Quick Afghanistan Take -

Tonight Obama, who I voted for and probably you did too, becomes LBJ without the Great Society. 

There really was a political way out:  "We can't afford it." 

Somehow, Democrats never understand the "we can't afford it" objection resonates with the public whenever the Republicans make it about a social program.  There shouldn't have been a single Democratic objection to either war over the past decade that didn't begin with the phrase, "Well, first of all, we can't afford it."  And now, a year into an Administration that does not have an exit strategy for double digit unemployment, we're about to escalate by 30,000 US troop involvement in Afghanistan. 

We can't afford it. 

According to the Cato Institute, the 2010 Pentagon budget (which doesn't assume additional money for this escalation) means "every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on (defense) programs and agencies next year."

When you consider the escalation, that makes one year of the defense budget the equivalent of ten years of health care. 

Why is that a good tradeoff?

We are, as I've written previously, in a period of rapidly unlearning what took generations to understand (that would be the title of my book: The Unlearning).  The difference between Obama and LBJ is LBJ didn't have a Vietnam to look back upon.  When Obama announces this troop escalation tonight, what I will see is the equivalent of that Republican Presidential debate when the candidates raised their hands to indicate they didn't believe in evolution. 

A decade of trillion dollar wars and tax cuts for the wealthy - a quarter century of deregulation on banking and corporate America has left our cupboard bare.  One out of every 8 Americans and 1 out of every 4 American children is currently on food stamps.

That's socialized food.  Probably a Nazi/Muslim/Communist plot.

1 in 4 kids.  Right now.  Today. 

And right now, today, we're about to escalate our involvement in an absolutely unwinnable Afghanistan.

We can't afford it. 

Fear of a Black Planet

One of my favorite episodes of Frontline ever was a piece on the 10 year anniversary of the OJ Simpson verdict; it was smarter about the actual trial than the culture has allowed us to be and contextualized it in the context of race relations.  Near the end, there was a segment in a South Central Los Angeles barbershop (the general consensus of the patrons, that the LAPD "framed a guilty man" was earlier offered in the documentary by a criminal procedure class at Georgetown Law) which ended with two of the African-American men doing a run about Simpson finding out he wasn't really accepted in the white community just like Michael Jackson found out he wasn't really accepted in the white community because at the end of the day, "white people call rich black people niggers."

In one of my previous health care pieces I got the jump on Jimmy Carter in suggesting the hyperbolic reaction to Obama bears a relationship to his race.  That doesn't mean that if you oppose Obama you're a racist - it doesn't even mean that Joe Wilson, Congressman from South Carolina who had previously opposed the removal of the Confederate flag from the state's capitol, had Obama's race consciously in his mind when he shouted out "you lie" during his address to Congress.  We've seen the same combination of dumbness, demogoguery, and corporate dollars in action mobilize in opposition to health care reform before.

What Obama's race does do is makes it easier for his opponents to get to that fevered level, makes it easier to cross that bridge to move him from "politician whose policies I disagree with" to "terrorist, Nazi, death panels, Muslim, Kenya, Manchurian Candidate, socialist, Arab."

There is a level of opposition to this health care bill that genuinely believes Obama is looking to destroy the United States - that his secret goal is to kill Americans.  They have filled talk radio with it, sent countless forwarded emails across cyberspace with it, that language existed at McCain-Palin campaign rallies, at the tea parties, the town hall meetings, the 9-12 March on Washington.  And some of it is clearly stoked - stoked by Simple Jack saying Obama has a "deep seated hatred for white people" or Rush Limbaugh saying "in Obama's America" black kids cheer as white kids get beaten up on a school bus (and the solution to that should be "segregation"), or by the National Republican Senatorial Committee who issued a poll which included the following question:

Rationing and Restricting Health Care - Are you concerned that health care rationing could lead to:
             
A "quota" system which would determine who would get treatment on the basis of race or age.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about another poll, a RNC poll that asked if people were concerned that political party affiliation might be a basis for determining who received treatment under a government run health care plan.  There is a feeder relationship in play here, Fox News and right wing talk have positioned themselves as the "real news" - where you won't get lied to by liberal facts like global warming or evolution.  Exponentially, the number of Americans who can live hermetically sealed in propaganda bubbles, uncluttered with thoughts other than those spewed at them by those married to the Christian and/or plutocratic right, has increased.  When you add the official imprint of the Republican Party, whether it's Sarah Palin connecting Obama to terrorists, calling his health care plan "evil", or Texas governor Perry using the word "secession", or that poll question - using the racially loaded word "quota" in the context of Obama's health care plan to imply that white people would lose access to doctors - it is just enough gas to set those predisposed to those sorts of thoughts aflame with anger.

