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OLDER POSTS: |
Dummy of the Day: Limbaugh Won't Tolerate Romney's Nod to Science
Brendan Beery 6/9/11
It’s a basic rule of psychology that each of us tends to accept evidence that confirms our own worldview and reject evidence that undermines that worldview. Of course, the more one needs to believe a given proposition to soothe one’s own anxieties, the more this tendency intensifies. Read Full Post HERE
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Jesus Freaks Support Bullying Kids; Maybe We Should Bully Them Back
Brendan Beery 6/9/11
The poor right-wing victims at the “Family Research Council” and “American Family Association” are in full bedwetting mode today over efforts in both the public and private sectors to stop anti-LGBT bullying in schools. That’s right, these fake “Christians” are pro-bullying. Isn’t that was Jesus (pronounced by fake Christians as Juh-EEEEEE-zuss) taught: taunt and humiliate thy sinning underage neighbor until she’s swinging from a basement drain pipe with rope burns around her neck? Read Full Post
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Weinergate and Sesame Street
Brendan Beery 6/8/11
We are a nation with serious deficiencies in basic rules of logic and reason. We are so inept at logic and reason, in fact, that we persistently manifest an inability even to identify like exhibits as being alike and different exhibits as being different. Put another way, as a nation collectively, we would fail the Sesame-Street logic exam, “Which one of these is not like the others?” Read Full Post
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The Anti-American Revisionism of Ralph Reed's Freak Show
Brendan Beery 6/7/11
Aryan-American Ralph Reed, Fuhrer of the “Faith and Freedom Coalition,” presided this past weekend over an angry, frilly, pale stampede on Washington DC that Reed called his “Faith and Freedom Conference.” Right Wing Watch had some interesting observations about Reed’s freak show. Read Full Post
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Virginia Republican Wants Private Bank Under Government Control
Brendan Beery 6/7/11
Right-wingers argue obsessively that all we need to do to return prosperity to America is leave American banks and corporations alone. We are told that what suppresses American productivity and stymies entrepreneurship is the destructive impulse of politicians to meddle in free-market capitalism.
But this Republican preference for laissez-faire capitalism apparently cannot survive the decision of a bank, free from governmental interference, to fly a rainbow flag during the month of June to further its own interest in both promoting and advertising its commitment to diversity. Read Full Post
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Dems' Political Malpractice Aids Right-Wing War on Reason
"Brian Boru" 6/6/11
The incoherent whisper that epitomizes ‘messaging’ from the Obama Administration is profound political malpractice. It would not be so remarkable if there were not, on the other side of things, a malignant political force that celebrates greed, ignorance and war. That political force has already done near irreversible damage to the nation’s economy, its ecology and its culture. Now, it promises to do much, much more. Read Full Post
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New Photos of Breitbart Emerge; Pundit Appears to Have Santorum on Face
Brendan Beery 6/6/11
. . . Breitbart is at it again, releasing photos whose political relevance is utterly imperceptible but that depict images Weiner allegedly sent to a female with whom he was having a consensual adult relationship. Naturally, Breitbart is selling these photos as “emerging” bombshells even though they evince no crimes and no professional or political malfeasance or non-feasance.
I’m sorry to have to report that I too have “come into possession” of shocking new photographs of a well-known figure: Andrew Breitbart. I’m not going to release all of them at once; instead, I will leak them strategically at intervals that Breitbart himself will dictate with his own pace of debauchery. Read Full Post
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Romney and Santorum Don't Believe in Evolution, But Don't Worry: They "Believe in" America!
Brendan Beery 6/4/11
Mitt Romney finished off his "big announcement" barnburner with a familiar flurry of mindlessness: “I’m Mitt Romney and I believe in America, and I’m running for President of the United States.” So Romney becomes the latest right-wing pol to soothe our anxieties over his party’s compulsory aversion to science by assuring us that it’s all right—even if he doesn’t believe in evolution, he sure does believe in America. Read Full Post
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Right-Wing Anti-Gay Propaganda is Out of Control
Brendan Beery 6/3/11
Right wingers have so worn out Nazi comparisons that such comparisons are now conclusively presumed to be unreasonable by most in the mainstream media. So by howling unremittingly about how “Obama is a Nazi” (because he promotes universal healthcare), Teabaggers have unwittingly but fortuitously—for them—also inoculated themselves from having to address the Nazi antecedents of the anti-gay propaganda that they use.
