Osborne Ink || News that's fairly liberal, but never unbalanced.

Morning Awful: The ACLJ

Aug 5, 2010 Authoritarianism, Culture Wars, Kulturkampf, Morning Awful

Pat Robertson’s “answer” to the ACLU is leading the fight to keep a Muslim YMCA (NOT a mosque) from locating near the site of the 9/11 tragedy. Curiously, the ACLJ and ADL are contradicting themselves to do so:

The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), the legal advocacy group leading the charge, has argued repeatedly and forcefully in federal court on at least three occasions that local land-use laws like historical landmark designations don’t trump the religious and property rights of religious groups to build houses of worship. So has the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which controversially came out in opposition to the mosque last week. The group has filed no less than five amicus briefs in federal court arguing that local governments can’t use zoning laws to prevent the building of churches and synagogues.

The ACLJ is dedicated to culture war, not just in America but overseas:

The ACLJ is characterized by a yearning for apocalyptic confrontation. The ‘A’ should stand for authoritarian.

Tags: aclj, pat robertson

New Culture War Declared

May 31, 2010 Culture Wars, Kulturkampf

At Washington Post, Arthur C. Brooks wants to declare another Kulturkampf…for Chicago-Randian economics:

This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country’s future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise — limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution.

If Brooks means “limited government” as health care costs so out-of-control they threaten every American with bankruptcy, then yes. If he means “limited government” as regulators rubber-stamping British Petroleum memos and counting them as safety paperwork, then yes. If he means a financial system that rewards NINA loans, builds toxic investments disguised as premium investments, and then bets against them, then yes — this style of economics is under threat.

It needs to be. It must compete with a different kind of economic system: one in which energy companies are forced to spend a few of their millions on safety instead of billions on cleanup. I just don’t see that as “statist.” Nor is a managed economy around the corner; the president has not declared Teh Global Socializms™ in effect yet because he never will.

As for large-scale income redistributions: we just finished having one. It was a gigantic upward-transfer of wealth on the backs of America’s poor and middle. If doing away with that is socialism, then Brooks’ Kulturkampf would seem to be off to a bad start; and in fact, he’s already lost. But that is not the point of Kulturkampf. As Orwell put it:

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.

The real tension in Brooks’ world is between the very rich and the rest of us. He wants this social, economic, and political structure to remain intact. His side has held out the promise of wealth — a prosperity gospel — to convince Americans to vote against their own interests. The utter bankruptcy of that promise is the reason why his side has lost; the call to Kulturkampf is a way of trying to outlast events.

Kulturkampf And Rand Paul

May 21, 2010 Culture Wars, Kulturkampf, Lost Cause mythology, Rachel Maddow, Rand Paul, Republicans Meet The Teabag Terror, racism in politics

Kudos to Rachel Maddow for recognizing that tea party extremism is essentially leftover reaction to the Sixties. The word she’s looking for — the noun that describes this kind of regressive politics in which history is re-fought, from Texas schoolbook boards to Kentucky Senate races and passing through the town halls of August 2009 — is Kulturkampf. I prefer the German term because I’m a political scientist, and it sounds far more scientific than “culture war.”

I refer now to a post I wrote years ago, back at the beginning of this particular blog:

Kulturkampf is never a call to conversation; Kulturkampf stops all conversation. Kulturkampf is not a call to debate; it is The End of Debate. Negotiation and resolution are impossible — all that remains possible is annihilation of the other side. The only thing left to say is that “they” are wrong.

And on the related subject of “Lost Cause” mythology in February 2009:

In that dialectic of Kulturkampf, Obama destroyed the unspoken bastion of the GOP’s political theology just by being elected. The GOP sees his agenda — health care for all, peacemaking abroad, and active, competent governance — as a threat to their very ability to wage Kulturkampf. Not for nothing have they fostered mistrust of the very word ‘government’ and conspired to “drown it in a bathtub.” There was no coincidence in the Bush doctrine of incompetent government.

Kulturkampf is both means and end to the Culture Warriors. It is no coincidence that their target demographic has bought 60,000,000 copies of the apocalyptic Left Behind series: this is their political End Times.

