Where are all the conservative bumper stickers???

Recently I've seen a lot of bumper stickers on cars espousing a variety of political views. Interestingly (at least where I live) these stickers almost exclusively portray "liberal" sentiments or values. From "War is not the answer" to "Impeach Bush," liberals have cornered the market on bumper self-expression.


I started to imagine examples of possible "conservative" bumper stickers, and as I did so, I started to understand why you don't see very many. Almost every conservative slogan or talking point I could conceive was either ridiculous or just downright offensive when I imagined it prominently displayed on one's vehicle. Perhaps "Pro Life" is fairly innocuous, probably only offensive to abortion doctors and victims of a rape-induced pregnancy. And conservatives don't own the American flag, so only bumper stickers that are belligerently patriotic could be considered to be "conservative."


With that in mind, I thought I would utilize some free time at work - along with the Microsoft Paint program pre-installed on my PC - to provide some examples some of the more ridiculous and inconsistent conservative values:

The Freedom-hating Muslim: A Reality Check

I have dedicated many of these pages to the political polling data of Americans. However, in a time when our leaders are telling us that the greatest threat our country has ever faced comes from the Arab world, wouldn't it be interesting to examine what Arabs think?


In fact, this week the 2008 Annual Arab Public Opinion Poll was published, containing some very telling data. The survey (which interviewed subjects in six different Arab countries) found that 83% of the Arab public views the United States unfavorably. That finding alone is not particularly surprising. However, the study also found that Arabs' attitudes of the United States are overwhelmingly influenced by U.S. foreign policy as opposed to "American values."

Only 12% of Arabs indicated that their attitudes towards the U.S. were determined by American values. This is an overwhelmingly low percentage when you consider people often use "religion" and "values" interchangeably, and compared to the predominantly Muslim Arab world, Muslims in the U.S. make up a mere 0.6% of the population. For years we have been told that the 9/11 attacks and "The Great Satan" rhetoric coming from the Arab world was a direct assault on American values. However, as polling data (and, well, common sense) suggest, perhaps the best way to determine the attitudes of people in the Middle East is to actually ask them.

Of course, these data allow us to view the erroneous statements and beliefs of prominent Republicans in a whole new light.

George W. Bush

Perhaps the most famous example of this fallacy was the post-9/11 "analysis" of President Bush: "America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world....They hate our freedoms," Bush proposed. "Our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."

As ridiculous as the notion of someone hating freedom may sound, most Americans bought into this idea at the time.

Rev. Jerry Falwell

When he wasn't busy outing children's TV characters, the reverend chimed in with his own analysis of the 9/11 attacks:

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'

While Falwell later apologized for the remarks, placing the blame for the death of 3,000 innocent civilians squarely at the feet of the American Left hardly seems like a slip of the tongue.

Rudy Giuliani vs. Ron Paul

In a May 2007 Republican debate, Ron Paul asserted that the United States was attacked on 9/11 in part as blowback from of an interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East. Giuliani took exception, calling Paul's hypothesis "absurd." The pro-war Fox News audience erupted in applause, as it appeared Giuliani had easily bested the unpatriotic Paul. Paul didn't back down, however, responding with what rational-thinking Americans know to be the truth:

If we think we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred then we have a problem. They don't come here to attack us cause we're rich and we're free. They attack us cause we're over there. I mean, what would we think if other foreign countries were doing that to us?

As it turns out, Ron Paul was right. While Giuliani got the applause, Paul's campaign has raised more money and won more delegates than Giuliani's, and Paul is still technically in the race, compared to Giuliani, who dropped out three months ago.

John McCain

Certainly it is still very possible for a Republican to run a successful campaign while still making this error. In fact, John McCain's error is no slip of the tongue either - it's in writing on his official campaign website, http://www.johnmccain.com/. McCain states that:

The [9/11] tragedy highlighted a failure of national policy to respond to the development of a global terror network hostile to the American people and our values.