It is now considered unacceptably impolitic to accuse anybody of acting like a Nazi without regard to whether such a charge is warranted. That is unfortunate, especially at a time when Teabaggers from the grass roots all the way up to the United States Supreme Court warrant the charge. Read Full Post HERE
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Spread the Word! NJ Governor Chris Christie's Sasquatch Ancestry Confirmed!
Brendan Beery 6/2/11
The “Chris Christie Exhibit” has been a popular attraction for political visitors to the Tea Party Zoo. The beast in the exhibit is known to have a peculiarly unpleasant disposition. He is an aggressive knuckleballer with right-wing fecal matter and will charge the bars at the mere sight of a police uniform or anyone wearing the words “Union Local No.” on a baseball cap. Read Full Post HERE
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Palin Slams America During Statue of Liberty Visit
Brendan Beery 6/2/11
Have you ever had that feeling about an overdue project or a begrimed house—that overwhelming disquiet of not even knowing where to start? As I survey the nest of political cockroaches spawned by our national home-soiling in the 2010 elections, that is the feeling I have. Where do I start? There is a sea—nay, a whole galaxy—of anti-gay, anti-contraceptive, anti-reproductive-choice, anti-privacy, anti-union, and anti-liberty initiatives and propaganda polluting our political home.
And once again I find myself looking for any high-hanging fruit to go after. Can an entire political party really have devolved into this—a mule-animal so completely beholden to mindlessness that the most serious contenders for its presidential nod count among them Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin? Read Full Post HERE
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Right-Wing Hack Rick Scott Hates American Legal Tradition
Brendan Beery 6/2/11
Have you noticed the widespread right-wing campaign to protect America from the throng of Sharia lawyers swelling the ranks of our law schools and courthouses like a cotton-straining Weiner? Nothing gets teabaggers worked into a froth like an imagined threat from within or abroad.
But leaving aside the witlessness of right-wingers’ urgent anti-Sharia flurry, the irony lies in their movement’s implicit mission of protecting and preserving traditionally American sources of law. The irony is that this teabagger crowd doesn’t care about traditionally American sources of law, as for example the US Constitution.
Read Full Post HERE |
Dummy of the Day: A Heck of an Anti-Gay Screed
Brendan Beery 5/31/11
Conservative columnist Peter Heck has dashed off a screed so long on ignorance, harangue and animus that it’s hard to know where to start. Heck uses CNN anchor Don Lemon, who has “come out” as being gay, to characterize “coming out” as something gay people do for fun because they like talking about their private sex acts in public. More mindless propositions could scarcely be imagined.
Read Full Post HERE
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"F4U" Postpones My Memorial Day Barbecue
Brendan Beery 5/30/11
I was planning on taking the rest of the Memorial Day off from blogging. But God had different plans for me. In a shameless fit of self-promotion, I posted a link to today’s blog about supporting our troops on the Huffington Post. Somebody who calls himself or herself “F4U Corsair” posted the following reply, which is such a sublime right-wing-think specimen that I had to postpone the barbecue and share it:
You know what is sadder than not funding our Veterans? It is the people who mock yellow ribbons.
Read Full Post HERE
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I Support Our Troops! Raise My Taxes!
Brendan Beery 5/30/11
A few nights ago I heard a representative of “Rolling Thunder” say, “I think a lot of Americans don’t support the troops enough.” But what anybody means by “support the troops” has been a tangle since September 11, 2001. In the run-up to the Iraq War, which included running out of Afghanistan before we caught Osama bin Laden (and after Bush’s war council had already let him escape), the now-famous conflation of supporting the troops and supporting George W. Bush began to be pushed in earnest.
Read Full Post HERE
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"Low-Hanging Fruit" All That's Left in Right-Wing Population
Brendan Beery 5/29/11
I’ve recently had several conversations with friends and family in which I have worried that maybe I was spending too much time picking off right-wing “low-hanging fruit.” It almost seems unfair to pick so many fights over reasoning with those so inexpert at the task. But among right-wingers, who else remains but “low-hanging fruit”?
Read Full Post HERE
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Michele Bachmann as Montesquieu's Misadventure
Brendan Beery 5/28/11
Those who rhapsodize most about “liberty” and “freedom” should be regarded with the most apprehension by the rest of us. In the tireless campaign by mindless political movements to co-opt every symbol of Americanism, our language has not been spared. So when a politician like Michele Bachmann uses the words “liberty” and “freedom,” she frequently means something much different than what our founders meant: individual liberty and individual freedom. Our founders were not beholden to oil companies or religious sects, so their notions of these ideas were not bastardized into concepts like states’ rights or strictly economic liberty.
