Is The Democratic Party Serious About Fighting For LGBT Equality?

The Democratic Party prides itself on being a big tent so the answer is both yes and no. Mainstream FDR progressives are very serious about equality-- like the Pennsylvania state Senator, DaylinLeach, in the video above. Confused conservatives who, for whatever reason, stumbled into the wrong party are not. When I was growing up, my grandfather, a dedicated Socialist, told me to never trust the Democrats. He pointed out how conservative Democrats-- mostly, but not exclusively, in the South-- were preventing equality under the law for the descendants of the African-Americans they had enslaved and fought a Civil War to keep in bondage. Eventually almost all of those southerners found their way to the Republican Party, which they have since taken over, like a cancer.

Today, no matter how many times you hear Debbie Wasserman Schultz or Steve Israel braying about the big tent party, even they wouldn't dare suggest the tent is big enough for pro-slavery racists. Those people belong in the GOP, not the Democratic Party. So why is the Democratic Party still recruiting virulent homophobes? Steve Israel says its part of the DCCC's "big tent approach" to recruit bigots like Jennifer Garrison. While Nancy Pelosi was working like a dog to figure out how to pass ENDA over John Boehner's opposition, Steny Hoyer and Steve Israel were out raising money for Garrison and tricking other Democratic congressmembers into contributing to her campaign. I even noticed that a gay congressman had donated $1,000 to her campaign at Israel's request. I suspect that Israel never told him any of this:

House Majority Floor Leader Jennifer Garrison of Marietta wants the Equal Housing and Employment Act to wait until after the November 2010 election, according to some of her colleagues, so that she can run for secretary of state without having to answer for her vote on it.

The bill, also known as EHEA or H.R. 176, prohibits discrimination by sexual orientation or gender identity in public and private employment, housing and public accommodations. It passed the State Government Committee 8-5 on June 17 and could be voted on by the entire House at any time.

Twenty-one other states have similar measures, including one passed last week in Delaware. No federal protections exist.

There have been six House sessions since the bill cleared the committee, most consumed by budget matters. Legislators and the governor could not agree on a budget for the fiscal year that began July 1, and the state is running on temporary resolutions until an agreement can be reached.

But the House has voted on other matters in those six sessions, expanding domestic violence laws to include foster parents, changing the licensing of dental assistants and proposing a constitutional amendment to set livestock care standards.

Some EHEA supporters are concerned that delaying the vote will hurt its chances to pass during the present two-year session, requiring it to be reintroduced for the next one in 2011.

The measure’s Democratic sponsor, Dan Stewart of Columbus, is not concerned with the bill’s speed so far, but also sees no benefit in it lingering.

“I don’t want it to come up on a budget vote,” Stewart said. “People won’t be focused on anything but the budget, but if we’re passing other legislation, I want it to move.”

The bill now has between 53 and 61 “Yes” votes in the 99-member House, depending on who is asked. Fifty votes are needed to pass it. The chamber has 53 Democrats and 46 Republicans.

Stewart believes that 8 to 12 Republicans will join 51 Democrats in voting for the bill, when it comes to the House floor.

House Speaker Armond Budish of Beachwood made it clear on Equality Ohio’s lobby day in May that he would move the bill quickly.

His spokesperson, Keary McCarthy, stood by that commitment on June 30.

But Garrison has been quietly pulling in the other direction.

One of the most socially conservative Democrats in the General Assembly, colleagues say Garrison is very influential with Budish.

She is running for secretary of state next year, and will face Franklin County Commissioner Marilyn Brown in the Democratic primary. Brown is backed by current Secretary Jennifer Brunner, who is running for U.S. Senate. The winner will face either Republican State Sen. Jon Husted or former Ashtabula County Treasurer Sandy O’Brien.

Garrison already has a rocky relationship with the LGBT community. She won her House seat by gay-baiting her predecessor, Nancy Hollister, in 2004.

Earlier that year, Hollister was the only Republican to vote against the so-called “defense of marriage act.” It was considered a courageous vote.

Garrison sent out mailings that read, “If you believe marriage is between one man and one woman, there’s something you should know about Nancy Hollister.”

The other side of the card said, “DOMA was enacted precisely to protect Ohioans from having to accept ‘marriages’ or ‘unions’ entered into in other states. Despite the value of DOMA, Nancy Hollister voted against it. Jennifer Garrison believes marriage is between one man and one woman and will fight to protect our values.”

In 2006, as a member of the House Education Committee, Garrison helped to kill an amendment that would have required Ohio schools to protect students from bullying for their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The anti-bullying bill passed without the LGBT protections.

An attorney, Garrison opposed EHEA last year, saying it is wrong to single out classes of people for protection. This is a common talking point that anti-gays use against equality laws, and is legally flawed.

Garrison is now on the DCCC Jumpstart List. She's a Steve Israel kind of recruit. Now watch that Daylin Leach video up top. He's not on the jumpstart list and he hasn't been recruited by Steve Israel and he's not a Steve Israel kind of recruit. In fact, Steny Hoyer, who has already maxed-out to Garrison, has endorsed one of Daylin's conservative opponents. If you'd like to help Daylin bring his message of inclusivity and equality to Congress… well, here's the place.


UPDATE… Kind Of

And, speaking about how racism and homophobia have been banished from respectable circles, a few words on the Richard Cohen column from today's Washington KKK Post by Jamison Foser:

Richard Cohen famously attacked Iraq war skeptics as "fools or frenchmen." He's regularly and enthusiastically endorsed torture. He's repeatedly downplayed sexual misconduct, including referring to the act of getting a 13-year-old drunk and raping her as "seduction." He's said that calling hate crimes "hate crimes" is almost as bad as hate crimes (read: murder) themselves. He justified the profiling of Trayvon Martin because a hoodie is a "uniform we all recognize." He just learned last week at his local movie theater that slavery was not benign. (Though he opposes affirmative action because race "has become supremely irrelevant.") He downplayed the Bush administration's politically-motivated outting of a CIA agent (and he lied about the victims in the process). A recurring theme of his columns is that straight white men can't catch a break because the gays, women, and racial minorities have all the power. He regularly displays open contempt for liberals. And the Washington Post bills him as a liberal columnist.

Given that history, I don't think Cohen's use of "conventional" was inadvertently sympathetic. I think it was sympathetic. But even if it was inadvertent-- even if everything above was inadvertent-- I'd like to think a professional writer would be competent enough at his craft to get through a column without accidentally defending slavery or rape or revulsion at interracial marriage.

  And regardless of his motivation or intent, I'm about 15 years past being sick of one of the nation's two most important newspapers pretending this guy represents my views.

"Egotisticalgiraffe" could be a new pet name for Ted "Jesus, I Suck" Cruz, but how about "Whitetamale" and "Moneyrocket"?

Plus, Richard Cohen walks back his "just plain
wrong" (mis)judgments of Edward Snowden

"Some computer has a strange sense of humor. . . . I'm waiting for ‘Rusticrhubarb.' "

-- Matthew Aid, author of The Secret Sentry: The
Untold History of the National Security Agency

by Ken

No, it turns out that the egotistical giraffe has nothing to do with Senator Scum, any more than white tamale is "the name of a vegetarian special at a Tex-Mex joint, or possibly an ethnicity-bending rap artist," as our pal Al Kamen speculates in his Washington Post "In the Loop" item "Odd names for spy games."

In fact, "Egotisticalgiraffe" is "the moniker given to a technique that allowed the NSA to uncover the identities of those using a communications system designed to keep users anonymous," while "Whitetamale" is "a project in which U.S. agents hacked into Mexican officials' e-mails" and "Moneyrocket" "target[s] counterterrorism in the Middle East, Europe and Asia." In case you haven't guessed yet, these odd epithets and such others as "Shiftingshadow," "Yachtshop," "Steelflauta," "Stormbrew," and "Fairview" are National Security Agency (NSA) code names, a subject that came to public notice via that gift that keeps on giving, the leaked documents of Edward Snowden. (And speaking of Edward Snowden, see the note below.)

