Tea Party Express Calls Out David Weigel at Washington Independent

I'm not involved with top-level planning whatsoever, but I just got word from the folks at Our Country PAC/Tea Party Express that the Washington Independent's David Weigel is making erroneous statements regarding the organization's place in the tea party movement. See Weigel's piece, "Discord in the Tea Parties?":

I’m hearing — though the players have not yet responded to my questions — that there’s some serious friction between one of the main organizations of the Tea Party movement and one of the late-comers. The main organization is Tea Party Patriots, the genuine grassroots group (with some marginal ties to FreedomWorks et al.) launched in February, after Rick Santelli’s CNBC “rant.” The late-comer is the Tea Party Express, the offshoot of the conservative, GOP-centric Our Country Deserves Better PAC.

Our Country Deserves Better is repudiating the "late-comer" characterization. See, "We’ve Been Proud Supporters of the Tea Party Movement." This screencap from the post shows a February 23 entry at the Our Country PAC MySpace page:

And here's the response:

A reporter for a Washington D.C.-based newspaper referred to the Our Country Deserves Better Committee this week as “late comers” to the Tea Party movement. We had a good chuckle over this misrepresentation, because the Our Country Deserves Better Committee has been involved in supporting the tea party movement since it all began way back in February 2009. We’ve learned to be patient when members of the press get their facts wrong about the tea party movement and the goals of all of us who are involved in fighting for our country’s future.

So to make sure the record is set straight here’s the history of our involvement in the tea party movement – it is one that we are very proud of. We’ve been honored to work with hundreds of thousands of tea party supporters all across America – and our work has only just begun!

David Weigel's a talented young reporter, but he's by no means objective. He was formerly at Reason, so his shift to the radical left is particularly interesting in terms of the left/libertarian axis. Anyway, he's not to be trusted. See my earlier entry as well, "What's Up With David Weigel?"

Added: Weigel has updated with another post, "Tea Party Patriots vs. Tea Party Express."

Census Worker Was Naked, Bound: Leftists Blame Bachmann, Beck, Limbaugh, Malkin, and Palin

At the New York Times, "Witness Says Census Worker Was Naked, Bound" (via Memeorandum). Of course, that's confirmation that Bill Sparkman's death couldn't have been suicide. You know, the right-wingers killed him. From airhead Larisa Alexandrovna:

I ... think it is absolutely fair to ask why someone would target a census worker (and sadly, a single father of two)? I have never heard of a Census worker being murdered before. I am sure it happens and has probably happened even in recent times, but I simply have never read or heard another instance of such a crime. So at the very least we can say it is a rare crime.

And I think that it is also fair to question the role Rep. Michelle Bachmann [sic] (the psychotic, drooling, knuckle-dragger, ill-informed conspiracy theorist, birther and hater masquerading as a member of Congress) jihad against the Census Bureau had something to do with it.

Okay. Right.

And since Charles Johnson's also advocating this meme, it's no doubt ironclad! (Memeorandum link only - trying to observe the LGF embargo.)

How about at Democratic Underground, "Handy Guide to how Republicans and Fox News are Responsible For Census Worker Being Hanged":

We need to absolutely expose Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, Michelle Malkin, CNN's Lou Dobbs, Michael Steele, Rush Limbaugh and the legion of others parroting right-wing lies for trumping up this nonsense and getting people to now commit murder in a hideous fashion.

Conservatives getting people to commit murder?

Okay. That's a really credible hypothesis coming from folks who post with murderous Che Guevara avatars. It's kinda like, you know, communists don't have to "get" anyone to murder people - they just go out and cut down their opponents without provocation.

And how about that "Fed" graphic above? Oh, that's from The Brad Blog, "Was the 9/12 Murder Related to Inflammatory Rhetoric of Beck, Bachman, and Fox 'News'? Or to Recent Local Events That Have Rocked the Rural, Poor, Republican County? Or All of the Above?" Geez, all that, and the Photoshop's already enough for an indictment!

But wait! Maybe it wasn't the right wing after all. Even the nihilist Firedoglake is skeptical:

Before we assume that this apparent homicide was a response solely to the attacks Michele Bachmann and others have made on the census, it's worth recalling how Clay County made news earlier this year, when a bunch of local officials were indicted for vote fraud.

Whew! I feel better already. All that Fox viewing is turning me into a murderer!

Related: "Sparkman: Casualty of Methland, USA? Or Victim of Anti-Government Bile?" (via Memorandum). Plus Lindsay "Don't Spell My Name Wrong You Nazi Stormtrooper" Beyerstein's on the case, "Meth and Anti-Government Extremism Not Mutually Exclusive."

Michael Lind Smears Conservative Activists as 'Teabaggers'

I was looking to give Michael Lind's a fair shake in his essay today, "Intellectual Conservatism, RIP."

Interestingly, Lind offers decent background discussion to neoconservatism (most appropriate, following the death of Irving Kristol), but he loses me when he joins Janeane Garofalo in smearing conservative activists as "teabaggers":

In its origins, neoconservatism was a defense of New Deal/Great Society liberalism at home and abroad, both from the radical, countercultural left of the era and from its own design defects. The early neocons were Kennedy-Johnson liberals who believed that liberal reform should avoid naive utopianism and should be guided by pragmatism and empirical social science. The '70s neoconservatives were so focused on the utopianism of the '60s campus left, however, that most paid too little attention to a far greater threat to their beloved New Deal tradition, the utopianism of the libertarian right. Ultimately Milton Friedman and other free-market ideologues did far more damage to America than the carnival freaks of the counterculture.

But the early neoconservatives were right to defend mainstream liberalism against countercultural radicalism. Like today's right, the '60s and '70s left was emotional, expressivist and anti-intellectual. (One of its bibles was Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book!") Like today's right, the '70s left favored theatrical protest over discussion and debate. The prophets of the Age of Aquarius and the "population explosion" were every bit as apocalyptic as Glenn Beck. And just as today's right-wing radicals play at Boston Tea Parties, so Abbie Hoffman dressed up as Uncle Sam. The teabaggers are the Yippies of the right.

