Blog entry

Weekend Watchdog Wrapup

Terrance Heath — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:34:14 -0400

Well, it looks like another 0-for-3 weekend for the watchdog, as most of the questions focused less on the economy and more on the presidential race and campaign tactics.

Michigan Governor Jennifer Granhlom — who stood in for Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin during Sen. Joe Biden's debate prep — was asked about that experience on CBS's Face the Nation, rather than how the economic downturn has impacted people in her state.

On NBC's Meet the Press, Paul Begala spent more time fielding questions about campaign tactics than the economy.

And, on Fox News Sunday, Karl Rove was spared any questions about conservative's penchant for deregulation and how it relates to the current economic crisis.

Oh well, maybe next week we'll actually hear about the issues.

E. coli conservatism headline of the year

Rick Perlstein — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 23:25:33 -0400

Tiny bit of melamine in food is OK, experts say/ But U.S. officials emphasize they won't tolerate deliberate additions

...officials stressed the scientific assessment does not mean that U.S. authorities will tolerate any melamine that is deliberately added to foods. In China, unscrupulous suppliers appear to have been adding melamine to make watered-down milk seem protein-rich in quality-control tests. That's because melamine is high in nitrogen, as is protein.

"If products are adulterated because they contain melamine, (authorities) will take appropriate actions to prevent the products from entering commerce," the FDA said in a statement. The agency said it was setting the 2.5 parts-per-million standard to address situations in which the chemical accidentally comes into contact with food, such as in cases where it is used for industrial purposes in a factory that makes food products.

Officials also stressed that infant formula sold to U.S. consumers must be completely free of melamine.

"There is too much uncertainty to set a level in infant formula and rule out any public health concern," the FDA said.

Aesthetic Affirmative Action

Rick Perlstein — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 23:09:15 -0400

The reviews are in: American Carol, the conservative "comedy" about the liberal plot to ban the Fourth of July, is the worst film in the history of celluloid.

But according to our conservative friends, you've no less than a duty to see it anyway, because we've got a culture war to win, dammit!

(More here—note especially the trope of "courage" as it pertains to consuming conservative culture.)

[UPDATE: Mrs. Big Con, her nose so high in the air she needs an oxygen tank to breathe, points out that our valiant foemen can't manage to spell the name "Micheal" right.]

The CRA Blood Libel

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:54:29 -0400

This post has been hard to write. I'm getting to it after the longest possible day of procrastination. That's because it's about why we needed a Community Redevelopment Act in the first place. And, more importantly, why we still need one now.

This is a photograph of community organizer Martin Luther King being hit by a rock while marching for the open housing on the segregated Southwest Side neighborhood of Gage Park in Chicago. (He also had a knife thrown at him, but it missed; this was the march of which he intoned, "I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.")

I wrote about this march once before, in my most-widely read post—one that took several months of procrastination to accomplish. It was the one where I quoted all the letters Illinois liberal senator Paul Douglas received from the white homeowners of Gage Park after that march. They wrote things like:

As a citzen and a taxpayer I was very upset to hear about 'TITLE IV' of the so-called civil rights Bill S. 3296. This is not Civil Rights. This takes away a person's rights. We too are people and need someone to protect us. We designed and built our own home and I would hate too think of being forced to sell my lovely home to anyone just because they had the money.

It is safe to say that not a single white person has ever moved into a negro neighorhood yet there has been over a million white people dumped, shoved, or pushed out of their homes by expansion of negroes.... NEGROES HAVE BEEN MADE THE BOSS OF THE UNITED STATES.

Note the bottom line: "I would hate too think of being forced to sell my lovely home to anyone just because they had the money." People were not throwing rocks because folks with less money wanted to move into their neighborhood. They were throwing rocks because people with a different colored skin wanted to move into their neighborhood.

Clearly, anti-discrimination legislation was necessary then. Why is it necessary now?

Well, I get letters. I got one a couple of weeks ago from a reader. It went like this:

Dear Mr. Perlstein:

I read your book this past weekend. Being 55, I was around and aware of the period described in your book, and related to it. You got the details right but you got the overriding story wrong: Nixon was not the cause of the great shift to the right; he was pulled along by the rushing tide.

It is now 40 years later. I live in central NJ, a nice progressive town. The South Side is where the black people live, where the little crime we have comes from. The public schools are 50%+ black because most white parents who can afford it send their kids to private schools. We work together but we don't play together (contrary to what we are told in Lite Beer commercials). We are all quite gentile about it relative to 1968, but we will not tolerate the lowering of standards and standards of living that come with the influx of blacks.