But, Al asks, "what's behind the odd titles?"

Matthew Aid , author of "The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency," explains that most of the NSA's code names are no more than computer-generated sequences of words.

"Some computer has a strange sense of humor," he said. "I've never met an egotistical giraffe. I'm waiting for ‘Rusticrhubarb.' There are only so many words in the English language."

They are intentionally random so as to avoid indicating the kind of operation it is or whose identity is being protected, Aid says.

Witness some of the other cable-intercept programs included in the documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Aid's wackier favorites include "Moneyrocket" (targeting counterterrorism in the Middle East, Europe and Asia), "Shiftingshadow" (Afghanistan and Pakistan), and "Yachtshop" (worldwide Internet metadata).

And then there's the mysterious "Steelflauta," which sounds as if it could be related to Whitetamale. (A flauta is a rolled taco.)

The NSA's daily workings are rife with code names. Missions, programs, operations, companies and individuals are assigned them. The bizarre lexicon then shows up in slide presentations — which made up the bulk of Snowden's document dump.

For example, Aid says, the telecom companies that participated in the PRISM program were given nifty (and random) aliases. Verizon is "Stormbrew," while AT&T is "Fairview."

Yet some names seem intentionally chosen. An operation for hacking into Mexican officials' e-mails just happened to be called Whitetamale? And PRISM, for example, seems to evoke the program's mission. "That one does actually sound like a human sat down" and created it, he said.

And sometimes it seems that there's a sly sense of humor at work. The NSA's first cable-intercept program, created during the Cold War, was called "Shamrock," though it was eventually shuttered after criticism from Congress. Its replacement? The NSA dubbed it "Blarney."

SPEAKING OF EDWARD SNOWDEN, DID YOU
CATCH RICHARD COHEN'S POST COLUMN . . .

. . . in which he said flat-out that he had been "just plain wrong" in his earlier "judgments" on Snowden? It's a column called "Edward Snowden is no traitor," which is actually tougher than the title suggests.

It's easy to say that a modicum of sense is all Cohen would have needed to refrain from rushing to judgment on the subject, and it's true. But I think it's only fair to give him credit for so forthrightly walking back his original misjudgments and in so doing giving proper credit to the importance of the revelations mined from Snowden's documents. I know I make fun of Cohen a lot (he's such an easy target), but as I also point out periodically, there are times when he rises to the occasion.

He's done a particular service here because he's called new attention to the importance of those revelations, which is what the story should have been all along -- a story that all those foolish howls of "traitor" to such an unfortunate extent successfully obscured. As a result, I'm thinking that a separate post about the Cohen column may be appropriate. Or you could just read it yourself.

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Right-wingers at sea both literally and figuratively, says Richard Cohen

"Nothing good happens when Republicans leave land."

-- Richard Cohen, in his WaPo column "Republicans adrift"

by Ken

This observation by columnist Cohen is prompted by a pair of right-wing ocean voyages: the famous one in 2008 when loony tunes gathered by The Weekly Standard headed north to Alaska and made a shocking discovery, and one just this past November, organzied by National Review, when the cruise ship Nieuw Amsterdam chugged out of Fort Lauderdale carrying a shipload of crazies who no doubt booked passage thinking they would be celebrating the Great Triumph over the Devil Obama but instead cruised the Caribbean licking their wounds.

Cohen draws on a report by New York magazine's Joe Hagan who went along as a paying customer and then wrote about it. "To his considerable credit," says Cohen, "Hagan abstained from shooting these particular fish in their barrel and instead portrayed them as dismayed and somewhat disoriented refugees from an America that used to be."

There were, it seems startling revelations -- at least startling to this crowd. Revelations like this one from a Romney economic aviser, Kevin Hassett: "Minorities came out like crazy. White people didn’t get to the polls. There are far more African-Americans voting than they expected." {Yes, this is apparently a direct quote. Cohen notes, "Who 'they' might be is not exactly clear.") Or there was this prescription from GOP pollster Scott Rasmussen ("who thought better of Romney chances than did the voters"), with regard to those weird minority voters who came out of nowhere: "You show them that you really care. You talk to them as grown-ups on a range of issues." There ya go, old white guys! Easy-peasy!

A menacing sense of foreboding permeates Hagan's article. The passengers both fear and hate Barack Obama. To them, he is the nightmare president -- allegedly alien in outlook, morality and economic approach. An economic cataclysm is imminent, and the nation has wandered into an icky swamp of immorality. "I'm afraid," a passenger told Hagan. "Write that. We're scared to death."

I chortle not. I was once a National Review subscriber, although never a conservative. In its infancy and for years afterward, the magazine was bursting with ideas. The writing was often fresh and engaging -- Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne and Garry Wills were contributors -- and liberalism, to which I also subscribed, was already showing signs of intellectual exhaustion.

Now, though, it is conservatism that is both intellectually exhausted and nearly indefensible. It is the movement of the ideologically ossified, of gun zealots and homophobes, of the immigrant-phobic and the adamantly selfish. It insists that government must be small (an impossibility!), education must be local (a stupidity) and that debt, no matter what the reason, is immoral and reckless. The movement has lost its reliable monster. Godless communists have been replaced by the church ladies of Planned Parenthood. History giggles.

Nothing good happens when Republicans leave land. In 2008, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker wrote about the voyage of the M.S. Oosterdam, which chugged up the Alaska coast carrying a tour group from the Weekly Standard. At Juneau, conservative notables, including Fox News commentator Fred Barnes, lunched with the governor, Sarah Palin -- and, as men often do on shore leave, swooned. Her remarkable qualities -- "how smart Palin was," according to Barnes -- and her considerable beauty left most of them a bit addled. A buzz went up. The zeitgeist was alerted. In due course, she was John McCain's running mate. Only the voters saved us from a debacle.

The National Review cruise encountered no such star of tomorrow. Instead, the emphasis was on yesterday. These passengers were people who had -- and maybe still have -- a sense of possession about America. It was once theirs. It once looked like them and acted like them and thought like them. No more. In more ways than one, they were out to sea.

#

One question, Richard Cohen: Did Republicans really WANT a better candidate than the 2012 field offered them?

Former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker -- now that's talent?

"None of these candidates [i.e., the 2012 Republican presidential field] were remotely qualified for the highest office in the land. Arguably, Romney was the exception -- and that’s the whole point. He won just by showing up."

-- Richard Cohen, in his WaPo column today,
"The Republican brain drain"

by Ken

Before we proceed with today's lesson from Brother Richard Cohen, a couple of caveats:

* About Richard Cohen himself, it's the usual: Although he normally seems to me a Village hack, he hasn't lost all his marbles, and every now and then he can size up a situation like a serious pundit.

* For the purposes of this enterprise we're going to have to accept that latterday Republican politicos like Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Howard Baker, and Bob Dole constitute "talent." For many of us this is quite a considerable stretch, but when you see who these skells are lined up against, I think you'll see the point.

This is the start of Richard Cohen's Washington Post column today, "The Republican brain drain":

In 1980 Ronald Reagan won the Republican nomination. He beat a future president, George H.W. Bush; two future Senate majority leaders, Howard Baker and Bob Dole; and two lesser-known congressmen. This year Mitt Romney won the GOP nomination. He beat a radio host, a disgraced former House speaker, a defeated Senate candidate, a former appointee of the Obama administration, a tongue-tied Texas governor, a prevaricating religious zealot who happens to serve in the House of Representatives and a cranky libertarian doctor. Where did all the talent go?

Until the Republican Party can answer this question, it makes no sense to continue to carp about Mitt Romney and the startlingly incompetent presidential campaign he’s running. His faults as a politician are manifest. He is robotic, unknowable (his own wife asserted at the national convention that “he made me laugh” and then failed to cite a single humorous moment), ideologically incoherent and severely out of touch with the average American. He is his party’s nominee because, like the one-eyed man in the valley of the blind, he is just the best of the worst.

