The Opinion Mill

They’re attacking Barack Obama over his basketball game. I repeat — his basketball game.

Is there a 12-step program for conservatives who are ready to wean themselves off whatever bug juice they’ve been swigging for the past decade?

It gets outraged because Barack Obama’s campaign is using a German-language flyer — to promote an appearance in Germany! 

The sea of Germans drummed up by the Obama campaign will be used as props to tell us Americans how to vote, and the campaign isn’t trying to pretend otherwise. That’s breathtakingly arrogant, and par for the course for Barack Obama.

In an argument, I do try to keep a charitable mindset and not simply asssume my opponent’s arguments are shaped by a brain-cell deficit. But I mean . . . come on. How does the author of such a statement cross the street without getting run over, or tie his sneakers without hanging himself?

“Breathtaking” indeed.

Barbara Ehrenreich (author of the classic Nickel and Dimed) has a new book out, This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation, a collection of essays, articles and columns — gathered from The Progressive, The Nation and the NYT, among others — chronicling the social and economic wreckage that will be the Bush administration’s legacy in America. In the clip above, Ehrenreich talks about her book with Minnesota talk-show host Jack Rice. Ehrenreich will be online for questions next weekend at the Firedoglake book salon.

* * * * *

David Sirota, author of The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington, goes on Fox Noise to demolish the GOP’s let-them-eat-cake attitude as typified by Phil Gramm and his notion that people caught in the economic downturn are a bunch of whiners. (Actually, it’s more a let’s-give-their-cake-to-our-rich-campaign-contributors attitude.) Going up against a Republican wingertron who can do nothing but recite discredited nonsense, Sirota acquits himself admirably.

* * * * *

Given the rock-bottom ratings of the Fox Business channel, Naomi Klein’s appearance on its surrealistically vapid “Happy Hour” probably did more to boost the channel’s fortunes than it did to boost sales of the new paperback edition of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Nevertheless, Klein took her message right into the faces of the Fox news twinkies, who were reduced to hollow-sounding laughter as Klein explained how the Bush administration’s attempt to expand offshore drilling by manipulating worries about the oil crunch is classic “disaster capitalism” — using calamities and fears to ram through measures and changes that would never have passed muster with the voters.

One of SCTV’s later seasons included a spoof of local TV children’s programming, which back in the days when there really were local TV channels meant getting some over-the-hill actor to dress up as a ringmaster or a ship captain and introduce ancient Three Stooges films and cartoons nobody else would touch. The SCTV spoof show was called “Happy Hour,” featuring a well-oiled host named Happy Marsden. I’m not sure Fox Business wants to cultivate that kind of association with its own “Happy Hour” show, but from what I’ve seen the SCTV version isn’t that much goofier than what Fox is trying to do.

* * * * *

When Bruce Bartlett walks down the street, do people roll their eyes and use their fingers to make little twirly motions next to their heads? Even by the sub-sub-basement standards of the Wall Street Journal, Bartlett’s column arguing that the GOP is the true party of civil rights, the theme of his new book Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past. The childlike inanity of Bartlett’s attempt to pretend that the GOP is still the party of Lincoln, not the party of Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott, brings out the best in some bloggers. Matt Yglesias points out that while the Republican Party had a great record on race in the 19th century, there’s been some water under the bridge since then. John Hobo decides that Bartlett is asking African-Americans to vote for long-dead candidates and takes it from there.

* * * * *

Pioneering hip hop artist Grandmaster Flash has a book out: The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats. Listen to him talk about it with Bat Segundo.

The childlike inanity of Bruce Bartlett’s column in today’s WSJ, “The GOP Is the Party of Civil Rights,” really is astonishing, and only goes to emphasize that in today’s wingnut-rich media environment, there is literally nothing too ridiculous or offensive to go unpublished as long as it goes out with a conservative marketing tag.

Bartlett’s burble — please don’t call it an “argument” — has it that the Republicans are the true paladins of civil rights. Considering that the halls of wingerdom are still echoing with tributes to the late Jesse Helms, as disgusting a racist as ever slithered through the corridors of power, that’s pretty rich. As one might expect, Bartlett has to reach pretty far back into the historical record to back up this claim.

Lyndon Johnson consistently opposed civil-rights legislation while he was in Congress, but as president worked hard to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Neither would have passed without the strong support of congressional Republicans, who provided the margin of victory.

Richard Nixon is said to have developed a “Southern strategy” of using racial code words like “law and order” to gain votes in the South. Yet he did more to desegregate southern schools than any president in history. Nixon also created affirmative action to help break the power of racist labor unions, and minority set-asides for government contracts to aid black entrepreneurs.

Bartlett is amusing to watch as he trips over the facts he’s trying to spin, such as when he has to admit that Harry Truman “deserves great credit” for desegregating the civil service and the military. But really, let’s just cut to the chase. The era of Civil Rights legislation prompted the exodus of the Democractic Party’s “Dixiecrat” racist faction first to independent movements like the States’ Rights Party, and then the GOP. Strom Thurmond left the Democrats to become a Republican because of his support for Barry Goldwater in 1964. Helms switched to the GOP in 1970. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” of coded appeals to racism has been quite effective. Not only does Bartlett skip past the Dixiecrat element, he neglects to mention that the affirmative action programs and minority set-asides begun by the Nixon administration arouse nothhing but loathing among contemporary Republicans and conservatives.

