"Oscars 2002: Somebody Make It Stop!" - All Salon

By Cintra Wilson

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Cintra Wilson’s report on Oscar 2002 was simply lovely. How the hell did she manage to get by the Bland-o-Matic censors? I’m not saying you guys at Salon are exactly dull — I do subscribe, after all — but I wasn’t expecting such in-your-face fun in an Oscar report. Wilson is a gem, a goddess, a prophet. And she is so, so right to warn us all of the perils of the Tom Cruise menace. I just worry that his minions will discover her existence and attempt to squash her in an “M.I.”-like SWAT team apocalypse.

– Carl Skutsch

When I read the N.Y. Times coverage of the Oscars this morning, I thought that last night had just been a bad dream and that I hadn’t actually spent four and a half hours in agony. So I immediately went to Salon, thinking “they must have seen what I saw.” God bless Cintra Wilson for having the raw fire and courage to tell it like it was. She has single-handedly restored my faith in humankind. Next year I’ll skip the program, and read her coverage instead. Pay her twice!

– Amy Scheibe

Someone should let Cintra Wilson know that they do have medication now that might provide her with considerable relief.

– Cindy McMullin

I just wanted to say that Cintra Wilson’s article on the Oscars was the most hilarious thing I’ve read in ages! Now there’s a talented writer! I thought it was a great night for the Oscars, in no small part because I’m an African-American woman. Nevertheless, whenever we win one of those coveted statues, there’s always that feeling of, “Hmmm, is this a ‘make-up’ award?” Cintra hit the nail on the head with many of her astute and scathingly funny observations — not only about giving awards to the black folks and people like Randy Newman when they are long overdue — particularly in the wake of Sept. 11 — but also about Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts and Ron Howard. So so funny!

By the way, I thought Whoopie was funny! She was obviously under restraining orders, though, in light of the spectacle she made of herself few years back.

Great job to Salon.com and Cintra, keep it up.

– Karlene J. Rogers, Esq.

Regarding Cintra Wilson’s crack about the supporting actress award always going to “the new babe,” Jennifer Connelly’s been acting since she was 11, in “Once Upon a Time in America,” and if you believe the Internet Movie Database, is 31 years old. A quick check of IMDB also reveals that she’s done almost two dozen films, including “Waking the Dead” and “Requiem for a Dream.”

Wilson seems almost as hysterical as Halle Berry, and less in command of her facts.

– Don Chartier

I want to congratulate Salon and Cintra on your coverage of the 2002 Oscars. It summed up what I felt the entire time I was watching. From Whoopi Goldberg’s stupendously unfunny “honey chile” routine (has she ever been funny? Please make her go away), to Halle Berry’s total meltdown/freakout. (Honey chile, it’s just an award, not justification for your existence.) That weird and ugly scene for me summed up why the Oscars blow: We’re supposed to care as much as she does about getting that award. Well, I don’t. It just matters less and less to me what these overpaid, self-important hucksters do. There are so few artists who show up to that gilt debacle, and the few who do are rarely nominated, and even more rarely do they win (tell me why Denzel didn’t win for “Malcom X”). I stopped watching the Grammys about three years ago when I just couldn’t take the crass commercialism and throwaway, faceless boy/girl bands anymore. It’s the same with these crappy movies. (“A Beautiful Mind”?! Puh-lease.) The Oscars are next on my hit list. Bah.

– Sean Driscoll

I just read a piece written by Cintra Wilson about the Oscars that made me cringe much harder than I did when Halle Berry fell apart onstage at the Oscars. Her writing reminds me of my attempts at high school Op-Eds when I mistook ignorant rebelliousness for contrarianism. Oscars weren’t thrown at Denzel and Halle, they were won by them, and deservedly, as they are both fine actors. I am so tired of the fix-is-in cynicism that pervades awards shows — if you don’t like the sappy self-congratulation, don’t watch.

– Emma Margraf

Cintra Wilson’s Oscar article is the funniest, truest piece of writing I’ve had the extreme pleasure of consuming since “Moby Dick.” This is not hyperbole. Her vivisection of Hollywood hubris and hucksterism is a painful delight — it almost makes me content with my position among the lumpen masses, where I don’t have to publicly and obscenely justify my fatuous existence every year. If Tom Cruise is übermensch, I’m the üntermensch, and that’s fine with me.

– Todd Robinson

Cintra Wilson’s takedown of this year’s Oscar snooze-fest was fucking brilliant. If she wants to be Owen Wilson, then I want to be her. Salon should only have more writers like her on staff and fewer arteriosclerotic poseurs like David Horowitz.

– J.C. Costa

Your Oscars coverage was the best thing Salon has ever printed. Although there’s no chance that Cintra Wilson doesn’t already know that, please tell her.

– Rachel DeWoskin

Thank you, Cintra Wilson, for showing us all the flexible and variable nature of the word “fuck” and for demonstrating convincingly that any journalist who hasn’t the wit and intellect to come up with less sophomoric ways of expressing herself really has absolutely nothing intelligent or relevant to say. Larry Flynt has more brains — and class.

When are people like Wilson going to figure out that being obsessed with hating Hollywood is just a lower, more soul-sucking form of being obsessed with Hollywood? Like it or not, America has always loved its celebrities, and its kitsch as well — more and more since 9/11. Hollywood is just feeding the monkey. If you’re so much higher and holier than Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts and the Oscars in general, spare us your envy and do what most intelligent people do when they don’t like something: Ignore it. Otherwise, you just look like — to borrow from Ms. Wilson’s charmingly erudite vocabulary — a fuckin’ loser.

– Ed Tarkington

Cintra Wilson’s essay was so on-target and downright funny that I laughed myself silly reading it. It’s as if she was channeling my own thoughts about the ridiculousness of Hollywood. I grew up watching Oscar telecasts and have only recently begun to see them with the same vision as expressed so beautifully by Ms. Wilson (and I’m almost 40! How sad). But what a hoot to read my exact thoughts so succinctly and uproariously expressed here at Salon.com.

Every self-obsessed, silly celebrity should read this essay and go straight to their checkbook to write a big ol’ check to charities that support underprivileged children instead of sifting through their $20,000 goodie baskets.

Thanks for the chuckles.

