Obama's Community Blogs: Moderated After All...

Little Green Footballs is doing some fascinating online excavation at the Obama campaign's official webpage. It turns out Obama's hate-filled "community blogs" are indeed moderated:

Well, well. Look what’s going on at the official Barack Obama campaign web site; in one of their community blogs filled with hateful ranting, we discover that the administrators are paying attention to these “unmoderated” blogs after all: Barack Obama : : Change We Can Believe In C42D’S FEAR AND LOATHING IN AMERICA.

Hi David,

Thank you so much for your involvement in the BarackObama.com online community. Your voice is valued here; however, we were forced to remove your recent blog post due to your use of profanity. It detracts from a welcoming community where all people can engage in positive discourse.

This is your first warning. Please be mindful of your language in the future.

Thanks for your understanding and cooperation in maintaining a respectful dialogue on our website.

Emily

Obama for America

LGF's got additional examples (of demands to bring banned blogs and commenters back, for example), but I like the conclusion:

Obviously, this means blogs and groups like these, which have been pointed out at LGF over and over, must meet the standards of the campaign:

Barack Obama : : Change We Can Believe In Michael Morrissey’s Blog: 9/11 Truth
Barack Obama : : Change We Can Believe In Government of, by, and for The Israel Lobby: ‘The Israel Lobby: AIPAC’ 1-5
Barack Obama : : Change We Can Believe In Marxists/Socialists/Communists for Obama
Barack Obama : : Change We Can Believe In Adam Roberts’s Blog: The Nature of the Proletariat

And there are many, many more like these still posted at the site, with more going up every day.

Change we can believe in?

Keith Olbermann: Another Update on Moral Relativism

Scott at Power Line has an update on Keith Olbermann's nihilist hatred, "Keith Olbermann, Liar":

Observers of the insane clown posse on MSNBC - observers such as Ed Morrissey, for example - noticed the classless comments made by Chris Matthews to Keith Olbermann on Olbermann's "Countdown" show in connection with the death of Tim Russert. "It may be tricky to say this, and I'll say it," Matthews said, introducing his weirdly derogatory remembrance of Russert.

Matthews said that Russert had believed the administration's assertion that Saddam was trying to get nuclear weapons and that Russert was "an everyman" for believing it. Matthews was giving Russert what was at best a backhanded compliment, essentially portraying the just-deceased Russert as a dupe. Watch the video for yourself here.

On Monday Olbermann promoted my friend Andrew Breitbart as the Worst Person in the World throughout "Countdown." Breitbart's photograph was displayed and Andrew was given reason to get excited. In the event, however, Olbermann conferred the honor collectively on FOX News because of an observation Andrew had made in a segment on "FOX and Friends" that morning. The "FOX and Friends" segment with Breitbart talking about Russert can be seen here.

In conferring the honor on FOX News, Olbermann baldly lied about the ground for it. Olbermann's Worst Person in the World segment can be seen here. With his crazed pomposity, Olbermann intoned: "For God's sake, do you have to do it the first morning of the first week day after the man has died? Could you not shut the spigot off just for a little while? Could you not wait until after we have the funeral? Of course, you couldn't. You're FOX News and you are the worst persons in the world." He vaguely derided FOX News for the comments that Matthews had in fact made to Olbermann.

In other words, in the clip above, Olbermann falsely imputed Matthews's offense committed on Countdown and on MSNBC on the evening of Russert's death this past Friday to Breitbart and FOX News. In the only critical comment Breitbart made on FOX, Breitbart had accurately described Matthews's offense in his segment discussing Russert on FOX News. The offense for which Olbermann seems to have called out FOX News as the Worst Person in the World was actually committed with Olbermann on MSNBC, and Breitbart had criticized Matthews for it.

Because Breitbart's observation about Matthews was correct and damning, Olbermann chose not to quote or show it. Olbermann was thus free to misrepresent the gist of Breitbart's comments for the purposes of conferring his Worst Person in the World honors. In short, MSNBC accused its nemesis at FOX News -- not Breitbart, a somewhat less appealing target to Olbermann -- for what Breitbart said, and imputed Matthews's offense committed on MSNBC to Breitbart and FOX.

Pot. Kettle. Black. Or worse.

See also, "Keith Olbermann: Off the Deep End of Moral Relativism."

Matthew Yglesias Annointed as "Foreign Policy God"

I've read Matthew Yglesias' recent book, Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats, so I'm not surprised that hard-left partisans are annointing him as a divine foreign policy analyst.

Case in point: Josh Marshall, in his post, "Yglesias Becomes Foreign Policy God," with a brief interview:

Matt Yglesias, former TPM Associate Editor and all-around blog star, has a new foreign policy book out, Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats. We caught up with him last week at The Strand bookstore here in lower Manhattan and asked him whether he thinks Democrats are ever going to get out of the fetal position when it comes to taking the fight to Republicans on their catastrophic foreign policy record ...

I've written much on Yglesias, for example, my entry, "The Radical Foreign Policy of Matthew Yglesias."

That essay draws on Jamie Kirchick's incisive take-down of Yglesias' pacifism, but last week's Los Angeles Times featured a review of the book, by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan:

Yglesias occasionally assumes the bloggerish pose of an outsider screaming at the Establishment, but in its substance his preferred foreign policy is as Establishment as could be. What he offers is a livelier version of the sort of "liberal internationalist" platform that might be found in, say, a task-force report put out by a center-left think tank. The "liberal alternative," he explains, "does not consist of 'new ideas' or a search for new glib slogans. It is rather an age-old doctrine that has been developed over time [and] was working well in the 1990s." It is "the professional consensus," sensible but stale -- or, as he characterizes the liberal approach to nuclear nonproliferation policy, "frankly, dull."

