VauxhallVelcraux

http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifWhile it's a good indication that Democrats have not lost their timidity and Republicans have not lost their temerity that we're even still in Iraq, and the altnernative to Bush's policy is a series of toothless and diluted resolutions, no one seems to notice that Republicans still control the Senate.

After threatening a procedural shutdown if Democrats filibustered another judicial nominee (which I guess is a less august method of opposition than simply not vetting them at all, as the GOP-controlled Senate did with our previous president's choices), the Republicans have used that same filibuster they claimed to revile...and now they're exercising what amounts to a passive version. They torpedoed the minimum wage bill, and forestalled indefinitely any debate on the homeopathic-strength anti-war resolution.

Has the media gone completely insane? No one, to my knowledge, has so much as noted in passing the breathtaking hypocrisy at work, or the incredible stranglehold that the GOP has placed around Harry Reid. Apparently zealous leader-worship is mandatory for the executive when that executive is a Republican and forbidden in all other cases.

The Times' front-page article takes it as an article of faith that, until the expiration of eternity, Democrats will need sixty votes to do anything. And Jim Bunning of Kentucky couches his intransigence in the name of comity. If they'd only pushed a little harder to get what they wanted as the minority, the Democrats might be governing today.

Because he's just a shitty writer. For being stupid, he should be beheaded by terrorists, along with the rest of the milkily apologetic pro-war pundits who still have their sinecures.
Here's the column, purloined from behind the Times Select firewall in a petty act of civil disobedience (because it's outrageously expensive).

Foreign policy experts are still trying to parse Vladimir Putin’s weekend blast against America, which he described as a brutish country that “has overstepped its national borders, in every area.” But rather than asking what exactly motivated Mr. Putin to lash out at the U.S. in this way, the question we should be asking is: why do remarks like these play so well in Russia today?

I’ve just returned from Moscow and I can tell you what analysts there told me, what even Russian liberals reminded me of: NATO expansion. We need to stop kidding ourselves. After the end of the cold war and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, the Bush I and Clinton administrations decided to build a new security alliance — an expanded NATO — and told Russia it could not be a member.

And let’s not forget that the Russia we told to stay out in the cold was the Russia of Boris Yeltsin and his liberal reformist colleagues. They warned us at the time that this would undercut them. But the Clinton folks told us: “Don’t worry, Russia is weak; Yeltsin will swallow hard and accept NATO expansion. There will be no cost.”

So, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic were invited to join NATO in 1997, and Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia followed in 2002. Lately, there has been talk of Ukraine and Georgia also joining.

I believe that one reason Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer and cold warrior, was able to come to power after Mr. Yeltsin was partly due to the negative vibes of NATO expansion. We told Russia: Swallow your pride, it’s a new world. We get to have spheres of influence and you don’t — and ours will go right up to your front door.

But now that high oil and gas prices have made Russia powerful again — the gasman of Europe — Mr. Putin is shoving Russia’s resurgent pride right back in our face. In effect, he is saying to America: “Oh, you talkin’ to me? You thought you could tell me that the cold war was over and that NATO expansion was not directed at Russia — but we couldn’t be members anyway. Did you really think we were going to believe that? Well, now I’m talkin’ to you. Get out of my face.”

Mr. Putin was only slightly more diplomatic in his Munich remarks, where he said: “The process of NATO expansion has nothing to do with modernization of the alliance. We have the right to ask, ‘Against whom is this expansion directed?’ ” We all know the answer: it’s directed against Russia. O.K., fine, we were ready to enrage Russia to expand NATO, but what have we gotten out of it? The Czech Navy?

For those of us who opposed NATO expansion, the point was simple: there is no major geopolitical issue, especially one like Iran, that we can resolve without Russia’s help. So why not behave in a way that maximizes Russia’s willingness to work with us and strengthens its democrats, rather than expanding NATO to countries that can’t help us and are not threatened anymore by Russia, and whose democracies are better secured by joining the European Union?

I got an earful on this from Russians. “NATO expansion was not necessary,” Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the last liberal Duma members who is ready to openly criticize the Putin government, said to me: “In the current world, Russia is not a military danger for any neighbor. It was the wrong concept. You need another architecture.”

