Gov. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a Republican, signed a bill into law on Friday declaring that the federal regulation of firearms is invalid if a weapon is made and used in South Dakota.

On Thursday, Wyoming’s governor, Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, signed a similar bill for that state. The same day, Oklahoma’s House of Representatives approved a resolution that Oklahomans should be able to vote on a state constitutional amendment allowing them to opt out of the federal health care overhaul.

In Utah, lawmakers embraced states’ rights with a vengeance in the final days of the legislative session last week. One measure said Congress and the federal government could not carry out health care reform, not in Utah anyway, without approval of the Legislature. Another bill declared state authority to take federal lands under the eminent domain process. A resolution asserted the “inviolable sovereignty of the State of Utah under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.”

The Times article points out that legal and constitutional scholars are pretty much of the view that this is mostly a bunch of hot air. But that doesn’t seem to be deterring state lawmakers from shouting a lot. It turns out there’s something called The Patrick Henry caucus in the Utah legislature which, according to The Times, “formed last year and led the assault on federal legal barricades in the session that ended Thursday.” There’s also something called The Tenth Amendment Center, which prides itself on pushing this sort of thing, as if Article 6 of the Constitution didn’t exist. It’s worth a quick look just to see how bizarrely some of this stuff can be dressed up.

We’ve been here before, of course, as we noted in our comment on the secessionists last summer. And, once again, it’s useful to drag out that interesting data from The Tax Foundation on which states are Givers and which states are Takers. Givers, remember, are states whose federal tax payments exceed money received back from the federal government; Takers are states who get back more in federal taxes than they pay. This is actually a useful way to look at the world, because, as is often the case, when you follow the money (or lack of it), a different story emerges. We might think of giver states as, say, Parents, and taker states as, say, Deadbeat Offspring. All sorts of potentially colourful labels emerge, but we’ll leave it at that.

Because, once again, you have to wonder if anyone knows anything anymore. Let’s take that Patrick Henry group in Utah, who probably think they’re choosing between Liberty or Death. If we check the good old Tax Foundation data for 2005 (the most recent year for which they present data), it turns out that Utah is—yes!—a taker, getting back $1.07 in federal spending for every $1 in federal taxes paid. So, Utah—a deadbeat state. South Dakota–ditto. South Dakota gets back a whopping $1.53 for every $1 paid in federal taxes. That’s pretty impressive. Wyoming? Check—it gets back $1.11 for every $1 paid. Oklahoma—a state with lots of oil? Hey, look, Oklahoma gets back $1.36 for every $1 paid.

Most of this, according to The Times, is driven by conservative ideology:

“There’s a tsunami of interest in states’ rights and resistance to an overbearing federal government; that’s what all these measures indicate,” said Gary Marbut, the president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, which led the drive last year for one of the first “firearms freedoms,” laws like the ones signed last week in South Dakota and Wyoming.

In most cases, conservative anxiety over federal authority is fueling the impulse, with the Tea Party movement or its members in the backdrop or forefront. Mr. Herrod in Utah said that he had spoken at Tea Party rallies, for example, but that his efforts, and those of the Patrick Henry Caucus, were not directly connected to the Tea Partiers.

But not all:

And in some cases, according to the Tenth Amendment Center, the politics of states’ rights are veering left. Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin, for example — none of them known as conservative bastions — are considering bills that would authorize, or require, governors to recall or take control of National Guard troops, asserting that federal calls to active duty have exceeded federal authority.

Actually, this is potentially interesting—Vermont is a taker ($1.08), but Wisconsin is one of the 17 (yes, only 17) giver sates (at $0.86), and Rhode Island gets back exactly as much as it pays out. And Montana? Right, Montana gets back $1.47 for every buck it gives to the dreaded and overbearing federal government.

Really, the solution to this is pretty simple. Just pass a Constitutional Amendment that would prohibit states from receiving more in federal disbursements than it pays in federal taxes. If residents of Montana and Utah and the Old South (where secession talk has been cropping up more frequently) want to moan about the overbearance of the federal government, they should man up and agree not to take any more money from the federal government than they pay in. Gee, I wonder how that will turn out. Otherwise, let’s just laugh at them for being the hypocritical deadbeats that they are, and if we live in a Giver state, start leaning on our representatives about why we continue to subsidize these states whose legislatures clearly don’t appreciate it.

Part 2 of 2. (Read part 1…)

It’s Time to Separate Church and State, Once and for All

If you recall, anti-Catholic prejudice was once a problem for Catholic politicians in the US. John F. Kennedy went so far as to address the issue head-on in his 1960 campaign – probably because he didn’t feel he had much choice. Here’s what he told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12 of that year:

I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters — and the Church does not speak for me.

He went on to assert his respect for the separation of church and state and vowed that Catholic officials would not dictate policy to him. As noted in part 1, the times, they have a-changed.

In 1960 it was “anti-Catholic prejudice.” In 2010 it’s “empirical evidence of improper behavior by the Roman Catholic Church.” And it’s time it stopped. Cold.

If I were a Congressman, I’d introduce a bill yesterday stripping all US operations of the Roman Catholic Church of their tax-exempt status. At the press conference announcing the move I’d also say something along these lines: “I won’t be running for re-election – what could possibly be the point? However, between now and the day I leave office, I’m going to raise hell 24/7/4ever over this issue. I know that I’ll probably never get my bill into a committee hearing, let alone get it out of committee, but if Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens can draw as much attention as they have, I feel certain that I, as a sitting member of the United States Congress, can get booked on every talk show in America. Rest assured, my fellow citizens, this is going to make for some epic television.”

Of course, I’m not Congressional material. If you want to know what Congressional material is, recognize that representatives of a foreign theocracy are inside Congress shaping policy … and not a damned one of the spineless sacred whores on Capitol Hill has uttered a fucking syllable in protest.

Did I miss something?

“America is a Christian nation.” It certainly is. Sort of. It’s a Christian nation in the same way that it’s a white nation, a heterosexual nation, a right-handed nation and a nation with brown hair. That is, “Christian” is the majority position. Boy howdy, is it the majority position, with a majority of the population saying it believes angels and demons are active in the world and 80% saying they believe in miracles. Hell, even our atheists and agnostics sound a little religious. A snapshot of American religious affiliation that I offered up back in 2007 is instructive:

• Polls show the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Christian ranging as high as 85% or beyond.
• The president is a Christian…
• …as is the VP.
• The Speaker of the House is Catholic…
• …and the Senate Majority Leader is Mormon.
• Well over 90% of our Congressional representatives are Christian, with a majority of the remainder being Jewish.
• The Supreme Court features seven Christians and two Jews.
• All of our major presidential candidates in both major parties.
• Almost all of our past presidents; depending on how you count Unitarians, you have to go all the way back to Lincoln (ironically enough, the founder of the GOP) to even find one to debate over;
• Hell, even sports franchises are starting to build their operations around the evangelical litmus test.
• It seems unlikely that a similar review of the legislatures and courthouses in the 50 states would reveal too much variation from this overpowering Judeo-Christian norm.

There’s no denying that we’re a Christian culture – in many ways, that’s a simple math question and it’s about as controversial as noting that whites of European descent are the racial majority. But Christian culture and Christian government aren’t the same thing, and the United States is most emphatically not a Christian state. Not yet, anyway.

Reflecting back on my “if I were a Congressman” fantasy from above, I suppose I’d spend the remainder of my time in office asking the audiences of those TV shows to think about a proposition: to wit, while most Americans are Christian, “Christian” describes a lot of different things and not one unitary thing. Dr. Sid’s “modest proposal” from a couple of months back was more about provoking than persuading, but at its core there’s an important question. If you’re a Christian, you may want to see a more Christian government. But if you’re a Baptist, do you want to see a more Catholic government? If you’re Catholic, how are you going to react when the Texas School Board is co-opted by Mormons and all of a sudden the nation’s textbooks are filled with lessons that transform the hallucinations visions of The Prophets into stone cold fact? If you’re a member of the Foursquare Bible Congregation in Smallpond, Alabama, you probably agree with the Stupakers on abortion, but how do you feel about the idea that your duly elected representatives are keeping counsel with that German eunuch in the pointy hat?

Think about it, Christian supermajority. Think hard.

Crawling Toward a More Rational Future

Evidence suggests that there may be hope in the long run.

From USA Today:

The percentage of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.

These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

“More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I’m everything. I’m nothing. I believe in myself,’ ” says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.

From FutureMajority:

The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) also found that a movement towards claiming no religious affiliation is “a general trend among younger white American.” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported “people not affiliated with any particular religion stand out for their relative youth compared with other religious traditions.”
…
The National Journal profiles a growing faction of non-religious youth – the Secular Student Alliance (SSA). Their motto is “Mobilizing Students for a New Enlightenment.” The SSA’s chapters have grown from 42 in 2003 to 129 this year and they currently have a network of over 14,000 students. Their mission is “to organize, unite, educate, and serve students and student communities that promote the ideals of scientific and critical inquiry, democracy, secularism, and human based ethics.”

From AlterNet:

We are on the verge — within 10 years — of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.

Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.

So perhaps in the 2020s and beyond the Bible-thumping Jesus Jihadi yahoo will be a thing of the past – or at least, his inexplicable influence on the course of government will be. But that’s of little comfort today. Just because the good guys win the war eventually doesn’t mean they don’t lose battles along the way, and lost battles mean casualties, measured in lasting damage to real human lives. Even if it’s just ten years until we’re free of these crusaders, understand that a lot of mischief can be done in a decade. If I might put it in more meaningful terms, remember how long George Bush was in office? Add two years to that.

Not that it will do any good, but your Senators and representatives need to hear from you that it is not acceptable for the Catholic Bishops to be meddling in the people’s business. Separation of church and state. Today.

When Jesus attacks, the proper course of action is to smack him in the nose with a crowbar. It says so, right there in the Constitution.

Part 1 of 2.

I tripped across a provocative headline in the Wall Street Journal the other day: “They Need to be Liberated from Their God.” Turns out the story was about Mosab Hassan Yousef and his spying on Hamas. Which was a little disappointing. There’s no doubt that Palestinian Muslims need to be liberated from their god, but given the recent explosion in documented attacks by US Christians on their fellow Americans (as well as on reason and basic common sense), I thought perhaps the WSJ was going to be the first mainstream “news” outlet to do a story on Jesus Gone Wild!

I keep a running tab of stories that strike my interest. Taken individually, each might suggest a particular narrow social pathology, which is to be expected in a nation of 300 million. But over time they accumulate into a gestalt, with all the small pictures adding up to a disturbing big picture. For instance:

Item: Pope warns against witchcraft in Angola

(AFP) – Mar 21, 2009

LUANDA (AFP) — Pope Benedict XVI issued a warning against witchcraft Saturday during his visit to Angola, after calling on African leaders to battle corruption and drawing a tough line against abortion.

Item: Pope in Africa reaffirms “no condoms” against AIDS

YAOUNDE, March 17 (Reuters) – Pope Benedict on Tuesday reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to the use of condoms in the fight against AIDS as he started a visit to Africa, where more than 25 million people have died from the disease in recent decades.
…
“It (AIDS) cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, they increase the problem,” he said in response to a question about the Church’s widely contested position against the use of condoms.

The disease has killed more than 25 million people since the early 1980s, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, and some 22.5 million Africans are living with HIV.

Item: Rape row sparks excommunications

By Gary Duffy
BBC News, Sao Paulo

A Brazilian archbishop says all those who helped a child rape victim secure an abortion are to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

The girl, aged nine, who lives in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, became pregnant with twins.

It is alleged that she had been sexually assaulted over a number of years by her stepfather.

The excommunication applies to the child’s mother and the doctors involved in the procedure.

The pregnancy was terminated on Wednesday.

Abortion is only permitted in Brazil in cases of rape and where the mother’s life is at risk and doctors say the girl’s case met both these conditions.

Police believe that the girl at the centre of the case had been sexually abused by her step-father since she was six years old.

Item: Did the Mormons baptize Obama’s mother, after her death, without his knowledge or consent? A: Yes, they did.

A reader contacted me last week, saying that last year, in the heat of the presidential campaign, the Mormons had posthumously baptized Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. Baptizing the dead of other faiths, secretly and without the consent of their families, is a common Mormon practice. For the past fifteen years the Mormons have caused quite a stir by forcibly baptizing Jewish Holocaust victims – in other words, converting them to Mormonism – despite strong objections from the Jewish community.

