The Duck Dynasty bigots and the conservatives who love them

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Bible-thumping bigot.

Hey, here's a thought, A&E, if you don't want to be associated with bigotry, stop giving reality shows to, you know, fucking redneck bigots like the Duck Dynasty clan. I mean, what the fuck did you think was going to happen?

And, really, all these bigots are doing is doubling down on their bigotry:

The family has spent much time in prayer since learning of A&E's decision. We want you to know that first and foremost we are a family rooted in our faith in God and our belief that the Bible is His word. While some of Phil's unfiltered comments to the reporter were coarse, his beliefs are grounded in the teachings of the Bible. Phil is a Godly man who follows what the Bible says are the greatest commandments: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart" and "Love your neighbor as yourself." Phil would never incite or encourage hate.We are disappointed that Phil has been placed on hiatus for expressing his faith, which is his constitutionally protected right.

It is, yes, but it's not a constitutional right to have a TV show, and A&E is under no constitutional obligation to keep these bigots on the air.

And if Phil Robertson was just "expressing his faith," then his faith teaches bigotry, which apparently his version of fundamentalist Christianity does. And if really loves his neighbor as himself, why would he then compare homosexuality to bestiality and say that gays and others who supposedly sin "won't inherit the Kingdom of God." It seems Phil likes the hateful parts of the Bible, of which there are many, not to mention of his "faith" generally, and filters the rest of it through an ideology of bigotry and hate. His family can spin it however it wants, but that spin is bullshit.

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Be careful which enemies you make

By Edward Copeland 

In Charles Ferguson's outstanding documentary on the financial meltdown, Inside Job, one of his interview subjects is former N.Y. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who'd been known as the Sheriff of Wall Street for going after shady business practices long before the collapse. Toward the end of Inside Job, it makes the point that none of the financial firms ever faced investigations for their traders writing off high-priced escort services as business expenses, but the Justice Department did pursue Spitzer when it was discovered after he was governor that he used an escort service. The work that Spitzer did and the promise he held as a gifted politician that came crashing down because of his personal weakness are detailed well in another excellent documentary from the prolific filmmaker Alex Gibney, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.

Gibney also made the great 2010 documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money as well as the similarly outstanding Taxi to Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the World. He also served in producing capacities on Ferguson's excellent No End in Sight and the brilliant Who Killed the Electric Car?

While Client 9 definitely makes the case that the political downfall of Spitzer may have been an orchestrated hit by his enemies in the business community and the Republican Party, Gibney doesn't try to downplay Spitzer's faults beyond the weakness that led him to seek high-priced sexual companionship in the first place. The film paints a broader portrait of the man's achievements and his hubris, which include a superiority complex and an approach that makes him come off as a bully, even if what he was trying to do was right.

As with the best documentaries, Client 9 teaches you things that you didn't know. It seems as if so many of the recent outstanding documentaries, no matter what their subject may be, show how spoonfed the U.S. media are, regurgitating "facts" that get handed to them while seldom checking their veracity. As far as I knew (and I imagine this to be the case with most people who heard about Spitzer and the call girl), his preferred escort was "Kristen" aka Ashley DuPre, who then turned herself into another of those freak celebrities, who ended up with a job at Rupert Murdoch's New York Post as a love and sex columnist.

Client 9, through interviews with one of the owners of The Emperors Club escort service, reveals that Spitzer saw "Kristen" maybe once but mainly went out with a woman who went by the name Angelica. Gibney interviewed her, but she didn't want her face or voice revealed, so an actress plays her part and reads the transcript of her interviews. Ironically, she's now a commodities day trader.

Where Spitzer really might have earned the enemies who were determined to stop him was when as attorney general he went after the head of AIG, Hank Greenberg, for the crooked financial games that company was playing, long before that company's collapse became a major cause of the world financial collapse and cost U.S. taxpayers billions in not one, but two bailouts. Greenberg was not at the helm by then, having been removed by his own board for violating company rules, but the methods AIG employed while Greenberg ran it were still going on and led to AIG's implosion.

U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia prevented Spitzer's pursuit of Greenberg prior to that by claiming the Justice Department was building a case against Greenberg, which they never filed. However, this same Garcia intercepted wire transfers Spitzer made and started looking into escort services that led to leaks that got Spitzer's sexual habits revealed. This also came at the time the Bush Administration was firing U.S. attorneys who weren't prosecuting enough Democrats.

