Today in pissy racism

A quick note for those keeping score at home: Kevin Williamson is still a race-baiting piece of shit:

[National Review] decided to send roving correspondent Kevin Williamson, who has some strong revisionist views on American racial politics, to East St. Louis, Illinois, to take in the local scene, and … oh, no:

East St. Louis, Ill. — "Hey, hey craaaaaacka! Cracka! White devil! F*** you, white devil!" The guy looks remarkably like Snoop Dogg: skinny enough for a Vogue advertisement, lean-faced with a wry expression, long braids. He glances slyly from side to side, making sure his audience is taking all this in, before raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge. Luckily for me, he’s more like a three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg, a few inches shy of four feet high, probably about nine years old, and his mom — I assume she’s his mom — is looking at me with an expression that is a complex blend of embarrassment, pity, and amusement, as though to say: “Kids say the darnedest things, do they not, white devil?”

The scene ends with an interminable sentence Williamson probably regards as “literary":

... my terminus in East St. Louis, where instead of meeting my Kurtz I get yelled at by a racially aggrieved tyke with more carefully coiffed hair than your average Miss America contestant.

There are a few lines in here that a good editor would cut but could be waved off as unwitting bad judgment — the Heart of Darkness reference, three fifths, making fun of the hair. But when the writer also decides the best comparison for a young black kid’s behavior is a monkey and to gratuitously question his parentage, there’s really not much question, is there?

Torture is a bipartisan value

I was talking to Ms Heel-Filcher about the new report out, that says that responsibility for torture went up to the highest levels of the executive. Most of those in that chain of command are still employed by the U.S. in positions of authority and trust: in the CIA, Defense, State, and elsewhere.

Ms Heel-Filcher asked the question "How likely is it, do you think, that Obama doesn't know the extent of who's responsible for the U.S. torture program?"

My answer, as of this week? Zero. Total impossibility.

You see, as long as there was plausible deniability, as long as the "a few bad apples" parry was viable, Obama's choice not to prosecute those few bad apples was understandable. Wrong, reprehensibly wrong, even on its own terms, but understandable: why would you want to drag the country's collective consciousness through the pit of evil that such a prosecution would represent? (Because if the victims had been sorority girls instead of brown men with beards...)

Now the situation has changed. Supposing for a moment that Obama had been lied to by the intelligence and defense agencies -- had been convinced by his internal accounting that the responsibility lay near the leaves and not at the root -- then the conclusions of this report would, if allowed to become the new normal, spell the end of Obama's actual use of power. If the defense/intelligence structure can pull that kind of coverup on POTUS himself, and face no consequences when it's exposed? Then they're running the show, and POTUS himself is a muppet.

I'm fairly sure that Obama's not a muppet; and I'm damn sure that he doesn't see himself as one. Which leaves him with two options:

Either the President was actively complicit in the covering up of the chain of command giving orders to torture; or anyone in that chain, above the level that the President did know about, needs to spend the rest of their life in Leavenworth. Not just for torture, though that's enough on its own to put you there -- but for trying to make a muppet out of the President in the process.

History class is no fun because of all the spoilers

Former Saints linebacker Scott Fujita takes to the pages of the NYT in support of marriage equality. High fives all around: as he says,

Years ago, my wife and I became friendly with a young woman whose teenage brother committed suicide after coming out to an unsuspecting and unsupportive father. This woman explained that her father was a football guy, a “man’s man” — whatever that means. She challenged me to speak up for her lost brother because, as she said, the only way to change the heart and mind of someone like her father was for him to hear that people he admires would embrace someone like his son. 

It's critically important that figures like Fujita, with all the self-identification they garner from everyday American guys, push the public consciousness of homosexuality as not something distasteful to be "tolerated", but as something different but equally gender-normative

One thing that struck me, however, is Fujita's choice of rhetorical strategy. He builds the op-ed around past and future conversations with his daughters, conversations about issues of human and civil rights in the U.S.:

As my girls grow up, they will learn about a few of the more embarrassing moments in our nation’s history. And I expect they’ll ask questions. But for the most part, I’ll be prepared to respond because I can point to the progress that followed... But there’s one question I’m not prepared to answer: “Why aren’t Clare and Lesa married?”

This is the pattern that James Loewen talks about in Lies: American history is the story of how, back then, we faced down some obstacles and emerged triumphant. Loewen talks about how American history (as a grade-school subject) isn't so much about learning as it is about instilling civic pride and patriotism; it follows that any discussion in which the U.S. does not come out looking rosy (or at least does not come out having fixed whatever the problem was and moved triumphantly on) is off-limits.

Now, I don't know how genuinely Fujita himself is unprepared to say to his daughters, "Claire and Lesa aren't married because our nation has some big problems."[1] I suspect that this is more rhetorical setup than actual tongue-tiedness at introducing a young, impressionable mind to the notion that America's more perfect union has some ugly cracks in the masonry. But it's an illustrative example regardless.

[1] I caught myself continuing that sentence "... that we haven't completely solved yet", but that is exactly the attitude I'm trying to avoid: the idea that we're America, dammit, and all our problems are either solved or will soon be.

Whistling past the water board

The Times has the story: the first ex-CIA officer is facing prison for blowing a whistle.

Meanwhile, nobody from the CIA or any other agency has faced sanctions for torture.

Shocking news

In today's round of news that is more surprising for actually seeing print than for its actual content,

• Support for Obamacare spiked after Thursday's SCOTUS ruling. Did the news coverage actually inform people what was in the bill? Do Americans have faith that the Court would have overturned Death Panels as unconstitutional? Or are most of us just authoritarians, ready to support whatever is the law of the land?
• Scully gets the scoop on Anderson Cooper. Centrists salute!

... and meanwhile, at the spine store, the DCCC has decided that voting against Americans' ability to pay for healthcare should cause one electoral distress.