Pico's Wee-Wee List 2

There's something else we've never experienced before: An African American presidential candidate being heavily criticized in a hard-fighting campaign. (We've been criticizing Hillary and Bill relentlessly for 18 years, in and out of campaigns. Not new.) And that means, to me, that all of us are going to have to let up on the sensitivities if we're going to get through this without reacting to every comment as if it is racist.

What Bill said--I heard him--was that this whole thing, meaning Obama's anti-war position, is a fairytale. He didn't say Obama's campaign is a fairytale. Big difference. Not every putdown is race-based or an allusion to something race-based. If Sharpton implied something else, he's on Pico's wee-wee list.

And this, snipped from Daily Dish: "If you have a social need, you're with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you're young and you have no social needs, then he's cool." - a "Clinton adviser" to Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland.

If the implication is that this is a racist comment, Pico pisses on Sullivan. We're grown up enough to look at class and race in one glance, aren't we? Isn't this pretty much what African America was saying by asking if Obama is Black enough? What's the problem? White Americans are going to be critiquing this candidate, and that's as it should be. What sucks is when any American attacks any candidate using race-baiting and woman-baiting and queer-baiting and immigrant-baiting and so on.

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Pico is fed up with Chris Matthews' running sexist sabotage of Hillary Clinton. Whizzzzzzz.

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I hear Marion Jones was sentenced to six months today for lying about having used steroids. I want to see Mark McGuire similarly sentenced. I'm not holding my breath.
Jones is the Martha Stewart of athletics. It would be so much more valuable for us all if she were sent out on a national speaking tour to highschools, to talk about steroids, personal character, clean competition, all that. I saw her press conference when she confessed. I've seldom been so impressed by someone sucking it up and taking responsibility. IMHO, she outclasses every compromised athlete in all of sports. Pico wees on the head of this judge.

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Sometimes I think that Andrew Sullivan believes he was elevated, on a shell, fully formed, from the sea. He writes:

That's a helpful distinction. Of course, I've long sided with Camille Paglia on this question. I belong to a minority, but I've always insisted on playing by the same rules as straights. I want no special privilege and no government discrimination either. My libertarian-conservative approach to gay politics was laid out in Virtually Normal. It's one reason I don't fit in with the Human Rights Campaign people either. I'm happy to live my life, and let others live theirs'. I don't want or need the government to love me, make me feel better or tell me how to live. My deep difference with Hillary Clinton is precisely this. In my view, it takes an individual. And that's not a function of misogyny. It's a function of believing in liberty.

No if's this time: Sullivan gets to feel the wrath of Pico. Because, duh, it's a function of unexamined privilege. Any notion that he might ever play by the same rules as straights is pure fantasy because straights won't let him, or else there'd be no reason for straights to differentiate him as they do, and, not coincidentally, no way for him to capitalize on his Otherness. Thus, ironically, it's also a function of unexamined oppression. If he weren't Queer, and English, he wouldn't be collectible and if he weren't collectible, he wouldn't have the platform he has. There are thousands of straight boys as talented, and English, and attractive, as he.

Identifying with the Oppressor

How can someone as intelligent and well informed as Andrew Sullivan be so thick?

The context is the allegedly politically expedient decision of Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi to drop transgender people from ENDA, the Employment Nondiscrimination Act. Defending his support of that expediency, Sullivan writes:

If we are defined by those who hate us, LGBT makes some sense, although it could also include straight women who don't conform to traditional roles, straight men in the same position, and so on, which would mean LGBTSFSMQ or something. My point is that the respective experiences of being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender are very distinct and different. And I do not define myself primarily by shared victimhood. Indeed, as many angry LGBTQWhatever readers have insisted, I am not a victim. I am a privileged, white sexist patriarchal rich HIV-positive-with-meds guy. So why, then, pray, am I still regarded (in your acronym at least) as a part of your "community"?

