Friday night in Los Angeles, smoke in the air still – the mountains that separate Southern California from the rest of America are still burning and the basin was masked by a vague haze all day, but better than the previous day’s dun twilight from dawn to dusk. And in the far room Bill Maher is on the early east-coast HBO feed, ending his weekly show with his “New Rules” segment. He can be tiresome and smug, but when he gets to the last New Rule, where he gets on his high horse, he has his moments. And on Friday, October 26, his concluding New Rule was pretty good –
This Halloween, every time you see something that’s supposed to scare you, like a skeleton or a severed head or the ingredients in diet pudding … take a moment and think about fear: What are you afraid of; what should you be afraid of. What’s really scary this Halloween is that the same group of idea-free losers who won the last presidential election could win the next one by making us afraid of the wrong things. Which is why this year for Halloween, I’m going as something truly horrifying: a melting polar ice cap.
He’s talking about global warming? CNN’s Glenn Beck says it doesn’t exist (and maybe when CNN, desperate for better ratings, makes Beck head of all their news operations, will make that their official position). Well, Beck also said that the California fire victims are the kind of people who “hate America” – so we all deserved it or something. Is CNN trying to outfox Fox news? Who knows?
Bill Maher, on the other hand, is concerned with risk and response –
This week - as every week - all the Republican candidates talked about was who was toughest in the war on terror. While the country’s most populous state literally burned. The Democrats, as usual, said nothing, because they didn’t want to offend fire.
He smells fake problems here, and pandering, and more than a bit of bullshit –
The Republicans, including the scaremonger in chief, sell themselves as protectors of our safety. But since they’re all, except for McCain, armchair warriors, they’re only comfortable protecting us from fears they made up. Like the way Iran is itching for a war with the United States now. Ahmadinejad is pure evil! Terror has a new name, and it’s nearly unpronounceable.
At the Republican debate this week, Mike Huckabee said, “Islamofascism is the greatest threat we ever faced.” Really? More than the Nazis? And the Russians? And the Redcoats? In his latest ad, Mitt Romney warns eerily that Muslim jihadists want to establish an Islamic caliphate covering the whole world, including America.
And I thought the people scared of gays and Mexicans were paranoid. Islamic terrorists taking over America? They can barely get across the monkey bars. Our defense budget is 600 billion a year, they’re using guns they took off a dead Soviet in 1981 - I think we can hold Charleston.
We’re the most powerful nation on earth with the largest economy and the best military, and we’re made to act the fool by a few thousand cave dwellers who still put out their video on VHS.
Is he allowed to say that? You remember what happened before -
ABC decided not to renew Maher’s contract for Politically Incorrect in 2002 after he made a controversial on-air remark on September 17, 2001, in which he agreed with guest conservative political commentator Dinesh D’Souza that the 9/11 terrorists were not cowards, and then went on to say, “We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”
In the context of the sensitive aftermath of the attacks, such a remark was deemed too controversial for some financial supporters. Although some pundits, including conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, supported Maher in pointing out the distinction between physical and moral cowardice, companies including FedEx and Sears Roebuck pulled their advertisements from the show, costing the show more than it returned. Ari Fleischer, who was the White House Press Secretary at the time, responded to a reporter’s question about Maher’s comments by saying: “…they’re reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that…”
The show was subsequently cancelled on June 16, 2002, although the Baltimore-based Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBG) had dropped the show from its ABC-affiliated stations months before that.
And now he’s saying we’re scared of our own shadows, and worried about the wrong things –
And that’s because over the last seven years, because of the incompetence that goes by the name George Bush, we’ve become the most insecure, paranoid superpower ever. We don’t think we can get anything right anymore. We can’t take care of our own citizens after a hurricane, or plan for our wars, or maintain our infrastructure, and our celebrity rehab facilities obviously aren’t working at all.
Some people looked at this fire and saw not a dangerous phenomenon brought on by man’s activities and requiring a scientific solution, but a cleansing catharsis sent by God to punish liberals. Even though it mostly burned Orange County.
Well, you have to live out here to get that last joke. Orange Country is pretty creepy – even when it’s not burning. There may be 0.34 registered Democrats in the whole county and a ratio of flag pins to lapels of nearly 1:1 – or so it seems. Think large SUV’s to the horizon, each with a yellow “Support the Troops” magnet on the back door and someone really angry at the wheel, often a well-armed soccer mom. These are Glenn Beck’s people. California is more than Hollywood and Berkeley – heck, we gave the world Nixon, then Reagan. If the fires were a cleansing catharsis sent by God to punish liberals why didn’t Teddy Kennedy’s Massachusetts burn? And too, why are the Red Sox, Patriots and Boston College winning everything in site? What’s up with God? He likes irony?
