All Dialogue Guaranteed Overheard

Because of the current flurry of chatter about same-sex marriage, people have been talking about other kinds of icky couplings.  I first noticed it in comment threads under posts by my Tabloid Friend on Facebook, but then I saw people talking about it on other blogs.  In most cases, the subject was brought up by commenters rather than the bloggers themselves, whereupon it would take over the thread, so it's clearly a sore matter for numerous people.

The issue is marriage between first cousins.  When I first saw people ranting about it online, I was surprised, because not only did I have no objection to it, I hadn't realized that it was a cultural taboo in some areas.  Half the states in the Union prohibit first cousins from marrying, though.  Someone in a thread online speculated that the states which prohibit cousin marriage also would be hostile to same-sex marriage, with the implication that those stupid inbred hillbillies are hypocrites or something.  Cousin marriage is illegal in several states that could be viewed as stereotypical, though: Alabama, Kentucky, and West Virginia, for example.  And a number of the commenters who feel compelled to let the world know the grossness of cousins marrying are nevertheless nice liberal advocates of same-sex marriage.

Here in Indiana, first cousins are permitted to marry as long as both are at least 65 years old.  In much of the world, though, cousin marriage is not only legal but preferred.  The common rationale for prohibiting it is that the children of cousins are more likely to have birth defects.  That's true, but the total risk is still pretty low.  Besides, what evidently bothers most of the people I see ranting cousins about marrying isn't the genetic risk: they're just grossed out by it, an objective fact too obvious to be debated.

Which gives me an excuse to post here a story I've been sitting on for years.  A decade ago I was using a university computer lab.  The only other people there that day were two young women, both students, talking loudly to each other as if they were using cell phones.  I wrote down some of their conversation as it happened and sent it to myself in e-mail, so I can vouch for the accuracy of the dialogue below:

Two girls are sitting on the other side of the lab from me discussing their love lives, and one is telling the other how she met a guy her younger brother's age (2 years younger than she is) who turned out to be a fourth cousin.  "We're religious and stuff", so she considers this too close for them to get romantically involved.  The other one is telling her to go for it: "Third cousins would be too close, second cousins would be too close, but I think this isn't too close. ... God musta wanted you guys to meet," said the other.  "You really think so?" said the first dubiously.

Her brother teases her about their having retarded kids.  Her friend says, "Well, he's your brother, of course he's gonna tease you."

"But what if we wanted to get married, I mean like how gay is that?"  Oh, girl -- the only risk your kids run is that their mother is retarded. 

I left in my "retarded" reaction, even though I know it's an unacceptable pejorative, because it's essential to the plot.

Fourth cousins?  I'm amazed that the family tree was that well-recorded.  I wasn't even aware of my second cousins when I was growing up, and if I'd met some random person who was a third cousin I don't know how I'd ever have figured out the relation.  And what religion considers fourth cousins, or third cousins, too close?  Even first cousins aren't forbidden to marry in the Bible.  (It's worth noticing that among the forbidden unions in that list are people like stepsisters, who wouldn't even be related genetically.  Whatever the basis for these prohibitions, it's not a concern for birth defects.)  According to Catholic tradition (i.e., fantasy), Joseph and Mary were first cousins, and there are numerous other cousin marriages in the Bible, none of which is condemned.

So, it's clear that whatever the source of this revulsion I'm seeing toward first-cousin marriage, it's not religion.  That would be true even if I weren't an atheist who doesn't consider religion to be the source of anything: religion is a stew into which people toss their hangups and virtues, and get them back endowed with the yummy goodness of divine authority.  Parents can't necessarily be blamed either, since then you have to ask where the parents got their taboos.  By the same token, even devout religious believers are often capable of ignoring biblical or other religious prohibitions.

One good thing about the same-sex marriage controversy, then, is that it brings attitudes like these to light.  But is anyone paying attention to them?  I said "controversy" rather than "debate," because there's very little debate.  Most Americans, including the college-educated, think that debate means stating their opinion and stopping there; but that's just where debate begins.

