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When the Don Imus controversy happened five years ago, Leonard Pitts had a great column explaining why it was so offensive, which you can read in full here. Here’s an excerpt that shows the crux of his point:

While a coarse and irreverent people will tolerate and even celebrate breaches of decorum and the slaughter of sacred cows, one thing folks won’t put up with, one thing that riles something deep in human nature, is somebody who picks on someone smaller.

This is exactly the mistake Limbaugh made. And this what the people who complain that Limbaugh is being punished more than Ed Schultz was for calling Laura Ingraham the same thing, or why Bill Maher has never been punished for his various insults to Sarah Palin, don’t understand. Limbaugh is a successful radio host, and Sandra Fluke is a student. Limbaugh is the more powerful one in the equation, whereas Bill Maher is a successful comedian attacking a successful politician, and Ingraham and Schultz are both pundits.

I haven’t seen anyone else say this in so many words ever since Pitts did, but I think it’s a very important point.

UPDATE: Thought of another example. President Obama’s comments on the Henry Louis Gates arrest and the subsequent “Beer Summit”. That was basically the same deal. Although he might not have meant to, what it looked like was the President of the United States saying on national TV that some regular guy is “stupid”. That’s why Obama had to make amends.

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In the course of a long and sometimes incoherent explanation of why he “apologized” to Sandra Fluke, Rush Limbaugh said something I hadn’t heard about before:

What this was all about was the president of the United States acting extra-constitutionally, mandating that Catholic churches and their schools provide contraceptives, abortifacients.  He doesn’t have that power constitutionally.  He cannot mandate these things…

That was the original purpose of the hearing.  [Darrell Issa] was to get facts into the record that otherwise would not be aired, but [Issa’s] committee is made up of Republicans and Democrats and there are rules and procedures that are followed in calling witnesses.  So the Democrats tried to play a game with Darrell Issa and his committee, and he rejected it.  What they did was, they requested a witness for his hearing, a man named Barry Lynn to make their points for them…

At literally the last minute the Democrats decided they want Sandra Fluke… not because she had any special knowledge or credentials like Barry Lynn has, but because her optics as a woman and a college student, a 30-year-old college student and an activist on Democrat issues, by the way.

Limbaugh’s source for this information is this article in The Washington Examiner. I have to say, this is an interesting point, and if true, it does indeed paint the Democrats in a bad light, though not at all for the reasons Limbaugh thinks.

Barry Lynn is the head of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It would have been idiotic for the Democrats to have an expert on that issue–even one sympathetic to their side–testify on this issue because it is allowing the Republicans to draw them into their type of battle. The Republicans wanted it to be “separation of Church and State” issue, not a public health issue. And the Democrats, by the sound of things, were very nearly stupid enough to go along with them.

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Breitbart.com has published its late namesake’s final piece. The statement on the site claims it is the first step in their quest to fulfill Breitbart’s desire to “vet” President Obama.

His last column concerns a play about the community organizer Saul Alinsky that was staged in Chicago in 1998. Of note, in Breitbart’s opinion, is that then-State Senator Obama appeared on a panel discussing the play after its conclusion. This panel also included various individuals who Breitbart alleges had ties to communism. This, he determines, casts much suspicion on Obama. Then there is the fact that the promotional materials for the event misspell Obama’s name, which, the article seems to imply, is more evidence of his sinister designs.

Then Breitbart, having apparently reasoned

The play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the President.

goes on to provide us with a synopsis of it. It is rather a disjointed account, but then, I have not seen the play. Perhaps the fault here is not Breitbart’s, but the dramatist’s. And I don’t quite see the part where I am supposed to be horrified at the idea of the Commander-in-Chief to be watching such a play.

The fact that Obama showed up to talk about some play is not terribly damning, in my eyes. It is true that other people, perhaps quite bad people, showed up as well, but when you are State Senator your job is to curry favor within your district, and you cannot help it if it is the one populated by communist sympathizers. Not that I wish to imply I trust Breitbart’s accusations of communism, but I mean that even if he is entirely right, he has still proven nothing about the character of the President.

He fails to provide any information concerning what Obama said on the panel. He gives a plausible account of his whereabouts, but you can only determine so much about someone from that. Especially a politician, who will go anywhere where they have persuadable voters. If this is what their “vetting” of the President is going to be like, I would say that he does not have much to worry about.

