Opinion and Analysis

Ezra Klein reviews the new book The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria:

In short, Zakaria makes two arguments, one descriptive, one normative. The first argument, the descriptive one, is that moment of unipolarity is ending. This odd interregnum between the fall of the Soviet Union and the maturation of other world powers (ranging from developing behemoths like India and China to major alliances like the EU) is coming to an inevitable, and entirely predictable, end. America will neither rule nor run the world alone. India, China, Brazil, Russia, and Europe are simply too big to let us have the globe to ourselves. [...]

The question, then, is not whether a multipolar world will arise, but how we will react to it. We can, as many of the neoconservatives advocate, react with fear and suspicion, viewing the power of others as a threat to ourselves. [...] We can, in other words, create a zero-sum international competition with all the attendant risks and consequences.

Or we can see the arrival of other powers as a positive-sum development. We can realize that just as Japan benefits from the internet created in America, so too can we benefit from advances discovered in China, Brazil, and Germany. A cancer cure developed in Singapore can save lives in South Dakota, an energy technology discovered in Germany can cut emissions in Georgia. And on a global political level, we can see these emergent powers as protectors and guarantors of regional stability and progress who will do much to better their own regions and reduce the sort of chaos that could spin beyond borders and across continents.

Liberals see opportunities for cooperation, while conservatives see nothing but competition.

See Newsweek for an excerpt from the book.

So once you've finished the reading list of anti-conservative books, you can get started on these:

• Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, Eric Alterman
• The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman
• Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America, Robert Reich
• Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn from Conservative Success, Paul Waldman
• Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision, George Lakoff
• Framing the Debate: Famous Presidential Speeches and How Progressives Can Use Them to Change the Conversation, Jeffrey Feldman

Back in 2006, I remarked "it's about time liberals start taking aim at conservatism itself" and not just individual conservatives like George Bush, Bill O'Reilly, and Ann Coulter. It looks like others had similar thoughts, because there's a bumper crop of anti-conservative books available now.

• The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, Greg Anrig
• Conservatives Without Conscience, John Dean
• Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, Glenn Greenwald
• Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy, Jeffrey Feldman
• God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, Sarah Posner
• The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics, Jonathan Chait

Digby says it's started, right on cue:

[In February] I wrote this:

It was only a matter of time before the media began to trivialize Obama and his campaign as a bunch of latte-sipping left-wing hippie elites. That's the 30-year conservative rap on liberals and it's been fully internalized by the MSM and a whole lot of Americans, including some Democrats. When you start to hear the pundits talking about "beer track/wine track" this isn't far behind...

[...] This is a Village meme that has been used over the course of thirty years.(Fifty, if you want to go back to Stevenson.) It has been so internalized among the media elites that the Republicans don't even have to say it out loud anymore. It was inevitable that it would happen. [...]

Nobody should be surprised or unprepared for this by now. I think Obama's campaign people underestimated how this label could be applied to their guy and they allowed it to play out in Pennsylvania in ways that should have been anticipated. But then I have always wondered why Democrats are always off guard every time this hits them.

Here's an interesting exchange: Elizabeth Edwards writes an op-ed in the New York Times blasting the media's refusal (yet again) to cover any issue of substance duringa presidential campaign (snarkily titled "Bowling 1, Health Care 0"). Brian Williams, "liberal news" anchor with NBC, sneers at Edwards and says folks should go read Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal instead (choice quote: "Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama's problem. America is Mr. Obama's problem."). And then Glenn Greenwald smacks them both down.

Elizabeth Edwards' Op-Ed critiquing our media's vapidity prompts multiple paragraphs of trite NYT bashing. Peggy Noonan's insistence that Barack Obama's love of America is in question among the Gate 14 crowd (in contrast to the Ultimate Patriot John McCain) — a column that is dumb and disgusting in exactly equal measure — prompts a Pulitzer nomination from our leading News Anchor and deep praise. That's because we have a Liberal Media.

Here's an excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's new book Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics in which Glenn explains how conservative boasting about "toughness" and "self-reliance" is a way for them to avoid looking at their own inadequacies (antiwar.org):

[Rush] Limbaugh is a physically weak individual, wallowing in a life of depraved hedonism, who has never displayed a single act of physical courage. He avoided combat in Vietnam by claiming that an anal boil rendered him unfit for service (and, once he became famous as an über-warrior, said nothing when a Limbaugh biographer falsely claimed it was due to a football injury). Thus, he takes pleasure in observing acts of American cruelty and barbarism. He finds "levity" in it and cheers it on. It makes him feel powerful and strong, feelings he — understandably — is unable to obtain from his own life and actions.