Thus, it’s hardly a stretch to imagine the Mormons’ doing this to Obama’s mother. Still, I had no proof. Then yesterday, I received a document. It’s allegedly a screen capture of the registration-only section of the Mormon-run Web site, FamilySearch.org. In that screen capture, excerpted above, is clearly the name and correct date of birth and death of Barack Obama’s mother (Stanley Ann Dunham, born 29 Nov 1942 in Kansas, died 07 Nov 1995) and the date of her alleged post-death baptism by the Mormons.

Item: Catholic schools bans child whose parents are gay

Last week, a standing policy of the Archdiocese of Denver denied a child from enrolling in the Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School for kindergarten next year because the student’s parents are lesbians.

Currently the student is in the school’s preschool program and will be allowed to finish the year, according to Jeanette DeMelo, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese.

“It’s clear if they only accept students with perfect parents, they would have almost nobody,” said Beth Osnes, an organizer for the protest. “I know they have the right to, but why would they want to?”

Inside the church, the Rev. Bill Breslin addressed the issue in his sermon. He also posted his comments on his blog.

“If a child of gay parents comes to our school, and we teach that gay marriage is against the will of God, then the child will think that we are saying their parents are bad,” Breslin said on his blog. “We don’t want to put any child in that tough position.”

Please note: this is happening in the People’s Republic of Freakin’ Boulder!

That’s some big picture, huh? It’s gotten so bad that even former president Jimmy Carter, a man as responsible as any for introducing the poison of evangelical influence into the mainstream of modern politics, has had enough.

Of course, you live here. You read the news. That a lot of Christians are out of control isn’t a real revelation, is it? But lately, the goddamned Catholic Church has been making an unusually immoral and anti-Constitutional nuisance of itself. For instance:

• The Catholic Church is ending its long-standing relationship with St. Charles Medical Center in Bend over a surgical birth-control technique. Note, that’s Saint Charles the place is named after.
• The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a directive for Catholic health care that insists on inflicting artificial “life” sustaining techniques on dying (or functionally dead) patients despite the wishes of the patients or their families.
• And it doesn’t matter whether you’re even Catholic or not – all you have to do is be in the building.
• 300,000 Terri Schiavos, anyone? Let’s face it, the opinion of one reactionary geezer in Rome has now trumped centuries of ethical progress.

Still, we’re talking about their facilities and they’re paying the bills, and they have the right to control their operations the way they see fit, no? Well, maybe, maybe not. Ignoring the wishes of the patient, especially when those wishes are legally expressed in something like a living will, that’s pretty appalling, but I guess you could make the argument.

Even if you won that argument, though, get a load of the latest shenanigans from our friendly Catholic Bishops, who have now offered their “help” in wrangling an outcome in the Senate. You know, because that would make democracy better and stuff.

The Roman Catholic bishops signaled Thursday that if agreement is reached with House leaders on anti-abortion language, the church would work to get the votes needed to protect the provisions in the Senate — and thereby advance the shared goal with Democrats of health care reform.

“We would strongly urge everyone, Democratic and Republican, to vote to waive the point of order,” Richard Doerflinger, an associate director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told POLITICO. “Whether it would be enough to get to 60 votes, I can’t predict. We would certainly try.”

“I think it’s something we should explore,” said Rep. Dale Kildee (D-Mich.), a longtime opponent of abortion. “It could be something that could carry out the bishops’ objective.”

And why not? The Bishops have “helped” before, after all.

In November, the bishops drove a tough bargain, winning an amendment by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) that would severely restrict the ability of even private companies to provide abortion coverage under new state insurance exchanges. That House deal — since weakened by the Senate — is what the bishops want to revive now as part of Obama’s final push on health care. But to survive the Senate, any revisions would need 60 votes to overcome points of order under the expedited reconciliation procedures being contemplated.

David Dayen observes, astutely enough, that “the Catholic bishops want to show a measure of dominance over the US government.” His nuanced look at the tactical knife fight of this particular backroom liturgical drama is helpful to those trying to understand how sausage law gets made.

Meanwhile, those of us out here beyond the Beltway can perhaps be forgiven for saying “wait a sec – back the truck up.” An organized cabal of Roman Catholic aparatchiks are so far up Congress’s ass that they’re openly discussing how they’re going to inject Vatican dogma into a US health care bill?

Excuse me?

The Constitution is clear that what you believe is your business, and I have no problem with that. But when your beliefs inspire actions that hurt the innocent, that systematically victimize those who believe other things, then I start to care. When those beliefs fuel actions that harm me and impinge on my freedoms, well, that’s the point where it becomes self-defense, isn’t it?

Tomorrow: Divide & Conquer

Nothing could be more “real American” than herringbone mahogany floors. Curious to cover them with white area rugs trimmed in gilt, but that’s what Rush did. It’s a shame too, it would be worth staring at the floor to avoid looking at walls, ceiling and furniture. Maybe i’m too low brow, but i just don’t get murals on the ceilings…unless they depict great moments in NASCAR history across acoustic tiling to contrast with the lovely faux wood paneling in a trailer.

I’m sure all the furniture is ultra expensive and impressive; to be honest, some of it wouldn’t be bad were it not set in one of Catherine the Great’s interior decorating nightmares. The man has a pink dining room for god’s sake. Pink.

The one bathroom pictured is a disappointment in that it’s relatively tasteful…if we discount the gold candelabra chandelier above the tub. I was ready for the tub faucet to be a 1:25th scale golden dolphin, or maybe a scale reproduction of the Grand Cascade at Peterhof with a miniature of Samson fountain serving as the faucet.

As best as i can see, the floor plan labels the room “den”, but Corcoran calls it a “library” in the listing. It looks like a library that Limbaugh would own: it only contains a handful of books and most of them are the kind you put on a shelf to impress people rather than read. Granted, the woodwork in the library is stunning, but the desk and lamps are atrocious. As is the view out the door. And is that a framed picture of Hitler on the wall?

Maybe i’m being hard on Rush and his obvious lack of taste. I’d probably be as stupid and angry as he is if i woke every morning to a ceiling mural depicting two doves carrying a giant garland of flowers. The scene is about as realistic as a European swallow grasping a coconut by the husk and transporting from a tropical to a temperate zone. Or, roughly equal to how realistic Rush’s political doctrine is for governing a modern nation.

In any case, if you’ve got the $13,950,000 to drop on this abomination, you’ve probably got the spare change to actually make it livable too. Head over to Corcoran’s site for the full listing, pictures and floor plan. And no, you can’t use my spoon. Find your own.

Image credit: Tatyana Churikova’s English speaking guide service site. The photo is from Pavlovsk because i’m too lazy to dig up shots i took of Tsarist palace interiors.

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

Reactions have been all over the place, but there’s been strong suspicion of the findings from both “liberal” and “conservative” corners (especially conservative, as you’d expect). Which is good. These kinds of results may tell us something important, but we’re always advised to proceed cautiously and critically, especially when the findings of science are reported in the popular media. And double-dog especially when that popular media outlet is FOX or  CNN. Understand – their criteria for reporting on research (there are thousands of studies published each month, and if you’re not an academic you hear about maybe three of them) have nothing to do with the social value of the research itself and everything to do with whether or not they think you might click on the link (and perhaps even on one of the ads on the page).

So, the critical reader should automatically pause and consider the following with respect to this story:

• Who is the researcher? What’s his expertise? Is he a pure academic or does he receive funding from sources with an axe to grind? Has his past research been unduly driven by concerns that appear, to the informed observer, to be more ideological than scientific? And so on.
• Is the story written by a reporter who understands science and research and statistics? (The answer here is usually no.) If not, then we need to find the actual study and see what it really says.
• Further, has the reporter bothered to ask him or herself any of the questions in that first bullet point? (Again, the answer is almost always no.) If not, what does it mean for the story (and the reader’s understanding of it) that the reporter can’t tell the difference between a Nobel laureate and a corporate PR hack?
• In this case, the story addresses IQ, but what does this really tell us? IQ is not a comprehensive measure of intelligence. It tells us some things (and these are important things) but it comes nowhere near telling us everything that we’d want to know when considering the “intelligence” of an individual or population.
• The definitions used here are beyond useless. “Conservative” and “liberal” are as artificial as labels come, for starters (the Political Compass test illustrates a small part of the problem), and when you add in the fact that the study probably relied on self-identification (hardly the most objective measure in the world) there is every reason to be cautious about the very way in which the two groups were constructed. What would it mean for the results if we learned that a good number of the liberals were gun owners or that a significant portion of the conservative group had serious misgivings about the Bush administration’s pro-torture activities?

This last point is crucial, because while self-report in studies like this tends to problematic under the best of circumstances, your margin for error explodes when the researchers and the participants don’t agree on the terminology.

The study takes the American view of liberal vs. conservative. It defines “liberal” in terms of concern for genetically nonrelated people and support for private resources that help those people. It does not look at other factors that play into American political beliefs, such as abortion, gun control and gay rights.

“Liberals are more likely to be concerned about total strangers; conservatives are likely to be concerned with people they associate with,” he said.

Now, is that what you think of when someone asks you if you’re conservative or liberal? Do a less educated and a more educated subject define those terms for themselves in the same way? Even if you explain what you mean by the term, do they each process it and respond the same way (after all, regardless of whether they’re conservative, liberal, libertarian, green or fascist, a less educated respondent is less likely to have the sophistication needed to parse a definition that’s not really like any they’ve encountered before).

Not to belabor the point, but we’re talking to Americans here, and we’re trying to exclude abortion, gun control and gay rights from how these respondents evaluate whether they’re conservative or liberal? Seriously? I’d argue that for huge portions of the population, abortion, gun control and gay rights are what the words liberal and conservative mean.

Hopefully by now it’s clear that I have significant reservations about the actual study and that I don’t trust the CNN story to get the story right, regardless of the actual findings of the study or the actual objective reality that the study may or may not have accurately described. As it turns out, my hesitation may be justified.

As I snooped around some other commentary on the study, I came across further reason for skepticism (interestingly enough, from an apparently “liberal” source that was linked by another liberal source). Dr. PZ Myers, a bio professor in the Minnesota system, stomps a mudhole in Kanazawa and walks it dry.

And then look at the source: Satoshi Kanazawa, the Fenimore Cooper of Sociobiology, the professional fantasist of Psychology Today. He’s like the poster boy for the stupidity and groundlessness of freakishly fact-free evolutionary psychology. Just ignore anything with Kanazawa’s name on it.

By all means, click on the links Myers embeds in that passage at his site, because he’s just getting warmed up. I don’t know much about Myers as a source himself, but he’s an academic, he’s a self-described agnostic and he links to the Richard Dawkins network (Dawkins being the Great Liberal Evolutionist Atheist Satan from Hell), so we might at least view his assault on Kanazawa as worth exploring, being as neither is exactly coming off as a conservative apologist.

So, to the question: are liberals smarter than conservatives (or vice versa)? Somewhere out there is an answer, and I for one would love to know what it is. I have my suspicions, based on my own experiences, but those suspicions are hardly science. If I’m right, I’d welcome the support of hard research, and if I’m wrong I’d like to know so I can reevaluate and get my opinions more in line with the facts. Hopefully you feel the same way.

In order to find that answer, though, we’re going to need a better study than Kanazawa’s (which seems horribly flawed, although I won’t know for sure just how much so until I see the actual study). Here’s what I think a more conclusive study would look like.

• For starters, it would need a more comprehensive measure of intelligence. IQ is a piece of the puzzle, but we’d also want to factor in creativity, associative thinking, critical thinking and problem solving. We’d like to be clear about the importance of memory vs. processing power in the equation, and before we get started we’ll want to decide whether to integrate newer concerns like “social intelligence” or whether social skills are better classified as something other than intelligence.
• We’ll want a much better handle on that whole conservative vs. liberal quagmire. Doing the study so as to render a verdict on those two categories is useless. We’d be better served by evaluating intelligence according to which political party people identify with, and even this would be problematic (what do you do with all those independents who are independent for wildly divergent reasons, for instance). I don’t have a satisfying frame in mind right now, but unless we can get to some meaningful definitions about political beliefs (definitions that make sense to the participants as well as the researchers) we’re wasting our time and money.
• It needs to be longitudinal and will ideally have mechanisms for evaluating how perspectives shift over time. More to the point, it would be important to know what factors shift those positions. Does education make you more X? If so, are there certain kinds of education that do so?
• It would be nice to know how these factors vary according to demographic variables. Are you more prone to the liberalizing effects of education if you’re working class from the South than if you’re middle class from the Upper Midwest?
• This study needs to be funded by a non-partisan entity of some sort and should be conducted by researchers with no particular ideological master. Under no circumstances should it receive funds from corporate sources. Whether there’s any actual biasing effect or not (and by the way, there is – research most often serves the interests of those writing the check), the value of such a study would be badly kneecapped by the appearance that its results were bought. It goes without saying that the study should be headed by a person or team with a track record that makes clear their commitment to academic rigor and uncompromising ethics.
• Methodologically, the study should employ both quantitative and qualitative instruments. You’ll obviously need the quant to generate a broad statistical basis, but this should be augmented by interview and observation phases to add depth and texture to the findings.
• For fun, it would be nice if there were an intercultural component. Is what we see happening in the US like what happens in other countries? If not, how are we different and what factors seem to account for the variance?

