NATIONAL REVIEW DEATH WATCH

The wingnutty declension of the National Review continues. In response to Barack Obama's defense of reproductive freedom, NR blogger Ed Whelan suggests that the Democratic candidate (whom he calls a "former fetus") would have been aborted had he been born twelve years later, after the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision. Such bizarre counterfactual history is yet more evidence that the right-wing intellectual is an endangered species.

THE PALINIFICATION OF THE CONSERVATIVE INTELLIGENTSIA, OR THERE'S A RED UNDER YOUR BED! AND HE'S BLACK!

The Republicans are whipping their wingnut base into a frenzy about Barack Obama and his scary otherness. The results are not pretty. But Obamaphobia has reached new levels of absurdity among the once formidable conservative intelligentsia. For the last few days, they have wrangled over whether Obama is a Maoist, a Stalinist, or a Democratic Socialist. The discussion is truly absurd.

The correct answer for you students of American political history: none of the above. Obama is a neoliberal on economic policy. He favors the public-private partnerships that have been the staple of bipartisan governance for the last forty years. There is nary a whiff of socialism among the Democratic candidate's advisors. Obama's foreign policy toward Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, and Russia is, in every respect, mainstream. Were Dwight Eisenhower or John F. Kennedy to return in 2008, they would find little to challenge in Obama's resolutely centrist views on American international relations.

If you have the stomach for it, or if you want a good laugh, check out the lengthy exchange on Obama's supposed leftism at the Power Line and the National Review Online. William F. Buckley, Jr. would, no doubt, be appalled at the intellectual degradation of the journal that he founded, the National Review. Usually dead wrong, but often very smart in its heyday, the NR has fallen into an abyss of partisan foolishness. Rather than standing athwart history and yelling stop, as Buckley once described the conservative intellectual mission, the National Review's current stable of hacks, and their counterparts in the wingnutty blogosphere, are stuck in the mud. Let's call it the "Palinification" of the G.O.P., a substitution of bilious sloganeering for intelligent, if dangerously wrongheaded analysis. For those of us on the political left, the disappearance of an intellectually rigorous right wing is a good thing over the long run. But listening to wingnuts hurling spurious charges of terrorism, treason, and leftism is excruciating in the short run.

CAMILLE LOVES SARAH, THE SEQUEL

Salon has given the chronically vapid Camille Paglia thousands of words to pontificate on all sorts of issues that she knows nothing about, such as Obama's views on foreign policy. Paglia argues somehow that Obama's resolutely centrist foreign policy is rooted in campus radicalism. "The university culture at Columbia and Harvard through which Obama passed has been drenched in a reflexive anti-Americanism for several decades. Armchair blame-America-first leftism is the default mode. Disdain for the military is rampant, and conservative voices are rarely heard." Had Paglia actually read Obama's foreign policy statements and had she actually examined Obama's by now well-known record at Columbia and Harvard...but well that would actually require fifteen minutes of research. For Paglia, logorrhea substitutes for logic.

But that's not the worst of it. Paglia continues her month-long swoon over Sarah Palin. And she reveals a new infatuation with Todd. She hails the Alaskan couple as Sarah "powerful new symbols of a revived contemporary feminism." Here's the clincher: "That the macho Todd, with his champion athleticism and working-class cred, can so amiably cradle babies and care for children is a huge step forward in American sexual symbolism." If only Paglia had watched the gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Republican convention, she would have observed a fascinating bit of political theater playing out. Bristol Palin (whose shotgun wedding Paglia would surely manage to interpret as a step forward for feminism) was the primary caretaker for little Trig. Cindy McCain rocked the sleeping child for a few minutes, no doubt in an effort to soften her sharp edges. But then, when the prime time cameras came on, Todd took over. Until the cameras were on, the baby got passed about among the womenfolk. As a feminist dad, I can say that my "cred" came from cradling my babies out of the limelight at two in the morning. A few minutes of theatrical parenting on prime time TV is not a blow for equal parenting. And anyhow, who watches the Palin clan when Todd is zipping about the tundra on his snowmobile?

To top it all off, Paglia throws in a good dollop of racial essentialism. "When I watch Sarah Palin, I don't think sex -- I think Amazon warrior!" So gushes Paglia, as her analysis degrades even further. She goes on: "the questions that keeps popping up for me is whether Palin, who was born in Idaho, could possibly be part Native American (as we know her husband is), which sometimes seems suggested by her strong facial contours. I have felt that same extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness billowing out from other women with Native American ancestry -- including two overpowering celebrity icons with whom I have worked."

And finally, Paglia defends Palin against charges that she's a dim bulb: "On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse -- which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it..." Palin as empty verbal vessel waiting to be filled by Republican policy knowledge. Hmm. I'll leave it to my friends in cultural studies to interpret that one.

