seems to take it at face value when Stack's wife's stepfather says that Stack "had a hang-up with the I.R.S" and then declares: "And that’s undoubtedly the reason he flew the airplane against that building. Not to kill people, but just to damage the I.R.S."

How hard can it be to see that this makes no freaking sense? He chose an office building and flew his plane into it in the middle of the days but he only wanted to hurt some abstraction called the IRS and had no idea he would kill people?

Rich is working from the long-standing formula that made some reality-based sense since in, say, 1965, in which as long as the Democrats distanced themselves from the tiny Communist Party and the Republicans from the John Birch Society, that made them safe and responsible centrists. And sure enough, he mentions one of the set pieces in this antique view: "Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Waterloo". And how many times are we going to have to see our Pod Pundits quote the late William Buckley's opinions from the 1960s about what Rich calls, "the John Birch Society, another far-right organization that has re-emerged after years of hibernation." Somebody has been hibernating, but it hasn't been the JBS. As Michelle Goldberg, Chris Hedges, Max Blumenthal and others have documented, the JBS has been a major influence in shaping the current Christian Right worldview. That would be the Christian Right that is now the base constituency of the Republican Party of the great moderate Maverick McCain. And the JBS has always maintained influence among rich Republican ideologues. But in Frank Rich's epistemology, anything that he's slept through must have itself been hibernating. He notes that the JBS' views "remain unchanged" from the 1960s. Uh, no, Frank. They're still bigots and crackpots, but they have been adjusting their extremist views all along to current events. No, they haven't been hibernating.

Despite the role of Dick Armey's FreedomWorks in financing Tea Party events, the organizing activities of Glenn Beck and FOX News, their endorsement by Republican stars like Sarah Palin and much more, Rich is struck by how very different the Tea Party movement is from the nice, respectable Republican Party that has made torture one of its most beloved core values.

How does he know this? Why, the Tea Partiers criticize that fine moderate Maverick McCain! "They loathe John McCain and the free-spending, TARP-tainted presidency of George W. Bush." The seemingly endless man-crushes of our male pundits, even the alleged liberal ones like Rich, on the hardline rightwinger and nasty old white guy John McCain is one of the more bizarre political phenomena of the last two decades.

In the last few paragraphs, he tries half-heartedly and without making much sense to talk about the ways in which Republicans may be encouraging far-right crackpots among the Tea Partiers and JBSers and so forth. But the main thing his column shows is his own cluelessness.

The pundit bus arrives

Via NetFlix, I've been watching the 1960s sci-fi TV series The Invaders, in which space aliens disguise themselves as human beings and try various things to conquer the Earth for presumably nefarious purposes. It would be easy to believe that a large portion of our pundit corps were such space aliens. But the ones in The Invaders were hard to detect at a distance. A lot of them had a hand deformity of the pinkie fingers or the thumbs. But the signs from our star pundits are much stronger. They just don't process information in the way most terrestrial beings do. Now, there's no actual evidence that they are Pod People from outer space. It's just that it's the only theory I've heard advanced that comes close to explaining their alternative consciousnesses.

Tags: frank rich, radical right

Four columns

Here are four columns that present a good snapshot of what is wrong with our national press. First, the stars, both in the New York Times in their regular high-profile Sunday columns:

Maureen Dowd, The Lady and the Tiger. Second consecutive column complaining about White House social secretary Desiree Rogers. MoDo compares her to Tiger Woods. (?!?)

Frank Rich, Obama’s Logic Is No Match for Afghanistan. One of the highest-profile liberal "opinion makers". He uses a column on the Afghanistan War to also complain about those White House party crashers. And then he works in - why not? - Tiger Woods.

Democracy can't survive over the long run with a national press like this.

On the other hand, here are two columnists who you are not likely to see on the Sunday morning bobblehead shows, Joe Galloway of McClatchy and Jules Witcover of TMS Features. Witcover got booted from his long-time gig as a columnist for the Baltimore Sun years ago, almost certainly because of his sensible criticisms of the Iraq War.

