The problem with media mudfights

Has anyone noticed how much time and effort cable news pundits and bloggers put into ridiculing, fact-checking, and demonizing the pundits and bloggers on the other side of the political spectrum? Rather than act as watchdogs of the power elite, Fox News and MSNBC personalities, for example, often seem more interested in engaging in the following kind of shtick: “You won’t believe what [FILL IN TALK-SHOW PERSONALITY’S NAME HERE] said today!” And off they go with a ten minute segment about how crazy that person is. I don’t think I need to provide any examples because this is a well-known phenomenon. If you’ve watched Glenn Beck, The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity, Hardball, The Ed Show, Countdown, Rachel Maddow, or the Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, you know exactly what I’m talking about. This is not to say that some of these shows don’t present new and insightful information and perspectives on the important issues in politics, but Left/Right mudslinging matches have become a significant part of all these media programs.

In 1987 Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman put forth their “propaganda model” to paint a picture of how the American media operates in their classic book, Manufacturing Consent. In it, they argued that although the US technically has a free press that is not officially constrained by the government, it is nonetheless self-censoring and serves to protect and reinforce the status quo. Their propaganda model has five key features, or “filters” as they call them, through which information must pass before being published or put on the airwaves, lest news that is damaging to the Establishment be consumed by the masses. Anyone interested in a full explication of the model can read about it here, but in this post I would like to concentrate on their fourth filter, which is “flak.”

Chomsky and Herman note,

“Flak” refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. It may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills before Congress, and other modes of complaint, threat, and punitive action. It may be organized centrally or locally, or it may consist of the entirely independent actions of individuals.

The authors here are discussing flak that it is heaped upon the media by non-media types, such as the government, media watchdogs such as the Media Institute, Center for Media and Public Affairs, and Accuracy in Media, and other groups or individuals who write or telephone their complaints. When Chomsky and Herman were writing, the media news landscape was quite different, with no internet, no Fox News, and no MSNBC. In the late 1980s, the primary sources of news were print media and the half-hour nightly network newscasts (ABC, CBS, and NBC) and one twenty-four cable news channel (CNN).

Among conservatives, there has always a feeling that these news organizations have a liberal bias (despite the fact that they are all giant corporations that rely on other giant corporations for funding through advertisements). As an endnote (pg. 28, no. 110) in Manufacturing Consent observes,

George Skelton, White House correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, noted that in reference to [President Ronald] Reagan’s errors of fact, “You write the stories once, twice, and you get a lot of mail saying, ‘You’re picking on the guy, you guys in the press make mistakes too.’ And editors respond to that so after a while the stories don’t run anymore. We’re intimidated.”

This sort of flak continues to this day, obviously, and I imagine there is way more of it coming these days because of the ease of email correspondence.

But since the arrival of Fox News, MSNBC, and the internet, another form of flak has taken shape, one that has seemingly surpassed the older form in importance if not volume. And that’s the media-on-media flak I alluded to in the opening. Watch one of the big opinion shows on cable news and see how long it takes the host to discuss the latest dimwitted remarks from one of their ideological adversaries. I think in the last two years, Glenn Beck has been the target of more media-originated flak than anyone. I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve it, but at some point the MSNBC crowd and the liberal blogs have to give it a rest. “Oh my god! Glenn Beck said the craziest thing today!”

No shit. That’s his job—to be an insane, ranting, schmuck who exploits conservatives’ absurd sense of victimhood by pulling back the curtain on a gallery of phantom socialist menaces: Barack Obama, Van Jones, Paul Krugman, and paradoxically, billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros. Though Beck is a nut (or at least plays one on television), he is a symptom, not a cause of 21^st century (mis)information overload. The ideological lines have been drawn for a while and very few will ever think beyond this narrow paradigm—a completely natural consequence of a media culture that has trained the rabble to think of its problems as being caused by “the other side.” Meanwhile, the elites who run the country go largely unscathed and continue to exploit and pillage the bickering serfs below.

- Max

max.canning@gmail.com

Glenn Beck Is A Repressed Fascist

I hear that quantum physicists are doing wonderful things in the field of string theory these days. One hypothesis that has gained momentum over the last several years is that there exist parallel universes alongside our own on other planes of reality. If this is the case, and scientists ever find what they believe to be a wormhole leading to these unknown places, allow me to volunteer to be the world’s first inter-universe traveler. My reasoning is simple: I do not want to live in a universe where Glenn Beck makes $32 million a year doing whatever it is that he does.

Over the last thirty years or so, conservative thought in the United States has undergone a remarkable devolution. Whereas the conservatives of the 1950s, sixties, and seventies were ably and articulately represented by the likes of William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and others, today’s right wing relies on the ostentatious Beck and the forever self-aggrandizing Sarah Palin to champion modern conservative values. Palin’s style differs from Beck in that her rhetoric is heavily platitudinous—even for a modern conservative. Palin manages to give lengthy speeches about politics without saying anything. Beck’s shtick on the other hand is fueled by personal mania combined with a gross misinterpretation of American and world history. As bad as Palin is, as a speaker and rhetorician she will never be as dangerous as Glenn Beck is.

Take this line from Beck speaking on his radio show last week. He was criticizing remarks by Simon Greer, who is head of the Jewish Funds for Justice (whatever that is) for saying,

“The government is you, me, and 300 million whom we share with our nation. Government is one way which we care for our neighbors, and tradition tells me to care for my neighbor as I care for myself. Here's what we do for each other as Americans: We grow food, we create jobs, we build homes, pave roads, teach our children, care for our grandparents, secure our neighborhoods. Government makes our country function. To put God first is to put humankind first. To put humankind first is to put the common good first.”

