The Washington Post's Editorial Page

If I was more ambitious I'd devote an entire blog, or several hundred book pages, to the issue of the WaPo editorial page. To the way in which it's stable of right-wing columnist and opinion writers like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Kathleen Parker, Anne Applebaum, Michael Gerson, Ruth Marcus, Michael Kinsely and William freaking Kristol (among others) are "balanced out" by such opposite numbers as...David Broder? (suuuuure.) Richard Cohen? (Ugh.) Fred Hiatt? (riiiiiight) David Ignatius? (please, just stop.)

The only consistently liberal voice on the page is Eugene Robinson, and he is hardly up to the job all by himself. While he seems like a genuinely nice guy on T.V. (perhaps not so difficult givent hat he often sits next to Pat Buchannan), his opinion columns suffer from the standard mainstream liberal wussiness that cedes the vital ground before the debate even begins.

In his latest column, Robinson has his moments in fighting absurd Republican arguments against trying Khalid Sheik-Mohammed in New York. "Putting KSM and the others on trial in a civilian proceeding on U.S. soil is not just a duty but also an opportunity," he says. "It's a way to show that we do not have one system of justice for ourselves and another for Muslims, that we give defendants their day in court, that we insist they be vigorously defended by competent counsel -- that we really do practice what we preach." Right on, Gene. But it doesn't last long:

...the critics can't really think a judge is going to give Khalid Sheik Mohammed an open microphone to spew his jihadist views, or fear that a jury -- sitting just blocks from Ground Zero -- will look for reasons to let an accused mass murderer off on some technicality.

Aww, I thought we needed to have a have a war of ideas, Gene! How can we do that if he's not allowed to express his ideas? Now of course there are rules in a courtroom, and he won't really be able to just take a microphone and start ranting--nobody can do that in a criminal trial. But, moreover: so what if he did? Republicans use this as one of their main arguments against having the trial in New York--that KSM is going to use witchcraft and convert people to a life of terrorism by talking about how he truly and deeply believes with all his heart that killing innocent civilians is God's duty. And how does Robinson deal with this assumption? Does he laugh at it? Does he defend the right to a fair trial as a necessary component of a free and impartial justice system? (Hint: nope.)

The second part of the sentence is even worse. "Don't worry," he says, "the jury will find him guilty." Wait...what? The reason it's okay to have a civil trial of someone accused of plotting 9/11...is because we know he's guilty? What if he didn't do it? What if he was a patsy set up by OBL to take the fall?

I know we all watch Judge Judy and that OJ Simpson happened a million years ago and so we're all legal experts now especially when it comes to evil terrorists, but...how the fuck does anybody know who's guilty before they've gone to trial?

That's why we have trials--to determine guilt, or innocence. Or at least it is in the imaginary universe I learned about in school. In modern America, I guess we have trials when we're sure we can get the conviction. Because otherwise, KSM would just sit in prison for the rest of his life.

And that, of course, is what is happening to those Guantanamo detainees for whom the government isn't sure it can get a conviction in a civil trial, whether because they'd be exonerated due to torture or the evidence is otherwise tainted or non-existent. They're going to stay at Guantanamo forever, or until the right wing rage and fear-dressed-up-as-manly-toughness chills out a tiny bit. (Whichever comes first.) And this is what completely destroys the Obama administration's rationale for trying KSM in the first place, as Greenwald noted last week. If we're trying him in civilian court because he's entitled to a fair trial (or else he'd have to be treated as a POW and released in a timely manner), then why don't we try or release all the other detainees?

Because it's just a political ploy. Because Obama wants the dum-dums in the media to say, "look, he's not Bush! He's giving a terrorist a trial!"

As though going through with the farce, with its entirely foregone conclusion, in a legal trial with lawyers and evidence and everything that's been the foundation of international law for several thousands of years, is deserving of praise.

Or of being labeled "liberal," for that matter.

Robinson continues on sensibly enough:

It's amazing that so many people who insist on the "war on terrorism" framework apparently have such little interest in understanding the enemy, which seems to me the only way to find the enemy's vulnerabilities. The jihadist narrative is largely about justice, or rather what radical imams and their followers perceive as injustice.

