Today In Bullshit

Probably the biggest downside to having professional training in psychology is learning to cope with the cringe response as mainstream news and opinion types contort the discipline in idiotic ways to support arguments that mostly aren't worth making. A sterling example of this is an article published today on Slate as part of an ongoing series on "how your unconscious mind shapes you" that attempts to explain today's heated political climate by comparing the collective partisanships of the left and right to a married couple seeking counseling. The author, Shankar Vedantam, draws on research on predictors of marital conflict and dissatisfaction (conducted by John Gottman, the biggest name in the marital therapy field) to enlighten us on the fact that the "right" is expressing anger toward the "left" while the "left" is expressing contempt toward the "right," which by the way, is provably more toxic to the health of a marriage, and therefore worse for society by the logic of Vedantam's incredibly tortured analogy.

The first point to make here is one that's so obvious that Vendantam acknowledges it himself in the second to last paragraph of his article: opposing political persuasions are nothing like a marriage. The point of marriages are to help facilitate bonds of love and support between partners, which can be threatened by an excess of disagreement and dispute. Politics is about disagreement and dispute. If it wasn't, there'd be no need for multiple political points of view.

I suppose Vedantam might make the argument that our political discourse today is uniquely marked by anger on one side and contempt on the other, and that the emotional tone is baked in unconsciously to one's political leanings (this may be the point that he's making in the article, but it's difficult to tell because it's such an incoherent piece of work). That doesn't wash, though, because political tone, like everything else in politics, varies dramatically based on who's in power and who's out of it. Think back to the bygone days of the 2004 election, when Republicans controlled the executive and legislative branches. At that time, the Democratic base was at the peak of a nearly decade-long angry fist shake at George W. Bush. Meanwhile, the Republican base was sneering at John Kerry for having the sheer balls to be a decorated Vietnam veteran. Do those emotions sound familiar?

The thing that really gets me about this article is that it pulls the old trick of analyzing our "political discourse" without actually much, if any, reference to those who hold political office. I suppose if your sample size for liberal thinking is a smattering of blogs and Keith Olbermann, you could make the argument that contempt for the right is a dominant emotion, but wouldn't it be a good idea to mention President Barack Obama, who ran on promises to pursue bipartisan compromise and has, with severely limited success, actually tried to do so? This "both sides are at fault" thinking has gotten almost comical in an age where Senate Republicans have filibustered close to a hundred bills in the past 20 months.

So, no, marriage counseling can't tell us anything about liberals and conservatives.

Quick Ft. Hood update w/ links

General Casey strikes the right notes of caution. Megan McArdle pushes back against any political interpretation of the tragedy. Jeffrey Goldberg urges that Hasan's Muslim background not be dismissed or downplayed. All good reads with smart points.

Thoughts on the massacre at Ft. Hood

Yesterday's shooting spree by Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan at Ft. Hood affected me greatly. Usually I take tragic news more or less in stride, but this incident is so disturbing on so many levels that I've found myself looking at every bit of news I can get my hands on and turning the implications over in my head. The deepest and most immediate part of this tragedy, of course, is the fact that 13 American servicemembers are dead, killed on their own nation's soil as they prepared to deploy to war. At a time when our military is fighting two foreign wars characterized by unpredictable violence and insurgent tactics, to have this type of attack occur on the supposedly safe and friendly ground of an Army base is doubly horrifying. I can't even fathom the anger and pain that active-duty servicemembers, veterans, and their families are feeling in response to these murders, particularly given all the misinformation and speculation swirling around in the first hours of the attack.

Adding to that, we've got to deal with the fact that the shooter was, by all appearances, a religiously devout Muslim. Pretty much as soon as Hasan's name leaked out, when the inital reports were that he had been killed, political fault lines were forming over this issue. Broadly speaking, (and it should be noted that plenty of commentators across the ideological spectrum either refrained from weighing in due to lack of evidence or took a measured and appropriate tone in their analysis) the tack from liberal commentators was that Hasan's religion shouldn't be assumed as the motive for the attacks and the tack from conservatives was that Hasan is clearly a terrorist and that politically correct cowardice is making America vulnerable to Islamic extremism.

