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'It's not gun power'

Earlier this week, during a Facebook discussion about assault rifles on my friend Bill Strasburg's wall, one of his pro-gun-but-civil friends replied to something I'd written with this nifty artifact of today's bizarre conservative political culture:

"Dan, When the gov't attempts to oppress you, what are you going to use to fight back? We've seen in history, multiple times, where gov'ts have murdered millions of people after they took their guns away."

The reason I like this statement so much is that it represents a core element of the post-rational fantasy world that is currently collapsing around the heads of so many (overwhelmingly white) Americans these days. Despite the fact that our Second Amendment grants us gun rights predicated on the value of a well-regulated militia, the final fallback position for today's pro-gun partisans is the argument that untrained civilians need assault rifles so that when our own government's black helicopters come for us, we'll be able to fight back. Which our Founding Fathers could have specified as their constitutional intention, yet mysteriously didn't.

It makes me wonder. How many white American men my age have based their adult gun politics on the experience of watching the original Red Dawn as teenagers in 1984 and thinking "That looks awesome! WOLVERINES!"

But here's the thing so many of these would-be insurgent guerillas simply fail to grasp, no matter how you explain it. In a world where governments possess spy satelites, drones, wiretaps, sniffers, intelligence databases equipped with Non-Obvious Relationship Analysis agents, plus all manner of convert, overt and law-enforcement firepower, your little Bushmaster looks... cute.

Remember Saddam Hussein's Revolutionary Guard? They had some of the best tanks money could buy from the old Warsaw Pact. They spent the early stages of the first Gulf War hiding those tanks, because tanks just made better targets for our aircraft, and when they finally brought them out to fight, those tanks just made better targets for the guys in my old unit.

Sure, the Iraqis were far more effective as guerrila fighters in the Second Gulf War, but not effective in the sense of "winning." Once our armed forces adopted a more evolved counter-insurgency playbook, those Iraqi "freedom fighters" (or "Islamic terrorists," depending on your politics) were eventually reduced to something approaching irrelevence. 

Which brings us to today's collapsing conservative fantasy world.

My reply to Bill's friend referenced the changing landscape of war and resistance, but concluded with this: "We do have power as citizens, and we need to use it to fight against oppression. But it's not gun power."

If the time ever comes when American citizens must choose between surrendering their liberties and resisting their government, the last thing we'll want to do is pick up assault rifles and take to the streets. Picking up an assault rifle and taking to the streets just makes you a high-resolution target. Holing up in your home with an assault rifle just isolates you for easy removal. Trying to form a group of people with assault rifles just makes you visible to communications monitoring, and then here comes the drone strike. 

Our power as citizens today is primarily based on our ability to communicate in the open and to organize -- loosely -- in full public view. It's the power of information and networked transmission that can bypass mass-media propaganda channels. It's the power of distributed networks, without identifiable nodes of control. Our own Department of Defense created the original Internet as an adaptable communications system that could survive a nuclear attack because it could find a way around whatever portions of the system the enemy destroyed. It works that way for regular people, too.

Corporate interests in the "online market" have pretty much paved over the Web idealism of 2005-07. But it's important that we remember that people power, regardless of whether one lives in a democracy or a dictatorship, is based on information, communication and clarity of purpose. 

In other words, assault rifles don't deter government oppression. People do.

Why Newt won SC: Hatred

 

There's been plenty of punditry on the topic of Newt's "surprise" win in the Palmetto State, but I think it's really quite simple. Bill Clinton won because he felt our pain. Newt Gingrich wins because he channels their hate.

My fellow South Carolinians hate a lot of things, including their prevailing belief that expressing one's hatred in public has been unfairly prohibited by political correctness. There are costs in 21st century America for publicly and explicitly hating blacks, gays, atheists, illegal immigrants, intellectuals and liberals, and so Southern conservatives have learned to speak in code: birth certificates, grades, teleprompters, food stamps, welfare, socialism. The code words express the outlines of their complaint, but not the seething anger that animates their politics.

