Mitt Romney says he’ll Keep America America, but to do that he’ll have to Restore America. The United States has lost a lot of America thanks to the un-American voters who keep electing baby-killer socialists from the Democrat party. Mitt Romney seems to think that he’s the man to unite America against these un-American Americans who are so intent on destroying America. He may well be right. *

One of the first things Romney will have to restore is the true meaning of the pledge of allegiance. Does anyone else these days understand that the pledge is about swearing off class warfare? That it’s about showing proper deference to the most successful Americans, the Job Creators? Over the last few generations, since the New Deal shunted America onto the wrong track, we’ve had Civil Rights and Voting Rights and Disability Rights and Gay Rights and on and on. It’s no wonder that a whole lot of Americans, from the semi-successful to the not-so-successful to the downright unsuccessful, seem to think they practically own the place.

Maybe what we need is a new pledge to restore the true meaning of the old pledge. In fact, to get back to the concept of one nation under God and indivisible, we probably need separate pledges for the 1 percent and for the 99 percent. For those of us who haven’t contributed our fair share of job-creating success, the pledge should remind us whose coattails we’re riding. Something like this:

(Or should it be peace and quiet for the prosperous? I’m not sure. These things take work, and all I’ve got is a first draft. Feel free to tinker with it.)

Changing the pledge of allegiance might seem awfully radical. It might seem like too much. But think, do you want your children to drop out of school so they can beat drums and chant in some squalid sodomite tent city? Or would you rather be humbled and put in your proper place by a new American pledge?

Law and order is one area where Romney and the other Republicans, except for the old crackpot, see pretty much eye to eye, with each other and even with un-American Democrats like Obama. But thanks to a Harvard Divinity School student named Matt Bieber, the Romney campaign was the law-and-order standout in New Hampshire.

Bieber had taken a bus up from Boston to see the primary process first hand and do some blogging about it. On Monday Nov. 9, the day before the vote, he went to the town of Hudson to hear Romney speak. Soon after he got there, he was “chatting up a campaign staffer when a police officer approached.”

Sir, we have to ask you to leave the premises.

“Sir, is this about my backpack? I’d be happy to show you - there’s nothing dangerous in there.”

“No, sir - we’ll explain it to you outside.”

I gathered my things and walked past a group of citizens and press, humiliated and confused.

Outside, the officer said, “Sir, the campaign has identified you as someone who was at a protest at Romney’s office in Manchester.”

Bieber had a lot of questions, like, “Could I speak to someone from the campaign to clear this up?” Couldn’t be done with so many people around, he was told. And besides, as one of the arresting officers, Roger Lamarche, told Rosie Gray at Buzzfeed, “It’s not my job to give people an explanation.”

So what was his job? Lamarche explained that although he and Kevin Ducie are officers in the Hudson, N.H. Police Department, their job that Monday was “to provide police service to the Romney staff who had hired the town of Hudson to hire [us].” It’s true, he said, that Bieber “hadn’t done anything.” Still, it was “the staff’s word against [Bieber’s],” and since the officers were working for the staff that wasn’t much of a dilemma. They just arrested him. Problem solved.

Bieber says he was never at any protest in Machester, and he sure doesn’t seem like a protester. Of course there’s no way for me to know for sure. Maybe he’s putting up an elaborate front, pretending to be this earnest guy who just wants to experience retail politics up close and personal and then write about it. I haven’t seen a single reason to doubt him, though. The Romney campaign hasn’t offered any explanation to reporters or to Bieber himself, even though he’s asked very nicely.

Bieber did seem to think that he could just show up at whatever campaign event he felt like and ask any kind of questions he wanted. So maybe the Romney folks did him a favor. Once their man restores America so that it’s American again, people like Bieber will need to know their place. And a few hours in the Hudson, N.H. holding pen sure beats a face full of pepper spray, don’t you think?

* ⇑ I see that Newt Gingrich, too, realizes that “America’s enemies are… other Americans.”

Bell Curves, black and white — Slightly different? Top from The Bell Curve, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray (via — see also). Bottom from La Griffe du Lion, a pseudonymous American academic.

Back at the end of November, Andrew Sullivan wrote a short post claiming that the study of intelligence — not just its racial aspects but the general study — has “been strangled by p.c. egalitarianism.” He admitted later that his conclusion was “an over-reach” (“Sometimes that happens when you respond as a blogger to a story”). But it opened up the whole race-and-IQ can of worms. And, well, there they were, old and tired but still squirming.

Sullivan has a history with the issue. In the 90s, when he was the editor of The New Republic, he devoted an issue to trying (and apparently failing) to “foment a sane discussion of The Bell Curve.” Ta-Nehisi Coates was one of the “young intellectuals who’d gather under the flag-pole” at Howard University at the time. He remembers it as a galvanizing moment: “That the in flight magazine of Air Force One would argue that all the world I’d known was brain addled set me afire.” He brought some of the fire to the latest round of the old debate, talking back to his friend Andrew. [⇓ the whole thread ⇓]

It’s an honorable role Sullivan is trying to play, though, and not an easy one. He’s read The Bell Curve and it’s not some flimsy racist tract, it’s a serious statistical analysis of a longitudinal study that followed nearly 12,000 Americans for 12 years, starting at age 17. He’s looked into some other similar studies, too, and he’s “gob-smacked by the resilience of IQ differences between broad racial groups.” But as Coates says, the main conclusion — that Africans, on average, are not as intelligent as Europeans — is “a long-held tenet of slave-holders and white supremacists.” And there’s no clean break between the impressive late-20th-century studies and the old racist pseudoscience. They share the same preoccupation with the problem of black people and the same conviction that it will always be with us. But that doesn’t mean the science is wrong, it just means that it takes balls to stand up for it.

I doubt that anyone has stood up for it as heroically as Will Saletan. In 2007, after DNA-discoverer James Watson made some foolish remarks about the intelligence of Africans, Saletan wrote a series of articles for Slate. He “soak[ed] [his] head in each side’s computations and arguments” and concluded that African genes probably carry a mental deficit. Since it’s an idea that makes a lot of people angry and uncomfortable, he looked over the precipice for us and found that “the truth isn’t as bad as our ignorant, half-formed fears and suspicions about it.” The truth set him free, anyway, and his voice rang out across the land.

Don’t tell me it isn’t genetic. Don’t tell me it’s God’s will. And in the age of genetic modification, don’t tell me we can’t do anything about it.

No, we are not created equal. But we are endowed by our Creator with the ideal of equality, and the intelligence to finish the job.

In other words, it’s a chance for all the p.c. egalitarians to get off their butts and pick up the White Man’s Burden. White Person’s Burden, I should say. Naturally, Saletan aimed his pep talk at people like himself — the educated non-blacks who have to somehow live with themselves after they give in to this politically-incorrect truth. How the folks running around with a bunch of African genes are supposed to deal with it, he didn’t say. They’re the problem, after all, not the solution.

Sullivan is 100% behind the hard truth, too, but he doesn’t go overboard with the heroics. His bottom line is that we need “unfettered research into reality.” In the mean time he seems to be unsure what the gob-smacking data means or even whether it means much of anything. But “conservatism is about facing reality.” And “research is not about helping people; it’s about finding out stuff.” So he’s ready and waiting to face the facts, if only the researchers could get to work finding out the stuff he needs to know.

We shouldn’t be too worried, though. The data on IQ differences may be way too persuasive to ignore, but when he answers Coates’s initial criticism, Sullivan stresses that the differences are subtle.

No one is arguing that “that black people are dumber than white,” just that the distribution of IQ is slightly different among different racial populations, and these differences also hold true for all broad racial groups.

The last point is good. “The differential between Caucasians and Asians - or between Ashkenazi and Sephardim Jews - is also striking in the data.” So Coates is wrong to say that the project is all about showing “a genetic relationship between the darkness of skin and the potency of neurons. (Only for ‘Africans,’ mind you.)” The research has deepened to the point that it’s confirmed all our stereotypes. It’s not just some narrow-minded racist thing about white superiority anymore.

Still, at least in America, the black-white difference is the elephant in the living room. That might be true even if it really was just a matter of “slightly different” distributions. But the distributions are the same old bell curves, and the difference that matters is the distance between the peaks — the gap in average IQ. The number that’s tossed around most of the time is roughly 1 standard deviation. That’s what you’ll find in The Bell Curve, for instance, and in “Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability,” the 2005 article by J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur R. Jensen that Saletan soaked his head in (Saletan wrote that “everyone agrees that the black-white IQ gap closed significantly during the 20th century,” but that’s not what I’m finding).