To put it bluntly, both of these general arguments make me extremely uncomfortable. As far as the first goes, it seems extremely likely that Hasan's religious beliefs played a substantial role in his actions. Even excluding the very real recent and historical phenomenon of acts of violence being committed as an affirmation of Islamic faith, what are the odds that a man as religiously devout as Hasan appears to have been would commit such an extreme act if he believed it to be at odds with his spiritual beliefs? His religion is absolutely fair game in this discussion, and I think it's disingenuous and false to pretend otherwise.

However, to address the other line of thought, just because Hasan's Islamic beliefs played a major role in this shooting doesn't mean that he committed the shooting because he was a Muslim. This in an important distinction to make for several reasons. First, there's a substantial strain of post 9/11 conservative thought that holds that Islam as an entity is the cultural enemy of the United States and that this idea should be an explicit cornerstone of the "war on terrorism." Note, for instance, the opening of this blog on the Fort Hood shootings: "The moment I first heard about the mass murders at Fort Hood I knew in my bones that the shooter or shooters were Muslims." One of the more extreme exemplars of this line of 'thinking' is Michelle Malkin's 2004 book In Defense of Internment, which offers up a retroactive justification for the WWII policy of detaining Japanese citizens on the basis of their ethnic background by way of advocating for racial profiling to be actively deployed to combat terrorism on American soil.

Unlike some on the left, I think that the U.S. government and American culture on the whole have on balance done a commendable job of clearly identifying the violent and totalitarian strains of Islam, rather than the religion as a whole, as the target of anti-terrorism efforts, the Afghanistan invasion, and the fight against the Iraqi insurgency. I believe that this is a reflection on the long tradition of religious freedom in America and is a major reason why our country hasn't had nearly the problems with organized radicalism and backlash from the Islamic population that areas of Europe have experienced in the time since 9/11. It's also the right decision on a tactical level: overt or covert declarations that America is the enemy of Islam only serve to reinforce the similar claims made by al-Qaeda types in their vile recruitment pitches, and there remains beside the small matter of the impracticality of declaring open hostility on an ideology with well over a billion adherents. But it's a nuanced position that can be difficult to maintain, particularly since there's a vocal segment of the American population who openly defines patriotism as being synonymous with evangelical Christian faith, and violent attacks perpetuated by Muslims on domestic soil can test it mightily in the eyes of the public. Conservative writer Reihan Salam has a great piece about this that's well worth reading.

The investigation into Hasan will hopefully clear some of this up, particularly on the question of whether he had any verifiable links to terrorist groups. My sense, based on the limited facts available, is that he was essentially an isolated and embittered man who became disenchanted with his job and his life, and in response immersed himself in the idea that the U.S. military was persecuting him personally and Islam generally. The shootings themselves feel sort of like a hybrid of a terrorist act and a suicide-by-cop; I have no idea which was foremost in Hasan's mind, but I suppose eventually we'll know more.

The final thing that disturbs me about the Ft. Hood shootings is the speculation about Hasan's role as a mental health provider who worked with soldiers suffering from PTSD. I've already seen at least two articles (here and here) claiming that Hasan may have been suffering from 'vicarious traumatization' from dealing with PTSD sufferers, that he may have had PTSD himself as a result, and that this may have been a factor in his rampage. This is an idea that needs to get smacked down as quickly and decisively as humanly possible.

First of all, treating PTSD or having interactions with PTSD sufferers is NOT in itself traumatic. Trauma is specifically defined as exposure to an event involving actual or threatened death or serious injury to a person or witnessing another person being exposed to same, and reacting with intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Listening to a person talk about trauma is NOT dangerous, and therefore cannot be traumatic. It can be very stressful, but stress is not the same thing as trauma. I have no doubt that Hasan was deeply affected by the stories he heard from the soldiers under his care (and the way, he was almost certainly not conducting psychotherapy with the soldiers under his care, because modern psychiatrists almost exclusively concern themselves with medication prescription and management) but he did not develop PTSD as a result of his work.

