Month: June 2013

A woman feels less alone after reading this post:

He had this long knife in his hand. He had a rag over his head so I could not see his face even though it (and he), were dark as death at the time. He was inside me. He smelled like he had been sleeping in shit-garbage for weeks. His dick was soft and he was struggling to have his orgasm.

And my body moved against him. Just once. Maybe a few seconds of time that in my memory has always been a long and very sick movie. One of those dreams that leaves you with a hole-in-your-heart feeling that never goes away.

I do not know who was more shocked. Me or him. He froze. I froze. I know what a cold sweat is. It is instant, wet and freezing. I thought he would kill me right then for sure. The knife blade was shining. He said “What are you doing?” He said it roughly. I kept silent. I did not know what to say. I have never known what to say about this. Not known what to think of myself.

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The difference between conservative reformers and pseudo-conservative bullies is that the reformers watch South Park. Or you can just blame it all on Weigel.

Below is an almost poignant recent video of a man still clinging to the hope that, at some point, the GOP may be able to have a conversation about how to address the crisis in middle class mobility, security, and job growth:

How does the right react to a smart young writer trying patiently to bring its agenda back to what he thinks is a winning formula? Erick Erickson calls him a faggot. Not in those words, exactly, but by egregiously, pre-emptively dismissing Barro’s arguments in the following way:

Josh Barro is a late twenty-something gay male who hates conservatives, champions Obamacare, attacks Republicans for wanting to oppose it, supports the tax hikes that come with Obamacare, wants to rid the GOP of social conservatives, and gets fawning pieces of prattle composed by liberals who want everyone to know that their friend Josh Barro is a conservative reformer who wants less conservatism.

Josh is currently the Politics Editor at Business Insider, and used to write for Bloomberg View, after being a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He does not “hate” conservatives; he wants to rescue conservatism from its current nihilism, bile, anti-intellectualism and loathing of modern life. Josh defends himself better than I can. Erickson gets most of his facts wrong – but none of that matters past the “gay male” soubriquet.

I recall asking a leading conservative intellectual why he thought most of the rightwing press refused to review “The Conservative Soul.” His answer: if you weren’t a homosexual, they might. He didn’t seem shocked by this or offended. Just telling the truth. All I can say is that if the GOP wants to escape from its pseudo-conservative cultural and intellectual backwater, they’ll need more Barros and Frums and fewer Ericksons and Malkins. But I won’t be holding my breath. And I won’t wait for others in the Republican reformist camp to call out the homophobia either. They have a base they want to keep happy.

Previous Dish on Chait’s profile of Barro here and here. Our Ask Anything archive is here, and Josh will be back soon with other thoughts on the intellectual crisis on the right, and how to get past it.

My initial reaction to the Daily Caller’s rigged chart of White House visits by the IRS head, Douglas Shulman, was O’Reilly’s and Woodward’s. But in a matter of seconds, it was clear that there was a grotesque distortion. Later, we got to the bottom of the question, and found nothing there. A definitive piece by Garance Franke-Ruta also put the matter to rest.

But O’Reilly is, as we know, immune to facts when they get in the way of smearing Obama as a second Nixon. That’s no surprise. Roger Ailes runs a tight propaganda ship, just as he did when he worked for, er, Nixon. But why is Bob Woodward joining in? Here he goes again:

“This fiction that somehow [The IRS is] totally an independent agency is absurd,” the legendary journalist said Monday on “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News, saying that in the Nixon era, the Treasury secretary refused to audit Democratic groups when the IRS commissioner was asked to do so by the White House. “Clearly in the pipeline, lots of people knew some of this or should know it. And I agree, this should be investigated, but you know who should lead the investigation? President [Barack] Obama.”

Notice that his one piece of evidence that the White House meddles with the IRS is from the criminal Nixon administration. Any evidence apart from that, Bob? Have you even seen the careful reports proving this a fake story? Do you even care? And by what authority should the White House investigate an agency designed to be as independent of the White House as possible? Can you imagine the ratings Ailes would get out of Obama doing that? Those who should investigate are not those now recklessly accused. The Congress should find out if there’s anything of substance there, and so far, no dice.

Whence Woodward’s bile? Irrelevance in Obama’s Washington, one senses. But aiding and abetting Roger Ailes, who crafted Nixon’s media strategy in 1968? That’s more than bile. It’s bitter.

When partisans are asked to do just that, they become less partisan:

Without any money involved, Democrats’ estimates of the change in unemployment under Bush were about 0.9 points higher than Republicans’ estimates. But when correct answers were rewarded, that gap shrank to 0.4 points. When correct answers and “don’t knows” were rewarded, it shrank to 0.2 points. [Political scientists John Bullock, Alan Gerber, Gregory Huber and Seth Hill] conclude that false answers — like Democrats saying that casualties in Iraq increased from 2007 to 2008 — are just cheap talk, a way to signal a party affiliation rather than a sincere belief.