Two pieces of advice: Salon, it's time to can Paglia. And America, it's time to can Palin.

CAMILLE LOVES SARAH

I am a feminist, I live in Philadelphia, I write for popular periodicals. I am Camille Paglia.

Not.

Wannabe Rustbelt Intellectual, Paglia, has penned a rambling, incoherent column in today's Salon (h/t to Kathy G--it's great to have you back) holding up Sarah Palin as the model feminist and charging, bizarrely, that Barack Obama is making himself too black for middle America. Of Obama, Paglia confesses: "I have become increasingly uneasy about Obama's efforts to sound folksy and approachable by reflexively using inner-city African-American tones and locutions, which as a native of Hawaii he acquired relatively late in his development and which are painfully wrong for the target audience of rural working-class whites that he has been trying to reach." Huh?

Paglia writes that "in terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment." Except one inconvenient fact. Palin and the McCain campaign have been playing the victim card at every turn. Paglia buys right into this, arguing that Palin has been subject to "witch-trial hysteria" over the last few weeks. Hyperbole aside, Camille, this is a political campaign. Should the Democrats bow in worship of the gun-toting, economic conservative, book-banning, faux-reformer vice presidential candidate of the opposing party? Overall, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have been exceedingly polite to Palin out of deference to the double-standard that has infected the election since Palin debuted: namely that it's OK for the pitbull with lipstick to bark and bite, but not OK for her opponents to fight back.

Tough questions about Palin's qualifications? Unfair, because she's a woman. Concerns about her executive experience? Sexist: she wouldn't get these questions if she were a man. Obama uses the phrase "you can put lipstick on a pig and it's still a pig" in a discussion of McCain in a speech. Cries of sexism and outrage by the McSame camp. This coming from the campaign of the sexist who called his wife a c-nt, cracked a vile joke about Chelsea Clinton as the bastard child of Janet Reno, and has never seen a pro-woman public policy that he likes. The sham victimology that the GOP is using to shield Palin from the hard-hitting criticism that every political candidate should face is nothing short of appalling.

Palin-loving Paglia goes on to burnish her middle-American credentials in one of the most risible passages in her article. "One reason I live in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia and have never moved to New York or Washington is that, as a cultural analyst, I want to remain in touch with the mainstream of American life. I frequent fast-food restaurants, shop at the mall, and periodically visit Wal-Mart (its bird-seed section is nonpareil)." Paglia's leafy suburb (which I won't name to protect her privacy) is lush and pretty rich. It has a great school district. You can live the very good life there. I'm sure that the lawyers, doctors and college professors who live in her sweet little slice of suburbia are true middle Americans.

When Paglia goes to her local mall, she's not rubbing shoulders with the blue-collar swing voters of Northeast Philadelphia whom Biden, Obama, Palin, and McCain are courting, unless she happens to enter through the stockroom or spends a few minutes after hours schmoozing with the janitorial staff. The residents of her quiet corner of the world aren't, for the most part, struggling to make ends meet. They haven't been ravaged by eight years of Republican policy: they have been favored by it. Most of the working-class voters with whom Paglia disingenuously identifies don't have time to linger in the bird-seed section of Walmart, they work there. That the arch Paglia is now the voice of authentic working-class America is just plain bizarre.

SUBURBANITES BEWARE!

Suburbanites beware! The skryrocketing price of oil is part of a liberal conspiracy to destroy your way of life. Of $4 a gallon gas and the Democrats, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann (R-Minnesota) argues: "I know it is hard to believe, it's hard to fathom -- but this is 'mission accomplished' for them....They want Americans to take transit and move to the inner cities. They want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, [and] take light rail to their government jobs. That's their vision for America."

All I can say in response is thank goodness we're in the Last Days. Bachmann and the pious suburbanite rightists who support her will be lifted from their SUVs in the Rapture before President Obama herds them into subways and forces them into tenements.

Some other examples of Bachmann's religious hubris, her far-right views on the environment, and her general wingnuttery.

HEY, HEY, HO, HO: POLAR BEARS HAVE GOT TO GO!

Breaking news: the polar bear is the true agent of racial repression in America. I kid you not.

No this is not an Onion story--really. It's a wacky, tragic, and true tale of how a venerable civil rights organization became a corporate pawn. And how corporate lobbyists, overpaid and underworked, are creating a sham movement of the poor to support an agenda to roll back environmental regulation.

The players: Exxon, the Pacific Legal Foundation (a right-wing libertarian advocacy law firm), the dubious Alliance to Stop the War Against the Poor, the polar bear, and the Congress of Racial Equality and its chairman-for-life Roy Innis. Jill Tubman, herself the daughter of a CORE activist, untangles the bizarre story.

