When Privileged, "Libertarian" Elephants Fight

1. Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald8m

   I dream of the day when someone will engage this argument without first wildly distorting it beyond recognition http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/05/24/an-islamist-beheading-in-britain-ctd-3/ …

   
   

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2. Andrew Sullivan ‏@sullydish37m

   Greenwald's blindness to the savagery at the heart of Salafism is very hard to understand, let alone forgive: http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/05/24/an-islamist-beheading-in-britain-ctd-3/ …

   
   

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It is the grass that suffers.

Professional Left Podcast #181 *

"On the diffusion of education among the people rest the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions." 

-- Daniel Webster 

* Podcast ends at 1:07:45.  The remaining 17 minutes were erased in honor of the upcoming 41st anniversary of the Rose Mary Stretch. 

Links:

• 
  

Da' money goes here:

Steve Rhodes at The Beachwood

would like your attention for a few minutes while he explains how things work in Chicago.  

For the record, I am a fan of Steve -- both his dedication as a reporter and his muscularity as a writer -- and have met him a few times IRL.  I also have friends who work in the CPS system and I come a family of dedicated teachers and administrators. 

...

In a better world, too, we wouldn't need an elected school board. It's an issue I was once agnostic on, in part because I hadn't really researched the arguments well enough to have what I felt would be a valid opinion. But like many, I now believe that, given Chicago's political culture and the nature of City Hall, it's abundantly necessary. I happen to favor mayoral control of the schools - though I could be persuaded otherwise. But a board appointed by a mayor is a joke. What's the point of having a board, then? Maybe the formula should be mayoral control, which basically means hiring the superintendent, with an elected board. Checks and balances, because yesterday six unelected board members, an unelected superintendent and a mayor overruled an entire city.

This plan is mad, and for the next year and more we'll be seeing a steady stream of stories recounting one disaster after the next. Children will be hurt. And neighborhoods will be see more devastation.

And at some point, a new CPS administration will come in and tell us that the previous administration did it all wrong, just like this one is saying now. They all say that so they can have their own claim to greatness as they stamp their ticket for the next job. Each succeeding administration, of course, is comprised of people from the same political circle. They're all pals, and they never speak up in real time. (The real question, then, is where were you, David Vitale?) But we'll be told the status quo is no longer acceptable, as it was in the day when they closed 50 schools. And they'll ask where the parents and teachers were. Well, we saw where they were yesterday, and where they've been all along, begging for mercy, pleading for reason, crying for justice, believing that facts could win the day. But this is Chicago. Brute force wins the day here. This is not a fact-based community.

Also for the record it would be fair to say that, broadly speaking, the syndrome he describes played no small part in my decision to move away.

Nothing but sad going on here.

Something Something Whig Something Something Burke, Ctd.

 

Mr. Sullivan continues his demented, long-running performance of "Something Something Whig Something Something Burke" at the Theater of Conservative Make-Believe, once again putting Mr. Potato-head eyes on the steaming turd that is Modern Conservatism and pretending it's really a misunderstood Colonel Steve Austin action figure just itching to bust out of its box and put its Bionic Burke Power Arm to work saving the world.

Which is where my libertarianism cedes to conservatism. At some point, freedom must be tempered if its impact undermines the very social contract that allows it to exist. The inequality we are experiencing as a function of globalization, technology, recession and a tax system so complex it beggars understanding is a real and direct threat to our social coherence and stability as a democratic society. It seems to me conservatives should be among the first to recognize this danger – as Bismarck and Disraeli once did – and forge a public policy to counter it.

This conservatism would embrace universal healthcare as a bulwark of democratic legitimacy in an age of such extremes; it should break up the banks and bring back Glass-Steagall; it should drastically simplify the tax code, ridding it of special interest deductions; it should construct an international agreement to prevent the egregious and disgusting tax avoidance of a company like Apple; and it should seek to invest and innovate in education and infrastructure.

Some of this inequality cannot be stopped, the globalizing forces behind it are so strong. But mitigating its damage is a real challenge. And conservatives who believe that we are one nation should rise to it.

Busting up banks? Universal health care? Spending real money on infrastructure and education?  As pillars of Conservatism?

Somewhere in the wilds of Vermont, Bernie Sanders is laughing hard enough to shart maple syrup into orbit.

