A privacy amendment

Conservatives like to pretend that there is no general "right to privacy" because those words don't appear in the Constitution.

So maybe it's time for the American public -- which does believe it has such a right -- to end the discussion once and for all and put them in.

Dan Savage (via Sasha) suggested the other day that progressives put together their own campaign for a constitutional amendment establishing, once and for all, a general right to privacy.

This actually was an idea I proposed to folks in Salon's Table Talk some years back, but no one else seemed to want to latch onto it. So I've had to satisfy myself with arguing, ardently, for Democrats and progressives to drop all this talk about a "right to choose" and start talking about a "right to privacy," because that is what is really at stake with the ascendancy of so-called "strict constructionists" to the federal bench under the Bush regime. I've made that argument here again and again and again and again.

Fortunately, during the recent Senate hearings on John Roberts' appointment to the Supreme Court, the right to privacy indeed came rushing to the fore as a significant point. Rather predicatbly, right-wing propagandists like Rich Lowry weighed in pre-emptively on Roberts' behalf, arguing that because the Constitution doesn't explicitly list a general right to privacy, it doesn't exist:

There are privacy rights in the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment, for example, prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. The entire constitutional scheme is meant to limit government power and leave people alone most of the time. But there is not a generalized, abstract right to privacy unhinged from any constitutional text.

The mischief began 40 years ago in the case Griswold v. Connecticut, when the Court struck down a prohibition on contraceptives on the basis of a "right to marital privacy." The bit about "marital" was quickly dropped, and the new discovery became a general right to privacy.

In Griswold, the Court suggested the right might be found in the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth and/or Ninth Amendments. In other words, it must be there somewhere, anywhere. But since the right to privacy is nowhere mentioned, the Court had to contend that it resides in "penumbras formed by emanations." In layman's terms, that means in partial shadows formed by emissions, which it doesn't take a constitutional scholar to conclude sounds pretty vaporous.

"'Privacy' [has] functioned as a euphemism for immunity from those public-morals laws deemed by the justices to reflect benighted moral views," write scholars Robert P. George and David L. Tubbs. From a right for married couples to obtain contraceptives, it has evolved into a constitutional right of homosexuals to engage in sodomy (in the case of Lawrence v. Texas in 2003) and then the right of gays to marry, in a 2003 Massachusetts-supreme-court decision.

But Roberts didn't make this argument -- after all, it was precisely this position that had destroyed the nomination of Robert Bork back in 1987. Roberts had to expound quite bit on "the so-called right to privacy" (as he once put it), but gave answers that, on the surface, seemed to suggest he agreed with the existence of such a general right.

However, as William Saletan at Slate pointed out, his answers actually were slick evasions that paved the way for him to overturn Roe v. Wade on the basis of the limitations to such privacy rights:

Roberts was asked to locate the right to privacy in the Constitution. He quoted parts of the Bill of Rights pertaining to military occupations and invasions of citizens' homes. Does the right to privacy extend beyond those contexts? Roberts offered one addition: "I agree with the Griswold court's conclusion that marital privacy extends to contraception." Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., pressed him about the extension of contraceptive rights to unmarried people. "I don't have any quarrel with that conclusion," he allowed. What about Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case that interpreted Griswold to bar prosecution of private sex between consenting adults? Roberts ducked the question, citing "the difference between the issue that was presented in Griswold and its ramifications." In other words, any claim of privacy beyond the specific "issue" in Griswold—the right to marital contraception—is a "ramification" Roberts might reconsider.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., asked Roberts whether the right to abortion "is so embedded that it's become a part of our national culture." Roberts demurred, explaining, "That gets to the application of the principles in a particular case." Feinstein asked Roberts whether the "right of privacy applies to the beginning of life and the end of life." Roberts begged off again, arguing, "The exact scope of it, with respect to the beginning of life and the end of life—those are issues that are coming before the court." Feinstein asked Roberts about his pro-privacy remarks to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. Roberts affirmed the "right to be left alone" as "a general statement of the principle." But he cautioned, "With regard to particular restrictions [Wyden] was talking about ... I don't think it's appropriate to comment on."

You get the picture. Privacy is a principle so general that its assertion against any "particular restriction" unspecified in the Constitution, aside from a ban on married people using birth control, is a mere "ramification" or "application" open to review. By refusing to define privacy's "scope," Roberts eviscerates it.

Save the Court has more:

By saying that he believes in a constitutional right to privacy the way every member of the Court does, Roberts is essentially saying that he would provide virtually no real protection for the right to privacy. Every member of the Court, of course, includes Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. According to their view, any right to privacy does not encompass a woman's right to reproductive choice, and both have argued that Roe v. Wade should be overruled. According to their view, any right to privacy apparently does not include the right of consenting adults to be free from criminal prosecution for what they do in the privacy of their own bedrooms, as reflected in their dissents in Lawrence v. Texas. And according to Scalia's view, the right of privacy does not give even a fully competent adult the right to refuse unwanted medical treatment, as reflected in Scalia's opinion in Cruzan v. Missouri Dept. of Health.

Now, the subject continues to linger with the nomination of Samuel Alito to the court, likewise virtually assured to be a vote to overturn Roe:

Alito wants government to be able to interfere in personal decisions on reproductive rights. In Casey, Alito stated that he would have upheld a provision of Pennsylvania's restrictive anti-abortion law requiring a woman in certain circumstances to notify her husband before obtaining an abortion. His colleagues on the Third Circuit and the Supreme Court majority disagreed and overturned the provision.

But like Roberts, Alito is adopting the phony "I do believe in privacy rights" stance adopted by Roberts. And it appears to be working:

Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said Alito told him in their meeting that he recognized a right to privacy, the principle that underlies the Supreme Court's abortion rights rulings. "I think he believes in that fundamental right," Durbin told reporters in Washington.

Volokh Conspiracy explores quite a bit more of Alito's real positions WRT privacy rights. As one commenter notes:

What exactly does he mean by "right to privacy"? The problem with that right (apart from the question of whether it's in the constitution) is that it's definitionally nebulous--it could mean a great deal or could mean next to nothing, depending on how one construes "privacy." If the right to privacy does not preclude spousal notification for abortions, then it's essentially a defense against state intervention, not a defense of personal sovereignty, which is a very important philosophical distinction.

Another commenter immediately observes:

Yep, pretty nebulous, sorta like "due process" or "privileges and immunities", "unreasonable search", "free exercise" or any of those unenumerated rights lurking in the 9th Amendment (maybe privacy is even one of those rights). One can certainly argue that there is no general right of privacy from government intrusion in the Constitution because the Constitution does not explictly provide for such a right but if "definitionally nebulous" made recognizing the right problematic (or the extent of the right), then that same objection could be applied to any number of rights in the Constitution.

Indeed, the right to privacy is generally recognized as one of those unenumerated rights inherent in the Ninth Amendment:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

And as Jeralyn at TalkLeft noted back in 2002, the Ninth Amendment rights widely recognized by jurists over the years have included not just the right to privacy but also the right to self-defense, which in my mind provides a more powerful bulwark in defense of private gun ownership than does the Second Amendment.

Yet, strangely enough, we don't see conservatives arguing that there is no "right to self-defense" ... even though those words appear nowhere in the Constitution.

As those wild-eyed leftists at USA Today point out:

In fact, the right to privacy is older than the republic, protected in the Constitution and affirmed repeatedly in a century of court rulings before the abortion controversy. Though the word privacy isn't in the Constitution, the "right to be let alone," as Justice Louis Brandeis put it, permeates the document.

What are freedom of religion, freedom of speech and freedom from unlawful searches and the like other than respect for privacy? Leading Founders urged adoption of the Constitution as necessary to protect "private rights." And the Ninth Amendment was added to assure that other rights already taken for granted were "retained by the people."

Starting in the 19th century, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution protects the privacy of the mail and that individuals have a right to refuse medical treatment.

Thus it was no stretch when, in 1965, the court overturned a Connecticut law banning birth control. Surely, the court ruled, the right of privacy prohibited police searches of "the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms." That decision, Griswold v. Connecticut, was the foundation for Roe.

To the anguish of those who want government in the bedroom and other personal places, privacy rights now protect unmarried and same-sex couples and individuals.

I think it's pretty clear that the coming Supreme Court lineup -- and particularly the Robert court -- is going to bring an end to Americans' general right to privacy.

Progressives would be smart to begin preparing against that eventuality now. As Sasha notes, it will be fun watching conservatives tie themselves up in knots explaining to Americans why they don't have a general right to privacy. But even more important, it is the kind of campaign around which a positive, forward-thinking progressive agenda can gain traction.

Malkin and journalism

Speaking of Michelle Malkin, check out Alex Koppelman at Dragonfire as he weighs in on Malkin's standards when it comes to journalism.

Koppelman points out (as I did earlier) that Malkin has never worked as a reporter or in the belly of the daily production of reportage, and quotes me regarding her career here in Seattle as a columnist. Then he continues:

None of this has stopped Malkin from interpreting even the minutest details as evidence of a liberal media conspiracy. Last week, it was a photo of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, altered by USA Today in what Malkin called the "malicious photoshopping of a black Republican official." Undoubtedly, the photo had been altered -- Rice's dark, bloodshot eyes had been whitened, and her pupils had changed in shape, becoming unflattering, even creepy -- but such alteration is hardly evidence of malice. In fact, alterations like those happen all the time as photo editors try to make their work more visually interesting.

