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

Their Madness Was Allowed

Paul Krugman's latest column, State of Paralysis, is about the insanity of the California budget crisis and how a small revanchist group of far-right radicals had been steadily deconstructing the state government since Pat Brown left office. Krugman pins the origins in Prop. 13 which used a real problem of unjustified increases in property taxes to set in motion the real killer in the state - the requirement of a super majority in the state legislature to raise state taxes. This has led to wildly unpredictable and financially regressive attempts to pay for the needs of a diverse and productive state through lotteries, sin taxes and fees. Part of the reason that property values skyrocketed in the state was because the only way to expand the property tax base is to have higher and higher valuations on real estate, either in newly constructed or in "trade ups". (On the lack of move up buyers in California, see Calculated Risk's latest post.)

I was enjoying the blistering column until I came across this paragraph:

To be blunt: recent events suggest that the Republican Party has been driven mad by lack of power. The few remaining moderates have been defeated, have fled, or are being driven out. What’s left is a party whose national committee has just passed a resolution solemnly declaring that Democrats are “dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals,” and released a video comparing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Pussy Galore.

Not so fast, Paul. Lack of power? To the contrary, they are using their power efficiently and effectively. They have significant leverage in the form of things like the super-majority needed to have a realistic budget. They have spent years looting every treasury they could find, lining their own pockets and those of their cronies, and now scream about the need for fiscal austerity when asked what they did with the dough. That is why the City of San Diego is now in such dire financial straits - the Republican power elite in the government diverted funds away from the employees' retirement system and lavished it on the Republican National convention, an unneeded ball park, payments to developers, and other pet projects to feather their own nests.

I wondered if I was being a bit too tough on the Krug until I read Bob Somerby's post today. The Incomparable One politely takes the Shrill One to task for thinking the Republicans are being driven mad by a lack of power. After a wonderful slap-down-in-passing of Olbermann, Somerby asks, "But was the GOP driven mad this year, or in recent years? And was the GOP driven mad by a lack of power?" He then takes us on a quick historical review of their purposeful "madness" and the gatekeepers who let them get away with it. Bob's argument is very clear (my emphasis):

In fact, the GOP and its agents have been behaving this way for a very long time. We’d suggest they were driven mad by an excess of power—by the grinding power the party held through most of the past forty years.

Here at THE HOWLER, we’ve been watching as our political narratives have turned in the past six months. As we’ve watched, we’ve pondered the way the GOP controlled such political narratives from 1968 on.

Controlling the narrative is key to political leverage. This is Somerby's fundamental objection to Krugman's slip-up, and then he illustrates that the utter "insanity" of the GOP has been around for a good long time and that it was soberly presented as legitimate public discourse all the way along. For example:

Just how crazy was this era? Let’s pose a question to younger readers: Did you know that the Clintons used condoms and crack pipes for ornaments on the White House Christmas tree? After former FBI agent Gary Aldrich made that and other preposterous claims in a crackpot, best-selling book, Tim Russert devoted the bulk of a worried hour to The New Yorker’s outrageous attempt to fact-check Aldrich’s claims. Today, Russert’s scolding cross-examination of Hedrik Hertzberg and Jane Myers reads like a fever-dream from a deeply lunatic era.

This was being done in May of 1997. Bob notes "That fall, we started planning this web site. (It took some time!) But let’s be honest: Few career players showed signs of giving a fig about this spreading lunacy." (my emphasis)

You do not need a legislative majority as long as you have cowed the majority into agreeing to your filibusters, jiggered the law to multiply the effects of minority opposition on crucial government activities (vs. preventing a simple majority vote from abrogating the rights of a minority), and have the media consistently legitimizing the extremist posturing because of deeply held class resentments.

Bob points directly at this last point as what has kept the nation under the sway of Movement Conservative Madness (my emphasis):

This lunacy didn’t stem from a lack of power. It grew when Republicans had too much power. And let’s make sure we understand where that excess came from:

In large part, it came from the willingness of the mainstream press to tolerate or repeat any GOP claim, no matter how patently crazy. In large part, it came from the refusal of liberals and Dems to resist this misuse of power.

Gene Lyons resisted in 1995 with Fools for Scandal; few career players followed suit. This created an unfortunate world—a world in which Republicans and their agents could make any claim, no matter how blatantly crazy.

This is how we end up in a situation where the voters have clearly indicated they have had enough of these psychopaths, that they want an end to permanent war, that they are tired of losing ground while Little Timmy Geithner's buddies turn financial malfeasance on a stupefying scale into more money for them, that they want affordable health care, that they want to know the truth behind the lies of the criminal Bush regime, yet our "liberal" leadership is preaching the virtues of bipartisan agreement.