There are probably more issues we’d want to see addressed, but these represent at least a decent foundation for discussion. If we conduct such a study, and if it produces results similar to those reported by Kanazawa, then we’ll have something interesting to factor into our policy making.

One note, though. Let me call your attention to this passage from the CNN story:

The IQ differences, while statistically significant, are not stunning — on the order of 6 to 11 points — and the data should not be used to stereotype or make assumptions about people, experts say.

This is among the most ludicrous statements I’ve heard in some time. Assume we were to find that intelligence between two political groups varied by as much as 10 points, and assume that these findings were significant at the .95 level (and assume for the heck of it that the qualitative segments of the study supported the findings and provided richer insights into them) – you’re going to suggest that an overall intelligence difference of 10%, considered across a population of 300 million, isn’t stunning? I beg to differ. A variance of that magnitude would be positively staggering.

A difference of 10% between individuals is the difference between an A and a B, a B and a C. It’s the difference, in many cases, between the guy you want operating on your child and a guy you wouldn’t let anywhere near your child. In a financial advisor it could be the difference between comfort and borderline insolvency. If you’d like your teenager to go to the best school possible, it’s the difference between a highly ranked national university and a good, but not spectacular state system school.

What if half the population suddenly became 10% smarter? When you think about highly competitive business deals, for instance, deals where one company gets the contract by a hair’s breadth, would you take a 10% boost?

Make no mistake, the degree of difference we’re talking about here, even if it’s at the low end of the variance instead of the high end, is massively significant when we’re talking about the collective intelligence of a society the size of the United States.

In the end, I don’t know what, if anything, we really learn from Kanazawa’s study. But it’s an interesting question, and knowing the actual answer could do us a lot of good. It’s just a shame that we can’t count on our intrepid press to get the damned story right, if and when it ever happens.

• Under TABOR, Colorado declined from 35th to 49th in the nation in K-12 spending as a percentage of personal income.
• Colorado’s average per-pupil funding fell by more than $400 relative to the national average.
• Colorado’s average teacher salary compared to average pay in other occupations declined from 30th to 50th in the nation.

Also,

• Under TABOR, higher education funding per resident student dropped by 31 percent after adjusting for inflation.
• College and university funding as a share of personal income declined from 35th to 48th in the nation.
• Tuitions have risen as a result. In the last four years, system-wide resident tuition increased by 21 percent (adjusting for inflation).

A report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities last year summed it up nicely: TABOR Has Hampered Economic Growth and Reduced Quality of Life in Colorado. Responding to some pro-TABOR silliness bubbling up in Maine, the Center lays out some inconvenient details:

TABOR has, however, harmed Colorado’s economy since 2001, when TABOR prevented the state from recovering adequately from the recession. Incomes grew more slowly in Colorado than in Maine during the first half of the decade. Coloradans voted to suspended TABOR in 2005, but the state still has had trouble recovering. Overall, per capital personal income growth has been higher in Maine than in Colorado since 2000 – both in the post-recession period during which Colorado’s TABOR was in effect, and after its suspension.

Oddly, while we’re near the bottom in national spending on public education, we lead the country in spending on prisons. I can’t imagine how those two factoids might be related, though. Can you?

Hang on to your hat, though. It just got better.

Welcome to Teabagger Paradise

It’s a shame about Colorado Springs. It’s a beautiful city, with spectacular mountain views, one of the finest liberal arts colleges in the nation and great microbreweries. Of course, it’s also home to Focus on the Family, the air wing of the Christian theocracy movement and one of the most notorious political pigfuckers in America, Douglas Bruce. It’s the kind of place where, if you don’t keep a close watch, the church down the street might kidnap your kids and baptize them without your permission.

Now, the Springs is also becoming the nation’s foremost case study on what happens when people decide that by god, they’re not going to put up with all those outrageous taxes anymore. Get a load of this:

This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.

“I guess we’re going to find out what the tolerance level is for people,” said businessman Chuck Fowler, who is helping lead a private task force brainstorming for city budget fixes. “It’s a new day.”

Some residents are less sanguine, arguing that cuts to bus services, drug enforcement and treatment and job development are attacks on basic needs for the working class.

“How are people supposed to live? We’re not a ‘Mayberry R.F.D.’ anymore,” said Addy Hansen, a criminal justice student who has spoken out about safety cuts. “We’re the second-largest city, and growing, in Colorado. We’re in trouble. We’re in big trouble.”

Turn off the street lights and fire some cops, huh? Hard to imagine how that could go wrong.

I appreciate your concern, Addy, but the truth is that you’ve been in trouble since, oh, I don’t know, let’s call it 1992. That’s when the state let itself get Bruced. None of this is a surprise, though. It’s pretty much what smart folks have been warning you about since, oh, I don’t know, let’s call it 1992.

At the risk of sounding condescending or elitist, I can’t help thinking that this is the kind of thing that happens when a culture goes without education for too long. It’s kind of like when the fetus doesn’t get enough oxygen.

Teabagger paradise, indeed.

A Meaningless, Yet Emotionally Seductive Corrective

Here’s what I’d like to do. I want to get a microphone and a bat – maybe a nice 33-ounce Louisville Slugger – and head down to the fair city of Colorado Springs. I’ll go up to random people on the street and here’s how it will go:

Me: Excuse me, I’m conducting a man-in-the-street survey for FOX News. Do you have a moment?

Citizen: Of course! I get all my news about the world from FOX.

Me: First question. How do you feel about all your public services being discontinued?

[Option 1]
Citizen: I think it’s ridiculous that people are so stupidly anti-tax that they’re willing to let such a beautiful city go to hell like this.

Me: Thank you. Have a nice day.

[Option 2]
Citizen: I think it’s ridiculous. This is happening because of the liberals and their overpaid government bureaucracy.

Me: Next question. How did you vote on TABOR?

Citizen: I voted for it, of course.

At this point, I whip out the bat and club them like baby seals. (The microphone was just a prop, in case you haven’t figured that out already.)

Or not. When all is said and done, the most satisfying course of action will be to grab some popcorn, pull up a chair and enjoy the show. There are few things I enjoy more than watching stupid people reaping what they have sown (which explains my love of reality television, I suppose). What we’re seeing right now in the Springs are the first few scenes of a morality play. The question is whether or not the denizens of America’s foremost Anti-Tax Utopia are bright enough to figure out the moral: to wit, where taxes and services are concerned, 2 -2 = 0.

I doubt it. The smart money says that their solution will be to cut taxes. In fact, I’d put money on it.

Any takers?

Overturning key provisions of McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and flouting a century of precedent, the decision opens the floodgates to a torrent of spending by banks, insurance companies, energy companies, automakers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, chemical producers, agribusiness giants and media oligopolies — both domestic and foreign – to sway races by buying candidates. And to trash American democracy in the process.

“Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy — it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people — political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. The irony in Kennedy’s logic is profound, as the Court has in essence granted the status of personhood — of individual citizenship — to corporations, who are the least likely entities on earth to hold officials accountable to anyone but their own interests.

When Goldman Sachs, for instance, finds itself with a $16 billion (that’s with a “b”) bonus pool for top executives, what is the likelihood they are going to make campaign contributions to any political candidate who supports a tax on such bonuses, despite the government’s bailout for Wall Street?

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), who was in the room for the Court’s announcement, condemned it as “the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case. It leads us all down the road to serfdom.”

Yet it may be that prospect that offers the only remaining hope to unite a nation so fractured by partisanship and anger. In the face of this ruling, average Americans will become disenfranchised laborers, with no access to any ability to affect the political system in their favor. The grassroots donations of $10 here and $25 there that Barack Obama credited with momentum for his victory will be so much chump change in the face of these new playing rules. While labor unions and other groups will also be exempt from previous spending limits, it is the staggering power of corporations to shout down ordinary citizens through an exponential ability to outspend them that poses the gravest threat to our common welfare.

The real divide in this country is not so much left vs. right as haves vs. have-nots. Most Americans want health care reform. We just disagree on the best route to get it. Most Americans are disgusted at Wall Street’s escape from the economic hardship average people face every day, losing their jobs and homes and worrying about feeding their kids. Some think Democrats should be punished for the banks’ bailout; others insist it’s a Republican legacy for which the right must bear blame. Today’s decision, however, cements the already-entrenched power of the ‘haves’ to control public discourse and thereby the political agenda toward their own ends.  But if anything can galvanize the populist base of this country – and that is our true, uniting base – it must be today’s catastrophic court decision, which threatens to undermine our jobs, our health, our safety, our environment, the air we breathe and the water we drink, our access to information, virtually every element of the quality of life and freedoms we jointly value as Americans.

In the wake of this decision, progressives have more in common with teabaggers than either of us ever dreamed possible. We’ll need a lot more strange bedfellows to come together to save our democracy, fractious and scarred as it is. Congressman Grayson has introduced a set of bills to bite back – learn more here.

They recognized long ago that those who control the definitions of words rule the conversation. They know that rigorous repetition of their memes is akin to selling any product — advertise, advertise, advertise. That meme machine, usually cranked up biennually, now operates full time. In 30-second, televised chunks, the memes spew forth in every market. The messages are paid for by political organizations and single-minded groups quietly but heavily underwritten by those who wield wealth and power as a blacksmith’s hammer, bending comprehension by the electorate over an anvil. In hour-long, prime-time, broadcast soliloquies, their public voices ritualistically denigrate that which does not serve The Meme.

They are not The Right. They are not The Left. But they perpetrate the meme that the struggle for political power and control is between Left and Right. That’s the remarkable cunning of their strategy: Take two entities that are essentially identical and paint them as vastly different, and one as preferred. Misdirection masquerades as clarity.

They have remarkable resources. They own media organizations that control television, radio, Web entities, and newspapers. They have highly paid minions whose divisive, hateful, meme-managing messages they control. They have massive databases that allow parsing of their memes for different audiences.

They have money. Lots of it. They spend it without reservation in the pursuit of winning. They know that well less than 1 percent of American adults contribute to political candidates. They can outspend those who oppose the meme — and did so, spending $23 billion on campaign contributions in the past decade.

Where will you find them? The paper trails of their political largesse lead to the finance, insurance and real-estate industries; lawyers and lobbyists; ideological and single-issue donors; the health-care, health products and pharmaceutical industries; communications and electronics firms; labor unions; agribusiness interests; energy and natural-resource extraction corporations; transportation; and the defense industry.

They have eroded efforts to reform campaign-finance laws and to curtail and control campaign spending. Now the Supreme Court of All The Land appears poised to remove the last shackles limiting their political spending in service of The Meme. They will be able to spend more money to achieve more power and control over … winning? (What is it, exactly, that they think they’re winning?)

They cannot control what people think. Free will has not yet been fully suppressed. But they can limit what people think about by dunning them with focus-grouped, direct-mailed, oped-paged, demographically diced, Facebooked, tweeted, news-storylined memes. In their world of continuous, mediated shouting, it is difficult to hear an opposing whisper.

They’re winning because they have bought representation — legislators and lobbyists galore. They’re winning because they do not face the electorate — their well-disguised, glad-handing, baby-kissing, well-coiffed, properly memed candidates face the voters.

They’re winning because so many watchdogs are no longer watching. Their natural adversaries are experienced journalists bred in vats of skepticism. But the ranks of professional reporters and editors, never high to begin with, have been thinned to the point of virtual ineffectiveness. They are winning because they can continue to hide in so many dark places.

They are winning. But have they won?

• Item: Former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino says “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.”
• Item: GOP apologist Mary Matalin says President Bush “inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history.”
• Item: Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani says “We had no domestic attacks under Bush; we’ve had one under Obama.”

