Few people are as reliably ridiculous as Worldnutdaily publisher Joseph Farah. If there is a hall of fame for asinine writing, Farah is a first ballot inductee. In his latest column he revisits an old issue that his little webrag flogged to death last year, the shocking (to him, that is) possibility that the plaintiffs in Lawrence v Texas might have arranged to get arrested so that they could challenge the validity of the law. Lawrence is the Supreme Court ruling that overturned state laws against sodomy, something the religious right has been complaining about mightily ever since. And a year later, Farah's position has gotten no more rational.
Here's some background. A Texas county judge by the appropriate name of Janice Law wrote a book called Sex Appealed. Worldnutdaily is selling the book, and here is how they describe the "shocking" allegation in the book:
Most shockingly, Judge Law explores pervasive rumors that the events of September 17, 1998, were a prearranged, orchestrated set-up designed to test Texas Penal Statute 21.06 - a too-perfect case.
Yep, that's the big stunning secret the book allegedly reveals, that Lawrence and Garner, the two men arrested for sodomy and subsequently challenged the law and won, were trying to get arrested so they could file that constitutional challenge (under the standing doctrine, you can't challenge a criminal law in this country unless it has actually been applied to you). For some reason, Farah regards this as scandalous and thinks that it somehow changes everything and either makes the case moot or changes its validity. A head scratcher, that is.
Of course, most of his misunderstanding is due either to historical ignorance or a willful decision to ignore reality. The fact is that getting oneself arrested in order to challenge the validity of a law is not only not the least bit unusual, the practice has a venerated and important history in this country. In the Scopes trial, the ACLU took out newspaper ads in Tennessee seeking a teacher who would consent to being arrested for violating the Butler Act by teaching Darwin; John Scopes volunteered and his arrest was preordained and orchestrated.
The same thing happened many times during the civil rights struggles. In the buildup to Rosa Parks' arrest. The NAACP were looking for a test case and they considered several different people and situations, looking for the one that made the best test case. Parks was not the first person to be arrested for refusing to sit in the back of the bus. Jackie Robinson was court martialed in the military in 1944 for doing the same thing (and later acquitted). In 1955 a 15 year old named Claudette Colvin was arrested for the same thing, but the NAACP figured she was too young to withstand cross examination and, because she was pregnant, made a bad public symbol for that fight. So they chose Rosa Parks instead, and her arrest was likely orchestrated from the start in order to challenge the segregation laws.
The same thing has happened many times in the anti-abortion movement, something Farah would certainly not be opposed to. Abortion protestors have gotten themselves arrested many times so they could challenge the constitutionality of various clinic protection acts that they believed violated their right to free speech (and sometimes they were right to do so). Would Farah really claim that because those arrests were planned for that purpose, the court rulings upholding their rights are therefore invalid? Would he be arguing that the courts were "fooled, manipulated, played like fools"? Of course not. But that's what he's arguing here.
For some bizarre reason, he also makes a huge deal out of the fact that two of the three people involved in the case (Garner, Lawrence and Robert Eubanks, the man who called the police and reported a man with a gun at the apartment) have died since the case began. And he makes a big deal out of the fact that Garner was "briefly investigated" when Eubanks was murdered (never charged, much less convicted). What on earth is his point? He really seems to believe that if he can make the plaintiffs in the case look like bad guys, the rationale for the ruling unravels. Is he really that stupid? It appears so.
But of course, none of this is at all relevant to the substance of the ruling. If anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional, then they are just as unconstitutional when applied to people Farah doesn't like. Garner and Lawrence may be the two worst human beings in the Western Hemisphere (though wtih Ann Coulter alive, that seems farfetched), but that does not magically make the law under which they were arrested constitutional. Can you imagine a law student handing in a paper claiming that a Supreme Court ruling is invalid for reasons like this? I imagine my friends who teach law having to take a few minutes to stop laughing before writing a big fat F on the paper.
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Farah is a loon, to be sure, but what is most illuminating about his screed is that it vividly illustrates the true position of Farah and his ilk on gay rights.
Make no mistake, they want sodomy laws (along with a determination of rebuttable presumption that any person who admits to being gay is also admitting to being guilty of sodomy) so that ~all~ GLBT persons may be imprisoned as felons. Quite the Final Solution to the gay problem.
