Sunshine Lollipops and Rainbows -- and Vladimir Putin's Little Pony

It's interesting that the usual suspects among LGBT advocacy groups have not condemned the New York Times depicting Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as lovers.  I mean, GLAAD, our own anti-defamation league?

Under Greenwald's challenge I find the predictable absurd defenses of the Times cartoon.  This one , for instance:

i dont really have an issue with it. it clearly gets under his skin and im 100% more for making fun of trump by calling putin his boyfriend than...not doing that (i am a queer male and i speak for the trees)

I'm not sure I fully understand the bit about being "more for making trump by calling putin his boyfriend than ... not doing that."  So "not doing that" would be a bad thing?  The only way to mock, let alone criticize Trump is to fag-bait him?  The Resistance is more intellectually, morally and comedically bankrupt than even I thought.

This one was somewhat original, though:

I don’t think they’re going to condemn a depiction of 2 people in love. It mocks Trump bc Trump does seem to be in love w Putin sometimes. But trying to claim making out, nipple twisties & unicorns riding thru as gay stereotypes is a stretch. All lovers so [sic] those.

So the Times was just trying to depict Trump and Putin in a positive way, as a loving couple?  Ooookayyyy.  I'll admit that I'm not sure I agree with Greenwald's rhetoric about "disgusting gay stereotype[s]"; I'm always wary when gay people denounce stereotypes.  Just as straight bigots who denounce Teh Gay often turn out to be gay themselves, gay people who denounce the stereotypes generally aren't as non-stereotypical as they like to think they are.

As always, the best way to evaluate the Times animation is to plug some different values into the equation.  Imagine that the Times produced an animation which depicted Trump and Putin according to the grand American tradition of the minstrel show.  The comedic possibilities are considerable: Trump and Putin as a pair of shuffling, watermelon-eating, handkerchief-headed darkies, robbing the sacred henhouse of Democracy to fill their bellies -- until a haint played by Robert Mueller comes along, Don and Vlad's eyes bug out, their hair stands on end, and they cry "Feets do yore stuff!" as they light out.  Pretty cool, don't you think?  I bet a lot of white Resistance liberals would eat it up. But there'd certainly be an outcry, condemnation, righteous denunciation of the Times for using these disgusting stereotypes.

There'd be defenses too: of course every woke liberal knows that being black or eating watermelon or raiding the henhouse aren't bad things in themselves, but Trump (and probably Putin as well) would surely see the depiction as degrading, so degrade away!  I believe, though, that the condemnation would win out, because white liberals are better trained in rejecting racist humor than straight liberals are in rejecting antigay humor.  Fag jokes, as I've pointed out before, are common and acceptable among straight liberals who piously support gay marriage and gays in the military, just good clean fun, and this was true years before Trump ran for the Presidency.

I just remembered Barry Blitt's infamous New Yorker cover depicting the former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad reacting with consternation as another man taps his foot under a restroom stall.  This was supposed to be sophisticated satire, but I thought it was clumsy and tone-deaf.  I still think so, and I think it revealed a lot about the artist, the magazine, and its audience that a mere linking of an official US enemy to homosexuality is worth a sly chuckle.  That cartoon, along with the even more controversial Obama cover, featuring Barry and Michelle as black militants sharing a terrorist fist bump as a US flag burns in the White House fireplace, are for me further evidence that, contrary to Jon Schwarz's claim, liberals don't necessarily do analogies or humor any better than conservatives do.  "I'm just trying to make myself laugh," Blitt told NPR.  I thought he gets paid to make other people laugh as well?

Don't You Love Rhetorical Questions?

Now that White History Year has resumed, here are a few words from the prophetic Alexander Cockburn thirty-one years ago:

"Why not a Martin Luther King Day?" the New York Times asked editorially last Friday, and answered, "Dr. King, a humble man, would have objected to giving that much importance to any individual.  Nor should he be given singular tribute if that demeans other historical black figures like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois and Malcolm X ..."  Give one of them a holiday and they'll all be wanting one.  Muhammad Ali Day, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Day. Where would it end?  Better, the Times suggests, to give King a statue in the Capitol, presumably in white marble to blend in with the rest.

[Originally published in the Village Voice, December 21, 1982; reprinted in Cockburn's Corruptions of Empire (Verso, 1988), p. 301]

Keep Your Government Hands Off My Catfood Commission!

Tom Tomorrow's latest cartoon baffles me.  It depicts Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles appearing in the Oval Office to offer a nonplussed-looking Barack Obama their help against the "arbitrary, self-imposed budget deadline" he faces. 

