“Nothing is more important than saving … the Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels. The humans? The planet does not need humans.”

The word “froggies” fascinates me in the context. (And, of course, the Squirrels.)

I have a dream that the racist bobblehead will claim he is the true heir of Martin Luther King. And that his wingnut fans are the true heirs of the Civil Rights Movement.

I have a dream that the bobblehead will call his rally “Restoring Honor.”

I have a dream that the ghost of George Orwell will rise from its grave, and spin like a top across the Atlantic and land on the mall in Washington D.C. And the spinning-top ghost will smite the damn bobblehead, and he will fall, and his wingnut fans will raise a groan!

I have a DREAM today!

I always knew that he wasn’t the raging leftist he was painted to be. I took a lot of flak from a lot of people during the primaries for not seeing Barack Obama as the progressive savior we’d been waiting for. That the guy I supported turned out to be a personal trainwreck doesn’t change the fact that we found out everything we needed to know about Barack Obama in 2004, when he sat on his hands when the late, great Stephanie Tubbs-Jones needed a Senator to co-sign her objection to certifying the highly suspect Ohio election results, and then selected the odious sellout Joe Lieberman as his mentor.

Oh, I had some hopes about him; not the “hopey-changey” stuff that Sarah Palin likes to mock, but some hope that perhaps he would feel the responsiblity that accompanied the work of the people who got him elected. When he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act, that hope was enhanced somewhat. But by the end of his first year in office, it became clear that Barack Obama was always going to be more concerned with being conciliatory towards those who hated him and would never regard him as a legitimate president than with the concerns of those who got him elected.

But despite my doubts about Barack Obama, even I never dreamed that he’d be so bound and determined to be the guy who presided over the destruction of Social Security.

Credit where it’s due: lambert (Corrente) has been dreaming that exact nightmare about Obama for years now. “Only Nixon could go to China,” as he likes to say.

To tell you the truth, though, I’m still not convinced that Obama actually wants anything, at least not in a political sense. He seems to me an utter blank. He’s a self-propelling election device that exists solely to get itself elected. It continues to amaze me that so many people somehow thought this empty suit was a savior. Even his campaign message was just a recycled leftover from one of Axelrod’s earlier clients.

So what does he want? I don’t know. Perhaps he has obligations to his financial backers. Wall Street bankrolled his campaign, and those vampires have been slavering for a chunk of Social Security for years now. Maybe there was a deal. Who the fuck knows.

I haven’t even been keeping up with the news. Until today, when someone on Facebook mentioned the new Emily’s List anti-Sarah Palin video and ad campaign. I haven’t watched the video yet, but I did read the article in Bloomberg’s, wherein the president of Emily’s List justifies her group’s campaign by saying, “We didn’t want women across the country to think that there’s only one voice for women.”

What?

Okay, Emily’s List? If you don’t want women (or anybody else) to think that there’s only one voice for women, then why are you obsessing over the political opinions of this one woman? In the gender-neutral world we all wish for—a world where women are half the human race and, as Gloria Steinem once said, a mediocre woman can do as well as a mediocre man—obviously women are going to be all over the map with their opinions, politics, and abilities. Just like men are. Yes? And the notion of one woman speaking for all women will be as ludicrous as the notion of one man speaking for all men. Yes? And while we’re not living in a gender-neutral world yet, we are living in a world where women have been active and prominent across the full political spectrum for decades now. Yes? And so your concern that people might think this one woman somehow speaks for all women is rather absurdly misplaced. Yes? And in fact your whole campaign seems to actually undermine the idea that women are simply half the human race and that no one woman speaks for all women. Yes?

*********

UPDATE: Someone just pointed me to Sarah Palin’s Facebook page, where she has a post up today honoring the ratification of the 19th amendment. I have to quote from it, because the reference to the Emily’s List thing actually made me laugh:

