"Mainstream" of the Democratic Party? Daily Kos and the Death of Israel

Is this the future of the Democratic Party, announcing the inevitable destruction of the state of Israel?

Apparently, that's what Daily Kos suggests, in a post that's tantamount to a death warrant for the Jewish state:

This insuperably hateful anti-Semitic screed has been denounced by Little Green Footballs as "The Protocols of the Daily Kos":

How low can Daily Kos go? Perhaps the most sickening, hate-filled antisemitic diary ever at Daily Kos: Daily Kos: Eulogy before the Inevitability of Self-Destruction: The Decline and Death of Israel.

Readers should please recognize that LGF does a phenemonal service in monitoring Daily Kos for demonstrations of the nihilist culture of death that it propagates.

Recall also, that Markos Moulitsas, the publisher of Daily Kos, claims that his blog represents the "center" of the Democratic Party's contemporary ideological platform - Moulitsas' anti-Semitism is the "mainstream" of the progressive community.

This is why I left the Democratic Party.

But don't take it from me. Get it straight from the Kos "eulogy":

[The] State of Israel as the homeland for the "persecuted Jews" was envisioned by one man of Austria-Hungary origin, Theodor Herzl. He promulgated "If you will it, it is no dream." This will was achieved with the founding of the artificially created state under the mandate of the United Nations....

Note the scare quotes around "persecuted."

But check the post. It gets more deathly evil futher down, for example, in implicitly blaming Israel for September 11:

Israel embody [sic] the vessel of boiling blood of horror and perfidy in demonic vileness for its pattern of terrorism and murder in the name of Zionist ideology.

A photo of the Twin Towers exploding in flames precedes this passage. But note further:

This is the bidding of a farewell formed in the extension of a middle finger by the militantly atheistic Luciferian Ashkenazic Jewish sect that - resolved they be - believe in - by genetic predisposition and/or indoctrination from birth - supremacism of the Master Race, because they have accomplished the goal of procreating State of Israel to dominate in hegemony by the art of seduction, after centuries of persecution and expulsion on charge of treason by subversion of host nations, blood rituals in human sacrifice of Gentile children, corruption and ravishing of women, conspiracy to injure and murder esteemed officers & rulers and usurious & fraudulent deed in union with the spiritual descendants of the wicked Jews of the extinct Sadducee sect, the persecutor and abetted executioner of Jesus Christ, propagating fruition of the species as the "Chosen One" and bringing the world to its knees without mercy for subservience and obedience by slavery (brainwash) and tyranny....

As Israel reach [sic] the milestone of the 60th anniversary commemoration, its legacy will be showered not with peace and goodwill but revulsion of conscience and damnation.

Israel is "Lucifer"? Israel be damned?

That's all I care to cite, as this is sickening. It's almost unbelievable that one should see this posted at what's considered the most important left-wing blog on the web.

As noted at the Kos post, we are at a time of the 60th commemoration of the founding of the Jewish homeland, and given views such as these, the nation's prosperity and survival is an even greater phenomenon.

Mortimer Zuckerman, in his essay, "Israel's Historic Achievement," notes this:

This is a story without parallel, of a love of a people for the land of Israel. In this land in ancient times, the Jewish people were born. In this land in modern times, the Jewish people were reborn. They have never left Israel voluntarily and returned when they could, from more than a hundred countries speaking more than 80 languages, a modern-day gathering of the exiles. More than 3,000 years earlier, Moses had prophesied, "Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back." And so it was.

But Zuckerman also reminds us:

The refusal to accept the existence of Jews in a separate state of Israel is worse than anti-Semitism. It is, as former Canadian Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler described it, "a genocidal anti-Semitism, the public calls for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people," wherever they may be. Listen to the state-sanctioned genocidal anti-Semitism in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran, made clear by the publicly avowed intent to acquire nuclear weapons for this purpose. It is in the language of the covenants, charters, platforms, and policies of the terrorist movements and militias of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda, which call not only for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews but also for acts of terrorism in furtherance of that objective, supported by religious fatwas in which these genocidal calls are held out as religious obligations. All this comes from a culture that greets brutal deeds of terrorism with glee and celebrates martyrs and their families.

And genocidal anti-Semitism is also found on the pages of Daily Kos.

This is why I blog.

Please distribute this post widely, and consider supporting John McCain in the fall.

See also my earlier entry, where I provide a reminder of the importance of historical memory today, "Nazi Germany's Years of Extermination, 1939-1945."

Close Combat: Helmand Province, Afghanistan

While everyday Americans are cocooned at home, shopping at the mall, watching the latest Blake Lively video on their laptop, or even protesting the evil Bush/Cheney cabal in Washington, our brave U.S. Marines are busy fighting in Helmand Province, Afghanistan:

See more at the Daily Mail:

A Marine just millimetres from death as a bullet whistled past his head had the moment of his miraculous survival caught in a dramatic series of pictures.

Under fire from Taliban fighters on the Afghan frontline, the American solider shelters in a muddy trench baked dry in the Helmand province's searing heat.

Hat tip: The Drawn Cutlass

David Horowitz: Premiere Pro-Victory Public Intellectual

I was a little too hasty in writing about Foreign Policy's survey of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals."

I forgot to mention David Horowitz.

If a former 60s-era radical activist turned neoconservative agitator can be considered a "public intellectual," Horowitz is in the top tier of my rankings. He's the premiere pro-victory polemicist of the neocon right, and his writings are showcased most recently in the new book, Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America's War on Terror Before and After 9/11.

I'm currently about a quarter of the way through the volume, but Horowitz provides a quick synopsis in his talk at the National Press Club last month:

You can read the introduction to the book here.

Jane Novak: "Another Good Day of Infuriating the Yemeni Authorities..."

I know a lot of us "9th tier" bloggers could use a little more exposure, so pick your Third World dictatorship, and start hammering away with those critical blog posts!

It turns out that Jane Novak, a citizen-blogger from New Jersey (who's blogging for journalistic freedom in Yemen), is covered in the New York Times today, and the article includes a link to her page.

I guess it's not the first time:

OMG the New York Times article is too funny. The fact that there is a Times article is funny enough, but its a killeh becasue its all true....

Well, its another good day of infuriating the Yemeni authorities...

I like it!

Novak's picture is here.

Appeasing Iran Defining Feature of Obama Campaign and Persona

Caroline Glick's analysis of the Democratic response to President Bush's Knesset speech is devastating in its brutal honesty, and it's an absolutely essential message now that the Illinois Senator's being discussed in the media as the presumptive nominee:

Spin doctors were relabeled "strategists" in the early 1990s. And as Mark Steyn wrote last week in National Review, "Increasingly, the Western world has attitudes rather than policies."

The latest attitude to be flouted as policy is indignation. Specifically, Democratic Presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama's furious indignation at President George W. Bush's address before the Knesset last week where he celebrated Israel's 60th anniversary and extolled the US's alliance with Israel. Beyond praising the Jewish people's 4,000 year-old devotion to the Land of Israel and to liberty, Bush used the speech to warn against those who think that Iran and its terror proxies can simply be wished away through appeasement.

