Why balance is bullshit.

Pictured here is Mike Ites and his son, both, serving with the Iowa National Guard in Iraq.

What and how he thinks should scare you.


From 60 Minutes, May 27, 2007 (emphasis added)



(Video here)

VO: Down the road in Wellsburg, at the Ites home, it is a father and son, Mike and Josh, who are shipping out together.

"I feel that God led me to do this job," says Mike Ites, who has been on the job 20 years, and is a fulltime guardsman.

At the time of the interview, Ites was 49 years old and was going on his first combat deployment to Iraq.

"What are your thoughts about the war in Iraq? What does it mean to you?" Pelley asks.

"Well, I believe that I'd rather be in their country keeping them turned down or from coming to America. What they did on 9/11 is a travesty," Mike Ites says.

"You draw a line from 9/11 through Iraq to the present day?" Pelley asks.

"I do," he replies.

Later in the segment (and transcribed by me, so any errors are my own):

VO: Mike Ites and his son Josh used to be on the same page.

Pelley: I have the sense here that you guys don’t see eye-to-eye on the war.

Mike Ites: That would be a true statement.

Pelley: There’s a difference of opinion. Josh, c’mon, tell me what you’re thinking.

Josh: I just feel we will be here a long time. And it’s gonna take a lot more time than what people think back home to fix what’s going on over here. From what I see, they don’t want us here.

Pelley: Mike? You disagree with that?

Mike Ites: Yeah. I believe that we’re supposed to be over here. Progress is being made. If you go back to 9/11 and what the people did there, and when the President asked “Do you want me to go after these people?”, the whole United State stood up in unison and said “Yes we do.” He says “This is going to be long and drawn out. Are you really sure you’re really going to stand with me.” And they said “Yes we will.”

Mike Ites: Well now some aren’t. Because the American People are a Gimme People, and Give it to me Now.

Pelley: You’re a little bit angry that the folks at home have turned against the war.

Mike Ites: You could say that

Pelley: More than a little bit.

Mike Ites: Well as I said, I believe in what we’re doing.

Of course per the Wingnut handbook, being “angry” means that anything Mike Ites says or thinks is automatically not credible.

Or is anger only a bridge too far when it comes to Liberals?

Conservative hypocrites simultaneously invent (Anyone who screamed for Clinton’s blood over trivia was just a Good American who Loved the Rule of Law) and violate (Anyone who even faintly questions any of the myriad grossly illegal, mendacious, sleazy, imbecilic or simply evil things Dear Leader Dubya has done is “deranged” and hates America) so many ridiculous “rules” about who gets to be in the Good American Clubhouse that that its hard to keep track anymore.

Anyway, for those of you kids out there thinking of becoming Big Time Journalists, you might be asking yourself “If I were Scott Pelley, what is the next question I would ask Mr. Ites?"

A friendly, roundabout question, like “Did you take a Big Bus or a Little Bus to Iraq?”

A medical question, like “Have you perhaps sustained head trauma that has severely damaged your higher reasoning centers?”

A blunt question, like “Where in the wide, wide world of sports did you ever get ahold of such a stupid fucking idea?”

None of which Scott Pelley even came close to asking, which is a shame, because there is no room left for polite, stilted, Broderian-fainting-couch reportage on the likes of Mr. Ites anymore.

Which itself is terribly sad because I’m quite sure he’s a churchgoing, family-centric, straight-arrow guy. Raised nice kids. Worked hard his whole life. Good neighbor who’d lend you his chain saw and show you how not to lose a finger using it.

And that he volunteers to stand between me and harm is damned noble.

No kidding, which is why it is so sad that his indefensibly idiotic opinions render all of these good points irrelevant.

2004 was a watershed year for a lot of people I know. Myself included. 2004 didn’t “radicalize” us in any sense – most of the people I’m thinking about haven’t changed their politics much in the last decade or so – but it “volatilized” us.

Or maybe “volumnized”.

We started using the word “fuck” a lot more, and a lot more loudly. As in “What the fuck are these morons thinking? Can’t they fucking read? Can’t they fucking rub two facts together and get anything but baffled? Oh, and who the fuck are these undecided freaks who, three weeks before the most important fucking vote of this generation, cannot make up their fucking minds?”

Like that.

It was when legions of us finally looked the Mike Ites’ of this country square in the face and realized that being polite and forgiving and Christian and tolerant and coolly rational to the generation of Red Staters who learned everything they know from suckling on the Limbaugh/Falwell teat had completely failed.

To borrow 3.5 tasty paragraphs from Christopher Hayes' terrific review of a sinister book entitled "The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies" from here: (emphasis added)

For Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, the minimum wage is an iconic example of the economically backwards policies favored by the foolish masses. “In theory,” he writes, “democracy is a bulwark against socially harmful policies, but in practice it gives them safe harbor.” Examining this “paradox” takes up the rest of the book, but his explanation is pretty simple: Voters are crazy.

The Myth of the Rational Voter is best understood in the context of a long-standing academic debate over whether democracy works. It’s a question that has two related, but distinct, sub-components: Do democracies produce optimal policies for its citizens? And do democracies produce policies that accurately reflect the will of the majority?

