Month: May 2005

Poll: Bush Fails to Make His Case – Again

Jon Ponder

The first CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll since President Bush’s “news” conference on April 28 shows that former Andover cheerleader has failed again to rally the American public behind his plan to phase out Social Security. In fact, while 81 percent of the respondents agreed that the program is broken, only 35 percent liked the President’s approach. The poll also showed that Bush received an over-generous 48 percent approval for his job performance.

The news conference came after the President campaigned for his plan to end Social Security for 60 days at staged events packed with his supporters in mostly Red state venues. The White House hoped the events showcasing the President would gin up positive coverage on local news channels, but this plan apparently backfired.

What is difficult to calculate is how many viewers of local news coverage came to see Bush’s plan for what is – an attempt to make the Social Security safety net disappear in order to gain partisan advantage. Republicans don’t give a damn if we end up with millions of elderly Baby Boomers living in cardboard boxes in 20 years. Their stated goal is to end the two party system in the United States. By destroying Social Security, they will remove it as a reliable arrow in the Democrats’ quiver of political issues.

These are the same craven political masterminds who sent us to war in Iraq primarily to ensure that Bush would be a “war president” and thus win reelection in 2004, and who are about to destroy the parliamentary rules of the US Senate, thus laying waste to the last institution of civility in our republic, in order to pack the courts with Talibani judges who can be relied upon to roll back civil rights.

Democrats – and especially the MSM – dare not speak the truth about the Gops’ true goals lest they be labelled “librul” by corrupt conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and Tom DeLay and millions of their dittohead followers. And that factor, the demonization of the word “liberal” by the Right, may be the neatest trick of all. Shunning the liberal label has become so reflexive that it forces the Republicans’ opponents and their watchdogs to censor themselves, without any means for reprisal.

Runaway Bride Predictions, Olbermann vs. O’Reilly

Jon Ponder

From TVNewser:

Keith Olbermann, Countdown, Friday: “Those photos of this woman — I don’t know how recent they are. There’s just a feeling about those shots, with her eyes sort of bugging out, that you look at that and say, Is she going to run or do something?”

Bill O’Reilly, The O’Reilly Factor, Friday night: “The epidemic of crimes against women and children in America continues with the disappearance of 32-year old Jennifer Wilbanks from an Atlanta suburb.” Also: “It’s got to be a crime. A woman like that with a long history of responsibility. She had a steady job… She just wouldn’t bolt and not tell anybody.”

> Update: 7:13pm: “The epidemic of crimes against journalism in America is apparently a lot more serious than we thought,” Olbermann blogs…

Gays face same enemy as Jews in ’30s: hatred

Buck Banks

In today’s Miami Herald, Leonard Pitts Jr. examines the au courant tendency to label the crisi dujour as whatever’s “Holocaust.” In this case, it’s a gay holocaust. While drawing the distinction between capital H and little H holocausts, Pitts notes that the tendency of conservatives to want to limit freedoms, especially those of gays and lesbians, does harken back to the neo-fascist days of the late ’30s, early ’40s.

Gay Holocaust?

That was the subject line of an e-mail I received last week from ”Chris,” a lawyer in a red state. He wanted to know if anybody else sees a similarity between the beginning of the Holocaust — the nibbling away of rights and personhood that ultimately led to the attempted extermination of a people — and what is happening to gay people in American right now.

He knows it’s far-fetched. ”But,” he says, speaking of the conservative element that is pushing hardest against gay rights, “we are not dealing with normal people here.”

Chris concedes that there are differences between the plights of Jews and gays. “But they also have this in common — at one time in history, that time being the present for gays, they were the object of official government-sponsored hatred couched in the name of religion or morals.”

Here’s what I think:

The Holocaust is an atrocity unique in history, and I’m wary of appending modifiers: the ”this” holocaust or the ”that” holocaust. There’s a reason the word takes a capital h.

Which is not to say the lawyer is off base. I’ve long felt the current spate of laws — you can’t do this because you’re gay, can’t have that because you’re lesbian — bears a discomfitting resemblance to Germany in the 1930s.

Both spring from a mind-set that says a given people is so loathsome, so offensive to our sensibilities, that we are obliged to place them outside the circle of normal human compassion. We don’t have to hear their cries, don’t have to respect their humanity, don’t have to revere their tears, because they are less than we — and at the same time, are responsible for everything that scares or threatens us.