This is an unfathomably important point to make because the PTSD syndrome is based partially on how the sufferer reacts to his or her memories of the trauma as being potentially as harmful as the traumatic event itself. The gold-standard psychotherapies for PTSD derive much of their effectiveness from helping PTSD sufferers understand that their memories cannot hurt them and desensitizing them to their emotional power. If because of this incident the military and the public come to the utterly mistaken conclusion that talking about traumatic events can traumatize listeners or "give them" PTSD, that belief will absolutely impair our ability as a society to help those suffering from PTSD seek help and recover from the disorder. The very last thing that PTSD sufferers need is more reinforcement for the idea that their memories are dangerous to themselves and others, or another repetition of the overblown and inaccurate stereotype that PTSD 'causes' people to go on murder sprees.

I hope that many of these concerns don't come to pass, just as I hope that this tragic event gets the attention that it deserves. I'll definitely be following this story closely.

whoa...

I just stumbled across this blog post, in which Matt Yglesias pushes back against a David Brooks column complaining about how technology has ruined romance by presenting a passage from Brett Easton Ellis's pre-Internet and texting book The Rules of Attraction. It's a pretty good pushback, if you leave aside the fact that Yglesias kind of bricks the layup by picking a segment that depicts a rape rather than a seduction, which I chalk up to him being too lazy to look further into the book (if I recall correctly, the excerpt in question comes within the first couple chapters) to pick one of the countless other exchanges that would have been more suitable to the point. But what really caught my attention was this lead-in statement:

Here’s his depiction of the the “sanctified . . . choice of an erotic partner” in 1985, when Brooks was 24 and there was no SMS or World Wide Web:

Hold the phone. David Brooks is only 48 years old? According to the infallible Wikipedia, yep. I would have pegged him at least a decade over that. I guess his apostasy vis a vis the conservative CW on same-sex marriage and Barack Obama makes a little more sense to me now.

Let's parse last night's elections!

A disclaimer: I think that off-year elections, particularly those coming a scant 10 months into the first term of a presidency, aren't incredibly meaningful, and discussing them as such is really more akin to masturbation that serious analysis. Then again, you could say that about nine-tenths or more of contemporary political discussion and you wouldn't likely be wrong. I like masturbation, though. I also like politics, so let's do this.

The dominant spin from last night's elections is probably going to be that the Republicans taking the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey represents a Republican resurgence and a rebuke of sorts to the Obama Administration. Exhibit A of this line is Karl Rove's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today in which he essentially chalks up the Democratic losses to voter unease over the potential costs of Obama's health care reform proposals. I'm not sure that this argument holds water particularly, since it isn't like Obama decided to reform the health care system sometime in March of this year. It was a major part of his presidential campaign, and it didn't seem to dissuade a lot of people from voting Democratic then. It seems more plausible to me that the fact that there's been so little forward momentum on health care depressed Democratic turnout and created a lane for the energized Republican opposition, but I don't think that's what happened either.

Rather, I think people voted for the gubernatorial elections based on their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the governance of their state, rather than based on their antipathy or affection for Barack Obama. Chris Christie, newly elected Republican governor of New Jersey says that he's looking forward to "working with President Obama," not exactly words that will get him a headliner slot at any upcoming Tea Party rallies. It also bears mentioning that Jon Corzine is a Wall Street billionaire who bought his way into office, and "Wall Street billionaire" is a shade below "Roman Polanski" in the hierarchy of things people, let alone the Democratic base, are positively disposed to at present. If I lived in New Jersey, I sure as shit wouldn't take twenty hard-earned minutes out of my day to throw a vote Corzine's way.