As the president put it, "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided. We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

To Israeli ears, Bush's words were uncontroversial. Israel is beset by enemies who daily call for its physical annihilation and while doing so, build and support terror forces who attack Israel. For most Israelis, the notion that these enemies can be appeased is absurd and deeply offensive.

The only strong reaction that Bush's remarks provoked in Israel was relief. In spite of the Bush administration's own participation in the six-party talks with North Korea, its support for the EU-3's feckless discussions with the mullahs, its paralysis in the face of Hizbullah's takeover of Lebanon, and its support for the establishment of a Palestinian state run by Fatah terrorists dedicated to Israel's destruction, at the very least, standing before the Knesset, Bush effectively pledged not to allow Iran to acquire the means to conduct a new Holocaust.

From an Israeli vantage point then, it was shocking to see that immediately after Bush stepped down from the rostrum, Obama and his Democratic supporters began pillorying him for his remarks. Most distressing is what Obama's reaction said about the Democratic presidential hopeful.

OBAMA'S RESPONSE to Bush's speech was an effective acknowledgement that appeasing Iran and other terror sponsors is a defining feature of his campaign and of his political persona. As far as he is concerned, an attack against appeasement is an attack against Obama.

Obama and his supporters argue that seeking to ease Iranian belligerence by conducting negotiations and offering military, technological, military and financial concessions to the likes of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who refers to Israel as pestilence, daily threatens the Jewish state with destruction, and calls for the eradication of the US while claiming to be divinely instructed by a seven-year-old imam who went missing 1100 years ago is not appeasement. Indeed, Obama claims that conducting direct face-to-face negotiations with the likes of Ahmadinejad is the right way to be "tough."

But is this true? Obama recalls that US presidents have often conducted negotiations with their country's enemies and done so to the US's advantage. And this is true enough. President John F. Kennedy essentially appeased the Soviet Union during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when he offered to remove US nuclear warheads from Turkey in exchange for the removal of Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba.

But there are many differences between what Kennedy did and what Obama is proposing. Kennedy's offer to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was made secretly. And the terms of the deal stipulated that if its existence was revealed, the US offer would be cancelled. More importantly, Khrushchev was open to a deal and was ready to give up the Cuban nuclear program. And - most importantly of all - Kennedy deployed military forces and went to the brink of war to make the alternatives to negotiation credible.

Obama has repeatedly stated that unlike Kennedy, if he is elected president, he will not openly threaten war while being open to private talks. Instead, Obama intends to surrender the war option while conducting direct, public negotiations with the mullahs. So from the very beginning, he wants to undermine US credibility while giving Ahmadinejad and his murderous ilk the legitimacy that Kennedy refused to give Khrushchev.

Far from exerting force to strengthen his diplomatic position, Obama has pledged to withdraw US forces from Iraq where they are fighting Iranian proxies, cut military spending and shrink the size of the US nuclear arsenal.

SINCE THE definition of appeasement is to reward others for their bad behavior, and since the US has refused for 29 years to reward the Iranians for their bad behavior by having presidential summits with Iranian leaders, Obama's pledge represents a massive act of appeasement. And since it is Iran's illicit nuclear weapons program that would bring a President Barack Obama to the table, his policy would invite nuclear blackmail by other countries by signaling to them that the US rewards nuclear proliferators.

Foreign policy's going to loom large this election (despite the economic priorities), and for all the significance of Obama's cult of personality, the American public may in the end decide that dangerous diplomacy is a bad recipe for American foreign relations.

See also, Gateway Pundit, "John Bolton: "Bush Hit the Nail on the Head-- Now the Nails Are Complaining" (Video)."

Barack Obama and the Political Psychology of Race

John Judis has a great new piece on the political psychology of racial resentment, as it relates to Barack Obama's presidential bid, at the New Republic:

The issue of race is the longest-lasting cleavage in American politics. It is also perhaps the least understood. The open exploitation of racist sentiment by vote-hungry politicians was for centuries a durable American tradition. More recently, race has assumed a subtle, often unspoken form during campaign season, as Republicans have sought white votes by slyly associating their Democratic opponents with controversial black figures like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, or with topics--welfare, crime, federal funding for "midnight basketball"--that many voters identify with African Americans.

Now, with Barack Obama inching closer to the Democratic nomination, race looms yet again as a central factor in American politics. Already, race has played a key part in the Democratic primary, almost certainly hurting Obama among swaths of voters in states like New Jersey, Ohio, and, most recently, Pennsylvania. If he manages to win the nomination anyway--and it appears he will--race seems likely to play an even larger role in the general election.

What role, exactly, will that be? No one knows for sure, but the field of political psychology offers some clues. In recent years, scholars have been combining experimental findings with survey data to explain how race has remained a factor in American elections--even when politicians earnestly deny that it plays any part at all. In 2001, Princeton political scientist Tali Mendelberg summarized this research in a pathbreaking book, The Race Card. Her provocative analysis is hotly debated and far from conclusive; political psychology, after all, is not a hard science. Still, her ideas and those of other academics help to shed light on what has happened so far in the primaries and what might unfold once Obama wraps up the nomination. Their findings suggest that racism remains deeply embedded within the psyche of the American electorate--so deep that many voters may not even be aware of their own feelings on the subject. Yet, while political psychology offers a sobering sense of the difficulties that lie ahead for Obama, it also offers something else: lessons for how the country's first viable black presidential candidate might overcome the obstacles he faces.

Judis writes from the left of the spectrum, but he's even-handed.

I studied racial politics and psychology in some detail in the 1990s (prior to teaching an upper-division course on Black Politics).

I'm a conservative on these issues, but I never underestimate lingering racial bigotry in the country.

I may have mentioned previously that I pumped gas at the local Chevron station when I was at Fresno State (a great job, frankly, for the study time, even if it didn't pay well). When I moved to Santa Barbara I worked for a time at the Chevron filling station downtown, on the weekends, for less than a year while I started my graduate program.

I'll never forget one Saturday morning in Santa Barbara, when my boss - the owner - was working around the station with a couple of his handymen, and three stereotypical poor black women drove up in a really old, beat-up station-wagon. They looked like prostitutes: Lots of makeup, loose, low-cut blouses, with long fingernails and smoking cigarettes. They were lost and asked to see a city map. The boss helped them to a map posted at the window, and they lingered a little before heading down the road, the exhaust spewing out the back of their thrasher of a wagon. I stood near the boss and his buddies while they watched the women drive off. They were laughing, and the boss says, "I love black women. I wish we could still own a few." The other two guys thought this was the funniest thing since blackface, and they were all slapping themselves on their knees in hilarity.

