Entries Tagged 'demagogues' ↓

Barack Obama doesn’t approve of political satire.

Barack Obama doesn’t approve of Bernie Mac’s comedy routine.

Barack Obama doesn’t approve of his daughters offering up personal details about their family life.

Unfortunately, John McCain doesn’t approve of political satire, either; and he never talks about his family. Plus, he thinks Viagra vs. birth control is a very serious debate.

Lighten up!

Folks: We are in for an excruciatingly moralistic four (or eight!) years.

I wish our culture warriors would get cracking! (Though, truth to tell, from the controversy surrounding the latest animated blockbuster from Hollywood, it seems like they’re not moribund after all.)

Andrew Sullivan is nostalgic for the McCarthy years, and he thinks William Kristol should be the first one made to account for his errors:

But when you’re this prominent a war-backer and you get things this wrong on a subject this important, don’t you think a smidgen of self-criticism or self-analysis could be in order? (I’m omitting the fact that the WMD casus belli Kristol also asserted as fact was a total chimera, but given the number of Kristol’s errors, this now seems small beer). …

It seems to me that we demand accountability from our politicians and we should demand accountability from our intellectuals. Not that they always get things right - but that they give a full accounting when they are wrong. Instead we reward and celebrate those who not only get things wrong - Kristol and Rove now have prominent columns in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal - but those who have never taken personal responsibility for their own mistakes. Until we purge all these tendencies from Washington, we will not learn from history and we will keep repeating it.

Somehow I doubt that Sullivan’s idea to put the neocons to the screws will get very far. But the urge to purge, to punish, to flay the evil-doers in our midst, to exorcise the demons, reminds me of this movie.

Here’s something Sullivan ought to ponder—that some of those who were purged in this country didn’t weep for themselves; they took it on the chin:

In spite of the subsequent loss of Trumbo’s livelihood and stature (”He probably was the best writer of that time,” Kirk Douglas offers, not inaccurately, in an interview), not to mention the aftereffects of a seminomadic existence with his family and the injustice of seeing his work produced under assumed names, “Trumbo” clearly proves that, if nothing else, its subject endured the deprivations of the blacklist with more wit than any of the rest of the writers in the original Hollywood Ten.

“Get ready to become nobody” is how Trumbo describes the process of divestiture that followed his HUAC adventure.

But since he’s the punitive sort and because the stakes are so very high, perhaps Sullivan has more exquisite tortures in mind for his neocon victims, ways to force them to recant and repent? Waterboarding, perhaps? I hear it’s all the rage.

The divisions on the left have left some people feeling smug and self-satisfied.

Here’s Mark Steyn:

Randi Rhodes agrees with Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro on everything - abortion, health care, climate change, you name it. Yet the first is “a f***ing whore” and the second is “David Duke in drag” merely because they disagree on which Democratic senator would make the best president. …

There’s something rather heartening about this for those of us on the right who’ve been on the receiving end of the left’s vehemence: Apparently there really is nothing personal about it. You can be a chickenhawk warmonger racist homophobe mysogynist Bush shill or a pro-feminist pro-gay pro-black icon of progressive politics for a generation, but, if you cross the likes of Randi Rhodes, you’re all the same and you merit the same four-letter words and KKK slurs.

I can see why Steyn would be comforted to know that his critics are irrational by definition and not just mad at him. But that doesn’t help us, as a country and as a society, deal with the dime-store demagoguery that now characterizes our public “discourse.”

Demagogues of all stripes should be discouraged, marginalized, de-fanged, deligitimized, and brought down. They’re dangerous in any society, because they stir up mob sentiment.

There’s a call for a nationwide “sacred conversation about race.” Naturally, it comes from the disgraced church under whose aegis the not-sacred Rev. Jeremiah Wright preached for 35 years:

 Rev. H. John Thomas, General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ, speaks at a press conference at Trinity United Church of Christ Thursday, April 4, 2008 in Chicago announcing that the UCC , joined by the National Council or the Churches of Christ in the USA are calling for a nationwide “sacred conversation” abut race in the United States.