... This week Malkin's back at it. Her new target is James Dao, a reporter for the New York Times, and a piece he wrote after the number of American casualties in Iraq hit 2,000. In the article, Dao quoted part of a letter Corporal Jeffrey B. Starr wrote to his girlfriend in case he died in Iraq, which he did in April of this year. Dao chose a quote from the letter that expressed Starr's premonition of his own death. Malkin, though, was angered by what Dao left out -- a part of Starr’s letter in which he confirmed his willingness to die for what he considered a noble cause. This, to Malkin, was proof of "selective editing" and "agenda-driven" reporting by Dao. But the truth is never as black-and-white as Malkin sees it.

Dao declined to comment for this article, but he did forward along an Email from Bill Borders, a senior editor at the Times. "The most prominent part of the presentation of Starr was the picture and caption at the top of Page A15," Borders wrote. "The caption represented him this way: 'His father, Brian Starr, said his son believed in the war but was tired of the harsh life.' The article also reported that even after his son's death Brian Starr 'remained convinced that invading Iraq was the right thing to do.' " And, in fact, Dao explicitly referred to Starr's pro-war views, using the same language given in the caption.

There can be some debate as to whether Dao should have included the rest of Starr's letter, and I myself would say he should have, not because the additional material would substantively change the portrayal of Starr, but because Starr's letter was a moving look into the thoughts of a soldier whose life was tragically cut short. But that's ultimately an editorial decision -- including the omitted portions of the letter would have meant fitting 100 additional words into the story. In a piece totaling more than 3,500 words, as Dao's did, that may not seem like much, but the article included the words of more than a dozen soldiers and their families, as well as background on the war, statistics on the death rates of soldiers, charts and photos. If Malkin had experience as a reporter she would know that in a newspaper, where articles must fit spaces defined more by advertising and layout concerns than editorial concerns, every word matters. Cutting 100 words of Starr’s letter, after summarizing the pro-war views those words reflected, allowed Dao to explore the lives of other soldiers, other families hurt by tragedy. That's not bias; indeed, it's the essence of a reporter's job.

Koppelman's piece was fresh in my mind when I happened upon Michelle's self-written profile at Pajamas Media:

A lot of the work that I do, it isn't just about opining, but about investigative journalism as well. That's one of the coolest things about the blog, being able to do that kind of hybrid thing. I got a lot of criticism in the past for doing opinion pieces with a lot of reporting in them. A lot of mainstream media editors aren't comfortable with that because they don't expect it. So I love that about blogging.

Ahem.

A few words about investigative journalism:

Investigative journalism is actually an extremely arcane, and hallowed, field within the trade. The people who are investigative journalists will spend months, sometimes years, working on a single story. Their specialty is a knowledge of genuine investigative techniques, including those employed by private investigators, and include some practices that some people (like certain mayors of Spokane) might consider devious. But for the most part, it's arduous work that requires, above all, an ability to comb through stacks of records and pull out important information.

Real investigative journalists are capable of employing their skills in a variety of areas: crime, corporate mismangement and malfeasance, government corruption and incompetence, and political scandals -- though the latter, while the best known, are probably the least often applied.

If you want to get a sense for the work of real investigative journalists, spend some time strolling about the site of Investigative Reporters and Editors, the premier organization for such journalists in this country. And note: If you do a search on their site for "Malkin," you come up empty.

There are very few genuine investigative journalists working today at most mainstream newspapers, mostly because they are expensive and not terribly productive in terms of the quantity of copy that newspapers rely upon, and because they also have a nasty habit of embarrassing the friends of their publishers. For some reason, when budget cuts come down in today's newsrooms, the investigative spots are usually the first to go.

Sometimes I am mistakenly referred to as an "investigative journalist," and I always try to take pains to correct that misinformation. What I do is more in the way of "research journalism" -- that is, I tend to rely on standard research techniques (interviews and archival research) rather than investigative techniques.

I've known and worked with a number of real investigative journalists over the course of my career, including Jay Shelledy (who worked on the Don Bowles investigation) and James Steele, of the famed Barlett and Steele duo.

In fact, Jim Steele is a friend of mine.

And Michelle, trust me -- you're no Jim Steele.

'Unhinged': Early notes

Finally got my copy of Michelle Malkin's new book, Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, and have begun digging already. Suffice to say that every aspect of my earlier critique has been confirmed in spades, and then some.

Of course, you can't judge a book by its cover. But I had an immediate question about its cover -- specifically, the back cover.

Y'see, the early reports on the book indicated that not only would Malkin feature nasty, ugly quotes from nasty, ugly liberals on the back cover, but it would include their e-mail addresses.

And that's what they showed when Malkin appeared on O'Reilly's show the other day. O'Reilly even specifically mentioned it.

But when my copy arrived, the nasty quotes were there ... but not the e-mail addresses.

Now, I have to admit, I was hoping to be one of the unhinged liberals Malkin quoted on the back cover.

But I also have to admit that I wasn't nasty enough. In fact, the bigots and mysoginists she does quote are definitely not on my side (regardless of what Malkin likes to imply, as she does for the entirety of this book).

I was hoping to be there anyway, just because I wanted to see what kind of mail it would generate to be on Malkin's list.

And when the inevitable death threats arrived, I really wanted to be able to sue the bejeesus out of Malkin and Regnery.

I wonder if that's why there weren't any e-mail addresses, as promised.

Suppressing democracy

Ask yourself which is the more important principle:

-- the right of American citizens to vote, or

-- preventing those who are ineligible to vote from doing so.

Now, think of this as a kind of Rohrschach test: The answer you give is neither right nor wrong. But it does tell us a great deal -- about your politics, about your priorities, and about what kind of American you are.

I think a strong case can be made that without the latter principle, the former is rendered meaningless. There are legitimate reasons to exclude some from voting -- particularly non-citizens, felons, and those who have already voted once -- and that failing to protect adequately from fraud dilutes and pollutes the meaning of every legitimate voter's ballot.

But there's little doubt, in my mind at least, that the former principle is far more significant; without it, the latter is not just meaningless, it's inoperative.

The right of Americans to vote, and the need to encourage citizens to participate in the voting process, is one of the real bedrock principles of our Republic and its democratic institutions. So while the need to protect against fraud is obviously fundamental, the pursuit of it must never come at the expense of the right of citizens to legitimately participate.

Better, in my mind, to let a hundred felons vote than to prevent a single citizen from legitimately casting their ballot.

Today's Republicans, obviously, disagree with me.

In the wake of the hotly contested Washington governor's race that saw the GOP's well-noted anti-democratic tendencies come rushing to the fore, we now face the prospect of an outrageous attempt by Republicans at intimidating voters by threatening to disqualify them -- often without any real evidence for doing so:

GOP challenges rights of hundreds of voters
Republican claims in King County draw angry denial

By GREGORY ROBERTS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Hundreds of worried and angry voters deluged the King County elections department Friday with calls questioning a Republican-backed effort challenging their right to vote in Tuesday's election, elections officials said.

Several voters said that King County GOP Vice Chairman Lori Sotelo was dead wrong in her claim that their voter registration addresses are not those of legitimate residences. And Democratic politicians denounced the Republican initiative as a blatant attempt to intimidate voters.

State GOP Chairman Chris Vance acknowledged some challenges were brought in error and would be withdrawn. But he vigorously defended the undertaking overall and promised more of the same.

The spark for the political firestorm was the delivery of certified letters Thursday from the county elections department to voters on the GOP hit list, which totaled 1,774 names after duplicates were eliminated. The letters informed the voters of the challenge and cited the state law requiring voters to register at a valid residence address.

"I'm extremely disappointed and angry at the audacity of this woman and the party she represents," said Demene Hall, who got one of the letters. Hall has lived for 16 years at the Watermarke apartment building at 320 Cedar St. in Seattle, her registration address.

Hall, who said she is "too African American" not to be a regular voter, said Friday she came of age in the civil rights era and watched her parents hand out political fliers outside polling places they were not allowed to enter.

"We just buried Rosa Parks on Wednesday, I got the letter on Thursday and today is my 57th birthday," she said. "And they're challenging my validity?"

Vance acknowledged that the inclusion of the Watermarke on the list was a mistake. Elections officials late Friday said Sotelo had rescinded 140 of the challenges.

But, Vance said, "The overwhelming majority of our challenges are valid."

Right. Actually, there's no proof of that, and plenty of evidence that the majority are in fact mistaken.

The Daily Kos diary entry by Andrew Villeneuve of the Northwest Progressive Institute lays out what has been happening:

And here's what's really clever: the filing of the registrations was timed to be right on the eve of the November 8th election, so that hearings have to be scheduled after the election. The GOP is hoping that voters whose registrations are being challenged will get discouraged and just not even bother to vote at all.

After the letters began arriving, the news media and progressive NW bloggers quickly jumped on the story.

The story first appeared on The Stranger's website, where one of the voters whose address was challenged posted to the site's forum:

So I get this certified letter from King County today informing me that my voter registration has been challenged.

Attached is a form signed by some woman named Lori D. Sotelo saying that "under penalty of perjury" she has "personal knowledge and believe that this person ... does nto reside at the address given on his or her voter registration..."

