"A Mob Intent on Violence" and the Second Amendment Solution

Here's Bob Filner:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Yep, that describes the Republicans pretty well.

Oh, perhaps you were expecting me to say "the Tea Party"? HELL with that. The Republicans embraced the Tea Party throughout the election and continued to do so right until it became inconvenient now that they've been reminded that violent nutballs are not just volunteers, donors, and convenient campaign props but are actually violent nutballs.

Here's the thing: it doesn't matter whether the Arizona shootings were inspired by "left-wing" grievances, "right-wing" grievances, both, or neither.  Everybody has issues. Everybody has grievances. You're never going to achieve consensus. What matters is how the Republicans and their pet Teabaggers advocate the resolution of those grievances.

No, what's fucked up about the Rebaggers, what makes them dangerous, is their method of conflict resolution. They don't care about democratic activism, or rhetoric, or debate. That shit's for pansies. No, they're doing everything but out-and-out telling America that the solution is to grab a gun, the biggest clip you can find, lock 'n load, and start airing out anybody who gets in your way. Good ol' "Second Amendment solutions", as they put it.

So you get crazed mobs like this. You get people who can't accept that their chosen candidate was beaten by a filthy lieberal Jew Democrat, and who are told (according to Filner) by various psychotic right-wing blogs that "democracy has failed them" and that it's time to grab the AKs and go to town.

You get people like Loughner, who was deluded into thinking that he could resolve his grievances (real or imagined) with Rep. Giffords at the point of a gun.

You get self-described "foot soldiers" like Scott Roeder, who decides to resolve his grievances against abortion providers through first degree murder. 

You get ex-felons like Byron Williams who do their damnedest to kill every member of the ACLU and Tides Foundation that he can lay his hands on because Glenn Beck all but told him to.

And you get people like Jim David Adkisson, who slaughtered 3 people in a Unitarian church in Knoxville because "all liberals should be killed because they're ruining the country".

That's what you get when you have an entire party, an entire movement, that is built upon telling people that the only thing between them and prosperity, safety, security and happiness is firing as many rounds as they can into the Other.

Bob Herbert STILL on a Tear

Shorter Herbert: "Nobody gives a shit about the poor any more".

The politicians and the media behave as if the poor don’t exist. But with jobs still absurdly scarce and the bottom falling out of the middle class, the poor are becoming an ever more significant and increasingly desperate segment of the population...

...The poor, who have been hurt more than anyone else in this recession, don’t stand a heartbeat’s chance in this political environment. The movers and shakers in government don’t even give a thought to being on the side of the angels anymore — they’re on the side of the millionaires and billionaires.

Nearly 44 million people were living in poverty in 2009, which was more than 14 percent of the American population and a jump of four million from the previous year. Anyone who thinks things are much better now is delirious. More than 15 million children are poor — one of every five kids in the United States. More than a quarter of all blacks and a similar percentage of Hispanics are poor.

Are we doing anything about this? No. Our government officials, from the president on down, are too busy kissing the bejeweled fingers of the megarich.

Shorter Demosthenes: "Damned straight".

It Takes a Whole Lotta Dumb to Make Whatzisname Right, But It Looks Like Somebody Managed It

You'd think it wasn't the Censorship McGee writing this, but yeah, Whatzisname actually has a legit point here about some Young Liberal in Canada named John Lennard who is babbling on and on about The Great American Republican Revolution and how the Liberals need to make themselves over in the Republicans image.

Kinsella brings up the hoary old "given the choice between a real Republican and a fake Republican, they'll choose the real one every time" bit, which is a pretty fair cop in a country where the right-wing party isn't as seemingly (and scarily) wedded to murderous eliminationism as its American counterpart.

But more importantly, this Lennard character misses the point that nobody gives a shit about the deficit and SHOULDN'T give a shit about public debt. No, really, John, they don't. That's not why the Republicans won, and you're deeply misinformed if you think otherwise.

