Stupidest Legislative “Money-Saving” Plan of the Month: The First Three Nominees

It’s true: I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks. Still, it surprises me that I apparently missed the memo announcing the contest for Stupidest Legislative “Money-Saving” Plan of the Month. Apparently there are some really cool prizes involved, as the contestants are lining up, each with a scheme a little more insane than the one before. Here are three contenders I found out about within about roughly a six-hour stretch a few days ago. (I really have been busy; that’s why I’m only now writing about it.) For the purposes of this contest, the Alabama town that demanded proof of American citizenship—indeed of Alabama citizenship—to get (and pay for) clean water, and the Let Women Die law that sailed through the US House are not eligible, as they are merely mean-spirited and depraved, and don’t even pretend to save money.

We still have some really good entrants, however:

Representing the great state of Kansas, we have the Topeka City Council’s decision to repeal the city ordinance banning domestic violence. Really. OK, so this isn’t quite as colossally cretinous as it might initially appear: this is really a petty and petulant jurisdictional dispute between the city and the county, neither of whom want to accept responsibility for misdemeanor cases (half of which involve domestic violence) because their respective budgets have been cut. So now the Shawnee County DA has in fact capitulated and agreed to do his freaking job prosecute such cases, clearly as a direct response to public outcry. This apparently includes re-visiting the cases of between 18 and 30 (sources differ) alleged criminals released because no one would take the case. Who’s right in the turf squabble? I. Don’t. Care. The council vote would be unconscionable and unsupportable under any circumstances.

Is it a coincidence that the 7-3 vote to de-criminalize such cases corresponds exactly to the ratio of men to women on the city council? I don’t know; I can’t find a record of who voted which way. But I’ll say this: I’m betting they weren’t going to de-criminalize the completely understandable crime of kicking idiot city councilmen squarely in the balls.

Next up: Camden County (Georgia) is contemplating a measure that would put two inmates—convicted of things like drug offences and theft—in each of three existing fire stations as a money-saving measure. What could go wrong, after all? Let’s see, we’re not only expecting professional firefighters to do their own highly risky jobs, but to “monitor” the inmates: a term I take to imply both supervision of their work and serving as guards. Put simply, the real firefighters would be under-trained to watch the inmates, who would not only be under-trained as firefighters, they’d also require constant scrutiny because, well, they’re inmates. The people of the area, no doubt, would be ever-so-happy to be suffering from the anxiety accompanying a fire, only to have a convicted thief wandering through their homes.

Stuart Sullivan, a firefighter, spoke to the Board of County Commissioners, urging them to drop the plan: “If you vote to bring these inmates into our working environment, you jeopardize not only the employees' well-being, but the safety of our citizens.” Well, duh. Seriously, Mr. Sullivan, when did coherent argument start becoming a legitimate way to influence government policy? True, the proposal is insulting to professional firefighters by suggesting they can be readily replaced both those Jack Marshall describes as “not just … barely-trained amateurs, but barely-trained amateurs who can’t be trusted to walk free in the community.” True, it unnecessarily endangers good citizens whose focus in a literally life-and-death situation is inherently distracted by supervisory responsibilities they shouldn’t have to perform. True, it serves to undermine the trust and camaraderie necessary for any such venture, and not for some legitimate ancillary benefit like civil rights: this isn’t eliminating DADT we’re talking about. But, Mr. Sullivan, these are county commissioners we’re talking about: you’d have a better chance of making your case to a collection of corn cobs.

After all, it might save a fair amount of money, although I’d be willing to bet that even the short-term savings are unlikely to approach, let alone equal, the $500K estimate that’s being tossed around: 20% of that would be a more plausible figure. But you can’t expect a county commissioner to have the mental capacity of a bottle of olive oil. Think I’m being too harsh? Here’s Commissioner Jimmy Starline (apparently his real name): “I've been told these inmates are very enthusiastic about being a firefighter. It's an opportunity to break that cycle. This is not like a chain gang. Life at a fire station could be a whole lot more pleasant than life in jail.” Oh, well, then. As long as the freaking prisoners like the idea, then it’s OK, right?

Finally, there’s Pinellas County, Florida, whose County Commissioners voted to stop fluoridating the water supply. You, Gentle Reader, might have been under the impression that this battle had been fought and won by the forces of science two generations ago. Ah, but the Tea Party crowd and their enablers (I’m looking at you, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, et al.) have successfully brought us to the point at which that which has long been accepted as scientifically proven is now up for grabs, not on the basis of new evidence, but based simply, in Isaac Asimov’s words, on “the false notion that democracy means ‘my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.’” I’m pretty sure gravity is next on the hit list for the tin-foil hat crowd.

Honestly, here’s some of the reporting of David DeCamp of the St. Petersburg Times:

Some speakers Tuesday compared it to Soviet and Nazi practices and warned of cancer, reduced IQ and deteriorating bones.

“Fluoride is a toxic substance,” said tea party activist Tony Caso of Palm Harbor. “This is all part of an agenda that's being pushed forth by the so-called globalists in our government and the world government to keep the people stupid so they don't realize what's going on.” [Note: it seems to be working.]

He added: “This is the U.S. of A, not the Soviet Socialist Republic.”

The fact that the medical and dental communities are unanimous in support of such programs means nothing to the self-appointed authorities, the Tea Partiers. Lunatics on the left and the right have been part of the American political system for as long as I can remember, and I suspect for a good while before that. Up until recently, however, the mainstream politicians and commentators kept the crazies in check. True, the anti-war crowd made life a little difficult for mainstream Democrats during the Vietnam War, but that was primarily because there was little difference in either the rhetoric or the policies of the two major parties at the time. Generally, the fringe elements of both parties have been recognized as precisely that: the fringe. That changed recently, though. The mainstream GOP loathed Obama with such a passion that they sold their soul to the Tea Party to gain a majority in the House of Representatives. The result is a pandering to the rampant anti-intellectualism of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and similar shills.

The Democrats have their own populist movement, the #Occupy crowd, to deal with. But whereas there may be more of them than there are Tea Partiers, and those folks have far higher approval ratings than the Tea Party ever did—a 54-23% positive rating according to a poll just published in Time magazine—they will have far less impact on actual policy because they aren’t just a front for some left-wing equivalent of the Koch brothers or Dick Armey, and are therefore uninteresting to the pols who care far more about donors than about constituents.

Ultimately, what these stories show is an affirmation of legitimate uses of government. Punishing those who beat up women, preventing or extinguishing fires in the most efficient manner possible, providing at least base-line dental care that benefits all citizens: these are, it seems to me, undeniably good things, and appropriate uses of government resources. I bet it wouldn’t be difficult to find other available cuts, things far less self-evidently essential at the very least, in any of those jurisdictions. Or—God forbid!—there might even be additional revenue enhancements. But the country is long on stupid right now. There will be more idiotic ideas… and I’ll do what I can to give you the opportunity to laugh at them.

The really bad news: the month is still young.

Is Paul Ryan Running in the New York 26th?

There’s a special election in the New York 26th today to replace the disgraced Chris Lee (he was the shirtless Craigslist guy, for those of you struggling to remember which slimebag Republican hypocrite is which). Such events often garner considerably more attention than they’re worth, and this one is certainly no exception: it’s not like there’s going to be a shift in the balance of power, after all.

And both sides have already audience-tested their talking points in the event of a defeat. Should Jane Corwin hold the seat for the Republicans, expect to hear the Dems crow about how close they made an election in what should have been a safe seat for the GOP, despite a massive amount of cash from both the RNC and a host of PACs, ranging from Karl Rove’s American Crossroads to various Tea Party affiliates. (Corwin has also “loaned” her campaign more than $2 million of her own money.)

Speaking of the Tea Party, there’s actually a Tea Party candidate in the race, Jack Davis. And his presence will be blamed for a Republican defeat, should there be one. This is especially galling to the GOP because Davis is simply a rich and largely self-funded political opportunist who doesn’t really believe in Tea Party ideals. He’s run for Congress three times before, always as a Democrat, and he’s been denounced by the Tea Party hierarchy. (Oh, wait. The Tea Party is an entirely grass-roots organization; they don’t have a hierarchy. Well, you know what I mean.) What Davis is doing is precisely what many other “third-party” candidates have done in the past: find a spot on the ballot because some small party doesn’t really have a candidate of their own (does anyone really believe Ralph Nader was a Green, or Bob Barr a Libertarian?). And it’s certainly true that such candidacies can affect elections: many on the right blame Ross Perot for Bill Clinton’s victory over George H. W. Bush; many on the left blame Nader for George W. Bush’s win over Al Gore.

