Maybe this is a stretch

Lefties (obviously) and Righties (maybe less so, but check here or even listen to Mark Levin if you can stand it) have, for months, tried to understand the rise of the cult of Glenn Beck.

Yesterday, Nate Silver put it this way:

Beck is a PoMoCon -- a post-modern conservative. And his philosophy is not all that difficult to articulate. It borrows a couple of things from traditional American conservatism:

-- It shares an extreme distrust for government, particularly the Federal Government.
-- It shares the notion that American society is in some sort of state of existential decline.

On the other hand, it also features some important differences:

-- It is much more distrustful of non-governmental institutions, such as labor unions, corporations, political parties, community groups, the media, and scientific institutions.
-- It is largely indifferent toward 'social issues'.
-- It is much less explicitly aligned with the Republican Party.
-- It has much less use for elites, which it also distrusts.

The PoMoCons are not so much less self-consistent as they are less concerned with consistency, as compared with traditional conservatives. Theirs is a bric-a-brac, skeptical (sometimes to the point of paranoid), play-it-by-ear, relatively spontaneous reaction to the here-and-now -- not something cooked up by a K Street thinktank. There is no future, no past -- there is only today. And today is a pretty good day to be Glenn Beck.

This is mostly right but not entirely.

Beck constantly clings to a revisionist past, it's one of his most important rhetorical tools. He uses his own interpretation of what "the Founders" envisioned to justify any number of political positions.

Glenn Beck rails against community organizers but defends oil company profits. He might use the language of elite vs. working man, he might occasionally rail against "corporations" but on substance, he's a big defender of carnivorous capitalism except maybe when applied to the banking system.

David Frum has a post putting Beck closer to the Ron Paul side of things.

Beck does seem to share some beliefs with Paul. There is a definitive anti-establishment spirit, I agree with Silver on that.

Often in a similar breath, people have compared Beck's base to that captured by Ross Perot.

They're trying to define it as a conservative populism, which might be the best way to put it.

But when I think of Glenn Beck's rise to popularity over the last couple of years, I wonder if the historical derivative is not David Duke. I'm not suggesting that Beck shares any of Duke's neo-nazi viewpoints but I am saying that Beck's unexpected share of the airwaves is analogous to when Duke elbowed his way into the mainstream political discussion behind a cloak of anti-establishment rhetoric.

His regular referrals to perceived African American benefit at the expense of whites, his fear-mongering around the fictional power of organized labor, his inexplicable predictions that Obama is Castro in a tailored suit - it's to me, much more Duke than Paul or Perot. It's obviously way softer because Beck doesn't have a litany of ties to Nazi and KKK groups or statements to that effect. Beyond that, he is able to manufacture an aura of nice-guy authenticity using his tears and his selective memory of American strength cooperation after 9/11.

At other times, I wonder if the whole cult is overblown. Apparently 42% of Americans have never even heard of the guy. Nonetheless, his show is now the highest rated on Fox News or close to it. That's quite frightening, maybe more so for traditional conservatives than for liberals.

A loaded gun on the table

Before I get into this, let me first say that I would agree with some reasonable conservative critiques of the legislative process related to healthcare, that people are not as informed as they need to be on the different proposals on the table. I agree that a sweeping overhaul of the systems that govern 17% of our GDP represents an immense undertaking that should be pursued very deliberately. I agree that President Obama overestimated the capacity of the American public to conceptualize the legislative process. I also agree that the President has done real harm to healthcare reform's chances at passing in a reasonable time frame because of a failure to get out in front of some of the more ridiculous lies and smears. That such a large percentage of Americans now view this bill as an imminent threat to their health instead of an imperfect and evolving improvement to our system is deeply troubling.

The problem is, unfortunately, that I'm not sure what I would have had the President do differently aside from getting out in front of the smears faster. In '93, when Clinton dictated a bill to Congress, they freaked. So this time, Obama decided to let Congress do it's constitutionally-authorized job, only to be criticized for not exercising leadership. So I think we're seeing some real structural problems with our civil society that can't really be reduced to "if only Obama had" or "if only Obama hadn't."

