LEFT HOOK! THE BLOG

The Filibuster Revisited, part 2

2011-12-15T04:44:00.000-08:00

Another round with Nice Guy Eddie over the filibuster. Eddie got things rolling here, I replied, then he came back to it in his "comments" section. Here's my next installment:

Many years ago, I used to argue for doing away with the Senate entirely. I haven't given that matter much thought in more recent years, but I'd probably still lean in that direction. It seems a lot bigger subject than the one on the table, though, and, honestly, not really relevant to the more narrow question of the filibuster. Feels like a bit of a dodge, Eddie. But it's out there, so I'll offer up a few words on the matter of the Senate's existence. Not to argue for its abolition--not just now, anyway--but to make the case for why it's kept around.

The Senate was created in imitation of the House of Lords, to allow societies' overdogs to act as a check on the more democratic House. Senators were appointed by the state legislatures. Eventually, democracy moved forward, and we started directly electing them. An element of the original rationale for the Senate does, however, remain: it was a place where states would have equal representation, so the bigger, more populous ones wouldn't be able to dictate everything that happens in government. It isn't, in itself, democratic--it's a compromise that allows democracy to go forward, and it's one you can understand, because you've already made the argument about the alleged danger of allowing a state of affairs wherein 6-10% of the population could theoretically elect sufficient senators to "enact whatever they want to." Checks and balances.

One of the first and most basic rules of pragmatism is "never let the perfect become the enemy of the good." In refusing to accept the argument that eliminating the filibuster would make things "better" solely on the grounds that it leaves the non-democratic Senate in place, you're violating that rule. Things like getting rid of the Senate and adopting these micro-districts about which you write may be great ideas, but they involve massive, radical, controversial change in the basic structure of government. I'm a big one for radical change,[1] but if we're going to be pragmatists, those sorts of changes would require multiple constitutional amendments, and major, comprehensive changes in the laws of every state in the U.S., while getting rid of the filibuster is a simple matter of changing an internal Senate rule that's arguably unconstitutional anyway. It's true that, in the Senate, "When you’re talking 5-10% either way, you’re about half an order of magnitude LESS than the 50% that a liberal democracy calls for to pass legislation," but what you seemed to forget for a moment, there, is a) that the Senate can't pass legislation on its own--it requires the much more democratic House. And b) that with the filibuster in place, that democratic body can't pass anything. And I'll go ahead and throw in c) the fact that the math has never worked out that way. 6-10% of the population may theoretically be able to combine and "enact whatever they want," but in practice, they never have. In practice, the senators of 48.7% of the population (in the first 2 years of Obama) were able to block everything the senators representing 74.9% of the population tried to do. No pragmatism-based or democracy-based way to defend that.

"...saying, 'To defend the filibuster is to defend its abuse,' is no more profound that me saying 'to do away with the filibuster is to defend the abuse of those who can now act unopposed.'"

...except they don't get to act "unopposed" if the filibuster is removed. They still have to deal with the more democratic House and with the president. This is the democratic process; the filibuster is the negation of that process. If you have any respect for that process, the two are not equal. They're not even close to it. I have no doubt at all that you understand this (and that you do respect the process), but that understanding left you when you wrote things like "if the Senate IS undemocratic ON THE WHOLE, BY DESIGN, then one more or one less undemocratic practice within that structure is, IMHO, immaterial." The fact that the existence of the practice completely neutralizes the democratic process[2] pretty much removes any pragmatic grounds for dismissing it as "immaterial." You say the filibuster should be kept around to "protect the rights of the minority," but it neither protects a valid right of the minority nor has it ever done so. It's just a backdoor way for the losers of an election to continue to rule, and in a democracy, that's not a "right."

Does a defense of the filibuster equal, as I asserted earlier, a defense of its abuse? It absolutely does unless one's idea for reform can prevent the sort of abuse we've seen, and, here, I'm a bit disappointed you didn't go into your idea of filibuster reform. It's true that I probably would be unmoved by it, but I'm certainly willing to listen.

Perhaps we'll continue.

--classicliberal2

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[1] I suspect your proposed micro-districts would prove quite unworkable, but I've been an advocate of proportional representation for years. There are several ways to do it. Most are preferable to the way things are currently done.

[2] And when, as we've seen in recent years, literally everything the senators representing 74.9% of the population try to do is blocked by the senators of 48.7% of the population, the points about the Senate end of the process being theoretically undemocratic don't really hold a lot of water. Obviously, that relates to the recent actual situation in the Senate, and doesn't negate the criticisms arising from different theoretical situations, but it's another point a pragmatist probably shouldn't overlook.

The Kidnapper-In-Chief

2011-12-14T17:57:00.000-08:00

In what's getting to be a very old story, the Obama, today, offered up yet another huge example of why he deserves to be absolutely destroyed at the polls in 2012.

During the previous administration, the "president" claimed the power to arbitrarily kidnap anyone--even U.S. citizens on U.S. soil--and throw them in a deep, dark hole forever. No courts, no lawyers, no appeal, no due process of any kind. Just label them a "terrorist" and they disappear. That such "powers" were, in reality, utterly illegal, totally unconstitutional, and, in fact, anti-constitutional didn't deter him for a moment. That "president" was a fascist son-of-a-bitch, though, and when it came to expectations, it was probably unreasonable to think one would get anything from a pig but a grunt.

One expected a bit more, however, from a Democratic president who came into office as part of a huge Democratic electoral tsunami that drew its power from public repudiation of everything for which that prior administration stood. But, as it turned out, the Obama started letting people down before he'd even taken the oath, and that's been the story of his administration ever since.

As my regulars will have no doubt noted, the legacy of the Bush administration is one of the matters that has persistently vexed ye humble editor. Bush waged steady, relentless war on the constitution, the rule of law, and open, accountable, democratic government, and, in the process, sewed the seeds of a monstrous dictatorship. Those seeds need to be rooted out, without mercy, because if they're allowed to pass into precedent, they will yield a monstrous crop in the future. The Obama stood against these abuses before the 2008 election, but since his ascension to the presidency, he has, time and time again, gone out to the field to tend, defend, and even nurture the poisonous fruits of that prior "president's" labors.

Today, he was at it again. The Senate has attached, to the National Defense Authorization Act, a totally unrelated rider that codifies, into U.S. law, the Bush administration's asserted kidnapping powers.[*] The Obama initially threatened to veto the larger bill if this was included, but after some Senate tinkering with the wording of the rider that did absolutely nothing to change its substance, the White House announced, today, that the Obama gang would no longer advise the president to do so. The Senate passed it, then House immediately followed suit, and there's every indication the Obama will soon sign it.

Through his actions, the Obama has forcefully marked himself as unworthy of holding the office of President of the United States.

But then, what else is new?

--classicliberal2

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[*] As soon as this "power" is used, it would face court challenge, and, in a functioning federal judiciary, it couldn't withstand constitutional challenge. Unfortunately, America is burdened with a federal court system (and a U.S. Supreme Court, in particular) swamped with right-wing ideologues. Some are mavericks on such issues, and may very well strike it down, but they're certainly no reliable check. And, in any event, the court process takes time, and the victims of the policy could be made miserable for a lot of years before the courts get around to ruling one way or the other.

The Filibuster Revisited, part 1

2011-12-13T22:40:00.000-08:00

Early last year, I went a few rounds with Nice Guy Eddie from "In My Humble Opinion" on the subject of the Senate filibuster, him fer it and me agin' it. It started here, then continued here and here, with remarks from both of us spread through the "comments" section of both blogs in the great, totally disorganized manner that would come to mark all of my more involved exchanges with Eddie.

Eddie thought on the subject for a long time. Nearly two years! A ridiculous item on Fox News, reported via Media Matters, inspired him, yesterday, to return to the subject. I've decided to post my reply here, as well as in his comments section. I fear it's rather cursory, but I don't think, for a moment, it will be the last word in the discussion, so I've dubbed it "The Filibuster Revisited, part 1":

(A note: In order to have any idea what's going on, I recommend reading our entire exchange.)

In my second piece on this subject from last year, I ran the same numbers you did, but my results were that, "at present population dispersal, just over 5.6% of the U.S. population, residing in the smallest states (which contain 11% of the total U.S. population), can theoretically elect a sufficient number of Senators (41) to filibuster anything everyone else wants to do." You came up with 2.3%. It's been so long I don't remember exactly how I did my own calculation, but it doesn't really matter--either result supports my larger point.

I also ran the then-current numbers about actual Senate representation: "...at present, Democratic Senators represent 74.9% of the population, while Republican Senators represent 48.7% of the population (there being overlap between states that have mixed Senate delegations). The minority is still running everything."

I pretty much addressed everything you wrote, here, back then. The notion that we will get bad results without a filibuster is a) absolutely true, and b) of absolutely no relevance. One either believes in liberal democracy or one doesn't. If you do, you have to take the good with the bad.

Defending the filibuster necessarily entails defending the abuse of it we've seen since Republicans lost control of congress in 2006, and particularly since 2008. That abuse has literally changed the constitutional order and is, arguably, unconstitutional. More to the point, though, it completely nullifies our elections, rendering them meaningless exercises. This, too, is something one must defend in order to defend the filibuster. In evaluating its potential merits, one has to weigh this--a complete frustration of the democratic process, every day of every week of every year, forever--against the benefit of keeping it around, and in my view (and I think history clearly supports me in this), any alleged benefit is mostly illusory. No counter at all.

I don't see any argument in its favor.

--classicliberal2

MRC Demands Disclosure, Doesn't Offer Any

2011-08-20T23:36:00.000-07:00

Over at Newsbusters earlier this week, Scott Whitlock, the MRC's "senior news analyst," slammed ABC News' World News Tonight for having "hid[den] the identity of a global warming activist." The gripe was that the network had shown a clip of climatologist Heidi Cullen talking about climate change without noting Cullen's connection to Climate Central, an advocacy group. Whitlock apparently couldn't be bothered to actually watch the broadcast he was purportedly critiquing--in the broadcast that occurred in the real world, the name of Cullen's group appeared in huge letters beside her face as she spoke. Zachary Pleat, over at Media Matters, appropriately scolded Whitlock for this embarrassing error, and Whitlock subsequently issued a semi-correction.

What no one appears to have noted about the incident (except ye humble editor, in a comment on Pleat's article) is that, while the MRC "senior news analyst" was bashing a network for quoting a climatologist on climate change without noting her "advocacy" on the issue (very dubious as a sin, even if it actually had happened), he, himself, had declined to disclose the fact that his own organization has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from Big Oil, in an article in which he's writing about one of Big Oil's pet causes. As I wrote last month, Big Oil finances the climate change denial industry, of which the MRC is a part. Whitlock's behavior in concealing this isn't aberrant; it's standard operating procedure at the MRC. The Center's gang of regulars constantly churn out articles that parrot Big Oil propaganda on issues like climate change, gas prices, and domestic drilling, yet, as far as I've been able to determine, not one of these articles has ever disclosed these contributions.

--classicliberal2

More on Phony Balance, the Phony Study & the Phony Crisis

2011-07-29T22:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, liberal columnist Paul Krugman returned to his theme of the perils of false "balance" in the press, particularly in coverage of the current debt "crisis," where, in the name of "balance," news reports have repeatedly presented both the Democrats and the Republicans as being at fault for a problem that, in fact, is entirely the fault of the Republicans:

"Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. As you may know, President Obama initially tried to strike a 'Grand Bargain' with Republicans over taxes and spending. To do so, he not only chose not to make an issue of G.O.P. extortion, he offered extraordinary concessions on Democratic priorities: an increase in the age of Medicare eligibility, sharp spending cuts and only small revenue increases. As The [New York] Times’s Nate Silver pointed out, Mr. Obama effectively staked out a position that was not only far to the right of the average voter’s preferences, it was if anything a bit to the right of the average Republican voter’s preferences.

"But Republicans rejected the deal. So what was the headline on an Associated Press analysis of that breakdown in negotiations? 'Obama, Republicans Trapped by Inflexible Rhetoric.' A Democratic president who bends over backward to accommodate the other side--or, if you prefer, who leans so far to the right that he’s in danger of falling over--is treated as being just the same as his utterly intransigent opponents. Balance!"

Krugman sees the obvious problem with this:

"...this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault."

Krugman had written about this same problem earlier this week, and his comments drew a typically stupid retort from Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard, who completely misrepresented them as a condemnation of a balanced press, and even as a call to censor conservative views about the debt "crisis."

It seems at least part of this misrepresentation--put more bluntly, a direct and blatant lie--is, like so many others, official policy over at Newsbusters: Krugman's latest remarks on the subject have drawn another retort from one of the Media Research Center's muck-merchants, one that repeats the lie. This time, it's from Scott Whitlock, MRC senior news analyst. In Whitlock's telling Krugman "urges more bias" in the press, and is "complaining about too much fairness."

Like Sheppard, Whitlock tries to refute Krugman's characterization of press coverage of the debt ceiling by referencing a phony MRC "study" on the subject, and, like Sheppard, he misrepresents that "study":

"In fact, as a July 26 Media Research Center report found, journalists have not made an effort to be 'centrist.' The MRC found that 66 percent of network stories mainly blamed the Republicans for the debt ceiling impasse. Only 20 percent found the Democrats at fault."

Ye humble editor slashed that "study" into bloody, quivering sausages Wednesday when Sheppard first pulled it out of his hat; in brief, it's a phony bit of ill-conceived propaganda in the worst sense of that word, entirely dependent, for its conclusions, on wholly subjective judgments that are, demonstrably, completely absurd--an insanely partisan grasping at straws.

Even if one accepts it on its own terms, however, it neither refutes Krugman's analysis of the press coverage nor supports Whitlock's assertions about it. Krugman's complaint is that too many press reports are portraying both sides as "equally intransigent." The "study" merely asserts that press reports are blaming Republicans more than Democrats, adding up attributions of blame within a report and grading who was the target of the most such attributions. That doesn't even address Krugman's point, much less refute it. Whitlock's claim that the "study" shows that "only 20 percent [of press reports] found the Democrats at fault" is a misrepresentation--the actual finding was that only 20% of reports were judged to have blamed Democrats more than Republicans. Whitlock's assertion that the "study" shows that "journalists have not made an effort to be 'centrist'" is, likewise, false: of 202 stories about the debt ceiling mess, 56% were judged, by the authors, as assigning no blame at all to either side (their "conclusions" were based on only 44% of the initial sample). That, alone, is enough to falsify Whitlock's claim.

But one can play with the offered numbers in an entertaining way: when that big, discarded sample is included, over 73% of the news stories examined were judged to blame no one, to mostly blame Democrats, or to blame both sides equally--146 out of 202 stories are judged by the authors as not mainly blaming Republicans for a problem that is, as I wrote in that earlier blog, 100% the fault of the Republicans.

And that's if one grants the absurd, subjective judgments of the "study" any merit (and that it hasn't any is rather painfully evident). Not only is the MRC gang unable to manufacture a phony study that convincingly poses as a real one, they can't even properly represent the findings of the one they do cull together. One could almost feel sorry for them, if they weren't such bastards.

--classicliberal2

Phony Balance, A Phony Study & A Phony Crisis

2011-07-27T23:42:00.000-07:00

The current debt ceiling "crisis" has thrown a spotlight on a particularly damnable practice of the corporate press, the elevation of "balance" over accuracy. Columnist Paul Krugman issued an appropriately impassioned complaint about this yesterday:

"Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating--offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

"So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent--because news reports always do that."

