I realize that full-throttle wankery is not to everyone’s tastes. But if you like the stuff, do yourself a favor and read Lee Siegel’s “Obama’s Dangerous Obsession” piece. The idea is that Obama’s remarks at Fort Hood betray a dangerous infatuation with Lincoln and that, although everyone loves Lincoln, the guy presided over a bloody civil war, so we might also expect presidents who like Lincoln to want to preside over bloody wars. It’s more complicated than that and, honestly, I’m not sure that it makes any kind of logical sense. But he really explores the studio space. It’s a little hard to believe that it’s not parody.
Sprezzatura!
by DougJ| 82 Comments
This post is in: Media, Assholes, Good News For Conservatives
dr. bloor
Still sounds safer than a president whose middle eastern foreign policy is driven by a desire to prove the Bible right.
Punchy
Obama’s also tall, like Lincoln, and likes Black people, too! Both abhor slavery, have odd first names, and come from The Land of Lincoln! OH NOEZ!
Hopefully, in a just world, Obama does again kick Huckabee’s and Barbour’s and Sanford’s ass again, just like Abe.
Ash Can
What have we been saying about Obama driving his adversaries insane?
Keith
As opposed to what, obsessing over Ronald Reagan?
Max
Reminds me of this one in the Mooney Times…
Jesus. I wish they’d just call him nig*er and move on.
DougJ
What have we been saying about Obama driving his adversaries insane?
I don’t think Siegel is an adversary. That’s the genius of it. He’s writing exactly what I was aiming for with my failed WaPo submission — a completely incoherent anti-Obama piece written from the point of view of someone who doesn’t oppose Obama.
Cat Lady
More cowbell, ftw.
Why hasn’t Lee Siegel died of ridicule and shame by now? Why!?
Just Some Fuckhead
I’m going to dinner so you will have to preside over your own bloody civil war.
Kryptik
Sadly, shit like this shows why Poe’s Law demonstrates such a problem. There really ARE people that batshit insane, no matter how hard it is to believe that they’re serious.
dr. bloor
@Ash Can:
Siegel’s been sitting in the parking lot of Insane for years now, waiting for everyone else to arrive.
John Ball
Pardon me while I bang my head against the wall for a moment.
licensed to kill time
__
tl/dr yet, but the first paragraph resonates with me in a different way. I also get shivers up my spine when thinking about Lincoln and Obama, because of the crazy factor in this country who may wish for them to end up the same way. Cf that wacko John linked to who was praying for his death via a Psalm.
Sophist
You’re not sure! What does Siegel have to do, wear his underpants on his head? Of course it makes no sense.
SpotWeld
@DougJ: So.. what, he’s just surfing the tide of the wingnut zeitgeist?
I can watch someone doing that at the bus stop.
Kryptik
@SpotWeld:
But it’d be irresponsible not to speculate that Obama might secretly be instigating a civil war so he can be a good war president!
Cerberus
Well, both were hated by the same people, that’s for sure.
CT Voter
I choked on this:
Men’s club is the opposite of feline and feline = passive-aggressive?
WTF?
JenJen
You know what I remember the most about this assknob Lee Seigel? That he wrote a lengthy and whiny critique of the Oscars back in February, which centered around the fact that he had obviously never seen “Pineapple Express” and so didn’t get the James Franco-Seth Rogen skit where they reprise their role as two stoners, this time sitting around their apartment watching the Oscar- nominated films. I remember it being the only bright spot of the entire show, but Seigel just didn’t get it.
Why is this idiot writing about poltics again?
Ugh
That is whole loads of awesome right there.
CT Voter
@Punchy: Another eerie parallel between Obama and Lincoln: both were born in three syllable states, and both worked in a three syllable state.
Clearly, this is good news for conservatives.
And we are doomed.
El Cid
So, now Obama’s dangerous both because he’s obsessed with Lincoln and thus prone to think of things in terms of a bloody divisive war and because he’s a naive Third Worldist religious diversity extremist who doesn’t understand Just How Much We Are At War With Those Who Want To Kill Us?
WTF?
Kryptik
@JenJen:
Because most people are paid precisely because they have no fucking clue what they’re talking about. Easier to make them say anything you want that way.
