Saturday, March 15, 2003

Ace See Hell You - Doug Grow, sanctimonious as ever, held forth on the Lindner flap last week in the Strib, expressing muffled indignance that the ACLU would take Lindner's side in the debate (as well they should):

Tigue, a First Amendment lawyer best known for defending adult bookstores, strip clubs and pornographers, not only is willing to defend Lindner ("if he pays me"), he stands firmly for the rights of Lindner's constituents.

"It was more than a year ago that he called the Dalai Lama a cult leader," Tigue said. "That means the people in the last election elected him knowing full well he'd made such an idiotic remark. It's clear [that] the majority in his district don't mind being represented by an ignorant bigot."

Writing is rewriting; I have to wonder what Tigue said before Grow selected the quotes that best reflected his own thesis.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the Lindner flap lately. Yes, he's ignorant. But let's look at some of the claims the left is making, via Grow:

There is no question that Lindner's remarks are absurd, even hateful.

Hateful? Please, Doug - where does ignorance become "hateful?"

But why are DFL House members seeking to drag Lindner's sorry mind before the House Ethics Committee? Why not let him choke on his own free speech?

According to Rep. Frank Hornstein, DFL-Minneapolis, one of the things that motivated the DFL caucus to push for an ethics hearing and a censure was the behavior of Republican representatives.

"The silence Monday is what most concerned us," said Hornstein, the grandson of Nazi concentration camp survivors. "What really struck me is that he is saying that his beliefs are common to the beliefs of the majority." Hornstein said he has not heard Republican House members repudiate that notion.

So you get in trouble for what you don't say? Let's look at the very likely case, that the GOP wants to move on to the many important issues facing our state and let the whole stupid Lindner flap fade with time (as such things always do) - that means "his beliefs" are "common to the beliefs of the majority?"

Mr. Hornstein: What an incredibly, mind-numbingly stupid thing to say.

Here's what Lindner said, and what it means:

• "Gays and Lesbians were not persecuted during the Holocaust". Untrue, obviously, and based on a faulty conclusion drawn from the dust-flap of a book about the homoerotic aspects of Naziism. And yet DFLer after DFLer has queued up to call the statement "homophobic". Homophobia (an etymologically suspect word - "Homosexual" means "attraction to those who are the same as you" in the original Greek". Homophobia would be "Fear of those who are the same as you...") should mean "genuine hatred of gays". But according to many gay activists, the very act of being "uncomfortable" around gays is, itself, homophobic.
• "We don't want the US to turn into Africa". To hear the Afro-American DFL's response, you'd think Lindner was wearing a pointy hood and a white sheet.Yet read his comment carefully; he didn't criticize africans, he pointed out that Africa is beridden with AIDS. Now, does that mean gays should be removed from the Human Right Act? That's another argument. But the fact that the Minneapolis DFL contingent are piling on Lindner as a "racist" for pointing out something that happens, inconveniently, to be true (Africa is plagued with AIDS!) is doublespeak of the lowest order.

I think I've changed my mind since the last time I posted about Lindner. While he doesn't represent the Republican Party I want to see, I'll support him; he may be ignorant and ill-informed, but he's no less so than many of those who oppose him for the most specious political reasons.

And the good news from all this; the main reason the DFL is piling on Lindner with such aplomb is that they really have nothing else going on. Quick - name a DFL legislative initiative. Any initiative. "Harping on GOP initiatives" doesn't count as an initiative, by the way. Throw those out, and there really is no answer, is there?

So the good news is that the DFL has no game. The bad news is that they're taking it out on the First Amendment.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/15/2003 12:18:24 PM

Martin Sheen - Fundamentalist Minister- It's easy to forget, amid the protests and pronouncements and publicity, that Martin Sheen was once an excellent actor.