Under the section where she is asked to provide factual basis for the challenge, she writes "Voter is registered to vote at an address that is not a physical residence."

WTF? I live in a vintage apartment building in Belltown [the Watermarke] with about 60 other people. Then I talked to my neighbors - EVERYONE I talked to also received the letter.

Yep -- that's right. The Republicans challenged the voter registrations of EVERY SINGLE PERSON in THIS apartment building:

[Shot of Watermarke building]

Others being harassed are people who have lived in the same house for decades, and still others whose residence is also where they operate their business.

Vance and the GOP later admitted that the Watermarke residents were included by mistake and rescinded their challenges. However, the Seattle Times reported on others who were not so fortunate, though their challenges were every bit as bogus:

Jeff Weber, another voter whose registration was challenged, said he lives and is registered at his home in West Seattle, and is mystified about how he ended up on the Republicans' list.

"I think it's outrageous," he said. "It's a bungalow in West Seattle. ... It's a single-family house on a 5,000-square-foot lot. If they had done any investigating at all, they would have known."

Annette Fallin of Belltown said she was notified her registration had been challenged the same day she mailed in her absentee ballot.

"I'm very irate over it," she said. "I get this piece of mail telling me they're not even counting it like a normal ballot."

The challenge to Fallin's registration was one of the 140 the GOP dropped Friday. More than 50 of the 140 were registered at her apartment building, the Watermarke on Cedar Street.

The challenges to Thoma's, Taylor's, Blodgett's and Weber's registrations were not rescinded.

What is the GOP doing here? Can you imagine being one of these voters -- a legitimate, long-time voter who expects to cast their ballot as they always have, and suddenly you get a letter from a Republican official who says she's going to challenge your right to vote? That's not just Orwellian: it's Kafkaesque.

But then, it's what we've come to expect from today's Republican Party. It well knows that its grip on power is either maintained, in many places, or obtained, in places like Seattle where it struggles, by the slimmest margins -- and that its interests are more often served by suppressing voter turnout.

After all, it was a similar vote-suppression effort in Florida in 2000 that likely delivered that state to George W. Bush and with it the presidency. Many will recall Greg Palast's reporting on the effort, which has always struck me as a little shaky, particularly his assertions -- which he admits are simply estimations -- that 90 percent of the ChoicePoint voter-roll eliminations were incorrect. But there's little doubt that there was an extremely high rate of error in the purges, certainly in excess of 50 percent.

That's simply unacceptable. If you accept the primacy of the right of citizens to vote, then these attempts at preventing ineligible votes have to be as close to perfect as possible; an error rate of even more than 1 percent is too great. Because anything more than that means you're violating the inviolable.

[There's also a notable hypocrisy in all this for those of us who were observers in the Gregoire-Rossi tussle, because Republicans have made it a constant subsequent talking point -- no, a screaming point, really -- that King County elections officials proved themselves hopelessly corrupt and incompetent in this election, notably by their inability to reify a relatively small number of ballots with the numbers of votes (it was around .3 percent).]

But then, these kinds of vote-suppression effort have become commonplace in the GOP, particularly in areas where there are strong Democratic voting blocs, which are always what Republicans target. Recall, for instance, that there have been broader voter-suppression efforts, including those in Ohio in 2004.

To Republicans, elections no longer are sacred exercises in democracy. They are just another game that they can rig. All in the name of power.

And that's what the Rohrschach test reveals: If you prioritize the rights of voters, you will oppose vote-suppression efforts, particularly those that would intimidate legitimate voters. If you prioritize fraud prevention, then in the end you're placing process before participation -- the cart before the horse, as it were -- and, if you approve of the techniques currently in vogue with the GOP, you ultimately are willing to discard the rights of legitimate voters. The latter reveals a profound anti-democratic impulse, while the former indicates a healthy respect for democracy.

The latter also reveals, I think, the disposable ethics of the conservative movement: In the end, all that matters is winning. If democratic principles are trampled upon a bit, well, we can just pick them up and dust them off afterward, can't we?

Or, as long as they're laying there in the dirt, maybe we can just trample on them a little more.

UPDATE: David Goldstein at HorsesAss.org runs down the preliminary numbers, and it looks grim for Chris Vance and Washington State GOP. It appears their error rate may be in the 30 percent range or higher. That's literally hundreds of bogus challenges.

Fact check: Malkin and O'Reilly

Well, I'm still awaiting my copy of Michelle Malkin's new book, Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild. So in lieu of any new data, I checked out her appearance on Bill O'Reilly's show [via Crooks and Liars] the other night, promoting her new smear job on the left. A couple of things she said were noteworthy:

What I do argue is that a lot of the violence, a lot of the paranoia, a lot of the conspiracy theories, a lot of this hatred that I talk about is not relegated to the fringes of the left, we are talking about, um, something that is permeating, a disease that is permeating the leadership, up to the top. You know, it wasn't just some fringe crackpot on some college campus who was suggesting on a radio station, for example, that President Bush was tipped off to 9/11. That was the head of the Democratic National Committee: Howard Dean.

Hm. The remarks she's referring to, evidently, are these, made by Dean on Dec. 9, 2003, in an exchange with radio host Diane Rehm:

Caller: "Once we get you in the White House, would you please make sure that there is a thorough investigation of 9/11 and not stonewalling?"

Dean: "Yes, there is a report which the president is suppressing evidence for, which is a thorough investigation of 9/11."

Rehm: "Why do you think he is suppressing that report?"

Dean: "I don't know. There are many theories about it. The most interesting theory that I've heard so far -- which is nothing more than a theory, it can't be proved -- is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis.

"Now, who knows what the real situation is? But the trouble is, by suppressing that kind of information, you lead to those kind of theories, whether or not they have any truth to them or not, and eventually, they get repeated as fact. So I think the president is taking a great risk by suppressing the key information that needs to go to the Kean Commission."

Now, you can interpret these remark any number of ways -- it's worth noting, at least, that he does not openly endorse the theory, but you can probably say, quite fairly, that it was irresponsible to bring the theory up without clearly disavowing it. Still, any fair reading of the entirety of his remarks has to recognize that what Dean was talking about was the way speculation runs rampant when the government doesn't properly investigate catastrophic events like 9/11 -- and when the administration stonewalls, as it was doing at the time. It was a valid point, badly put.

Six days later, Dean was asked on Fox News Sunday about this exchange:

WALLACE: The most interesting theory is that the president was warned ahead of time by the Saudis. Why would you say that, Governor?

DEAN: Because there are people who believe that. We don't know what happened in 9/11. Tom Kean is trying to get some information from the president...

WALLACE: Do you believe that?

DEAN: ... which doesn't -- no, I don't believe that. I can't imagine the president of the United States doing that. But we don't know, and it'd be a nice thing to know.

WALLACE: I'm just curious why you would call that the most interesting theory.

DEAN: Because it's a pretty odd theory. What we do believe is that there was a lot of chatter that somehow was missed by the CIA and the FBI about this, and that for some reason we were unable to decide and get clear indications of what the attacks what were going to be. Because the president won't give the information to the Kean commission we really don't know what the explanation is.

Dean clearly said what he neglected to say, clearly at least, the first time: that he did not subscribe to this theory. He was asked about it at again a subsequent presidential debate in Durham, N.C.:

DEAN: Well, in all due respect, I did not exactly state that. I was asked on Fox fair and balanced news that... (laughter) I was asked why I thought the president was withholding information, I think it was, or 9/11 or something like that. And I said, well, the most interesting theory that I heard, which I did not believe, was that the Saudis had tipped him off.

We don't know why the president is not giving information to the Kean commission. I think that is supposed to be investigated by Congress. I think it's a serious matter. I agree with Wes Clark, the president is not fighting terrorism. And we need to know what went wrong before 9/11.

I did not believe, and I made it clear on the Fox News show that I didn't believe that theory, but I had heard that. And there are going to be a lot of crazy theories that come out if the information is not given to the Kean commission as it should be.

Now, these remarks garnered a lot of attention at the time -- he was, after all, asked about it on a televised debate -- and a lot of condemnation from mainstream Democrats, not to mention such "liberal" media outlets as Slate and Spinsanity.

So what was that about liberals never condemning any signs of kookery within their own ranks? Had Dean made clear at the outset what he evidently believed -- that this was an example of the kind of groundless conspiracy theories that harm the broader societal and national interests -- no one would have uttered a peep. He was criticized, fairly, for bringing such a theory up so neutrally, since doing so is irresponsible. And he was loudly and publicly spanked for it. But every politician commits gaffes, and Dean certainly was no exception; he corrected himself rather quickly in this case, and was thoroughly excoriated for it anyway.

Trying to suggest, as Malkin does now, that Dean actually believed this theory (and perhaps continues to do so) is simply false, and a smear. As is Malkin's claim that this case is more evidence that liberals tolerate conspiracy-theory mongering, when the broader liberal reaction in this case actually indicates the opposite.

Of course, rapping with O'Reilly, she had a sympathetic audience when it came to the subject of Howard Dean.

And, speaking of conspiracy theories, O'Reilly says this of Dean's assumption of the DNC chairmanship:

That was a backdoor deal.

Oh really? Last I checked, Howard Dean won the chairmanship because he picked up a large majority of votes of DNC members. What backroom deal was that, Bill? Or do you know some secret, blockbuster insider info about a ... conspiracy ... that none of the rest of us know?