The Republicans won because people are pissed that the Dems didn't seem to give a shit that they don't have jobs, because Obama turned out to be about as interested in serious change as the executive board of Goldman-Sachs, because the health care bill was a prime example of the Dems giving away the store before negotiations even began, and because the wealth of corporate America was poured into making damned well ensuring that the Republicans won.

(Which is the thing that always seems to get ignored by people like Lennard. Probably don't like the implications much.)

The Liberals can't really capitalize on this. The Libs don't have a fraction of the money that the Conservatives do. They won't have the job thing, because most of the places where things ARE bad in Canada are already held by the Liberals. The Liberals simply aren't going to be able to successfully run to the Conservatives' right, and especially not on economic matters. And as for "change", where the hell is the "change" in focusing on issues like public debt that only register to the powerful and plutocratic when you're a party being CONSTANTLY derided as only caring about the issues of said plutocrats?

The saddest part is that Lennard doesn't seem to know what "progressive" means. Look at this:

Liberals must call for an immediate, across-the-board 3% cut to the operating budgets of every federal department, agency and Crown Corporation.

Families have had to tighten their belts in recent years. Now it's the government's turn. If we use recent budget figures as a guide, a modest 3% cut in administrative costs could save upwards of $1.5-billion a year...

...By getting back to the basics, Mr. Ignatieff has the opportunity to boldly usher in a new progressive agenda, one based on building strong core institutions and respecting taxpayers' hard-earned money.

Excuse some salty language, but can this Lennard character explain to me WHAT IN THE BLOODY BLUE BLAZES IS SUPPOSED TO BE "PROGRESSIVE" ABOUT ACROSS-THE-FUCKING-BOARD CUTS TO GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS? Buddy, that's not a "progressive" agenda. That's not "strong core institutions" either, since you don't something stronger by starving it. That's Republicanism. Republicanism at its worst.

Edit: Ah. The boy's working at an elite law firm now. Well, that makes a bit more sense then. I can see why the issues of plutocrats would hit center stage, and other issues like collapsing productivity, growing poverty, the collapse of the middle class and record-high income inequality would seem quaintly unimportant.

After all, it looks like our boy Lennard isn't going to have to worry about being a "have-not" any time soon.

Ross Douthat is a Pathetic, Pathetic Man

The man is so desperate to try to create some sort of association between the Arizona shooter and "leftists"—and so inept at doing so—that he has written an article about political violence that doesn't mention word one about Timothy McVeigh.

Sure, he mentions the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, and other leftist boogiemen. But when it comes to actual, horrific, politically-driven violence? Not a goddamned word. Doesn't even dodge around it or try to change the subject. Just ignores it entirely.

Yes, he also engages in a fair bit of good ol' fashioned false equivalence. He babbles (there is no better word) about how Democrats supposedly use "crosshairs" and "targets" as well, and does it while conveniently ignoring how the Republicans and their Tea Party buddies pair it with the sort of violent, eliminationist, hateful rhetoric that you'd normally expect to find on Stormfront instead of on the websites of the "mainstream" right. THAT, you'd expect from a water-carrier like Douthat.

But seriously? Not a single word about McVeigh?

That's just plain pathetic.

More on Arizona

Wee bit more in the Times about Loughner.

Don Coorough, 58, who sat two desks in front of Mr. Loughner in a poetry class last semester, described him as a “troubled young man” and “emotionally underdeveloped.” After another student read a poem about getting an abortion, Mr. Loughner compared the young woman to a “terrorist for killing the baby.”

“No one in that class would even sit next to him,” Mr. Coorough said. Another fellow student said that he found Mr. Loughner’s behavior so eccentric — including inappropriate remarks and unusual outbursts — that he wondered if he might be on hallucinogens. Mr. Loughner grew up in Tucson and was an unremarkable student at Mountain View High School, classmates said.

And yet, by all accounts, he wasn't terribly religious.

I think we can safely retire the whole "he's a leftist" thing. Leftists don't call young women "terrorists" for having an abortion.

