Michael Bérubé - American Airspace

Snow advisory

On Sunday, Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page wrote a stirring defense of Tony Snow (free registration required), decisively routing the “liberal critics” who “flooded the Internet with evidence that Snow is, of all things, a conservative!”

Take it away, Mr. Page:

Snow is no refugee from the goofy wing of conservatism. In the 15 years I have known him professionally, he has impressed me repeatedly as a man of conscience who genuinely cares about solving the tough problems of poverty, bad schools and sour race relations.

Solving the tough problems of poverty, bad schools, and sour race relations. Sounds like a Compassionate Conservative®! But there’s more:

When he’s not trying to adopt the Rush Limbaugh/ Bill O’Reilly demagogue pose, he’s a guy who sheds more light than heat. His critics do themselves a disservice when they blur that distinction.

OK, it would’ve helped if Mr. Page had explained how many hours per day Tony Snow spends in not trying to adopt the Rush Limbaugh/ Bill O’Reilly demagogue pose, so that we could tell precisely when he’s shedding more light than heat. But there’s no question that liberal critics blur that distinction. Why, just the other day, the “weblogger” named “Digby” referred to heat as a form of “electromagnetic radiation,” while Jane Hamsher of “Firedoglake” insisted that light was a measure of the energy in a system. Let’s get physical, liberal critics! For once and for all, light and heat are not the same thing.

And now for the nut grafs:

I was particularly disappointed to find one of the controversial quotes that have come back to haunt Snow, since it was unfairly ripped out of context from one of my columns.

A Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee press release, for example, recounted the quote like this:

“In 1991, then-White House speechwriter Tony Snow defended former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, saying, `Duke is talking about things people really care about: high taxes, crummy schools, crime-ridden streets, welfare dependency, equal opportunity. A lot of politicians aren’t talking about these things.’”

Snow’s quote appeared in my Nov. 20, 1991, column and it was not in defense of Duke. Rather, Snow was trying to explain why the former Klansman had just won an estimated 55 percent of the white vote in the Louisiana governor’s race. Snow wanted me to know that, just as those of us who attended Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March were not acting out of black supremacy or anti-Semitism, neither were all Duke voters moved by racism.

“You can’t write off Duke’s voters as racists,” he said. “Duke is talking about things people really care about: high taxes, crummy schools, crime-ridden streets, welfare dependency, equal opportunity. A lot of politicians aren’t talking about these things.”

If mainstream politicians don’t listen to the frustrations of ordinary people and address them in some constructive way, Snow was saying, the loony extremists inevitably will move in.

All right, liberal critics, now let’s shed some electromagnetic radiation here, shall we? First of all, Tony Snow did not say, “Duke is talking about things people really care about: high taxes, crummy schools, crime-ridden streets, welfare dependency, equal opportunity. A lot of politicians aren’t talking about these things.” He said, “You can’t write off Duke’s voters as racists. Duke is talking about things people really care about: high taxes, crummy schools, crime-ridden streets, welfare dependency, equal opportunity. A lot of politicians aren’t talking about these things.” A little context sheds a lot of light. In the future, when you quote Snow, don’t omit the “You can’t write off Duke’s voters as racists”: it changes the entire meaning of the passage.

Second of all, you can see here that what Page said above is completely true: Tony Snow is a man of conscience who genuinely cares about solving the tough problems of poverty, bad schools and sour race relations. Look again at that list: David Duke was talking about high taxes, crummy schools, crime-ridden streets, welfare dependency, equal opportunity. A lot of you kids out there in Blog-o-land won’t remember this, but politicians in 1991 had never mentioned these things! Yes, all five are code words for black people, who crummy up our schools and crime-ride our streets with their welfare dependency, thus causing high taxes and eroding equal opportunity with their government-handout “affirmative action” programs. But until David Duke came along, no mainstream American politician had ever talked about crime or schools or affirmative action or welfare or taxes!

Which brings me to point number three. As is clear from the context, Tony Snow was not endorsing or justifying David Duke. He was simply explaining David Duke’s popular appeal. A lot of Duke’s voters came to Duke for the good schools and the safe streets, and simply stuck around for the white supremacy. It was important in 1991, after all, to explain the David Duke phenomenon to liberal elites who just “didn’t get it.” To understand the roots of Duke’s appeal to Southern voters, you have to look at the root causes of their grievances, which, as I noted in point two, had no other outlet. And because Tony Snow beat the September 10, 2001 deadline for looking into the root causes behind the rise of extremist political figures (by almost ten full years!), his remarks about Duke’s supporters imply no sympathy with Duke himself.

