The Serpent's Wisdom

Election day in many places yesterday, saw:

• Ohio overturning by referendum an anti-union measure;


• Maine overturning by referendum a law that made it harder to vote;


• Mississippi overturning by referendum a proposed amendment that would define zygotes as human beings;


• A black lesbian woman elected to the city council of Charlotte, NC


• An openly gay state senator elected in Virginia


• A conservative state representative in Michigan was recalled


• ETA: The conservative state senate president of Arizona (known for his harsh anti-immigrant stance) was recalled


• ETA: Kentucky elected a Democratic governor, AG, and Secretary of State

I'd say some changes appear to be underfoot...

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs let loose on leftist critics of the administration the other day:

"I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it's crazy. ... They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality. ... They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president."

Frankly I think this should cost him his job, which is not something I say lightly. It won't, though, because he's only saying what everyone in the White House is thinking. But outbursts like this, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's lovely 'f*cking retards' comment last year, and so on, are going to cost the Democrats dearly on election day this year and in 2012. They can't afford to keep insulting the folks who are most likely to contribute, to volunteer, and to vote on their behalf. They may think they can rely solely on the wealthy donors who flocked to them in 2008, but they can't.

These outbursts also show what they're thinking: we're leftists, they've billed themselves as "leftists," therefore we owe them our vote, our support, and our praise. But leftist bloggers don't work for the Democratic party, and this is what really annoys them. In 2009 they established "Common Purpose," an initiative to essentially get leftist bloggers to start spreading White House talking points for them. Well, hey, it works for the Right, right? ;)

But let's get to the real meat of the problem, which is: the Obama administration is doing a lot of the same things that annoyed leftist bloggers when the Bush administration did them. Leftists complained then, and complain now, not because they are anti-Republican partisan hacks, but because they are anti-injustice.

Foremost in my mind, and the one that I think 20, 30 years from now is going to really tarnish Obama's legacy: the establishment of a permanent authority whose purpose is to imprison people -- citizens and non-citizens -- indefinitely without trial. This is an indelible blemish on the American human rights record akin to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. But they "stopped torture" (they didn't, but they said they would), and they "tried" to close the prison at Guantanamo, so we should be happy, right?

Continuing the war in Afghanistan despite the apparent absence of any evidence that it's making the US safer from Islamist terrorism? There's that, too. People can oppose the war for rational reasons that don't involve the desire to replace the Pentagon with a hippie flower garden. Then there's: appointing bankster wolves to watch the economic henhouse... refusing to prosecute telecoms for their willingness to aid DHS in their program of mass invasion of privacy without search warrants... refusing to prosecute agents who committed torture or investigate detainee deaths or accounts of torture... refusing to investigate the Katrina disaster... and these are all things Democrats did of their own free will without being able to blame them on Republican obstructionism.

So this is not, as the White House wants to paint it, a matter of being upset because the public option was taken out of the health care bill or because other legislative compromises were made to pass bills. Yes, those things suck too, but they are forgivable and they can be fixed. But it turns out we're really bad at paying no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Republican campaign rhetoric has become so far detached from meaning and reality that they are at this point staging the first dada presidential campaign in history. I suppose it was the inevitable next step after the "war on Christmas" and "liberal fascism" and other megaWTF nonsense.

For example: McCain presenting himself as the "candidate for change" when he has voted with the president 95% of the time. He's talking like he wants to "throw the bums out" but the only "bums" he's really talking about are the "liberal establishment" of Washington. Um, what liberal establishment? The narrow Democratic majority? Interesting, especially since Senate Republicans have staged more filibusters in the last two years than had been done by anyone in the previous 230 years combined.

It's like they're standing in town square shouting "Lincoln's mother's dog! Vote for me!"

The really fascinating thing about this is, that the polls say so far it's working. Obama's been incredulously exclaiming, "Come on, you can't just make stuff up," but apparently you can, if you repeat it often and loudly enough.

It dawned on me while watching this clip of Hillary Clinton telling Tyra Banks about dealing with the aftermath of Bill's infidelity.

Clinton's campaign is like none other in recent memory, and perhaps in US history, because she is primarily speaking to women.

Well, the only way i can describe what i mean is to resort to pomo-speak. Feminists would say that political discourse has been dominated by men's narratives. That means more than just saying that it's mostly come from men; female politicians have also tended to organize their speeches in ways that reflect a cultural status-quo that decrees certain perspectives (those of women, people of color, etc.,) to be irrelevant, unimportant, or off-topic. To bring these perspectives to the table unapologetically is to intrude, to steal the microphone.

Like so much of what i write about, this is stuff we are trained to look past until it becomes conceptually "invisible" (or "nonsensical" to those who don't want to give sexism any credence), and so if you don't understand what i mean, take it this way: she is dog-whistling to the people she expects are likely to vote for her.

