Wieseltier's Mosque Notes

Leon Wieseltier, someone who cannot ever be accused of being soft headed or weak spined, has what is hands-down the best piece on the Cordoba Mosque controversy I have yet read.

Can't Crazy Just Be Crazy?

It's become the standard operating procedure on both sides of the political spectrum when someone does something crazy, criminal, twisted, or otherwise condemnable: Go look for a clear political motivation that will make the other side look bad.

This is So. Fucking. Tiresome. And it happens every time. We've reached the point where we view everything through a politicized, ideologically clouded lens so that conservatives have not only decided that conservatives don't like soccer, but that it's socialist, an utterly inane argument on just about every level but one that numerous pundits proffered during the World Cup without batting an eyelash.

So this James Lee fella goes postal at a cable network headquarters and . . . you guessed it. The search for his political agenda that damns half the politically sentient population was on. Thankfully Michelle Cottle brings some common sense, which will of course get lost amidst the yammering:

But, to state the obvious, we’re not forced to pick sides. Lee wasn’t an ideologue driven by his own political extremism to do something drastic. He was, first and foremost, batshit crazy. We’re talking about someone who so lost touch with reality that he thought the best way to save the planet was to force a television network to run game shows promoting the ideals of “human sterilization and infertility.” (Can’t you just envision the “Jeopardy” spin-off? Thanks so much, Alex! I’ll take chemical castration for $400.)

The guy was a nutter. He had bizarre ideas that don't fit neatly into the left-right, Democrat-Republican paradigm, and even if he did, so what? is that really all it takes? A crazy liberal shoots a bunch of folks and thus we're all tainted? A crazy conservative shoots a bunch of folks and the entire endeavor of conservatism is invalidated? That's reductionist idiocy that smacks of nothing more than substanceless "gotcha!" politics.

Are You Freaking Kidding Me?

So the majority of Republicans don't think Obama legitimately won the election and that somehow ACORN stole it. This is just completely idiotic and unhinged. But I also really do not believe that it is true. This is one of those questions that is so reliant upon party identification and sample size and . . . . but seriously -- are you fucking kidding me? How is it possible that a single human being could think something so monumentally stupid never mind even a poor and surely not representative sample? Even if the margin of error were 30% that would be batshit crazy.

Trusting America

I simply do not understand the outcry against exposing Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to a criminal trial in New York City. Indeed most of the arguments are either irrelevant or overstated (and of course not a few of them are the result of the fact that if Obama said it was day at noontime, the vast swath of the right would proclaim it to be night). Charles Krauthammer sums up the argument as well as anyone -- which is to say, not particularly well -- in today's Washington Post:

September 11, 2001 had to speak for itself. A decade later, the deed will be given voice. KSM has gratuitously been presented with the greatest propaganda platform imaginable -- a civilian trial in the media capital of the world -- from which to proclaim the glory of jihad and the criminality of infidel America.

I have no idea what "September 11, 2001 had to speak for itself" means, and neither do you, because it is nonsense, words that are intended to be portentous and meaningful but that are instead empty and useless. But that's not the point. The point, it seems, is that Charles Krauthammer and his ilk have no faith in the very things that make us better than the KSMs of this world. They have no faith in our ability to protect a courtroom in New York City. They have no faith that our truth is better than the jihadist's propaganda. They have no faith that our judicial system can prevail.

For many on the right -- and Krauthammer is only exhibit A -- the only real factor in terrorism is that it is a useful cudgel with which to whack those they disagree over the head. In the wake of that awful tragedy on 9/11 conservatives and Republicans were quick to point out that the failures of intelligence and security were the fault of no party and no politician, or rather, of all parties and all politicians, a useful conceit for them when they occupied the White House and both houses of Congress. But ever since that moment when suddenly accountability was so difficult to glean the right has been looking for ways to paint Democrats and liberals as soft on terrorism and weak on foreign policy. And if that means disparaging the American system, so be it. When Democrats and liberals criticized foreign policy during the staggering run of incompetence that was Bush years, the right was quick to play the un-American card, so quick to impugn the patriotism of those who disagreed with them. But apparently patriotism, like everything else, is contingent upon the prevailing political winds.

I think our truth is better than the jihadist propaganda. Clearly conservatives do not. That's a shame. There was a time when he seemed to love this country. It's amazing what Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill will do to a man's patriotism. Who knew that conservative love of country was only skin deep?

Put Khalid Shaikh Mohammed on trial. Give his poisonous rantings the widest audience possible. Not only is it the right thing to do in terms of upholding America's values. It also is the right thing to do because unlike Charles Krauthammer, I believe both that our ideas are better than the jihadists' and that any public airing of those ideas is a win for the United States of America.