I find this type of rational becoming more and more pervasive. Especially in the extreams of both parties (the religious right and the liberal left). What makes me nervous about it is that once someone resorts to this type of logic there is no longer any room for discussion. Facts and rational arguments become irrelevent unless they support a predetermined position. Further, anything that could possibly help support that position is seen as evidence, regardless of whether it is relevent.
For the religious right it is oposition to gays and abortion. For the Liberal left it is a viceral hatered of Bush. Neither is healthy. I hope that in 2008 one of the major parties nominates a centrist moderate who will objectivly look at the issues facing the country as a whole, rather than someone who is so beholden to the extreams of theer party that they must continue to push that extreams beleifs in every case. I do not beleive that we will get that in 06, because the mid-terms are dominated by the dedicated party memebrs who turn out in much greater numbers.
"For the Liberal left it is a viceral [sic] hatered [sic] of Bush."
Yeah, I know what you mean. If only those Bush haters would give some reason. They could name him as the first president to support torture as official US policy. They could describe how his faith-based policies put Chuck Colson's program in prisons, where conversion to fundamentalism became a prerequisite for early release. They could point out that in almost any issue involving civil liberty, Bush takes the stand against it. They could showcase his failure to hold Saudi Arabia responsible for 9/11, or to demand that the Saudis reform their educational system, and to end their support for Wahhabi madrassas abroad.
But they never do any of that, do they? Damn Bush haters. They're every bit as irrational as the religious fundamentalists.
All of thoes are rational points. My issue is not with people who take that approach. It is with people who's hatered has gotten so intense that they can not recognize that anything Bush has done has been positive. I don't like Bush, but he has had some accomplishments and there are some things that he has done that are positive.
Re mess
"I don't like Bush, but he has had some accomplishments and there are some things that he has done that are positive."
Name one.
"He really seems to believe that if he can make the plaintiffs in the case look like bad guys, the rationale for the ruling unravels. Is he really that stupid? It appears so."
No, he isn't really that stupid. However, he knows that his readers are.
"I don't like Bush, but he has had some accomplishments and there are some things that he has done that are positive."
Well, I have to admit that he *did* raise public awareness of the choking hazard posed by pretzels. Is that what you mean?
What's particularly puzzling with the "they just arranged to get arrested so it shouldn't count" argument is that it seems to imply that, in reality, nobody really wants to enforce sodomy laws. The gays had to exaggerate persecution in order to try to make their point. But the laws are only in the books, and the Religious Right wants them to stay there in order to try to make THEIR point. The idea of police actually arresting someone? Oh, that had to be staged. And see, it sure was. We win.
Perhaps this is the sort of thing one ought to expect out of a group which can manufacture "persection" out of "Happy Holidays." They think it's all posturing for the best rhetorical effect.
Name one.
Can I say "ditto", or is that frowned upon?
When Bush was elected in 2000, I hoped that because of the tight margin of victory, he would govern from the center. After 9/11, I hoped that he would be the Uniter he claimed to be. When he invaded Iraq, I said "I don't trust him, but how can I know that he doesn't have proof of the existence of WMDs?"
I gave him plenty of opportunities to prove himself, even though I knew his views were antithetical to mine. In every case, he chose the wrong path -- the exclusively partisan, politically advantageous, xenophobic, selfish path.
Still, though I hate listening to Bush fumbling his way through the "Things to Avoid" section of the Dummies' Guide to Rhetoric, I blame Cheney and Rumsfeld and the rest of the ship of fools more than I do Bush.
In sum, it's not a visceral hatred -- it's the emotion born of tormented brain cells shrieking to protest the logical impossibilities imposed upon them.
Reduction of the tax on dividends leading to more efficent capital markets by reducing the manufactured bias towards debt financing.
Many people miss the core dishonesty of Bush's leadup to the Iraq war. It only indirectly involves whether or not Bush cherry-picked the intelligence regarding Saddam's WMD programs. That itself is a significant question. But not nearly as serious as the larger corruption.
Bush committed his adminsitration to conquering Iraq, even while he was claiming otherwise. In the months prior to war, Bush justified his preparations for war with reference to UN sanctions and demands that Saddam readmit the UN weapons inspections. Just prior to the invasion, there were two significant events related to this: Saddam did in fact readmit the weapons inspectors, and the UN denied that their last resolution was approval for invasion. Despite this, despite the fact that the process he demanded had achieved what he demanded, Bush invaded anyway.
This showed, very clearly, that the entire process Bush had engaged with the UN regarding weapons inspections was a ruse. Whether or not one thinks the Iraq invasion was wise on other grounds, this ruse is the kind of corruption in international dealings that the US must avoid. I cannot think of a graver crime ever committed by a sitting president. And it has come back to bite us, in undermining our ability to garner international cooperation regarding Iran's nuclear program.