The Fools Think About the Clever People, Of Course

My Tabloid Friend on Facebook posted this image to his news feed last night.  Of course, it never entered his mind, or the minds of his commenters who liked it, that Bernstein could have been talking about them.  No, it must be about the Reichtards, the wingnuts, the religious wackos.  Democrats, and especially pro-Obama Democrats, are smart.

I'm listening to a speech by Thomas Frank on Alternative Radio, on "Ideology Over Reality."  He's having fun telling how people like Eric Cantor, confronted with the information that Ronald Reagan raised taxes, simply refuse to believe it.  "Ideology," Frank calls that, but I think he's wrong there.  It's the cult of personality, which trumps both ideology and reality, and Tabloid Friend's posts bear witness to it.  (What does the President know?  Who cares?  He'll burp us.  He'll cover us with his feathers, and give us shelter under his wings.)

Long Briefs 2: We Are Poor Little Lambs Who've Lost Our Way

It's been a busy week, which is one reason I haven't written as much as I should: with so many topics to choose from, I couldn't decide where to dive in. So let me begin for now with the Supreme Court's decision in Florence v. Bd. of Chosen Freeholders, which permits authorities to strip-search anyone arrested -- not convicted, mind you -- for even minor offenses. (As emptywheel points out, the real purpose and function of strip-searches is "not as a legitimate means to keep jails safe, but as a way to make it easier to cow select classes of our population", because "searches serve to humiliate, degrade, and erode identity.")

So, of course, many liberal progressive commentators have been up in arms over the Florence decision. What most of them haven't mentioned was that the Department of Justice -- Obama's DOJ, that is -- supported the prisons in the case, as reported by ABC News last October.

The Obama administration is siding with the prisons in the case and urging the court to allow a blanket policy for all inmates set to enter the general prison population.

“When you have a rule that treats everyone the same,” Justice Department lawyer Nicole A. Saharsky argued, “you don’t have folks that are singled out. You don’t have any security gaps.”

(Notice the word "folks" in that statement; it's the Obama touch, following the Bush II precedents.)

To my surprise, though, Obama's support for strip searches was mentioned this morning on NPR's comedy news quiz program, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, by its host Peter Segal. It's not the first time that show has pushed the NPR limits a bit.

I've been mentioning this on Facebook, especially in response to my Tabloid Friend's pro-Obama posts. TF himself hasn't reacted yet, but many of his friends have, in predictable terms. Apparently none of them knew about this, so they began by angrily denying it. (The other stages, including acceptance, will follow soon.) One said that "we" don't know what "the man thinks about it." I replied that we do, and supplied a link to the ABC story. He said that it wasn't really an intervention because Obama didn't dress up as the Lone Ranger and storm the Court chambers with guns blazing. Another argued that Obama couldn't have intervened, because the President doesn't decide which laws he's going to defend -- and then the commenter stumbled all over Obama's initial defense of the Defense of Marriage Act, which has since been withdrawn. Another commenter demanded a link (which I'd included in the comment she was answering), and accused me of being a "whiny leftist."

It's going to be fun to watch how the discussion proceeds. I wasn't surprised that TF and his posse don't know that Obama agrees with the Court on this decision -- they exhibit no tendency to think for themselves, and of course the White House isn't going to inform them, thus leaving them alone in the dark without a guide -- but it's going to be difficult for them to flipflop decorously, to pretend that they opposed the decision out of ignorance and had to change their minds because Obama had gone off in the other direction. It's unlikely, given their loyalty to the POTUS, that they'll continue to oppose the decision: that would make them "whiny leftists." More likely they'll simply try to forget it, but I'll try not to let them.

Authentic Democratic Gibberish

My Tabloid Friend on Facebook linked to this article celebrating the Dear Leader, whose poll numbers have been rising lately. No wonder: compared to the prospective opponents the GOP is fielding, he almost even looks good to me.

