Month: January 2011

Palin’s Blood Libel Against Assange

As it turns out, all the pundits arguing that Julian Assange had blood on his hands after the release of diplomatic cables were wrong:

The damage caused by the WikiLeaks controversy has caused little real and lasting damage to American diplomacy, senior state department officials have concluded. It emerged in private briefings to Congress by top diplomats that the fallout from the release of thousands of private diplomatic cables from all over the globe has not been especially bad. This is in direct opposition to the official stance of the White House and the US government which has been vocal in condemning the whistle-blowing organisation and seeking to bring its founder, Julian Assange, to trial in the US.

A congressional official briefed on the reviews told Reuters news agency that the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers. "I think they want to present the toughest front they can muster," the official said. The official implied that the WikiLeaks fiasco was bad public relations but had little concrete impact on policy.

It was Sarah Palin who said of Assange that "he is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands." If "blood libel" meant what she thinks it does she'd be guilty of it.

As The Boomers Fleece Us All

This is an astounding figure:

During the last decade, California state government payments for retirement benefits have grown at an alarming and unsustainable rate, exceeding $5 billion a year, more than state support for the entire UC system. These huge and growing slices of the budget pie are needed to pay for average state retirement packages now valued at more than $1.2 million. The taxpayers who pay for those retirement benefits have an average of $60,000 saved for their own retirement.

California is a state where citizens can legislate at the ballot box. How long will they tolerate public employees more than $1 million richer in retirement benefits than they are?

This Is What We Can Do To Each Other

The Esquire editors look back at the Oklahoma City memorial and don't find much cause for optimism:

Oklahoma City happened. The carnival rolled on. It got wilder. It got nuttier. Ideas so long abandoned and destructive that they seemed like primal superstitions from a barbarian age now were shined up for the cameras and presented as legitimate alternatives to the accumulated reason and intellectual progress of two centuries. The complicity in it got broader and deeper and nobody thought much about the empty chairs.

Yglesias Award Nominee

"Just because the dots between violent rhetoric and violent actions don't connect in this case doesn't mean you can afford to ignore the possibility — or, as many fear, the inevitability — that someone else will soon draw the line between them…. Now that the right has proved to the world that it was wronged, this would be a good time to prevent the next tragedy from destroying its political momentum. Despite what we eventually learned about the shooter in Tucson, should the right have really been so shocked that many feared a political connection between the heated rhetoric of 2010 and the shooting of Giffords?" – Joe Scarborough.

My only caveat is that we don't yet really know the full background to Loughner's mental illness.

So far, the paranoia and conspiracy theories dominate – but they also dominate the atmosphere of the far right. And when a mentally ill young man complains of the "Broken United States Constitution", or regards legal tender as illegitimate “I did not pay with gold and silver!”, some of this nuttiness has penetrated. It didn't come from nowhere. And the critical point from the very beginning was not that Loughner was some kind of trained militia member killing a foe, but a mentally unstable person who, because he is mentally unstable, might be susceptible to extreme rhetoric from authority figures.

The Tea Party: More Anti-Gay Than All Seniors

To my mind, there are two widely believed myths about the Tea Party. The first is that they care about debt. I don't believe this, because a movement that actually cared about debt would have run a campaign specifically designed to propose ways to reduce it. They produced no such plan. Immediately after the election, moreover, they did a deal borrowing a huge amount more and adding $700 billion to the debt by refusing to let the Bush tax cuts sunset – the condition for the cuts' original passage, remember? The Tea Party is not an anti-debt movement; they are an anti-tax movement, that came about during a period in which taxes were lowered, while debt soared.

The second myth is that they are somehow unlike the Christianist right, and more tolerant and easy-going on social issues.

Again, I think this is wishful thinking. My own view is that they are hard-line Christianists in a different outfit – powdered wigs, muskets and red cheeks – and are outliers on issues of modernity – racial integration, women's rights, gay equality.