Read Full Post HERE
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Seventeen Year Old Strikes Back Against War on Science
Brendan Beery 5/28/11
How telling it is that a 17-year-old recent high-school graduate has intellectually outclassed virtually the entire Louisiana state government. In 2008, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal signed a law allowing science teachers to use “supplemental” materials in addition to texts approved as academically suitable. The obvious objective of this law’s proponents was to nurture the admixture of science and religion, which of course are as compatible as Newt Gingrich and marital fidelity.
Read Full Post HERE
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Palin and Pointless Pontification
Brendan Beery 5/27/11
A recent appearance by Sarah Palin on Fox News is the best exemplar in recent memory of the mindless blathering that passes for political discourse in some quarters. Greta Van Susteren asked Palin to opine on the state of the Republican Party generally, after which Palin explained that Republican “principles” were “sound” and that the “planks of the platform” were “great.” As to the “idiosyncrasies,” Palin continued, “ya know, they are what they are.”
Read Full Post HERE
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Tennessee Again Chooses to Waste Money on Legally Hopeless Anti-Gay Legislation
Professor Brendan Beery 5/27/11
It’s curious how much taxpayer money self-professed fiscal hawks are willing to spend defending religion-based laws that have no chance of surviving constitutional review. I recently wrote a piece about Tennessee legislator Stacey Campfield’s imposing on his entire state the cost of resolving his own gender confusion in the public realm; Stacey proposed to ban any mention of homosexuality in Tennessee’s schools in a law that is destined for a swift First-Amendment fail.
Read Full Post HERE
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Wisconsin Open-Meetings Law Serves its Powerful Purpose
Brendan Beery 5/26/11
Although many obtuse politicians treat lawyers and laws as little more than fodder for punch or applause lines, most laws really do make sense, and most of them wouldn’t had they not been drafted by thoughtful lawyers. This brings me to Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Act, which turned out to be the noose a Wisconsin judge used to hang Governor Scott Walker’s union-busting law.
Read Full Post HERE
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Dummy of the Day: Bushie Hates How Much Obama Hates Easter
Brendan Beery 5/26/11
The “Eastergate” controversy is back. According to Right Wing Watch, history quack David Barton had former George W. Bush aide and admitted plagiarist Tim Goeglein on a radio program yesterday to pontificate about the horrors of the Obama presidency. Obama’s failure to sermonize about Jesus on Easter was Goeglein’s Obama transgression de jour.
Read the Full Post HERE
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The Christian-Constitution Fairytale
Brendan Beery 5/25/11
Republican biblical fetishism is matched only by Republicans’ lust for another writing they profess to worship even though few of them have read it: the US Constitution. I teach constitutional law (among other courses) for a living. And every time I teach it, I must take care to disabuse brainwashed students of all their notions about our “Christian” Constitution and our supposedly fundamentalist founders. The right-wing disinformation campaign has been as effective as it has been cynical; a lie repeated often enough can make believers of the unlearned among us.
Read the Full Post HERE
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Enlightenment Quote of the Day: David Hume as Tea Party Precursor
Brendan Beery 5/25/11
While most Americans celebrate the lives and minds of Eigteenth-Century thinkers like Jefferson, Adams, Paine and Madison, the study of those men’s writings tends to dig up the kind of free thinking and audacity that makes dogmatic traditionalists piddle. So conservatives have picked through Eighteenth-Century thinkers in search of more soothing ideas. I doubt any “philosophers” from that Enlightenment have been more cited by conservatives than Edmund Burke or David Hume. As many of us endeavor to understand the link between racism and the Tea Party, consider this passage from conservative hero David Hume . . .
Read Full Post HERE
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The Tragic Illogic of Tornadic Religiosity
Brendan Beery 5/25/11
In general, religion requires the suspension of reason. I can’t attack it since I’ve done it myself. I know how to believe what I wish rather than what I know; in fact, my own experience with “belief,” which honesty requires me to present as the product of volition rather than care, elucidates the usefulness of religion in soothing tragedy. Like most progressive humans, I can say that very bad things have happened to me. Religion happened to me at birth, but I never understood it until I watched my mother drown in her own blood as she succumbed to cancer at age 48.