And that brings me to my final point: Tony Snow is eminently qualified to serve as White House press secretary not only because he is a man of conscience who genuinely cares about solving the tough problems of poverty, bad schools and sour race relations, but also because he can see the future. If you doubt it—or if you think, as an out-of-touch liberal elite critic who doesn’t understand physics, that this sensible blog has suddenly degenerated into trippy Fafblogisms—look again at Clarence Page’s “contextualization” of Snow’s remarks:

Snow was trying to explain why the former Klansman had just won an estimated 55 percent of the white vote in the Louisiana governor’s race. Snow wanted me to know that, just as those of us who attended Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March were not acting out of black supremacy or anti-Semitism, neither were all Duke voters moved by racism.

That’s right: back in the fall of 1991, when David Duke had just won 55 percent of the white vote in the Louisiana governor’s race, Tony Snow was able to compare David Duke’s white voters to black participants in a Farrakhan-led march that would not happen for another four years. That’s the kind of foresight and sagacity the White House needs now! Oh, how I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when Tony Snow turned and said to Clarence Page, “You can’t write off Duke’s voters as racists, Clarence. After all, four years from now, many of your people will take part in a march organized by a nutcase anti-Semite. And don’t even get me started on O. J. Simpson! It may be hard for you to see it now, but I have the very strong sense that something bad is going to happen with that man, and many white Americans are going to get extremely upset. David Duke is just proleptically channeling that future racial tension into a right-now campaign, and if mainstream politicians don’t listen to the frustrations of ordinary people and address them in some constructive way, the loony extremists inevitably will move in.”

Besides, you know what? Snow was right. The loony extremists did move in. That’s just what you get for not listening the first time, liberal critics.

Posted by on 05/02 at 12:06 PM

It never ceases to amaze me how much even FauxNews benefits from the incredible circle jerk that is our media establishment.

(capcha word: “longer")

Posted by on 05/02 at 01:34 PM
Dude, your perspicacity is astounding. It is always a pleasure to read you. Carry on smartly shipmate.

Posted by on 05/02 at 01:40 PM
I sure hope Tony, and Clarence (wasn’t that the name of a 1950’s clown?) can help me understand the obviously huge difference between Duke’s racism and racism at Duke??? It must be in the context, and therefore the thinking of white people in Lousiana in 1991 is substantively different than the thinking of some white boys at a university in North Carolina.

Posted by on 05/02 at 01:52 PM
spyder,

there is no racism at Duke; they do lotsa charity work in the community.

In a more vital vein:

Sesame Street should introduce the

“One of These Things is Substantively Different From the Others”

Posted by on 05/02 at 02:18 PM
So I guess Snow’s tagline should be:
I am not a demagogue, I just play one in public.

... Oh wait, Page says “when he’s not trying to adopt ...”, which construction he would use only if he thinks Snow trys and fails at it.

So I guess it is:
I am not a demagogue, I just play a half-assed one in public.
Now, I am thinking that a guy who has gotten pwned by the likes of Limbaugh and O’Reilly day-in, day-out over a period of years is in fact the perfect fit for spokesman for this administration.

(captcha word; “lot” - in an apt homophonic reference to another guy who genuinely cares about these very issues ... well once he gets his beachhouse rebuilt at someone else’s expense that is.)

Posted by on 05/02 at 02:29 PM
For you decadent fifth columnists in your coastal enclaves who don’t know about the World’s Greatest Newspaper, the Chicago Tribune is a distinctly Republican newspaper that appeals mostly to suburbanites in the collar counties. Clarence Page is the in-house liberal columnist.

After the Tribune runs a column from Garrison Keillor or Molly Ivins, you can count on seeing an angry letter or two from readers, wagging their metaphorical fingers and invoking the name of Colonel McCormick as they threaten to cancel their subscriptions over the Trib’s slide into Bush-bashing and liberalism.

There are never letters like that after a Clarence Page column. He’s almost Joe Kleinish.

Posted by DrDrang on 05/02 at 03:11 PM
Duke is talking about things people really care about: high taxes, crummy schools, crime-ridden streets, welfare dependency, equal opportunity.

When you point out that in making issues of these “things people really care about” Duke was trying to attract the votes of people who blame these “things” on folks whose skin pigment is browner than their own, you’re really blurring the light and heat. I wish you wouldn’t do that. Sometimes reading this blog is like walking into a dark kitchen where the oven is on—there’s like a faint glow and it’s warm, but you can’t see the source of the heat and trying to walk towards the heat in order to find the light gets you nowhere. It’s warm and fuzzy yet frustrating.

Posted by on 05/02 at 03:31 PM
Stay away from the light, Ed! Don’t go near the light!

