cognitive dissident

I know, I know...you're as tired of posts about the McCain/Palin media mendacity machine as I am. I would be remiss in my blogging duties, however, if I didn't call your attention to Andrew Sullivan's post "Scales. Eyes. McCain." I can't do his fine writing justice by abridging it, so I'll reprint both his introduction and his conclusion:

Reading the "press" in this surreal climate right now, one is tempted to despair. I'm not giving in to it, because I still believe that the actual truth matters in the world. If propaganda could win in the end against truth, then Bush's approval ratings would be somewhere in the high 80s. They are in the lower 30s. In the end, the American people are not fools. And facts are facts. Right now, we are being subjected to an absolutely disorienting blizzard of lies and absurdities (Palin is a lying absurdity) from the McCain campaign. The idea is to so disorient people, to throw so many new concepts, brands, lies, images, marketing and distortions at them that they will not be able to focus on the issues in this election, and the real choices serious people have to make.

[...]

In the end, whatever the power of the religious fundamentalist movement that is now the GOP in simply denying reality, reality wins. And the fact that John McCain is now a serial and shameless liar will also sink in. The question before us is not whether this will be one day understood to be true. The question is whether it will be flushed out in time.

We cannot control these despicable liars in the McCain campaign. We can only tell the truth as fearlessly and as relentlessly and as continuously as we can until November 4. We must do our duty. And if the American people want to re-elect the machine that has helped destroy this country's national security, global reputation and economic health, then that is their choice. But I am not so depressed to think that they will.

We must give them the truth. And that will feel like hell. And we must tell it like Truman told it: cheerfully, passionately and relentlessly.

Sullivan's not right all the time, but he nailed this situation perfectly. If our media had more pundits of his caliber, we'd be much better off.

Posted by cognitivedissident at 4:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

This paper on "Ann Coulter and the Problems of Pluralism" by Samuel Chambers and Alan Finlayson (h/t: Patrick Appel, subbing for Andrew Sullivan) defines Coulterism as "a distinct form of political-performance-action that exceeds the imagined rules of 'proper' public speech" and suggests that, despite being "one of the most important political developments of our time," it nonetheless "tends to be too easily dismissed by liberals:"

Furthermore, we contend...that Coulter and her ilk in fact succeed in a political critique of mainstream political liberalism in America and that the failure of liberalism to recognise this fact lies at the heart of many of its problems - be they conceptual, electoral, ideological or governmental.

How is Coulterism's critique to be considered a success? Indeed, in what respects does it actually function as a critique? Chambers and Finlayson answer obliquely later in the piece:

Every time a Coulterist remark causes outrage or anger, every time it succeeds in causing offence and every time it garners the accusation of having 'gone too far' [...] this reaction provides evidence not of the failure but of the success of the Coulterist polemic. For it shows that the polemic has effectively put into question what had previously seemed settled and habitual.

This is less a substantive critique of liberalism than a deliberate effort to continue moving the Overton window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window further to the right. This is borne out by the authors' later observation that "The genius, if we may call it that, of Coulterism is that in playing the political game in this way it extends and rewrites the rules to trap those who most believe in them." Chambers and Finlayson also write that:

"it is not only extremely easy but also terribly tempting to dismiss Coulter as a minor media-made irritant, a flaky extremist or just another pundit. And Coulter has, of course, been accused of deliberate distortion, selective misquoting and outright falsification (Franken 2003). But all five of her books, from her 1989 indictment of Bill Clinton through to Godless, have topped the New York Times' best-seller list."

This is a non-sequitur. The sales figures for Coulter's books have nothing to do with her numerous distortions, misquotations, and falsifications (which are quite solidly proven, and not just by comedians). Pretending that they do is a way of side-stepping the issue, or--even worse--pretending that that the facts don't matter if a book sells well enough. Chambers and Finlayson prefer to focus on Coulter's style rather than her (lack of) substance:

While liberal theory is preoccupied with rational deliberation and the ultimate neutrality of justice, Coulterism speaks in angry, aggressive, mocking and emotive terms - all the while rejecting any pretence of neutrality. Coulterism remains gleefully, fiercely partisan while denouncing liberals as the partisan ones. And this is not simply - or certainly not only - an irrational challenge to liberalism.

It is this inversion of reality that we liberals find so difficult to comprehend--the politically powerful posing as the powerless, the economic elites pretending to be populists, the media mavens complaining of censorship. As a liberal, I have no qualms about "giving up on a normative pre-judgement of Coulterism as clearly 'out of bounds' or simply 'wrong' in a moral sense," although it would greatly trouble me to give up basic rules of non-contradictory argumentation and truthfulness. Issues of decorum can be easily dealt with, but offenses against rationality itself are more problematic.

I don't despise Coulter because she's abrasive or offensive--that's her shtick, after all--but because she's full of shit. As the authors write, "Coulter wants a dirty fight; perhaps we should respect her wishes." I believe that I've already done so; see here and here for the most recent examples.

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A while ago, Tony Blankley asked "Was Iraq Worth It?" over at ClownHall; his answer was as disingenuous as one would expect. Here are a few the holes that Swiss-cheese his column into incoherence and irrelevance:

Blankley admitted "it is doubtlessly true that our invasion of Iraq (and Afghanistan) helped al-Qaida's recruitment," after claiming "it is reasonable to assume that we have killed [...] between 800 and 1,900 non-Iraqi terrorists who otherwise would have been plying their trade elsewhere." Juxtaposing those statements makes it clear that these current terrorists wouldn't be "plying their trade" anywhere if we hadn't invaded Iraq, for the obvious reason that they wouldn't have been recruited into terrorism.

Blankley's claim that "Fighting and winning always impress. Even merely fighting and persisting impress" is true only where justice has been observed; unprovoked aggression, for example, not only fails to impress but is justifiably criticized. Coupled with his segue into a conversation with a former Soviet general, Blankley's point is muddled even further. The general's reaction to our invasion of Vietnam (58,000 dead) is described as "They thus calculated that they'd better be careful with the United States. What might we do, they thought, if our interests really were threatened?" Are we to extrapolate from this example and be impressed by the Soviet Union's ten-year persistence (15,000 dead) in Afghanistan? They didn't prevail--as we didn't in Vietnam--but is their persistence categorically impressive to Blankley? By his own statement, it should be.

If Bush were impressed enough by the Soviets in Afghanistan--after being sure to avoid his own service in Vietnam--he might give up on hunting terrorists in Afghanistan and instead help create more of them during a lengthy and disastrous occupation of an unrelated country. [Oops...perhaps that shouldn't be phrased as a hypothetical example.]

Blankley was nonsensical yet again when concluding about disagreements over Bush's Iraq policy that "This is a debate worth having before November" only two paragraphs after writing that "The full effects of the vigorous martial response of President Bush [...] will not be known for decades." The inherent contradiction here is as obvious as Blankley's subtext: we need another "vigorously martial" president (McBush, perhaps?) to avoid a repeat of the calamitous peace and prosperity that one hopes will distinguish the incoming administration from the current one.

If he were liberal, a hack like Blankley would not be a prominent columnist.