As for the whole three-way ordeal in New York's 23rd district, I think more than anything it demonstrates that winning Congressional elections is basically a matter of convincing people that you're going to be fully dedicated to kicking loose those sweet, sweet federal pork dollars than your overarching allegiance to a philosophical theory of governance. From what I've read, Hoffman was running far more on the latter category and was notably weak in the former. It's not by accident that pretty much everybody in Congress gets re-elected for decades despite the fact that the voting public pretty much unanimously hates the House of Representatives as a collective entity. As such, I don't think it's really valid to draw a larger inference about the electoral future of the conservative movement from this one instance. However, I did come across a quote today from noted conservative intellectual Glenn Beck that gave me pause:

And here's what the ‑‑ forget about the Democrats. Here's what the Republicans should learn. The tea party movement, if you think you're going to run people that are going to be, you know, ACORN wannabes and they're just part of the corruption, part of the system, if you're going to run those people, you can expect a tea party guy to come out, and the tea parties, they'll help you lose every single election. Every single election. Because I for one am not ‑‑ if I believe in the Republican, I'll vote for the Republican. But if you're running somebody who's like part of the system, I'm not interested. I'm not interested. And I think that a lot of Americans are like that. So the Republicans have a choice to make. You can either spend a million dollars trying to destroy a third party accountant, or you could say, wow, this accountant probably would come in within three points of beating the Democrat if we combined our efforts, Republicans and Democrats, spent a fortune, had our candidate then drop out and campaign for the Democrats, we might be able to come in with about a 3‑point margin. You might want to just say, "Maybe we should go with the accountants. Maybe we should go with the regular people."

Remember two months ago when I suggested that the right was succumbing to fallacies that had long plagued the left by mounting strident and inane protest marches? What noted conservative intellectual Glenn Beck is suggesting here is literally a replica of the modern American left's worst idea, running ideological protest candidates to "send a message" to the mainstream party. Let's review the two most prominent examples. The first is successfully defeating Joe Lieberman in the Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut. Rather than ushering in a new wave of unabashed legislative progressivism, Lieberman just won re-election as an Independent, proceeded to campaign wholeheartedly for John McCain in 2008, and was most recently seen vowing to help the Republican minority fuck over any meaningful healthcare reform bill from being brought to a vote in the Senate. The second is Ralph Nader's presidential bid in 2000, which was aimed squarely at siphoning votes from Democratic nominee Al Gore. Despite a rather pathetic nationwide showing, Nader still managed to accrue more than enough votes to cover the small margin separating Bush from Gore in Florida, clearing the way for Bush to win both the state and the election ('win' of course, being shorthand for 'U.S. Supreme Court decision barring the completion of vote recounting', although I think Bush would have wound up winning anyway). Suffice it to say that the Bush presidency isn't exactly what the average Nader voter had in mind on his or her way to the ballot box in 2000. I should know, I was a freshman in college at the time and I was acquainted with quite a few of them. If there's a similar situation that forms on the right in 2010/2012 (or the Republicans nominate Sarah Palin for president), I don't imagine that it'll turn out much better. I'm somewhat skeptical that this will actually happen, but the idea's obviously percolating out there.

From my point of view, the only thing about last night that should inspire anger or fear among liberals is the narrow passage of yet another gay marriage ban, this time in Maine. Specifically, I'm extremely disappointed that Obama and/or the DNC didn't lift one finger to suggest that Democrats should turn out to prevent rights being stripped from gay citizens. I know that that Obama's against gay marriage and the Democrats as a national political entity have absolutely no spine when it comes to taking a stand for social liberties, but this is really fucking shameful. Legal discrimination against gays is the defining civil rights issue of our time. These state constitutional bans are not going to last forever. They're going to fall, either by being repealed by less-bigoted future electorates (which I'd prefer) or by federal action (which I'll accept, despite the fact that it'll kick off yet another generations-long political battle a 'la Roe v. Wade). And eventually, Americans will look back at these laws with the same revulsion that we (or: most of us) look back at Jim Crow laws today. I expect better of Obama than the half-assed thumb-twiddling we're getting from him on these kinds of issues, and I hope that I'm far from alone in that view.

