THIS MODERN WORLD

Sitting here listening to some right winger on the radio tell me what Martin Luther King would have really believed if he’d lived, I am reminded of the time I attended a young Republicans conference ten years ago or so. I had lunch at a table of very pleasant young people, one of whom explained to me in all earnestness that her father had been in law enforcement and had the inside story — the wiretapping and harassment of MLK wasn’t due to any disagreement anyone had with his message, it was due to the fact that outside agitators followed him around and caused all sorts of trouble. Law enforcement was simply trying to protect Dr. King.

Basically, Republicans will fight social progress tooth and nail until it becomes inevitable, then try to claim credit for it. In fifty years, when this nation inevitably has a single-payer health care system, health savings accounts will be long forgotten, and Sean Hannity’s progeny will be braincasting cherry-picked facts which “prove” that the Republican party supported single payer from the very start.

Anyway, if MLK had lived, do you really think the Republican party would embrace him quite so wholeheartedly? Imagine him as a guest on Hannity’s radio show:

HANNITY: Welcome to the show, Reverend. You’ve said some pretty outrageous things about the war in Iraq. Do you think America is a force for good in the world or for evil?

KING: Well, Sean, I think it’s more complicated than that–

HANNITY: Good or evil?? Which is it, Dr. King? Good–or EVIL?

KING: Sean, I–

HANNITY: I’m not going to let you change the subject! This is MY show! Now answer the question — is America good or evil?

KING: Sean, you can’t just–

HANNITY (to engineer): Pot him down — cut his mic. With all due respect, Reverend, I’m not going to let you dodge the question. Why won’t you just admit that you hate America? Why don’t you have the decency to admit that you hate this country and everything we stand for?

Etc., etc.

Update: a reader sends a link to this clip from last night’s Boondocks, with pretty much the same riff. (Just to be clear, I didn’t see the show — I was busy watching Jack Bauer’s latest exploits. That guy sure gets a lot done in the space of an hour, doesn’t he?)

…Rick Perlstein emails:

And wouldn’t you know it, at the time they blamed King for his own assassination.

Reagan after the King assassination: it was just the sort of “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.”

Strom Thurmond: “We are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case.”

… Dennis Perrin is working the same beat:

As the British Labour leader Aneurin Bevan put it, reaction loves to wear the medals of its defeats; and you cannot move far in rightwing bloggoland without seeing puffy chests festooned with plastic medals and gaudy ribbon. Judging from some of the reactionary takes on King, you’d think that the late Civil Rights leader was always celebrated as a fine fellow, a decent American, and if the Heritage Foundation is to be believed, a conservative who would, had he lived, doubtless stump for the likes of Bush/Cheney. This is a collective effort of ideological ass-covering. The National Review at the time not only was hostile to King, it editorially supported state’s rights in the South when Civil Rights workers were being beaten and murdered. To much of the American right of the 1950s-60s, King was a commie race-mixing agitator who sought to undermine if not destroy the American system. And when King began speaking out against the Vietnam War and the capitalist assault on the poor, the Liberal Media, which patted King’s head after Selma, turned decidedly against him.

Here in America we have Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. In England they have Media Lens.

One point Media Lens makes repeatedly is that while the British media is better than that of the U.S., it’s often still horrible. And this sadly includes the U.K. “liberal” outfits that drive our right wing into a teeth-gnashing, pants-wetting frenzy, such as the BBC, Guardian, and Independent.

Recently Media Lens demonstrated how the BBC simply takes it as given that the U.S. and U.K. genuinely, no-crossies want to bring democracy to the mideast. When Media Lens asked the BBC’s director of news, Helen Boaden, what the evidence was for this, she replied that their “analysis of the underlying motivation of the coalition is borne out by many speeches and remarks made by both Mr Bush and Mr Blair.”

So there you have it: government figures have said something. And as anyone familiar with history knows, that means IT MUST BE TRUE.

I don’t know why everyone doesn’t adopt this standard, because it makes everything so much easier. For instance, by using what I call the “Boaden Methodology,” we can prove:

1. Napoleon’s motivation for invading Egypt in 1798 was to liberate Egyptians. Why? Because that’s what he said:

“I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring your rights from the hands of the oppressors…”

2. England’s motivation for occupying Iraq in 1917 was to liberate Iraqis. That’s obvious, because that’s what the commanding British general said:

“Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators…”

3. Hitler’s motive for supporting a 1941 coup in Baghdad? Duh. It was to liberate Iraqis! If it weren’t, Hitler would never have said:

“The Arabian Freedom Movement in the Middle East is our natural ally…In this connection special importance is attached to the liberation of Iraq…”

Given all this, the real question is why Arabs are so skeptical about the obvious good intentions of Bush and Blair. My guess is, it has something to do with their primitive culture.

(Thanks to TG for the Hitler quote)

Roy links to Roger-Simon-The-Man-Who-Created-Moses-Wine, who uses the occasion of the Alito hearings to make a snarky and completely irrelevant reference to Chappaquiddick. This is a completely standard tactic in the right wing playbook, of course. But if you follow these things — and lord knows, there’s no reason you should — you know that Roger-Simon-The-Man-Who-Created-Moses-Wine is rather famously, at least in his own mind, a Yoosta Bee. I’ve never been sure why anyone would feel their opinion has more weight after they’ve revealed the shallowness of their former convictions, but that’s a discussion for another day. The more directly related question is something Berube wrote about a little while back — why is it that everyone who had a political conversion on 9/11 immediately discarded everything they used to profess to believe, and offered themselves up wholeheartedly to the conservative borg collective?