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I’m going to talk about Rush Limbaugh’s comments on Sandra Fluke here, but first, a reading from Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West:

The abundant proliferation of primitive people is a natural phenomenon, which is not even thought about, still less judged as to its utility or the reverse. When reasons have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become questionable. At that point begins prudent limitation of the number of births. The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature… Instead of children, she has soul conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.” [Chapter 13, p. 245]

That part is from the chapter wherein Spengler is contrasting city people and rural people. It is kind of like “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse“, as written by a pessimistic, nationalistic German philosopher. Reading Spengler is very disturbing  to a cosmopolitan liberal such as myself, since I can’t help but sense a hostility on his part towards that type of person. And yet, the other types he liked so much are also those least likely to ever read the works of an obscure philosopher, so there it is.

But you are no doubt wondering: why did I drag a long-dead and half-forgotten German nationalist writer in today? Well, first I wanted to note that he is noting a difference in attitudes towards birth control between city people and rural people. This difference matches up nicely with the broader differences between cosmopolitan city-dwellers and nationalist farmers that we often see. (I talked about this a little in this post about why Sarah Palin likes “small town America” so much.)

Alright, enough of that. What are the nationalists in our own day and age up to? Well, as you all have heard, Rush Limbaugh has been calling Sandra Fluke various insults and making disgusting insinuations and suggestions. That is quite a reprehensible and loathsome thing to do–not to mention unchivalrous, if we use the language of Limbaugh’s longed-for days before feminism. His full comments are these:

Well, what would you call someone who wants us to pay for her to have sex? What would you call that woman? You’d call ’em a slut, a prostitute or whatever.

He is, in addition to being rude, completely wrong. These terms do not apply, and moreover this is not even what Ms. Fluke is asking for. She is actually asking for insurance companies to cover contraceptives. At best, Limbaugh could argue that people are paying indirectly by causing these companies to raise rates, but then one can just as easily argue that those who refuse to take steps to ameliorate the disastrous effects of changes in the climate are forcing me to pay for their reckless behavior, since increased storms mean increased insurance costs.

In any event, part of Limbaugh’s job is to shock people, and this he has certainly done, yet again. I am not optimistic about attempts to make companies pull advertising–though it’s certainly worth a try–because I fear that there are a great many people who agree with him. Whether they have come by their opinions honestly, or simply by dint of listening to Limbaugh is hard to say, but as long as he has a fanbase, he will continue to have advertisers.

On being accused of misogyny, Limbaugh quoted H.L. Mencken’s definition of a misogynist as “a man who hates women as much as women hate one another.” I am not sure why he mentioned this, or what it means, or how it is relevant, but there you have it. And then Limbaugh said the following amazing statement to explain why he is not “a Danger to the Women of America”:

They want to blame me as being the person they should fear, when in fact the people doing all these things I just said I have no power to do, the Democrat Party is doing. That’s who everybody’s afraid of in this country… They’re afraid of Democrat Party.  They’re afraid of the Obama administration.  The Obama administration will take away your birth control, and if you let ’em do that, they’ll tell you when you can and can’t take it. And then they’ll tell you when you can and can’t have sex, and then they will tell you when you can or cannot have an abortion!

You give them this power, that’s what they want.

Now, I think I kind of understand what he’s trying–and failing–to say here. It’s similar to the idea that Gerald Ford was expressing when he said “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”

Except that has no relevance here. Fluke was asking for the government to make contraceptives cheaper. Now, it is certainly true that the power of the State is such that it could take this away, also. However, they would only take it away if the control of the state were handed to people who want to do so–the Rush Limbaughs of the world, in other words.

So, this last statement is a brilliant exercise in what Orwell called doublethink, but we have come to expect that from Limbaugh. But what’s worse is that I suspect he must have a sizeable number of listeners who agree with him. As Ferrerman mentioned, there are many others who think like Limbaugh. It would be a fine thing if he were punished for his remarks, but the truth is that the real problem with Limbaugh and his odious sentiments is not that he says them, but that when he says them, he is, alas, speaking for many others.

UPDATE 3/3/2012 7:41 PM: Limbaugh apologizes to Fluke. I have to say, I’m surprised. I would have expected his show to end before he would do that.

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In Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story The Devil and Daniel Webster, the Devil at one point says:

“When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on her deck. Am I not in your books and stories and beliefs, from the first settlements on? […] I am merely an honest American like yourself — and of the best descent — for, to tell the truth, Mr. Webster, though I don’t like to boast of it, my name is older in this country than yours.”

It’s a very interesting story, for it is very patriotic–jingoistic, even–but it doesn’t deny the unpleasant parts of American history, either.

