The Dish

The video we posted yesterday of the girl weeping at her father's return from war is not the only one. Here's another of a son and his dad – a surprise reunion in class. A Montage of several after the jump:

It's good to see Eric Cantor actually distance himself from the notion that Obama is another Hitler, and to talk of inclusion as an important GOP value. But when you see what his actual proposals are, you realize how empty all this is. He says the most important thing is the debt. But his only policies are further tax cuts. This is the money quote:

He refused to say whether he would cut entitlement spending to help reduce the deficit.

They have nothing to offer but anger.

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"This kind of rhetoric – on the same day that the Fort Hood massacre took place – is gasoline on a fire of atavistic hate. Someone in the GOP leadership needs to call it out – before its logic propels us

toward more violence and social division."

But they won't call it out. They'll embrace it, use it, and then lapse into a carefully-scripted victimology - as feigned as it will be ferocious - should the fringe activists they are now currently whipping into a frenzy erupt into violence and people start to point fingers at the enablers in the GOP establishment.
 
We have seen this before. Gingrich spent the better part of a decade, and the entire two-year election cycle leading up to the 1994 GOP route, inveighing against "sick", "pathetic", "traitorous", "cheating", "radical", "permissive", "anti-American" elements in the government, the Clinton White House, and the Democratic party. Bill and Hillary Clinton were "the enemy of normal Americans". Dick Armey compared the New Deal and the Great Society to Stalin's Five-Year Plan and Mao's Great Leap Forward – two of the

most murderously destructive state experiments in human history.

GOP congressmen openly sympathized and courted anti-government "militias". The hated, amorphous, ill-defined, all-purpose "bureaucrat" that Clinton (or Obama, or Carter, or the Communists, or the blacks, or the gays - take your pick) controlled with diabolical precision existed for no other purpose than to keep the selfless and God-fearing Southern Man, and his fellow "Real Americans", from enjoying his beer, his NASCAR, and his guns. One man finally decided to do something about it and killed 168 people. When gently questioned by Tim Russert as to whether the white-hot vitriol he rode to power might have contributed to a political climate which made Oklahoma City possible, Gingrich of course reacted with the wounded pride of the professional mountebank - "How dare you?", such comparisons are "grotesque", and on and on.

Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, Steve King, John Boehner - they're calling the same plays from 15 years ago. Same nuts. Same squirrels.

Pam Spaulding reacts to the DNC's refusal to support marriage equality in Maine and its subsequent transparent lies about it:

Shut the gAyTM down; only give directly to candidates and organizations you believe are truly working in your best interest. Not a penny to the DNC; it's the only leverage you have as an average citizen. The big donors in our community have to take a stand on this kind of nonsense, otherwise, they are enabling this kind of treatment of our community. It's party-building at our expense each and every time, as we watch windows of opportunity close. The thought of a halt to the cash flow will stop this BS pronto, if only to make them listen for a goddamn minute before stepping on the gas to run over us again.

It's the obvious problem with having all our eggs in the Democratic basket. That's largely the GOP's fault, of course, as they have done all they can to make gay Republicans extinct.

But the DNC/HRC fusion robs the community of any actual representation of us, and should remind us that any civil rights movement that puts its trust in any political party loses both its integrity and its success.

We have to do this ourselves, from the ground up, in our living rooms and churches, synagogues and mosques, workplaces and family get-togethers. We need to change the leadership of HRC to end their role as the Democratic party's chief enablers of substantive inaction. And we need to remain focused not on the nastiness of our opponents, but on our own positive arguments for change. We must not take the Christianist bait. We're winning because we have the better argument. So keep making the argument, and stop looking to others to save us.

Crack for film buffs:

The suspect has been caught; the motive seems a workplace grudge. One person dead. Second Amendment still in force.

Catherine Rampell tries to explain the difference between two conflicting workforce estimates:

What explains a spike in unemployment in October alongside a relatively modest decline in employment during the same month?