Krugman argues that the press and pundits need to "break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault" in this matter, because holding to it amounts to affirmatively misleading the public.

Over at Newsbusters, associate editor Noel Sheppard isn't about to touch the merits of that argument, offering, instead, the fanciful interpretation of it as a condemnation, by Krugman, of "balance and centrism," a call to "censor conservative views about the debt ceiling," an insistence that "the news media... only report the side he [Krugman] agrees with." Sheppard is both a profoundly brainless man and a chronically deceitful one--I leave it to the reader to judge which of these defects are at play, here.

Sheppard seeks to refute Krugman by arguing that, actually, the big three network newscasts "have consistently cast the GOP as the villains in this debate," and he has a study to cite that shows it, or so he says. Except it turns out to be just another phony "study" by his Media Research Center of the kind the MRC is notorious for grinding out, and it neither refutes Krugman nor backs Sheppard's characterization of it.

The MRC's "About" page asserts that the organization aims to prove the liberal bias of the press "through sound scientific research." It mentions science a few times, actually. Makes them sound serious. In practice, the MRC gang treats "sound scientific research" as some sort of liberal trick, and steers well clear of it. Their standard game, when it comes to assembling a "study," is to invent some ridiculous, phony, completely subjective standard, one they engineer specifically for the purpose of having the press fall short of it, then collect all of the examples of the press falling short of it and report these as "findings." The aim is partisan distortion and obfuscation.

Their current "study," the one Sheppard cites, follows in this dismal tradition.[1] As they tell it, they looked at every story about the debt ceiling from the three networks' morning and evening programs from July 1 to July 22. They report their methodology thusly:

"Analysts reviewed each story, then tallied all reporter statements and soundbites which clearly assigned responsibility to Republicans or Democrats. If the majority of statements within that story assigned blame to one party or the other, it was scored as 'blaming Republicans' or 'blaming Democrats.' If the story contained a balanced number of statements, it was recorded as 'balanced.'"

While Sheppard used the results generated by this methodology to refute Krugman, a glaringly obvious hole in it--more like a gaping chasm--is the very one Krugman identified; the assumption that both sides are to blame for the current situation. If they aren't, then the reports the "study" identifies as "balanced" are, in fact, a complete misrepresentation of reality.

And, to be crystal clear, Republicans, when it comes to the matter of the debt ceiling, are solely and entirely responsible for making it a "crisis," and keeping it one. Not just partially responsible or even mostly responsible. 100% responsible.

Raising the debt ceiling is a routine housekeeping matter for the government.[2] Failure to do so, however, would result in a disastrous default, and, because of this, Republicans, primarily those in the House of Representatives, have attempted to use it for blackmail, refusing to support any effort to raise the ceiling unless they're granted extraordinary budgetary concessions, concessions they wouldn't be able to get under the normal budget process. In their insistence on linking the current debt ceiling to the future budget process,[3] they assumed full responsibility for the present situation. The "crisis" is their arbitrary creation, and they can end it at any moment, merely by passing a single sheet of paper containing a single sentence that alters a single number.

The Obama and congressional Democrats chose, very unwisely, to negotiate with the hostage-takers, and have offered up to the Republicans deep spending cuts, including cuts in "entitlement" programs, but, because the Obama's plan also involved some increased revenue from Big Money, Republican House speaker John Boehner abandoned the negotiations (while, in the Bizarro world of the nut right, the far-right press has loudly, repeatedly, and falsely asserted the Obama has offered Republicans nothing). Democrats hold the White House and the majority in the senate, and the cuts offered by the Obama are absolutely anathema to the Democratic base, and to the overwhelming majority of the public, as well, yet they were still offered as part of a compromise. As Peter Hart put it over on the FAIR blog yesterday, "by any reasonable standard, the White House and the Democratic leadership have made an array of drastic compromises in order to win favor with Republicans." The only reason there isn't a deal is that Republicans have been unwilling to compromise on anything on their end. They control one part of one house of congress, but are demanding a capitulation by everyone else so complete that they've walked away from proposals so heavily stacked in their favor that even offering them could spell political doom for the Obama. Again, the Republicans are entirely responsible for the lack of a deal.

So when the MRC comes along and does their little "study," and pretends as if a "balanced" report on the matter must equally blame both sides, they're shoveling the same rancid fecal matter they always have.

And there's more stink on it.

The article on the "study" by MRC Deputy Research Director Geoffrey Dickens asserts that, of the stories that assigned blame to someone for the current crisis, "the skew was lopsidedly anti-Republican," with 66% of stories "mainly assigning them the blame for the impasse," while 20% suggested Democrats "bore more responsibility," and 14% were "balanced."

Given that Republicans are demonstrably 100% responsible for the current mess, it would, indeed, be a scandal if 34% of press stories either blamed Democrats more or blamed both sides equally, but there's no reason to believe these results bear any relationship to reality.

Relevant to Sheppard's attempt to use these results against Krugman is the fact that MRC isn't dividing reports that blame both sides from those that blame only one side. Those who carried out the study are, instead, dividing the reports into categories based on their subjective judgment of which side a report blames more than the other.

The few examples cited by the article as representative of an anti-Republican slant don't inspire any confidence in the subjective judgments that formed the basis of the results. Amy Robach and Ann Curry from the Today Show questioned whether Republicans were wasting time or putting on a show for their constituents by insisting on debating proposals everyone acknowledged had no chance of passing--merely by asking what seem like glaringly obvious questions, they were both judged to be blaming Republicans. CBS correspondent Nancy Cordes was judged as blaming Republicans based on a story in which she reported on Democratic complaints about House majority leader Eric Cantor, even though she asserted, in that report, that Cantor was being made a "fall guy" by the Democrats. Most hilariously, ABC News' Jake Tapper is said to have "used the words of former Republican Senator Alan Simpson to shame the GOP." Simpson is, of course, an extremely conservative fellow, a die-hard Republican, and a hyper-partisan to the point of rather extreme obnoxiousness, but because he is critical of what the congressional Republicans are doing and because Tapper reported it, Tapper is judged as blaming Republicans. And so on.

Grasping at straws, see?

It's also significant that MRC threw out about 56% of its initial sample. While the "study" encompassed 202 stories, MRC's conclusions are based on only 85--always a huge warning sign. 56% of reports were judged as assigning no blame at all, and even if we embarked upon the fool's errand of accepting these demonstrably flawed subjective judgments, this is hardly the mark of a press corps dedicated to blaming Republicans. That number alone is enough to put the lie to Sheppard's claim that the "study" shows the press has "consistently cast the GOP as the villains in this debate." If we accept the "study," the press hasn't consistently cast anyone as the villain.

With what does this leave us? A "crisis" manufactured by ill-intentioned dolts, a "media watchdog" that acts as propagandists for said dolts, and a press corps that does things like this and faces only the complaints of lefty bloggers for it as it threatens to mislead the nation over a cliff.

--classicliberal2

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[1] There apparently isn't any actual "study" to which I can link. The MRC analysts' results are recorded in that Geoffrey Dickens column, and that seems to be the only reference.

[2] During the Junior Bush administration, it was raised 7 times.

[3] Raising the debt ceiling doesn't involve new spending; it merely allows the government to cover the spending congress has already authorized, a fact that, notably, is barely mentioned in press coverage.

The Tragedy of the Obama: Debt-Ceiling Edition

2011-07-20T13:00:00.000-07:00

Niceguy Eddie, over at "In My Humble Opinion," has offered up some thoughts on the unpopularity of the current Republican position with regard to raising the debt ceiling. I thought I'd throw in a few of my own.

Popular sentiment does, indeed, cut strongly against Republicans on this issue. It cuts against them in this same really big way on pretty much every major issue, and Eddie is right about there being absolutely no reason for Democrats to compromise with them about anything when it comes to this. Republicans are a minority party with a minority in government and no real public support behind what they're trying to do, here. The Democrats could put their collective foot down, offer nothing at all, and dare the Republicans to do anything except either fold like an accordion in the face of this, or stand firm and reap the disastrous consequences. There really is only one choice. Demos would be literally insane to allow Repubs to hold the U.S. hostage over a debt-ceiling increase.

The reason offering nothing would work is the dirty little secret behind the entire debt-ceiling fight: Republicans, in the end, will vote to raise it. The, broadly speaking, Big Money community understands the ruinous effects of a potential default, and won't allow their puppets, in either party, to bring one about. Voting against a debt ceiling increase is political theater, staged by members of both parties from time to time, but the ceiling is always raised, and, at the end of the current made-up "crisis," it will be, as well, and Republicans--a sufficient number of them--will be on board when the votes are counted. That will happen, regardless of what else may. Democrats don't have to offer any deal at all, much less make one. Anything they "negotiate" away is by choice, not anything dictated by necessity.

Unfortunately, the Obama--as usual--is choosing to try to negotiate away anything and everything. From practically the moment he left the gate, he offered Republicans massive cuts to "entitlements" in exchange for their going along with some relatively minor revenue increases. That offer is still on the table. It shouldn't be. Republicans will probably hold out for more until nearly the last minute, but if there's even a chance enough Democrats will be willing to charge over the same cliff as Obama (and, as, practically speaking, it takes so few votes, there's a good chance of this), Republicans will eventually take Obama's deal.

If this happens, Obama will go down in history as having accomplished what no Republican has ever managed--to begin the dismantling of Social Security and Medicare. Defending these things has traditionally been a signature issue with Democrats. Indeed, Republicans, politically speaking, committed mass suicide via their votes, last year and this, on the Ryan plan. Democrats could have used that to absolutely eviscerate the Republican congressional caucus from coast to coast. Unless, that is, Democrats can be made to agree to the same sort of ruinous cuts that makes that plan so unpopular. That would rather spectacularly neutralize it as an issue, but, more to the point, it would remove one of the major reasons the public supports Democrats. Obama is working at chucking an easy win-win for his party and, much more importantly, undermining critically important programs, and isn't just pursuing a course that would begin their destruction; he's also working toward helping elect those who would finish the task.

--classicliberal2

Newsbusters & Me, Part 3

2011-07-17T23:52:00.000-07:00

The Media Research Center describes its mission as being to "prove" a "strident liberal bias" exists within the national news media--one that "undermines traditional American values"--and to "neutralize" the impact of this bias on American politics. In brief,

"The mission of the Media Research Center is to bring balance and responsibility to the news media."

At some point in the recent past, this was somewhat altered. The ranting about "strident liberal bias" and the rest was left in place, but the current version of that "in brief" sentence reads:

"As 'America's Media Watchdog,' the MRC seeks to bring balance to the news media."

A wave of the flag, while all talk of "responsibility" is dropped, and it would be impossible not to note the obvious symbolism. It isn't that the MRC has changed from a more to a less noble mission--they never had any sort of noble mission in the first place. It's that, by dropping the pretense of "responsibility" while waving the flag, they're being a little more honest. But just a little.

The way the MRC gang goes about trying to bring "balance" to the news media is to complain about the fact that any views with which they disagree are given any time at all in the news media. The MRC dubs, as "liberal," just about anyone who offers any view that can, in any way, be interpreted as out-of-sync with the far right (as they define the far right, which they represent as simply "conservatism"). Of the articles that appear on the Center's Newsbusters blog, a large portion are devoted to simply complaining about the fact that someone somewhere offered a "liberal" (as they use the word) point of view, the implication being that this shouldn't happen.[1]

Today, for example, Bob Schieffer, the host of CBS News' Face the Nation, asked a pair of senators why, with the looming matter of the debt ceiling yet unresolved, the senate is going to waste time debating a balanced budget amendment that everyone, on all sides, knows has no chance of passing. This drew a complaint from Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard. Though Sheppard suggests, in his closing sentence, that Schieffer was somehow poorly informing the public about the measure, he offers nothing to support that. Rather, his objection in the article is simply that Schieffer quite reasonably called into question the wisdom of setting aside a much more pressing matter in order to have a futile debate on a measure that, while apparently beloved by Sheppard, has no chance of passing.

Sheppard offered another example of this today, as well. On "The Chris Matthews Show," the host asked a panel of journalists, "of the Republicans running for president, which one offers the best chance of becoming a great president?" None of the panelists picked one. Sheppard didn't like that. Mainstream journalists, operating in a profession that puts a premium on "objectivity," always tend to be non-committal on such questions, and three of the four panelists simply dodged it.[2] Sheppard, of course, presents their failure to endorse, as potentially great, any of the candidates as evidence of the irredeemable liberalism of the press, which is a non-sequitur that both ignores that big, obvious reason they would dodge the question and presumes that no conservative could fail to find at least one of the 2012 Republican candidates great. The latter puts a lot of Republicans in an awkward position--throughout this year, "undecided" or "someone else" has usually polled, among Republicans, ahead of any of the named candidates.[3]

This is what many--maybe most--Newsbusters articles are "about"; mere complaints that anyone with a different point of view was given any time at all. That these points of view are so often alleged to be different based on willfully negative, counter-intuitive, and even counter-factual and completely irrational "interpretations" bespeaks how little actual substance an org devoted to exposing "liberal bias" in the press has to write about.

While preaching "balance" in the press, the MRC gang doesn't practice anything like "balance" in the way they manage their blog. When I tried to sign up for Newsbusters, they took a month to approve me.[4] There were long delays, I was told, because they had so many applications, and tried to weed out troublemakers, by which, from the composition of their regulars, they seem to mean "liberals who may offer something other than blind cheerleading for the team." Somehow, I slipped through, but I didn't last long.

In my time, there, I would sometimes get pulled into side-arguments with the other posters, but, for the most part, I tried to offer substantive criticism of Newsbusters' work.

The regular posters, there, did not appreciate this effort.

The Newsbusters' regulars, it should be said, are some of the absolute worst I've ever encountered in all my years of poking through the right wing of the internet. Virtually every time I wrote anything, I was reflexively met with charges that I was a black-hearted liar, that I was a hypocrite, and so on--basically any charge that would, in some way, discredit me. I was even accused of plagiarism, after I cut-and-pasted some of my own words. This was the response to every substantive criticism. Half a dozen posters seemed to have nothing better to do than follow me around and append, to my every utterance, these same sorts of accusations. They couldn't, in even a single instance, substantiate the charges, because the charges had no basis in reality, but making any sort of substantive case wasn't the point. I was a liberal. To them, that meant I was, by definition, guilty of all of those things. Their endless barrage of charges amounted to a deployment of the Big Lie technique against me, and they seemed too deluded by their own fantasies to even realize it.

Whoever is charged with overseeing quality control at Newsbusters--very concerned about troublemakers, remember--allowed this to go on day in and day out. When, however, I offered a substantive critique of a column by MRC head Brent Bozell (the details of which are recounted here), my Newsbusters account was suspended, and the critique deleted from the site. While I've been kicked out, all of those other right-wing posters--the ones who devoted all of their energy to libelous attacks on me and the few other liberals who managed to get through the filtering process; the ones who never offer a single substantive comment on any subject; the ones who act as nothing more than an amen corner for Newsbusters' writers--are still active.

That's "balance" at the MRC, the kind they give every indication they'd apply to the rest of the press.

--classicliberal2

---

[1] Even comedians making jokes about conservative political figures end up in Newsbusters' crosshairs (the writers display a particularly intense obsession with Bill Maher and Jon Stewart).

