The answer is “yes”, but it’s not easy. Former Muslim radical Shiraz Maher describes the travails of trying to stay Muslim and become British at the same time. The recording at the link describes just how hard it is to buck the tide. You know, the tide that doesn’t exist. But before intellectuals in the West congratulate themselves on their modernity, it may be useful to read Howard Fast’s account of his attempts wrench himself from the bosom of the Communist Party — all that he knew; all that he loved; all he belonged to. He wrote:
The “secret” Khrushchev speech, admitting and detailing to the Soviets’ Twentieth Party Congress the terrors of Stalin’s rule, was published in The New York Times on June 5, 1956. The next day the staff of the Daily Worker met. We had all read the speech. The somber terror of it was in our eyes and on our faces, and now the discussion was whether or not to print it in the Worker. In the course of that discussion, something happened that will remain with me until I die. … They all looked at me, but no one broke the silence. We had come to the end of a road. and we knew by what grace we were alive. We knew it – and oh, what a terrible knowledge that was. Each one according to his talent and ability had given his life to the cause of mankind, the brotherhood of man – and we knew that for this the reward was death.
Fast knew that he could no longer believe in Communism. To continue a moment longer was to live a lie, to take the side of murder and of death; even perhaps to be murdered in a purge one’s self. But there was another kind of death that he feared; slower, painful and more protracted. And while he would face it himself the fear of that greater death made many of his comrades remain Communists.
Discipline in the Communist Party is voluntary, but in the silent background is the sword of excommunication. Without the power and religiosity of expulsion, the Communist Party could not exist as it is. Before the moment of the Khrushchev secret speech, expulsion from the Communist Party was akin to eternal damnation, the body alive but the soul already dead for eternity; and so powerful had this conviction of the membership become, and so widely and sincerely had they promulgated it, that millions of non-Communists considered anyone who bore the label of expulsion from the Party as a lost and damned soul, a corrupt and dangerous human being who no longer owned the right of admission to the society of men of good will.
To a sincere and devoted Communist, expulsion was almost as bad as death – and sometimes worse. It is almost impossible to convey to many people what the total implication of expulsion meant. For almost a generation, several million Americans of good will accepted the fact that a man was expelled from the Communist Party either for being a police spy or for utter venality and degeneration of character. Such an expelled person became outcast, not only among Party members but among a circle of progressives a dozen times larger than the Party itself. This was a concept deliberately nurtured and put forward by every Communist Party on earth; for it was basic to Party discipline.
Without this ritual of expulsion and its accompanying mythology, the Communist Party would be something else indeed. The expelled Communist thus became the leper-heretic of today, living on under an interdiction unique since medieval times.
The vast majority of true believers are not, as some would suppose, the soccer moms attending their Sunday church and leading their ordinary lives the rest of the week. The real compulsive joiners are those must attend the church of the co-op, pray at the shrine of the Global Warming, join political Action Wires and feel the “need to connect” without which their lives have no meaning. In the service of the new secular faiths all the old forms have been given new names. The medieval procession, sans the candles but with the molotov cocktail, has become the modern protest rally. Indulgences are back as carbon credits. Instead of a bishop on a distant cathedral altar, there is an orator before Greek columns at Invesco Field.
It’s hard to accept that we are not always the people we’ve been waiting for. For many people, freedom and doubt are unbearable burdens. Who would leave the throng and wander the night and in the stillness listen for the whisper of God?
Tip Jar.
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124 Comments
1. George:I’m off topic and I’m sorry. But the Federal Government is in the process of making the biggest power grab in US history. It is a complete take over of the US economy giving the unelected Paulson and his elite banker buddies dictatorial powers. And putting the US taxpayer on the hook to bail out irresponsible borrowers and lenders across the globe. It is immoral, unconstitutional, and doomed to fail in everything except the increase of government power.
I’m posting this here because I have a great admiration for Wretchard’s writing and thought, and respect for the posters that read and comment. I’m am curious to know other people’s take on this.
Sep 21, 2008 - 8:12 pm 2. Mark:Howard Fast wrote:
“The expelled Communist thus became the leper-heretic of today, living on under an interdiction unique since medieval times.”
Yes, but not so unique. Every group enforces its orthodoxy. The Sons of Liberty weren’t above some tarring and feathering.
In polite society today, at least my polite society, being a Republican is something akin o being a leper. And there’s no Father Damien to care for the unclean.
Howard Fast’s ‘April Morning’ is a fine novel about April 19, 1775.
Sep 21, 2008 - 8:33 pm 3. Dave:To a lesser degreee, the Fast experience with the communists is still going on today, with Democrats.
The fear of expulsion, or at least denunciation, is what keeps moveon.org, codepink, HuffPO, democratic underground ad anuseum in control of the party machinery.
The fear of being “read out of meeting” sometimes keeps people on the straight and narrow. But all too ofter it serves to secure compliance with the unholy.
Sep 21, 2008 - 8:39 pm 4. Mad Fiddler:Anyone who’s watched Disney’s “Mary Poppins” will probably have had the experience of being taught prudently to place our childhood pennies into a savings account in order to begin earning interest. How many times have we had it explained by condescending adults and advisers that money should never be left idle, simply sitting in an account?
NO, it must be “re-invested,” “loaned out” to deserving enterpreneurs, to guarantee that more interest revenues be generated, while creating more wealth and more deposits into savings accounts which can in their turn be loaned out to other enterprising business folk to be put to useful work, et cetera ad infinitum.
This is the basis of the “Fractional Reserve Banking System” that the Western world has been using for a thousand years and more. The depositor takes for granted that the money she placed in the bank will be available when she needs it. But in fact, most of that is immediately made available to be loaned out to others. Only a relatively tiny fraction of the bank’s cash assets are actually kept on hand at any time – enough to satisfy the normal needs of customers needing cash, plus some small cash reserve for unexpected demands. Meanwhile, that money is simultaneously regarded as being guaranteed available to those debtors who have taken out loans or credit lines from the same bank or loan association.
Gets weirder and weirder as closer you look.
Sep 21, 2008 - 8:40 pm 5. Mad Fiddler:Hmmm. musta been a comment meant for another place…
Sep 21, 2008 - 8:41 pm 6. coyotl:In some countries, one can’t stop being a Muslim anymore than one can seek peace with the Jews. That would be Islamist countries like Iraq, which Wretchard believes is some sort of liberal democracy led by the benevolent Nouri al-Maliki. Wretchard, when will you wake up?
Iraqi’s warmth to Israel exacts a heavy price Associated Press/AP Online
September 22nd, 2008
By SAMEER N. YACOUB and VANESSA GERA
BAGHDAD – First his two sons were murdered. Now he faces prosecution. The reason for Mithal al-Alusi’s troubles? Visiting Israel and advocating peace with the Jewish state – something Iraq’s leaders refuse to consider.
The Iraqi is at the center of a political storm after his fellow lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to strip him of his immunity and allow his prosecution for visiting Israel – a crime punishable by death under a 1950s-era law. Such a fate is unlikely for al-Alusi, though he may lose his party’s sole seat in parliament.
Because he had visited Israel, many Iraqis assume the maverick legislator was the real target of the assassins who killed his sons in 2005 while he escaped unharmed.
Now he is in trouble for again visiting Israel and attending a conference a week ago at the International Institute for Counterterrorism.
“He wasn’t set to speak, but he was in the audience and conversed with a lecturer on a panel about insurgency and terrorism in Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel,” said conference organizer Eitan Azani. “We didn’t invite him. He came on his own initiative.”
Al-Alusi has a German passport, allowing him to travel without visa restrictions imposed on other Iraqis. Lawmakers accused him of humiliating the nation with a trip to the “enemy” state.
The uproar shows how far Iraq has moved from the early U.S. goal of creating a democracy that would make peace with Israel and remove a critical force from the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The U.S. Embassy declined comment. “It is an issue for the Iraqi parliament, not the U.S. Mission to Iraq,” said spokesman Armand Cucciniello.
“What has happened was a catastrophe for democracy,” Al-Alusi told The Associated Press in an interview in his Baghdad home. “Within an hour’s time, the parliament became the policeman, the investigator, the judge, the government and the law. It was a sham trial.”
Sep 21, 2008 - 8:47 pm 7. weSwinger:Sorry George, but straight libertarianism is never going to be the answer to a globalized world economy. It was US politicians that started the trouble with the Community Reinvestment Act, and our financial engineers who thought they could inoculate those forced loans against default risk. The US got to enjoy the economic boom times resulting from over-leveraging, and now we will pay the piper. These last weeks have been the Bush administration’s “finest hour”. The risk of financial market implosion was real and imminent. And they stepped up before it was too late. (Also, the assets the government took on are likely to pay for themselves. Consider the size of the monthly premium dollars flowing into AIG.) You (and other BC’ers need to read Amity Shlae’s history of the Great Depression to see how necessary positive government action is to prevent bank runs and promote confidence in markets. (Rather than the negative actions taken by Hoover and Roosevelt.)
Fast’s piece above makes it clear that the Depression brought many “cadres” into the Communist Party itself, and created a lot of sympathetic fellow travelers. The actions of the Bush administration may have averted another such episode – why do you think Obama &co. were cheering the market turmoil so fervently? They would have used a market crater to return us to their “good old days” – the Thirties. Trying to get back to the thread. . .
Sep 21, 2008 - 8:47 pm 8. Benj:Wretch’s reach back to Howard Fast and the Cold War seems a bridge too far. Though the subject of Communist Party people is always interesting. (There’s a nice summation of Solzhenitsyn’s penetrating line on all that here, along with a half-come-back from another Nobelist. http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2008/08/when_alexander.html)
But if we’re going to go back to the 50’s (and beyond), there’s another American writer out of the past who seems a lot more relevant than Howard Fast. Sarah Palin quoted the words of Westbrook Pegler approvingly in her Convention speech, though she didn’t name him (just invoked a “writer”). Remember that line re the moral superiority of America’s small towns where we “grow good people.” That was the Pegler note. He was piece a work. A massively popular columnist for tabloids who spent his life cultivating the paranoid Ken-equivalents of his own time. Palin started out as a critic of Euro-fascism. Freaked over the New Deal. Ended up an American fascist who was tight with the the White Citizens’ Councils of the segregated South. As Bobby Kennedy’s kid pointed out after Palin spoke, Pegler loudly expressed his hope (back in the mid-60s) that “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter [Bobby Kennedy's] spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.”
That Palin would invoke the words of such a monster is telling. My guess is that she didn’t have a clue about who she was quoting (though the Bush speechwriter who wrote her speech surely did). Cluelessness, though, is not the best defence…
Sep 21, 2008 - 8:49 pm 9. wretchard:It is a complete take over of the US economy giving the unelected Paulson and his elite banker buddies dictatorial powers. And putting the US taxpayer on the hook to bail out irresponsible borrowers and lenders across the globe. It is immoral, unconstitutional, and doomed to fail in everything except the increase of government power.
There may be good temporary reasons for the bailout associated with preventing the collapse of the financial system (and destroying value by stopping a going concern) but I don’t think Paulson and friends are in a position to make the case. They belong to a fraternity whose existential interests are threatened and have an inherent conflict of interest. Any solution to the financial crisis must do two things: buy the system time to write down worthless paper in an orderly way; and bankrupt the people who made bad management choices. Bailing out the institution (and the people) who generated these losses means they can repeat the fiasco again. They’ve struck out and should leave the field.
But this is a situation for oversight, if any, yet I’m worried that the overseers are no better themselves than what they have oversight of. Just how much wisdom Congress will bring … Part of the problem of the last decade is that regulation has often meant enforcing compliance. I’ve heard that a considerble effort in many companies is eaten up by checking boxes rather than making good business decisions. I’ve heard that a lot of consulting work is geared towards keeping things compliant rather than profitable. Enacting regulation is like deputizing a private sector employee to work as a bureaucrat. While you may theoretically work for a company, you really carrying out a regulatory function.
So while I think there may be some rational reason for a temporary bailout; I’m not confident that the foxes can be left in charge of the chicken coop or that bringing in more oversight won’t just include the weasels and stoats too.
Sep 21, 2008 - 8:58 pm 10. hdgreene:By the time I was in tenth grade I had read three or four of Howard Fast’s books without realizing he was a Communist (but I was something of a pinko myself then). Interesting that it took until 1956 for his questioning of “the cause” to begin.
I also read Upton Sinclair around the same time, who was a committed Socialist. And yet he was very skeptical of Communists in books he wrote in the late 1930’s and 1940s — not quite at the “George Orwell” level but close. Of course Upton had run with the pack for decades. He even fronted for the left in the matter of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Cause Celebre of his day. From the Wikis:
In 2005, a 1929 letter from Upton Sinclair to his attorney John Beardsley, Esq., was publicized (having been found in an auction warehouse ten years earlier) in which Sinclair revealed that he was told at the time he wrote his book Boston, that both men were guilty. Some years after the trial Sinclair met with Sacco and Vanzetti’s attorney Fred Moore.
Sinclair revealed that after the executions, he had talked to Moore in a Denver hotel. “Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth, …He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them. …I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point, I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case”. Sinclair furthermore said that he was “completely naïve about the case, having accepted the defence propaganda completely.”[22] A trove of additional papers in Sinclair’s archives at Indiana University show the ethical quandary that confronted him.[23]
Well, Upton seems to have gotten over it but I don’t think he was quite as trusting of the Marxist brothers after that.
Of course some folks would prefer their eyes be plucked out rather than opened. I have often noticed that a leftist can be quiet mature and accomplished in a chosen field of endeavor but revert to a kind of spoiled adolescence when talking politics.
At some point I decided that they likely formed their political point of view in adolescence and then began to self identify as a “caring person of the left.” At the micro level — their own life — they would encounter problems and challenges and adjust accordingly. But at the Macro level — the level of their ideology — they would rationalize the problems away or simply change the subject. They would never quite mature in their political thought.
