Tuesday Mashup (8/25/09)

(And I also posted here.)

In an otherwise commendable New York Times Magazine on Sunday focusing on issues pertaining to women’s rights, Virginia Heffernan tells us here of “feminist hawks” such as David Horowitz and the right-wing site Little Green Footballs (I was wondering what Horowitz was up to, since I haven’t heard him screech about “liberal bias” on college campuses for a little while now, as noted here).

Heffernan tells us the following…

Horowitz may not be an obvious feminist, but as someone who has dedicated his life to political media (producing or contributing to magazines, books, political ads, cable news, talk radio, blogs, video podcasts, even a pamphlet), he’s adroit at adapting ideologies for media platforms. Right now, this one is working for him.

Like many conservatives, Horowitz appears to have come to feminist-hawkism after 9/11. But in his hands, the ideology has fast became a tenacious memebrid — as Tim Hwang, a sociologist and the director of the Web Ecology Project, calls memes that unite two or more cultural phenomena.

“The neat marriage of hawkish tendencies and feminist framing of issues does this quite effectively,” Hwang explained to me in an e-mail message. Borrowing left-wing shibboleths is one way that “conservative ideas can make it big in a generally more liberal online social sphere,” he wrote. Furthermore, to depict Islamic regimes less as terrorists than as repressors of civil liberties may appeal even to traditional isolationists, as it “plays off of the strong communities of libertarians that dominate some prominent spaces.”

As Katha Pollitt of The Nation notes here…

"The Islamofascist Awareness people aren't interested in what's actually going on in the Muslim world," Columbia anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod told me by phone. "They just use the woman question as an easy way to target Muslims." Abu-Lughod reminded me, for example, that genital mutilation is basically a regional African custom that has acquired religious overtones--most Muslim societies don't practice it, and many non-Muslims do. She also pointed out that this semester, contrary to Horowitz's claims, women's studies is offering or cross-listing no fewer than three courses about women in the Muslim world, none of which paints a rosy picture.

The oppression of women in the Muslim world is a major theme among the Islamofascistly aware. And here the story gets a bit tricky. An awful lot of those associated with the Week are antifeminist conservatives--I mean, come on--Rick Santorum? Ann Coulter? Sean Hannity? These are people who've made careers out of attacking the mildest updates on American women's roles, whether it's working mothers, birth control or even, in the case of Coulter, the right to vote! In the zillions of words for which Horowitz is responsible--as writer, activist, speechifier and editor of Frontpagemag.com--there is virtually no evidence of concern for the rights, liberties, opportunities or well-being of any women on earth, except for Muslims. Leaving aside the industrialized West for a moment, it's not as if life is a picnic for women in China, India, Africa, Latin America. Why no interest in them?

And including Little Green Footballs as a site that promotes feminism is laughable when you consider this.

But Heffernan’s piece truly descends into absurdity here…

As a fan of intensely specific forms of communication — blogs, memoirs, reality TV — I don’t believe that any idea exists apart from its mode of dissemination. But I also know that ideas that seem especially big and irresistible are usually so elegantly integrated with particular communication technologies that it’s hard to conceive of them separately. Could Rush Limbaugh’s patriotic anti-elitism have coalesced anywhere but on AM radio? Could “family values” have emerged without Christian TV?

There is nothing "patriotic" about Flush Limbore – to get an idea of his “patriotism,” click here and read some of the linked content (keep an antacid handy, along with some Ibuprofen).

And given the way Flush feels about the Times in particular, I would say that Heffernan is displaying a textbook case of “Stockholm Syndrome.”

Today’s dreck by Bret Stephens of the Murdoch Street Journal here brings us a disgusting attempt at equivalency between the outing of Valerie Plame and the well-deserved move by Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate interrogators who, as noted here “threatened to kill the children and sexually assault the mother of a key terror suspect,” among other likely violations.

Didn’t we used to work up some measure of outrage against countries that perpetrated this kind of stuff? Or is that “so pre-9/11” of me?

Also, am I the only one who is a little amused by how our right-wing media-industrial complex now basically admits that Plame was victimized by our former ruling cabal, doing so only because, as the Washington Post tells us here…

The Justice Department recently questioned military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay about whether photographs of CIA personnel, including covert officers, were unlawfully provided to detainees charged with organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

…

Investigators are looking into allegations that laws protecting classified information were breached when three lawyers showed their clients the photographs, the sources said. The lawyers were apparently attempting to identify CIA officers and contractors involved in the agency's interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects in facilities outside the United States, where the agency employed harsh techniques.

…

…government investigators are now looking into whether the defense team went too far by allegedly showing the detainees the photos of CIA officers, in some cases surreptitiously taken outside their homes.

To me, this is a story about a bunch of allegations. Yes, the allegations are awful, but the only thing we know for sure is that photos were taken by “The John Adams Project” (probably of “CIA personnel, including covert officers,” but the story leaves that in question even if the headline does not – ugh…”Journamalism” at its finest, as Atrios would say).

