Krugman Agrees

On all counts - Obama's dangerous Reagan worship, on his misrepresentation of Democratic history, and on the deep self-delusion and denial of the Obamacans when confronted with the baldly stated illiberal beliefs of The Precious:

Some readers may recall that back during the Democratic primary Barack Obama shocked many progressives by praising Ronald Reagan as someone who brought America a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.” I was among those who found this deeply troubling — because the idea that Reagan brought a transfomation in American dynamism is a right-wing myth, not borne out by the facts. (There was a surge in productivity and innovation — but it happened in the 90s, under Clinton, not under Reagan).

All the usual suspects pooh-poohed these concerns; it was ridiculous, they said, to think of Obama as a captive of right-wing mythology.

But are you so sure about that now?

And here’s this, from Thomas Ferguson: Obama saying

We didn’t actually, I think, do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically because we thought that was irresponsible. We had to act quickly.

As Ferguson explains, this is a right-wing smear. What actually happened was that during the interregnum between the 1932 election and the1933 inauguration — which was much longer then, because the inauguration didn’t take place until March — Herbert Hoover tried to rope FDR into maintaining his policies, including rigid adherence to the gold standard and fiscal austerity. FDR declined to be part of this.

But Obama buys the right-wing smear.

More and more, it’s becoming clear that progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion. Once you got past the soaring rhetoric you noticed, if you actually paid attention to what he said, that he largely accepted the conservative storyline, a view of the world, including a mythological history, that bears little resemblance to the facts.

And confronted with a situation utterly at odds with that storyline … he stayed with the myth.

What infuriates me about this situation is that the people who were the most rabid Obama supporters, racing around intimidating anyone who opposed The Precious, spreading lies about HRC, gaming caucuses and rigging votes, justified their actions be claiming that HRC was just a front for right-wing interests and would run an administration identical to the one Obama is running now, whereas he would be the reincarnation of the pantheon of Democratic greats all rolled into one. These are often the same people who failed to vote for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004, again claiming that there was "no difference" between them and Bush, that they weren't liberal enough, etc. Gore in particular was singled out for this kind of treatment.

Obama is wholly captured by the conservative myth of the strong entrepreneurial Republicans leading the nation out of the divisive, wasteful wilderness of the weak Democrats. He said so in his campaign, he has said so every day of his administration, and he may very well bring about the end of the Democratic Party given his determination to follow in Saint Ronnie's footsteps.

Anglachel

Media Darlings and Policy Disasters

A pattern I'm noticing among former Obama cheerleaders is how quick they are to subsume Obama to Clinton. BTD scornfully dismisses him as a Clinton Democrat, for example, and now Sirota (is it funny that my spell check wants to change "Sirota" into "scrotum"?) is rolling him back into the Clinton/DC/Third Way borg. He has disappointed them, he is no longer top-drawer goods, so now they paint him with the worst epithet they can pull out of their kit-bag - Clinton Democrat.

None of these esteemed pundits appears willing to cop to the fact that Obama is being completely consistent with what he campaigned on - a platform of feel-good rah-rah and center-right policies, coupled to a deliberate rejection of identification with the Democratic party. Obama was a transformational figure only in their self-indulgent wet dreams. (BTD in particular has no grounds to complain as he explicitly said the reason to support Obama was his media darling status, not his policies.) They supported Obama in order to defeat HRC, and, rather like Obama himself, failed to consider the all important closing line of The Candidate "What do we do now?"

Olbermann Out

Falstaff says it best: "Keith, we knew ye all too well. Richly deserved -- but for rather different reasons. This is like getting Capone on tax evasion."

Here are my reasons:

• Falsies -May 13, 2009
• Women They Love to Hate -November 14, 2008
• The Lady Killers - October 15, 2008
• Metaphor? No, Murder. - April 25, 2008 
• Olbermann Calls for Clinton's Murder - April 24, 2008

Anglachel

WKJM's Frustration

A friend sent me a link to a TPM editorial post by WKJM where the pool boy claims "Now, before saying anything else, let me say that there's never been a bigger fan of Bill Clinton's than me (though I had some wavering in 2008)." before launching into a totally bizarre put down of , well, you tell me (I'll provide the entire post so it is all in context):

A report surfaced today that Bill Clinton is frustrated as heck that the Dems can't manage to get a coherent or persuasive message together for the midterms. And he's even doing what he can to get together good talking points for candidates and stump in all the right places to help save the Democratic majorities even if the current leaders can't manage it themselves.

Now, before saying anything else, let me say that there's never been a bigger fan of Bill Clinton's than me (though I had some wavering in 2008). And I've never doubted his intuitive political skills, which make him -- whatever else you think of him -- one of the consummate, defining political players of the 20th century. And, as you've seen if you've read what I've written over the last three months, I've been distressed by the Democrats' inability or unwillingness to grasp hold of what winning political issues there are in such a rough climate.

Popular is as Popular Does

I laughed out loud at lunch today when I read this article in the LA Times, Clinton outshines Obama as campaign trail surrogate, poll finds:

According to a Gallup Poll released Tuesday, more voters of all political persuasions said they were more likely to back a candidate if Democrat Clinton campaigned for him or her, than if the campaigner were President Obama, who is fighting to keep Democrats in control of Congress.

The poll found that 53% of Democrats said Clinton’s personal endorsement would carry weight compared to 48% who said Obama’s would. On the negative side, 5% of Democrats said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate if Clinton campaigned, while 6% said they would be more hostile if it were Obama. The differences between those numbers translates into what the poll said was a net of 48 for Clinton and 42 for Obama.

Clinton and Obama fare less well with Republicans and independents but the former president, free of the burden of actually being in office and having to make tough decisions, again gets the edge. Neither Democrat carries much weight with either group, but Clinton is less hurtful by a ratio of about 2 to 1 among Republicans.

Among independents, 21% said they'd be more likely to vote for a candidate who was baked by Clinton compared to 12% who said the same about Obama.

Idiocracy

The Incomparable One, Bob Somerby, uses Tom Friedman as an example to deliver a nice swift kick to the so-called liberal media (mostly my emphasis):

As we talk, can we offer some context? Friedman announces, this very day, that the Whitewater “scandal” was bogus. His announcement is less than timely:

• It has now been seventeen years since the first bungled Whitewater story appeared—on the front page of Friedman’s own newspaper.
• It has now been fifteen years since Harper’s published “Fool for Scandal,” an article by Gene Lyons. Lyons’ piece debunked the New York Times’ bungled work. Harper’s is a rather well-known American journal of thought.
• It has now been fifteen years since Lyons published an op-ed column, “The Non-Scandal That Won’t Quit,” in the Washington Post, a well-known newspaper.
• It has been thirteen years since Harper’s published Lyons’ book, Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater.
• It has been nine years since the publication of The Hunting of the President, by Lyons and Joe Conason.

In short, Friedman is rather late to the game with today’s announcement. But that’s exactly how things work inside an idiocracy! Inside the mainstream press corps, everybody knew the rules in the 1990s—you had to bury Lyons’ work, which went right after the mainstream press corps. By now, a great many years have passed. At long last, it’s safe for store-bought fellows like Friedman to tell Times readers the truth—but only in passing, of course.

Let’s be fair! We only single Friedman out because his column appears today. On Monday night, the gruesome dandy Lawrence O’Donnell played a related game on Countdown. And of course, that program’s $5 million man ran off and hid in the late 1990s, blubbering in the arms of Roger Ailes rather than staying to tell the truth about what was happening around him. (Olbermann publicly apologized to Ailes for criticizing Matt Drudge, then accepted big-bucks employment at Fox Sports. He kept his pretty trap shut tight all through the Clinton impeachment and the subsequent War Against Gore. Today, of course, he’s on your side—paid $5 million to play there.)

In short, the “liberal” world played the lead role in the hunting down of Clinton, then Gore. You may live in an idiocracy if:

The people who agreed to perform those tasks can be hailed as “liberal” giants, with no questions ever asked.

On Monday, we thought Paul Krugman was right on target, as he typically is—but insufficiently shrill. Yes, it’s striking when a society refuses to discuss climate change. But in fact, your society can’t discuss any issue! Bob Herbert can’t discuss education; to this day, we have seen no one attempt to explain the gonzo state of our health care spending. It isn’t that we don’t discuss it well. We don’t discuss it at all!

This morning, Friedman makes a rather odd statement. “[M]e wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer,” he clumsily says. He wonders whether we can do that? Isn’t the truth rather clear?

In the midst of all this idiocracy, the liberal world still hails the people who conspired to take down Clinton, then Gore. No questions are asked of our liberal heroes, who now play progressives on TV! They, no less than Roman Polanksi, have remained free to roam the world. Now, Polanski has stepped in a trap. Their free range continues.

Now that it is clear that neither Bill nor Hillary Clinton has any intention of leaving the world stage, and even more clear that to the degree Obama has any effectiveness outside of his fawning circle, it is due in great part to the support they are giving him, suddenly the chattering class is beginning to wonder if maybe, just maybe, they missed some boat.

But Somerby's point, the one that was driven home by the campaign of 2008, is that the so-called liberal media is driven by celebrity, not by politics and sure as hell not by facts. Like Polanski, their freedom is based on the confidence that other members of the tribe - members like Olbermann and Friedman, Dowd and Maddow - will not turn on them and expose them to judgment. The spoil sports, like Lyons, Conason, Krugman and the Incomparable One himself, are ostracized, ignored and treated as beyond the pale. Shrill! Like the Polanski apologists, the popular "liberal" punditocracy secretly (and not so secretly) approve of the violations they witness others of the tribe perform, preferring to blame the victims for their less than pure states to identifying the lies, the crimes and the preferential treatment the attackers deploy to excuse their acts.