To you or me, this may seem like a pretty uncontroversial statement. But thank god we have Glenn Beck to set us straight. He tells us:

“This leads to death camps. A Jew, of all people, should know that. This is exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany. Put humankind and the common good first.”

Beck went on to say that this Greer’s line of thinking leads to death camps because old or disabled would be regarded as harming the common good and therefore they would have to be “liquidated.”

To me, this is one of the clearest examples we have of Glenn Beck engaged in an active psychological projection, which is the denial of one’s own unconscious characteristics or inclinations by outwardly accusing others of having those same attributes. Sane people who are not fascistically inclined regard “common good” as an ideal to be striven for. Conservatives and liberals alike laud this goal, although they have different ideas on how to get there. Beck, however, attacks the very notion itself because he says this will inevitably involve rounding up certain undesirable elements of the population and exterminating them. “Death camps,” as he said. But how in the world do you get from phrases like “common good” and “put humankind first” to the Nazi-esque extermination of people? You don’t. Only Beck does. Many conservative commentators have at some point played the Nazi card over the last year and a half, but Beck invokes them regularly to ascribe Hitlerian characteristics to a wide variety of political phenomena and ideas—from the work of community organizations such as ACORN or Americorps to “social justice,” Beck sees Bormann-type boogeymen everywhere. It could be that he’s doing it just for show and to rile people up, but on the few occasions I have watched this piece of work operate, I get the feeling that he genuinely believes what he’s saying.

Ironically, Beck has accused liberalism/progressivism of being a cancer that embodies fascist philosophies. On the Right, it is becoming increasingly popular to describe the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini as being rooted in progressivism. (See Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”) But as any schoolchild knows, fascism is an inherently conservative and reactionary doctrine. Fascism is not about putting humankind first as Beck seems to think, but about putting the nation-state first, whose glory depends on the social cohesion of the general population which is preferably comprised of a single uniform ethnicity. Every fascist state in history has invariably invoked the superiority of the people of that state to all outside groups. Sound familiar? How many times have we heard Beck and other conservatives espouse the tired mantra that America is an “exceptional” nation with a special place in world history? All the time. It’s their m.o. Criticize U.S. foreign policy in front of them and see what happens. Just recall the Bush years. Anyone who wasn’t 100% on board the war train for Iraq was deemed a terrorist sympathizer or at the very least a pussy by Beck, Hannity, et al. These men decry the purported rise of “big government” under the current president, but remember that no matter how much authority the Bush administration usurped for the federal government, they were behind it all the way. The decision by the Obama administration that conservatives have approved the most of is his decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan. A close second is his sending 1,500 troops to the border to keep out Mexicans from a territory that less than 200 years ago belonged to Mexico. That illegal immigration has come to the forefront of the political landscape at a time when the American economy is in the doldrums and American workers are getting the red-headed stepchild treatment speaks volumes about the political culture. It says that Americans—like the Weimar Germans before them—are looking for a scapegoat, a reason for why their livelihoods are fucked.

And Glenn Beck is giving them one.

- Max

Heinous Display By Teabaggers

Amazing video shot at a Columbus, Ohio tea party of a man, presumably a health care proponent, with a sign saying he has Parkinson’s Disease. The sign may be true, it may not. But it’s not like these teabaggers would know either way. Whatever the case may be, this is yet another horrifying display of the Randian ideal of looking out for one’s self while telling everyone else to go fuck themselves. It seems there are more Glenn Becks out there than I thought.

Got a horrible disease? Too fucking bad. No handouts for you. You should have thought about the consequences before you acquired what the health insurance companies call a preexisting condition.

It’s bad enough that Americans are stupid. We don’t need to add “malicious” to the equation.

- Max

Card Check Opponents Advance Completely Nonsensical Arguments

Lobbying for the oppression of American workers since 1912.

The propensity of many Americans to oppose their own economic interests never ceases to amaze me. I find this utterly fascinating, as it is the most interesting and mind-boggling phenomenon in American politics. It’s a topic that I have touched upon in posts about the tea partiers, and I hope to explore it greater depth in the coming weeks. For now, I want to examine one particular issue through which this problem has so clearly manifested. That issue is Card Check.

Card Check, also known as “majority sign-up,” would make it easier for workers in a particular company to unionize. There is a bill currently stalled in Congress—the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)—that would make Card Check the law of the nation. The idea is very simple. Under Card Check, workers of a potential bargaining unit sign what are called “authorization cards” which state the employees’ desire to be part of a union. If a majority of workers in a unit sign cards, the cards are sent to the National Labor Relations Board for verification and certification. Once this is done, those workers are officially a union, even the ones who did not sign cards. Card Check simply allows the will of the majority to be obliged (either for or against unionizing), while preventing “free riding” in those units that do become unionized. It wouldn’t be fair if some employees didn’t pay any dues, and yet got to reap whatever benefits the union is able to secure. Even the current law dictates that once a union is formed, all employees are in the union regardless of how they voted. So Card Check changes nothing on this score.

Current law does not allow for automatic unionization after a majority of workers sign authorization cards. Under the present statute, if 30% of the employees or more sign authorization cards, which are then sent to the NLRB, the Board authorizes an election using a secret ballot, in which all employees vote on whether to unionize. The EFCA would keep this provision, while also adding the abovementioned majority sign-up rule.

