There’s been something on my mind from a month and a half ago, and I thought I would address it. I have, what I think is a very friendly relationship with The Q-Filmcast guys. But when they did an episode of Dr Strangelove, there was a little unpleasantness—both on their blog and on Twitter. I was unhappy that they simply avoided the political content of the film. And as is my way, I am not one to use the soft sell. I wrote, “It amazes me that any of you could miss the fact that the same radical right-wing John Birch Society has come back in a big way within the Tea Party.” That was specifically in reference to how the film lampoons water fluoridation as a communist conspiracy.

They wrote back that they wanted to stay away from politics and focus on character and so on. If that’s the case, I can only wonder why they picked the film. Really. If they decided to watch Birth of a Nation, would they focus on Lillian Gish’s acting and avoid its explicit racism and Klan apologia? I don’t think so. My point is not to put these fine guys down, but just to point out that politics is politics. It is no longer acceptable to publicly claim that the Klan was just created to protect the purity of southern white woman. But we are (sadly) still arguing about American empire. And even more pointedly we still have people like Brigadier General Jack Ripper (the Fluoridation guy who starts the nuclear war). All you have to do is listen to Lieutenant Colonel Allen West (retired).

So to take no position on these matters is very much to take a position. One can’t, for example, be agnostic on the issue of torture. Being agnostic is being for it. But what really bothered me about the whole interaction was that facile disregard of my position. And then there was this tweet, “I go to the cinema to get away from socialists, or at least escape the endless political nonsense that’s tearing us apart.” They go to the cinema to get away from socialists? Really?! Because all you have to do to get away from socialists in America is to step outside your house, visit almost any website, watch any television program, or talk to anyone. And then, after implicitly vilifying socialists as a kind of pox on society, they provide an appeal to understanding. Apparently, the political nonsense that’s tearing us apart is that there are socialists who disagree with them.

This, I’m afraid is what is behind the “can’t we all just get along” chorus. It is really just a sneaky way of saying, “Shut up and get lost!” But I would much rather get the latter treatment. As regular readers know, I talk to a lot of conservatives and I find there is a lot of crossover in our beliefs. At least, there is a lot of crossover until Fox News and hate radio start telling them what all good conservatives ought to think. But if someone doesn’t want to discuss politics, that’s fine. But don’t pretend that you’re above it when my opinions offend you. All it really means is that your opinions either go along with the perspective of the nightly news, or you only listen to news sources that reinforce your prejudices. (Actually, that’s the same.)

To give you an example of what I’m talking about, the same guys who complained about my political nonsense that was “tearing us apart” tweeted out this image for Independence Day:

And it went along with the text, “1st rule of America… No tyranny.” Now there is so much wrong here it makes me weep. I hate that it turns Washington into a guy in a Tareyton Cigarettes ad. I hate the depiction of the founding fathers as though they were toughs rather than the Enlightenment thinkers that they were. I hate that of all pictures to post on Independence Day, this is the one they chose. But most of all, I hate the caption. That’s the first rule of America? No tyranny? Well, I’m against tyranny, but the tyranny that the Declaration of Independence refers to is nothing compared to the tyranny that was suffered by the African slaves held by the white ruling elite. And the man pushing hardest against this English tyranny (John Adams) was eager to set up his own tyranny against the lower classes in the new country. And what about Gerald Horne’s contention that many of the delegates were not interested in tyranny but the thought that England was soon going to outlaw slavery in its colonies? But none of this matters. These are arguments that we could have.

But promoting a slogan like “First rule of America… No tyranny” shows that the filmcast guys do have a political ax to grind. If you had asked me what the first thing that the Declaration of Independence brings to mind, I would have said, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I just don’t see the 1765 Stamp Act as the definition of tyranny. But again, that’s an argument that we can have. But we can’t have it when people who clearly disagree with you pretend to be disinterested.

So does Dr Strangelove work today as an indictment of the Tea Party? Most certainly. Does it lampoon people who think that international relations are about how hard various leaders can beat their chests? You bet. And is it scornful of the idea that we live in anything like a tyranny today? Absolutely.

