Author: Grand Moff Texan

Via MOMENT OF TRIUMPH

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Daily KOS’ very own kennedy joss has a great idea.   I just gave it a little tweak.  

I have read with great amusement the antics of Mike from Florida on Keith Olbermann’s show, kickin’ some sexual predator ass.

But it’s so small time. Why is sexual predator still in a media chair? Sexual predator is a sexual predator. Sexual predator should have lost sexual predator‘s job over the Mackris case. Sexual predator should be a media pariah. It is our fault Sexual predator isn’t. Sexual predator gave us the sharpened sword, and we refused to run Sexual predator through. Why?

We need to finish Sexual predator off. Right now.

Bill Clinton, loved around the world, guilty of little more than Prosperity-gate, was ruined over consensual sex. Ruined. He could not even fight back against al Qaeda without the Right screaming “Wag the Dog!” and “No war for Monica!”

Sexual predator sexually harassed and stalked a co-worker. Then sexual predator threatened her. Those are crimes, people. She gave us the transcript. Sexual predator settled, after issuing all manner of vile threats to her. This is not (just) funny. Sexual predator is a criminal. Just because sexual predator got her to “shut up!” doesn’t mean we have to.

Sexual predator should’ve been toast after settling with Mackris. Seriously, what the HELL? Sexual predator should be washed up. On skid row somewhere. Period.

We can still do it. We can still do the right thing. We can still hold sexual predator accountable. But we need to be relentless. We need to be as ruthless as sexual predator is to sexual predator‘s critics on this one. For the nation’s sake, and for what sanity we might possibly rescue from sexual predator‘s viewers.

Sexual predator is a sexual predator. No one should be saying or writing or thinking “sexual predator” without the words “sexual predator” attached to it. No one should be interviewed about sexual predator on the air without calling sexual predator a “sexual predator.” Every one of us who calls into sexual predator should get the words “you are a sexual predator” in before sexual predator pushes the “dump” button. Media people should be asking if sexual predator is allowed around children, and if parents feel safe with kids near sexual predator. Every argument sexual predator makes should be dismissed as the vile oozings of a sexual predator. Boycotts and protests of FOX should be centered around FOX’s celebration and promotion of a sexual predator. Complaints to advertisers should be prefaced with asking them why their “family conscious” company advertises for a sexual predator. What message are they sending to the kids? Such companies should be accused of sponsoring sexual predation.

Sexual predator is after our children. Sexual predator even wrote a book targeting kids. A book for kids! By a sexual predator! FOX parents should be reminded every day that every time they turn on sexual predator, they are letting a sexual predator in the house, to influence their kids. Any parent who buys sexual predator‘s book is buying the work of a sexual predator for their kids. How is that responsible parenting?

It would have been wonderful if Olbermann had raised enough to rescue the actual Mackris tapes. We do have the transcript, and plenty of people who can do a dead-ringer sexual predator voice, and who can make dance-mixes and raps and Wagner pieces with them. But what is dangerous about this is the temptation to view the Mackris incident merely as an irresistible chance to ridicule.

We must get past the joy of ridicule to the righteousness of outrage, at least as it should be modeled to these holier-than-thou sex-police right wingers. Why should one of the Right’s main sexual predators (and Clinton evicerators) get away with sexual harassment and stalking, when sexual predator butchered our guy over consensual sex?

We need to master this talking point, and spread the word so that it blankets blogsylvania and penetrates the SCLM. We should at least be able to take this page from the “Rove frame” playbook, since it involves fact. Sexual predator is a sexual predator. Sexual predator should not be in a media position to influence kids. Sexual predator should not be left alone with kids. Sexual predator should not be allowed to buy Sexual predator‘s way out of the social consequences of harassment and stalking. FOX should be ashamed of promoting sexual predation by retaining Sexual predator. We will not rest until Sexual predator is run out on a rail.

By the way, if Sexual predator decides to sue over this, won’t the discovery process be fun?

A Modest Proposals Production

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Via MOMENT OF TRIUMPH

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Um … actually, you just read the entire idea right there in the title.  I’m proposing we trade George Bush for Osama bin Laden.  Not as any kind of peace offering, mind you.  Just a straight up trade between sworn enemies, and then we get right back to killing each other.  

Everybody wins!  

First of all, I’m not sure the US can afford another day of Bush being in office.  Judging by his record so far, another major American city will face devastation before he leaves office.  Why should we treat our enemies and detractors to the spectacle of Americans fleeing yet another devastated city?

If it weren’t for “Manhattan” on that sign, would you think this was a scene from Katrina?  Or one of the two major blackouts of the last few years?  Or September 11th?  That’s the thing about the Bush administration:  they always keep you guessing!

Instead, I’d rather see Bush and bin Laden passing each other on a bridge somewhere (do they even have bridges in South Waziristan?) like something out of early Cold War fiction.  What would they have to say to each other as they passed, these two spoiled brats who have so much blood on their hands?  

Instead of fleeing Americans, I’d rather the world tuned in to the broadcast of Osama bin Laden’s execution.  America needs that more than it needs George Bush.  Now, those of you who know that I’m a medievalist might expect me to dig deep into Europe’s bloody history and whip out some gory hunk of arcane sadism, and I have to admit that making a ‘Blood Eagle’ out of bin Laden has its appeal.  But he probably wouldn’t last long enough to make it worthwhile (and executioners who kill too quickly have been known to be lynched by angry, sadistic mobs).  So, I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you.  My proposal is simple:  

metal from the WTC and Pentagon forged into bullets, a firing squad drawn from servicemen and women affected most by the attacks, held on the deck of an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific.  