We have a president who is to the right of Bill Clinton and moving further right in an time when the political tides have reversed. Obama presents vague policies that would have been weak in the face of Gingrich's Contract on America, and seems determined to retain the one set of advisors from Big Dog's administration who most needed to be shown the door. He keeps talking about compromise and meeting the opposition half way as though agreement is a good in and of itself.

No, half-way to crazy instead of all-the-way crazy is not an acceptable political compromise. It should not be allowed.

Somerby concludes (my emphasis):

The GOP didn’t get crazy this year. They were publicly crazy a long time ago, enabled in their public lunacy by a wide range of major players. Liberals and Democrats hid in the woods, waiting until the tide turned.

Eventually, Bush destroyed the known world—and narratives have started to turn. But GOP’s lunacy hasn’t. For many, it’s all they know.

That tape about Pelosi is astounding. But they played similar, gender-trashing games with Hillary Clinton for many years. Our heroes were camping in the woods—or were vouching for Chris Matthews’ brilliance.

How did the GOP go mad? They went mad in a crackpot era, the 1990s. We seem inclined to forget that era today. In that era, their madness was allowed.

This is one of the reasons that I singled out Eric Boehlert's presentism as a fatal weakness of his otherwise engaging book. The failure of the liberal response to the right-wing madness is the unspoken shadow to Left Blogistan triumphalism over the most recent elections. To understand why Obama knew himself perfectly safe to ignore the liberal blogs, you need only look at the spectacle of those blogs falling all over themselves to show that they could trash the Clintons, too. The focus on tactics of a particular campaign season takes that campaign out of the decades long political context which alone can explain the continual cognitive capture of seemingly liberal opinion makers by a determined and organized political rump group.

The madness has been allowed because it has inculcated the media - from the talking heads shows to Talking Points Memo - with the fantasy that they are somehow combating the evil politicians in their smokey back rooms, yet the enemy always ends up being the Democrats. Obama is safe to the degree that he refuses to identify as a member of the party, but keeps crooning his Obamacan non-partisan love song to the admiring opinion makers who look at him and see only themselves and their belief that they are the hip heroes of the republic, all pretending to be Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman up on the big screen.

And while the hipsters hang out in their virtual bar - or maybe it's a Brat Pack era casino lounge, given the amount of gambling going on, a throwback to the days before the rise of Movement Conservatism - the madness of the right continues to be allowed.

Anglachel

Framed

Bob Somerby goes off in a somewhat unusual direction in his post from yesterday. His main focus is on the misrepresentation of Nancy Pelosi's statements about when and what she knew about the Bush administration's criminal torture behavior.

One of the reasons Somerby is an incomparable resource is because he researches and sources what it is the press reports over time. His write up of the current mendacity shows what Pelosi has been reported as saying for the last six months. He presents the original material (transcripts, Pelosi's own press release, a TV clip) and then identifies how reporters, in this case the WaPo reporter Paul Kane) changed her words to make them fit the spin the press wished to "report". This is standard operating procedure for Bob, a degree of fact finding (dare we say it? a degeree of reporting) that is absent from most of the press and virtually all blogging.

Towards the end of the post, Bob links to an Oliphant cartoon that depicts Pelosi smoking a joint and claiming she didn't inhale. What Bob says about this cartoon is critical:

The political price: What political price will Democrats pay for Pelosi’s sweeping accusation? Consider Pat Oliphant’s new cartoon, which appears in this morning’s Post. Too gaze on it, just click here.

The cartoon is called “The Pelosi Position.” Pelosi is shown smoking a large joint marked “Torture.” She’s making a familiar statement: “But I didn’t inhale.”

Translation: Pelosi’s sweeping charge is reactivating press/pundit frameworks from the Clinton era. This has been obvious watching cable. Oliphant spells it out nice and clear.

During the 1990s, Clinton—then Gore—were portrayed as feckless dissemblers, "willing to do and say anything." You couldn’t believe a thing they said! Clinton had said that he didn’t inhale—and Gore had said he invented the Internet! In June 1999, Hillary Clinton even said she was a childhood fan of the Cubs and the Yankees! Earlier profiles seemed to show this was true. But so what? The press called her every name in the book (links below). As they’d done throughout the era, the corps was prepared to pretend.

You couldn’t believe a thing Big Dems said; Big Dems were feckless dissemblers. (If the press corps had to dissemble to "prove" it, dissemble the press corps would.) Given Obama’s impressive demeanor and unusual background, this framework has been dying on the vine this year. But it still lurks inside these idiots' heads. Pelosi made a sweeping accusation this week—and the framework returned from the closet.

