Welcome to Fascist America

Why don't Repuglycans just rename their Party to match their ideas? Uniion-busting? That is fascism. Ask Mussolini.

Read about the outsourcers' bill of rights that the Republican House just passed.

This is how Rep. George Miller (D-CA) had to say about the bill from the floor of the House:

Under this bill, a company can retaliate against a worker for trying to organize a union. The employer could layoff that worker and subcontract their work out.

A company can bust a union by setting up a shell company down the street and send all the work there until all of the union employees have lost their jobs. Workers would be out of luck because the NLRB would be prohibited from ordering the work returned to those now-unemployed workers.

Welcome to Fascism, America.

Jonah Goldberg's And His Batshit Crazy Liberal Fascism Theory

I just discovered this interesting post by David Neiwert, Historians vs. Jonah Goldberg, on the truly batshit crazy book by Jonah Goldberg entitled Liberal Fascism, in which the hopelessly inept would-be historian wastes 496 pages in an attempt to to make the point that fascism is a phenomenon not of the right, but of the left.

Because the book has become a favorite of the Tea Party's right, in spite of--or, more likely, just because of--its fantastic interpretation of facts and history, Neiwert has sought "a serious response from academics to Goldberg's traduced version of history", a version of history that Goldberg himself has hailed as "a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care."

Not everyone, particularly real historians, agrees with Goldberg's ass-essement of his own work, and a few historians responded to Neiwert's request to answer the book's batshit theory.

Here is a link to the History News Network website, which hosts the critiques and ensuing discussion of Goldberg's work of fiction. Below the Introduction by Neiwert himself you can find links to the critiques of Liberal Fascism by, among others, historians Robert O. Paxton (the author of The Anatomy of Fascism, one of the definitive books on the subject), and Matthew Feldman.

Tortured Democracy, Torturing Democracy

It seems that too many Americans, many of whom should know better, have bought the Bush administration's line that we had to torture some bad guys to prevent further attacks on the United States in the post 9/11 world. So we should be grateful for such efforts like Sherry Jones' Torturing Democracy or Bill Moyers' series on torture, which remind us that just because "we did it" does not make it right and that to maintain otherwise is to surrender the substance of what should make America different from its enemies.

Justice, Bush Administration Style

I would have called Gov. Siegelman's prosecution "justice, Republican style" if it were not for the fact that it disgusted some Republicans, too, such as former Arizona AG Grant Woods, one of the most vocal critics of the imprisonment of the former Alabama Governor.

In case you missed '60 Minutes' last Sunday, or if the owners of your local TV station are former business partners of George W. Bush and Republican donors, as the Bass brothers of WHNT are, and decided to black out the broadcast in your area...






(via Bradblog, and courtesy of CBS)

Now ask yourselves:

Do you really want to trust people like these with wiretapping your conversations (or, more likely, your congressman's) without a court order, or would you rather believe that this is just another example of the liberal media's dirty tactics against Saint George and Arcangel Karl?

Introducing Snuggly, The Security Bear

Those liberals scaremongers will say anything to taint the stellar reputation of our beloved president and his righteous administration on the homeland security front. Luckily, cartoonist Mark Fiore brought Snuggly to the rescue with a cartoon that even your most liberal friends will understand.

Introducing Snuggly, The Security Bear in...
The Spies Who Love You

Goodbye, Newman!

You were thinking about the pudgy mailman on Seinfeld, weren't you? No, as despicable as Larry David, et al., managed to make Wayne Knight look on the famed sitcom, that Newman had a sense of humor and some brains--however ill-employed. The one I am writing about here has neither. Enter "Gunny" Bob Newman.

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In the AM wasteland of Denver, CO, which is littered with an endless litany of hatemongers of the right-wing conservative kind, from Limbaugh to Hannity, from Savage to Medved, from Ingraham to Rosen, people that make Jon Caldara seem like a fair-minded, unbiased individual, "Gunny" Bob Newman has the distinction of being the most hateful and one of the most inaccurate.