After Sept. 11, as Americans rallied around the president and his approval ratings shot up, Democrats sold out those principles and assumed a "defensive crouch": "The purpose of all this was to weather the political storm resulting from 9/11 and to position Democrats for the electoral battles to come." Instead, Bush and his Republican allies not only won the major fights over foreign policy but also achieved historic political gains. "Like ostriches with their heads in the sand," Yglesias writes, the Democratic Party leaders "believed they could make the security issue go away by ignoring it, but instead they only made it easier for their adversaries to devour them." Their "short-sighted opportunism and inattention to basic principles would harm the party's long-term fortunes." The policy cost came with a war of choice that continues today. (Yglesias, like the Democrats he chastises, backed the war, and some of the ire he directs at pro-war Democratic politicians and policy experts seems to stem from a sense that they misled his more naïve self.)

As a Democratic political strategist, Yglesias is shrewd, and his critique of the Bush administration's foreign policies is trenchant. He tends to overstate, however, the effect his recommended course of action would have had on those policies at the outset. More forthright argumentation, more intellectual courage, more faith that voters would recognize the wisdom of calm and caution -- all this, he suggests, would have allowed Democrats to reshape the debate about foreign policy in the months and years after Sept. 11. But, as he concedes, "9/11 marked the beginning of an enormous psychological change on the part of the American people," and "[f]rightened, anxious, and justly outraged people are not eager for self-examination or the message that patience is needed." The Bush administration had something it wanted to do, and Americans wanted something done. Prudence and restraint stood little chance against the shock and awe of the new.

Kurtz-Phelan's a bit too even-handed than is warranted by the subject matter. Yglesias has a way of twisting leftosphere attack-points into a seemingly acceptable Democratic Party policy planks.

I naturally disagree with the premise that the war's been a "disaster" or a "castastrophe."

Mistakes were made when political officials in the Bush White House and the Pentagon ran an ideological war, and as military professionals began implementing innovative methods of counterinsurgency on the ground, circumstances improved - to the point that now most mainstream obervers agree that the United States is poised at the threshold of victory.

Moreover, neoliberal institutional theory in international relations cannot honestly be sold, as does Yglesias, as an implacably antiwar doctrine of Democratic Party retreat.

Yglesias' book is well timed, but the thesis he proposes is outside of mainstream thinking on U.S. foreign policy, and to implement his recommendations under an Barack Obama administration will make this nation less safe in a world of complex and genuinely threatening challenges abroad.

Illegally Dumped Debris Plagues Los Angeles

The Los Angeles Times reports the problem of inner-city trash removal in Los Angeles. Budget cuts under Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa have shifted resources to law enforcement, and it often takes weeks for city sanitation worker to clear the refuse.

As the photograph above indicates, the areas most affected are the poorer neihborhoods, as in South Central, but this passage indicates how howful conditions are:

Last year, more than 200,000 cubic yards of refuse -- enough trash to cover an acre and rise 12 stories -- was dumped in alleys and streets citywide. The cost to clean it up: $12 million.

Only two crews -- 10 people -- are dedicated to some of the areas most prone to dumping in South L.A. Six of those workers also are responsible for downtown and Boyle Heights, said Bruce Howell, who oversees alley cleaning citywide for the department.

"I'd like to do more, but I only have so many crews," said Howell, adding that twice he has requested money for an additional crew but that the proposals were killed because of budget constraints.

Keeping alleys clean, Howell said, is a never-ending job for his crews, which return regularly to the same problem areas. He said gang members in South L.A. have used blighted byways to operate and have even blocked access with refuse to prevent authorities from entering.

In response to years of illegal dumping, the public works department unveiled a new weapon in 2000: surveillance cameras.

The cameras, programmed to issue an audio warning and take still photos, were installed in 65 alleys and street corners.

But department officials said they were unaware of a single prosecution resulting from photos taken by the cameras. Harris said the photos that he has seen have not been clear enough to identify people or license plates.

Public works officials insist that the cameras have deterred crime.

"There is less dumping and [graffiti] tagging where those cameras are," said Paul Racs, who oversees the cameras for the department's Office of Community Beautification.

In some South L.A. alleys, however, the presence of cameras has failed to stop illegal dumping.

On a recent afternoon, a camera on a telephone pole near 92nd and Hickory streets looked down toward the carcass of a dead dog, which had been there for more than a week, according to neighbors.

The animal laid next to two stuffed chairs, ripped and broken, and a pile of household trash. Flies swarmed around a garbage bag sitting amid a pool of dried blood. The bag was filled with what neighbors said were animal parts. About 20 feet way, a rotting cat carcass lay on top of what appeared to be motor oil.

The smell was stifling.

Carlos Garcia, 63, whose backyard faces the alley, stared at the camera and shook his head.

If someone dumped rubbish in the mayor's neighborhood, he said, it would be picked up right away.

"He would be mad," Garcia said. "This isn't right."

No it's not right.

Urban sanitation is a basic function of local government, and the Villaraigosa administration needs to find money for clean up. These pictures remind me of my travels in Mexico, where I was shocked to see dead horses rotting in the gutter in major cities.

Straight to Hell? Now That's Some Change!

Now, I know there are a lot of people are upset with the neocons, but boy those community bloggers over at BarackObama.com really don't mess around with the tender sentiments!

Little Green Footballs has the full post.

Gasp, I'm one of the evil, despised "neocons"!

Well, alright, if a future Obama administration's radical war crimes tribunal gets the neocons in the star chamber, I only regret that I have but one life to give my movement!

Where Have You Gone, Mr. Charlie?

Kim McLarin, over at The Root, thinks she's really onto something, defending Michelle Obama from "right-wing extremists" intent to revive Ole Jim Crow before Barack Obama can be sworn in.

At issue: The dreaded "whitey tape," which has yet to be produced, but is apparently rock-solid evidence that the night-riders are slipping on their hoods:

And so continues the conundrum of being a post-racial black candidate in a still-very-racial world. To speak the truth about anything involving race is to be accused instantly of dragging out that famous racial deck we've all been dealt that stands us in such good stead in America.

The campaign of Barack Obama has had to rebut, not once but several times, the wild rumors that his wife Michelle used an insulting term for white people while railing from the pulpit of Trinity United Church in Chicago. His campaign has had to set up a website to refute the charge, and Obama himself has had to chastise mainstream reporters for spreading the lie.

What he hasn't done—because he cannot if he wants to win the presidency—is roll out the clearest and most obvious knockdown of Whiteygate. Namely this: "When the hell was the last time you heard a black person call somebody 'whitey?'"