I wonder what is salvageable in the current hysterical climate. Can the President wait for comprehensive bills to reach the floors of the House and Senate before swooping in with his own plan - maybe one that incorporates some GOP standards like TORT reform? Will members of Congress just decide that these town hall mob scenes won't sway them from voting for something really critical for the short term health and long term wealth of the country?

I'm not sure.

I just know that I'm getting increasingly, well, frightened by the hysterical lying about the President's plan - and not just by the outer fringes of the right win - but by members of Congress and by veteran GOP talking heads.

It's not just Sarah Palin claiming the end of life counseling clause (an idea offered by Republican Rep. Charles Boustany of Lousiana, by the way) would result in death panels that would kill off her parents and child; it's also Newt Gingrich refusing to repudiate that remark on national television and instead highlighting by parsing together some obscure old speeches by Rahm Emmanuel's brother.

It's not just Glen Beck joking around about poisoning Nancy Pelosi, it's Representatives actually getting death threats at their offices. There have been fistfights at town halls and at least one instance of someone bringing a concealed gun to a meeting.

These people aren't angry because they don't think the bill being debated by the House Energy Committee doesn't quite strike the right balance between cost controls and extended coverage; it's because they've been heinously mislead to believe that the government is going to make it more difficult to receive coverage than it is now, cut medicare, or worse, send death panels out to kill old people.

A lot of these same people have also been lead to believe that President Obama is not a legitimate elected leader. There is an all-too casual invocation of Nazi Germany and Hitler.

Add it up.

We've had people going out in record numbers since election day to purchase weapons. We've had a growing movement to discredit the President's legitimacy as an elected leader. We have a shameless push to convince people that his moderate initiatives to stabilize the economy represent dictatorial socialism. We now have a transparent effort by GOP leaders - role models for some - to trick already frightened Americans into the belief that healthcare reform will literally bring about some form of medical genocide. And we are also witnessing seemingly unchallenged efforts to invoke the personification of evil (Hitler) in describing what this healthcare bill represents.

It is vile and sickening. It even makes me afraid.

We have really dark history of racism and violence in this country and it appears as though GOP leaders are ginning up unrest amongst the kinds of people who have been alienated because of their resistance to the progress we've made in our society.

And it doesn't seem like anybody in the Republican Party leadership cares about the tipping point.

Rachel Maddow had a really jarring segment on this last Friday that I think everyone should watch in entirety.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

If you can't spare the 15 minutes, skip ahead to 7:55 and watch Rachel talk to Frank Schaeffer, an original founder of the political evangelical movement who has since repudiated his past views.

I was really struck by Mr. Schaeffer's alarm and after sleeping on it for two nights to pass it through the hyperbole scan, well... he's got me quite on guard.

--

If the default position of 100% of the Republican Congress wasn't just to kill whatever healthcare reform proposed by the President or by Congressional Democrats, it would be a lot easier to have a civil discussion about the best way to achieve sustainable reform.

But most elected Republicans and the conservative base aren't at all interested in that.

The GOP is oriented to fight any healthcare reform bill 'by any means necessary.' But it's scarier than that. The GOP is oriented to fight any progress possible.

As Mr. Schaeffer puts it, the GOP strategy is to leave a loaded gun on the table, stop just short of calling it honorable to halt Obama's policies with violence, and walk away.

I'm not sure GOP leaders know how to stop the hideous monster they've reanimated.

This is the America the world fears; not the America the world respects.

--

Organizing For America has unenviable task of trying to cut through all this BS with actual information about the actual reforms being debated in Congress.

They have an office here in New Orleans and they really need our help.

842 Camp St. in the CBD.

There are phone banks every Tuesday and Thursday from 6:00PM to 8:30PM and they canvass on Saturdays.

Their number one priority is to reach individual voters and to attempt to disabuse them of the baseless lies being spread about healthcare reform.

If you want to get involved, e-mail BayasW@dnc.org or call the HQ at 504-302-0802.

Call the senior citizens in your life.

Go to www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck to arm yourself with tools you can use to debunk the lies.

Shep Smith

At least there's someone at Fox trying to yell some sense into these folks.



Turns out Shep is an honorable guy. Good work. Keep it up.

He's been on a roll over there. He's got the attitude of a second semester senior and I like it.