[2] The fourth, Time's Joe Klein, picked Barack Obama, who has, indeed, ruled as a Republican president in all but name. But Klein said he was a great Republican president, and "great" simply isn't a word one can justify applying to the Obama.

[3] Two days ago, in the most recent Gallup poll on the subject, 58% of Republicans declined to express a preference for any of the Republican candidates, and of the candidates themselves, only Mitt Romney draws double-digit support (and he only manages 13%).

[4] This is in sharp contrast to the way the MRC's liberal, democracy-friendly counterparts handle such matters. If a reader wants to comment on an item from Media Matters For America or FAIR, it's a simple matter of offering the comment (at the FAIR blog), or taking a few seconds to sign up then make it (at MMFA).

Newsbusters' Newest Deal: A Depressing Lie About The Great Depression

2011-07-10T11:32:00.000-07:00

On this week's edition of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher," reactionary columnist Ann Coulter told the Nation's Chris Hayes that his mother, because she is a government employee, didn't have a real job, and is, in fact, just "a drain on society." Standard fare from Coulter, a vapid cretin who has made her fortune peddling ugly, brainless insults to an ugly, brainless audience. Among that audience is counted Newsbusters' associate editor Noel Sheppard, an exceedingly stupid and perpetually dishonest man, who, yesterday, felt compelled, by these personal qualities, to offer Coulter an "attaboy." An ill-intentioned moron praising a bird of like feather is hardly news, but in the midst of it, Sheppard let fly a Coulterish howler regarding the Great Depression and the New Deal, and I decided I'd jot down some remarks on it.

On "Real Time," author Amanda Foreman had asserted that "government does not create jobs." Eventually, a surprised Bill Maher asked: "During the Depression, government didn't create jobs?" Recounting this part of the exchange, Sheppard jumps in:

"Once again Maher showed his stupidity. The unemployment rate in 1929 was 3.2 percent. After federal spending tripled from $3 billion to $9 billion, unemployment was 17.2 percent ten years later.

"Liberals just can't get it through their heads that all the money and New Deal programs thrown at the Depression did little to solve it."

The Great Depression only began toward the end of 1929. That 3.2% estimated unemployment rate is from the pre-Depression economy. Pre-New Deal, as well. The New Deal didn't begin until 1933, by which point unemployment was a staggering 24.9%. That's the proper baseline for evaluating the effect, on unemployment, of the era's spending. There's a good reason Sheppard didn't use it--unemployment was dramatically reduced during the New Deal, and, in fact, never went that high again. By 1937, it had been cut down to 14.3%. A mini-recession hit in 1938 and bumped it up a bit,[*] but the massive government spending that came with World War II finally beat back unemployment, ended the Depression, and, in fact, made the U.S. the most powerful economy in the world; the years that followed--years of largescale government intervention in the economy--saw the greatest economic boom the U.S. has ever experienced.

These are facts that dumb liberals and stupid ol' Bill Maher have gotten through their heads. It's likely that Sheppard has gotten them through his head at some point in his life, as well, and just preferred lying to sharing them with his readers.

--classicliberal2

---
[*] Unemployment, during that recession, briefly rose to 19%, and, in recent years, it has become a common practice, among conservative commentators, to compare unemployment as it stood at the beginning of the New Deal to unemployment as it stood at the trough of that recession, and to argue that the New Deal wasn't able to accomplish much. A big lie, but nowhere near the scale of the one offered by Sheppard.

Newsbusters & Me, Part 2

2011-07-03T01:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Terry Krepel, over at ConWebWatch, wrote about a comment from Brent Bozell, the head of the Media Research Center. Bozell was complaining about the criticism of crackpot Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann by Chris Matthews, the mouthy dunce who hosts MSNBC's Hardball. "He [Matthews] would never in a million years wage that kind of insulting attack on Hillary Clinton," fumed Bozell. Krepel points out that not only has Matthews "insultingly attacked Hillary Clinton" but at least two of those attacks have been reported on Bozell's own Newsbusters blog. In the first, Matthews had suggested that Clinton owed her political career to sympathy generated by her husband's philandering. In another, Matthews, in 2008, was complaining about Barack Obama potentially tapping Clinton to be Secretary of State:

"Why would he pick her? I thought we were done with the Clintons. She's just use it to build her power base. It's Machiavellian. And then we'll have Bill Clinton, too. I thought Obama didn't want drama... She's just a soap opera. If he doesn't pick her, everyone will say she's been dissed again, we'll have to live through that again."

Krepel leaves the matter at these two examples, but, in fact, they're not only fairly typical of Matthews' very long-running series of insulting attacks on Hillary Clinton, they're actually rather mild compared to some of the other things he's said. In 2001, he told an MSNBC colleague "I hate her [Clinton]. I hate her. All that she stands for." Indeed, Matthews has hated Hillary Clinton since at least the mid-1990s, and it is a hatred that has often seemed obsessive. In 2008, David Brock, the founder of Media Matters For America, put together a list of just some of the things Matthews has said of her; "she-devil", "Nurse Ratched", "witchy", "uppity", "a fraud", "anti-male," and on and on and on.

In short, Bozell's suggestion was, in fact, a lie of monumental proportions. A thing directly and brutally contrary to reality. Back in March, I wrote about another incident, in which Bozell bizarrely suggested that, at the time of the Iraq war, the press had been very hard on Bush, and, by contrast, was allowing Obama a free ride on the Libyan intervention.

Liars lie for a reason, and what both of these have in common is that they exemplify the agenda of Bozell and his organization. Purporting to be a "media watchdog," the MRC is, in fact, devoted to preaching, to a very dismal choir, a very dismal line, the same one preached by nearly all right-wing media outlets. It tells an extremely conservative audience that, though the public is with them, they are persecuted. Those carrying out the persecution are "elites," identified, in this up-is-down-and-black-is-white narrative, as liberal intellectuals, liberal academics, liberal journalists, liberal entertainers, liberal Democratic politicians, or just plain liberals.[1] Politics is reduced to a simple contest between good and evil, with liberals filling the "evil" role[2], and "liberal" is the default designation for anyone who isn't identifiably of the far right on every conceivable issue--those so tagged are often, in reality, conservatives whom outlets like the MRC just decided aren't conservative enough, or aren't conservative in the right ways.

This manufactures an incredible amount of politically useful resentment in the target audience--no one likes being persecuted--but its most important effect--and, arguably, its intent--is to completely destroy the confidence of that audience in anything that doesn't originate from far right sources; to beat back the very idea that there is an objective fact on which everyone can agree, and make momentary political utility the thing which dictates the audience's perception of reality. In their telling, the MRC and other like-minded orgs give it to you straight. Just about everyone else is probably an enemy with a malicious agenda (and they're always enemies--there's rarely any room allowed for any honest disagreement). Chris Matthews, by virtue of his sometimes disagreeing with the far right, is tagged as a "liberal," and from that, it follows that he would never use his privileged position of prominence in the press to attack Democrat Hillary Clinton in the same way he just attacked reactionary Rep. Michelle Bachmann (Cretin-MN). Similarly, the corporate press is irredeemably liberal, and it follows that it must have been very hard on Bush over the Iraq war, and, in stark contrast, easy on Obama over the Libyan intervention. It's all about telling a tale that is politically useful at the moment. Reality doesn't even enter into the equation.

The article that, a few weeks ago, prompted me to join Newsbusters was an Alex Fitzsimmons piece from 28 April that seemed a perfect example of how far-right media groups like the MRC generate their own little self-contained world, and carefully keep out real-world considerations that could burst this bubble. Fitzsimmons was upset that MSNBC's Chuck Todd, in an interview with Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), declined to blame the Obama administration for rising gas prices.

"After making excuses for the Democratic president, Todd boldly asserted that 'there doesn't seem to be any expert that believes' Obama could have done anything to prevent the price of gasoline from eclipsing $4 per gallon.

"Perhaps the morning anchor meant to say there doesn't seem to be any liberal experts who are criticizing Obama for not doing more to curtail rising gas prices: the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, offered the president some policy advice on this precise issue." [italics in original]

Fitzsimmons quotes three "experts" from Heritage. They recommend battling high gas prices by cutting back barriers to further domestic oil drilling. Further, "Wicker noted that he and 28 senators recently introduced a resolution to 'send a message to the president' in support of streamlining the review process for oil permit applications." Fitzsimmons adds:

"And just so NBC's political director knows, Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu (La.) and Mark Begich (Alaska) joined the chorus of congressional opposition to Obama's squelching of offshore oil drilling."

Taking this a step at a time, there's a basic logical problem in trying to heap blame on Obama policies for $4+/gallon gas: gas actually went over $4/gallon during the Bush administration, well before Obama had even been elected, and as high as it has been under Obama since Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives, it has never risen as high as it was under Bush.

Next, the idea that further domestic oil drilling won't significantly reduce the price of gas at the pump isn't, as Fitzsimmons would have it, a concoction of "liberal experts." It's an uncontroversial conclusion that is broadly shared by experts of all political stripes, including the Bush Energy Department, only a few years ago. In 2010, PolitiFact subjected the question to a fairly detailed examination and came to the same conclusion. It's pretty basic math.[3]

Who, on the other hand, is Fitzsimmons relying upon for his assertion that Obama policies are to blame for high gas prices? His three "experts" are from the Heritage Foundation, an organization that has received millions from Big Oil interests who would directly benefit--and benefit big time--from greater and easier domestic drilling. The total investment of Big Oil in Heritage is unknown, as Heritage is secretive about its donors, but it has received over $4.1 million from Koch family foundations alone, and one of the "experts" cited by Fitzsimmons (Nicolas Loris) actually worked for the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation before moving to Heritage.

Fitzsimmons approvingly quotes all of those senators who are beating up on Obama. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the one Todd was interviewing, has, in his political career, received $456,810 from oil and gas interests. Though Wicker claimed to have 28 senators behind his resolution, the link provided by Newsbusters lists only nine, but they're enough to make an important point. Wicker is one of them. Here are the rest:

Sens. Mark Begich (D-Alaska): $140,605
Thad Cochran (R-Miss.): $228,485
Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.): $293,300
Richard Shelby (R-Ala.): $353,200
Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska): $523,689
Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana): $807,844
John Cornyn (R-Texas): $1,734,950
Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas): $2,141,025

The numbers beside their names are how much the oil and gas industry has spent on purchasing them over the years (all numbers courtesy of the Center For Responsive Politics).

To summarize, Fitzsimmons is advancing an extraordinarily improbable proposition, but it's one that, if believed, would benefit a particular--and particularly conservative--industry, and, while he completely misrepresents, as liberals, those who reject it (which is a dismissal of their views), every one of his own sources has ties to that industry.

Of course, the fact that they're paid shills doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong, but, to put it as kindly as possible, it does make a strong case that anything they say on this matter is to be viewed, by anything approximating a reasonable person, with extreme skepticism. Fitzsimmons merely reproduces their views, presents them as entirely credible, and doesn't disclose any of the info I've just recorded here, while completely ignoring obvious drivers of high gas prices such as insane speculation and oil-company profiteering.

Is Fitzsimmons merely incompetent? Probably not. Certainly unethical as hell, but he's hardly alone in that. In context, his article was just one of many. The MRC had, for a long time, been pimping the notion that Obama's alleged--and mostly imaginary--resistance to further domestic drilling was driving up the price of gas. Part of this has to do with politics. The oil industry is very kind to the Republican candidates favored by the MRC, and this is the line the industry wants pimped. The public is very angry about high gas prices, and has largely been blaming the industry (and speculators) for them, so there is a strategic motive for wanting to try to divert anger away from it and toward the Obama administration. The big reason the MRC is pimping this line, though, is probably the same reason all those others are; the same reason the MRC doesn't disclose that those others are; the same reason the MRC pimps climate-change denial: the organization has received a fortune from the oil industry. Since 1998, the MRC has received $412,500 from ExxonMobil. Fitzsimmons didn't disclose this, either. Neither has anyone else at the MRC who has written about this subject or any other touching on Big Oil.[5] All while they work to destroy their audience's confidence in everything except orgs like their own.

That's how things work at the MRC, where political fantasy stands in for "reality," those who pay the piper call the tune, and those who dance to it never know the difference, and probably wouldn't care if they did.

--classicliberal2

---
[1] This "elite" is never defined as corporate CEOs, business associations, investment bankers, the super-rich that have such a disproportionate share of wealth, their sycophantish mouthpieces in the press, or their purchased lackeys in government, or any of the other interests that, in the real world, actually run the U.S. A lower-middle-class workaday journalist is part of an "elite"--the head of ExxonMobil is not.

[2] When I offered this analysis in my first "Newsbusters & Me" post, conservative reader Mark81150 objected: "No dude, I don't think the American left is pure evil, just knee jerk reactionary, authoritarian to it's core, savagely hostile to opposing views, and utterly unable to process irony or the hypocrisies of it's own positions." And, he added, it is "intellectually thuggish." A distinction without a difference, to be sure, but one Mark was, tellingly, unable to perceive.

[3] And even the microscopic effect further domestic drilling would have wouldn't take place for years, as it takes years to establish a drilling operation.

[4] Since 2004, the MRC has also taken in $15,005 from Koch family foundations. Not exactly a princely sum, but worth a mention.

[5] Climate change denialism was invented by Big Oil, and has been a major project of the industry for decades; the MRC--what a surprise--pimps hardcore denialism, and no one who writes any of its constant articles on this discloses its financial relationship with the industry.

A Reply to Mark81150

2011-07-01T11:55:00.000-07:00

My first "Newsbuster & Me" post on Wednesday drew a pair of responses from a conservative fellow named Mark81150. It's in the "comments" section, and that's where I would normally reply, but I decided it's enough of a topic to make a new post of it instead:

In my original post, I'd written that "A large segment of the right has, for years, waged open war on the notion that there is any such thing as an objective set of facts about anything." You take issues with this, and, speaking as, presumably, one of those conservatives I'd referenced, write:

"What we wage war on, is that leftwing OPINION can be presented as 'objective fact' a slight [sic] of hand the left has used for decades."

But you offer, as your only example of this, the matter of global climate change, which, you write, "is routinely used by the left to say the right isn't dealing in reality." You characterize this conclusion as "a very hyper partisan slant at best, an outrageous lie in truth." You are unequivocal on it:

"...when a leftists states global climate change is catastrophic and man caused.. that's an opinion based on some junk science.. not a 'fact'"

To state the obvious, Mark, you're not a scientist working in the fields related to the study of climate change. Neither am I. Neither are most people. For our info on this, we have to rely on experts who are. Someone over at Wikipedia has helpfully assembled an article, loaded with links, documenting the world scientific consensus on global climate change. That consensus, stated in brief, is that it is happening, and it is caused by human activity. The article notes an important fact:

"No scientific body of national or international standing has maintained a dissenting opinion; the last was the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, which in 2007 updated its 1999 statement rejecting the likelihood of human influence on recent climate with its current non-committal position."

That consensus is a fact, not "left-wing opinion," and people--even "leftists"--who reference that consensus--that fact--aren't offering "an opinion based on some junk science." They're referencing what the experts on this subject have overwhelmingly concluded about it, based on mountains of science that have been tested, re-tested, and re-re-tested from every conceivable angle, and that get higher and higher with every passing year.

