Brainless

It appears that Michelle Malkin’s lobotomy procedure was successful.

Monica Goodling, One of 150 Pat Robertson Cadres in the White House

Monica Goodling, a previously unknown Justice Department official who served as liaison to the White House, has become a key figure in the Attorneygate scandal. When newly released emails revealed the prominent role Goodling played in engineering the firing of seven US Attorneys, Goodling pled the Fifth Amendment, refusing to testify under oath.

Josh Marshall writes that Goodling may be “afraid of indictment for perjury because she has to go up to Congress and testify under oath before the White House has decided what its story is.”

Goodling’s involvement in Attorneygate is not the only aspect of her role in the Bush administration that bears examination. Her membership in a cadre of 150 graduates of Pat Robertson’s Regent University currently serving in the administration is another, equally revealing component of the White House’s political program.

Goodling earned her law degree from Regent, an institution founded by Robertson “to produce Christian leaders who will make a difference, who will change the world.” Helping to purge politically disloyal federal prosecutors is just one way Goodling has helped fulfill Robertson’s revolutionary goals.

Regent has assiduously cultivated close ties to the administration and its Republican outriders. Gonzales’s predecessor, John Ashcroft, is currently cooling his heels at Regent as the school’s “Distinguished Professor of Law and Government.” Christian right super-lawyer Jay Sekulow, who also teaches at Regent and shares a Washington office with Ashcroft, participated in regular briefings with the White House on court appointments. In 1998, he leased a private jet through Regent to fly Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to speak at the school’s 20th anniversary (Though Sekulow regularly argues cases before the Supreme Court, he apparently did not view hobnobbing with Scalia as an ethical breach).

When the Bush administration came into power, it looked to Regent for a reliable pool of well-groomed Republican ideologues eager to wage the culture war from the inside. The former dean of Regent’s Robertson School of Government, Kay Coles James, was promptly installed as the Director of the Office of Personnel Management.

According to her bio, from 2001 to 2005, James was “President Bush’s principal advisor in matters of personnel administration for the 1.8 million members of the Federal civil service.” In that role, James rolled back the power of unions in the federal sector. Now that she’s out of government, James is back among her Christian right allies, appearing frequently as a guest on James Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio show.

Another Regent figure who impacted White House policy is Jim David, the current Assistant Dean for Administration in the Robertson School of Government. David was inserted in the Justice Department in 2003 as yet another sop to the Christian right; he served as deputy director of the department’s Task Force for the Faith-Based & Community Initiative.

Since leaving the DoJ, David has spent a considerable portion of his spare time writing opinion pieces that appear on Regent’s website. One of his most noteable screeds, penned in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, described a bright spot in the destruction of New Orleans. “We do not grieve, however, for the flooded and destroyed sex clubs that filled men with lust and degraded women,” David wrote. “We do not miss the casinos that preyed upon individuals whose lack of self-control deprived families of needed food and shelter. We do not lament the destruction of voodoo stores prevalent in New Orleans before the flood.”

At Regent, Goodling was drilled in the importance of unflinching loyalty to the Republican program. Once in the Justice Department, she proved an able cog in the Bush administration’s political machine, meeting with Republican activists in 2006 to help plot the firing of New Mexico’s prestigious US Attorney David Iglesias, a fellow Republican who “chafed” against administration initiatives.

But as scrutiny of her actions intensifies, the evangelical Goodling resorts to the 5th Amendment — man’s law — to avoid breaking the biblical commandment against lying. Only the goodly and godly Pat Robertson could have prepared her to make such a decision.

The Gringo Invasion

A really interesting article by the US-Mexico border wire service, Frontera Norte-Sur, came across my radar today. It deals with a phenomenon that has not been given enough attention in the US press: the reverse migration of middle class Americans to Mexico. According to this article, a record number of Americans are moving to Mexico to escape high healthcare costs and life under the Bush administration. Their lifestyle in Mexico represents an ironic mirror of the culture of Mexican migrants living in the US. Here is an excerpt of this piece, which is not available online yet:

…A recent, path-breaking article published in Dissent magazine described a group that doesn’t learn the new language, displays its native flag, maintains its traditional customs, and even celebrates its old holidays in the new country. “Some live and work without proper documentation and have even been involved in the illegal transport of drugs across borders,” stated the piece. Sound familiar?

Written by Sheila Croucher, a professor of political science at Ohio’s Miami University who is studying US migration to Mexico, the article delved into the complex aspects of the new Gringolandia south of the border. Professor Croucher found that many of the same issues which surround the Mexican immigrant community in the US ring true with the US immigrant community in Mexico as well. As Croucher summarized it in an interview with Frontera Norte Sur, “The precise things that politicians and pundits are railing against in the US.”