The A-list blogosphere had the opportunity to align itself with the truth tellers or to comfortably ensconce themselves as the pool boys and cabana babes of Versailles. We know where they have thrown in their towels. The failure of Democrats to make headway against the Movement Conservative onslaught is partially their responsibility as willing enablers of Versailles and as participants in the persistent demonization of Clinton Democrats. It is the political equivalent of slut-shaming, and it is not mistake that the same bloggers who hate everything Clinton are also so cool with misogyny. It is the same pattern of behavior - domination masquerading as morality. Meanwhile, the vast rightwing conspiracy continues to utilize every media channel to promote their anti-D/democratic ideology and move their agenda forward despite being rejected by the majority of the nation.

Whole Foods Nation holds as an object of contempt a particular slice of the nation that fails to be sufficiently cultured for their tastes and spurns the popular heros of that culture, even when it is clearly the way to hold substantial political power with a minimum of political compromise. Their cultural contempt for people who just won't see that defense of their celebrity hero is worth some fucked over females is paradigmatic of their politics as well.

That is idiocracy.

Anglachel

And Who is Getting Vetted?

Slowly easing back into blogging, gang.

Thanks for all the replies on the previous post. I think people took the question a bit too literally. It was more about the political imagination and how the narrative of the campaign in the minds of the viewers was constructed. Both camps tried to control and channel the phenomenon, but neither were running that show.

Different topic now. So it appears good old Judas Richardson has some corruption scandal to deal with and he is withdrawing his name from consideration as a cabinet secretary. The Spousal Unit and I had placed bets as to who would be the first Precious appointee to bite the dust and we both said Richardson, but I had joked it would happen before the nomination was confirmed. Little did I know...

Hmm, maybe all cabinet appointees need to be vetted as thoroughly as Hillary. I realize that the Obama administration doesn't actually care about venality, corruption and hostile workplace environments, but it would make them look a little more competant if all their hoopla about wanting to avoid drama meant something besides public hazing of the Clintons.

Just a thought.

Anglachel

Dignity of the Office

There are good discussions of the Favreau photo showing Obama's chief speechwriter and another Obama staffer performing lewd acts on a cutout photo of Hillary Clinton, with Favreau grabbing Sen. Clinton's breast while the other staffer grabs her hair and forces her to chug beer. See posts one, two and three on Alegre's Corner, and posts at one and two at Corrente, Feminist Law Professors, Historiann, Shakesville and TalkLeft. My opinion of Favreau himself is that he finds denegration through sexual molestation a neat-o thing, and I pity those who have to deal with him on a daily basis. I am a little unclear on when the photo was taken (Before June? Near the convention? Before the election? Within the last few weeks?) and I am also uncertain about his employment status (Is he currently chief speech writer? Applying for a job at State?), but these are subsidiary concerns, things that slightly increase or decrease the offensiveness of the image but do not change the political circumstances of the revelation of the image.

The question of Favreau himself (well discussed at the above linked blogs) may be getting most of the attention but that is not where the political issues lie. The political question remains: what will Obama do with this challenge to his authority? Does he have the political acumen and self-assurance to make a well-timed example of someone who has been important to the campaign?

The stance Obama takes towards Favreau will have repercussions. To say "Sorry, this behavior does not measure up to this administration's standards, can't have this around," would clearly communicate some serious expectations for executive staff performance and workplace environment. To fail to do so will damage the administration.

The reluctance to act upon the irreducible fact of this photo is paradigmatic of Obama's political behavior. He is loath to spend political capital to do the right thing if that thing involves an implicit (let alone explicit) criticism of himself. This is one of the reasons the Rev. Wright situation dragged on as long as it did. The desire to not be wrong overshadows the desire to do what is right, particularly if there is political advantage (real or imagined) to be wrung from the wrong. I compare this political tendency - wait out bad news and see if it will resolve itself - to the behavior of banks that have reaped a windfall from the Hanky Panky. They have capital but will not put it at any risk even when the long term danger for failing to do so dwarfs any immediate penalty. The Village snickers at Hillary's degradation, shills like Campbell Brown want HRC to act out their own private revenge fantasies instead of behave like a public figure of stature, and the public is distracted by the collapsing economy. It must be tempting to see if this situation can be toughed out.

What should be an opportunity to set a number of political expectations is being allowed to slide down the memory hole to defend the imagined hoard of capital.

But this isn't a campaign and we are talking serious, high-stakes politics. Hillary Rodham Clinton is not an electoral adversary, nor is she just another senator. By virtue of her appointment as Secretary of State, she is the representative of the United States to the world. She embodies American policy and reliability to other sovereign nations. To allow this image of her being treated with disrespect by a close associate of the president, someone who appears to be on track as a member of the administration, says two things to the nations and diplomats she will engage:

1. Go ahead, piss on her. We do.
2. We don't respect you enough to send someone we respect to treat with you.

Had this photo come out during the campaign, it could have been kept an individual matter, dimissed (however disingenuously) as the unfortunate side effect of a highly competitive contest. But now Hillary has been named Secretary of State and the revelation of the contempt under these circumstances carries a different meaning. This image is no longer about her. This is not a situation of her making. It is an act of denegration towards her. She cannot respond to it politically because, while it is a personal insult, it is not her political predicament.

It is about defending the dignity and authority of a cabinet officer, which is identical with defending the dignity and authority of the administration as such. It is about Obama's ability to maintain order and enforce discipline. In this case, the president is responsible for defending the nation, as represented by a member of his cabinet, from violation and degredation. That the acts were perfomed on a cardboard cutout should increase awareness of the symbolic import of an assault upon a representation of the country. People have mentioned (and even Photoshopped in) faces of other women, which misses the point. The correct reshuffling of that image would be to have foreign nationals in the place of the staffers. What is done to the Secretary of State is done to the nation.

As I mentioned above, it is not clear when the picture was taken but that is irrelevant. The repercussions of this demonstration of disrespect are happening now.

The dignity, efficacy and authority of the office is at stake.

Anglachel

Focus of Attention

Hillary will be Secretary of State.

Something I find fascinating about that article is the URL. The name of the file is "01clinton.html". The article is about the "security" (note - not foreign policy) team that Obama has assembled, yet it is filed under Hillary's name. This makes me think about a few things.

The chattering class and their avid readers in Whole Foods Nation are still more obsessed with their internal demons than with the fate of the nation. Stanley Fish's article on calumny aimed at the Clintons is as relevant today as when it was first published, and this is a danger to liberal politics. The fault line within the Democratic Party remains.

Next, the Neocons have succeeded in getting international relations and foreign policy intrepreted as police actions. It's not a policy team, it's a security team. The parts of the article not drooling over the presumed battle against the evil Clintons plays up the toughness and hawkishness of the new team, with emphasis on terrorism rather than the true international danger, which is the world wide collapse of economies.

The problematic emphasis on the Bush-style use of terrorism (The bad guys are gunna git you if you don't give us what we want) that so many of the Very Serious People want to promulgate, as though the problem with Bush/Cheney was the mode of execution and not the foreign and domestic policy objectives, focuses on the guys caught on video camera in train stations and hotel lobbies, the viscerally menacing Other, all too like the raging shooters at schools and malls. This terrorism is photogenic, adapts well to endless video loops on CNN, and allows the talking heads to hyperventilate.

What we don't see is the struggle for power in Pakistan, where the military continues to defy the civilian government, and where decades old US-USSR cold war operations continue to generate blowback. The Vale of Kashmir may be the single most dangerous flashpoint on the planet at the moment. We have an incoming president who has repeatedly voiced critical and belligerant opinions about Pakistan. We now have a Secretary of State who has connections to the (note relative term) more democratic elements in the country. And this is just one of the foreign policy challenges facing the new administration.

It may send WKJM into apoplexy, but the worst job in the world has been put into very good hands.

Anglachel

Pandora's Box

So the NYT is saying that Hillary will be Secretary of State. I am, of course, intrigued and pleased by the prospect, but note that I won't believe it until the official announcement. Indeed, I won't actually believe it until the confirmation hearings are completed and she takes the oath of office.

What I expect to see for the next week is mass hysteria among the Whole Foods Nation crowd who won't accept that this can be a legitimate appointment. The CDS will get worse, not better. They will do everything in their power to try to derail the nomination.

I don't have time for a longer post this moment. If you have not been reading Bob Somerby this week, go there right now (he's linked in the sidebar) and read very carefully what he has to say about CDS. The opposition to HRC as Secretary of State is rooted in the green light Obama himself gave to using irrational hatred as an acceptable political tool against other Democrats. (And this is why BTD is wrong about the conduct of the campaign.) Somerby appears to be the only critical analyst around who understands the implications of this.

Obama opened Pandora's box, allowing the pestilence of right-wing CDS to set up shop in the heart of left politics.

Anglachel

The Stupidity that is CDS

Paul Krugman takes a whack at the latest round of CDS:

Clinton business issues

Everywhere you look, there’s stuff about Bill Clinton’s donors and all that, often with the implication that there must inherently be something dirty going on, because, well, just because.

But I guess that’s just the way things are. After all, do you remember all the grief President Bush got over his family’s questionable business ties?

Neither do I.

Any blogger who participates in the continued hunting of President Clinton by the right wing and the MSM rather than helping to shoot down the bullshit demonstrates that he's no different than Matt Drudge. Period.

The pernicious effect of CDS is that it has convinced vast swaths of the chattering class that the source of corruption in American politics is the Clintons, and that anything except them in a position of power is preferable to either of them having any authority, even if that means Republicans or a Democrat who insists on keeping the political opposition with their hands in the cookie jar.

The disconnect between their hysterical paranoia and reality would be amusing if it was not continually endangering the nation.

