James McEnteer : How Intolerance Is Poisoning the Well

Art by Alice Brickner / Getty / Big Questions Online.
Deadly discourse:
How intolerance poisons our well

Most public 'discussion' consists of one side lobbing insults at the other from across an unbridgeable divide. There is little genuine give and take.

By James McEnteer / The Rag Blog / May 30, 2012

Intolerance runs rampant in American public discourse. Blog and article comment threads degenerate quickly into insult and abuse. The most innocuous opinions about almost anything can provoke shrill, scathing attacks. Even fact-based news accounts excite condemnation as biased or irrelevant.

Deep reserves of anger apparently abide in the U.S. population, ready to explode into violent rhetoric at the smallest transgression -- real or imagined -- against the responder’s hobbyhorse, be it guns, religion, sexuality, race, the environment,or whatever else.

Three related phenomena largely account for this inflammatory incivility: a meretricious media, more desperate than ever to survive; irresponsible religious and political figures, willing to enunciate increasingly extreme and outrageous views for high-profile notoriety; and the nature of the internet itself, the most powerful and pervasive system of communication yet devised.

The internet connects everyone to everyone else, conjuring global intimacy. Thanks to cell phones and YouTube, we can all be “in the moment” when a woman lets fly a racist rant in the London underground or a mob storms a public square in Madrid or Cairo or Oakland or a crime occurs somewhere on the planet. Every place appears as near or far as any other, here on our screen.

Modern technology can summon up flash mobs or instant wads of cash to protest or abet incipient events. We can weigh in instantly to “like” or condemn what we see or hear, calling forth responses to our own responses, ad infinitum.

Aided by the anonymity of user names, the level of interchange on comment threads trends downward over time, not up, producing more heat than light. Our sense of familiarity, however illusory, with events or newsmakers, breeds a primal contempt that tends to focus personal and political frustrations into immoderate attacks that in turn provoke others.

Irresponsible political heavyweights also demean our discourse. Mitch McConnell declared that the top priority of Congressional Republicans was to make sure Obama is a one-term president. That’s a pathetic partisan agenda for a so-called major party leader, considering the many challenges we face as a nation and a species.

Of course such a lame and limited ambition is far easier to accomplish than trying to restore employment, boost the economy, reduce military spending, promote environmental health, improve education, etc. etc. But McConnell and his ilk are not really out to better the lot of average Americans. Their goal is to serve their sponsors and masters, who enrich and enable them.

Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham rail against Muslims and homosexuals from pulpits they call “Christian,” though the blind hatred they flaunt contradicts the love and tolerance Jesus Christ actually espoused. Phony Christian bigots like Graham and Robertson -- and the Westboro Baptist Church -- poison our atmosphere and disinhibit their followers to commit acts of violence.

These false prophets spew enmity and discord in the name of religion, like the killers of abortion doctors who consider themselves “pro life,” a murderous irony they have not the eyes to see.

Media feed on conflict as much as the Pentagon does and, like the military, may sometimes provoke it for their own ends. To whip up interest in the “information” they peddle for (decreasing) profit, media amplify the divisive words of bigots, fools, and scoundrels (with someone like Robertson, they get a three-fer) and then play up the predictably outraged responses.

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Network and numerous publications give platforms to political zombies like Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and Sarah Palin, to rouse the faithful and enflame opponents. Murdoch resuscitated Gingrich after his well-deserved political demise, granting him an artificial afterlife.

Murdoch’s largesse enabled the foredoomed Gingrich campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. The ethically impaired former House Speaker made over-the-top remarks that provided provocative headlines, enlivening the deadly primary process, feeding the Murdoch machine.

A recent British government report declared Murdoch unfit to lead a major corporation. But who will stop him? Murdoch is a major polluter who ought to be fined for degrading our atmosphere.

Like the irresponsible political and religious figures they interview, media “personalities” feel a need to top one another or themselves, to raise the decibel level to maintain their visibility. These talking heads give their fans permission to speak and behave outrageously. After he shot an unarmed black teenager to death, George Zimmerman sought out Fox stalwart Sean Hannity for counsel. Why?