I couldn't help thinking how damned stupid these men were, frankly, given my own background. I wondered if they had any clue as to issues of, say, the politics of "high yellow" racial mixing! I walked away, and talked it over with my wife (then fiancee) later that day. We agreed, you're always going to have some ignorant crackers, but views like these - in my own experience - are an extreme minority. That's not to say that bigotry and discrimination are not a prolbem, or that they're unhurtful. But as a long-time student who worked his way up from community college to a Ph.D. from the University of California, I can attest personally to how committed are those in the educational system to upward racial mobility. In industry, sure, we see lingering patterns of discrimination, but affirmative outreach programs in the corporate sector are extremely advanced, the norm even. It's too bad, really, that we now often focus on racial access to the exclusion of excellence (with some added racial hate-mongering, but more on that in later posts).

As for racial resentment in politics today, I'm thinking back to one of the readings I assigned when I taught my class back in 1999: Earl Black and Merle Black, Politics and Society in the South. The book's a classic in the study of black politics and civil rights. Black and Black offer a very perceptive model of progressive racial intergration, operationalized as black movement through three "belts" of the traditional white society "color line":

Black Americans have confronted massive discrimination in each of three broad categories. Controversies in the outer color line have concerned the "segregated position of Negroes in the public arena"; disputes in the intermediate color line have focused on "economic subordination and opportunity restriction"; and tensions in the innermost ring have involved white acceptance of blacks in intimate friendships and private associations.

Black and Black draw here on the research of Herbert Blumer, and his early essay, "The Future of the Color Line," which is discussed more recently in Lawrence Bobo's research essay, "Prejudice as Group Position: Microfoundations of a Sociological Approach to Racism and Race Relations."

In election '08, Americans - who this week in the Democratic primaries are turning out to see Barack Obama in record numbers - are close to breaking the highest barrier to the outer ring of blacks in the political system, if Obama's elected in November. Moreover, blacks have made incredible strides in all sectors of the American economy since the civil rights movement, so much so that the most important but under-discussed fact of black life in America today is the expansive black American middle class.

Even on the "innermost ring" of the color line, blacks today are integrating into "intimate friendships" as never before, and public opinion is more open to the interracial marriages than at any time in American history.

As I've noted before, one of the great benefits of Obama's presidential campaign is that it provides the country the greatest opportunity in the post-civil rights era to really openly discuss race, and for Americans to vote their greatest hopes and fears concerning the nation's most longstanding division.

More research will sort out the fine points of this year's voting patterns, but Judis notes that economic class - not racial animus - is most likely the biggest impediment to electing a black president this year:

What, then, can the political psychology of race tell us about the current primaries and the coming general election...?

One indication is the exit polls. The percentage of voters who backed Hillary Clinton (or, earlier, John Edwards) while saying that the "race of the candidates" was "important" in deciding their vote is a fair proxy for the percentage of primary voters who were disinclined to support Obama because he is black. That number topped 9 percent in New Jersey; in Ohio and Pennsylvania, two crucial swing states, it was more than 11 percent. And that's among Democratic primary voters, who are, on average, more liberal than the Democrats who vote in general elections.

Obama's connection with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, which exploded into the news after the Ohio primary, may do lasting damage to his candidacy by undermining his attempt to transcend race. Wright's words tie Obama to the stereotype of the angry, hostile--and also unpatriotic--black who is seen as hating both whites and white America. Wright turns Obama into a "black candidate" like Jackson or Sharpton. And, as a black candidate, Obama falls prey to a set of stereotypes about black politicians.

Some of these have to do with abilities. A 1995 study found that voters believe black politicians "lack competence on major issues." Other stereotypes relate to ideology. Several studies have shown that if subjects compare a black and white candidate with roughly equal political positions, they will nevertheless see the black candidate as more liberal. Obama is already vulnerable to charges of inexperience, and, after Wright surfaced, he fell prey to an ideological stereotype as well. Whereas he benefited in the initial primaries and caucuses from being seen as middleof-the-road or even conservative, his strongest support has recently come from more liberal voters. In Pennsylvania, he defeated Clinton among voters who classified themselves as "very liberal" by 55 to 45 percent, but he lost "somewhat conservative" voters by 53 to 47 percent and moderates by 60 to 40 percent. In a national Pew poll, Obama's support among "very liberal" voters jumped seven points between January and May, while his support among "moderates" dropped by two points....

If Obama wins the Democratic nomination, he should be able to inherit the white women who backed Hillary Clinton. As political psychologists have shown, these voters should be largely amenable to his candidacy. He should also continue to enjoy an advantage among white professionals. But Obama is likely to continue having trouble with white working-class voters in the Midwest--voters who tend to score high on racial resentment and implicit association tests and who, arguably, decided the 2004 election with their votes in Ohio.

So, there is some racial resentment there, but overall, given the cult-like phenomenon that's already emerged around the Illinois Senator, the question's not likely whether the country's ready to elect a black president. The question is whether people want this black man.

The fall campaign will put that question to the test.

More later!

The Democrats and Muslim Terrorists

Malise Ruthven's got a new review essay on Islamic radicalism, "The Rise of the Muslim Terrorists."

Ruthven's well worth reading. Tough on both sides of the political spectrum, he makes some interesting observations on the Democrats and the threat of Islamist terrorism, with reference to Roy Gutman's, How We Missed the Story: Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and the Hijacking of Afghanistan:

A searing critique of US policy in Afghanistan after the departure of Soviet troops in 1989, it traces the policy shifts in Washington and especially the loss of focus that assisted the rise of the Taliban. Gutman's central claim, that the inability of the US to prevent the September 11 attacks was not so much an intelligence or military failure as a strategic foreign policy failure, will not make comfortable reading for Hillary Clinton's advisers.

Foremost among the errors that he documents in detail was the failure of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright to give adequate support to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the most able of Afghanistan's mujahideen commanders, in the face of pro-Taliban pressure from the Pakistan military. Massoud, the Tajik leader, headed a multiethnic coalition and practiced a moderate version of Islamism that contrasted starkly with Taliban extremism. His troops were much more disposed to observe the rules of war than their opponents.

Because of the Lewinsky scandal and complications arising from Pakistan's nuclear policies, Clinton was distracted, with ultimately devastating consequences.

David Horowitz makes some similar points in his book Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America's War on Terror Before and After 9/11.

More Women in the Sciences and Engineering? Nah, Maybe Later...

Why aren't there more women in science and engineering? Elaine McArdle over at the Boston Globe's got some ideas:

WHEN IT COMES to the huge and persistent gender gap in science and technology jobs, the finger of blame has pointed in many directions: sexist companies, boy-friendly science and math classes, differences in aptitude.

Women make up almost half of today's workforce, yet hold just a fraction of the jobs in certain high-earning, high-qualification fields. They constitute 20 percent of the nation's engineers, fewer than one-third of chemists, and only about a quarter of computer and math professionals.

Over the past decade and more, scores of conferences, studies, and government hearings have been directed at understanding the gap. It has stayed in the media spotlight thanks in part to the high-profile misstep of then-Harvard president Larry Summers, whose loose comment at a Harvard conference on the topic in 2005 ultimately cost him his job.

Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.

