Conor Friedersdorf continues to muck around in the Big Hollywood fever swamp. He links approvingly to this piece, entitles his post “The NEA Flirts with Propaganda,” and says “This is another item getting most of its play on Andrew Breitbart sites and Fox News — and it is plainly a story that the mainstream media would do well to cover.”

This is strange advice. Conor fails to actually quote what is exactly supposed to be so nefarious and improper that was said in that now notorious conference call. The full transcript has been kicking around for some time, and the best anyone can come up with is this passage:

“All of us who are on this phone call were selected for a reason, and you are the ones that lead by example in your communities. You are the thought leaders. You are the ones that, if you create a piece of art, or promote a piece of art or create a campaign for a company, and tell our country and our young people sort of what do and what to be into, and what’s cool and what’s not cool.”

Excuse me for a moment.

Yes, that’s it. That’s that horrible piece of unAmerican propaganda currently poisoning our government and causing Lady Liberty to weep bitter tears. That’s it; that’s what Conor thinks is worthy of national media attention. Do I even need to go on? Don’t bother looking for recriminations or punishment for artists who don’t produce pro-Obama artwork, or do produce anti-Obama (or anti-Democrat, or anti-government) artwork. There’s no such coercion anywhere– you know, the kind of coercion that the people pimping this pathetic story so desperately want to find. What’s there is precisely the kind of vague, empty bureaucrat speak that suffuses not only every branch of government, regardless of the party of the sitting president, but also every corporate conference call promoting “synergy” and collective effort for collective goals.

Let me ask you a question– do you think that it would be workable for the members of government bureaucracies to not work to meet the goals of their department’s leadership, so long as those goals aren’t illegal or unconstitutional? I’m not talking about elected officials; I’m not talking about members of the legislature; I’m not even talking about the cabinet level officials that should counsel the president away from actions they find detrimental to the country. I’m talking about low level bureaucrats who were hired to actually, you know, do what the government tells them to do– and which the sitting government is empowered to do by the fact that they won the election. I’m asking if Conor or anyone else thinks that employees of branches of government should not talk about effective ways for those branches to carry out their agendas. Perhaps it would be nice for certain strains of conservatism which see government failure as success, but for the actual day to day prosecution of government, not so much. Would Conor write that the Department of Defense flirts with propaganda if it endeavors to fulfill the wishes of the president? I don’t think so!

Oh, by the way– that conference call? Yeah, it’s actually about the President’s National Day of Service, which does not involve the NEA’s puny $155 million dollar budget. Conor didn’t bother to actually fact check the post he was linking to so enthusiastically. (Neither, I’m willing to bet, did the other commenters on the post at the American Scene; reading them, I suspect that they just took at face value that something really evil was happening.) As SEK from the Edge of the American West blog says, the actual ends that this call is trying to achieve are an increase in community service, such as seeing more young people at blood drives. This is the alleyway the drunken husk of conservatism has crawled into, opposing service to one’s country and community as tantamount to socialism.

Now, that’s what matters– the fact that what was said was absurdly trivial, and that the conservatives screaming and carrying on like they’ve found a dead body in Joe Biden’s trunk are actually completely wrong about what they think the call is about. But, yes, the hypocrisy rankles. It does indeed bother me that the ideology responsible for having people sign written pledges declaring their support for President Bush before they see our elected officials speak now complains about this. It does indeed piss me off that a few short years ago, Republicans were routinely doing things like calling for Howard Dean’s hanging for criticizing the war in Iraq, and yet now they stand enraged over this meaningless conference call. It does indeed make me angry that the president himself declared that anti-Iraq war argument “gives comfort to our enemies,” and yet now I read Conor Friedersdorf calling for national prominence on this nothing of a story. Yes, indeed, it makes me angry that a party and ideology that represented nothing more forcefully or loudly than the notion that dissent was unpatriotic and treasonous, and that supporting the president and his aims were our solemn duties, now turn around and complain about something like this. Yes, that makes me angry.

This was not a great post from Conor. But it’s of a piece, sadly, with what we’ve come to expect from conservatives who are laboring away in the wilderness of a collapsed and empty party and ideology. What a sad, pathetic display the last several months have been from our conservative commentators. Again and again, we see posts that operate from a conservative position, yet assume so little of conservatism and conservatives that were I to write them they’d be seen as horribly elitist and condescending. The assumption that conservatism is a vehicle driven by dishonesty, a lack of integrity and opportunism suffuses our conservative blogosphere, and yet never is there a consideration that perhaps this means the ideology should be abandoned, or that perhaps some credit should be given to its counterpart for holding itself to a higher standard.

This isn’t the soft bigotry of low expectations, really. This is the harsh bigotry of no expectations. Sad to say, the bigotry is brought not against the party being held to no expectations, but to its antagonist. Sad, and strange.

