On Thursday, Peggy Noonan wrote a column where she said that the IRS was going after individuals because they were conservatives. Her evidence? She’s heard of four different conservatives who were audited last year. I’m serious! That’s her claim. But it is even sillier than that. Take for example, this gem of deep thinking, “The Journal’s Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who’d donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors.” Wow. The election was last year. The donation would have had to have been in late 2011 or early 2012. I doubt very seriously that the IRS would even have noticed his campaign contribution by last June.

Need more evidence? Franklin Graham “believes” his father Billy was targeted. I guess it’s a faith thing. And a conservative freelance writer who earns a “meager” living got audited. With the almost 1.5 million IRS audits last year, what are the odds that these three random people would be audited? I can tell you one thing, Noonan knows this isn’t just chance! “It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake.” Oh boy! I think Noonan has been riding the Crazy Train for too long and her brain has started to rattle apart.

Nate Silver has an excellent statistical analysis that shows just how insane Noonan is being. In fact, it even comes with a wonderfully understated sarcastic title, New Audit Allegations Show Flawed Statistical Thinking. For example, 12% of all people who made more than a million dollars last year were audited. So if Idaho businessman Frank Vandersloot has gone without an audit for 30 years, he’s damned lucky. The same undoubtedly applies to Billy Graham. He has a net worth of about $25 million. Son Franklin makes over a million per year. Rich people get audited, especially because they employ a large army of lawyers and accountants to avoid paying their taxes.

As for that poor freelance writer, well, the IRS is much more likely to audit people who make a lot less than normal. Regardless, people get audited. And Nate Silver provided this nice little chart to show who is really getting audited:

The main point of this is that Obama voters were audited at a rate 12 percentage points higher than Romney voters. Noonan’s column is entirely typical of this weird, and totally unjustified, belief among conservatives that they are some kind of persecuted minority. Just look at the voting habits of Romney and Obama voters: the more money they have, the more likely they are to vote conservative. This also means that the more conservative you are, on average, the richer you are. I know on the Crazy Train, everyone thinks that “elite” means college professors who make $50,000 per year. But in the real world, it’s the rich who actually have power. Not only is Obama not oppressing these people; no one is oppressing them.

Please Peggy Noonan! Please disembark the Crazy Train!

This morning, Jonathan Chait reported, The Strange Creation of the Obama Scandals. And Glenn Greenward reported, The Major Sea Change in Media Discussions of Obama and Civil Liberties. Indeed, Obama does seem to be experiencing a perfect storm of bad sandal-like news. And most of the coverage of it is horrible.

It isn’t as though all of these controversies don’t tell us a whole lot about modern America. It is just that what they tell us is not playing much of a role in the coverage. Instead of looking at what is wrong with how this country is run, we get stories straight out of bad TV westerns. Obama wearing a black cowboy hat moseys into town and grabs an innocent woman. Suddenly, Rand Paul wearing a white cowboy hat rushes out into the street. “Take your hands off her!” Paul yells at him. And on and on. There’s a bad guy in town and that bad guy is the president who is responsible for everything.

You all know me: I’m not a big fan of the president’s. But he is not the bad guy in all of this. He certainly is one of the bad guys in an evil system that proudly rewards villainy. But he doesn’t stand out in what is really going on and this is most definitely not a story of good versus evil.

Consider scandal number one: Benghazi. There is an important issue here. People in our foreign embassies should not be murdered. Were their problems with that particular embassy or our embassies generally? I’d like to know. I’m sure the American people would like to know. But that’s not what the scandal is all about. It is about how the administration talked about the attack on the Sunday news shows after it happened.

Mostly, this all stayed in the right wing media rabbit hole. Until last Friday when ABC reported on email messages that said that the talking points of Susan Rice were changed many times by the White House. Again, even if this were true, it would hardly be important. But it turned out, that it wasn’t true. On Tuesday, CNN reported that ABC got it wrong. It turned out that the Friday report was not based on email, but rather upon what were surely Republican staffers’ summaries. Once the actual email messages were seen: no story.