Let me leave you with something I learned in Yeshiva: You know that the Israelites spent 40 years in the desert after leaving Egypt. But, even walking with long rest breaks, the trip might take months, not 40 years. The commentaries tell us that the Israelites with instructed to take the long way to Palestine, through Jordan, thus the 40 years. G-d knew that people who have only known slavery would not know how to behave as free people, so
the generation that knew slavery died out during the march, and a new generation of free Israelites entered the land.

We freed the slaves before they ever learned to be free. And we have pandered and held them to lower standards for these 40 years so they STILL don't know how to behave. Maybe in 100 years or so - maybe - they will be civilized enough to live on the North Side with us.

A--- K------
Highland Park, NJ

Now, as it happens, by an extraordinary coincidence, when I opened this email I had just returned from the following event:

That's me after a speech to Victor Harbison's social studies class and school newspaper staff at...Gage Park High School, only blocks from where Martin Luther King was hit by that rock. Yes, thanks to legislation like the CRA, Dr. King earned at least a partial housing victory for his martyrdom; for all of our profound social problems that still remain, at least the families of those kids have a reasonably fair chance to live in those same fine bungalows that white Gage Park residents defended with rocks, knives, their very bodies, and letters like these:

It is my firm belief, and of all my neighbors, that King should be taken into custody, charged with fomenting civil disorder and anarchy.... Today, the insufferable arrogance of this character places him on a pedestal as a dark-skinned Hitler.

And despite men like Mr. K------ who still write letters like this:

We freed the slaves before they ever learned to be free. And we have pandered and held them to lower standards for these 40 years so they STILL don't know how to behave. Maybe in 100 years or so - maybe - they will be civilized enough to live on the North Side with us.

Well, guess what? I showed that letter to Mr. Harbison, and he read it aloud to his class. Just so they could be more realistic about what they're up against; just so they could get a better grasp of the struggles that still remain to be fought. I can't imagine what it would be like to be one of those kids, knowing that no matter how hard I work, no matter how much money I make—and no matter how much, respectful rapt attention I pay to a guest speaker like Rick Perlstein telling stories about things that happened 25 years before I was born—there will still be soul-sick folks like Mr. K------ who could never believe I rightfully earned what I have.

I explained all that in a return letter to Mr. K-----, in fact, enclosing the photograph above. You know what he wrote in response?

Too many of those students in the picture have Rev. Wright attitudes, and most of us simply won't deal with them. Now that's a lesson worth teaching them.

Look at that picture, dammit. Which of those kids "have Rev. Wright attitudes"? The one who's now doggedly working through my 900-page book? The one who earnestly asked me why people didn't understand that if black people were discriminated against by forcing them to live in dirty housing, it didn't make sense for white people to write letters to their senator about how they refused to live among people who'd live in dirty housing?

This is the level to which conservatives have driven our political discourse: to win an election, to keep power, they are stooping Mr. K------'s arguments, if you can call lies with all the moral heft of the ancient blood libel against Europe's Jews—blaming a despised, outcast social group for a financial crisis they had nothing to do with, in order to aggrandize the ability of the dominant group to hate and oppress—"arguments."

Under the Radar

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:08:16 -0400

If the conservatives manage to win the presidential election, this likely-illegal propaganda campaign might have a lot to do with it.

The Right and Rape

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:47:59 -0400

Kathy G writes this:

if we lived under the kind of legal/political regime Palin has spent virtually her entire life working to bring about, and if my 11-year niece were raped and became pregnant as a result, she would then be compelled, in Sarah Palin's America, to carry her pregnancy to term and to give birth.

And one of her commenters writes this:

I've long thought that conservatives do not think there is as much of a difference between sex and rape as liberals do. Certainly there have been studies that show that people who believe strongly in traditional sex roles (who tend to be conservative) are much more likely than the general population to think that if a girl lets you take her out on a date and pay for everything, and then invites you back to her apartment, that this is an implied contract for sex, and that if she backs out you are justified in forcing yourself on her. (And there are studies that, depending on how you ask the question, can get between 20% and 50% of men to admit that they'd consider raping someone if they knew they wouldn't be caught. For a good little list, see: http://www.holysmoke.org/fem/fem0286.htm . Terrifying, isn't it?)

If that is the case, then this attitude is perfectly understandable and self-consistent. Of course, the premise on which they are reasoning is obviously insane, but the conclusion they come up with does logically follow the premise.

Discuss.

But before you do so, read this.