This just in: we're winning the culture war

I didn't get much of a chance to read up on the blogosphere today, but I noticed that several of the writers I read commented in amazement at the Washington Post's decision to publish an editorial by Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, entitled "America's Secular Saboteurs." These bloggers quite accurately pointed out that the content of this piece is unhinged and naked bigotry, and argued that its publication reflects extremely poorly on the Post's editorial standards. The truth is quite the contrary. The Post has done a great public service in giving this column such a prominent platform, as it ably illustrates the desperation and intellectual bankruptcy of religious conservatism in 2009. It would take far too much time to point out every instance of ignorance and historical contradiction in Donohue's piece (read it yourself and they'll likely jump right out at you), so I'll only address what I see as the highlights. The editorial's first paragraph:

"There are many ways cultural nihilists are busy trying to sabotage America these days: multiculturalism is used as a club to beat down Western civilization in the classroom; sexual libertines seek to upend the cultural order by attacking religion; artists use their artistic freedoms to mock Christianity; Hollywood relentlessly insults people of faith; activist left-wing legal groups try to scrub society free of the public expression of religion; elements in the Democratic party demonstrate an animus against Catholicism; and secular-minded malcontents within Catholicism and Protestantism seek to sabotage their religion from the inside."

The standard practice in this type of writing is to identify your ideological opponents as a marginalized but devious band of schemers seeking to deceive the larger body of honest citizens into complicity in their agenda. By contrast, Donohue rattles off a laundry list of conspirators: educators, sex enthusiasts, artists, civil libertarians, the Democratic Party, and even unnamed fifth columnists within Christianity itself. Note that this 'paragraph' is actually only a single hysterical sentence. One can almost feel Donohue's paranoia rising with each successive semi-colon. Indeed, given the vagueness of his language, Donohue may well be including up to half of the U.S. population under his "cultural nihilist" rubric.

Shortly thereafter, Donohue pinpoints his villains' sinister logic:

"If societal destruction is the goal, then it makes no sense to waste time by attacking the political or economic structure: the key to any society is its culture, and the heart of any culture is religion. In this society, that means Christianity, the big prize being Catholicism. Which explains why secular saboteurs are waging war against it."

The magnitude of ignorance displayed in Donohue's equation of Catholicism with the essence of American culture is nothing short of breathtaking. The heyday of American anti-Catholicism to date took place in the nativist movement of the mid-to-late 19th century, when Catholic immigrants began arriving en masse to United States from Europe. The reaction from the largely Protestant populace was to mount a campaign of violence and economic and social marginalization against Catholic immigrants for - you guessed it - their perceived lack of allegiance to American culture. (Feel free to watch Gangs of New York for a fictionalized primer on the religious politics of the era, but be sure to fast-forward through the scenes where Cameron Diaz has speaking roles). In fact, as recently as 1960 John F. Kennedy, still the only Catholic to hold the U.S. Presidency, had to take pains during his campaign to assure the electorate that he would not be beholden to Papal authority in making decisions as President. Beyond the typical religious-right "religion is the primary arbiter of culture" fallacy (which I'll return to later), it's nearly impossible to argue that American history and culture are synonymous with Catholicism without ignoring a great deal of salient historical facts.

Donohue later follows with this bit of revisionism:

"There was a time when Hollywood made reverential movies about Christianity. But those days are long gone. Now they just insult. And when someone finally makes a film that makes Christians proud, he is run out of town. Were it not for Mel Gibson, there would have been no "Passion of the Christ." But for every Harvey Weinstein who likes to bash Catholics, there is always someone else waiting in the wings to do the same."

Mel Gibson was not "run out" of any town for making The Passion of the Christ. Donohue conveniently neglects to mention the very public incident in which Gibson was caught driving while intoxicated and proceeded to sexually harass a female arresting officer, all the while spewing the kind of rank anti-Semitic beliefs that he had so vigorously denied holding during the run-up to The Passion of the Christ's release. Isn't it interesting, in this context, that Donohue prefers to pin Gibson's downfall on the likes of Harvey Weinstein (what kind of last name is that, anyway?)