It is in the baroque grandiosity of the lies Mr. Sullivan tells himself about Conservatism that he is at his most Conservative.

Something Something Bismarck Something Something Disraeli.

There Is Still A Club

You are still not in it:

...

 President Obama held a private meeting with top national security journalists on Thursday afternoon following his national security policy address at the National Defense University in Washington, POLITICO has learned.

Present at the meeting were Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist; Gerald Seib, the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau chief; Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor of the Washington Post; David Igantius, the Washington Post columnist; Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic correspondent and Bloomberg View columnist; and Joe Klein, the Time Magazine columnist.

The meeting, which was scheduled to last for one hour but lasted for two, was held in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.

President Obama also met earlier this week with a number of progressive journalists, including the Post's Ezra Klein, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, and MSNBC's Jonathan Capehart.

It is rumored that David Brooks was invited but was too humble to attend.

Waiting For The Miracle

Back a million years ago during the darkest days of the Age of Commander Cuckoo Bananas, we Liberals used to make a big deal of the fact that it was gonna take a generation to undo all of the destruction wrought by eight years of the Bush Administration;s pandimensionally ruinous fuckuppery.  They had pulverized everything they had touched into a poisonous snarl of barbed-wire-botulism-and-dynamite and they had left behind a cohort of dead-eyed  dead-ender fanatics fanatically dedicated -- as a matter of standard operating policy -- to making every shitty situation infinitely worse by any means necessary.

Maybe some people were under the impression that that this "It will take decades" talk as merely the rhetorical pinstriping of bloggers who had to SHOUT to be heard over the din of Republican sappers demolishing the republic.

It was not.  

This was never going to be easy.  

There never was a Big Wooden Timejump Wheel down in the basement that would turn it all around overnight if we just pushed hard enough on the king spoke.  This was never going to happen without crushing disappointments from our own leaders, relentless sabotage from the Right, and understandable exhaustion and despair and contempt from within our own ranks as every couple of tiny steps forward seemed destined to be immediately followed by some bit of dumbfuck backsliding calibrated specifically to demoralizing the base.

It was never going to be easy, but it is at least possible that we made a small step in the right direction today.  Charlie Pierce turns an unjaundiced but case-hardened eye on President Obama's speech today and comes away with some unsparingly realistic observations:

... Let us be honest with ourselves as a political people. Had Barack Obama run for president completely on the platform laid out above — not piecemeal, like closing Gitmo or restraining wiretaps — and had he run for president by divesting himself fully of the prevailing momentum from that rage and that fear that still existed in 2008, then he every likely would not have found enough people in this country to vote to make him president. We are the people who strung the tightrope on which he now walks, and on which every president after him will walk as well. That's why half the speech defended what he'd done, while the other half tried to define the limitations of what he can do.

So the speech came down to little more than an attempt to find an exit strategy for an eternal war. We did X, because all the alternatives were worse. We will try to do Y. but maintain our right to do Z, if necessary. The global war on terror always was the vehicle through which conundrums were produced that presidents would have to solve. His predecessor didn't try to solve them because he didn't see them as conundrums at all. We rewarded that view by re-electing him. Now, at the very least, we have a president who recognizes that he's in a box on this kind of thing.

We will never elect a president on a platform that he will weaken the office, and that also means giving back powers only recently acquired and exercised. If that were the case, then George W. Bush would have been a one-term president. The speech today was probably the best for which we could hope. What was even more clear is that he has no intention of letting Congress off the hook, either...

I know it must have hurt you
It must have hurt your pride
To have to stand beneath my window
With your bugle and your drum,
And me I'm up there waiting
For the miracle, for the miracle to come.

Froomkin Comes Alive

Back in 2007, Dan Froomkin posted this informal and very helpful list of rules for journalists who want to practice their craft professionally and honorably.

Here are some parts of it:

You Can’t Be Too Skeptical of Authority

• Don’t assume anything administration officials tell you is true. In fact, you are probably better off assuming anything they tell you is a lie.

• Demand proof for their every assertion. Assume the proof is a lie. Demand that they prove that their proof is accurate.

• Just because they say it, doesn’t mean it should make the headlines. The absence of supporting evidence for their assertion -- or a preponderance of evidence that contradicts the assertion -- may be more newsworthy than the assertion itself.

