Civil Disobedience and Its Consequences

When I was a junior in high school, in the middle of Richard Nixon’s first term, I took a course in civics. Back then, this was required of all high school students, usually taken in their junior or senior year. Our civics course was simply entitled “U S and Comparative Government” and was taught by a retired army officer. Col Marshall was an old JAG lawyer, a conservative, an atheist, and one of those singular teachers who encouraged, demanded that students think outside the proverbial box, or at least, pretend to do so.



As required reading for the course, he insisted that we read Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” (subtitled “Resistance to Civil Government.”) I’ve re-read this several times since then – quite often, the perspective of a sixteen year-old changes with age and life experiences. Like a lot of things, each time the piece is read, new ideas emerge – things, heretofore, I’d not considered.



Thoreau wrote the essay as a consequence, both of his objection to the Mexican-American War and to slavery. Going back and looking at this essay again, I’m positively astounded that the Tea Party hasn’t picked up Thoreau, instead of or along with Ayn Rand, as a particular hero.



Thoreau thought that the government of the day was corrupt. (Not much has changed then.) His premise was that whenever government asked a citizen to act in such a way that such an action impinged upon his moral reservations, then it was the citizen’s duty to disobey the request, by passive resistence. In Thoreau’s case, it was a matter of refusal to pay taxes. Taxes provided funds for the war, and taxes, for Thoreau, represented a citizen’s tacit approval of slavery, as, then, the institution was upheld by law.



So, in a nutshell, if one disapproved of a law, one broke, via passive resistance, to prove a point of conscience. Incumbent upon this action, was the fact that, as per usual, anyone who broke the law was usually punished, either by fiscal fine or by imprisonment. Thoreau welcomed that. Any sort of punishment meted the offender by the government should be worn, figuratively, as a badge of honour and a means of proving the point that the law, in and of itself, was unjust and wrong.



Put succinctly: Commit the crime and you do the time.



What was unique about the way in which I was taught about the principle of civil disobedience, as a high school student, was how the teacher drew in contemporary and near-contemporary examples of this – from conscientious objectors in the first two World Wars, to Gandhi, right down to Martin Luther King, whose use of Thoreau’s principle was something we’d all seen enacted on our television screens and actually remembered. Years later, when I had occasion to read more about Gandhi and to see the Academy Award-winning film of his life, I remember being struck by the number of times both he, Martin Luther King and their followers were beaten and imprisoned by officials of their respective governments and how they accepted their fates with dignity and aplomb.



Recently, we seem to have a spate of people bucking against what they consider to be unjust laws imposed by a corrupt government on its citizenry, in the name of civil disobedience – but with a difference. Each time these perpetrators are arrested or apprehended by officials of the government, this action is met with great wailing, gnashing of teeth and rending of garmentry by their supporters and incessant calls for signatures on various petitions against the government investigating and prosecuting the people who’ve infringed these laws. If they’re charged and imprisoned, there are demands for their immediate release, many times from the culprits, themselves.



That’s not civil disobedience. That’s cowardice.



When Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King placed their hand in the fire that was an unjust law, they expected to get burned. That was the entire point of their willful disobedience. They knew the consequences. Their actions and the subsequent reactions ensuing proved a point; and although it may have taken years, these men’s protests were ultimately proven to have achieved what their perpetrators intended.



A year ago, Richard Clarke, in an appearance on Bill Maher’s Real Time, declared that illegal cyber activity – otherwise known as hacking – was the new terrorism. Cyberwars. Recently, the Justice Department has identified cyberterrorism as one of their main objectives and warned that anyone suspected, arrested and tried for this crime will meet the full force of the law.



I recognise that the former co-founder of PCCC, who is, ironically, an ethics fellow at Harvard, may have been exercising thoroughly Thoreauvian civil disobedience in his hacking of MIT’s computer systems in an effort, illegally, to download the entire contents of MIT’s JSTOR service, to prove a point. But if he did this and broke the law, then he should also face up to the fact that he’d going to be prosecuted and accept his fate.



So should his legion of supporters, some of whom, themselves, are professional authors and historians, and should, therefore, view this in context.



Otherwise, they’re deceiving themselves and those of us who read and trust their own works. .

Nabucco - Hebrew Slaves Chorus

To hear this sung in the distance in Italy on a summer's evening is bliss.

Of Cabbages and Kings: It's Not That Obama's Naive; It's Just That the President Isn't White

(Sigh) I hate to bring race into this equation. I hate even approximating a race war, but the time has come, the Walrus said, to speak of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax - of cabbages and kings, thus saith Lewis Carroll.

Race has always been a part of the 44th Presidency. It couldn't help but be. After all, Barack Obama is the first African American to be elected President. John Kennedy was the first Catholic elected to that position. People spoke about how Kennedy's devotion to Rome would impact upon his legislative agenda, but that only covered his religion. Race, like the poor, is always with society, and it stands to reason that this President's race, whilst it certainly shouldn't impact upon his ability to govern, is clearly a problem, overtly and covertly, with various and sundry citizens of the United States, Right and Left.

I know I'm opening a can of worms, and a lot of sites where I'd hope to post this will explode in all kinds of cockroaches crawling from the woodwork in order to gnaw at the ideas expressed herein, but - hey - better to be called a cockroach than "the dumbest motherfuckers," which I gather a noted sage in the Progressive community reckons anyone who supports the President is.

Let's see, one high-profile voice in the blogosphere who passes himself off as a Progressive, but who is really a Koch-funded, Citizens United-supporting, child labour-loving, Gary Johnson Libertarian, refers to supporters of the President as "Obamalovers," in what he reckons to be a cute and clever rendition of the old Dixiecrat pejorative of "n*ggerlovers."

A second neurotic doyenne of the Professional Left blatantly declares any vociferous supporter of the President to be a paid Breitbart troll whose sole purpose in life is to undermine the Presidency of Barack Obama. Go figure that one, especially since this same pundit went on record to say she resented African Americans even thinking that they constituted the President's base.

To say that race matters, regarding matters to the Right of the political spectrum, is an understatement. Who doesn't remember many of the people showing up for Sarah Palin's campaign rallies in 2008, with their stuffed monkeys called "Little Hussain," the elderly woman challenging McCain with her misguided fact that Candidate Obama was an Arab, the shouts and jeers, even to one man shrieking out that Obama must be killed during a Palin pow-wow. Then there was the Tea Party and their various depictions of the President as a socialist, a communist or anything frighteningly evile, but always depicted as an African chieftan or, again, a apelike creature. And let's not get started on the Birthers.

I know all about Republican delegitimisation of the Democrats, particularly Democratic Presidents. That's been the order of the day, presidentially, since Clinton was elected in 1992; and, yes, Clinton was particularly demonised in a way, heretofore, no Democratic President had been. That, I will admit.

Real demonisation of the Left by the Right began some 40 years ago, and was actually, unwittingly aided and abetted by the Democrats, themselves - or at least the New Age Democratic Party fronted by Gary Hart and co. The Republicans excoriated the liberal Democratic tendancy left over from Johnson's Great Society of the Sixties, and the New Dems responded by eschewing any reference to liberals or liberalism. From thence forward, they referred to themselves as "Progressives," and forwent any association with what they perceived to be the failed liberalism of a herd-follower like Hubert Humphrey.

Humphrey supported the Viet Nam war, and so the New Dems affected an anti-war stance on all fronts, which made it easy for the Republicans to big up the myth about the Democratic party being weak on defence and unpatriotic. Why, as the Republicans pointed out, a great many of the so-called New Democrats, were scrubbed up hippies from the Flower Movement. And the Democrats obliged there and now. Whenever someone attacks the Left, a favourite saying amongst the Professional Left pundits is that said person is "punching a hippy," when many of these people talking like this are too young even to understand what a real hippy was, and those who are, are ex-Republicans, themselves.

A lot of these so-called Professional Left pundits have been making hay while the sun shines for the past three years, criticizing everything this President says and does. They've done it so much and for so long that one could be forgiven for thinking that they actually hate the man, and you have to ask why.

Well, I've bought just about as much of their rationale, pushed at them via talking points engendered by those well-established guardians of the Left like Arianna Huffington, who taught the dittoes to recite that Obama was a Wall Street tool, that he was a corporate whore, that he "just wasn't that into" the Middle Class, that he was a Nowhere Man. I've had just about enough of their gloating when another well-established hero of the Left, Cenk Uygur, goes of an a high-handed screed, boasting about what he would tell this President to do. I'm fed up with that wannabe Alpha Male, Bill Maher, emerging from his hiding place behind the comedian's mask to tell us how weak the President is, how bad a negotiator he is, how he has no spine, how he constantly caves to the Republicans, especially on tax cuts to the rich, when the high-minded Bill Maher, himself, cheats the State of California out of millions of dollars in property tax annually with a phoney charity registered as the owner of his properties. And I'm tired of the assumption voiced in Joan Walsh's latest blog and wittered and twittered about by various and sundry scribes from the Progressive Left: the President, especially in these debt ceiling negotiations, is naive.