Opponents argue, rather disingenuously, that Card Check would infringe on workers’ rights by eliminating the right to a secret ballot. But if a majority of employees have signed authorization cards expressing their wish to unionize, an election is superfluous. And if only 30% of employees sign cards, an election using the secret ballot is still held. So what’s really going here?

The main argument against majority sign-up is a strange one. Right-wingers do not publicly advocate against Card Check by stating the actual reason they oppose it, which is that it’s not a business-friendly piece of legislation. Any law that makes it easier for workers to negotiate collectively with management is anathema to American conservatism. But conservatives cannot tell the American people they oppose Card Check for this reason—that it has the potential to empower them as workers and to negotiate better compensation for themselves. Instead, the Right has had to cook up a farcical ruse of an excuse that invokes “worker rights” and the right to have a secret ballot.

A secret ballot is a good thing. But once again, under Card Check, if a majority of workers sign union authorization cards, there is no need—if you are an employee—to have any kind of election, secret or otherwise. However, if you are the employer, then you have every reason to drag out the process as much as possible. Opponents of Card Check argue that a secret ballot is necessary to protect “worker rights” because they say employees will undoubtedly feel pressured into signing a card by their coworkers. Take a look at this advertisement from the Orwellian-named Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, which is financially backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Retail Industry Leaders Association, among other groups of for-profit organizations:

Not that it would matter, but someone should tell the assholes behind this ad that this isn’t On the Waterfront. Not every union leader is a fucking mob caricature, which apparently is the only role that Vince Curatola can play. As someone who has engaged in a majority sign-up effort, workers don’t try to intimidate their fellow employees because (1) that’s not right; and (2) you’ll end up alienating people. The best way to approach coworkers is to tell them about the organizing effort and encourage them to ask any questions they have (which most of them will). In my experience, hardly anyone was outright against unionizing. It’s just that most of them had never even considered it and weren’t sure how it worked. I was pleasantly surprised to find that many of the employees who said they’d think it over, ended up asking to sign cards later on.

If workers have to worry about coercion from anyone, it’s their employer, who writes their paychecks. The employer, after all, can use the threat of job loss to whip employees against unionizing. (Even though this is illegal, it happens often.) If a majority of workers sign cards, all an election would do is allow the employer time to lobby against unionization through coercion and staff-splitting.

The passage of Card Check is questionable at this point, even with the supposedly worker-friendly Democratic Party in power. As for the American people themselves, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s magazine recently featured an article misleadingly titled, “Poll shows public opposes card check,” and cites a Voter Consumer Research poll indicating that 61% of respondents oppose Card Check. But if we look at the actual poll, we find that this figure represents 61% of the mere 28% of respondents who said they had actually heard of Card Check. It should also be pointed out that as a news topic, Card Check features more prominently in Right Wing media than anywhere else because it makes great fodder—albeit illogically—for screeds against Democrats and organized labor. Hence, it may very well be that politically-minded conservatives are more likely to have heard of Card Check than liberals.

So how is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce defining “public?” For that, we need only do some simple math. Take the 28% of Americans who’ve heard of Card Check, and multiply that number by the 61% of them who oppose Card Check, and we find that when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says that the “public” opposes Card Check, they mean that 17% of Americans oppose Card Check.

That’s a strange way of defining “the public.”

It remains to be seen whether the EFCA will become unstuck in Congress. As of now its prospects look bleak, and if it fails (which is likely), this will only add to the number of ways that Barack Obama has disappointed the people who elected him. If the EFCA is resurrected, expect a fierce battle involving the kinds of crazy conservative rhetoric we became accustomed to last summer during the health care “debate.” It may be an uphill battle. In 2009, for the first time since Gallup started asking the question, “Do you approve or disapprove of unions?” in 1936, less than a majority said they approved. Now, I’m not going to sit here and claim that every union is great and only has the interests of its members in mind, because that is not the case. But there are a lot of good unions that really protect the well-being of their members because they create bargaining opportunities for workers that would not otherwise exist. Everyone recognizes the truth of the “strength in numbers” maxim. And yet, America’s peasant mentality only seems to be worsening. Idiots like Glenn Beck make millions by incoherently ranting against heretofore uncontroversial ideas, such as social justice and collectivism in a sinister effort to perpetuate a notion of extreme individualism. Sure, he’ll support collectivist activities such as the tea parties in the short term, but only as a means to achieve a culture of isolationism and marginalization.

So it is with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Retail Industry Leaders Association, and other business interests of this nation. These organizations have spent millions of dollars to lobby against Card Check under the guise of lobbying for worker rights, which is laughable. And the only thing more absurd than the notion of big business looking out for us, is the fact that people are actually believing it.

- Max

Will All The Real Fascists Please Stand Up?

The Führer 2.0

The fact that a despicable man like Adolf Hitler was able to brainwash the majority of the German populace into buying his twisted worldview is a fact that still seems unbelievable over 70 years later. An analysis of the unique political and social factors present in Germany at the time is not sufficient to explain how the masses were so vulnerable to Hitler’s advances. For that we must also take psychological factors into account. Research suggests that there is a certain type of character structure, called the authoritarian personality, which makes one particularly prone to being submissive to authority. If it were not for the prevalence of this type of character in Nazi Germany, Hitler may never have assumed power in the first place. This is the same type of personality that we see displayed in many conservatives today. In contemporary American politics, the influence of this personality type wreaks untold havoc, effectively acting as a silent killer of democratic progress.