On this anniversary of women’s suffrage, let’s take a moment to be grateful for the diversity of the debate. Women don’t walk in lockstep with each other in politics, any more than men do. We should be proud of our ability to engage in a civil discussion and healthy debate. I know I am. Unfortunately, I’ve recently come under attack for speaking up for sisters who seek to serve in public office. The sad part is that the attack comes from other sisters who happen to be on the other side of an issue that has been of great importance to American women from the time of our feminist foremothers, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, down to today. I’m speaking of the issue of life. I feel compelled to offer some advice to our sisters who like to throw stones at those of us who respectfully disagree with them on this issue (and they sometimes refuse to even countenance the fact that some of us can call ourselves feminists and disagree with those who claim the mantle of “real feminists”). First, ladies, it’s hard to take a critic seriously when they lecture you wearing a bear suit. So, it’s difficult for me to drum up much outrage at this latest ad. But, really, lying about a sister while wearing an Ewok outfit is no way to honor our foremothers on the eve of the 90th anniversary of their victory. But, that aside, I’d love to know where you got those get-ups. Halloween is just around the corner, and Piper and Trig would look adorable as little grizzly bears.

1. TIME Magazine puts mutilated Afghan woman on the cover. I’m linking to the Jezebel article about it because Irin Carmon has the most thoughtful take I’ve seen.

2. Shirley Sherrod is going to sue Andrew Breitbart. Professor Hutchinson at Dissenting Justice argues that she would probably have a stronger legal case against the USDA.

3. Phyllis Schlafly still alive, still hates women. What’s really cool is that her hairstyle hasn’t changed since 1978 either.

4. “Tea Partiers Aren’t The Bigoted White Guys You Fear” claims the New York Press. It’s an interesting piece by Spencer Wilking, who apparently spent some time with the Tea Party in New York. It turns out that the Tea Partiers aren’t just deluded Fox-News-brainwashed white males; they’re also deluded Fox-News-brainwashed women, black men, immigrants—everybody! Actually this doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s clear that there is a lot of racism in the Tea Party, but that’s just because there is a lot of racism in rightwing propaganda. Fundamentally, the Tea Party is a creation of the rightwing noise machine: talk radio, Fox News, the whole Rush Limbaugh-Glenn Beck axis of evil. I don’t mean that the Tea Party doesn’t really exist; I mean that Tea Partiers are Tea Partiers because they’ve been listening to this wingnut garbage for years and they think it’s true. They think Democrats are socialists, that Obama is a communist, that we must cut taxes on the rich, and so forth. The Tea Party is what you get when you have an unbridled giant propaganda machine running 24/7 for 30 years.

5. Four out of five women on “The View” appear to be dressed uncomfortably. Yeah, I know that’s not really the lead story, but it’s what caught my attention. President Obama went on the show, yadeyadeyade, but at least he had on pants and comfortable shoes.

6. Last minute addition! Rare zedonk born in Georgia. She’s an adorable little thing:

I clicked over to the ScienceBlogs link to the story, since I thought a scientist might have some interesting points to offer. Alas, the “scientist” turned out to be Jason Goldman, whose post is noteworthy for its repeated references to the zedonk as male. Even as he’s quoting news stories that clearly refer to the animal as female (emphasis added):

I’m not going to create a new category for this creature, because I never expect to blog about these critters again. At least it’s clear that he’s a mammal.

A zedonk, an unusual cross between a donkey and a zebra, is attracting attention at Chestatee Wildlife Preserve in north Georgia after being born there about a week ago.

The animal, which has a zebra father and a donkey mother, has black stripes prominently displayed on her legs and face.

C.W. Wathen, the Dahlonega preserve’s founder and general manager, says the foal has a zebra’s instincts. Wathen says she sits up instead of lying on her side, as if she’s staying alert for predators…

…Donkeys and zebras don’t usually mate, but zedonks turn up occasionally. In 2005, a zebra gave birth to a zedonk in Barbados, according to the news website Science Daily. And in the 1970s, three zedonks were born at a European zoo to a donkey mother, according to the website of Britain’s Colchester Zoo. (via boston.com)

According to Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic:

Now, the zedonk can finally take its place in the menagerie of weird hybrid animals like ligers, wholphins, and camas (camel-llama mixes), all testaments to the power of “love” to transcend all obstacles, even speciation.

I just wonder what they’re gonna name the little guy.

Actually, they named her Pippi Longstocking. Seeing as she’s a girl and all.

So I’m reading this thing, wondering about this clown who is so saturated in the maleness-as-norm viewpoint that four feminine pronouns fail to impinge on his consciousness, and I thinks to myself, “Hang on! Could this possibly be the same guy who did that dude-centric Porn Is Good post Twisty wrote about?”

And whaddya know: same guy.