Posted by Michael on 05/02 at 03:43 PM
WHITE light, WHITE heat.

Get it, Frenchy?

Posted by on 05/02 at 04:29 PM
And I guess Adolf wasn’t an Anti-Semite, racist demagogue either. He was only articulating the feelings of German voters upset by the loss of WWI, the Great Depression, the Reds, and the Jewish capitalists.

Page’s column is carried in the Baltimore Sun, and I usually like reading him, but when I read the column this morning, I went “huh?”

Funny post, Michael.

Posted by on 05/02 at 04:40 PM
WHITE light, WHITE heat.

Get it, Frenchy?

I don’t see how it could be any clearer.

Posted by on 05/02 at 04:42 PM
Dear Michael

I really like your blog, and read it often. I find your political musings humorous and trenchant, and your stories about your son touching and delightful. I wish, however, that you would use a different font. One with serifs, perhaps. You write long posts, and they are single-spaced, and they are in a small point size. For all these reasons, they are hard to read. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has a wonderful little publication, available on their website, dealing with things like readability of fonts and setting up topic headings. They’re writing about these things for lawyers writing appellate briefs, but the lessons there are instructive to all writers. Myself, in fonts, I like Book Antiqua. All the best.

Posted by on 05/02 at 05:28 PM
Wow - this is one of the last posts I would want to take issue with, but… I don’t understand the last criticism - what’s wrong with making a comparison between something that happened in 1991 and 1995? Following Lefty’s example, I would feel pretty comfortable saying (now or in 1991) that people shouldn’t vote for anti-semite, racist demagogues, because, after all, look what happened in Germany - but I wouldn’t expect to be accused of precience as to the tendencies of Louisiana politics…

Could someone set me straight on this? Otherwise I’d prefer to argue that the comparison was simply wrong on it’s merits without violating the space-time continuum…

Posted by on 05/02 at 05:30 PM
Wendy—In Firefox and Explorer, the point size of this blog is adjustable. Just click on “View” in the toolbar, and choose “text size” from the pulldown menu.

As for font choice: I find that some serify fonts, like Bodoni or Cheltenham, are actually less readable than this one. I’ve always been fond of Palatino and Melior, though.

Brian—there’s nothing wrong with making a comparison between something that happened in 1991 and 1995. But there’s everything wrong with pretending that Tony Snow could have compared the David Duke vote to the Million Man March in 1991, which is precisely what Page is doing here (hence my emphasis on the “just won” in “Snow was trying to explain why the former Klansman had just won an estimated 55 percent of the white vote in the Louisiana governor’s race"). Quite apart from the obvious fact—ignored by both Snow and Page, for whatever reasons—that voting for a governor and taking part in a march are vastly different kinds of political actions (the one implying that you would, indeed, like to be governed by the principles of the person or party you support, and the other implying no such thing), Tony Snow simply could not have adduced Farrakhan’s 1995 March as an analogy for David Duke’s Louisiana run in 1991. Whatever “black” David Duke parallel Snow was thinking of in 1991, the Million Man March wasn’t it.

Posted by Michael on 05/02 at 06:10 PM
Try reading that one more time, Brian. Page is saying that Snow told him in 1991 that Duke’s supporters were like Million Man marchers ...but the thing is, the Million Man march hadn’t happened yet. So Page just, you know, made that up…

Posted by on 05/02 at 06:11 PM
It’s good to see this “webbed log” branching out beyond literary criticsim and dangeral studies and into some hard science. I’d watch out though—that Myers kid might get upset about you invading his turf, and then come the squids.

As I understand it, heat is caused when light and other radiation hits atoms and excites their electrons. So, when Snow is emitting light, what he is really doing is causing sympathetic vibration in certain sections of the populace, and exciting them into producing heat of their own. Just like David Duke: His non-racist willingness to tackle the tough issues of crime-ridden streets and welfare dependency created heat in his equally non-racist base, who knew exactly what he stood for. For Duke, Snow, Page, and the people they work for, it is all light and heat, smoke and mirrors.

Posted by on 05/02 at 06:27 PM
Got it - the omission of the “Snow’s quote appeared...” sentance allowed my brain to edit for temporal paradox - kind of like when MS Word automatically capitalizes things you don’t want capitalized - I hate that…

Anyway, I still think arguing what he says is wrong on its merits (as made explicit in Michael’s comment to me) is better.

Just not funnier, I guess…

Posted by on 05/02 at 06:52 PM
Well, that’s the whole problem with this blog, Brian. Whenever it’s a choice between better and funnier, I go with funnier.

Thanks for helping us clear this one up.