Joe Galloway, It’s hard to get into the holiday spirit 11/25/09. He writes, "What's the point in having a Democrat in the White House and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress if they all act like Republicans?" A question most Democratic base voters are asking right now. On the Afghanistan escalation, he writes, "There are several very good reasons why sending 34,000 more U.S. troops there is a very bad decision." And proceeds to explain.

Jules Witcover, Going for the Quick Fix 12/04/09. Witcover says of Obama's Afghanistan escalation: "He is rolling the dice on this one, against high odds."

No word in these columns from Galloway and Witcover, however, on White House party crashers or Tiger Woods' love life.

Tags: establishment press, frank rich, joe galloway, jules witcover, jules maureen dowd

How quickly they change

Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich in their Sunday New York Times columns give two excellent examples of how smug dismissal of Sarah Palin can quickly turn into admiration. The Beltway Village during 2008 and mostly up until now was more concerned with Tina Fey's imitation of Palin than with what Palin and her supporters were about. Especially as that might be indicated by Palin's own neo-Confederate and theocratic ties.

Maureen Dowd is in her more liberal mode lately. Which is kind of hard to distinguish between her Bush-friendly mode. But her latest, Visceral Has Its Value New York Times 11/21/09, shows how the Village script of Palin as a ridiculous dummy can easily morph into appreciating her as the voice of Real Americans. And the Villagers all fancy themselves as in tune with Real Americans. You know, the ones for whom the federal budget deficit is the biggest problem the country has. (Yes, Village thinking is often quite bizarre and contradictory measured against normal standards of reality. But since they think the deficit is critical, they assume as always that the Little People think the same.)

MoDo, who likes to remind us that Obama is a girl (not a compliment in MoDo's gender obsessions), now admires Palin for "her visceral power," the inner energy she radiates (MoDo used a quotation to say that - I guess it sounded too New Agey to put in her own voice), her dynamism, her close contact with the grass roots, her exuberance, and "the good looks, the tabloid-perfect family, the Alaska quirkiness, the kids with the weird names." With a mixture of admiration and snotty condescension - who says in print that other people children have "weird names"? - MoDo manages to both pump up Palin's image and give cred to her the-elites-look-down-on-us-Real-Amurcans" schtick. Palin's neo-Confederate ties? Her theocratic, superstitious, extremist brand of Pentecostal Christianity? I suppose MoDo would find that sooo booo-oooring to write about. So instead she insults Palin's children's names.

Did I mention that MoDo is one of the star opinion "journalists" in what is still considered the leading "quality" paper in the United States?

She actually spends most of the column trashing Obama in various ways. Then at the end she kinda-sorta defends him. But does it in such a pitiful way all that she just reinforces the Republican and Broderian criticism of Obama being supposedly "indecisive".

Frank Rich, who often writes some atrocious stuff, too, and has been recently taking the Republicans' bait to ridicule the Party base and their heroes, in The Pit Bull in the China Shop 11/21/09 actually manages to criticize other Villagers for delivering their authoritative opinions on Palin's book without actually having read it! Criticizing fellow Villagers is so rare that he at least deserves one hand clapping for that. (I would just note, without detracting from his unconventional stance, that one can certainly form a reasonable opinion about well-reported portions of a book without having read it cover to cover.)

Rich claims to have actually read her book. And coming from a guy who just a few columns ago was chortling over how the Tea Partiers (aka, Palin fans) were leading the Republican Party to a new 1964 landslide defeat, statements like this are another wonderful illustration how sanctimonious Village ridicule can quickly become star-struck admiration: "Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama, and attention must be paid. Those who wishfully think her 15 minutes are up are deluding themselves."

Rich goes on to focus on what are the important issues - in the eyes of our Village Pod Pundits. Palin's show-business acquaintances. Levi Johnston.