Broadcast to the world.  

OK, I’ll throw in one medieval flourish:  gibbet his body.  Make it a permanent exhibit in DC.  Hell, put a webcam on it and let people take bets on what bird pecks at which eye.  

Bush out of the White House and Osama dead, just think how happy America would be (not to mention how much safer)!  

It’s a win-win deal!  

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Brought to you by Modest Proposals and the letter ‘Q’

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note:  I wrote this this morning and put it out of my mind.  It’s nothing special, just a piece of my mind.  But now that everyone else is talking about Bush’s “doctrine” today, I feel it’s time to point out that there’s no there there.

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Via MOMENT OF TRIUMPH

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Those of us who haven’t been wrong about everything over the last several years speak.  

You listen.  

The invasion of Iraq was a mistake and it has only hurt US interests in the region (not to mention the rest of the world).  

Those of you who supported it, especially the so-called “liberal hawks” can kindly shut the fuck up now, because when you supported this course of action you were either being stupid or dishonest and neither is worth listening to.  Let those who haven’t been wrong about everything for the last several years take the lead now.  

But you won’t, will you?  You’ll keep repeating the same ignorant shit, covering for the same failure and mass-murder, protecting the same half-wit pampered pussy in the White House who’s trying to run out the clock on his failed presidency ’cause he doesn’t know what to do, and you’ll keep calling everyone who won’t join you in your fellating of failure “shrill” and “anti-American” and every other coward’s cop-out from a debate you can’t handle.  

If anyone is “anti-American” it’s you idiots who supported this war in the first place.  You know you have this administration behind you, convulsively kicking in its last throes as it may be.  The only reason you are able to continue your sad support of your country’s isolation, impoverishment, and humiliation is because you’re backed up by a huge media machine and the threat of state terror.  You’re safer supporting the criminal than you would be opposing the crime.  If you really gave a shit about your country, you’d either spend the rest of your lives trying to redeem yourselves or you’d eat the fucking barrel.  

But you won’t, will you?  

You never believed any of this shit in the first place, did you?  You just never had the guts to stand against it.  The criminals were counting on Americans to be weak, and it looks like they were right just often enough.  

Thanks a lot, weak link.  

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Via MOMENT OF TRIUMPH

WARNING:  This post is nothing but process talk, so sue me.  Trying to understand what my infant daughter is going through, I’ve been reading up on brain development and emotional maturity ….  

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I’ve been perplexed for years about something a trauma nurse once told me.  She said that there’s no bigger whiner in the ER than a middle-aged white male.  It was an ER conventional wisdom, apparently, just like “scum never dies,” but I couldn’t make sense of it for the longest time.  

Years of marveling at the grand stupidity of politics, however, has cleared a few things up for me.  
Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be sociopaths:  

In medieval Japan there was a sarcastic expression that translates, iirc, as “shogun wisdom.”  The example I recall was of a tutor playing a board game with the son of the shogun, expected to be the shogun himself one day.  If the boy made a hopelessly stupid move, opening himself to certain defeat, the tutor was expected to throw up his hands and say something like “oh, what a brilliant move!  I have no hope of winning this game!  Truly, you have your father’s acumen.”  It was either that or the tutor could expect to lose his head.  

“Shogun wisdom,” meaning the incapacity of the pampered, was used to explain the incompetence of a generation of military leaders, thought to have gone soft.  Think Rome in the 3rd century.  

I observed a frustration in white males, especially those older than me.  I can pass for “white” in the sense that I am what is called “white,” but was not raised to think of myself as “white,” since my upbringing always kept my real heritage before me.  I thank my mother for raising me to know who I am and instilling me with a reflexive disgust for racism and racists.  “Black” and “white” are not races, I know, which is why most American talk about race is simply a fairy story with a body count.  Thus, I passed as a non-white among whites and listened to their chatter.  

They were not happy.  

Wouldn’t you like to know?

Wouldn’t you like to know people?

Great King Rat was a dirty old man

And a dirty old man was he

Now what did I tell you

Would you like to see?

Where will I be tomorrow?

Will I beg or will I borrow?

I don’t care I don’t care anyway

Come on come on the time is right …

Excuse me, could you please turn down your sound-track?

They, having been raised on the cultural artifacts of the mid-20th century, which pretended to embody the values of the late nineteenth century (something comical to those who know better), were therefore raised with the expectation and certainty that they would get the girl, kill the bad guy, and run off into the sunset.  Women would be marginal actors, if occasionally pretty.  Non-whites would be marginal actors unless they were the baddy.  

This silly little mythology set them up for massive disappointment because these boys, once grown to manhood in the 1960’s and 70’s, found themselves in the crosshairs of a rising force of non-whites and non-men.  This generation of white men found themselves blamed for the excesses of their father’s hegemony, the brutal reality of what kept non-whites and non-men in servile roles.  Regardless of whether my father’s generation could be blamed for continuing those excesses (they can), they resented being blamed for them.  Why?  Because they never enjoyed the full fruits of that hegemony.  Yes, I know that white males still enjoy considerable advantages in America, but these advantages are considerably reduced while white males take infinitely more shit about them (in the sense that ‘1’ is infinitely greater than ‘0’).  They’re disappointed.  