After all, it's women who will turn out to vote for her - Democratic, independent, and even Republican. To go for the win, she just has to convince enough women to vote, particularly the elusive "voters who stay at home on election day," who make up roughly 40% of everyone who's registered to vote. Even a relatively small chunk of this crowd will help her win the primaries, the nomination, and eventually the election.

My prediction is that the longer she stays in the race, the more virulent and hateful will become the sexism in the criticism against her. I'm not talking about criticism of her policy positions, i mean very obvious "ad feminems" ranging from asking if "America is 'ready' for a woman president," or lengthy analysis of her decolletage or her "emotional meltdown" in New Hampshire (where she got, you know, a little choked up answering a question). The sexist nonsense is already at a fever pitch, so it will be interesting to see what the months ahead will hold -- especially as it begins to dawn on men that she's not even really speaking to them when she speechifies.

The rotten tomatoes hurled at Hillary Clinton over the last two decades are the kind of things many women fear will be hurled at them, too. She shrugs them off. Maybe she gets upset about them in private; we'll never know; but in public she shrugs them off. This alone infuriates verbal bullies, who hate nothing more than to see their slings slide off with no obvious effect. But women see it and can imagine the same things said to them, and for this reason, whether they like her or not, Clinton has in some ways become the champion of women in politics.

The interesting thing about this strategy is, if she keeps it up the way she's been playing it, then the more hateful the crap which is flung at her, the more effective will be her outreach to women. They may not even like her policy positions, but they may in the end vote for her if for no other reason than they're sick of seeing it happen to someone who reminds them of themselves.

It's a risky strategy and may not in the end pay off, but it's certainly not the only thing there is to Clinton's campaign. Still, i think if anything the polls are understating the real number of people willing to vote for her. Women i know who support Clinton are genuinely afraid to say so aloud, because every time they do they get to hear about what a bitch she is. Not how wrong she is about the war or violent video games, but how shrill or calculating or phony she is. What matters really is not what they say to pollsters over the phone, but what they actually do in the privacy of the voting booth eleven months from now.

A piece in this weekend's Washington Post is the Rosetta Stone that unravels the mystery of why Democrats like Nancy Pelosi took the impeachment of Bush and Cheney off the table - their hands are in the torture pie too.

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

So, there you have it. The Democrats won't impeach for the same reason that Mukasey, during his confirmation hearings, could not even admit to have pondered whether waterboarding is torture: because it makes them open to prosecution too. They are personally and individually complicit in the Bush Administration's crimes against humanity.

Senator Larry Craig of Idaho is not resigning, after all. He's going to stay in Congress for another 14 months so he can, among other things, continue to vote against GLBT people.

On the face of it, it is absurd that a man can be arrested and convicted for Disorderly Conduct for waving his hands at the person in the next restroom stall and bumping his foot. It's gross, yes, but he wasn't caught actually doing anything sexual with someone. Yet his former allies in Congress are acting as if he had.

As lady_babalon put it when we discussed this a while back, he's being hoisted on his own pitard. Thing is, it's because of people like Larry Craig that gay men are so hated that someone can even be arrested for doing those things. He brought it on himself.

I have no doubt whatsoever that he was cruising for sex. Sometime in 1990 i was at a shopping mall with my fiancee and a gay friend. He and i went into the men's room (i was still male-identified then) and i didn't notice anything unusual at all. Afterwards he told me the men's room we'd just been in was being cruised. How could he tell? "Oh, guys who are cruising do little things, like sniffing noises or coughs, or tapping their feet, that kind of thing." How do you know it's cruising and not someone with a cold? "You just can."

After he pointed it out to me, i began to notice it. He's right, when you're alert to it you can tell the difference between guy-with-a-cold sniffing noises and guy-who-will-blow-you sniffing noises.

What Larry Craig did was actually on the blatant side. He was also much more persistent than i ever personally saw - it reads like the nonverbal-cruising version of "not taking no for an answer." Most of the cruising signals i saw were so subtle i was not really sure i had interpreted them correctly. Bumping your foot against the guy in the next stall? Beyond forward.

Many gay and bi men confine their sexual outlet to anonymous encounters like this as a way of locking it away and not facing it. A man can have sex with literally thousands of men that way over the years, and after every time come out of the bathroom and rejoin their wife and kids and keep their veneer of heterosexual respectability like none of it ever happens.

Get elected to Congress and vote against gay people? The perfect cover, no one will ever suspect! But it is more than just "self-loathing;" homophobia it is a way to make it easier for "straight" men to sexually prey on other men.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

A few days ago i described the amazing energy i feel whenever i’m around young queer people. There’s a vibrancy there that brightens the day and gives me hope.