You don't need to be racist to oppose Obama, but there haven't been guns at town hall meetings of the President before, there haven't been school district boycotts of Presidential speeches before, there haven't been Congressmen shouting out "you lie" at the President before, phrases like "terrorist fist jab" and "pals around with terrorists" weren't used to attack a President before. 

White Presidents, as Bill Clinton has pointed out, get attacked and attacked hard.  But less in a way which has as its premise the idea that they aren't really the President.  That they shouldn't be treated as the President.  There are lots of ways, to wrap this health care debate back to the first Obama speech, to think about what happened to Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, but there aren't white Harvard professors arrested under similar circumstances.  If we see a South Carolina congressman shout something at first African-American President that hasn't been shouted by a Congressman at a white President - or a Boston cop arrest a black Harvard professor for something a white Harvard professor has never been arrested for - it doesn't stretch the boundaries of fair play to fit that in a racial frame. 


Last week, a Republican congressman from Missouri used an anecdote about monkeys stealing golf balls to explain the condition in which conservatives find themselves in today's Washington.  Simple Jack and Rush Limbaugh have used the word "reparations" to explain Obama's motivating purpose behind social policy.  Limbaugh called Obama "an angry black guy". 

When some of his opponents see Obama, they don't see the President of the United States - they see "just another n***** in America."

Or Maybe They're Just Idiots.

Last night, I talked about the lunatic right wing fringe as held captive by the same plutocratic hegemony that has all of us in its grip.  Sure, they call Obama a Nazi instead of turning their rage on Goldman Sachs, but we are united in our fury toward the establishment.

I may be on the opposite side of the political spectrum from someone who says that government should keep its hands off Social Security, but I don't hate the vibe.

In fact, I feel about Joe Wilson the same way I feel about Mark Sanford.  Except for the part where these guys legislate one way and then live another, I couldn't possibly care less about who an elected official sleeps with.  I'd love to extend a metphorical hand across the aisle in a post-partisan way to say "okay, everyone sleeps with whomever they want - it's no longer a thing.  Break."  If Joe Wilson calling the President a liar during a speech to Congress means that now that type of thing is in play, I'm down.  I'd much, much, much prefer a political culture where the President (and all elected officials) were less untouchable glass figurines and more civil servants, just well compensated, highly publicized DMV clerks.  If we can give them the whatfor now - that's terrific - and I'll expect similar rabble rousing from a lefty Congressman the next time it's appropriate.  This is a good result. 

I'm still not down with taking the guns to speeches though. 

So, I'm feeling good about the crazies.  Maybe I'm adopting that 9-12 sensibility that Simple Jack talks about (which part of 9-12 was devoted to hating the victims' families - that's something Simple Jack has subsequently said he does). 

It's a brand new day!  I may go to a John Birch Society cross burning, er, meeting, later on.

But then I read this.

It's worse than that.

That's a New Jersey poll.  Those numbers are all voters.  So, a fifth of the voters in Jersey aren't sure if Obama's the Anti-Christ. 

When you ask Republicans, it's 1/3. 

And when you ask Hispanics, it's almost half.  Almost half of the Hispanics in New Jersey think the President of the United States may be the anti-Christ.

That means that almost half of the Hispanics in New Jersey actually believe the anti-Christ may exist, which is troubling enough. 

18,000 real Americans die every year because of a lack of health insurance.

That's a 9/11 every two months. 

But we're worried about ghost stories and fairy tales. 

The Devil's imaginary.  He won't get you any faster than the Easter Bunny will bring you a chocolate egg. 