And, really, naivete has been the contents of the envelope pushed by the ueber Left since the beginning of this Administration. The President is naive about wanting bipartisan cooperation for legislation. He's naive to want the Republicans to like him. He's naive about Afghanistan, about Healthcare reform, about job creation, about the economy, about just about anything, simply because there are just oh-so-many experienced pundits on the Left who could just do things so differently if he'd only listen to them.

What's frightening about that is the sheer number of those scions of the Left who, until the past decade, were card-carrying neocon Republicans.

Is there a whiff of ratfuckery about the place all of a sudden?

This naivete motif, I'm sorry to say, plays in very nicely with an image many of the Professional Left retain regarding African Americans, especially those in positions of power. It's basically an "Affirmative Action" mentality toward them: they've achieved what they've achieved, thanks to Progressives' efforts, so now they'd do well to listen to the advice these people have to impart to their protoges. They need help, and the ueber Left is there to give it. They're there to tell - er, advise - the President what to do.

It's just a typically and badly hidden genre of patronising racism, but it's racism, all the same. And their frustrated, because the President, intelligent Negro that he is, simply won't do as they say - because if he did, you know, things would just be that much better. Ne'mind, he'd probably have to bypass the Senate and people like Ben Nelson and Joe Manchin; ne'mind, that he'd have to pretend the Republican House didn't exist, although it does - thanks, in a great part to all those Progressives who sat out the vote in a sulk in 2010. Hell, he can just rule as a dictator. After all, isn't that what Bush did? Well, as one Progressive noted this week, Obama's nothing but a black Bush, anyway.

Sometimes, the Left suffers from a psychological wardrobe dysfunction.

But it seems as if the President is too much the recalcitrant Negro for some on the Left, it seems he's not Negro enough for other big mouths who manage to say nothing. After all, earlier this spring, no less than Cornel West excoriated the President for, amongst other things, daring to have a white mother, be educated in primarily white institutions and feel at home amongst educated, white, Jewish men. This coming from a man whose parents were educated professionals, who grew up in a predominately white community, and who has spent all his adult life amongst the leafy, white academic suburbs of Cambridge, Massachusetts and Princeton, New Jersey.

But at long last, it would seem that people in the political and pundit world are beginning, if they haven't realised it beforehand, to, at least, find the courage to allude to the racism which belies the treatment meted this President, by both the media and the public in general.

Note Rep Sheila Jackson Lee's pointed comment, aimed at House Republicans, about the real reason so many difficulties are being dreamed up about the passage of this year's debt ceiliing increase:-



And just to be fair and balanced, we've had Lawrence O'Donnell give a masteclass on The Last Word this past week about What The President Is Really Trying to Do 101, for all those who subscribe to having the President's words and intentions inadequately interpreted for you by no less than Adam Green of Bold Progressives, who, for the modest price of five dollars a shot requested contribution, will ensure that you stay in an appropriate state of fear at the next betrayal the perfidious President is about to enact against his natural supporters. Not that any of these people either listened to O'Donnell or paid heed to what he said, if they did; but Thursday night's segment was particularly brilliant, in view of the scare-mongering Green is propagating regarding the sort of cuts to Medicare he envisages Obama making only in his scammy, little mind.

Watch the segment, for yourself, especially the bit beginning around the seven-minute mark:-

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That's right, in 1993, when Lawrence O'Donnell was an aide to the Senate Finance Committee, no less than Bill Clinton, pushed through the biggest cuts to Medicare and Medicaid in the history of the programs' existence ... with the complete and utter support of both a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House. No single liberal opposed these cuts. Not Ted Kennedy who was then in the Senate. Not Bernie Sanders, who was then a Congressman from Vermont. This was Bill Clinton Pre-Triangulation, before Newt got control of the Hill. This was Bill Clinton in liberal mode.

As O'Donnell asks rhetorically, where were all the voices shouting betrayal then? Instead, now, we don't even get a definite word from the President about any sort of cuts to Medicare; instead we get a deliberately concocted and misleading headline by Sam Stein, arguably the laziest and most inept reporter covering anything Presidential, and all hell breaks loose - so much so, that when the President states categorically that wealthier people should pay more into their Medicare program and the ueber Left erupts, they're opposing exactly what they berated the President for not doing in November: raising taxes on the wealthier elements of society.

And, of course, the unspoken question of why people are doing this from the Left to the President, is left, appropriately, dangling, by O'Donnell.

I am not alone in thinking that this is the first time in my life when I've seen a President so derided by both sides of the political equation. Not even Nixon, who was revealed to be crooked and dishonest, was so reviled. And whilst Clinton was certainly delegitimised in the worst way, first for supposed criminal activity, and subsequently for a sexual peccadillo, this was done entirely by his political opponents in the Republican Party.

Delegitimising a Democratic President is par for the course for the Republican Party, even the lunatic asylum which is masquerading as such right now; but unrelenting criticism of a President by those on his side of the spectrum is not only stupid, it's divisive as hell, and projects the party as being weak and as much out of control as the Teabaggers on the Right.

The latest fly in the ointment with which the Progressives hope to smear the President came in the leak about Elizabeth Warren not getting promoted as head of the newly-formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Late last night on Twitter, that noted political pundit Katrina vanden Heuvel, child of privilege who pays lip service to the poor and who's fashioned a career for herself as a political sage without any iota of political experience or acumen, was working herself into a lather trying to find someone who knew "something" (presumably, something bad) about the man rumoured to be the President's choice - like, was he a Wall Street or an international banking tool?

Of course, this is the same Katrina vanden Heuvel, who last year predicted that Nick Clegg would emerge triumphant from the British General Election as Prime Minister, because he'd been an intern on The Nation. (Nick Clegg is now the vilified as the most odious political opportunist in Britain and a true betrayer of his party). And this was the same Katrina vanden Heuvel who trolled the lengths and breadths of MSNBC during the campaign of 2000, telling all and sundry that a vote for Al Gore was a vote for George Bush, and real Progressives wanted Ralph Nader to succeed.

That theory all worked out so well, didn't it?

And of course, that was the same Ralph Nader, who, on election day 2008 and several times publically thereafter, has taken perverse pleasure in referring to the 44th President of the United States as a "Tom."

Racist, much?

Progressive Pundits Punching Down: KO KO's Disabled Lady

The more I see and hear of the thin-skinned, cherry-picking, rumour-mongering rich kids and faux bourgeoisie who inhabit the political tranche of the Fourth Estate in America these days, the more I begin to worship at the altar of the BBC, which is troubling for me.



If public figures are going to increasingly put themselves within cyber arm’s reach of the public they purport to serve, people whose reading or viewing habits effectively pay these icons’ over-inflated salaries, then said talking heads need to learn the art of civil debate and how to accept disagreement gracefully and listen to another point of view, especially if that point of view has something valid to contribute to the discussion.



Last night on Twitter, Keith Olbermann got into a one-sided slanging match with a former fan, whose handle was “stormymalone.”



“Stormy” politely objected to the content of Olbermann’s latest “Special Comment,” based entirely on the rumour-mongering of arguably the laziest so-called journalist ever to cover the White House beat, Sam Stein. Stein is a suckling of Arianna Huffington, who’s being guided by arch-hack Howard Fineman in the art of shady, anonymous sources who always purport to know the way the object of their hatchetry thinks.



Olbermann based his comment on Stein’s rumour-mongering that maybe the President was angling to raise the age limit on Medicare to 67. The content of Olbermann’s latest “schooling of the President” (because that’s what these effete, white, affluent and privately-educated Progressives have to do to a black President, dontcha know?) was to remind him that liberals care about the poor, the indigent, the weak, the elderly and the disabled – implying that the President doesn’t. Olbermann also issued a less-than-veiled threat not to vote for Obama in 2012, if he even thought about cutting either Social Security or Medicare – which is rich, since Olbermann has never voted. The only assumption to be gleaned from that piece of overt hostage-taking is a nudge-nudge-wink-wink implication that, although Keith doesn’t vote, his threat is implicitly a clarion call for his sheeple to sulk out the vote in 2012.



