Josh Marshall zeigt uns heute, dass es manchmal einfach nur nötig ist, Aussagen zu vervollständigen:

Chris Suellentrop has a half bizarre/half chilling report from the campaign trail in Florida last night. It's about what seems to be a new feature of the Bush rallies: the pledge of allegiance to President Bush.

Here's Chris ...

"I want you to stand, raise your right hands," and recite "the Bush Pledge," said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States."

I know the Bush-Cheney campaign occasionally requires the people who attend its events to sign loyalty oaths, but this was the first time I have ever seen an audience actually stand and utter one. Maybe they've replaced the written oath with a verbal one.

I believe in one father, one son and one other son, who's now governor of Florida, who will take over after this son retires from office in 2009.

James Wolcott zeigt die vielleicht subtilste aller Methoden im politischen Kampf: die Identifizierung, Isolierung, Benennung und Katalogisierung von rhetorischen Manövern des Gegners:

"John Kerry is a sphincter. Okay, that's a bit juvenile."
--Jonah Goldberg, NRO [kein link].

"I suppose in John Kerry's world good diplomacy lets the boys in the bar finish raping the girl for fear of causing a fuss. Okay, that was unfair."
--Jonah Goldberg, NRO [kein link].

This slimeball rhetorical device should become known as the Jonah Goldberg Limited Takeback, in which you assert something vulgar and provocative, then acknowledge you stepped over the line without withdrawing the original slur. Sort of like spitting at someone, then saying, "Gee, I guess my saliva went a little too far."

Eine Alternative wäre gewesen, die grausliche Analogie weiter zu spinnen: Von der Vergewaltigung weißt du nur vom Hörensagen; die anderen bringen dich dazu, zuerst jemanden in die Bar zu schicken, damit der feststellt, ob da wirklich jemand vergewaltigt wird. Der sieht sich gründlich um, findet keine Anzeichen, möchte die Situation aber noch beobachten. Daraufhin stellst du dem Typ, den du der Vergewaltigung bezichtigst, ein Ultimatum: er soll auf der Stelle die Bar verlassen, oder du wirst die Konsequenzen ziehen. Dann schlägst du ihm den Schädel ein, zertrümmerst die Bar, reißt der Frau, die angeblich vergewaltigt wurde, die Kleider vom Leib und zwingst sie, deine Freunde und dich einen nach dem anderen "ranzulassen" (wie du dich ausdrückst) und dabei laut zu schreien: "Ich mache das aus freiem Willen und weil ich es geil finde!" Gleichzeitig hast du vergessen, dich um einen Freund von dir zu kümmern, der in einer anderen Bar gerade an einer Alkoholvergiftung stirbt, nachdem du ihn zu einer Sauftour überredet hast, um ihn von seiner Freundin loszubekommen, auf die du einen anderen Freund von dir gehetzt hast, der mit ihr aber alleine nicht fertig wird. Nicht zu vergessen, dass du bis oben hin voll bist, nichts mehr siehst, nicht mehr klar denken kannst, nicht mehr weißt wo du bist, was du tust, und wer deine Freunde sind und wer nicht und dass du eigentlich nur noch nach Hause ins Bett willst und dich fürchtest, an deinem eigenen Erbrochenen zu Ersticken. Ganz abgesehen von deinen zahlreichen angepissten Freunden, die dir im Schlaf Hakenkreuze auf die Stirn malen werden.

War das jetzt infantil, oder gar unfair? You decide!

Die heutige Doppellektion kommt von einer Korrespondentin und einem Korrespondenten von Laura Rozens blog War and Piece. Zuerst kommt Karen Mickleson zu Wort, die auf dem Feld der politische Psychologie arbeitet und uns erklärt, warum es wichtig ist, nicht nur den Inhalt, sondern auch die genaue Intention von Aussagen zu prüfen:

First, I quote a bit of painful truth from Bob Herbert from the NYT 9/24/04:

The president said he is personally optimistic and he delivered an upbeat assessment of conditions in Iraq..... If you spend more than a little time immersed in the world according to Karl Rove, you'll find that words lose even the remotest connection to reality. They become nothing more than tools designed to achieve political ends. So it's not easy to decipher what the president believes about Iraq....This is scary....the world needs more from the president of the United States than the fool's gold of his empty utterances.