To Say Before Going to Sleep
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Albert Earnest Flemming

I would like to sing someone to sleep,
have someone to sit by and be with.
I would like to cradle you and softly sing,
be your companion while you sleep or wake.
I would like to be the only person
in the house who knew: the night outside was cold.
And would like to listen to you
and outside to the world and to the woods.

The clocks are striking, calling to each other,
and one can see right to the edge of time.
Outside the house a strange man is afoot
and a strange dog barks, wakened from his sleep.
Beyond that there is silence.

My eyes rest upon your face wide-open;
and they hold you gently, letting you go
when something in the dark begins to move.

On the panel for This Week with George Stephanopoulos today: conservative George Will,  conservative Peggy Noonan,  Republican strategist Ed Gillespie, Democrat Robert Reich, Democrat Donna Brazile. Last week’s panel: conservative David Brooks, conservative George Will, journalist Cokie Roberts, journalist Sam Robertson Donaldson (fixed). This is not some aberration; conservative over-representation on political talk shows is a verifiable, repeated phenomenon. Conservatives, your assignment: in 600 words or less, explain to me why a liberal media would continuously disadvantage itself over and over and over again on such shows. No, simply asserting that journalists like Roberts are inherently liberal is not persuasive, considering how desperately they attempt to argue from a neutral POV.

A student on a Belleville West High School bus was beaten for his choice of seat, not because he was white, according to a witness and police.

OK, so someone please tell me what evidence Rod Dreher, or Drudge, is offering  that this was a racially motivated beating, in the incident he refers to. Rod takes it as an article of faith that black kids beating up a white kid can only be a matter of racial violence. But why? I can think of any number of other reasons why kids would be fighting each other. Also, kids whoop and holler and cheer for a fight no matter who or why. And what would Rod say if several white kids beating up a black kid was taken, with no other evidence whatsoever, as a race crime? I don’t get it. Also, let me just say to Rod– I grew up in a designated urban, high-black population public school district, and I can assure you, white people fought back, just like they fought back against other white people, against Hispanic people, just like black people fought back against each other…. It’s an odd comment.

Rod Dreher links to and quotes Arnold Kling, who says something very useful for our conversation about the Glen Beck movement– and, incidentally, something that our media insists I am not allowed to say myself: “I come back to my view that this is white, small-town America making its last stand.”

There are legitimate political differences that the members of these movements represent; there are differences that they have been misled about, such as death panels, that nevertheless represent real and important fears and tensions; there are simply illegitimate concerns that are a facet of certain misleading media outlets, and fear of the other, such as the Birthers; and there are the actual extremist fringes, such as the white racists carrying Confederate flags to protest a black president. There is a lot of the first two, a little of the third, and even less of the fourth, if my handle on this movement is correct. There is another element, though, and it is essential. We cannot understand this phenomenon without being honest about fundamental motivating effect of fear in the face of the loss of white rural conservative Christian political dominance. Full stop. If we aren’t willing to engage in the anger that this class of people, traditionally this country’s power base, feels in the face of demographic changes that challenge their political dominance, we are not having an adult conversation about the state of American politics. We simply are not.

As a commenter on another blog said, it reminds me of nothing so much as the complaints as the Sunni Arabs in Iraq, a minority in Iraq but in control of the country for the better part of a century. I’m not referring to the Sunni insurgency, of course, but rather to the Sunni street, who react with incredulity and anger to the idea that theirs is no longer the ruling political demographic of their country. I have sympathy for a group of people who were conditioned through a period of dictatorship and the bizarre nationalist Baathist ideology to believe that they have a right to lead the country, no matter what the demographic realities of Iraq were. This has led to the emphasis, in Sunni Iraqi political propaganda, of the Sunnis’ belief that they are being oppressed by being out of power. So used to the privilege of ruling the country, the notion of confronting the future as merely one of many political classes is tantamount, in their minds, to finding themselves suddenly under authoritarianism.

The rural Christian white power base of this country, I put it to you, is similarly faced with a moment of loss of political privilege, less stark or extreme but equally discomfiting. And they, too, have been poorly served by tradition, rhetoric and a selective reading of their nation’s history. It is a matter of absolute, unwavering faith in this country that the real America is the land of white rural Christians. To suggest otherwise is to invite scorn and ridicule, and not just from the likes of FOX News, but from reliably centrist, mainstream publications and media vehicles. It is a central part of American mythology. I find it inarguable that there is a dominant cultural meme that there is a real America in between the coasts whose needs and desires are, by virtue of who holds them, more legitimate and pressing than those of anyone else. This iron-clad belief in one group’s political preeminence has handicapped that group’s ability to react to demographic and political change. I genuinely believe, following the Reagan administration, that conservatives grew to believe that they simply had a stranglehold on American politics that would never be challenged outside of the margins of American politics. This led to the serial derangement at the presidency of Bill Clinton.