Without CDS, would we have had W in the White House? I think not.

Anglachel

Effective Democratic Government

We're laughing our asses off around Casa Anglachel after reading this article: Several Early Choices Have Clinton Pedigree:

Barack Obama argued for months that victory for his opponent would be akin to a third term for President Bush. But as he embarks on his own presidency, Mr. Obama faces the challenge of building an administration that does not look like a third term for former President Bill Clinton.

Obama has never had to do anything in his public life except run for election. He has no background in administration and no team of people who can help him with that. He's got a bunch of intellectuals and talking-head courtiers surrounding him, plus the second tier losers from the Clinton administration who all wanted to get back at people who weren't nice to them last time. Guess what?

But this is only the beginning of a delicate balancing act for Mr. Obama: between bringing a new generation of leadership to Washington as a signal of his commitment to his pledge to change politics, and recruiting, at a time of intense economic and national security challenges, from the biggest pool of Democrats with national executive branch experience. ...

As he looks to build a presidency from scratch, Mr. Obama recognizes that he needs at least some of the expertise of the Clinton circles, advisers said. Most telling was his decision even before the election to tap Mr. Podesta, founder and president of the Center for American Progress, a Washington group widely viewed as Mrs. Clinton’s government-in-waiting until she lost.

Mr. Podesta put together an extensive team to plan for a possible Obama transition; not counting Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s representatives, all 10 members of the advisory board served in the Clinton administration. Still, some of them held relatively low-level positions in the Clinton era and were not identified so personally with the former president. And now Mr. Podesta is being joined by two co-chairmen, Valerie Jarrett and Pete Rouse, who are both close to Mr. Obama.

All the blogospheric people who have made an industry out of Clinton bashing and demonizing Bill's administration while refusing to hold anyone else accountable and who have been at the forefront of proclaiming what incredible change The Precious will bring to Washington are now having to deal with the very basic fact that the new preznit won't be able to do jack shit without using the people Left Blogistan loves to hate.

It's only The Village and the self-appointed "experts" (often members of the media or else Ivory Tower academics, all of them the worst kind of Stevensonians) of Left Blogistan who hate Clinton and Gore (and for pretty much the same reasons - their joint fantasy that they are opposing white trash racists) and who insist the Clinton administration was a failure. The rest of us can see that it held the line against the Movement Conservatives and would have done more save for the backstabbing of a complacent Congress. We can rationally criticize Clinton's administration without falling prey to CDS, which is why we can both be pleased to see some real policy wonks may be running the show and mock the Obamacans for having to confront the vacuity of their preferred candidate's political vision.

Big Dog's speech at the convention, the speech that actually defined the Democratic agenda according to a coherent, humane, and actionable ideology, remains the touch stone for what Democrats need to do to become the preferred choice for government, not just a way to reject the Movement Conservatives. The way to do that is not by hoping for change, but by getting over the internal culture wars of the party, rejecting the CDS of the Left as well as the Right, and building on the foundation that has already been laid.

Those of us who already started the change 16 years ago are waiting for the rest of you to catch up. We are the change you have been waiting for.

Anglachel

Dependencies

If the Incomparable Bob Somerby were truly just a "crank", as the Blogger Boyz would have you believe, then they would not feel so threatened by him.

Bob is not an easy blogger to read. He has an ornate, almost baroque, manner of writing that grates. He is repetitive and could benefit from an editor to help him get to the point. Sometimes the connections to Gore are a bit of a stretch. The sarcasm gets laid on with a trowel instead of a butter knife.

But what makes me wade through the stylistic annoyances is the simple fact that Bob Somerby is incomparable because he always tells the truth. With documentation. And he tells the truth about all participants in the media atrocities, even those ostensibly on his side, the nominal allies.

Somerby has a fundamental argument about the treatment of liberals (aside - I love that Somerby is unafraid to say "liberal" as a solid and respectable political stance.) and the Democratic Party by the media that he alludes to, but does not flatly state, preferring to demonstrate than to assert. He does it again in his rejoinder to Kevin Drum in todays post, "We’ll tell the truth starting now, Kevin says. To our mind, that isn’t enough," where he gives Kevin Drum sincere praise and then uses Drum's excuses to get into his real concern (My emphasis throughout):

If we’re talking about media treatment of Gore, “occasional passing references” won’t really be “fine;” most often, such references will be met with incomprehension by voters who have never heard a word about any such episode. ... In this way, the liberal silence of the Clinton-Gore era—a silence Kevin doesn’t explain—has created a world where it’s very hard for liberals to mention such matters. And of course, it wasn’t just the War Against Gore which fell down the well of career liberal silence; a long string of Major Dems have been treated rather oddly by the mainstream press in the past sixteen years. (Or do you believe that the Clintons are murderers?) Before the Drum-acknowledged “War Against Gore,” we had six or seven years of pseudo-scandals directed at Bill Clinton—and at his wife. But uh-oh! Career liberals ran and hid then too—and they ran and hid in 2007 when Hillary Clinton was subjected to a good deal of mainstream attack. Tim Russert had been field-dressing Big Dems for years when he waylaid Clinton during that October 2007 debate (along with his helpmate, Brian Williams). But career liberals had rarely mentioned such conduct—and few career liberals mentioned the trashing Russert gave Clinton that night.

Especially given the history which followed, the mainstream press corps’ War Against Gore has turned out to be the most consequential chapter in this unfortunate story. But career liberals rolled over and died in the face of such conduct, right through this year’s primary season! In fact, career liberals have an extensive history of rolling over and accepting such conduct. Their acquiescence extends well past the War Against Gore, right up into the present. ...

For reason Kevin didn’t explain, career liberals sat out the War Against Gore—and the wars against both Clintons, and much of the nonsense aimed at John Edwards. Career liberals also stared into space as the mainstream press corps spent a decade making a hero of Saint John McCain; christened Giuliani as “America’s Mayor;” and kept insisting that Bush 43 was a plain-spoken fellow who says what he means, a pose it maintained until his dissembling and gruesome judgment had largely destroyed the known world. On the whole, the career liberal world sat and stared during all these mainstream press misadventures. By way of contrast, we discussed them in real time. We started discussing the War Against Gore the week it began; simultaneously, we discussed the sanctification of McCain in detail. In all candor, this makes it a bit rich to be lectured by Kevin—whose work we do in fact greatly admire—about the best way for the liberal world to move ahead now with these themes. How about a little straight talk? Kevin has now worked for two journals which did and said virtually nothing about these matters in real time. We’d prefer to see him explain this abject past silence, rather than lecture us about future strategies—lecture us, the ones who were right, by his own (gracious) admission.

Yes, it’s hard to raise these matters now, several years after the fact. Kevin tells us that “occasional passing references are fine.” But someone needs to tell Naomi Judd (and a hundred million others) about her country’s actual history. Let’s be clear: When Kevin discusses the War Against Gore (or the preceding war on the Clintons), he’s discussing essential American history—history his colleagues avoided like the plague when it was actually happening. In our view, it falls to Kevin and his colleagues to figure out how to adjust for that error—the error which Kevin acknowledges. (For the record, he wasn’t a journalist at the time.) But make no mistake: This is major, consequential American history—history which changed the course of world affairs. It just doesn’t work for Kevin to say that it’s too late to bring it up now.

We’ll tell the truth from now on, Kevin says. We don’t think that’s quite enough. ...

Here’s the thing you must understand if you want to see how this syndrome works: Your career liberal world is closely tied to the world of the Village press corps. They want to work and play (and be paid) in that world; they want to be honored as Village citizens. As a result, they keep their mouths shut when Palin is pimped—like the great Saint McCain before her. You will not see them challenge Robinson, or ask him why he wrote such nonsense. Nor will you see them write the history of a perfect cretin like Matthews. You see, they want to play Hardball too. It’s the way career libs build careers.

We know, we know—you want to believe that you play on a one-for-all liberal/progressive team. But you have been sold, a million times, by Kevin’s colleagues (we don’t include Kevin, out on the far coast).

They want to play Hardball, too.

Somerby is talking most directly about the Blogger Boyz, but his criticism is not limited to PB 1.0. He is talking about the people who are the regulars on the talking heads circuit. He's talking about the second tier bureaucrats who traded pseudo-scandal for insider notoriety. He's talking about the columnists in papers and magazines, particularly the political magazines and politicized culture purveyors. He's talking about the current leadership of the party.

His thesis is simple and devastating: There can be no liberal politics as long as the public voices and faces of liberalism, the career liberals, want to be "honored as Village citizens." They place Village citizenship above actual citizenship, allying themselves with this power elite against the nation.

This is a deeper problem than mere careerism. If it were only the case that the Josh Marshalls and Young Ezras and Big Media Matts of Left Blogistan wanted to move out of their cheap digs and get paying jobs with health benefits and 401(k) plans, that would be easy enough to isolate. Kiss up, kick down, good riddance to ya.

What Bob identifies is that the career liberals, those people whose business it should be to describe, define, and implement a liberal vision for the nation, have no critical distance from or desire to remain independent of The Village, the clique and culture that is enamored of winners, power, and domination, and who regard national politics as their personal playground. The career liberals willingly place themselves in a dependent relationship to that power elite and mold their behavior, opinions and goals to be in accord with what The Village is willing to tolerate.

Hence Somerby's emphasis on Gore. Gore's stolen presidency has changed the course of human affairs dramatically for the worse. This was an enormous historic event, one that had devastating consequences for the nation and the world, and the career liberals have done their best to sweep it under the rug. Don't be sore losers! It's old history. Nobody cares about that stuff anymore. The focus on Gore is the stand in for a focus on the fate of the nation. Here was one of the finest people our nation has produced, and he was reduced to the butt of jokes by his nominal allies in exchange for the opportunity to munch cocktail weenies with Tim Russert. The trashing of the Clintons, who Somerby has less emotional attachment to, is coming to greater prominence in his posts as he limns an identical pattern of behavior. We know this narrative, we know how it is used to dismantle our institutions and the fabric of our government and, this time, we knew full well what we were doing.