Posted by on 05/02 at 07:02 PM
I gotta disagree with Tritone Substitution re: Michael’s perspicacity. Even I, who can’t remember the vacation I took last October, immediately seized upon the anachronism when I read the excerpt from Page’s column. “WTF?!” I asked myself, although I didn’t utter the initials; I said the words silently to meself. “Who the fuck edited that? How in the world did that get past numerous editors and into newspapers all across this land?”

Not one single editor remembered that the MMM happened in 1995? No one—not a solitary one—remembered the 10th anniversary news stories last fall?

I’m flabbergasted. I’m a reporter for a web publication, but I used to be a newspaper copy editor, and if I had run across a passage like that, I would have told my editor we need to find another column to put in that space. I don’t understand why my erstwhile colleagues in the dying newspaper industry don’t give a shit about the product they’re producing.

The industry deserves to die. Good riddance, ya morons. Hope you Guild guys aren’t really counting on having pensions!

Posted by on 05/02 at 08:49 PM
spyder, you may be thinking of Clarabell Hornblow, late of Doodyville. Not to be confused with Clarabelle Cow, a B-list Disney character.

Yes, it is odd that Page considers self-conscious, insincere race-baiting less offensive than authentic racism. That’s like saying it’s not murder if you use a knife instead of a gun.

However—when I read the time-travel paragraph, I took the Million Man reference as Page’s, not Snow’s. Not that there’s anything in the gummy, vague text to make it clear one way or the other.

Page’s defense of Snow is based entirely on their personal relationship, the fact that they go to the same cocktail parties and drop the same names. Reminds me of my high-school friend who was into SCA. One of his Ren Faire pals was a flaming perv, creepiness levels measurable via both heat flux and light level sensors. My friend insisted we were wrong, we were misjudging a shy and misunderstood soul, right up until Mr. Creepy was discovered hiding in a confessional at Ss. Cyril and Methodius during First Communion practice, clutching the exposed and rampant Li’l Creepy.

Fun fact: C. Hornblower was played by Bob Keeshan, aka “Captain Kangaroo,” aka “Worst Non-Porn Mustache, pre-John Bolton Division.”

Oh—I call dibs on rights to “Pimp My Crime-Ride!”

captcha: western—Yee-haw!

Posted by on 05/02 at 08:59 PM
I know this is completely off topic but didn’t Tony Snow introduce Linda Tripp to Lucianne Goldberg, and so on and so on. I’m just saying…

Posted by on 05/02 at 09:55 PM
Because snow is a white substance, it does not shed light but refract it.

Refract, v.
1. To deflect (light, for example) from a straight path by refraction.
2. To alter by viewing through a medium

Furthermore, snow is an insulator, which is to say, which is to say it will trap air which can be warmed by something (steaming piles of B.S., say) radiating beneath it.

So, I suppose we can conclude from this that Mr Snow will deflect light (not shed it) such that our view of reality is altered, and he will also remain full of hot air.

Captcha: been. As in, been drinking.

Posted by D.B. on 05/03 at 02:58 AM
When I sober up in the morning, I’m going to wish it was possible to edit comments. Alas.

Captcha: zipper. As in, zipper it til you’re sober.

Posted by on 05/03 at 03:00 AM
Captcha: needed. As in, last night a half a bottle-a Jack needed drinkin’.

Posted by black dog barking on 05/03 at 09:38 AM
The Snow/Page assertion that Duke received 55-60% of the white vote in the 1990 Louisiana Senate race due to enduring white racism is something that ought to be susceptible to verification, either way. Might there have been some other reason for it? For example, contra Michael, sometimes a vote does not imply that you would “like to be governed by the principles of the person or party you support,” but rather that you do not want to be so governed by the other guy. I can imagine voting against Duke for precisely that reason, regardless of his opponent.

In fact, his opponent was an incumbent Democrat, J. Bennett Johnston, who had won by a crushing margin (85%) in his previous election, and by all accounts was a moderate-to-conservative politician who had delivered no small amount of federal dollars to Louisiana. Weighed against this were the effects of the ongoing recession, which appear to have hit Louisiana industries particularly hard. On balance, though, there is no reason to believe that Duke’s high vote totals were the result of general disaffection with the incumbent.

Louisiana voters could hardly claim ignorance at the time, either. Duke’s background was well publicized, leading several Republican politicians - both local and federal - to publicly endorse Johnston (imagine this happening today).

In other words, a superficial examination of the facts seems to justify the conclusion that Duke’s share of the white vote was earned by his white supremacist roots, not in spite of them. That these were filtered, as well as could be managed, though codephrases like “welfare dependency,” which might otherwise have merit as issues on their own, only slightly alleviates this.