I had noticed this in myself. Reading Sinclair when I was thirteen and fourteen, I decided I was a Socialist and even told my friends of my commitment. Soon I was turning away all doubt. But I caught myself doing that and I thought: if I want to reorganize the world on Socialist principles maybe I should think it through — follow up on the doubts instead of burying them. I would even read the National Review (as well as “The Nation” and TNR) from time to time. Soon I was no longer socialist.
I think Howard Fast, a splendid writer (or so I thought at the time) must have buried a lot of doubts in an unmarked mass grave somewhere.
Sep 21, 2008 - 9:00 pm 11. Dave:Benj: I am from a small town. According to your “reasoning”, we do not grow good people there because Westbrook Pegler said otherwise. We would only grow good people if Westbrook Pegler said we grew bad people.
The truth of the matter is that both you and Pegler are irrelevant. We grow what we grow regardless of what he said or you now say.
You are the only one who lets his opinions be shaped by the rantings of a deceased rabble-rouser.
By the way, your assertion that the Palin speechwriter knew/was inspired by Pegler is right out of HIS playbook.
Also, who was the author who sued Pegler
Sep 21, 2008 - 9:13 pm 12. ledger:and was awarded $1 in damages? Not to mention a whole lot more in punitive damages.
Come on come on. Quick answer. No fair googling now.
“Can a person stop being a Muslim?”
Good question.
How did Obama do it?
Sep 21, 2008 - 9:31 pm 13. George:weSwinger – thanks for tying bring me at least somewhat back on topic. I agree that a collapse of this kind pushes people toward communism – or perhaps just faster toward whatever radical direction they were already heading. The financial collapse of Weimar Germany was certainly blessing to Hitler.
Wretchard – thanks. I agree with you about the foxes and the hen house. I don’t agree that there is anything that the government can do in this situation. When credit expansion ends, and credit contraction begins it’s too late. This contraction has only just begun and will be unstoppable. The government “responses” will all be self-serving. They will increase government power and payoff cronies.
I completely disagree with weSwinger’s statement that a globalized economy means we must abandon liberty. A globalized economy is all the more reason for laissez-faire. It is far too complex to be managed. The attempt at managing has landed us exactly where we are now. And because this “management” has been coordinated across the globe, the entire global economy is about to implode – as opposed to just one country. It’s one global economic noose for one global economic neck to paraphrase Ayn Rand.
Sep 21, 2008 - 9:44 pm 14. Don:OMG is this one of those actual Troll take overs I was just reading about…where someone insists on posting off topic to sort of take over the board…It wouldn’t be half funny but ‘cept the topic itself is a 3/4 topic take over Can you stop being a Muslim well the commies couldn’t stop and that’s why carbon new age ice credits…sorry charlie poorly written, you just pealed that one off without an edit, now didn’t ‘cha, boy…
Sep 21, 2008 - 10:04 pm 15. Nomenklatura:I just saw a couple of academics over at Bloggingheads discussing modern student culture. They made some reasonable points.
The most interesting was about how, even though professors may push a Marxist perspective just as much as they used to, the impact on their students today seems to be just about zero. One observed that the students are more heavily invested in their computers, clubs and sports than in their academic work, and may in some sense have created a ‘parallel university’ which is theirs rather than their professors’.
This struck me as a good thing. I think it’s largely powered by cellphones and web-enabled social networking. I suspect it’s also critical that these students are able to be in college and yet still stay in close touch with their families (I know many students who talk with their parents via cell phone more than once a day).
The life path for many students used to involve going to college, where they would be effectively cut off from their existing connections and molded by the academic environment and their supervisors. This created a whole generations who were severely dependent on the left-tilting social networks they acquired at that time, and remained for decades afterwards exposed to threats of excommunication.
Hopefully students today are being helped by technology to acquire a more diversified social identity, which can form the basis for a somewhat more self-reliant future.
Sep 21, 2008 - 10:14 pm 16. Konyok:It’s not really a facile question in regards to Senator Obama.
As the son of a muslim and the stepson of a muslim, and having received some koranic instruction in Indonesia, Barack Hussein Obama is considered muslim by islamic law; ie. he would not be required to convert before being allowed to worship in a mosque.
Because Senator Obama calls himself christian, he could be denounced as an apostate.
This is NOT puffery. Ask any practicing muslim that you know.
Sep 21, 2008 - 10:17 pm 17. George:Ok how about this for on topic: The post is about deeply deluded, indoctrinated people running up against evidence contrary to their beliefs. This new evidence is overpowering, forcing them to reexamine their whole lives and world view as a result.
That is kind of like what is going to happen when a fed(s) fueled global credit expansion finally drives enough people to the brink of insolvency and a few right over it. All of the sudden reality sets in. What is really of value? How much cash can I lay my hands on? Should I buy gold? We look back on our lives and wonder how we ever thought that restructuring a bunch of liar loans into a CMO could create AAA paper. What were we smoking? Now get serious, get cash. And the deflation feeds itself until the de-leveraging is done.
What is relevant here is what did these former commies turn to when reality set in for them? Some went pure nihilist. Others reexamined the arguments of the other side and became some form of capitalist/individualist. But in the collapse of a global credit expansion how many people really understand what the “sides” are? I see this as a damning indictment of monetary policy and reaffirmation of the necessity of a gold standard and of keeping the government out of the economy. Others will see it as the result of years of deregulation and reganomics. Many poor souls will conclude that both communism and now capitalism have utterly failed. These will be fodder for the nearest demagogue.
Sep 21, 2008 - 10:21 pm 18. Don:Hey Nomen, that was a very positive view of the future, and I thank you, Other than an enhanced type of safety for women, I have often wondered about the impact of constant communication, we saw some of that with 9/11, I think you are right, and with bloggers constantly exposing the rhetoric of the left to other than the intended audience, wider communication all around is a good thing
Sep 21, 2008 - 10:23 pm 19. NahnCee:I have absolute faith in capitalism and greed, which means necessarily that a government take-over of ways to make money *must* be temporary or a lot of very bright and energetic people are going to start looking for ways to overthrow that government.
Sep 21, 2008 - 10:42 pm 20. Mad Fiddler:Read Witness by Whitaker Chambers.
great testimony of a communist who awoke and changed.
Sep 21, 2008 - 11:06 pm 21. wretchard:One of the reasons Whitaker Chambers broke with the Communist Party was the murder of Juliet Poyntz, “a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), a founding member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). After resigning from active work with the Party, she disappeared in 1937, never to be seen again, and is believed by several sources to have been abducted and murdered by a Soviet NKVD assassination squad.” Chambers, unlike the fellow travelers and useful fools, was close enough to the unvarnished Party to know how the game was played.
The deadly game was alive and well during the Age of Aquarius. Beneath the veneer of Peace and Love, it was all business. Commie business. One of the reasons David Horowitz broke with the Left was in response to the murder of Betty Van Patter by the Black Panthers.
I’ve described my own experiences with the killers on the Left too often to repeat here. The first safe house I ran — a one room affair that was hardly more than a closet — became the hiding place of two guys in their early 20s who had escaped a purge by machinegunning in a cane field from which they were the only survivors. To give you an idea of the dimensions of my “safe house” it was 10 foot long by 3 1/2 feet by 8 foot high. In it were a wooden bed, a stencil cutting machine, a hotplate and single 100 watt bulb which hung from the ceiling. That furniture, two fugitives and myself were somehow crammed into this space, in which I also managed to cook. To solve the sleeping problem I raised the bed on cinder blocks so that one could sleep on the bed, the second under it while I slept between the bed and the wall. Them were fun days.
But seriously, don’t assume Dohrn, Ayers and company are effete nothings. They mean what they say.
Sep 21, 2008 - 11:26 pm 22. bobal:ah, jeez…absolute faith in….greed. Well ya got to choose a master to serve, I quess, ya can’t serve two.
Sep 22, 2008 - 12:21 am 23. fedya:@Nomenklatura:
….even though professors may push a Marxist perspective just as much as they used to, the impact on their students today seems to be just about zero.
@wretchard:
i?But seriously, don’t assume Dohrn, Ayers and company are effete nothings. They mean what they say.
Yes, they really do mean it, and it “gets them off”, if that circumlocution can mean what it obviously means.
Excellent thread, my life is passing before my ai-yi-eyez!
So, integrating [synthesizing?] these thread droplets, I’d like to add an observation. The non-Leninist Left has never and will never deal with Stalin and Khruschyov, they’re above it, right? Right! However, as Mr. Fast and others so authentically expressed, the truth of Stalin and the facts of the CP were inseperable. Thus we have the need for a “New Left” in the ’60’s. Bill Ayers and company were seeking a way to promote revolutionary “praxis” without the problematic dimension of “Saturn Eating His Children” [see Goya's engraving re: France in Spain under Napoleon] that has vexed revolutionaries since the French secularized Revolution.
The temporary adjustment, based first of all on bald Hope, and later on Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and perhaps most of all the useful obfuscations of them thar Frenchified Poste-Modernies [whew!] was to create a model of revolutionary vanguardism that eschewed the unpleasant need for Revolutionay Murder. Why, it even put the onus on revolutionary murder on the insatiable Oppressed!
Whoo-hoo! Now we can make f******* BLOODY revolution by manipulating those primitives in the 3rd whirled to slit teh throats, etc.
We, of course, remain pure. We are not Bourgeoises, because we be’z teh Revolutionares. Just a bunch of White Europeans expiating our “guilt” by sacrificing them darkies.
Gramsci-ite Marxism is the single worst manifestation of Racism ever seen. It USES racism, etc., to fight Capitalism and Christianity in the expectation that the successsful completion of that Struggle will be some really cool freedom… or whatever, something really, really cool, you know?
How the Left has lost her moorings and her stature! How we have lost ours.
I say fight, compatriots! It will be bloody awful and there is no guarantee of victory, but death is preferable to submission!
Sep 22, 2008 - 12:27 am 24. Wadeusaf:Benj:
“Pegler (not Palin) started out as a critic of Euro-fascism. Freaked over the New Deal. Ended up an American fascist(?) who was tight with the the White Citizens’ Councils of the segregated South.”
Smacks of smear. Why does freaking out over the New Deal lead one to be an American fascist? I fail to see the connection. Perhaps it was the New Deal that allowed him to dabble in Anti Semitism, from which ailment I do not know if he ever recovered. But neither “sin” makes him a monster, rather a part of the fabric and flavor of American thought during his writing career, He died in 1962, so his comment about bobby K. was perhaps referenced to the Bay of Pigs(sans lipstick, I’m certain), a venture over which much ill will was launched).
That you would object to the invocation of his words is telling. As you said, Clue-less-ness is not always the best defence. PC stinks.
Sep 22, 2008 - 12:52 am 25. fedya:…which is to say, that teh Revolutionaire wants desperately to have the Reactionaries Murder him. It is so damned tawdry to have one’s own “Comrades” kill one, is it not?
Too bad the beneficiaries of our Romantic Revolutionary Lives don’t appreciate us, no? Well, we run the US economy to preserve our coupon-clipping, Trust Fund lifestyles thru the Damnocrats, do we not? That certainly must count for SOMETHING, does it not?
We do deserve our State priviledges as much as we ostensibly eschew our “white skin priviledges”, do we not?
Why, Lord, must I pay attention to this grotesque evil, why?
Sep 22, 2008 - 12:57 am 26. fedya:@Wadeusaf:
Why do you bother?
Sep 22, 2008 - 12:59 am 27. Paul:Seems to me that this financial crisis was caused by more than just bad management choices.
The ones who should be punished are the ones that gamed the system knowing their schemes would eventually someday go really bad and threaten to take down the whole financial system. But maybe that was the point in the first place. .
At the top are the leftist Clinton Adminstration democrats who turned fannie, freddie and ginnie into another form of welfare. Subprime lending is, was and will always be a bad idea. It defies natural human behavior to expect that a high percentage of loans without sufficient collateral or a sufficient income to cover the loan payments , won’t go bad. I ‘ve read ( according to I believe either Calculated Risk or Big Picture ) that the percentage of subprime loans went from almost nothing in the late ninteies to almost 23% today. Whoa! I don’t know if that figure is correct but anything close to that percentage couldn’t last.
Other Bad guys:
THE FANNIE MAE BUNCH. Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick et al, at Fannie Mae who made millions gaming the system. It seems they are also ones that expanded Fannie into issuing it’s own securities based on mortgages it held, rather than bundling other banks mortgages and selling them.
There are a lot of questions on what happened at Fannie Mae. Why were foreign powers buying in such great bulk these questionable Fannie Securities backed implicitly by the Federal Government?
If there were to be low quality loans backed by Fannie , why weren’t these lesser loans separated and rated by their collateral, loan size, FICO scores, and loan payment to income ratios.
RINOS AND DEMOCRATS WHO PROTECTED FANNIE AND FREDDIE FROM REFORM. A lot of people in government knew there was a big problem. Bush since 2003, McCain since 2005 have repeatedly been pushing for reform. It was all blocked.
THE MEDIA. Just like the Black Panther murders, stories unfavorable to the left are either unwritten or untold.
THE CORRUPT APPRAISERS, AND THEIR SLEAZY LOAN BROKER/ BANKER FRIENDS. Here is LA County, ( Number 1 on the foreclosure hit parade), there are a huge number of loans with no money down that are way over, and were always even at the peak, way over the value of the property. There are clearly many, many good trustworthy appraisers, loan brokers and bankers. But there was clearly a whole lot of scams going on, particularly in conventional mortages that could be sold to Fannie, where unsubstantiated loans were given to people tied to the bankers in some way. The problem for Wall Street is there is no way of telling this after the fact without a very expensive investigation.
THE BIG WALL STREET FIRMS. Too many firms deemed by their own management “too big to fail”, engaged in risky practices in huge hedge funds, and leveraging these mortgage backed securities over 100 to one. The real problem was that these firms thought they could never lose and there was no risk for them. That led to very risky behavior and eventually bankruptcy for at least a few.
The financial markets are in a tough spot. The bailout is probably necessary, but this bailout is also ripe for wholesale abuse on many levels. I don’t expect the guys responsible for this current to be punished. I only hope this bailout doesn’t create an even bigger mess.