A few guesses about the political price to be paid:

The hubbub will make it slightly harder for Obama to nominate Sotomayor (as opposed to a more "traditional" choice like blonde Diane Wood). But Obama will nominate Sotomayor anyway. Because of the hubbub and the reactivated frameworks—the nomination fight will be a bit harder. Obama, and his party generally, will lose a bit of political capital in the form of a few ratings points.

This makes the health care fight a bit harder. Does the public plan therefore come out? These are the political problems we sometimes create when we scream our deepest beliefs, as progressives have begged Obama to do all through the course of this year. (my emphasis)

Jonathan Turley just can’t understand why Obama won’t scream long and loud, just like him. Then again, the heartfelt professor already has good health care.

About the Cubs and the Yankees: In June 1999, Hillary Clinton said she loved the Cubs and the Yankees as a child. Earlier profiles seemed to suggest that this was true—but the corps called her every name in the book. It triggered an established framework, you see. Send your own kids to another room. Then, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/16/08.

In 2007, they took a turn with this bullroar again. This time, their clowning may have been even dumber. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 10/2/07. The n-word even got used this time! (When trashing Clinton, as when trashing Gore, the n-word was “Nixonian.”)

This is the way they portrayed Big Dems right up through Obama’s nomination. Under Obama, these frameworks had been dying on the vine. In the last day or two, they are back.

Somerby appears to be saying that because Pelosi spoke the truth about the manipulations of the CIA in the service of the criminal Bush administration, that the press will use this to make it just that much harder to achieve the Democratic agenda. On one level, the most obvious level, Bob seems to be saying that political liberals need to be quiet so as not to make things toughre for Obama. In this, I disagree with the Incomparable One, though with care, as Bob is a more insightful and subtle thinker than people assume, because the way he frames the situation, he questions why saying patently obvious and common sense political things gets some political actors demonized by the Villagers.

Combine his judgment with comments made by Ian Welsh in this comment thread on Corrente and we get a familiar picture of the culture inside the Beltway. The cultural exclusivity of the Village translates into political danger for policy and politicians who do not do not properly reflect the opinions of the Village - which is most of the substantively liberal objectives of the Democratic Party.

Bob points to the peculiar split between the party and The Precious, how the press treats "Big Dems" one way while engaging in adulation of Obama on the other. The frameworks have not been dying; they merely have not been applied to Obama. Thus we end up with the strange situation where Pelosi is being pilloried in the press for saying she did not know at the time the full extent of the Bush torture regime, while the stories about Obama (who now is in a position to know everything about that policy) refusing to release the rest of the torture photos and reinstating the Guantanamo tribunals are washed away from the front pages.

Boehlert talked about the way in which Obama got everything he wanted from Left Blogistan without having to make promises in return. Perhaps the correct framing is that he got everything he wanted from the Democratic Party without having to promise much of anything in return.

The situation is that Big Dems are still the enemy while Obama basks in the glow of media approval.

Anglachel

Falsies

Right on cue, The Incomparable One, serves up another excellent take down of the so-called-progressive media by focusing on the casual acceptance of sexism by the audience as a legitimate and progressive mode of political rhetoric.

Susie Madrak, in her review of Boehlert's new book, cuts to the chase more crisply than I did the other day:

Perhaps it will help matters if I point out the only blog reviews to date have been written by the bloggers who also protested the treatment of Hilary Clinton in last year’s primary. Which raises an interesting question: Is discussing even the possibility of sexism in the liberal blogosphere the third rail? Looks like it. ...

But the book does have a few flaws. Boehlert takes great pains to list the charges of sexism in the primary without really investigating them; for instance, I can’t imagine why he let it pass when a male blogger claims there was no sexism on his site because he didn’t allow his commenters to call Clinton a "cunt" or a "bitch." (Because, of course, we all know there’s simply no other language that could possibly demean women.)

My point - that the A-List and A-List-wanna-be bloggers were on message with the major media, not in opposition to them - is most clearly demonstrated by the way in which sexism was not simply tolerated, but deliberately and aggressively deployed, first in the primaries and again in the general campaign. I also think that we have to focus on class and liberal disdain for "low culture" as something that amplified the misogyny.

Somerby has always been clued in to this mix, though he often overwhelms the fundamental argument with his exhortative style. Today, though, he sets aside his usual arch delivery and delivers a sharp, uncompromising critique of the fauxgressive media celebrities and the pseudo-liberals who love them.

