This from George Will’s commentary (via TPM):

But because he is a white Mississippian, many liberals consider him fair game for unfairness.

Will is writing about Leslie Southwick, Bush’s new nominee for the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, claiming that Democrats are resisting his nomination, at least in part, because he’s white.

Now, look at this conservative commentary on why Democrats resisted other Bush nominees:

Despite their inevitable protesting to the contrary, it is clear that Ted Kennedy’s gang of 45 [Democratic senators] discriminated against [Miguel] Estrada because he is Hispanic, like they discriminate against another nominee, William Pryor, for his devout Catholicism. Indeed, if Congress were an ordinary employer and a federal judgeship were treated as a job under federal antidiscrimination law, then Estrada would likely win on a claim of employment discrimination.

Hmm. So, Democrats hate Hispanics and Catholics as well.

When Democrats opposed Janice Rogers Brown, a black woman, because of her outrageous political extremism, this conservative echoed many others, saying “that’s just what the Democrats fear more than anything else – a mature, black woman who loves her country and the Constitution.”

Senator Orrin Hatch claimed Democratic senators reject women nominees because they don’t like women, saying “I’ve heard for 27 years how much greater they are for women. Don’t believe it. If they were, they wouldn’t oppose these wonderful women nominees.”

And that, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg; Republican claims of Democratic racism and sexism are virtually endless, though they especially arise whenever Democrats oppose a conservative nominee to the bench.

But the problem, of course, is that Democrats are painted as being racist and sexist against everybody; in the examples I have listed above, Democrats are supposedly bigoted against men and women, against whites, blacks, and Hispanics, as well as against Southerners and Catholics. Search more and I’m sure you will find claims that Democrats are bigoted concerning every single race, religion, region, and sexual orientation. Apparently, Democrats are prejudiced against all human beings in all their diverse forms.

Some conservatives cushion their argument, noting for the sake of an escape clause that it’s really the conservatism in the candidates that the Democrats object to–but they do this only as a footnote, in between repeated statements that Democrats are opposing blacks, Hispanics, women, etc. etc. Which, of course, is a cop-out: if it’s really about the nominees’ political stances, then why bring up race and gender at all? Because, of course, they want to make the claim that Democrats are racist and sexist even as they protest that they’re not claiming Democrats are racist or sexist, even though they are blocking these minority women from the bench for no good reason, and did I mention that the nominee is a black woman and the Democrats are opposed to her?

This goes right alongside the conservative knee-jerk reaction to opposition of the war, claiming that liberals “hate the troops” because they criticize Bush or other conservatives on their war stance. The same can be said about how conservatives claim that liberals want to tax the average American when they oppose more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, or that Democrats want to hurt small businesses when they propose a minimum wage hike or oppose any Republican measure to curry favor with Big Business.

The tactic is very simple: when Democrats oppose something that is conservative, find the closest group of sympathetic innocents and claim that the Democrats are doing what they’re doing because they hate this group (or, sometimes, find an antagonistic group and claim that the Democrats love them). If they oppose a court nominee, it’s really because of the nominee’s race, gender, or religion, no matter which color, sex, or creed that nominee might have. If Democrats oppose any conservative proposal concerning the military, then it’s because the Democrats hate the troops and love al Qaeda. If the Democrats oppose a conservative proposition regarding business, then it’s because Democrats hate the average American worker, or small businesses.

There is always some innocent standing along the wayside that the Democrats supposedly hate. Call it projection, call it a tried-and-true political tactic, call it sheer hypocrisy–whatever it is, it is a common theme in conservative rhetoric.

There is a certain level of schizophrenia involved in conservative views about race, especially in light of the candidacy of Barack Obama. While he is delighting massive crowds of liberals and independents–and even some conservatives–the far right wing is going apoplectic over the whole affair. Wingnuts scramble to find racism in liberals’ appreciation of Obama, at the same time that they strain to see disapproval from the mainstream African-American community.

