Depression Recovery

Question:

November 14, 2004 FRANK RICH On ‘Moral Values,’ It’s Blue in a Landslide FAREWELL to Swift boats and "Shove it!," to Osama’s tape and Saddam’s missing weapons, to "security moms" and outsourced dads. They’ve all been sent to history’s dustbin faster than Ralph Nader memorabilia was dumped on eBay. In their stead stands a single ambiguous phrase coined by an anonymous exit pollster: "Moral values." By near universal agreement the morning after, these two words tell the entire story of the election: it’s the culture, stupid. "It really is Michael Moore versus Mel Gibson," said Newt Gingrich. To Jon Stewart, Nov. 2 was the red states’ revenge on "Will & Grace." William Safire, speaking on "Meet the Press," called the Janet Jackson fracas "the social-political event of the past year." Karl Rove was of the same mind: "I think it’s people who are concerned about the coarseness of our culture, about what they see on the television sets, what they see in the movies …" And let’s not even get started on the two most dreaded words in American comedy, regardless of your party affiliation: Whoopi Goldberg. There’s only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media’s conventional wisdom, it is fiction. Everything about the election results – and about American culture itself – confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry’s defeat notwithstanding, it’s blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide. Kerry voters who have been flagellating themselves since Election Day with a vengeance worthy of "The Passion of the Christ" should wake up and smell the Chardonnay. The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats. Those whose "moral values" are invested in cultural heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O’Reilly and the self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over MTV. William Bennett’s name is now as synonymous with Las Vegas as silicone. The Democrats’ Ashton Kutcher is trumped by the Republicans’ Britney Spears. Excess and vulgarity, as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy no political party will ever stamp them out. If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corporation, and each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest of Fox’s very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson’s "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls’ "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless to say, Mr. O’Reilly. There are "real fun parts and exciting parts," said Ms. Cosby to Ms. Jameson on Fox News’s "Big Story Weekend," an encounter broadcast on Saturday at 9 p.m., assuring its maximum exposure to unsupervised kids. Almost unnoticed in the final weeks of the campaign was the record government indecency fine levied against another prime-time Fox television product, "Married by America." The $1.2 million bill, a mere bagatelle to Murdoch stockholders, was more than twice the punishment inflicted on Viacom for Janet Jackson’s "wardrobe malfunction." According to the F.C.C. complaint, one episode in this heterosexual marriage-promoting reality show included scenes in which "partygoers lick whipped cream from strippers’ bodies," and two female strippers "playfully spank" a man on all fours in his underwear. "Married by America" is gone now, but Fox remains the go-to network for Paris Hilton ("The Simple Life") and wife-swapping ("Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy"). None of this has prompted an uprising from the red-state Fox News loyalists supposedly so preoccupied with "moral values." They all gladly contribute fungible dollars to Fox culture by boosting their fair-and-balanced channel’s rise in the ratings. Some of these red staters may want to make love like porn stars besides. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) An ABC News poll two weeks before the election found that more Republicans than Democrats enjoy sex "a great deal." The Democrats’ new hero, Illinois Senator-elect Barack Obama, was assured victory once his original, ostentatiously pious Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race rather than defend his taste for "avant-garde" sex clubs. The 22 percent of voters who told pollsters that "moral values" were their top election issue – 79 percent of whom voted for Bush-Cheney – corresponds almost exactly to the number of voters (23 percent) who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. They are entitled to their culture, too, and their own entertainment industry. And their own show-biz scandals. The Los Angeles Times reported this summer that Paul Crouch, the evangelist who founded the largest Christian network, Trinity Broadcasting Network, vehemently denied a former employee’s accusation that the two had had a homosexual encounter – though not before paying the employee a $425,000 settlement. Not so incidentally, Trinity joined Gary Bauer and Fox News as prime movers in "Redeem the Vote," the Christian-rock alternative to MTV’s "Rock the Vote." But the distance between this hard-core red culture and the majority blue culture is perhaps best captured by Tom Coburn, the newly elected Republican senator from Oklahoma, lately famous for discovering "rampant" lesbianism in that state’s schools. As a congressman in 1997, Mr. Coburn attacked NBC for encouraging "irresponsible sexual behavior" and taking "network TV to an all-time low with full frontal nudity, violence and profanity being shown in our homes." The broadcast that prompted his outrage on behalf of "parents and decent-minded individuals everywhere" was the network’s prime-time showing of Steven Spielberg’s "Schindler’s List." It’s in the G.O.P.’s interest to pander to this far-right constituency – votes are votes – but you can be certain that a party joined at the hip to much of corporate America, Mr. Murdoch included, will take no action to curtail the blue culture these voters deplore. As Marshall Wittman, an independent-minded former associate of both Ralph Reed and John McCain, wrote before the election, "The only things the religious conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment." That amendment has never had a prayer of rounding up the two-thirds majority needed for passage and still doesn’t. Mr. Wittman echoes Thomas Frank, the author of "What’s the Matter With Kansas?," by common consent the year’s most prescient political book. "Values," Mr. Frank writes, "always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won." Under this perennial "trick," as he calls it, Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force the culture industry "to clean up its act" – until the votes are counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting capital gains and estate taxes. Mr. Murdoch and his fellow cultural barons – from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing C.E.O. of Viacom, to Richard Parsons, the Republican C.E.O. of Time Warner, to Jeffrey Immelt, the Bush-contributing C.E.O. of G.E. (NBC Universal) – are about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious entertainment. It’s they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, who actually set the cultural agenda Gary Bauer and company say they despise. But it’s not only the G.O.P.’s fealty to its financial backers that is predictive of how little cultural bang the "values" voters will get for their Bush-Cheney votes. At 78 percent, the nonvalues voters have far more votes than they do, and both parties will cater to that overwhelming majority’s blue tastes first and last. Their mandate is clear: The same poll that clocked "moral values" partisans at 22 percent of the electorate found that nearly three times as many Americans approve of some form of legal status for gay couples, whether civil unions (35 percent) or marriage (27 percent). Do the math and you’ll find that the poll also shows that for all the G.O.P.’s efforts to court Jews, the total number of Jewish Republican voters in 2004, while up from 2000, was still some 200,000 less than the number of gay Republican voters. When Robert Novak writes after the election that "the anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, socially conservative agenda is ascendant, and the G.O.P. will not abandon it anytime soon," you have to wonder what drug he is on. The abandonment began at the convention. Sam Brownback, the Kansas senator who champions the religious right, was locked away in an off-camera rally across town from Madison Square Garden. Prime time was bestowed upon the three biggest stars in post-Bush Republican politics: Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. All are supporters of gay rights and opponents of the same-sex marriage constitutional amendment. Only Mr. McCain calls himself pro-life, and he’s never made abortion a cause. None of the three support the Bush administration position on stem-cell research. When the No. 1 "moral values" movie star, Mel Gibson, condemned the Schwarzenegger-endorsed California ballot initiative expanding and financing stem-cell research, the governor and voters crushed him like a girlie-man. The measure carried by 59 percent, which is consistent with national polling on the issue. If the Republican party’s next round of leaders are all cool with blue culture, why should Democrats run after the red? Received Washington wisdom has it that the only Democrat who will ever be … read more »