There are a number of problems with these assertions, not the least of which is that when Saudi terrorists started flying hijacked jets into large buildings on September 11, 2001, George W. Bush had been president of the United States for the better part of eight months. The lapses in memory noted above are all striking, but especially so in the case of Giuliani, who was, from September 11 until he dropped out of the presidential race on January 30, 2008 (a span of roughly 2,332 days, if my math is accurate), unable to say so much as “hello” without somehow shoehorning “9/11″ into the conversation. (He sounds even more clueless when he gets called out and tries to backtrack.) At the time of the attacks Perino was living in San Diego and working in “high-tech public affairs,” so it’s possible she missed the story. Still, when she was hired as Press Secretary, you’d think some mention of 9/11 would have been included in her orientation packet. And Matalin – wasn’t she working for Vice President Cheney at the time?

In any case, it seems safe enough to classify 9/11 as a “terrorist attack.” But the problems with this chicanery don’t end with the fall of the World Trade Center towers. A second wave of revisionism asserts that the US was a terror-free zone after 9/11. For instance:

• The New York Post’s Michael Goodwin claimed that former President Bush had “a record of zero successful attacks on America after 9/11.”
• Just last week Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour told Neil Cavuto that “one of the things the American people appreciate about the Bush administration, after Sept.11, not one time did the terrorists who tried to kill us and end our way of life, not one time were they able to attack the mainland United States again.”
• FOX News harpy Monica Crowley said on Bill O’Reilly’s show that after 9/11 Bush and Cheney had a “100% perfect track record in keeping the homeland safe from an Islamist terrorist attack.” The quote is in the video, but is not not mentioned in the linked post. (For bonus fun, note Crowley’s assertion that Obama cares more about terrorist rights than American lives. It takes some effort to make BillO look like the rational one.)

Other prominent noise engineers have been beta-testing the meme for awhile. The Dick is on record with this rhetorical misdirection: “The important thing is whether the Obama administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the past eight years.” And, as Dave Neiwert and Blue Texan point out, Peggy Noonan was pioneering the meme in late 2008.

Of course, these claims are objectively, demonstrably false. While history teaches us to have low expectations for honesty when it comes to FOX News mouthpieces, Southern Republican governors, former Reagan speechwriters and Dick Cheney, Goodwin’s column would be an on-the-spot, no-appeal, have-security-escort-him-from-the-premises-right-now firing offense at a real newspaper.

The facts, please?

2002 attack against El Al ticket counter at LAX. In July 2002, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet opened fire at an El Al Airlines ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport, killing two people and wounding four others before being shot dead. A 2004 Justice Department report stated that Hadayet’s case had been “officially designated as an act of international terrorism.”

2006 UNC SUV attack. In March 2006, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill graduate Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar drove an SUV into an area of campus, striking nine pedestrians. According to reports, Taheri-azar said he acted because he wanted to “avenge the deaths or murders of Muslims around the world.” Taheri-azar also reportedly stated in a letter: “I was aiming to follow in the footsteps of one of my role models, Mohammad Atta, one of the 9/11/01 hijackers, who obtained a doctorate degree.”
…
2001 Anthrax attacks. A March 2004 State Department report on “Significant Terrorist Incidents, 1961-2003″ quotes then-Attorney General John Ashcroft saying of the letters containing anthrax mailed to various targets: “When people send anthrax through the mail to hurt people and invoke terror, it’s a terrorist act.” Five people were killed as a result of those letters in the autumn of 2001.

2002 DC-area sniper. The state of Virginia indicted Washington, D.C.-area sniper John Allen Muhammad — along with his accomplice, a minor at the time — on terrorism charges for one of the murders he committed during a three-week shooting spree across Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Muhammad was convicted, sentenced to death, and subsequently executed for the crime.

Then there’s the hundreds of cases of domestic terrorism aimed at women’s health clinics during the Bush presidency.

Bob Cesca has compiled an extremely detailed record of terrorist attacks for the last three presidencies, and suffice it to say that the facts of the matter do not support the hype emanating from the right-wing noise machine.

(By the way, given how Matalin is trying to frame these “issues,” she shouldn’t have any problems with us chalking the underpants bomber and Fort Hood up to Bush’s account, since Obama “inherited” those attacks. Right?)

Bring in da Noise

So what’s really going on here? Giuliani, Matalin, Perino, Noonan, Barbour, Crowley, Cheney and Goodwin might be fork-tongued apparatchik tools of the first order, but they are not unacquainted with the facts. On the contrary – they’re very familiar with the facts. They just don’t like them. At all. So they hit the media trail with malice aforethought. They had a plan, and the plan was to lie like a cheap toupée.

Why?

“Because they’re congenital liars” isn’t enough, even if it’s true. Check their lineages. Review their résumés. Trace their connections and study the organizations that fund their activities and the activities of their allies. Remind yourself about the political and rhetorical landscape of the Bush years, when official speech came once and for all unhitched from fact, from truth, from any sense of decency or shame. These were the years when the words spewing from our official organs (and let’s include FOX News and the transcriptionists working for most other mainstream media outlets in this formulation, because the message couldn’t have been distributed without them) ceased serving any master other than desired outcome. You didn’t worry about telling the truth. You figured out what you wished the truth were, what you wanted the truth to be, then you looked at the camera, said it with a straight face, and kept on saying it no matter what. (NOTE: Technically speaking, you didn’t have to lie. It was perfectly acceptable to tell the truth so long as it worked as effectively as a lie.)

It wasn’t about the facts. It was about the narrative. And in the end, the decade of the ’00s saw the ultimate triumph of spin over journalism. From here on out, if you assume good faith on the part of our official political and “press” institutions ever again you well and truly deserve what happens to you.

No, the truth is that these people don’t go to the fridge for a beer without an agenda, and they all play their parts in the Long War Against America. The foundation for our current predicament was laid in the 1960s by players who cared more about the war than the battle and who were willing to lose a few games along the way in order to establish a long-term right-wing dynasty. If you’ve been paying attention since, oh, 1980 or so, it may have occurred to you that the brains behind the “conservative” revolution were pretty good at it, too.

So it would be sheer stupidity to assume that the recent parade of revisionism headed by Perino, Matalin and Giuliani was an accident or a coincidence. It makes infinitely more sense, given what we know about the Right’s meme machine, to see these bald-faced assertions as the leading edge of a coordinated propaganda campaign.

But to what end?

Ahhh, That Newspeak Smell

The short answer may look something like “to make Bush’s record look better,” but that’s hardly of long-term value in and of itself, even if it’s correct. He served his two terms and isn’t currently eligible to run again…although brother Jeb continues to lurk like a jackal just out of rock-throwing range. Regardless, we’d file “making Dubya look better than he really was” under “means,” not “ends.” Remember, the only goal that matters is long-term Republican hegemony. In that context, a literal reading of terrorism during the Bush years is a negative, and is something that a crafty opponent might be able to exploit. If everyone believes that Bush was hell on terrorists, on the other hand, that meme serves future electoral and policy goals. In the shorter term, it becomes a stick that can be used against Obama in 2012 (and against all Dems in this year’s mid-terms). In the long term, it strengthens the perception that Democrats are pussies and Republicans have balls that drag the ground. In combination with the “world is a scary place” meme, this makes for a powerful campaign platform.

The problem is that it’s not always easy to burnish the image of someone whose record is replete with inconvenient facts. Imagine, for instance, that you were hired by the descendants of Josef Stalin to polish his legacy. There are lots of strategies you might employ, but there is that unfortunate little genocidal maniac problem – he did, after all, kill way more people than Hitler, and you can only smear so much lipstick on a war pig. But what if, instead of working around the facts, you could change them? Perception is reality, especially in an era where words are not intended to signify actual objective facts. Turns out Stalin didn’t kill 20 million people – Lenin and Khrushchev did that. Sure, Stalin inherited a bit of a mess, but he was pure hell on the genociders while he was at the helm.

All of which is fun to contemplate, but how would you actually do it?

A Blueprint for Bushevik Revisionism

If I were going to do it, here’s the strategy I’d employ. Don’t worry if it seems like the plan may take a long time and cost a lot of money – as it turns out, my GOP backers have plenty of both.

• First off, I need a gullible audience. Too many brainiacs will kneecap the entire project. The best way to optimize my audience is to dumb down the education system as far as possible. In particular, we’ll need to shift the emphasis away from programs that foster analytical skills and self-reliance and toward programs that teach people to follow instructions. “Empowering” parents and students and insisting on “accountability” by the runaway bureaucracy that is the public school system (fueled by “overpaid” teachers and “corrupt” unions) will be extremely helpful.
• Next, I need a powerful strategy machine. This is easy. We just pour money into “think tanks” that attract bright minds and develop conservative “ideas.” Money is the most compelling attractor in the world, and we can absolutely outspend our opponents.
• Now that I have the meme-generation engine set up and the audience primed, we need a medium by which to transmit the message. Our chances are going to be slim in a society that relies on a hard-nosed press that takes its watchdog responsibilities too seriously. So we need a strong offensive against the Fourth Estate. If media institutions see themselves as guardians of the “public interest” we’ll get chewed up and spit out in little pieces; however, if media institutions are businesses, then the goal is profit, just like any other business. To that end, we’ll lean heavily on the already dominant ideology of free enterprise in promoting ownership and taxation structures that corporatize the press. We’ll also promote the (also well-established) ideology of self-determination, which makes clear that people know what’s best for themselves (no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary). Those who would suggest that the public can’t be counted on to know what’s good for it we’ll dismiss as paternalists and elitists and socialists. There’s tremendous power in telling people that they’re right. The public interest, by god, is what the public is interested in, and an appropriately undereducated populace can be counted on to ignore complex news in favor of splashy entertainment.
• Now we’re in great shape. Citizens Consumers know they’re right no matter what, so there’s no reason to respect education. They sneer along with our noisemakers at the elitists. All opinions are equal. Their self-worth is a function of what they can buy. Their attention spans are insanely short. They don’t know history nor do they see any need for it – history is only relevant insomuch as it validates their immediate purchasing decisions. Life is good.
• Once we have destroyed, though weakened educational programs and the noise media, the ability to critically evaluate data and to distinguish between information and disinformation, we begin working through a variety of channels to socialize the idea that “controversial” “issues” should be “debated.” Since all opinions are equal and we have carefully crafted and distributed veritable libraries worth of disinfo, these debates become never-ending shoutfests that lead to more and more confusion (although, ironically, increased public certainty that ill-informed opinions are fact). A couple of “ideas” that should be “debated”: ubiquitous research demonstrating that our climate is warming and that human activity is in part to blame is part of a genocidal conspiracy and millennia-old superstitions are science. Remember, the refusal to respect all opinions as equally valid is arrogant and elitist.
• At this point we can begin shaping history a little more aggressively (because “facts” are now in play and the insistence on their preeminence is de facto evidence of elitist condescension). We’ve won a number of battles over getting the “creation” “debate” into textbooks so students can “consider all the facts” and “decide for themselves.” Ditto for the climate “debate.”
• Now, time to codify the Newfacts. Having softened up the textbook beachfront through a consumer-friendly treatment of manufactured controversy, we’re ready to take the final step. We rewrite history – literally. Even if we have to include events like 9/11, we now have the freedom to structure those lessons so that it looks like Bush “inherited” the attacks from Clinton and that Bush then became a warrior hero. Over time, well, it’s like they say – the winners write the history books. And not all wars are fought with guns. Our final co-option of the official textbook version of history will be significantly aided if we can call on long, cozy family relationships with powerful publishing interests.

Someone is guaranteed to read this scenario and cry “conspiracy theory.” When that happens, you’re encouraged to take a long, hard, critical look at how the person leveling the charge fits into the process outlined above.

The truth is that this blueprint involves no speculation at all. It points to real events and draws logical conclusions about motives. For instance, certain wealthy interests pour millions and millions of dollars into conservative think tanks that work in documented ways to shape public policies that are in the best interests of their donors. No conspiracy theory is required to reach the obvious conclusions here. In fact, any credible conservative will tell you that it’s essentially American for people to invest their resources in ways that benefit their interests – that’s what the free market is.

When people speak and act they do so for reasons, and many times we can figure out what these reasons are without too much trouble. When a lot of people who are known allies say and do things that seem obviously coordinated – especially when they have a history of acting in concert toward common goals – we’re well advised to pay attention and ask ourselves what’s really going on.