Jeffrey Goldberg Full of It On Arizona Shootings

...which, admittedly, isn't exactly a rare thing.

But why on earth would he try to claim this?

Imagine if the Ft. Hood shooting had been covered the same way as the Giffords shooting? During Ft. Hood, commentators and politicians were falling over themselves to preemptively announce that Nidal Hasan's religious faith had nothing to do with the shooting.

Which commentators would those be? Because I happen to recall rather a lot of blather about the extent to which this guy's religious faith had EVERYTHING to do with the shooting, especially once it came out that he wasn't happy about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Goldberg either doesn't get it, or won't admit it. It may be unseemly to tie together the act of a lone nut and the right's incredible and disgusting eliminationist attitude towards anybody more liberal than Glenn Beck. But I haven't the slightest doubt that, were the guy to turn out to be progressive, liberal, or leftist, the right would be up in arms about it?

And do you know how I know? BECAUSE THEY'RE ALREADY DOING IT.

No links, because to hell with those guys, but we're already seeing wingnuts seize on the brief impressions of a few twitterers who knew the guy 3 or 4 years ago to try to blame progressives for what happened. We've already got delusional asshats trying to tie together a DailyKos commentator who said "Giffords is dead to me" and the killer, despite the simple fact that the communications we do see from the man are nowhere near as lucid as the posts that are supposedly from him.

The conservative movement and its various hangers-on are always, ALWAYS purely instrumental when it comes to their outrage over things like this. If it's one of theirs, they'll apologize their asses off, and do whatever they can to shift the blame. If it's not one of theirs, they'll scream to the heavens about the evils of the liberal-progressive-socialist-leftist-whatevers that were (naturally) entirely responsible for this.

Those of us who are disgusted and repelled by said movement need not adopt these tactics. At least, not necessarily, though damned if they don't work like a charm on the Usual Suspects in the media. But we should never, EVER forget what's going on, and why. NEVER give them the benefit of the doubt.

Because if you do, they'll just grab it, pocket it, and scream that much louder about how repulsively evil you are.

Eliminationist Rhetoric

There is no reason to believe that Jared Lee Loughner, the shooter in the horrific attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others today, identifies with any sort of specific political ideology. He supposedly identified The Communist Manifesto as an influence, but he also indicated Mein Kampf and To Kill a Mockingbird as well, and certainly his YouTube channel suggests a troubled mind more than a specific ideology.*

That said.

I think this is the point where we can settle on one thing: there is no room in America for the sort of eliminationist rhetoric that we've been hearing from the right over the years, including from prominent people like Sarah Palin.

It's not right. It's not just. It's not safe. And the danger IS real.

*(No, I'm not linking to his YouTube channel. Find it yourselves.)

Edit: And, no, saying someone "is dead to you" is not eliminationist. Pathetic attempts to try to link DailyKOS to all this notwithstanding.

(That's just projection aimed at muddying the waters and convincing the press to cover it as a "he said/she said", "pox on both your houses" story instead of what it actually is. But even so.)

Punch Some More Hippies, Barry

If the White House were half as eager to take shots at Republicans and conservatives as they are their own base, they might have not got their asses kicked last November.

Edit: Hah, I didn't even make the connection. His new chief of staff is a Daley. If anybody knows about beating the holy hell out of dirty liberal hippies, it's the Daleys.

Senate Filibuster Reform

Not perfect, but a damned sight better than what's there right now.

My only concern is that the ConservaDems will come down on it because it diminishes their importance and power. Remember, the Republicans weren't the problem once Franken was finally seated. It was recalcitrant Democrats.

Bob Herbert on a Tear

Oh, now THIS I like. Bob Herbert's ripping up the Reps, saying "Get Ready for a [Rep] Rerun":

You just can’t close the door on this crowd. The party that brought us the worst economy since the Great Depression, that led us into Iraq and the worst foreign policy disaster in American history, that would like to take a hammer to Social Security and a chisel to Medicare, is back in control of the House of Representatives with the expressed mission of undermining all things Obama...
...Maybe the voters missed the entertainment value of the hard-hearted, compulsively destructive G.O.P. headliners. Maybe they viewed them the way audiences saw the larger-than-life villains in old-time melodramas. It must be something like that because it’s awfully hard to miss the actual policies of a gang that almost wrecked the country.