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George Will's ANWR column (the one I dissected here and here) apparently contains yet another falsehood. Will made this claim:

Drilling is underway 60 miles off Florida. The drilling is being done by China, in cooperation with Cuba, which is drilling closer to South Florida than U.S. companies are.

This McClatchy news article (h/t: Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy) shows that Will's claim is false:

"China is not drilling in Cuba's Gulf of Mexico waters, period," said Jorge Pinon, an energy fellow with the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami and an expert in oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. [...] China's Sinopec oil company does have an agreement with the Cuban government, but it's to develop onshore resources west of Havana, Pinon said. The Chinese have done some seismic testing, he said, but no drilling, and nothing offshore.

The interesting aspect of this is not the number of times George Will can be wrong in a single column, but in how quickly his falsehood spread through the Right's media echo chamber. Everyone from Dick Cheney to John Boehner (R-OH) to Investor's Business Daily to George Radanovich (R-CA) has cited Will's claim without ever bothering to ascertain that drilling was actually being done.

This is the sort of episode--one of many, unfortunately--that justifies an attitude of extreme skepticism toward the corporate media's op-ed writers.

update (6/17 @ 3:40pm):
Will issued a correction for this error, but did not address any of the other errors.

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I received an email with a question regarding my analysis of George Will's ANWR fixation:

"Specifically, which of the facts in George Will's column are disputed by opposing facts?"

I am glad to oblige, as several of Will's claims are indeed contradicted by the facts. Like pulling a loose thread on a cheap sweater, examining Will's claimed "facts" cause his column to quickly unravel into a useless pile of punditry. Here are a few examples:

1). Will claims that:

"One million barrels is what might today be flowing from ANWR if in 1995 President Bill Clinton had not vetoed legislation to permit drilling there."

Even at an output of 780,000 barrels per day (the mean estimated maximum production level, courtesy of the Department of Energy), Clinton's protection of ANWR is costing us 75 cents per barrel; using Will's statistic of 27 gallons of gasoline per barrel, that would be less than 3 cents per gallon. Wow, we'd better start drilling right now! </sarcasm>

(Extrapolating from 780,000 barrels of ANWR oil to 1 million barrels of Saudi oil, it is apparent that Schumer was wildly off the mark with his 50-cents-a-gallon estimated price drop at the pump. It's far more likely that any such cost savings would never reach consumers.)

2). Will claims "10.4 billion barrels of oil" in ANWR, but the USGS mean estimate is that "the total quantity of technically recoverable oil in the 1002 area is 7.7 BBO." My money is on the geologists being correct; Will's track record isn't very good.

3). Will claims the following:

"The common people of New York want Schumer to be their senator, so they should pipe down about gasoline prices, which are a predictable consequence of their political choice. Also disqualified from complaining are all voters who sent to Washington senators and representatives who have voted to keep ANWR's oil in the ground and who voted to put 85 percent of America's offshore territory off-limits to drilling."

The error Will makes in the first sentence is compounded in the second. Did Schumer discuss only his opposition to ANWR drilling during his campaign, to the exclusion of all other issues? Did every voter select him as the candidate of choice solely on that position? The answer to each of these questions is obviously "No," unless Will can produce an example of a single-issue ANWR voter. Just as much for Schumer as for all the other Congresscritters in question, the voters have most definitely not relinquished their right to complain about any elected official's stance on any subject. Will's demand that voters "pipe down" instead of speaking up is both undemocratic and odious.

4). Will claims that "drilling [at ANWR] would be confined to a space one-sixth the size of Washington's Dulles airport." Dulles airport sits on 11,830 acres of land, and Will is apparently using his buddy Bush's claim that 2,000 acres of ANWR would suffice for oil extraction. 2,000 is indeed approximately one-sixth of 11,830...but the numbers are misleading. The legend of this ANWR map explains that the 2,000-acre area does not include: roads, gravel mines, and all parts of the pipelines other than where the support posts contact the ground!

This is equivalent to claiming that I could fit 148 Hummers in a typical parking space. How? The H1 has a curb weight of 7,847 pounds, and its tires are inflated to 50 PSI. Therefore, it only needs 157 square inches of pavement. A typical parking space is roughly 9-by-18 feet, so 148 Hummers should fit in a single parking space with room to spare! (When one re-enters the realm of reality, however, one Hummer barely fits in a typical space; each H1 is over 7 feet wide and 15 feet long.) Likewise, the inclusion of infrastructure in proposed ANWR land usage is necessary in order to accurately estimate the environmental impact.

I previously noted Will's non sequitur comment on $100 million exploration costs versus tax rates, his omission of Schumer's remarks on big oil tax breaks, and his dodging Bush's failed bargaining with the Saudis while excoriating Schumer's quid pro quo proposal. These are some of the reasons why some of Will's conclusions are as problematic as his "facts:" because they spin the debate toward implied conclusions that are unsupported by the data cited.

(This list of errors was made while giving Will a pass on most of his statements, allowing the majority of them to stand--for the purposes of brevity--without even a cursory attempt at verification. I have neither the time nor the inclination to serve as a fact-checker for Will, although his need for one is obvious.)

Like veneered furniture, Will's columns often look great at first glance, but his glossy command of language, the illusion of scholarship, and the sheen of a patrician wit (lacking in the cut-rate hackwork of Ann Coulter and her ilk) can be deceptive. When the poorly attached veneer peels off, the cheap materials and shoddy craftsmanship are plain to see; melamine and mendacity, one might say.

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George Will's column on gas prices (at Jewish World Review or ClownHall or WaPo --pick your poison) quotes a few sentences from Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) discussing Saudi Arabia's ability to lower gas prices by increasing oil output; Will responds by pretending that drilling in Alaska's ANWR would solve our energy problems. Although it is true that it is primarily Democrats who blocked ANWR drilling, Bush's lack of a comprehensive national energy policy isn't their fault--it's his.

In the end, Will does nothing but prove that political pandering to cash-strapped voters exists on both sides of the aisle. Schumer's full remarks from 13 May are available from the Government Printing Office (here, here, and here), and contain more than the pandering to consumers highlighted by Will:

...right now, it is Big Oil and OPEC that are benefitting and American families are losing. It is unfortunate we are at this point. Eight years of poor stewardship over our Nation's energy policy has left us with [no] alternatives. And my Republican colleagues have blocked every attempt at real energy reform that would help alleviate the rising energy prices in this country.

In the 110th Congress alone, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have blocked four different attempts by Democrats to extend the alternative tax provisions, and not only for a year or two but many.

On June 21 of last year, the extension of energy credits received 57 votes; on December 7, it received 53 votes; on December 13, it received 59 votes; and on February 6, 58 votes.

Each time, Republicans put up roadblocks requiring 60 votes in order to pass the bill. Each time the overwhelming majority of Democrats voted for the bill, the overwhelming majority of Republicans voted against.

President Bush opposed the bills because each would have ended tax breaks for big oil, as if they needed more tax breaks given their record profitability.

