They hate us for our freedoms

I spent the weekend in Harvard Square, bastion of freedom and tolerance.  In more than one restaurant, same sex couples were openly kissing on each other.

Why this should offend people, I have no idea - people should love who they love - and no one was offended in Cambridge.

But fundamentalists believe they should be free to keep others unfree, so they fear Massachusetts and its fearlessness.

They should fear us.  We can persevere through winters that would kill them.

Yet we keep sending them subsidies via federal spending, we keep trying to convince them that the Enlightenment beat the Dark Ages for good reason (not to mention the Union defeating the Confederacy), and we keep failing to help them find the joys of the liberal democracy that we, not they, happily inherit from the Founders.

So strange that the one lesson they learned from the Civil War was never to be outgunned.  Tsk-tsk, always fighting the last war...

America, love it or leave it

Remember Vietnam? It was a dirty little war that exposed fault lines in American society. Since the Civil Rights movement was going on at the same time, we tend to lump them together as the turmoil of the 1960s. But there are some aspects of the Vietnam anti-war movement that deserve special attention today.

On one hand, during Vietnam, we had the conservatives who thought and said, "My country, right or wrong," and "America, love it or leave it." They meant, shut up and go fight, even in a stupid war. No doubt, they were committed to America, but their idea of the meaning of America was the limited view of an obedient tribalist.

On the other hand, we had liberals (and, yes, radicals) committed to the idea that freedom and democracy could coexist even in a dangerous world. They thought that a bad idea was a bad idea, and the sooner that was exposed, the better. They thought democracy was at its very center concerned with settling in public and by the people what to do, what not to do, and what to stop doing. They knew the difference between the existential threat of the Nazis and the sphere of influence threat of the North Vietnamese communists. In John Kerry's best line (and possibly his only good line), "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

The truth is that we do need people who will go fight without looking for every possible rationalization why whatever conflict is current is a bad war. We also need people who will question every conflict.

Now that President Barack Obama has been reelected, the huge irony is that the same tribalists and their political heirs are beside themselves with the urge to secede. They've completely abandoned "my country, right or wrong," because what they really meant was, "my white, conservative tribe, right or wrong."

In real time, those of us who even contemplated a dovish path on Vietnam, they told to get the hell out. Now that an election didn't go their way, instead of taking their own medicine and, in the extreme, relocating - the way Mitt Rmoney's grandfather did when his sacred polygamy was threatened by secular authorities - they are wailing and gnashing their teeth, threatening to secede again from the Union.

So, even though I didn't sign this citizen-created White House petition, I applaud its in-your-face message to the disloyal secessionists:

You simply cannot be a patriot if you're ready for civil war when you don't get your way.

Like Bolsheviks, Nazis, Viet Cong, and Khmer Rouge

The Taliban know that every girl who learns to think and every father who teaches his daughter to think, subverts  the backwardness and evil of fundamentalist Islam. Thinking is a threat to their fervently chosen ignorance. The Taliban are more than willing to kill in defense of their radical refusal to grow into liberal society.

Sirajuddin Ahmad, the spokesman for the Taliban in the Swat Valley, said that Ms. Yousafzai became a target because she had been “brainwashed” into making anti-Taliban statements by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai.

“We warned him several times to stop his daughter from using dirty language against us, but he didn’t listen and forced us to take this extreme step,” he said.

Both father and daughter remain on the Taliban’s list of intended victims, he said.

This reminds me Kurtz's apologia in "Apocalypse Now":

I remember when I was with Special Forces... seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn't know what I wanted to do!

Kurtz's eventual response was a descent into the heart of darkness, into monstrous depravity, into insane homicide.

What should our response be? Could we retain our moral character, retain our judgement, which Kurtz called our defeat, and nonetheless issue a secular fatwa that anyone who harms Malala Yousafzai or her father Ziauddin will be subject to a U.S. lethal finding?

Moderation needs space and time and tolerance to grow. Extremists of all stripes know this and murder moderates. Would it benefit moderates to exact a deadly cost from the extremists, or would it simply drive others into their arms?

America is already using drones for targeted assassination as a tool of war, if not statecraft, despite a long-standing inclination not to - in reaction to out-of-control spy agencies during the Cold War. Israel has used assassination. Killing the guilty, the enemy, the vicious murderer of your children has visceral appeal, and there's often no civil authority in these cases. Has that been for the good or the bad? It's hard to tell.

It's hard to imagine our government could responsibly manage vengeance orders, when it can't manage a just civilian death penalty. It can't even manage political asylum very well.