You'd think, looking at the cartoon, that Obama had nothing to do with the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.  Of course it was his own bipartisan creation, packed with deficit hawks of his own choosing, including Paul Ryan.  ("Bipartisan" is a keyword in the cartoon, but only to mock Simpson and Bowles.  Obama's own bipartisanship-mongering is not mentioned.)

I looked around the web a little to see if I could find out whose idea the Commision was.  It looks like it was Obama's; he certainly made it his own.  One article I found was from last Monday's New York Times.  The title was a giveaway: "Obama's Unacknowledged Debt to Bowles-Simpson Plan."  Aha!  There was no "Bowles-Simpson Plan."  Another article I stumbled on, from a small newspaper, explained it very well:

“Simpson-Bowles” is shorthand for a bipartisan deficit commission co-chaired by Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles. While the commission never formally issued a report because it never reached consensus on a plan, Simpson and Bowles informally presented a memorandum of their ideas to the Congress and President Obama.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it?  And it's not exactly obscure.  Yet the notion that the Commission produced a report has gone viral in the corporate media.  (So much so that I bought it for a while myself.)  Even if you like the recommendations in their memo, Bowles and Simpson did not speak for the Commission as a whole.  Which hasn't kept them from touring the country giving speeches pushing their recommendations at $40,000 a pop.

The Times article never mentions this. Instead we get stuff like this:

It came just a few months after the president had opted not to endorse the recommendations of a deficit commission he had created in hopes of brokering a bold, bipartisan deficit deal. That gave rise to a portrayal that has stuck, popularized by Republicans, pundits and some Democrats: that the president, out of political timidity, snubbed his own panel’s plan.

There are also allusions to "the major tenets supported by a majority of the commission’s members", "the commission’s report in December 2010," and so on.

To repeat: the "recommendations" did not come from the commission; "his own panel" produced no "plan."  The memorandum the chairmen produced could probably have been written if the commission had never been appointed nor met in solemn convocation -- which would have saved a lot of money right there.  The writer quietly acknowledges reality further down:

On Dec. 1, 2010, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson unveiled an ambitious package of spending cuts and revenue increases that was supported two days later by 11 of the 18 commissioners — five from each party, including all three conservative Senate Republicans, and an independent business executive. While three votes short of the 14 needed to force a Congressional vote, it raised hopes that the blueprint could lead to compromise between Mr. Obama and Republicans. 

The writer almost admits that the "package" was the work of the two chairmen, not the commission itself, and it didn't get the fourteen-vote supermajority required to force Congressional action.  The commission itself had been packed by Obama with deficit hawks (I mean, Paul Ryan?), without whom I suppose support for the memo would have been even weaker.  But it's an article of faith in the corporate media that Simpson-Bowles could have saved us, even if only by putting forth material for bipartisan compromise that could have ended the gridlock, but President Obama lacked the political will to face down his base.

Read the comments on the Times article if you have the chance and the stomach; they're even more demented, by and large, than the article itself.  Evidently the Times has Hope that President Obama will have the commitment to bring about real Change of the kind wealthy Republicans want: spending cuts of the right kind -- especially Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- while leaving the big moneymakers, high-tech industry and its evil twin the military, untouched.

At their recent lunch, Mr. Obama assured Mr. Bowles he would not give up. Mr. Bowles said the president talked of seeing “a real opportunity” for compromise after the election, when Republicans will be eager to avoid the expiration of Bush tax cuts and automatic cuts in military spending — suggesting another chance for a deal inspired by Bowles-Simpson. 

“To see his commitment,” Mr. Bowles said, “gave me real hope.” 

This Man Must Be a Prophet

It's going to be a while before it's certain who carried out today's terror attacks in Norway, but some of the response already has been revealing.

Apparently a "jihadi" group claimed responsibility for the bombing, which the New York Times and some other papers promptly reported:

The response to this report was predictable, as shown by the comments to this MSNBC piece: Kill the ragheads! This shows that the Muslims hate our freedoms! Nuke Mecca! Glenn Greenwald pointed to part of the New York Times article which declared "the attacks appeared to be part of a coordinated assault on the ordinarily peaceful Scandinavian nation." As Greenwald noted, "This is simply inaccurate. Norway is a nation at war -- in more than just one country", namely Libya and Afghanistan. (What the Times probably meant, though, was that things are normally peaceful in Norway, not that it doesn't wage war elsewhere; much as news reports of quiet in the Middle East usually mean that although many Arabs have been killed or wounded, no Israelis have been hurt.)

For pointing this out, Greenwald was immediately smeared by some of his hostile commenters, for (so they imagined) claiming that the attacks were justified. That's only to be expected, of course, because Americans who leap to advocate violence against foreign civilians (when they're forced to notice it) naturally assume that anyone who is critical of American violence must therefore welcome violence against America.