The same writer also recently explained "Why President Obama is more like Jesus Christ than any Republican", concluding:

President Obama is far from perfect and his legacy is still yet to be complete, but as his presidency continues each day he has stayed true to his message. Not every promise has been fulfilled and as his time in office continues the choices become greater. One thing that can be said about President Obama is that he is doing what is best for the country as a whole, not just a particular sector of the country. It's hard to please everyone when we all have different ways of thinking, but in the end if the message in the story of Jesus is to be tolerant, caring and accepting and doing what is right for everyone, President Obama has a stronger leg to stand on than his Republican counterparts.

As you can see, Robert Sobel needs a copyeditor. President Obama has only one leg to stand on? A bit earlier Sobel wrote, "In no way should anyone try to compare President Obama to Jesus or anyone else [so why is he doing it?], he's his own man and he stands on his own two feet." (Sobel bills himself as a "middle class father, husband and son, [with] a degree in communications and media production." College degrees aren't what they used to be, I guess.)

And no, I don't think it can be said about Obama "is that he is doing what is best for the country as a whole, not just a particular sector of the country."

What especially enchanted me was this comment from a Top Commenter:

The President of the USA is a mighty fine man, husband, father, an leader of the free world. The best President we have ever, I only saw the republicans kill JFK but loved him didn't see him for to long since I was young. Obama is the best thing besides McCain & Palin Poor Bruce below me is a brunt of an thuglican whom call our PRESIDENT a CHIMPMS. He probobly needs viagra or something to a republican that wants to talk about evolution and is a Pukelicant, whom needs viagra, an needs cialis for his erectile dysfunction is all he thinks about...Not about the Solar & Wind Green Energy. He looks like the supidest man in a red shirt a BP Employee whom should be jailed for polluting the Gulf of Mexico and killing the people of the ocean he stands in front of with pride so you see the dolphin dead behind his right should. OMB BP SUCKS AN SO DOES BRUCE VAN BRUNT FROTHY FECAL MATTER. Bullseye on his face would look nice...

It's great to see that unlike the Republicans, Democrats and especially supporters of President Obama are rational, literate, and civil.

A Quick One While I'm Awake

This image was in my Facebook Tabloid Friend's feed today. (I looked him up, and John Fugelsang is a stand-up comedian.) It's built on the familiar observation that many if not most "pro-life" individuals are not distinguished for caring about human life outside the womb -- or even inside it, if the expectant mother is poor, or brown skinned, or of the wrong religion. Nor is this constellation of attitudes limited to the US.

As I read through the list, I realized that it's not really fair to Republicans; after all, President Obama also favors the death penalty; he is pro-war in theory and in practice; he is pro-unmanned drone bombs; he is pro-nuclear weapons (and pro-nuclear power); he is pro-torture (though like Bush, he calls it something else); his stance on gun-control is fuzzy, but I'll admit that the gun lobby considers him anti-gun (though that may hold no more water than the Israel lobby's conviction that he is anti-Israel); he has refused to sign the international land mine treaty, which makes him objectively pro-land mine. (And for an added bonus, he's pro-cluster bomb.) It turns out that you can be all these things, and still call yourself a Democrat.

The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good

My Tabloid Friend on Facebook posted the above cartoon to his feed today. I've been wondering why. Does the cartoonist believe that voting constitutes all the 'doing anything about it' a citizen ought to do? Possibly. I took it as one more Democratic whine about the professional leftists who do nothing but complain about what we think Obama didn't do, and made all the voters stay home in November 2010. I wish I had such power, but it can't be repeated too often that it was Obama and his fellow Democrats who discouraged the voters. I voted, even though I knew it was an empty gesture, except to enrage Obama loyalists who took for granted that as an Obama critic, I must be a lifelong nonvoter. What can you do with such irrationalists except infuriate them?

Certainly Tabloid Friend doesn't think that simply voting is enough. We should all be out there working for Barack, who if we just give him the chance will change our lives. We should be doing fund-raisers, working phone banks, canvassing door to door, and especially not criticizing the President in any way. For the past couple of weeks, especially, TF has been working himself into a lather of fury against all infidels (for they are many, ranging from the antichrist Ron Paul to enemies of the faith like Glenn Greenwald. Predictably, he (and many many other Obamaphiles) misread Greenwald's Saturday column on Ron Paul as an endorsement, but I can excuse that since he was no doubt too blinded by tears at Greenwald's iniquity to read the actual text.