Snow’s job as a journalist should have been to illuminate all of that, instead of contributing to the, well, Snow job. And that should suffiiciently illustrate his qualifications for his current position.

On the other hand, although the phrasing is certainly clumsy in Page’s column, I too see nothing formally wrong with the 1991/1995 comparison. As written, it does imply that Snow at the time was comparing Duke’s election with Farrakhan’s MMM, but a decent editor could have (should have) fixed this.

Posted by on 05/03 at 09:51 AM
Thanks, M, for injecting some sober commentary amidst all these hard-drinkin’ readers. But I have two quibbles, even as I endorse (and therefore would like to be governed by) your final three paragraphs. One, while you’re right that one sometimes votes for candidate A simply to keep candidate B’s paws off the levers of state power (I believe I did this in 2000 and 2004, myself), the point remains that comparing elections and marches is like comparing apples and chainsaws. Though Farrakhan is indeed a nutcase anti-Semite, the 400,000 participants in the MMM were not thereby anti-Semitic by association, any more than marchers in antiwar rallies convened by ANSWER in 2001-02 became Stalinoid drones like the people of the Workers World Party. Whereas the people who voted for David Duke were, in fact, voting for David Duke. Which brings me to thing two. Duke’s opponent was Bennett Johnson in the 1990 Senate race, and Edwin Edwards in the 1991 governor’s race. Edwards was widely known to be a master of graft in the rich Louisiana tradition, but Duke appeared to be such a threat to the state—and to the legitimacy of the GOP—that (as you say) many conservatives crossed party lines to “vote for the crook,” as a popular bumper sticker put it. Edwards won 61-39.

All of which is to say, Snow was full of it in seven different ways. And Page shouldn’t be cutting him even a teeny bit of slack today.

Captcha: “opened,” as in it’s only morning but I’ve already opened the day’s first bottle of absinthe.

Posted by Michael on 05/03 at 10:24 AM
”...the point remains that comparing elections and marches is like comparing apples and chainsaws.”

Fair point. And thanks for the gentle reminder that the election in question was the 1991 governor’s race, not the 1990 Senate race. The Senate race was the closer of the two, although Duke won 55-60% of the white vote in both cases.

Posted by on 05/03 at 11:48 AM
you are right about one thing: the topics Snow credits Duke with talking about are all coded appeals to racism (with the possible exception of high taxes which may appeal to other baser instincts). So what does that say about Snow? To me it says he is either incredibly dense, totally insensitive, an apologist for racists or, at the risk of redundancy, a typical republican hack habitually employing the southern strategy at every opportunity.

Posted by on 05/03 at 12:57 PM
1) The font, the general design of the site, and the length of the posts are all web-smacking good, in my opinion, and people have paid me to opine about such things.

2) You know how we have Zeno’s Paradoxes, Planck’s Constant, and Godwin’s Law? Many people don’t know this, but we also have <font size="+1">Bérubé’s Trope</font>

Posted by on 05/03 at 03:42 PM
(IGNORE OR DELETE THE ABOVE. THAT WAS A CASE OF MURPHY’S LAW.—AF)

1) The font, the general design of the site, and the length of the posts are all web-smacking good, in my opinion, and people have paid me to opine about such things.

2) You know how we have Zeno’s Paradoxes, Planck’s Constant, and Godwin’s Law? Many people don’t know this, but we also have Bérubé’s Trope.

A trope is “a figure of speech which consists in the use of a word or phrase in a sense other than that which is proper to it.” Bérubé’s Trope is “a figure of speech which consists in the use of a captcha word or phrase in a manner other than that which is proper to it, i.e., as an ironic or prescient blog comment commentary rather than as a security device; a comment meta-comment.”

Captcha word: “field,” as in, “I’d comment on the difference or lack therof between heat and light, but that’s really not my field.”

Posted by on 05/03 at 03:59 PM
"thereof.” Godwin dammit.

Captcha word “these,” as in, “One of these days I’d like to see an Arbitrary But Fun Friday in which the commenters are asked to post nothing but comments on the captcha word just like these.”

Posted by on 05/03 at 04:02 PM
Tahnks, tanhks, and thanks, Amanda! Especially for that last suggestion. What a labor-savin’ Arbitrary But Fun Friday that would be—just right for a guy who’s reading graduate seminar papers during his non-blogging waking hours!

Posted by on 05/03 at 04:39 PM
vetiver While i did think of those two clowns and the horror that was Buffalo Bob, especially when thinking about Page and Snow (and virginal interns and Senate pages), i was remembering a Clarence the Clown (made more famous as the face on the bag toss carny game of recent vintages) that was one of the three bullies who regularly assaulted the fine Emmett Kelly in the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus (Bailey being a familial forebearer/cousin and thus i got to see those shows way too much in my youth). Decades later, whilst living in the greater Lake Tahoe region, a local casino enterprise owned the Emmett Kelly collection and museum bringing up all sorts of memories and phobias.