"It Shines for All"

Rick Perlstein — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:24:55 -0400

Some of you may have missed the news that the six-year-old neocon daily newspaper the New York Sun (slogan: "It Shines for All") has folded. (You're excused, in fact, if you missed the news that the six-year-old neocon daily newspaper the New York Sun ever existed.) One of the arguments I get in sometimes with my fellow liberal wingnutologists is whether it's worthwhile to label the modern conservative movement "authoritarian." I've always argued that the term is a counterproductive misnomer. But having now read the setting Sun's "Guidelines for Interns" at the NYC media gossip site Gawker, I may be forced to reconsider:

My fair and balanced radio appearance

Rick Perlstein — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:56:13 -0400

I had an interesting experience on the radio this past weekend. It might have been a telling one—I'm not sure.

On Friday I went to Chicago's public radio station WBEZ to tape a discussion on the week's news for American Public Media's show Weekend America. My co-panelists were comedian Dana Gold and ~~comedian~~ conservative congressional staffer Tara Setmayer. We were asked about the financial collapse. I said it was the fault of the conservative ideology of deregulation. She said it was the fault of Jimmy Carter. Because he passed what she misidentified as the "Community Reinvention Act."

Yes, well, that would be the right-wing smear du jour: the Community Reinvestment Act caused the meltdown, not greedy bankers and the oily politicians who love them. As regular readers at OurFuture.org know, we've called the idea a modern day equivalent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a Big Lie narrative that blames a despised, outcast social group for problems they had nothing to do with, in order to aggrandize the ability of the dominant group to hate and oppress.

(How made up is it? CAF is on the case.)

So what did I do in that Chicago radio studio last Friday when a wingnut (who, incidentally, is African American) spewed forth some excrement about how ~~Jews harvest the blood of children for their Passover matzohs~~ handouts to swarthy people are responsible for the meltdown of the American economy? I did my job. I called it a "lie and a slander," explaining in simple and forceful terms that lending institutions covered by the CRA have a lower mortgage default rates than ones that aren't, and that even if the former were the worst companies in the history of the universe, they wouldn't have helped produce the financial contagion had not conservative deregulation green-lighted the buying and selling of insanely irresponsible mortgage-backed securities.

Then we moved on to the next topic. I believe it was Lance Armonstrong's decision to come out of retirement.

Then, the next day, waiting in the drive-through line at a Burger King, I heard myself on the radio. But not my debunking of the right-wing smear. That part was cut.

What happened? My experience with Weekend America in the past—this segment on the evolution of Richard Nixon's "silent majority rhetoric"—was great; it seems a perfectly typical public radio production, liberal enough in that milquetoasty, NPR sort of way. And the reason a conservative lie was allowed to stand could have been perfectly innocent: perhaps the audio of my debunking was garbled by crosstalk. Perhaps they cut without a second thought, just for purposes of time; my stint in the recording studio was twice again as long as the completed segment, so they had to cut somewhere.

But it's also possible that the producers' thinking could have gone something like this:

He said: "it's the conservatives' fault." She said: "It's the liberals' fault." Both drew political blood in equal measure, and the canons of fairness and balance demand we leave it at that, rather than let the liberal sneak in the last word: "He said, she said"—snip, snip, snip.

Which would be a splendid illustration of how conservatives launder lies across our political discourse. Textbook, actually. No malice aforethought on the part of the media gatekeepers; just an overcautious commitment to the value of what they call "balance" over the value of Truth with a capital T.

Which is just how the right might be able to get away with making the 2008 presidential election a referendum, for millions of low-information voters, over whether minorities should be able to get away with taking over all the instruments of federal power and writing checks to each other, or whether they will be stopped before it's too late.

Tomorrow I'll have more: startling evidence of why we need the CRA now as much as we ever did.

Finishing What General Sherman Started (2)

Rick Perlstein — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:44:32 -0400

If you want to visit the frontier of the Third Worldization of America, come to Atlanta. This summer, they ran out of water. This fall, they've run out of gas.

Late-Nite Disaster Capitalism Reflections

Rick Perlstein — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 22:00:47 -0400

Kind of foolish to presume that conservatives will be jammed up when confronted with their records of rank hypocrisy, but—why not? Let's recollect a few things nonetheless.

(1) Should our friends at Newsmax happen to start whining about Barack Obama, and New York Times, pointing to John McCain's gambling issues, remind them of their cover story hyping "McCain's 14-hour stints at the Las Vegas craps tables."

(2) Back in the day, Human Events (in an article in which McCain was the subject entitled "The New Axis of Evil") was coughing up warnings that even John McCain would be better than "Obama socializing entire corporate sectors." Wonder what they're making of the fact that the Republican and Democratic leaderships, John McCain and Barack Obama, and George Bush have now joined forces to socialize an entire corporate sector?

At the bottom of the Republicans' political crisis is the structural contradictions of conservatism. They can't live with it, they can't live without it.

And a final thought: read Digby, with an assist from yours truly, about how to kick conservatism when it's down—once and for all.