The Facts of the Case

Today one of my liberal Facebook friends linked to a blog post about Rick Santorum's stupidity while he was still running for the Republican presidential nomination. I can't cast the first stone at another blogger for not being timely, and anyway, that's not really what I noticed in the post.

Senator Santorum, you'll recall, claimed in public that only one university in California offered courses in U.S. history. Rachel Maddow, fearless defendrix of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, exposed Santorum's ignorance for all to see. Santorum then explained that what he "should have said was that none of the UC campuses teach a survey course in Western Civilization." This also isn't true, and after enjoying a hearty laugh at Republican Stoopid, the blogger expresses his bafflement about it:

I really don't get this. If you're Rick Santorum and you're issuing an apology like this, you have to know it's going to make it to the air and be fact-checked. Don't you turn to an intern or someone and say, "Hey, before I send this out, call up the University of California and make sure they don't offer courses in Western Civilization so I don't look like an idiot again"? And there were people who wanted this man to have the job where you get to order a nuclear attack.

He has a point.

The friend who linked this post commented "Don't let those silly 'facts' get in the way", and a commenter chimed in: "in the GOP emotions trump facts." I argued that in politics emotions trump facts, and that Democrats are no more interested in facts than Republicans are. My friend chided me for saying that there's no difference between the parties, which of course was not what I said (and which tends to support my position rather than his). And one difference is that if you're a Republican and you say something that isn't true, Rachel Maddow and other Obama fans will be all over your case; if you're President Obama and you say something that isn't true, Ms. Maddow will maintain a discreet silence about it, and the President won't "look like an idiot." After all, there's an election campaign going on, loose lips sink ships, we all have to do our part in the war effort.

For example, last week the President told Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone that his administration had cracked down on medical-marijuana dispensaries "because it’s against federal law. I can’t nullify congressional law. I can’t ask the Justice Department to say, 'Ignore completely a federal law that’s on the books' . . . ". Glenn Greenwald promptly pointed out that "as Jon Walker conclusively documents, the law vests the Executive Branch with precisely the discretion he falsely claims he does not have to decide how drugs are classified." I can't find that Ms. Maddow has pounced on this absurd falsehood. Neither have the Republicans, though.

But I'll stick with education. Last week during a story on protests over student debt in the US, Democracy Now! ran a clip of a speech by Obama in which he said, "We can’t price the middle class out of a college education, not at a time when most new jobs in America will require more than a high school diploma."

This is one of the President's favorite themes, repeated over several years, but it too is false. Even on its face it's suspect: if there are all those shiny new jobs out that which require college degrees, why are there so many recent college graduates who can't find work, and certainly not the kind of work they went into debt for? Alexander Cockburn did a good piece on the subject of the "Knowledge Economy" in March, pointing out that most jobs in America, including "new" ones (of which there just aren't very many, as each month's job report reminds us), do not require even a bachelor's degree. The late Gerald Bracey criticized Obama repeatedly on this point, in February 2009 for example (emphasis mine):

Obama said, "Right now, three quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma, and yet just over half of our citizens have that level of education." Scary, huh? Not really. This statistic was a favorite of ex secretary of education of education Margaret Spellings, about whom we can all express a sigh of relief that the operative word is, "ex."

If you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics stats on job projections, it is almost true (but not really) that what Obama said is right. But there are two hugely compromising factors that make this statistic much less fearsome that it first appears:

1. The definition of "more than a high school diploma" is a weasel phrase, an incredibly slippery statistic. It does not mean a B. A., an Associates Degree, nor even a year of on-the-job training. The BLS projects that the overwhelming majority of jobs to be created between now and 2016 will require "short term on the job training." That's one week to three months.