Okay, so maybe this isn't the most blinding insight you've ever read. But how often do you see it in an Authentic Village Values WaPo column, which is to say one written by someone not named E. J. Dionne Jr., Gene Robinson, or Harold Meyerson? (Those can all be dismissed relatively effortlessly with a wave of the hand and a bemused "Oh, that E.J./Gene/Harold [fill in the appropriate dreamer].")

The list of Republicans who looked at Iowa’s daunting demographics and did not run is more distinguished than those who did. At one time or another, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain (who was forced to drop out) were front-runners. Can you think of any two people less qualified for the presidency? How about Ron Paul, another front-runner, or Mad Newt Gingrich or Rick Perry, the cement-mouthed governor who would eliminate three Cabinet offices, if only he could remember them? How about Rick Santorum, a fun guy, who actually beat Romney in Iowa, or Jon Huntsman, a decent man with shallow political experience — and, it seemed, aptitude?

None of these candidates were remotely qualified for the highest office in the land. Arguably, Romney was the exception — and that’s the whole point. He won just by showing up. He beat a bunch of nobodies. This is how the GOP wound up with such a weak candidate, one who espouses extreme positions he does not for a moment believe.

I know it's easy, but I can still be had with a fresh round of indiscreet bashing of the 2012 GOP presidential "field."

The list of Republicans who looked at Iowa’s daunting demographics and did not run is more distinguished than those who did. At one time or another, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain (who was forced to drop out) were front-runners. Can you think of any two people less qualified for the presidency? How about Ron Paul, another front-runner, or Mad Newt Gingrich or Rick Perry, the cement-mouthed governor who would eliminate three Cabinet offices, if only he could remember them? How about Rick Santorum, a fun guy, who actually beat Romney in Iowa, or Jon Huntsman, a decent man with shallow political experience — and, it seemed, aptitude

"Open the window and listen," says our Richard.

You will hear the moans and groans of Republican officials and their trained pundits. But where were these people when their field of oddballs was being assembled? Why were they so silent when Hispanics and women were being told to shove it and the long-dead Darwin was being debated? More to the point, maybe, how come they put up with a primary and caucus system — Iowa first, New Hampshire second — that seemingly was designed by a sly Democrat? The answer is that they do not have the courage nor the intellectual integrity to stand up to the know-nothing (dominant) wing of the Republican Party. They have designed a system where, politically speaking, the lowest common denominator wins. We are all the poorer for it.

At the heart of the toxic presidential-choosing system, says our Richard, setting up my favorite line, "is the series of incredibly damaging primaries and caucuses that, in the crucial early stages, produce a candidate who could sweep Bavaria." (Presumably all readers know that Bavaria is known for being the ultraconservative heartland of Germany.)

He recalls the extent of the pandering ("across the board") that Willard Inc. submitted to in Iowa.

A GOP candidate has to oppose same-sex marriage, deny global warming and insist — against all evidence — that local control of education is the best. The only way around these positions is to skip the Iowa caucuses entirely. It is no place for a moderate. It is, really, no place for a thinking person.

Okay, now here's where we have to take a relatively dispassionate view of the likes of Reagan and Bush Sr. and Baker and Dole. Do you see what I mean about the caliber of the lineup against which these skells are lined up?

Contrast the candidates of yore with the collection that took the field this year. The Republican Party has had a brain drain so that now its highest intellectual achievement is — like an infant in the Terrible 2s— simply to say no to everything, especially taxes. To paraphrase Marx, rise up, GOP moderates. You have nothing to lose . . . but losing.

Just one thing, Richard. These "GOP moderates" of whom you speak. Where are they again? Because if they existed in any appreciable number, wouldn't you think that a candidate would have found his/her way into the field to give them someone to rally 'round?

#

Re. the "'you don't build that' fight," Richard Cohen says: "The president has nothing but truth and history on his side"

"Romney's embrace of tea-party thinking is just ideological womanizing. (He won't call in the morning.)"

-- Richard Cohen, in his latest WaPo column,
"The gap in the ‘you didn't build that' fight"

by Ken

I've just done a quick to check on stuff I've written about Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, and I've turned up such nooks of memory as "It feels creepy agreeing with Richard Cohen, but I agree with him about 'The missing Obama'," from November 2009, but also the less snarky October 2010 "Richard Cohen gets it seriously right about right-wing hate speech."

Now I'm nonplussed to say that his latest column seems to me both seriously right and seriously needed, in an election season that's going to be dominated by nonsensical lies from the Rampaging Right. (Links onsite.)

The gap in the ‘you didn't build that' fight

By Richard Cohen

My boyhood friend Jack became a doctor -- and a conservative. He had gone to public schools, attended college with the help of a government scholarship, went to medical school on the Army's dime, and learned his specialty in military hospitals. He insisted that the government had done nothing for him. In that way, he is both the soul and the wit of the Republican Party.

It was in rebuttal to the Jacks of this world that Barack Obama earlier this month updated John Donne's "No man is an island" by knocking the idea that individual success is always the product of individual qualities, such as industriousness: "Let me tell you something: There are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help."

This observation, so obvious you'd think it didn't have to be stated, was then followed by what became a gotcha sound bite: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet."

The entire GOP, including its claque in the press, pounced. You would have thought Obama had just belittled self-discipline and other virtues and quoted from "Das Kapital" or, even worse, a ditty by Pete Seeger. To his critics, Obama's version of It Takes a Village was further proof of his commie creds, possibly Islamic as well. Mitt Romney found the line totally -- and I mean like totally -- "disconcerting." As to the charge that Obama was being quoted out of context, Romney declared that "the context is worse than the quote." OMG!

Of course, the president has nothing but truth and history on his side. Every schoolchild in my neck of the woods learned that the Erie Canal, which made New York truly the Empire State, was government-funded -- $7 million appropriated at the insistence of Gov. DeWitt Clinton. The railroads did not come from nowhere and neither did the ports or the highway system. Government played a role. Government has always played a role. If it just got out of the way, the mindless mantra of the tea party's heavy thinkers, we would all be in deep trouble.

Across the mighty ocean, the Economist magazine has taken note of this debate over the role of government and pronounced it healthy in principle but pathetic in execution. Both the right and the left have trivialized this important issue, but conservatives have gone from simplistic formulas to bravely idiotic ones. "American conservatism has grown so angry that it has become a parody of its former self," the magazine says. "Tax cuts are always right (even if they inflate the deficit); government activism is always wrong (even if stimulus helped avert a depression). And the right's hypocrisy when it comes to spending on conservative projects (prisons, the armed forces, subsidies to big business) is breathtaking. George W. Bush presided over a huge growth in government." The Economist, a right-of-center publication, has it nailed.

Romney's embrace of tea-party thinking is just ideological womanizing. (He won't call in the morning.) While in Israel, he mentioned that one of the books that influenced his thinking on foreign affairs is "Start-Up Nation" by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. (Senor is one of Romney's important foreign policy advisers.) It is a good book, mentioned favorably by me in a recent column, and it accounts for why little Israel has become such a high-tech giant. As always, there is no single answer. Large-scale immigration (mostly from Russia) contributed, and certainly the conversion from an essentially socialist economy to a capitalist one has made a huge difference.

But so has the government -- in particular, the army with its own culture of innovation and intellectually elite units devoted to high-tech training and warfare. Graduates of these programs, having satisfied their military obligation, populate Israel's high-tech sector -- and, to Israel's chagrin, America's as well. Israel is the start-up nation because the government helped start it up.

As the Economist notes, this is not a trivial debate. The refusal of the contemporary Republican Party to acknowledge a role for government is linked to an illogical determination never to raise taxes. Obama may be too liberal for some, but the alternative that Romney offers by parroting the conservative GOP line is simply not credible. Prosperity may not always take a village, but it sure doesn't take the village idiot.

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Why is anyone surprised that right-wing "thinkers" degrade women every chance they get?

"[A]ny woman who levels a charge of sexual harassment at a GOP candidate is going to be pummeled by the conservative media and treated like a cross between a crank and a witch. In the reddest, angriest parts of America, it is best for an aggrieved woman just to shut up."