The Trayvon Martin killing has become a flashpoint for issues from gun rights to racial profiling. Martin and Zimmerman turned into instant symbols and martyrs for different points of view. Some public figures donned hoodies in support of Martin, while one company does a brisk business marketing rifle targets with a hooded figure in their bull’s eye.

Events like the Trayvon Martin murder are difficult to discuss -- or even to perceive -- on their own terms, devoid of the biased context into which such incidents “fit.” Our preconceptions determine the meanings of everything that is said or done.

Most public “discussion” consists of one side lobbing insults at the other from across an unbridgeable divide. There is little genuine give and take. Thesis and antithesis rarely move toward any synthesis. They merely reenforce entrenched beliefs. Media promote and thrive on this sort of futile noise and conflict, a circus that distracts from the decreasing abundance of bread, enabling business and politics to proceed as usual with minimum interference.

Our lack of civility has consequences. Bullying -- including cyber-bullying -- of school-aged children by their peers (and in some cases, the parents of those peers) causes terrible harm, including suicide and murder. This trickle-down meanness merely follows the examples set by public figures in media and politics who belittle others for their religious preferences or sexual orientation.

With fewer defenses, our children are more likely to suffer the sometimes fatal effects of our toxic emotional environment before the rest of us. Mentally unstable individuals like Jared Loughner, who killed six people and injured 14 in Tucson in 2011, also absorb the free-floating anger around them without a clear sense of what it signifies or where to direct it.

Even adults in traditionally calm corners of this world, such as the fanatical anti-Muslim Norwegian who murdered 77 of his countrymen to avoid multicultural contamination, can be twisted by the overheated sentiments of foaming politicians, amplified by media. Who will take responsibility for such consequences?

There is a high price to be paid for allowing violent, hateful speech to predominate over more rational forms of public discourse. I fear we have only begun to pay it.

[James McEnteer is the author of Shooting the Truth: the Rise of American Political Documentaries (Praeger). He lives in Quito, Ecuador. Read more of James McEnteer's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Lamar W. Hankins : 'The Fox Effect' Poisons Public Discourse

The Fox Effect:
Disinformation that poisons public discourse

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / March 26, 2012

[The Fox Effect, by David Brock, Ari Rabin-Havt, and Media Matters for America (2012: Anchor); Paperback; 336 pp; $15.]

Sometimes education is not the answer, at least if the question is one that involves politics. A 2008 Pew report supports this proposition. What one believes about political issues is determined more by one’s view of the world than by facts.

There is more emotion involved with political beliefs than reasoning says the Pew study and another study by Dan Kahan at Yale University. Researcher and author George Lakoff suggests that people with authoritarian and individualistic orientations are less likely than others are to accept facts that are contrary to their emotional state.

More education does not fix this disconnect. Other researchers from Dartmouth and George Washington University have found that better-educated Republicans are more resistant to facts that aren’t emotionally satisfying than are their less well-educated compatriots.

Examples of this include the widespread (and false) belief among conservatives that the 2010 healthcare bill included “death panels,” the ridiculous proposition that Barack Obama is a Muslim, and the widespread right-wing fabrication that Obama is not a U.S. citizen. We’ll get to global warming in a minute.

Now, we have a new book that argues that the deliberate misrepresentation of facts by Fox News strengthens the conservative views of Republicans and poisons our political discourse.

The title of the new book by Ari Rabin-Hayt, David Brock, and their colleagues at Media Matters for America explains clearly its premise: “The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine.” In case you were wondering whether these authors are nothing but a bunch of lefties and Democrats, the personal journey of David Brock might convince you otherwise.