• Don’t print anonymous assertions. Demand that sources make themselves accountable for what they insist is true.

...

Be Particularly Skeptical of Secrecy

• Don’t assume that these officials, with their access to secret intelligence, know more than you do.

• Alternately, assume that they do indeed know more than you do – and are trying to keep intelligence that would undermine their arguments secret.

Watch for Rhetorical Traps

• Keep an eye on how advocates of war frame the arguments. Don’t buy into those frames unless you think they’re fair.

• Keep a particular eye out for the no-lose construction. For example: If we can’t find evidence of WMD, that proves Saddam is hiding them.

• Watch out for false denials. In the case of Iran, when administration officials say “nobody is talking about invading Iran,” point out that the much more likely scenario is bombing Iran, and that their answer is therefore a dodge.

Don’t Just Give Voice to the Administration Officials

• Give voice to the skeptics; don’t marginalize and mock them.

• Listen to and quote the people who got it right last time: The intelligence officials, state department officials, war-college instructors and many others who predicted the problem we are now facing, but who were largely ignored.

• Offer the greatest and most guaranteed degree of confidentiality to whisteblowers offering information that contradicts the official government position. (By contrast, don’t offer any confidentiality to administration spinners.)

Look Outside Our Borders

• Pay attention to international opinion.

• Raise the question: What do people in other countries think? Why should we be so different?

• Keep an eye out for how the international press is covering this story. Why should we be so different.

...

Encourage Public Debate

• The nation is not well served when issues of war and peace are not fully debated in public. It’s reasonable for the press to demand that Congress engage in a full, substantial debate.

• Cover the debate exhaustively and substantively.

Write about Motives

• Historically, the real motives for wars have often not been the public motives. Try to report on the motivations of the key advocates for war.

• Don’t assume that the administration is being forthright about its motives.

• If no one in the inner circle will openly discuss their motives, then encourage reasonable speculation about their motives.

...

It's a pretty good list to which I would only add a few, small tweaks and definitions.

First, a leaker is not necessarily a whistleblower, and neither of them is a journalist.

Wikipedia tells me that a "whistleblower":

...  is a person who tells the public or someone in authority about alleged dishonest or illegal activities (misconduct) occurring in a government department or private company or organization. The alleged misconduct may be classified in many ways; for example, a violation of a law, rule, regulation and/or a direct threat to public interest, such as fraud, health/safety violations, and corruption. Whistleblowers may make their allegations internally (for example, to other people within the accused organization) or externally (to regulators, law enforcement agencies, to the media or to groups concerned with the issues).

On the other hand, "leaking" is a more generic term and does not necessarily involve disclosing misconduct.

"To disclose without authorization or official sanction."

All things being equal, getting even with your boss for denying you a promotion by telling a gossip columnist she is screwing around on her husband is certainly a "leak" but hardly qualifies as blowing the whistle on dishonesty or misconduct.  Under this definition, Karl Rove was certainly a "leaker" for outing Valerie Plame (although to be fair, being a sociopath,  he probably considered himself a do-gooding whistleblower as well.)

Second, starting with the fact that abridging the "free press" is specifically prohibited by the United States Constitution while "telling a reporter about all the weed they're smoking down at the post office" is not, going after a leaker or whistleblower is not in any way comparable to going after a journalist. 

Depending on the context of your actions, boosting your colleague's diary or recording the drunken blurtings of some DOL middle manager without their knowledge or copying a million random Top Secret government documents while under military contract and passing it on to a reporter may make you a hero or a villain or just a dick...but it also might make you a criminal.  The reporter who receives your purloined secrets has a pretty comprehensive first amendment right that should protect them under almost every circumstance: you, on the other hand, have very limited protections for handing over those secrets: 

Under most US federal whistleblower statutes, in order to be considered a whistleblower, the federal employee must have reason to believe his or her employer has violated some law, rule or regulation; testify or commence a legal proceeding on the legally protected matter; or refuse to violate the law.

In cases where whistleblowing on a specified topic is protected by statute, US courts have generally held that such whistleblowers are protected from retaliation. However, a closely divided US Supreme Court decision, Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006) held that the First Amendment free speech guarantees for government employees do not protect disclosures made within the scope of the employees' duties.

