Oh, and about Wall-E: today’s comments on Frank Rich’s column remind me that I’ve been meaning to note, the most interesting creative choice in the movie is the decision to present Fred Willard in live-action as Shelby Forthright, the long-gone CEO of Buy n Large.

Why? I assume it’s to emphasize the notion that the people who trashed the planet are people. Like us. Which is probably also why the only after-the-credits gag you get is the Buy n Large logo appearing on the screen.

An earnest commenter is trawling the blogs trying to find out just what Barack Obama meant by “mental distress,” as in “I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy….”

Well, earnest commenter, it is possible that Obama means “mental distress” to encompass some kind of qualm or concern short of mental illness. In which case Obama is only “restating existing law”; there is no legal late-term abortion on the grounds of “cold feet,” “the screaming heebie-geebies,” or whatever synonym for “hysterically irresponsible woman-feelings” you’d like to use.

But look again: that can’t be true, because the Obama quotation clearly says, “I think it has to be a serious physical issue….” Now, it is possible that Obama understands, say, paranoid schizophrenia, because it has a chemical basis, to be a “serious physical issue” rather than a mental illness.

But that would certainly be an unconventional use of the language.

So what can Obama mean? It seems he doesn’t mean anything, much, beyond saying, “I certainly don’t support abortions on frivolous grounds.”—i.e., “It is not just a matter of feeling blue.” (Wait, is that a slam on depressives?)

To be clear, I fully expect (for whatever my full expectations are worth) that Obama as president would appoint judges and justices who support a woman’s right to choose an abortion. I firmly believe this is dog-whistle language.

Of course, defenses of the form, “he doesn’t really mean it, he’s just signalling a constituency he’d like to court and later ignore,” when made on behalf of modern Republicans using terms like, say, “states’ rights,” don’t elicit my sympathy.

You know, I’ve been spending a portion of my time over the last few weeks mulling over the intriguing thesis that the rise of the Republican Party in the South happened because southerners got richer—i.e., that it’s rich people voting their self-interest that accounts for Republicanism in the South, and it’s nothing to do with (say) George Wallace splitting the Democratic Party and delivering the racist part to the GOP. And mulling this thesis requires careful examination of voting patterns, and scatterplots, and regressions, and concerns about ecological fallacies, and so forth.

And then Jesse Helms up and dies, unleashing from the depths of Nexis the long history of his views on race:

• “The nation has been hypnotized by the swaying and gesturing of the watusi and the frug.”
  – WRAL Viewpoint, 1966
• “They should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to marry a Negro.”
  – In response to Duke University students holding a vigil after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, 1968
• “I’ve been portrayed as a caveman by some. That’s not true. I’m a conservative progressive, and that means I think all men are equal, be they slants, beaners or niggers.”
  – February 6, 1985
• “All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction.”
  – After Mexicans protested his visit in 1986
• “I’m going to make her cry. I’m going to sing Dixie until she cries.”
  –of his new colleague, Senator Carol Moseley-Braun

And there was this television ad, which helped him pull ahead of Harvey Gantt:

I know, I know: but if you look at the numbers, it’s class, not race. I mean, Helms’s own advisor said so: “Well there is nothing racial about the campaign.” What advisor, you ask? Why, Charlie Black. Yes, McCain top advisor Charlie Black. Well done, Senator McCain.

But wait, if you look at these regressions, you might understand that modern Republicanism truly owes nothing to the racist past of the segregationist South!….

via Tom S., among other places.

On 5 July 1855, the day after the publication of Leaves of Grass, literary critics began thinking about how best to imitate Whitman.  Few are the authors who inspire the flattery of imitation more than he!  Few are the critics who are able to resist the urge to flatter any else but he!  Few are the sentences in which I’ll continue to enact the enthused imitations I mock!

Think I’m making this up?  The following might be far less successful than zunguzungu’s found Williams, but the poemified version of the anonymous review of Leaves of Grass from the September 1855 edition of The United States Review certainly is telling.

In a way, this is an extreme version of a common critical vice: read too much of this or that to the exclusion of all else and you’ll start to inhabit the voice you purport to study.  The linked example may be Derrida, but read a few books on Joyce and Faulkner and you’ll see the same unhealthy attitude abounds.  But I digress.

On to the ersatz American heart of the body poetic!

Walt Whitman and His Poems

An American bard at last!
One of the roughs, large, proud, affectionate, eating, drinking, and breeding,
His costume manly and free,
His face sunburnt and bearded,
His postures strong and erect,
His voice bringing hope and prophecy to the generous races of young and old.
We shall cease shamming and be what we really are.
We shall start an athletic and defiant literature.
We realize now how it is and what was most lacking.
The interior American republic shall also be declared free and independent.

For all our intellectual people,
Followed by their books, poems, essays, editorials, lectures, tuitions, and criticisms,
Dress by London and Paris modes, receive what is received there,
Obey the authorities,
Settle disputes by the old tests,
Keep out of rain and sun,
Retreat to the shelter of houses and schools,
Trim their hair, shave, touch not the earth barefoot,
And enter not the sea except in a complete bathing dress.
One sees unmistakably genteel persons,
Traveled, college-learned, used to being served by servants,
Conversing without heat or vulgarity,
Supported on chairs or walking through handsomely-carpeted parlors,
Or along shelves bearing well-bound volumes.