Aleksei Pushkov, who has a foreign policy news show on Russian TV, said: “NATO expansion was a message to Russia that you are on your own. Russians were unhappy. We said: ‘The cold war is over, so what is this? They are moving a military alliance toward Russia’s border.’

“At the time of NATO expansion, I was running around the world saying one thing: ‘Don’t do it, or, if you do, stop with the Baltic states because you are losing Russia,’ ” Mr. Pushkov added. “And the answer I got was fantastic: ‘What can Russia do? What measures can you take?’ I said, ‘We can’t take any measures. You are losing an ally. Because there is a deep tectonic shift in the Russian psyche that says, ‘These guys are about exploiting Russia’s weakness. They don’t want it as an ally, but as a junior partner that will be like a little dog doing whatever they say.’ ”

I’m not here to defend an iron-fisted autocrat like Mr. Putin. But history is prologue. The fact is, we helped to create a mood in Russia hospitable to a conservative cold warrior like Mr. Putin by forcing NATO on a liberal democrat like Mr. Yeltsin. It was a bad decision and one that keeps on giving. Just when we need to be getting Russia’s help, we’re getting its revenge.

First of all, Putin's "lashing out" at the US constitutes an accurate statement about American power and they ways we use it. Perhaps it was impolitic for a head of state, but Friedman's own columns routinely castigate our national laziness re oil, green energy, Iraq, etc. "Remarks like that play well in Russia today" because anti-Americanism is as morally justifiable as it is popular with semi-literate electorates (if a country like Russia could be said to elect its leader).

So, according to Friedman, NATO is making things worse with Russia...but he furnishes no concrete examples of what precisely Russia will do to us. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's not stoking truly base anxieties of a nuclear showdown with our old enemies. If it's natural gas they'll withhold from the West, so much the better to amend our grotesque energy policies. Does Friedman support a smaller NATO, an irrelevant NATO? I don't think American unilateralism is a viable alternative at this juncture, and while it might be "antagonistic" to Russia to have Estonia allied with the US and nearly all of Europe, it would require major logistical changes to incorporate into NATO the world's largest country by landmass--without even accounting for its corporatist, authoritarian leanings and unsavory arms deals.

Putin knows he can acquire more power by puffing up a phantom pissing contest with the West, and then conceal his power-grabs by claiming NATO expansion as a grave threat to Russia. Sticking it to Putin--who is an anti-democratic dictator, spawned in the KGB--might just be the Bush Administration's sole foreign policy success. Friedman's idea that Russia would be cooperative and multilaterally-inclined but for NATO expansion is naive. Additionally, Friedman's characteristic oversimplification squeezes the dynamic of post-Soviet Russia's political transition into a single linear axis where admitting the Czech Republic (and its Navy; that was funny) into NATO bred a chain reaction leading to the restoration of a crypto-Stalinist dictatorship.

As far as Friedman's writing goes, this column is a jumble of mixed metaphors (plus at least one split infinitive). "A tectonic shift within the Russian psyche that says, 'These guys are exploiting Russia's weakness...'" Okay, we've got seismology combined with pop psychology, the sum of which is then anthropomorphized as a speaker. Earlier, he decodes for the layperson Putin's baffling utterances as "Oh, you talkin’ to me? You thought you could tell me that the cold war was over and that NATO expansion was not directed at Russia — but we couldn’t be members anyway. Did you really think we were going to believe that? Well, now I’m talkin’ to you. Get out of my face." Putin, when his words are anglicized, shifts from mafioso to Queen Bee/Mean Girl. Thanks, Tom L.

Along with the "far-left"/"far-right" appellations you read all over the place, on blogs, in editorials, in books written by pundits, I think the word "extremist" should be retired from intellectual discourse. It's too easily hijacked by headlines for purposes of delegitimizing opponents' viewpoints without actually attending to the arguments they make.

In my fantasy world, where my novel gets published to great acclaim and I make the rounds on television news, creating little controversies everywhere, I'm sure I would be branded as an 'extremist,' 'Commie,' 'far-left' tool of the 'radical homosexual agenda' before I opened my mouth, and who would want that to happen (to themselves--in fantasy world)?

