In comments the other day, someone asked why it is I spent so much time and energy in frontal assaults on wingers and wingnuttery. And as I’ve said before, it’s because I considered them to be dangerous - extraordinarily detrimental to the country in terms of how they governed, and how they poison the discourse. And I’ve been more than happy to get down into the mud. Some say, well, that makes you as bad as them. I say - it’s the only language they understand, and necessary, if we are to get past this historical period marred by disastrous right-wing policy and divisive right-wing rhetoric.

Which leads to this: Via Josh Marshall, Neil Gabler writes in the LA Times about what he calls the right’s “McCarthy gene.” Which is to say that while we often invoke Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign as the beginning of the modern conservative movement, Gabler thinks the style goes back even further than that:

McCarthyism, on the other hand, which could be deployed by anyone, thrived. McCarthyism was how Republicans won. George H.W. Bush used it to get himself elected, terrifying voters with Willie Horton. And his son, under the tutelage of strategist Karl Rove, not only got himself reelected by convincing voters that John Kerry was a coward and a liar and would hand the nation over to terrorists, which was pure McCarthyism, he governed by rousing McCarthyite resentments among his base.

Republicans continue to push the idea that this is a center-right country and that Americans have swooned for GOP anti-government posturing all these years, but the real electoral bait has been anger, recrimination and scapegoating. That’s why John McCain kept describing Barack Obama as some sort of alien and why Palin, taking a page right out of the McCarthy playbook, kept pushing Obama’s relationship with onetime radical William Ayers.

And that is also why the Republican Party, despite the recent failure of McCarthyism, is likely to keep moving rightward, appeasing its more extreme elements and stoking their grievances for some time to come. There may be assorted intellectuals and ideologues in the party, maybe even a few centrists, but there is no longer an intellectual or even ideological wing. The party belongs to McCarthy and his heirs — Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Palin. It’s in the genes.

In the end, McCarthyism is not beaten by saying “At long last, sir, have you no sense of decency,” and hoping the American public finally understands. The public won’t, as it hasn’t. But McCarthy’s heirs can be beaten at their own game. Finally, they have been.

This one’s important because conservatives have been trying to tell us that the mortgage crisis was caused by the evil gub’mint forcing banks to lend to minorities:

The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.

The great lie being perpetrated by the right is that the banks - the wonderful, wonderful banks! - didn’t want to lend to untrustworthy minorities. No, they were forced to do so by Big Gub’mint.

False. The banks thought these risky mortgages were a gold mine. And they were - for a while.

Bowing to aggressive lobbying — along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK — regulators delayed action for nearly one year. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone and the meltdown was under way.

“These mortgages have been considered more safe and sound for portfolio lenders than many fixed rate mortgages,” David Schneider, home loan president of Washington Mutual, told federal regulators in early 2006. Two years later, WaMu became the largest bank failure in U.S. history.

The general rule of thumb with YouTube seems to be that if you wait long enough, everything will show up.

This would be Phil Seymour, with a cover of a Bobby Fuller Four tune. Doesn’t get much more obscure than that. I come to all this stuff via various power pop compilations I’ve bought over the years, including this one, with Seymour as part of the Dwight Twilley Band’s “I’m On Fire,” and here, with what may be one of the best guitar-pop tunes of the skinny tie era, “Baby It’s You” (hear it here, on his posthumous MySpace page). Would love to do that one in a band sometime, if I could find someone who could sing those kind of harmonies.

This tune is now the theme song for some Spray-N-Wash sort of product, and the boy saw the commercial the other night and has been singing it ever since. It’s a “rockin’ tune,” he says. And it is! Except I never liked it as much as this one or this one.

Neil Giraldo is a helluva guitarist, tho.

Yeah, well, not with a guy honking lugars into the gutter.

This would be XTC, from Urgh! A Music War, a 1981 British music documentary that, for some reason, I was unaware existed until last weekend.