"The ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State harbor an agenda to smash the last vestiges of Christianity in America. Lying about their real motives, they say their fidelity is to the Constitution. But there is nothing in the Constitution that sanctions the censorship of religious speech. From banning nativity scenes to punishing little kids for painting a picture of Jesus, the zealots give Fidel a good run for his money."

No. What Donohue and those who think like him fail to understand is that these groups and their supporters, with very few exceptions, have no designs on censoring private religious expression. Rather, they push back forcefully on the fiction that religious belief, in general or particular forms, is an intrinsic part of American society and should receive official sanction and support as such. Preventing public property and money from being employed to display a nativity scene or a statue of the Ten Commandments is not religious censorship and is no way equivalent to denying private citizens the right to do the same with their private property. Rather, it's a judicious assertion of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which remains deeply ingrained in American culture no matter how loudly the Donohues of the world disdain it.

"Catholics were once the mainstay of the Democratic Party; now the gay activists are in charge. Indeed, practicing Catholics are no longer welcome in leadership roles in the Party: the contempt that pro-life Catholics experience is palpable. The fact that Catholics for Choice, a notoriously anti-Catholic front group funded by the Ford Foundation, has a close relationship with the Democrats says it all."

I'm sure that the gay activist overlords of the Democratic Party are quite pleased with President Obama's speedy and bold moves to overturn the federal Defense of Marriage Act and the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ban on homosexuals serving in the armed forces. More fascinating is the rapid sequence of assertions that (1) the Democratic Party does not welcome "practicing Catholics" (2) there exists a group called Catholics for Choice, which in fact has a close relationship with the party, and (3) Catholics for Choice is "notoriously anti-Catholic." The message here is fairly obvious: personal religious belief and identification mean nothing when it comes to determining whether or not a person "counts" as a Catholic, while toeing the Church's anti-abortion hardline means everything.

Donohue concludes with this gem:

"The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they're too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels."

Let's leave aside the more explicitly disturbing connotations of asymmetrical breeding as a strategy to achieve cultural and political goals for the time being and focus on the real implications of what Donohue is saying here. In a single sentence, he's managed to neatly encapsulate his view that children are little more than empty vessels to be indoctrinated with an unaltered version of their parent's religious, cultural, and political beliefs, for the purposes of continued engagement of a vaguely defined and ever-changing enemy on a metaphorical field of battle. It is inconceivable to Donohue that, absent some nefarious outside influence, children raised in a conservative religious family could grow up to become atheists, homosexuals, members of Catholics for Choice, or any other of the myriad means of "deviancy" that populate his worldview. To him, these are not their choices to make. They are to be made for them by authority; specifically, by a glorious singularity of parental power and religious dictate.

Bill Donohue is a grubbing fascist with not one shred of respect for the United States of America's rich and dynamic culture of individualism, mutual tolerance, and democracy. He makes no secret of his profound contempt for American citizens who fail to reflect in full his personal prejudices. All of this is abundantly clear in every sentence of his idiotic and vile editorial. We are fortunate to live in a time where this can be made clear, and even more fortunate that Donohue himself has chosen to discredit himself so thoroughly and nakedly on the public stage. It's clear that Donohue imagines himself to be a holy warrior leading a vast army of the devout to a divinely ordained victory. His writing reveals him to be little more than a cheap dictator huddled in a bunker, cursing the names of imagined conspirators under his breath, while promising his dwindling camarilla a glorious triumph in a war that he has already lost.

Leave General McChrystal alone!

The political chatter of the week is quickly coalescing around U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, who last week publicly stated his support for a large troop increase in the war in Afghanistan and his belief that a more narrow approach that does not revolve around ensuring political stability, as has apparently been advocated by the Vice President's office, will not be effective in securing the U.S.'s strategic interests in the region. Much of the published opinion has been critical of McChrystal, with at least one commentator going so far as to dub it a "plain violation of the principle of civilian control." The idea, it seems, is that McChrystal is trying to force Obama's hand into giving him what he wants through press leaks and public pronouncements.