And that would work out so well for all of us, wouldn’t it? Sulk out the vote for hissy fit then let the sort of roosters in the henhouse that will do real and lasting damage. Kinda like cutting one’s nose off to spite one’s face, isn’t it?

Anyway, “stormymalone” twittered her point, politely, to Olbermann:-



@keitholbermann Disenchanted w/ special comment tonight. Silly. Lots more liberal dems want Obama than don’t. Good night & good luck #sadabout 7 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone

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@keitholbermann The world didn’t end when SS age was raised from 65. So when I’m 66+ it will be there. I still plan to work to 70 at least. about 7 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone

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@keitholbermann Slams President for raising Medicare age from 65 to 67 yet 50% of youngish kids now will be 100+ yrs. That’s progress.

And Keith’s reply?



@StormyMalone in short, you’re fine, so screw everybody else. Hate to break it to you: you are not a liberal @StormyMalone Jesus, you really are nuts



Nice, eh? Not.



I know Twitter only allows for a 140-character response, but this doesn’t even denote actual character within the specified limit. This is the response of a creep, an overgrown adolescent who isn’t receiving the adulation and compliments on his cleverness he feels are his just reward and so he belittles his critic. She’s not even a critic, she’s a fan who watches his show and who happens to disagree with his point of view. Within the specified limit, “stormymalone” managed to get her point across succinctly, concisely and politely; and for that, she receives snark, ad hominem and invective from a high-profiled public figure.



Olbermann’s not the only one to treat his public thus. Joan Walsh famously tells anyone with a differing viewpoint that they’re “mental,” that they “need help” and that it “sucks to be you.” The celebrity talking heads issuing these verbal sideswipes aren’t recalcitrant adolescents, they’re a fiftysomething man and woman, multimillionaires who are fortunate enough to be given a public pulpit from which to expound on the frustrating weaknesses which they perceive this singular President to possess. Never mind that neither Olbermann nor Walsh has ever had any real connect professionally with government, elected officials or the manner in which politics functions in this country. Never mind, that one doesn’t vote and has never been able to commit himself enough to vote (albeit, he can seek to influence others’ votes). Never mind, the other is an unreconstructed PUMA who has difficulty accepting a black man at the helm as much as the other does as well.



Never mind that these people mouth platitudes regarding the poor, the working class, the Middle Class, the indigent, the troops, the disabled, the immigrants and cuddly animals. These are people who write cheques from the sanctity of their minimalist living rooms, for the benefit of the needy or the disabled, and the only working class people they know are the ones to whom they pay minimum wage to clean their less-than-fragrant bogs.



They are liberal voices, dammit, and their point of view is the accepted one! The populace will obey!



Well, it turns out that the omniscient Mr Olbermann, who reckoned that “stormymalone” was just some selfish shit out to score some late night points against a big name on Twitter – you know, some pleb who needed taking down – was actually responding to someone who had a very real and very vested interest in any changes to come in Social Security and Medicare.



“Stormymalone” is, in fact, an elderly disabled woman, a Democrat in red Indiana, a constituent of Mitch Daniels, who plans to work until she’s 70, if she’s able. The real time benefit of the twittersphere is that it enable you to watch so-called icons reveal their rancid feet of clay, but at the same time, it’s sad in that you get to see so many ordinary people’s expectations of these people vanish into the smoke and mirrors behind which their idols hide.



“Stormymalone’s” palpably disappointed reply to Keith’s snark:-



@KeithOlbermann That was a bit harsh, no? I’m on disability and still work like crazy even though I feel like crap. Not noble, just real. about 7 hours ago via Twitter for iPhonein reply to KeithOlbermann

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@KeithOlbermann Seriously, I can understand the error because you are so much younger than I and I only know because I had to decide this yr about 7 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone in reply to KeithOlbermann

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@KeithOlbermann You mean for SS? My birthday is 2/28/45 and my SS age is 66 which I just reached in Feb. about 7 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone in reply to KeithOlbermann

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Seems Professional Left can’t reconcile they voted in 2008 for POTUS Obama and not Dictator Obama. Move to Cuba, guys. No need to write… about 7 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone

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And further:-



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@BlueTrooth @keitholbermann pontificated to me in a tweet saying I’m not a liberal. 100% Pro choice, pro gov, pro Obama. Guess I’m an R! about 7 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone in reply to BlueTrooth



Here is Olbermann, perched high and alone in his ivory tower someplace in the oh-so-fashionable upper West Side of New York City, issuing threats to a President he’s already branded a “quisling” and a “Nazi appeaser”, bullying out a woman who was born in 1945, someone who is disabled and who is still working and making her own contribution to society and who plans on working until she’s 70. She’s someone who’s been there, done that, read the book, seen the movie and bought the teeshirt. KO’s salary in one week is probably more than she’d see in a year, and he treats this person as if she’s something he scrapes off the bottom of his shoe.



You know, living in Britain, we’ve all been transfixed here at the rate the media of Rupert Murdoch has come tumbling down to the ground, several year after the BBC, itself, was found to be – in certain respects - less than clean. Watching antics like this, from people who are supposed to be professional, only reinforces my view that the United States has become a oligarchy where the minds of willfully lazy and intellectually bereft people, both on the Right and on the Left, allow themselves to be led by the short and curlies into a welter of deliberate misinformation, by a media with its own sinister agenda.



So much is levelled on this President that people believe he has to do everything - execute, legislate, adjudicate. Even the Congress, both houses, act like the ubiquitous spoiled brat, stamping their feet and insisting that Daddy pay attention, that Daddy take an interest; and when Daddy does, they sulk some more, because in paying attention, Daddy has to remind the rest that they’re nothing but a gaggle of snivelling crybabies, looking after their own corporate preserve.



And so the media propagate the myth of the Magic Negro, if only to show that there is no such thing, and they unwittingly collude with the Dark Side conservatives, the arch-Rightwing activists, they purport to hate so much. They enable them, and by urging their sheeple to withold the vote for a Democratic President who’s achieved more legislatively than any Democratic incumbent in the past 50 years, they play an enormous part in taking this country back to the cultural dark ages.



But that’s OK, as long as Keith or Joan or Katrina or Ed still get their airtime and their points across. That’s OK, as long as there are people out there who’ll repeat their talking points and defend any criticism of Keith or Joan or Katrina or Ed as if they were deeply personal friends or family members, taking any disagreement as a personal insult. In the world of their warped loyalties, Barack Obama is the traitor, and these designer-clad, misanthropic twitterphiles are the only thing standing between us and any Armageddon they’d have us believe our President would inflict upon us.



That’s OK, because “stormymalone” inadvertantly revealed Keith to be the proverbial disrobed Emperor. These sadsacks want to be loved, adored and accepted; and any criticism of the viewpoint they’re trying to push regarding this devilish, uppity black President, means we like the black buy best, or as “stormymalone” opines, sadly cognizant:-



@JesusOfSuburia Wonder if Obama blocks people who disagree with him? KO will block me too. Our sin? We love Obama more than Keith.

And in the words of a real newsman and journalist, folks, that’s the way it is.

Excommunication By State

I am a Virginian born and bred. My mother's people were Virginians before Virginia was Virginia. They met the first settlers when they arrived to found Jamestown in 1607. One married John Rolfe. She rests a few miles down the road from me here in England, for her sins. For mine, I'll rest in the Commonwealth, I hope.

I am a proud Virginian and proud of the people who made the Commonwealth great. Because of Virginians, we have a Constitution (James Madison), a Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson) and a Bill of Rights (George Mason). We can claim the first President and the first woman to be elected to the British Parliament. We might have been stupid enough to house the capital of the Confederacy, but in 1989, we elected the first African American governor to preside over that old capital, and that's when Derval Patrick was still in short trousers.

Johnnie Cash married a Virginian. So did Al Gore.

We've given America eight Presidents, and we're waiting on Number Nine - please, may he or she be a Democrat.

But, Lord, we do have some low-hanging fruit in the state, and when it hangs low, it hangs low.

Now, being a fruit-producing state, there are two types of low-hanging fruit. One's the sort that just evolves to a certain point and then gets no further. It's a poor fruit and a victim of circumstance, like poor education and no occupational opportunity or general poverty, that produces a Lindie England. With a bit more nurturing and a lot of attention from people in a position to act as benefactors (i.e., responsible representatives of the people), a lot of Lyndies could have been avoided.

But it's the second type of low-hanger that's troublesome. And that's a low-hanging fruit which is deliberately, almost arrogantly, swaybacked, looking out for its own brand and thinking about no other even though this fruit is smack dab in a position to be noticed.

And just to be truly fair and balanced, there's a piece of low-hanging fruit from the Right and another one from the Left swinging from an apple orchard someplace in Eastern Virginia.