Posted by on 05/03 at 04:54 PM
"Whereas the people who voted for David Duke were, in fact, voting for David Duke.”
MB

But what do you say when, as seems likely, a few days from now, millions of British voters--people who have all their lives steadfastly voted Labor, as did their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents--cast their votes for the BNP in England’s local elections? Will it suffice simply to call them “racist” and leave the analysis at that? If not, why does it suffice for Duke voters, most of whom make much less money than you or me and face serious real-life problems that factored into the decision to vote for that thug? I’m afraid that the Left is stuck in neutral precisely because its supposedly most fervent advocates are chiefly concerned with basking in their own sense of moral perfection, to which program the eternal demonization of some rednecks who pulled the wrong lever once or twice in Louisianna contributes mightily.

NL

Posted by on 05/03 at 06:06 PM
Man! That is just a great post. Nothing to add.

Posted by Chris on 05/03 at 07:57 PM
So, Norman Levitt, are you agreeing that Duke enjoyed strong support amongst white Lousianans because they thought he could solve their real-life problems? And the reason The Left is “stuck in neutral” is because, rather than spend our time facing real-life problems such as poverty, education, and the Iraqatastrophe, we are instead basking in the light (or is it heat?) of a smug sense of moral perfection? That’s seriously what you’re saying? What does David Duke have to offer besides an appeal to racist instincts? What makes Page’s apologia for Snow’s apologia for Duke so despicable is the attempt to say that the reasons so many white voters supported him are unknowable, when in fact they are fairly obvious—while there are no doubt a few sad, deluded individuals who were totally on board with Duke’s well-thought-out plan to rearrange marginal tax rates in order to stimulate the economy, the rotten core of his support is racism. To pretend otherwise is absurd, insulting, and an excellent qualification for a White House press secretary.

Posted by on 05/03 at 08:19 PM
Holy shit can that Michael lay down a rejoinder or what?

Posted by on 05/03 at 08:42 PM
Amid rampant speculation, it is rumored that Fox News and the Bush administration will be collaborating on a new program direct from the White House. An unnamed Fox source has confirmed the speculation and has provided some further information to Thought Theater. Bucking the trend towards reality based programming; the show is expected to be loosely based upon the selective facts surrounding the internal workings of the President and his policy operatives. The source went on to say that the program will have a superficial talk show - game show format where reporters will be allowed to ask questions and then each member of the White House Press Corp will use a hand-held device to vote on whether they believe the answers that are provided by Tony. Once the question and answer session is completed, the reporter with the most correct votes will enter a soundproof booth with Helen Thomas.

Helen will be wired with a microphone. Tony will then turn on Helen’s mic and allow her to ask a question. Once the question has been asked, the Press Corp votes again on whether the question should be allowed or whether the winning reporter in the sound booth should bitch slap Helen and end her questioning. The unnamed source, when pressed, refused to acknowledge that the tabulation system had been provided by Diebold. At that point Brit Hume’s voice was overheard in the background calling for security. The phone then went silent. Efforts to contact (Juan) the source have since failed.

read more observations here:

http://www.thoughttheater.com

Posted by Daniel DiRito on 05/03 at 08:55 PM
"So, Norman Levitt, are you agreeing that Duke enjoyed strong support amongst white Lousianans because they thought he could solve their real-life problems? And the reason The Left is “stuck in neutral” is because, rather than spend our time facing real-life problems such as poverty, education, and the Iraqatastrophe, we are instead basking in the light (or is it heat?) of a smug sense of moral perfection? That’s seriously what you’re saying? What does David Duke have to offer besides an appeal to racist instincts? What makes Page’s apologia for Snow’s apologia for Duke so despicable is the attempt to say that the reasons so many white voters supported him are unknowable, when in fact they are fairly obvious—while there are no doubt a few sad, deluded individuals who were totally on board with Duke’s well-thought-out plan to rearrange marginal tax rates in order to stimulate the economy, the rotten core of his support is racism. To pretend otherwise is absurd, insulting, and an excellent qualification for a White House press secretary.”

This is very confused. The question at hand is not about Duke, nor even about Snow, but about people who voted for Duke and, more broadly, Le Pen in France and (presumptively) the BNP in England. Let’s take it as read that Duke and Snow are filth, who should die quickly of some loathesome disease, their remains to be cast upon a dungheap, and that they should take some of their best friend with them. So much for that.