The near-uniformity of the experts on this doesn't mean those experts are right, of course. It does, however, place, on deniers, what any objective observer would be forced to conclude was a staggering burden of proof. To support your own position, you, the non-scientist, would not only have to disprove those ever-growing mountains of science; you would also have to believe that either the entire global scientific community is made up of a bunch of dummies who have, for years, been taken in by "some junk science" (that you're brilliant enough to see through), or that, without any apparent motive at all, they have undertaken a conspiracy to lie about it that is global in scale, and that stretches back decades. Instead, all you offer is the claim that "there are a large number of climate change skeptics in the world of science," and a link to a Business Insider article listing 10 prominent climate-change "skeptics." Just ten. And even of those, some aren't outright deniers, not a one of them has ever published their "theories" about global warming in a peer-reviewed journal, and some of them aren't scientists at all.

More significantly, several of them (Plimer, Ebell, Michaels, Happer) are de facto mouthpieces for business interests--big business interests--that would be negatively affected by any legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. The auto industry, utility companies, Big Coal, and most especially Big Oil, in fact, invented the climate denial industry in the late '80s, and have kept it going ever since. You complain that deniers are branded as heretics by "people who have a financial vest [sic] interest" in so labeling them, and trash Al Gore for making money from warning about climate change while you parrot an insanely improbable line that was invented and is wholly sustained by industries that have a direct and massive financial interest--their sole interest with regard to the topic--in having you swallow that line.

In short, this is actually a perfect example of how "the right isn't dealing in reality." Or at least of how you aren't.

It's also a perfect illustration of my own point, the one you were trying to refute.

And it isn't the only illustration of that you offer. In the midst of a lot of ranting and throwing empty (but typical conservative) charges at liberals, you say lefties are "in complete denial that you are a minority view in America. We [conservatives] are the largest group, and you can't accept it, so you paint us as the bad guy." As evidence, you drag out a Gallup poll, showing that a larger number of people self-identify as "conservative" than as moderates or liberals, and, based on it, write "you're kidding yourself."

Setting aside your dime-store "psychoanalysis," it just so happens I've written about these self-identification polls. Rather than rehashing it, read what I wrote here.

Who is kidding whose self?

--classicliberal2

Newsbusters & Me, Part 1

2011-06-29T02:41:00.000-07:00

For the last few weeks, I've been spending some time over at Newsbusters, the big blog of the Media Research Center (MRC). The MRC has always portrayed itself as a media watchdog with a conservative bent, but it would be a big mistake to put it in the same pound as liberal media watchdogs like Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), and Media Matters For America (MMFA), and not just because the MRC is extremely conservative. The MRC isn't just a different breed of watchdog. It's an entirely different species from its liberal counterparts.

Media Matters For America lists, as its mission, "comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." Part of the mission of FAIR can be found in its name--the "A" stands for "Accuracy." These groups are centrally concerned with, among other things, correcting misinformation. Keeping the record straight. The MRC has a very different mission. The legend of Newsbusters reads "Exposing & Combating Liberal Media Bias." Their more detailed "About" page tells the same story. They're about "bias," not accuracy.

It shows in their work. An incredible amount of misinformation flows forth from Newsbusters, just as it has always flowed forth from the MRC. Newsbusters is afflicted with a depressingly common ailment of the American right, one about which I've written repeatedly over the years; they see politics as a simple contest between good and evil--themselves being good, the "liberals" being evil--and embrace the idea that reality itself can be subservient to and defined by their own momentary political passions. A large segment of the right has, for years, waged open war on the notion that there is any such thing as an objective set of facts about anything. This is done as a means of denying any sort of victory to those whom it sees as enemies--if there are no universally agreed-upon yardsticks, there's nothing against which to measure the conservatives, nothing that can be used to judge them unambiguously wrong. By this view, more broadly, that which they, themselves, believe and want and do is, by definition, that which is true and proper and right. They hold the converse to be true, as well. The reason accuracy isn't listed as a concern of Newsbusters is because, for the conservatives who toil away at it and (most especially) for those who uncritically groove on its work, "liberal" equals, by definition, "misinformation." They don't have to prove something is false; they just have to make a case that it comes from a liberal or aids liberalism (often just defined as anything that disagrees with or could hinder extreme conservatism), and, in their world, that means it's probably wrong, misleading, inaccurate, and/or an outright lie. They will sometimes make a show of trying to actually prove something is genuinely inaccurate, and they sometimes find genuine examples, but for the most part, their efforts in this vein are laughably superficial.

A perfect case-in-point is the newest Brent Bozell column. Bozell is the head of the MRC, and, like a lot of emperors, apparently doesn't like it when someone comes along and points out his lack of clothing. I've been pointing it out for a long time, though, and last night, when, shortly after Bozell posted that column, I did it again, my Newsbusters account was suspended, and the reply I'd written was consigned to a Memory Hole, as if it had never even existed.

Bozell was writing about an appearance by comedian Jon Stewart on "Fox News Sunday," wherein Stewart was interviewed by Chris Wallace. The interview happened over two weeks ago, but a whole lot of conservative commentators just keep bringing it up. It has become one of their temporary obsessions because Stewart said some things about Fox News that righties like Bozell find extremely inconvenient. That, for example, Fox News is very different from legitimate news organizations because it's really just a massive propaganda project for the Republican party, its content and tone tightly dictated by the committed partisans who run it. Stewart admitted his own bias, but said his show's focus wasn't on conveying it--it was on making people laugh. Whereas news orgs are centrally concerned with offering news and information, Fox is centrally concerned with spreading propaganda, in the most negative sense of the word. The thing that assured Stewart would get plenty of attention from conservatives, though, is that he said, "And in polls, who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? The most consistently misinformed? Fox. Fox viewers. Consistently. Every poll."

Like a lot of the righties who have written about the Stewart interview, Bozell was particularly unhappy about those remarks:

"In the real world--outside Stewart’s smug bubble--this is garbage."

By way of demonstrating its status as merit-free refuse, Bozell immediately begins extolling a 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center, one that asked respondents to name the Secretary of State, the prime minister of Britain, and to identify which party controls congress. Viewers of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes show "were better informed than Stewart’s 'Daily Show' gigglers" on these points. But, of course, Stewart hadn't said Fox viewers were uninformed; he said they were misinformed. Neither Stewart nor anyone else has ever even alleged that Fox News misleads its viewers about things like the identity of the British prime minister. In short, Bozell is "refuting" a claim Stewart never even made, rather than dealing with the one he had made.

He gets a bit closer to the mark when he writes about the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), which, in 2010, conducted a survey that showed Fox News viewers were significantly more likely to be misinformed about a wide range of subjects.

Bozell labels the PIPA gang "liberal pranksters masquerading as pollsters"--when liberal = misinformation, it's important to get that label in place up front, even if there's no real reason for applying it--and he challenges the premise of two of their examples of misinformation held by Fox viewers. The first was that Fox viewers, in high numbers, thought most economists had concluded the health care law would increase the deficit; the second was that they thought most economists had concluded the Obama stimulus caused job losses. Whether it's fair to judge people harshly based on their impression of the opinion of most economists on a given issue is a matter that could be legitimately debated, but Bozell isn't interested in that sort of debate. He writes that the idea that Obamacare will reduce deficits is "a patently ridiculous claim that doesn’t acknowledge the real world," and asserts that "Fox News viewers are tagged as the 'misinformed' dummies, because their opinions are grounded in logic."

Notice the sleight-of-hand? The survey, on that question, wasn't asking respondents their opinion of the effect of the health care law; it was asking respondents to offer their impression of the opinion of most economists who have studied the matter. The two are not the same, nor were respondents likely to confuse the two, because, before this question, they were first asked to offer their own impressions of the effect of the law. Bozell, of course, declines to share this fact with his readers when he's doing his little dance.

In limiting his remarks to these two questions, Bozell grossly misrepresents the overall survey. Most of the items on which Fox News viewers was shown to be misinformed were not subject to being "interpreted" away as nebulous abstractions. They were straightforward factual matters, ones about which Fox viewers were radically wrong. In huge numbers, Fox viewers believed the Obama administration had initiated the auto bailout (it hadn't), that most congressional Republicans had voted against TARP (most voted in favor of it), that the Obama stimulus contained no tax cuts (about 40% of it was tax cuts), that their own income taxes had gone up during the Obama administration (they hadn't), and so on.[1]

Bozell also fails to address or even acknowledge the existence of other surveys touching on Stewart's claim, which leaves his readers with the misimpression that the claim is based on a single poll, the one Bozell (falsely) suggested was fatally flawed. In reality, multiple surveys going back nearly a decade have concluded that Fox News viewers are among the most misinformed news consumers. PIPA had reached that conclusion in a poll from 2003 that tested respondents' knowledge of issues related to the Iraq war and War On Terror [tm]. Media Matters cited four other polls from recent years that show the same thing. If a single poll has ever reached a contrary conclusion, neither I nor any of the conservative commentators who have written about this in the last few weeks have been able to find it. Bozell, like everyone else who has labored to refute Stewart, was forced to rely on--and to misrepresent--that Pew survey, the one that doesn't even address the question.

This was the game PolitiFact played when it entered into the fray; using Pew surveys that measured whether news consumers were uninformed, rather than misinformed, to muddy the water, then use the mud to rule Stewart's claim "false," while ignoring the existence of most of the surveys that did touch on--and that supported--Stewart's claim. Many of PolitiFact's readers nailed PolitiFact on this, but though the PolitiFact gang acknowledged this criticism, they have so far declined to withdraw their bogus "false" rating of Stewart's claim, and it continues to be used by conservatives as a club against Stewart.

That club was used to bash Stewart into offering a response, in which he said "I defer to (PolitiFact's) judgment, and apologize for my mistake. To not do so would be irresponsible," at which point he broke into a litany of claims made on Fox News that PolitiFact itself had rated as "false"--so many items that the texts of them literally blotted out the screen. Bozell referenced this in wrapping up his column:

"Jon Stewart did the right thing and conceded he was the one misinforming people on Fox News."

Of course, if Bozell thinks that's what Stewart actually did, he's utterly clueless,[2] and if he thought such a concession was "the right thing" to do, he's probably among those who think the Obama administration initiated the auto bailout, included no tax cuts in the stimulus, and raised his income taxes.

As is usually the case with Bozell, his new column consists of accusing people of being "liberals," and offering a superficial analysis, built on misinformation, that completely collapses under even cursory scrutiny. It's aimed at stoking the prejudices of those already predisposed to dismiss as useless anything from "liberals," and is woefully short on much anyone else would find particularly convincing. Last night, I wrote up a more compact version of the criticism of it I've offered, here, and it led to my being banned by Newsbusters, a place where substantive criticism is most definitely not welcome.

--classicliberal2

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[1] Bozell does offer one potentially legitimate criticism of the 2010 PIPA survey; that its sample of Fox viewers is too small to render a definitive judgment on all Fox viewers. The PIPA pollsters were looking for consumers of a broad range of news sources, not just Fox viewers, and their judgment of Fox viewers is based on about 145 people. While the relatively small sample size is a legitimate criticism, it really doesn't touch on the issue of Stewart's claim, which was that polls show Fox viewers to be the most misinformed. The 2010 PIPA poll--like all the others--did show that to be the case.

[2] PolitiFact showed itself to be equally clueless about what Stewart had actually done, and wrote that the comic had "accepted our False verdict and apologized." Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard didn't get it, either, and whined that "this is how a child admits a mistake, not a grown man..." No, Noel, it's the way a comedian makes an important point.

A Bozell in the Bush Is Worth A Press In Iraq?

2011-03-25T12:26:00.000-07:00

Right-wing "media critic" L. Brent Bozell III, the clown who runs the Media Research Center, just popped up on "Fox & Friends" to assert that, while Obama "seems to be getting a free pass from most media outlets" with regard to his decision to involve the U.S. in the Libyan crisis, George Bush Jr. got "anything but a free pass" from the press while dragging the U.S. into the invasion of Iraq.

Julie Millican & Adam Shah have issued a corrective to this jaw-dropper over at Media Matters, writing that this "shows that Fox News may actually inhabit Bizarro World." In the real world, of course, the corporate press was--and, for the most part, has remained--a virtual co-conspirator with the Bush administration over the matter of Iraq. In the lead-up to the Iraq war, Millican and Shah note, the media

"acted as Bush's lapdogs, eagerly parroting every dubious claim the Bush administration made about Iraq and shouting down the few who dared to disagree. So bad was the media's coverage of Iraq, many major media outlets have since issued apologies for their complete and total failure to investigate any of the claims made by the Bush administration."

They quote several examples of this, and their article isn't bad. Its shortcoming is that the authors, having made their overarching claim about Bush-friendly coverage, failed to make use of readily-available hard data that more ably made this point.

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting , which, unlike Bozell, conducts real media criticism, undertook a survey of Iraq coverage by the three major U.S. news networks and PBS' Newshour. FAIR broke down every news story on Iraq in a two-week period during the critical lead-up to the conflict (30 Jan., 2003 to 12 Feb., 2003). In that time, there were 393 on-camera sources on the evening newscasts. Out of that, only 17% "represented skeptical or critical positions on the U.S.'s war policy." Among U.S. sources, 75% were "official sources"--current or former government or military officials--and, of these, only one expressed any skepticism of the Bush policy. Only 6% of total U.S. sources were skeptics, and, "of all 393 sources, only three (less than 1 percent) were identified with organized protests or anti-war groups."

Keep that last number in mind when reading that, at the time FAIR was reporting this, Brent Bozell was using his column to smear the anti-war movement, and, more to the point, to bitterly whine about the failure of the press to sufficiently do the same. His headline (and no, I'm not making this up)? "Only Anti-War Citizens Are News." Bozell himself wrote four columns in the period covered by that first FAIR survey. The first (31 Jan.) was a rant about violence on tv; the second a complaint about "gay left politics in print"; the third about Michael Jackson; and the fourth a furious rant against CNN for having the audacity to put Bill Clinton on "Larry King Live" on Ronald Reagan's birthday. Not one of them was devoted to Iraq coverage, which suggests "media critic"--and fanatical Iraq invasion supporter--Bozell wasn't finding much to complain about in that critical period.

When the war began, FAIR followed up with another survey, beginning the day Bush launched the war, and continuing for three weeks. This one cast an even wider net--it examined the Iraq coverage of the three networks, the Newshour, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports, and Fox’s Special Report with Brit Hume. In this period, there were 1,617 sources appearing, but the results were even worse than before:

"Nearly two thirds of all sources, 64 percent, were pro-war, while 71 percent of U.S. guests favored the war. Anti-war voices were 10 percent of all sources, but just 6 percent of non-Iraqi sources and 3 percent of U.S. sources. Thus viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war; with U.S. guests alone, the ratio increases to 25 to 1... While the percentage of Americans opposing the war was about 10 times higher in the real world as they were on the nightly news (27 percent versus 3 percent), their proportion of the guestlist may still overstate the degree to which they were able to present their views on U.S. television. Guests with anti-war viewpoints were almost universally allowed one-sentence soundbites taken from interviews conducted on the street. Not a single show in the study conducted a sit-down interview with a person identified as being against the war."