I was reminded of this on hearing the recent controversy over Rick Santorum’s comment that Satan “has his sights on… a good, decent, powerful, influential country – the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age. [sic] There is no one else to go after other than the United States“.

First of all, as I said before, I’m not a religious person. And also, I have no intention of voting for Rick Santorum. I do not plan to vote for any Republican candidate, and even if I did, Santorum would be my third choice out of the current field of four. So, I am not defending him here.

However, it doesn’t quite make sense to me why this is such a big deal. I mean, it is a (in my opinion, regrettable) fact that this country is not going to elect a President who does not publicly profess to be a Christian anytime soon. We have had Presidents who were not very religious in the past, of course, but nobody knew it then, because they kept it to themselves. Personally, I think this is a sub-optimal state of affairs, but there’s no point in denying it.

So, given that, and given that the Bible talks about this “Satan” figure rather a lot, why should anybody be surprised to hear Santorum talking about him? I mean, if you believe in the Bible, as Christians are supposed to do, it seems like you’ll probably end up believing in Satan, too. Now, I know some Christians regard him as an actual guy with horns who is out there somewhere, and some think of him more as a symbolic character representing “Evil”. It seems to me that Santorum’s comments could be read either way, as well. Why is everyone so surprised? Did people actually not realize what Santorum believes before now?

So, with that said, I personally don’t care for what he says in this speech at all, and it has very little to do with the Satan bit, and almost everything to do with deeper, philosophical issues. Again, it’s interesting to contrast the ideas in The Devil and Daniel Webster with Santorum’s remarks. Here’s part of Daniel Webster’s big speech from Benét’s  story:

[Webster] talked of the early days of America and the men who had made those days… He admitted all the wrong that had ever been done. But he showed how, out of the wrong and the right, the suffering and the starvations, something new had come. And everybody had played a part in it, even the traitors.

Santorum:

[Satan] didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has [sic] so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

Like I said, both the story and Santorum’s speech are basically advancing nationalistic viewpoints, and yet Benét’s story has a much more optimistic–dare I say it, “progressive”–theme to it, whereas Santorum’s is a dark vision of decadence. I just think that’s kind of interesting. Of course, Benét wrote that in 1937–maybe he would be firmly in the Santorum camp if he were around today. Who knows?

Nationalist conservatives nowadays are very reluctant to entertain the notion of wrongdoing in the early days of the country. It’s curious–I think their narrative requires that everything be wonderful until the damned liberals showed up.

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President Obama–the same President Obama who is allegedly engaging in “class warfare” and supposedly out to tax “job-creators”–has announced a plan to “lower the corporate tax rate from 35% to 28%.” Read all about it.

One thing to keep in mind before arguing about what this plan means is that it is a plan that is being proposed. Meaning that if anything ever does come of it, it will probably be completely different than it is now, once all the different interests have hashed it out.

But, just for fun, let’s talk about it. Apparently, idea is that in exchange for these tax cuts, “corporations would have to give up dozens of loopholes and subsidies that they now enjoy. Corporations with overseas operations would also face a minimum tax on their foreign earnings“, according to the Associated Press article.

Okay, but here’s the thing: ultimately whether it comes under the label “taxes”, “loopholes”, “subsidies” or what have you, there is ultimately only one question: do the corporations get more money as a result of this plan or less? I’d like to see some sort of estimated balance sheet that gives some idea whether corporations, if treated as a monolith, win or lose from this plan. I won’t hold my breath, though, because it’s going to be virtually impossible to get good reporting on that.

More to the point, even if you somehow did find that out, we would then have to drill down into the details of which corporations will lose and which will win, and then try to figure out if they’re the right ones. Which is always a gamble, because it’s basically the same problem as trying to pick winners. And then of course, as the AP article points out it is unlikely that any of this will happen in an election year, and thus, even assuming Obama does get re-elected, it’s unknown what the Congress will look like next year.

This is why the idea of getting rid of the whole tax code appeals to people. It appealed to me, in my Libertarian days, until I realized that since taxes in some form are necessary to run a government, there would have to be new one installed, and in the course of installing it, all the same problems would immediately recur.

While we’re on the topic, why is Obama doing this, if such a class-warrior he is? Is he just as beholden to the corporate interests as his Republican opponents. I don’t know, but I know some Democrats who are going to think so.

