dem come for de rasta and you say nothing
dem come from the Muslims you say nothing
dem come for the anti-globalist you say nothing
dem even come for the liberals and you say nothing
dem come for you and will speak for you? who will speak for you, who ?
Amanda Marcotte is a widely read liberal Democratic blogger who was handpicked by the presidential campaign of John Edwards to run their web operations. In spite of the fact that the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress three months before, it took only 16 days for the radical right and their allies in the corporate media to pressure her into resigning and to bully Edwards into issuing an apology for hiring her in the first place.
All of this is disturbing, but none of it is very surprising. While the circle of liberal bloggers and grassroots party activists clustered around online communities like the Daily Kos, the campaign of Ned Lamont in Connecticut, and Marcotte’s own weblog Pandagon have received a good deal of attention in the corporate media and even some credit for the Democratic party’s takeover of Congress last November, elite Democratic Party powerbrokers like Chuck Schumer, Rahm Emanuel and Hillary Clinton and even Howard Dean have traditionally kept them at arm’s length. On the other hand, Catholic League President William Donohue, right-wing journalist Michelle Malkin, Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and the other conservatives who mounted the campaign against Marcotte and fellow John Edwards hire Melissa McEwan have powerful financial backers on the Christian right and genuine access to the inner circles of the Republican Party.
In addition to being on the wrong side of a mismatch with their adversaries on the neoconservative and Christian right, the Democratic Party’s digital grassroots has further stacked the deck against itself. Over the past 4 years, they have consistently tried to distance themselves from and marginalize the anti-war and social justice movements. The result has been a de facto surrender of the terms of the debate to corporate media appointed right wing gatekeepers like Bill Donohue. Indeed, when Bill Clinton famously distanced himself from the Black Nationalist rapper “Sister Souljah” in the 1990s, it would have been hard to imagine the fervor with which both conservatives and liberals would have latched onto what at the time seemed a forgettable exercise in campaign rhetoric. But over the past decade, and especially since the beginning of the war in Iraq, conservatives have rarely let a month pass without demanding some kind of Sister Souljah moment from liberals.
They are rarely disappointed.
On October 10th of 2002, after the Republican controlled House of Representatives and the Democratically controlled Senate passed H.J.Res.114 authorizing Bush to go to war in Iraq, the millions of people in the United States who opposed the war from the very beginning, suddenly realized that they had no representative in either major political parties, and took to the streets. From the rally in Central Park on October 6th, 2002 organized by Notinourname and International Answer to the mass demonstrations on February 15th, 2003 that put over 100 million people in the streets simultaneously all over the world and which were labeled “the other superpower” by the New York Times, the United States saw the largest sustained burst of anti-war activism since the protests over Kent State in the early 1970s.
While the “netroots” was still in its infancy (The Daily Kos was founded in May of 2002), Atrios in April of 2002, MyDD in April of 2002, and Firedoglake in December of 2004), liberals and the intellectual elite on the margins of the Democratic Party were far from pleased. Haunted by Nixon’s victory in 1968, the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and McGovern’s crushing defeat in 1972, the specter of another anti-war movement and another backlash from the “silent majority” proved stronger than their anger at the way their representatives in Congress gave in and wrote Bush out a blank check to invade Iraq.
The most egregious example came on October 16th, the day Bush signed H.J.Res. 114 into law, Michelle Goldberg, a writer for the “liberal” online magazine Salon.com, and a proxy for Columbia professor Todd Gitlin, penned a scathing hit piece called “Peace Kooks”, an attack on Not In Our Name and International Answer, two of the more radical groups leading the protests. While maintaining that she was opposed to the invasion of Iraq, Goldberg made no secret about how she felt about the anti-war movement. She hated it. The protests weren’t organized by grassroots Americans at all but rather by “outsider agitators” who were trying to hijack the war for their own agenda.
http://dir.salon.com/story/politics/feature/2002/10/16/protest/index.html
Goldberg’s piece, which was later reprinted and widely circulated by Front Page Magazine editor and fellow Salon writer David Horowitz, dripped with class elitism and passive aggressive venom. If the organizers of the protests were dangerous radicals, then the “ordinary Americans” who attended them were just plain stupid. “The new antiwar movement is in danger of being hijacked by bizarre extremist groups — and most protesters don’t even know it”, Goldberg wrote, never bothering to explain how people at the rally she was panning could be unaware of the radicals involved in organizing it when she had already called our attention to their very obvious and in your face presence. “There were the usual suspects, like the girl from the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade who donned a kaffiyeh and hurled red-faced imprecations against capitalist tyranny”.