There’s nothing slight about a 1 standard deviation difference. It means that going from a typical white population to a typical African American one should be kind of like going from the regular class to the remedial class. Daniel Seligman went over the implications in his 1992 book A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America. (I should say that I’m not quoting directly from the book, I’m quoting from the website flawlesslogic.com. No doubt their quoting is flawless, too.)

If you tell yourself that the top professional and managerial jobs in this country require an IQ of at least 115 or thereabouts, then you also have to tell yourself that only about 2.5 percent of blacks appear able to compete for those jobs. The comparable figure for whites would be about 16 percent. […]

The data are even more depressing on the downside. An IQ in the 70-75 range, which many psychologists would label “borderline retarded,” implies a life that is guaranteed to be short of opportunities. Very few students in that range will absorb much of what elementary schools teach, and virtually none will graduate from high school; few will succeed in finding and keeping good jobs. None will be admitted into the armed forces (required by law to screen out the lowest ten percent of the distribution). The bad news is that a substantial minority — apparently more than one in five — of American blacks have IQs below 75. Around one in twenty whites are below 75.

One of the proud racists at the Vanguard News Network goes through the same reasoning to show the folks “Rattling the Monkey Cage” at TheRoot.com that “the differences in those distributions explain a lot of what you blacks blame racism for.” He even shows his work.

[S]uppose that a certain kind of work requires that the person doing it have an IQ of 130 or more. There are jobs of this kind, which require more brains than muscle. Job applicants of every race approach the employer seeking jobs of that kind, and the employer, to stay competitive in his industry, must select only those applicants who meet the minimum IQ qualification

And the answer is that “about 1 out of every 20 whites qualify,” but “only 1 out of every 7030 blacks do.” Assuming that an employer is drawing from a population with 1 black for every 5 1/2 whites, then…

If among his hirelings there is a lower ratio of whites to blacks than 1900, then the employer is being racist in favor of blacks, though perhaps he is being forced into it because of Affirmative Action laws.

[⇓ about those statistics ⇓]

(According to Ron Paul, you could look forever and you’d never find a black person with the brain power to make it in the quantitative realms of investment banking. Back in the 1990s, Paul told his followers that “complex embezzling” was “100 percent white and Asian.” He must have been thinking generically about the different races, since he couldn’t possibly have know every complex embezzler out there. So using your higher math skills to monetize risk in such a way that you soak both your investors and the taxpayers, for instance, must be a job for super geniuses, people so high up in the IQ stratosphere that there’s not a black person in sight. The darker criminals aren’t the brainy ones, but as Paul [⇓ or whoever ⇓] said, they’re “unbelievably fleet-footed.”)

There’s a good reason the book is called The Bell Curve and not, say, The Big Bad IQ Gap. An effect of the two offset distributions is that the discrepancies grow exponentially as you move away from the average. Even the relatively small IQ difference between whites and Asians (3 points, according to Rushton and Jensen) means that as a proportion of each population there should be several times more Asian than white geniuses and vice-versa for simpletons. The disparities between the white and black curves are much larger.

Sullivan owns that he wouldn’t mind if affirmative action was a casualty in this debate but he doesn’t go into any detail. According to the race-and-IQ hypothesis, the proportion of African Americans who are suited even to be middle managers, never mind engineers or lawyers, is much smaller than the proportion of European Americans. If anything, to the extent that this theory circulates as fact, it strengthens the case for affirmative action. It makes a compelling and seemingly rational case that it’s a huge waste of time to look for qualified black candidates for any “high IQ” job. But then it’s the job of a reality-facing pundit to take those big risks on behalf of the people who stand to lose. There’s no way they’re gonna do it, right?

Whether the underlying cause is genetic is an endlessly fascinating question — will the problem of black people always be with us? Researchers like Rushton and Jenson are sure that it will be. But those two displaced bell curves supposedly describe the world as it is now. There are all sorts of assumptions buried in the data and in the concept of IQ, and there’s no way I’ll have the time and interest to work through the primary literature and sort it all out. But what comes out in the end is claims like this: you’d have to go through 5 or 10 times as many blacks as whites to find someone who’s mentally equipped to be a teacher or an accountant. I find that very hard to believe. I might get into the reasons in another post. Right now my point is that this is where the theory touches down in the real world. It makes some very strong claims about the here and now, and there’s nothing subtle about them.

I’m sure Sullivan knows what the bell curves mean. I guess he didn’t feel like facing that much reality.

• the thread ⇑ Sullivan’s first post was on Nov. 21. A couple of days later he responded to a reader. It was about a week before Coates fired back. After that, it was Sullivan 3, Coates 2, Sullivan 4, Sullivan 5, Coates 3, Sullivan 6, Coates 4. Rod Dreher has a highlights reel.

• about those statistics ⇑ The bell curve is a normal distribution. Once you have a mean and a standard deviation you can get the percentage of people who have an IQ above X or below Y from a table or a web form. Different writers use somewhat different mean and standard deviation values, though, and it’s often not clear what the original source was. Actually the means are pretty consistent — 100 or 103 for whites, 85 for blacks. The standard deviations are not so consistent. According to La Griffe du Lion, the means are 100 and 85, the standard deviations are 15 and 13.5 (black and white) — see the red and blue graph at the top of the post. The VNN racist uses 103 and 85 as the means, 16.4 and 12.4 as the standard deviations. That means the discrepancies he calculates are extra large, and you’d pretty much expect a person like that to play them up.

  I’m not endorsing any of those numbers. I don’t have much faith in the research behind them. And the main point doesn’t depend on an exact value of the mean and standard deviation. Any two bell curves centered about 15 points apart with standard deviations of about 15, plus or minus a few, will produce the same general effect — large discrepancies in frequency of IQs that are significantly above or below average.

• or whoever ⇑ Yeah, this stuff is from the Ron Paul Newsletters, and as everyone knows, just because his name is on the top and the whole thing purports to be financial and survival advice from Ron Paul, that doesn’t mean that Ron Paul actually wrote it.

Last week, AmericaBlog announced in a headline that “Romney adopts KKK slogan: ‘Keep America American’”. It’s a great story if you listen like Butt-head and if you’re out to get Mitt Romney any way you can. Otherwise it’s nonsense, which is why it’s already blown over. It wasn’t really about Romney, anyway. It was about giving the Republicans a taste of their own medicine, slinging bullshit and slander like Fox News. Maybe this says something about the level of frustration on the left. Or maybe it’s the same old same old and just happened to push my buttons.

The story was picked up right away by MSNBC and the Washington Post. Both outlets quickly backtracked. After MSNBC issued an apology or two, John Aravosis — the creator, editor, and principal writer of AmericaBlog — added an incredulous update to his story.

[I]t’s not entirely clear what they’re apologizing for. The story is true. Romney used the phrase at least twice, and it is an old Ku Klux Klan slogan. So what about the story is incorrect, or as Al Sharpton is now calling it (he works for MSNBC) “innuendo.” Innuendo? It’s a Klan slogan, he said it.

(These days the article starts with another update, because “the Romney people are now claiming that the phrase he’s been using is ‘Keep America America’ instead of ‘Keep America American.’” This shouldn’t have been news to Aravosis since it’s exactly what you hear on the video embedded in his article. It seems like a pretty meaningless distinction, but maybe not if your whole case rests on nothing but the literal repetition of three words.) *

Causing Al Sharpton to reach out to Romney as a fellow “victim of unproven innuendo and half-truths” seems like a real accomplishment, but Aravosis is unfazed. In a separate piece about MSNBC’s apology, he holds the line. The “story” is very simple, and the ball’s in Romney’s court. The Romney campaign official who tweeted that “MSNBC apologizes to @MittRomney for ‘appalling’ KKK comparison” got it wrong, though, because

nobody “compared” anybody to the KKK. The story was, is, that Mitt Romney has repeatedly used a slogan that just happens to be a former Ku Klux Klan slogan. And it is. So is the Romney campaign claiming the slogan isn’t a former Klan slogan? Are they saying that Romney will continue to use it? No chance in hell of that. (And that’s news.)

I don’t know about “nobody,” but it’s true that Aravosis didn’t do anything as forthright and labor-intensive as a comparison between Romney and the KKK. According to the Washington Post, Aravosis is a “political commenter” and a person who generates the “provocative stuff” that’s “part of the formula for cable news success.” What that means, I guess, is that it’s his job to come up with stuff and other people’s job to think about it and deal with it.

