Supporting Children

While I'm somewhat certain it's effective, this is an absurd spot.



I especially like the part where Mitt tells me that he'd like to clean up the water that our kids swim in. Not the REAL water, that can stay filthy and sicken kids. No, he means the metaphorical water of sex and violence.

Here we go again. Violent acts in art do not cause violence, period. The Holocaust didn't happen because of Lethal Weapon, as far as I know.

Mitt Romney comes from a political party that is about to block any expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or S-CHIP. The President would rather let the program expire and drop 7.4 million children from the ranks of the insured than do the right thing. It is an abominable crime, to threaten to veto improvements to this program that would help cover all children in this country with medical care. Child prevention is the cheapest and easiest type of care available, and it should be to the everlasting shame of Republicans that they wouldn't work to make S-CHIP a full and strong safety net for our youngest citizens.

But the REAL issue, according to this clown, is to "clean up" metaphorical water. How about we make sure kids aren't physically sick first before turning to mental sickness.

UPDATE: That's the other thing, isn't Romney getting rich off of pornography and violence in hotel pay-per-view? In other words, isn't this like the guy saying we have to clean the ocean also being the one dumping toxic chemicals into it at the same time?

UPDATE II: One other thing. How can conservatives continue to get mileage out of decrying popular culture? Isn't the very fact that it's "popular" pretty much a guarantee that attacking it ought to fail? Why aren't Democrats out in full force decrying GOP efforts to "tell us what we should watch as if we can't think for ourselves"?

Blowed Up! Blowed Up Real Good!

When I was a teenager I went to see one of the Lethal Weapon movies. It featured the predictable level of explosions and violence, with something or someone blowing up every five minutes or so. In one scene, the "bad guys" have rigged a diving board so that one of Riggs and Murtaugh's partners would detonate a bomb upon attempting a dive. This happened, and the crowd cheered, as they had for every other 'splosion. Except this time, the friend to the main characters of the film was being killed. No matter - a good 'splosion demands some whoopin' and hollerin'. I remember that pretty vividly as being one of the core reasons I'm not all that interested in action movies anymore - somewhere along the line, it became unimportant who's head was being blown off, as long as somebody's was.

It is in this context that I bring you, via a pre-Salon Glenn Greenwald, this snippet from Jeffrey Goldberg's New Yorker profile of Joe Lieberman:

Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago, I was in a movie theatre in Washington when I noticed Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, a few seats down. The film was “Behind Enemy Lines,” in which Owen Wilson plays a U.S. pilot shot down in Bosnia. Whenever the American military scored an onscreen hit, Lieberman pumped his fist and said, “Yeah!” and “All right!”

Let us remember how Joe Lieberman rose to fame in the US Senate. He was the first Senator to speak out and condemn President Clinton for his personal failings in the Lewinsky scandal. He practically ran to the well of the Senate and assumed the role of America's moral scold.

But the truth is that after much reflection, my feelings of disappointment and anger have not dissipated, except now these feelings have gone beyond my personal dismay to a larger, graver sense of loss for our country, a reckoning of the damage that the president's conduct has done to the proud legacy of his presidency and, ultimately, an accounting of the impact of his actions on our democracy and its moral foundations [...]

The president is a role model. And because of his prominence in the moral authority that emanates from his office, sets standards of behavior for the people he serves.

His duty, as the Reverend Nathan Baxter (ph) of he National Cathedral here in Washington said in a recent sermon, is nothing less than the stewardship of our values. So no matter how much the president or others may wish to compartmentalize the different spheres of his life, the inescapable truth is that the president's private conduct can and often does have profound public consequences.

In this case, the president apparently had extramarital relations with an employee half his age and did so in the workplace in the vicinity of the Oval Office. Such behavior is not just inappropriate. It is immoral. And it is harmful, for it sends a message of what is acceptable behavior to the larger American family -- particularly to our children -- which is as influential as the negative messages communicated by the entertainment culture.

Under this standard, it is unacceptable to have consensual relations of a private matter in the White House. It is perfectly acceptable, however, to hoot and holler in the middle of a theater at the prospect of American military weaponry incinerating other human beings.

Here's Greenwald's laser-sharp take:

That is about as vivid a profile of the neoconservative warrior mentality as one can get: paranoid and frightened guys who derive personal and emotional fulfillment by giddily cheering on military destruction from a safe and comfortable distance -- who see war as a fun video game to play, through which one can feel the pulsating sensations of power and triumph -- combined with an obsessive focus on, really a paranoia of, the threat of Islamic fantacism to the seeming exclusion of every other issue and danger.

Joe Lieberman is the ultimate 101st Fighting Keyboarder, glorying in the violence and damage done by the American military but loath to actually get close enough to the conflict himself, preferring to LITERALLY cheer it on, and to make legislation that will send people to their deaths to fulfill his fantasies. He is also profoundly dishonest when going about on these moral crusades, deploring the amount of sex - and violence - in the media. Here's Holy Joe pontificating about the depravity of 21st-century America in a statement from 2003:

Some might ask why are we talking about virtual dangers when we are engaged in a very real war. The short answer is that leadership demands facing more than one issue at a time. We must continue responding to other problems here at home as we fight abroad. And the fact is parents remain very concerned about the cultural climate their kids are growing up in today, and very curious about what the future holds.

That's understandable. More than three decades worth of research, much of it conducted by people in this room, has firmly established that the electronic media has a powerful influence on the attitudes, values and behavior of America's children, and that this influence has only grown larger as the amount of time young people spend consuming media has grown greater.

Often this has been a positive force – helping kids learn everything from the alphabet to the intricacies of other cultures. And too often, I am afraid, it has been a negative force – bombarding our children with images of sex and violence. The most extreme expression of that today is a disturbing and irresponsible new trend in top-selling video games – most notably Grand Theft Auto Vice City – to link sex with violence and reward players for degrading and killing women.

We know conclusively that heavy consumption of media violence can have harmful developmental consequences -- desensitizing children to the effects of real-life violence, making them more prone toward aggressive behavior, and encouraging them to treat violence as an acceptable and effective way to resolve conflict.

Just last month, researchers at the University of Michigan published a longitudinal study that added significantly to this body of evidence, demonstrating that prolonged viewing of violent television by children was directly linked to later aggression as young adults. Both men and women who were high TV-violence viewers as children were significantly more likely to have engaged in some form of violent behavior and committed some type of criminal act – even after controlling for a broad range of other risk factors.

I couldn't agree more. Joe Lieberman is precisely the type of impressionable child that, when constantly exposed to violent media, grows up to be desensitized to the effects of real-life violence, and is therefore more aggressive in promoting such violence. He also, due to his prolonged viewing of these disgusting images, clearly treats violence as an acceptable way to resolve conflict.

It's astonishing that somebody this juvenile would be allowed to run a cash register, let alone run the Homeland Security Committee in the US Senate. He is an odious, perfidious little man, who gets his pleasure from the very violent acts he feels so qualified to scold others for creating.

UPDATE: Here's a little-seen video of Sen. Lieberman extolling the virtues of things blowing up.