What's gonna get you is not having health care.

(edit - on the other hand, which makes three hands, I believe, and creates an even more pressing need for health care, I thought Edgar Renteria was going to come through for me last night.  He did not.  They break my heart every year.  Where's the public option on my baseball team never having won a World Series?)

Stockholm Syndrome

One of the 18,000 Americans who will die this year because of a lack of health insurance, the only industrialized country in the world where this happens, is the real life Norma Rae.

There's reason to be angry about things that happen in the United States.  Reason to march on Washington, reason to call the President of the United States a liar; reason for rage.

Like the 19 million in fines the five largest California insurance companies have had to pay out in the past 18 months.

Or that domestic violence is a pre-existing condition.

And that executives of bailed out companies are taking home millions.:

"From 2006 through 2008, the top five executives at the 20 banks that have accepted the most federal bailout dollars since the meltdown averaged $32 million each in personal compensation" -Institute for Policy Studies

I don't care where the President was born.  I don't care what he thinks of Kanye or what Kanye thinks of Taylor Swift.  I do care that we're in another Gilded Age.  Economic inequality is greater in the United States than any other industrialized nation.  Americans are literally facing real life death panels today in the form of insurance claims departments.  We stand, almost all of us, at the mercy of the crappy corporations we work for; as long as our health care is completely tied to them we are beholden - unable to step out of line, to complain about workplace conditions, to attempt to unionize, as our workplaces slash our pay and vacations, increase our hours, bully, browbeat, threaten, and intimidate us at every turn.  How easy it is to snuff us out, foreclose our homes, split our families.  The dropout rate in poor school districts runs as high as 50% ensuring a permanent supply of troops to serve as chum satisfying our permanent demand of war. 

And yet people march on Washington to carry the water for power.  Any attempt to point out that we have become a plutocracy is met with fury.  Nazis.  Socialists.  Terrorists. 

That's all that's left.  Goldman Sachs takes home nearly 2 billion in profit in a quarter but somehow ordinary Americans actually believe Obama is tearing apart the fabric of capitalism. 

It's the ultimate case of Stockholm Syndrome.  Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Simple Jack worm the plutocrats propaganda right into the brains of the oppressed.  Instead of recognizing on whom the rage should be directed - it's funneled, as it's always been in American history, toward other marginalized groups.

Field slaves were taught to resent the house slaves.  Poor white colonists, barely ekeing out livings were taught to despite the Native Americans, fighting over the same scraps as were they.  "I ain't got no quarrel with the Viet Cong", Muhammad Ali insightfully said when refusing his induction into another American War against poor people of color in a far off place, "no Viet Cong ever called me nigger." 

Go kill middle eastern shepherds while Goldman Sachs makes 2 billion dollars.  Go kill Vietnamese.  Or Koreans.  They're the enemy.  Look over there.  Go kill Germans, they sunk the Lusitania.  Go kill the Spanish, they sunk the Maine.  Go kill Mexicans, they crossed the wrong parallel. 

Hate gays.  God says so.  Or Hispanics.  Learn the language or get out of the country.  Or blacks.  Simple Jack said Obama "hates white people."  Rush Limbaugh said today "In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering."

Go hate anyone you want.  Just let the money keep rolling in. 

While the body count keep rising.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Monday night my Giants won a baseball game; this matters because we haven’t won since and absent a statistically improbable stretch we’re marking the days until elimination.

There’s no mystery in why this Giants club will fall short of the playoffs; we have a historic imbalance between our pitching (giving up .8 runs per 9 innings less than league average) and hitting (scoring half a run less per game than league average); according to Baseball Prospectus our making the playoffs with that little offensive punch would be an almost singular happening: Unfortunately, none of the aforementioned teams disgraced the batter’s box as badly as Bochy’s bunch. Teams can clearly find their way into playoff baseball with poor offenses and tremendous rotations, but no team has done so with an awful offense even remotely comparable to the one fielded by the 2009 Giants since the Dodgers made the playoffs in the 1996 campaign.

But Monday, Juan Uribe homered twice and tripled – we scored a truckload of runs and moved to our high water mark for the season, 14 games over .500.