One study of information-technology workers found that women's own preferences are the single most important factor in that field's dramatic gender imbalance. Another study followed 5,000 mathematically gifted students and found that qualified women are significantly more likely to avoid physics and the other "hard" sciences in favor of work in medicine and biosciences.

It's important to note that these findings involve averages and do not apply to all women or men; indeed, there is wide variety within each gender. The researchers are not suggesting that sexism and cultural pressures on women don't play a role, and they don't yet know why women choose the way they do. One forthcoming paper in the Harvard Business Review, for instance, found that women often leave technical jobs because of rampant sexism in the workplace.

But if these researchers are right, then a certain amount of gender gap might be a natural artifact of a free society, where men and women finally can forge their own vocational paths. And understanding how individual choices shape the gender balance of some of the most important, financially rewarding careers will be critical in fashioning effective solutions for a problem that has vexed people for more than a generation.

Oh boy! A "certain amount of gender gap might be a natural artifact of a free society"?

Don't tell that to the feminist lobby at Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences!

Obama and the Iranian Threat

Jennifer Rubin's got a great post up on Barack Obama and Iran, "Not A Serious Threat:

This remarkable bit of footage from Barack Obama’s appearance in Oregon last night is now floating around on YouTube. It might be useful as an undergraduate course exam: how many errors can you spot? Obama apparently believes that Iran and other rogues states (he lists Iran, Cuba and Venezuela) “don’t pose a serious threat to the U.S.” Iran, specifically, he tells us spends so little on defense relative to us that if Iran “tried to pose a serious threat to us they wouldn’t . . . they wouldn’t stand a chance.”

So, taken literally, he seems not much concerned about Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, its sponsorship of terrorist organizations, its commitment to eradicate Israel, its current actions in supplying weapons that have killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq, and its role in eroding Lebanon’s sovereignty through its client Hezbollah.

And then there is is unbridled faith in diplomacy, unaffected by the lessons of history. Was it presidential visits with the Soviet Union that brought down the Berlin Wall? Or was it the 40 year history of bipartisan military deterrence, the willingness of Ronald Reagan to walk away from Reykjavik summit, the resulting bankruptcy of the Soviet Empire, the support of dissidents and freedom fighters in the war against tyranny, and the willingness to identify Communism as a center of evil in the late 20th century?

You can understand why every attempt by John McCain to discuss global threats is labeled “fear-mongering” by Obama. In his world this is all a fantasy and we are not at risk. All perfectly logical . . . if you divorce yourself from reality.

John Bolton's also got some skin in the game:

President Bush's speech to Israel's Knesset, where he equated "negotiat[ing] with the terrorists and radicals" to "the false comfort of appeasement," drew harsh criticism from Barack Obama and other Democratic leaders. They apparently thought the president was talking about them, and perhaps he was.

Wittingly or not, the president may well have created a defining moment in the 2008 campaign. And Mr. Obama stepped right into the vortex by saying he was willing to debate John McCain on national security "any time, any place." Mr. McCain should accept that challenge today.

Foreign policy may end up being the great neutralizer this fall. Obama's far ahead in the fundraising race (and in youth support), but in the battle over Iran, McCain'll put Obama up on his knee.

Will the Real Manly Candidate Please Stand Up!

Via Ann Althouse, here's a blogger who's looking for the most manly candidate:

I'm working on a mini-project here to track mainstream media and politicians calling Obama a faggot, directly or indirectly. This will become a dominant narrative this fall as McCain is a real manly man and Obama can't bowl over 37. We all know who the GOP and the corporate media are going to back.

I was thinking about this during Pansy-gate, that it doesn't really matter if the word pansy was meant as an anti-gay insult or an anti-weak-and-feminine insult - saying that being a pansy is bad is homophobic. Feminine, prissy, anti-gay, sissy, weak, and non-gender conforming insults all come from the same place: that there's only one way to be masculine and one has to be that type of masculine to properly lead an organization, be competent at his or her job, or be a worthy human being. That concept is inherently sexist and homophobic, no matter whether or not someone uses the word "faggot" itself....

What I'm looking for here are comments in the mainstream media (talk radio doesn't count) that call Obama some form of "faggot."

Althouse throws down her able best John Houseman law prof reprise (gender-neutral allusion, of course):

As long as we're obsessing about whether criticism of Hillary Clinton is a manifestation of sexism, why not get some balance and obsess over whether criticism of Barack Obama is homophobic? Well, for one thing, Hillary Clinton is, plainly, a woman, but talking about Obama in these terms floats a rumor. You could also have a mini-project tracking insinuations that Obama is a Muslim. Are you criticizing the insinuations or propagating them?

Ouch!

But hey, I thought Obama was tougher than Indiana Jones on Good Morning America today: Hey, "Lay Off My Wife!"

More fun at Memeorandum!

American Power: Member in Good Standing of Right-Wing Blogosphere!

Readers may recall how I routinely joke about my limited impact on the web, happily toiling away in the "9th tier" of the blogosphere.

Of course, some of my readers have indulged me, suggesting that I underestimate the influence of American Power - but modesty is the best policy! So I'm intrigued, frankly, to be included in the second installment of the "The Official Village Voice Election-Season Guide to the Right-Wing Blogosphere."

But you've got to love the picture! Here's the stereotypical right-winger, according to the Village Voice mandarins:

I look nothing like that guy, LOL!

Yo, calling Captain Ed!

Here's this, though, from the post:

"Did [the California Supreme Court] just hand the state to McCain?" asked Instapundit. Ten points is a big spread to cover, but rightbloggers hope the shlockwaves will be felt nationwide — even though Obama has himself said he believes "marriage is between a man and woman." Ed Driscoll called Obama's position a "smoke-but-didn't-inhale nuanced all-bases-covered position" because the Senator otherwise favors civil rights for gay people, in Driscoll's view a fatal weakness. Power Line concurred: "There is good reason to believe that McCain's judicial appointees would approach the issue quite differently from a legal standpoint than Obama's would." That won't fit on a bumper sticker, so Ann Althouse suggested Republicans work their anti-gay magic in a whispering campaign: "McCain only needs to stimulate feelings that things are changing too fast, that courts are taking over too aggressively, and that unknown, worrisome things might happen — unless stable, restrained judges are put in place... Obama's message has been change. He's committed to that message, and it can be turned against him." So, what scares Americans more: four more years of Republican rule, or homosexuals? We wait breathlessly for Clio's judgment.

Well, well ... what company! Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, and Power Line, among others!

I'm stylin'!!

Michelle Malkin's got a link at the post too - I hope I'm not getting that far right-wing!

Now, if I could just get some link love from Newshoggers - then I could truly say goodbye to the lower 9th ward, ehh, I mean tier, lower 9th tier!!

Democratic Activists Will Push Obama Toward Trade Protection

Support for free trade has been declining among partisans of both parties this election season.