Yes, it’s certainly Davis’s presence on the ballot that is making things tough for Corwin. It couldn’t be that Democrat Kathy Hochul has been hammering at Corwin’s support for Paul Ryan’s budgetary fantasies to the extent that the AP article describes the race as “a referendum on the Republican plan to transform Medicare.” No, it couldn’t be that. It’s all about Davis. After all, Eric Cantor said so, so you know it’s true.

Well, actually, it’s both, and anyone honest about what this election means will tell you so… which means that we won’t hear it from any party leaders on either side. The Ryan plan is hugely unpopular with just about everyone who isn’t a GOP Representative. Even Tea Party supporters oppose cutting Medicare and Medicaid by a 70-28 margin. If Hochul can tap into that opposition to radical libertarianism, and it appears she has been fairly effective at doing so, she could stand a chance even in a very conservative district that voted for Chris Lee by 51 points(!). But no, she would have no chance of more than a moral victory without Davis.

Another point needs making. My guess is that Davis will attract three kinds of voters. The first, the smallest group, will know him and/or his policies (he apparently has better name recognition than either of his major-party opponents), and will vote for him on that basis. A somewhat larger cohort, I suspect, are completely fed up with both parties and are looking to lodge a protest vote, to express displeasure actively rather than passively sitting out the election. I’ve used this tactic myself on numerous occasions over the years. Finally, there’s the part of the Davis voting bloc that the GOP is rightfully worried about: those who will vote for him not because he isn’t running as a major-party candidate, but specifically because he is running as a Tea Partier. That may draw votes from Corwin, and might just turn the election.

Of course, we have no real way of knowing why people vote the way they do. What they tell pollsters is probably some indication, but it isn’t entirely accurate for one simple reason: people lie. What is really important here is this: Davis is indeed the largely liberal “fraud” the national Tea Party claims him to be. But let’s look at the ramifications of that statement. In an informed electorate, that would mean that his third-party candidacy would draw votes from Hochul, not Corwin. That the GOP is screaming foul can be taken as proof that the Republicans (rightly) regard a significant percentage of Tea Partiers as completely uninformed and/or stupid. Only someone who didn’t know the candidates would vote for Davis over Corwin thinking he was the more conservative choice. Of course, only someone hubristically ignorant or dumber than the proverbial sack of hammers would vote for a Tea Party candidate at all, ever.

I should note that this kind of implicit recognition of the political incompetence of many of one’s supporters is not a specifically Republican phenomenon. Remember the 2000 Presidential election, when many on the left pointed to exit polling to suggest that more people in Florida had intended to vote for Gore rather than Bush? Those “butterfly” ballots were a real problem (after the fact, of course) to Gore supporters. But when you really break down their argument, it looked like this: “voters too stupid to figure out a ballot would have voted disproportionately for our guy.” Probably true, in this case, but hardly the stuff of bumper sticker aphorisms.

So what will tonight’s results mean? Not much. There’s no way the GOP can make even a reasonably comfortable victory look good. For the Republicans to come up as real winners, they’d have to limit Hochul to less than the 26.2% achieved by Philip Fedele against Lee last November. In other words, even if we grant that every vote for Davis would have gone to Corwin in a two-way race, those two candidates combined would have to total over 73% of the vote or the GOP is losing ground. I can’t imagine that Hochul won’t close that gap appreciably, even if she doesn’t win. Indeed, a “blowout” win for Corwin right now would be maybe 6 points. For those of you who aren’t math majors, 6 is considerably less than 51. And that dramatic decline happened a). in less than seven months, and b). when the Democratic candidate focused on what the national GOP is saying.

Conversely, I don’t see Hochul taking 50% of the vote, either. Even were she to be elected, and even if national trends tip towards the Democrats (or, more accurately, away from the Republicans), as I expect them to do, she’ll face a tough re-election fight in that district. But the Democrats have already won, even if they don’t end up electing Ms. Hochul. This should have been a safe hold for the GOP, and it wasn’t. That may have to be enough for the Dems, but it really is rather a lot.

What does all this mean nationally? Well, if Corwin wins, not much. The national GOP already knows they’ve got to figure out a way to disavow Ryan’s budget plan without appearing to do so: a perilous balancing act, but one which they’re likely to get away with, thanks to the usual sloth of the corporate media. And a win is a win. The fact that it was considerably narrower than it should have been will be gone from the news cycle in days if not hours. If Hochul pulls off what would still rank as a significant upset, however, there’s a chance of energizing the base, attracting candidates who want to run as Democrats rather than as GOP-Lite, and suggesting the kinds of strategies and ground games that might lead to a very different 2012 election than happened in 2010.

One other consideration, of course, is that Paul Ryan’s name is being tossed around by the likes of Eric Cantor and Dick Armey as a presidential candidate. Such a run would be significantly damaged by a Hochul victory, as it wouldn’t be just the Democrats who would natter on about how unpopular Ryan’s economic plan is, but rather the rest of the Republican field would have their knives sharpened and at the ready, too. The fact that many of these same folks supported those policies… erm… yesterday is, of course, irrelevant in the world of politics.

Yes, a Hochul victory would hurt Ryan a fair bit. Decisively? Possibly, but remember that four years ago all the pundits were gearing up for the seemingly inevitable presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. Oops.

Strange Bedfellows

One of the signature characteristics of the Tea Party movement during the last election was its utter disregard for intellectual consistency. This phenomenon took different forms in different moments and different places, of course. There was the sudden concern about the deficit that few Tea Partiers had given the slightest notice with respect to, say, the $1,000,000,000,000+ spent on the Iraq and Afghan wars. There was the outrage that President Obama was a socialist (or was it a Fascist? it’s so hard to keep up) because of the bank bailout (which, of course, happened in the Bush Administration)… but actually collecting on a mere fraction of the debt legitimately owed to the American people by the callous and venal operatives of BP in the wake of the Gulf disaster would be similarly socialistic.

There were the cries of anti-Americanism against anyone who didn’t share their jingoism, even as they claimed their movement was primarily if not exclusively economically motivated. Finally, there is the completely ginned-up and astroturfed outrage that gives the party its name (Taxed Enough Already), when the overwhelming majority of us pay less in taxes now than during the George W. Bush years, and the overall tax rate is lower than at any time since the Eisenhower administration. In short, the average Tea Partier has always been readily, and not altogether inaccurately, characterized as equal parts ignorant, stupid, gullible, and arrogant.

The GOP was happy to have the energized base and claims to populism, even if the outrageousness of Tea Party candidates may have blunted Republican gains in the 2010 elections (my post-election analysis here). The traditional party hierarchy, that gaggle of white Christian men (oh, and one token white male Jew), paid lip service to Tea Party concerns, but underestimated the fledgling libertarian movement’s desire for a quid pro quo in terms of roles in leadership and, indeed, policy decisions.

Now it turns out that at least some of the Tea Party-backed House freshmen, in alliance with intellectually honest libertarians in the GOP, are making some waves. I’m not talking here of the paranoid delusions professed (notice I didn’t say “believed”) by the Michele Bachmanns and Glenn Becks of the world. What completely baffles the Republican Old Guard is that, unlike their own rhetoric, that of the Tea Party is sometimes… wait for it… sincere.

I can’t blame the GOP leadership too much—I was caught off guard, too. But here are two stories that suggest that there are members of the Republican Party who actually believe in limited government.

First is the first significant (because unexpected) defeat of the new GOP leadership in the House of Representatives. Speaker John Boehner figured there wouldn’t be any problem getting the required 2/3 majority to fast-track the extension of three of the more perfidious provisions of the Patriot Act, that utterly unnecessary, invasive, and oft-abused paean to Bush-era fear-mongering. Boehner guessed, correctly, that there were enough Democrats who either really were Big Government proponents or were sufficiently gutless that they’d cave on any issue if the opposition merely intoned the magical incantation, “National Security.”

What the Great Orange One didn’t count on was that, whether because of, despite, or independent of the prodding of Dennis Kucinich, who specifically courted “members of the Tea Party who came to Congress to defend the Constitution,” some 26 GOP Representatives, including seven Tea Party-supported freshmen, broke ranks and actually voted against an over-reaching government. The Patriot Act itself, of course, was an insidious intrusion into the lives of citizens against whom there isn’t enough evidence to get a warrant, even though every cop and every prosecutor at every level knows at least one judge who would grant such a warrant based on the merest whiff of speculative evidence.