The willingness of the career liberals to throw away the criminal treatment of three of the strongest actors in liberal politics Somerby attributes to the careerists' willingness to set aside truth to gain entry to the Village. How does Somerby formulate it? "The instinctive refusal to tell the truth lies at the heart of their culture."

This is not merely a description of the MSM. This is Bob's diagnosis of the disease that has claimed the ostensible left.

Kevin kinda gets it when he says we need to complain about media misbehavior today, but not bother with trying to defend Gore "in the last century," as if we were discussing newspaper articles about Al Smith. Gore remains a potent national figure who could very well have run in 2004 or this year, but who would have been subjected to exactly the treatment Kevin rolls his eyes at. It is exactly the behavior we saw this year against Hillary, so it isn't old news at all. It isn't news - it is a pattern of behavior, an aggressor/appeaser dependency between the right-wing owned MSM and the career liberals who want to be Kewl Kids and not be villified in the papers.

The liberal left needs to establish an oppositional relationship with the MSM, just as the Movement Conservatives have done, and treat them not as allies, but as adversaries.

Anglachel

It's Not Their Place

Garry Trudeau reminds us all of the (in)famous article by The Village Queen Bee, Sally Quinn:

There's trashing and then there is trashing.

The Villagers were all afraid of the hicks from the hinterlands coming in and breaking the fine china:

Jackson was the first President to invite the public to attend the White House ball honoring his first inauguration. Many poor people came to the inaugural ball in their homemade clothes. The crowd became so large that Jackson's guards could not hold them out of the White House. The White House became so crowded with people that dishes and decorative pieces in the White House began to break. Some people stood on good chairs in muddied boots just to get a look at the President. The crowd had become so wild that the attendants poured punch in tubs and put it on the WhiteHouse lawn to lure people out of the White House. Jackson’s raucous populism earned him the nickname King Mob.

The Villagers looked at the selection of the chimperor as a reverse Jackson, installing the scion of a previous occupier from their own class to undo the "populist" damage of the Bubba from Arkansas. They cheered the coronation of C+ Augustus, who has most assiduously defended their class interests against the bottom 90% of the population. They eagerly joined Bush in trashing the economy, the nation's international integrity, the readiness of the military, the privacy of the population, the health of the environment. All that mattered to them, all that still matters to them, is putting the people they consider their social inferiors in their place.

The Village's selection of The Precious as their favored candidate should not be mistaken for any changing attitude towards the inferior and undeserving and most certainly not for approval of liberal democratic values. The praise for Obama is due to his embrace of High Broderism and his willingness to be a Very Serious Person on subjects like American military presence in the Middle East, Universal Health Care, privacy rights, regulation of corporations, and the social safety net generally.

Regard the media carefully. They did a lot of praising of Bush for his persona and folksy appeal while turning a blind eye to the rapacious assualt on the nation's wealth by the Movement Conservatives and being active cheerleaders for the Neocon assault on the rest of the world. Bush himself for most of it was treated as an affable, likeable onlooker to the bad things (assuming they were reported as bad or even at all) those other people (Cheney, Powell, Feith, Santorum, McConnell, Rumsfeld, Delay, et. al.) were doing.

Here is the narrative we will hear as regards The Precious - Oh, those bad, extremist, ideological Congressional Democrats, in the pocket of "special interests," refusing to support the oh-so-moderate and resonable requests of The Dear Leader. He's trying to be bi-partisan and they keep insisting on their populist agenda. They can't be doing this for rational reasons. [sotto voce It's because they are racists, you know.] If only they would see the need to impose austerity measures to restore confidence in the markets, and understand we need to stay in Afghanistan to confront terrorism, and quit trying to strangle business and innovation with those regulations.

The enemy will remain the lower classes, the people who trash things because they are trash, the Democrats will continue to be beaten up as the enemies of the state, and The Village's courtier culture will continue unabated, indeed, augmented by the willing cooperation of the Blogger Boyz.

Bob Somerby will remain very busy documenting the atrocities.

Anglachel

Losers

Kevin Drum recently posted from his new digs at Mother Jones, complaining about Bob Somerby:

But here's what I don't get: why does Bob think that liberals are giving away a "giant political advantage" by not harping on this constantly? Frankly, I'd be delighted to harp away if I actually thought this was one of the top 100 issues that might help the future of liberalism, but it's not, is it? Media criticism in general helps our side, but what exactly would it gain us to relate everything back to Al Gore's decade-old mistreatment with the Ahab-like intensity that Bob does? Wouldn't it just cause everyone to tune us out as cranks and fogeys? Anyone care to weigh in on this, on either side?

C'mon, Bob, stop being a crank and an old fogey! You're really harshing the mellow here. Can't you just move on, like the rest of us Iraq War supporters have, and understand that we don't care if Al Gore was robbed? I mean, he's a boring crank, too, and it really puts a damper on the cocktail weenie circuit if you bring up his name.

Bob Somerby may take the treatment of Gore a little too personally, given that he is a close friend, but the foundation of his argument is far more sound than the shaky underpinnings of the Blogger Boyz. Indeed, haven't we just watched a repeat of the same phenomenon, with the press going apeshit about the horrible, lying, murderous Hillary monster who wants our Precious destroyed? Kevin asked for a response, and Bob provided one:

And no, there really aren’t “100 issues” that would better serve “the future of liberalism.” It’s absolutely, completely absurd that Kevin would say such a thing.

Repeating: Most voters have never heard a word about the situation Kevin described. For that reason, they’re strongly inclined to believe the GOP’s relentless complaints about bias. They hear endless claims about bias toward Palin; they never hear a single word about what was done to the Clintons and Gore. Surely, Kevin knows why that is. Once again, let’s make sure that we all understand:

In the early 1990s, conservative power was sweeping through Washington. In large part, this took the form of endless, nasty attacks against both Clintons. They were both liars; they were both sex fiends; why, they hung decorative condoms on the White House Christmas tree. Beyond that, of course, they were murderers. By 1999, large blocks of cable “news” time were being devoted to this insanity. And go ahead, Kevin—when you “come down,” you can check it out! When Hardball and Hannity pimped those vile murders, not a single career liberal player offered one word of protest.

By 1999, there was simply nothing you couldn’t say—as long as you said it about the Clintons. And then, about Candidate Gore.

The mainstream press corps accepted all this; indeed, they were the principal malefactors. So, of course, did your “liberal leaders”—weak, unprincipled, hackworthy men who run with the Sally Quinn crowd.

And they refused all enlightenment. In 1996, Gene Lyons published Fools for Scandal (How the Media Invented Whitewater), the most important political book of the decade. But go ahead—try to find a single reference to Lyons’ book in your “liberal journals.” And go ahead—see what those same fiery journals did when Gene and Joe Conason published The Hunting of the President in early 2000. Of course, you probably know what they did—they all agreed to keep their traps shut. By that time, these broken-souled losers had completely rolled over for those joint RNC/MSM narratives. They had adopted their masters’ commands. To this day, they have never looked back—or wanted you to do so. Candidate Gore had every advantage, Josh told you in 2002.

Beyond that, see what they did when the MSM turned its sights on Candidate Gore. In March 1999, it seamlessly happened—the venom aimed at President Clinton was instantly, seamlessly transferred to Gore. And what did your liberal leaders do? Some ran and hid—and some played along! Indeed, the Bradley campaign was built around dishonest panders to the insider press corps about their hatred of Clinton and Gore. And the “left” of your party played this sick game. By December 1999, the Bradley campaign was even pretending that Gore had been responsible for the gruesome Willie Horton debacle. Disgracefully, Bradley himself began to say this the next month—even though he’d said the opposite, in some detail, in his own 1996 book. But so what? One pundit challenged this balls-out lying. Sadly, it was Morton Kondracke. Every good “liberal” shut up.

That’s right! The weak-willed men at your “liberal journals” went along with this deeply unprincipled trashing. You can still find their names on those mastheads. And oh yes! You can find the U.S. Army deeply entrenched in Iraq.

Sorry, kids! The American public will never think we’re “cranks and fogeys” because “we harp on this so much!” Let’s be frank: The public will never hear this at all, because our leaders will never tell them about the disgraceful things they did in thrall to MSM power and influence. They won’t mention Ceci or “Kit;” indeed, when Ceci and Kit got briefly criticized in the summer of 2000, Jane Mayer heroically jumped in the stew, saying it was all due to sexism! (Happy with how that bullsh*t worked out?) For these reasons, “media bias” remains a powerful tool—a powerful tool for the GOP. They’re playing this card very hard this week—because it’s one of their strongest.

Last week, Naomi Judd began telling voters that no one has ever been trashed like Palin. Quite naturally, voters tend to believe such claims, because they’ve never heard anything different. In our view, Mother Jones should call Mother Judd and tell her the things he wrote in that post. We’ll offer this one small guess to Kevin: You’ll likely find Judd a damn sight more honest than the players who work in your yard.

“Liberal bias” is a powerful card, a card they’ve spent fifty years perfecting. They play this card because it works; it keeps working because our side has refused to debunk it. As we’ve long said, we refuse to tell the public the truth about the press corps’ recent conduct. One side keeps saying things which are bogus. And one side won’t say what is true.

Conservative power blew into town—and the millionaire “press corps” bowed down before it. To this day, the career liberal world won’t tell the public the facts about what happened next. Mother Judd has never heard a word about the matters Kevin described. And, with Mother Jones fretting so hard, it’s quite clear that she never will. ...

