Do you have to be a moron or a nutjob to be a right-winger? No, but at least that would give you an excuse

We don't blame crazy people when they talk nonsense, do we? Or people who are truly too dumb to know better? That's the basis of my plan for restoring a measure of sanity to public discourse.

"This book and books like it destroy our political culture, undermine fair elections, inhabit the slippery space between politics and slander. . . .

"These books destroy civic debate on purpose -- and are fundamentally at odds with democracy. The goal of Corsi's project is not to discuss facts -- it is to destroy the very possibility of discussion by implying that a Presidential candidate is a sleeper-cell terrorist -- and doing so in the context of a huge broadcast media effort to convince the country of the same thing.

"That is not just factually wrong. It is wildly immoral. Whether or not Corsi published lies is not even half the discussion we should be having."

-- Jeffrey Feldman, in an August 2008 Frameshop post,
"What America Needs to Hear About Jerome Corsi"

by Ken

I've lifted the above quotation from my colleague Jeffrey Feldman straight out of a previous post, because it made a point that I hadn't seen made so explicitly and that bears directly on the subject "I wrote about earlier this week: the loony Right's compoundly and unabashedly delusional" discovery" that Hitler was a leftist -- just like President Obama! (It's a network of delusions so complex and so contrary-to-fact that it's almost impossible to discuss. Which is what reminded me of Jeffrey's point: that the Right's leap into a free-for-all where they are in no way accountable to facts has as its goal "to destroy the very possibility of discussion."

When one party to the "discussion" feels free to say any damned thing that comes into its head, asserting for all its blitherings the dignity of claims to fact, there is truly no possibility of discussion. And as Jeffrey suggested, it's hard to believe that this isn't the intention.

The piece I wrote earlier this week was "How the 'Hitler twisters' have helped me understand the Holocaust deniers." and made the rash claim to have a proposal for returning political discourse disabled by right-wing nuttery to rational bounds. It's far from foolproof, and it's a bit tricky, but I'll offer it for what it's worth.

It came to me partly as a result of reading a post the other day in which Glenn Greenwald made wicked fun of Reason magazine editor-in-chief Matt Welch for accusing President Obama of "multiple lies and distortions" in a Tuesday statement about the CBO. His first point of attack was that that serially lying, distorting devil in the White House uses "the verb 'reports' to describe what the Congressional Budget Office does." It seems that Reason, the Pseudo-Intellectual Journal of Right-Wing Imbecility (technically I guess it's really "Pseudo-Intellectual Libertarian Imbecility), has done a "foundational feature" on the CBO, in which it explained that the CBO "does not 'report,' it 'projects,' in highly speculative fashion, what a proposed piece of legislation may cost." This screed, Glenn informed us, appeared "next to a photo of Obama with a Pinocchio nose."

So according to Welch, Obama "lied" because he used the word "report" to describe what the CBO does and because he suggested the CBO's projections are reliable. What, then, does that say about numerous Reason editors and writers, who wrote the following back when Reason loved the CBO because it was reporting that Obama's health care proposal and other policies would increase the deficit? Using Welch's "reasoning," it must mean that Reason's staff is filled with outright liars.

From here the yuks came fast and furious as Glenn provided a series of six instances going back to last December of Reason pseudo-journalists reporting on CBO "reports" or "reporting."

Of course the issue isn't only, or principally, semantic. As Glenn documented, when the CBO reports, or projections, or whatever you want to call them, could be used to argue against Obama initiatives, the Reason gaggle treated the CBO with reverence, as a font of unassailable wisdom.

When it suits them -- meaning when the CBO issues negative findings about Obama's domestic policies -- Reason holds up the CBO as an authoritative oracle not to be questioned. Three weeks ago, Reason's Nick Gillespie warned of "massive premium hikes" based on "the CBO's latest assay of the Senate's health-care reform plan."

[And he added a host of other examples, including one from editor-in-chief Welsh himself.]

