Very Serious Journalists, like James Risen, may look down their noses at bloggers, imagining us at our keyboards in our pajamas. They can laugh, but the kind of journalism practiced by FDL is running rings around them. “He said/she said” may work for the Village media, but FDL aims to sort out who’s right and why, and then tries to make things better. If FDL’s version of journalism appeals to you, we could use a little financial support to make things even better down the road.

In his new book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Bill McKibben portrays the dire environmental conditions that a generation ago seemed like abstract predictions of what our grandchildren might endure. In much of his previous work the environmental journalist and activist aimed to wake people up to the existence of climate change before it was too late.

A coal mine saddled with unsafe conditions. Wealthy mine owners willfully ignorant of safety violations and unventilated toxic gasses threatening miners. And government officials unable to hold the mines to the most basic safety standards. It all led to the deaths of dozens of miners caught in an underground explosion.

But this isn’t the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia. It’s a World War Two era mine explosion in Montana.

“Goodbye Wives and Daughters,” by Susan Kushner Resnick, is the thorough account of the 1943 coal mine explosion in Bearcreek, Montana that killed 74 miners.

The FDL Book Salon chats with Frank Schaeffer, author of Patience With God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism). Schaeffer critiques those who demand certainty — both religious and atheist thinkers — and instead invites people to consider a belief system rooted in wrestling with questions.

In Baker’s retelling, the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department, specifically Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson (featured on the cover as the “false profits” of the title), allowed the housing bubble to grow unchecked, ignored and even encouraged the reckless mortgages that intensified risk, and were caught completely off-guard by the eventual meltdown. Stripped of their home equity wealth, consumers could not ring up the purchases that fed the national economy. Foreclosures and a glut of vacant housing on the market devastated the construction industry. The write-offs and toxic securities at the banks brought them to their knees. Baker says this was completely predictable:

Whether he knows it or not, Charlie Pierce probably understands the Prop 8 trial going on in Judge Walker’s courtroom in California better than anyone else. It’s a reprise of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, where experts are suspects and idiots are geniuses.

Charlie, are you working on IA, Volume II yet?

The Left at War tells the story of some arguments around the Iraq war that only partly intersected with the fights that were raging in the blogosphere at the same time. The book is less interested in arguments between warbloggers and progressives, or between the center and the left of the Democratic party, than in the battles among left intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Michael Walzer and, indeed, Michael Bérubé himself. Bérubé’s thesis is straightforward. Much of the opposition to the war, from writers like Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn sucked. And it sucked because these people adhered to a simplistic narrative in which the US was always evil, and intervention abroad was always imperialism under a thin facade of respect for human rights. What Bérubé calls the “Manichean Left” actually made it more difficult to mobilize against the Iraq war, because it provided pro-war writers with an excuse to brand all opponents on the war as crazy.

Electing Barack Obama has actually been sort of the same thing. For a lot of people, just getting Obama elected president was IT. They’d been fighting (or hiding under the bed, whichever the choice) for so long that this was the be-all and end-all. And then he got elected (with the help of a lot of people and people who actually went and stood in the voting booth and made their choice) and everyone held their breaths and waited for some disaster to hit before the inaugural. And then Aretha Franklin stood up and sang and the Chief Justice screwed up the oath and they did it again. And there’s been all this noise trying to delegitimize the entire thing.

When I started blogging six years or so ago, I wrote a lot about the new right wing, trying to describe what I was seeing and hoping to understand what had happened to the mainstream conservatism I had grown up with and thought I knew. Until I came across Dave Neiwert’s blog Orcinus, I didn’t even know there was a word for it. Once I read his long posts called “Rush, Newspeak and Fascism,” I did. It’s called “eliminationism,” which Neiwert defines as “a politics and a culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas in favor of the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through suppression, exile, and ejection, or extermination.”

This new strain of conservatism, then, wasn’t actually conservatism at all, but a hearkening back to old radical strains of American tribalism and some very unpleasant 20th century European political movements —which all focused on completely annihilating perceived internal enemies. One would have thought that notions of expelling racial groups or committing genocide had been purged from the American body politic sometime around the turn of the last century. But here it was again, all mixed in with white supremacy, fundamantalist religion, nationalism, chauvanism and paranoia — and it was being absorbed into the mainstream of one of the two American political parties.

The American right wing faces a serious public relations problem, which is that their ideas, honestly presented, would largely fail to capture enough people’s enthusiasm to win elections. It’s a built-in downside when your philosophy elevates the interests of an elite few over the many; the many will not like it. So the only hope for continued movement in the conservative movement is to argue dishonestly, through fear and distraction, to incite panicked decisions instead of slow, thoughtful ones. Unfortunately for the right wing, our system is a deliberative democracy, and thus tends to bend towards the left with time.