We're Going Down

Selective? Probably. But it seems every tea party rally, every group assembled to laud their lions, Glenn and Sarah most particularly, is rife with such people. Convinced that we're going to hell in a hand basket, swallowing whole the delusional claims of their leaders, but entirely unable to articulate anything specific other than aggrievement. Surely they can come up with something specific. I know I can.

That such a big chunk of citizens can have been riled up by people with big egos and bigger wallets, without so much as a thought that they've been played, manipulated, is beyond understanding. They're so sure they're right, but they can't point to a single thing. What explains it?

I just watched a remarkable show on HBO, "My Trip To al-Queda." I highly recommend it for everyone, no matter your political leanings. It's mostly the one man show of Lawrence Wright, who wrote "The Looming Tower: Al-Queda and the Road To 9/11." It's both a personal reflection on his reporting, in which he got to know several pretty questionable guys, and a very revealing history of the roots of al Queda and its main leaders. He's no sympathizer, as the end of the show makes clear. But he does show, convincingly, how our response to 9/11 fulfilled exactly the narrative bin Laden hoped for.

It was his focus on the idea of humiliation -- from the point of view of many Arab Muslims -- that is relevant to the above clip of folks at the Glenngasm. Humiliation, he said, is a great excuse for hate. He compared the showing of the same clip of a couple of GIs taking an Iraqi family out of its house, as seen on CNN and al Jazeera. You don't have to be a bleeding heart or Deanna Troi to see how it would be seen in the Muslim world.

How humiliating it must be to those teabaggers that people they despise, liberals, a black family in the White House, took the upper hand. They want their country back in the same way al Queda wants to reëstablish the caliphate. Read these signs, decide if the people carrying them could be described as thoughtful, or manipulated. The words of a couple of paranoid lunatics have convinced them.* Given the credulity and shallowness (to put the best face on it) we see in Sam's clip, it's clear nothing will convince them otherwise.

A lot of that is going around.

____________________________

*Of the four leaders in question (Beck, Palin, OBL, and al-Zawahiri), I think only Beck is literally crazy (assuming he actually believes his white-board demonstrations), and only Palin is demonstrably stupid. OBL and a-Z seem neither of those (although that level of religious zealotry, like Beck's delusions, can certainly be associated with schizophrenia), but are clearly more overtly and inarguably evil and single-mindedly committed to literal destruction. But I'm not sure who actually has the ability to do more lasting harm to our country. 9/11 took many innocent lives and cost a lot of money, shook our sense of security, but of itself it had no ability to destroy us. The next attack, the same. The destruction of a society like ours has to come from within, from us. From Glenn, Sarah, and their ilkiness among the RWS™, the destruction is harder to see (to some), but is more fundamental and pervasive, and, ultimately, more deadly to us all.

Many, of course, see Obama as a destroyer. But he's doing only what he promised to do when elected (or, in some sad cases, less). Whatever you think of stimulus money, health care, money for vets and roads, Wall Street reform, it's all been done as a result of elections. What the Glennsarahscreamer crowd are about is nullifying elections and perverting the electoral system by replacing informed voters with propagandized ones, using lies, hate, and intolerance instead of planes. Much more powerful, I'd say. Find the HBO documentary and watch it. The parallels are remarkable, despite the fact that it was clearly not the point of the film.

Party Like It's 9/11

After enjoying the above, endorph your pleasure centers in this: Sarah and Glenn have gone overt, cashing in straight up on 9/11. The difference is, the latter is not a joke. Their low opinion of their gullible followers knows no bounds.

From these guys to Newt to the whole body of RWS™, 9/11 has morphed overnight into a Republican occasion for hate and fear-mongering. (And fund-raising.) In my calm moments I can manage to say it's pretty amazing. And it's been so easy.

Note to teabaggers: you're being played for fools. And cash cows.

Op Note

Another day in the OR. Any case that takes eight hours is serious business. If you have a cyst in your bile duct, have it removed before it grows a cancer inside. It's better that way.

About Time/I Don't Get It

Couldn't decide which title to use. It is about time, and I don't get why it took so long.

