Author: Burr Deming

Chief Justice Warren Burger, accustomed to decorum and ritual, was said to have been startled by Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall one morning. One Justice after another, encountering the head of the Court, made customary greetings to “Mr. Chief Justice.” Then came Marshall with a jovial, “What’s shaking, chiefy baby.”

Michael Steele began his tenure as Republican chairman promising to attract urban young people to the GOP message. He would put together an “off the hook” campaign into “urban-suburban hip-hop settings” to appeal to minority youth, an untapped market for Republicans, to be sure.

President Obama composed a stimulus package to keep as many working people as possible from losing their jobs. Steele dismissed it, with an urbane flair, as “just a wish list from a lot of people who have been on the sidelines for years.. to get a little bling, bling.” I admit running to the urban dictionary. Did “bling bling” still mean the same thing?

Governor Bobby Jindal, Republican governor of Louisiana gave a speech that went fairly flat. Steele came to the rescue. He offered “some slum love out to my buddy.” He confronted the Republican pattern of garnering white votes with race baiting campaigns. “Tonight, we tell America: we know the past, we know we did wrong. My bad.”

And so it went. Thurgood Marshall had engaged in a bit of humor, gentle disrespect combined with a little self-mocking. But Michael Steele? You didn’t have to be a hip hop enthusiast to be provoked into embarrassed eye rolling by his meat locker cool. Anyone who, as a youth, ever encountered an uncle or neighbor trying to act the part would squirm just a little.

Republicans loved it, of course. Well. Some did. At first. Michele Bachmann reflected fond visionary hopes of some that the GOP would at last achieve a sort of coolness, as she lapsed into a demented chant, introducing Steele to CPAC with “You be da man! You be da man.”

But then he started impacting the first principle, the prime directive. The Republican Party has a problem. It has accomplished a mathematical anomaly, winning huge in November, but still managing to shrink. It’s largely the tea party effect. The GOP drives out liberals, then moderates, then conservatives who are not extreme enough, then extremists who do not howl at the moon. But the party was to maintain the lead in, as they say, the key demographic. Money flows. And that’s where Steele put a dent.

The “naked lady place scandal” as Rachel Maddow adeptly called it, changed the money raising dynamic. Well publicized visits to sex bondage clubs, and subsequent argument about it, painted political donors as sexually weird and very uncool. Country Club boasts about donating to the GOP became less a status symbol than something to hide. The bottom fell out of the barrel for Republican fund raising. Conservatives still gave, but not to the Republican Party. The GOP Governor’s Association and right wing PAC’s took over. Michael Steele is more than an embarrassment. He is an active participant in the remarkable shrinking party that is now the GOP.

Last night, Steele is reported to have promised supporters in a telephone conference that he will run for re-election as head of the Republican National Committee. Here’s wishing him well in that endeavor. You be da man, Michael Steele! You be da man.

This week the staff of a Democrat, incumbent Congressman Tom Perriello of Virginia, called his Republican opponent a carpetbagger. So the Republican National Campaign Committee got the home addresses of several staffers working for Democrat Perriello.

Republicans were hot to demonstrate that the Democrat was disloyal to his district, hiring workers who lived in other areas. Sometimes any campaign issue will do, and turnabout being fair play, Republicans published the names of half a dozen workers, all living outside the district. One of them was Perriello’s chief of staff. Republicans said the he should fire them all.

It all reminded me of a small town I once did some business in. I made a few friends, but there was a reserve that bordered on iciness from some others. One new friend explained it with a story of local parochialism. He had once voiced a mild disagreement on some minor matter during a group discussion. It was not a sharp rebuke, rather an on-the-other-hand sort of comment. “Oh, that’s right,” said a woman in the group. “You’re not from around here.” He had lived in the community all his life, but she was using her “you” in the plural. She meant that his family had not been multi-generational residents.

So last week, Republicans published the names of those half a dozen staff members. They. Added. Their. Exact. Home. Addresses. As in HOME.

This is not the first experience this Congressman has had with home addresses. Last year, some enterprising Republican published the Congressman’s home address and urged conservatives to “drop by” and pay their respects. Well, it was almost his address. Seems there was a mistake and the address was wrong. It was actually that of the Congressman’s brother. One person who dropped by the brother’s home in the dead of night did not ring the bell, but rather cut the gas line leading to the house.