To be sure, there are many lessons to be learned here, including the fact that the Obama administration has failed once again to overturn the transgressions of their predecessors: politicians like power. Moreover, this victory for civil liberties is, of course, likely to be short-lived, as the proposal will be back ere long in a different form, requiring and no doubt receiving a mere majority vote. It is certainly possible, too, to overstate the role of Tea Partiers and indeed of Republicans in general in the outcome of the recent vote: Democrats are in the minority, but over four times as many of them as Republicans voted not to extend the law. Furthermore, nearly 85% of the official membership of the Tea Party caucus voted in favor of the extension. An administrator of the Facebook group Americans Against the Tea Party stated flatly that the “Tea Party did not help defeat the extension of the PATRIOT Act.”

Still, when a bill comes up seven votes short of passage and at least that many self-described Tea Party members voted “nay,” it would be petulant and unfair not to give them some of the credit—after all, the Democrats, from a President who seems to find the Constitution nearly as inconvenient a document as his predecessor did, on down through the House rank and file, nearly 70 of whom couldn’t be enticed to vote against extending the worst law in recent memory, didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory.

The second stirring of the libertarian wing of the GOP (I’m not sure if the individuals involved identify as Tea Partiers or not) comes from the state legislature in Wyoming, where two state representatives, unsurprisingly both female, went toe to toe with someone Rachel Maddow aptly calls a “culture warrior, a big, intrusive government statehouse member by the name of Bob Brechtel.” Mr. Brechtel introduced a bill which would not merely allow but to demand governmental interference in women’s decisions about whether or not to have an abortion: to require doctors to tell them they have a right to see an active ultrasound, to tell them a bunch of medically suspect claims about fetal pain, to insist on a 24-hour waiting period between the consultation and the procedure, etc.—the usual attempts to add a little more misery to young women who are already faced with a harrowing decision in medical, ethical, and pragmatic terms, in other words.

Enter Representatives Lisa Shepperson and Sue Wallis. There’s nothing particularly new about what they have to say: that medical consultations are and ought to be “the most private thing you can imagine” (Shepperson), and that, since every case is different, “our ability as free moral agents cannot justify these broad strokes” (Wallis). Wallis did tell of her own abortion decision, which came on the heels of a bout with cancer. That humanizes the discussion, to be sure, but women like Ms. Wallis have courageously been telling their stories in such venues for years.

What separates these women’s speeches from those we’ve heard a thousand times before, however, isn’t merely that they’re coming from elected Republican women, although that’s part of it. I confess that I can’t remember the last time I’ve heard this rhetoric from that source. But what’s really significant to me is that both these legislators crafted their arguments by appealing to beliefs the GOP purports to value: small government and individual responsibility. It’s an argument that’s needed to be made, in the same way that Ted Olson’s persuasiveness, not simply as a very good lawyer, but indeed as a Republican has been instrumental in overturning DADT.

What’s more, they succeeded, in an overwhelmingly Republican state with a legislature to match, in defeating Brechtel’s bill. He has re-introduced it, but in a watered-down form, devoid of the most invasive provisions. It will probably pass, the same way the Patriot Act will almost certainly be rammed through Congress by a coalition of bigots, faux law-and-order types, and Big Government megalomaniacs of both parties. But—and, unfortunately this counts as a win in today’s political climate—it won’t be as bad as it might have been.

But these stories, even if they represent only a delay or a slight dilution of horrible legislation, do have meaning. They remind us that the Republican Party is every bit as “Big Government” as their Democratic counterparts—they just want a different big government. Don’t hold your breath to see anything that looks like a real balanced budget coming from these guys: there will be cuts to education, to the arts, the PBS/NPR, to financial aid, to salaries for state, federal and local employees like cops and teachers (and university professors), possibly even to Social Security. But don’t expect that totally useless missile system to get scaled back, or that modest tax increase on the ridiculously wealthy to levels still lower than during the Reagan administration to be enacted. Don’t think the GOP will pass on an opportunity to spy on you without any real reason, to criminalize your sexuality, or to deny your right to worship as you please unless you thump the Bible with both hands.

Some six years ago, when Samuel Alito had just been confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, I wrote in my old blog that “it's just possible that Mr. Alito is in fact a jurist of ‘steady demeanor, careful judgment and complete integrity,’ just as President Bush described him. Wouldn't that spoil Bush's day!” I’m having another of those moments today. I think there are more legitimate uses of government than true libertarians do, but their position is at least logically and ethically consistent.

GOP leaders from Reagan to Bush to Boehner and McConnell, however, see small government as more of a bumper sticker than a philosophy (to be fair, it’s a better slogan than “Tax Breaks for Millionaires and Spies in Your Bedroom”). Whether the true small government advocates on the right will be willing to join forces with civil libertarians on the left on an ongoing basis remains to be seen. But, given the policy disputes that might be affected by such an alliance—abortion rights restrictions, gay marriage, the continuing saga of DADT—the old adage that “politics makes strange bedfellows” has never seemed more apt.

It's Easier to Admit to Something If It's True

It may seem strange, with so many significant world events to be commented on, and after such a long absence from writing here, that I would return with what is, to be sure, a trivial concern. I have thoughts about what’s happening in Egypt right now, thoughts about the new Republican House whose members assured us their sole focus would be jobs and then as one of their first actions proceeded to try to re-define rape, thoughts about the horrific events in Tucson a few weeks ago. But one of two things has held me back. Either what I had to say wasn’t really blog-length (I could say it in a couple of sentences or it would take a longer essay than I had time to write or, likely, than you would choose to read), or someone else had already said pretty much what I wanted to say, and I could simply link to that piece from my Facebook page (those of you who “like” that page may have noticed an increase in such traffic over the last few weeks).

So here goes with a blog-sized issue, in the hopes that it will help me break my blogger’s block.

One blog/website I check not infrequently is called Ethics Alarms. I read (or at least skim) virtually all of these posts, agree with many if not most, and link to a few, both in my Curmudgeon Central persona and, less frequently, as myself. The blog is written by a guy named Jack Marshall, a Virginia-based ethicist and lawyer (and stage director!), who appears to mean it when he says his blog “attempt[s] to be bold without being reckless,” and that it is “dedicated to starting discussions, not ending them, despite the tone of certitude that often invades its commentary.” This attitude jibes well with the stated goals of my own blog: “You won't agree with me all the time... or at least I hope not. If all you can bring to the table is unsubstantiated opinion, please don't feel compelled to prove it, but I'd love to hear from you if you can offer an intelligent perspective that differs from my own.”

Anyway… Mr. Marshall recently posted an essay praising Marvin Kalb for “confronting the most prestigious and perhaps the most egregious of left-biased media, the New York Times, with the truth it routinely denies.” While I certainly agree with Marshall’s general point, that news is news and opinion is opinion, and the latter should not insinuate itself into the former (at least without an acknowledgment that it is doing so), there is much about the piece that is puzzling.

We begin with the opening salvo, an assertion that the “so-called mainstream media have an obvious leftward political bias,” for which “the evidence is overwhelming.” That is an arguable case, but I’d suggest that such bias, should it exist, is hardly “obvious.” It is true that a considerable majority of reporters self-identify (or are registered) as Democrats. This could, of course, be taken as evidence of a cabal: that only like-minded true believers can work in the MSM. Of course, it could just as easily be argued that journalists are well-educated and curious folks who are likely to be the best-informed demographic in the country about current events, and that smart and well-informed people tend to lean to the left. More to the point, while no one can completely eliminate his/her own perceptions or lived experience, it certainly is possible to minimize those subjective impulses (cue the Sonia Sotomayor references). As I’ve said repeatedly, I can direct a Brecht play without being a Communist or a Racine play without being a monarchist.

Moreover, with the increasing corporatization of the media, news coverage in general is trending to the right. I freely grant that my experience may be idiosyncratic, but in all the hoopla generated by the Tea Party’s protests against Obama-care in particular, I literally never heard anyone in the Corporate Media point out that the health-care bill will, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, reduce the deficit by a couple of hundred billion dollars… a fair amount of money in my neighborhood. But I heard a lot of Republican hand-wringers, suddenly, miraculously even, worried about the deficit. Everything the inane Sarah Palin utters is breathlessly recounted on the evening news, more often than not without rebuttal of even her most egregious factual errors. Need I continue?