Funny that Michelle, in the spirit of denouncing conservative extemism and wackery -- which she claims conservatives do -- neglects to denounce this bizarre conspiracy theory.

But then O'Reilly asks the million-dollar question:

O'Reilly: Do you see mainstream conservatives condemning Michael Savage?

Malkin: All the time.

O'Reilly: You do?

Malkin: Of course you do. In fact -- again, I think that this is something that the mainstream media does not recognize. It is in fact conservatives who are very outspoken in condemning fringe people, and people who are extremists on the right side of the aisle.

Malkin goes on to tout the Trent Lott case -- which was, if anything, the exception that proved the rule. Not to mention that the motives of many conservatives in dumping on Lott had more to do with internecine warfare within the GOP than any pure or enlightened motives. At the same time, Malkin seems oblivious to the significant role that liberals -- especially the liberal bloggers Josh Marshall and Atrios -- played in keeping the Lott story alive. It's not as if conservatives alone deserve credit for bringing Lott down.

But in the meantime, back to O'Reilly's question (and Malkin's response): People on the right condemn Michael Savage? Really? Who?

Please, Michelle, name one. And I mean one conservative of any significant standing who condemns Savage, not just meekly criticizes him.

How about you, Michelle?

A quick Google of your site reveals only four posts that include any mention of Savage, and most of those are in your comments (and those are all favorable mentions).

The one post you did write about Savage is actually in his defense.

Speaking of "unique levels of hypocrisy."

UPDATE: TBogg points out that Malkin also has a history of publicly discussing speculative theories (which turned out to be groundless) and giving them credence.

Joe the Fixer

I always get these little flashbacks when I see Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova back making their presences felt in the national media.

Because I used to see them on MSNBC a lot, back during the Clinton impeachment, where they were busy pounding home that day's GOP talking points. I downloaded a lot of sound bytes from them (among many others) for the MSNBC.com site, because that was my job.

What I noticed was that they tended, well, to prevaricate, hedge, and distort. A lot.

Actually, as Atrios notes, the Toensing/diGenova team has quite a bit of history in this regard. TV producers like to bill diGeenova in particular as a "legal expert" of various shades, but what he really made his career as was a political fixer.

The text from Toensing's recent Wall Street Journal piece was right in line with this: a classic piece of misdirection, encapsulating of Republican talking points on the Plame scandal, but spun to pin the blame on the CIA. And, on the truth meter, she doesn't disappoint.

Take, for instance, the first graf of her rundown of talking points:

First: The CIA sent her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger on a sensitive mission regarding WMD. He was to determine whether Iraq had attempted to purchase yellowcake, an essential ingredient for nonconventional weapons. However, it was Ms. Plame, not Mr. Wilson, who was the WMD expert. Moreover, Mr. Wilson had no intelligence background, was never a senior person in Niger when he was in the State Department, and was opposed to the administration's Iraq policy. The assignment was given, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, at Ms. Plame's suggestion.

Actually, the facts are this: Mr. Wilson went to Niger because he had the necessary diplomatic contacts there to obtain the information; the CIA did not need a WMD expert to gather it. The Senate Intelligence Committee's charge that he was given the assignment at Plame's suggestion has been proven false.

And that's just the first. The rest are either as badly grounded factually or are complete non-sequiturs.

In other words, disinformation in the guise of propaganda. Clouding the discourse by intentionally repeating falsehoods.

Par for the Toensing/diGenova course. They've been at this a long time.

DiGenova's history as a fixer well precedes even the impeachment brouhaha. He will probably, in fact, go down in history as the last independent counsel ever appointed to investigate an administration of the same party to which he belonged. Two years later, of course, the Calvinball standard was put into effect.

Robert Parry reported all this some time back:

After the Bush interviews, diGenova began work on his final report. Despite the evidence that Clinton's files had been exploited to influence the outcome of a presidential election, diGenova concluded that there was no wrongdoing by anyone in the Bush administration.

DiGenova added only "that certain White House personnel may have indirectly encouraged the search for Clinton's passport files by making inquiry about the status of responses to [FOIA] requests." As for the Oval Office, diGenova "found no evidence that President Bush was involved in this matter."

DiGenova reserved his toughest criticism for State Department Inspector General Sherman Funk for suspecting that a crime had been committed in the first place. DiGenova castigated Funk for "a woefully inadequate understanding of the facts."

John Duncan, a senior lawyer in Funk's office, protested diGenova's findings of no criminal wrongdoing.

"Astoundingly, [diGenova] has also concluded that no senior-level party to the search did anything improper whatever," Duncan wrote. "The Independent Counsel has provided his personal absolution to individuals who we found had attempted to use their U.S. Government positions to manipulate the election of President of the United States."

DiGenova was such a naked partisan that when he issued his report, he apologized to Bush Administration officials on behalf of the American people for putting them through the ordeal of an independent counsel investigation -- an investigation that, in fact, was more grounded in potential criminal behavior than Whitewater.

It was the last bit of business from the old Bush administration that needed tending to, and Joe -- well, he fixed it.

Nice to see some things never change, I suppose.

Friday whale blogging

This is a female orca and calf I photographed near Lime Kiln State Park on July 28.

Unhinged indeed

One of the reasons Michelle Malkin fails the test of being an actual journalist lies in the way she conducts her work: There is simply no evidence of any attempt at fairness.

A serious journalist -- theoretically, at least -- tries to operate with an open mind. It's essential when approaching a subject to gather the available evidence first, and if a conclusion is to be reached, it is only done so when all the evidence is in and weighed. Typically, this means when a reporter is assigned a story, he or she looks first to gather as much information about it as possible.

This doesn't mean the journalist is necessarily "objective," or that bias can't creep in. The very selection of a subject of inquiry may represent a certain bias; and the interpretation and presentation of the data may also be slanted. But the core of the journalistic enterprise revolves around honest inquiry.

Malkin forgoes all this. Throughout her career, her approach has been thesis-driven: She latches onto a potential story or scandal, settles on an angle to pursue, then sets out from the start to prove her thesis, ignoring or tossing aside all contradictory evidence along the way. This was the trend in her column-writing career at the Seattle Times, and it came to full fruition in her execrable In Defense of Internment, which ignored a mountain of evidence contradicting her thesis, and in the process became nothing less than a historical fraud.

Now her latest book is out, and the trend not only continues, it evidently intensifies, if the preliminary material she has made available on her Web site is any indication. [My copy is supposed to be arriving in the mail soon. Yes, dear readers, I'll be reading Malkin so you won't have to. It's a sacrifice, but someone has to make it.]

Titled Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, it's supposedly an expose of those angry lunatics of the left. Malkin says:

I'll probably have to say this a million times, and those predisposed to attack the book (without reading it, natch) will ignore it, but I do not argue that we on the Right have never gone overboard in political word or deed. The book is about turning MSM conventional wisdom on its head and showing that the standard caricature of conservatives as angry/racist/bigoted/violence-prone crackpots is a much better description of today's unhinged liberals than of us.

Fair enough. But just a little later, she writes this:

It's not Republicans taking chainsaws to Democrat campaign signs and running down political opponents with their cars. It's not conservatives burning Democrats in effigy, defacing war memorials, and supporting the fragging of American troops. And it's not conservatives producing a bullet-riddled bumper crop of assassination-themed musicals, books and collectible stamps.

It's not a Republican who invoked Pol Pot and Nazis and Soviet gulag operators when discussing American troops at Guantanamo Bay. That was Democrat Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, who kept his Senate Minority Whip position and who continues to blame an “orchestrated right-wing attack” for what came out of his mouth.

It's not Republicans who suggested that President Bush had advance knowledge of the September 11th attacks or that Osama bin Laden has already been captured. Those notions were advanced by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright and current Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean.

And it wasn't a Republican who asserted that the war Iraq was "just as bad as six million Jews being killed." That was Democrat Rep. Charlie Rangel, who has refused to apologize and whom no Democrat leader has denounced.

So, you see, despite her earlier disavowal, Malkin does intend to show that it isn't Republicans who have gone overboard in stoking the current political fires. It's just Democrats and the "wacky left."

This is reminiscent of Malkin's disclaimer, with her last book, that she wasn't arguing in favor of race-based internment of Arab Americans -- she was simply justifying the race-based internment of Japanese Americans.

Well, Michelle ...

It isn't Democrats who sprayed racist, pro-Bush graffiti on Democratic campaign HQ in Sacramento, or stole computers from Democrats in Ohio, or set campaign signs afire in Louisiana, or spread blood and innards around the front door of Bush critics. It isn't Democrats firing workers for their presidential choices.

[In fact, I tried keeping a running tally during the election of reports of thuggery from both right and left, and tracked it at a post called Thug Watch. Though I'm sure there were some reports that I missed on both sides, the reports of thuggery from the right, as you can see, outnumber those from the left by a factor of more than 2-to-1.]

It isn't Democrats, Michelle, who have denigrated the service of war heroes; it's people like you. And it isn't Democrats who are delivering a steady stream of "bestselling" books attacking liberals as subhuman scum: calling them innately treasonous, identifying them with terrorists, the "enemy within" with a "mental illness." Going on talk shows and saying that the best way to talk to a Republican is "with a baseball bat, preferably."

