THIS MODERN WORLD

You know who I mean: the ones who unthinkingly embrace every self-evidently propagandistic myth that comes along, be it about WMDs, Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman or whatever else.

Here’s one more they got wrong:

The American Civil Liberties Union released the memo and other FBI documents it obtained from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.

“Personally, he has nothing against the United States. The guards in the detention facility do not treat him well. Their behavior is bad. About five months ago, the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Koran in the toilet,” the FBI agent wrote.

Of course, the Pentagon denies it, and that’ll be the spin (if they even acknowledge the story at all). Because it doesn’t matter how many times the Pentagon lies — they want to believe, and always will. They are Charlie Brown to the Pentagon’s Lucy, but without the anguish. They lay on the field after the football has been snatched away and do not even notice that their clothing is lying in improbable heaps around them, do not realize that they have been played for fools once again.

Update: a reader points out that Charlie Brown loses his clothes when he is pitching, not when he is trying to kick the football. Never let it be said that this blog does not strive for accuracy at all times.

This cartoon, which ran in the American Prospect in December of 2001, riffs on a Hannity & Colmes-style show called “The Shouting Zone.”

Well, once again, reality outpaces satire:

Note also the fourth panel in that cartoon, in which — crazy, over the top satirist that I am — I have the conservative suggesting that the evildoers should be “tortured until they spill their guts.” This was, of course, well before the Abu Ghraib revelations, back when the very notion that anyone would condone the torture of detainees still seemed like — well — outrageous satire.

That’s how far we’ve come, and how quickly.

From Editor and Publisher:

Where, in the week after the Great Newsweek Error, is the comparable outrage in the press, in the blogosphere, and at the White House over the military’s outright lying in the coverup of the death of former NFL star Pat Tillman? Where are the calls for apologies to the public and the firing of those responsible? Who is demanding that the Pentagon’s word should never be trusted unless backed up by numerous named and credible sources?

Where is a Scott McClellan lecture on ethics and credibility?

The Tillman scandal is back in the news thanks not to the military coming clean but because of a newspaper account. Ironically, the newspaper in question, The Washington Post — which has taken the lead on this story since last December — is corporate big brother to Newsweek.

The Post’s Josh White reported this week that Tillman’s parents are now ripping the Army, saying that the military’s investigations into their son’s 2004 “friendly fire” death in Afghanistan was a sham based on “lies” and that the Army cover-up made it harder for them to deal with their loss. They are speaking out now because they have finally had a chance to look at the full records of the military probe.

“Tillman’s mother and father said in interviews that they believe the military and the government created a heroic tale about how their son died to foster a patriotic response across the country,” White reported.

While military officials’ lying to the parents have gained wide publicity in the past two days, hardly anyone has mentioned that they also lied to the public and to the press, which dutifully carried one report after another based on the Pentagon’s spin. It had happened many times before, as in the Jessica Lynch incident.

Tillman was killed in a barrage of gunfire from his own men, mistaken for the enemy on a hillside near the Pakistan border. “Immediately,” the Post reported, “the Army kept the soldiers on the ground quiet and told Tillman’s family and the public that he was killed by enemy fire while storming a hill, barking orders to his fellow Rangers.” Tillman posthumously received the Silver Star for his “actions.”

The latest military investigation, exposed by the Post earlier this month, “showed that soldiers in Afghanistan knew almost immediately that they had killed Tillman by mistake in what they believed was a firefight with enemies on a tight canyon road. The investigation also revealed that soldiers later burned Tillman’s uniform and body armor.”

My friend Bruce Shapiro points out the lead story on NBC30 local news in Connecticut last night — beating out the Senate crisis, the stem cell bill, and the New London sub base closing:

Rats Seen Near Waterbury Fast-Food Restaurant.

Conservative blogger Stephen Bainbridge^[1] has a good post about “the deal” that pretty much sums up why I hate the filibuster :

The filibuster is a profoundly conservative tool. It slows change by allowing a resolute minority to delay – to stand athwart history shouting stop. It ensures that change is driven not “merely by temporary advantage or popularity” but by a substantial majority. Is it any wonder that it has usually been liberals who want to change or abolish the filibuster rule?

The filibuster is an anti-democratic tool that’s been used to empower some of the most horrible elements of our society in blocking progressive reforms such as anti-lynching legislation, the civil rights act, and universal healthcare. It’s a depressing irony that Democrats have been forced into a position of defending this tactic due to the even greater hypocrisy of the Republican majority in the Senate^[2].

Then again, as far as I’m concerned, the filibuster isn’t the only problem here. I’ve always hated the fact that the Senate is an anti-democratic institution that disproportionately favors the south :

If each of every state’s two senators is taken to represent half that state’s population, then the Senate’s fifty-five Republicans represent 131 million people, while its forty-four Democrats represent 161 million. Looked at another way, the present Senate is the product of three elections, those of 2000, 2002, and 2004. In those elections, the total vote for Democratic senatorial candidates, winning and losing, was 99.7 million; for Republicans it was 97.3 million. The forty-four-person Senate Democratic minority, therefore, represents a two-million-plus popular majority — a circumstance that, unless acres trump people, is at variance with common-sense notions of democracy. So Democrats, as democrats, need not feel too terribly guilty about engaging in a spot of filibustering from time to time.

What’s even more frustrating is that this was all by design :

Writing to Thomas Jefferson, who had been out of the country during the Constitutional Convention, James Madison explained that the Constitution’s framers considered the Senate to be the great “anchor” of the government. To the framers themselves, Madison explained that the Senate would be a “necessary fence” against the “fickleness and passion” that tended to influence the attitudes of the general public and members of the House of Representatives^[3]. George Washington is said to have told Jefferson that the framers had created the Senate to “cool” House legislation just as a saucer was used to cool hot tea.

The notion that the Senate is the body in which cooler heads prevail strikes me as incredibly elitist. What is it about the makeup of the Senate that makes the body immune to the “fickleness and passion” of the House? The fact that states with small populations are given the power to overrule the will of the majority? This is just the sort of notion that I’d expect from a group of men who felt that the only people who could be trusted to pick their own representatives were wealthy, white males^[4].

Going back to the filibuster, before you all decide to send me angry emails, lemme make one point clear. I think the Democrats are completely justified in their use of the filibuster. It may be a tactic I disagree with, but my discomfort with its use is outweighed by the fact that the the GOP majority are trying to sneak wingnuts into the judiciary while crippling the rules that allow Democrats to give “advice and consent”. When the Republicans play this dirty, we’d be fools to not fight fire with fire.

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^{1 : Who gets my respect for being a real conservative and not just another partisan hack.}

2 : As Prof. Brainbridge put it :

[A]ny honest conservative must admit that the only reason we’re having this debate over filibusters is because of Orin Hatch’s changes to the Judiciary Committee rules and procedures on matters like blue slips, hearings, and so on, which deprived the Democrats of the tactics that the GOP used to bottle up a lot of Clinton nominees in committee.

3 : Which worked so well during the Terri Schiavo fiasco.

4 : No, I’m not bashing the founding fathers. I think their flaws should be kept in historical context, but I bring this up to make the point that our concept of how we define a democratic republic has evolved over the last 200 years or so.