-- Richard Cohen, in his Washington Post column
"Political bully boys trying to intimidate women"

by Ken

Here's one way of looking at it: When even Richard Cohen gets it, how hard can it be to get?

Last week I ventured a suggestion as to why Herman Cain's accusations of sexual harassment hadn't crippled him as badly as Rick Perry's, er, megagaffe ("Why all the fuss about Rick Perry's 'gaffe'? Is there anyone who didn't already know he's a moron and a thug? Really?"):

I would assume the embarrassing "secret" is that GOP voters not only don't hold sexual harassment against a person, they admire it. It gives them hope for a return to the good old days, when everyone understood that the only way to have your women was barefoot and pregnant.

This by now should be so obvious as to be beyond discussion. The only thing that exceeds far-right-wingers' loathing of women is their stark terror of them. Well, there's one other thing that might exceed far-right-wingers' loathing of women: their loathing of people who are racially, ethnically, religiously, or in any other "-ally" way different from them. That's another story, though in a lot of ways it isn't. It's largely the same story, the only difference being that, alone among these enemy species, the women have the mystical power to ensnare men into consorting and in fact cohabiting with them. I would argue that this only increases their loathing. I suppose some benighted souls will argue that men, far from loathing, worship their wimmins. Jeez, wake up and smell the perfume.

Since I try not to keep too close tabs on wingnut punditry, I admit I was taken aback by some of the stuff I found in Richard Cohen's column -- and I like to think that nothing that comes out of those evil, insane mouths surprises me.

The furious counterattack against the women who in the past had accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment was led by Rush Limbaugh, who occupies a vast electronic locker room, making jokes that would be considered immature in junior high school. When one of Cain's accusers, Karen Krau­shaar, said she'd like to coordinate her remarks with other Cain accusers, Limbaugh wondered why: "Do they want to synchronize their menstrual periods? Why appear together?" You can just hear the towel snap.

As is his custom, Limbaugh accused irate women (and men) of not getting the joke -- of being too PC. Earlier, he had some locker-room fun with the name of Sharon Bialek, another of Cain's accusers. Sharon "Buy-a-lick," he called her. My, my, such a potty mouth. My, my, such a jerk.

Limbaugh was hardly alone in turning on the accusing women. For some reason, Bialek's financial history became public knowledge. She had been in debt. She has had two bankruptcies. The Drudge Report noted that she once lived in the same Chicago building as David Axelrod, President Obama's chief political adviser. As if to ice matters, Bialek was represented by Gloria Allred, who in countless media references is called a "celebrity lawyer." Whether this means that she represents celebrities or is one herself is not at all clear, but it does mean -- lest you miss the import -- that she is a tawdry ambulance-chaser and that her client, in the characterization of the New York Post's Andrea Peyser, is a gold digger.

[You can find the links for Limbaugh, Drudge, and Peyser onsite. I'll be damned if I'm going to send them any traffic. -- Ed.]

In this regard, as in so many others, the loons of the Right have an invaluable ally in the primitive nomadic world view of old-time Judeo-Christianity. I don't think there's any reasonable question at this late date that those desert wanderers were scared so doodyless of women that they built their social order around strict oppressive control. Naturally they made believe it was "for their own good," but authoritarians frequently couch their repressive regimes in that sort of empty rhetoric.

We could launch an endless theological inquiry, or I could just offer you one word: Eve.

(It might then be asked, tauntingly: So what about them Wingnut Wimmins? You know, like Princess Sarah and Wackadoodle Michele. Seriously?)

To return to Richard Cohen:

Peyser, Matt Drudge and Limbaugh somehow forgot that two cases against Cain were settled and not for inconsiderable sums. If they were mere nuisance complaints, then Cain's employer at the time, the National Restaurant Association, would not have made cash settlements of $45,000 and $35,000. This does not prove that Cain was guilty, only that the claims were deemed not frivolous. This is a bit more than just-go-away money.

Cain is clearly one of those guys who learned years ago that bluster, not the truth, will set you free. He trimmed about not even knowing about (1) the claims or (2) the settlements. This, too, does not prove that Cain is a sexual harasser, merely that he is not particularly persuasive. It's hard to believe that, as the president of the association and the target of the complaints, he was unaware of the settlements. Such a man would be an odd choice for chief executive of the United States.

I know that some women (and men) bring false charges of sexual harassment merely to get a payday. Whether any of Cain's accusers did that, I cannot say, but I doubt it. I know also that some sexual harassment claims arise from misunderstandings -- a remark that went sideways or a "victim" whose shoulder is nothing but chips. But I can also say that these charges are not made without apprehension by women who value their careers. They fear not only retribution -- never mind that retribution is illegal -- but also that their claim will make it hard for them to find another job. No one wants to hire a troublemaker.

Sometimes when Cohen "gets" stuff, it turns out that there's a buried personal connection, and perhaps that's the case here.

I worked for an insurance company back in the “Mad Men” days. I saw the way women were treated, the incessant and quite unremarkable harassment of that period. It was, in this respect, an ugly era -- uglier for blacks, for sure, but ugly for Jews and for other minorities and for all women. Some of this ugliness lingers -- for blacks, for Hispanics, for gays and, it now seems certain, for women. The jokes of the infantile Limbaugh, the attacks on women whose claims were treated seriously by their employers, suggest some slippage in the women’s movement.

The aggrieved women have faded. They chose prudence over valor, the comfort of anonymity to a public gutting. Other women must have taken notice. Cain, whose candidacy is without purpose, may yet prove useful. He reminds us of how far we still have to go.

We've pointed it out here at DWT, though perhaps not often enough, but one of the ugliest facets of the monumentally ugly 21st-century evolution of the Republican Party has been its virulently raging war against women. In which, I should point out, they have found all too many allies in the supposedly less extreme Democratic camp -- a truly unholy alliance.

Those right-wingers keep looking in the mirror and seeing utter worthlessness. Is it any wonder they work so desperately to annihilate everyone who's different from them? Because the chances are that everyone who's different from them is better than they are. How could they not be?


ON THE SUBJECT OF WINGNUT WIMMINS (VS. WINGNUT MENS)

The Washington Post's only moderately whacked-out right-wing columnist Kathleen Parker points out in her column "Perry, Cain and a parade of painful moments" that a pretty male dolt like Rick Perry can't get away with "winkage" in the way that a babe like Princess Sarah could, or Herman Cain either. She argues without much backup that "Perry and Cain are both talented men who deserve more than our contempt," but insists:

Nevertheless, it has become clear that they are not now presidential material. We may indeed overlook their faults, but we needn’t excuse what are more than mere lapses. Their lack of knowledge or recall suggests a lack of depth and an absence of seriousness. We expect more from those who pretend to the throne.

And though Americans admire the self-made who have experienced ordinary life, most don’t want an ordinary person to lead the country.

A funny line is worth a laugh, a song may buy you lunch, but in the end, there’s no winking one’s way to the White House.

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When it comes to union-bashing in Wisconsin, right-wing pols and pundits don't let facts get in the way of ideological rampaging

The great Pat Bagley understands class warfare when he sees it. (Don't forget to click to enlarge.)

by Ken

This morning on the radio I caught some chatter about the imminent release of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's second budget. The correspondent being interviewed raised the interesting point about the governor's first budget: that one of the crucial ways in which he "balanced" it was by simply ignoring the state's accumulated unpaid $3 billion pension obligations.

What right-wing New Jersey pols -- and their union-bashing fans in the punditocracy don't like to mention is that the pension benefits in question, going back to the administration of Republican Gov. Christie Todd Whitman, were negotiated in totally bad faith in exchange for union concessions on salary and other direct benefits. Apparently the union negotiators at the time had a glimmering that the state had no intention of honoring those pension commitments but felt that the make-believe pension "gains" were better than nothing. The reality seems to have been that they were exactly nothing.