Aravosis isn’t a journalist, anyway, so he skips all of the tedious reporting and contextualizing and analyzing that journalist have to do. Instead, he has a suggestion. It seem to be an important one, too, because it gets more thought and attention than the news he’s breaking.

In an era in which it’s apparently okay for Republicans to accuse President Obama of being a socialist, I guess we now need to ask if Mitt Romney is a Ku Klux Klansman.

Note the reasoning: Don’t ask whether Romney is a klansman because it’s a good question, ask because that’s what the Republicans would do. In fact, it’s a stupid question, but I guess that’s ok — asking stupid questions is exactly what Republicans do, right? Aravosis doesn’t want us to worry about whether or not Romney’s use of a KKK slogan was inadvertent, because “no, the Republicans would say, if this were a Democrat, that clearly the candidate was a closet member of the KKK.”

So should we go totally Republican and instead of asking just announce that “Romney is ‘a closet member of the KKK’”? Aravosis leaves that up to us to decide. If he gave his opinion it would involve comparisons and conclusions that he’d probably have to defend. I’m sure he has better things to do, what with cable news needing its next fix of provocative stuff and all. This is, to my mind, a loathsome way of informing the public. I know it well from my dealings with the academic hack KC Johnson. Give no context but plenty of rhetorical subtext. Point readers in the direction you want them to go but take no responsibility for where they end up. When pressed, play word games and feign ignorance (who, me? compare??? I was just noting the facts!).

Aravosis does have a point about the bogus labels that the right-wing talking heads are constantly slapping on Obama — they dish it out and then get all sanctimonious when they have to take it. It bothers Eric Loomis, too. It was his post on Lawyers, Guns & Money that got me started on this “somewhat silly controversy.” One passage in particular stood out:

Republicans can say quite literally anything they want about the president without any consequences, but if Democrats note that Romney may have used the same phrase as the KKK about an issue on which Romney shares a lot of similarities with past hate groups, they are vilified as destroying the public discourse.

I relate to the frustration. It’s good to be clear about where the asymmetry is, though, because if you just look at the mass of “public discourse,” there’s a whole lot of vilifyin’ goin’ on, and it’s not a one-sided thing. Fox News’s doublespeak slogan — “Fair and Balanced” — shows the essential difference between left and right. It says that for Fox, the “liberal media’s” pious standards are good for one thing — screwing liberals. And it’s amazing how well it works sometimes. Something questionable happens at NPR, the right-wing opinion mill churns out its buckets of bile, and the reaction is, “Did we say something wrong?! Oh my god, we’re so so sorry! Who do we need to fire?” The Shirley Sherrod fiasco feels like the same reflex on steroids — a bunch of liberals jumping up to dance to the beat of a man who “want[s] it to be in the history books that [he] took down the institutional left.” When the opposition has its double standards proudly tattooed on its money-stuffed bicep, the only one worried about “civil discourse” is the punching bag.

But it’s the form of Loomis’s comparison that stood out, not the issue. It has a very familiar ring, one I associate with conservative sites (though I figure that’s mainly because it bothers me most when it’s coming from conservatives). When I got around to Aravosis’s version I realized that it’s the whine that really gets me.

And can you imagine what the networks would have done if the Obama campaign were using an old KKK slogan, even inadvertently? Oh the never ending prime-time debate it would create. But, as always, when a Republican is on the receiving end of the criticism, it’s no big deal, and in fact, you’re a bad person for even mentioning it.

No political persuasion has a monopoly on whining, but the right has a real flair for feeling persecuted. It must be all that seething Christianity. And you’re never too powerful to feel persecuted when feeling persecuted is in your ideological DNA. Roger Ailes, supposedly apologizing for calling NPR execs Nazis — not apologizing to NPR, of course, but instead to his buddy Abe Foxman at the Anti-Defamation League — whines about how FoxNews was beat up by a couple of rabbis. Rick Perry, on the other hand, whines for the masses about how “gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.” But the most annoying whine of persecution is the kind the starts “imagine if.” Imagine if a Republican said that about blacks/gays/women/immigrants! They’d crucify him!

This is really what Aravosis’s Romney/KKK “brouhaha” is all about — doing unto the Republicans as they done unto us. Since he must’ve known from the beginning that it wasn’t going to amount to anything, it was mostly an excuse to whine. And not just about the Republicans. Before his story hit the web he was already primed for “the traditional media to poo-poo this and ignore it, or write it off as funny, while they freely quote the GOP candidates…” etc., etc. Because if there’s one thing that every living person with a political axe to grind has in common, it’s that the mainstream media has screwed them over before, is screwing them over now, and will screw them over again in about five minutes. (Hey, this whining thing is pretty fun!)

If you wanna play hardball, find a pitcher who can throw a strike. This one watches the ball sail out of the park and wishes he could hit it like that, too.

By far the best article I found about Mitt Romney’s “KKK slogan” was written by a historian, Yoni Appelbaum, for the Atlantic blog. He covers both the immediate history — the story emerging from the twitterverse in what “might serve as a case study on politics in the social media age” — and the century-and-a-half history of the phrase “keeping America American.” Generally it’s been used to send the kind of messages you’d expect, somewhere on the spectrum of paranoia and xenophobia, but not always.

The process was set in motion by a reporter who tweeted about a stump speech Romney gave in New Hampshire. Presumably it was about the same as Romney’s speech a few days earlier in Iowa.

[President Obama] means what he says when he says he wants to fundamentally transform America. There’s nothing wrong with America that needs transforming. I want to restore America. I want to turn around America. I want to keep America America.

The LA Times quotes a variation on the theme from another Iowa campaign event. Unlike the current president, “who wants to transform America into a European-style nation,” Romney said that he would “keep America American with the principals that made us the greatest nation on Earth.”

Applebaum traces the slogan back to “an 1887 appeal in The Congregationalist, promoting efforts to convert and assimilate Catholic immigrants from Canada.” Over the years, it was used by the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. And, of course, the Klan. “More often than not,” Applebaum writes, “calls to ‘keep America American’ have played upon fears that our nation is beset by alien ideas, or even worse, alien peoples.”

But there’s another thread. Applebaum picks it up around the turn of the 20th century, in the writings of Universalist Minister John Coleman Adams, who “believed that embracing timeless ideals required continual progress toward the goal of crafting a more perfect union and a more inclusive nation.” When Romney spoke at CPAC back in Feb. 2010, according to Applebaum, he “placed himself squarely in that tradition, speaking directly to our hopes for a better future. As the campaign has worn on, though, [he] has edged closer toward emphasizing our fears instead.” (This video, which is included in Aravosis’s original article, is taken from near the end of the speech. It’s not actually a campaign ad, it just looks like one.)

Others have lost their liberty by trading it away for the false promises of big government. We choose to hold to our founding principles. We will stop these power seekers where they stand. We will keep America America by retaining its character as the land of opportunity. We’ll welcome the inventor, the entrepreneur, the innovator. We’ll insist on greatness from every one of our citizens. And rather than apologizing for who we are or for what we have accomplished we will celebrate our strength and goodness.

According to Eric Wemple, “[t]he unfortunate upshot of that moment is that Romney used a phrase deployed by the KKK eerily similar to one deployed by the KKK in proximity to a reference to immigration policy” (the overstrike is a correction to account for the fact that Romney actually said “keep America America”). Which is to say that there’s a Klannish way to read it, so it’s legitimate fodder for cable news. If you’re the type who can’t help noticing when someone says “anus,” cable news sounds like the place to be — Butt-head must love it.

Anyway, the essence of conservatism is keeping things the same. Add a little bumper-sticker patriotism and you have a perfect slogan: “Keep America America” (or “American”). How could this phrase not crop up again and again? It’s a great way to signal that you’re a true down-home conservative, and that’s a lot of what Romney is doing.

But in his recent speeches, he’s also offering a meaningful choice. It’s between his American America and Obama’s “European-style” America, which is a pretty mindless, knee-jerk way to put it, but that’s how we like our politics. As campaign rhetoric goes, it’s not bad. Compared to Aravosis’s juvenile scandal-mongering, it almost looks honorable.

* ^ Yoni Applebaum goes into the issue of America vs. American in a comment under his article.

And there’s one point that I particularly wish I’d emphasized and explained at greater length. America and American are, in this context, semantically equivalent. Romney’s favored - and perhaps only - formulation, “Keep America America,” is historically less common. If you’re trying to accuse him of echoing a particular group or speaker, I suppose which way he says it might actually matter. So the headlines claiming he was using a Klan slogan were, as far as that goes, doubly slanderous. And I certainly wish to quote him accurately; there’s value in accuracy, independent of whether it makes a semantic difference.