2. The "fastest-growing occupations" account for very few jobs. For every systems engineer, we need about 15 sales people on the floor at Wal-Mart (and we have three newly minted scientists and engineers for every new job in those fields). The huge job numbers in this country are accounted for by retail sales, janitors, maids, food workers, waiters, truck drivers, home care assistants (low paid folk who come to take care those of us who are getting up in years), and similar low-trained, low-paid occupations. Note that I did not say these people are "low-skilled." As Barbara Ehrenreich showed after she spent two years working in "low-skilled" jobs, there really is no such thing (see her Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America).

The sentences I put into boldface are the key: "more than a high school diploma" includes one week to three months of "short-term on-the-job training."

So, either the President is ignorant or he's lying, but what he's saying is misleading, to put it kindly. Bracey says that Obama "accepted the same garbage that the propagandists, fear mongers such as Lou Gerstner, Bill Gates, Roy Romer, Bob Wise, Craig Barrett and many others--God help us, Arne Duncan?--have been spewing for years." Whatever the reason, Obama has no reason to worry about looking like an idiot, no matter how many lies he tells. If a Republican utters a palpable untruth, Rachel Maddow will criticize it publicly; if a Democrat does it, Maddow will find something else to talk about, like Teh Ex-Gey. Even the Republicans don't seem to be interested in exposing falsehoods like this; they're more interested in Obama's birth certificate. Republican media will claim that a Democrat is lying, but of course it's hit-or-miss whether they'll be be right about it.

This goes back to Noam Chomsky's dictum, shared with Martin Luther King Jr., that it takes no courage to attack the crimes and lies of your official enemies; what is harder, and often dangerous (though much less so in the US), is attacking the crimes and lies of your own side and its friends. But as Chomsky also suggests, it is precisely the people who attack official enemies exclusively who will crow about their courage in Speaking Truth to Power, while attacking the troublemakers who criticize the home team as cowards, drug-addled nuts, and traitors.

Laughter Is the Best Medicine

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Avedon wrote at The Sideshow today:

"The canard is that 'forcing' organizations to provide contraceptive health coverage means forcing them to pay extra for it. Of course, the reverse is true - policies that omit contraceptive coverage cost more than policies that provide it, because pregnancies cost more than contraception. And that means that what the no-contraceptive-coverage crowd really wants is to force people to pay extra for an exception that nobody needs. There's a similar canard related to the whole idea of forbidding funds for abortions for welfare recipients - it's cheaper for the state to fund it than not to fund it, so the rest of us are having to pay the costs of not funding it. This is, of course, a consistent theme with right-wing policy. Fully-funded, WIC programs used to save us $45,000 for every $100 spent, but they kept cutting down until it saved not nearly that much, and yet it still saves us money, though every cut means it saves less again. And so on."

Jon Stewart paraphrased Rick Santorum's political philosophy as "We should all be free to live by Christian law." No, Santorum wants us all to be free to live by Roman Catholic law. Protestants don't have a uniform view on contraception, for example, though many Jews, especially the ultraorthodox, would agree with Santorum and Gingrich in opposing contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage, and Darwin's theory of descent with modification by Natural Selection. I think that Joan Walsh was wrong, and that Santorum's critics have not been stressing Santorum's Catholicism enough.

Stewart did zero in on a central matter: Is this issue upsetting most Catholics (let alone other believers) or just "the old guys who run it"? The old guys who run it, of course.

But how about this religious exemption? Will Catholic hospitals perform circumcision? Do employee insurance plans cover this, uh, non-Catholic procedure? (That's a biblical doctrine, by the way: the apostle Paul forbade his gentile converts to undergo circumcision, though he wasn't fully consistent about this in practice.) Can Jewish hospitals insist on circumcising all boy children of their employees, or they won't cover pregnancy and childbirth? Can religious hospitals refuse to treat people who don't belong to their denomination? If not, why not? Of course that would be discrimination, but so is refusing to provide full insurance coverage to non-Catholic employees who don't share their employers' reservations.