Naturally, this call would come from the disgraced outfit under whose aegis the not-sacred Rev. Jeremiah Wright nurtured grievances and spread poisonous lies to his parishioners for more than two decades.

It’s not a bad idea, and Ross Douthat gets that part:

[N]early every pronouncement from Osama bin Laden or his imitators contains something that might be laughable, if it weren’t in deadly earnest.

There’s the incessant nostalgia for the Crusades, heavy-handed enough to embarrass Sir Walter Scott, and the Risk-board view of geopolitics, epitomized by the oft-cited aspiration to reconquer “Al-Andalus” (known to most of us as “Spain”) for Islam. There’s the blinkered understanding of American politics, as when Bin Laden criticized George H.W. Bush for “installing” his sons as governors of Texas and Florida, and seemed to suggest (depending on the translation) that he might make a separate peace with any American state that didn’t vote for George W. Bush. And of course, there’s the consistency with which Al Qaeda and its fellow travelers greet perceived insults to Islam with threats and actions that seem designed to, well, vindicate the offending parties.

When a Danish newspaper published cartoons portraying Muhammad as an assassin and a terrorist, Islamists responded to these outrageous insinuations by inciting their co-believers to … assassination and terrorism. When the Pope stirred up controversy by suggesting that Islam might be less compatible with reason and philosophy than Christianity, he was answered with a burst of (no doubt rigorously reasoned) acts of violence committed on behalf of the faith he had insulted. Now, just in time with Easter, he’s been answered with al Qaeda’s idea of inter-religious dialogue as well.

But ridiculing this by ridiculing in-earnest and exquisitely effective Nazi propaganda, as Douthat does, seriously misses the mark:

If Hitler’s Germany hadn’t turned Europe into a charnel house, many of the elements of National Socialism — the clumsy anti-Semitic propaganda, the philosophical pretensions, the ranting speeches, even the uniforms — would seem almost deliberately comic, like bits and pieces from a Monty Python sketch.

This could only be written by someone who absorbed the evils of Nazism via pop culture, and who therefore has a limp response to it. He suggests that OBL should go ahead an make Pope Benedict’s day:

Here’s hoping that His Holiness enjoys a quiet chuckle while he puts the Swiss Guards on high alert. There’s nothing wrong with laughing at evil, so long as your bodyguards are packing heat.

Something tells me that the West will need to do a little more than “pack heat” against OBL and those he continues to inspire. But I do salute the effort to look for a handle on OBL that makes the threat he poses accessible to those he is intimidating through his demagoguery.

In other counterterrorism news, today the New York Times writes about the Dutch anti-Islamist provocateur Geert Wilders [e.a.]:

Of the Netherlands’ 16.5 million residents, a million are either Muslim or of Muslim descent. Many of them are so-called guest workers from Morocco, Turkey and other Islamic countries who came here decades ago to work in factories and stayed to raise families of their own.

Occasionally, conflicts arise between mainstream Dutch society — which supports gay marriage and legalized prostitution, for instance — and the often more conservative Muslim minority, and Mr. Wilders has successfully mined the unease between them.

This somehow leaves the impression that Wilders is someone acting for his own (political) benefit. And later on, the Times writer spells out [e.a.]:

Since no one has actually seen Mr. Wilders’s film, some here have started wondering if it is as fake as his hair color, a clever publicity stunt devised to prove his point that Islam and freedom of speech cannot coexist.

Mr. Wilders disabuses him of the notion:

“I get in so much trouble, both privately and politically, that if I would do it for publicity reasons, I would be a fool,” he said.

It’s pretty obvious to me that Wilders is doing it for publicity reasons—that is, to publicize the dangers of Islamist extremism to Western societies.

If that makes him a fool, let there be more such brave “fools.”

Ideologically Correct comedians don’t refer to Barack Hussein Obama’s middle name, or to the fact that his last name rhymes with Osama, says K.O.

