Charlie Sykes become the latest pundit to embrace cleek’s law:

If liberals hate something, the argument goes, then it must be wonderful and worthy of aggressive defense. Each controversy reinforces the divisions and the distrust, and Mr. Trump counts on that.

What may have begun as a policy or a tactic in opposition has long since become a reflex. But there is an obvious price to be paid for essentially becoming a party devoted to trolling. In the long run, it’s hard to see how a party dedicated to liberal tears can remain a movement based on ideas or centered on principles.

It stopped being a movement based on ideas or centered on principles a long time of course, but calling conservatism an irrational anti-liberal reflex is good description.

I made a Facebook post about 9-11.

It went viral.

It wasn’t even the first viral post I wrote this week, or the first to offend a certain segment of America.

And many people were offended.

Oh, yes, they were offended.

Those who beat their fleshy chests and wave the flag in righteous unending fury and bleat most bitterly about “Freedom” and “Liberty” and “Patriotism” were the most offended.

Because aren’t they always?

Aren’t they?

They attempted to hack my Facebook account.

When that didn’t work, they complained to Facebook in righteous anger, furiously waving their little flags.

Because that’s what you do when you love “Freedom” and “Liberty” and “Patriotism” -- not the real freedom and liberty and patriotism but the jack-booted goose-stepping version where everybody is lined up and made to salute the flag with a gun to the back of their necks.  The kind of “Freedom” that’s administered by serious men of pure Aryan descent with death’s heads and lightning bolts on their collars.

Eventually these patriots  succeeded in convincing Facebook’s idiot mechanical brain to remove my post for “violation of community standards,” even though nothing I wrote violates Facebook’s community standards in any way.

Now, I’m not particularly vexed by this.

First, because this is the risk you take when you post to Facebook. You don’t own it. You don’t control it. You are entirely at the mercy of poorly coded algorithms and the arbitrary judgement of some 20 year old Frappuccino swilling douchebeard somewhere in the bowels of the Facebook cloud.

Facebook’s interests aren’t yours, even if like me you make them piles of money by pulling in 70,000 people every day.  I knew this when I signed up. It irritates me, what they did pulling down my post because a bunch of fascist right-wingers got their delicate little Hitler Under-Roos all in a bunch, but I’m not in anyway surprised by the behavior of either party. It’s right there in the EULA.

Second,  Because the people who complained confirm everything I said about them.

And I’d be lying if I said that didn’t amuse me.

By getting my post pulled down they confirm everything I said.

They always do, these patriots, predictable as the next row of goose-stepping Nazis.

And what was it I said that was so terrible?

What was it I said that was deserving of censorship and death threats?

This:

You're expecting some kind of obligatory 9-11 post, aren't you?

Here it is, but you're not gonna like it.

15 years ago today 19 shitheads attacked America.

They killed 3000 of us.

And then ... America got its revenge for 9-11.

Yes we did. Many times over. We killed them. We killed them all. We killed their families. We killed their wives and their kids and all their neighbors. We killed whole nations that weren't even involved just to make goddamned sure. We bombed their cities into rubble. We burned down their countries.

They killed 3000 of us, we killed 300,000 of them or more.

8000 of us came home in body bags, but we got our revenge. Yes we did.

We're still here. They aren't.

We win. USA! USA! USA!

Right?

You goddamned right. We. Win.

Except...

Every year on this day we bathe in the blood of that day yet again. We watch the towers fall over and over. It's been 15 goddamned years, but we just can't get enough. We've just got to watch it again and again.

It's funny how we never show those videos of the bombs falling on Baghdad today. Or the dead in the streets of Afghanistan. We got our revenge, but we never talk about that today. No, we just sit and watch the towers fall yet again.

Somewhere out there on the bottom of the sea are the rotting remains of the evil son of bitch who masterminded the attack. It took a decade, but we hunted him down and put a bullet in his brain. Sure. We got him. Right? That's what we wanted. that's what our leaders promised us, 15 years ago today.

And today those howling the loudest for revenge shrug and say, well, yeah, that. That doesn't matter, because, um, yeah, the guy in the White House, um, see, well, he's not an American, he's the enemy see? He's not doing enough. So, whatever. What about that over there? And that? And...

Yeah.

15 years ago our leaders, left and right, stood on the steps of the Capitol and gave us their solemn promise to work together, to stand as one, for all Americans.

How'd that promise work out?

How much are their words worth? Today, 15 years later?