TF also accused Greenwald of "concern trolling," which means he either doesn't know what concern trolling is, misread Greenwald or -- quite possibly -- both. Such misreading is a pattern: TF wailed last summer that Greenwald wanted to impeach Obama and "wanted a Republican President instead" (as though Joe Biden, who would become President if Obama were removed from office, was a Republican), and more recently put up a fury of links to Obamarista attack sites which misrepresented the bill (here, for example) and claimed falsely that Obama threatened to veto the National Defense Appropriation Act because he opposed indefinite detention; but the White House's own statement of reservation (which these sites incautiously linked to) complained that the bill would limit the Executive's ability to decide whom to detain by imposing due process on him. Even Jon Stewart, a longtime Obama fan, understood what that meant.

TF also doesn't seem to think that organizing and campaigning and voting for the candidate of your choice is a good thing, unless that candidate is Barack Obama. Do the devotees of Paul and Santorum and Bachmann and Perry and Cain get credit because they didn't just sit around and whine and complain, like some people? Of course not. They're stupid and vicious and gullible, unlike the Obama loyalists, who are skeptical and critical but can't you see that there's a campaign going on and we have to support the President or McCain will rise from the dead and invade the Oval Office and eat our brains and then where will we be? Our civil liberties will be gone and there will be endless war and a dead economy, that's where!

I haven't had much to say about Ron Paul here because I don't think he's important. He represents only part of the rightwing fringe, and I don't think there's much danger that he will get the Republican nomination, let alone win the election. If that were to change, I might write about him more, but post-Iowa it still doesn't look likely. Yes, he has some positions -- on US war, on civil liberties -- that I agree with, but so did a Stone-Age racist like Pat Buchanan, and I wouldn't endorse him either. I don't believe that Paul has really put these issues on the media radar, because most of the attention he's been getting has been focused on his worst aspects, and are we really seeing a broader range of debate in the corporate media because of Paul's modest successes on the campaign trail? Of course not; the corporate media don't work that way. And you don't have to be a Libertarian to oppose the Endless War, or the War on Drugs, or Obama's enhancement of the surveillance state. Paul deserves no particular credit for taking those stances; he certainly doesn't own them.

Besides, Paul is a Libertarian -- big L, not small l -- and that shouldn't be forgotten. Avedon Carol beat me to a number of things I was going to say about him, and said them better:

Sure, his "libertarianism" seems to be limited to a "states rights" fallacy (it's okay for individual states to destroy your freedom, it's just not okay for the federal government to do it) and then only on certain issues (obviously, not reproductive freedom, a fairly crucial one), but then, I haven't seen any evidence that Obama and his cadre of money-grubbing warmongers care about those freedoms at any level. And while Paul advocates ghastly economic policies, so do the people who currently occupy the White House. And yet, while Obama's supporters would draw the line at raping a nun on live TV (sorry, Glenn, but that's in the "dead girl/live boy" category), they are still happy to support him despite the fact that he is deliberately dismantling the American economy and every feature that might have saved you and yours from various kinds of slavery and unnecessary death. (And, you know, though I can tell you from experience that being raped is seriously unpleasant, it really isn't the worst thing that can happen. I mean, be honest: Given the choice between watching your children die because Obama managed to derail the creation of a decent health care system or seeing Obama rape a nun on live TV, which would you rather have him do?) But, you know, what really burns is that the only person saying these perfectly sane things about stupid wars is a right-wing crackpot, because there is no one in the allegedly liberal leadership saying it. And for that alone, those people deserve to be locked up someplace where they will feel forced to scream about their civil liberties and rights as Americans.

Greenwald seems to have struck a nerve with Roy Edroso, who still couldn't quite bring himself to gaze into the abyss.