Afterword

The only founding father I have a great deal of respect for is Thomas Paine who has largely been written out of our history books, other than noting the importance of Common Sense. What is not widely known is that his 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice called for property and estate taxes to pay for old age pensions. Sound familiar? Sound like an idea that was almost a century and a half before its time? Sound like an idea that conservatives today want to destroy? (Actually, it would already be destroyed, it if weren’t funded by a ridiculously regressive payroll tax.) It has also been suggested that the reason Paine was pushed to the side by the big founding fathers was his abhorrence of slavery. It’s interesting that all the founding fathers in that picture were slave owners. What a joke political discourse has become in this country.

Jonathan Bernstein and Jonathan Chait have had a little fight. Bernstein started it by writing, Barack Obama Is a Generic Brand. Basically, all he’s saying is this, “[A]lmost everything about Obama’s presidency can be explained by saying he’s a Democratic president.” In other words, Obama has acted the way any Democratic president would have acted. Bernstein gives him credit for perhaps being a better manager and even (although I think it’s laughable) a better negotiator. But otherwise, he’s a Democratic president—full stop.

I would go further. I would say that Barack Obama is a generic New Democrat. His brilliant idea coming into office was that if he offered the Republicans policies that they claimed to support, they would support those policies. For example, Obama offered the Republicans the exact same healthcare law that John McCain campaigned on. But the Republicans were never going to allow a Democrat—a black Democrat—to usher in a new era of politics where the two parties worked together on things they could agree on. So I think the difference between a Hillary Clinton administration and an Obama administration is only that she wouldn’t have been so naive. In terms of policy, Bernstein is right: no difference.

But Chait begs to differ, How Barack Obama Saved the Obama Administration. He says that there are two issues on which Obama really stuck his neck out. The first is the EPA regulation of existing power plants. And as proof that this was a gutsy move that most Democratic presidents wouldn’t have done, he notes that some pundits said he wouldn’t do it. Well, the fact that Matt Yglesias laid out the fact that it could be done and then covered himself from being criticized for being naive by saying that Obama wouldn’t do it, doesn’t mean very much. I’m sure that what actually happened was that Obama asked his advisers, “What can we do about global warming?” They mentioned coal-fired power plants and he said yes. Unless Chait’s memory is getting a little weak, a lot of people have been talking about this for years.

The second issue was pushing forward with Obamacare after Ted Kennedy died and it looked like the whole thing was going to fall apart. This one is hilarious. Chait wrote, “In late August of 2009… Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel wanted to pull the plug on comprehensive reform, but Obama overruled them.” Oh my! The Republican who claims to be a Democrat Rahm Emanuel wanted to pull back and Obama overruled him?! Maybe Chait is right, but not in the way he thinks. Your average Democrat wouldn’t have allowed Rahm Emanuel anywhere near his inner circle. Remember: he’s the guy who said that we liberals were “fucking retarded.”

I think it is more likely that Obama pushed ahead with the ACA because by that time he had figured out what a less naive president would have known all along: even if he dropped the ACA and gone with some minor healthcare reform, the Republicans would have killed it too. It doesn’t matter how minor it was, just as with the ACA, there would have been not a single Republican in Congress willing to vote for it.

I have no problem with Obama. He’s about as good a president as we are likely to get as long as half the country doesn’t vote. But there is nothing especially great about him either. He’s certainly not bold. If it weren’t for Joe Biden shooting his mouth off, Obama still would be against same sex marriage. He is an entirely typical New Democrat. That’s what we got last time and that’s probably what we’ll get next time. And there’s nothing especially terrible about that. But don’t let’s think that Obama stands out in terms of his leadership.

Martin Longman brought my attention to the fact that, Opie and Anthony Are No More. Apparently, for almost twenty years, there has been this thing called, The Opie and Anthony Show. It’s one of those shock jock shows that young men of limited intelligence think is super keen. I don’t mean to paint with too broad a brush, but Howard Stern is generally considered the best there is and I find his show to only be of reasonable quality with many aspects that don’t much appeal to me. I figure that Opie and Anthony are on the lower end of the maturity scale, but I really don’t know.