Third, I would revise Mr. Froomkin's editorial choice to wrap his rules around the relationships between journalists and "the administration"/"administration officials" and change it to "authority". The relationship between reporters and any "authority" can become corrupt and damaging to the republic whether that authority is the White House, Wall Street, the Koch Brothers, G.E., Rupert Murdoch or the Rand Paul Administration-in-waiting. 

Finally I would ask what if any real-world consequences should be visited on people who call themselves journalists but flamboyantly flout Mr. Froomkin's rules?   

Should Judith Miller have been able to claim journalistic protection for helping Dick Cheney lie us into a war?  

Was Jeff Gannon a journalist?  If not, why not?

Is James O'Keefe a journalist?  

Is Sean Hannity?  Is Rush Limbaugh?  

If I decide to start tossing unsubstantiated slander around as fact because an anonymous source whispers it in my ear, do I get to be considered a journalist? 

And would another blogger ethics panel finally clear all of this up?

Hercules Said I Should Read This

Great article.CLARK WHELTON Death by Media President Obama’s current woes and his cozy relationship with the... fb.me/28BufYcRh
— Kevin Sorbo (@ksorbs) May 22, 2013

So I did.  

Here's a little taste:

CLARK WHELTON

Death by Media

President Obama’s current woes and his cozy relationship with the press

21 May 2013

Revelations concerning Benghazi, the IRS, and government probing of the Associated Press make it increasingly clear that Barack Obama was led astray by his friends in the media. They intended no harm to the president, needless to say. But by withholding the criticism that prods public officials into doing a better job, by choosing not to print negative stories and commentaries about the Obama administration, the press corps tempted the president and his staff with visions of invincibility. The pro-Obama news crew—with a boost from the Nobel Peace Prize committee—confirmed the president’s exalted view of himself. They are in part responsible for encouraging Obama to think that he could tamper with the truth about Benghazi and get away with it....

And Hercules was right -- it is a "great article"!  Mr. Wheldon's article has everything:  paranoia, peevishness, free-floating rage against sinister, unnamed "mainstream editors, editorial writers, and journalists" and all done without ever troubling his busy readers with things like "evidence" in the form of, say, a link to a single example of who specifically "they" might be or what "they" specifically did and when and where they did it.

Instead, Mr. Whelton shares his butthurtedness at "late-night talk-show hosts" for making fun of Conservatives for being whiny, peevish, paranoid dolts, which admittedly is unfair on a "nuking legless bunnies in a teacup" level of pure lack of sportsmanship, but seriously, Mr. Whelton, if you want people to stop mocking you as failed, mentally underclocking losers who obsessively hang on every lie that comes out of Limbaugh’s and Beck’s mouths then stop being failed, mentally underclocking losers who obsessively hang on every lie that comes out of Limbaugh’s and Beck’s mouths.

By way of example of what I am talking about, let me cite a couple of examples by Mr. Clark Whelton which he has thoughtfully located in the very same "great article" Hercules told me I should read:

Last September, when Mitt Romney raised questions about Benghazi, the mainstream media accused the Republican presidential challenger of “politicizing” the issue. Taking their leads from Democratic press releases, they kept the spotlight on Romney’s supposed missteps, giving the Obama administration time to camouflage a murderous terror attack as a spontaneous riot.

Yes, some people did think it unseemly for Willard Romney to swoop into the middle of a foreign policy crisis before the ashes had cooled to accuse the Obama Administrations of the worst things imaginable.  But Mr. Romney's real problem was not that he "raise questions" so much as he "stepped on his own dick on national teevee in front of 100 million witnesses and got called on it".  Which happened precisely because instead of heeding professionals who knew enough to stay away from Sean Hannity talking points while the cameras are rolling, the Romney campaign instead decided to take advice from failed, mentally underclocking losers who obsessively hang on every lie that comes out of Limbaugh’s and Beck’s mouths.

Mr. Whelton also find overwhelming evidence of the Librul Media's perfidy in that:

They hounded and harassed Sarah Palin—author Joe McGinnis even moved next door to her home—determined to destroy someone they perceived as a threat to Obama’s power.