But I know that I wish Sirajuddin Ahmad dead. The shooters who have gravely wounded Malala, I wish dead. Their commanders, dead.

Traditional war-making has proven a very poor tool to accomplish those just deaths without a mortgage of further deaths uncounted. This reasoning is how liberals like me get to law as the best tool to accomplish punishment of the guilty. It lacks the immediacy of gunning down your enemies, but it lasts better.

Public domain photo from the Library of Congress, found here.

Itching for another shot at the Union

Neo-Confederates fantasize openly about insurgency against an impossible and bizarre scenario that ends in loss of sovereignty:

“He's going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the U.N., and what is going to happen when that happens?” Head asked. “I'm thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we're not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we're talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy."

Judgement-free Judge Tom Head (R-lunatic fringe, Texas - sorry to be redundant) is canny enough to phrase his dark fantasy as a Lexington-Concord revolution, but you know he's really dreaming of Fort Sumter.

And these Americans have guns and want to budget more locally to train the local lunatics against the federal government.

This will not end well.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

They'll be coming for my dual citizenship

Michael Lind, whom I first read in Up from Conservatism, is always thought-provoking, even when he and I disagree.  But I can't find anything to quarrel with in this:

[T]oday's Tea Party movement ... should be called the Fort Sumter movement, after the Southern attack on the federal garrison in Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12-13, 1861, that began the Civil War. Today's Tea Party movement is merely the latest of a series of attacks on American democracy by the white Southern minority, which for more than two centuries has not hesitated to paralyze, sabotage or, in the case of the Civil War, destroy American democracy in order to get their way.

Nor in this:

Contradicting the mainstream media narrative that the Tea Party is a new populist movement that formed spontaneously in reaction to government bailouts or the Obama administration, the facts show that the Tea Party in Congress is merely the familiar old neo-Confederate Southern right under a new label. The threat of Southern Tea Party representatives and their sidekicks from the Midwest and elsewhere to destroy America's credit rating unless the federal government agrees to enact Dixie's economic agenda of preserving defense spending while slashing entitlements is simply the latest act of aggression by the Solid South.

We have a real national political problem that dates from the very beginning of our nation. One part of it, the part I grew up in, doesn't want to be American if that means it doesn't get its own way.

And its way is backward, reactionary, aristocratic, and often violent.

Why we should have hanged Jeff Davis

Secession was treason and should have been treated as such.

One of America’s worst traitors, a man who had committed or condoned far worse acts against his country than Benedict Arnold, was allowed to go home after his brief detainment in Virginia. But even that lenient punishment was enough to elevate [Jefferson] Davis to Southern martyrdom. Rumors were spread throughout the South about his mistreatment at Fortress Monroe, although Davis himself said the stories were untrue. Until his death in 1889, he found a stronger voice in passionately defending the right of secession and extolling the nobility of the Lost Cause. He became, like so many of his fellow Confederates, an unreconstructed rebel. As one might expect, he never believed that he had committed a single traitorous act; in fact, he boldly, even arrogantly, affirmed that every one of his actions was legal and constitutional. Unlike Lee, he never sought a pardon, which is just as well because he probably would not have gotten it (although President Johnson, who was courting the Democratic Party at the time, could have easily caved in on this issue). But he also never uttered a single word of regret or remorse for the bloody revolutionary war he had willfully led against his country.

It was and is unpatriotic to adhere to the Confederacy.

Serbs and Croats

Hard as it may be to believe, the South still harbors people who believe the Civil War ended with the wrong victor. These pro-treason neo-Confederates blame the Union for its unprovoked attack on their peaceful secession (cough, Ft. Sumter, cough). They blame a tariff that didn't pass until after they seceded.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans don't blame their forefathers for holding other humans in brutal bondage. Their ancestors were fighting for liberty! Well, liberty for the landed white male gentry, anyhow...

Defense of slavery is still - publicly - a bridge too far even for these historical revisionists. So they deny that it was an important cause of the war. The overwhelming historical record that proves otherwise? Their heads are too far up their asses to see that.

The joy of se...

Secession:

The events include a “secession ball” in the former slave port of Charleston (“a joyous night of music, dancing, food and drink,” says the invitation)...

One of the secessionists:

“We’re celebrating that those 170 people risked their lives and fortunes to stand for what they believed in, which is self-government,” [Jeff Antley, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Confederate Heritage Trust,] said. “Many people in the South still believe that is a just and honorable cause. Do I believe they were right in what they did? Absolutely,” he said, noting that he spoke for himself and not any organization. “There’s no shame or regret over the action those men took.”

