General Petraeus, correctly, does not think the smoke from burning Qurans in the spring smells like victory:
"We condemn, in particular, the action of an individual in the United States who recently burned the Holy Quran," said the statement issued by military commander Gen. David Petraeus and the top NATO civilian representative in Afghanistan, Mark Sedwill.
Maybe because:
The Taliban said in a statement emailed to media outlets that the U.S. and other Western countries have wrongly excused the burning a Quran by the pastor of a Florida church on March 20 as freedom of speech and that Afghans "cannot accept this un-Islamic act."
Neither US "hawks" or "doves" have anything to cheer about apropos of an "Afghan Spring" of violence by religious zealots there, as ignited by religious zealots here. Neither do General Petraeus or the population of Afghanistan. The only two gaining parties are the Taliban and "Pastor Terry Jones."
I've noticed that mainstream reports like this one in the New York Times bury the identity of the Quran desecrator way down in the column. Suppose Minister Farrakhan publicly roasted a Holy Bible during a Friday afternoon prayer meeting, and that it drove the "good Christian people" of Chicago, for instance, to firebomb Arab nation consulates (because they are perceived to be less dangerous to "good Christian people" than local Nation of Islam properties): does it seem likely that we'd have to wait until the 10th paragraph to find out the identify of this "individual in the United States"?
Usually when I see the term "coarsening the political debate," it's usually part of a quote attributed to a member of the establishment political class, including politicians, think tank spokesmen, and celebrity columnists. Both sides denounce the practice, but I think our shared media experience strongly indicates that it's Republicans who systematically began doing this in earnest during the Nixon administration. I remember when Vice President Spiro Agnew, previously the corrupt governor of Maryland, being deployed over the media to tar liberals as the "nattering nabobs of negativism." It was an absurd construct that we teenagers laughed about, but it's my earliest recollection of a politician attempting to demonize a mainstream category of people. There were certainly other, more significant examples that went right past me.
After years of respite during the terms of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, the team that invented Reagan brought with it a whole arsenal of sneaky little tricks to coarsen the political debate in the form of deftly delivered wisecracks aimed at a lost generation of slowly aging hippies who had become ashamed of what they'd been (i.e., yuppies). During the early and mid-80s, I was less tuned into Republican attack politics than what was happening to public policy at their hands. I was paying more attention to the damage being wrought than the "enabling technologies" for that destruction. Still, I assume that there was some subtlety being applied by Reagan's strategy team.
Many of us might agree that Ground Zero of the postmodern "coarsening," yearwise, was 1988 shortly after the Democratic National Convention. Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis had won the nomination. He was a short, wonky, funny-looking guy who had performed well in his acceptance speech and was polling extremely well immediately afterward with what appeared to be a GOP-weary electorate. But the diabolical Lee Atwater was on the job for George Herbert Walker Bush, the patrician establishment archetype who somehow remained an utter pussy even after being shot down while piloting a torpedo bomber in the Pacific during World War II. I'm sure that most people over 40 or so remember the "Willie Horton" capital punishment campaign commercial during the 1988 presidential campaign, and the opportunity it set for a debate moderator to ambush Dukakis in one of the debates and finish taking the wind out of sails. The New England blueblood and a cynical South Carolina bigot teamed up to mainstream the coarsening of the political debate. My perception to this day is that Democrats rarely do it, and Republicans do it all the time because it's the best tactic they have for ongoing minority rule: keep average white people terrified of everyone who is different from them.
Democrats stupidly try to counter Republican coarsening with "taking the high road," which is an asymmetric strategy that has driven the party to timidity and irrelevance. Today they only participate in the power structure by giving Republicans what they want and pretending that even their most heinous enemies work in good faith. The last mainstream Democrat I remember pushing back hard against Republicans on the Senate floor, Dick Durbin in 2005, was quickly chastened after his experiment with expressing his unvarnished opinions about the Bush administration's Guantanamo interrogation tactics. He has behaved as if emasculated ever since he apologized for the remark a week after he made it. You see, by noting parallels between federal government activities and Nazism, you are coarsening the dialog... and we can't have that. Unless you're a Republican or a Tea Partier slandering a Democratic president's origin, religion, character, and motives.