Response:

    What adulterous president got a blow job in our White House, again?  That was a "Blue State" electorate pResident, right?  Yeah … that’s what I thought.  And who lied about it under oath?  Yeah, that’s right … that’s what I thought.  And who pardoned convicted drug traffickers, drug dealers, money launderers, corrupt government officials, and Marc Rich (who went on to do other great things like Oil For Fraud) … yeah, that’s what I thought.  There the blue state’s versions of moral values in one package.     Go dry up, weak little troll.  You lost … get over it.  Move On, Org!  Go to Florida and get your depression therapy.  The first step to recovery is to admit you (as a group) have a problem …  Right now, you’re going through what is known as "deflection and self-justification"  Using other people’s problems and weaknesses in order to feel better about yourselves and justify your (as a group) moral values.     Deflect all you want.  Justify yourselves all you want.  It still doesn’t change your party’s core values and how far-off they are from the center of the rest of the country.     You should have learned by now via the election that trying to blame someone else doesn’t strengthen your party or make them a more viable option. Lostpup198 "We will all be better citizens when voting records of our Congressmen are followed as carefully as scores of pro-football games." — Lou Erickson

Response:

>What adulterous president got a blow job >in our White House, again?  

You think there was only one? The Repair Guy http://repairguy1993.netfirms.com/

Response:

Take it easy, Tony — your guy won, get used to it.        Posted via TITANnews – Uncensored Newsgroups Access              >>>> at http://www.TitanNews.com <<<< -=Every Newsgroup – Anonymous, UNCENSORED, BROADBAND Downloads=-

Response:

>Take it easy, Tony — your >guy won, get used to it.

Yeah … I knew that you couldn’t come back with anything substantive to answer me with.  Fucking yip-yips. Lostpup198 "We will all be better citizens when voting records of our Congressmen are followed as carefully as scores of pro-football games." — Lou Erickson

Response:

>>What adulterous president got a blow job >in our White House, again?   >You think there was only one? >The Repair Guy

I’ve only seen proof of one. Lostpup198 "We will all be better citizens when voting records of our Congressmen are followed as carefully as scores of pro-football games." — Lou Erickson

Response:

[more delusional nonsense] Hey, Bruce, haven’t you heard? YOU LOST!!! Freep

Response:

Do you guys really think that’s a cogent response? "Hey – news flash: You lost"? I could show you an authentic photo of W serving sauteed babies to Osama bin Laden, and you’d just say "hey, get over it – you lost!" As if this election means we should stop fighting for what we believe?  Fat freakin’ chance. We’re not going to stop. Get over it.