Bob starts with an insightful, critical, yet also sympathetic report on Marion Barry casting the sole dissent from the D.C . city council's bill to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions. Bob makes clear his own disagreement with Barry, and his hope that Barry's assessment of the effect of the vote on D.C.'s black community is wrong. He then asks why there is little attention being given to Barry's opposition and arguments outside of the D.C. Metro area, specifically among the "progressive" media. Indeed, why not? This is a significant political figure making a strong argument about a possibly violent rejection of a cause near and dear to liberal hearts, an argument that has resonance in California where Proposition 8, enshrining anti-gay bigotry in the state constitution, was strongly supported by African American voters. This is a serious point of contention among traditional constituents of the Democratic Party and needs to be understood and dealt with.

What do we get instead? The trivialization of the issue compounded by blatent misogyny, courtesy of Keith Olbermann. A long but excellent excerpt, all emphasis mine:

But it’s funny, ain’t it? You haven’t heard squat about Barry’s “ugly words” on your “progressive” cable news channel! But last night, The Dumbest Person in the World devoted another lengthy segment to ridicule of Carrie Prejean, an insignificant 21-year-old who recently made the mistake of saying something about same-sex marriage which Olbermann has never even bothered describing.(For the record, her view on the matter seems to resemble that of Barack Obama. And that of Hillary Clinton. And John Kerry and Al Gore.) The big nut went on for almost seven minutes mocking Prejean—and her breast implants. But it’s funny, ain’t it? You’ve never heard a word on this program about the things Marion Barry said.

Of course, the reasons for that are obvious:

Olbermann doesn’t have videotape of Barry walking around in a two-piece swim suit. And Barry is an older man, not a younger woman. As Olbermann has made dumb-foundingly clear, he seems to live for the opportunity to ridicule young women. He never says boo about older man—perhaps understanding they could come to his studio and engage in conduct which might require him to obtain a sphincter implant.

Olbermann’s a woman-trasher—a genuine nut on this matter. And no, we hate to break the news: He doesn’t do “progressive” television. He seems to do work designed to capture the eyeballs of well-meaning young liberals. And for some ungodly reason, he does television which has long been devoted to the ridicule of women’s brains and bodies. Marion Barry doesn’t count. An insignificant creation of Donald Trump quite incessantly does. ...

For sheer stupidity, we strongly recommend last night’s buffoonish segment, devoted to the eternal dumbness of Miss California. (To watch the segment, click this.) Olbermann plays you every way but blue, citing those breast implants two separate times (including in his opening paragraph) and failing to tell you why Prejean might be upset about the way she’s been treated. (He always forgets to explain this.) You see, in the world of “progressive cable,” calling a young woman a “c*nt” and a b*itch” isn’t worthy of comment —if she fails to hold pseudo-progressive views, that is. “Where are the feminists?” Laura Ingraham inquired. We would broaden her limited framework: Where are the progressives?

Oh, we forgot! They’re dragging their knuckles and sucking their thumbs, watching a 50-year-old nutcase get his eternal jollies. And drive his rating among the demo, putting millions of bucks in his pants.

Where are the "progessives" indeed.

The Incomparable One turns the criticism of the media around to those who eagerly consume it and who are proud to count Olbermann as one of their tribe. Bob asks what Eric Boehlert danced around but couldn't quite bring himself to ask, what Susie and BTD (among others) have asked, which is why are liberals so comfortable with Olbermann's and others' use of liberal politics to engage in crude misogyny?

With Prejean, as with Gov. Palin and in an oblique way with Hillary, the mysogyny is twisted together with a culture critique that tries to have its cheesecake and spit on it, too. The high-minded disdain evinced by (mostly but not always) men like Olbermann allows both the critic and the audience to manhandle stereotypes of "low" women, simultaneously creating what is low and implanting those reviled qualities into a disposable other, inviting each other to ogle, manipulate, possess and indulge in those despicable (yet deeply desired) aspects under the guise of rejecting them. We can't just talk about Prejean's opinions - we also have to stare at her (false, deceitful, whorish) breasts which serve as proof of her shallow character, her vanity, and her desire to be fucked over. She's just asking for it!

We lose sight of the real political challenge, the deep division within the Democratic coalition about our commitment as a party to equal rights, and we are assaulted by yet another misogynistic T&A drool session masquerading as political commentary. In the end, Somerby is less criticizing Olbermann than he is those who watch him with admiration, thinking that this is somehow progressive.

To think you can engage in this kind of misogyny and be progressive is simply false.

Anglachel

No Ticket to Ride

I am perusing my complimentary copy of Eric Boehlert's new book, Bloggers on the Bus (thanks, Eric), and I am mystified by an enormous lacuna in its pages.

Nowhere is Bob Somerby or The Daily Howler directly mentioned.

Perhaps I have not looked in the right place in the index or missed the specific pages where The Incomparable One is discussed, but I'm sitting here, scratching my head, trying to figure out how anyone, let alone someone as perceptive as Boehlert, can omit Bob Somerby from an analysis of the media and the blogs in Election '08, especially as Somerby was cranking out some of the most clear-eyed, trenchant commentary on the circus.