However, "These same individuals then completely and shamelessly shifted gears once the CBO began reporting that the revised iterations of the proposal would actually decrease the deficit. And the 'principled non-partisan libertarians' at Welch's Reason led the way in this rank intellectual dishonesty." In an update, Glenn excerpted a Washington Post by Welch and Reason's Nick Gillespie referred to a "warning" on health care costs from "the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office" as "expert feedback."

So essentially what Welch is saying is: "I am a lying piece of filth. The truth is for suckers and sissies. I am an intellectual hooligan, and every word out of my mouth or word processor is designed to prevent actual discussion. If you dare contradict my lies, I'll call you names that will make 'liar' sound like a compliment, and probably impugn your grandmother's sexual preferences in the bargain."

It was in the course of reading this illuminating account that I thought up my plan. Basically, the idea is this. It's not true, as some people say unfairly, that to be a right-winger (or conservative, or Republican -- they all seem to be the same thing at the moment) you have to be either crazier than a coot or dumber than doody. The fact is that, no, you don't have to be either (a) insane or (b) too stupid to know better in order to be a RW loon. However, but at least right-wing loons in those two groups have a legitimate excuse. I think it might be a good idea to encourage those claiming the insanity exemption to provide an affidavit from some sort of accredited mental-health professional, but this is really a formality. Do we really require backup from those claiming insanity as a defense for their political blithering?

How about if we simply have people who belong to these two parts of the wingnut coalition to self-identify in all their political speaking and writing? What possible objection could anyone have to insane or imbecilic argumentation from people who have declared themselves insane or imbeciles?

At the same time, people from other blocs within the coaltion -- the corporate predators, for example, or the ideological hooligans or the "too lazy to learn" or the compulsive liars or the "just wanna be told what to do by somebody in charge" and so on -- would also be invited to self-identify. They could begin their screeches or screeds with something like: "Speaking as a member of the Corporate Predators' Wing of the Wingnut Loons, I say . . ." And this way we would have the benefit of knowing where they're coming from. If they choose not to announce their subgroup affiliation, though, we could assume that they're not members of either "free pass" group, and treat them accordingly.

Does it really matter which of the other groups they belong to? I confess that it would be entertaining as well as helpful to know which of the wingnut factions Mr. Welch, for example, caucuses with. But at least no one would feel any need, or indeed any impulse, to pay any attention to what he blithers.

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What's really at stake in Swiftboat-style propaganda assaults like the Obama hatchet-job books? Oh, it's just the health of our democracy

Liar Jerome Corsi and lie-debunker Paul Waldman last night
on Larry King Live (thanks to Media Matters)


"This book and books like it destroy our political culture, undermine fair elections, inhabit the slippery space between politics and slander. . . .

"These books destroy civic debate on purpose -- and are fundamentally at odds with democracy. The goal of Corsi's project is not to discuss facts -- it is to destroy the very possibility of discussion by implying that a Presidential candidate is a sleeper-cell terrorist -- and doing so in the context of a huge broadcast media effort to convince the country of the same thing.

"That is not just factually wrong. It is wildly immoral. Whether or not Corsi published lies is not even half the discussion we should be having."

-- Jeffrey Feldman, in a Frameshop post today,
"What America Needs to Hear About Jerome Corsi"

by Ken

Every now and then a writer articulates a point that makes a whole bunch of swirling phenomena come into focus for me. Today our Frameshop colleague Jeffrey Feldman (most recently author of Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy) did it with some comments on the debate on last night's Larry King Live between noted liar Jerome Corsi (of the Swiftboat liars) and noted lie-debunker Paul Waldman (of Media Matters, most recently co-author with John Dean of Free Ride: John McCain and the Media).

If you don't immediately recognize Corsi's name, it first came to our attention when he helped orchestrate the Swiftboaters' lies to demolish John Kerry's 2004 presidential bid. Now he has dipped into his grab bag of snares and delusions to produce an alleged book (well, it's got covers, and pages with type on them between the covers, and it comes from a company formerly known as a publisher of actual books) that sets out to assassinate the character of the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama.