For the Far Right, everything about Obama is about race. The same voices that claim they envision a color-blind society (by essentially ignoring the racism that exists and allowing it to run unchecked) are the same ones who see nothing but race where Obama is involved–but in classic projection, they claim that it’s the liberals who are obsessed with race. Obama isn’t white enough, he’s not black enough, he’s a way for liberals to assuage their racial guilt; apparently, Obama’s popular only because he biracial, but at the same time, liberals don’t like him because he’s biracial. It’s a confusing barrage of half-baked excuses to make Obama be all about race, while in the background, the standard-bearer for the Far Right, Rush Limbaugh, continues the “color blind” drumbeat by playing and re-playing the racist melody, “Barack the Magic Negro.”

The real irony here is that people who like Obama are the actual ones who are color-blind. They’re the ones who have listened to him speak, have appreciated his charisma and the appeal of his personality, the power of his speaking style and strong talent for communication. It’s not because he’s black, any more than it was because Bill Clinton was white. Obama appeals to people because of who he is.

But here’s how bad things have become on the flipside: a major news network has been forced to completely disable comments from site visitors for stories about Barack Obama. The reason: persistent, voluminous racial epithets–so many, that CBS can’t keep up with them and eliminate them on a one-by-one basis.

So, who is posting these comments? His liberal fans? Umm, not too likely. No, it is probably the “color blind” right-wingers, the ones who don’t “see race,” and who accuse the liberals of rampant racism where Obama is involved. The attacks and threats have become so bad that Obama has been given Secret Service protection earlier than any other candidate in history.

Just look at the right wing’s criticisms of Obama. Try to find one that isn’t somehow connected to race, or act in some way to make his race or ethnicity an issue. You’ll have a hard time doing so. This might be because there’s just not that much about Obama that they can attack. But personally, I think it goes deeper than that. It’s more about the far right’s inability to handle the idea of a liberal man of color taking power, so they focus on that–in a similar fashion that they have always responded to Hillary Clinton’s being a woman.

It’s not pretty, but it is what’s there.

Sean recently asked me if I had seen Conservapedia, and though I had, it reminded me of a theme I’d been kicking around but had not gotten around to writing extensively on yet: revisionism. One of the favorite charges of conservatives is that liberals are revisionists about everything, “rewriting” history on everything from Iraq to the Constitution, from WWII to the Reagan era and so on. No clearer a case of projection could be found; conservatives are in the midst of nothing less than a revolution of revisionism, with history being only one small but notable aspect. The framers were all Christians and the U.S. was set up as a Christian nation, with our legal system founded on the Ten Commandments; conservatives are the heroes of civil rights for minorities because Lincoln was a Republican; Reagan won the Cold War single-handedly; Iraq was all about freeing the Iraqi people; and so on and so forth.

Conservatives are the ultimate revisionists. One of the key elements of conservatism is, after all, the desire to return to a “better” past, and all the revisionism of past times that is required to make it all seem like a sepia-toned paradise.

But it’s not just the past they want to revise, it’s everything. Aside from the obvious point of political spinning to revise people’s views on current political developments, conservatives have branched out into several other areas. Newt Gingrich spearheaded linguistic revisionism in the 1990’s when he sent Republicans a memo titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” on how to use language to spin reality. Republicans became “active, confident pioneers of reform,” while Democrats were “corrupt, self-serving traitors espousing a destructive welfare state.” This was nothing new; as you recall, Bush 41 spearheaded an attack on the very word “liberal”; Gingrich’s effort was simply more methodical and far-reaching. But the end result was a culture in which language became a tool to do far more than give immediate spin.

This branched out into the conservative war to control the media itself, either by pressure and influence or by direct ownership. It had its roots in the successful punditry of people like Rush Limbaugh, but fully blossomed with two developments: the foundation of Fox News and the establishment of the perception of the media as being “liberal.” These two elements work in lockstep.

I’ll begin with the second of those two, the “liberal media” lie. As I laid out in this post, the whole “liberal media” myth began with an unscientific survey which found that 60% of news reporters had personal political affiliations to the left of center. Though the study could have simply proven that more liberal reporters answer surveys than conservatives, and though the survey gave no evidence whatsoever that any such personal affiliations had any effect whatsoever on actual reporting, the “study” was used as “proof” that liberals ruled the media–despite a different survey which showed that in fact, editors and publishers, the people who really do rule the mainstream media, are 66% conservative. But once the “liberal media” perception got started, it was simply repeated as fact so many times that now it is an accepted “truth,” even in light of current media positions which are so blatantly conservative that a “liberal media” is unthinkably absurd.