Where in American literature is the first show of America?
Where are the gristle and beards, and broad breasts, and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the souls of the people love?
Where is the majesty of the federal mother, seated with more than antique grace, calm, just, indulgent to her brood of children, calling them around her, regarding the large and the young and the older with perfect impartiality?
Where is the vehement growth of our cities?
Where is the spirit of the strong rich life of the American mechanic, farmer, sailor, hunter, and miner?
Where is the huge composite of all other nations, cast in a fresher and brawnier matrix, passing adolescence, and needed this day, live and arrogant, to lead the marches of the world?

Self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself all attributes of his country, steps Walt Whitman into literature!
Talking like a man unaware that there was ever hitherto such a production as a book, or such as being as a writer,
Every move of him has the free play of the muscle of one who never knew what it was to feel that he stood in the presence of a superior.
Every word that falls from his mouth shows silent disdain and defiance of old theories and forms.
Every phrase announces new laws—not once do his lips unclose except in conformity to them.
He makes audacious and native uses of his own body and soul.
He recreates poetry with the elements at hand.
He imbues it with himself as he is,
Disorderly, fleshy, and sensual,
Lover of things,
Yet lover of men and women above the whole of other objects in the universe.

His work is to be achieved by unusual methods!

Not a whisper comes out of him of the old stock talk of rhyme and poetry,
Not the first recognition of gods or goddesses or Greece or Rome.
No breath of Europe,
Or her monarchies,
Or her priestly conventions,
Or her gentlemen and ladies,
Or her idea of caste,
Seems ever to have fanned his face or been inhaled into his lungs.
In their stead pour vast and fluid the fresh mentality of this mighty age and the realities of this mighty continent and the sciences and inventions discoveries of this present world.
Not geology, nor mathematics, nor chemistry, nor navigation, nor astronomy, nor anatomy, nor physiology, nor engineering,
Is more true to itself
Than Whitman is to them.

On this day in 1966, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Now, quoting from the National Security Archive:

The U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a law ensuring public access to U.S. government records. FOIA carries a presumption of disclosure; the burden is on the government - not the public - to substantiate why information may not be released. Upon written request, agencies of the United States government are required to disclose those records, unless they can be lawfully withheld from disclosure under one of nine specific exemptions in the FOIA. This right of access is ultimately enforceable in federal court.

LBJ only reluctantly signed the law. He held no signing ceremony, which was unusual, given that he typically enjoyed pageantry almost as much as patronage. And he issued a signing statement (pdf) that undercut FOIA. I suppose it’s not surprising that the president wasn’t a huge fan of a law that offered the American people unprecedented access to government documents. More surprising? Republican Congressman Donald Rumsfeld (pdf) was on the side of the angels, championing FOIA — though only in the wake of LBJ’s landslide in the 1964 election. Approximately a decade later, Rumsfeld and his buddy, Dick Cheney, would spearhead the Ford administration’s losing effort to contain FOIA’s growth.

If Rumsfeld’s support for the bill was politically motivated, the real hero of the story was a Congressman from Sacramento, John Moss. Moss had led hearings in the mid 1950s on the perils of government secrecy. Ten years after that, in 1965, he sponsored the FOIA bill. At the time, Moss struggled against every agency in the federal apparatus, including the Department of Justice, which threatened that the Supreme Court would strike down FOIA (pdf) even if it somehow became law.

Despite the executive branch’s misgivings and roadblocks set up by entrenched bureaucratic interests, the Senate passed its version of Moss’s bill in the spring of 1966. The Johnson administration — nudged by a young press secretary named Bill Moyers — then began looking for ways to hop on the bandwagon before it completely filled. White House counsel Milton Semer, for example, suggested that LBJ could spin FOIA as an effort to cut through the red tape (pdf) in Washington. The Justice Department, meanwhile, worked directly with Moss, watering down his bill by exempting many different kinds of documents from FOIA and offering “broader protection for the internal working papers of executive agencies.”

The House voted on Moss’s bill on June 20, passing it unanimously. Johnson then signed FOIA into law on this day in 1966. Years later, Bill Moyers recalled:

I knew that LBJ had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the signing… He hated the very idea of the Freedom of Information Act; hated the thought of journalists rummaging in government closets and opening government files; hated them challenging the official view of reality. He dug in his heels and even threatened to pocket veto the bill after it reached the White House…He relented and signed ‘the damned thing,’ as he called it (I’m paraphrasing what he actually said …).

So, on Independence Day, we should celebrate our freedom to gather information about the government, even as the government gathers information about us.

It’s not too late to get one; maybe it’ll look nice enough you’ll forget how mad you are.

Oh, you didn’t hear?

Now, I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term.

Via Ari, who is in the wilds, and everywhere but particularly here.