PARENTHETICAL DIGRESSION: WOULD YOU BELIEVE
SIMON & SCHUSTER IS PUBLISHING THIS CRAP?

I really didn't pay much attention when I heard that there were two book-form hatchet jobs on Senator Obama coming out. Well, of course there are, I thought. Why wouldn't there be? That's one of the things the Right-Wing Noise Machine does: publish book-form piles of crap to stroke the prejudices of the wingnut faithful and, with any luck, hoodwink a few lazy or gullible readers outside the tent. They've got their own little publishing industry, and their own publishers, like Regnery. Then I gave it as little further thought as possible.

So I was kind of stunned to hear that Jerome Corsi's Obama hatchet job is published, not by Regnery or one of those other make-believe publishers, but by Simon & Schuster! Well, not Simon & Schuster exactly, but an imprint crated by S&S for celebrated right-wing propagandist Mary Matalin.

I don't know what was in the S&S folks' minds. Oh wait, I do. I'm sure some genius reading Publishers Weekly noticed one day that make-believe publishers like Regnery sell a shitload of books to their gullible and brain-challenged readers. And I guess that turned into a mandate: How can we get us some of that boodle? And somebody thought of Mary Matalin, and nobody thought to wonder whether her business plan would be to bring shame upon a publishing house with a long and honorable tradition. Or maybe nobody at S&S cared about that possibility. Heck, there's probably nobody affiliated with the company with any awareness of its history.

I would suggest a vigorous campaign to heap shame upon the current custodians of S&S, except that I doubt there's anybody on the job there who's capable of shame.

From the people I know who watched the Larry King extravaganza, while liar Corsi bombarded viewers with gobs of his made-up "facts," and kept challenging his adversary to answer his "facts," lie-debunker Waldman avoided the trap of debating phony facts and went after the kind of work Corsi does. My sources were all aglow over the job Paul did showing the phony up.

All my sources except Jeffrey Feldman, that is. Oh, he was filled with admiration for the job Paul did standing up to the liar. However --

It saddens me to have to acknowledge that, even though Paul did a great job on Larry King, I think Corsi won the debate -- unfortunately.

Why?

From the very start of the broadcast, Corsi made the debate about 'the facts' and kept returning back to that idea. 'I'm getting out the facts,' 'MM makes ad hominem attacks, but cannot refute the facts,' etc., etc. Paul did a great job pulling back the curtain (amazing job). But King never let the conversation come up to the real issue: this book and books like it destroy our political culture, undermine fair elections, inhabit the slippery space between politics and slander.

Left unsaid here is that it would have been futile, even fatal, for Paul to try to debunk Corsi's fake facts, and if he had tried, he would have ceded the ground to the liar. This is, of course, exactly what the professional liars of the Right-Wing Noise Machine count on.

I don't know that there's anything to be done about it, but I think it's desperately important that those of us who are able and willing to understand what Jeffrey is saying here at least become aware of the nature of the assault on democracy represented by the Swiftboating school of right-wing demagoguing.

At this point I should yield the floor to Jeffrey, who -- it turns out -- has a vision of how last night's debate might have gone differently:

Americans from all over the country have talked about this problem before--the problem of shady right-wing groups that assemble huge private backing and then wade into elections with the purpose of bullying a candidate off the national stage--so this is nothing new. But the media ignores us. Saps like Larry King choose instead to debase the hard work of researchers like Paul Waldman, and to willfully ignore the larger issue here: the wholesale undermining of our civic culture by deep-pocketed right-wing groups with a history of breaking election laws.

What America needs to hear from Larry King about Jerome Corsi is something like,"This book is filth. It goes against everything we believe in about honest, healthy civic debate. Don't buy it. Jerome, you are obviously part of a shady organization that uses money to sell lies with the goal of undermining serious debate in the 2008 Presidential election. The only reason your book is atop the best-seller list is because you have a giant political marketing machine working behind the scenes. Caveat emptor -- buyer beware."

Yeah, yeah. I know. It is hard to imagine someone like Larry King saying that on his show -- hard to even conceive of an America in which journalists use their broadcast power to protect our civic culture rather than promote shadowy figures who seek to destroy it. But imagining it is the first step.