I mean, come on. White man, please.

Speaking as a person who has been black all of my 40-plus years on the planet, I can say with some authority that no self-respecting black, African-American, Negro, colored or even "there's only one race: the human race" person I know would use the word.

Not unless they were quoting Rush Limbaugh. Or maybe George Jefferson.

The accusation is insulting not only because it so clearly reveals the desperation of right-wing zealots terrified of losing their stranglehold on a gasping America by playing to baseline anxieties and sad, unfortunate fears of those hard-working white Americans we've heard so much about; but because, frankly, it's so ham-fisted in its mendacity.

I mean, 'Whitey?'

The woman has a law degree from Harvard, for crying out loud. If, for some reason, she was trying to rile up a congregation she could do much, much better than that. I have spent the afternoon trying—with all the honesty and courage and humble introspection that is called for in this historic moment, with America poised to finally cast off its original sin and move into the full realization of those ringing words in the Declaration of Independence—to think about the terms black folks use when talking among themselves about white people.

I could barely move my pencil tip. Probably because black folks spend a lot less time talking or even thinking about white people than most white, right-wing reactionaries and their black counterparts dream in their hot little dreams. I had trouble, and, after hours and hours, the best I could come up with was this:

White folks. Whites. White people. They.

Or, in the case of Limbaugh in particular: Hophead. Pill-popper. Junkie nincompoop.

But really, that was pretty much it. When I was growing up in Memphis in the groovy '70s, some people tried to get the word "ofay" going, but, in my circles at least, it never really took. My mother's generation used Mr. Charlie, my older sister's cool boyfriend use to say The Man. There was redneck, of course, but growing up in Memphis, the only people I ever heard use that word were white people.

There was cracker, but usually that referred to a certain, specific kind of hog-jowled, Southern racist, as in "That cracker had the nerve to make me wash his sheets—and I don't mean the ones he use on his bed!"

I know a genteel older black woman who, out of delicacy or discomfort, will never use the words white or black when referring to people associated with those hues. Instead she says "wonderful people" and "beautiful people," which I think is kinda sweet.

But whitey? Uh uh! I'm sorry. No.

There's really a lot here with which to take exception.

But my first reaction, is c'mon, "ofay," give me a break!

You have to love this bit about the genuine black credentials,"in all of my 40-plus years," as if that's supposed to provide the gold standard of authority. You'd think in that "40-plus" Ms. McLarin might have heard someone utter an racial epithet representing a bit more raunchy vengeful indignation.

Where have you gone, Mr. Charlie?!!

But it's not just Ms. McLarin's inauthentic authenticy. Notice this line about how, as the campaign winds along, and Barack Obama's star continues its ascent, we're just now "poised" to cast off America's "original sin and move into the full realization of those ringing words in the Declaration of Independence..."

I'm shocked! You'd think we never had the civil right movment ... Yo, Dr. King ... it was all for naught!

Now, remind me again, what was that legislation we passed again, back in '64? Oh, yeah, the landmark Civil Right Act, followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which resulted in the election of thousands of black officials throughout the South in the decades since.

Oh no (clutching my chest), "I'm coming to join you, Elizabeth!"

Seriously, the postmodern, multicultural left is so invested in racial grievance that it's not enough to mount angelic protestations about how in "all my years" no "self-respecting" black would call their neighborhood bigot a "cracker."

Nope, the multi-culti types simply pull out the most convenient stereotypes, of petrified "right-wing zealots," most of whom are probably like Rush Limbaugh: Hopheads. Pill-poppers. Junkie nincompoops.

That's it! Turn it all around on the racist "shock jocks!" Sing it, honey! It's Limbaugh, Coulter, Malkin, and Hannity! They've done it ... they're the ones reponsibilty for that 71 percent single-parent black family statistic. No need to denounce "whitey," when you've got fascist crack-head terminology handy!

Of course ... that's what Jeff at Protein Wisdom's talking about, with the "perpetuation of grievance politics being such an essential piece to the progressive political strategy."

I'm down wid' it, yo!

MoveOn's Latest Attack on McCain

My previous post, on Jim Croce, reflected how warmly I feel about my readers: I've got the best darned community of readers a guy could wish to have.

But let's get back to regular blog programming here at American Power, and what better way than with this truly underhanded emotional appeal to retreat from Iraq, from the nihilist antiwar group, MoveOn.org:

I've written about Iraq as much as anything else, and I find truly phenomenal the depths of depravity to which the left will descend in demonizing the president, this war, John McCain, our soldiers, and the American people who support them.

Allahpundit puts things in perspective:

The left (or at least the segment that MoveOn represents) still hasn’t quite accepted the idea of a volunteer military. If you enlist, it can only be because you were somehow forced — through a draft or, per Charlie Rangel and Waffles, through economic hardship. No one serves because they want to. Which makes this ad the flip side of liberals wondering why Bush hasn’t “sent” his daughters to war. Mom’s not sending Alex and you can’t “take” him, either, even if he wants to go.

Note how Chuck Todd is just a shade easier than I am on MoveOn's moral destitution:

It was a borderline shameless ad. Using a baby like that. ... That's an ad that strikes me as one that's going to backfire a lot, not a little.

I'll have more ... because the nihilists are just getting warmed up.

Every Time I Tried to Tell You...

I heard Jim Croce, I'll Have To Say I Love You In A Song," on the way to work.

Let's remember him, via YouTube:

Well, I know it's kind of late
I hope I didn't wake you
But what I got to say can't wait
I know you'd understand
Every time I tried to tell you
The words just came out wrong
So I'll have to say I love you in a song

Yeah, I know it's kind of strange
But everytime I'm near you
I just run out of things to say
I know you'd understand
Every time I tried to tell you
The words just came out wrong
So I'll have to say I love you in a song

(LEAD BREAK)

Everytime the time was right
All the words just came out wrong
So I'll have to say I love you in a song

Yeah, I know it's kind of late
I hope I didn't wake you
But there's something that I just got to say
I know you'd understand
Everytime I tried to tell you
The words just came out wrong
So I'll have to say I love you in a song...