It's 15 years later and we're STILL afraid. We're still terrorized. Still wallowing in conspiracy theories and peering suspiciously out of our bunkers at our neighbors. Sure we won. Sure we did. We became a nation that tortures our enemies -- and our own citizens for that matter. We're a nation of warrantless wiretaps and rendition and we've gotten used to being strip searched in our own airports. And how is the world a better place for it all?

And now we're talking about more war, more blood.

But, yeah, we won. Sure. You bet.

Frankly, I have had enough of 9-11. Fuck 9-11. I'm not going to watch the shows. I'm not going to any of the memorials. I'm not going to the 9-11 sales at Wal-Mart. I don't want to hear about 9-11. I for damned sure am not interested in watching politicians of either party try to out 9-11 each other. I'm tired of this national 9-11 PTSD. I did my bit for revenge, I went to war, I'll remember the dead in my own time in my own way.

I'm not going to shed a damned tear today.

We got our revenge. Many times over, for whatever good it did us.

I'm going to go to a picnic and enjoy my day. Enjoy this victory we've won.

I suggest you do the same.

Horrible, yes?

How terrible that I should suggest we stop wallowing in this misery, that we stop allowing ourselves to be terrorized by men long dead.

Yes indeed, how terrible.

On Facebook, posts openly calling for the assassination of the president do not violate Facebook’s community standards.

Open racism doesn’t violate Facebook’s community standards.

Sexism and misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, bigotry of every stripe, none of these things violate Facebook’s community standards – or the community standards of supposed Christian Conservatives for that matter. 

Posts that directly call for armed insurrection, that call for militias and Sovereign Citizens to march on Washington and burn it to the ground, to hang the government from the nearest light poles,  don’t violate community standards.

You can use Facebook to organize Klan rallies and gather Neo-Nazis for Trump, to take over a bird sanctuary in Oregon or even to call down the wrath of your god upon everybody you hate.

You can openly call for the murder of a football player that you don’t think is patriotic enough.

All of these things are fine.

But don’t say you’re not going to celebrate 9-11.

Two of Donald Trump’s economic advisers, Lawrence Kudlow and Stephen Moore, have revived an idea about the source of the financial crisis that really should have been put to rest long ago.

In a column published and rebroadcast by many politically sympathetic sites, they lay the blame for the credit crisis and Great Recession on the Community Reinvestment Act, a 1977 law designed in part to prevent banks from engaging in a racially discriminatory lending practice known as redlining. The reality is, of course, that the CRA wasn’t a factor in the crisis.

What’s so wonderful about their article, which is an attempted take down of the Clintons, is that they miss the very obvious ways Bill Clinton’s administration did contribute to the financial crisis. But doing that would have been at odds with their anti-regulatory philosophy.

Here’s the heart of the Kudlow and Moore case:

The seeds of the mortgage meltdown were planted during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Under Clinton’s Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary, Andrew Cuomo, Community Reinvestment Act regulators gave banks higher ratings for home loans made in “credit-deprived” areas. Banks were effectively rewarded for throwing out sound underwriting standards and writing loans to those who were at high risk of defaulting. If banks didn’t comply with these rules, regulators reined in their ability to expand lending and deposits.

They then argue that this was part of a broader campaign to make loans to unqualified low-income folk, which in turn caused the crisis.

Let’s just be clear about what the CRA does and doesn’t do. It simply says that if you open a branch office in a low income neighborhood and collect deposits there, you are obligated to do a certain amount of lending in that neighborhood. In other words, you can’t open a branch office in Harlem and use deposits from there to only fund loans in high-end Tribeca. A bank must make credit available on the same terms in both neighborhoods. In other words, a “red line” can’t be drawn around Harlem, a term that dates to when banks supposedly used colored pencils to draw no-loan zones on maps.

Continues at: Lending to Poor People Didn’t Cause the Financial Crisis

The post No, the CRA Did Not Cause the Financial Crisis appeared first on The Big Picture.

Michael Grunwald has written one of those articles I suggested yesterday we'd be seeing a lot of over the next year: a review of President Obama's record. The title and subtitle tell you a lot about his particular take on the issue: The Nation He Built: A Politico review of Barack Obama's domestic policy legacy - and the changes he made while nobody was paying attention. It is a very deep dive into - not only the headline policy accomplishments of this administration - but the ones that are rarely acknowledged.

This article is a must-read for anyone who is interested in being informed about the Obama presidency. But I want to focus on the question Grunwald raises at the end. That's because it is a question that has come up often in conversations I've had with my own "political junkie" friends.

If the Obama brand of change is so great, why haven’t more Americans embraced it? Does he have a larger “Everything’s Amazing, Nobody’s Happy” problem?

