Everyone's Extreme But Me and Thee

I'm out of town until tomorrow (I hope), and Internet access is harder to get than I expected.  But I just remembered this excerpt from James Barr's book Fundamentalism that I've quoted before, and which fits in with what I wrote the other day about liberals and Fox News:

As with some other comparable social movements, there is always a position more extreme than the one you are talking with at any particular moment. A person whom an average mainstream Christian will regard as a rabid fundamentalist will often be found to consider himself rather moderate; beyond him there lie, it appears, whole tracts of belief that are much more intransigent and uncompromising. The fundamentalist polemicist thus puzzles people by assuming a pose of moderation. He affects to suppose, at least at times, that his is in fact a central position within Christianity. On the one side you have the severe distortions of Roman Catholicism, on the other you have the utter perversions of liberalism, and in the middle you have the sound, central and moderate position of his own conservative evangelicalism. There may indeed be persons who push the conservative evangelical position to unnecessary extremes, it is admitted, but the average sound conservative (i.e., the one you are talking to at the moment) occupies middle ground. It is thus not uncommon to find a person who holds absolutely all the tenets of fundamentalist belief, … but who nevertheless uses the term ‘fundamentalist’ not for himself but for some shadowy group of people who hold a yet more extreme position.

Easy enough, eh?  Let me add a complicating thought.  Sure, that crazy Fox News fan over there, or that wacked-out fundamentalist, might think he's a sensible moderate, but he's really extreme.  So far so good.  But are you, O real sensible moderate, as middle-of-the-road as you like to think?

My own answer to my question is that I'm not concerned with being either extreme or moderate.  If what I think is right sets me at odds with most right-thinking people, so what?  It's not exactly news, is it, that most right-thinking people have been wrong in the past?  Well, maybe it is, to some people.  After the dust has settled, right-thinking people like to rewrite history so that they were on the right side after all, and the crazy extremists who took the right position before turn out to have been right for the wrong reasons, like those who opposed Bush's invasion of Iraq on the grounds that it was based on falsehoods and constituted aggression.  To right-thinking people, we only thought that because we were motivated by a visceral knee-jerk hatred of Bush and of the Republican Party, plus a general dislike for military violence.  (As if any of those were bad reasons.)  The right reason, according to right-thinking people, is that the war wasn't well-planned or organized, it turned out to take longer than expected, but our hearts were in the right place.  And the same people are ready to be right-thinking again, as often as it takes.  As I've said before, it's easy to be moderate if you get to pick the extremes in advance.

On the other hand, I don't mind if I agree with most people either.  After all, if most people have the good sense or good taste to agree with me, it might mean there's hope for the human race after all.

Trying to Pull Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

So the Supreme Court left most of the Affordable Care Act standing, to the fury of the Far Right and the glee of the Near Right. I don't have any links, but Avedon Carol also noticed that until the decision was actually announced, it seemed that most Democrats, like most Republicans, took for granted that the law would be overturned: "I told Jay Ackroyd and David Dayen that I'd be very surprised if the Roberts court struck down the mandate. I gotta say that because it seemed like everywhere else, everyone was all ready for the Supremes to kill it." This article quotes several people from both parties who predicted that the ACA wouldn't even pass, but it's a postmortem from two years ago and has no bearing on last week's Supreme Court ruling; it is of interest, though, as a reminder that even some politicians who supported the bill seemed not to believe in its viability.

I had no real expectation of the outcome myself, so I watched the hullaballoo with a jaundiced eye. Liberal bloggers and Facebookers went wild with celebration, because for them politics is no more than a spectator sport, and all they care about is rooting for the winning team. It is of course utterly vital that their team, the right team by definition, be the winner, so that they can reward themselves by strutting and hooting and pumping their arms and imagining the other team's face being rubbed in the dirt, but they are much less informed than sports fans are about the actual working of the sport.

But that comparison is probably unfair to sports fans. Noam Chomsky likes to tell how,

When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief.

