A Conscientious Objector in the War on Christmas

During The Daily Show’s first segment last night, Jon Stewart went after Fox News for again turning the Holiday Season into a trumped up culture clash that Fox insists on describing as “The War on Christmas.”  Once again, blogger doesn’t seem to be able to embed video from The Daily Show but you can watch it here.  (It really is very funny.)

As always, right-wingers’ complaints about their so-called ‘War on Christmas’ devolve to an assertion that “America is Christian nation” and – when called upon to defend this patently untrue statement – they point to the Pilgrims, who settled in New England seeking ‘religious freedom.’ 

(For the record, Americans may be a Christian people – by and large – but that does not make us a Christian nation.  The First Amendment makes clear that the government is to neither establish a religion nor to interfere with its citizens’ religious observances.  Our governing document, in other words, is religion neutral.  Of course, being ‘neutral toward’ religion is not the same as being ‘hostile toward’ religion.)

But hearing this sort of stuff always sticks in my craw, because it is very, very stupid.  I can never help but think that the people who make this argument betray that they never acquired more than a Fourth Grade education of American history, and that they should by all rights be embarrassed by their own ignorance.  So let me get just a few things off of my chest:

Happy Evacuation Day, Everybody!

And speaking of quirks in American history that get forgotten or swept under the rug, if you've not already seen Sarah Vowell's appearance on The Daily Show last week in which she explains the history of "Evacuation Day" -- which was once a huge American holiday and now, thanks to "Abraham Fucking Lincoln" is almost entirely forgotten -- you should check it out.

I attempted to embed the video, but either blogger does not support the type of embedding Comedy Central makes possible or I am just too clueless to figure out how to get it to work.  But you can see the thing by clicking here.  (You'll have to sit through a ten second ad for a video game; sorry.)

Go, learn, enjoy.

Book Review: The Reactionary Mind

So over the weekend I read Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind:  Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.  I finished it Sunday morning and have allowed a few days to go by to get my thoughts about it in order.

So as not to spoil the book for anyone thinking about reading it for oneself, those thoughts are below the fold.

Sarah Palin Update (Kind of)

D’Oh!

A month or so ago I predicted that Sarah Palin would not run for office, but would instead try to position herself as a “kingmaker” within the Republican Party; if she could convince GOP candidates that she was capable of delivering a substantial bloc of Republican voters, then the candidates would have to kiss her ring to obtain her endorsement.  This would keep her a viable political celebrity and help to ensure continuing (paid) speaking engagements.

So far that hasn’t happened; to date I have seen no reports that any GOP candidate has been pressing for Palin’s endorsement.

But in what is (for me, at least) a surprising twist, Donald Trump seems to have stepped into the role Palin seeks to fill.  To date Trump has met with Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, and – we now learn – Rick Perry.  What’s more, Trump apparently turned Perry into a Birther.

Of course, the irony is that it was Sarah Palin herself who started this fad when she met Trump and the two of them – for unknowable reasons – went to a chain pizza restaurant where Trump embarrassed himself by failing to eat his pizza like a true New Yorker.  Jon Stewart explains:

I have absolutely no idea why the Republican presidential aspirants think that kissing Donald Trump’s ring will do them any good – I can’t imagine that Trump wields any real power within the party – but I do delight in imagining how bitter it must make Palin to be ignored by the candidates and reality TeeVee alike.

Ah, politics . . . thy name is schadenfreude.

Americans Are Too Stupid to Avoid the Nigerian Prince Scam

Two days ago John Cole wrote up a quick post titled “Easy Marks” about supporters who left their homes, jobs and families to move to Iowa and campaign for that transparent grifter Sarah Palin.  Cole started his screed by asking

You ever hear a news report about a bunch of people who were swindled and lost their life savings in an obvious scam?  I’m talking about the people who lose their life savings to a Nigerian prince who emailed them and said if you just give me your bank account info I will put millions in it for you.  Every time I hear stories like that, I feel an immediate twinge of sympathy, and then a wave of “JUST HOW FUCKING STUPID ARE YOU?”