Why have these politicians repeatedly made this specious error in spite of it's utter implausibility? Simple. Because it is easier to comprehend than decades of American meddling in the Middle East, supporting a coup in Iran, defending Israel, bombing Lybia, establishing bases in Saudi Arabia, as well as this latest Iraq debacle. And it's easier on the conscience for Americans to tell themselves, "Oh, terrorists are just crazy" or "They just despise our values" rather than accept that their own country's reckless imperial foreign policy decisions have created dangerous enemies abroad.

Let's just examine exactly how idiotic is the notion of the Freedom-Hating Terrorist. Take, for example, an Arab prisoner at Guantanamo. I would seriously doubt he would prefer captivity to freedom, let alone be willing to kill for his right to remain imprisoned. That is absurd. I'm also fairly certain he would be very pleased to be afforded the right of habeus corpus (which we Americans frequently enjoy). The right to practice religion freely and the opportunity to prosper economically are also likely to appeal to both Americans and Arabs alike.

Even if you could assume that all of these values didn't appeal to the majority of the Arab world, lack of appeal simply isn't enough to justify horrific terrorist acts perpetrated against the West. If people are willing to kill or be killed, it almost always accompanies the promise of reward or heroism. It's hard to see how killing an innocent person because you don't like their values is particularly rewarding or heroic. Yes, I know about the 72 virgins, or whatever the number is. But you can't conflate religious fundamentalism with terrorism. The two do not necessarily go hand in hand. The religious aspect and the promise of martyrdom makes committing suicide attacks easier for the attackers to go through with, but it is not the motivating factor behind the attack. If it were, wouldn't radical Islamic terrorism be raining down on all of the non-Muslim world? Instead, nearly every Islamic terrorist attack on record - from Munich, to Pan-Am 103, to the London and Madrid subway bombings and the Iraqi insurgency - was motivated not by religious fanaticism, but by what the attackers saw as retaliation for unjustified acts committed against them.

The motives behind the 9/11 attacks are no different. The 9/11 Commission Report found that even Osama bin Laden, as ideological as any Muslim, claimed the 9/11 attack was not motivated by disdain for American values, but in retaliation for American foreign policy. In a 2004 video, bin Laden traced the genesis of the attacks as far back as the 1982 U.S.-led attack on Lebanon. And rather than being an enemy of freedom, bin Laden asserted that the attacks were meant to "restore freedom to our nation." Certainly the 9/11 attack was a reprehensible act for which no justification exists, but that doesn't mean those responsible were acting out of sheer lunacy. Making up fables like "They hate our freedoms" is not only untrue, but dismissing the real motivations behind the attack only serves to make another attack more likely.

We know that the idea that "they hate our freedoms" is preposterous, so why do people still believe it to be true? To better understand the post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy debacle, we need to examine a little social psychology. The incorrect belief that Arabs hate American values stems from a broader social phenomenon known as the Fundamental Attribution Error. Psychologists define the error as "the tendency to overestimate the internal and underestimate the external factors when explaining the behaviors of others." In other words, people (normal people, for this is not a cognitive disorder) tend to believe the behavior of others is more a function of the type of person they are rather than what situations may have contributed to the behavior. Most of us have been in the situation where someone driving in the car in front of us has made a questionable driving maneuver, after which we thought (or said aloud) "What a dumb asshole!" Chances are the driver is neither dumb nor an asshole, but was rather influenced by children in the car, a phone call, another driver, stress, or some other external factor or factors.

So as it relates to the analysis of terrorist acts, United States politicians and pundits have over-emphasized the personality-based explanation (these guys are crazy freedom-haters) and under-emphasized the external factors (U.S. intervention in the Middle East). In fact, as Patrick Rael of the Bowdoin Orient illustrates, Osama bin Laden and others have not only claimed to be acting in retaliation for U.S. military intervention, but have also stressed that they are themselves "freedom fighters." Thus any idea that Muslim terrorists "hate freedom" is preposterous because they feel that is the very goal for which they strive. More than just an exercise in relativism, the inability of both the United States and Muslim extremists to view each other with objectivity has had disastrous consequences.

Profiles in Right-Wing Lunacy: Alphonso Jackson

Last week, Alphonso Jackson, then Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) spent his last day in office. Forced to resign amid numerous scandals of impropriety, the public is now beginning to see the dirty underbelly of Jackson's tenure at HUD, a tenure marred by politicization, corruption and disturbing egomania.