– Cindy Murphy

Once more, an overly smug writer (?) feels the need to prove their high I.Q. to the rest of us. Clueless Cintra: The Oscars are not highbrow; they’re fun to watch anyway. Only a pretentious snob would rain on the parade.

As for all the ranting about “negroes,” she proves once again that most non-African-Americans (and a few conservative African-Americans) just don’t get it. It is a source of pride to a huge, influential part of our population to receive recognition by everyone. These are people who don’t feel a sense of entitlement — even after consistent, overwhelming performances. So two African-Americans win a couple of Oscars. It’s about damn time.

Cintra’s racism is of a particularly ugly type. I bet she voted for Ralph Nader.

Cintra, lighten up. Cintra, get a life.

– Sylvia Silliman

Would someone please give Cintra Wilson a gaudy-ass statue for this simply scathing and utterly truthful article? Oh the joy I derived out of reading those words. It was totally priceless, right on-target and so fucking funny, I literally cried from laughing so hard. You go girl!!

– Sandy Green

And to think, I gave up “Bride of Chucky” to watch the Oscars.

– Sherry Bruce

Are you out of your mind? “America squirmed” during Halle Berry’s acceptance speech? What America shared at that moment, which your writer may not be aware of, is called “emotion.” Halle’s acceptance speech was one of the few heartfelt moments of true human spirit and emotion during an otherwise overlong show. I for one thought she was great, as did just about everyone else who watched, at least according to every newspaper article I’ve read, radio show I have listened to, TV program I watched and every single person I have talked to about it since Sunday evening.

Maybe the writer squirmed, but she was all by herself.

– Tom Ortenberg

Cintra Wilson’s piece on the Oscars was mind-bendingly funny and painfully accurate. Thank you for reaffirming my faith in the human condition (not to mention intelligent and objective entertainment reportage) and reassuring me that I am not alone in my growing disaffection with the bloated excesses of our beloved Hollywood superstars.

– Michael Idato, the Sydney Morning Herald

Cintra does not get it. And when I think about it, it probably isn’t necessary that she does except that her words get published and read by other people, and because of that, it is always possible for her to influence someone else.

Halle Berry’s speech made no sense to you, Cintra, because you are either not of color, or you are under 40, or both. Did you not hear Sidney Poitier speak? Anyone that grew up in the ’60s knows and understands what true racism and bigotry are, and if they no longer admit how ingrained racism is in our society, they choose to do so because they know and witnessed the truth. Racism is so prevalent and accepted that African-Americans were very happy that three awards were presented to African-Americans last night because that has never happened before. Forget your “we are the world” idea that it all shouldn’t matter. Yes, you are right, it shouldn’t but it does, very much so.

– A. Grayson

I loved Cintra Wilson’s Oscar 2002 review! It nailed exactly those dark little thoughts in the corner of my mind — that the Academy was making this Black Appreciation Night. Granted, I haven’t seen “Monster’s Ball” so I can’t comment on Berry’s Oscar, but Denzel’s performance in “Training Day” didn’t come across as being the best of the year. He was good, but was he that good?

Kudos also for bitching about “A Beautiful Mind” and Ron Howard. It’s like he’s the poster boy of What Hollywood Accepts, which happens to be safe fare. Ugh.

– Joseph Prisco

Cintra Wilson’s Oscar diatribe could be dismissed as merely adolescent if it weren’t so fucking racist.

Fine, she hates Tom Cruise. Fine, she thinks celebrities are ludicrous. (Not that this keeps her from writing about them again and again, but anyway.)

However, she then makes the injurious assumption that several thousand Academy members collectively voted for Denzel Washington and Halle Berry, honored Sidney Poitier and applauded Whoopi Goldberg just to appease the darkies.

In one fell swoop — and more sickeningly under the guise of egalitarianism and searching for meaning in a post-Sept. 11 world — she fells the accomplishment of four enormously talented artists and entertainers who earned much deserved praise for their work.

The KKK couldn’t have done it better.

– Litsa Dremousis

Just read Cintra Wilson’s reduction of the Academy Awards telecast and thought, Whoa, there goes my need for melted cheese on my vegetables, chocolate layer cake with chocolate fudge frosting, having my toes sucked by Keanu Reeves or any number of other, now-superfluous excessive indulgences. In her deconstruction of the Academy Awards, Cintra has ladled a fabulously rich, thick and salty chicken-fat gravy of comeuppance over the piping hot biscuits of celebrity excess baked in the Kodak Theater last night, and, while I felt horribly guilty eating it, I did clean my plate.

– Julia C. Smith

A note from the author:

I wouldn’t have said what I said about Ryan O’Neal if I had known he had leukemia. It’s only funny if he was merely fat. Apologies.

– Cintra Wilson

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What a GOP cave looks like

The House’s top Republicans desperately want to retreat on the payroll tax – if the Tea Party lets them

By Steve Kornacki

House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio listens at left as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Va., talks about jobs and the latest government report on unemployment, Friday, Feb. 3, 2012, during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) (Credit: AP)

Topics:Opening Shot

Since the 112th Congress was seated more than a year ago, the Republican House Conference has served as a generally reliable reflection of the Tea Party movement’s passions and priorities. A significant chunk of its members — mainly freshmen, but also some veterans — are explicitly aligned with the movement, while those who aren’t know better than to break too loudly or too publicly with it, lest they fall victim to a primary challenge.

This is why Speaker John Boehner, a Capitol Hill lifer whose political biography invites automatic Tea Party suspicion, has been repeatedly forced to subordinate his best judgment to the zeal of purity-obsessed rank-and-filers. And it’s why Boehner’s surprise decision yesterday to support a payroll tax cut extension even if it’s not paid for represents a real gamble — one that seems grounded in a reasonable calculation but that still has the potential to create another serious political mess for him and his party.

The political logic of his move is obvious: If an extension isn’t implemented by the end of the month, tens of millions of middle class Americans will face an election year tax increase — one for which congressional Republicans, who’ve seen their poll numbers drop lower and lower with each showdown they’ve forced with President Obama, will likely take the blame. Given the relatively low cost of an extension, it hardly seems worth risking further damage to the GOP brand, especially since the party’s hold on the House is somewhat tenuous.