The Bush era ended with conservatism in collapse. The tea party was an attempt to create a new American right, but what the astroturfers have actually done is resurrect the settled issues of the past. Rand Paul may be walking back his position on the Civil Rights Act, but he cannot help himself; between now and November he will be the gift that keeps on giving. David Frum describes Paul thusly:

Thus far, Democratic efforts to create a vote-enhancing villain had failed. Now Rand Paul has contrived to volunteer himself. It’s as if his mission had been to walk across an empty room without tripping. Instead, he stepped out of the room, rummaged through a hall closet, found a vacuum cleaner, plugged it in, extended the wire, took a dozen steps backward, and then raced forward to catch his ankle, plunge face forward and break his nose. As unforced errors go, this may be one of the most impressively self-destroying in recent U.S. electoral history.

As a libertarian, Rand is likely in favor of the right of suicide. But thanks to him, the damage will now be felt by others too, who will now be called upon to explain where they stand on every fruitbat idea ever aired in back issues of the Ron Paul newsletter.

And how. Even worse than Paul will be the Paulites. Argue with them, and you’ll find yourself rehashing the Civil Rights Acts, the gold standard, and the question of a central bank that was argued and re-argued throughout American history until the creation of the Federal Reserve. They want to undo history; they are all about going back to some mythical, golden utopia of their imagination. Along the way, they would undo every advance of American society and politics.

Lest you think I exaggerate, look at who Rand Paul hangs out with.

Koch’s Suckers

Apr 18, 2010 Culture Wars, John Birch Society, Kochs, Kulturkampf, Piltdown politics, Sunday Sermon

This is an epic deconstruction from Maddow.

It is the most absurd form of right-wing projection that all of media and government are in the hands of some sinister conspiracy. In fact, that conspiracy theory itself is the conspiracy. Koch Industries was founded by a man who founded many things besides, including the John Birch Society — a subject Maddow has covered before:

JBS was essentially an update of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion formula (edit: see note below). In fact, all the diverse paranoias of political ages past were recycled into JBS. Anti-Mormon, anti-Masonic, and anti-Catholic lies were turned into anti-communist ones, just as fluoridation “mind control” has recently been updated for a back-to-school speech. There’s nothing new in the paranoid universe.

The tinfoil hat set has been around a while. Wealthy right-wing capitalists from Henry Ford to Fred Koch to Don Blankenship have paid good money to keep conspiracy theory alive and kicking. Climate change denialists invoke this bogeyman of Teh Global Socializms™ all the time; it is no accident that Kochs have outspent Exxon in supporting climate change denial shops. Koch money appears at any number of conservative “free market” prop-shops like the CATO institute and even the Ayn Rand cult. That shouldn’t be surprising; Rand’s libertarianism is a natural fit, though a strange bedfellow given her atheism.

Indeed, the conspiracy to keep conspiracy theories alive is itself an old, vast, international coalition of conspiracy creators (Protocols came out of Russia). The Russian connection picks up again with the history of the Koch fortune, which was built with Stalin’s money.

In other words, this right-wing stupid-propagation system is an old thing. Its progenitors have always been hip deep in culture war, and have always served the interests of wealth and power. They have updated ancient hate-speech and paranoid histories to serve in new eras; now they have moved online and into the number one cable network to create the tea party movement.

The direct-mail lists of the John Birch Society have morphed into the email lists of Americans For Prosperity, with JBS growing as a result.

Organized by the powerful and rich, for the powerful and rich, to the benefit of powerful and rich people, the tea party phenomenon is “grounded” in a mindset I call the paranoid universe. First described by Richard Hofstadter, a picture of the leviathan very much resembles its own picture of the world, in which

both the US and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the US government would betray the country’s sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist new world order managed by a “one-world socialist government.”

As close readers of this blog will know, there has been a move away from the non-profit model of astroturfery to the for-profit model. Suckers will pay for their apocalypse porn.

Worse, in the age of email suckers can be born every nanosecond and propagate creatively at will, shooting from Ning.com to Sara Palin’s Facebook page to Twitter and back before truth ever finds out it is needed.

Breaking this conspiracy-to-promote-conspiracy open is the easy part. Getting it into the mainstream consciousness is much harder, but Maddow has done yeoman’s work in making that happen.

ADDING: As per the comments below, I should like to explain “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion formula.” Protocols is a famous case of Piltdown politics; anti-Semitic texts crossed the borders of Europe into Russia. The ideas were published in a volume that found its way to Henry Ford, who propagated the story.

The same method has been applied by the Kochs. Blaming Jews commies for all the world’s ills, a powerful western capitalist promotes the lie that a cabal of Jewish bankers satanic international conspiracy wants to drink the blood of your children wants to create a global collectivist state.