I miss him.

Have a lovely day, my wonderful readers!

Ranking Political Science: Thoughts on a "Top Paper" Award

Via the Monkey Cage, it turns out that "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," by John Mearsheimber and Stephen Walt, was ranked the top paper in political science by the Social Science Research Network.

As readers may know, there's been a massive debate on the Mearsheimer and Walt thesis (see "Hard-Hitting Critique or Deadly Lies?").

The New York Times has a story on the rankings, "Now Professors Get Their Star Rankings, Too."

I've met Mearsheimer and Walt's scholarship formed a basis for my dissertation research.

I simply wonder if their scholarly bright-light on Jewish influence in American foreign policy was a larger contributor to the article's award citation than the paper's fundamental research excellence.

I don't think critics of the Bush administration's foreign policy agenda will bother with questions like this, for example, "On Israel, America and Aipac," or "Iraq, Israel, Iran."

For a balanced analysis, see Walter Russell Mead, "Jerusalem Syndrome
Decoding "The Israel Lobby."

No Conservatives Daily Kos? Thank Goodness!

Newsbusters asks, "Why Isn’t There a Conservative Daily Kos?"

My short answer: There's just no place for Moulitsas-sponsored bigotry on the right side of the web, or at least there shouldn't be (although there are some hate-filled conservatives, certainly, who aspire to a millenarian takeover of the movement).

Here's this from Newsbusters:

Whether or not one agrees with the political views of Markos Moulitsas, there's no getting around the fact his website has become not just a powerful force in the blogosphere, but is also shaping the Democrat Party.

This raises an important question: Why isn't there a conservative website like Daily Kos?

The answer's not novel: The Kos movment arose in protest against the Bush administation - it's is an oppostitional movement, where the prefix "anti" is placed in front of every one of its causes:

Whether it's anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-Lieberman, or anti-Conservatism, there typically is an anti- in front of any Netroot cause.

Well, you can add "anti-Tim Russert" to the list. Daily Kos hosted an attack on the late NBC moderater that provides more support for my notion that Moulitsas sponsors hatred on his page:

I am not mourning this 5 million-dollar-a-year talking head, felled by his own obesity. How is it that in this world of suffering, we are expected to weep for a talentless and filthy rich tv prince? It is an example of false consciousness, like the frenzy over Princess Di's death...

The post was originally entitled, Burn in Hell, Tim Russert, You Talentless Lackey.

That's emblematic demonization, exemplifying the type of filthy evil that's routinely hosted on Kos' page.

Even Kos readers are questioning Moulitsas' sponsorship of evil, "Where Are You, Kos? We Need You."

Where's Kos? Probably working on his follow-up to his McCain's "yellow teeth" smear.

Conservatives would do well to avoid creating their own Daily Kos, and if they do, hosting the same kind of disrespect, I'll denounce them too.

That's what I do.

Hat Tip: LGF

Texas Fred and the Banality of Racism

This post is an update to my earlier entries, "Texas Fred's Bigotry," and "Texas Fred's No Holds Barred Anti-Immigrant Racism."

Readers will recall that Texas Fred is the bullying online megalomaniac who spouts some of the most reprehensible anti-immigrant racism to found in the conservative blogosphere.

I first came into contact with Texas Fred in 2006, in the comment thread of conservative milblogger, where the issue under discussion was victory in Iraq (and recall that this was pre-surge, and things weren't going well). Texas Fred's a Bush-basher, and he was spouting the extreme antiwar line, and I called him out for his advocacy of all the Murtha/Pelosi talking points. It got a bit nasty, and things now have been rekindled.

For further background on the reemergence of the debate, check Saber Point.

In any case, there's been an interesting (or disturbing) number of developments over the weekend in response to my rebuttals of Texas Fred's anti-immigrant ideology.

I've received a lot of support from readers, in the comments and in private e-mails, and I'm grateful. Texas Fred apparently has been reaching out by e-mail to other conservative bloggers in an effort to find validation for his hated. Samantha West, in the comments to my last post, reported:

Well, he emailed me and asked if I thought he was advocating murder. My response: yes he is.

The problem with such kinds of hatred is that it is easily transferred to any group: bigots need a group to hate, and they will fill that need with anyone who comes along and doesn't act like them.

There's more at the comment, but note that Samantha was so turned off by all of this she wrote her own elegant post repudiating anti-immigrant eliminationism: "Why Do You Hate Them So Much?"

I communicated with another blogging buddy by e-mail as well, and he indicated to me that he'd requested that he be taken off the Texas Fred blogroll. I clicked on the link to Texas Fred's blog in my buddy's note, and it turns out my ISP had been blocked by a plug-in filter system Texas Fred uses to ban critics of his racism, preventing them from monitoring his hatred. When I spoke to my buddy by e-mail later he wrote back:

I'm laughing. I've been banned from Texas Fred's site. When I attempt access it diverts me to the ACLU. The measure of a man...

That's right: Texas Fred's filter-block redirects his critics to the home page of the American Civil Liberties Union!

There's an unbeatable combination of irony and hypocrisy in this feat, by a far right-wing bigot, who bans his critics by redirecting them to the far-left wing homepage of the defenders of open-borders illegal-immigrant sanctuary radicals. You can't make this stuff up!!

But follow along, because it all makes sense: It turns our Texas Fred both sought out validation AND banned his critics while putting up a Father's Day post bragging about his patriotic right to demonize illegals: To ALL of My Low Class Redneck Friends:

We have been called REDNECK, BEER DRINKING, NASCAR LOVING, BACK WOODS, HILLBILLY, PORCH SITTING, GUN TOTING, CRACKERS, DAMNED-FOOL, CRACKER AIRHEAD, FAT-ASSED MURDERING NAZIS and RACISTS simply because WE want to stand up for America while there is still an America to stand up FOR.

And to those accusations I say: IF my standing up for America makes me all of that, then I wear the title of REDNECK proudly, and I hope all my FRIENDS enjoy this little musical thank you!!

We may not be PhD’s, we’re not FAUX Intellectuals, we don’t live in Ivory Towers and we’re NOT hypocrites, we KNOW what we are, we love our families, our homes and our nation, we’re REAL Conservatives, not RINO posers and we’re proud of it too!!