Read the whole thing, if you want.

In addition the Janeane Garofalo, I'm reminded of the post over at Voting Female, "Maxine Waters Calls All Tea Party Protesters Homosexuals in her Latest Attack on Free Speech: For Those Who Haven't Figured It Out Yet ...'Tea Bagger' is a 'Male Homosexual'." (That's the best discussion you'll find of what a "teabagger" really is.)

Michael Lind's not too far from Maxine Water's if he's going to attack concerned citizens as teabaggers. So much for conservative intellectualis, or at least Lind's version of it.

What's Up With David Weigel?

You have to really shake your head at the ideological alliances of today.

Take David Weigel, who's got a piece up today on the GOP, "‘Right-Wing’ Rhetoric on Hold After Museum Shooting." It's a pretty strong attack on those who take exception to the left's smear against the conservative movement as a bunch of "Christian fascist eliminationists."

Weigel's a reporter at The Washington Independent, but previously he was a contributing editor at the libertarian Reason Magazine. In the latter position he'd be expected to advocate small government and the protection of liberties from the expansion of state power. On the whole, Reason would appear to support the libertarian wing of the GOP. But often the ideological lines get blurred, and some hardline libertarian activists are essentially "unpatriotic paleoconservatives" who veer over into hardline leftist territory - and, of course, some of that activity includes not just opposition to robust national defense, but even things like 9/11 trutherism and tin-foil hats.

So it's interesting that Weigel's moved from the Reason bench over to the hard-left Washington Independent, where such Bush-bashing nihilists as Spencer Ackerman also hold court. Such "libertarians" also include the America- and Israel-hating Daniel Larison, and the "liberaltarian" posse at Ordinary Gentlemen. These guys riff on (pothead) Will Wilkinson quite a bit. And they also gain sustenance from the likes of Andrew Sullivan. "Sully," of course, is a deranged Obamaton who feeds on the writings of Charles Johson at Little Green Footballs.

The respectable Matt Welch put the kibosh on these strange dalliances in a recent post. He notes:

The focus on political teams blurs one central, overriding truth: When it comes to bailout/stimulus/econ, there is no significant break in policy between George W. Bush and Barack Obama, no matter how much it benefits enthusiasts and detractors from pretending there's a sharp break between the two.

Welch, of course, is no fan of neoconservative foreign policy, so he naturally opposes the forward role of the U.S. in conflicts such as Afghanistan and Iraq. But he's good to distance himself from all the crazed left-liberal hoochy-kootchy.

Anyway, I mention all this just as hardline leftist Steve Benen is citing David Weigel in support of his attacks on the conservative movement.

Folks need to be careful about their allegiances.

I don't know David Weigel personally (although my blog-buddy Robert Stacy McCain calls him a good friend). No matter. Connecting the dots here - even with an admittedly broad brush - gives you some idea of what's really going on with the left-libertarian coalitions today: It's all anti-(neo)conservatism, all the time.

Thank goodness Sarah Palin's a neocon!

GOP at Risk of Becoming Monochromatic Party?

Here's Ronald Brownstein on the implications for the GOP of Arlen Specter's defection to the Democratic Party:

In one sense, Specter's defection merely continues a generation-long trend. Since the 1960s, each party's electoral coalition has grown more ideologically homogenous as conservatives have migrated away from the Democratic Party, and liberals and moderates have moved away from the GOP. That ideological resorting has thinned the ranks of Republican House and Senate members from left-leaning areas such as the Northeast and the West Coast and has culled Democrats from conservative regions, principally the South.

This ideological and geographic sorting-out has narrowed each party's reach. But Democrats in recent years have maintained a broader coalition, both in Congress and among voters, by demonstrating more receptivity to diverse views. In the Senate, for instance, Democrats hold 22 of the 58 seats representing the 29 states that twice voted for George W. Bush. And just 40 percent of self-identified Democrats consider themselves liberals, according to Gallup polling; the rest identify as moderate or conservative.

By contrast, the GOP is becoming an increasingly monochromatic party, dominated by the most conservative voters and regions. This process enormously accelerated under Bush and Karl Rove, who built their governing strategy on energizing the Republican base rather than on expanding it by courting swing voters. Today, Democrats hold their largest advantage in party identification over Republicans since President Reagan's first term, and 70 percent of the shrunken GOP core identifies as conservative. After Specter's leap, Republicans hold just two of the 36 Senate seats in the 18 mostly affluent and secular "blue-wall" states that twice voted against Bush -- and that have now voted Democratic in each of the past five presidential elections.

Notice Brownstein's framing: The Democrats have reached out "more receptively" and "maintained a broader coalition," while the Republicans have "thinned the ranks " and have become "an increasingly monochromatic party."

The Repubicans, in other words, have emerged as a "fearmongering neo-fascist hate-machine."

That's all well and good for the Democratic/progressive Republican political establishment that wants to turn the GOP into the party of gay marriage and cap-and-trade.

But as the power of the Tea Party movement is demonstrating, Republicans won't return to power by "running as a less enthusiastic version of big-government Democrats."

See also, Nice Deb, "For You Slow Learners Who Still Haven’t Figured Out The Tea Parties."

GOP-Smearing Image Credit: David Hoogland Noon.

Charles Johnson's Strange Alliance with Andrew Sullivan

Sometime back I posted on "On Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs." I noted at the post that "it turns out that yesterday Johnson basically joined the likes of Glenn Greenwald in attacking Glenn Beck for SIMPLY HYPOTHESIZING the possibility of an American anarchy ..."

Well now we have Johnson attacking the "Project 912 Glenn Beck Tea Party" as a society of "book burners." But get this: Andrew Sullivan joins in with an approving link, "A Tea Party Tantrum."

I earlier suggested "I have no personal quarrel with Johnson..." Unfortunatelty, it's hard for me to say the same thing today. Pamela Geller is in the midst of an ongoing flame war with Little Green Footballs. A recent post was titled, "Neo-Nazis Link Up With Charles Johson, Little Green Footballs Smears Beck, the GOP and Conservatives." Previously, Pamela published an essay titled, "Charles Little Green Footballs: The New Fascism ... on the Right."