Lord, what do we do with assholes like Eric Cantor and Ed Schultz?

The boys from Richmond and Norfolk just keep on piling embarrassment on the Commonwealth.

Eric's the Republican - the one who always reminds you of Tom Sawyer's tattletale brother, Sid, who never put a foot wrong, always dotted his i's and crossed his t's and never failed to say yes ma'am to Aunt Polly. But when her back was turned, it was Sid, who was always miming the way she limped or making faces.

Ed's the Democrat - the one who makes you think of Judd Frye in Oklahoma, the Neanderthal who could have been redeemed by Laurie's love but wasn't, who lost his temper and fell in a fight won by Curly. Ed's the bull in a china shop who runs off too much at the mouth, gets told off by the teacher, then steals some wimpier kid's lunch money.

Our Eric's been a naughty boy, as The Huffington Post explains:-

House Democrats are circulating a resolution accusing House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) of having a conflict of interest in the debt ceiling debate, a move that could provide an awkward C-SPAN moment for one of the lead Republicans in the budget negotiations.
The resolution goes after Cantor's investment in ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury ETF, a fund that "takes a short position in long-dated government bonds."
The fund is essentially a bet against U.S. government bonds. If the debt ceiling is not raised and the United States defaults on its debts, the value of Cantor's fund would likely increase.
The Democratic resolution, obtained by The Huffington Post from a Democratic source on the Hill, argues that Cantor "stands to profit from U.S. treasury default, which thereby raises the appearance of a conflict of interest," and that he "may be sabotaging [debt ceiling] negotiations for his own personal gain."

Oo-er. That is not the kind of thing a good Virginia boy is raised to do. Well, not unless you're trailer trash. As my elderly aunt would say, Eric's mama ought to turn him over and wail the hell out of his sorry ass for doing something like that. Why, betting against an economic failure of the US Government and actually surreptitiously sabotaging debt ceiling negotiations for personal gain ... that's tantamount to treason! That's despicable, onerous and downright hateful.

And Ed hasn't been much better.

Back last year, Ed got mad at President Obama's Press Secretary, who got mad at people like Ed, who were supposed to be on the President's side, but sought to criticize every little thing he did, said or planned to do or say. Nothing he did was ever good enough to allay the criticism. So Robert Gibbs called out the so-called Professional Left, and Ed lost his temper. (Virginians are famous for losing their tempers).

Well, Ed lost his temper so much, that he told the sheeple - I mean, he advised the people who watched him on television or listened to his radio show not to vote in the 2010 midterms. Teach the Democrats, teach the President a lesson, he said. Show them how much their criticism hurt the base which got them elected.

The base? (Cough, cough) ... The base? The base is solid, Ed. The base doesn't go off on one when it doesn't get instantly gratified. I didn't think there were that many stupid people in America, but - hell - I'm from Virginia, so I guess there must be someone out there on the Left Coast or up in the Northeast lazy enough to let a Southside boy like Ed do their thinking, because those damned people just stayed at home and he handed the key to the House door to Eric ... so Eric could cook the books, back out of the debt ceiling negotiations and hope the government tanked all around. The President would lose, John Boehner would lose, Eric would be chosen Speaker and laugh all the way to the bank.

But now, sixteen months before the General Election of 2012, Ed's ranting the same old song:

Don't vote! If the Democrats, if Obama cuts entitlements like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, DON'T VOTE!

That's right. Don't vote, and let Eric's party come in and really cut entitlements. You see, Ed's latest fearmongering was based on an anonymous rumour, a Chinese whisper, a clever piece of ratfuckery sucked up by The Washington Post and The New York Times. When someone finally got up off their ass and investigated, they found that any proposed "cut" in Social Security was to cut the cost-of-living increase of $34.41 per month to $34.27 per month. A cut of fourteen cents per month - $1.68 per annum.

So for that, Ed says, don't vote. Hand everything to the Republicans who won't just cut, they'll hatchet.

Totally irresponsible and totally wrong.

I am ashamed to share the status of Virginian with these two dumbasses. So I propose a punishment: Excommunication by State.

First, I would have the pair of them carted down I-95 and I-64 on a flat-bed truck, slowing along the way to allow people assembled along the sidelines of the route to pelt refuse at them. I would take them to Williamsburg, where I would lock them in the public stocks and give people the opportunity to hurl some of the rotten, worm-infested apples and peaches from our orchards, using their heads as targets. They would then be ceremoniously dumped with the contents of two chamber pots, before being tarred, feathered and ridden on the back of Macaca Allen back to Richmond and onto the shores of the James, where they'd be tossed in a burning boat (along with Macaca) and cast out to sea and their fates.

And as the wind whistled in off the Eastern Shore each evening, we could all hear Ed and Eric, crying for their mamas.

One Man's Racism Is Another Man's Comedy

There's a Facebook friend in my social network, from Denver, Colorado, a man of the Left, who insists that race isn't a factor with the Left's so-called disillusionment with the President.

I disagree.

Of course, race factors into the Left's perception of the President and his performance, as much - if not more, in a different way - than it does on the Right. It was always going to factor. If Hillary Clinton had won the nomination and the election, the question of gender and her response to certain situations based on the fact that she was a woman, would always be cause for comment and speculation. Certainly, Jack Kennedy's Catholicism and its adherence to the supremacy of Rome, was a mitigating factor for some during his brief Administration.

This is a seminal Presidency, the first time an African-American is Commander-in-Chief.

Having come of age during the Seventies, when the newly-born Progressives were driving the agendae of the Democratic Party with their quest for ensuring equality through Affirmative Action, I watched, often from the sidelines, when the first woman or the first African-American man (or woman) ascended to some post or position heretofore only inhabitable in the realms of the omnipotent white male. Suffice it to say, in each instance, that the performance standard was raised just enough, to ensure that the seminal appointment would either burn out in trying to achieve a success easily achievable by his or her white brethren, or fail. Few failed. Many achieved, but at a cost.

In those days, on the Right, you had administrators who hated the thought of having to compromise their sexism or racism (or both) and who could barely contain their disdain at having whom they considered to be lesser beings in positions of responsibility and authority. Those sorts were easily recogniseable.

Worse, were the supposedly enlightened people of the Left, the ones who went out of their way to refer to any female appointee as "Ms" or who made a great show of lunching with "the black guy" and showing friendly in the office - only to shake his head and tut-tut almost reprovingly each time the slightest error was made, often rolling his eyes as he glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the crew, the action wordlessly admitting, "See, I told you so. Have to show them everything."

And so they would hover. And explain. And assume. And breathe a sigh of relief when the woman or "the black guy" would move to a different department or job. Or he'd seethe silently, if such person deservedly got a promotion he had perceived to be his and his alone.

You can see this now.

We've been able to see it from the Right as far back as the Tea Party's inception in 2009. It was a poor masquerade to hide behind words like "socialist" or "communist" or "Marxist" or even "Nazi," especially when those words accompanied signs which depicted the President as an African tribal chief or a monkey.

But from the Left, it's revealed itself in stages and some subtely and by voices whom the media willingly identifies as "Progressive". Ah, but these voices made it abundantly obvious to the hoi polloi who hung on their every word, that their criticism of the President had everything to do with his "policy" and nothing to do with his race - which, of course, prompted that noted "policy" critic and Progressive, Glenn Greenwald, to begin almost immediately to refer to any of the President's supporters as "Obamalovers" and to use that phrase viciously and in such circumstances, that it wasn't difficult for anyone to realise that "Obamalover" was a euphemism for that timeworn old George Corley Wallace phrase of "n*ggerlover." Even Joan Walsh is using the same phrase with aplomb now, but Joan's racism is quickly becoming an open issue in many areas of the Left.

And as for Greenwald's Progressivism, this is the man who writes for the Koch-founded and funded Cato Institute. This is the man who openly embraces the Citizens United decision, who supports Gary Johnson for President of the United States, a man who wants child labor laws rescinded, who wants the Department of Education dismantled and the EPA finished. Yes, Greenwald, who doesn't vote and who never has, is an identifiable Progressive.

Ever since the beginning of this Administration, one of its most vociferous critics, Rush Limbaugh, hasn't been too good to bring race into the fray. He mocks the President and his family on this score from his radio pulpit on a regular basis, employing stereotypical voices and musical soundbytes. Rightwing personalities have created pictures of the White House lawn turned into a watermelon patch.

All of this is disgusting and openly racist and has been decried as such by people from the Left and by some on the Right who still retain a conscience and a modicum of common sense.

But what happens when this sort of thing emanates from the Left?

