Maddow: In search of liberal press criticism!

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2013

Here’s what it doesn’t look like: How would it look if the liberal world conducted real press criticism? Not just of the Fox News Channel, but of the mainstream press?

Here’s what it wouldn’t look like. Last night, Rachel Maddow was criticizing “the Beltway media” again—or at least, she was pretending to do so:

MADDOW (2/5/13): The accusation that President Obama has grown the deficit giantly since he has been in office is a very politically potent accusation. And when Republicans say it, the Beltway media tends to write it down as if it was true.

It is not true. It has not been true for a very long time, and there’s really no excuse anymore for not knowing that.

According to Maddow, Republicans have been saying that Obama “has grown the deficit giantly since he has been in office.” And when Republicans make that claim, Maddow says “the Beltway media” tend to write it down as if it’s true.

Like everything else, that’s possible! But Maddow didn’t quote any Republican actually making that (bogus) claim. More significantly, she didn’t cite any mainstream journalist or mainstream news org which had advanced such a claim.

(To watch the whole segment, click this.)

Gullible liberals may hear such a statement and think Maddow's playing it tough. In fact, she is basically clowning. In the process, she’s making her liberal viewers dumber while avoiding a fight with a powerful mainstream press corps—the cultural sea within which she swims for her millions of dollars per year.

Did Maddow ever explain who she was talking about in this segment? Was it ever clear who she meant by “the Beltway media?”

Did she ever name the person who has said that Obama “has grown the deficit giantly since he has been in office?” Did she ever cite a Beltway news org which has made that (bogus) claim?

Predictably, no. During the segment, she discussed Obama’s appeal to the Congress to delay the imposition of next month’s scheduled budget cuts. (We think that’s good advice.) Earlier in her presentation, this is the spot where she first mentioned those wascally Republicans—and one major national news org:

MADDOW: The Republicans, of course, want another round of harried negotiations. Speaker John Boehner, second-place vice presidential finisher Paul Ryan, they say they do not want out of this latest self-imposed crisis in Washington. They want to use the threat of that crisis, they want to use the threat of this sequester thing, the threat of a self-imposed recessionary force, to force the president into spending cuts he otherwise would not make.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month on why they feel that way. Quote, "The driving passion for Mr. Boehner in these fiscal debates is his conviction that trillion-dollar deficits are sapping the country of its energy and prosperity."

Trillion-dollar deficits, his driving passion. Everybody loves John Boehner’s passion.

Maddow was snarking about Boehner in that last statement. But in this passage, she doesn’t cite any Republican making the claim she would later describe. Nor is the Wall Street Journal shown to have made such a claim.

As she continued, Maddow hoisted a chart and made these (accurate) statements:

MADDOW (continuing directly): But this is supposedly what he feels so passionate about. This is a chart of the country’s budget deficit levels every year. Red bars are President Bush’s deficits from 2008 and 2009. Blue bars are President Obama’s deficits. Those really big bars are when the whole world economy crashed, including ours. Remember that?

You notice how the deficit gets smaller when the bars are blue over time? See how they’re getting shorter as you go to the right?

Indeed, Maddow’s chart showed the deficits getting smaller in the Obama years. But it also showed four straight annual deficits which were, in fact, over one trillion dollars each year.

As she continued, she made another accurate statement. She then moved to the bogus claim which still had no named author:

MADDOW (continuing directly): Today, the Congressional Budget Office released their deficit projection for 2013. So for this upcoming year, the nonpartisan CBO, their projection, and according to them, under President Obama, the deficit is slated to continue to shrink, as it has been under President Obama.

But the supposedly gigantic growth of those deficits is why congressional Republicans are committed to us lurching from self-imposed crisis to self-imposed crisis instead of us working this stuff out like adults.

That highlighted statement is true. The 2013 deficit is projected to be just $854 billion—assuming those spending cuts are made, the cuts Obama wants to halt. (We agree with Obama’s judgment.)

At this point, Maddow moved to her key accusation—her unsupported key accusation. She referred to “the supposedly gigantic growth of those deficits.”

From the chart, a viewer could easily see that such an accusation would be wrong, that the deficits haven’t been growing. But Maddow has quoted no Republican making that claim, and no one in “the Beltway media.”

From there, she moved to the ringing claim with which we opened this post: Republicans say that Obama has grown the deficit giantly since he has been in offcie. And when Republicans say it, the Beltway media tends to write it down as if it was true.

We hate to be the ones to tell you, but Maddow is often a bit of a fraud. That segment last night was lazy, dumb and insulting. Its central claims were thrilling to hear—but they were unsupported.

Did we mention that this segment was presented by Rachel Maddow? As usual, Maddow was posturing for easily pleased liberal viewers while failing to challenge anyone in the actual mainstream press corps.

What would liberal press criticism really look like? Thrust us—this ongoing scam isn’t it.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it: Can you name a major mainstream journalist or news org Maddow has ever challenged?

She constantly dings "the Beltway media." Have you ever heard anyone's name?

How long did people have to wait in line to vote last November!

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2013

The New York Times struggles with data: We have a very weak national discourse. As a people, we just don’t seem to be very smart.

Two apparent examples emerged in yesterday’s New York Times. Among several others!

First, a very important topic—the length of time various people had to wait in line before voting in November’s election. As everyone has heard, some people had to wait as long as eight hours before they were able to vote.

Obviously, that’s insane—an insult to our democracy.

According to this front-page report in yesterday’s Times, an analysis by the Orlando Sentinel “concluded that more than 200,000 voters in Florida ‘gave up in frustration’ without voting” because of the very long lines. That is a very serious matter, especially if we assume that the long lines may have been deliberately engineered to suppress the minority vote, as people have been alleging.

But to what extent did that actually happen? In our view, Jeremy Peters’ front-page report is monumentally worthless, despite its wealth of data.

The report is built around a large graphic. But this is pretty much what the graphic shows:

PETERS (2/5/13): The average wait nationwide was 14 minutes last year, according to Mr. Stewart’s data. Blacks and Hispanics waited an average of 20.2 minutes, compared with 12.7 minutes for whites. In the most populous areas—those with more than 500,000 voters in a county—the average wait was 18 minutes, more than double what it was in counties with fewer than 50,000 voters.

Obviously, it would be better if everyone had to wait the same amount of time—blacks and whites, urban and rural. But the major problem which has been discussed does not involve the difference between waiting 20 minutes to vote, as opposed to 13.

The larger concern involves those people who were forced to wait for hours. But where did that happen? And what is the evidence that the long waiting time was deliberate? This report almost completely skips those seminal questions. It substitutes a bunch of data which are largely beside the point—and it even includes this minor point of confusion:

PETERS: Several recent polls and studies suggest that long waiting times in some places depressed turnout in 2012 and that lines were longest in cities, where Democrats outnumber Republicans. In a New York Times/CBS News poll taken shortly after Election Day, 18 percent of Democrats said they waited at least a half-hour to vote, compared with 11 percent of independents and 9 percent of Republicans.

It isn’t just that Democrats outnumber Republicans in cities; Democratic politicians are usually in charge of our larger cities. If cities had the longest waits, that hardly addresses the free-floating question:

Did Republicans deliberately engineer long lines in heavily Democratic districts?

The question we should be exploring involves deliberate attempts to create eight-hour lines to suppress one particular party’s vote. In this front-page news report, Peters seems to discuss everything but that seminal question.

We thought Peters’ data were largely useless, though they gave the impression that deep analysis had occurred. That said, we were puzzled by the data in a second report, this time from the front page of yesterday’s Science Times section.

Hannah Fairfield starts her report with a reference to Lawrence Summers’ “notorious comments about women’s aptitude” in math. She then presents a short report which, truth to tell, has little to do with what Summers said—a report which is accompanied by a puzzling graphic.

In this passage, Fairfield describes the puzzle she’s attempting to solve. If we’re reading her graphic correctly, we think she has left something out:

FAIRFIELD (2/5/13): [R]esearchers have been searching for ways to explain why there are so many more men than women in the top ranks of science.

Now comes an intriguing clue, in the form of a test given in 65 developed countries by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It finds that among a representative sample of 15-year-olds around the world, girls generally outperform boys in science—but not in the United States.

What explains the gap? Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the tests for the O.E.C.D., says different countries offer different incentives for learning science and math...

As she continues, Fairfield puzzles over the detailed data which you can peruse in her graphic. Here’s what she doesn’t seem to see:

In almost all of the countries shown, the gap between the boys’ and girls’ average scores seems to be very small. In the United States, boys seem to have outscored girls by less than three percent on the science test in question.

Despite Fairfield’s misleading presentation, boys outscore girls in quite a few other countries, also by margins which seem to be very small. In major countries where girls outscore boys, the differences also seem to be very small—two percent or less.

How much do such small differences matter? How much does it really matter if boys in one country are two percent better on one discrete science test, while girls in some other country display the same slight advantage?

In our view, Fairfield creates a lot of confusion through her misleading text and her "small differences" graphic. But she doesn’t seem to see the problem raised by those tiny gaps.

Is Fairfield exploring a non-problem problem? We’re going to take a guess here:

The gaps between boys and girls in some of those countries may be larger than Fairfield’s graphic makes them seem. It may have been a bad idea to present these gaps in the form of percentages—percentages which are derived from average “scale scores” on this science test.

That said, we don’t really know. Fairfield’s report strikes us as woefully weak—but then again, this is the Times.

ROSA PARKS AT 100: The myth of the myth!

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2013

Part 3—The shape of our national problem: In comments, several readers of Charles Blow’s column noted that it was pure bunk.