Will's attempt to make Democratic actions (protecting the environment and conserving domestic oil supplies) equivalent to Republican ones (drilling everywhere and protecting oil-industry profits) is ludicrous at best and dishonest at worst. Schumer wanted to use arms sales to Saudi Arabia as a bargaining chip for increased oil production, something that Bush preferred to simply beg for--and, of course, Bush failed. (Dubya's manly hand-holding with King Abdullah didn't force the Saudis to "open up the spigot" after all, did it?) For some (partisan?) reason, George Will didn't complain about Bush's failure. Instead, the bow-tied buffoon blathered on about increasing oil exploration, making this claim:

Just probing four miles below the Gulf's floor costs $100 million. Congress's response to such expenditures is to propose increasing the oil companies' tax burdens.

Anyone with the barest knowledge of rhetoric will recognize this as a non sequitur; anyone with even minimal understanding of partisan posturing will see through Will's sham. Unable to stop digging when he's in a hole, Will closes his piece with the sarcastic remark: "Let it not be said that America has no energy policy." It is precisely in the area of energy policy where Americans should take a few moments to refresh their memory of Jimmy Carter's 1979 "crisis of confidence" speech (mistakenly called "malaise" by conservatives):

In little more than two decades we've gone from a position of energy independence to one in which almost half the oil we use comes from foreign countries, at prices that are going through the roof. Our excessive dependence on OPEC has already taken a tremendous toll on our economy and our people. This is the direct cause of the long lines which have made millions of you spend aggravating hours waiting for gasoline. It's a cause of the increased inflation and unemployment that we now face. This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our nation. The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our nation. These are facts and we simply must face them.

Carter remarked that "There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice," but there was a way to delay the sacrifice, to create a greater burden on future generations by postponing the necessary actions and making the adjustment to a high-priced-oil future both more prolonged and more painful. That was the hidden cost of taking the Reagan-Bush-Bush detour into energy-policy denial. Some people got to enjoy a scenic ride, but as a nation we are now further from our destination, with a clueless joyrider behind the wheel and a fuel gauge approaching "E."

The conservative supply-side mentality assumes that everything would be just fine if we would just drill every drop of crude and pour it all--along with increasingly large amounts of our agricultural output--into the tanks of their gas-guzzling SUVs. Great idea, guys...but what happens tomorrow when oil is $200/barrel and gas is $10/gallon, while we've wasted still more years on this short-sighted waste-it-all-now mindset with no concern for the future?

Liberals like Carter tend to take the longer-term view, realizing that we need to address demand for oil as much (or more than) its supply. Increased efficiency, energy-conscious urban planning, and more research into alternative and renewable energy sources would also gas prices to drop as much or more than drilling everywhere--but because demand would be drastically lower. With a finite and diminishing resource like oil, sticking more derricks into the sand--along with many Republicans' heads--is not a long-term solution.

Quote of the Day:

"That's what happened to Jimmy Carter--he asked Americans to take responsibility for their profligate ways, and promptly lost to Ronald Reagan, who told them once again that they could do anything they wanted." (p. 125, Jane Smiley, "The Unteachable Ignorance of the Red States," Slate, 4 November 2004)

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As expected, the wingnut whining has been especially annoying ever since the California Supreme Court's pro-marriage decision yesterday. Pam Spaulding writes about "Freeper, fundie heads exploding over CA marriage decision" over at Pandagon, and here are a few other examples of right-wing rhetoric:

Janet LaRue breathlessly exclaims at ClownHall that the court has "ordered" same-sex marriages, and asks "Will Citizens Submit?" (The decision, of course, does no such thing...but why should facts get in the way of a sensationalistic headline?)

National Review's William Duncan claims "Supreme Overreach," but his terminology is so confused that he calls his anti-marriage allies "pro-marriage."

At Human Events, Ernest Istook refers to equal marriage rights supporters as "the Neville Chamberlains of the cultural wars." Istook is confused as well: California's pro-equality ruling may become the Brown v. Board of Education or Loving v. Virginia of our era; it is nothing like Chamberlain's Munich Agreement (which gave part of Czechoslovakia--Sudetenland, for those who paid attention in history class--to Hitler).

On the other (sensible) side of the aisle, Glenn Greenwald has pre-debunked most of the conservative "arguments" already. At Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum looks at the polling trends and foresees "a very tough campaign" to defeat the anti-marriage ballot initiative. Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick asks "Who You Calling Activist?" and thoroughly demolishes that anti-marriage (and anti-factual) "activist judges" trope:

When it comes to gay marriage, California is a hotbed of activism. Their activist Legislature has twice passed bills that would legalize gay marriage, and their activist governor has twice vetoed those bills. That same activist Legislature also enacted a ban on same-sex marriage in 1977, and its activist citizenry passed a statewide ballot initiative in 2000 doing the same thing. While polls show that Californians are increasingly supportive of gay marriage, other activist citizens have been collecting what now amounts to 1.1 million signatures to amend their constitution in November to say that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." But then today the state's activist Supreme Court got in on the activist action, finding in a 4-3 decision that the California ban on same-sex marriage violates the "fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship." That makes everybody an activist in California, just by virtue of the fact that they are acting. (Let it be noted that it's particularly activist of the state Legislature and its citizens to be banning and legalizing gay marriage all at the same time.) [emphasis added]

Andrew Sullivan thinks through the situation, and comes to a principled--although still conservative--conclusion:

People can talk about activist liberal judges all they want. But the simple truth is that what has changed these past twenty years is not the nature of judges, but our collective understanding of what sexual orientation is. [...] It is simply that the next generation has grown up with a different definition of who gay people are. They see gay people as interchangeable with straight people. They don't think we're inferior to them. Because they know us.

Once you alter that basic understanding, then re-fitting the law to account for it may, at first blush, look liberal or activist, but in fact, it's just removing what now appears a massive anachronism and anomaly. Yes: this means that the court is dong something the first Californians would have regarded as outrageous. But that goes for so many other issues as well, especially race and gender, where our core definitions have shifted with time and knowledge.

Is this shift an ideological one? I don't believe so. It's an empirical one, based on increased knowledge of who gay people are.

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In an all-too-appropriate prelude to tomorrow's fifth anniversary of "mission accomplished," spin-zone host Bill O'Reilly claimed--on the air and with a straight face--that:

"We didn't invade Iraq."

This is why we liberals often call his channel "Faux News:" It's little more than unfair and imbalanced opinion packaged as real journalism.

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JR Dunn wrote a piece on "The Disgrace of Liberalism" at American Thinker that I can only describe as delusional. He begins with this assertion:

2008 marks the end of liberalism as a governing force in the same way that 1968 marked the end of liberalism as a political doctrine.

This makes perfect sense, I guess, if one ignores the four decades of conservative governance between those dates: Liberalism is at the end of its viability because...conservatives have been in charge--and have failed monumentally--for forty years! Dunn's rhetoric continues to get the better of his logic throughout the piece, as in these sections:

The Democrats went into the 1968 presidential election as crippled as any political party in American history, choked with failure, bereft of ideas, and facing a general uprising from their own younger elements.

[...]

Liberalism will stagger on. It still has control of all those urban political machines, along with the unions and bureaucracies. But it has no future. Personality cults and ideology will take you only so far. We may yet live to see this albatross removed from the nation's back.