Brock has worked for The Washington Times and The American Spectator, and he was one of the key people financed by Richard Mellon Scaife to look for heinous crimes committed by Bill and Hillary Clinton in Arkansas in an attempt to destroy Clinton’s presidency. He termed Clarence Thomas’s accuser during Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination hearings, Anita Hill, “a little bit nutty, a little bit slutty” in a book he wrote touching on Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment of her by Thomas.

Before Clinton’s presidency was over, Brock had his own Damascus Road experience and denounced his right-wing colleagues and himself for their sewer antics and dishonesty. Since that time, he has devoted himself to exposing conservative disinformation and misinformation, and was a founder of Media Matters for America.

Brock and Rabin-Hayt’s new book draws from memos leaked by disaffected Fox News employees to show that Fox is not just another news organization, but a propaganda mill whose purpose is to change the Republican Party into a political institution that satisfies the basest instincts of the neoconservatives who embody Fox News.

The Fox News Channel is in a real sense the alter ego of its president, Roger Ailes, who began his political career working for Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush, for whom he produced the misleading, but politically brilliant, Willie Horton ad that shut down any chance Michael Dukakis may have had to become President.

To understand how close Fox News and Roger Ailes are to Republican Party politics, consider that in the week leading up to the first Tea Party events, Fox ran 100 promotional spots, all free. This largess fits in with Ailes’s desire to turn the party over to anti-government, libertarian, neoconservative forces. What Fox supports and promotes influences Republicans’ political beliefs more than the facts do. A clear example of this is the debate about global warming.

A University of Maryland poll shows that Fox News viewers believe overwhelmingly that there is no scientific consensus that we are experiencing man-made climate change. Notice that this proposition is not focused on what the viewers believe about man-made climate change, but on what they believe about the scientific consensus on that matter.

Their views have been so shaped by disinformation and propaganda broadcast by Fox News that they think there is no scientific consensus about climate change, a demonstrably untrue assertion. Now, the scientific consensus could be wrong, but there can be no doubt that such a consensus exists. Only dishonest reporters claim otherwise.

Fox viewers also believe that their taxes have increased under Barack Obama’s presidency, another position easily refuted, but one repeated so often on Fox that its viewers accept it as true. As Ari Rabin-Hayt says, all they need do is look at their own tax returns and they will see this proposition is false.

In a very real sense, Fox News is like the older brother of a friend of mine. When they argued as they were growing up, the older brother would make up facts so that he could win the argument. It didn’t matter to him that what he said was pure make-believe. He insisted that it was true, that he had read it somewhere, or that someone in authority provided the information -- so he could win the argument.

The authors of The Fox Effect acknowledge that Roger Ailes is brilliant as a producer of Fox News. But he has devoted his brilliance to harming the world by poisoning the arena where much public discourse occurs today -- the air waves of cable television.

Fox’s productions are excellent largely because Ailes insists on having high production values, utilizing great graphics and sets. Rabin-Hayt says that Fox News is more visually and auditorily appealing than other cable outlets.

Fox was the originator of the now-ubiquitous crawl -- the news ticker that appears at the bottom of television screens during shows. Ailes created the crawl in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy when the news was coming in too fast to cover in only one way.

According to the authors of The Fox Effect, Fox News presenters and commentators don’t present false information by accident. They do so intentionally. The head of Fox’s news division in Washington, Bill Sammon, has acknowledged that five days before the 2008 election, he went on air and called Obama a socialist even though he knew it wasn’t true.

This false allegation was repeated on 30 Fox segments just before the election. If the essence of good journalism is presenting the truth, what can you say about someone who has acknowledged in writing that he lied for political purposes on a news show?

The authors of The Fox Effect believe that the fundamental problem with Fox News is that it destroys our national debate because its commentators and producers refuse to stipulate what the known facts are.

For instance, we can’t debate about whether the cost of fixing climate change will be worth the expense of transforming our economy in fundamental ways, if that would be necessary to correct the problem of global warming, because Fox (and its adherents) will not stipulate the scientific consensus about the fact that we have man-made climate change.

