Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Many visitors here may already be familiar with Red State Son, Dennis Perrin’s unique blog. But for anyone who isn’t, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Dennis is a longtime commentator on politics—he was on the writing staff of Politically Incorrect in its early, funny incarnation—and author of two books: Mr. Mike, a biography of SNL’s Michael O’Donoghue, and American Fan, about our frenzied sports culture.

That alone would indicate Dennis is an interesting dude. But there’s much, much more to him. Start with this: “Atoning at Night: A Janitor’s Tale”.

Then you could move on to “Reggie White Wash” about Reggie White’s heart full of hate; “Punchy”, about Christopher Hitchens’ propensity to rewrite his own past; “Sad Libs”; “Freedom Granted, Freedom Won”; and more!

After that, if you’re so moved you might send Dennis a few bucks. I’ve been trying for seeming years to persuade him to promote himself—just getting him to put up a pay pal button has been like pulling teeth. Our little corner of the world can only grow stronger if we support each other, and Dennis is someone we need in the fight.

So Elisabeth Bumiller is leaving the White House beat for the New York Times. I’d like to mark this sad occasion by recalling my tribute to her from eighteen months ago.

• • •

I’ve had a crush on Bumiller for some time, but she truly won my heart when she explained why reporters asked Bush no hard questions at his press conference just before the invasion of Iraq. You see, they’re cowards:

ELISABETH BUMILLER: I think we were very deferential, because in the East Room press conference, it’s live. It’s very intense. It’s frightening to stand up there… You are standing up on prime time live television, asking the president of the United States a question when the country is about to go to war.

There are several entertaining things about this:

1. I’m sure it’s scary to ask the president a question on live national TV just before a war. But…

(a) If you can’t handle it, maybe you should get another job. It’s also “intense” to be an NFL quarterback and, whenever you drop back to pass, have six men weighing a collective ton trying to crush you. But if this makes you stay at home in bed on Superbowl Sunday, perhaps professional football is not for you.

(b) As scary as it may be to ask the president a question just before a war, I’ve heard tell it’s even scarier to FIGHT IN A WAR. It may be scarier still to be in a country about to invaded by the most powerful military in human history, and know you and your family may soon be converted into scraps of red, wet flesh. Perhaps Bumiller could think of this at such times and fucking get ahold of herself.

2. The New York Times has been owned by the same family for 108 years. When they bought it, the new publisher Adolph Ochs wrote a famous front page editorial:

It will be my earnest aim that The New York Times… give the news impartially, without fear or favor…

“Without fear or favor” is so much a part of the Times self-image that it was used as the title of an authorized history of the paper. Yet Bumiller explicitly acknowledges giving the news with fear. And we can throw in favor too, because “favor” is quite close to “deference,” as thesauruses will tell you.

So Bumiller very publicly whizzed all over her employers’ founding credo. For this, she retains one of the New York Times’ highest profile and most prestigious positions. But I guess this makes sense in a country where you can only be Attorney General if you hate the Constitution.

“LOOKED LIKE A SMUG, BARKING COW”: This was Matt Taibbi’s characterization of Bumiller when when he crowned her winner of 2004’s Wimblehack competition.

AND SERIOUSLY: I do respect Bumiller for being honest about the fear felt by reporters like herself. The Bush administration and its lovely friends certainly do try to generate this fear, and I’d far rather have journalists speak openly of it than continue their standard pose of being courageous crusaders for truth.

Yesterday was the 38th anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s shooting by Sirhan Sirhan. (Kennedy lived for a few more hours, and actually died 38 years ago today.) Mike Gerber has some compelling thoughts about that and the rest of the greatest hits of the sixties:

When I think of the assassinations now, there is no curiosity or nostalgia; because they have never been definitively solved, I feel that they are still with us. History is fact robbed of its ability to injure; these events still bite. And so, when I saw RFK on Slate today, the long-haired, doom-etched RFK of ’68, I felt the bite again, and not a little dread. JFK’s death was about the unthinkable happening, but his brother’s murder was the world confirming the terrible fact of what it had become. Or maybe, what it always had been.