Gwen Knapp, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, said the real key to the win was a third inning bunt by Freddy Sanchez.

No, she really did. I know, right?

Here’s the thing – over a quarter century ago, one of the first matters argued by Bill James and subsequently proven incontrovertibly true is that bunting is harmful. Let’s say you are trailing 4-2 in the 8th inning, but have runners on first and second and nobody out. Your chance of scoring those runs decreases dramatically if you trade that scenario in to have one out and runners on 2nd and 3rd. Meaning – a successful bunt makes you less likely to score. This is true across the board in virtually any circumstance. There’s almost never a good reason to give up an out. We know this. Baseball’s almost entirely transparent. We keep really good records.  If a situation in baseball has occured before, we know what the result was.  If it's occured enough times, there's a predictive value to those past results. 

Despite this, Knapp, who gets paid to write about the Giants, credited the win to a bunt.

The scenario wasn’t exactly as I described; I mean – two runs down in the 8th inning, no outs, two on – this could be a big inning, right – a crooked number that might save the season. Clearly, that’s not a spot where you want to sacrifice an out – I mean, who would possibly do that? 

The Giants did it. Two days later. The bunt was unsuccessful. The Giants didn’t score. The Giants lost.  The Giants lost.  Again.  The San Francisco Giants have had 30 years of the 2 greatest players in National League history and have never won a World Series.  But we sure do bunt sometimes. 

So what was today's game story? How did the Chronicle report this catastrophic blunder?

That the fault wasn’t the strategy – it was the failure to execute that strategy better. 

Why is this important? It’s important because faced with that situation, the Giants, and similarly wrong thinking organizations throughout all manner of human endeavor, will bunt again. And sometimes, the bunt will work – and if it’s followed by a barrage of home runs – someone will wrongly credit the bunt.

And it’s going to cost us more games. And more games. And more games.

Why does this bunting myth persist? How can reasonable people, people who watch even more baseball than do I, fail to understand that even successful bunts are bad ideas – that they are making it less likely to win the game?

I think for two reasons.

One – because it feels like something’s happening. The runners are moving forward – and that’s what you want – you’re getting closer to the plate – closer to scoring. The cost of that movement, the out, isn’t properly appreciated; it’s subsumed by the flashiness of the success.  If I run really fast off of a cliff and flap my arms there may be a moment where it feels to me like I'm flying - it may, if you take a snapshot at exactly the right time - may even look to an outsider writing a story, look like I'm flying. 

But that's just 'cause the ground is too far away for me to notice yet that I am in free fall. 

The other reason is because it privileges expertise – strategy – playing the game “the right way.” If I’m an absolute novice, a blank slate in baseball analysis, I would look at the two homers and the triple, the actual scoring blows, and say “that Uribe guy won the game” – but the knowledgeable, those who possess the secret, special sauce understanding of the game within the game, can chuckle from an insider’s position, “you just don’t get it; you can't understand how things really work.”

Those secret divine codes are how sportswriters – and managers – how broadcasters – and coaches – how the privileged elite keep their positions. As long as games are won and lost through hidden, special strategies like that bunt – through unquantifiable means like chemistry and leadership – it maintains the requirement that those who possess those special powers stay in their positions. How does the sportswriter keep a job in 2009, when every element of every game can be watched, recorded, and analyzed by anyone with the MLB package at least as well as those who sit in the press box – she has to possess a particular, specialized level of fancypants understanding. Sure, it looks like it was those two homers – but let me tell you it was really the bunt. And that manager standing in the corner wearing a uniform for no apparent reason – well he hasn’t crossed the plate a single time all year, but without him – who would call for those magical game changing bunts? Who will  marshal collective energies of the great unwashed if not for the great and glorious leader, growing greater and more glorious every day? How can we, with only Juan Uribe and his trifling two homers and a triple, possibly win baseball games?

(Yes, this is turning into metaphor)

So, what does this have to do with the picture of the congressman from South Carolina who called the President of the United States a "liar" during a joint session of Congress last night?

I don’t know what lesson you’re going to learn from the trillion dollar endless war in Iraq.