What’s hilarious is that Goldman describes himself as a “graduate student in Developmental Psychology at the University of Southern California,” with an interest in “the way that the environment interacts with biology in producing innate or skilled behavior, and the evolution of the mind.”

At any rate, my post this morning is occasioned by this piece from Tina Brown in the Daily Beast:

Let’s NOT have a conversation about race. The calls for Obama to now make the Shirley Sherrod debacle a teachable moment fills me with panic that the president will retreat to the Oval Office and craft a soaring piece of oratory, instead of getting on with the humdrum business of firing the stumbling, bumbling members of his own team who, as the saying goes, can’t find their ass with either hand.

Good idea, sez me—but is that really the way they say it over there? “Can’t find their ass with either hand?”

The American expression (or at least the version I grew up with) is “can’t find their ass with both hands tied behind their back.” Which, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is vastly superior.

Here’s the deal: one of the things that’s been annoying the living fuck out of me about the Sherrod business is the wingnut claim that the NAACP people in the video laugh and cheer at racial discriminination. No, they don’t. It’s a weird upside-down kind of world where you can watch a video in which people clearly do not laugh and cheer, and still come away saying ooh look, they laughed and cheered! What the fuck?

So Lord Saletan has done exactly what I was getting ready to do, which is parse the goddamn video (since apparently people can’t be relied on to simply watch the thing; no, we have to provide a blow-by-blow narrative of the action):

Breitbart’s followers have parroted this indictment in messages to numerous media outlets, including National Review and Slate. But is it true? Let’s look at the video. The key section starts around 16 minutes in. I’ll quote the speech and describe the reactions from the audience, to the extent I can discern them. You can check my version by listening to the audio as you follow along. Here’s Sherrod:

When I made that commitment, I was making that commitment to black people, and to black people only. [Pause. Silence.] But, you know, God will show you things, and He’ll put things in your path so that—that you realize that the struggle [Audience: Alright] is really about poor people. [Audience: Alright, alright.]

Racial appeal met with silence; non-racial appeal met with approval. Sherrod’s next words:

You know, the first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he—he took a long time talking, but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. [Audience: Alright. Murmurs.] I know what he was doing. [Audience: Alright.] But he had come to me for help. [Audience: Amen.] What he didn’t know, while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him. [Laughter.]

The audience seems sympathetic to Sherrod’s resentment of the farmer’s arrogance, as she perceived it. How should we interpret the laughter? Is it laughter at her power to withhold help from a white man? Or is it laughter at her power to withhold help from a guy with an attitude? The evidence so far suggests the latter: The audience has embraced an appeal for “poor people,” shunned an appeal for “black people only,” and given Sherrod her only Amen when she noted that despite the farmer’s attitude, “he had come to me for help.” But let’s keep listening.

I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. [Audience: Mm-hm.] So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. [Sherrod smiles and pauses. There's a single staccato noise somewhere in the room. No words, no laughter.] I did enough so that when he—I assumed the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me, either that or the Georgia Department of Agriculture. And he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him. [Pause. Silence.]

This time, Sherrod has mentioned only the farmer’s race, not his attitude. She delivers the crucial line—”So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do”—with a smile and a wry tone that invites any racist to laugh or blurt out approval. But she gets nothing. I had to listen to this clip more than a dozen times before I realized that the “applause” Breitbart describes could only be the staccato noise. To interpret this as applause, you would have to believe that a single person, representing an otherwise silent audience, suddenly decided to change the congregation’s language of affirmation from call-and-response to clapping—and just as suddenly, after a single stroke, decided to stop.

As Sherrod renounces her old attitude, the audience comes alive:

Well, working with him made me see [Audience: Mm-hm] that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t [Audience: That's right, that's right], you know. And they could be black, and they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people—those who don’t have access [Audience: Mm-hm] the way others have [Audience: Mm-hm].

So, let’s review the Breitbart gang’s allegations:

When … she expresses a discriminatory attitude towards white people, the audience responds with applause. False.
The NAACP … is cheering on a person describing a white person as the other. False.
The NAACP audience seemed to have approved of her actions when she talked about not helping the white farmer. False.
They weren’t cheering redemption; they were cheering discrimination. False.
As Ms. Sherrod recounted the first part of her parable, how she declined to do everything she could for the farmer because of his race, the audience responded in approval. False.