As for the "assassination" themes, Michelle, it wasn't a left-wing blogger who posted the following remark at the height of the 2004 campaign:

Rope. Tree. Justice. The only three things that Qerry deserves for his "service".

No, as a matter of fact, that was a blogger who resides on your blogroll.

It was that same blog, in fact, that earlier urged the use of violence against another blogger and even provided directions to that person's home on his blog. I'm not aware of any left-wing bloggers having done that.

Indeed, for all the left-wing wackery out there -- and there's no doubt plenty of it -- what you don't see is this kind of eliminationist rhetoric.

After all, Michelle, it wasn't a prominent Democrat who publicly hypothesized about what would happen to the crime rate if all black babies were aborted. It wasn't a prominent Democratic radio talk-show host in Seattle who said of a U.S. Senator -- yes, the same Dick Durbin whose remarks you find completely out of line: "This man is simply a piece of excrement, a piece of waste that needs to be scraped off the sidewalk and eliminated."

It isn't the most prominent liberal talk-show host in the country who jokes that we shouldn't "kill all the liberals" -- instead, we should "leave enough so we can have two on every campus -- living fossils -- so we will never forget what these people stood for."

It wasn't a prominent member of the "liberal" media who opined that we ought to incarcerate everyone who works for Air America.

It wasn't a Democratic congressman who opined that we ought to ship liberal dissenters to Iraq to serve as "human shields."

It wasn't left-wing letter writers who attacked former USA Today editor Al Neuharth and recommended he face execution for treason. Al Neuharth, mind you -- not exactly Mr. Liberal.

And kooky theories? Well, Michelle, what about the forthcoming tome from a well-known conservative postulating -- against all known historical fact -- that fascism is a liberal phenomenon. Of course, you know all about ignoring the weight of historical evidence, don't you?

It isn't liberal bloggers, Michelle, who have waxed wroth at the General Ripperesque notion that the Flight 94 memorial is actually a tribute to the terrorists, or who have whipped up groundless fears about Islamist terrorists in Oklahoma and elsewhere; no left-wing moonbats groundlessly attacked the Pulitzer winner in photography or attacked USA Today with conspiratorial accusations for a badly retouched photo.

No, Michelle, that would be you and yours. Moonbats, wingnuts, take your pick: The shoe fits -- you.

Look, there's no use in pretending that there isn't excess on the left as well. Unlike Malkin, I probably would be more than willing to acknowledge its presence and denounce it when it occurs if people like Malkin and Co. weren't so ready to spring into action at the first imagined slight (and more often than not, they are imagined) -- and yet so consistently fail to acknowledge similar behavior on the right.

Indeed, the pattern has been rather the opposite: When the acts of violence that the right wants to link to liberals turns out, in fact, to be the work of right-wing extremists, there's no acknowledgement made, much less apologies issued. Witness, for instance, Malkin's handling of an arson case in Maryland which she and other prominent bloggers presumed to be the work of eco-terrorists; but when it turned out that these were race-related arsons, the subject went away quickly with a brief semi-acknowledgement of error. Likewise, Malkin waved all kinds of accusations about regarding a murder of a Coptic Christian family in New Jersey, and then quietly shut it down when it turned out not to be the work of Islamist radicals after all.

And that's the problem, isn't it? It would be nice to have pleasant, reasonable debate in which facts and evidence and reason all play a role and are all respected -- but in recent years, the right hasn't been playing by those rules. Not since the Republican Congress ignored the popular will and proceeded to impeach Bill Clinton. Not since Republicans quite literally stole the 2000 election. Not since their incompetence left us exposed to the worst terrorist attack on American soil. Not since they subsequently shoved a misbegotten war in Iraq down our collective throats.

Because in the pursuit of that agenda, the conservative movement has become a take-no-prisoners, scorched-earth entity, whence so much of the ugliness in our current discourse arises. A lot of it, as I've examined at length previously, is deeply personal stuff, and the effect on our personal lives has been lasting and profound.

The chief, overarching argument of the conservative movement, in essence, has been that liberals are the sole and primary cause of everything that is wrong both with America and with the world at large. What kind of reasonable discourse is possible, really, when that is the starting point of the conversation?

Malkin's book, it's clear, is simply going to be another contribution to that liberal-bashing trend, even as it pretends to shame liberals for behavior that is rampant within the ranks of conservatives -- behavior, indeed, encouraged from the very top. After all, it wasn't a Democratic vice president who pointedly, and publicly, told a prominent U.S. Senator to go fuck himself.

A serious journalist would have examined the ugliness in the discourse and recognized that it's rampant on both sides. I also think an honest accounting would find that, if anything, it's more pronounced and far more aggressive from the right. Much of the ugliness from the left seems, if anything, largely reactive to the nasty provocations and threats of elimination coming from the right.

But Malkin, as we know already, is not a serious journalist. As with her last book, she has simply chosen snippets of evidence that support her thesis and ignored substantial contravening evidence -- which is never mentioned, let alone confronted. The result is a blinkered and ultimately false version of reality.

There's only one thing to call that: propaganda. Malkin's book not only is unlikely to end the ugliness in discourse -- it virtually guarantees that it will get worse.

When to ignore them

I've known for some time about the white-supremacist twin singing duo known as "Prussian Blue." They've performed at Aryan Congresses at Hayden Lake and are prominently touted at a number of hate sites, particularly Stormfront and National Alliance. If you monitor the far right, you know about them.

So, in some ways, the recent ABC News report on them really wasn't anything new. Though I did note that they intend to leave Bakersfield and move up to these parts. We're just thrilled.

What it did highlight, of course, was a noteworthy facet of white-supremacist culture: the way it imitates "secular" society with its own, parallel forms, particularly in the entertainment field.

They've been doing this for some time now. The biggest arena for this is in hardcore metal music, where skinheads and white-power types have been churning out records and CDs for years. The most prominent of these operations is Resistance Records, which is nowadays operated by the National Alliance. [For a complete rundown on this, read the Center for New Community's report [PDF file] on the white-supremacist manipulation of youth music subculture.]

What the ABC report did, unfortunately, was give the Gaede twins national exposure -- exactly the kind they were hoping for. And besides Cynthia McFadden's horrified tut-tutting and moral indignation, the report didn't shed much light on the subject. Certainly there was little discussion of the larger context of this phenomenon, and there was only a brief attempt to examine just how successful the twins actually are in recruiting people into their belief system.

Predictably, the girls' defenders and promoters on the far right used the ABC report for their own ends: to depict themselves as victims of an arrogant, out-of-control media, and to burnish their persecution complex. You also had neo-Nazi figures like Edgar Steele leveraging the moral-outrage line: How could these horrible people abuse two sweet girls like Lynx and Lamb?

You even had mainstream conservatives offering knee-jerk apologias for the twins -- this from a writer for a Web site dedicated to "exposing" left-wing extremists. (The post, which was pulled, was so well researched that the writer couldn't even bother to read the entirety of the ABC News report.)

This is a common problem with reportage on white supremacists: All such reportage, even if largely negative, is seen by them as (and in fact is) a way of getting the word out to the public, much of which is already skeptical of the innate perspectives offered by mainstream media reporters anyway. If the reporter fails to explain to the audience the larger significance beyond the moral horror of these belief systems, then these reports become helpful ways to recruit.

Thus it's incumbent on any reporter filing such stories to get the larger perspective: to explain, in this case, how musical acts play a role in white-supremacist recruitment (there was a brief stab at this), and to discuss whether recruitment like this is actually working (they really needed to talk to someone who monitors the numbers of people actually joining white-power movements). It might not have hurt to have shown the girls performing at an Aryan Congress, so viewers could see what their audience is.

The reality, though, is that acts like the Gaede twins and the Resistance Records hatemongers are of concern almost solely because of their power to recruit -- and that power is questionable at best. Thus, in the bigger picture of the movement, they are an interesting sideshow, but not a lot more. That's why it's questionable to run a report on them, other than its freak-show quality.

I often hear from people who despise the far right that the best thing to do is just ignore them. Of course, my own experience has been that this is a horrible mistake: Movements like this flourish in an environment of public ignorance and silence from the opposition. Pretending that they don't exist and hoping that they go away is a virtual guarantee that they will stay and prosper.

But standing up to them has to entail knowing when and how to stand up to them. This means recognizing the leaders and their strategies and exposing them, as well as publicly opposing them.

And there are, indeed, times to simply ignore them. When they put little girls up onstage to spout their hate -- well, the contempt such a thing inspires is understandable. But the whole point of their schtick is to provoke outrage that they can then claim is left-wing menace directed at two harmless little girls. So it may be best just to deny them the attention they seek.

The ultimate Newspeak

Newspeak, you may recall, has a special quality: It combines two ideas that, conventionally speaking, are virtual (if not precise) opposites, and presents them as identical -- thereby nullifying the meaning contained in each word: "War is Peace." "Ignorance is Strength." "Freedom is Slavery."

Newspeak serves two functions:

1) It deflates the opposition by nullifying its defining issues, and throws the nominal logic of the public debate into disarray.
2) It provides rhetorical and ontological cover for its speakers' own activities and agenda.

Via Atrios, we learn that none other than Jonah Goldberg has emerged with perhaps the most crystalline example of Newspeak possible, one that projects the right's own totalitarian impulses onto its opponents: Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton.

