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Republican conservatives are just liberals in right-wing drag

Friday, June 26, 2009
Remind me: Which political party is "decadent" and "sick"?
by Joe Conason

Whenever the latest Republican politician is caught with his zipper undone, a predictable moment of introspection on the right inevitably ensues. Pundits, bloggers and perplexed citizens ruminate over the lessons they have learned, again and again, about human frailty, false piety and the temptations of flesh and power. They express concern for the damaged family and lament the fall of yet another promising young hypocrite. They resolve to restore the purity of their movement and always remember to remind us that this is all Bill Clinton's fault. What they never do is face up to an increasingly embarrassing fact about themselves and their leaders. They're really just liberals in right-wing drag. The proof is in the penance, or lack thereof, inflicted on the likes of Mark Sanford, John Ensign and David Vitter, to cite a few names from the top of a long, long list. For ideologues who value biblical morality and believe in the efficacy of punishment, modern conservatives are as tolerant of their famous sinners as the jaded libertines of the left. Even after confessing to the most flagrant and colorful fornication, the worst that a conservative must anticipate is a stern scolding, followed by warm assurances of God's forgiveness and a swift return to business as usual. Mark Sanford may have forfeited his presidential ambitions, but the South Carolina governor seems determined to hold onto his office despite his escapade in Argentina -- and if he is thrown out, the reason will be his offenses against good government rather than his betrayal of his marriage vows. John Ensign isn't expected to step down from the Senate, despite the mounting evidence that he concealed his extramarital affair through the misuse of public funds; even now he remains more popular than fellow Nevadan Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader. And then there is David Vitter, the Louisiana bon vivant whose evangelical constituents seem inclined to reward him for consorting with prostitutes by giving him another Senate term. The safest prediction is that these pharisaical pols will continue their careers without suffering the retribution they have earned. According to the Old Testament -- a text regularly cited by these worthies as the highest authority in denouncing reproductive freedom and gay rights -- the proper penalty for adultery is death by stoning. Leviticus is quite clear on this point (as any truly strict originalist could hardly deny). Fortunately for all of us, biblical law doesn't rule this country, despite the zealots on the religious right who disdain separation of church and state. Very few Americans believe that we should impose state sanctions, let alone the death penalty, on private peccadilloes. But civic tolerance doesn't excuse the limp, smiling attitude of the Republican right toward the infidelity of its leaders. That flabby acceptance contrasts sharply with right-wing screaming about the iniquity of the opposition. As understood by conservative commentators, this is not mere rhetoric but a theory of civilization's rise and fall. Ann Coulter believes that liberals actively "seek to destroy morality" by "refusing to condemn what societies have condemned for thousands of years," including "promiscuity" and "divorce." Dinesh D'Souza once recommended sarcastically that the Democrats adopt the mantle of "moral degeneracy" by forthrightly advocating "divorce, illegitimacy, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality and pornography." The supposed depravity of the Democratic Party has long been a favorite theme of conservatives, dating back to the rise of Newt Gingrich, who distributed an official campaign lexicon to Republican congressional candidates that featured such defining insults as "decadent," "permissive," "sick," "selfish" and, of course, "liberal." Back then the Georgia Republican was on his second marriage and carrying on a clandestine affair with the young Capitol Hill clerk who would eventually become his third wife (after he converted to Catholicism and had his union with wife No. 2 annulled). In 2007, he admitted on James Dobson's radio show that he was cheating on wife No. 2 with future wife No. 3 while he was publicly chastising President Clinton for consorting with Monica Lewinsky. Gingrich has remained a consistent favorite among his pious comrades. Today, in fact, Gingrich is fully rehabilitated as a party spokesman, still nurturing presidential ambitions. So why should any other Republican fear the wrath of the righteous? The disappointment in Sanford and Ensign among the devout must be particularly keen, since they have so rigorously aligned themselves with the most fervent elements of the religious right. For more than a decade, Ensign lent his name to Promise Keepers, the all-male Christian prayer movement run by a former Colorado football coach, whose mass rallies highlighted men's integrity, purity and uncompromising domination of family life. Both he and Sanford have worked closely with the Family, a secretive Christian fellowship on Capitol Hill that maintains a brick townhouse where Ensign and other members of Congress have resided. Over the years both men have won the highest marks from the Family Research Council, the Christian Coalition and the American Family Association -- and until the other day, Sanford was featured as an invited speaker at the Family Research Council's upcoming Values Voters Summit 2009. (As Pam Spaulding and Think Progress noted, however, the FRC removed his photo from the summit Web site immediately following his confessional press conference.) Certainly there is considerable pressure for Sanford to resign in South Carolina, and perhaps he will surrender. But he might well ask whether that is fair when Ensign is hanging on and Vitter appears to be in the clear. For a while, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins had threatened to challenge Vitter in the Republican primary next year, but last March he announced that he won't run after all -- and instead endorsed Vitter for reelection. Amazingly, Perkins then hosted a radio broadcast with Vitter as his guest, where they tut-tutted over the alleged ethical problems of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Nobody had the poor taste to mention the infamous black books in which Vitter's friendly madams in Washington and New Orleans had inscribed his name and phone number. By the way, while Vitter, Ensign, Gingrich and perhaps Sanford have been able to retain their positions and political viability, the same cannot be said for the most recent offenders on the progressive side. Neither Eliot Spitzer nor John Edwards, each among the most promising figures in the Democratic Party, will ever be a candidate for public office again, although their misbehavior was no worse than what their Republican counterparts did. If they looked honestly at themselves, religious conservatives might notice that they are morally lax, socially permissive and casually tolerant of moral deviancy -- just like the liberals they despise. So as they wonder aloud why the same salacious nightmare haunts them, year after year, the best advice they can get happens to come from that old sinner Clinton. As he so often says, the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing while expecting a different outcome.