Readers can check the veracity of Pamela's claims at her posts. But the meme is familiar irrespective of the particulars: Charles Johnson's mounted a long campaign against a number of neoconservative bloggers in the U.S., and that's on top of blogs such as Gates of Vienna and Brussels Journal in Europe.

What's interesting to me, especially, is that Johnson still continues to attack the Obama administration collectivism, all the while aiding and abetting the left's nihilist campaign against religion and social conservatism. Strange, no? But wait! Johnson's also been busy with attemps to repudiate some previous recognition from Andrew Sullivan: "There’s nothing like a left-handed compliment from Andrew Sullivan to totally creep you out."

I've got news for you, Charles, you're just as creepy as Sullivan, and just as dangerous.

On Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs

You know, I've been thinking about Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs.

When I go over there nowadays I get confused. Last year LGF was doing some of the best pushback-blogging against leftist crazies like Markos Moulitsas. But now it seems Johnson's done an about face against conservatives, especially people of faith. I'm not a "creationist," but I've noted that Stephen Jay Gould's "doctrine of nonoverlapping magisteria" suggests a compatibility between Christian beliefs and scientific evolutionary theory.

Well, it turns out that yesterday Johnson basically joined the likes of Glenn Greenwald in attacking Glenn Beck for SIMPLY HYPOTHESIZING the possibility of an American anarchy:

There's not going to be any mass anarchy, and there's not going to be any sedition. Glenn Beck isn't going to bring about the End Times, or a financial crash.

But what he IS doing is encouraging and inciting the real nutjobs out there to do violence. One on one violence, stoked by paranoid fantasies.

It's crazy, and it's wrong, and it's irresponsible.

It's crazy? I'm sure many said the same thing about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, despite the warnings of the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center.

I have no personal quarrel with Johnson, although I'd just note here his tremendous inconsistency. On the one hand he attacks radical Islamists for practices such as child killing, and then on the other he attacks people like Geert Wilders for attacking, well, the exact same thing.

For some related matters, see Dr. Pat Santy's comments on the controversies Johnson's had with folks on questions of Islam and terror (see, "My Response to Blackmail Threats").

But also check out Stogie's post at Saberpoint for more on what folks are noticing about LGF:

I rarely read the blog "Little Green Footballs" any more. I have discovered that, as time goes by, I have less and less in common with its owner, Charles Johnson. Frankly, he acts like someone who is developing a brain chemistry imbalance. If so, he should consider a psychotropic medication like Prozac or Paxil. Personally I prefer Zoloft. Since I started taking it, I notice the ax murders are fewer and further between. Yes, we don't see that much of Mr. Hyde anymore.

Charley's latest gambit is to trash Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and to oppose Geert Wilders. Seems Charley is very adamant about the right of individuals to freedom of religion, apparently any religion, regardless of their practices, e.g. honor killings, genital mutilation, wife beating, polygamy, jihad, insistence on Sharia rather than democracy. No doubt Aztecs performing human sacrifices of virgins would be just fine with him. You can't oppose "freedom of religion" after all. Charley is so open-minded and tolerant that he would probably accept an invitation to dinner by a tribe of cannibals, and never notice when they shove an apple in his mouth and push him into a big pot of boiling water.

Another of Charley's annoying habits is that he has become a fanatical supporter of Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. That's fine if that's your bag, but every other post is an ideological screed in support of this pseudo-science. Who cares?

Evolution, says Charley is absolutely true and beyond criticism. Today he was running an article entitled "Transitional Fossils Do Exist."

Charley should know. He's one of them.

My main interest here is as it relates to the broader internal debates I've been discussing on the freaky left-libertarian alliance of "liberaltarianism," as well as the continued and self-evident power of neoconservative clarity in combating the creeping totalitarianism of Islamic radicalization.

At lot of folks are focusing on electoral schisms within the GOP, but some of the more overarching issues of foreign affairs and moral authority are going to be increasingly important to the emergence of the next right-wing governing coalition.

More later ...

**********

UPDATE: Critical Thinker add this, from the comments:

Methinks ole Charlie might need to go back to playin' Jazz and leave the world of bloggin'. Seems he is turning into a control freak and might be the one going off of the deep end.

Obama to Rekindle LBJ's Foreign Policy!

Melanie Phillips, with her usual aplomb, concisely lays out the danger of a Barack Obama administration in foreign affairs:

Obama thinks world conflicts are basically the west’s fault, and so it must right the injustices it has inflicted. That’s why he believes in ‘soft power’ — diplomacy, aid, rectifying ‘grievances’ (thus legitimising them, encouraging terror and promoting injustice) and resolving conflict by talking. As a result, he will take an axe to America’s defences at the very time when they need to be built up. He has said he will ‘cut investments in unproven missile defense systems’; he will ‘not weaponize space’; he will ‘slow our development of future combat systems’; and he will also ‘not develop nuclear weapons,’ pledging to seek ‘deep cuts’ in America’s arsenal, thus unilaterally disabling its nuclear deterrent as Russia and China engage in massive military buildups....

Obama dismisses the threat from Islamism, shows zero grasp of the strategic threat to the region and the world from the encirclement of Israel by Iran, displays a similar failure to grasp the strategic importance of Iraq, thinks Israel is instead the source of Arab and Muslim aggression against the west, believes that a Palestinian state would promote world peace and considers that Israel – particularly through the ‘settlements’ – is the principal obstacle to that happy outcome. Accordingly, Obama has said he wants Israel to return to its 1967 borders – actually the strategically indefensible 1948 cease-fire line, known accordingly as the ‘Auschwitz borders’.

There's more at the link, and when you're finished there, check out Daniel Larison, who sees the reincarnation of LBJ's liberal containment in an Obama presidency:

The people worried about the second coming of Carter ought instead of be more concerned about an administration more like LBJ’s, in which we would all probably agree that an excess of hawkishness rather than the lack of it was the central flaw.

