En Point - Ballet and Bergdahl now, Flint/Coburn and Ballet, then

I am amused at the right wing anti-elitist (when it suits them) radical right which embraces and extols mediocrity in all its many manifestations.

That pro-mediocrity-bia is now being used as part of the discrediting of Bowe Bergdahl, because he liked and participated in ballet.  You see some of the more malicious and ignorant 'talking heads' on Faux News talking about Bergdahl as a "ballerina" in their intent to discredit him, as apparently an intended slight against both his patriotism and his masculinity.

I think the most accurate response from the left was when Bill Maher made the statement, "If life were a Disney movie, John McCain and Lindsey Graham would be the cowardly Mastiff and the gay Chihuahua"."

The whole right wing hysteria made me think of most of all was the action movies of the 1960s featuring the late, great James Coburn in the two hyper-masculine (but evolved feminist) character of Derek Flint in the action adventure movies, Our Man Flint (1965) and In Like Flint(1967), intended to be the U.S. answer to Ian Fleming's character of the sophisticated, cultured, and oh-so-manly-man, James Bond, 007.

You can see a little of the Flint ballet sequence from the second film in the movie trailer:



In the first movie, the character of Flint refers to having just returned from Russia.  When asked why he was there, his response is that he was there for the ballet.  Asked why he would go so far to SEE the ballet, he explains he was not there to SEE the ballet, he was there to TEACH the ballet to the Russians.  In the second film, there is actually an action sequence in which the character of Flint is seen performing in a ballet (it is not clear which one), then seducing the prima ballerina, and subsequently escaping the Russian authorities by using in part, his exceptional ballet leaping skills.

Of course, back in the 1960's, an icon could be not only patriotic, but the heroic savior of not only the United States, but the entire world. It is doubly entertaining that in those films we see the threats of climate change to the world, and a successful repudiation by the hero of masculine fears of feminism and female equality, a fear exemplified by the right wing denial of obvious destructive anthropogenic climate change and the right wing war on women. You would never see Derek Flint using a term like femi-nazis; he loves and respects women.

I will conceded that there have been some prominent figures in the ballet who were homosexual, like the exotic late Rudolf Nureyev. There have been other equally very overtly heterosexual dancers as well, like the modern Misha Barishnikov, and before him the proclaimed greatest dancer of the early 20th century, Vaslav Nijinsky, who clearly had numerous women lovers and who straight married one of his dancing partners, but is alleged as well to have engaged in gay sex with male patrons to advance his career. Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of seeing the erotic concluding choreography of L'Apres-midi d'un faune.

GOP = HYPOCRISY -Looks like maybe Bergdahl is being 'Swiftboated' to try to make political hay against Obama

If this video does not play for you, it is the second interview here, from 6/4/2014, with the author of the article and another reporter from Afghanistan, with Reuters.

From the New York Times (article cited above)

Can Bowe Bergdahl Be Tied to 6 Lost Lives? Facts Are Murky

But a review of casualty reports and contemporaneous military logs from the Afghanistan war shows that the facts surrounding the eight deaths are far murkier than definitive — even as critics of Sergeant Bergdahl contend that every American combat death in Paktika Province in the months after he disappeared, from July to September 2009, was his fault.


All across Afghanistan, that period was a time of ferocious fighting. President Obama had decided to send a surge of additional troops to improve security, but they had not yet arrived. In Paktika, the eight deaths during that period were up from five in the same three months the previous year. Across Afghanistan, 122 Americans died in that period, up from 58 in 2008.

In addition, a senior insurgent commander known as Mullah Sangeen, who was part of the Taliban-linked Haqqani network, had been carrying out attacks in the area for several years. A joint military statement by American and Afghan security forces released a month before Sergeant Bergdahl vanished warned that the mullah had brought in “hundreds of foreign fighters.”

Facts are often obscured in the fog of the battlefield, witnesses have incomplete vantage points and the events are five years in the past now. But an archive of military reports logging significant activities in America’s war in Afghanistan offers a contemporaneous written record of events in Paktika that summer. The archive was made public by Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Pvt. Bradley Manning, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for the leak.

The first two deaths the critics link to Sergeant Bergdahl involved a major assault by insurgents on a combat outpost called Zerok on July 4, 2009. Their view is that the Taliban knew the Americans were stretched thin by the search mission and took advantage of that opportunity to try to overrun it.

Where does my claim about swiftboating come in? Here, the fact that all these interviews of angry men who are claiming things about Bowe Bergdahl that do not appear to be true (however much they might believe it) is being arranged by GOP strategists. Those strategists make their livings off smearing people, especially our President.

They don't care if they also smear a member of our military - just like they did not care if they lied about now Sec. of State Kerry. It's all grist for the smear campaign mill, and facts be damned. Conservatives don't know or need or want to know what the facts are. They just gin up excuses for hating the president, and lies are fine for that.

From the Huff Po:

GOP Strategists Are Arranging Media Interviews To Attack Bowe Bergdahl
On Tuesday, BuzzFeed identified Richard Grenell, who once served as an aide to U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton and later worked for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, as playing a key role in publicizing Bergdahl's critics.

"My role was to ask the firm to help facilitate the interviews for free. Brad Chase agreed to do it. He is handling all the requests. He isn't political. I originally spoke to Cody, the leader, via Twitter then asked the firm," Grenell told The Huffington Post's Sam Stein.

Certainly Bergdahl's release on Saturday raises legitimate questions about the circumstances surrounding his capture, the legality of the exchange and whether it merited the release of five Guantanamo Bay detainees. But the fact that Republican operatives are shopping around interviews behind the scenes meant to stir opposition to the Obama administration threatens to turn the debate over a prisoner of war into another partisan slugfest ahead of the November midterm elections.

The OTHER reason to call this out as shit-picking to smear the President, factually or otherwise (preferably NOT factually, looking at the overall performance) - also from the Huff Po:

Conservatives Have Hilariously Forgotten How Badly They Wanted Bergdahl Home

Radio producer and collector of social media hypocrisy Matt Binder has tapped into a new Twitter goldmine: conservatives apparently forgetting their adamant support for bringing captured Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl home at any cost.

These conservatives tweeted for years about Bergdahl, urging leaders to leave no man behind. But when President Barack Obama's administration succeeded in doing just that, their messages about the soldier took quite a different turn.

Here are some of the funniest backtracks Binder found (read the tweets from the bottom up):

Matt Binder ‏@MattBinder

this lady has 9 total tweets. first on morning of Bergdahl's release before his release (P.S. she made the petition) pic.twitter.com/kCaou2LrAb

Click over to Binder's Twitter feed for more.

While conservative Twitter's Bergdahl backlash is unquestionably over the top, Republican lawmakers have also changed their tune on America's only prisoner of war in Afghanistan. As The Huffington Post's Amanda Terkel and Sam Stein reported Tuesday, GOP lawmakers upset with Obama for releasing five Taliban detainees from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for Bergdahl repeatedly urged the administration to do everything they could do to bring him home.