“You're just discovering this now?” one acerbic reader asked. “Glad to hear that Rosa Parks is getting a well-deserved book of her own, but this is not the first time someone has unveiled the true story of her actions,” this reader said, massively understating.

“I'm sure this is an excellent book,” another reader wrote, talking a serious leap of faith, “but it’s old news, as anyone who has paid attention to the true history of the civil rights movement already knows.”

Duh. But other readers lionized Blow, praising him for telling the truth, a truth which had long been hidden. In these somewhat embarrassing comments, we get a glimpse of the shape of our broken discourse:

COMMENTS TO BLOW’S COLUMN (2/2/13): Thank you and the professor for revealing the truth. This old white girl is happy to read it.

[...]

Thank you, Mr. Blow. I'll use this column in my history course when we get to the 1950s, and I'll read The Rebellious Life as well.

[...]

Bravo, Mr. Blow! Let the truth speak loudly and may the country listen.

[...]

Rosa Parks is even more heroic in reality. Kudos to her biographer for bringing this crucial information forward and to Mr. Blow for publicizing it.

[...]

I look forward to more columns like these, dispelling myths and pointing us to the truth.

[...]

Thank you so much for this illuminating column, Mr. Blow. Your points about the "sanitization" of Rosa, as well as her long life of activism and feisty personality, were things I'd never known.

And so forth, and so on and more so. New York Times readers constantly fawn to the newspaper’s famous columnists, no matter how inane, bogus, dishonest or disrespectful the column in question may be. In this way, readers of our smartest newspaper have sleep-walked through the many years in which Times columnists have advanced the stupidest narratives of our age:

Why did Al Gore wear a brown suit? Did Naomi Wolf tell him to do it?

Through all the columns from Maureen Dowd trashing every known major female Dem, gullible readers have continued to gulp the purest bullshit the New York Times can roll.

We are where we are because of these people—because of this newspaper’s pseudo-journalists, because of its gullible readers. The comments to Blow from the history teachers were perhaps the most embarrassing. But the comments to his ludicrous column were an education all the way through.

Can we talk? That last quoted commenter “hadn’t known about the sanitization of Rosa” Parks because the sanitization hadn’t occurred, certainly not in the ludicrous way Blow described it.

According to Blow, Mrs. Parks was “sanitized and sugarcoated” at the time of her death in 2005. Quoting Professor Theoharis, he seemed to say that this sanitization had occurred “in nearly every account” of her remarkable life.

According to Blow, “pure mythology” and “pure fiction” were widely advanced in the process. Has any Times columnist ever authored a more absurd misstatement?

The truth is nothing like this. Mrs. Parks died on October 24, 2005. That very afternoon, Bob Dotson recalled her astonishing life in a report for NBC News.

As he closed, Dotson debunked the very “myth” Blow finally “dispelled” last weekend:

DOTSON (10/24/05): She would not budge on that long-ago bus, because she had been forced from the seat once before by the same driver, the day she tried to register to vote in 1943.

MRS. PARKS (videotape): As long as we did give in, it meant that they could say that we were satisfied with that type of treatment.

DOTSON: Rosa Parks never was. And for that, she was given this country’s highest honor, the Congressional Gold Medal.

People said she was tired the day she refused to give her bus seat to a white man. "They were wrong," she said. "The only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

Bob Dotson, NBC News.

As he closed, Dotson debunked the piece of “pure fiction” which Blow pretended to refute last week, even as he suggested that the press corps had massively failed in this task at the time of Parks’ death.

In fact, everyone refuted this alleged myth at the time of Mrs. Parks’ death. Scads of them quoted Mrs. Parks, just as Dotson did.

"The only tired I was, was tired of giving in?” Mrs. Parks told the story that way in her own book, Rosa Parks: My Story, a book which appeared in 1992. Now, everyone and his Uncle Harold refuted this myth about Parks. They used her own memorable words to double-kill a piece of mythology which had long since ceased to exist.

As we noted yesterday, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times repeated Parks’ words about not being tired in lengthy front-page news reports the morning after her death. They included all the parts of Parks’ life story which Blow said had been “sanitized.” See THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/5/13.

The Post and the Times quoted Mrs. Parks—but then, so did almost everyone else. In the Boston Globe, Mark Feeney did the honors in a front-page news report:

FEENEY (10/25/05): "I had no idea when I refused to give up my seat on that Montgomery bus that my small action would help put an end to the segregation laws in the South," she wrote in her autobiography, "Rosa Parks: My Story" (1992).

"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that wasn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

[...]

"I had a very strong sense of what was fair," she wrote of herself as a girl, something she attributed to the teachings of her mother and maternal grandparents.

Feeney described Parks’ long-time activism before her famous refusal to stand, along with the activism of her husband, two other elements which had been sanitized, according to Blow's absurd column.

“The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” This refutation of a long-refuted myth was cited all over the country. Parks was quoted in the Boston Globe—and in the conservative Boston Herald. She was quoted in the Washington Post—and in the conservative Washington Times.

She was quoted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—and in the Birmingham News. Her words were repeated in Salt Lake City’s Deseret Morning News—and in the Augusta Chronicle.

Then, the syndicated columns began to appear, spreading the refutations farther. Ellen Goodman’s column debuted in the Boston Globe, then spread to newspapers all over the country. Last Saturday, Blow basically rewrote Goodman’s piece, while suggesting that he was the first to tell the tale:

GOODMAN (10/28/05): THE MYTHOLOGY OF ROSA PARKS

It is remarkable how often the legend survives the legendary figure. So it is with Rosa Parks.

The mythology describes the woman who died Monday at 92 as a "humble seamstress." The textbooks pay homage to a "simple woman" with tired feet whose refusal to give up her seat on the bus to a white man half a century ago sparked a movement. The eulogies cast her as the "mother of the civil rights movement," as if it were an unplanned parenthood.

But the obituaries also suggest another side to her story. The "humble seamstress" was a civil rights activist long before that fateful bus ride. The "simple woman," secretary of her NAACP chapter, attended a leadership conference the summer before her act of civil disobedience. As for those tired feet? Parks herself wrote, "The only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

Goodman’s column spread the refutation far and wide. But so did other syndicated columns, all of which quoted Parks’ famous words about not being tired:

Syndicated columns quoting Parks’ refutation:
Ellen Goodman, the Boston Globe
Dale McFeatters, Scripps Howard News Service
Marc Morial, Copley News Service
Gary Borders, Cox News Service
Gregory Clay, Knight Ridder/Tribune

The Associated Press didn’t quote Mrs. Parks’ words in its news report, though reporter Bree Fowler quickly refuted the idea that Parks had refused to stand because her feet “were hurting.” That said, the AP had published a lengthy review of Mrs. Parks' life in December 2004, ten months before, on the anniversary of her famous action.

In Helen O’Neill’s 1600-word piece, the AP directly refuted the alleged mythology, ten months before Parks’ death. O'Neill described Mrs. Parks as "a woman whose near mythological status has long eclipsed the reality of who she is and what she accomplished." She then explained what she meant:

O’NEILL (12/4/04): Parks herself has chafed at the way she has often been portrayed: A 42-year-old seamstress so exhausted after a day stitching hems at the Montgomery Fair Department Store that she simply refused to budge.

"The only tired I was," she wrote in her autobiography, "was tired of giving in."

In fact, Parks had been actively involved in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, despite the fact that, at the time, anyone who supported desegregation risked reprisals from the Ku Klux Klan.

But Parks, as a child, had been enrolled in a private school in Montgomery where, in addition to English and science, white teachers taught black students a philosophy of self-worth and equality. Later she worked at a military base where segregation was banned.

"I could ride on an integrated trolley on the base," she wrote. "But when I left the base I had to ride home on a segregated bus."

Quietly, she began to engage in small acts of resistance, such as leading youth members of the NAACP to Montgomery's main library, even though they knew they would be directed to the poorly stocked branches for blacks across town.

She married Raymond Parks, a barber, drawn to him, she wrote, by "the fact he didn't seem to have that meek attitude, what we called an Uncle Tom attitude toward white people." He was also deeply involved in the NAACP. There were secret nightly meetings and endless reports of lynchings and other acts of racial violence.

As secretary of the NAACP, Parks would read them all.

There wasn't much sugarcoating there. The AP filed this lengthy portrait ten months before Parks' death.

In fairness to Blow, his ludicrous claim about “sanitization and sugarcoating” is a faithful account of the outright deception offered by Professor Theoharis at the start of her new book about Parks, a fascinating book we strongly recommend.

Theoharis discusses the full arc of Mrs. Parks’ life. But she is one of the most doctrinaire writers we have encountered since the time when the PLP broke from SDS. She apparently feels that her heartful beliefs permit her to peddle absolute nonsense about the way Mrs. Parks’ life has allegedly been distorted.

Theoharis paints herself as a brave bold hero at Mrs. Parks' expense.

Tomorrow, we’ll show you what Theoharis writes at the start of her book concerning the coverage of Mrs. Parks at the time of her death. If Theoharis researched her claim at all, what she writes is grossly dishonest, an act of outright deception.

Blow should have told his readers that. Instead, he offered one of the most ridiculous statements in the long history by which we've been handed world-class bullshit by columnists at the Times.

Many people wrote searching reviews of Mrs. Parks’ life at the time of her death. Let’s excerpt three more:

In the New York Times, Juan Williams essentially wrote last weekend's Blow column. Eight years later, Blow would rewrite this piece, then claim it had never been written:

WILLIAMS (10/31/05): Rosa Parks led an inspiring life. Unfortunately, we rarely hear about it.