A retired marine with an endless reserve of venom and scorn for those who disagree with him, you can catch his fake laughter on 850 KOA, weeknights from 7 to 10 p.m.

On his radio show, the "Gunny" regularly accuses political opponents of being fascists or Nazis:

• He refers to Keith Olbermann as "Olbermeinkampf". Olbermann declared him Worse (Bronze) Person in the World during the Sep 6, 2007, edition of Countdown and reminded him that "the guy who wrote Mein Kampf was a right-winger like yourself."
• He hates Hillary Clinton with a passion, and routinely pours Nazi and fascist references on her. For example, he referred to her campaign staff as "the Third Reich insofar as its refusal to quit until there is simply no other choice". During the same rant, he asked his listeners to "Remember the Germans back in World War II. I mean, they fought down just about the last man in the middle, standing in the middle of Berlin! And the Clintons think the same way when it comes to givin' up."
• He demeaned Democrats as wanting to establish a "socialist utopian state under the spiked boot heel of Hillary Rodham Clinton" (another not so veiled reference to Nazis).
• He referred to Daily Kos and its Democratic supporters as "a demented, putrid segment of our society", and referred to the YearlyKos, the Daily Kos annual gathering, as "bigger than any KKK, Nazi, or Muslim terrorist gathering".

(The above examples are all documented by Mediamatters, which, no doubt, the "Gunny" would refer to as a liberal hate group.)

Notice the pattern of association and how he regularly demeans his opponents?

There's more in the Gunny's hall of shame:

• His hatred for Democrats extends to Barak Obama, whom he has called Osama, just like Rush Limbaugh has done on a number of occasions, and whom he accused of wanting to introduce the subject of sexual intercourse to kindergartners.
• He wanted all Muslim immigrants to wear "GPS tracking bracelets" and called for "a little moratorium on Muslim visas".
• He suggested that "aborting such horrible people as Murtha, Pelosi, and Cindy Sheehan would be OK."
• He called Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch "hate-filled, anti-freedom organizations".
• He even managed to refer to a Quaker organization as a "hate-group".

The above examples are also all documented by Mediamatters, an organization that the "Gunny" would no doubt refer to as something like "a putrid segment of our society".

And then, to give you an example of Newman’s hypocrisy and bias, just the other night, he ranted for several minutes about the fact that the just-released study that counted the number of times the Bush administration had lied to link Iraq to WMDs and 9/11, is the work of by the Center for Public Integrity, which received funding from "liberal fascists" like Barbara Streisand, George Soros, and the Pew Charitable Trusts, therefore implying that the work is biased and untrue. You can judge for yourselves here. But that is only the beginning.

As soon as he was done, the "Gunny" took a phone call which sounded as if it had been set up as a follow-up to his rant (I am not saying it was, but it sure sounded like it.) Out of left field, the caller brought up Whitewater and implied that Hillary Clinton was implicated in some horrible things, leading to the murder of Vince Foster, among many unspoken crimes. Newman’s idiotic and forced laughter sounded as insincere as Hillary’s tears looked in that New Hampshire diner. (I am not joining Newman in Hillary-bashing, but my feelings on the diner incident are not a mystery).

Naturally, Newman failed to mention that the Whitewater investigation was part of the infamous Arkansas Project, funded in large part by Richard Mellon Scaife with the aim of destroying Clinton's presidency, or at least hampering it. Needless to say, the study by the Center for Public Integrity that Newman lambasted deserves much more credibility than the Whitewater investigation ever did.

It is likely, as it seemed to me, that the juxtaposition of the Whitewater investigation with the study by the Center for Public Integrity was meant to remind Gunny Bob's many biased listeners that studies like the one by CPI are meant to obfuscate the real issues and threats to America, like the alleged lies of the left and the danger of another Clinton in the White House. The only problem, of course, is that 4 years of investigations by special prosecutor Ken Starr, into Whitewater and other affairs, failed to implicate the President and the First Lady.