I'm skeptical. McChrystal's job isn't to avoid having a professional opinion on the conduct of the military operation that he is in charge of overseeing, and he isn't required to refrain from sharing his professional opinion with others, except, I suppose, in cases where it would threaten the operational security of his stated mission. Rather, McChrystal's job is to obey the orders of the commander-in-chief, Barack Obama. As far as I can tell, he hasn't disobeyed an executive order or even communicated an intent to do so. All he's done is state a tactical preference based on his analysis of the situation. If Obama doesn't like how he's behaving, he's free to relieve him of his command, as presidents have frequently done to military generals throughout U.S. history.

Yes, McChrystal's comments go against the grain of chain-of-command protocol as it's typically understood, and yes, it's hardly good decorum to put your boss on the spot. But, as is so often the case, what's bad for discipline and protocol is good for American democracy. Lest we forget, American men and women are currently on Afghan soil putting their lives at stake in this conflict, with the potential of more joining them depending on the decisions made. Let's also remember former General Eric Shinseki, who Donald Rumsfeld threw under the bus in the George W. Bush days for having the sheer balls to suggest that the U.S. bring enough ground troops into the invasion of Iraq to maintain order in the country. The American people didn't get the benefit of the full debate then. I'm not about to argue that they should be denied it now.

All this isn't to say that Obama has to take McChrystal's advice. There's no telling whether or not he's even right about Afghanistan. After all, if the Iraqi people had greeted the U.S. invasion with party hats and kazoos, like Bill Kristol promised, and begun throwing Sunni/Shiite get-to-know-you block parties as soon as that statue of Saddam hit the concrete, no one outside of a few military historians would even know who Eric Shinseki is right now. Obama's the President, and the decision is his alone to make based on the facts and strategic objectives as he sees them. Does he expose himself to more potential criticism because of McChrystal's statements? You bet. But that's the burden of leadership.

I'm a strong Obama supporter, and I genuinely don't know what the best course of action in Afghanistan is at this juncture. I trust him to weigh the alternatives and make an appropriate choice. But I also expect him to be open and accountable to the American people about the reasoning behind that decision, and having this discussion take place in the public sphere will only serve to motivate that transparency. Obama's supporters don't owe him any protection from the political risk that tough decisions entail. We'd be better served by advocating our own views and values, whatever they may be, in hopes of having our own influence on the outcome (advocates of full withdrawal are probably in for lean times on this front).

And if things don't go well, maybe in 2012 we'll wind up with President Mitt Romney, aka the only American executive to preside over a government that's both legalized gay marriage and mandated universal healthcare.

What the left misses about the new right

One of the more vexing things about watching the current political situation in this country is that I think the organization and momentum behind the anti-Obama Tea Parties and similar political statements on the right is, in some real ways, a genuine shift from what one would expect from that side of the spectrum based on recent history. As an self-identified man of the left, it frustrates me a tad that I've seen very little serious consideration of the shifting nature of the opposition from "my" side of the aisle. Here are three major themes that I see popping up in left-centered analysis of the New Right (as I'll call it for the purposes of this post), and why I believe they're misconceptions.

#1: They're gullible pawns of Republican politicians/Glenn Beck: This is the big one. The idea that voters or activists on the right are brainwashed by charismatic but evil figureheads is probably one of the foundational assumptions of liberal political analysis since at least the 1990s. It's false. The reason why is simply that it's very difficult to convince one person, much less a large group of people, of something that they don't already at least somewhat implicitly believe. Leaders of movements typically don't invent a whole new way of thinking and convince others to follow them; they cannily summarize an already occurring shift in the zeitgeist in a way that resonates with people. The idea that Republican leadership is orchestrating the Tea Party protests is fairly ridiculous. Republicans are attempting to capitalize on them, certainly, with mixed success. But don't believe for a minute that anybody, anywhere would take to the streets on orders from the likes of Michael Steele and John Boehner. Another clue to this is the meteoric rise to prominence of Glenn Beck and the role his radio and television shows have played in the recent right-wing rallies. If the vast right-wing conspiracy wanted to anoint an avatar of right-wing populism, why would they pick the manic and ridiculous Beck rather than Rush Limbaugh, who commands a larger audience and was even specifically targeted by the Obama White House earlier in the year? Which leads me straight into another misconception...