Sep 22, 2008 - 1:02 am 28. fedya:@Nomenklatura:
the impact on their students today seems to be just about zero.
Myself, with a kid in a top level Left-Coast University, I get more jazzed when The Kid shows some sense than I was jazzed by Sarah Palin, and that is saying something!
When “The Kid” shows evidence of submission to teh Murxi-mistes, well, I feel like an s***, but what can I do?
Killing Marxists in the USA is counter-productive. Elsewhere, well, that’s different, isn’t it (equal opportunity racial non-discrimination under violence, right?) If New Left Revolutionnaires are brutal thugs, are they not somewhat inexperienced yet?
Now = easy pickin’
Later = not so easy…
You don’t think Carl Davidson is thinking in these terms? Just a rhetorical question, dude, of course he is.
Sep 22, 2008 - 1:12 am 29. wretchard:The ones who should be punished are the ones that gamed the system knowing their schemes would eventually someday go really bad and threaten to take down the whole financial system. But maybe that was the point in the first place.
The 2008 elections aren’t really about McCain versus Obama or vice versa, except superficially. You can make the case that these elections are about the outsiders versus the insiders — and that the insiders are out of control, able to pursue their own narrow financial, cultural and even foreign policy agendas without restraint. Can the outsiders resore sanity through electoral revolution? Or is the electorate too fragmented to mount an effective response? Maybe even crisis only creates more opportunity for the players. Makes it easier to kick open the vault door, easier to send out the taxman. They may soon get the sense that there’s really nothing to stop them. Is there something to stop them? I wonder.
Sep 22, 2008 - 1:16 am 30. fedya:@Paul:
Murder, bloody Murder, is (a) too easy, and (b) too counterproductive.
Well, I didn’t really want to commit Murder after all. Neither did/does The New Left.
Originalist Muslims, well, that’s another matter entirely… hence their fascination for Our Left…
Sep 22, 2008 - 1:17 am 31. fedya:@Wretchard:
and that the insiders are out of control, able to pursue their own narrow financial, cultural and even foreign policy agendas without restraint.
Confounding that evil is a faint glimmer of hope presented by Sarah Palin’s candidacy, is it not?
Sep 22, 2008 - 1:20 am 32. wretchard:Newt Gingrich makes the case against the bailout.
Sep 22, 2008 - 2:54 am 33. peterike:Benj: Wretch’s reach back to Howard Fast and the Cold War seems a bridge too far.
Rather, it is a bridge back to that very certain somewhere from whence Obama derives. The bridge to the nowhere of his soul, if you will.
Nomenklatura: The most interesting was about how, even though professors may push a Marxist perspective just as much as they used to, the impact on their students today seems to be just about zero.
Disagree. While the kiddies don’t go around spouting Lenin or carrying Mao’s little red book anymore, the professoriat has pulled off a far greater heist. On many a campus, being “progressive” is cool. Being Replican is akin to being a leper, an evil leper. And actually, this attitude is already prevalent in high school. The peer pressure is almost insurmountable.
Huge numbers of people vote based on how they think their peer group will vote. They support the candidate that will ensure they aren’t mocked or rejected. This has been shown countless times by surveys that attempt to match a person’s views with the candidate they plan to vote for, finding that very often people are voting for the guy that doesn’t agree with them. But hey, he’s the cool guy.
I’ve always wondered why, exactly, Conservatives could never manage to make themselves into the cool kids. I mean, what on earth could be more rebellious on a college campus today than to be a Bush supporter?
Sep 22, 2008 - 4:37 am 34. hdgreene:These real estate bubbles are fed by the Progressive Income Tax and the Mortgage Interest Deduction. It forces more money into high end real estate investments as a tax shelter. This was once a favor to the Real Estate and Construction industry who are now dependent on the tax fix. But it shifts resources “up market” and away from more modestly priced housing. This is the way I put it: fifty years ago families had five children and two or three bedrooms. Now they have one or two children and five bedrooms (and three bathrooms). In this case, the house is not a shelter for the family, it is a shelter from taxes.
A simple (and politically doable) reform might be to turn the mortgage deduction into a tax credit aimed at creating savings for a large down payment for a modest first house — say $25,000 to $35,000 depending on the housing market in the area. This would increase the value of older homes and favor those the system is promoted as helping (but doesn’t). And it would quit feeding real estate bubbles (this is the third one I can remember. We are now setting up the fourth). Of course, the top Marginal Income Tax rates would have to be cut. I would recommend a flat tax. I can dream, can’t I?
Can a person stop being a real estate speculator? Can a politician stop being, well, a politician?
Sep 22, 2008 - 5:10 am 35. wretchard:Far more Reds died at the hand of the Party than by their declared enemies, like the FBI and CIA, who were by comparison ineffectual. A book about the life of Isiah Oggins describes what befell an American who spied on his country for Stalin. “Despite long, loyal service, he was arrested and sent to an Arctic gulag and despite frantic pleas for Oggins’s release from his wife, and more modest U.S. government efforts, the Soviets murdered Oggins in 1947 to keep his story from getting out.” It is particularly ironic that his wife, also a Communist, hoped the US government could save him. It couldn’t.
Probability alone almost guarantees that today there must be a considerable number of such people government, the media and in business who are secretly in the service of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda, drug cartels, Chavez, Castro and God knows what else. Forget the so-called “Christianists”. These are the real true believers.
Sep 22, 2008 - 5:40 am 36. Alexis:benj:
I think there’s more than an off-chance that Sarah Palin is not aware of Mr. Pegler, any more than she’s aware of the actual history of the Pledge of Allegiance. Her speechwriter probably slipped it in, and it probably sounded good to her.
Do we grow good people in our small towns? Yes. We grow some rotten apples too, and I know some of them. I’m related to some of them. And yet, this is a trap Barack Obama set up for himself. It’s a bad idea to talk about Kansas as being America’s “heartland”, as it comes across as condescending schmaltzy kitsch. Although growing up in a Seattle suburb and attending the local Unitarian church may not have the romance of “Kansas” as the land of the virginal and naive, it would have been more honest. Besides, the real Kansas does have its share of corruption.
Sarah Palin comes across as authentic, and for many leftists, she is authentically somebody they don’t like. She is particularly popular among right-wing female political activists in rural areas, the kind of women you might find at an anti-abotion rally. Women like her aren’t common; after all, it is the rare politician who goes out of her way to look like Marge Simpson. Still, there are strong similarities between Sarah Palin and many politically active right-wing women throughout the Midwest.
Just as Barack Obama’s popularity is a two-edged sword, the same can be said about Sarah Palin. I think John McCain is betting that Obama supporters won’t be able to restrain themselves from enthusiastically attacking Sarah Palin. Think of Sarah Palin as a conservative version of Ann Richards. She didn’t really win the governor’s race in Texas. Clayton Williams lost it because he didn’t act like a gentleman.
As much as I admire her, I do think Sarah Palin should be asked if the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster ought to have its curriculum taught in our public schools.
Sep 22, 2008 - 7:37 am 37. Charles:If Palin is elected VP, then you’ll see you’ll see just how shrewd all the many T Boone Pickens ads have been. Palin set up the 40 billion dollar gas pipeline deal in Alaska.
She’s already staked out a position as being interested in energy policy. Likely is she’ll go for Pickens idea.
If the US could stop shipping 700 billion dollars overseas annually in just a few short years by shifting over to gas for vehicles–then much of the underlying monetary tension would be resolved. As well, a lot of bad guys would be defunded.
That too would buy time for more long term solutions.
Sep 22, 2008 - 8:23 am 38. Charles:I’ve heard this story told several times in several ways. This one tells it pretty succinctly.
Sep 22, 2008 - 8:35 am 39. Charles:How The Democrats Caused Our Current Financial Woes
LA Times
Case Closed Rosenberger were Soviet Spies
By Ronald Radosh
September 17, 2008
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-radosh17-2008sep17,0,864776.story
Julius and ethel Rosenberg were executed 55 years ago, on June 19, 1953. But last week, they were back in the headlines when Morton Sobell, the co-defendant in their famous espionage trial, finally admitted that he and his friend, Julius, had both been Soviet agents.
It was a stunning admission; Sobell, now 91 years old, had adamantly maintained his innocence for more than half a century. After his comments were published, even the Rosenbergs’ children, Robert and Michael Meeropol, were left with little hope to hang on to — and this week, in comments unlike any they’ve made previously, the brothers acknowledged having reached the difficult conclusion that their father was, indeed, a spy. “I don’t have any reason to doubt Morty,” Michael Meeropol told Sam Roberts of the New York Times.
With these latest events, the end has arrived for the legions of the American left wing that have argued relentlessly for more than half a century that the Rosenbergs were victims, framed by a hostile, fear-mongering U.S. government. Since the couple’s trial, the left has portrayed them as martyrs for civil liberties, righteous dissenters whose chief crime was to express their constitutionally protected political beliefs. In the end, the left has argued, the two communists were put to death not for spying but for their unpopular opinions, at a time when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were seeking to stem opposition to their anti-Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War.
Sep 22, 2008 - 8:41 am 40. Benj:Alexis – you’re probably right re Barack’s pander to the heartland. And I hear you re visceral response to Palin. Though I think it was a response to the persona as much as to the Frontier realities… There’s a useful piece in this week’s The New Yorker by Gourevitch who’s a decent reporter. (Wrote the early classic account of the Rwandan genocide.) He was up in Alaska interviewering Palin in the weeks before she became candidate for VP. Piece zeroes in on Alaska’s politics – w/ reliance on earmarking and feds and “the commons” – which are pretty unique. Palin’s pov a few weeks back was probably closer to the AIM than Country First. The pitbull with lipstick persona just constructed w/ help from the pub’s Pegler-quoting speechwriter isn’t utterly inauthentic but it’s pumped up too…
Wade, I’m guessing you checked the Wiki entry on Pegler. Not quite sure why you have any impulse to defend the guy. If it’s P.C. to condemn journos who cultivate violence against Americans, than I’ll come correct. What’s all the palaver about dates? As per Wike – Pelger asserted…
“in November 1963 (at the height of the civil rights movement) that it is “clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry”; his embrace of the label racist, “a common but false synonym for Nazi, used by the bigots of New York”; or his habit of calling Jews “geese,” because, “they hiss when they talk, gulp down everything before them, and foul everything in their wake,” characterized his beliefs in the latter portion of his life.”
You like the idea of your candidate quoting (with approval) an American fascist? I think that’s a yes or no question, no?
Sep 22, 2008 - 8:44 am 41. Konyok:When liberal and progressive politicians speak of our “shared American values” one thing they mean is the delegitimization of anticommunism. The shibbolith of McCarthyism has proven durable and potent. Although the historical evidence continues to grow for an aggressive comintern penetration of American government and institutions, the pertinant datum for most literate Americans remains that Joseph McCarthy conducted a “witch hunt.”
In an interesting recombination of American exceptionalism with the ideas of the 30’s United Front, it has become gospel truth for a huge swath of the American political spectrum that a) the United States is immune to the political pathologies of European marxists, and, b) the greatest danger to the United States is the exploitation of anticommunism by a crypto fascist right.
American radicals have nourished themselves on the belief that Marxism does NOT inevitably lead to some version of the Soviet Union. Whether Gramscian, Fabian, Trotskyite or Anarcho-syndicalist, the American revolutionary’s argument always contains an implicit assumption that things would go differently in America because America is different. The great embarrassment that they never mention is that American communists were always agents of the Soviet state first and American revolutionaries second. The Soviet Union was never interested in installing a soviet regime in the United States, at least not until the very end of the struggle. The United States was simply too useful as a milk cow of technology and capital, milked by an impressive corps of both controlled agents and agents of influence.
One of the dominant memes of the center left has been anti-anticommunism. They never really supported the aims of radicals, but were uncomfortable with confronting them – the idealistic appeal of the old United Front against fascism was too strong and there was a hope that radicals could be rehabilitated and brought back to liberalism. Joseph McCarthy was revealed/portrayed as such an odious character that the “witch hunt” could painlessly become the greater evil for liberals. In defending against the “overreaction” to communism the liberals could both create the narrative of themselves as defenders of freedom and avoid attacking their old allies on the left. Today’s progressive simply doesn’t process a conservative’s accusation of socialist ambitions. All that registers is the familiar “Commie pinkos under every bed” conspiracy theories of lore. The juices of righteous indignation begin to flow and a romantic “speaking truth to power” moment is born.
Unfortunately, this anti-anticommunism is morphing into a reflexive anti-antiterrorism. If the conservative crypto fascists were *wrong* about communists, surely they are wrong about islamic jihad, as well. It isn’t that they love Salafist jihad, they just remain fixated on opposing the specter of McCarthysim.
Sep 22, 2008 - 8:50 am 42. Charles:Ron Silver is wrong in his premises imho but he does a pretty good job in this piece entitled FEAR — of representing conservative Jewish Hollywood opinion these days.
http://pajamasmedia.com/ronsilver/
Oddly he wrote the piece more than a year ago and he hasn’t written since.
Sep 22, 2008 - 8:53 am 43. Konyok:Benj,
If you want to hold Alexis to a “yes or no” answer, I think that you ought to either produce better evidence that this Pegler chap is a “fascist,” defined precisely, or explain your working definition of “fascist” for the purposes of this forum.
I don’t think that being racist or antisemitic alone qualifies as fascist, otherwise you would be bound to call for Senator Barack Obama to denounce Senator Robert Byrd as a “fascist.”
Sep 22, 2008 - 9:00 am 44. slade:RE: Bloomberg article linked by Charles.
Politicizing the issue is nonproductive – merely a continuation of the mindset that started the ball rolling and gave it a few good pushes along the way. The 2005 Senate bill is just an example of a Congress that is “stuck on stupid.” Too many facilitating events prior to that event, including the failure to regulate the derivatives market (Phil Gramm**) and, as pointed out elsewhere (Desert Rat @ Elephant Bar), failure of Republicans to push the bill in the House to pressure the Senate. There are ways these things are done – if the backers are serious about the doing.