The authoritarian personality was first studied shortly after WWII in the early 1950’s by psychologists at UC Berkley. These researchers found that the authoritarian personality typically consisted of nine specific character traits: conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception (desire for status quo), superstition and stereotypy, power and ‘toughness,’ destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sexuality (sexual repression).” Although the validity of some of these specific traits have been debated over the years (i.e., they have not all been found to correlate highly with each other), it is now well accepted that authoritarians are generally people “who readily submit to the established authorities in society, attack others in their name, and are highly conventional.” The parallel here with extreme right-wingers in this country should be clear enough. An ironic example of authoritarian “conservatives” can be witnessed in the fans of Glenn Beck (i.e., the Obama is Hitler crowd); these folks represent a perfect example of potential Nazis in training. If cultural and political forces were tweaked in the right way, these are the characters that would jump at the opportunity to be cogs in the machine of any fascist dictator.

Many liberals assume that a lack of intelligence is primarily to blame for the conservative or authoritarian proneness to self-imposed slavery. The question is: what specific aspect of intelligence do they lack? Because there are many different facets of intelligence, there are no doubt plenty of half-retarded conservatives that can nonetheless display any amount of competency within various areas of expertise. Where conservatives do show evidence of mild to severe mental retardation, however, is in their lack of critical thinking skills and inability to tolerate ambiguity (i.e., creative problem solving). In other words, they tend to think in absolutistic, black and white terms. This closed-minded way of approaching the world makes the authoritarian character prone to things like excessive religiosity and/or patriotism. The common denominator for these conservatives is the excessive drive to submit to a grand authority figure. Questions of morals, for example, are either perceived to be absolutely dictated by the laws of men or by an almighty god; in either case, there is always an ultimate authority figure that dictates right from wrong. It is this lack of tolerance for ambiguity and the concomitant lack of self agency that makes many a conservative comparable to a childish thumb-sucker in constant need of a father figure to control their every whim. This, my friends, is real stupidity. And this is conservatism in the good old US of A.

It seems to me that the authoritarian’s inability to tolerate ambiguity (anti-intraception) is the most damaging character trait of all. This marked discomfort with uncertainty is what drives conservatives to cowardly strive for maintaining the status-quo, which to them is comfortable because it seems objective and real. Holding onto the status-quo negates the “need to seek subjective thought or imaginative resolution to problems. The solution is thought to be written somewhere in the policies and rules of the organization; if not the authoritarian can turn to a higher authority such as a superstition or myth. If the solution is not written, it is the job of the authority to decide, not the submissive.” It is this masochistic submission of will prompted by the fear of uncertainty that spawns virtually all of the other traits of the poisonous authoritarian/conservative personality.

The conservative mind’s special proneness to fearing uncertainty is also supported by an abundance of evidence suggesting that conservative ideologies serve to allay fears of death. By submitting their will to authorities, these characters can effectively bypass the experience of being alone in an uncertain and dangerous world. In effect, the drive toward conservatism can be boiled down to representing a defense against these basic existential fears. Of course, these are fears that every one of us grapples with just by virtue of being a fragile human being destined to be devoured by meal worms. Conservatives, however, represent the extreme end of this fear spectrum; they are the most fearful and cowardly among us. A horrendous example of a state ruled by such fear was witnessed in Nazi Germany. If it were not for those of us on the opposite end of the fear spectrum (e.g., progressives) to buffer the power of these cowardly conservative souls, we would all surely be fucked.

Franklin Deleano Roosevelt once said: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” In a sense, this is certainly a wise and true statement, for it is fear that spawns most of the evil perpetrated by our species. But fear itself only wreaks havoc when it is manifested by the human animal, so perhaps progressives should embrace and accept a healthy fear of those authoritarians among us who unknowingly have too much of it. Maybe we should start to get more paranoid à la Glenn Beck and find some charismatic personalities to go around ranting on popular news shows about the scourge of conservatism that is attempting to ruin our fine country. Only instead of pretending to be an academic by writing on a chalkboard and drawing insanely illogical conclusions in order to spread fear, the progressive paranoid could be a real academic that rants about the actual evidence which suggests that conservatives truly are the cancer eating away at our society.

So go out there and be afraid. Be very afraid. (Beck starts 1:00 in.)



Note

In this essay I have taken liberties with the use of generalization. Not all “conservatives” can be said to have authoritarian personalities. In fact, what I would consider real conservatives (e.g., Ron Paul) can often display the polar opposite traits of the authoritarian. The ones I am referring to are mostly those on the more extreme end of the social conservative spectrum (e.g., people who habitually watch Fox News, religious fundamentalists, George W Bush fetishists, etc). Furthermore, the fact that those with authoritarian personalities happen to exist primarily within the conservative and Republican camps in this country is not to say that these types always fall to the “right” of the political spectrum. Historically, authoritarian types have just as easily been swayed by Stalin’s brand of communism, for example. So yes, super “lefty” communists with authoritarian personalities can also be authority-humping assclowns. Again, it is the unique combination of contemporary social and political forces in this country that make these types gravitate towards the Grand Old Party.

~Wolf

Citing The Existence Of Snow, Right-Wingers Delcare Climate Change Bogus

Doh! A polar bear reacts to Sean Hannity’s suggestion that the occurrence of snowstorms calls climate change into question.

Let me begin this post by saying that I am not at all qualified to speak in depth about climate change. Any person who wishes to investigate this matter will find an abundance of online resources from renowned climatologists and scientific academies that comprise the “climate change is real” consensus. What I would like to discuss here is the startling ignorance and gleeful anti-science sentiment displayed by some of the nation’s most visible conservatives.

