Punish the first coup attempt so there isn't a second one

On this first anniversary of the terrorist insurrection that tried to overthrow Joe Biden's comfortable 2020 election win and with a second coup clearly in the works, remember this. 

 

Although it was a ham-fisted coup attempt, Weimar German authorities did not adequate punish the white supremacist fascist authors of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. They barely got a slap on the wrist. A few months in jail for treason and attempting to overthrow the republic. Enough to make them invent more grievance against the democrats (lowercase d) but not enough to deter them. 

 

They didn't fail the second time. 

 

Within a decade, they fabricated an excuse to seize absolute power - an attack on their national legislature building, mind you - and eventually genocide and world war.

Radical moderation is no virtue

A follow up to the previous entry...

I believe that consensus is the preferred route for society and government. In fact, I'm fairly uncomfortable with conflict, at least face to face. I think civility should be the default pathway for society. I simply don’t believe we should be a slave to it merely for its own sake. In fact, we mustn’t. Radical moderation can be just as dangerous as radical extremism. It seems counterintuitive but it’s true.

I believe that consensus is the preferred route for society and government. It should be the default route. I simply don’t believe we should be a slave to it. In fact, we mustn’t. Radical moderation can be just as dangerous as radical extremism. It seems counterintuitive but it’s true.

Without agitation and contestation, we would not have had great social advances like: women’s voting, the end of slavery, the end of segregation/apartheid, consumer protection laws, health and safety laws, worker protection laws, unemployment insurance, the 40 hour work week and many other things that make America a first world country.

Warm and fuzzy bipartisanship has led to many abominations including: the Patriot Act and the war on civil liberties, the deregulation of the financial industry that led to recent economic meltdown, the aggression against Iraq, the Vietnam War, the internment of American citizens of Japanese origin in the 1940s, the genocide against Native Americans, to name but a few.

Yes, the ultimate purpose of agitation is to form a newer, better consensus. But neither is of any value in and of itself. The objective is that which is better. Not only can you not make omelettes without breaking eggs, but even after you break the eggs, you still have to stir things up to get something useful.

Think of it this way. Pick any despotic regime in history. It was no doubt led by extremists. But the extremist regime could not have survived without the active cooperation and acquiescence of moderates. Of people who maybe didn’t agree with the regime but didn’t want to shake things up or were afraid to make waves. Sometimes extremism is actually principle. Sometimes moderation is complicity. Not always but at times. Neither is a virtue in and of itself. The key is know when which is appropriate.

Instead of radical moderation, how about moderation in moderation.

Want smaller government? You got it!

One of the easiest ways to get elected is to promise smaller government and lower taxes. It sounds great as rhetoric because it's removed from context. In first world countries, there is an equation, a link between taxes paid and services to citizens provided. Different countries define that equation in different ways but it's there in every developed country. One of the most brilliant things strategically the American far right has done is to break that link, to focus only on the undesirable part (taxes) without discussing their relationship to the desirable part (services).

I'd have less problem with the smaller government/lower taxes rhetoric if its espousers were honest about the consequences. Yeah, they sometimes use rhetoric like "We all have to make sacrifices" (all usually meaning the 99%) or "tough choices have to be made. But it's all passive tense stuff, vague, nebulous and deliberately evasive. Just once, I'd like someone to have the guts to run for office on the platform of "crappier roads" or "higher crime."

Here are a few examples I've heard in the media recently about people who got their desire for smaller government...

-School districts across Indiana are getting rid of busing;

-Some municipalities are dealing with budget shortfalls by turning off streetlights;

-Warren County (NY) tried to seriously scale back its meals for seniors program until town supervisors (all conservatives) in the municipalities affected revolted.

It's funny how everyone loves smaller government and lower taxes when it's a theory but a bit less so when it actually affects them (THEM!). No wonder conservatives typically avoid being completely honest about the *full* consequences of their rhetoric.

Republicans are holding the economy hostage and thumbing their nose at the Constitution

I'm not a Democrat or a supporter of President Obama, but the Republicans' actions with regard to raising the debt ceiling is completely disgraceful, although that's probably an understatement.

To recap...

-Congressional Republicans are refusing to raise the debt ceiling to pay for expenditures Congress has already authorized as part of the regular budget. Given that 'Tea Partiers' yammer on incessantly about strict fidelity to the Constitution, perhaps they can explain how their demand that spending be approved by Congress twice squares with the 14th Amendment.

