“Family Values Creeps Have A Tough Week”: Josh Duggar, Bill O’Reilly & The Sickening Hypocrisy Of The Sanctimonious Right
“19 and Counting” could be the name of a reality show on the 2016 GOP presidential field. (Poor Reince Priebus.) But it’s actually the name of that TLC show you never watch on the bewildering Duggar family, headed by Jim Bob and Michelle, who have 19 children (and counting?) because they claim that’s what God wants. There was always something off about them, but now comes news that oldest son Josh Duggar, executive director (until Thursday) of the Family Research Council’s political arm, sexually molested at least five young girls, including, it seems, his sisters, when he was a teenager.
As the details come out, it seems Jim Bob Duggar knew about his son’s abuse for at least a year, and tried to address the problem by taking him to talk to church elders, including a session with an Arkansas state trooper who later went to jail for child pornography. No, I’m not making this up. Then they sent him for “counseling” to a program that consisted of remodeling homes. When police investigated three years later, they wouldn’t let them talk to young Josh. No charges were brought against him.
We don’t know all the details of the wrongdoing of Josh Duggar, who was a minor at the time. We do have a lot of details about what his parents did, and it’s safe to say they handled the problem abysmally, for Josh and their daughters. By the way, it was observed on Twitter that the family’s sanctimonious statement mentions God six times, “daughters” none.
This comes on the heels of court transcripts revealing that bullying patriarch Bill O’Reilly, another purveyor of right-wing family values, used to return to his family and “go ballistic,” in his words, once dragging ex-wife down the stairs by the neck in front of his daughter. The daughter called his outbursts “scary and demeaning,” but also told a counselor she didn’t have much of a relationship with him because he was “never around.”
Of course, that didn’t stop O’Reilly from lecturing African Americans on how to raise their families, blaming black community troubles on “no supervision, kids with no fathers.” Now we know that instead of taking care of their own children, O’Reilly and the Duggars were out telling other people how to take care of theirs.
Or in the case of the Duggars and LGBT folks, telling them they couldn’t have any. With 19 biological kids of their own, the Duggars should have been way too tired for that level of homophobic activism, but they made time for it. And yes, a staple of their screechy preaching has been that LGBT people…wait for it…molest children.
Stellar mom Michelle Duggar made a robocall pushing the repeal of a local anti-discrimination ordinance, arguing that it would allow “child predators” to threaten “the safety and innocence of a child.” Maybe she had a guilty conscience.
Josh himself claimed anti-discrimination laws “protect one group of people over another” and make it hard to “protect the well-being of women and children in our cities.” (Think Progress has a handy guide to “9 times Josh lectured the world on family values before admitting he was a child molester.” Enjoy.)
On the campaign trail in 2012, Duggar told reporters “Our family is like the epitome of conservative values. People connect to us in that way.” Much of the 2016 GOP presidential field has connected to Josh, at least, who seems to have a vanity photo with a most of the 19 (or so) and counting GOP presidential contenders. The entire Republican field is united on the inferiority of gay families, but hails parents like the Duggars, who let their son prey on his sisters for a year without going to authorities.
Meanwhile, Fox News remains silent about the behavior of O’Reilly, because his angry white patriarch shtick is the core of its brand. The NFL is now more sensitive to the concerns of women’s rights advocates than Fox is. It was a tough week for sanctimonious creeps, but it wasn’t so great for the rest of us, either.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 22, 2015
“A One-Man Off-Key Greek Chorus”: A Hard Spring Brings Hard Days For Jeb Bush
With a lush spring came cruel days. The Philadelphia train wreck happened only a hundred miles up the tracks from the Baltimore riots. Is the wind of history, the zeitgeist, on the job as we face the 2016 presidential race?
If so, it’s worth noting that Jeb Bush, the Republican frontrunner, spent days defending older brother George W. Bush, the former president, and the long war he started in Iraq. The younger brother was a one-man off-key Greek chorus.
In defending the decision to go to war based on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — a claim proved false — the former Florida governor kept saying, “my brother.” Like we the folks are all in with the Bush family? It’s not as if we enjoy fond memories of a presidency defined by 9/11.