Where is mention of Somerby's brilliant phrase, Whoever Kidnapped Josh Marshall?

A phrase that neatly sums up the schizophrenia gripping Left Blogistan by the throat from November 2007 through the Democratic National Convention, and continued to rear its psychotic head through the confirmation hearings for Secretary of State Clinton. A phrase that points directly to the paradox Boehlert himself identifies, then shies away from investigating, in the final few pages of the book - that "The bad news for liberal bloggers was that as the Obama campaign unfolded... it became obvious that bloggers were never really invited to the party." (p.261)

Boehlert's book is interesting in a number of ways, and I encourage my readers to get your hands on a copy and read it, but something I find disconcerting is its presentism. Part of this is in the nature of the topic - the recent election - but to represent the political critique of both the Movement Conservatives (to use Paul Krugman's phrase) and the Villager media culture as having started with Chris Bowers, Kos and Atrios boggles my mind. In the introduction, Boehlert talks about Timothy Crouse's 1972 expose of the political press, The Boys on the Bus, from which this new book draws its name. He says,

And yet there hasn't been enough serious public attention paid to the netroots phenomenon, which is why I decided to write Bloggers on the Bus. Inspired by Crouse's book, although I'm in no way comparing my work with his pioneering effort, I believe the uniquely twenty-first-century phenomenon of the netroots ought to be documented. (p. xi, Introduction)

I agree that there has not been enough serious public attention paid to the netroots, but, Eric, sorry, Bob Somerby was blogging back in 1998, the twentieth-century. The foundation of the liberal blogosphere is Somerby's writings on the war against liberal politics and the Democratic Party conducted by the so-called liberal media. The impetus for his blog was the media assault on the Clinton Administration.

The Daily Howler is one of the (if not the) longest published political blog of substance out there. The Howler and The Horse (Media Whores Online - The site that set out to bring mainstream journalism to its knees, but found it was already there...) were the two must-read sites for anyone who wanted to get around the courtiers of Versailles. Somerby's influence on and inspiration for what we know today as Left Blogistan is as incomparable as his archives. Somerby is difficult to read, bugs the hell out of me at least half the time, and some of his obsessions are not on my radar, but unlike people like Kos, Josh Marshall, Big Media Matt and other Blogger Boyz, he has never allowed himself to be compromised or co-opted by the mainstream media. Or by a political campaign.

Somerby would probably agree when Eric says,

The outdated campaign bus had broken down. Worse, over the years not only had its media passengers slavishly maintained the same pack-driven approach that Crouse bemoaned decades earlier, but the political press had become increasingly unserious, with an almost nonstop devotion to campaign tactics, process, and trivia. (p. x, Introduction)

but would add "and the big name bloggers of the netroots, the people you so admiringly write about in your book, are part of that unserious press corps. They want to be the pool boys servicing the media celebrities in their cabanas."

On the same page, Boehlert can describe in excellent detail how thoroughly the Obama campaign worked with the mainstream media to ensure delivery of his message with his spin, and then state (with no hint of irony), "The Internet, as Barack Obama demonstrated in 2008, offered a way for candidates to go around the traditional Beltway media and communicate directly with voters." (p.x)

No.

Obama was the candidate the MSM wanted to see elected. Obama's "joke" at the press roast this weekend (some of you reported on me, all of you voted for me) is as revealing on this count as George Bush's quip about the mega-rich ("or, as I call them, my base."). They worked just as assiduously for Obama's election as any of the Blogger Boyz. Their political war in 2008, just as it had been from 1992 through 2000, was conducted against those upstarts from Arkansas and Gore the Bore. The paradox of the 2008 election was how little effect the liberal thinkers and writers, from Paul Krugman down to yours truly, had on the public discourse. Obama was the establishment candidate, and the leading lights of the Left Blogosphere were as thoroughly managed by that establishment as any of the talking heads.

The Election of 2008 marks the moment when some bloggers were allowed on the media bus, as long as they directed their ire at the same people Tweety and Tim Russert held in contempt. Those who refused to adopt the language and goals of the CDS-afflicted DC Elite were shoved in front of that juggernaut. We're still there, clinging to the grill, just as undisciplined and scrappy as ever.

Chapter 8, The Blog War of 2008, tries to capture some of that dynamic, but is still captive to the misapprehension that the A-list blogs on the Left were not part of the media's magic circle. Or perhaps Boehlert is well aware of the phenomenon, but not willing to state it himself. Instead, he quotes a conversation he had with Paul Krugman about the campaign:

But as the primary unfolded in 2008, Krugman, a Clinton supporter, did not like what he saw online. He objected to what he called the creation of a false portrait of Hillary Clinton. To him, the pile on recalled how the traditional media savaged Al Gore during the 2000 campaign, portraying him as borderline delusional. In 2008, Krugman watched Clinton get tagged by the press as delusional, except this time lots of liberal bloggers joined in as well, he said, twisting stories and quotes to make CLinton look as unappealing as possible.