Well, it seems this last week, Anthony Cumia was out in New York City trying to take some pictures. A black woman happened to be in one of his pictures. She objected, Cumia escalated the situation and before long things got totally out of hand. According to Cumia, the woman “punched” him several times, but without minimizing it, I suspect it was what I would call a hit or a slap. And when I’m out in public and I call a woman the n-word and the c-word, I don’t think I’m in much of a position to complain if she knees me in the groin. Apparently, then some black guys came to the defense of the woman. But he doesn’t claim that they touched him and Cumia never went to the police.

Instead, he did what any privileged white man would do: he went on Twitter to vent to his 162,000 followers. And vent he did. No one tweet is a total barn burner. He never uses the n-word (but his followers do), but he does use the c-word. He talks about “those people” and how he was attacked because he was white and how they are savages and it’s a jungle. But his whole interaction was with one black woman. And the black men who came to her defense, probably did it because all they heard was him yelling expletives at her. Regardless, as we know (though it isn’t always right), in an altercation, people will go to the defense of the woman.

But let’s assume that it was a group of ten blacks and Mr Cumia was unfairly wronged by them. And let’s assume that he didn’t go on Twitter and say a bunch of racist and misogynistic things. His takeaway from the incident is the fundamental racist problem in the United States. If the same thing had happened with a group of white people, Cumia would likely be just as mad. But he wouldn’t generalize about it. It wouldn’t be “those people” in the general sense; it would have been “those ten people” who abused him. Because in modern America, white isn’t a race. It’s just the default. All other races are defined by how they deviate from white.

Now I know that Cumia will say that he has nothing against blacks and women. And in fact, right now, his latest tweet [Since deleted. -FM] is of him smiling with his arm around a black man. That’s not it. That’s not how racism works in the “I make $3 million per year crowd.” The problem is thinking that if one person who we’ve arbitrarily placed in some “race” (an artificial construct, but a useful one) does something we like or don’t like, it must say something about the entire race.

My favorite example is a racist driver. A black guy cuts him off in traffic. The guy thinks, “That’s totally typical! That’s what blacks are always doing!” If a white guy does the same thing, he thinks, “What a jerk!” And that’s the end of it. But if a black guy does something nice like allow him to merge into heavy traffic, the guy thinks, “Well, that’s unusual.” Nothing changes, of course. The nice black guy is just the exception that proves the rule. That is racism in America: white people are individuals whose actions only reflect on them; black people are representatives of an entire class.

The terrible thing is that I doubt seriously that Cumia is any more racist than any of us. In my life, I fight gut reactions (good and bad) all the time. But I am at an advantage of understanding somewhat how it works. I don’t delude myself into thinking that just because I would never consciously treat a black man differently that I don’t suffer from racist impulses. I am afraid that it is unlikely that Cumia will ever understand this, especially since so many of his fans seem to be egging him on in the opposite direction.

[In checking the broken Twitter link, I noticed that Cumia now has over twice as many followers as he did at the time of this article. Racism is a good career move in America. -FM]

On Thursday, I wrote, Jobs Report Good News for Senate Elections. As if reading my mind, Jonathan Bernstein responded, Sunny Jobs Report Won’t Save Democrats. His argument is that if things go very badly for Obama in Ukraine, Iraq, and elsewhere, or the economy tanks, it will be very bad for the Democrats. But if none of these things happen it will not help the Democrats all that much. Fair enough, but I think he’s being too simplistic about it regardless.

Looking at the Senate, the very fact that the control of this chamber is pretty much a toss up is an indication that the lack bad international news and a rapidly improving economy are having an effect on the election. The Democrats are way overexposed. They ought to be looking at being decimated with only 43 seats come January. Instead, the most likely result will be that will have 48 or 49 seats.

But let’s look at the unemployment numbers for this year and the previous two mid-term elections. In 2006, the unemployment rate was going down by 0.03% per month. The 2010 number was 0.04%. And the number thus far this year is 0.12%. So while the economy was improving when Bush and Obama saw their parties lose big, it was not improving at a fast enough rate to stand out in an off-year election.