First Breitbart and his acolytes falsely accused Sherrod of discriminating against whites as a federal employee, despite having no evidence for this charge in the original video excerpt. Strike one.

Then they misrepresented Sherrod’s story as an embrace of racism, when in fact she was repudiating racism. They later pleaded ignorance of this fact because they didn’t have the full video. Strike two.

Now, with the full video in hand and posted on their Web site, they’re lying about the reaction of the NAACP audience.

I’ll add one other thing, which I daresay is outside Lord Saletan’s experience. The part where the NAACP audience laughs? What they’re laughing at is the kind of anecdote all black people and all feminists know very well: the sexist/racist white guy who needs your help but can’t resist trying to show how much better he is than you. I personally think the NAACP audience is laughing in recognition of the situation and Sherrod’s very human response (”how much do I want to help this schmuck?”).

Not that I suppose any of this really matters. Andrew Breitbart is a white supremacist hoaxer, and he’s going to keep right on with his lying bullshit.

*************

Update: You know what else Andrew Breitbart is? Not anonymous. Yeah. He’s totally, completely, not anonymous. Everybody knows his name. His whole media empire is named after himself. So why in the fuck did CNN use the Sherrod hoax as an excuse to complain about “anonymous bloggers” who do terrible things like this?

Both well-written, both offering cogent summaries of key aspects of the case.

Amy Davidson’s Two Minutes in Georgia, from the New Yorker blog, is superb:

The most obvious aspect of the Shirley Sherrod affair is its shabbiness. How many minutes do you spare before deciding to destroy someone’s life? It would be nice if the answer to that question were a number greater than two. In March, Sherrod, the director of rural development for the Department of Agriculture in Georgia, gave a speech at a local N.A.A.C.P. Dinner. It was about forty-three minutes long. A few days ago, Andrew Breitbart posted and publicized a clip from the speech. (Who is Andrew Breitbart? See Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker Profile for more on that.) The clip was two minutes—long enough for N.A.A.C.P. officials to condemn her, and for frightened Department of Agriculture officials to call Sherrod on her cell phone and demand that she resign. She says that the final call came when she was driving, and that she was told to pull over and end her career before she even got where she was going.

It’s the pull-over-and-resign-now incident that really gets me. If you’ve ever been wrongfully accused of something, you know that what’s worse than the initial accusation is when people who ought to know better—or who should at least be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt—believe it.

As for the false accusations against Sherrod and the breathtaking dishonesty of Andrew Breitbart, Davidson’s summary is elegant:

It’s not just a matter of quotes being taken out of context (although there is that). The two-minute clip Breitbart ran is introduced with this text: “Ms Sherrod admits that in her federally appointed position, overseeing a billion dollars… She discriminates against people due to their race.” And here’s Breitbart’s description of the action:

This federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions.

No, she doesn’t. She tells the story of how, twenty-three years ago, she initially assumed that a white farmer, with the law on his side, unlike a black farmer, didn’t need much help beyond being put in the hands of a white lawyer; when she realized that he did, she sprang into action, and saved his farm. She says that God put the farmer in her path to show her what her full mission was: helping poor rural people of all races. (This was during the farm-foreclosure crisis of the eighties.) She was not an “executive bureaucrat” then, and the whole thing had nothing to do with “federal duties” or “a billion dollars.” And anyone who saw even a couple of minutes more of the video would know it. Surely, whoever put the clip together did.

Breitbart, of course, is a toad; whether he’s a mentally deranged toad, as Andrew Sullivan suggests, is unclear (though I daresay Sully would know about that sort of thing).

But it’s the reaction of the Obama administration that is so disheartening. Archie Bland explains why, in The Obama administration’s most unlikeable moment yet:

Now, one obvious fact to emerge from this is that the conservative blogosphere, and its allies in the media, are not especially careful about who they hurt in pursuit of a political scalp that will hurt the Obama administration. But that’s so obvious as to be barely worth noting. No one will be especially surprised to learn that Bill O’Reilly issued a swift call for Sherrod’s resignation, or that Breitbart’s most salient comment after the full facts emerged was that he “could care less about Shirley Sherrod.” Indeed, as this Washington Post story makes clear, Fox News was far from the biggest villain of the piece.

