Category: Keepers

Greenwald responds to my latest post. He protests:

That I “legitimated” the London attack or argued it was a “legitimate protest” is as obvious a fabrication as it gets. Not only did I argue no such thing, and not only did I say the exact opposite of what Sullivan and others falsely attribute to me, but I expressly repudiated – in advance – the very claims they try to impose on me. Even vociferous critics of what I wrote, writing in neocon venues, understood this point (“I do find myself wanting to agree with Greenwald in arguing that this is an atrocious murder rather than an act of terror”).

I don’t fabricate things. Look at this direct quote:

“[T]he term [terrorism] at this point seems to have no function other than propagandistically and legally legitimizing the violence of western states against Muslims while delegitimizing any and all violence done in return to those states.”

Here’s my objection: the West kills “Muslims”; the Jihadists target “states.” That framing, in the direct wake of an act of religious barbarism, actually places Jihadists on a higher moral plane than the West. We’re killing people of a different faith on purpose; they’re just protesting by killing the soldiers who murder them. Maybe Glenn didn’t mean for it to come out that way. But it did.

And yes, I can see (just) how an off-duty soldier might qualify as a non-civilian, although we don’t yet fully know the details of the plot, and therefore complicate the “terror” label. That’s a point worth considering. I also conceded that a defense of the killing as blowback was involved here. So we’re not that far apart on those matters.

But I strongly resist the idea that the West has attempted to kill Muslims in the way that Jihadists have killed so many Muslims and infidels, even though civilian casualties have been a horrifying fact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the drone wars now winding down. We are seeking to defend ourselves from theocratic mass murderers after an unprovoked attack; they are seeking the triumph of their version of Islam, by any means, including mass murder. The US has not killed for religious reasons; the Jihadists kill solely for religious reasons, which include the sacrosanct nature of religiously-demarcated territory. That includes the Woolwich beheading, as the full context shows. The Jihadist was not defending the “land” he lives in. He is a British-born convert to a murderous form of Sunni Islam (which detests and seeks to murder Shiite infidels as much as any non-Muslims). He is, in fact, attacking his own land, its soldiers and its democratic norms. He wants to turn Britain into a Sharia-Islamist state. And he’s not shy about saying so. That equation of his land with, say, Pakistan, is a religious belief, not an objective fact.

Then there are the fabrications from Glenn. I “continuously justify any manner of violence and militarism” by the US. That accusation is just bizarre, given my record over the last several years, my support for withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, my opposition to new wars in Libya and Syria, my long campaign against torture, and on and on. But, yes, I do believe we are in a civilizational war, as I wrote just after 9/11.

It is a war between violent Jihadist theocracy and the Western tradition of separation between church and state. It is a war we did not seek and it is a war we are trying to end. For the Islamists, in contrast, this war is for ever – until their version of theocracy is triumphant. And the butchers of Woolwich are quite clear about their goals: the imposition of Sharia law and the end of democracy in Britain, their actual native land. For them to assume other countries as “their land” is an obvious sign that what lies behind this is not strategic blowback only – it is a theology of theocracy.

Norm Geras is not as blinkered:

[I]f a man says that he’s butchered someone on the street because of… Afghanistan, it is then true, if he is not lying or self-deceived, that somewhere in the causal chain leading up to that murderous act Western intervention against Al-Qaida and the Taliban has played some part in bringing the atrocity about. But it is by no means a sufficient explanation, as you can quickly ascertain by starting to count up in your head all those angered or upset about Western intervention who haven’t butchered anybody. At the same time, you can start to compute how many people responsible for jihadist terrorism today not only cite Afghanistan and/or Iraq but frame the reference within the terms of an Islamist ideology according to which the slaughter of innocents is an apt response to Western foreign policy. That’s a very large number of people. It is also true, of course, that not all Islamists commit terrorist murder, so this isn’t a complete explanation either, but you’d think the ideological factor should have some prominence.

A rational explanation of these acts is therefore available that places central emphasis on its ideological causes, and doesn’t just parrot what the jihadists themselves say. And those leftists and liberals (verkrappt section) who always draw attention towards what the killers say and away from the belief system that inspires them are not just appealing to rational explanation, they are offering a very particular type of skewed ‘explanation’ that obscures a crucial element of the picture.

I think Glenn has gone from a completely legitimate critique of the West’s “war on terror” toward the equation of Jihadist murder with legitimate self-defense after 9/11. I can see why the latter can spawn the former. I cannot see how they are both morally equivalent.