Exactly. That's why we need to have the war of ideas, right? To talk about how their interpretations of history are wrong. Unfortunately, he continues:

In the enemy's version of history, the West -- meaning the United States, Israel, Britain and what used to be called Christendom -- has a long history of exploiting the Muslim world. We occupy Muslim lands to steal their resources. We install corrupt lackeys as their rulers. For all our high and mighty talk about fairness and justice, we reserve these luxuries for ourselves. In this warped worldview, we deserve any atrocities that jihadist "warriors" might commit against us.

Protesting that all this is absurd and obscene does not make it go away.

A crucial element of the conservative frame can be found in Robinson's use of the word "we." "We" occupy Muslim lands..."We" install corrupt lackeys..."We" reserve these luxuries for ourselves. The implication is that average Joes like you and me and Eugene Robinson--we didn't do these things! Therefore why should we suffer? And he's absolutely right. We didn't do this, and we shouldn't suffer.

But even if "we" didn't do these things, they still managed to happen. The history of grievances Robinson lists is certainly absurd and obscene--but it is also objectively true. As Paul Wolfowitz admitted back in 2003, American troops bombed, invaded and occupied Iraq and caused the deaths of over 100,000 of its citizens because we wanted its oil. Our man in Afghanistan was just reelected despite unequivocal evidence of widespread electoral fraud. Obama continues to supply an overwhelming amount of military aid to Israel, even as Jewish settlements continue to expand in the West Bank; four million people in Gaza are now cut off from the rest of the world by an Israeli blockade that keeps out cement, glass, plastic, steel, and children's toys for fear that they will be used to make bombs or rockets. And of course, we are refusing to extend the right to fair trial to any of these accused terrorists. That's exactly what this debate is all about. We can argue about the relative merits of these actions--arguments can and have long been made to the effect that the Iraq and Afghani invasions, the corrupt leaders, the denial of habeaus corpus are all necessary evils. And nothing can ever justify terrorist attacks on defenseless civilians. But this does nothing to alter the fact that American oppression is a fact of daily life for millions of Muslims.

A vast, vast majority of those millions do not engage in terrorist attacks. But a tiny handful do. And it's the very essence of a blame-the-victim, heads-in-the-sand, root-causes-be-damned conservative mentality to claim that the legitimate grievances that those millions have with our policies are invalidated by the fact that the crazies among them engage in terrorism.

If Eugene Robinson were really interested in finding out what motivates the terrorists, he might start by examining his own biases. That alone would hasten the end of the "war on terrorism"-- more so than whatever will happen in this "trial of the century." (Hint: he's guilty.)

Respect on the Playground

My 2nd favorite political blogger asks us to pay special attention to one particular passage at the end of Charles "I went to prison for Watergate and all I got was crazier" Colson's "Manhattan Declaration" (Tristero's comments below):

The President and many in Congress favor the expansion of embryo-research to include the taxpayer funding of so-called "therapeutic cloning." This would result in the industrial mass production of human embryos to be killed for the purpose of producing genetically customized stem cell lines and tissues. At the other end of life, an increasingly powerful movement to promote assisted suicide and "voluntary" euthanasia threatens the lives of vulnerable elderly and disabled persons. Eugenic notions such as the doctrine oflebensunwertes Leben ("life unworthy of life") were first advanced in the 1920s by intellectuals in the elite salons of America and Europe. Long buried in ignominy after the horrors of the mid-20th century, they have returned from the grave. The only difference is that now the doctrines of the eugenicists are dressed up in the language of "liberty," "autonomy," and "choice."

Of course this is bullshit, anyone sane will agree, and the distortions and poor associations between different pseud0-facts make for incoherence, if you try to make actual sense of it. So what is this about? Why is this weird passage in the Christianist Manifesto?

Focus carefully on the style. Get it? No? Ok, let's spell it out. Check out what this passage contains:

The President and many in Congress...Industrial mass production...human...to be killed...assisted suicide..."voluntary" euthanasia threatens the lives of vulnerable elderly and disabled persons...Eugenic...lebensunwertes Leben ("life unworthy of life")...the elite salons of America and Europe. Long buried in ignominy after the horrors of the mid-20th century, they have returned from the grave.