This is weird but I'm about to blog about Meghan McCain

The other day, I happened to be watching Rachel Maddow's consistently excellent television program. Meghan McCain was a guest. At first, I thought that this was an odd choice.

I knew she had some blog during the campaign but I hadn't realized that she'd started writing for the Daily Beast nor had I heard that she'd just blasted Ann Coulter of all people in one of her columns.

Turns out that Meghan McCain kind of rocks.

The interview was incredible. In it, she discusses her decision to remain in the public eye in order to stand up for the moderate wing of the Republican Party. She is exceedingly brave, refreshingly honest, and totally authentic.

I didn't trust my own reaction the next day so I had to watch it again.

It holds up.

She's not always completely articulate but I've got to give her a full round of applause for being a badass chick with lots of heart.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Since this interview, conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham, an alleged grownup, went after Meghan for her weight - and Meghan has already appropriately destroyed her in another column.

--

It is so fucked up that there are so few Republicans out there willing to face down the far far right that 24 year old Meghan McCain is all of a sudden being looked to as a national spokesperson for a decent, reasonable, and inclusive GOP.

In what kind of reality are some of these people living where Meghan McCain is to be scorned but Joe the fucking Plumber is to be mined for new ideas?

Winger Cells

CNN gives it the aww cute treatment but maybe we should start taking statements like these a more seriously, at least when we're talking about what the conservative base is and the GOP's loyalty to it.

“I may run for president of Texas,” Norris wrote Monday in a column posted at WorldNetDaily. “That need may be a reality sooner than we think. If not me, someone someday may again be running for president of the Lone Star state, if the state of the union continues to turn into the enemy of the state.”

The actor claimed “thousands of cell groups will be united around the country in solidarity over the concerns for our nation” and said that if states decide to secede from the union, that Texas would lead the way.

Jokes aside, Chuck Norris is now a pretty heavily involved right wing nutcase. You may recall the ads he shot on behalf of Mike Huckabee's Presidential campaign. Lately he's been pimping Glenn Beck's "We Surround Them" campaign in which tons of other seriously disturbed people will gather at house parties together to watch Glenn Beck ratchet up the paramilitary rhetoric.

It's not enough to say that the consistent and increasing use of this kind of violent, insurgent language is over the top. I mean the way gun sales went up around the Inauguration, I really do worry about the manipulative power of some of these guys like Beck. There are a lot of crazy people out there. I'm not suggesting any real armed resistance but a bunch of Waco-style tragedies seem all too plausible.

That the elite GOP leadership chooses to embrace, let alone publicly denounce this kind of rhetoric just goes to show how out of touch the whole Party is with mainstream human reality.

Sarah Palin & Glen Beck Hate Polar Bears

I'm sorry that this is a ten minute video. Governor Palin shows up at around the 4 minute mark but you might want to watch Glenn's monologue, for which Mrs. Palin expresses her appreciation.




And here she is defending herself for getting her former brother-in-law fired as a state trooper.




Village alcoholism, sure. But is she ready to lead?


--

Below is a more substantive report on the abuse of power investigation and here is a the backup article.



Those are fairly serious allegations and quite a two-step out of the gate for Governor Palin. It would be one thing if the investigation had been unable to find anything but this story just broke last month. It's brand spanking new and will remain in the news as more information comes forward. McCain's demonstrating some fine judgment with this pick. Another panicked response out of the McCain camp.

Whether he's talking up war with Russia or Iran or picking our possible next vice president, John McCain just can't seem to take a deep breath and evaluate things clearly. There is no steady hand at his campaign and a rapidly diminishing judgement within the candidate himself.

Did they even vet Sarah Palin? Did they run any polls on her?

Do they really think that a first term governor from a state of 700,000 people in the Arctic that was previously the Mayor of a town of 8,00o has comprehensive knowledge of the complicated foreign policy matters of the day? Do they think she could possibly understand the national economy?

Do they really think Americans are going to be confident enough to count on her as insurance for McCain's age?

--

Bad judgment update:

From CNN

John McCain first met Sarah Palin only six months ago and had just one conversation with the Alaska governor before offering her the vice presidential slot on the Republican ticket, the Arizona senator's campaign said Friday.