If the current trend continues with the employment, the rate could 5.5% by the time of the election. I’m not saying that would have a huge effect, only that it would have some positive effect. And even Bernstein accepts my overall argument. He wrote “there’s more downside risk than upside opportunity.” Well, yeah. We all know that. But Mark Begich might win in Alaska without any help at all from the economy. Mary Landrieu only needs a little help in Louisiana. No one is suggesting that if the economy adds 400,000 jobs each of the next four months that Matt Silverstein will be the new Senator from Oklahoma and the Senate will have a Democratic super-majority.

But Bernstein is right to note the downside risks. Things could go very poorly over the next few months. The Republicans in Congress have almost unlimited powers to harm the economy, but I think at this time they are likely to stay quiet, figuring they will sail into power if they do nothing. And I don’t see Obama doing anything too terrible in international affairs. The good economic news really is good news for the Democrats. But it’s not time to start partying.

It’s Independence Day! Hooray! It’s the day we got independence from England. Well, it’s the day we declared independence from England. Well, it was the day that the document was ratified. It isn’t even clear whether the official document was ready to be signed for another two weeks. And then it seems to have been mostly signed in August. Although there were a number of people who were there to ratify it who never signed it at all. And at that point, it had been almost a year and a half since the war had started. And the declaration really didn’t mean much of anything in the context of the war, although it did give the English Tories a good laugh about the rich white folk calling for liberty while they held millions of Africans in slavery.

So we have another holiday of dubious importance. And we can add to this an even larger dose of American jingoism than we usually get. Despite appearances, I’m not anti-American. I love my country as I love my mother. And that means I don’t pretend that either are anything that they are not. There is a great deal to like about America. But there is a great deal to be embarrassed about. Our bombing campaign, including the two atomic bombs, against Japanese civilians was shameful. I don’t especially blame our support of despots throughout the world, but our rhetoric about liberty makes such behavior shameful. Our recent torture program that our government hasn’t even been willing to admit to is disgusting. It is still “enhanced interrogation” rather than torture. That’s like calling murder “enhanced spiritual processing.” And, of course, I don’t know how anyone can’t refrain from taking down their flags today after seeing the smiling Americans in this picture:

I could go on and on and on. Countries don’t become dominant empires without being evil. The problem the government had with the Abu Ghraib pictures was not that these things were going on. The problem was the American people saw them. It didn’t really matter that the rest of the world saw them; they already knew in a general sense. But as usual, the government made a show of punishing a couple of low level people and sweeping the rest under the carpet. “This isn’t who we are!”

And indeed, that’s true. We are much, much worse. But that’s not to say that many of us do not try to do better. After all, that’s why atrocities like Abu Ghraib and the My Lai Massacre have to be kept from the people. Most people (not just Americans) are decent. Of course, those in power claim they do what they do for the good of the people. This is rarely true. What they do, they do for the good of their rich and powerful friends—and for themselves.

The Declaration of Independence was not a general document. It didn’t apply to women or blacks or poor whites. Most of the rich white men who signed it didn’t want to get rid of aristocracy; they wanted to get rid of English aristocracy. Men like John Adams explicitly wanted an American aristocracy. Because, you know, whoever is rich right now are the people who should be in charge forever.

But do you know who the Declaration of Independence really didn’t apply to? The native peoples. Before Europeans came, there were many millions of natives in what is now America. But by 1800, there were only 600,000. And by 1890, there were only 250,000. Not all of that was due to an intentional genocide, but quite a lot of it was. In 2000, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) released a formal appology. It’s quite a document, because it is so not like what I hear from conservatives (and sadly many liberals as well) that wronged minority groups should just, “Get over it!” The BIA noted, “And while the BIA employees of today did not commit these wrongs, we acknowledge that the institution we serve did. We accept this inheritance, this legacy of racism and inhumanity. And by accepting this legacy, we accept also the moral responsibility of putting things right.”