Read the whole Dish thread on the Woolwich beheading here.

My first instinct on hearing about the case of James Rosen was somewhat casual. Much too much so, in retrospect. Yes, Rosen was a pretty clueless reporter; yes, disclosure of a source in North Korea could have been extremely damaging to national security. Some kind of investigation was merited. But the move to issue a warrant to Rosen for possibly being a co-conspirator in leaking the information crossed a line. And it was crossed by Attorney General Eric Holder. Leakers are not journalists. That distinction got blurred.

Holder, in his defense, was pressured by the CIA and the Congress, which is why there’s been relatively little outrage there:

On December 3, 2009—just a few months before he approved the affidavit in the Fox case—Holder, FBI director Robert Mueller, and director of national intelligence Dennis Blair were hauled before a secret session of the Senate Intelligence Committee to explain why they weren’t punishing more leakers.

But it is the job of the AG to resist such pressure if the pursuit of the leak were to turn into near-prosecution of the press for doing its job. The good news is not that Holder is apparently experiencing regret – his excruciating remorse is expressed through Daniel Klaidman’s tiny violin here. It is that he is going to oversee new rules that will prohibit going near reporters’ records:

Among them would be stating a clear presumption in the guidelines against seizing reporters’ work product, either through subpoena or search warrant. Currently, the guidelines require that prosecutors “take all reasonable steps to obtain the information through alternative sources or means.” (A presumption test would be a higher standard to overcome.) Another priority will be making sure that search-warrant applications are subjected to the same level of internal scrutiny that subpoenas currently receive before they are approved by the attorney general. Some changes, meanwhile, will involve simply bringing the rules into the Internet Age. Originally established in 1970 and updated in 1982 to include telephone records, they don’t even mention emails, texts, or other forms of digital communication, like social media.

There’s more, as Klaidman notes. I’m not one of those people offended when government pursues leaks that could be detrimental to national security – especially a crucial source inside North Korea who was effectively deemed moot by Rosen’s report – and who may have suffered a terrible fate. But search warrants and subpoenas of reporters’ work need to end. The amateurishness of the reporter really isn’t salient here. Maintaining a bright line between the DOJ and the vital work of investigative journalism is.

And I should have seen that more clearly from the get-go.

Greenwald refuses to label the beheading in London “terrorism,” calling it just another attempt to stir paranoia against Muslims:

[T]he term at this point seems to have no function other than propagandistically and legally legitimizing the violence of western states against Muslims while delegitimizing any and all violence done in return to those states …

I really have to try restrain my anger here. First off, Glenn’s adoption of the view that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan amounted to “continuous violence by western states against Muslim civilians” seems a new step toward the memes of Islamist propaganda. Does Glenn really believe that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, however flawed, were deliberate attempts to kill Muslim civilians, in the way al Qaeda deliberately targets and kills Muslim civilians?

If he does, then I beg to differ. The reason we invaded Afghanistan was not because we decided to launch a war on Islam. It was because wealthy, Islamist, hypocritical bigots launched an unprovoked Jihadist mass murder of Western innocents from a cell based in a country run by a regime that specialized and specializes in the mass murder of other Muslims.

Before 9/11, America had saved Muslims in the Balkans from Christianist fanatics. We helped liberate Muslims in Afghanistan from Soviet oppression. We continue to give vast amounts of money to Muslim countries like Egypt, and, because of our economic development and need for oil made multi-billionaires out of Saudi clerics. And the war against Saddam, though a criminal enterprise and strategic catastrophe, nonetheless removed one of the most vicious mass murderers of Muslims on the planet. And the sectarian murder of Muslims that followed, however the ultimate responsibility for the occupying forces, was not done by Westerners. It was done by Muslims killing Muslims. The West, moreover, is committed to removing its troops from Afghanistan by next year and is fast winding down drone strikes.

How can that legitimize a British citizen’s brutal beheading of a fellow British citizen on the streets of London? If we cannot call a man who does that in the name of God and finishes by warning his fellow citizens “You will never be safe” a terrorist, who would fit that description, apart, of course, in Glenn’s view, Barack Obama?

The barbarian with the machete was not born in a Muslim country or land. He was born in Britain, educated at Marshalls Park school in Romford and Greenwich University.