Jackson, a longtime buddy of George W. Bush, was appointed HUD Secretary in 2004. In a break from the Bush crony tradition, Jackson had actually worked in the public housing arena prior to coming to HUD. Jackson, however, soon established himself as a true Bush loyalist, and attempted to run his department with a political bent. As early as 2006, Jackson was accused of awarding housing contracts on the basis of political affiliation and loyalty to the President. (On a side note, the idea of an African-American Republican has always struck me as odd. The fact that a black American would join the party of Richard Nixon, David Duke, Tom Tancredo and Bill O'Reilly truly baffles the mind. But that's a discussion for another time.) He once rescinded a contract offer because the contractor didn't like President Bush. In Jackson's own words, "Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president?"


Jackson also was the focus of an FBI investigation into allegations he improperly awarded contracts to his friends and business associates, including awarding a lucrative housing contract to a golfing buddy. Of course, this was all taking place as the United States quickly found itself in the midst of a debilitating mortgage crisis that is fueling a nationwide recession. Amid all the controversy surrounding Jackson, he announced his resignation on March 31, 2008, not surprisingly to focus on "personal and family matters."


Now that he has resigned, we are beginning to learn more about Alphonso Jackson, the man, and it isn't pretty. Most notably, Jackson has shown himself to be an alarming egomaniac, which is all the more amusing in light of his disgraced departure from public service. On April 13, the Washington Post reported that he had submitted an "emergency bid" of $100,000 in taxpayer money to have a portrait of himself commissioned. In addition, the walls of the HUD headquarters' lobby, until very recently, were entirely covered with 20 large color photographs of Secretary Jackson.

To put this is perspective, we had a girl at my office a couple of years ago that had a single 8x10 framed photograph of herself adorning her cubicle. We all thought she was a narcissistic nutcase, and that was just one photo.

If that weren't enough, on April 16, Jackson threw himself a lavish going away party (at tax-payer expense), attended by over 1,000 HUD employees. The disgraced secretary is described as "honorable" on the cover of the event program, modestly graced this time with just four photographs of Jackson.

So, in Alphonso Jackson, we have a Republican who believes that government is a way to help his friends get rich. He believes the government should reward political loyalty and punish political criticism. He headed a government agency that did virtually nothing to regulate the predatory lending practices that have spelled disaster for homeowners and investment banks alike. And he believes that HUD should allocate precious time and resources to paying homage to Alphonso Jackson. Jackson is the poster boy (no pun intended) for why America can't afford another incompetent, crony-laden administration, and why the more seats Democrats win in November, the more abuses like those of Alphonso Jackson will come to light.

Profiles in Right-Wing Lunacy: John Yoo

It seems as though with each passing week, Americans are learning more and more about the disturbed conservative mind of John Yoo. Currently the quintessential fish-out-of-water (he teaches law at UC Berkeley), Yoo worked in the Department of Justice under George W. Bush when the legal underpinnings of unitary executive rule were being established. As it turns out, Yoo - then a fairly low-level DOJ staffer - authored several influential memos supporting the legality of torture, unitary executive power and the suspension of habeas corpus. Because of the far-reaching scope and questionable legality of these memos, Yoo is currently facing charges of war crimes while the National Lawyers Guild is calling for Yoo to be fired and disbarred.

Some of Yoo's greatest hits:

Torture

In 2002, Yoo helped author the now infamous "Torture Memo," which was essentially a liberal interpretation of the interrogation techniques allowed by international law. The memo defined the illegal practice of torture as "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." It also stated that the infliction of such pain must be intentional. Such narrow definition of torture opened many loopholes with which the U.S. could conduct a host of "enhanced interrogation techniques." So when the President says the United States "does not torture people," he is technically right, because his administration has exempted itself from international treaties and the Justice Department has worked to redefine torture to legalize what interrogators were already doing.