Self-government for white people. And this asshole can't even bring himself to regret what secession brought! He calls it a just and honorable cause! To keep other humans in bondage...

For some reason out of thin air, these words echo:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

Homage to treason is not treason, but no one should forget that the Confederate defenders of slavery committed high treason and brought incredible pain and suffering on their nation, black and white.

Update (12/2): Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes the Confederates to the neo-Confederates.

Reality bites

Why would Republicans even consider saying yes when no has worked so well? When so many extremists from their hard right wing were elected on a platform of HELL NO by wingnuts who might settle for more obstruction if they can't refight the Civil War?

Republican Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, who is expected to become the new House majority leader in January, questioned on "Fox News Sunday" whether there was any benefit to compromising with President Barack Obama.

The question was not whether Obama was willing to work with Republicans, as he stated last week, but, "Are we willing to work with him?" Cantor asked.

"I mean, first and foremost, we're not going to be willing to work with him on the expansive liberal agenda he's been about," Cantor said.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, told the CBS program "Face the Nation" that agreement exists on some specific provisions, but he refused to signal any willingness to compromise.

Big media, for its part, will no doubt continue to expect President Obama to compromise without any corresponding expectation of the GOP.

CNN will continue to screw up the most basic facts about, for example, the debate over keeping the rich from paying progressive taxes:

Obama wants to extend the lower tax rates for income above below $200,000 a year for individuals and $250,000 a year for families, saying that means 98 percent of Americans won't be subject to a de facto tax increase.

Yes, they printed it without the strike-through.

And Mitch McConnell will prove over and over and over again that Republicans only pretend to care about the deficit when caring about it hurts those of us who are non-rich:

McConnell, however, made clear that Republicans believe no one should have their tax rates return to the higher levels of the 1990s.

"We don't have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem," McConnell said, repeating a line parroted by Republicans on other shows.

Note of course the thoroughly Republican framing: no one should pay more (never mind the trillions saved by the rich and the corresponding crumbs the rest of us get).

And big media will never, ever notice that Republicans are hysterically hypocritical on deficits. Noticing the bullshit is against the rules of the reigning kleptocracy.

If we can't win the election, maybe we'll start shooting

A wingnut offers his plan for electoral defeat:

Republican congressional candidate Stephen Broden stunned his party Thursday, saying he would not rule out violent overthrow of the government if elections did not produce a change in leadership.

It's not just the lone nuts who lust to refight the Civil War.

Pity the poor white victims of northern aggression

Neo-Confederate nostalgia is a hallmark of Republican politics in the South. Gov. Robert McDonnell (R-1861) somehow forgot that the Confederacy fought for the right of white people to own and dispose of as they would black people whose descendents still live in Virginia.

Read the whole proclamation, now with its slapdash patch. It's filled with curtseys to the poor put-upon white people who long for the day their treasonous ancestors wore gray:

April is the month in which the people of Virginia joined the Confederate States of America in a four year war between the states for independence that concluded at Appomattox Courthouse.

War for independence! Concluded! He can't even bring himself to call it a civil war. There's no way he could own up to the real cause of war or to admit the defeat and unconditional surrender that Grant imposed on Lee, who was powerless to resist further.

[I]t is important for all Virginians to reflect upon our Commonwealth’s shared history, to understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War.

These white defenders of slavery chose their course, chose to make war on the United States, yet Virginians are supposed to reflect upon their so-called sacrifices alone. Pity the poor white victims of northern aggression!

[A]ll Virginians can appreciate the fact that when ultimately overwhelmed by the insurmountable numbers and resources of the Union Army, ...

Neo-Confederates still take refuge in the article of faith that their heroes were better soldiers than the Union's because they were outnumbered and still held out for four years. But they were on defense, which is always easier and less costly in men than offense.

Instead of starting over, McDonnell shoehorned in an anti-slavery clause, leaving behind all the tropes that serve neo-Confederate nostalgia and excuse-making.

CNN has this, to which I say amen:

"[McDonnell] says the wrong thing, he sends a signal to his base and then he makes an apology," [Virginia State Sen. Henry Marsh III, a black Democrat,] said, "It's a question of whether or not he's sincere or not."

McDonnell didn't forget. He knew exactly what he was doing. He didn't declare Civil War History Month, now did he?