Good lead paragraph, but I think that second bit is slightly off. What motivated the public is fear, resignation, and rage.
There was fear from the still-employed lower-and-middle class about whether or not they'd lose their jobs and what little wealth they had left. Fear, suspicions, and isolation is ever the friend of the Republican.

There was resignation from progressives, liberals, and youth. They (we?) have lost all faith in the ability of Obama and the Democrats to actually enact positive change. The fact that a sixty-seat majority in the Senate couldn't get anything done was devastating, and the spectacle of Obama being perfectly willing to arm-twist progressive Dems but NOT conservative Dems or wingnut Reps was even more so. Obama's thorough abandonment of his base and supporters and repeated "hippy-bashing" was just final blow. So they just didn't bother to donate, campaign or vote.

But more than anything, there was rage. Americans know they've gotten a raw deal. They know they're being exploited. They know that the "Masters of the Universe" fucked things up, and got ordinary Americans like them to shoulder the burden. They're pissed that they got castigated for wanting to own a home in a nice neighbourhood and then finding out they got fleeced by the lying banks and mortgage houses. They're incandescent with fury over the lack of jobs. And they know it's all because the people that got paid the big bucks because they were supposedly the most talented, skilled, and thoughtful people in America were actually a pack of asshats mostly concerned with lining their pockets and those of their friends. It isn't about the "socialist Democrats"; bankers aren't socialists and the public absolutely despises that gang. It's about the Powers That Be and their utter betrayal of America's trust.

But what follows, well...Herbert really surprised me.

The mantra for Mr. Issa and the rest of the newly empowered Republicans in the House, including the new Budget Committee chairman, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, is to cut spending and shrink government. But what’s really coming are patented G.O.P. efforts to spread misery beyond Mr. Obama and the Democrats to ordinary Americans struggling in what are still very difficult times.

It was ever thus. The fundamental mission of the G.O.P. is to shovel ever more money to those who are already rich. That’s why you got all that disgracefully phony rhetoric from Republicans about attacking budget deficits and embracing austerity while at the same time they were fighting like mad people to pile up the better part of a trillion dollars in new debt by extending the Bush tax cuts.

This is a party that has mastered the art of taking from the poor and the middle class and giving to the rich. We should at least be clear about this and stop being repeatedly hoodwinked — like Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy’s football — by G.O.P. claims of fiscal responsibility.

There’s a reason the G.O.P. reveres Ronald Reagan and it’s not because of his fiscal probity. As Garry Wills wrote in “Reagan’s America”:

“Reagan nearly tripled the deficit in his eight years, and never made a realistic proposal for cutting it. As the biographer Lou Cannon noted, it was unfair for critics to say that Reagan was trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor, since ‘he never seriously attempted to balance the budget at all.’ ”

We’ll see and hear a lot of populist foolishness from the Republicans as 2011 and 2012 unfold, but their underlying motivation is always the same. They are about making the rich richer. Thus it was not at all surprising to read on Politico that the new head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Fred Upton of Michigan, had hired a former big-time lobbyist for the hospital and pharmaceuticals industries to oversee health care issues.

This is almost astonishing. Sure, a blogger can say such things. But a New York Times columnist isn't supposed to write comments that are so, well...classist. You're allowed to call the Republicans out-of-touch, or zealots, or zombies, or whatnot. But to actually call it as it is? To say that they're just there as agents for the cash-soaked bastards who screwed things up so badly in the first place?

Astonishing.

I wonder if they'll make him write a retraction.

"Haves" and "Have Nots"

Well, you'd think that anybody using THAT line would be a progressive, or even a liberal, right? Nope. Republican.Scott Walker, come on down:

“We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots,” Mr. Walker, a Republican, said in a speech. “The bottom line is that we are going to look at every legal means we have to try to put that balance more on the side of taxpayers.”