David Corn, the “liberal” columnist for the Nation, who would later go on to work for the right-wing media collective “Pajamas Media” was even more alarmist. In an article for the LA Weekly dated October 30th, 2002 he ducked into a phone booth, donned his superman cape, then activated his X Ray vision to rescue would be anti-war protesters from those stealthy reds who, like terrorists, lurked among them.
http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/behind-the-placards/3458/?page=3
“If the goal is to bring the silent majority into the anti-war movement, it’s not going to be achieved by people carrying pictures of Kim Jong-Il even if they keep them hidden in their wallets.”
While he was at it, maybe Corn should have tried to find the weapons of mass destruction behind Ramsey Clark’s pack of Trojans.
The destructive pattern would not change as liberal Democrats moved from working for magazines like Salon and mainstream Democrats like Dean to working for themselves. Indeed, in spite of the way the cluster of liberal Democratic websites that grew up around the campaign of Howard Dean exploded in 2003, there was almost no mention of the anti-war and social justice movements and no consistent line opposing the war in Iraq. They would ricochet between mocking Bush’s incompetence, taunting right wingers to sign up for the military, and predicting the imminent takeover of all of Iraq by the Shiite militias, but they would never come out and call the war a crime, something that, even if the United States could win, would still be wrong. And they maintained a strict separation wall between themselves and people to their left, whom they saw as a possible excuse for the right to attack.
On March 16th, a few days before the invasion of Iraq, Rachel Corrie, the American political activist was killed in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army. While getting some attention at the beginning in the mainstream media it was met with deafening silence by the Democratic left, who all but ignored the relentless campaign of demonization that took place within the online right and in mainstream publications like the Wall Street Journal. In fact, the Rachel Corrie incident was the first canary to die inside the coal mine, and the toxic brew of red-baiting and misogyny directed against the dead anti-war activist whipped up inside the online right by the pro-Israeli lobby and by grassroots neoconservatives was an early template for the campaign of manufactured outrage directed against Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McKewen by William Donohue and the Catholic League for Civil Rights.
In 2005, when University of Colorado professor of Native American studies Ward Churchill was targeted by the right and their allies in the corporate media in a way that prefigured the attacks on Amanda Marcotte in almost all of its details, most liberals in the now well developed netroots not only ignored the almost unprecedented removal of tenure via a campaign of outrage manufactured by the far right, they went out of their way to distance themselves from Churchill.
Glenn Greenwald, for example, normally one of the “netroots” most ferocious opponents of the far right, seemed far more interested in distancing himself and his fellow Democrats from Churchill than he was in defending Churchill’s right to speak and to publish.
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/02/why-ann-coulter-matters.html
“Put simply, Coulter’s importance is infinitely greater than Ward Churchill’s (or Harry Belafonte’s or Barbra Streisand’s or any other left-wing bogeyman), and Reynolds’ connection to Coulter is far more substantial than all of those Democrats who never even heard of Churchill before and yet, according to the sermonizing Reynolds, nonetheless somehow had a compelling obligation to denounce him.”
You denounce your extremists, he wrote, daring neoconservative blogger Glenn Reynolds to come out and attack Ann Coulter, and we’ll denounce ours.
I wrote my post urging that Reynolds be asked about his conspicuous silence concerning Coulter only once: (a) several days elapsed after Coulter’s speech and Reynolds said nothing to condemn it, and (b) I began receiving e-mails pointing to posts written by Reynolds where he piously demanded that Democrats not remain “silent” in the face of intemperate remarks by far less important figures than Coulter.
But the real test for liberal bloggers would come a year later.
Neither Ward Churchill nor Rachel Corrie had ever been associated with the Democratic Party. Cynthia McKinney, on the other hand, was a different story, and the controversial Georgia Congresswoman would prove to be a difficult test case for liberal bloggers and grassroots Democratic Party activists.
Indeed, while McKinney is occasionally grouped with Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, Maxine Waters and other left leaning Democratic members of Congress, she is in fact considerably more radical. While in congress, she consistently worked outside of the framework that even Kucinich and Conyers are careful not to violate. Dennis Kucinich, for example, serves largely as a liaison between the Democratic Party and the anti-war movement. His role is to draw anti-war radicals into the party without being a real threat. Note, for example, that he has not introduced articles of impeachment. McKinney, on the other hand, consistently crossed the line, introducing articles of impeachment, calling for a more thorough investigation of 9/11, advocating a more “even handed” American posture towards the Arab Israeli conflict.
Whatever precisely happened on March 29th, 2006, when McKinney got into some kind of altercation with a Capitol Policeman, and it’s important to note that all of the widely publicized charges were thrown out of court due to lack of evidence, it drove a deep wedge into the left wing of the Democratic Party. Not only did John Conyers and the Congressional Black Caucus decline to intervene on McKinney’s behalf, liberal Democratic bloggers in the “netroots” were split bitterly. More radical members of the “netroots” like Amanda Marcotte herself sided with McKinney, noting the misogyny and the racially charged nature of the attacks in the media. http://pandagon.net/2006/04/08/even-if-cynthia-mckinney-did-what-they-say-it-wouldnt-matter/ But more conservative Democratic webloggers like John Avarosis of Americablog bitterly attacked McKinney and defended the behavior of the Capital police.