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – > [more delusional nonsense] > Hey, Bruce, haven’t you heard? YOU LOST!!! > Freep

Response:

Keep fighting. I approve. Keep the "vote for us, you stupid morons" act going, too. That way, we get to win in 06 and 08 as well. Freep

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -> Do you guys really think that’s a cogent response? > "Hey – news flash: You lost"? > I could show you an authentic photo of W serving sauteed babies to Osama bin > Laden, and you’d just say "hey, get over it – you lost!" > As if this election means we should stop fighting for what we believe? Fat > freakin’ chance. > We’re not going to stop. > Get over it. > [more delusional nonsense] > Hey, Bruce, haven’t you heard? YOU LOST!!! > Freep

Response:

"Fearless Freep" offered: > Keep fighting. I approve. Keep the "vote for us, you stupid morons" act > going, too. That way, we get to win in 06 and 08 as well.>

Freep nails it: "We hate all of you dumbass hick SOBs tyhat live between the Delawarer  River and the Sierra Nvadas, but vote Demo-Lib for higher taxes on rich bastards making more than $30k a year, an gutted antique military, public lands  confication so our radical green allies can go backpacking without you rabble botering them on your snowmobiles, trial lawyers getting fat off bullshit lawsuits (like our poster boy, John Edwards) and best yet, your choice of homos or lebians living in wedded bliss right next door!"

Response:

: :     What adulterous president got a blow job in our White House, again?  That : was a "Blue State" electorate pResident, right?  Yeah … that’s what I : thought.  And who lied about it under oath?  Yeah, that’s right … that’s what : I thought.  And who pardoned convicted drug traffickers, drug dealers, money : launderers, corrupt government officials, and Marc Rich (who went on to do : other great things like Oil For Fraud) … yeah, that’s what I thought.  There : the blue state’s versions of moral values in one package.  Which is exactly why Clintons blowjob is always res-erected time and time again, to push such propaganda stereotype hype crap.  Close to half of the USA believes that  "moral values" go beyond just whether one is  sexually pristeen or not. These people have a wider definition that includes such things as sapping the resources of foreign countries whilst giving the native occupants litttle in return,  lying to the public about the reasons for a particular war, polluting the environment, doing next to nothing when it comes to steering our energy policies away from oil or nuclear, minority rights, selling weapons to the Iranians, sending our troops into battle for a bullshit war without properly designed humvees, spreading slander and malicious falsities about others, manipulating the populace through fearmongering and trumped up issues, ( the list goes on and on)  Moral values?  Faugh!!!!! :     Go dry up, weak little troll.  You lost … get over it.  Move On, Org!  Go : to Florida and get your depression therapy. Which in propagandist speak translates to ‘go away’ :  The first step to recovery is to : admit you (as a group) have a problem …  Right now, you’re going through what : is known as "deflection and self-justification"  Using other people’s problems : and weaknesses in order to feel better about yourselves and justify your (as a : group) moral values. You mean like taunting someone about their beloved sisters suicide? :     Deflect all you want.  Justify yourselves all you want. That’s about all the repugnicon propagandists ever do,,, deflect and justify. However, in the arena of moral values, their arguments are pretty thin IMHO  When one adds it all up, it pretty much boils down to one flimsy repugnicon propagandist overly hyped myth,,, *Democrats don’t believe in oppressing gays, so they’re morally depraved*  Absolutely brilliant!!!!  Let’s just see how long that one will fly,  especially now that it’s ben flagged. : It still doesn’t : change your party’s core values and how far-off they are from the center of the : rest of the country.  The rest of the country?  You’re making some pretty big assumptions about the values of all of the rest of the people that didn’t even vote,  aren’t you?  I guess it’s good that there are psychics sych as yourself that can know such things though eh?  Here’s an idear. Why even have elections when all we really need to do is have Tony use psychic divinition to determine the core values of America for us. typical  propandists trick,      accuse the adversary of your worst shortcoming.  It’s no secret that the Democratic party is the party of giving liberally.  Do you know what this means to give? And how do you deflect and justify not giving?  Turn the word liberal into a bad word?  bad bad liberals, they believe in society as a whole helping the less fortunate,,, how morally depraved they are!!! :     You should have learned by now via the election that trying to blame : someone else doesn’t strengthen your party or make them a more viable option.  Why not? It worked damn well for Rove and the repugnicon propagandists. Might that be what you’re really afraid of? Welcome to the top,, now there’s nowhere to go but down. : Lotsapoop198 : : "We will all be better citizens when voting records of our Congressmen are : followed as carefully as scores of pro-football games." : : — Lou Erickson :

Response: