One Person's Opinion

A compendium of random thoughts regarding politics, society, feminism, sex, law, and anything else on my mind. POST YOUR COMMENTS BY CLICKING ON THE TIME INDICATOR BELOW THE POST YOU WISH TO COMMENT ON. RSS FEED AVAILABLE AT http://feeds.feedburner.com/Dilanblogspotcom

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Tuesday, November 18, 2003
 
MORE "TIM GRAHAM":
Who is this guy, anyway? He's the person at The Corner whose assignment it is to articulate the right wing's claims of media bias. Well, he's really on a roll now. First, he posts an item that simply parrots a flash press release from the Media Research Center, a right-wing group that researches media bias. (That's pretty obvious evidence that Mr. Graham has been assigned the task of whining about media bias from right wing central, isn't it?)

Then, he puts in an item calling for completely biased coverage of the gay marriage decision by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts-- he wants the media to spin this as "unelected judges versus the democratic minority". Hey, Tim, I thought the party line was you guys wanted an unbiased media that let the viewers decide these things!

But what really drives me nuts about Mr. Graham's post on the gay marriage issue is that he refers to the issue as follows: "Judges favor what proponents call gay 'marriage,' but energized democratic majorities tend to reject it." Notice the use of "scare quotes" around the term "marriage", and also the use of the locution "what proponents call".

As a lawyer, I see scare quotes all the time in legal briefs. (For instance, in a case where one side denies that a contract was ever formed, you might see a sentence like this: Plaintiff contends that the parties agreed to a "contract" to distribute the pencils.) They drive me nuts. The reason is that-- except in certain, limited, obvious situations where the other side is clearly misusing a term-- scare quotes are a substitute for argument, rather than an argument itself. Mr. Graham's post is a perfect example of this. The reason proponents call the issue gay "marriage" is because that is what they are seeking-- a right of gays and lesbians to marry their life partners, and to claim all the public benefits of marriage. If Mr. Graham wants to articulate why he believes, for some reason, that gay marriage isn't really "marriage", that's fine-- but HE HAS TO ARTICULATE THE ARGUMENT. Putting "marriage" in quotes doesn't make the argument, doesn't persuade anyone (which is the point of making an argument), and basically makes the writer look either like he is too lazy to articulate the basis for his position, or doesn't have a basis for it.

In Mr. Graham's case, I would imagine it is a variant of the second alternative-- Mr. Graham thinks that gays and lesbian are so different and alien that any arrangement that they arrive at cannot be called "marriage". Of course, if he articulated that argument, he would look deeply homophobic. So, since he doesn't have a non-homophobic basis for his position, he falls back on scare quotes.

Sunday, November 16, 2003
 
THEY ALL SEEM TO HAVE AN ASSIGNMENT
I always thought that Hillary Rodham Clinton's invocation of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" out to get President Clinton was way over the top. Bill Clinton created his own troubles. He had an affair with a subordinate (while this was a perfectly voluntary act, it also raises troubling questions about sex and power that have been properly addressed by feminists in situations where a Democratic presidency wasn't at issue), and then lied about it in a sexual harassment suit where he was legally obligated to tell the truth. Then, he lied to the country, and most importantly, would have continued lying about it to his dying day, and using his subordinates and yes-men to trash Ms. Lewinisky's integrity, had unimpeachable incriminating evidence (his semen on the dress) not materialized.

So I don't think Bill Clinton's impeachment problems were the result of any vast conspiracy. But I must say, more recent events are casting Ms. Rodham Clinton's analysis in a more favorable light. What I am referring to is the extent to which the right wing seems to "assign" certain tasks to writers, producing canned and predictable opinion that seeps its way into the public discourse without regard to its validity.