President Obama is announcing a jobs program aimed at rebuilding infrastructure. Seems to me it's what lots of people, myself included, have argued the original stimulus should have been much more about than it was. (In my case, I admit, I don't what the hell I'm talking about. Biology major. But not completely devoid of non-biological thought.) Too little to do much good, I fear; too late to get it passed. Rs will see to that.

Of course there already has been money going to infrastructure: I've driven past (or have been bogged down in) several highway projects decorated with signs proclaiming as much. And I get that not all stimulus should be short-term, and that it's reasonable to have used money for such things as energy projects, and to save state government jobs, teachers and cops. But how short-term would it be to repair and rebuild roads, dams, plants, bridges? We've ignored them for decades; there must be decades of work. And what of the downstream (is it trickle-down?) effects of people having money to spend, buying stuff, which re-opens shuttered businesses, who hire more people, who have money to spend...

The problem -- among many -- with the administration's caving to Rs in the beginning, adding too much in tax cuts to the stimulus and not enough spending (and yes, devoting too much to needed but not top-priority job-creating spending, larding it with more than a lot of pork), is that it's played right into hands of the most cynical. Namely, by sabotaging recovery congressional Rs can now point to the stimulus and say, as John Boner (who's about to give new meaning to the term "nothing rhymes with orange") just did, that it all proves "we can't spend our way to prosperity."

That's like saying the Donner Party proves you can't pack for a trip.

Ya Think?

In a statement bearing as much surprise as an announcement that water quenches thirst, David Petraeus says the plans of a church (here I go again, bashing Christians) to burn Korans on 9/11 could endanger lives of our troops. Gee. Really? Think it even might turn friends into enemies?

These people are idiots. (Among other things, lost on them like warmth on a witch's tit is the association of book-burning with the sorts of people they claim to abhor.) They exemplify perfectly the poison that people pour into our body politic, in the name of some perverted idea of faith, of right and wrong. Worse (though not by much) than the anti-non-mosque at non-ground-zero crowd, they're not just expressing a short-sighted and narrow-minded opinion, they're deliberately trying to enflame. Both, though, are clearly doing us harm. And yet I'm sure they'd all say that our wars are god's work, and that they support the troops 100% (as long as they don't have to pay taxes to do it.)

In words that should be in my previous post, on irony, Sarah Palin, hater of non-mosques at non-ground-zero, has this refudiation of book burning:

I would hope that Pastor Terry Jones and his supporters will consider the ramifications of their planned book-burning event. It will feed the fire of caustic rhetoric and appear as nothing more than mean-spirited religious intolerance. Don't feed that fire. If your ultimate point is to prove that the Christian teachings of mercy, justice, freedom, and equality provide the foundation on which our country stands, then your tactic to prove this point is totally counter-productive.

The man of god has announced they're going ahead as planned. He's a guy who wants his country back, I assume. Which one would that be? Not, evidently, the one with lifted lamp.

Some have raised concern that it's not up to military leaders to make judgments on civilian activities, even such noxious ones as this. I think they have a point, and this article makes it well:

I've long argued that the way Americans treat Islam and Muslims definitely has an effect on the fight against terrorism abroad, but I'm uncomfortable with Petraeus drawing a direct line of responsibility between whether or not American troops live or die and whether or not a group of radicals holds a "burn the Quran day." There's something about that statement that crosses the line for me -- I just don't think that in a democracy people in uniform are the proper arbiters of what constitutes appropriate free expression, even when it's an event with fascist overtones as obvious as a public book burning. Suffice it to say that if Republican elites were committed to tamping down Islamophobic hysteria rather than exploiting it and Democratic officials were less timid about assembling a national-security narrative in which America was strengthened instead of weakened by its tolerance and religious plurality, we wouldn't be here.

Still, someone needs to call out the fundamental stupidity and destructiveness of the planned burning. And I find the last sentence, above, by far the most important, which is why I bolded it, and have said as much before. Rs are fomenting hysteria for political gain, at obvious cost to our country, and they couldn't care less. (The party leaders have been notably mum.) And Ds have failed to point out the obvious ways in which American tolerance and pluralism are part of our strength.