Long-time readers might remember when I asked the question “was Theodore Roosevelt a socialist?” I said at the time that I thought T.R. “was merely a pragmatist, and found that the easiest way to thwart radical socialism was to allow for moderate socialism.” The same argument could apply here, if we ask “is Obama out to aid the corporations?”* Well, yes, but not as much as the Republicans are. The easiest way to thwart radical corporate tax cuts is to allow for moderate ones.

 

*I did not ask “is Obama a Capitalist?” for reasons which are long and complicated. The short version is that, in my view, very few people can actually be said to be “capitalist”, as almost all countries, governments, and corporations engage in some scheme of artificial wealth redistribution, which, according to some Republicans makes them “socialist”. By their definition, almost everything short of anarchy is socialism. Also, of course, helping corporations isn’t quite the same as being a capitalist, but it’s not being a socialist either.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates used to occasionally do posts titled “Talk To Me Like I’m Stupid” when he wanted to know about some subject. I am going to borrow his line to put some questions to you readers on the issue of Catholics and their opposition to contraception, which has been in the news lately.

I am not a religious person, and never have been. Most of what I know about religion is just the commonplace knowledge one can’t help picking up in our society. But I don’t know much detail, or history, of religious teachings. So, I don’t actually understand why so many Catholics, especially their leaders, are against contraception. I consulted my favorite source, Wikipedia, on the topic, and it reported that the Catechism of the Catholic Church is where it’s all codified.

Unfortunately, having read that article, it’s still not clear to me who originally wrote this Catechism and when. Apparently, it rests on the authority of the Pope–which surprised me, because I was expecting that something from the Bible itself would be the ultimate grounds for this. I was surprised, in fact, by how little the actual Bible got cited in all this.

Now, on to the second issue I don’t understand. If I recall correctly, this whole thing started because religious institutions don’t want to have to pay for contraceptives for their employees. Now, what I’ve never seen actually explained is: might it be the case  that some of  these employees are not followers of the same religion as their employer? If  so, then the question becomes: Is there a “nor tolerate those who do” clause anywhere in the Catholic teachings?

That’s important, because if it turns out there is, it could lead to some serious problems. But quite honestly, I realize that the answers to these questions are probably quite obvious, and that I am displaying an embarrassing ignorance of the subject.

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On his show today, Rush Limbaugh was talking about James Taranto’s interview with Jeffrey Bell in the WSJ.  Bell’s argument is that “social conservatism” is very useful for winning elections for Republicans. He, and Taranto and Limbaugh, all seem to feel that this is a novel idea. It sounds to me like he’s just reiterated Thomas Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas?, except without the part about how, once elected, Republicans immediately go back to pursuing their economic agenda.  But in fairness, as I haven’t read Bell’s book, I don’t want to dismiss his work.

So, what is this “social conservatism”, anyway? Well, I guess it’s opposition to abortion, contraception, homosexuality, agnosticism, atheism and so on. Bell defines it broadly as opposition to the sexual revolution. And, in the Taranto interview, he elaborates:

Mr. Bell notes that social conservatism is largely a working-class phenomenon: “Middle America does have more children than elite America, and they vote socially conservative, even though they might not necessarily be behaving that way in their personal life. They may be overwhelmed by the sexual revolution and its cultural impacts.”Mr. Bell squares that circle by arguing that social conservatism is “aspirational” and “driven by a sense in Middle America that the kind of cultural atmosphere we have, the kind of incentives, the example set by government, is something that has to be pushed back against.” [Italics mine]

Since Bell’s whole book is about social conservatism, this seems surprisingly vague. Maybe he’s just saving up the real “nuts-and-bolts” description of social conservatism for his book–you don’t want to give away the big plot twist on the posters, after all. Still, it’s kind of weird.

As usual, my opinion is that everything begins to make a lot more sense if instead of “social conservatism”, you insert the word “nationalism”. I hope talk about this more thoroughly later this week, but the short version is that I have come to believe that “nationalism” covers far more than just jingoism; it pretty much accounts for all the things that are typically labeled “social conservatism”.

Anyway though, for now, let’s just focus on Bell’s point, which is that this is a winning strategy for the Republicans. Of course, he’s right. I think we can all agree on that. He even makes a point very close to one I made awhile back about the Democrats being willing to trade extending the Bush tax-cuts for the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”. So, he’s basically right in his assessment of how this dynamic works.

Where I think he’s wrong is when he implies that “the Left” is “imposing” social liberalism on people. Forgive me, but I don’t quite see it. “Liberalism” is derived from the Latin word for “free”. Liberalism is about freedom. Is it possible to impose freedom? Maybe, but it’s an odd way of putting it. You could say the Founders “imposed” freedom from the Proclamation of 1763 on the colonies, but it sounds strange.