Habeas Corpus

Keeping with the unprecedented idea that combating terrorism was primarily a military operation, Yoo has argued that the 4th Amendment need not apply to counter-terrorism efforts. This memo concluded that, "the Fourth Amendment [has] no application to domestic military operations," essentially stating that even U.S. citizens under the protection of the constitution are not immune to illegal search and seizures, as long as the country is engaged in any kind of "War on Terror." Of course this is a frightening conclusion. Simply put, the president can determine what is considered terror, who can be considered an enemy combatant, and when and how the military should be used. This leads to a remarkably brash definition of presidential powers, which will be described next.

Unitary Executive Power

Yoo is a proponent of consolidated executive power during wartime. Yoo stated in a 2001 memo:

In both the War Powers Resolution and the Joint Resolution, Congress has recognized the President's authority to use force in circumstances such as those created by the September 11 incidents. Neither statute, however, can place any limits on the President's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response. These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make.

Yoo also stated in a 2005 debate that no treaty could prevent the President from authorizing enhanced interrogation techniques, including crushing the testicles of a detainee's child. According to Yoo, the authority to torture "depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that." So, in essence, the President is above the law. Yoo believes there is no law that can limit Presidential powers during wartime, and that the legality or illegality of an interrogation technique is determined solely by what the President thinks.

We can now start to see the neoconservative mindset come into focus. If presidential powers increase when the nation is at war, it's no wonder that the United States has been at war for all but one year of the Bush presidency. And the "Global War on Terror" isn't so much a single operation, but an infinite campaign to somehow eradicate something that can never fully be eradicated. It would be akin to the President declaring that as long as there is crime to fight in the U.S., the president alone can determine how to define crime, how to deal with criminals and which parts of the constitution he needs to adhere to. Like crime, there always has been, and always will be throughout history, acts that could be defined as terrorism.

It would be interesting to hear how Yoo, who has also been a visiting scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, feels about unitary executive power when a Democrat is in the White House. Luckily for us, Yoo has in fact contradicted himself numerous times to fit his political agenda du jour, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald documented last July. Yoo has flip-flopped on presidential use of the military, use of executive privilege and FISA laws. If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2008, expect Yoo to moderate his views on executive power to fit his own political agenda.

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If John Yoo's sick totalitarian view of constitutional government weren't enough to cement his place among the insane, he recently delved into the world of election politics, the results of which are equally troubling.

In a March 24, 2008 Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, Yoo blasted the Democratic Party's use of superdelegates in the nomination process:

That the 2008 Democratic nominee for president will be chosen by individuals no one voted for in the primaries flew for too long under the commentariat's radar. This from the party that litigated to "make every vote count" in the 2000 Florida recount, reviled the institution of the Electoral College for letting the loser of the national popular election win the presidency, and has called the Bush administration illegitimate ever since.

ThinkProgress highlighted Yoo's hypocrisy, as one who would criticize a party's "undemocratic" nomination process while at the same time espousing totalitarian views of the executive office.

More troubling than Yoo's hypocrisy, however, is his startlingly vapid argument. As simple as it may seem to most, Yoo fails to grasp the fact that primary elections do not elect a president. In fact they are not really "elections" at all, but a nomination process, a process that is much more democratic than most other democracies around the world and more certainly democratic than at earlier times in our nation's history. Primary elections were not seen in the United States until the 20th century, and before that relied completely on congressmen and political bosses to nominate a presidential candidate.

Yoo makes the fundamental error of conflating a primary election (a method by which a political party has determined it will nominate it's candidate) with a national election. Yoo claims that the "delegate dissonance wasn't anything the Framers of the U.S. Constitution dreamed up. They believed that letting Congress choose the president was a dreadful idea." The problem with Yoo's analysis is the notion that the founding fathers had some concept of political primaries. They barely had knowledge of political parties, and certainly didn't lay down any foundation as to how parties nominate their candidates.

In addition, one could easily argue that the Democrat's is a more democratic nominating process than that of the Republican Party. The RNC employs a "winner-take-all" system similar to the electoral college in the general election. By allocating delegates based on a percentage of popular votes won, the Democratic nominating process is more representative of the general public than the Republican system. For example, let's say a state has 10 delegates at stake in the primary. In the Democratic Party primary, if Candidate A wins 60% and Candidate B wins 40%, then Candidate A wins six delegates to Candidate B's four. In a Republican primary, Candidate A wins all ten delegates. The Republican system is one that says, essentially, "Get on board with the leading candidate, or your vote won't count." Doesn't sound very "Democratic" to me.

