"The closing of the conservative mind ..."

Once more, David Frum stands up for the principle of journalistic integrity. Although I don't share most - if any - of his ideological notions, I admire him for being the lone voice in the arid rightwing crackpot media desert.

When people talk of the "closing of the conservative mind" this is what they mean: not that conservatives are more narrow-minded than other people — everybody can be narrow minded — but that conservatives have a unique capacity to ignore unwelcome fact.

When Dan Rather succumbed to the forged Bush war record hoax in 2004, CBS forced him into retirement.

Breitbart is the conservative Dan Rather, but there will be no discredit, no resignation for him. Instead, conservatives are consumed with a new snippets-out-of-context uproar, the latest round of JournoList quotations. Here at last is proof of the cynical machinations of the hated liberal media! As to the cynical machinations of conservative media — well, as the saying goes, the fish never notices the water through which it swims.

The difference between Dan Rather and Andrew Breibart is more complex than the simplistic reduction Frum suggests.

Dan Rather, one of the last old-school journalists, "succumbed" to the pressure of a form of news reporting in the 21st century which has become fast, furious and focused on trash journalism. He was trained to rigorously examine the sources of putative damaging disclosures about public figures; in this case his need to prove himself in a media increasingly staffed with hungry young wolves proved to be his downfall. Although made the scapegoat by his superiors at CBS when the documents pertaining to Bush were alleged to be forgeries, Rather has not gone quietly into that good night.

Andrew Breibart is a toxic fabricator, a con man, and a dumpster-diver. He's a self-styled JackAss reporter; he's a balding, schlumpy and braying male version of Ann Coulter; a wannabe Christopher Hitchens without the creds. Yet his presence amongst the Limbaughs and O'Reillys serves a purpose; he makes them look like serious newsman in comparison with his own disgraceful method of gotcha! reporting.


This time, according to Frum, he has surpassed himself. Breibart sliced and diced a video recording of an USDA black employee so it made it seem that she was an unrepentant anti-white folks racist. The material was manipulated; in reality she was recounting an individual experience of a paradigm shift and how she went on to help the farming families she had prejudged.

Frum is visibly disturbed and outraged by Breitbart's willful deception and malvolence.

There will be no apology or statement of regret for distributing a doctored tape to defame and destroy someone. There will be not even a flutter of interest among conservatives in discussing Breitbart’s role. By the morning of July 21, the Fox & Friends morning show could devote a segment to the Sherrod case without so much as a mention of Breitbart’s role. The central fact of the Sherrod story has been edited out of the conservative narrative, just as it was edited out of the tape itself.

As I said, Frum's voice is a lone rational voice among rightwing media hate-mongers.

Cons too tough on crime for Black's taste?

First it was David Frum disassociating himself from the likes of Sarah Palin and the Hatriots - the Tea Party Patriots aka teabaggers.

Now it's Lord Black himself, gently castigating Stevie Spiteful and his bully boys for their "Roadmap to Strengthening Public Safety."

It is painful for me to write that with this garrote of a blueprint, the government I generally support is flirting with moral and political catastrophe. My respect for the Prime Minister prevents me from being any more explicit here about the implications of failure to reconsider the government's course on this issue.

The Roadmap is a bad plan to take Canada to a destination it should not wish to reach. [...]

The whole concept of prison should be terminated, except for violent criminals and chronic non-violent recidivists, and replaced by closely supervised pro bono or subsistence-paid work by bonded convicts in the fields of their specialty. Swindlers and embezzlers, hackers and sleazy telemarketers are capable people and they should serve their sentences by contributing honest work to government-insured employers.

Canada would save a billion dollars annually in prison costs and the employers of the penitent-workers would save $2-billion annually, a tremendous shot in the arm to national productivity. Many of the prisons could be recon-figured as assisted housing for the homeless and slum-dwellers. Canada would again be a model of the innovative public policy pursuit of institutionalized decency and social reform.

The principle that the rape of the rights of the least is an assault on the rights of all is attributed to Jesus Christ and is at the core of Judeo-Christian civilization and the rule of law in both common and civil law jurisdictions. And it is not just a tradition; there are several million Canadians in families that have bitter memories of personal or close relatives' encounters with the vagaries of justice.

According to this, Darcy Sheppard's father is not bitter that his son was pilloried while Michael Bryant won't be held accountable for his homicidal actions on the night of August 31, 2009. Too bad. I'm sure he could have done excellent pro bono work, advocating for the rights of cyclists in Ontario.

And. Also. Read fern hill's 'Stupid on Crime' blogpost again. See? There's a scary convergence happening; some of the Cons are catching onto Harper and his bullies tactic of playing to the stupid, authoritarianism-loving base.

Frum Gives Permission?

OMFG. David Frum is being reasonable. Again.

In a piece titled 'The Reckless Right Courts Violence', he calls on the rightwingnuts to tone it down. Actually using the word 'incitement', he links to many instances of the wild idiocies coming from radio and telly loony pundits.

All this hysterical and provocative talk invites, incites, and prepares a prefabricated justification for violence.
. . .
Hyperbolic accusation and fantasy murder may well serve a talk-radio industry facing a collapse in advertising revenues—down 30–40 percent over the past two years, reports NewMajority.com’s Tim Mak.