Nobody knows for sure how many people of US origin reside in Puerto Vallarta and other regions of Mexico, but Croucher said that one US State Department estimate made several years ago pegged the number at about 600,000 souls. Since 9-11, the US government has become reticent about disclosing information concerning US citizens living abroad, Croucher added.

In addition to the older haunts of San Miguel Allende and Lake Chapala in central Mexico, newer gringo “clusters” are emerging in the Baja Peninsula, in Rocky Point (Puerto Penasco) in Sonora, around Banderas Bay in Jalisco and Nayarit, in Zihuatanejo-Ixtapa and Troncones in Guerrero, and along the Mayan Riviera on the Caribbean Coast.

Mirroring Mexican immigrant communities north of the border, US migrant communities in Mexico boast their own social and civic organizations, participate in the political life of the old country and enjoy access to native-language newspapers, radio programs and cablevision.

The 2004 US Presidential campaign signaled the new importance of the US migrant population in Mexico. Speaking by telephone from Mexico City, Croucher recounted how the Democratic Party dispatched former Clinton Administration official Ana Maria Salazar to round up the expatriate vote, while the Republican Party sent President Bush’s nephew, George P. Bush, to rally his party’s faithful. In the town of San Miguel Allende alone, the Democrats raised $10,000 dollars for Kerry’s bid, Croucher added.

“After 2000 it became clear to people how close the elections could be and the importance of the vote abroad,” Croucher affirmed.

A good percentage of the US migrants complain about the drift of politics as well as the propensity for overregulation back in the states. A young woman from the United States who preferred to identify herself only as Denise, has tasted the world from Pakistan to Puerto Vallarta. The world traveler contended that the strict security measures on US borders symbolize the end of liberty as we once knew it, and represent a closing window on the rest of the global community.

“It’s a freedom thing, nobody likes to be controlled,” she said. “In the states, it’s black and white. Here there is a gray area. If you get stopped in the states, you always get a ticket.”

For Croucher, economics, specifically health care costs, are far more influential in driving US citizens to Mexico than either George W. Bush or the local street cop. Many Mexican dental clinics and doctor’s offices in the border region and points south thrive on a growing US clientele. Fees are reasonable, prescription medicines are affordable, appointments are given in minutes or hours instead of weeks or months, and the quality of service is good, “Americans I talk to have nothing but positive things to say about health care in Mexico.” Croucher said.

Considering that the looming mass retirement of the baby boomers coincides with the growing melt-down of the US health care system, Croucher noted a certain irony in the snappy remarks of commentators who accuse Mexico of exporting its problems to the US. “We’re exporting our problems abroad,” Croucher contended.

Who Is Christian? Only Dobson Knows

James Dobson has a peculiarly narrow definition of Christianity. To Dobson, possible GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson, who was baptized in the Church of Christ, is not a Christian. (”We use that word – Christian – to refer to people who are evangelical Christians. Dobson wasn’t expressing a personal opinion about his reaction to a Thompson candidacy,” said Dobson spokesman Gary Schneeberger.) But Newt Gingrich, according to Dobson, is “the brightest guy out there” and one of “the most articulate positions on the scene today.” Apparently Thompson needs to have a few more wives before he earns Dobson’s stamp of approval.

The Fred Thompson Effect

The latest USA Today/Gallup poll is out and it is pretty startling. Despite being undeclared, actor Fred Thompson is polling at 12%. Giuliani, meanwhile, is down 13%, partly as a side-effect of Thompson’s potential candidacy, partly as a result of increased conservative awareness of Rudy’s personal profile. And Romney barely registers anymore.

Thompson’s instant appeal clearly reflects the hunger among Republican primary voters for a candidate with genuine conservative credentials and national name recognition. I know very little about him off the top but my instinct is to write him off as a threat in the general.

Madman Cometh 

Thought it might be worth noting Dobson’s response on his show last Thursday to criticism of Gen. Peter Pace. As could have been predicted, he went nuts, going in for a shot at that evil new phenomenon known as cohabitation, which those wild kids out in “the culture” are practicing everywhere these days:

“If homosexuality is moral, so is living together out of wedlock and sleepin’ around and doin’ the other things that are so common in the culture today. And yet two Democratic candidates for the presidency and one Republican candidate for the presidency came out and said General Pace was wrong, he shouldn’t have said that.”

The Man-on-Dog Aesthetic

A steamy scene from Rick Santorum’s upcoming feature

Rick Santorum claims he’s getting into filmmaking:

Less than three months removed from his congressional career, the former Pennsylvania senator said in an interview last week that he is planning two film projects in part to counter what he characterized as the stream of left-wing documentaries coming from Hollywood and independent filmmakers.