So why am I so seemingly obsessed with the obnoxious "Gunny" Bob Newman? Because, as much as I understand and respect First Amendment rights, I do not believe that the First Amendment confers absolute rights to free speech, either when the medium used to convey it is a limited resource or when the content of speech is so evidently false, hateful, or both.

Am I suggesting that we should deny "Gunny" Bob Newman his right to free speech? No. Like all of us, he has the right to his opinions and to voice them. This right is an ingredient of freedom, just as our airwaves are an essential resource for the public. Essential, does not mean without limits, though. Bandwidth is limited. The number of voices that can be heard is itself limited. What I propose is this: while diversity is a value that must be preserved and fostered, even on the airwaves, the limited availability of bandwidth makes it necessary to discriminate between what we allow and what we don't allow to be broadcast. In a civil society, civil differences of opinion must be encouraged and protected. Scorn, hatred, and falsehoods should have no place.

I’ll give you an example: While I do not agree with much of what Jon Caldara says, his viewpoints are far from hateful. They may be patronizing, biased, incorrect, or disagreeable, but, to the best of my knowledge, they are not hateful. He expresses his views, which have little or nothing to share with mine, harshly but respectfully. I can't stand David Brooks or Bill Kristol, but their presence on NPR, or PBS, or FOX only irks me, it does not offend me. Gunny Bob, on the other hand, is often hateful, scornful, and offensive, as he was tonight when he indulged a caller who refused to call gay soldiers "men" and joined him in ridiculing them as they prance in feathers in their little parade. He does not deserve a spot on the public airwaves. I am sure that there would be no lack of alternatives in the world of right-wing radio.

I can feel the criticism rising: doesn't that equate to censorship? It does not. If "Gunny" Bob wants to express his views, he can publish books, write articles for newspapers, or blog on his website. There is hardly a limit to his ability to publish his ideas in printed form. Books, newspapers, the Internet: all are viable means of broadcasting one's ideas to the public. And they have one thing in common: they are private and unlicensed, unlike airwaves, which belong to the public (and are licensed by the public, through the FCC). In addition to that, now that satellite radio has emerged with Sirius and XM, he can still find a spot on the air. You want to listen to "Gunny" Bob spewing hatred and falsehoods? You pay for it, and let the rest of us enjoy civil discourse.

The time has come to reclaim civility on the public airwaves. That the first amendment guarantees people the right to say what they want, even when it's hateful, does not imply that they have to be awarded a 50,000 watt public megaphone to help them. It’s time to clean up our air. Time to say "Goodbye, Newman!"

Recommended Reading

An Italian Lesson On Fascism

[Originally posted at TheDailyFuel.com on March 3, 2006]

In a speech given earlier this week to a joint session of Congress, a rare privilege for a foreign head of state, Mr. Berlusconi, the current prime minister of Italy, remembered how Italy overcame fascism thanks to the help of American troops who helped liberate Italy from its fascist domination. Growing up in Italy, I remember hearing stories of how strenuously the Italian partigiani (the Italian word for members of the homegrown anti-fascist resistance) finally defeated the fascist army with the help of the American allies. After the war the Italian Republic was born, on June 2, 1946. The Italian Constitution specifically prohibits the rebirth of the Fascist party. People were eager to put that dark, shameful chapter of our nation’s history behind them. This revulsion for fascism has its linguistic equivalents in Italian. For example, one of the most negative words in the Italian language is delatore. Delatore is the contemptuous term reserved for a "friend" of the fascist government who would voluntarily report to fascist authorities other individuals, often partigiani, accused of being undercover anti-fascist activists. Delatori received monetary and/or other rewards for their despicable acts. The word "snitch" is as a close as English gets to this Italian concept, but it lacks the intrinsic connotation of fratricide and the tie to fascism of the Italian concept. There is just no equivalent in American English to convey the contempt that Italians feel when they utter the word delatore.