Me, I’m learning it wasn’t poor execution, it was that we shouldn’t have done it in the first place.  It wasn't that the generals failed to get down the bunt - it was that bunting is a poor percentage play.

I don’t know what lesson you’re learning from the economic collapse.

Me, I’m learning that it wasn’t poor business judgment by some lenders, that it was the strategy of laissez faire as preached/practiced by conservatives over the past quarter century.   An entire mountain of inside baseball economic theories thoroughly discredited.

I don’t know what lesson you’re learning from the current health care crisis.

Me, I’m learning that it isn’t about too many lawsuits, not about a couple of overpaid CEOs, not about the disinclination of Americans to wash their hands. It’s about a system that makes health a private good as opposed to a public one. Every other democracy makes the choice that health is like fire protection or police protection – even if you can’t afford it, as a member of that society you should still receive coverage. Why don't we privatize the fire department (as we once did), or call the police force "socalized law and order"?  Why have a public school system at all - if parents really want their kids to learn to read and write, they'd get good enough jobs to afford to send them to private school.  Where they could pray.  To Jesus. 

Everyone else says their citizens deserve cops.  And fire departments.  And health care.  It's a choice they make as a society.

We choose to bunt with 2 on and no one out.   Which sounds like socialized baseball now that you think about it.  Sacrificing for your fellow man. 

The Congressman pictured way at the top, Joe Wilson from South Carolina, called Obama a liar last night during his speech – most have reacted negatively to this.

Let me go the other way.

On the substance, obviously the guy’s a crackpot. He called Obama a liar for saying illegal aliens won’t be covered under the health plan. He is in error.  Democrats do not want to take doctors who would normally be saving Republican lives and instead force them to give abortions to illegal aliens. 

(If Obama's a white dude, does the congressman from South Carolina do that?  If Obama's a white dude, would a Georgia Senator say he needed to show some humility?  When we look back on this - what will the historical context be of white southern congressmen shouting "you lie" as the first African-American President speaks before Congress?  What will the context be when we talk about Simple Jack saying that  the first African-American President "hates white people"?  How challenging will it be to connect those dots? )

There are those who have reacted negatively to the conservatives in the town hall meetings who have shouted and screamed and called Obama a Nazi-socialist-grandma killa.

Let me go the other way.

On the substance, these people are subliterate. Universal health care doesn’t make you a Nazi; if it did, there’d be a lot of Scandanavians with Hitlerstache. And if a country with as much unfettered corporate power as ours is socialist, that means the world’s awash in red.

But the take that we should just be respectful and mind the great and powerful President as he dispenses wisdom is a bad lesson to learn. If the Democrats had shouted down Bush when he was talking about weapons of mass destruction, or passing tax cuts for the wealthy, or gutting civil liberties protection, or the whole host of other sins to noxious to speak about in a baseball post – wouldn’t that have been a better result?

I want a Congressman to tell truth to power.  Loud, obnoxious, totally disrespectful truth. 

If the only way to get that ability is to allow a Congressman to lie to power, I'll take that trade.

We don’t need more deference to authority. We need less. When the President orders a missile strike or the Giants manager orders a bunt, I want to be able to shout at him.  I shouted at my television endlessly when Bruce Bochy sent Kevin Frandsen up to bunt, down 2 runs with nobody out in the 8th inning of a game we absolutely had to have.  If I then had to sit in a room with him, I'd have screamed that he was a crummy manager and demanded to see proof that he was born in this country and not a secret Dodger raised from birth to inflitrate us, one who would probably hand Russ Ortiz the "winning ball" as he lifted him from a World Series we were 8 outs away from winning with a 5 run lead!! 

Oh, yeah. 

If you’re wrong, you’re wrong. Regardless of title, position, or protocol.  And someone should say it.

Enough with the bunting already. 

51%

Only 51% of Kentuckians believe the President of the United States was born in the United States.

This is why every other industrialized country in the world has health care.  And we have 18,000 Americans dying every year because of a lack of health insurance.

You want a death panel?  A death panel is an insurance company denying you coverage because of a pre-existing condition.  That didn't stop Rudy from waving the invisible bloody shirt on Meet the Press Sunday; saying that without tort reform the only way to pay for new health care is by pulling the plug on grandma.