More thoughts on the military/civilian thing, here. A salient comment therefrom:

In my view, the general crossed a line. But he did so out of a sense of responsibility - as in his insistence on the importance of the Israel-Palestine question to the broader war. Alas, I see the American far right - in which I include the likely Republican candidates for president - crossing far worse lines of incitement out of irresponsibility and cheap politics. And then a farce like Palin - who wants more aggressive Israeli settlement in the West Bank and conflates the Cordoba complex with bin Laden - simultaneously declares her love for the troops.

And what is the price for her? It wins her votes. It flatters her vanity. It rouses the true believers. And it helps lose the war. (emphasis mine, big surprise.)

As usual, I don't know which is more depressing: that we have a party (and its universal propaganda wing of the airwaves and photons) shamelessly using hate as a political tool; or that there are so many Americans only too happy (or too stupid not) to be used this way.

Okay, I do know: it's the latter, by far. For it is on their backs that we ride ourselves to oblivion.

[Update: he's canceling it. Good for him. And he plans to meet with Imam Rauf. Hope he reads this first. It's pomegranates and hand grenades.]

[Update #2: Gates called him. Love to have heard the conversation. And the conversations before the conversation.]

Irony

Everywhere you look there are ironies, and it's hard to say which are the greater.

We're about to throw out of office the people who tried to fix the problems caused by those we're sending back in.

(For even more irony, read the "Mood ring" post by the author of the above cartoon [right below it], the inimitable Tom Toles.)

We've "liberated" (or whatever it's been) millions of Muslims; yet the people in armchairs who claim the action as their own, who puff up and scream that those who opposed it are unAmerican, would deny freedom at home to all of Islam. Thousands are dead, tens of thousands wounded, trillions spent in the name of planting democracy thence, only to uproot it hence.

We've asked our warriors to die for people over there that we (and by "we" I mean teabaggers and RWS™) don't want to live with here.

Over the seas, we hope -- we need -- that people in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq and Iran rise up against those who preach fear and hate and violence. At home, we rally at the feet of demagogues whose cynical manipulations of fear and hate (and undisguised calls for violence) are amplified in unprecedented synchrony by non-stop right-wing media who claim the mantle of country-love while disparaging and ignoring the most essential tenets of it. Like respect.

I'd call that ironic, all right.

Well, perhaps these people traditionalists. After all, demagoguery and fomenting of hate for minorities has a long -- if largely, until now, unsuccessful -- history in this country. In a recent column, Nicholas Kristoff described it this way:

Suspicion of outsiders, of people who behave or worship differently, may be an ingrained element of the human condition, a survival instinct from our cave-man days. But we should also recognize that historically this distrust has led us to burn witches, intern Japanese-Americans, and turn away Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.

Perhaps the closest parallel to today’s hysteria about Islam is the 19th-century fear spread by the Know Nothing movement about “the Catholic menace.” One book warned that Catholicism was “the primary source” of all of America’s misfortunes, and there were whispering campaigns that presidents including Martin Van Buren and William McKinley were secretly working with the pope. Does that sound familiar? [Yes, it does.]

It may be a fine tradition -- perhaps even evolutionarily sound -- but it doesn't make me feel any better. Back then, it was the occasional pamphleteer. Now, it's pervasive and coordinated right-wing screaming.

And, in perhaps the greatest irony of all, the triumphalists are complaining that, in his low-point end-of-combat speech on Iraq, Obama didn't praise Bush enough; when, in fact, he gave them more than they deserved-- just as he did in not pursuing war crimes -- in pretending that everything was fine. So fast is history being rewritten that the ink is smearing. While, in a perfect circle of ironies, the screamers count on the shamefully short memories of Americans, we've already forgotten how the war began, was carried out, and descended into horrifying debacle. "The surge worked," we are being told, now as before, and for that we should haul George Bush upon our shoulders and march him into the history books, his greatness pristine as cleared brush.

The fact is, Obama effectively concluded "enough is enough." Couch it any way you want: it was time to end the endless horror to whatever extent possible, declare stalemate, and (sort of) leave. After all the blood, money, and time, with no actual endpoint, it's finally up to Iraqis to solve Iraq. Frank Rich, in one of his better columns, quoting Andrew Basevich, a West Point grad whose son died in Iraq, captures the irony far better than I:

“The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as a smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation and waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget....