Don’t listen to what mama says

Not a word not a word mama says

Or else you’ll find yourself being the rival

The great Lord before He died

Knelt sinners by his side

And said you’re gonna realise tomorrow

They lived after the Long Summer of the White Male.  They got to pay for their fathers’ crimes, but they never really got to enjoy their fathers’ criminal empire.   Just imagine if you went through the long hazing process of joining a fraternity and then, once you were an upper-classmen, hazing was banned by law.  You paid, but you never got your payback.  

This is why I keep saying that the anger over “the loss of white male cultural hegemony” drives conservatism in the present day.  It explains the movement’s archaism, appeal to racists, and its silly little tin-eared testicle-poetry that passes for postures of strength.  This is why middle-aged white males whine about not being allowed to be tough any more without seeing the irony, much less the pathos.  

They’re so cute when they’re angry!  

Brain-damage is not a political philosophy:

Being spoiled literally means that they have not developed emotional maturity and the ability to restrain themselves.  They were raised to be on top no matter what, so why would they develop emotional maturity?  Being perpetually frustrated, furthermore, means that these emotionally immature males are in a perpetual state of petulance, and this makes them easy to exploit.  The left side of the brain interprets speech.  The right side of the brain registers the emotional value of that speech.  It does not matter that the right is talking crap.  That crap registers in the right side of the angry white male’s brain.  It does not matter that the left is talking process.  That crap registers in the right side of the brain of no one.  

This is a cultural predisposition.  It reproduces itself.  The right selects as its leaders people who can talk crap to angry idiots.  The left, conversely, is preselecting for failure by selecting for leaders that can talk sense to an empty room.  

It is irrational to be compulsively rational in the face of the irrational.  Dealing with the irrational as irrational is the only rational response.  Politics is substantially irrational, since people subscribe to a political identity as a rationalization and justification of their own identity.  Policy is merely an epiphenomenon.  Once the left learns that, the right is dead in this country.  Strong emotions enhance memory.  The right provides strong emotions and little to remember besides magical thinking and scapegoating.  The left provides almost no emotional stimulus and yet expects you to remember more detail about policy.  Therefore:  they have turned a weakness into a strength, we have turned a strength into a weakness.  The art of post-rational politics was indeed an Art by the middle of the nineteenth century.  Look at a calendar.  It’s time for the left to learn.  

No I’m not gonna tell you

What you already know

‘Cause time and time again

The old man said it all a long time ago

Come come on the time is right

This evil man will fight

I told you once before

Breeding reactionaries, breeding failure:

This cultural predisposition also reproduces itself on an organizational scale.  The differences in hierarchy are reflections of differences of philosophy.  The right can create a marketing strategy at the highest levels because it idolizes the elite.  The right’s lower strata will repeat that message, regardless of how silly or contrafactual, because of the right’s fetish for followership.  They pay their dues at the lower levels and expect that once they reach the top they will be able to be able to do unto others (which, considering the closed nature of elites, is kinda sad).  Reactionaries make the best followers.  

But this also explains why the left thinks that it has to have one message for everyone (because we actually value Democracy) and expect everyone to see the truth of our message (because establishment Democrats  trust rationality and disdain emotional appeals).  Being right doesn’t mean shit when your government is determined by popularity contests called “elections.”  Often, the truth is unwelcome.  

The right’s appeal to spoiled white males explains why they have no patience for policy.  The right’s political philosphy is a series of riffs on basic, magical thinking.  The economy is supposed to take care of itself, if only it is left alone.  The family is supposed to take care of itself, if only it is left alone.  Technology is supposed to develop itself, if only it is left alone.  But this is merely a re-hash of Kropotkin’s anarchy, a collectivist response to the proposals of communism in early 20th century Russia.  

From Russia with Love, just like the neocons:  

Kropotkin’s anarchy states that, once you eliminate all unnatural influences on a society, that society will naturally take on its best and most efficient form.  If the circumstances of that society change, it’s best to do nothing, since everything is self-regulating.  

Sound familiar?  

This is the excuse of the spoiled white male to do nothing and expect everything.  This is why the right wins elections but can’t seem to govern.  This is why, when the spoiled white male doesn’t get his way, he’s gonna blame you even though he’s in power!  That’s the story of his whole, pathetic life.  

His mythology and reliance on magical thinking predispose him to respect superstition and distrust science.  Superstitious thinking allows him to reconstruct entire mythical superstructures from a single data-point, making the maintainance of his ignorance very data-efficient.  Conversely, superstitious thinking allows him to reject an entire scientific consensus, if it’s inconvenient to his betters, simply by citing a single flaw in a single study (real or imagined).  A coward by nature, he runs away and hides in what he thinks are the caves of his ancestral superstitions.  

Now listen all you people

Put out the good and keep the bad

Don’t believe all you read in the Bible

You sinners get in line

Saints you leave far behind

Very soon you’re gonna be his disciple

Abortion.  Global warming.  Creationism.  Mythology is more important than the facts, it’s even more important than getting results, for one simple reason:  if you can’t win elections you don’t determine policy.  Tapping into the mythology of a bloc that has nowhere else to go can keep you in power even if you produce only failure after failure.  

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[promoted by BooMan. Now, this is what I’m talking about. And I want a Safire exposure next]

The scenario sounds somehow familiar:  in support of a somewhat loopy Republican president’s campaign against an Arab dictator, Judith Miller was willing to plant official US disinformation in the New York Times.  

The year was 1986.

Nine years into her tenure at the New York Times, she participated in John Poindexter’s disinformation campaign against Libya for the Reagan administration.  As Bob Woodward later revealed in the Washington Post, Miller planted Poindexter’s propaganda in her own writings:  claiming that el-Khadaffi was being betrayed from within his own country, that he had sunk into depression, and had turned to drugs.  Miller went on to claim Khadaffi had tried to have sex with her, but lost interest when she claimed Jewish heritage.  