"Reduction of the tax on dividends leading to more efficent capital markets by reducing the manufactured bias towards debt financing."
In other words, another bonanza for the rich which has the additional advantage of smoothing the path towards this country's economic collapse.
Reduction of the tax on dividends leading to more efficent capital markets by reducing the manufactured bias towards debt financing
This is not an accomplishment given his lack of budgetary discipline.
Try again.
mess, took awhile for you to come up with that huh? It might be a good thing, but it was not complete. Since we have record deficets no other source of funds where provided nor any reduction in government spending was put in place to offset the change in tax income, so at best it gets an I for incomplete.
Gee, I guess everyone is completely right. Everything that Bush has done has been competely negetive. He has not done anything that could be considered positive - even a provision within an bill that had positive effects. I'm sorry that I stepped over the line and thought that there could be parts of a bill that are positive without the entire thing being positive. My bad. I'll get back in liine. And you are right - this is totally different from the religious right. After all, when they provide reasons those reasons are completly wrong. After all, we are always right.
Mess, when I read you first post I tried to think of something positive that Bush has done, I thought there must be somthing, but could not. Even the things that would be considered good ideas, like making sure kids had good education, were so badly done they have done more harm than good. So I am thinking that Bush will finally displace Buchanan. For me that's good news, as it was always bad that our only gay president was listed as the worse. I am realy sorry that I can not say one good thing about our president, but I can find nothing good in anything he has done, that is either sad for me or if I am right, sad for America.
For what it's worth, I think the lowering of tax on dividends is a good thing. There are other things Bush has done that I think alright. I'll give him props for resisting his wingnut base on immigration. (So far.) But the hallmarks of his presidency have been a grab for executive power, a dishonest foreign policy, an attempt to pare civil liberties down to a size where they can be drowned on a waterboard, a disregard for science, and a kowtowing to his religious right base. It's hard to place a lowered the dividends tax in that list; it just doesn't rate.
I'm inclined to see Farah's approach as out and out lying. These people aren't so stupid they can't figure out how these things work, or worked through history. Instead, they are carefully calculating what sorts of arguments can be sold to the largest mass of their dimwitted footsoldiers, developing a list of talking points from that, then creating narrative arguments from those points and flogging the narratives repeatedly.
This is exactly the way, say, an advertising campaign for a product works, except there's little or no intellectual content to the advertising.
And as to the left's Bush hatred. I'd argue it stems from an enormous amount of frustration as the left watches the debacle unfold and can't get the rest of the country to register it. This is really unfortunate because this anti-bush hysteria oozes into the consciousness of swing voters and may actually put a Republican in the White House again. It's very stupid, self-sabatoging behavior [see WaPo-O'Conner incident for a lucid example].
Instead, the left should be educating itself on the new mass communications reality in the country, deconstructinig how the far right gained control of everything, and realigning the way they think about politics. There's some of this happening, but mostly the left seems to be arguing about this. At this point I see little progress and certainly the left's leadership is still stuck in the 1960s.
[And as an odd historical footnote. When I lived in Alaska in the late 70s I was, barely, acquainted with the attorney who got himself arrested so he could successfully challenge the state's marijuana laws. For some time, at least a decade I suspect, there were no state laws against marijuana use, and such use was very open. Eventually some constitutional laws were reinstated by referendum, but I was long gone by then.]
Re mess
"Reduction of the tax on dividends leading to more efficent capital markets by reducing the manufactured bias towards debt financing"
Gee mess, is that the best you can do? Even Hitler had more accomplishments then that (set up the Volkswagon company, did away with unemployment, built the Autobahn).
Re Tule
As bad as Dubya has been, I'm not sure he is worse then James Earl Carter, whose total screwup on Iran has caused his sucessors nothing but frustration and is responsible for the current situation. By the way, what is the source for the claim that Buchanan was gay. Just because he never married doesn't mean he was gay.
Reduction of the tax on dividends leading to more efficent capital markets by reducing the manufactured bias towards debt financing.
Assuming that you're going with the conventional Pareto-compliant definition of efficiency, I'm not sure why, exactly, you think this holds water. Individual savings and investments are currently the lowest they've been since the Great Depression. If "efficient capital markets" apply only to investors, that's A-OK. But it's not exactly trickling down to the lower rungs in any discernable way.