Rolling back the clock

Republicans and other unsavory Tenthers want to use discredited and obsolete arguments to roll back the march of progress. Sean Wilentz in the New Republic:

Now, as in the 1860s and 1960s, nullification and interposition are pseudo-constitutional notions taken up in the face of national defeat in democratic politics. Unable to prevail as a minority and frustrated to the point of despair, its militant advocates abandon the usual tools of democratic politics and redress, take refuge in a psychodrama of “liberty” versus “tyranny,” and declare that, on whatever issue they choose, they are not part of the United States or subject to its laws—that, whenever they say so, the Constitution in fact forms a league, and not a government. Although not currently concerned with racial supremacy, the consequence of their doctrine would uphold an interpretation of the constitutional division of powers that would permit the majority of any state to reinstate racial segregation and inequality up to the point of enslavement, if it so chose.

That these ideas resurfaced 50 years ago, amid the turmoil of civil rights, was as harebrained as it was hateful. But it was comprehensible if only because interposition and nullification lay at the roots of the Civil War. Today, by contrast, the dismal history of these discredited ideas resides within the memories of all Americans who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s—and ought, on that account, to be part of the living legacy of the rest of the country. Only an astonishing historical amnesia can lend credence to such mendacity.

Wilentz is overly generous, I think. The Tenthers would by and large be happy to wake up in the ante bellum South - just so long as they got to be aristocrats and not poor white farmers or, heaven forfend, with their color changed.

This is not to say that I think the Democrats' heath insurance reform is a slam dunk to pass Constitutional review. There's ample precedent for mandates to have auto insurance, though some states provide alternatives to purchasing a policy, such as posting of a bond, essentially self-insurance. But this health insurance mandate goes a bit further in that dying and emigrating are the only ways to escape it.

Of course, there's also the current Supreme Court, still dominated as it is by conservatives, four of them accurately hard-right conservatives - Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts. An ideologically similar court was willing to nullify the outcome of the 2000 Presidential election (or, at the very least, to fix the result before the result could be accurately known). It would be naive to think their judicial modesty - not at all evident on the hard right, by the way - might restrain them from overturning a democratic act of Congress.

Lies a-mouldering in the grave

Since no doubt some of their readers are still fighting the Civil War, the AP sees fit, in a story about John Brown's raid 150 years ago today, to give equal time to "the War Between the States". Am I supposed to be happy they didn't call it the War of Northern Aggression?

Now, once again, we flirt with hardened, unbridgeable division:

After decades of mistrust and recrimination over the conflict between slavery and free labor, many in the North and South now found themselves even more fundamentally at odds. As Northerners increasingly hailed Brown as a hero, panicky Southerners execrated him as the devil himself. The tempest over John Brown appeared to shatter any hope of regional reconciliation. As one South Carolina editor put it, "The day of compromise is passed [and] there is no peace for the South in the Union."

It would be too much to claim that John Brown's raid made the Civil War inevitable. But it is fair to say that it helped to create an unbridgeable gap between the free states and the slave power that could only be, as Brown himself put it, "purged away with blood." There are many lessons that can be drawn from John Brown's raid, but the experience of the Civil War ought to stand as a permanent rebuke to the irresponsible incitement of contemporary political figures who trade so easily in rage and resentment.

Viagra for the Confederacy

Because the two bestest times of all time were the Civil War and the Great Depression, a couple of Confederate/Republican golden oldies are sweeping the nation. Well, not exactly the nation, but the Republican back benches in those citadels of enlightenment, Montana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.

Some dipshit two-bit Oklahoman would be happy to condemn his fellow citizens to become Okies.

From Montana to South Carolina, lawmakers in mostly red states have pushed ahead with measures calling for state sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment, saying the federal government has overstepped its bounds with the stimulus package. The states are calling for the right to ignore laws they deem unconstitutional.

This is what gets them excited. I hope there's not little blue pill for it, although they are trying to deal with their political impotence.

Look, we settled this in 1865 after killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of loyal Americans and people whose children would once again be loyal Americans. Some of the latter were my relatives.

You states rights idiots don't have the power to unilaterally declare a federal law unconstitutional, as if you can even spell it. It doesn't matter what bullshit law you pass in Oklahoma or South Carolina (perversely proud home of Fort Sumter) or Montana or at your local militia meeting.

Of course, I guess we thought we had this settled even before the Civil War, when in the 1780s we ditched the Articles of Confederation in favor of the stronger government in the Constitution.

Why is CNN covering this fake and bullshit-filled trend? You don't think Lauren Kornreich called up Republicans in every state legislator, do you? The Republican press machine must have issued a release, which she dutifully typed up.