That brings us to scandal number two: IRS targeting of conservative groups. Ever since Watergate, there has been a law that stops the president from even communicating with the IRS. Why? To stop the president from doing what conservatives are implying he did: use the IRS to go after his enemies. But there is absolutely, positively no reporting that even hints at this sort of thing going on. So what happened? It seems some low-level staff members were trying to deal with the huge increase in 501(c)(4) applications. These were overwhelmingly from conservative groups. And it isn’t like they didn’t also go after liberal groups. They not only went after them, they denied them. Norm Scheiber puts it brilliantly:

But there is a real issue here. Why are all of these political groups (on the left but primarily on the right) being allowed to pretend that they are do-gooder social groups when they are just the newest kind of political action committees? Again, this is not the focus of the story. Instead it is that evil IRS (probably controlled by that evil Obama) going after all their enemies.

And finally, scandal number three: the Justice Department looking at the phone records of the Associated Press. This one has begun to bug me the most. I am one very small voice of a relatively limited group of leftists and libertarians who have been screaming about this for years. And now the press is interested in it because they think they might be able to tie it to the president? This is pathetic! There is nothing particularly appalling about this revelation. It may turn out to be completely legal. Because Obama (just like every president before him) has pushed these surveillance laws further and further. After the Washington Post said this scandal was calling into question Obama’s status as a civil libertarian, Glenn Greedwald wrote, “You don’t say! The Washington Post‘s breaking news here is only about four years late.”

There are three important questions: (1) are our embassies safe; (2) are our tax laws being taken advantage of by political groups; and (3) what are we going to do about our ever degrading civil liberties? But the mainstream press isn’t interested in these questions. Instead, they are like that dog in Up: “Scandal?!”

Afterword

Fourth Estate my ass:

I laugh pretty easily, but I very rarely guffaw. But I did today when I read the following, “In Florida, the GOP’s state director of Hispanic outreach, Pablo Pantoja, has resigned his position, left the Republican Party, and changed his party identification to ‘Democrat.'” I’m not quite sure why I found it so funny. I guess it is the extreme nature of changing party affiliation. It is not surprising that someone working for GOP outreach to Latinos would quit in disgust. But to be so disgusted he changes party? That’s funny!

It also goes along with what I’ve been saying for months: immigration reform is necessary but not sufficient for the Republicans. Passing an immigration law (that is primarily a giveaway to large corporations anyway) is not going to do much to repair relations when the Republican Party is not prepared to do anything else.

The Florida Nation has published a letter from Pantoja in which he explains why he has decided to change parties. Basically, it all comes down to his feeling that the party is based upon racial intolerance. In particular, the Jason Richwine controversy, where it turned out that the researcher at the Heritage Foundation had some The Bell Curve like ideas of Latino intelligence. Pantoja noted that Heritage distanced itself from Richwine, but that in general, the conservative reaction has been a collective yawn. “Other immigration-related research is still padded with the same racist and eugenics-based innuendo.”

I’m glad that Pantoja has realized what the party he worked for was all about. However, I can’t but wonder how it took him this long. This is, after all, the party of the Southern Strategy. The party of Willie Horton. The party of “reverse” racism, self-deportation, and Macaca. It is also the party of The Bell Curve and the argument that minorities are poor not because of sociohistorical reasons but because they are stupid. But Pantoja is young, and I’m afraid that inside the conservative bubble, much of this information about the true nature of the Republican Party is filtered out.