Point Counterpoint

In an earlier post I linked to this article on Dan Savage's ongoing campaign against Rick Santorum, a worthy target if ever there was one. In case you didn't click through, here's the relevant passage, asterisks and all:

Savage and Santorum's spat originates in 2003. Santorum had compared gay sex to bestiality and incest and in response, Savage set out to Google-bomb and create a new meaning for "Santorum" (just try it to see results). But on the heels of Santorum signing the "Marriage Pledge," Savage appeared (NSFW-unless you have earphones and can watch YouTube at work) on Bill Maher's Real Time on July 15. Savage, along with the panel, discussed the stable of potential Republican nominees. "I sometimes think about f****** the s*** out of Rick Santorum," he said. "He needs it...Let's bone that Santorum good. I'd be up for whipping up Santorum in that Santorum." That night he issued an apology, but it was for a comment he made under his breath, not an apology to Santorum.

Savage's remarks didn't offend me ("Oh, Dan, how can you say such awful things?"): they pissed me off. I can sympathize with him, of course: bigotry of any kind infuriates me too. But I'm not venting on national television. Further, Savage these days is letting his rage render him totally irrational, as I've pointed out before. I'm not pissed off because Savage is "hurting the cause", as some might argue. I'm pissed off because he's indulging in homophobic abuse that no one should be allowed to get away with, using sex as a metaphor for debasement and humiliation. He's tapping into the same reservoir of male violence that drives queerbashers and rapists. Me, I don't think that Rick Santorum "needs" to be fucked, brutally or tenderly. I wouldn't touch him -- or Dan Savage, for that matter -- with a ten-foot pole.

On the other hand, I think that Google-bombing Santorum was a brilliant, effective, and entirely justified move. Santorum thinks it's okay to compare homosexuality to pedophilia (risky territory for a Roman Catholic these days) or bestiality, which isn't moral argument but simply a cheap smear. If you need evidence that he's stupid as well as evil, he continues to use the same vacuous and dishonest comparisons, even though they aren't necessary to an anti-gay campaign. Maybe he feels that, after having been compared to the frothy mix of semen and fecal matter that sometimes accompanies anal sex, he has nothing to lose. Except the race for the 2012 Republican presidential campaign, I guess. And on the third hand, Savage should realize by now that humiliation isn't the most effective way to stop an opponent; after all, Frothy still did a lot better this time around, even if he finally was defeated by equally bigoted opponents. That indicates that the Google-bomb didn't hurt Santorum where it mattered, among his reactionary Christian-homophobe constituency. I doubt we've seen the last of him. ("No," to quote Firesign Theater, "but the first of you turns my stomach!")

There are more than two sides here, though AtlanticWire blogger Alexander Abad-Santos doesn't stand above the fray as he evidently believes he does, in that lofty, Olympian corporate-media journalistic way. Did you notice the word "spat" in the paragraph I quoted earlier? Well, he goes on to make sure you know he meant it.

What They Say They're Fighting About: Gay rights. This is how Savage and Santorum got into this spat in the first place. Santorum's stated that his ideal view of America doesn't include gay rights like marriage equality and has, in the past, equated gay sex with bestiality and incest. Conversely, Savage, who is openly gay, is an advocate for gay rights and created the "It Gets Better" campaign--a project that aims to combat the effects of bullying on gay teens.

What They're Really Fighting About: They're fighting about fighting at this point. It's worth pointing out, too, that Savage benefits from his stance and criticisms of Santorum, hence his recent appearances on Maher and FOD. Santorum, having only raised $582,348 in second-quarter reports is trying to monetize Savage's attacks.

"What They Say They're Fighting About" -- Ooooh, snap! It's not as if the status and condition of non-heterosexuals in American society isn't still a contested issue, with a considerable body count, pretty much all of it on one side. It's not as if sex between men or sex between women hadn't been a felony in many American states until 2003 -- and despite having been overturned by the United States Supreme Court, many of those laws are still on the books, and being used to harass queers. Meanwhile, as far as I know, no antigay bigot has done jail time simply for expressing bigoted views (as opposed to beating up or killing somebody). "Gay rights" is really the least of it. It's about deeply rooted cultural attitudes, much like racism and sexism. To skate over that hard reality with the airy word "spat" is despicable.