This sort of address publishing thing has become a pattern. Remember Congressman Mark Foley, who hit the headlines in 2006, after making suggestive advances on young Congressional pages? Conservative bloggers were outraged, but not all of them were angry at the Congressman. One published the names and home addresses of the minors who were the objects of the Congressman’s desires. Seems they were guilty of tattling. Major conservative sites then linked to the article containing the addresses.

The following year a couple of small children in Maryland became living examples of what government assisted health care could do. The little kids had been in a serious car accident. One of them would almost certainly have died of brain injuries had not medical care been available under a government program. Conservatives got angry. They not only published the address of the kids, but included driving directions to their door.

This new approach may seem harsh. But the well being of staff members, the privacy of the young objects of Congressional urges, and the safety of injured little kids must not stand in the way of conservative principles.

It must have been a fearful journey. It was a time in which women were commonly viewed as property, to be given over from father to husband. The young Marie, my grandmother, had been promised in marriage to a man she did not love. So she fled her native Ukraine and came to America. I do not know whether she entered by way of Ellis Island. It was a common port of entry. It seems likely that she would have been among those processed by overworked officials of varying degrees of sympathy for newcomers.

The social networking that went on in those days is unclear to me. She somehow got word that the man to whom she had been promised was on his way to find her, claim her, and take her back to the Ukraine. One story my momma told me illustrates the terror a new land must hold for new immigrants. After being in her new land for a few months, Marie became lost in New York City. She spoke no English. In the country she had fled, authorities were always to be feared, and she did not know what reaction there would be in America to a woman fleeing the man who owned her. She avoided the police. She confronted the confusion of the streets alone.

Her stay in New York was one of watchful waiting, looking for some sign of the man who was searching for his escaped bride. Eventually, she packed up and continued her odyssey, journeying up the Hudson River and then westward, finally settling between Syracuse and Rochester. She met a man, fell in love, and married.

I never knew my grandfather. He died when my mother was a young child, I have the impression her memories of him were vague. He served in the Polish army at some point. My mother was the youngest of several sisters born of that marriage. It was an insular existence. My mother did not speak English until she was old enough to go to school. My grandmother never knew any language than that of her own upbringing. My mother translated.

The arguments for English-only policies would have applied to my grandmother, although people of her origin are not the targets. Anti-immigrant sentiment of today would not have been aimed at her either. Those who argue against citizenship for children born here do not have my mother in mind. But my grandmother’s ethnicity, and that of my mother, was very much an issue in their community when my parents were married. My momma was eventually accepted by his family, but the thin residue of ethnic separateness was always present.

Eastern Europeans, with their strange language, their strange names, and their stranger Catholic religion, were not an easy fit in the community of my birth. Nativism has a long tradition in this country, although the targets shift over time. Today, bigotry is directed against those of Latin descent. It is most distinctive, for me, among those who hate illegal immigration because the undocumented cut ahead, not following the rules. When those same enforcers of immigration etiquette also push to restrict legal immigration, I suspect the niceties of waiting in line are not their real concern.

Michael Medved was once a movie critic with a reputation for stretching pretty far to preach conservative political commentary in his reviews. I saw Million Dollar Baby, directed by Clint Eastwood, on cable. It was a bit of a downer, I thought. I later came across a Michael Medved review that I had missed. It should have contained a spoiler alert. He didn’t like what he saw as a right-to-life violation in the movie, so he gave away the ending. He later explained, “there are competing moral demands that come into the job of a movie critic. We have a moral and fairness obligation to not spoil movies. On the other hand, our primary moral obligation is to tell the truth.”

It’s hard to find Medved’s review on line anymore, so I’m going by memory here. I recall his summary of the theme as having the title character, Hilary Swank, needing to prove her self-worth by boxing. It supported Medved’s attack, though not his giving away the ending. But there was another problem. It lacked the virtue of truth. I remember trying to recall anything in the movie that would suggest such a thing.

And that is a serious drawback to political passion. The temptation to veer away from truth is a powerful one. Lately, Medved has been a frequent victim. Driving to the office a few weeks ago, I listened to an interview with Medved concerning the Islamic Cultural non-Mosque in Manhattan.