Let's try correcting that analysis so that it more closely resembles reality, shall we? Here's my attempt:

2008 will mark the end of conservatism as a governing force and as a political doctrine. The Republicans go into this presidential election as crippled as any political party in American history: choked with failure, bereft of ideas, and facing a general uprising from their own younger elements.

Conservatism will stagger on. It still has control of all those media outlets--along with the corporate boardrooms and executive suites--but it has no future. Personality cults and ideology can take them only so far, and we may yet live to see this GOP albatross removed from the nation's neck.

Reminder: only 296 days and 14 hours remain until our long national nightmare is over.

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EJ Dionne lets the market fundamentalists have it with both barrels over the Bear Stearns bailout, writing:

Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy. [...] ...if this near meltdown of capitalism doesn't encourage a lot of people to question the principles they have carried in their heads for the past three decades or so, nothing will.

Nothing will, but I assume that his remark was meant rhetorically.

I don't fault Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, for being so interventionist in trying to save the economy. On the contrary, Bernanke deserves credit for ignoring all the extreme free-market bloviation. He doesn't want the economy to collapse on his watch, so he is willing to violate all the conservatives' shibboleths about the dangers of government intervention. [...] Wall Street usefully might feel a bit of gratitude, perhaps by being willing to have the wealthy foot some of the bill or to acknowledge that while its denizens were getting rich, a lot of Americans were losing jobs and health insurance. I'm waiting.

I suspect that Dionne will be waiting for quite some time. After all, gratitude--like paying taxes--is for the little people.

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Dinesh D'Souza tries to excuse "That Notorious Buckley AIDS Column" via several means, none of them convincing. First, he attempts some chronological obfuscation by claiming "Buckley had written a notorious column during the 1980s" and "not much was known about AIDS in the early 1980s." These statements are both true, and both are misleading.

By writing "during the 1980s" rather than giving the column's date of 18 March 1986, D'Souza tries to obscure its true age, and thus justify its homophobia via ignorance. What was known about AIDS "in the early 1980s" is irrelevant, as a great deal was known--for those who cared to learn--by 1986. (By way of context: The first CDC reports were issued in 1981, the retrovirus was isolated in 1983, and antibody screening for blood donors began in 1985. 1986, the year of Buckley's tattoo remark, saw the release of Surgeon General Koop's celebrated Report on AIDS.)

D'Souza claims that Buckley's suggestion of tattooing people was AIDS was made "somewhat light-heartedly," but I fail to see humor in such Nazi-esque forced tattooing of those who already suffer from a fatal disease. Tattooing "abandon all hope..." on their lower backs is as abhorrent an idea as sewing pink triangles onto their work camp uniforms.

Far from being a mid-1980s aberration, Buckley revisited the tattooing idea in 2005, suggesting that "maybe it is up now for reconsideration." He displayed his homophobia to the end; if he couldn't make history stop, he could at least stop learning about subjects that upset his fragile heteronormative worldview.

How pitiful.

update (3/5 @ 2:59pm):
D'Souza posted his column at ClownHall, and I've been having some fun with the trolls who hang out there.

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Rick Perlstein's piece on "Why William F. Buckley Was My Role Model" shows the personable side of the famed conservative icon, while the NYT obituary provides the expected bevy of biographical data. Check out these videos of a 1969 Firing Line confrontation with Noam Chomsky for a sense of how the left-vs.-right arguments have degenerated since Buckley's time at the pinnacle of American conservatism.

Although Buckley's conservatism often led him to conclusions that were indefensible in retrospect, in particular his racism

"The central question that emerges...is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes--the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race." (National Review, 24 August 1957)

and homophobia,

"Everyone detected with AIDS should be tatooed [sic] in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals." (New York Times op-ed, 18 March 1986)

"Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddam face and you'll stay plastered." (to Gore Vidal during an ABC debate, 28 August 1968)

his erudite vocabulary and patrician manner were nearly always a pleasure to admire and to argue against. Buckley was a far more worthy intellectual opponent than the crowd of cretins currently clamoring to claim his crown, and he will be missed.

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Moyers, Bill. Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times (New York: New Press, 2004)

Matt Drudge and Bill Moyers illustrate the difference between journalism as simulated on the Right and practiced on the Left: Drudge with his short, sleazy, and occasionally slanderous website; and Moyers with his thoughtful and contemplative PBS broadcasts. Drudge promotes a brash self-aggrandizement where Moyers encourages contemplation and community. Moyers quotes (accurately) sources across the political spectrum (from Thoreau and Adam Smith to Leo Strauss and Grover Norquist) in personable essays that illuminate--rather than obscure--our relationship to the news media. In spite of his reserved demeanor, Moyers sidesteps the perils of blandness to deliver criticisms of our money-driven "raw reactionary politics" (p. 10) and the media in their thrall:

Conservatives--or, better, pro-corporate apologists--hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words such as progress, opportunity, and individualism into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right. (pp. 10-1, "This Is Your Story. Pass It On")

Stretching from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to the faux news of Rupert Murdoch's empire to the nattering nabobs of no-nothing radio to a legion of think tanks paid for and bought by conglomerates - the religious, partisan and corporate right have raised a mighty megaphone for sectarian, economic, and political forces that aim to transform the egalitarian and democratic ideals embodied in our founding documents. (p. 129, "The Fight of Our Lives")

For faux populism--and Faux News--there is no shortage of right-wing media outlets. One wonders: how deep is the left/right divide between news and noise? Is it more than coincidence that the more ephemeral and demagogic media (Fox, talk radio, op-ed pages) are more conservative while the more deliberative and contemplative ones (magazines, books, NPR) are more liberal?

Moyers doesn't answer these questions, but thinking about his example can help us answer them for ourselves.

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In his essay "God, Science and Immaterial Things," Dinesh D'Souza tries to dismiss a skeptic's disbelief in the supernatural deity, but errs when he states that "all the great religions, and certainly the Abrahamic ones, regard God as an immaterial spirit."

He might want to check these twelve bible verses: ten indicate that god has a corporeal body, whereas only two describe him as a spirit. D'Souza's god stands and walks; he has a face, hands, loins, and "back parts."

That doesn't sound very "immaterial" to me.

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Drudge, Matt. Drudge Manifesto (New York: New American Library, 2000)

Matt Drudge's Drudge Report website was revolutionary in the sense that Drudge's hyperlinked gossiping anticipated the era of blogs and RSS feeds, while Drudge himself was reactionary in his focus on libel and lasciviousness. Initially notorious for being sued by Sidney Blumenthal (after accusing him of spousal abuse), Drudge later broke both the Clinton/Lewinsky story (which Newsweek had--after internal discussion--declined to publish) and its notorious cigar incident.) As the US District Judge Paul Friedman noted in the Blumenthal v. Drudge lawsuit, "Drudge is not a reporter, a journalist or a newsgatherer. He is, as he himself admits, simply a purveyor of gossip."

Drudge's dedication of his book to Linda Tripp left a vomit-in-my-mouth taste that was, if anything, amplified by the book's contents. His writing style is annoyingly fragmented and disjointed; his salacious and braggadocio is easily mocked, as in the Sludge Report website. On paper, Drudge practically parodies himself:

I'm sought out--even venerated--by the very people who trash me. I have little ambition, but they make me famous. Which is interesting. And infamous. Not boring. Notorious. Even better. (p. 36)

There is as little actual content in this book as one might expect, and his scattershot style doesn't help. Neither does his poor scholarship. On page 141, Drudge recites a quotation--allegedly from Abraham Lincoln--that is widely known to be false:

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." (See this Snopes article for details.)