Books are the most obvious example of this. As a general rule, any conservative book with a snappy main title followed by a colon and an accusatory subtitle is the result of an assignment. Michelle Malkin writes "Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists Criminals & Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores", because she was assigned the task of putting out the argument for a nativist immigration policy (which would just happen to advance the long-term goal of reducing the number of future immigrant votes for Democratic candidates). (By the way, just as an aside (I might post on this in detail in the future), do you notice how, even in Malkin's book's title, she conflates a "terrorist invasion" with the ordinary folks who cross our borders to find work? They are, of course, apples and oranges, and it is truly offensive to compare a poor Mexican migrant to an Islamist terrorist.)

Amazon.com has a wonderful feature that tells you what other books were bought by people who bought the book you are browsing.

And guess what-- Michelle Malkin's book links to a couple of the other "assignments" given out by right-wing central: "Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First", by Mona Charen, and "Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Endangered America's Long-Term National Security", by Robert Patterson. Other assignments that are easily found through amazon's linking function include "Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror", by Rich Miniter, "Hillary's Scheme : Inside the Next Clinton's Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House", by Carl Limbacher, and "Shut Up and Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN are Subverting America", by Laura Ingraham. There's also "Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years", by Rich Lowry, "Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity" by David Limbaugh, and "Arrogance: Rescuing America From the Media Elite", by Bernard Goldberg. Adding to the comical similarity of the titles of all these books, the Lowry and Limbaugh books even add ridiculously obvious symbolism on the jackets-- the "A" in the otherwise white-lettered "LEGACY" on Lowry's book's hardcover is scarlet (get it?), and the "T" in PERSECUTION on the book by Rush's brother David is shaped like a cross.

Each of these assignments advances an argument that the institutitonal Republican Party sees as necessary to advance its electoral prospects. Slandering liberals as being on the wrong side of the cold war, as Charen does (along with Ann Coulter, in her book "Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism") helps plant in the electorate the sense that Democrats can't be trusted to defend the country against the current threat of terrorism. Blaming Clinton for the rise of Bin Laden (which was actually a bipartisan foreign policy failure-- W wasn't doing enough about him before 9/11 either), as Miniter does, has much the same benefit to the GOP. Raising the spectre of a Hillary candidacy for President, as Limbacher does, works wonders for right-wing fundraising. Aligning the Democrats with unpopular (and shallow) Hollywood elites, as Ingraham does, is another pet GOP project. I won't go through the rest of the titles, but you get the idea.

Fox News dutifully interviews these authors when their books come out, giving them added publicity and taking their (usually slapdash and poorly researched) views seriously. Michelle Malkin, for instance, has seemingly been interviewed every time an immigration issue has been discussed on the network.

But the assignments go beyond the bookshelves. When there isn't enough time to publish a book, the right wing turns to the web and parcels out more assignments. Any honest reader of the New York Times op-ed page knows that Paul Krugman calls the right wing on a lot of their BS. (This isn't saying Krugman is always right-- he isn't. But he points out a lot of the dissembling and half-truths that the right wing uses to sell policies that are really bad ideas (e.g., the efforts by the Bush administration to conceal the fact that its tax cuts are directed overwhelmingly at rich people).) So, someone named Donald Luskin gets assigned to trash Krugman.

Bernard Goldberg's books aren't published day to day, so someone has to advance the right wing's spurious and slanderous claims that the mainstream media is biased against conservatives. Someone named Tim Graham, at The Corner at National Review Online, and who doesn't (unlike many Corner bloggers) provide his e-mail address, writes about nothing other than supposed media bias. He's clearly on assignment. Here's a typical item. He lays into Judy Woodruff-- as fair and straight-laced a journalist as there is-- for asking supposedly softball questions of Tom Daschle regarding the recent Senate flare-up regarding the President's judicial nominees. But if you look at Graham's list of six questions, four of them are clearly adversarial to Daschle. (In any event, Woodruff is not Sam Donaldson or Tim Russert-- she's not a really tough interviewer. Graham provides no counterpoint of where she is ever any tougher with a Republican interviewee. But then, that's not part of his assignment.)

The point is, this is all clearly coordinated. I leave it to others to determine whether this constitutes a vast conspiracy, but what is happening is clearly no coincidence.

 
AFTER A LONG DELAY...
I'm back with some new posts.