Not only does Newt understand the immense power of repressed hatred, he also grasps that the one group Americans can still hate publicly without fear of reprisal is "The Media." Newt ran in South Carolina as The Guy Who Really Hates The Media, demonstrating to standing-ovation crowds that when it comes to hating, he's the man.

Of course, Newt has this one little problem nationally, but you know. Politics.

Next stop: Florida.

Romney & Ingraham, 1.20.12: Hoping for bad news

In case the media circus surrounding Newt Gingrich's win in South Carolina yesterday caused you to miss Laura Ingraham's Thursday's radio interview with Mitt Romney, here's a chance to catch up. It's a remarkable glimpse of the dilemma facing the Right today, regardless of its eventual nominee. I transcripted the full text of the most interesting exchange (emphasis mine):

INGRAHAM: Governor, the President and the Vice President, Secretary of the Treasury have said that, look, the economy is getting better, it's creating jobs month to month, it's not growing as fast as anyone wants but it's getting better. You've also noted that there are signs of improvement on the horizon in the economy. How do you answer the President's argument that the economy is getting better in a general election campaign if you yourself are saying that it's getting better?

ROMNEY: Well of course it's getting better. The economy always gets better after a recession. There's always a recovery. There's never been a time anywhere in the world where an economy has never recovered. The question is, has it recovered by virtue of something the President's done, or has he delayed the recovery and made it more painful, and the latter is of course the truth.

The President's policies have made this recession deeper, and it made the recovery more tepid and difficult on the American people. This is the worst recovery we've seen from a recession since Hoover. And President Obama wants to take credit for things getting better. He in fact has made things worse. He's made this recovery take much longer.

But will our economy get better some day? Of course it will. And it will not be thanks to President Obama, it will be in spite of President Obama, and that's of course the message we have to give. If people think the right course for improving an economy is to massively expand debt and the federal government, why they can vote for Barrack Obama. But we know better.

INGRAHAM: But isn't it a hard argument to make if you're saying, like, OK, he inherited this recession, and he took a bunch of steps to try to turn the economy around, and now we're seeing some more jobs, but vote against him anyway? Isn't that a hard argument to make? Is that a stark enough contrast?

ROMNEY: Well, do you have a better one, Laura? (laughs) It just happens to be the truth. (laughs)

We're going to see the numbers in terms of how the economy does. It's very possible, by the way, that the economy will go into a decline again. I mean it's a... I can't tell you that I can predict that it's going to get better, but I think that ... at some point it's going to get better. But I don't think President Obama's helping it. He's been far less effective than he should have been at turning the economy around. I think if we'd elected John McCain we'd be in a much better position today. But do I think that the economy will get better at some point? Yeah. But you know by November of 2012 we'll see if it's gotten better or not.

The key for me is that if you look at what's happened to American employment, the reason that our unemployment rate has come down is because of the number of people who've dropped out of the base of workable, uh, the workforce. And him taking credit for people becoming so desperate that they drop out of the workforce altogether is a very weak position from which he'll be campaigning.

After months of effectively blaming the recession on Obama and "holding him accountable" for the nation's miseries, Republicans are now faced with an increasingly bleak landscape. An improving job market. Surprising growth in the manufacturing sector. Unemployment claims at a four-year low. "Twenty-two consecutive months of private-sector job growth," a White House figure I can't replicate from BLS data, but even its less-sexy alternate isn't bad: job growth for the past 15 consecutive months, and 18 out of the last 22. We added 1.6 million jobs in 2011, and the unemployment rate dropped from 9.1 to 8.5.

To make matters worse for the GOP, despite its hypnotic drumbeat of blaming Obama for everything, the public has consistently continued to acknowledge that our current economic conditions are something the President inheirited, rather than the result of his policies.

The Republican scorched-earth policy in 2010-11 succeeded in limiting the speed of the recovery and damaging Obama's approval ratings (though, interestingly enough, not his favorability ratings), but at an appalling high cost to the nation and the public's view of the GOP as a whole.