And to think that a respectable publishing house, Palgrave Macmillan, just laid out good coin for the chance to publish a book-length version of Barlett’s intellectual finger-painting. Will it toddle up the bestseller list to join other loaded diapers like Liberal Fascism? I’m not sure, but this much I know: the intellectual decay of conservatism is getting nastier by the week.   

One of wingerdom’s favorite dreamland correspondents has declared that the Iraq war is over and — surprise! — we won:

I would go so far as to say that barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What’s left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it’s time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.

I guess it’s only to be expected that the war we were lied into by the only president to be personally chosen by God would be winding up just in time for the conclusion of that president’s final term. (Assuming Scalia et al don’t have another surprise in store for us.) After all, Obama has made it clear he wants a tight timetable for withdrawal, and the Iraqis themselves have been clamoring for the U.S. to get lost. Let the Republicans declare victory and go home, leaving behind a brutalized pseudo-state, a make-believe government riddled by terrorist elements, a population traumatized by ethnic cleansing, women at the mercy of theocrats and fresh trouble brewing in Kurdistan. Let the victory parades begin!

Look, I’m resigned to the fact that the wingers will be sounding triumpets, crying “Hail Caesar!” and scattering rose petals at Bush’s feet no matter what happened in Iraq. They’ve been doing it ever since that clown show on the aircraft carrier. Bush has his hard core of supporters who don’t care if the country’s been robbed, so long as the crooks have a magnetized yellow ribbon on their getaway car.

Since the bad guys won and the crooks are going to get away clean, why not end the scam now? Ring down the curtain now, get the troops out, leave one less mess for the next administration to deal with? Can we at least get that much out of this horror? Nobody’s fooled except the fools, so let’s just cut the crap and get this thing over with.

If you’ve been scratching your head over that vapid profile of Rush Limbaugh that cluttered up the pages of the Sunday NYT magazine, consider yourself a member of a very large club. While there’s no denying that El Rushbo still has a large radio following, it’s also undeniable that the Republican Party is in for a shellacking in November, the entire menu of conservative nostrums has been stained and discredited by the Bush administration, and the GOP presidential nomination is going to a candidate Limbaugh despises while his beloved Mitt Romney went down in flames.   

All these signs of decline, along with El Rushbo’s usual array of unhinged attacks, would indicate that Tak Radio Gasbag No. 1 is on the downhill side of his long, odious career. So why did one finish the article with the feeling that the writer, Zev Chafets, went home from the interview with Limbaugh’s scrotum-prints on his chin?

Perhaps, as Eric Boehlert notes, because Chafets is a dittohead in good standing with the conservative gallery of scat-flinging howler monkeys, and there was never any doubt that the finished article would be about a hard hitting as a wet Twinkie:

That’s why there was no mention in the very long profile about the fact that Limbaugh has called Sen. John Kerry a “gigolo,” mocked Democratic Party chief Howard Dean as “a very sick man,” agreed that liberal philanthropist George Soros is a “self-hating Jew,” denounced then-Sen. Tom Daschle as an Al Qaeda sympathizer, mocked anti-war crusader Cindy Sheehan, whose son was slain in Iraq, by teasing, ” ‘Oh, she lost her son’ — well, yes. Yes. Yes. But you know, this is [sigh] — aaah. We all lose things.”

Or that Limbaugh has claimed Democrats “hate this country” (i.e. “What’s good for Al Qaeda is good for the Democratic Party in this country today”); denigrated members of the U.S. Armed Forces, calling military men and women who criticized the war in Iraq and advocated withdrawal “phony soldiers”; toasted photos of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib as “good old American pornography”; suggested actor Michael J. Fox faked symptoms of his life-threatening illness while taping a pro-stem-cell-research commercial; called Sen. Barack Obama a “Halfrican American”; and announced Obama and Osama bin Laden are “on the same page.”

There was not even a whiff of those odious attacks in The New York Times. Who knows? Maybe Chafets, given his clear political leanings, didn’t include those nuggets because he didn’t think the smears were particularly controversial. Maybe Chafets agreed with all of Limbaugh’s pronouncements.

It’s certainly possible. Reading some of Chafets’ previous work (he used to be a columnist for the New York Daily News), I often got the feeling that he was applying to be a Limbaugh ghost writer, the way he dumped all over Democrats and cheered lustfully for a war with Iraq.

We no longer expect much from the NYT op-ed pages, known chiefly as the place where Bill Kristol showcases NewsMax-level accuracy and insight. But shouldn’t the magazine observe a higher standard? I’m not demanding that NYT profiles be written by people who are ideologically antagonistic to their subjects. What I am demanding is that the authors of those profiles observe basic standards of accuracy, and show themselves willing to challenge their subjects. The only challenge detectable in Chafets’ profile is how low he’s willing to go in fawning over Limbaugh, and by running this knob-polishing epic apparently uncut and unedited, the Times has once again given supporters of quality journalism cause for despair.