Needless to say, when prosecutors go after prostitution rings, they rarely go after the clients, just the owners and the prostitutes. In contrast, around the same time, the D.C. Madam case surfaced and they only pursued the madam there, even though it was revealed that two of her clients were high-profile Republicans, including Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, who was just re-elected. He faced no legal inquiries.

Many believed that Spitzer had a good shot at being the country's first Jewish president. I just wonder if he'd been able to keep after Wall Street as he was doing, whether some of the mess that happened could have been prevented since no regulatory fixes have really been put in place to stop it since. Government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations shall not perish from the United States and we the little people always will be the ones paying the price. Thank goodness we have documentary filmmakers such as Alex Gibney to do the job that journalists have long since abandoned or forgotten how to do.

(Cross-posted at Edward Copeland on Film.)

Republican hypocrisy and the Gulf oil disaster

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It's hilarious -- isn't it? -- that Republican senators like Mitch McConnell and David Vitter, eager as always to score cheap political points even at the cost of exposing their raging hypocrisy, are criticizing President Obama's handling of the Gulf oil spill. Like most in their party, after all, these are conservatives who think that government should exist solely to bomb foreign peoples (and, these days, preferably Muslim ones) into submission, pay out huge sums of corporate welfare, and legislate sexual morality, certainly not to clean up the environment. Indeed, it's precisely the anti-regulatory conservatism of Republicans, and specifically of the Bush administration, which made policy based on what was good for Halliburton and ExxonMobil, not on what was good for the country, let alone the environment, that created the culture of profit-above-all-else irresponsibility that allowed the Gulf oil spill to happen in the first place.

And apparently these Republicans think Obama is Superman -- and that he can do whatever he wants, that his will is supreme, and that he doesn't face Republican obstructionism at every turn.

But what else should we expect? It's just the same old bullshit from the same old bullshitters.

What does David Vitter have against interracial marriage?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Maybe something, maybe nothing. But you'd never know it from his response to that Lousiana justice of the peace's recent refusal to issue a marriage licence to an interracial couple.

Instead of demanding that Keith Bardwell resign or have his licence revoked, as Gov. Bobby Jindal and Sen. Mary Landrieu did, Sen. Vitter, he with the prostitution scandal in his own recent past, first avoided the issue when confronted by blogger Mike Stark, then had his spokesman e-mail this to Greg Sargent:

First, Sen. Vitter thinks that all judges should follow the law as written and not make it up as they go along. Second, it would be amazing for anyone to do a story based on this fringe, left-wing political hack's blog -- he's been handcuffed and detained in the past over his guerrilla tactics.

The first part of that statement implies that Vitter is indeed opposed to what Bardwell did, given that what he did was illegal. But why generalize the issue to apply to "all judges." What do "all judges" have to do with it? The issue is what Bardwell did. And why not mention Bardwell by name? Or, at least, why not address the issue directly? And why go on to attack the person who asked the question? Vitter may not like Stark, but the ad hominem attack is obviously just a distraction here. He wants the issue to be Stark, not interracial marriage or racism, and he wants to focus on the story, and on who started it, not on what actually happened, the facts of the story. But Stark didn't make it up. The story was reported by the Associated Press, hardly a bastion of leftism. Stark simply wanted to know what Vitter thought, but Vitter, in response, just danced around a) what Bardwell did, and b) the issue of interracial marriage.

Which begs the question that is the title of this post, as well as this one: What is Vitter hiding?

David Vitter is... right?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Yes, I suppose he is. Along with Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT), Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) has introduced an amendment that would, according to USA Today, "exclude illegal immigrants from the population count used to allocate congressional seats after the 2010 Census. It also would require the Census to ask people whether they are citizens."

Well, I like the first part, not the second. I generally favour amnesty for illegal immigrants, with a path to eventual citizenship, but it doesn't make sense to include them when it comes to representation in Washington. Permanent residents, yes; illegal immigrants, no.

I do not, however, think that illegal immigrants should be excluded from population counts broadly. It's important to know how many people live in a specific place, after all, not least because the provision of services depends to a significant degree on actual population count. In this respect, illegal immigrants are still residents, like it or not.