Two main themes recurred as the Obama cult netroots crowed over their victory: one was the stoopidity of the Republicans who said that they would move to Canada because of this ruling. They ignored the fact of real socialist healthcare in the People's Republic of Canuckistan, of course, but such threats, like the threat to Go Galt, are almost always meaningless anyway -- like the Democrats who vowed to move to Canada if Bush won in 2000 and 2004. Canada collaborated shamelessly with Bush, so what's the point?

The other big story was CNN and Fox News's misreporting, in their eagerness to be firsties, of the Supreme Court's decision as overturning instead of mostly upholding Romneycare. (As FAIR pointed out, this was far from the first, or most serious, time the corporate media has got things wrong in the first flush of a scoop.) The Obama fans hooted and pumped their arms and rubbed the Rethugs' faces in the dirt: Only a stoopid stoopid, and probably fat, would get their news from Fox or CNN!

Maybe so. Someone stoopid like this:

President Obama himself initially thought he had lost the healthcare vote because he was watching CNN.

The news channels wrongly reported that the individual mandate - the key part of the law - had been killed off.

The President had been watching on a TV in the White House and appeared calm as he tried to absorb the grim news about his signature piece of legislation.

But moments later White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler came in giving the thumbs up - because she had her facts straight.

I gleefully posted this story to my own Facebook wall, and linked to it in comments on other people's postings about the networks' gaffe. Nobody much was interested, and of course it was mean of me to harsh other people's buzz. One old friend from high school, a law professor with a background in statistics, was sympathetic: "Yep, when you have to rely on the media.... Of course, Chief Justice Roberts appears to have structured the opinion that way, intentionally. He needn't have done that." True, it's ridiculous to expect people to read past the first page of a Supreme Court decision, as Stephen Colbert declared sarcastically -- who ever heard of such a thing? As for relying on the media, the President is the one person in America who shouldn't need to rely on the media in such matters: even if he can't afford to have a messenger bring him a copy personally, couldn't someone at the Court e-mail him a PDF? Obama has been critical of the media in the past ("If everyone just turned off your CNN, your Fox, your ... TV, MSNBC, blogs, and just go talk to folks out there instead of being in this echo chamber, where the topic is constantly politics"), so his reliance on it here is even funnier.

My friend also remarked, "I don't know which media source Obama was following, but I think they all got it wrong first, and then corrected." I pointed out that Obama's media source was CNN, in the excerpt I quoted; I forgot to mention that "they" (the corporate media, I presume) did not "all" get it wrong first -- that must have been her apologetic invention. She responded: "Weird--would not have been my first choice. And why only one source?" Her own "first choice" would have been the New York Times, to judge from previous conversations I've had with her. (The Times is not a very reliable source either, but to each her own.)

This same friend and I had a couple of heated conversations over Facebook last weekend, on the media and on science. In both cases she lamented that people in this country aren't taught "critical thinking." I can agree with that, but training in critical thinking will be of little use if you don't use it. With doctorates in statistics and law and a strong background in computer science, my friend is probably smarter, and certainly better educated, than I am; but when it comes to politics she leaves her critical thinking on standby. She even protested, when I pressed her on the bias inherent in reporting the news from the viewpoint of the investor class, that she's busy and doesn't have time to investigate everything. Any Creationist Tea Party Republican could probably say the same, but my friend wouldn't see that as an excuse for them. You don't have to be I. F. Stone to broaden the range of your news input usefully: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting puts out less material in a week than any given issue of the daily Times, and it's a good starting place.

The Democrats' expectation of defeat over Romneycare also reminded me of something Whatever It Is I'm Against It wrote a couple of years ago after an Obama press conference:

WHAT SOME WOULD HAVE PREFERRED: “Now, I know there are some who would have preferred a protracted political fight, even if it had meant higher taxes for all Americans, even if it had meant an end to unemployment insurance for those who are desperately looking for work.” The assumption here is that he would have lost the fight. It’s pretty much always Obama’s working assumption that he will lose any fight. And then, funnily enough, he does.

