The war in Iraq, the American war in Iraq is over, said the President tonight.

Phil Ochs had the same to say about Vietnam about 40 years ago — though he knew it was far from over. We all know the same is true about Iraq. Not only is that war far from over, but more than 50,ooo American troops remain there for God knows how much longer.

I’m not quite sure why Barack Obama even made his speech tonight. It changed nothing. And all it really accomplishes is to crank up a national conversation about what the hell it means that “combat operations” are over.

What really needs to be discussed, and what we are doomed to not grapple with as a nation until it is way too late, is why we ever invaded Iraq in the first place. However you assess the future of the non-war in Iraq, I think it fair to say 7 1/2 years after the invasion that the mission has been an unmitigated failure.

Not only have we not built a democratic Iraq, we have built an Iraq that can’t even put together a functioning government.

Violence still runs rampant.

Electricity is still spotty.

Ethnic divisions remain volatile and sure to explode again.

The religious fundamentalists are stronger than ever.

What there is of a government in Baghdad is now a firm ally of Iran — the exact opposite of what we said we desired.

“It’s the basket case of the Middle East,” says the anything but radical NBC correspondent Richard Engle of our regime in Iraq.

No domino effect of democratization has swept the Middle East.

The Israeli-Palestinian relationship is worse than it was before we occupied Iraq.

We have fewer friends in the region, not more.

We have transferred our troops to Afghanistan where we support a “government” headed by a fraudulent and deeply corrupt head of state and where the Taliban are surging.

For what did 4,000 Americans and tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis die for?

Are the lives of the people of Afghanistan any better than the lives of Iraqis under Saddam?

Meanwhile, domestically, the chickies have come home to roost. We are faced with a domestic political war in which the Talk Radio Republican Party is poised to win back the House and roll stymie American politics for another decade. If I remember correctly, the Democrats won back Congress four years ago, not because they had any pro-active attractive program, but rather because the GOP had defaulted. Americans were sick of the war in Iraq and of Bush-Cheney and the Democrats were the only alternative in town.

Pelosi and Reid made a lot of noise about ending the war in Iraq and here we are almost a half decade later with an “end” that everyone knows is a joke. The war funding kept flowing with the Democrats controlling Congress. And once the White House was secured, the equally futile war in Afghanistan was escalated.

Bush drove the economy into a ditch, handing the Democrats a wonderful if opportunistic political opening and the Dems have failed to exploit it.

The result is that our two wars and our broken economy are now property of the Democrats. Didn’t and shouldn’t have been this way, but so it is. A clear failure of leadership.

I have no sympathy for the Democrats. Only scorn and disgust. They have now placed in a horrible position and are holding us hostage. And I rather resent it.

Their abdication, their inability to govern, to inspire their own base, to take even opportunistic advantage, now puts us in a tenuous, boxed-in position. With an enthusiasm gap of a whopping 25% in favor of the Republicans and with some polls showing an historic 10% generic congressional advantage for the GOP, we will be forced to vote for bankrupt Democrats in November merely to ward off a tsunami of wing-nuts flooding into Congress.

It’s a lose-lose proposition. At best, we come out of November with the status quo. At worse, we are in Hell.

But, meanwhile, the war is over.

Beckistan

As I said a few days ago, I was having some degree of difficulty processing the deeper meaning of tens or scores of thousands of Americans spending their Saturday by fancying charlatan Glenn Beck as Our Saviour.

Christopher Hitchens has come up with a compelling explanation that really resonates with me.  It’s all about “white self-pity.”

Says Hitch:

In a rather curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one. What does it take to believe that Christianity is an endangered religion in America or that the name of Jesus is insufficiently spoken or appreciated? Who wakes up believing that there is no appreciation for our veterans and our armed forces and that without a noisy speech from Sarah Palin, their sacrifice would be scorned? It’s not unfair to say that such grievances are purely and simply imaginary, which in turn leads one to ask what the real ones can be. The clue, surely, is furnished by the remainder of the speeches, which deny racial feeling so monotonously and vehemently as to draw attention.

Read the rest.

Update: Doug Henwood, who I mention later in this piece, has responded with his own new post.

