Sometimes I feel as if Rush Limbaugh isn't entirely to be trusted

Another day, another act of lone-wolf right-wing terror. In what is sure to a standard-issue argument from the right, Republican Party Leader Rush Limbaugh claims that the attacker was inspired by the American left. According to Limbaugh, you can make this connection because:

He hated both Bushes...he hated neocons...he hated John McCain...he hated Republicans, he hated Jews, as well. He believed in an inside job conspiracy of 9/11. This guy is a leftist, if anything...

Unfortunately for Rush, it does not take long to find von Brunn's connections to the world of right-wing extremism (emphasis mine):

(Von Brunn's) book, "Kill the Best Gentiles," is a screed against the Talmud and is dedicated to Revilo Oliver, a well-known denier of the Holocaust. Von Brunn's writings condemning "Negroes" and Jews were prolific...

...Todd Blodgett, a former Reagan White House aide who later worked with several extremist groups, met regularly with von Brunn in the 1990s and early 2000s.

"Von Brunn is obsessed with Jewish people," Blodgett said. "He had equal contempt for both Jews and blacks, but if he had to pick one group to wipe out, he'd always say it would be Jews."

Blodgett was part-owner of Resistance Records, which distributed music by white racist groups, and worked for Willis Carto, the founder of Liberty Lobby, a radical right group...

...Von Brunn apparently supported himself through much of the 1980s and '90s by distributing copies of the Spotlight, the Liberty Lobby's racist newspaper. "A lot of people like Von Brunn made some good money taking those around to senior homes, restaurants, gun shows and places like that," Blodgett said.

Unless the political scene has altered greatly, I don't believe aides to the Reagan administration, owners of white racist record companies, and frequenters of gun shows distributing racist literature are people regularly associated with the left wing, at least not since the Southern Strategy during the Nixon era.

Then there is this:

On Dec. 7, 1981, he (von Brunn) walked into the Federal Reserve headquarters on Constitution Avenue NW with a handgun and threatened to take members of the Board of Governors, including then-Chairman Paul A. Volcker, hostage.

Police said he had an 11-page document, which he characterized as an exposé of an "international bankers' conspiracy to rule all nations from one central seat of government." Court records said he intended to place them under citizens arrest and charge them with treason.

At his trial, von Brunn said that his goal was to "deport all Jews and blacks from the white nations" and that statistics on IQs of black and white Americans "proved that there is one race that is better than another." He also testified that "Jews were the greatest liars that have ever afflicted mankind."

This conspiratorial obsession with the Federal Reserve is a well known facet of right wing extremists, a much discussed and disseminated belief amongst right-wing "Patriot" groups and considered to be a key part of rule by ZOG (the so-called Zionist Occupational Government). These groups are right wing, consider themselves "real" Americans by virtue of the "organic" Constitution, and amongst other things, often believe the paper money printed by the Federal Reserve is counterfeit, part of a general belief about the sovereignty of America being usurped by outside (usually Jewish) forces long associated with the right wing in groups like the John Birch Society and the Posse Comitatus. It's the same belief system that explains the far right's obsession with leaving the United Nations, or their obsession with Mexico reconquering southwestern America.

Rush is, as usual, very careful in his choice of examples, focusing on targets-the Bushes, neocons, an inside job on 9/11-that are often associated with anger on the left, which can make his claim seem plausible on first hearing it. And that's the point-by weeding out the larger context of von Brunn's belief system and only focusing on a few disembodied, cherry-picked items, he can make it seem like this was an act of left-wing extremism, if you are inclined or wish to think it so. However, right-wing extremists were always suspicious of the internationalist Bushes, the mostly-Jewish neocons, and Israel. This by no means makes such people leftists.

Christian Terror: More Than Just Abortion Clinic Violence

Blah. Engaging any argument made by Ann Coulter seems like an exercise in futility. However, this bit from her syndicated column on June 3 extends an idea that has been floated by conservatives often, especially during the height of the Bush II years, and I suspect that over time we'll hear a similar argument from the right over and over again, so it makes sense to take it on:

Why aren't liberals rushing to assure us this time that "most pro-lifers are peaceful"? Unlike Muslims, pro-lifers actually are peaceful.
According to recent polling, a majority of Americans oppose abortion - which is consistent with liberals' hysterical refusal to allow us to vote on the subject. In a country with approximately 150 million pro-lifers, five abortionists have been killed since Roe v. Wade.
In that same 36 years, more than 49 million babies have been killed by abortionists.

Let's recap that halftime score, sports fans: 49 million to five.
Meanwhile, fewer than 2 million Muslims live in America and, while Muslims are less murderous than abortionists, I'm fairly certain they've killed more than five people in the United States in the last 36 years. For some reason, the number "3,000" keeps popping into my head.
So in a country that is more than 50 percent pro-life - and 80 percent opposed to the late-term abortions of the sort performed by Tiller - only five abortionists have been killed. And in a country that is less than 0.5 percent Muslim, several dozen Muslims have killed thousands of Americans.

Let's dissect this. Coulter is attempting to call out liberals, who she claims are quick to tell conservatives that Muslims are generally peaceful, and that terrorist attacks on their part are the acts of extremists; she wishes to know why liberals don't make the same claim about the forced-pregnancy movement. Furthermore, she claims that while a majority of Americans oppose abortion, and a very large majority oppose the kind Tiller performed, there have been only 5 deaths of doctors who perform them; while a far smaller group of Muslims living in America have killed a greater number of Americans by far.

The point of all this is to extend the idea that Islam is a religion of violence, an idea the right in America disseminated in large quantities during the height of the Bush II administration-a tool in the attempt to "other" Muslims generally. By contrast, the forced-pregnancy movement, who liberals accuse of being a domestic terrorist movement according to her, is in her estimation the very picture of peaceful protest for change, based on the fact that the forced-pregnancy movement has only murdered 5 abortion-clinic workers. And, of course, liberals are the worst of hypocrites, simply the very worst, for protecting the larger reputation of Muslims in the wake of their terrorist acts, while not doing the same for forced-pregnancy advocates in the wake of their terrorist activities.