Read Full Post HERE
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Anti-Gay Tennessee Law is Dead On Arrival in Federal Court
Professor Brendan Beery 5/24/11
One measure of legislation’s legitimacy of purpose is whether the legislation stands any chance of surviving constitutional challenge. Legislatures have lawyers, so when legislators enact a law that lawyers must have told them will be struck down after taxpayers bear the cost of mounting a futile defense, evidence mounts that those legislators were not up to the business of good-policy lawmaking, but rather were up to costly mischief. This brings us to legislator Stacey Campfield (Stacey claims to be a male, despite his androgynous name) and his Tennessee law, which provides, “No public elementary or middle school shall provide any instruction or material that discusses sexual orientation other than heterosexuality.” This law will be challenged in federal court, and as any competent lawyer would have advised Stacey and “his” Tennessee Legislature buddies, the law is dead on arrival.
Read Full Post HERE
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Dummy of the Day: The Photo Says It All
Brendan Beery 5/24/11
I wrote yesterday about Minnesota Republicans’ decision to put the question of opposite-sex-only marriage to a popular vote even though Minnesota law already provides for opposite-sex-only marriage. The HuffingtonPost reports that a driving force behind this initiative to target gays just for kicks is Catholic agitator Jason Adkins.
Read Full Post HERE
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Justice Kennedy to Minnesota: Make My Day
Brendan Beery 5/24/11
Minnesota’s legislature has decided to submit to the voters a question that few in the state were asking: whether marriage should be limited to opposite-sex couples. Minnesota law already restricted the scope of marriage to include only opposite-sex couples. But social right-wingers are not just bigots; they are proactive bigots.
Read Full Post HERE
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Analogical Malpractice: Why Bush One and Kuwait is Not Like Obama and bin Laden
Brendan Beery 5/23/11
A popular talking point among the puerile punditry is that, just like George HW Bush’s popularity foundered before he lost to Bill Clinton in 1992, Barack Obama’s job approval numbers could tumble before he loses to a Republican in 2012. The analogy underlying this pop wisdom is supposed to be one between Bush One the war president who repelled the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Obama the war president who felled Osama bin Laden.
Predictably, the pundits selling this story have been gazing at shiny objects and losing the figures behind them. The analogical conclusion that one result will mirror another requires that the results being matched flow from the same inputs. The “shiny objects” fixations of most pundits narrow those pundits’ notice to superficial parallels: two presidents presided over military victories; in both cases evildoers were vanquished; in both cases people felt good; in both cases presidents got “bumps”; and in both cases those presidents can lose.
Read Full Post HERE
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Dummy of the Day: Tea Party Twit Katrina Pierson
Brendan Beery 5/23/11
It’s become common political lore that the Republican Party is at war with itself. Ever since Ronald Reagan courted conservative Christians to join a coalition including moneyed interests and disaffected Southerners to form an electoral juggernaut, Republicans have tended to discover that they had run afoul of the Vampire rule: once you’ve invited it into your home, you’ve empowered it to destroy you. The remaking of Republicanism into a church-state mule-animal transformed anti-Republicanism from mere political opposition into a struggle to rescue American pluralism from the grip of a white, Christian, fundamentalist monolith. 
The little-tent reality of Reagan’s “big-tent party” was exposed by George W. Bush and remains obvious to anyone alert enough to watch putative Republican legislative “job creators” busy at work against homosexual infiltrators and Planned Parenthood abortionists. One would have thought that, after voters pushed back against social conservatism and Terri-Schiavo politics, Republicans would have thought twice before admitting any other unconventional interest into the party as a dominant force. Enter the “Tea Party.”
Read Full Post HERE
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Perkins Parrots the Myth: The Dangerous Conservative Campaign Against Gays
Brendan Beery 5/22/11
The folks at Right Wing Watch posted this tirade by Aryan-American Tony Perkins of the “Family Research Council” about gay activists last week:
As I have long pointed out, it’s not enough to make a few concessions to these [gay activist] extremists. Once they have a foothold, a little bit of acceptance turns into a full-blown demand to co-opt your business. They want corporations to join them in the assault on real tolerance. Unless you cower and give them what they want, these activists will make sure you can’t function in society. Over the years, gay activists have perfected this kind of corporate terrorism. And until companies stand their ground and refuse to negotiate, homosexuals will continue to bully businesses.