Godwin.
- JS
Farah of WorldNutDaily isn't a loon--he's making money selling books to loons, and laughing all the way to the bank. Kind of like Ann Coulter and those TeleVangelists.
On the issue of whether Lawrence's and Garner's arrest was collusive, it is highly doubtful. The arrest came about as a result of a tip from an third party tipster, who called the police claiming that Lawrence's apartment was being burlarized. The police entered the apartment (because of the tip, no 4th amendment violation), searched the place, and discovered Lawrence and Garner. The tipster was subsequently identified and convicted of filing a false police report, which is a crime. It is highly doubtful that someone--the tipster--would have agreed to commit a crime merely to make Lawrence's and Garner's a test case in the courts.
mess | September 22, 2006 02:10 PM
Reduction of the tax on dividends leading to more efficent capital markets by reducing the manufactured bias towards debt financing.
No. Make dividend payments deductible to the corporation when paid. That would eliminate the bias towards debt financing. Banks that receive interest payments from corporate borrowers have to include those payments in their income for tax purposes, so why should individuals, trusts and corporations that receive dividend payments not be required to include those payments in their income for tax purposes?
SLC writes, "As bad as Dubya has been, I'm not sure he is worse then James Earl Carter, whose total screwup on Iran has caused his sucessors nothing but frustration and is responsible for the current situation."
It depends on which current situation you mean. The Wahhabis who committed 9/11, the London 7/7 bombings, and most other acts of Islamic terrorism in western lands are not the same as the Shi'ites, who include the Iranian regime and Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia is the nation most responsible for the export of the Wahhabi strain of Islam. As far as I can tell, US support for Saudi Arabia has been a bipartisan effort for decades. No president has said to the Saudi kingdom: you must stop using oil money to fund radical madrassas throughout the world. That would have been a very wise move to press after 9/11.
SkookumPlanet wrote: "...the left should be educating itself on the new mass communications reality in the country, deconstructinig how the far right gained control of everything, and realigning the way they think about politics. There's some of this happening, but mostly the left seems to be arguing about this."
Which they be doing. Too bad the right isn't doing the same thing. Leftist demagoguery is just as bad rightist demagoguery. Am I too naive to ask for a politcal movement based on knowledge and intelligence, not manipulation? "Manufactored consent" should be viewed as an anthema to real democracy, not a contest of who can do it better.
I'd like to give people like Farah, Limbaugh, and Coulter more credit in assuming they don't know they're being illogical. At least it gives them the dignity of being honest people.
Re Russel
The current situation relative to Iran.
Bill
I think you miss a fundamental point. People like Farah, Limbaugh, and MizCee are interested in only one thing, power. [And perhaps wealth.] The only concern they have about their methods for getting power is a method's effectiveness. They are amoral people.
MizCee is a highly educated, perceptive, savvy individual. To imagine she arrived at her recent highly distorted, nonsensical treatise on evolution logically or in good faith boggles the mind! She didn't bother talking to evolutionary biologists! Either she's a moron or a liar and only the latter makes sense. These three people use a quiver full of persuasion-industry techniques to do every sort of reality shape-changing under the sun.
In a PZ post about MizCee I called these types professional liars, which is what they are. Turn me into a recording-bug on the wall and I'll give you proof of that.
"Dignity"? What planet are you from? They slander innocent, hardworking, underpaid scientists by the tens of thousands without evidence. They distort and lie about our country's institutional heritage to convince a bunch of ignorant bigots that said ignorant bigots are knowledgeable, as here. They use rhetorical skill to demoralize, humiliate, inflame, demonize, lie, falsify -- the list is much longer. This isn't in dispute; the behavior is self-evident.
You show me a pattern of honesty in these people, then I'll listen to a plea for dignity. All evidence available is consistent -- they are amoral, manipulative, power-craving political operatives and extremely dangerous to the future of American democracy.
We live in a democracy. We live in a society that's so technologically sophisticated it's become impossible for individuals to understand and be aware of technology other than in narrow areas critical to their vocation or avocation. Here's what's happened when those two facts got combined --
Over the last 50 years a sophisticated, science-based approach to subconsciously building reality in peoples minds has developed, invisible except to the relevant professionals. This approach allows persuaders to, in essence, pre-condition how people treat new incoming information. Once activated, these techniques are very costly to undo and nearly impossible to fight when done long term without getting into the game of influencing and shaping this unconscious terrain also. Otherwise, when you make fact-based information available, it never makes it through the front gate.