Let's first of all take a look at the possible answers to that question that Grunwald identified. Here's what White House aides said about it:

When I put this to Obama’s political aides, they acknowledge everything isn’t amazing, especially middle-class wage growth, but they also say plenty of Americans are happy. The president’s approval ratings are hovering just below 50 percent, better than any 2016 candidate’s in this era of rigid partisan polarization.

He then notes what President Obama himself said about this in an interview with Bill Simmons.

...Obama blamed this on bad salesmanship, saying he wished he had communicated better early in his presidency. “I think a certain arrogance crept in, in the sense of thinking as long as we get the policy ready, we didn’t have to sell it,” Obama said. “One thing I learned through some tough election cycles: You can’t separate good policy from the need to bring the American people along and make sure that they know why you’re doing what you’re doing.”

Finally, Grunwald proposes his own theory.

But one possibility, a troubling one for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, is that Obama’s activist policies poll badly because people just don’t like them...

In domestic affairs, however, Americans often react badly to promises to Do More. They seem to suspect that when government acts, it’s probably acting to help someone else.

Because answers to these kinds of questions are always more complex than we usually allow, I suspect that there is a lot of truth in all of these. But I'd like to add one that Grunwald didn't mention: the role of the media.

In order to understand the role the media has played, I'm going to oversimplify some changes we've seen over the last few years. What we have right now is what some people call the "mainstream media," which consists of the major news networks and big print/online publications, combined with the proliferation of what might be called "partisan" media.

Pundits in the mainstream media see it as their job to challenge politicians - especially the president. So they focus on poking holes in whatever an administration says. As an example of how those assumptions about the role of the mainstream press have permeated coverage of the White House, here is how Howard Kurtz described his reaction to President Obama's end-of-the-year press conference last year when he called only on female reporters.

I’m not saying the press has to be prosecutorial toward the president. But a full-dress news conference is a rare chance to ask aggressive questions that are honed to knock the commander-in-chief off his talking points. A correspondent can even do something as basic as quoting a Republican critic and asking the president to respond. But there was none of that.

There is nothing wrong with what Kurtz is describing. But it restricts the questioning/reporting to political rather than policy discussions. The political angle is what currently consumes our mainstream media.

It is easy to see the role that right wing media plays in all of this. They are constantly screaming about what a failure President Obama is and how government is all about giving freebies to "those" people. But what about liberal media/pundits? A lot of them get consumed with screaming back at the ridiculous things Republicans say/do. But they are also often populated by pundit/activists who see it as their job to "hold the administration's feet to the fire." In doing so, they react negatively to what Keith Humphrey's called "airing clean laundry" and fall into the trap Marilynne Robinson captured with this:

Most of the things we do have no defenders because people tend to feel the worst thing you can say is the truest thing you can say.

So the real question becomes: where do everyday Americans go to actually hear about President Obama's policy accomplishments? The pickings are few and far between. That has played a huge role in the problem of perception vs reality.

In a recent dispatch from Ferguson, Missouri, Jelani Cobb noted that President Obama's responses to "unpunished racial injustices" constitute "a genre unto themselves." Monday night, when Barack Obama stood before the nation to interpret the non-indictment of Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown, he offered a particularly tame specimen. The elements of "the genre" were all on display—an unmitigated optimism, an urge for calm, a fantastic faith in American institutions, an even-handedness exercised to a fault. But if all the limbs of the construct were accounted for, the soul of the thing was not.

There was none of the spontaneous annoyance at the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, and little of the sheer pain exhibited in the line, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon." The deft hand Obama employed in explaining to Americans why the acquittal of George Zimmerman so rankled had gone arthritic. This was a perfunctory execution of "the genre," offered with all the energy of a man ticking items off a to-do list.

Barack Obama is an earnest moderate. His instincts seem to lead him to the middle ground. For instance, he genuinely believes that there is more overlap between liberals and conservatives then generally admitted. On Monday he nodded toward the "deep distrust" that divides black and brown people from the police, and then pointed out that this was tragic because these are the communities most in need of "good policing." Whatever one makes of this pat framing, it is not a cynical centrism—he believes in the old wisdom of traditional America. This is his strength. This is his weakness. But Obama's moderation is as sincere and real as his blackness, and the latter almost certainly has granted him more knowledge of his country than he generally chooses to share.