He does not have a history of concern with foreign policy – or even sensitivity toward the mass murder of Muslims. There is no record of his protest against the mass murders by the Taliban – because those kinds of murders of Muslims he approves of. He is a convert to the Sunni Islamism of Anjem Choudary, whose street thugs were involved in a melee in a London street only last week as they attacked and scuffled with Shi’a Muslims. Choudary’s group wants Sharia law imposed on the UK, a war against Shiites everywhere, the brutal subjugation of women, and suppression of every freedom Glenn cares about. The idea that this foul, religious bigotry – when it provokes its adherents to the kind of barbarism we saw two days ago – is some kind of legitimate protest against a fast-ending war is just perverse.

I want the war in Af-Pak to end. I agree that blowback is a real problem. I was horrified by the Iraq war. I remain appalled by GTMO and the legacy of torture. But I cannot defend any analysis of what happened in London as some kind of legitimate protest against Western foreign policy rather than terrorism in its most animal-like form, created and sustained entirely by religious fanaticism which would find any excuse to murder, destroy and oppress Muslims and non-Muslims in the name of God.

They did this before 9/11 and before our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. They are doing it now in Syria in the name of the same God. These genocidal theocrats did not need to be spurred by the US and UK’s actions – although they can view those as a further inflammation. They are living out their twisted, foul faith – which requires them not merely to kill, but to hack and mutilate and dismember another human being and celebrate that fact with a glee and a pride that has absolutely nothing to do with foreign policy and everything to do with the evil lurking in the totalitarian’s soul.

I have to say I have always respected the sincerity and clarity of Greenwald’s critique of the war on terror. But his blindness to the savagery at the heart of Salafism is very hard to understand, let alone forgive.

Recent Dish coverage of the Woolwich beheading here, here, here and here.

[Re-posted from earlier today. Blogosphere response to the pivotal speech here.]

The challenges that Barack Obama faced upon taking office were, even his critics would admit, daunting: an economy tail-spinning toward a second Great Depression, two continuing, draining and tragically self-defeating wars, and an apparatus of vastly expanded executive power (including torture) which had only just begun to be checked by the judiciary. More to the point, the United States was formally at war in a conflict which seemed to have no conceivable end.

And so easily the most important thing the presidents said today, it seems to me, was the following:

We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us, mindful of James Madison’s warning that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” … The AUMF [Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists] is now nearly twelve years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. Groups like AQAP must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States.

Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states. So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate. And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further. Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.

“Ultimately repeal the AUMF’s mandate”. I wish the word “ultimately” were not there. But the announcement of an eventual, discrete, concrete end to this war may have been a step enough for now. For my part, I think it should be a critical goal of this administration to repeal that AUMF by the end of its second term. Our goal must not be an endlessly ratcheting of terrorist and counter-terrorist violence that creates more enemies than friends. Our goal must be normalcy and freedom, even as we continue strong counter-terrorism strategies outside of the context for warfare.

I’m glad the president defended the strike against Anwar al-Awlaki as forcefully as he should:

When a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America – and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens; and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot – his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a swat team.

My view entirely. I’m struck too by his Niebuhrian grasp of the inherent tragedy of wielding power in an age of terror – a perspective his more jejune and purist critics simply fail to understand. This seems like a heart-felt expression of Christian realism to me:

It is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in all wars. For the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss. For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred through conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. But as Commander-in-Chief, I must weigh these heartbreaking tragedies against the alternatives.

Indeed he must. And in the aggregate, I think history will look back on the balance he struck and see more wisdom in it than the purism on the civil liberties left and right or the lawless violence and torture of the Bush-Cheney years.

A few more key points: he will end the moratorium on releasing Yemeni prisoners at GTMO; he has appointed a figure to expedite the closure of the former torture camp (perhaps his newfound friendship with John McCain can accelerate the process). But he offered no real solution to the 50 or so prisoners deemed still dangerous to the world but who cannot be tried for lack of admissible evidence. He had noting really on that – except a self-evidently vain appeal to a Congress unwilling to give an inch on anything.

But the broader framework of the speech was the most important: the possibility of a return to normality, to a point where the understandable trauma of 9/11 no longer blurs our ability to construct a realist but restrained counter-terror strategy. That’s the promise of his presidency: the healing of a giant wound to this country’s psyche and values. And here’s where it came through most tellingly for me:

The scale of [the current] threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11. In the 1980s, we lost Americans to terrorism at our Embassy in Beirut; at our Marine Barracks in Lebanon; on a cruise ship at sea; at a disco in Berlin; and on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. In the 1990s, we lost Americans to terrorism at the World Trade Center; at our military facilities in Saudi Arabia; and at our Embassy in Kenya. These attacks were all deadly, and we learned that left unchecked, these threats can grow. But if dealt with smartly and proportionally, these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11.