Tort reform's a scam.  I know you've been told otherwise, by the insurance lobby for the past twenty years, but here's a quick clue - there have been numerous states like mine, which have had aggressive tort reform, capping damage awards, limiting potential claims, narrowing the courthourse doorway opening to potential plaintffs.  But somehow insurance premiums don't fall accordingly.  Somehow, it turns out that insurance companies are really just interesting in making every dollar they can.  Tort reform's just another way to accomplish that. 

We're too dumb to survive.  We are going to wave flags and and guns and bibles until we collapse.  Lots of reasons for this.  The corporatized media, as discussed in today's Greenwald is a good place to start.

I thought Oakland giving up a 1 for Richard Seymour was the dumbest thing I'd see all weekend.  Then I thought that Juan Manuel Marquez drinking his own urine in preparation for his upcoming loss to Floyd Mayweather was the most backward thing I'd see all weekend.  And then I saw that poll.

Half of the people in Kentucky think that Obama was born in the United States.  Half. There you go.

Simple Jack Bakes Kwanzaa Cake.

I enjoy the Food Network, despite (or perhaps because) much of it is shot like porn, with the extreme closeups and the money shots.

I never gave much thought to Sandra Lee until I saw this. It's something she calls a Kwanzaa Cake - which naturally commemorates African heritage with popcorn, corn nuts, and apple pie filling.  It's as if she saw the one Friends episode where Rachel makes that trifle with jam and ground beef and peas and sponge cake and thought "not only does that Jennifer Aniston have kick ass hair and sure can keep a man, but look how colorful that dessert looks!  Peas and Jam!  Why had no one thought of this before!"

It's as big a revelatory train wreck as you're likely to see, it's the moment where you recognize not that Sandra Lee had a bad day, it's that she simply has no idea what she's doing.  It's bad enough that I'm always surprised she's been able to keep her gig; she was just so exposed as fraudulent, I can't believe anyone could view that and ever take her seriously again.

It was precisely the same thought I had watching this.  Simple Jack goes on a nearly ten minute rant about how Rockefeller Center (and therefore NBC) is ground zero for a secret communist/fasicst/progressive plot based on hidden messages in the artwork that prefigure the rise of Obama.

No.  I'm not kidding. 

These types of lunatics used to be confined to the outhouse of political debate; Lyndon LaRouche has been around for decades; the John Birch Society decades before that.  Probably you've gotten a INCOME TAX IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL, HERE'S THE PROOF! email from some wingnut (or Wesley Snipes); I used to encounter the occasional criminal defendant who said the .19 that he blew should be excluded from evidence as under principles of maritime law American criminal courts had no jurisdiction over his actions. 

But now they're on TV.  And the radio.  And they have book deals.  And they run school boards.

School districts in 7 states aren't going to run Obama's "hey kids, work hard, study, stay in school" speech next week out of concern that it will be communist propaganda. A "keep your kids at home" movement is underway among the right.

It seems, as has much of the right blather since the election, like purposeless hyperbole.  You know Obama's not building an unholy socialist army of the night.  If there are people who don't, they're too far gone to reason with.

But simultaneously in the news cycle comes this. That's the Texas state board of education preparing to change the way US history is taught in Texas, in a way that props up "significant conservative advocacy organizations and individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, and the Moral Majority" without any sort of progressive equivalent.  This is important because Texas and California drive the high school textbook market - a version of US History taught in Texas may well become the version of US History taught everywhere. 

Under the shouts of "Obama's indoctrinating schoolchildren" comes actual propaganda forced into curricula. 

You want to laugh when conservatives talk about death panels and concentration camps and not providing Republicans health care.  You know it's bonkers.  You know they're just Birchers with power.

But then you recognize they're Birchers with power.  And you wonder what it is they have in store for us.

Unrelated: (1) Start Buster Posey.  (2) I'm on Team Michele.

Tick, Tick, tick.

This was today; one of apparently A DOZEN guns at the Obama event in Phoenix.

Yeah, this a debate.  One side thinks it's about death panels and they're carrying automatic weapons.