It was surprising, therefore, that when the long awaited job opportunity with a mainstream Democratic Party candidate finally came, it was Amanda Marcotte, a loyal Democrat but also stridently feminist, gleefully profane, and militantly secular, who got tapped, and not one of her more low key, Ivy League white male colleagues. Indeed, many of the better-known, white male liberals in the “netroots” have always appeared to be censoring their writings with an eye towards later employment in the Democratic Party. Take the case of Jimmy Carter. While he was frequently written about, and defended on the pages of weblogs like Atrios and the Daily Kos in 2005 and the beginning of 2006, a simple search through the biggest Democratic web loggers will reveal that he basically drops off the face of the earth after he published “Peace not Apartheid”. Why, after all, risk writing about the Middle East, an issue you probably don’t know much about anyway, if it’s only going to cause you trouble later on after you get hired by Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton?
Amanda Marcotte, on the other hand, while, once again a very loyal Democrat willing to work for John Edwards even after Edwards declared that “all options were on the table” for Iran, has never been a Democratic Party activist like Jane Hamsher or Jerome Armstrong. On the contrary, she’s practically made her reputation as a bomb thrower and a provocateur, couching opinions that, while perfectly true, would be still be incendiary, even without the additional verbal hot sauce she’s always piled on top. “The Catholic church is not about to let something like compassion for girls get in the way of using the state as an instrument to force women to bear more tithing Catholics.”
The sequence of events that followed Amanda Marcotte’s hiring played out in an almost perfectly textbook manner and are described too well by Amanda Marcotte herself in her Salon.com article to be worth going into any detail here. Shortly after she was hired on January 30th, the predictable grumbling started to bubble up on far right wing websites like Michellemalkin.com and Littlegreenfootballs.com, all of whom demanded Amanda Marcotte’s head.
Come, come, they said, barking the familiar orders at liberals in the netroots, give us a Sister Souljah moment now.
Amanda Marcotte is a very popular figure in the liberal “netroots” and of course, as she remarked herself in her post on Cynthia McKinney, white. So a manufactured campaign of outrage on the extreme right side of the blogosphere wasn’t going to be enough in and of itself of to make Amanda Marcotte lose her job. On the contrary, there are liberal Democratic webloggers like the above-mentioned Glenn Greenwald, who practically live for fights with the hard right online.
But while everybody in the “netroots” likes to complain about how the mainstream media favors the right, and while some of them could have anticipated how easily they could have escalated the “controversy” over Amanda Marcotte onto MSNBC, CNN, and Fox, and while a few might have even guessed the role that misogyny and appeals to the cultural backlash in middle America over issues like abortion and gay rights might have come into play, none could have fully imagined how far the right would take it and just what it meant.
There would be no more demands for Sister Souljah moments from the left. The double standard would now be open and unapologetic.
Last Fall, when the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress with a clear mandate from the American people to scale down the war and reign in the Christian right, George Bush, the White House, the corporate media and the Republican Party did not respond by moving to the center. On the contrary, Bush’s response could best be summed up by “fuck you. Congress is now closed.” The war would now be escalated, not scaled back. Bush was letting Congress know where the real power inside the United States government stood, and it was not with them, and Congress knew it.
No sooner did George Allen concede to Jim Webb in Virginia than “liberal” Congressman and member of the Congressional Black Caucus Charles Rangel start calling for a reintroduction of the draft. Rangel’s proposal of course was hypocritical. Rangel is opposed to escalating the war. But what it demonstrated was that Rangel accepted the terms of debate laid out by the right. Criticize the conduct of the war, but not its morality. Call the war a mistake. Don’t call it a crime. Boxed in by his limited options, Rangel settled for a draft bill he knew would never succeed. He even voted against it himself.
Certain that the Democrats would offer no real opposition to the war in Iraq, the Bush Administration quickly offered them a way to save face. Bush proposed a troop “surge” in Iraq, a very public increase of troops levels by 20,000, something that the Democrats could appease their liberal grassroots by loudly and publicly opposing, and something which let them put off talking about the occupation of Iraq itself. And the Democrats went even further, reassuring George Bush that he wouldn’t be impeached or held accountable for an obvious pattern of lawbreaking since the war in Iraq began by flooding the media with an early primary horserace for 2008. Suddenly all the talk of impeachment and of ending the war was gone and it was all about media superstars Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Ana Nicole Smith.
Similarly, in the realm of culture, the right and the corporate media was letting the liberal “netroots” know where the real power stood. There would now be an open, naked double standard. Amanda Marcotte would be a test case.