It might not be entirely inaccurate to say that Savage and Santorum are now merely "fighting about fighting," because there is a tendency for people locked in conflict to forget what divides them as they focus on tactics and vengeance. But given what gay people, and especially gay youth, are facing now -- given lethal antigay violence, given the bullying of gay kids that inspired Savage's "It Gets Better" in the first place, given the neglect with which nominally responsible adults have responded to this violence -- there's a distinct flavor of "Let Them Eat Cake" in Abad-Santos' dismissal of the Savage-Santorum "spat" as a merely personal quarrel. (And by "Them" I mean gay people.) I don't doubt that Santorum sincerely believes in the bigoted swill he spews at, apparently, every opportunity. That just shows how little sincerity is worth. Nor do I doubt that Savage's excesses spring from the helpless fury he feels every time the suicide of another young queer is reported in the news. Or when bigoted schoolmates celebrate such suicides. Rage is a perfectly appropriate reaction to these stories. Dismissing them, as Abad-Santos does, is not.

What is going on between Savage and Santorum can't be reduced to pettiness or spite. If they both disappeared tomorrow -- whether they were carried up to Heaven by angels, or cast into Hell to be entertained by demons -- the real issue would still remain, and even if Abad-Santos were right (though I don't think he is) about what is driving Santorum and Savage now, he'd be every bit as guilty as they are for reducing the conflict to personalities.

He That Is Married Cares for the Things of the World

I guess we all need demonic Others to give us an excuse to run around screaming and waving our hands limply at the wrists. Rick Santorum has Homosexuals. We Homosexuals have Rick Santorum. I clicked through from a post describing to a confrontation between a transgender activist and Santorum in South Carolina:

Kneena Raheja, 20, yelled, "Mr. Santorum, you have spilled queer blood!" as the GOP presidential hopeful finished speaking, according to BuzzFeed. It was a tough crowd; just one man reportedly snickered.

Raheja, who was born a boy, later told Buzzfeed that she thinks "people like Rick Santorum are actively violent towards the queer population."

You know, I really hate it when my people (and they are my people, drunk or sober) trivialize our very real problems with overwrought, inflationary rhetoric. "Spilled queer blood" is, I guess, normal if not acceptable hyperbole: the phrase "blood on his hands" is a common metaphor, as is "bloodbath," and hardly anybody takes it literally. But "actively violent" is not, except in the La-la Land where "violence" covers everything from turning down the corners of your mouth in distaste to spraying a crowd with automatic weapons fire. (Cf. "rape," which "continues to evolve from a word meaning 'violent, forced sexual intercourse' to its more modern definition as 'something kind of upsetting that happens to famous people.'") Santorum may be inciting other bigots to violence, though like any person in his position he'd surely disavow any such intention and condemn anyone who physically attacks homosexuals in his name. But "actively violent" can't, as far as I can tell, mean anything but that Santorum picks up the baseball bat himself; and if Raheja has evidence of that, the police need to have it and charges need to be filed.

Anyway, the article alluded to Santorum comparing gay marriage to polygamy in New Hampshire, so I clicked through to that story:

When his answers failed to persuade the crowd, he was forced to resort to Socratic method -- a tactic that frustrated some in the audience and led to shouts that he was avoiding the questions.

"If it makes three people happy to get married, based on what you just said, what makes that wrong and what you said right?" Santorum asked a young woman grilling him on marriage equality, comparing same-sex marriage to polygamy.

When she responded that his question was "irrelevant," Santorum replied, "You know, it's important, if we're going to have a discussion based on rational, reasoned thought, that we employ reason." There were audible groans from the audience.

