The Opinion Mill

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.

That New Yorker cover showing Obama and his wife dressed as terrorists and bumping fists in the Oval Office is lame and stupid. It doesn’t work as satire because its ostensible target — dumb rumors about Obama being a Muslim terrorist in disguise — isn’t even grazed, much less hit. It doesn’t work as humor because when professional dickwads like Sean Hannity and the wingnut aviary are either implying that Obama is a closet terrorist or saying it outright, depicting him as such isn’t a joke.

If the cover had shown as this image a nightmare plaguing Joe Lieberman’s sleep, it would have had a shot at being fun. As presented, it’s simply the furthering of a vile lie that’s already had too much time in the air. And it’s about as funny as a case of kidney stones.

I like The New Yorker, but let’s bear in mind that before Seymour Hersh came aboard, it was yet another platform for Iraq warwhores.

Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas? was an expert demolition of the notion that the GOP is “the party of the people,” and a scathing examination of how conservatives have exploited stereotypes and distortions to get working-class people to vote against their own interests. Frank’s new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, due out next month, carries this argument forward by showing that the damage wrought by conservative doctrine is not a matter of incompetence, but the logical, predictable outcome of conservative doctrines.

Shakesville has some spicy-hot excerpts, like this:

Fantastic misgovernment is not an accident; nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. [...] Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. [...] The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job.

In many ways, The Wrecking Crew sounds like a complementary work to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, just out in a new paperback edition. One of Klein’s themes is the penchant of conservatives to use disasters like the flooding of New Orleans to force their pet nostrums on the victimized populace. In this video clip, Klein shows this approach at work in the way wingers have used rising oil prices as an excuse to push for drilling in ecologically sensitive areas:

Klein will appear on Crooks & Liars this Wednesday, July 16, for a live chat.

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One of this year’s publishing success stories has been Vincent Bugliosi’s The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, which has been on the lower reaches of the NYT bestseller list despite a notable reluctance among mainstream venues to review or even take notice of it. The secret has been an under the radar promotion campaign using the Internet and extensive radio interviews. That and the fact that the book’s message — that Bush lied America into an unnecessary war and should be prosecuted for the damage he’s done to ths country – is howlingly obvious.

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Right up there with Vogon poetry, it’s the verse of Mao Zedong! How does it compare with the romance novels of Saddam Hussein? Or the love poetry of Josef Stalin? Or the hot bestiality of Lewis “Scooter” Libby? Or the sizzling falafel action of Bill O’Reilly? Do we have the makings of a readers’ circle here, or what?

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The New York Sun, a money-losing neocon rag, employs a jailbird to write a book review! Not only that — the jailbird is one of the paper’s backers! What will we tell the children?

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Bidding farewell to writer Thomas M. Disch.

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.

Another reason to send those checks to WBAI.

Every now and then, the New Jersey legislature goes through a spasm of debate about the best candidate for the official state song of the Garden State. (There’s an unofficial state song, and anyone who likes it is welcome to it.) Inevitably, someone suggests “Born to Run,” and just as inevitably somebody points out that the song is about getting out as fast as possible, and the some conservative blowhard inevitably crows that that makes the song perfect because high taxes and liberal policies are chasing people out of the state, and then inevitably the howler monkeys at WingOWingPointJive start flinging scats and inevitably the whole thing gets very, very tedious.

Having just returned from a beautiful weekend on New Jersey’s beautiful shoreline, I have realized that the state song of New Jersey need be only one line long: “Have you got your beach tag?”

You don’t need a Bruce Springsteen to sing it, either. Just summon up your best impression of Grandpa Simpson, or Charles Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons, and croak it with self-righteous satisfaction. It’s most effective peformed a capella, but for those who insist on musical accompaniment, I suggest something along the lines of Devo’s version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” or the clattering Flying Lizards cover of “Money.” I picture a video with platoons of wizened Beach Nazis scrambling across dunes and trampling sandcastles in their determination to make certain that every sunburned back is counterpointed by a wristband or a tag attached to the swimming trunks. If anyone tries to launch an invasion of the United States from the sea, he’d better not try it along the Jersey Shore, or the invading armada will be stopped at the surf line by some turkey in wrap-around GeezerGuard sunglasses, demanding to see beach tags.