Our future depends on the answers.

____________________

Thanks to those who helped me find resources for this story: Brandon Hersh at Media Matters, Matt Browner Hamlin, Julia at The Voice, Clifford Schecter, Ellen at Newshounds, Spencer Ackerman, Wendy Norris and David Neiwert.

Along the way he spends a good deal of time defining what he means by “egalitarianism” and “elitism.” A particular concern for Henry, and one that’s critical to the discussion here, has to do with the nature of equality, which is distinguished from egalitarianism. In specifically addressing equality of opportunity versus equality of outcomes, Henry believes (as do nearly all American “conservatives” that I know and have read) that we have in recent decades overemphasized the latter. That Henry was a lifelong Democrat, a “card-carrying member of the ACLU” and Northeastern liberal cultural elite of the first order (arts critic for The Boston Globe and Time) adds a bit of spice to the argument.

If you’ve read the previous installments in the series (part 1, part 2, part 3), it should be clear that I see elitism, properly understood, as an important key to a more enlightened society that better serves interests of all of its citizens. This argument has perhaps taken some unexpected turns so far, and there are more twists still to come. For the moment, it’s critical that we understand the following premise: performance elitism, which is necessary to the long-term health of a society, depends on a level playing field.

The concept of “level playing field,” then, is central to our ultimate goal. What do we mean by the term and what do we not mean?

Equality of Outcomes: Bad in Principle, Impossible in Practice and Nobody Believes in it Anyway, So Why are We Talking About It?

In Principle: I’m not sure this argument even needs making to a rational audience, but it’s important to dismiss the popular straw men that the privilege elites and their allies like to trot out in order to distract us from the real issues. For the sake of form, then, here goes.

To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a human society that wasn’t hierarchical in some way. So let’s begin by accepting that rigid egalitarianism doesn’t come naturally to the species. But is it a good idea? It’s easy enough to paint a pleasant utopian vision where we’re all equal, so long as we’re all equally prosperous. The problem is that it’s hard to imagine how we get there from here. If we’re to suppose a philosophy that’s grounded more or less in plausibility, then we have to account for what we know about the human animal.

The individualistic/free market/classical liberal premise regarding egalitarianism is that people are motivated to work for personal gain, and the cynical contemporary conservative/Randian corollary is that if the end result is that the guy who innovates and busts his ass has to give it all away so that the lazy guy who refuses to work can have just as much, then nobody will work. Ultimately we’ll all be equal, all right – we’ll all have nothing.

The relative truth or falsity of this belief system aside for a second, this is an awfully dim view of the human spirit. It alleges that people won’t produce for the common good and that people won’t pursue achievement for intrinsic reasons. These conclusions, taken as absolutes (since they’re usually presented that way), have never been demonstrated and are suspect on their face. However, it’s easy enough to accept that they’re valid to some lesser degree. While I might argue that most of us have enough personal pride that we’d never lay down and quit just to spite the system, and while I might also also argue that as things hypothetically got bad enough we’d all pitch in and at least try to survive, the less there is in the way of return on our effort, the less we’re likely to produce – at a macro level, at least. The curve isn’t linear, but there’s no doubt an effect.

Conclusion: Given what we know about human behavior, the radical pursuit of purely equal outcomes would fail to maximize the potential of the system. Fair enough? Good. Moving on.

In Practice: Again, I can’t imagine that this point really needs making, but: assuming a cadre of extreme radical egalitarians somehow seized control of the government (and understand that at present, the most liberal elements of the Democratic Party don’t have a representative in DC who comes anywhere close to fitting this description), how would you enact the measures needed to bring into existence a purely egalitarian society? There are too many people who oppose it, these people have too much money and power, there’s no mechanism by which this money and power could be quickly be stripped, the reformers have no apparent allies in the military or on the Supreme Court (or even the federal circuit bench), and there are simply too many ways by which the haves could circumvent the new regime.

Conclusion: Some people have more than others and it’s impossible to imagine a day in our lifetimes when this will no longer be so. This means that some children are going to be born into better circumstances than others. They’re going to have access to better schools, and when they graduate they’re going to inherit a network of social connections that provide them with better and more lucrative opportunities, regardless of their qualifications. Period.

Nobody Believes It Anyway: In most cases, equality of outcome is equal parts bogeyman and straw man. To be sure, there are social and political movements and philosophies that seem to push in that direction if we insist on misunderstanding them in their shallowest forms (and this is America, so that’s precisely what we do). If all you know of the world comes from shout radio, for instance, feminism doesn’t seek equality of opportunity for men and women, it wants to render men and women the same in every ludicrous way imaginable, so either we outlaw urinals or have government-financed programs teaching women how to use them. And so on. Am I being unfair to conservative shout jocks? Well, I’m coming closer to fairly representing their views than they do the views of feminists.

Sure, there are members of the feminist movement (and this goes for members of all -ism movements) who hold radical views, and there are very likely a few who do propose policies that would result in something like a pure equality of outcome based on gender (as I’ve noted before, there are 300 million Americans, and it’s hard to imagine a proposition that nobody would embrace). But the .01% most radical members of a movement do not comprise, no matter what a media pundit may tell you, a majority, and in fact they are just what the numbers would imply: a very small minority. The majority of feminists, and multiculturalists, and gay rights activists and civil rights activists and so on are bright enough to grasp basic social realities.

Conclusion: A level playing field has nothing to do with a mythical forced equality of outcomes agenda or the non-existent hordes conspiring to inflict them on us.

Equality of Opportunity: A “Fair Chance”

In 2006 I wrote an essay on a man who was born with every advantage imaginable, but who had evolved a self-image that lacked anything remotely like self-awareness. I called the man “Bob,” and it shouldn’t take anyone who knows anything at all about my hometown more than a couple of seconds to realize who Bob really is. Here’s a bit of what I had to say in that piece:

Life is a 100-yard dash. Despite Jefferson’s horsewax about all men being created equal, the truth is that some folks begin with a 99-yard headstart. I get it. I understand that’s how life is. I run as hard as I can and I try not to begrudge anybody their advantages. I also try to keep a clear head about my own advantages, because while I began at the starting line, I know that some people began the race at the bottom of a hole 20 yards back.

Here’s what I’m over, Bob. I’m sick of guys who started a yard from the finish line writing self-absorbed books lecturing the rest of us on how to be better runners. Getting there first in your case proves that your daddy was fast, not you. So take your win for what it is and shut the fuck up.

I know dozens of people as smart as you or smarter, Bob. Maybe hundreds. And a lot of them are struggling just to get to the finish line because of how guys like you have rigged the game. This much I’d bet my life on: had you grown up where I did, you’d be pumping gas. Or, let’s give you some credit. You’re still pretty smart and have some attitude about you, so maybe you’d own the gas station.

I continue to like the 100-yard dash metaphor for its ability to convey proportion. Its limitation is that we can’t take it too literally because a race only has one winner. And as I note above, the reality of life is that some people are simply going to get a head start, while other unfortunate souls are going to have to run with a few handicaps.

When I insist that our society’s public policy must assure a “level playing field,” I don’t mean that we need a Harrison Bergeron-style Handicapper General to make us all “equal”: we don’t need to worry about completely eliminating head starts, even when they overprivilege halfwit douchebags like our most recent former president (although a productive policy would perhaps cultivate a strong progressive tax structure that limits inheritance privilege more than we do at present).

I also don’t mean that we need to obsess over what it means to win – it’s okay if a particular “race” has many winners. The business world has lots and lots of individuals who we’d consider winners. The same goes for the academy. And the world of arts and letters. And sports, and music, and theater, and film, and so on. What matters is that everyone is afforded an opportunity to achieve to their highest potential, regardless of the circumstances of their birth. If some are born into advantage, so be it, so long as all have a fair chance to succeed.

To this end, America’s public policy needs to:

• provide a minimum baseline of opportunity; this policy set would largely focus on education, although in some cases it may also take into account other factors;
• the goal of the policy should be to assure that young citizens of noteworthy ability who are willing to dedicate themselves to educational and professional achievement can reliably earn their way to the top of their professions (we can argue about the nuts and bolts of this policy later – for now, we’re discussing broad goals and objectives);
• to the extent that children of privilege can attain higher degrees of success despite inferior capabilities, the system would not be deemed a success.

Put more succinctly, when we look at the upper echelons of a given industry, profession or organization, we should see a higher correlation between success and merit than between success and privilege. Until this is the case, we have not sufficiently leveled the playing field and our culture will continue to underperform its potential, to the detriment of all of us.

Egalitarianism, Equality, Democracy

Henry attempted to distinguish between equality of outcome, which he called egalitarianism, and equality of opportunity, which he called democracy, and his use of “democracy” in this context was a little unsatisfying, for a lot of reasons. Still, it’s significant that he linked opportunity and democracy. They’re not the same thing, but one depends on the other.

Perhaps the more important point to make is that we can have democracy without having anything worth having. After all, if we all have a voice and we vote to usher in an age of unparalleled self-degradation, that’s democracy, even if it represents an undesirable state of existence. We can also use our democratic power to vote ourselves into a new era of serfdom – something we’re far closer to doing than makes rational, self-interested sense.

What we mean when we wax eloquent about democracy is a higher-order ideal of self-determination where we all have a shot at prosperity that hinges on our abilities and our willingness to work for a better life and where the fate of the nation rests in the hands of those who legitimately comprise our brightest and best. That sort of democracy is something that doesn’t exist in the United States at present, if it ever did. If we are to achieve this enlightened society someday, then we must maximize the fullest potential of each citizen, and this can only be accomplished by bolstering the default level of opportunity.

So when we say “leveling the playing field,” what we’re really talking about is raising up the low end so that the least fortunate among us still has a reasonable shot of succeeding alongside the most fortunate.

More in the Democracy & Elitism series…

Still, if that whole scene set your plausibility alarms to ringing, you might want to brace yourself for this one.

Think Progress makes a great catch on C-SPAN this morning: Someone calls in while Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) is answering the lines, practically in tears because Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) missed this morning’s procedural vote on health care.

He was apparently concerned that — after following Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) instructions to pray that someone couldn’t make a manager’s amendment vote Sunday night — his prayers for Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) to die struck the wrong senator.

“Our small tea bag group here in Waycross, we got our vigil together and took Dr. Coburn’s instructions and prayed real hard that Sen. Byrd would either die or couldn’t show up at the vote the other night,” the caller said.

Let’s review. A teabagger, following the lead of his duly elected Congressfolk, gets together with his fellow Christians and prays that God will kill a political opponent.

WWJW? Sen. Byrd, that’s who.

There’s so much wrong here it’s hard to know where to start. But suffice it to say that these mouth-breathers worship one more hateful god. Further, this god is apparently a bad shot – if you’re aiming for Byrd and only manage to wing Inhofe, well, omnipotence is right out the window, huh?

Maybe in the next Spidey sequel they can cast Sen. Coburn and his drooling band of lobotomized Christian teabaggers as the villains. But while we’re waiting on the fantasy to arrive at a theater near us, isn’t it nice to know that these people are free to roam the streets in reality?

UPDATE: TPM wonders if the caller was a prankster. Could be, could be. Hard to say for sure, but it’s certainly plausible. It’s just a shame that we live in an age where we have things like “citizens” carrying assault rifles to political rallies to consider – makes it hard to sort reality from fantasy.

Image Credits: Panchosoft.com and Raymond Pronk

Until he drifted off message and said:

You are listening now to the shouts in the background of the Hitler youth.

The following YouTube video has Monckton saying “Hitler youth” twice, but you can skip to the last 20 seconds or so if you aren’t interested in sitting through the entire thing.

As someone who’s studied the Nazis, I think we can safely add the history of Nazism right under climatology on the list of things Monckton is ignorant of.

However, the more interesting point is that Monckton publicly cracked. It’s one thing to say intemperate things about your ideological opponents in private email correspondence that you never intend to make public, but it’s something else entirely to do the same in a public forum. Clearly, when being badgered, even a practiced speaker like Monckton can get frustrated and publicly say things that are intemperate at best.

The way I see it, climate disruption deniers have only two courses of action they can take. Either they can condemn Monckton’s intemperate public remarks just as they have condemned the private intemperate remarks of climate scientists in the illegally-obtained CRU email archives. Or they can forgive Monckton his public remarks and similarly forgive the climate scientists their private remarks as well.

Forgiving Monckton but condemning the CRU climatologists would be hypocritical.