"It was ugly," said Krugman, who was also startled to see portions of the Obama-loving netroots alter their views on cornerstone issues, such as the need for universal health care. Specifically, the netroots had been stalwart in calling for government mandates to insure universal coverage. Clinton supported mandates and Obama did not, yet progressives online flocked to Obama despite his position. "Suddenly being opposed to mandates, which for me is basically being opposed to universality, becomes a touchstone of being a real progresssive?" Krugman asked incredulously. "Wow. There was a definite [Orwellian] 'we-have-always-been-at-war-with-Eastasia' feel to that."

For the columnist, the Democratic race represented a turning point for the blogs, an end to innocence. Said Krugman, "I don't think people like myself are ever going to look at Daily Kos the same way."

What we witnessed in 2008 was the cognitive capture of the major blogs by the Beltway. The A-List bloggers are now functionally and culturally part of the Village.

I doubt those bloggers will ever leave the bus.

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

Somerby is Right

In the Krugman column I cited in the immediately previous post, he began it by disparaging anyone who didn't get all choked up over seeingObama win, "If the election of our first African-American president didn’t stir you, if it didn’t leave you teary-eyed and proud of your country, there’s something wrong with you."

That pissed me off for reasons I couldn't fully explain, until I read the Incomparable One, Bob Somerby, and he captured my thoughts (my emphasis):

Sign us up for “something wrong,” we said after reading Krugman

If those are the rules of the current game, sign us up for “something wrong with you.”

Were we stirred Tuesday night? We’re not quite sure. Teary-eyed? No, although moist at times. And we very much admired Obama when he took the hand of Biden’s mother and led her to the front of the stage. It made us think of Bill Clinton, on Inaugural Day, when he stopped to talk to a man who may have been homeless—and addressed him as “sir.” In each case, we were pleased to have a president who had such excellent judgment. ...

Should we have been “proud of our country” because of “the election of our first African-American president?” Many African-American citizens have reacted to this week’s events with deep emotion; for just one (second-hand) example, read the letter from Donald Graul in this morning’s Post. This week,we’ve often recalled the professor who wrote, earlier this year, about her elderly parents in Mississippi; the professor said she was thrilled that her parents had lived long enough to see Obama’s campaign. For ourselves, if that professor pays travel and lodging, we’ll go down to Mississippi ourselves and carry her parents around on a chair. But when it comes to this part of the question, our own thumb largely comes down on a different part of the scale.

First, we’re not surprised that the country elected Obama, who was in most ways (not necessarily all) the clearly superior candidate. And we don’t plan to pretend we’re surprised, as many big pundits have done (not Krugman). Duh. We recall the way pundits stood in line in 1995, urging Colin Powell to run. And we recall the November 1996 exit polls: Had Powell been the GOP candidate, voters said they would have elected him—said so by a wide margin. (Powell 48, Clinton 36, Perot 8. Just click here.) To heighten the drama, pundits pretend that Tuesday’s election was something no one ever imagined. When they do so, some are lying again, as they do with such endless aplomb.

So no, we actually weren’t surprised to see Obama elected. Nor are we “proud” when voters do sensible things; as in the days when we taught fifth-graders, we expect sensible conduct. Beyond that, our thumb comes down on the part of the scale which says that Barack Obama should get to be Barack Obama, without having the mountain of race hoisted up on his back. It has been a very long time since any white person had to bear the burden of his ethnicity, which was never as big a mountain as race; we’re tired of seeing white folk insist on making Obama be the black guy. Rather than get all excited and proud about “our first African-American president,” we’d like to see people put their focus on having our first recent successful president.

By the way: Many children will not be able picture themselves as president of the United States, though that’s a separate question.

Should we be “proud of our country” for electing Obama? In most ways, he was the clearly superior candidate; why exactly should we be “proud” when voters make such a choice? Frankly, we think our standards have been dumbed way down when we clap ourselves on the back for such conduct.

Beyond that, we think we might to revisit the context in which this decision occurred.

Should we be proud of Tuesday’s outcome? ... How could anyone be “proud” of a country whose structures have conspired, for such a long time, to support these grisly elites in such gruesome, gong-show behavior? Guess what? Your political culture is a screaming disgrace. But so what? Even your smartest, most superlative columnist is saying that you should be proud of the country whose elites refuse to stop behaving that way. Whose elites agree not to tattle. ...