Kevin Roderick at LAObserved has put up a hilarious post about the local Pacifica Radio, KPFK.  Readers of this blog know that I used to have a daily show there until a decade ago when “revolutionaries” took it over and have increasingly turned it into an electronic Albania.

Roderick’s post is a follow-up to a blog he did about 5 weeks ago about how the program director, Alan Minsky, warned the staff and volunteers of impending economic catastrophe and politely asked for volunteers to step forward to either surrender or shorten their programs.  He said he needed to introduce some updated programming that hopefully would generate more revenue and audience and he needed room in the schedule to do it.

You might ask, why would a manager ask instead of direct and just fire those who are dead wood?  Answer: because the station is dominated –both on staff and in its audience– by loonies who scream “fascist coup” if anybody’s special interest i.e. his or her program, is tinkered with.  Minsky is a nice guy but what a pathetic, groveling and demeaning position to put oneself in — to have to beg your subordinates to give up their positions!  Minsky himself is part of the problem. While he’s certainly among the smarter and more rational folks in the station, his pedigree was forged in the fever swamp of the Independent Media Center — a watering hole for True Believers. And he’s never quite outgrown it.

Well, you have probably guessed the payoff by now. Roderick reports this email coming from Minsky:

“Unfortunately, following my e-mail of one month ago in which I asked KPFK programmers, for the good of the station, to offer to shorten the length of their show or to move to a web-based show or to end their shows, not a single programmer stepped forward and made such a sacrifice,” writes Alan Minsky. As a result, he warns that the hammer is about to fall: “New voices need to be added to KPFK’s programming. In a week’s time some very difficult decisions will be made by KPFK management.”

Difficult? Since when is shooting fish in a barrel difficult?  With two or three hours of exception during a 168 hour week, you could pretty much randomly kill off any program and it would be improvement.  What’s going to be difficult, of course, are knee-jerkers who will go apopleptic and then  charge that racism, sexism, ageism, liberalism, fascism, and cystic fibrosis has swamped the purity of “people powered-radio.”

What we’re dealing with here is what former General Manager Mark Schubb calls “time slot sluts” — programmers who would do anything with anybody to retain their little slice of radio time. (Schubb, by the way, was inappropriately fired by the revolutionaries in 2002 and won several hundred thousand dollars in a legal settlement). There’s also an uncomfortable truth to be found here. KPFK and its programmers go on endlessly about how it is “community radio” that serves the people. ROFL

KPFK primarily, if not exclusively, serves its own programmers.  Period. Full stop. They are there for their own sake and nobody else’s.  Sort of like a mirror image of Glenn Beck.  The proof is the unanimous refusal by any of the programmers –95% of which are unpaid volunteers– to let go of the microphone so that the station itself can survive. What does that tell you? Fuck the people and “the community.”  Apparently, every single last programmer there thinks he or she is indispensable — a word and a concept they have apparently confused with the term “unlistenable.” And we’re talking in many cases about programmers who have been on the air 15, 20, 25 years or more without a fresh idea since Oliver North took his oath before congress.

Pacifica Radio is bleeding money and audience. Mostly because the programming sucks.Big Time.  And it sucks so bad that, for years now, its on air fundraising has become not only incessant, but chock a block with truther conspiracies and quack miracle medical cures.  It is a bleeding sore of the Left and makes you wonder about left-wing critics of The Media (why is the Left Media even worse than the MSM?).

By the way, there are some numbers that I have that are not in Roderick’s story.  Minsky’s memo is misleading as it refers to recent station growth from 120,000 to 180,000 cumulative listeners per week. But the station had 180,000 listeners twelve years ago and with a much weaker signal. What we are talking about is total stagnation. But it gets worse. The real way to measure listenership, however, is by Average Quarter Hour followers — people who tune in for at least 5 mins during an average 15 minute period. That’s very close to the number of people listening at any given moment.