In other words, Colson and his cronies are saying Obama is Hitler and Democrats are Nazis. They're planning a Holocaust for Christians.

Disagree that that is the intent? Perhaps you think the gratuitous use of the German was just an accident, or mere intellectual posturing. Or that it's just a coincidence that the phrase "The President and many in Congress" occurs so close to "Industrial mass production" as well as the word "human" and the phrase "to be killed."

If you really think this is just some kind of random half-baked nonsense, just boiler-plate, then - and I mean this very sincerely - you don't know the first thing about how language works in modern American political discourse. And so, you will be satisfied with a liberal rhetoric that counters this disgusting demagoguery with something as unfocused and ineffective as spring rain and mushrooms. And nasty creeps like Colson, Donohue, and their ilk will continue to have regular access to sitting presidents.

"Spring rain and mushrooms" refers to a post from earlier this week in which Tristero ripped apart Marty Potek of the Southern Poverty Law Center for describing the vast resurgence of the militia movement since Obama's election as "mushrooms popping up after a spring rain."

Obviously, these right wingers know what they're doing. They know how to take horrible, un-American ideas and frame them in such a way that they are given airtime and serious debate by a credulous news media. But a big reason, maybe even the MAIN reason they have been so successful is that liberals simply refuse to play the game, instead preferring to believe that if we all just ignore the crazies, they'll go away, and we can get back to the good old days when nobody used mean language. Unfortunately, pretending not to hear it when somebody calls us unpatriotic pussies (or responding with language that makes us sound just like pussies) rarely seems to win the argument, especially when the media are the kids on the sideline going "oh snap, he's talking about your MOTHER!"

Just imagine what could be done if liberals were as skilled as the crazies at this kind of thing. Imagine if there were more than 1 or 2 congressmen who did stuff like this on a daily basis:

Grayson SCHOOLS this guy. And he does it without yelling or calling anybody a Nazi either, which should be quite instructive for sensitive types who think it's uncivil to raise your voice when engaging bigots.

And he makes it look easy, because it really is easy. It's easy because on so many issues (e.g. global warming, gay rights, health care, market regulations, immigration, tax policy, education, arts funding, abortion, war, abstinence education, faith healing, what's really in the U.S. Constitution), Republicans do not know the basic facts. A real liberal should never miss an opportunity to lay bare the stupidity and ignorance that underlies their beliefs.

And winning a fight or two might even make the rest of the playground take notice.

Weisberg Redux & Ideology

In this post I want to first clarify a few things, and then talk some more about my new buddy Jacob Weisberg. So, first:

I don’t really intend this to be one of those quick, rapid-news response type blogs where somebody provides their take on the news, mainly because 1. It’s really hard to stay on top of things, and 2. Lots and LOTS of people do that really well already (see here, or here, or here, for just a few inspiring examples). Plus, I’d much rather take my time and get my thoughts in order.

Keeping the focus on specific “liberal” media figures allows me to research and write about things that I find really fascinating (de Tocqueville’s note about how freedom of thought in America leads paradoxically to a narrow range of acceptable opinion, for example), without feeling the need to comment on every little thing that happens. So, while I don’t really have the mind to go digging through the House and Senate health care bills to see how they differ, I will want to talk at some point about the assumptions underlying the media’s reporting of those bills. Without going insane, of course.

To find my fake liberals, I’ll generally stick to those standard, “old media” sources, i.e. the Times, Post, WSJ, CNN and other cable networks on occasion, mainly in order to keep things somewhat limited, but also because those news sources, despite their circulation and ratings losses, are still the means by which an overwhelming majority of Americans get their news (whether directly or indirectly). From my perspective, then, FOX News is not so much a media outlet as much as it is news itself, like a protest on the Washington mall whose size we might want to argue about. I’m only interested in it as an item on which those traditional outlets report.

FOX, of course, was the recipient of an unusually angry smackdown from none other than Jacob Weisberg one month ago. It was part of a larger media freakout that started after the White House Communications Director gave an interview in which she was asked what the administration thought about being called evil commie terrorist Nazis by a 24-hour news network 24 hours a day. When she told the truth, editorials ran in every major paper, and the subject received intense scrutiny from the major networks (and she eventually resigned, of course, which is a whole other blog topic).

