“The Only ‘Marginal Behavior’ Is His”: Rush Limbaugh’s Finding Out He’s Not Normal, And It Scares Him
I am not normal.
This, I learned from a news story 35 years ago. The details have faded with the passage of time, but the gist of it remains clear. Some expert had crunched a bunch of numbers in search of the “average” human being, the planetary norm, and found that she was an 8-year-old Japanese girl, living in Tokyo. I don’t fit that profile; I’m willing to bet you don’t, either. So as a matter of statistical fact, I’m not “normal” and neither are you.
I’ve always found that story a useful corrective whenever I am tempted to declaim too haughtily on what is or isn’t normal. I offer it now to Rush Limbaugh in the vain hope it will help him rethink his assault last week on the woman who used to be Bruce Jenner. Granted, the story was about planetary norms and Limbaugh was ranting about American social norms, but the principle still applies.
As you doubtless know, Jenner’s transformation into a woman named Caitlyn has been quite controversial. She has been praised for her “courage” by President Obama and called “brave” by Ellen DeGeneres. At the other extreme, one David French, blogging for the National Review, dismissed her as a “surgically damaged man,” while a Matt Walsh on Glenn Beck’s website, The Blaze, called her a “mentally disordered man.”
And we have recently learned that, back in February, Mike Huckabee cracked about wishing he could have identified as female when he was in school so he could have showered with the girls. As inadvertently revealing as that “joke” feels, it is Limbaugh’s response that really helps us understand why those who are threatened by, and viscerally angry about, Jenner’s transformation, feel as they do.
As Caitlyn made her debut on the cover of Vanity Fair, the talk-show host fumed that Republicans should reject her, even though she identifies with the, ahem, big tent party. Liberals, he complained, are trying to “redefine normalcy.” He went on to say that nowadays, “conservatives and Republicans are the new weirdos, the new kooks, and that is part of the political objective here, in normalizing all of this really marginal behavior. I mean, if less than 1 percent of the population is engaging in it, it’s marginalized behavior; it isn’t normal.”
One might argue, citing Miles Davis, Steve Jobs, Rosa Parks, Stan Lee, Sally Ride, Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley, and a thousand other rule breakers and innovators, that “normal” is overrated. But put that aside, take Limbaugh at his word, and the fear undergirding his complaint becomes plain. He and those like him look at Caitlyn Jenner and wonder: “If this is normal, what does that make me?”
It’s worth noting, in light of Limbaugh’s fears, that the country’s opinions on social issues like this are shifting, and not in his direction. Gallup recently reported that America is moving sharply left on the moral acceptability of everything from gay rights to stem cell research. I’m aware of no polling on Jenner’s transformation, but who would be surprised to find that there is widespread approval?
Not that freedom should be a popularity contest (most of us agree now that Jim Crow is wrong, but it was also wrong back when much of the country thought it was right), but it is better to have the wind behind you than against you. Ask Limbaugh, who now finds himself pushing against that wind and finding that the only “marginal behavior” here is his. That must be chilling to a man so obsessed with defining and defending “normalcy.” He should get used to it.
Because these days, what isn’t normal is the small minded need to stigmatize those who walk a different path through life. What isn’t normal is the bigot’s siren call to our basest and most baseless fears. What isn’t normal is hatred and terror of the new.
Poor Rush. It turns out that what isn’t “normal,” is him.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, June 8, 2015
“Dispensed With The Niceties”: Hillary Clinton’s Grand Strategy To Beat The GOP: Take Bold Positions Early And Often
For the better part of 20 years now, Bill Clinton’s presidency has been synonymous with a hazy political concept called triangulation. Since his advisers made the term famous, it has been used to describe everything from standard-issue compromise, to the willingness to confront reactionary elements in one’s own party (think Sister Souljah), to the appropriation of another political party’s policy ideas. The latter is as close to a proper definition as there is.
One big concern bedeviling progressives is that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy will mark the return of triangulation—the preemptive ceding of ideological turf, at a time when, thanks to partisan polarization, such concessions amount to outright victories for the Republican Party. But the early days of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy suggest these fears are overblown—that she is engaged in an entirely different kind of political positioning, one that carries the promise of significant progressive victories or at least of clarifying the terms of key policy debates dividing the parties.
The nature of the strategy involves staking out a variety of progressive issue positions that enjoy broad support, but it’s not as straightforward as simply identifying the public sentiment and riding it to victory. The key is to embrace these objectives in ways that makes standard Republican counterspin completely unresponsive, and thus airs out the substantive core of their ideas: Rather than vie for conservative support by inching rightward, Clinton is instead reorienting liberal ideas in ways that make the Republican policy agenda come into greater focus.