Really? You just picked someone to be your replacement, a potential commander-in-chief during a crisis, based off of one conversation?

In Defense of Mayor Nagin

The American Zombie on Monday:

I just got an angry email in my AZ account from someone claiming that Nagin is being attacked because he's black and that I and "all the other bloggers" in the New Orleans blogosphere are racist....I guess the person wasn't including the African-American bloggers in this city who have been critical of Nagin as well.

By the way...is there a pro-Nagin blog out there?

Anywhere.....where.....where.....where....

Gambit contributor Kevin Allman in the comments section of that AZ post:

Just a note: I've got keys to the Gambit blog and I will GLADLY run a pro-Nagin essay by a New Orleans blogger as long as it's original and not a press release.

I've looked for pro-Nagin blogs so I can invite the authors to contribute. I can't find any.

Anyone: get in touch with me.

Yes, this will be a "pro" Nagin blog post.

--

There is an appropriate time to 'defend' Ray Nagin. It occurs just about once a year, around the anniversary time when conservative pundits can't avoid discussing Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf's recovery process.

Conservatives hate Hurricane Katrina because, perhaps more than any other singular Bush Administration failure, as the federal response to the disaster most irreparably battered the President's highly cultivated image.

Look at what happened to his approval ratings in late 2005 and early 2006.

Bush fluffers would prefer to ignore that painful episode as much as possible. It provides evidence of the fallacy of the neoconservative model of governance blatant enough that it doesn't take an effete Wall Street Journal liberal to point it out. (Cons: "Gov't=Bad" :: Cons manage Gov't badly :: Cons: "See how bad Gov't is?") The Katrina tragedy also brought the issue of poverty back into the national discourse. Conservatives don't like talking about poverty because the policies they advocate so often exacerbate it - and pretty much everyone knows that.

Thus, when discussion of Hurricane Katrina is unavoidable, like it will be next week, drowning conservatives have little flotsam to which they can cling.

There are only a few things they can try.

One is to blame the citizens of New Orleans for their 'refusal' to evacuate. This one is usually only parroted by uber-insulated conservatives like Rush Limbaugh that are not accountable to the mainstream public and never have to justify their statements with demonstrable fact. There are a few reasons why this argument isn't really attempted outside of ignorant talk radio. First, the rebuttal to this fabricated refusal myth is a discussion of poverty that conservatives don't want to have. Second, the language associated with the refusal myth, which touches on some expectation of government handouts, laziness, and stupidly is so racially loaded that any media personality that faces a mainstream audience knows better than to indulge.

What mainstream conservative pundits can do to is deflect criticism of the Bush administration and avoid substantive conversations about America's responsibility to the Gulf, the human rights of displaced New Orleanians, and poverty is to drop the hammer on C. Ray Nagin.

Last week, I did my first ever radio interview for an extremely obscure talk show based out of New York. Though the program was billed for political independents, I was greeted with the following question, which I will paraphrase:

The Hurricane was awful, we all remember the tragedy as it came into our living rooms, yada, yada, yada... In the days after Katrina, there was a fleet of school buses ready to go and Ray Nagin told them they weren't needed. Wasn't Ray Nagin terrible? Isn't it all Ray Nagin's fault? Isn't he an idiot and the worst guy ever?

Now certainly Ray Nagin deserves a great deal of blame for our failed hurricane preparation but to get a question like that three years after the fact demonstrates the lengths the conservative message machine has gone to put forth a revisionist history of the storm. This effort has been buttressed by more competent federal responses to the wildfires in California and the flooding in Iowa. It has given conservative voices an opening with which to carry out the Rove disaster response plan: blame the Democrats. (Never mind the fact that Mr. Nagin was instrumental in originally implementing the very Rove-hatched media response plan which Nagin himself is now the most direct target - I'm trying my best to make this 'pro' Nagin.)

It's funny because conservatives don't want to talk about Nagin's failures as a mayor post-Katrina because Nagin's most glaring failure has been his implementation of a generally conservative recovery ideology: outsourcing to private developers, dismantling public assets, stalling investment in the most devastated neighborhoods, and refusing to address low wages, high rents, and nonexistent health care. Instead, the focus is on Nagin's failures as an agent of FEMA during a 3 week period 3 years ago.