When Bush lies, he is not . . . addressing people who read news or who think or who look for sense in the world. He is speaking to those who want relief from thinking, from hard decisions, from complex judgments; he's speaking to those who want a likable authority to take care of the hard stuff. He's speaking to the "my president, right or wrong" folks. He's speaking to those whose need for reassurance trumps the need for truth.

In fact, when Bush lies, he's not speaking at all. He's repeating the "empty utterances" of Rove's carefully crafted message.

I pray Kerry's handlers help him understand that the debate will have little to do with content, and everything to do with crafting the impression of an alternate "dad" whose aggression and firmness can fulfill fantasies of retaliation and imaginary protective safety.

Merke: Worte können informieren, agitieren, kalmieren. Jetzt kommt Chris Lovell zu Wort, ein Student der griechischen Literatur, der uns zeigt, dass Thucydides bereits alles gesagt hat, was es über Politik zu sagen gibt und dass man ihm mehrmals pro Jahr lesen und immer bei sich haben sollte. [Ich persönlich empfehle ihn allen Leuten, die ich treffe, habe ich ihn selber aber noch immer nicht gelesen, obwohl Thucydides es inzwischen sogar bis in die Präambel der EU-Verfassung geschafft hat.]:

This reminded me of a passage from the Greek historian Thucydides, describing what happens to language during wartime:

To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as thoughtless aggression was now considered the courage of a loyal ally; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; the ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot sucessfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one's blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of doing any wrong at all. Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership...

--Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 382

Some of this seems quite Rovian. The idea that "the ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action" sounds a lot like the flip-flop accusation levelled against Kerry. What's chilling is that Thucydides was describing political behavior during a civil war . . .

Der heutige Instruktor in der Kunst des politischen Kampfes, ist publius, der Autor des blogs "legal fiction" (Pardon my Shrillness - via Brian Leiter). Die hier angewandte Taktik ist eine Kombination aus Verleih-dem-Feind-einen-Preis, der "der angebliche Feind meines Feindes ist in Wirklichkeit der Freund meines Feindes, trotzdem zitiere ich ihn, als wäre er [der angebliche Feind meines Feindes] mein Freund" Taktik und der guten alten Gegenüberstellung von Zitaten:

And last thing, G[gelöscht] R[gelöscht] wins the Hermann Goering Award today. If you’ll remember Goering’s famous line:

Gilbert [the interviewer]: "There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."

Göring: "Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

And now, G[kein link] R[zu ihm]:

This is behavior that is absolutely unacceptable coming from a Presidential campaign in wartime, and it's not an isolated incident but part of a pattern of such behavior. Joe Lockhart should apologize for these remarks, and Kerry should fire him. Otherwise you're going to hear a lot of people questioning Kerry's patriotism. And they'll be right to.

Diesmal beobachten wird Noam Chomsky in Mother Jones (The Resort to Force) bei der doppelten Verwendung des Wortes revolutionär. Merke: durch die Verwendung eines emotional hoch aufgeladenen positiv besetzten Wortes die Aufmerksamkeit des Publikums auf sich ziehen; es dann ein zweites Mal benutzen, diesmal um klar zu machen, dass die angemessene Verwendung desselben hier nur negativ erfolgen kann; wahlweise auch umgekehrt. [An dieser Stelle möchte und sollte ich mich für all die schlimmen Sachen entschuldigen, die ich, unter dem Einfluss der letzten Überbleibsel der Doktrin des vital center und ohne eine Ahnung zu haben wovon ich rede, über ihn gesagt habe.]