But i’m also very worried because queer youth are in deep trouble. If you’re young, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, you’re in crisis. I’m especially concerned about young people of color in our community.

Statistics. They never tell the whole story, but pretend i’m writing about real people here:

• 83% of queer youth experience damage to their property, personal attacks, or verbal insults. (83%? Just pretend this refers to every young queer person you meet and you would basically be right.)
• 40% of queer youth experience physical harassment.
• 26% are forced out of their homes due to conflicts with parents and family over sexual identity. That’s one in four. I’m sure that’s what Jesus really wanted, right — your kid on the streets?
• Between 25-40% of homeless youth are queer. Since queer people make up somewhere around 5% of the population, this means that a queer young person is five to eight times as likely to wind up homeless than a straight young person.
• Homeless queer youth are often prostituted, and face discrimination in the shelter system. Only a few small shelters have been designed to meet the needs of homeless queer youth.
• The hate-murder rate of transpeople may very well outpace the per-capita rate of all other hate killings. Most of this is happening to young adult transpeople of color.

A few sources:
Health toll of anti-gay prejudice
Southern Poverty Law Center: ‘Disposable People’
Gender PAC: 50 Under 30
Transgendered Youth at Risk for Exploitation, HIV, Hate Crimes
After Working the Streets, Bunk Beds and a Mass (NYTimes, reg. req.)

Here in Massachusetts, there was some “controversy” last year over Youth Pride. I put “controversy” in quotes because, unless you are ex-Governor Mitt Romney, Brian Camenker of MassResistance, or some other reactionary Republican or Catholic, you can either see the need for Youth Pride (see the above if you have any doubts) or it doesn’t put you out very much.

Mitt “i’ll be a more effective champion of gay rights than Sen. Kennedy” Romney thought it would look good for his 2008 presidential campaign to take this class of exploited, abused kids and add his own kick for good measure. He moved first to kill (that didn’t work), then to gut, the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth.

This after using his line-item veto to kill (the very meager) state funding for AIDS programs and GLBT domestic violence programs in Massachusetts.

Kicking someone when they’re down. Mmm, very compassionate.

(Connected to this was the decision of 39 commissioners, advisors and past members of the Governor’s Commission on Sexual and Domestic Violence to express “no confidence” in Lt. Governor Healey as the head of that Commission.)

As you might guess, i have a problem with people who can look at a class of vulnerable people who are being routinely harassed, beaten, kicked out of their homes, prostituted and otherwise exploited, and killed, and think that the compassionate thing to do is to treat them like a political football, to point a finger at them and talk about what is wrong with them.

Of late i’ve been finding my perspective shifting much more towards the situation young people are in. For those of us who are over 35, our job really is to pave the way for them and to not screw up their lives. They’re not just “the future,” they’re the world. And those who lead our society should be deeply ashamed at how low they have prioritized the needs not just of young queer people, but of young people in general.

If there's anyone still around who has a shred of respect for John McCain or any interest in him as a presidential candidate, it must surely have been damaged by his stunt the other night, of singing "Bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann."  Or his little 'joke' the other night that during his shopping excursion in Baghdad, he picked up a souvenir for Jon Stewart.

Upon being criticized for these callous remarks, he's told his critics to "lighten up" and "get a life."  (Of course, soldiers killed by IEDs in Iraq HAD a life until they were sent there.)  Every time i've ever heard comments like this (and "can't you take a joke?" and "snap out of it") the more convinced i become that there are almost no conditions under which these are ever acceptable remarks. 

Because what they mean, underneath it all, is, "I don't have to listen to you or care about what you think, you are less than a real person to me.  The fact that you even bothered to voice your concern is nothing more than an irritation to me."

Okay, in the last month alone, this man has:

• Legalized medical marijuana in New Mexico
• Helped broker a deal with North Korea so they will re-allow nuclear weapons inspectors
• While making that deal, he also arranged the return of the remains of several American POW/MIA soldiers from the Korean War
• Banned cockfights in New Mexico
• Announced that he would pull all US troops out of Iraq (a pledge so far avoided by all of the mainstream candidates for president)

I can't unequivocally back him until he moves a little closer on GLBT rights and makes his position on domestic spying more clear, but he's starting to look like a real candidate here. Democratic straw polls are beginning to reflect this.  He is also the only governor running on the Democratic side, which is a big deal.  He's more clearly qualified on foreign policy than anyone else running, having been US Ambassador to the UN.  And, he announced his candidacy on Jon Stewart's program, how cool is that?

Leftist bloggers might have potty mouths, but at least we don't repeatedly, again and again and again, call for the violent death of people who disagree with us or point out inconvenient facts. (Thanks to Shakespeare's Sister.)