Well, then, it becomes comedy.

How is Bill Maher's repeated reference to the President as "President Sanford and Son" any different from Limbaugh's depiction as such, using the Sanford and Son music as a backdrop to his criticism? Fred Sanford, a comic figure, was the quintessential lazy and feckless black man, unable to come to terms with modern life, a bumbler, who witlessly called upon a higher power (his dead wife) whenever his luck ran out.

Rush can ride that pony with impunity. Such tastelessness is what is expected from someone who joked that he'd like to own an NFL franchise because he fancied owning some black men. But Bill Maher regularly identifies himself as a "Progressive." How does he tie in a Sanford depiction of a President whom, at various times when the political fashion dictates, he perceives to be weak? Why "President Sanford and Son" instead of "President Barney Fife," another bumbler and stumbler, who happened to be white?

Then there's the disappointment that the stereotype hasn't been fulfilled. Throughout the Gulf Crisis, Maher and his cronies screamed for the angry black man to emerge. Today's radical chic, many of whom were in middle school watching Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, still think of a black man as a cross between Clarence Williams III playing Linc in The Mod Squad and Stokely Carmichael; everybody else was either Flip Wilson, Bill Cosby or Diahann Carroll playing Julia.

Maybe this is why, during the summer of 2010, Maher whined during a monologue that when he voted for Obama, he thought he was voting for a real black man, a mothafucka gangsta who'd strike fear into the Cabinet by pounding the table with his fist, then opening his jacket to reveal a gun on his hip. Instead of "President Sanford and Son," we now get "President Clarence Carmichael" with a soupcon of Mister Tibbs. So Bill voted for John Shaft and got Cliff Huxtable, which subsequently allowed him - not once, but twice - to declare the President a "pussy" on national television, once on Fareed Zakaria's program in November 2010, and then on his own show some two weeks ago.

Mark Halperin describes the President as a "dick" and gets an indefinite suspension, and rightly so. Bill Maher calls the President a "pussy" and gets laughter.

Go figure.

Ah, but Bill's a comedian. He's a wannabe political pundit who's invited on any and all political opinion shows to talk politics, but when something like this occurs - hey, he's a comedian. It's for laughs, folks.

Like Jon Stewart, who's an acknowledged comedian, but whom people really do consider a newsman or a political pundit. So when Stewart, when satirizing African-American Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain, by using a voice straight from Amos'n Andy, is surprised when Cain considers this racist, I'm surprised that Stewart is surprised.

Herman Cain has a Southern accent - which, I presume, Stewart, who was educated in Virginia, is channelling. But I wonder how coincidental it is that Stewart's Southern accent, employed for his Cain satire, sounds suspiciously like that of Kingfish Stevens, who - like Fred Sanford - came to represent a feckless, less-than-honest and lazy portrayal of a black man?

I am not saying Stewart is racist or even knowingly so. With Maher, I have my doubts. He's too much the Left Coaster and also has too many Rightwing sympathies (death penalty, racial profiling, anti-union) and associations (Arianna Huffington, Darrell Issa, Bill Frist), that a thinly disguised veneer of racism wouldn't surprise me in the least.

And when this is the case amongst those whom we deem "our own" on the Left, we have to acknowledge our shortcomings too; because I've always perceived the Left to have the same problem with the Obama Presidency as Scarlett had with Prissy. Prissy was the recalcitrant slave who just wouldn't do what Miss Scarlett said until Miss Scarlett snapped and slapped her, which is what I get the impression the Professional Left and their sheeple would like to do with this recalcitrant President, who just doesn't do as they say when they say and how they say.

This attitude is summed up brilliantly by the blogger rootless_e, writing in The People's View about Paul Krugman's litany of disillusionment with the Obama Presidency (which Jonathan Alter in his book The Promise puts down to the fact that Krugman has been angling for a Cabinet post since 1992 and hasn't secured one):-

...I have no more patience for "progressives" who want to tell the President and the rest of us us what to say and how to talk - and that's the underlying substance of Professor Krugman's critique, the failure of the President to stick the script that the progressives have written. The President, however, is not Mr. Krugman's graduate assistant and he's not the errand boy.

It's as I've always said: The Right don't like the fact that there's a black man in the White House who isn't serving coffee, and the Left doesn't like the fact that there's a black man in the White House who's smarter than they are and who doesn't do what they order.

When the Left Borrows from the Right

I'm not a great fan of Cynthia Boaz, but I'll give her fair due. She's written a cracking piece which you can see on TruthOut.org's website, entiled "14 Propaganda Techniques that Fox 'News' Uses to Brainwash Americans."

It's a pretty inclusive article, but she should have added how elements of the Right, specifically the Tea Party, borrowed principles and techniques from Saul Alinsky and used them to their advantage -the organising and the targeting of communities and people within these communities in order to grow a movement from within. This whole current Republican Party borrowed a lot of organisational methods from the old communist party, in point of fact.

As much as they like to invoke his sainted memory, the Republican Party is not the party of Reagan. These people are the grandchildren of Barry Goldwater and direct lineal descendents from the Birchers of the Fifties and Sixties. The Birchers borrowed a lot of organisational practice from the communist party, from the era when the communists were trying to infiltrate the union movement.

It was from the old communist handbooks that the Birchers learned to infiltrate the lowliest organisations, mingle with the hoi polloi in order that they might see and accept them as people much like themselves (which they were), and then move onto something bigger and better. Start with the PTA, move onto the Town Council, run for Mayor, County Supervisors, State General Assembly etc etc. This might take time, but these people, unlike a lot of people today, understood that incremental change is change that lasts.

Thus, when the Democratic party, under the urbane and suave leadership of Gary Hart and co, newly-minted voters from affluent, professional, white-collard middle class homes, people with no emotional or traditional connection either to the working class or the labor movement, kicked the working class of the rural South, Midwest and other areas of the country to the political curb, the "family values" Republicans, many of whom were people these folks had known all their lives, were there to pick them up, dust them off and turn them in direction Right. Even though a lot of this effort took 30 years to achieve.

Cynthia's right to emphasize the fear tactics and brainwashing used by Fox News and the Right, in general, in order to keep their vast demographic so pulverised with fear that they're basically infantilised - hey, it's always easier to control scared children - and it's fair to say that a lot of this necessity on behalf of the Right's public voice arose after 9/11, when we were all pretty much scared cackless. It's pretty accurate to say that whilst George Bush and Co mananged to keep the country in a heightened state of fear over the spectre of Osama bin Ladin for 8 years, that fear now has been handed on by the Right to focus on the figure of the President, himself.

I'll grant you, for forty years, the Right has systematically demonised the Left to the point that the Left accommodated the Right and abandoned the use of the word "liberal" as a pejorative - instead, reinventing itself under the guise of "Progressive."

We watched the Republicans throw various dirty bits at Bill Clinton, mostly in the shapely shapes of women coming out of the woodwork to tell about his sexual exploits. He was also labelled a cocaine trafficker and a murderer. And now we've seen the Right vilify and seek to delegitimise Barack Obama in a myriad of ways which are just as bad, and worse, than the way Clinton was morphed into Public Enemy Number One, by the GOP.

He's been called a Kenyan, a Mau-mau, a socialist, a communist, a Marxist and a Nazi. He's been accused of being a curious Manchurian candidate, smuggled as a baby into the country by his mother and raised and groomed for the highest office in the Land. Some on the Right have characterised him as an uppity thug; one even called him a liar to his face. He's been accused of wanting to establish death panels, in order to determine who might live and who might die under his Healthcare program. All of this has been force-fed various tranches of the public to the point that they are convinced and nothing and no information could persuade them that they've been fed a tissue of lies.

And that's just from the Right.

Because as the Right has borrowed extensively from the Left in order to beat them at their own game, so the Left is borrowing from the Right and - for some reason - undermining this Administration.

Let me show you how, using some of Cynthia's listed propaganda techniques.

1. Panic Mongering. This goes one step beyond simple fear mongering. With panic mongering, there is never a break from the fear. The idea is to terrify and terrorize the audience during every waking moment. From Muslims to swine flu to recession to homosexuals to immigrants to the rapture itself, the belief over at Fox seems to be that if your fight-or-flight reflexes aren't activated, you aren't alive. This of course raises the question: why terrorize your own audience? Because it is the fastest way to bypasses the rational brain. In other words, when people are afraid, they don't think rationally. And when they can't think rationally, they'll believe anything.
Do the Left indulge in this? Quite frankly, yes. Not to the extent that the Right do, but it's there in the Leftwing media, on the web and certainly on MSNBC.