One might be tempted to hope--despite his myriad shortcomings--that Drudge would seek a broader series of targets in the post-Clinton era, but his assertion that "The person that sits in the Oval Office next will get my undivided attention." (p. 206, from a Q&A at the National Press Club, 2 June 1998) seems to have been disproved by the dearth of Bush-era bombshells. Drudge seems to prefer attacking Hillary--and even Gore--to helping salvage America from the ravages of Bushism. (In fact, Drudge is infamous enough to warrant his own section at the media bias site MediaMatters.)

Many lamentations have been written on the decline (and presaged demise) of traditional journalism, but one shudders to think that this sort of worthless tripe--bereft of erudition, shorn of context, lacking both style and substance--will be its replacement. This book is perhaps the saddest of many sad commentaries on American reportage, both online and off. Drudge does, however, provide a useful Quote of the Day:

"Sometimes, I think Matt Drudge and Don Imus have more influence than Bill Moyers and David Broder. And that's a pretty sad thing to say." (p. 97, Jay Harris, Chairman and Publisher of the San Jose Mercury News)

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Books discussed in this essay:

Rall, Ted. Wake Up, You're Liberal!: How We Can Take America Back from the Right (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2004) (Amazon link, my review)

Rall, Ted. Generalissimo El Busho: Essays and Cartoons on the Bush Years (New York: Nantier Beall Minoustchine Publishing, 2004) (Amazon link, my review)

Coulter, Ann. Godless: The Church of Liberalism (New York: Crown Forum, 2006) (Amazon link, my review)

After reading a slew of books on liberalism last month, I spent a little time on the (mostly) lighter side of the liberal-vs.-conservative divide. At first glance, it might seem unfair to discuss two of Rall's books along with one of Coulter's; however, this doesn't begin to remedy the disparity in media coverage the two authors have received. While both Coulter and Rall are political provocateurs, Coulter is often considered newsworthy for penning her slanted screeds while Rall is usually pilloried for his political incorrectness. In the small (to some) area of accuracy, there is no question that Rall does a far better job than Coulter at expressing positions that are backed up by facts. She may be the more flamboyant and successful pundit, but he has more than mere opinion on his side.

I previously noted the errors in Rall's Wake Up and Generalissimo el Busho in my reviews, but they were outweighed by at least one order of magnitude by Coulter's outright lies in Godless. In addition being much less frequent, Rall's mistakes were generally misattribution of quotes, where accuracy was not central to his arguments. Coulter's errors, on the other hand, were such that removing them from consideration destroyed the carefully knit fabric of distortions upon which her conclusions rely.

MediaMatters takes issue with Coulter's misinformation on evolution, which she charmingly parodied as the "Flatulent Raccoon Theory," citing factual errors in ten different subject areas:

Coulter devotes two whole chapters to the discussion of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Throughout, she offers falsehoods, misleading statements, and distortions of evolutionary theory, all packaged with smears of prominent progressive and Democratic figures as well as news reporters and media personalities.

Media Matters also notes that Coulter's endnotes are, as usual, "rife with distortions and falsehoods." They cite fourteen errors of documentation, concluding that:

Coulter routinely misrepresented the information of her sources, as well as omitted inconvenient information within those same sources that refuted her claims. Coulter relied upon secondary sources to support many of her claims, as well as unreliable or outdated information.

In addition to demonstrating her poor scholarship, this analysis also made clear Coulter's lack of respect for her readers, who she clearly assumed would believe anything she wrote, as long as there was a citation attached to it.

PZ Myers at Pharyngula examines Coulter's "No Evidence for Evolution" claim and, echoing MediaMatters' criticisms, is "at a loss to say in words how abysmally awful this book is:"

This far right-wing political pundit with no knowledge of science at all has written a lengthy tract that is wall-to-wall error: To cover it all would require a sentence-by-sentence dissection that would generate another book, ten times longer than Coulter's, all merely to point out that her book is pure garbage. So I'm stumped. I'm not interested in writing such a lengthy rebuttal, and I'm sure this is exactly what Coulter is counting on--tell enough lazy lies, and no one in the world will have time enough to correct them conscientiously. She's a shameless fraud.

Betty Bowers' review gives Coulter's book the treatment it really deserves; perhaps--if I had a greater gift for comedy--I should do the same in the future rather than refuting her falsehoods. Despite the tedium involved in documenting the never-ending stream of right-wing hypocrisies, Raw Story did some investigating and discovered that Ms Coulter is "unknown at [the] church she claims to attend." The Communications and Media Director of the church Coulter claimed to attend, New York's Redeemer Presbyterian Church, commented:

"The only thing I have heard is hearsay that she is an attender. Our database shows that she is not a member. [...] And I don't know anybody that would have seen Ann Coulter. We don't really know her."

Being a godless liberal, I might be completely off-base here...but isn't there a biblical prohibition against lying?

In all fairness, some of the criticisms levied against Coulter by her detractors are also valid in respect to Rall: Each is prone to callous insensitivity in the search for humor, each has quite an appetite for publicity, and each is both infuriating and entertaining--although partisans will disagree about which is which.

What separates them (besides the black cocktail dress) is that Ted Rall isn't full of shit.

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Coulter, Ann. Godless: The Church of Liberalism (New York: Crown Forum, 2006)

The words "partisan" and "hack" often join to form the clichéd term "partisan hack" that identifies the conflation of ideological blindness and partisan fervor; although I strive to avoid overused phrases, nowhere is that trite term more appropriate than when discussing Ann Coulter. As the ever-witty Christopher Hitchens observes in his review of Godless in the UK magazine Liberal:

"Since her books always pull enough of a crowd to put them on the bestseller list, the editors and fact-checkers at her publishing house evidently go on vacation when the manuscripts float in. [...] Coulter finds herself inventing new ways in which to be wrong. As it goes on, the book begins to seem more like typing than writing, and its demonstration of the relationship between poor language and crude ideas becomes more overt."

Her publisher's website has an excerpt of Godless that was no doubt fashioned to showcase her undeniable talent for infuriating liberals, while simultaneously obscuring the fact that her ideological edifice is built on misrepresentations and outright falsehoods. Here is the opening paragraph:

Liberals love to boast that they are not "religious," which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion. Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe. In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as "religion."

The most difficult aspect of reviewing a book by any infotainer (a category in which I include Al Franken and Michael Moore as well as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Ann Coulter) is in distinguishing the hyperbole from the humor, the arguments from jokes. (This is not an issue of missing subtleties, but in trying to gauge the gullibility of her wingnut fans; I had the same problem while writing my review of Coulter's Treason and Slander, and I felt compelled to tally each and every inconsistency, misrepresentation, and falsehood, which was both time-consuming and pointless.) I've been much more lenient on Coulter this time, although her arguments are as unconvincing and her jokes as unfunny as ever.