Khadaffi, you’ll remember, was the 80’s Saddam Hussein (back when Saddam Hussein was still cool).  Muammar was Reagan’s “Mad Dog of the Middle East,” which is kinda weird when you consider that Libya is in North Africa.  As you’ll see at the bottom of this article, there was no event on earth that Republicans would not attach to his name for the sake of justifying what they wanted to do in the region anyway.  He was our blame-sink at that time.  Other Muslims have since taken his place.  It’s all still the same game, and Judith has been playing it since the days of skinny ties and perms.  

And so now, with the First Amendment drama playing out, a quick review of the material that’s been building up on this woman for the last two years on the blogsphere reveals a much longer but very consistent career.  Judith Miller has been and probably still is an informal asset not of our government but of an American political faction.  From North Africa to the Mesopotamian, she has provided copy to support imperial adventures.  Perhaps she thinks her powerful patrons will protect her, perhaps she knows too much, or perhaps she’s just too old to start over and simply needs to protect her accustomed sources.  Her access to them is what’s made an otherwise utterly undistinguished career.  If it weren’t for her usefulness as a propaganda outlet, over three decades, she’d have no content at all.  

This is not a question of freedom of the press, unless by “freedom” you mean the “freedom” to pass on government propaganda, which is a very strange notion of “freedom” outside of, say, North Korea.  

Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?

There used to be a carefully run but outwardly informal network of US intelligence operatives working in academia and journalism and in many other walks of life.  Volunteers, amateurs, ready to be tapped for some fragment of a mission they did not understand, led otherwise unremarkable lives.  

Judith is one of those people.  Trust an amateur’s sense of the dramatic to get the better of them.  The fact that she received a doomed David Kelly’s final, forboding message and that she was one of the fake anthrax terrorist’s targets would only further have convinced her that she was some Secret Agent, involved in a dangerous game with international implications.  It seems she went somewhat soft, as a result.  

After all, the perqs were outstanding.  One of the things that’s always struck me about these pawns is how easy it is to beguile them.  Life is a party, whatever their party’s moral pretentions may be.  Ehrenstein dug up the goods from old print sources a while back.  We rejoin our heroine shortly after she’s earned her bat’s wings on Libya, where she has learned that she’d been sitting on her real talent all along.  Access was, after all, a two-way street:  

These kinds of connections, of course, would not last forever since the coin of her trade was, erm, declining in value.  Judith could, however, actually work to preserve her role as preferred input valve for random bullshit on the Arab boogeyman of the week.  She began cultivating new kinds of relationships with conspiracy nut Mylroie as well as with Pipes’ unsavory thinktank.  In short, she found work in the Islamic Threat Industry where she had cut her teeth.  And business was good.  

What?  These journalists aren’t old enough to remember the 80s?  

… as if … we’d been infiltrated … by foreign agents … using our news media as a weapon … ?

Her long career as a propaganda outlet hardly distinguishes her, even in the 1980s.  Among these examples (.pdf) you’ll notice that the same story keeps being told about different people to justify the same policies:  

On a later Reagan administration claim that Libya was planning to overthrow the government of the Sudan, see for example

For a later exposure of some of the U.S. government’s disinformation campaigns, see

Is this starting to sound familiar?  

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(cp @ dKOS)

Episode the First, in which I unleash my inner Freeper

I thought that, on the momentous occasion of Bush’s speech and the anniversary of the transfer of that sovereignty thingy to Iraq, we might take a spin around the globe and see how freedom, prosperity, and democracy were marching, now that Bush has reassured the world that he’s going to keep doing things exactly the same way and he won’t say when he’ll stop.  That way, you won’t know WHAT He’s going to do!  

So, where better to start with the reaction to Bush’s speech than out in Terroriststan?  Take it away, hadjis!  

Yeah!  Like Bush is going to give the sovereignty thingy to THOSE people!  Bush will celebrate the exact same thing next year no matter what happens.  That’s because he’s unswerveable and he’s bringing that to places in the Middle East, like Libya.  

Oh, it’s from London.  Nevermind, fruits!  

Let’s leave England and hear from one of our allies instead:  

What?  No schools?  No … painted schools?  Terrorists bomb schools and then we paint them.  Doesn’t our ally Jordan know that?  

More perfidy from Jordan!  A “middle ground”?  That would mean changing the Staying of the Coursing.  And we thought that Jordan’s monarchy was our ally in Democracy™!  How much “dignity” do you people need?  You sound like that Democrat senator.  You know, the one who rhymes with “turban”?  

Iraqi resistance?  They’re firing already?  See?  Bush’s Iraqi brigades are already on the march!  Just like Freedom™!  I can  fight terrorism with exclamation points!  It only takes like 1 1/2 keys on my keyboard!  

But isn’t it sad that, thanks to the liberal media, we can only get the REAL news from a conservative thinktank like the UAE?  Sad.  

Hello?  Israel?  Didn’t you get the memo?  There is no timeframe.  Rumsfeld was just being charming.  And furthermore there is no burden on Bush’s shoulders.  He’s got people for that.  

So take your funny little customs and your funny little country and go kill someone else’s Savior next time, OK?    

FINALLY some sense from Libya!  Man, Bush sure scared y’all when he dragged Saddam from his Spider Hole™.  Yes, the resistance of the Iraqi people to terror will be crucial to solving the terrorists.  Now keep it coming, biyatch!  More that.  C’mon!  