Weisberg probably intended his Newsweek column that week to be a stirring call-to-arms, a true liberal defense of Obama’s right to say the obvious truth out loud. And it certainly seems right on:

There is no need to get bogged down in this phony debate, which itself constitutes an abuse of the fair-mindedness of the rest of the media. One glance at Fox's Web site or five minutes' random viewing of the channel at any hour of the day demonstrates its all-pervasive slant. The lefty documentaryOutfoxed spent a lot of time mustering evidence that Fox managers order reporters to take the Republican side. But after 13 years under Roger Ailes, Fox employees skew news right as instinctively as fish swim.

Rather than in any way maturing, Fox has in recent months become more boisterous and demagogic. Fox sponsored as much as it covered the anti-Obama "tea parties" this summer. Its "fact checking" about the president's health-care proposal is provided by Karl Rove. And weepy Glenn Beck has begun to exhibit a Strangelovean concern about government invading our bloodstream by vaccinating people for swine flu. With this misinformation campaign, Fox stands to become the first network to actively try to kill its viewers.

It’s a sad state of affairs when credit must be given to a political columnist for telling the truth, but Weisberg tells the truth here, and he does so with an edge that’s actually pretty refreshing. Let’s see where he goes with this.

That Rupert Murdoch may tilt the news rightward more for commercial than ideological reasons is beside the point. What matters is the way that Fox's model has invaded the bloodstream of the American media.

YES. Absolutely. Maybe I’ve been too hard on this guy. It invades the bloodstream. Wait—what invades the bloodstream exactly? What does he mean by their “model?”

By showing that ideologically distorted news can drive ratings, Ailes has provoked his rivals at CNN and MSNBC to develop a variety of populist and ideological takes on the news. In this way, Fox hasn't just corrupted its own coverage. Its example has made all of cable news unpleasant and unreliable.

So close, and yet so far. Weisberg’s problem with FOX—his real problem, more important than the lies and inciting violence and everything else—is that ideologically-based news is popular, and so the other networks have followed suit.

Leave aside for a moment the question of whether MSNBC or CNN(?!) can really be called “ideological” in the same breath as FOX. First of all, that stupid show Crossfire existed way back in the ‘80s until it was destroyed by Jon Stewart's wrath in 2004. Whatever golden age Weisberg is pining for, when all news was fact and nothing was opinion or ideology—it never existed. All reporters have always had their own filters across their eyes about the world. There is no “neutral” reporting. There is always a belief, an opinion, or an interpretation to be made, and the reporter can either be honest and up front about those beliefs, or he can disguise them; he can even ignore them entirely. In this sense, FOX is really not so bad as he makes them out to be; despite the “fair and balanced” label, everyone knows FOX anchors/pundits/producers all have an angle. In this sense at least, they deserve some credit for honesty.

The problem rather lies in his tossed-off phrase “ideologically distorted news." There’s a big bad WRONG assumption about the world going on here. Weisberg believes in truth. Which is a good thing, because plenty of political commentators don’t. But he also believes that truth is something that is distorted by ideology, ANY ideology—whether by Glenn Beck on the right (or wherever he resides) or by Keith Olbermann somewhere on the left. According to Weisberg, these pundits, because of their “ideological biases,” are unreliable. The truth exists of course, but it can be found somewhere in the middle between these two “extremes.”

This kind of thinking is incredibly pervasive, and so utterly wrong. FOX News doesn’t suck because it’s ideological—it sucks because its ideology is driven by contempt and fear and religious extremism, and the policies they promote have had and will have awful consequences for the world. Ideology itself, though, is just a set of beliefs or principles about the way the world works and should work. Neo-Nazis are ideological, and nonviolent civil rights workers are ideological. We can argue about the difference between these two sets of beliefs, but having beliefs, any beliefs, shouldn’t be the problem.

Every mainstream political non-opinion journalist, however, is taught to sublimate their personal beliefs in their work. They are just mere conduits through which information flows, you see. And so on every issue, no matter what, the Times or Post or CNN or whoever will at some point say: “Democrats say this. But Republicans say this.” And because they cannot allow their “ideology” (i.e. their brains) to interfere with the story, they cannot comment on the fact that one side is usually lying their asses off.