“...common decency demands that we reflect on all that has occurred in bringing us to this moment.... the whitewashing of our recent history is well under way. The price will be to keep repeating it.”

He's plenty hard on President Obama for abetting the whitewash. And the RWS™ have the temerity to complain that not enough praise was lavished.

Now there's irony, of the first order.

Logical

Something's wrong.

You have pains somewhere, or bleeding, or you're losing weight, peeing orange. Whatever. Constipation, diarrhea. Take your pick. So you see your doctor. She sends you to some specialist or other who collects some inadequate or irrelevant data, and, having interpreted it exactly wrong, makes a diagnosis. You see a surgeon, who concurs with the diagnosis, or maybe comes up with a new one based on a few more irrelevant tests. Anyway. So he takes you to the OR, and does the wrong operation, carries it out badly, ham-handed, crude. Probably doesn't even do the one he said he'd do. Sews your asshole to your ear. There are complications. You lose a leg, or an arm, can't speak anymore, or can't hear. You're in a wheelchair with stool draining out your belly button, you're breathing through a hole in your neck, you have to eat through a straw. Or a tube in your gut, or your subclavian vein. Your original doctor is horrified, and spells out in no uncertain terms exactly how the surgeon screwed up. It's outrageous, she says. Sue the sonofabitch. Call the cops.

What do you do?

Well, naturally, you recommend the surgeon to your friends, send him Christmas cards, and, next time you need an operation, probably to correct the problems he created, you head right back to him. Who wouldn't?

With the same unassailable reasoning, we're about to return to power representatives of the very party who made nothing but false moves, both when they were in the majority and put into place all the policies that have done us in, and more recently, when they were out of power, who railed at the plans to undo the problems they created, stonewalled them, and were unanimously wrong about everything they predicted over the efforts to fix things.

At a moment of crisis, conservatives made a series of predictions, assessments, and guarantees -- all of which turned out to be hopelessly backwards. Rewarding the confused [ed. note: confused? A misnomer if ever there was one.] only encourages more confusion, while punishing those who were right only encourages worse policymaking.

What to do? Reëlect 'em, hand them back the reins.

Makes sense to me.

Vested Interest

It's one thing, I suppose, to feel the need to wear a bullet-proof vest when you speak at Abe Lincoln's feet. It's a bit of another to brag about it, to use it as some sort of proof of your fantasies.

Because the thing is, if I look outside and see the sun is shining and decide nevertheless to carry an umbrella, I guess you could say I'm only being cautious... even if there isn't a cloud in the sky and my iPhone weather-radar app shows no clouds within a light year. But were I to go up to everyone I see and tell them that the umbrella is proof of the unpredictability of weather, well, I'd assume most of them would paste a neutral smile on their faces and move away very deliberately. Backwards, so as not to lose sight.

As usual, it leaves me wondering if Beck is truly insane, or just the world's most successful seller of snake oil. I think it'd speak more highly of him if it were the former, make it more honest. Can't make it a positive for his flock, though, either way.

I'd also suggest that the people at a Glenn Beck rally of the sort who'd shoot someone for speaking his or her mind would be aiming out, not in.

Hey, Look

That way to forty years.

So far, so good.

Restoring Honor

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Not huge, I admit. But, given the self-important hucksterism, not insignificant. And sort of representative of the whole shtick: manipulation, based on his own fantasies, sucked up and swallowed whole by teabaggers hungry for validation of their darkest thoughts.

And, as long as we're discussing honor and speakers at the Glenngasm, there's this (to the surprise of no one except everyone):

"The worst stuff isn't even in there," Michael Joseph Gross said on "Morning Joe" Thursday. "I couldn't believe these stories either when I first heard them, and I started this story with a prejudice in her favor. I have a lot in common with this woman. I'm a small-town person, I'm a Christian, I think that a lot of her criticisms of the media actually have something to them. And I think she got a bum ride, but everybody close to her tells the same story."

......

"This is a person for whom there is no topic too small to lie about," he said. "She lies about everything."

I'll leave it to the reader to discover the "she." Tough guess.

Back In The Saddle

My former clinic contacted me recently, asking if I'd like to come on back and work with their new cancer surgeon in the OR. Why not? I've missed it. Much of it. Some of it.