Dangerous Right-Wing Nutter Alert!

Think the right wing has sunk as low as it can go? Don't bank on it. At Newsmax John L. Perry advocates a coup against President Obama without advocating a coup against Obama. To wit (or witless, as the case may be):

Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don’t shrug and say, “We can always worry about that later.”

In the 2008 election, that was the wistful, self-indulgent, indifferent reliance on abnegation of personal responsibility that has sunk the nation into this morass.

This is batshit crazy, except that too many on the right are swallowing this guano without enough sane conservatives speaking out against it. The Big Lie has become a huge part of the right's arsenal and they have no compunctions with using it. Obama does not just disagree with them politically. These disagreements have now somehow become dangerous to the point where people who purport to be serious and love this country are providing justification for a military coup.

UPDATE: This noxious piece has been pulled. But you can see the text here.

Conservative Insanity Watch

So, today's iteration of the once-respectable mainstream of conservatism has brought us in recent weeks the Birther Conspiracy, "Death Panels," "I want my country back," and Nazis, Nazis, Nazis (oh -- Hitler too). And then there is that old chestnut of "socialism," an accusation universally made by people with a grasp of history so shallow only they would be stupid enough to be able to find a way to drown in it. The latest in this deluge of idiocy is the outrage that the American president might actually want to speak to school children and encourage the virtues of work. Never mind, of course, that George HW Bush and Ronald Reagan did so (the latter with overt political messages).

There are voices of sanity on the right, of course. They are merely being drowned out by the insanity. And that insanity is making it nearly impossible to have a reasoned debate on issues, a debate that really does need to take place, not that the Glenn Beckification of the right would have you know that there is room for such reason.

Frum's Sanity and the Hitler Analogy

Well, at least one conservative is willing to get up and call for an end to the endless and idiotic Hitler analogies that the right is throwing around at Obama these days. Kudos to David Frum. Naturally the right has ratcheted up the use of this analogy far beyond what the idiots on the left did during the Bush years even though the right played the outrage game when the left did so. I suppose I've got to give the right credit for having enormous balls, at least.

Idiocy Alert: The Conservative Meltdown

In today's Boston Globe Scott Lehigh gets after the completely idiotic conservative accusations of liberal fascism (Jonah Goldberg's book of the same title is probably the worst example of journalistic use of history ever, by the way) and Vermont Socialist (but really Social Democrat) Bernie Sanders similarly dismisses the conservative accusations of socialism.

Part of me is amused that contemporary conservatism has become a bastion of idiocy and shallow thought as the movement implodes into incoherent tea parties ("We are about to return to the high marginal tax rates of the first Bush administration! Batten the hatches!") and as Rush Limbaugh becomes the most prominent person within the movement (which says more than anything I could about the state of the right). But there is also a patina of danger behind this unhinged and marginalized right-wing zealotry. Idiocy fetishized as resistance breeds violence.

Idiocy Alert: GOP Showing its Colors Edition

Seen on a (piece of shit, by the way) car today, five days BEFORE Barack Obama's inauguration: An "Impeach Obama" bumper sticker. You stay classy, conservatives!

Race and the Election

Naturally many of the questions that have emerged after Barack Obama's historic victory in the 2008 presidential election have related to the question of race and racism. What does Obama's victory tell us about racism in the United States today? Since he won, is it not clear that we are free of the burdens or fears of racism in contemporary politics? Are we really in a post-race era in the United States? What role will race play in Obama's policies as president?

There is much to celebrate, and there can be no doubting that the United States has made tremendous strides since the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing. As veteran civil rights activist Charles McDew has often said, those who say things have not gotten any better were not there when things were bad. But improvement from a nadir is hardly sufficient to proclaim that we are past race. There is less racism in the United States than there once was. That hardly means that we are past racism. We just need to take a more nuanced perspective on the role that race plays in the United States, and we especially need to be aware that the black-white dynamic is no longer the sole, or even necessarily most important, dynamic when it comes to racial politics in the United States. Take a few minutes to listen to some of the more obnoxious statements from the anti-immigrant right and you might understand why it is not only black Americans who have a right to be skeptical that we have reached perfectibility on race relations in this country.

While race did not decide this election, that hardly means that race was not a factor in Obama's margin of victory, or that it did not play a role in specific states and localities or among particular demographic groups (including among those who supported him). But there is still much to celebrate, even if the rosiest pronouncements are pretty silly.

