The Clown Show

David Weigel has a great interview with Alexander Zaitchik who's written what sounds like a laugh-a-minute profile of Glenn Beck.

What sort of attempts did you make to interview Beck for this book? If you made those attempts why were you denied?

I never tried to get in touch with him or his inner-circle. Even if he had agreed to talk to me, which was extremely unlikely, I wouldn’t have believed a word that came out of his mouth. Beck may not know much about politics or history, but he has arguably the most demonstrably sophisticated instinct for self-promotion on earth. I wasn’t interested in allowing Beck to use the book as a way to reinforce his well crafted and partly fictitious redemption narrative. Nor was I interested in trading my cerebellum for subject-access. I’ll leave that kind of thing to Zev Chafets.

Um, snap.

Shots at Zev "Rush is misunderstood" Chafets aside, Zaitchik makes a great point.

In the last year, Media Matters and other liberal groups have made a cottage industry of Beck-watching and Beck-bashing. I think you show that he loves this stuff — he loves it when people mock him for crying. Is the left doing a shoddy job of challenging Beck?

It is very easy and extremely tempting for liberals to tee-off on everything that comes out of Beck’s mouth. He’s a giant tree whose branches bend with juicy, chest-high fruit. But what I think a lot of people don’t understand is that this is all by careful design. Beck understands that controversy is the closest thing to a publicity perpetual-motion machine. He’s been courting controversy for decades. That’s the name of the game he learned in radio—get them talking about you, raise your profile—and it's in his blood in a way it can only be for someone who has been fighting for his survival in ratings wars since he was a teenager. It’s all about being in the news, finding the next biggest stage on which to promote his shows and his sponsors. Beck loves it when people go after him for crying, or blog about silly questions like, “Did he really boil the frog?”

Back in Baltimore in the early '90s, he crafted this whole extensive bit around hamsters and snakes in order to get PETA protesting in the station parking lot. He’s a positional marketing mastermind. It’s not a coincidence that the “third most listened to” show on talk radio is so well branded as being hosted by “the crying conservative with the chalk board and the Truth.” He knows exactly what he’s doing. I wish the left was better at resisting some of the bait he dangles on a daily basis, and focus on the bigger picture, like the agenda of [David and Charles] Koch-funded groups like Americans for Prosperity, which feeds Beck most of his scripts. That, and the content of the religious pseudo-histories he keeps telling people to read. At some point, enough is enough, and the left is letting him run this never-ending diversion play.

Like a lot of "modern conservatives," Beck is fueled by victimhood and his audience -- themselves feeling like the victims of what they perceive as affirmative action on their backs -- drinks it in like nectar.

More on the Koch brothers and their dad, a founding member of the John Birch Society.

Rounding up Taliban leadership

More interesting news from Pakistan, where security forces arrested two more Taliban leaders.

The arrests were made by Pakistani officials, the Afghans said, but it seemed probable that C.I.A. officers accompanied them, as they did in the arrest of Mr. Baradar. Pakistani officials declined to comment.

Together, the three arrests mark the most significant blow to the Taliban’s leadership since the American-backed war began eight years ago. They also demonstrate the extent to which the Taliban’s senior leaders have been able to use Pakistan as a sanctuary to plan and mount attacks in Afghanistan.

A senior United States official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the arrest of the two shadow governors was unrelated to Mr. Baradar’s capture.

Even so, Mohammed Omar, the governor of Kunduz Province, said in an interview that the two Taliban shadow governors maintained a close working relationship with Mr. Baradar.

“Mullah Salam and Mullah Mohammed were the most merciless individuals,” said Gen. Razaq Yaqoobi, police chief of Kunduz Province. “Most of the terror, executions and other crimes committed in northern Afghanistan were on their orders.”

The arrests — all three in Pakistan — demonstrate a greater level of cooperation by Pakistan in hunting leaders of the Afghan Taliban than in the eight years of war. American officials have complained bitterly since 2001 that the Pakistanis, while claiming to be American allies and accepting American aid were simultaneously providing sanctuary and assistance to Taliban fighters and leaders who were battling the Americans across the border.