So today was my first day back at the hospital where I'd spent over twenty years, and many of the people I knew were still there. Hugs all around from some my favorite nurses, a couple of whom ran down the hall to see me. Handshakes from former colleagues. It felt good. Walking the corridors, I could easily imagine no time at all had passed. Anesthesia turnover hasn't gotten any faster. They have a larger supply of large scrubs, in sizes too big even for me.

I remembered that shoe covers go on the outside of shoes, you wash your hands before you put on the gloves, put on the mask before you wash your hands. Did nothing to embarrass myself. I could still place a stitch, tie a knot, dissect adhesions off a liver. So that's good.

It's been a long time since I'd been part of a liver resection. Got to witness a tool I'd not seen, a Habib radiofrequency unit. I assume they don't let things with that name near ground zero. Wouldn't be respectful.

Long cases are still long cases, back and knees still hurt. But it was fun. I believe I was more help than hindrance, so I think I'll do it some more. Standing, as I will be, on the wrong side of the table, I'm not expecting it to produce much fodder for my favorite blog.

Breakup

If I sound even more irascible than usual lately, it's because I've been through a messy divorce.

Well, that's a little dramatic, I suppose, since I'm talking about a former friend and not my wife of thirty-nine years (in two days). It's a guy with whom I've always shared major disagreements on all the things they say break people up: birth certificates, mosque locations, religion, politics, civil rights, gay rights, church and state, global warming, which way to hang the toilet paper, and where you squeeze the toothpaste tube. But for several years, because of other things in common -- including, I thought, inquisitive and skeptical minds -- we'd managed to maintain a rewarding friendship. Notwithstanding the occasional blowup, we could discuss these issues in ways that some might consider rational.

Suddenly, it's not that Obama is simply wrong about everything. (There have been times when my former friend actually admitted he'd done certain things well, including his much greater attention to the needs of vets of Bush's wars than Bush ever gave.) Now, Obama is an Islamist plant, controlled by unseen forces, deliberately trying to destroy our country, and it's unconscionable that I don't recognize it. Now, I'm not just a blind apologist for this treasonous incarnation of pure evil (yes, he's used terms like that), it's that I'm a Jew; and Jews, he averred, collaborate with the enemy. (In that little pearl, he began by talking about Michael Bloomberg, but then, fully knowing my background, generalized.)

Yike. (Which rhymes...)

He seems to think that pictures -- sent to him by his fellow wingers, forwarded to me with relish -- of Obama on a bicycle at Martha's Vineyard, juxtaposed with some (non-simultaneous) of Bush at a VFW hall, prove something very, very important. I implored him to argue about policies, not bicycles, especially since, when he wasn't posing for cameras while "clearing brush," Bush rode his bike all the time and since at the same time in his presidency, Bush had taken twice the vacation days. I didn't -- but I wish I had -- point out that Bush can visit VFW lodges until the troops come home, and it will never make up for sending them, unprepared, into an unnecessary and unplanned war, making Afghanistan immeasurably worse for the kids fighting there by abandoning it prematurely, and standing for woefully inadequate care for the returning troops.

Ignoring the entreaty, my former friend insisted again that bicycles trump, oh, I guess, efforts for mass transit, energy independence, electric grids, teachers, cops, firefighters, kids with PTSD and TBI, health care, and saving the auto industry as proof -- proof! -- that Obama is evil. And that I'm a black-hearted accomplice. (And now, in his most naked America-hate yet, the president is trying to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The bastard.)

Suddenly, the man says he never knew these things about me, that I was a liberal. Weird. I've been writing this stuff for years, and as recently as a couple of months ago he wished we were neighbors so we could talk it over on his porch, with our favored clear spirits, on ice.

We spent a week together last year. Hardly a stranger to my views, he's visited here, with his wife, most recently earlier this year. He's found my ideas on miracles (who put the geese in the jet engines?) and death (we become what we were before we were born) interesting and challenging, even as he disagreed. Now, he says I constantly bash Christians. (Okay, I sort of do: but only the ones who want to make it the law of the land and substitute it for science in my schools. And I bash all religions. Except Buddhism. I kind of like Buddhism.)