Sean Hannity, whose highest degree is a high school diploma, presents himself as an expert on a whole variety of issues. The confidence with which he speaks on these topics serves primarily to mask the plain fact that his understanding of the problems of the day consist of predictable platitudes and right-wing talking points. One of the issues on which Hannity is an “expert” is climate change, as evidenced by his reasoning that because the eastern United States has recently experienced a slew of snowstorms, climate change is therefore a fake. “Global warming, where are you? We want you back,” was his ludicrous reaction. Glenn Beck, who also has no college degree, showed similar skepticism on his radio program by suggesting that climatologists commit mass suicide. And many Republican congresspersons, such as Jim Inhofe (R – Oklahoma) have made statements ranging from suspicious to outright disbelieving on the entire phenomenon.

The idea that because the month of February has brought snowstorms and cold weather to the eastern seaboard, this somehow imperils the science supporting climate change, is so stupid, so profoundly idiotic, that one wonders if the people who say such things are being serious. I am aware of no climate change theory that posits there will be no snowstorms or cold weather from here on in. Unfortunately in some circles, the science of climatology is as simple as looking out one’s window in order to gauge the feasibility of climate change. But fear not, my fellow climate change believers; summer is right around the corner. And if we use the skeptics’ own methodology, we should have no problem demonstrating an empirically verifiable warming trend starting very soon. That should buy us some time, at least until October.

These types of criticisms of climate change are quite curious. Hannity, Beck, et al. do not dare discuss or debate the actual science with reputable scientists who have researched and analyzed this problem because they would surely be exposed for the frauds they are. Listening to people like these rail against climate change, one gets the impression that they believe the whole thing is a hoax perpetrated by an agenda-minded global scientific community. But cui bono? Whom does worldwide acceptance of global warming benefit? If climate change is real, it would seem to be a giant inconvenience to most everyone on the planet. Governments, businesses, individuals, everyone. It has been suggested that climate change is being pushed by the green industry, but this is an insane assertion when we consider the relative power of the non-green heavy-hitting lobbyists from oil companies, the auto industry, and other sectors who wish to see a status quo approach to climate change. The last time I checked, “Big Solar” does not occur in the Washington lobbying vernacular. And if you think climate change is simply a scheme to make money for Al Gore, please check yourself into the nearest emergency room and tell the receptionist that you require an immediate psychological evaluation.

It isn’t so much the skepticism of such individuals that irritates me. Rather, in denouncing climate change as a hoax and citing the recent snowstorms, people such as Hannity and Beck assume a rather giddy tone. It is as if they truly enjoy ridiculing the scientific professions. We saw the same thing a few years ago when theocrackpots were at their most vocal and obnoxious in attempting to insert creationist hogwash into the science curricula in public schools. President Bush himself supported the idea “so people can understand what the debate is about.” Of course, there is no debate—not a serious one, anyway—involving Darwinian evolution and creationism, or intelligent design, or whatever else the religionists want to call this horseshit hypothesis. When scientists—specifically biologists—across the country condemned this uninformed statement, the theocrackpots reverted to the standard line about the scientific community and its own problems with dogmatism. However, the only dogmatism involved in science is the unchanging adherence to the scientific method, which demands a staunch commitment to evidence, logic, and truth-seeking, even if it means drawing a conclusion that is unexpected or unwelcome. Scientists are in fact “dogmatic” in this sense, in that they are beholden to reality. Living such a life is not always convenient, but it is generally free of the delusional wishful thinking that often plagues the reasoning of so many people.

It’s funny. We’re constantly hearing fiscally prudent Americans denounce the massive debt their country has accumulated, because they say they don’t want their children and grandchildren to be saddled with that burden. But when it comes to climate change, the kids are on their own, which just goes to show that “The Children” talk is merely pious rhetoric masking a self-centered, I-don’t-give-a-flying-fuck worldview. It’s only the planet we’re talking about—the only humanly inhabitable piece of real estate in the known universe. And yet, there are some who would have us believe that the rapidly growing population of humans can burn increasing amounts of fossil fuels on a planet with an atmosphere that retains a good amount of heat, without any repercussions whatsoever. Indeed, in the Republican rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union speech last month, Virginia Governor Bob O’Donnell declared, “We are blessed here in America with vast natural resources, and we must use them all.”

Use them all? Really? All of them? Sadly that is the attitude of many citizens in this zombie consumer horror show we call America. People rarely think beyond what’s right in front of them at the time, let alone worry about the state of America and the world fifty or one hundred years from now.

- Max Canning

BREAKING NEWS: “Glenn Beck” Confesses His On-Air Persona Is Part Of Decade-Long Sociology Experiment.

Sociologist Peter Morton

Filed by Max Canning:

New York—In a stunning admission that is likely to send shockwaves throughout the American media, “Glenn Beck” announced on Sunday that his radio and television shows are part of an elaborate social experiment to find out whether he could “make the crazy seem plausible to millions of people.”

“This has been an incredibly disturbing experience for me,” said Peter Morton, a.k.a. “Glenn Beck.” On Sunday, Morton revealed in a press conference and Q&A with reporters that he is a sociology professor at the University of South Florida who has been on sabbatical for ten years, during which time he has hosted a nationally syndicated radio show and two cable television programs as part of a major academic research project. Morton said he has authored an upcoming book, The Mass Psychology of Stupid, which describes his experiences as one of the preeminent right-wing talk show hosts in the United States.