Here is a small bit of that document:

Perhaps surprisingly, this makes me proud. I don’t expect anyone or any country to be perfect. But the first step to improving our behavior is to admit our wrongs. I so wish that we could outlaw the chant, “We’re number one!” For one thing, in many bad ways, we are number one. I would replace that chant with something that many of us would embrace, “We’re trying to be better!” Because all the proclamations of how great we are only arrest us in our efforts to improve.

If freedom is what Independence Day is really all about, then we should see the Declaration of Independence as a deeply flawed beginning of a very long road we have traveled and must continue to travel. We have very far to go.

See Also: Previous Independence Day Articles

2013: Four Independence Days
2012: Happy 4th: American Imperialism
2011: I Felt Like a Gringo

In the long run, John Roberts is going to go down as one of the worst chief justices of the Supreme Court. I don’t say that because I disagree with the rulings of the court. That’s a given, even when the court isn’t so skewed. The problem for Roberts’ legacy is that the Court is getting totally out of control. It no longer seems like a deliberative body and seems more like just another legislature where the Republicans and the Democrats battle it out.

This was especially clear to me yesterday when I read, Supreme Court OKs Another Religious Birth Control Exemption. I’ll give you the details in a moment, but the short version is this: on Monday, the Court said one thing and then on Thursday, they reversed themselves. This is not surprising, of course. As I wrote on Monday, the conservatives on the Court seem to have thrown out the whole idea of consistency. Just as with Bush v Gore before, this week the Court carved out a special exception for one particular belief of a particular kind of Christian. We know that they will not apply this logic generally because it would mean the end of law in the United States.

You may remember some time back that the Obama administration came up with a birth control compromise for religious-oriented nonprofits. The idea was that the groups would not pay for birth control but the insurance companies would provide it at their cost. The truth of the matter is that there is no cost because generally, birth control pays for itself. Pregnancies and babies are very expensive. Well, in Monday’s decision, the majority praised this compromise. So why is it on Thursday that the very same majority gave Wheaton College a temporary exemption from the contraceptive mandate?

Here’s how it is supposed to work: if a group felt that they might endanger their seat in heaven by providing birth control to their employees, they needed to file a form saying, “Hell no, we hate hoes!” But Wheaton College didn’t even do that. They just went to court and asked for an exception and they got it. Actually, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals said no. And the Supreme Court overruled it. It will undoubtedly be heard as a case next year.

There are two issues here. First, the Court majority is saying that the harm done to individuals until the case is fully resolved (for example, death) is nothing compared to the hurt feelings of institutions like Wheaton College. It also signals that the conservatives are planning to find that the religious exception doesn’t just apply to closely held companies who are absolutely, positively certain that they know exactly what God wants. (Note: one of the things that Wheaton knows God doesn’t want is Catholics, since in 2004 they fired a philosophy professor who converted to Catholicism.)

Second, it is now clear that the majority’s argument in Burwell v Hobby Lobby where they praised the administration’s compromise was just to allow them political cover. It was meant to make them seem reasonable. The fact is that at least four of the justices are nothing but ideologues who are determined to put their particular brand of Christianity in a state of quasi-official religion.

Of course, as is typical of the conservative bullies on the court, the order was not signed. So Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagan put out a 16-page signed dissent. Sotomayor wrote, “I have deep respect for religious faith, for the important and selfless work performed by religious organizations and for the values of pluralism. But the Court’s grant of an injunction in this case allows Wheaton’s beliefs about the effect of its actions to trump the democratic interest in allowing the Government to enforce the law.” She also noted “those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word. Not so today.”

Indeed they can’t. And that’s why I think Roberts will be vilified in the future. And he’s very clearly aware of what’s going on at the court. That’s why he found in favor of Obamacare in the first place. But when the issue is his Christian faith (He’s actually a Catholic; maybe he should have thought about that when siding with the anti-Catholic bigotry that defines Wheaton College.) he can’t seem to stop himself. It’s like religion disrupts his thinking ability.

I’m generally fairly tolerant of religion. But I’m getting to the point of siding with Christopher Hitchens in the subtitle of God Is Not Great: religion does poison everything.