We can envisage a world in which this war is over, and yet our counter-terrorism continues “smartly and proportionally”. It is a tough and usually lonely task to make these calls. Which is why a president is ultimately accountable for them. Today, he stood accountable; and he neither shirked from responsibility nor apologized for the inherent tragedy of any armed conflict.

From this hard realist assessment, however, came a light at the end of a psychological and political tunnel; a small flicker hope at the end of a long dark night of fear.

(Photo: US President Barack Obama speaks about his administration’s drone and counterterrorism policies, as well as the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, May 23, 2013. By Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.)

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Let me explain why I remain genuinely baffled by the framework of the current discussion of the IRS scandal. There is little doubt, after the Inspector General’s report, that the Cincinnati office in charge of 501 (c) 4 scrutiny unfairly and unreasonably – even outrageously – seemed to apply political criteria for screening such groups. The question remains why they did this, what their motivations were, to what extent scrutiny of such groups was actually an important task to accomplish, how far that got distorted, and how far up the chain this decision went. These are very important questions, which is why I hope hearings can uncover more evidence than the actual report – and hold specific people accountable, apart from the resignation of the acting head of the IRS (which nonetheless has occurred).

But here’s where I do a double-take, which is roughly what happened as I was curled up on the couch last night watching Bill O’Reilly argue – with no evidence whatsoever – that the Obama administration had decided after the 2010 mid-terms to target Tea Party groups by using the IRS as a politicized bludgeon. This utterly unsubstantiated claim (see above) is now the dominant meme, the working assumption of the propagandists at Fox News. When pressed to defend this extraordinary reach, O’Reilly admitted he was purely speculating – or in his weasel words, “educated speculation.”

Then I read Mitch McConnell arguing that the GOP and its donors are “intimidated” by the Obama administration – because of its desire to see that those exercizing explicitly political speech after the Citizens United decision actually be identified by name. It’s funny, but “intimidated” is not the first adjective that springs to mind when contemplating the Senate Minority Leader. For McConnell, the First Amendment includes protection for extremely wealthy people’s total anonymity even as they funnel unlimited funds toward a political campaign. And the idea that the House Republicans or the Tea Party or the 501 (c) 4s or Karl Rove were in any way seriously intimidated does not seem, shall we say, to be reflected in their extravagant expenditures in 2012 and their evident joy in attacking their sinister, coffee-colored pinata one more time right now. And it’s worth pointing out that getting that 501 (c) 4 approval was not necessary for the entities to spend their money from the get-go. Which they did. To little avail.

Then we hear pundits like George Will and Peggy Noonan actually bring up Watergate as the closest historical analogy – which is, to put it bluntly, deranged. Remember, for example, that this scandal was not exposed by Woodward and Bernstein (although anecdotal complaints were aired in the press at the time) – but was exposed by the IRS itself. The IRS moreover also attempted to end this practice, and when that failed, set up an Inspector General report into the outrageous screening. In such an investigation, the Obama administration properly maintained an ethical distance for fear of seeming to affect the investigation’s findings. Watergate? Are they out of their fricking minds? Or cynics trying to gin up a story in a not-so-great season for ratings?

Then comes the Wall Street Journal with the coup de grace: because the White House kept itself scrupulously distant from the IG report, there is, apparently, no accountability in government:

Alexander Hamilton and America’s Founders designed the unitary executive for the purpose of political accountability. It is one of the Constitution’s main virtues. Unlike grunts in Cincinnati, Presidents must face the voters. That accountability was designed to extend not only to the President’s inner circle but over the entire branch of government whose leaders he chooses and whose policies bear his signature.

What you immediately notice is that under this scenario, Obama cannot win.

If he had interfered with the IG investigation, we would have a shit-storm of major proportions as he would be accused of unethically and improperly meddling in an investigation designed to be independent. Yes, the president runs the executive branch including, say, the Justice Department and the IRS. But his political relationship to those ideally neutral bodies is rightly constrained. And how could the president have intervened before the facts were fully known and weighed by an independent investigation anyway? He’s damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. Which is why his legal counsel was well advised to maintain that wall before the evidence was fully known.

This then becomes, in the eyes of the Washington Post, “shielding” Obama, as if this affair were about plausible deniability, as opposed to ethical government. The very attempt not to interfere is described as some kind of illicit political interference. In the pincer movement from Fox and the WaPo, there is no way Obama himself can come out shining.