I thought Obama's pulling the public option from consideration, guaranteeing failure of American health care (currently ranked 37th in the world.  U-S-A!  U-S-A!) would be the worst news of the day.  And then came this.

As Krugman notes today, the wackos protesting some type of universal health care as socialist are really protesting health care as practiced by the rest of the world.  Even Switzerland, a gun loving, free market haven, has a public option.

Further, over the weekend, the Washington Post picked up on my contextualizing this debate with previous conservative blockades to social justice, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.   The right wing position on social security, on unions, on the minimum wage, on civil rights has long been relegated to the dustbin of history - we don't look at George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door in 1963 and think he was one side of a vibrant debate over federalism.  If we had cable news when Wallace tried to stop the desegregation of elementary schools or had his candidacy for President supported by the John Birch society, or became Alabama's governor while saying "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" the take would be about how passionate the opposition to civil rights is and how the Democrats needed to abandon their liberal base and reach across the Mason-Dixon line to accomodate the very understandable fears of the south.  Too much change after all.  Why does it need to happen so fast?  It took LBJ 6 months to pick out a dog but yet he has to rush civil rights legislation?

How did Johnson become President again?  For some reason I can't seem to recall.

The Guy With the Gun

That's the guy with the gun, a gun which he said was loaded, outside the Obama town hall yesterday. That's the Jefferson quote you've heard before on his sign.

That's the same quote. The t-shirt belonged to Timothy McVeigh; if you look closely at the bottom right corner, you'll see that it's marked as government evidence.

Let's be honest. You and me. That dude is threatening to assassinate the President of the United States. And let's be honest again. If someone in fact, does attempt to assassinate the President of the United States, you'll be less surprised than you were when Michael Jackson died. In a country with our level of gun violence and our history of assassination attempts of our Presidents, that the response to this guy was not to take him away but instead to put him on with Chris Matthews is revealing.

Because in this century, we've moved people away from Presidents for less. Like, for example, the arrests at the Republican National Convention last year. Or 2004.

And there's a context here. And you all know there's a context here. There isn't someone so partisan he can't recognize the context here.

1. Obama's African-American. Maybe you've noticed. And Bernie Mac isn't his Vice-President. I don't know when I first heard a variation of the joke about who would have to be the first black president's VP in order to prevent assassination (Eddie Murphy talking about Jesse Jackson in '84?) but it became a stock comedic device. Wishing racism doesn't exist and isn't part of the subtext in the incredible fear of Obama doesn't make it so.

2. The War on Terror. We've established a framework, both "legal" and cultural, where the appropriate way to handle terrorists is extrajudicial. Be they suspects locked up without charge in Gitmo, Cheney's alleged assasination squads, or a thousand Toby Keith songs - there's broad belief that the morally appropriate post 9-11 response to terrorism is death. It didn't take long for the 2008 campaign rhetoric to focus on the Obama=terrorist equation. He was framed as a Muslim, he was framed as being created, perhaps in a Manchurian candidate type of way, to infiltrate the US government. Why doesn't he wear the flag pin? Why did he take the flag off his plane? Why doesn't he put his hand over his heart during the Star Spangled Banner? What about his minister? Why did his wife say that only now was she proud of America?

Doesn't his name sound a lot like Osama? And isn't his middle name Hussein? And what about the "terrorist fist jab" (maybe my all time favorite Fox News moment that's not when somehow it identifies Republicans caught in sex scandals as Democrats). The Vice-Presidential nominee for the Republicans said Obama "pals around with terrorists". The anger that existed in the crowds of the dying days of the McCain campaign focused not on health care reform - not on imaginary tax increases - it centered around John McCain not yelling out in a full throated way what a certain percentage of Americans, fueled by talk radio and Fox news and absolutely no ability to separate facts from fantasy knew to be true, that the United States was about to elect a terrorist President.

And why would no one stop it?