Aas I understand the story, the intervening Democratic governor, Jon Corzine, at least acknowledged the problem of the state's pension nonfunding, though he couldn't quite find money with which to do anything about it. With Republicans, however, there is no such thing as honoring legal commitments where the objects of those commitments, like people who do actual work for the public good, are also objects of your contempt.

At the time of the economic meltdown, as word trickled out about the stupefying bonuses being paid to the already wildly overpaid scum who had worked so hard to bring the system down, we were told earnestly that there was nothing to be done about it, it was a legal and moral obligation to pay the thieves and extortionists for their honest year's worth of theft and extortion. When it comes to workers who negotiated in good faith, organized criminals like New Jersey's blimplike governor have no qualm about spitting on the state's legal commitments. Just as his fellow thug-governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin feels that he has the right to simply nullify basic rights of workers to negotiate their conditions of employment.

Both Howie and I have been talking, as well as people like Paul Krugman and George Lakoff, have been talking about the subterfuge being used by the militant economic thugs of the Far Right, pretending that they're responding to the urgencies of the economic meltdown -- the very meltdown their thieving economic policies caused -- rather than using them as a pretext to enforce the Darwinian extreme-right-wing agenda they've always lusted after. And we'll have to continue talking about it. But for now we just need to touch on some of the basic lies being brandished by the thugs of the Far Right, as great thinkers David Brooks and Richard Cohen weigh in on how those evil public-sector workers have been plundering the American taxpayer.

Every word is a lie, of course, but that doesn't seem to matter. Apparently pundits too are covered under the right-wing Universal License to Lie, which grants blanket permission to utter any lie, no matter how far-flung or preposterous, in the service of the Higher Untruth of Right-Wing Sociopathology.

First, let's pay a quick visit to reality, courtesy of Jeffrey H. Keefe of the Economic Policy Institute:

Wisconsin public versus private employee costs: Why compare apples to oranges?

Jeffrey H. Keefe
February 15, 2011

Inaccurate comparisons of national and Wisconsin public employee compensation with private sector compensation are circulating in Wisconsin. These faulty comparisons, showing that public employees in Wisconsin are dramatically overpaid, seem to support legislative efforts to increase benefit contributions by public employees. These increased benefit contributions would subject them to a pay cut greater than 10% and eliminate their collective bargaining rights.

But when we compare apples to apples, we find that Wisconsin public employees earn 4.8% less in total compensation than comparable private sector workers. The comparisons -- controlling for education, experience, hours of work, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and disability -- demonstrate that full-time state and local public employees earn lower wages and receive less in total compensation (including all benefits) than comparable private sector employees.

Why does it appear otherwise? Both nationally and within Wisconsin, public sector workers are significantly more educated than their private sector counterparts. Nationally, 54% of full-time state and local public sector workers hold at least a four-year college degree, compared with 35% of full-time private sector workers. In Wisconsin, the difference is even greater: 59% of full-time Wisconsin public sector workers hold at least a four-year college degree, compared with 30% of full-time private sector workers.

These stark educational differences arise for two reasons. First, many public employees are professionals and teachers in positions that require higher levels of education. Second, the movement to privatize public sector work has been accomplished in great part by moving low-skilled work from the public to private sector, where benefits are often more modest.

If the dominant pundits of our time were to put their itty-bitty brains together and set up a Pundits' Academy, if they exhibited a shred of honesty in designing the curriculum, you can be sure the course work would be organized around a series of core courses: Knowing Which Side Your Bread Is Buttered On 101, 201, 301, 401, and a complex of advanced seminars. Every now and then Richard Cohen writes a column, or more often a portion of a column, that suggests there might still be, lurking in the depths of his shadowy mind, a few cells that on occasion still receive and process limited sensory data from the real world. Which just means that the man has to work harder the rest of his thumb-sucking time to make sure none of that heresy sticks.

It's harder to catch David Brooks in contact with reality. In his plodding way he's much more true to his fundamental personal reality, which is that his working life is wholly dedicated to licking the dicks of the Rich White Men who own the country, thereby making it possible for someone like him, with no visible professional skills, to earn a living. Meanwhile, under his standard pretense of reasoned moderation (of Wisconsin: "The leaders there have done everything possible to maximize conflict" -- no, Davy, that's not what has happened), he spews the standard right-wing kill-the-unions line. As Dean Baker points out in a post today:

cepr
CENTER FOR ECONOMIC POLICY AND RESEARCH

David Brooks on Wisconsin: Flaunting Ignorance of Economics

Tuesday, 22 February 2011 05:38

Let's all have a hearty round of laughter at David Brooks' expense. He doesn't know that employer side payments for benefits like pensions and health care come out of workers' wages. In his column today, he tells his readers that public employees in Wisconsin should have to pay for these benefits just like private sector. Apparently he doesn't know that they already do.

Go into any economics department and tell the faculty that you think employers should have to pay more for workers' Social Security benefits. The ridicule with which which that suggestion will be greeted should be heaped on Mr. Brooks for failing to understand basic economics. And of course, we actually have data that show that the higher benefits received by public sector workers in Wisconsin are more than fully offset by lower pay.

Of course the bigger mistake in Brooks' column is the assertion that we are looking at a decade of austerity. This may prove true, but this is a policy choice. We had unbelievably incompetent economic policy in the last decade. The Fed and the Bush administration allowed (arguably encouraged) the growth of an $8 trillion housing bubble. It was fully predictable that it would collapse and lead to a serious recession.

Unfortunately, economic policy continues to be guided by people who were too incompetent to recognize this bubble and the danger it posed. The route out of this downturn is simple, the government needs to spend money to create demand. This is the economy's problem at the moment, not a scarcity of resources. However, the incompetents control the debate and are now promising us a decade of austerity rather than taking the simple steps that would be needed to get back to full employment.

UPDATE: "THE PROGRESS REPORT" ON "THE
TRUTH BEHIND THE ANTI-UNION ASSAULT"

The TPR crew does its usual excellent job backgrounding and distilling the subject in today's report.


STOP THE PRESSES: SOUTH DAKOTA SEN. JOHN THUNE
WILL NOT, REPEAT NOT, RUN FOR PRESIDENT IN 2012

If that's "good news," the bad news is that, as the Washington Post's "Fix"-er Chris Cillizza reports,

he wants to remain in the Senate to fight for conservative principles.

"There is a battle to be waged over what kind of country we are going to leave our children and grandchildren, and that battle is happening now in Washington, not two years from now," Thune said in a statement. "So at this time, I feel that I am best positioned to fight for America's future here in the trenches of the United States Senate."

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Richard Cohen gets it seriously right about right-wing hate speech; David Brooks gets it wackily wrong about his pal Rahm

"Four dead in Ohio": Neil Young performs "Ohio" in Toronto's Massey Hall, 1971.

by Ken

I didn't begin to encounter Richard Cohen's writing until he was a full-blown columnist. (Feel free to take "full-blown" in the most lurid sense you can imagine.) Every now and then you get a glimpse that someone you've known only as a gargoyle may not have always been as we see him now.

As a matter of fact, if I'd known that the column in question was in fact a Richard Cohen column, I doubt that I would have clicked through. But washingtonpost.com has this bizarre habit of circulating periodical e-newsletters touting it current crop of opinion pieces without identifying the author. As if an opinion can exist independent of the person who's expressing it. And so if there's a blurb in the e-newsletter that sounds like it might be interesting, you have to click through just to find out who wrote the damned piece.

Here's what got me in the "Today's Opinions: Afternoon Edition":

1) When words can kill
On the right, hateful rhetoric is fired like bullets.

There must have been a morning edition of this e-newsletter in which I'd noticed this promo, and paused over it, principally wondering who might be writing on the subject. This time I decided to find out, and imagine my surprise to find that it's that obnoxious gasbag Richard Cohen.

He explains that in the course of his bicycling he has lately been hearing a good deal of Neil Young's "Ohio," and has to "repress a tear" when he hears the line "What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?"