In comments, Greenwald says -- very graciously, I would add -- that he did lay out the problems with Paul in his italicized "honest line of reasoning" that a hypothetical pro-Obama liberal would take. I am tempted to say that I didn't credit this because Greenwald had put it in the mouth of a fictional character with whom he doesn't agree, and so I did not consider it his own point of view; but to be honest, my eyes were too filled with blood to read carefully after I saw my own point of view characterized thus: "Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason..." Jesus, Glenn, why not add "Mwah hah hah" and "Pathetic humans! Who can save you now?" while you're at it?

Hm. Obama loyalists have no trouble accusing Obama's critics of being willing -- indeed, eager -- to have a Republican in the White House, or accusing "progressives" who praise Ron Paul for his stances they like of embracing his other repulsive positions but they blanch at the thought that they are also stuck supporting Obama's most monstrous actions. "Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America's minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason" isn't a caricature of America under Obama: it's an understatement of the reality, and one that Edroso spends very little time on. (But then his blog is dedicated to mocking the Republican fringe, not to covering the news.) This is the same syndrome I've so often noticed with right-wingers I've known: they like to think of themselves as hard-nosed realists, but when their noses are rubbed in the horrors their government is committing with their tax dollars, they turn green and look away, and by the next time I see them, they've forgotten everything and have to be reminded all over again.

(By the way, under that same post at alicublog, two different commenters objected to the term "Obama loyalists," denying that they were any such thing. One of them is new to me, but the other was the same person who writes things like:

Whatever my feelings about Obama's centrism I've got to say that he and Michelle really adorn the White House. As a couple they are just...well...magnificent and the children are fucking adorable (same age as my two so I really feel for them). The huffpo lineup of former first ladies and their dresses at these state dinners was like the evolution of humanity from grotesquely old and billowy faux victoriana to blooming, statuesque, youth.

I've never seen her actually criticize anything Obama has done, except in the dismissive way she brushes aside "Obama's centrism." I'd hate to see what a loyalist would sound like, if she isn't one.)

Not that I entirely blame them, or Edroso. I don't like to think about innocent people being killed and maimed and tortured either. Nor am I claiming moral superiority here, an ability to confront evil without flinching. I flinch all the time. But I can't seem to make myself forget or ignore these things. (Just as I don't read alternative media because I have self-discipline and lots of free time: it's because I don't have enough time to spend much of it on the corporate media.) Call it my weakness; I've been called worse.

Greenwald and Avedon also pointed out that we're seeing the consequences of a permanent campaign season. Back to Avedon:

It's now almost permanent election season, which means that we always have to be in partisan mode and never discuss actual issues. We can never acknowledge that maybe a guy on Our Side is promoting bad positions because to do so would give aid and comfort to the Bad Guys on The Other Side. Almost from the moment he got into office, we've been told we can't criticize Obama because it would help the Republicans. We also can't ever admit that someone who isn't a Democrat might actually have a better position on some issue than Obama does. We can't be honest about what's really going on because it might help the Republicans. But it's true that, no matter how wrong and repugnant (and dishonest or stupid) he is on many other important issues, Ron Paul is the only one who seems to have sensible positions about the war and secrecy regime.

To repeat: to say this is not to endorse Ron Paul. It's to recognize that a lot of people are deeply invested in squelching the discussion of "actual issues" because it's all about Our Side and the Other Side. It's probably not a coincidence that Tabloid Friend and Roy Edroso and many other Obamaristas are big sports fans, though TF spends more time flogging sports than Roy does. You cheer for your team/candidate/party because it's your team/candidate/party, and you boo the other team/candidate/party because it's the other team/candidate/party. There's a difference, though: you can criticize TF's favorite teams and he won't freak out as much as he will if you criticize Obama. Before long we're going to see fans on both sides lamenting that the media and the bad guys on the other team/party are reducing everything to personalities, that they refuse to address the issues. And they'll be right, except for their refusal to see that they're also talking about themselves.