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Right-wing historical revision

Monday, February 2, 2009
The right-wing New Deal conniption fit
by Andrew Leonard

For the editors of the Wall Street Journal, the spectacle of a major government spending program aimed at combating a severe recession is evidently a nightmare beyond belief, complete with a popular interventionist-leaning president, Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House, and, scariest of all, a legion of zombie back-from-the-dead Keynesian economist holy warriors. How else to explain the paper's increasingly shrill declarations that the New Deal absolutely, positively did not work? The latest salvo came Monday morning in a piece by two economists, Harold L. Cole and Lee. E. Ohanian: "How Government Prolonged the Depression." Defenders of the New Deal will find much to argue with in Cole and Ohanion's account, but for simplicity's sake, I am going to zero in on just one point -- the impact of the New Deal on unemployment. Cole and Ohanian: The goal of the New Deal was to get Americans back to work. But the New Deal didn't restore employment. In fact, there was even less work on average during the New Deal than before FDR took office. How can one make this claim? Unemployment reached 25 percent in the Great Depression, and fell steadily until World War II (although there were some bumps up along the way). Ah, but the revisionist position is that unemployment did not fall as much as it should have. And this argument is based on an interesting interpretation of the available data. As Amity Shlaes, currently the premier anti-New Deal historical revisionist writing for a popular audience, explained proudly in her own Wall Street Journal opinion piece in November, "The Krugman Recipe for Depression," a necessary step is to not count as employed those people in "temporary jobs in emergency programs." That means, everyone who got a job during the Great Depression via the Works Progress Administration (WPA) or Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), or any other of Roosevelt's popular New Deal workfare programs, doesn't get counted as employed in the statistics used by Cole, Ohanian and Shlaes. Let us reflect, for a moment, on what the men and women employed by those programs achieved (aside from earning cash to buy food and pay for shelter, of course). In his paper, "Time for a New, New Deal," Marshall Auerback (pointed to by economist James Galbraith) summarizes: The government hired about 60 per cent of the unemployed in public works and conservation projects that planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America, and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York's Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge complex, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown. It also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields. And it employed 50,000 teachers, rebuilt the country's entire rural school system, and hired 3,000 writers, musicians, sculptors and painters, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. In other words, millions of men and women earned a living wage and self-respect and contributed mightily to the national infrastructure. But, according to the statistics as interpreted on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, they were unemployed. Way back in 1976, economist Michael Darby exposed the absurdity of not counting WPA workers as "employed" in his paper "Three-and-a-Half Million U.S. Employees Have Been Mislaid: Or, an Explanation of Unemployment, 1934-1941." More than 30 years ago, Darby observed that correctly counting those 3 and a half million people as employed workers effectively debunked "the 'un-fact' that recovery was extremely slow from 1934 through 1941. From 1933 to 1936, the corrected unemployment rate fell by nearly 5 percentage points per year..." Shlaes dismisses Darby's reappraisal of Great Depression unemployment statistics by arguing that "to count a short-term, make-work project as a real job was to mask the anxiety of one who really didn't have regular work with long-term prospects." Of course, some would argue that "masking the anxiety" of workers who did not know how they were going to feed their children or put a roof over their heads is precisely the job of government in times of great economic turmoil. And that, really, is where the whole project of New Deal revisionism breaks down. The bottom line conservative position on the New Deal is that, theoretically speaking, the economy would have returned to "normal" more quickly if FDR had refrained from interfering with the workings of the free market through his vast array of interventionist programs. Sadly for them, we never got a chance to find out, because the situation in 1933, when Roosevelt took office, demanded government action. Twenty-five percent of the nation was unemployed. Human suffering was immense. If the market had been left to work its problems out all by itself, further suffering in the near term would have been unimaginable. And not just unimaginable -- but also politically unacceptable. If the New Deal actually extended the Great Depression, we might wonder, why was Roosevelt reelected three times? One explanation would be that the general public is an idiot, and I must confess, I've leaned toward that point of view myself after viewing the aftermath of Election Day in the U.S. on a number of occasions over the last three decades. But another explanation could be that a majority of voters experienced material improvements in the quality of their lives as a result of New Deal programs. This is a point of enduring frustration to conservatives, and they've expended vast effort over the years in their attempt to rewrite history and convince us that what our grandparents knew was wrong -- to the point that they've even tried to tell us that the people who built the fantastic Art Deco structures at the high school my daughter is currently attending were "unemployed." I do not think those workers would have agreed.