**And let’s not forget that both Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin in the corner office at Goldman Sachs during the 1990’s when derivatives trading was King. It’s a small incestous community – way beyond the politics of the divide.
Sep 22, 2008 - 9:08 am 45. Benj:Konyok – Your post was short and compact and full of truth re the historical failings of the American left. Might add, though, that the critique (and the very phrase itself) of anti-anti communism was made by Lionel Trilling who was (famously) liberal. There have always been folks on the left who were fully alive to the dangers of communist parties. Try this piece by the radical feminist Ellen Willis and you’ll see there have been leftists who were alive to dangers of Islamism…
Before the War
This piece first appeared in 1989 in the Village Voice.
By Ellen Willis
Make no mistake: Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for Salman Rushdie’s execution is not simply a piece of lunatic demagogy directed at an individual, but a serious act of political intimidation with far-reaching consequences. The Iranian head of state has declared war – quite literally – on Western secular, democratic institutions. He has rallied his international troops in his most daring bid yet to extend the power of Islamic theocracy beyond his own country, even beyond the Moslem world, by force. Do the people and the governments supposedly committed to democratic values have the will to fight back?
Already Khomeini has won a few battles. Rushdie can hardly be blamed for going into hiding, and perhaps it’s too much to expect of his publishers that they go on with his book tour as a protest, with a video or audio tape of Rushdie taking his place. But Vikings’ craven statement that they never intended to offend anyone by publishing Rushdie’s book and “very much regret the distress the book has caused” is inexcusable. So is the action of the Waldenbooks, the country’s largest books chain in taking Satanic Verses off the shelves. (As the company’s executive vice-president, Bonnie Predd, sententiously put it: “We’ve fought long and hard against censorship. But when it comes to the safety of our employees, one sometimes has to compromise.” (How about simply offering any nervous employee a few days off.?) In France, Presses de la Cite, Rushdie’s publisher, has ‘postponed’ publication of the French edition (you remember France, home of Voltaire, but more recently the drug company that tried to scuttle the abortifacient RU 486 under pressure from anti-abortion activists). Nor will the West German house Keipenheuer and Witsch publish Rushdie’s book as scheduled.
There is no indication that the world’s governments are taking Khomeini’s move as seriously as it deserves. Britain has made the strongest statement, which nonetheless falls short of declaring that officially putting a price on the head of a British author exercising the right to free speech in his own country is an act of war against Britain and will be viewed as such. The United States has confined itself to a routine condemnation of terrorism. Canada gets the prize for moral oafishness. Revenue Canada, a government customs and taxation agency, has temporarily banned further imports of the Rushdie book, pending an investigation of the possibility that it contains “hate literature” (the ban was announced the first day of Canada’s National Freedom To Read Week). Will Britain, the U.S., or anyone else move to bring this issue before the United Nations? If they do, is there any chance the UN will vote for meaningful sanctions against Iran? And if not, will those Western nations that call themselves democracies get together to impose sanctions on their own, The last two questions are, I’m afraid, rhetorical.
The attack on Rushdie and the anemic response to it are not occurring in a vacuum. Democratic secularism is increasingly vulnerable to a religious fundamentalism that in all its forms – Christian, and Jewish as well as Islamic – is increasingly feeling its power. And Western governments, far from resisting anti-democratic absolutism, have been abetting it. The Thatcher government has enthusiastically pursued its own censorship of books and other media. The U.S. has, of course, been in bed with fundamentalist Christianity since the election of Jimmy Carter. The Reagan administration never got too exercised about violent attacks on abortion clinics, refusing to include them in its antiterrorist rhetoric, the political climate surrounding abortion has become so intimidating that no American drug company has been willing to test RU 486, must less market it. Our government also supports, on the grounds of the right to freedom and self-determination, the fundamentalist guerrillas in Afghanistan, who – if, as now seems likely, they end up in power – may make Khomeini look mellow. Is there anything left of the West’s loudly proclaimed commitment to freedom that goes beyond such ironies? More and more that question, too, begins to seem rhetorical.
Sep 22, 2008 - 9:12 am 46. Benj:K – quickie – OK – call him a racist – or a jew-baiter – or a scumbag…- I’ll let you worry re the fine distinctions – And as for Bobby Byrd – I certainly would look askance at O if he’d invoked Byrd as an authority on American culture. As you may know, O has an interesting acocunt of his first meeting with Byrd in “Audacity”…That was a complicated encounter and O gets it down on paper. Not out to TRASH the man who’s legacy he’d overcome – but not there to forget it all either…
Sep 22, 2008 - 9:22 am 47. Dave:The finanacial crisis is critical, but none too serious.
More later. Suffice it to say that necessary corrections are not anywhere near as expensive as Chicken Littles would have us believe.
Also, long-term corrective actions do NOT require micromanagement.
Sep 22, 2008 - 9:33 am 48. trangbang68:Benj, Excuse my ignorance, but I don’t know Westbrook Pegler from sliced bread so his fascist tendencies I can’t comment on. I wonder though how you like your candidate’s political patron, Bernadine Dohrn, being an enthusiastic cheerleader for Charles Manson stooge Susan Adkins plunging a butcher knife in Sharon Tate’s pregnant abdomen? I don’t see how digging up the myriad comments of the ghosts of associations past benefits Obama.
Sep 22, 2008 - 9:42 am 49. Konyok:Benj,
It’s not the specifics, it’s the attempt to corner Alexis that I object to.
This “yes or no, right now!” debating technique is neither probative nor forensic.
**
I do believe that our 50-50 divide is somewhat contrived and poses some real dangers for us.
If either world view represented by our major political parties had a monopoly on truth, or on hypocrisy, it would be reasonable to assume that one or the other would have gained permanent ascendency a long time ago. I think that where the rubber of ideology hits the hard pavement of complex reality the elegantly structured arguments give way to cold, hard exigency.
In a way, your boolean question to Alexis is symptomatic of the problem that plagues us. You seem to be targeting a moderate voice to score a point delegitizing Sarah Palin in a forum most unlikely to be convinced. The expected net result is that you get a temporary ego trip, Alexis feels weird and onlookers perceive another data point confirming a swiftboating of Palin from the left. I know it’s a trite reposte, but do you really think that a hermeneutic examination of Barack Obama’s speeches would not reveal some troubling associations?
Both right and left seem to be abdicating the perils of independent thought and happily donning the livery of their respective teams. We are all the poorer for that, especially in that it weakens us against the collective threats that we surely face.
This forum is one of the few bright spots where I sometimes actually gain a new insight on things. I am deeply grateful to Wretchard.
Sep 22, 2008 - 9:59 am 50. peterike:What Benj doesn’t note is that his Pegler reference is posted on countless Leftie web sites already. In other words, it’s a Kos talking point and Benj, dutiful soldier that he is, is spreading the virus.
The full quote runs: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity.”
Now that may or may not be true. (If Hollywood is to be believed, under every small town “happy family” lies a seething cauldron of incest and abuse, but Hollywood types do like to project their own lives onto others.)
In any case, what earthly difference does it make that Pegler was an anti-semite or a right-wing crazy? What has that got to do with the content of the statement? The fact that Benj, and many others, are trying to smear Palin by inference is distasteful and quite in keeping with their usual scummy behavior.
Some logic too. Pegler was a dangerous creep, Palin quoted Pegler (un-named), therefore Palin is a dangerous creep. I find this new science fascinating, how apparently human beings immediately assume all the characteristics of those they quote. No doubt this has been proven with the same rigid adherence to scientific standards as Al Gore’s Global Warming movie.
Sep 22, 2008 - 10:31 am 51. weSwinger:@George: giving up libertarianism does not mean giving up liberty. It means not letting markets crater and lead to economic collapse while we hold our noses and say “it’s not my fault.”
@Wretch: fully on board with your distrust of the elites in the Ivy League, D.C., Wall Street axis. These people have been a disaster on every front. Paulson &co. will bear close watching. And though sympathetic to Newt’s policy prescriptions, I have to remind you the man is not in power and does not seem to be seeking it, but is merely scoring points with us on the libertarian/conservative wavelength. As I said earlier, this emergency response is the Bush administration’s finest hour. They do not have the legislative majority to implement Newt’s policies, but they did have the decisiveness to pull all of our financial chestnuts out of the fire, in a politically possible way.
Sep 22, 2008 - 11:01 am 52. Benj:K – Take your point re yes or no’s (in general). But just so we’re all clear, it was Wade (as I clearly indicated in my post), NOT Alexis, whom I put on the spot. And only after Wade accused me of a “smear” – not directed at Palin – but at Pegler!! (Again, see his earlier post.) BTW I have a respectful epistolary relationship with Wade. Though he called me out, I did not, for example, jump all over the fact that he was way off when it came to his dates. (Trying to find a way to justify Peg’s murderous line on Bobby, he had Peg fading out in 62. The dog didn’t die until 69.) Just so we’re all clear, the Peg thing matters because he’s one of the founts of the modern paranoid style of right-wing populism. A style often on display here at the Club and one that informed Palin’s speech…
As for Wretch, I’d be somewhat more “glad” (to use your term) if he’d distance himself from the paranoids in his Club, but he seems intent on cultivating them. Did you catch that passage earlier in this thread where he invoked CP spies in America and then followed up with this doozy…
“Probability alone almost guarantees [!!] that today there must be a considerable number of such people government, the media and in business who are secretly in the service of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda, drug cartels, Chavez, Castro and God knows what else. Forget the so-called “Christianists”. These are the real true believers.”
Wretch isn’t making a case – as you were – about the failures of the left to face up to evil(s) in this world. He’s encouraging conspiratorial thinking. The notion, for example, that there are many American “true believers” working undercover on behalf of the Chinese CP in America today is beyond belief. Try in your own mind to put together Wretch’s flailing phrase “God knows what else” with his certainty at the end – “These are the real true believers.” Utter incoherence…
Re Dohrn & Ayers etc. If/when O starts quoting them in his speeches now, you might have the beginnings of a case. Otherwise, you’re talking nonsense. Obama quote King. Palin quotes Pegler. Your call.
Sep 22, 2008 - 11:09 am 53. trangbang68:Benj,He (Obama) named his book after a quote from Jeremiah Wright. Is that a direct attribution?
Sep 22, 2008 - 11:18 am 54. slade:Your constant use of Ken as a model of conservative thought is obsessive and faulty logic (arguing from the specific to the general)
More later. Suffice it to say that necessary corrections are not anywhere near as expensive as Chicken Littles would have us believe. – Dave
As long as derivatives traders take it in the shorts, I’ll be fine.
Sep 22, 2008 - 11:23 am 55. slade:to see how necessary positive government action is to prevent bank runs and promote confidence in markets – weSwinger
Absolutely. No question about that. From WSJ: Through Wednesday, money-market fund investors — including institutional investors such as corporate treasurers, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds — pulled out a record $144.5 billion, according to AMG Data Services. The industry had $7.1 billion in redemptions the week before. I don’t know if that meets the technical definition of a Run, but it’a a breath-taking number.
My question is *who* decides *how* the $700B will be allocated. My understanding is that the horse-traders are in full gallop.
Sep 22, 2008 - 11:27 am 56. Charles:How The Democrats Caused Our Current Financial Woes
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_hassett&sid=aSKSoiNbnQY0
Greenspan’s Warning
The clear gravity of the situation pushed the legislation forward. Some might say the current mess couldn’t be foreseen, yet in 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: If Fannie and Freddie “continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,” he said. “We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.”
What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.
Different World
If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.
But the bill didn’t become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn’t even get the Senate to vote on the matter.
That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: “It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.”
Mounds of Materials
Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.
But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.
Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.
Sep 22, 2008 - 11:29 am 57. slade:The US got to enjoy the economic boom times resulting from over-leveraging, and now we will pay the piper. – weSwinger
That’s not what I’m seeing. Overleveraging was concentrated in hedge funds which are owned by the wealthy individuals and a number of state pension funds looking for lower cost, higher return investments to make state balance sheets look better (see Christine Todd Whitman as Governor of NJ and more recently Jeb Bush in FL).
The so-called Main Street investor with mutual funds in an IRA or 401K was exposed only through ownership of financial stocks, which, in a portfolio with conservative asset allocation, would be what? 10% or so.
The profits from those “boom times” were concentrated in very specific (and high volume) vehicles. The bad decision-making was also concentrated within a very specific sector – lenders. The abuse of derivatives trading falls squarely on Congress. A small percentage of (criminally) negligent loans was disguised in various ways and used to destabilize the broader economy while generating transaction fees and management fees, not bringing value or growth into the economy.
Sep 22, 2008 - 11:37 am 58. Alexis:benj:
Although Palin does inspire euphoria from a narrow group of supporters, there is more than a little bit of unease about her within conservative ranks. It’s just that you’re unlikely to hear it because their antipathy toward Obama is greater than their unease about Palin. She inspires a combination of admiration and unease, but unease with her is nearly impossible for Obama supporters to exploit precisely because their unease about Senator Obama is much stronger.
Obama supporters would probably be better off praising her rather than attacking her because some things she has accomplished are indeed praiseworthy from a leftist perspective. She’s one of the few politicians who can inspire both the Christian Right and Log Cabin Republicans. Can you imagine right-wingers praising a woman who tripled taxes on big oil companies in Alaska and then cut checks to every Alaskan? That’s Sarah Palin. Can you imagine right-wingers praising a woman who vetoed a bill that would have stopped benefits for domestic partners of homosexual state employees? That’s Sarah Palin. Can you imagine right-wingers praising a woman who until recently had warmly praised Barack Obama’s energy plan? That’s Sarah Palin. It may be wiser to selectively praise some of Governor Palin’s accomplishments while contrasting them with John McCain’s record.