The problem with her position is that she has singled out extremism in the name of forced pregnancy as a movement unto itself, disconnected from any larger movement of right-wing Christian extremism; while she lumps all factions and beliefs within Islam together as if it is a monolithic whole, committed in full to the extremist viewpoints of Al Quaeda, all over the Muslim world from the Middle East to Indonesia. That's obviously a false comparison. Leaving aside the mistake of putting all Muslims under one classification, abortion-clinic terrorism is part of a larger, Christianist extremist movement that has as its target not simply abortion clinics but homosexuals, the federal government, or anyone who threatens "traditional values" as they interpret them (excerpt from NPR, May 2, 1995):

LYNN NEARY: It would be wrong to say that all groups on the extreme right are influenced by religion. The right-wing militias that have sprung up around the country vary widely, but there is evidence that some of them believe that the justification for their cause can be found in The Bible, a manual for setting up militias, which is distributed by a group called the Free Militia, begins with a quote from Jesus. The first chapter outlines the biblical inspiration and authority for forming a militia.

John White [sp] is an expert in terrorism, who also teaches Christian ethics at Western Theological Seminary in Michigan.

JOHN WHITE, Christian Ethics Teacher, Western Theological Seminary of Michigan: Many times the call to religion is a call to violence because the groups are so heavily involved in ontological arguments in the sense that they claim that the deity has chosen them to represent divine will, and they're also reflective of eschatological arguments, believing that they- the end times are upon humanity, in Christian terms that Armageddon is near, and they are ready to fight the final battle of creation for- for God and for America.

This view of the state of America's increasing moral degeneracy and a belief that the nation has strayed from its God-ordained path informs this movement, regardless of the target:

LYNN NEARY: The suggestion that religious freedom was involved at Waco resonates with the extreme right, says James Davison Hunter [sp], author of Culture Wars. Hunter says the underlying political philosophy of the extreme right is a belief that the government has lost its legitimacy in part because it has forgotten its religious heritage.

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER, Author, 'Culture Wars': Corresponding to this broader political philosophy are certain religious understandings about the nature of America and its history, a kind of historical philosophy, if you will, that views America as having been at one time Christian and departing from its Christian roots.

Abortion clinic shootings are but one aspect of a larger right-wing, Christianist-based brand of terrorism. The Christianist perspective regarding the direction they see America taking is what drives people like Shelley Shannon, Paul Hill, and Scott Roeder to do what they do, just as it motivated Eric Rudolph, just as it motivated Robert "Jack" Jackson and Doug Sheets in Shelby, North Carolina. And there clearly is an overlap between the tax-protester, sovereign-citizen movement, militia movement and Christianist beliefs that has contributed to violence such as the bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City.

When Tiller's shooting is put in the proper, real context of Christianist-based terror in America, the number of similar terrorist acts committed jumps considerably-certainly well over Coulter's preferred number of five. This is, of course, excluding the threats and attempts that have been thwarted, of which there are many. Muslim extremists may have killed many Americans in one fell swoop on September 11, but Christianists have certainly tried to keep up over the years, so if their numbers lag behind those of Islamic extremists, its hardly for lack of trying.

Ann Coulter is aware of all of this. Her framing of the event is simply a little trick, a way for her to portray Islam as a religion of violence, liberals as hypocrites, and anti-abortion activists as peace-loving civil protesters all at once, by whiting out the context behind the act.

The real comparison, were she to make it, might be this: Much as all of Islam should not be stained by the acts of a few fool extremists in their midst, neither should all Christians be tainted by the acts of a few fool extremists in their midst. As for the forced pregnancy movement specifically, their rhetoric has been increasingly incendiary for years, in keeping with the rhetoric and actions of Christianist extremists generally, so I have no problem whatsoever with directly linking them with domestic terrorism. The blood of George Tiller is on their hands whether they acknowledge it or not.

George Tiller and Domestic Terror

For someone who's first political awakening revolved around supporting abortion rights, this was depressing and sad, but not terribly surprising (not the part where his shooter was charged). The extremist right wing had started ramping up its violent rhetoric when it became clear that their side was not going to win in 2008, with some notable results.

Acts like this are terrorism. While the singular act of assassinating George Tiller had a specific material purpose in killing one of the few doctors in America willing to perform late term abortions, the more important motive and result is the instilling of fear amongst those that support abortion rights, or even amongst those who don't overtly support the right-wing Christian based forced-pregnancy movement. The choice of churches in both of the examples I linked to above is an important aspect of the overall timbre of the attacks (Sara Robinson, Orcinus):

First Knoxville, then this. Sherilyn Ifill once made the point that lynchings typically occurred on courthouse lawns as a symbol that the mob had overridden the authority of the state and taken justice into its own hands. So what does it mean when right-wing terrorists start gunning down progressives in the pews of their own churches? Two events do not a pattern make -- but if this keeps happening, it'll be clear that there's a message being sent...

...(Christian) fundamentalists have never been willing to recognize the legitimacy of other faiths.* And certain factions on the far right have never had qualms about vandalizing mosques or synagogues in order to harass Muslims and Jews into political and social silence.

But they used to leave Christian churches pretty much alone. The fact that this shooting occurred in a church (again) suggests that this tactic is now being tried out on more closely related faith groups whose views don't comport with the fundamentalist party line. As Dave has often pointed out, bringing violence to houses of worship is usually an overtly eliminationist act. They are trying to terrify liberals by making us feel at risk and unsafe inside our own spiritual sanctuaries -- the very places we go to feel the most security and peace. This is terrorism, plain and simple -- Christian fundamentalist terrorism, committed by people Sam Smith has started referring to as "Jesus's Jihadis."

Sara Robinson hits the right points, because terrorism is only partially about the violent act-it is also about the symbolism. If you are a terrorist, what you do, how you do it, and where you do it are all important facets of sending a specific message to your opponents-if you don't believe as we believe, or if you are not just like us, you are not safe, even in the sanctuary of a church, a previously near-untouchable target.