And Bozell? In such an environment, pickings were mighty slim for a right-wing "media critic" whose paycheck is dependent upon perpetuating the myth of a "liberal media." Two of the six columns he wrote in this period had nothing to do with Iraq. The day after the war began, he was off writing about alleged "Anti-Catholic 'entertainment'." Later, deep in the midst of war, he penned a rant against the Oscar Awards. Of the four pieces dealing with Iraq coverage, all were about minor, peripheral matters. One was a complaint that the press had failed to sufficiently smear then-Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle for a remark critical of Bush; one was devoted to smearing journalist Peter Arnett; one attacked that noted newswoman Madonna for what may have been in a new video she declined to release to the public. Again--not joking. The last one, though, was the keeper. An anti-war demonstration had just picketed CNN over its Iraq coverage. How is a right-wing "media critic," whose career is devoted to pimping the "liberal media" lie, to explain such a thing to his credulous audience? About the protesters, Bozell writes:

"First the Democrats wouldn't carry their anti-war water. Now the media won't do their job and undermine the war effort? So the Loudmouth Left is doing what it does best: moan and scream, this time outside cable news studios... The war is going well, too well, and the coverage apparently is too positive. So the Loudmouth Leftists are crowding the streets and demeaning CNN with Nazi epithets."

The best he does, as he goes along, is to suggest the protesters are radicals whose claim to a legitimate complaint in this matter is dubious. Re-read the FAIR numbers quoted above when evaluating Bozell's claim, in this same column, that the protesters' complaints about coverage boiled down to the lack of sufficient live gore and death on television.

Bozell can find "liberal bias" in anything. If Barack Obama was to step outside and say "the sky certainly is blue today," Bozell would find bias in any reporter who may have nodded his head in agreement (and could probably produce some "scholar" from the Heritage Foundation to dispute the notion, then trash the rest of the press for failing to debunk Obama's "the sky is blue" lie). Reading through these Iraq columns, though, you'll find angry ranting, pro-Bush nonsense, a plethora of lies and misrepresentations, an often obsessive focus on the utterly trivial. What you won't find is any contemporaneous support for Bozell's later assertion that Bush was being given a hard time by the press. And there's a reason for that.

--classicliberal2

Walker's War on Wisconsin (UPDATES below)

2011-03-12T11:17:00.000-08:00

What can one say about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker? He's shown himself to be a preening, self-important peddler of poppycock, a wannabe Mussolini of the Midwest whose efforts to centralize an extraordinary amount of government power in his own hands have made him a rock star on the Republican right. That last only sounds paradoxical to those who don't pay attention.

Walker came to power alongside a rubber-stamp Republican majority in the state legislature, and he opened his administration in January by pressing through the body a series of fiscally ruinous policies, including huge tax cuts for the wealthy and for big business. Having added hundreds of millions of dollars worth of red ink to the state's finances, he then asserted that looming red ink meant the state faced a financial "crisis," and insisted it called for drastic and immediate measures to combat.

As it turned out, of course, the major aspects of his "Budget Repair Bill" didn't have much to do with the state's finances. It was mostly just about centralizing a great deal of power in Walker's hands. Among other things, it would have empowered him to sell off state-owned energy facilities to his Big Money cronies at will, without even any competitive bidding, and would have exempted such decisions from laws regarding public interest considerations. It would have removed from the legislature control over Medicaid, granting Walker's administration the dictatorial authority to raise premiums, limit program eligibility, and change reimbursement rates at will (Dennis Smith, Walker's appointee to head the agency charged with administering Medicaid, is an advocate for states leaving the program entirely). Most notoriously, it would break the state's contracts with public employee unions, cut their benefits, and strip from most of them their collective bargaining rights.

This last item caused quite a furor. Walker badly underestimated how unpopular it would prove to be, but he definitely knew he had a stinker on his hands, and he and the Republicans initially tried to jam it through with minimal debate before anyone noticed. He unveiled the bill, there was a single public hearing regarding it, a single committee meeting, and the Republican majority would have passed the bill the next day in a matter of minutes, except 14 Democratic legislators literally left the state in order to prevent them from having the Senate quorum necessary to do so.

The result was a stand-off that went on for weeks.

Walker was unyielding. Every time the absent senators would try to negotiate any sort of deal with him, his response was to call a press conference and insult them, while launching petty vindictive attacks on them through the legislature--trying to take away their parking, their pay, and their office expenses. More seriously, he and the Repubs tried to have them arrested for "contempt," in direct violation of the state constitution.

Walker insisted that the anti-union elements of his bill were absolutely necessary to deal with the state's fiscal "crisis." It became a mantra. It was a matter of public record that Wisconsin's future projected budget shortfalls--the portions not attributable to Walker's own policies--had nothing to do with the unions' benefits. They were a consequence of several items, primarily projected Medicaid expenses. Still, Walker repeated his mantra, and apparently hoped people would pay little attention to details. The unions had immediately agreed to the actual fiscal elements of Walker's proposal--the cuts in their benefits. Still, Walker repeated his mantra. Those concessions were always on the table, and at any point in this protracted drama, Walker could have simply taken them and declared victory. He refused to take "yes" for an answer because his purpose, contrary to his mantra, was to bust the unions, and he had no intention of accepting a negotiated settlement that left them their rights. Republicans in over a dozen states, in fact, suddenly simultaneously decided they also needed to go after their state's unions in the same way. Still, Walker repeated his mantra, apparently expecting us to accept this as merely an incredible coincidence.

The public didn't bite.

Instead, waves of protesters filled the state capitol. The demonstrations were scrupulously peaceful, but Walker ordered the capitol locked down anyway. A court ordered his administration to reopen it; Walker simply ignored the order, and circulated false stories in the press about the protesters causing millions of dollars in damage (in reality, there had been no real damage).

In order to finally pass the portion of the bill stripping the unions of their collective bargaining rights, the Repubs--after all that mantra repetition--finally had to admit it wasn't a fiscal measure at all, which had the benefit of removing the need for a senate quorum. They held a brief meeting with only two hours notice--an apparent violation of Wisconsin law--and passed the measure a few minutes later, inadvertently offering up the perfect footnote to the whole sordid affair by immediately arranging to attend a high-dollar fundraising dinner being thrown in their honor by lobbyists in Washington D.C..

To bask in the presence of their purchased puppets, these corrupt lobbyists will offer up a minimum $1,000 donation just to get in the door; lots of love, with lots of zeroes attached. The reaction of the larger public, however, has been quite different. After only two months in office, Walker's approval rating is in free-fall--down around 40%. Big majorities are now telling pollsters that, if the 2010 election was held again today, they'd vote against him, and by this time next year, he will--courtesy of Wisconsin's recall laws--most likely be reduced to a very-highly-paid Fox News special commentator, touring the brain-dead hemisphere of the talking-head circuit as a right-wing martyr to mean ol' labor unions, while a lot of the Repubs who backed him in the legislature will be unemployed. That may be the happiest ending Wisconsin can manage.

Meanwhile, the national Republican party has embraced the Mussolini of the Midwest as a hero, and seem to have decided they want what he's done to Wisconsin to be both their model and the public face of their party. Repubs, in legislatures across the country, continue their efforts to centralize power and destroy democratic--and Democratic--institutions.

Stay tuned.

--classicliberal2

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UPDATE (12 March, 2011) -- I've always found, in the various theories of liberal democracy, much merit in the notion that, when a government is elected, it earns the right to enact its program. In spite of what the Scott Walkers of the world believe, we don't elect dictatorships in the U.S., and the minority should get some concessions along the way, roughly equivalent to its size, but democracy has no meaning if a majority is prevented from governing at all. We've seen this at the federal level. Democrats won the White House and huge majorities in congress in 2008, but were effectively prevented from governing by a Republican minority that systematically abused the process and, in essence, completely nullified that entire election.

The Wisconsin situation isn't even close to being analogous to this, because Democrats, there, were objecting to items in a single bill, rather than to everything the Republicans had proposed, and Walker was refusing a reasonable compromise that fully addressed the concerns he feigned in public regarding state finances while pushing for a measure to which the public was overwhelmingly opposed

Still, the Democratic legislators' exit from the state in order to prevent that bill from going forward is a use of process to foil an elected majority, and merits some scrutiny.

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UPDATE (8 April, 2011) -- The potential violation of Wisconsin's Open Meetings Law in passing the union-busting bill resulted in a court injunction against publishing or enforcing the law. Wisconsin law requires that the Secretary of State publish any law in the official newspaper before it can be enforced. Walker and Republican Senate leader Scott Fitzgerald decided they could just ignore this law and the injunction, as well; they had the law published by the Legislative Reference Bureau, then publicly declared it had been legally published, was in effect, and that it would now be enforced. Rather than simply holding these clowns in contempt, the judge in the case issued a second order tersely reemphasizing that publication and enforcement of the law has been enjoined. Walker finally backed down, but the entire incident is emblematic of his behavior throughout this ordeal.

Setting the Record Straight on "Jack-Booted Thugs"

2011-03-10T18:19:00.000-08:00

I'm still not really up to writing much, or well, but an item over at Media Matters caught my eye tonight, and I felt compelled to offer some thoughts on it.

Adam Shah of Media Matters For America offers this as his set-up:

National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre is the last person a responsible media outlet should have on its airwaves to comment on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). That's because LaPierre once referred to ATF agents as "jack-booted government thugs" and reportedly called for "lifting the assault weapons ban to even the odds in the struggle between ordinary citizens and 'jack-booted government thugs.'"

Shah's framing can be read in such a way as to suggest that anyone who would call government agents "jack-booted government thugs" is inherently nuts. The gripe I have with this is that government agents frequently are jack-booted thugs. That LaPierre said so isn't why his comments were problematic.

LaPierre is a reactionary who deals in the nuttiest sort of black-helicopter conspiracism. His rhetoric, offered in the 1990s, is indistinguishable from that of the militia movement that grew like a cancer in that same period, and it's this context that elevated his "jack-booted government thugs" comment from a truism to an eye-raiser.

But it takes some space to explain why.

The right is not, in fact, "anti-government." As much as the press and some liberal commentators love to use that phrase as shorthand, it's difficult to imagine a characterization that could more grossly misrepresent the politics of contemporary conservatism. There are many "schools" of conservatism in the U.S., of course, but the core of the conservative base, at present, is made up of what may fairly be described as self-obsessed authoritarians. They're very opposed to government that taxes them. They're very opposed to the small "d" democratic elements of government, those responsive to the public. When it comes to pursuing their own cherished goals, though--which usually involve maintaining the aristocratic prerogatives of The Powers That Be, aggressive militarism, and enforcing social homogeneity--no amount of government ever proves to be enough.

This conservative core isn't opposed to jack-booted thuggery on the part of government. Those on the right have, in fact, always supported such thuggery, nurtured it, enabled it, even demanded it, for the simple reason that government thuggery has, historically, almost always been aimed at the left or at other groups despised by the right (immigrants, racial minorities, etc.), and the conservatives have been (and are) its enthusiastic advocates as long as that's the case.

When LaPierre made his comments, on the other hand, the right was out of power, and the narrative had shifted. Suddenly, the story peddled to the nuts was that a democratic--and, more importantly, Democratic--government was out to get white, right-wing rednecks. This was a handy way of inflaming the bumpkins against the other party, but reflected no genuine concern about government abuses.[*] During the just-concluded Bush administration, when a real thug was running the government and asserting the power to ignore the law and the constitution at will, kidnap, torture, and even murder American citizens with no pretense of due process, and so on, the conservatives virtually worshiped government power and their Maximal Leader, and the militia culture and movement, which had made such a pretense of being centrally concerned about government abuses in the '90s (when abuses were relatively minor), all but disappeared. When Democrats rolled over Republicans in the 2008 elections, though, the right went back to criticizing government again, and the militia culture was suddenly back again with a vengeance.

Back in the 1990s, the federal action against the Koresh cult in Texas became the central organizing cause for militant reactionaries. The broad narrative of the event that evolved on the nut right was that the cult was merely an unthreatening church that was attacked and besieged by the government for no real reason, then, at the end, was maliciously burned alive for refusing to submit. None of this had much of a relationship to the truth, but it made for a nifty organizing tool for years.

LaPierre was opportunistically playing to this sentiment when he made his "jack-booted government thugs" comment. In the same letter in which he wrote those words, he even made explicit reference to the action against the Koresh cult, and, further, added

"Not too long ago, it was unthinkable for federal agents wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms to attack law-abiding citizens. Not today."

Of course, such a thing hadn't been "unthinkable" to left-wing political parties, the civil rights movement, radical groups, labor unions, anti-war groups, and more other non-conservative and anti-conservative groups than can be named--they'd been on the receiving end of government violence for over a century, by that point. It was only "unthinkable" to white Christian conservative good ol' boys who had never been subjected to it. LaPierre was part of a cadre of reactionaries who, for purposes of political expediency, was trying to make it thinkable to them. The world learned how thinkable some of them found it when a fertilizer bomb went off in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing hundreds.

I realize that's more of a mouthful, as explanations go, but the implication that condemning government thuggery is what makes LaPierre's comments reprehensible shouldn't be allowed to stand. They're reprehensible for entirely different reasons. Real government thuggery should always be condemned by every American worthy of the name.

--classicliberal2

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[*] Back in the 1990s when LaPierre made his comment, the NRA was, in fact, trying to reinvent itself as a crime-fighting organization, circulating false "statistics" about how "soft on crime" America was, and advocating a "get tough" approach. In a word, thuggery.

Re-Thoughts on "Civil Discourse" (UPDATE BELOW)

2011-01-19T12:48:00.000-08:00

I'm currently in the midst of a devastating personal crisis, and I'm probably crazy to even attempt to comment on any serious subject. It's a diversion from what's really on my mind, and, while that can be welcomed when thoughts are as bleak as mine, it's never a good state of mind for creating thoughtful discourse. I'm going to give it a try, anyway. If it doesn't turn out to be one of my best, it's something of a little miracle if I finish it at all.

The attack, by a deranged gunman, on a crowd at a public political gathering in Arizona has led, in the last few days, to some criticism of the political climate created by the right, which, in turn, led to a massive pushback by the right (far larger than the almost-non-existent original criticism). The cretinous Sarah Palin emerged from her Alaskan bunker to climb up onto her cross and deny rhetoric can play any role in such violent atrocities, while simultaneously asserting that the rhetoric suggesting that it may cause it can inspire violent atrocities, pretty much mirroring the tone of the entire conservative reaction. Writing over at "In My Humble Opinion," the overworked Niceguy Eddie has offered up some thoughts on the matter of civil discourse, but I take issue with what he says, to a degree, and decided I'd try to write about it.

First, Eddie:

"I’m not saying that we SHOULDN’T be more civil in our discourse, but using tragedy to highlight even THAT (which to some people STILL constitutes an “agenda”) is still politicizing it."

I think you miss a much more important point. One of the most serious problems we face in the U.S. flows, at base, from the efforts of those on the right to intentionally demonize, delegitimize, and dehumanize their enemies. What passes for public discourse from the American conservative elite (and is accepted without any significant skepticism by a lot of their followers) is little more than a string of personal attacks with that kind of total destruction as a goal. The right shows absolutely no regard for the truth when they're about this. They don't try to personally destroy someone based on the actual views and actions of that someone; they just, to put it bluntly, make shit up. Obama isn't opposed because of anything he actually does or is; he's opposed because he's a Kenyan Bolshevik who wants to set up government death panels to kill the elderly and infirm, manage a government takeover of industry, and destroy capitalism. The narrative, offered by the American conservative elite, of what happens in the U.S. rarely even touches reality. By it, there isn't even any room for honest disagreement. Those who disagree are enemies, and those enemies are the enemies of mankind itself.