DougJ
So.. what, he’s just surfing the tide of the wingnut zeitgeist?
It’s not wingnuttery, it’s pure wankery. There’s a difference.
Kryptik
@CT Voter:
And both states started with an I! That must mean that Obama is a big giant narcissist just like Lincoln was!
trollhattan
As is typical for me I lost interest partway through the
article, op-ed,thingie and went for the comments.Mistake.
My act of contrition is to share these:
corrente.blogspot.com/2009/11/palin-news-ek-cover.html
instaputz.blogspot.com/2009/11/flat-out-awesome.html
Much win! Also.
Kryptik
@DougJ:
It’s wingnuttery when you believe it.
It’s wankery when you don’t but post it anyways as legit, because ‘some people say’.
licensed to kill time
__
And this, of course, could all just be a figment of Siegel’s overwrought imagination. Sheesh.
SpotWeld
@DougJ: When you split the curl to divide the insanity into right-wingnuttery and left-wingnuttery (when in truth it’s all the same wingnuttery) then you’re riding the wankery?
Ugh
Hmmm… we can have fun with this…
Any contemporary president who consciously models himself on the Darth Vader is quite possibly going to lead us all into an intergalactic war resulting in the destruction of Alderaan.
El Cid
@licensed to kill time: Why are douchebags like this writer convinced that they see more in historical events than, say, I do? Do they think that when they reflect upon the Civil War or World War 1 that they think Deep Thoughts, while the rest of us just have images of slinkies going around or Chuck Norris fight scenes in our heads?
twiffer
so…from this i get the idea that:
1) honoring military sacrifice = wanting to escalate a war started by your predecessor who displayed a callous attitude to the death of soldiers, and is thus a bad thing
2) lincoln slaughtered thousands in the civil war…personally!
3) we should have just let the south secede because ending slavery didn’t magically end racism.
4) cats aren’t manly
man, i need a drink.
valdivia
Isn’t Lee Seigel the movie or theater or something artistic critic from The New Republic who sock puppeted his own blog? And had to resign in disgrace? Now he is an expert on politics? Huh?
Kryptik
@valdivia:
Oh god, I thought the name sounded familiar.
SteveinSC
I got burned last night about the sarcasm/no sarcasm deal, but if Siegel’s piece was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek it was idiotically written, and if not it is just idiotic. Does that man know anything about Lincoln and his motives and beliefs? (Oh yeah, and it may have been, really,well, tongue-in-cheek. Know what I mean? Know what I mean? wink, wink. As in “die nase ist zwischen den backen”.)
JenJen
@valdivia:
The same.
The Daily Beast: Where otherwise failed persons go to launch “expert” writing careers under the tutelage of Tina Brown (see also: Nicolle Wallace; Tucker Carlson).
valdivia
Yes, here we go. Lee Siegel sock puppet extraordinary.
Mark S.
Well, I don’t know, it only took a hundred years for the South to desegregate water fountains, so I don’t think they were going to part with slavery anytime in the near future. But it’s all Lincoln’s fault for, well, basically getting elected, because that is when the South seceded. Hell, Lincoln even offered to put slavery in the Constitution to avert the war.
Also, for other aspiring wingnut welfare aspirants, if you want to bash JFK for ill-advised rhetoric, don’t use the “Ask not” part, but use this part taken from the same speech:
soonergrunt
I can’t link to it from work as it’s blocked, but TBOGG did a great takedown on this piece.
valdivia
@JenJen:
What is up with giving these idiots second lives? I did hear, once, from an ex who knew TB that her talents as an editor pretty much laid in using the weakens of her authors to get them to self confess on the pages on The New Yorker. I think she is much much worse than that for giving us McCain jr and this idiot Siegel.
licensed to kill time
@El Cid: Deep Thinkers Do It Deeper, doncha know. For that manly mode of musing, unlike feline passive-aggressive types who just spin pretty words without thinking of the ramifications on Deep Thinkers’ psyches.