One side plays this game to win. On the other side, Kevin is palling around with careerists.

We've seen it happen all over again this year, except that it was conducted inside of the so called liberal political arena.

If I have a criticism of the Incomparable One, it is that his analysis does not extend much beyond his presentation of the fact of the Left's cooperation with the Right's maniacal jihad against the Clintons and Al Gore. Then again, that's not his objective. He has set for himself the sisyphean task of simply telling the truth. It is people like Bob that Hannah Arendt means when she says "Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs." He is a trustworthy witness testifying about the facts on the ground, no matter the desire of the courtiers to dismiss the destruction of political accountability.

But the question remains - why has the intelligentsia of the Left turned so implacably against people whose stated policies and observable acts are not substantively different than those who won that group's support? The embrace of The Precious shows that it is not merely the media being anti-Democrat - they loved him from the get-go and are eager to see him coronated in exactly the way they lusted for Bush in 2000. I think the answer has come out this year that the bias is class and acculturation. Upper class, cool, urbane, and not too interested in the details. That's for the underlings to handle.

It's the politics of people whose need for government resources and services are at a remove but substantial, like defending a financial system, rather than immediate and actually fairly modest, like some help paying the heating bills when the fuel companies price gouge. It is a politics that is disdainful of people in need. It doesn't like people who aren't from the right class and culture, and is suspicious of people who think too much about how to fix things that threaten people in need. It admires those who use power to take what they want.

As I said before, it is a politics of catering to the winners rather than defending the losers. What offends the Drums and Marshalls and other "pro-war before we were anti-war" suck-ups on the Left most about Somerby is that he keeps defending a "loser." Al may have won back some of these guys with the environmentalism and Nobel prize, but fundamentally they all still despise Gore as a loser, and they thought of him this way before the debacle of 2000.

They want their own Reagan, someone who will make them stop feeling like losers, even if it means losing touch with the principles they claim to hold.

Anglachel

Update - Also read Vast Left's latest on Corrente, When windmills attack, is it quixotic to notice?

Sullied

The Incomparable Bob Somerby is one of the very few voices in Left Blogistan who rejects all truthiness and is willing to turn his criticism on his fellow bloggers for their unseemly desire to move out of remote blogospheric hamlets and into The Village. His take down today of Josh Marshall (no more jokes about who kidnapped him) is a thing of beauty, "Will someone stop Josh Marshall before he defends Bush again?"

Somerby reviews Josh's bizarre insistence that John McCain's campaign is worse than anything seen in American politics in 35 years, including Marshall's casual defense of both Bushes' excrable campaigns. I think Somerby misses a small point, that Marshall is not thinking of Nixon as the worst campaign, but of George Wallace. Why? Because it fits with the meta-narrative of dividing the electoral world into racists and non-racists, instead of into conservatives and liberals, or Republicans and Democrats, or some other issue-based form of political categorization.

Key Somerby quotes (but read the whole thing, it is powerful):

Here’s the rest of Josh’s original post—a post which helps define the broken soul of emerging “progressive” culture: [long cite of how the Bushes weren't involved in the Willie Horton or the Swift Boat Veterans smears.] That concluded Josh’s original post. It’s why this guy has to go.

First, it’s astounding to see the way Josh keeps defending the campaign of George Bush the elder. We know, we know—within the framework of the Village, this sort of thing makes you a Serious Person. But is there no end to the insults we must endure from these transparent strivers? ... Josh may be too young to remember these things; he may be too dumb to have read about them. But with his repeated defenses of Bush the elder, he is misinforming a whole generation of younger readers. We know! We know! Within the Village, this sort of thing makes you a Serious Person. But it’s time for this bullsh*t to stop. ...

Is the current campaign “the most dishonest” of the past 35 years? For a liberal or a Democrat, it’s insane to address that question without discussing the twenty-month War Against Gore—and yes, Josh understands that fact (link below). But Josh is making himself a career—and he’s willing to disinform you to do it. Within the Village, you become a Very Serious Person by disappearing what the Villagers did for twenty straight months during Campaign 2000. Josh understand that history well—and he knows enough not to discuss it. ...

Josh has played for you for many years on this score. In the process, he is emerging as the Sully of the pseudo-left. It’s long past time for this weird, creepy man to pack his satchel and go. At any rate, will someone please stop poor Josh Marshall before he boo-hoos, blubbers and cries defending Bush the elder again? Josh! George Bush 41 ran a scuzzball campaign! It was the start of modern GOP campaign culture. Our advice: Go away and grow some stones. Come back when you’re ready to say it. ...

[Cite of Josh repeating lies form Drudge] Good God! To this day, Josh continues to air that highlighted claim, which originally came from Drudge—a claim whose absurdity became clear within about ten minutes. (As an adept of The Cult of the Offhand Comment, Josh is also eager to throw in the "hard-working, white" quote.)

Hasn’t the public suffered enough from the actual Andrew Sullivan? Defending Bush, avoiding Campaign 2000, Josh makes himself a Serious Person. But you can’t build a progressive politics by respecting the need of people like this to shape-shift the recent past.

I don't think Somerby is wrong on any of these counts, I would simply push him further. He keeps hinting at it when he talks about the broken soul of emerging "progressive" culture, insults from transparent strivers, the frantic desire to become a Very Serious Person, the pseudo-left (a phrase Somerby has been using for several days), shape-shifting the recent past, and so forth. His focus is on the blogosphere and the straightforward lies of people like Marshall, Yglesias, Markos, Kevin Drum, Hamsher, Huffington, Atrios, Steve Benen, and Digby, the people who started exactly in the same place as Somerby (well, not Arianna) and who all of them, every last lying scumbag one, found out that the way to get invited onto TV, interviewed in big name news papers, sucked up to by political campaigns, was to join in the defamation of the Clinton/Gore administration.

It is more important to this group of the wanna-be punditocracy to be seen beating up that administration than to be critical of any Republican one. As we have seen over the last year, it is also more important to the Unity Democrats to defame these people than to actually unify the party into an electoral super-majority. It is this fact that Somerby criticizes by proxy in his contempt for Marshall and for the forces arrayed against Gore. He presents the media lies to expose the political lies.

To me, as I have been writing for months, the key lies with the psychosis of the Stevensonian crowd, who hate all things white and southern and who have seized the presence of racism (real and imagined) as the source of evil in the body politic. No lie is too much, no threat of violence too far, no manipulation of the process too crude in the Battle Against the Bubbas.

This is why we have the weird opposition to McCain and Palin, almost identical to the trashing of Hillary, focusing on racism and social status to the exclusion of substance. It can work if you have already decided that the poor and working class as such are not worthy of political representation. Exactly in the way that the Republicans have tried to make urban black populations stand in for everyone below upper middle class, trying to sully programs for lower classes by forcing programs benefitting those classes into grotesque blackface, now the Democrats are coming at this group from the other side, whitewashing their own class bigotry with the specter of the KKK.

Before Somerby guts, skewers and shish-kebabs Marshall, he nails Richard Cohen on Cohen's incoherent bloviating:

But why should anyone pay attention to anything Richard Cohen says? Having left the Republican Party for dead, this is the way he describes the modern Democratic Party:

COHEN (10/21/08): Ah, I know, the blues are not all virtuous. They are supine before self-serving unions, particularly in education, and they are knee-jerk opponents of offshore drilling, mostly, it seems, because they don't like Big Oil. They cannot face the challenge of the Third World within us—the ghetto with its appalling social and cultural ills—lest realism be called racism. Sometimes, too, they seem to criticize American foreign policy simply because it is American.

Still, a Democrat can remain a Democrat—or at least vote as one—without compromising basic intellectual or cultural values.

Talk about the lesser of two evils! According to Cohen, Democrats refuse to stand up to the teacher unions and indulge in irrational hatred of big corporations. They don’t have the guts to stand up to “the ghetto”—our own “Third World within.” And of course, they sometimes “seem to criticize American foreign policy simply because it is American.” This is an astounding portrait. And yet, despite these astonishing flaws, a person can be a Dem today “without compromising basic intellectual or cultural values!”

Look at who Cohen goes after - environmentalists, unions, black (ghetto) poor, and critics of American hegemonic power. Hmm, sounds like he doesn't like liberals. Sounds like he equates being against those things with being a real Democrat, calling people who want unionization (defense of working class) and policies to alleviate poverty (refusing to pathologize urban blacks or rural whites), protection of the environment and development of renewable energy (defense of life itself), and object to smacking around small countries (diplomacy, not bombs and assassinations) lacking in intellectual power and cultural values. Praising Reagan? Excusing the Bushes? That's all good.

Bob has it right. What this last political year shows us is how the Unity Democrats have Sullied liberalism.

Anglachel

The Lady Killers

I delayed a few days in writing this as I didn't want to rain on Paul Krugman's Nobel parade, an award he richly deserves, but even he says it's time to move on from that.

I was disgusted by Krugman's blog post on October 10, Not about the Financial Crisis, but not for the reasons most people had. Most writers focused on the comments about the right-wing hatred towards Obama and how afraid Krugman felt seeing this hatred. Part of me is just tired of the "They're all out to kill me!" story line Obama has been pushing since last year. News flash, Precious: Anyone who runs for or occupies the office of President becomes a potential assassination target. Ask George Wallace. Ask Gerry Ford. Why was Krugman so shocked, shocked, at the sight of angry right-wingers chanting violent threats? Political violence in this country is overwhelmingly from the Right, with a few notorious examples on the Left. It is often mixed with racism and always linked to authoritarian personalities who believe that they have some cause or mission that justifies their use of violence to achieve their ends. This is what ties William Ayers to Timothy McVeigh, and why ethical people shun Ayers to this day. He ordered the murder of people for ideological reasons and has never repented of his acts. It is to the credit of the Left that we don't have many like this. But what bothered me most about Krugman's post was not what he said, but what he left out.