The reason for the perception is yet another facet of revisionism and spin: if everyone can be convinced that the news media is liberal, then everyone will believe that the actual truth is more conservative than is being presented in the media.

Which leads us to the other piece of the conservative media play: Fox News. Conservatives are in a tizzy about how Democrats are “afraid of reporters” and are somehow “dangerously threatening a free press” by refusing to take part in debates hosted by Fox News. The reason why Democrats are shunning said debates is for a reason that should have been made more clear long ago: Fox “News” is nothing more than the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. In fact, it is so openly political that it is amazing that they can still make any claim to being an objective news organization at all.

But Fox has, from the beginning, made its biases perfectly clear. They followed the Limbaugh model on a large scale: they went for far more opinion and commentary than actual news, stacking the ranks of their broadcasters with some of the most brazenly partisan pundits that could be found. They eschewed formal news formats, and instead launched a new style of “journalism” featuring hard-edged and angry delivery of doctrine and dogma backed by riffs of rock music and flashes of high-tech computer graphics. They then called their unabashedly right-wing fare “fair and balanced,” in contrast with the rest of the “liberal media.” And when their ratings rose and challenged other news organizations like CNN, those organizations quickly rocked hard to the right in the hopes of regaining their faltering market share.

So as conservatives now saturating the airwaves consistently pushed the idea of a “liberal media,” the media tilted noticeably to the right, delivering a one-two punch to perception: a right-wing media perceived as being so “liberal” that the public would believe that the actual truth was even further to the right.

But the trend of revisionism didn’t stop there; it only accelerated with the election of George W. Bush, and gained a frictionless surface in the wake of 9/11. The Bush administration started revising everything it could get its hands on, most notably science itself. Global warming and Creationism became new foci of the revisionists. Scientists who depended upon public funding or worked for the government in any way found their reporting censored and edited at the highest levels, themselves sometimes even put under gag orders preventing them from telling people the truth, while the government spouted a revised form of science that upheld their political agendas. Even the public perception of science itself was attacked on the grounds of “fairness” and “opinion.” Suddenly, if any “scientist” could be found to oppose an idea, then all views on the issue were represented as “opinion”; no matter how many scientists stated firm acceptance of an idea that offended conservatives, there was “no consensus,” “the jury was still out,” and “more study” would be necessary. Meanwhile, any conservative yahoo who came to the table with an idea, no matter how ludicrous and unsupported by evidence, would have to be taken seriously, else there would be no “fairness” and science would be suppressing opinions. Suddenly, science from the schoolroom to the government ceased being a forum where evidence or even reason would be required; conservative credentials are all that one would need to have one’s theories presented side-by-side with arguments which had been steadily built over decades or even centuries by arduous, relentless study and piercing peer review.

Similar revisionism came to the legal establishment; this trend started in the 70’s with right-wing backlash against the Roe v. Wade decision. In the conservative view, any judge who rules in a way unfavorable to the conservative worldview is “legislating from the bench.” The political legal philosophy of strict constructionism, breaking into a myriad of branches in an attempt to rationalize the philosophy’s negation by the Ninth Amendment, attempts to completely revise the Constitution itself by narrowly reinterpreting it out of relevancy, making way for broad new insertions of conservative philosophy to act as a new core of judiciary standards. By interpreting wordings in our highest statement of law, there is no right to habeas corpus, no right to privacy, no separation of church and state, no protection against unreasonable search and seizure–virtually no right to anything save for keeping and bearing arms, when it comes right down to it.

So the arrival of the Conservapedia comes as absolutely no surprise to me whatsoever. Whether it turns out to be a new phenomenon in the definition of all things in the light of political agendas, or if it winds up being nothing more than a sad, pathetic joke, it makes no difference. It is simply the most obvious and inevitable development imaginable in today’s conservative revisionist movement to redefine anything and everything in a conservative light.

It’s hard to watch CNN recently due to their constant Reagan-o-Rama Love Fest, and I imagine it must be insufferable in the U.S. His legacy, already badly distorted by conservatives, is getting a complete whitewash due to sympathy. (Reality check here.)