But as the past 13 months have demonstrated, this sort of political logic doesn’t tend to hold sway with the Tea Party crowd, which has convinced itself that rigid, compromise-averse devotion to ideological purity is the key to a sustained GOP revival. It helps that many of the true believers in the House come from safely Republican districts where there’s little or no threat of a general election backlash. So the risk for Boehner is that Tea Party Republicans in the House — and influential Tea Party leaders outside the House — will deem his payroll tax move a sellout, since it would add to the deficit.

And by last night, there were some ominous signs for the Speaker. As Politico reported:

The announcement shocked rank-and-file members, who were back in their House districts. Senate Republicans were likewise caught off guard — even one GOP leader who was trying to negotiate a compromise had no idea it was coming.

And conservative ire rose throughout the day, threatening to derail Speaker John Boehner’s plan to take the thorny issue off the table.

[SNIP]

More than a half-dozen House Republicans, reached directly by POLITICO, declined to comment on the record about the decision, saying they wanted to hear the case from their leadership when they return Tuesday. GOP leadership said the decision to move forward with this plan depends on reaction from the rank and file.

The good news for Boehner is that he didn’t make his announcement alone. Cantor, the ambitious majority leader, has a poisonous relationship with Boehner and is far more trusted by the Tea Party crowd, so it seems significant that he was willing to team up with him here. It could dissuade other conservatives from picking a fight, and it could also be a sign that the leadership has done its homework and determined that there’s no real threat of another Tea Party uprising.

If the House GOP does go along with Boehner and Cantor, it would suggest that the December payroll tax battle really did rattle rank-and-file members, even those who spent 2011 demanding absolute purity — that they are now more conscious of and responsive to the potential national impact of hard-line posturing. It would also suggest that Obama’s improving political fortunes are having an effect. The question is whether this would have any broader implications. House Democrats are apparently hoping to roll a GOP payroll tax cave into other previously unimaginable concessions on extended unemployment benefits and a Medicare doc-fix. If they’re able to do that, then what else that was impossible in 2011 might be possible in 2012?

If Boehner and Cantor prevail, it might also deflate (at least a little) one of the GOP’s favorite anti-Obama talking points. After all, Republicans across the country spent most of yesterday decrying Obama’s proposed budget for failing to tackle the deficit more aggressively. And yet, if they now sign off on the Boehner/Cantor plan, they’ll be voting to increase the deficit. What’s more, as Jonathan Bernstein pointed out, they’ll be doing so even though Democrats were willing to offset the expense by raising more revenue from the wealthy:

In other words, when push comes to shove, they’d much rather increase the federal budget deficit than to raise even a dime of taxes on wealthy Americans.

Look for Obama to point that out once or twice this year when Republicans attack him on the deficit.

: Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki More Steve Kornacki

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Occupy fights the law: Will the law win?

From Boise to Nashvile, the movement faces an unconstitutional legal siege

By Arun Gupta and Michelle Fawcett

Occupy Boise is under legal and meteorological siege. (Credit: AP/John Miller)

Topics:Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Boise, National Lawyers Guild, Editor's Picks

The Occupy movement is an exercise in the workings of power whether it is social, financial, policing or political. The occupations that began in September spread with an infectious passion. By October hundreds of encampments had popped up nationwide with the tacit cooperation and sometimes explicit approval of local officials. For a few heady weeks Occupy Wall Street had the glow of popular legitimacy – social power – trumping whatever fusty laws prohibited camping or a continuous presence in a public space.

The inevitable counteroffensive was launched in November. Using the mass media, politicians hyped the movements as imminent threats to public health and safety, justifying aggressive evictions of prominent occupations in Oakland, Calif., Portland, Ore., and New York City. The police violence and mass arrests, the tried-and-true methods of state power employed to suppress radical movements, backfired and the movement grew more. Within weeks other major encampments in Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston and New Orleans were scattered with hundreds of arrests. A third wave of closures has been underway since late January with occupations shut down from Hawaii to Miami and Austin, Texas, to Buffalo, N.Y.

Nonetheless, some encampments survive. In Houston a small contingent is legally maintaining a presence in downtown Tranquility Park, though a ban on tents and tarps has kept all but the hardy or desperate away. In Tampa Bay, after months of police harassment, occupiers found a safe haven in a privately owned public space donated by a wealthy supporter.

Now, a new strategy is being deployed to yank the rug from under occupations in four cities: legal power. Politicians have recently passed laws in Honolulu and Charlotte, N.C., that with a stroke of the pen made the occupations illegal, enabling police to sweep them away. Two more occupations, in Boise, Idaho, and Nashville, may be nearing the end as their respective state legislatures are on the verge of outlawing the democratic villages that for months have been thriving next to edifices of power. Critics charge that the anti-Occupy laws reveal how the law is not an objective code that treats everyone equally, but an arbitrary weapon wielded by the powerful.

In a separate case, the Hamilton County Commission in Tennessee gets the award for the most innovative and dicey use of the law. After passing a law on Jan. 4 that bans various activities that Occupy Chattanooga is engaged in, the commission filed suit in federal court against nine alleged occupiers, asking for a determination that the law is constitutional as well as payment for legal fees. Lawyers for the group have filed a motion to dismiss, and the suit does appear to be on shaky legal ground because “the county is trying to impose a monetary penalty on a group of innocent people for their political activity.”

Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, a progressive bar association founded in 1937, says, “Clearly the law is used politically. Occupy has shed a spotlight on that fact. Laws are enacted arbitrarily and interpreted as to how the status quo wants to interpret them.” She points to how camping in public space – the main rationale for shutting down occupations – is routinely allowed and even assisted by police when thousands of consumers camp overnight for Black Friday sales, the latest iPhone model or concert tickets.

On Dec. 9, the city of Honolulu approved a sweeping anti-homeless ordinance that the local ACLU testified against as being “a particularly egregious attack on the homeless.” The new law was used to arrest Occupy Honolulu members in late December and to clear out their encampment in early February, though organizers report that they are still camping in a park overnight and putting away their tents every morning.

In Charlotte, as a welcoming gift for this year’s Democratic National Convention, the City Council passed an ordinance on Jan. 24 banning camping on city property, prohibiting items such as glass bottles, sparklers, police scanners, scarves, backpacks, duffel bags and coolers within the boundaries of an “extraordinary event,” and criminalizing the use as a “projectile” of “animal parts or fluids, manure, urine, feces or other organic waste by-products.” Less than a week after the anti-camping ordinance passed, police busted up the Occupy Charlotte encampment on the Old City Hall grounds. (No word if the police have nabbed any feces flingers yet.)