“Elite” hasn’t always been an epithet. In fact, if we consider what the dictionary has to say about it, it still signifies something potentially worthy. Potentially. For instance:

e·lit·ism or é·lit·ism (-ltzm, -l-) n.
1. The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources.le

That definition, while technically accurate enough, could use a bit of untangling, because it embodies the very nature of our problem with elitism in America. In popular use, the term “elite” and its derivatives has been twisted into a pure, distilled lackwit essence of “liberal” – another once-proud word that fell victim to our moneyed false consciousness machine.

However, if we sift the definition a bit, we find that it’s actually three definitions masquerading as one: intellect, social status, or financial resources. Those are not three ways of saying the same thing. On the contrary – they’re two or three distinctly different things. And in understanding these distinctions, we will hopefully come to a better grasp of what ails America. To wit: while elitism literally refers to a set of different and only barely related conditions, we are routinely encouraged to conflate them all. When we do, it causes us to ignore dynamics that threaten our individual and collective well-being and to denigrate the dynamics of opportunity that offer us hope for a more prosperous and productive democracy.

Elitism: Three Definitions

Let’s look at what the term “elite” means in three contexts.

1: Social elite. Up until the dawn of modern democracy in the 18th Century most societies were ruled by kings or emperors or chieftains or sheiks or some similar variety of hereditary elite. These societies tended to be rigidly class-based, and much of your life’s potential was strictly determined by the station into which you were born. If your parents were artisans, you were probably going to be an artisan. If you were born into the peasantry, a peasant you would live and die. In some places the “divine right” doctrine made clear that this was all God’s will – the hereditary lineage was as God intended. The class structure, with the king at the top, was the natural order as decreed in Heaven.

We don’t have the divine right of kings in the US today, of course, but humans being human, we still see vestiges of dynastic social elitism. In part one of this series we noted the Bush dynasty, of which former president George W Bush was at least fourth generation. We’re all well acquainted with the Kennedy clan, as well, and even if we don’t know the specific histories, we certainly know the names of other American royal families: Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Duke, Hearst, Pulitzer, Reynolds, Carnegie, Kellogg, Morgan, Stanford, Ford, Du Pont – and virtually every city of any size has its own local aristocracies. In my hometown of Winston-Salem, NC, names like Reynolds and Hanes carried a lot of weight, for instance, and in Denver, where I live now, one finds any number of things named after the Iliff and Bonfils clans.

2: Financial elite. In the old country social and financial status tended to go hand-in-hand. In America, social status has tended to trail financial success at a safe distance (since the first generation or two of an emerging financial dynasty invariably has to overcome the taint associated with being nouveau riche – that is, one may have a lot of money, but that doesn’t mean one has breeding, culture or sufficient social skills to be accepted into polite society). However, over time even a pack of socially distasteful Arkies like the Waltons can be expected to gain a measure of acceptance.

For purposes of discussing elitists in America, it makes sense to consider the social and financial elites as more or less one group. These groups, which we’ll collectively term privilege elitists, are distinct from what our dictionary calls…

3: Intellectual elite. In brief, intellectual elites are people who, regardless of socio-economic background, comprise a society’s “knowledge class.” They are usually educated (although they may be largely self-educated); they earn their livings with their brains; as a general rule they value learning and education; and they dominate the teaching professions. If the social and economic cohorts are privilege elitists, then let’s call this group the performance elites.

First, though, we need to address a sticking point. The word “intellectual” troubles many Americans for reasons they’ve probably never stopped to think about. This distaste results from the fact that Americans historically placed a great value on applied learning. Those who founded and developed our culture were people who crossed a large ocean to escape poverty or seek religious and social “freedom” (a popular, if problematic way of putting it) or get away from the European establishment, remember. They tended to have less patience with learning for its own sake (pure knowledge), which in families like mine often got dismissed as useless “book learnin’.” Book learnin’ was seen as infinitely inferior to “common sense.”

“Intellectual” has always signified the pursuit of knowledge that wasn’t “good for anything.” As such, it has never been respected in America, and any number of disparaging iconographies* have grown up around the concept. “Eggheads” and “brainiacs” are rarely thought to know anything of value, and even the main body of 20th Century “science fiction,” a genre ostensibly devoted to praising science, is perhaps better understood as engineering fiction.

Intelligence vs Intellect

So we have a perceptual hang-up about intellectuals. Are these perceptions fair, though? Or accurate? Or productive? In a word, no.

Once upon a time I insisted that I was intelligent, but that I was not an intellectual. I could go back and attempt to explain what the distinction was in my mind, but the reality is that I had fallen for the faux-populist ideology I’m describing here. I identified closely with my working class roots and allowed myself to associate intellectualism with smug, self-superiority. That I knew a few smug, self-superior intellectuals only served to reinforce my delusion.

Whatever attitude a particular individual case may adopt, our intellectual/performance elites are generally defined by a few extremely desirable qualities. They are smart; they have worked hard to acquire knowledge; and they believe that the wisdom arising from knowledge holds the key to a better world for all of us. They may not be “of the people” in the sense that their lives are fully integrated into working class culture, but the ones I know uniformly care a great deal about “the people” and wish for them greater opportunity, prosperity and happiness.

Let’s also be clear about the place of those with “useful” knowledge. There may be a popular tendency to herd them into different chutes than the eggheads, but engineer types are performance elites, too. Literally understood, they are people who put their minds into the service of building our present and our future.

Some intellectual elites were born rich, but most probably weren’t. Most had to work very hard for what they’ve gotten. Countless thousands mortgaged their futures with student loans. And if they take a minute to think about it, a lot of them would probably react strongly to being lumped into the same group as trust fund elitists who were born rich and never accomplished anything of lasting value in their lives.

As a way of visualizing the differences between these two groups (which we’re necessarily abstracting to make a point), consider this chart, which opposes the tendencies and qualities of performance and privilege elites.

Despite cynical attempts to convince the public that elitists are actively working to destroy the American way of life, the truth is that the targets of this scorn are guilty of precisely the opposite. Privilege elites are, by definition, born into legacies of wealth and power. When former President George W Bush talked about promoting an “ownership society,” these are the owners he had in mind. They’re the “haves and have-mores” who constituted his “base.” They’re the hyper-rich top one percent who, according to various analyses, own over 50% of the nation’s wealth. They also own, in addition to everything else, the media outlets responsible for propagating the toxic “liberal/intellectual elite” meme.

The elitism under attack, performance elitism, is built on striving, achievement and knowledge. These elites earned whatever status they have through hard work, while the privilege elites inherited their birthright through a modern equivalent of the divine right of kings. Intellectual elites seek equal opportunity while economic elites use their heft and influence to promote ever-greater inequality of both opportunity and outcome.

Yes, we do have elitists in America. But elitism isn’t necessarily bad – on the contrary, depending on what sort of elitism we’re talking about, it may be a very good thing. It may be the very quality that allowed the US to become the greatest nation in the world, or it may be the quality that is eroding our greatness more and more each day.

The next time you hear “elitist” used to describe someone who’s trying to destroy America, pause and ask yourself a few questions:

• Who’s doing the talking?
• What does their portfolio look like?
• Who owns the wires they’re using to address you, and what is the bested interest of those who own the channel?
• Is the image being presented plausible? Do the elites being pilloried have either the motive or the means to do whatever they’re being accused of doing?
• As you listen to the story, do you clearly understand what is meant by the word “elite” as it is being employed?
• Is it clear to you that the speaker/writer understands what the word “elite” means?
• Is the term being used to clarify or obfuscate?
• Finally, based on what you’re being told and how the argument is being presented, how much credit for intelligence do the story’s producer’s give you? Is it clear what they want you to think and how they want you to react? If so, what motivation on their part explains the direction they’re trying to move you?

Most importantly, if you have personally worked hard to improve your mind so that you can improve your life as well as the lives of those in your family and community, don’t let a cynical propaganda frame deprive you of that which you have earned. Be proud of your status as a performance elite and don’t back down from privilege elites who would denigrate your accomplishments.

* What I mean by iconographies is a series of narratives and popular images used to depict members of a group. For a quick example, think about the stereotype of the mad scientist. Or the trope of the wandering kung fu master. Or the crooked used car salesman. Or the ambulance-chasing lawyer. Or the narcissistic model. We have clichés of all sorts of types or groups of people, and more often than not these quick, cheap categorizations prevent us from understanding the humans depicted in meaningful ways. See Neal Stephenson’s use of the term in Anathem.

_______________________

Next: Who Are These Out-of-Touch “Liberal Elites,” Anyway?

But viewed in the rarified context of the very wealthy, the amounts are petty cash.

For example, former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman has put $19 million so far into her campaign for governor of California — but that’s barely 1.5 percent of her $1.3 billion fortune.

Whitman has “publicly floated the notion of a record-shattering $150-million campaign budget” — but even if she financed $100 million of that herself, that still would only be 7.7 percent of her billion-dollar-plus wallet.

She wants to be governor of what used to be one of the 10 largest economies in the world. But she takes a back seat to newly re-elected New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in spending your own money to be somebody big. No one in American history has spent so much of his own money to win an election.

Bloomberg has now spent $261 million to become and remain the mayor of the Big Apple. That works out to $174 per vote this year, $85 in 2005, and $74 in 2001, according to New York Times reporter Michael Barbaro.

Egads — more than a quarter of a billion dollars. But even that amount of political spending represents only 1.63 percent of Bloomberg’s $16 billion fortune. But he had to overturn New York City’s term limits law to win that third term. Ironically, this year fewer people voted for him — 557,059 — than voted to approve term limits in 1996— 586,890. In an election in which he had been expected to coast easily to his third term because of his extravagant spending and the perceived weakness of his opponent, he won by only 4 percentage points.

Bloomberg had argued that New York City needed his — and only his — expertise in coping with the crisis that enveloped the global economy and hurt the city. Yes, he does have a credible reputation as mayoral manager. But to argue that a law must be changed — a law he supported — to allow him to continue in office as the only suitable mayor during an economic downturn is arrogant.

And Village Voice writer Tom Robbins reported that, based on a book by former NYTer Joyce Purnick, “many months before economic disaster struck in September 2008 — the crisis that Bloomberg said prompted his reversal on term limits — the mayor was already pondering the move.” More arrogance.

Size — as measured by wealth — matters in politics. For example, the total wealth of the 50 richest members of Congress is nearly $1.3 billion, an average of about $25 million each. Sen. John Kerry tops the list at $167 million.

But compared with the personal finances of mega-rich political and corporate elites such as Bloomberg and Whitman, Kerry’s ability to self-finance an election pales. This trend has been apparent for nearly 20 years, particularly in the land of 90210.

California, it seems, breeds really rich people who want to buy a political title. One of Whitman’s opponents — state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner — says Whitman’s trying to buy her way into Sacramento. Yet Poizner’s no piker. He “sold a high-technology company for $1 billion in 2000, and plunged $12 million of his fortune into his 2006 election as insurance commissioner.”

Internet entrepreneur, eBay founding member, and venture capitalist Steve Westly spent $35 million of his own $200-million-plus wealth before losing the gubernatorial primary election in 2006. Former Marriott and Northwest Airlines exec Al Checchi burned through $40 million of his $700 million nest egg in his 1998 race, also losing in the primary.

And who can forget Michael Huffington, who spent $28 million of his own money and $100 million overall in losing to Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 1994.

Wealth, combined with time served in office, leads to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. Liberals would argue he’s been one of the most effective senators in American history (although credible conservatives might disagree). Yet he spent little of his own fortune to stay in office, at least since 1998. Kennedy gave only $1.35 million of his own money to his campaigns, compared with $28 million in individual contributions and $2.6 million in PAC money, according to Federal Election Commission records aggregated by the Center for Responsive Politics. But Kennedy was far from a billionaire. His last Senate disclosure estimated his net worth between $43 million and $163 million.

Money has always spoken loudly in politics. But the tens of millions available to billionaires to spend on their own campaigns is deafening.

Billionaires have always spent plenty of money on politics. Since 1978, one aggregation of data says, 82 billionaires have donated almost $62 million to Republican and Democratic candidates.

Some of these wealthy men (only seven billionaire donors were women) would argue it’s a merely a cost of doing business. Others might argue that campaign contributions to worthy candidates might foster social change (according to their definitions, of course). Still others might admit that they donate large sums simply because they can. The last is called really hefty “political throw-weight.”