Scott Walker is governor of Wisconsin.

Wisconsin.

A state where the gap between the rich and the middle class, once so low that the state prided itself on its relative equality, has yawned ever wider over the last few decades, as the top fifth decile's income rises 36% since 1990, while the poor's income barely budges despite the enormous growth in productivity. (And remember, if it follows American trends, Wisconsin's wealthiest 5% would have had their income go up by sixty percent.)

THAT is "haves" vs. "have nots". It has nothing to do with public sector unions.

Well, okay, that's false. It absolutely does. Unions, and especially the public sector unions, are just about the last thing that is protecting the middle class from utter annihilation by the modern robber barons and their various mouthpieces and hirelings. The prospect of a nasty strike is the only thing stopping corporate executive management from getting rid of pensions, health care, and anything approaching a decent salary for their employees. And since that's who Republicans work for...

Makes sense that they'd be pushing now. After all, America has what the Marxists always referred to as a "reserve army of the unemployed", including a lot of highly-skilled young college grads so desperate for work that they'll work for free and call it an "internship" if you dangle the prospect of a job in their face. And they're the lucky ones. If you're older, or uneducated, or (god forbid) black, you're just straight-out screwed.

It must be frustrating not being able to take advantage of this situation by slamming wages and salaries into the ground as hard as you possibly can. Certainly the shareholders—who are principally members of the same hyper-wealthy fraction of Americans that executive management belongs to—are going to want them to do it. Their job is to to "maximize shareholder value", is it not? That's how you do it these days. Innovation and market development is for chumps. Screwing the employees on one side and customers on the other: that's the ticket these days.

So, yes, looking at it through that light, it makes sense. Scott Walker knows that his job as a Republican governor is also to "maximize shareholder value". It shouldn't be. His job should be to help the people of Wisconsin. But in this zombie-ruled world, that just ain't happening.

Hey, Bill Kristol: (Plus: State of the Union and Onion Panels)

America already has health care rationing, you twit. It's just that it's rationed on the basis of wealth.

I realize that may not bother you much, being the wealthy son of a wealthy, well-connected man. But that's small comfort to the poor kids whose share of health care resources you 
got to gobble up because you won the lucky sperm contest however many years ago it was.

C&L notes, quite rightly, that the insurance companies are the agents of rationing. But, really, it comes down to money.

(Well, that, and the process of demolishing any sort of public-spiritedness left in America by making people so terrified of the future that they work seventy-hour weeks for inadequate pay and hoard gold like fantasy dragons in case their kids get sick. But that's about money, too. Terrified workers don't buck for better pay.)

Edit: And while you're watching C&L and getting annoyed, here's Chris Matthew's panel sounding like an Onion New Network parody of themselves.  It'd be nice if even Andrew Sullivan had said "uh, actually the Dems got shellacked because of the weak job situation and because the base stayed home, it has nothing to do with this 'center' bullshit". But, as per usual, there were no real progressives on there. Just conservative Villagers, babbling the same old bullshit and punching the same old hippies.

I suspect that the State of the Union tomorrow will, in the eyes of historians fifty years from now, be cited as the moment when America completely lost its shit and the zombie conservativism that caused so much damage finally came back and finished it off. I don't think it'll be the election, since the election was basically a primal scream against the serial fuckups of the wealthy lackwits that these panelists are apologizing for. I think it'll be when said lackwits deliberately misinterpreted the message to finally rip away what little comforts the poor and (soon-to-be-extinct) middle class had left.

Missile Defense?

Seriously? That's the supposed reason to stop the latest START treaty? Krauthammer, did somebody put your columns in a time capsule from August of 2000 or something?