Forget about us peons, we don’t have Deep Thoughts – that’s why they have to think them for us.
valdivia
duh and now I see that DougJ totally hinted at this by using his sock puppet name in the title. Sorry I was so slow on the uptake Doug!
licensed to kill time
@soonergrunt:
Here’s the linky to TBogg
kommrade reproductive vigor
Now, now. I’m sure he is equally alarmed when the GOP dusts off its “We’re the party of Lincoln,” ad for its biennial attempt to trick us dumb darkies into voting for some jackhole of a bigot.
YellowJournalism
Hmm…I wonder where his mother put up her “Men of the Third World” beefcake calendar?
dfd
I’m no Lincoln scholar but this particularly at odds with history.
JenJen
@valdivia: The Daily Beast is an absolute rag, it really is. I recall right after the Bernie Madoff story broke, Tina Brown turned to wretched “How To Make Love To A Man” writer Alexandra Penney, who had invested with Madoff. Penney named her account “The Bag Lady Chronicles” in which she would lament the hardship of having but one midtown Manhattan apartment, and having to lay off her cleaning lady who always made sure her white oxford shirts were perfectly pressed. And she would refer to herself as a “bag lady” over and over and over again, with each new post. It was positively revolting, and I couldn’t understand for the life of me why Tina Brown or anybody would find this kind of input on the Madoff scheme valuable.
Speaking of Lee Siegel, I just “got” DougJ’s post title. Good one, Doug. :-)
dfd
@dfd: should be “seems particularly at odds with history”
EDIT FUNCTION PLEASE
DougJ
The Daily Beast is an absolute rag, it really is.
Yes, I agree.
Megan McCain is their best columnist, no joke.
Liberty60
@El Cid:
But you see- teh Leftists are cowardly, weak appeasers, who don’t hunt and are in Andrew Klavans words, “scrawny chested” homos, or sissy metrosexuals.
But they are also, simultaneously, at the very same time violent vicious thugs, who are coming to kick in your door and rape your daughter and take over the Internet and take over health care and take over the schools.
The Liberals are incompetant, clueless really, unable to see that lower taxes make higher revenue and stuff like that;
But they are also, simultaneously, Machiavellian strategists who cleverly have a secret plan to initiate a one world government, and empower your local postmaster general to make a sudden midnight first strike to confiscate your guns,and trick your children into singing hymns to the Dear Leader .
This is how it always is in Oceania- the forces of Eurasia are always weak and cowardly, but also six feet tall and muscle bound with fury. Jews are both genetically stupid, but diabolically clever.
Future articles from Mr. Siegel:
The Government: Why It Is Too Incompetant To Deliver A Letter!
Our Government: Why it Can Expertly Construct An Entire Hospital System in Afghanistan!
robertdsc
Kenya is two syllables. Get with the program!
/wingnut
cmorenc
WOW! This is wankery of a very high order to think Lincoln was on a grandiose religious-flavored war and glory ego trip, ergo for Obama (also a President with some war decisions to make) to borrow in any part from Lincoln’s elegant rhetorical repretory means Obama is also leading us on a grandiose religious-flavored war and glory ego trip. I especially admired the supremely sublime wankery of Siegel’s implication that the Civil War’s battles and deaths were a completely unnecessary result of his grandiouse messianic bloodlust. Well, yes – if only Lincoln had calmly acceeded to the South’s succession with a withering: “want to secede? Go knock yourselves out, and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out”, none of this unpleasantness would have ever occurred. Ditto Obama.
valdivia
@JenJen:
I try not to read them at all and only see the headlines as reported in other blogs I do read that link to their site. I have also stopped reading HuffPo which for other reasons is becoming a cesspool. But this Lee Siegel piece takes the cake. Just wow.
WereBear
And Obama’s vice president has the first name of Joe, while Lincoln has a famous quote about coffee, which is… (wait for it!) nicknamed “joe.”
And there you have it! Friggin’ eerie, that is.
thomas Levenson
Also nice: Siegel dismisses Andrew Delbanco, his moral imbecile, as “one Andrew Delbanco, a college English teacher.”
That would be this Delbanco, author of five books, with a body of serious criticism and body of cultural journalism that Siegel would let a hundred dachshunds hump his leg to match.
Sock puppet Siegel is one truly pathetic waste of perfectly good carbon.