This is a familiar right-wing ranting point against gays. In an earlier post entitled The Myth of the Politically Powerful Minority, I described the tendency of conservatives, even one on the US Supreme Court, to use propaganda against gays that has dangerous historical antecedents. In Romer v Evans and Lawrence v Texas, the Supreme Court ruled that states could not criminalize the private sexual conduct of gays or target gays for disfavor based on a “bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group.”
Read Full Post HERE
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Dog Whistles and Codes: Covert Republican Message Making
Brendan Beery 5/21/11
Recent Republican race-baiting, in the person of Newt Gingrich and his allegorical references to Detroit and food stamps, raises anew the issue of Republican “dog-whistle politics.” That Republicans habitually trip over themselves in the proverbial “race to the bottom” with their appeals to the fears and anxieties of small-mindedness is well understood by any close observer of American politics. But the well-read and keenly alert are not the electoral targets or concerns of Republican message-makers. The people Republican strategists seek to reach—or at least not to scare—are the vast numbers of Americans who are not paying attention closely, those whose ignorance renders them susceptible to the game of bait-and-switch that the right-wing has been playing with Americans for decades.
Read Full Post HERE
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Agema Wants Michigan Students to Pay for His Own Sexual Confusion
Brendan Beery 5/20/11
Republicans’ focus on the economy and jobs was again on display this month when mega-church poster boy David Agema (a Michigan state representative) proposed to fine public universities to the tune of 5% of their state funding if they continue to provide health insurance for employees who live with other adults outside of marriage.
I recently posted this excerpt from our founding father Thomas Paine: “By engendering the church with the state, a sort of mule-animal, capable only of destroying, and not of breeding up, is produced, called the Church established by Law. It is a stranger, even from its birth, to any parent mother, on whom it is begotten, and whom in time it kicks out and destroys.” But the Republican Party, which bastardizes the teachings of Jesus to abate their own sexual confusions and shame while invoking his name for political gain, cannot be dissuaded.
Read Full Post HERE
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Kansas Abortion Laws Can't Survive Under Current Standards
Professor Brendan Beery 5/19/11
 Last week, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed into law a prohibition against insurance companies covering abortion procedures as part of women’s regular health-care plans. The Kansas City Star reports that Brownback also signed a new law under which “Kansas will require annual, unannounced inspections of abortion clinics, impose new health and safety rules specifically for them and prevent them from using telemedicine systems to dispense pregnancy-terminating drugs . . .”
If federal courts are faithful to established precedents, these laws will not survive judicial review.
Read Full Post HERE
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Assertion and Certitude: Leading Indicators of Misleading Statements
Brendan Beery 5/16/11
The folks over at thinkquest.org (an educational association) have compiled a great summary of propaganda techniques used by both governments and private advertisers. One of those techniques is bald assertion:
Assertion is commonly used in advertising and modern propaganda. An assertion is an enthusiastic or energetic statement presented as a fact, although it is not necessarily true. They often imply that the statement requires no explanation or back up, but that it should merely be accepted without question. . . . Any time an advertiser states that [its] product is the best without providing evidence for this, [it is] using an assertion. The subject, ideally, should simply agree to the statement without searching for additional information or reasoning. Assertions, although usually simple to spot, are often dangerous forms of propaganda because they often include falsehoods or lies. (Emphasis added).
A well-reasoned argument starts with a principle that the speaker must establish as being beyond reproach and applicable in all cases.
Read the Full Post HERE
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Out-Of-Touch Oil Execs Emblematic of Economic Social Divide
Brendan Beery 5/15/11
A couple days ago Senator Jay Rockefeller told oil executives, “I get the feeling that it’s almost like you’re—like the five of you are like Saudi Arabia. That you’re caught up in your profits, you’re highly defensive, you yield on nothing.” He continued, “I think you’re out of touch. Deeply, profoundly out of touch. And deeply and profoundly committed to sharing nothing.” When the Senator called on the executives to participate in our country’s “shared sacrifice” in paying for all the wars and programs Republicans decided to start without paying for, one of the oil executives said, “I don’t think the American people want shared sacrifice; I think they want shared prosperity.” It was a typical empty Republican applause line: everything in America is all goodness, God, and gumballs.