Race and racism will continue to have a place in the discussion. From concrete policies -- disproportionate sentencing, say, or affirmative action -- to those incidents, such as children blithely chanting "assassinate Obama" on a school bus in Idaho, we will have regular reminders that when it comes to racism, apologies to William Faulkner, the past is not necessarily past.

Curbing Use of the "S" Word

In an "Editorial Observer" column in today's New York Times Philip Boffey takes on the idiocy of invoking "socialized medicine" to attack the various health care proposals coming from the democratic candidates. I would go farther -- almost every invocation of "socialism" in the current political dialogue is so muddle-headed as to be laughable. Conservatives love to taint their opponents with socialist/Communist labels even if those labels are laughably inapt. It's their go-to move, as the Nazi analogy is for some elements of the left, though invocations of Nazism and fascism by now tend to cross aisles. That particular brand of idiocy, anyway, now transcends partisanship.

Iraq and Vietnam: The Quagmire of Analogies

So now Iraq is like Vietnam. When for so long war supporters have fulminated and sputtered that it is not. And now the anti-war masses will argue that Iraq is not like Vietnam. When for so long they have fulminated and sputtered that it is.

How is this: In some ways the Iraq War loosely resembles some aspects of Vietnam. In a huge number of ways it does not. That will prove deeply dissatisfying to ideologues who are unwilling to make comparisons except for when it helps them to make some larger point to lambaste the other side. A moderate stance on the analogy is a lot more true than the perspective of those who now argue that Iraq is like Vietnam in order to try to pin prospective failure on a party that was not in power in any branch of government in the first four years of a war that is now not quite four-and-a-half years old. And it is a lot more true than the stance of those who have tried to invoke Vietnam as shorthand for "bad war."

In our constant quest to develop a usable past, we almost always do so the wrong way. The reality is that in terms of planning at strategy and long-term approaches, this war in Iraq is, like nearly all wars, sui generis. At this point the only quagmire that seems apt is the one that ideologues on both sides find themselves mired in as a result of their desperate attempts to score points against those with the temerity to disagree with them.

In Defense of Joseph Wilson

Over at The New Republic Michael Currie Schaffer has a defense of Joseph Wilson. It may not be the defense any of us would want, mind you. But it largely rings true, and I love the subhead: "Joseph Wilson's selfless self-promotion."

David Corn on Bill Kristol

In The Washington Post David Corn has ruthless takedown of Bill Kristol in an inaptly titled piece, "Why Bush is a Loser." The title is inapt because while Corn does go after Bush's policies he really takes aim at Kristol, one of the President's biggest cheerleader and a man who would lead me to pack my beach clothes if he told me a storm was coming. Kristol, as Corn only begins to reveal, has been so wrong about so much in the last five years. Amazingly, this nearly unbroken streak of wrongness has not reduced Kristol's smug sense of certitude even one iota.

Hat tip to Donnie Baseball.

Whining Conservatives

Michael Currie Schaffer has a nifty article at The New Republic online about our new age of Republican crybabies. This has been one of my favorite hobbyhorses: Conservatives love to talk tough and self-fellate over what hardboiled realists they are. Until things go awry for them. Then they open up the spigots with a blast of whining so shrill one feels the need to swaddle the crystal in bubble wrap.

Victor Davis Hanson and the Search For Untruth

It has been apparent for some time that Victor Davis Hanson's ultimate goal is to be the rootinest, tootinest, toughest hombre ever to sit before a word processor. The short, direct sentences! The Hemingwayesque phrasing! The muscular assertions! Don't support the war? You are an effete lefty pussy. Probably a liar as well. You wouldn't last one minute at the OK Corral that is the Hoover Institute's Palo Alto, where men like their whiskey straight, their six-shooters drawn fast, and their women swooning.

Unfortunately, there is an almost direct inverse relationship between Hanson's Landisesque testosterone infusion over the last five years and his fatuousness. His latest article is a case in point. So it's time for a long overdue dcat parsing. Let's see how well Hanson holds up to scrutiny. I'll place Hanson's words in quotation marks and will precede mine with *** . And away we go:

"'This war is lost,' Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid recently proclaimed.

That pessimism about Iraq is now widely shared by his Democratic colleagues. But many of these converted doves aren't being quite honest about why they've radically changed their views of the war."

*** An accusation of dishonesty is pretty ballsy from someone who has already framed the discussion so dishonestly, isn't it? Who among the candidates of whom he speaks qualifies as a dove? A dove would oppose most or all wars. So Hanson has a pretty immense burden -- it is incumbent upon him to prove dishonesty, and also to prove that opposing a bungled Iraq War qualifies as "dovish." I'll trust that he will do so.