According to figures I just saw, KPFK’s latest AQH is down to an all-time low of 1600 (in a signal area of 25 million people).  Two points of comparison. KPFK bottomed out at an AQH of  1800 in 1995 during a similar period of decay.  During Schubb’s management (1995-2002), he got those numbers to peak at about 7500-8000….which means, in reality, KPFK has about 20% of the audience it did a decade ago.  By contrast, successful public radio stations like KPCC can boast of an AQH 12-15 times bigger than KPFK while running, quite literally, about one or two percent of the wattage of Pacifica and thereby commanding a much smaller signal footprint. Nice work, comrades!

This is not just a problem at KPFK, but is rather a network-wide crisis.  Of the five Pacifica stations, two don’t even have recorded ratings because they haven’t paid the bill of the rating service! At this moment, all five positions of permanent station General Manager are open!

There’s been pretty much a conspiracy of silence on the Left about this. When the “revolutionaries” were in the process of taking over Pacifica a dozen years ago and Amy Goodman was scandalously using her air time to undermine her own network’s leadership and funding, the left media fell over each other to see who could more quickly (and falsely) condemn Pacifica for “corporatizing.” This was a damn lie exploited Goodman for personal gain, as it turns out, and never wanting to be outflanked on the left, the left blindly joined in the Pacifica bashing (with the honorable exception of The Progressive magazine which could smell something fishy and steered clear of the fight). At the time, I was working for The Nation and anchored Radio Nation which was produced out of KPFK.  And while the mag waffled around on the issue, not willing to defend the network that hosted its own program, it ultimately went into the tank for the loonies by running a partisan editorial supporting the bone-headed idea that Pacifica should have elected listener councils to manage programming (Of course, The Nation didn’t think this would be a workable idea for itself where two or three editors made and continue to make its own editorial decisions!).

Once the knuckle-head purists took over the network, and started destroying it, we’ve never again seen any sort of follow-up report in any  lefitst or “progressive” media circles, let alone among the left-of-center media criticism outfits like FAIR and Free Press. Not one in more than a decade.  The five stations have a market value of hundreds of millions of dollars, but the left turns a blind eye to ever scrutinizing this failing institution.

There was one breach in the wall a few weeks ago when lefty economist Doug Henwood, still a progammer at Pacifica’s WBAI, went public with his own horror report.  Read it here. I like Doug. He’s good guy and quite smart and he means well. But he’s about ten years too late. The game is already long over.

As the old joke about the Cuban government goes: The regime has already fallen. We’re just waiting on the official paper work. Or, if you prefer, what’s the sound of one lip flapping?

I will be the first to admit that I am confounded, confused and concerned that a couple of hundred thousand Americans find solace in former drunk and $32 million a year pinhead huckster Glenn Beck as the man who will redeem a Fallen America.  Even as demagogues go, he’s fourth rate. And that he is, as I said, primarily a huckster rather than a zealous ideologue ought to be dead obvious.

The great part, I suppose, about being 59 years old is that is no longer my job to save the world. And now, it seems, even trying to understand it is becoming an increasingly challenging if not futile task.

I will venture a few disjointed thoughts about it, however.

Let’s get one thing out of the way as quickly as possible. With all the talk of the Park 51 mosque being an insult to 9/11 families, the real desecration this week was a racialist-tinged right wing usurping the mantle, legacy and anniversary of the MLK speech. It’s both a fraud and an insult to our collective intelligence.

Second, I am not quite sure what word to use, but let’s say I have been “amused” by the pretzel-like verbiage used by the MSM to politely describe Beck’s on-the-Mall followers in polite and “balanced” terms.  It wasn’t exactly a torchlight Nuremberg rally. But then again, it wasn’t exactly something very wholesome or rational.

Sorry to be so judgmental, but if you are upset with the economy, if you don’t like big deficits, if you are tax-phobic and if you think Barack Obama isn’t up to the job of being president, well, then, that’s your right. But to believe that a TV jokester like  Beck and an obvious idiot like Sarah Palin are gonna save you, then, sorry, you’re just plain stupid as well.

Wait, Marc, are you willing to call 200,ooo Americans stupid?

Answer: Yes, I am. And a whole lot more.

I give some credit to Chris Good of The Atlantic who did a compelling job of describing what he saw out there on the Mall.  He counted four blacks out of 200,000. Surely, he was off by a factor of maybe 25.  Which changes nothing.