I mention this because PPP has just done a poll on marriage equality, something they are going to repeat to test trendlines. There is almost no difference between Tea Party views and regular Republicans. 52 percent of TPers and 52 percent of GOPers want no rights whatever for gay couples, either in civil unions or civil marriage. Only self-described "conservative" Republicans have a higher opposition at 57 percent. Moreover, on civil marriage for gays, TP support is at 17 percent, compared with 42 percent support for non-TPers.

Tea Partiers and Republicans are more anti-gay than all the over-65s.

Bonus poll points: minorities come out strongly in favor of legal gay relationships with 79 percent of Latinos and 62 percent of African-Americans in favor of either civil marriage or civil unions. And yes, TNC, a greater proportion of whites oppose recognition for gay relationships than blacks.

Limbaugh Poison Watch

We've observed most every prominent pundit on the right go on about how despicable it is to politicize the Tucson tragedy, how only the most cynical, irresponsible person would engage in that sort of "blood libel." So will they have the courage to include Rush Limbaugh in their condemnation, now that he has offered an extended monologue blaming various liberals for the shooting, run on his Web site along with this graphic?

Graphic

Its a strange sort of moral universe where you condemn something in the strongest language at your disposal only to begin doing it yourself on the theory that turnabout is fair play.

Palin, of course, did exactly the same thing in her creepiest-ever "interview" on Fox "News" the other night. (Aren't you proud I didn't obsess about it? I'm trying. Okay, I've been sick as a dog and couldn't muster the psychic energy.)  She insisted both that an attemted assassination had nothing whatsoever to do with any outside political influences and then called Loughner a left-winger! Jon Stewart got it right last night as he often does.

Sargent Shriver, RIP

Scott Stossel, Shriver's biographer, eulogizes:

 I grew up in the shadow of Vietnam, Watergate, the hostage crisis, stagflation, oil crises, impeachment, and later 9/11 and the War on Terror. Public service, for my generation, often seems to be a hollow or futile thing. It can be hard even to say the words "make the world a better place" without having them stick in your throat, so hopelessly naïve and lacking in irony do they sound. For Shriver's generation, their experience of government and of public service was much different. They saw the New Deal help lift millions from Depression; they saw the Allies defeat Totalitarianism; they saw the post-War boom, the Civil Rights movement, and America put a man on the moon, just like JFK said we would. So much that he'd seen and done had instilled in him the faith that public service could be a powerful and positive force; so little that I've seen has conveyed that. 

Shriver's voice, then, is a voice from a more hopeful past. But while he was in part a product of his times, his optimism and idealism and commitment to service transcend the particularities of his time and circumstance. His career is a rebuke to cynical journalist types like me who focus on what's wrong with things, what's "realistic," what can't be done. Often the things that he accomplished (starting the Peace Corps in just a few months, or getting 500,000 kids into Head Start programs its first summer when the "experts" said that 10,000 kids was the maximum feasible) were things that everyone beforehand had said were not realistic, or downright impossible. Shriver had a gift for what one of his old War on Poverty colleagues called "expanding the Horizons of the Possible." In my darkest moments of despair over my biography of him, when I had a half-written, 1,000-page pile of garbage, and I'd think to myself that I'd never be finished, and that this wasn't worth pursuing, I'd tell myself, For God's sake, Shriver ran the Peace Corps and the War on Poverty–at the same time, while raising five kids!–so you can damn well finish this book.

Quote For The Day

"You've got state secrets, targeted killings, indefinite detention, renditions, the opposition to extending the right of habeas corpus to prisoners at Bagram in Afghanistan. And although it is slightly different, Obama has been as aggressive as President Bush in defending prerogatives about who he has to inform in Congress for executive covert action," – Bush-era CIA director Michael Hayden praising Obama.

But no torture and no secret black sites. Hayden may not feel that matters but many of us do.

What Was Lieberman Thinking?

Chait's guess:

In Lieberman's mind, I would submit, Obama was the heir to McGovern, and after he went down to defeat at the hands of popular maverick John McCain, Lieberman would be well-positioned to say "I told you so." He could then tell Democrats that only his brand of moderate Democratic politics could truly prevail, and the sadder but wiser party base would trudge back to his column.