Beyond that, conservatives bring on local guests willing to talk about how far our tourism industry has come since Katrina and how you could walk the French Quarter and not even know a Hurricane had ever hit.

Ray Nagin is an unfair victim of conservative racism and attempts to paint the mayor of New Orleans as indicative lazy do-nothingness on the part of New Orleanians during the storm. Neoconservatives don't want to place the blame for the Katrina response where it really belongs, at the feet of their own ideology that implements broken government on purpose.

So:

Sometimes I feel like defending Nagin when he is used as a punching bag or used as a symbol for black people in general by neoconservative Bush administration brown-noses.

That's the best I can do for him.
--

There is a great irony here and it's not 'e doesn't actually like Nagin.'

All of the apologists out there that rail against Nagin critics by levying charges of racism are themselves ignoring what Nagin's policies are actually doing to the African American community of New Orleans.

The reality is that the biggest Nagin apologists out there aren't those that think attacks on Mr. Nagin are racist, they're the racist Republicans that themselves profit from Mr. Nagin's implementation of a bastardized free market disaster "recovery" policy slate that disproportionately hurts poor African Americans.

Recall that Ray Nagin himself contributed to George Bush's campaign in 2000 and nearly maxed out to the evil Billy Tauzin.

Also recall that campaign donations of members of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, hand picked by Mayor Nagin, went to GOP candidates a whopping 94% of the time.

It is Nagin and the policies of his administration that are propping up and perpetuating the economic and racial injustice.

Those that call critics of Mayor Nagin's recovery policy racist should look in the mirror. They should think about who's really holding up Ray Nagin. They should look at who's really behind the Mayor's Excellence in Recovery Award (i.e. excluding those that were tricked into membership). They ain't exactly the victims of Katrina - they're the profiteers of false recovery.

So to Kevin and the American Zombie, if we're looking for a real pro-Nagin blog, maybe we should be contacting the exclusive class of boosters profiting from our city's unrecovery. They'll be above the Ritz on Friday.

We Have All Assembled Here Because We've Got To Get That Obama

On Howard Wolfson, super senior Clinton strategist joining the Fox-News-team:

"He's got an insider's knowledge of how campaigns work and sometimes don't work," said John Moody, executive vp news editorial at Fox News. Wolfson couldn't be reached for comment.

Wolfson is one of a number of high-profile political figures the channel has hired in recent months for its election programming, including Karl Rove, former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Clinton adviser Lanny Davis.

"We really think we've got the chess board covered," Moody said.

Fox News pretty unabashedly proclaiming Wolfson, Huckabee, Davis, and Rove to be pawns in their global chess game.

But Wolfson, Davis, Huckabee, and Rove are not so nice to see in HD.

What I'm saying is that they haven't exactly been brought into fold to look good and read the damn news.

They're big-time power brokers and they've all decided to congregate under one roof.

This is a lot like the plot of Tomorrow Never Dies.

Links

Two Links.

When this tragedy is manipulated in a lie, when the story of Katrina is selectively rewritten, New Orleanians must reassert the truth.

Always and forever.

Drop the Shovel!

Ouch Ouch Ouch Ouch Ouch.



Uh oh, not again.



What does this do to ratings? How do sponsors respond? Does it just get ignored?
This video should be picked up by CNN and MSNBC and everyone else looking to sap viewers and advertisers away.

via my fourth cousin Josh Marshall

Here General, These Bullet Points Won't Hurt A Bit

Read this fascinating and disturbing NYT piece revealing the intersection between the Pentagon and the mainstream media.


UPDATE:

Another thing that is fascinating and especially disturbing is that this NYT piece is not being picked up elsewhere in the mainstream media. Not at the Washington Post, not at CNN. Was it in your hometown paper today? Other than on progressive blogs, where else have you seen the story referenced?

(Scratch that on WaPo, Howard Kurtz wrote about it this morning)

The New York Times' David Barstow wrote an incredible piece of investigative journalism that essentially proves the Pentagon's willful and successful manipulation of the media.
How is that not the biggest story in every paper in America?

People on the internets agree that it's a big story. The article is the most emailed and most blogged about story on the New York Times website. I think that should be taken as an indicator that the story might be of interest to a wider audience that might not be entrenched in day-to-day online discourse.