Most recently, Clinton has adopted an aggressive position in support of expanded voting rights. “We have a responsibility to say clearly and directly what’s really going on in our country,” she said in her latest campaign speech Thursday, “because what is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other.”
This is standard Democratic boilerplate, but in service of something new. Most Democrats have been engaged for some time now in rearguard actions to protect voters from disenfranchisement efforts, and promote a remedy to the damage the Supreme Court did to the Voting Rights Act. These are important efforts, but easily countered. It isn’t unpopular to argue that voters should have to show ID, for instance, or to rail against phantom voter fraud, and it’s easy to gloss over the complex nature of the Voting Rights Act in ways that obscure the real goal of these policies, which is to systemically reduce turnout among disproportionately Democratic constituencies—the poor, the young, and ethnic minorities.
Clinton’s plan, by contrast, demands clarity from her opponents. She has proposed that every American, except those who opt out, be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18, and that every state offer at least 20 days’ worth of early voting. Republicans can’t easily oppose this—and oppose it they must—without being explicit about the fact that they want to keep the voting rolls as trim as possible.
Most Democrats likewise support President Barack Obama’s administrative efforts to liberalize immigration enforcement, and want to create a citizenship track for unauthorized immigrants. Republicans oppose both aims, but have been able to muddle that fact using vague procedural language. Generally speaking, it’s not the liberalization of immigration law they oppose, but the unilateral nature of Obama’s actions. They oppose amnesty, but keep the door to a nebulous “legal status” ajar. Both positions are malleable enough to allow the Republican presidential nominee to tack dramatically left in the general election, and gloss over the hostility the GOP has shown to immigrants since promising to liberalize after Obama’s reelection.
For over a year, Democrats humored the GOP’s wordplay in order to preserve the possibility of striking a legislative compromise that includes something Republicans could call “legal status.” Now that the immigration reform process has collapsed, Clinton has dispensed with the niceties. In promising to preserve Obama’s immigration policies, she called out “legal status” as a ruse. “When [Republicans] talk about legal status,” she said, ’“that is code for second-class status.” She has taken the standard Democratic position and weaponized it. Republicans can’t pretend there’s no daylight between their views and Democrats’ views, because Clinton has defined the Republican position for them, by contrast.
Because this kind of obscurantism pervades the GOP’s substantive agenda—through tax policy, social insurance reforms, workplace regulation—Clinton should be able to deploy the tactic across a wide array of issues. Seizing the first-mover advantage is one of the undiscussed upsides of Clinton’s dominance in the Democratic primary field. It doesn’t guarantee her victory over a Republican opponent, but it will assure that the debate between the two of them occurs mostly above board.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, June 6, 2015
“We’re In The Grip Of Madness”: Obsession With Guns Now Infects College Campuses
The Texas Legislature has just passed its version of campus-carry — a bill that allows students, teachers, janitors, administrators, and anyone else with a firearms permit to carry concealed handguns on college campuses throughout the state. That means students sitting in a library or classroom or strolling through a classic tree-lined quadrangle may be armed.
College campuses don’t have enough problems with student misbehavior? Administrators aren’t frazzled enough coping with rapes, binge drinking, and routine infractions such as cheating? The Legislature had to add concealed weapons to the mix?The illogic is hard to overstate. This is what one proponent of the measure, GOP state Rep. Jonathan Stickland, had to say: “An armed society is a safe society, so any time you have gun control, there is far more opportunity to become victims.”
Ah, where to begin?It should be clear from the recent spate of police shootings that even those who are highly trained make mistakes with their weapons. They fire too quickly, killing the unarmed. They shoot bystanders. They miss altogether. What makes the gun lobby think that civilians would handle their firearms with more precision and control?
One Texan who is intimately familiar with firearms tried to persuade the Legislature not to pass campus-carry. Adm. William McRaven, who is now the chancellor of the University of Texas System, said, “I’m a guy that loves my guns. I have all sorts of guns. I just don’t think bringing guns on campus is going to make us any safer.”
The man is a former Navy Seal. He commanded the U.S. Special Operations forces who killed Osama bin Laden. But the GOP-dominated Legislature ignored him.
Clearly, we’re in the grip of a kind of madness, an irrational, fevered obsession with firearms. Sometime in the not-too-distant (I hope) future, historians and anthropologists will study our society’s gun sickness to try to figure out how we became so warped by firearms ownership. They’ll ponder this cultural weirdness just as we look back at the Salem witch trials and the classification of homosexuality as a mental illness.