Let’s be clear: Our lack of pride had nothing to do with the conduct of American voters. To our ear, that caller’s decency spoke for itself—and she didn’t even vote the way we did! But why on earth would any sane person be proud of a country of Riches and Dowds—of Milbanks, Joe Kleins, Beinarts and Chaits? People like Talk of the Nation’s caller live inside a culture of clowns—and very few career players are willing to tell them. We’ll praise her decency to the skies. But “proud of our country?” Please.

What kind of country do you live in? Last night, Chris Matthews clowned for the full hour about Sarah Palin, pretending that anonymous claims about her dumbness are somehow plainly accurate. He has no idea if these claims are true—but he’s pimping the world your way now. You see, he wants to run for the Senate—as a Dem. So last night, he kept pimping your novels.

Your country? A hall of mirrors, staffed by clowns. Proud of it? Sorry—we’re not. We’ll proudly sign our name on this list: “Something wrong with us.”

Exactly.

I am pleased to see that the Republicans are out of power. I am pleased to see someone who isn't white elected as president. Then again, as Somerby points out, the nation happily would have elected Colin Powell as president 12 years ago. I think this election gave a lot of people reason to pat themselves on the back for something that does not deserve commendation. I do not think this says something good about "us".

Obama won because he was the media darling (and, BTD, you were right, I was wrong, on the ultimate importance of that condition), not because of his positions, his conduct, or his capabilities. He won on a tide of misogyny, homophobia and crude intimidation. He is already trying to weasel his way out of the high expectations he encouraged people to have of his ability to make things change.

I am not proud of the way in which people I previously respected in the blogosphere willingly turned themselves into caricatures of the media elite they claimed to oppose and/or who descended to the levels of the violence and paranoia of the rightwing fever swamps. This applies to those who supported Obama and those who opposed him, the poles coming to meet each other at the extremes. I am not proud of an election where someone as intelligent and humane as Jeralyn Merrit transforms herself into a facsimile of a hyena, rabidly peddling misogyny, ageism and paranoia, things she did not have to do to make a case for her candidate, or even to soundly criticize the opposition.

I agree with the Incomparable One that our political culture is screaming disgrace and gladly stand in solidarity with him.

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.

Somerby on Nominal Allies

I am working on a big post and don't have anything to add to the general furor over the Hanky Panky. Instead, here is Bob Somerby on Atrios (Duncan Black) changing his reporting on the first preseidential debate to fit the media narrative, my emphais:

One last point about “nominal allies,” for whose likely decency Atrios thoughtfully vouches.

Starting in the summer of 2002, we began to express an unfortunate theme, one we had only begun to ponder: We began suggesting to readers that their nominal allies are often not actual allies. (We tepidly mentioned E. J. Dionne first.) This takes us back to a political era which may now be nearing an end, as American institutions disintegrate. But looking ahead to what may become a vastly changed political landscape, we’ll suggest to readers that the growing inanity of the liberal web makes that entity no ally either. Increasingly, the liberal web is written by and for fly-weights. You’re handed silly, childish tales—silly tales that will make you feel good.

You’re told that you play on a team called The Shirts—and that The Shirts are very good people. You’re told about the vile team called The Skins—and you’re handed endless proof of their troubling ways. Just yesterday, the Post’s Shankar Vedantam did a nice job describing the general way this process works, as he has done many times in the past. (His weekly pieces are true must-reads.) But increasingly, the liberal web is written for rubes. People like Atrios serve you crap sandwiches, assuming you’ll wolf them straight down.

Unfair to Atrios? To tell the truth, we can’t exactly say. But again, just click here to read that third post, the one about the way McCain was treating Obama “on a par with dog shit.” Do you really believe that Atrios thought that? Or was he just serving another thick sandwich—scripting you with the words you should say? Trust us: If you believe he really thought that, there will be many fine meals ahead. For ourselves, we can’t help wondering if the Three Tenors didn’t all learn a catchy new tune.

Their outrage was stirring—by Saturday noon. In real time, it seemed oddly muted.

Nominal versus actual allies. I think this really sums up the way Left Blogistan has been going, PB 2.0 as much as PB 1.0. Perhaps it s an unavoidable outcome of an environment in which partisanship is the ground for all subsequent discussion. Bob Somerby has no respect, let alone love, for John McCain, so his criticism of Duncan's change of story has to do with the integrity of the reporting, particularly reporting that is done in real time and with a wide audience.

Somerby has always and only been concerned with one thing - the lies of the media that serve to defend the debasement and dismantling of our institutions. It is truthiness that has become the lasting institution. Women have certainly found out that unless they embrace the "Bros before Hos" ethos, our presumed allies on the left are nominal, not actual. The Paulson bill gave us another view on this, with a horrifically fascinating mix of reasons for casting this or that vote, all claiming to be in the service of the ordinary citizen.