Sarah Palin is neither a devil nor a saint, and it would be wise for all Americans to realize that. Alaskans seem to like her, though.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that Westbrook Pegler is just as fascist as you say. Before today, I had never heard of him, and I’d be willing to bet that at least 99.9 percent of Americans had never heard of him either. Chances are that even most PhD’s in American History wouldn’t know Mr. Pegler from a peg on the wall. That said, if one is faced with a choice between voting for a pal of Professor Ayers who knowingly and approvingly quotes Jeremiah Wright for the title of his autobiography or someone who knowingly and approvingly quotes an obscure fascist in a speech, one is faced with a choice between voting for neither ticket or voting for the lesser evil.
Sep 22, 2008 - 11:45 am 59. slade:Charles -
That’s all well and good. It’s campaign season and there is an election to be won. But politicizing this issue, which exhibits some clear structural deficiencies beyond the GSE’s that are currently being sorted out, just brings the process dangerously closer to “camel is a horse designed by committee.” But I’m through now out of deference to Wretchard’s attempt to revisit the larger world.
Sep 22, 2008 - 11:47 am 60. Benj:Peterike- Quick- the Bobby Kennedy Jr. post re Pegler dates back a week or so. Don’t think it’s been getting much play on the web lately. I invoked Peg because Wretch had invoked had invoked another writer frowm back in the day, Howard Fast! PS Pegler was one of George Trow’s bete noires. Trow seems to me to be a TRUE conservative – Wouldn’t have been thrilled by Ophra’s role in the campaign. Wouldn’t have been thrilled by the Reality Show dimension of the Palin roll-out either…
Sep 22, 2008 - 11:58 am 61. Konyok:@Benj
Whoops. I didn’t catch where your response to Alexis ended and that to Wade began. I apologize for casting you as a bully. (I’m now adapting this @ flag. It does make good sense and the eye readily recognizes a change in direction. I held out because it looked vaguely “metric” to me, if you get my avoirdupois meaning …
I think that Wretch gave his statement a little gratuitous spin, but, I also think his thesis is reasonable. Considering that the United States is effectively the hub of the global wheel it is nigh a metaphysical reality that every government, multinational corporation, religion, NGO, terrorist group, drug cartel or James Bond villain has people busily observing, lobbying, canvassing and casing the joint out. (Just as we have analysts and operatives in the damndest of places … )
I do think that I see a collision of reflexes here.
It seems to me that when you read Wretch’s statement the shape of the contour that catches your eye reminds you of McCarthyism. Once that button is pushed, it is difficult to dispassionately judge the truthfulness of the statement.
In our host’s statement I see another reflex. As a Christian he has an equal or greater visceral response to the “Christianist” meme. Progressives have their own doppelganger of McCarthyism in their fear and loathing, real or feigned, of expressions of religion. Even before 9/11 it had become a favorite rhetorical device for some to refer to the religeous right as “America’s Taliban.” He is responding to the effort to cast Sarah Palin as the wicked witch of the North with an argument that the objective threat posed by external opponents is enormously greater than any potential threat from overt Christians like Palin.
To quote Michelle Obama: “This debate doesn’t help my children!”
These points are not necessarily mutually exclusive or even related to each other at all. They are both points that deserve discussion.
**
If I had time, I would almost be tempted to perform a linguistic/textual analysis of one of Obama’s speeches. I guarantee you that I could find and document sinister connotations in the most innocent-sounding of phrases. But, then I’d be contradicting my “let’s just all get along” stance, wouldn’t I?
Sep 22, 2008 - 12:07 pm 62. weSwinger:@slade – Most of our home values rose in a breathtaking fashion. We used that market increase in equity to finance a lot more stuff. So yes, the typical American benefitted greatly.
@peterike – yessir! Nomenklatura is too hopeful. Kids are getting the left/liberal party line in the air they breathe. In their formal education, from elementary to grad school, they get the party line. In pop culture all their iconic figures have drunk the kool-aid and are now pushing it. The Gramscian takeover of the educational and media institutions is almost complete. Even more horribly, if your children got their religious instruction in a mainline Protestant or RC church in the ’70’s through the ’90’s they would have gotten the party line reinforced there as well. If I knew then what I know now, I would have home-schooled my boys.
Sep 22, 2008 - 12:19 pm 63. slade:let’s just all get along
Getting along isn’t the issue. It’s finding a civilized way to *not* get along.
Sep 22, 2008 - 12:20 pm 64. Eggplant:Off-topic:
Looks like the blogosphere has tracked down the source of the anti-Palin smears. Surprise-surprise, the source appears to be paid operatives working for the Messiah. This might be a repeat of the Dan Rather / TANG debacle.
Refer to:
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/194057.php
Sep 22, 2008 - 12:25 pm 65. Konyok:http://michellemalkin.com/2008/09/22/bloggers-sniff-out-anti-palin-astroturf-campaign-and-the-cover-up-begins/
Touche, slade.
Sep 22, 2008 - 12:28 pm 66. slade:Most of our home values rose in a breathtaking fashion. We used that market increase in equity to finance a lot more stuff. So yes, the typical American benefitted greatly. – weSwinger
Which happened because of tax policy that rewarded high-end home-ownership.
Sep 22, 2008 - 12:31 pm 67. slade:Thank you Konyok.
Hope that doesn’t make me your poodle.
Sep 22, 2008 - 12:32 pm 68. slade:Let’s just let that one go. This “poodle” thing amuses me – the triumph of packaging over value.
Hmmm?
Sep 22, 2008 - 12:37 pm 69. Konyok:Right over my head, slade.
Enlighten me?
Sep 22, 2008 - 12:38 pm 70. slade:Sorry. That was a reference to European countries being branded as “poodles” for unthinking loyalty and alliance with the USA. “Groupies” if you will, of the Rock Star variety – small lights following big lights.
But I do admire your elegant prose.
Moving on …
Sep 22, 2008 - 12:44 pm 71. slade:Oh heck this is going downhill. I do hope that made it better not worse.
Sometimes it’s best to “reset” – like the mortgages.
Sep 22, 2008 - 12:48 pm 72. Konyok:Actually, I’m watching this financial discussion with a lot of admiration for you guys who actually know what you’re talking about.
I really, really want weSwinger to be right.
This is one of those squishy philosophy hitting pavement moments. I’m watching oil bounce surrealistically with a sick feeling that it’s the dollar devaluing rather than oil appreciating.
It seems to my freshman macroeconomics mind that there must be a sweet spot somewhere between regulation and lassez faire, and that the sweet spot migrates through time with changing conditions.
I also want to believe that the “fundamentals are sound.” I look at the wealth around me and contrast it with what I’ve seen in the Third world. It all looks so substantial. But, how *fundamental* are we talking? Agriculture, resources, manufacturing? Jeez. We don’t do any of that stuff anymore. Is an “information economy” sustainable? Again, I really, really hope so.
So, I’ll just listen to you guys …
Sep 22, 2008 - 1:06 pm 73. slade:I don’t think that Conrad Black article has been posted here yet.
There’s a lot I could quote but let the interested follow through.
Sep 22, 2008 - 1:18 pm 74. trangbang68:Back to original question. Can a person stop being a Muslim? Imad Mugniah , Mohammed Atif, Shamil Besayef, Zarqawi all stopped being Muslims when they became wormfood.
Sep 22, 2008 - 1:24 pm 75. Benj:Konyoke – Gots to bow down. Your take on the different “reflexes” is deeper than my line, ah, edits. But – what can I say – Wretch has been rumor-mongering re O’s (supposed) threat to the Republic for months now…No one’s got time to look back, but if you do you’ll see I haven’t gone to extremes when it comes to characterizing Palin’s Christianism. While I noted her bit of censoriousness in Wasslia – in response to those who were pretending an O administration would do away with the Bill of Rights – I’m not living in fear of her (or Mac). You may recall a couple threads back I quoted that black writer Randall Kennedy who allowed he’d be REALLLY disapointed if O lost. Never occurs to him, though, to argue his side should immediately set about to sabotage the next administration. But Whiskey (and others here) have announed there own determination to do just that. No word from Wretch if he’s down with that program. (And again, remember Wretch isn’t even an American citizen. His readiness to sponsor our country’s worst angels seems pretty appalling to me but I guess I’m insufficiently internationalist…)
Alexis – Good m arching orders – Perhaps you’ll allow me to note that I’m well aware of the contradictions between Palin’s in-State record and her new National profile. BTW – That was the point of Gourevitch’s piece in the New Yorker (which I invoked earlier in the thread). Which makes it even sadder to me that she allowed herself to become an “attack dog” for the pubs’ culture-warriors…
Sep 22, 2008 - 1:33 pm 76. Konyok:@Benj
I was poking around looking for some explanation why Sarah Palin quoted this obscure guy in her speech. The various reactions to her speech have constipated the search engines, but I think that I have it. Pat Buchanan used the phrase in one of his books. Palin recounts how pleased she and her neighbors were when Buchanan made a campaign stop in Wassila. She read his book, liked the phrase and used it when she had a chance. (Kinda like the way that I took Trilling’s thesis about anti-anticommunism … )It is a nice phrase, especially for small town people.
Actually, I was struck by how long Wretchard took before expressing an opinion about Obama. It is possible that there was a kind of peer pressure from the forum for him to join in the alarm, but I saw him turn very slowly. (I’ve trolled here daily since the first battle of Fallujah, but began posting only since just before the invasion of Georgia.)
I can tell you how it was for myself. Back in December into January I was looking at Senator Obama with an interested eye. The Republicans were squabbling about who was the *real* conservative. Hillary seemed almost inevitable. I would have voted for her if paired with most of the then Republican field, exceptions McCain and Giuliani. A nearly transcendent moment unfolded when Obama stated that Democrats needed to reconcile themselves with the fact that for the past 20 years Republicans had been the party of ideas, that Ronald Reagan had changed American politics and that Democrats needed to work harder to compete intellectually. This was a courageous stand to take and he was quickly taken to task by Hillary and the netroots. His surrender was embarrassing to watch. At that moment he lost his strongest card for the general election and his best vaccination against Reverend Wright and William Ayers.
I kept watching and became truly alarmed at the vacuous “Change you can believe in” sloganeering. Alarm became outright fear after I attended an Obama rally in February. I actually saw a woman faint, but I didn’t hear a single bit of cogent political philosophy, just a pleasing string of platitudes. His poor performance in debate with Hillary without a teleprompter added a splash of contempt. The dimissal of hard questions as “divisive” even as his rhetoric became more partisan clinched it for me.
I think that Wretchard may be projecting his experiences in the PI and sees phantoms invisible to most of us. We are exceptional, after all, and those kinds of things don’t happen here. Or, he may have a perspective into a place in our own shadows that we can’t see. I don’t know.
I want to believe that our political system is so stable, has so much “business as usual” momentum built into it that a president Obama simply couldn’t make the degree of “fundamental change” that he proposes. (A lot of Obama supporters that I’ve spoken with agree with Reverend Wright that he’s a politician who says what he needs to say and that they are sure he would actually preside with a light hand.)
But, when such strong passions are aroused, stuff can happen.
(Which is exactly where YOUR concern with the rhetoric here comes from, I understand and agree.)
What can we do?
Learn to disagree civilly. Explain ourselves as fully as possible without going off into short hand insults. We blues and reds are indeed stuck with each other.
Sep 22, 2008 - 2:20 pm 77. NahnCee:Eggplant, be interesting to see if the Jawa Report gains any traction in the real world; i.e., if any of the people I know who are pro-Obama ever come to hear about it since I’m positively certain it won’t be mentioned by the media nor on any of the web-sites they use for their comprehensive information and world-view.
Sep 22, 2008 - 3:08 pm 78. Benj:K. – I bow again. You’re right as rain re reds and blues. And though I think Wretch’s fear of phantoms is just that – I’ll allow that he’s not alone in imagining “it could happen here.” Lord knows I’ve heard a lot that talk on the left in the past. But – have to say – that sort of discourse was a louder PRE-OBAMA. And that’s one of the reasons why his rise has been so GOOD for all Americans…
I’m sure you’re right too re the Pat B./Pegler connection. Though my guess is that it was the speechwriter’s inspiration…- As for Obama – I’ve posted plenty here about why I’m responsive to him – even written a bit about the back adn forths over Reagan during the Dem primary (had some email exchanges with Hillary supporter Sean Wilentz who just wrote a book about Reagan) so no need to re-up this sec. But I will say that my experiences in OBama crowds are VERY different from yours. No fainting fits – most naturally integrated mass gatherings I’ve ever participated in. Hard not to walk out feeling hopeful about America…
And on that score K – YOUR posts are making me wonder if I’m being a bit of an ingrate re Wretch. But I really do think he needs to get clear in his own head about what’s diff about America. (And that means trying to think through America’s racial history as well as the sweeter dimensions of our exceptionality)….
Sep 22, 2008 - 3:13 pm 79. Alexis:Konyok:
Hmm. So it was Buchanan she really quoted. That makes sense, at least in terms of trying to keep paleoconservatives from voting for Barr or Obama.
Although I strongly disagree with Pat Buchanan on the vast majority of topics, I think the proper response to his ideas is (1) sober refutation and (2) domestication of a sufficient amount of his rhetoric so his actual political ideas don’t gain traction. Hopefully, Sarah Palin can interpret Pat Buchanan’s remarks in a manner that doesn’t promote his policies.
Is Sarah Palin a Buchanan conservative? It’s hard to say, although I suspect that she doesn’t subscribe to the doctrine of preemptive defense. Thus, the apparent confusion. (Actually, neither do I. I support the overthrow of Saddam Hussein based upon very different reasons than the doctrine of preemption espoused by the Bush administration.)
In any case, it should be interesting to find out whether Sarah Palin changes Beltway politics or whether Beltway politics changes Sarah Palin. She does seem to be adept at cutting losses with the example of turning against the “Bridge to Nowhere” after she knew the political costs of getting it were too great. Of course her opposition was rooted in opportunism and expediency; so what’s new in politics? (The Golden Gate Bridge could also be considered to be “The Bridge to Nowhere”, but it was the people of Marin County who bought the bonds for that wonder, not the federal government.)