But in determining his meaning, as well as its historical resonance, I don’t think the distinction is particularly salient. Most of those who have called to Keep America America - or American - have been expressing their fear that our nation is beset by alien ideas or peoples, and needs to be defended. With disturbing frequency, those calls have crossed the line into outright bigotry. They have also been contested by other calls to Keep America America - or American - that stress our pride in being a land of opportunity. The former tend to emphasize how virtuous America has historically been, while the latter tend to stress our continuing struggle to live up to our stated values.

The use of the phrase itself tells us almost nothing. The key is context, and meaning. What does each speaker intend it to convey? That’s the question I intended to pose, and I think it remains important.

I once heard a female professor of mathematics talk about an encounter she had with a senior colleague soon after taking her first faculty job. He told her that he didn’t think she belonged there because he knew for a fact that women weren’t good at math. Coming from a math professor, of all people, the reasoning is mind-boggling — surely he understood the basics of probability distributions. It could be true that on average women are less capable mathematicians than men and also true that this particular woman was more capable than most men, including a certain professor standing in the hall making an ass of himself at that very moment.

That’s the basic problem with believing that you’re smarter than a whole class of other people — it tends to make you stupid. That anecdote is my favorite example (and it’s just an anecdote, so take it with a grain of salt — I have no reason to doubt the woman who told it but I don’t have a lot of faith in my own memory). It’s been on my mind because of the exchanges last week between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Andrew Sullivan about race and IQ. I have a second-favorite example, too, and unlike the first one it’s documented in fantastic detail. It’s been sitting on my hard disk for a long time, part of a collection of half-written blog posts that just gets more impressive every year. I guess now’s the time, finally.

The presumed fool in this story is also a woman, and the operating assumption is that she’s a scientific ignoramus. Not because she’s a woman, of course, but because she’s a feminist, which is a much better reason. Specifically — not that it really matters, because they all think alike — it’s Amanda Marcotte, prima donna of Pandagon. Feminists hold science in contempt and don’t even believe in reality, and you don’t need to know any science to see what a scientific ignoramus a person like that is.

Her opposite number is Jeff Goldstein, the guru who for 10 gleeful years has been serving glistening gobs of Protein Wisdom from a can. Just like Newt, he sounds like a smart person is supposed to sound, only you don’t have to be dumb to think that, just easily impressed. Like David Thompson, for instance, who’s our unreliable narrator, or something.

A lot of the story is a pretty typical episode of the echo chamber follies, just with an especially united front of willful ignorance. Goldstein ratchets the pretense up with a load of his patented intellectual spam. Meanwhile, Thompson takes the knee-jerk assumptions about who’s smarter up a notch, commenting that Goldstein “probably [has] quite a few IQ points” on Marcotte. So guess which one has a clue about basic evolutionary biology?

Once upon a time almost 3 years ago, Amanda Marcotte wrote a blog post about Nadya Suleman (“Octo-Mom”). She starts it by quoting a blogger who had assumed that “the desire to have children is a very normal, biological urge” and had then speculated that the urge had gone haywire in Suleman’s case. That’s not a biological urge, Marcotte counters — it’s socially constructed.

For David Thompson, this is just the kind of entertaining nonsense he’s come to expect.

Note that Ms Marcotte is quite insistent on this point. The inclination to reproduce simply is a cultural construct, and a dubious one at that. Why humans should apparently be unique in this regard, untouched by biology, isn’t entirely clear. Presumably, human beings - specifically human men - have constructed elaborate patterns of behaviour to mimic almost exactly biological inclinations that are felt as real, by men and women, but which don’t in fact exist.

When it’s the commenters’ turn to get their licks in, Thompson’s message is boiled down to its lowest-common-denominator essentials: Marcotte is an agenda-driven fool and her ideas are pure rubbish.

So when birds and bees feel the urge to have baby birds and baby bees, it’s biology. But when humans feel the urge, it’s a cultural construct. [posted by carbon based lifeform]

This is stupidity so high and rarefied that it leaves one gasping for breath. It is on exactly the same level as stating that the urge to find food is a cultural construct. [David Gillies]

Isn’t she self-nominating for a Darwin Award? [georgesdelaotour]

No, there’s nothing to think about. This woman is a notorious idiot, nothing she says is interesting or sensible or intellectually provocative, she’s the most predictable form of brainless, ideological zealot. [Amos (my emphasis, though, because what could be more perfect?)]

Unfortunately, if we ‘educate’ vast numbers of people beyond the level of their intelligence, we will get dross like that spouted by Marcotte and Freethinker. [paul ilc]

Ignorance can be a lot of fun in the right atmosphere, and Thompson is good at cultivating it. The idea that it’s biology when bees feel the urge to have baby bees is above and beyond, though — seems like “carbon based lifeform” may have watched “Bee Movie” and “Bugs Life” a few too many times. Exactly one person gets the basic biology right, but his mild comment that he’s “not sure there is a ‘reproductive instinct’” doesn’t seem to have left any impression [1]. Thompson may have had some doubts. He seems to be fishing around when he drops in a comment to say that Marcotte “seems to be claiming that the species’ inclination to reproduce (or become pregnant, or to parent or whatever) is real only as a malleable social construct.” And if he’s wrong, he suggests, it’s because of Marcotte’s “knotty and erratic thinking.” Bullshit! Her description of the biological inclination is just fine — there’s nothing knotty or even social-contracty about it.

As far as I know, there’s no evidence whatsoever for the popular theory that women are born with the urge to breed that’s as real as the sexual urge. It doesn’t make sense that we would have an inborn urge to have babies that is a separate thing from the urge to have sex—sex seems to be nature’s way to convince most of us, at least, to breed. Reliable contraception was only invented, relative to human history, about yesterday. We don’t evolve so quickly that a natural urge to procreate would have to evolve to keep us alive in response to our newfound ability to separate sex and procreation.

It’s actually Thompson who is imagining that humans are un-biological. Marcotte is insisting that the human reproductive drive is biological, i.e., the same as in every other animal. Unlike Thompson & Co., she understands that the only way to get an inborn, biological urge is to evolve it. The only way to evolve an “urge to have babies” is if that urge translates into the act of mating. But all that’s needed to get animals to mate is an urge to mate, and for hundreds of millions of years that’s done the job. Lady rabbits don’t sidle over to their partner, feeling somehow incomplete, and say in bunny body language, “Oh honey, I wanna have a baaaaybeee!” The call of the wild is “let’s get it on!” There’s absolutely no evidence that humans have evolved a different urge. What we’ve evolved is the ability to manage the urge, because we can make the conscious connection between sex and babies.

Marcotte’s piece has shortcomings, of course. Sex is not the only innate urge involved in human reproduction — unlike guppies, humans can’t just squirt the little suckers out, we have to raise ‘em up, too. And I agree with the general impression that she writes dogmatically about social constructs. It’s as if they were hashed out by a bunch of guys in a smoke-filled room and handed down to posterity. As far as science goes, though, it’s not ignorance or contempt that stands out but matter-of-fact acceptance and the way it’s juxtaposed with uncritical articles of feminist faith — that’s how it looks to me, anyway. [2]

Thompson and his merry band of wankers are fixated on a dumb feminist, though, so they’ve airbrushed out any detail that might make you, like, stop and think “hmmm, maybe she’s right about that.” They’re left with a pin-up that makes them feel real smart, and when she says “social construct” and “patriarchy” it’s just… soooo… hhhhhotttt! Any sign that she has a brain would obviously spoil the fun.

It’s an awfully pathetic and mean-spirited way to get your ego stroked, but it’s not all scorn and derision in Thompson’s clubhouse. Down in the comments, he takes a moment to look up to someone he admires.

James S: Does Marcotte actually respond to criticism?

Thompson: [F]rom what I’ve seen,… if it’s realistic criticism and challenges her recurring assumptions (of which there are so many) then it’s very rarely engaged, and not well. If you browse the, er, exchanges of views between Marcotte and Jeff at Protein Wisdom, you’ll see that Jeff generally makes a point of engaging with criticism and specifics, sometimes at great length. Sadly, this favour isn’t returned. As I said, a visit to Pandagon is not unlike stumbling into some kind of church. It’s a gathering of the faithful.

James S: Wow. Anyone who proves her wrong is a sexist, racist hater.