You're a gay man, Andrew, and you make a profession of it. To say that you don't primarily identify by "shared victimhood" is disingenuous. You're a victim of orchestrated hatred, contempt, and violence whether you've experienced them or not. But I don't have to scroll far among your posts to find your complaints about your unrecognized marriage, so I'd suggest that you drop the contempt expressed in "victimhood" and own your membership among those who have been severely victimized by homo-hatred and sexism.

I take your point that internalizing victimization can be debilitating, can ultimately magnify the consequences of bigotry when it isn't healthily processed. That isn't always or necessarily the case, however. As I found out when I came out in 1973, owning victimization is also a necessary first step to empowerment. Properly processed it empowers us by helping us to put responsibility where it belongs. It gives us the insight, impetus, and courage to resist and effect great change. That's certainly what the Gay and Lesbian Left has done since Stonewall, your contempt for us notwithstanding.

Bruno Bettelheim, Dachau and Buchenwald survivor and famed child psychologist, named the malady you appear to manifest: Identification with the oppressor. It's a classic if flawed survival adaptation. But straight men are not likely to let you into their club as long as membership is predicated on faithfully playing by the rules of fixed gender roles.

What you don't seem to grasp is that this homo-hatred is a war of sorts, so far an unaccomplished genocide, but on the part of the Right, a wished-for genocide nonetheless--sometimes literal, sometimes psychic. Whether you were shot or not, others in this war have been. If you are one of us, then like it or not, either you share our victimization in solidarity and honor the price we've paid collectively or you trivialize it as "victimhood," dishonor us, and commit a kind of treason. There are consequences for you, which Bettelheim pointed out. There's no middle ground here.

To your second contention, that straight men and women who don't conform to gender role assignments also could claim membership in our group, why, yes, of course. What links us all, transgendered folk, and gays and lesbians, and nonconforming straight men and women, is the phenomenon of sexism: that is, the imposition onto maleness and femaleness of fixed, specific, and hierarchical gender roles. How you come so close to seeing this, but completely miss it, is a mystery. To the extent that a "mannish" straight woman and a "feminine" straight man are ridiculed and taunted, they are united with us as gender-role outlaws. The consequences--or experiences, as you put it--differ by degree but not by kind.

But you risk even your tenuous acceptance by straight, rich, white men of power, and your conservative ideology, if you acknowledge this.

Sullivan Drops in from Planet Make-Believe

From The Daily Dish, which rarely fails to punch my buttons, this fit of political prissiness:

Fading memory has helped some to forget about the Clintons, their political machine and their ruthlessness. A rising black politician in the Democratic party is a threat to them and their power over blacks. So they are doing what they can to crush him, and punish any Democrat who associates with him. As Hillary Clinton's poll numbers rise, her leverage increases. As does the fear of those Democrats who know what follows if they cross the power-couple from Hot Springs. I don't know what prompted Lewis to back Clinton; he marched between Obama and Clinton in Selma, but worshipped with Obama afterwards as you can see above. But I very much doubt that Bill did not have a word with him. Again: the way in which Hillary uses her marriage to advance her own power is striking. No real feminist would do this; only someone who postures as a feminist while using her husband as a tool.

Peculiar of Sullivan to berate the Clintons for acting like successful presidential politicians. Does he think the Bushes, or the Reagans, or the Nixons didn't or don't have a "machine," or that they don't "have a word with" people who might be inclined to differ with them? Oh puhleeze. Berate the Clintons for something no other successful politician does, not for exhibiting the sine qua non of the species.

And, could it be just that Lewis hadn't quite made up his mind in Selma? Could it be that he wanted to see where the odds would fall before needlessly pissing off one or the other candidate? That's what I would have done in his shoes. Furthermore, one might argue that Clinton deserves the post more than Obama, having far stronger credentials, and that Lewis reckons accordingly, figuring that Obama will live to run another day.

But noooooooooo. In classic boythink, Sullivan, unable to see Hillary as anything other than an appendage of Bill, projects his own fallacy onto her, and then presumes to give Hillary feminist lessons. Like, as if!