“I cannot continue the charade any longer,” a visibly shaken and broken Morton read from a prepared statement. “This has gotten way out of hand. I started this experiment ten years ago with honest intentions, to test the credulity of the American public, and to try to gain a deeper understanding of the political psychology of the American people. Today, my experiment ends, and my search for a therapist begins.”

Morton said his experiment commenced in 2000, when he used his connections in the radio industry to secure an afternoon show on WFLA in Tampa. “By that time,” said Morton, “I had already published several peer-reviewed papers on the sociology of politics, so I came up with an alias. Americans gravitate towards people with short names that are only one or two syllables long. Notice that Obama is the first president since JFK to have a last name that’s more than two syllables, and only the third major presidential candidate since 1972 with a three-syllable name, [McGovern, 1972 and Dukakis, 1988] so I eventually settled on ‘Glenn Beck.’”

When the Glenn Beck Program premiered in 2000, Morton espoused moderately conservative views. However, as time progressed, Morton said he realized that in order to maintain ratings that would keep him on the air, he would have to “up the ante.” Gradually, Morton went from a reasonable but obscure radio show host to a right-wing fringe figure broadcast over 280 stations nationwide by 2008.

“This endeavor was only supposed to last six months, a year, tops. I was planning on losing money because I was funding it myself,” said Morton. “The next thing I knew, I was making millions of dollars for saying the craziest stuff I could possibly think of. It was exciting and scary at the same time. I had never done so little actual work in my life and here I was raking in more money than I had ever seen. But on the other hand, it was frightening to know that there was such a huge market for this. And then HLN called me one day asking if I’d want to host a TV show. A TV show!”

Morton hosted Glenn Beck on HLN for two and a half years before signing a deal with Fox News. He hosted his first show on the network on January 19, 2009, the day before Barack Obama’s inauguration. “The last year of this experiment was by far the toughest,” Morton said. “It was one thing to be an apologist for the Bush administration and go after his detractors. The work was mundane and old because Hannity and O’Reilly had already been doing it for years on television. But with a new Democratic president coming into office, I knew I’d have a chance to showcase my creativity as a propagandist.”

Within a year, Morton’s excitement was tempered by the stark realization that his insane rants had actually been resonating with millions of people. “I was trying to get fired,” confessed Morton. “But no matter what I did or said, my ratings just kept going up and up. I thought shedding what were obviously fake tears time and again over 9/11 would do it, but people just ate it up. And then I got the idea to start insinuating that Obama was in league with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. And I thought that would do me in for sure. I mean, we all know how conservatives reacted to people who called Bush ‘Hitler.’ But as you know, not only did I not get fired, my ratings went even higher. You should see the emails I received, thanking me for telling the truth and exposing the Nazi-Stalinist, ACORN-orchestrated plot to destroy America. These weren’t a few isolated emails. This was 85% of the correspondence I got.”

Morton continued, “Then I figured, you know, I’ll just go off the deep end. I’ll just directly attack the half-white, half-black president and call him a racist, which makes no sense whatsoever, but I wanted out of there. It was becoming too much. It was a really daunting task coming up with new red meat conspiracy theories to toss to the viewers. Over the summer I was really grasping at straws with the FEMA camp thing. So I went on Fox & Friends one morning and said something about how this president has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture, and that he’s a racist. Don’t ask me what I meant by ‘white culture’ because I didn’t mean anything by it. There is a French culture. A Norwegian culture. An Italian culture. But there is no universal ‘white culture.’ It’s a meaningless term.”

“Well, there was a backlash from liberals, but my bosses at Fox just doubled down even after a several companies pulled their ads from my show. The next thing I knew I was being contacted by Goldline International to hawk precious metals. And I thought, ‘My audience can’t buy gold. They’re not rich.’ But then I realized I could cross the ethics line by plugging gold on my show while simultaneously advertising for Goldline on my free time. When that didn’t get me fired, I decided I had had enough. So here I am today.”

Morton also offered insights into media personalities he encountered during the experiment. “When I was at HLN, I ran into Nancy Grace in the hallways a few times. She’s an incredibly disturbed individual. Maybe bipolar, I don’t know. She’s obsessed with dead, missing, and battered white kids. Once, about two hours before her air time, she was in a panic because a missing kid she had planned on talking about turned up in his parents’ house. He was just hiding. So she was in her office hunched over her computer looking for news about victimized children. I tried to help. I said, ‘Well Nancy, a little girl got kidnapped today in New York.’ Her eyes lit up. She said, ‘Where?’ and I said, ‘Harlem.’ Then she just frowned and went back to her computer.”

Morton also discussed some of the personalities at Fox News, at one point calling Bill O’Reilly a “schoolyard bully” who’s “probably a sexual deviant.” When asked to clarify, Morton responded, “Have you read Those Who Trespass? I wouldn’t have read it, but one day he handed me a copy and said he wanted to know what I thought. It was the worst thing I’ve ever read in my life. Worse than the loofah affidavit.”

About Sean Hannity, Morton said, “Hannity was by far the worst. He’s not conservative. He’s not liberal. He’s not anything. He’s just for whatever the Republican Party is for, and against whatever the Republican Party is against. He’s like a member of the politburo. I don’t think he’s ever had an independent thought in his life.”

“By the way,” Morton added, “Ann Coulter is a guy.”

Conspicuously absent from Morton’s prepared remarks at the press conference was any mention of “Glenn Beck’s” 9/12 project—a mass gathering of disaffected Americans who last summer protested nonexistent tax hikes and other vague ideas such as “spending.” One reporter, however, did inquire about that momentous event in Washington last September.