The "most significant blow to the Taliban leadership in eight years." Hmmm. I wonder what those attacking the administration for being "lackadaisical" about the "War on Terror" will say now? Oh, right, we'll hear "jokes" about not "Mirandizing" them. Ha ha.

"One big overblown latke."

Quote of the day (on the "controversy" over the White House Hanukkah celebration), from Rabbi Levi Shemtov:

“I feel that we need to save our communal kvetching in reserve for when it’s more called for and really matters."

"The death list"

These are the people that Andy McCarthy, former federal prosecutor and current rightwing bloviator, declares are traitors for defending the Constitution of the United States.

One lawyer calls it the “death list” — a cadre of about 20 veteran defense lawyers in New York who have broad experience in death penalty and other complex criminal cases. They have represented defendants in terrorist bombings in East Africa, drug-related killings in Manhattan and the Bronx, police killings in Brooklyn and on Staten Island.

They are not all household names, and the list is closely held. But every day in Federal District Court in Manhattan, a lawyer from the list is on call, ready to be appointed in a capital case.

And it is from this short list that lawyers are expected to be initially chosen to defend Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others accused in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks when they arrive at the courthouse early next year.

Of course, there is uncertainty about whether Mr. Mohammed and his co-defendants will even want lawyers or a trial. But if the court follows its own practice, the list, or “capital panel,” as it is called, will be the source of lawyers as the defendants begin their journey through the civilian system.

“I would imagine this is the hour of truth for the panel,” said Isabelle A. Kirshner, a former panel member.

The list includes lawyers like Frederick H. Cohn, 70, a 6-foot-2 graduate of Antioch and Brooklyn Law School, who is known for his Fu Manchu-style mustache and acid wit in the courtroom. There, too, is Avraham C. Moskowitz, a 52-year-old Columbia Law graduate and former federal prosecutor who describes himself as a committed Zionist, who has family in Israel, and whose brother was in the World Trade Center when it was attacked in 1993. Joshua L. Dratel, 52, is also on the list — a Harvard Law graduate who lived a block from ground zero and had to relocate for three months after his apartment building was damaged.

Today, the list has evolved into a kind of ad hoc terrorism bar as well, with a majority of those on it experienced in such cases. For any lawyer on the list who gets a Sept. 11 case, said Ms. Kirshner, “there’s going to be an enormous personal, professional and emotional commitment that’s going to have to be made.” And that, she added, is “going to translate into their friends and relatives saying, ‘How can you represent these guys?’ ”

Some lawyers on the list are undertaking their own searching review of whether they should participate.

“I could not take that case,” Mr. Moskowitz said. He said that although he felt confident that he could vigorously defend an accused Sept. 11 terrorist, “my background, my politics, my very essence would create the appearance of a conflict.”

But other lawyers said they would have no problem taking a case of one of the men held for years at Guantánamo. “I’m not campaigning for one,” said Edward D. Wilford, a lawyer on the list whose last high-profile case involved his representation of a man convicted last year in the murder of a New York police officer, Russel Timoshenko, during a traffic stop in Brooklyn.

“But if I’m privileged enough to be asked,” he said, “I’ll step to the front and gladly represent one of these human beings with the same zest and zeal I would any other human being who is facing the death penalty.”

These men and women, following in the footsteps of John Adams, are true patriots, unlike those who would shred our constitutional values in order to cheer on the waterboarding of an alleged mass-murderer.

A different world

Never mind that the husband of his former employer repeatedly used terrorist attacks in other countries as opportunities to proclaim solidarity with other freedom-loving countries, while at the same time subtly and not so subtly advancing the notion that the terrorists are attacking "over there." Andrew Malcolm now claims that Obama's condolences to Russia for a possible terrorist attack is "not presidential." And unlike George W. Bush, who would never use such events as political and score-settling opportunities, the Obama administration just can't resist.

Oh well.

I'm with stupid

Roy describes his "critical method."

I'm sometimes asked why I don't talk more about Malkin here. I prefer nuts with interesting personality quirks -- the Goldbergs, McArdles, Noonans, and such like. Malkin is like some dead-eyed shark looking only for the shortest distance between her mouth and her meal. Her absurdities are no less rank than theirs, but if a personality intervenes in her construction of them, I've yet to detect it.