The first project, Santorum said, would explore the relationship between radical Islam and the radical leftists in various countries around the world, including Latin America. It would be about an hour.

The second would be a longer, broader documentary that he said would aim to ‘’change the culture of America.'’ He declined to go into specifics about the proposal.

Steve Sailer Sucks 

I’ve added a new link to my blogroll, Steve Sailer Sucks. This is a high quality blog devoted to relentlessly attacking someone who sucks.

Sailer’s racist profile of Barack Obama is out, by the way. Unlike in Vdare, Sailer stops just short of calling Obama a “wigger.”

 A Familiar Scenario
“Mainstream” conservative operative mingles with neo-Nazis, neo-Nazis bash Jews (”revolutionary Jews” to be exact), “mainstream” conservative goes home, keeps job. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve watched this happen…

I Learned It From Watching You, Dobson 

Ever wonder how Tom DeLay became such an ethical man? Here’s how he described his spiritual “resurrection” to Focus on the Family’s Citizenlink:

As you alluded to a little while ago, Dr. Dobson’s video, Where’s Dad?, had a profound impact on you. Explain a little bit how watching that film, which urged fathers to put their wives and kids first, turned you back toward Christ.

Well, I will always be grateful to Congressman Frank Wolf, who’s close to Dr. Dobson, who had a ministry of going to freshmen congressmen’s offices and sitting down with them. His whole strategy was to invite them to come to a Christian Bible study.

And then he would, as part of his presentation, have you sit down and watch Where’s Dad? And everything Dr. Dobson said in that video that was wrong about being a dad – that was me. And I recognized it; I broke down. I didn’t immediately start going to Bible studies, but Frank Wolf wouldn’t give up – and then I started going to the Bible studies and I was led back to Christ.

They Can’t Help It

It’s so hard to keep track of all the scandals in Washington these days, I almost forgot about Stephen Griles, the Interior Department deputy secretary who was known as “our guy” by Jack Abramoff and company. Poor Griles. He didn’t have to lie when he testified before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in 2005. He wasn’t facing any criminal charges. He wasn’t accused of taking bribes from Abramoff.
But like a typical Republican, Griles just couldn’t help himself. He told the committee he had “no special relationship” with Abramoff, an obvious falsehood contradicted by moutains of emails. It was almost as if lying was an involuntary function of Griles’ body. Now, for his completely gratuitous crime, Griles is going to jail. Are you paying attention, Kyle Sampson?

News Flash

Michelle Malkin has no life.

Meet Sean Hannity, Cafeteria Catholic:

Conservative commentator Sean Hannity’s support for contraception and a segment on his TV show has led to criticism of him as a dissenting “cultural Catholic,” led by a priest who heads a major pro-life group and who said Mr. Hannity should be denied Communion.
“I have no problem with birth control. It’s a good thing,” Mr. Hannity has said, prompting the Rev. Thomas Euteneuer, president of Human Life International, to send a mass e-mail last week calling the Fox News Channel and talk-radio host’s repeated public defenses of contraception “just devastating for the faith of others who may be weak or vacillating in this area.”
“We have enough pretenders to the title of Catholic in public life without being treated to superficial assessments of profound moral issues. … Public Catholics like Hannity have no right to profess ‘another Gospel,’ or the faith of millions — and indeed their own souls — are in serious jeopardy,” Father Euteneuer said.

The White House’s Porn Plot Against Prosecutors

My latest is out on the Nation’s website. Here are some key grafs:

In September 2006, just weeks before pivotal Congressional midterm elections, Paul Charlton, US Attorney for Arizona, opened a preliminary investigation into Republican Representative Rick Renzi of the state’s First Congressional District for an alleged pattern of corruption involving influence-peddling and land deals. Almost immediately, Charlton’s name was added to a blacklist of federal prosecutors the White House wanted to force from their jobs. Charlton is someone “we should now consider pushing out,” D. Kyle Sampson, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez’s chief of staff, wrote to then White House Counsel Harriet Miers on September 16. In his previously safe Republican district, Renzi had barely held on in the election. On December 7, the White House demanded Charlton’s resignation without offering him any explanation.

[…]

The Justice Department and the White House offered a scattershot of alibis for firing Charlton. The Bush Administration’s case against Charlton rested ultimately on the account of a little-known Justice Department official named Brent Ward, who claimed in a September 20, 2006 e-mail that Charlton was “unwilling to take good cases.” Ward’s allegation was vague in its claim, mysterious for its submission and vacant in context.