Thompson: In fairness, there are probably quite a few IQ points between Jeff and Amanda, but the point remains that one of them engages with criticism in a serious (if sometimes mocking) way, while the other does not. Instead, she denounces unbelievers. Actually, it can be fun to watch Jeff fence with his more substantial critics. The exchanges with Professor Ric Caric leap to mind. … In many ways he’s like a smarter Marcotte and uses similar tactics but with, ahem, Academic Gravitas™. [emphasis added]

The really fascinating part of that, for me, is the way he sets Caric up as “a smarter Marcotte.” Any fool can look at the right-thinking people and the wrong-thinking people and figure out who’s smarter. But when you have two equally benighted individuals, what do you do? There are a couple of knee-jerk heuristics Thompson might have used, but maybe it’s a little more subtle and more personal than that. If the smarter one is “more substantial,” and if by “substantial” you mean that he produces a lot of text that lets our hero cut a dashing figure as he thrusts and parries, then the nod definitely goes to Caric.

From what I’ve seen, anyway, Goldstein thoroughly enjoyed his encounters with Caric. In July 2007, Caric presented a laundry list of all the deplorable things he’d found on PW and all of its connections to other deplorable sites, people, and ideas. Goldstein had no trouble answering and dismissing the individual points, and overall he was delighted with Caric’s disapproval, delighted to return it. A few days later, Caric was back with a conventional homily on racism, framed with a few sarcastic jabs at Goldstein. It was a perfect opportunity for Goldstein to play literary critic and expound his own iconoclastic philosophy of race. To be accused of bigotry by an certified Professor of Mindless Diversity is mother’s milk to Goldstein.

Maybe there have been exchanges like that between Marcotte and Goldstein. They’re natural adversaries, for sure, and in a tribalistic way they could be really useful to each other. What I found, though, is a one-liner Marcotte posted about a month after those exchanges with Caric:

The perfect person to deny that many conservative men act out of a sense of anxious masculinity is a guy who pulls his dick out 25 times a day to make sure it’s still there.

So you can see why “Academic Gravitas™” makes for a “smarter Marcotte” — unlike the real thing, it never draws blood. And it’s not like Goldstein is above this kind of thing. He’s happy to respond in kind in Marcotte’s comments and then with his own post. More recently he put Scott Eric Kaufman down as “an intellectual vagina” who’d birthed an “Asian gal’s ping pong ball.” It’s an amazing genital-racial metaphor, especially when you consider that the ping pong ball — some guy who sent Goldstein an obnoxious email — is presumed black.

Anyway, Caric is just a guy with a blog, like the rest of us peons. Goldstein and Marcotte are big-time bloggers, and there are good reasons for that — they’re both fluent, productive writers who project a strong personality, though their styles are worlds apart. Marcotte is general-interest magazine kind of writer — Newsweek, not The New Yorker. Aside from a bit of feminist lingo, maybe, and niche topics like skepticism, anyone who can follow The Daily Show can drop in on Pandagon and get what Marcotte is writing about. Goldstein demands more time and effort. His writing is a performance, it directs attention to the writer, and it’s full of arcane material that pulls you into his world. His style puts him in the center of a circle of readers who are focussed on his very conspicuous erudition, among other things. The impression of intelligence isn’t necessarily false, and if for some reason you had to guess his IQ and compare it to Marcotte’s, that’s probably the thing to go with. But the comparison is a lot more interesting than that. You can get a sense from their styles of the general character of the two writers, with the political slant and subject matter factored out — Marcotte is upfront, accessible, and unguarded while Goldstein is showy, manipulative, and entrenched.

Goldstein is a very gifted writer, though, no doubt about it. When he’s not being self-consciously intellectual, he’s a superb hard-hitting, mad-as-hell editorialist. He also has an impressive ability to generate baroque highbrow text that’s also impassioned and readable, and he can get a lot of verbal mileage out of a small idea.

Because for Limbaugh’s signs to acquire the meaning the Obama camp wants viewers to take away from their presentation, those signs must be entirely severed from their original intent. And it is only at that point - when the interpretative process is left up to the intentions of a receiver who has naught but the signifiers to go on, thanks to the dishonest and intentional removal of all the indexes to original intent that occur inside the signified context of the utterer (eg., metatextual clues signaling irony or parody; think of lines being lifted from Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and being used by Obama to suggest that Swift “wants to exterminated the poor of Ireland”), that one can argue that Limbaugh’s piece “means” what the Obama camp suggests it means.

I think Marcotte would just write something like this (the part in bold corresponds to the passage above): The two lines were sarcastic when Limbaugh said them, but there’s nothing to clue you in about that in Obama’s ad — the ad makes it seem like Limbaugh was being serious (and then she’d add something like, Good Work! Maybe Obama’s finally grown some ovaries!).

In the post I just quoted, Goldstein uses eight dense paragraphs to explain that deceptive out-of-context quoting is a “crass rhetorical trick.” That’s what it takes, I guess, to show how this commonplace principle of intellectual integrity is actually a profound manifestation of intentionalism. The bottom line, anyway, is that “once one understands intentionalism, one realizes that there is nothing else:”

we either appeal to the intent of the author in order to “interpret,” or we privilege our own intent, which is what happens when we refuse to allow the original signs to act as anything more than signifiers upon which we then graft our own meaning.

Goldstein takes this idea of intentionalism very seriously, as you can see. It’s one of his signature causes. He takes it personally, too. Look what happened when Scott Eric Kaufman wrote that Goldstein had “fully embraced” the theory of Ayers ghostwriting for Obama, when in fact he had only used the theory as a hypothetical in a “rather academic exhortation on the various beings of agency.” It was a gross misrepresentation of his intentions, and Kaufman did it knowing full well that “those predisposed to read his political hackery are similarly predisposed to avoid confronting primary texts.” Goldstein threw an epic temper tantrum, and who can blame him?

So naturally, when Goldstein criticized Marcotte’s “octo-mom” post he was careful to privilege her intent. After all, it’s a matter of basic critical integrity, as applicable to a loathsome enemy like Marcotte as to a friend like Rush. And after about 43 seconds of careful study, he realized that the primary, topical purpose of the article is to dismiss the notion that there’s a biological urge to have babies, first of all because it’s a myth, and second of all because it puts the onus of reproduction on women and their inchoate yearnings (he couldn’t help chuckling at the thought of a feminist trying to win an argument by invoking science).

Ha! Goldstein already knows all about social construct theorists and don’t need to bother with no stinkin’ text! And anyway, Marcotte’s post was predigested for him by his warmup act, Darleen Click, who realized that “no where would [Amanda] state something so positively about homosexuality or transgenderism… no, those aren’t subject to change at all, no social construct there. Heh.” (it’s so very taxing, you see, for Darleen to have Amanda all up in her head not stating things). When Goldstein stepped in with some thoughts about “Ms Marcotte’s (predictable) position,” he congratulated Click for the “nice gotcha moment.” “Social construct theorists like Amanda are often trapped by inconsistencies in their own arguments,” he notes, and then uses some big, bonecrushing words to trap her between one (predictable) position he misrepresents and another that he imagines. If there’s one thing those folks really love it’s a gotcha moment, and lack of evidence is no reason to miss out on the fun. Comments she left under her post suggest that Marcotte has a somewhat more subtle position on homosexuality — she writes that it’s still “real” even though “[it] has an environmental component” — but there’s no way Goldstein could have known about that. As far as the claims Marcotte really did make, Goldstein’s language is impressive but vague. He’s kind enough to clarify in the comments, though, and then he’s clearly wrong. [3]

Anyway, the important thing is the ultimate intentions of Marcotte and her social constructivist red army, which are “to seize political control by seizing control of how ‘meaning’ is determined.” It’s “a clear indication that the institutionalization of ‘response’ theoretics has progressed to the point where we must, indeed, either fight back or else become subsumed by interest groups bent on controlling ‘meaning’ by purely rhetorical force.” Goldstein is a formidable rhetorical warrior. Nobody is working harder to keep the world safe from the insidious spread of pernicious literary theoretics than he is.

He’s also an intellectual fraud, a billowing gasbag of pedantry, hypocrisy, and self-pity, and the perfect poster boy for the puffed-up but ultimately hollow cult of superior intelligence. I wouldn’t be at all surprised or bothered to find out that his IQ is quite high — it would just be more evidence of how little the number tells you about the quality of the product.

NOTES

1. ^ It’s not just because he gets the fundamental biological fact right that Rich Rostrum’s comment stands out. There’s also a tone of actual curiosity, as if there might be something of interest other than the partisan implications.