Forty years on, Kennedy-King-Kennedy looks to me like the moment things started going bad, when control really clamped down from above, and apathy really took root below. Our country is headed in the wrong direction, and without a shred of romanticism, I think that direction was set by the assassinations of the 60s–not only by the loss of those people, their ideas and their ability to inspire, but also by our getting used to unsolved public murder as business as usual. That is a coarsening equal to any suffered by the Roman Republic. Is it merely coincidence that we’ve turned from a country of possibilities to one grinding out the same tragic, hoary imperial script? The country is traumatized, directionless, hurt; and a generation of politicians have risen who are experts at keeping us that way.

We go around in circles, searching for Kennedy-manques, a right wheel turning around a chewed stump where the left wheel used to be. If you don’t like metaphors, here’s a fact: All of the “lone nuts” of the 60s weakened one side of the spectrum, in favor of the other. We may think that’s a mournful coincidence now, but I doubt future generations will.

And that’s not even mentioning Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton and quite a few others who, out of the purest coincidence, all got shot in the head.

The rest is here.

You might wish America weren’t a country that needed a Torture Awareness Month. But we are, and June is it:

June 26th is the date that the United Nations has marked as the International Day in Support of Survivors and Victims of Torture. This year a coalition of human rights, civil liberties and faith organizations have joined TASSC International, a leading survivors organization, in declaring June “Torture Awareness Month.” This awareness raising month is an effort to respond to the growing evidence that the United States government is engaging systematically in the use of torture and inhuman treatment as part of the “war on terror.”

Follow the link to TortureAwareness.org for lots more information, upcoming events and suggested action. People with blogs may also wish to visit Bloggers Against Torture and join up. Even the blog-less will find it has a fantastic round-up of blogosphere anti-torture writing.

(Via Nell of A Lovely Promise.)

On the day when Ann Coulter and Pat Robertson finally send the death squads to kill you and me and our families and everyone we know, whose fault will it be? Well, that’s obvious: it will be our fault.

Glenn Reynolds learnedly explains this for us here:

Peter Ingemi writes that the antiwar left has made Haditha morally irrelevant:

There is one aspect about Haditha that seems to be ignored by everybody.

Our press and the anti-American left both in this country and outside of it has been reporting “Hadithas” over and over again over the last three years.

Time and time again our friends have accused us of every possible atrocity that there is to the point that internationally people are already able to believe this or the 9/11 stuff or all the rest.

Because of this, internationally it is totally irrelevant if the Marines actually violated the rules of war. Our foes are going to say that we’ve done things if we do them or not, so the only people that it really matters to will be the people killed (and family) and the people in our own country who support the military.

The real danger is that we who support the war will reach the point that we say “we might as well be taken as wolves then as sheep”. At that point the left can celebrate that they have made our military and those who support it the people they claim we are. Once that happens however any compunction about respecting them will be gone, and remember one side is armed and one is not.

That is a fate that I don’t wish on any of us.

Neither do I.

It would be easy to say this is straight out of Nazi propaganda. So let me say it: this is straight out of Nazi propaganda. If anyone with time on their hands wants to look through this archive, I guarantee you’ll find a dozen statements just like it—the same weepy self-pity and righteous sense of victimization from people with all the power, the same warnings that the powerless are soon going to get what they’ve been asking for FOR SO LONG, etc.

However, in fairness to Professor Reynolds and Mr. Ingemi, I’m sure you could also find this in the propaganda of the Soviet Union, the Iraqi Baathists, the Ottomans during World War I, etc. There are only so many ways to be dangerous authoritarian psychopaths. It’s really not right to expect Reynolds and Ingemi to come up with anything new.

(Via Matt Barganier at Antiwar.com.)

HOLY CRIPES ALMIGHTY: Reynolds has updated the post with this:

Some people, judging from my email, are misjudging — or deliberately misconstruing — Ingemi’s point. Ingemi’s point, as I took it, is that crying wolf leads in the end to moral callousness, as people assume that there’s no point in behaving morally when they’re going to be called monsters anyway. This seems rather uncontroversially obvious to me.

I almost never look at Instapundit, so I actually had been concerned I might have been a little unfair to Reynolds. But, uh, not anymore.

It would take five years to untangle every strand of his Crazy Yarn, so let me just concentrate on this: what kind of person believes it’s “uncontroversially obvious” that human beings work like this? Read that again: “people assume that there’s no point in behaving morally when they’re going to be called monsters anyway.”

You know, Professor Reynolds is welcome to call me a babykiller every day until the sun explodes. Yet somehow I still won’t come to his house and shoot his children.

That’s just the way my species is, here on the planet we call “Earth.”