Demanding it is what comes next.

Now this is a fantasy, but it's a pretty fantasy, and I'm afraid -- as Jeffrey suggests -- a necessary one. There's a line in there that's so potent, I think we all need to hear it again, so I'm going to pull it out, with just a tad of elision:

"It is hard to conceive of an America in which journalists use their broadcast power to protect our civic culture rather than promote shadowy figures who seek to destroy it. But imagining it is the first step."


BRAVE NEW FILMS GOES AFTER FOX'S PERENNIAL OBAMA SMEARS

One important weapon we have now against the Right-Wing Noise Machine which we didn't have in 2004 is Robert Greenwald's truth-telling team at Brave New Films. They've issued a new appeal:

The FOX smears are continuing and we need to stop them from spreading to the rest of the media. Watch FOX's laughably inaccurate distortions, as they smear Barack Obama on everything from the economy to race to patriotism to flag pins.

In the coming weeks, FOX will escalate its gross misrepresentations of Obama, and we know from painful past experience that some in the corporate media will spread FOX's canards by presenting them as fact. We must stop the spread.

At the link, along with the video there's a petition to sign, declaring:

"Fox is a Republican mouthpiece, not a legitimate news organization. Real news organizations must reject Fox's smears of Barack Obama and get the real facts out."

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One handy way to keep up on the outpouring of high-quality progressive-themed books is with FDL's weekly Book Salon (coming up today at 5pm ET)

No, that's not Arianna Huffington. It's Tracey Ullman as Arianna, whom she's been lampooning rather mercilessly on her current Showtime series, Tracey Ullman's State of the Union. The real Arianna is the guest on today's Firedoglake Book Salon, on the occasion of the publication of her new book, Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe. That's today at 5pm ET, 2pm PT.

"Politicians, always reading the cultural winds, make their life's work convincing 50 percent plus one of their constituency that they understand their fears and hopes, can honor and redeem them, can make them safe and lead them toward their dreams. Studying the process by which a notably successful politician achieves that task, again and again, across changing cultural conditions, is a deep way into an understanding of those fears and dreams--and especially, how those fears and dreams change.
--from the preface to Rick Perlstein's Nixonland (Scribner)

As you see, I got my copy of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, and also of Cliff Schecter's The Real McCain. Again, not that I'm plugging Amazon, but two days from placing order to receiving books--with hefty discounts and "free super saver shipping"--isn't bad!

At the time I made mention of the remarkable flowering we've seen in recent years of important, exciting books written from an unabashedly progressive standpoint--many of them coming from writers who have established their bona fides in the progressive blogosphere. This is roughly parallel to the outpouring of hard-core right-wing propaganda tomes over the last several decades--with the obvious "but"s. Hardly any of the right-wing propagandists had any interest in truth, knowledge, enlightenment, or understanding, just hammering their ideological psychoses and rallying the faithful to their clarion cry of ignorance and hatred. It was the vanguard of a movement built on storm-trooper-enforced knee-jerk ideology.

And of course the right-wing ideologues had access to a cadre of free-spending-zillionaire sugar daddies, to pay them to write and to publish their damned books. These days the right-wing propagandists, not surprisingly given that their world view is built on delusions and lies, that the progressive movement is funded entirely by George Soros. I don't doubt that Mr. Soros is contributing generously to progressive projects of his choosing, but virtually none of the specific ones the wingnuts go batshit over have any connection to him.

No, in the book world we've experienced a growing willingness of mainstream publishers to go out on a limb--as they seem to see it--with credentialed non-right-wing writers and the emergence of hardy independent publishers committed to the quest for truth--as in the case of Jeffrey Feldman's Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy, just published by Ig Publishing.

As I mentioned, my schedule, or perhaps just the state of my brain, makes book-reading an elusive goal, making it hard for me to keep up on the literally dozens of titles I've hoped to get to over the last few years. One resource I meant to mention is Firedoglake's weekly Bo0k Salon, where the author participates in a live online chat with a moderator carefully matched to the book.