This time he didn't; but there's always next time.

I Get My Misinformation from the New York Times!

There's been some excitement in liberal circles about a new study which shows that people who depend on Fox News for their news are worse-informed than people who use other media.  NPR listeners did the best, followed by viewers of "Sunday Morning Shows" and The Daily Show.  Metaphorical high fives were exchanged across the Intertoobz; the sound of liberals patting themselves on the back could be heard across the nation.  But I wanted to know more, so I looked at the numbers.

True, NPR listeners did much better than Fox News viewers.  But not even the NPR listeners did very well.  On four questions about US politics, for example, Fox News viewers would answer 1.08 questions correctly, while NPR listeners would answer 1.51 questions correctly.  So the star pupils scored 38 percent; not exactly a result to brag about, even if the dunces only scored about 25 percent.

Not that I'm surprised.  When stories like this emerge, I always point out that after the first Gulf War, in 1991, a study "conducted by the University of Massachusetts' Center for Studies in Communication, found that the more people watched TV during the Gulf crisis, the less they knew about the underlying issues, and the more likely they were to support the war."  Fox News didn't exist in that day, so the other corporate media, like CNN and the broadcast networks had to shoulder the task of misinforming the public -- a task at which, as the study showed, they succeeded admirably.

And since 1991, the "mainstream" media have continued to do their part for the war effort.  FAIR documents the malfeasance not only of Fox but of more respectable news outlets, including print media.  A discriminating reader who wanted to be misinformed in the run-up to the second Gulf War, for example, didn't have to go slumming with Fox News, because the New York Times was running Judith Miller's dispatches which passed along Bush administration's fraudulent propaganda.  Just this month, MSNBC's Chris Matthews went for a double-dip: he claimed before an audience of cable-TV professionals that the government would have more trouble making false claims about weapons of mass destruction today because the vigilant 24/7 cable news networks would have brought about a "reckoning."  As FAIR points out, Matthews is not only ignoring the fact that the cable news networks existed in 2002, he and his colleagues embraced Bush administration claims and cheered on the war.  The most prominent opponent of the war at MSNBC in those days, Phil Donahue, was fired, and Matthews seems to have lobbied management to get rid of him.  Matthews is definitely bipartisan, though: nowadays he's passing along the Obama administration's false claims about Iran's (non-existent) nuclear program.

So, I think the celebration over Fox News's inadequacy is overreaching a bit.  One of Tabloid Friend's commenters remarked: "Every time any other media is compared to Fox their viewers always come across as morons."  So how do NPR's listeners, with their score of 38 percent, come across?  Ben Adler at The Nation claims that Fox News "fails the fundamental test of journalism: are you informing your audience?"  True, but so do the rest of the corporate media, who should be regarded with as much skepticism as Fox.

The Pot Calling the Kettle FOX

My Tabloid Facebook Friend posted a link to an article called "Fourteen Propaganda Techniques Fox 'News' Uses to Brainwash Americans," which put me in mind of the Rules of Communist Revolution that used to circulate in mimeograph back in the good old days before the Internet, when you could believe everything you read. The Communists had only ten rules, Fox has fourteen! That shows the advantages of the Free Market!

The author of the article, Dr. Cynthia Boaz, is "assistant professor of political science at Sonoma State University, where her areas of expertise include quality of democracy, nonviolent struggle, civil resistance and political communication and media", so you know she understands media and politics very well. Let's go through her list of the techniques used by "Fox News and other propagandists disguised as media" to deceive We the People. To see her full commentary on them, just click the link. I'll add some more examples to show how uniquely evil Fox "News" is.

1. Panic Mongering. Oh, my, how awful! Other media, to say nothing of Democratic politicians and operatives would never try to scare us into supporting them by ginning up fake threats -- creating terrorist plots, for example, or pretending that another country poses a danger to us.