Whether we should move our economy, for instance, away from carbon-based energy can’t be discussed because Fox will not acknowledge the core facts that would lead to that discussion.

According to the authors, Fox doesn’t necessarily create lies -- like the one about death panels during the health care debate -- but it amplifies and gives a forum to such lies. In Rabin-Hayt’s view, Fox "launders" the lies.

Because Fox’s lies have been exposed, Fox now has as much credibility as a political party has; that is, it is suspect. Fox has been the key propaganda arm of the Republican Party for many years and gave the Tea Party element of the Republicans more cachet than the Tea Party would ever have mustered on its own.

As a letter-writer to The New York Times put it:

"By passing off conservative jihadism as 'fair and balanced' reporting, Ailes and Fox have diminished the journalistic enterprise itself, contributing mightily to a communications universe in which research, facts and dialogue are seen as soft, boring and ineffectual compared with fear-mongering, Bible-thumping and race-baiting. Honest debate becomes impossible, and the entire marketplace of ideas on which a functioning democratic society depends is put at risk."

Just the point made by The Fox Effect.

This is why I have jokingly said that “friends don’t let friends watch Fox News,” at least not without adult supervision.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Political News as Commodity

Screenshot of Rachel Maddow reporting on the phony ACORN media sting during her MSNBC show. Image from Democurmudgeon.
What sells is legitimate:
Political news is a commodity

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / March 6, 2012

“The public version of Andrew was not the version I knew. I won’t miss the public version of Andrew. But the next time I’m walking down the street in New Hampshire, I will think of him, and I will wish I could run into the Andrew Breitbart who I knew.” -- Lawrence O’Donnell, The Last Word, MSNBC, March 2, 2012.

Andrew Breitbart, the despicable electronic journalist of the Right, died on March 2 at the age of 43. Breitbart gained fame for producing short “documentaries” which distorted the image and activities of ACORN, a national organization of community activists. The slander of this grassroots organization led ultimately to its defunding by Congress.

Breitbart prepared and disseminated distorted footage of a speech by Georgia Rural Development Director for the Department of Agriculture Shirley Sherrod leading to her dismissal by the Obama Administration. He constructed a clumsily doctored documentary from a Labor Studies class at the University of Missouri to make it look like the instructors, one of whom was a trade union staffer, were advocating working class revolution.

Breitbart produced vicious lies about people and organizations. The harm he did to the real lives of poor and powerless people in our society in these and other instances is incalculable.

And not only did Breitbart produce venomous news accounts, he became a role model for other so-called journalists who have produced like-minded distorted reportage on venues such as Fox News.

In addition, it is important to recognize that the distorted journalism that pervades Fox News can be found in the work of almost every other major media purveyor, electronic and print, in the United States. And Breitbart was a producer of this distorted journalism and an inspiration for the expansion of it throughout the profession.

So why did Lawrence O’Donnell, who generally is a principled journalist and voice of those victimized by powerful economic and political elites, memorialize Breitbart in such touching ways?

And O’Donnell was not alone. Arianna Huffington and many others took the view that Breitbart, although he presented distorted information that impinged on progressive movements and policies, was passionate about his craft. Several media pundits suggested that Breitbart’s slanderous advocacy journalism, even if misplaced, was a contribution to a new journalism.

Why is it that journalists laud those who produce and disseminate news that destroys organizations and people who do good works? Why are journalists -- who produce news that exacerbates anti-worker, racist, and sexist attitudes and values, or more generally produces pain and suffering -- celebrated by their peers?

Perhaps part of the answer can be found in an analysis of news in modern society. We know that products that people produce and consume have “use value,” that is they provide some concrete and practical purpose which explains why we value them. Food is produced and consumed because we need food to survive. Beyond food, we consume many products because they provide us with comfort and pleasure.

Before the rise of capitalism, workers and peasants produced goods and services for their own use. With the rise of capitalism workers increasingly participated in the production of goods and services for sale in the marketplace. Workers produced not for use but for sale. Virtually every product became a commodity for sale.

