Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 898

January 9, 2016

Hong Kong’s publishers keep disappearing. Its autonomy could be next

Global Post BANGKOK, Thailand — On paper at least, Hong Kong is a quasi-independent territory of China where people are free to dish dirt on the Communist Party — a privilege denied to 1.3 billion inhabitants of the mainland.

That vision of Hong Kong, however, is growing dimmer. If allegations are correct, it now appears that those who scrutinize Beijing’s political elite can get snatched off the streets of Hong Kong and dragged into China proper.

That is among Hong Kongers’ worst fears, and they are right to worry. In recent months, five people connected to a single publishing house — known for detailing misdeeds of Communist Party officials — have simply vanished.

The latest to disappear is 65-year-old Lee Bo. He is an editor with Sage Communications, which puts out salacious books, sometimes shakily sourced, that describe Communist Party scandals. His top transgression, it seems, was preparing the release of a book on the — alleged — secret love life of China’s President Xi Jinping.

Lee’s case is remarkable because he was on Hong Kong soil when he disappeared on Dec. 30.

His wife, whom he briefly called after being detained, has told reporters that he said Chinese operatives took him to a non-disclosed location. He called from a number with a mainland Chinese area code.

According to his wife, he told her he was asked to assist an investigation into the dissident publishing house. (Lee’s wife has since withdrawn her missing-person report after claiming to have received written assurances from her husband, a move that Amnesty International said “smacked of intimidation.”)

If true, this is a massive breach of Hong Kong’s autonomy.

Under a cherished set of “one country, two systems” laws, which offer limited independence to Hong Kong, Chinese police aren’t allowed to make arrests within its borders. If covert Chinese forces can freely abduct dissidents in Hong Kong, the territory’s prized free speech ideals are practically meaningless.

Three other Hong Kong residents connected to the publishing operation vanished while visiting the Chinese mainland in October. Another disappeared while on vacation in Thailand — a sign that the Communist Party is willing to pursue its targets even on foreign soil. (Thailand, ruled by a military junta, is increasingly cooperative in deporting traveling Chinese dissidents back into their government’s hands.)

Sage Communications belongs to a clique of independent publishers in Hong Kong that focus on “power struggles behind the scenes, love affairs and political gossip,” says Maya Wang, a researcher with Human Rights Watch.

These titles excite many readers in mainland China, where the government maintains a tight stranglehold on both published and online speech. “As a result, there’s been a thriving industry, though it’s a bit small, in which tourists come to Hong Kong from the mainland just to purchase books,” Wang says. “The books fill an important need in the Chinese publishing industry.”

The abductions have stirred panic among Hong Kong’s feisty anti-Beijing crowd, which agitates for liberalized democracy over the Communist Party’s authoritarian stylings. One Hong Kong lawmaker, Dennis Kwok, says that the allegations, if true, strike “a fatal blow to ‘one country, two systems’ and Hong Kong’s judicial independence.”

“In the past, we were safe because we lived in Hong Kong instead of mainland China,” says Agnes Chow, a student activist who helped lead Hong Kong’s “umbrella revolution,” in a video posted online shortly after Lee vanished.

“However, the circumstances have changed with this abduction... we feel that Hong Kong is not Hong Kong anymore,” Chow says. “I’m also afraid for my personal safety after this incident happened. I still believe we should continuously fight for freedom from fear.”

The Communist Party is hardly discreet about its loathing of what it calls Hong Kong's “radicals.”

“Their behavior will only make the city’s future path bumpier and bring annoyance to the local people,” stated a recent op-ed in the Global Times, a Chinese government mouthpiece. The piece also warned that “certain people from Hong Kong should really feel ashamed of what they have brought to the city.”

For now, the whereabouts of the five missing publishers are unknown. Activists and lawmakers publicly speculate that they are being held in China — perhaps by shadowy forces dispatched by angry officials, perhaps by the government itself.

A similar case — in which a Hong Kong publisher named Yao Wentian was nabbed while prepping a book called “Chinese Godfather Xi Jinping” — may offer a clue to their fate.

The publisher was arrested in 2014 for “smuggling” industrial chemicals, purchased legally, on a trip to the mainland. His supporters are adamant these charges were a means to punish his political speech by proxy. He is now serving a 10-year prison sentence somewhere inside China.

Global Post BANGKOK, Thailand — On paper at least, Hong Kong is a quasi-independent territory of China where people are free to dish dirt on the Communist Party — a privilege denied to 1.3 billion inhabitants of the mainland.

That vision of Hong Kong, however, is growing dimmer. If allegations are correct, it now appears that those who scrutinize Beijing’s political elite can get snatched off the streets of Hong Kong and dragged into China proper.

That is among Hong Kongers’ worst fears, and they are right to worry. In recent months, five people connected to a single publishing house — known for detailing misdeeds of Communist Party officials — have simply vanished.

The latest to disappear is 65-year-old Lee Bo. He is an editor with Sage Communications, which puts out salacious books, sometimes shakily sourced, that describe Communist Party scandals. His top transgression, it seems, was preparing the release of a book on the — alleged — secret love life of China’s President Xi Jinping.

Lee’s case is remarkable because he was on Hong Kong soil when he disappeared on Dec. 30.

His wife, whom he briefly called after being detained, has told reporters that he said Chinese operatives took him to a non-disclosed location. He called from a number with a mainland Chinese area code.

According to his wife, he told her he was asked to assist an investigation into the dissident publishing house. (Lee’s wife has since withdrawn her missing-person report after claiming to have received written assurances from her husband, a move that Amnesty International said “smacked of intimidation.”)

If true, this is a massive breach of Hong Kong’s autonomy.

Under a cherished set of “one country, two systems” laws, which offer limited independence to Hong Kong, Chinese police aren’t allowed to make arrests within its borders. If covert Chinese forces can freely abduct dissidents in Hong Kong, the territory’s prized free speech ideals are practically meaningless.

Three other Hong Kong residents connected to the publishing operation vanished while visiting the Chinese mainland in October. Another disappeared while on vacation in Thailand — a sign that the Communist Party is willing to pursue its targets even on foreign soil. (Thailand, ruled by a military junta, is increasingly cooperative in deporting traveling Chinese dissidents back into their government’s hands.)

Sage Communications belongs to a clique of independent publishers in Hong Kong that focus on “power struggles behind the scenes, love affairs and political gossip,” says Maya Wang, a researcher with Human Rights Watch.

These titles excite many readers in mainland China, where the government maintains a tight stranglehold on both published and online speech. “As a result, there’s been a thriving industry, though it’s a bit small, in which tourists come to Hong Kong from the mainland just to purchase books,” Wang says. “The books fill an important need in the Chinese publishing industry.”

The abductions have stirred panic among Hong Kong’s feisty anti-Beijing crowd, which agitates for liberalized democracy over the Communist Party’s authoritarian stylings. One Hong Kong lawmaker, Dennis Kwok, says that the allegations, if true, strike “a fatal blow to ‘one country, two systems’ and Hong Kong’s judicial independence.”

“In the past, we were safe because we lived in Hong Kong instead of mainland China,” says Agnes Chow, a student activist who helped lead Hong Kong’s “umbrella revolution,” in a video posted online shortly after Lee vanished.

“However, the circumstances have changed with this abduction... we feel that Hong Kong is not Hong Kong anymore,” Chow says. “I’m also afraid for my personal safety after this incident happened. I still believe we should continuously fight for freedom from fear.”

The Communist Party is hardly discreet about its loathing of what it calls Hong Kong's “radicals.”

“Their behavior will only make the city’s future path bumpier and bring annoyance to the local people,” stated a recent op-ed in the Global Times, a Chinese government mouthpiece. The piece also warned that “certain people from Hong Kong should really feel ashamed of what they have brought to the city.”

For now, the whereabouts of the five missing publishers are unknown. Activists and lawmakers publicly speculate that they are being held in China — perhaps by shadowy forces dispatched by angry officials, perhaps by the government itself.

A similar case — in which a Hong Kong publisher named Yao Wentian was nabbed while prepping a book called “Chinese Godfather Xi Jinping” — may offer a clue to their fate.

The publisher was arrested in 2014 for “smuggling” industrial chemicals, purchased legally, on a trip to the mainland. His supporters are adamant these charges were a means to punish his political speech by proxy. He is now serving a 10-year prison sentence somewhere inside China.

Global Post BANGKOK, Thailand — On paper at least, Hong Kong is a quasi-independent territory of China where people are free to dish dirt on the Communist Party — a privilege denied to 1.3 billion inhabitants of the mainland.

That vision of Hong Kong, however, is growing dimmer. If allegations are correct, it now appears that those who scrutinize Beijing’s political elite can get snatched off the streets of Hong Kong and dragged into China proper.

That is among Hong Kongers’ worst fears, and they are right to worry. In recent months, five people connected to a single publishing house — known for detailing misdeeds of Communist Party officials — have simply vanished.

The latest to disappear is 65-year-old Lee Bo. He is an editor with Sage Communications, which puts out salacious books, sometimes shakily sourced, that describe Communist Party scandals. His top transgression, it seems, was preparing the release of a book on the — alleged — secret love life of China’s President Xi Jinping.

Lee’s case is remarkable because he was on Hong Kong soil when he disappeared on Dec. 30.

His wife, whom he briefly called after being detained, has told reporters that he said Chinese operatives took him to a non-disclosed location. He called from a number with a mainland Chinese area code.

According to his wife, he told her he was asked to assist an investigation into the dissident publishing house. (Lee’s wife has since withdrawn her missing-person report after claiming to have received written assurances from her husband, a move that Amnesty International said “smacked of intimidation.”)

If true, this is a massive breach of Hong Kong’s autonomy.

Under a cherished set of “one country, two systems” laws, which offer limited independence to Hong Kong, Chinese police aren’t allowed to make arrests within its borders. If covert Chinese forces can freely abduct dissidents in Hong Kong, the territory’s prized free speech ideals are practically meaningless.

Three other Hong Kong residents connected to the publishing operation vanished while visiting the Chinese mainland in October. Another disappeared while on vacation in Thailand — a sign that the Communist Party is willing to pursue its targets even on foreign soil. (Thailand, ruled by a military junta, is increasingly cooperative in deporting traveling Chinese dissidents back into their government’s hands.)

Sage Communications belongs to a clique of independent publishers in Hong Kong that focus on “power struggles behind the scenes, love affairs and political gossip,” says Maya Wang, a researcher with Human Rights Watch.

These titles excite many readers in mainland China, where the government maintains a tight stranglehold on both published and online speech. “As a result, there’s been a thriving industry, though it’s a bit small, in which tourists come to Hong Kong from the mainland just to purchase books,” Wang says. “The books fill an important need in the Chinese publishing industry.”

The abductions have stirred panic among Hong Kong’s feisty anti-Beijing crowd, which agitates for liberalized democracy over the Communist Party’s authoritarian stylings. One Hong Kong lawmaker, Dennis Kwok, says that the allegations, if true, strike “a fatal blow to ‘one country, two systems’ and Hong Kong’s judicial independence.”

“In the past, we were safe because we lived in Hong Kong instead of mainland China,” says Agnes Chow, a student activist who helped lead Hong Kong’s “umbrella revolution,” in a video posted online shortly after Lee vanished.

“However, the circumstances have changed with this abduction... we feel that Hong Kong is not Hong Kong anymore,” Chow says. “I’m also afraid for my personal safety after this incident happened. I still believe we should continuously fight for freedom from fear.”

The Communist Party is hardly discreet about its loathing of what it calls Hong Kong's “radicals.”

“Their behavior will only make the city’s future path bumpier and bring annoyance to the local people,” stated a recent op-ed in the Global Times, a Chinese government mouthpiece. The piece also warned that “certain people from Hong Kong should really feel ashamed of what they have brought to the city.”

For now, the whereabouts of the five missing publishers are unknown. Activists and lawmakers publicly speculate that they are being held in China — perhaps by shadowy forces dispatched by angry officials, perhaps by the government itself.

A similar case — in which a Hong Kong publisher named Yao Wentian was nabbed while prepping a book called “Chinese Godfather Xi Jinping” — may offer a clue to their fate.

The publisher was arrested in 2014 for “smuggling” industrial chemicals, purchased legally, on a trip to the mainland. His supporters are adamant these charges were a means to punish his political speech by proxy. He is now serving a 10-year prison sentence somewhere inside China.

Global Post BANGKOK, Thailand — On paper at least, Hong Kong is a quasi-independent territory of China where people are free to dish dirt on the Communist Party — a privilege denied to 1.3 billion inhabitants of the mainland.

That vision of Hong Kong, however, is growing dimmer. If allegations are correct, it now appears that those who scrutinize Beijing’s political elite can get snatched off the streets of Hong Kong and dragged into China proper.

That is among Hong Kongers’ worst fears, and they are right to worry. In recent months, five people connected to a single publishing house — known for detailing misdeeds of Communist Party officials — have simply vanished.

The latest to disappear is 65-year-old Lee Bo. He is an editor with Sage Communications, which puts out salacious books, sometimes shakily sourced, that describe Communist Party scandals. His top transgression, it seems, was preparing the release of a book on the — alleged — secret love life of China’s President Xi Jinping.

Lee’s case is remarkable because he was on Hong Kong soil when he disappeared on Dec. 30.

His wife, whom he briefly called after being detained, has told reporters that he said Chinese operatives took him to a non-disclosed location. He called from a number with a mainland Chinese area code.

According to his wife, he told her he was asked to assist an investigation into the dissident publishing house. (Lee’s wife has since withdrawn her missing-person report after claiming to have received written assurances from her husband, a move that Amnesty International said “smacked of intimidation.”)

If true, this is a massive breach of Hong Kong’s autonomy.

Under a cherished set of “one country, two systems” laws, which offer limited independence to Hong Kong, Chinese police aren’t allowed to make arrests within its borders. If covert Chinese forces can freely abduct dissidents in Hong Kong, the territory’s prized free speech ideals are practically meaningless.

Three other Hong Kong residents connected to the publishing operation vanished while visiting the Chinese mainland in October. Another disappeared while on vacation in Thailand — a sign that the Communist Party is willing to pursue its targets even on foreign soil. (Thailand, ruled by a military junta, is increasingly cooperative in deporting traveling Chinese dissidents back into their government’s hands.)

Sage Communications belongs to a clique of independent publishers in Hong Kong that focus on “power struggles behind the scenes, love affairs and political gossip,” says Maya Wang, a researcher with Human Rights Watch.

These titles excite many readers in mainland China, where the government maintains a tight stranglehold on both published and online speech. “As a result, there’s been a thriving industry, though it’s a bit small, in which tourists come to Hong Kong from the mainland just to purchase books,” Wang says. “The books fill an important need in the Chinese publishing industry.”

The abductions have stirred panic among Hong Kong’s feisty anti-Beijing crowd, which agitates for liberalized democracy over the Communist Party’s authoritarian stylings. One Hong Kong lawmaker, Dennis Kwok, says that the allegations, if true, strike “a fatal blow to ‘one country, two systems’ and Hong Kong’s judicial independence.”

“In the past, we were safe because we lived in Hong Kong instead of mainland China,” says Agnes Chow, a student activist who helped lead Hong Kong’s “umbrella revolution,” in a video posted online shortly after Lee vanished.