That may sound surprising at a time when Rosa Parks is probably mentioned in every American history textbook and is the subject of dozens of biographies. The problem is that her story is usually presented as a simplistic morality tale.

[...]

The truth is that Mrs. Parks was not someone who one day, out of the blue, decided to defy the local custom of blacks sitting in the back of the bus. That story leads some people to the cynical conclusion, once voiced by a character in the movie ''Barbershop,'' that all Rosa Parks did was sit on her bottom. That's not only insulting but a distortion that takes away the powerful truth that Rosa Parks worked hard to develop her own political consciousness and then worked hard to build a politically aware black community in the heart of Dixie.

Before that one moment of defiance on the bus she was a civil rights activist who had long fought to get voting rights for black people in Alabama. Apparently it is too confusing to mention that as far back as 1943 she had refused to follow the rules requiring black people to enter city buses through the back door. And it invites too much complexity to mention that in the late 40's, as an official of the local branch of the N.A.A.C.P., she was forming a coalition with a group of black and white women in Montgomery to fight segregated seating on city buses.

...In Montgomery, she worked mending dresses. One of her employers was Virginia Durr, the wife of a powerful white lawyer. Mrs. Durr, a member of the interracial Women's Political Council, became Mrs. Parks's ally in a long-term effort to use political pressure to end the daily indignity of riding segregated buses.

Mrs. Durr introduced Mrs. Parks to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. The school taught strategies to empower white and black people to get better wages, to register to vote and organize as a political force. Even before Highlander, Mrs. Parks had championed the rights of a teenager, Claudette Colvin, who was arrested in March 1955 for refusing to give up her seat to white people on a Montgomery bus.

All of this preceded the moment when Rosa Parks refused to give up her own seat on the bus. Even after her arrest she had to agree to fight the charges of violating segregation laws, and risk angering the white establishment in town and losing her job. Her husband and her mother told her she was going to be lynched for becoming the named plaintiff in a challenge to segregation. She made a deliberate decision to take up the fight. There was nothing spontaneous about this.

Williams’ column told the real story, but he did protest a bit too much. By now, many others were telling the same complex story about Rosa Parks. In Newsweek, Ellis Cose used the very “children’s book” metaphor Blow dragged out last weekend, attributing it to an Alabama journalist:

COSE (11/7/05): A weary seamstress on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 refused to stand so a white man could sit, ushering in the age of equality. So goes the “children's version of the civil-rights movement,” in the words of author Diane McWhorter.

The complete story is considerably less child friendly. It would include at least a reference to Thomas Edward Brooks, a 21-year-old black soldier who got on a Montgomery bus in 1950. Brooks made the mistake of entering through the front door instead of the back. For that, as authors Donnie Williams and Wayne Greenhaw relate in "The Thunder of Angels," a policeman bashed him on the head with a billy club and shot him dead.

At least two other black men were similarly killed in the years leading up to Parks's act of civil disobedience.

Can we talk? By the time of Mrs. Parks’ death, the refutation of the alleged myth was so widespread that it was almost hackneyed. In truth, it had been a long time since anyone had been spreading the alleged myth about Mrs. Parks.

That said, many people, Cose and Williams included, wrote accounts of Mrs. Parks’ life that were very much worth reviewing. For our money, Rochelle Riley may have said it best in the Detroit Free Press, in the city to which Mrs. Parks was forced to move to escape the loss of her employment (and that of her husband) and the relentless threats:

RILEY (10/25/05): Anyone who thinks that Rosa Parks was a simple seamstress who just got tired one day better take another look at the history. A former secretary of the NAACP and adviser to the NAACP Youth Council, Parks had been evicted from buses before.

The fact that she was a tiny, soft-spoken but firm woman belied the effect she had on the battle for equality. She was no accidental activist.

[...]

Parks was a complex woman who understood the plight of her race. She had more heart and courage and compassion for the circumstances that have led to the black condition in poor neighborhoods in cities across the country than other black people could admit then or now.

That compassion was evident in August 1994, after a would-be young thief attacked her in her own house. In a later account of the incident, she wrote, "I pray for this young man and the conditions in our country that have made him this way."

I can't forget her concern for that young man. I love her ability to see the place that birthed his anger.

Riley wasn’t sanitizing or sugarcoating. For ourselves, we like the edge of anger that animated her rejection of the “simple seamstress who just got tired” story—a refutation which was occurring everywhere newsprint was sold.

Over the weekend, New York Times readers were thanking Blow for finally letting them hear the truth. History teachers were praising Blow’s courage!

They'd never heard this story before! Gaze on the shape of our problem.

Tomorrow: Professor Theoharis and Columnist Blow assail the words “quiet,” “soft-spoken”

Who in the world was Rosa Parks!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2013

A glimpse from 1966: Rosa Parks was a very unusual person. Her personal history, and her moral development, are very much worth exploring.

When she died in 2005, she lay in state in the Rotunda of the Capitol Building, just the thirty-first person so honored. Why exactly did that happen? At the same time, broadcasters tried to give us glimpses of who she had actually been.

On NPR’s All Things Considered, Melissa Block and Robert Siegel played a fascinating piece of tape from 1966. Mrs. Parks had been interviewed on KPFA, an NPR member station:

BLOCK (10/25/05): Rosa Parks died last night at the age of 92. Her refusal that day to comply with racial segregation led to the Montgomery bus boycott. It was a seminal event in the civil rights movement, a single, quiet act of defiance.

(Audiotape of 1966 interview)

MRS. PARKS: The driver said that if I refused to leave the seat, he would have to call the police. And I told him, “Just call the police,” which he did. And when they came, they placed me under arrest.

INTERVIEWER: Wasn't that a pretty frightening thing, to be arrested in Montgomery, Alabama?

MRS. PARKS: No, I wasn't frightened at all.

INTERVIEWER: You weren't frightened?

MRS. PARKS: No.

INTERVIEWER: Why weren't you frightened?

MRS. PARKS: I don't know why I wasn't, but I didn't feel afraid. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen even in Montgomery, Alabama.

(End of audiotape from 1966)

SIEGEL: The death of Rosa Parks brings to mind some questions: What makes some people stand up against injustice while others who might be more obvious candidates for courage don't?

Siegel was asking an excellent question. Others had been beaten, even killed, for failing to obey the orders of bus drivers in Montgomery. According to Mrs. Parks, she had decided that she would have to know, once and for all, what rights she had as a human being and a citizen.

She paid a very hard price for her act in the next dozen years. This is a part of her story which is rarely told.

“Congressman Lewis, what do you think it was about Rosa Parks that led her to take that act of civil disobedience?” That was Siegel’s first question to his guest, Rep. John Lewis.

Siegel was asking an excellent question. Before the week is done, we’ll show you what Lewis said.

Zero Dark Thirty gang change their tune!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2013

Pretty much as we told you: Last Friday, Salon posted the transcript of an interview with Mark Boal, screenwriter and producer of Zero Dark Thirty.

“Zero Dark Thirty goes feminist,” said the headline on the Irin Carmon piece. You could tell that Boal is strongly feminist, based on this statement to Carmon:

CARMON: I don’t know if you saw the review that our film critic at Salon, Andrew O’Hehir, wrote—

BOAL: I probably did at some point. I have to get on a helicopter—I’m gonna sound really douchey, but I have to get on a helicopter in a second.

Boal didn’t want to sound douchey, but he did have to run!

Whatever! Let’s move to the larger story:

In her assessment of the interview, Carmon suggests that the ZD30 gang are changing the way they’re selling the film, in an attempt to salvage its Oscar chances. She said they’re shifting the focus away from torture and the hunt for bin Laden.

Instead, they’re suddenly selling the film as a statement about gender politics—as a feminist film:

CARMON (2/1/13): But after several weeks of defending themselves against charges that the film’s representation of the hunt for bin Laden suggests that torture was an effective and important tool, the film’s creators are ready to change the subject. Now they want to talk about women, in the film and beyond. (It might also be an effort to salvage the film’s Academy Award hopes; “Argo” has gained momentum at the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild awards, and some have suggested Hollywood wants to avoid the torture controversy.)

After all, the character of Maya, the determined CIA agent whom the film depicts as most responsible for finding bin Laden in Abbottabad, needed to convince all the cautious and careerist men above her that she’d really found the al-Qaida leader’s hiding place.

Director Kathryn Bigelow has also lent her name, along with the likes of Katie Couric and Jonah Hill, to a social media campaign billed as a “salute to heroic women,” tying the film to the lifting of the ban on women in combat. “Zero Dark Thirty” screenwriter and producer Mark Boal spoke to Salon yesterday about the gender politics of the movie.

What makes ZD30 a feminist film? The Maya character “needed to convince all the cautious and careerist men above her that she’d really found the al-Qaida leader’s hiding place.”

Just for the record: When we wrote about Zero Dark Thirty, we said this was the only theme we actually saw in the film—and we said that ZD30 practically hits you over the head with this theme. We said we’re typically drawn to that theme in films, but we found it just a bit cynical here, given the global political framework in which the theme is wrapped.

For those reasons, we were intrigued by Salon's interview with Boal. Carmon’s impression? Bigelow and Boal are now selling the film in a new-and-improved, all-different way, as a feminist picture.

Our own impressions: Watching this film, we saw no sign that Bigelow and Boal have any global political views at all. We saw no sign that they have any views about torture, except as a way to keep people looking.

We said they were letting us ogle Jessica Chastain as another to way to keep us looking. And sure enough! If you look at the full-page ads now running in the New York Times, they feature slightly disheveled glam shots of Chastain—and no other visual cues at all. A reader is given no other clue as to what this film is about.