-The current federal fiscal year ends on September 30. This means that Republicans and their 'Tea Party' fringe are holding the economy hostage to their probably unconstitutional ideological posturing rather than waiting two months for budget negotiations, where such grandstanding belongs.

A piece from last year in The Washington Post sheds some more light on the widening inequality in the US.

From World War II until 1976, considered by many as the "golden years" for the U.S. economy, the top 10 percent of the population took home less than a third of the income generated by the private economy. But since then, according to Saez and Piketty, virtually all of the benefits of economic growth have gone to households that, in today's terms, earn more than $110,000 a year.

Even within that top "decile," the distribution is remarkably skewed. By 2007, the top 1 percent of households took home 23 percent of the national income after a 15-year run in which they captured more than half - yes, you read that right, more than half - of the country's economic growth. As Tim Noah noted recently in a wonderful series of articles in Slate, that's the kind of income distribution you'd associate with a banana republic or a sub-Saharan kleptocracy, not the world's oldest democracy and wealthiest market economy.

It's worth noting that not only Republicans but Democrats, like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have been complicit in crafting policies to this effect.

Bloodthirsty cowards or 'defenders of freedom'?

It's interesting how many self-proclaimed 'freedom loves' (said breathlessly) are really nothing more than bloodthirsty cowards whose instinctive reaction toward the actual exercise of freedom always seems to be one of violence.

Witness Jonah Goldberg who thinks that there hasn't been enough carnage. The right-wing extremist syndicated columnist bemoans the fact that Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange hasn't yet been assassinated.

Oops, my bad.

According to FoxNews.com's Christian Wilton, another bloodthirsty coward who wants The Assange Problem to *cough* disappear, the new euphemism for assassination is a 'non-judicial action.'

And given all the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan who've perished via 'non-judicial actions,' one wonders why the esteemed New York Times pooh-poohed Assange for going into hiding.

The triumph of hate: the US plunges further into the Dark Ages

”There’s nothing more frightening than ignorance in action.” –Tom Smothers

There’s was a lot of optimism that the inauguration of a not completely regressive (in rhetoric at least) president and administration might reverse the Dark Ages the United States has been in for most of this decade. Sadly, it’s seemed to embolden bigots and other retrograde forces.

It’s clear that Muslims are welcome to build a mosque and community center ANYWHERE* in this great and free land of America.

(*-This offer is not valid in the lower 48 states, Hawaii or Alaska)

Opposition to the fraudulently named* Mosque at Ground Zero was supposedly motivated only by (hold hand over heart) the fact that it was “too close” to Ground Zero... without ever quite specifying what distance away from Ground Zero would be tolerable.

(*-The community center would not be at Ground Zero. And the multistory building would have a mosque but only as one of many components. Calling the whole project a mosque is like referring to a YMCA as a swimming pool)

Subsequent events have laid bare the real agenda of these people.

Some news items you may have missed...

-Bigots torched the site of a proposed Islamic community center in Tennessee... this was after NPR reported on the controversy. The chief opponent of the TN mosque proudly displayed his ignorance by declaring, “We're Christians and this religion represents people that are against Christians.”

-The New York Times reported on opposition to similar Islamic community center projects in places as diverse as Florida, Tennessee and southern California. Apparently, San Bernadino, CA, is also “too close” to Ground Zero.

-Former House speaker Newt Gingrich recently compared supporters of the “Ground Zero Mosque” to Nazis.

-The Associated Press quoted the vile Gingrich as again fanning the flames of hatred with his comment that “America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization.” The AP also reported that Days ago, a brick nearly smashed a window at the Madera Islamic Center in central California, where signs were left behind that read, "Wake up America, the enemy is here," and "No temple for the god of terrorism." This past week in New York, a Muslim cab driver had his face and throat slashed in a suspected hate crime.

-Because of his refusal to fan anti-Islamic hatred (and perhaps his failure to invade any Islamic countries), an increasing number of Americans now believe the falsehood that President Obama is a Muslim. It’s not just that 20 percent of the entire nation’s population believe this lie, but that most would view this lie, if true, as an evil, horrible state of affairs.


The overwhelming majority of Muslims in America are peaceful, law abiding. They are respectful of the communities they live in. They serve on school boards and coach youth sports and serve in the armed forces of the United States. They consciously chose to live in a secular republic with a secular Constitution, rather than in a theocracy. They chose to live in America because they felt it had some appeal, not because, as the despicable Gingrich suggests, they want to undermine.