He said:

We've seen this before. One thing that has been sort of written out of the mainstream history of politics is the sheer insanity of the attacks on the Clintons - they were drug smugglers, they murdered Vince Foster (and lots of other people), they were in league with foreign powers. And this stuff didn't just show up in fringe publications - it was discussed in Congress, given props by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and so on.

What it came down to was that a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate. Ronald Reagan was supposed to have settled that once and for all.

The problem, Paul, is that the Left has been doing the exact same thing to the Clintons and Clinton Democrats for the last eight years. The Incomparable Bob Somerby gently takes Krugman to task, as he does all self-styled progressives who avert their eyes to the sins of the SCLM (my emphasis):

THE DECLINE OF THE REST: Paul Krugman has long been our favorite top-level columnist-the one who almost always says something accurate and/or relevant. And of course, Krugman is the only high-end columnist who would have typed what follows. As we noted yesterday, this material appeared last Friday, on his New York Times blog: [quoting same paragraph as I did above]

There are shortcomings to that paragraph-which appeared as part of a short post on a larger subject. In our view, it's always a mistake when liberals fail to mention an obvious fact-the fact that the insanity of the attacks on the Clintons was quickly transformed, in March 1999, into the insanity of the attacks on Candidate Gore. And that twenty-month Group Insanity "didn't just show up in" conservative editorial pages, like that of the Wall Street Journal; it was heavily driven by famous "liberals" on the op-ed page Krugman shares. We especially think of Frank Rich and Bob Herbert, who were still driving the most inane critiques of Gore even after his first debate with Bush. But the sheer insanity of the 1990s was widely purchased, all around. Even "liberals" signed up for the Clinton-hatred, then agreed to extend it to Gore.

None of these giants has ever explained why this insanity happened.

As Krugman put it, this history-changing episode has been "written out of the mainstream history of politics." Most career liberals still won't discuss it. For that reason, most voters have never heard that it even occurred.

Among top-end pundits, only Krugman will ever discuss this insanity.

Somerby's point, expressed mildly towards Krugman in recognition of the work Krugman has done to call out the idiocy, is that it is not just the Right that launched broadsides against some of the most talented and capable leaders we currently have, but the Left was fully involved in it, too. This election season, all of the worst attacks on the Clintons have been from the Left, right down to repeating the lies about murdering a personal friend, about their aberrant sexuality, about their criminal business dealings, about their insatiable lust for power. Cover the names and you couldn't tell Scaife from Josh Marshall.

What the two best critical voices on the Left have also left out in these criticisms, particularly glaring in Krugman's post given his focus on violence and assassination, is that this election season has not been marked by racism, but by misogyny of a very violent kind, and that this violence has come overwhelmingly from the Left. I don't think this is because the Left is inherently more misogynistic than the Right, but see it as a sign that expressing hatred of and desires to inflict violence upon women is as acceptable across the political spectrum as racism was in the first half of the 20^th Century. While Krugman was consistently critical of Obama and the more general lies his campaign promoted about Hillary Clinton throughout the primaries, he has a single blog post after the primaries were over scolding a general audience (Sexism? Who, us? )about the presence of "raw sexism" as one of a number of factors that made for a bad primary, but immediately walked back his criticism by saying "So this is no time for a protest vote."

And why not?

While he has a public freak out over some typical wing-nuts yelling violent threats, Krugman did not say a single word at the time (nor anything since) about Keith Olbermann's very public exhortation on national TV for some Democratic delegate to kill Hillary because she was politically inconvenient. As I said then:

...However, certainly within the liberal blogosphere and the MSM (I do not venture into the wingnut fever swamps), there is no drumbeat for violence against Obama.

This is not the case with Hillary. I have myself read comments advocating rape and murder. I have read main posts saying she was inciting violent acts against her, or saying they could "understand" the position of those who wished violent harm to befall her, her husband and her daughter. The descriptions of what Obama should do to Hillary verge on the pornographic. Not a day goes by that some prominent voice on the left or in the MSM does not demand her submission, subordination and public humiliation.

And now a major MSM celebrity and talking head, not some anonymous commenter on some obscure blog, has openly and unapologetically advocated that Hillary Clinton be marched into a dark room and murdered.

Think that is too far? A real stretch? Just a tad bit hysterical? Replace Hillary Clinton with Barack Obama in that formulation and you tell me what that means. If someone said this about Barack Obama, it would mean that this man be lynched to remove him from a path to power. Period. Full stop. No equivocations. It would be understood as nothing less than a call for the man's murder, and there would be an outcry from EVERY Democrat, even those of us who do not much care for Obama as a candidate, condemning those words, because that is what we are called upon to do when confronted with evil.

And, when those kinds of threats were made towards Obama, they were instantly and vehemently denounced and not just by Democrats. It was called for what it was, on the spot, and McCain was rightly held responsible for tacitly condoning the threats. The Right needs to be called out and condemned for its reliance on threats and acts of violence to advance its political goals. It is the party of Timothy McVeigh, of clinic bombers, of Abu Ghraib.

But the Democrats and the self-proclaimed progressive blogosphere have shown themselves to be more than willing parties to misogyny and violence against women. Along with Olbermann's homicidal fury, there were the widespread comments after the Kentucky Derby that the euthanized filly was a good example for what should be done to Hillary. The language and imagery I mentioned when writing about Olbermann resurfaces every time there is a breath of a rumor that somehow Hillary isn't campaigning hard enough for Obama. How she is going to pay if he loses, because... well, because she is there and women are the usual targets of violence when men feel disempowered, disrespected, disappointed that they didn't get what was owed to them. The deep irony of the Obama campaign's self indulgent "She wants us dead!" yowling over the RFK reference is that the parallel was between Hillary and RFK - trailing in the delegate count but persisting to the end despite threats and danger. She was the person in RFK's shoes and the one at risk of murder, not Obama, especially given the constant agitation against her at every level of the media.

I started to write up a post about misogyny and this election cycle and found I have been writing about it since November 4, 2007, almost an entire year. I doubt I will be finished after November 5^th, 2008. This campaign has been defined by false claims of racism and the brutal enactment of misogyny. The assaults on women as women show us that using misogyny to intimidate and eradicate female participants (voters as well as candidates) is excusable in a way that racist assaults are not. Racist attacks have to be dog whistled because they cannot be made openly without immediate backlash and condemnation by people in power and major opinion makers. Allan's "macaca" moment is an example of this, and I think the McCain campaign rally tapes will be another. Public imagery of Obama that has any racist overtones (such as the New Yorker cover, which I do believe was intended as satire) is greeted with anger and derision. There are words you just can't say in connection with Obama without having hot coals heaped on your head.

This is a good thing.

It is how our society should respond to attacks upon anyone for what they are. It is how any true progressive will respond, regardless of how the larger society behaves. But this outrage does not extend to women. Language and imagery denigrating women as women (bitch, shrew, whore, cunt, slut) are available on most of the well-trafficked locations of Left Blogistan, in the spring referring to Hillary, this fall referring to Sarah Palin. Cannonfire presents a few ugly examples of just how unfiltered the hatred has become, and is probably not safe for most workplaces.

The people at McCain's rally were indefensible, and we did not see any mainstream, reputable new reporter of public figure saying that he could "understand" why people would want to murder Obama, or even something less than that level of violence. We saw and heard exactly that kind of excuse summoned to dismiss threats and smears against Hillary and we are in a rerun of even worse with Gov. Palin. Violence and maltreatment of women has as long and, yes, as violent a history in this country as racism. Neither women nor minorities have been treated all that well, and both have placed their hopes in the Democratic Party to right past wrongs and prevent more in the future. This election cycle, whether the mainstream media will acknowledge it or not, whether the A-List blogs will cop to their gleeful gang bang of women they love to hate, has been a very public repudiation of one groups' hopes.

That female identification with Hillary and later Palin has been dismissed as either irrational (vagina voting) or actually a sign of secret racism exposes the ease with which misogyny is mobilized to try to belittle, badger, and dominate. Its very ubiquity makes it unremarkable and difficult to problematize. Our arguments and explanations on how we perceive our interests to be best served are trivialized as the whines of "bitter knitters" instead of serious challenges by engaged citizens. Insisting that we be heard garners a mix of aggressive bluster and wide-eyed faux-innocence.

Misogyny deniers try to focus on just a few figures, and explain away broad actions as being reasonable responses to these despicable, polarizing broads. No, no, it's not that we are kicking women down; it's that Hillary's a cold bitch! We'd like someone else. But not Ferraro, that racist, shriveled up old hag. And Chelsea is really just letting herself get pimped out. Then we defend teenage sexuality, except for that wanton slut, Bristol Palin, and her bigger slut, the mother I'd like to fuck (MILF), Sarah. But then how to explain the fury expressed at women who do not support Obama? It's any woman who does not toe the line, not just the politicians.

Too many doing this, male and female alike, will not accept that the modes of attack "work" because they rely on a background of bigotry and denigration that attaches itself to all female bodies. They can laugh at images of a fist smashing into Palin's face until her bones are broken and her teeth are knocked out because that is an excusable, if not precisely acceptable, way to treat women in this culture. I think of the photos of the faces of battered women in Annie Liebovitz's photo essay book, Women, and wonder what they would think of that imagery. The shirt "Bros before Hos" with Obama and Hillary's faces on it was a giggle fest for most of the left wing blogs ( at worst a "tsk, tsk, that's childish" objection) but "works" because women are whores and we brothers have to stick together against those greedy bitches. We all know women are just out to bleed you dry, just like your ex-wife did. The current pop hit "Whatever You Like" is little more than a sugar-coated version of a man asking to buy access to a woman's body, but the bro/ho relationship is clear.