I can understand, to some teeny tiny extent, the way many of these former liberals reacted to the far left’s knee-jerk response to 9/11.  I thought the far left’s knee-jerk response to 9/11 was a knee-jerk response myself, and though it was well informed about American imperialism, it didn’t do very much to explain (a) the rise of militant Islamism, the origins of which had very little to do with American anything, or (b) the fact that none of the more immediate victims of American imperialism (from, say, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala, East Timor, Palestine, or the Cherokee Nation) were involved in the attacks of that day.  But my differences with the far left on that score did not lead me to abandon the American left that fought for the minimum wage, the eight-hour day, the weekend, Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Clean Air and Water Acts, unemployment insurance, reproductive rights, gay rights, and universal, single-payer health care.  By contrast, when the Charles Johnsons, James Lilekses, Tammy Bruces, and Roger Simons of the blogosphere parted ways with liberalism, they not only pledged allegiance to Bush; they also adopted all manner of traditional wingnut obsessions that predate 9/11 by decades.

It’s really quite eerie when you think about it, and I don’t believe it can be explained simply by hatred of Muslims or fear of another attack.  Because these people don’t just go on about the War on Terror and the firmness of Dear Leader; they also go on about Jane Fonda (!) and Dan Rather (!!) and the New York Times and the whole MSM and the United Nations (!!!) and Jimmy Carter and the Clenis® (!!!!!) and Teddy Kennedy and the French.  It’s just bizarre.  (Roger on the subject of the U.N. is especially unhinged.) It’s like, “Everything changed for me on September 11.  I used to consider myself a Democrat, but thanks to 9/11, I’m outraged by Chappaquiddick.” Seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear any of them go off one day about our giveaway of the Panama Canal or the insidious plot to fluoridate our drinking water.  It’s as if the moment they threw in their lot with Bush, they were e-mailed a Wingnut Software Package that allowed them to download every major wingnut meme propagated over the past thirty years.

…a cat toy with a trapped mouse? That’s pretty much what Stephen Colbert’s interview with John Stossel was like. It’s online here, for the time being.

(Watching Stossel on O’Reilly, on the other hand, was like watching a two man circle jerk.)

…sorry, was that too unpleasant an image for the first thing in the morning?

The fact that Sam Alito spent all week stonewalling was to be expected, but I think some of the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee deserve equal blame for treating this more like political theater than a job interview. I understand getting a soundbite is part of the shallow hell that our political climate has become, but a lot of the exchanges makes it clear that most of the Democrats think they’re a tough question away from getting Alito to blurt out some incriminating remark like “Abortion is worse than the holocaust” or “the President should be considered a monarch”. But I fear that the hunt for a smoking gun is coming at the expense of helping the American people figure out who the hell this Alito guy is.

Here’s the thing the American people (and most of the Senate) don’t seem to understand about confirmation hearings. It’s not about finding out what Alito thinks, but how he thinks. The conclusions that Alito has reached on a litany of issues are ultimately less important that the thought process that led to those conclusions. Since we can’t predict the future and it would be highly inappropriate to demand promises from a potential Supreme Court justice, the best we can do is try to figure out how this guy’s brain is wired. What sort of arguments is Alito open to? What roles to emotion, religious belief, or intellectual curiosity play in Alito’s judgment? Is he more motivated to side with experts or laymen? Interpreting the law isn’t a mechanical process, it’s an art. We just want to see what kind of artist Alito would be.

Of course, that just leads us back to the original problem, that Alito isn’t man enough to publicly stand by his own words. Even when we look at these hearings in the proper light and don’t just consider them a laundry list of litmus tests, the best way to get familiar with the way Alito evaluates arguments is to ask him about controversial issues. Not because it’s a cheap way to get him to pick sides, but because high-profile, controversial issues have a wealth of commentary on which to refer, are easier for the American people to understand than obscure constitutional provisions, and serve as a pretty good introduction to what sorts of things are likely to sway a Justice Alito.

For example, taking aside every potential court case, what sorts of conclusions could you draw from a revelation that Alito supports the teaching of intelligent design in science classes? For me, I’d conclude that he’s unable tell the difference between science and pseudoscience, that he’s willing to stretch the idea of presenting “all sides of an issue” to ridiculous extremes, that he’s willing to make broad decisions without being fully informed about the issue(s) involved, and that he might be the kind of judge who would let his religious beliefs get in the way of making logical decisions. Since these would be ample subjects for followup questions, I wouldn’t just settle on those impressions of Alito, but I’m only speaking hypothetically at this point. In reality, Alito would have avoided answered the first question completely through the sort of dissembling Alito’s biggest defenders used to call “Clintonian”.

That, to me, is the most paradoxical thing about this whole judicial confirmation kabuki dance. On the one hand, we’re supposed to believe that Alito is a top-notch intellectual giant, but he’s so uninformed about the most controversial issues of our time that he can’t be bothered to form an opinion. Alito’s a neutral “referee” who’s willing to listen to both sides before making up his mind, but he’s so weak-willed that taking any stand at all would limit his ability to be even-handed in future cases. I don’t know which is worse : Republicans insulting our intelligence by playing dumb, or taking them at their word that and accepting the notion that their best pick for the high court is a habitual liar who’s too stupid to remember things he did and said 20 years ago.