Weisberg wants the White House, and “respectable journalists” (i.e. non-ideologues) to ignore FOX news. But that’s what got us into this mess in the first place. If you ignore them, their bullshit sprouts wings and gets in the ether and everybody gets so used to the taste that they can’t tell that it’s bullshit anymore. What liberals need to do is confront FOX forcefully, not just in the occasional column but repeatedly, and systematically, every single time they open their mouths, because being liberal means being against things that are conservative. Explaining why you're against things that are conservative might even help the people understand what's at stake in these battles, and why they might want to consider what liberalism has to offer.

Sure, most political reporters will always report these debates as “he said, she said,” and leave it at that. But if supposedly liberal columnists continue to believe that ideology itself is bad, and that truth can always be found in the middle, well then we end up with a country held hostage to the “non-ideological” whims of people like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman. Which is what we have now.

Which is making me so happy, I can't even tell you.

Welcome, Goals, and Jacob Weisberg

Hi, and welcome to Liberalism 101.

I came of age in the Bush years. I was euphoric about Obama’s election last year. Since then, it’s become increasingly obvious that the deep, substantive, fundamental change that I voted for last November has failed to materialize.

I won’t get into the details of how Obama has disappointed thus far; you can read them elsewhere, and if you’re paying attention to national news you know them already. That said, my anger is not directed solely at Obama. He has, of course, been aided and abetted by a Democratic party that seems just as determined to make corporate tools of themselves as the Republicans. And as corporate tools, they are first and foremost non-ideological. In other words, the dominant wing of the Democratic Party is not liberal. And while this may be an obvious truth, the implications of it are quite profound. What millions of Americans voted for last November was not mere symbolic change—important as that was. What we really voted for was systemic change, for an uprooting of the decay in our politics that allowed George Bush and every horrible thing he did to take place.

What we really voted for was liberalism. But right now, we’re not getting it.

I read a lot these days about how the Republican party is suffering an “intellectual crisis." That's a nice way of putting it. But the Democrats have suffered a real intellectual crisis for far longer. Liberalism, as a set of coherent beliefs about the world, translated into a governing philosophy, has been in retreat since the late ‘60s. It is a retreat that has played out in the newspapers, radio stations, and cable t.v. channels by which ordinary people try to make sense of their world. In every visible way, from rhetoric to policy, liberalism and liberals have been on the defensive over the last 40 years.

Why this has happened has been the subject of much armchair analysis, and I won’t go into it here. It's an obvious fact that debates over political strategy, over the horse-race of election campaigns, are now the main topic of commentators who have themselves been responsible for the changing debate, although these commentators never acknowledge their role as participants in these ideological battles. Indeed, a recurring theme in every objective analysis of modern political journalism is the uncanny ability of mainstream political journalists to somehow believe in themselves as great and important pillars of the political establishment, who yet do nothing more than report independent facts to a public that is well-informed by their analysis.

They are so much more than this, of course. They are integral players who frame the political debate for Americans, and the way they frame the debate has real consequences, in terms of winners and losers, and subsequently in terms of policy, and thus for the lives of real people, both in this country and throughout the rest of the world. That, of course, is the truth that is so often lost in abstract discussions about war, or the national debt, or the price of a health care bill. That these things aren’t games; they’re not about winners and losers, or about toughness, or about posturing and all the other bullshit.

Obviously, we have FOX News, and they are what they are. Their whipped-up hysteria plays an obvious role for the Republican party. But who or what is FOX’s opposite number? CNN? The New York Times? Washington Post? MSNBC? Right-wingers say they're all part of the liberal media, but of course this is just a tactic. The truth is that there is no single mainstream source of liberal news, and this is primarily because American liberalism today is a hand-me-down from an earlier age when truth, and facts, and objectivity in reporting were not just important but essential pillars of journalism. Over the last 40 years, these ideals have been steadily eroded, and it is no coincidence that this progression has occurred alongside the liberal decline. They are one and the same.