"Ohio" has been around for 40 years, and I have heard it over and over again. It's about the 1970 killing of four students at Kent State University during a demonstration against the Vietnam War. The killers were the equally young men of the Ohio National Guard. I was in the National Guard myself once. How did this happen? "This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio." . . .

The line about the woman dead on the ground hits with concussive force. I feel I knew her. One of the four killed was Allison Krause, and she went to school in the Washington area. Her father, Arthur Krause, sometimes called me. Arthur had devoted himself to seeking justice for his daughter. He should have known better. He was a Holocaust survivor.

Cohen was a reporter at the time of the Kent State killings, he tells us, and he coveted the story, which was obviously a huge one. But "the journalistic sluggers whooshed out of the newsroom, jumped a plane and wrote the story."

But it is a story no more and so, on the bike, the full horror of it came through: My God, American soldiers had shot American college students. This was not China, not Tiananmen Square, and not Iran and the pro-democracy rallies of last year -- not any of those places. . . .

He ran through his mind how it had happened.

Bullets had killed those kids, sure -- but they were fired, in a way, from the mouths of politicians.

The governor of Ohio, James Rhodes, demonized the war protesters. They were "worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element. . . . We will use whatever force necessary to drive them out of Kent."

That was the language of that time. And now it is the language of our time. It is the language of Glenn Beck, who fetishizes about liberals and calls Barack Obama a racist. It is the language of rage that fuels too much of the Tea Party and is the sum total of gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino's campaign message in New York. It is all this talk about "taking back America" (from whom?) and this inchoate fury at immigrants and, of course, this raw anger at Muslims, stoked by politicians such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Lazio, the latter having lost the GOP primary to Paladino for, among other things, not being sufficiently angry. "I'm going to take them out," Paladino vowed at a Tea Party rally in Ithaca, N.Y.

Oh, Mr. On-the-One-Hand, On-the-Other-Hand has to get in a jab at the Left. "Back in the Vietnam War era," he writes, "the left also used ugly language and resorted to violence." And this is certainly true, though kind of ripped out of context. Cohen has own "but," though, and it's a serious one:

But the right, as is its wont, stripped the antiwar movement of its citizenship. It turned dissent into treason, which, in a way, was the worst treason of all. It made dissidents into the storied "other" who had nothing in common with the rest of us. They were not opponents; they were the enemy: Fire!

On my bike, I recalled those days and wondered if they have not returned. Sticks and stones may break bones, but words -- that singsong rebuttal notwithstanding -- can kill. We lose presidents to words and civil rights leaders to words -- homosexuals and immigrants and abortion providers, too. Richard Nixon is named in the song because he was the president at the time and because his words were ugly. He was enthralled by toughness, violence.

I hear the song more clearly now than I ever did. It is a distant sound from our not-so-distant past, but a clear warning about our future. Four dead in Ohio. Not just a song. A lesson.

I'm not sure the point can be made much better than this.


SO IS IT POSSIBLE THAT DAVID BROOKS
WAS ONCE . . . WELL, SOMETHING DIFFERENT?

Nah, I don't think so either. And you may well say that anyone who reads a David Brooks column deserves what he gets. Which is true enough, except that it doesn't deal with the faux credibility his blithering gains from appearing there on the op-ed pages of the New York Times print and Web editions. No matter how furiously the NYT folk work at debasing the brand, it still carries an implication of substance.

Today, in an especially egregious outing, "The Soft Side," our David is out to defend his friend Rahm Emanuel -- who used to phone him about stuff he'd written or might write apparently, if I remember right, about every 30 minutes -- from all the vicious things that are being said about him now that he's slithered out of the White House and his second-to-none access to the president. It's a piece that's wrong-headed in so many ways that one wouldn't know where to begin if one were of a mind to take it seriously.

I may yet write about the substance of today's column, if I can't get the bad taste out of my mouth.

SIDEBAR ON VILLAGE OBLIVIOUSNESS

I mean, really now, is it possible that none of the Village media hucksters have even the most rudimentary knowledge of what the health care faux-reform hullabaloo was about, or what happened in the course of it? After Mara Liasson's either incompetent or mendacious bungling about Master Rahm's "prescience," we have our David recallling how he "criticized the lack of cost control" in the package. I mean this literally: How is it possible for anyone with any interest in matters political not to know that nobody in the Western Hemisphere fought more tenaciously than Master Rahm against any cost-reducing proposal that would in any way have inconvenienced the megacorporate interests of Big Pharma and the health insurance giants?

(Corollary question: And how is it possible that such people draw paychecks from outfits like the NYT and NPR?)

Just for now let's play Villagers-for-a-day. That means, for one thing, that we're going to skip over the whole issue of being coopted by pols with agendas (hmm, that's redundant, isn't it?) and just focus on what our David thinks is the charge against his pal Rahm: that's he's impolite and bad-tempered.

Now, as longtime readers of DWT know only too well, Howie and I between us have written, ahem, a lot about Master Rahm, and while I'm sure that the subjects of his rudeness and ill temper have come up, and they're legitimate points, as symptoms of the kind of mind we're dealing with (genus: bully, species: wildly and unmeritedly self-assured), our issue is his ruthless whoring on behalf of the corporate masters who have so generously coopted him (ooh, that word again!).

If you've got a barf bag handy, try reading this:

Rahm has somehow managed to remain true to his whole and florid self. He’s managed to preserve the patois of Chicago, the earthy freneticism of his Augie March upbringing.

He made some big mistakes: Trying to use the financial crisis as an opportunity to do everything at once. He can sometimes be harsh. But he has generally lived up to his ample heart. He gave up the chance to be speaker of the House because of his affection for Obama. He gave up the chief of staff job and returned to Chicago because that city is in his bones.

I interview a lot of politicians. Rahm is unique. Flawed like all of us, he is a full human being, rich and fertile from the inside out.

Ah, so that's it. Our David's pal Rahm's one and only flaw, if we forget that occasional cussing, is that he's too deeply and sincerely committed to doing too much good too fast? Oh jeez, oh jeez. (Can't you just imagine what the Master says about that simpering simpleton Brooks behind his back?)

Now it's certainly possible for an authentic journalist to have, by virtue of sustained personal exposure possibly including personal contact, a special understanding of a public figure. The late Murray Kempton, the greatest columnist of them all, had (as I understand it from exposure rather than personal contact) a streak of sympathy for Richard Nixon on a personal level, and when it's Murray Kempton, if you're smart, you listen. (The mitigation he found was in some ways more damning than other commentators' fire-and-brimstone damnation.)

For the most part, though, this idea of journalists, even columnists, giving us deeper insight into public figures by virtue of personal relationships is, well, theoretical. In David B's case, since he spends his whole professional life showing how clueless he is about any substantive issue you can think of, or at least any that he can think of, it's not surprising that he has no clue as to why his pal Rahm is so reviled. Let's just say that no, Davy, it's not because he uses profanity. (Although, again, the way he uses profanity may be legitimately symptomatic of substantively objectionable qualities.)

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Conservatives Want To Give Gays A Choice: Get The Cure Or... Get Killed

Do conservatives-- in this country, at this time, Republicans and Blue Dogs-- want to exterminate gay people? You'll have to ask them. I'm sure the Log Cabin Republicans and the GOProud Republicans don't. I doubt Republican closet cases David Dreier and Charlie Crist and Lindsey Graham want to. (I'm not as certain about more tightly closeted Republicans-- and more hysterical closeted Republicans at that-- like Mitch McConnell, Trent Franks, Adrian Smith and Patrick McHenry. And I'm far less certain about what the religio-fascist C-Street cult would like. They're at least partially behind the Kill the Gays legislation in the process of being adopted by Uganda. Last night Rachel Maddow interviewed huckster Richard Cohen, a self-proclaimed psychologist who says he "cures" gays and wrote a book, Coming Out Straight, that has been widely seen as a profitable joke-- until Ugandan right-wingers started using it to justify their anti-gay jihad. Oh-- and speaking of jihads by religious fanatics... Muslims also offer people who think differently than they do an opportunity to "change or die" just before they're killed (or "converted").