What I find strange about all of this is why more Republicans don’t move over to the Democratic Party. As it is, the Democratic Party is no less conservative than the Republicans were in, say, 1970. In fact, it might be more conservative. So what is it that stops conservatives from embracing the Democrats? I think there is a clue from Pablo Pantoja: he was in the military. And despite Democrats being excessively pro-military and highly belligerent in foreign policy, people still think the Republicans are the pro-military party. (How they can think that when the Republicans so casually march them into war, I’m not clear.) I think there is a strong tendency to believe that “real” men vote Republican. But hopefully Pantoja’s realization is a sign that even these fundamental forces are giving way to all the bad things that the Republican Party does and stands for.

When I was a kid, I loved the show Hogan’s Heroes. What’s not to love? In the middle of an unpopular war, we got comedy about the most noble war in our history. Plus: zany Nazis! What I didn’t understand at the time were all the politics. Some of this was quite good. The lovable Sergeant Schultz, for example, was said to be a Social Democrat. He was an example of the good German stuck living under the rule of the Nazis. But not all the politics in the show were so benign.

In particular, Hogan’s Heroes is very much part of American Cold War propaganda. The most obvious example of this is the fact there there is no soviet POW. This wasn’t true of the pilot episode, but even still, the character was old and primarily a tailor, a role that was easily integrated into Newkirk. So the final cast is three American, and one each of French and British who were both of lower rank than all the Americans. And the only two who are taken seriously are the Americans Hogan and Kinch. This is all perfect, because Americans at the time and even today think that World War II is a story of how America came in to help their foolish but good friends. USSR? Did they send any troops?

The best example of our attitudes toward the Soviet Union was the character of Russian spy Marya, played by my generation’s Rosalind Russell, Nita Talbot. Don’t know who that is? Let me refresh your memory:

When I was a kid, I hated her character. Now she is by far my favorite character. Of course, even she is referred to a “White Russian,” which pretty much means a Russian who ain’t too keen on all this communism. But even still, she is a morally ambiguous character. The viewer never knows whose side she’s on. Of course, in every case she turns out to be on the side of the Allies.

I couldn’t believe that Hogan’s gang trusted her, when I watched the show as a child. At 5, I was immune to her sexy charms. Watching it now, I don’t know why Hogan is so skeptical about her. She always turned out to be a loyal ally. Of course, the real reason he was skeptical, was that that was central to the comic gold that Marya was. Each episode was the same: Marya shows up, appears to rat out Hogan, and it all ends well.

But look what it told the American public: even in World War II, the Russians couldn’t be trusted; sure, they were on our side, but only because our interests intersected (as if that wasn’t true of all of the Allies). What’s more, Russians as a people were not really like us.

There is so much wrong with Hogan’s Heroes. I’ve met people whose parents would not allow them to watch the show, with very good reason. It is hard to make fun of Nazis as stupid and impotent when they were anything but. And the show pushes American superiority over even our closest allies in a way that I’m very uncomfortable with. Yet it is a whole lot of fun and I never tire of watching Nita Talbot.

Afterword

There is, of course, another take on Marya: a Freudian take. She symbolizes ephemeral commitments: the desire for uncomplicated sex. And this is why the sex crazed LeBeau always trusts her. Hogan, the American hero, does not admit to believing in such casual sex. It is perfectly all right for him to have dozens of casual affairs with mousy, nonthreatening women. But the American male ego is fearful of a woman who interacts with him as an equal—one who is clear that she wants what he wants.

There was one thing in Iron Man 3 that I really liked: Ben Kingsley. When I saw that he was in the film, I figured he was slated to play the bad guy. Those tend to be the kind of roles that he gets. And at the beginning of the film that looks about right. Actually, it sets up a plot with two bad guys who are working together. One is an evil scientist, played very well by the pretty boy in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Guy Pearce. The other is the Kingsley character, basically a fictionalized Osama bin Laden named “The Mandarin.” But there are tells.

Before I go on: you do know that I don’t think there are such things as “spoilers.” Well, that’s not exactly true. I wouldn’t give away what’s really happening in The Sixth Sense if you hadn’t seen it. But even in it, the film is really good even if you know. In fact, it is better. So if you really think that knowing what happens in Iron Man 3 is going to ruin it for you, then please click away now to this picture of a happy lamb. You have been warned!