In a system of commodity production the sales effort becomes more important than the basic value the goods hold for their producers. As capitalism unfolded over the last 200 years, the production of goods and services became more concentrated in fewer and fewer corporations and financial institutions.

Huge conglomerates organized the production and distribution of goods and increasingly engaged in the process of generating demands for the wants people have in a modern society. In short, ours is a society of mass production and mass consumption. And consumers are vital to its survival and growth.

What does this analysis of the rise of our modern economy mean for journalism? It suggests that at some time in the past, images of our world and knowledge about it were produced and consumed by families and communities for their immediate needs. Over time, large media corporations were created to produce news and knowledge for dissemination among larger and larger populations. News became a commodity.

Media corporations increasingly saw the need to produce news, a commodity, which would be broadly consumed by the people. In other words news, in a world in which 10 media monopolies dominate, required the selling of their product. As the media monopolies competed for customers for their commodities, appeals increased to the base desires, values, and beliefs of a population that already were shaped by racism, sexism, and animosity toward workers and the poor.

Here is where skilled journalist/viral ideologues enter the picture. They applied their skills to the production of news that would entice and increase the appetite for more of the news that privileged scandal, racism, and sexism.

But what about the more rigorous, informed, and "professional" journalists who waxed eloquently about Breitbart’s professionalism despite some of his odious practices? Well, sad to say, virtually all media workers are engaged in the business of producing commodities for sale in the media market. So for them, the Breitbarts of the world are to be admired for their craft, if not their message and impacts on people’s lives.

In the end, the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the media, the 10 media conglomerates that produce one-half of all we read, listen to, and view in news and culture, is a direct result of the fact that our economic system requires the commodification of everything, including news and culture. Andrew Breitbart was an inevitable product of this system.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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National Review's Texas Tall Tale

Texas through the looking glass:
Chamber of Commerce fluff

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / August 7, 2009

See 'Going Alamo,' by Kevin D. Williamson, Below.

Here's a dandy bit of fabricated economic good news from National Review. It is classic Republican POV, and the worst they call dear leader, Gov. Rick Perry, is "a classic conservative hard case who just vetoed a pre-kindergarten spending bill."

This "through the looking glass" reasoning is Chamber of Commerce fluff extolling a Texas with no mention of barrios, death row stats, incredible property taxes and soaring power bills just to note a few obvious omissions. High-rung GOP Leader, Mississippi Governor, Haley Barbour is barely making it even with his state's "punitive income tax system" and even with Toyota and Nissan plants operating in Mississippi the state is in dire shape financially.

Barbour's Republican conservative state leadership has made the poor poorer, kept uneducated still uneducated, while he and his white male cronies remain firmly in control playing to the state's deluded conservative base. Meanwhile Barbour's Washington Lobbying Firm is raking in the moolah.

This article by Kevin Williamson is a classic case of comparing apples to oranges. Let's hear it for the wonderful Republicans and their wonderful leadership and their wonderful ability to forget the disaster of the past eight years!

Going Alamo
By Kevin D. Williamson / July 20, 2009

If you want to know where the future is headed, look where the people are going. And if you want to know where the people are going, check with U-Haul. Here's an interesting indicator, first noted by the legendary economist Arthur Laffer: Renting a 26-foot U-Haul truck to go from Austin to San Francisco this July would cost you about $900. Renting the same truck to go from San Francisco to Austin? About $3,000. In the great balance of supply and demand, California has a large supply of people who are demanding to move to Texas. There's a reason for this.

"Did the greater prosperity in low-tax states happen by chance?" asks Laffer, who studied the issue for a detailed economic report, Rich States, Poor States. "What seems obvious to us appears as right-wing science fiction to many California legislators and pundits. They claim that serious reform of the tax code is unrealistic, that a large state has many duties to fulfill, and that it is irresponsible to call for a return to a 19th century view of the role of government... Not only does Texas lack a highly progressive income tax -- it doesn't have one at all!