This recent story makes it clear how much hocus pocus and fiscal legerdemain lies behind the claims of shore communities that they have to charge for beach use in order to maintain the beaches. Under these circumstances, the idea of a statewide or regional beach pass sounds fine to me. And if the sandwingers of Monmouth, Ocean and Cape May counties whine because it takes away some of th gravy they wring from New Jerseyans who have already paid for beach replenishment and other servies through their taxes, so much the better. 

So if there muts be beach passes, the idea of instituting a statewide beach pass program

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.

Happy Fourth of July, everybody. For this Extended Weekend Edition of the Sunday Bookchat, we’re taking the words right out of the mouths of authors of new books that deserve the attention of lefty and progressive readers — and potential recovering wingers who have gotten tired of kindergarten claptrap from Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck and want to see what real books look like.

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Kerwin Swint, author of Dark Genius: The Influential Career of Legendary Political Operative and Fox News Founder Roger Ailes:

He makes a big deal out of saying, “You don’t even know what my political views are,” and you’ll hear some people say that he’s really a businessman, and I think there’s some truth to that. But, he might not have started out in the 1960s as a conservative ideologue, but the people he has worked with, and the people he has come into close contact with, he’s bought into it. He’s well ensconced in the conservative movement and, in my opinion, a leader of the conservative movement. I think that he’s more conservative than some people might be willing to admit and certainly more conservative than he’s willing to admit.

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Ernest Freeberg, author of Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent:

The press defended its own right to operate without censorship, but most editors were also eager to demonstrate their enthusiasm for the war [World War I] and their loyalty to the government. They did this in part by bashing the radicals. It seems odd that these editors were so jealous of their own First Amendment rights, and so cavalier about the speech rights of others. But they held the common view that constitutional rights only belong to those who use them responsibly. In their view, the radicals wanted the right to say things that might, in the end, lose the war and even tip the country into a revolution that would overturn the Constitution.

And so they were happy to see Debs go to jail. The New York Times ridiculed Debs’s claim that he enjoyed a First Amendment right to speak his mind about the war, insisting that the government had a more important right to “defend itself against unbridled speech.” And the Washington Post called Debs a “a public menace” whose free speech claims were nothing more than “hairsplitting over the infringement of liberty.” My favorite, though, is the editor who called Debs a “treasonably-inclined blatherskite.”

The radicals were not surprised by any of this. Long before the war broke out, they had argued that the mainstream press was owned by, and operated for, the master class. Their critique of the impact of media monopoly on democratic debate was prescient.

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Paul Alexander, author Machiavelli’s Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove:

When Rove headed with Bush to Washington after winning the presidency in 2000, Rove had one overriding goal, which he would state publicly over the coming years: to set up what Rove termed “a permanent Republican majority.” “When Karl got to the White House,” Texas-based Republican strategists Mark Sanders told me, “he immediately started putting together a plan for what was essentially the Third Reich of Republican majority in this country. That was absolutely his plan, a Republican majority domination not just of the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, and the presidency, but also state legislatures across the country. This was not just a pie-in-the-sky dream that Karl had. He wanted to see the Republican Party rule for the next 30 to 40 years.”

To do this, Rove needed the South to remain solidly Republican, and of looming concern was Don Siegelman—a popular, effective governor in Alabama, and a Democrat. It is not surprising, then, that Rove targeted Siegelman as someone who needed to be defeated and then driven from the political scene so he would not be able to reappear in the future to pose a threat.

“So all roads lead to Karl Rove, who wanted me out of the way,” Siegelman told me, “because I was a threat not only in Alabama but also on the national level. I was the first Democratic governor to endorse Al Gore. Heading toward 2004, I had spoken out at a Democratic Governors Association meeting against Bush’s policy in Iraq and his education and economic programs, and I was ready to take that message to key primary states.” To achieve this, Rove participated in a political prosecution of Siegelman that culminated with Siegelman going to prison which ended Siegleman’s political career—or so it appeared at the time.

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Peek in on the launch party for the Progressive Book Club. Reading the Freedom Writers gets a schoollteacher suspended. Ahmed Rashid talks about the new wave of Jihadis.