It's a sad commentary on American political discourse that she has any audience at all. Here are some passages from Coulter's book, followed by my commentary along with factual rebuttals. I have not attempted to completely correct Godless, but have chosen a representative sample of Coulter's assertions (in bold) that are easily disproved. (Even so, I feel it is necessary to apologize for the sheer length of this review.)

Although they are Druids, liberals masquerade as rationalists, adopting a sneering tone of scientific sophistication, which is a little like being condescended to by a tarot card reader. Liberals hate science and react badly to it. (p. 3)

Thanks to Ms Coulter's wisdom, I now understand why liberals are hostile to teaching evolution in biology classes, geology and cosmology in science classes, understanding climate change, promoting sex education programs, recommending STD/cancer vaccines, and funding stem cell research. Oh, wait...it's actually conservatives who are against those things. It looks as if Coulter's projection has struck again.

Throughout this book, I often refer to Christians and Christianity because I am a Christian and I have a fairly good idea of what they believe, but the term is intended to include anyone who subscribes to the Bible of the God of Abraham, including Jews and others. (p. 3, footnote)

Jews "and others?" Since Muslims also worship the Abrahamic deity, they must also be "Christians" under Coulter's definition. (Her Islamophobic readers either skipped this footnote or don't realize the lineage of Islam.)

Water. Liberals are worried we're going to run out of something that literally falls from the sky. Here's an idea: Just wait. It will rain. (p. 8)

Here's an idea: Look up "drought" in the dictionary. Then look up "aquifer" in an encyclopedia. Dumbass.

Liberals are constantly accusing Christians of monumental self-righteousness for daring to engage in free speech or for voting in accordance with their religious beliefs. (p. 18)

No, we don't have any objection to your self-righteousness; we just don't want it funded with our tax dollars. (It's that pesky First Amendment again!)

Throughout the 2004 campaign, the Democrats were looking for a Democrat who believed in God--a pursuit similar to a woman searching for a boyfriend in a room full of choreographers. (p. 19)

Virtually any Democrat would have fulfilled the "believed in God" criterion, both then and now. At the time Coulter wrote Godless, there were no non-religious national politicians. At present, there is only one: Pete Stark (D-CA).

"NARAL is an acronym for something with "abortion" in the title, but we don't know what because the NARAL webpage won't use the word abortion. (p. 20)

I used the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to see what the NARAL website looked like in January 2006, a full five months before Coulter's book was released. The site opened to a petition which mentioned the word "abortion," went to a homepage that mentioned "abortion," and also linked to an "About" page--the most likely destination for someone who claims to be unfamiliar with the acronym NARAL--which mentioned "abortion" seven times in as many paragraphs.

He [liberal minister Jim Wallis] leapt into the breach. He proposed to teach the Democrats how to "reframe" their language to make people think they believe in God. (pp. 20-1)

Coulter cites Matt Bai's "The Framing Wars," (NYT, 17 July 2005) which observed:

Wallis wrote a memo to the Democratic Policy Committee titled ''Budgets Are Moral Documents,'' in which he laid out his argument that Democrats needed to ''reframe'' the budget in spiritual terms.

Wallis quoted Proverbs 31:8-9 ("Speak out for those who cannot speak, for the rights of all the destitute. Speak out, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy.") in his criticism of Bush's budgetary slaps in the face to millions of the poor and needy in America; there is no indication that he urged Democrats to bear false witness about their beliefs.

When Democrats were running the show, their idea for fighting crime was to spend $40 million to set up midnight basketball leagues... (p. 42)

I am *so* sick of conservatives ridiculing "midnight basketball" as a loopy liberal idea that I could...I don't know...point out that they're full of shit. Here's a passage from the relevant presidential address:

"Midnight Basketball has become a real community institution. And people come to play and to watch and to cheer and to find new hope and to shape their lives. Streets once littered with drugs and plagued by violence have become peaceful and passable. Not surprisingly, the crime rate has dropped by 60 percent since this program began."

Speaker: George H.W. Bush, discussing his 124th "Point of Light" (1991-04-12)
Source: George Bush Presidential Library and Museum

Even after Giuliani's triumphant success, liberals demean his accomplishment. Those who won't believe will never believe. They say the crime rate was already falling, as if the drop in the number of murders during the Dinkins administration from 2,154 murders in 1991 to 1,995 murders in 1992 was the equivalent of the Battle of Midway. It was probably a bookkeeping error. (p. 46)

According to the NYPD statistics on murders in NYC (available here in appendix table 4), murders under Dinkins (1990-1993) declined from 2,245 in 1990 to 1,946 in 1993 (the rate dropped from .307 to .265). Under Giuliani (1994-2001), murders continued to decline (from 1,561 to 649) and rates continued to drop (from .213 to .081). (The data curves for raw numbers and rates are nearly identical.)

Was the murder rate already declining when Giuliani took the reins from Dinkins? Yes. Did the rate's decline accelerate under Giuliani? Also yes. It's hardly "demeaning" to note the first fact, although it disproves Coulter's assertion.

To this day, Democrats demand that we credit Clinton for the plunging crime rate in the nineties--which did not begin to plunge until Giuliani became mayor of New York. Clinton may have tried to socialize health care, presided over a phony Internet bubble, spurned Sudan when it offered him Osama bin Laden on a silver platter... (p. 49)

How many inaccuracies can Coulter cram into a single sentence? Let's just look at the first few. First, is she seriously claiming that Giuliani's election to the NYC mayor's office had an effect on crime nationwide? She can't be serious. According to the US DOJ, the national violent crime rate peaked in 1991. (The rates for murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault peaked in 1980, 1992, 1991, and 1992 respectively.) Thus, by Coulter's logic, Giuliani (amazingly!) caused crime rates to drop nationwide several years before he took office on 1 January 1994. If you're going to demean someone, at least get your facts straight.

The managed competition model used in crafting Clinton's "Health Security Act" was not socialized medicine, except perhaps by defining socialism as "whatever conservatives don't like."

The dot-com bubble can hardly be laid at Clinton's feet--at least not any more than the housing bubble can be blamed on Dubya. Has Coulter never heard of the Federal Reserve? Wall Street? Venture capital? IPOs?

About the Clinton/Sudan/bin Laden claim: Please, don't make me refute that steaming pile of bull-slander again. One wishes Coulter (and the other conservatives who repeat this lie ad nauseum) would bother to read the 9/11 Commission Report; this claim was debunked in Chapter 4:

In late 1995, when Bin Ladin was still in Sudan, the State Department and the CIA learned that Sudanese officials were discussing with the Saudi government the possibility of expelling Bin Ladin. U.S. Ambassador Timothy Carney encouraged the Sudanese to pursue this course. The Saudis, however, did not want Bin Ladin, giving as their reason their revocation of his citizenship.

Sudan's minister of defense, Fatih Erwa, has claimed that Sudan offered to hand Bin Ladin over to the United States. The Commission has found no credible evidence that this was so.