The first sign that it was now all about raw power was who the right and the corporate media chose to be their standard bearer, William Donohue, an unapologetic anti-Semite and head of the “Catholic League for Civil Rights,” a far right wing organization bankrolled by, among others, Dominos Pizza Chairman Tom Monagham. While liberal Democrats like Glenn Greenwald, as noted above, often taunt the right to be consistent. If you support the war, then enlist. Denounce your extremists and we’ll denounce ours, the right doesn’t play this game. They are perfectly comfortable with double standards.
In an article by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, for example note how Donohue continues to pretend that the Democrats could “even the score” by putting on a suit and tie, purging themselves of their more marginal supporters, and accepting his terms. John Edwards is a decent man who has had his campaign tarnished by two anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots. Just give us a Sister Souljah moment, he seems to hint, and everything will be OK.
But once Chris Mathews, Bill O’Reilly, and CNN decided to appoint Donohue as a gatekeeper, the game was up. The ruling class had taken its ball and gone home for while Edwards would apologize for Amanda Marcotte’s criticisms of the Catholic Church, almost as if on cue, Donohue would be allowed to get away with statements that were far more extreme than anything that had ever been written on Pandagon or Shakespeare’s sister.
We’ve already won. Who really cares what Hollywood thinks? All these hacks come out there. Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, okay? And I’m not afraid to say it. … Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism. We have nothing in common. But you know what? The culture war has been ongoing for a long time. Their side has lost. [MSNBC, Scarborough Country, 12/8/04]
Where was the anti-Defamation League? Were was Joe Lieberman? Where were the major Jewish political activists? How about Little Green Footballs or the pro-Israeli right online, people who are sensitive to any manifestation of anti-Semitism from the left? Did they approve of it from the right? All of them were conspicuously silent. Indeed, while there is indeed a virulent strain of anti-semitism on the left, it’s almost always hidden behind political agenda that are not necessarily anti-Semitic, support for the Palestinians or behind the 9/11 Truth Movement. Not so with Donohue. His anti-semitism is open, unapologetic, taunting. We’ve already won. Who really cares what Hollywood thinks?
But Donohue’s anti-Semitism, of course, was never really the point. The target wasn’t Jews and the reason for using an anti-Semite as a spokesman wasn’t anti-Semitism. It was to say this. We can get away with whatever we want, whenever we want, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You will play by our rules and you will enjoy it.
Interestingly enough, there is no prohibition on criticizing religion from the right and I’m not talking about the right’s constant attacks on Islam. There is a residual pro-immigrant, anti-war, and humanist streak inside the Catholic Church and mainstream Protestant denominations that might eventually get in the way of the ruling class’s agenda. But criticizing it is to be a privilege reserved for people whose pro-war, pro ruling class credentials are beyond reproach, people like Christopher Hitchens, for example or, surprisingly, Bill O’Reilly, who’s the subject of a press release from, astonishingly, The Catholic League for Civil Rights.
“O’Reilly ended this segment by saying, ‘The Vatican wants all the illegals to come here but it does want them to be Catholic.’ Looks like the time has come for O’Reilly to take some of his own medicine and wise up or shut up.”
What’s even more astonishing about this is that O’Reilly is saying exactly the same thing Amanda Marcotte was accused of saying, that the Catholic Church is cynically playing politics in order to increase their own membership.
“The Catholic church is not about to let something like compassion for girls get in the way of using the state as an instrument to force women to bear more tithing Catholics.”
Nevertheless, Bill O’Reilly still has a job at Fox News and Amanda Marcotte has been sent back to Pandagon, and the message for “liberal bloggers” is quite clear. Over the next few years, there is going to be a winnowing process. We have already driven a wedge between the Democratic Party and radicals in the anti-war movement. We have made it unacceptable for any mainstream Democratic candidate to be overly critical of religion or overly supportive of gay rights or abortion rights.
Now we have come for the liberals.
Those of you with the right gender, skin color and background are going to find employment in the campaigns of mainstream Democratic candidates like Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton. Quite obviously, the Internet is going to continue to play an expanding role in politics and your skills are going to be needed. For those of you who have gone to the right schools, there might even be guess professorships at major universities and checks from liberal thinks tanks. But if you rock the boat in any way, if you talk about the anti-war movement, if you lend any support for the movement to impeach George Bush or defend people who we have designated outside of what’s acceptable, then you too will be labeled unacceptable just like that loud mouth feminist Amanda Marcotte and, while living on ad revenues and freelance writing assignments might work when you’re 25, don’t imagine you’re going to like it at 35 and 45. Pay no attention to what that moonbat from old Europe Martin Niemoller once said about how, after they picked off the communists, social democrats and Jews there was no one left to stand up for him. We will never come for you. Trust us.