Anyway, it seems to me that Ron Paul is a distraction. The Obama loyalists love that distraction; I'd rather not make it easy for them to evade the issues.

Reagan: The Other Third Rail

Thanks to my Tabloid Friend on Facebook, I know that Ron Paul was foolish enough to criticize Ronald Reagan some years ago. First below is the 1987 quotation from Paul, then Politico writer Ginger Gibson's commentary.

“I think we can further thank Ronald Reagan for doing a good job [on furthering the Libertarian Party]. He certainly did a good job in 1980 pointing out the fallacies of the Democratic liberal agenda and he certainly did a good job on following up to show the disaster of the conservative agenda as well.”

The first rule in modern GOP politics is that you do not diss Ronald Reagan. The Reagan embrace may not be as tight as it was, say, a decade ago, but he is still a revered figure in the party. Thus, the above line from Paul’s nomination speech at the 1987 Libertarian Party convention in Seattle may not go over well with GOP regulars.

Fortunately, some American presidential candidates are cannier and more cautious than Ron Paul where Reagan is concerned. Here's how you do it, Ron:

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people—he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

Yep, that was Barack Obama (via), during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Or was he aiming for the Republicans?

There Are People Who Do Not Love Their Fellow Man

I don't know much about Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. I probably wouldn't even if I watched TV, since reality programs about religious nuts are not my cup of tea. What little I do know comes primarily from voyeuristic liberals who throw tantrums about them but at the same time can't or won't avert their eyes.

This sort of thing always reminds me of something that happened in the 1960s, when I was in my late teens. My brothers and I were riding with my mother to go shopping in town, and we passed a couple of long-haired, possibly bearded young men hitchhiking. My mother's head spun around as she gawked at them; it's a miracle we didn't go off the road. This was rural northern Indiana, and the hippie look wouldn't be taken over by country music fans for another decade or more, so actual hippies were in short supply. "I thought you said those people were just doing it to get attention," I remarked with typical teenage acidity. "Well," my mother replied with a high-pitched giggle I hadn't heard from her before, "I'm giving it to them!" Her prescription for us, of course, when dealing with those who are just doing things to get attention, was to withhold it. But quod licet Mommy non licet loinfruit.

I think it was my Facebook Tabloid Friend who first linked to a story about the Duggars, when they announced her latest pregnancy. I believe he linked to this story, a bit of concern trolling about the health risks of too many pregnancies. Tabloid Friend has thousands of friends on Facebook, most of whom appear to be Obama loyalists and nominal liberals like himself, people who scorn religious fundamentalists who forget that Jesus taught Love, you bigoted assholes! LOVE!!! So, of course, being true followers of the gentle Nazarene, they reacted to the Duggars with disgust. Loving disgust, of course, in the true spirit of Christ. Like my RWA1 on Facebook, TF saves me a lot of time in finding this kind of material.

Then after Michelle had a miscarriage, Tabloid Friend let us know that the Duggars had taken a picture of the little mite and distributed it publicly! to the whole freakin' world! ... Well, actually, they distributed it at the memorial service they held for her. According to Mary Elizabeth Williams's post on the story at Salon, one of the Duggars' young cousins tweeted the picture, and it eventually went up on the Duggars' website. Now, we all know I'm weird, but I don't see this as a big deal. The picture wasn't a gory, pro-lifer dead fetus; it was a cleaned-up tiny hand resting on (I presume) Michelle's finger. Not nearly as morbid as a Victorian dead-baby picture. Not as morbid as Eric Clapton's memorial song for his four-year-old son. But goodness, the fury this inspired! Christlike love-like fury of course. (I'm not being entirely sarcastic there: judging from the gospels, Jesus was given to exactly such outbursts himself.)