The particular target of concern here, the New York Times, principally through the sloth (or mendacity) of Judith Miller, who unquestioningly parroted Bush administration talking points as if they were undisputed fact, became one of the primary cheerleaders for the Iraq war, and, like the Bush administration itself, never took responsibility for its role in a trillion-dollar debacle which failed to uncover any of those WMD it would be a “slam dunk” to find. The Times subsequently sat for months on a story about warrantless wiretaps (a clear violation of the 4th amendment) until after President Bush was safely re-elected. These are not the actions of a radical left-wing institution. This is not to say that the Times doesn’t make some decisions that could legitimately be described as left-leaning. But they’re an equal-opportunity incompetent. They’re lazy, they’re more interested in having access to power than in speaking truth to it, and they’re oftentimes more interested in the “sexy” story than in the truth. But they’re not “the most egregious of left-biased media.” And, despite their manifold flaws, they’re still better at journalism than virtually anyone else in the arena.

Marshall’s claim that MSM “supposedly objective reporters are openly adversarial to conservatives while covering news events” is supported by a link to a nearly two-year-old piece he wrote himself (I presume) describing a single incident in which a CNN reporter I’ve never heard of (Susan Roesgen, anyone?) said a couple of stupid things on the air. In the absence of a video or even a transcript of Roesgen’s alleged transgressions, I can’t assess the events except through Marshall’s descriptions. (N.B., I am not suggesting that Mr. Marshall is misrepresenting facts, or that he couldn’t have supplied other examples.)

Certainly decrying a rally as “anti-CNN” is dumb, but declaring the event unfit for “family viewing” might well have been a reaction against the language employed (as in, shall we say, citations from the Anglo-Saxon) rather than content. And while it might seem petulant to observe that the Tea Party movement was largely a product of the proselytizing of Fox News, the fact remains that that’s an objectively true statement. Moreover, were I in the position of interviewing such protesters, I suspect that I’d want to know why they were describing the President of the United States as a “fascist,” if they really thought they were benefiting their cause by doing so, and indeed if they had other than a visceral rationale for their allegations. I would “cut off” such a protester if he wasn’t making any sense—not because I didn’t want to have his ideas on air, but because I might hope to find someone better able to articulate a rational reason for the demonstration. And, of course, I might have been granted only a very small window of air time. If this is the best available example of MSM reporters’ contempt for conservatives, in other words, I’m pretty much unimpressed.

And then, Marshall’s essay gets really strange: “Fox News, which was launched to counter balance this tendency [towards a left-leaning media], has at least been relatively open about its conservative slant: ‘fair and balanced’ was always intended to convey Fox’s efforts to balance the scales, not to suggest the Fox News by itself was balanced.” In what universe? True, Fox News was, in its origins, intended to do exactly what is described here: to balance a perceived slant in media coverage. I actually used to watch some Fox programming in the network’s early days, and I continued to watch Fox News Watch throughout its first incarnation, when Eric Burns moderated (very well, I might add) and the likes of Neal Gabler were given the opportunity to engage in actual discussion with the Cal Thomases and Jim Pinkertons or the world. But even as the corporate media has drifted rightward in recent years, Fox has steadfastly moved even further to the right into, frankly, loonyville.

Fox, in other words, lurches far more to the right than MSNBC, the New York Times, or NPR veer to the left. Those latter organizations may, from time to time, interpret the news through their own political lens, but they don’t simply fabricate stories about death panels or Sharia law. In England, two of the three most widely-respected newspapers are the Guardian and the Telegraph. Everyone knows the former leans left and the latter leans right. But both try as best they can to get the facts straight, and I’ve linked to both of them in blog pieces over the last few months. It is possible, in other words, to be a legitimate news organization and still have a political point of view. But Fox News doesn’t live on that planet.

That network’s complete disregard for anything approaching coverage that is either fair or balanced is quite obvious to any reasonably informed person who watches for five minutes or glances at their website. The recent headline that “Obama Botches Bible Verse at Prayer Breakfast” because the President quoted accurately from the New International Version instead of apparently the only Fox-approved translation, the King James Version, is merely one among dozens of examples of Fox’s desire to cast Mr. Obama in a bad light, facts be damned.

The only real question is whether Fox News is an arm of the Republican Party or the other way around. I know that, you know that, Mr. Marshall knows that. But I see no evidence that the Fox viewership knows that. Turn on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC, and chances are you won’t go an entire episode without hearing a phrase like “for those of us on the left.” But show me any evidence at all that Fox’s equivalent talking heads are ever that forthright about their political positioning. Bill O’Reilly’s catch-phrase isn’t “And now, from our side”; it’s about his “No-Spin Zone,” which, of course, is all about spin, just, well, his spin. I see literally no one at Fox, either on air or in management, who is “relatively open about its conservative slant.” A self-image as being unlike the allegedly leftie other guys, sure. But overtly conservative? Nope. Maybe those confirmations (admissions?) are there and I missed them… I’d really like to be proved wrong about this.

Next on Mr. Marshall’s menu is an indictment of the MSM because of its “repeated tardiness in covering legitimate ‘conservative news stories’ like the New Black Panthers controversy, and the ACORN ‘sting.’” Seriously? The “New Black Panthers” is a tiny, completely impotent, and not terribly smart gaggle of fringies (good article from Newsweek here), and investigation of them was deemed, well, not worth the bother by Attorney General Holder. No one other than the hacks at the Washington Times who manufactured the “controversy” could believe the NBPP poses any kind of threat to free and fair elections anywhere. No one, that is, except Fox News. Well, actually, they don’t believe it, either, but they’re willing to pretend that they do because of their need for ideological red meat.

The ACORN “sting” consisted of significantly edited footage, quite intentionally misrepresenting what actually happened. (My blog piece on the topic from last April is here.) This, of course, didn’t stop Fox News from beating the drum to destroy ACORN, just as they were to do subsequently when another tape deceptively edited by the despicable Andrew Breitbart purported to show Shirley Sherrod (remember her?) admitting to racial bias, whereas the unedited footage showed precisely the opposite. Fox, of course, both their commentators and their alleged reporters, screamed for President Obama to fire Sherrod. When the administration cravenly did so without bothering to find out the facts first, Fox went apoplectic again because Mr. Obama did precisely what they themselves had demanded that he do.

In other words, while there may be “legitimate ‘conservative news stories’” the MSM hasn’t covered, the two examples cited by Mr. Marshall don’t qualify, and the current-events reference to “the similar Planned Parenthood videotapes,” another Breitbart-edited hatchet job, doesn’t look like it’s going to be much of a story, either, largely because (who’da thunk it?) the unedited tape tells a very different story than the edited version. I know, I know, next I’ll tell you that ice is slippery. This non-coverage isn’t because the media is leftist; it’s because they’re sometimes competent, and they’re becoming increasingly less interested in being pawns in a sleazy propagandist’s latest ploy. (Sidebar: honestly, who would trust Andrew Breitbart if he said that ice cream tastes good?)

Finally, we come to the conclusion of Mr. Marshall’s essay, in which he cites Mr. Kalb’s observation that “there’s more analysis dipping into commentary and the editorial side of reporting than a straight hard news story.” To be honest, I’m not sure what that means. Reporting isn’t a Joe Friday “just the facts, ma’am” phenomenon. Ever. Every reporter, every editor (and I’ve been both, though not professionally) makes myriad choices about what facts are relevant and what aren’t. When two “facts” seem to be in disagreement, which gets rhetorically privileged? “X, but Y” or “Y, but X”?

Moreover, as I tell my students all the time, the nature of analysis is simultaneously objective and subjective: that is, there is as much difference between analysis and opinion as there is between analysis and purely objective reporting (as if the latter were indeed possible). This is a distinction I expect the dimmest of my Theatre Appreciation students to understand: I have no interest in your opinion, in whether or even why you liked or didn’t like something. Tell me what you saw, and, if you want an A, tell me what it might have meant. My classroom employs all three approaches: there are objective facts, there is analysis (“this seems to have happened because of that”), there is (occasionally, always clearly identified) opinion. It strikes me that reporting is remarkably similar in this regard: reporters and professors alike should be careful to distinguish between personal opinion (even professional opinion) and objectivity, but it’s frankly unreasonable to suggest that every statement be parsed and modified into meaninglessness. This positioning of analysis between the objective and the subjective doesn’t seem too difficult a concept to expect a professional journalist (Mr. Kalb, or a NYT reporter) to be able to comprehend.