Never mind that he calls the tax bill "bipartisan", when it was a big Republican victory. That's why they were willing to hand over DADT, which threatens the wealthy 0.1% that Dubya aptly called "his base" not one whit. They traded away the TheoCon's interests to serve the moneymen's interests, just as they have before and will again. It barely matters; Krauthammer is only bringing it up as "punch a hippy" fodder, a paen to the "bipartisanship" that he wouldn't give a shit about if Barry had an "R" beside his name.

But missile defense? You've gotta be kidding. Even if North Korea is a bit more unstable than it used to be, it's been made patently clear that America's conventional war advantage ain't what it used to be either. Maybe if this WERE 2002 or so, it might make sense, but American predominance has kind of had a difficult run since then.

Let's be honest. If Russia wanted to ruin America, they wouldn't need nukes for it. All they'd need to do is completely economically align with China and start really tightening their grasp on Eastern Europe, and there's a whole host of economic consequences that would make the White House sweat.

Why on earth would they need to, though? Putin has to see what's going on. Cold-blooded or no, he's possibly the most clear-sighted state leader the world has right now. There's no way that he's missed that America's wealthiest and their various mouthpieces (like Krauthammer!) are tearing down everything else in their quest to extract whatever cash can be produced by the other 99.9% of Americans. There's no way he's missed just how disastrous Obama's Administration has been so far, DADT or no DADT.

He, and everybody else that may (or may not) wish America harm, can just sit tight and let all the work be done for them. The danger isn't nukes. It's people like Krauthammer himself.

A Short Pop-Culture Aside

Tron: Legacy is billed as a sequel to Tron. It doesn't do a bad job in that respect. But considering just how much attention is paid to the astonishing soundtrack that Daft Punk created for it, and how closely the action seems to be connected to that soundtrack...

...could it be that the movie is, in its own way, as much a sequel to Interstella 5555?

Screwing Consumers: It's the Telecom Way!

Once again, the old rule that I figured out ages ago remains true: if a conservative starts babbling about the Internet and "innovation", it's really justifying yet another way to screw consumers.

For years, proponents of so-called "net neutrality" have been calling for strong regulation of broadband "on-ramps" to the Internet, like those provided by your local cable or phone companies. Rules are needed, the argument goes, to ensure that the Internet remains open and free, and to discourage broadband providers from thwarting consumer demand. That sounds good if you say it fast.

Nothing is broken that needs fixing, however. The Internet has been open and freedom-enhancing since it was spun off from a government research project in the early 1990s. Its nature as a diffuse and dynamic global network of networks defies top-down authority. Ample laws to protect consumers already exist. Furthermore, the Obama Justice Department and the European Commission both decided this year that net-neutrality regulation was unnecessary and might deter investment in next-generation Internet technology and infrastructure.

Analysts and broadband companies of all sizes have told the FCC that new rules are likely to have the perverse effect of inhibiting capital investment, deterring innovation, raising operating costs, and ultimately increasing consumer prices. Others maintain that the new rules will kill jobs. By moving forward with Internet rules anyway, the FCC is not living up to its promise of being "data driven" in its pursuit of mandates—i.e., listening to the needs of the market.

This is all nonsense. Consumers DON'T have choice. The Internet CAN'T route around telecoms' dominance of the Last Mile. And in a situation of oligopoly or monopoly, "innovation" is only going to happen in ways that allow the monopolist to squeeze more cash out of their captive "customers". We're already seeing North American telecoms systematically underinvesting in capacity now, since there's more money to be made in promising "unlimited" internet and then using your deliberately-cripped networks as an excuse for extracting big data transfer fees. THAT is what will "increase consumer prices", not neutrality!

But, as is usually the case, the only thing this guy cares about is ensuring that the wealthy stockholders of these companies can drain that much more money out of already-beleaguered middle class. Sure, that's what the Republicans and the Wall Street Journal's opinion page is all about. But you'd think they'd be a bit more subtle about it.

(Oh, and if anybody tries to start their own network, they get crushed. Witness what's happened to most of the municipal WiFi initiatives. They work quite well, until the telecoms lean on state governments to get them shut down in the name of, yes, "competition" and "innovation". It's enough to make you puke.)