"Most of the serious Democratic presidential candidates -- Sens. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd, and former Sen. Jonathan Edwards -- once voted, along with Reid, to authorize the war. Sen. Barack Obama didn't. But, then, he wasn't in the Senate at the time."

*** This is fine as far as it goes. But surely a historian is not going to ignore that things change over time. He is not going to pretend that the last four-plus years never happened. Is he?

"Now these former supporters of Iraq find themselves under assault by a Democratic base that demands apologies. Only Edwards has said he is sorry for his vote of support.

But if the Democratic Party is now almost uniformly anti-war, it is also understandable why it can't field a single major presidential candidate who was in Congress when it counted and tried to stop the invasion."

*** Yup. That's precisely what he is going to do. I'll give him credit for cajones not only for making such a brazenly intellectually dishonest argument, but for doing so seconds after framing the issue as one of fundamental dishonesty on the part of the Democratic candidates. When you write like the Marlboro Man you can pooh pooh niceties such as intellectual integrity. That shit's for vegans and stay-at-home dads.

"After all, responsible Democrats in national office had been convinced by Bill Clinton for eight years and then George W. Bush for two that Saddam's Iraq was both a conventional and terrorist threat to the United States and its regional allies."

*** And "responsible Republicans" cried foul every single time Clinton used even a hint of force against Saddam Hussein throughout the 1990s. And Saddam Hussein was neither the only nor was he the most significant threat in the post-9/11 world. So Hanson is raising a glib red herring. (And Hussein would not have been a threat had George W. Bush removed him from power when ther opportunity was before him, but that would not fit the partisan trope, so we'll ignore it.)

"Most in Congress accepted that Saddam was a genocidal mass murderer. They knew he used his petrodollars to acquire dangerous weapons. And they felt his savagery was intolerable in a post-9/11 world. There was no debate that Saddam gave money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers or offered sanctuary to terrorists like Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal. And few Democrats questioned whether the al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist group Ansar al-Islam was in Kurdistan."

*** Absolutely. No one denied that then. No one denies it now. Which is why its assertion here and now means fuckall. That Saddam was a potential threat did not mean that we had to go to war in March of 2003, and it did not mean that we had to handle that war incompetently at every point, and it does not mean that we have to line up behind incompetence now. I frankly believe we need to stay in Iraq now, but to imply that not following this administration's chosen course is to coddle Hussein is about as brazenly dishonest as an argument can get.

"In other words, Democrats, like most others, wanted Saddam taken out for a variety of reasons beyond fears of WMD. Moreover, it was the Clinton-appointed CIA director George Tenet who supplied both Democrats and Republicans in Congress with much of the intelligence they would later cite in deciding to attack Saddam."

*** And it was the Bush administration that manipulated intelligence and heard only what they wanted to hear while ignoring countervailing information. George Tenet does not have the power to declare war. Only in a partisan screed would Tenet's appointment by Clinton be necessary to invoke.

"When both congressional Democrats and Republicans cast their votes to go along with President Bush, they even crafted 23 formal causes for war. So far only the writ concerning the fear of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction has in hindsight proven false."

*** Fair enough. But of those 23 a good number were predicated on the threat Saddam posed then based on WMD's and such. The Democrats were dumb to endorse what amounted to a blank check. And we've been over this before -- in the hierarchy of reasons the administration put forward, WMD's were first, second, and third among equals. To conflate these all as being of equal value is absurd.

"But we no longer hear much about these various reasons why the Democrats understandably supported the removal of Saddam Hussein. Instead, they now most often plead they were hoodwinked by sneaky warmongering neocons or sexed-up partisan intelligence reports."

*** "They" do? Who, exactly? Let's see some evidence that a single one of the Democratic candidates have this simplistic a stance. Hanson is brilliant at creating straw men, knocking them down, and then claiming some sort of heroic victory. Straw men, after all, do not fight back. It's a simple question, really: Does Hanson think that absent the WMD claims the Democrats would have voted to go to war with Iraq? Is there evidence for this counterfactual? It is a shame that the pre-war intelligence got mucked up as badly as it did, but given that the Democrats were not in power in either Congress or the executive, Hanson's argument sounds remarkebly like passing the buck.

"There is nothing wrong with changing your mind, especially in matters as serious as war -- but the public at least deserves a sincere explanation for this radical about-face."

*** Hanson is being ironic, right? He's winking at us through the smoky prose? He must be. Because surely he is not making an argument about being honest to the American people and aiming it at Democrats. Is he?

"So why not come clean about their changes of heart?"

*** Once again -- an assertion absent evidence to make a fairly brazen accusation.

"Many Democrats apparently think that claiming they were victimized by Bush and the neocons is more palatable than confessing to their own demoralization with the news from the front."