Which (finally) brings me to this: a campaign ad by a Democrat that tries the novel approach of proactively using symmetric, not asymmetric, tactics against a right-wing opponent.
Alan Grayson's approach here is very much in the spirit of Lee Atwater. We could deconstruct its sleazy production value, the editing of the "Taliban Dan" clip, and especially the demonization of an already-unsavory right-wing nut with a catchy, ugly nickname shown in a pseudo-Arabic font. But what makes it different than Atwood's work, in my opinion, is that in back of the media packaging the ad's claims are documented and undeniable. They are not overstretched interpretations, lies, or pure hateful mockery as deployed by Atwater so effectively.
Coarse? Yes. But that cat was let out of the bag decades ago by the masters of divide-and-conquer politics. Effective? Yet to be seen. For an early indication, listen for Republican outrage about how Grayson has coarsened the dialog "beyond the pale" or some such thing. Next, note whether a debate moderator asks Taliban Dan live on TV whether he supports any rights for battered wives or whether he still believes God wills wives to SUBMIT to their husbands without exception. Finally, count the votes. There is reportedly some very big out-of-state money from "Big Pill," as Grayson calls Pharma, and other usual suspects. Moneywise, he's outgunned. So how else to fight overpowering opponents but by attacking their weakness... in this case, Taliban Dan. But you attack him using symmetric tactics.
* As seen first on TPM: the Executive Director of Minutemen American Defense (MAD*), Shawna Forde, and two others arrested on charges related to a double homicide in Arizona. Two members of a family with a Hispanic surname were reported to have been murdered in a 30 May home invasion 10 miles north of the border. Authorities suspect premeditated murder as part of a scheme by "thieves looking for drugs and money," according to the report. The Post-Intelligencer referred to the alleged home invasion ringleader as an "anti-immigration activist." That's some nice post-intelligence newswriting, I'd say. Here is an undated and unedited statement by Ms. Forde, copied and pasted directly from the MAD web page (go find it yourself, I'm not linking to it):
I would like to let everyone know that we are in full operation we have people coming from Florida and other parts of the country to assist in gathering exclusive footage of drug cartel drug smuggling and humane trafficking.
* Here's a timely example of The Fox Effect. It's about 30 seconds into a Glenn Beck segment:
"It's no longer dis... un... uh... respectable to be antisemitic on The Left."
Triple play! Some nobody on Fox immediately found a way to connect today's Nazi-inspired terrorism at the Holocaust Museum to the Palestinian people and American liberals while obscuring the fact that the suspect in custody for the shooting is an extreme right-winger with a history and a following. You know, just like Glenn Beck.
Yes, let's call it The Fox Effect. Even ShepardSmith knows it.
Update: as Martha Gellhorn's Ghost implies in the comments, The Fox Effect, like Mephistophiles, is known by many names. And it looks like she came up with a valid alternate coinage.
Unlike a fertilized egg, Dr. Tiller did not have a right to life. Scott P. Roeder is a freedom fighter.
The outcome of Dr. Tiller's murder has been declared "bittersweet" by Kansas "abortion opponents." It is not really clear which part of it they thought was "bitter." The arrest, maybe. After all, the most important thing is that the "prayer was answered."
And in the article, the New York Times does a really nice job of balancing the viewpoints of physicians and advocates of reproductive rights versus people who support domestic terrorism.
* I have fears that these Palin/McCain experiments with inciting mobs to violence could be the prelude to something unspeakably ugly. Consider what might happen if, in the next 2 weeks or so, that dark-skinned thugs appeared at Republican rallies and started scuffling with GOP nutbags in order to "defend" Obama. Those thugs would certainly be what the French call "agents provocateurs", and they would somehow, indirectly as hell, be on the payroll of some very, very bad people who have a very keen interest in making sure that Obama never sets foot in the White House.
It would create a public atmosphere ripe for backlash against Obama, not to mention much more sordid or violent potential impacts. The corporate media would be the enablers. I'm not saying it would even work. But think about how heinously effective such an idea could seem to desperate, criminal white men.