“Yeah,” said Morton. “I’m not proud of that, but I wanted to see how many people I could get to physically show up at a specific place and time. It’s one thing to get millions of people to tune into your show from the comfort of their homes and cars, but the 9/12 project was designed specifically to see how many people would jump when I said to jump. A lot of people were wondering why I didn’t show up to my own march in D.C. The reason is that it just would’ve been too much. I did not want to see what I had created. I did not want to have to give a rousing and insincere speech. I did not want to see the rotten fruits of my deceitful labor.”

“I need a drink.”

Morton’s book, The Mass Psychology of Stupid will be available sometime in the fall.

- Max

Teabaggers Hold Million Moron March

AP

Patients from a D.C. psychiatric ward hold signs while on a fresh-air break at Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project.

Spurred into action by the poorly educated, crew-cutted Mormon ignoramus, Glenn Beck of Faux News, a confederacy of teabagging dunces descended on the National Mall in Washington D.C. today as part of his “9/12 Project.” His stated purpose was to bring the country together by reminding everyone of how we all felt united as Americans on September 12, 2001. Beck showed how serious he was about his little cause by fake-crying in a series of despicable on-air displays in which 9/11 served as a backdrop for his teary-eyed theatrics. Not surprisingly, the rally was far less noble, and much uglier than it’s purported goal might indicate, as it attracted some of the most under-evolved humanoid cretins walking America today.

Here is a video from the Associated Press of this Million Moron March:

Did everyone catch what that white sign said on the right of the screen? It read:

OBAMA:

WE HAVE WAKEN [sic] UP TO YOUR EVIL PLANS TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY. TAKE YOUR RACIST, UN-AMERICAN ACORN GROUPS AND ARROGENT [sic] WIFE BACK TO YOUR OWN COUNTRY AND STRIP THEIR RIGHTS AWAY!

As Beck himself did earlier this year, the sign accuses Barack Obama of being racist, and then proceeds to tell him to go back to his “own country.” You’ve got to love bald-faced hypocrisy. I also find the reference to Michelle Obama as “arrogent” quite instructive. The First Lady has conducted herself in a dignified manner, and hasn’t done anything that one could call arrogant. But I guess if you’re the racist asshole holding that sign, you expect black people to act meek around whitey just as they did in the Jim Crow South. Ah, the good old days.

The worst kept secret about this whole march is that it had nothing to do with policy and everything to do with the president. These teabaggers bitch about taxes, but the federal government has not raised their taxes or even proposed doing so since the last administration. They whine about freedom but were either silent on the Patriot Act or defended it on the grounds that they had “nothing to hide.” They are 100% partisan, and don’t give two shits about spending or the federal deficit. They were nowhere to be found in the Bush years when Dick Cheney boldly declared, “Deficits don’t matter,” and showed us just how much he believed in that maxim. Did teabaggers protest the bailout of Wall Street in last year’s TARP signed into law by Bush? No. Did they protest the ARRA (stimulus bill) this year which allocated money for infrastructural projects across the nation, and was signed into law by Obama? Yes. What does this tell you about these halfwits masquerading around as fiscal conservatives? That they can’t get off the couch to protest the largest single fleecing of American taxpayers in the history of the country, but they can hop on buses and ride a thousand miles to protest a bill that might actually benefit their states and hometowns. What are they really protesting here?

The president. The black president. The black Democratic president. The funny thing is, there is reason to protest, except these idiots are protesting the wrong thing. Like Bush, Obama is in Wall Street’s pocket and will act accordingly. However, Obama still has to get reelected. He also has a legacy to shape for the history books. For Obama, health care reform is a means to both of those ends, but his proposal is hardly radical. Before the debate even began, Obama inexplicably took the prospect of a single-payer system off the table, and thus his best bargaining chip. Whereas he could have started with single-payer in the negotiations with Congress, only to meet legislators halfway and create a strong public option, he has started with the public option. As a result, he now appears to be giving up ground that he should have had no business surrendering in the first place. This all begs the question, just how much reform does Obama want? Clearly not much. And if this country does get health care reform, you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be concessions to the health care industry throughout the bill.

So then, the teabaggers are protesting what? Not socialism, as many of them claim. They can’t be because in order to be protesting against socialism, there has to be socialism, which there isn’t. Socialism is when the government controls the means of production. In the United States the private sector controls the means of production and also the government, which it uses to funnel taxpayer money into the private sector when it needs capital, and also through the annual Pentagon budget. That is definitely not socialism. It’s not even capitalism. It’s just theft. Business as usual. Although I must say, the government’s response to the latest financial meltdown was an unusually overt “Fuck you,” and should have made clear to everyone who really runs this country.

It is clear to me that these teabaggers are either protesting nothing that exists in reality (socialism), or are protesting something that could provide them with a cheaper and better alternative to the health plans offered by rapacious health insurance behemoths. Either way, we’re dealing with an extremely dangerous pathology—one that emboldens the ruling elite by demonstrating a profound ignorance of its power and outrageous excesses. While Beck and the teabaggers rail against a phantom socialist menace, Wall Street is laughing all the way to the fucking (offshore) bank with our money.