Yoo is correct that the superdelegate system does have the ability to stymie the hopes of a more populist candidate. In close primary elections, as we have this year, the idea is that the superdelagates are there to help cast a deciding vote for the more "mainstream" candidate. This year, we would have to assume that candidate is Hillary Clinton, and the populist is Barack Obama. If the superdelegates are here to overrule the will of the common Democrat in favor of someone whom they feel is more of a Washington "insider" (Clinton), then, I would not care for that kind of system.

It's not that Yoo is incorrect in noting that certain flaws exist in the superdelagate system. It is the fact that he somehow believes primary elections should be governed by the the same standards as general elections that completely invalidates Yoo's position. Yoo's column, while not unusual by WSJ's standards, is special in its purely partisan scope and utterly untenable premise. From what we have seen from Yoo thus far, it is safe to assume that the Op-Ed was less an educated critique of the Democratic nominating process than a petty partisan jab at what is perceived as a divided party.

Score One For McCain!

"Like, McCain totally has foreign policy skills"

As Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continue to battle for the Democratic nomination, John McCain is busy locking up key endorsements. This week, McCain secured the much-sought-after endorsement of quasi-celebrity Heidi Montag. Montag, a "star" of MTV's scripted reality series The Hills, was quoted in Us Weekly magazine, espousing her preference for the aging politician. "I'm a Republican and McCain has a lot of experience," she stated.

You may be asking yourself, "Who the %@*$ is Heidi Montag?" True, scripted reality television may be a harbinger of the Apocalypse. Sure, a spoiled, Paris Hilton wannabe may not possess any real political clout. But let's not diminish the importance of this endorsement.

First, the Montag endorsement has shown a real breadth of support for McCain's candidacy. Now, he's got the senior vote and the youth vote. He's got the support of those that decry the political influence of the "Hollywood Elite," and, well, a Hollywood elitist. And while some viewers will naively dismiss scripted reality shows like The Hills and it's predecessor Laguna Beach as contrived, disingenuous garbage, centered around spoiled rich assholes you couldn't care less about, that couldn't be further from the truth. Montag is really a crossover sensation, and The Hills can potentially appeal to both reality TV and dramatic TV viewers. That's a very large demographic group, and with Montag is his corner, McCain has it all but locked up.

But in all seriousness, are we really that surprised that this flavor of the week, soon-to-be coke fiend is a Republican? Now if a young Hollywood star like Ellen Page were a Republican, that would be absolutely shocking. But Heidi Montag, not so much. She's rich, she's from Orange County, and she dates this douchebag:

Enough Said.

Now I'll admit that I don't really see Montag's announcement as a valuable "endorsement," but I'm going to have some fun with this anyway. Montag, 21, strikes me as someone who is a Republican because her parents are Republicans. A telltale sign that one is not particularly politically aware is when they are under 30 and vote for a Republican. When I was 18, I voted for Bob Dole, for Christ's sake. Why? Because my parents were Republicans and I didn't know any better. The fact that her basis for the endorsement was because "I'm a Republican," indicates the shallow depth of analysis Heidi Montag has to offer this election cycle.

While McCain will certainly take any vote he can get from anyone under the age of 60, I'm not so sure the Montag endorsement is all that great for McCain. First, it is an endorsement from someone who doesn't have the slightest credentials with which to make an endorsement. Something tells me Montag's not super excited about staying in Iraq for the next 100 years or privatizing social security. Secondly, if there's one thing typical Americans can do without, it is rich, spoiled, overexposed, talentless trust fund socialites. If I was an undecided voter and Heidi Montag (or Nicole Richie, Kim Kardashian or whomever), preferred one candidate, I'd vote for the other guy. Finally, it's not like this is an endorsement that will resonate with any key voting bloc. Ironically, most people interested in who Heidi Montag would vote for are too busy paying attention to people like Heidi Montag to even vote in the first place.