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In a prematurely administered autopsy of the ‘death of conservatism’, Bill Moyers’ Friday interview with Sam Tanenhaus, (the Editor of the New York Times Book Review and the Week in Review section) dissected the motivations and ideology of the “revanchist” anti-Obama birther/teabaggers and the movement against health care reform.

It should come as little surprise that a protest movement attempting to paint Obama as “a basic pastiche of right-wing hobgoblins” is fraught with internal contradiction. Reports of anti-government, anti-tax protesters complaining about the ineffectiveness of public transit service aside,  anti-government protesters demanding that government not touch the effective government program they depend on, Medicare, tend to elicit the most laughter.

(via lookatthisfuckingteabagger)

In a interesting interpretation of the thought (or lack there of) behind these strange messages, Tanenhaus conjures up an articulation of the deep-seeded, nearly unconscious visceral distrust of the dependency created by the patron/client relationship  between the citizens and the state, unleashed by by the  Johnson Administration’s “Great Society” legislative agenda (where, it should be noted, Bill Moyers served in a variety of roles including LBJ’s White House Press Secretary):

BILL MOYERS: There’s a paradox there, right? I mean, they say they’re against government and yet the majority of Americans, according to all the polls, don’t want their government touched. You know, there were people at these town hall meetings this summer, saying “Don’t touch my Medicare.” You know, keep the government out of my Social Security.

SAM TANENHAUS: Yes. This is an interesting argument. Because it’s very easy to mock, and we see this a lot. “Oh, these fools. These old codgers say the government won’t take my Medicare away. Don’t know Medicare is a government program?” That’s not really what’s going on, I think. I think there’s something different. A sense about how both the left and the right grew skeptical of Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson, and the argument was everyone was becoming a kind of client or ward of the state. That we’ve become a nation of patron/client relationships. And a colleague of yours, Richard Goodwin, very brilliant political thinker, in 1967 warned, “We all expect too much from government.” We expect it to create all the jobs. We expect it to rescue the economy. To fight the wars. To give us a good life”. So, when people say, “Don’t take my Medicare away,” what they really mean is, “We’re entirely dependent on this government and we’re afraid they’ll take one thing away that we’ve gotten used to and replace it with something that won’t be so good. And there’s nothing we can do about it. We’re powerless before the very guardian that protects us.“

Certainly this revelation does not explain the totality of the situation in the United States, but I think it does offer a nuance often missed in similar attempts to delineate conservative ideology.

Tenenhaus’ comments on the dominance of theater and show in American politics are also worth the look: download the podcast of Friday’s Bill Moyers Journal interview with Sam Tanenhaus.

said:

@rhh awesome avatar.

said:

@andrewmcintyre i salute you ;)

*Glenn Beck on Media Matters

Today we learned that CTV will broadcast 60 hours of tomorrow’s Michael Jackson memorial over 10 of its channels.  While reading their press release loudly proclaiming the “super-simulcast,” I cringed with horror. Has anyone turned on a TV in the last week, flipped through the channels, and not had Michael Jackson’s ridiculously tragic life invade their living room?

It gets better.

After a long and nauseating “Save Local TV” campaign by CTV and CanWest (and the even more disgusting counter campaign by the cable and satellite companies – I’m looking at you Shaw and Rogers) today the CRTC decided to bailout the broadcasters to the tune of $100 million for the 2009-10 broadcast year.

Saying the absolutely most ridiculous thing possible, CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein, Q.C. pronounced that “we have taken steps to ensure that broadcasters … continue to provide Canadians with programming that reflects their needs and interests.”

von Finckenstein will surely soon declare that up is down,  black is white and that money grows on trees. The CRTC is requesting that you submit your comments by August 10, 2009, by filling out the online form.

On the bright side, Ben Mulroney and dead Michael Jackson have real chemistry together.  (as noted by  @robertmcbean)

Clay Shirky on these newfangled interwebs and how they are changing the world.

As noted by the Inside the CBC blog, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has taken out their big black marker and begun heavily redacting their transcripts of supposedly public hearings related to the fate of the private broadcasters. How on earth does this “Independent Public Authority” justify these secretive practices? How can deliberately hiding this information “ensure that both the broadcasting and telecommunications systems serve the Canadian public” as is the CRTC’s stated mandate? The CRTC website states: “As an independent organization, the CRTC works to serve the needs and interests of citizens, industries, interest groups and the government.” When will the CRTC remember which group is at the top of that list?

On the other side of the coin, today I heard of a federal government bureaucracy getting it right. Canada’s National Film Board has opened up their archives & put hundreds of their films online. Check out www.nfb.ca/explore-by/ and make sure to share any gems you find using your favorite social networking platform. 

On the topic of sharing cool stuff using social media, my friend Doug Lacombe has written up an engaging examination on the etiquette of using twitter during events and presentations in “Live tweeting; bird–brained or brilliant?”

Lastly, Duncan Kinney, another buddy of mine and recent journalism grad, has been hard at work on two impressive local Calgary web community initiatives. YYCblogs.com is an opt-in Calgary blog aggregator that crowdsources its content from Calgary bloggers. It is an excellent way of discovering new local blogs and what topics are important to the Calgary blogging community. yycPHOTOBOOK.com is the other project Duncan is involved in organizing. The website explains its raison d’etre with a simple rhetorical question:

If you could show someone only one picture that displayed the most important part of Calgary, what would you show? Now take that idea with 32 different Calgary-based photographers and what kind of book would you get? That’s what we’re going to find out with this project.