The point of the Cultural Center was, in part, to put a thumb in the eye of terrorists. This show of American unity was to be a rebuke to the bigotry of Islamic extremists, a demonstration that American Muslims not only pointed an accusing finger at bin Laden, but were supported by mainstream America. Conservatives and liberals joined in supporting them, until American bigots parroted al Qaeda bigots. Medved chuckled at the controversy. It would be so simple to solve, he said. Just move the center a few more blocks away than the 12 block distance now planned. Opposition would vanish.

Then Medved had another chuckle at the self-contradiction of President Obama, who questioned the wisdom of the planners, but who had originally said, according to Medved, “Opponents of the mosque (sic) want to take away religious freedom.” Medved added “No we don’t.” Strangely, Obama neither questioned the wisdom of planners of the center, nor characterized opponents in any way. Medved was simply not telling the truth.

Medved is sincere in his conservative beliefs. He argues that those who see American slavery as historical evil exaggerate. His reasoning is that slavery was unfortunate, but not that bad. More recently, he says if God voted, the ballot would be for Republicans only. His reasoning there is that conservative evangelists have invested more study in God’s word, so they should know best. They tend to support Republicans, so there you have it. Liberals sympathize with the poor while biblical law supports equal treatment of both.

Biblical scholars, friends as they are of Michael Medved, may forever debate the unusual ethic that conservative politics demands. The Ten Commandments are important and people should hold to them. Except the one about false witness. It’s always okay to lie in service to the Lord.

Is it possible for a political party to gain stunning victories while spinning toward death? Ruy Teixeira provides an answer. He is a Senior Fellow with two think tanks and does substantial work at others. He helped direct a huge project that was jointly sponsored by conservatives and liberals (pdf). This is the very beginning of Teixeira’s summary:

The tectonic plates of American politics are shifting. A powerful concatenation of demographic forces is transforming the American electorate and reshaping both major political parties. And, as demographic trends continue, this transformation and reshaping will deepen. The Democratic Party will become even more dominated by the emerging constituencies that gave Barack Obama his historic 2008 victory, while the Republican Party will be forced to move toward the center to compete for these constituencies. As a result, modern conservatism is likely to lose its dominant place in the GOP.

This won’t help Democrats much this year. Conservative rage is secondary. The economy is paramount, and Senate procedures, by which Republicans try to break the recovery, are an arcane mystery to most. The GOP kills the recovery and voters see a Democratic majority. Who you gonna blame?

Economic ruin is not a permanent condition. As the homeless are housed, working people go back to work, and a sense of rationality prevails, the party that has sponsored that rationality will also prevail. The chances are the recovery will not affect most people by election time this year. Republicans should retake both houses.

One slender reed of hope remains for Democrats in 2010, and certain doom awaits the GOP after 2010. That slim hope and that doom stem from a flaw in Teixeira’s analysis. Republicans will not be forced to move toward the center. In fact, the GOP will be forced to move toward even more extremism. Teixeira, and most analysts, regard the lemming-like ideological march of the GOP to be a strategic decision. In fact, it is a sociological phenomenon. As the party becomes more conservative, extremists move to purge those who are insufficiently extreme. As the impure leave, the purity of surviving conservatives drives the party more to the right. The standard shifts, and even more are considered not extreme enough. The cycle ends in singularity.

Epistemic closure is the tendency of conservatives to close off reality. It was first coined by conservative Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute. Even Sanchez does not name the real culprit. Technology offers conservatives a respite from actual events. If the cold bright light of reality is bothersome, a new light switch is now available, provided by the internet and cable TV.

The GOP will be murdered by technology. The home computer done it.

The importance of an individual in the White House can be roughly measured by the length of the title. The relationship is inverse. Less means more.

Barack Obama is President.
Rahm Emanuel is Chief of Staff.
Valarie Jarrett and David Axelrod are Senior Advisors.

Kevin Jennings is Assistant Deputy Secretary at the Department of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools. A long way down the line. But Jennings is making headlines. Conservative Christians charge him with abetting statutory rape. At issue is a counseling session he had as a teacher with a gay student. The youngster acknowledged sexual contact with a man he had met the night before at a bus stop.

Did Jennings have a legal obligation to report the incident? A teacher/student relationship is not legally protected as would be a lawyer’s relationship with a client, or a member of the clergy with one of the flock. But most of us want kids to feel free to talk with teachers in confidence, with some exceptions.