Yet as this morning's Wall Street Journal reports, the Democratic Party in the last couple of decades has become the party of trade protection, and intense pressure from the party's restrictionist wing will likely prevent Barack Obama from adopting international economic openness should he take the White House next January:

Since at least John F. Kennedy, presidential candidates have campaigned as tough on trade and then governed as free traders. Some business leaders are expecting the same if Barack Obama makes it to the White House.

Don't count on it.

Sen. Obama, the Democratic party frontrunner, and his rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton, have expressed some support for trade liberalization during their careers, as public opinion and congressional politics have shifted markedly against free trade. A coalition of anti-free trade activists and labor unions also has used the long primary season to wring commitments from the two candidates on an astonishingly detailed list of trade issues, making it hard for them to reverse course.

The two Democrats are on record saying they would rewrite the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico -- if not pull out of the deal -- remake Nafta arbitration panels, oppose trade pacts that President Bush wants to push through Congress, designate China as a currency manipulator and examine whether World Trade Organization commitments impinge on issues as diverse as local-content rules and subsidies for colleges.

While only Sen. Clinton has said she would take a formal "time-out" on new trade deals, a President Obama would likely do the same thing, given the commitments he has made.

Sen. Obama "wants the right kinds of trade policies," says his chief international economic adviser, Daniel Tarullo, a former Clinton White House economic aide. "We need to address shortcomings of past trade agreements and the international environment," especially Chinese foreign-exchange policy, he says.

The Illinois lawmaker stresses that any trade deal must include provisions to protect unions' rights to organize and bargain collectively. Violations could be enforced through trade sanctions.

That's significantly different from current practice. Few trade deals cover labor; Nafta does, but the chances of assessing damages under the accord are remote.

The provisions "can help put pressure on countries to keep improving worker conditions," Sen. Obama argued in his book, "The Audacity of Hope," a view he repeats regularly on the campaign trail. But his stump speeches don't include the doubts he expressed in his book. The changes "won't eliminate the enormous gap in hourly wages between U.S. workers and workers in Honduras, Indonesia, Mozambique or Bangladesh," he wrote.

Rising protectionism is a worldwide phenemenon, but it's been boosted as a political issue by hard-left anti-globalization activists, many of whom have hammered the Democrats on import competition and labor standards.

Of all the principles of economics, there are few that have been more powerfully demonstrated than the notion of comparative advantage. In the post-World War II period, the trends in the U.S.-led international economy have been toward increasing prosperity, and those nations with the most liberalized trade regimes have been best at expanding GDP growth and reducing poverty.

Trade protection has become a knee-jerk issue among those freaked out by growing transnational interdependence, but the benefits are real, and a shift to protectionism today would curtail American export success and harm job growth in highly integrated U.S. job sectors. Note, further, what former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills has said about the patterns of trade expansion in the postwar era:

The U.S. experience since World War II proves that increased economic interdependence boosts economic growth and encourages political stability. For more than 50 years, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the United States has led the world in opening markets. To that end, the United States worked to establish a series of international organizations, including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO)....

The results to date have been spectacular. World trade has exploded and standards of living have soared at home and abroad. Economist Gary Hufbauer, in a comprehensive study published this year by the Institute of International Economics, calculates that 50 years of globalization has made the United States richer by $1 trillion per year (measured in 2003 dollars), or about $9,000 added wealth per year for the average U.S. household. Developing countries have also gained from globalization. On average, poor countries that have opened their markets to trade and investment have grown five times faster than those that kept their markets closed. Studies conducted by World Bank economist David Dollar show that globalization has raised 375 million people out of extreme poverty over the past 20 years.

And the benefits have not been only economic. As governments liberalize their trade regimes, they often liberalize their political regimes. Adherence to a set of trade rules encourages transparency, the rule of law, and a respect for property that contribute to increased stability. Without U.S. leadership...the world would look very different today.

In today's political environment, in which just 10 percent of Americans say the ecomomy's getting better, the case for expanding free trade may be a hard sell.

The challenge for the candidates will be to convince their constituencies of the continued benefits of trade openness.

For more on the dangers of growing protection, and trends in labor market dynamics, see Purple Nation, "Frank Gets it Wrong Again," which offers a powerful criticism of Thomas Frank's recent article, "Our Great Economic U-Turn."

Nazi Germany's Years of Extermination, 1939-1945

I imagine it's just a coincidence, but I picked up Saul Freidlander's new book, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, just a couple of day prior to President Bush's recent statements on appeasement, delivered during his visit to Israel.

I commented on the controversy in an earlier entry, "Bush's Knesset Address: Revisiting the Lessons of Appeasement."

The Years of Extermination's a massive tome, roughly 700 pages, not counting another 100 pagers of footnotes on documentary sources.

I'm not going to rush though it, in any case. I've got a couple of books going currently, although I've commited to reading Friedlander in his entirety.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a passage from the introduction, on the nature of German anti-Semitism in the 1930s. We talk so much about racism and oppression in all the current debates over political correctness, foreign policy, the abomination of the American project, etc., but what people don't often do is bear themselves straight up, and pay respect to historical memory.

Here's Friedlander:

The peculiar aspects of the National Socialist anti-Jewish course derived from Hitler's own brand of anti-Semitism, from the bond between Hitler and all levels of German society, mainly after the mid-thirties, from the political-institutional instrumentalization of anti-Semitism by the Nazi regime and, of course, after September 1939, from the evolving war situation. In The Years of Persecution, I defined Hitler's brand of anti-Jewish hatred as "redemptive anti-Semitism"; in other words, beyond the immediate ideological confrontation with liberalism and communism, which in the Nazi leader's eyes were worldviews invented by Jews and for Jewish interests, Hitler perceived his mission as a kind of crusade to redeem the world by eliminating Jews. The Nazi leader saw "the Jew" as the principle evil in Western history and society. Without a victorious redeeming struggle, the Jew would ultimately dominate the world. This overall metahistorical axiom let to Hitler's more concrete ideological-political corollaries.

On a biological, political, and cultural level, the Jew strove to destroy the nations by spreading racial pollution, undermining the structures of the state, and, more generally, by heading the main ideological scourges of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Bolshevism, plutocracy, democracy, internationalism, pacifism, and sundry other dangers. By using this vast array of means and methods, the Jew aimed at achieving the disintegration of the vital core of all nations in which he lived - and particularly that of the German Volk - in order to accede to world domination. Since the establishment of the National Socialist regime in Germany, the Jew, aware of the danger represented by the awakening Reich, was ready to unleash a new world war to destroy this challenge to his own progress toward his ultimate aim.

These different levels of anti-Jewish ideology could be formulated and summed up in the tersest way: The Jew was a lethal and active threat to all nations, to the Aryan race and to the German Volk. The emphasis is not only on "lethal" but also - and mainly - on "active." While all other groups targeted by the Nazi regime (the mentally ill, "asocials" and homosexuals, "inferior" racial groups including Gypsies and Slavs) were essentially passive threats (as long as Slavs, for example, were not led by Jews), the Jews were the only group that, since its appearance in history, relentlessly plotted and manuevered to subdue all of humanity.