Andrew Stuttaford has a fascinating profile of the guy, his beliefs, and why he became what he is, in the National Review:

His authority reinforced by the fact that he portrays a president on an upscale soap opera, Sheen uses celebrity status to push his causes (fair enough — it's our fault, not his, if we take an actor seriously just because of the roles he plays). But "Jed Bartlet" has not been his only taste of office, either on screen (he has played other presidents and at least two Kennedy brothers) or off. In 1989, Sheen was named honorary mayor of Malibu. Naturally, His Honor marked his appointment with a decree proclaiming the area "a nuclear-free zone, a sanctuary for [illegal] aliens and the homeless, and a protected environment for all life, wild and tame." Interviewed more than a decade later by Hispanic magazine, Sheen relived the moment with obvious pleasure: "The reaction was what I kind of half-expected, and it wasn't favorable. I was considered a radical who sold out the city. It just shows you the power of words and the power of someone's convictions. It just scared the hell out of them."

Well, not really — it just shows that people don't like having a loopy mayor. But no matter: If Sheen had become a St. Paul, the rest of us were, to him, like so many Galatians, an errant people to be hectored, lectured, and generally harangued.

And there's more - about the "liberation theology" religious roots to his politics.

And, also, this telling bit:

One of the hallmarks of Sheen's activism is the number of times he has been arrested, around 70 at the latest count, often carefully choreographed for photogenic spectacle, which might include, say, prayer (yet another Nagasaki protest, this one at Los Alamos in 1999) or, for real excitement, fake blood (Fort Benning, same year).

There is another way in which these martyrdoms have been a touch theatrical. None were likely to have serious consequences. Now that there's a chance that they might, Sheen has seemed to shy away. Following a conviction for trespass at a demonstration at Vandenberg Air Force Base, he is on three years' probation and is taking care to avoid the police, handcuffs, and the judiciary. As he explained to Newsday last fall, "If I get arrested for anything now, I go right in the slammer." The actor's taste for martyrdom clearly includes neither the big house nor the loss of hundreds of thousands in dollars from his appearances in Aaron Sorkin's fake White House (Sheen reportedly earns around $300,000 for each episode of The West Wing, not so much less than the $400,000 that George W. Bush makes for a year in the real thing), but it's telling that it has taken this, rather than any change of heart, to stop — at least until his probation expires — the seemingly endless run of arrests.

Sounds like a lot of our local high-profile demonstratchiks. Anyone remember the "Honeywell Project"? The eighties/nineties era protest group, largely peopled by a pacifistic cult from Luck, Wisconin, racked up hundreds of arrests among them - all of them the sort of plastic-cuffed, in-and-out "arrests" that scarcely puts a dent in anyone's day, much less the day of someone who has no day job.

And I can't help but see the Soliah parallels here:

Most people accept that they have, at least temporarily, to live under some laws with which they may profoundly disagree. In his repeated recourse to (let's be euphemistic) "direct action," Sheen appears not to — an approach that is, at its core, undeniably undemocratic...Revealingly, when the law and his own notions of what is right coincide, Sheen is only too happy to don the jackboots. For example, driven in part, doubtless, by one son's painful battle with substance abuse, he was a leading opponent of a California ballot initiative designed to allow certain low-level drug users to receive treatment rather than jail. That shouldn't be a surprise. Sheen is a zealot: a man so convinced of his own rectitude that, for him, any compromise becomes a sin. Needless to say, such moral absolutism usually comes with a profound disdain for the points of view of those who disagree — to Sheen, I suspect, their opinions count for no more than their votes.

Now, some of you are going to ask "why are you doing a profile of an actor when you have such disdain for most of their opinions in the first place?"

Simple: Sheen's story illustrates that of many of our more workaday opponents. Whether the Highland Park marm who drives her Volvo to the WAMM rallies, or the Macalester brats who seem to be majoring in "social activism", there's an element in the fundamentalist left that sees itself as exceptionalistic, not only smarter than the rest of us, but whose agendas are so righteous they naturally trump everyone else's.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/15/2003 10:35:01 AM