   I’m not sure there is a “reproductive instinct”. There are instincts and drives to engage in behaviors which lead to reproduction, and to care for young, but the process is too long and indirect to be reflected in a “drive”. Animals mate and produce young - but do they _know_ that mating leads to offspring? I don’t think so.

   As far as I know, only humans are capable of performing actions in conscious expectation of results that will not occur for a long time (such as planting seeds to grow food to be eaten several months in the future). I don’t see how such awareness could drive the development of an “instinct”, though it can certainly combine with the desire to care for children. Note that people will make very strong efforts to obtain adoptive children, even when those children are of a different race and thus not possibly the adopter’s genetic offspring.

   It’s not that case, by the way, that every other comment is the kind of pure strident stupidity that I excerpted in the post. As usual with comment threads, there are lots of tangents. I see the redoubtable Amac in there — a person who’s quite capable of calling out nonsense, but here he’s one of the tangents. There are also a couple of smart comments at the end that came in months later and weren’t part of the discussion/celebration.

2. ^ The most polemical parts of Marcotte’s piece, to my mind, are when she makes these cultural constructs sound like conspiracies, writing things like, “culturally constructed differences… exist to demean and oppress women” and “the mythological ‘biological clock’” is essentially “an effort to Other women” (my emphasis).

   It may or may not matter that she doesn’t include parenting with biology, and that’s the basic problem — who knows? Parenting is a very complex, long-term, and subtle thing, especially compared to sex, and I don’t see how the urges that guide us to raise our offspring (and guide our offspring to make sure they’re raised) could be so precisely targeted that they don’t have spillover effects. The fact that people choose to adopt and it works out is pretty good evidence of that. And when it comes to possible differences in the reproduction-related urges of the two sexes, the mammaries loom large.

   In spite of what Thompson and all the rest of them think, it’s clear from Marcotte’s blogging that she has an active interest in science and she’s fairly well informed. She identifies herself as a skeptic, too, so she regularly argues for evidence-based ideas and against faith-based ideas, and does it fairly well from what I’ve seen. I have the feeling, though, that the conspiratorial patriarchy is represents a faith-based core of feminist ideology that she hasn’t (or at least hadn’t) managed to confront. The process of social construction is surely more organic and more interesting than that. That’s how it seems to me, anyway, based on the diverse social systems of non-human primates and the work of feminist biologists like Sarah Hrdy.

   One symptom of Marcotte’s polemical thinking is indifference or intolerance of the inconvenient experience of other women. This was extreme in the wake of Marcotte’s notoriously vehement comments about the Duke lacrosse case. She was apparently unwilling to tolerate even respectful disagreement from other feminists, including one from Duke. The local perspective in a situation like that is more than just another opinion, and a commentator working from a distance needs to be open to it. It’s not the last word, but it’s the voice of experience and it usually complicates the picture. Marcotte, it seems, preferred to keep it simple.

   In the much less charged context of her “octo-mom” post, Marcotte is of course much more understanding. She acknowledges that some women experience a strong urge to have children and she wants to reassure them that she believes their feelings are “real.” Nonetheless, the way Marcotte sees it, these women have internalized a system that’s designed to demean and oppress them. It seems kind of patronizing, doesn’t it? This is a realm where a whole lot can be guessed but very little is known. There is no evidence-based explanation for the feelings those women have. The truly skeptical approach to the situation is to respect the unknown. The polemical approach is to collapse it down to a line of defense.

3. ^ This, from Goldstein’s post, is Darleen Click’s “gotcha” after he’s bloated it up with pseudo-erudition:

   Deconstructing — and so re-conceptualizing — the “social construct” that Amanda suggests was built up by patriarchal forces to trick women into thinking the desire to procreate and “mother” is a biological imperative is, to her way of thinking, good. Re-conceptualizing the “social construct” that tricks homosexuals or the transgendered into thinking that their behavior is biologically driven, on the other hand, is reductive, evil, and Christianist.

   In short, she wants to have it both ways — and she wants this precisely because it puts her in charge of deciding for everyone else what is right and what is wrong, socially speaking.

   He does manage to identify a desire to “mother” as one the things that Marcotte is writing off as a social construct. I don’t see why the word is quoted, though — a desire to mother seems like a pretty good guess about where that urge to have a baby comes from. It’s probably just verbal filigree (thus the quotes), since it goes with a “desire to procreate,” which is another version of the pseudoscientific thing that doesn’t exist.

   Responding to a reader, he summarizes his take on Marcotte’s position more clearly, and he manages to be more clearly and totally wrong, both about evolution and Marcotte. The puppeteering is shameless, too. In the post, it’s the fabricating of her supposed position on homosexuality and “she wants to have it both ways — and she wants this precisely because….” Then in the comment it’s, “when pressured, it becomes obvious that Amanda would change her tune….” It become even more obvious that Goldstein is spouting pure bullshit.

   What Amanda is saying is that the evolutionary imperative to reproduce doesn’t really exist — that it is social construct. It is REAL, she concedes, but real as a SOCIAL CONSTRUCT, and so adaptable to change by human will alone. In a sense, this is true: we can often constrain our biological insticts by way of agreed upon social contracts, and so create social constructs to militate against biological norms.

   But that’s not what Amanda means. Instead, she is arguing that there are no biological imperatives, only social constructs that act AS IF they were biological imperatives.

   This is nonsense, and as both Darleen and I (and others) noted, when pressured, it becomes obvious that Amanda would change her tune with respect to other biological imperatives as it suits her political needs.

Danon describes himself as a friend of Huckabee’s and says, “I can honestly tell you that I have never met a more sincere friend of our cause. He ponders the Holocaust and its dark legacy more than many Jews do.” Danon thinks that it was ridiculous of the ADL “to criticize a man who is undeniably one of Israel’s staunchest and most effective supporters….” That’s the inevitable point in Huckabee’s favor, and it’s not necessarily a bad one but it’s always made uncritically. Danon adds that the criticism of his friend “actually trivializes the Holocaust” but doesn’t explain how. Not that I entirely disagree — language policing tends to trivialize everything it touches.

It’s a good thing to stand up for your friends, and it’s nice that Danon can testify to his friend’s sincerity. Thinking more generally, he writes, “We want our Christian friends to visit Israel, to teach their children about the Holocaust and yes, to share their experiences and concerns with the widest possible audience.” Nobody should “censor such individuals” or “stifle the kind of message uttered not once but continuously by Huckabee.” Fair enough, though it’s too bad he has to confuse criticism with censorship — the ADL is not in a position to “censor” anyone, and Foxman’s criticism of Huckabee wasn’t exactly fire and brimstones.

There’s one glaring problem — Danon completely misses the point. He describes the story Huckabee told about his daughter, which he finds moving and sympathetic — presumably it’s just what he’d like a friendly visitor to Israel to take away. So far so good. Then he adds, by way of justification, that…

The story was so indelibly etched in the father’s mind that he retold it occasionally to emphasize the short memory of mankind when it comes to hatred and mass murder. Even more, he felt his young daughter’s intuitive understanding spoke eloquently of the sacred duty of accountability, contrasted with inaction and collaboration in the face of horrific crimes.

That’s nice, but Huckabee was not talking about “hatred and mass murder,” he was talking about the budget deficit. If he was calling his audience to their “sacred duty of accountability… in the face of horrific crimes” for the budget deficit, then he was most certainly trivializing the Holocaust, in a big way.

Foxman could have done even a tiny bit of fact-checking and discovered what most people in the Israel and American Jewish community know quite well, that Israel and the Jewish people have no stronger advocate than Mike Huckabee.

Seems like the competition for Greatest Goy Friend to Israel and the Jewish People is pretty stiff over there at Fox News. But actually those three gentlemen of fair-and-balanced land were playing their get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s just the ticket when Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League get on your case for rhetorical abuse of the Holocaust. There was a little burst of attention last week when Huckabee and Foxman tangled and then quickly kissed and made up. The three incidents together reveal some interesting patterns, though — some very lame watchdogging, first of all.

Last November, Glenn Beck mounted an all-out assault against George Soros on his Fox News show. Foxman found one of Beck’s claims, that Soros was once “a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps,” to be “completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top,” not to mention “horrific.” Beck responded by going to his files and pulling out a recent letter of apology from none other than Abe Foxman, who had written to Beck that “I know that you are a friend of the Jewish people, and a friend of Israel.” Once prompted, Foxman reiterated the sentiment, adding that “there are certain things [Beck] doesn’t understand, which have led him to make insensitive remarks.” Apparently they’re not that big a deal, though.