And now, after all of this, the economy is improving, the Republican primary season has produced nothing but the prospect of a protracted fight between two unpopular candidates, Occupy Wall Street shifted the national discussion from debt to income inequality, and more than 1 million people in Wisconsin have signed petitions to recall their Republican governor. Reince Priebus must be quietly losing his mind.

After framing 2012 as an economic question, the crisis for the GOP is that they can't publicly cheer against the economy, and the economic data is improving to the point that even their hyper-partisan media supporters can't ignore it. So while they'll cross their fingers and hope for bad news in the coming months, what do they do in the meantime? Based on Romney's response, perhaps they'll draw on a discordant note from the otherwise positive November 2011 jobs report: that the improvement was an accounting trick based on discouraged workers leaving the workforce.

That's not an entirely incorrect observation. Discouraged workers do drop out of the market, and the ratio of job openings to job-seekers remains above 4-to-1 for the third consecutive year. It's a tough recovery, following the worst recession since the Great Depression, which is why getting this stuff right is important.

But the bottom line on Romney's claim that "the reason that our unemployment rate came down is because of the number of people who have dropped out of... the workforce" is that he's flat wrong. The size of that workforce -- the number of Americans who are counted as employed or looking for work -- grew in 2011. Yes, there were month-to-month fluctuations, like the drop emphasized by Republicans in the controversial November jobs report, but the workforce grew again in December, even as the unemployment rate dropped for the fourth consecutive month.

By the Bureau of Labor Statistics' numbers, the Civilian Labor Force stood at 153,250,000 Americans in January 2011. By the end of December, that figure had risen to 153,887,000. That's an increase of 637,000 people. And despite having to include all those new people in the pool of workers, the national unemployment rate dropped by 0.6 percent.

But it gets worse for the GOP.

Republicans have spent three years dismissing out-of-hand any Democratic assessments of federal policies that included estimates of "jobs saved," instead favoring absolute numbers framed from their least-flattering perspective. By opening their critique to say that "Things are improving, but we would have done better," and moving away from their context-free assault on the President's economic numbers, they are moving onto a battefield in which the ground favors the Democrats.   

This doesn't mean Obama wins in the fall. But it does mean the planets are re-aligning.

The Revolution Will Be Commercialized

"Nowadays, for both poles of the political spectrum but especially for the right, politics is a business—the entertainment business. The freak show, as Mark Halperin termed it, has been turned into a fully merchandised product. It was Fox’s Roger Ailes who had the insight that the American right was an underserved market, one with a powerful kind of brand loyalty. Fox News has turned a disaffected segment of the populace into a market, with the fervor and idiosyncratic truth standards of a cult. Wingnut-ism has been monetized, is one admittedly partisan way of looking at it. Palin stokes the disaffection of her constituents and then, with the help of Fox, offers to heal them, for a price. And—surprise—they’re more affluent than most Americans. Fifty-six percent make over $50,000 a year, according to a Times/CBS poll. Running for president is no doubt part of her business model. But forget elections (as many Palin supporters already seem to have done); she’s already the president of an alternative America—and also its CEO."

-- Gabriel Sherman, in his April 25th article about Sarah Palin for New York magazine.

Reid, racism and ... oh dear Gawd

I think I get it. The "uproar" over Sen. Harry Reid's "racist" statements about President Obama is a calculated episode of Republic rage designed to assert a passionate proxy claim: that Republicans have for years caught media hell for statements about black people, and now they want the same standard applied to Democrats. 

So let's set aside Reid's remarks and deal with the GOP grievance for which this controversy is a stand-in. Does the mainstream media apply a double standard on race when it comes to Republicans and Democrats?

Answer: I think so.