"We hasten to add that the last time we checked, Texas still had literate kids, navigable roads and functioning hospitals, which one would think impossible given the hysterical rhetoric coming from defenders of California's punitive tax system. In fact, the Texas success story illustrates everything we have been recommending for California all these years. How do they do that?"

How, indeed?

Texas was among the last states to enter the recession. California is expected to be the last state to leave it. Texas has lots of jobs and not much in the way of taxes. California, the other way around. California has Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Hollywood Republican who presided over enormous expansions of spending and debt. Texas has Rick Perry, a classic conservative hard case who just vetoed a pre-kindergarten spending bill, adding to the record number of vetoes he's handed down as governor. And it's not just Perry -- the story of Texas politics is full of Democrats who would have been too right-wing to be elected as Republicans in Connecticut or Pennsylvania. Things are a little different down south of the Red River.

Governor Perry sums up the Texas model in five words: "Don't spend all the money." Here's what a good long run of small-government, low-tax conservatism has achieved in Texas: Once a largely agricultural state, Texas today is home to 6 of the 25 largest cities in the country, more than any other state. Texas has a trillion-dollar economy that would make it the 15th-largest national economy in the world if it were, as some of its more spirited partisans sometimes idly suggest it should be, an independent country.

By one estimate, 70 percent of the new jobs that were created in the United States in 2008 were created in Texas. Texas is home to America's highest-volume port, the largest medical center in the world, and the headquarters of more Fortune 500 companies than any other state, having surpassed New York in 2008. While the Rust Belt mourns the loss of manufacturing jobs, Texans are building Bell helicopters and Lockheed Martin airplanes, Dell computers and TI semiconductors. Always keeping an eye on California, Texans have started bottling wine and making movies. And there's still an automobile industry in America, but it's not headquartered in Detroit: A couple thousand Texans are employed building Toyotas, and none of them is a UAW member.

Source / National Review (access restricted)

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Mancow on Waterboarding : 'I Would Have Said Anything to Make it Stop'

Mancow on Olbermann. Below, waterboard denier Sean Hannity. Photo by Douglas C. Pizac / AP.
Mancow: Hannity called me after I was waterboarded and said, ‘It’s still not Torture’

By Satyam Khanna / May 27, 2009

With Keith Olbermann Video.

Last month, Fox News’s Sean Hannity claimed he would agree to be waterboarded “for charity…for the troops’s families.” Since then, multiple pundits have challenged Hannity to undergo the torture tactic, yet he has been unusually silent on the subject of waterboarding since.

Last week, right-wing radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller stepped up to the plate and had himself waterboarded to prove that it isn’t torture. Immediately afterwards, Mancow admitted that it was “absolutely torture” and was “way worse” than he expected.

Yesterday, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann interviewed Mancow about his experience under the bucket. “I would have said anything to make it stop,” Mancow said, further confirming that torture does not produce reliable intelligence. “I don’t think drowning is harsh enough. … This is worse. This isn’t gulping for air. This is your brain is shut off.” Mancow said that despite the “horrific” event, Hannity called him afterwards to insist that waterboarding still isn’t torture:

MANCOW: First of all, Sean Hannity called me and said, “It’s still not torture.” I said, “Sean” — he is a friend of mine — “it is torture.” All right. But, look, you are giving 10,000 dollars to the Veterans of Valor.org. So I think you are stand-up guy for doing that.

“I felt the effects for two days. I had chest pains. I told my wife — I have two little kids. We prayed. I said, dear God, help me. I had chest pains. I was so stressed out by this,” Mancow said. Watch it:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Time and again, those who have dared to undergo waterboarding have said it is torture. Mancow, who initially scoffed at the tactic, explained to Olbermann: “Look, I see the video…the sprinkling of the water, big deal. … I was laughing at it. I was willing to prove and ready to prove that this was a joke. And I was wrong.”

Mancow laughed at waterboarding until he tried it himself. Hannity’s fact-free claim that waterboarding is “not torture” might carry more weight if he displayed the courage of Mancow.