I don’t want a reporter to tell me what to think about an issue, but I do expect a reporter to know more about an issue than I do, and to provide me with the relevant information. What qualifies as “relevant” in this formulation is ultimately at his or her discretion: I’m not an economist or a Middle East expert or a lawyer, or (usually) possessed of whatever particular professional insight might be most useful to understanding a specific issue. I am not, or at least I try not to be, a disjunctive thinker: there are shades of meaning in every useful commentary. I will agree with this politician most of the time but not always, and so on. But if I’m not going to simply agree with what my political party (religious leader, favorite commentator…) tells me, I need answers to certain very real questions: What does this mean? What is its context? How does it change the status quo?

As Times editor Bill Keller says in a part of the interview not quoted in Marshall’s blog entry:

I don’t mind analysis in the news pages; in fact, I encourage it every day. The discipline of objectivity or impartiality is something that is drilled into American reporters from their first day on the job….

It’s an aspiration, and reporters and editors bring their own beliefs to their jobs, and… just as judges are expected to set their personal prejudices aside in judging a case, reporters and editors are expected to lay their personal prejudices aside in assessing the facts of a news story….

They [readers] don’t get my opinion. If we’re going to write a piece on a particular political figure, then supplying some context to his remarks or his activities is a service to readers, I think.

Forgive me if I don’t go running after my torches and pitchforks at the audacity of those comments.

If the Times is actually editorializing under the guise of news reporting, that’s a bad thing. I really can’t comment on that assertion because, while I read the occasional Times article on line, it’s been quite a few years since it was my principal source of news, and while I haven’t seen any real evidence to support the claim, it night be true. If the charge is true, the Times wouldn’t be the only news source to do so, and I feel confident that they’re not as bad as some (Cough. Cough. Fox. Cough.). But while Mr. Kalb (and hence Mr. Marshall) may have a point, I find it interesting that the bleeding of opinion into news is never overtly linked to liberal bias: the closest Kalb comes is suggesting that “many conservatives” regard the Times as “left-wing.” And Keller’s responses are about as untroubling as it is possible to be.

Mr. Kalb’s questioning, then, seems rather more tepid than intrepid. He may have “visibly upset” Mr. Keller, as Mr. Marshall claims, but nothing like that is apparent in the audio tape. I’m afraid I’m not ready to lionize Kalb or to demonize Keller. Rather, I’m reminded of the television ad for The Nation, which claims that journal exhibits “that well-known liberal bias you won’t find anywhere else.” Think about what’s implicit in that claim…

Just what you wanted: more election analysis

Amidst the scramble to interpret the results of this week’s elections, a few themes emerge. The Obama administration over-reached. The Republicans’ abiding concern for the deficit resonated. The health-care bill was a political liability. The Tea Party was hugely successful. The only way Democrats can survive is to move to the center. These claims have two principal things in common: 1). they are uttered breathlessly and virtually unanimously by the drones who make up what purports to be the journalistic class in the corporate media, and 2). they’re crap.

The Obama administration, in fact, tried valiantly to deal with the myriad burgeoning disasters left on its plate by Bush the Lesser. But, despite real successes, they utterly failed to accomplish much of the agenda that appeals to the Democratic base, creating the enthusiasm gap we heard so much about this cycle. DADT is still on the books. Guantanamo is still open for business. More troops were sent into Afghanistan than were pulled out of Iraq. Key provisions of the PATRIOT Act were just extended. Executives at bailed-out businesses thanked us for our collective, if involuntary, generosity by pocketing billions of dollars in bonuses: a decent percentage of which found its way back into Republican coffers to help defeat any politician who might even contemplate regulating those industries so that the recent near-calamitous economic mess doesn’t repeat itself. Democrats in general have equivocated on such obvious issues as the Park51 project because otherwise they’d be criticized by the Moron Tabernacle Choir of Beck, Gingrich and Palin. Really?

Republicans’ utter hypocrisy on matters budgetary is manifest. Pick your argument, they’re all true, and any one of them ought to be sufficient to make the point. 1). The only President in a half century to make significant reductions in the national debt as a function of GDP was Bill Clinton; the worst offenders at exploding the deficit: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. 2). The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the net cost of the Bush administration’s Medicare prescription drug plan will exceed that of the health care bill, the stimulus package, and the bailouts combined. 3). I have yet to see a single Republican willing to say, “Here’s what we need to cut.” Don’t give me “across the board cuts in discretionary spending,” especially if you’re blithely claiming the military budget isn’t at least largely discretionary. 4). And don’t tell me that allowing a slight increase, to the level of a decade ago, in the taxes of the people who can afford it most, decreasing the deficit by nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars ($700,000,000,000), is some kind of socialist plot.

The health care bill was actually pretty popular until wild misrepresentations of it went unchallenged. Indeed, a plurality of the citizenry weren’t concerned about over-reach; rather, they thought it didn’t go far enough. Journalistic laziness (or worse) went a long way towards allowing right-wing spin to somehow be regarded as the unquestioned narrative line, but the corporate media were abetted by the Democrats. First, they repeatedly capitulated to the minority, getting literally nothing in return, further watering down what had already been a compromise bill. A single-payer plan was never even on the table, for example, although such a system would be the cheapest, most efficient, and generally best possible structure. I say this, by the way, as someone who actually has some experience with such a plan, unlike those who purport to believe fairy tales because doing so is the only way to repay insurance companies and predatory employers for their continued electoral largess. Then, of course, the Dems, with rare exceptions, ran away from, or apologized for, what should have been their signature achievement.

The Tea Party? Give me a damned break. Really, where did a Tea Party candidate pick up a seat for the Republicans? (Because, let’s face it, they may pretend to be separate entities, but the TPers are a wing of the GOP reserved for those who think the likes of Mitch McConnell and David Vitter are too sane.) There was a legitimate chance of the GOP picking up a Senate seat in Delaware until Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell got the nomination. Harry Reid richly deserved to be defeated, and taking him down would have been a significant symbolic victory for the GOP, but they nominated about the only Nevada Republican who couldn’t beat Reid. Tea Party candidate Ken Buck lost in Colorado (his unguarded description of the TP faithful as “dumbasses” may have been about the only honest statement of his campaign… and it may have lost him the election). Joe Miller may well lose to Lisa Murkowski… whichever way it goes, the seat stays Republican.

Yes, Rand Paul won. But a pompous racist douchebag who skates along the border between idiocy and insanity is different from outgoing Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning exactly how? Kentucky didn’t elect Rand Paul despite his racist frat boy persona; they elected him because of it. (Perhaps you will recall that Hillary Clinton’s virtually last gasp in the primary season two years ago was a huge win in Kentucky, where she campaigned basically as, well, a racist frat boy.)

Ultimately, the sigh of relief you heard on Thursday was from the mainstream GOP (to the extent that’s not a contradiction in terms). Democrat Patty Murray was finally declared re-elected in Washington, making the next Senate Democratic by a 53-47 margin: in other words, nominating Tea Party morons Angle, Buck and O’Donnell didn’t cost the GOP the Senate. The best they could have done was a tie, with Vice President Biden as the deciding vote. Whereas the Senate has devolved to a place where you need 60 votes to order a cup of coffee, that 50th vote does matter in determining committee chairmanships, for example. There may have been a Tea Party candidate who defeated an incumbent Democrat, or even who flipped a seat in a gubernatorial or senatorial race, but I honestly can’t think of one. The four big Tea Party winners, Paul, Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley and Mike Lee, all replaced Republicans. Lee, who defeated incumbent Bob Bennett in a primary for senator from Utah, is hardly an outsider: he’s a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Alito and the son of a Reagan Solicitor General.

Much was made of people who voted for Obama and for Republicans this time around. This claim, unlike those above, at least has some validity. After all, someone had to change a party affiliation somewhere, right? Well, sort of. There are a few real trends in midterm elections: the party in the White House gets punished, pretty much whether the country is in good shape at the time or not; there’s a lower voter turnout, especially among certain demographics: minorities, young people… precisely those groups that tend to trend to the left; and there was an abnormally high number of Democratic retirements—it’s much easier to win an open seat than to depose an incumbent. Indeed, only two incumbent Democratic Senators lost. One, who will be missed, was Russ Feingold. The other, who won’t be, is Blanche Lincoln.