As for Boise and Nashville, both the Idaho and Tennessee legislatures are set to enact their anti-Occupy bills by wide margins, but occupiers are hoping they can convince a court to block or overturn the laws because they are arbitrary. In Idaho’s case the punishment for camping only amounts to an infraction, a non-arrestable offense, while in Tennessee those in violation could be jailed for up to 364 days and fined $2,500.

Boghosian says these laws will likely be challenged in court as unconstitutional. “It’s one thing to say people can’t sleep in the parks after midnight, but it’s another to create that law after they have already camped for an extended period of time. That is a political act … In several jurisdictions we have seen laws created targeting specific people who have a political message. As well, existing laws are frequently being enforced arbitrarily based on the political content of the message and that violates the First Amendment.”

There is another troubling legal trend impacting the Occupy movement, according to Boghosian. She says that since protesters nonviolently shut down the 1999 World Trade Organization ministerial in Seattle, the National Lawyers Guild has observed how police work with municipalities to create ordinances in advance of “national special security events” such as the Charlotte law. Boghosian says the “event-specific ordinances are often found to be unconstitutional. They ask for prohibitive insurance. They ask for restrictive permits. They tie protesters up in court and this distracts them from the message. It becomes another way the government chills free speech.”

In Chicago, where occupiers deride mayor and former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel as “Mayor 1%,” the city has enacted its own questionable event-specific ordinance for the planned NATO and G-8 summits this May. Chicago activists call it the “sit down and shut up” law because of the onerous restrictions it places on freedom of speech and public assembly. Boghosian says this is another arbitrary use of the law as it is designed to go after political messages of specific groups.

The battle of Boise

Occupy Boise strategically choose to plunk down on the grounds of the old Ada County Courthouse next to the Idaho Capitol, says Bryan Walker, a 47-year-old practicing attorney active with the group. “We selected the site because there was no statute on the books prohibiting Occupy Boise from camping there.” Walker says the occupiers informed Idaho’s Department of Administration they were going to use the courthouse grounds, and presented “operational plans” but did not ask permission. “The state acknowledged they did not have legal authority to prevent us from occupying the spot,” he added.

The camp was set up on Nov. 5, and when I visited weeks later the organization was impressive and the lack of police surprising. It included tents serving as a kitchen, dining area, a free clothing store, arts and crafts, childcare, medical care, psychological and spiritual counseling and even a workers center.

One factor in Occupy Boise’s careful planning, explains Walker, is the presence of older members such as himself and his wife, Cyndi Tiferet. “We tend to have more patience,” he says. “There are a myriad of tools at our disposal, and we’ve been waiting for a movement like this for a long time, so we are ready to do it for the long haul.” Occupy Boise has been careful to stay within the legal boundaries and has had only a handful of problems with substance abuse or violence that have marred other occupations. When I spoke to Tiferet on the courthouse grounds, she said their legal status kept relations cordial with the police who were maintaining a low-key presence.

As evidence for Occupy Boise’s neighborly presence, Walker pointed me to a letter from Boise Chief of Police Michael Masterson, dated Jan. 31, commending the occupiers for conducting “themselves in a civically responsible (law abiding) and peaceful manner. We have found our ongoing dialogue to be helpful, constructive and respectful.”

He wasn’t just delivering warm tidings, however. Masterson wrote that because “the State of Idaho may very soon enact legislation that prohibits camping on state property … we anticipate that it may ultimately impact our future relationship.” What he wanted was for the occupiers to clean up the site and skedaddle “prior to any enforcement action.”

Masterson was referring to a bill introduced at the beginning of the 2012 Idaho legislative session with the sole purpose of banning camping on state property. The bill’s legislative intent is “to regulate the use of the grounds of the Capitol Mall and other state-owned and leased grounds and facilities in order to prevent the unauthorized use of these grounds and facilities as a temporary or permanent place for camping, lodging or living accommodations.”

The superfluous nature of the bill is not lost on observers. It’s a case, as the Idaho Statesman puts it, of “trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. … As a response to Occupy Boise, this bill makes its sponsors look like they are out to quash public protest.”

Because the bill singles out one group, it may backfire. Walker asserts, “The legislation is weak on due process grounds. The intention is to put an end to our vigil, which is protected freedom of speech. It is an abridgement of our first amendment rights.” The bill is designated as an emergency, meaning it will go into effect once it is signed into law instead of the state’s normal process of enacting new laws on July 1.

Ironically, the bill has been a boon to Occupy Boise. Walker says, “If this legislation had not cropped up we may have ended the camp already. But it gave us precisely what we wanted, the political expression.” Rather than diverting their energy, says Walker, “It’s been a huge favor because the media attention has been incredible. It has given us the bully pulpit … The letters to the editor and comments on articles about the proposed legislation have shifted markedly in our favor. It’s gone from people griping about damage to the grass to saying you need to listen to these people.”

Occupy Boise has mobilized up to 60 people to attend various legislative committee hearings on the bill, which Walker says has been an empowering experience. “I had never testified before the legislature and here I am doing it. People from the camp are showing up and testifying in House and Senate Committee hearings. People who are homeless or who have come out of prison with no training or resources are coming into the Capitol, standing before their senator or sepresentative and having their say.”

Even though the anti-camping bill passed the Idaho House by a 53 to 16 margin (and is now before the state Senate), the occupiers’ regular and, by all accounts, respectful presence in the legislature won them the support of the entire Democratic caucus plus three Republicans. Not all legislators see it that way. The House speaker has ordered the building to be locked down, which is designed to be open to the public. The body has been prohibiting signs and placards in the chambers, and on one occasion asked a dozen occupiers to remove American flags pinned to their clothing.

Walker says, “In more than 120 years in the state of Idaho the Legislature has never felt a need to do that before. Plus the high level of security they are pouring into the statehouse has provoked comments to the legislators like, ‘What are you afraid of? They are doing exactly what you want them to do.’”

As for next steps, if the bill passes as an emergency measure then Occupy Boise will almost certainly fight it in court. Walker says, “If we don’t have to decamp until July, then it’s up to the general assembly to decide if we should stay or not. My opinion is we need to go with what’s effective and focus on our goals.”