These tools and others, based on increasingly nuanced scientific knowledge of how humans process information, I've been calling "psychomarketing". The terminology I've seen used is persuasion science/persuasion industry. They know it has to be emotional, persuasion-based communication and there is immense competition to do this. There is no other functional alternative. Period. Cognitive science is beginning to show us the human brain evolved primarily as an emotional decision maker, not primarily a rational one.
Immediately it's about a highly specialized type of communication, through certain media with strengths and weaknesses, to huge masses of extremely distracted people, and in an HIGHLY competitive environment where many decades of research and application results are being utilized by high-stakes, big-money players whose survival depends on the results!
Average Americans, outside their immediate social milieu, exist in a virtually 100% designed and manipulated environment. Thinking, or rather believing, that facts or information or education or, we've learned recently, even actual reality are adequate to counter this new media environment is highly irrational. The apparently widespread belief that things can be changed without getting immersed in the persuasion game is doomed, doomed, doomed.
This technology drives our economy! For six months I've been commenting on this topic on Scienceblogs and have given numerous examples of these techniques in use in politics, and still have many more unused ones.
Persuasion industry professionals would study the output of these three in detail and would decide all of their behavior is carefully specked out from a marketing bible with updates from corporate headquarters, then the specifications used to devise local marketing and sales campaigns, and then iterations of campaign material manufactured and disseminated. That's exactly what Ed describes Farah doing with this bogus issue.
There are many, many ways to lie. These people use nearly all of them. Only one political faction has figured this out, 30 years ago, and has since been slowly, effectively changing the way Americans perceive reality.
As I have stated on other blogs, the strategy employed by the hermaphordite Ann Coulter and her fellow travellers was first stated by Joseph Goebbels. If one is going to tell a lie, make it a big one and tell it often and loud; eventually people will believe it. Worked pretty well for his "client" A. Hitler.
SLC and gang
To be clear, because I bungled my close, I didn't mean "Only one political faction has figured this out, 30 years ago..", the "this" being lying, which is the way it reads. I meant to refer to the modern psychomarketing approach, which includes all SLC refers to and much more.
SLC | September 23, 2006 01:57 PM
The current situation relative to Iran.
If you want to talk about the problems with Iran, you would have to go at least as far back as 1953. It whas then that the Eisenhower administration, at the behest of Britain and British Petroleum, caused the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran under Mossadegh, and re-install the Shah.
There was nothing that Carter could have done to stop the revolt against the Shah and his despotic regime in 1978-79. And the Iranians, having witnessed the CIA overthrow of the Mossadegh government in 1953, made sure that they weren't going to allow that to happen again.
Re raj
"There was nothing that Carter could have done to stop the revolt against the Shah and his despotic regime in 1978-79."
The Shahs' despotic regime? Compared to the current regime, the Shah looks like an angel. The fact of the matter is that James Earl Carter, the most incompetent president in US history, failed to realize the threat posed by Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic fundamentalists. He then compounded his error by failing to take decisive action when the US embassy was taken over by these same Islamic fundamentalists and the employees therein were taken prisoner.
Reza Pahlavi had much to answer. It seems to me that to the extent that the US takes blame for the Iranian revolution, it has to include all the US administrations that supported the Shah and his methods, rather than pressuring the Shah to reform. For decades, the US was happy with the Shah as long as the oil companies were happy with the Shah.
In retrospect, it's easy to say that the US should have done everything possible to prevent the rise of a fundamentalist Islamic state. Carter was not the last president to allow that. Reagan not only allowed the same in Afghanistan, his administration actively supported the mujahideen there. I remember Republican senators at the time comparing them to America's founding fathers, and revelling in the mujahideen's strong faith in God.
Skookum,
Farah and company may only be interested in power. I don't know. I was just saying that if they really believe their sophistry it at least means they're sincere. But history is filled with the harm caused by sincere people.
As for politics by means of "scientific" persuasion and emotional manipulation I wouldn't deny that it works. I just think it's disquieting that it should be the basis of deciding our political destiny. Emotion may play a greater role than reason in our political decision making. And I don't have a complete problem with that in so far as a person's guiding principles may have a subjective basis. I just take issue with the idea that political movements should be reduced to manipulative mass marketing campaigns or the brazen demagoguery of people like Limbaugh and Coulter. I understand that glitzy ads showing candidates with good teeth at a Fourth of July picnic are the bread and butter of American politics but style shouldn't overtake substance.