And yet we get the drivel spewed forth by the likes of Evan Bayh, who is in a close race with Lincoln for the coveted title of Democrat I’m Least Unhappy to See Out of Office. Bayh, whose highly-respected father actually stood for something, got his gig through the quasi-nepotistic system of party politics, and hasn’t had anything intelligent to say about literally anything in years. Yet he presumes to tell Democrats how to regain the political momentum: by acting like Republicans, of course. You know, like Blanche Lincoln did. For the record, I said in May, when Arkansas Democrats had an opportunity to nominate an actual Democrat, Bill Halter, “I don’t see Lincoln standing a chance against [John] Boozman; Halter would also be an underdog, but he could at least balance the corporate backing Boozman will receive with labor support.”) Lincoln lost by 21 points (!). Show me another incumbent in the last generation to lose by that much without some kind of personal scandal.

Indeed, the numbers don’t support Bayh’s analysis in the slightest. Of the 34 Democrats who voted against health care reform, for example, only 12 were re-elected: barely one in three. And this is why the best comparison for this election isn’t 1994, when the Republicans swept into power in Congress on the promises of the “Contract with America.” This time, there’s another document, a rather flabby screed called the “Pledge to America.” But literally no one really believes the American people like the Republicans this time around, or even think the Republicans have any ideas: they just don’t like where we are, and the Dems are in charge. The fact that they haven’t been for very long, and that the hole dug by President Bush and his minions was very deep and very wide didn’t really matter. T’row da bums out.

The better analogy would be 2004. The Democrats had a chance to nominate a candidate with ideas—a Howard Dean, for example—but they hated George W. Bush so much they were convinced to go with the “more electable” John Kerry. Kerry proceeded to run one of the most gutless and passionless campaigns in history, offering little in the way of real policy and allowing the slanderous Swift Boat ads to go unanswered. That same kind of intellectual lethargy and unwillingness to actually fight in the political trenches characterized the 2010 campaign, as well.

This year’s election was decided by three things: 1). the daft Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court last January (next time you’re contemplating a vote for President, consider whether your candidate would be stupid enough to nominate a Justice who really thinks unlimited and anonymous corporate—or union—spending on political campaigns is a good idea), 2). Democratic cravenness, 3). branding.

Citizens United, of course, opened the floodgates on tens of millions of dollars spent on attack ads which were seldom as much as accurate, often funded either anonymously or by a handful of ridiculously rich folks who see it in their best interest to invest a few million dollars to buy a politician here or there: much cheaper than actually having to, say, pay for the clean-up of the debacle they caused in the Gulf of Mexico, or make their mines safer, or actually provide benefits for their employees.

It looked for a brief moment that the Democrats might actually figure out that the anonymity of donors to all those cobbled-together consortia of hate speech might be a campaign issue for them, especially when it became clear that the Chamber of Commerce was accepting contributions from foreign sources. The CofC leadership was righteously indignant, of course, that anyone would suspect them of wrong-doing: it would be illegal, they screamed, to do what they were accused of doing… as if that made them innocent. Yes, assholes, it would be illegal. That’s the point. You would be committing multiple felonies if your fancy accountants can’t paper over the fact that you are accepting money from foreign corporations and attempting to influence American elections. Does it really matter if you put it into different budget lines? To me, it makes no practical (as opposed, possibly, to legal) difference if you get a $1 million contribution, and use that money to buy attack ads or if you use it to cover your overhead, freeing up $1 million of money that would have had to be spent on overhead to pay for… wait for it… attack ads. But the corporate media didn’t think there was a story there, and Democrats were obediently silent.

Indeed, the Democrats in general were unwilling to engage in the fray. Sure, there were Republicans—Rick Perry, for example—who cravenly ducked out of debating their opponents. But how many Democrats pointed out that the stimulus plan included the largest middle-class tax cut in history? Or that the allegedly budget-busting health care bill is projected by the CBO to reduce the deficit by over $100 billion over the next decade? How many talked about credit card reform? Or reminded the electorate that much-despised (but necessary) bank bailout happened during the Bush administration? How many pointed out that, despite the shrillness of the right, the allegedly “failed” stimulus is credited by every non-partisan analyst with having prevented a far worse disaster? How many, in other words, ran as Democrats? Instead, the best they could muster was “those guys are even worse than we are.”

But tied in with this failure is the notion of branding. Again, the blame is shared by a listless Democratic party and a slothful and compliant corporate media. How many times did we hear about the “Bush tax cuts,” when the only dispute is whether to extend them to people who make over a quarter of a million dollars a year in taxable income: or, rather, on income over that level (Democrats would extend the Bush tax cuts for the first $250,000 of income). By comparison, how many times did we hear about the Bush bank bailout? Or the Obama tax cut? Now, the bailout may have been necessary and the tax cuts bad policy, but there’s no question that most folks like lower taxes (as long as there are no concomitant cuts in services). [For a brilliant rebuttal to this simplistic position, read this.] And the bank bailout was intensely unpopular. The Republicans knew it was something that had to be done. But, because they knew it was going to pass, anyway, they could cynically vote against it, earning them faux populist points.

Of course, the likes of Rachel Maddow have been pointing most of this out for some time. But she never brought, say, NBC’s Chuck Todd onto her show to ask why he was propagating beltway corporate media conventional wisdom as if it had the slightest bit of legitimacy. Because she has too much loyalty to the organization to expose the news director as an utter idiot, perhaps?

Ultimately, the Democrats deserved, based on what they accomplished in Washington, to remain in power. Based on what they did the campaign trail, however, they richly deserved to be defeated… unless, of course, they were running against Republicans.

The reality is that if voters want Republicans, the GOP are better at providing them than the Democrats are. Gazillions of dollars of sleazy campaign money notwithstanding, the Democrats would have done just fine if they’d stood for something. They didn’t, and while the “hurricane” touted by the right didn’t exactly materialize, it was pretty ugly Tuesday night. So, what are the chances the Dems will take precisely the wrong lesson from Tuesday’s results? About the same as that the sun will come up tomorrow.

Antiphon Is Always Welcome at Our Tea Party

I was discussing Oedipus the King with my freshman-level Play Analysis class the other day, and I wanted to talk about how notions of guilt and innocence were different for the Greeks than for us. Today we have all manner of tests of intentionality; for the Greeks, it pretty much boiled down to one thing: what happened? They weren’t much concerned with motivations or similar psychological analysis. The fact that Oedipus tried valiantly to avoid his prophesied fate only to commit his horrible acts in direct consequence of his attempted circumvention of them may have made Oedipus more sympathetic, but it had precious little to do with his guilt, as far as either the Thebans of the fictive world or the Athenians of the real-world audience were concerned.

There were in fact different punishments for crimes committed intentionally and unintentionally in ancient Greece, but there was no need, for example, to show negligence to convict someone of an accidental crime. Thus, it is all but irrelevant that Oedipus unquestionably believed beyond the proverbial shadow of a doubt that his parents were back in Corinth when he killed his biological father in the world’s first recorded incident of road rage, and subsequently became, literally, a BAMF.

To illustrate the point, I mentioned the events enumerated in the Second Tetralogy of the orator Antiphon. What happened was this: a young athlete was practicing javelin-throwing. A little boy ran out onto the field to collect the javelins just as the young man released his next heave. As luck would have it, the spear penetrated the boy’s ribs, and he died on the spot. No one claimed the death was anything but accidental, or indeed that the young javelin-thrower had failed to take proper precautions. Indeed, all agreed that his throw was well within the boundaries, and that he had done nothing wrong in ethical terms. Still, the boy’s father accused the young man with accidental murder, a charge which carried a penalty of a year or more of exile. (The defense in the case seems to argue that the young man is in jeopardy of a death sentence, but this is a wild exaggeration. Go figure: a lawyer who distorts the truth.)

Here’s where Antiphon enters the picture, as an orator (or, more accurately, logographos, or speechwriter) hired by the defense. (The orator wrote the argument, but it was delivered by someone else, in this case the young man’s father.) He can’t argue that accidents happen, and that, in the absence of negligence, there’s no case. In a society that cared about the notion of pollution, with a stain clinging to anyone who kills, even inadvertently, that argument would go nowhere. So what Antiphon argues instead is that his client is in fact the aggrieved party… after all, he didn’t get to see how far his throw was because that pesky kid got in the way:

because the boy ran under the trajectory of the javelin and placed his body in its path, one of them was prevented from hitting the target, whereas the other was hit because he ran under the javelin…. Since the young man made no mistake, it would not be fair for him to be punished for someone else’s mistake; it is enough for him to bear the consequences of his own mistakes. But the boy was destroyed by his own mistake, and the moment he erred, he also punished himself. Therefore, the killer is punished and the death is not unavenged.

Really, it was damned decent of the young man’s father to allow the boy to escape without further punishment. I mean, interfering with a javelin-thrower’s workout is a serious offense.