According to the Amazon synopsis:

LIBERAL FASCISM offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg shows that the original fascists were really on the Left and that liberals, from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton, have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler’s National Socialism.

Goldberg draws striking parallels between historic fascism and contemporary liberal doctrines. He argues that “political correctness” on campuses and calls for campaign finance reform echo the Nazis' suppression of free speech; and that liberals, like their fascist forebears, dismiss the democratic process when it yields results they dislike, insist on the centralization of economic decision-making, and seek to insert the authority of the state in our private lives–from bans on smoking to gun control. Covering such hot issues as morality, anti-Semitism, science versus religion, health care, and cultural values, he boldly illustrates the resemblances between the opinions advanced by Hitler and Mussolini and the current views of the Left.

Of course, as I just got done explaining a little bit ago, the conservative charge that fascism was a leftist phenomenon is a rightist attempt at David Irvingesque historical revisionism. There is not a single serious historian of either fascism or World War II who does not consider it a right-wing phenomenon: its anti-liberalism and anti-socialism were its defining characteristics, regardless of the rhetoric adopted by early adherents and leaders. Remember Robert Paxton's description of the political space that the fascists occupied in obtaining power:

In sum, fascists offered a new recipe for governing with popular support but without any sharing of power with the Left, and without any threat to conservative social and economic privileges and political dominance. The conservatives, for their part, held the keys to the doors of power.

The key historical fact underlining this debate is that fascism never was just a European phenomenon. It may have originated in America (Paxton identifies the Ku Klux Klan as the first real iteration of fascism in the era of mass politics), and certainly there were fascists in America in the 1920s and '30s (see, e.g., not just the Klan but also the Silvershirts), all of whom were aligned to the right, sometimes (as in the case of the America First Committee and Charles Lindbergh) with mainstream conservatives.

For that matter, of course, there are still genuine fascists and proto-fascists with us today. They go by such names as the Aryan Nations, Christian Identity, or National Socialist Movement. And they're all aligned, politically, to the far right. Their spinoffs, such as the Patriot/militia movement, were all right-leaning movements with substantial interaction with mainstream conservatism, as I've documented at length. Indeed, the militia movement's own bastard brainchild -- the Minutemen -- is now being ardently adopted by a variety of supposedly mainstream Republicans.

This was underscored by a couple of recent forays in the realm of a serious discussion of fascism. First, from an outsider's perspective, there was this piece by Paul Bigioni, a relatively little-known Canadian attorney, which takes a meta-structural approach to observing fascism's creep in the United States.

He does this first by examining the economic and political structures that led to fascist regimes in Italy and Germany, and concludes:

Even this brief historical sketch shows how fascism did the bidding of big business. The fact that Hitler called his party the "National Socialist Party" did not change the reactionary nature of his policies. The connection between the fascist dictatorships and monopoly capital was obvious to the US Department of Justice in 1939. As of 2005, however, it is all but forgotten.

It is always dangerous to forget the lessons of history. It is particularly perilous to forget about the economic origins of fascism in our modern era of deregulation. Most Western liberal democracies are currently held in the thrall of what some call market fundamentalism. Few nowadays question the flawed assumption that state intervention in the marketplace is inherently bad. As in Italy and Germany in the 20's and 30's, business associations clamor for more deregulation and deeper tax cuts. The gradual erosion of antitrust legislation, especially in the United States, has encouraged consolidation in many sectors of the economy by way of mergers and acquisitions. The North American economy has become more monopolistic than at any time in the post-WWII period. Fewer, larger competitors dominate all economic activity, and their political will is expressed with the millions of dollars they spend lobbying politicians and funding policy formulation in the many right-wing institutes which now limit public discourse to the question of how best to serve the interests of business. The consolidation of the economy, and the resulting perversion of public policy are themselves fascistic. I am quite certain, however, that President Clinton was not worrying about fascism when he repealed federal antitrust laws that had been enacted in the 1930's. The Canadian Council of Chief Executives is similarly unworried about fascism when it lobbies the Canadian government to water down our Federal Competition Act. (The Competition Act regulates monopolies, among other things, and itself represents a watering down of Canada's previous antitrust laws. It was essentially written by industry and handed to the Mulroney Government to be enacted.)

At present, monopolies are regulated on purely economic grounds to ensure the efficient allocation of goods. If we are to protect ourselves from the growing political influence of big business, then our antitrust laws must be reconceived in a way which recognizes the political danger of monopolistic conditions. Antitrust laws do not just protect the marketplace, they protect democracy.

Our collective forgetfulness about the economic nature of fascism is also dangerous at a more philosophical level. As contradictory as it may seem, fascist dictatorship was made possible because of the flawed notion of freedom which held sway during the era of laissez-faire capitalism in the early twentieth century. It was the liberals of that era that clamored for unfettered personal and economic freedom, no matter what the cost to society. Such untrammeled freedom is not suitable to civilized humans. It is the freedom of the jungle. In other words, the strong have more of it than the weak. It is a notion of freedom which is inherently violent, because it is enjoyed at the expense of others. Such a notion of freedom legitimizes each and every increase in the wealth and power of those who are already powerful, regardless of the misery that will be suffered by others as a result. The use of the state to limit such "freedom" was denounced by the laissez-faire liberals of the early twentieth century. The use of the state to protect such "freedom" was fascism. Just as monopoly is the ruin of the free market, fascism is the ultimate degradation of liberal capitalism.

Certain to get more attention is a piece that Lewis Lapham published this week in Harpers titled "On Message," which springboards off an old FDR quote:

"But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then Fascism and Communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land." -Franklin D. Roosevelt, November 4, 1938

In 1938 the word "fascism" hadn't yet been transferred into an abridged metaphor for all the world's unspeakable evil and monstrous crime, and on coming across President Roosevelt's prescient remark in one of Umberto Eco's essays, I could read it as prose instead of poetry -- a reference not to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or the pit of Hell but to the political theories that regard individual citizens as the property of the government, happy villagers glad to wave the flags and wage the wars, grateful for the good fortune that placed them in the care of a sublime leader. Or, more emphatically, as Benito Mussolini liked to say, "Everything in the state. Nothing outside the state. Nothing against the state."

[Hat tip to Carolyn Kay at Make Them Accountable]

The Eco essay that caught his attention was "Ur-Fascism," which I've discussed at length previously. Lapham goes on to notice, as did I, to what a large extent the fascist themes that Eco identifies are operative in 21st-century American politics, and then proceeds, somewhat whimsically, to proclaim:

Eco published his essay ten years ago, when it wasn't as easy as it has since become to see the hallmarks of fascist sentiment in the character of an American government. Roosevelt probably wouldn't have been surprised.

He'd encountered enough opposition to both the New Deal and to his belief in such a thing as a United Nations to judge the force of America's racist passions and the ferocity of its anti-intellectual prejudice. As he may have guessed, so it happened. The American democracy won the battles for Normandy and Iwo Jima, but the victories abroad didn't stem the retreat of democracy at home, after 1968 no longer moving "forward as a living force, seeking day and night to better the lot" of its own citizens, and now that sixty years have passed since the bomb fell on Hiroshima, it doesn't take much talent for reading a cashier's scale at Wal-Mart to know that it is fascism, not democracy, that won the heart and mind of America's "Greatest Generation," added to its weight and strength on America's shining seas and fruited plains.

... As set forth in Eco's list, the fascist terms of political endearment are refreshingly straightforward and mercifully simple, many of them already accepted and understood by a gratifyingly large number of our most forward-thinking fellow citizens, multitasking and safe with Jesus. It does no good to ask the weakling's pointless question, "Is America a fascist state?" We must ask instead, in a major rather than a minor key, "Can we make America the best damned fascist state the world has ever seen," an authoritarian paradise deserving the admiration of the international capital markets, worthy of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind"? I wish to be the first to say we can. We're Americans; we have the money and the know-how to succeed where Hitler failed, and history has favored us with advantages not given to the early pioneers.

Lapham also later describes the ways that modern American politics resemble fascism:

I don't say that over the last thirty years we haven't made brave strides forward. By matching Eco's list of fascist commandments against our record of achievement, we can see how well we've begun the new project for the next millennium -- the notion of absolute and eternal truth embraced by the evangelical Christians and embodied in the strict constructions of the Constitution; our national identity provided by anonymous Arabs; Darwin's theory of evolution rescinded by the fiat of "intelligent design"; a state of perpetual war and a government administering, in generous and daily doses, the drug of fear; two presidential elections stolen with little or no objection on the part of a complacent populace; the nation's congressional districts gerrymandered to defend the White House for the next fifty years against the intrusion of a liberal-minded president; the news media devoted to the arts of iconography, busily minting images of corporate executives like those of the emperor heroes on the coins of ancient Rome.

An impressive beginning, in line with what the world has come to expect from the innovative Americans, but we can do better. The early twentieth-century fascisms didn't enter their golden age until the proletariat in the countries that gave them birth had been reduced to abject poverty. The music and the marching songs rose with the cry of eagles from the wreckage of the domestic economy. On the evidence of the wonderful work currently being done by the Bush Administration with respect to the trade deficit and the national debt -- to say nothing of expanding the markets for global terrorism -- I think we can look forward with confidence to character-building bankruptcies, picturesque bread riots, thrilling cavalcades of splendidly costumed motorcycle police.