Neo-Confederate ties? Theocratic Christianism? Rich doesn't get into those, either. The Village script still calls for leaving those out. Even though they are highly relevant to understanding her politics and what the Republican Party has become. And it's understandable. Facing up to what today's Republican Party is would make the practice of High Broderism, with his idolatry of bipartisanship (on the part of Democrats) nearly impossible to practice. Later on, he cities some polls showing that Palin is a Republican favorite in the polls for the 2012 Presidential nomination just behind Mike Huckabee, he doesn't cite any polling data to support his assertion that Palin "the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama." If the polls he's using show Huckabee leading Palin among Republicans, wouldn't that make the Huck a more important brand at the moment?

Rich devotes a paragraph to pointless ridicule of a pious letter Palin wrote for her baby Trig that is reproduced in the book. He is ruffled that she worded the letter as a letter from God. Pop psychology, yes. Actual analysis of her theocratic religious ties? Not so much. The only exception is a really vague and speculative reference to Palin's "'rapture' theology" - to which Palin may or may not subscribe from anything we see in Rich's column.

Rich's utter helplessness is trying to actually analyze her appeal is illustrated by the following comment, which is correct: "The more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy-headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as an avatar of the anti-elite cause." But without understanding that in the context of the dominant Christian Right culture in the Republican Party, it tells us nothing. Except that Frank Rich is disturbed at the dumb masses he takes the Real Americans to be.

With all that fluff in his column, I do give Rich credit for at least mentioning the anti-gay position of the far-rightist Lynn Vincent who Palin chose for her ghost-writer.

And to top it all off, Rich manages to sing the praises of that greatest of all Mavericks, St. John McCain. Yes, that would be the St. McCain who made Sarah Palin a national figure by choosing her as his Vice Presidential nominee in 2008. Our pundits' love for the mavericky Maverick McCain is even greater than their love for Monica Lewinsky.

Maybe I'm getting a bit too deep into the weeds on this, too deep at least for my own comfort. But this David Sirota column that provides a refreshing trashing of Dean Broder and our Pod Pundits generally over the Afghanistan War, Intelligentsia against intelligence Salon, even he manages to embrace the notion that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are somehow harmless entertainment on the fringes of the Republican Party:

The trend is deeply disturbing. It's one thing for talk-show-host wannabe Sarah Palin or carnival-barking provocateur Glenn Beck to glamorize willful ignorance -- that's been the narcissistic act of celebrity court jesters since the dawn of history. But it's an entirely different thing when hostility to intelligence and to the basic process of thinking itself emanates from the very professional thinkers who lead the nation's intelligentsia. [my emphasis]

Our pundits, even supposedly solidly liberal ones like Frank Rich and David Sirota, are just having a hard time facing up to what the Republican Party has become.

Tags: frank rich, maureen dowd, sarah palin

Nothing to worry about

Good ole Pat Boone, the clean-cut Christian pop singer who must be about 100 years old by now, just had a column at World NutDaily and also at NewsMax saying that the "vermin" in the White House need to gassed with a "very powerful fumigant" to get rid of its "invaders" and "alien rodents". Republicans on OxyContin, it ain't a pretty sight.

Fortunately, we know from Frank Rich's column Sunday that characters who talk this way are marginal figures in the Republican Party. You know, like Rush Limbaugh, who hardly any Republicans listen to, much less share his attitudes and ideas. Otherwise I might worry.

Tags: frank rich, paranoid style, pat boone, radical right

Frank Rich vs. GOP "Stalinists"

I'm not so thrilled about Frank Rich's New York Times column The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York 10/31/09. The short version of my discomfort with it is that he seems to be looking for that now-extinct political species, the "moderate" Republican.

He apparently thinks that two of the current off-year elections coming on Tuesday have Republicans who are practically Democrats:

No wonder even the very conservative Republican contenders in the two big gubernatorial contests this week have frantically tried to disguise their own convictions. The candidate in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is a graduate of Pat Robertson’s university whose career has been devoted to curbing abortion rights, gay civil rights and even birth control. But in this campaign he ditched those issues, disinvited Palin for a campaign appearance, praised Obama’s Nobel Prize, and ran a closing campaign ad trumpeting “Hope.” Chris Christie, McDonnell’s counterpart in New Jersey, posted a campaign video celebrating “Change” in which Obama’s face and most stirring campaign sound bites so dominate you’d think the president had endorsed the Republican over his Democratic opponent, Jon Corzine. [my emphasis]

It seems to go right by him that in order to find an example of Republican politicians who are seemingly willing to distance themselves from the likes of Sarah Palin, he has to find them among two that he describes as very conservative Republicans.