Actually, I don't mind the second part either. What's wrong with asking about citizenship? Shouldn't a jurisdiction know how many of its inhabitants are citizens and how many are not? (Only citizens can vote, after all, and only citizens can run for public office. I lived in the U.S. for a long time, with a Green Card, and wasn't able to vote.) I realize that this "would raise more questions in the public mind about how confidential the Census is," according to the head of one Latino organization, but, as long as there would be no requirement for proof of permanent residency, I don't see a problem here, unless the government were to take the list of non-citizens and use it to root out illegal immigrants.

I may be missing something here, but it just doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

Quote of the Day

By Creature

"In contrast to the kind of luvfest David Vitter is used to, this trip was legal, public and no money changed hands...As we all remember, the last time David Vitter made public comments about a 'luvfest' he end[ed] up begging for forgiveness. I am anticipating an apology from him for this web ad in the near future." -- Louisiana Democratic Party spokesman Kevin Franck in response to a fundraising ad by confirmed john (and staunch family man), David Vitter.

Forgive and forget

By Mustang Bobby

When the news broke that Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) and then Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) had confessed to having extramarital affairs (and in the case of Mr. Vitter, engaged the services of a prostitute), the knee-jerk reaction among the conservatives was to respond with "Spitzer-Edwards-Clinton did it too!" even if no one had brought up the former Governor of New York, the former Senator from North Carolina and presidential candidate, or the former president. It was a preemptive attempt to inoculate them from accusations of hypocrisy by distraction. It's a juvenile response and it really doesn't work because a) it's irrelevant, and b) why would conservatives, who make a living bashing liberals or anyone who doesn't toe their line of granular morality, want to compare themselves to people they view as moral degenerates?

There are a couple of reasons I can think of. For one thing, the Republicans have branded themselves as the party of morality and personal responsibility and held up the Democrats as advocates of "divorce, illegitimacy, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality and pornography." And yet the Republicans have supplied us with ample examples of their own "moral degeneracy," as Joe Conason delineates in Salon.com:

The supposed depravity of the Democratic Party has long been a favorite theme of conservatives, dating back to the rise of Newt Gingrich, who distributed an official campaign lexicon to Republican congressional candidates that featured such defining insults as "decadent," "permissive," "sick," "selfish" and, of course, "liberal." Back then the Georgia Republican was on his second marriage and carrying on a clandestine affair with the young Capitol Hill clerk who would eventually become his third wife (after he converted to Catholicism and had his union with wife No. 2 annulled). In 2007, he admitted on James Dobson's radio show that he was cheating on wife No. 2 with future wife No. 3 while he was publicly chastising President Clinton for consorting with Monica Lewinsky. Gingrich has remained a consistent favorite among his pious comrades.

Today, in fact, Gingrich is fully rehabilitated as a party spokesman, still nurturing presidential ambitions. So why should any other Republican fear the wrath of the righteous? The disappointment in Sanford and Ensign among the devout must be particularly keen, since they have so rigorously aligned themselves with the most fervent elements of the religious right.

For more than a decade, Ensign lent his name to Promise Keepers, the all-male Christian prayer movement run by a former Colorado football coach, whose mass rallies highlighted men's integrity, purity and uncompromising domination of family life. Both he and Sanford have worked closely with the Family, a secretive Christian fellowship on Capitol Hill that maintains a brick townhouse where Ensign and other members of Congress have resided. Over the years both men have won the highest marks from the Family Research Council, the Christian Coalition and the American Family Association -- and until the other day, Sanford was featured as an invited speaker at the Family Research Council's upcoming Values Voters Summit 2009. (As Pam Spaulding and Think Progress noted, however, the FRC removed his photo from the summit Web site immediately following his confessional press conference.)

Certainly there is considerable pressure for Sanford to resign in South Carolina, and perhaps he will surrender. But he might well ask whether that is fair when Ensign is hanging on and Vitter appears to be in the clear. For a while, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins had threatened to challenge Vitter in the Republican primary next year, but last March he announced that he won't run after all -- and instead endorsed Vitter for reelection. Amazingly, Perkins then hosted a radio broadcast with Vitter as his guest, where they tut-tutted over the alleged ethical problems of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Nobody had the poor taste to mention the infamous black books in which Vitter's friendly madams in Washington and New Orleans had inscribed his name and phone number.