It's pretty much as Carmon said: bin Laden is gone from the marketing. What's left is the determined young woman who stood up to the male bureaucrats.

Our impression? Kathryn Bigelow doesn’t come from the world of politics and ideas. She comes from the world of exciting movies which find ways to make you keep looking.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Like Boal, we wouldn’t want to sound douchey about this feminist film.

Skeet-shootgate: Big Ed almost steps up to the plate!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2013

Rachel entertains us: Inexorably, your Daily Howler just keeps getting results! We refer to yesterday’s post about the skeet-shoot lunacy/nonsense (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/4/13).

Last night, Big Ed Schultz flogged the lunatic debate about Obama’s skeet-shooting—and he almost named a relevant name in the process! During his program’s opening segment, he ridiculed "the Washington media"—and he even cited one actual famous newspaper:

SCHULTZ (2/4/13): This all started when The New Republic released a wide-ranging interview with the president. But the focus has been on this exchange. The president was asked directly, "Have you ever fired a gun?" He answered directly, "Yes, in fact, up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time."

The answer created a frenzy in the Washington media.

[...]

The Washington Post wrote more than 1300 words fact-checking the president’s answer. They wrote, "We are eager to see a photograph or hear from someone who saw him at the skeet range, to put this matter to rest."

Of course, Fox News was quick to keep the fire raging all week long. So, the White House—all right, they went along with it. They released a photograph. Now what do you think? Instead of ending the conversation, the press forced it even more, focused on it even more.

Now, the Washington Post was on defense. "Basically, all statements by public figures are subject to scrutiny. The president made an unexpected claim. And for nearly a week, the White House refused to back it up."

But in the end, they concluded the issue is settled. Not according to the White House press corps...

Incredibly, reporters asked more questions about this nonsense at yesterday’s White House press briefing. Schultz played tape of this manifest lunacy before he brought on two guests.

One part of Schultz's presentation made the analysts cheer. Schultz actually named the Washington Post as he discussed this lunacy!

For our money, we would have liked to see him name Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler by name. But naming the Post represented progress, given the way our career liberal leaders typically play this game.

Alas! Naming Fox News is incredibly easy; naming the Washington Post is hard. Last night, Schultz actually name-called the mainstream Post along with the old standby, Fox.

On the Maddow Show, the topic played out differently. Maddow didn’t fault the mainstream press corps for the continuing skeet-shoot lunacy. She didn't criticize George Stephanopoulos; she didn't mention the Post.

Dearest darlings, it just isn't done! Never has been!

Instead, she clowned and cavorted at the end of her program about the way our craziest pseduo-conservatives have treated this ridiculous topic. Mugging for us as is her wont, she mocked the way this nonsense has been treated at crackpot sites like Breitbart.

In truth, the lunacy of crackpot pseudo-conservatves is a serious issue—a major national problem. But Maddow played this matter for fun, treating us to the clowning that helps more gullible liberal viewers learn to love her more.

Schultz at least was willing to name the name of a major mainstream newspaper. Sadly, this represents a bit of a breakthrough for the career liberal world.

One major problem with Schultz’s discussion: When Schultz discussed this topic with his guests, Katrina vanden Heuvel quickly established a familiar time frame.

Remember what we’ve told you:

Within the career liberal world, all lunacy in the mainstream press corps started with Iraq. Vanden Heuvel was truly irate as she advanced this framework:

VANDEN HEUVEL: I mean, I think we’re looking at inside-the-Beltway media malpractice. It’s not new, Ed. I’m thinking we’re on the tenth anniversary of Iraq, and the press essentially—much of the press played stenographers to power, not an accountability watchdog media which we need.

This skeet-shooting incident has nothing to do, it’s utterly irrelevant with the actual policy proposals now under debate. So you have to ask yourself, “Who does the media inside the Beltway think it’s representing?”

As vanden Heuvel declaimed, she never named any particular inside-the-Beltway news org. Could that be because she herself is paid by the Washington Post?

To his credit, Richard Wolffe managed to name the Post—one time. But alas! Like vanden Heuvel, he spoke as if the war in Iraq was the starting point for this type of ludicrous press corps conduct.

Near the end of the discussion, vanden Heuvel tried to make a sale:

VANDEN HEUVEL: We’ve seen this before. The serious policy debates don’t get the coverage they deserve.

But the president can drive it more. And media, like The Nation or MSNBC, can try to amplify the serious messages that need to be heard, the serious policy, the serious accountability journalism that needs to be heard if there is going to be some advance.

How wonderful! Viewers can get the serious stuff from The Nation, where vanden Heuvel is part owner! Sadly, that fact helps us recall just how flawed her time frame actually is.

Vanden Heuvel was peddling piddle long before the war in Iraq! Mere weeks before the 2000 election, she put this disgraceful political porn into print:

COCKBURN (10/16/00): Gore's "populism" is comical, yet one more facet of a larger mendacity. What suppressed psychic tumult drives him to those stretchers that litter his career, the lies large and small about his life and achievements? You'd think that a man exposed to as much public derision as was Gore after claiming he and Tipper were the model for the couple in Love Story, or after saying he'd invented the Internet, would by now be more prudent in his vauntings. But no. Just as a klepto's fingers inevitably stray toward the cash register, so too does Gore persist in his fabrications.

Recently he's claimed to have been at the center of the action when the strategic oil reserve, in Texas and Louisiana, was established. In fact, the reserve's tanks were filling in 1977, when Gore was barely in Congress, a very junior member of the relevant energy committee. The legislation creating the reserve had been passed in 1975. At around the same time as this pretense, the VP claimed to have heard his mother crooning "Look for the union label" over his cradle. It rapidly emerged that this jingle was made up by an ad man in the seventies, when Al was in his late 20s.

As a clue to why Al misremembers and exaggerates, the lullaby story has its relevance as a sad little essay in wish fulfillment. Gore's mother, Pauline, was a tough character, far more interested in advancing Albert Sr.'s career than in warbling over Gore's cot. Both parents were demanding. Gore is brittle, often the mark of the overly well-behaved, perfect child. Who can forget the panicked performance when his image of moral rectitude shattered at the impact of the fundraising scandals associated with the Buddhist temple in Los Angeles?

"He was an easy child; he always wanted to please us," Pauline once said of him. The child's desire to please, to get the attention of often-absent parents, is probably what sparked Gore's penchant for tall tales about himself.

Alexander Cockburn’s scripted lunacy continued from there. To his credit, he managed to cite a long list of (invented) Gore lies—and to slime Gore’s mother!

Plus, he posed as a shrink!

It was vanden Heuvel who waved that porn into print, weeks before the nation voted in November 2000. Are we happy with how that turned out?

Today, career liberals know that press corps history began a bit later, with the war in Iraq. Vanden Heuvel tries not to mention the Washington Post—and she pretends that she herself hasn’t been part of this lunacy.

Maddow clowns about sites like Breitbart—and the rapidly sliding Kessler goes unnamed. But then, it has always been done this way within the career liberal press.

ROSA PARKS AT 100: Why can’t Charles Blow stick to the facts!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2013

Part 2—What three major newspapers said: Presumably, columnists at the New York Times know how to look things up.

They know how to fact-check a claim, no matter how pleasing it is.

That said, what did Charles Blow find if he fact-checked the claims which drove last Saturday’s column? If he fact-checked his claims, he found what we did:

His pleasing claims were bunk.

The pleasing claims which drove Blow’s piece concern the public’s understanding of Rosa Parks, who was born one hundred years ago this week. Blow cites a fascinating new book about Mrs. Parks—a book we strongly recommend, with several strong words of caution.

According to Blow, the new book, by Professor Jeanne Theoharis, “argues that the romanticized, children’s-book story of a meek seamstress with aching feet who just happened into history in a moment of uncalculated resistance is pure mythology.”

As Blow describes this alleged “mythology,” he cites material from Theoharis’ book which undercuts the myth:

Blow cites the fact that Rosa Parks was raised by a grandfather who often sat on his front porch with a rifle in case the Klan came. He cites the fact that Parks herself sometimes sat with her grandfather because, as she once said, “I wanted to see him kill a Ku Kluxer.”

Blow cites another story from Mrs. Parks’ childhood. He describes the way she used a brick to defend herself against a white child, with her mother warning her that she would be lynched because she was “too high-strung.”

Blow cites the fact that Parks married a man who was already “a civil rights activist,” a man “who sometimes carried a gun.” He notes that Mrs. Parks herself had “spent nearly two decades before the bus incident struggling, organizing and agitating for civil rights, mostly as the secretary of the Montgomery” NAACP.

As Blow nears the end of his column, he cites another piece of “pure fiction” concerning Mrs. Parks. Then, quoting Theoharis, he describes the way the public was misled about Mrs. Parks' life at the time of her death:

BLOW (2/2/13): And the idea that she stayed seated because of physical fatigue is pure fiction.

“I didn’t tell anyone my feet were hurting,” the book quotes her as saying. “It was just popular, I suppose because they wanted to give some excuse other than the fact that I didn’t want to be pushed around.”

The book also lays out Parks’s leading role in the bus boycotts and her decades of activism after the civil rights movement.

When Parks died in 2005, Theoharis says, “The Rosa Parks who surfaced in the deluge of public commentary was, in nearly every account, characterized as ‘quiet.’ ‘Humble,’ ‘dignified,’ and ‘soft-spoken,’ she was ‘not angry’ and ‘never raised her voice.’ ”

Parks, like many other Americans who over the years have angrily agitated for change in this country, had been sanitized and sugarcoated for easy consumption.