Larison blogs at the American Conservative, the home of unpatriotic conservatives "at war with America":

They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation's enemies.

I genuinely doubt Obama will send hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops into foreign hostilities to fight our new "Cold War" against radical Islam!

But you've got to love those paleocons - they do know how to spice up an otherwise slow blogging night!

The Marginal Returns of Political Blogging

As readers know, I've been recently studying political demonization in the blogosphere.

In fact, I've developed something of a theory of secular demonology (by no means original), that hypothesizes a particular psychology of hatred that drives the leftosphere, which I've applied, for example, to "The Commentocracy of Hate." To be clear, I do not claim that conservatives are angels (there's a lot of right-wing extremism online, frequently defended by reference to strained notions of free political speech). Recent empirical history, however, demonstrates a powerful propensity among those on the left to mercilessly attack conservative partisans in government and online, going so far as mounting a political psychology of revenge.

I'm returning to this topic again after reading Jason Steck's outstanding essay on group think in the blogosphere.

Steck argues that blogging as a political medium has reached the point of diminishing marginal returns. Online partisans on both the left and right have no inclination toward objective critical analysis, and their respective commentocracies reward those blogs best able to demonize the other. Consequently, insightful, intellectual nuance and persusion get completely marginalized in the flaming haze of political battle:

Take a step back and review any political blog you like and you will immediately be struck by the sameness of the posts. They take the story of the day — invariably some substance-free “gaffe”, photo op, or partisan charge of corruption — and attach a laundry list of catastrophic impacts foretelling the end of the world if that candidate would be elected. Any reference to actual policy issues will be brief, insubstantial, and driven entirely by stereotypes. Comments threads will be infested by cut-and-paste repetitions of well-worn slogans and talking points, bereft of any engagement with the issues of the real world or any recognition that disagreement could indicate anything other than demonic possession. The scripts rule the day without any tolerance for deviation or criticism of any kind:

Mandatory Script #1: Obama is a “socialist” who is simultaneously too intellectually lightweight to be President yet a Machiavellian genius enough to be bamboozling everyone

Mandatory Script #2a: McCain is “McSame” seeking a third BushHilter term so that he can sell Social Security to Halliburton and bomb every country where brown people live in order to establish an American Empire that will revoke the Bill of Rights in order to establish a theocracy.

I'm getting a kick out of both of these "scripts," although if parsimony adds power, the brevity of Obama's script might provide a little value-added as the campaign moves forward.

Seriously though, Steck's onto something, although I don't think his resigned conclusion is completely warranted:

I care deeply about this election, but I find that writing about it publicly is pointless. Welcome to the brave new world of politics, where morons rule by rote.

I've been blogging for about a two-and-a-half years. Recently, when logging-on in the mornings, and especially when I check Memeorandum, I feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. The most important stories on politics and public policy are often pushed to the side. Controversies serving as fodder for scandal rise to the top. The major bloggers weigh in with venomous attacks and snarky dismissals. One or two of these get picked up by the MSM, and then become "news" themselves. The White House or the major campaigns make a statement, and then it all starts over again in the morning.

I think there's more to it than that, however. I was introduced to the blogosphere by reading academic, high-brow blogs. I liked reading, for example, Daniel Drezner and Virginia Postrel. Folks like this are successful in their professions, and they've generated much of their readership trough their working reputations. Ann Althouse is a fabulous blogger as well (she also teaches law), and she's become something of a media sensation with her serious but stylistic online presence.

There are more examples like this, but what's happened with the partisan blogs is that they've become of the footsoldiers of the revolution, especially on the left. There's simply not going to be compromise when partisan bloggers and their communities see themselves in battle. It can get disgusting, as Steck notes in the comments:

Whenever ... a blog emerges that actually does attempt to provide balanced and/or mixed perspectives, they get shunned. To say that such blogs get "blacklisted" is not an exaggeration. They disappear from Memeorandum, are systematically denied links by the partisan blogs as punishment for their heresies, and are sometimes even subjected to campaigns designed to encourage other blogs to blacklist them. (For example, one blog owner I know of often disseminates orders to his co-bloggers instructing them not to link to other bloggers he doesn’t like or agree with and extends requests to the same effect to his other friends in the blogosphere, yet he claims publicly to welcome equally views from "left, right, and center".) There are more than a few commenters who do the exact same thing — trying to harass and defame any blog or writer who commits an act of heresy against their particular Mandatory Script....

For example, Newshoggers is an example of a blog that often [finds] stories that no one else is talking about at all. But they cancel out much of the value of that positive contribution by their relentless and abusive approach to blogs that they disagree with, usually ignoring contrary perspectives entirely but, when they do acknowledge them, often personally attacking the authors of those dissenting blogs or just lying about what those dissenters said in order to force-fit them into the pre-existing, demonized scripts. Glenn Greenwald is another exemplar of this tendency who has been rewarded massively for his hateful efforts as is FireDogLake. And those examples are in addition to the blog that I know for certain does outright blacklisting behind the scenes while publicly claiming to represent “left, right, and center”.

I'm betting that this "certain" blog is "The Moderate Voice" (aka "The Partisan Voice"), and I'd also note, interestingly, that the three blogs Steck mentions above are among the most prominent demonologists in the leftosphere.

Still, I too think folks should step back a bit, but my suggestion is for people to ask themselves what they hope to achieve by blogging? In my case, I visited many blogs years ago, and my comments at various sites became essay-length, so I thought I'd better get in the game.

It takes a while to find a niche. I started with a lot of cerebral posts, often unrelated to the headlines of the day, with very little partisan bite. I talked to more experienced bloggers who said they liked what they say, but recommended taking the gloves off. I have done that, while trying not to lose my academic side, with my style of lengthy, substantive posts of ranging ideas.

In any case, the blogging medium should be here to stay, or, at least until another platform comes along to replace the immediacy and potential impact of citizens' journalism. Most bloggers will not have a huge readership, but I'm confident that insight and intelligence are rewarded, and I'm frankly blown away sometimes at how awesome the blogosphere works as an alternative and competitor to traditional media.

