Setting aside the penguin and his cheerfully obtuse dog, the main “characters” in my strip for the past six or seven years have basically been George Bush and his Legion of Doom administration (and of course their various mouthpieces and enablers). Which leaves me vulnerable to a problem that, say, Charles Schulz did not have to face: my characters keep getting up and walking away.
Karl Rove, President Bush’s longtime political adviser, is resigning as White House deputy chief of staff effective Aug. 31, and returning to Texas, marking a turning point for the Bush presidency.
There’s still a big Donald Rumsfeld-sized hole in my cartoon — watching him testify during the Tillman hearings, I was reminded once again that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. And now Karl, my ever-reliable Machiavellian straight-man, is leaving. Sure, maybe he’ll be back for some corruption inquiry or war crimes tribunal — but it just won’t be the same as having his blandly evil presence in the background of the Oval Office whenever I need it.
Last week, Newsweek ran a cover story on the global warming denial industry, which, astonishingly enough, began with the premise that overwhelming scientific consensus on the issue is not subject to false “balance”.
Sen. Barbara Boxer had been chair of the Senate’s Environment Committee for less than a month when the verdict landed last February. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” concluded a report by 600 scientists from governments, academia, green groups and businesses in 40 countries. Worse, there was now at least a 90 percent likelihood that the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels is causing longer droughts, more flood-causing downpours and worse heat waves, way up from earlier studies. Those who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change have spent decades disputing that. But Boxer figured that with “the overwhelming science out there, the deniers’ days were numbered.” As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on. “I realized,” says Boxer, “there was a movement behind this that just wasn’t giving up.”
(Last week’s most recent example was the glitch in some NASA data, a “gotcha” moment for the glib mouthpieces of denial, to which there was, predictably, less than meets the eye.)
It’s really just a matter of motive. If we ever get serious about addressing greenhouse emissions, it will cut into the profits of various industries, in some cases substantially. Hence, industry has a clear, straightforward motive to argue that global warming is not much of a problem. But — and this is the problem for the naysayers — those who acknowledge the reality of global warming would seem only to be motivated by (a) science and (b) concern for the future of the planet. Hard to demonize that, which is why you’ll constantly hear various talk-radio blowhards ascribing somewhat vaguer, and less plausible motives to the rationalists, i.e., they just want power. Glenn Beck, for instance, compares Al Gore to Adolf Hitler. Occam’s razor should slice through such nonsense like a knife through butter that’s been left out on the table in the middle of another record heat wave. But the well-funded denial industry continues to approach the debate like O.J. Simpson theatrically struggling to pull on an allegedly tight glove in front of a gullible jury, and too many people seem incapable of asking the most basic question: who has the most reason to lie?
I was going to write something about this alarming story by McClatchy reporter Matt Stearns about Bush’s continuing interest in attacking Iran. But Nell of A Lovely Promise already said everything I had to say:
Stearns vastly overstates Congressional opposition to a U.S. military strike in Iran. This passage made my jaw drop:
It’s been the consensus for months among the Democrats who hold the majority that Bush must get congressional authorization before any military strike [on Iran].
Orilly? Then why was a provision requiring such an authorization stripped from the Democratic leadership’s version of the Pentagon supplemental spending bill in April before ever coming to a vote? Why did a similar standalone bill go down to defeat in May with 100 Democratic members voting against it? And why does Stearns not even mention either event?
All of these calls for “unity” and prayers that thousands of people die so that people “wake up” have nothing to do with anyone preventing the Bush administration from doing what they want. They’re simply expressing a deep anger that the dirty fucking hippies don’t agree with everything they say. Ultimately, they’re angry that their pet war isn’t going well and angry that the dirty fucking hippies don’t rely on quite as many adult undergarments as they do. Read the rest of this entry »
I think we really have to ask: why are people who are, by their own account, not just mistaken but completely clueless among the people who are given platforms to express their opinions?
I hate sounding snide about this, but for an adult to be asking this is really like an adult asking “why hasn’t Santa Claus come to my house with presents for me?”
After concluding our Sunday night show at Lollapalooza, fans informed us that portions of that performance were missing and may have been censored by AT&T during the “Blue Room” Live Lollapalooza Webcast.
When asked about the missing performance, AT&T informed Lollapalooza that portions of the show were in fact missing from the webcast, and that their content monitor had made a mistake in cutting them.
During the performance of “Daughter” the following lyrics were sung to the tune of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” but were cut from the webcast:
- “George Bush, leave this world alone.” (the second time it was sung); and
- “George Bush find yourself another home.”
This, of course, troubles us as artists but also as citizens concerned with the issue of censorship and the increasingly consolidated control of the media.
AT&T’s actions strike at the heart of the public’s concerns over the power that corporations have when it comes to determining what the public sees and hears through communications media.
That’s right. AT&T, like other telcos who say you can “just trust them” not to censor content in the absence of mandatory net neutrality, just did exactly what everyone who’s worried about net neutrality always believe they would do.
What’d that take? About ten seconds?
Why don’t people just laugh in the faces of industries that claim they can self-regulate?
George Orwell describes the right-wing blogosphere
The Scott Beauchamp affair is reminding me of this, from 1984:
A Party member…is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline…called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.
At first it seems amazing that Orwell could have precisely described today’s right-wing blog world sixty years ago. But the right-wing blogs are just an outgrowth of human nature, which never changes. (In particular I’m always been struck by the consistency with which such people are unable to understand analogies.)