Hob
Apocalyptic wha? Easy intimacy with death whaaa ?!
ARGH YOU FUCKING MORON BLRGRGFNMG
Obama was speaking at a military base where people had just been tragically killed. Is Siegel saying he should’ve spoken on some happier, totally unrelated subject? Or maybe, to make sure no one thought he was too easily intimate with death, he should’ve run around the podium shrieking OMG SOMEONE’S BEEN SHOT RUN AWAY!!
JenJen
@valdivia: Totally agree on HuffPo, too. Unless, of course, you’re interested in Arianna “My Hair Is Always On Fire Why Won’t Obama Listen to Meeeee” Huffington, or a quick link to some topless photos of some model you never heard of.
Note: I have nothing against topless models. I would merely like for them to stay off of poli-blogs.
Second Note: Hold the phone! I take it all back.
valdivia
@JenJen:
The whole tone of Arianna as seer of the truth while most other people see different things just makes me sick. And I only click on HuffPo to see their polls about pictures for Michelle Obama outfits. :-)
But that Levi pic is pretty good.
Chris Johnson
This anti-cat bullshit is particularly offensive.
Do you realize how many fewer people, both Americans and Iraqis, would have needlessly died if George W. Bush had been distracted by playing with yarn?
Hob
@cmorenc: I’m more than half convinced that there’s been a recent coordinated effort to rehabilitate the Confederacy. As in, some Scaife-type funder of wingnut propaganda has actually put the word around that it’s time to write lots of op-eds that include some offhand remark about how of course, as we all know, the South kinda had a point. I just have a vague impression that we’re seeing these little hints a LOT more in the last few years, not just from obvious cranks & racists, but also hacks like Siegel who probably never gave two seconds’ thought to the Civil War in his whole life.
This wouldn’t have to be meant to literally get another civil war rolling – could just be someone’s bright idea that since the Republicans have managed to alienate almost everyone outside of the South, and wingnuts have increasingly leaned on creepy revolutionary rhetoric, it would be helpful to suggest to the rest of the country that they shouldn’t be too creeped out by this because those rebels were really just like you & me, just didn’t like being told what to do, etc. (cue Dukes of Hazzard theme).
This paranoid theory isn’t needed to explain Lee Siegel, though. He’s just an ass.
El Cid
Recent? The “lost cause” bullshit started right after the war, as part of the propaganda campaign for the terrorism which beat back black political rights when federal troops were withdrawn from occupation, and which ‘restored’ white supremacy by the end of the 19th century.
Then they went on the monuments campaigns to honor the white Confederacy dead as a way of publicly celebrating segregation.
Then you had the entire battle against any federal steps toward equality from the 1940s to the signing of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, including the changing of state flags so that the Southern treason-mongers could celebrate the Confederacy every day in state government.
Then Goldwater hits upon the ‘Southern Strategy’ which Nixon took up with a vengeance, and Ronald Reagan launches his campaign at the Neshoba County fair in Mississippi talking about “states’ rights” and just having had to denounce the KKK’s endorsement of him.
All we ever fucking do is barely survive some set of assholes’ attempts to create or rehabilitate the god-damned Confederacy.
Liberty60
@Hob:
I never go for conspiracy theories, but I ascribe this to the defining deviancy down theory:
Each pundit or blogger pushes the ideas a bit further out there, and emboldened by the previous, others join, until what was once laughable is mainstream.
Example- I browse Pajamas Media to get enraged- today I saw a comment where a guy was making the case that Joe McCarthy was really onto something and had it right all along.
No one contradicted him. A few years ago, this comment would have been laughed away, but I fear I will see an article in the Weekly Standard soon making this very case.
Chad N Freude
@thomas Levenson: The Delbanco quotation is from a NY Times book/art review and represents cherry-picking at a very high level, i.e., reversing the meaning of the quote:
So is Siegel deliberately intellectually dishonest, or intellectually dishonest because he is stupid, or both?