After the first flush of vitriol subsided -- Williams writes that "Commenters right here on Salon called them 'an obscenity' who are “unfairly crowding the planet with [their] disgusting obsession' and 'selfish, polluting choices,' who were, in essence, 'asking for it'" -- the main accusation was that the Duggars were making a spectacle of themselves with that picture. They were so worked up that they ignored matters that Williams had covered in her post, like who took the picture, and that it was spread first by a young cousin on Twitter. (We all know how aware teenagers are of privacy issues in social media.) They claimed that the Duggars were making a spectacle of themselves, exploiting their children just to make a buck for their reality TV show. Which has some justice, since the Duggars are indeed the subject of a reality TV show, but that means everything they do is connected to it. If the fetus had survived to term, the show would have exploited her baby cuteness. So anyone who wants to level this accusation has to ask whether a given act is good or bad in itself, and as I said, I don't see anything wrong with taking and distributing this picture.

I suspect a couple of other factors. The (slightly) less sinister one is just good old-fashioned squeamishness about the human body-- except that we right-thinking liberals are supposed to be healthy, life-affirming, pro-sex and pro-pleasure; hostility to the flesh is supposed to be the domain of Them, the Bible-thumpers. It's not that simple, though. One of the first things I noticed about Tabloid Liberal and his Obama-loving community of commenters was how much time and energy they spent rubbernecking and clucking over sex scandals, like Anthony Weiner's photos. Again, the party line is that only Republican Bible-thumpers care about what a politician does on his own time, but in reality it appears that liberals are at least as hysterical about it: at least as much as the Republicans who went after Bill Clinton in the Nineties, they demand that (especially male) politicians be monogamous and preferably married, a role model for our youth. (I remember that during Monicagate some Republicans wailed about how difficult it was to explain these horrible things to children, who would be traumatized for life because Our President had a dick; I think it was Katha Pollitt who pointed out that children were much more traumatized by the wars Clinton was waging, especially the terror bombing of Iraq, and by the alarmism over bad Muslims who were going to attack America if we didn't kill them first.) And good old Christopher Hitchens, who has just become late; I'll always remember his panicky revulsion over Clinton's "horrid leavings" on Lewinsky's blue dress. (And then there was his dismissal of the Dixie Chicks as "sluts" and "fucking fat slags" for mildly disrespecting George Bush.)

Another factor is squeamishness about death. Despite American secularists' self-righteousness about their rationality, their openness, their liberality, they exhibit very little of any of these. Death is scary, and I'm not putting people down for being upset by it. But "disgusting pictures of their dead baby"? The picture can be seen on Williams's post; I don't think it's disgusting -- if anything, a better criticism would be that it's too sanitized.

The other factor expresses itself in rhetoric reminiscent of the eugenics movement: the Duggars are breeding like rabbits, "pumping out so many babies on an already crowded planet", "the batshit Duggar woman, who spits out babies like a dog whelps pups - all for the greater glory of whatever sky fairy she and her semen-donor worship", "if everyone had the Duggar's thoughtless self-entitled attitude towards breeding the world would be a desolate, Mad Max style wasteland" -- but wait a minute, isn't it already a desolate wasteland?: "7 billion people on this earth and this lady thinks its cool to pop out 20. effing ridiculous", "This lady is a kid collector , she pops em out like rabbits", "This women is like a self fufilling prophecy pregnancy puppy mill." And there's a lot more like those out there. This is lynch-mob language, the sort of swill you hear from Israelis about the Arabs, that you used to hear about Jews from the Nazis, and from eugenicists about just about everybody.

Sure, you can argue against having such a large family, but that's just the point: these people aren't interested in arguments, they're just venting rage against people who haven't, as far as I can tell, actually harmed them in any way. They refuse to avert their gaze from this sight that inflames them so much. They're rubberneckers, ghouls, like people who gather around a fight or a traffic accident, hoping to see gore. If anyone's mental health is suspect in this little circus, it's not the Duggars'.

Two criticisms about the Duggars do seem possibly relevant to me. I've seen a couple of claims that the Duggars rely on public assistance, but evidence is slim so far. The best support I've seen is one commenter on this post, who answered another commenter's claim that taxpayers aren't contributing to the Duggars' income: "I admit that I do not watch this on a regular basis; however, when I did, the family (all of them) went grocery shopping and the mother used food stamps, a program that is tax-payer funded." (No permalinks to the individual comments, which are nested under this one.) This is only of real interest because the Duggars are apparently right-wing Christians who would be happy to get rid of public assistance for other less worthy people; if so, they're hypocrites and do have too many children: more than they can support despite being debt-free and employed.