All is not lost, for the moment at least. The returns of excellence in political blogging may have diminished some, but the ultimate output still carries substantial utility for politics.

Obama Sees Traction in Continuing Racial Grievance

Election 2008 may be remembered for an odd counter-intuition on racial progress: For the first time in history, a black American has secured a major-party nomination for the presidency. This milestone should demonstrate America's equal political opportunity for people of color. Yet, simultaneously, the very ascendence of a black presidential nominee is forcing people to confront latent racial prejudices that seemed slowly fading as the pattern of post-civil rights integration normalized cross-racial comity and interaction.

Is Barack Obama to blame for the fraying of the integrationist consensus?

A man who advertised himself as America's postracial healer now appears to be complicit in the resegregation of American attitudes on skin color and the politics of racial recrimination.

Gallup polling, for example, finds a majority of Americans agreeing racism is widespread:

A recent USA Today/Gallup poll finds most Americans saying racism is widespread against blacks in the United States. This includes a slim majority of whites (51%), a slightly higher 59% of Hispanics, and the vast majority of blacks (78%)....

As on most issues involving race in the United States, blacks are much more likely to see racism as a problem than are whites. However, other questions in the poll showed that Americans remain optimistic that race relations could improve, if Americans could hold an open national dialogue on race and if Barack Obama were elected as the first black president.

Notice how black Americans are much more likely to view politics through a racial prism.

Indeed, today's Washington Post poll finds Barack Obama running strong overwhelmingly among narrow interest group constituencies sensitive to race-baiting appeals:

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama holds a 2 to 1 edge over Republican Sen. John McCain among the nation's low-wage workers, but many are unconvinced that either presidential candidate would be better than the other at fixing the ailing economy or improving the health-care system, according to a new national poll.

Obama's advantage is attributable largely to overwhelming support from two traditional Democratic constituencies: African Americans and Hispanics...

Yet:

Obama's standing with the white workers runs counter to an impression, dating from the primary season, that he struggles to attract support from that group. McCain advisers have said for months that they think the Republican can win a significant share of those voters because of Obama's performance in the spring.

The survey suggests it will be difficult, but not impossible, for McCain to increase his appeal.

Think about this: The Post's survey contacted people making at or below $27,000 annually - that is, the working classes. So, we are seeing lower-income whites who are favorable to the Obama campaign, but also, in Gallup's findings, only a slight majority of white Americans see society as racist.

In other words, the Obama campaign has an incentive to push racial politics as a wedge issue.

Black voters already cling to outdating notions of hegemomic racist domination of the political landscape. If Obama can sharpen racist thinking among white voters, by alleging that John McCain is exploiting racist stereotypical images of sexual predation among blacks, perhaps more white voters - who are more inclined toward electoral color-blindness, but may have debilitating white guilt - can be sucked into the frame of a racial recriminatory coalition: McCain's racist! Vote Obama!

Thus, strangely, Barack Obama has in fact no incentive to campaign on a post-civil rights platform of equality of opportunity. Indeed, Juan Williams notes that last week's outbursts might just be the beginning of racial general election campaign:

With polls showing the presidential contest between John McCain and Barack Obama getting closer, a question is now looming larger and larger. Is skin color going to be the deciding factor?

Just last week, Sen. Obama warned voters that Sen. McCain's campaign will exploit the race issue by telling voters that "he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." A few weeks earlier, he said they will attack his lack of experience but also added, "And did I mention he's black?"

The McCain campaign did not counter the first punch, but after last week's jab -- fearing that Mr. Obama was getting away with calling his candidate a racist -- campaign manager Rick Davis responded to the dollar-bill attack by saying, "Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong."

Mr. Obama's campaign concedes it has no clear example of a Republican attack that expressly cites Mr. Obama's name or race. Yet in the last few days some Obama supporters were at it again, suggesting that a McCain ad attacking Mr. Obama as little more than a "celebrity," by featuring young white women such as Britney Spears, is an appeal to white anxiety about black men and white women.

The race issue is clearly not going away.

Williams suggest that the Bradley effect may be at work, with many white voters not revealing their genuine racial sensitivties to pollsters. Therefore, Williams notes that instead of continuing crass racial appeals to further divide the electorate, Obama needs to return to his original promise of racial transcendence:

To win this campaign, Mr. Obama needs to assure undecided white voters that he shares their values and is worthy of their trust. To do that he has to minimize attention to different racial attitudes toward his candidacy as well as racially polarizing issues, and appeal to the common experiences that bind Americans regardless of color.

Obama conceded last Friday that his "dollar bill" remark sought to play the race card. Hopefully, Obama will go further and fully repudiate the politics of racial demonization.

Polls show that Americans see race discrimination as continuing, and the odd implication for the Democrats is that they can score political points by further exacerbating those racial tensions that do exist.

Maybe America will one day have a campaign judging presidential candidates by the content of their character, but it won't be Barack Obama's presidential bid that helps us get there.

See also, Betsy Newmark, "It Always Seems to Come Down to Racism."

Graphic Credit: Gallup Poll

The Hatred of the Online Crowd

Popular culture has been transformed by new modes of online communications and social networking platforms. From Blogger to MySpace to YouTube, technology provides endless opportunities for people to make friends, share hopes and joys, and perhaps live dangerously.

One of the most disturbing manifestions of the today's online reality is the phenomenon of "trolling," which is discussed in today's New York Times:

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait....

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

What caught my attention about this story is not the notion of "trolling" but the larger issue of the "hatred of the online crowd," referred as to "malwebolence."

Much of online communication is pseudonymous, and thus in the absence of fear of consequences we see the proliferation of the most horrendously depraved behavior from what is, essentially, a tech-savvy, un-lumpen web-prowl-etariat.

We know the dangers: tragedies like Megan Meier's MySpace suicide, the mysogynistic death threats to tech-writer Kathy Sierra, or the demonization of conservatives bloggers like Jeff Goldstein.