Seeing this act for what it really was-a stepping-up in the extremist right-wing of it's intent to resort to violence-is of the utmost importance, partially because of the way America's democracy works, and partially because of the nature of leaderless resistance. In order to ensure that a broad array of political voices can be heard without retribution, our nation's Çonstitution allows for almost unlimited political, social and artistic voice, regardless of how extreme it may be. While this is in the main a good feature of our democracy, it does allow for the use of scapegoating, nativism and claims of un-Americanism to be used as weapons to gain political advantage. The freedom that allows for vigorous political debate also allows for this kind of low manipulation-it is part of the bargain that we strike in America to run a workable democracy. And ultimately, rhetoric is only rhetoric. Rush Limbaugh may be a lying asshole, Michelle Malkin may write a book in favor of interment camps for Muslims, Ann Coulter might wish publicly for the New York Times to be bombed, but their words, no matter how vile, don't make their opponents disappear (though they clearly wish for this to be so). In fact, if the last two elections are any indication, Americans have rejected their message in large numbers. But therein lies the problem-rhetoric about liberals and attempts to associate Barack Obama with terrorists or to claim he isn't really an American, and attempts to demonize liberals generally, didn't do the job.

The conundrum between the need for almost unlimited speech freedom, even in the case of liars or violently-oriented people; and the degree to which eliminationist rhetoric and resentment over the loss of power can lead to acts of violence; demands that the terms of the debate be very clear and as truthful as can be. This is why it is important to define acts like killing George Tiller as terrorism. Because that is what this was-an act on the part of right-wing, Christianist extremists to send a message to their opponents that they are not safe from extra-governmental acts of violence, including death. And if it is not seen and understood as such amongst the broader public, and not reported that way in the media, it will be very difficult to fight it effectively on the rhetorical battleground, where the seeds for future terrorist acts are either sown or washed away.

This act should be defined as terrorism because of its symbolic intent. All acts of terrorism are intended to do this-it is what defines terrorism, as the very word connotes the spreading of terror and fear within a population, through targeting that population for violent or intimidating acts. The social or political motivations can vary, as can the degree of organization, but the effort of the tactic itself is always the same-to intimidate. To that end, symbolism is key. For example, during the height of the lynching era in the American south, many of the lynchings had a highly public element:

On 2 April 1899, approximately two thousand white men, women, and children participated, as both witnesses and active agents, in the murder of Sam Hose in Newman, Georgia. Sam Hose was burned alive. In the final moments of his life, the assembled crowd descended upon his body and collected various parts of it as souvenirs. The Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican recounted the scene of Hose's dismemberment in the following manner:

Before the torch was applied to the pyre, the negro was deprived of his ears, fingers and genital parts of his body. He pleaded pitifully for his life while the mutilation was going on, but stood the ordeal of fire with surprising fortitude. Before the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the bones were crushed into small bits, and even the tree upon which the wretch met his fate was torn up and disposed of as "souvenirs." The negro's heart was cut into several pieces, as was also his liver. Those unable to obtain ghastly relics direct paid their more fortunate possessors extravagant sums for them. Small pieces of bones went for 25 cents, and a bit of liver crisply cooked sold for 10 cents.

Seven months later in December 1899, the New York World, in an article entitled "Roasted Alive," reported on the similar fate of Richard Coleman in Maysville, Kentucky, before a crowd of "thousands of men and hundreds of women and children." The article noted that "Long after most of the mob went away little children from six to ten years of age carried dried grass and kindling wood and kept the fire burning all during the afternoon." It also revealed that "Relic-hunters visited the [End Page 639] scene and carried away pieces of flesh and the negro's teeth. Others got pieces of fingers and toes and proudly exhibit the ghastly souvenirs to-night."3 In a 27 February 1901 Chicago Record article on the hanging and burning of George Ward before a crowd of four thousand people in Terre Haute, Indiana, the newspaper gave the following account of the scene of Ward's murder:

When the crowd near the fire tired of renewing it after two hours, it was seen that the victim's feet were not burned. Someone called an offer of a dollar for one of the toes and a boy quickly took out his knife and cut off a toe. The offer was followed by others, and the horrible traffic was continued, youths holding up toes and asking for bids.

(Harvey Young, The Black Body as Souvenir)

This kind of highly public, grisly killing was integral to maintaining the subordinate status of African Americans in the south. The actual amount of lynchings, though substantial, was not nearly enough to eradicate the presence of black people in the south, and in any case, this would not have been desirable, as their labor was needed:

There was, however, no possibility that a color line could be drawn literally; blacks in the south could not be locked out or driven away, because the south's economy was tottally dependent on their labor, and no definition rooted in biology could successfully be used to assign every individual his or her proper place (J. William Harris, Ettiquette, Lynching, and Racial Boundaries in Southern History: A Mississippi Example).

Thus, to demarcate the "color line" in a manner that would effectively render blacks subordinate without literally driving them out of the south entirely, highly ritualized acts, like those described above, acted as a symbolic warning. Similarly, the choice of targets or dates of acts will be imbued with symbolic meaning. Al Quaeda could have chosen any of millions of targets within America-it chose the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon, symbols of America's economic and military might. An attack like that will not, as a singular event, cause the existential destruction of the U.S., nor would Al Quaeda believe that it would. Rather, by choosing those particular symbols of America, they are attempting to send a message, both about their grievances with the U.S., and, in the case of the Pentagon, about what little security military strength can really provide, even on your home turf, when faced with dedicated, extremist religious fundamentalism mixed with a willingness to resort to violence. So too is the assassination, in his church, of Tiller such a symbolic act, with the same desired result. Christianist extremists are attempting to sow insecurity amongst the population, specifically the non-Christianist, non-forced pregnancy supporting population, choosing a highly significant target imbued with meaning and with a well-known history for his part in this particular struggle.

Unfortunately, there is already some resistance to calling this act terrorism, as will be seen below. During the mid to late 1990s, acts like this and the Oklahoma City bombing were often commonly described as domestic terrorism. However, the election of George Bush, who the extreme right wing found more favorable, tamped down much of the right-wing militant activity, and thus it was not so much in the media spotlight. Furthermore, the rise of Islamic terrorism in the public consciousness after 9/11 pushed memories of that era out of the public mind.