In addition, one can just picture the PR team in the White House now, gleefully relieved to be free of the media attention to everything from Abu Ghraib to Valerie Plame, and busily working on how to get back control over the news cycle, putting the press on the track they want instead of focusing on all these felonies and disgraces.

British theaters (excuse me, “theatres”) are being issued night-vision goggles so the ushers can monitor the crowd during the film and catch anyone with a video camera.

I have some experience with movie theaters, and quite frankly, I think this is ridiculous. First, they only seem to be doing this in England, which is meaningless as the “World Wide Web” is, naturally, “world-wide” and a taping made anywhere could be posted on file-sharing services and made universally available.

But more importantly, I will bet you that many if not most pirate videos are made by people working at the theaters themselves. theaters are not always well-policed, and all it takes is one projectionist to run the film during non-business hours and make a videotape of it. Projectionists always test-run new films to scan for problems in the print, and while some of these are attended by theater staff, I am certain a projectionist could get away with doing it after midnight when the manager and staff have left.

People are being warned not to look at the sun directly during the transit of Venus against the sun tomorrow, and I can tell you from personal experience how this is excellent advice. When I was in my early teens, and an avid astronomy buff, I wanted to watch a partial solar eclipse. I had my telescope and had applied a solar filter to the eyepiece, making it safe to view the sun through the scope (a 2.4″ refractor, BTW–I got an 8″ reflector later on). My father had even removed the sighting scope so that I would not accidentally look into it. And then, as the stupid young kid I was, I used the rings that held the sighting scope as a target finder and looked through them, at the sun, with my right eye, in order to align the scope. And that’s how I got a blind spot just off the center of my vision in my right eye.

Fortunately, the spot is only in one eye, and when using both eyes, the left eye compensates and I don’t see the spot–but if eye floaters get in the way in my left eye, or if I close my left eye, then the blind spot becomes apparent and interferes with my vision.

So I would heartily endorse the advice not to look at the sun directly, never do that; if you want to view the transit of Venus, you would need a scope for that anyway–I’m pretty sure that even using a dark plastic filter for naked-eye viewing (as some people do at eclipses), the transit would not be visible as Venus would likely be too small to see anyway. If you have binoculars, put them away–way too dangerous! And if you have a telescope, only a solar filter–specially made, not improvised–would be acceptable, and at that, learn from my example and don’t look at the sun to target the scope.

Better yet, just wait for TV and web sites to publish the pretty photos.

Got a heads-up from Kevin Drum’s column (his media link is subscription only) that the Texas GOP approved its 2004 party platform, and it’s a doozy. Among the highlights:

–Support for “the traditional definition of marriage as a God-ordained, legal and moral commitment only between a natural man and a natural woman.”

–Support for state legislation that would make it a felony to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple and for any civil official to perform a marriage ceremony for a same-sex couple.

–Opposition to government action to restrict, prohibit or remove from public display the Ten Commandments or other religious symbols.

–Denouncement of “any unconstitutional act of judicial tyranny that would demand removal of the words ‘One Nation Under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance.”

And according to Drum’s read of an Austin paper article:

A plank in a section titled “Promoting Individual Freedom and Personal Safety” proclaims the United States a “Christian nation.”

….Also new this year is a section declaring that the Ten Commandments “are the basis of our basic freedoms and the cornerstone of our Western legal tradition.”

“We therefore oppose any governmental action to restrict, prohibit or remove public display of the Decalogue or other religious symbols.”

….As delegates prayed and sang, oversized religious images, including Jesus on the cross, were displayed on the hall’s giant video screens. Christian clergymen took turns leading the prayers, some with political overtones.

Add to that the Texas GOP’s vow to do away with separation of church and state, repeal the minimum wage, make it illegal for a gay person to raise a child, do away with the IRS, get the U.S. to leave the U.N., and take back the Panama Canal–but I think this stuff has been on their docket for some time.

Yes, the Texas GOP–the Party of Scary People.

Update: for those of you looking for electoral vote maps showing recent polling information, two reasonable ones (as far as such things can be reasonable) can be found at electoral-vote.com and RealClearPolitics.com. USElectionAtlas.org has some good electoral vote map stuff as well.