Below are both segments of Rachel's interview with Cohen, who may or may not have worked on Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), another "former" gay who now claims to be (mostly) straight.

It feels creepy agreeing with Richard Cohen, but I agree with him about "The missing Obama"

Plus: At the WaPo, a pundit is born!

I've often suspected that at least some of Richard Cohen's Washington Post columns are written by the Broder monkeys -- the 500 monkeys at computer keyboards who bang out the columns printed under David S. Broder's byline -- in their spare time.

by Ken

Say, have you been keeping track of this great America's Next Great Pundit Contest the Washington Post has been running? I noted the announcement back in the day, and even spent whole seconds contemplating entering, but quickly gave up the idea when I accepted that they were serious about wanting a "pundit" as opposed to an insightful and incisive columnist. (Much emphasis was given to performance on video, which I guess is thought to be central to the pundocratic life.) I didn't pay any further attention until yesterday, when I happened to notice that they were already down to two finalists. Wow, head to head!

So, skipping over all the rest of the contest proceedings, I read one of those final entries, "The Palin take on health-care costs," and was so appalled, I couldn't bear to read the other. I guess the guy thought he was being "cool" and comical and casual. It just seemed to me garbled, ignorant, and backward -- truly revolting. I thought it would have been embarrassing in a high school newspaper. After that, I didn't have the heart, or rather the stomach, to read the other final entry.

When I went to get a link for that column, I discovered that there was no need for me to have read the second piece; the one I had read, by one Kevin Huffman ("I'm a Teach for America executive and a former lawyer and first-grade teacher. An Ohio native, I live in Washington and find the city puzzling, amusing and amazing" -- isn't that just charming? bleahhh!), was the winner!

By "pundit," of course, what the Post means is somebody who'll throw out a heap of opinions that sound slightly offbeat but always reinforce good old mainstream orthodoxy -- a true Village voice. The paper's opinion pages already have quite a lot of these. I would have thought the last thing America needed was another one.

But then, the Old Pundits can't go on forever. As we already know, David S. Broder hasn't written a column in years, possibly decades, that chore having been turned over to the Broder monkeys (see photo above), the 500 monkeys at computer keyboards who bang out the columns printed under the Broder byline. And I've often suspected that at least some of Richard Cohen's columns are written by the Broder monkeys in their spare time.

But every now and again Richard Cohen rouses himself from punditry and writes an actual column. Of course the subject matter will tend to the bleedingly obvious. (In the technical literature, this is commonly referred to as Maureen Dowd Syndrome.) Nevertheless, sometimes even obvious points need to be made repeatedly in order for, well, the point to be made.

The missing Obama

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, November 24, 2009

In my set, I am known as the guy who always had some reservations about Barack Obama. Sure, I supported him in the primaries against Hillary Clinton and I voted for him, with both glee and enthusiasm, especially after John McCain uttered the most shocking words in American politics -- "Sarah Palin." But I had such qualms about Obama that I even disparaged his famous speech on race, which almost everyone else thought was just about the greatest ever given on the subject. I just reread it -- and I was a bit chastened (I was too severe), but mostly I was saddened. Where is the man who once gave that speech?

The speech, delivered in Philadelphia in March 2008, was compelled by the rantings of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who had been Obama's pastor and spiritual adviser. Wright, a man of a certain age with the emotional scar tissue that comes from a life in a harshly racist society, had let loose his anger -- and it had been caught on tape and YouTubed around the world. A sermon that had a context and an appreciative audience looked like sheer demagoguery and madness on the small screen. Obama had to kiss off Wright.

He did so with style and with dignity. But more than that, to reread the speech is to be impressed once again with the fluidity of Obama's mind -- his logic, his reasoning and his immense writing talent, which made a great impression on the impressionable people in my profession.

But to reread the speech is also to come face to face with an Obama of keen moral clarity. Here was a man who knew why he was running for president and knew, also precisely, what he personified. He could talk to America as a black man and a white man -- having lived in both worlds. He could -- and he did -- explain to America what it is like to have been a black man of Wright's age and what it is like even now to be a black man of any age.

Somehow, though, that moral clarity has dissipated. The Obama who was leading a movement of professed political purity is the very same person who as president would not meet with the Dalai Lama, lest he annoy the very sensitive Chinese. He is the same man who bowed to the emperor of Japan when, in my estimation, the president of the United States should bow to no man. He is the same president who in China played the mannequin for the Chinese government, appearing at stage-managed news conferences and events -- and having his remarks sometimes censored. When I saw him in that picture alone on the Great Wall, he seemed to be thinking, "What the hell am I doing here?" If so, it was a good question.

The Barack Obama of that Philadelphia speech would not have let his attorney general, Eric Holder, announce the new policy for trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Sept. 11 defendants in criminal court, as if this were a mere departmental issue and not one of momentous policy. And the Barack Obama of the speech would have enunciated a principle of law and not an ad hoc system in which some alleged terrorists are tried in civilian courts and some before military tribunals. What is the principle in that: What works, works? Try putting that one on the Liberty Bell.

Of course, there's a difference between campaigning and governing. There is no reality to campaigning. You want Guantanamo closed, you say you'll close it. You want to close it as president, and all of a sudden it becomes a political crisis that costs you your White House counsel, an experienced and principled man named Gregory Craig. Governing is hard.

But governing has to be informed by moral clarity, by the sense that we always know the president's interior life -- his bottom lines. Obama's political career has been too brief for us to know his bottom lines by votes cast in any legislative body or decisions made as an administrator. He had little record but lots of rhetoric -- much of it morally stirring and beautifully written.

As president, though, he has tried so hard to be the un-George Bush that the former president's overweening moralism -- his insistence on seeing things as either black or white -- has become an Obama gray. Human rights in general has been treated as if it's a Republican idea. Obama should reread his Philadelphia speech. He'll find a good man there.

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Can the Fraternal Order of Media Whores for McCranky pull the plug on the monster they created?

Well, for once Young Johnny didn't lie -- when he told us
the economy isn't his strong suit. [Click to enlarge.]

"'I broke my promise to always tell the truth,' McCain said [after the 2000 South Carolina primary]. He has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised."

-- Village gasbag Richard Cohen, in his Washington Post column
yesterday, "The Ugly New McCain"

by Ken

You have to figure that the Washington Post's Richard Cohen had some idea of the ridicule he was opening himself to when he acknowledged in his column yesterday trashing his onetime hero, Young Johnny McCranky: "I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty."

With just the hint of a tear, the Old Gasbag remembers how in 2000 his hero the Old Shithead --

did something extraordinary: He confessed to lying about how he felt about the Confederate battle flag, which he actually abhorred. "I broke my promise to always tell the truth," McCain said. Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised.

(Confidential to campaign genius Steve Schmidt at McCranky HQ: Shouldn't Young Johnny be campaigning on this seemingly superhuman ability to keep a secret? To this day, does anybody -- except the Old Gasbag, that is -- know that the Crankyman "actually abhor[s]" the Confederate battle flag? Would anyone in, say, South Carolina care to field this one? Of course it could just be simple forgetfulness that causes the Crankyman to neglect to mention this anytime he's on formerly Confederate soil.)

Now of course, unbeknownst to the Old Gasbag, by 2000 Young Johnny had told so many lies that if he were Pinocchio his nose would have circled the globe. Once again, I refer one and all to Cliff Schecter's indispensable The Real McCain.

DON'T TELL ME THERE'S (GASP!) A MEDIA DOUBLE STANDARD!

Say, isn't it fascinating how little attention the infotainment news media pay to The Real McCain, a work of actual verifiable research by a serious, responsible fact-based journalist, even as they scratch their asses while lending credibility to, even orchestrating media blitzes on behalf of, out-and-out fictional, undisguisedly malicious hatchet jobs published about Barack Obama? Nope, no double standard there! (I'm just saying.)