What accounts for this bizarre e-mail? And who is Brent Ward?

Ward first came to prominence in Utah, where as US Attorney during the Reagan era he cast himself as a crusader against pornography. His battles made him one of the most fervent and earnest witnesses before Attorney General Edwin Meese’s Commission on Pornography; he urged “testing the endurance” of pornographers by relentless prosecutions. Meese was so impressed that he named Ward a leader of a group of US Attorneys engaged in a federal anti-pornography campaign, which soon disappeared into the back rooms of adult bookshops to ferret out evildoers. Ward returned to government last year as the chief of the Justice Department’s newly created Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, where his main achievement has been the prosecution of the producer of the Girls Gone Wild.

Fire Walk With Me

The snow is back on the ground here in NYC and the air is cold enough to keep me inside all day. In my apartment I can hardly feel my feet despite the best efforts of my small radiator. It’s hard to believe that only last week it was 75 degrees and sunny here.

I spent that day inside the Nation’s offices, under the glow of flourescent lights. When I finally stepped outside at around 9 pm, I had forgotten how warm the weather was.

I set out from Union Square for the West Village. I walked fast, passing a b-boy crew modeling freezes for revelers on the Square, past cafes rumbling with the slurred chatter of the half-drunk after-work crowd, past thousands and thousands of faces. I felt slightly ashamed for experiencing the sense of strangeness that accompanies being among so many people I will wonder about endlessly but never know. That feeling is a New York City cliche exhausted in sheafs of literature and the many — too many — films that muse about the “degrees of separation” between subway riders.

But the feeling is inescapable. Cliches are cliches because they are true, after all.

Crossing W. 4th St, I sensed an atmospheric shift; I had entered a newly nervous city. Cops milled around in every direction: detectives, beat cops, SWAT team members, literally hundreds of them pouring out of squad cars and paddy wagons. Most of them seemed forlorn. Everyone else seemed confused, whispering questions as they stood waiting to cross one of the many barriers the police had erected to seal off what I soon learned was the scene of a heinous crime.

I walked down the narrow streets of the Village. The police presence intensified there. On Sullivan St, where a crowd of residents had assembled waiting for permission to go home, the klieg lights of local news crews emitted an eerie glow, projecting the shadows of bystanders on to the walls above now-empty restaurants and bars.

NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly was somewhere nearby, inspecting the site where a bartender and two cops had just been executed.

About an hour earlier, a 42 year old man named David Garvin walked into De Marco’s Pizzeria with a .357 revolver, a Ruger 9 millimeter pistol, 100 rounds of ammo, and shot a bartender in the back 13 times. Two unarmed auxiliary cops pursued Garvin down the block. He turned back and killed them too.

Minutes later, Garvin was gunned down by NYPD officers arriving on the scene. He apparently planned to escape with a disguise that included a glue-on beard.

Portrait of a killer

What motivated Garvin to murder? Days later, nobody knows. Regular patrons of DeMarco’s say he had never clashed with the bartender he killed. He was a failed filmmaker with no criminal record, no record of violence. Garvin’s only recorded signs of mental instability were several passive aggressive emails he sent to married women who had rebuked his romantic advances.

In his stalkeresque missives, described in the NY Times on Saturday, Garvin reminds me of countless men who have described to me their tactless conquests, and who so often describe the women who denied their advances as a symbol of all their failures. Of course, I have only suspected one or two of them of sinister impulses.

Garvin’s brother told the NY Daily News that his brother became unhinged after the 9/11 attacks and obsessed over Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” He may have suffered from paranoia, but was never diagnosed. Garvin’s aggressive episodes prior to his crime were strange, but by no means harbingers of the exceptionally brazen and calculated crime he would commit.

Serial killers like the “BTK” killer, a Kansas Lutheran church elder and family man named Dennis Rader, rarely leave clues about their dark tendencies either. But Garvin does not fit the profile of a typical serial killer. For all his aggressive tendencies towards women, there is no evidence suggesting that Garvin was preoccupied with sexually perverse fantasies as most serial killers are.

Garvin initially reminded me of the characters in Mark Ames’ book, “Going Postal,” which discusses the workplace killings and school shootings in the context of Clinton’s “New Economy” and the mouting alienation of 1990’s America. Yet unlike Garvin, the Columbine killers and practically every so-called “disgrunted postal worker” had some grievance with their peers that sparked their murderous outbursts.

Unless more conclusive information surfaces about Garvin’s past, his motivations may forever elude understanding. In this sense — and only in this sense — Garvin is not unlike other seemingly well-adjusted people who suddenly exhibit extreme behavior, from serial killers to terrorists to political radicals. It is possible to develop a direction for understanding subjects like these, but it is not productive or even possible to gather a full understanding of them.