To be sure, the vast majority of Americans are not persuaded that more guns are tantamount to more safety. They know better. Polls show that we support additional gun safety laws, including a ban on large-capacity magazines and broadening background checks to make it more difficult for criminals and the deranged to get guns.
But we don’t care enough. We haven’t gone about the business of isolating this madness, quarantining the fevered, protecting ourselves from the spread. We’ve allowed this infection to embed itself in the bloodstream of civil society.
Currently, according to the website of the National Conference of State Legislatures, 19 states prohibit concealed weapons on college campuses. Twenty-three others allow college presidents or regents to make the decision. But it seems inevitable that campus-carry laws will spread.
The gun lobby has more energy, more focus, more intensity. Its minions take their odd enthusiasm to state legislatures, to city councils, and to court, where they seek to overturn even modest gun safety laws. They target politicians who dare suggest that not every private citizen needs to own a shoulder-fired rocket launcher.
When Gov. Greg Abbott signs the bill, as expected, Texas will become the ninth state to allow campus-carry, and proponents will continue to push in gun-crazed states with Republican-dominated legislatures. Look for some to emulate Utah, which has the broadest (and nuttiest) law, outdoing Texas. Its statute specifically bans any college campus from prohibiting concealed weapons. In Texas, at least, private colleges may opt out.
There is a very real danger that some student will kill another on campus. Or kill a teacher with whom he or she has a disagreement. Or go on a rage-fueled spree and kill several people.
Texas, especially, ought to know better. It was the scene of one of the nation’s earliest spree shootings, in 1966, when former Marine Charles Whitman fired from the clock tower on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin.
Unfortunately, the Texas Legislature has trampled the memory of the dead.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize Commentary in 2007, The National Memo, June 6, 2015
“Not To Worry, The Negativity Is Coming”: Why The GOP’s 2016 Bloodbath Is Going To Be Great Fun — And Instructive
If there are any Republicans out there who haven’t joined the presidential race, they’ll probably be getting in soon — even if a Donald Trump campaign is too much to hope for.
With a remarkable 15 announced or soon-to-announce candidates, including such dynamos as Lindsey Graham and George Pataki, there’s still one thing we haven’t seen yet: the Republican candidates attacking each other. There’s been a vague insinuation here and an implied criticism there, but no real verbal fisticuffs to speak of. But worry not: The negativity is coming, and when it does, it will come fast and hard.
The first contest of the primary season is still eight months away, but as it gets closer, each candidate will start seeing their relative place in the contest come into focus. And the more it does, the greater the incentive will be to take potential opponents down a peg.
Whoever’s in front (if anyone actually moves to the front) will want to beat back challenges from below. Those behind will want to punch upward to pull down the leader. And everyone will want to strike out laterally to make sure they’re the ones with a chance to climb upward.
Once the primaries begin, desperation will set in for some candidates, which inevitably leads them to sign off on nastier rhetoric and advertising than they ever thought they’d engage in. If all goes well, it’ll be a spectacle of insults, attacks, and character assassination. Should be great fun.
Lest you think I’m being too cynical, let’s not forget that just because you’re criticizing another candidate instead of touting your own virtues doesn’t mean you aren’t contributing something valuable to the debate. There are reasons to vote for candidates, but there are also reasons to vote against them — and if their opponents don’t tell us, we might not learn about them at all. As I heard a political consultant say once, no candidate is going to tell voters, “I hope you vote for me, but before you do, there are a few things you ought to know…” If Jeb Bush’s diligent opposition researchers discover that Scott Walker once shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, then we should hope they’ll share that information with the rest of us.
So when the race gets adversarial, we shouldn’t reflexively condemn the fact that the candidates are criticizing each other. It’s important to remember that when candidates are being “positive,” they’re just as likely to be feeding the voters pabulum. In fact, research on political advertising I did in my former life as an academic showed that positive ads were less likely to concern policy issues and more likely to contain inaccuracies than negative ads. What’s more helpful to voters: showing them a soft-focus picture of my family and sharing my deep love for America, or telling them that the numbers in my opponent’s tax plan don’t add up?
There are better questions to ask than whether the candidates are being “positive” or “negative.” Is the criticism they’re making accurate and fair? Does it tell us something meaningful about the candidate being criticized? Is it relevant to the job he or she will be doing as president? If the answer to those is yes, then there’s nothing wrong with it.