The underlying premise of Lapham's satire is the notion that we are already fully subsumed by fascism, given how immersed we are in Eco's description.

But Eco's essay is by no means definitive. Many other scholars have attempted similarly to describe and explain and define fascism, as I've explained previously; the difficulty, as always, lies in the fact that fascism is not an ideology based on a core ideology, manifesto, or text. Eco's methodology is similar to that of others, notably Stanley Payne, who have attempted a descriptive approach to fascism:

Payne's approach is useful, in the same way that Eco's is -- it contains important descriptive information that helps us get a sense of the multifaceted phenomenon that fascism in fact is. (Payne's typology is also a good deal more systematic and logically coherent than Eco's.) But these approaches share a similar flaw -- that is, a number of the traits described in these systems also can clearly describe not only communism, which is by its nature the ideological opposite to fascism, as well as other political ideologies. In that sense, it's clear these traits tend to be endemic to totalitarianism broadly -- they're going to be woven into what is fascist, but they won’t be unique to it.

Much wrangling has ensued (Payne's Fascism: Comparison and Definition was published in 1980). The long and short of it is that the consensus (and debate) since the early 1990s has tended to revolve around the work of Oxford professor Roger Griffin, who lectures on the History of Ideas at the school. His 1991 text, The Nature of Fascism, is considered by many to be the definitive work on the subject.

Griffin has essentially managed to boil fascism down to a basic core he calls palingenetic ultranationalist populism. (Palingenesis is the concept of mythic rebirth from the ashes, embodied by the Phoenix.)

Our understanding of fascism, as I went on to explain, has continued to expand with more scholarly work, including that of Robert O. Paxton, whose book The Anatomy of Fascism is something of a landmark in the field, as I've gone on to explore elsewhere. Paxton, similarly, identifies nine "mobilizing passions" that are constant through all stages and forms of fascism, but notes general principle that is also a constant:

... [E]ach national variant of fascism draws its legitimacy, as we shall see, not from some universal scripture but from what it considers the most authentic elements of its own community identity. Religion, for example, would certainly play a much larger role in an authentic fascism in the United States than in the first European fascisms, which were pagan for contingent historical reasons.

My reading of Paxton suggests that while we are indeed swimming in fascist impulses, the defining characteristics of genuine fascism -- the violence, the charismatic leadership, the eliminationism -- are generally lacking, though not altogether.

So I think Lapham, even if whimsically, has leapt to the wrong conclusion -- that we are so deeply in the grip of fascist impulses that there seems no turning back. I think there's still a chance at redemption -- but liberals need to wake up to what they're up against.

Jonah Goldberg's new book represents both a special problem, as well as a special opportunity, because of the Newspeak that its title -- "Liberal Fascism" -- represents. Goldberg, in the Newspeak tradition, is not just negating the meaning of both "liberal" and "fascism", but he's providing cover for a conservative movement that, evidently, is intent on adopting fascism as the essence of its agenda.

This is what makes his book the ultimate Newspeak: Newspeak is one of the earmarks of the budding fascist -- and what better way to bud further than to accuse your opponent of engaging in precisely the politics you intend to pursue?

And yet. And yet: What better way, really, to expose the nature of the conservative beast than to let conservatives bring up the subject of fascism?

In a lot of ways, I welcome the opportunity to discuss this. Because it's an opportunity for everyone to understand better just what fascism really is. Let's hope other liberals don't shy away.

Propagandists like Goldberg always flourish in a vacuum of public ignorance. If liberals try to pretend he doesn't exist in the hope this meme will just go away ... it may be a fatal mistake.

When it comes to fascism, fighting back is the only option. But first, we need to see the nature of the beast we're fighting.

Journalistic standards

The other day, Atrios -- in discussing Cathy Young's piece questioning right-wing bloggers, particularly Michelle Malkin, for their handling of a series of incidents involving the appearance of explosive devices at various campuses around the country (see my take on that) -- asked the 64,000-dollar question:

By the current rules of the road is Michelle Malkin really a "professional journalist?"

I'm not really sure what the current rules of the road are, but the answer really depends on what your definition of "professional journalist" is, particularly within the realm of print media, which is where Malkin primarily operates.

If it's "anyone who works in a public capacity for a media organization" -- which does indeed seem to be the current rules of the road -- then she probably is.

But by the old-fashioned standards of what makes one a "journalist" -- which entails being primarily a truth-seeker -- she is not.

You see, it used to be that, in order to be called a journalist, one had to actually be, or have been, a reporter. And Malkin has never been a reporter, at least not in any professional capacity.

Now, part of this involves traditional professional ladders within the business. For many years, nearly everyone who was ever an editor was, first, a reporter. Then, once on the editor's rung, one had the option of writing editorials. Columnists -- the star positions on editorial pages -- were culled either from the ranks of editors or star reporters.

Thus, traditionally, anyone who held a column-writing position at a newspaper had first been a reporter and perhaps an editor as well, and thus was in every regard a "professional journalist." Indeed, it often was the case that columnists provided original reporting within their columns.

Those days have now largely gone by the wayside. Nowadays it is not unusual to find columnists chosen from the ranks of non-journalists, and often from among professional ideologues, simply for their ability to string words together in an entertaining fashion. Or sometimes they are chosen just because they fit a certain profile the editor wants for his page.

Malkin is just such a creature. In fact, one of the advantages that she offered editors was that she was a "twofer" who fit two of the key criteria that editors use when deciding upon a columnist: she's conservative and a minority. And she writes reasonably well too.

She is, in fact, more properly described as a "professional pundit," not a "professional journalist." She does do not do original reporting; she provides commentary on other people's work, or cheerleading for various aspects of the conservative-movement agenda. In Malkin's case, it is predictably partisan commentary at that, which propels her even more accurately into the realm of "professional propagandist."

As I've explained previously, I have something of a history with Malkin. I edited her column at the Bellevue Journal American in the early 1990s, while she was syndicated through the Los Angeles Daily News. The LADN only ever employed her as a columnist. Likewise, when Malkin moved to the Puget Sound to go to work for my friend Mindy Cameron at the Seattle Times, it was only as a columnist.

Now, it's true that while at the Times, Malkin did make the occasional foray into providing original reporting within her columns. Indeed, she was rather eager to write various exposes -- but unfortunately, she had trouble doing the requisite legwork to make those exposes actually stick.

First, there was the attempt to question a bit of local "corporate welfare" that turned out to be factually wrong. (Note the correction at the top.)

Then Malkin unleashed a tirade against city officials that explicitly called them prostitutes. Even readers recognized it as crudely libelous, not to mention devoid of basic ethical standards.

There were other instances that raised questions about her judgment as displayed in her columns: one, a column on "envirocrats" that was full of false facts and dopey assertions.

In another piece, she touted the film Waco: Rules of Engagement, which was later thoroughly debunked -- not to mention that its chief promoters and admirers were the Patriot/militia crowd.

Similarly, another column [which has since been strangely removed from the Times' archives] touted the later-debunked "statistical analysis" of John Lott regarding gun control.

The capper, perhaps, was a hit piece accusing the state's Democratic attorney general of manipulating prosecutions in drug cases. A key problem, as the victim pointed out, was that Malkin never bothered to contact the AG's office to get its side of the story -- and moreover, Malkin was once again simply wrong on the facts.

Shortly afterward, she announced she was "moving on."

She polished off her career there by writing a post-departure piece that amounted to a vicious attack on Seattle in the wake of the WTO riots. As numerous respondents pointed out, her mean-spiritedness was exceeded only by her lousy grasp of facts.

In sum, Malkin's recent pose as a defender of veracity in journalism is riddled with all kinds of ironies -- not least of which is that much of what Malkin advocates for amounts to an abandonment of journalistic standards.

But the fact that Malkin has never been a professional beat reporter (and only adopted the pose of one while writing at the Seattle Times) has a real effect on what and how she argues. Because if she had ever been one -- if, in fact, she had ever worked on a daily beat in a newsroom and been actually involved in the dirty daily work of getting out a newspaper, instead of languishing in the role of pundit throughout her career -- she would be a lot less quick to jump to false conclusions about the work of her professional peers.

Indeed, the best argument that Malkin is not a professional journalist is the sheer lack of professionalism in her dealings with other journalists.

This includes her misfire of an attack on Julie Chen -- for which she never had the courtesy or courage to apologize.

It also includes her failure to keep her word when she promised to let me interview her by phone (she later decided an e-mail exchange would suffice -- some standards!).

Probably the most egregious case of this was her bashing of the Pulitzer winner in photography -- an attack so overwhelmingly ignorant of the work done by photographers and how they do it that it really served only to provide concrete proof that Malkin has no idea what she's talking about when she writes about the work of other journalists. But again, that's because she's never been a real journalist.

Malkin continues unabated and unabashed, since being conservative means never having to say you're sorry. She's lately taken editors at the "MSM" to task for failing to join her in taking up cudgels against the spooky threat of creeping Islamism in the memorial to Flight 94 victims. More recently, there's been the Oklahoma suicide bombing and her confusion over the failure of the nation's editors to leap to the obviously dubious conclusion that this suicide was potentially part of an evil Islamist plot extending its tendrils to every corner of the nation.