This anti-Jewish frenzy at the top of the Nazi system was not hurled into a void. From the fall of 1941, Hitler often designated the Jew as the "world arsonist." In fact the flames that the Nazi leader set alight and fanned burned as widely and intensely as they did only because, throughout Europe and beyond, for the reasons previously mentioned, a dense underbrush of ideological and cultural elements was ready to catch fire. Without the arsonist the fire would not have started; without the underbrush it would not have spread as far as it did and destroyed the entire world. It is this constant interaction between Hitler and the system within which he ranted and acted that will be analyzed and interpreted, as it was in Years of Persecution. Here, however, the system is not limited to its German components but penetrates all the nooks and crannies of European space.

When I read Years of Persecution, I was particularly disturbed by the growing segregation of Jews in Germany, leading up to the breakthrough event, Kristallnacht. I've read numerous works on Nazi history, starting back years ago with William Shirer, and then through graduate training with scholars like Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Ian Kershaw, and Michael Burleigh. Each interpretation, each different historiographical thesis ... this history, frankly, is among the most important developments of modern times, for it requires one to consider the ultimate nature of supreme evil, and how each one of us can realize a personal philosophy of personal justice and right.

I'll have more on Friedlander as I move along in the book.

In the meanwhile check out Richard Evans' review of Years of Extermination at the New York Times.

Photo Image: Auschwitz

Obama Draws Record Crowd in Portland

Barack Obama drew the largest crowd of his campaign today in Portland, Oregon, the New York Time reports:

Senator Barack Obama drew one of the largest crowds of his campaign so far on Sunday, addressing an estimated 75,000 people who had gathered here on the banks of the Willamette River.

“Wow! Wow! Wow!” were his first words as he surveyed the multitude, which included people in kayaks and small pleasure craft on the river on an unseasonably hot day in Oregon.

It is “fair to say this is the most spectacular setting for the most spectacular crowd” of his campaign, he told the audience. His wife and daughters, who have been with him most of the weekend, joined him on the stage at the beginning of the event but left as he was about to speak.

Mr. Obama has been campaigning extensively in Oregon, a state he hopes to win in Tuesday’s primary, as the Democratic presidential nominating race ticks down to its last handful of contests. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has been on a four-day swing through Kentucky, which also holds its primary on Tuesday and where she appears likely to draw the most votes.

Mr. Obama stopped earlier at an ice cream parlor, Lew’s Dari-Freeze and Drive In, in Milwaukie, a suburb of Portland. There, answering questions from reporters, he edged closer to declaring victory in the Democratic battle than has been his habit. He said he was returning to Iowa to await the results of the primaries on Tuesday night because “we thought it was a terrific way to bring things full circle.”

Portland has got to be ground zero of Obama support. Either that, or that river-side burg's emblematic of the Obama phenom in "progressive" cities nationwide.

Check out this video of the event, from the Huffington Post:

See also, the Portland Tribune, "Poll: Obama Trouncing Clinton in Oregon."

Also, don't miss my earlier entry, "Barack Obama's Cult of Personality."

George Bush, John McCain, and U.S. Foreign Policy

The New York Times has a big article up on John McCain's foreign policy, "The McCain Doctrines."

I'm going borrow from James Joyner's post, on Daniel Drezner's take on it:

Dan Drezner argues, persuasively, that John McCain’s foreign policy is not, as critics charge, simply a continuation of George W. Bush’s. Essentially, while McCain has strong neoconservative tendencies (i.e., he’s quite willing to intervene militarily based on morality alone even if there is no compelling U.S. security interest at stake) but that’s he’s much more aware than Bush that the need for the support of the American public.

He quotes extensively from a piece in the NYT Sunday Magazine from Matt Bai. The key [paragraphs]:

It’s clear, though, that on the continuum that separates realists from idealists, McCain sits much closer to the idealist perspective. McCain has long been chairman of the International Republican Institute, run by Craner, which exists to promote democratic reforms in closed societies. He makes a point of meeting with dissidents when he visits countries like Georgia and Uzbekistan and has championed the cause of Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned leader of the Burmese resistance. Most important, as he made clear in his preamble to our interview, McCain considers national values, and not strategic interests, to be the guiding force in foreign policy. America exists, in McCain’s view, not simply to safeguard the prosperity and safety of those who live in it but also to spread democratic values and human rights to other parts of the planet.

McCain argues that his brand of idealism is actually more pragmatic in a post-9/11 world than the hard realism of the cold war. He rejects as outdated, for instance, a basic proposition of cold-war realists like Kissinger and Baker: that stability is always found in the relationship between states. Realists have long presumed that the country’s security is defined by the stability of its alliances with the governments of other countries, even if those governments are odious; by this thinking, your interests can sometimes be served by befriending leaders who share none of your democratic values. McCain, by contrast, maintains that in a world where oppressive governments can produce fertile ground for rogue groups like Al Qaeda to recruit and prosper, forging bonds with tyrannical regimes is often more likely to harm American interests than to help them.

Here's how Joyner concludes:

On this score, I think McCain is right. That he’s more aware of the limitations of American military power to shape the world than Bush, too, is a hopeful sign. I do wish, however, that he was more reluctant still.

Now, back to Drezner:

This strikes me as a spot-on assessment of McCain's foreign policy instincts -- a little less postmodern, "we create reality" than George W. Bush's, but nevertheless leaning quite heavily in the neocon direction.

It's this passage, however, where McCain mentions something I haven't heard from him before on foreign policy:

Most American politicians, of course, would immediately dismiss the idea of sending the military into Zimbabwe or Myanmar as tangential to American interests and therefore impossible to justify. McCain didn’t make this argument. He seemed to start from a default position that moral reasons alone could justify the use of American force, and from there he considered the reasons it might not be feasible to do so. In other words, to paraphrase Robert Kennedy, while most politicians looked at injustice in a foreign land and asked, “Why intervene?” McCain seemed to look at that same injustice and ask himself, “Why not?”

“I think we’ve learned some lessons,” McCain told me. “One is that the American people have to be willing to support it. But two, we need to work more in an international way to try to beneficially affect the situation. And you have to convince America and the world that every single avenue has been exhausted before we go in militarily. And we better think not a day later or a week later, but a year and 5 years and 10 years later. Because the attention span, unfortunately, of the American people, although pretty remarkable in some ways, is not inexhaustible.”....

McCain is relying on the same strategy to achieve success both in Iraq and in the November election. In each endeavor, McCain is staking everything on the notion that the public, having seen the success of a new military strategy, can be convinced that the war is, in fact, winnable and worth the continued sacrifice. Absent that national retrenching, McCain admits that this war, like the one in Vietnam, is probably doomed. Near the end of our conversation in Tampa, I asked him if he would be willing to change course on Iraq if the violence there started to rise again. “Oh, we’d have to,” he replied. “It’s not so much what McCain would do. American public opinion will not tolerate such a thing.”