And does Frank Rich really think its a novel thing for one Party to borrow popular but largely content-free symbolism from the other Party's ad campaigns? I mean, using "Hope" in a campaign commercial isn't exactly the same as supporting health care reform and strong financial regulation, or opposing the war in Afghanistan. You know, the stuff that actually affects people's lives?

How does this position from Bob McDonnell's campaign Web site differ in substance from Sarah Palin's, Rush Limbaugh's or Glenn Beck's:

Bob McDonnell has concerns that Washington’s proposed reforms will drive the cost of health care up and jeopardize quality and access. Reforms being discussed in Washington could raise costs for those who already have insurance, harm small business owners and make it harder to create jobs, or shift millions of Virginians from their private insurance into a government run system, raise taxes and increase our deficit even further. Rather than centralizing control of health care at the federal level, or saddling Virginia businesses and workers with new mandates to pay for plans the government thinks they want, we should let individuals and families control their health care decisions.

I beginning to wish for a moratorium on citations to Richard Hofstadter's essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics".

Richard Hofstadter(1916-1970)

Which might sound a tad strange for someone who's been making references to Hofstadter and his writing on the "paranoid style" for pretty much as long as I've been blogging, as in Richard Hofstadter and the "paranoid style" of politics 12/29/04, in which I discuss the theory generally. When I checked, I was a bit surprised at how many of my posts over the years contain a reference to his work. Here's how Rich uses Hofstadter:

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.

While his narrow analogy between the Tea Partiers and the Birchers is a valid enough use of Hofstadter's work, the emphasis should be on narrow.

Because the main essay in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965) was about the kind of politics practiced by the Barry Goldwater faction of the Republican Party that dominated the Presidential nominating convention in San Francisco in 1964, including a very public clash with the "eastern Establishment" wing of the Party lined up behind Nelson Rockefeller's Presidential candidacy. That was a key turning point for the present-day "movement conservatism". The movement conservatism that has dominated the Republican Party since 1980!

The Beltway Village is in thrall to the faith of High Broderism: American politics is dominated by the "vital center"; bipartisanship is the high and best form of politics; the "extremes of the right and the left" have to be avoided but especially those of the left.

One of the many problems of that conceptual framing of the world of American politics is that as the Republican Party became dominated by what was it's scruffy, still-not-respectable right wing back in 1964, and then became more and more radicalized to the point of embracing criminal torture as one of its core values (not unrelated to the embrace of lynching by the segregationists of 1964) and launching an overt war of aggression in Iraq based on straight-up fabricated claims, the priests and devotees of High Broderism have continued to define the Republican Party as being part of that "vital center." "Vital center" was a phrase that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. popularized in a book by that title, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949), which was one of the founding texts we might say of Cold War liberalism. In his last book published during his lifetime, War and the American Presidency (2004), Schlesinger left no doubt of his own ability to distinguish between today's Republican Party and some kind of centrist conservatism. He described the Party then led by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush this way:

For all his buffoonish side, the president is secure in himself, disciplined, decisive, and crafty, and capable of concentrating on a few priorities. He has maintained control of a rag-tag Republican coalition, well described by Kevin Phillips ... as consisting of "Wall Street, Big Energy, multinational corporations, the Military-Industrial Complex, the Religious Right, the Market Extremist think-tanks, and the Rush Limbaugh Axis." All these groups agree in their strong support of their president, though they sharply disagree among themselves.

Frank Rich writes as though only the Christian Right and the OxyContin Axis are those who practice the "paranoid style". And in this best of all possible High Broderist worlds, they are doomed to political marginalization.