Today, the world inhabited and explained to us by mainstream, national political reporters is governed by a few basic rules. For example: presidents who go to war are “decisive,” while antiwar protesters/policies etc. are “weak.” Spending on social programs like health care will add dangerously to the national debt, while spending on fighter jets with lasers is necessary and imperative. Democratic presidents need to stand up to the left-wing in their party, while Republican presidents show “resolve” by getting right-wing legislation passed. In each case, these standard assumptions reflect a right-wing viewpoint; and yet, each of these rules has been uttered (or made salient) on countless occasions by journalists, commentators, and even politicians who claim to be not just moderates, but LIBERALS.

This last fact bears repeating. It would be one thing if the debate were tilted so that ostensible “moderates” and “centrists” alone parrot right-wing talking points. But it is the nature of things today that even self-identified liberals say these things. This, of course, is the end result of all the "liberal=dirty word" propaganda that has been beamed out incessantly over the last 40 years. It's not just average Americans who have been trained to hate liberalism: liberals hate liberalism too.

Obviously, I've laid out a lot here, and I'm not going to chase down every last philosophical thread in this blog. My focus here is this: respected, mainstream political reporters, opinion columnists, pundits, et al, who either claim to be liberal, or progressive, or who claim to represent liberal views in their reporting, and who nevertheless, either through ignorance or calculation, display very little understanding of what liberalism actually is. Who are they? What are their reflexive beliefs about the world? How have these beliefs been mis-identified as liberal or left-leaning? And what can be done to stop them?

By way of example, consider Jacob Weisberg. Editor-in-chief of Slate.com and occasional Newsweek contributor. In this week’s issue, he wonders, “Does Obama Need to Speak More Harshly About Islam?” Weisberg begins by noting Obama’s childhood spent partly in Indonesia, and refers to the fact that 11 percent of the public continues to believe that the president is himself a Muslim. While Weisberg is quick to point out that this is untrue, he immediately follows this by saying that the president's heritage feeds a broader suspicion that he is too casual about the threat from America's Islamist enemies.

Before going any further, it should be noted that Weisberg is one of the better-known mainstream liberal writers in America. His column regularly runs in Newsweek; he is the creator of the “Bushisms” calendar, and he wrote a well-received and generally left-leaning book on the Bush Tragedy. He recently blasted FOX News as being not just misleading but "un-American."

And yet this man, this liberal institution who explains liberalism to America in the pages of Newsweek, magazine, basically just wrote: Ten percent of Americans are insane racists. Here’s why they may have a point.

Weisberg goes on to explain how the Fort Hood shooting is bad for Obama because it does serious damage to Obama's premise that greater friendliness toward Islam is a viable strategy for countering the Islamist threat. I’ll leave it to others to counter this absurdity in full, but it seems to bear mentioning that Obama continues to bomb and occupy Afghanistan, and support several secular middle-eastern dictators, and to hold suspected terrorists in legal limbo without trial, and he also continues the Bush-era tactic of extraordinary rendition, whereby the CIA drops suspected terrorists into dungeons belonging to those allied dictators for purposes of torture. In that light, perhaps his occasional speeches praising Islam should be seen as one of several ongoing strategies for countering the Islamist threat.

Finally, Weisberg lays the coup de grace: America does not face a threat from the perversion of faith in general. We face a threat from the perversion of one faith in particular.Without going into either the factual inaccuracy or general offensiveness of this statement, I'll just note how representative this is of modern mainstream “liberal” fear of appearing offensive towards Christians. Indeed, this is the main subtext of Weisberg’s article—that while those 10 percent who think Obama is an evil Muslim may be technically wrong, their more mainstream, God-fearing middle-class American brethren are similarly “suspicious” of Obama’s foreign policy intentions. Of course, Weisberg does not bother to connect this “suspicion” to any actual group, or individual figure, nor does he cite any poll detailing the average American’s “suspicion.” He just states it as an accepted fact that is part of the landscape of Obama’s presidency. Like the cherry trees on Pennsylvania Avenue, Americans are suspicious of Barack Obama.

THIS is the real reason why Obama has failed thus far to accomplish any real change. Because when he deviates THIS MUCH, when he dares to give speeches in which he praises the Muslim religion, he is called an un-American terrorist-lover by a columnist who passes for liberal in this sad day.

To change anything at all, we have to focus first on what liberalism is and what it isn't.

Uncovering, calling out and stopping this bullshit is the starting point.

(I'll have more on Weisberg soon, because he's got so much good material.)