Criminal intent, physical violence, and child abuse are among the exceptions. Statutory rape is a form of child abuse, and has to be reported. Sex is rape whenever it is not consensual. Consent can’t be given by a child. That is why defending Roman Polanski, who fled the country to avoid sentencing after conviction for statutory rape, is a sign of Hollywood corruption. A teacher is obligated to report statutory rape.

In 2006, it became obvious that Congressman Mark Foley was making sexual advances to Congressional Pages, GOP leaders left him alone. The cover up left Foley in charge of a committee safeguarding children. After it all exploded, Foley did not face charges in the District of Columbia. That is because the age of consent in DC is 16, the age of the boys he hit on. Conservative Christians at the time defended his “harmless pranks.” Angry conservatives published the names and addresses of the boys who had “tattled.” But Republicans were bounced from the Congressional majority.

In Jennings’ case, the accusations have turned out to be bogus. The boy was 16, the age of consent in Massachusetts. As with Foley, the adult was legally untouchable. It appears he was also unreachable, having been an anonymous one night stand. Jennings was concerned that the boy had not used a condom. The despondent boy told him his life was not worth saving. Jennings objected and they argued. The young fellow left a bit happier.

Conservative Christians, who believe they possess an exemption from the 9th Commandment, have falsely accused Jennings, changing the age from 16 to 15. They argue that the boy should have been outed. But I like to think the youngster’s life may have been affected in a more wholesome way.

He had encountered a teacher who actually thought he was worth saving.

This past weekend Steve Benen, who blogs for the Washington Monthly, offered a rundown of conservative Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs.

Benen wants to give credit where due and decided it was due in Johnson’s derision of a few documented cases of conservative dementia. It is worth noting, as Benen does, that Johnson has been getting some heat from conservatives for turning away from the sort of thing that is becoming right wing orthodoxy. He approves of Johnson’s call to reject extremism, and hopes others follow Johnson’s sensible lead. He quotes Johnson:

This turn toward the extreme right on the part of Fox News is troubling, and will achieve nothing in the long run except further marginalization of the GOP — unless people start behaving like adults instead of angry kids throwing tantrums and ranting about conspiracies and revolution.

Benen is an unfailingly thoughtful writer, and Johnson does deserve credit for courage in the face of withering unreasoning from fellow conservatives. But the analysis offered by both is misguided.

The Republican Party is not in a downward spiral because of evil or stupid leaders. There are some demonstrably undesirable characters, to be sure. Some can be shown to possess less than stellar intellect. But those things are effects, not causes.

The GOP is the victim of a sociological phenomenon. Today’s technology was not around during those times when Democrats went around the bend. In those days, reality had a way of imposing itself. The loss of an election or two had an astonishingly sobering effect. Re-examination of ideas was the inevitable outcome of electoral waterboarding. This is not happening today.

Technology offers a wider spread of choice than ever before. Conservatives are clustering around those outlets that tell them what they want to hear. The country is really with them. “They don’t surround us, advises Glenn Beck. “We surround them.” If it wasn’t Beck it would be someone else.

The drumbeat is endless. Conservatism has not failed, true believers are told. It cannot fail. It can only be failed. The party drifts rightward, and loses moderates. This causes a further rightward drift, and the loss of more moderates. The cycle is hard to stop.

The drumbeat fuels the cycle, but it is not the cause. It is sought out by those who are addicted to the comfortable message. The comfort sought by the base is at the base of the problem.

The message is the massage.

Michael Steele knows the Republican Party is fighting for more than the next election. They are battling for the loyalty of tomorrow’s voters, the kids who will come to the ballot box a decade or more from now.

He is right about that. Events have forced a re-evaluation of many of the perceived failures of the administration of Jimmy Carter. He was a stronger and more prescient executive than was commonly seen by even most of us who voted for him as he lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980. But many of those who were coming to even the dimmest political awareness in the 1970s grew up to be reliable Republicans. They were taught early on to associate Democrats with economic flubbery and failure in international security.

