Category: The Dish

Hell’s Kitchen, New York City, 6.45 pm.

Small Wars Journal offers a round-up of articles on child soldiers. An excerpt from Peter Singer’s article:

The nature of armed conflict…has changed greatly in the past few years. Now the presence of children is the new rule of standard behavior in war, rather than the rarity that it used to be…

The practice of using children, defined under international law as under the age of 18, as soldiers is far more widespread and more important than most realize. There are as many as 300,000 children under the age of 18 presently serving as combatants around the globe (making them almost 10 percent of all global combatants). They serve in 40 percent of the world’s armed forces, rebel groups, and terrorist organizations and fight in almost 75 percent of the world’s conflicts; indeed, in the last five years, children have served as soldiers on every continent but Antarctica. Moreover, an additional half-million children serve in armed forces not presently at war.

More small-town pop-culture moves his way.

Yeah, I miss the old coot. He was onto something.

The creator of the Willie Horton ads sets up a group to slime Obama.

The self-inflicted damage has been immense:

The most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll charts Clinton’s decline from a high point just after her victory in New Hampshire to a new low point this spring. In that time, her favorable rating underwent a 40-point swing among independents. In mid-January, 59 percent of independents said they had a favorable impression of her, compared to 39 percent unfavorable. Last week, it was the reverse: 39 percent favorable and 58 percent unfavorable.

They’re on eBay.

It’s about the worst idea I’ve heard in a long time, almost pure political bribery and gimmickry. Which is why, I suppose, Clinton has now joined McCain in the idiocy.

If you live long enough … Matt comments here.

I’ve been struggling somewhat to get a handle on some of the smearing now directed at Barack Obama. Some of it is politics as usual and nothing that one can get too upset about. It is the job of opposing campaigns to try and paint a picture or construct a narrative about an opponent that emphasizes their electoral weaknesses. And so arguing that Obama is "inexperienced" or "unvetted" or "liberal" is a completely legitimate, if somewhat depressing, strategy. He who drives the narrative wins the election. And a narrative about a biography is the most powerful there is.

But then there is simply the knowing assertion or airing of obvious lies about Obama. The purveyors of the lies know they are untrue, but assert them anyway. And so Bill Kristol knows that Barack Obama is a faithful Christian. At least he knows that everything Obama has written and said about his faith would suggest as much, and that Obama’s long record of church attendance backs this up. But Kristol can still argue in the New York Times that Obama is actually a Marxist/Communist and his faith is a cynical charade. His faith is, in fact, in Kristol’s view, a "mask," a conscious, manufactured deception. Obama becomes the Manchurian Candidate, whose success merely reinforces the notion that he is actually a fraud. Hillary Clinton, for her part, knows that Obama is not a Muslim, but when asked to dispel the canard, she can still add the qualifier, "as far as I know." Again the addition is a meretricious nod to truthiness, a hope that something she knows is untrue can yet be introduced into the political bloodstream to her advantage.

To say that someone who self-describes as a Christian is actually an atheist or a Muslim is a form of McCarthyism, but because it rests on no facts at all, and mere suspicion, and indeed denial of what the candidate himself says in an area only the candidate can truly know, it’s something slightly different. McCarthy at least himself believed that his targets might have been (and some indeed were) Communists. Bill Kristol doesn’t actually believe that Obama is a Communist. But the threat of a non-Republican non-fundamentalist Christianity emerging in national political discourse is so dangerous to Kristol’s coalition that the Big Lie is necessary. McCarthy, one needs to remember, had more respect for the truth and was far less cynical than Rove.

So, taking a cue from Colbert, maybe one way to describe this kind of tactic is McTruthyism.

In McTruthyism, you have to know the actual truth about someone and nonetheless eager to smear that person with a lie. It gets truthy when you frame the lie as a question or a suspicion or the revelation of a secret. So the McTruthy lie will come in a factually irrefutable form: "The Mask Slips." "As far as I know." "Hmmmm." The classic formulation comes from – surprise! – South Carolina:

"Obama, Osama, hmm, are they brothers?"

They’re just asking. They’re not saying. Like Stephanopoulos and Gibson, or Rove or Clinton, they have no evidence for their accusations; they just don’t know for sure. Is Obama really a patriot? Is he really a Christian? And since their target is already defined as a potential fraud, the last person to believe is Obama himself. In fact, his denials only help underscore the shifty, devious deception of his candidacy. And the job of politics and journalism is to ask questions, isn’t it?  Are you actually a communist? Do you secretly hate your country? Do you privately support terrorism? Is your Christianity a front for Marxism? Do you find the Pledge of Allegiance repellent? Do you respect the flag?

It’s all about the truth, after all. Or the "truth". Or power. And as this campaign proceeds, you can see how many in the Washington elite care about each.