I had a hunch that “The Mandarin” was not all that he seemed. But the truth was a lot more fun than I ever expected. “The Mandarin” is just a character being played by English Shakespearean actor Trevor Slattery. It seems the poor man had a real hard time staying off drugs. So the bad guy comes to him with an offer. Tony Stark says, “He said he’d get you off drugs?” Slattery, half nodding out, perks up and says, “No! He offered me more!” So the drug addled actor just thinks that he is performing a role. When he’s not on camera, he’s kept occupied with drugs and prostitutes. But that’s not what was so great!

What was so great was Kingsley’s performance, which is hysterical. And it was really great because his “The Mandarin” character was entirely believable. It was just the way you would expect a Shakespearean to perform it. Think: Patrick Stewart. And it is a nice reminder of many great actors (e.g. Gary Oldman) who come from working class backgrounds: after seeing them on the screen speaking the king’s English, it is shocking to hear them speak with their normal lower-class accents. Kingsley works that into comic gold. He also uses the drugs and the typical actor narcissism.

I thought that I ought to point this out. I don’t ever recall seeing something in one of these films that I liked so much. Even still, I doubt that there is more than 15 minutes of Kingsley in this 2+ hour monstrosity. But having anything that is really good is unusual, and worthy of note.

Afterword

I’ve long thought it interesting that The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, a film about three gay drag queens, stars three actors who generally play badasses. First there is Terence Stamp of The Limey. Then Hugo Weaving, Agent Smith in The Matrix. And Guy Pearce of Memento. I find that curious.

During the third act of The Purple Rose of Cairo, Cecilia (Mia Farrow) goes into the movie with Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels). While in the townhouse, she sees a telephone and exclaims, “I’ve dreamed of a white telephone!” You see, Cecilia is a poor woman living during the Great Depression. The Purple Rose of Cairo celebrates how film allowed people to escape the hardships of their lives by watching the happy lives of Hollywood characters whose problems were always solved by the time the credits rolled. And the white princess telephone was a good example of the perfect life to people who would be lucky to even have their own black standard phone.

I was thinking about this today as I watched Iron Man 3 with my brother. As you may recall, my brother is a big action movie fan, with a particular love for Marvel Comics. I’m not fond of these films, but they are grist for a project I am working on about film propaganda. It is interesting that in the fascist countries, the governments had to take over the film industries. But in the United States, the private sector independently makes propaganda films that most governments would be embarrassed to produce. I feel more sullied by the average Hollywood action film than I do by an episode of The Factor.

That was fully the case with Iron Man 3. But it is done with a degree of cognitive dissonance that is staggering. Of course, that’s just perfect for an America propaganda film. Americans simultaneously think that we are the biggest, baddest country in the world. And that we are the most peaceful country in the world. We spend more on our military than the next 11 countries combined because all those other countries are a bunch of meanies who stop us from being the Gentle Giant we really are. So it makes perfect sense that Iron Man 3 would be similarly addled.

The biggest problem is Iron Man himself: Tony Stark. Since the middle of the first film, he is some bizarre kind of pacifist. He refuses to build weapons for the military. (This is how he and his father became rich, but that’s another issue.) Yet he spends all of Iron Man 2 and Iron Man 3 and The Avengers working with the military. Plus, he provides it with his “iron” suits, which are, after all, weapons. This is a real problem. The whole superhero genre is just vigilante fiction. And it works really well with someone like Daredevil, where the character is an outsider who is disliked by the authorities. You can’t be an iconoclast and an integral part of the social power structure. But that’s what all of the Iron Man movies would have us believe. And that is particularly true here where Iron Man must choose to save the president or his girl friend. Of course, in the end, through some kind of comic book lack of reason, he gets to save both; but the choice he makes is to save the president rather than Pretty Pepper Potts. Sorry: that’s Captain America bullshit.