Today’s children, seeing parents recover from President Bush, are likely to grow up as Democrats. So Steele wants to recast the Republican image to achieve greater appeal in what he calls “urban-suburban hip-hop settings”. His self-conscious use of terms unfamiliar to many older adults has provoked some comment. He is against “bling bling” in stimulus efforts. He offers “some slum love out to my buddy,” Bobby Jindal, who he says “is doing a friggin’ awesome job in his state.”

I dimly recall a sitcom I saw in my nearly forgotten youth. The title and plot escape me, but the scene was one of a middle class suburban professional in a casual sweater arguing outside of his comfortable house with a couple of hipsters. This was in pre-hippie days. As they reject his uncool values, he verbally pushes back. “Hey, I’m with it,” he protests. “I’m hep.”

Michelle Bachman, hosting part of the recent CPAC conservative fest, got into the spirit of the effort to appeal to America’s future voters. “Michael Steele, you be da man!” She then repeated, for emphasis, “You be da man!”

The GOP is rapidly becoming a regional party of racially resentful white men. A few Republican office holders seem to want to stop the downward spiral with actual rethinking of values and worldview. But they are becoming more afraid of their own volatile base than of the general electorate. If the message must stay the same, what is left?

Steele gambles that wrapping the grand old message in a hipper, cooler, younger language will do the trick. Sometimes a conservative associate becomes daring enough to join in with what fringe whites imagine black folks to be. A sort of minstrel show without, thankfully, blackface.

Will young kids grow up remembering a sincere effort to communicate in language they understand? Maybe. I suspect the image they carry will be an out of tune attempt to be cool, combined with intolerance and ignorance.

I’m hep. Hear me rap. Farm out! Right arm! Outta State! You be da man!

Your very cool turn.

In the made for television movie about the events leading to 9/11 that played over a year ago on ABC, much of the drama had to do with failure to stop Osama bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks. You can see the frustration of the military people with the terrorist mastermind in their sights, as they wait for permission from Washington to pull the trigger. You can see the uncertainty as a sweaty Clinton bureaucrat hesitates, finally letting the opportunity go by. As the television drama demonstrates, Osama lived and so thousands died on American soil. It happened almost exactly that way.

Almost. Except it was not Clinton’s people who backed down from attacking bin Laden. It was the Bush administration. ABC had turned research for the drama over to a conservative ideologue who made the conscious decision to turn history on its head. Bill Clinton was shown as weak and clueless. President Bush was shown as unflinchingly heroic.

With the harsh memory of that administration not even beginning to fade into merciful obscurity, the distortions of loyalists begin. Viral emails, occasional television commentary, radio and print, carry a repetition of the familiar tale. President Clinton was weak, indecisive, letting bin Laden go, and leaving President Bush to face the consequence of near criminal negligence.

In fact, President Clinton was mocked during his term by Republicans who thought his focus on terrorism was obsessive. In an article published almost exactly two months before the 9/11 attacks, David Keane, head of the Conservative Union, pointed to specific anti-terrorism activities by the Clinton administration. He regarded everything from financial tracking to cut off funds to terrorists, to efforts within the United States to find and stop terrorism before it happens as unjustified infringements. He praised Republican statements opposing anti-terrorist actions, and urged Republicans to make these useless activities a major campaign issue in 2002 and beyond. President Clinton more than tripled funding for fighting terrorism. He multiplied the number of intelligence agents assigned to stopping terrorism by similar proportions, to 357 percent of what had been.

He and his people begged the new Bush administration to continue and expand those efforts. Their pleas were laughed away, with tragic results. Anti-terrorist budgets were slashed, agents reassigned to anti-porn projects, CIA warnings derided.

I don’t blame President Bush for disregarding the warnings, and discontinuing efforts by the Clinton administration against terrorism. He did not know, did not suspect what would happen. The Bush administration regarded Clinton as a little crazed on the topic of terrorism.

I do object to the continuing efforts of some sweaty palmed conservatives for whom the truth is just not good enough.

This year, as every year, we celebrate the bravery of those founders who quite likely would have been executed had their Declaration of Independence not prevailed in battle. It is noteworthy that that theirs was not the only independence declared during those uncertain days.

Of General Washington’s 100 or so slaves, 17 stole into the night in search of freedom. Thomas Jefferson, who unsuccessfully sought to retain a condemnation of slavery in the American Declaration, lost 23 of the 200 slaves he owned. They escaped slavery and fled their celebrated owners.

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