I didn’t go into class thinking I was going to talk about Antiphon, but the anecdote came into my head in the middle of the discussion. And then, just as quickly, it was returned to the back of my mind, to that intellectual space that occasionally gets dredged for a pertinent tidbit, but basically is just allowed to simmer on the lowest possible heat. Or so I thought. A couple days later, we got the modern challenger to Antiphon’s title of Most Outrageous Case of Blaming the Victim in Recorded History. You see, that was when it became public knowledge Heritage Foundation consultant, Tea Party doyenne, and wife to a US Supreme Court Justice, Virginia Thomas, proved she’s an even bigger idiot than hubby by leaving a voicemail on the office telephone of now-Brandeis professor Anita Hill. To “[extend] an olive branch to her after all these years,” as she subsequently claimed to a reporter who wondered, in effect, what the hell she thought she was doing? Hardly. No, the actual message included this: “I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.” I suspect I wasn’t the only middle-aged American to do a spit take at that one.

The request that Ms. Hill should be asked to apologize nearly 20 years after the fact for damaging the reputation of a Supreme Court nominee who was confirmed anyway, and who went on to be one of the biggest disasters and, by objective standards, most activist, judges ever to serve on the SCOTUS is, well, nigh onto mind-boggling. More to the point, the preponderance of the evidence, then and now, suggests that Justice Thomas was at best a creep and at worst a felon. [In the interest of political fairness, I note that the same description would apply to Bill Clinton.] Ms. Hill, was, after all, the alleged victim. I’d make a more direct analogy to running under a javelin, but the Freudian implications of such a linkage would send my laptop metaphorically screaming into the night.

At best, Ms. Thomas’s ill-conceived scheme highlighted the inanity if not insanity of the Tea Party hierarchy, not to mention serving as a reminder of the true Astroturf quality of the movement: nothing says “just folks” like the spouse of a Supreme Court Justice, after all. Nor did it do anything to dispel the developing conflict-of-interest allegations about Justice Thomas (and his more-evil-because-less-stupid sidekick, Antonin Scalia) participating in Koch-funded strategy sessions.

But Virginia Thomas’s inter-personal and political clumsiness quickly paled in comparison to another, even more accomplished, practitioner of Blame the Victim. After all, it is conceivable that Ms. Thomas might have a point. The fact that such likelihood is roughly equal to Louis Gohmert’s losing his seat in Congress this week (his only opposition is a Libertarian, as the Democrats are characteristically too cowardly to field a candidate against one of the most embarrassing Representatives in history) doesn’t change the fact that there’s a possibility that Ms. Hill’s accusations were spurious. There is no definitive proof; one could make a case that one’s conclusions on the case might tell us more about the observer than about the evidence. Besides, it is not unreasonable that a wife would take her husband’s side in such a dispute, even if the majority of the population didn’t concur. The whole demanding an apology thing may be a bit much, but spousal loyalty in general is not to be disparaged.

No such possibilities admit themselves in the case of Tim Profitt, the Rand Paul-supporting goon who is caught on tape literally stomping on the head of a defenseless MoveOn.org operative named Lauren Valle. It doesn’t matter what went before. It doesn’t matter whether she instigated the confrontation. It doesn’t matter that, if so, MoveOn.org was simply taking a page from the FreedomWorks bag of tricks, employed a few months ago by that particular Astroturf cabal to disrupt town meetings on health care reform. What matters is what we see on the tape: a young woman wrestled to the ground by one man (without context, we can’t tell, but this part could have been a legitimate attempt at crowd control), and then having her face stepped on, quite intentionally, by another man, causing a concussion.

In any sane universe, there is only one response to this latter action: immediate arrest on battery charges and an equally immediate repudiation of such thuggery by the candidate. Imagine my surprise that neither happened. Mr. Paul distanced himself from Profitt, one of his county organizers, without really condemning his actions:

...there was a bit of a crowd control problem. I don't want anybody, though, to be involved in things that aren't civil. I think this should always be about the issues. And it is an unusual situation to have so many people so passionate on both sides jockeying back and forth. And it wasn't something that I liked or anybody liked about that situation. So I hope in the future it is going to be better.

The Paul campaign (as opposed to the candidate himself) released a statement condemning “violence of any kind,” but (of course) softening the blow by addressing “supporters on all sides.” They were also “relieved to hear that the woman in question was not injured.” A concussion and a sprained shoulder = “not injured” to the Paul campaign. At least they're consistent: nothing else that comes out of that campaign comports to reality; why should this?

And the knuckle-dragging drooler who committed the assault? As far as I can tell, he’s still at large, blaming the police and Ms. Valle, and… wait for it… demanding an apology! How dare the physically restrained Ms. Valle allow her head to interpose itself into the path of Mr. Profitt’s foot? Outrageous!

Antiphon would be so proud.

How not to conduct political discourse: three case studies

Three news stories have caught my attention of late, all of them tied to the notion of unintended consequences, indeed of (presumably inadvertently) undermining the cause one purports to support. I’m in political agreement with the protagonists in two of the three scenaria… so let’s start with the one I don’t.

The Republican Party has, on a national level, become remarkably adept at creating and then attacking straw men. A rational populace would regard this obviously vapid ploy for what it is: a cynical but quite possibly successful attempt to manipulate the emotions of an under-educated and frankly rather stupid base, and indeed to distract attention from the party's collective failure to generate any solutions to any real problems. The particular target of the right’s wrath in Georgia (and apparently in other states, as well) is a completely and utterly fictional provision of the recent health care bill that supposedly calls for the implanting of microchips in American citizens.

Naturally, the fact that neither the bill that was ultimately passed nor any version of the legislation that was ever under consideration includes anything like such a provision is, of course, completely irrelevant to those legislators more interested in getting their name in the paper than in doing any real good, and that would be… let me see… yep, all of them. Thus we get SB 235: Microchip Consent Act of 2009 (not voted on until 2010), which would “prohibit requiring a person to be implanted with a microchip.” (OK, am I the only one amused by the fact that the primary and secondary sponsors of this claptrap are both named Chip?) Anyway, apparently legislators in Georgia can think of no better way of spending their time than in holding hearings with an eye to criminalizing behavior that doesn’t currently exist and that literally no one has any interest in having exist. One might also note that even if so-called Obamacare actually did include a microchip implantation provision, any state law to the contrary would be trumped by the federal statute.

Oops. Sorry. Apparently I was misinformed. Because, you see, according to a column on the website of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “a hefty woman who described herself as a resident of DeKalb County” testified that, against her will, a “microchip was put in [her] vaginal-rectum area” by “researchers with the federal government,” specifically the Department of Defense.

In columnist Jim Galloway’s words, “It was not funny, and no one laughed.” Well, the illness that afflicts that poor woman is indeed anything but funny… but the legislators who solicited her testimony, who put on the little charade at which her delusions were revealed—these morons do indeed deserve to be the subject of ridicule. Governor Roy Barnes may elicit an intentional laugh with his quip that “if someone holds him down to insert a microchip in his head, ‘it should be more than a damned misdemeanor,’” but the bottom line is anything but chuckle-worthy: this transcendently silly bill passed the Senate 47-2 in February, and was favorably reported out of the Assembly last week: shortly after the graphic demonstration of just how inane this legislation truly is.

Another story that has appeared in the last couple weeks concerns an apparently liberal idiot named Jason Levin, who created a website called crashtheteaparty.org. On it, and in subsequent interviews, he called for his supporters to infiltrate Tea Party events in order to make the TP crowd appear to be even more stupid than they already seem. Thus, he advocated, for example, having his minions in Tea Party drag claim President Obama is “an alien from outer space.”

The website now consists of nothing but an attempt to sell “tea-shirts” to raise funds: Levin, a teacher in Beaverton, OR, was placed on administrative leave until the district can determine whether he used school computers to work on his political website or did so on school time. These, not the site itself, would be violations of district policy. And I suspect that there will be a lot of folks who would like him gone: the Tea Party crowd out of vengeance, and the sane people because he’s a cretinous yahoo.