Safety in Nashville

Occupiers in Nashville have traveled a similar, if bumpier, road. On Oct. 7 they descended on the Legislative Plaza within sight of the state Capitol, Supreme Court and Legislature. Michael Custer, a 46-year-old line cook, musician and father of four, calls it “the place to address the state of Tennessee,” adding that “it’s always been used for that.”

Gov. Bill Haslam’s administration wasn’t too happy about that. So it secretly drafted a nighttime curfew on the plaza, and hours after unveiling it on Oct. 27 began hauling away members of Occupy Nashville and their gear. The problem was, in trying to criminalize Occupy Nashville Haslam was acting illegally. The state arrested more occupiers the following night, but night court Judge Tom Nelson refused both times to keep the protesters jailed because “I can find no authority anywhere for anyone to authorize a curfew anywhere on Legislative Plaza.”

Days later Federal District Court Judge Aleta Trauger issued a temporary restraining order on the new policy and observed, “I can’t think of any more quintessential public forum than the Legislative Plaza.” Trauger added that the state was at fault for exercising “clear prior restraint of free speech,” and two weeks later issued a preliminary injunction on the policy.

Notching a victory against governmental abuse of power was a shot in the arm for the Nashville group. But the preliminary injunction noted the state could still enact new laws regarding the use of the public area, while Occupy Nashville and others could likewise challenge those rules.

According to Michael Custer, the occupation has stabilized at a few dozen regulars while the state has pursued an underhanded strategy to chip away at its support while preparing to legislate it away. As in Boise, police have been largely absent from the Legislative Plaza, but in Nashville’s case that’s a problem.

Custer explains that “unsavory vagrants” are the issue. “We have a pretty small group and, well, we’re easily intimidated. So we had to call the city police many times to get violent people removed from the camp.” Calling the police was a difficult decision for occupiers, says Custer. “We do band together and try to chase off the violent people. We will call the police when violence is happening on the plaza, and it hurts to do it, but we’re not going to let the violence happen.”

Now, says Custer, the police are “using the injunction that we have against them to justify why they’re not there.” When they call to file a complaint the police retort, “Yeah, well, we can’t tell you apart. Y’all look the same to us!” He adds that they have informed the state “many times” of their code of conduct against drinking on the plaza, possession of drugs, sexual assault or harassment or violence.

The Nashville media have reported on the protesters’ “pleas for improved security,” to which one official responded that the state cannot “go out and, in effect, baby-sit protesters 24/7.” The concern about manpower did not stop the state from reportedly deploying more than 70 state troopers and other law enforcement personnel to enforce the now defunct curfew two nights in a row. And both the city and state had enough resources to infiltrate undercover police into the Occupy Nashville movement from the beginning.

At this point the damage is done. Custer says some media stake out the site looking for footage of public urination or drug use that then shows up on the nightly news as the face of the movement. Over the last few months, Custer says, polling has shown public approval of Occupy Nashville drop from 70 percent to 30 percent.

This loss of social power has opened the door to wild claims about Occupy Nashville that are used to legitimize the legal attack. Rep. Eric Watson, who introduced the anti-camping bill, seems obsessed with the genitals of occupiers. In October Watson said he saw some members engage in a sex act outside his office, which allegedly triggered the police infiltration. (An unnamed legislative aide also claimed witnessing an “orgy going on out on the plaza.”)

During recent hearings before the House Judiciary Committee, which Watson chairs, he bellowed indignantly that an occupier “peed on” a secretary taking a cigarette break. His solution: “If you approve of that and you think that’s peaceable assembly, you need to be peed on.”

Custer responds, “We know that Homeland Security is out there and we have been told by state police that they are photographing and recording us. If someone was breaking the law so blatantly then they should have been arrested.”

It was during those judiciary committee hearings that the one-year jail time was added for anyone maintaining “living quarters on publicly owned property” where residency is not allowed. To get rid of the Occupy movement, the state is taking a sledgehammer approach by also effectively criminalizing homelessness.

Occupy Nashville is almost certain to challenge the law in court once it passes. Like their compatriots in Boise, they hope to block implementation of the law or even have it overturned. In a perverse manner, the laws are a sign of success of the Occupy movement. Novelist Arundhati Roy told me that she doesn’t think “the state will allow people to occupy a particular space unless it feels that allowing that will end up in a kind of complacency, and the effectiveness and urgency of the protest will be lost.”

That urgency will be on display repeatedly this year. On May Day. In Chicago during the G-8 and NATO summits. In Tampa Bay, Fla., for the Republican National Convention and Charlotte for the Democrats. And in ways no one can predict. In each instance the confrontation will come down to a question of power. The government will deploy all the ideological, policing and legal power at its disposal. On the other side, the Occupy movement has the power of a unifying idea and social legitimacy. It’s a lopsided battle, but no one could have ever imagined that the Occupy Wall Street movement could have come this far already.

: Arun Gupta, a New York writer and co-founder of Occupy the Wall Street Journal, covers the Occupy movement for Salon. More Arun Gupta
: More Michelle Fawcett

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Unhappy Valentine’s Day in Israel

A racist Israeli law divides married Palestinian couples; Jewish couples are exempt

VIDEO

By Taiseer Khatib

Taiseer Khatib and his wife, Lana

Topics:Israel-Palestine, Valentines Day

This Valentine’s Day, I live in fear of being separated from my wife by the force of the Israeli state and the whim of bureaucrats enforcing a discriminatory law that can separate Palestinian citizens of Israel from Palestinian spouses from the occupied West Bank. This fear will hang over us for years if the “Citizenship and Entry Into Israel Law” is not revoked as the state can use this law to separate me from my family.

Lana, my wife, is from Jenin in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. She has a diploma in economics from Al-Najah University in Nablus. We met and fell in love in Jenin in late 2002 after Israel’s destruction of the Jenin refugee camp during the second intifada. She moved to Israel in 2005 to live with me. We now have two children, Adnan, who is 4 and a half years old and Yosra, who is 3 and a half years old. My family means the world to me and yet our standing in Israel is extremely tenuous because of my ongoing failed effort to secure citizenship for my wife.