“However, the circumstances have changed with this abduction... we feel that Hong Kong is not Hong Kong anymore,” Chow says. “I’m also afraid for my personal safety after this incident happened. I still believe we should continuously fight for freedom from fear.”

The Communist Party is hardly discreet about its loathing of what it calls Hong Kong's “radicals.”

“Their behavior will only make the city’s future path bumpier and bring annoyance to the local people,” stated a recent op-ed in the Global Times, a Chinese government mouthpiece. The piece also warned that “certain people from Hong Kong should really feel ashamed of what they have brought to the city.”

For now, the whereabouts of the five missing publishers are unknown. Activists and lawmakers publicly speculate that they are being held in China — perhaps by shadowy forces dispatched by angry officials, perhaps by the government itself.

A similar case — in which a Hong Kong publisher named Yao Wentian was nabbed while prepping a book called “Chinese Godfather Xi Jinping” — may offer a clue to their fate.

The publisher was arrested in 2014 for “smuggling” industrial chemicals, purchased legally, on a trip to the mainland. His supporters are adamant these charges were a means to punish his political speech by proxy. He is now serving a 10-year prison sentence somewhere inside China.

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Published on January 09, 2016 12:00

New atheists must become new vegans: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the extra burden on moral leaders

Philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris, who has written extensively on morality and its inextricable link to the well-being of conscious creatures, recently addressed the fact that he eats meat. Speaking to psychologist Paul Bloom in a podcast in 2015, Harris admitted:
“…the fact that I participate in a system that does this knowingly (animal factory farming) more or less condemns me as a hypocrite… We are two people who have admitted to participating in a system that is not only in some sense objectively bad, but perhaps so bad as to be the kind of thing that would be on the short list as to be an embarrassment to our descendants.”
Happily, in a podcast released earlier this month, Harris has reported that since that statement he has been a “vegetarian… and aspiring vegan.” Given his position as a vocal and persistent champion of reason, I always suspected this day would come. Other than just providing a few more decibels to my small and intermittent efforts to encourage others to consider the implications of what they have on their dinner plate, this willingness to mercilessly introspect on the ethics of one's own way of life is inspiring. What will my descendants be embarrassed about? It’s time that Sam Harris’ fellow scientists and public intellectuals start realizing that the ethics of eating meat is an important issue. As each one of them is arguably attempting to contribute to building a just and humane global civilization, they should stop pretending that nonhuman animals are not its citizens. Given advances in neuroscience, biology and evolution, we have known for years that animals have the capacity to suffer. Couple this with our technological abilities to meet our food requirements without relying on animals, our burgeoning knowledge of human nutrition and health (including the impact of animal products on the development of many chronic diseases) and the huge impact the meat and dairy industries have on global warming (arguably our greatest challenge), it should seem quite obvious where our moral compass is currently pointed. As I wrote in ‘The Pollution of Good Ideas":
“…unfortunately arguments for a vegan lifestyle are misrepresented by quantum healers with crystals, recommended by naturopaths and homeopaths, and endorsed by those who claim that broccoli has a vibrational quality that is in-sync with our bodies… As a result, vegan philosophy tends to be viewed as lacking reason and logic, and strongly associated with anti-modern medicine sentiments.”
The vegan lifestyle has been hijacked by misinformed hippies in the same way that meditation has been stained by a similar trend of idiocy. Both have been strangled between pseudo-spiritualism and pseudo-science, and almost entirely obscured from the view of rational-thinking people in the process. Harris has attempted to vaccinate (pun intended) spirituality from woo-woo, and his first steps toward advocating veganism are echoing this. However this cannot be achieved alone, and it’s about time that others with a suitably endowed platform come to share the load. Like the New Atheists movement in the early 2000s, it appears we are on the precipice of a similar avalanche in gaining the attention and megaphones of public intellectuals in the question of meat-eating: a "New-Vegans" movement. As I’ll detail below, we are both frustratingly close and far away; many traveling down the road of moral progress have arrived at the destination of veganism intellectually, but not in practice. In a discussion between biologist Richard Dawkins and moral philosopher Peter Singer, Dawkins noted:
“[It] leaves me in a very difficult moral position… I think you have a very strong point when you say that anybody who eats meat has a very strong obligation to think seriously about it and I don’t find any good defense. I find myself in exactly the same position as you or I would have been, well probably you wouldn’t have been but I might have been, two hundred years ago […] talking about slavery… I think what I’d really like to see is people like you having a far greater effect on, I would call it, consciousness raising and trying to swing it around so it becomes the societal norm not to eat meat.”
"People like you"? How about people like Richard Dawkins? Michael Shermer, author of "The Moral Arc," tweeted, “Ugh. Watched The Earthlings last night researching moral progress. Feels like moral regress when it comes to animals,” as well as writing an article titled “Confessions of a Speciesist.” However promising these signs were, sadly he has also admitted, “No I’m not a vegetarian but think we should expand the moral sphere to include marine mammals and all primates as a good start.” Lawrence Krauss recently had Peter Singer on stage with him as part of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. Though he started off the event by bragging about wearing vegan shoes, and discussed the ethics of meat-eating at length with Singer (describing the argument for vegetarianism as “powerful”), he only suggested that he might become vegetarian. This kind of moral hypocrisy should be scrutinized and ridiculed accordingly – ridiculed to the point where it would be career suicide for any public intellectual to stubbornly persist with it. Absurdly, Sam Harris has been dragged over the coals for simply pointing out that torture of humans in very rare and in extreme circumstances would be justified (mostly the result of gross misinterpretations of his argument), but his colleagues who openly admit to implicitly supporting systematic torture of non-human animals suffer no such damage to their reputations. The psychologist Steven Pinker, a hero of mine, wrote the brilliant and extensive book "Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes." While impressive in both its length and density, Pinker's book dedicates barely over five pages to the topic of meat-eating and factory farming. Though optimistic in its accounts of declining human-versus-human violence, Pinker says, “These imponderables, I suspect, prevent the animal rights movement from duplicating the trajectory of the other Rights Revolutions exactly. But for now the location of the finish line is beside the point.” What point is that? Human well-being, I guess. The poster boys and girls of atheism, secularism, science and reason have done wonders for so many domains of public discourse. While they fittingly weigh in on many moral questions not restricted to religious indoctrination and its impact on human rights, animal rights has so far garnered little attention. However, the great thing about reason is that it is a tool. Reason does not presuppose its answers, but is rather a process by which conclusions germinate under the light of the best available evidence. The best available evidence currently shows that eating meat and animal products is bad for animals, our health and the environment. Many of the New Atheists and their associated colleagues have realized this; they just need to come forth into the light.  Philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris, who has written extensively on morality and its inextricable link to the well-being of conscious creatures, recently addressed the fact that he eats meat. Speaking to psychologist Paul Bloom in a podcast in 2015, Harris admitted:
“…the fact that I participate in a system that does this knowingly (animal factory farming) more or less condemns me as a hypocrite… We are two people who have admitted to participating in a system that is not only in some sense objectively bad, but perhaps so bad as to be the kind of thing that would be on the short list as to be an embarrassment to our descendants.”
Happily, in a podcast released earlier this month, Harris has reported that since that statement he has been a “vegetarian… and aspiring vegan.” Given his position as a vocal and persistent champion of reason, I always suspected this day would come. Other than just providing a few more decibels to my small and intermittent efforts to encourage others to consider the implications of what they have on their dinner plate, this willingness to mercilessly introspect on the ethics of one's own way of life is inspiring. What will my descendants be embarrassed about? It’s time that Sam Harris’ fellow scientists and public intellectuals start realizing that the ethics of eating meat is an important issue. As each one of them is arguably attempting to contribute to building a just and humane global civilization, they should stop pretending that nonhuman animals are not its citizens. Given advances in neuroscience, biology and evolution, we have known for years that animals have the capacity to suffer. Couple this with our technological abilities to meet our food requirements without relying on animals, our burgeoning knowledge of human nutrition and health (including the impact of animal products on the development of many chronic diseases) and the huge impact the meat and dairy industries have on global warming (arguably our greatest challenge), it should seem quite obvious where our moral compass is currently pointed. As I wrote in ‘The Pollution of Good Ideas":
“…unfortunately arguments for a vegan lifestyle are misrepresented by quantum healers with crystals, recommended by naturopaths and homeopaths, and endorsed by those who claim that broccoli has a vibrational quality that is in-sync with our bodies… As a result, vegan philosophy tends to be viewed as lacking reason and logic, and strongly associated with anti-modern medicine sentiments.”
The vegan lifestyle has been hijacked by misinformed hippies in the same way that meditation has been stained by a similar trend of idiocy. Both have been strangled between pseudo-spiritualism and pseudo-science, and almost entirely obscured from the view of rational-thinking people in the process. Harris has attempted to vaccinate (pun intended) spirituality from woo-woo, and his first steps toward advocating veganism are echoing this. However this cannot be achieved alone, and it’s about time that others with a suitably endowed platform come to share the load. Like the New Atheists movement in the early 2000s, it appears we are on the precipice of a similar avalanche in gaining the attention and megaphones of public intellectuals in the question of meat-eating: a "New-Vegans" movement. As I’ll detail below, we are both frustratingly close and far away; many traveling down the road of moral progress have arrived at the destination of veganism intellectually, but not in practice. In a discussion between biologist Richard Dawkins and moral philosopher Peter Singer, Dawkins noted:
“[It] leaves me in a very difficult moral position… I think you have a very strong point when you say that anybody who eats meat has a very strong obligation to think seriously about it and I don’t find any good defense. I find myself in exactly the same position as you or I would have been, well probably you wouldn’t have been but I might have been, two hundred years ago […] talking about slavery… I think what I’d really like to see is people like you having a far greater effect on, I would call it, consciousness raising and trying to swing it around so it becomes the societal norm not to eat meat.”
"People like you"? How about people like Richard Dawkins? Michael Shermer, author of "The Moral Arc," tweeted, “Ugh. Watched The Earthlings last night researching moral progress. Feels like moral regress when it comes to animals,” as well as writing an article titled “Confessions of a Speciesist.” However promising these signs were, sadly he has also admitted, “No I’m not a vegetarian but think we should expand the moral sphere to include marine mammals and all primates as a good start.” Lawrence Krauss recently had Peter Singer on stage with him as part of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. Though he started off the event by bragging about wearing vegan shoes, and discussed the ethics of meat-eating at length with Singer (describing the argument for vegetarianism as “powerful”), he only suggested that he might become vegetarian. This kind of moral hypocrisy should be scrutinized and ridiculed accordingly – ridiculed to the point where it would be career suicide for any public intellectual to stubbornly persist with it. Absurdly, Sam Harris has been dragged over the coals for simply pointing out that torture of humans in very rare and in extreme circumstances would be justified (mostly the result of gross misinterpretations of his argument), but his colleagues who openly admit to implicitly supporting systematic torture of non-human animals suffer no such damage to their reputations. The psychologist Steven Pinker, a hero of mine, wrote the brilliant and extensive book "Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes." While impressive in both its length and density, Pinker's book dedicates barely over five pages to the topic of meat-eating and factory farming. Though optimistic in its accounts of declining human-versus-human violence, Pinker says, “These imponderables, I suspect, prevent the animal rights movement from duplicating the trajectory of the other Rights Revolutions exactly. But for now the location of the finish line is beside the point.” What point is that? Human well-being, I guess. The poster boys and girls of atheism, secularism, science and reason have done wonders for so many domains of public discourse. While they fittingly weigh in on many moral questions not restricted to religious indoctrination and its impact on human rights, animal rights has so far garnered little attention. However, the great thing about reason is that it is a tool. Reason does not presuppose its answers, but is rather a process by which conclusions germinate under the light of the best available evidence. The best available evidence currently shows that eating meat and animal products is bad for animals, our health and the environment. Many of the New Atheists and their associated colleagues have realized this; they just need to come forth into the light.  

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Published on January 09, 2016 11:00

Oil, money, politics and evil: Our leading Middle East ally is the worst country imaginable