An equally difficult hurdle to overcome is the "lone wolf" image that singular acts such as this are often described as. This muddies the waters in correctly defining acts like this, even amongst people who may be otherwise sympathetic to Tiller, like in this exchange from Rachel Maddow's show on June 1:

JONATHAN TURLEY, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR: Hi, Rachel.
MADDOW: I`m making these observations politically just as a citizen, but I wanted to ask you tonight if it`s legally appropriate, legally useful, to approach this problem as terrorism?
TURLEY: Well, in some cases, it is. You know, some of these past cases have elements of terrorism. Rudolph is a good example of that -- although, you know, he was not just anti-abortion, he was anti-homosexual. He was sort of at war with the world. And that makes this definition a little more difficult.
Some of us, particularly on the civil libertarian side, are uncomfortable with using the terrorism label because, you know, the Bush administration expanded this definition to the breaking point. I testified not long ago in Congress of how the Bush administration would classify what were rudimentary criminal cases as terrorism cases and use these laws against them.
The problem we have, as you know, is to deal with lone actors like this. I don`t believe that the man who killed Dr. Tiller was a classic terrorist. I think that he was a murderer. He assassinated him.
But I don`t see the elements of an organized terrorist plot. And in many ways, he`s the most dangerous thing that we face.

or another example here, from CNN on May 31st, before his shooter was apprehended:

MIKE BROOKS, CNN SECURITY ANALYST (via telephone): You know, Don, what you just heard from that great affiliate reporter who has been working hard on this story, that he did wear a bulletproof vest, and he was shot in the head.
So to me, that says it's someone who probably had been looking at him, knew his actions. This subject has also apparently had been seen there at the church.
So it's probably someone that he knew, had some contact with, or someone who was actually planning this for quite some time.
But you talked about back, and we talked Don back in 19'84. I was on the FBI joint terrorism task force in Washington, D.C. and was involved in an investigation that dealt to see whether or not there was a nationwide conspiracy to kill abortion doctors and to bomb abortion clinics.
LEMON: That was called VAAPCON, right? Violence Against Abortion Providers Conspiracy. It was a grand jury, right, in that case?
BROOKS: That's correct, Don. It was a grand jury that was sitting in the eastern district of Virginia.
The investigation lasted for almost two years, and there were about 13, roughly 13 subjects that we were looking at, to say, OK, are these people involved in a conspiracy?
After the investigation, a little over two years, it was decided that, you know what, there is not a conspiracy. These were all basically lone actors, because it started right after July, 1994, Paul Hill in Pensacola killed Dr. John Britain. And right after that, there had been a bombing of an abortion clinic falls church. And that's when we decided -- the Justice Department decided we have to take a closer look.
LEMON: Paul Hill was the first -- I believe he was the first man, or the first person who got the death penalty for killing an abortion provider. So that's very interesting.
So this tells you -- you're saying this guy acted alone, maybe with some sort of vigilante, and was following this guy, and just had a vendetta and wanted to get him.
BROOKS: Just hearing what I'm hearing right now, Don, that's what it sounds like.

and further on down, here:

LEMON: I was wondering if it was going to change, and it might change that.
Bill, in the short time that we have left, talk to me about -- you said both sides will be tamping down and really monitoring themselves. But does this offer and fodder for either side in this issue?
SCHNEIDER: Well, I think it would be unfortunate if people exploit what was possibly, likely an individual act of violence. I don't think you can characterize it as a policy on the part of abortion opponents.

These statements skirt around the issue, and in the last statement, deny, the reality of the leaderless resistance movement in America. In this permutation of right-wing extremist terror, groups are made up of cells of 2-6 people, working autonomously for an understood goal, but without any centralized plan:

Leaderless resistance ensures that the larger movement can never be concretely linked to these individual acts. The important connection, though, can easily be found on a broader scale...

"There is a problem talking about 'a conspiracy' or 'a national conspiracy,'" says Michael Reynolds, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Klanwatch arm. "What we may have, looking at the overall pattern, are several conspiracies."

The arsonists (church arsonists in the 1990s) rely on leaderless resistance: "It's a guerrilla strategy. Instead of a top-down structure, you have cells of two to six individuals going out and committing whatever acts they choose, whether it's assassination, robberies, arson or bombings...
(In God's Country, Dave Neiwert)

This concept of leaderless resistance reaches back to at least 1992, in the aftermath of the Ruby Ridge meltdown. The keynote speaker in the meeting in Estes Park, Colorado was former Klan leader Louis Beam, an early proponent of leaderless resistance:

This Louis Beam (sp) created this plan, he wrote it out in one of his last publications when he was the leader of the Klan, called "The Seditionist." And what it means is that small groups, with no leaders that can be caught and topple the whole group, will go out and plan their own acts of domestic terrorism and act when they feel like they should act, based on the conditions and the material. And the purpose of the movement, in its many postings on the Internet and the World Wide Web and the publications and videos and books they sell, is to give inspiration to the Timothy McVeighs in our society. (National Press Club Luncheon Speaker Morris Dees, APRIL 16, 1996)

It's important to remember that while there is no centralized plan to this kind of terrorism, as there would be with a group such as Al Quaeda, there is a generally known and understood concept of action that its adherents recognize and act on, disseminated through literature and the internet. Thus, these actors, whether they be lone wolves like Paul Hill or small groups like those linked to the bombing in Oklahoma City, know what to do and can plan their attacks without having to be told by a central leader or committee.

Abortion clinics have often been targets of this kind of terrorism:

Attacks on abortion clinics and their workers are perhaps less common but often command more attention, especially when they entail horrifying murders like Paul Hill's fatal shotgun attack on Dr. John Britton and his escort, James Barrett. Hill is only one of several anti-abortionists who have used lethal force agains clinics and their employees: John Salvi III killed two women in two gun attacks on abortion clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1994; Michael Griffin, a onetime associate of Hill, fatally shot abortion doctor David Gunn in 1993...A Grants Pass, Oregon, woman named Shelley Shannon shot and wounded a Wichita, Kansas, abortion doctor in 1993; from prison, her correspondence to other anti-abortionists has indicated a nationwide underground network of like-minded activists inclined to commit violence against abortion workers. One of these groups linked to Shannon, the Army of God, later claimed credit for setting off pipe bombs at an abortion clinic and a gay nightclub in Atlanta.

While I am sympathetic to claims of civil libertarians that the Bush Administration stretched the definition of terrorist to the breaking point, the specific issue regarding the Bush Administration revolved around using such definitions to grab unprecedented executive power, for which the terrorism issue acted as a tool. Such expansion of executive power is a real problem, but it is a separate one. By no means should it allow us to shy away from calling acts like the murder of George Tiller terrorism. Terrorists use violence as a way of "achieving a radical change in the status quo, which would confer a new advantage, or the defense of priveleges they perceive as threatened" (Martha Crenshaw, The Strategic Logic of Terrorism). There is no doubt that acts like this are an attempt to both confer a new advantage and to protect privileges right-wing Christian extremists perceive to be under attack.