When Parks died, Theoharis writes, “The Rosa Parks who surfaced in the deluge of public commentary was, in nearly every account, characterized as ‘quiet.’ ” Blow helps us see what that alleged fact means:

Rosa Parks and her astonishing life had been “sanitized and sugarcoated for easy consumption.”

In comments, some Times readers expressed anger at the way they’d been misled at the time of Parks' death. They didn’t know that Blow’s presentation was largely bogus—that they were actually being misled by the column which had them upset.

Presumably, Blow knows how to fact-check claims, even if the claims are pleasing. What did he find if he fact-checked the way Mrs. Parks’ life was recalled at the time of her death?

He might have started with the Washington Post. On the front page of that well-known newspaper, Patricia Sullivan wrote a 1989-word account of Parks’ remarkable life.

How surprising! Almost every element in Blow’s debunking was laid out that day in the Washington Post! In the passage which follows, Sullivan described Mrs. Parks at the time of her famous refusal to stand.

Rosa Parks’ remarkable life deserves a respectful telling. It received that treatment that day on the front page of the Post:

SULLIVAN (10/25/05): She was an activist already, secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP. A member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church all her life, Parks admired the self-help philosophy of Booker T. Washington—to a point. But even as a child, she thought accommodating segregation was the wrong philosophy. She knew that in the previous year, two other women had been arrested for the same offense, but neither was deemed right to handle the role that was sure to become one of the most controversial of the century.

But it was as if Parks was born to the role. Rosa McCauley was born Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, the home of Booker T. Washington's renowned Tuskegee Institute, which drew many African American intelligentsia. She was the daughter of a carpenter and a teacher, was small for her age, had poor health and suffered chronic tonsillitis. Still a child when her parents separated, she moved with her mother to Pine Level, Ala., and grew up in an extended family that included her maternal grandparents.

Her mother taught Parks at home until she was 11, when she was enrolled in the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery, where her aunt lived. Segregation was enforced, often violently. As an adult, she recalled watching her grandfather guard the front door with a shotgun as the Ku Klux Klan paraded down their road. Her younger brother, Sylvester, a decorated war hero in World War II, returned to a South that regarded uniformed veterans of color as "uppity" and demonstrated its disdain with beatings.

She married barber Raymond Parks in 1932 at her mother's house. They shared a passion for civil rights; her husband was an early defender of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of young African Americans whom rights advocates asserted were falsely accused of raping two white women.

Sullivan went to describe Parks’ training as a civil rights activist at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., in the summer of 1955. “So a few months later, in the winter of 1955, when Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, it was with the knowledge of both the everyday indignities of segregation and the building momentum of the civil rights movement,” Sullivan wrote.

Eventually, Sullivan discussed the matter of Parks’ alleged fatigue and/or aching feet at the time of her refusal to stand. Citing Mrs. Parks’ 1992 autobiography, she again recalled the defiant grandfather.

Then, she repeated one of Mrs. Parks’ most widely-quoted statements—a statement which was quoted everywhere at the time of her death:

SULLIVAN: "Let me have those front seats," the driver said, indicating the front seats of the middle section. No one moved. He repeated himself: "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats."

The black rider by the window rose, and Parks moved to let him pass by. The two women across the aisle also stood up. Parks slid over to the window. "I could not see how standing up was going to 'make it light' for me," she wrote in her autobiography, My Story (1992). "The more we gave in and complied, the worse they treated us.

"I thought back to the time when I used to sit up all night and didn't sleep, and my grandfather would have his gun right by the fireplace, or if he had his one-horse wagon going anywhere, he always had his gun in the back of the wagon," she wrote. "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

“The idea that she stayed seated because of physical fatigue is pure fiction,” Blow heroically said. But the Washington Post directly addressed that claim in its account of Mrs. Parks’ life—and it cited most of the other elements identified in Blow’s column.

Sorry! There was no sanitizing of Parks in the Washington Post that morning. The fatigue and the aching feet were debunked. The defiant grandfather sat on his porch, with his granddaughter watching. Her husband’s (heroic) activism on behald of the Scottsboro Boys was cited.

Mrs. Parks’ activism, and her personal courage, were both front and center.

There was no sugarcoating of Parks in the Washington Post. All the basic elements Blow revealed were stressed in the Post’s report.

Did other newspapers sugarcoat Parks at the time of her death? If Blow fact-checked the Los Angeles Times, he found the passage posted below, part of a 2242-word front-page report.

As Blow would heroically do eight years later, Elaine Woo explicitly rejected “the mythology” that (allegedly) grew around Parks. Even the childhood incident with the brick was in Woo’s lengthy report:

WOO (10/25/05): Memorialized in poetry, dance and song, Parks was, by most accounts, both simpler and more complex than the mythology that grew around her.

She was born Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Ala., to Leona Edwards, a teacher, and James McCauley, a carpenter and builder. Her parents split up when she was 5, prompting her mother to move Rosa and her younger brother Sylvester to live with family in Pine Level, a small town near Montgomery.

Some of her early memories were of white people who treated blacks kindly, particularly a Yankee soldier who said she was cute and "treated me like I was just another little girl, not a little black girl," Parks wrote in her 1992 autobiography, "Rosa Parks: My Story."

But she also remembered an old black man named Gus Vaughn who refused to work for whites. And she remembered how her grandfather kept a gun by his side to protect the family from raids by the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s.

The earliest hint of the fortitude that would bolt her to a bus seat years later may have come when she was 10. On the road near home, she had encountered a white boy named Franklin, who uttered some offensive words and threatened to hit her. Young Rosa picked up a brick and dared him to strike. Franklin, she recalled, "thought better of the idea and went away."

Her grandmother was horrified by Rosa's behavior. You'll be lynched before you turn 20 if you keep standing up to whites, she scolded.

Parks once speculated that the urge to stand up to oppressors may have come from protecting her little brother from bullies. Whatever the cause, "I do know," she wrote, "that I had a very strong sense of what was fair."

[...]

She went to high school at a laboratory school run by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes, but was forced to drop out to care for her grandmother and later for her mother. She went back to school for her degree in 1933, after she married Raymond Parks, a Montgomery barber. Raymond Parks was also an activist in the local NAACP and helped raise money to defend the nine black men accused in the Scottsboro rape case, one of the most sensational racial trials of the Depression era. He was the first man aside from her grandfather with whom Parks could discuss racial conditions, and it impressed her that he was not afraid of whites.

[...]

Several hours after her arrest she was bailed out of jail by NAACP activist E.D. Nixon, civil rights lawyer Clifford Durr and his activist wife, Virginia. That night they all gathered at Parks' home. Nixon asked if she would be willing to be the plaintiff in a test case against the bus segregation law. Although her husband feared that lending her name to the cause would get her killed, she said yes.

She had plenty of opportunity for forethought, but Parks said she never intended to get arrested.

Nor did she refuse to give up her seat because she was tired, as many in her legion of admirers told the story. She was not any more weary that day than usual.

"No," she said, "the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." The little girl of 10 who refused to take guff from a white boy had grown into a 42-year-old woman who couldn't see why she should stand up so a white person could sit down.

Can you find the sugarcoating? Woo included the rifle-bearing grandfather—and she told the story of the brick, with the subsequent warning about getting lynched. She included the (heroic) activism of Raymond Parks—and she too explicitly debunked the story of the tired feet, in the memorable way Parks herself had debunked it.

Did Americans newspapers “sanitize and sugarcoat” Parks at the time of her death? That is the claim that Blow passed on, live and direct from a rather doctrinaire professor who chose to toy with some basic facts to advance her own doctrinaire world-view.

Did Blow fact-check this professor’s claims? Right at the start of her book, Theoharis specifically criticizes the New York Times’ coverage at the time of Parks’ death, cherry-picking one tiny phrase to give a grossly misleading impression.

Did Blow check to see it his own newspaper sugarcoated Mrs. Parks’ remarkable life? If he did, he found an 1826-word front page report by E. R. Shipp, a Pulitzer Prize winner—and a black woman who was raised in Conyers, Georgia.

Did the New York Times sugarcoat/sanitize Parks? Like Sullivan and Woo, Shipp explicitly rejected the alleged mythology Blow and Theoharis have now bravely dared to discuss while pretending to be in the vanguard:

SHIPP (10/25/05): Over the years myth tended to obscure the truth about Mrs. Parks. One legend had it that she was a cleaning woman with bad feet who was too tired to drag herself to the rear of the bus. Another had it that she was a ''plant'' by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The truth, as she later explained, was that she was tired of being humiliated, of having to adapt to the byzantine rules, some codified as law and others passed on as tradition, that reinforced the position of blacks as something less than full human beings.

''She was fed up,'' said Elaine Steele, a longtime friend and executive director of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. ''She was in her 40's. She was not a child. There comes a point where you say, 'No, I'm a full citizen, too. This is not the way I should be treated.'''

In ''Stride Toward Freedom,'' Dr. King wrote, ''Actually no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, 'I can take it no longer.'''

Mrs. Parks was very active in the Montgomery N.A.A.C.P. chapter, and she and her husband, Raymond, a barber, had taken part in voter registration drives.

At the urging of an employer, Virginia Durr, Mrs. Parks had attended an interracial leadership conference at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., in the summer of 1955. There, she later said, she ''gained strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks but for all oppressed people.''

Did E.R. Shipp sugarcoat Mrs. Parks, who wanted to work for all oppressed people? Mrs. Parks’ defiant grandfather didn’t appear in the Times—and Shipp’s report failed to include Mrs. Parks’ own statement about being “tired of giving in.”