American foreign policy is full of things we can’t see and things we don’t talk about. The drone war of the Obama years; the “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation” of the George W. Bush years. Nixon and Kissinger’s secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. The overthrow of democratic governments we didn’t like: Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961, Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. Once you get started with this stuff it’s hard to stop, and pretty soon your friends are giving you that look, like they’re wondering at what point you’ll start talking about your stormy personal relationship with Richard Helms, or the microchips implanted in your dental work. But even by those standards, the case of Saudi Arabia is special. We love Saudi Arabia so much! The Bush family loves Saudi Arabia; the Clinton family loves Saudi Arabia. You and I are frequently told that we love Saudi Arabia, even if we aren’t exactly sure why. We write mash notes in Saudi Arabia’s yearbook, in pink Magic Marker with lots of hearts: BE-HEDDING ALL THOSE PPL! U R SO SEXY!!! We have never overthrown a democratic government in Saudi Arabia. It would admittedly be difficult to do so, since Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that has never had a democratic government and never will. Our tax dollars and Saudi oil dollars flow back and forth between Washington and Riyadh in a bewildering matrix understood by no one, ending up along the way in the handbags of hookers in Vegas and the tip baskets of croupiers in Macau. It’s kind of a crazy, stupid love. No, I mean that. It’s diagnosably insane and unbelievably stupid, verging on suicidal. Saudi Arabia is damn near the worst place in the world when it comes to all those human rights and civil liberties America supposedly cares about so deeply. (Actually, it seems like the worst place in the world in general, but that’s a broad and highly subjective claim.) Women are effectively the property of their fathers, husbands or brothers. Homosexuality does not officially exist, and is punishable by death. Internal dissidents and critics of the monarchy have been convicted on such charges as “breaking allegiance with the ruler” and “contact with foreign news organizations to exaggerate the news.” Last week’s execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a leading Shiite cleric, along with dozens of other people, made worldwide news because it further inflamed Saudi Arabia’s not-so-cold war with the Shiite rulers of Iran, which is playing out on the ground in Yemen with devastating civilian consequences. But that kind of dubious judicial proceeding and brutal punishment is far more the Saudi rule than the exception. All non-Islamic religious practice is forbidden, and that fatwa is frequently used to persecute or suppress Shiites, Ismailis and other Muslim minority sects. “The Saudis have beheaded at least as many people as ISIS has,” says Jennifer Loewenstein, a journalist, activist and scholar who has followed the Saudi-American relationship for many years. “But people don’t know anything about it. It doesn’t make the news.” All of that is bad. It’s really bad, almost inexplicably bad. When right-wingers, or their hard-headed "liberal" pals like Bill Maher, get worked up about the dangers of Islam and the creeping threat of Sharia law, they often start talking about Muslim-ruled countries where women are not allowed to drive. Well, there is exactly one country that fits that description, and it’s not Iran or Pakistan or Indonesia or any of the other majority-Muslim nations in the world. Not to sugarcoat Iran’s internal problems or its erratic international behavior, but compared to Saudi Arabia it’s pretty much the East Village in 1983. Women drive and hold public office and work outside the home; if you held a gun to my head and told me my daughter had to grow up in one of those two places, it wouldn’t even be a close call. Then we get to the deeper, Alice in Wonderland levels of hypocrisy and absurdity. Since we’re talking about the Iranians, who are constantly described in the American media as crazy-town Muslim zealots: Whose side are they on when it comes to ISIS? (And if we asked 100 American voters that question at random, how many of them would get it right?) Neither the mullahs in Tehran nor the politicians in Washington are eager to talk about this, but Iran and the United States find themselves in a strategic and military alliance at the moment, in which at least some cooperation is clearly happening behind the scenes. But wait, you say: The Saudis, our beloved allies, well and truly hate the Iranians. So whose side are they on? Fascinating question, young Jedi. How many zeroes do I need to write on this check before you forget you asked it? Clear across the political spectrum, our politicians whimper and moan about the threat of Islamic terrorism — which kills fewer people in the United States than bathtub falls or malfunctioning appliances — even as they insist that the world’s principal supporter and exporter of the most extreme and fanatical varieties of Islam is our BFF and bedrock ally in the Middle East. Wahhabism, the most puritanical and fundamentalist strain of Sunni Islam, is the official state doctrine of Saudi Arabia. How much Wahhabi theology directly fed into the rise of anti-Western Islamist radicalism and associated terrorist groups is a hotly contested question. You certainly can't say that all or most Wahhabists support al-Qaida or ISIS. A central premise of the Saudi state is that extremist views can be confined to the mosque, while all attempts to act them out in the political zone will be crushed without mercy. But there is no doubt that Islamist intellectual pioneer Sayyid Qutb and the founders of al-Qaida and the leadership of ISIS all considered themselves to be following the Wahhabist and/or Salafist tradition, which has found its fullest expression in Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, and 15 of the 19 hijackers who carried out the 9/11 attacks were Saudi citizens. Anomalies, you say? A handful of disgruntled outsiders in a stable, pro-Western society? Mm-hm, OK. You go right on thinking that, darlings. According to Ali al-Ahmed, a dissident Saudi exile who now runs the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, there have been thousands of Saudi fighters and suicide attackers among the al-Qaida and ISIS forces in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. “Those thousands of people were the products of whom?” al-Ahmed asks. “Of Iran? No. They are the products of the Saudi system,” which tacitly encourages or tolerates Sunni militants, he says, as long as they do not carry out attacks within the kingdom. Al-Ahmed has written extensively about the virulent anti-Semitism and anti-Christian rhetoric found in the textbooks provided to every Saudi-educated child. As a leading U.S. official wrote in an internal memo a few years ago, “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” Let’s see – who was that? Well, my goodness: It was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose personal, political and nongovernmental affairs are so thickly encrusted with Saudi money it’s a wonder she can see out the windows. (That passage comes from an intergovernmental cable sent to the Treasury Department, which was later retrieved and released by Wikileaks.) So whatever else we might want to say about Clinton and the Saudis, we can’t accuse her of being naïve or ignorant. One of the most important, and most widely ignored, pieces of investigative journalism to emerge from the 2016 campaign so far is this Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, who documents the troubling web of connections between the Clintons and the Saudi government (which is of course identical with the Saudi royal family). The House of Saud have been among the biggest donors to the Clinton Foundation, Isikoff reported, contributing somewhere between $10 million and $25 million. Bill Clinton has made several lucrative trips to Saudi Arabia, and was paid $600,000 for two talks he gave there while his wife was secretary of state. Faced with what could fairly be described as significant P.R. challenges, the Saudi government recently hired a high-powered Washington lobbying firm called the Podesta Group to represent its interests in the U.S. That firm is owned by Tony Podesta, a longtime Democratic Party operative and fundraiser who, as of the Sept. 30 Federal Election Commission filing, had “bundled” more than $140,000 for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Tony’s brother and former partner in the lobbying firm, John Podesta, has served as Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff and Barack Obama’s presidential counselor. He is now the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Is there a smoking gun in Isikoff’s reporting? Some documentary evidence to indicate that the Clintons or Obama or anyone else has done the Saudi royal family’s bidding despite knowing what they clearly know about the nature of the Saudi state? It depends what level of smoke you’re looking for, but I guess not. Isikoff includes the requisite denials and reassurances from all parties: Heavens no, says Tony Podesta; my work as a shill for the world's worst government is completely unconnected to my political fundraising. “Human rights” and “core principles” are super-important, says a flack for the Clinton campaign (in an email). The money trail doesn’t look great, I would submit, but go ahead and believe whatever you want about Clinton’s personal integrity and how it’s not for sale at any price. Anyway, Hillary Clinton is not the point. She happened to be standing there this week, pinned on the horns of a minor but unappetizing dilemma: She had to make disapproving noises about the Saudi regime after the execution of Sheikh Nimr, a prominent critic of the Saudi monarchy and the leader of a religious minority who had specifically disavowed violence. Then she had to look grave for a few seconds, until the media and the public lost interest and it was back to business as usual. That business is the symbiotic relationship between American policy-makers and politicians of both parties and Saudi oil, money and power, which goes back many decades and is rarely discussed in public. “I go back and forth on this in my own mind,” says Loewenstein, “but I think Saudi Arabia is more important to the Americans than Israel. Not just because of oil, although that's a big part of it. But because Saudi Arabia is the dominant, ascendant power among Arab states.” America has been closely allied with the Saudi monarchy since it was established in the 1930s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House. First the Saudi regime was indispensable for economic reasons, Loewenstein says, once it became clear that America’s domestic oil supply was drying up. Then the Saudis became important for political and strategic reasons, after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Access and control to Saudi Arabia’s bottomless petroleum reserves, and the freedom to use the kingdom as the center of American military power in the Middle East, trumped all considerations of human rights, democracy and ideology. Saudi Arabia was also an important piece on the Cold War chessboard. “Anyone who was willing to side with the United States against the Soviet Union was welcome,” al-Ahmed says, irrespective of how they handled their internal affairs. “In order to secure their own power, the Saudis found it useful to join the ‘regressive’ camp in the Arab world,” says al-Ahmed, in opposition the pan-Arab nationalism and modernism of leaders like Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, who tilted toward the Soviets. “The Saudi monarchy has been a very stable regime, at least until recently,” says Loewenstein. “A horrible regime, but a stable one.” As we have moved from the Cold War and the energy crisis to the endless War on Terror, American policy-makers have valued stability over pretty much everything else. Whether America's steadfast loyalty to the rulers of the desert kingdom has actually produced stability in the Arab world or the Middle East is another matter. “The Saudis were a religious, fundamentalist nation right from the start,” Loewenstein says. “We always liked that. Or at least we used to like it, because it meant they weren’t going to go Communist.” As al-Ahmed sees it, Saudi money has become a constant ingredient in American politics over the last few decades. If half his stories about the devious mechanisms by which Saudi cash has entered American pockets are true, the Clinton story is the tip of the iceberg. “I’ve lived here long enough to know that the American political system runs on money,” he jokes. “As we say here in America, there is no free lunch. It isn’t that hard to figure out, and the Saudis figured out that they could buy decisions.” Rebel maverick troll Donald Trump is now overtly running against Hillary Clinton rather than his Republican opponents, and presumably does not need Saudi oil money. Does that mean he is willing to buck the trend on this question, and cut through the Gordian knot that ties us to the worst country in the world? Not exactly. Trump wants a seat on the Saudi gravy train along with everybody else. But give him credit for being too clueless, or too unschooled in the language of politics, to lie about the nature of the transaction. Trump was asked on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" this week how he would play the worsening standoff between Iran and Saudi Arabia. “I would back Saudi Arabia, but you know what? We're a debtor nation. They've got nothing but money," the Donald told Mika Brzezinski and her co-host, noted Saudi shill Joe Scarborough. “I wouldn't back them for nothing. I would say: You’ve got to pay. We’re going to help you. You gotta pay. You gotta pay.”American foreign policy is full of things we can’t see and things we don’t talk about. The drone war of the Obama years; the “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation” of the George W. Bush years. Nixon and Kissinger’s secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. The overthrow of democratic governments we didn’t like: Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961, Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. Once you get started with this stuff it’s hard to stop, and pretty soon your friends are giving you that look, like they’re wondering at what point you’ll start talking about your stormy personal relationship with Richard Helms, or the microchips implanted in your dental work. But even by those standards, the case of Saudi Arabia is special. We love Saudi Arabia so much! The Bush family loves Saudi Arabia; the Clinton family loves Saudi Arabia. You and I are frequently told that we love Saudi Arabia, even if we aren’t exactly sure why. We write mash notes in Saudi Arabia’s yearbook, in pink Magic Marker with lots of hearts: BE-HEDDING ALL THOSE PPL! U R SO SEXY!!! We have never overthrown a democratic government in Saudi Arabia. It would admittedly be difficult to do so, since Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that has never had a democratic government and never will. Our tax dollars and Saudi oil dollars flow back and forth between Washington and Riyadh in a bewildering matrix understood by no one, ending up along the way in the handbags of hookers in Vegas and the tip baskets of croupiers in Macau. It’s kind of a crazy, stupid love. No, I mean that. It’s diagnosably insane and unbelievably stupid, verging on suicidal. Saudi Arabia is damn near the worst place in the world when it comes to all those human rights and civil liberties America supposedly cares about so deeply. (Actually, it seems like the worst place in the world in general, but that’s a broad and highly subjective claim.) Women are effectively the property of their fathers, husbands or brothers. Homosexuality does not officially exist, and is punishable by death. Internal dissidents and critics of the monarchy have been convicted on such charges as “breaking allegiance with the ruler” and “contact with foreign news organizations to exaggerate the news.” Last week’s execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a leading Shiite cleric, along with dozens of other people, made worldwide news because it further inflamed Saudi Arabia’s not-so-cold war with the Shiite rulers of Iran, which is playing out on the ground in Yemen with devastating civilian consequences. But that kind of dubious judicial proceeding and brutal punishment is far more the Saudi rule than the exception. All non-Islamic religious practice is forbidden, and that fatwa is frequently used to persecute or suppress Shiites, Ismailis and other Muslim minority sects. “The Saudis have beheaded at least as many people as ISIS has,” says Jennifer Loewenstein, a journalist, activist and scholar who has followed the Saudi-American relationship for many years. “But people don’t know anything about it. It doesn’t make the news.” All of that is bad. It’s really bad, almost inexplicably bad. When right-wingers, or their hard-headed "liberal" pals like Bill Maher, get worked up about the dangers of Islam and the creeping threat of Sharia law, they often start talking about Muslim-ruled countries where women are not allowed to drive. Well, there is exactly one country that fits that description, and it’s not Iran or Pakistan or Indonesia or any of the other majority-Muslim nations in the world. Not to sugarcoat Iran’s internal problems or its erratic international behavior, but compared to Saudi Arabia it’s pretty much the East Village in 1983. Women drive and hold public office and work outside the home; if you held a gun to my head and told me my daughter had to grow up in one of those two places, it wouldn’t even be a close call. Then we get to the deeper, Alice in Wonderland levels of hypocrisy and absurdity. Since we’re talking about the Iranians, who are constantly described in the American media as crazy-town Muslim zealots: Whose side are they on when it comes to ISIS? (And if we asked 100 American voters that question at random, how many of them would get it right?) Neither the mullahs in Tehran nor the politicians in Washington are eager to talk about this, but Iran and the United States find themselves in a strategic and military alliance at the moment, in which at least some cooperation is clearly happening behind the scenes. But wait, you say: The Saudis, our beloved allies, well and truly hate the Iranians. So whose side are they on? Fascinating question, young Jedi. How many zeroes do I need to write on this check before you forget you asked it? Clear across the political spectrum, our politicians whimper and moan about the threat of Islamic terrorism — which kills fewer people in the United States than bathtub falls or malfunctioning appliances — even as they insist that the world’s principal supporter and exporter of the most extreme and fanatical varieties of Islam is our BFF and bedrock ally in the Middle East. Wahhabism, the most puritanical and fundamentalist strain of Sunni Islam, is the official state doctrine of Saudi Arabia. How much Wahhabi theology directly fed into the rise of anti-Western Islamist radicalism and associated terrorist groups is a hotly contested question. You certainly can't say that all or most Wahhabists support al-Qaida or ISIS. A central premise of the Saudi state is that extremist views can be confined to the mosque, while all attempts to act them out in the political zone will be crushed without mercy. But there is no doubt that Islamist intellectual pioneer Sayyid Qutb and the founders of al-Qaida and the leadership of ISIS all considered themselves to be following the Wahhabist and/or Salafist tradition, which has found its fullest expression in Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, and 15 of the 19 hijackers who carried out the 9/11 attacks were Saudi citizens. Anomalies, you say? A handful of disgruntled outsiders in a stable, pro-Western society? Mm-hm, OK. You go right on thinking that, darlings. According to Ali al-Ahmed, a dissident Saudi exile who now runs the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, there have been thousands of Saudi fighters and suicide attackers among the al-Qaida and ISIS forces in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. “Those thousands of people were the products of whom?” al-Ahmed asks. “Of Iran? No. They are the products of the Saudi system,” which tacitly encourages or tolerates Sunni militants, he says, as long as they do not carry out attacks within the kingdom. Al-Ahmed has written extensively about the virulent anti-Semitism and anti-Christian rhetoric found in the textbooks provided to every Saudi-educated child. As a leading U.S. official wrote in an internal memo a few years ago, “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” Let’s see – who was that? Well, my goodness: It was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose personal, political and nongovernmental affairs are so thickly encrusted with Saudi money it’s a wonder she can see out the windows. (That passage comes from an intergovernmental cable sent to the Treasury Department, which was later retrieved and released by Wikileaks.) So whatever else we might want to say about Clinton and the Saudis, we can’t accuse her of being naïve or ignorant. One of the most important, and most widely ignored, pieces of investigative journalism to emerge from the 2016 campaign so far is this Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, who documents the troubling web of connections between the Clintons and the Saudi government (which is of course identical with the Saudi royal family). The House of Saud have been among the biggest donors to the Clinton Foundation, Isikoff reported, contributing somewhere between $10 million and $25 million. Bill Clinton has made several lucrative trips to Saudi Arabia, and was paid $600,000 for two talks he gave there while his wife was secretary of state. Faced with what could fairly be described as significant P.R. challenges, the Saudi government recently hired a high-powered Washington lobbying firm called the Podesta Group to represent its interests in the U.S. That firm is owned by Tony Podesta, a longtime Democratic Party operative and fundraiser who, as of the Sept. 30 Federal Election Commission filing, had “bundled” more than $140,000 for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Tony’s brother and former partner in the lobbying firm, John Podesta, has served as Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff and Barack Obama’s presidential counselor. He is now the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Is there a smoking gun in Isikoff’s reporting? Some documentary evidence to indicate that the Clintons or Obama or anyone else has done the Saudi royal family’s bidding despite knowing what they clearly know about the nature of the Saudi state? It depends what level of smoke you’re looking for, but I guess not. Isikoff includes the requisite denials and reassurances from all parties: Heavens no, says Tony Podesta; my work as a shill for the world's worst government is completely unconnected to my political fundraising. “Human rights” and “core principles” are super-important, says a flack for the Clinton campaign (in an email). The money trail doesn’t look great, I would submit, but go ahead and believe whatever you want about Clinton’s personal integrity and how it’s not for sale at any price. Anyway, Hillary Clinton is not the point. She happened to be standing there this week, pinned on the horns of a minor but unappetizing dilemma: She had to make disapproving noises about the Saudi regime after the execution of Sheikh Nimr, a prominent critic of the Saudi monarchy and the leader of a religious minority who had specifically disavowed violence. Then she had to look grave for a few seconds, until the media and the public lost interest and it was back to business as usual. That business is the symbiotic relationship between American policy-makers and politicians of both parties and Saudi oil, money and power, which goes back many decades and is rarely discussed in public. “I go back and forth on this in my own mind,” says Loewenstein, “but I think Saudi Arabia is more important to the Americans than Israel. Not just because of oil, although that's a big part of it. But because Saudi Arabia is the dominant, ascendant power among Arab states.” America has been closely allied with the Saudi monarchy since it was established in the 1930s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House. First the Saudi regime was indispensable for economic reasons, Loewenstein says, once it became clear that America’s domestic oil supply was drying up. Then the Saudis became important for political and strategic reasons, after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Access and control to Saudi Arabia’s bottomless petroleum reserves, and the freedom to use the kingdom as the center of American military power in the Middle East, trumped all considerations of human rights, democracy and ideology. Saudi Arabia was also an important piece on the Cold War chessboard. “Anyone who was willing to side with the United States against the Soviet Union was welcome,” al-Ahmed says, irrespective of how they handled their internal affairs. “In order to secure their own power, the Saudis found it useful to join the ‘regressive’ camp in the Arab world,” says al-Ahmed, in opposition the pan-Arab nationalism and modernism of leaders like Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, who tilted toward the Soviets. “The Saudi monarchy has been a very stable regime, at least until recently,” says Loewenstein. “A horrible regime, but a stable one.” As we have moved from the Cold War and the energy crisis to the endless War on Terror, American policy-makers have valued stability over pretty much everything else. Whether America's steadfast loyalty to the rulers of the desert kingdom has actually produced stability in the Arab world or the Middle East is another matter. “The Saudis were a religious, fundamentalist nation right from the start,” Loewenstein says. “We always liked that. Or at least we used to like it, because it meant they weren’t going to go Communist.” As al-Ahmed sees it, Saudi money has become a constant ingredient in American politics over the last few decades. If half his stories about the devious mechanisms by which Saudi cash has entered American pockets are true, the Clinton story is the tip of the iceberg. “I’ve lived here long enough to know that the American political system runs on money,” he jokes. “As we say here in America, there is no free lunch. It isn’t that hard to figure out, and the Saudis figured out that they could buy decisions.” Rebel maverick troll Donald Trump is now overtly running against Hillary Clinton rather than his Republican opponents, and presumably does not need Saudi oil money. Does that mean he is willing to buck the trend on this question, and cut through the Gordian knot that ties us to the worst country in the world? Not exactly. Trump wants a seat on the Saudi gravy train along with everybody else. But give him credit for being too clueless, or too unschooled in the language of politics, to lie about the nature of the transaction. Trump was asked on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" this week how he would play the worsening standoff between Iran and Saudi Arabia. “I would back Saudi Arabia, but you know what? We're a debtor nation. They've got nothing but money," the Donald told Mika Brzezinski and her co-host, noted Saudi shill Joe Scarborough. “I wouldn't back them for nothing. I would say: You’ve got to pay. We’re going to help you. You gotta pay. You gotta pay.”