But first, a brief look back at CORE. Founded in 1942, CORE brought together an interracial group of activists, many of them interested in bringing Mahatma Gandhi's teachings to bear on the creation of a "beloved community" that transcended racial division. CORE activists built alliances with the labor movement, with left and religious groups, and with wartime pacifists. They formed experimental communities (sometimes called ashrams) where they lived together black and white, at a moment in history where crossing the color line was transgressive. They experimented with sit-ins to challenge restaurant segregation and sponsored a 1947 Journey of Reconciliation to break down segregated interstate transportation in the South. CORE activists bridged North and South, providing training for a new generation of activists who would shape the transformative wave of protest in the early 1960s. Most famous for its role in the 1961 Freedom Rides through the South (a reprise of the 1947 Journey, but on a much larger scale), CORE activists also led protests against housing segregation in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Cleveland, New York, and Los Angeles. In Philly, Newark, and Brooklyn, CORE spearheaded protests and civil disobedience at construction sites with all-white workforces. And by 1964, CORE chapters were leading the way in grassroots community organizing in poor communities over issues like tenants' rights, price-gouging inner city stores, and police brutality. CORE fell on hard times, however, and by 1966, it repudiated its longtime interracialism and embraced black power. Its membership plunged and its donations dried up. But some of its most creative activists, including founding member James Farmer, housing reformer Clarence Funnye (who tragically died in a plane crash in 1970), and antipoverty warrior George Wiley, left CORE but took the organization's mandate with them and pushed in new directions.

Roy Innis, who took the helm of CORE in 1968, followed a different path. A firebrand advocate of black power, he soon migrated to the political right. By 1972, Innis was a prominent supporter of Richard Nixon. He became a Reaganite. And he joined the board of the National Rifle Association and, in an appalling affront to its founding principles, branded CORE as a national "pro-firearms organization." Among CORE's more prominent allies is the Community Financial Services Association of America, the trade association of "payday lenders" (or as they call themselves the "payday advance industry"). In 2005, CORE honored life-long civil rights activist Karl Rove at its annual Martin Luther King, Jr. dinner. In Tubman's words, Innis now presides over "the decrepit, corrupt CORE."

What is Innis's new battle? It is against the listing of the polar bear as an endangered species. Protecting the endangered bear is, in Innis's words, an "attack on economic civil rights." If we save the polar bear, sites for oil drilling are limited, the oil supply shrinks, prices rise, and guess what, poor people are left paying more. Advocates of the protection of endangered species are "modern day Bull Connors and George Wallaces, who are standing in the door, trying to prevent poor Americans from achieving Martin Luther King’s dream of equal opportunity and true environmental justice." I can think of about 500 direct ways that poor black people are ripped off by profit-artists like those who bankroll CORE. And I can think of lots of ways that Exxon could show its concern for poor people. How about subsidies to inner city gas stations? Or better yet, grants for public transit systems that so many people of color rely upon, since they can't afford exorbitant insurance, expensive cars, and costly fuel.

The environmentalist movement has not always allied itself with African Americans and other minorities. But a robust environmental justice movement in recent years has gone a long way toward repairing that breach. The bottom line is that environmental devastation knows no color line. Climate change and reliance on fossil fuels have devastating long-term consequences for black and white, Latino and Asian, American and Bangladeshi alike. In fact it's poor people who suffer the brunt of manmade environmental disasters from floods to fires to chemical dumping. And really, what has Exxon done for poor people of color?

Thinking about the face off in Alaska between the polar bear and Roy Innis, one thing is for sure. I will never think about whiteness and privilege in the same way again. And more seriously, I shudder in horror in memory of the true heroes of CORE: James Farmer, James Peck, Gloria Brown, George Houser, Clarence Funnye, and on and on, whose extraordinary contribution to the black freedom struggle will continue to inspire, well after the tragedy and farce of the organization that calls itself CORE is long gone. They would be marching on Exxon and thinking locally and globally about the ways that racism, environmental degradation, and corporate greed are mutually reinforcing.

PROFESSOR RUSH'S REVISIONIST HISTORY

Civil rights, the New Deal, affirmative action. I thought I knew a lot about these topics. But it's time to completely revise my work.

I refer to Professor Rush Limbaugh and his arguments that 1) The smashing political success of Barack Obama is the consequence of affirmative action, a program that is barely hanging on by a thread because of sustained challenges in the legislatures and in the courts by the right; 2) Women's suffrage is responsible for "big government." If we only hadn't given all of that power to blacks and women, then America could be great again.