Me, I try to stay away from all the nuts and am grateful to Roy for making his daily voyages up the Styx on our behalf.

"The Obama problem"

It's interesting that Newsmax would pull the column. Apparently calling for sedition was, on second thought, maybe not such a good idea. Hell, even LGF called it "Bad Craziness at Newsmax."

And it seems this former staffer for the Johnson and Carter administrations has been calling Obama names for quite some time.

The birther grift

The first "birthomercial." But, really, behind the racism, ignorance, and attempts to delegitimize (once again) a Democratic president, it's all just your standard issue late night TV scam.

Glenn Beck boils a frog

He is evil, stupid, and wrong. Both parts of that proverb are wrong. And I don't think that stunt is going to help his ad sales, but genius bidnessman Murdoch seems unconcerned about that.

But all that said, isn't there a Federal Law against this sort of thing? Why, yes, though up against a First Amendment challenge, there is:

18 USC 48 / PUBLIC LAW 106-152

Sec. 48. - Depiction of animal cruelty
(a) Creation, Sale, or Possession.
Whoever knowingly creates, sells, or possesses a depiction of animal cruelty with the intention of placing that depiction in interstate or foreign commerce for commercial gain, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

(b) Exception.
Subsection (a) does not apply to any depiction that has serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value.

(c) Definitions.
In this section
(1) the term ''depiction of animal cruelty'' means any visual or auditory depiction, including any photograph, motion-picture film, video recording, electronic image, or sound recording of conduct in which a living animal is intentionally maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded, or killed, if such conduct is illegal under Federal law or the law of the State in which the creation, sale, or possession takes place, regardless of whether the maiming, mutilation, torture, wounding, or killing took place in the State; and

(2) the term ''State'' means each of the several States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and any other commonwealth, territory, or possession of the United States

Murdering small creatures to make "a point." What a movement the Right is creating.

The communist manifesto

History is a living, breathing thing. F'rinstance, until today, I was unaware that the Soviet Union was brought low by the Supreme Soviet's mandate of compact fluorescent lighting and Khrushchev's determination to have solar panels installed in his dacha.

As one of Roy's commenters noted, we all knew having Barry X in the White House would cause many on the Right to go stark raving mad, we just didn't know how quickly they would become boring as well.

In fact, the death of the Soviet Union has actually been a boon for neocommunists. Now, Obama and his fellow travelers like Jones, Ayers, Wright, Klonsky, and ACORN, can spout all the same totalitarian, anti-American, central-planning ideas the hard Left has always pushed, but in the abstract -- under such mushy labels as "social justice" and "green jobs." That is, they are liberated from having to defend the Soviet Empire, which, until 1991, was a living, breathing, concrete example of how horrific these ideas are when put in practice.

Oh. Kay.

The vast rightwing...

But you knew this.

Advanced even this week by Republican stalwarts including the party’s last vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, and Charles E. Grassley, the veteran Iowa senator, the nature of the assertion nonetheless seemed reminiscent of the modern-day viral Internet campaigns that dogged Mr. Obama last year, falsely calling him a Muslim and questioning his nationality.

But the rumor — which has come up at Congressional town-hall-style meetings this week in spite of an avalanche of reports laying out why it was false — was not born of anonymous e-mailers, partisan bloggers or stealthy cyberconspiracy theorists.

Rather, it has a far more mainstream provenance, openly emanating months ago from many of the same pundits and conservative media outlets that were central in defeating President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals 16 years ago, including the editorial board of The Washington Times, the American Spectator magazine and Betsy McCaughey, whose 1994 health care critique made her a star of the conservative movement (and ultimately, New York’s lieutenant governor).

It is encouraging that the New York Times recognizes this and is calling bullshit on it. But as long as the Chuck Grassley's of the world are considered Very Serious People, then real reform is doomed.

Dr. Death

Welcome to the intersection of Washington, Wingnuttia, and the bottom feeders who suck blood from both, Dr. Emanuel.