Nor do they proclaim that BITCH IS THE NEW BLACK and tear down the MSM for being so obviously in the tank for Barack Hussein Obama.

On the other hand, Keith dear, he’s Jon Stewart—with an audience of 1 billion—and you’re not. Being his ideological policeman is such an important job, though. Isn’t it?

The University of Delaware recently came under fire from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, for its “diversity” program, in which students are educated by 7,000 RAs in oppressors vs. oppressees. Attendance at their res-life re-education sessions was mandatory, until FIRE struck and the university immediately caved.

Here’s an excerpt from the University of Delaware Office of Residence Life Diversity Facilitation Training document [e.a.]:

“A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination. (This does not deny the existence of such prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination.)” - Page 3

Is our children learning?

A gift especially for you, from the New York Times:

I wonder how much “they” paid for the ad, and who “they” are.

I love Milos Forman. His best movies are breathtaking. And even his worst movies are a hundred times more interesting and entertaining than most of what passes for highbrow mainstream entertainment. That said, Goya’s Ghosts is a mess—didactic where it should be satirical, melodramatic where it should be dramatic, stingy where it should be generous. As I said: a big mess.

That’s a damn shame, because, as Cinematical notes, it’s got some really stirring moments on a subject of hot contemporary debate—

Javier Bardem embodies one of Forman’s favorite fool-archetypes here: the true believer who is double-blind in thinking that the system he loves loves him back and that his earnestness in upholding it will produce rewards down the road. Bardem plays Brother Lorenzo, a Catholic priest who argues passionately for the grisly torture of the Inquisition in the opening scene, as the other priests sit quietly and imbibe his passionate commitment to the cause instead of daring to debate any of his points. It’s only later, when an unlikely turn of events sees him having dinner in the home of a man suspected of being a “Judiazier” that he’s asked to give any kind of thoughtful defense to his beliefs. ‘How could there be any value in a confession given under extreme physical torture?,’ Brother Lorenzo is asked, to which he replies that God grants the innocent the ability to withstand the torture and not utter false statements, but allows the guilty to perjure themselves. A few minutes later, he’s singing a completely different tune.

And Time magazine puts it in perspective:

[T]he entire film is less an exercise in historicism (though the portrait of the painter is accurate enough, as is the depiction of historical events, the story is pure fiction) than it is an elaborate analogy with our own times. This is quite understandable — Forman lost his parents to the Nazi concentration camps and came of age in Communist-ruled Czechoslovakia, and he has long needed to address the issues that shaped his life in a movie. Goya’s Ghosts is not entirely successful in doing so. …

[I]t has about it a kind of messy passion that is quite fascinating. It obviously means a great deal to its auteur, and that passion grants the film a felt and wayward life not usually granted historical epics.

That judgment applies particularly to Bardem’s performance as the loathsome Lorenzo. In the beginning, as he volunteers to lead the newly revived Inquisition, he is all soft-voiced reason. He is polite to the point of obsequiousness, not only to his church superiors, but even to the people he torments. Creepy, well-met and utterly corrupt, and when the French invade he simply disappears — only to reappear later as, of all things, a Voltairian rationalist, married, with children, and growing rich as an enforcer for Spain’s occupiers. He is, in his way, also a perfect modernist, blowing blandly and prosperously with the winds of change. As long as there is power and status to be had, he does not care who he must serve to obtain those boons. By analogy, Goya’s Ghosts has much to say, largely through this character, about such current issues as torture, terror and the fact that some people can profit hugely by making up ideological justifications for the anarchy they loose upon the world.

The reviewier, Phil Bray, concludes his political takeaway thus:

If you find yourself thinking about, say, Abu Ghraib while you’re watching this movie, that’s OK with Forman and Carriere.

That’s true, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough, because the film isn’t about politics. It’s about human nature—about how even the apolitical among us (and most people are apoliticial) are ensnared, and potentially enslaved, by the pathologically political people who live among us: the seekers of power and privilege and those who serve and/or cozy up to them … regardless of their political persuasion. Right or left, it doesn’t matter. Potentially, power corrupts us all.