Would there have been similar amusement on the Left if McCain supporters promoted shirts with a racial slur, such as "Homeland before Homeboys," or "Stop the buck here"? When someone proposed a PAC called "C.U.N.T" with an image of a star-spangled female crotch, it was seen as tacky at worst and usually as uproariously funny. What if there had been a PAC called "No Indulgence, Genuine Gains, Equal Rewards," with an image of a blackface minstrel in an Uncle Sam costume, or other patriotic emblems on a disembodied rapper (capped teeth, baggy pants, set of heavy chains and medallions, etc.), wouldn't that have been some good natured ribbing? You know, don't take it so seriously or personally. What about PACs called S.P.I.C., W.O.P., K.I.K.E., B.E.A.N.E.R, etc.? All in tacky fun, hey?

Calling Hillary a cunt or Sarah Plain a slut only work because of the misogynistic backdrop in which we understand that these are qualities of being female, and where they are used to shame, humiliate, intimidate and justify violence against the women so named, exactly as racial epithets are used to do the same on reviled minorities. These kinds of racial epithets and imagery were acceptable, even respectable, in popular culture. Alex Guinness' great movie, Kind Hearts and Coronets, released in 1950, shocked me when I saw it in the 70s. Watch the movie trailer for the particular scene. Some versions have been dubbed to remove the offending word. I remember eating at "Sambo's" restaurants as a child, a chain marketed through racist imagery. It is now gone. Conversely, there are two "Hooters" restaurants within 10 miles of my house, where women's breasts are the central marketing tool for second rate fried food. It's promoted as a "family" restaurant, by the way.

What the campaign season has demonstrated is misogyny is as acceptable a weapon of social and political dominance as race demagoguery was through George Wallace's presidential campaigns. By Reagan, it was dog whistle time. I've written before why the fauxgressive Left is happy to profit from misogyny as a social condition in Just Like Grad School and Weeding out the Competition,

The reaction can be guilt rather than anger because there is really no chance that this class of people will ever get ahead as a class such that there would be competition. It may not be PC to say this, but there is a very rational basis for working class white racism that has nothing to do with believing minorities are lesser beings and everything to do with keeping that structural advantage in place. That's why the cynical claims of the Obama campaign about Archie Bunkers - when the target is actually the guilty upper middle class - doesn't ring true. Obama himself is no threat. He codes "white". The threat he offers is not raising up minorities but turning his back on all the working class and failing to enact policies and programs that will help those who are struggling. The real way to undermine racism is by increasing economic stability and prosperity, not by trying to shame people living on the edge as some kind of moral reprobates.

Change the makeup of that class and suddenly the privileged white boyz start getting nasty. The structural disadvantage that kept women from competing directly for previously male-only positions, structures both legal and cultural, have disappeared with enormous speed in the last forty years, especially the last twenty, and while entry of women into the workplace in professional and skilled labor ranks (they have always worked their asses off in retail, agriculture and service industries) has increased household income, it has also curbed a rise in male wages while offering increased competition for positions. Women's economic success has directly harmed individual male economic success and the concomitant social privilege. ...

The success Hillary is enjoying is flushing the fauxgressives out of the woodwork. Hillary hatred has permutations beyond simple misogyny, but the very real competition that women as a class offer these guys is what we see bubbling up in anti-feminist broadsides and pathetic attempts to reduce women's choices and aspirations to acts of vagina voting or bitchy resentment. What we are seeing in this election, from right and left, is the rage of white males who see their privilege under real threat and they don't like it one bit.

It's not the entire explanation, but I think it explains a large part of why Left Blogistan fell all over itself to see who could piss on women, candidates and voters alike.

There is no "answer" for it as long as it is a contest where the privileged have no intention of letting the dominated get a leg up, and where authoritative critical voices fall silent when wrongs are committed. Paul Krugman, I'm sorry to tell you that your willingness to push aside all the unpleasantness for the sake of winning the election, lecturing Hillary voters, us bitter knitters, to not go away mad just because we've been threatened with rape, murder, beatings and torture if we don't ditch that bitch and vote for The Precious has materially harmed women. You should have been screaming every day about how Obama had better put Hillary on the ticket or else watch half the party walk off, encouraging people to be angry over being treated with contempt instead of meekly getting the scraps from the table. Maybe if someone of your stature took seriously that treating women badly to their faces means treating them badly in social policy - the kinds of policies I have reason to believe you support - we'd have a hope of moving Obama out of his neo-Reaganite position and slightly towards something that moves the country towards the left.

Changing the subject doesn't change the situation.

For me, my political calculus has changed. There's never been a chance I would vote for Obama, nor that I would vote for any Republican, and for much the same reason - illiberal, misogynist, classist, and lacking a vision for the construction of progressive state. I also will not be forced out of my party and the institutional power it can command. However, my money will not go to general party funds or to PACs where it might be used to support candidates and party officials who refuse to fight back against misogyny. My votes will only go to women from now on. Male Democrats are going to have earn back my support by performing public, material acts to counter misogyny, such as promoting the ERA again, defending women's reproductive choices, passing UHC, which is of greatest importance to women with dependent children and no employer-based insurance, raising the minimum wage which affects women's job categories the most, defending Social Security, and supporting GLBT rights.

The lady killers are no more and no less than the racists of the Left, and should be treated as such.

Anglachel

Note - A few edits throughout to correct formatting problems and correct grammar. Reference to Annie Liebovitz's book added.

Anatomy of a Dog Whistle

Back in July and August, Digby tried to show the world how she wasn’t a racist like the rest of her benighted family by finding racism in every over-parsed phrase uttered by anyone, Left or Right, that wasn’t an unqualified and glowing endorsement of The Precious. I talked about that in Barking up the Wrong Tree, and how the Republican attack was not on race but on qualifications – which is a more subtle and difficult to address attack on civil rights, equality and protection under the law – feeding into their Ward Connerly-led assault upon Affirmative Action (AFAC). I then followed up with four posts about Affirmative Action and the current political contest: Affirmation, Easy Come, Easy Go, Qualified Success, and Obvious Injuries of Class.

The overall message of those five posts in concert is simply this: trivializing the very real damage that racism and other modes of socio-economic oppression inflict on people by trying to turn unflattering snarks about a not-very-likeable candidate into the ravings of George Wallace as he bars the door leaves the playing field wide open for true racist dog whistles (and even racist brass bands) because it inures people to real calls to fight the invidious effects of racism. Racism becomes reduced in the political imagination to name-calling and who likes a sissy who can’t stand up for himself? The kinds of arguments that do substantial and long term harm to the population, such as the efforts to undermine AFAC, become difficult to talk about as what they are, racist dog whistles, because they don’t fit the name-calling mold. They are dog whistles because their treatment of race (and also of gender, class and sexuality) is oblique, well mixed with certain kinds of facts, but presenting a persistent theme: these undeserving people are unfairly helped by (the government/the Democrats/the ACLU/insert demonized liberal organization’s name here), distorting the natural order of things (the free market, God’s will, unfettered individualism, etc.) and keeping you from getting what is rightfully yours.

I have condemned the instrumental use of racism, misogyny and homophobia by Obamacans. Back in early June, I condemned the willingness of pro-Hillary supporters to deliberately take up the racist, ratfucking bullshit of the Right to spread smears about Michelle Obama, in Visceral Reactions. The epicenter for this type of assault was (and remains) No Quarter, run by a Republican (Hillary supporter or not) and very friendly to Republican interests. Recently, The Confluence has begun serving up the same ugly mix, which is why I have dropped it from my blog roll and will have nothing to do with PUMA. The current set of posts (no, I will not link to them) serves up a toxic brew ostensibly about the current financial market and Obama’s connections to it, but is actually little more than regurgitation of the Republican racist assault on equal opportunity lending. Anti-Obama sentiment opens up the flood gates to connect him, ACORN, and Franklin Raines to Fannie Mae, subprime loans and government involvement in lending generally. The argument (and the post) relies heavily on images of African American politicians, administrators and executives to make visually the claim that cannot be made verbally, recalling Lee Atwater’s infamous remarks about not being able to say racial slurs which inspires a new level of creativity to convey the message: those people are ripping you off again, taking what is yours for themselves.

I encourage people to read Mandos’ post, “Subprime lending and minorities,” on Corrente. Ignore his moronic bout of CDS in the last paragraph (and the pathetic excuse he offers to try to claim it’s not really CDS) and concentrate on the meat of the post itself where he offers a well-reasoned rebuttal to the claims of the Confluence post. What I am going to do in this post is talk about the politics behind the arguments, which I have addressed recently in Political Investment and in More Myth Debunking, this time focusing on the Republican war on the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Democrats need to understand that trying to use the Republicans’ arguments as weapons against their intra-party rivals do nothing except weaken the party for the inter-party battles. I am not interested in talking about the fecklessness of the Democratic leadership at the moment – there will be plenty of time for that in other posts – but in trying to show how using the dog whistles of the Right do not help our own candidates (no matter who you support) and merely serve to corrode the Democrats’ efficacy. It is, at heart, a Somerby argument that nominal allies are often our worst enemies.