It’s been a great weekend, and I’m in too good a frame of mind to let my thoughts be sullied by the career of Jesse Helms. Hendrik Hertzberg, as it turns out, wrote the perfect obituary for Helms, albeit a few years early, on the occasion of his retirement from the Senate in 2001:

Helms never bothered with the soft bigotry of low expectations. He has always preferred the hard stuff, undiluted by the branch water of euphemism. Many of the Helms retrospectives of recent days have dated his entry into serious politics to 1960, when, after having spent most of his thirties as a banking lobbyist, he began delivering nightly five-minute commentaries on a Raleigh television station and on something called the Tobacco Radio Network—the job that propelled him into the Senate, twelve years later. But as far back as 1950, Helms, then twenty-eight, helped run what the Duke University historian William H. Chafe has called “the bitterest, ugliest, most smear-ridden campaign of modern times,” the race to unseat Frank P. Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina and probably the most distinguished North Carolinian ever to sit in the United States Senate. “The Graham campaign is generally viewed as the most pivotal in modern southern history since it set the precedent for the race-baiting and red-baiting tactics that were later employed so widely by politicians like Orval Faubus, George Wallace, and Jesse Helms,” Chafe has written. “Helms, of course, helped invent these tactics.” Over the succeeding half century, Helms changed but little. His own campaigns have invariably been powered by appeals to prejudice, racial and otherwise. In recent years the focus of his bigotry has shifted increasingly toward gays and lesbians. But his disdain for people of color (exemplified by his “humorous” habit, in private, of referring to any black person as “Fred”) continues to find ways of expressing itself. He is the Senate’s most reliable opponent of any measure aimed at securing the rights or improving the conditions of African-Americans. In 1994, when Nelson Mandela visited the Capitol, Helms ostentatiously turned his back on him.

How like Helms to kick the bucket during Independence Day weekend, and thus give the knuckle-draggers, Kloset Klansmen and religious whackjobs a chance to foul the meaning of patriotism by singing his praises.   If you want to take your gag reflex out for a spin, check out some of the more bizarre tributes the winger pundits are excreting on behalf of this disgusting man — one of the sleaziest creatures ever to leave a slimy trail through the halls of government.

Do I sound extreme in my contempt for Jesse Helms? Extremism in the denunciation of such odious creeps is no vice. America becomes a better country in exact proportion to the distance it puts between itself and something like Jesse Helms.

Anti-tax jihadist and Republican bigwig Grover Norquist is famous for having said he doesn’t want to kill government, he just wants to make it small enough that it can be drowned in a bathtub.

Thanks to the conservative penchant for faith-based infrastructure maintenance, every summer in America brings a bigger bathtub:

The worst Midwest flooding since 1993 has generated images of swamped towns, cracked roads, washed-out bridges, overwhelmed dams, failed levees, broken sewage systems, stunted crops and water-logged refugees.

The losses are in the billions of dollars and still mounting, as the costs of crop losses alone send shocks through the inflation-wracked world food system and threaten insurers.

The disaster has reminded policymakers of the decrepit state of U.S. infrastructure, stirring concerns similar to those following the deadly Minneapolis bridge collapse in 2007 and the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Even before the latest flooding, a group representing engineers said the United States needed to spend about $1 trillion more than it does now to bring infrastructure up to par with modern needs and standards.

“The patch-and-pray approach simply won’t succeed,” said David Mongan, head of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

But the group also said its five-year cost estimate was outdated and does not count the price of new roads, rails, and sewers required by a growing population, nor the cost to repair damage inflicted by the recent Midwest floods.

President George W. Bush has asked Congress for $1.8 billion to boost funds for flood recovery but it is unclear how much of that money will end up in infrastructure repair.

Of course it’s not clear how much of the money will go for infrastructure repair. Under Bush rules, virtually none of the money will go for infrastructure repair. The preznit has hungry lobbyists and campaign contributors to feed, and only a few months left to put another layers of fat on their flanks. All you heartlanders who turned up your noses and laughed along with El Rushbo as New Orleans drowned better invest in life rafts and water wings. Getting screwed by Republicans: It’s not just for dark-skinned people anymore!

I propose that from now on, flooded areas — in fact, any area hit by an overwhelming natural disaster area — be referred to as Grover’s Bathtubs, in honor of the man whose knowing, bottomlessly cynical use of anti-tax pledges and other weapons of mass hysteria helps keep those roads and bridges decaying. Because, you know, government doesn’t work — unless, like Grover, you know how to work the government.

It’s true. I don’t know how much actual research will be involved. Krauthammer probably just needs someone to feed and wash the little man who lives inside his head and hisses “Bomb them!” whenever he hears something he doesn’t like.

Sounds like a cushy gig. As Matt Yglesias points out, it’s not as though Krauthammer (or his employer, FreaxNoise) puts such a high premium on fact-checking or accuracy.   

Karl Rove accuses the New York Times of outing a CIA agent.