God Bless America, God Bless Texas and God Bless each and every one of you wonderful AMERICAN REDNECKS!!

Now, while there are no links to my page, the references to Ph.D.'s, "faux" intellectuals, RINOs, and so forth, represent outright libelous attacks on my reputation. Here's Texas Fred in his comment over at American and Proud, where had responded to the blog's host, Robert (who had commented on my page):

Damn Donnie Dickless, your superiority complex is enormous…

I hope you realize that not everyone is as impressed with your faux intellect as you are, that was what got your ass run off from Jarheads place the last time…

And because you were pretty much told off, you have taken issue with me in nearly every format that has followed since, troll much Donnie??

Aside from the vulgarity, this quote immediately links Texas Fred at American Proud to his latest slurs on my reputation on his home page. So readers can see why I find it just mindboggling that these "real" conservatives, who pound their chests and announce their martial superiority, and who display tremendously patriotic images on their blogs, actually claim to represent the mainstream of the traditional American right:

Now, in my previous entries (here and here) I went too far in suggesting that maybe Texas Fred's page should be taken down for advocating racist hatred and eliminationism. Constitutionally, extremist hate speech is protected, as long as there is no explicit incitement to violence.

So far, while the noxious sentiment expressed by Texas Fred and his commenters is extreme, I've yet to see Texas Fred, by definition, urge his readers to commit violence on his behalf.

I don't read Texas Fred 's page, of course, and I've never trawled through his archives, so perhaps that's the motivation for setting up the plug-in ISP filter-system.

The issue, in any case, is larger, in that the right of free speech should not be moral license to bigotry and hatred, but that's exactly what's happening in Texas Fred's echo-chamber. I mean, this type of advocacy is not just "venting." We're seeing the extreme glorification of martial eliminationism, which goes just so far before its hedged as constitutionally protected or as plausibly deniable.

Look over at Texas Fred's later comment at American and Proud:

I wouldn’t be terribly upset if the POTUS decided to put me on the border with a 50 cal with shoot to kill orders, I would miss a few at first but eventually I’d get the hang of it.

Read that whole thread, as well as some of the others at these blogs - it's just more of the same.

In fact, this is what I call the "banality of racism," which draws on the concept of the "banality of evil," from Hannah Arendt. Arendt's thesis is controversial, but it does have application.

For our purposes, we're seeing the essential banality of racism in Texas Fred's blog rings. Banality refers the commonplace, the ordinary, the unquestioned. When old Freddie writes up all his bigoted posts, and all of the commenters engage in mutually congratulatory flagellation, it's just establishing racist immigrant-bashing ("shoot-to-kill" or "starve the bastard babies") as commonplace and correctly ordinary.

Contemplation of the horrific becomes operationalized in terms of "normalization." With reference to Arendt, normalization in the Nazi context refered to the process in which noxious, inhumane, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and standard. The justification is found in statements like, "I was just following orders," which is similar to Texas Fred's assertion that "if the POTUS decided to put me on the border with a cal" he might miss a few at first, but would soon be mowing down the "wetbacks." All of this would be just fine, because it's seen as structually mechanical, ordered from above. No need to think about ultimate moral or human agency. Just kill the "bastards," and be done with it.

More recently, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has gone much further than straightforward "normalization" of mass murder in his book, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. He argued that everyday Germans acted on the basis of eliminationist anti-Semitism, and thus the origins and progression of Nazi Germany's extermination of the Jews bubbled from the bottom-up, rather than having been coerced by totalitarian elites.

Now, while I don't want to take such analogies too far, it's certainly the case that those of the Texas Fred blog rings reflect a banality of racism in the commonplace sense used here. Also, recall from above that old Freddie argues that this is what "REAL conservatives" do, not "RINO posers," and that's the problem.

Clear-thinking people know that this level of racial intolerance and anti-immigrant bigotry simply is not mainstream thinking in America.

Texas Fred knows this, deep down, which is why he bans by plug-in filter (and ACLU redirection) those who would shine down the bright light of moral opprobium. It is why he seeks external validation by sending his e-mail probes to potentially sympathetic conservatives, like Samantha above, who he might then recruit into his hate syndicate. It is why he seeks further justfication by lurking around the web to find examples that might validate his views, for example, in his post today, "Michael Reagan Advocates the Mass Murder of 9/11 Truthers."

If there's no psychology at work here, then we're substantiating the "banality of racism" thesis, and we can see where things might logically go. If there's some true mental derangement at work, on the other hand, then the man needs help (as some of my readers have suggested).

Whatever the case, this kind of hate makes it harder for the rest of us conservatives, who respect the rule of law, and who practice some level of divine tolerance, even when we're outraged at our government.

This hate makes it more difficult, because the true extremists - the nihilist left whose anti-Semitism and racism I'd rather be exposing - can point to folks like Texas Fred, who claims to be the "true GOP," and then extrapolate to smear all conservatives as "fascist."

This simply will not do.

Now before concluding, let me disabuse those readers who might think I'm becoming obsessed with Texas Fred.

Frankly, I'll be really glad if I never write another post on the issue. But for anyone who spends serious time on the web, it's a matter of principle to rebut hateful slurs against one's integrity, morals, and reputation. For example, recall Peter Wehner's devastating take-down of Joe Klein's misrepresentions, "The Klein and the Fury."

Finally, I'm no William F. Buckley. I just want to be on record as defending my integrity in a way that promotes a respectable model of how a morally right conservative should act, First Amendment guarantees or not.

Texas Fred and his webrings of hate do not constitute that model.

Father Hunger: The Tragedy of America's Missing Dads

I've been hammering Barack Obama almost exclusively of late, so to be fair I want to praise the Illinois Senator for coming out yesterday with a gutsy statement on the crisis of absent fathers in American life:

Addressing a packed congregation at one of the city’s largest black churches, Senator Barack Obama on Sunday invoked his own absent father to deliver a sharp message to African-American men, saying, “We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception.”