The other important negative is that the Duggars belong to the Quiverfull Christian movement, which explicitly and overtly encourages the production of children, with women subordinated to men. (Interestingly, the movement also rejects medical treatment for infertility on the grounds that they are "a usurpation of God's providence".) Typically, Quiverfull focuses on a couple of "Old Testament" verses as the core of their doctrine, while apparently ignoring the New Testament's exaltation of celibacy and sexual abstinence. In this light, the Duggars' reality show can be seen as an attempt to make their cult look "normal" (to reverse right-wing attacks on gay-friendly television programming) by presenting a relatively attractive family as its emblem.

You could compare the Duggars, by the way, to the secular scientists Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who had a dozen children in the early twentieth century in a somewhat more egalitarian marriage, immortalized in the book and movie Cheaper by the Dozen. Which reminds me of a reason, suggested by one online writer, why someone might enjoy watching the Duggars' show: it's interesting to see how people manage the logistics of a difficult task and bring it off successfully -- and raising a large family is a difficult task.

But there, you see? This fuss has tricked me into spending much more time than I intended online looking for information about the Duggars, who don't seem to me worth that much attention. In the case of Tabloid Friend and his community of commenters, the Duggars are much more interesting than, say, Obama's last-minute decision not to veto the indefinite-detention bill -- a matter on which, so far TF has had nothing to say. (You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, I guess.) But that's normal, isn't it? Scandalous sexual material is always handy for diverting the ignorant masses from issues that might actually affect their well-being. TF isn't that different from a Republican comparing homosexuality to bestiality -- he's just doing it from the other direction.

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.

In the Latter Days There Shall Arise Many Anti-Obamas

There's another Facebook friend of mine, let's call him the Tabloid Friend because of his fondness for linking to stories of sensational crime stories and sex scandals. He's a devout Obamanian -- in fact a few weeks ago he urged me in evangelical terms to let Obama into my heart, it would change my life the way Obama had changed his -- so he also links to Obama apologetics and material that mocks the Stoopid Republicans. But he's mad hot cute, so I keep him on my friends list while annoying him and his many allies in comments. (I'm not such a slave to lust as to let my politics be compromised by it.)

Today he wrote something that surprised me. He'd linked to a political cartoon that showed Qaddafy waiting to be admitted to Hell, while the Admissions Demon complains over the phone that Obama is killing too many Muslims: "Things were sure quieter here under GW Bush's watch." I commented that Bush killed a few hundred thousand Muslims, so of course it was hardly quieter then; and if you believe in the Christian Hell, that of course is where they went. Another commenter replied, "Duncan..get an education!! Ignorance sucks!!"

It now occurs to me that the person was upset that I'd said that Muslims would go to Hell; I didn't realize that because I thought I'd made it obvious that it was only "if you believe in the Christian Hell." If you don't, as I don't, then of course they won't. I thought the complaint was about the subject of the cartoon, the large number of Bad People with Arabic names being sent to Hell on Obama's watch, and that the person disagreed that Bush killed a few hundred thousand Muslims. Certainly the cartoonist was ignoring that fact. The joke demands that selective amnesia to work.

Tabloid Friend then addressed the other commenter: " He was being facetious. I know the snark is a bit over the top at times but he's generally harmless." I was not being facetious about the number of people Bush killed, nor about Christian belief in Hell. (And being criticized for "over the top" snark by TF is like being accused of rudeness and meanness by Ann Coulter: like getting an A on my report card.)

Still, given the cartoon itself, it seems that even Obama fans are forgetting the murderous record of his predecessor. Is it because their policies are too similar for comfort? Or is it that they're so busy rewriting and obfuscating Obama's record that they're whitewashing Bush too, just to be safe?