At which point I just put away my earnest charts and cool graphs and 1,000 posts demonstrating how fatally encrusted with genuinely, dangerously batshit crazy Conservatives the halls of congress and the columns and cameras of the mainstream media have become.  I put it all down and shrug because people like Mr. Whelton and his pal Hercules have sailed right on past the ideological event horizon beyond which they can be reached.  

Because the ticking of that terrible bomb in their heads drowns out everything else (from me, a year ago):

To be an American Conservative means that every day terrifying reality impinges a little more; every day history conspires a little harder to flick sparks at the detonation cord which will obliterate you.  And since all compromise is surrender, and surrender sets off the bomb, rather than sue Reality for peace, they have left themselves no choice but to scrape together anything that might ignite the fuse --  all of their bigotries, all of their paranoid delusions, all of their crackpot notions of good and God and government -- into one, big pile, and defend it all collectively as a Holy Cause.

And never look back.

Being bigoted, atavistic assholes is the hill they have decided to die on.

And nothing is ever going to turn them around.

Because, like Roger Ailes circa 1970ish, they are absolutely convinced that because the media does not uncritically regurgitate their paranoid conspiracies theories back to them it must therefor follow that the media has been captured and occupied by the Dirty Hippie Commie Horde:

The Idea Behind Fox News Channel Originated in the Nixon White House

A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News" (read it here) is an unsigned, undated memo calling for a partisan, pro-GOP news operation to be potentially paid for and run out of the White House. Aimed at sidelining the "censorship" of the liberal mainstream media and delivering prepackaged pro-Nixon news to local television stations, it reads today like a detailed precis for a Fox News prototype. From context provided by other memos, it's apparent that the plan was hatched during the summer of 1970. And though it's not clear who wrote it, the copy provided by the Nixon Library literally has Ailes' handwriting all over it—it appears he was routed the memo by Haldeman and wrote back his enthusiastic endorsement, refinements, and a request to run the project in the margins.
...

Because this is not their world.
And they are very disappointed.

As We Approach The Eighth Anniversary

Of Judith Miller being carted off the L'Hotel Graybar to protect her anonymous source in the Valerie Plame case, it is an interesting thought-experiment to imagine how different this would all have looked --

Novak: ‘I Don’t Think I Hurt Valerie Plame’ And I Would Out Her Again Because The Left ‘Tried To Ruin Me’

By Ben Armbruster on Dec 3, 2008 at 10:51 am

During a recent interview with the National Ledger, conservative columnist Robert Novak was asked if he would reveal Valerie Plame Wilson’s secret CIA identity if he could go back and do it all over again. Novak noted that he has previously said he “should have ignored” what he had been told about Plame, but he now claims he is “much less ambivalent“:

NOVAK: I’d go full speed ahead because of the hateful and beastly way in which my left-wing critics in the press and Congress tried to make a political affair out of it and tried to ruin me. My response now is this: The hell with you. They didn’t ruin me. I have my faith, my family, and a good life. A lot of people love me — or like me. So they failed. I would do the same thing over again because I don’t think I hurt Valerie Plame whatsoever. But of course, Plame was “hurt” because of Novak’s column — she no longer has a career as a covert CIA agent. Moreover, Plame has said that she feared for her and her family’s lives after Novak revealed her identity.

But Novak ignoes the point that Plame’s outing had broader national security implications. In fact, Plame’s CIA job was to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and as one former senior intelligence officer put it, the leak made “it harder for other CIA officers to recruit sources.”

...

-- to someone who believed that

...Bob Novak was just an intrepid reporter trying to do the important work of a free press in a democracy.

...Judith Miller was a First Amendment Hero who was persecuted by a vile, overreaching federal gummint

... As Miller's role in the CIA leak probe was revealed, a certain schadenfreude took hold in Times newsrooms both in New York and in Washington, which have been seething over the Miller saga.

In a special prosecutor's quest to find the culprit who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, Miller, 57, wound up spending 85 days in jail earlier this year rather than name the source who mentioned Plame's identity to her. She served time, she said, because she did not believe her source had sufficiently waived the confidentiality agreement between them.

It was all for the sake of the First Amendment rights of journalists, she says -- which prompted eyes to roll among some of her colleagues at the Times, who believe she really went to jail because she needed to resuscitate her professional image. Miller had been battered by earlier allegations of bias in support of the Bush administration's contention, since discredited, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. (She became so controversial, in fact, that in late 2003 the Times prohibited her from writing about WMD.)...