That madness has been funneled into the "birther" movement, you can go here to see yesterday's polls revealing the astonishing percentage of conservatives in Virginia and North Carolina who believe that Obama was not born in the United States. The Carolina poll also revealed that 12% of the Republicans who responded don't believe that Hawaii is in the United States (I'd guess a healthy number of them are big, big fans of Simple Jack.) What would be great, in the coverage of the town hall protests, are questions of the protesters along those lines - how many of the people screaming about death panels (I'm getting ahead of myself) or (bizarrely) waving the Bible in protest of universal health care - would also fall into these previous categories? The appropriate way to view someone who thinks Obama is a secret Muslim terrorist from Kenya (or un-American Hawaii) who hates the flag and wants to kill babies with down's syndrome is as a kook. Even if there are lots of them, co-ordinated by the corporate interests who have fought health care reform for 15 years - pumping in hundreds of millions of dollars to keep even a watered down bill from passing - they're still kooks.

I just finished teaching the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and it's hard to express to students that federal laws prohibiting racial discrimination by business were enormously controversial, that they sparked protest - that they drove the southern Democrats to switch political parties (and become the backbone of the modern day Republicans, the reason why the south is politically awash in red for the past 40 years, why we've gotten to this place in our history where people think Obama must be a secret terrorist). But really they just have to watch the news today. If the Civil Rights Act of 2009 came up for a vote - with exactly the same language that passed 45 years ago, what would be the reaction?

My money says this - right wing talk radio and Fox News (and Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin) would say it was a plan to give black people your business. "This bill will establish Obama/Acorn style affirmative action panels where your business can be seized by the federal government if you don't employ a sufficient percentage (except they'd use the word quota) of blacks or women or Hispanics. The appointment of Justice Sotomayor is a way to get the Supreme Court to go along. If you don't have enough blacks in management, your business will be foreclosed and it will be turned over to "the community". Vote no on the Civil Rights Act of 1964...er...2009. It's a Nazi Bill! Read your Bible!"

3. The Nazi stuff. After the Bush bailout in September I wrote (wrongly) that the best thing here was the Republican canard that Democrats (who would be viewed as a center-right party in the rest of the industrialized world) were somehow radical Socialists would be dead. Instead, of course, that's all you've heard ever since. The stimulus package (that, despite being too small saved us from the Great Depression) the non-existent tax increases on the middle class, and now a non-single payer health care system, a system that leaves intact insurance companies (talk about death panels) are not only evidence of Obama being a socialist - but also a communist - and (demonstrating a real lack of understanding about the differing totalitarian systems in the early 20th century) a Nazi.

Virtually every other industrialized nation has universal health care.

Are they all Nazis?

Has Western Europe been overrun with Nazis? Why is Simple Jack not covering this?

If killing Obama Bin Lyin'...oops, I mean Osama Bin Laden, what an easy mistake that is, to confuse the first African-american president with a mass murderer of 3000 Americans, is the "moral" thing to do - then what about Hitler?

A stock "what would you do" ethical dilemma as long as I can recall has been "you travel back in time, you meet Hitler when he's still a painter, should you kill him?"

There is no equation more firmly implanted in the western pysche than Nazi=evil. Not criminal. Evil.

The difference is not semantic. The appropriate response to a criminal is what - legal means of prosecution, conviction, and punishment.

The appropriate response to evil is to eliminate it. That's why Bush didn't call Iraq/Iran/North Korea that Axis of Criminals. That's why the war on terror wasnt framed as "Good vs. Criminals."

And that's why Sarah Palin, last week, called Obama's healthcare plan "downright evil."

The Nazi talk has been ratched up since inauguration day, the level of violent rhetoric by the right, where Obama is compared to Hitler, or where (as Simple Jack did) Obama is said to "hate white people" just continues to crank and crank and crank.

And yesterday, a guy with a loaded gun and a sign that is not so subtle code within the extremist community stood outside Obama's town hall.

And that's where we are in the summer of 2009.

The Vice-Presidential nominee from last year said Obama is going to establish death panels that might kill the elderly or disabled children. The former speaker of the House said he agreed with her. As did Simple Jack.

A secret Muslim terrorist sympathizing communist Nazi who is going to kill the elderly.

That's the President of the United States.

And what is the morally appropriate way to deal with him?

What was the morally appropriate way the right wing extremists dealt with Tiller the Baby Killer?