Glenn Greenwald, who is by far the best blogger I've ever read, does it in his inaugural post for Salon. It's not so much that I want to stick up for Glenn Reynolds, the extremist in question, who is a fascist and doesn't really deserve attention as a serious thinker. However, damning all conservatives or Bush-supporters as extremists clouds the big picture. (Although, honestly, you have got to be seriously devoid of introspection to be cheering the government on at this point).

Dyed-in-the-wool right-wingers aren't simply these parochial blowhards to whom the mainstream media grant disproportionate airtime as part of a backbreaking attempt at appearing fair. They're not all carbon copies of Fred Phelps. They command legions of readers, or followers, as the case may be. When conservatives condemn liberals as extremists, it's part of a successful enterprise in which the mainstream creeps ever rightward, with liberals and leftists cut out of what passes for a 'national conversation' while apparently no one can be too far to the right to forfeit credibility as a public figure (cf. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan). At the risk of oversimplifying the already one-dimensional axis on which political affiliations are graphed, you can't be further to the right of those men without being a Klansman or skinhead. On the left, there's a vast gulf that could be filled with all sorts of people, but--just to name a few--Ralph Nader's too "unreasonable," black leaders are too "militant," and for whatever reason, the only academics that ever get on television are moderate-to-conservative and gender-conforming.

As of yet, reality simply can't accommodate this strategy when liberals employ it, because there's a giant swath of this country who identify as evangelical Christians, and those people are already acutely attuned to feeling "shut out" by "cultural elites." The right can ignore the left, but for the left to ignore the right or label its spokespersons as extremists reinforces the prevalent ethos whereby left-wing intellectuals know nothing about ordinary people's lives and don't give a shit about them, either. So not only is tarring someone with the "extremist" label needlessly corrosive to reasonable discussion, it might just be adding fuel to the fire of the right's dizzyingly adroit campaign to screw liberals and leftists, no matter what they say or do, or even if they say anything at all.

Read it, bitch.

First of all, let's talk photo. It's a shot of a young, not unattractive 20-something walking to his therapist's--at night, across a parking lot, after the rain. He's wearing a leather jacket. If not for the bright lights, which suggest a film or music video set (or sexual surveillance), one might think this young closet case is out cruising.

That's just funny. More to the point, this article is yet another example of the so-called liberal media bending over backwards to cater to their staunchest critics--people whom reporters are no doubt tired of hearing bitch and complain--by "triangulating" between the accepted scientific consensus and an ideologically driven, archconservative fiction. This is perfectly analogous to taking seriously a Chevron-funded think tank that exploits tiny lacunae in our current understanding of global warming, or the Discovery Institute's protestations that since biology can't replicate the genesis of living matter in a test tube, God must have made humans ex nihilo in 6000 BC.

The New York Times is literally taking at face value (and not ethnographically) claims that gay people can (and by implication, ought) attempt to alter their sexual orientation if they have some moral objection to it. Rather than investigate the absolutely insane origins of those objections--or, more importantly, the profound psychic damage they can produce in tormented young homos who have the misfortune of being raised as Mormons, Shiites, Hasids or Catholics--this article employs the time-honored tactic of not engaging the bullshit straight on but leaving it to the news consumer to read between the lines. I.e., they're lazy. And naive to think that news coverage of this ilk will placate their vituperative right-wing critics, who want to silence dissent and will regard the Times as the enemy forever, no matter how slanted and inaccurate their reporting becomes.

Are we really supposed to believe Ted Haggard is "completely heterosexual"? In all likelihood, he's completely homosexual. It would blow up the entire evangelical edifice to concede that a man with a direct line to God is an incorrigble faggot. So they'll make him disappear and call it a stunning rout for reparative therapy over the forces of licentiousness.

Similarly, what's especially pernicious is the reporting on the odd ways in which this Corey person is groping towards the truth about himself. He's afraid that his inadequate feelings as a man might be behind his gayness, and he's probably right. Boys who are sensitive or bad at sports or who like writing poetry or making clothes or decorating are generally shunted out of a rigid gender binary where 'true' manliness is as limiting as it is stringently enforced. And not everyone's good at repressing things. Childrearing in devoutly religious families tolerates nonconformity less than a lot of other situations. But the Times, dominated as it is by neoliberals and their fascination with neuroscience and genes as the causations of all things, might not entertain explanations that verge on the psychoanalytic (let alone Marxian). So yet again, in their pursuit of avoiding all things left-wing in favor of the holy and eminently "sensible" middle, they forego reality.