Source / Think Progress

Also see Talk Show Host Waterboarded : 'It Was Instantaneous... Absolutely Torture' by John Byrne / The Rag Blog / May 22, 2009

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Racism in the New York Post? Sharpton Spanks the Monkey Cartoon

Cartoon by Sean Delonas in today's New York Post.
'The cartoon in today's New York Post is troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys.' -- Rev. Al Sharpton

By TMZ / February 18, 2009

The Reverend Al Sharpton is putting the smack down on the New York Post -- suggesting racism could be a factor in a political cartoon featured in this morning's edition.

The cartoon (by Sean Delonas) comes in the wake of yesterday's national news story about the cop who shot and killed a rampaging chimp in Connecticut. But the controversy in the comic comes from the dialogue between the two officers -- which reads, "Now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill."

Before most of you woke up, Sharpton already fired off a statement saying, "The cartoon in today's New York Post is troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys. One has to question whether the cartoonist is making a less than casual reference to this when in the cartoon they have police saying after shooting a chimpanzee that "Now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill."

"Being that the stimulus bill has been the first legislative victory of President Barack Obama (the first African American president) and has become synonymous with him it is not a reach to wonder are they inferring that a monkey wrote the last bill?"

Calls to the Post have not been returned.

Source / TMZ

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You Don't Need a Weatherman : George Will and Friends Blast McCain Tactics

George Will calls Sarah Palin John McCain's 'female Sancho Panza.'
Conservative pundits say negative campaign just isn't cutting it.
By Michael C. Moynihan / October 9, 2008

A bit of conservative blowback on the McCain campaign's impotent strategy of making the final weeks of the election about Barack Obama's association with former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers. First up, George Will:

This, McCain and his female Sancho Panza say, is demonstrated by bad associations Obama had in Chicago, such as with William Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist. But the McCain-Palin charges have come just as the Obama campaign is benefiting from a mass mailing it is not paying for. Many millions of American households are gingerly opening envelopes containing reports of the third-quarter losses in their 401(k) and other retirement accounts -- telling each household its portion of the nearly $2 trillion that Americans' accounts have recently shed. In this context, the McCain-Palin campaign's attempt to get Americans to focus on Obama's Chicago associations seems surreal -- or, as a British politician once said about criticism he was receiving, "like being savaged by a dead sheep."

David Frum, who has been scathing in his criticism of the Sarah Palin choice, is similarly baffled by the "chummy with terrorists" line of attack. At his National Review blog, Frum unloads on Team McCain (after assuring readers that he will indeed vote for him):

American voters are staggering under the worst financial crisis since at least 1982. Asset values are tumbling, consumer spending is contracting, and a recession is visibly on the way. This crisis follows upon seven years in which middle-class incomes have stagnated and Republican economic management has been badly tarnished. Anybody who imagines that an election can be won under these circumstances by banging on about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright is ... to put it mildly ... severely under-estimating the electoral importance of pocketbook issues.

We conservatives are sending a powerful, inadvertent message with this negative campaign against Barack Obama's associations and former associations: that we lack a positive agenda of our own and that we don't care about the economic issues that are worrying American voters.

Source / reason.com

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Curbing Their Enthusiasm : Conservatives Souring on Sarah

Gov. Sarah Palin walks along the grounds of the United Nations with Katie Couric on Wednesday.
Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker's call for Palin to withdraw a 'watershed moment'
By Kate Phillips / September 26, 2008

The drip, drip, drip of bad reviews keep falling this week against Gov. Sarah Palin, whose two-day segments of interviews with CBS’ Katie Couric have weakened conservatives’ initial embrace and enthusiasm for the vice-presidential nominee. As if Senator John McCain already hadn’t faced a rough week, which started with conservative columnist George Will bemoaning the Republican candidate’s positions on the economic bailout and suggesting Mr. McCain may be unfit to be president.