It’s clear that the far right and forces of Christian extremism are hell bent in alienating moderate Muslims, in pushing them into the extremist camp, solely to advance their own political ambitions. This is truly sickening and disgusting. It is against everything the Real America (if not Sarah Palin’s America) is supposed to stand for. This is not what my country is about. These divisive hatemongers ought to read the Pledge of Allegiance. “...indivisible, with liberty and justice for ALL.”

It’s quite clear that the domestic forces of darkness and hatred and bigotry are a far greater threat to American values and civilization than some Muslim version of the YMCA.

George W. Bush was a socialist

"When I give food to the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I'm called a communist." -Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.

I was biking home from work today when I saw a bunch of signs tacked to telephone poles, all of which read, "Obama is a socialist and hates our nation" or something similarly unhinged. It's not really breaking news that respect has pretty much evaporated in our political dialogue. It's no longer a dialogue, but a series of independent monologues, loudly and furiously screamed. E pluribus unum, no more. But what I've noticed lately is how language has become another casualty of our national rage.

Epithets have become devoid of meaning, other than being an expression of anger. "Obama is a socialist" or "Bush is a Nazi" or "The Tea Party is fascist" don't really have anything to do with accurately reflecting socialism, Nazism or fascism. The appellations now just mean that a speaker doesn't like the object of his hatred.

Take the "Bush is a Nazi" remark. Some call the Bush administration incompetent. I think that undersells their intentions. In my opinion, BushCheney administration did great harm the country, the economy and the Constitution. It had definite authoritarian and hypernationalist instincts as well as a penchant for international aggression. But the sum of this did not make them Nazis or tantamount to them.

The Nazis more than an ordinary, aggressive dictatorship; there are hundreds of those throughout history. What made the Nazis different is that they represented well-planned, large scale and quite intentional mass murder. The BushCheney administration was venal but I think it would've been more than happy to conquer Iraq and its natural resources without the deaths of 700,000 or more Iraqis. The Nazis were purists for a psychopathic ideology; the BushCheney folks were just plain greedy and willing to stop at nothing. Not good, but not the same.

The "Obama is a socialist" slur is another that purges language of any meaning. 'Socialist' has always meant something along the lines of redistributing wealth from the rich to the working class for the purposes of a creating a more equal society. You can argue whether that's good or bad, useful or harmful, but this is what the word has traditionally meant. But in our culture of meaningless language, the name-calling simply means "I don't like him."

The bank bailout takes money from the working class to subsidize rich banks and bankers. Obamacare takes money from the working class and forces them to give to rich, private insurance conglomerates. The health care, pharmaceutical and banking industries overwhelming preferred 'donating' (investing) its money to candidate Obama rather than candidate McCain, so it's little surprise that the current president is so beholden to them.

But these things take money from the working class to give to the rich for the purposes of creating a more unequal society. This is corporatism. It's not socialism. In fact, it's the complete opposite of socialism.

Yet, in the current political culture, Nazi means any enemy of civil liberties and socialist means anyone who supports the use of government for any purpose.

Using those 'contemporary' definitions, Woodrow Wilson was a Nazi and George W. Bush was a socialist.

The words don't really matter. It's the incoherent rage, the idea is that my side is uniquely virtuous and the other side inherently malicious, that's supposed to resonate. It's the intent, not the specifics, that matter.

But while I realize this makes me hopelessly anachronistic, words SHOULD matter.

No matter how much the hateful (Ann Coulters), the shrill (Rachael Maddows) or both of the above (Glenn Becks) may loathe it, their ideological opponents are and will remain Americans. America belongs to all of us, not just any one of us.

There have always been disagreements, often bitter, sometimes bloody, over policy decisions in this country's history. There have always been disagreements about what sort of America its citizens want to live in. But (in the non-bloody cases) the way these disagreements get resolved is by people talking, even arguing, but eventually listening and then trying to come to some sort of consensus.

Americans may honestly disagree over what should be done. But how can they find that consensus if they can't even agree on what basic words mean?

Or maybe crushing honest citizens in the name of ideological is more important than finding that broad but imperfect consensus. Love America by hating Americans.

Welcome to 2010!

Moderate GOP legislator receives death threats by self-styled patriots

Fallout continues to rain down in the aftermath of the 23rd Congressional District of New York special election. The far right spin is that the 23rd was a victory for them that a registered Republican with a national following and funding lost a two-person race in a region with huge Republican advantage that hadn't sent a Democrat to Congress since before the Civil War to an unknown supposed Nancy Pelosi clone.