Well, this lost friendship plucks out not even the smallest fiber from the fabric of space-time. My disappointment is not that I can't change his mind, but that we're no longer in the same universe. My greater concern, though, is the extent to which it speaks of where we are as a nation.

Polarized to the point of putrefaction, is where. If two guys who actually knew each other, face to face, talked about old wars and old loves, can't maintain with differing views, who the hell can? And it might just be that the worst possible explanation is really true: there have always been chasms between right and left, but there were also always a few bridge-builders (of which we were, sort of, two). What there hasn't ever been is a black president.

This resorting, by the right, to lies and conspiracy theories about birth and religion and terrorists and not one of us. Where does it come from, if not that? This absolute refusal to argue the issues but to focus on made-up "otherness" -- comes from the same place as the Jew thing, I guess. Looking at Glenn Beck's all-white rally of the aggrieved, it's hard not to believe it.

But I'll take them at their word.

When this person, to whom I've actually said "I love you, man" (and anyone who knows me knows how monumental that is), and who said the same to me along with promises that "I'll never let you down," pulls the Jew card out of his... uh... pocket and claims that had he known where I stood on things he'd have stayed away... well, I actually worry a little for his mental state but a lot more for the country's. We're too far gone, we're past the point, we've set ourselves asunder in ways that are simply irreparable. And it comes at a time when the opposite is needed more than it ever has been and, ironically, when we have a president most suited to have bridged the gaps. (Ain't no R candidate on the horizon who'd try; sure as hell ain't any in the Congress.)

Selective memory of my once and former friend aside, the president did try, hard, when he took office. Congressional Rs literally marveled that they'd had more face time with Obama in a month than they'd had with Bush in eight years. To the outrage of many liberals, Barack Hussein Obama had Rick Warren speak at his inaugural. Remember that? (All part of the plot, I assume.)

And then it dawned on those elected Rs: if we let Obama succeed, we're screwed. Not the country, of course -- who cares about that; the more important things: party and personal power. So they abandoned ship when we needed them the most. Abetted by the RWS™ and their collaborators at Fox "news", they've spewed nothing but fear and hate and lies -- never solutions (other than "second amendment" ones) -- ever since. Knowing they had no cogency or credibility on policy, and realizing that they could make money -- bags of it -- by betting on and stoking the prejudices and fears and zombie beliefs of their base; substituting soilage for substance, they anakined to the dark side. Take down the man, at the expense of the country. How enthusiastically they've been followed.

It's been bad enough to watch the creation and funding and astroturfing of a bunch of frightened, angry, self-sorry, uninformed, gullible, paranoid, deliberately and proudly fact-free teabaggers. But now, out of the blue, like the predator drones that our president fires at (his fellow) terrorists in numbers greater than his predecessor, they got to my former friend, too. If him, then more than enough to bring us -- themselves included -- down.

Jews?

Who didn't know whom?

OTOH, I gotta admit it makes it a hell of a lot easier.

___________________________________

Postscript: as if a gift from the gods, I've received an email from another of my conservative friends. He writes a weekly newspaper column about which we frequently correspond. Arriving just when I'd mostly finished the above, here's what he wrote, in part: "...although we may disagree on some things, I've come to respect your opinions, thoughts, and arguments. In fact, next to Leonard Pitts, yours is the site I visit most often..."

His words are restorative to my dying hope for reaching across divides. It's not enough to save our country, but it could go a little way to saving me. So, thanks, Larry. (When I asked if it was okay to quote him, he said: "Go ahead. We need more people to understand that differences of opinion are still permitted and can, in fact, be enjoyed."

Enjoyed. Imagine that.

Random Signs Of Something

Orrin Hatch, perhaps the last Congressional R with half a brain (or maybe it's that he uses the good half or the other one randomly), is in favor of (or not really against) the non-mosque at non-ground-zero.

Let's be honest about it, in the First Amendment, religious freedom, religious expression, that really express matters to the Constitution. So, if the Muslims own that property, that private property, and they want to build a mosque there, they should have the right to do so. The only question is are they being insensitive to those who suffered the loss of loved ones? We know there are Muslims killed on 9/11 too and we know it's a great religion. I know a lot of Muslim people who I have a very great regard for, not the least of which is Muhammad Ali. He's a great friend of mine. But as far as their right to build that mosque, they have that right.
The question is, should they? Is it insensitive not to, in the eyes of the majorityof New Yorkers? It's going to come down to New York and what New York decides to do....