The intensity of the hatred itself is not new. What's novel is the unprecedented volume and retrievability, which is accelerated by the liberation of unaccountability.

I haven't been the subject of a social networking demonization campaign, although last week I was introduced to the term "cobag" by those friendly nihilists at Sadly No! (and I get "fair and balanced" malwebolence from extreme right-wing hate bloggers as well, who allege I'm RINO for speaking out against racist blog rings (as seen, for example, here, here, here, and here).

My wife sometimes worries about my safety, as I don't blog pseudonymously.

Much of this hatred is defended in terms of the First Amendment, and the legal protections against online demonization aren't so robust, as the Times indicates:

Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech...?

Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It’s tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients ... like ... Megan Meier presumably wouldn’t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well....

Many trolling practices ... violate existing laws against harassment and threats. The difficulty is tracking down the perpetrators. In order to prosecute, investigators must subpoena sites and Internet service providers to learn the original author’s IP address, and from there, his legal identity. Local police departments generally don’t have the means to follow this digital trail, and federal investigators have their hands full with spam, terrorism, fraud and child pornography. But even if we had the resources to aggressively prosecute trolls, would we want to? Are we ready for an Internet where law enforcement keeps watch over every vituperative blog and backbiting comments section, ready to spring at the first hint of violence? Probably not. All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling without snuffing out the debate.

That's probably as good a description of the issues as we're going to get (although I'd be interested to read some legal and scholarly articles on this).

Read the entire New York Times article here: "The Trolls Among Us."

GOP Unfairly Branded as White Supremist

Christopher Bodenner, writing at the Daily Dish, was impressed with Shelby Steele's recent analysis of Barack Obama's racial politics at the Wall Street Journal - and for good reason. Next to Juan Williams, Steele's the most thoughtful commentator on the pathologies of black victimology in America today.

But what really got me interested was Bodenner's link to an essay by Margaret Kimberley, "Freedom Rider: Shelby Steele Loves White Supremacy."

Kimberley, writing at The Black Commentator, says:

Shelby Steele is a well known black conservative, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a leading right wing think tank. Steele has made a lucrative career for himself by lambasting black people and praising white people. He says that racism is all in the past, that all is right with the world and it is up to black people to admit it and stop complaining.

Recently on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal Steele outdid himself. Steele lamented that white people just aren’t as vicious as they used to be. He believes that the legacy of slavery, segregation and American imperialism left a terrible legacy on white people. Of course, the worst impact was on the oppressed and subjugated, but Steele isn’t very worried about the legacy the past left on them.

Kimberley stretches too far when she goes off on the Iraq war as "racist." Yet, she's clear in making the radical left-wing case for an alleged entrenched, undending white supremacy in the GOP today:

Steele’s confusion is so great that one has to wonder if he even reads the newspaper or watches the news. “There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant”....

Steele’s assertion that there are no advocates of white supremacy is truly difficult to fathom ... If he thinks white supremacists have disappeared he need only look in the mirror. He has achieved the rare feat of being a man of color who cheerleads for an idea that has murdered and otherwise destroyed the lives of millions of people he should identify with. He believes in manifest destiny, imperialism and white skin privilege. Consequently, he exults in shame and hatred of his own people ....

The Wall Street Journal and Steele have had a long running love affair. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the onslaught of federal government inaction that created so much suffering...

The Black Commentator announces it's committed to the "struggle" for "peace" and "social justice," Marxist revolutionary code language, but Kimberley's ideas are common on the left today.

For example, we saw a left-wing backlash in response to Bruce Bartlett's recent article, "The GOP Is the Party of Civil Rights."

Crooked Timber, for instance, attacked Bartlett's necrophilia, that is, his love of "dead" Republicans:

Bartlett does not even claim, in the op-ed, that there are living Republicans who deserve the support of African-Americans, due to their support for civil rights. The most recent instance he cites is Richard Nixon, who supported affirmative action as a way of busting racist unions. He is, apparently, seriously arguing that African-Americans should consider voting for dead people.

Lawyers, Guns and Money also attacks Bartlett:

The problems with Bruce Bartlett's pseudo-historical WSJ piece are almost too numerous to contemplate. For starters, it's laughable for him to suggest ... that the varieties of racism [marking] the pre-civil rights era have somehow been "buried"...

The left's outrage with Shelby Steele, as well as with writers like Bruce Bartlett, reflects the nihilist tendency to smear all Republicans as unequivocally racist.

These attacks are unprincipled and outrageous. Republicans (or conservatives) historically stress traditional values, such as equal treatment under the law. They argue that society should be organized around excellence and achievement, not handouts, quotas, and racial recrimination.

Douglas MacKinnon, a longstanding GOP operative, argued last week that the GOP is unfairly branded as racist:

As a Republican with a conservative point of view, I have written more on the greatness of black America, and the need for my party to reach out to that community, than just about anyone I know....

And yet as much as I and other Republicans try to increase the dialogue, correct the record and derail the hateful rhetoric that divides us, others choose to deliberately ignore heartfelt efforts. As one example, last September, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote a column titled “The Ugly Side of the GOP.”

In a somewhat rambling piece that was syndicated all over the nation, Herbert said, “Last week the Republicans showed once again just how anti-black their party really is”...

MacKinnon wrote a column in response these claims, and then forwarded it to Herbert. To which MacKinnon notes, "Unfortunately, he chose to ignore my outreach..."

Herbert's non-response is no surprise.

The meme that America is irredeemably racist - and especially that the GOP is the bastion of today's Jim Crow ideology - provides the far left-wing of the Democratic Party a powerful tool of guilt-mongering and racial victimology.

Jesse Jackson blew the mask off this meme, however, with his totally corrupt double-standard on Barack Obama, when he announced that the Illinois Senator should be castrated for allegedly talking down to black Americans about personal responsibility.

Note how Fox News was branded as "racist" for just broadcasting these issues.

As I've noted many times this year, to the extent that we've seen outright racism in election 2008, it's been on the Democratic Party side (see, "Barack Obama and the Political Psychology of Race").