The elite of the right has a gargantuan, omnipresent, multi-media machine to spread this narrative. It's like nothing that has ever existed in human history, and for a huge portion of the population (a distinct minority, but still huge), that narrative is holy writ.

This isn't just a problem in the ridiculous political food-fights we have every day, most of which don't amount to a hill of beans. It has, among other things, the potential to cause incredible amounts of violence. If you spend 24-hours/day, every day, telling your credulous followers that their enemies--those with whom they politically disagree--are out to destroy them, it's only a matter of time before a lot of them are going to get it in their heads that they'd better pick up a gun or a bomb and "save" the country. But violence isn't even the biggest problem we face as a consequence of this narrative. It's much bigger. It is, in fact, a literally existentialist matter. Forget about "civil discourse." Public discourse itself has been all but destroyed in the U.S. by this, and that's the death of a democratic society. Increasingly, people can't talk to one another in any meaningful way, they certainly can't disagree with one another, and for those who have seriously bought into the narrative as it is seriously offered, allowing any influence at all over public affairs by someone who disagrees--an enemy--begins to seem absolutely intolerable. Maybe even just living next to them will starts to seem intolerable.

Political rhetoric appears to have played no role in what happened in Arizona, but if the incident draws some attention to this wretched state of affairs, that's something positive that can come from the horror. I understand your concern for the feelings of the victims, Eddie, but I don't think dealing with this is any offense to them (though the ranting and bumper-sticker fix-alls offered by some of those clowns you mentioned are certainly thoughtless and inappropriate). The dead are gone. The rest of us still have to live, and part of that is addressing this problem.

It isn't addressed by noxious censorship, or anything like that. It can only be addressed by something we've fallen out of the habit of doing: having a real national conversation.

That said, I really don't think it will be addressed. Not as a result of what happened in Arizona, in any event. What little critical commentary that has emerged in recent days has focused, almost entirely, on things like Sarah Palin's use of phrases like "don't retreat; reload," and on defeated senatorial candidate Sharron Angle's suggestion that "Second Amendment remedies" could be a response if the right person--read: her--didn't win an election, and on Republicans' use of a map that put crosshairs on the districts of congressmen they're "targeting." This is totally misguided criticism. The problem isn't with things like this (most of which are of little consequence, and are relatively innocuous). It's with the context in which things like this are offered. It isn't with scattered comments involving allusions to violence. It's with the right's overall narrative. Focusing on the scattered comments will prevent it from being addressed.

It should also be most forcefully noted that this is a problem with the right, not with the rest of us. If, in the phony games of "balance" traditionally played by the press and in conservative efforts to deflect the issue by presenting a few scattered examples of inappropriate rhetoric by liberals, this is lost, then so will be any effort to address the problem.

The biggest reason it won't be addressed, though, is because of its sheer size. It isn't about those stray remarks. It's about what a huge portion of the population has been told to believe, and has accepted as reality. That's not something that can be turned on a dime. It may not be something that can be turned at all. A turn, in this case, requires people to begin questioning nonsense they've accepted as gospel for years. More importantly, it would require those who peddle it to them to stop peddling it, and that would entail that big right-wing machine going entirely out of business, because that's all it has to offer. Fat chance. And how do you have a conversation with people who, as a matter of fundamental ideology, regard you as an enemy whose every word is a lie, and refuse to indulge in any real conversation?

We have to try, though.

What else is there?

--classicliberal2

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UPDATE (20 Jan., 2011) -- NiceGuy Eddie replies in comments, and my response ran a little long, so I'll put it here. Eddie:

"...you can't simultaneously accept the truth that having 'civil discourse' will affect the Right's behavior 90% and the Left's just 10% and NOT call that 'an agenda.' That I happen to SHARE that agenda with you doesn't change the fact that it's AN AGENDA. And while you and I will rightly call it an AMERICAN agenda or a MORAL agenda or a PRINCIPLED agenda, given the affect it will have, and on who, the Right can reasonably call it a LEFTIST Agenda. That's bullshit of course, and it's their fault for moving to the Right of SANITY, but from their POV, it's still TRUE."

That's a symptom of the very malady I outlined in what I wrote before, though, and you can't cater to that. If you try, you lose before you even begin, because that's the outcome their narrative is designed to produce, the only one. If, as a precondition to having that conversation, you have to wait until the right doesn't act that way, that conversation will never happen.

As for angry ranting, it is often not only appropriate; the lack of it would be inappropriate. There's a big difference between angry ranting based on something that should provoke angry ranting and the sort of manufactured outrage that flows from (and sustains) the right on a daily basis. That's why the narrow focus on mere "civil discourse" is so misguided. There's no reason at all to be civil about things that legitimately provoke incivility. The reason the right's incivility is a problem is because it's based on nonsense. One lie on top of another on top of another.

When those on the right were fighting the health-care bill because it set up death panels to kill old people, they weren't disagreeing with the health-care bill; they're just making up shit to try to dehumanize their enemies. The same is true when they opposed it because it provided government health-care to illegal immigrants. No permutation of it ever did, and this was thrown out merely to fan the flames of racism and rip at the fabric of society (that clown Wilson, who, at Obama's address to congress, shouted "YOU LIE!" became a hero on the right for doing that). The same is true when they oppose it because they're against "socialized medicine." The bill that was passed doesn't "socialize" any aspect of health care. (and, further, the idea behind that--that any government involvement in business is properly characterized as "socialism"--is also a part of what I'm talking about, as is the fact that, in the right's usage, "socialism" is both a synonym for "liberalism" and an invocation of Bolshevism).

Now, the health care bill was, it's true, a monstrous piece of legislation. There were more painfully real reasons to genuinely oppose it than could be easily listed. I wrote article after article denouncing it at the time. The right wasn't opposed to it because of any of those real reasons. As I pointed out repeatedly, it was, in fact, a Republican bill that was passed. It was modeled on Romneycare in Massachusetts, and almost exactly the same legislation had been proposed, in recent years, by Republican Sen. Judd Gregg, and by former Republican Sen. Bob Dole. The first iteration on it was created by congressional Republicans back in the '90s when Clinton was working on health care--it was their proposed alternative (that's where Romney apparently got it). When Obama adopted it as his own, Republicans dropped it like a hot rock, and attacked it with the sort of rhetoric I just outlined.

There's a huge difference between outrage based on something actually outrage-worthy and this kind of bullshit. If I offer up an angry rant on an angry-rant-worthy subject and I'm tagged, by the right, as a hypocrite for doing it because I denounce their angry ranting (which is based on bullshit), that's symptomatic of their own problem, not an indication that I'm "rightly" branded a hypocrite.

As much as I've gone on, I don't think I've even started to do this subject justice. I'm just having an incredibly hard time right now. As bad as everything else is, a "friend" chose this, of all times, to manufacture an absolutely absurd drama and use it to drop another atom-bomb on me a few days ago (a few of them, actually). I try not to hold it against her, and I know I'm not even in any shape to judge what happened or anything else. I thought I'd already hit rock-bottom these last two months; she made a great stride in proving me wrong. A lot of what I've "written" here, was cut-and-pasted, with modifications, from some earlier things I'd written, because I'm just not up to writing right now.

The Obama Backs Bush Murder Policy

2010-11-09T15:35:00.000-08:00

In one of the best-kept secrets of the U.S. corporate media, the Obama administration yesterday went before a federal court and threw its full support behind yet another of the Bush administration's assertions of fascist powers. This time, the issue revolves around the question of whether the executive branch of the U.S. government has the unlimited, unchecked, unreviewed power to unilaterally designate, as a danger to the U.S., a U.S. citizen--a civilian in a non-combat situation--then murder him. This administration, like the last, says "yes," and also asserted, in a manner all too familiar to those of us who had followed Bush's efforts to drag the U.S. down the long, ugly road to fascism, that it was an executive matter the judiciary hadn't even the authority to review.

All of this was in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, who are looking to limit the government's power to carry out these sorts of Mafia-style extrajudicial murders to cases of imminent danger to life and safety and have requested that the court force the executive branch to publicly disclose the secret process that results in a U.S. citizen being placed on a government hit-list.

The ACLU and CCR are acting at the request of Nasser Al-Aulaqi, the father of Anwar Al-Aulaqi. Anwar is a reactionary Muslim cleric reportedly placed on a government hit-list. Because he has been so targeted, the Treasury Department asserted that the ACLU and CCR, before they could even bring the suit, had to request a special license to allow them to do so. They requested the license, the government failed to provide it, and they proceeded to file a separate suit against the licensing scheme. Seems like a no-brainer. It's bad enough the government would assert the unrestrained power to kill U.S. citizens, but we're well into Kafka territory when someone so targeted has to obtain a license from that same government to allow him to challenge its decision to destroy him.

Linked to terrorists and, in his own right, reportedly an anti-Western Islamist reactionary of the worst sort, Aulaqi is hardly the poster-boy for an ideal plaintiff, but he is an American citizen, and his inflammatory views are of no real consequence to the issue at hand. Aulaqi has never been convicted or even charged with any crime by the U.S.. Jameel Jaffer, who presented arguments for the ACLU yesterday, put the matter succinctly:

"If the Constitution means anything, it surely means that the president does not have unreviewable authority to summarily execute any American whom he concludes is an enemy of the state."

The "liberal" Obama administration disagrees. Hopefully, the matter can be decided before it gets to the current Supreme Court.

--classicliberal2

Sound Election Analysis, or A Big Bunch of B.S From Bayh?

2010-11-04T12:08:00.000-07:00

In these tough economic times, Evan Bayh certainly doesn't have to worry about ever being out of work. The cretinous right-wing slug who, until his retirement in January, is Indiana's excuse for a junior Senator, decided, yesterday, to give us a preview of his likely post-Senate job as a political analyst. Unsurprisingly, it looks a lot like what he's been doing as a "Democratic" Senator; namely, trashing liberal Democrats. The American conservative elite like "Democrats" who trash Democrats. They pay them well for it.

For some reason, the New York Times saw fit to waste the paper and ink necessary to mass-publish Bayh's application for this dismal work in the form of an op-ed offering the Senator's take on Tuesday's congressional election. Bayh concludes Democrats lost because they're too liberal.

What a surprise, right?

"To a degree," he says, "we" by which he means Democrats, "are authors of our own misfortune." How so?

"It is clear that Democrats over-interpreted our mandate. Talk of a 'political realignment' and a 'new progressive era' proved wishful thinking. Exit polls in 2008 showed that 22 percent of voters identified themselves as liberals, 32 percent as conservatives and 44 percent as moderates. An electorate that is 76 percent moderate to conservative was not crying out for a move to the left."

But then, again, the American public isn't "76 percent moderate to conservative"; that polling reflects how people--most of whom are not political junkies and don't put a great deal of thought into what simple label they apply to their politics--view themselves, and is profoundly impacted by the decades-long demonization of the "liberal" label. Ask them specific questions about their views and Americans are, just as they have been for ages, liberal, and, on most issues, overwhelmingly so.

Bayh is phoning it in from another dimension when he says "we," by which he means Democrats, "were too deferential to our most zealous supporters." In this one, the Obama, who has largely set the Democratic agenda, has remained well to the right of the general public, continuing the war in Iraq while expanding the war in Afghanistan, refusing to even consider single-payer health care, then dropping the public option from the Republican health care bill he adopted as his own, watering down regulatory reform, moving the already-reactionary Supreme Court further to the right, refusing to throw any kind of weight behind Democratic congressional efforts to both prevent companies from exporting jobs and to encourage companies to import them, at a time when jobs are THE major issue, then, as a final indignity, publicly trashing his own base while whining about how he doesn't get any credit for his "accomplishments." This behavior helped turn off his base and feed the "enthusiasm gap" between Democratic and Republican voters, which Gallup reported, just before the election, was 19%--greater than they'd ever measured in the nearly-two-decades they'd tracked it.

Bayh's fanciful account of the election season:

"During election season, Congress sought to placate those on the extreme left and motivate the base--but that meant that our final efforts before the election focused on trying to allow gays in the military, change our immigration system and repeal the George W. Bush-era tax cuts. These are legitimate issues but unlikely to resonate with moderate swing voters in a season of economic discontent."

Hard to know where to start.

In the real world, the public overwhelmingly supports allowing homosexuals to serve in the military. A typical poll (this one from CBS News) found, only a few weeks ago, 69% support for the proposition, 51% saying they supported it "strongly" (only 21% opposed it). Trying to make this possible wouldn't have been an effort "to placate those on the extreme left"--it would have been an effort to enact a policy overwhelmingly supported by the American public. Unfortunately, the Democrats weren't trying to allow gays in the military during the campaign--they were, instead, engaged in delaying tactics designed to prevent the matter from becoming an issue in the campaign. Only weeks ago, a federal court voided the current policy, and if the Obama had wanted, he could have just been done with it, at that point. Instead, he chose to appeal the ruling, which didn't endear him to anyone on the left.

There was no serious movement on immigration reform at any point during the campaign--Bayh's assertion to the contrary is fantasy.

It's a misrepresentation--or, just to call it straight, a lie--to say Democrats were trying "to repeal the George W. Bush-era tax cuts." The tax cuts aren't going to be repealed--they're going to expire. That's the law. If nothing happens, they all go away. The debate is whether or not they should be continued. Democrats have argued for renewing the tax cuts that go to most people while allowing to expire the big chunk of them that go to those of higher income. Polling shows that this is also the position of a majority or plurality of the public, depending on the question's wording, so, again, this isn't aimed at trying "to placate those on the extreme left"--the Democratic view has broad support.

Some numbers being well-circulated on the left blogosphere today further cripple Bayh's narrative that Democrats cut their own throats by being Democrats. While the liberal Congressional Progressive caucus lost only three of its more-than-80 members on Tuesday, the Blue Dog caucus, made up of right-wing Democrats like Bayh who shun "their" party and side with Republicans time and time again, was decimated, losing nearly 30 of their 54 members.

Even after voters sent most of the "Democrats" packing, Bayh's big solution to Democratic woes is that Democrats should become even more conservative, and that the already-conservative Obama should move even further to the right--"seize the center," as Bayh euphemistically puts it. It's the sort of conclusion the American conservative elite pays well to spread around, particularly when it's being offered by a faux Democrat, so while Bayh has proven himself utterly worthless as a Senator, he can leave his overpaid post in these bad economic times without a worry about future employment. He'll have work. His family will never go hungry. His future is bright. He should probably wear shades.

--classicliberal2

"Far to the left in American politics"? A Test Case

2010-11-02T07:54:00.000-07:00

I sometimes poke around over at "The Next Right," a theoretically "reformist" conservative site (albeit one that, in practice, mostly ends up being SOS), and, this being election day, I thought I'd step over there and see if there was anything interesting.

I found a blog, there, from poster Ironman, about Rep. Chris Murphy, the Democratic congressman from Connecticut's 5th district. Posted yesterday, it advises people to "be pragmatic tomorrow--remove a radical from CT 5." Campaigns produce a lot of hyperbolic rhetoric, of course, and maybe it's best to chalk IM's words up to the feverish emotions of the moment and leave it at that, but something made me want to offer a few comments on it. Probably the fact that it's so perfectly emblematic of the very wrongheaded "thinking" of a lot of the contemporary American right.