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Published on January 09, 2016 09:00

Palestinian says New York Times edited and censored his quotes to shine positively on Israel

"I think that this interview was my last interview ever, I am done with media!" exclaimed Ayed Fadel. Fadel is the Palestinian owner of Kabareet, a bar in Haifa, Israel. He was featured in a Jan. 3 piece in The New York Times titled "In Israeli City of Haifa, a Liberal Arab Culture Blossoms." The article, written by Times reporter Diaa Hadid, characterizes the Israeli city as a hub of "a self-consciously Arab milieu that is secular, feminist and gay-friendly," juxtaposing it as "a striking secular counterpoint to the conservatism of many of Israel’s Arab communities." The Times claims Haifa "has embraced its diversity" and is "a comfortable place for liberal Palestinians who want not only to escape the constraints of conservative Arab communities but also to be among their own people." In order to do so, it quotes young progressive Palestinians like Fadel. There is a problem, however. Fadel says the Times took his quotes completely out of context. Three other people interviewed for the article also felt they were misrepresented. According to Fadel, the U.S. newspaper of record removed all of his criticisms of Israel and its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. "There are so many points missing, crucial ones, that the lack of them make this article shallow, offensive and degrading," Fadel explained. On social media, the young Palestinian man described the Times interview as a "trap," in order to contribute to an article making Israel look good. He said he "found this piece disturbing." "It refers to certain aspects and neglects so many others that I personally mentioned during the interview," Fadel explained. "It portrays the modern Palestinian in a 'Western' image that comforts white readers and make them say, 'Oh, they're just like us!'" "I do agree our community has developed and evolved, and I love going to the places mentioned in this article. They feel like home, and because they feel like home, it's disturbing the way they were illustrated," Fadel added. Salon reached out to The New York Times for comment. The author, Diaa Hadid, relayed her response for Salon to Margaret Sullivan, who edits the Times' Public Editor's Journal. Sullivan included Hadid's comments in a post published on Jan. 8, a sequel to a previous post published earlier in the morning that summarized criticisms the piece has received from all across the political spectrum. Hadid stood by her work, which she said she thought "was ultimately fair." "I thought I had conveyed what they meant – which is my duty as a writer: to not take things out of context, and to be fair to what people mean," she said. "I wrote this story really because I wanted to pay tribute to Haifa's unique culture, and particularly how Palestinian citizens of Israel had carved their own dynamic, liberal scene in the city," Hadid explained. "For that reason, I was mortified to find out that at least four people I had interviewed felt that I had misrepresented them in the story, and that it had garnered more criticism than any other story I have written in nearly a decade of coverage the Middle East," she added. In his previous statements on social media, Fadel strongly disagreed that the representation was fair and accurate. Fadel says that for "90 percent of the interview we were talking about how the culture of the cultural resistance is growing and taking place in so many levels, such as music, art spaces, etc., and how the Palestinian underground scene is getting bigger and bigger and full of creativity and how literally it is being a place full of intelligence and rebel agenda." The Times excised the vast majority of what he said, and instead emphasized a few details that confirmed its narrative, Fadel recalls. It quoted Fadel saying "We want a gay couple to go to the dance floor and kiss each other, and nobody to even look at them, this is the new Palestinian society we are aiming for." Fadel argues this statement was de-politicized in order to shine positively on Israel. "Yes I did say that, but it was a whole build up for the conversation until I reached this sentence," Fadel explained. The larger context was removed. Most strikingly of all, Fadel says the Times whitewashed his criticism of Israeli pinkwashing. Pinkwashing refers to a propaganda strategy in which countries, corporations or institutions portray themselves as LGBTQ-friendly, in order to distract from human rights abuses, crimes or misconduct in which they engage. As an example, Fadel pointed out that the Times mentioned the Palestinian "Kooz queer film festival that we hosted without mentioning that one of the most important topics in it was the Israeli pinkwashing." He emphasized that this "is misleading, especially when I've been totally used as a 'pinkwasher' with the quote above!" In its article, the Times constantly stressed how Haifa, Israel allows LGBTQ Palestinians to feel open. Never does it mention the Israeli government's systematic discrimination against all Palestinians, including LGBTQ ones. Nowhere in the piece does the New York Times acknowledge Israel's illegal 48-year military occupation of the Palestinian territories, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, or the illegal almost decade-long siege on the Gaza Strip, or the violence the Israel Defense Forces regularly inflicts upon a largely defenseless occupied indigenous population. Nor does the Times recognize even once in the piece the fact that, according to Israeli human rights group Adalah, there are more than 50 Israeli laws "that directly or indirectly discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel in all areas of life, including their rights to political participation, access to land, education, state budget resources and criminal procedures." Instead, the article characterizes the oppressive British colonial occupation of historic Palestine as a rosy time "when a lively Arab cultural life flourished." It furthermore describes Israel's violent forced removal of roughly 80 percent of the indigenous population of Palestine in 1948, referred to by Palestinians as the "Nakba," as "the war in which Israel was established, when Arabs fled, or were forced to leave, their homes in many cities, including in Haifa." Renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, along with many other scholars and human rights experts, has debunked the myth that Palestinians voluntarily "fled," and has instead classified the Nakba as a form of ethnic cleansing. Critics on social media characterized the New York Times article as reminiscent of Orientalist portrayals of Israel as a bastion of civilization amid a cesspool of supposed Palestinian backwardness. Fadel lamented that the Times interview "was another trap by the white media, that is always trying to show us as the 'cool yay hipsters full of tattoos and piercings,' far away from the on-the-ground reality that we are facing and fighting every day.""I think that this interview was my last interview ever, I am done with media!" exclaimed Ayed Fadel. Fadel is the Palestinian owner of Kabareet, a bar in Haifa, Israel. He was featured in a Jan. 3 piece in The New York Times titled "In Israeli City of Haifa, a Liberal Arab Culture Blossoms." The article, written by Times reporter Diaa Hadid, characterizes the Israeli city as a hub of "a self-consciously Arab milieu that is secular, feminist and gay-friendly," juxtaposing it as "a striking secular counterpoint to the conservatism of many of Israel’s Arab communities." The Times claims Haifa "has embraced its diversity" and is "a comfortable place for liberal Palestinians who want not only to escape the constraints of conservative Arab communities but also to be among their own people." In order to do so, it quotes young progressive Palestinians like Fadel. There is a problem, however. Fadel says the Times took his quotes completely out of context. Three other people interviewed for the article also felt they were misrepresented. According to Fadel, the U.S. newspaper of record removed all of his criticisms of Israel and its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. "There are so many points missing, crucial ones, that the lack of them make this article shallow, offensive and degrading," Fadel explained. On social media, the young Palestinian man described the Times interview as a "trap," in order to contribute to an article making Israel look good. He said he "found this piece disturbing." "It refers to certain aspects and neglects so many others that I personally mentioned during the interview," Fadel explained. "It portrays the modern Palestinian in a 'Western' image that comforts white readers and make them say, 'Oh, they're just like us!'" "I do agree our community has developed and evolved, and I love going to the places mentioned in this article. They feel like home, and because they feel like home, it's disturbing the way they were illustrated," Fadel added. Salon reached out to The New York Times for comment. The author, Diaa Hadid, relayed her response for Salon to Margaret Sullivan, who edits the Times' Public Editor's Journal. Sullivan included Hadid's comments in a post published on Jan. 8, a sequel to a previous post published earlier in the morning that summarized criticisms the piece has received from all across the political spectrum. Hadid stood by her work, which she said she thought "was ultimately fair." "I thought I had conveyed what they meant – which is my duty as a writer: to not take things out of context, and to be fair to what people mean," she said. "I wrote this story really because I wanted to pay tribute to Haifa's unique culture, and particularly how Palestinian citizens of Israel had carved their own dynamic, liberal scene in the city," Hadid explained. "For that reason, I was mortified to find out that at least four people I had interviewed felt that I had misrepresented them in the story, and that it had garnered more criticism than any other story I have written in nearly a decade of coverage the Middle East," she added. In his previous statements on social media, Fadel strongly disagreed that the representation was fair and accurate. Fadel says that for "90 percent of the interview we were talking about how the culture of the cultural resistance is growing and taking place in so many levels, such as music, art spaces, etc., and how the Palestinian underground scene is getting bigger and bigger and full of creativity and how literally it is being a place full of intelligence and rebel agenda." The Times excised the vast majority of what he said, and instead emphasized a few details that confirmed its narrative, Fadel recalls. It quoted Fadel saying "We want a gay couple to go to the dance floor and kiss each other, and nobody to even look at them, this is the new Palestinian society we are aiming for." Fadel argues this statement was de-politicized in order to shine positively on Israel. "Yes I did say that, but it was a whole build up for the conversation until I reached this sentence," Fadel explained. The larger context was removed. Most strikingly of all, Fadel says the Times whitewashed his criticism of Israeli pinkwashing. Pinkwashing refers to a propaganda strategy in which countries, corporations or institutions portray themselves as LGBTQ-friendly, in order to distract from human rights abuses, crimes or misconduct in which they engage. As an example, Fadel pointed out that the Times mentioned the Palestinian "Kooz queer film festival that we hosted without mentioning that one of the most important topics in it was the Israeli pinkwashing." He emphasized that this "is misleading, especially when I've been totally used as a 'pinkwasher' with the quote above!" In its article, the Times constantly stressed how Haifa, Israel allows LGBTQ Palestinians to feel open. Never does it mention the Israeli government's systematic discrimination against all Palestinians, including LGBTQ ones. Nowhere in the piece does the New York Times acknowledge Israel's illegal 48-year military occupation of the Palestinian territories, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, or the illegal almost decade-long siege on the Gaza Strip, or the violence the Israel Defense Forces regularly inflicts upon a largely defenseless occupied indigenous population. Nor does the Times recognize even once in the piece the fact that, according to Israeli human rights group Adalah, there are more than 50 Israeli laws "that directly or indirectly discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel in all areas of life, including their rights to political participation, access to land, education, state budget resources and criminal procedures." Instead, the article characterizes the oppressive British colonial occupation of historic Palestine as a rosy time "when a lively Arab cultural life flourished." It furthermore describes Israel's violent forced removal of roughly 80 percent of the indigenous population of Palestine in 1948, referred to by Palestinians as the "Nakba," as "the war in which Israel was established, when Arabs fled, or were forced to leave, their homes in many cities, including in Haifa." Renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, along with many other scholars and human rights experts, has debunked the myth that Palestinians voluntarily "fled," and has instead classified the Nakba as a form of ethnic cleansing. Critics on social media characterized the New York Times article as reminiscent of Orientalist portrayals of Israel as a bastion of civilization amid a cesspool of supposed Palestinian backwardness. Fadel lamented that the Times interview "was another trap by the white media, that is always trying to show us as the 'cool yay hipsters full of tattoos and piercings,' far away from the on-the-ground reality that we are facing and fighting every day."