A Wise Man and a Fox News Weasel

This video was passed on to me by my friend Mark. Really watch the whole thing. I hope it makes you smile as much as it made me smile.




Seriously the whole video. It keeps going.

Interesting Editorial Decision by the Times-Picayune

On Monday, William Kristol, one of the leading neoconservative un-thinkers in the nation wrote a column for the New York Times. It's an anti-Obama piece called "Generation Obama? Maybe Not Quite."

It's a piece of garbage column, as has come to be customary from Mr. Kristol.

In it, he cites some dubious journalism, asserting that Mr. Obama had lied about personally hearing some more controversial sermons by Rev. Wright at Trinity Church:

But Ronald Kessler, a journalist who has written about Wright’s ministry, claims that Obama was in fact in the pews at Trinity last July 22. That’s when Wright blamed the “arrogance” of the “United States of White America” for much of the world’s suffering, especially the oppression of blacks.

This was an interesting thing to insert into the column because it has proven to be a total falsehood. Last July 22, Mr. Obama was in Miami.

As the information was pointed out to the author, Mr. Kristol added some italics to introduce his piece: "I regret the error."

Talking Points Memo alerted its readers to this correction and also linked to this site, which has much more detail about Ronald Kessler, the author of the original false report.

This morning, I opened the local paper and was unpleasantly unsurprised to notice that the Times-Picayune had selected Bill Kristol's inaccurate piece for republication on page B-5.

Mr. Kristol's admission of inaccuracy and apology was not included. Instead, the Times-Picayune simply deleted the debunked portion of the column and ran it as if the whole thing (where Mr. Kristol's blatant attack piece on Mr. Obama included blatantly false information) never happened.

The decision, and I don't know if this was the Times-Picayune's choice or if this is something decided by the distributors of syndicated columns, deprives readers of information that would allow them to determine on their own whether or not Mr. Kristol is capable of providing capable analysis.

Either way, the big story is Mr. Obama's brave speech on race from the great city of Philadelphia.

A lot of Volvos? Part 2

The other day, Leigh alerted me to this piece in New Orleans Magazine. (We later learned that we're not really supposed to show people the terrible stuff they say)

At the time, my response was to refuse to respond because I found the biases in the article to be so offensive that it wasn't worth my time.

One passage in particular was especially elementary:

The protesters themselves were the subject of much of the controversy. Several prominent New Orleanians, including a couple of council members, charged that many of the protesters were out-of-town, Birkenstock-clad agitators who had never set foot inside a New Orleans housing development until news cameras showed up.

Recent developments seemed to bolster that claim.

After a three-hour standoff at B.W. Cooper – the old Calliope project – SWAT officers arrested two 50-something-year-old protesters from Brooklyn. Other public housing activists turned out to be Ivy League college students on Christmas break.

“We’ve seen a lot of Volvos,” one city official said.

That last quote clearly seemed to strike me. That's why I'm still clearly bothered by it. That it was the language of a city official and not the author was maybe the reason it stuck with me so hard.

By the way, the author of that "article" is actually an outside agitator himself. His name is Chuck Hustmyre and he lives in Baton Rouge. He also is a frequent contributer to Fox News and has appeared on the prestigious The O'Reilly Factor.

I'm sure he's a nice guy.

Anyways, there was still something that irked me about that Volvo quote.

There was something I had read one time...

... in one of them books.

Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left Wing Freak Show by Geoffrey Nunberg.

A preview is available online for free with google books!

Here's a passage:

At it's inception, "Volvo liberal" was just another one of those pop marketing descriptions like "baby boomer" and "soccer mom," but it rapidly became a disparagement. By 1981, Pat Buchanan was accusing his radio sparring partner Tom Braden of the "Volvo, white wine and cheese set."

The brand image of the Volvo was ideal for this sort of stereotyping: not only was it an unglamorous car from socialist Sweden that people bought simply because it was safe, but its name had a serendipitous gynecological resonance - probably the main reason Volvos rather than Saabs were singled out for political stereotyping.