...Karl Rove was merely a brave whistle-blower trying to get the word out about the dangerous goings on inside a run-amok branch of the federal government.

Were the world a debate tournament, I could vehemently and craftily defend each and every one of these points against the pro-secrecy troglodytes who merely pretend to cherish the Constitution but clearly do not love liberty or the First Amendment as much as I do.

Then I could pack up my sample case, go on to the next round, and vehemently and craftily argue the exact opposite if that was the luck of the draw.

The world is not a debate tournament.

So How's That Surge Working?

Five years ago, the now-defunct "Group News Blog" put together this helpful video explaining the American military strategy of temporarily adding more troops to Iraq while at the same time bribing the people who were shooting at us to shoot at other people until we could make it out the door known "The Surge".

Five years and thousands of uncontrollable public Neoconservative erections later, this is what post-Surge Iraq now looks like:

Attacks in Iraq kill over 40, sectarian tensions high

By Kareem Raheem

BAGHDAD, Iraq (Reuters) - A series of bomb and gun attacks across Iraq killed more than 40 people on Tuesday, a day after over 70 died in violence targeting majority Shi'ites that has stoked fears of all-out sectarian war with minority Sunnis.

Nearly 300 people have been killed in the past week as sectarian tensions, fuelled by the civil war in neighboring Syria, threaten to plunge Iraq back into communal bloodletting.

Ten years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, Iraq's Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds have yet to find a stable power-sharing deal and violence is again on the upswing.

In the biggest single incident on Tuesday, a car bomb exploded near a Sunni mosque in the Abu Ghraib area of western Baghdad killing 11 people and wounding 21, police and medics said.
...

No word on whether the horrific violence and ongoing failure of basic civil institutions has once again delayed completion of the President George W. Bush Some Grand Square in downtown Baghdad.

We Join Professor David Brooks' Humility Class Already In Progress... -- UPDATE

So America's Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual decided to use Teh Googles to pad out his Yale class on Humility:

What Our Words Tell Us

By DAVID BROOKS

About two years ago, the folks at Google released a database of 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. You can type a search word into the database and find out how frequently different words were used at different epochs.

The database doesn’t tell you how the words were used; it just tells you how frequently they were used...

...

The Kesebirs identified 50 words associated with moral virtue and found that 74 percent were used less frequently as the century progressed. Certain types of virtues were especially hard hit. Usage of courage words like “bravery” and “fortitude” fell by 66 percent. Usage of gratitude words like “thankfulness” and “appreciation” dropped by 49 percent.

Usage of humility words like “modesty” and “humbleness” dropped by 52 percent. Usage of compassion words like “kindness” and “helpfulness” dropped by 56 percent. Meanwhile, usage of words associated with the ability to deliver, like “discipline” and “dependability” rose over the century, as did the usage of words associated with fairness. The Kesebirs point out that these sorts of virtues are most relevant to economic production and exchange.

...

First, we must all agree agree right now that nobody is going mess up Bobo's latest Pet Theory scam by mentioning that words like, say, "Pride" and "Prejudice", "Vanity" and "Fair", "Great" and "Expectations", "Crime" and "Punishment", and "The" and "Idiot" probably showed up a lot more in the literature after the 18th century than before 18th century for reasons that had nothing to do with humility, freedom, Benghaaaaazi or, for that matter, the relative woodiness or tinniness of the words themselves.

Also don't mention that sheer number of books being vomited out by the publishing industry in the 20th century almost certainly skewed the results beyond salvation, as does the fact that the tonnage of books being produced does not necessarily have any relationship to the number of readers or depth of influence any give book may have.

Second, for the sheer chutzpah on display in converting an afternoon farting around on the computer into a way to burn three hours of class time ("'Humility' down. 'Twerking' up.  Discuss!"), bravo, Mr. Brooks.  Bravo!

But let us not tarry, because there is so much more to see!

For example, as some of you may know, America's Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual only landed that gig teaching Humility to Elis because several years ago the Sulzberger family had the bright idea of giving him a job for life drizzling 800 words of room-temperature verbal tapioca into the op-ed page of America's Newspaper of Record twice a week.  For awhile, Mr. Brooks got by on his new job by basically doing the kind of wingnut scut-work that Bloody Bill Kristol had been paying him to do his previous job --  penning paeans to the unalloyed awesomeness of George W. Bush, bashing Liberals for being cluelessly or unpatriotically  or antisemitic or mulishly or doltishly wrong about things like economy and Iraq, etc.