If you read this in time and have nothing else to do, coming up today (as noted above) is Arianna Huffington. If you can't or couldn't catch the live chat, of course, it's all still accessible in the Book Salon archive, along with all the other titles that have been covered.

In addition, if you have books you especially want to commend to DWT readers' attention, you can either throw them in a comment (or comments), or drop me an e-mail at KenFromDWT@aol.com.

Happy reading!

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From the bookshelf: If you've been waiting to order your copy of "Nixonland," now's the time to get cracking--plus some other book notes

One thing that should be obvious by now is that the final descent into right-wing darkness marked by the Age of Bush has also stimulated and focused a wave of progressive writers like gangbusters. Howie is the DWT book guy, and he keeps you apprised of the books he's devoured. Me, in my 9-to-5 grind I mostly dream of finding the time and concentration for so grand a project as, you know, reading a book.

Now word comes from our friend Rick Perlstein that for-real retail copies of his long-awaited Nixonland : The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America actually exist and are being shipped to buyers. ("I can't really believe it myself," Rick writes. "I signed the contract for the thing in November of 2001, first started thinking seriously about it in 1998, and wanted to write just this book since I was sixteen years old.")

If you haven't heard about Nixonland, what you need to know is that Rick Perlstein has always been a close observer of the right side of the great left-right political split that erupted in the '60s. His 2001 book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus looked at how the seeming conservative debacle of the 1964 presidential election in fact laid the groundwork for the ascension of the new Right. In Nixonland, I gather, he's carried that chronicle (watch out, it's 896 pages and weighs a whopping 2.4 pounds) forward to the years 1965-72 and the emergence of the conservative movement as a political force, with emphasis on how those culture wars looked from the other side.


WHY NOT TOSS THE REAL McCAIN IN YOUR SHOPPING CART?

If your book source of choice happens to be Amazon, you'll notice that the hefty discount offered on Nixonland, which brings the price down from $37.50 to $24.75, also drops you below the magic $25 mark for free shipping. If you're as cheap as I am, this is a problem.

Now we've probably all got so many books on our reading list that the solution is obvious: piggyback one of the others onto your order. I'd been meaning for weeks now to get hold of Cliff Schecter's The Real McCain, the book I'm hoping will provide both a framework and a lot of raw material for penetrating the fake halo of that double-talking phony McCranky and keeping his sorry ass out of the White House.

Probably you already know that The Real McCain was conceived and substantially written--by Cliff and another of our favorite writers, the patrician Bob Geiger--before the embarrassing collapse of the McCranky campaign, which seemed to drag the book down the drain with it. Until, with the GOP presidential field looking like some sort of circus freak show, the McCranky campaign was reborn, and The Real McCain was back in business.

By tossing The Real McCain in my shopping cart, thereby getting free shipping on both books, I added only about six bucks to the total I was about to pay for just Nixonland.


AND ONE LAST BOOK NOTE: PERVERSION OF LANGUAGE

I don't want to leave the subject of important new books without a quick mention of Jeffrey Feldman's latest, Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right is Poisoning American Democracy, due out May 1 from enterprising progressive publisher Ig Publishing.

You probably know Jeffrey from his Frameshop blog, in which case you know that he is a careful student of language. I've been tinkering with a set of advance galleys of Outright Barbarous, with a view to bracketing it with one of the most remarkable books I know (as much for its genesis as for its actual content), Victor Klemperer's LTI--Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich): A Philologist's Notebook, the study of the Nazi perversion of language which Klemperer (a first cousin of the great conductor Otto Klemperer) extracted after World War II from the remarkable diaries he kept secretly all through the reign of National Socialism. (As it happens the book I'm trying to get through now is the final volume of the Klemperer diaries, from 1945 throuh his death in 1959. It's a tough subway read.)

All smart politicians know that language is important. Smart totalitarians, however, understand that control of language is crucial. Manipulation of the language was a key factor in the rise of the American Far Right. One of these days we need to talk about this a little.