1) Exotic origin

2) Secret knowledge

3) Sinister plan

Or as Hofstadter defined it more broadly, and I summarize:

1) THEY are against you and want to make your life hell

2) THEY control everything; trust no one (except me)

3) THEY are all in it together

Both Ford and Koch supported a fiction — a narrative — that defined a paranoid world, and there are only three moving parts to that narrative. Individual memes  in either body of arcanum vary, but they come from a global continuum of crazy with roots older than the printing press. That’s because memes pass from generation to generation.

This blog post in no way promotes the idea that Kochs and Fords are  somehow mixed up together in a vast, sinister conspiracy; that would be paranoid.

James Baker is Not an Idiot

Mar 31, 2010 Culture Wars

As much as I despise him for his role in the 2000 recount battle, Baker gives the president’s foreign policy accurate accolades. Go here to watch.

By not getting in the boat with lunatics, Baker and Frum are now what’s left of the conservative movement’s intellectual credibility. Which is not saying much, I know.

Sheehan Is Full Of Shit

Mar 19, 2010 Culture Wars, DADT

John Sheehan, (Gen., US Army, Rtd) told a House committee yesterday that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell must remain the policy of the United States military because having open gays turned the Dutch into such wussies they couldn’t prevent the genocide of Srebrenica:

The battalion was understrength, poorly led, and the Serbs came into town, handcuffed the soldiers to the telephone poles, marched the Muslims off, and executed them.

First of all, the 400-odd member Dutch unit in question was facing a Corps-sized element of the Republika Srpska. The attacking unit was probably nowhere near full strength, but we’re talking about a large ratio — about 8 to 1 at the very least.

Second, Srebrenica was what commanders call an “enclave” — completely surrounded — for long enough before the assault that locals were already starving to death. The Dutch couldn’t have been much better-off.

Third, the fact that a NATO unit surrendered when that treaty organization had hundreds of aircraft available to annihilate any attacker speaks volumes about the conduct of that war. Western allies were powerless because they shirked from using power.

And what was it that prevented Bill Clinton from risking American might against the mighty Serbs? Why, yes — it was a wave of isolationism in a Republican-controlled Congress.

Sheehan knows all of this. He’s just being disingenuous lying his ass off.

Scorsese Decoded

Mar 11, 2010 Culture Wars, Directors, Kulturkampf, Scorsese, Twitteratti, movies

Via Roger Ebert’s new voice comes this summation of the director’s work:

Every one seems to be about a man who has realized the dichotomy of his life and making a choice. Once blind, now seeing… for better or worse.

I noticed this years ago. Scorsese’s always taken a very personal approach to the gospel; I was more offended by the Brooklyn accents in “Last Temptation” than the material, which was pretty tame compared to Genesis. I may add it is strange how that movie was vilified, considering Scorsese’s entire life’s work has been a redemption of Christian parable.

Morning Breakfast

Feb 10, 2010 11-Dimensional Chess, Consensus, Culture Wars, Kulturkampf, President Barack Obama, The Peace of 2008

I’m having eggs and bacon and biscuits with toast and coffee. It’s cold outside and dammit, this is the south.

There will be new FDA rules to end the days of misleading nutritional information because Obama is just like Bush.

Frank Rich recognizes the 11-D chess move that is Obama’s DADT strategy:

In another, milder cross-examination — on “Meet the Press” last weekend — John Boehner, the House G.O.P. leader, fended off a question about “don’t ask” with a rhetorical question of his own: “In the middle of two wars and in the middle of this giant security threat, why would we want to get into this debate?” Besides Mullen’s answer — that it is the right thing to do — there’s another, less idealistic reason why President Obama might want to get into it. The debate could blow up in the Republicans’ faces. A protracted battle or filibuster in which they oppose civil rights will end up exposing the deep prejudice at the root of their arguments. That’s not where a party trying to expand beyond its white Dixie base and woo independents wants to be in 2010.

Obama is turning the demographics of social change  into a wedge between Republicans and independent voters as well as the military — which also affirms my thesis that Kulturkampfers have already lost, and that Obama knows exactly how to use opinion polls. When he described an end to the culture wars in his inaugural speech, he wasn’t kidding.

Obama understands the concept of “divide and conquer.” In the politics of consensus, it is called “wheat from chaff.”