Despite the might of the Israeli government arrayed against us, Lana and I persevere because love is a force far more powerful than the state. No matter the government responsible for repression, whether in apartheid South Africa, the Jim Crow South, or elsewhere, love has always been more powerful. We knew the risks when we married after the law passed in 2003. But we were determined not to allow an apartheid state that discriminates against Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line to disrupt our love.

Lana’s residency has so far been possible only through yearly extensions of her permission to stay in Israel. Yet these have been entirely subject to the arbitrary discretion of Israel’s Interior Ministry and its security services. She has no legal or social rights, nor the possibility of obtaining health insurance or social security. She is not allowed to hold a job or drive a car. She is, by any fair reckoning, a third-class resident of Israel.

Lana used to be an independent woman – having worked for four years in the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Jenin – but today, in “modern” Israel, she is now totally dependent on me. Our home, rather than a haven, has become her prison. She is stuck and there is no immediate prospect of release. This situation causes her and us permanent frustration. “I feel my freedom was stolen from me by this racist law,” she says. “It doesn’t matter where you live, you are always controlled and denied rights by the state of Israel, [merely] because I am Palestinian.”

We are not alone. There are tens of thousands of other Palestinian families targeted by the so-called Citizenship Law. Originally promulgated in 2003, it prohibits Palestinians without Israeli citizenship from joining their spouses in Israel or seeking eventual rights of residence. There is no comparable prohibition against family unification for non-Palestinian citizens of Israel, i.e., the country’s present-day Jewish majority.

The law explicitly discriminates on the basis of race. Notwithstanding this fact, the Israeli Supreme Court of Justice earlier this year rejected a final appeal against the law. As a result, my wife could well be denied the right to live with me, a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, and our two children in my hometown of Akka.

As many as 30,000 Palestinian-Israeli families (approximately 130,000 individuals) are under a similar threat of separation. On either side of Israel’s unilateral line of separation, many are already living apart from their spouses and children. They have no voice in Israel and face a Supreme Court that seems to think allowing them into Israel, and upholding human rights, is akin to “national suicide.” Israel’s nonstop security emphasis has turned all members of its Palestinian minority – and their spouses – into would-be security threats. Of course, settlers who have repeatedly employed violence from Gaza (prior to September 2005) to the West Bank to Israel face no similar restrictions on their married lives. Violence against Palestinians counts very differently in Israel.

The recent Israeli Supreme Court decision means that Lana can no longer hope, however tenuously, to acquire citizenship, or even permanent residency. In the best case, she might obtain further extensions of her present status. Meanwhile, the threat of those extensions being suspended will hang all the more ominously over us. Each time we go to the Interior Ministry to renew her permission, and each time Lana goes to renew her permission from the Israeli military administration near Jenin, we face the possibility of being told the permit will not be renewed due to security reasons or some other excuse. It is a dreadful climate in which to raise a family. There is no certainty and stress pervades our lives.

The would-be harmony of family life is further disrupted by the fact that we cannot choose to live in Jenin. According to laws introduced after the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israeli citizens are not allowed to live or even visit Palestinian cities in Palestinian Authority-administered areas of the Occupied Territories. We, and tens of thousands of our compatriots, are caught in a truly Kafkaesque dilemma. The fear of being torn apart as a family has become a daily part of our lives.

While many of us have since childhood suffered discrimination, dispossession and violence at the hands of the Israeli state, and have watched with dismay as the international community fails to hear and address the difficulties of Israel’s non-Jewish minority, we see the new “Citizenship Law” as marking a particularly ominous regression for Israeli society. It is clear, and explicitly acknowledged in the Israeli public arena, that the purpose of this law is to further compound the difficulties confronting the country’s Palestinian minority, to make that community ever less viable, and ultimately to secure an Israel empty of Palestinians. In recent years, and especially in this current Knesset, more that 25 laws and law proposals were passed or advanced that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Many Palestinians affected are convinced that the law aims to make life so unbearable for families that they will permanently leave Israel.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who met last week with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is a proponent of the legislation. So far as I know, Secretary Clinton said not one word to him on behalf of the Palestinian families negatively affected by the “Citizenship Law” Lieberman touts. Thanks to the American silence, the United States abdicates its position as self-described “leader of the free world.”

Lieberman, who is a staunch advocate for the ethnic transfer of Palestinians out of Israel, regularly employs language that reminds Israel’s Palestinian population of the climate of violence in which our parents and grandparents were evicted from their homes in 1948, while those who remained were reduced to clear minority status. In fact, the “Citizenship Law” has been forced upon us by a Supreme Court put in place by an Israeli democracy that holds hegemony only because over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled and never allowed to return at the time of Israel’s creation in 1948. Such is the reality of the Middle East’s self-proclaimed “only democracy.” It is a democracy built on ethnic cleansing that to this day is pulling apart Palestinian families from either side of the Green Line. Meanwhile, Jewish couples from inside Israel and the illegal settlements of the West Bank face no such fears.

This Valentine’s Day I hold little hope for a steady and certain future with my wife and children. Even venturing to share our situation – and that of thousands of other couples – endangers my family by exposing us to the whim of that faceless bureaucrat who may consequently be leaned on by an elected official unhappy that Israel is being exposed for its discriminatory laws.

This is a far cry from the Israel that Prime Minister Netanyahu described last year to Congress. In his make-believe Israel, the one delightedly indulged by an out-of-touch Congress, Palestinians enjoy full rights equal to those of Jewish Israelis. This is a lie as the state’s discrimination against me and my family attests.

The United States has some experience with such laws through its own miscegenation laws of previous decades. That American racism was best addressed by the civil rights movement and its success in guaranteeing equality for all citizens without regard to their race, religion or ethnicity. On Valentine’s Day it is long past time for Israel to address its own racism by promulgating similar laws that will promote the legal equality of Palestinians and Jews alike.

: Taiseer Khatib is a Ph.D student in Anthropology at the University of Haifa and a teacher at Western Galilee College in northern Israel, Taiseer's story is part of a series called 'Love Under Apartheid' and available at www.loveunderapartheid.com. More Taiseer Khatib

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The right’s lost causes

From the culture war to foreign policy, conservatives have been defeated on every front

By Michael Lind

Lori Campbell (L) and Maja Roble, who are engaged, kiss at a celebration rally for Tuesday's ruling on Proposition 8 in West Hollywood, California February 7, 2012 (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Alcorn)

Topics:Republican Party, 2012 Elections

American conservatives are deranged by anger — and why shouldn’t they be? For decades, they have been losing on multiple fronts. From the culture war to the welfare state to foreign policy, conservative initiatives have been rejected by the American people and repudiated by public policy. At most they have won a few battles while losing the war.