...There's a question of whether it's too close to the 9/11 area, but it's a few blocks away, it isn't right there. Frankly, there are a lot of people who feel, including the mayor of New York, that they should have every right to do it, and that New Yorkers should support them...

_____________________________

Wanna know how the site for the non-mosque and non-ground-zero was actually chosen? Read this:

“Listen,” said El-Gamal, “do you have any clue how the Manhattan real-estate market works, what is involved? People seem to think that we picked that building to make some kind of point. But that is simply insane. This is New York; no matter who you are, you just don’t choose a building, move in, and take over. Do you know how many places I looked at? I looked at Chambers Street. I looked at Vesey Street, Broadway, Greenwich Street, Warren Street, Murray Street. Maybe half a dozen more, I can’t even remember now. It was only after all that that Park Place came up. Even then, it was the most grueling negotiation of my life. So many times I told myself, Wow, this just isn’t worth it. One minute the deal was on, eight months later it was off. The whole thing almost drove me nuts.”

"Triumphalism," indeed.

_________________________________

One of the, until now, loudest scientific voices against anthropogenic climate change has become a believer.

Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled "sceptical environmentalist" once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN's climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.

But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. "Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century," the book concludes.

________________________________

Watch this. The man is the son of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Talk about balls, and deafening silence:

Tell me the gay rights thing isn't 100% about religion-based bigotry. Voices like his are drowned like witches.

______________________________

And Paul Krugman, at least as grumpy as me when he looks around, recently had this to say. Hardly anything new to me, since I've been saying it, too, ad nauseum mio. But these days you can never feed bad enough:

The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop witch hunt by his political opponents.... — at one point taking 140 hours of sworn testimony over accusations that the White House had misused its Christmas card list.

Now it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse. Let’s turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh: “Imam Hussein Obama,” he recently declared, is “probably the best anti-American president we’ve ever had.”

...Republicans will soon control at least one house of Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly...

...What we learned from the Clinton years is that a significant number of Americans just don’t consider government by liberals — even very moderate liberals — legitimate. Mr. Obama’s election would have enraged those people even if he were white. Of course, the fact that he isn’t, and has an alien-sounding name, adds to the rage...

...And powerful forces are promoting and exploiting this rage. Jane Mayer’s new article in The New Yorker about the superrich Koch brothers and their war against Mr. Obama has generated much-justified attention, but as Ms. Mayer herself points out, only the scale of their effort is new: billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife waged a similar war against Bill Clinton.

Meanwhile, the right-wing media are replaying their greatest hits... ...Now, as we’ve just seen, [Limbaugh's] doing his best to insinuate that Mr. Obama is a Muslim. Again, though, there’s an extra level of craziness this time around: Mr. Limbaugh is the same as he always was, but now seems tame compared with Glenn Beck.

And where, in all of this, are the responsible Republicans, leaders who will stand up and say that some partisans are going too far? Nowhere to be found.

To take a prime example: the hysteria over the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan almost makes one long for the days when former President George W. Bush tried to soothe religious hatred, declaring Islam a religion of peace...

...But here’s the thing: Mr. Bush is still around, as are many of his former officials. Where are the statements, from the former president or those in his inner circle, preaching tolerance and denouncing anti-Islam hysteria? On this issue, as on many others, the G.O.P. establishment is offering a nearly uniform profile in cowardice.

So what will happen if, as expected, Republicans win control of the House? We already know part of the answer: ... a “wave of committee investigations” — several of them over supposed scandals that we already know are completely phony. We can expect the G.O.P. to play chicken over the federal budget, too; I’d put even odds on a 1995-type government shutdown sometime over the next couple of years.

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I wish my bank accepted this: 87,000 = 500,000. Maybe they do, the other way around.

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Here and there, a flicker of reason. Extinguished before it can take hold, by the shouts of the RWS™ et al. If only they'd commit the energy to pitching in that they do to tearing down, we'd have a chance.

It'll never happen.

Wonder how they'll take down their Danish climate traitor.