The Bush administration's fundamental mistake was to believe that a generation-long project could somehow be pursued without the need for consensus by anyone outside the executive branch. McCain seems to get that.

After researching what the American people think about foreign military interventions, I'm pretty sure that the American people don't want us in Iraq regardless of how well the surge works (Bai makes this point later on in the article). I'm not sure, however, whether this will be the deciding factor in how they vote in November.

The paradox: for McCain to be a more prudent foreign policy president, he needs to have a hostile public constraining him. Of course, if that's the case, then it's entirely possible he won't be elected president in the first place.

This is all very interesting, although note something about Drezner's conclusion: The research he's talking about is his thesis that Americans are "realist" in their basic orientation to American forward power internationally (which is, surprisingly, the opposite of the major "internationalist" strand posited by scholarship on U.S. public opinion on foreign policy).

In other words, the public views foreign commitments in terms of crude national interests (cost-benefit analysis), and thus if Americans "don't want us in Iraq," we can expect pressure to force a withdrawal from the war early next year.

I don't read public opinion that way, as I've noted many times (the war's unpopular, but the public's not demanding a precipitous surrender).

Thus Drezner's reading of McCain and public opinion misses something.

As Thomas Powers has suggested at the New York Review of Books, it's not so much that McCain "gets" the intense public resistance to costly foreign adventurism. If public opinion's as bad as it is, then the skills we need in the next president are the courage to admit we've lost the war and the political leadership to guide the political system to extract our forces from the supposed fiasco.

McCain won't do any such thing, of course. But I think Powers is wrong anyway, because I have a different take on public opinion: Success is contagious. If we continue to make gains thoughout the post-surge period of the deployment, the public will ride out the storm. (And we are continuining to make progress: See, for example, Captain Ed, "Guess Who Realized the Surge is Working?", on Nancy's Pelosi's acknowledgment of progress in Iraq.)

As expensive as the war is, Americans don't want to lose. The election campaign will allow McCain to clarify these issues, and with his experience, he'll most likely be a better salesman than President Bush on the vital need for a continuing commitment to the Iraqi people.

Barack Obama's Cult of Personality

I've been chronicling Barack Obama's embrace by the progressive/radical left for some time now. Thus it's no surprise to me that Obama supporters have turned to artistic iconography to build a cult of personality around the Illinois Senator.

As the Washington Post indicates, Shepard Fairey, the graphic designer pictured above, has created the Democratic primary's "equivalent of the Che poster," an agitprop pop-art image for the Bolshevik-constructivist set.

The Obama cult is the topic of this week's cover story at the Weekly Standard, "Let a Thousand Posters Bloom":

More than any other politician in recent memory, Barack Obama has been the subject of iconography. His campaign's official posters often portray Obama in a beatific light--clad in a white shirt and silver tie, eyes squinting and looking into some middle distance above the camera, a nimbus of wispy clouds illuminating his sacred head. But even away from the Obama mother ship, graphic designers and pop artists have adopted the candidate as their own, producing a raft of posters and prints in support of his campaign.

Last summer, an Obama poster began appearing in downtown Chicago, plastered randomly in public spaces. Drawn in mustardy yellows, Obama appeared from the shoulders up, staring straight at viewers, with a sunburst exploding behind his head. Below the image, in large block letters, the poster proclaimed "The Dream." At the time, the artist was identified only as "CRO," but, as the posters spread, CRO was revealed to be Ray Noland, a 35-year-old graphic artist....

To get a sense of Noland's politics, you need only look at the details. In one print, a crowd of Obama supporters is waving tiny placards, some of which read "Surge of Diplomacy" and "Peace Is Patriotic." Another poster, titled "No! From the Go," bears the slogan "U.S. out of Iraq."

Noland's designs attracted a huge amount of attention in the art community, and even some interest from the Obama campaign. At first, campaign officials asked him to donate his images, according to the New York Post. He declined. But the campaign finally did purchase a poster, which was used as part of the official promotion for a September 2007 rally in New York City.

Shepard Fairey was the next to step forward. He is best known for his early 1990s underground "Andre the Giant has a posse" campaign, a cultural phenomenon designed around a small, easily reproducible likeness of the wrestler. Fairey distributed thousands of stickers and posters bearing the image, which eventually took on a life of its own, turning up in cities and towns across the globe--the image itself becoming part of the popular culture. Fairey specializes in this sort of epiphenomenon, which he calls "propaganda engineering." As his website proudly proclaims, he's been "manufacturing quality dissent since 1989."

Fairey is not new to politics. As he told Creativity-Online.com, "I've been paying attention to politics since the mid-'90s." In 2000, he created an anti-Bush poster. In 2004, even though he "wasn't really that impressed" with John Kerry, he mounted what he calls a "pretty aggressive anti-Bush poster campaign" called "Be the Revolution" in support of Kerry. It wasn't until Obama appeared on the scene that Fairey really fell for a candidate. He would later explain that he admired Obama's "radical cachet." "I have made art opposing the Iraq war for several years, and making art of Obama, who opposed the war from the start, is like making art for peace."

In January, he unveiled two posters in support of Obama. Done in blood red and grays, the prints depicted a large, iconic Obama, head thoughtfully cocked. One version of the poster proclaims "HOPE," the other, "PROGRESS." As Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum noted, the Fairey motif was something like "Bolshevik constructivism meets skate-punk graffiti art," all of which suggests that the subject might be "a Third World dictator." But the American Thinker's Peggy Shapiro grasped the poster's more proximate ancestor: Fairey was using "the graphic style of totalitarian Soviet propaganda .  .  . [recalling] the idealized portraits and personality cult of the 'Beloved Leader' such as Stalin and Lenin."

Fairey's posters have become huge hits--you often see them at Obama rallies adorning either T-shirts or signs and plastering urban places such as bus kiosks....

Artists keep flocking to the Obama campaign, designing posters, sometimes selling them, and often giving them away for free....

Designer Jean Aw, trying to explain the attraction, told the Huffington Post that "By placing such an emphasis on building a visually appealing brand, Obama is validating the importance of design in communication. This in turn builds support from the design community, who might feel that a design-conscious candidate best represents their personal beliefs."

Of course it is equally possible that artists are responding instead to an ideological kinship with Obama. The Upper Playground is an artist collective in San Francisco, which the San Francisco Chronicle helpfully describes as a "multiplatform international lifestyle brand encompassing artist-centered clothing and housewares." In February they endorsed Obama, writing, "For too long we have been plagued by mediocrity and incompetence at the Executive level. As an international company, we feel that it is time to support a candidate that truly embodies the American spirit in both his campaign and his ideologies. We believe that Barack Obama is that candidate."

Meghan Daum at the Los Angeles Times, in commenting on Fairey's agitprop fame, offers the best summary of Obama's idolatry:

The Obama poster has spread Fairey's fame, but is the image good for the candidate? Like the photograph-turned-icon of Che Guevara -- which graces the T-shirts of countless hipsters who barely know who the guy is -- Fairey's Obama poster is rooted in the graphic style of agitprop. There's an unequivocal sense of idol worship about the image, a half-artsy, half-creepy genuflection that suggests the subject is (a) a Third World dictator whose rule is enmeshed in a seductive cult of personality; (b) a controversial American figure who's been assassinated; or (c) one of those people from a Warhol silk-screen that you don't recognize but assume to be important in an abstruse way.