And that of course gives Stephens (taking his cue from Drudge/Malkin) the opportunity to wax indignant about photos taken of CIA personnel outside their homes, when we don’t know for sure at the moment whether or not that actually happened (and it’s not like Malkin and co. have such a reliable track record on this stuff either).

However, I wanted to focus on something else that Stephens alleges here that ticked me off (in the event that all of these suppositions turn into facts)…

In that case, more CIA agents will be gunned down—and the John Adamses of our day will have given demonstrably material support to terrorists.

Stephens apparently needs to be reminded that John Adams, in addition to being our second president, was a patriot. Along with every other signer of the Declaration of Independence, he pledged his “life, fortune, and sacred honor” on behalf of our country. When has Stephens ever done that, or would he ever (and I can only imagine the guts it took to defend the British soldiers who fired upon unarmed civilians in The Boston Massacre, but he did it and won acquittals for four of the six...the other two who fired on the crowd were convicted of manslaughter).

Perhaps, though, Stephens could find a bit of a kindred spirit in the John Adams who, as president, passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, whereby criticism of the federal government could be punished by 2-5 years in prison and the president was “allowed...to deport any foreigner that he thought was dangerous to the country,” as Wikipedia tells us (I’ll admit that our nation was a lot more fragile then than it was now, but bad precedent is bad precedent no matter how you slice it).

And I had to laugh when I read the following from Stephens…

Consistency, principled or foolish, has never been a hobgoblin of the liberal mind.

This 2006 column from Stephens tells us that Plame was “an anti-Bush partisan,” but that is omitted in his column today, where he describes Plame correctly as “a covert CIA operative whose cover was blown by a vindictive Bush administration out to ruin its critics.”

And Stephens is lecturing us on consistency?

Finally, I bring you “The Pericles of Petticoat Junction,” as James Wolcott referred to V.D. Hanson (here), who tells us the following (more liberal bashing, of course, and again referencing the Holder investigation)…

Scotland, I think, assumed that the new administration was more therapeutic than in the past, and would not object too much to its release of a terrorist murderer, given that we are loudly pursuing our own interrogators rather than more terrorists — and mostly for reasons of partisan expediency. In the wake of the Bush success in stopping another 9/11, and breaking up numerous plots aimed at mass murder in the U.S., it was Eric Holder, after all, who once proclaimed to CNN that the Geneva accords did not apply to Guantanamo.*

Let’s put aside for a moment the laughable notion that Magistrate Kenny MacAskill gave any consideration to our domestic politics when deciding to release Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi for the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, as noted here (and yes, I think Al Megrahi should have been left to rot in prison also, though I wasn’t the least bit surprised by the welcome he received when he returned to Libya).

I will actually give Hanson an acknowledgement that Holder was a bit inconsistent on whether or not the Geneva accords applied to any Guantanamo inmates.

However, I should point out that there’s a little matter that is often inconvenient to Bushco acolytes which they frequently overlook at moments such as these when they’re casting partisan aspersions.

It’s called legal precedent.

Specifically, I’m referring to the Supreme Court ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, noted by Glenn Greenwald here…

In 2006, the position espoused by Holder, Rumsfeld and the Bush administration was rejected by the Supreme Court in Hamdan, when it ruled that even Al Qaeda detainees are entitled to the minimum protections afforded to all detainees by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. Ironically, the account of Holder's ACS speech that Digby cited (I haven't been able to find the full text of Holder's speech) claims that Holder said "it was disgraceful that the Supreme Court 'had to order the president to treat detainees in accord with the Geneva Convention'" -- a criticism that would also seem to apply to Holder's early view that detainees were not entitled to Geneva protections.

…

I personally discount -- not entirely but somewhat -- what people said and did in the immediate aftermath of the trauma of 9/11, and I consider January, 2002 to be part of that period. Many people who have ended up as important advocates for the Constitution and the rule of law made some early statements and formed some positions, undoubtedly attributable to the emotional impact of 9/11, that they came to regret.

Holder's remarks came before there were any reports of the extremism and abuse that the Bush administration was planning. As that became more apparent, and as the emotional impact of 9/11 receded, Holder clearly changed his views on these topics and reversed himself rather thoroughly. It's true that these early positions evinced some poor judgment and instincts, and everyone can decide for themselves how much weight to give that in light of his subsequent strong and eloquent advocacy on behalf of Constitutional protections and the rule of law.

And speaking of “poor judgment and instincts,” I give you once more Gary Brecher’s epic takedown here on Hanson’s “A War Like No Other,” including Brecher’s hilarious observation (in the matter of Hanson trying to equate the Iraq debacle with ancient conflicts) that “Hanson’s got his fans convinced that Socrates himself would volunteer for duty in Fallujah, if only he didn’t have to drink that damn goblet of hemlock.”

And all of this from a guy who never served.