To return to the Baltimore and Philadelphia scenes, equidistant from the Mason-Dixon line. Those shocking sights, from April to May, told us that business as usual is taking a tragic toll. The Northeast infrastructure is old, getting older. So are Baltimore’s sad-sack slums, visible from a moving Amtrak window as a train zips up to New York. Lives are on the line. Stressed rails reach a breaking point. And if we let things languish in policing and income inequality, heat will rise on the streets. Plain as that.
But Jeb Bush, the leading Republican candidate (all but declared) had nothing nice to say, no sympathy note to send from his alternate universe. He astonished even friendly media at Fox News and conservative pundits by a doomed defense of “my brother” and his administration’s aggression in starting the Iraq War — still playing out. But as we know from previous Bush family dramas, loyalty to the tribe comes first. Nearly all Jeb Bush’s foreign policy advisors were on his brother’s A list, too.
After several stumbles on whether he would have invaded Iraq as president in 2003, Jeb Bush finally conceded that would be a bad idea. Yet he’s echoed his brother’s bluster and blunder by speaking to the issue with the veneer of a sneer. Why “re-litigate” the past? Many were puzzled at how little thought Jeb Bush gave to the biggest question facing his quest — and bedeviling his brother’s legacy. (If his brother started it, hey, how bad could it be?)
By nature, the busy Bushes don’t spend a lot of time lost in thought or looking back: “No regrets” could be the family coat of arms. Now we know Jeb Bush is no exception. Contrary to claims he’s his own man, he often invokes his last name, stating his brother is his “closest advisor.” Oh brother.
When war goes wrong, it’s in the distance. Here at home, something strange went awry seven miles north of Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. A Northeast Regional train came around a bend, speeding at over 100 mph. The derailment devastated and bewildered swaths of the East Coast and beyond. Philly is a handsome city — with the Victorian zoo, the river boathouses, the Museum of Art. The city responded with great compassion and care to the injured and the dead that night. Brotherly love.
Eight beating hearts on that train were gone in a split second, torn from their plans, dreams, loved ones. All eight bodies were found in the wreckage. One victim, Rachel Jacobs, and I are alumnae of Swarthmore College in Philadelphia. She was 39. Somehow she seemed a long-lost friend.
Everyone knows safety improvements and infrastructure investment are overdue (except Congress.) Those old railway bridges over the bountiful, wide Susquehanna River? Sure, it’s easy on the eyes, crossing over the river. The most peaceful way to travel is now freighted with anxiety.
Here’s the thing this spring asks, starkly. Did our country get derailed at a reckless speed? Was Iraq akin to the curve in North Philadelphia?
The next president should address buttressing transportation, income inequality and beleaguered cities with fresh imagination and ideas. Whether a President Jeb Bush could do all that and regain our moral stature in the world community is a bridge too far. He’s failed the test of character.
The younger Bush is not the one to lead us out of our predicament, safe toward home.
By: Jamie Stiehm, The National Memo, May 22, 2015
“Being Punitive For The Hell Of It”: Kansas Wants The Very Poor To Crawl, Often, For The Means Of Survival
Former WaMo Weekend Blogger Max Ehrenfreund has an important if maddening piece up at WaPo’s Wonkblog today about the latest indignity towards the poor inflicted by those good Christian GOP lawmakers in Kansas.
A dollar bill is a special kind of thing. You can keep it as long as you like. You can pay for things with it. No one will ever charge you a fee. No one will ask any questions about your credit history. And other people won’t try to tell you that they know how to spend that dollar better than you do.
For these reasons, cash is one of the most valuable resources a poor person in the United States can possess. Yet legislators in Kansas, not trusting the poor to use their money wisely, have voted to limit how much cash that welfare beneficiaries can receive, effectively reducing their overall benefits, as well.
The legislature placed a daily cap of $25 on cash withdrawals beginning July 1, which will force beneficiaries to make more frequent trips to the ATM to withdraw money from the debit cards used to pay public assistance benefits.
Since there’s a fee for every withdrawal, the limit means that some families will get substantially less money.