No, the question is about the attitude of some would be left intlellectuals toward the folks who vote in considerable numbers for such creatures as Duke and Le Pen and, alas, the BNP. It is obvious that racism in some form is a significant part of what motivates them, but it is shallow intellectually to limit one’s analysis to this truism, and it is politically suicidal to decide that, having diagnosed them as racists, we can simply assume that they will never have a place in the constituency of the left. In case you hadn’t noticed, human motivations are tangled and rarely consistent. I daresay that the average Duke voter, explaining himself to someone he trusts, would probably not come out with a simple “I hate niggers who don’t know their place.” Rather, like pretty much any voter surfing on a tide of resentment, he would probably recite a litany of deprivations and injustices, involving anything from property taxes to the disappearance of big-mouth bass from the local lake. There would probably be a suggestion that his sorrows are do the machinations of greedy outsiders of some kind (banks, corporations are just as likely to be named as liberals and Jews) who manipulate and bribe the local blacks with money and privileges that come at the expense of the local whites. There would probably also be an intimation that this is really a protest vote aimed at the moral bankruptcy of the established parties, rather than a whole-hearted show of support for the rogue candidate, even though he at least seems willing to pay attention to the voter’s concerns.

Mutatis mutandis, that’s what you get from Le Pen voters and, lately, from the hard-core Labor voters who seem to want to vote for the BNP in council elections this time around. I think it’s safe to say that the 40% of Palestinian voters who went with Hamas a couple of months ago were thinking along similar lines. And, as long as the Million Man March was mentioned, it’s far from clear that the average participant is any more immune from nasty racial chauvinism than the average Duke voter. It may be so, but this would have to be carefully argued, not merely asserted.

If you’re simply going to consign these various large constituencies to the ranks of the depraved, you’re hardly likely to get anywhere politically. AS I say, it seems like a self-defeating exercise in coddling one’s own sense of moral excellence. The funny thing is that if Snow’s remark had been made by a left-wing sociologist (many of whom have said pretty much the same thing) it would hardly have drawn much protest on the left--merely a few sage nods about “false consciousness”. Of course, Snow’s motives for making the remark were most likely quite different from the hyposthetical sociologist’s, but the statement, taken purely on its own, is not that vicious or crazy, and hardly the best stick with which to beat Snow and his fellow assholes.

NL

Posted by on 05/03 at 09:37 PM
I carry no brief for Tony Snow. He is an especially slick partisan hack and I hate him.

Nevertheless, I think he has a point. I’m old enough to remember when crime was a huge issue and saw how overburdened the City University System of New York was by students who were blatantly unqualified to be there and how the liberal/lefts response to anyone, not just David Duke, who questioned the status quo was automatically declared racists. That’s exactly what happened to Patrick Moynihan when he pointed with alarm to all the young black men growing up without fathers. Democrats who challenged the received wisdom were visciously (and, even worse, unintelligently) attacked. It was lefties who tried to stifle open campus debate with speech codes. Now a lot of lefties are kicking because Bush won’t let dissenters attend his public appearances. Guys like David Duke stepped into the vacuum lefties helped create.

The fact is, the republicans took over in the 1990s because we let them by being such a bunch of abusive sanctimonious fatheads.

Remember it was lefty postmodernists who were the first ones in decades to promote the idea that objective reality just so much boosh-wah. Our side had a huge hand in creating the current political mess. We gave the Rush Limbaughs all the credibility they would need.

Posted by Hieronymus Braintree on 05/03 at 09:41 PM
"Remember it was lefty postmodernists who were the first ones in decades to promote the idea that objective reality just so much boosh-wah. Our side had a huge hand in creating the current political mess”

See:

http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=qbs2spqnm1dqtcqd674hrvq4x2kksg7h

NL

Posted by on 05/03 at 10:43 PM
In the original context of the light/heat dichotomy light was bad; heat was good. To wit:

“These blazes, daughter, giving more light than heat, extinct in both, even in their promise, as is a making, you must not take for fire.”

Polonius’s warning: ignore the pretty words, he just wants to screw you.

Snow is no Hamlet, Page, no Polonius; still
‘ignore the pretty words, he just wants to screw you’ seems apropo.

I remember the bumper sticker that read “vote fot the crook, its important!”, but what I most remember about it was that it struck a nerve, a deep fear and concern, that many voters would be turned off by both candidates and stay home on election day, which would work in Duke’s favor. It was ugly politics that almost worked.

Captcha: island

Posted by on 05/04 at 12:55 AM
Thanks for the link, Norm.