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Published on January 09, 2016 09:00

January 8, 2016

“The Sopranos” at 17: After watching all six seasons, I’m left with the queasy feeling that the legions of fans of the show have been played

When I read David Remnick’s 2013 declaration “The Sopranos remains the best television series since the beginning of the medium,” my first thought was, Jesus, I hope he’s never seen "The Wire." This was not only because I think "The Wire" is a better show. I’ve just finished watching the entirety of "The Sopranos," spread out over some months, and I’m left with the queasy feeling that Remnick and the legions who herald the show, like just about everyone who ever did business with Tony Soprano, have been played. I get it: "The Sopranos" is a good show. It leads with a smart premise with scads of potential—a mafia kingpin is having a crisis of conscience that affects his health and drives him into therapy—and the episodes are scripted with flair and cheek, not to mention muscle and sharp teeth. The way that Edie Falco, Dominic Chianese and some of the other regulars deliver their lines can be a thing of beauty, as is the moment in the penultimate episode when Bobby Baccalieri is shot at the model train shop: The miniature trains crash, and the toy passengers’ faces reflect the horror from which they, petrified plastic, can’t turn away. It’s one of several astonishing moments across the series’ run. Still, as episodes unspooled before me, I became distracted by a sense that they weren’t adding up to more than the sum of their bloodied body parts. The precise reason for my dissatisfaction with "The Sopranos" eluded me for a long time, but by season six—its last—I had it. In “The Fleshy Part of the Thigh,” in which Paulie Walnuts finds out that Ma isn’t his biological mother, he does something characteristically heinous at the episode’s end, after which my husband said, optimistically, “Ah. So this sets him up to be at odds with Tony in future episodes, right?” If "The Sopranos" were a better show, he would have been right: Big moments would necessarily bleed over and infect the story lines to follow, growing something bigger still. But by now I knew that my husband shouldn’t get his hopes up. I’d come to see end-of-the-act "Sopranos" violence as a default setting: It distracts us—we startle, shield our eyes, register the loss of life or working limb—from what seems to me the whole enterprise’s lack of purpose. I stuck around for all six seasons, figuring that the show would eventually work its fabled magic on me. It never took. At one point, while my husband and I were taking in season four’s “Watching Too Much Television,” I found myself on the verge of saying aloud, “You know what? This is a really good episode.” But then the last scene came—Tony takes a belt to a former ally—reducing all that came before it to cartoon. At the midpoint of one late episode featuring sad sack chef and restaurateur Artie Bucco, I said, “Just wait: he’ll get a beating before it’s over,” and he did. Here’s another one: At the end of season five’s “Sentimental Education,” Steve Buscemi’s character, freshly sprung from jail and pursuing a legitimate business prospect—he’s a licensed massage therapist now—beats up his benefactor, the idea apparently being that taking the high road is too much for someone who has been so low for so long. But the attack seems untrue to Buscemi’s character, for whom there was every chance of professional success and who had something that can’t be said of his peers: a genuine, sustained interest in something besides taking the easy way out. In "The Wire," when someone trying to fly right succumbed to his old ways, this reflected both character and social forces at work; here, Buscemi’s tirade seemed like a tantrum. While watching the episode, I wondered if the character’s undoing reflected the series’ writers’ undoing. I was also getting bored: What is compelling about watching characters erode with regularity? “Mergers and Acquisitions,” from season four, was a typically infuriating episode. We’ve been here before: Unable to get what he wants through reasoning, the main player (Paulie, in this case) opts for administering a pummeling (he gets two thugs to rough up his mother’s friend’s son, a childhood pal who is now a school principal). What are we supposed to make of what Paulie did? Is this supposed to be funny? Inevitable? What is the cumulative point of all this? These people are assholes—and? So? Looking back, the series plays its hand early on, in season two’s “Bust Out,” in which a bystander does a good deed: He tells the cops that he has witnessed a murder. But the show plays him for a fool: The tweedy nebbish is sitting at home, listening to atonal jazz, his dictionary ostentatiously on a stand across the room, when his wife happens on a newspaper story about how Tony Soprano may be involved in the crime, which implicitly puts her husband’s life at risk. The wife becomes risibly alarmed, and the man turns sniveler, racing to the phone to tell the cops to retract his story. This scene was obviously played for laughs, and I was struck by what felt like the mean-spiritedness of the episode’s writing: It sets us up to root against the good guys. To be sure, I was riveted as much as the next person by the third season’s “Pine Barrens,” a Buscemi-directed fan favorite, in which Christopher Moltisanti and Paulie end up in the snowy woods in a standoff with a Russian mobster. But as I watched, I was aware that the satisfaction I was deriving approximated the satisfaction I might register while watching an action movie: The only thing at stake was, would Christopher and Paulie find their way out of the woods? Would I have cared if they didn’t? Throughout the series, I found myself not feeling much of anything when a character kicked it. No one deserved to wear a halo on "The Wire," but usually when someone went down, it was cause to feel something because each character was a mixture of baseness and some degree of aspiration to do better—like a real human being, in other words. By the end of "The Sopranos," I felt nothing for the hunted, no longer haunted, Tony. His existential crisis was the purely literal kind now. The show’s original proposition—his pangs of conscience lead him to pursue therapy—was dust. What was "The Sopranos" about now? In 2007, Remnick wrote of the series, “The show evolved in the manner of a sprawling social novel of the nineteenth century.” Yet the social novel by definition has something to say. “It’s a metaphor for how the government works,” a friend of mine said of "The Sopranos," which sounds good—hey, I’d want to watch a show that was about that—but this doesn’t wash: the idea is that the U.S. government is corrupt, just like Tony and his associates? Well, some, even many politicians are corrupt, sure, but in a democracy there are enough good guys to hold off total and complete Sopranos-style lawlessness. I was going to conclude by saying that after "The Sopranos’" lead pipe to the kneecaps grabs viewers’ attention, it isn’t sure what to tell us. But maybe I just don’t like what I think it’s saying. Overarchingly, "The Sopranos" promises that the outcome of a choice will be what "Girls" promises the outcome of a sexual encounter will be: Things will almost always go very, very badly. Cynicism as an engine of art is grand—literature would be lost without it—but both "The Sopranos" and "Girls" are reaching for some semblance of realism, and it just isn’t accurate or fair to suggest that all paths lead to failure at pretty much all times. In real life, some people do manage to, un–Ginny Sack–like, achieve their weight loss goals and, contra Moltisanti, stay off drugs. The people spinning "The Sopranos" seem to be saying that there’s no hope for any of us. The lack of intellectual engagement or challenge I felt while watching the show (They’re just going to kill someone off in the last few minutes? Again?) seemed to reflect something inartistic at work: the series’s gratuitous cynicism. By all means, be cynical—but earn it. Instead of foreordaining his doom, show us a character fighting for his integrity, and then, sure: let the bad guy, or the bad impulse, win—sometimes. For me (but not just me), "The Wire" was as life-changing as a fictional television series could be. It opened my eyes to the folly of the drug wars, and got me to see culpability when anyone participates in the drug trade (yes, even as a casual consumer). "The Wire" also affects viewers in such a way that it seems impossible to mention the show to another fan and not spend the next 20 minutes yakking about it. (Is there anyone who has seen the first season of "The Wire" who can look at the young actor Michael B. Jordan today and not bring hand to heart?) Because "The Sopranos" is the show that’s "The Wire’s" closest peer in terms of genre, era and accolades earned, I expected more of it. And I truly would have preferred to yammer about something besides its shortcomings. So yes, "The Wire" ruined me for "The Sopranos," but I’m glad it did if it raised my standards for what to ask of “the best.” For me, "The Sopranos" lacks a key ingredient of greatness: what I can only call, with more than a scintilla of embarrassment at the fustiness of the phrase, a moral vision. But if you love "The Sopranos," then that’s a wonderful thing: may it enduringly be a source of joy and/or release in your life. Just be honest about why you love it. My husband enjoyed the show more than I did. At one point he chided me, “Stop looking at it realistically.” That’s entertainment. Nell Beram is coauthor of "Yoko Ono: Collector of Skies" and a former Atlantic Monthly staff editor.

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Published on January 08, 2016 16:00

How Margaret Cho revives “Fashion Police”: Performing fashion snark as “a woman of color, as a queer woman, as someone who is plus-sized and very proud of my fat”