In the movie, “There shall be no liberty for the enemies of liberty!” is the cry of the secular republicans against those who would stand in the way of their revolution: monarchs, cardinals, clerks, lawyers, bankers, newspapermen, merchants—everyone with a stake in the system.

Goya’s Ghosts is a failed film, but its 75-year-old director has got something to say, if you’ve got the time and the curiosity to listen.

How is it that the extremely busy columnist, author, and television commentator David Brooks

can find the time not only to inject new ideas into the bloodstream of the great national debate (okay: it’s actually the culture war circus) but also to read and coherently critique entire books by his ideological opponents

[H]ey, nobody ever died from contact with pomposity, and Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason” is well worth reading. It reminds us that whatever the effects of our homogenizing mass culture, it is still possible for exceedingly strange individuals to rise to the top.

Gore is, for example, a radical technological determinist. While most politicians react to people, Gore reacts to machines, and in this book he lays out a theory of history entirely driven by them.

but that a whippersnapper blogger like Matthew Yglesias is too bored *** to engage serious, knowledgeable critics like Noah Pollak on substantive issues

Peretz clearly has the better understanding of Gaza, and the better argument. But he became annoyed, told Yglesias to shove off, and let the ignorant party come away appearing more reasonable. That’s too bad, because Yglesias’ writings on the Middle East, I’m afraid to say, have a distinctively hanging-out-at-the-coffee-shop feel to them. Yglesias believes that “Hamas-Fatah violence is largely the result of deliberate American policy.” If Peretz won’t have a go at this argument, I will.

and entirely dismissive of the ideas (which he won’t even read)+++ of certain public intellectuals in favor of the ideas of other public intellectuals whom he’s more inclined to trust … well, just because (i.e., for unstated reasons)?

I have no real intention of reading a 28,000 word Paul Berman essay on why Tariq Ramadan is bad in The New Republic, so I’ll refrain from commenting on the substance of things. I will note that Ian Buruma’s Iong New York Times Magazine article on Ramadan reached very different conclusions and I’m more likely to take Buruma’s word for it than Berman’s.  

The last time Yglesias chose certain smart people over certain other smart people to take at their word, of course, he ended up supporting the Iraq war. Under the circumstances, I’d be more wary both of trusting my own instincts and of laying out the politically correct stance on issues for others. But then I’m not under 30.

———–

*** and intellectually dishonest: Yglesias pretended that the entire “dust-up,” rather than being a fierce debate about the reason for the horrifically violent fighting between Hamas and Fatah, was a mere ”feud” between him and Marty Peretz and that Jonah Goldberg had “piled on”:

I was going to just ignore New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz’s efforts to bait me, but when Jonah Goldberg piled on it was just too much intellectual firepower to stay out of the fray. Now, seriously, what Brian Beutler said. And what Brian Ulrich said. I’m done with this feud as there’s really no point in arguing with someone who’s proud of his role in bringing Charles Krauthammer into the national conversation.

+++ at least not all the way through: Yglesias later tackled the Berman piece, in a manner of speaking. He used his second post to attack Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

No, not him

LAWRENCE OLIVIER AS ARCHIE RICE, LONDON, 1957, photo by Snowden

I mean him:

Really, it’s too delicious. First, in May 2006, Andrew Sullivan introduces America to the crisis of “Christianism”:

 So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

 (though I note that the concept was introduced a year and a half earlier, in November 2004, on the Daily Kos)

However, there is another movement in this nation, which I refer to as Christianism.  The term is dervied from “Islamist” — or those people who claimed to be followers of Islam, but are nothing more than terrorists who do not follow the principles of Islam.  There are those “Christians” who do not seem to be following the principles of Christianity — thus the term “Christianist”.

Then today, having hysterically hyped a bogus concept for more than a year, Sullivan, finding himself uncomfortably off-message, asks: “Is Christianism Peaking?” His lede is a closeup of this dude,

the Big Bad Wolf who stared down the “Christianists” who got Sullivan’s knickers in a twist.