If we see genuine white supremacy on the right, it's at the margins, among people associated with Stormfront and extreme right-wing Paulbots, as well as racist vigiliante blogs on the redneck wilderness.

One extremist blogger announced recently that Sherri Shepard of the View should be kicked to the curb, which reflects the kind of white supremist hatred depicted in films such as American History X:

Elisabeth Hasselbeck got baited into a discussion she can not win, not on the air, not in a liberal minded show and not being as sweet as she is. She needed to get up and grab that dumb bitch by her horse hair weave and curb stomp her ass.

It's true that vile views like these can be readily found on the extremist right-wing fringe, but as we've seen in Bartlett and MacKinnon's essays above, mainstream Republicans have repudiated this hatred time and again.

This will continue to be a challenge for the GOP (who are not only slurred by the left as racist, but "pseudo fascist" as well), although the party's eminently better positioned - on the basis of history and basic values of decency and fair play - to lead the country toward the colorblind society that is rightfully America's bounty.

See also, The Next Right, "How John McCain Should Respond To Racism."

Related: Classical Values, "The Fascists Are Still Coming!

Obama Can't Transcend Race?

Well, I guess race and politics is going to be the hot issue online today, and I'm also having a debate here on the relative propensity for partisan race-baiting, at "Obama's Rise Creates White Supremist Backlash."

So, let me point readers to a couple of posts of interest: On the Democrats as consumed by race, see Jammie Wearing Fool, "Race-Obsessed Democrats Have a Lot of Healing to Do." On Democratic victimology, see Shakesville, "Michelle Obama Racism/Sexism Watch, Part 11."

The latter post, from Shakesville, makes the startling claim:

Obama does not transcend race. Race is not something that can be transcended. There's no level of universal appeal that will somehow erase the color of your skin and all your experiences of living in it. Obama just happens to be the kind of black dude who doesn't automatically make a certain sort of white person uncomfortable -- the sort of white person who goes around the fucking bend if you point out even unconscious racism in something he's said and yet secretly believes our prisons are full of black men because black men commit more crimes, duh. Big difference.

This blogger's responding to Rupert Cornwell, who suggested:

Like the golfer Tiger Woods (and to a lesser extent Colin Powell), Obama transcends race. He is the post-racial candidate...

And for that, Cornwell's slurred as racist. Oh sure, read all of Cornwell for the context, but think about it: Just the notion that the country can transcend race is itself racist?

That's some freaky postmodern victimology, especially since Obama himself's been at pains to push a transformative racial appeal (to little success, as he's the first to call out folks as racists when the going gets tough).

I think we're really just getting into the season's politics of racial recrimination, and it's an odd thing: As the country's on the verge of historic change, if Barack Obama's elected as the nation's first black president, we're reverting to the most primitive debates, often for the most cheap points of partisan political gain. Somehow, I don't think this is what Dr. King had in mind.

Contrary to the suggestion in the comments to my post, it's clear that the lefties are especially intent to drag the country through the slime of racial grievance politics this year.

For more on this see, "Birth of a Meme."

Obama's Rise Creates White Supremist Backlash

White supremist hate groups have seen an increase in activity and identification, according to the Washington Post:

Sen. Barack Obama's historic victory in the Democratic primaries, celebrated in America and across much of the world as a symbol of racial progress and cultural unity, has also sparked an increase in racist and white supremacist activity, mainly on the Internet, according to leaders of hate groups and the organizations that track them.

Neo-Nazi, skinhead and segregationist groups have reported gains in numbers of visitors to their Web sites and in membership since the senator from Illinois secured the Democratic nomination June 3. His success has aroused a community of racists, experts said, concerned by the possibility of the country's first black president.

"I haven't seen this much anger in a long, long time," said Billy Roper, a 36-year-old who runs a group called White Revolution in Russellville, Ark. "Nothing has awakened normally complacent white Americans more than the prospect of America having an overtly nonwhite president."

Such groups have historically inflated their influence for self-promotion and as an intimidation technique, and they refused to provide exact membership numbers or open their meetings to a reporter. Leaders acknowledged that their numbers remain very small -- "the flat-globe society still has more people than us," Roper said. But experts said their claims reveal more than hyperbole this time.

"The truth is, we're finding an explosion in these kinds of hateful sentiments on the Net, and it's a growing problem," said Deborah Lauter, civil rights director for the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors hate group activity. "There are probably thousands of Web sites that do this now. I couldn't even tell you how many are out there because it's growing so fast."

Neo-Nazi and white power groups acknowledge that they have little ability to derail Obama's candidacy, so instead some have decided to take advantage of its potential. White-power leaders who once feared Obama's campaign have come to regard it as a recruiting tool. The groups now portray his candidacy as a vehicle to disenfranchise whites and polarize America.

Read the whole thing.

Apparently Stormfront's seen an "explosion" of activity over the last year or so.

These folks are a small minority, although the Washington Post also reports today on a new survey, which finds that 3 in 10 Americans "acknowledge feelings of racial prejudice." Still, the poll finds an improvement in racial sentiment, with just 1 in 10 saying they wouldn't feel comfortable voting for a black president.

As I've noted before, we do see a miniscule extremist fringe, just a couple of percentage points nationally, that espouses the most disgusting racial supremist doctrines (see, "Barack Obama and the Political Psychology of Race").

Not only that, to the extent that bigotry's been a factor in electoral politics this year, it's been on the Democratic side, as Sister Toldjah points out in her post on Obama and the race card.

See also, "Obama Calls Out Republicans for "Campaign They'll Run."

Obama Calls Out Republicans for "Campaign They'll Run"

Barack Obama, at a fundraising stop yesterday, alleged that Republicans will mount a fear-based racial campaign against him this fall:

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama said on Friday he expects Republicans to highlight the fact that he is black as part of an effort to make voters afraid of him.

It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy," Obama told a fundraiser in Jacksonville, Florida. "We know what kind of campaign they're going to run. They're going to try to make you afraid.