Bill
I agree that's it's very disquieting. This isn't a situation I find preferable. It just is.
I was dismissive of advertising/PR for years, but multiple interests of mine over decades gradually outlined this evolving approach and it's logic. I also watched it's increasing application to politics, basically by one faction. I have concluded, reluctantly and slowly, that the nature of the beast is demonstrably beyond the ability of average citizens to perceive, let alone counteract.
May I suggest your understanding seems a couple decades out of date. Science is showing us our own internal perception of how our brain seems to operate and how our consciousness seems internally is an illusion and that there's likely myriad mechanisms effecting our thinking, our perception, and our will that are completely inaccessible to every human on the planet without an fMRI. Such sub-conscious, or pre-conscious, avenues of persuasion are being built into psychomarketing tools.
I have two negative examples of this pre-conscious technique here.
However, it's not hopeless -- at all. There is a positive avenue open. On the other hand there's also a huge obstacle.
The way this technology has been used so far in political life has created in many, many people an unexamined stereotype that it's use means fabrication, falsehood, and manipulation. This is not true. Psychomarketing can be used ethically and effectively, and is so everyday, for example, in social marketing, public health, etc.
The obstacle is this stereotype, which prevents people from looking at the field any further than sloganeering. There's a twin obstacle, which is a misguided belief that simply getting the facts, truth, information, etc to the citizenry will result in them making proper decisions. Cognitive science is showing us this is not a realistic understanding. These two obstacles together lead most politically aware, smart, good-minded people to disdain the very tools, approaches, and media that have become indispensable to success. This, of course, leaves those who adopt these tools extremely powerful, relatively.
I've been trying to address this on scienceblogs. A couple months ago, at Chris Mooney's, I put together a hypothetical example of how psychomarketing could be used effectively and ethically in global warming issues. The comment is titled The Evidence Project. at [http://scienceblogs[dot]com/intersection/2006/04/nordhausshellenbergerm…]
Also on that long thread is my explanation of a hidden-in-plain-sight preconscious manipulation used to sell the Iraq War, Led to War by Proximity Soundbites and near the end a kind of media-cognition-ecological explanation of why it works so well on citizens in Who Da Foo'.
SLC | September 24, 2006 08:03 AM
The Shahs' despotic regime? Compared to the current regime, the Shah looks like an angel.
That is doubtful, but even if it were, that would not be unusual. Recall what immediately followed the French Revolution? Or what followed the 1917 revolution against the Czar? In each case, the regime that followed was probably at least as despotic as the regime it replaced. Certainly in the case of the Russian Revolution, there was a jockeying for power in the months following the initial revolution, and the more despotic regime won out. That was also the case with the Iranian revolution. It might be nice if successor regimes are better than those that they replaced, but it isn't always the case.
Your implicit claim that Carter would have known the nature of the regime that would eventually come to power in Iran following the initial revolt against the Shah makes no sense. Hindsight is 20/20. On the other hand, the fact that you are ignoring the CIA-organized overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadegh government in Iran and replacing it with the Shah's--yes, despotic--regime in 1953 is telling. That was the event that led to the 1978-1979 revolution in Iran, and to ignore that fact is to ignore a crucial part of history.
Regarding the Iranian takeover of the US Embassy in Teheran, what would you have had Carter do? And that is aside from the fact that Carter himself was the trigger of the takeover--the takeover was not triggered by the revolution, it was triggered by Carter's decision to allow the Shah to enter the US for medical treatment, and that occurred some time after the revolution had occurred. Moreover, and to harken back to the 1953 CIA overthrow of the Mossadegh government, it has been reported that more than a few of those who took part in the takeover were expressing revenge for that overthrow.
Saudi Arabia is governed by a hereditary and absolute monarchy. It's the exact antithesis of the ideals of the US Constitution; much more so than the old Soviet evil empire ever was (the Soviet system at least *pretended* that all its citizens were equal). And yet, George Bush calls the Saudi's "eternal friends" of America. Not even Ronald Reagan[1] had a problem with them. This may be one reason why, when President Bush talks about bringing liberty and freedom to the oppressed peoples of the world, the general response is a cynical, "yeah, right".
[1] Neither, of course, did that other great warrior against Communism, Margaret Thatcher, whose government sold enormous amounts of arms to the Saudis; the Blair government has followed through on those contracts
Is Rambo III still shown much these days? You know, the one dedicated to the freedom-loving people of Afghanistan...?