No feminist politician I know would fail to make use of her husband's political capital in the game of politics. That would be stupid, and I don't know any stupid feminists. Again, Hillary is a politician. Don't berate her for behaving accordingly. And try not to be jealous that she's married to the greatest politician of our time.

Andrew is visiting from Planet Make-Believe this week.

Sullivan: "We Have War Criminals in the White House"

When Andrew Sullivan calls Bush a "war criminal," something significant has happened.

Sullivan is a conservative. Sullivan is highly educated, well informed, and adept at rubbing his brain cells together. Sullivan is well connected, and he is not generally given to hyperbole. He is one of a handful of people on the Right whom I respect. He has The Atlantic as just one of his platforms, and if he weren't also out, gay, and gaily married, he'd be really influential.

Sullivan concludes a short piece on today's New York Times revelations about yet another "hide, distort, and lie" Bush episode thus:

A couple of things need to be stressed, because I've learned the hard way that intelligent people simply refuse to absorb what is staring them in the face, when what is staring them in the face is so staggering:

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics.

There is no doubt - no doubt at all - that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes. We know this because the law is very clear when you don't have war criminals like AEI's John Yoo rewriting it to give one man unchecked power. We know this because the very same techniques - hypothermia, long-time standing, beating - and even the very same term "enhanced interrogation techniques" - "verschaerfte Vernehmung" in the original German - were once prosecuted by American forces as war crimes. The perpetrators were the Gestapo. The penalty was death. You can verify the history here.

We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?

A couple of suggestions.

One of most shameful, paralyzing dissemblings of late is the spin that only Democrats occupy Congress. They could do much more than they're doing, but the rest of the truth is that Republicans in Congress that protect, enable, and permit this President to remain in power.

It is time for Republicans who love the constitutional promise of America to step up to impeachment, to show statesmanlike leadership instead of craven capitulation to a rogue Republican junta.

It is similarly time for conservatives, moderates, liberals, and progressives to put relentless pressure on all our senators and representatives, Democrat and Republican, to impeach and remove both Bush and Cheney from office.

What have we to lose? If we fail, the blueprint that Naomi Klein has laid out for us in The Shock Doctrine may well be our fate. Yes, I'm serious. Too many sinister correspondences have accumulated between the people and ideas that plunged Chile's 160-year old stable democracy into a bloody coup d'etat and the people and ideas that rule us today for a responsible citizen to ignore them. It happened there and it can happen here. If we continue to be drowsy sheep, it will.

Here's what I see: There are the unitary president's boggling power grabs: He has put himself beyond the reach of ordinary law and given himself and his men extraordinary, unconstitutional powers. There are his extensive and largely secret domestic spying networks.

There are the administration's systematic attempts to privatize education, intelligence, warmaking, and Social Security. There is its successful de-funding of the federal treasury and its creation of a crippling $10 Trillion debt in order to enrich his fellow oil, construction, mercenary, and weapons princes.

There are his relentless attacks on what shreds of social safety nets remain.

There are his "privatization laboratories" in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast and his demonstrated contempt for human life in the service of enabling the shocks that permit those privatization wealth transfers.

There is the unbelievable travesty of a voluntary war for profit--another privatization shock lab in which oil giants get Iraq's oil, Iraqs get impoverished, demoralized,and bought up, Bush and his buddies get even richer, and hundreds of thousands are killed, maimed, and/or displaced.

There is now also legal torture and indeterminate detention of US citizens on US soil without court oversight or, apparently, even court reach.

Unfathomably, with all the resources that have gone to das Heimat Sicherheit (the Nazi name for the Department of Homeland Security), every day comes another report that nothing, really, has been done to make us more secure. It's beginning to look a lot like a bait and switch deal to me.