This cannot be the Obama campaign's idea of good public relations...

Well, the Obama folks apparently think so.

Totalitarian chic is popular, and as this is widely considered the "change" election, voters have only themselves to blame if, God forbid, they eventually succumb to the cult of Obama in November.

Equal Footing? Same-Sex Marriage and the Civil Rights Legacy

I discussed California's same-sex marriage ruling in an earlier entry, "The Presidential Politics of Same-Sex Marriage."

The question of whether gays should be legally permitted to marry is far from resolved, and the California Supreme Court has done the country a service by placing a (really) hot-button social issue back on the political agenda.

I don't get too fired up about gay rights issues (gays should be able to serve openly in the armed services, for example). However, I do have a problem placing the quest for homosexual rights on an equal plane as the historic black American freedom struggle.

It turns out that California Chief Justice Ronald George is saying he was influenced in his legal thinking by Jim Crow segregation from the post-bellum South, via the Los Angeles Times:

In the days leading up to the California Supreme Court's historic same-sex marriage ruling Thursday, the decision "weighed most heavily" on Chief Justice Ronald M. George -- more so, he said, than any previous case in his nearly 17 years on the court.

The court was poised 4 to 3 not only to legalize same-sex marriage but also to extend to sexual orientation the same broad protections against bias previously saved for race, gender and religion. The decision went further than any other state high court's and would stun legal scholars, who have long characterized George and his court as cautious and middle of the road.

But as he read the legal arguments, the 68-year-old moderate Republican was drawn by memory to a long ago trip he made with his European immigrant parents through the American South. There, the signs warning "No Negro" or "No colored" left "quite an indelible impression on me," he recalled in a wide-ranging interview Friday.

"I think," he concluded, "there are times when doing the right thing means not playing it safe."

So, does "doing the right thing" mean that gay rights is the new social justice issue of the 2000s? Are gays that oppressed?

Here's this from the Weekly Standard in 2006:

THE MOVEMENT TO REDEFINE MARRIAGE to include same-sex unions has packaged its demands in the rhetoric and images of the civil rights movement. This strategy, though cynical, has enormous strategic utility. For what reasonable, fair-minded American could object to a movement that conjures up images of Martin Luther King Jr. and his fellows campaigners for racial justice facing down dogs and fire hoses? Who is prepared to risk being labeled a bigot for opposing same-sex marriage?

As an exercise in marketing and merchandising, this strategy is the most brilliant playing of the race card in recent memory. Not since the "poverty pimps" of 35 years ago, who leveraged the guilt and sense of fair play of the American public to hustle affirmative action set-asides, have we witnessed so brazen a misuse of African-American history for partisan purposes.

But the partisans of homosexual marriage have a problem. There is no evidence in the history and literature of the civil rights movement, or in its genesis in the struggle against slavery, to support the claim that the "gay rights" movement is in the tradition of the African-American struggle for civil rights. As the eminent historian Eugene D. Genovese observed more than 30 years ago, the black American experience as a function of slavery is unique and without analogue in the history of the United States. While other ethnic and social groups have experienced discrimination and hardship, none of their experiences compare with the physical and cultural brutality of slavery. It was in the crucible of the unique experience of slavery that the civil rights movement was born.

The extraordinary history of the United States as a slaveholding republic included the kidnapping and brutal transport of blacks from African shores, and the stripping of their language, identity, and culture in order to subjugate and exploit them. It also included the constitutional enshrining of these evils in the form of a Supreme Court decision--Dred Scott v. Sandford--denying to blacks any rights that whites must respect, and the establishment of Jim Crow and de jure racial discrimination after Dred Scott was overturned by a civil war and three historic constitutional amendments.

It is these basic facts that embarrass efforts to exploit the rhetoric of civil rights to advance the goals of generally privileged groups, however much they wish to depict themselves as victims. Whatever wrongs individuals have suffered because some Americans fail in the basic moral obligation to love the sinner, even while hating the sin, there has never been an effort to create a subordinate class subject to exploitation based on "sexual orientation."

It is precisely the indiscriminate promotion of various social groups' desires and preferences as "rights" that has drained the moral authority from the civil rights industry. Let us consider the question of rights. What makes a gay activist's aspiration to overturn thousands of years of universally recognized morality and practice a "right"? Why should an institution designed for the reproduction of civil society and the rearing of children in a moral environment in which their interests are given pride of place be refashioned to accommodate relationships integrated around intrinsically non-marital sexual conduct?

One must, in the current discussion, address directly the assertion of discrimination. The claim that the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman constitutes discrimination is based on a false analogy with statutory prohibitions on interracial marriages in many states through much of the 20th century. This alleged analogy collapses when one considers that skin pigmentation is utterly irrelevant to the procreative and unitive functions of marriage. Racial differences do not interfere with the ability of sexually complementary spouses to become "one-flesh," as the Book of Genesis puts it, by sexual intercourse that fulfills the behavioral conditions of procreation. As the law of marital consummation makes clear, and always has made clear, it is this bodily union that serves as the foundation of the profound sharing of life at every level--biological, emotional, dispositional, rational, and spiritual--that marriage is. This explains not only why marriage can only be between a man and a woman, but also why marriages cannot be between more than two people--despite the desire of "polyamorists" to have their sexual preferences and practices legally recognized and blessed.

Moreover, the analogy of same-sex marriage to interracial marriage disregards the whole point of those prohibitions, which was to maintain and advance a system of racial subordination and exploitation. It was to maintain a caste system in which one race was relegated to conditions of social and economic inferiority. The definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman does not establish a sexual caste system or relegate one sex to conditions of social and economic inferiority. It does, to be sure, deny the recognition as lawful "marriages" to some forms of sexual combining--including polygyny, polyandry, polyamory, and same-sex relationships. But there is nothing invidious or discriminatory about laws that decline to treat all sexual wants or proclivities as equal.

People are equal in worth and dignity, but sexual choices and lifestyles are not. That is why the law's refusal to license polygamous, polyamorous, and homosexual unions is entirely right and proper. In recognizing, favoring, and promoting traditional, monogamous marriage, the law does not violate the "rights" of people whose "lifestyle preferences" are denied the stamp of legal approval. Rather, it furthers and fosters the common good of civil society, and makes proper provision for the physical and moral protection and nurturing of children.

Well-intentioned liberals shudder upon hearing the word "discrimination." Its simple enunciation instills guilt and dulls their critical faculties. But once malcontented members of any group--however privileged--can simply invoke the term and launch their own personalized civil rights industry, the word has been emptied of its normative and historical content.

I doubt that's a message the major gay rights organizations are ready to embrace.

See more on this, at Memeorandum.