The creepiest thing I've seen so far about the attacks is by a BBC commentator, who suggests sadly that the Oslo attack will mean "the end of innocence" in Norway.

To the outside world, the lives lived by Norway's people, both the elite and ordinary folk, may seem naive.

Though up to now they have not seen any reason to protect themselves.

Like Sweden before the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986, the Norwegian people have collectively resisted any calls for greater home security.

To them, living in an open society has been not just a privilege, but also a statement to the rest of the world; a display of how it is possible to live together in peace. ...

Norway's attitude to risk might now change, quickly and dramatically, as private individuals withdraw and as central authorities bolster security.

If so, a possible goal of the attackers may well have been achieved, in that they have robbed Norway of its innocence.

This is concern trolling at its most shameless. There has not so far been any indication that Norwegians are rushing to follow the US and UK by converting their country into a locked-down security state; the writer simply wants them to, as the crocodile tears course down his cheeks.

Soon afterward, though, it emerged that the gunman "dressed as a police officer" who attacked a Labor Party youth camp, and appears to be connected to the bombing, is a Norwegian. Those who are old enough to remember the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 will recall that there were initial reports of a swarthy Arab-looking guy fleeing from the scene, which inspired a similar flurry of anti-Muslim frenzy -- until the suspect turned out to be a blond American veteran of the first Gulf War. Similarly, the attempt by white supremacists to bomb a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Spokane earlier this year excited very little interest in the corporate media. Greenwald remarked in an update to his post:

... if indeed it turns out to be a domestic rather than "terrorist" (i.e., Muslim) attack: American interest in these attacks and the desire to be seen publicly denouncing them will quickly diminish -- almost to the point of non-existence -- if the perpetrators are not Muslim.

In his Twitter feed, Greenwald also quoted a tweet from MazMHussain:

Reports terrorists are Norwegian; but let me say any planned racism/ethnic profiling of white Nordic men is UNACCEPTABLE

Hear, hear!

I Know I Am, But What Are You?

What would I do without RWA1, my right-wing acquaintance who enlivens Facebook with the most amazing-yet-predictable outbursts against Teh Left and Teh Liberal Media? Tonight he linked to a commentary by P. J. O'Rourke at The Weekly Standard, announcing that The New York Times has "lost it." RWA1 commented: "The NY Times has become a partisan rag in its political coverage of this country, the equal of William Loeb's Manchester Union Leader or Pulliam's Indianapolis Star." Like he considers that a bad thing?

The Times has always been partisan, though not in the way that RWA1 means. It has always represented the political "center," and spoken for the ruling elites. When Ronald Reagan was turning Central America into a charnel house in the 1980s, the Times dutifully passed along the party line. (Ironically, it was right-wing publications like U.S. News & World Report and The Wall Street Journal that exposed Reaganite lies.) When Nicaraguans voted out the Sandinistas after a decade of US-sponsored and managed terrorism, the Times printed a banner headline on their front page, "AMERICANS UNITED IN JOY," which as Noam Chomsky said was "the kind of headline you'd see in some weird, exotic, totalitarian state, like Albania." When it came time to make war on Iraq again, the Times not only went along with Bush, its reporter Judith Miller helped invent the propaganda.

Of course there were occasional lapses, like the publication of the Pentagon Papers almost forty years ago; we don't have a controlled press in the US, so adherence to the party line is not complete. This causes fury among folks like RWA1, to whom I once recommended Mark Hertsgaard's fine book On Bended Knee (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988), which documented how the mainstream American media knowingly and deliberately collaborated with the Reagan administration from the start; RWA1 was nonplussed, because media submission had not been total, and all he could see were the deviations from perfect discipline. Happily, the Moonie Washington Times became the Reagan administration's house journal, setting a standard of partisanship that the New York Times couldn't hope to match.

Now we also have The Weekly Standard, an overtly right-wing rag that is nothing if not partisan; but that doesn't bother RWA1, nor does the equally blatant partisanship of the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, or National Review Online, or Commentary, or the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, which are his main sources on Facebook. Is it that he expects better of the New York Times and the Washington Post? I find that hard to believe. He clearly thinks that P. J. O'Rourke, Joe Rehyansky, George Will, Jennifer Rubin, and the other modern Demosthenes whose work he cites are sensible, sober commentators, speaking truth to power. It's great to have these constant reminders that the "sober" Right (as opposed to the flamingly deranged Right, the regular beat of Roy Edroso) is still so completely dishonest, as to make even the Obama Administration look halfway sane by comparison.