That brings up another element in the equation. The conservatives are remarkably forgiving of their own transgressors. Mr. Vitter, Mr. Ensign, and Mr. Sanford still have their jobs, and the idea of quitting -- at least voluntarily -- doesn't get much traction with them or with their party. (The one exception was Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), who, when caught e-mailing sexually explicit messages to teenage boys, was out of a job and out of town before sundown. The difference, of course, was that he is gay. Gov. Mark Sanford's e-mails to his mistress are the stuff of bad romance novels, but he still has a job. There are even double standards in incriminating evidence.) Democrats are not so lenient. Mr. Spitzer resigned his office (as did Gov. Jim McGreevy (D-NJ) when he came out of the closet and admitted to an affair with his driver) and Mr. Edwards will never hold political office again.

Why is that? You could probably chalk the Republicans' ability to forgive and forget up to their Christian charity, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that they're just big old hypocrites who hold everyone else up to a higher standard than they are willing to hold themselves up to. (Either that or if they ran out everyone in the party who was divorced or had a fling, there would be even fewer of them than there are now.) And you can also assume that they will find someone else to blame for their own failings; back when Newt Gingrich was going through his divorce, his allies blamed it on Bill Clinton's culture of permissiveness, and now Rush Limbaugh is blaming Mr. Sanford's fling on Barack Obama and the struggle he had with the South Carolina state legislature accepting federal stimulus funds (bringing a whole other meaning to the term "stimulus package," I guess). So much for the "personal responsibility" party.

Moral failings and human frailties are oblivious to party allegiance. We all have them. So trying to exploit someone else's while holding yourself up as the paragon of virtue is destined for epic failure. That's harder to forgive and forget.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

When in doubt, vote for the porn star

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It looks like David "Family Values" Vitter will not go unchallenged as he seeks re-election to the Senate from Louisiana in 2010.

On his own Republican side, he may face no less a potentially serious threat than Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, a major figure on the theocratic right.

And -- keep your fingers crossed -- he may also face porn star Stormy Daniels:

The Draft Stormy Web site says that "2010 presents the Pelican State with the opportunity to start with a clean slate -- to elect a representative that we can be proud of, who will work tirelessly, and who will challenge the status quo. We at the Draft Stormy campaign feel that Baton Rouge native Stormy Daniels is best suited to fulfill these duties."

*****

Daniels, 29, isn't affiliated with a party but is embracing the idea of a possible candidacy.

She said she's planning a "listening tour" around Louisiana to talk about a range of matters, including the economy -- which along with women in business and protection of children are the three issues listed on her Web site. When told Vitter can be a tough opponent, she said she's "always up for a good fight."

"I think anyone that knows me... is more than aware of that," Daniels said. "Politics can't be any dirtier of a job than the one I am already in."

Great line -- I'm just not sure how true it is.

Still, political inexperience aside, Daniels is far more honourable than Vitter, who, you remember, got caught up in the "D.C. Madam" scandal, his phone number showing up in Deborah Jeane Palfrey's escort service's records -- and all he admitted to was "a very serious sin in my past." Uh-huh. Sure. (I won't judge his morality -- what he does is his business, and his family's -- but I will judge his hypocrisy, which is outrageous even by the outrageous standards of Republicans.

But back to Daniels... She won the 2007 Penthouse Gold G-String Award (adult site). That's good enough for me.

Voters of Louisiana -- show her your support.

(For more on Daniels, see her Wikipedia page, as well as her official website (adult site). And check out Draft Stormy, which includes clips of some of her media appearances.)

Clinton confirmed, Holder held back

By Michael J.W. Stickings

In case you missed it, Hillary Clinton was confirmed by the Senate, 94-2, and sworn in as the new secretary of state this evening.

One of her biggest boosters was John McCain. The two who voted against her? -- David Vitter and Jim DeMint, two of the more loathsome Republicans in that august body.

Meanwhile, with Specter and the Republicans looking to make a show of it all, a committee vote on AG nominee Eric Holder won't take place until next week at the earliest. (He'll be confirmed eventually.)