Speaking of Moynihan (whom I loved, though the new Penn/Moynihan Station has got to be one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard), he once made a pithy observation by comparing 1990s PC liberals to the Catholic Church and its response to the Reformation. To wit: “Keep excomunicating people and the next thing you know, you’re surrounded by Protestants.”

It worked. We’re surrounded by Protestants.

Posted by Hieronymus Braintree on 05/04 at 01:17 AM
Good points. I know of one study that proves the 1994 midterm elections—and the GOP takeover of Congress—were the direct result of swing voters being disgusted and horrified by Andrew Ross’s book, Strange Weather.

Posted by on 05/04 at 08:47 AM
That’s exactly what happened to Patrick Moynihan

Yes, I admit that I recall with shame the day back in 1990 when we lefties purged Daniel Patrick Moynihan from the Democratic Party because of our insufferable smugness over racial issues. Because we do think expressing concern over the perceived plight of black families is exactly like David Duke.

And when President Johnson presciently noted that the Democratic Party had just lost the South for a generation, he was of course speaking of perfectly understandable reaction of many Southerners to the heavy economic burden imposed on the lower and middle classes by passage of the Civil Rights Act. To suggest that racism had anything to do with it is over-the-top leftist smugness.

Oh, and presidential nominee Ronald Reagan kicking off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi with an appeal to “states’ rights”? Only the most deranged moonbat would find any racist signals in that.

So please forgive us, O enthusiastic defenders of all those ordinary people, white and black, who voted for David Duke because of his brilliant speechmaking and his dynamic plan to restore a favorable balance of trade with Latin America. We get so hung up on the fact that they were voting for an unrepentant “white nationalist,” as if somehow racism were still a problem in this country, even in the South. How ridiculous to suggest that a substantial portion of that 39% in the Louisiana gubernatorial races were motivated by racism, unconscious or not, and not by never-before-mentioned issues of “bad schools.” I mean, when is the last time you heard a politician talk about schools? And that’s what makes Mr. Snow’s commentary so trenchant.

Posted by on 05/04 at 08:58 AM
“Keep excomunicating people and the next thing you know, you’re surrounded by Protestants.”

Brilliant bit of wit, but… mightn’t a Catholic feel that the failure to hold to certain principles would prevent one from being an actual Catholic? So, you’re surrounded by Protestants either way. The proper extrapolation for contemporary leftist politics, then, would be either “Why fight it?” or “If you can’t beat the racist demagogues, join the racist demagogues.”

Posted by on 05/04 at 09:57 AM
HERCULES! HERCULES!

Posted by on 05/04 at 10:17 AM
no refugee from the goofy wing of conservatism

I guess that makes him a proud permanent resident.

Posted by on 05/04 at 11:38 AM
I think Norman Levitt is simply making the entirely valid point that moralizing condemnations are not enough to defeat racist politicians; to do that, we must have good sociological analyses of what attracts voters to racist candidates and parties.

Whether or not what Tony Snow said about Duke voters is good sociology, that’s a whole ‘nother question, as we say down here in Baton Rouge. As is the “lefty postmodernists” business. But NL’s main point is, I think, perfectly well-founded.

Posted by on 05/04 at 02:32 PM
"It is obvious that racism in some form is a significant part of what motivates them, but it is shallow intellectually to limit one’s analysis to this truism, and it is politically suicidal to decide that, having diagnosed them as racists, we can simply assume that they will never have a place in the constituency of the left. In case you hadn’t noticed, human motivations are tangled and rarely consistent. I daresay that the average Duke voter, explaining himself to someone he trusts, would probably not come out with a simple “I hate niggers who don’t know their place.””

“Intellectually shallow,” perhaps, but accurate. If the average Duke voter were to explain himself in some other fashion, it would only be because it is no longer socially acceptable to do so. Thus the need for codephrases, for sublimating the basic impulse beneath more complex “motivations.”

Anecdotal evidence may not be evidence, but I know no small number of native white Southerners who, whatever their other personality traits, harbor a deeply ingrained hostility toward African-Americans as a group. Otherwise wonderful people, when confronted with racial miscegenation, for example, suddenly transform into evil, hateful characters one otherwise only encounters in made-for-TV dramas. It’s an astonishingly specific response as well - Asians don’t elicit the same responses. The generations that knew and approved of racial segregation are not yet extinct, and their legacy not yet purged from the collective racial memory.

As for political alliances, of course racism has its place on “The Left,” as it always has. Surely we are all cognizant of the longstanding conflation of Labor and anti-immigrationism, usually intertwined with simple racism. David Duke’s message would have been nearly as easily twisted to conform to a leftist perspective as a right-wing one, give or take the right codephrases.

Posted by on 05/04 at 03:40 PM

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