2. Character Assassination/Ad Hominem. “I hear these people saying [President Obama is] like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” [then-Press Secretary Robert] Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.” Or:

Democrats, just congenitally, tend to get -- to see the glass as half empty. (Laughter.) If we get an historic health care bill passed -- oh, well, the public option wasn't there. If you get the financial reform bill passed -- then, well, I don't know about this particular derivatives rule, I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with that. And gosh, we haven't yet brought about world peace and -- (laughter.) I thought that was going to happen quicker. (Laughter.) You know who you are. (Laughter.)

Or you can just focus on personalities instead of issues.

3. Projection/Flipping. "It involves taking whatever underhanded tactic you're using and then accusing your opponent of doing it to you first." I can't think of specific liberal/centrist examples of this offhand, though they're lurking in the back of my mind. Any suggestions? I'll add examples later as I think of them.

4. Rewriting History. Taking credit for withdrawing American troops for example, under an agreement that your predecessor negotiated. Never happen! And if it did, the liberal/left news media would catch you at it! Or:

Obama, today: “We did exactly what we said we were going to do in Libya.”

"Something about a short-term no-fly zone, right?" Whatever It Is I'm Against It prompted helpfully.

5. Scapegoating/Othering. "The simple idea is that if you can find a group to blame for social or economic problems, you can then go on to a) justify violence/dehumanization of them, and b) subvert responsibility for any harm that may befall them as a result," says Dr. Against the crazies at Westboro Baptist Church, say. Or against anybody who engages in "hate speech."

6. Conflating Violence With Power and Opposition to Violence With Weakness."We came, we saw, he died."

7. Bullying. It's not exactly a new problem, nor is it limited to Fox.

8. Confusion. "The idea is to deliberately confuse the argument, but insist that the logic is airtight and imply that anyone who disagrees is either too dumb or too fanatical to follow along", says Doc. Erm, isn't that exactly exactly the liberal attitude to the "Reichtards" and Bible-thumpers?

9. Populism. "This," Dr. says, "is especially popular in election years." Indeed it is, indeed it is.

10. Invoking the Christian God. "My religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman." Oh, and Rick Warren; remember him?

11. Saturation. "There are three components to effective saturation: being repetitive, being ubiquitous and being consistent," Dr. says. The message must be repeated cover and over, it must be everywhere and it must be shared across commentators: e.g. 'Saddam has WMD.' Veracity and hard data have no relationship to the efficacy of saturation." Or, as already noted, "Iranian nuclear weapons pose a direct threat to the U.S."

12. Disparaging Education. Again, this predates Fox News; it's part of the mainstream media. In The Bush Dyslexicon Mark Crispin Miller describes at length how, after the third debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush in October 2000,

the "analysts" at CNN said not one word about the substance of the candidates' exchange but just kept harping on the general "statements" were putatively "trying" to make about themselves through their tone and body language.

Although a waste of time, the postdebate bull session was at least not strongly biased, nor was its anti-intellectualism too pronounced. On ABC there was a far more noxious session on the subject of the third debate.

This session, featuring Sam Donaldson, George Stephanopoulos, Cokie Roberts, and George Will, "captures perfectly the the barbarous synergy between the right and TV news, each feigning populism for its own elitist purposes." Roberts complained that the issue debated by the candidates wasn't "the important point there. ... Because that's not what comes across when you're watching the debate. What comes across when you're watching the debate is this guy from Washington doing Washington-speak" [pages 68-69]. The irony of four Beltway media insiders denouncing Al Gore for being a Beltway insider, while delicious, was totally lost on Roberts.

It's also a tactic used against people like Bertrand Russell or Noam Chomsky, who are undoubtedly supersmart but got no common sense. It's usually backhanded, like Paul Berman's complaint in Terror and Liberalism (Norton, 2003, p. 150) about Chomsky's "customary blizzard of references to obscure sources" -- obscure sources like The New York Times and The Boston Globe, you know.