Margaret Cho, the Asian-American, queer, politically active, sex positive, burlesque dancing, singing and songwriting, stand-up comedian, has a brand new gig. She can now add "fashion critic" to her ever-expanding curriculum vitae. Cho will be joining E!’s "Fashion Police" this season. She was a guest host last season, but now she’s a permanent member of the judge’s panel, rounded out by Melissa Rivers, Brad Goreski, and "Fashion Police" veteran Giuliana Rancic. Cho is the prominent comedian on the panel -- a role that was previously filled by Kathy Griffin, and by Joan Rivers before her. Rivers died in 2014, and she was one of the last standup acts who could trace her roots back to Classic Hollywood — back when Ed Sullivan could still make your career. Back when Johnny Carson was the newly crowned king of late night. Back when the mob still ran Las Vegas, and the Rat Pack still played The Sands. Rivers was a brash woman in an era defined by its machismo. She popularized red carpet fashion culture almost singlehandedly. She was, as much as she hated the term, a legend. And it’s very, very difficult to live up to a legend. The first "Fashion Police" season after Rivers passed away was an unmitigated disaster. Rancic embroiled herself in controversy after insulting Zendaya's dreadlocks. Kelly Osbourne quit the show. And Griffin, who was dogged by constant criticism and comparisons to Rivers, walked after filming just seven episodes. There was a general sense that perhaps the show was permanently kaput. But here we are. The new season kicks off on Monday, Jan. 11. And Cho, from an outsider’s perspective, appears to be stepping into a minefield; by her own admission, she doesn’t know much about fashion. Salon spoke to Cho on the phone about Joan’s legacy, her own qualifications, what she thinks of Rancic and Griffin, and whether she has to watch what she says. What do you think Joan Rivers brought to the show, and what are you going to bring to the show in comparison? You can never replace Joan. She created the red carpet. She created the idea of bringing an audience into the spectacle of the red carpet. ["Fashion Police"] wouldn’t have even existed as a platform if she hadn’t generated it; it was her way of bringing [the spectacle] off of awards show coverage and into her own theater. So you can never replace her. I’ve been so close to her, and her family, and the other people on the show. And so I wanted to go and spend time with my friends, and play around with the idea of, “What can we do, now that she’s not here?” It’s about telling jokes and having a good time. I don’t mean to ever replace her. I just want to hang out with Melissa in this place that Joan built for her and for the rest of us. Joan always said that that we female comedians were really lucky because we were funny. We could work forever, because our appeal had nothing to do with youth or beauty or any of those things that actresses have to count on. We were beyond that. We were always going to work, because we were always going to be funny. It’s something that’s been proven over years and years of show business. Do you feel the pressure of not having Joan there? What’s the atmosphere like in that room? There is no pressure. We can honor her by being as funny and as ridiculous and fearless as possible. Although, Joan was an interesting person; she had lot of fear about whether she was funny enough or good enough. She was always very conscious of whether she was doing the right thing. I think the cast is very optimistic. I think that after Joan died, everybody needed time to figure out what was going to happen. The show is her voice, and it’s her baby. It’s one of the things that I know she was proudest of creating. I think it’s possible to do it without her. It’s still not the same, but it’s true to her vision. "Fashion Police" is not in my realm. I’m not a fashionista, although I do have strong views about what fashion is and what I like about fashion. It’s also a place to tell really dirty jokes and try to get away with them. Can you be more specific in regard to your view of fashion, and what you would like to see more of? I like it when it’s more artistic — when it’s more about the fantasy and spectacle of the red carpet rather than being in the moment in terms of trends. I don’t have a perfect body, so I appreciate people who still want to feel like they belong, and say, “We have a voice. We can look fabulous.” Also, I like different attitudes. My favorite clothes have always been the ones that are really outrageous. I like Bjork’s swan dress; that was the ultimate in terms of self-expression and of making it your own. I want to see more stuff like that. Can anyone ever go too far? Or the more outrageous, the better? I think the more outrageous, the better. It’s just fun. I don’t have the same perspective as all the other panelists; they all have a different aesthetic. They like classic looks. They like beauty and what is aesthetically pleasing. I like outrageous. I like ridiculous. I like funny stuff… I just go for the gut reaction. It doesn’t have to be from "great" designers; I want to support new designers and outrageousness in any form. Have you learned more about fashion recently? Or are you trying to preserve the purity of that gut reaction? I think I’m learning more about it. And I’m also learning about telling jokes; it’s not just necessarily about making fun of people. It’s just a way, for me at least, to tell jokes about what happens in this other world that parallels the real world. The jokes should never be mean. You should be able to do the joke and have the person there. You don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. I’m not really a mean comic in that way. It’s more about having fun with the listener and having fun with each other. Yes, but as a whole, fashion is very based upon looks and aesthetics. Do you see a conflict there? I mean, totally. But you can make all kinds of jokes. This is where Joan and I disagreed a lot. She thought I was fat, and complained about my fat. [Laughs] But I could never complain about somebody’s fat. I don’t have the same sort of aesthetic there. I think it’s changing in fashion. I think we’re now appreciating different kinds of bodies; it’s not so much of a strident ideal that we’re striving for. Joan used to tell a lot of those types of judgmental jokes, and get away with it. With her generation, the attitude was always this "us versus them" — that we need to bring them down to our level, because there was such a separation between celebrities and "real" people. That’s the way that she grew up in show business. And I think she got away with it because she was part of that generation. She also did it in a very loving way and a very sweet way. I know you’re saying that it’s all about the jokes and hanging out with friends. But it would be naive to deny that there’s a lot of money riding on this. Have you heard any pressure from the network in terms of what they want to hear and what they want to see? I get paid very little for what I do on "Fashion Police." I don’t know what the other people make, but I make about $5,000 per episode, which is really not a lot. But I love the franchise, and I love being there for my mentor and for Melissa. That, to me, is a payment unto itself. It’s a great joy to do it. I’m sure there’s pressure, but they’re not pressuring me, because they haven’t said anything. What did you think about Kathy Griffin’s time on the show? I was in the running the first time [when Rivers died], because Kathy wasn’t sure if she wanted to do it or not. I always wanted to do it, but they went with Kathy. I tried to talk her out of it so that she would give me her spot! [Laughs] I didn’t understand why she didn’t like it. We haven’t discussed it beyond when she me told she was leaving, and I told her, “Well, you’d better make sure that I get that job!” I always had my eye on it, so I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t a fit. I thought she was perfect. And then a little after that, Melissa told me they wanted me. Giuliana Rancic kind of stepped into traffic last season over Zendaya’s dreadlocks. Have you talked to Rancic since then about her comments? It’s hard, because it’s all very volatile. I don’t think she actually got to say what she wanted to say. I think it was taken out of context. Sometimes when you tell jokes, you can’t be complete in your thought. I don’t know. I wasn’t there, and I didn’t witness it when it happened. But I felt bad. Comedians often get to this place where they’re offending people, and it’s something common that they have to navigate. As a woman of color, as a queer woman, as someone who is plus-sized and very proud of my fat — the more identities you are, the more you can get away with. You have to be very responsible and aware. But at the same time, you have to be true to your profession. Margaret Cho is currently in development for a marijuana-centric dramedy called "Highland," which will debut on Amazon Prime. This April, she will be releasing a rock album called American Myth. You can find out more at www.margaretcho.com.Margaret Cho, the Asian-American, queer, politically active, sex positive, burlesque dancing, singing and songwriting, stand-up comedian, has a brand new gig. She can now add "fashion critic" to her ever-expanding curriculum vitae. Cho will be joining E!’s "Fashion Police" this season. She was a guest host last season, but now she’s a permanent member of the judge’s panel, rounded out by Melissa Rivers, Brad Goreski, and "Fashion Police" veteran Giuliana Rancic. Cho is the prominent comedian on the panel -- a role that was previously filled by Kathy Griffin, and by Joan Rivers before her. Rivers died in 2014, and she was one of the last standup acts who could trace her roots back to Classic Hollywood — back when Ed Sullivan could still make your career. Back when Johnny Carson was the newly crowned king of late night. Back when the mob still ran Las Vegas, and the Rat Pack still played The Sands. Rivers was a brash woman in an era defined by its machismo. She popularized red carpet fashion culture almost singlehandedly. She was, as much as she hated the term, a legend. And it’s very, very difficult to live up to a legend. The first "Fashion Police" season after Rivers passed away was an unmitigated disaster. Rancic embroiled herself in controversy after insulting Zendaya's dreadlocks. Kelly Osbourne quit the show. And Griffin, who was dogged by constant criticism and comparisons to Rivers, walked after filming just seven episodes. There was a general sense that perhaps the show was permanently kaput. But here we are. The new season kicks off on Monday, Jan. 11. And Cho, from an outsider’s perspective, appears to be stepping into a minefield; by her own admission, she doesn’t know much about fashion. Salon spoke to Cho on the phone about Joan’s legacy, her own qualifications, what she thinks of Rancic and Griffin, and whether she has to watch what she says. What do you think Joan Rivers brought to the show, and what are you going to bring to the show in comparison? You can never replace Joan. She created the red carpet. She created the idea of bringing an audience into the spectacle of the red carpet. ["Fashion Police"] wouldn’t have even existed as a platform if she hadn’t generated it; it was her way of bringing [the spectacle] off of awards show coverage and into her own theater. So you can never replace her. I’ve been so close to her, and her family, and the other people on the show. And so I wanted to go and spend time with my friends, and play around with the idea of, “What can we do, now that she’s not here?” It’s about telling jokes and having a good time. I don’t mean to ever replace her. I just want to hang out with Melissa in this place that Joan built for her and for the rest of us. Joan always said that that we female comedians were really lucky because we were funny. We could work forever, because our appeal had nothing to do with youth or beauty or any of those things that actresses have to count on. We were beyond that. We were always going to work, because we were always going to be funny. It’s something that’s been proven over years and years of show business. Do you feel the pressure of not having Joan there? What’s the atmosphere like in that room? There is no pressure. We can honor her by being as funny and as ridiculous and fearless as possible. Although, Joan was an interesting person; she had lot of fear about whether she was funny enough or good enough. She was always very conscious of whether she was doing the right thing. I think the cast is very optimistic. I think that after Joan died, everybody needed time to figure out what was going to happen. The show is her voice, and it’s her baby. It’s one of the things that I know she was proudest of creating. I think it’s possible to do it without her. It’s still not the same, but it’s true to her vision. "Fashion Police" is not in my realm. I’m not a fashionista, although I do have strong views about what fashion is and what I like about fashion. It’s also a place to tell really dirty jokes and try to get away with them. Can you be more specific in regard to your view of fashion, and what you would like to see more of? I like it when it’s more artistic — when it’s more about the fantasy and spectacle of the red carpet rather than being in the moment in terms of trends. I don’t have a perfect body, so I appreciate people who still want to feel like they belong, and say, “We have a voice. We can look fabulous.” Also, I like different attitudes. My favorite clothes have always been the ones that are really outrageous. I like Bjork’s swan dress; that was the ultimate in terms of self-expression and of making it your own. I want to see more stuff like that. Can anyone ever go too far? Or the more outrageous, the better? I think the more outrageous, the better. It’s just fun. I don’t have the same perspective as all the other panelists; they all have a different aesthetic. They like classic looks. They like beauty and what is aesthetically pleasing. I like outrageous. I like ridiculous. I like funny stuff… I just go for the gut reaction. It doesn’t have to be from "great" designers; I want to support new designers and outrageousness in any form. Have you learned more about fashion recently? Or are you trying to preserve the purity of that gut reaction? I think I’m learning more about it. And I’m also learning about telling jokes; it’s not just necessarily about making fun of people. It’s just a way, for me at least, to tell jokes about what happens in this other world that parallels the real world. The jokes should never be mean. You should be able to do the joke and have the person there. You don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. I’m not really a mean comic in that way. It’s more about having fun with the listener and having fun with each other. Yes, but as a whole, fashion is very based upon looks and aesthetics. Do you see a conflict there? I mean, totally. But you can make all kinds of jokes. This is where Joan and I disagreed a lot. She thought I was fat, and complained about my fat. [Laughs] But I could never complain about somebody’s fat. I don’t have the same sort of aesthetic there. I think it’s changing in fashion. I think we’re now appreciating different kinds of bodies; it’s not so much of a strident ideal that we’re striving for. Joan used to tell a lot of those types of judgmental jokes, and get away with it. With her generation, the attitude was always this "us versus them" — that we need to bring them down to our level, because there was such a separation between celebrities and "real" people. That’s the way that she grew up in show business. And I think she got away with it because she was part of that generation. She also did it in a very loving way and a very sweet way. I know you’re saying that it’s all about the jokes and hanging out with friends. But it would be naive to deny that there’s a lot of money riding on this. Have you heard any pressure from the network in terms of what they want to hear and what they want to see? I get paid very little for what I do on "Fashion Police." I don’t know what the other people make, but I make about $5,000 per episode, which is really not a lot. But I love the franchise, and I love being there for my mentor and for Melissa. That, to me, is a payment unto itself. It’s a great joy to do it. I’m sure there’s pressure, but they’re not pressuring me, because they haven’t said anything. What did you think about Kathy Griffin’s time on the show? I was in the running the first time [when Rivers died], because Kathy wasn’t sure if she wanted to do it or not. I always wanted to do it, but they went with Kathy. I tried to talk her out of it so that she would give me her spot! [Laughs] I didn’t understand why she didn’t like it. We haven’t discussed it beyond when she me told she was leaving, and I told her, “Well, you’d better make sure that I get that job!” I always had my eye on it, so I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t a fit. I thought she was perfect. And then a little after that, Melissa told me they wanted me. Giuliana Rancic kind of stepped into traffic last season over Zendaya’s dreadlocks. Have you talked to Rancic since then about her comments? It’s hard, because it’s all very volatile. I don’t think she actually got to say what she wanted to say. I think it was taken out of context. Sometimes when you tell jokes, you can’t be complete in your thought. I don’t know. I wasn’t there, and I didn’t witness it when it happened. But I felt bad. Comedians often get to this place where they’re offending people, and it’s something common that they have to navigate. As a woman of color, as a queer woman, as someone who is plus-sized and very proud of my fat — the more identities you are, the more you can get away with. You have to be very responsible and aware. But at the same time, you have to be true to your profession. Margaret Cho is currently in development for a marijuana-centric dramedy called "Highland," which will debut on Amazon Prime. This April, she will be releasing a rock album called American Myth. You can find out more at www.margaretcho.com.Margaret Cho, the Asian-American, queer, politically active, sex positive, burlesque dancing, singing and songwriting, stand-up comedian, has a brand new gig. She can now add "fashion critic" to her ever-expanding curriculum vitae. Cho will be joining E!’s "Fashion Police" this season. She was a guest host last season, but now she’s a permanent member of the judge’s panel, rounded out by Melissa Rivers, Brad Goreski, and "Fashion Police" veteran Giuliana Rancic. Cho is the prominent comedian on the panel -- a role that was previously filled by Kathy Griffin, and by Joan Rivers before her. Rivers died in 2014, and she was one of the last standup acts who could trace her roots back to Classic Hollywood — back when Ed Sullivan could still make your career. Back when Johnny Carson was the newly crowned king of late night. Back when the mob still ran Las Vegas, and the Rat Pack still played The Sands. Rivers was a brash woman in an era defined by its machismo. She popularized red carpet fashion culture almost singlehandedly. She was, as much as she hated the term, a legend. And it’s very, very difficult to live up to a legend. The first "Fashion Police" season after Rivers passed away was an unmitigated disaster. Rancic embroiled herself in controversy after insulting Zendaya's dreadlocks. Kelly Osbourne quit the show. And Griffin, who was dogged by constant criticism and comparisons to Rivers, walked after filming just seven episodes. There was a general sense that perhaps the show was permanently kaput. But here we are. The new season kicks off on Monday, Jan. 11. And Cho, from an outsider’s perspective, appears to be stepping into a minefield; by her own admission, she doesn’t know much about fashion. Salon spoke to Cho on the phone about Joan’s legacy, her own qualifications, what she thinks of Rancic and Griffin, and whether she has to watch what she says. What do you think Joan Rivers brought to the show, and what are you going to bring to the show in comparison? You can never replace Joan. She created the red carpet. She created the idea of bringing an audience into the spectacle of the red carpet. ["Fashion Police"] wouldn’t have even existed as a platform if she hadn’t generated it; it was her way of bringing [the spectacle] off of awards show coverage and into her own theater. So you can never replace her. I’ve been so close to her, and her family, and the other people on the show. And so I wanted to go and spend time with my friends, and play around with the idea of, “What can we do, now that she’s not here?” It’s about telling jokes and having a good time. I don’t mean to ever replace her. I just want to hang out with Melissa in this place that Joan built for her and for the rest of us. Joan always said that that we female comedians were really lucky because we were funny. We could work forever, because our appeal had nothing to do with youth or beauty or any of those things that actresses have to count on. We were beyond that. We were always going to work, because we were always going to be funny. It’s something that’s been proven over years and years of show business. Do you feel the pressure of not having Joan there? What’s the atmosphere like in that room? There is no pressure. We can honor her by being as funny and as ridiculous and fearless as possible. Although, Joan was an interesting person; she had lot of fear about whether she was funny enough or good enough. She was always very conscious of whether she was doing the right thing. I think the cast is very optimistic. I think that after Joan died, everybody needed time to figure out what was going to happen. The show is her voice, and it’s her baby. It’s one of the things that I know she was proudest of creating. I think it’s possible to do it without her. It’s still not the same, but it’s true to her vision. "Fashion Police" is not in my realm. I’m not a fashionista, although I do have strong views about what fashion is and what I like about fashion. It’s also a place to tell really dirty jokes and try to get away with them. Can you be more specific in regard to your view of fashion, and what you would like to see more of? I like it when it’s more artistic — when it’s more about the fantasy and spectacle of the red carpet rather than being in the moment in terms of trends. I don’t have a perfect body, so I appreciate people who still want to feel like they belong, and say, “We have a voice. We can look fabulous.” Also, I like different attitudes. My favorite clothes have always been the ones that are really outrageous. I like Bjork’s swan dress; that was the ultimate in terms of self-expression and of making it your own. I want to see more stuff like that. Can anyone ever go too far? Or the more outrageous, the better? I think the more outrageous, the better. It’s just fun. I don’t have the same perspective as all the other panelists; they all have a different aesthetic. They like classic looks. They like beauty and what is aesthetically pleasing. I like outrageous. I like ridiculous. I like funny stuff… I just go for the gut reaction. It doesn’t have to be from "great" designers; I want to support new designers and outrageousness in any form. Have you learned more about fashion recently? Or are you trying to preserve the purity of that gut reaction? I think I’m learning more about it. And I’m also learning about telling jokes; it’s not just necessarily about making fun of people. It’s just a way, for me at least, to tell jokes about what happens in this other world that parallels the real world. The jokes should never be mean. You should be able to do the joke and have the person there. You don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. I’m not really a mean comic in that way. It’s more about having fun with the listener and having fun with each other. Yes, but as a whole, fashion is very based upon looks and aesthetics. Do you see a conflict there? I mean, totally. But you can make all kinds of jokes. This is where Joan and I disagreed a lot. She thought I was fat, and complained about my fat. [Laughs] But I could never complain about somebody’s fat. I don’t have the same sort of aesthetic there. I think it’s changing in fashion. I think we’re now appreciating different kinds of bodies; it’s not so much of a strident ideal that we’re striving for. Joan used to tell a lot of those types of judgmental jokes, and get away with it. With her generation, the attitude was always this "us versus them" — that we need to bring them down to our level, because there was such a separation between celebrities and "real" people. That’s the way that she grew up in show business. And I think she got away with it because she was part of that generation. She also did it in a very loving way and a very sweet way. I know you’re saying that it’s all about the jokes and hanging out with friends. But it would be naive to deny that there’s a lot of money riding on this. Have you heard any pressure from the network in terms of what they want to hear and what they want to see? I get paid very little for what I do on "Fashion Police." I don’t know what the other people make, but I make about $5,000 per episode, which is really not a lot. But I love the franchise, and I love being there for my mentor and for Melissa. That, to me, is a payment unto itself. It’s a great joy to do it. I’m sure there’s pressure, but they’re not pressuring me, because they haven’t said anything. What did you think about Kathy Griffin’s time on the show? I was in the running the first time [when Rivers died], because Kathy wasn’t sure if she wanted to do it or not. I always wanted to do it, but they went with Kathy. I tried to talk her out of it so that she would give me her spot! [Laughs] I didn’t understand why she didn’t like it. We haven’t discussed it beyond when she me told she was leaving, and I told her, “Well, you’d better make sure that I get that job!” I always had my eye on it, so I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t a fit. I thought she was perfect. And then a little after that, Melissa told me they wanted me. Giuliana Rancic kind of stepped into traffic last season over Zendaya’s dreadlocks. Have you talked to Rancic since then about her comments? It’s hard, because it’s all very volatile. I don’t think she actually got to say what she wanted to say. I think it was taken out of context. Sometimes when you tell jokes, you can’t be complete in your thought. I don’t know. I wasn’t there, and I didn’t witness it when it happened. But I felt bad. Comedians often get to this place where they’re offending people, and it’s something common that they have to navigate. As a woman of color, as a queer woman, as someone who is plus-sized and very proud of my fat — the more identities you are, the more you can get away with. You have to be very responsible and aware. But at the same time, you have to be true to your profession. Margaret Cho is currently in development for a marijuana-centric dramedy called "Highland," which will debut on Amazon Prime. This April, she will be releasing a rock album called American Myth. You can find out more at www.margaretcho.com.

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Published on January 08, 2016 16:00

“Poor people lose”: “Making a Murderer,” reality television and our shared mythology of a classless society

Over the New Year’s weekend, I binge-watched Netflix’s 10-part documentary series "Making a Murderer," which follows the remarkable case of Steven Avery – a man wrongfully convicted of rape and released after 18 years, only to be rearrested and convicted of murder. The filmmakers, Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, spent untold hours at home with the Avery clan, who live in a kind of family compound on their scrapyard in rural Wisconsin.

I see a lot of documentaries, but I’ve never seen one about people like the Averys. Watching, I was struck by how rarely a mainstream American film shows how poor people actually live. We see Steven’s mother frying hamburgers, talking on the phone, watching local news coverage of Steven’s trial while making soup. What makes these scenes interesting, even revelatory, is where they occur. Steven’s trailer, his parents’ modest house, look nothing like the set of a family sitcom or its contemporary equivalent, the “reality” show. If you spent your life watching television, you might reasonably conclude that all Americans live like Kardashians or “real” housewives. For poor rural folk, nothing could be less real.

"Making a Murderer" is an exhaustive, sometimes tedious police procedural. It’s also that rare thing in American film, a story about class.  For 10 hours, we are presented again and again with the visual contrast between the Averys and everyone else in the courtroom. The prosecutor and defense attorneys are dressed as you’d expect, as are the journalists, the victim’s family and most of the spectators. But Steven Avery’s father comes to court in stiff, brand-new denim overalls, clearly purchased for the occasion. Mrs. Avery wears a kind of flowered smock I haven’t seen since childhood, worn by the elderly ladies who worked in the kitchen at church suppers. 

The Avery story is unusual in that it isolates the variable of class from the powerful, and related, question of race. "Making a Murderer" takes place in rural Wisconsin; like the police, the prosecutors and the victim, the Avery family is white. If the Averys were black, their story would become part of the current conversation – long overdue – about racial inequities in policing, the criminalizing of blackness. We’d have a language to explain why police were so convinced of Avery’s guilt, or why his girlfriend was harassed by law enforcement, or how his learning-disabled nephew was interrogated for hours without legal counsel. Micro-aggression, targeting, the culture of incarceration: because the Averys are white, none of these terms seems to apply. The closest we ever get to an accurate assessment of the forces at work comes from Avery himself in the third episode: "Poor people lose," he states simply when confronted with the new charges against him. It's hard to disagree. Yet the fact that we lack any larger language for talking about class cuts to some basic truths about Americanness.