Most people have trouble seeing the divine spark in people who take our parking spots. [Ashley] Smith could see God's hand in a multiple murderer holding her hostage. By showing [Brian] Nichols genuine Christian love, Smith turned him from a beast to a fellow sinner, still deserving of punishment, but also of forgiveness. This phenomenon, utterly unknown to liberals, is what's known as a "miracle." That's how a real religion responds to rapists and murderers. In the liberal religion, there is no grace, only lies and death, some of it everlasting. (p. 59)

This paragraph is borderline nonsensical, following as it does her paean to the death penalty as "the deliberative, sane act of an advanced civilization protecting itself from predators" (p. 27). In Coulter's upside-down world, the death penalty is a grace-filled miracle of forgiveness while rehabilitation (something at which she scoffs) is actually a barbaric practice. Huh?

And a lot fewer people saw the victim's Willie Horton ad than the NAACP's ad during the 2000 campaign assigning responsibility to George Bush for the murder of James Byrd. (p. 66)

The voiceover of the NAACP's TV ad does not blame Bush for Byrd's death, only for refusing to support a Texas hate-crime bill:

I'm Renee Mullins, James Byrd's daughter. On June 7, 1998 in Texas my father was killed. He was beaten, chained, and then dragged 3 miles to his death, all because he was black.

So when Governor George W. Bush refused to support hate-crime legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again. Call Governor George W. Bush and tell him to support hate-crime legislation. We won't be dragged away from our future.

The transmitter of all liberal idiocy, Michael Moore, summarized what liberals think of Americans in Bowling for Columbine when he said, "[W]hether you're a psychotic killer or running for president of the United States, the one thing you can always count on is white America's fear of the black man"--as evidenced by Michael Moore, who has done everything possible to avoid contact with them. (p. 72)

Here is a passage from Moore's book Stupid White Men, where he laments the absence of African-Americans from his business life:

When I leave New York to go to Los Angeles for a few days to work and meet with people in the business [...] I can go days and never encounter a single African-American unless it's someone to whom I'm handing a tip. How can that happen? [...] For once I'd love to see a black person in the seat next to me at a Knicks game--or within twenty rows of me in any direction (players and Spike Lee excluded). For once I'd like to walk onto an airplane and see it filled with only black passengers instead of a bunch of complaining white jerks who feel a sense of entitlement in demanding that I give up my lap so they can put their seat in it. (p. 69)

Moore later proclaims "I'm done hiring white people" (p. 73) and issues this offer:

So if you're African-American and you'd like to work in the media--or already do but haven't been able to get out from behind that damn reception desk--then I encourage you to drop me a line and send me your resume. (p. 74)

That doesn't sound like someone who's trying to "avoid contact" with blacks.

At the 1992 Democratic National Convention, which nominated Bill Clinton, the Democrats wouldn't even allow a pro-life Democrat governor of a large swing state to speak. Governor Robert Casey was the enormously popular governor of Pennsylvania. But the Democrats wouldn't let him speak because of his pro-life views. (pp. 85-6)

This is false. Casey was denied a speaking slot at the convention because he hadn't endorsed the Clinton/Gore ticket. As noted in Wikipedia, "Other pro-life Democrats such as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, Senators John Breaux and Howell Heflin, and five pro-life Democratic governors did speak" at the convention.

In 2005, the New York Times triumphantly announced that the word abortion is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. [...] It doesn't have words like child rape either, but that doesn't mean Christianity is ambiguous on the subject. (p. 93)

One only wishes that some churches were less ambiguous on the subject, instead of coddling numerous child molesters and covering up their crimes for years if not decades.

The most important value to liberals is destroying human life. (p. 97)

Now it makes perfect sense: the reason why so many liberals are pacifists, object to wars of aggression, and oppose the death penalty is that they want to destroy human life. (As opposed to conservatives, who believe in the sanctity of human life...at least from conception to birth.)

It was treason to respond to Joe Wilson, who accused the Bush administration of lying about the case for war with Iraq based on Wilson's trip to Niger. [...] But no one could say Wilson's alleged expertise was based on a nepotistic junket he was sent on because his wife worked at the CIA. (p. 101)

No, it was treason to respond to Wilson by vindictively outing his wife as a CIA covert operative. (See the note for p. 112)

Conforming to a pattern, when a commission was convened to investigate intelligence failures that preceded 9/11, Republicans mistakenly imagined that the purpose of the commission was to investigate intelligence failures, not to be a partisan game for the Democrats to rewrite history. [...] The "Clinton Whitewash Commission" covered up a classified military data-mining project known as "Able Danger," for example. (p. 106)

The 9/11 Commission was a scam and a fraud, the sole purpose of which was to cover up the disasters of the Clinton administration and distract the nation's leaders during wartime. (p. 108)

The 9/11 Commission's flaws involved, among other things, whitewashing intelligence failures from the administrations of both Bill Clinton (who didn't do enough to stop al Qaeda) and George Bush (who did nothing until 9/11).

The Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the "Able Danger" program (which, in fairness to Coulter, had not been released at the time Godless was published) debunks several conspiracy theories and explicitly states the following:

...prior to September 11, 2001, Able Danger team members did not identify Mohammed Atta or any other 9/11 hijacker. (p. 8)

If this PDB was so important, why has the media shied away from printing it? (p. 109)

Why didn't the media ever see fit to reveal the full text of the August 6 PDB? [...] The media deliberately prevented Americans from seeing the memo in order to attack Condoleezza Rice for saying the document contained only "historical information"--which it did. (p. 111)

The media didn't "see fit to reveal the full text" of the PDB because the Bush administration redacted portions of it. The unclassified portions were widely disseminated in April 2004, including (for example) CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and even Fox "News." The PDB was also printed in Chapter 8 (pp. 261-262) of the 9/11 Commission Report.

That's "deliberate prevention?"

The man the Democrats wanted to be commander in chief, Senator John Kerry, said, "it's an 'act of treason' to reveal the identity of intelligence sources." (p. 118)

Here's a video clip of Bush I stating that, "I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors." (The CIA website has the full transcript.)

How does a published react to some pompous jerk who wants to call his book The Politics of Truth? Okay, seriously, what are you going to call it? (p. 121)

Are titles such as Slander, Treason, Godless, and If Democrats Had Any Brains They'd Be Republicans not examples of authorial pomposity?

Even if we skip over the absurd logic that because documents are forged, what they purport to show has been proved false--an old spy trick--it would later turn out Wilson had never seen the forged documents. (p. 123)

One wonders if Coulter would be willing to apply this supposition to the Killian documents discussing Bush's (not quite enough) time served in the National Guard.

Tellingly, liberals' one example of The Republican War on Science, as one book title puts it, is the Christian objection to Nazi experimentation on human embryos. (p. 192)

Coulter once again falls prey to Godwin's Law. Judging by these photos, where German Christians seemed to be rather supportive of Hitler (Christian) and the rest of the (also Christian) Nazi regime, I have to ask: what objection is Coulter talking about?

Coulter has obviously not read Chris Mooney's book, which gives numerous examples of right-wing obstruction of scientific inquiry and suppression of religiously incorrect conclusions. For anyone who wishes to be more informed than Coulter, the book's website is here, and much of it is available from Google Book Search here.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has put forth other examples as well, from their "A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science:"

In recent years, scientists who work for and advise the federal government have seen their work manipulated, suppressed, distorted, while agencies have systematically limited public and policy maker access to critical scientific information.