While the civilized world has recoiled in horror at the excesses and war-hungriness of the United States over the last six years, the only real complaint from our right-wing war cheerleaders about the commander in chief is that he has not given them enough torture, secret prisons, wars of aggression, barbaric slaughter, and liberty infringement. Their hunger for those things is literally insatiable, because they need fresh pretexts for feeling strong. And nothing provides those feelings of strength better than revering a tough-guy male leader and mocking liberal males as weaklings and losers. [...]

It's rather ironic (and almost certainly not coincidental)

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Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, has a column in the Wall Street Journal, of all places:

Consider, for example, the one fateful charge that the punditry and the other candidates have fastened upon Mr. Obama — "elitism." No one means by this term that Mr. Obama is a wealthy person (he wasn't until last year), or even that he is an ally of the wealthy (although he might be that). What they mean is that he has committed a crime of attitude, and revealed his disdain for the common folk.

It is a stereotype you have heard many times before: Besotted with latte-fueled arrogance, the liberal looks down on average people, confident that he is a superior being. He scoffs at religion because he finds it to be a form of false consciousness. He believes in regulation because he thinks he knows better than the market. [...]

It is by this familiar maneuver that the people who have designed and supported the policies that have brought the class divide back to America — the people who have actually, really transformed our society from an egalitarian into an elitist one — perfume themselves with the essence of honest toil, like a cologne distilled from the sweat of laid-off workers. Likewise do their retainers in the wider world — the conservative politicians and the pundits who lovingly curate all this phony authenticity — become jes' folks, the most populist fellows of them all.

Today the NYTimes published convincing details of the Defense Department's program to shape public opinion on the Iraq war, before and after the invasion of Iraq, by using retired military officers who are authoritative "military analysts" for FOX and other media organizations.

Other administrations had made sporadic, small-scale attempts to build relationships with the occasional military analyst. But these were trifling compared with what [Torie Clarke, Assistant Secretary of Defense for public affairs] had in mind....a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary....

The Pentagon's regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees....The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments....

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Glenn Greenwald's new book Great American Hypocrites: Toppling The Big Myths of Republican Politics looks like a doozy. This excerpt is from a recent interview about the book (AltWeeklies.com):

RLN: You begin your analysis with the example of John Wayne as a prototype of the hypocritical would-be hero of the right. What specifically drew you to him, and why does he stand out?

GG: To this day, John Wayne is the prototype of the uber-patriotic, uber-masculine, uber-courageous Moral Republican Warrior. His imagery is the template that pioneered the brand and that the Right uses to this day to build up their political leaders. [...]

Yet John Wayne was one of America's biggest and most repugnant frauds — in exactly the way that modern Right-wing leaders are. At a time when virtually nobody avoided combat, Wayne did exactly that, using the most dishonorable means imaginable, throughout all of World War II. Because the most successful male actors, including older ones, went to fight, he was able to stay in Hollywood and become extremely rich playing war heroes. He spent the rest of his life glorifying every American war and accusing war opponents of being cowards, Communists and traitors. He crusaded for traditional American morality, attacking others whom he perceived to deviate, while he engaged in compulsive womanizing and adultery, repeatedly breaking up his own family, and wallowing in pill addictions.

Before there was Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, George Bush, Bill Kristol, David Vitter and even John McCain — there was John Wayne. One finds key parts of Wayne in each of them. To this day, he's the role model for how the Right conducts itself and the methods they use to swindle the American public.

An excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's new book Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Myths of Republican Politics (Huffington Post):

If one examines America's presidential elections beginning in 1980 to the present, what one finds is a consistent and unchanging pattern. The Republican Party dresses up its leaders in all sorts of virtuous personality costumes. The establishment press, driven by the vapid dynamics of high school personality complexes, digests and then promotes that iconography. National elections are dominated by personality imagery and smears and are almost completely bereft of consideration of substantive issues. Worst of all, the personality images that dictate our election outcomes are not just petty, but entirely false, grounded in pure myth.

In every one of these critical aspects, John McCain is perfectly illustrative of the same twisted process that has infected our political discourse and converted our national elections into, using the words of John Harris and Mark Halperin,

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