This sort of thing is exactly the reason why North American internet access is becoming a tragic joke, to the point where it hurts competitiveness and productivity. And it's only going to get worse, not better, since the FCC has pretty much punted on the issue with a loophole-ridden "law" that will probably get torn to shreds by the telecoms' lawyers and various pet mouthpieces. Certainly the Obama Administration has shown that they could give a rat's ass.

Hope you enjoyed the free Internet. Because, folks, unless something changes real soon, it's goin' bye-bye.

David Gergen, You Idiot

The Tax Bill and START weren't "bipartisan victories". The Republicans won a big victory in cramming huge upper-class tax cuts down America's throats, and they were almost certainly never terribly opposed to START to begin with. It was just about ensuring that the Dems didn't get a "win" over them.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell is History

Yep, I'm as surprised as you are. Kudos to the President and to the Congress for finally sacking up and getting rid of a ridiculous law. And, yes, kudos to ol' Joe Lieberman for pushing so hard on it. He still doesn't deserve nomination next year, but this is something that he will be able to honestly look back upon with pride.

And, hey, Susan Collin, Olympia Snowe, and a few other Republicans actually stood up for the rights of people who aren't white, male, conservative and rich for a change. That's almost shocking. 

Observations About Language Drift

Two things really strike me about this story about how words change over time.

First, the google books archive is really going to be a useful resource for broad-scale research.

Second, that anybody who seriously attempts to use the word "culturomics" deserves a smack upside the head. Good GOD, guys. Just because you're studying the use of words doesn't mean you're allowed to muck 'em up for the rest of us.

Kelly McParland is "Unejjicated"

There's a saying going around that "left" populism is about wealth, whereas "right" populism is about education. I don't know how I feel about that, but the spectacle of someone like Kelly McParland writing something like "Some smart insider type with a university degree in high finance is going to have to explain to us poor unejjicated peons how this is a good idea"  proves at least the latter bit. Wingnuts clearly get really, really shirty about education for some reason.

It's a bit bizarre, really. Almost anybody can get a post-secondary education, assuming that  they can afford it. Surely someone making as much money as McParland can. Takes four years at most to become "ejjicated". Yet almost nobody will EVER make enough money to benefit from, say, the estate tax cuts. A vanishingly small minority will get billions of dollars, while everybody else doesn't see a thin dime. But it's somehow school that's the problem here?

Of course, it could just be an act. Perhaps he's just trying to win over a particular anti-education, anti-intellectual audience. But that's the truly strange part. He writes for the NATIONAL POST. Why on earth would such a group of people be reading it in the first place?

(He could also simply be a tendentious twit, like that guy who linked to my earlier post on WikiLeaks. But I suspect that that goes without saying.)

A General Note About WikiLeaks

I honestly haven't seen an attack on the concept yet that didn't boil down to "all you proles should shut the hell up and go back to work". That's what all that "sometimes there needs to be secrecy" stuff generally boils down to.

Sure, diplomacy must have a secret component. Sources and methods should be protected, for example. But it's transparently (heh) obvious that there is far more secrecy than there needs to be. The reason is equally transparent: because in a democracy, the very last thing you want is for the voters to know what they're actually voting for. Keep the reality of the situation secret, lie to them with every breath, and hope that the lies are consistent and attractive enough that they'll go along with it.

See, if they knew what they were voting on, then they'd know what they can't vote on. All those bits of government that keep on rolling no matter who won the election? The ones that usually have something to do with blowing up random bits of the planet for "America's interests"? HELL no, you folks ain't going to be voting on that stuff. Democracy isn't supposed to go THAT far...Americans might disagree with what "America's interests" are, and then where would we be?

But just telling them "no, screw you, that stuff isn't up for debate" doesn't work. People can get annoyed when Their Betters make these sorts of decisions for them. So you keep them in the dark. Don't let them know that the decisions even exist, let alone how they've been made. That keeps them under wraps.

