Prairie Weather

The tools of fascism

The blogger formerly known as PDiddie, at Brains and Eggs, looks at how close we have come to fascism.  Not to be shrugged off. 

The political dichotomies ... form a continuum not along a straight line left and right but rather as a clock face, where moderates or centrists are located at 6:00 and the extreme right and left wings converge at 12:00. With this in mind, it is easy to see that it is but a small step from totalitarian left to totalitarian right. There is not much difference in these extremes except their social standings.

Leon Trotsky called both of these enigmas of mankind ‘fascist’. The right wing corporate conservative unites with the petty bourgeoisie left wing social (usually religious) conservatives. He called left wingers “social democrats” and “social fascists”.

Once the petty bourgeoisie were compelled to change course, they were employed to fight the street battles, to get bloody, and take the risks. This is just what the Republican Party needed, an Army – not in this case to fight a war but to win the battle at the polls.

I think there's another trend here, and that's the one which keeps urging us to "move on."  Certainly the move-on-sters are the ones who'd just as soon we didn't call them on their mistakes and crimes -- the current administration is very eager to have us move on and they are helped by a media which sees the value of endless new stories, no matter how violent.  A fresh, bloody, action-filled war story in far away Iraq is certainly more interesting to watch on a large flat screen than people sitting around a table trying to figure out how to prevent another 9/11.

I'm troubled by how easily we are persuaded to never look back, never apply the old rules to bad actions.  Carpetbagger looks at this:

To the extent that a discussion about the events of 2002 and 2003 won't save any lives or resolve the ongoing crisis, the point is accurate. But in terms of a basic standard of accountability, it's seems wildly irresponsible to say that whether the White House intentionally misled the world about a war is no longer a question worth asking.

Which leads me to Python. In one classic scene, John Cleese's Sir Lancelot storms a castle, sword in hand, murdering most of a wedding party based on the mistaken intelligence belief that someone was in desperate need of a rescue. The castle owner, anxious to curry favor with Lancelot, encourages the survivors of the attack to let bygones by bygones. As the castle owner tells his guests, "Let's not bicker and argue about who killed whom…."

The let's-not-worry-about-2002 argument is effectively making the same kind of pitch. Let's not bicker and argue over whether the president intentionally launched a war under false pretenses and manipulated intelligence to bolster a decision he'd already made; what's done is done. That's in the past. It's irrelevant now. The important thing is to look forward.

It's not that I'm against a plan for the future; it's that the questions about the recent past deserve answers. Is it unreasonable to think we might be able to do both, applying some standards of accountability for what's happened while also crafting a plan for the future of Iraq?

We'd damn well better.

Reports from the "Even Jesus Sometimes Farts, Too" Department

Report #1.

Report #2.

And there'll be plenty more, you can be sure.

Lie down with dogs...

Perhaps we should all commiserate with Bob Woodward, particularly now that Arianna Huff has put a label on him that's going to stick, poor fella, for the rest of his Washington career.

It makes some sense to suck up to power when that power is for the good, is interesting, stimulating, and has intrinsic merit.  None of these descriptions applies to the Bush administration.  I'll go one step further:  there hasn't been an administration in Washington since Carter's which could boast of anything like real integrity.  No, I'm not thinking of  Monica-level sleaze, I mean the sleaze demanded of any administration which is living comfortably with big money and letting the chips fall... into selected laps. 

Possibly Bob Woodward has never known from quality, he only knows how to get invited and get used. That's why dumb blondes get our sympathy.  Sympathy's the most you get when you can't get no respect.  Between Arianna's opinions and the comical description written by Nora Ephron, Bob Woodward looks sillier and sillier.

Damn fool: Nino [Scalia] vs Al [Franken]

Guess who won?

Update:  I'm listening to Franken tell The Rest of the Story.  Later, at a cocktail party, he confronted Scalia on the matter of Roe v. Wade, pointing out that before Roe, there was nothing in the Constitution to prohibit abortion.  Scalia, furious, said "Wrong!" and ended the confrontation.  Later, constitutional history scholars declared Franken to be right.  Scalia may want to reconsidered being an "originalist."

A quick Google on this subject shows that the right wing press is doing its best to demolish Franken over his "foolish" confrontation with Scalia.  Franken, of course, is an excellent fool, and in this case I'm referring to that old royal tradition of having a fool to confront the king, tease him into an awareness of reality.  We know the fool from King Lear, but lots of us are unfamiliar with the "fool" tradition in which the fool is the one who turns out to be right, to be the wise man.  There is no fool in the White House, not in the old meaning, but one is badly needed.  Forrest Gump who, after all, was honored in a White House ceremony, is the only fool in today's American pop culture.  Fools are on the outs and wisdom isn't an attribute with much popularity these days. It's lovely to watch a comic Harvard fool slip a couple of good ones to the outrageously pompous Justice Scalia, certainly one of the less wise justices in our history.

Wilkerson's concerns grow more serious

Larry Wilkerson keeps remembering more, consulting his notes, and talking.  More here...

Impeachment; and more evidence to support it

There's been a fresh call for impeachment from an interesting source.

And there's a growing pile of evidence -- big enough to allow a willing Congress (like the one which went after Bill Clinton) to impeach George Bush several times over, no sweat.

How?  Well, Congress.  The House is in disarray.  They might even welcome impeachment hearings as a way of getting their own sins out of the limelight..  But the Senate still contains pompous, die-hards -- people of both parties -- so connected to the status quo ante that they're bound to be seen as the Administration's eager partners during any airing of dirty laundry.   We need to make it worse for them to cling to lies than it would be to detach themselves from the Bush administration.