“Too many fathers are M.I.A, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes,” Mr. Obama said, to a chorus of approving murmurs from the audience. “They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”

The speech was striking for its setting, and in how Mr. Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, directly addressed one of the most sensitive topics in the African-American community: whether absent fathers bore responsibility for some of the intractable problems afflicting black Americans. Mr. Obama noted that “more than half of all black children live in single-parent households,” a number that he said had doubled since his own childhood.

Accompanied by his wife, Michelle, and his daughters, Malia and Sasha, who sat in the front pew, Mr. Obama laid out his case in stark terms that would be difficult for a white candidate to make, telling the mostly black audience not to “just sit in the house watching SportsCenter,” and to stop praising themselves for mediocre accomplishments.

“Don’t get carried away with that eighth-grade graduation,” he said, bringing many members of the congregation to their feet, applauding. “You’re supposed to graduate from eighth grade.”

His themes have been also been sounded by the comedian Bill Cosby, who has stirred debate among black Americans by bluntly speaking about an epidemic of fatherless African-American families while suggesting that some blacks use racism as a crutch to explain lack of economic progress.

I don't think Obama's going to be able to go as far as Bill Cosby on this issue, although I wish he would. No other political or social phenomenon has had as detremental an impact on the life chances of young black Americans than the collapse of the traditional black family.

Juan Williams wrote a powerful essay on the topic this weekend, at the Wall Street Journal:

The extent of the problem is clear. The nation's out-of-wedlock birth rate is 38%. Among white children, 28% are now born to a single mother; among Hispanic children it is 50% and reaches a chilling, disorienting peak of 71% for black children. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, nearly a quarter of America's white children (22%) do not have any male in their homes; nearly a third (31%) of Hispanic children and over half of black children (56%) are fatherless.

This represents a dramatic shift in American life. In the early 1960s, only 2.3% of white children and 24% of black children were born to a single mom. Having a dad, in short, is now a privilege, a ticket to middle-class status on par with getting into a good college.

The odds increase for a child's success with the psychological and financial stability rooted in having two parents. Having two parents means there is a greater likelihood that someone will read to a child as a preschooler, support him through school, and prevent him from dropping out, as well as teaching him how to compete, win and lose and get up to try again, in academics, athletics and the arts. Maybe most important of all is that having a dad at home is almost a certain ticket out of poverty; because about 40% of single-mother families are in poverty.

"If you are concerned about reducing child poverty then you have to focus on missing fathers," says Roland Warren, president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, based in Gaithersburg, Md. This organization works to encourage more men to be involved fathers.

The odds are higher that a child without a dad will have more contact with the drug culture, the police and jail. Even in kindergarten, children living with single parents are more likely to trail children with two parents when it comes to health, cognitive skills and their emotional maturity. They are in the back of the bus before the bus – their life – even gets going.

A study of black families 10 years ago, when the out-of-wedlock birthrate was not as high as today, found that single moms reported only 20% of the "baby's daddy" spent time with the child or took a "lot" of interest in the baby. That is quite a contrast to the married black mothers who told researchers that 88% of married black men, or men living with the mother, regularly spent time with the child and took responsibility for the child's well-being.

The statistics indicate the phenomenon of "father hunger" for all sociodemographic groups, but there's simply nothing comparable to the overwhelming statistics of nearly three-quarters of black kids growing up without dad.

Which is why I was a little surprised at Ann Althouse yesterday, who ridiculed Obama's speech from a feminist perspective:

There are a lot of women raising children alone — or with another woman — who don't like to think that their children are missing some special "guide" or "leader" because there is no male parent figure. This is not to say that such women don't see the value of a good father, only that they find something offensive in saying that the "male figure" in particular is needed. And Obama is saying that it is so important that it left a hole in his heart:

“I know the toll it took on me, not having a father in the house,” he continued. “The hole in your heart when you don’t have a male figure in the home who can guide you and lead you. So I resolved many years ago that it was my obligation to break the cycle — that that if I could be anything in life, I would be a good father to my children."

Now, I know what he is trying to do is to push more men to be involved in their children's lives, but the way he is saying it, he is siding with traditionalists who think the male role is special, distinctive, and necessary.

I'm with Obama on this one, and in jest I left my two-cents at the Althouse comment thread (and don't miss the reply).

But let Joanne Jacobs respond specifically to Althouse, since the feminist angle's not my specialty:

Children who grow up with two married parents do the best on measures of wellbeing; they also cope very well if a parent dies. Divorce hurts; acquiring a stepfather doesn’t help much. It’s better to be the child of divorce than the child of never-married parents: Divorced fathers are much more involved with their children than never-married fathers. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, but this is what I heard from a researcher at a seminar on child poverty about 12 years ago.

I don't know which "researcher" Jacobs' is referring to, but social science studies indicate the powerful role of missing fathers in the life outcomes of kids in the black community.

For all the talk of "courage" in making the speech yesterday, Obama's still got a lot of work to do with conservatives on the issue. See, "Obama’s Fatherhood Talk Is Cheap: Act, Senator. Do It for the Children."

World War II: The War Worth Fighting

Christopher Hitchens has a masterful take-down of Pat Buchanan's World War II revisionism, at Newsweek:

Is there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second world war was a "good war" and one well worth fighting. And if we possess one indelible image of political immorality and cowardice, it is surely the dismal tap-tap-tap of Neville Chamberlain's umbrella as he turned from signing the Czechs away to Adolf Hitler at Munich. He hoped by this humiliation to avert war, but he was fated to bring his countrymen war on top of humiliation. To the conventional wisdom add the titanic figure of Winston Churchill as the emblem of oratorical defiance and the Horatius who, until American power could be mobilized and deployed, alone barred the bridge to the forces of unalloyed evil. When those forces lay finally defeated, their ghastly handiwork was uncovered to a world that mistakenly thought it had already "supped full of horrors." The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities.