The 2002 National Security Strategy, and its implementation in Iraq, are widely regarded as a watershed in international affairs. "The new approach is revolutionary," Henry Kissinger wrote, approving of the doctrine but with tactical reservations and a crucial qualification: it cannot be "a universal principle available to every nation." The right of aggression is to be reserved for the US and perhaps its chosen clients. We must reject the most elementary of moral truisms, the principle of universality -- a stand usually concealed in professions of virtuous intent and tortured legalisms.

Arthur Schlesinger agreed that the doctrine and implementation were "revolutionary," but from a quite different standpoint. As the first bombs fell on Baghdad, he recalled FDR's words following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, "a date which will live in infamy." Now it is Americans who live in infamy, he wrote, as their government adopts the policies of imperial Japan. He added that George Bush had converted a "global wave of sympathy" for the US into a "global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism."

Abermals zeigt uns Josh Marshall die Kraft der historischen Analogie:

A generous way to put it -- the lede of Dana Milbank's piece in tomorrow's Post: "President Bush and leading Republicans are increasingly charging that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and others in his party are giving comfort to terrorists and undermining the war in Iraq -- a line of attack that tests the conventional bounds of political rhetoric."

Can we re-check the sprinkler system in the Reichstag?

Herr Mark Kaplan aus der Charlottenstraße ist ein feiner Kerl. Er zitiert die Postmoderne rauf und runter, seine Adresse ist die des Gregor Samsa aus der Verwandlung, er erwähnt Bruno Schulz und Paul Celan, legt sich mit allen möglichen Leuten an, zitiert in überreichem Umfang Žižek (den ich anfangs - wie so viele andere - nicht gemocht, später aber lieben gelernt habe), kennt Negri (Exhibit H.)- hat aber nicht allzu viel für ihn übrig - und schafft es, aus Lacan Sinn herauszupressen. Nicht zu vergessen, dass er Tarkowskis Verfilmung von Solaris als einen seiner Lieblingsfilme angibt. Da er aber auch ein faustkämpfender Linker ist, zeigt er heute ein Manöver, das man allgemein den "linken Haken des Anderen" nennt.

Im folgenden (Zizek's neck & Other matters) versucht er eine Erklärung für die zahllosen nicht ausschließlich aus den USA stammenden Leute zu finden, die hauptsächlich in Form von blogs (aber auch in den traditionellen Medien) Jagd auf anti-Amerikanismus machen; eine Theorie der ideologisch gleichgeschalteten, sich regelmäßig auch "links" nennenden, freiwilligen Diskursfeuerwehr. Die Räume, in denen sie ihre Ziele finden represent the alien gaze, the point from which Americans appear strange to themselves. Inspecting BBC or French coverage, they catch, as it were, a view of their face in profile. They are seen from a place from which they cannot see themselves, so that a portion of their being escapes them, like the outside of a mirror, producing a kind of symbolic castration.

It is this gaze which they wish to deny/ recuperate/ co-opt, so as to remain inside their own Imaginary space. They would prefer a world where nobody is looking at them from a position (cultural or political) external to them, and the only way to do this, presumably, is the cultural and political domination of the globe.

Und wo wir gerade dabei sind kommt via Brian Leiter (The Warlords of America) folgendes gerade richtig (John Pilger, The Warlords of America):

On 6 May last, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution which, in effect, authorised a "pre-emptive" attack on Iran. The vote was 376-3. Undeterred by the accelerating disaster in Iraq, Republicans and Democrats, wrote one commentator, "once again joined hands to assert the responsibilities of American power."

The joining of hands across America's illusory political divide has a long history. The native Americans were slaughtered, the Philippines laid to waste and Cuba and much of Latin America brought to heel with "bipartisan" backing. Wading through the blood, a new breed of popular historian, the journalist in the pay of rich newspaper owners, spun the heroic myths of a supersect called Americanism, which advertising and public relations in the 20th century formalised as an ideology, embracing both conservatism and liberalism.