Liberals creation myth is Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor. It's a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist's laboratory or the fossil record--and that's after 150 years of very determined looking. (p. 199)

Projection.

...atheists need evolution to be true. [...] That is why there is mass panic on the left whenever someone mentions the vast and accumulating evidence against evolution. (p. 200)

This "vast and accumulating" evidence never makes an appearance in Coulter's argument; perhaps this is because it doesn't exist?

The only reason a lot of Christians reject evolution is that we are taught to abjure big fat lies. You can look it up--we have an entire commandment about the importance of not lying. (p. 200)

Irony.

...the fact that the eye has been cited as an argument against natural selection for 200 years is true, but this is hardly an argument in favor of evolution. Despite having 200 years to work on it, evolutionists still don't have an answer. (p. 207)

Coulter is right: We don't have an answer. Over the past 150--not 200--years, however, we have developed an extraordinarily well-supported theory, which is infinitely more than creationists have managed to cobble together in the past several millennia.

For the last time, "God did it" is not an answer!

They ridicule us for saying, "The Bible is true because it says so right in the Bible"--which I've never said, by the way. (p. 215)

You don't need to say it, Ann, when so many of your allies are saying it for you. (By the way, the relevant passage is 2 Timothy 3:16, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.") I look forward to hearing Coulter disavow this circular sentiment the next time it is expressed by a right-wing biblical literalist.

From Marx to Hitler, the men responsible for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century were avid Darwinists. (p. 268)

Marx died before the twentieth century dawned, making the assignation of blame for Soviet atrocities rather tenuous (even more tenuous than that of Darwin). Mao and Stalin were probably the two most directly responsible for twentieth-century deaths, and those are due more to Lysenkoism than evolutionary biology.

The eugenics movement wasn't a wild, irrational perversion of Darwinism. It was a perfectly logical extension. (p. 269)

Sure it was, in the same way that the Auschwitz gas chambers were a "perfectly logical extension" of pesticide development. (The term for this rhetorical tactic is "guilt by association.")

Hitler's embrace of Darwinism is not a random fact, unrelated to the reason we know his name. It is impossible to understand Hitler's monstrous views apart from his belief in natural selection applied to races. He believed Darwin's theory of natural selection showed that "science" justified the extermination of the Jews. (p. 271)

It is impossible to understand Hitler's monstrous views apart from his belief in the anti-Semitism endemic within German's Christianity in general and Lutheranism in particular (see here and here).

Once man's connection to the divine is denied, you can reason yourself from here to anywhere. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, "If God is dead, everything is permitted." (p. 277)

Sorry, Ann. I believe Dostoyevsky is the author you're looking for, who put the questions "But what will become of men then, without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then, they can do what they like?" in the mouth of Mitya in The Brothers Karamazov. (Coulter may have misjudged her audience by mentioning Sartre. He and Dostoyevsky wrote dense, meaningful books that will never be bulk-purchased by right-wing groups in order to create the illusion of best-seller status.)

Given Coulter's extreme problems with telling the truth, it is not too much of an exaggeration to re-use Mary McCarthy's quip about Lillian Hellman: "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."

Posted by cognitivedissident at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ann Coulter eulogizes her father here, in her inimitable way.

The Rude Pundit responds here, in his.

What do you think? Over the top, or appropriate?

update (1/14 @ at 12:15pm):
Here's another swipe at Coulter, courtesy of Chris Kelly at HuffPo. The "I can see your balls" line is priceless!

Posted by cognitivedissident at 1:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've long puzzled over the amount of blatant projection among the wingnuts--Ann Coulter being the most obvious, and most consistent, example--and Sara at Orcinus has recognized their rhetoric as an unintentional "looking glass" into their psyches:

When conservatives tell us that we need constant surveillance to make us secure, what they're telling us is that they themselves are prone to criminal behavior if they think nobody else is watching. The fear of exposure is the only force keeping them on the right side of the law -- and that's why it's the only form of "security" they understand. Bear this in mind if you decide to do business with them.

When they tell us that our future depends on supporting a military that's bigger than the rest of the world's fighting forces combined, what they're telling us is that they can't handle chaos, complexity, change, or being out of control. The whole world is a threat; the only solution is a bigger gun. Bear this in mind if you find yourself in conflict with them.

When they tell us diplomacy isn't an option, they're telling us that it's not an option they understand. Words, agreements, treaties, and contracts mean nothing to them. Brute force is the only option they comprehend...or are likely to respond to themselves. Bear this in mind before you negotiate with them.

When they tell us that homosexuality is a threat to American families, what they're telling us is that homosexuality is a threat to their families. As in: if they ever dared to admit their own sexual interest in other men, their wives would leave them, and take the kids. Bear this in mind when they hold themselves up as moral paragons.

When they tell us the Islamofascists are a threat to our way of life, they are quite correctly pointing out that there are fascists threatening our way of life. They're just deflecting their own intentions on to brown people far away. Bear this in mind before assuming they share your belief in constitutional democracy.

When they accuse reality-based folks of promoting "junk science," they're telling us they basically think all science is junk. Bear this in mind before attempting to present them with convincing evidence of anything.

When they tell us to support the troops, what they're really saying is: You better, because we won't. Bear this in mind when you evaluate the real costs of the war.

When they tell us the government can't be trusted, they're telling us they can't be trusted to govern. Bear this in mind every time you step into a voting booth.

update (3:37pm):
When I revisited some of my notes on Ann Coulter, practically a poster child for projection, this gem stood out:

"...you could tell what [liberals] were up to by what they accused conservatives of. Liberals can't help projecting their own malevolence onto others." (Treason, p. 201)

update 2 (8:59pm):
Sara responded to my Coulter quote: "That simply takes my breath away. It's just so...so...recursive!"

Indeed. Coulter's projection is often so blatant that I wonder how she--or her minions--can be oblivious to it.

Posted by cognitivedissident at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tony Blankley, one of the GOP's shills at The Moonie Times, ranted on NPR's All Things Considered this afternoon that the CIA displayed "common sense" in destroying videotapes of tortured detainees. Over at DailyKos, Devilstower mocked Blankley's pathetic argument that the potential release of the torture tapes would be "a catastrophic propaganda defeat for us."

Blankley asked "what has happened to common sense," but displays shockingly little of it himself. If we need to "begin to convince the Muslim world we are not their enemy," perhaps not torturing Muslims in our custody would be a good start; a videotape of a tortureless interrogation would inflame no one's passions.

Right-wing pundits may have forgotten habeas corpus, "the rule of law," and "innocent until proven guilty," but the rest of us--and the rest of the world--have not.

Posted by cognitivedissident at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dinesh D'Souza tries to explain "Why Atheists Are So Angry"--a topic I've dealt with before--but his latest argument hinges on this sophomoric sophistry:

Atheists often like to portray themselves as "unbelievers" but this is not strictly accurate. If they were mere unbelievers they would simply live their lives as if God did not exist.

I don't believe in unicorns, but then I haven't written any books called The End of Unicorns, Unicorns are Not Great, or The Unicorn Delusion. Clearly the atheists go beyond disbelief; they are on the warpath against God. And you can hear their bitterness not only in their book titles but also in their mean-spirited invective.

If we lived in a