Sep 22, 2008 - 3:16 pm 80. Bob Murphy:@Benj
“Did you catch that passage earlier in this thread where he invoked CP spies in America and then followed up with this doozy…
“Probability alone almost guarantees [!!] that today there must be a considerable number of such people government, the media and in business who are secretly in the service of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda, drug cartels, Chavez, Castro and God knows what else. Forget the so-called “Christianists”. These are the real true believers.”
Jeez, Benj. You just don’t get it, do you?
Sep 22, 2008 - 3:34 pm 81. starling:You are in denial about the communist spies that infested America which were exposed after the fall of the Soviet Union when their records became open to investigators (for awhile).
And now you are in denial, apparently, of even the possibility that those other named parties are enemies of the United States and enemies of the personal freedoms that form the basis of American life.
Have you even read the Koran?
You have Imagine/kumbaya fantasies?
What I cannot understand is how so many people on the left can look but not see.
They have not the integrity or real world foundation to recognise their enemies. Poor little dears can’t cope and then they go into Freudian transference and manufacture a string of things they can cope with. Say “global warming”, the “population bomb”, “silent spring” etc etc.
The only thing they have in commmon is that it is always capitalism’s fault and the solution is always international progressive socialism.
You are a waste of bandwidth on this site, Benj.
A pissy little broken record, like most of your ilk.
Does your chatter mind ever stop? Do you ever have moments of transcendent awareness when you venture outside your mental projection/ego and into the real world? Or even acknowledge there is a real, objective world?
You are the reason the founding fathers gave every state two senators, to offset the emotional populist hothouses of the big cities.
Benj wrote: “And as for Bobby Byrd – I certainly would look askance at O if he’d invoked Byrd as an authority on American culture. As you may know, O has an interesting acocunt of his first meeting with Byrd in “Audacity”…That was a complicated encounter and O gets it down on paper. Not out to TRASH the man who’s legacy he’d overcome – but not there to forget it all either…”
@ Benj: I don’t have “Audacity” so I don’t know about the details of the first encounter between The One We’ve Been Waiting For and “The Conscience of the Senate.”
Is there anything about this momentous encounter of these moral titans that you care to share?
Sep 22, 2008 - 4:02 pm 82. Lifeofthemind:@Bob Murphy,
Sep 22, 2008 - 4:03 pm 83. Eggplant:Did I owe you an apology for anything? Someone seemed to think so last week.
NahnCee said:
“… be interesting to see if the Jawa Report gains any traction in the real world; i.e., if any of the people I know who are pro-Obama ever come to hear about it since I’m positively certain it won’t be mentioned by the media nor on any of the web-sites they use for their comprehensive information and world-view.”
For sure the MSM would supress this story. However this type of scandal is something that Drudgereport would pickup on. Once Drudgereport is on it then the MSM has no choice but to bring it forward. Drudge is probably tracking it and will bring it out after the finance stuff has settled down. Hopefully it will come out just before or just after the debates.
Sep 22, 2008 - 4:04 pm 84. Wadeusaf:For the record, no I didn’t use Wiki (I was in a hurry to get out the door). And I wasn’t defending Pegler’s ideas, just his right to hold them. Repugnant or not. I find it fascinating that a man whose thoughts for years were a ramrod for progressive thought could be so quickly brought to the burn pile for strenuous disagreement with FDR’s methods and the Kennedy’s. He was fired from his very lucrative column in 1962. Some attribute that to his already intense dislike for the Kennedy Brothers among other disagreements with the Hursts. But throughout his career he distinguished himself as an anti authoritarian and not a racist or a monster. He took a stance against segregation in professional sports among other issues. So debasing him for his quote about Bobby Kennedy was understandable for RFK JR. But for excoriating palin for quoting him as a monster smells of smear. Shame on this rush to judgment. It is unbecoming. Or well I guess it is becoming. Tis a Shame.
I will not (but could) opine that the Dems left him and not the other way round however, because his move to antisemitism is an amazing march of already twisted thinking IMO. I do disagree with the classification of the man as a monster.
Sep 22, 2008 - 4:56 pm 85. Bob Murphy:@lifeofthemind.
Sep 22, 2008 - 5:05 pm 86. Bob Murphy:You got beaucoup credits in my book from your posts.
I wouldn’t even notice if you made a disparaging crack about something I said unless you got as boringly repetitive as Benj (on any topic).
I’m not here for my ego and I have a hide like a rhinoceros.
The short answer is no. I recall no undue criticism at all.
Slight correction. I would notice, lifeofthemind, and ponder your criticism’s merit but probably not take it as a personal slight.
Sep 22, 2008 - 5:07 pm 87. whiskey:Well of course there is something to stop the insiders, Wretchard. And neither Ayers nor Dohrn were of your caliber. They had Daddy’s money after all to cushion their lives on the run. On the French Riviera no doubt. No sleeping between a bed and the wall in a hot-box.
What will stop the insiders is … the outside world. Imagine say, a President Obama responding to the nuking of NYC, with 3-6 million dead, by apologizing for making Muslims angry as is his first instinct. Promising reparations and the like. All America’s fault. As Americans gaze a great hole where Manhattan was and wondering when their cities are next.
Obama would be lucky to avoid a firing squad after swift impeachment, and the Democratic Party would suffer the fate of the Whigs, with many Senators and Congressmen joining the Republican Party immediately. As an enraged American public wants examples made, both foreign, and domestic.
This is what the battle is all about. Will we live or die? Simple as that.
Sep 22, 2008 - 5:13 pm 88. theOldJew:wretchard,
“Far more Reds died at the hand of the Party than by their declared enemies”
My father grew up in Poland between WWI and WWII. He had college friends some of whom were Zionists, and some of whom were Communists. A few of the Communists went off to the Soviet Union to help build Socialism. Word filtered back later that they were in the Lubyanka but had insisted to their visitors that “it was a mistake but the Party will correct the error.” Eventually they disappeared forever.
I think Fast and his comrades knew the truth long before Khrushchev’s speech, they just refused to admit the truth of their knowledge. They could hide it from themselves because no one important from their side had told them what they had heard many times before from “unreliable” people or worse, capitalists.
Sep 22, 2008 - 5:30 pm 89. elijah:“The notion that Iran could truly blockade the strait is wrong – but so too is the notion that US operations in response to any Iranian action in the area would be short and simple.”
Sep 22, 2008 - 5:52 pm 90. Benj:Wade – Not getting your distinction re Pegler’s ideas and his “right” to hold them. I didn’t argue that he should’ve been thrown in a Gulag. But see no reason to go back on my claim that he was a monster. What else do you call a sophisticated writer who looked forward to the “spilling” of Bobby’s brains, called Jews “geese” and spoke up for racism at the height of the struggle against segregation. Call me P.C. if you must – but Pegler was a monster.
As for Palin, I did not – to use your phrase “excoriate her as a monster.” I did call her on her “cluelessness” about what Pegler stood for. I’d urge you try GEorge Trow’s historical account of America’s media templates in “My Pilgrim’s Progress”. Trow saw Pegler as a root-source for today’s right-wing populists…Some on the left are happy there’s now an Olberman to rant back at O’Reilly. I’m not in their camp. I figure Olberman is probably an heir of Pegler’s too!
Sep 22, 2008 - 6:47 pm 91. peterike:Benj quotes Wretchard and claims the following is a “doozy”:
Probability alone almost guarantees that today there must be a considerable number of such people government, the media and in business who are secretly in the service of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda, drug cartels, Chavez, Castro and God knows what else.
For goodness sake, Chinese spying is rampant in American industry, and there are dozens of front companies in California that exist only to buy/steal technology. Clinton happily sold them the store for campaign cash. Saudi money drifts like snow through government and academia. You don’t think the rest are in there laying cash down? What, the Russians??
Ever hear of “oil for food” Benj? Money is changing hands everywhere. As that great 80s song from The Brains had it:
We think we know what we’re doin’
We don’t pull the strings
It’s all in the past now
Money changes everything
Money changes everything
Money changes everything
Were there some way to bet on W’s statement, I would pawn everything I own with absolute confidence and lay my money on him being right. Except possibly for Castro, who I suspect doesn’t care anymore, but was neck deep at one time.
Sep 22, 2008 - 7:12 pm 92. peterike:Incidentally, not like there’s a concerted effort going on or nothing, but if you Google “Westbrook Pegler” for the past year, you get 70,000 hits (26,000 for the past month – I don’t know how to extend the gap beyond a month but less than a year).
So that’s 70,000 hits in a year. Yet if you Google “Westbook Pegler -palin”, which is to say pages where he’s mentioned WITHOUT Sarah Plain, you get 2,200.
So that’s 67,800 hits WITH Palin, 2,200 without. Concerted smear effort? Nah, sheer coincidence.
Sep 22, 2008 - 7:33 pm 93. Nine-of-Diamonds:“As for Palin, I did not – to use your phrase “excoriate her as a monster.” I did call her on her “cluelessness” about what Pegler stood for.”
And I take it your deliberate cluelessness about a certain Black Liberation Theology church that has courted extremist Palestinians is something praiseworthy, right? Of course one quote from a long-dead anti-Semite is much more important than ties to modern-day Palestinian extremists. “New politics”. “Change we have been waiting for”. Well, a CinC who spent 20 years immersed in Afro-Nazism DOES count as change.
Then again, Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Johnson were notorious racists, so maybe the Magic Negro is just the same filth in a different wrapper. Except that O has enough melanin to make Benj overlook the sort of bigotry he’d condemn in a non-black politician.
And the Left’s hyperventilation about Pegler is laughable on its face. According to that logic, any politician who has approvingly quoted Jefferson or Washington must be in favor of slavery and disenfranchising women. Maybe Benj should report back to Kos for new marching orders – this fallacy isn’t going to get his hopeychangey Afro-Nazi idol any traction.
Sep 22, 2008 - 7:44 pm 94. Konyok:@Benj
Indeed, I saw the enthusiasm and the happiness of the people at the Obama rally. It gave me a profoundly sad, and alarming, feeling of being alone in a crowd. It was the same feeling that I had at a revival meeting once. There was such excitement all around me, but I strained to find meaning in the words.
The paradox is that I seek reconciliation and I see that a charismatic leader could lead us to that. But, there is a price to be paid for unity. Every successful “us” has got to be defined by a “them.” The other is the yin to our yang.
In that Obama rally I knew without doubt that I was that other, the “divisive” one with my troubling need for proof. With just a few well placed suggestions and a skillfully staged provocation the crowd of happy people around me could easily have become a lynch mob.
Paranoia? No. You’d probably feel the same way at a charismatic church service or a Hannah Montana fan club meeting.
Aside from the expected partisan loyalties, there is something else about Barack Obama that discomforts conservatives. His rhetoric has all of the conventional references to us, we, our country. But, they seem perfunctory, like passing notes to the chord change. Whenever Senator Obama becomes specific it seems that he dwells on the shortcomings and the faults. At those moments it is impossible for us to forget the “clinging to God and guns” comment. He uses a formula common to televangelists: this isn’t about me, it’s about you! But, the coda always resolves with Obama in the heroic role.
So, Barack Obama has managed earn more conservative suspicion than even Hillary Clinton herself. It is important for you to understand that this animus is not the product of some great “Republican smear machine” or a mass epidemic of racism. We feel in a visceral way that we are the target, the scapegoat of Obama’s unity.
Sep 22, 2008 - 7:47 pm 95. peterike:Some might say that chickens are coming home to roost. Perhaps, that’s one way that you can look at it. But, there are an awfully lot more of us than you think and we are not the unthinking neanderthal brutes that you think we are.
According to that logic, any politician who has approvingly quoted Jefferson or Washington must be in favor of slavery and disenfranchising women.
Hitler loved dogs.
Sep 22, 2008 - 8:00 pm 96. fred:I love dogs.
I’m just like Hitler!!
I believe a person can stop being a Muslim, but first he or she has to begin being a person. And a person of great courage, because the penalty for apostasy in Islam is death.
Ali Sina’s recent book, which is a psychobiography of the Prophet, gives a pretty good idea of what Islam does to a human being and what kind of human beings are produced by this cult. The children who are most traumatized probably have no chance of getting out of it. Those who are less narcissistic and personality disordered, and who have those moments of doubt or insight, quietly nurtured during their lives, might have a chance of at least breaking free of it in their hearts and minds.
Islam is a cult that appeals to all the worst vices in humanity. That is why I consider it Satan’s perfect vehicle for destroying the human race: it has something in it for just about every disturbed and dark person to exploit to his or her own advantage. This is why I always equate Allah with Satan.
Sep 22, 2008 - 8:17 pm 97. Wadeusaf:Benj, What is wrong with the quote? What is wrong with the notion that “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,” that would cause you to doubt the intent of the speaker?
If you insist upon tarring the meaning of the words, by invoking the words of the author in a totally different context, in a time when such speech while sometimes insulting was yet viewed in light of meaning and not in light of a convenient sound bite.
Pegler one a Pulitzer for reporting on Illegal Union Activities, and after praising the Roosevelt attacked them for fascistic tendencies. Calling European Fascism what it was, and witnessing the hiss of the snake, opposing segregation in sports. All of his stances were consistent with his internal nemesis. He is not a monster, though his words even then could be monstrous.
Much much worse has been said about me, and with intent too.
Sep 22, 2008 - 9:31 pm 98. Benj:K – “we are not the unthinking neanderthal brutes that you think we are.”
Aren’t you lettng yourself get carried away by your own rhetoric. I just “bowed” down to your intelligence a couple times in this thread. The only reason I’m posting here is because I know there are thinking folks in the Club. How can you go from your Red and Blue clarity above to this sort of doomy self-pity…
I doubt I’m the one to answer that question. My guess is that’s it’s on you to figure out why you and yours…
“feel in a visceral way that we are the target, the scapegoat of Obama’s unity.