But the political largesse of these 82 billionaires is miniscule compared with Bloomberg’s $261 million and Whitman’s $19 million. Her spending has been just since January — and the election is still a year away. Whitman’s spending, since she has no political profile and has rarely voted, has only one goal — name recognition. She can afford to spend $60 million, $80 million, even $100 million to have her name on the tongue of every registered California voter.

I have argued (here and here) for a radical overhaul of campaign financing. I have said that Congress should appropriate sufficient monies to adequately pay for every federal and statewide election in America. If candidates or incumbents took the public money, then they could not take a dime from any other source. (Forget the money-as-free-speech argument. The candidate makes the choice, not the donor.)

But is that argument for massive public financing feasible any more? When a billionaire 16 times over spends $261 million be merely the mayor of a city, how could Congress expect taxpayers to cover that stratospheric cost, let alone statewide and federal races?

The arrogance of Bloomberg and Whitman — I can outspend anyone, and thereby buy the political office I want — fosters another dramatic and saddening change in how America elects its leaders. As Bloomberg and Whitman have discovered, they no longer need to press the flesh and make nice to such commoners as mere multimillionaires to raise the money to run. (There are other consequences, too, as Doc Slammy will explain in his “Democracy & Elitism” series beginning today.)

America has plenty of billionaires. The Forbes 400’s collective net worth is $1.27 trillion. Many are shrewd, capable, intelligent people. Others were merely lucky, married well, or inherited wealth. And wealth by itself does not render any citizen ineligible for public office. (Or poverty, for that matter.)

But what massive wealth offers is literally the ability to avoid the voters. Yes, all candidates face the electorate at the ballot box. But wealth affords the ability to artfully mediate or remanufacture the narrative of one’s self, one’s policies or positions, one’s history and biography. Handshakes and baby-kissing at the county fair are no longer a mandatory ritual for a really rich candidate. The wealthy can manipulate elections through the legal means of self-financing a campaign. They can hire the best consultants (and Bloomberg rewards his consultants with $100,000 bonuses) and produce the most effective ads. And they can spend money on polling to parse the electorate for targeted emails and direct mail messages.

Most important, they need not depend on the Republican and Democratic national parties for financing. They need not kiss anyone’s ass.

These are the major leagues that professional egotists Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck wish to inhabit. Despite their large incomes from various media, they’re still in the minors.

But Rush Limbaugh? He’s at or near the billion-dollar mark, thanks to a first eight-year contract for $265 million and a second for $400 million (and the rumored $100 million bonus).

Limbaugh could self-finance a Senate seat from Florida — or any state he chooses to move to and establish residency.

Frankly, I’d rather have Salma Hayek move to New York state, where I live, and run for the Senate. After all, she married well. With a net worth of $7 billion, she could easily buy that seat. Even Caroline Kennedy, with a net worth estimated between $100 million and $400 million, couldn’t pony up enough.

Welcome to the well-funded New American Political Oligarchy — a Bloomberg-Whitman production.

Is there a more radioactive word in American politics today than elitist?

Admit it – you saw the word and had an instinctive negative reaction, didn’t you? If not, then count yourself among the rarest minority in our culture, the fraction of a percent that has not yet had its consciousness colonized by the “evil elitist” meme. If not, you’re one of a handful of people not yet victimized by a cynical public relations frame that poses perhaps the greatest danger to the health of our republic in American history.

Pretty dire language there, huh? Perhaps we’ve ventured a little too deeply into the land of hyperbole? It might seem so at a glance, but in truth the success of any society is largely a function of the things it believes and how those beliefs shape its actions and policies. A nation driven by ideologies that work to undercut its strengths is doomed, and the United States has become an abusive consumer of a complex, toxic cocktail of self-defeating dogmas and the resulting public behaviors.

American society has its share of elites, elitism and elitists, but unfortunately it badly misunderstands who’s who, what’s what and how it all affects our nation. These misunderstandings arise, in part, because we have been lied to so ubiquitously and so effectively by powerful, wealthy interests – interests that stand to gain a great deal by keeping the public as misinformed and confused as possible. Interests with the resources required for broad mass media propagation of the toxic meme. Interests with a deep comprehension of how the mass culture thinks and acts. Interests that are extremely adept at playing on the weaknesses of the public mind and shepherding it toward a desired end.

I rarely resort to Marxist terminology, but in this case Friedrich Engels* offers up an important concept: false consciousness. In a nutshell, this theory argues that a society’s economic elites use their resources to foster among the lower classes – in contemporary America, this would be the rapidly dwindling middle class and the working classes – an erroneous belief about how the culture is structured. This would include false beliefs about the distribution of wealth, about opportunity and one’s prospects for success, about the relationship between the wealthy and the poor, about the actual causes of poverty and inequality, and so on.

In all cases, the failure of the lower classes to accurately perceive the true nature of the society’s economic and political reality works in favor of the powerful and against the members of the underclasses.

A couple of relatively recent cases from American presidential politics illustrate the point. In 1992 Bill Clinton was the Democratic challenger to Republican incumbent George HW Bush. Clinton had been born into a poor, broken, Southern Baptist family in Arkansas. He was, in every sense imaginable, an American Everyman – a living-and-breathing Horatio Alger story. He’d worked hard and fought his way up the ladder, against all odds. He earned enough in the way of academic scholarships to put himself through Georgetown, one of the nation’s finest universities. He did so well there that he earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. Now bad for a simple country boy from a trailer park in Arkansas.

Bush’s story was the polar opposite of Clinton’s. His father was a wealthy banker and a US Senator. His grandfather was a wealthy industrialist. He attended elite schools as a boy (Greenwich Country Day School, Phillips Academy), and whatever he may have accomplished in life, it’s uncontroversial to say that he’d been working with as many advantages as his opponent had disadvantages.

Fine – a wealthy man representing the GOP, a “man of the people” representing the “party of the people” – all was apparently running to form. Except that Clinton got mauled in the South. He got mauled with poor voters. He got mauled by Christian voters. The problem was that somehow a blueblood from Kennebunkport was perceived as being “more like” the common underclass voter than the man who was legitimately one of their own.

Clinton went on to alienate Americans on “both” ends of the political spectrum, and the point here certainly isn’t to lobby him a place on Rushmore. Rather, we should simply take note of the massive gap between who these men were and how they were perceived with respect to class, economic identity and the question of elitism.

A few years later, the next generation of the Bush lineage produced a president, George W Bush. In 2004 this Bush, who was even more deeply soaked in the rich juices of dynasty, stood for reelection in a contest where elitism again became an issue. He attended the Kinkaid School in Houston, then Phillips. Then Yale, then Harvard Business. (Please understand – if you attended Phillips, Yale and Harvard, you have trodden the most economically and politically elite pathway available in the United States, period.) While at Yale he was a member of arguably the most elite society of its sort in America, Skull & Bones.

His opponent, John Kerry, also came from a certain measure of privilege. His parents were upper-middle class and his mother was a member of the Forbes family. He attended Yale, like his opponent, and also was invited to join Skull & Bones. and In 1995 he married Teresa Heinz, whose estimated worth was in the $750B range.

A rational assessment of the 2004 election, then, would have cast it (policy positions notwithstanding) as a contest between two competing elites. Neither faced much in the way of want or class struggle growing up, both attended the finest schools money could buy, they were fraternity brothers in the nation’s most influential and privileged secret society, and so on. In the 100-meter dash of life, we might safely observe that Kerry began with a 90-meter head start, while Dubya had only to lean forward a bit to break the tape. (12 years earlier, the supposed elitist candidate had actually begun the race in a deep hole 20 meters behind the starting line.)

But if you’ll recall, that isn’t how the media-fueled campaign was framed at all. Bush, like his father, was painted as the regular joe and Kerry as the effete Yankee elitist. Amazingly – or perhaps predictably – the electorate swallowed the lie, hook and sinker.

Perhaps you can’t fool all the people all the time, but by November of 2004 we had clearly reached the point in our history when you could fool an electoral majority all the time.

* Eagleton, Terry (1991). Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso.

____________________

Next: What do we mean by “elitism”?

Image Credit: Le Nouvel Ordre Mondial

“If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW,” says the Telegraph’s James Delingpole.

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey claims the emails discuss “repetitive, false data of higher temperatures.”

The National Review’s Chris Horner salivates, “The blue-dress moment may have arrived.”

“The crimes revealed in the e-mails promise to be the global warming scandal of the century,” blares Michelle Malkin.

The Australia Herald-Sun’s Andrew Bolt claims the emails are “proof of a conspiracy which is one of the largest, most extraordinary and most disgraceful in moderrn [sic] science.”

So, do these emails and documents represent proof of a “conspiracy” and “scandal”? At this point it seems highly unlikely, and the more that people look at the illegally-obtained emails and documents, the less likely it will become. Here’s why.

First, there has been much ado made about some emails that supposedly talk about “tricks” and procedures to “hide the decline”, as well as other words used that indicate that the CRU scientists (and their various correspondents) were lying about their data (something that RealClimate discusses). And it’s much ado about nothing (with apologies to Shakespeare). I work in electrical engineering where I use words and phrases that, taken out of context, could be misinterpreted as nefarious by people who are ignorant of the context or who have an axe to grind. For example, I regularly talk about “fiddling with” or “twiddling” the data, “faking out” something, “messing around with” testing, and so on. In the first case, I’m analyzing the data to see if I can make it make sense or if I can extract the signal from the noise. In the second case, I’m often forced to force a piece of electronics into a specific mode manually so I can test it and verify some other function, or I use the phrase to provide artificial test data for calibration and/or verification that my electronics are working correctly. And in the third case, it usually involves trying to deduce whether a problem is caused by the electronic board I;m testing or by the equipment that is doing the testing.

Second, it might be unpolitical to say that you’ll be happy when someone died, or that Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts are pricks and assholes, but that doesn’t make the statements a scandal. I personally was happy when former Senator Jesse Helms died, and I will probably enjoy a drink of expensive scotch when Marc Morano, James Inhofe, and Steve Milloy kick the bucket. And I’ve got no problem calling someone like Joe D’Aleo a liar or Steve Milloy an oxygen thief. If that makes me a bad person, well, I’m OK with that. I expect that most people hold enough contempt for some of their enemies to relish it when they die. So it’s not political and it’s not nice or decent, but it’s also not scandalous. It’s still human, and scientists are just as human as anyone else.

Third and probably most importantly, no matter how much the deniers scream, these emails aren’t likely to reveal any evidence of scientific malfeasance. And even if they do, there’s an entire globe of researchers whose independent research has bolstered the case that climate disruption is real and that it’s predominantly caused by human civilization. It will take more than even a couple of thousand emails to knock the massive, reinforced scientific foundation that underlies anthropogenic climate disruption.

And let’s not forget – the emails and documents were obtained illegally. If there is truly damning information (such as a critical scientist or three overtly saying stuff along the lines of “I fudged my data and nobody caught me. You lost the bet – pay up.”), then the illegality of the release will fade somewhat in the face of other data. But if not, this hack will be a major problem for not only the hackers who released it but also for all the people who are republishing the emails. Hacking is illegal, but in some states and countries, releasing private email correspondence is considered breach of privacy and is thus also a crime.

Finally, let’s point out that some of the people here screaming the loudest from their soapboxes are hypocrites (such as Michelle Malkin and Ed Morrissey). If the hackers had got into military computers and released private communications, they’d be screaming for the hackers’ blood and demanding that any site republishing the emails be brought up on federal charges. But here they’re screaming for the victim’s blood. If hacking and leaking emails is wrong, then it’s wrong. Claiming that it’s wrong when a leak targets your friends but OK when it targets your enemy makes you a hypocrite and a political hack worthy of nothing but disdain.

There’s a chance that the hack will end the career of a scientists or two, probably for political reasons. But the supposedly damning emails the conservatives and deniers are touting are nothing of the sort. And given how strong the science is, it can survive this latest round of denier dirty tricks.

For anyone interested, here’s a link to a Memeorandum page where there’s lots of links about this topic.

Special effects in movies, when well done, are fun.  They help us escape from our lives to enjoy tales of superheroes, mutants or alternate realities.  We travel to faraway or mythical lands and see dragons, dwarfs and trolls, tree-creatures battling orcs, wizards and sorcerers battling.  Oh yeah, and stuff blowing up.  (Thank you Michael Bay)  None of this really exists, of course, but that’s part of what makes it a good escape for the viewer.