In the case of Michael Brown, this is more disappointing than enraging. The genre of Obama race speeches have always been bounded by the job he was hired to do. Specifically, Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America. More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people. But black people, the community to which both Michael Brown and Barack Obama belong, have the distinct fortune of having survived in significant numbers. For a creedal country like America, this poses a problem—in nearly every major American city one can find a population of people whose very existence, whose very history, whose very traditions, are an assault upon this country's nationalist instincts. Black people are the chastener of their own country. Their experience says to America, "You wear the mask."

In 2007, Barack Obama's task was to capture the presidency of a country which historically has despised the community from which he hails. This was no mean feat. But more importantly, it was not unprecedented. And just as Léon Blum's prime ministership did not lead to a post-anti-Semitic France, Barack Obama's presidency should never have been expected to lead to a post-racist America. As it happens, there is nothing about a congenitally racist country that necessarily prevents an individual leader hailing from the pariah class. The office does not care where the leader originates, so long as the leader ultimately speaks for the state. On Monday night, watching Obama both be black and speak for the state was torturous. One got the sense of man fatigued by people demanding he say something both eminently profound and only partially true. This must be tiring.

Black people know what cannot be said. What clearly cannot be said is that the events of Ferguson do not begin with Michael Brown lying dead in the street, but with policies set forth by government at every level. What clearly cannot be said is that the people of Ferguson are regularly plundered, as their grandparents were plundered, and generally regarded as a slush-fund for the government that has pledged to protect them. What clearly cannot be said is the idea of superhuman black men who "bulk up" to run through bullets is not an invention of Darren Wilson, but a staple of American racism.

What clearly cannot be said is that American society's affection for nonviolence is notional. What can not be said is that American society's admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. increases with distance, that the movement he led was bugged, smeared, harassed, and attacked by the same country that now celebrates him. King had the courage to condemn not merely the violence of blacks, nor the violence of the Klan, but the violence of the American state itself.

What clearly cannot be said is that violence and nonviolence are tools, and that violence—like nonviolence—sometimes works. "Property damage and looting impede social progress," Jonathan Chait wrote Tuesday. He delivered this sentence with unearned authority. "Property damage and looting" has been the most effective tool of social progress for white people in America. It describes everything from enslavement to Jim Crow laws to lynching to red-lining.

"Property damage and looting"—perhaps more than nonviolence—has also been a significant tool in black "social progress." In 1851, when Shadrach Minkins was snatched off the streets Boston under the authority of the Fugitive Slave Law, abolitionists "stormed the courtroom" and "overpowered the federal guards" to set Minkins free. That same year, when slaveholders came to Christiana, Pennsylvania, to reclaim their property under the same law, they were not greeted with prayer and hymnals but with gunfire.

"Property damage and looting" is a fairly accurate description of the emancipation of black people in 1865, who only five years earlier constituted some $4 billion in property. The Civil Rights Bill of 1964 is inseparable from the threat of riots. The housing bill of 1968—the most proactive civil-rights legislation on the books—is a direct response to the riots that swept American cities after King was killed. Violence, lingering on the outside, often backed nonviolence during the civil-rights movement. "We could go into meetings and say, 'Well, either deal with us or you will have Malcolm X coming into here,'" said SNCC organizer Gloria Richardson. "They would get just hysterical. The police chief would say, 'Oh no!'"

What cannot be said is that America does not really believe in nonviolence—Barack Obama has said as much—so much as it believes in order. What cannot be said is that there are very convincing reasons for black people in Ferguson to be nonviolent. But those reasons do not emanate from an intelligent fear of the law, not a benevolent respect for the law.

The fact is that when the president came to the podium on Monday night there actually was very little he could say. His mildest admonitions of racism had only earned him trouble. If the American public cannot stomach the idea that arresting a Harvard professor for breaking into his own home is "stupid," then there is virtually nothing worthwhile that Barack Obama can say about Michael Brown.

And that is because the death of all of our Michael Browns at the hands of people who are supposed to protect them originates in a force more powerful than any president: American society itself. This is the world our collective American ancestors wanted. This is the world our collective grandparents made. And this is the country that we, the people, now preserve in our fantastic dream. What can never be said is that the Fergusons of America can be changed—but, right now, we lack the will to do it.

Perhaps one day we won't, and maybe that is reason to hope. Hope is what Barack Obama promised to bring, but he was promising something he could never bring. Hope is not the naiveté that would change the face on a racist system and then wash its hands of its heritage. Hope is not feel-goodism built on the belief in unicorns. Martin Luther King had hope, but it was rooted in years of study and struggle, not in looking the other way. Hope is not magical. Hope is earned.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/barack-obama-ferguson-and-the-evidence-of-things-unsaid/383212/