Update: in acknowledgment of anon in my comments section, here's a shot of actual paranoia ripped from the comments section of this Politico post:
Between 8:45 PM and 9:15 PM tonight (Oct 8) on Intrade, someone just bet a LOT of money against Obama winning the presidency. And I mean a LOT. His stock, which has been over 70 for a couple of days now and at 76 most of the time today dipped down to 64 or so in those 20 minutes under heavy betting before recovering immediately after 9:15 to 73... Very strange.. is there something someone knows?? What is the news tomorrow, JMart?" Posted By: intrade | October 08, 2008 at 11:54 PM
If you need me tomorrow, I'll be in the bunker with my 50 bottles of wine.
* Apropos of the 1990s Rwandatalk radioman who incited the Hutu majority to exterminate the "cockroach Tutsis" (not to mention raping, hacking apart, and burying them alive), Media Matters for America traces the short but continuing history of a persistent McCain campaign smear of Barack Obama that has been spread and perpetuated relentlessly by the corporate media even though it has been authoritatively debunked by the likes of DC celebrity pundit Andrea Mitchell. And Mitchell is no lefty fellow traveler --- she regularly appears as an Atrios "Wanker of the Day." (Sorry, I can't find an example of Mitchell's wanking because Atrios doesn't provide us with a search engine for his site.)
This is how it's done by genocidal dictators: transform the mass media into an unrebutted echo chamber for hate speech. Create a scapegoat class through broadcast slander and then sic the fear-addled bigots on them. Are we almost there yet? With one more stolen presidential election, maybe.
* When I first read the news about North Carolina Sen. Liddy Dole wanting to name an international HIV/AIDS medical aid act after the late Sen. Jesse Helms, I reacted somewhat like Atrios. I thought it was amusing that the name of this homophobic cadaver would be associated with legislation intended to prevent the spread of HIV. He would be certainly be mortified by the development were he not already mort-ified.
But because I am not gay or lesbian, my first reaction to the story lacked empathy for the victims of Helms' epic style of sociopathic, bigoted politics. Pam Spaulding at Pandagon explains it so the rest of us can understand, though, with some NC-level political tinge, to boot.
Afterword: For readers who are on Blog Inconsistency Patrol at this moment, I do not believe that the tone of this post is out of keeping with what I wrote yesterday about dead people who are horrible. My tone is overtly vulgar here because Helms' life work deserves no respect by any stretch of civility. Neither Helms himself nor any of his loved ones could seriously believe, in good faith, that there was any moral content whatsoever to the dead senator's soul. I'm not the judge, but I'm not responsible for the discredit he brought upon himself through a lifetime of peddling hatred to his enablers in return for income and political power.
Late update: I hereby honor Senator Dole by naming an important component of my home infrastructure after her. We shall heretofore refer to the seat of our busiest porcelain throne as the Liddy My Toilet. That something y'all can get behind, North Carolina?
* Much comment on the racism of our first-ever female vice presidential nominee (1984), Geraldine Ferraro, can be found on the web tonight. Here's a representative one --- a Daily Kos link with commentary from Bob Cesca, illustrating that Ferraro has a long history of this kind of race-baiting.
Obama's campaign doesn't need to be demanding resignations from Hillary's campaign, but they do need to point out what the Clinton campaign has become: monstrous. And then they should hire back Samantha Power and give her a raise.
Erratum and update: Well, it appears that Geri Ferraro was not the first-ever female vice presidential nominee after all. StuporMundi apologizes for his error. However, Ms. Ferraro was, as far as StuporMundi knows, the first-ever female vice presidential candidate to end up being such a clueless, bigoted asshole.
RubberCrutch, 14-watt illuminatus and man about town, earns his living as a simple country editor, as if toiling on a chain gang beside Larry Fine, making little sentences out of big ones.
He has 30 years of professional experience in written and visual communications, including journalism, public relations, advertising, technical publishing, and photography. In connection with some of those roles he has won several unimportant awards.
[Editor's note: in archived Fifty50 posts, all references to one "StuporMundi" in fact pertain to our hero, RubberCrutch, unless otherwise noted. Thank you for your attention in this matter.]
It is the mission of this weblog to offer you, at least half the time, an assortment of essays and pictures pertaining to current events, aesthetic studies, psychological inquiries, and everyday tomfoolery, presented in a jocular setting that is suitable for Mom, Pop, Junior, and Sis, as long as Mom and Sis do not object to literature that sometimes contains words such as "asshole" and "fuck."