Also, iconoclasts are not rich guys. Sure, they could have lots of money, in theory. But Tony Stark isn’t just rich; he’s corporate; he’s continuing to pull in the money. In other words: he’s David Koch with a goatee. Or something. Or rather: many things, because as usual for Marvel characters, he is whatever character the scene requires. But when he is at home in his billion dollar cliff mansion, he is above all, a rich man. He has the 21st century equivalent of the white princess phone.

And that’s important. It’s all important: rich, suave, badass. People need to escape the hardships of the second Great Depression.

Afterword

I have a general problem with the Hollywood action film: it does not celebrate real heroism. All kinds of people, but especially people who fight in wars and run into burning buildings, show great heroism. But these movies toss this sort of thing to the side. They also say that all human institutions are useless. The army, the police cannot manage anything. This is all strange, because superheroes are about as close as we ever get to the Greek heroes. But those heroes worked inside a social context. Patroclus and Achilles fought together in the war against the Trojans. Hector was above all a family man who just wanted to help run his city-state. The Hollywood action films are not the stories a great civilization tells itself.

(Take note: that last paragraph was pure conservatism. I don’t think any serious conservative would disagree with it. Of course, neo-conservatives would. Most people who call themselves “conservative” would. But real conservatives: they’d agree with me. But in general, I have no problem with real conservatives.)

I was just reading a very good article by Greg Sargent over at The Plum Line about the new Republican push to use the Debt Ceiling to enact policies they don’t otherwise have the political power to demand. Sargent believes it is all a game; the Republican leadership has already stated that they will not actually crash the economy, so it is a meaningless threat. I think he is being a bit optimistic. The Republicans are hardly consistent. And just because they know crashing the economy would effectively end their political party, that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t do it. Chauncey DeVega at AlterNet has argued, How the Modern GOP Is Like a Death Cult. And he’s right.

But I was taken by something that Sargent wrote about the haplessness of the Republican leadership. “They don’t know how to get House Tea Partyers to agree to any constructive way out of this mess.” Why do we refer to the “Tea Party wing of the Republican Party”? Do parties have parties? No, they don’t. We use this term because we are still accepting the original media framing of the Tea Party movement. The idea was that this was the rise of some previously uninvolved part of the electorate that was tired of the right and the left. Of course, it was no such thing. It was 99% pure Republican Party base. If it was unhappy with the Republican Party, it was only because it though the party was too liberal.

So I have a problem with referring to the “tea partiers” of the Republican Party. We should refer to them correctly as the extreme wing of the Republican Party. Because that is what the term means to people on the left. But it allows people on the right to think that the “tea partiers” are innovative thinkers who transcend the GOP, when they are more the opposite. They are the least transcendent thinkers in the conservative movement.

Only try to realize the truth.

There is no Tea Party. Then you’ll see, that it is not the Tea Party that bends, it is only yourself.

Jonathan Chait wrote this morning that immigration reform is different this time. He focused on the conservative push back against the Heritage Foundation paper than said that immigration reform would cost us a trillion dollars and cause us all to die of syphilis next year. As he correctly noted, this paper is actually not any worse than other papers conservatives accepted like Paul Ryan’s budget causing unemployment to drop to 3% and that the Bush tax cuts would pay for themselves.

All of this is true, and yet I don’t think that immigration reform is really different this time. What you have to understand is that the modern Republican Party doesn’t really make compromises. Steve Benen wrote an article yesterday at Maddow Blog about Eric Cantor’s new Republican rebranding campaign. The great new idea is to appeal to women with a media blitz. And what are they going to tell women? Only that they should support the “Working Families Flexibility Act.” That is a euphemism, of course. It should be called the “Employer Flexibility to Screw Employees Act.” It is an idea that the Republican Party has been pushing for decades. My point is that even when Republicans reach out to a group of people, they aren’t willing to do anything; it’s just, “You should love us just the way we are because we ain’t changing a thing.”