For instance, if I were running against the newest entrant, Lindsey Graham, I might note that while he touts his experience in foreign policy as the foundation of his campaign, on foreign policy questions he’s perpetually wetting his pants in terror, which has some disturbing implications for his decision-making as president. Is there anything illegitimate about that?
But nobody’s naïve here — we know that the accurate, meaningful, and relevant criticisms are likely to be fewer than the ones charging candidates with sins like insufficient ideological purity or dangerous flip-floppery, not to mention the ones that delve into the candidates’ personal lives. And with so many candidates, the chances that the race will devolve into a thunderdome of pummelling and recrimination are pretty high. But in and of itself, that doesn’t mean the Republican primaries will be any less edifying than they would be if they were entirely civil and polite. At least it’ll be entertaining.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributing Writer, The Week, June 3, 2015
“The Country Is Leaving Them Behind”: How GOP Candidates Feed The Social Conservative Narrative Of Oppression
If you want to get a sense of what social conservatives are thinking and feeling, there are few better ways than watching how Republican candidates seek their votes. Call it empathizing or pandering, but the candidates know it isn’t enough to say “I agree with you on the issues” — you have to demonstrate that you feel what they feel and look at the world the same way they do. That’s true to a degree of any constituency group, but it may be particularly important with voters who feel as besieged as social conservatives do today.
Which is why many of the GOP presidential candidates are repeating a narrative of victimhood and oppression that has become common on the religious right. It says that the forces of secularism — cruel, immoral, and on the march — are consolidating their gains and preparing to make it all but illegal to be a Christian.
“There are consequences when you don’t genuflect to the latest secular dogmas,” said Jeb Bush in a speech at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. The left, says Bobby Jindal, wants to “essentially outlaw firmly held religious beliefs that they do not agree with.” Not only will opposing same-sex marriage get you branded a hater, says Marco Rubio, “what’s the next step after that? After they’re done going after individuals, the next step is to argue that the teachings of mainstream Christianity, the catechism of the Catholic Church, is hate speech. That’s a real and present danger.” “We are moving rapidly toward the criminalization of Christianity,” says Mike Huckabee.
It may sound ridiculous to assert that this majority-Christian country with a stronger tradition of religious freedom than any other country on Earth is about to start rounding up Christians and putting them in jail for their beliefs. But to many on the religious right, that doesn’t seem like such a remote possibility.
It’s partly because, in a very real sense, the country is leaving them behind. The rapid change in public opinion and laws on gay rights is the most vivid current reminder, but it’s part of a process that has been going on for decades. The truth is that American society has been drifting away from the “traditional” values to which they hold for some time now, whether it’s on things like corporal punishment, women working outside the home, or the infusion of Christian practices into government-sponsored activities (like prayer in schools). That’s not to mention the discomfort they feel upon seeing a celebrity undergoing a sex change hailed for her courage and splashed across the covers of glamorous magazines.
And Christians themselves are shrinking as a proportion of the population. According to recent data from the Pew Research Center, in 2014 Christians made up 70.6 percent of the American population, down 8 points from just seven years before. Meanwhile, the population of the “unaffiliated” — atheists, agnostics, and people who don’t identify with any religion in particular — has grown to 23 percent of the public. Most strikingly, only 56 percent of millennials identify as Christian, while 35 percent are unaffiliated, suggesting that the trend will continue.
So it’s perfectly understandable for social conservatives to feel like they’re living in a society that no longer shares their values, because they are. I might say, “Welcome to the world everybody else lives in” — if you’re a Jew or a Muslim, you aren’t going to complain that unless the department store puts up a banner acknowledging your particular holiday that you’re suffering under the bootheel of oppression.
Nevertheless, many conservative Christians have constructed out of these developments an uplifting story for themselves, where their supposed persecution gives them nobility and heroism. They can now tell themselves that just by doing what they’ve been doing — having lots of kids, staying chaste until marriage, or just going to church — they’re courageous revolutionaries, underdogs fighting the odds on behalf of their principles and God’s desires. When they oppose gay marriage, they aren’t the equivalent of George Wallace barring the schoolhouse door, they’re the equivalent of the Soviet refusenik in 1975 or the American patriot in 1775.
Liberals may dismiss this kind of rhetoric, but it’s mostly sincere, and it will likely become louder as social progress continues in the direction it’s going. It’ll be particularly interesting to see what the candidates say if the Supreme Court rules that gay people have a constitutional right to marry, as it may well do in a matter of weeks.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributing Writer, The Week, June 4, 2015
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