I don’t get it. But then I am not working from a conclusion to a premise. I do not believe that the Obama administration is some kind of terrifying left-wing tyranny, exercising lethal political powers to punish its opponents, rifle through their tax returns, and take away everyone’s guns. But for some, all this is a given. Michelle Malkin knew all of this as far back as 2010, when she published her tract, “Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies.” If you point out that the first Obama term had a historically minuscule numbers of “scandals”, they will presumably just reply that it’s because they are so brilliant at never getting caught.

The paranoid style is not new in America. But it finds its locus in exactly those populations who feel marginalized by the tectonic cultural and social and economic shifts in the Obama era. And the syndrome is not new. Here’s a passage from Richard Hofstadter’s classic definition of the pseudo-conservative in America:

The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in various phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence of the real suffering which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics for the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization. He sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world — for instance, in the Orient — cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.

Fox News has made pseudo-conservatism very lucrative, and as I watched the pure cynicism of Bill O’Reilly, making even more millions from yet another “book”, and wrily winking that he knows this is all paranoid bullshit, but, hey, it’s what he gets paid for, I felt little but nausea.

Let’s keep the government honest. Let’s get to the bottom of it. But let us not descend into the pseudo-conservative mindset that assumes Watergate-style malevolence purely because it feels good and makes money.

Update from a reader:

I agree 100% with your post. I’ve made the same general argument about Malkin with friends. However, your 2010 date for her book was the paperback edition. The original came out in July 2009, SIX MONTHS AFTER HE TOOK OFFICE. A minor point, perhaps, but it remains stunning to me.

Evan Wolfson criticizes Michael Kinsley for prematurely declaring victory on marriage equality:

We’ve built a 58% majority for same-sex marriage nationwide, up from 27% in 1996, when Congress passed the so-called DOMA as I was co-counseling the world’s first-ever trial on whether the government actually has a good reason for denying the freedom to marry in Hawaii. We are, happily, winning … but we are far from having won.

Freedom to Marry … is gearing up for the next round of work and battling it will take to turn the public opinion we have persuaded into the actual legal and political action that will be the true “mission accomplished” that Kinsley is prematurely celebrating. We know we will win, but also know we have a huge amount still to do – organizing, educating, enlisting, lobbying, door-knocking, fundraising, and campaigning that Kinsley’s piece trivializes when he writes, “The challenge [is] simply getting people to think about it a bit.” If only it were, or had been, or will be that simple.

I think Evan mistakes Mike’s enthusiasm – and the extraordinary gains we have indeed made – with complacency. But they’re both right; we have won the argument in a way few movements have so swiftly; but we still have not come close to accomplishing the mission. We saw the still-enormous gap to overcome yesterday as gay couples were removed from being covered under the new immigration reform. The reform tries to include everyone trapped in immigration hell or limbo (and sometimes, trust me, purgatory), but it explicitly excludes only one group of people: gay and lesbian Americans who have taken up the responsibilities of civil marriage.

These people are not immigrants; they are American citizens forced to choose between their country and their spouse. No heterosexual would see that exclusion as anything other than what it is: the American government’s persecution of its own citizens, even as it seeks to ease the plight of its resident non-citizens. And breaking up families or forcing them to move abroad to stay together is more than discrimination. It’s cruelty. It doesn’t get clearer than that. Gay citizens are regarded as less worthy than straight non-citizens by their own Congress.

The quote of the day was from Lindsey Graham: “You’ve got me on immigration. You don’t have me on marriage. If you want to keep me on immigration, let’s stay on immigration.” There are things I would want to say to Butters that only human decency prevents. I wish he’d treat Americans like my husband with a scintilla of such respect.

Harry Enten examines the deep-red states least hospitable to equality:

With the exception of Virginia, it’s pretty clear that southern Republican support for gay marriage is lower than among Republicans nationally. As such, it’s difficult to see how support among southern Republicans will hit 50% anytime before 2040. It’s hard to imagine more than the stray Republican voting for same-sex marriage. Polarization is at all-time high, and politicians are more afraid about losing primaries than general elections. Republicans have no need to vote for same-sex marriage.

Thus, unless the federal government jumps in, most, if not all southern states won’t legalize same-sex marriage for the foreseeable future. Most of their citizens don’t want it, and by the time they do, most Republicans still won’t. Considering you’ll need a majority or supermajority of state legislators to get the bans reversed, and that Republicans have a strong hold over these chambers, same-sex marriage in the south doesn’t have much of a chance anytime soon.