What.  The.  Fuck?  

Egypt?  

Didn’t they just schedule elections?  How the sam hill could they dolchstoss-thingy America behind our back with this hate-filled terrorist-support?  Everyone know where the chaos came from.  Iraq!  Just like 9/11™.  

Oh, and I just checked on Instapundit and Paul Bremer was NEVER the chief administrator of the United States, so nice try, Dan al-Rather bin LYIN’!  

Iraqi people … historic juncture … constitution … their country … moving ahead … political process … Iraqi government … extremist … terrorist …

See?  Now THAT’S how you stay on message!  It’s like they cut up Bush’s speech and rearranged the little paper thingies into more Bush!  And to think that so many liberals talk bad about our allies!  Let the liberals read this and see how Freedom™ works!  Americans could use more real Americans like Mr. al Bayan!  

And on that note, let us slip the surly bonds of the liberal media and go around the world for more news about Democracy™ and Freedom™!

So, what’s the good word out in East Terroriststan?  If you read between the lines of the liberal media, you can get the real news!  

<u>Afghanistan</u&gt:  

Labor calls for troop commitment to Afghanistan

OK, let’s get one thing straight.  Americans don’t give a damn about Frontline or any of that PBS propaganda, so save it for the lesbians in line at the abortion mills, bucko!  Suggesting more troops at a time like this only highlights American casualties.  

Afghanistan opium trade booming

So what?  You can make anything out of anything.  Look, if the Afghans want to make Opium or Polo or Chaps, that’s fine.  Prosperity is part of Freedom™.  And Democracy™.  So long as American intelletual property like CK-1 is protected, only the liberals will complain.  

Now why would a reporter want to tell people how to make drugs, hmmmmm?  

Militants infiltrated into Cent. Asia from Afghanistan: Putin

Well, my heart bleeds for Karimov.  His alliance with Bush has left his country vulnerable to attacks from Liberated Afghanistan, where Freedom™ reigns! That’s because they’re having to run away from Bush in the south!  But you’ll never read that in the liberal media.  

AFGHANISTAN: UN ENVOY CONDEMNS GROWING VIOLENCE

A Frenchman at the UN reports that blah blah blah.  

I’m sorry.  You lost me at “Frenchman.”  

Meanwhile, Bush is busily exporting American style Democracy™ to Iraq!  

<u>Iraq</u&gt:  

US to expand Iraq prisons to house 16,000 inmates

Gee, I wonder what other sovereign nations the US will build prisons on next?  Castro must be getting jealous!  

Under fire on Iraq, Bush plays 9/11 trump card

“Trump card”?  Sify news?  More like SISSIFY NEWS!  YOU’RE FIRED!!!  

I’m glad the whole world is watching this war.  That way, the whole world can see what we’re capable of, and what we’re made of.  After all, if Osama thinks that Iraq is important, that that’s good enough for me!  You see, we conservatives respect the views of people of faith.  You liberals just don’t get that.  

US firm facing $1.4bn question over Iraq bill

By Francis Harris in Washington

Snort!  Yeah, that Army report came from Democrat Senators.  Enough said!  Period!!!  

“Bunny Greenhouse”?  Yeah, like THAT’S a real name.  It’s like, “hi, I’m Hothouse Marmoset, here to hate America for the liberal media!”  

Whatever.  America’s not dumbed down enough for this any more.  

Veteran of Iraq war denied trip home to Cuba

Hello?  Liberal reporter?  HE WAS TRYING TO GO TO CUBA?!?!  Cu-fucking-bah?  As in the Castro?  Man, how stupid do you think Americans are?  We already learned that Cubans don’t care about their sons.  Clinton didn’t get that and it cost him the election!  

War of mosques is shattering Iraq’s hopes

OK, I’m gonna stop it right there, but I just wanted to show you that, in a country that’s drowning in sexual filth, this writer could even get through an article on Iraq without working SEX into the equation.  It’s a good thing there are strong Americans like Dick Cheney out there to help clean up the discourse.  

But also notice the not-so-subtle insinuation of religious conflict in Iraq.  Nice try, but I know that Iraq is a M-U-S-L-I-M country, it’s all ONE RELIGION.  It’s not like it’s Northern Ireland or anything, where Christians and Catholics go around kneecapping each other all the time.  We’ve got this whole dramatic story here, and they paint it as some great mystery who killed this guy.  I’ll tell you who killed this guy:  a terrorist!  It’s that simple.  This is what Bush is trying to stop.  

US Offensives in Iraq Meeting More Casualties and Increased

This is the kind of Durbin defeatism we cannot afford in this country.  I know that these operations weren’t failures because I’ve got numbers.  Lot’s of numbers.  Big numbers, too, some of them.  One of the towns is already called “Hit.”  Not too long before we’ll be reading about a raid on “Hit and Smacked” because they’ve both been pacified.  Pacified into the stoned age like Reagan would have done!  

You can’t fool someone that’s got moral clarity.  

This is a tangent from Stirling’s post at BOP, and is in part an elaboration on Oldman’s concerns as expressed on the thread.  

Loss of hegemony to China will have a centrifugal effect on America, because its significance to racist assumptions in American society precisely overlay the political divide.  