Some might say that chickens are coming home to roost…”
Those chickens are certainly to the point – given Mr. Pegler’s line on Bobby! But consider my line on black people’s generosity. O knows Malcolm X marked a spot – but it’s not where we’re at. He’s not about cultivating anger at his fellow Americans. Or talking up those chickens. Surely you’ll allow that a thousand commentators have commented on O’s unthreatening persona – Pretty hard for me to see how you could imagine one of his crowds turning into a lynch mob. Unless you’re locked on guilt at what white folks did to Afro Americans. In that case – rise up!! It’s certainly true that O’s quest to attain power for the people will give his Afro Am constituency a buzz. But, I hope you’ll beat your own defensive reflex (to use your term) the next time you’re confronted with the spetacle of black folks feeling – maybe for the first time! – that they truly belong in America.
Sep 22, 2008 - 10:14 pm 99. Benj:Wade – try Alexis’s post on the problematic nature of O’s own nods to the heartland and you’ll get a sense of what’s wack about Palin/Pegler’s faux-organicism. Even if Westy wasn’t a truly odious character. Guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one. If I was introducing myself to the American people I wouldn’t start off by quoting with approval a white supremacist and anti-semitic journalist who was on record calling for the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. You’re apparently cool with that. You are You. I am Me.
Sep 22, 2008 - 10:28 pm 100. Paul:Wretchard:
All of Newt’s ideas for pushing growth are great moves, and should be done whether or not there is a bailout. Whether they alone would sufficiently relieve the financial crisis I could only guess.
However, the problem is almost all of them are dead on arrival in the present Congress. So that leaves us probably with a bailout that frankly scares the crap out of me. The bailout proposal needs accountability, and needs to address the prior incentives in the system that led to the risky lending, and financial abuses that occurred.
Back to Newt’s point. The price tag for this bailout is unknown because a lot depends on how fast the economy can grow with the bailout. Can these shaky assets and securities be turned over, cleaned up and recycled in the system or not. If the economy is booming, many of these shaky assets become much more desirable. If the economy tanks, then these bad securities may be worth close to zero.
So that seven hundred billion may only be a few hundred billion or it may be 2 or 3 trillion. Or GULP , if the Messiah gets in and messes around, enacting socialist controls etc, the price tag may be 5- 10 Trillion or more, a depression and the end of the United States of America as we know it.
Sep 22, 2008 - 10:55 pm 101. Wadeusaf:Benj,
Of all the ticky tacky to attempt to off track the train, if you are going to measure via those words we can just stop now. It is hopeless, there is not way out, no end in sight. We are all of us human.
Well except for the messiah.
Yeah I thought about invoking X too. And that other Barry, Goldwater, or countless others who’s attitudes changed with age or circumstance, for better or worse. George Wallace (the Governor and not the comic). Hell even Lucifer was once considered noble and good. A charitable aversion to sin not sinners, is not easy to live up to, and sometimes convienent to ignore. No shakespear, no Kant, no Hobbes, nor Socrates, nor Plato, nope cannot invoke Hume, or Jefferson…slave owner don’t cha know.
It won’t stop Benj. No one you could quote to defend yourself with is not human and not a one of those humans is perfect. Not even “OH”.
Sep 22, 2008 - 11:57 pm 102. Fletcher Christian:trangbang68; “Imad Mugniah, Mohammed Atif, Shamil Besayef, Zarqawi all stopped being Muslims when they became wormfood.” Nicely put. Four down, a billion to go.
fred; “This is why I always equate Allah with Satan.” Try this (slightly altered) declaration for size. I think I came up with it myself, but may be wrong: “There is no Devil but Satan, and Mohammed is his prophet.”
Sep 22, 2008 - 11:57 pm 103. starling:Benj said: But, I hope you’ll beat your own defensive reflex (to use your term) the next time you’re confronted with the spetacle of black folks feeling – maybe for the first time! – that they truly belong in America.
Benj, two questions. Do you care to define “truly”? I was born 10 days after MLK’s I have a dream speech. That gives me 45+ years of experience a black man in America. I have never felt for so much as a single day that I didn’t belong to this country. And I never felt the need to qualify my belonging with that adverb. I just belong period. Nothing Obama does or doesn’t do will change that one iota.
So the second question is this: do you think my experience is atypical? Or, if you prefer, what % of “black folks” will feel they “truly” belong for the first time if Obama wins?
Sep 23, 2008 - 5:06 am 104. Nine-of-Diamonds:“If I was introducing myself to the American people I wouldn’t start off by quoting with approval a white supremacist and anti-semitic journalist who was on record calling for the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. You’re apparently cool with that. You are You. I am Me.”
Can someone remind me in whose home the Magic Negro launched his political career? When he was introducing himself to the American People? But that was OK, right, because he’s the Messiah.
That’s what is so fascinating about the Afro-Nazi drones and their White enablers. No consistency whatsoever; instead, one rule for me and another for thee. Someone tell me if I’m wrong. Perhaps if SP had launched her political career in Eric Rudolph’s house and had attended a Christian Identity church for 20 years Benj would be scrambling to justify her candidacy. Of course. What makes Benj defend O, and not White politicians who are similarly situated? Melanin – nothing more.
Beneath the pretty “articulate Negro” surface O and his apologists represent the same racist tradition that the US did not begin to overcome until recently. O is a throwback – not hope & change.
And another thing – why this moronic obsession with “making history?” How will America redeem itself by electing a Black candidate? Far from being the high point of racial reconciliation, O’s race-centric candidacy is causing resentment to fester. There is no evidence that electing a minority/female ruler makes a population more tolerant. Women ruled countless European kingdoms and territories during the Middle Ages – yet sexual and physical abuse remained rampant in peasant households. Pakistan has had a female ruler and I wouldn’t call them champions of women’s rights. The French elected Leon Blum, a Jew, as Prime Minister in 1938; two short years later they collaborated with the Nazis to eliminate their Jewish population.
Obama thinks he can ride the spectre of racial politics straight to Pennsylvania Ave. and discard it with no ill effects once it’s served its purpose. We shall see.
Sep 23, 2008 - 7:03 am 105. Benj:Wade – one more time – You invoke Wallace and Malcolm (as if they were moral equivalents which is wack to begin with!) but stay with them for a sec. They famously “changed” as they grew older, right? Pegler just got meaner as per Wiki…
“In the 1950s and 1960s, as his conservative views became more extreme and his writing increasingly shrill, he earned the tag of “the stuck whistle of journalism.” He denounced the civil rights movement, embraced anti-Semitism, and in the early 1960s wrote for the John Birch Society —until he was invited to leave for his extreme views.
His assertion in November 1963 (at the height of the civil rights movement) that it is “clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry”; his embrace of the label racist, “a common but false synonym for Nazi, used by the bigots of New York”; or his habit of calling Jews “geese,” because, “they hiss when they talk, gulp down everything before them, and foul everything in their wake,” characterized his beliefs in the latter portion of his life.”
Forgiveness is all, nobody’s perfect, but the critque of PC can’t become a refusal to judge. That’s been a heavy problem on the left. Sounds like you got it bad too if you balk at anyone expressing disdain for Pegler. Geese? – Jesus Wade – why would you want to waste your energy excusing such a sick fuck …
Starling – You got me. I was loose with my generalization. But maybe it makes sense for me to turn the question around. (And I’ll understand if you reject the premise of a race-based query!) What percentage of Afro-Ams do you think ID deeply with Obama’s candidacy. I quoted one – Randall Kennedy – in a previous thread:
“If Obama is defeated, I will, for a brief time, be stunned by feelings of dejection, anger and resentment. These will only be the stronger because the climate of this election year so clearly favors the Democrats, because this was supposed to be an election the Republicans couldn’t win, and because in my view, the Obama ticket is obviously superior to McCain’s.
But I hope that soon thereafter I’ll find solace and encouragement in contemplating this unprecedented development: A major political party nominated a black man for the highest office in the land, and that man waged an intelligent, brave campaign in which many millions of Americans of all races enthusiastically supported an African American standard-bearer.
I hope that I’ll take to heart the wisdom offered by two of my students. “Obama losing,” one wrote, “would be hurtful, but it still spells substantial progress. . . . Change WILL come — the wheels have been set in motion.” Declared the second: “Sometimes you have to believe in the change before it comes (and in the face of its apparent defeat) for the change to be possible.” …
One of my closest friends is an Afro-Am who is largely unimpressed with O. He strikes me as exceptional on this front but it’s certainly possible that I’m overestimating the degree of identification with O among black Americans.
Sep 23, 2008 - 7:08 am 106. Nine-of-Diamonds:Looks like someone was too gutless to face up to the Bill Ayers connection. Big surprise.
Why don’t the O-Drones address the racial double standard? Because they can’t. As a wise man pointed out earlier, Obama has no message – his identity is itself the message. Without his half-black skin O would have been laughed to scorn.
Stuttering logorrhea is “thoughtfulness”.
Dealing the race card, like so many Southern segregationists before him did? “Change”.
Paper-thin resume? “A new perspective”.
The tragic thing about the man is that he really did have a chance to run a post-racial campaign; initially it seems like he tried not to use his skin color as a crutch. Inevitably, though, his lack of qualification caught up with him, and he had to play the only card in his deck.
Sep 23, 2008 - 8:02 am 107. RattlerGator:Bully for you, starling.
Let me clue you in on something, Benj. African American identification with Barack Obama is a mile wide and an inch thick.
You do remember, don’t you, his status before the Iowa caucus when liberal white folks said it was okay to vote for Obama, don’t you? I doubt if any American group celebrates celebrity for the sake of celebrity more than we do.
Black people are not going to (by and large) tell you what they honestly feel about Barack Obama — now that he has caught fire — just as they didn’t honestly tell you what they thought of O.J. Simpson (when that was the cause celebre). I know you won’t believe me. That’s fine. History is going to prove me correct.
Sep 23, 2008 - 8:10 am 108. Konyok:@Benj,
I guess that I was a bit carried away. The “you” that I felt considered “me” a neanderthal brute is not the Benj with whom I’ve been conversing. I was addressing the progressive smugocracy. (Sorry, loaded word, I know … )
As audience members, and sometimes as individuals, conservatives are often treated to not-so-subtle polemics in what would ordinarily be a completely non-political occasion. This would simply be a nuisance, like fending off Jehovah’s Witnesses at the bus stop, in a free marketplace of ideas, except that the content is almost always an offhand attack against us. The greater part of progressive rhetoric is founded on the premise that the progressive project is so manifestly correct that an opponent must needs be defective, mentally or morally to doubt its truth. To be sure, there is also a conservative rip tide that combines Rush Limbaugh style invective with atavistic nativism to a nearly toxic level. The big difference, though, is that a person almost has to be looking for the latter, while the former has become almost ubiquitous in our public spaces. We are constantly told by bumper stickers: “Oh, evolve …!”
Although grossly simplistic, the term conservative means to conserve. On the margin, the conservative resists change and wants things to remain as they are. For the sake of this discussion I’ll term the social/political/economic status quo as America1.0. (Obviously, this is not an initial condition and many conservatives want radical changes, consider this a placeholder, OK?) The term progressive means to progress. On the margin, the progressive desires change and would like to replace the status quo with America1.1.
Obviously, if a plurality of the population opposes the update when first proposed, progressives need to convince their countrymen of the desirability of the changes. Despite political majorities in the 1990’s, dominance of higher education and the entertainment business, progressives have not convinced the country. As Obama said: “… they still cling to their guns and their religion.”
The response of the bulk of progressives to this situation is reminiscent of the stereotype of the clueless American tourist in a Mexican market – they repeat themselves LOUDER.
They blame “Republican attack machines” and “corporate media,” they call for a restoration of the Fairness Doctrine. They blame racism or false consciousness for the American people’s pig-headed refusal to replace America1.0 with America1.1. With Senator Obama’s candidacy we see an attempt to reconfigure the marketing program with a friendly, contemporary style. Rarely do they ever seem to consider re-engineering the update to more closely approximate the temperment and desires of the American people.
So, we find ourselves with an elite exasperated at an obtuse and ungrateful public, and a growing resentment at the ever more transparent attempts by the elite to manipulate the people.
For this particular dynamic, Senator Obama’s race simply is not a factor.
My discomfort with the mass psychology of an Obama rally has nothing to do with the race of the participants or my personal comfort levels with groups of other races. I live in the inner city of a metropolitan area and commute on public transportation daily. As I said, my discomfort was the same that I felt as a non-believer attending a revival meeting.
Sep 23, 2008 - 8:24 am 109. M. Simon:It is easy to dismiss such feelings with the thumb worn narrative of racism, but I would argue that there are some very interesting studies waiting to be made of the group dynamics of the Obama candidacy.
Wretchard,
But this is a situation for oversight, if any, yet I’m worried that the overseers are no better themselves than what they have oversight of. Just how much wisdom Congress will bring … Part of the problem of the last decade is that regulation has often meant enforcing compliance. I’ve heard that a considerble effort in many companies is eaten up by checking boxes rather than making good business decisions. I’ve heard that a lot of consulting work is geared towards keeping things compliant rather than profitable. Enacting regulation is like deputizing a private sector employee to work as a bureaucrat. While you may theoretically work for a company, you really carrying out a regulatory function.
So while I think there may be some rational reason for a temporary bailout; I’m not confident that the foxes can be left in charge of the chicken coop or that bringing in more oversight won’t just include the weasels and stoats too.
Sadly we only have men to work with. The New Man has not arrived on the scene.
Sep 23, 2008 - 8:40 am 110. Benj:K – you’re going to get sick of me agreeing with you. Your line on the “smugocracy” seems more than defensible to me. (And O. himself has, carefully (!) signed off on a good part of your analysis in “Audacity.”) That said, I do think that right-wing populists – and sometimes (believe it or not) straight-up mainline media folks – have stoked culture wars as much as “smart” progressives. (By the way, I ‘ve come to hate both those terms!) Tom Frank, as you probably know, offers the standard left analysis of how snobbish Dems and canny pubs has done their parts to pave the way through the Age of Reagan. Here’s a link to a short, interesting peice about the virtues (and limitations) of Frank’s line – http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2005/06/among_the_belie.html
I’ll take your word re race having zip to do with your fear that the O crowd might turn into a lynch mob. But – it’s a million miles away from my own felt experience there. Given you’ve allowed that you got a little carried away when you were addressing me just now, I wonder if you’d allow that the fault might be in you not the Star!