He also makes the point that this rally, with Beck channeling no one less than God himself, should put to rest the B.S. story line that there is no connection between the Christian Right and the Tea Party. Apparently, they are a same-sex couple.

That race-tinted demagogy  resonates at a time when America is in such an economic slump and a black man is sitting as president really should surprise no one. What I DO find disheartening is the coarseness and superficiality of it all.  If we had a rational Tory party in this country I would be a much happier person and we would all be better off — even though I personally would vehemently disagree with it.

Instead, we have … well, clowns. Very cynical clowns and buffoons leading this opposition.

Also, we have a lot of clowns and buffoons out there among “the people.” Especially, older, whiter, and resentful people. If you think for one moment that we saw today was manufactured by Fox News, you are dead wrong. Fox lubricated and revved up the event using its network as a mobilizing platform.  But, don’t let the yick-yacks who showed up for this farce off the hook.

It takes two to tango. And the dance we saw today was a death rattle of rational discourse.

Good night. And  may God  –or Glenn– bless you.

AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews

Two points for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He re-stated, emphatically and unconditionally, his support for the so-called Ground Zero mosque ( a rather misleading misnomer that the media continues to blindly foster and repeat along with a whole of other crap):

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says not allowing a mosque to be built near ground zero would be “compromising our commitment to fighting terror with freedom.” The mayor made the comment Tuesday in an impassioned speech at a dinner in observance of Iftar, the daily meal in which Muslims break their fast during the holy month of Ramadan. Bloomberg says a compromise wouldn’t end the debate. He says the question would then become “how big should the no-mosque zone around the World Trade Center site be?”

This puts the Republican mayor in quite a different category than spineless Democrat Harry Reid (who said he opposed the mosque)  and the rather goofy Howard Dean (who says there should be a compromise — whatever that means).  As I said in a post last week, this issue is black and white, cut and dried. There is absolutely no reason to demand a compromise other than sheer ignorance, intolerance, bigotry or disingenuous “sensitivity.”

The mosque, itself, is little more than an asterisk. The controversy around it, however, has become a watershed political moment. If you like touchy-feeling language, it’s truly a teachable moment. We learn that Republicans, from lizards like Rick Lazio to human-turtle hybrids like Mitch McConnell, are shameless promoters of fear, ignorance and overt racism. We learn that Democrats, for the most part, are worthless in providing meaningful leadership in moments when it is really needed.

Indeed, depending which poll you prefer somewhere between a slim and overwhelming majority of Americans oppose the Park 51 Islamic Center. And so? We learn, that a lot of Americans are ignorant, bigoted or politically ill-served by our political class.  Poll Americans in 1955 about equal rights for Negroes and you would get a majority in opposition. Go back a hundred years and you get a majority in favor of chattel slavery.

That’s what political leadership is all about. It’s about getting out ahead of public opinion to shape it and enrich it — not to pander and to kow-tow to the lowest common denominator (which in this case is pretty damn low).  As Frank Rich said tonight on MSNBC, we’re currently fighting two wars at the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of lives in order to defend two nation states that are Islamic, in which there are thousands of mosques. So, we are willing to send our kids to die to defend a mosque in Kandahar but we won’t allow the construction of one in lower Manhattan?  Our leadership has failed. So has mass public opinion.

It’s aggravating and embarrassing.

It’s also classic deployment of bread and circuses.

We are quickly slipping into a double-dip recession. Some of the more pessimistic talk of a “mild depression.”  Millions have no work. Republicans and now a predictable but alarmingly increasing number of Democrats are shilling for the richest 3 percent of Americans, arguing to extend the Bush tax cuts — which will cost us quite literally trillions in deficits over the next decade.  We remain mired in two absolutely futile and unwinnable wars and while the U.S. “combat role” in Iraq has now ended, the war hasn’t and it seems crystal clear that we will keep tens of thousands of troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan for the duration of most of our lifetimes.

And what are we debating? If Muslims have civil rights? If Sarah Palin picks winners or losers?