China in particular, and Asians in general, are bogeymen to the right in a way that’s difficult to understand from the outside.  Their racist heritage leaves them with a peculiar heirloom, and if you get to know a middle-aged, white, male social conservative (and if you’re a white male like me), they’ll show it to you.  
It looks like this:  
[racist]
Blacks are more physical that whites.  Asians are more mental than whites.  At least whites can take comfort from the notion that whites have the best of both worlds.  But the blacks are a physical danger and the Asians are crafty.  You have to smack one and keep an eye on the other or they’ll get us.  
[/racist]  

This isn’t so much a taxonomy as it is a continuum for a self-justifying ontology.  I’m reminded of a Mexican-American joke about whites, Latinos, and blacks being baked in God’s oven as He tried to get the recipe right, which has a similar self-situating agenda.  But the upshot of the black-white-eastern axis is that the whites who imagine it imagine themselves surrounded.  These are the whites who idealize armed societies, believing them to be orderly and well-mannered societies, even though this is historically nonsense.  

Part of the anger that drives the right on the War on Terror is the shame and humiliation of American whites.  Sand niggers weren’t supposed to be able to do that to us.  It’s going to take self-consciously White America a long time to get over the perceived violation of white supremacy.  This is a dimension that the left largely overlooks and it explains why the left has been consistently unable to anticipate the degree to which the right will tolerate the suspension of supposedly American principles in the War on Terror (specifically, why the sexual humiliation of Arabs is so important to the right).  Guantanamo is a mass, slow-motion lynching that the right desperately needs in order for it to feel on top again.  “Arab women” porn spam appeared in my email exactly on schedule with the invasion.  Raped, the victim needs to rape another to get back on top.  

The Jim Crow hypocrisy of the right’s core constituency was that they could indulge in a little sadism at the wogs’ expense, as a perquisite of hegemony.  We take their women, we kill their men.  They do not do this to us.  In a similar fashion, rural conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in the 20th century were guerilla wars fought on the bodies of women (and this is a war the women always lose).  But with this simian joy in utter and even scatological power over others comes an exactly equivalent, terrible, formless fear of what “they” might do to “us” in return, and it drives further violence, and thus fear, in a vicious circle.  This fear usually comes out in the form of fears about the safety of white womanhood and blacks wind up sprouting “strangely” from trees while the white frolic under them.  

When the Chinese start owning America (in many different ways), the white male angst in this country is going to explode.  Moreover, the near monopoly of one side of the political spectrum on (specifically) THIS brand of racist metaphysics will  leverage the force and consequence of that violence.  It has nothing to do with communism any more than the right’s cultivation of a hatred of Islam has anything to do with Muslims.  This is a matter of what color is the guy on top compared to the guy on the bottom.  If the racial order of America’s racist assumptions is violated, people are going to get violated.  

And I don’t just mean people of the “offending” race, I mean anyone suspected of facilitating the fall of the White Man from Grace.  “Nigger-lover,” “liberal,” they’re only the term of convenience for those who will not join us in our fears, and who thereby endanger us in the war with the other.  You must just want them to win, you know, unless you’re willing to do to them what we fear they’ll do to us.  

In the imaginary conflict, racial adversaries pay each other back in a coin of violence that has two terrible sides:  exultation and fear.  What the whites who pine for armed societies of gunslingers or (movie) samurai really want is a weapon as an equalizer against the black man he fears, and with it the (presumed) rituals of a bygone society to distinguish between his white superiority and what he imagines as the frightening animal advantage of the black.  I know this because they confide it in me, believing that I am a white male like them.  Turn this upside down and this is White America’s fear of Asians.  But I am not.  I am not white.  I know that no one is.  

Turn this structure of fear backwards again, however and I suspect that it is Asians’ fears of whites: Asians of both sexes look at me the way some whites look at blacks.  White America will be surprised to find that Asians have not only their own racial pride, but their own racist pecking-order, unanswerable to American assumptions of the centrality not only of themselves, but of their conflicts.  If I am right about this racist reciprocity, then the stage may be set for a very different kind of racial strife within America (driven by foreign confrontations with America).  Each “side” will perform a racial antipathy of sufficiently reasonable similarity to the expectations of his Other that each will feel justified in escalation, see such escalation as necessary for survival, and attack those of his own “race” for not playing along.  Subverting the structure and inevitability of this confrontation, therefore, will be difficult, and the peacemakers will be vilified on all sides.  

Hegemony is demonstrated to the hind-brain of the hegemon, as I keep saying, by a successful monopoly of the privileges of sex and violence.  In this way, we are convinced that we have finally reached The Top.  As we saw briefly in the late 80s and 90s vis-avis the Japanese, the perceived loss of hegemony will be manifest in seemingly odd personal and intimate fears.  This will pull left and right, east and west coast against the middle, and will have unpredictable consequences for the youngest generation, where racial identities are in a critical state of flux.  

(A Googlebomb for Steve Gilliard.)  

Via MOMENT OF TRIUMPH

This is not the Confederate Flag.

This is the Confederate Flag.

If you google “Confederate Flag,” you will not find a single, real Confederate Flag on the first page, and few examples after that.

Not only has”Confederate Flag” changed to mean something it should not, the phony “Confederate Flag” has changed in significance over time, too. It began as a battle flag, a way to tell Confederate from Union forces on the field, since their two flags weren’t that different, and units’ uniforms and individual banners were anything but standardized. The phony Confederate Flag seems to have borrowed the Cross of St. Andrew, seen on the Scottish flag, or maybe St.Patrick’s cross, incorporated into the Union Jack, but that’s just me guessing.