I won’t bother to copy and paste anything from Sullivan’s furious backpedaling. Just five days ago, he was claiming that Christianists were taking over the military and preying on innocent Orthodox Jewish kidney-stone sufferers—the horror! the horror! (I made fun of him here.)

He is left to bleat incoherently about his politics, religion, and moral code—not that I’m paying attention. I’m fascinated by the fact that he abandoned his year-long anti-Christianist crusade just like that. Stopped on a dime.

Yglesias slapped him about it. But it looks like the very influential Frank Rich is the one who made him back off.

The new bosses are not quite like the old bosses, eh?

I am heartbroken. Our very own Basil Fawlty ***has gone medieval on Anderson Cooper.

Get the gay-baiting details at ETP. Because that’s what this is. Keith Olbermann is a political hack and moral scumbag posing as a moral crusader. He is also a chickenshit. He never invites political opponents to his show to debate them. Instead, he rants and raves from his MSNBC bully pulpit—yes the same network that just got on its high horse about Don Imus. Capus said he got a lot of complaints from inside NBC about Imus’s racism and sexism. Let’s see how many complaints he gets from inside the network about Olbermann’s gay-baiting.

Meanwhile, I’m willing to bet good money that Cooper, who, admittedly is a big fave in my household so I’m waving my Team Cooper colors, is going to come out of this like the effortlessly classy guy he is.
Good breeding still has its merits (GWB notwithstanding). From a 1991 review of Richard Brookhiser’s Way of the WASP:

“The way of the WASP” consists of six closely related values or character traits–conscience, civic-mindedness, industry, success, use, and anti-sensuality. The most important is conscience–”the great legacy of Protestantism.” Conscience is not the modernist way of paradox and ambiguity; “it is the inner light that shows us self-evident truths … the source of whatever freedoms WASP society enjoys.” Civic-mindedness is the “operation of conscience in social relations.” Honor, family, group take a back seat to the good of society. Conscience mandates–and civic-mindedness sanctions–industry, which results in success. By “use,” Brookhiser means asking what things are good for, a kind of practical Aristotelianism. Finally, the WASP suspicion of sensual pleasure is not a morbid turning away from the body, but an application of the test of use: sport, food, even art, are valued because they’re “good for you.” It is the only WASP trait he seems to regret: “The Chinese work hard; so do the Italians. Yet they both know how to cook.”

————–

*** The last time I fulminated about Olbermann was in this post:

What is most objectionable about Olbermann is that he’s, as Olbermann Watch’s Robert Cox says,

a political hack posing as a journalist and abusing the trust implied in the NBC brand to get out a political message.

Windbag Obama, whose campaign has been all about nothing, is now all about hot air. And he’s a bald-faced demagogue to boot. He wants Don Imus to pay for all the sins of our culture:

 In an interview with ABC News Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., called for the firing of talk radio host Don Imus. Obama said he would never again appear on Imus’ show, which is broadcast on CBS Radio and MSNBC television.

“I understand MSNBC has suspended Mr. Imus,” Obama told ABC News, “but I would also say that there’s nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group. And I would hope that NBC ends up having that same attitude.”

Except when he wants Fox to pay for the sins of our culture.

I can’t believe that Hillary Clinton just keeps looking better and better to me.

A quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger about “climate change” in today’s New York Times (in Thomas Friedman’s behind-the-pay-wall column) caught my eye:

What is “amazing for someone that does not come from a political background like myself,” said Governor Schwarzenegger, is that “this line is being drawn” between Democrats and Republicans on climate change. “You say to yourself: ‘How can it be drawn on the environment?’ But it is.

[[Ostensibly, Schwarzenegger was saying that climate change is a suprapartisan issue, which is true. To the extent that climate change is happening---and it certainly seems to be happening; the question is how quickly and what we can or should do about it---it certainly affects everyone on the planet---but not equally. However, to say that “the debate is over,” which Schwarzenegger also says to Friedman, is a crafty, cunning classic triangulation political maneuver. See Frank Luntz on this matter.]]