Phoebe
I am so not going to read that. I used to read TNR online all the time when I was marooned in Alaska and he made my head fold in on itself. When I saw the headline of the post I thought, “Wait, where is that from, that sounds familiar… Oh NO!” I think my tolerance for this stuff has just gone way down. But thanks for the memories and especially for “explores the studio space”. Perfect. That guy is a true piece of work. Without peer.
JenJen
@El Cid: Speaking of Lost Cause Mythology, Ta-Nehesi Coates has written some really good stuff on the topic. For example, I’m pretty sure it was him who pointed out something I’d regrettably never thought of before… that “Gone With The Wind” is a prime example of Lost Cause Mythology.
cmorenc
@Hob
@ElCid
I grew up and went through the bulk of my school years in a small southern town in SE North Carolina in the pre-civil rights, pre-integrated schools era. Integration did not begin to happen until the start of my junior year of high school in fall 1965.
ON-POINT TO THE CIVIL WAR PERSPECTIVE: I remember when we studied North Carolina history in the 7th grade and then American History in the 10th grade, and reached the topic of the Civil War, “our side” in that war was unquestionably the southern side in everyone’s mind, the war was primarily titled “The War Between the States” (only very secondarily “The American Civil War”), the Battle of Gettysburg and Pickett’s Charge were the subject of intense “what if ” (Lee had succeeded in that battle, and not made some critical mistakes)…and so on. From nearly every white southern kid’s perspective (and adults too), the Civil War was a noble, but lost cause. Paradoxically, we thought the freeing of the slaves was a good, worthy result, and Lincoln was a great President, but…the REAL HERO of that era and that war in our eyes was…Gen. Robert E. Lee.
And yes, in MOST southern county seats, somewhere on the courthouse lawn, you’ll find a prominent monument, erected sometime in the post-reconstruction era between 1877 and 1900, dedicated to “OUR CONFEDERATE DEAD”, including the old State Capitol grounds in Raleigh, NC.\
NOWDAYS, however the overwhelming bulk of the southern population outside of some very-deep red areas of South Carolina (well ok still too much of that state), Georgia, Alabama, and Mississipi (well ok, still way too much of those last two states), have lost most of their fascination, attachment, and most importantly, self-identification with the Civil War and the southern side in it. Most (though hardly all) natives have grown past it and moved on, and the huge influx of modern not-so-damn anymore Yankees into the population has further enormously diluted it. Thus, there’s no groundswell or special fascination with keeping the symbolry of the Confederate flag alive (except as a historical fact and curiosity) outside of the four states mentioned.
The place it’s being kept covertly alive is within some of the more ardently socially conservative, right wing sectors in the South, mixed in with a signficant faction of the harder-core wingnuts (though hardly all of the wingnuts are covert southern civil war sympathizers).
JenJen
@cmorenc: Wow! Incredibly interesting, cmorenc. Thanks very much for taking the time to write that.
El Cid
@cmorenc: I’m a Southerner. I’m well aware of the diversity of the South. In fact, many of my fellow Southerners are stunned when I tell them that after the Civil War but before the end of the 19th Century, blacks not only had political rights but were winning office.
The point of having a neo-Confederate propaganda campaign is precisely to fight against the Southern and national diversity which has moved beyond the prison of its reactionary system.
The majority of our nation’s African Americans live in the South. An increasing share of its Latino citizens.
And yet, the last 30 years of the national agenda were largely shaped by a neo-Confederate-led Republican Party and the GOP has now largely divested itself of the classic business moderates and business conservatives who led its Northeastern and Midwestern wings.
Please, please, please don’t confuse my disgust with the rotten scoundrels pushing white-based, conservative reactionary neo-Confederatism upon so many of my Southern neighbors as some sort of hatred of the region itself. It’s different.
But we still have to put up with this shit, and these assholes still help drive the national agenda, and if somehow given a chance to get their bloody, stinking claws on national power again, may get their dreams fulfilled of killing the Republic that they hate. Hell, we may not even truly ever recuperate from the last 30 years of damage they and their allies in the most venal of the corporate super-rich have inflicted upon us.
Mark S.
@Liberty60:
I don’t know which one of her shitty books it was, but Ann Coulter spent half of it fellating McCarthy.
Quaker in a Basement
The Party of Lincoln says, “Lincoln was askin’ for it!”