"I couldn't believe this was happening to me," says Emanuel, who in addition to spending his career opposing euthanasia and working to increase the quality of care for dying patients is the brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. "It is incredible how much one's reputation can be besmirched and taken out of context." (See pictures of health care for the uninsured.)

It would only get worse. Within days, the Post article, with selective and misleading quotes from Emanuel's 200 or so published academic papers, went viral. Minnesota Representative Michelle Bachmann, a fierce opponent of Obama's reform plans, read large portions of it on the House floor. "Watch out if you are disabled!" she warned. Days later, in an online posting, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin attacked Emanuel's "Orwellian thinking," which she suggested would lead to a "downright evil" system that would employ a "death panel" to decide who gets lifesaving health care. By Aug. 10, hysteria had begun to take over in places. Mike Sola, whose son has cerebral palsy, turned up at a Michigan town-hall meeting to shout out concerns about what he regarded as Obama and Emanuel's plans to deny treatment to their family. Later, in an interview on Fox News, Sola held up the Post article. "Every American needs to read this," he declared. (Read "What Health-Care Reform Really Means.")

By this point, Emanuel, who has a sister who suffers from cerebral palsy, had arrived in northern Italy, where he planned to spend a week on vacation, hiking in the Dolomites. Instead, he found himself calling the White House, offering to book a plane home to defend his name. "As an academic, what do you have? You have the quality of your work and the integrity with which you do it," he said by phone from the Italian Alps. "If it requires canceling a week's long vacation, what's the big deal?"

It's funny he was in Italy. Because "quality" and "integrity" are foreign words to Betsey McCaughey.

But it is important to note that Time's Michael Scherer is calling bullshit on this.

In her Post article, McCaughey paints the worst possible image of Emanuel, quoting him, for instance, endorsing age discrimination for health-care distribution, without mentioning that he was only addressing extreme cases like organ donation, where there is an absolute scarcity of resources. She quotes him discussing the denial of care for people with dementia without revealing that Emanuel only mentioned dementia in a discussion of theoretical approaches, not an endorsement of a particular policy. She notes that he has criticized medical culture for trying to do everything for a patient, "regardless of the cost or effects on others," without making clear that he was not speaking of lifesaving care but of treatments with little demonstrated value. "No one who has read what I have done for 25 years would come to the conclusions that have been put out there," says Emanuel. "My quotes were just being taken out of context."

Maybe a Bible would have been better?

The historical perspective and self-awareness of the Cornered are stunning to behold.

Why look, there's an idling, empty bus

Disingenuous, thy name is Krauthammer. Appended for some reason to a post decrying "the stuff" he prooflessly alleges was given as ransom to the North Koreans -- in Krauthammer's mind, I'm sure photos of the two American journalists toiling at a prison work farm would have made for better American propaganda -- is this:

There is a certain irony in an administration denouncing ordinary Americans who get together to express what they believe and to confront authority, when that administration is led by a man who began his career as a community organizer, whose job, as I understand it, is to take ordinary Americans, get them together to express what they believe, and express demands against the authorities.

So it's unbelievably hypocritical. And, of course, as we just heard, this only happens when you have a conservative protest. It is called a mob. If it’s a liberal protest, it is called grassroots expressing themselves.

Remember, just a year ago under the Bush administration, dissent was the highest form of patriotism. And today it is a kind of either organized anger, it's a facsimile of anger, it's unpatriotic, it's whatever.

Look, there is a genuine revolt against the idea of remaking a [health-care] system when over 80 percent of Americans have health insurance. Five of six of those are happy with their health care, and four of five are happy with their health insurance.

You have an administration arrogantly deciding it is going to tear it all up, start all over, and people are surprised that there are protests, and say that it had to be manufactured? Of course it is spontaneous. [If] people go together on a bus, that's entirely legitimate, and it ought to be encouraged.

"If people go together on a bus" to this entirely spontaneous demonstration of American political dissent.

Of course, his other points are just as salient.

• Dissent was encouraged during the Bush administration
• I guess it depends on who you mean by "ordinary Americans"
• Yes, there's "genuine revolt" over the idea of remaking health care in this country

"And they eat your brains"

Tying the zombies to Republican leadership. Well played, sirs.