(Coincidentally, a few hours later Jon Stewart would also cover Palin’s very obvious grift, focusing on how she continued to solicit donations from supporters even though she had no intention of running, and he also compared those supporters to people who fall for the old “Nigerian Prince will give you millions” internet scam.)

The thing is, when I first read Cole’s piece I thought he was going somewhere else with it.  To me, a very obvious and much more important example of the Nigerian Prince scam is the supply-side one that’s been run on the American people ever since St. Ronnie Raygun took office:  the idea that if we just keep showering the wealthiest among us with greater and greater largesse, and keep cutting their taxes, eventually some of their wealth will work its way down to the rest of us and we’ll all be better off.

We’ve been trying this now, to greater or lesser degrees, for 30-odd years and it still hasn’t worked.  Wealth disparity is greater than it has been since WWII, the economy is in the worst condition since the Great Depression and Conservatives are still calling for us to just “double-down” on the same failed idea because eventually we’ll get our money back.

And this, of course, is exactly how the Nigerian Prince scam works.  First you invest a little money in it, then you are told you need to invest just a little more, and then just a little more, and then suddenly you’ve got so much invested in it that you feel you have to keep going just on the off-chance you might not be getting ripped off.  The scam plays on our unwillingness to recognize and walk away from “sunk costs.”

You’d think that most Americans wouldn’t be stupid enough to fall for the same patently obvious scam for more than 30 years.  I guess we’ll see. 

I, For One, Do Not Welcome Our New Corporate Overlords

Some years ago, when stories first began to surface about how corporations were tracking people’s on-line interests and then selling that information to others, I read an interesting article contrasting the different view Americans and Europeans had of the practice. 

Essentially, polling on the issue showed that Europeans were relatively unconcerned that their government might have access to their on-line histories, but were much more wary of private corporations having the same.  Americans essentially subscribed to the opposite viewpoint; the poll showed that Americans didn’t very much mind corporations tracking their on-line activities, but Americans were worried that their information might wind up in a government database somewhere.

About Releasing Bin Laden's Death Photos

So President Obama has announced that no photos of Osama bin Laden’s body will be released.  As loathe as I usually am to speculate about the political calculations behind decisions like this, I wonder if perhaps in this instance Obama really is playing 11^th-Dimensional chess.

When I first learned that bin Laden’s body had been buried at sea, I thought this was a really, really bad mistake.  (You can see my initial take on the news of bin Laden’s death here.)  I predicted that the same impulses that drive the unhinged Birthers would give rise to a new conspiracy group – the Deathers, they are now called – who would claim that bin Laden really hadn’t been killed, that he had been captured and was being held or that Obama had cut a deal with him and that this was all a huge conspiracy to help get Obama re-elected.

And, indeed, despite the fact that (i) the election is still a year and a half away (which makes that conspiracy seem a little, um, poorly timed) and (ii) a conspiracy of this magnitude would be almost impossible to pull off, something of a “Deather Movement” does seem to be getting started.  For example, Andrew Breitbart’s site has posts suggesting darkly that something fishy seems to be going on without a body to view.  Fox Business News has some bloviator suggesting two days ago that without a body there will always be some “lingering questions” and “how will we know he’s dead.”

(As Jon Stewart said, mocking this douchebag:  “When are we going to stop pretending, as a country, that there is a level of empirical proof that will satisfy the conspiracy seekers amongst us?  These things are never about evidence.  We could have a videotape of the terror leader himself holding up Sunday’s New York Post and his birth certificate in his ‘I am bin Laden, Seriously’ t-shirt, saying on camera ‘I think this dude’s about the fuck me up big time,’ [and it] wouldn’t matter.”) 

Brian Kilmeade over at Fox and Friends wondered what the rush was to get the body buried at sea (saying that he agrees with Senator Graham “what’s the rush?” – so I guess Lindsay Graham is out there raising questions about this too, although I’ve not seen that myself).