Consider what Pat Buchanan and other social conservatives called “the culture war” in the 1980s (after Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church in 19th-century Imperial Germany). Even with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade is in no danger of being overruled. The most that conservatives can do is back state-level initiatives like forcing pregnant women to view sonograms of fetuses — initiatives that are soon slapped down by the federal courts.

Gay rights? Since the 1970s and 1980s, when Miss America winner Anita Bryant led a nationwide crusade against gays and lesbians, public attitudes and public policies have been revolutionized. A center-right Supreme Court struck down state sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and the ban against gay and lesbian soldiers in the U.S. military has been repealed. The push for gay marriage has provoked a backlash, but each generation of Americans is more tolerant than the older one. Now that Glenn Beck tells Bill O’Reilly that gay marriage doesn’t bother him, and O’Reilly defends the right of Ellen DeGeneres to represent J.C. Penney as a spokesperson, it is clear that, except for some mopping-up operations, this particular war is over and the liberal side has won.

Censorship? In the 1980s, Attorney General Ed Meese campaigned against pornography, symbolized by Playboy and Penthouse, and in the Clinton years Democrats supported the V-chip in televisions to allow parents to screen out smut. Now practically anything can be viewed on PCs and phones, and most award-winning dramas feature profanity and softcore sex scenes that would have provoked nationwide protests a few decades ago. This is a triumph for libertinism, if not liberalism.

Even as they have witnessed the collapse of their efforts to roll back the liberalization of laws governing sex and censorship, American conservatives have met defeat in their efforts to dismantle the middle-class welfare state created by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. George W. Bush’s push to partly privatize Social Security was so unpopular that his own party distanced itself from it. Some on the right are still enthusiastic about replacing Medicare with a system of vouchers, but any serious attempt to do so would alienate many Tea Party supporters, who, according to polls, dislike government in general but support Social Security and Medicare. This contradiction was summed up in the Tea Party protester’s sign: “Get your government hands off my Medicare!”

Even the much less ambitious attempt to introduce school vouchers, a centerpiece of conservative policy efforts in the last quarter of the 20th century, was a miserable failure. Supported both by free-market libertarians and social conservatives who sent their children to religious schools, the voucher policy was pushed by right-wing think tanks and conservative donors like the late Theodore Forstmann, who grew rich by pioneering leveraged buyouts. It turned out that affluent white suburban voters tend to be satisfied with their neighborhood public schools and are not moved by appeals to the well-being of the poor inner-city youngsters who were drafted to serve as the poster children of this libertarian scheme.

To make matters worse, from a conservative perspective, the lawmakers whom the right elected to shrink the welfare state have steadily expanded it. Republicans as well as conservatives supported the expansion of the earned income tax credit, a subsidy to poor workers, and the child tax credit, a European-style childcare subsidy championed by Newt Gingrich, among others.

A Republican Congress passed, and George W. Bush signed, the law creating the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the biggest expansion of entitlements between the creation of Medicare and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” which itself was inspired in part by a Heritage Foundation plan as well as Republican Gov. Mitt Romney’s “Romneycare” in Massachusetts. The fact that many of these welfare state subsidies are delivered by means of tax credits, rather than directly, should fool nobody. These have been massive expansions of the middle-class welfare state.

In foreign policy, the neoconservative right appeared for a time to have prevailed. Beginning with the Clinton administration’s war in Kosovo, many neoliberal Democrats joined Republican hawks in celebrating global U.S. military hegemony and “liberal interventionism.” But the Bush administration overreached after 9/11 when it invaded Iraq shortly after it invaded Afghanistan. The costs of those two debacles quickly soured the public on “the war on terror.”

As early as 2006, when Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense in the Bush administration, the U.S. began a course correction. Under Obama, the defense establishment has pivoted away from an emphasis on COIN or anti-jihadist counterinsurgency in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan toward “offshore balancing” against perceived traditional great-power threats like China in Asia. The Obama administration acquiesced quietly in the Iraqi government’s rejection of permanent U.S. bases in Iraq — a disastrous setback for the neocon dream of a U.S.-dominated Middle East. The withdrawal and demobilization of U.S. troops as the wars wind down will reduce U.S. military manpower by around 40 percent in the years ahead. Even in the brief, dubious NATO intervention in Libya, the administration chose to “lead from behind,” repudiating neoconservative triumphalism.

During the administrations of Clinton and George W. Bush, a few of us argued against neoconservative and neoliberal triumphalism, in favor of a more modest blend of liberal internationalism and realpolitik. Now we have it. Not only the war on terror, but also America’s post-Cold War flirtation with liberal imperialism, died with Osama bin Laden.

This is not to say that conservatives have not won some lesser victories in the last generation. But in most cases they did so only because centrist and liberal Democrats themselves were divided on the subject. The deregulation of utilities, transportation and finance from the 1970s through the 1990s was as much a project of Democrats like Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton as of Republicans. The repeal of the federal entitlement to welfare under Clinton was supported by Democrats as well as Republicans, because means-tested programs for the poor have always had less public support than universal programs like Social Security and Medicare. Cap-and-trade legislation, the Holy Grail of Greens on the left, was killed by coal-state Democrats, among others, after being subjected to persuasive criticism by a new generation of environmentalist thinkers like Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute. Divides among Democrats have also doomed efforts to tilt federal law in favor of unions. The failure of grandiose visions of mass transit and high-speed rail owe less to partisanship than to their cost, their impracticability, and their lack of appeal outside of a small group of affluent white progressives in a few expensive coastal bohemian enclaves.

The only significant achievements that the right can claim on its own have been the tax cuts under Reagan and Bush. These have created an enduring gap between federal revenues and federal outlays, because Republicans themselves have been unwilling, when in power, to live up to their small-government rhetoric by slashing defense and middle-class entitlements. At some point, though, revenues will rise to match spending, as a result of the partial or complete expiration of the Bush tax cuts, higher tax rates, new taxes like a federal value-added tax, or inflation that produces “bracket creep,” pushing taxpayers into higher tax brackets. And when that happens, big taxation will pay for big government and the right will have nothing to show for its generation-long “starve-the-beast” strategy of cutting government by depriving it of revenue.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for liberals to admit that they are winning most of their battles. Particularly in an election year, partisans fear that complacency will lead to low turnout. And the single-issue movements of the left, no less than those of the right, depend on stoking anxiety in order to raise money and mobilize activists. So you can expect to hear that if the Republicans recapture the White House or Congress as a whole, we will see the return of criminalized back-alley abortions and racial segregation, while Social Security and Medicare might be abolished.