The arguments themselves have a long history in the fever swamps of the Right. In the original versions, it was the Evil Bill Clinton forcing banks to loan money to those kinds of people with the CRA. It added insult to fantasized injury that a Friend of Bill’s (FOB) and one of those people (i.e., an African American), Franklin Raines, was made CEO of Fannie Mae. At the time, the subprime crisis hadn’t hit and the opposition to these two entities was about the restrictions they placed on the free market. Then, about this time last year, before Obama was the nominee and just as Wall Street was being forced to confront the great shitpile, a more sophisticated argument was pushed forward – that the subprime crisis was a result of the combination of the CRA forcing banks to make loans to minority and poor borrowers and that the GSEs (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) accelerated this phenomenon by buying up the toxic mortgages and encouraging more to be made. The sotto voce argument here was that the black man running Fannie Mae was purposefully doing this to advantage undeserving black borrowers. This smear was first anti-government, then anti-Clinton, then anti-black.

The root of the smear is the toxic combination of Republican racism and greed, instrumentalized via the Southern Strategy to rally white resentment to win political power to dismantle the regulatory state crafted in the New Deal. The CRA forced the banking industry to make loans in areas and to people they did not want to serve. Let’s be clear – the CRA did introduce more risk to the system to those who were already comfortable with how things were arranged, exactly in the way that giving “those people” rights as such was “risky” for the existing power structure. People continuously treated as outcasts by definition will not have the socio-economic markers of inclusion, such as wealth, education, the right kind of table manners, the preferred grammatical forms, and so forth. They are a risk because they are not part of the social slice where everyone plays by the power elites cultural norms. This is one reason why women as such are being cast as a political problem (and thus a political risk) this electoral season because they are viewed as not being willing to play by the cultural norms, and many are afraid they will vote along gender lines instead of “as they should.” The anxiety is due to the knowledge of discriminatory treatment and the fear of punitive backlash. But I digress.

Home ownership is a major (and in an era of stagnant and declining wages, often the only) way for a household to accumulate significant wealth for a reasonable investment. Inheriting my father-in-law’s house after he passed away almost 3 years ago allowed us to liquidate 20 years of wealth and put it in our pocket. That wealth gave us economic leverage we didn’t have before, which (given a normal economic situation) could be used to garner us a greater economic leg up than having to rely on just our own earnings. My parents were able to give a house (albeit an old and slightly dilapidated one) to one of my siblings, an immense transfer of wealth his public servant income could not have obtained. It is these generational wealth transfers that can make home ownership wealth engines. (Tangential comment - In the bubble market, people did not have to wait for inheritance. They could put little or nothing down, sit on the property for a relatively short period of time, and reap the kind of payback that ordinarily took one or two generations of property holding to get. Why the hell wouldn’t people want to risk getting in over their heads with a potential reward like that?)

In a normal, non-bubble, market, to build up generational wealth is no small feat, even for those inside the magic circle of social respectability. Wealth of one generation is closely tied to that of the preceding one, and if you have been systematically, legally and extra-legally barred from ordinary wealth accumulation through the way socio-economic resources are structured, then with each cycle of wealth generation, you fall that much further behind. The further behind you fall, the greater a “risk” you are to the institutions and individuals who have moved risk from their arenas of operation to yours. Redlining, denying credit, residential covenants refusing ownership to certain classes of individuals, are all examples of reallocating economic risk. It avoids risk which creates greater risk for those excluded from opportunities for safety. All of this connects to the anti-AFAC arguments through the trope of who is deserving of social rewards and benefits by refusing to acknowledge the patterns of deprivation and exclusion that render entire classes of people “too risky” to be given access to those rewards and benefits. They’ll just come in and trash the place.

What the CRA did more than anything was force financial institutions to take on the risks that had been created by their exclusionary practices. It also came with reporting requirements to allow oversight to ensure that investments and loans were real and not merely exploitative. For every risk that succeeded, the probability went up that subsequent risk taking in that arena would pay off. It was in the institutions’ long term interests to see that the risks paid off. The industry loathed both the enforced risk taking and even more the oversight that they saw as a camel’s nose under their insider practices tent. The racists simply saw advantages being provided to minorities and needed no other reason to oppose it. When Bill Clinton strengthened the Act in 1994, it enraged both sides, and the fury was ratcheted up when he made it part of GLBA.

I’m not going to go into the financial ups and downs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they are brought into the argument more to obfuscate it than to add substance. The malfeasance at Fannie and Freddie was done by their private sector managers engaging in the same kinds of questionable business practices that other such managers did in the crisis though on a scale the GSEs could only dream of. One of the best run downs on the GSE failures is here by Tanta of Calculated Risk (in an argument with Paul Krugman) , where she spares no sympathy for anyone. One of the reasons I appreciate Tanta so much as an economic analyst is because she is very aware of class arguments being brought in to try to rule out risk by ruling out the poor. (Also see this short article by Mark Thoma, economist at U of OR.) The point of objection by the Right to the GSEs is that they, along with FHA, provide money to “undeserving” people who are too poor or economically damaged goods, there for fleecing but not for advancement. As for who “those people” are, just look at the list in Taking Out the Trash. It’s not just the white trash that is being described – it’s all the undeserving and reviled in our society. The GSEs have been swept strongly into the current arguments because it allows people to talk loudly about Franklin Raines and use his picture all over the place. For the Left, he is a FOB, and so can be bashed for his Clinton connections. On the Right, he is an FOB and he’s black, so they get to engage in CDS and racism, plus tie him by race and political party to Obama. Just as I’m not particularly interested in discussing Democratic leadership failures, I am not interested in Raines’ very real management failures (and possible corruption) as the head of Fannie Mae. The current Republican interest with Raines has more to do with his color and connections to the Clintons, and how that can be exploited, than with his alleged corruption.

The argument is little more than this: banks are being forced by Democrats to loan to blacks who are such bad credit risks that they are bringing the entire housing sector down. In California and other Southwest markets, it is the blacks and the “illegals” in tandem doing this. Why are Democrats going along? Because, the Republicans claim, they are captive to black (and other reviled groups’) interests and allow themselves to be used by the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, the ACLU, ACORN, and any other group perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be minority dominated. When the accused organization in (I’m looking at you, ACORN) has a very questionable history, it gets easier to spread guilt by association. This is how Franklin Raines fits in – the (incompetent and undeserving) black CEO who ran Fannie Mae to enrich (undeserving) blacks and other low-life “sub-prime” flimflam artists.

Again, I am not making an argument that there is nothing to object to on the part of any of these actors. I am pointing out the manipulation of facts, coincidence, prejudice and ideology to create a racist dog whistle that advances the objective of dismantling the regulatory state. It appeals to the worst in the listener and reinforces those beliefs by wrapping it up in a half-baked argument about the secret corruption of those people, out to steal our vital fluids and sap our national vigor.

Kind of like the CDS the Right has been pushing for 20 years and which the Left has eagerly seized upon when it suits their intra-party infighting needs. In fact, the effectiveness of the Right’s racist arguments is increased by the way in which the Left will allow enormous amounts of lies to be spread as long as they see that someone named Clinton is being blamed. The pattern of racist attacks on Obama, attacks promoted by some on the Left, is comparable to the pattern of classist attacks on the Clintons, attacks promoted by most of the intellectual Left, attacks which were extended to Gore (as Bob Somerby has incomparably and exhaustively documented) by the Village and babbled approvingly by more than a few denizens of Left Blogistan.

CDS fractures the Left's attempts to combat the Movement Conservative assault on civil rights and social justice. The rightwing counts on the willingness of the Village and the Blogger Boyz to never resist an occasion to take a cheap swipe, just as Mandos did in his otherwise excellent post. BTD asked during the campaign if it was more important to the Obamacans to purge the Clintons from the party than to win the election. I think the answer is that they are more interested in purging what the Clintons culturally represent to them than to have an effective political party. They are viscerally opposed to what they think is present in these people (and the nature of the attack on Palin echoes the historic attacks on the Clintons from Left and Right) in much the same way as a significant portion of the Republican party cannot see a candidate like Obama – or Deval Patrick or Barbara Jordan or John Lewis or Carol Mosley Braun or Douglas Wilder or Stephanie Tubbs Jones, or for that matter Condi Rice or Colin Powell – without having their racism kick into overdrive. The CDS driven Left does not appear to notice that the attempt to quarantine all the “bad” effects of political decisions by the Democrats as somehow attributable to the actions of these two specific political actors and their never-quite-firmly-defined circle of unindicted co-conspirators (Obama himself having been one of that group in the not so distant past, along with Rahm Emmanuel, Joe Lieberman, all of the current Congressional leadership at one point or another, and quite a number of public intellectuals and their families, including Paul Krugman’s son) does not and cannot defend the Democrats from rightwing claims that they are failing, they are lying, they cannot be trusted to protect the nation, etc. nor does it encourage more progressive behavior from those who are alleged to be combating the deleterious effects of the 90s, as we are seeing in the FISA vote, the current rip-off fiasco, the abandonment of UHC, and so forth.

Thus we end up with the leading lights of Left Blogistan solemnly agreeing that the president who fought tooth and nail to secure vital loans to help create long-term wealth in minority communities is nothing but a racist, another faction of the Democrats grabbing everything the Republican ratfuckers are shoving their way to tar the people, policies and plans that the Clintons have promoted and defended against rightwing attacks in some misguided belief that this will hurt Obama with voters instead of reinforce the Obamacan claims that the Clintons are just racists like their Bunker and Bubba supporters, while the Right merrily spreads the lie that Bill and the Democrats created the mortgage meltdown by setting up a scam for the undeserving minorities and poor to steal money and houses through the GSEs and CRA.

This is the full anatomy of the rightwing dog whistles of the last half century: Stirring up visceral reactions with distortions of cultural stereotypes and ordinary politics, mixed well with personal smears and attributing the worst possible motives to unobjectionable acts, in order to divide opposition and mobilize resentment in the service of dismantling the legacy of the New Deal.

And it just keeps working.

Anglachel

PS - Yes, the reference to an economist's relative is ironic.