13. Guilt by Association.

“Just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations,” Mr. Obama said. “So groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections.”

It didn't help that the administration had no evidence for these claims. (Or that the US spends huge sums of money to influence foreign elections.)

14. Diversion. Mic check!

“It’s OK,” the president assured the audience. “It’s alright. Listen, I’m going to be talking about a whole range of things today, and I appreciate you guys making your point. Let me go ahead and make mine, alright? And I’ll listen to you. You listen to me.”

I think we've listened to him long enough, far more than he has listened to us. But that's another topic. Meanwhile, this post may undergo revision after posting if I remember better examples of the principles in action.

The Autumn of Love

I thought I'd be able to embed this Fox News video from Facebook, but evidently not, so you'll just have to use the link. At least one of my Facebook Friends, someone I went to high school with, thinks it's just the bee's knees, but that's just evidence of how damn dumb you have to be to believe what you see on Fox News.

First off, Fox's pundits think that a satirical sketch about a sitting President on Saturday Night Live is a sign that the liberal media's "love fest" with Obama is over. All it really means is that Saturday Night Live routinely does satirical sketches about sitting Presidents, regardless of their party affiliation. Fox's misreading is not surprising, though: the Right has always missed the jabs that liberal humorists direct at Democratic Presidents. Consider the Onion, which has been sniping at Obama as well as Republicans all along. Take Doonesbury: Garry Trudeau always has made fun of Democratic politicians, including Presidents, and liberals and leftists generally, ever since the early days of his comic strip. Following the American tendency to mistake politics for a sporting event where you cheer only for your team, conservatives have a great deal of trouble recognizing this. Then compare the Right's contender for an anti-Doonesbury, snoozefest Mallard Fillmore. How often I read it depends on how many discarded copies of the local newspaper I encounter, but I have never seen Bruce Tinsley make fun of Republicans or conservatives; that's one reason Mallard Fillmore is no threat to Doonesbury's hegemony.

Second, what liberal media love fest? The New York Times and the Washington Post have been fussing about Obama ever since he became a contender for the nomination, and they always gave George W. Bush an easy ride (though not as easy as Dubya's fans wanted, it's true -- that would be impossible). FAIR has been covering this: see their articles on alleged pro-Obama bias in the corporate media, for example.

Third, Fox's commentators are a bit confused about the political spectrum. The "left" has been skeptical, and harshly critical, of Obama all along. It's the center-right that loves him, though I know that "center-right" looks like "radical left" to Fox News and its audience. If the leftward wing of the center-right, roughly liberal Democrats, are starting to fall out of love with Obama, it's because they've begun to realize just how right-wing he is -- not, as the Fox pundits and their fans have it, because they've realized he's really a Socialist. Hence the GLBT Equality March from last weekend, a grassroots event very different from Obama's astroturfing, and therefore dismissed by Obama's partisans along with the Right. Roy Edroso had a good post pointing out Teabag Nation's general hostility to the gay movement -- not exactly surprising, but a useful reminder.

If the government has been interfering with big business and the banking/finance sector as the Fox pundits complain, that was 1) a bipartisan move initiated by Bush and embraced by both Obama and McCain, 2) at the insistence of big business and the banking sector. Those big players just wanted billions upon billions of taxpayers' dollars, of course, not any restrictions on their irresponsible behavior, and that was pretty much what they got. Like government involvement in Americans' health care, government interference with outrageous executive salaries and reckless financial practices was just what most Americans wanted.

It's really hard to make any sense out of this clip, because the pundits are grasping desperately to see Obama brought down. It doesn't really matter why someone -- anyone! -- is criticizing Obama, as long as it's someone outside their own narrow ambit. Are gays criticizing Obama? Good! Do many Americans distrust Obama's commitment to public health care? Well, they should, because he's not really committed to it, and that's a good thing, so what the public is wrong in wanting it, but let's not go there, because this is the American People we're talking about. The Fox pundits, and Teabag Nation generally, are just as incoherent as their allegedly more liberal counterparts on CNN, or elsewhere in the corporate media; but also as incoherent as the more genuinely liberal commentators who want to believe that Obama is a closet progressive, and have to do a lot of fancy footwork to make a case for that.