Dear Glenn Beck: The Meaning of “Barack”

Feb 5, 2010 Culture Wars, Faux Noise Channel, Faux Noise™, Glenn Beck, Kulturkampf, Obama Derangement Syndrome, Obama antichrist, Obama smears, Obama's middle name, Scare Words, progressives

Okay, that’s it Glenn. You’ve gone too far:

BECK: He chose to use his name, Barack, for a reason. To identify, not with America — you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical? Really? Searching for something to give him any kind of meaning, just as he was searching later in life for religion.

Meanings of barack and derivations: to kneel, to bless, to invoke blessings, to sanction, to be blessed, to enjoy or find pleasure or delight, to ask a blessing, to seek a blessing, to be praised, to be sublime.

A bierka is a pool or small pond, which is a sacred item in desert cultures. Check the Old Testament and you’ll find that Hebrews had some harsh treatments for anyone who poisoned a well; it was considered a crime against humanity.

There are other nouns based of the root barak: blessing, benediction, bounty. There is a negation meaning “misfortune” or “bad luck.” There are several parts of speech made from the root: when an Arab needs congratulations, you should say mabrook.

This information comes from from my taxpayer-supplied copy of the Hans-Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, which still smells of Kuwaiti sand.

Glenn, I understand your problem: you are a clown with a circus. You are forced to top yourself each and every weekday. Every morning, you must pray to god for inspiration to top the boiled frog episode. This would just be entertainment if not for the fact you serve a rotten agenda: to rally racists, idiots, lunatics, and otherwise good Christians to the banner of the Republican Party.

Not that I mind; you’re helping to marginalize your own side. But along the way, you’ve stolen the act of every wacknoggin in the history right-wing media from Alex Jones to Father Coughlin, and now you’re channeling Jack Van Impe. You never know what the hell you’re talking about because your reading list consists of John Bircher paranoia, Atlas Shrugged, and — apparently — Hal Lindsey. Not a far stretch for someone who believes in golden plates and spirit-wives, I know — but still, it would all be fine except for the part where you constantly fill the heads of millions with this kind of dangerous garbage.

Glenn, you’re pandering to religious extremism and invoking the culture wars somewhere they absolutely don’t belong. I get the timing, because religiosity is hot: first there was Brit Hume, then Rush Limbaugh, and of course we have the highly-questionable testimony of Tim Tebow’s mom coming up in the midst of the f***ing SuperBowl this Sunday.

But this is really, really dangerous. You are telling your cult of worshipful know-nothings that the president serves the dark side, and by doing so you encourage very un-Christian divisions. Fear and hate are the tools of darkness. The truth is that YOU serve the dark side, Glenn. Your entire line of attack on Obama is psychological projection, like when you call Obama a “racist” and then pander to racism.

In fact, as long as we’re on the subject of things you project, consider your employer’s cozy relationship with the Chinese communist party. Hey, look — I connected YOU to actual, living, breathing, non-imaginary commies in one step — and without a chalkboard prop to make people think I maybe know what the fuck I’m talking about.

As long as I’m on a roll: the president might have changed his name to Joe Wilson or Bobby Jindal; but he instead chose to keep his birth name “not (as) some assertion of my African roots … not a racial assertion. It was much more of an assertion that I was coming of age. An assertion of being comfortable with the fact that I was different and that I didn’t need to try to fit in in a certain way.”

Get that, Glenn? Barack Hussein Obama kept his name because America is already enlightened enough to vote for a black man with a funny foreign name. Which just goes to show that you’ve already lost. The most you and your colleagues in the wingnutosphere can hope to accomplish is to make it as likely as possible to come to violence — just like the fight against progress did in the 1860s and 1960s.

Oh, which reminds me of one other thing: I’m sick of you pretending to know what “progressive” means. You’ve filled up endless hours of airtime with horse manure about a movement you don’t understand one tiny bit. I’ve done a better job of explaining the history of the progressive movement in a five-minute rock video than you have done in your entire career:

We’ve all been in those mind-numbing, stomach-churning, sleep-inducing conversations with people whose brains seem to be smaller than their mouths. They’re always endlessly long, painfully agonizing and hopelessly futile. I’d attempt to get past the screeners and tell you all this myself, Glenn, but it would be pointless. Just grow the hell up, you stupid racist bastard.

H/t to Simon Malloy at Media Matters

Prejean Flakes Out on Larry King

Nov 12, 2009 Culture Wars, Kulturkampf, Michele Bachmann Crazy Counter™, sarah palin

My favorite part? She’s afraid to take questions from callers. Hello, you’re on a talk show…