The most sanguine observers say “yes” on both counts. But given that surveys consistently show that voters are distressingly ignorant about both the rudiments of policy (whether we spend more on foreign aid or social security) and politics (how many senators each state has), it’s a difficult case to make.
…

It’s tempting to dismiss Caplan’s thesis out of hand, because it’s so self-consciously “provocative” and because he’s translating an old discredited anti-democratic argument into the jargon of econocentric elite-speak. But if you support democracy, you must confront the fact that voters can often be stunningly under-informed and that majoritarianism run amok can lead to persecution, hatred and injustice. Reading Caplan’s book, then, is both bracing and necessary because it forces the reader to stare into the abyss—an abyss the author seems only too happy to jump into.

Mike Ites is the abyss into which the election of 2004 made so many of us stare.

Into the eyes of someone whose opinion is wrong. Simply, lethally, utterly wrong. And who is dug into that opinion so deep – who is so morally and psychologically invested in the lies his Dear Leader has told him to dance him off the cliff – that he cannot change his mind.

He dare not change his mind.

Instead he finds an entire, well-financed fascist propaganda infrastructure more than happy to keep spoon feeding him comforting deception.

That the real problem is “…the American People are a Gimme People”.

The real problem that some Americans are not Blindly Loyal enough to the Dear Leader.

The real problem is the Dirty Hippies.

The real problem is the Liberal Press who won’t print all of that Good News from Iraq.

No, Mr. Ites, the Real Problem is that Iraq and the Iraqis had nothing, nothing, nothing to do with 9/11.

Nothing. Nada. Zip. Ninguna. Nihilo.

The Real Problem is that your Dear Leader lied to you. Repeatedly. Knowingly. Premeditatedly.

The Real Problem is that your Dear Leader built an entire Bullshit Bridge between the casus belli he got on 9/11 and the war he and his Neocon vultures wanted, and then cold-bloodedly pimped your grief, your fear and your patriotism to stampede you across it.

The Real Problem is that you and millions like you aren’t strong enough to face the truly terrifying truth that most of what you believe about the wider world is bullshit, and the people you trusted to lead your country are liars.

That men you trusted made you a chump.

A heavily-armed patsy, in the wrong country, for the wrong reason, killing the wrong people on the orders of treacherous cowards and thugs who have used you as cannon fodder for their Imperial ambitions, and for whom you no doubt proudly voted.

Twice.

The Real Problem is that, in the name of Holy Balance, journalists treat the patently and dangerously delusional adherents of Cult of Dubya as if their opinions were worthy of discussion.

Except what Mr. Ites still dogmatically believes in this Year of Our Lord 2007 -– that we are in Iraq because “What they did on 9/11 is a travesty" -- is not a matter of opinion, any more than a fanatical insistence on the flatness of the Earth, the falseness of the Holocaust, or a 6,000 B.C. “Born On” date for Creation are matters of opinion.

These are matters of historical and scientific fact, and those who insist otherwise do not have opinions.

They have delusions.

And when one’s delusions have been calculatedly stoked and weaponized by evil men, have been marched into the wrong fucking country, have caused the death of tens of thousands, the mutilation and suffering of hundreds of thousands, the displacement of millions, at the projected cost of trillions of dollars, then your wingnut fantasies no longer get to be elided over as merely creepy and eccentric.

Because now your delusions come with one of the biggest fucking price tags in American history. One that we will be paying down for generations to come.

Which is why those delusions no longer deserve anyone’s respectful attention, or any cravenly obsequious treatment by journalists in the name of “balance”.

The Real Problem is simply that journalists don’t have the nerve to ask the True Believers of the Cult of Dubya simple questions about their radical, ruinous and unshakable beliefs.

The Real Problem is that people who believe as Mr. Ites does are dangerously irrational, and the people who make a fat living propping up Mr. Ites’ dangerously irrational beliefs are depraved scum.

For the last thirty years many of us on the Left remained politely and tolerantly silent on these subjects we should have been loud and rude and demanded to know why dangerous, stupid, racist or crazy people keep getting treated with deference by the Lords of the Media?

Why people who are always wrong all the time about everything keep getting invited back into the national spotlight to share more of their idiotic insights, and people who have a track record of actually getting it right about Bush, Iraq and a hundred other thing are treated like kooks?

Why, when your country has been handed over to perverts and fascists by imbeciles and Christopaths, your press has collapsed into a pile of toadying hair, you treasury has been pissed away by criminals and your military hobbled by cowards and fanatics, it is somehow beyond the fucking pale to get angry about it?

The reason we are in Iraq, Mr. Ites, isn’t that it was necessary to “be in their country keeping them turned down or from coming to America”.

No one in Iraq had any intention of attacking us.

The reason we are in Iraq, Mr. Ites, is because of millions of ignorant, fear-addled, Gospel-According-To-Rush, revenge-hungry, Bush-worshipping fools and the media that caters to them.

In other words, the reason we are in Iraq, Mr. Ites, is you.

And what 2004 changed is that, no matter what, you can forget about us ever politely skirting around that ugly fact again.