For longer than the Confederacy lasted, and for more than a century after the American Civil War, the phony Confederate Flag has stood for the defiance of the South, for America’s own, premodern apartheid. It has become, simply, The American Swastika.

The comparison isn’t inflammatory, it’s deliberate and appropriate. This wouldn’t be the first time an old symbol changed meaning due to its abuse by the sick and twisted.

One Bad Apple From Germany Killed Millions. Hitler didn’t just leave behind a mnemonic for all students of astronomy in the English language. He took an ancient good luck symbol, a nearly universal one, and turned it into a universally recognized symbol of evil.

It can happen. And it did happen here. Don’t give me that bullshit about slavery not being relevant to most of Southern society, or not being a factor in the Civil War, or not being the monopoly of the South. This is a Southerner you’re talking to, and I’ve heard it all before and I know better. I know my region’s history, and it is unique within my country. Something different happened here. The South cannibalized their entire culture, even their supposed religion, to justify the racism that justified first slavery and later (and for much longer) the political subjection of African Americans. The truly sad thing is that even those who never owned slaves (and ante-bellum middle class Southerners were more likely to buy a slave and rent him out than they were to buy their own land) were part of this conspiracy of justification. After the American Civil War an even wider portion of Southern society was directly involved in the subjection of African Americans. The Civil War didn’t sweep away a civilization based on slavery, it merely displaced its ruling class and began the South’s long, slow march away from its top-heavy, agrarian, aristocratic society. American apartheid had been democratized, and with it, the Confederate Flag became its egalitarian symbol against the Civil Rights movement and all other aspects of integration for generations.

The Confederate Flag resonates, as a symbol, throughout Southern culture.

People all over the world know what they’re looking at when they see the Confederate Flag. Regardless of what those who display the Confederate Flag may say it means, the Confederate Flag is never far from the Klan and like groups, and the Confederate Flag is never displayed by their historical victims. Showing the Confederate Flag doesn’t just leave the displayer with a burden of proof, to show that for them it’s something other than what the Confederate Flag has stood for, now, for generations. Rather, the Confederate Flag’s history, both long and recent in this country, are such that the Confederate Flag cannot be displayed in good faith. The meaning of the Confederate Flag is utterly unambiguous. At best, venerators of the Confederate Flag can plead ignorance, not innocence.

I grew up with the Confederate Flagand there was never any question what it meant. The South would rise again, that’s what the Confederate Flag meant. We flew the Confederate Flag at my high school.  The Confederate Flag appeared on bumpers, T-shirts, and other paraphernalia. “Dixie gonna do it again!” and similar slogans accompanied the Confederate Flag.

There was simply no question. The Confederate Flag is not a symbol of heritage. That should have been obvious enough in Mississippi, where more people fought for the Union than the Confederacy, and yet the Confederate Flag’s defenders insist it is part of that state’s “heritage.” No. It’s part of the “heritage” of that minority of Mississippians whose “heritage” involved the subjection of the rest. That’s their “heritage.” Hey, if the pointy hat fits, wear it.

So, if you’re going to attack a people, demonize and destroy their language and religion, hold them up as a threat to civilization and “your” womanhood, destroy their families, rape, murder, mutilate, crush them in labor camps and then, when someone justifiably smacks your racist ass, take that whole murderous shame underground, don’t be surprised when your precious symbol, the sign of all you hold holy but that all the world recognizes as the sigil of your sickness, becomes, quite simply, your Swastika. That’s all the Confederate Flag which is not the real Confederate Flag will ever be, now.

It’s The American Swastika

This diary began as a post on MAJeff’s post.  

You should read him anyways, but you should surely read it before you read anything below.  

Jeff’s post is a good example of bringing what is otherwise academese to the mythical “educated non-specialist” that we all like to be, and even the specialists who checked in voiced their approval of Jeff’s precis of ideas that can and do consume careers.  

I’d like to respond both to the theory and its application as presented, especially this:  

Well, that’s not the only conversation that was going on, there.  So much more has been said, even on the explicit and rational level than has been heard.  Instead, too many of us have been performing our expected roles.  

And we’re supposed to be the ones who can think out of those boxes, right?  
One of the difficulties in thinking clearly about how we recreate our gender(ed) identities from moment to moment is the profusion of different one around us, at least for those of us living in a cosmopolitan environment.  

When the notion that gendered power might have negative implications for the gender in power finally found a popularizing work (long after the observation itself had passed the ‘no duh’ phase for those of us with even a passing involvement in gender), I was surprised (because I was still kinda young) at the hatred it elicited from the very popular audience that was supposed to receive it.  This was before I learned that the problem with worrying about what people think is that most of them don’t (and don’t want to).  

How could feminists be such hypocrites, these idiots ranted, to say that masculinity hurt the same men who supposedly dominated society?  This, after trashing men for so long!  

This was wrong on so many levels.  

1. feminists are popularly imagined to be men-haters because Limbaugh says so.  No other reason.  Sure, you can find some pretty reductionist, essentializing bullshit from women who apparently have problems with men, but so what?  You can find people working out their personal problems down at Jiffy Lube.  Who gives a fuck?  
2. the popular response also ignored that just across the highway, over on the other side of town, or among a different generation or cohort, gender could be being acted out in a very different way.  

There are plural masculinities and femininities because we bring different ones here from all over the world and because some of us are trying to change them.  That makes for a confusing world, which is why academics get paid the big bucks…

KOS’ initial comment was incredible loaded and imho totally stupid.  And yet I knew what he was talking about in the same way that I know what people are talking about when they trash academics, for instance, even though these are only stereotypes.  In fact, the set KOS was talking about is quite ironically NOT the women’s studies type, in my experience.  People who actually study this stuff have a tendency to know something about it.  As with much knowledge, however, a little is a dangerous thing, and too many are about as well informed as your average ditto-head.  