The same thing is going on in the immigration bill. There has always been a large part of the Republican elite who want immigration reform. Let’s face it: it’s good for business. In the long term, it is good for everyone. In the short term, it is good for Walmart. The business interests who will lose out on more legal workers are small and weak. So the Republican leadership wants this and always has. What’s different this time is that they lost last time. Before, they thought with a Republican president, they would be able to get their law. Now they know they have to fight for it.

And look at how typical the conservative response to the Heritage paper was. Those who are against immigration reform embraced it; those who are for immigration reform denounced it. And yes, those denouncing it did it with facts. But conservatives are fine with facts when they are helpful. But facts have no relationship to truth for them. They are just rhetorical devices. All we are seeing now is an argument between two sides that has long existed in the Republican Party. There’s nothing new here.

A funny thing happened on the way through the question and answer session of the Tenth Annual Altegris Conference in Carlsbad. Niall Ferguson claimed that John Maynard Keynes was all wrong about economics. But he said it in a most inappropriate way. Let me back up a bit, because I know most people have no context for this.

I’ve written quite a lot about Niall Ferguson. He’s a historian who has got a lot of attention over the years providing ignorant economic analysis that conservatives really want to hear. In particular, he claimed for years that hyperinflation was just around the corner. He eventually admitted that he was wrong. But since then, he’s become a standard conservative hack. In the run up to last year’s election, he wrote a highly publicized attack on Obama that that was riddled with falsehoods and was more generally just deceptive. We expect better from Harvard professors, but now that Ferguson is getting $50,000 a pop for speeches to the 1%, that is who he represents.

Needless to say, Ferguson believes that all we have to do is cut government spending to the bone and it will be Morning in America. I’m not going to go into all that is wrong with this; I’ve written enough about it elsewhere on this site. The main thing to understand is that Ferguson (like most conservatives) simply believes in cutting the government and so he disregards Keynes. He has no cogent arguments against Keynes.

So he took on one of Keynes’ most quotable lines, “Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.” Keynes was attacking economists of the time whose only advice about the Depression was that, “In the long run it will be okay.” Tom Kostigen reported that Ferguson said that while we might not be alive, our children and grandchildren would be. This, of course, totally misses the point Keynes was making. But it got worse. He said that Keynes didn’t care about future generations. Because he didn’t have children. Because he was gay.

The only part of that which is true is that he didn’t have children. His wife did suffer a spontaneous abortion, however. Regardless, Ferguson is not an idiot. He quickly put out an unqualified apology. I don’t particularly care one way or another. On the one hand, I know what it is like to get excited and say something that I don’t mean. On the other, I know that Ferguson is an elitist and that is its own kind of bigotry.

What I think is important here is how a supposedly serious academic stoops to character assassination rather than argument. And that is typical of the conservative economic movement. I understand that we all have our list of thinkers who we trust. I am inclined to believe something that Paul Krugman says and inclined to be skeptical about something Ferguson says. But that doesn’t mean I stop thinking: sometimes I disagree with Krugman; sometimes I agree with Ferguson. Ferguson admitted defeat on the inflation argument he was having with Krugman. But that didn’t cause any rethinking of his economic model. And that was because he doesn’t have an economic model. Like most conservatives, he has certain ideas about how society should be run, and he shoehorns all economic information into that.

And that is the lesson of Ferguson’s “Gay Keynes” moment.

Update (6 May 2013 9:21)

According to various sources, Keynes was gay. So I was wrong about that, not that it matters. However, it is generally true that any homosexual behavior tends to cause someone to be labeled as strictly homosexual. Human sexuality is far more complex than that. As Woof says in Hair, “Well, I wouldn’t kick Mick Jagger out of my bed, but uh, I’m not a homosexual, no.”