Why is this happening? Apparently because Republican legislators heard anecdotes about “the welfare” accessing ATMs at baseball games, liquor stores, casinos, etc. It’s just like the stuff Ronald Reagan once said about food stamp beneficiaries using their change to buy vodka. So for their own good, the solons decided to force them to make more and much smaller withdrawals, even if their cash benefits are used, as they typically are, for relatively large payments like rent.
While some politicians and news organizations have found occasional examples of the poor misusing their public assistance, there’s no clear evidence that it’s a systemic problem or that limiting the recipients’ access to cash would force them to use their money differently.
In other words, the legislators were just being punitive for the hell of it. After all, it’s mostly those people we’re talking about. Why shouldn’t they have to crawl?
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 21, 2015
“Chest-Thumping Belligerence, Been There, Done That”: Why Marco Rubio’s Tough Guy Act Is Actually A Display Of Cringing Cowardice
Marco Rubio is laying out his foreign policy platform for 2016, and the take-home message is this: PANIC!!!
Join me in keeping our country safe in the New American Century. Click here now: http://t.co/r8aMy4fU2E pic.twitter.com/g5ri5UuCT0
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) May 16, 2015
Elsewhere, Rubio is laying claim to the usual panoply of hyper-masculine tough guy imagery: flags, bald eagles, and banners proclaiming “American Strength.”
What he means by strength can be seen in a speech he gave to the Council on Foreign Relations, blaming everything bad that has happened overseas in the past six years on President Obama’s insufficiently aggressive stance towards Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba. It would appear that chest-thumping belligerence is how safety is to be obtained.
Let’s call this what it is: cowardice. Whatever happened to political courage?
I’m speaking of real political courage, not the kind that neoconservatives equate with moar war. The politics of courage, as it is practiced by the Republican Party, is heavily gendered and homophobic — as can be seen in the slurs (e.g., “sissy”) used against those less militarily inclined. Attacking political enemies for lacking “manly” courage is a political commonplace going back hundreds of years.
Sexism, of course, has been a bipartisan affair, but these days Rubio’s party is undoubtedly the worse offender. Since the end of World War II, attacking liberals for their weak, effeminate unwillingness to make the “tough decisions” to kill or imprison lots of people has been a staple of conservative rhetoric. This has been buttressed more recently by Democrats’ association with feminism and gay rights, their corresponding greater number of female candidates, and the opening of a gender gap between the parties.
Such attacks rely on sexist tropes about women (or LGBT people) being incapable of hard, logical analysis due to excessive emotion or softness. Needless to say, those are totally illegitimate grounds for criticism. To the contrary, there is nothing strong, tough, or courageous about constant demands for more use of violence, or executing innocent people, or invading random countries for no reason.
However, if one can clear away the various prejudiced dross, there is a political case to be made for courage. I reject the idea that one can quickly and easily obtain more security by sacrificing liberty — and I also believe that not flying into a hysterical frenzy every time something terrible happens takes real courage.
After 9/11, that kind of courage was notably absent from American political leadership. Instead, there was a grasping panic; impossible, childish demands for physical security (the “one percent doctrine“); and a blind, psychotic thirst for vengeance. The most convenient victim turned out to be Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. That war of aggression did nothing for American security — indeed, it gravely harmed it. And like any act of bullying, it was fundamentally an act of cowardice.
Sometimes courage requires standing up to physical danger, like not losing one’s wits when under fire. It can also be strength in the face of pain and grief. A sensible reaction to terrorist attacks would involve both: a realization that total security is an impossible goal, and that senselessly lashing out at random targets will not heal the damage done by the attackers.
Unfortunately for something like half a million Iraqis, President Bush was a knock-kneed coward. It’s too bad that Rubio mistakes his foreign policy for courage.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, May 20, 2015
“The George Costanza Defense”: George W. Bush Didn’t Just Lie About The Iraq War. What He Did Was Much Worse
None of the conservatives running for president want to be associated with the last Republican president — not even his brother (for whom stepping away is rather complicated). After all, George W. Bush left office with an approval rating hovering in the low 30s, and his grandest project was the gigantic catastrophe of the Iraq War, which we’re still dealing with and still debating. If you’re a Republican right now you’re no doubt wishing we could talk about something else, but failing that, you’d like the issue framed in a particular way: The war was an honest mistake, nobody lied to the public, and anything bad that’s happening now is Barack Obama’s fault.