Words

"The last Marines are out of Vietnam," said Richard Nixon, square-facedly, as he touted his "Vietnamization" strategy. At the time, my base in Danang was crawling with Marines. I know; I was there.

The hedge? The guys I saw, and treated, were stationed in the Philippines, in Vietnam TDY. Temporary duty. Not really there, because their home base was a thousand miles away. (Wow. I just took a wild guess. But look!) Magic. Poof. No more Marines.

Makes me wonder, really, what's going on in Iraq, now that "all combat troops" have left. It's true the number is down by 100,000 from its peak, and that's good (except who knows how many "contractors" remain?) But I wonder what the definition of "combat troops" has become.

Turns out, I'm not the only one.

We're Sunk

Writes a thoughtful conservative whom I admire:

In the course of American history, if either liberals or conservatives disappeared entirely from the American scene, leaving the right or left to pursue their best ideas and most flawed excesses alike, this country would be in far worse shape than it is today.

And anyone who thinks that completely vanquishing "the other side" in American politics would produce good results for very long is naive at best.

It is to our collective benefit that the competing ideological factions in the United States operate as the best versions of themselves. Criticism that helps them get there is the most useful. On individual matters, one or another faction occasionally ends up being definitively right (or catastrophically wrong). Still, on the whole our ideological opponents are more help than hindrances compared to a world where they didn't exist. This seems obvious to me, but I thought I'd state it since a lot of people disagree, or at least talk and act as if they do.

In finer prose than mine, he's stating a central theme of this blog, severally stated: we need two strong parties in this country, both committed to thoughtful discourse and understanding that disagreement is not only not a sign of hatred of country, but is, in fact, absolutely necessary.

Some might argue that my tone here is incendiary and not helpful. Maybe so, but it's proportional to what I see from the right. And whatever else, it's always rooted in demonstrable (and usually linked) fact. My wrath has never been directed at conservatives who present thoughtful and helpful ideas; I have, in fact, also linked to them when I find them. The author of the above being one of them...

What I find so literally sickening, and worthy of derision in the strongest terms, is the extent to which the RWS™ have descended -- and have dragged their party with them -- into total and abject warfare. No prisoners. With the goal in mind of total destruction of the "other" side, they have abandoned entirely even the pretense of helping: Coulter, Savage, Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Palin... you name 'em. It's about hate and derogation, us versus them. Because it's made them millionaires, because they'll evidently never go broke by counting on the gullibility of their listeners, they whip up reactionary fears and deliberately avoid discussing policy or comity in any form. It's all about Obama as terrorist Muslim, liberals as evil, about scorched-earth destruction, wholly based on scare tactics, distortions, and outright lies. This is not anything close to the "finest version" of conservatism. (Would that my criticism could "help them get there.") In the past, they've been better. Now, they're nothing but bunch of angry white people who can't see beyond their conspiracy theories, who can't recognize that in their buying in, they're selling out.

Far as I'm concerned, not to point it out is dereliction.

Teabaggers have allowed themselves to be manipulated; they've swallowed whole the anger, but with no information or ideas to wash it down. They're mad as hell, they see monsters under their beds, they're not gonna take it any more, even as they can't articulate what "it" is or with what they'll replace it. Other than the usual: no taxes, no regulations, and no gays. Or, lately, Muslims. How it would work this time around, well, they can't really say; because it's what failed us most recently, even as they seem to have allowed it to be erased from their minds.

Rather than deriding those with whom we differ, which is the stock in trade of every single right wing screamer, we should be valuing disagreement and using it as a vehicle to solutions. My gripe -- and to call it that is thoroughly to minimize it -- is with the lies and conspiracies of the right, and the fact that they've effectively become beliefs, effacing entirely the foundation of democracy. It's depressing, it's disgusting, it's the willful abandonment of reason, in favor of the easy rewards of hating others instead of looking at oneself. It's shutting out everyone else, including thoughtful people like Mr Friedersdorf, with whom I often disagree but whom I mostly admire. Absent voices like his on the right, even if -- especially if -- the louder ones manage to gain control of Congress, there is no future for us.

I wish the teabaggers could see it. And I wish the few remaining voices like the above weren't so thoroughly drowned out.