The most obvious proponents of this technique are FireDogLake's Jane Hamsher and Bold Progressives' Adam Green. Green is a particularly bad with this technique. If you're on his e-mail list or even on Jane's, you've probably received e-mails from them, telling you in breathless terms, urgent terms that time's running out for this cause or that cause, the latest dastardly deed of betrayal that Barack Obama's about to level on Left. Cleverly inserted inside these fear e-missives is the kind request that if the recipient just clicks on a link to sign a petition and donate at least $5.00 to the cause au courant, of course, Jane or Adam or whoever will be able to fight just that much more securely to ensure that your rights are preserved.

Green's most recent cause celebre has been haranguing people that the President is about to axe not just Medicare, in cahoots with Paul Ryan's budget plan, but also Social Security Insurance. If you cast your mind back to April when the President gave his George Washington University speech - the one where he handed Paul Ryan his ass on a platter - I'll let Joy Reid of The Reid Report, also - like Green - an MSNBC political contributor, tell you how Green man-managed this issue:-

Nobody knows what the president is going to say at 1:35 this afternoon about entitlements. The stories flying around the Beltway about what Obama will announce, including the speculation that he will embrace the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles “cat food” commission, are jsut that: speculation. The White House often releases embargoed previews of the president’s speeches. I’m on that media list. They didn’t do it this time, and have made it clear they won’t. (Thanks for leaking those prior embargoed speeches, National Journal…)
Green is probably on those lists too.
In other words, he has no more idea what the president is going to say than I do. The president may very well go all Simpson-Bowles on us, and if he does, it will be worth debating how smart that is. But at this stage, no one knows.
But that didn’t stop the “bold progressive” from releasing a dramatic email this morning, quoting a bunch of disillusioned Obama voters who can’t believe he’s selling out Medicare and Medicaid, which they know because … well they just know he’s gonna do it and they can’t BELIEVE it…! And asking the recipient to sign their petition demanding the president not “sell out,” the way they already know he will. From the in-box:
Joy-Ann,
Urgent! The White House announced that in a big speech today, President Obama will do what no Republican President has been able to do: Put Medicare and Medicaid on the table for potential cuts.
Many former Obama volunteers, donors, and voters are deeply disappointed. A Democratic Congressman said on MSNBC on Monday that Obama needs to “act like a Democrat.”
Will you sign this urgent pledge, which we’ll deliver to the Obama campaign?
“President Obama: If you cut Medicare and Medicaid benefits for me, my parents, my grandparents, or families like mine, don’t ask for a penny of my money or an hour of my time in 2012. I’m going to focus on electing bold progressive candidates — not Democrats who help Republicans make harmful cuts.” Click here to sign.
Below are some amazing notes from Obama volunteers who worked passionately for the President in 2008.
Many people still want to believe in President Obama. But the White House needs to understand that their actions now will have real consequences for 2012. The level of grassroots enthusiasm will be determined by whether the President fights for bold progressive change — and takes cuts that hurt grandparents, the disabled, and kids firmly off the table.
The White House will absolutely be watching the progress of this petition. And we’ll deliver the pledge signatures to the Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago.
Please sign today — then, pass it to others who worked to elect President Obama in 2008.
Thanks for being a bold progressive.
– Adam Green, Stephanie Taylor, Jason Rosenbaum, Keauna Gregory, and the PCCC team.
Now, the beauty part of this, beside the fact that when you go to the petition, the CONTRIBUTE button is nicely highlighted in red, is that no matter what Obama says today, it works out for PCCC.
If he fails to “sell out” Medicare and Medicaid, PCCC will claim credit for making him change a speech that I’m pretty sure was written before they started their online petition drive – much the way they claimed the credit for the popular revolution in Wisconsin. Then they’ll raise money on their “win” in turning the feckless president around, and Green will go on Lawrence’s “Last Word” show to skewer Obama for having to be forced to change his ways when he promised to govern as a liberal.

I received one of these e-mailed screeds from Green, because I used to be on his mailing list too, but that one jumped the shark for me, for exactly the reason Joy outlined: No one knew what the President was going to say.

And know what? The only mention made of Medicare or Social Security was in direct opposition to what Ryan proposed to do, but since the President gave that address 24 hours after Green sent out his desperately urgent e-mail, enough people had sent their five-dollar donations to Bold Progressives, that Green had garnered a cool $300K in less than 24 hours, and he bragged about it.

Nice work, if you can get it. For a grifter. And isn't that just a little bit illegal? Still, MSNBC, who leans forward, continuously brings Green to the table and identifies him as a political contributor.

Here's the rub. Green is a graduate of my alma mater, the University of Virginia. We have a stringent Honor Code which precludes any student lying, cheating or stealing. If Green had tried some of the tactics he's so successful in trying now as a student, he'd be ordered to leave the University within 24 hours ... basically for lying, cheating and stealing. He probably studied under Larry Sabato, but I know Larry, and I don't imagine Larry would have either encouraged or condoned a scam piece like this.

Still, some people have more money than common sense. Let's plough on.

2. Character Assassination/Ad Hominem. Fox does not like to waste time debating the idea. Instead, they prefer a quicker route to dispensing with their opponents: go after the person's credibility, motives, intelligence, character, or, if necessary, sanity. No category of character assassination is off the table and no offense is beneath them. Fox and like-minded media figures also use ad hominem attacks not just against individuals, but entire categories of people in an effort to discredit the ideas of every person who is seen to fall into that category, e.g. "liberals," "hippies," "progressives" etc. This form of argument - if it can be called that - leaves no room for genuine debate over ideas, so by definition, it is undemocratic. Not to mention just plain crass.

Once again, people on the Left have engaged in this technique - most often against the Right; and though it might make me a hypocrite, I've no problem with "my" side giving back to the Right just as good as they give us; but MSNBC - Lean Forward MSNBC - engages in this as much against the President as against the Rightwing. And so do many of the celebrity talking heads, especially against the viewing/listening/reading public who happen to disagree with their particular assessment of the President.

Weeks before he was sacked from MSNBC, Keith Olbermann embarked on a scurrilous "Special Comment" against the myth these celebrity talking heads and several members of Congress from safe, affluent districts, had been pushing about the President "caving" on extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Never mind the fact that this compromise secured notable benefits for the unemployed, the poor and the working poor, the President should have walked on the discussions and allowed the tax cuts to expire. (And sacrificed the repeal of DADT and the passing of SMART and the First Responders' legislation).

Ne'mind all that. Keith's special comment wantonly labelled the President a "quisling," which is the worst sort of traitor, and likened him to a Nazi appeaser.

That same week, appearing on Fareed Zakaria's Sunday program, Bill Maher - not to be undone - promptly declared the President a "pussy." He recently reiterated that once again a week ago on his program.

Meanwhile, we've seen Hamsher and her cronies on the FDL site refer to the President as "the Affirmative Action President," "Bugaloo Bush," and even "the house nigger."

It's not just the President for whom they're aiming. Olbermann and Joan Walsh, inveterate Twitterers, regularly engage in punching down at followers from the Left who disagree with their opinions. Olbermann's favourite tack is to address these people as "morons." Joan tells people to "get help" or she opines that their lives must suck (to be so stupid as to dare disagree with someone so far elevated by appearances on television that they must know the subject about which they discourse).

In fact, quite recently, Joan reckoned that anyone who vigorously defended the President was actually a GOP troll, most likely paid by Andrew Breitbart, and that these people would do more damage to Barack Obama than anyone else.

Pardon me, but I was raised a Democrat, by parents who'd voted Democratic since Roosevelt and beyond. I was raised to support the party, especially if there were a Democrat in the White House. Criticize the President, yes, that goes without saying; but wantonly and in the fashion of the radical chic the way this President has been criticized for absolutely everything, by the Right as well as the Left, it goes without saying that his supporters are many things, but not underminers.

And it's these selfsame supporters who've been labelled "Obamabots" by those morally superior purists who follow every word, deed and thought of the likes of Hamsher and Green as truth, when - in fact - like many on the Right, including Hamsher's political bedfellow, Grover Norquist - they're pushing the propaganda technique of the Big Lie to the fullest.

3. Projection/Flipping. This one is frustrating for the viewer who is trying to actually follow the argument. It involves taking whatever underhanded tactic you're using and then accusing your opponent of doing it to you first. We see this frequently in the immigration discussion, where anti-racists are accused of racism, or in the climate change debate, where those who argue for human causes of the phenomenon are accused of not having science or facts on their side. It's often called upon when the media host finds themselves on the ropes in the debate.

This is something the Left doesn't like to here, but it's there and it needs addressing: racism. On the Left, the tack has been rather like the old Fawlty Towers episode about German guests in the hotel: Whatever you do, don't mention the war.