Read Full Post HERE
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"Man" Named "Stacey" Angry About All the Homoeroticism in Tennessee's Schools
Brendan Beery 5/12/11
Conservatives have the strangest notions about equality and neutrality. It was conservative “thinking,” of course, that begot the mule-animal called “separate but equal.” Perhaps we should pity the mind that could conceive of such a thing. How small must one be to perceive that rigging his contest against another could yield a conscionable win? But the win means more to the conservative mind than the contest, so a contest against one whose “equality” consists of separateness does not embarrass a conservative the way it would a progressive.
In (where else?) Tennessee, (what else?) Republican legislator Stacey Campfield proposed a bill that would mitigate some of the gender confusion that polluted his own development, which bill provides, “No public elementary or middle school shall provide any instruction or material that discusses sexual orientation other than heterosexuality.”
Asked whether this law discriminates, Campfield said,
My bill is neutral. It doesn’t say anybody can speak for it or against it. So, I’m sure people wouldn’t want someone coming out and saying, you know, there are some people who say, you know, we should be preaching against it and saying it’s evil, dirty and wrong, or some people say hey, it’s great, wonderful thing.
This is, you know, quite a brave anti-discrimination, you know, posture. But seriously, can you imagine replacing the words sexual orientation and heterosexuality with any other immutable traits and getting away with it (anywhere else but in the South or Evangelical Midwest)? Let’s try it:
“No public elementary or middle school shall provide any instruction or material that discusses ethnicity other than whiteness.”
“No public elementary or middle school shall provide any instruction or material that discusses gender other than maleness.”
“No public elementary or middle school shall provide any instruction or material that discusses the accomplishments of citizens except for American citizens.”
“No public elementary or middle school shall provide any instruction or material that discusses given names other than traditional male names.”
In the all-too-Republican world of Mr. Campfield, the rules immediately above, which are logically precisely parallel to the law he drafted, are not discriminatory, but neutral. What a world that must be.
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Republican Fear-Mongering Designed to Start or Extend Wars, Not Win Them
Brendan Beery 5/11/11
On Monday night, counterterrorism expert Michael Sheehan was interviewed on MSNBC. When comparing the Bush and Obama Administrations, both of which he has worked under, he said that there was very little difference at “the operational level.” But there was a difference at the top. Whereas Bush rattled on relentlessly about al Qaeda as an existential threat to the United States—a force capable of destroying our way of life—Obama treats al Qaeda as a serious threat but one that can be exterminated while Americans go about their business.
Republicans, overwrought at the prospect that Americans might begin to reflect the calm and confidence of their President, have been thrashing about trying to keep Americans scared; if the population isn’t eyeing the advance of terrorism from afar and homosexuals from coastal areas, then Republicans can’t get about finishing the middle class for good. Bush and his ilk, inept at all manner of governance, are nonetheless adept at fear-mongering. It’s the classic bait and switch: keep Americans preoccupied with nonsense like “traditional values” and Sharia law in hopes they won’t notice the Republican fingers in their pockets.
The Republican penchant for fear-mongering, while it is an effective stratagem for starting a war, is contraindicated for winning one. Mr. Sheehan has written,
The most obvious cost in exaggerating the threat is in the over-expenditure of precious national treasure. This includes billions of dollars of taxpayer money, the deaths of our young soldiers, and the pressure put on our civil liberties in the pursuit of terrorist cells.
In addition to these obvious costs, there is a subtle and perhaps even more pernicious consequence of overstating the threat. It is important to understand that terrorism is an instrument of the weak and that the terrorist depends on a psychological overreaction to an attack on an innocent civilian target. Absent the use of a nuclear weapon, which is highly unlikely, Al Qaeda will have real difficulty affecting our country except through an over-reaction to the next attack. Remember, Hurricane Katrina wiped out a mid-sized American city and shut down commercial shipping in the Gulf of Mexico for several days and our national economy still grew by over 4 percent that year. We are a very resilient nation.
Thus, by constantly wetting themselves over terrorist threats and aggrandizing a sad little tribe of fundamentalist mouth-breathers as an existential threat, the Republican Party created an al Qaeda brand image that al Qaeda could never have achieved without the complicity of Bush-Cheney histrionics. The Bush-Cheney approach to terrorism also violated basic tenets of psychlogical warfare; consider this excerpt from what is regarded as a “brilliant” argument by Professer J. Michael Waller published in February 2006, in the midst of the Bush Administration’s incessant cowering at every terrorist peep:
Incessant, morbid portrayals of an individual, movement, or nation as a mortal enemy might rally support for the American side, but they have a shelf-life that gets tired over time. Constant specters of unrelenting dangers risk sowing defeatism and chipping away at our own morale. Abroad they risk making the U.S. look like a bully in some places and surrender the propaganda advantage to the other side. The questions at this stage of the war are:
- Do we inadvertently aid our enemies and potential enemies by taking them too seriously?