IM's premise is that Murphy is some sort of wild-eyed lefty radical who is misrepresenting himself in his reelection bid:

"Chris Murphy's closing argument in his flagging bid for re-election is that he represents the 'pragmatic center' of American politics.

"I call B.S. on this. Let's count the ways Murphy is far to the Left in American politics--even beyond the usual Nancy Pelosi foot soldier."

His first example:

"Murphy is one of the most vocal opponents of the use of warrantless wiretaps to obtain information to thwart terrorist threats... [D]o we want to hamstring the people who keep us safe? Murphy evidently does."

Is this evidence of Murphy's radicalism?

Well, it should be said, right up front, that Bush's NSA wiretapping program was completely illegal--a blatantly criminal enterprise that was explicitly forbidden by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had been on the books for decades, so IM's premise, that standing against government surveillance conducted with blatant criminality makes one some sort of radical, is, to put it as kindly as possible, shaky (another depressing sign of creeping fascism on the right).

What did the public think about Bush's criminal enterprise? In the immediate aftermath of the story breaking, the U.S. was almost equally divided. Polling showed that slim majorities either supported or opposed it based on the wording of the poll question, the more accurate wording producing stronger opposition than support. Murphy's "radical" opposition to it was in line with that of half the public.

That was just after the story broke.

As time went by, public opinion shifted strongly against the Bush administration on this matter. By Oct. 2007, a Mehlman Group poll found that 61% said the government should have to get a warrant before conducting this sort of surveillance; only 35% supported the Bush position. By Jan. 2008, another Mehlman Group poll asked the same question; 63% said the government should have to get a warrant (55% said they believed this "strongly"), with only 33% supporting the Bush position (24% "strongly"). By Feb. 2009, just after the beginning of Murphy's current term in office, 63% of respondents were telling Gallup they favored an investigation into the matter, including 77% of Democrats, 64% of independents, and even 41% of Republicans. Murphy's "radical" view, which IM says puts him "far to the Left in American politics," is, in fact, that of an overwhelming majority of the public--of Democrats, of independents, and of nearly half of the Republicans.

IM continues:

"Worse still, he favored letting the telecom firms that assisted the War on Terror face ruinous lawsuits from lefty lawyers "

The telecom firms in question "assisted the War on Terror" by illegally turning over private information on their clients to the Bush administration. They weren't ordered by a court to do so--Bush wanted it, and they just handed it over. Bush sought a bill granting these companies a blanket immunity from any legal action their enraged clients may bring against them. Murphy opposed this immunity.

Evidence of Murphy radicalism? Hardly. In that same Mehlman Group poll referenced above, 57% opposed granting immunity; 45% "strongly" opposed it. Only 33% supported it (22% "strongly"). The opposition to immunity cut across all political lines--liberals opposed it by 64%, moderates by 58%, and even 50% of conservatives opposed it.

So, again, IM is describing Murphy as a "radical" and "far to the Left in American politics" based on his holding the same views that are also broadly and overwhelmingly held by the public.

It's also worth, again, noting IM's premise in using this example; that Murphy is some sort of extreme lefty based on Murphy's opposition to blatant lawbreaking by the telecoms, turning over private information on the public to the government.

IM continues:

"Murphy is also one of the firmest opponents of keeping the detention facility at Gitmo open."

The public has been strongly divided on this question. In Jan. 2009, 53% told the ABC News/Washington Post poll they thought the U.S. should close the facility, with 42% supporting keeping it open. A CBS News/New York Times poll three months later showed an almost-even split--47% should continue to operate, while 44% said to close the prison. An AP/Roper poll two months later showed the public evenly split on the question--47% approved of Obama's then-goal to close the facility within a year, while 47% opposed it. Again, Murphy's view seems in line with about half of the public.

Unfortunately, this matter has been subject to a great deal of right-wing fear-mongering. The far right expended a great deal of effort telling the public that closing the facility would mean al Qaida prisoners would be dropped in their back yards, and when poll questions include nods toward this, NIMBYist sentiment kicks in. A USA Today/Gallup poll from May 2009, for example, asked, "Suppose the prison at Guantanamo Bay is closed. Would you favor or oppose moving some of those prisoners to a prison in your state?" 74% were opposed, with only 23% in favor. The results are usually less dramatic (around a 60/40 split), but large majorities do oppose closing the facility if the prisoners end up in their back yards, so on this matter, Murphy can be said to be out of sync with most people, if one doesn't control for NIMBYism.

IM continues:

"Chris Murphy has a problem with the health care bill. He doesn't think it went far enough. He is a strong supporter of the public option."

As was most of the public throughout the health-care debate. In a Time magazine poll from July, 2009, 56% supported the public option, 36% opposed. In a CNN/Opinion Research poll from Aug., 2009, 55% favored the public option, 41% opposed. In a Kaiser Family Foundation poll from Sept. 2009, 57% supported a public option, only 37% opposed. In a Quinnipiac poll from Oct. 2009, 61% supported the public option, only 34% opposed. In a CBS News/New York Times poll from Dec., 2009, 59% supported the public option, with only 29% opposed. This poll broke down the results by party, and found that support included 80% of Democrats, 59% of independents, and even 33% of Republicans.

So, again, Murphy is tagged as a lefty radical for being in line with most of the public.

And that's the whole of IM's substantive case against Murphy. He whines about Murphy attended a gathering of internet liberals, misrepresents a comment Murphy made to MSNBC [*], and concludes that "there are none [Democrats] more deserving of defeat than Connecticut's Chris Murphy."

It's clear IM doesn't like Murphy's politics, and, for whatever reason, he seems to personally despise the man, but he utterly fails to prove his premise that Murphy is some sort of "radical" who "is far to the Left in American politics." From IM's description, in fact, Murphy appears to be exactly what IM quotes him as calling himself, a representative of "the 'pragmatic center' of American politics." That IM sees this as "radical" says everything about himself, and nothing about Chris Murphy.

--classicliberal2

---

[*] IM's version:

"He [Murphy] told MSMBC that after he and his colleagues got past the voters in November they would return with 'steel in their spine' ready to cast more tough votes against the wishes of their constituents."

The actual comment, in context:

"Giving an upbeat scenario for Election Day, Murphy said, 'When we retain the House, some members are going to come back with some extra steel in their spines, having cast some tough votes and having survived what’s likely the toughest election of their career.'"

[NOTE: The polls I cited but to which I don't link come from Pollingreport.com]

Monsters, Noses, & What Comes Next: Thoughts on the 2010 Congressional Elections

2010-10-30T18:44:00.000-07:00

Some liberal commentators have displayed something akin to a panic at the prospect of a big Republican win in Tuesday's congressional elections. Keith Olbermann, Paul Krugman, and others have expressed their despair that fickle voters would return to power the advocates of the failed policies that, among other things, decimated the U.S. economy, sending it plunging into the deep pit in which it now remains stubbornly trapped. They've correctly outlined the extreme reactionary nature of the current Republican party, a party that has adopted its lunatic fringe as its mainstream.

In my view, most of these liberals presently sounding the alarm see this last as too recent a development. It's actually something that's been going on for quite some time, and their failure to recognize it doesn't speak well of them. They're right about one thing, though--it really is worse than ever. The hard core of the American right has, for decades, been an ever-rightening gaggle of overly reactionary reactionaries, but, while the broader, less insane Republican party with which they largely associated has always been a relatively narrow coalition, there had always been some little room for more reasonable--or, more precisely, less unreasonable--voices. In recent decades, though, that hard core has dragged out the long knives and ran them through just about anyone who wasn't as brutish, stupid, insane, and ass-backwards as it is. This was greatly accelerated by the 2008 campaign and its immediate aftermath, which saw the Democrats absorbing larger portions of the moderate and run-of-the-mill conservative demographics, leaving the hard core right to rebuild the Republican party. They've made it into a monster more monstrous than it has been in the lifetime of most people reading these words.

Now, that monster stands poised to take over, and progressive commentators are beside themselves at the prospect.

Their "solution," however, is not terribly helpful. They just tell us we should hold our noses and vote for Democrats.

The "hold our noses" part is necessary because the Democrats, in the last two years, have been abysmal failures. The Obama not only failed to roll back the horror that was the above-the-law, dictatorial chief executive built by the Bush administration, it refused to prosecute those responsible for it, and has actually defended most of its elements from every substantive challenge, allowing it to pass into precedent. The Obama and his party entirely squandered the historical opportunity handed them by the public in 2008, a chance to really get some things done; instead of anything that could be mistake for progressive change, all we've gotten from them are warmed-over conservative Republican policies. Even if the Democrats pulled off some incredible upset win on Tuesday, there's absolutely no reason to believe they'd behave any differently for the next two years than they have for the last. The nose must be held if voting for most Democrats because they don't deserve our vote. Most people, I suspect, aren't going to give it to them, either.

It's clear that the far right is just as much a horror show today as its fiercest critics insist, and there's no doubt it could do a great deal of damage if allowed unfettered power. It's just as clear, though, that, in spite of the alarmist sentiment coming from the liberals, it isn't going to get that sort of unfettered power. The reactionaries aren't winning hearts and minds. There's been no sudden upsurge in public enthusiasm for far-right policies or attitudes. Indeed, most people totally--even viscerally--reject both. The only reason the reactionaries are even being allowed anywhere near power now is because, at a time when the economy is in the toilet and the Democrats who hold the majority suck, they control the Republican party, which, in a theoretically two-party state, is considered the only viable alternative for expressing discontent. If they were to win both houses of congress on Tuesday and were to begin implementing their nuttier policies, the public would turn on them instantly. The right has managed to, broadly, rule the U.S. for decades, regardless of which party had a majority, but the far right is inherently self-destructive.

That shouldn't be read as underplaying the damage it could more realistically do. Even without an overwhelming win, they could block any effort at reform. But then, again, practically no one, among the elected, is offering any real reform anyway. Would it really be such a loss if the Obama was prevented from implementing the same kind of Republican policies, in the second half of his term, as he did in the first half?

This election is historically significant for a few reasons. It's the first election after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the "Citizens United" case, which guaranteed a significant degree of conservative success at the polls. In the wake of that ruling, corporate America has flexed its muscles in the ongoing congressional campaigns, with Big Money frequently outspending the parties and candidates in an effort to purchase an even more compliant congress. As long as this ruling remains uncorrected, this trend will only get worse as time goes by. This is also a census year, and to the extent that Republicans win at the state level, they'll be the ones directing redistricting efforts in the states based on that census, using the process to gerrymander as many safe Republican districts as they can manage.

The energy of progressives, though, shouldn't be so heavily directed toward playing electoral politics and trying to maintain a temporary majority in government for those who are (or at least seem) less reactionary. That energy should, instead, have been directed toward pushing for progressive reforms from the Obama and the Democratic congressional majority for the past two years. Only days after Obama's election, Tom Englehardt wrote a prescient piece I approvingly quoted (with some caveats)[*] at the time:

"Leave Obama to them [political Washington] and he'll break your heart. If you do, then blame yourself, not him; but better than blaming anyone, pitch your own tent on the public commons and make some noise. Let him know that Washington's isn't the only consensus around, that Americans really do want our troops to come home, that we actually are looking for 'change we can believe in,' which would include a less weaponized, less imperial American world, based on a reinvigorated idea of defense, not aggression, and on the Constitution, not leftover Rumsfeld rules or a bogus Global War on Terror."

Progressive reformers didn't bother, and now, it's too late. Regardless of what happens with this election, liberals need to finally get off their asses, roll up their sleeves, and do what Englehardt suggested years ago: raise some hell, and keep raising it.

--classicliberal2

---

[*] The biggest one being that Englehardt gave Obama a pass on taking the blame. I thought--and think--he can take lots and lots of it.

"The Republicans are Nazis"?

2010-10-27T09:57:00.000-07:00

Drawing parallels between contemporary politics and Nazism is a tricky business. It's usually a good idea to maintain a taboo against it, because, as "Nazi" and "fascist" became multi-purpose curses in political discourse, such parallels were both ubiquitously drawn and, in almost every case, entirely inappropriate. We have to be able to learn from the past, and when we cheapen the world's experience with fascism by hanging the label on everything we don't like, we're cheating ourselves of that ability.

That, however, is the same reason such parallels shouldn't automatically be a taboo. The taboo was created to combat inappropriate use of such comparisons. From that, the best of intentions, I fear we've often erred in the opposite direction, coming to regard any comparison at all as inherently out-of-line. If overuse of the labels makes it difficult to learn anything from our past, rejecting any comparison to fascism simply because it is a comparison to fascism makes learning anything utterly impossible. The yardstick by which we should measure any such comparison should always be its appropriateness.

With that as preface, "Down With Tyranny" is rather alarmed, today:

"Michael Godwin can [shove it]. The Republicans are Nazis... Or do you not see the relation between Sharron Angle's 'Second Amendment remedies,' Joe Miller's private thugs roughing up journalists, Daniel Webster's religious cult calling for the stoning of disobedient women and gays (stoning to death, I might add), Republicans' incessant demands that the Constitution be altered in ways they prefer, Boehner's 'Hell, No' obstructionism to economic salvation for the country, Rich Iott's glorification and emulation of SS death squads, physically violence towards women from top tier GOP candidates like David Rivera and Tom Ganley, and Monday evening's ugly 'altercation,' as Rand Paul put it in defending his fascist supporters, 'between supporters of both sides?' If America votes in the Republicans next week, it's one giant step--perhaps an irreversible one--towards what the German's allowed to happen to them in 1933."

As fascist parallels go, this skirts right along the boundary between appropriate and inappropriate. My initial impulse was simply to write it off as over-the-top, but there are certain on-the-ground facts that hinder such an easy dismissal. Not so much related to this election in particular, but about the trend of what, today, passes for American conservatism, which genuinely has been toward fascism for some time, now.

Consider what happened during the Bush administration. In George Bush Jr., the U.S. was confronted with a "president" who asserted the power to ignore U.S. law and the constitution at will; to unilaterally suspend fundamental constitutional rights like the free press; to kidnap anyone, anywhere in the world, including U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, and to throw them in a deep, dark hole, with no access to courts, lawyers, any semblance of due process. From there, the victims of this government kidnapping could, the administration asserted, be tortured, shipped off to foreign soil to be tortured, tried in secret kangaroo courts with secret evidence and predetermined outcomes, and even murdered in secret. Or, they could just be left down in that deep, dark hole to rot. Forever. Behind closed doors, the administration claimed the "authority" to read our emails, listen in on our phone conversations, dig through our financial records. They openly used "signing statements" to assert that they were immune from literally hundreds of laws passed by the legitimately elected government. Obsessed with secrecy, they made getting any significant information from the government almost impossible, while carrying out a program of "cleansing" the key agencies of that same government of elements considered insufficiently "loyal" to Bush. They lied the U.S. into undertaking an imperial project in Iraq that has cost thousands of lives, billions in treasure, and resulted in a quagmire from which the U.S. hasn't yet managed to extricate itself, and had every intention of doing the same thing in Iran. And that's just for starters.

A fascist parallel is not only entirely appropriate, when describing such a thing, it's virtually inescapable. Arguably, it would, in fact, be completely irresponsible not to draw such a comparison. Certainly, the historical precedents for what Bush did are to be found, primarily, in squalid dictatorships.