It might be the self-employed, said Joseph Brusuelas, director at Moody’s Economy.com. Self-employed workers are not included in payroll (establishment) numbers, and the household survey data show that this group was hit particularly hard in the last month. Entrepreneurs may be doing especially badly because they are still having trouble getting financing for their businesses, Mr. Brusuelas said.

“Small businesses, start-ups and mid-size businesses — the places more likely to be captured by the household survey, but not the establishment survey — are not getting relief in the credit market,” he said. “This is perfectly illustrative of a recession caused by a financial crisis. Credit markets are healing but most of the companies benefiting are the larger companies.”

A reader writes:

I'm a straight, married man, 32 years old. My dad is an out Gay man. Mom and dad divorced when I was six, and he came out shortly thereafter. My adolescence was fraught with tense cover ups of my dad's lifestyle; draping a sheet over the bookcase of gay interest books when friends came over; drumming up odd (and, in retrospect, clearly see-through) lies to explain this or that "family friend", and why my divorced parents were still civil and could eat together at holidays. I was full of confusion and self-loathing while playing games of "Smear The Queer" on the playground and listening to homophobic rock and rap music with my friends. I'm embarrassed about my behavior to this day. I frequently feel the need to apologize for attempting to shove my own father back into the closet, even though he was already out, proud, and comfortable.

My best friend from that time also had a gay parent, and even we didn't discuss it until we were both grown men. Fake aunts, uncles, friends, and roommates were as close as we could get back then. And I grew up in San Francisco! I can only imagine what this might be like for children in less liberal parts of the country.

I want this discussion to happen earlier in life. I hope kids growing up in the future won't have the same issues. I desperately want this to be normalized, for the children. Because even though I have no problem talking about my dad's sexuality today, back then, I was deathly afraid to address it because of what it might have said about me and him both. What my friends might say, the insults they'd be able to add to their repertoire.

To focus the debate around kids' understanding of their own sexuality is missing the point; kids will always do what they do when it comes time to experiment. This is really about kids' understanding of the world around them; I pray that by the time I have a couple of my own, that there won't be any stigma attached if one of their friends has two dads.

A reader writes:

I agree with your post. The question I have been wrestling with over the past 6 to 8 months is how best to push back. I have written 'letters to the editor', I have started my own blog, I have tried to engage people who accept lies as fact, but to little avail. Ultimately, it seems that the far right wing is not interested in facts, attempting to find out what is happening around them, or even engage someone like me in civil conversation. The people I have spoken with just get pissed off, and move away. They are ”know nothings“ in a very real sense.

Knowledge is the work of the devil, it seems. It goes far beyond anti-intellectualism. It teeters on the brink of some sort of mutated religious fanaticism: it is an act of faith, a bizarre and dangerous belief that the country is being run by fascists, communists, atheists, Jews, Blacks, all distilled into one person, President Obama. Anything and everything they believe is a “right” guaranteed by the constitution and god. So what to do?

My guess is that someone or some group will fall into the abyss and turn on one of their own who has strayed from some imagined orthodoxy. They must purge their group before than can proceed with their ambiguous mission. It will play out in a tragic way. Only then will people stop and reflect upon our degenerating state of affairs. What happens after that reflection, I cannot guess. Perhaps the violence and destruction that occurred in Europe and Asia during the last century will visit our relatively tranquil shores, and the American psyche will change for the better. I have been an unredeemed optimist my whole life, but for the first time dark clouds are all I see.

I think I will drink more over the next years.

One response is also simply to challenge the Palinites to tell us specifics: what programs do you want to cut? Which war do you want to end? Which taxes do you want to raise, if necessary? How do you insure the uninsured? Instead of flailing at the dumb extremism of them all, it's important to keep demanding they contribute to the substantive debate.

But, boy, it really struck me after this email. What a perfect epitome of know-nothings than a candidate who literally knows nothing. Which is why Palin remains their candidate, and a Peronist threat to democratic life and discourse. Which is why the Dish will continue to follow her closely, even as others move on.

Megan ponders the job numbers.