Finally, just in case that hasn't gotten your attention; there's the ENDGAME. This from Residentcynic on Daily Kos:

ENDGAME is the policy executed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its sub-agencies, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Office of Detention and Removal (DRO), that is part of a sweeping 10-year plan (2002-2012) to: 1) apprehend, 2) incarcerate (detain), 3) "process"—(investigate and question), and 4) remove all removable aliens or potential terrorists. The order of apprehension to removal is literal, as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under DHS shifted the traditionally two-pronged approach of 1)investigation, 2)detention-removal to a one-pronged approach in 2000: detention-first and "process" the person while incarcerated. (p. 2-7 of ENDGAME document)

Bush already has $400 million to work with, and, with his crony Halliburton, is in process of creating 40,000 detention beds in this country, for "aliens and potential terrorists." What exactly is a "potential terrorist" when only The Decider gets to decide? If he doesn't lie the way the election turns out, what's to stop him from declaring martial law and using one of his mercenary armies to enforce it? Or maybe the bombing of Iran will be the shock that precipitates the fall of the United States at the hands of its own president.

Andrew, what do you make of this? The same "free market/privateers" and Neo-Cons who pulled off Chile and Argentina and Indonesia are either in our Administration or allied NGOs or think-tanks as we speak, or just were, or are its gurus (Kissinger, Strauss, Friedman) or disciples. I mean Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Perle, Norquist, Moore, et al.) It looks very like they have everything they need to pull it off, and are devoted to the idea that they should.

Yes, "our refusal to absorb what is staring us in the face is staggering." But really, how many more bread crumbs do we need?

I'm doing my bit where I am. Call on your people to do theirs. Now.

[Inserted October 7: Received this update from Residentcynic, author of the important research on ENDGAME referenced above. This update is also available in the comments addressing this post:

"Just wanted to alert you to a couple of changes/corrections to the diary I posted at dKos.

"First, the 'potential terrorist' cite is actually on p. 2-11 of the document, and not in the Executive summary.

Second, I accidentally noted that KBR had a contract with DHS in 2000, 2004, and 2006. DHS was not an official agency until 2002, thus, the contract was between KBR and what was formerly the INS and now is ICE/DHS. Link can be found at:

Thanks for spreading the word, I really think this is important and should not be shrugged off."]

Musing on Andrew Sullivan's Marriage

There are times when I love Andrew Sullivan (The Daily Dish), despite our vast political and theological differences. For me, he’s at his best when he reflects on faith and theology, and when he applies his erudition to fillet the "neocons" and those he rightly calls “Christianists”—a term he coined, analogous to the terms “Islamists,” “Maoists,” “Zionists.” It connotes virulent political extremism, as it is meant to do, which is why Christianists take such heated exception to it. (FYI: A “Christianist” is--in my terms--a rightwing political agent/ideologue who strews biblicisms before him like desiccated blossoms and finds more of the Loving Carpenter in Leviticus and Deuteronomy than in the verses ascribed to Jesus himself. It’s a mystery.)

I intend to write more about Sullivan from time to time, but for now, I’ll say what I say about any other out gay or lesbian conservative. If the essence of conservatism is standing for traditional social and political values and advocating deliberate (glacial) change, essentially he is--they are--a glaring rebuke to it.

In his essence he contradicts its essence. We don’t come out gay or lesbian, or get married as gays or lesbians, especially having been traditional Christians since childhood, without drawing deeply on our own inner strengths and essential beliefs.

These, ipso facto, are not conservative. They are profoundly liberal. That is, they and the resulting actions profounding contractict both prevailing social mores and the conservative dictum regarding the pace of decorous, prudent change. Further, they reveal profound belief in the individual’s inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and in our individual responsibility to act, alone and collectively, to remove any hostile feet from our necks. Despite how conservatives like to appropriate these values unto themselves, and denigrate liberals who exhibit them, these liberal values are enshrined in our Constitution. That anyone so boldly espousing them can identify as "conservative" is a mystery.

Nevertheness, despite our differences, I wish to Andrew and his love what I wish to those of us who married at the San Francisco City Hall in February, 2004 -- I'm thinking now of course of CJ and me, and especially of Keith and Andreas, for reasons they'll understand: the happiest of weddings and honeymoons, a life of unfolding wonder, generosity, courage, and kindness, and lasting joy in each other.

And a safe return home and to the blogosphere.