But Shipp, like the others, explicitly rejected the “myth” about Mrs. Parks’ fatigue. She added these pieces of sugar-coating as she described Parks’ refusal to stand:

“Her act of civil disobedience, what seems a simple gesture of defiance so many years later, was in fact a dangerous, even reckless move in 1950's Alabama...Blacks had been arrested, and even killed, for disobeying bus drivers.”

Presumably, Blow knows how to fact-check claims. That said, the implied claim he links to his slippery professor—the claim that Parks was “sanitized and sugarcoated” at the time of her death—is just monumentally bogus.

At this point, we’ve barely scraped the surface of the bunk involved in that claim. Tomorrow, we’ll look at more of the ways Mrs. Parks was described in 2005.

For today, we’ll close with yesterday’s question: Is there anyone who has earned the right to have the truth told about her life? To be treated with full respect, even by our leading journalists?

In some truly remarkable ways, Theoharis and Blow are toying with the memory of Mrs. Parks. In fairness, they tell a pleasing tale as they do—but the pleasing tale they tell is monumentally bogus.

Why do these people persist in this conduct? At the very least, can’t they stop the fictitious claims when it comes to a person like Parks?

Tomorrow: A debunking so widespread as to be almost hackneyed

Manifest insanity watch: The nature of our problem!

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2013

Stephanopoulos and (Matthew) Dowd, disturbed by Obama’s skeet-shooting: Last week, we noted the way the Washington post’s Glenn Kessler is turning into a partisan crank.

Three days later, he proved our point. He posted a ridiculous FactChecker piece about the president’s statement, in response to a direct question, that he often skeet-shoots at Camp David.

If you click, please note the ludicrous headline on the Kessler piece.

Kessler’s piece is almost insane. It’s a throwback to the bad old days, in which the press corps pretended to be deeply worried about such questions as these:

The press corps' greatest concerns:
Why would Candidate Gore wear a brown suit?
Did Naomi Wolf tell him to wear it?
If so, does that mean that Gore doesn't know who he is?
Why does his suit jacket have three buttons?
Why did Candidate Kerry go wind-surfing off Nantucket?
Why did Kerry get the wrong kind of cheese on his cheesesteak?
Why did Candidate Obama drink orange juice instead of just ordering beer?

Over the past twenty years, very few career liberals have been willing to note the insanity of such discussions. The nation, and the world, have paid a heavy price.

Last week, Kessler was playing the fool about the skeet-shooting “issue.” Also: About a photo the White house released, in response to a request for proof of Obama’s meaningless statement.

We strongly suggest that you read Kessler’s piece. Can you see that his work is insane?

Yesterday, the lunacy spread as George Stephanopoulos spoke with Matthews Dowd on ABC's This Week. As you peruse their exchange, please remember:

When Obama said that he often skeet-shoots, he was responding to a question from a journalist. When the White House released the photo which shows him skeet-shooting, it was responding to a request for such proof:

STEPHANOPOULOS (2/3/13): We're back with our roundtable right now. And, Matthew Dowd, I want to come to you, but as I come to you, I also want to put up the new salvo in the debate yesterday from President Obama.

You saw that picture they released of the president skeet-shooting at Camp David back in August, after he said it was something he does all the time up in Camp David. And David Plouffe, his former senior adviser, puts out a tweet saying, "Attention skeet-birthers, make our day. Let the Photoshop conspiracies begin."

Of course, they were answering the skepticism about whether President Obama was really a shooter. But was it smart to put out that photo?

DOWD: Well, I think they had to put out the photo. I think if you go back a few days, I don't think it was very smart for him to make that statement in the New Republic when he said, "I shoot skeet all the time up there," because, first of all, it wasn't going to change anybody's mind that's against him. It wasn't going to make anybody think, "Oh, wow, Barack Obama is this." It reminds me of what—

To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, which is, being a skeet-shooter, being a hunter is a lot like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you're probably not. Nobody is going to believe him because of that picture, and that picture I think just makes him look like he's pandering. And as Carly [Fiorina] said on the break, he is pandering in that.

And I think that's the problem with it, that it's sort of a distraction from the [gun] debate. I don't think they should have ever said it. Nobody believes that about the president.

Can you see that that entire exchange is basically insane? To wit:

It’s insane that anyone wasted their time discussing this manifest nonsense at all. That said, Dowd’s criticisms of Obama for 1) answering a question and 2) responding to a request make things even crazier.

Stephanopoulos played along with The Crazy. For decades, the career liberal world and the mainstream press have has refused to identify this for what it so plainly is.

One of many anecdotes about Rosa Parks!

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2013

A gentle spirit, forced to fuss: At the time of Rosa Parks’ death, many people offered anecdotes about her life and spirit. We’ll never get to them all unless we start doling them out.

One such story was told by the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a towering figure in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He told his story to the NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown, at the end of a segment recalling Mrs. Parks' life:

BROWN (10/25/05): Rev. Lowery, we just have a minute, but I wanted to ask you: Did she know how important she was?

LOWERY: Listen, it didn't bother her. It didn't faze her. She was totally undisturbed by it. Let me share this story quickly, that—

My youngest daughter married some 20-some years ago. Mrs. Parks gave her a $25 check for a wedding gift.

A year later, she ran into Mrs. Parks somewhere, and Mrs. Parks fussed at her. She said, “Daddy, you called her a gentle spirit but she wasn't gentle. She said to me, ‘Young lady, why don't you cash that check? I can't get my bank account straight!’ ”

And my daughter said to her, “Mrs. Parks, I will never cash that check. It's a treasure to me to have this from you.” Mrs. Parks didn't understand it because she didn't recognize her own place in history. And she left my daughter fussing, “Young lady, cash that check!”

That was the humility that hallmarked the life and ministry of Rosa Parks.

BROWN: All right, Rev. Joseph Lowery and Eleanor Holmes Norton, thank you both so much.

As a child, she also sat with her grandfather on the front porch, as he brandished his shotgun.

Presumably, each of these stories is true. That said, Rev. Lowery may not have fully understood Mrs. Parks, whose waters seemed to run very deep–so deep that she seemed to prefer not to have them discussed.

ROSA PARKS AT 100: Fiction and myth!

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2013

Part 1—Charles Blow keeps making things up: Rosa Parks died in October 2005 at the age of 92. She became the 31st person in American history to lie in state at the Capitol Building.

Today would have been her one hundredth birthday. In honor of the occasion, Charles Blow’s column in Saturday’s New York Times discussed a fascinating new book about her life.

Do we know all we should about Rosa Parks? As he began, Blow recommended this new book, just as we do—and he made a slightly odd statement:

BLOW (2/2/13): Rosa Parks, Revisited

Most of what you think you know about Rosa Parks may well be wrong.

On the verge of the 100th anniversary of her birth this Monday comes a fascinating new book, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” by Jeanne Theoharis, a Brooklyn College professor. It argues that the romanticized, children’s-book story of a meek seamstress with aching feet who just happened into history in a moment of uncalculated resistance is pure mythology.

Most of what we think we know about Rosa Parks may be wrong? Because the claim is so heavily nuanced, it’s almost certainly true.

But as he cointinued, Blow identified the belief, or alleged belief, he seems to have in mind. In the passage we have quoted, Blow challenges “the romanticized, children’s-book story of a meek seamstress with aching feet who just happened into history in a moment of uncalculated resistance.”

That account of Parks is wrong, Blow implies. He also suggests that Professor Theoharis’ new book about Parks lays this “pure mythology” to rest.

As he continues, Blow cites some aspects of Parks’ life with which many people may not be familiar. As he does, he suggests that there was nothing meek or mild about Rosa Parks.

When Parks was a child, her grandfather “often sat vigil on the porch with a rifle in case the Klan came,” Blow writes. Parks “sometimes sat with him because, as the book says she put it, ‘I wanted to see him kill a Ku Kluxer.’”

As he continues, Blow devotes four paragraphs to a story about an attempted sexual assault against Parks—a story whose provenance the professor obscures and Blow completely distorts.

Blow notes that Raymond Parks, Rosa Parks’ husband, was a (very brave) civil rights activist before he ever met his wife—and that he “sometimes carried a gun.” Blow notes that Mrs. Parks “spent nearly two decades before the bus incident struggling, organizing and agitating for civil rights, mostly as the secretary of the Montgomery, Ala., branch of the N.A.A.C.P.”

Some or all of that information may have been new to some readers. But soon, Blow returns to the “pure mythology” he cites at the start of his piece. In the passage which follows, he identifies a piece of “pure fiction” concerning the act which made Rosa Parks world famous:

BLOW: [Rosa] Parks explained that “I had felt for a long time, that if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, that I would refuse to do so.”

That day came on Dec. 1, 1955, when a bus driver asked her to get up so that a white man could sit. She refused. This was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. It was a political calculation informed by a life of activism. As Parks put it, “an opportunity was being given to me to do what I had asked of others.”

And the idea that she stayed seated because of physical fatigue is pure fiction.

“I didn’t tell anyone my feet were hurting,” the book quotes her as saying. “It was just popular, I suppose because they wanted to give some excuse other than the fact that I didn’t want to be pushed around.”

The book also lays out Parks’s leading role in the bus boycotts and her decades of activism after the civil rights movement.

Again, Blow insists that Parks was not “a meek seamstress with aching feet who just happened into history”—although, it should be said, there would be nothing wrong with being such a person.

In his column, Blow keeps suggesting that fiction and mythology surround our understanding of Mrs. Parks. As he nears the end of his column, he quotes Professor Theoharis, who identifies one source of this breakdown right at the start of her book:

BLOW (continuing directly): When Parks died in 2005, Theoharis says, “The Rosa Parks who surfaced in the deluge of public commentary was, in nearly every account, characterized as ‘quiet.’ ‘Humble,’ ‘dignified,’ and ‘soft-spoken,’ she was ‘not angry’ and ‘never raised her voice.’ ”

Parks, like many other Americans who over the years have angrily agitated for change in this country, had been sanitized and sugarcoated for easy consumption.