KS in MA
“one truly pathetic waste of perfectly good carbon” (#54): Win!
My introduction to Siegel was when he wrote that you had to have “strong fundamentalist leanings” to understand Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead.” That sheds a little light on his inability to understand Lincoln, or for that matter Obama.
A small subset of general wankery, of course.
El Cid
@Quaker in a Basement: Thank god I wasn’t drinking or eating anything when I read that, or the laptop would be sufferin’.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@Liberty60:
Didn’t Ann Coulter write a book about how Joe McCarthy was really onto something and had it right all along.
Reexamining the sixty-year history of the Cold War and beyond—including the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Whittaker Chambers–Alger Hiss affair, Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” the Gulf War, and our present war on terrorism—Coulter reveals how liberals have been horribly wrong in all their political analyses and policy prescriptions.
soonergrunt
@licensed to kill time: Thanks!
cmorenc
@El Cid:
Oh, no worries, I didn’t take it even remotely that way at all. Rather, I was trying to fill in some essential background cultural history for the majority of people here who either live outside the south, moved into it from elsewhere, or live there but are simply too young to remember the sort of world these neoConfederate sympathizers are trying to recapture.
IMHO it probably seems astonishing to many folks that every native southerner now on the downhill side of middle age and older grew up self-identifying strongly with the Confederates in the civil war and history classes EVEN the ones who now hold solidly progressive views on most things and voted for Obama. Now some of the neoconfederates are much too young to have grown up in the sort of pre-civil rights/integration environment we did, but nonetheless they hang around way too much with the ones who couldn’t ever let it go, and got infected with it themselves.
Steeplejack
DougJ:
Heh, good one. That really, really made my day, which up until now had been pretty crappy.
neal peart
I had to read Siegel’s article twice to confirm that it was not parody. He’s apparently serious.
dadanarchist
FTL (For the Lexicon)
Hob
@El Cid: Sorry, I should’ve been clearer. Yeah, what you said, all true… alas. But I was thinking specifically about the modern right-wing media funnel — this thing where a few dozen hacks start hammering the exact same inane argument at the same moment, not because of their deeply felt ideological convictions, but just because they got a memo that this is the new line to push. I mean, clearly there is such a thing, just judging by the little clusters of op-eds and blog turds that appeared throughout the Bush years and during the 2008 campaign… some hacks are just hacks, but some hacks are getting memos. And like I said, I have this vague paranoid feeling that at some point in the last couple years, someone decided to inject an extra helping of Southern Lost Cause into the national psyche via the hackvine.
The style is kind of different than the old-school thing — these weird little offhand remarks, coming from guys like Siegel who are not Pat Buchanan — it seems like more of a PR maneuver by people who don’t really care about the myth, but are trying to manage their party’s image problems now that the Southern Strategy is all they have going for them.
It’s like a PR firm whose client insists on using Satan as their spokesperson. The Satanists are already cool with it, but everyone else flinches when they see him eating babies and farting brimstone. But the firm is stuck with him. So they get various people to opine about how grannies always say they want to eat up the babies, so how bad can that be, and brimstone helps to disinfect the environment or something.
Col. Klink
You know who else “really explored the studio space” – Phil Spector.
dSquib
No, really. You nailed it in the first sentence.
But I agree with one thing:
Yes, I often find it disturbing how casually religious people speak about death. Quite how this is unusual only applies to Obama and Lincoln is beyond me. I would wager that every non-civil-war-time President has at one point addressed the death of someone or some people, referencing a “journey” to the beyond and so on.
chrome agnomen
let this not be mistaken for original thinking, but much of the confederacy obsessing in the south is rooted in a search for identity. i speak as a yankee transplant who has lived south of the mason and dixon line for 35 years. it’s related in a way to religious identity, passed on reflexively generation to generation. being reflexive, it has not been reflective. fortunately, as others have noted, it is being diluted more every year as even the deep south becomes less exclusionary.
every year here there is a headline in the paper, ‘hunter mistaken for turkey—shot’. a lot of these people are still shooting at sounds. but even the most closed eyes must at some point open.
licensed to kill time
another content free comment just to get my reply arrow back