The sad thing is that the same people who defend this nonsense are the ones who rail against utterly open processes like the development of scientific consensus, or equally open government programs like food and drug safety. If you want to know how you're protected from horrible food poisoning, the information is out there. If you want to know why global warming is a threat, the information is out there. And if you want to know why those guys in the white suits came and removed the asbestos from your office, the information is out there too. And, hey, if you REALLY think it's bullshit? You can vote on it.

But not defense and foreign relations. Never that. Defense against food poisoning is one thing. Defense against, say, terrorism or instability is quite another. That's all supposed to be done FOR you, at great expense, while they snow you with a steady drumbeat of jingoistic nonsense and misplaced patriotism.

Certainly that's the press's reaction as well. THEY are allowed to know the truth. They are (or obey) Very Serious People. They ask The Right Questions, get The Right Answers, and tell all you idiots The Right Way To Think. And when The Right Way To Think turns out to be wrong, as is inevitably the case these days? Well, there are new Right Questions, new Right Answers, and new Right Ways To Think.

So you get assholes like Paul Carr, who say things like this:

I hate the fact that he’s trading on a myth that We The People have a right to know everything our governments are saying and doing in our name when, in fact, we elect people to act in our best interests on a global stage without necessarily giving us a heads up every time they want to have an off-the-record chat with a dictator.

 This is Right Thinking in spades. This guy is a tech columnist, one who clearly hasn't the faintest clue whether or not he's elected someone who will "act in our best interests". Certainly, if he either in Britain or America, the overwhelming tide of evidence suggests that they are NOT "acting in our best interests", never have, and arguably never will unless something seriously changes.  Like it or lump it, that's what WikiLeaks represents: a serious change.

How anybody, even someone this clueless, could even BEGIN to make this argument after the Iraq war is beyond me. I suppose he was too busy exulting in the the glory of having Steve Jobs dictate how he uses his computer, and thought that the same should apply to governance as well. Well, that, and trying to be some kind of Ellis-like cranky British scribe. Except without the talent. Or sense of humor.

Then again, maybe that's the issue, isn't it? The people who are crafting and repeating Right Thinking never live up to the responsibility. You're frankly doing a crap job. So why not let the rest of us decide?

Edit: Good bit on this was put up in, all of all places, The New Republic. Yeah, Peretz's rag. No, I don't get it either. But here's David Rieff, breaking it down in the midst of a weird Clay-Shirkyesque piece that somehow doesn't mention Clay Shirky:

In reality, there was only one group that was not privy to this information released by Wikileaks: the general public. And we can’t have them properly informed, now can we? Father (or, in the case of Secretary Clinton, “mother,” I suppose) knows best. I do not often agree with Noam Chomsky, but it seems to me that he was exactly right when he said that “one of the main reasons for state secrets is so that the state can defend itself from its citizens.” But, regardless of Washington’s motives, stopping Julian Assange (which, in any case, is not the same thing as stopping Wikileaks, as we are all starting to discover) will not be a victory over terrorism, as Senator Mitch McConnell has suggested so preposterously, for the simple reason that the one group we can be sure had the information in the cables before the Wikileaks are the terrorists.

In contrast, powerful people hate being shown up as much if not more than they hate failure, and people with insider information that gives them special status hate losing their intellectual monopoly, since they know that, if they do, loss of status will not be far behind. In this sense, the back-story of Wikileaks is not that American diplomacy is threatened or that Al Qaeda has been strengthened but that American diplomats have lost face, and American policy intellectuals have been confronted by an existential threat to their priestly monopoly on inside information. Oh, the pity of it!

That's something I've been banging on for a while. All these statements that "we elect our leaders to make these decisions for us!" miss the point that the people with the greatest say are not elected at all. The "priestly intellectuals" that set the ground and decide what the options are have never been elected by anybody but their colleagues and/or co-conspirators. They aren't even bureaucrats; at least bureaucrats are accountable to somebody. These jokers aren't really accountable to the people at all.

Which is probably why they keep showing up despite being wrong damned near 100% of the time.