Historical scholarship has nevertheless offered various sorts of revisionist interpretation of all this. Niall Ferguson, for one, has proposed looking at the two world wars as a single conflict, punctuated only by a long and ominous armistice. British conservative historians like Alan Clark and John Charmley have criticized Churchill for building his career on war, for ignoring openings to peace and for eventually allowing the British Empire to be squandered and broken up. But Pat Buchanan, twice a candidate for the Republican nomination and in 2000 the standard-bearer for the Reform Party who ignited a memorable "chad" row in Florida, has now condensed all the antiwar arguments into one. His case, made in his recently released "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War," is as follows:

• That Germany was faced with encirclement and injustice in both 1914 and 1939.
• Britain in both years ought to have stayed out of quarrels on the European mainland.
• That Winston Churchill was the principal British warmonger on both occasions.
• The United States was needlessly dragged into war on both occasions.
• That the principal beneficiaries of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.
• That the Holocaust of European Jewry was as much the consequence of an avoidable war as it was of Nazi racism.

Buchanan does not need to close his book with an invocation of a dying West, as if to summarize this long recital of Spenglerian doomsaying. He's already opened with the statement, "All about us we can see clearly now that the West is passing away." The tropes are familiar—a loss of will and confidence, a collapse of the desire to reproduce with sufficient vigor, a preference for hedonism over the stern tasks of rulership and dominion and pre-eminence. It all sounds oddly … Churchillian. The old lion himself never tired of striking notes like these, and was quite unembarrassed by invocations of race and nation and blood. Yet he is the object of Buchanan's especial dislike and contempt, because he had a fondness for "wars of choice."

This term has enjoyed a recent vogue because of the opposition to the war in Iraq, an opposition in which Buchanan has played a vigorous role. Descending as he does from the tradition of Charles Lindbergh's America First movement, which looked for (and claimed to have found) a certain cosmopolitan lobby behind FDR's willingness to involve the United States in global war, Buchanan is the most trenchant critic of what he considers our fondest national illusion, and his book has the feel and stamp of a work that he has been readying all his life.

Read the whole thing.

Hitchens is exceedingly fair to Buchanan, and note that the arch paleoconservative is hardly the first to make the revisionist argument on the origins of World War II (although A.J.P. Taylor's a much more credible source).

For more on American foreign policy and paleoconservative thought, see David Frum, "Unpatriotic Conservatives: A War Against America."

Democrats Defecting to McCain Banner!

Via Nice Deb, it turns out a number of Democrats are refusing to support Barack Obama for the presidency:

As an avid supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries, Debra Bartoshevich is not alone in her frustration over Clinton's defeat.

She’s not alone in refusing to support Barack Obama.

And she’s not entirely alone in saying she’ll vote this fall for Republican John McCain instead.

But what makes her unusual is that she holds these views as an elected delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Denver this summer.

“I’m sure people are going to be upset with me,” said Bartoshevich, a 41-year-old emergency room nurse from Waterford in Racine County, and convention delegate pledged to Clinton.

See also, "The Specter of McCain Democrats."

Obama Grew Up Muslim, Half-Brother Confirms

I've noted many times here that the question is not whether Barack Obama is Muslim, but whether he's been honest and forthcoming about his personal history.

It's thus extremely interesting that Malik Obama, Barack's half-brother, confirms that the presumptive Democratic nominee grew up Muslim:

Apparently the Obamas of Kenya have been reading those scurrilous emails to which Barack likes to refer, because they have no doubt -- contrary to the claims of the Obama campaign, that the presidential candidate was raised a Moslem. They take that as a given.

As the Jerusalem Post reports, "Barack Obama's half brother Malik said Thursday that if elected his brother will be a good president for the Jewish people, despite his Muslim background. In an interview with Army Radio he expressed a special salutation from the Obamas of Kenya."

The Obama brothers' father, a senior economist for the Kenyan government who studied at Harvard University, died in car crash in 1982. He left six sons and a daughter. All of his children - except Malik -- live in Britain or the United States. Malik and Barack met in 1985.

In a remarkable denial issued last November that still stands on the official campaign website, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs issued a statement explaining that "Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised as a Muslim, and is a committed Christian."

Apparently Malik Obama, himself a Muslim, had not read the press release.

Melanie Phillips is the most recent commentator to draw attention to the massive body of evidence that leaves no doubt that Barak Hussein Obama was born a Muslim (Islam is patrilineal) and raised a Muslim (so registered in school, acknowledging attending Islamic classes, reported accompanying his step-father to the mosque, and able to recite the Koran in the original Arabic).

Reuven Koret, Aaron Klein and Daniel Pipes have previously pointed to the attempts by Obama and his campaign to conceal the candidate's Muslim background. The well documented evidence draws upon the on-the-ground interviews by researchers in Indonesia and Kenya, published quotations of Obama's childhood friends and his school records, as well as the candidate's own autobiography.

It is not clear whether Barack Obama will now disown his half-brother Malik, or throw him under the campaign bus, for acknowledging that shared family background. In any case, some one should notify "Fight the Smear" tout de suite. Perhaps they can get him with the program.

Be sure to check the Obama campaign's official denial, "Obama Has Never Been a Muslim."

See also, "Obama's Appeal in the Muslim World."

Photo Credit: Israel Insider

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UPDATE: Jake Tapper at ABC News is debunking claims of Barack Obama's Muslim upbringing: "From the Fact Check Desk: What Did Obama's Half-Brother Say About Obama's Background?"

Note, though, that the question remains as to whether Obama's been completely forthcoming on his Islamic heritage.

According to Daniel Pipes, in his investigation, "Confirmed: Barack Obama Practiced Islam":

Obama was an irregularly practicing Muslim who rarely or occasionally prayed with his step-father in a mosque. This precisely substantiates my statement that he "for some years had a reasonably Muslim upbringing under the auspices of his Indonesian step-father."

See also Melanie Phillips on the massive evidentiary trail, "Obama Takes on the Great Global Blogosphere Conspiracy Against His Holiness."

The Science of Political Smear

Let me point readers to the comment thread to my post, "The Partisan Gap in American Morality."

I highighted in that entry that statistically, Republicans are more concerned about the collapse of American social values than are Democrats. The difference is not large quantitatively, but significant, and I frankly believe that conservative Republicans have more respect for traditionalism than do Democrats, who on average adopt and defend moral relativism.