Where have we the (misled) people been getting our “fiction” about Rosa Parks? As Blow quotes an angry professor, we are told that “nearly every account” of Parks' life at the time of her death painted her as someone she wasn’t.

Blow implies that these accounts “sanitized and sugarcoated” Parks. Presumably, those presentations advanced the mythology Blow had cited—the idea that Parks was a meek, quiet seamstress with aching feet who just happened into history. The idea that she refused to get up from her seat because of fatigue, because her feet were tired.

Was Rosa Parks tired that day? Did her feet hurt? It ought to be said—those would have been excellent reasons not to surrender her seat. But Blow is certainly right on one score. As Parks explained all through her life, those weren’t the reasons why she refused to get up from her seat that day.

Did Parks resist because her feet ached? Almost surely, anyone with that impression is in the grip of a fiction.

But then, there are a lot of mythologies about Mrs. Parks, and Blow and Theoharis seem eager to create some new fictions. Indeed, some new myths are already spreading in the comments to Blow’s column, bogus claims concerning the motive for Parks' most famous act.

Without any question, Theoharis has written a fascinating book about Mrs. Parks, a book which deserves a close reading. That said, is there any American whose life has been such that she deserves a full measure of respect and devotion from our journalists—and from our professors, who can still, on the rare occasion, be quite doctrinaire?

If there is such a person, it’s Mrs. Parks, for reasons we’ll consider all week.

Are new myths being spread about Rosa Parks? Tomorrow, just for starters, we’ll address one part of Blow’s new column. We’ll show you what was actually said in American newspapers, and on American news programs, when Mrs. Parks died in October 2005.

We’ll contrast what was actually said at that time to the absurd account found at the start of Theoharis’ book. We’ll ask the question we’ve asked for fourteen years: Why do our journalistic and academic elites feel entitled to make shit up, even about Mrs. Parks?

Mrs. Parks died after a long and astonishing life. By almost all accounts from the people who knew her, her life was “rebellious” in certain ways, “quiet” in many others.

Except in works of myth and fiction, still waters can sometimes run very deep. “Quiet” people will sometimes produce the most powerful acts of rebellion.

Tomorrow: October 25, 2005: Here's what was actually said

Flying to Finland but stopping at France!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2013

Who the heck is E. D. Hirsch: We’ve always been puzzled by E. D. Hirsch, the well-known—

Well darn it, there we go again! Who the heck is E. D. Hirsch?

Kevin Drum does a post today about Hirsch’s latest education pronouncement, in which Hirsch says it’s good for a student to have a large vocabulary. Or something like that. (Yes, we’ve read the whole piece, at City Journal.)

As always, Hirsch’s somewhat fuzzy piece made us wonder who he is. We often get a “Being There” feel when we read pieces by Hirsch.

Who the heck is E. D. Hirsch? We journeyed to Wikipedia, where we found this account of the period when he started as head of the composition department at the University of Virginia:

WIKIPEDIA: Hirsch's work on composition led to a major shift in his career. During the late 1970s, while giving tests of relative readability at two colleges in Virginia, he discovered that while the relative readability of a text was an important factor in determining speed of uptake and comprehension, an even more important consideration was the reader's possession—or lack of—relevant background knowledge. Students at the University of Virginia were able to understand a passage on Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, while students at a Richmond community college struggled with the same passage, apparently because they lacked basic understanding of the American Civil War. This and related discoveries led Hirsch to formulate the concept of cultural literacy—the idea that reading comprehension requires not just formal decoding skills but also wide-ranging cultural background knowledge. He concluded that schools should not be neutral about what is taught but should teach a highly specific curriculum that would allow children to understand things writers tend to take for granted.

You’d think that passage came from The Onion, with its account of Hirsch’s key discovery—his discovery that readers who lack relevant background knowledge might have trouble understanding some particular text.

Just so you’ll know, Hirsch was roughly 50 years old when this breakthrough occurred.

Should we blame the oddness of that passage on Wikipedia? We’re not sure, but here’s the way the on-line encyclopedia describes Hirsch’s early days at Virginia:

WIKIPEDIA: In 1977 he published The Philosophy of Composition, an investigation into the question of what makes writing more or less readable. The key concept in the work is the concept of relative readability. Hirsch argues that readability must be assessed relative to the writer's "semantic intentions." One text is more readable than another if it conveys the same semantic intention (i.e., meaning) more succinctly and clearly, so as to demand less effort from the reader. The goal of composition instruction, according to Hirsch, is to find ways of conveying the same meaning more clearly, effectively, and efficiently.

If we’re reading that correctly, Hirsch decided a text is more readable than some other text if it’s easier to understand.

Although we’re often puzzled by Hirsch, this may be Wikipedia’s doing. But below, you see one part of Hirsch’s new piece, a passage Drum presented.

Hirsch says American schools should pattern themselves on something that happened in France a while back. We find this slightly puzzling:

HIRSCH (1/13): Nearly every child in France attends a free public preschool—an école maternelle—and some attend for three years, starting at age two. The preschools are academically oriented from the start. Each grade has a set curriculum and definite academic goals, and the teachers, selected from a pool of highly qualified applicants, have been carefully trained.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the French conducted an experiment with 2,000 students to determine whether sending children to preschool at age two was worth the public expense. The results were remarkable. After seven years of elementary school, disadvantaged students who had started preschool at age two had fully caught up with their more advantaged peers, while those who had started at three didn’t do quite as well, and those who had started at four trailed still further behind. A good preschool, it turned out, had highly egalitarian effects. A very early start, followed by systematic elementary schooling, can erase much of the achievement gap, though the payoff isn’t fully apparent until the later grades—a delayed effect that is to be expected, given the slowness and cumulativeness of word-learning.

Are we flying to Finland but stopping at France? We couldn’t help wondering: How “disadvantaged” were disadvantaged students in France in the 1970s? Reading this passage, a person is told that the French came up with a way to eliminate “the achievement gap.”

Plainly, that sounds like a great achievement. But how large was the gap the French were confronting? If we’re recommending an American application, this is a blindingly obvious question. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Hirsch.

We’re always puzzled by E. D. Hirsch. All through his piece at City Journal, we found ourselves puzzled again.

Timbuktu and our Serious People!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2013

David Brooks’ basket case: In this morning’s New York Times, David Brooks lays out the case for comprehensive immigrations reform.

The evidence all supports it, he says. He ends his column with a warning:

BROOKS (2/1/13): The first big point from all this is that given the likely gridlock on tax reform and fiscal reform, immigration reform is our best chance to increase America’s economic dynamism. We should normalize the illegals who are here, create a legal system for low-skill workers and bend the current reform proposals so they look more like the Canadian system, which tailors the immigrant intake to regional labor markets and favors high-skill workers.

The second big conclusion is that if we can’t pass a law this year, given the overwhelming strength of the evidence, then we really are a pathetic basket case of a nation.

Are we “a pathetic basket case of a nation?” Why does Brooks have to ask?

To see Brooks’ question answered, just skip over to Paul Krugman’s column, remembering the mess which occurred when he did Morning Joe this week.

Krugman writes a highly instructive column, a variant on the instructive column he’s now written dozens of times. He describes the way the western world’s Very Serious People insist on a certain set of economic nostrums.

He then walks us through the evidence. Those nostrums turn out to be junk.

Krugman has written this column again and again and again. It doesn't make any real difference. His demonstrations rarely affect the things said by Serious People—people like Mika and Joe.

Implicitly, his column describes us as “a pathetic basket case of a nation”—as a society whose elites refuse to react to real events in the real world.

This brings us today’s front-page report from Timbuktu, an ancient city which has recently suffered under the imposition of Shariah law.

Lydia Polgreen’s report is fascinating all the way through. Near the end, without intending to do so, she describes suffering Timbuktu as a version of our own nation.

She quotes local residents describing the way they suffered under the strictures of invaders. In what way does the conduct of these invaders differ from the conduct of the people Krugman keeps describing?

POLGREEN (2/1/13): Mr. Tandina said he tried to use his decades of Koranic education to argue with the Islamists, citing verses about respecting the burial places. They would not listen.

Before long, he said, amputations started. Then came the executions. Again he said he tried to intervene, going to the Islamic court with stacks of Islamic law books under his arm.

“Islam was whatever they said it was,” he said. “They did not respect the holy book. They respected nothing but their own desires.”

For hundreds of years, Timbuktu was one of the world’s most important centers of Islamic learning. The city has dozens of mosques, and it is famous for the ancient, handwritten manuscripts that city residents have collected for generations, preserving them against waves of invaders and creating a priceless trove of knowledge about the Islamic world and beyond. Many families have long traditions of Islamic learning, passed from father to son.

So many here bristled when the Islamists called the population to lecture them about the proper practice of the religion in which they had been raised.

“What they call Islam is not what we know is Islam,” said Dramane Cissé, the 78-year-old imam at one of the city’s biggest and oldest mosques. “They are arrogant bullies who use religion as a veil for their true desires.”

Be sure to read Polgreen’s full report. But in fact, Krugman has written that column dozens of times.

It doesn't matter what he says. As in Timbuktu, so here: The people in question aren't going to listen. They have their own desires.

BLANCO AND BALKANIZATION: A week in the life!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2013

Epilogue—Bye Bye Blanco: To state the obvious, we liberals can’t fix our nation’s polarization all by ourselves.