I’m looking forward to the results.

Today we learned that one of the primary purposes of the systemic torturing of prisoners by US defense and intelligence officials was to try to establish the non-existent link between Iraq and al-Qaida, thereby justifying the illegal 2003  invasion of Iraq after the fact. McClatchy reports:

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003.

It really comes as no surprise that the neoconservatives in the Bush-Cheney administration, not content to merely tell the public lies, actually sought to create “evidence” through the use of torture; The poverty of their underlying philosophy actually promotes a bastardized version of the Platonic “noble lie.” But it seems that they’ve taken it to new extremes.

Andrew Sullivan captures this furious state of reality-denial (and “reality” creation) with respect to the use of torture in the term “imaginationland” he coined in 2007:

Torture gives false information. And the worst scenarios that tortured detainees coughed up – many of them completely innocent, remember – may well have come to fuel US national security policy. And of course they also fueled more torture. Because once you hear of the existential plots confessed by one tortured prisoner, you need to torture more prisoners to get at the real truth. We do not know what actual intelligence they were getting, and Cheney has ensured that we will never know. But it is perfectly conceivable that the torture regime – combined with panic and paranoia – created an imaginationland of untruth and half-truth that has guided US policy for this entire ["War on Terror"]**.

**(or should I now call it the “overseas contingency operation” -AMcIntyre)

In light of today’s news Sullivan explained the point even more clearly now that we are finally past the Bush-Cheney nightmare:

It ended, as all regimes bent on total power always end, with torture. Why? Because reality may differ from ideology; and when it does, it is vital to create reality to support ideology. And so torture creates reality by coercing “facts” from broken bodies and minds.

This is how torture is always a fantastic temptation for those in power: it provides a way for them to coerce reality into the shape they desire. This is also why it is so uniquely dangerous. Because it creates a closed circle of untruth, which is then used to justify more torture, which generates more “truth.”

The release of the information in the McClatchy article, and the ongoing uncovering of the details of the torture tactics, are provoking intense discussion around the Orwellian term “enhanced interrogation techniques” and other politically loaded terms like the “War on Terror.”  Yet, I sat with jaw hanging as I watched even the ultra-conservative Fox News check much of its own typical newspeak at the door in this discussion: 

To be “Fair and Balanced” I should provide some real context for this conversation:

Judith Miller is the former New York Times reporter who broke one of the key stories in the lead up to the illegal American invasion of Iraq called “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts” which was widely criticized as shoddy reporting. Further to that, in 2005 Miller again cherry picked information from the same nefarious network of neoconservative Bush admin. sources when she wrote a piece outing the identity of Valerie Plame, a former covert CIA agent whose husband happened to call B.S. on an attempt to tie Nigerian “yellow cake” uranium to Saddam Hussein.   

Clifford May is the president of a thintank called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.  His defense of torture, even if he believes it to be “near-torture” fundamentally violates one of his own foundation’s tenants: “No one should be denied basic human rights, including minority rights, women’s rights, and religious freedom.” How ironic that Mr. May doesn’t seem to grasp that governments in democracies that flirt with torture, much less embrace it whole heartedly in their policies, are a much larger danger to their democratic values than ANY external threat could ever be. 

In spite of this typical Fox News non-disclosure and beltway-media-insider asshattery, when Mr. May asks Judith Miller this question at 5:30 “Judy… Is putting someone in a small … confinement with a caterpillar torture?” it instantly made me recall one of the most terrifying scenes in Orwell’s 1984 where Winston’s captors subject him to his worst fear: Rats. 

“But for everyone there is something unendurable — something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to.” 

Only by conjuring up his worst nightmares and placing him in a specialized tiny torture cage full of “old scaly grandfather[s] of the sewers” could they finally break Winston and make him hollow inside. 

With the long list of torture techniques the US had at its disposal, and the consistent involvement of psychologists and “doctors without morals” in the process, you be the judge as to the Bush administration’s intentions and their  ability to realize the worst fears of Muslim detainees: 

Waterboarding: simulated drowning. al-Qaida no. 2 KSM was waterboarded 183 times in one month. 

Walling: slamming prisoners into a flexible wall

Sleep deprivation: the CIA was ­authorised to deny detainees sleep for up to 180 hours.

Forced nudity: often in the presence of female guards to exaggerate the feelings of discomfort. 

Cramped confinement: placing detainees in uncomfortably small containers or boxes. 

Insect in confinement: placing detainees in a tiny box and introducing an insect

Repeated slaps: repeated slapping of detainees in the face and body

Water dousing: continual dousing of detainees with cold water

Food deprivation: slowly starving detainees by limiting them to a diet of 1000 calories a day. 

Just in case  Clifford May has forgotten Orwell’s dire warning about unchecked power in his mindless defense of torture in the name of democracy: 

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

Yet, in a supposed democratic system of government that respects human rights, no matter how great the perceived threat and no matter how supposedly “effective” the techniques are, torture is never justified under any circumstances. The end never justifies the screams.

UPDATED: 4:21 PM April 23, 2009: This sad yet powerful song via Rob Hyndman (@rhh)

Via Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker’s very readable & often funny blog:

See how many “teabagging” jokes you can spot in David Shuster’s hilarious MSNBC preview of today’s right-wing “Tea Parties”

I counted thirteen definites plus two possibles.