Half of America Marches on Washington

I didn't pay a lot of attention to last weekend's Equality March on Washington, though I did notice that almost none of the online commentary I saw ventured to give numbers. "Thousands" was the word I usually saw; not even "tens of thousands." That suggested to me that the turnout was pretty small. Finally I found an article on the New York Times site which informed me that, according to the march organizers, "at least 150,000 people had attended, though the authorities gave no official estimate of the crowd size." That's a respectable figure. Even if you allow for the overcounting that organizers are often accused of, and cut the figure in half, you've got about as many people as turned up for the Teabaggers' in Washington rally a month ago: 1.4 million in Michelle Malkin numbers, 70,000 or so in real world people. (Note the difference between the lead and the picture caption in this article.)

But the key issues that the march was about -- marriage and the military -- are not issues I care about, and in fact I'm dubious about them. The main thing that caught my attention before the march took place was the contemptuous attitudes expressed to the march by what might be called the gay establishment, if we had such a thing. Barney Frank confirmed my low opinion of him with his snide remark, "The only thing they’re going to put pressure on is the grass." If you want hilarity, though, here's what he said on Michelangelo Signorile's show: "Barack Obama does not need pressure." I'd say that pressure is exactly what Obama needs. Lots of it, on a variety of issues.

Joe Solmonese of the Human Rights Campaign chided marchers to give President Obama a little time: "'It’s not January 19, 2017,' he wrote, referring to what would be the last day of Mr. Obama’s presidency if he were to win a second term." Right, and exactly how does Solmonese suggest that we pressure Obama after he's left office? (Oh, I haven't mentioned Obama's speech to the HRC on the eve of the march. Haven't watched the video, haven't read the transcript. Excerpts, and Jon Stewart, indicate it is more of the same hot air the man can deliver in his sleep. Maybe I'll look at it more closely some other day.)

One response that drew some attention (I can't now find where I first read it, but here's a source) was an anonymous Obama "adviser" quoted by CNBC's John Harwood jeering at the marchers as the "internet left fringe" who need to "take off the pajamas, get dressed and realize that governing a closely-divided country is complicated and difficult."

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/12/nbc-reporter-obama-white_n_317081.html

The marchers were in their pajamas? Harwood later explained:

"My comments quoting an Obama adviser about liberal bloggers/pajamas weren't about the LGBT community or the marchers," he wrote. "They referred more broadly to those grumbling on the left about an array of issues in addition to gay rights, including the war in Afghanistan and health care and Guantanamo -- and whether all that added up to trouble with Obama's liberal base..."

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/12/bloggers-furious-at-white_n_317424.html

Oh well, that's all right, then: I already knew that Obama despises the left. And why not? How many votes can we deliver, after all? Not many. So I guess he won't want my vote in 2012. That part at least will be easy.

A White House flack tried to do damage control:

In a comment to Greg Sargent of The Plum Line, White House senior communications director Dan Pfeiffer basically refuted the report.

"That sentiment does not reflect White House thinking at all, we've held easily a dozen calls with the progressive online community because we believe the online communities can often keep the focus on how policy will affect the American people rather than just the political back-and-forth," Pfeiffer emailed.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/12/bloggers-furious-at-white_n_317424.html

I liked Jon Stewart's take on the march and the coverage it received, though (via).

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Queer and Loathing in D.C.
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

Dan Choi is very cute, and inspires all manner of unclean thoughts in my mind, but he really should keep that gag on. Dan, you did not "defend" or "protect" America in Iraq. You were part of an aggressive invasion (and now occupation) force that had and has no business being there. Waving your patriotism around just makes me more sure that the Equality March was not for me.