Unfairness doctrine

The frothing wingnuts are everywhere, spilling bile as if it were water. Now and then I find one willing to spill blood (Matt at January 5th, 2009 4:12 pm ET):

The end of democracy as we know it. This is whithout [sic] a doubt the most fixed election ever. There was no standard other than cheat enough to have Franken pull ahead and then stop counting.

When democracy ceases to function and if you pay enough money you can subvert the will of the people to your whims. Then there is only one thing left for the comman man to do.

Civil War.

Reading the hate and ignorance in any mass market comments section makes me less than sanguine of the happy fate of democracy. Sanguinary? Yeah.

There's plenty of ignorance on the left, though it comes nowhere near matching the sheer stupidity of the right, but the real yawning abyss of disparity is in hate. We make fun of them, despise some of them, hate a select few. They hate us all.

The wingnuts have forgotten their kindergarten lessons - how to use their inside voices, how to play nice with others, how to use their words instead of their puny little fists to settle disputes, how not to bite their classmates, how to accept not getting their infantile narcissistic way right goddamn now from mommy every goddamn time, how not to throw a tantrum even if they're disappointed. They have no sense whatsoever of a commonwealth that extends beyond them.

They have lost this most basic socialization - hey, they're against socialism, why not be against socialization - because of the swill they listen to on talk radio and Fox News. They have public models of ugliness that allow them cover to revise and extend that ugliness forever.

And that gives their petty little 2-year-old's ids such a thrill of delight that only isolation could ever make them stop. Instead, they have a permanent play date with their mutual dittoheads, with whom they have constant self-reinforcing tantrums.

America is much the lesser for it.

Ron Paul's "reasonable approach"

Digging Digby

What she said. Be sure to read this source of hers.

As a youth, I had heard all about the banality of evil, but I persisted in denial. There must have been something particular and defective in the German character, for instance, that permitted Hitler to coarsen ordinary morality out of his people. First, jealousy and fear, then petty cruelty and thuggery, then aggressive war and torture, and then holocaust.

By now, I know that the moral and judgemental defects that lead from fear to mass murder infect the entire human race. Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, Hutu, Turks, Arabs, Israelis, and of course Americans. I should have known this earlier; what we did to Africans that caused the Civil War should have been enough. Before that, we committed genocide on native Americans. Even before that, my people in the British Isles brutalized and killed each other for the slimmest mindfuck reasons like divine right of kings or "Christian" sectarianism.

The yawning abyss between humane and human might be more obvious, I guess, though only in the way that a runaway train is more obvious when you're standing on the tracks than when you're momentarily safe on the platform. Atrocities come naturally to us. They are our cultural and genetic heritage, and we live in a period when the Bushists have largely rendered law impotent to restrain them.

The Bushist excuses for torture committed by Americans continue their - and our - lapse from the hope that liberty and democracy could ameliorate our brutal human nature. Now, having abandoned our higher principles for base and bloody violence, we Americans are simply another senescent empire on the verge of self-destruction.

The same goes for the redemptive hope that Christianity sometimes gives. Those in power call themselves Christians, but they have rationalized the same expedience as Pontius Pilate. Their excuses for torture would permit crucifixion so long as we cut down and revived Jesus before he died from blood loss and exposure.

As for me, I have to work hard to restrain myself from advocating the gallows and instead to suggest that we may need a new Spandau - perhaps Guantánamo - not for terrorists but for our own home-grown war criminals.

No lie too odious

There is literally no lie too nasty, no threat too uncivil, no power too immoral to use in defense of conservatism. Remember, this stuff came out of Rush's own mouth. It's not the interpretation of some liberal. He's proud of it!

Rush's dittoheads (I almost typoed 'dildoheads') have lately been screaming their misunderstanding of freedom of speech because Harry Reid and forty-two other Senators sent Clear Channel a letter criticizing his 'phony soldiers' comment. It works like this: Rush gets to say his piece, but he's not guaranteed a radio show to do it, and he's not immune from the free speech of others about him and what he says.

Will these brownshirts now scream in defense of the unnamed reporter whom Rush threatened with Enemy of the State style victimization, including penury? Yeah, dumb question. Of course not, they'll be screaming their offense that someone would question their favorite lying, drug-addled, multiply divorced, Viagra-to-Santo-Domingo hate talker.

Some of them, given the address of the reporter's children's school, would show up there to menace them. They belong to the conservative movement and the Republican Party, which have failed utterly to keep their own house in order.

Goaded by Rush and Michelle and all the boys on Fox, this angry, vicious band of wingnuts will start America's second civil war. They'll kill a lot of people like me before they're done.