Blue Corn Comics -- News from a Multicultural Perspective

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Thursday, July 02, 2009

Climate deniers are idiots[I]f you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it—and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists—a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.

Yet Mr. Broun’s declaration was met with applause.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Right-wingers spew hateA similar wave of revulsion and denial is currently roiling the netherworld of America's extreme right wing. We're not talking here about mere conservative Republicans. This is the lunatic right, for whom the election of Barack Obama was much more than a political defeat: It was a racial and existential nightmare. If he can succeed, if no catastrophe or deprivation of rights ensues, then these people have feared and plotted and hated in vain.

The United States' extreme right wing inhabits a shadow world, and the delusional nature of its core beliefs--anti-Semitism, white supremacy and a rat's nest of economic and constitutional conspiracy theories--makes tracing causality within its ranks a dicey proposition. Still, it's clear that something is stirring this peculiarly American cesspool in ways that haven't occurred since the mid-1990s, when an upsurge in activity among so-called militia groups culminated in the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, the deadliest terrorist incident on American soil until 9/11.

Friday, June 26, 2009

Obama defends traditional marriageThe brief insists it is reasonable for states to favor heterosexual marriages because they are the “traditional and universally recognized form of marriage.” In arguing that other states do not have to recognize same-sex marriages under the Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause, the Justice Department cites decades-old cases ruling that states do not have to recognize marriages between cousins or an uncle and a niece.

These are comparisons that understandably rankle many gay people. In a letter to President Obama on Monday, Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights organization, said, “I cannot overstate the pain that we feel as human beings and as families when we read an argument, presented in federal court, implying that our own marriages have no more constitutional standing than incestuous ones.”

Monday, June 22, 2009

White people strike backCrazies. Lone nut jobs. Isolated loonies. Those are frequent descriptions of people like James von Brunn, the 88-year-old white supremacist accused of opening fire at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and killing a black guard.

Others believe he represents something more dangerous: a growing racist movement motivated by a number of converging factors, including the first African American president.

The potential for an increase in violence from whites who feel they are slipping from power is high, people from across the ideological spectrum say.

Saturday, June 06, 2009

When Obama speaks, people listen...Today, America has a dual responsibility: to help Iraq forge a better future--and to leave Iraq to Iraqis. And I have made it clear to the Iraqi people--(applause)--I have made it clear to the Iraqi people that we pursue no bases, and no claim on their territory or resources

It is not hard to imagine George W. Bush, as president, saying those same words. Yet millions of people at home and abroad would not have believed his claim to have no interest in sustaining a US military presence in Afghanistan, Iraq or anywhere else. Why? Well, if you don't know, you slept through the first eight years of this century. The fine words that Bush did frequently speak about promoting democracy abroad and protecting the world from tyrants and terrorists were undermined by his misrepresentations of the actual threats (see WMDs in Iraq) and his actions (see rushing to war in Iraq when the UN weapons inspections process was under way and working).*****

Conservative "thought" is frozenIt's a story that many of us have heard from our upper middle class baby boomer Dads over and over again and inevitably goes something like this:

Liberalism in the 60's and '70s were well-intentioned and of course the civil rights movement was necessary, but "interest groups" (read: unions and minorities) "went too far" and the government tried to do "too much." Government over-regulated and over-taxed and spent too much on programs that didn't work. Unions choked our competitiveness. Liberals didn't properly account for unintended consequences of government programs and the degree to which the government would interfere with the free market and it screwed up the economy. Plus, the social programs alienated "mainstream Americans" (read: white Christians). It turned out we needed Reagan to cut taxes, break the unions (ie air traffic controllers), and deregulate to fix things again.

Whether some of that is true or not is beside the point (based on my recent reading of Matusow's "Unraveling of America," it's not all untrue). But I was seven in 1980, Sorkin was three. This view of the world is frozen in an era that's been gone for three decades. Its as if nothing has happened since, like a major opening in the wealth inequality gap, the rise in competition from heavily unionized Western Europe, the failure of supply side economics, or the shift in the economy from heavy manufacturing of goods to the provision of services.

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Doctor's murder = terrorismRight-wingers have a problem admitting that there's such a thing as right-wing terrorism. We saw it recently with that prescient Homeland Security bulletin that they all claimed smeared them. And now we're seeing it again with the assassination of Dr. George Tiller.

Palin, like most movement conservatives, is worried most of all about the possible effects this murder will have on the anti-abortion movement and her own politics.

More to the point, she refuses to acknowledge--just as she did in the campaign last year, in the above interview with John McCain--that abortion-clinic violence is in fact domestic terrorism.*****

Obama censors rape photosPhotographs of alleged prisoner abuse which Barack Obama is attempting to censor include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse, it has emerged.

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

*****

Conservative ideology = disgustPsychologists have developed a “disgust scale” based on how queasy people would be in 27 situations, such as stepping barefoot on an earthworm or smelling urine in a tunnel. Conservatives systematically register more disgust than liberals. (To see how you weigh factors in moral decisions, take the tests at www.yourmorals.org.)

It appears that we start with moral intuitions that our brains then find evidence to support. For example, one experiment involved hypnotizing subjects to expect a flash of disgust at the word “take.” They were then told about Dan, a student council president who “tries to take topics that appeal to both professors and students.”

The research subjects felt disgust but couldn’t find any good reason for it. So, in some cases, they concocted their own reasons, such as: “Dan is a popularity-seeking snob.”

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Why conservatives love Bush (and hate minorities)I was asked this week why the president seems so attractive to the heartland, to what used to be called Middle America. A big question. I found my mind going to this word: normal.

Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man. He’s normal. He thinks in a sort of common-sense way. He speaks the language of business and sports and politics. You know him. He’s not exotic. But if there’s a fire on the block, he’ll run out and help. He’ll help direct the rig to the right house and count the kids coming out and say, “Where’s Sally?” He’s responsible. He’s not an intellectual.

The thing that is really driving conservatives crazy, I think, is that their identity politics just isn’t working like it used to. Their whole approach has been based on the belief that Americans vote as if they live in Mayberry, and fear and hate anyone who looks a bit different; now that the country just isn’t like that, they’ve gone mad.*****

Generals say close GuantanamoThis past weekend, two of America's foremost experts on defense and security issues came out in full support of the President's plans to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center. General Petraeus, CENTCOM commander, said that the detention center hurts our ability to maintain the moral high ground, harms our counterinsurgency efforts and serves as a major terrorist recruiting tool. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a career intelligence and defense official who has dealt with imprisoning terrorists for 20 years, said this past Monday that the U.S. has imprisoned terrorist suspects many times and conservative opposition amounted to "fear mongering." The statements from Petraeus and Gates reflect a growing consensus among former senior officials, military officers, and national experts that Guantanamo must be closed. Yet conservatives continue political attacks that argue that closing Guantanamo will bring terrorists into our backyard and that its symbolic damage to America's image is irrelevant. These arguments, as the President said in his speech last week, are not "rational." Dangerous detainees would be transferred to some of the most secure prison facilities in the world--much more secure than the makeshift facility in Guantanamo.