In our view, our current “basket case” status began with the creation of pseudo-conservative entities decades ago. For decades, these entities have broadcast disinformation and encouraged tribal loathing. This has lessened the chance that we can function as Richard Blanco’s “one country—all of us.”

(For part 1 in this award-winning series, go ahead—just click this.)

But we the liberals have increasingly aped the conduct of The Others. In our view, this depressing development is perhaps the biggest story in current political media.

We liberals enjoy our tribal hate too; we spread our own disinformation. This makes it harder to achieve Richard Blanco’s one country.

For today, let’s take a quick survey of four recent events which occurred under “our sky.”

MSNBC’s treatment of hecklergate: It’s a requirement of tribal culture—we must learn to hate The Others. So it went when MSNBC helped invent hecklergate.

The question: Did Neil Heslin get heckled this Monday as he testified at a hearing about gun safety? Heslin’s 6-year-old son, Jesse Heslin, was one of the children who were killed in the Sandy Hook massacre.

It isn’t clear whether Heslin, a plainly sensible person, thinks he was “heckled” at this public hearing in Hartford. On CNN, he said he thinks the response by some spectators was “disrespectful.”

But on Tuesday night, Lawrence was angrily telling us that Heslin had indeed been heckled. He teased the topic again and again, helping us fuel our righteous anger. He then redefined the word “heckling” when he finally played the full tape of the (very brief) incident.

For ourselves, we wouldn’t say that Heslin was “heckled,” although that's a matter of judgment. We don’t think this (very brief) incident was cause for outrage or comment. But on Monday afternoon’s Martin Bashir show, the tape of the incident was “edited” (doctored) in such a way as to eliminate Heslin’s direct questions to the audience—the direct questions which helped produce that brief set of responses.

After the doctored tape was played, tribal pundits began to stoke tribal fury. Perhaps without having seen the full tape, they made embarrassing statements, like the one which follows from Julian Epstein.

To watch the full Bashir segment, click this. Does Martin Bashir ever quit?

EPSTEIN (1/28/13): This I think has to be a new low in this debate, the idea that you would desecrate the memory of the victims of Newtown and insult their families. This I think shows just I think how extreme and outrageous the NRA—and I assume the hecklers were NRA moles—how they’ve become.

The NRA has relentlessly played the fool in the post-Newtown debate. But good God! Epstein was also playing the fool, telling us that the hecklers must have been “NRA moles.”

Was Heslin heckled that day? Did those who (briefly) responded to his questions insult him? Did they desecrate the memory of his son? We would say no to all those questions, although these are matters of judgment. But here’s what isn’t a matter of judgment: Once again, MSNBC had doctored a tape to fuel its viewers’ tribal fury. And Epstein played the fool in his ridiculous comments—just as pundits on Fox have done for these many years.

Bye Bye Blanco, the analysts said, after reviewing the relevant tapes-the full tape of the full exchange, along with Martin Bashir’s instant doctored version.

The demonization of Governor Haley: On Monday evening, Rachel Maddow helped us learn to hate Governor Jan Brewer more fully. She did so by giving us liberals a gong-show account of a rather unremarkable situation (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 1/30/13).

Two nights later, Maddow’s target was Nikki Haley, another Republican governor. In this instance, Maddow was troubled by the fact that Haley appointed Tim Scott to the Senate to replace Jim DeMint, who had resigned.

Haley had done this even though Scott plans to run for a full term in his own right. In the passage which follows, Maddow showered praise on Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, who has just appointed a temporary caretaker senator, and she slammed the unethical Haley.

But there she went again! Can you spot some basic facts this tribal hate merchant omitted?

MADDOW (1/30/13): Interestingly, this appointment to the U.S. Senate today is actually the second one that Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts has made as Massachusetts governor. When Senator Ted Kennedy died in office, the governor made a similar choice for the appointment to that seat when he chose, also like Mo Cowan, a trusted former staffer who had no designs on running for the seat himself.

And if you think about that, it's actually a pretty respectful way to handle the profoundly anti-democratic process of one person just getting to designate a person to be a U.S. senator because there is a vacancy. We don't generally [sic] do that for the House, right? But we do that for the Senate, which is a kind of grossly undemocratic thing about the U.S. Senate.

And when a governor is given this grossly undemocratic power to be the individual designator of who gets to hold a seat in the U.S. Senate, how that governor chooses to use that power says a lot about that governor in terms of his or her ethics. They can, as Deval Patrick did both times, they can appoint a real placeholder to neutrally caretake the seat until an election can be held, an election that is not going to be affected by whoever this neutral place holder is. That`s how Deval Patrick has now done this twice.

Or alternatively, a governor can choose someone to appoint to the U.S. Senate who actually intends to run to keep the spot, thereby just granting that person the power and advantage of incumbency for the U.S. Senate seat for any future race.

And that’s what South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley did when she got the profound undemocratic power to appoint someone to a Senate seat in her state. She picked Congressman Tim Scott, who intends to run to keep that seat.

One governor taking maximum advantage of her chance to put her individual thumb on the scale of democracy. And one governor refusing to do that, staying neutral before the will of the voters. This kind of thing is a test of political character, I’ve always thought. Just ask Rod Blagojevich, when he gets out of prison.

Maddow taught us to hate Haley more fully for her lack of ethics and political character. Haley was Goofus—and Patrick was Gallant!

But uh-oh! Speaking of ethics and character, Maddow forgot to tell us that Haley’s disgraceful conduct is quite common among governors of both major parties. As usual, we liberals were taught to hate The Other in the absence of obvious relevant facts.

Haley’s conduct is quite routine. One example: Just last month, the Democratic governor of Hawaii appointed his lieutenant governor, Brian Schatz, to the Senate when Daniel Inouye died. Like Senator Scott (R), Senator Schatz (D) has said that he plans to run for the seat in his own right.

At present, at least three Senate Democrats originally reached that body by appointment (Schatz, Gillibrand, Bennet). We count three Senate Republicans who got there by the same route (Murkowski, Heller, Scott). Whatever you think of the ethics involved, it’s very common to appoint people to the Senate who plan to pursue full terms.

Governors of both parties do this. Unless your hatred is being amped by tribal players like Maddow. Unless you're being dumbed down.

Our tribe’s occasional harsh reaction to the views of Those People: Blanco was dreaming in his poem. He pictured a world, under our sky, which plainly doesn’t exist:

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story
told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.

My face, your face, millions of faces in morning's mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day

[...]

All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day...

All of us equally vital—unless we hold the views of the other tribe. To wit:

On Monday, the New York Times published an op-ed column, Confessions of a Liberal Gun Owner. For our money, it wasn’t an especially helpful column, partly because the Times, in a typical cultural tic, published the thoughts of a gun-owning liberal novelist who now lives in Texas, though he hails from the northeast.

We found his piece a bit too writerly to be fully useful, but that’s neither here nor there.

The liberal writer, Justin Cronin, says he owns guns to protect his family, even though he understands the risks of gun ownership. He also says he thinks that guns “are woefully under-regulated” and that he “loathes the NRA.” That said, will anyone assume that Cronin invented the reaction he describes from his non-Texas friends?

CRONIN (1/28/13): Alas, the days of à la carte politics like mine seem over, if they ever even existed. The bigger culprit is the far right and the lunatic pronouncements of those like Rush Limbaugh. But in the weeks since Newtown, I’ve watched my Facebook feed, which is dominated by my coastal friends, fill up with anti-gun dispatches that seemed divorced from reality. I agree it would be nice if the world had exactly zero guns in it. But I don’t see that happening, and calling gun owners “a bunch of inbred rednecks” doesn’t do much to advance rational discussion.

Cronin blames Limbaugh more—for now, we still strongly agree—but notes the reaction from our own tribe. That said, our tribe is often prepared to describe The Other in such colorful ways—and surely, everyone knows this.

“All of us as vital as the one light we move through!” All of us except the inbred rednecks who don’t see things the way we do.

Our professors can spot the explicit racists: Bobby Jindal recently made a fairly obvious statement: “The first step in getting the voters to like us is to demonstrate that we like them.”

With that in mind, do we the liberals actually like them the American people? Do we even respect the American people? In the Washington Monthly’s current edition, Professor Cobb made the analysts cry with this remark straight outta Yale:

COBB (1/13): The heralded “Age of Obama” began with a sugar high of post-racialism, but four years later the number of whites subscribing to explicitly racist ideas about blacks had increased, not diminished. (Cobb's italics)

Presumably, Professor Cobb refers to this sad AP report, which actually says that the number of Americans subscribing to explicitly racist ideas about blacks had increased in the prior four years. “51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey,” the AP wrote.

Americans—“all of us!” The professor instead cited whites.

Whatever! But to the extent that it’s ever explained, the way the survey drew that conclusion seems to be an embarrassment. And by the way: As presented by the AP, the survey's topline data don’t show how many blacks or whites expressed such sentiments. We’ll guess that may be because many blacks are also “expressing explicit anti-black attitudes,” given the terms of this apparent pseudo-scientific gong-show.

But nothing stops us tribal liberals from reveling in such denigrations. To borrow from Dr. King’s shocked language about the Montgomery city commissioners: Even our professors teach us to hold and express these tribal views!

We agree with Justin Cronin; Rush Limbaugh is more at fault. But at present, we liberals are finally doing our part to extend the tribal chaos.

In his poem, Blanco pictured one day in the life. We have drawn from events of one week.

The beloved community can go fly a kite! We’re being trained to be tribal fools—and to be tribal haters.

The others have been in training much longer. But our tribe is catchin' on up.