Back to the matter at hand, however, which is the politicization of everything in our country and our culture and our national conversation—a horrible path that we should resist, not encourage.

Unfortunately, things do not seem to be going in that direction. Today, for example, Andrew Sullivan suggests that America’s finest writers and thinkers—in this case, Emerson and Thoreau and Emily Dickinson—ought to be used as cudgels in a propaganda war against those who would deny ”climate change.”

In America, in particular, love of the land has long been a part of patriotism. And where religious faith appears, it isn’t necessarily a paean to Gaia. “America, The Beautiful” is an environmentalist hymn. America’s greatest poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, are intoxicated with the natural beauty of this continent. Part of their intoxication is their sense of the divine saturating the natural. Read Thoreau or Emerson and the same American interaction with nature is palpable. Americans, after all, forged a relationship with wilderness more recently than any Europeans. And there is, therefore, a deeply patriotic form of green thought in America that has been overly neglected by environmentalists and that can and should be reclaimed by political leaders, especially on the right.

There is also, it seems to me, an authentically religious approach to the environment that is completely orthodox and defensible.

This is the essence of demagogy, helpfully defined by Wikipedia thus:

Demagogy (Demagoguery) (from Greek demos, “people”, and agogos, “leading”) refers to a political strategy for obtaining and gaining political power by appealing to the popular prejudices, fears and expectations of the public — typically via impassioned rhetoric and propaganda, and often using nationalistic or populist themes. 

Sullivan’s deplorable and grotesque suggestion that we should plunder America’s national treasure—its glorious art and literature—for political purposes is disgusting enough in itself.

That anyone would take Andrew Sullivan, entertaining and popular as he is, seriously on anything having to do with politics is a sad commentary on how far we, as a country and a culture, seem to have fallen.

Shankar Vedantam, writing in the WaPo, has gone and taken all the fun out of the nasty partisanship out of in the blogosphere and beyond—by clarifying what exactly gives it that nasty edge. His piece is called “Disagree about Iraq? You’re Not Just Wrong — You’re Evil” [e.a.]

A wide body of psychological research shows that on any number of hot-button issues, people seem hard-wired to believe the worst about those who disagree with them. Most people can see the humor in such behavior when it doesn’t involve things they care about: If you don’t care about sports, for example, you roll your eyes when fans of one team question the principles and parentage of fans of a rival team.

I’ve gotta say that as amused as I am by the battling in the blogosphere, and as helpful I find it in working through my own passionate (and sometimes overheated) feelings about hot-button issues, I am sorta stunned by the meanness that goes on in every day life these days.

There is not a corner of my life that hasn’t been touched by the hysterical politics of the day

“We are really bad about putting ourselves in other people’s places and looking at the world the way they look at it,” said Glenn D. Reeder, a social psychologist at Illinois State University who recently conducted a study into how supporters and critics of the Iraq war have come to believe entirely different narratives about the war — and about each other. “We find it difficult to grant that other people come to their conclusions in good faith if they reach a conclusion that is different than ours,” he said.

That’s the creepy thing: that friends, family members, colleagues, business associates, and neighbors can turn one one another in an instant; that people can simply begin to think the worst of one another … over politics. There is no end to the troubles that begin when people use politics as a weapon against one another.

Can’t we all get along?

Despite the fact that I share Nick Cohen’s rage at my once-upon-a-time bosom buddies on the left, I am no conservative and certainly not a Republican. So I don’t “have to” speak up. Nevertheless, I stand with Alan Wolfe in his criticisms of Dinesh D’Souza’s lame-brained attack of the “cultural left”:

Like his hero Joe McCarthy, he has no sense of shame. He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible. People on the left, especially those who have been subjects of D’Souza’s previous books, will shrug their shoulders at his latest screed. I look forward to the reaction from decent conservatives and Republicans who will, if they have any sense of honor, distance themselves, quickly and cleanly, from the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.