But then things got bad.

Then they got very bad.

Then Reality itself reached out and slapped George Bush's dick out of Mr. Brooks' mouth, at which point America's Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual burned out his brakes and clutch frantically trying to veer away from the Mainstream Media's suddenly collapsing main story line -- "Liberals are awful and wrong about everything!" -- and onto the Mainstream Media's New!And!Improved! mother road -- "Isn't it sad how everyone on the Right and Left both get everything equally wrong every time!" -- before the paint on the "Both Sides Do It" mile markers had even dried.

And by God he did it.

He did it by dint of sheer, brute repetition -- sticking hell-or-high-water to his story that Conservatives saved America from the pot-smoking, sexytime Hippie Peril of the 1960s but also might have gotten a wee bit drunk at the V-L Day party and said a few impolitic things, but hey, don't we all? -- and by making sure that he never found himself in the presence of anyone who would ever ask him any long, tricky questions about the Bad Old Days when he made a living putting his less-than-humble boot in to the Liberals, Mr. Brooks found a second career for himself as Chief Defender of a Centrist faith which only a few years earlier he repeatedly and roundly mocked during his first career.

Which is why, to this very day, in column after column, you will find Our Mr. Brooks hewing fanatically to the strategy which bought him his mansion:  making sure every single fucking hobbyhorse he mounts comes with a Centrist Trojan crouching inside,

Including the one he rode in on today:.

This story, if true, should cause discomfort on right and left. Conservatives sometimes argue...

Liberals sometimes argue ...

After which, to avert the possibility that some future smartass might come along and add this column to the Great Big Pile Of Things David Brooks Has Gotten Terribly Wrong, Mr. Brooks used half of his final paragraph to inform his readers that he had just completely wasted their time by completely negating the premise on which the entire column was based:

Evidence from crude data sets like these are prone to confirmation bias. People see patterns they already believe in. Maybe I’ve done that here...

Because that's how you do it in the NBA!

UPDATE:

Robin Lakoff, professor of linguistics at Berkley makes a similar point without saying "fuck" nearly as often:

...

And if the story Brooks would like to tell is true, this shift in word usage would neatly and clearly tell us that liberalism has changed our characters in negative ways. The problem is that, even granting that the facts cited by Brooks are unequivocally correct, they cannot be used to draw Brooks’ conclusions. The link between linguistic form and real-world reference and function is tricky and complicated. Yes, sometimes the appearance of new words, and the vanishing of old ones, can tell a story about social and political change over time: when was the last time you heard “spinning jenny”? And how often did you encounter “blogosphere” 20 years ago? In cases like these, it’s easy to see the connection between usage share and cultural importance. But when one applies the same tests to words that do not refer to technological innovation or political structure and the like, the test is not nearly so reliable.

Consider “racism.” It is first attested, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the first decade of the 20th century. By Brooks’ standard, that would imply that racism, the attitude and behavior, only came into being then, and therefore only then needed a word to describe it. Similarly, “sexism,” in its current sense, is only attested in the mid-1960s. What should we make of that?

Actually, the appearance of these words at those times is a positive indicator. Racism and sexism have been endemic in our species as far back as the historical record allows us to determine, and probably further. But it was only in the 20^th century that people first began to see these kinds of behaviors as something other than normal and inevitable, and therefore worthy of naming and eventually changing. To name these evils was to show them as aberrant and evil, something that could be recognized as peculiar and changeable.

...

While "Living Anthropologically" points out (via Tyler Cowen) that I have been a fucking moron for  actually sweating over what I write David Brooks these last eight years when making a post out of simply copy/pasting six paragraphs of a David Brooks column and buttoning it with "Here is more, interesting throughout" can yeild 92 comments in one day.

Some of Our Disputes

Go back awhile.

As this 2006 post from the late Steve Gilliard illustrates:

Wednesday, August 02, 2006 

It matters to some people

Billmon posted this up and it bugs the shit out of me.

A "Bad" Sign............................