American society is classless, a pure meritocracy: this is part of our shared mythology. My parents believed it. Raised poor, they joined the military, went to college on the G.I. Bill and became schoolteachers. They believed they’d made it, and in a real way, they had. They worked and saved, built a house, sent two kids to college – the sort of incremental mobility that was possible for poor white people (and, thanks to discriminatory lending practices, largely off limits to poor blacks).

In our part of the world, these were not small things. We lived in a little coal town in western Pennsylvania where a union job in the mines was a golden ticket. A miner earned twice what a schoolteacher did – at least until the early eighties, when a miners’ strike paralyzed the town for months. I started junior high in a brand new pair of Nikes of which I was deeply ashamed, because none of my classmates had new shoes. It’s an unease I’ve carried my whole life, the feeling of having been unfairly favored. I wasn’t the smartest in my class, or the most industrious. I didn’t deserve my sneakers, my education or (especially) my good parents, any more than the next kid did.

The coal mines are gone now, the good union jobs a distant memory. The fracking boom has brought trucks and heavy equipment, out-of-state workers and a windfall for tavern and restaurant owners, but so far hasn’t translated into employment for the locals. Wal-Mart is the biggest employer around. Yet even there, in the post-industrial Rust Belt, nobody wants to identify as working class, which seems like joining a losing team. Politicians understand this, which is why they’re always banging on about lifting up the middle class. It’s a basic truth about the American psyche: If you’re an out-of -work coal miner, if you’re stocking shelves at Wal-Mart or living on disability, you still consider yourself middle class.

Culturally, western Pennsylvania isn’t so different from Manitowoc County, where the Averys live. In this election year, many in both communities will vote for Donald Trump, a born-on-third billionaire who pivots around their sore spots. Formerly pro-choice, he’s now declared his opposition to abortion. He’s promised not to take away their guns. Trump’s stance on immigration is perfectly pitched to people who’ve lost their jobs and need a scapegoat, and his loud mistrust of Muslims plays well in communities that don’t have any. He understands how the national conversation about race sounds to poor white people: Black Lives Matter implies, to them, that their own lives don’t matter. Not because they’re racist (though some are), but because they too have been left behind – their communities gutted, livelihoods lost– and there’s no affirmative action for them.

This is how Trump has cast himself, however improbably, as a populist billionaire. Bernie Sanders sings to educated liberals, but when it comes to crossing the class divide, he lacks The Donald’s Sprachgefül. Candidate Sanders holds strong and apparently sincere convictions about economic justice, but he has no common language with the voters who might actually benefit from them. He speaks – frequently and unselfconsciously – about poverty, a word that, to poor people, is roughly as appealing as cancer. Trump’s promises may be as real as reality television, as real as the "Real Housewives," but these are fantasies poor people are accustomed to buying. In his own career as a reality TV star, Trump has played the irascible tyrant (You’re fired!), flexing the kind of power poor people will never experience except vicariously. (Working for an asshole is miserable, but watching one on TV is kind of fun.) Donald Trump has visited their living rooms; he has entertained them, and he does not shame them. He may be an asshole, but he’s an asshole they know.

Over the New Year’s weekend, I binge-watched Netflix’s 10-part documentary series "Making a Murderer," which follows the remarkable case of Steven Avery – a man wrongfully convicted of rape and released after 18 years, only to be rearrested and convicted of murder. The filmmakers, Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, spent untold hours at home with the Avery clan, who live in a kind of family compound on their scrapyard in rural Wisconsin.

I see a lot of documentaries, but I’ve never seen one about people like the Averys. Watching, I was struck by how rarely a mainstream American film shows how poor people actually live. We see Steven’s mother frying hamburgers, talking on the phone, watching local news coverage of Steven’s trial while making soup. What makes these scenes interesting, even revelatory, is where they occur. Steven’s trailer, his parents’ modest house, look nothing like the set of a family sitcom or its contemporary equivalent, the “reality” show. If you spent your life watching television, you might reasonably conclude that all Americans live like Kardashians or “real” housewives. For poor rural folk, nothing could be less real.

"Making a Murderer" is an exhaustive, sometimes tedious police procedural. It’s also that rare thing in American film, a story about class.  For 10 hours, we are presented again and again with the visual contrast between the Averys and everyone else in the courtroom. The prosecutor and defense attorneys are dressed as you’d expect, as are the journalists, the victim’s family and most of the spectators. But Steven Avery’s father comes to court in stiff, brand-new denim overalls, clearly purchased for the occasion. Mrs. Avery wears a kind of flowered smock I haven’t seen since childhood, worn by the elderly ladies who worked in the kitchen at church suppers. 

The Avery story is unusual in that it isolates the variable of class from the powerful, and related, question of race. "Making a Murderer" takes place in rural Wisconsin; like the police, the prosecutors and the victim, the Avery family is white. If the Averys were black, their story would become part of the current conversation – long overdue – about racial inequities in policing, the criminalizing of blackness. We’d have a language to explain why police were so convinced of Avery’s guilt, or why his girlfriend was harassed by law enforcement, or how his learning-disabled nephew was interrogated for hours without legal counsel. Micro-aggression, targeting, the culture of incarceration: because the Averys are white, none of these terms seems to apply. The closest we ever get to an accurate assessment of the forces at work comes from Avery himself in the third episode: "Poor people lose," he states simply when confronted with the new charges against him. It's hard to disagree. Yet the fact that we lack any larger language for talking about class cuts to some basic truths about Americanness.

American society is classless, a pure meritocracy: this is part of our shared mythology. My parents believed it. Raised poor, they joined the military, went to college on the G.I. Bill and became schoolteachers. They believed they’d made it, and in a real way, they had. They worked and saved, built a house, sent two kids to college – the sort of incremental mobility that was possible for poor white people (and, thanks to discriminatory lending practices, largely off limits to poor blacks).

In our part of the world, these were not small things. We lived in a little coal town in western Pennsylvania where a union job in the mines was a golden ticket. A miner earned twice what a schoolteacher did – at least until the early eighties, when a miners’ strike paralyzed the town for months. I started junior high in a brand new pair of Nikes of which I was deeply ashamed, because none of my classmates had new shoes. It’s an unease I’ve carried my whole life, the feeling of having been unfairly favored. I wasn’t the smartest in my class, or the most industrious. I didn’t deserve my sneakers, my education or (especially) my good parents, any more than the next kid did.

The coal mines are gone now, the good union jobs a distant memory. The fracking boom has brought trucks and heavy equipment, out-of-state workers and a windfall for tavern and restaurant owners, but so far hasn’t translated into employment for the locals. Wal-Mart is the biggest employer around. Yet even there, in the post-industrial Rust Belt, nobody wants to identify as working class, which seems like joining a losing team. Politicians understand this, which is why they’re always banging on about lifting up the middle class. It’s a basic truth about the American psyche: If you’re an out-of -work coal miner, if you’re stocking shelves at Wal-Mart or living on disability, you still consider yourself middle class.

Culturally, western Pennsylvania isn’t so different from Manitowoc County, where the Averys live. In this election year, many in both communities will vote for Donald Trump, a born-on-third billionaire who pivots around their sore spots. Formerly pro-choice, he’s now declared his opposition to abortion. He’s promised not to take away their guns. Trump’s stance on immigration is perfectly pitched to people who’ve lost their jobs and need a scapegoat, and his loud mistrust of Muslims plays well in communities that don’t have any. He understands how the national conversation about race sounds to poor white people: Black Lives Matter implies, to them, that their own lives don’t matter. Not because they’re racist (though some are), but because they too have been left behind – their communities gutted, livelihoods lost– and there’s no affirmative action for them.

This is how Trump has cast himself, however improbably, as a populist billionaire. Bernie Sanders sings to educated liberals, but when it comes to crossing the class divide, he lacks The Donald’s Sprachgefül. Candidate Sanders holds strong and apparently sincere convictions about economic justice, but he has no common language with the voters who might actually benefit from them. He speaks – frequently and unselfconsciously – about poverty, a word that, to poor people, is roughly as appealing as cancer. Trump’s promises may be as real as reality television, as real as the "Real Housewives," but these are fantasies poor people are accustomed to buying. In his own career as a reality TV star, Trump has played the irascible tyrant (You’re fired!), flexing the kind of power poor people will never experience except vicariously. (Working for an asshole is miserable, but watching one on TV is kind of fun.) Donald Trump has visited their living rooms; he has entertained them, and he does not shame them. He may be an asshole, but he’s an asshole they know.

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Published on January 08, 2016 15:59

New twist in Bristol Palin’s baby drama: The abstinence mascot now needs proof he’s the dad

Bristol Palin's custody battle over her new baby girl is getting more intense.

After it was reported that Palin’s alleged baby daddy filed for child support and joint custody of 2-week-old Sailor Grace, the Palin camp and the state of Alaska are now saying —in very different words — that they need proof he's the dad.

As per child custody laws, Sailor’s presumed father, Dakota Meyer, must now take a paternity test to corroborate claims he made in the court filing.

Palin met Meyer in 2013 during the filming of her mother’s reality show, “Amazing America.”

The two were engaged after Meyer proposed at a Rascal Flatts concert in March 2015. The two had subsequent wedding plans that were abruptly called off in May, just a  week before the big day. And shortly thereafter, in June, Palin announced she was pregnant.

At the time of the cancelled nuptials, tabloids circulated rumors that Meyer — a Marine veteran and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient — had a “secret wife.” Palin would later refute these claims, saying, “Dakota was legally divorced years ago, as any good reporter could and should have disclosed to readers.”

Palin announced via Instagram on Dec. 24 that she’d given birth a day earlier. She has refused to identify the father.

Further conspiracy surrounded Sailor’s birth, with tabloids claiming that Palin had given birth a month earlier, in November. The rumors stemmed from geotagged Facebook posts that incorrectly placed the Palins’ whereabouts in New Orleans instead of Alaska. In response, Palin Instagrammed a closeup photo of her IV bag, which confirmed her hospital admittance date to be Dec. 22. The photo acted to hush any divergent theories of the date of Sailor’s conception.

Meyer’s 85-year-old grandmother, Jean, told the Daily Mail that “it does hurt [to have to prove paternity]. But that’s just the way the law is. You have to get permission here and permission there.”

Jean, a Greensboro, Kentucky, native, said she’s relatively unfamiliar with Bristol Palin. “I’ve met her, but I don’t really know her,” she said. “But I helped raise Dakota and I do know him. He’s a strong young man and a good one.”

Sailor’s famous grandmother, Sarah Palin, issued her own statement, condemning Dakota. “For many months we have been trying to reach out to Dakota Myers [sic] and he has wanted nothing to do with either Bristol's pregnancy or the baby,” she told Entertainment Tonight.

The elder Palin even went so far as to say that Meyer’s push for joint custody is simply a way for him to “save face.”

David Martin, a rep for Bristol, also weighed in, telling ET, “My values are such that a real American hero doesn't ask for child support.”

Bristol Palin's custody battle over her new baby girl is getting more intense.

After it was reported that Palin’s alleged baby daddy filed for child support and joint custody of 2-week-old Sailor Grace, the Palin camp and the state of Alaska are now saying —in very different words — that they need proof he's the dad.

As per child custody laws, Sailor’s presumed father, Dakota Meyer, must now take a paternity test to corroborate claims he made in the court filing.

Palin met Meyer in 2013 during the filming of her mother’s reality show, “Amazing America.”

The two were engaged after Meyer proposed at a Rascal Flatts concert in March 2015. The two had subsequent wedding plans that were abruptly called off in May, just a  week before the big day. And shortly thereafter, in June, Palin announced she was pregnant.

At the time of the cancelled nuptials, tabloids circulated rumors that Meyer — a Marine veteran and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient — had a “secret wife.” Palin would later refute these claims, saying, “Dakota was legally divorced years ago, as any good reporter could and should have disclosed to readers.”

Palin announced via Instagram on Dec. 24 that she’d given birth a day earlier. She has refused to identify the father.

Further conspiracy surrounded Sailor’s birth, with tabloids claiming that Palin had given birth a month earlier, in November. The rumors stemmed from geotagged Facebook posts that incorrectly placed the Palins’ whereabouts in New Orleans instead of Alaska. In response, Palin Instagrammed a closeup photo of her IV bag, which confirmed her hospital admittance date to be Dec. 22. The photo acted to hush any divergent theories of the date of Sailor’s conception.

Meyer’s 85-year-old grandmother, Jean, told the Daily Mail that “it does hurt [to have to prove paternity]. But that’s just the way the law is. You have to get permission here and permission there.”

Jean, a Greensboro, Kentucky, native, said she’s relatively unfamiliar with Bristol Palin. “I’ve met her, but I don’t really know her,” she said. “But I helped raise Dakota and I do know him. He’s a strong young man and a good one.”

Sailor’s famous grandmother, Sarah Palin, issued her own statement, condemning Dakota. “For many months we have been trying to reach out to Dakota Myers [sic] and he has wanted nothing to do with either Bristol's pregnancy or the baby,” she told Entertainment Tonight.

The elder Palin even went so far as to say that Meyer’s push for joint custody is simply a way for him to “save face.”

David Martin, a rep for Bristol, also weighed in, telling ET, “My values are such that a real American hero doesn't ask for child support.”

Bristol Palin's custody battle over her new baby girl is getting more intense.

After it was reported that Palin’s alleged baby daddy filed for child support and joint custody of 2-week-old Sailor Grace, the Palin camp and the state of Alaska are now saying —in very different words — that they need proof he's the dad.

As per child custody laws, Sailor’s presumed father, Dakota Meyer, must now take a paternity test to corroborate claims he made in the court filing.

Palin met Meyer in 2013 during the filming of her mother’s reality show, “Amazing America.”

The two were engaged after Meyer proposed at a Rascal Flatts concert in March 2015. The two had subsequent wedding plans that were abruptly called off in May, just a  week before the big day. And shortly thereafter, in June, Palin announced she was pregnant.

At the time of the cancelled nuptials, tabloids circulated rumors that Meyer — a Marine veteran and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient — had a “secret wife.” Palin would later refute these claims, saying, “Dakota was legally divorced years ago, as any good reporter could and should have disclosed to readers.”

Palin announced via Instagram on Dec. 24 that she’d given birth a day earlier. She has refused to identify the father.

Further conspiracy surrounded Sailor’s birth, with tabloids claiming that Palin had given birth a month earlier, in November. The rumors stemmed from geotagged Facebook posts that incorrectly placed the Palins’ whereabouts in New Orleans instead of Alaska. In response, Palin Instagrammed a closeup photo of her IV bag, which confirmed her hospital admittance date to be Dec. 22. The photo acted to hush any divergent theories of the date of Sailor’s conception.

Meyer’s 85-year-old grandmother, Jean, told the Daily Mail that “it does hurt [to have to prove paternity]. But that’s just the way the law is. You have to get permission here and permission there.”

Jean, a Greensboro, Kentucky, native, said she’s relatively unfamiliar with Bristol Palin. “I’ve met her, but I don’t really know her,” she said. “But I helped raise Dakota and I do know him. He’s a strong young man and a good one.”