But here's the difficult part for Republicans. It's not a context-free double standard, and it's probably not going to go away until party leaders establish a sustained public track record of confronting the racist-wacko wing of the GOP. There are clearly party officials who find this corner of the conservative base frightening and offensive, but political calculus has long required that they trend lightly on their neo-Bircher constituents.

Neither can media attitudes (not to mention public skepticism) about Republican racial credibility be laid entirely at the feet of a few closet Klansmen. Nixon's "Southern Strategy" was a successful racist gambit. Lee Atwater felt so bad about his role in perpetuating that era that his conscience compelled him to a deathbed confession of his political sins. George H.W. Bush gave us Willie Horton, and his son won the Republican nomination in 2000 with the help of push polls in South Carolina that insinuated that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. Earlier this year a majority of Republicans believed that ACORN had stolen the election for Obama. And so on.

Is it fair to tar all Republicans with this brush? No. Think back to the conservatives who confronted the extremists at various campaign rallies in 2008, or even to McCain trying to correct statements made by audience members at town hall gatherings. I'm no fan of Michael Steele, but I certainly don't think he's a black-on-black racist. 

So if you Republicans want an apology for Trent Lott, here's mine. Lott shouldn't have had to resign his Senate leadership post for those comments he made to Strom Thurmond. Dumb? Yes. Firing offense? No. I suspect Lott was just trying to say something nice on the man's100th birthday and probably wasn't thinking too clearly about the fact that he had just publicly endorsed an explicitly racist campaign platform from 1948. Mistakes were made.

But here's the part I wish more Republicans would get. Lott was sacrificed for your party's collective sins since the middle of the 20th century, and the sins of the father will continue to be visited on his children until you confront the cynical political calculus that keeps nine out of 10 black voters in the Democratic camp. 

The deep irony here is that in setting the racism bar so low for Reid, Steele and the Republicans are laying a trap for the next ill-equipped white guy from their party who says something quasi-stupid. As a liberal I can't say I'm upset about that, but my agenda here is pretty simple. In the same way that only Nixon could go to China, only the Republican Party can push the die-hard remnants of white racism out of the mainstream once and for all.

Consider it a practical quest. I sure wouldn't want to be known as the "white party" in a country with our current demographic trends.Not a good long-term branding solution.

*(For the record -- and so as not to hide behind the view-from-nowhere -- I don't consider what I read of Reid's remarks to be racist, or anything less than candid truth. But racism is, like obscenity, in the eye of the beholder... which is part of what makes it such a tiresome subject.)

Conservative Talking Points? There's an app for that!

The continuing death of irony

Poor Cal Thomas. In trying to argue a conservative Christianist case this week against the Iowa Supreme Court's wise decision on gay marriage, he wound up satirizing himself yet again.

When Meredith Willson wrote the wildly popular musical "The Music Man" half a century ago, Harold Hill proclaimed trouble had come to River City, Iowa in the form of a pool hall, which he claimed would corrupt young people unless the local citizens bought the musical instruments he was selling and got their kids into a marching band. He promised that playing music would keep kids from "fritterin' away their mealtime, suppertime, chore time, too" ...

Neither Willson, nor his mythical character Hill, could have foreseen what "trouble" the Iowa Supreme Court has brought on the state (and potentially the nation) when it unanimously ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry "does not substantially further any important government objective"...

(snip)

The battle over same-sex marriage is on the way to being lost. For conservatives who still have faith in the political system to reverse the momentum, you are — to recall Harold Hill — "closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge."

Thomas' problem? If you'll recall your Broadway history, The Music Man is a story about a con man. That "trouble" they had right there in River City? There wasn't any. Just a con man trying to sell musical instruments by manipulating a bunch of rubes via drummed-up fears of a corrupting influence.

Amy Goodman arrested in St. Paul

Journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now is an honest, sensible, principled journalist and American.

What the hell is going on in Minnesota?

The Birth of Palin

(Click on images to see larger size. Click here to download original)

Photoshop cartoons by Dan Conover, via Xark's Creative Commons license.

Which one is smarterer?