Other new poll information coming in now, this one from Zogby, published in the Wall Street Journal in a very nicely done Flash page.

The poll covers 16 battleground states and includes Nader in the poll. Even so, Kerry stands out markedly well. Of the states listed, Bush leads in only four: Iowa, Arkansas, Tennessee and West Virginia. In two of the four states–Tennessee and West Virginia–Bush’s lead is only within the margin of error.

In contrast, Kerry leads in the other 13 battleground states (Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin), with only three of those (Florida, Missouri and Nevada) being within the margin of error. In all other states, Kerry has leads of up to 9.6%.

According to the count made by Daily Kos (who keep good track of polling info), if the election were held today, Kerry would win the electoral college by 102 electoral votes, 320-218. Even this conservative guy has Kerry winning by an even larger margin, though he points out in his blog that Dukakis was leading by more at this time (though he ignores the fact that Bush Sr. was not an incumbent then and was not post-war).

While Kerry holds only a few percentage points’ lead in national polls, it has always been the case that the electoral situation has favored Kerry, as Bush’s lead is much bolstered by a very large (and useless) concentration of support in “red” states, whereas Kerry’s support is more broad.

What do you do when your political opponent catches you in a major blunder and holds you publicly accountable for it?

You claim that your opponent said something despicable that they never said, and then criticize them for it.

That’s the latest tactic from the conservative side, with their claim that Democrats are calling for us to cut and run from Iraq, to retreat and leave it behind. And it is a ludicrously false assertion. But they know that if you act like it’s true with enough sincerity, enough people will believe it and your opponents will be blunted by it.

You know that Bush botched the war effort, trying to get it done quick so he could win an election, and not have the U.N. bog it down with irrelevancies like weapons inspections and diplomacy. He insulted our allies and cobbled together a skeleton “coalition,” leaving the U.S. and Britain holding the bag, the U.S. most at stake economically. With no exit strategy and no projection on how much it would cost, Bush flew in to do the job before anyone realized the scam. And in the end, we found out that Bush’s arguments were not much more than hot air: no WMD, no nuclear program, no terrorists, no threat to the U.S.

In short, he rushed to war, broke the bank doing it, and there was not enough of a good reason in the American national interest to have done it.

So the Democrats made the reasonable charge that Bush planned and executed the war in an incompetent manner, and now we’re stuck with the quagmire. Now that the damage is done and we’re in Iraq, we have no choice but to follow through, whatever the cost. But there is excellent reason to criticize Bush for having brought us into this mess.

The right-wing play on that: the Democrats are saying it’s too expensive and they want us to retreat, to cut and run, but we conservatives are too brave for that; we’re staying and we’re gonna beat the terrorists. And so on.

Of course, no Democrat ever suggested we “cut and run.” In fact, they have been the first ones to make it crystal clear, in the debate last week and elsewhere, that we cannot and must not retreat from Iraq. Carol Moseley Braun, one of the more liberal candidates, said simply, “We don’t cut and run.”

But the truth doesn’t stop conservatives when they feel they’ve got a good thing going.

This columnist says we should not follow “the Democrats’ cut and run advice.” Huh? This one takes a more subtle course, claiming that “the constant carping of the media and the Democrats gives the terrorists and our other enemies in the region the hope that the Vietnam experience will be repeated and we’ll cut and run.” That, of course, is in line with Rumsfeld’s recent charge that anyone who criticizes the Bush administration is giving aid and comfort to the enemy and hurting our armed forces, so just shut up and give us the money.

And now the talking heads on TV are disseminating the charge, claiming that Democrats want us to give up and run, tail between our legs. I’ve heard it more than once from the left-right guests brought in on the news shows, one just a few minutes ago on CNN–the right-wing guest making the clear assertion that liberal criticism means they want us to just high-tail it out of Iraq.

Something tells me, though, that this high-speed spin cycle won’t really buy much slack from the American people. A new Zogby poll puts Bush down to 45%. There’s only so far you can lie outrageously to them before they start to tire of it and wonder how they’re going to fare in the future with half-trillion dollar deficits, rising unemployment rates, and what little money we have going to places like Iraq.

There’s no question we have to finish the job there. The point is, we shouldn’t have gone there in the first place, and Bush is to blame for that.