In this case, it's whatever you do, don't bring race into it, even when it's really all about race. How could it not be about race, when we have the first African American President in the White House?

No, he doesn't have to bring it up, anymore than I would have expected Hillary Clinton to have played the gender card, had she won (and which Sarah Palin does remorselessly and without compunction); but some of the remarks and the attitudes emanating from certain quarters on the Left have had a particular whiff of subtle racism about them.

Walsh, two months ago, uttered an inadvertantly racist remark in a Twitter feed, and had her posterior portion served up to her on a platter by several African American bloggers, articulate and intelligent people who were offended. Did she apologise for the way she worded her sentence? No. Show remorse? Never.

Some of these remarks have been foolishly inane, like Chris Matthews getting over-excited and blurting out that he sometimes forgets Obama is a black man. Others are blatantly ignorant and provocative, such as Bill Maher's referring to the President as "President Sanford and Son" or wondering why we didn't elect a "real" black man, one who embodied all the characteristics Bill ascribes to ghetto gangstas, including carrying a gun concealed on his person.

But if anyone points these items out or questions the appearance of racists attitudes on the Left, the argument is turned around to imply that the person introducing the subject is, themselves, a racist.

I'm a white woman from the South. I grew up just when segregation was ending and integration was the norm. I lived through the high age of deliberate Affirmative Action in the Seventies. I've seen kneejerk liberals welcome minority employees into the fold and then proceed to patronise and raise the performance standard as an excuse to tut and to criticize. People like me just don't hear dog whistles, we see the mutts being herded across wide expanses of fields.

Nobody likes to be called a racist, but more and more African Americans are recognising the subtle form of patronising racism amongst the Progressive Left and are calling them out about it - whether it be Cornel West and his personal vendetta against the President in implying that Obama inherited too many white traits from his Kansan mother, to Joan Walsh's ladylike vapours at the thought that African American supporters of the President would dispute that people of Joan's ilk make up the Democratic base.

(They don't.)

4. Rewriting History. This is another way of saying that propagandists make the facts fit their worldview. The Downing Street Memos on the Iraq war were a classic example of this on a massive scale, but it happens daily and over smaller issues as well. A recent case in point is Palin's mangling of the Paul Revere ride, which Fox reporters have bent over backward to validate. Why lie about the historical facts, even when they can be demonstrated to be false? Well, because dogmatic minds actually find it easier to reject reality than to update their viewpoints. They will literally rewrite history if it serves their interests. And they'll often speak with such authority that the casual viewer will be tempted to question what they knew as fact.

Yes, sorry to say the Left is guilty of this as well. Not on such a grandiose scale as we've seen on the Right, with Palin's version of Paul Revere's ride or Bachmann's making John Quincy Adams one of the Founding Fathers when he was still wet behind the ears, and their respective supporters scurrying onto Wikipedia in an effort, actually, to rewrite events, themselves. And not with the odious David Barton pushing his revisionist history of the United States as a nation founded on a vision from God. But our side does its fair share of rewriting history.

Here are some facts we rather conveniently ignore about our various saints:

Theodore Roosevelt, founder of the Progressives, was a Republican. He coined the phrase "bully pulpit," but it didn't mean what we interpret it to mean today. In Roosevelt's time, "bully" was slang for "great" or "good." So when he described the Presidency as a "bully pulpit," he really meant it was a great platform by which to communicate and not one by which a leader could forcibly impose his will upon Congress or the public.
Woodrow Wilson, whom the Righwing revile and whom the Leftwing revere, was a notorious racist. Fact.
FDR was a pragmantist, more at home in the world of industrialists and finaciers. His best friend was Bernard Baruch. Once he'd got his social justice schemes in place, he dropped the Progressive Midwest Democrats and joined up with industrialists to promote production for what he perceived to be the upcoming war. He interned the Niseii, not because he wanted to, but because the public demanded it. He interned them in concentration camps. That's right. He tried to stack the Surpreme Court and got smacked by Congress. He wasn't afraid to send in National Guard troops to bust union strikers during the war and argued heavily with John Lewis of the CIO about unionising WPA jobs to the extent that Lewis endorsed Wendell Wilkie in 1940.
LBJ went from hero to zero in two years. Whilst he was an effective Senate Majority Leader, he wasn't that successful a President. He managed to sign the Civil Rights Act, but was helpless against the onslaught of white backlash that erupted in the North. He lied about the Bay of Tonkin disaster in order to get us more heavily involved in Viet Nam. Until his dying day, he never ceased to refer to a person of African American heritage by anything other than the awful n-word.
Barack Obama did not run as a Progressive, but as a Centre-Left pragmatist, who never advocated single-payer health insurance or, really, a public option. He always said he'd bring down action in Iraq, whilst concentrating on upping the ante in Afghanistan.
John Edwards, prior to 2008, was a triangular Clintonian Democrat. He only decided to run as a Progressive in order to hit Hillary Clinton from the Left in the primary campaign of 2008. He has never and still doesn't approve of same sex marriage.
5. Scapegoating/Othering. This works best when people feel insecure or scared. It's technically a form of both fear mongering and diversion, but it is so pervasive that it deserves its own category. The simple idea is that if you can find a group to blame for social or economic problems, you can then go on to a) justify violence/dehumanization of them, and b) subvert responsibility for any harm that may befall them as a result.

This is a regular tactic of the Hamsher Firebaggers as well as Queen Ratfucker Arianna Huffington. If it's Wednesday and the economy's bad, blame the President or one of his advisors, usually Tim Geithner. Huffington pushed the big lie last year that Geithner was viciously opposed to Elizabeth Warren being appointed to head of the Credit Protection Agency. The other big lie she promoted up to and including the eve of the Midterm election, was that the President "just wasn't that into the Middle Classes" - as if she were such an expert on the middle class, itself.

But she's still out there, still commanding the media attention of the sociopath she is and still being identified as a Progressive voice, even though she's now a part of the corporate Kochmeister social swirl. MSNBC and Bill Maher treat her like a goddess when she's more like a gorgon. Why?

6. Conflating Violence With Power and Opposition to Violence With Weakness. This is more of what I'd call a "meta-frame" (a deeply held belief) than a media technique, but it is manifested in the ways news is reported constantly. For example, terms like "show of strength" are often used to describe acts of repression, such as those by the Iranian regime against the protesters in the summer of 2009. There are several concerning consequences of this form of conflation. First, it has the potential to make people feel falsely emboldened by shows of force - it can turn wars into sporting events. Secondly, especially in the context of American politics, displays of violence - whether manifested in war or debates about the Second Amendment - are seen as noble and (in an especially surreal irony) moral. Violence become synonymous with power, patriotism and piety.

Whilst the Left in no way identifies with violence in the way the Right does, there is, with this Presidency, a penchant of people on the Left to use various epithets and phrases that, unconsciously, have a pejorative historical value when applied to this seminal Presidency.

I've noted before that Bill Maher regularly refers to Obama as a "pussy." He has also stated that the President was weak, without spine and not a leader in the least. So have many other people from the Left. It doesn't matter that each time these accusations get bandied about, the President proves there's more than one side to strength than swaggering like Bush or chest-beating, which is what people like Maher with Big Daddy issues seem to expect from this President. They long for the stereotypical angry Black Panther of a man, and the moment the President loses his temper, which is always done in a calm, cool and rationally cold sort of way, they either go running for cover or they whine some more that this isn't enough.

There's such a sort of strength as quiet strength from within. As far as throwing temper tantrums, my Sicilian grandmother always used to remind me that "revenge is a dish that's best eaten cold."

7. Bullying. This is a favorite technique of several Fox commentators. That it continues to be employed demonstrates that it seems to have some efficacy. Bullying and yelling works best on people who come to the conversation with a lack of confidence, either in themselves or their grasp of the subject being discussed. The bully exploits this lack of confidence by berating the guest into submission or compliance. Often, less self-possessed people will feel shame and anxiety when being berated and the quickest way to end the immediate discomfort is to cede authority to the bully. The bully is then able to interpret that as a "win."

I think we saw a fair amount of this recently, especially at NetRoots Nation 11, when Lt Dan Choi, the latest Hamsher tool, ostentatiously confronted the bisexual OFA volunteer in a humiliating fashion for all to see. It happens when someone disagrees online with the Alpha man likes of Glenn Greenwald, David Sirota or John Aravosis (he, who's pronounced on Twitter that "all blacks are insane"). It occurs in the commentary sections from The Daily Kos to Huffington Post to Salon, where people name-call and bait others. It happens on phone-ins from the Right and from the Left, and it's inexcusable.