Paragraph after paragraph of self-justifying crapola

Well. According to blogger, it looks as though the last time I actually attempted this was in 2007. About 2 years have passed since my last post. After such a long time not blogging, and given the fact that my skills at such were not strong, it would be a fair question to ask exactly why I decided, now, out of nowhere, to begin this again. After all, the form is no longer remotely novel. I have not shown in the past I have anything particularly new or insightful to add to the world of political discourse. My older posts were generally poorly constructed rants-frankly, most are embarrassing to me now that I read them again-not the opinions necessarily, but the way I wrote them and the lack of real thought I put into them, and my tendency to follow the lead of, or to be more precise, completely rip off, other more established, higher-quality blogs. Furthermore, when I started 3 or whatever years ago, I had visions of truly making an impact on our political world, using my insight and knowledge to help establish a new progressive way of thinking-with all of the attendant prestige that such influence would bestow. Unfortunately, my output was, well, what you see on this blog-which is to say, it was at the low end of mediocre. Given this, I now have no such delusions of grandeur. I can't even remember why I had them in the first place.

Furthermore, the tone of my previous writing was, well, bizarre. It's like I was shouting on a street corner. I've been forced to write throughout my life on many occasions, and I can honestly say I have never written like this before or since. It's hard for me to believe that I actually made any of this tripe public. It might have been ok for, say, a diary or personal journal or something, but I put these things in places where people could actually read them. Considering that I made all kinds of pronouncements about the State of The World Today for all the world to read, you might think I would put a little thought into it. But you would be wrong.

On top of the fact that my skills were lacking, the fact is that, as I mentioned above, blogging on politics is not a new or novel idea anymore. The medium is beyond saturated, and there is a well-established hierarchy of elite bloggers with large followings. While there are far better reasons to do this than to garner attention, the blog medium's most useful (to me) innovation is the comment thread, where the ideas of a post can be debated by readers and the original writer. Without readers who are willing to criticize and comment (hopefully constructively, with solid logic or information), I would be writing journal entries again, only in a place where people could read them and snicker. But any hopes I might have of attracting a group of readers would have to be minimal at this point, as the limited market for political blog readers has almost certainly been comprehensively reached by now. This was probably the case a few years ago, when I started writing here, but at least then there was some general buzz about those new-fangled blog thingamajigs. At least to me, the idea of writing political commentary on a blog that people might actually read seemed so COOL, and I just wanted to get going RIGHT NOW!!, so much so that I just started writing posts and linking to things, often without completely reading them. That exciting time, when it seemed that this was a Wave Of The Future upon which brave souls such as myself could ride, is well over, and now I wonder if it just wasn't something that largely existed in my head. Now, the idea of a left-leaning hack blathering on a blog is of no consequence at all-I would be one of thousands, doing something that most people feel they can go back to ignoring, now that a Socialist Muslim used ACORN to commit voter fraud to get into the Presidency and force us into FEMA camps. Why read this little nobody when there are other writers in blogoland of greater consequence and influence?

And thus, why should I bother? I just spent three paragraphs making a convincing argument that I had no business writing a blog, so why have I decided I would anyway? And furthermore, why explain why? If I wanted to start again, couldn't I have just started posting again? Why this infernal metablogging? Don't I have other things to do? Is my life really this empty?

Actually, no. I have a lovely wife I love; a beautiful six month old son with gorgeous blue eyes, ridiculously fat cheeks and a hilarious, maniacal giggle; and I am in school to become a teacher, which I am really excited about. My life is fuller and more satisfying than it has ever been. This lengthy explanation is about something else. I really just think that my previous writing was really, really bad. It was just junk. It was bad enough that I think it merits some explanation, or at least acknowledgement. And I think that starting again after such a long (and unlamented) hiatus requires some justification. Based on my previous work, anyone reading me would have to have thought I was an idiot. I look at it this way: If someone reading me agreed with me, that meant they already agreed with me in the first place. Anyone that didn't agree with me would certainly not have walked away convinced. And, worst of all, anyone that was on the fence about a subject would have had little reason to think I knew what I was talking about, and thus would have had no reason to listen to me. I might have been trying to provoke thought, but I mostly provided unintended comedy.

So, why would I risk further embarrassment? There are some actual reasons, and now that I no longer think that I am going to build some massive, adoring following, I can pursue them without trying to be clever, which is good, since I am not. The first reason is simply because I want to have a forum to organize my thoughts on things I find important. There are things in the world I find important; I'd like to force myself to figure out what I think of them. While I could do this in a journal or something like that, doing this in a public forum will force me to be more careful. Why I think that will make a difference I don't know, since it didn't before, but maybe this time it will stick. Also, the occasional presence of comments is, again, from my perspective, a truly useful tool. At least, I think so theoretically. It might turn out that people tune in simply to call me a douche bag. True that may be, but it will hardly help me to organize my ideas. And it will make me cry. But, that's a chance I will have to take.

The second reason I have decided to re-start my silly little blog is because I wish to construct a political and social narrative that reflects my beliefs and ideas about the world and how it works, including the way I think it should work. I also want to build a counter-narrative to those narratives that I think impede my vision of the world. The mainstream media has, by and large, accepted the narrative presented by America's right wing in an often undiluted format since at least the 1980s, and during that span it usually had a monopoly on how events were presented. Until blogs, few alternative ideas made it through that noise. The rise of left wing blogs was a godsend for people like me who felt, during the Bush II administration early on, that the world had completely lost its bearings altogether. Obviously, times have drastically changed since I first attempted this. The economic crisis is the most important issue of the day, as opposed to the Iraq War a few measly years ago, there is a new president, the Republicans have been reduced to idiotic theater like teabagging, and all of that original anger that served as the original impetus to start blogs a few years ago is different. It is a far more established medium, and I'm not sure I would have much to add to it.