Whatever it is, it’s all their fault. Blame them, whoever ”them” may be.

WE’RE ALL HUMAN

My problem is that I see human dignity as all of a piece. I don’t know how to want it for me and mine but not for them and theirs. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, we are caught in a network of mutuality. As Dick Cheney put it, freedom means freedom for everybody. As Cain put it, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

I always considered that the signature lesson of the Holocaust; always felt that in the largest sense, it was not about Jews and Aryans, but about humanity and inhumanity. The Holocaust was, after all, only hatred carried to its logical extreme, the predictable outcome of an environment where we countenance taking rights from ”them,” heaping scorn on ”them,” making scapegoats of “them.”

And who can deny that this describes the plight of gay Americans in 2005? Or that demagogic lawmakers are using this environment to further their own ambitions?

There used to be an expression in Southern politics. The candidate who lost because he had been found insufficiently draconian on racial issues was said to have been ”out-niggered.” These days, the worry seems to be that one might be ”out-homoed.” Consider, for instance, a law under consideration in Alabama to ban books with gay characters from public school libraries.

Books. With gay characters.

AN IMPORTANT QUESTION

It prompted a group of gay Alabamans to rise before a legislative committee and ask a pregnant question.

Why do you hate us?

And it strikes me that the same thing could have been asked by an Armenian in 1915, by a Bosnian Muslim in 1992, by a Rwandan in 1994 and, yes, by a Jew, in 1936.

We just don’t learn.

Ours is a stable and prosperous democracy, so no, I don’t predict train cars full of gays rolling toward death factories.

Still, the mind-set of aggrieved righteousness that allowed those trains to roll is not dissimilar from that which would ban gay people from public school libraries.

Maybe your instinct is to find the comparison unthinkable. Nobody is interning gays, nobody mass-murdering them.

You’re right. But ask yourself: How many would if they could?

Schwarzenegger Loads, Aims at Foot, Shoots

Jon Ponder

Marc Cooper writes in an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times that there was a whole lot less to the Minutemen Project than the media tried to portray. Organizers claimed that 1,000 patriotic citizens – many of them armed – were going to watch for illegal immigrants along Arizona’s border with Mexico for the entire month of April.

All Mexicans traveling north without proper documents got wind of the publicity and chose another route into the United States. The Minutemen noted the lack of illegal traffic along the Arizona border and declared victory. The media – and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger – fell for the ruse, and for the governor this could prove to be politcally fatal mistake. Coooper writes:

On its opening day, I could count no more than 135 participants, even at the two kickoff public rallies along the Arizona border. At one near the border town of Douglas, two dozen reporters and a handful of TV cameras swarmed over no more than 10 Minutemen — most of them sitting in lawn chairs or in pickup truck beds.

One Minuteman organizer admitted, “This thing was a dog-and-pony show designed to bring in the media and get the message out, and it worked.”

Illegal immigration is the “third rail” of politics for Republicans in California, but maybe Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t get the memo. Perhaps he was busy filming a Sci-Fi movie in 1994 and didn’t notice when his friend and advisor Pete Wilson ran for governor a second time using Proposition 187, the anti-immigrant initiative as a wedge issue. For Wilson, the campaign worked in the short term. He was reelected with comfortable margins. But for California Republicans, the campaign was a disaster. It energized California Latinos and drove millions of them into the Democratic Party. Many of these Latinos – especially younger males – switched parties to vote for the Terminator.

As disengaged as young male voters tend to be, you can bet they heard about this:

[On Thursday], Schwarzenegger called a conservative talk radio show in Los Angeles to blast a local Spanish-language television station for a billboard that “promotes illegal aliens to come in here, and that’s the last thing we need.” He went on to praise the controversial Minuteman Project, saying the group has done “a terrific job,” by putting hundreds of armed civilians in Arizona to stop illegal immigrants from crossing the Mexican border.

This is not a case of the Governor shoring up his base. Schwarzenegger is a liberal Republican who has no base among the far Right in his party. They’ll hold their noses and vote for him, or they’ll stay home. The votes he’ll need to push him over margins will come from Latinos who may identify with immigrants, and thus resent the anglos in the pick up trucks watching with binoculars and guns.