8. Confusion. As with the preceding technique, this one works best on an audience that is less confident and self-possessed. The idea is to deliberately confuse the argument, but insist that the logic is airtight and imply that anyone who disagrees is either too dumb or too fanatical to follow along. Less independent minds will interpret the confusion technique as a form of sophisticated thinking, thereby giving the user's claims veracity in the viewer's mind.

Favourite tactic of Glenn Greenwald and Keith Olbermann. When in doubt, tell the person who disagrees with you how stupid they are and that they simply cannot follow your logic. Greenwald's a particularly bad sock puppet, who trolls websites where he's mentioned, often under the guise of someone else, to bait and bother.

9. Populism. This is especially popular in election years. The speakers identifies themselves as one of "the people" and the target of their ire as an enemy of the people. The opponent is always "elitist" or a "bureaucrat" or a "government insider" or some other category that is not the people. The idea is to make the opponent harder to relate to and harder to empathize with. It often goes hand in hand with scapegoating. A common logical fallacy with populism bias when used by the right is that accused "elitists" are almost always liberals - a category of political actors who, by definition, advocate for non-elite groups.

The extreme Left, the Progressives, do this in reverse. Yes, we know the Rightwing is suspicious of anything smacking of elitism - Northeastern or Coastal liberals educated, often privately, but having degrees, if not from Ivy League institutions, then mostly from well-established institutes of higher education.

Make no mistake. This is a divide and conquer technique employed by the Rightwing. The Rightwing wants an uneducated or undereducated populace, poor and unsuspecting,whilst at the same time, suspicious of anything redolent of sophistry. It's to the advantage of the Republicans and their corporate Kochmeisters that there be an underclass of peasants, for lack of a better word, willing to work for whatever rate of pay offered, under the belief that their employer would look after their interests better than any union could ever seek to do. Suck the workers in and entertain them on a diet of Rightwing and religious talk radio pumped through the tannoy daily from dawn until dusk of the working day.

But instead of reaching out to these people, instead of trying to dispel the notion that the Left is the Devil in disguise and out to ruin their way of life as they know it, we ridicule them. David Carr did as much last week on Real Time with Bill Maher when he referred to inhabitants of Kansas and Missouri as having sloping foreheads, indicating low intellect.

Well, Mr Carr, time was, Missouri and Kansas were blue states. And Virginia. And North Carolina. And Montana. And the Dakotas. And Texas, for that matter. These people need to see and hear people, from our side, who sound and act like them, not to deride or denigrate them, but to convince them that the real party fighting for their interests is actually the Democratic party. Or, at least, it should be.

10. Invoking the Christian God. This is similar to othering and populism. With morality politics, the idea is to declare yourself and your allies as patriots, Christians and "real Americans" (those are inseparable categories in this line of thinking) and anyone who challenges them as not. Basically, God loves Fox and Republicans and America. And hates taxes and anyone who doesn't love those other three things. Because the speaker has been benedicted by God to speak on behalf of all Americans, any challenge is perceived as immoral. It's a cheap and easy technique used by all totalitarian entities from states to cults.

Again, the Left does this in reverse, and it does no one any good. Just recently, the Rightwing came out with a new meme to push in the run-up to the next election: Liberals hate God.

That's it. We hate God. Not only are they painting us as weeping-Nellie atheists in a culture war, but we're the enemies because we are perceived to hate God.

I can't possibly think where they got that idea.

Oh, wait ... once again, maybe Bill Maher comes into the equation.

Look, I'm a non-believer, but I know that our country was founded on the principle of having the freedom to woship, or not to worship, as one chooses. And I know that most of the Founding Fathers were elite members of the ruling aristocracy, educated during the Enlightenment, and that most were probably Deists. Thomas Jefferson not only had a copy of the Koran, he even edited his own Bible to suit his own tastes.

I also know that most non-believers are found on the cultural Left - with the exception of S E Cupp and Karl Rove (and Cupp is suspect, whilst Rove flipflops on his atheism depending on the audience). But I hate proselytisers of any stripe, and I abhor the raving atheist who propagates his opinion that anyone who believes is demented as much as I abhor the fundamentalist who exorts me to repent or burn in hell. Whatever floats your boat, the Left is supposed to be the side demonstrating tolerance here. Deriding anyone's religious beliefs is as bad as dismissing anyone's lack of belief.

11. Saturation. There are three components to effective saturation: being repetitive, being ubiquitous and being consistent. The message must be repeated cover and over, it must be everywhere and it must be shared across commentators: e.g. "Saddam has WMD." Veracity and hard data have no relationship to the efficacy of saturation. There is a psychological effect of being exposed to the same message over and over, regardless of whether it's true or if it even makes sense, e.g., "Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States." If something is said enough times, by enough people, many will come to accept it as truth. Another example is Fox's own slogan of "Fair and Balanced."

Do we do this? Yes, we do. How about endless, endless repetition of the fact that:-

The President is weak
The President is a corporate tool of Wall Street
The President just isn't into you
The President is just like Bush
The President isn't a good negotiator
The President caved
The President caved
The President caved
The President caved
Get the picture? There are people out there right now on our side, who won't believe anything else, other than the most pejorative talking points about this President; and some of them are people who should know better.

13. Guilt by Association. This is a favorite of Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart, both of whom have used it to decimate the careers and lives of many good people. Here's how it works: if your cousin's college roommate's uncle's ex-wife attended a dinner party back in 1984 with Gorbachev's niece's ex-boyfriend's sister, then you, by extension are a communist set on destroying America. Period.

You know, the old Blue Dogs have taken some knocking in the past three years. So much so to the extent, that I had a very unwise sould from the Commonwealth of Virginia tell me that she was glad a Tea Partier had unseated Rick Boucher, an established, moderate Democrat of 30 years' standing in the midterm elections. If you're going to vote for a Blue Dog, she reckoned, you may as well vote Republican.

Rick Boucher was not Ben Nelson or Joe Manchin. He was a loyal Democrat who voted with the party, but because he was centrist and veered centre-Right, he was deemed a Blue Dog, and therefore, unworthy of serving, even if that meant losing a Democratic seat in the House of Representatives.

The Hamsherites think that way too. In fact, they've put together a group who are looking to find someone either to primary the President in 2012 or to run a third party candidate; and you know what? They don't give a rat's ass that such a tactic would literally hand the White House front door key to a President Bachmann or Perry or Pawlenty, because they reckon that the Democratic party needs a shakedown like this to reform along more Progressive lines. After all, a Presidential term is only four years, right?

Wrong.

The last time a serving Democratic President was primaried, we got 12 years of Republican rule - those 12 years which set us firmly on the road to hell from which we're desperately trying to find an exit. Peeps, this current Republican party isn't the party of the smiling Gipper. It's people are, at best, Goldwater's grandchildren; at worst, they're the natural successors to the Koch-funded John Birch Society. They're Dominionists, intent on turning this country into a Christian theocracy. They come with Ayn Rand in one hand and thumping a Bible against their hip with the other. They want to control women's reproductive rights, ditch the Department of Education and public schools and live by states and property rights. This is back to the future, big time!

Anytime we label any Democrat pejoratively, we lessen the strength of the Democratic party.

Cynthia Boaz listed 14 different propaganda tactics employed by Fox and the Right to brainwash people. The Left, aided and abetted by MSNBC and other entities, is guilty of following 12 of those 14 propaganda techniques, albeit modifying them to suit their own agenda. But the difference is that the Right is using those techniques in order to demonise the opposition - us - whilst we on the Left, some of us, at least, use these techniques less effectively against the Right, but - perversely - more effectively against ourselves.

Admittedly, the plebescite of the Left is often led by the short and curlies by professional hacks who masquerade as Leftwing pundits - Huffington comes to mind, and she's anything but. Yet consider that Hamsher owns a public relations firm who represents and advises Republican candidates, that Greenwald has been connected with the Cato Institute and the Koch brothers and that several of these celebrity talking heads have a past history of being neocon Republicans, themselves. Even Bill Maher, who repeatedly and incorrectly labels himself a Progressive, is far too cosy with the likes of Darrell Issa and Andrew Breitbart.

So going into the 2012 election and aiming for a Democratic President securing a second term, all we seem to have managed to do is create a house divided against itself, whose foundations, the base, are anything but strong.

And, please, don't patronise me by pushing the old chestnut of the President abandoning his base. His base abandoned him the minute they ceded their capacity for critical thinking to those who profit from dividing and conquering. Or maybe it's just more comfortable being morally right in Opposition with no responsibility to govern?