Yet here I am doing it anyway, at great length, wasting all manner of time justifying this excursion. Lord, make me get to the end. In any case, another reason I want to waste precious space is, well, because I am just egocentric enough to think I might be able to contribute to a general store of knowledge. I like knowing and learning things, I formulate opinions about those things, and I want to write about them. Furthermore, as I am back in college to get a new degree, I have access to our university library's resources, including all kinds of scholarly articles, books, etc., all on the magical internet, right at my fingertips. I could quote from obscure journals! I could post someone else's charts! I could footnote! I could write at the level of a hung-over college junior! How exciting! Ok, not really exciting. Perhaps not even interesting. But anyway, I actually enjoy writing in that way, and doing the research, and having to think things through and then presenting them to a potential audience. Given that, it makes sense to write on a blog. Since I am now freed from feeling I have to make some kind of immediate impact, I am free to write on topics in a broader way. Since I am freed from feeling I will ever draw an audience, I can fill paragraph after paragraph with self-indulgent pablum like this, or drone on in the stilted style of a scholarly journal-I mean, who really cares? Who is really reading this anyway? And could it really be any worse than, say, David Broder's work? Or George Will's?

Oh, my, yes. Yes it very well could.

So, what will I be blogging about? I really don't know. Some people have subjects they specialize in or have expertise in. I don't have those particular advantages, so I really don't know where this will take me (although hostility towards Evangelical Christianity will certainly make repeat appearances). Well, politics will come up. I won't attempt to be current-events driven, because that takes up a lot of time I won't have. My topics will have to be broader. I am hoping that writing on various subjects will help me develop a theme that I can pursue in greater depth-more than one, hopefully. I will also probably throw in posts about my mundane life, like stories about how I was riding my bicycle on a training ride when I was T-boned by a pickup truck, and then I had to be taken to the hospital, and then, when I went to the police station later that night to pick up my wreck of a bike and write out a police report, I was arrested on a four-year-old contempt of court charge (this is all true, by the way). Since stupid shit like that happens to me all the time, it will probably find its way into this blog.

And that, mercifully, wraps up this bright new beginning. As anyone could see, I have set the bar low, in a very obvious attempt to make even barely competent writing seem like a success. Hopefully, I will be able to clear that bar in the future.

Mitt and His Magic Moment

I wanted to write something witty and clever about Mitt's so-called "Kennedy Moment." However, since I lack cleverness or wit, I'll defer to the great Charles Pierce, who crystallizes my thoughts exactly:

Hey, Mitt. They think your religion is a cult and they think you're pretty much a foof. They're always going to think that, even when and if you're the nominee and some of them beg their Personal Lord And Strength Coach for permission to vote for you. Ain't going to be pretty, son. I feel for my former governor. I truly do. He's taking an unfair rap for his religion, and an unfair rap for his gardeners, all in the same week. However -- and it is a big However -- he's the one who decided to run for the nomination of a party that has enthralled itself to shoeless fundamentalist rubes and anti-immigration yahoos. He could have gone two ways. He could have stood against this and argued, correctly, that the GOP is on its way to becoming a regional, racialist-based, minority party. (The approach John McCain briefly tried on in the aftermath of the 2000 South Carolina primary, but which he thereupon abandoned for the next seven years.) He could have done us all a favor and Souljah'ed the lunatic portions of his base. He had the money and the record to do it. Instead, he pandered, over and over again, to the crazy people, and now the crazy people are acting like crazy people act, and all the chickens are coming home to roost on his handsomely chiseled head.

Further, the endless fake parallels to John F. Kennedy's speech to the Baptist ministers are as ahistorical as they are clumsily drawn. Kennedy was addressing a still-extant cultural anti-Catholicism in the South and nativist Know-Nothingism in the North that had remained virulent within his lifetime. He was addressing his speech to the entire country and, if you read it very carefully, you discover that he essentially was telling the Baptist ministers to go to hell, that they were crackpot religious bigots whom he very subtly marginalized from a changing political process. Most of what he told them they didn't really believe, and he knew it, and they knew it. Kennedy wasn't appealing for their support. He was warning them that their stale religious prejudices were being left behind in the New Frontier. As is plain from the text to everyone except, apparently, David Brooks, Romney's speech was narrowly aimed at garnering the support of an important slice of the base he needs to win his party's nomination. The deliberate misreading of the Constitution. The Meacham-esque blathering about the religiosity of the Founders. The monumentally indiscreet -- and philosophically risible -- equation of freedom with public god-babbling. This is all nothing except more pandering. And shouldn't someone making this facile comparison point out that Romney is a Mormon bishop and is thus tied more closely to his church's power structure than Kennedy ever was? I mean, Jack wasn't even a very good Catholic. Gene McCarthy was right about that.

That's pretty much it in a nutshell. That Mitt would say there should be no religious test, then would basically turn around and say that there should be a religious test and that he passes! is basically what I expected. This parallels the immigration debate, where Bush was hoping that he could bring the more socially conservative Hispanic vote to the Republican party and add to his base, forgetting that the odious Republican base doesn't like people who don't shimmer with lily whiteness, which, of course, is how the Republicans wanted it. They built their base, in large part, on racial and religious bigotry, and they still want to use it when it's convenient (like when there are Muslims afoot). Maybe this nonsense still speaks to them enough for Mitt the Duplicitous to win the primary (I doubt it, but what do I know? Little). But the coalition of pricks has been showing signs of fraying lately.

Our long national nightmare is over

Well, it's the season for Jesus Claus and Santa Christ. I am hoping to get through it without hearing too much of the yearly blather about the non-existent War on Christmas, a cousin to the shibboleth of Political Correctness that still seems to fuel the fires of conservative outrage (I suppose something has to, since things like Mike Huckabee's release of a serial rapist for political reasons and Rudy!s sex on the city raise nary a grumble on the right). Nothing ruins Christmas like Christians, of course, and over the last couple of years those of us with rational temperaments have had to endure a war on intelligence during the holiday season.