Last week, Kevin Williamson took matters into his own hands when a fellow audience member wouldn’t stop using her smartphone during a theater performance:

The lady seated to my immediate right (very close quarters on bench seating) was fairly insistent about using her phone. I asked her to turn it off. She answered: “So don’t look.” I asked her whether I had missed something during the very pointed announcements to please turn off your phones, perhaps a special exemption granted for her. She suggested that I should mind my own business. So I minded my own business by utilizing my famously feline agility to deftly snatch the phone out of her hand and toss it across the room, where it would do no more damage.

He was subsequently ejected and could face criminal charges. I’m with Kevin 100 percent. He didn’t grab the phone before talking with the management. The management simply refused to stop the disruption. It was only then that he lost it. And I fully understand why.

I refuse to have dinner with someone constantly consulting their iPhone. I ask them to put it away or end the meal. I’m also an Acela Quiet Car Nazi. The plague of smartphone chatter is slowly destroying whatever space individuals once had to separate ourselves from the maddening crowd of gabbers. When some of us are allowed an oasis of calm – the quiet car – and others refuse to abide by its strictures, talking loudly with one another or yelling into their phones, I simply point to the quiet sign and remind them that this is supposed to be a library atmosphere. Others are too polite to address the rudeness. But they seem grateful for my being the necessary asshole. My gripe is that I am forced to be an asshole by the poor manners and contempt for others of gabbing phone-addicts. In my Acela experience, it’s often the executive white male types who simply ignore me and force me to find a conductor. Yes, in the end, my objections can make more noise and disruption than the asshole on the cellphone. But he started it.

I’ve stopped going to the movies entirely because of this. You cannot ignore a sudden light appearing three rows down. You cannot ignore the tippity-tap of the texter behind you. You can try – but there’s a reason the lights are kept low in theaters – so you can focus on the stage or the screen. These anti-social yahoos are destroying the performance for everyone – and then act all affronted when told how douchy they are. John Del Signore is among many calling Williamson a hero:

How many stern warnings do obnoxious assholes get before there are actual consequences? Unlimited, apparently. “I don’t think we’re going to start a new policy of ejecting customers,” [said Howard Kagan, one of the producers of the show Williamson was attending].

[But as Williamson notes,] “The Alamo Drafthouse has a very strict policy about this sort of thing. If you talk, if you use your phone, you’ll be thrown out. And it’s a very successful business model. People are willing to pay more for it! Theater managers have to do something about this… I wish twice a month some Broadway theater would jack somebody, do a high profile ejection. I think you would establish a new set of social norms.”

Me too. Or maybe one movie theater in a complex where cellphone use is explicitly barred. Alas, there remains some kind of deference to these morons, as if they had some kind of right to spoil Tyler Coates thinks Williamson acted just as selfishly as the person he was admonishing:

Williamson engaged in an angry conversation with a stranger during a musical performance, one that is set in an intimate cabaret environment. Surely that was distracting to his fellow audience members, not to mention the actors. In the end, he was forced to leave the show, and I can imagine that the scene of watching a woman slap her neighbor and then having security escort him out disrupted the performance for many more people than the woman’s silent Googling. I don’t find it inspiring; I find Williamson’s actions to be just as (if not more) rude than the woman who annoyed him. It’s not commendable, and it’s a shame to see an amateur provocateur take the attention away from the people on stage in the show whose job it is to perform for an audience.

There is no “silent Googling”. The management should, in my view, throw the Googler out. Dreher sympathizes with Williamson’s vigilantism:

More and more people, it seems, simply do not understand how to behave in public, and how to respect others. I wouldn’t recommend seizing the phones of rude old ladies and throwing them across the room. But I understand the impulse, and would pay Kevin Williamson’s court costs, if it came to that.

And Tod Kelly doubts that the incident really happened:

[N]othing in the exchanges Williamson notes sound or feel like the exchanges real people have in real life – it reads more like something he imagined doing while stewing in his seat.  Being the latest in a long, long line of Irish Storytellers, I can usually tell a story from an account, and Williamson’s feels like the former.

Well, we’ll see as the legal process unfolds.

(Video: Hugh Jackman discussing when he, from the stage, had to admonish an audience member whose phone kept ringing through a crucial scene in the play A Steady Rain.)

(Thumbnail photo by Jenny Cestnik)