As revenues dwindle, hosts feel compelled to intensify the talk-radio experience, hoping to win larger audience share with more extreme talk. It’s like the early days of the pornography industry: At first a naked woman is thrilling enough, but soon a jaded audience is demanding more and more, wilder and wilder.
. . .
It’s not enough for conservatives to repudiate violence, as some are belatedly beginning to do. We have to tone down the militant and accusatory rhetoric.

He winds up thusly:

If Barack Obama really were a fascist, really were a Nazi, really did plan death panels to kill the old and infirm, really did contemplate overthrowing the American constitutional republic—if he were those things, somebody should shoot him.

But he is not. He is an ambitious, liberal president who is spending too much money and emitting too much debt. His health-care ideas are too ambitious and his climate plans are too interventionist. The president can be met and bested on the field of reason—but only by people who are themselves reasonable.

All well and good, you say?

Well, maybe not.

The first of four (so far) commenters quotes that second-last paragraph and says:

I was with you until that line. Just because you know he is not these things, there are many who believe he is; so have you just given your permission?

*headdesk*

Frum misrepresents Obama's words

... about what he said in his Cairo speech regarding women's equality.

Oh David. For awhile there, we had such hopes. We saw you recoil from the vile rhetoric of the fundamentalist religious rightwing zealots.

But I guess your Republican friends were beginning to worry about you. So you had to join the fray and do the expected slamming of the US president, in spite of the fact he's nowhere near the socialist you and the other neocon pundits say he is. But I digress. Here's Frum:

The president addressed – surprisingly briefly – the issue of the rights of women in the Islamic world. This is not a small issue, now that the Islamic world extends into Europe and America. Women in cities like London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Oslo face mounting threats not only to their freedom, but even to their physical safety, from men who deploy violence in the name of Islam. Nor is it only Muslim-born women at risk. Now listen to the president:

"I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal."

But it is not only “some in the West” who take this view! It is many Muslim-born women themselves, some of whom live in the West – but others of whom live in Muslim-majority countries.

What?!?!? Is that all that Obama said about women's rights? Ah, no. There's also this, which Frum didn't rip to shreds because ..., well you figure it out.

"I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality. And it is no coincidence that countries where women are well educated are far more likely to be prosperous."Now, let me be clear: Issues of women's equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam. In Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, we've seen Muslim-majority countries elect a woman to lead. Meanwhile, the struggle for women's equality continues in many aspects of American life, and in countries around the world.

I am convinced that our daughters can contribute just as much to society as our sons. Our common prosperity will be advanced by allowing all humanity -- men and women -- to reach their full potential. I do not believe that women must make the same choices as men in order to be equal, and I respect those women who choose to live their lives in traditional roles. But it should be their choice. And that is why the United States will partner with any Muslim-majority country to support expanded literacy for girls, and to help young women pursue employment through micro-financing that helps people live their dreams."

Because the whole question of whether a woman chooses to wear a head covering is so much more significant than whether she's allowed to go to school? Tsk, tsk, David. There you go again.

'The prolife delusion'

David Frum weighs in on that weird Gallup poll, in a piece titled 'The prolife delusion'.

Is America becoming more prolife? A new poll by Gallup says so. The poll, released on the Friday before President Obama addressed Notre Dame University, thrilled the anti-abortion movement—and offered Republicans their first glimmer of hope in months.

But the poll is wrong. Worse, it’s misleading—and threatens to send Republicans careening in precisely the worst possible direction in pursuit of votes they will not find.

Charles Franklin of Pollster.com explains the poll’s big technical error. Gallup oversampled Republicans. At a time when only 1 in 5 Americans identifies as Republican, 32 percent of the respondents in Gallup’s survey group identified themselves as Republican. Franklin offers some interesting explanations of how this oversampling could have occurred. But what matters most are the consequences.

As the Republican Party shrinks, it becomes more conservative. Today’s shriveled GOP is much more prolife than the robust GOP of years past. So if you oversample Republicans, you are oversampling prolifers. Sure enough, when you look at Gallup’s breakdown of its results, all the rise in anti-abortion feeling is concentrated among self-identified Republicans.

To paraphrase Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard”: The prolife movement isn’t bigger—it is the Republican Party that has got small.

Hee. David Frum funny.

This leads to the special danger the (mis)information in the Gallup poll presents to Republicans. As multiple polls show, Republican appeal has drooped to levels not seen since the aftermath of Watergate, maybe not since the 1930s. Those Republicans who remain committed to the party are, as the abortion poll suggests, the most conservative—especially the most socially conservative. Very understandably, they wish to believe that the party can recover by focusing most on people like themselves. (It takes very little evidence to persuade people to do what they want to do anyway.)

Yet a strategy that emphasizes abortion and other family life issues can only lead Republicans to greater difficulty. The prolife segment of American opinion is disproportionately black and Hispanic. (Hispanics are almost 10 points more prolife than whites.) Unfortunately, as repeated disappointment should by now have taught Republicans, abortion is just not a voting issue for these voters. They vote for their pocketbooks, as poorer people of all races usually do.

Yes! Teh base! Teh base! Keep pandering to the base!