*** Wait a second: did you not lead off your article -- this one, the one we are all so enjoying, the one that is providing so much insight and entertainment, the one with the swagger and panache that makes weak men cower, with the following lines?: "'This war is lost,' Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid recently proclaimed.
That pessimism about Iraq is now widely shared by his Democratic colleagues." Why, yes, you did. So what you seem to mean by Democrats being unwilling to confess to their own demoralization actually is "The Democrats are so clear about their demoralization that I am going to lead my article off with what I believe is a telling quotation about that demoralization." My version is not as testeronalicious, I know, but it is honest and -- wait for this one -- fair.

"Others may fear that admitting publicly that a disheartened America should not or cannot finish a conflict would send a dangerous message to our enemies. So while these Democrats accuse President Bush of being hardheaded and unwavering on Iraq, they are still afraid that their own mea culpas would send an equally dangerous message of inconsistency abroad."

*** You are predicating this all on an argument you concocted in the mean streets of Palo Alto: that the Democrats actually want to apologize but are too dishonest to do so. And yet Occam's Razor might lead us to another conclusion: that knowing what they knew and when they knew it, they authorized the president to use force. They now believe, based on four years of incompetence, that it was a mistake. You want them to come shamefaced before you based on nothing other than a fantasy you have concocted that will fit in nicely with your views of Democrats. It's cute and clever and all, but it ignores a recent history that tells us a lot more than this paper-thin scenario you have created out of whole cloth.

"Democrats need to admit the truth: that removing a dangerous Saddam Hussein and promoting democracy in his place seemed a good idea to them in 2003-4 when the cost appeared tolerable. Now, in 2007, with over 3,000 American lives lost in Iraq, they feel differently."

*** This is the most reasonable thing you have written thus far, which is why it does not follow from everything else in the article. And it is still pretty inane. There is more to any anti-war argument, even the worst of them -- and there are lots of bad ones -- than "3000 American lives lost in Iraq." The reductionist cant is getting to be too much. I hope the article is almost finished.

"In other words, Democrats could argue that somewhere along the line -- whether it was after Fallujah or the start of sectarian Sunni-Shiite violence -- they either lost confidence in the United States' very ability to stabilize Iraq, or felt that even if we could, it was no longer worth the tab in American blood and treasure."
*** Yes, because these are the only options. Nothing to do with mishandling of the war. Nothing to do with torture. And of course Democrats do in fact make both arguments that you claim they are unwilling to make. But they do so in a way more sophisticated than your simplistic approach allows, so reduce away! No complexity! Complexity is for the tofu and birkenstocks crowd. No surrender!

"That confession could, of course, be nuanced with exculpatory arguments about the mistakes made by those in the Bush administration, such as: 'Our necessary war that I voted for to remove Saddam worked; your optional one to stay on to promote democracy didn't.'"

*** If you're wondering if he just created words to put in the mouths of the Democrats to make the Democrats look bad and the Republicans to look good, he did. Clever!

"Such an explanation of turnabout would be transparent and invite a public discussion. And it would certainly be more legitimate that the current protestations of 'the neo-cons made me do it.'"

*** It's sort of embarassing to have to tell a respected senior professor this, especially one with such a visible platform in the punditocracy, but quotation marks actually have a purpose. When you create a quotation that no one actually has said, and when you ascribe it to people who think differently from you, that is intellectually dishonest. It is sloppy. No one in the Democratic Party has ever uttered those words. Again, the irony would be staggering given the theme of the argument, but hairy-chested Old Spice men such as Victor Davis Hanson sneer at irony -- that shit is for metrosexual English professors.

"With America still engaged in a tough war, that kind of excuse-making just doesn't cut it."

*** Leave it to Hanson and his ilk to remind us that we are in a war. I still have no idea what excuse-making he is referring to, as he has asserted but not shown as much, but I am glad he closed with such a vibrant example of the Hanson style.

There are arguments for and against the war, there are arguments for and against the surge, there are arguments for and against troop withdrawal. Hanson manages to make absolutely zero of these arguments in this piece. Intellectual honesty really is not a sign of weakness. It's too bad that too many folks on both sides of the debate have not picked up on this reality.

Political Dialogue and the Coulterish Turn

Over at TNR Rick Perlstein has a piece on the conservative tendency to smear Democrats through codes about race, gender, and sexuality. Certainly conservatives are not alone in using slimy rhetoric, but right now they seem to have perfected the Coulteresque capacity to cross lines and then feign innocence. And to think, we have a long way to go before November 2008.