Note too that we've seen all the outrage on the left and right about smear tactics during this campaign season. But what is a "smear"? Is this concept fundamentally reprehensible, or is political smearing part-and-parcel to bare-knuckled politics?

Within reason, I'd say the latter.

But check out Steve Benen at Crooks and Liars, who is bent out of shape with right-wing bloggers "trolling" the comments at radical-left blogs to find evidence of racist hatred:

For quite a while, conservatives have embraced an annoying strategy — trawl through liberal blogs’ comments sections in the hopes of finding intemperate remarks. The right then takes these comments to “prove” that the left is made up of unhinged radicals....

Little Green Footballs, a prominent far-right blog, had this item yesterday:

A search of the official my.barackobama.com site for “Jewish Lobby” reveals an enormous amount of antisemitic hatred being posted…. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of posts that refer to the “Jewish lobby” at the Obama site. I stopped looking at the results on page 10. […]

By the way, it is absolutely no excuse to say that “anyone can post a blog there.” Barack Obama isn’t running a Blogspot blog, he’s running for president of the United States, and his official web site is full of hatred and antisemitism.

LGF’s criticism was interesting in part because it was only partially attacking Obama. The candidate, the argument goes, is wrong for having a forum filled with ugly content, even if the campaign didn’t produce the content. And, the argument continues, it speaks poorly of the campaign in general that it attracts people who’d provide the ugly content in the first place.

There are a couple of problems with this approach. First, the Obama campaign (to its credit) created an open online forum. Anyone can “post a blog there,” and it’s not the campaign’s fault when someone adds offensive content. Second, the campaign has moderators to delete the truly ridiculous posts and comments, but it’s hard to keep up with the level of abusive text. That’s just a practical, logistical problem, but it hardly speaks to bigotry within the campaign or among the campaign’s supporters in general.

Okay, say we accept that this is a "practical problem," that it would be unrealistic for the Obama campaign to effectively monitor every community blog post that goes up at barackobama.com.

Then what would Benen or other defenders of unhinged community racists say about the fact that the Obama campaign is openly coordinating political rapid-response planning with Markos Moulitsas at Daily Kos?

Someone at the Obama headquarters must know that hanging out officially with Markos Moulitsas is a political liability for the general election. It's not just the commenters at Daily Kos who are wickedly evil, racist, and anti-Semitic. Moulitsas himself has personally demonstrated his promotion of hatred many times.

But again, think about this question of political smear: It's not a smear to monitor and disseminate information on the hatred of the left. Indeed, I've been making an industry of it, and so far I've not been attacked as "smearing" people (well, maybe once or twice, by the targets of that opprobrium).

The truth is, political smear is an accepted, long-standing tradition in American politics, although there are degrees of partisan aptitude for the method, as Right Wing Nut House points out:

This is getting so painful to watch that I just had to write this piece.

I would say to my good friends on the left guys, where in all that is good and holy did you people learn how to smear someone? Jesus, Lord you suck at it. Taken as a whole, your efforts are beyond pitiful. Amateurish, disorganized, barely a grade above schoolyard bullying and taunts. Sometimes, you’re not even that good.

In the interest of practicing the “new politics,” – which basically means if you smear someone, you’re only pre-empting a “right wing attack machine” effort that only distracts from the issues in this campaign and if the right smears anyone, they are racist pigs who deserve 5 years in a re-education camp – allow me to instruct you in proper smear etiquette as well as show you the ropes on how to make that smear a winner.

The trouble is, your efforts to date have been horribly childish and uncoordinated. Allow me to give you some pointers:

When attacking another candidate, please refrain from making fun of their physical characteristics like “yellow teeth” or, more broadly, trying to smear the candidate by criticizing him for being tortured while in service to his country, receiving disability pay as a result.

From a tactical standpoint, this is a total waste of good smear material. First, you didn’t say anything about McCain’s cancer – a smearariffic gaffe in that you should always go for the jugular. You could have put it this way:

“John McCain’s teeth are yellowed as a result of his chemotherapy treatment for skin cancer – a disease that will almost certainly kill him before his first term in office is over.”

A truly inspired smear would include the disability pay and the fact that the torture McCain had to endure was so severe he can’t raise his arms above his head. Perhaps you could have thrown something in about how such extreme pain shortens the lives of those who experience it and tie it into the cancer meme.

Get the idea? When smearing someone, creativity and a keen eye for detail is a must.

The real problem you have is that you took the whole thing out of context and the smear was easily debunked. Taking words that someone says and then not putting them in the proper context is so…so…Clintonesque, so 1990’s. This is the 21st century guys! The YouTube of what McCain actually said was all over the place before your smear had a chance to get rolling.

Now, if you’re going to smear someone by taking what they say out of context, the quote must be more extensive and much harder to debunk – like Obama’s “bitter” remarks in San Francisco. The guy went on for 5 minutes about the misguided yokels who cling to their guns and bibles while harboring racist thoughts about blacks and Hispanics. The right wing noise machine went gaga over those remarks and turned them into political dynamite because the explanation by Obama’s camp was almost as long as the quote itself.

See what I’m getting at...?

Now let’s look at a successful smear, shall we? The “Obama is a Muslim” smear is so perfect, it makes me weep to think about how elegant and perfectly logical it is. First, please note the sheer volume of noise on this one. Almost every right of center blogger has posted about it at one time or another. It doesn’t matter if they try to debunk it, it’s like they say about your name in public relations; as long as they spell it right, it’s free advertising. As long as the smear is mentioned, it doesn’t matter which way the writer goes on it.

Secondly, note how impossible it is to be proved wrong. The Obama camp can try and debunk the smear all they want, they only dig a deeper hole for themselves. That’s because every time they try, some Indonesian who knew Obama back when pops up and swears the guy worshipped in a mosque when he was 8 years old or something.

Does that make Obama a Muslim? OF COURSE NOT! But you’re not thinking like the right wing attack machine. What does “true” have to do with a political smear? While an element of truth should reside somewhere in the smear – Obama was in a Muslim country when he was a boy – the rest just follows logically.

Now, that's a pretty good piece of Machiavellianism!

I'll have more later, but keep this post in mind next time you see pictures of Obama in a turban on my page.