----
In fact, lifestyle and consumer preferences aren't nearly as good as a predictor of political affiliation as the right likes to pretend. It's true that Volvo owners skew Democratic, but only by about 4-to-3, not very big when other factors like geography are added into the mix, and one that has been shrinking as Volvos become more expensive and luxurious - among buyers of new Volvos, Democrats have only a slight edge. As indicators of party affiliation go, owning a Volvo is a somewhat less reliable than rooting for a baseball team with a blue uniform.

Funny, the city official quoted in the article had to resort to a right-wing talking point label in order to trash activists in a city full of Democratic voters.

(That is, making the sketchy assumption that the official didn't skew his or her comments special for New Orleans Magazine, which is not likely to be financially supported by many Democratic voters in Orleans Parish.)

(That is, making the sketchy assumption that the official didn't skew his or her comments special for Chuck Hustmyre, frequent guest of Fox News Channel.)

It is also funny to note, as Geoffrey Nunberg does in the passage, that Volvos are quite expensive.

Most activists you'll meet in the city are actually poor. A lot of those public housing activists wear old, raggedy clothing and otherwise look as though they invest less in their hygiene. The hippie labels work better than the 'a lot of Volvos' label. You wouldn't tend to see New Orleans activist types of people in Volvos or any other new car. More likely, they're living out of their cars. Or off of Americorps stipends. Or they're otherwise volunteering in different recovery-related programs and limiting their own ability to create the type of income necessary to purchase a fancy new Volvo's. It's all about bicycles.

I thought a lot of those activists that I just labeled in another set of broad generalizations made some major tactical errors during the public housing demolition hearing process and it made me mad at them.

This New Orleans Magazine Article doesn't qualify as journalism.

The "city official" needs to be told about his or her mixed metaphors.

A lot of Volvos?

I don't know if I should thank Leigh for alerting me to this article from New Orleans Magazine.

I wonder if any written piece of local "journalism" has ever made me more frustrated with the level of discourse in this city.

I have no response to the article because it is such a blatantly biased distortion of the truth.

Leigh, you should cancel your subscription. This crap needs to be pushed to the margins.

I'm already tired of thinking about it.

This is what happens

Yesterday, I was shooting the sh-t with a gal friend of mine about some politics and whatnot. She was saying how she didn't really like Hillary Clinton all that much and gave me some fairly perceptive reasons.

I asked her what she thought about Barack Obama. She said she liked him but had reservations...

Like what?

"Did you know that he's a practicing Muslim?"

I died a little bit on the inside as she finished the question.

How could this happen? How could this lie have gone so far?

My friend is not stupid. She's not exactly politically inclined or informed, but she's not stupid. She's rational and capable and smart. She's also extremely good looking but that's neither here nor there.

She saw that her comment upset me.

"It's not like it's a big deal. I think it would make a great statement to elect a Muslim President."

So so frustrating. I kept my cool and explained that the "Obama is a practicing Muslim" line was a lie perpetuated by the right that has festered on the internet for a real long time.

Mr. Obama, rather, is the most spiritual Christian amongst the Democratic contenders. In fact, he probably invokes the Bible more than any other candidate for President on either side of the aisle, save Huckacrazy.

Yet, not long after Mr. Obama announced his candidacy, one usual suspect tried out an unsubstantiated and vile attack strategy:



I know, I was SHOCKED too. The story dropped a year ago. Here's another transcript of Fox News coverage.

Their reports cited Insight Magazine, a subsidiary of the Washington Times, which is in turn owned by the Unification Church. The Unification Church is a sect founded in the 1940s in Korea. It has a conservative agenda and, again, have acquired the Washington Times and its subsidiaries.

This New York Times piece described how the story spread quickly to other popular conservative media outlets.

Now Insight Magazine has pointed out that the crux of their piece was not an investigation into Mr. Obama's childhood. Instead, they were merely reporting what was dug up by Hillary Clinton's dirty tricks team.

Mrs. Clinton, for her part, virulently denied that allegation, saying the story was a hitjob on both candidates.

I tend to believe her, given that Insight got its start slinging muddy allegations against her husband. But it doesn't matter, I'm not discussing that angle.