My favorite social critic, Neil Postman, wrote of the danger we faced from totalitarianism. Two models of such are found in modern literature, he noted. There is the Orwellian vision of 1984 in which Big Brother is always watching you. A competing vision is that of Brave New World in which Aldous Huxley describes a society marked by a citizenry that willingly, and often blissfully, worships and complies with Power. They voluntarily distract and amuse themselves with drugs and trivia, trading in their rights for entertainment.

Be advised.

On your left.

On your right.

Here are some of the bodies stacked up at the county morgue in Tucson.  Just a few of them.  There’s a whole lot more in the 50 foot refrigerated trailer now more or less permanently parked in front of the Pima County Morgue.  Indeed, as The L.A. Times reports, Arizona is now well on the way for breaking its own record of people dying to cross the border.  Probably more than 220 this year:

In 2007, a record 218 bodies were found in Pima County. This year, the death toll could be worse. Already, authorities have recovered the remains of 170 migrants…

July was the worst month of this year so far, with 59 people found dead. More than half of them died from heat-related causes. On July 15, the deadliest day of the month, seven bodies were found, among them the remains of Omar Luna Velasquez, 25. The high temperature that day was 108 degrees.

To accommodate the bodies in the summer heat, a 50-foot refrigerated trailer truck has been parked in the coroner’s receiving area

Now, I’ve been around long enough to know that most folks couldn’t give one hoot about a nameless Mexican who quite literally gets his or her brains fried while crossing the Sonoran desert.  Some probably think they deserve it.  But for those who lack decency and compassion for simple people running tremendous risks, let’s at least look at this mathematically.

The record number of deaths occurred in 2007 when the U.S. economy was still peaking. The already draconian border crackdown in effect at the time had created a labor shortage in the Southwest and anyone lucky enough to make it alive across the border could get a job that paid ten times more than a job in Mexico — provided any job could be found.

In the intervening three years, great swaths of the Holy Protective Wall have been constructed. Batteries of new sensors, infra-red cameras, physical and electronic barriers have been constructed.  Arizona has passed SEVERAL laws make life miserable, supposedly, for illegals. National Guard troops have been sent to the border. The number of Border Patrol agents have been nearly doubled.  All this at the cost of quite literally billions of dollars.

And yet….they keep coming, as Pete Wilson used to say. And they keep dying in record numbers.  All this in the midst of an economic downturn in the U.S. and a fierce and intimidating escalation of nativist frenzy in Arizona.

How many different ways can you spell FAIL?

My friend and all around wise man, Chuck Bowden, has put it best. “The mass immigration from Mexico will cease only when we lower American wages to the level of Vietnam.”

As long as there is a 20 x 1 rural pay difference between the two countries, you really think the bloviating rhetoric of a head case like Sheriff Joe Arpaio or a lout like John McCain is going to make even a dent in the flow? And now add in the mass murder going on in northern Mexico? You’d be nuts, NOT to try and get across the border.

Get real.

Here’s Bowden.

P.S. No one has written with more dark lyricism about the Season of Death (the summer border crossing period) than Luis Alberto Urrea in his classic work, The Devil’s Highway. Writes Urrea:

It is then that lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, oranges, strawberries are all ready to be picked. Arkansas chickens are ready to be plucked. Cows are waiting in Iowa and Nebraska to be ground into hamburger, and grills are ready in McDonald’s and Burger King and Wendy’s and Taco Bell for the ground meat to be cooked. KFC is waiting for its Mexican-plucked, Mexican-slaughtered chickens to be fried by Mexicans. And the western desert is waiting, too—its temperatures soaring, a fryer in its own right.

So, que prefieres? Regular or crispy?

Even before Fidel Castro (sort of) retired from public view four years ago, I suspected he was already losing it. I saw a couple of speeches he made in the early part of the decade where he not only went on and on at length (as he always did) but he downright rambled, veered way off topic, and then started repeating himself.

He’c clearly a guy who doesn’t know when to put a lid on it under the best of conditions. Now there’s pretty convincing evidence that El Maximo Lider has a scambled head.

Earlier this week, he took up three pages (out of total of eight!) in the daily fish wrapper, Granma, to heap praise and quote at length from a book pushing one of the all-time nut ball conspiracies i.e. that the secretive Bilderberg Group….runs the world!  And all this time I had mistakenly thought it was a loosely affiliated, elite economic class with shared interests.