I worry no more. Bill O'Reilly has declared the war on intelligence a success. Christmas is saved from those "forces of darkness" that would allow businesses to cater to actual non-Christians during the holiday season by greeting people with "Happy Holidays" instead of "Get out of my store, you kike/raghead/atheist commie/dark person of indeterminate non-Christian religion-this is Our Time!" Or, well, whatever it was that privately-owned businesses were supposed to be forced to say to pay homage to the theocrats. Whatever. Anyway-to whom do Christians owe this overwhelming victory over the forces of almost nobody? Why, none other than-Bill O'Reilly himself! By jingo, Bill, you did it, with the strength of your hand and heart and your pure Christian spirit! Why, if it weren't for you, the overwhelmed, persecuted Christians would have had nowhere to turn, since they clearly have no power or support within our government or the media. But lucky for them, there was you, a man on a culture mission, making the world safe from licentious, amoral, sex-crazed anti-Christian liberals and their Christ-less allies. You know, when I think about it, that's probably the intersection between liberals and the terrorists. So, O'Reilly didn't really just save Christmas-he indirectly saved all of western civilizaion. That's quite a feat.

The War on the (non-existent) War on Christmas is stupid on so many levels that you could write a book about that alone and get a firmer understanding of the vapidity of the conservative Christian "movement." This, though, is a whole new level of dim. The ego of this man is stunning. The idea that America would become a Christmas-less nation (almost as though it were run by those anti-Christian heretics in Massachusetts) but for his tireless work is, well, ridiculous. For his support of this non-issue, he gives himself a public pat on the back. What I don't understand is, how can conservatives follow this nonsense? This little self-congratulatory wank inadvertently shows that his yammering about the non-existent War on Christmas was little more than cheap self-promotion. Beyond that, it has little meaning to him. You could say that about almost any subject he covers. Yet, he remains the idiot-king of the conservative talk-show world, the cubic zirconium in the Fox News tin crown. Liberals will generally eviscerate supposedly liberal pundits when they make fact-free or foolish assessments, or represent them poorly, as a quick Google search with the words "Joe Klein" will reveal. Yet, dunderheads like O'Reilly get a free pass, even though their ideology largely revolves around their wonderful selves and little else. When you're voting for a politician, you're forced to make a choice, even if it will be an imperfect one, and self-interest may be a part of the personality. That's just a part of the compromises one has to make in a democracy. But no one is forced to listen to a self-serving pudsmack like O'Reilly. That's a choice. That it's a choice conservatives make in such numbers is mightily revealing.

A long-winded post about Elite Mythology

I read this by Judith Warner in the New York Times, an article about the allegedly divisive, polarizing Hillary Clinton's surprising strength in this campaign, even when head-to-head against Rudy! Giuliani. I've never been quite as surprised as everyone else is that she might prove to be more popular than the punditocracy would believe-they mostly could never get their minds around the fact Bill Clinton was popular, either. While I don't plan to vote for her myself due to the fact I find her far too hawkish in her foreign policy, I can certainly see where she might be better liked by others.

There were a couple of things that stood out in the entry. There was this:

The “we” world of Tucker Carlson knew what they knew about Hillary Clinton — right up until about this week, I think — because they spend an awful lot of time talking to, socializing with and interviewing one another.

What they don’t do all that much is venture outside of a certain set of zip codes to get a feel for the way most people are actually living. They don’t sign up for adjustable rate mortgages, visit emergency rooms to get their primary health care, leave their children in unlicensed day care or lose their jobs because they have to drive their mothers home from the hospital after hip replacement surgery.

Hillary Clinton’s supporters, it turns out, do.

Alongside the newest set of poll results showing Clinton’s surprising levels of popularity among lower- and middle-class women, white moderate women, even black voters, was another story this week, based on a new set of data from the I.R.S.

It showed that America’s most wealthy earn an even greater share of the nation’s income than they did in 2000, at the peak of the tech boom. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, the Wall Street Journal reported, earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005 (the latest date for which these data are available), up from the high of 20.8 percent they’d reached in the bull market of 2000. The bottom 50 percent of people earned 12.8 percent of all income, compared with 13 percent in 2000. And the median tax filer’s income fell 2 percent when adjusted for inflation (to about $31,000) between 2000 and 2005.

More and more people are being priced out of a middle class existence. Because of housing prices, because of health care costs, because of tax policy, because of the cost of child care, The Good Life – a life of relative comfort and financial security – is now, in many parts of the country, an upper-middle-class luxury.

Given all this, you would think that Clinton’s big policy announcement this week on improving life for working families would have been big news.

After all, it contained a number of huge new middle class entitlements: paid family leave and sick leave, most notably. There were a number of tried-and-true triggers for outrage from the right wing and the business community like government standards and quality controls for child care. There could have been debate stoked among the many childless workers who now feel parents are getting too much “special treatment” in the workplace (Clinton supports legislation to protect parents and pregnant women from job discrimination). At the very least, someone could have accused Clinton of trying to bring back welfare. (She supports subsidies for low-income parents who wish to stay home to raise their children.) Or someone could have questioned how realistic it really is to pay for all that – to the tune of $1.75 billion per year – simply by cracking down on the “abusive” use of tax shelters, as Clinton proposes to do.

snip

(“I do see you and I do hear you,” Clinton said in a speech on “rebuilding the middle class” earlier this month. “You’re not invisible to me.”)

In contemplating the disconnect, as I often have done, between Hillary and her upper-middle-class peers, I find myself thinking of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

In Maslow’s theory of human motivation, needs were mapped out in a pyramid form. The broad array of physiological needs was at the bottom, followed by the almost equally wide range of safety needs: things like bodily and financial security, secure physical health and work, and property ownership. Transcendent needs, like truth, justice, wisdom and self-actualization, were in the tiniest triangle up at the top. As their “lower-level” needs were met, Maslow theorized, people moved up the pyramid; they did not – unless the material circumstances of their lives changed dramatically – move back.

The American middle class, it seems to me, is looking to politicians now to satisfy a pretty basic – and urgent – level of need. Yet people in the upper middle class — with their excellent health benefits, schools, salaries, retirement plans, nannies and private afterschool programs — have journeyed so far from that level of need that, it often seems to me, they literally cannot hear what resonates with the middle class. That creates a problematic blind spot for those who write, edit or produce what comes to be known about our politicians and their policies.