For the moment I want to focus on the part about the lies. I’ve found over the years that conservatives who supported the war get particularly angry at the assertion that Bush lied us into war. No, they’ll insist, it wasn’t his fault: There was mistaken intelligence, he took that intelligence in good faith, and presented what he believed to be true at the time. It’s the George Costanza defense: It’s not a lie if you believe it.
Here’s the problem, though. It might be possible, with some incredibly narrow definition of the word “lie,” to say that Bush told only a few outright lies on Iraq. Most of what he said in order to sell the public on the war could be said to have some basis in something somebody thought or something somebody alleged (Bush was slightly more careful than Dick Cheney, who lied without hesitation or remorse). But if we reduce the question of Bush’s guilt and responsibility to how many lies we can count, we miss the bigger picture.
What the Bush administration launched in 2002 and 2003 may have been the most comprehensive, sophisticated, and misleading campaign of government propaganda in American history. Spend too much time in the weeds, and you risk missing the hysterical tenor of the whole campaign.
That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of weeds. In 2008, the Center for Public Integrity completed a project in which they went over the public statements by eight top Bush administration officials on the topic of Iraq, and found that no fewer than 935 were false, including 260 statements by President Bush himself. But the theory on which the White House operated was that whether or not you could fool all of the people some of the time, you could certainly scare them out of their wits. That’s what was truly diabolical about their campaign.
And it was a campaign. In the summer of 2002, the administration established something called the White House Iraq Group, through which Karl Rove and other communication strategists like Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin coordinated with policy officials to sell the public on the threat from Iraq in order to justify war. “The script had been finalized with great care over the summer,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan later wrote, for a “campaign to convince Americans that war with Iraq was inevitable and necessary.”
In that campaign, intelligence wasn’t something to be understood and assessed by the administration in making their decisions, it was a propaganda tool to lead the public to the conclusion that the administration wanted. Again and again we saw a similar pattern: An allegation would bubble up from somewhere, some in the intelligence community would say that it could be true but others would say it was either speculation or outright baloney, but before you knew it the president or someone else was presenting it to the public as settled fact.
And each and every time the message was the same: If we didn’t wage war, Iraq was going to attack the United States homeland with its enormous arsenal of ghastly weapons, and who knows how many Americans would perish. When you actually spell it out like that it sounds almost comical, but that was the Bush administration’s assertion, repeated hundreds upon hundreds of time to a public still skittish in the wake of September 11. (Remember, the campaign for the war began less than a year after the September 11 attacks.)
Sometimes this message was imparted with specific false claims, sometimes with dark insinuation, and sometimes with speculation about the horrors to come (“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” said Bush and others when asked about the thinness of much of their evidence). Yet the conclusion was always the same: The only alternative to invading Iraq was waiting around to be killed. I could pick out any of a thousand quotes, but here’s just one, from a radio address Bush gave on September 28, 2002:
The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. The regime has long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist groups, and there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq. This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year.
What wasn’t utterly false in that statement was disingenuous at best. But if there was anything that marked the campaign, it was its certainty. There was seldom any doubt expressed or admitted, seldom any hint that the information we had was incomplete, speculative, and the matter of fevered debate amongst intelligence officials. But that’s what was going on beneath the administration’s sales job.
The intelligence wasn’t “mistaken,” as the Bush administration’s defenders would have us believe today. The intelligence was a mass of contradictions and differing interpretations. The administration picked out the parts that they wanted — supported, unsupported, plausible, absurd, it didn’t matter — and used them in their campaign to turn up Americans’ fear.
This is one of the many sins for which Bush and those who supported him ought to spend a lifetime atoning. He looked out at the American public and decided that the way to get what he wanted was to terrify them. If he could convince them that any day now their children would die a horrible death, that they and everything they knew would be turned to radioactive ash, and that the only chance of averting this fate was to say yes to him, then he could have his war. Lies were of no less value than truth, so long as they both created enough fear.
And it worked.
By: Paul Waldman, The Week, May 20, 2015
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