One of the things Beck clearly did understand is how to work the classic anti-Semitic stereotypes. Just a month earlier, after Rick Sanchez’s foolish rant about Jon Stewart and the Jewish “bigots” who control the media, Foxman wrote an editorial about the resiliency of those old stereotypes and the need for continued vigilance. He also wrote to CNN, congratulating them for firing Sanchez and urging them to disavow his anti-Semitic views more conspicuously. Beck’s theatrical effort to cast a rich Jewish businessman as an evil puppetmaster pulling the strings of government and the media was far more willful and sustained. Foxman singled out a single claim that as a Holocaust survivor he found intolerable. He had nothing to say about all the anti-Semitic dog whistling. Instead, he made sure everyone knew what a great friend to Israel Beck is. Sanchez is clearly not such a friend. [1]

And then, during the media afterparty for Beck’s “symphony of anti-Semitic dog-whistles,” Fox News boss Roger Ailes had this to say about the executives at NPR: “They are, of course, Nazis.” Knowing that Foxman would be “receiving calls” because of the way he’d shot his mouth off, Ailes sent a letter right away to the ADL chief, who took it as a “sincere and heartfelt” apology. And it seems that Ailes was indeed sincere about how some unnamed NPR execs really were “nasty, inflexible bigots,” and about how he and Fox News were the blameless victims of a couple of liberal rabbis. He may even have genuinely believed that Foxman’s discretion in calling out anti-Semites is “heroic” and that Beck’s claims about Soros were factual because the Fox News “Brainroom” checked and “found them valid.” Ailes’s complaining is definitely heartfelt, but when he gets around to the apology it’s as fleeting and insincere as can be. As I wrote a while ago, the exchange between these two is like a scene from a sitcom marriage, with Foxman as the punctilious wife and Ailes as the boorish husband — a quirky old couple happily talking past each other and hearing exactly what they each want to hear.

Last week it was Mike Huckabee’s turn after both he and Michele Bachmann invoked the Holocaust in their comments about the budget deficit (Huckabee was in Pennsylvania addressing an NRA convention). In a statement posted on the ADL web site, Foxman wrote, “It is highly inappropriate to use America’s mounting debt crisis as another occasion to invoke Nazis and the Holocaust, particularly on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day….” In response, the Mike Huckabee News managed to get a very indignant Mike Huckabee on the line and put together a “news” item:

“Foxman’s remarks are not only factually wrong, but they are hurtful to me personally in light of my unequalled friendship with members of the Jewish community, and I ask Foxman to retract his statement as publicly as he issued it, and apologize for his lack of accuracy in issuing it and for the harm done by attacking the very strongest advocates for the Jewish people and Israel.

“Israel and Jewish people need to make friends, not insult the ones they have” said Huckabee.

You can see from that parting shot how the strange alliance between Zionists and evangelicals might really be, “in the immortal words of Leon Wieseltier, ‘a grim comedy of mutual condescension’” (quoting Michele Goldberg). Huckabee stresses that it’s a factual issue, but there’s just one fact on his mind and it has nothing to do with his remarks to the NRA. His peerless support for Foxman’s tribe is the prime fact — Huckabee seems to feel that it’s his license to say whatever he wants about the Holocaust without Mr. Goodie Two-Shoes butting in.

It’s no surprise that Huckabee’s indignant reply didn’t say up for long. Blogger David Shroud quotes the bulk of it [2] and comments that “the ADL — apparently having exhausted its spine quotient for the week — capitulated entirely to Huckabee’s bullying.” Foxman didn’t exactly retract and apologize but he did write a letter that basically says nothing to see here — Huckabee “never intended to make any direct comparison between today’s issues and the Holocaust.”

In the primaries four years ago Huckabee set off the alarm with a remark about “the holocaust of liberalized abortion.” In the press release for that incident, Foxman is quite clear about what drives his criticism. “The Holocaust was a unique tragedy in human history,” he writes, and “analogies [to it] can only trivialize and diminish the horror, and cause further pain to Holocaust survivors and to those alive today who lost friends and loved ones.” The overriding concern, then, is not the sanctity of the Shoah, it’s much narrower. And I guess in order to be non-partisan, he sticks to a superficial reading and avoids much interpretation or analysis — either there’s an obvious analogy or there isn’t one. His deference to friends hems him in some more while it also mocks his non-partisanship. So basically he’s a branch of the PC language police. Whether you’re a politician or a pundit or Seinfeld joking about the “Soup Nazi,” he’ll get you if you offend his people’s sensibilities.

Given all that, it’s interesting what Foxman notices and what he ignores when an Israel-friendly politician is making hay with the Holocaust. After talking to Huckabee and listening to the speech — apparently he didn’t bother to do that before writing the man up — Foxman decided that not only was Huckabee not making any direct comparison, he also “[understood] why the Holocaust must always be remembered as a unique event in human history.” Let’s see how that stacks up against Huckabee’s speech in the video at the top of the post.

And all this time I’m just praying, Dear God, let my daughter understand what can so easily happen when people look the other way. We came to the end of Yad Vashem. There was a guestbook and my daughter stepped up to it and I stepped behind her and I looked over her shoulder, I watched. She took the pen out of my pocket and I I I stood over her shoulder and I watched her write words I’ll never forget.

She first wrote our name and our address down in the little book and then I looked and I watched her as she paused, because there was a place for comments and I wondered if my daughter would say anything in that space and if so what. So I looked and I watched and I saw her take that pen and in her childish 11-year-old scrawl I saw her write these words that I shall not forget as long as I ever live. These are the words she used. “Why didn’t somebody do something?” That’s all she wrote there. “Why didn’t somebody do something?” With that she put the pen back in my pocket, we walked out and she did not say another word for four hours.

My daughter got married last year, she’s now 28 years old. I’ve never had to ask her since that moment whether she got it. You will not find a spunkier little activist than my daughter. And I don’t worry about her, but I sometimes worry about us.

We were birthed by the greatest generation, who gave everything so we would have a better life than they did. And God bless them for it, and they deserve the term “greatest generation.” We cannot afford to be a generation that leaves our children with nothing but a huge debt and the very corrosion of freedoms that our founders and our fathers died and gave us so valiantly. And that’s why I say let there never be a time in this country where some father has to look over his daughter’s shoulder and see her ask this haunting question, “Why didn’t somebody do something?” Because in this room we are the somebodies and we commit we will do something to preserve this great American heritage. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America. Thank you.

As I was transcribing I had to wonder if Huckabee was getting paid by the word. I mean, “I watched her… and then I looked and I watched her…. So I looked and I watched and I saw her take that pen and… I saw her write these words….” But of course that’s his preacher patter, which must come naturally enough to him. It strikes me as a rather calculated performance in this case, though, because of things like the theatrical stutter on “I I I stood over her shoulder and I watched her write words I’ll never forget.”

He’s certainly not denying the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Instead, he’s using it to supercharge his daughter’s big question with emotion — daddy, why didn’t somebody do something to stop the most terrible horrible thing that’s ever happened in the whole history of the universe??? And his transfer of pathos from the Holocaust to the national debt hinges on her question. He certainly feels that he’s entitled to put the Jewish tragedy to work serving his own purposes. It’s not for me to say whether Foxman’s constituency would or should be as offended by Huckabee’s agenda-driven appropriation as by a direct analogy (if we don’t do anything, the national debt will be our childrens’ financial holocaust…). To me, both of them are more absurd than offensive.

And Huckabee isn’t satisfied just milking the Holocaust, he has to pile on the “greatest generation,” too. Funny that he’d bring those folks up — weren’t they the ones who financed the interstate highway system and a bunch of world-class public universities and in the process paid top marginal tax rates of between 70% and 90%? I don’t think this is the kind of valiant giving that Huckabee has in mind. But his rhetoric is as substance-free as it is solemn, so there’s no reason to expect anything to add up.

Back in 2007, abortion was the issue Huckabee was hyping when he got Foxman’s attention. [3]

“Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our workforce,” the former Arkansas governor said. “It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”

It really is a shame that all those fetuses weren’t raised up so they could be cleaning our toilets and pick our lettuce, isn’t it? Not that Huckabee made any real effort to understand the material consequences of legalized abortion. That would require some research — for example, the kind that’s led “Freakonomics” economist Steve Levitt to argue that what the post-Row “holocaust of liberalized abortion” really did was to lower the crime rate. [4]

Huckabee was just bullshitting, but I’m not convinced that he was doing it at the expense of Foxman’s Holocaust. I’m inclined to agree with the Priests for Life that the ADL was being awfully proprietary and “holocaust” is a perfectly valid way to refer to the mass slaughter in, for instance, Rwanda. Transferring the term to abortion is the lazy zealot’s way of insisting that fertilized eggs are “people,” a confusion that pro-life hangs on to for all its worth, since otherwise their fantastic faith-based morality has no claim on anyone else.