"They're going to try to make you afraid of me. He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?"

He said he was also set for Republicans to say "he's got a feisty wife," in trying to attack his wife Michelle.

Right-wing bloggers are up in arms, calling out Obama for playing the "race card."

Karl at Protein Wisdom suggests that "Barry O" is dealing the race card.

Captain Ed at Hot Air notes the hypocrisy, since Obama provided no evidence, and it was Hillary Clinton supporters during the spring primary who circulated pictures of Obama outfitted in traditional African dress (and Bill Clinton portrayed Obama as the next Jesse Jackson, an "ethnic" candidate, beholden to the racial grievance masters).

Captain Ed also indicate how the McCain campaign's been quick to repudiate racist smears in his campaign operation:

John McCain, meanwhile, was a lot more outspoken in criticizing his own supporters for relying on crypto-ethnic references. He immediately and publicly disowned, without any prompting, Bill Cunningham in Ohio after the radio host enphasized Obama’s middle name (Hussein) in his introductory remarks. McCain also fired one staffer for e-mailing a Jeremiah Wright video after explicitly saying that his campaign would have no comment on Wright or Trinity United.

McCain, for all his alleged apostasies, is solidly on conservative ground on this issue. As we saw with the Ron Paul phenomenon, there are a lot of far right-wing extremists, as well as the their irrationalist defenders, who will be all too happy to deploy the most vile racist hatred as part of their political agenda.

People like this do not speak for genuine conservatives (and they gives the nihilist lefties ammunition), much less the GOP. It will be interesting to see how things turn out, because as I've noted previously, this election's going to fought intensely on racial grounds.

Jim Webb and Neo-Confederate Ideology

As some readers may recall, I've denounced neo-confederate hate commenters at this blog on a couple of occassions (sample comments are here).

I'll note, though, it's a tricky subject dealing with affinity for the values of the Old South. If one respects Southern tradition, does that automatically make them bigoted? I don't think so, although some organizations - like the League of the South - have a history of supporting racist oppression, so it does matter where one positions themselves along the spectrum.

My blog buddy Stogie's family background dates back to the Confederacy, but you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who speaks out so consisently and eloquently against racism and anti-Semitism. Values of duty, honor, and pride of heritage are respectable sentiments, but in our age of extreme racial sensitivity, it must be difficult showing historical affinity for the patrician conservativism of the former plantation states.

I note all of this because Senator Jim Webb, who's name's being thrown around as a possible Barack Obama V.P., is apparently a philo-Confederate, as reported by the Politico:

Barack Obama’s vice presidential vetting team will undoubtedly run across some quirky and potentially troublesome issues as it goes about the business of scouring the backgrounds of possible running mates. But it’s unlikely they’ll find one so curious as Virginia Democratic Sen. Jim Webb’s affinity for the cause of the Confederacy.

Webb is no mere student of the Civil War era. He’s an author, too, and he’s left a trail of writings and statements about one of the rawest and most sensitive topics in American history.

He has suggested many times that while the Confederacy is a symbol to many of the racist legacy of slavery and segregation, for others it simply reflects Southern pride. In a June 1990 speech in front of the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, posted on his personal website, he lauded the rebels’ “gallantry,” which he said “is still misunderstood by most Americans.”

Webb, a descendant of Confederate officers, also voiced sympathy for the notion of state sovereignty as it was understood in the early 1860s, and seemed to suggest that states were justified in trying to secede.

“Most Southern soldiers viewed the driving issue to be sovereignty rather than slavery,” he said. “Love of the Union was palpably stronger in the South than in the North before the war — just as overt patriotism is today — but it was tempered by a strong belief that state sovereignty existed prior to the Constitution and that it had never been surrendered....”

There’s nothing scandalous in the paper trail, nothing that on its face would disqualify Webb from consideration for national office. Yet it veers into perilous waters since the slightest sign of support or statement of understanding of the Confederate cause has the potential to alienate African-Americans who are acutely sensitive to the topic.
Ron Walters, director of the African American Leadership Center at the University of Maryland and a professor of political science there, said Webb’s past writings and comments on the Confederacy could dampen enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket, should he appear on it.
“Unless he is able to explain it, it would raise some questions,” Walters said.

Edward H. Sebesta, co-author of the forthcoming “Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction” (University of Texas Press), said Webb’s views express an unhealthy regard for a political system that propped up and defended slavery.

His book, in fact, will cite Webb as an example of the mainstreaming of neo-Confederacy ideas into politics, said Sebesta, a widely cited independent historical researcher and author of the Anti-Neo-Confederate blog.

Read the whole thing.

What's difficult is for Southern politicians to separate themselves from caricatures of ideological reaction. Webb himself argued previously that woman should not serve in the military in combat positions, so perhaps he's got some work to do in political correctness.

Note that Webb won his seat to the Senate by defeating George Allen for the Virginia Senate Seat in 2006. Allen himself got in hot water for his alleged racial insensitivity, so the issue looks to be a third-rail dilemma for anyone running below the Mason-Dixon line - and it's an especially interesting question for Democrats, who are supposed to be the paragons of racial sensitivity, but are in fact just the opposite, mired as they are in some of the most embarassing race-baiting imaginable.

Comments are welcome, but keep them clean. I denounce racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry.

**********
UPDATE: Outside the Beltway has also posted on the Politico story, and this paragraph adds some context:

Slavery was the key issue absent which the Civil War wouldn’t have been fought and the resurgence of the Confederate battle flag in the 1960s was mostly about segregationist defiance. It’s easy to understand, therefore, why expressing pro-Confederate sympathies is politically problematic. But Webb’s admiration for the against-all-odds fighting spirit of his ancestors, most of whom fought for reasons having nothing to do with slavery or, frankly, political considerations of any sort, is understandable, too. In a complex world, one can simultaneously admire Robert E. Lee’s character, J.E.B. Stuart’s generalship, and the courage of those who charged up Little Round Top while damning the institution of slavery.

That sounds like a pretty fair way to place reverence for Southern tradition and military grandeur in perspective.