What’s much more striking and worrying is the way the Democratic administration and its allies acted. Sherrod was called three times in the same day by Agriculture Department officials urging her to resign; she was told that she had to quit immediately because the row was “going to be on Glenn Beck tonight”. Nor did the NAACP try to contact Sherrod before issuing a ruthless condemnation designed to put as much distance between the organisation and the story as possible. The reason for all this, of course, is that establishment liberals in America are utterly terrified of the brutality of the right-wing media, and will do whatever necessary to cut off those attacks before they happen – including throwing one of their own under the bus.

What a distressing lesson in the realities of public discourse in America. There’s been plenty of evidence before that the Obama administration is ruthless to the point of being callous when stories of this sort arise, that they’re petrified at the slightest whiff of a story about black-on-white racism, but this is just a different league of awful. I have never liked the president less.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Cecile Richards’ Statement on Abortion Ban in New High-Risk Insurance Pools

“Based on the Obama administration’s statement, we are deeply disappointed that the administration has voluntarily and unnecessarily decided to impose limits on private funds used to purchase health insurance coverage for abortion care in the new high-risk insurance pools…

“The very women who need to purchase private health insurance in the new high-risk pools are likely to be more vulnerable to medically complicated pregnancies. It is truly harmful to these women that the administration may impose limits on how they use their own private dollars, limiting their health care options at a time when they need them most. This decision has no basis in the law and flies in the face of the intent of the high-risk pools that were meant to meet the medical needs of some of the most vulnerable women in this country.”

….of the way we were.

Bless her heart, Cecile is upset. No wonder. After what she did to get Obama elected! Handing over the Planned Parenthood mailing list, even allowing an email campaign to spread what she knew were falsehoods—but it was worth it to elect Obama. Wasn’t it, Cecile?

God, I’m so sick of these clowns. All of these clowns.

I just spent a few minutes getting up to speed on the latest from the TriboList archives, and I wish I hadn’t. Not because there’s anything so bad there; it’s just people shooting the shit. What’s depressing is the delusional view from inside the pro-Obama tribe.

Witness this bit from Kevin Drum during the discussion on how to deal with the Jeremiah Wright business:

Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly, also disagreed with Ackerman’s strategy. “I think it’s worth keeping in mind that Obama is trying (or says he’s trying) to run a campaign that avoids precisely the kind of thing Spencer is talking about, and turning this into a gutter brawl would probably hurt the Obama brand pretty strongly. After all, why vote for him if it turns out he’s not going change the way politics works?”

Notice the caveat: “or says he’s trying.” Anybody who was really paying attention to the Obama campaign knew perfectly well that it was every bit as muddy an operation as you’ll find anywhere in politics. Obama would go out and give a speech about how “there’s no place for that kind of thing” while his operatives would furiously push every smear against Hillary they could scrounge up. They did it again with Palin. Rather than just opposing Palin and McCain on policy (and god knows there was enough there for that), they orchestrated a huge character-assassinating sexist mudfest, including the above-referenced Planned Parenthood email campaign.

Now here’s the funny thing: all these people who carried on like this did it in the belief that somehow it would be worth it. That somehow, Obama would be different. Think about that. Nothing about him or his campaign was in any way, shape, or form different from politics as usual. Nothing about the pro-Obama tribalism and uncritical reportage was in any way, shape, or form different from punditry as usual. So how did these people fool themselves into thinking this swamp of muck was somehow going to sprout kittens and rainbows?

Meanwhile, we have the example of Breitbart to show us how profoundly and hatefully dishonest the rightwing media is. That’s nothing new, of course. Years ago I remember being amazed when NewsMax edited a Hillary Clinton speech to make it look like she was endorsing Soviet-style communism. The Sherrod video is more of the same.

The left isn’t nearly that far gone yet, but if you lived through 2008 on the Hillary team, you know what I’m going to say next. Let’s see, who was it who doctored that video in Indiana to make it look like a Clinton adviser used the N-word? Who was it who spread the story that Hillary had called for Obama’s death? And jesus, I’m not even going to get into the Palin stuff.

People will say, oh you can’t compare the two, but here’s the thing: it’s all mud. It’s all fucking mud and mire. Our whole political discourse. Just mud and tribalism and hatefulness and secret lists and inside-the-beltway fart-breathing and meanwhile, millions are out of work and lives are being broken. Ain’t no kittens and rainbows gonna come out of this mess.