Heavy-handed rhetorical trickery is a sign of desperation. That’s where all of this leads me in the end. When you have to invoke a holocaust, whether it’s the Holocaust or some other one, to make your point and you’re not talking about the mass extermination of regular out-of-the-womb people, you’ve run out of good ideas. It could be you never had any in the first place.

NOTES

1. ^ Knocking people because they don’t come down as hard on their friends as they do on their opponents is one of the easiest and most tiresome criticisms out there, and I try not to indulge. In this case, though, because Foxman is speaking for a watchdog organization with high ideals I think it’s fair to expect him to be more evenhanded.
2. ^ ModernityBlog has a link to the original Huckabee News post in Google’s cache.
3. ^ Tracing the most popular Holocaust analogies over time might be a fun and enlightening little history project.
4. ^ Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Levitt is right — it’s not an argument I want to get into. My only point is that he did some homework before he made his claim. One place to start if you want to know more about his theory is these pages where he answers his critics.

As far as the BBC is concerned, Susan Bitter Smith is an ordinary American small business owner. Is lobbying an ordinary American business?

[When my Uncle Al gets interested in something that he doesn’t want to talk about with his golfing buddies or his rotating cast of girlfriends, he sends me an email. Usually it’s something political, I guess because he gets sadistic pleasure out of making me gag. I keep telling him he needs a blog, but he says that’s too much trouble.

Anyway, I got this email from him last week and I asked him if I could put it on my blog. He said, why the hell not? So, this is a guest post — my first — from Uncle Al. Enjoy.]

Remember that speech Obama gave a few days ago, the one about how he’s going to “win the future” with my money? I was driving around right after that and I turned on the radio. My girlfriend must’ve been messing with it, because it was some guy reading the news with a British accent. It was the BBC, and I didn’t even know you could pick them up around here! But I figured I might as well listen for a while. (Turned out it was the NPR station. Guess they’ve had to outsource.) *

First they had on Dennis Kucinich, and he said Obama didn’t go far enough and we need more taxes and less profits. The usual, what can I say? For the other side they got some lady named Susan Bitter Smith on the line, said she runs a small business in Arizona. What’d she make of the Obama budget plan?

Well I’m very concerned, because his message of moving forward to repeal the Bush tax cuts is very troubling to me and all small business people across the country, because that will mean that we will be lumped into this category of being rich even though we are not. We’ll find ourselves taxed to death which will have a huge implication not only for us but our employees.

Your employees, in what sense?

In the sense that if we cannot do business as we are and we no longer have the ability to have any profit motive, we’ll have to lay off employees, eliminate health care coverage and potentially find ourselves in a very different operating place, which means less to our employees pocketbooks.

I thought, hey, they could’ve done a lot worse. Liberals figure you can always squeeze some more money out of people who make money. You know, we’re the richest country on the face of the earth, but don’t even bother talking about how all that wealth is created, it’s a waste of time. This Bitter Smith lady’s got the right idea. Just remind them that when we make money we pay people, and when we don’t we stop paying. If we’ve got to fight a war to keep our money, at least the human shields are working for us instead of against us for once.

There was one thing that got me. What kind of businessman is going to lose the profit motive because of taxes? I mean, do you lose your sex drive just because the price of drinks goes up? Don’t get me wrong, she sounds like a real nice lady, and they could’ve done a whole lot worse. But this is what stuck in my head, and when I got home I started to dig around, to see if I could figure out what was up with her.

Turns out it wasn’t the first time they had her on the show. Back in 2008 the BBC put a bunch of reporters on a bus. They went out looking for real Americans, “miles away from the big corporate-style election campaigns the world glimpses on television,” and you know who they found? Susan Bitter Smith, “a Republican and a friend of John McCain.” What are the chances?

But you can see why they liked her. She’s got a way with words and like I said, she sounds like a real nice lady. When they pulled up in their bus she’d just lost the Republican nomination in a congressional race, but they “broadcast live from her home into the early hours relaying the thoughts and opinions of her friends both Republican and Democrat.” Then they called her up after 100 days of President Obama and she had some good news and some bad news. She was glad that the new guy seemed like he was up for protecting our country’s borders. But with the economy things were tough and she said her “profit margin is down to nothing.” She gave them some pretty sad pictures of “projects her company would have worked on if there had been finance available.”

Funny thing is, they introduce her on the radio as the owner of a “small business,” they talk to her about her business and her employees and her profits, they put up her pictures, but for some strange reason they never get around to saying what kind of business she’s in. It’s the same on her web site and twitter. Small business this, small business that, but what the hell is she selling? It’s something she wants to keep to herself, no question about that, so of course I had to know.

Dig a little and you find out that she’s the executive director of the Arizona-New Mexico Cable Communications Association. She’s been there for like 30 years, got hired right out of law school (got a sense of humor, too: “we’ve had a longstanding joke now for almost 25 years that they had to hire me because they asked me all kinds of questions that were highly illegal under EEO rules, like will your husband let you travel, are you going to get pregnant anytime soon….”). So in Arizona you can run a trade association and keep the change, if you know what I mean? Sounds like a sweet arrangement, but I don’t think she’d be blabbing on the radio if that was how she does business.

Dig some more, and you find a concern called Technical Solutions. Like the name says, they’re in the business of “client representation” and “client services.” Client numero uno is the Arizona Cable Telecommunications Association, which has got to be real convenient, because it’s in the exact same suite on N 44th St. as the business. She’s definitely leveraged her trade group gig, but it’s not like she’s doing it under the table. Look around the site and you’ll see that “Technical Solutions’ principal, Susan Bitter Smith, CAE, has been a registered lobbyist in Arizona for twenty five years.”

So there you go. She’s in lobbying and PR. It’s no surprise that she keeps quiet about it, because it’s not like she’s hiring ex-cons to make organic car tires from recycled barbie dolls or something. She helps folks with capital get stuff done, and a lot of people don’t appreciate that. Take these homeowners, who don’t want their precious spread of dust and cactus to get turned into a mall. They claim Bitter Smith told them she had a client that wanted to put up “a ‘small grocery store’” but it turned out to be “a 90,000 sq. ft. big-box store.” And when they said no thanks, she went to work on the politicians and the “Planning Department” and got things moving, anyway.

But that bunch of NIMBYs are probably Dems, so no big deal. It’s the other Republicans she has to worry about. Back in 2008 she got endorsed by Arizona’s tough-guy sheriff, Joe Arpaio. Folks running against her wondered what Sheriff Joe was doing, endorsing a pro-choice RINO like “Ms. BS”? Aha! It must be their “ongoing business relationship.” Sheriff Joe had been a client of Technical Solutions since 2001, to the tune of $164K, and Bitter Smith and her husband had coughed up about $1K in donations back to the sheriff.

Anyway, thank God for small business, because big business is bad business but small business is good. Seems like Bitter Smith figured this out running her cable association. She says that in Arizona they’ve got a mix of big and small operators, and it can be a challenge but there’s an up side. “They have understood they’re much more successful if they’ve got an issue where it’s the big Cox corporate person or the big Comcast corporate person, if there is also a small, independent person that says this is going to impact my business, as well.”

As long as she’s small, she can go on the radio and say her employees are nervous but so far she’s kept them on, even though her profit margin’s down to zero. If the CEO of big bad Comcast did that folks would just snort. But if it’s small business, well, that lady really cares! You don’t want to make her lay off any of those nice hardworking folks in her office, do you?

The funny thing is, big government’s not exactly a big problem for what she’s doing. Taxes go up and you think there ain’t no more profit in lobbying and PR? You kidding me? But you don’t want to talk about that if you’re lobbying the public to be better for business, I mean small business. In fact, if you know what’s good for you, you won’t even let them know that you’re a lobbyist in the first place.

I don’t know if Bitter Smith is ever going to make it into the big leagues as a politician. Probably not. But I’ve got to hand it to her, she’s a hell of an operator. She’ll even lobby a guy in congress while she’s trying to take his seat. But that’s just politics, not something to get all worked up about. And like I said, she sounds like a real nice lady.

And how about that BBC? I thought those guys were supposed to dig up all the facts and ask a lot of tough questions. Turns out they can be real nice, too.

* [It was The World Today at 03:05 BST on April 14, 2011. The audio isn’t online anymore, unfortunately. -Ed.]