In the modern era, most of America's wars have been launched by liberal Democratic presidents – Harry Truman in Korea, John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson in Vietnam, Jimmy Carter in Afghanistan. The fictitious "missile gap" was invented by Kennedy's liberal New Frontiersmen as a rationale for keeping the cold war going. In 1964, a Democrat-dominated Congress gave President Johnson authority to attack Vietnam, a defenceless peasant nation offering no threat to the United States. Like the non-existent WMDs in Iraq, the justification was a non-existent "incident" in which, it was said, two North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked an American warship. More than three million deaths and the ruin of a once bountiful land followed.

[...]

It is the continuation of a project that began more than 500 years ago. The privileges of "discovery and conquest" granted to Christopher Columbus in 1492, in a world the pope considered "his property to be disposed according to his will," have been replaced by another piracy transformed into the divine will of Americanism and sustained by technological progress, notably that of the media. "The threat to independence in the late 20th century from the new electronics," wrote Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, "could be greater than was colonialism itself. We are beginning to learn that decolonisation was not the termination of imperial relationships but merely the extending of a geopolitical web which has been spinning since the Renaissance. The new media have the power to penetrate more deeply into a 'receiving' culture than any previous manifestation of western technology."

[...]

Supremacy is the essence of Americanism; only the veil changes or slips. In 1976, the Democrat Jimmy Carter announced "a foreign policy that respects human rights." In secret, he backed Indonesia's genocide in East Timor and established the mujahedin in Afghanistan as a terrorist organisation designed to overthrow the Soviet Union, and from which came the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It was the liberal Carter, not Reagan, who laid the ground for George W Bush. In the past year, I have interviewed Carter's principal foreign policy overlords – Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser, and James Schlesinger, his defence secretary. No blueprint for the new imperialism is more respected than Brzezinski's. Invested with biblical authority by the Bush gang, his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives describes American priorities as the economic subjugation of the Soviet Union and the control of central Asia and the Middle East.

His analysis says that "local wars" are merely the beginning of a final conflict leading inexorably to world domination by the US. "To put it in a terminology that harkens back to a more brutal age of ancient empires," he writes, "the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together."

Was tun, wenn der Gegner die Faschismuskeule benutzt (oder die Walze von der Faschismuskeule)? Abermals zeigt die Wonkette, wie man sich erfolgreich zur Wehr setzt: Das Time Magazine wärmt die alte Semmel von Vizepräsident Cheneys "geheimem" Versteck auf und bekommt dafür den Faschismusknüppel zwischen die Füße geworfen: "TIME magazine would have revealed secret the location of Anne Frank, if they knew it."

Unsere furchtlose Kämpferin für die Freiheit des Zynismus reagiert auf die einzig richtige Art auf eine Faschismuskeule zu reagieren - indem sie einfach mit einer größeren kommt: It's a great analogy, because Cheney has also been in hiding from the Nazis -- the "energy policy Nazis," he calls them -- and he's been keeping a diary. Of course, instead of containing things like, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart," it's just a collection of Halliburton contracts and some doodles of Antonin Scalia shooting ducks.

We expect HarperCollins to be publishing it in October.

Ana Marie Cox (nom de guerre "Wonkette") zeigt, wie man das Gelernte anwendet ...

"He seemed to be able to evoke the World War II experience better than the guys who actually were in combat."
... und mit Neuem kombiniert ...
Yes, having a buddy bleed to death in your arms can dampen your enthusiasm for a war. But when your toughest wartime assignment is to keep your tan even, you don't really mind threatening to start another one.

... sowie eine Variation davon: Die Bildunterschrift ("Reservoir Running Dog Capitalists").

Belle Waring macht vor, wie man mit den Rechten umzuspringen hat:

We face scheming murderers with calm defiance.
They have soulless evil, we have self-reliance.
They butcher civilians, their cruelty shows.
Our steel, true steel, is tempered by blows.

Wir lernen: das Zitat ist die wirkungsvollste Waffe im politischen Kampf. Noch dazu bei so eloquenten Gegnern.