In the past few days alone, Malkin has led an attack on USA Today over a badly retouched photo of Condoleezza Rice on its Web site (though Malkin, notably, fails to explain that it did not run in the print edition of the paper). Malkin remains unwilling to accept the paper's explanation that it was just a case of bad retouch work, and her readers are chiming in with Assrocketesque "professional" evaluations of whether the photo's retouching was intentional or not.

Well, as a veteran of a major Web news operation, I can tell Ms. Malkin and her many acolytes that mistakes like this, unfortunately, are not altogether uncommon in Web newsrooms. Web photography editors can often include people who are not terribly experienced with image manipulation, and they will make mistakes like this with nothing but professional intentions. In many cases, retouching will take place with an enlarged version of the photo, and in an effort to clean up, sharpen, or otherwise brighten a photo, they will make corrections which look fine in an enlarged version and grotesque and strange when shrunk to Web size. I've seen mistakes like this being made, and it's never, ever with the intention of making someone look bad. Sometimes it can be done out of haste as well; I wouldn't be surprised if this happened when someone applied a "quick fix" program to retouch it and didn't bother to examine what he had produced.

In fact, I'm certain that the basic standards of most professional newsrooms are that cleanup efforts like this are a good-faith effort to make the subject look better -- and they fail simply because of haste or inexperience. I've never known a photo editor, regardless of their political views, to intentionally alter for the worse the appearance of a photo subject, and would be very surprised if that had happened in this case, since USA Today's newsroom is not exactly known as a hotbed of liberalism.

But then, that's my view because I've been there and know firsthand how easy these kinds of mistakes can be. It makes me a hell of a lot less eager to jump to conclusions.

The fact that Malkin doesn't is a result not just of her not having been there. It's also a product of her basic, and abiding, contempt for the hard work of professional journalists. That alone makes her unworthy of being considered one.

Hey good lookin'

You know, over the past couple of years, I've been hearing conservatives natter on endlessly about their obvious superiority over liberals. They're smarter. They have purer motives. They love their country more. They love kids and black people more.

Uh-huh. OK, guys, whatever you say.

But the topper comes from a TownHall writer named Mike S. Adams, who explains that not only are they smarter and and yadda yadda, but their women are better looking:

Just two days after learning that it was alright to talk about this issue, I was giving another speech in North Carolina. After the speech, my wife commented on the good looks of the young Republican women from UNC-Chapel Hill who were listening in the audience.

Of course, this is very good news. Since my wife is able to comment on the surplus of good-looking women in the GOP, that means I can, too. Of course, it also helps that she stopped reading my columns many months ago.

[She obviously has insider knowledge that gives her a leg up on the rest of us.]

The public discussion of this issue will help Republicans answer some important questions. For example: "Should we assume that being gay often causes one to be a Democrat? Isn't it more likely that the lack of exposure to attractive women causes Democrats to be gay?" And "Do Democratic women consider compliments in the workplace to be sexual harassment simply because they rarely hear them?"

But, of course, it isn't necessary at this time to explore the many intellectual questions that flow from the observation that our women are more attractive than theirs. Instead, we must immediately begin to exploit the issue for political gain. And the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute is doing just that by publishing a calendar featuring, among others, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, and Shemane Nugent.

Ah, yes -- be still my beating heart. These are indeed true visions of superior womanhood, so long as your taste runs towards soulless harpies for whom the word "crank" has multiple meanings. You know, women who will cut your heart out and feed it to the cat. And now that I think of it, most of the Republican women I've known have tended to be better manicured, though that doesn't necessarily mean they're better looking.

[For your own gander at the fine examples of Republican femininity Adams extolls, check out the folks who are selling that calendar.]

But just in case Mike has any questions about why gays and lesbians tend to vote Democratic, here's a tip: It's actually because the Republican Party is full of people with repugnant and grotesque misperceptions about what makes people gay. People like him.

And for that matter, it also has a lot to do with why people like me -- white, hetero, former Republicans -- are now Democrats too.

Because no amount of good looks can disguise a succubus. And the Republican Party is full of them -- both sexes.

Strawberry Days news

Kevin Wood at the Daily Yomiuri -- Japan's largest English-language newspaper -- has written a very nice review of my book, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community:

Strawberry Days is really three books in one: A detailed historical chronicle of the whos, whats, wheres, whens and hows of the internment and the events leading up to it; a series of personal anecdotes and emotional reminiscences from internees and those who knew them; and an insightful, well-reasoned analysis of why the internment happened and what its ramifications are.

Kevin includes some answers I gave him in correspondence prior to the review:

To Neiwert, the historical issue is still a timely one for a number of reasons: "First is the overarching lesson of the internment: That Americans, in times of great national stress, were willing to completely discard the rights of our fellow citizens--so long as it wasn't us. We also were willing to assume that race or ethnicity itself was cause to suspect others of treason. I don't think these propensities have gone away; in fact, they've been resurfacing a lot since 9/11...[the internment] gave the military the precedent it sought to enable it to arrest and detain civilians in a non-battlefield situation without any recourse to the courts. That precedent has come back to us in the form of military tribunals and 'enemy combatant status' instituted by the Bush administration since 9/11."

When the U.S. Supreme Court gave the constitutional seal of approval to the internment in its notorious Korematsu vs United States decision (in which U.S. citizen Fred Korematsu unsuccessfully appealed his conviction for the "crime" of refusing to leave his home), Justice Robert Jackson wrote in dissent that the precedent was "a loaded gun" that could be turned on the rest of the populace at any time.

"That warning, " says Neiwert, "has now come home to roost."

You can read the entirety of my responses to Kevin's questions at his blog.

The book, for what it's worth, is selling extraordinarily well, at least by my non-Malkinian standards. The first run (of 3,000) sold out, and the second run is still selling briskly. I'm getting a tremendously warm response to it.

My next appearance will be tomorrow night in Seattle's International District at the Wing Luke Asian Museum, where I'll be giving a presentation on the book. This will be a special event that, I hope, will be attended by many of the folks who participated in making it.

It's also going to be something of a multimedia event: I've prepared a slide show of many of the photos I collected over the years of researching this book, including the above photo of the Suguro girls on their strawberry farm.

The event is being co-sponsored by Densho, Eastside Asian Pacific Americans, Japanese American Citizens League/Lake Washington Chapter, and the Japanese American Citizens League/Seattle Chapter.

Finally, on a longer-term note, my readers in Southern California can mark their calendars: I've been invited to speak at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles on Jan. 21. I'm planning to do media appearances in conjunction with it. And I'm currently trying to book other appearances in California that week.

Neo-Nazis and the mainstream

Bill White, the neo-Nazi who was chiefly responsible for inciting the riots last week in Toledo, Ohio, is really a classic fascist: that is, he's a man with no real principles except a real devotion to obtaining power.

He's already been all over the map politically. For awhile he was a devoted Marxist (he wrote for Pravda) and then became a libertarian. His politics then swung far rightward and he began promoting neo-Nazism as a leader in the National Socialist Movement.

Whatever route he took, it produced a worm-riddled soul. How else can you describe someone who said this in response to news that the family of a federal judge had been murdered:

"Everyone associated with the Matt Hale trial has deserved assassination for a long time. I don't feel bad that Judge Lefkow's family was murdered today. In fact, when I heard the story, I laughed."

He nonetheless has something of a history of worming his way into mainstream circles. White has made some money in the Beltway by owning and managing slums, but he also claims to have friends in higher circles.

Earlier this year, White touted his mainstream credentials over at his Web site, under a headline, "SPLC Attacks Our Friends At The Washington Times: Homo Jews Demand Coombs, McCain, Others Resign":

This is amusing. First, Stacy McCain is a pretty good friend of mine, Francis Coombs is a big fan of our website, and I've had lunch with his wife at an American Renaissance conference. Stacy, at least, is not anti-Jewish -- they all come from that weird part of the "far right" that buys into race theories but has a weird admiration for Semites. I once suggested to Mrs Coombs that the Washington Times should more virulently criticize the Zionist Entity, and she told me that several Jewish columnists -- Charles Krauthammer, Norman Podhoretz and AM Rosenthal, among others -- had threatened the Moonie organization if they ever took an anti-Zionist stance. Wes Pruden, who is in charge of the Times, however, is an extreme Zionist, and I have cussed him out violently for his extreme pro-Jewish views. People who know him tell me they can't understand his love of the Zionist state.

In any case, the SPLC has been trying to get these guys fired for years now. Stacy, in paticular, wrote a front-page story exposing how the SPLC made up the Y2K militia threat in order to con a multi-million contract out of the Clinton government, and has been on their shit list every since.

Anyways, read on, as the homosexual Jewish lobby rails against some of the few good folk still writing in an American newspaper:]

...

If they wanted to go after Stacy's FreeRepublic postings, they should have done it in a timely manner (this is all about a year and a half old) -- and just attacked him, since he's a little guy and the bigger guys at the Washington Times are political and not particular brave, and thus always willing to throw the little guy overboard if they think it will save their own asses.]

Given that White is anything but reliable, his remarks nonetheless do raise questions about the associations of people like Robert Stacy McCain and the Coombses. Not to mention, of course, the prominent right-wingers who sit at the Washington Times' tables.

Wonder if there are any Beltway reporters brave enough to ask either McCain or the Coombses if, indeed, they socialize with Bill White.