We need to learn how to pick our allies.

Anglachel

Darling is as Darling Does

I'm going to start with a proposition, that the only real darlings in the media are the media whores themselves, and that their opinion is that it is all about them. It's about who they talk to and who they are seen with and who gets into whose funeral and who is king of the world because he's the arbiter of who gets to be Preznit. What most concerns them is their appearance to the world - hip, cool, yet achingly authentic and straight-talking, summoning moral outrage over the terrible people who don't pay attention to them.

They all secretly (or not so secretly) think they are, personally and directly, the inheritor of Murrow, Cronkite and Woodward & Bernstein. (Even Woodward thinks this, missing the irony that he is not himself, if he ever was.) Their delusion is that they are the defenders of the public weal, and from that conceit a thousand fetid flowers bloom. They like candidates who make them feel like they are on the cusp of history. They worshipped Ronald Reagan because he was a spectacle, the visual personification of their own fantasies about themselves.

This is the mainstream media. The Movement Conservative media understands that what they are here to do is stay in power by any means necessary. They are the ones who set the political agenda on the public ariwaves, seeding the stories as they salt the political earth. They help Republican candidates work the refs.

I noted a few days ago the NYT story about McCain cutting off his old media buddies, which got him attention that he needed. [Note - following sentence rewritten to be readable English.] Now, via Shakesville's Mustang Bobby, the McCain campaign is shoving back on the media again, demanding that Palin be treated with deference by the press, and having her refuse to talk to the press if they won't capitulate to the campaign's demands. And it's working. The Republicans are, once again, kicking the shit out of the press, calling out legitimate bad treatment, like the invasive questioning about Bristol Palin, but quickly expanding it to cover all treatment.

The Incomparable Bob Somerby goes into detail on the way in which the flat-out lies by Palin - lies he could rebut with a small amount of research - are being allowed to cruise right through, such as the total horseshit that she "sold" Murkowski's jet on eBay. He then points out the difference between how Palin is being treated and what has been done to Democrats (my emphasis):

For the record, the “luxury jet” was 23 years old—and it doesn’t seem to have been all that luxurious (more below). But no: Palin didn’t “sell” the jet on eBay—and she didn’t make a profit. Indeed, she lost money for the state of Alaska when she tried to sell the jet on eBay—a procedure that had long been the norm when the state sold its assets.

In short, the eBay story is basically bogus, like the tale of the Bridge to Nowhere. But these stories exist for an obvious reason; they exist to define Palin as “a woman with a lot of guts”—with a ton of hockey-mom savvy. These stories are effective politics—but then too, they’re basically lies.

That brings us back to our basic question: Why can Republicans tell such tales? For two solid years during Campaign 2000, the press corps invented such embellished tales, then pretended that Gore had said them. They then savaged Gore for his vast dishonesty. How can Palin herself pimp such tales, with barely a peep from the “press?”

And this is why arguments about what Democrat will be trashed less than the others is a crappy way to pick a nominee. The press has a narrative about Democrats - they lie, they are morally corrupt, they are cosmopolitan hillbillies, elitist hicks who don't understand heartland, working class values the way we inside the Beltway, Boston-to-DC corridor Villagers do.

If you want to know how the SCLM got the way it is, look at the way WKJM prostituted himself and his reputation (rightly earned by taking on Trent Lott, and by setting up a protest to prevent SS privitization) for the opportunity at those awful, monstrous, racist Clintons and be patted on the head by the Village for helping take out the trash. WKJM is like a little Woodward & Bernstein, flush with his fame at exposing and helping bring down someone high and mighty.

Somerby's point, the one the Blogger Boyz don't want to hear because it interferes with their vision of themselves as the culmination of the great muckraking tradition (stuck as they are in their Cliff Notes version of Hegelian dialectics), when they are in fact mere pool boys at the parties thrown by the Jackie Treehorn's of the media, is that this same media is simply, thoroughly, incorrigibly corrupt. These people are also cowards, quickly coming to heel when the Republicans snap their fingers and threaten to send the naughty reporters off to put the stories to bed without any gossip, free lunches or insider scoops.

The DNC and PB 1.0 willingly colluded with the media to tear down other Democrats, trying to be on the right side of the media by getting on the wrong side of liberal politics. The damage inflicted on their own side in this electoral round will, like the broadsides against Gore, come back to haunt the party for years.

Anglachel

(I completely rewrote the sentence about the push back on the press that I originally read in a post by Mustang Bobby. I apologize for the original mangled mess.)