Sep 23, 2008 - 9:40 am 111. Konyok:The New Man was stillborn in the Lubyanka.
Sep 23, 2008 - 10:15 am 112. Wolf Pangloss:@Benj
“In the 1950s and 1960s, as his conservative views became more extreme and his writing increasingly shrill, he earned the tag of “the stuck whistle of journalism.” He denounced the civil rights movement, embraced anti-Semitism, and in the early 1960s wrote for the John Birch Society —until he was invited to leave for his extreme views.
You know it sounds to me like Pegler became deranged with age. When did he write the small towns line? Was it when he was in his right mind or later?
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. It is possible that the least admirable thinkers can come up with good, poetic, powerful formulations every now and then.
Sep 23, 2008 - 11:30 am 113. Konyok:@Benj,
It wasn’t the star that disturbed me so, it was the constellation.
As you well know, we have us a genuwine existential dilemma.
In your link Smucker refers to corporate culture as the irritant in the redneck oyster’s shell. He’s got his finger on something, but just a piece of it. It seems to me that we all suffer from a kind of societal anomie.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 I agonized over how much I had previously enjoyed special effects chaos and destruction in movies. Confronted with the real thing, I was stricken with a sense of guilt that I had somehow contributed to what had happened by my approving consumption of cinematic mayhem. Years later, I get itchy when watching a “chick flick,” my fingers autonomously seek out swords or fighter planes and big explosions on the remote.
Is it corporate culture that has conditioned me to enjoy such sanguine fare? Perhaps, but most likely only in terms of my favorite staging and costumes. I want the Yanks to kill the Japs, not vice versa.
I do feel that struggle is an innate need of the human being. (No, I promises not to quote that windbag Nietzsche …) Not only do we get a rush of brain chemicals in the proximity of violence, but we seem to find great meaning for ourselves and our existence through identification with a dangerous cause. This tendency adds fuel to the struggle for alpha status by young males. It finds expression in video games. Even the current romance of *transgressive* art seems to me an expression of this behavioral feature, as is the present hardening of partisan identities.
Of course, this attraction to chaos is largely antithetical to the needs of communities. While the confidence of young warriors is necessary to protect the community from predatory outsiders, it must be tempered by the strategic wisdom of honored elders and controlled with taboos against violence within the group. (This is the communitarian – libertarian problem in a nutshell …)
In today’s mega societies we still like to break things, but stability at all cost is the imperative of our communities.
The real conditioning that I see taking place is an attempt to squelch these urges. (I’m sure that Whiskey will have some things to say if he sees this exchange … ) I think this has resulted in a kind of tentativeness and hesitation in our public life. We Americans rarely get that excited in public. (Our civic religion – sports – is the exception that proves my point.)
Secondarily, we have been conditioned by our entertainment media to be very cynical about politics and our government. *Everybody knows* that all politicians are crooks. This cynicism may not be pretty, but it has been a pretty good vaccine against demogogues.
In the throes of our anomie, we WANT to be moved. We WANT to be part of something. Enter Barack Obama: inspiring orator, Macluhanesque medium of “clean, articulate black man” as message, exuding confidence and friendly charisma. The crowd surrenders.
The very excitement that he inspires alarms the doubting Thomas unwilling to cast aside skeptical cynicism. The enthusiasm troubles our observer even more as he contemplates its proximity to the chaos imperative.
Is this excitement to be channeled to doing great things? Well, no, not really. Actually, just the election of a politician. What happens to this enthusiasm if disillusioned? That’s the million dollar question.
Between idealistic enthusiasm and cynical realism is a phase transition that can sometimes be really dangerous ground.
Sep 23, 2008 - 12:01 pm 114. Alexis:If I remember correctly, the phrase “Iron Curtain” was not first used by Winston Churchill. Instead, I think it was used by Joseph Goebbels. And yet, even though the term “Iron Curtain” originated in Nazi propaganda, it was a commonly used term during the Cold War. If we ought to refrain from using literary references from anti-Semitic Nazi scumbags, should we refrain from using the phrase “Iron Curtain”?
I find it rather amusing how Sarah Palin refers to New York as “the heart of America”, while Barack Obama refers to Kansas as “the Heartland”. I regard these references to “heart” as tiresome. One aspect I like about America is how there is no one ideal of America that everybody can agree upon. No one city epitomizes America, certainly not Greeley, Colorado! Americans can’t really agree upon what a “City Upon a Hill” is supposed to look like. We can’t even agree on whether it’s supposed to be on a hill at all, or even what constitutes “good” weather. And that’s fine, because Americans can be different and still be American.
Sep 23, 2008 - 1:45 pm 115. Benj:@Wolf – I think the quote comes from the mid-30’s. But he was pretty far gone even back then – Liked to imagine someone bumping off FDR and specialized in abusing Eleanor…
@ Kon – Too much in your post that’s worthy so forgive my quickie… Your response to 9/11 reminds me of my own – posted here about that in the past. Wasn’t sure at first WHY I felt personally at fault – wasn’t survivor’s guilt – though my wife got lucky (passed on a potential gig down around the Towers that day)…Slowly dawned that the Deed underscored my own beamishness about…Mankind. (As you can tell, I’m not too good at resisting hope-mongers! ) I’d always focused (pretty much exclusively) on Change. Skipped over the NEED for protection. My obliviousness to the need for Security came home to me bigtime on 9/11. And I felt the gravitas of people – conservatives!!! military guys, cops, fireman etc. – who worried – and ACTED! – while I was, ah, obnubliatory…
I hear you re the NEED to be “moved” – but Lord knows O is all clear about the fact that he’s a screen on which his audiences often project their own emotions. O often seems (to me) to go out of his way NOT to whip folks up. He comes across to me as a public Man Thinking. Not a little Hitler…
As for the dangers of any transition – Have to say that seems like pretty light stuff to me. If O turns out to be Deval Patrick…- I don’t think anyone is going to throw themselves off a bridge. And the only folks I hear talk re “blood in the streets” and “jumping to armed struggle” etc. are on this side of the fence. Maybe I’ve missed apocalyptos on my side, but surely you’ll allow that O is a pretty cool customer…
Your post reminds me of a Les Fiedler line I’ve quoted here in the past. Fiedler (as you probably know) was a lit critic – busted the Rosenbergs’ popular front style in one of his more famous (notorious on the Left!) 50’s pieces. Anyway Fiedler was a charismatic platform presence. But on an early 60’s panel at a German U, he wasn’t getting any action from the crowd. Wondered about that after the dealio. And his host explained – Germans don’t trust charisma! Well they’ve got an excuse. But I don’t think Americans have anything to be afraid of this electoral season. Don’t quite grasp why anyone who cares about the health of American demos should worry re O’s capacity to inspire kids – or the black mons and children who made up 80% of his audience yesterday at a Durham NC rally. -…All good, no?
Your deepest ruminations re media violence and moral character remind me of the last piece my pop wrote before he died – It was long thing in Harpers – “The Hard Man Cometh.” Gotta feeling he would’ve been honored if you’d read it…
Sep 23, 2008 - 2:27 pm 116. Steynian 253 « Free Mark Steyn!:[...] CAN A PERSON stop being a Muslim? …. [...]
Sep 23, 2008 - 2:31 pm 117. Konyok:@Benj,
I’ll try to dig up your dad’s piece.
As an observer of history, I share the German distrust of charisma. I suspect that our learned host does even more so.
(I fear that I don’t know all of your literary references, I am a mere geologist …
That Obama may be Deval Patrick’s twin is a real concern of itself. Not that he’s a bad fellow, just that McCain is so much more serious.
It is precisely that Rohrschach quality of Obama’s rhetoric that worries me so. It is a clever parlor trick, but is it a philosophy of governance? Especially given the challenges facing the next administration. The senator is expert at setting an emotional ambience, but is he capable of horsetrading? As to his cool manner, I detect a rather thin skin. The old geezer has managed to unnerve him pretty badly.
All of this blood-on-the-streets stuff is plain silly. I am hearing it from both sides, though. If Obama loses in a close race there will a lot of disappointed people with a relatively low maturity level. That is the transition that I was talking about – from Hope to Disappointment. (At this point, I think that McCain will win. Obama has a chance to redeem himself at the debates, but he has performed weakly since the convention.)
Sep 23, 2008 - 3:08 pm 118. Konyok:@Alexis
Would that mention of Greeley be in reference to Sayyid Qutb? Sly …
That’s a pretty good summary of federalism. I like it.
Sep 23, 2008 - 3:12 pm 119. Bob Murphy:@Konyok re America 1.1
Sep 23, 2008 - 3:23 pm 120. Nine-of-Diamonds:Nice rave. Good explanation.
Here’s a near supporting quote about the 1.1ers.
“To manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you — the social reformers — see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.”
Isaiah Berlin
“Maybe I’ve missed apocalyptos on my side, but surely you’ll allow that O is a pretty cool customer…”
As if the O-drones know anything about the Gatsby-esque chameleon they bow down to. Obama doesn’t even know his own position on half the issues. And as for O supporters not being apocalyptic, check this out:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larisa-alexandrovna/welcome-to-the-final-stag_b_127990.html
And all the chatter about black kids and white kids making common cause is laughable. The O-Drones mistake psychological dysfunction for inspiration. Black kids are, to put it nicely, racial tribalists. White kids want to alleviate their melanin-deficient angst. I spoke to one of them today – a South Texan girl who was painfully self-conscious about her family’s “backward” beliefs. Voting for O is a penance for wealth, white trash family members, whatever makes proggs self conscious. That’s not a ballot box you’re entering on Election Day; it’s the Magic Negro’s Confessional. Whites everywhere, I Absolve You.
Read a nice anecdote the other day about a gathering of some twentysomething O-drones at one of the messiah’s speeches. After all the usual hopeychangey teleprompter goodness, it came time for the Obama Youth to socialize. The black kids and white kids huddled apart in their little groups, not saying so much as a word to each other.
Sep 23, 2008 - 9:11 pm 121. Wadeusaf:I guess Mr. Ayers’s bag man can’t bring the races together after all – if he doesn’t fulfill that whole “stop the oceans” thing, then I’m REALLY going to feel cheated.
Benj,
I’ve been out and unable to respond. Let me say first the quote does come from the thirty’s and the man with whom Herst’s sold so many papers was never a gentle observer of the coarser images of his day. His language reflected the thinking of most of America, not just the rural folk but most of urban America too. Rough and tumble, and not at all genteel nor held back in fear of hurting feelings. As a “progressive” he disliked the authortarian aspects of the New Deal.
I am not saying his sentiments regarding Jews was noble, nor am I defending the particular stance he took. I would say that as a persuasive voice of American thought to dismiss Pegler as a monster is a bit over the top. I have heard worse left and right, and not been stunned by the sentiment, but informed.
In the case of the quote in Palin’s speech, the line spoke directly to a segment of America, not a sentiment of Pegler’s. I find it intellectually dishonest to dismiss every evidence of the man’s thinking as fascist or to refer to him as a monster. You may not like the man, you may not agree with the way he stated his arguments, but it was not so long ago that language was not so unacceptable.
I view Pegler not a monster to be ignored, but a mirror to be explored. Much of that reflection is of all of us, some of his remarks are not easy to digest muddled as they are in uglyness and pettiness of human affairs and affairs of human hearts. Others of his statements are true and in their truth can and ought to be used well. It was the sense the words made in the speech, they worked well. The reaction of RFK Jr. is understandable, but probably researched, the rest of the complaints are only piling on to disdain small town people and small town lives.
As a man of ideas I do not see the wisdom in your protest, I do not accept the logic of your complaint. PC is, I think, a menace to the health and well being of the county. And PC ought not to be confused with decency or respect.
Sep 23, 2008 - 9:58 pm 122. Benj:Wade – My mind boggled when you invoked SHAKESPEARE above…Hath not a GOOSE…Think how illogical your argument is – Pegler isn’t being abused in some ahistorical fashion for being a dead white male who didn’t anticipate the conventional wisdom of modernity. He was a MODERN writer who used all of his talent to trash liberal-mindedness in his own time.
You say – “PC is, I think, a menace to the health and well being of the county.” – A Conservative talking point. But Pegler’s example – and his very popularity – should serve as a reminder that PC is not nearly as much of a “menace” as the sort of hate promoted by that 20th Century man, Pegler. I don’t listen much to the right-wing populists in the media who are his heirs – though I think I get a whiffs of their raps at the Club. It’s my understanding they tend to steer clear of his uglier turns. And I guess that’s progress…
By the way – A decade or so ago it turned out that one of the tribunes of literary theory of “deconstruction”, Paul de Man, wrote nazi progaganda under an assumed name in the 40s. Many of his acolytes in the Academy. pretended it didn’t matter. Just as there were those who pretended it didn’t matter that Hiedegger signed letters Heil Hitler in the 30’s. Fuck Dat. (And, trust me, Pegler was no Heidgegger. Though i think they did share a readiness to conflate versions of human nature with the life of plants.)
Sep 24, 2008 - 12:59 pm 123. Wadeusaf:Free speech demands that even a holes be given their due. As tin eared as that often will sound, the attempted supression, silencing if you will of discussion of the ideas expressed in Palin’s speech is a sham and a shame. I don’t give a rip about Pegler.
The association of guilt to anyone reading or even agreeing with an idea stated because of who stated it is not wrong. Merits of the debate ought not be trumped by sentiments.
Sep 24, 2008 - 11:41 pm 124. Nine-of-Diamonds:“Just as there were those who pretended it didn’t matter that Hiedegger signed letters Heil Hitler in the 30’s.”
Not to mention those today who pretend it’s OK that that John McCain’s preacher supports Palestinian radicals. Oh, wait –
http://maggiesnotebook.blogspot.com/2008/04/jeremiah-wright-connects-with-hamas.html
“No one’s” been more concerned about Anti-Semitism than Obama.
O’s supporters don’t care about their intellectual dishonesty, so there’s no point in engaging them as if they do.
Sep 25, 2008 - 5:02 amSorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.