Sailor’s famous grandmother, Sarah Palin, issued her own statement, condemning Dakota. “For many months we have been trying to reach out to Dakota Myers [sic] and he has wanted nothing to do with either Bristol's pregnancy or the baby,” she told Entertainment Tonight.

The elder Palin even went so far as to say that Meyer’s push for joint custody is simply a way for him to “save face.”

David Martin, a rep for Bristol, also weighed in, telling ET, “My values are such that a real American hero doesn't ask for child support.”

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Published on January 08, 2016 15:00

This is how Ted Cruz wins: Why the formerly unthinkable could really, actually happen

When Ted Cruz came to the Senate in 2013, after winning a squeaker of a Senate race the previous November, he didn't waste any time in bringing himself to national attention. It wasn't his style to use his freshman term to keep his head down and learn the ropes.  Just seven weeks after being sworn in, Cruz made a name for himself by accusing fellow Republican Chuck Hagel of taking money from communist North Korea during his confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense. This accusation startled virtually everyone and earned Cruz a rebuke from committee chairman John McCain. Senator Barbara Boxer drew an apt analogy when she said she was reminded of “a different time and place, when you said, ‘I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such-and-such a date,’ and of course there was nothing in the pocket.” She was alluding, of course to the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy. As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker at the time, this was not hyperbole. She had personally heard Cruz claim that the Harvard School of Law had harbored a dozen communists on the faculty when he was a student there:
Cruz made the accusation while speaking to a rapt ballroom audience during a luncheon at a conference called “Defending the American Dream,” sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a non-profit political organization founded and funded in part by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch. Cruz greeted the audience jovially, but soon launched an impassioned attack on President Obama, whom he described as “the most radical” President “ever to occupy the Oval Office.” (I was covering the conference and kept the notes.)
He then went on to assert that Obama, who attended Harvard Law School four years ahead of him, “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” The reason, said Cruz, was that, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”
Within seven weeks of becoming Senator, Cruz was a national figure who was being compared to one of the most reviled figures in American politics. He was often compared to McCarthy from that point forward, even including the likes of conservative David Brooks, who found him to be quite a distasteful character:
It’s like the most un-conservative act to come in two weeks into the job and decide the Senate exists for you to take it over. So I think he’s made a lot of enemies. It doesn’t help that he has a face that looks a little like Joe McCarthy, actually. So, you know, I find him a little off-putting.
The more establishment figures like McCain and Brooks loathed him, the more the right wing of the party loved him. He became a backroom advisor to the "Freedom Caucus" in the House and he led the charge to shut down the government in 2013. Many on the right attribute their victory in 2014 to his strategic leadership. When he threw his hat in the ring for president, the conventional wisdom was that he was a fringe player along the lines of Michele Bachmann in 2012 and was assumed to be so unpopular within the party that he couldn't possibly raise any money. And even if he could  overcome those obstacles he had such a repellant personality that nobody in their right mind would vote for him for president. He was, after all, the reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy, a man whose name is synonymous with political paranoia. That doesn't seem to be happening. In fact, Cruz has shown himself to be a disciplined campaigner and a strategic thinker, managing the rough and tumble of this weird GOP primary campaign better than any of his rivals. He's fended off attacks with aplomb and doesn't seem to have been hurt by them. And as Dave Weigel reported yesterday in the Washington Post, he has not trimmed his ideological sails in the least:
One questioner asked about the alleged influence of the Trilateral Commission and David Rockefeller, two bugbears of conspiracy theorists. "It's a very good question," said Cruz, pivoting to discuss the Medellin national sovereignty case, which is featured in some of his TV ads here. Another questioner asked whether the Federal Reserve was constitutional, prompting a short monologue by Cruz about why America should return to the gold standard. And another questioner asked about the potential threat of Muslim courts issuing their own sharia-based rulings within the United States. "Under no circumstances should sharia law be enforced anywhere in this country," Cruz said. "We should do whatever it takes to prevent that."
It doesn't get any more hardcore than that. But Cruz has done something else that hasn't been noticed by most of the press corps. He's lost that Joe McCarthy countenance, and many of his harsh edges have softened. He's given one on one interviews in which he told personal stories that humanized him. He's lightheartedly sparred with Trump and others on social media batting back criticisms with clever bon mots instead of engaging in combat. The Christmas ad that caused such a ruckus when a Washington Post cartoonist portrayed his daughters as monkeys only served to introduce the two darling moppets to many more people than would otherwise have seen them. And rather than get down and dirty with Trump, as the man is obviously baiting him to do, he has maintained a rather stately mein, insisting that he is in the race to speak about serious issues. The contrast with Donald Trump's crude brashness has had the effect of making the awkward Cruz seem almost moderate in affect if not ideology. Meanwhile, polls continue to show a race with Trump at the top, then Cruz coming on strong in second and a cluster of so-called establishment candidates -- one of whom everyone still expects to emerge as the "candidate to beat." And perhaps that will happen as they predicted all along. After all, nobody has voted yet. But that is a unique way to analyze a race in January of an election year. If anyone but Cruz and Trump were in the number one and two position it would be assumed that they were the legitimate leaders and the race would be framed as a race between the two of them with some outside chance of a dark horse making a late move. But because they are both, in different ways, extremists, it's assumed they both represent a minority faction and the "mainstream" Republicans will emerge as the majority. But there's every reason to believe that in 2016 these two may actually represent most GOP voters while the Washington establishment types are the fringe. If that's the case, the establishment is going to have a big decision to make. Do they back the hated Cruz to stop the loathsome Trump? Or do they back the detestable Trump to stop the odious Cruz? What a choice. Early indications are that some DC insiders are still living in hope that one of the establishment types will break through but, still also harbor so much animosity toward Cruz that they'll take the risk of Trump rather than accept him as their leader. But they are in the minority. Jeb Bush, for instance, refused to say that he would vote for Trump if he were to get the nomination. More interestingly, it looks as though some of the mainstream conservative pundits are starting to make peace with the idea that Cruz may end up as the establishment candidate by default. Rich Lowry made this case in Politico by calling into question the conventional wisdom that Cruz is another Goldwater extremist who will necessarily go down in a massive general election defeat. And instead of finding parallels to his aggressive ambition in the repellant Joseph McCarthy, he compares him instead to another awkward, unlikeable politician who nonetheless got millions of people to vote for him for president in one very close loss, one very close win and one huge landslide: Richard Nixon.
Obviously and most importantly, Cruz is not a paranoiac. He is more ideological than Nixon. And he has none of Nixon’s insecurity, in fact the opposite. Nixon went to tiny Whittier College and resented the Northeastern elite; Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard and could be a member of the Northeastern elite in good standing if he wanted to be. But Cruz is cut from roughly similar cloth. He wears his ambition on his sleeve and is not highly charismatic or relatable. In high school, he could have been voted most likely to be seen walking on the beach in his dress shoes. If Cruz wins the nomination, it will be on the strength of intelligence and willpower. He will have outworked, outsmarted and outmaneuvered everyone else.
He has a point. Say what you will about Nixon -- and there's plenty to say -- he was a very smart politician. In particular, he overcame the political disability of having an extremely unpleasant personality to win the White House twice. I've written about Cruz's savvy strategy to appeal to the movement conservativesthe Carson evangelicals and the Paul libertarians here at Salon. And everyone knows he's killing Trump with kindness in the hopes of attracting his angry xenophobes and nationalists over to his campaign if Trump falters or they end up being the last two men standing. He's got important billionaires in his pocket. And now it appears that some of the Republican establishment is taking notice of his sharp political acumen and work ethic and are offering him the respect of recognizing that he's very good at what he does. That's the GOP coalition, right there. None of that means that Senator Ted Cruz is not a far right extremist. He is. But he is not just a canny politician, he's also a lucky one. After all, without a maniac like Donald Trump being in the race it's very unlikely he'd be in the position he is today no matter how hard he worked or how well he organized. And a smart and lucky extremist is a very dangerous one. Ted Cruz Trumped the Donald With His New Immigration Ad?When Ted Cruz came to the Senate in 2013, after winning a squeaker of a Senate race the previous November, he didn't waste any time in bringing himself to national attention. It wasn't his style to use his freshman term to keep his head down and learn the ropes.  Just seven weeks after being sworn in, Cruz made a name for himself by accusing fellow Republican Chuck Hagel of taking money from communist North Korea during his confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense. This accusation startled virtually everyone and earned Cruz a rebuke from committee chairman John McCain. Senator Barbara Boxer drew an apt analogy when she said she was reminded of “a different time and place, when you said, ‘I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such-and-such a date,’ and of course there was nothing in the pocket.” She was alluding, of course to the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy. As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker at the time, this was not hyperbole. She had personally heard Cruz claim that the Harvard School of Law had harbored a dozen communists on the faculty when he was a student there:
Cruz made the accusation while speaking to a rapt ballroom audience during a luncheon at a conference called “Defending the American Dream,” sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a non-profit political organization founded and funded in part by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch. Cruz greeted the audience jovially, but soon launched an impassioned attack on President Obama, whom he described as “the most radical” President “ever to occupy the Oval Office.” (I was covering the conference and kept the notes.)
He then went on to assert that Obama, who attended Harvard Law School four years ahead of him, “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” The reason, said Cruz, was that, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”
Within seven weeks of becoming Senator, Cruz was a national figure who was being compared to one of the most reviled figures in American politics. He was often compared to McCarthy from that point forward, even including the likes of conservative David Brooks, who found him to be quite a distasteful character:
It’s like the most un-conservative act to come in two weeks into the job and decide the Senate exists for you to take it over. So I think he’s made a lot of enemies. It doesn’t help that he has a face that looks a little like Joe McCarthy, actually. So, you know, I find him a little off-putting.
The more establishment figures like McCain and Brooks loathed him, the more the right wing of the party loved him. He became a backroom advisor to the "Freedom Caucus" in the House and he led the charge to shut down the government in 2013. Many on the right attribute their victory in 2014 to his strategic leadership. When he threw his hat in the ring for president, the conventional wisdom was that he was a fringe player along the lines of Michele Bachmann in 2012 and was assumed to be so unpopular within the party that he couldn't possibly raise any money. And even if he could  overcome those obstacles he had such a repellant personality that nobody in their right mind would vote for him for president. He was, after all, the reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy, a man whose name is synonymous with political paranoia. That doesn't seem to be happening. In fact, Cruz has shown himself to be a disciplined campaigner and a strategic thinker, managing the rough and tumble of this weird GOP primary campaign better than any of his rivals. He's fended off attacks with aplomb and doesn't seem to have been hurt by them. And as Dave Weigel reported yesterday in the Washington Post, he has not trimmed his ideological sails in the least:
One questioner asked about the alleged influence of the Trilateral Commission and David Rockefeller, two bugbears of conspiracy theorists. "It's a very good question," said Cruz, pivoting to discuss the Medellin national sovereignty case, which is featured in some of his TV ads here. Another questioner asked whether the Federal Reserve was constitutional, prompting a short monologue by Cruz about why America should return to the gold standard. And another questioner asked about the potential threat of Muslim courts issuing their own sharia-based rulings within the United States. "Under no circumstances should sharia law be enforced anywhere in this country," Cruz said. "We should do whatever it takes to prevent that."
It doesn't get any more hardcore than that. But Cruz has done something else that hasn't been noticed by most of the press corps. He's lost that Joe McCarthy countenance, and many of his harsh edges have softened. He's given one on one interviews in which he told personal stories that humanized him. He's lightheartedly sparred with Trump and others on social media batting back criticisms with clever bon mots instead of engaging in combat. The Christmas ad that caused such a ruckus when a Washington Post cartoonist portrayed his daughters as monkeys only served to introduce the two darling moppets to many more people than would otherwise have seen them. And rather than get down and dirty with Trump, as the man is obviously baiting him to do, he has maintained a rather stately mein, insisting that he is in the race to speak about serious issues. The contrast with Donald Trump's crude brashness has had the effect of making the awkward Cruz seem almost moderate in affect if not ideology. Meanwhile, polls continue to show a race with Trump at the top, then Cruz coming on strong in second and a cluster of so-called establishment candidates -- one of whom everyone still expects to emerge as the "candidate to beat." And perhaps that will happen as they predicted all along. After all, nobody has voted yet. But that is a unique way to analyze a race in January of an election year. If anyone but Cruz and Trump were in the number one and two position it would be assumed that they were the legitimate leaders and the race would be framed as a race between the two of them with some outside chance of a dark horse making a late move. But because they are both, in different ways, extremists, it's assumed they both represent a minority faction and the "mainstream" Republicans will emerge as the majority. But there's every reason to believe that in 2016 these two may actually represent most GOP voters while the Washington establishment types are the fringe. If that's the case, the establishment is going to have a big decision to make. Do they back the hated Cruz to stop the loathsome Trump? Or do they back the detestable Trump to stop the odious Cruz? What a choice. Early indications are that some DC insiders are still living in hope that one of the establishment types will break through but, still also harbor so much animosity toward Cruz that they'll take the risk of Trump rather than accept him as their leader. But they are in the minority. Jeb Bush, for instance, refused to say that he would vote for Trump if he were to get the nomination. More interestingly, it looks as though some of the mainstream conservative pundits are starting to make peace with the idea that Cruz may end up as the establishment candidate by default. Rich Lowry made this case in Politico by calling into question the conventional wisdom that Cruz is another Goldwater extremist who will necessarily go down in a massive general election defeat. And instead of finding parallels to his aggressive ambition in the repellant Joseph McCarthy, he compares him instead to another awkward, unlikeable politician who nonetheless got millions of people to vote for him for president in one very close loss, one very close win and one huge landslide: Richard Nixon.
Obviously and most importantly, Cruz is not a paranoiac. He is more ideological than Nixon. And he has none of Nixon’s insecurity, in fact the opposite. Nixon went to tiny Whittier College and resented the Northeastern elite; Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard and could be a member of the Northeastern elite in good standing if he wanted to be. But Cruz is cut from roughly similar cloth. He wears his ambition on his sleeve and is not highly charismatic or relatable. In high school, he could have been voted most likely to be seen walking on the beach in his dress shoes. If Cruz wins the nomination, it will be on the strength of intelligence and willpower. He will have outworked, outsmarted and outmaneuvered everyone else.
He has a point. Say what you will about Nixon -- and there's plenty to say -- he was a very smart politician. In particular, he overcame the political disability of having an extremely unpleasant personality to win the White House twice. I've written about Cruz's savvy strategy to appeal to the movement conservativesthe Carson evangelicals and the Paul libertarians here at Salon. And everyone knows he's killing Trump with kindness in the hopes of attracting his angry xenophobes and nationalists over to his campaign if Trump falters or they end up being the last two men standing. He's got important billionaires in his pocket. And now it appears that some of the Republican establishment is taking notice of his sharp political acumen and work ethic and are offering him the respect of recognizing that he's very good at what he does. That's the GOP coalition, right there. None of that means that Senator Ted Cruz is not a far right extremist. He is. But he is not just a canny politician, he's also a lucky one. After all, without a maniac like Donald Trump being in the race it's very unlikely he'd be in the position he is today no matter how hard he worked or how well he organized. And a smart and lucky extremist is a very dangerous one. Ted Cruz Trumped the Donald With His New Immigration Ad?

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Published on January 08, 2016 14:43