It’s kind of hard to imagine a major blockbuster that doesn’t involve some form of death, shock, torture, shooting or explosion.  War movies can bring perhaps the most accuracy to this genre and this is especially true of those that don’t sugar coat it.  Saving Private Ryan was very graphic but not in an over-the-top, gratuitous way.  It brought home the realities of war.  Most action movies, however, take violence to a completely unrealistic level.

Yes, there are gangs in real life, and there is some level of underworld in our major cities. But our movies would lead you to the conclusion that every street corner is a drug marketplace, every precinct is infested by corrupt cops, in every alley lurks an assassin, every bar is a spontaneous kung fu fight waiting to happen and every nightclub is a potential gang warfare site.  Around every corner a secret agent lays in wait for another secret agent. Domestic abuse is rampant and a serial killer lurks in your closet waiting to decapitate you.  Some zombie wants to eat your brains.

The real world does offer some of these adventures (the supernatural notwithstanding) but, again, the point of the story is to provide an escape for the viewer.  One thing to remember, though: violence always has a victim. Very few chainsaw murders are consensual.

Sex in the movies is also plentiful. It’s in our ads and our magazines, it’s on TV, it’s everywhere.  But there are rules. Flash a single breast or hint at a risque sex scene and your movie gets an R rating.  Show anything more and you’re stuck with an X rating – if you get a rating at all.  Movies with gratuitous nudity get R ratings, while others flirt with “the line” and get away with a PG13. In general, the idea is to offer various levels of nudity and sexuality for the sake of appealing to various levels of horny viewers (mostly men) and to make a buck in the process. It’s easy to view this brand of escapism as more positive than violence, mayhem and death.

Then there are more artistically inclined movies, usually independent, that ask us to think about real life.  In these stories, people who don’t have Hollywood-perfect bodies might get together and do the things that normal people do.  Some breastfeed in public.  Some have non-erotic showers.  Some change clothes.  Some kiss.  Some have sex.  They might show some skin but almost every human is nude at least once a day, right? Skin happens.

If these stories are told effectively we will relate to the characters as they tap into experiences that we all share.  They show reality, or some plausible fictionalized version of it.  Sometimes there are heated arguments and even violence, but they spare us the fx. No blood spatter analysis, nobody shot at point blank range, no body parts flying at us in 3D.

With this in mind, let’s think about the Moral Majority and its neo-puritan descendants.  Which movies seem to catch their attention?  What is it that gets under their skin and ruffles their feathers?

Yes, this is a rhetorical question.

While I respect the rights of people to choose what they see, let’s consider some numbers. Last year, depending on your source, between 15k and 20k Americans were murdered.  This adds up to about six people in 100,000.  Each of these murders, by definition, put an unnatural end to someone’s life.  Friends and family mourned, and in many cases incurred physical and emotional burdens that they will never shed.  The suck factor for homicide is 100%.

Last year approximately a quarter billion Americans had consensual sex.  (Okay, I’m making this statistic up but it can’t be far off.)  If the number is close, this comes to about 70,000 people in 100,000.  Each of these instances (by definition) involved two (or more) people coming together and enjoying the company of another for a time.  Whereas being a murder victim is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, many of these people will choose to have repeat episodes with the same person.  In general, then, it’s safe to assert that most of these victims of consensual sex leave better than they arrived.  The suck factor for sex is not zero but it’s a lot closer to zero than it is to 100%. (Obviously I emphasize “consensual” for a reason – non-consensual sex, sex with a victim, is not sex – it’s violence.)

Isn’t this odd?  Movies portray violence on an exaggerated, unrealistic scale. Violence has a very high suck factor. And nobody bats an eye.  Other movies depict natural sexuality (or maybe unrealistic, but harmless sexuality). And sex is an act that almost every adult in the country takes part in on a semi-regular basis (or they’d like to). The suck factor is very small. And this is what gets conservative panties in a bunch.

So to sum up: in art it’s fine to kill, maim and destroy but it’s not okay to portray a satisfying natural encounter or to take a picture of said encounter.

When you think about it, this bizarre dynamic extends well beyond the arts.  The Right has no problem advocating and rushing into real wars, wars that leave a lot of innocents dead along with the baddies we’re supposedly liberating them from. But sensuality, in all cases outside of married Christian sex, is considered bad (and even that isn’t to be depicted or talked about).  A major irony here is that when we consider all of the political sex scandals from the past few years Republicans seem to comprise a large majority of the perpetrators.  They profess to frown upon nudity, upon cleavage, upon homosexuality, upon sensuality of any type.  But behind closed doors this is exactly what everyone seems to seek.  Even some of the loudest proponents of the Defense of Marriage Act have been caught in hypocritical, compromising sexual situations.  Amusing, or perhaps tragic, is the fact that morality police like David Vitter and Larry Craig snuck behind the backs of their spouses for sexual fulfillment, betraying personal as well as public trusts.  Couples who simply acknowledge the realities if normal human sexuality, on the other hand, can explore their curiosities and desires with the full support, blessing and (optional) involvement of their life partners.

Damn, America has it backwards.

Europeans are a lot more comfortable with their bodies than Americans.  Their magazines feature topless women and there are far more topless beaches.  They have movies with unabashed sexuality (you even find live sex acts in respectable theatre presentations).  We always seem to portray Brits as stuffy but in this respect it is us that are the stuffy ones.

I imagine that with most S&R readers I’m preaching to the choir, but I’ll say it anyway.  Sex is natural and it’s healthy to explore. It should be celebrated instead of demonized.

Disclosure: I take artistic pictures of people in edgy sensual circumstances and participate in activities that those offended by this article would certainly frown upon.  I am tired of having the reactionary moral positions of others thrust upon my art, my life and my friends when all of those participating are benefiting from their involvement.  I really don’t mean to sound like a hippie when I say this but…. Make love, not war!

In case you missed it, the Daily Show’s John Stewart called out Fox’s Sean Hannity during his November 10 broadcast. It seems that Hannity’s show covered the anti-health care bill rally in Washington, and Hannity asserted that more than 20,000 people showed up (his guest, Michele Bachmann, asserted that the number could be as high as 45,000). Hannity then went on to show footage of the demonstration and, sure enough, it appeared that there were many thousands of people on hand. Or were there?

Stewart’s staff discovered something curious about Hannity’s footage. Though the recent demonstration took place on a crisp, sunny, fall day, (as demonstrated by the initial images in the segment) the footage of the crowd showed a cloudy sky and the dense, green foliage of summer. Stewart correctly pointed out that Hannity had used footage from Glen Beck’s 912 rally in September.

Last night, Sean Hannity acknowledged Stewart’s assertion and apologized for “an inadvertent mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.”

There’s just one problem. It was certainly a mistake, but it couldn’t have been inadvertent. I don’t know if Hannity, himself, made the decision to cut in scenes from the earlier demonstration in order to bolster the reported numbers at the anti-heath care rally, but someone did. You can’t make that kind of mistake “inadvertently.”

When a cameraperson is sent to shoot a rally, he or she captures that footage either on tape, flash memory or an external hard drive. It is then uploaded to a single file or group of files under a single heading. An editor then takes images from that file and matches them to voice-over copy or, in this case, simply uses scenes as background for Hannity’s and his guests’ conversation. On occasion, an editor will go to archival footage when she needs a particular shot it wasn’t practical for the cameraperson to get on the day in question. For instance, a story on troop deployment might use stock footage of an aircraft carrier or military aircraft taking off from a runway. In general, news organizations label this clearly so that viewers understand that these are not actual shots of the current deployment.

Hannity’s footage included shots from both November 10 and the September rally. This cannot happen by accident. An editor has to go find footage from two months ago and import it into the current footage on her non-linear editing (NLE) software, then drag and drop and cut and paste clips so that it looks like a seamless, one-day shot. Whether the editor did this on his/her own or whether a producer, or Hannity himself, made the decision to do this is unknown. But someone did.

This wasn’t an “oops” mistake. This was a serious-error-of-judgment mistake. This was the kind of mistake you get when someone caught in overt, criminal behavior says “mistakes were made.”

This was a downright lie.

So, for years, I have been throwing stuffed animals at Lou instead of beer bottles. But now I need throw them no more. Lou no longer haunts my 7 p.m. viewing. He quit his CNN program in a multi-syllabic huff this week. CNN’s venerable, respected chief national political correspondent, John King, will take over in January. I’m sure I won’t have to throw stuffed animals at Mr. King.

But I once considered Lou venerable and respected. He’s a Harvard grad, y’know, a self-touted intellectual giant in matters of finance and economics. That’s why I began watching him years ago. I learned from him things I did not know. But for the past few years, Lou has only taught me the face of intellectual arrogance, bigotry, and unexceptional reporting masquerading as “advocacy.”

Lou, he of the annual salary variously estimated between $5 million and $10 million, has come to fancy himself as a champion of the middle class. Mr. King, as host of CNN’s “State of the Union,” has traveled each week to a different state — 44 so far — to sit down with the middle class in their diner, pubs, and livingrooms. Can you remember — or imagine — Lou doing the same? Aside from his carefully staged, perfectly lit, orchestrated “town hall” meetings at which the middle class had to meet Lou on his turf, not theirs?

When he quit, he lamented the “partisanship and ideology” permeating national politics. He did not or could not view his own brand of divisive opinionating as just another form of partisanship.

CNN, I suspect, is glad to see Lou depart despite 27 years’ of mostly worthy service. CNN’s president, Jonathan Klein, larded the cable network’s own news story with bombastic paeans for Lou:

For decades, Lou fearlessly and tirelessly pursued some of the most important and complex stories of our time, often well ahead of the pack. … With characteristic forthrightness, Lou has now decided to carry the banner of advocacy journalism elsewhere.

So why’d Lou leave? Was it “extremely amicable,” as Mr. Klein said? Or was his ill-reported “advocacy journalism” wearing thin on a network that had begun to position itself as centrist, parked between MSNBC on the left and Fox News Channel on the right? Or, more bluntly, did Lou not pull in sufficient ad revenues to offset his high salary? (And he complained about Wall Street salaries? Sheesh.) By June, Lou’s ratings had shrunk to unacceptable levels. His TV program had been drawing only 650,000 viewers, and only about 180,000 were from that advertiser-favored, 25-to-54 demographic.

Lou has championed the movement opposing illegal immigration. That’s his signature issue following his self-admitted radicalization following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. When he did not appear in any way, shape or form on CNN’s “Latino in America,” it became clear he was a goner at the network.

Lou says he’s leaving because

some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to … engage in constructive problem-solving, as well as to contribute positively to a better understanding of the great issues of our day. And to continue to do so in the most honest and direct language possible.

Right. But how? Some pundits conjecture he’ll seek public office. Senator Lou? Hardly. Can you imagine Lou, who is wealthy and self-righteous, hitting the campaign trail and pressing the flesh of that middle class with whom he rarely mingles? Can you imagine him dialing for dollars — raising the money to run for office? He’d find that demeaning and beneath him. And he’s hardly likely to self-finance.

Lou won’t be entering politics. He does not like being held accountable by any one, whether individual, corporate, or political, for what he says and does. He wants freedom to act without consequence. Nor does he have the temperament to make the deals and compromises all politicians must.

Will he move on to Fox? Doubtful. Would he view his brand of intellectually arrogant elitism an ill fit for the likes of a network that many argue is anything but intellectual? Probably. And he certainly won’t bury himself in a conservative think tank. He’d have to submerge his ego.

Lou likes money. Lou likes fame. Lou likes being the center of a self-created universe. Note that his own website touts him as “Mr. Independent.” He likes that tag.

Perhaps Lou wants to be Rush. Lou has a nationally syndicated radio program, “The Lou Dobbs Show,” launched a year and a half ago by United Stations Radio Networks. It’s carried on 400 stations and reaches about 5 million listeners.

But conservative talker Rush Limbaugh has the top-rated talk show, reaching more than 14 million listeners. Lou is eighth in national radio ratings, behind mostly conservative rabble rousers I’ll bet he considers his intellectual inferiors. Then there’s the money: In 2006, Rush signed an eight-year contract grossing $400 million, about $50 million a year. Don’t forget his $100 million signing bonus.

Do you think Lou might find that kind of money attractive? Sure, but Lou has also seen the attention centered on Rush. By politicians. By presidents. By pundits. By the powerful. By the proletariat.

That’s Rush’s world. Lou wants to shoulder him aside. But his CNN gig was not going to get him there.

Bye, bye, Lou. And thanks: I can now buy a new TV.