Let’s face it, this incitement is downright dumb on a number of levels. First, it advocates dishonest behavior, which I thought was something those of us who aren’t tea-partiers sought to fight against, not endorse. Second, the tea party crowd does really well at coming across as “homophobes, racists or morons” without any outside help. Any American who pays the slightest bit of attention to the news and who cares even a little bit about the relationship between rhetoric and evidence already has a pretty good idea that the average tea-partier is neither an intellectual giant nor the poster child for racial enlightenment (there’s less evidence of homophobia; that accusation seems based more on a characterization of the tea party “type” than on specific evidence). If you’re turned off by a gaggle of stupid white folks trumpeting their ignorance and paranoia, you’re probably already not a fan of the Tea Party. So leave 'em alone, Mr. Levin. To cite Paul Begala’s riff on a Napoleonic original, “never interrupt your opponent when he’s destroying himself.”

But thirdly, and by far most importantly in political terms, you have got to know that that website is going to be seen by someone who disagrees with you, and that it won’t be long before Fox News takes one jackass’s website and spins an elaborate conspiracy theory whereby any idiocy ever uttered, every misspelled accusation that Obama is a “socilist” or the “commander in theif,” every racial slur directed at the President of the country: all these instantly become the product of left-wing infiltrators. I’ve seen it happen already—a friend of mine recently put a link to the “Teabonics” page linked above on her Facebook page. Within minutes, there was a response saying—and the irony is just lovely—“thanks to the ‘Crash the Tea Party’ movement they're [sic] plans include showing up with misspelled signs, racist signs, and using other means to make the tea party look bad.”

And finally, there’s a local event: I’ve been a supporter, monetarily and otherwise, of Amnesty International for over 30 years. As a faculty member I presume I am not eligible to become a member per se of the SFA affiliate, but I did “fan” their Facebook page, so I get periodic announcements of upcoming meetings, events, etc. So it was that a couple of days ago I received an announcement for an event advertised as "SFA Waterboard a Prof." Really? This is an event sponsored by the university's chapter of Amnesty International? It turns out that this is nothing more than an old-fashioned dunking booth with proceeds benefiting a good cause.

Still, there is practically a cottage industry on the right--Sean Hannity and Dick Cheney are at the front of a very long list--to pretend that waterboarding is just an innocuous little persuasive devise instead of the method of torture that any thinking person (including John McCain back in his sane period) knows it is. Making light of waterboarding is what we might expect from the Milos Gloriosus crowd in the Young Republicans, not from an organization devoted to human rights. Waterboarding is not cute, nor is playing little word games about it cute. It is neither witty nor appealingly glib to link a simple, controlled, dunking to one of the vilest mechanisms for torture ever employed in the name of the American people. Words matter. Truth matters. And, fortunately or otherwise, perception matters. Playing along with the right's diminishment of what waterboarding really is and making jokes about it isn't clever at all. In fact, it's quite the opposite.

There are those who want everyone to agree with them. Not me. I'd just as soon the morons were on the other side, where they'd be less likely to do my point of view any harm. Some people would charge me with elitism for saying that... whereupon I call upon the full force of my rhetorical and persuasive powers and respond: Yep.

Another "I hate being right" moment.

There are times when I hate being right. One such occasion would be when I wrote here before the beginning of the NCAA basketball tournament that Northern Iowa was “a legitimate 5-seed, and they got jobbed. (So, of course, did KU, by potentially having to face a team a whole lot better than a 9-seed in the second round.)” Still, when you get only 2 fast-break points because the other team is sending only one guy to the boards with everybody else getting back on defense and you still give up 18 second-chance points, when you have a 3:5 assist to turnover ratio (and your All-American wannabe point guard is 4:5), when your two starting guards are a combined 0-for-11 from beyond the arc… well, you’re likely to lose because you stunk up the joint, not because the other team was good or even lucky (and UNI was both).

But, much as I love the Jayhawks, it bothers me considerably more that I was right, too, when I wrote this: “while the first few years of this millennium certainly demonstrated that the Republicans are horrible at governance, they did study long enough at the Karl Rove School of Outrageous Prevarication and Political Slimeballitude to get pretty good at … playing to the simmering racial animus that motivates much of their base.” Today’s headlines, coming as they do on the 45th anniversary of the third Selma to Montgomery march organized and led by Martin Luther King, are chilling. MSNBC’s description of an “Ugly build-up to House health care vote” doesn’t begin to tell the story. The New York Times comes, perhaps, a little closer: “Spitting and Slurs Directed at Lawmakers.” Disturbingly, grotesquely, horrifically, anti-health care reform activists have chanted “nigger” at Representatives Clyburn and Lewis and “faggot” at Representative Frank.

Yes, our friends in the Tea Party movement have decided that being inordinately proud of their ignorance and boorishness is no longer sufficient. Nor is it apparently any longer to their advantage to concentrate all their animosity on President Obama. I wish I could say that this is because they recognized that the President has shown precious little (apparent) leadership on the health-care debate, and that the bill that is coming up for a vote in the House reminds one of the famous saying that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. No, they have simply decided that it was too much trouble suppressing their hatred for anything and anyone who is the slightest bit different from them: in terms of race, religion, sexual orientation, whatever.

This is a movement encapsulated by the words of second-rate actor and first-rate moron Craig T. Nelson: “I've been on food stamps and welfare. Did anyone help me out? No.” This is the crowd that got a Democrat elected in an upstate New York district whose last non-Republican representative had been a Whig: and yet the Republican leadership embraced them, embraced their utter disregard for reason, embraced their comparison of the President of the United States to Hitler, embraced their total ignorance of and/or disregard for the most basic provisions of the reform proposals, embraced their taunting of ill or disabled citizens who just want a system that cares at least almost as much about them as about corporate profits. And now… “oh, my goodness, we certainly don’t condone that kind of behavior.” Actually, no, you don’t condone getting caught.

Even as the most loony of the right argue that nothing happened (and that if it did, it was socialist "plants" who did the deed), leading Congressional Republicans like John Boehner and Eric Cantor are tsk-tsking while, of course, denying that the actions of the few are in any way indicative of the feelings of the many. Needless to say, the party that claims to value personal responsibility denies any role in creating and perpetuating an environment in which this kind of mob-driven ugliness can thrive.

When Democratic Representative John Larson suggested that it might be time to “ratchet back just a little bit,” Cantor responded, “you know what it is time for? It's time to listen to the American people, and that is the stunning thing about this.” Would that be the American people who support the public option and think the current bill doesn’t go far enough, sir? Oh, wait, majorities don’t matter. Not the majority who elected President Obama, not the majority who elected a significant majority of Democrats to both houses of Congress. Not in this Brave New World in which corporations have personhood. The only majority you care about, Mr. Cantor, is who contributes the majority of the money to your campaign coffers. And it takes a lot of $20 contributions to match what you pull in from the health care industry: over $594,000 from insurance companies, health professionals, pharmaceutical companies, and HMOs, nearly half a million dollars ($488,700, or about 82% of the total) of which came from PACs instead of individuals, just in the last election. Mr. Cantor, if I were to guess your principal allegiances as a Congressman, the people of your district would be lucky to crack the top 10.

Just in case you cared, though—in a moment of weakness, perhaps—here are the responses to two questions posed to voters in your home state of Virginia (home of Real Americans) by the reputable pollsters Research 2000:

“What would make you more likely to vote for Democrats in the 2010 elections: If they pass health care reform that includes a public health insurance option but gets zero Republican votes OR if they pass health care reform without a public option but with some Republican votes?” 55% prefer the former, 33% the latter.

“Would you favor or oppose the national government offering everyone the choice of buying into a government administered health insurance plan -- something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get -- that would compete with private health insurance plans?” 61% approve, 32% disapprove. Oh, by the way, it’s a little more emphatic still (62-30) among independents. “Listen to the American people,” indeed.

Like most of Congress (both parties), no doubt, I haven’t read the legislation in its entirety. Assuming the news media are doing their job even a little bit, however, I have a pretty good idea what is and isn’t there. To be honest, I fear the bill may have been so eviscerated that it might end up as a net loss. But I’m guided by two things: the conversion of Dennis Kucinich, and the rhetoric of the opposition. If the Republicans can’t muster a better argument against this bill than that it’s socialist (it clearly isn’t) or that the American people think it goes too far (they clearly don’t), then my temptation would be to hold my nose and vote for it.

But, if nothing else, this debate has taught us a lot. Unfortunately, one thing we’ve learned is that overt, pervasive, racism in this country didn’t disappear when some of us imagined that it did. The election of an African-American President wasn’t, as we hoped, the signal of a new era, but the catalyst for a trip back in time to a darker age. The wound we thought was healed had merely scabbed over, and there was some nasty, gangrenous pus underneath. I say that “we” were fooled. I should clarify: the Republican leadership and their corporate masters knew all along. That’s what they’ve been counting on.