I'm not sure that that was really "Socratic method," but two things should be noticed about this exchange. One is that Santorum's basic analogy is sound: if same-sex marriage should be allowed because it will make the partners happy, then it's legitimate to apply the same standard to other models. The "young woman grilling him on marriage equality" was wrong when she claimed that the question was irrelevant; if anyone was dodging the issue, it was she. And isn't it inspiring that the audience groaned when Santorum invoked reason?

The other is that they were both wrong, because polygamy is a traditional, biblical value. Instead of whining that he was changing the subject, his interlocutor should have asked him why he opposes polygamy -- if it was good enough for Moses and Solomon, why isn't it good enough for us today? (Jesus and Paul, on the other hand, are models for total sexual abstinence if not for becoming a eunuch for the kingdom of Heaven. Santorum, with his seven children, is no follower of theirs.) Putting same-sex marriage on the same level with plural marriage should have backfired: was he saying that, like polygamy, same-sex marriage was acceptable under the Old Covenant even if it isn't today? Wasn't he equating Adam and Steve with the patriarchs and their numerous wives and concubines? (If he brings up incest, remind him of Abraham and Sarah.) Is he aware that Augustine wrote that Christians didn't practice polygamy merely to conform with Roman law and custom? If so, he's a radical moral relativist. If not, he's ignorant. Either way, he painted himself into a corner.

Instead, the advocate for marriage equality revealed that she's just as narrow as Santorum. Like him, she hasn't thought much about the meaning or history of marriage and is just parroting slogans. It isn't like I needed to be reminded how little there is to choose between Santorum and his cultured despisers.

The Battle Cry of Freedom

From Glenn Greenwald this morning:

In fairness, the U.S. is fulfilling President Obama's pledge that it will "not stand idly by" in the face of a tyrant's oppression of his own people, as the U.S. is actively feeding that regime new weapons; that, by definition, is not "standing idly by." In his U.N. address, President Obama praised the regime ("steps have been taken toward reform and accountability") but then powerfully added: "more are required"; he also then equated the two sides: the government's security forces and democracy activists on whom they're firing and otherwise persecuting ("America is a close friend of Bahrain, and we will continue to call on the government and the main opposition bloc – the Wifaq – to pursue a meaningful dialogue"). I think it's important to remind everyone that the reason there is so much anti-Americanism in that part of the world is because they're primitive, ungrateful religious fanatics who Hate Our Freedom.

... as the regime in Yemen continues to slaughter protesters, it's worth reviewing this recently released WikiLeaks cable from 2005 detailing the mighty impressive list of weaponry supplied by the U.S. to that regime; it's important to remember, though, that WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning are the real criminals and it would be better for us not to know ...

From Steve Kornacki this morning, on last night's Republican candidates' debate. Of course, for him it's all about the elections, but still.

[Stephen Hill, an American soldier serving in Iraq], wearing a gray "ARMY" t-shirt then appeared on-screen and told the candidates that he is gay and that he had been forced to lie about his identity when he was deployed to Iraq in 2010 because he didn't want to lose his job. He then asked if the candidates would "do anything to circumvent the progress that's been made for gay and lesbian soldiers" now that the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy has been officially repealed.

His video then ended and ... a handful of very loud boos erupted in the debate hall. Otherwise there was silence -- not one cheer for an active duty soldier asking the candidates if they'd let him continue serving his country without lying. No other voter-submitted question all night elicited such a harsh response.

Rick Santorum then proceeded to make a fool of himself -- no surprise, of course. And Kornacki asked rhetorically:

Does it even need to be mentioned that none of the other eight candidates on stage took the opportunity to jump in and chastise the crowd, or at least to say "thanks" to the soldier?

Remember, The Name "Rick" Is a Lifestyle Choice

Possibly NSFW, though heavily bleeped for comedic purposes.

Dan Savage's New Threat to Rick Santorum from Dan Savage

Despite my occasional differences with Dan Savage, I agree with him that there's no need to play nice with bigots. (via)