From Media Matters (which includes a lengthy transcript from Rush's show):

On the June 2 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, while discussing Sen. Barack Obama's presidential candidacy, Rush Limbaugh asserted that the Democratic Party was "go[ing] with a veritable rookie whose only chance of winning is that he's black." As Media Matters for America noted, Limbaugh said on his May 21 broadcast that "Barack Obama is an affirmative action candidate" and asserted during his May 14 broadcast that "[i]f Barack Obama were Caucasian, they would have taken this guy out on the basis of pure ignorance long ago."

Also during the June 2 broadcast, while referencing a May 26 column written by John Lott Jr., Limbaugh stated, "John Lott Jr. has this theory. He's done some research and found out that the growth of government can be traced to when women got the vote." Limbaugh later asserted, "The one observation you can make about this whole business, because he proved it. I mean, it's -- the growth of government started like crazy when women got the right to vote. Which just proves: Size does matter to 'em."

I'm gonna preregister for Professor Rush's constitutional law class next. Seriously, this is but the beginning of what will be a long, ugly campaign of politics by smear. I'm not looking forward to a whole political season of white male victimology. But expect it to start now.

I'M A LOSER BABY...

Hot off the wires: Phyllis Schlafly has branded critics of her honorary degree as a bunch of losers. Ouch. I'm mortally wounded.

MICKEY MOUSE UNIONISM

The ever vapid, rightward slouching Mickey Kaus adopts a Gingrichian position on unions: he opposes legislation to allow the card check system for workplace unionization. This means, given the NLRB's lax enforcement of anti-intimidation laws and its carte blanche to corporate anti-unionization campaigns, that many unions will face nearly insurmountable barriers to winning workplace elections. Then Kaus gets even worse: "It seems to me that a) a tight 90s-style labor market and b) direct government provision of benefits (e.g. health care, OSHA) accomplishes what we want traditional unions to accomplish, but on a broader basis and without encouraging a sclerotic, adversarial bureaucracy that gets in the way of the productive organization of work."

Note to Mickey: 1) we are in a troubled 00s-style labor market, not a tight 90s-stle labor market 2) direct government provision of benefits (eg health care) is still a distant dream for most workers, 3) working people's wages have been stagnant or declining for most of the last thirty five years. And as for "sclerotic, adversarial bureaucracy," well, Kaus should take a detour next time he's hobnobbing with the rich and famous in LA and spend a day or two with the creative organizers in unions like SEIU who are organizing janitors, nursing home workers, and other service sector employees in some of the least secure, most poorly paying jobs in the country. Or perhaps he should spend a few hours with the once-sclerotic United Steelworkers who are responding to globalization by collaborating with their counterparts overseas.

Footnote: Great minds think alike. Check out this astute critique of Kaus.

BORK WINS THE LOTTERY

I can't help but chortle at the news that tort-reformer and near-Supreme Court justice Robert Bork just settled a $1 million dollar slip and fall lawsuit that he filed against the Yale Club of New York.

This from a man who prominently complained:

Courts are now meccas for every conceivable unanswered grievance or perceived injury. Juries dispense lottery-like windfalls, attracting and rewarding imaginative claims and far-fetched legal theories. Today's merchant enters the marketplace with trepidation - anticipating from the civil justice system the treatment that his ancestors experienced with the Barbary pirates.

Judge Bork lost his Supreme Court seat but won the lottery. Harr!

DR. NEWT’S HOME REMEDIES

“The Republican brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti- Reverend Wright, or (if Senator Clinton wins), anti-Clinton campaign, they are simply going to fail. “ So is Newt Gingrich’s headline grabbing diagnosis of his party’s chronic illness.

But Dr. Newt’s home remedies are a sign of his real quackery. The first three have to do with energy, including advocating the summer gas tax holiday. The fourth has to do with a moratorium on earmarks, a tired Republican battle cry that won’t find many takers among the G.O.P. senators and representatives who bring home the bacon to their districts.

Four of the remaining five are a hoot and the last is one of the Republicans’ oldest and tiredest recommendations. Here goes:

--Overhaul the census and cut its budget radically.

That’s bound to fire up the people. Joe Sixpack in Xenia is losing sleep about this one.

--Implement a space-based, GPS-style air traffic control system.

Note to Newt: Reagan killed PATCO twenty five years ago. Now you want Star Wars for the runways?

--Declare English the official language of government.

OK, that will bring them out to the ballot box. And it will work real well with McCain's efforts to hive off some of the Hispanic vote from the Democrats.

--Protect the workers' right to a secret ballot.

Here is Newt’s special pleading for anti-union business leaders. Scarcely an issue that will warm the hearts of bitter blue-collar workers.

--Remind Americans that judges matter.

Wait, haven’t the Republicans been reminding us of this for the last, well, 40 years. In any case, for better and for worse, judicial nominations have never been very high on the list of ordinary voters, particularly when the nation is bogged down in an endless war and the economy is tanking.

If this is the best that the Republicans have got, we can pause and take a breath.