- Does our relentless portrayal of individuals, ideologies, movements and philosophies as mortal dangers to America enhance the enemies’ status and prestige?
- Is it an unsound political strategy to hype the image and power of the enemy and the few leaders who personify it?
- Is there something else the United States and its allies should be doing in their attempts to discredit, undermine and defeat the enemy?
. . . [I suggest] that U.S. strategy includes undermining the political and psychological strengths of adversaries and enemies by employing ridicule as a standard operating tool of national strategy. Ridicule is an under-appreciated weapon not only against terrorists, but against weapons proliferators, despots, and international undesirables in general. [Read the rest here.]
This is not a new idea, and it should not have been unknown to our “war president” and his neocon war council; had they not ever heard of Tokyo Rose? But because the concern of the Bush-Cheney gang was to justify its wars and retain its political power rather than to demoralize its enemy, they picked fear over ridicule as the American posture toward an enemy that really was, in any sense beyond its desire to project violence, a joke.
As Mr. Sheehan has suggested, President Obama is more concerned with taking an appropriate psychological outlook vis-à-vis terrorists than with ginning up anxiety among the American body politick. If Obama’s calm and irreverence toward al Qaeda catches on, Republicans know they are in trouble. That’s why they take every chance they have to say we can’t let our guard down or there are still scary Arabs out there. What use are these constant exhortations to be afraid? American fear does not make terrorists less dangerous; to the contrary, it gives terrorists the win. We are fortunate to finally have grownups in the White House who understand that.
Michael Sheehan |
Due Process Through a Child’s Eyes
All the recent talk about torture and “enhanced interrogation techniques” and Guantanamo detainees has got me thinking again about the role of the Constitution in all this. The primary constitutional difficulty with the Bush Administration’s post-9/11 roundups and detentions was that they tended to dispense with due process, which the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution guarantee to all persons in the government’s custody. But it has occurred to me that when lawyers talk about due process, most people don’t know what they’re talking about. This is not to criticize “most people”; had I not gone to a fine law school, I wouldn’t understand it either. That doesn’t mean it’s hard to understand. Our founders incorporated in the Constitution notions of fair play that simply reflect our common experience.
You and I had experiences even as children that reflected the need for the due-process guarantee. I’ll share one of my stories here. . . .
Read the full Comment HERE.
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Thiessen is a Troglodyte, and Other Observations
Brendan Beery 5/9/11
Bush lemming Marc Thiessen wrote a screed published May 4 by the Washington Post in which he suggested that the commander in chief, after leading the effort to successfully exterminate Osama bin Laden, should make time in his schedule to apologize to the CIA. Thiessen’s piece is so representative of Republican reason-free ranting that I decided to dissect it, assertion by assertion.
Read the full Comment HERE.
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Republican Historical Quackery
Brendan Beery 5/8/11
So it is fully to be expected that the man conservative politicians like Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Michelle Bachman regard as the most promising “historian” of our time has no history degree. With countless brilliant minds populating the halls of the world’s most venerated institutions of higher education—the American university system that should be a source of great national pride—these Republican politicians have turned instead to an historical hobbyist named David Barton, who has a bachelor’s degree in (what else?) Christian education from (where else?) Oral Roberts University. . . .
Read the full Comment HERE.
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A simple Analogy for Torture Apologists
Brendan Beery 5/8/11
Logic is not the bailiwick of Tea Party types, so it isn’t surprising that torture apologists were tripping over themselves to proclaim the efficacy of waterboarding before sub-oceanic scavengers had taken their first bite out of Osama bin Laden’s carcass. Many claim, without citation to credible intelligence sources, that the information leading to bin Laden’s extermination was obtained by resort to “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The implication is that the magic tidbit—whatever it was—could not have been obtained without those techniques.
To illustrate the illogic of that conclusion, consider a mundane example that is logically parallel to the Republican argument. Suppose that a man has a noble objective in mind—getting his pregnant wife to the hospital soon after her water breaks. . . .
Read the full Comment HERE.
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