Courtesy of The House Next Door.

Yglesias quotes the Washington Post saying, “the fact remains that no one can claim with certainty that his or her communications were monitored.”

Are they calling Lawrence Wright a liar?

Lawrence Wright is a reporter for the New Yorker Magazine, and an author of the bestselling book on Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower. He’s also one of the few people in America who can say definitively that he was targeted by the U.S. Government’s warrantless wiretappping program, first exposed on the front page of The New York Times.

He tells the story of how he knew his phone calls were listened to…and how he then went on to question the head of US intelligence, Mike McConnell, about it.

Lawrence Wright first wrote about his experiences in an article in The New Yorker, called “The Spymaster.”

On this day in 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg concluded with a Union victory, leading directly to Shelby Foote’s finest hour. Although I know enough to be skeptical, and to carp, cavil, and, most of all, quibble rather more knowledgeably than the next chap, I’m still wowed by Ken Burns’s ability to evoke the horror of war by weaving together footage of talking heads and a series of still photographs, mediocre paintings, and an empty field, all backed by dramatic readings of primary sources, now-iconic music, and David McCullough’s spare narration. And speaking of masculinity and patriotism, I should know better than to let this bring tears to my eyes. [Sniff, sniff.] Damn you Ken Burns! You and your moving pictures!

(UPDATE: See below for details.)

I write a post about reverse torture porn and not a day later we learn Christopher Hitchens waterboarded himself. Coincidence? Of course it is. But we can use the conservative commentary on Hitchens to test my, um, pornographic thesis. We begin, as you do, with Michelle Malkin:

I can see agreeing to waterboarding for an article like the one Hitchens was writing.

I believe Mrs. Sade and Sacher-Masoch could weigh in here, but I’ll skip the overtly randy stuff in favor of the more substantial material produced by her commenters. To wit:

The question will always be, and there really is no avoiding it until we develop a true mind-reading technology: is our moral revulsion against torture justified that when weighed against the possible number of deaths we can avoid by using it, we will always argue against its use? [...] But what if the object in question we are seeking is a nuclear bomb hidden in our city? Suddenly we are on the receiving end of the blast and the calculus changes drastically.

You can’t lead those horses into these waters any faster. See?

The enemy believes that we are weak, & Hitchens & his ilk are to blame. It will come to a point, & soon me thinks, when real force will be required. And then it shall come to pass that the unpleasant realities of preemption need to be replaced with the even more unpleasant realities of vengeance […] & the Hitchens of the world will cease to be relevant.

You have to love the Old Testament rhetoric of what is, really, Frank Castle fury. This commenter wants the day to come to pass when on thee and thou with His flesh-hooks rains carbuncle distemper and harrows everyone who has ever disagreed with him ever. The only way to prevent — if that’s your bag, which clearly it isn’t some people’s — this disaster? Torture fantasies:

[T]hose photos may have showed what looked to be electrodes […] no current was passed through, nor is there any evidence of same [...] and I don’t care if appearances are shocking to the “sensitive” eyes of the all caring [liberals].

How many times has he rehearsed this bit? Stripping down the prisoner, rudely affixing the electrodes to his genitals, coyly fiddling the switch, &c. How are we not in the realm of fantasy when people affirm, on the basis of a picture, whether a current has ever passed through wires? (Short of “still in the plastic,” I mean.) But I’m meant to connect these apocalyptic fantasies and the sexualized means of their avoidance to John McCain, aren’t I? As luck would have it, someone beat me to the punch:

Debating that waterboarding is torture, when we have seen the depravity and cruelty displayed by our enemy, is just plain stupidity. Waterboarding, as a means of extracting vital information regarding our security is not torture, it is a means to an end and that means, whilst it may give some terrorist — who by the way, is hell-bent on our destruction — a few heart palpitations, and even may, gasp, feel he is drowning, he will be none the worse for his experience. Unlike John McCain, who cannot raise his arms above his shoulders, due to his injuries.

I am so glad I am not a liberal woman. Who could be attracted to these weak-kneed, ineffectual wussies who get limp at the thought of how awful these nasty Americans are for waterboarding.

Who loves SAT analogies? I love SAT analogies! But this one is really tough, so I’ll need you to help me out. At the thought of torture:

liberal : limp :: conservative : ____

Granted, this commenter wouldn’t have scored 800 anyway, what with “A is not torture because B and C are worse” passing for logic to her mind.

All of which isn’t to say that some people aren’t still satisfied with the role of torturer — “IF THAT MAKES YOU HOT SEE THIS! — only that it seems the McCain candidacy compels more than a few people to diversify their libidinal investments. (In more ways than they think.)

UPDATE: This comment concerning the war crimes prosecution of Japanese for waterboarding must be shared:

[T]he Japanese were considered war criminals, you effing morons, not for the act of waterboarding but for torturing to the point of drowning, and then going all the way and drowning or otherwise killing the prisoners.

We, OTOH, try to scare the carp out of the person being interrogated by giving him the sensation of, and the fear of, being drowned.

But how, pray tell, did it get in there?