Been following the story about the worker trampled to death at the Long Island Wal-Mart, but can’t say I’m either surprised or overly horrified for it.

What could be more quintessentially American than having someone trampled to death at Wal-Mart on Black Friday?

That’s who we are; this is who we’ve become. People stepping over the guy’s lifeless body SO WE CAN GET TO THE LOW LOW PRICES!!! People complaining when management shut down the store because, you know, somebody died.

Peter S. Goodman in the New York Times has a column today in which he says this:

It was a tragedy, yet it did not feel like an accident. All those people were there, lined up in the cold and darkness, because of sophisticated marketing forces that have produced this day now called Black Friday. They were engaging in early-morning shopping as contact sport. American business has long excelled at creating a sense of shortage amid abundance, an anxiety that one must act now or miss out.

Oh, nonsense.

Do the people who trampled this man to death bear no resposibility for their own frenzy? What type of society produces people who step over a body in order to get the shopping done?

This is a society that has elevated the shopping, the things that might be gained via the shopping, over all else.

This event is a perfect bookend to an era that’s now coming to a close. An era that, I desperately hope, we’ll one day look back on and wonder what in God’s name this country could have been thinking.

Walked down North Queen Street this afternoon to the jewlers shop to see if the $160 watch can be fixed for less than $160. Answer: No.

On the way back, passed a pale, reedy guy who looked to be about four tokes over the line. Then heard some sort of snorting; turned around to see him standing on the curb, holding a finger to his right nostril, and blowing his left nostril into the street. No tissue; just chunks into the gutter. Right in front of Cross Keys Coffee & Tea.

It strikes me that as we spend millions of dollars to rejuvenate the city, and argue over whether this is a good idea or not, it’s scenes like this one on North Queen which do more to run down this city than anything else you could name.

One of the things that’s been sort of perplexing in the post-election environment is the question: What now? [Read more →]

Because, see, if a store doesn’t actually use the word “Christmas” then the store hates Christmas and is trying to destroy Christmas, and good red-blooded God-fearing American loons shouldn’t shop there.

According to Dr. James Dobson:

Eight firms caved immediately: Best Buy, Cabela’s, Kohl’s, Lowe’s, Nordstrom, Pier 1, Toys R Us and Wal-Mart.

The Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy replied to the FOF missive, but, the group soberly reports, “did not convey a clear commitment to use the term ‘Christmas.’ Rather, they communicated their intent to approach their marketing in broad and diverse terms.”

Added FOF, “We’ll have to observe and see if what they publish avoids an insulting marginalization of Christmas.”

See??? To acknowledge that not all the people shopping at your store are Christians is “an insulting marginalization of Christmas!”

Dobson and his ilk aren’t interested in “saving” Christmas at all. What they are interested in doing is re-establishing the cultural primacy of their religious beliefs. They don’t care that America is a pluralistic nation; their faith - and thus them - must take precedence, officially and always.

Hm. Sounds like even the head honchos at his own network can’t stand Bill O’Reilly:

“It is not just Murdoch (and everybody else at News Corp.’s highest levels) who absolutely despises Bill O’Reilly, the bullying, mean-spirited, and hugely successful evening commentator,” Wolff wrote, “but [Fox News chief executive] Roger Ailes himself who loathes him. Success, however, has cemented everyone to each other.”

“The embarrassment can no longer be missed,” Wolff wrote, in another section of the book. “He mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it. He barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not that he would give Fox up—because the money is the money; success trumps all—in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.”

Calderone notes that Murdoch bioagrapher Michael Wolff says Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal in the first place was because he didn’t want to be tethered to “the belligerent, the vulgar, the loud, the menacing, the unsubtle” Fox News (that’s a pretty good definition of wingers in general, not just the stars on their network), and instead is pining for “the better-heeled, the more magnanimous, the further nuanced.”

So even Fox News’s owner is disenchanted.

But who will tell the viewers?

Toys ”R Us this morning was a madhouse, though I’ve no idea whether it was LESS of a madhouse than last year, or more. I’d gone because they had one of the big Star Wars Lego items for half off, usually $100, now $50. Since we live for Star Wars Lego, or the boy does anyway, we made the trip; but the item was sold out by the time I arrived, and I was glad. Didn’t have to stand in the internimable lines; could leave immediately via Farmingdale Road as far away from the Harrisburg Pike/Park City nightmare as possible.

One thing about the shopping this Black Friday - the sale prices are unbelievable. Spent part of yesterday going through the circulars, and I was astounded. This is how you get nervous shoppers in your store during tough times.

But I continue to be troubled by stories like this one, in today’s Era. Nothing wrong with the story or the writer or the approach, similar stories are likely being written in most newspapers across America today. Will consumers buy enough to keep merchants afloat? Sales are “brisk and robust” - but are they brisk and robust enough?

But enough for what?

Our current economic crisis is perplexingly complex in so many ways. But at the heart of it lies a simple, easy-to-understand truth. In order for things to get back to “normal,” the way they were, consumers need to start spending at the same rate - or higher! - than they did last year, or the year before.

The problem is, there’s only two ways that can happen. Either people have to be, or at least feel, wealthier than they are now.

Or they have to spend beyond their means.

The main reason the economy hummed along for much of the 2000s was the housing bubble. Because wages, in general, only kept pace with inflation. It wasn’t that people were becoming wealthier in terms of their weekly pay, though some of course were. Rather,  the value of their investments, particularly their homes, was rising. This is what made them “wealthier,” though unless you were actually selling your home, all that extra “wealth” existed mostly on paper, and in your head.

No matter. We took out home equity loans and ran up the credit card bills with this idea that, I don’t know, if it all went south we could sell the house and bank the difference and everything would be OK.

Then the housing bubble deflated. And that was that.

And unless or until we get a new asset bubble - what are we supposed to do? The average American is less “wealthy” - i.e. poorer - than last year. So we’re supposed to just keep on keeping on?

Yes.

If you spent $1,000 on gifts last year, our economic system needs you to spend that much on gifts this year; ideally more.

But is it wise for you to do that?

But most merchants were optimistic that they had the right stuff to persuade shoppers to spend as usual, despite the deteriorating economy.

To spend as usual despite the deteriorating economy is damned irresponsible. And there’s our great rub.

To save the economy, you have to be irresponsible. You have to engage in economically risky behavior.

And here’s the question we’ll never ask:

Does an economy based on this deserve to be saved?

Via Steve Benen, Obama is asked at a press conference: Do you have any shopping advice for nervous consumers?”

Look, I think families understandably are nervous and concerned about their economic situation. We’ve seen job loss. We’ve seen flatlining wages and incomes. The economic statistics have been bad, and people are watching television and understandably are nervous about their future.

There is no doubt that during tough economic times family budgets are going to be pinched. I think it is important for the American people, though, to have confidence that we’ve gone through recessions before, we’ve gone through difficult times before, that my administration intends to get this economy back on track, that we are going to create 2.5 million jobs over the next two years, that our future is bright if we make good decisions.

And what we don’t want to do is get caught up in a spiral where people pull back from the economy, businesses then pull back, jobs are reduced and we get into a downward spiral.

What we want to do is to be sober, to be clear, to recognize that we’ve got some real adjustments that have to be made. That’s true in individual businesses, it’s true in terms of individual family budgets, it’s also true for the economy as a whole.

But we continue to have the best workers in the world, we continue to have the most innovation in the world, we continue to be in possession of extraordinary resources, that if we harness properly will get this economy moving over the next couple of years, but also over the next two decades or three decades.

So people should — should understand that help is on the way. And as they think about this Thanksgiving shopping weekend, and as they think about the Christmas season that is coming up, I hope that everybody understands that — that we are going to be able to get through these difficult times, but we’re just going to have to make some good choices.

As Benen notes:

In other words, shop responsibly. Sounds reasonable enough.

Week’s vid is up.

Dr. James Dobson responds to Kathleen Parker - well, he had to, didn’t he?

So, Kathleen Parker has determined that getting rid of social conservatives and shelving the values they fight for is the solution to what ails the Republican Party (“Giving Up on God,” Nov. 19). Isn’t that a little like Benedict Arnold handing George Washington a battle plan to win the Revolution?

Whatever she once was, Ms. Parker is certainly not a conservative anymore, having apparently realized it’s a lot easier to be popular among your journalistic peers when your keyboard tilts to the left.

Food fight!

But you gotta love Dobson’s logic here. Anyone who disagrees with me = evil liberal.

The accuracy of her numbers isn’t the point, anyway — it’s the notion that, because there are people of many faiths in the United States, those of the Christian faith must not think or act like Christians when engaging the public square. That is similar to something then-Sen. Obama said a couple of years ago, arguing in a speech before a gathering of liberal Christians that “democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.”

“It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason,” he added. “I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.”

That is, as my theologian friend Al Mohler called it, “secularism with a smile” — offered in the form of an invitation for believers to show up, but then only to be allowed to make arguments that are not based in their deepest beliefs.

No, that’s not what it is at all. It’s to say that believers can show up and make their arguments - but that their arguments aren’t necessarily going to carry any more weight than anyone else’s arguments.

That’s the way it works in a pluralistic Democracy; everybody gets a seat at the table, no one’s argument is entitled to carry the day. We all have to learn compromise.

Conservative Christians cop the attitude that they will not compromise because there can be no compromise on what God wants and doesn’t want. Fine for them to believe that; but I’m not bound by their beliefs. Their proposals absolutely must be subject to argument - and if they can’t handle that, then they really do need to get out of the arena. Because that’s just the way it works.

Had half an eye on this for a few months, but sounds as if it’s becoming more serious:

The Northeast’s dwindling cast of Senate Republicans has Democrats circling Arlen Specter’s seat in Pennsylvania, convinced the party is well-positioned to make a competitive race out of the 2010 election.

Leading the pack of prospects — at least in celebrity — is Chris Matthews, the MSNBC “Hardball” host and a former Capitol Hill Democratic staffer. The Philadelphia native has been toying with a run for months, and this week he sat down with state Democrats to discuss the prospect of taking on the five-term GOP senator.

Matthews is a former speechwriter for President Carter and was an aide to Tip O’Neill, so it ain’t like he’s any stranger to the game itself, rather than merely commenting on it.

This month’s Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan political newsletter that handicaps races, cast Specter as among the four most vulnerable senators of the 35 up for reelection in two years. “He is increasingly isolated from his party as a Republican in a Northeastern sea of blue,” said Hershey, Pa.-based pollster Michael Young.

I don’t know - most of Pennsylvania remains pretty red, but as we saw here in what was once one of the reddest counties - that’s changing.

Interesting. Bad economy seems to be keeping people close to home this holiday:

Travelers breezed through airport terminals Wednesday and drivers cruised open roads, the effects of a sour economy blamed for keeping people closer to home at the start of the annual Thanksgiving rush.

Even though gas prices fell and airlines offered last-minute deals, many Americans appeared to be skipping trips this year. San Francisco resident Sharon McKellar called the Miami airport “shockingly quiet” after flying in overnight to visit family.

At Boston’s Logan International Airport, Alicia Kelly, 47, traveling with her husband and two children to Miami to spend the holidays with her family, said it was the lightest Thanksgiving travel she’s ever seen. “We have waited in no lines so far,” she said.

That’s the kind of thing that makes me more likely to travel. One thing I can’t stand - crowds/lines. Which is why I would never, ever go shopping on Black Friday, and think the people who wait in line for the stores to open at midnight are probably clinincally insane. Five minutes of that, I would be.

Here’s one in light of the drunken driving series we’ve been running, in which a druken driver runs over… himself.

I really shouldn’t read Paul Farrell.  But it’s like the car wreck on the side of the road - however horrifying, you just gotta look.

Thomas Friedman shovels out blame for the financial meltdown, and uses a front-end loader:

So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made a fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so.

Later, talking about Steve Eisman, a hedge fund investor who saw the sub-prime debacle coming, he writes this:

Eisman knew that subprime lenders could be disreputable. “What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism… ‘We always asked the same question,’ says Eisman. ‘Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.’ He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S.& P. couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. ‘They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,’ Eisman says.”

Greed or stupidity or intentional stupidity brough on by greed.

Lame-duck Bush last week was reduced to telling the world that capitalism was strong, none of this was capitalism’s fault!

Dude, all of this is capitalism’s fault.

Because unless you have a kind of capitalism where people specifically choose social responsibility over personal reward - no no, while I might make Big Bucks off this risky mortgage, it would be irresponsible of me to push you into it - then the thinking Friedman describes is an inherent flaw in the system.

Would you toe the line of civic responsibility - or would you, also, be grabbing for the biggest pile of dollars you could get?

Right, right, we’re all altruists when we’re not actually in the situation. None of this is to excuse anything that went on at Citigroup or Washington Mutual or anything else. But we can rail against greed, greed, GREED! all we want; until we realize that we have a system based entirely upon greed, in which certain ideological elements have been foursquare opposed to governmental firewalls that might protect aginast the excesses of greed, then greed is what you get. This is what you get. And now we’re getting it - good and hard.

Hm. Via Sullivan, an extremely provacative interview with gay Catholic Mexican-American (!) author Richard Rodriguez on California’s Proposition 8, and the hypocrisy he sees behind what he terms a ”deliberate civic intrusion” by the churches. Exerpts:

American families are under a great deal of stress. The divorce rate isn’t declining, it’s increasing. And the majority of American women are now living alone. We are raising children in America without fathers. I think of Michael Phelps at the Olympics with his mother in the stands. His father was completely absent. He was negligible; no one refers to him, no one noticed his absence.

The possibility that a whole new generation of American males is being raised by women without men is very challenging for the churches. I think they want to reassert some sort of male authority over the order of things. I think the pro-Proposition 8 movement was really galvanized by an insecurity that churches are feeling now with the rise of women….

<snip>

But the real challenge to the family right now is male irresponsibility and misbehavior toward women. If the Hispanic Catholic and evangelical churches really wanted to protect the family, they should address the issue of wife beating in Hispanic families and the misbehaviors of the father against the mother. But no, they go after gay marriage. It doesn’t take any brilliance to notice that this is hypocrisy of such magnitude that you blame the gay couple living next door for the fact that you’ve just beaten your wife….

<snip>

Then there is the Roman Catholic Church, my own church, which has just come off this extraordinary season of sexual scandal and misbehavior in the rectory against children. The church is barely out of the court and it’s trying to assume the role of governor of sexual behavior, having just proved to America its inability to govern its own sexual behavior.

Look at the evangelicals. In their insistence that people be born again, they know Americans are broken. In their circus-tent suburban churches, you find 10,000 people on a Sunday morning. You find people who have been divorced, people who have had drug experiences, people who have been in jail. These churches touch upon a dream that people can put our lives back together again.

Now these churches are going after homosexuals as a way of insisting on their own propriety. They are insisting that they have a role to play in the general society as moral guardians, when what we have seen in the recent past is just the opposite. I mean, it’s one thing for the churches to insist on their right to define the sacrament of marriage for their own members. But it’s quite another for them to insist that they have a right to define the relationships of people outside their communities. That’s really what’s most troubling about Proposition 8. It was a deliberate civic intrusion by the churches.