Right Wing Authoritarians [Torture is Good for You]

[Editors Note: I am not the staunchest Obama supporter, in fact I believe there are legitimate critiques of his policies -- especially his (mostly wrong-headed conservative) economic policy decisions. However, much of the right-wing criticism of Obama is fueled by hatred and, yes, racism. I quantify that last assertion here, but today I find myself SMDH at the revolting scumbags on the right. I mean, they have no sense of fuckin decency, no fuckin shame at all. I believe these cretins would fuck their own mothers over without a second thought...]

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Hate Multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. p 53, The Strength to Love, 1963

First things first. It seems there’s a mini storm over the above quote by MLK. The quote, with the leading line, I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy... went viral immediately after the news of the murder of Osama Bin Laden was released. A rather irresponsible article penned by Megan McArdle at The Atlantic, noted that after having Googled said quote, she couldn’t find verification. Therefore, the reporter surmised, the quote isn’t accurate, and MLK never said it.

Actually, as I have correctly cited, the quote is a genuine MLK quote. What isn’t part of the quote, is the first line and here’s what happened. The sentiment was first posted as a Facebook status, and it read (verbatim):

I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy, “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” -- mlk [emphasis added]

Note the placement of the quotation marks. As the status was repeated, the quotes were misplaced, giving the impression that the leading sentence -- the sentence not part of the MLK quote -- was attributed to MLK. This then led other reporters, bloggers, commenters to assert that MLK never said it. And that’s a false conclusion. But the larger point here is that journalists are doing a piss-poor job of research. Indeed, the research can be found in the comments section of The Atlantic article. Has this journalist ever heard of... books? Direct sources? *The article has been picked in places like the WashPo, The CS Monitor, and if you Google the first line, you’ll easily get 50-60k hits (the last time I looked).

This is bullshit, lazy, hack writing, plain and simple.

Now on to the important stuff...

I guess it was to be expected. No sooner than the news of OBL’s assassination was released, that the right wing cretins went into feces flingin’ mode, and started patting themselves in the back for the deed. What’s that? Yes, the Bush administration spent trillions, sent us to two unnecessary wars where about 50,000 of our men and women were killed or maimed, and spent almost a decade without even getting close to OBL, but Bush should be given the honors. Obama is just the lawn jockey. he can’t possibly be smart enough to capture/ kill OBL, right?

Except that it isn’t true. In fact, only six months after 9/11, The Village Idiot publicly admitted he was no longer concerned about OBL. Let’s take it to the videotape, Johnny:

Spin that bitches. More importantly, Bush shut down the CIA unit weighted with the responsibility of capturing Bin Laden. Guess who opened it up again? Yup... Obama.

The Reagan Con: Noam Chomsky on Reagan's Distorted Legacy, Wisconsin Protests, & Union Busting

We did not -- repeat, did not -- trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.-- Ronald Reagan to a televised national audience

Hopefully, you have read some good posts (here and here) separating the man from the myth. What follows is my own documentation of the failures and most egregious crimes of Reagan. But before that, I want to contextualize the so-called “Reagan Era.” I was a young man when Reagan and the “new” right ascended into power, forever changing America for the worst. Some of the consequences of Reagan’s policies (such as the Savings and Loan debacle) still haunt us. Most of all, Reagan was the ultimate inheritor of the “southern strategy,” the strategy to bring together disaffected (mostly southern) whites who wanted to blame minorities and civil rights gains for what they perceived as their losses.

Reagan was good at using the newer, coded, but no less racist language that attracted whites in large numbers. For example, Reagan never mentioned race overtly, but his discredited bullshit story of the “Welfare Queen” who drove a Cadillac didn’t have to mention skin color -- his base filled in the blanks. Similarly, when Reagan was asked to speak at the site of murdered civil rights workers, he invoked the right-wing meme of “states rights.” Many saw this as support for segregationist sentiments (who to this day still use the same “states rights” racial code). In fact, Reagan is on record as describing the Voting Rights Act as, “humiliating to the South.”

Ultimately, the greatest harm committed by Reagan, was his validation of the redefinition of “freedom” as corporate freedom. Government was the enemy and Reagan and his henchmen wanted to shrink it enough to drown it in a bathtub. Our current economic fractures have their root in Reagan’s misguided policies. But as fucked and cruel and vacuous as he was (his mind was most likely corroded by disease for at least one third of his two-term administration), he’s soft compared to his current day descendants -- all of whom are now trying to rewrite Reagan’s legacy...

Of Cuckoos and Neocons

Facts are stupid things.

-- Ronald Reagan

The best analogy I’ve come across regarding the neoconservative (now teabagger) movement is the one using the nesting habits of the cuckoo bird comparison. Cuckoos employ a rather interesting reproductive strategy involving what is known as “nest parasitism.” Briefly, the female cuckoo lays an egg in the nest of another species of bird (after first removing an egg from the host’s nest). Upon hatching, the baby cuckoo goes on to banish the remaining eggs and hatchlings of the host, at which point it becomes the sole focus of the host parent’s interest.

By now you’re probably asking why the host parents don’t banish the alien egg before the troubles begin, or at the very least abandon the parasitic baby cuckoo once it has grown to a size far larger than host parents themselves.

The problem, of course, is that birds lack the thinking skills necessary to recognize the parasite. They take note of the eggs, of the sight of a baby bird’s features and cries, and follow a “care for egg/hatchling in nest” instinctual pattern. It does not demand much of a masquerade on the part of the cuckoo to abuse the host’s instincts. All that is necessary is the initial neural imprinting by the parent host on the baby parasite’s signals.

One cannot help but be struck by the remarkable parallels between the nesting line of attack of the cuckoo and the infiltration of the conservative movement beginning in the 1970s by neo-conservatives (“neocons”) which has now been itself been taken over by the teabaggers.