The AP did a decent piece on this public display of goofiness, but there’s one mistake in the AP’s story. The Bilderberg conspiracy theory is 99% a favorite of the extreme right, often the anti-semitic right, and almost never shares up in the discourse of even the looniest lefty fringe  Here’s a few excerpts from the AP report:

Fidel Castro is showcasing a theory long popular both among the far left and far right: that the shadowy Bilderberg Group has become a kind of global government, controlling not only international politics and economics, but even culture.

The 84-year-old former Cuban president published an article Wednesday that used three of the only eight pages in the Communist Party newspaper Granma to quote — largely verbatim — from a 2006 book by Lithuanian-born writer Daniel Estulin.

Estulin’s work, “The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club,” argues that the international group largely runs the world. It has held a secretive annual forum of prominent politicians, thinkers and businessmen since it was founded in 1954 at the Bilderberg Hotel in Holland.

Castro offered no comment on the excerpts other than to describe Estulin as honest and well-informed and to call his book a “fantastic story.”

Estulin’s book, as quoted by Castro, described “sinister cliques and the Bilderberg lobbyists” manipulating the public “to install a world government that knows no borders and is not accountable to anyone but its own self.”

The Bilderberg group’s website says its members have “nearly three days of informal and off-the-record discussion about topics of current concern” once a year, but the group does nothing else…

The excerpt published by Castro suggested that the esoteric Frankfurt School of socialist academics worked with members of the Rockefeller family in the 1950s to pave the way for rock music to “control the masses” by diverting attention from civil rights and social injustice.

“The man charged with ensuring that the Americans liked the Beatles was Walter Lippmann himself,” the excerpt asserted, referring to a political philosopher and by-then-staid newspaper columnist who died in 1974.

“In the United States and Europe, great open-air rock concerts were used to halt the growing discontent of the population,” the excerpt said…..

This is first-class crap. Quite obviously.

There’s always been a strong anti-Semitic tinge to the Bilderberg conspiracy theory which was originally popularized by the John Birch Society. Nowadays, it’s a favorite of birthers, Birchers, and the folks who believe the Trilaterial Commission, the Illuminati and the Council on Foreign Relations also secretly run the world.

One point in favor of this conspiracy theory is that the Bilderberg Group meets for only 3 days a year. That’s not much time to plot running the entire world, which might explain why things are so effed up.

By the way, I don’t think Castro is anti-Semitic.

I think he’s senile.

Here we also have another example of the downside of dictatorship. It’s not just about stifling dissent and usurping power.  It’s also about snuffing out civic and intellectual life. Imagine being a 20 year old Cuban who must rely on one national daily newspaper run by the state. You wake up one day this week and find that the same Old Man who came to power almost 52 years ago eats up 40 percent of the day’s paper with a theory that not only has nothing to do with our life, but might as well been written by L. Ron Hubbard.

Very sad.

The hard part of life is having to balance those moments of great inspiration with those of ultimate disillusionment.  Case in point:  As part of my work as a prof at USC, I spent today on a journalism grad field trip to L.A.’s Skid Row.  There, amidst the squalor and poverty, was where I found great inspiration. Spending time with the lawyers, advocates, and street workers who battle all odds to win decency and rights for the most vulnerable and despised among us is to literally renew one’s faith in humanity.

But my high was short-lived. On the long drive back home I made the mistake of tuning into one of the XM political talk radio shows only to hear a LOT of folks argue against the now infamous Islamic cultural center/mosque to be erected two long blocks from Ground Zero.

Sorry, folks, but this is an open and closed issue. Our constitution and our professed ideals permit no (artificial, disgusting) “debate” on this issue.  Like Judge Wapner, I have read the complaints of the plaintiffs and  here is my ruling: to oppose the erection of the Islamic center is to classify oneself in the same ranks of overt anti-Semites, anti-Catholic bigots and advocates of Jim Crow.

Period.