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The buck stops where?

Wednesday, December 3, 2008
The buck stops where?
by Joan Walsh

I haven't written about President Bush for quite a while. I prefer to look toward the future. But his delusional exit interview with ABC's Charles Gibson made me pay attention again. When Gibson asked Bush what he was "unprepared for" when he became president, Bush gave this rather stunning answer. "Well, I think I was unprepared for war. I didn't campaign and say, 'Please vote for me, I'll be able to handle an attack.'" What an odd, self-pitying outbreak of candor for this strange president. I'm not sure how anyone could run for president and be "unprepared" for war. The job includes the title of commander in chief of the armed forces. It's true, though, that Bush didn't campaign as someone who would quickly start two wars, and commit the U.S. to a belligerent and reckless policy of unilateral preemptive attacks on our enemies based on perceived threats, not hostile actions (that's the "Bush doctrine," in case you're reading, Sarah Palin). This was a man who warned against nation building during the 2000 campaign, who said our foreign policy must be "humble," who seemed opposed to the Clinton administration's interventionist foreign policy whether in partly humanitarian missions like Bosnia, or defensive strikes against Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Osama bin Laden in Sudan. Few people who voted for Bush thought he was gunning to be a war president, based on his campaign rhetoric, so it was an incredible bait-and-switch when he became one. In retrospect, though, it seems clear that he arrived in the White House surrounded by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other twisted neocons who were determined to topple Saddam Hussein given any excuse, or none at all. Certainly the president was being candid in another quite concrete way: He was woefully unprepared for the Iraq war, invading with inadequate planning for the occupation and rebuilding that had to follow the fall of Saddam. Almost 5,000 Americans, and an unknown but much larger number of Iraqi civilians, have died thanks to his lack of preparation. History will prove him right on that score, but it won't be kind to him. Bush made a second stunning admission in his interview with Gibson. "The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq," he said. "A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington, D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess." What a cowardly, buck-passing answer. It was his administration that was responsible for the faulty intelligence; his administration that notoriously "stove-piped" the available evidence to make the case for war, ignoring all facts that contradicted the neocons' theories, crushing any dissent in the Pentagon and intelligence establishment. His administration then sold that corrupt evidence to Congress and browbeat members into authorizing the use of military force on the eve of the 2002 midterm election, by depicting them as traitors and sissies if they raised questions. Now Bush is trying to say he was misled by the "failure" of his own intelligence leaders and Cabinet advisors? What a loser. One last related distortion was Bush's lamenting that he hadn't changed the political tone in Washington. "9/11 unified the country, and that was a moment where Washington decided to work together. I think one of the big disappointments of the presidency has been the fact that the tone in Washington got worse, not better." But it was the Bush administration that changed the tone. On the heels of a brief bipartisan moment after 9/11, Karl Rove and others began laying the groundwork for a 2002 midterm campaign that would use the terror attacks against Democrats, and make sure that anyone who didn't support Bush's military and intelligence policies was smeared as being on the side of al-Qaida. Like the war and the intelligence failure, Bush bears personal responsibility for the ugly tone during his administration, but once again, the buck stops somewhere else. Bush brags to Gibson that he's proud that "I didn't sell my soul for politics" during the eight years of the presidency. If that's true, it's only because he sold it a long time ago. Update: In letters, several readers note an additional falsehood in Bush's interview: His claim that we "had to" invade Iraq because Saddam wouldn't let weapons inspectors in. Of course, Hans Blix and his team had gone into Iraq in late 2002 for the first time since 1998, and found no evidence of WMDs. In March, 2003, Bush demanded they leave before they completed their work so he could commence the invasion. Robert Parry recounts the sequence of events here. "Had we had a few months more [of inspections before the war], we would have been able to tell both the CIA and others that there were no weapons of mass destruction [at] all the sites that they had given to us," Blix told the Associated Press in 2004.