#2: This is just Republican business as usual: It's very, very tempting, given the ridiculousness of tactics such as the constant cries of 'socialism' to say that this is the same ad-hominem song and dance that we've gotten from the American right for the past decade-plus. Look a little closer, though, and you'll notice one big difference: the rallies and street-level rhetoric are all about government spending and taxation. What you're not seeing is a great deal of heated accusations about abortion, gay marriage, and the other religious-right hot buttons. It's hard to underestimate what a sea change this is; since the Clinton years, the most vocal and loyal right-wing Americans were motivated primarily by a desire to promote Christian fundamentalist social views. I'm sure that most of them were also opposed to budget deficits and government regulation of the healthcare market, but economic issues weren't what got them out of bed and to the phone banks on Election Day morning. What happened in the past three months to change their minds?

I'm not entirely sure anything did, by which I mean that I don't think that there's an immense amount of overlap between the vanguards of George W. Bush and those of the Tea Party movement. Rather, I think that what we're seeing now are the fruits of the 07-08 Ron Paul primary campaign. As you may or may not recall, Paul ran for the Republican nomination preaching a sort of crypto-libertarian line against government interventionism, with his signature issue being his opposition to the Iraq War. Being as the Republican primary in its early stages was essentially a three-way argument between McCain, Giuliani, and Romney about who had the most enthusiasm for bombing, torturing, or indefinitely detaining people of Middle Eastern descent, this was, to say the least, an atypical view. However, Paul built a surprisingly vocal grassroots campaign, setting what were at that time (and may still be, although I'm not sure) single-day fundraising records. I think that what we're seeing right now is a devoted core of libertarian-leaning Ron Paul types attracting the 'anybody but Obama crowd' on the more conventional hardcore right behind the artifice of opposing government spending. I doubt this coalition will ever do much besides protest Obama (there are large philosophical differences between libertarianism and modern Republicanism, which are nearly always minimized or ignored by liberal commentators), but the enthusiasm they're showing at present is undeniable.

#3: Attacking their motivations is the best way to discredit them: A large part of the debate over the past week or so has been about whether or not Joe Wilson, the grassroots opposition to Obama, or some combination thereof are motivated by racial animosity. I generally agree with John McWhorter's excellent article on the topic (short summary: probably somewhat, but it's not the key political issue that it's rapidly becoming). Underlying motivations are always complex and ambiguous, and invoking them tends to function better as a litmus test for existing political beliefs than as an argument to the unconvinced. There are very good reasons for the implemented and proposed increases in spending as of late; the stimulus and bailouts were designed to stop the skid of the economy and keep Americans out of soup lines (the jury is still out on how well it's worked, and likely will be for some time now) and healthcare reform is a past-due necessity to curtail the cost of medical care, which has been rising out of all proportion to other expenses for some time now.

Perhaps the best argument of all is simply to state that Obama won the election and is now attempting to do some of those things that he promised to do while he was running. Of course, this is going to engage the ideological opposition and cause some of them to wonder "what happened to my country?" That sentiment was practically running in my head on a tape loop from 2002-2008, and I was hardly alone. If he's successful, his popularity and the popularity of his party will rise or fall based on how well people like the results. And that, rather than the size or fury of protests or accusations of racism, will be the real test.

Score another one for Web 2.0

The top user-submitted tags on Amazon for Rod Blagojevich's upcoming memoir include "moron," "delusional," "historical fiction," and "hairbrush." Additionally, the promo description is a minor masterpiece of the form and well worth clicking through to read for yourself - apparently, Hot Rod's cash-in book is, among other things, "a treatise on the proper place of government in the everyday lives of its people" and "a mandate for healthcare reform." I'm sure that the blessing of Rod Blagojevich is exactly what's needed to push popular support for reforming healthcare to a critical mass.

Governor Rod Blagojevich's Illinois Blowout Sale - watch more funny videos