There is an absolute, unqualified right to freedom of religion in this America and the more you oppose the mosque, the closer you come to demonstrating the exact and precise sort of religious intolerance (and ignorance) that motivates such outfits as Al Qaeda and the Taliban (OK, and Opus Dei).

And you’re hearing this from a self-professed “stone, cold atheist” who — at a certain level– is repulsed by any church, synagogue, temple or mosque. I rather share the inclination of the Catalonian anarchists who preferred to turn houses of worship into public outhouses. But such is democracy. If you want to build something to adore a God that does not exist, no skin off my rear (except I don’t think you should have tax-exempt status).

I have been sickened by the jibber-jabber of thinly-veiled racists and bigots who speak of the Hallowed Ground in lower Manhattan.  Should we also ban Japanese tourists from visiting Pearl Harbor? How about prohibiting Germans from entering any American synagogues?

I was delighted to hear Barack Obama endorse the building of the mosque. And I was, shall we say, deeply disappointed to hear him walk it back the next day.

Harry Reid has behaved in a despicable way. I am so pleased I don’t live in Nevada as I am not forced to decide whether to vote for an unprincipled jellyfish like him or abstain at the risk of replacing him a Mad Hatter Tea Partier.

Most repulsive to me, as a nominal Jew, has been the unspeakable but rather predictable posture of the Anti-Defamation League. I say predictable because the ADL has been running one of the greatest of scams for way too long, baldly capitalizing on the Holocaust while serving, primarily, as a lobby for the state of Israel.  Anti-semitism is charge no one wants to bear, and the ADL has cynically manipulated the issue and politcally blackmailed (and blackballed) way too many legitimate critics of Israel by smearing them as anti-Semites (yours truly included).

The ADL is no more a “civil rights” organization than I am a PR man for the Vatican.  But it gets away with political murder because no one wants to risk the scarlet letter of Anti-Semite.  If it WERE a true civil rights group, and especially given the legacy of persecution of Jews, the ADL would be on the front line of supporting the building of the mosque.

Shame, and double shame, on the ADL for being outflanked on this issue by none other than conservative Ted Olson.  A former high-ranking official of the Reagan and Dubya administrations, Olson served as counsel for the later in Bush v. Gore and he in private practice he defended Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. Most importantly, he was widowed by 9/11 when his wife, conservative commentator Barbara Olson, died in one of the highjacked planes. But Olson, unlike the ADL, has given his unqualified support to the building of the mosque. Good for him!

(Historical anecdote: there are many low points in the history of the ADL. One of the lowest came in 1982 when it bestowed its high-prestige Torch of Liberty award to the great Las Vegas humanitarian, Moe Dalitz. The chief operator of the Desert Inn, Brother Dalitz was also the unabashed point man for the Detroit Mob in Sin City.  A real mensch.)

UPDATE: We can now add Doctor Howard Dean to the Hall of Shame on this one.

–

Apropos of this bullshit “debate” on the mosque, it reminded me of the book What’s the Matter With Kansas, by my old pal Tom Frank. Most of you know the thesis of this book i.e. that working class Americans are diverted into voting against their own economic interests (i.e for Republicans) because they are galvanized to the Right by the manipulation of social issues. I like Tom’s book but also I like some of the criticism of it. First, while it’s indisputable that voting Republican is, indeed, against the interests of most working people it is somewhat dubious to argue that voting for Democrats is actually voting in their self-interest. Maybe, somewhat, sometimes. But not very convincingly. Which leads to the second, more profound, criticism: that precisely because both parties support pretty much the same economic system, identifying with this or that party on strictly social or moral or religious or racial issues is not so irrational; there should be no assumption that minor economic differences can trump profound ideological postures. I think we are seeing that now. Folks who, I agree, OUGHT to be worried as hell about stimulating economic growth, about jobs, costs of education and health, rebuilding our infrastructure, getting out of two catastrophic wars and domestic city-building rathertha  mythical foreign nation building are instead bent out of shape because some AY-rabs wanna build a mosque in New York, are not being misled or snookered by Republicans and conservatives. Nope. Sorry, there’s an easier explanation than that. They simply live with their heads deep, deep up their asses and no amount of economic populism is going to win them over to different positions.