I had not thought of this Italian word in a long time until a couple of days ago, when the story of Sean Allen made news. Sean Allen is the tenth-grade student of an Aurora, Colorado school who taped his geography teacher, Jay Bennish, who was guilty of comparing the tone of George Bush’s speeches to Adolf Hitler’s and of highlighting what he considers the oppressive policies of the American government around the world. Immediately, countless right-wing voices (orchestrated, perhaps, by the liberal media?) have risen in unison to extol the virtues of the student who exposed this example of the left-wing conspiracy that is threatening the innocence of children in American schools. In other words, the right-wing is celebrating Sean Allen as a courageous whistleblower.

Anticipating hours of cruel and unusual entertainment, I decided to tune in to the conservative ether in order to listen to dozens of incensed callers who flooded the airwaves with their own testimonies of rampant activism by teachers (who are quickly replacing activist judges at the top of conservative phobias.) Some of the callers expressed the view that it was inappropriate for a geography teacher to address a political topic in his class. Perhaps that argument will resonate with those who believe that geography should be limited to the study of the morphology and the topography of our planet, instead of dealing with--more broadly-- the study of the earth and the social and political systems that define different areas of the planet.
In any case, whether a geography class is an appropriate venue to discuss political matters is not the issue. If that had been the real problem for Sean Allen, he could have simply approached his teacher and asked him why he thought it was appropriate for him to be discussing politics in a geography class, instead of resorting to clandestine taping. But clandestine taping is precisely what a tenth-grader who is growing up in an increasingly intolerant atmosphere will do.

The fact that seemed to anger callers the most was how inappropriate it was for tenth-graders to be exposed to political views (callers were quick to add that this would be inappropriate regardless of the teacher's allegiance, lest they should be accused of partisanship.) This point deserves some scrutiny: It is inappropriate for tenth-graders, who can drive, be sentenced to death, and soon vote, to be exposed to subjects of a political nature, but it is not inappropriate for military recruiters to buzz around high schools in search of dwindling cannon fodder? How is it that a sixteen year-old can legitimately be bombarded with ads enticing him to "be all that he can be," or to join "the few, the proud", but it is out of bounds for a teacher to open a class debate on American foreign policy, which has an impact not only on other parts of the world's geography, but also on the lives of all the kids who are currently being targeted by the D.O.D's recruiting efforts in schools across the country? If schools are discouraged from offering all sides of an argument, what have they become? Recruiting ground? When, exactly, is the right time to start talking about foreign policy with a student?

This latest controversy is rather symptomatic of a general attitude which is taking hold in this nation. The independence of schools, of all levels, is under attack. Science teachers are being asked to give exposure to Intelligent Design, an avowedly unscientific theory, in science classrooms. Colleges are coming under increasing pressure to limit a professor's ability to openly tackle certain subjects by establishing artificial borders built around patriotism. Courts are dealing more and more frequently with first-amendment cases centered around education. The right wing noise-machine is taking unrelenting aim at the education system for its traditional importance in raising dissent. By stifling our educators' ability to raise uncomfortable topics, conservatives are seeking to silence dissent by depriving it of all forums. Take for example David Horowitz's book, The Professors, which examines 101 controversial college professors to engender the impression that colleges are teeming with anti-American attitudes.

Sean Allen may have been sincere in thinking that his teacher stepped over an unwritten boundary in the world of education. The issue is not the point of view that his teacher presented but a) how Sean chose to deal with it, b) the reaction that he sparked on the right-side of the political spectrum and c) what that says about our society. This incident is proof that we are teaching our children that different points of view should not be debated, but that they should be squashed and punished. And the fact that he is being hailed as a whistleblower by a segment of the population points to a dangerous trend.

It is rather bitter irony that all of this was taking place while Mr. Berlusconi was giving his speech to Congress, and thanking America for helping Italy overcome fascism, because what is happening to teachers in classrooms all over the nation is what happens in totalitarian regimes. And that is also why Sean Allen's no snitch. The appropriate word to describe him exists, for now, only in Italian.