As a journalist who has reported on the far right for several years, I have been able to detect and document distinct patterns in the personal motivations of my subjects. Thus I have identified a subset among the right that I call CCC’s, or Conflicted Conservatives in Crisis. CCC’s are often radicalized through a personal crisis that they hold liberals responsible for causing. (Case in point: anti-abortion activist Leslee Unruh, who had an abortion in her 20’s). They are among the conservative movement’s most aggressive, eliminationist figures because their involvement in politics was spurred by such intimate experiences.

For CCC’s, backlash conservatism is cheap self-medication; it allows them to project their unresolved issues on to social groups that represent what they can not stand about themselves. But because cheap self-medication rarely works, CCC’s often display a massive gulf between their private actions and the political positions they take in public. This is why Ted Haggard, a CCC who could be seen proselytizing outside Colorado Springs gay bars during the early 1990’s, has been driven into obscurity by embarassed former colleagues.

Ted Haggard, a CCC

Even as my work led me to recognize the CCC complex as an essential thread of right-wing sociology, I could never claim a complete understanding of what makes right-wing radicals tick. To do so would be to ignore Robert Altermeyer’s landmark study “The Authoritarian Spectre,” which provided the basis for John Dean’s “Conservatives Without Conscience;” David Neiwert’s “The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism;” and Don Warren’s “The Radical Center.”

Some CCC’s are what Altman calls RWA’s, or Right-Wing Authoritarians, some (perhaps most) are Pseudo-Fascists, and some are what Warren identifies as MAR’s, or Middle American Radicals. But certainly not all CCC’s are. Since there are no easy answers, I try my best to avoid reductionism.

Reductionism is a familiar technique of right-wing literature about liberals and other assorted evil-doers. It would be easy to point a finger here at the books of Michael Savage (a classic CCC), Michael Smerconish or Michelle Malkin, but why waste time analyzing the work of figures whose negligible intellectual capacities render nuanced explanations impossible?

A better exhibit of right-wing reductionism is the work of French-Israeli documentarian Pierre Rehov. Rehov is a technically skilled filmmaker who has focused exclusively on the Palestinians. His most psychologically ambitious film, “Suicide Killers,” which I watched at the right-wing Liberty Film Festival, and which was introduced there by David Horowitz, attempts to probe the psychology of several young Hamas suicide bombers he interviewed. Rehov ultimately concludes that these suicide bombers, and through suggestion, all suicide bombers, are spurred to kill by their sexual repression and attendant resentment of sexually liberated Israelis.

Textbook right-wing reductionism

Rehov deliberately excludes any discussion of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, leading the unsophisticated viewer to believe that if only the Palestinians could just experience the bawdy good times depicted in “Girls Gone Wild,” they would be content with their lot in life. Certainly there is some validity to Rehov’s analysis of Islamic fundamentalism (his female interviewees’ stated wish to be among a male martyr’s harem in the afterlife supports his thesis) but by omitting analysis of the occupation’s effect on Palestinian society, and how the occupation has bred religious extremism, “Suicide Killers” tacitly justifies Israel’s most draconian policies towards the Palestinians.

An Eastern European physician survivor of a Nazi death camp quoted by Robert Jay Lifton in his magisterial study, “The Nazi Doctors,” neatly summarizes the problem with reductionism: “The professor would like to understand what is not understandable,” the professor told Lifton. “We ourselves who were there, and who have always asked ourselves the question and will ask it until the end of our lives, we will never understand it, because it cannot be understood.”

Simple conclusions lead to simple solutions. And simple solutions are not only dangerous, they rarely succeed. The search for answers is always the best destination.

Check in later today for a post on my trip to the scene of a brazen cop-killing in the West Village, and hopefully for a report on Attorneygate.

A Second Thought

Kadhim al-Jubouri is the man who brought down the Saddam statue after the invasion, an event that turned out to be one of the Bush administration’s biggest PR coups.

He spoke to the Guardian yesterday and this is what he said:

“I really regret bringing down the statue. The Americans are worse than the dictatorship. Every day is worse than the previous day.”

Battle of the Bridge

On Saturday, members of the black bloc and other “direct action” types marched from the main anti-war march on 23rd and Constitution towards a bridge leading to the Pentagon. They were met on there by a phalanx of Virginia state cops who looked like were conceived in the imagination of some anarchist comic book fanatic.

Isis was on the scene to capture the action that the mainstream press missed out on. This photo shows why she is one of the best guerilla photographers around. You can check out her archives here.

File Under WTF

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