Okay, I really pulled a lot from that. But the connection of ideas needed to be seen. The disconnect between the punditocracy, mostly upper middle to upper class, and the wider world outside of Washington is very real. It's utterly impossible to them to believe that Hillary Clinton might not be a harpy villainess in the eyes of the exalted salt-of-the-earth middle America. Nor are the upper classes classes going to be wildly thrilled with Hillary's appeal to lower middle class voters. Neither of those groups like her, in fact they tend to despise her, and yet there she is, positioned to win, pulling away against her Democratic foes and even, according to polling, winning in a general election, against all the conventional wisdom. Hillary is supposed to be a polarizing, unelectable bitch, and here she is, the strongest contender. It can't be explained as identity politics alone, since she leads Obama amongst African-Americans, and it can't be explained by anti-war sentiment alone, since she's always been rather hawkish and supported the Iraq war a long time, and remains hawkish towards Iran. It has to be, at least in part, because she's making her appeal to those caught trying to make it in a hardening economy, and it's working, in a way that it has not for, say, John Edwards. (All those stupid stories about Edward's haircuts seemed to work, except that they benefited not Rudy! or Mitt or St. McCain, they helped Hillary, who is hitting on some of those same two Americas themes. I can't tell you how funny I find that).

I don't think, at all, that the disconnect between the perception of upper class folk and lower class folk of Hillary, or any Democrat, is because of a wealth gap producing a blind spot, as Judith Warner puts it. A blind spot implies that if you merely could get such people to understand what it is like to live in harder circumstances, they would be less likely to dismiss politicians that appeal to people under duress. They might even develop sympathy for them. I see zero evidence of this. As the Frost family fiasco showed, even when presented with clear facts of the difficulties faced by middle and lower-middle income families, the right still reacts with crude, ugly personal attacks and claims that these "other" people are taking something that is rightfully the property of the elite. No, the disconnect stems from the great conservative myth of the Elite as Meritocracy.

I'm about to use anecdotal evidence to help make my point, so take that with the generous helping of salt it deserves. I grew up in an upper class community in the midwest (they do exist there). My own family is upper middle class, and certain branches of it fit into the upper class top 5% section of the economy. (I guess this makes me a limousine liberal or some such shit). I have seen, my whole life, this group of people as they are, not as they like to present themselves in public. A large proportion of the kids I grew up with stand to inherit large sums of money. Many of them were able, without any particularly special achievements, to go to elite universities, with all that entails. Some were accepted to these universities simply due to legacy, since they were not terribly high academic performers in high school. Many would have nice jobs waiting for them when they were done, either through family or connections with family or friends. Essentially, most of them were mini-George Bushes-not terribly talented, not terribly hard working, not terribly motivated born-on-third-basers. The one thing that really struck me about these people wasn't that they didn't understand the lives of less well-off people, though indeed they didn't (neither did I, at the time)-it was that they didn't understand they had not EARNED this lifestyle.

This is the wellspring from which this mentality really flows, an ignorance of their own passive acceptance of wealth with no work. They simply cannot accept the fact that they did not make this all happen, and thus feel that it is all deserved, as opposed to it being a gift. They really, really believe that their elite status stems from hard work and general personal worthiness, not lucky birth.

This misconception of their toil allows them to believe that they don't need to bother with those other people who haven't reached such heights. "Those people aren't rich, they aren't successful, they didn't go to the really good schools, etc...well, that's because they didn't work hard enough," they think. "Not like me. I did what needed to be done, and that's why I'm here." Thus rolls on the myth in their own mind.

I think that is what many liberals really don't get about these people. We tend to think they are nefarious plotters hatching manipulative schemes. And they often do. What we miss, though, is that they are also true believers-they really think their crony capitalism, avaricious tax cuts, corporate welfare, etc. are all the righteous and just rewards for the hard, hard work they put in to get there. This true belief has helped conservatives build the myth of the self-made bootstrapper, much to the Republican party's benefit. Ideologically, they have used it to manipulate middle and lower middle class voters, telling them that if they just work hard enough they can grab the brass ring--then, more importantly, telling them when they CAN'T that it's because some "other" person is TAKING it from them. That thief can be an immigrant, a woman, a black person through affirmative action, a lib'rul who taxes them, a commie, a feminazi, but someone is always ruining it for those people, who could have joined the elite if it weren't for those meddling darkies/women/immigrants/liberals/commies/feminazis/whoever. This is how they were even able to sweep up formerly Democratic constituencies like labor, selling them lies about how their success was being stunted by dark skinned devils and welfare queens, the lib'ruls are helping them do it, drop your union, vote Republican, tax cuts for the rich, this will help YOU succeed.

It's been difficult to pierce this haze. John Edwards has tried and tried and been childishly mocked for it, but the growing gap between the rich and poor, the disappearing middle class, the health care crisis and the failure of "movement" conservatism to improve life on a widespread scale are all combining to change people's minds about what the Elite as Meritocracy and Bootstrapper myths can really do for them.

And of course, there is the war. Not only is it bad and failing in and of itself, it also, as the most important manifestation of "movement" conservatism ever, calls into question the entire "movement" conservatism enterprise. And it is hard to position yourself as a supporter of regular, salt-of-the-earth people when your "movement" cuts veteran's benefits, or lets the VA hospital become a run-down hellhole, or keeps extending soldiers tours, or lets out of control mercenaries threaten soldiers, or loses millions of taxpayer dollars, all while being run by a fat, pear-shaped "elite" who will never face a shot fired in anger in their entire lives.

Yet this elite's self-image remains as it ever was; deserving, hard-working, and heroic, thus beyond any self-reflection. And so there is this disconnect, where people in this upper strata cannot for the life of them understand why Obama, or Edwards, or especially Hillary might actually appeal to people in, say, middle America. So, sure, maybe it is a blind spot. But if it is, it's a purposeful one. Calling it that gives them a little too much credit.

Then there was this:

Given all this, you would think that Clinton’s big policy announcement this week on improving life for working families would have been big news.

snip

But there was none of this. Clinton’s family policy speech in New Hampshire all but sank like a stone. If it was covered at all, it was often packaged as part of a feature on her attempts to curry favor with female voters. (“Clinton shows femininity,” read a Boston Globe headline.) It was as though the opinion-makers and agenda-setters, waiting with bated breath for Bill to slip up, just one more time, couldn’t see or hear the message to middle-class voters.

Well, anyone who has followed along with the news over the last 15 or so years would be familiar with that scenario. When it comes to reporting on politics, the "liberal" media cannot wait to disparage Democrats, and is impossibly vapid and out of touch. I urge anyone who is reading my incoherent tripe to read this. It is much better and covers most of this territory very well.