The Old Gasbag can even pinpoint "the precise moment of McCain's abasement." The moment of truth, as it were, came during Young Johnny's appearance last week on The View, when Joy Behar (God bless her) called the Crankyman on two of his campaign's more preposterous ads, the "lipstick on a pig" debacle and the sex-ed-for-kindergarteners bullshit:

"We know that those two ads are untrue," Behar said. "They are lies."

Freeze. Close in on McCain. This was the moment. He has largely been avoiding the press. The Straight Talk Express is now just a brand, an ad slogan like "Home Cooking" or "We Will Not Be Undersold." Until then, it was possible for McCain to say that he had not really known about the ads, that the formulation "I approve this message" was just boilerplate. But he didn't.

"Actually, they are not lies," he said.

Actually, they are.

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains -- his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that's all -- but just as honorably. No more, though.

And that did it for the O.G. He explains, you see, that his "years of being in the tank for McCain" were attributable, not to the famously chummy insider access of the favored media whores riding the Crankyman's Double Talk Express, but to his perception of the Old Shithead's "integrity":

What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story -- that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

Ack!

Talk about a defective (or more likely absent) bullshit detector! Well, they say when you can fake sincerity, everything else falls into place. And it appears that the O.G. and his fellow Media Whores for McCranky are preternaturally gullible.

And if you can fake integrity . . .

Of course Young Johnny didn't internalize "the code of the McCains." As anyone at all familiar with his biography knows, he spent his early manhood and his military career thumbing his nose at the starchy naval forebears the Admirals McCain. Or is internalizing-the-McCain-code another thing that's supposed to have happened to him during his time as a POW? You know, along with learning to love his country, which apparently he didn't before.

What can be tricky about the McCranky "integrity" is that, at least to an extent, the lying son of a bitch believes in it himself. This appears to be one reason why he manages to live a life of thoroughgoing ethical sleaze even while claiming to be the purest of the pure -- he really thinks everything he does is morally beyond reproach.

Remember that, unlike the other U.S. senators who formed the Keating Five in the heyday of the S&L greed-and-selfishness scandals, Young Johnny had a personal relationship with Charles Keating. The guy did (sleazy) business with the Crankyman's (sleazy) father-in-law, from whom came the lovely Cindy's bulging coffers, which have always bankrolled Young Johnny's political campaigns when he couldn't hornswoggle innocent civilians to pony up enough cash. But in Young Johnny's mind he is so integritatious that he is above any possible suspicion of "pay for play" political

So when his Senate votes reflect uniform fidelity to the corporate interests that bankroll him, how could anyone even suspect "corruption"? Can't we recognize a "conscience at work"? Similarly, why should it occasion as much as a second thought when he turns his entire political operation over to lobbyists, the people whose job it is to buy, or leastwise rent, government officials for their corporate masters? After all, he's Young Johnny McCranky, God's own earthly anointed saint. Makes that Jesus fellow look like a small-timer.

The Legend of the Maverick McCranky

Now while the O.G. may have been clueless about the Real McCranky until Joy Behar unmasked him, for many people -- even people who were taken in by the Crankyman's phony "maverick" persona, the Legend of the McCranky Integrity began unraveling sometime between 2004 and 2008 -- or possibly even during the first term of the Bush regime. It was the moment when the Crankyman realized that he still still had one last shot at the White House, but that it would have to be not just literally but "spiritually" as the successor to the anointed zealot of the Oh-So-Far Right, George W. Bush. While Chimpy the Prez went about his work destroying the country, Young Johnny was frenetically reinventing himself as the New Chimpy, trying to make himself the new darling of the Far Right fanatics and loons whom the "maverick" McCranky had once scorned.

Okay, so the O.G. and the rest of McCranky's Media Minions were kind of slow on the uptake. (Sometimes all it takes is paying attention.) Nevertheless, if you're campaign genius Steve Schmidt (a Karl Rove disciple, of course), you can't be thrilled to read stuff like this:

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir -- the person in whose hands he would leave the country -- is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not. . . .

He was going to look the American people in the eyes and say, not me. I will not lie to you. I am John McCain, son and grandson of admirals. I tell the truth.

But Joy Behar knew better. And so McCain lied about his lying and maybe thinks that if he wins the election, he can -- as he did in South Carolina -- renounce who he was and what he did and resume his old persona. It won't work. Karl Marx got one thing right -- what he said about history repeating itself. Once is tragedy, a second time is farce. John McCain is both.

For several months now campaign genius Steve Schmidt, who undoubtedly deserves credit for turning the moribund McCranky campaign around with his whirlwind of anti-Obama whoppers, has been pursuing a parallel strategy that has struck me as dubious, and potentially disastrous for his enterprise. He more or less declared war on the media.

Dr. Frankenstein was here

The conventional wisdom is that you can never go wrong waging war on the media -- at least if you're doing it from the Right. At this point the infotainment news media are safely owned by, or at least safely in thrall to, the Money-Grubbing Right, and can generally be counted on to do their bidding. Still, the myth of the "liberal media" dies hard, and if some media members who didn't get the memo have the temerity to not just report the blithering imbecilities squealed by McCranky's nincompoop running mate, who after all seems largely responsible for the resurgence of the McCranky campaign, but to point out that from the fact-based standpoint just about every word out of her mouth is a demonstrable lie, well, that's media "bias," isn't it?

So why do I describe this bash-the-media strategy, as employed by the McCranky campaign, "dubious"? Well, you can always get away with a certain amount of media bashing -- the voting public almost demands it. But there are limits, especially when your candidate was invented by the media. The Legend of Young Johnny the Truth-Talking Maverick is a media invention.

The people who propagated that myth either know, or are in a position to know, where the bodies are buried. If they turn against Young Johnny, is it possible that the whole miserable mishmosh could fall apart?

Or, then again, it may be too late. Is it possible that the monster, once created, takes on a life of its own, beyond the control of its creator? Isn't that the unfortunate lesson poor Dr. Frankenstein learned?

For example, even as the insane popularity numbers of Governor Who??? plummet, a staggering number of potential voters stand by their original crackpot judgment that "we like Sarah." No matter how unfounded that judgment may have been, people tend to be reluctant to let go of it. Look how long it took the public to discover that maybe Chimpy the Prez wasn't who or what they thought way back when they, you know, voted for him -- twice. And now they seem to be dealing with this uncomfortable discovery by wiping the memory. George W. Who? Nope, name doesn't ring a bell.

Still, I wonder whether campaign genius Steve Schmidt really appreciates the risky course he has charted, snubbing the very media minions who created their candidate. Hell hath no fury like a media whore scorned.


POSTSCRIPT: MARK CRISPIN MILLER SUGGESTS GOVERNOR WHO???
WAS CHOSEN AS A COVER FOR MORE GOP ELECTION-STEALING

NYU media professor Mark Crispin Miller (most recently author of a book on election fraud called Loser Takes All, from stalwart progressive publisher Ig Publishing) is a serious guy, and I take him seriously. Now he's advancing an alternate theory for the selection of Sarah Palin as McCranky running mate.

Realistically, Mark argues, Palin couldn't have been expected to do much more than energize the Republican "base." That's not enough votes to swing the election, but he suggests that it could be enough to provide cover for another Republican presidential-election theft.

In 2004, he argues, there was no late "surge" of support for Chimpy the Prez, notably in Christian-conservative strongholds like southern Ohio, by Christian "values" voters. It's a myth invented by GOP strategists to conceal what really happened: rigging of the election count, ironically (but crucially) dismissed by the media as a myth. And everybody bought it, losers as well as winners. Poor John Kerry was undone by that late surge of "values" surge.

But Mark points out that there is absolutely no evidence that such a thing happened, and even if it did, it couldn't have happened in anything like the numbers necessary to swing the election. However, if you scratch the surface, he argues, there is plenty of evidence, not just of voter suppression but of serious vote miscounting -- enough to steal the election.

The logic for 2008, he suggests, is that another stolen election can once again be covered with a myth of surging "values"-voter support. It's an interesting argument, and not surprisingly from Mark it's persuasively argued.

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