And this is the point:

[T]hat's exactly what's happening in Congress. Indeed, the very rules of the Senate empower mobilized minorities over majorities even when those majorities are mobilized, too. When the filibuster is employed, it takes 60 percent of the Senate, not 50 percent plus one, to enact legislation.

The rise of the filibuster should give constitutional originalists some pause.... Simply put, that number means that the Senate now runs by minority rule. A more corrosive attack on the first principle of democracy, that of majority rule, is hard to conceive. The increasingly routine use of the filibuster stymies the efficacy of government (in itself a conservative objective) and negates the consequences of elections.

But minority rule is what today's Republicans are all about. Hence we see disruption in the districts and stagnation in the Senate. When and whether the majority will bestir itself to reestablish democracy's first principle is anybody's guess. Abolishing the filibuster would be a good start -- and perhaps a necessary step to enact to big changes like health reform.

Good point. Republicans on the Hill and the Republicans in the base seem to be operating under a bizarre assumption: he who throws the biggest tantrum wins. It's no way for a political system to operate.

"I'm with stupid" seems to be the fashion statement du jour for these people.

They mean, of course, the angry mobs at Palin rallies, but this has been the Right wing playbook for eight long years, if not 40.

Brooks Bros. Riots

The vigilantes are back.

Between the birthers and the astroturfing tea baggers, it's damned hard to run a democracy around here.

And, of course, the media covering these events will continue to be bamboozled, just as they were during the 2000 recount.

The crazy stakes

Be afraid. No, really. Be afraid.

Kind of like Karen Finley

I'm beginning to wonder if the joke's on us and the wingnutosphere is nothing more than a brilliantly conceived piece of performance art.

Self-defense is legal, except when it's not

For Cliff May, nationalism is fine for Americans, but not for those living elsewhere.

Fox headline just now:

CIA Director Pulled the Plug on “Secret” CIA Assassin Plan

But shouldn’t the media — not least Fox — be discussing (now that the cat is out of the bag) whether it’s a good idea to pull the plug on plans to eliminate Osama bin Laden and others dedicated to slaughtering Americans by the thousands?

On a BBC radio show the other night, the interviewer asked me: “Wouldn’t such a plan be illegal?”

I replied that I was pretty sure that defending Americans — and even using force to do so — is not illegal, at least not yet.

Um, I'm pretty sure that efforts by American agents to target and assassinate someone in another country we are not at war with -- even if it's Osama bin Laden -- violate the law of that country as well as our own. That's why this program -- whether it was just a PowerPoint presentation, as some have suggested, or something more actionable -- was kept secret from Congress.

Further, I wonder what May would squeal if we learned that Cuba had plans to "eliminate" this guy in Texas.

And, by the way, I doubt very much we've taken "eliminating" Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders off the table. For all their dubious morality and international legality, those predator drones are still buzzing around, I believe.

If Iran falls and there are no conservatives to see it...

I know the wingnutosphere is ADD Central, but it is astonishing to me that attention to what is happening in Iran is simply nowhere to be found. I mean, what to make of the silence to this?

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Three prominent clerics criticized the Iranian authorities on Monday for failing to condemn the recent killing of Muslims in western China. Their comments often seemed aimed at the Iranian government’s own conduct during the crackdown after the disputed June 12 presidential election.

One of the clerics, Ayatollah Youssef Sanei, a reformist, drew a sardonic parallel, suggesting that Iran, which considers itself the defender of Muslims worldwide, could not criticize China’s repressive tactics while it was doing the same thing. He also said Iran’s silence was related to its commercial, military and political links with China.

“How could China suppress the Muslims so violently and seek good relations with Muslim countries, and sometimes dominate their markets?” Ayatollah Sanei wrote, in comments published on news services and reformist Web sites.

Several Parliament members and a member of the Tehran City Council have invoked the same comparison, Web sites reported. Although some seem genuinely upset by the deaths of Muslim Uighurs in western China, the issue has clearly gained a special resonance in light of the violence in Iran, where many opposition protesters have been killed and wounded since the election.

Is it because the right actually opposes the democracy movement in Iran as that might...might...diminish the blood lust towards bombing the country?

Or is it because they're siding with China anyway?