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This essay from Jon Chait, on Ayn Rand and the continuing domination of the politics of taxation grievance on conservatism, is important and true. The essential takeaway, besides a thoroughly fair but damning discussion of Rand’s life and legacy, is to point out (as we must keep repeating) that the rich pay remarkably less in taxes that the did just decades ago, and that they are vastly more wealthy than they were then, and yet still we hear complaints of tax tyranny and the oppression of the rich. And, as Chait says, because the reduction in taxes over the last decades and the almost unbelievable wealth creation for the economic elite is so inarguable– so Objectively true, if you will– they argument is framed in the language of tyranny, theft, and moral degradation.

Not to pick old wounds, but I was digging around and found this interview with Jonah Goldberg from Salon. I think it’s the best refutation of Liberal Fascism, as it’s both eminently fair, subject to his response, and totally damning. The best refutation, as I said when the book first came out, is simply the long paper trail of the Italian fascist movement, the architects of fascism. There’s lots of surviving philosophical and political treatises from the Italian fascist thinkers, and without fail, they define fascism in opposition to socialism and the left wing. The money quote, which interviewer Alex Koppelman finds, is from Mussolini, the single most important political figure in the history of fascism:  “Fascism [is] the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism.”

Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty hard on Goldberg’s argument. Read the whole thing.

Nefarious War
by Li Po
Translated from the Chinese by Shigeyoshi Obata

Last year we fought by the head-stream of the So-Kan,
This year we are fighting on the Tsung-ho road.
We have washed our armor in the waves of the Chiao-chi lake,
We have pastured our horses on Tien-shan’s snowy slopes.
The long, long war goes on ten thousand miles from home.
Our three armies are worn and grown old.

The barbarian does man-slaughter for plowing;
On his yellow sand-plains nothing has been seen but blanched skulls and bones.
Where the Chin emperor built the walls against the Tartars,
There the defenders of Han are burning beacon fires.
The beacon fires burn and never go out.
There is no end to war!—

In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;
The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,
While ravens and kites peck at human entrails,
Carry them up in their flight, and hang them on the branches of dead trees.
So, men are scattered and smeared over the desert grass,
And the generals have accomplished nothing.

Oh, nefarious war! I see why arms
Were so seldom used by the benign sovereigns.

I could go on a harangue about this, but really, the thing that kept popping into my head again and again was, “this is the soft bigotry of low expectations.”  Sometimes, an inaccurate compliment is far harsher than an accurate insult.

I was reading this reader email to Andrew and I really had to wonder– was this person railing against cost overruns and budget deficits when the prescription drug benefit was passed?

It’s hard to imagine a starker divide between the anger over the cost of health care reform and the very recent history of the prescription drug bill. You know, that absolutely enormous entitlement expenditure that may be literally unprecedented in terms of expense for social spending, when all is said and done. Where were the protests then? The screams of socialism? The (metaphoric) blood in the streets? I’m not saying that this protest now is entirely illegitimate, although you know my feelings on the content of the issue. But I do think that the contrast is extreme, and troubling.

Compounding this bizarre turnaround are a couple of supplementing facts. First, there was never any talk of the prescription drug benefit paying for itself, or anything resembling such a thing. The degree to which we can actually pare down costs with health care reform is of course a matter of controversy. But a lot of smart people think we can; it’s on the table; it’s something we acknowledge that, in a country which spends 17 cents of every dollar earned on health care, we need to attempt. There wasn’t ever any hint that the prescription drug bill would be anything other than a massive, permanent public expenditure. Second, the moral, compassionate argument for reform– the one that I am frequently told is somehow illegitimate or unserious– simply was the argument for the drug bill. Seniors couldn’t afford their medication, and they were being driven to bankruptcy, and they had to drive to Canada, and in America, we couldn’t allow that to happen. Strange how much compassion and sacrifice are contingent upon concerns of sect and party.

Look, I think we all know why the prescription drug bill wasn’t fought against where health care reform is: the elderly are a protected political class, and those without health care are not. But few people are willing to admit to such naked horse race concerns behind their policy preferences. So what can people who are explicitly opposed to health care because of concerns of fiscal responsibility say in defense of the prescription drug benefit?

If you are blogging or writing politically now, and you weren’t then, you get a pass. If you have some separate reason for resistance to reform other than the expenditure, that’s ok too. But if you are specifically arguing that you don’t like health reform because it’s too expensive or fiscally irresponsible, and there’s no record of you arguing similarly against the wildly expensive prescription drug bill, it’s hard not to see that as hypocritical and partisan. Fair?