CNN, amazingly, saw the story reported on Fox News and actually sent a reporter to the school in Indonesia that Mr. Obama attended as a young boy:

But reporting by CNN in Jakarta, Indonesia and Washington, D.C., shows the allegations that Obama attended a madrassa to be false. CNN dispatched Senior International Correspondent John Vause to Jakarta to investigate.

He visited the Basuki school, which Obama attended from 1969 to 1971.

"This is a public school. We don't focus on religion," Hardi Priyono, deputy headmaster of the Basuki school, told Vause. "In our daily lives, we try to respect religion, but we don't give preferential treatment."

Vause reported he saw boys and girls dressed in neat school uniforms playing outside the school, while teachers were dressed in Western-style clothes.

Meanwhile, both Senators Clinton and Obama condemned the Insight story and its subsequent coverage as a hit job, etc.

Fox "corrected" the story later. Insight Magazine did not:

In an interview Sunday, Mr. Kuhner, 37, said he still considered the article, which he said was meant to focus on the thinking of the Clinton campaign, to be “solid as solid can be.” But he declined to say whether he had learned the identity of his reporter’s sources, and so perhaps only that reporter knows the origin of the article’s anonymous quotes and assertions. Its assertions about Mr. Obama resemble rumors passed on without evidence in e-mail messages that have been widely circulated over the last several weeks.

And so the media world turned and turned. Britney Spears threw a baby against a wall or something, John Edwards got a hair cut for an unelectable amount of money, and a good-looking white woman went missing.

The various incantations of the lie that Senator Obama is a Muslim or a terrorist or something went back to the cesspool that is the right-wing online rumor mill.

And then we all went on and had a glorious campaign season, right?

Unfortunately, no.

Fanatical whisper artists continued to perpetuate totally make-believe stories about Mr. Obama's childhood, his connection to Islam, etc. One even left a comment on this little website. If they were here, they were everywhere, spreading the lie on bulletin boards and as comments on mainstream sites all over the internet. Those rumors, of course, never were given any kind of caveat explaining that it was just opposition research from the Clinton team or that the rumors were false...

Obama, after his original debunking of the Insight story, largely let the thing languish. I imagine his rationale must have been something along the lines of:

If I bring it up to deny it, it'll give the story more traction than if I just let the whack jobs waste their breath...

Unfortunately, that clearly was an inoperable strategy.

The lie has persisted in its existence. The lie has grown in size. The lie has spread in reach.

At a few campaign stops, Mr. Obama has addressed the rumor, but clearly did not want to keep bringing it up for the news. There were signed letters on from clergy testifying to Obama's faith in Iowa.

Now, in South Carolina, with just days before the big Feb. 5th primary that could determine the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama has been forced to confront the lie campaign forcefully.

But for every rational explanation he gives about the sincerity of his commitment to Christian faith, there is another headline that says

"Obama confronts Muslim rumors"

or

"Obama says he's not a Muslim"

Headlines which, though I have no way of knowing, are probably just as damaging as the original malicious chain emails that have perpetuated all this.

Dick Polman ran a piece today about a mostly unrelated line of attacks against Barack Obama that this time have come from the Clinton campaign. It has to do with this thing he said about Ron Reagan having good political timing. Oyster debunks it as well as anybody.

I bring up that article because Mr. Polman closes it with a famous story about Lyndon Johnson's early political career:

This is the grist of politics as usual, and it brings to mind the old story about how Lyndon Johnson clawed his way to a Senate seat back in 1948. While systematically tarring his rival, fellow Democrat Coke Stevenson, the young LBJ said it might be a fine idea to spread the rumor that ole Coke was fond of having carnal relations with farm animals. His aides were shocked. Lyndon, they said, you know that's not true. To which LBJ replied, "I know that. I just want to make him to deny it."

And here is Mr. Obama denying over and over again that he is or has ever been affiliated with Islam. It is an unfortunate lie that attempts to scare people based on emotional, irrational, and uninformed fears of a people they've been told to fear again and again. It has gained an unfortunate and discouraging amount of traction within the fringe and mainstream media.

It has gained so much traction that a nonreligious casual follower of the campaign, a political independent, a likely Obama supporter believed it to be true.

That is so so sad.

It is a lie it is a lie it is a lie it is a lie it is a lie! It's a lie!

And I don't even care what religion he is either.