Obama could be protested against for many reasons, not the least of which is his decision to reappoint Ben Bernanke to chair the Federal Reserve. Bernanke, along with Hank Paulson and then-president of the New York Fed, Tim Geithner, helped Wall Street pull off that impressive $700 billion TARP heist that’s going to make our economy much worse off in the long run. Indeed, the U.S. economy is in for a Day of Reckoning in the not too distant future because the government has artificially propped up companies that should’ve failed, and more importantly, because the government didn’t have $700 billion to give in the first place.

So pardon me if I chuckle a bit or shake my head when I see these middle to lower class shit-kicking teabaggers on television screaming in horror that a government-funded health insurance option might become a reality for the millions of Americans for whom private insurance is too expensive. Instead of protesting that the reform doesn’t go far enough, that we should have a universal health care system like every other developed Western nation, that stiff regulations be put in place to curb runaway premium costs, the teabaggers unwittingly shill for an industry that’s happy to keep fucking them in the ass as long as it’s profitable to do so. Forget what’s the matter with Kansas? What’s the matter with America?

Well, as Matt Taibbi explains, the peasant mentality lives on in America:

“…[A]ctual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs.”

Welcome to the corporatocracy.

- Max

Texas Secession? Yeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaw!

Remember back in 2003 when the Iraq war started and Faux News was decrying antiwar protestors as “un-American” and “treasonous” for exercising their first amendment rights? Well, this same network has been conspicuously silent in the face of a fledgling Texas secession movement, first given lip service in April by its scumsucking governor, Rick Perry. By now, Perry has undoubtedly realized that he made a grave mistake by dropping the “S” word because on Monday a couple hundred crazies turned out at the statehouse in Austin to demand that Texas secede while proclaiming outright their hatred of the United States. What, I ask you, could be more “un-American” than seceding from America?

Indeed, at the top of the list of the most treasonous things you could possibly do, secession is right up there with spying for the enemy during wartime. And yet, we’ve heard nothing from Faux News about the un-American and treasonous protests in Austin, or the 51% of Texas Republicans who are in favor of seceding from the Union. Not surprisingly, Glenn Batshit Beck is giving the secessionists the thumbs up because to hear him tell it, America is becoming a socialist totalitarian police state, complete with government-mandated eugenics and euthanasia, and whatever other fantasies he can come up with while off his meds.

I don’t really care about the double standard here; I just wanted to highlight the case as yet another exemplar of the “fair and balanced” news coverage over at Faux News. The reason I don’t care is because I want Texas to secede. Can you think of a better way to start improving the country immediately than by getting rid of a backward, obstructionist hellhole such as Texas? Rather than fight to keep Texas and the South, Lincoln should’ve said good luck and god bless.

Okay, okay, so Lincoln shouldn’t have done that. Slavery was an evil worth routing out, even though it meant that those of us in the land of literacy and dental hygiene would suffer the consequences. Incredibly, Texas and the rest of the South are still bitter about Appomattox and the freeing of the slaves, as evidenced by the ubiquitous Stars and Bars that pepper the territories of the NASCAR Republic.

Had Lincoln left the South to its own dubious devices, it would be interesting to see just how long it would’ve taken the Confederates to abolish slavery, if at all. In fact, I think a few million dollars ought to be put aside for a research project to this end: Had the Confederacy prevailed, at what point (if any) would it have outlawed the practice of slavery? We could get the nation’s finest historians, sociologists, and political scientists from all parts of the country together to come up with an approximate answer to this hypothetical, but nonetheless important question. I think if people knew that the Confederacy would have freed the slaves in 1987, it might kind of damage the South’s credibility a bit in Congress, you know?

If Texas wants to be its own country again, then by all means we should let them. The secessionists probably think the rest of us are horrified at the prospect of a Texas-less America. Texas wants to secede! Oh no!

Pshaw. Those divorce papers couldn’t be signed fast enough.

Actually, forget the divorce papers. We can save ourselves a whole lot of time just by handing Texas a letter of termination—a letter I’m going to draft myself.

Be sure to check back on Wednesday when I plan on having a pink slip ready for what we can only hope will be the Lone Star State.

- Max

Glenn Beck: Actor or Paranoid Psychotic?

Cover of Glenn Beck’s shitty book, the title of which suggests that he thinks there also exists a “Fake America,” fueling speculation that he’s certifiable.

Barack Obama hasn’t been president for six months and already the Republican shit factory is pumping out high-grade, persecution-complex BS at full capacity. One of the most efficient workers in this impressive operation is Glenn Beck of Faux News. Each time he goes on air, Beck somehow manages to outdo himself in the paranoid delusions department. Although I assume Beck is a jackass in real life just as he is on television, I cannot—I repeat, cannot—imagine that Beck actually believes half the shit he says on the air. Why? Because if Beck went around in his everyday off-air life saying what he says on the airwaves, he certainly would’ve been committed by now. I am not exaggerating and this isn’t a joke. I mean it 100%. If Glenn Beck really and truly is the man he plays on television, then my friends, he is man suffering from serious psychosis with secondary paranoid delusions.

Behold,

Beck’s ready willingness to shed crocodile tears over 9/11 was genuinely vile, to use the favorite word of Beck cohort Bill O’Reilly. I would also use O’Reilly’s term “smear merchant” to describe Beck, but for some reason whenever I hear this phrase I always picture some guy selling used underwear. In any event, Beck is doing great in the ratings as you might expect. You see, since about two seconds after Obama was sworn in, the electorally repudiated conservatives started to revert to their tried-and-true Clinton-era strategy of telling everyone “We’re fucked!” now that the Democrats have retaken the White House. This position rests in stark contrast to their strategy when they’re in power, which is “Fuck you.”

-Max