But the right isn’t going to repeal the great accomplishments of liberalism and remake America on the basis of sexual repression and censorship, free-market radicalism and American empire. Conservatives tried to do that and failed. No matter who wins this year, the right won’t get a second chance.

: Michael Lind’s new book, "Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States", will be published in April and can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com. More Michael Lind

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US media takes the lead on Iran

The propaganda over The Grave Persian Threat is as cartoonish as it was when directed at Iraq in 2002

VIDEO

By Glenn Greenwald

Many have compared the coordinated propaganda campaign now being disseminated about The Iranian Threat to that which preceded the Iraq War, but there is one notable difference. Whereas the American media in 2002 followed the lead of the U.S. government in beating the drum wars against Saddam, they now seem even more eager for war against Iran than the U.S. government itself, which actually appears somewhat reluctant. Consider this highly illustrative, one-minute report yesterday from the nightly broadcast of NBC News with Brian Williams, by the network’s Chief Pentagon Correspondent Jim “Mik” Miklaszewski, which packs multiple misleading narratives into one short package:

We’re told that if the U.S. ends up in a war with Iran, then “the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet would be the world’s first line of defense“: because Iran is threatening the entire world, and the U.S. would be defending “the world” from this grave Persian menace. Then there’s the ominous claim that “Iranian leaders have threatened all-out war”: but that’s “if Israel launches air strikes against Iran’s nuclear program,” which would already itself be “all-out war.” The NBC story — which begins with video shots of Iranians in lab coats lurking around complex, James-Bond-villain-like nuclear-ish machines — ends with twenty seconds of scary video footage of Iranian missiles being launched, accompanied with this narration: “U.S. officials warn that Iran’s massive stockpile of ballistic missiles is the more serious threat”; after all, “within just the past few days, Iranian leaders [cue video of a scary, ranting Ahmedinijad] have threatened that if attacked, they would launch those missiles at U.S. targets.”

It’s just remarkable to watch the American media depict Iran as the threatening, aggressive party here. Literally on a daily basis, political and media figures in both the U.S. and Israel openly threaten to attack Iran and debate how the attack should happen with a casualness that most people use to contemplate what to have for lunch. The U.S. has orchestrated devastating and always-escalating sanctions which, by design, are wrecking the Iranian economy, collapsing its currency, and generating serious hardship for its 75 million citizens. The U.S. military has that country almost completely encircled. The U.S. military behemoth, and Israel’s massive nuclear stockpile and sophisticated weaponry, make the Iranian military by comparison look almost as laughable as Saddam’s. Iran’s scientists have been serially murdered on its own soil, their facilities bombarded with sophisticated cyber attacks, and dissident groups devoted to the overthrow of their government (ones even the U.S. designates as Terrorists) have been armed, trained and funded by Israel while leading American politicians openly shill for them in exchange for substantial payments.

Yet the Manichean narrative driving this NBC report is par for the media course: Iran’s aggression must be contained, and it is leaving the U.S. and Israel with no choice but to pre-emptively attack it. Most telling is how Iran is continuously depicted as though they are the ones issuing threats of aggression even though all of their threats are retaliatory: if you attack us, we will attack back. Here, for instance, was how The Washington Post – under the headline “Iran, perceiving threat from West, willing to attack on U.S. soil, U.S. intelligence report finds” — described the recent warnings about The Iranian Danger from Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper:

That plot “shows that some Iranian officials — probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime,” Clapper said in the testimony, which was submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee in advance of a threat assessment hearing Tuesday. “We are also concerned about Iranian plotting against U.S. or allied interests overseas.”

As this blogger correctly observed:

What I like about the latest Iranian hijinks is that everyone is so forthright about the fact that any increase in Iranian bellicosity–ahem, “real or perceived”–is the direct result of American sword-rattling. There’s not even a stutter in the direction of circumlocution. It’s all straight up: “Senator, we are concerned that the Iranians may respond if we go to war with them.” It may necessitate a war!

The propaganda at play here is intense indeed. For several years, the U.S. and Israel threaten on an almost daily basis to aggressively attack a country, all while engaging in multiple acts of war against them, and then when their leaders suggest they may not acquiesce to such an attack with passivity and gratitude, those vows of defensive retaliation are used to depict them as the threat-issuing aggressors. And the American media, as always, eagerly implants the propaganda. Thus, if such a war breaks out, NBC News‘ Mik announces, “the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet would be the world’s first line of defense,” though those crazed Persian leaders have threatened to use “Iran’s massive stockpile of ballistic missiles” and to “launch those missiles at U.S. targets.”

I used to find somewhat baffling this bizarre aspect of American public opinion: time and again, Americans support whatever new war of aggression their government proposes, then come to regret that support and decide the war was a “mistake,” only to demonstrate that they learned no lessons from their “mistake” by eagerly supporting whatever the next proposed war is. Thus did the widespread belief that Vietnam was a “mistake” have no impact on their support for the attack on Iraq, and now — with some polls showing Americans, before their government even proposes it, preliminarily willing to cheer on an attack on Iran — it is clear they have learned nothing from their acknowledged “mistake” in supporting the attack on Iraq. Most Americans continue with this strange mindset: we realize we were wrong to support those past wars you gave us, but we stand ready and eager to support this next one!

But when you look at reports such as this one from NBC last night — and it was nothing unusual: I just happened to stumble into it by accident — it’s not hard to see why this happens. When continuously bombarded with authoritative voices uncritically warning them of the Grave Threat posed by the New Hitlers, and with powerful images of menacing missiles and unhinged leaders accompanying those warnings, even rational populations will become sufficiently scared into succumbing to the next act of aggression. The only thing unusual here is that, with Iran, the American media actually seems out in front of the U.S. Government in the propaganda effort rather than their normal position of submissively marching behind.