Now, conservatives have never warmed to Senator McCain this time around, but they were wowed by Mr. McCain’s selection of Ms. Palin as his running mate and at first, circled the wagons to defend her, despite her lack of foreign policy experience. She talked their values and represented small-town America, something neither ticket had offered to anyone before she surfaced.

But it seems a watershed moment occurred online earlier today when Kathleen Parker, a writer for TownHall.com, reversed her initial support for the Republican vice-presidential nominee and said Ms. Palin should drop out. Put the country first, she basically advised, by saying you need to go take care of your family first.

In a devastating assessment, Ms. Parker writes:

Palin didn’t make a mess cracking the glass ceiling. She simply glided through it.

It was fun while it lasted.

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

And then Ms. Parker winds it up, turning the backlash against women who criticize women on its head:

If Palin were a man, we’d all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she’s a woman — and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket — we are reluctant to say what is painfully true.

What to do?

McCain can’t repudiate his choice for running mate. He not only risks the wrath of the G.O.P.’s unforgiving base, but he invites others to second-guess his executive decision-making ability. Barack Obama faces the same problem with Biden.

Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country.

The National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez chimed in: “I don’t know Sarah Palin. Having missed the last cruise to Alaska, I’ve actually never met her. National Review wasn’t on her list of stops this week in New York. So I can’t pretend to know what her wiring is all about. But I know I like a lot of what I’ve heard her say. I also know a lot of what I like about her could be projection. I’m not where my friend Kathleen Parker is — wanting her to step aside to spend more time with her family and Alaska — but that’s not a crazy suggestion. She’s right to say that something’s gotta change.”

Ms. Parker’s words fell like dead weight on top of earlier columns this week on the right-leaning side of the blogosphere about the McCain-Palin ticket.

In a column on Thursday, conservative Rich Lowry compared Senator McCain to the “proverbial cartoon character over the edge of the cliff, in midair, desperately flapping his arms and somehow maintaining altitude.” Mr. McCain, he continues, has been “making moves that mark him as different, but can be seen as risky or gimmicky.” One of those moves, according to Mr. Lowry, was adding Governor Palin to the Republican ticket:

Does Palin know enough to be a national candidate right now? No, but she can be mostly walled off from the press. Will attacking Obama on Fannie and Freddie open McCain to attack because one of his top aides lobbied for the organizations? Yes, but he can bulldog through it. Is going to Washington going to help much of anything? Probably not, but the symbolism matters. All the unconventional moves risk eroding McCain’s reputation as a steady hand, but the alternative is simply being overwhelmed by the gravitational pull of the public’s desire for change.

And at The American Spectator, Philip Klein twice reviewed Governor Palin’s interviews this week. At first, he said: “Her answer that not supporting a bailout could mean a Great Depression was off message and irresponsible. For the rest of the interview, it was just lots of tired cliches, and random jargon that made it seem as if she was reading off of mental index cards. I know a lot of conservatives like Sarah Palin and always rush to her defense. But it’s absolutely not meant as an insult to say that she simply is not ready to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

But in a second take, Mr. Klein came away a little bit less judgmental about some of her answers, but said he wasn’t swayed away from her not being qualified. Still, he added: “What I am saying is that Palin is in a situation in which she has to field questions on a lot of subjects that she doesn’t know a lot about. Rather than try to spit out rehearsed lines over and over again, she would be better off, as much as possible, to speak in her own words, rooted in her own values, and sense of right and wrong.”

The Times’s David Brooks earlier challenged conservatives who were thrilled by the Palin pick, supporting her “on the grounds that something that feels so good could not possibly be wrong” — even though others have raised serious doubts about her qualifications. In his Sept. 15 column, Mr. Brooks made an argument for the importance of “prudence.” He asked:

“What is prudence? It is the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight.”

So, does Governor Palin have it? Mr. Brooks wrote: “Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.”

[Michael Falcone contributed to this post.]

Source / The Caucus / New York Times political blog

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