In any event, now Maher is telling us, that as a species, we’re failing at what he calls Survival Number One. That one’s easy, unless you work at CNN. You prioritize the threats –
Environmental catastrophe will visit all of us in the coming decades, in one way or another, and when it does I hope people like … oh, I don’t know, Lou Dobbs, says to himself, “Hmmm, maybe if I was going to spend my whole career obsessing about one issue - it should have been global warming. The skin just fell off my face and it turns out that really wasn’t the fault of a Mexican.”
And there are thing we can do. See Katharine Mieszkowski on the burning question – “The California inferno has ignited the long-smoldering debate over whether we have brought Mother Nature’s revenge upon ourselves.”
Actually, the item is about burning – controlled burns, natural cycles of fire – and about topography and local botany related to that. We have not been being very attentive to such matters, and things will get worse –
Are extreme weather conditions becoming more frequent? That’s the question Southern Californians must face in decades to come. Global warming, which will increase hot, dry conditions, scientists say, will likely make fire seasons longer in the coming years. And with California’s population projected to grow to 60 million by 2050, nearly 22 million more than today, there are likely to be more people living in the urban-wilderness interface. “Fire is going to be less and less likely to play its natural role … and more and more homes are going to be at risk of burning.”
And Ron Brownstein, looking at those in power and their prospects, sees the Republicans struggling with what is important, to remain in power –
On problems ranging from health care to energy, they have retreated to a reflexive denigration of government and praise of unfettered markets aimed squarely at hard-core conservatives. Tellingly, the GOP hopefuls have broken with Bush primarily on the policies - comprehensive immigration reform and the Medicare drug benefit - that he consciously formulated to expand the party base. “It is a tired party and an uncertain party, and it is trying to reach back to … the tried and true,” frets Peter Wehner, the former Bush White House director of strategic initiatives who is now at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center.
After being routed in 2006, many Republican leaders argued that the party lost voters in the middle because it had not been conservative enough, particularly on spending. That’s the view the presidential candidates are now reflecting. Giuliani, even with his recent concessions to party conventions on such issues as taxes and guns, pushed against that consensus by stressing national unity and inclusion in his riveting speech to the social conservatives last weekend. But he is a (qualified) exception in a party that seems committed to betting 2008 on the high-risk proposition that the way to recapture the center is to turn further to the right.
Kevin Drum offers this further analysis –
Every two years the losing party has this exact same conversation: (a) move to the center to appeal more to swing voters, or (b) move left (right) in order to stay true to the party’s liberal (conservative) heritage? My sense is that (b) is almost always the choice after the first loss or two, after which (a) finally wins out.
This year, though, we’re in a historically odd position. The Republican Party is still in stage (b), but to a smaller extent, the Democrats are back there too. The Democratic Party spent so long in stage (a) during the 90s, moving aggressively to the center after years in the wilderness, and the GOP moved so far to the right under Gingrich and Bush, that Democrats have the luxury of being able to move modestly to the left and yet still be moving relatively closer to the center than the Republican Party. On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s like the GOP is moving right from 8 to 9 while the Democratic Party is moving left from 4 to 3.5. The lunacy of the conservative base is providing a huge amount of cover for liberals to make some modest progress this year.
Said lunacy, of course, is best demonstrated by the fact that Brownstein - correctly - identifies Rudy Giuliani as the overall most moderate major candidate in the Republican field. Rudy Giuliani!
And who is minding the store? See this video – the ice cover at the North Pole, over time, going away fast. Republican core issues – no gay marriage, no woman choosing what’s wrong, and new wars with Iran then Syria, and maybe our old ally Turkey if it invades Iraq – seem misplaced. There are even bigger issues.
See this – the most popular commentator on television, has a new crusade. Bill O’Reilly tells the nation that “tolerance” of gays bothers him. Tolerance is what ruined this country and Harry Potter author is promoting “parity for homosexuals with heterosexuals.” That’s tolerance, and that’s wrong. ThinkProgress noted that on the October 23 edition of his Fox News show, Bill O’Reilly accused Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling of being a “provocateur” for “the gay agenda” of “indoctrination” after she “outed” one of her main characters, Dumbledore. O’Reilly continued his broadside against Rowling on his show the next night, saying the real problem is that she is teaching “tolerance” and “parity for homosexuals with heterosexuals” (Media Matters has the video).
California burns, the pole melt, and we get the usual – “Look! Homosexuals!” and “Look, Mexicans!” and “Look! Evil strange men in caves making videotapes!”
We could prioritize our threats. We won’t. We like being scared, and not just on Halloween.