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Feminism's Bastardization

Thursday, September 11, 2008
Zombie feminists of the RNC
by Rebecca Traister



From the article:

In this strange new pro-woman tableau, feminism -- a word that is being used all over the country with regard to Palin's potential power -- means voting for someone who would limit reproductive control, access to healthcare and funding for places like Covenant House Alaska, an organization that helps unwed teen mothers. It means cheering someone who allowed women to be charged for their rape kits while she was mayor of Wasilla, who supports the teaching of creationism alongside evolution, who has inquired locally about the possibility of using her position to ban children's books from the public library, who does not support the teaching of sex education. In this "Handmaid's Tale"-inflected universe, in which femininity is worshipped but females will be denied rights, CNBC pundit Donny Deutsch tells us that we're witnessing "a new creation ... of the feminist ideal," the feminism being so ideal because instead of being voiced by hairy old bats with unattractive ideas about intellect and economy and politics and power, it's now embodied by a woman who, according to Deutsch, does what Hillary Clinton did not: "put a skirt on." "I want her watching my kids," says Deutsch. "I want her laying next to me in bed." Welcome to 2008, the year a tough, wonky woman won a primary (lots of them, actually), an inspiring black man secured his party's nomination for the presidency, and a television talking head felt free to opine that a woman is qualified for executive office because he wants to bed her and have her watch his kids! Stop the election; I want to get off. (read the entire article)

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Did McCain and his team really squander a four-month head start?

It sure did.

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Selective Defenders of Free Expression on Salon.com

Wednesday September 12, 2007 13:43 EST
Selective Defenders of Free Expression
by Glenn Greenwald

According to our country's great warriors, one of the main reasons we wage Glorious War Forever in the Middle East -- not just in Iraq but soon (if Norm Podhoretz's "prayers" are answered) in Iran and maybe Syria and beyond -- is because The Islamofascists pose a threat to Our Freedoms (which Muslims hate). (read the entire article)

To recap:

Censoring offensive Mohammed cartoons = Existential Threat to our Civilization.

Censoring offensive anti-Christian commentary = Glorious Victory in the Culture War.

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Bush the Delusional

Bush on Iraq: "We're kicking ass" A day after the Government Accountability Office reported that the Iraqis have met just three of 18 benchmarks they had agreed to meet, George W. Bush offered a slightly rosier assessment of the war during his visit to Australia today. Asked by Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile to say how things are going in Iraq, the president of the United States declared: "We're kicking ass." -- Tim Grieve

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