My conservative friends (a number which shrinks every day) have a hard time believing that I only ever encountered their stereotypical PC in undergrads, and not among the serious ones.  Not among grad students.  Not among faculty.  Nope.  The only ‘apologize for being [insert non subaltern status here], since I can conceive of a rhetorical connection between your actions/words/silences and the suffering of [insert subaltern status here]’ idiots I ever ran into were dilettantes.  

You know:  poseurs.  One of them grew up to be Wonkette…

At the time, I was a new grad student working under a lesbian feminist scholar who was quantifying liturgical elements of radical Catholics’ wills during the upheavals of the Wars of Religion as a way of writing a history of the body in a time of all-out ideological combat.  After squinting at 16th century paleography puzzling through modern and premodern languages, entering data in a proprietary database, and having my boss (who doesn’t grasp that not everyone is as brilliant as she is) babble at me in her Tower of Babble codeswitch dialect of academese, the half-understood and soggy repackagings of Victorian sensibilities, or bizarre inversions of male chauvinism into a derivative female chauvinism were, as “feminism” or any other idea worthy of the suffix “-ism,” around which I had spent my adolescent life were now simply beneath contempt.  

In fact, I couldn’t stop laughing.  It was like learning about neural plasticity on Oprah or sovereign immunity on Limbaugh.  

Absent referents?  Whatever.  

These people weren’t any better informed than the half-assed ranters writing letters to the editor about “feminazis,” they had just accessorized their identities with some other handful of words they clearly didn’t understand.  These were ideologues, only they were leftists.  They were no better informed and were just as aggressive.  Which was I supposed to be?  The bad guy or the good guy in their dimestore morality tale?  

And who were they?  There was nothing progressive, or even self-conscious, about these people’s behavior.  It’s easy, for instance, to put on a Che shirt and talk about injustice in Latin America, but what are you doing about it and how do you keep that kind of victimization from happening in your own life?  For these particular ideologues, the rhetoric of a pseudo-feminism seemed to function as a sort of rationalization that relieved them of having to make the changes I would expect from a progressive person battling back against an unjust world.  No.  Same behavior, different rationalization.  Women who had a penchant for picking out men who were utterly unfit for the relationships they had planned for them could simply invert medieval notions of gender roles and write off all men as sexually driven, irrational, and unreliable (see?  Now you don’t need to watch Sex in the City, you know every plot and character!).  

Repeat if necessary.  

Or, more comfortingly, all sex (and the gender with which one associated it) could be reframed as a pathology.  When in doubt, men could also be dismissed as too rational, rationality being mere “male hysteria,” which is an easy way to get out of having to frame rational arguments or remember facts and sources.  Alternately, one could haunt oneself with the phantasms of women’s suffering, real or imagined, here or elsewhere, now or in the past, visiting vicariously what they could just as easily leave (unlike the actual, suffering women), but which also entitled them to challenge any not dreamily preoccupied with the non-present outrage about which they were materially doing nothing.  A moth-eaten, diaphanous shroud of conjured miseries did double duty as veil and blunt instrument.  

Now, I have seen every one of these pointless exercises repeated over vegetarianism, race, homophobia, and I’ve seen the same regurgitation of victim ploys be picked up by the right.  Potboiler popular feminism is not a unique phenomenon.  Plenty of people subscribe to an ideology they can’t be bothered to understand, dumbing it down to mere cargo cult status, just so long as it reinforces how they’ve accessorized their socioeconomic status and gives them fancy words to throw at their enemies.  

So, when I saw what KOS said, I knew immediately what he meant.  He was dreading the inevitable.  He’d spoke of the devil, invoked his own testicle-clipping doom, if only in his own imagination, the product of years of having to deal with shrill poseurs.  “Oh, shit.  Not those people again.  Real world trolls:  you know exactly what they’re going to say because they’ve been screeching at you for fucking years!”  

I also knew that he

1. didn’t need to say anything in the first place
2. had framed it backwards (women’s studies students aren’t his problem)
3. was probably going to piss off a lot of people who were even the people he was talking about
4. had just provided Powerwhine, etc., with a lot of content.  

So, where are we now?  

Ordinarily, I would say that people engaged in this kind of grudge match deserve each other, only the people around them don’t.  But in this case, I think we’ve got two groups of people who aren’t even addressing each other, but rather who are attacking some imaginary other.  

KOS refuses to perform the neo-masculinity demanded by pseudo-feminists:  outrage has been pronounced; you may now grovel and beg forgiveness.  If you cannot do this, you are the wrong kind of man.  Others have done this.  They are the right kind of man.  

Or perhaps his upbringing in another culture makes him genuinely hostile to or dismissive of the concerns of the color and class of women who are likely to be online anyway.  Theirs is a narrow band of possible femininities among many, most of which are submerged by cultural restrictions and/or economic limitations.  

You are two fragments, flapping at each other in an indifferent sea of possibilities and identities.  Get over yourselves.  All of you.  Any politically useful coalition on this or any other issue is going to cut across these cultures and their performances.  A lack of respect and a politically naiive sense of misplaced priorities has sundered natural allies.  The only beneficiary is the Right, for whom rigidity and submission, under the pretense of tradition and economics, are the norm.  

Do you think you’ll get a better deal from them?