That's not what happened to the paranoid-style politics of the "movement conservatism" of 1964. There aren't any Nelson Rockefellers or Mark Hatfields in the Republican Congressional delegations today. Although Village conventional wisdom John McCain is a bold Maverick who's playing that role. Frank Rich, in other words, can't address the reality of the fanaticism dominating today's Republican Party without going way outside the conventional assumptions of his fellow Villagers.

Dan Froomkin express a much better grasp of that situation as he addresses it in Seven questions for Dan Froomkin The Economist Online 11/01/09 in the context of press coverage of the bama administration and the problem for "balance" in the current climate:

DIA: Do you think the media should strive for objectivity in its reporting?

Mr Froomkin: No. Journalists should strive for accuracy, and fairness. Objectivity is impossible, and is too often confused with balance. And the problem with balance is that we are not living in a balanced time. For instance, is it patently obvious that at this point in our history, the leading luminaries on one side of the American political spectrum are considerably less tethered to reality than those on the other side. Madly trying to split the difference, as so many of my mainstream-media colleagues feel impelled to do, does a disservice to the concept of the truth.

Rich did depart a tiny bit from the Village wisdom on the Obama administration's (mild!) verbal attacks on FOX News:

Only in the alternative universe of the far right is Obama a pariah and Palin the great white hope. It’s become a Beltway truism that the White House’s (mild) spat with Fox News is counterproductive because it drives up the network’s numbers. But if curious moderate and independent voters are now tempted to surf there and encounter Beck’s histrionics for the first time, the president's numbers will benefit as well. To the uninitiated, the tea party crowd comes across like the barflies in “Star Wars.”

This is also a fairly strange statement, largely because Rich observes his obligation as a celebrity pundit not to talk about what the mainstream press is doing. Like, for instance, picking up the phony memes that FOX pumps up furiously. Like his own newspaper the New York Times recently scolding themselves for not paying enough attention to conservative concerns and promising to pay much more attention from now on. And he doesn't note a critical fact, which is that when Glenn Beck and other prominent figures in that "alternative universe" make hysterical and false charges against the Democratic health care reform plans, their viewers and listeners will find it very hard to find clear explanations of the key issues around that issue in the New York Times or other major news outlets. And they do a pitifully poor job of reporting on how the Beckians and the Limbaugh dittoheads actually do affect the political dynamics. Rich's column is an example of that, I'm afraid.

It's also important to remember that the whole Republican Party is keenly attuned to the Beckian/OxyContin "alternative universe", not just those for whom Palin is currently their favorite choice for Presidential candidate.

And I'm not so sure that for the typical TV viewer "the tea party crowd comes across like the barflies in 'Star Wars.'" Since our national press corps does such a very poor job of reporting on that movement, who the activists are and who the groups like Freedom Watch are that finance their protests, I'm not at all sure that's how they come across. One prominent aspect of the Tea Party protests is the extent to which they were organized by the partisan-Republican groups we know as FOX News. But, as we have seen, when the Democrats challenge the "news" channel crass partisanship and political organizing, even very mildly criticize it, the Village lines up to scold Obama and the Democrats for such naughty behavior. As Rich put it, "It’s become a Beltway truism that the White House’s (mild) spat with Fox News is counterproductive ..." Actually, mainstream pundits have said worse than that, that it was on the level of Spiro Agnews back in the day.

And, sure, when you look at Sarah Palin's close cooperation with Birchers and especially the neo-Confederate Alaska Independence Party (AIP), and with the theocratic and cultish aspect of the Third Wave Pentecostal movement of which she has been a very active part, she might look as though she came from an alternative political universe. But our national press corps focused on in 2008 and focuses on still is her verbal gaffes and Tina Fey's spoofs of her from Saturday Night Live. The average news consumer have heard a lot of that. But her "pallin' around" with neo-Confederates? Her theocratic religious commitments? Not so much. Not much at all, actually.

Tags: establishment press, frank rich, paranoid style, radical right, richard hofstadter

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