And that speaks volumes. It was more important for the far right jihadists to purge the party of infidels than to win the race with a candidate who agree with them on most issues.

That's why the far right ran not against Dede Scozzafava and the now-elected Bill Owens, but against the presence of moderates in the GOP and against the House Speaker. And it didn't work. Even in conservative (but pragmatic) upstate, the "Owen=Pelosi" smear wasn't enough to overcome the far right candidate's strident ideology, hatemongering and often bald-faced lying national backers and wilful ignorance of local issues.

Upstate NY Republican Assemblywomen Scozzafava and Janet Duprey both gave interviews to North Country Public Radio in which they wondered if there were still a place for moderates in the GOP. A third, Teresa Sayward, seems to wonder the same.

Sayward, Scozzafava and Duprey align with the Republican mainstream on most issues. But to the jihadists, politicians are judged solely on two: abortion and gay marriage. Anyone who varies from theocratic orthodoxy on either of those two issues is a "liberal" heretic to be burned at the stake. By contrast, "pro-life" frauds not only have no problem supporting pols who advocate state murder (the death penalty) or bloody wars of aggression without the slightest sense of contradiction, but do so eagerly and with startling regularity.

What's most notable is that all three of these Assemblywomen voted in favor of gay marriage during the last legislative session, Sayward famously giving an impassioned plea based on her status as the mother of a gay son. And yet none of the three received either a primary or general election challenger in last November's race. Further evidence that upstate may be conservative temperamentally but without the frothing-at-the-mouth ideological fervor that the far right wants to believe.

Probably the most disturbing part of the Duprey interview is her claim that she's received not just hate emails, but threats of physical violence. This is the edge to the far right that is extremely disturbing. According to media reports, President Obama has received far more death threats than any previous president. There certainly are strident left-wing ideologues, but they are typically derided by opponents as pacifists and sissies, not the groups most likely to commit violence to achieve political objectives. If the far right wants to marginalize the Republican Party into irrelevance, that's certainly its democratic prerogative. But it's one thing to threaten to take a politician out at the voting booth. It's quite another to threaten to just take him/her out.

And while there's certainly tension and harsh words within the Democratic Party as well, I don't know of anyone who's threatened to kill against Joe Lieberman or Max Baucus.


Update: Just to show that nastiness and vitriol is not unique to the right. From a MoveOn.org newsletter...

We're not pulling punches. We need to turn up the pressure on any senator who might be a Turncoat Democrat who supports a Republican filibuster. It's time to bring back our hard-hitting ad pressuring Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana to support a public option. If we raise $100,000 by Thursday, we can blanket the airwaves and turn up the pressure for Mary Landrieu back home before she decides how to vote in D.C.

Does it make me a "turncoat progressive" that I don't support the Democrats' HMO bailout that would fine people for being poor?

Does anyone actually believe anything anymore?

Conservatives rooting against Chicago for the Olympics because it might be seen to benefit President Obama, Congressmen criticizing the president while abroad, Congressmen interrupting presidential speeches to call him a liar... all of these things would've been treasonous and unpatriotic five years ago and punishable by a one-way trip to Gitmo.

Similarly, presidential secrecy, the likely prospect of insane escalation in Afghanistan and defense of the worst aspects of the war against civil liberties... these would've provoked liberal fury against the White House five years ago but now we're told ad nauseum that we need to "be patient."

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that virtually no one actually believes anything any more (including smug liberals) and are so vapid that they're only interested in scoring cheap political points against the "other" side.

It's not a coincidence that most political links and rants tend to be more concerned with attacking the other side than defending its own side. Defending your own side requires that you actually care about DOING something. Attacking the other side is a lot more convenient, because it's easier to destroy than to build.

The saddest part is that if you are an American who actually believes in something and who won't give your side an unlimited blank check for things you'd crucify the other side for, then there's a good chance you are a closed-minded ideological fanatic who believe that anyone not your political clone is the spawn of Satan.

Didn't we used to be able to balance having principles with treating others like human beings?

That fascist commie!

Sometimes a group becomes so unhinged that you're not sure whether to laugh or cry.

For example, a blogger at the conservative The National Review decided to compare Sen. Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler.

Many other elements of the far right (like this guy) have compared Obama to Hitler's appeaser, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain.

Hysterical and historically inaccurate invocations of Chamberlain are the militarists' fallback position when they don't have a real argument to make, which is, of course, most of the time.

But you have to be amused (or frightened) at the intellectual dexterity of a group that can compare someone to both Hitler and Chamberlain without the slightest hint of irony.