Why not engage in some actual investigation that proves, once and for all, that these reparative therapy scams are just that? How about some goddamn fucking journalism? Instead, this article comes off as a paean to the diversity of American religions: wow, what a rich tapestry of faiths we have...which all have some kind of evil, antigay program operating in the basement. But for every ostensible success story, there are many other stories of people who have concluded they were deluding themselves, including some who used to be among the movement’s most visible leaders. How about, "This expensive cruelty actually never works"? I don't expect an editorial anytime soon that says, "Religion is stupid. They're after your money. Any purported benefits can be derived elsewhere, and 'faith' is just a cover for stupidity or insanity. Unclench your moral sphincter and try to enjoy the time you've got with the people who love you. Love, the liberal media." But why do they always have to ferret out a highly dubious middle ground, fraught with their own political investments, and palm it off as a seasoned objectivity?

Bush came to NYC yesterday, visiting the Stock Exchange where he made an uncharacteristically candid speech about the realities of income inequality before leaving via the heliport that's essentially downstairs from my office. (I always wonder what he thinks about New York. If asked, he'd probably offer some just-folks opinion about the sinful ways of the big city and the notorious assholes who live in it, but he got more money from the Upper East Side than any other ZIP code, and if I were such a kingly president, I'd be sort of impressed with this corner of my domain).

Anyway, his brief stopover naturally precipitated legions of law enforcement doing all sorts of odd things that in the aggregate theoretically lead up to greater security for our leader, and, maybe, the rest of us. A few streets were closed, some to vehicular traffic, others altogether. (For example, you couldn't walk down Wall Street towards the Exchange, unless you were exiting the subway. That'll fool those towelheads.) South Street and the tip of the FDR Drive were blocked off except for the presidential convoy, because a podunk place like Manhattan doesn't need its major ring road artery on a weekday. The plazas on either side of my building were sealed, and everyone was trapped in our forty-story tower for ninety minutes--during lunch. And of course there were snipers on the roof, helicopters all over, NYPD divers in the river (that's got to SUCK), sirens everywhere, barricades left and right, and men with Uzis (at least, that's what I think they were) patrolling the streets. I wonder how long it'll be until chemical masks and riot gear are standard operating procedure.

These steroidal theatrics are intended primarily to terrify. Whether it be the NYPD, the Secret Service, the Armed Forces, the FBI, or a combination of them all, the sum is a phenomenon designed to maximize the visibility of the American government's grip on the situation. Many a cheery warmonger of our decade says or said things like, "Until Sept. 11, Americans didn't have to worry about things like terrorism." Taking that at face value (because tearing stupidity apart is a bore by now), one thing you might add is that "Americans never had to worry about seeing or feeling the full brunt of our military capabilities." Obviously, yesterday's mass inconvenience because the NYPD doesn't want to revisit Dallas 1963 only blocks from the WTC site doesn't nearly approach what the Iraqis (or, for that matter, the citizens of 60 other countries at least) have experienced, but I think the taboo has been violated.

Similarly, in Boston, a marketing tactic for "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" led the BPD to freak out over some Lite Brites that had been deployed in nine other cities without a fuss. The mayor and state attorney general clamored for blood, but not only were no laws broken, this hysteria has not--as one might hope--led to any reappraisal of just how easy it is to trigger a wasteful overreaction like calling out the bomb squad and shutting down a section of the Charles River. Nor was it limited to the BPD. Fox News (duh) questioned whether or not it was a "terrorist dry run." I mean, please.

There is at least a component of these anti-terror operas which seeks to deter homegrown would-be terrorists or anti-American foreigners germinating in our midst. I really don't know what to think about that, because there's no merit to a city appearing lazy or inept in its response. Again, however, it's inevitable that there will be a ratcheting up of a new normality, in which ordinary citizens can expect both their civil liberties and plain old time and energy to be checked at the door out of deference to security concerns.

As we passively permit law enforcement to ever-swallow greater concentric circles of cities, paralyzing everything within their self-assigned geographical purview with the ugly plumage of counterterrorism, the more we can naturally expect paranoia to take hold in all quarters, eroding some of the simpler pleasures of urban living and producing our own expensive and predictable false alarms that then demand blood to justify the fantastical expense.