Since what the social liberals are arguing for are things like “freedom for gays to serve in the military” and “freedom to use contraception”, I don’t quite understand why you would choose to couch this as “imposing” it. You could argue that perhaps these are freedoms that people ought not to have. I happen to disagree with that, but it’s an argument you could make, because it is widely agreed there are some things that people are not free to do. But that is different than saying these ideas are being “imposed” upon people.

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Charlotte Allen has a rather baffling piece in the Los Angeles Times. She begins like this:

A few years ago Ann Coulter published a book titled “How to Talk to Liberal (If You Must).” With all due respect, Coulter, one of my favorite conservative eye-pokers, was wrong. There is no “how” in talking to a liberal. You can’t talk to a liberal, period.

She then goes on to cite numerous cases in which she attempted to. This one is my favorite:

[A]s I was defending my doctoral dissertation on a medieval topic, I mentioned that wealthy women of that time often functioned as patrons of the arts, commissioning beautifully decorated religious books. “Women like pretty things,” I said. OMG! I looked around at the three learned but liberal female professors on the committee, their smiles suddenly frozen into rictuses, groans issuing from their lips. How was I going to tell my husband, who had already made the reservations for a celebratory dinner, that I’d failed the defense? (Fortunately, I didn’t, but it was a scary moment.)

I mean, that’s just nit-picking, in my opinion. If they had failed her over it, that would be another matter, but as it stands I don’t see why she should whine about a minor incident like the expression of someone’s face. Or at least don’t go using “these people looked at me funny once” to support a generalization about the adherents of an entire ideology.

(As an aside, I have had very interesting conversations about gender differences with liberal friends of mine–liberal female friends, at that! So, I can match Ms. Allen’s anecdotal evidence with some of my own.)

It’s not really a very ambitious article. It seems like its primary point amounts to “liberals suck”, and it never moves beyond that.

But wait! The L.A. Times, being a fair publication, also has a liberal, Diana Wagman, submit her views on the issue of “liberals vs. conservatives”.  The point of it, essentially, is that she is a liberal and she and her conservative neighbor got along fine until they found about one another’s politics, at which a point they yelled at one another a lot. And now she feels bad because they hate each other.

The two articles conform almost humorously to stereotypes–the conservative says that liberals suck, and the liberal remarks how sad it is that there’s so much hate in the world.

So, I guess another anecdote of mine is in order. Two of my friends in college were conservative, and I don’t think either of them knew I was a liberal. Whenever they’d say something like “those liberals are a bunch of idiots”, I’d say something like “Oh, yeah? What have they done now?” Then they would tell me, and I would smile and nod. I generally was able to ask them their opinions of things without them ever asking me for mine. And that suited us all just fine.

Should I have spoken up? Am I a traitor to the cause for not doing so? Maybe. But I didn’t think it was likely I would change their minds, and so I made a calculation that it was better to have friends I could rely on in matters not political than not have them at all.

On this blog, of course, I take a different tack: I tell people my views, and if they express different ones, then I am happy to debate with them. Mostly, this is because it will leave a written record, and it’s possible–unlikely, but possible–that someday I may write something interesting in the course of debating that might be useful either to the person I’m debating or else to some third-party who happens by and reads it. But this was very unlikely to happen in conversation.

Most people are not  good at spoken debate. I know I’m not. The closest thing we have to professional debaters are lawyers, and there’s a reason it takes so much training to be one of them. It’s a very difficult skill. Moreover, it’s even worse in political matters, because the two parties actively try to teach their techniques that are designed to benefit the Party, not further discussion or aid in arriving at something like the truth.

That’s what “talking points”, slogans and similar things that political parties put out are for; to keep people from having honest debates. Despite my reluctance to do so, I have been involved in a few spoken debates with Republicans. And I have witnessed many more between friends and family members. They can be quite amusing to watch because the participants on both sides very quickly fall into saying remembered phrases and slogans that they have learned from somewhere. It’s not really a debate; it’s like two synchronized recordings. This is true even for debates between actual politicians–the only difference is that they are usually better at hiding what they are doing.

Most people support their party fairly instinctively, and only learn the reasons and arguments they are putting out as a way of having something to say on their behalf. Personally, I try to always state my reasons for why I support them, and not their reasons for why I ought to support them. It’s very surprising how tough that can be.