I used to argue that progressives in this country had no choice but to support the Democrats -- even pathetic frauds like Howard Dean and inept Thurston Howell III clones like John Kerry. I used to quote Frederick Douglas's despairing comment about what the Republican Party of his day represented for African Americans: the rock; all else is the sea.

Maybe that was true, once. But I've finally come to realize that in modern-day America there is no rock -- just a vast, featureless expanse of reactionary ocean, like something from the set of Waterworld, except without a gilled Kevin Costner.

So here's my confession: At this point I really don't give a flying fuck whether the Democrats take the House or the Senate back. No, wait, that's not true. The truth is I hope they don't. It wouldn't save us from what's coming down the road, in the Middle East and elsewhere. It wouldn't force President Psychopath to change course or seek therapy. But it would make sure that the "left" (ha ha ha) gets more than its fair share of blame for the approaching debacle.

That may well be the natural role of the Democratic Party in our one-and-a-half party system, but I don't want any part of it any more. Which means that when I say it's a bad sign (consensus opinion always being wrong) that Charlie Cook now thinks the Republicans are likely to lose their House and/or Senate majorities in November, I just mean that it's a bad sign for the Democratic Party and its professional hangers on.

For the rest of us, and for whatever is left of this country's soul, it doesn't really matter. We've already lost.

You know, if you have a good job and a nice house, you can think this way.

If you're making minimum wage, you need a Democratic Congress, if you want to be treated with stem cells, if you want to get an abortion.

It's easy to sit back and say nothing will happen to Bush, because nothing will happen to you. But if you're fighting with the VA . it fucking matters. If your kid is in Iraq, it fucking matters. Fuck the shit which comes with Bush, there are people who need the help, even minimal help, a Democratic Congress can provide.

A lot of nice, middle class progressives forget that the fight isn't for them. You think for one second I believe Ned Lamont knows what it's like to be working class, much less working class and black, living in a New Haven housing project?

What I know is that Joe Lieberman turned his back on those people and put his foot on their necks in so many ways I've lost count. It's their kids dying in Iraq, coming home to a fucked up VA, not getting their benefits.

At least Lamont wants to listen and Lieberman stopped long ago.

You better remember that if you see a vast sea, there are some folks drowning and the question is whether you save them or leave them to their fate.

When those Coast Guard pilots and rescue swimmers flew over New Orleans, they could have said, shit, too many wires, too many unknowns, let's get some boats for them. Instead, they jumped in the water and started saving people.

Which is what we are tasked to do. We don't have time to worry about Bush, there are people who need a government not at their throats. They don't need it in theory, they don't need it in some undefined future, they need it today, and if not today, tomorrow. Those Wal Mart workers need real health insurance, and the GOP isn't going to give it to them.

There are real people who need what a Democratic Congress can provide and who need it as soon as they can get it.

Such is the nature of family fights,

Clueless Gay Tory Vows To Continue Being Obnoxiously Oblivious Because Something Something Burke Something Something Freedom

Over in University of the Internet's Alienist Phrenology Department, there are only two things more hilarious than America's Most Insufferable Privileged White Conservative Gay Catholic Tory Public Intellectual continuing to defiantly beat that Race Science thunder-drum no matter what.

One is watching the apparently eternally-patient Mr. Ta-Nahesi Coates take the role of Mr. Sullivan's extremely polite downstairs neighbor who asks his former colleague if he couldn't maybe tune his equipment up a little and maybe turn the volume down just a notch or two, to which Mr. Sullivan deafly replies over the din of this own racket, "LOUDER?  SURE, I CAN PLAY IT LOUDER!"

The other is watching Mr. Sullivan explains to us po' liberal simpletons that he is doing this all for our own good:

I do not doubt that many of those pursuing this question are doing so for ugly reasons. Probably a hefty majority. That should make one especially leery of their arguments and make one very aware of the need to use empiricism almost pathologically. But, of course, one reason why this area is so clogged with racists is that non-racists don’t want to go there. My worry is that not going there will only rebound against the case that such data should not in any way be used for public policy. If affirmative action is finally abolished, we may be able to get race as an identifier out of policy discussions altogether. But what happens if affirmative action goes and we have universities that are overwhelmingly Asian-American and Jewish? What will liberals do then?

Wish you'd stop bein' so good to us, Cap'n