And what about the larger American right? While Bush was building an embryonic tyranny of monstrous proportions, the conservatives practically worshiped him. Among conservative Republicans, he was probably both the most popular president and the most consistently popular one in the history of polling. In Jan. 2009, as Bush was leaving office (his poll numbers among the general public in ruins), the ABC/Washington Post poll asked respondents to offer an overall rating of his administration: A whopping 82% of conservative Republicans rated him a success; 53% "strongly."

Fascism remains very strong among what passes for conservatives today. The extreme anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-"different" sentiment is a part of it. A recurring example that never ceases to dismay is how the right makes it a matter of furious controversy every time the Obama administration arrests someone as a suspect in a terrorism-related crime, rather than simply kidnapping and torturing the fellow without regard for U.S. law or the constitution (and this represents an even closer step toward fascism than Bush encouraged, as his administration boasted of trying hundreds of terror suspects in legitimate courts, without any objection from the larger right). The Republican leader in the Senate describes his parties' primary goal as gaining power. They even have the seemingly bottomless support of the money elite, as with all successful fascist movements. A lot of what "Down With Tyranny" cites today could, indeed, be used to fill out this train of thought.

These are trends that are profoundly disturbing, particularly given the fact that the Obama administration chose to give the Bush gang a pass--no prosecutions or even investigations, and, worse, much of what Bush did has either been allowed, by the Obama, to pass into precedent, or has been actively defended by the current administration. This leaves the governing monster Bush built in place, to be used by whomever may come along, while, at the same time, the Republicans, whatever they are or may become, are, in this theoretical two-party state, always the default beneficiaries of frustration with the majority party.

It may be that DWT's comments today skirt the boundary of appropriate with regard to the use of Nazi parallels. It may be that this is the wrong focus. He clearly thinks the barbarians are at the gates. It may be that his major error in this is in failing to realize how much progress they've already made.

--classicliberal2

"The single most important thing we want to achieve..."

2010-10-26T19:44:00.000-07:00

"They [the Democrats] make these decisions to empower themselves. They make these decisions to empower the government. They are not making decisions in your best interest... they don't even know what your best interest is... they operate full-time, 24/7 based on politics and power."

The words are those of insane reactionary radio ranter Mark Levin, from 12 Oct., 2010, but it's sentiment one hears so frequently from conservatives on talk radio and on the internet that it has become a cliché. Democrats may make a public show of having other concerns, but secretly, they only care about power.

Meanwhile, here's Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, the man who would be majority leader of the Senate in the unlikely event that Republicans win a majority in the body, publicly outlining the Republicans' goals for National Journal only days ago:

"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. Our single biggest goal is to give our nominee for president the maximum opportunity to be successful."

The economy is barely limping along, unemployment is high, the government is running big deficits, Democrats are taking a daily pounding from the right for all of it, but this--gaining power--is the Republicans' primary focus, plainly and openly stated, right from the horse's mouth (or from one of its orifices, anyway).

The Obama has sacrificed his entire administration on the altar of getting along with these creatures, and has even said he thinks a big Republican victory may spur the Repubs to "offer serious proposals and work with me in a serious way."

--classicliberal2

Meeting the Mad Half-Way?

2010-10-25T13:57:00.001-07:00

Today, "Dradeeus," commenting on a blog over at Niceguy Eddie's great "In My Humble Opinion," wrote about the difficulty of constructive political discourse with what passes for "conservatives" these days:

"You can't debate between your position of what health care should be, budgetary issues, and foreign policy, with people who say 'death panels' and think their taxes are higher than they've ever been, and think Obama is a Kenyan usurper.

"There's no debate there. You can't cross the fields and hope to meet in a no man's land between sane and insane"

It's a familiar point to the three people who read this blog. A significant portion of the "conservative" base in the U.S. has, in blunt language, simply gone insane. They're what I, in the past, have called the Bubble People,", a large portion of the American right that "has increasingly opted to seal itself in what amounts to an alternate universe, and never have any more than superficial commerce with reality."

Today, for example, I open my email and I have yet another fundraising ad from yet another of the many right-wing outfits giving away (in exchange for a donation) a copy of the newest collection of right-wing garbage posing as a book. "The Roots of Obama's Rage," by Dinesh D'Souza.

If one knew absolutely nothing of the book or of the author, the title alone has to make any sane person who follows public affairs stop and scratch his head in complete bewilderment. "Obama's rage"? Obama is probably the most self-controlled, disciplined, least angry national politician in the lifetime of anyone reading these words. What passes for contemporary American political discourse is little more than a collection of professional Perpetually Angry Ranters; the Obama is so non-angry, he seems almost comatose by comparison, yet here's an entire book that begins with the premise that he's filled with rage, then purports to proceed to explain from whence it all came.

If that bewilderment by this theoretical neophyte on first encountering the book borders on incredulity, he'd be deep inside posted land when he got to D'Souza's "theory" that Obama is possessed of anti-colonialist radicalism he genetically inherited from his father. That's what passes for "theory" in what passes for "conservatism" today. Look for D'Souza's book to become a best-seller.

The Bubble People are a serious concern, for anyone who has serious concerns. The obvious problem everyone else has in dealing with such creatures on anything resembling a constructive basis is the one "Dradeeus" outlined in psychological terms: there's simply no possible compromise to be found between sanity and insanity. The insane have absolutely no interest in finding any, and, even if they did, the sane would have to become less sane in order to meet them half-way. The problem of the "conservative" base treating reality itself as entirely optional is one about which every responsible citizen should be concerned. It will continue to plague us for the forseeable future, particularly given the party system in the U.S., which makes the party of the mad the only option for expressing frustration when the other party rules.

--classicliberal2

The Hill Spews Squid's Ink All Over Campaign Money Story

2010-10-17T13:19:00.000-07:00

"Mainstream" journalism--that which emanates from what our conservative friends insist is the "liberal media"--has many damnable practices. Its obsessed with trivialities--endless acres of trees die and barrels of ink are wasted on tales of the private lives of celebrities, countless hours of airtime are devoted to so-called "human interest" stories like the current one about the rescue of the Chilean miners (which, with a national congressional election looming, has been the top news story for weeks). Such stories, which don't affect anyone on earth other than those few directly involved, are used to replace hard news about real subjects that really matter and that affect everyone. Then, there's "he said/she said" reporting, wherein news reports only showcase conflicting claims, while making no effort to ascertain the truth behind them. This leaves the news consumer with the (usually false) impression that either claim may be true, and lets him choose what he wants to believe based on his own biases, rather than on facts. Our press also gives us regular doses of false equivalence. This is a con-game wherein Subject A lies like a rug about everything, but, in reporting his lies, the journalist feels the need to "balance" his story by including a lie or two from Subject B, his opponent. Subject B's few, usually minor, sometimes imaginary lies are thus made the equivalent of Subject A's real, massive, ongoing, comprehensive lies, leaving the impression that "they all do it," and that it's all just the same.

Just yesterday, I was writing/ranting about a story that has gotten far too little coverage in the press. This election cycle has seen an unprecedented influx of money being funneled through outside groups, many of which don't publicly disclose the source of these funds. There have been allegations that some of this money may be coming from foreign sources. Whatever the sources, though, it's a matter of inherent (and grave) concern for everyone with any sense of responsible citizenship that there's this historically unprecedented influx of cash from utterly unknown sources aimed at manipulating the outcome of a federal congressional election. It's a documented fact that Republicans are the overwhelming beneficiaries of this secret money this year. In that sense, the story does have a partisan character, but it gets that character because that's who is benefiting from the money, not because some partisan decreed it. Republican elected officials willingly made themselves accomplices to this by standing, as a monolith, against changing the law in such a way as to force these shadowy groups to disclose the source of their funds (as everyone else must do).

As I was writing here yesterday, it has been almost impossible to get the "mainstream" press to cover any of this, and when it has, it's handling of it has often been horrendous. Today offered up another specimen of that sort of horrendous reporting, a textbook example of That Damnable False Equivalence that seemed worthy of showcasing. It comes to us from the Hill, an article by Michael O'Brien and Hayleigh Colombo under the heading "Democrats Have Raised $1 Million From Foreign-Affiliated PACs." If the title doesn't give away the character of the piece, the lead paragraph settles the matter:

"Democratic leaders in the House and Senate criticizing GOP groups for allegedly funneling foreign money into campaign ads have seen their party raise more than $1 million from political action committees affiliated with foreign companies."

They all do it, you see?

Except that, if you read the article, the utter inappropriateness of framing the story in this way becomes immediately apparent:

"The PACS are funded entirely by contributions from U.S. employees of subsidiaries of foreign companies. All of the contributions are made public under Federal Elections Commission rules, and the PACs affiliated with the subsidiaries of foreign corporations are governed by the same rules that American firms' PACs or other PACs would face."

Whoops! It seems these aren't "foreign contributions" at all. They come, instead, from Americans who work in Toyota plants. Unlike with the outside groups, the donors are all publicly identified; unlike with the outside groups, all of the money is openly disclosed; unlike with the outside groups, all of it is subject to finance rules.

In other words, this has absolutely nothing to do with the story of these outside groups and their shadowy benefactors, yet O'Brien and Colombo have chosen to explicitly offer this as a counter to that story. That's how they framed their entire article. They even give a spokesman for American Crossroads--a group backed by Karl Rove that has poured millions into congressional elections without disclosing where a penny of it came from--a platform for an unrebutted rant against Democrats for their "hypocrisy."

The only "story" O'Brien and Colombo really have is that Americans citizens legally donated to legally-constituted PACs that fully disclose those donations, and the PACs then made legal campaign contributions, also fully disclosed.[1] Not that this is unimportant--money given to campaigns in large amounts is always offered as a means of buying influence, and that's never unimportant, and desperately needs much more coverage--but O'Brien and Colombo don't offer it as a story concerned with money in politics. It's structured only as a counter to the story of the outside groups, and, so presented, it has no real reason for even existing, and amounts to nothing more than the journalistic equivalent of squid's ink, something squirted into the water only to muddy it so the squid that has been caught can escape.[2]

That this kind of story isn't at all unusual doesn't render it any less disgraceful.

--classicliberal2

---
[1] And, of course, both parties draw from these PACs, with Democrats getting slightly less than twice what Republicans get.

[2] I post, from time to time, over at the conservative site "The Next Right," and the Hill story has already been thrown at me, by one of the conservative posters, as a counter to my rant from yesterday. The comments section of the original story at the Hill site is packed with dozens of similar responses. The article's target audience perfectly understood its purpose.

"Is That All You've Got?": That "Liberal Media" & Money, Again

2010-10-16T16:31:00.000-07:00

Money in American politics isn't just the most important story in American politics; it's the only one. To quote myself on the point, "U.S. politics are all about money. It overwhelms every other consideration. A lack of understanding of this basic fact precludes any understanding of U.S. politics."

You wouldn't know this from the coverage money gets in much of the "mainstream" corporate press. The stories do get reported from time to time, it's true, but they're inevitably offered in a vacuum, without any proper foundation. It's never a subject covered in the comprehensive fashion that would be necessary to give it the proper context. Given the weight it merits, it would lead the news nearly every night. As it stands, stories of money in politics are treated as man-bites-dog tales, while we get intense, detailed, around-the-clock coverage of things like the rescue of the Chilean miners--"human interest" stories that don't affect anyone beyond those directly involved.

The big Money story at the moment is how Big Money is purchasing the November elections. In the wake of the grotesque Citizens United decision foisted on us, earlier this year, by our Supreme Court, "independent" expenditures in many of the congressional races around the country are actually outpacing the money spent by the candidates themselves. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that

"Business associations, unions and ideological groups have more than doubled their spending on political advertisements and messaging when compared to the entire 2006 federal midterm, a Center for Responsive Politics analysis indicates."

CRP also notes that spending by corporate-sponsored PACs has already more than tripled over the previous mid-term elections.

Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming beneficiaries of this are the Republicans, whose shameless pro-corporate, pro-wealthy, pro-Big-Money politics are offered without the threatening (but empty) populist rhetoric sometimes served up by the Democrats when they're trolling for votes. In the first three weeks of September, Republican-leaning groups outspent Democratic-leaning groups 7-to-1. A week ago, the CRP reported that

"Eight of the top 10 [outside] groups are conservative with one bi-partisan and one liberal group. Since September 1, identifiably conservative groups have spent $25.8 million, liberal groups $5.6 million, and bipartisan or nonpartisan groups $4.1 million."

The Political Correction project of Media Matters For America has documented that only 10 conservative groups have, between Aug. 1st and Oct. 11th, financed an incredible 60,052 attack ads aimed at liberal candidates--almost all Democrats--on behalf of their conservative opponents.

One of the major players in this orgy of spending is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Among other things, it has financed over 8,000 attack ads on behalf of Republican Senate candidates this year, and has promised to spend $75 million against liberal candidates around the country. Earlier this month, a ThinkProgress investigation revealed that the Chamber is financing this operation out of its general fund, a fund which solicits and accepts significant contributions from foreign sources. One would think this would set off some alarms in a press corps that always proves itself an enthusiastic conduit for any xenophobic (and generally baseless) allegation about sinister foreign influence on Democratic politicians, but, when the shoe was on the other foot (or, more to the point, on the other party), the matter actually received no significant coverage until the Obama and his underlings raised this issue. It briefly cracked the news cycle at that point, but only long enough for much of the press to dismiss it as baseless and irrelevant, and to characterize it as a last-minute desperation tactic.

That was certainly the case when CBS's Bob Schieffer asked White House adviser David Axelrod if he had any evidence that the Chamber was using foreign money to finance its campaign activity. Axelrod's reply was, "Well, do you have any evidence that it’s not, Bob?" Schieffer was unimpressed. "Is that all you've got?"

On the surface, Axelrod's reply sounds rather lame--it's always incumbent upon someone making an allegation to offer evidence of it--but it actually gets to the heart of an important part of the Chamber story, a part Schieffer was sidestepping with his withering retort: the Chamber's fat $75 million wad to attack Democrats has been collected from sources that aren't publicly disclosed. That much money is involved, and the donors are entirely secret. We know foreign sources give to the fund from which the Chamber drew that money. We don't know how much they give. More importantly, we don't know how much anyone has given, or even who has given.

While it's no small matter that China, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and other foreign concerns may be using outfits like the Chamber to pour money into U.S. elections, the narrow focus, by the White House, on "foreign" contributions was unfortunate, in that it allowed that much larger point to be missed. Nearly half of all the very Big Money presently being poured, by outside groups, into the elections on behalf of Republicans come from groups that don't even publicly disclose the source of that money.[*] What we have, then, is a mind-bogglingly huge wad of cash, intended to manipulate the outcome of U.S. elections, and we, the public, don't know where a dime of it came from. Politico reports that

"Never in modern political history has there been so much secret money gushing into an American election. By Election Day, independent groups will have aired more than $200 million worth of campaign ads using cash that can't be traced back to its original source."

That's important. No formulation of Responsible Citizenship would allow one to dismiss it.

Responsible Citizenship doesn't guide everyone, though. This summer, before this deluge, a Democratic initiative that would have at least made these groups disclose their donors was blocked when all 41 Republicans in the Senate--who are, of course, the beneficiaries of the current state of things--voted to filibuster it. An effort to revive it last month was similarly killed.

So there you have it. Is that all I've got? I'd say that was quite enough.

--classicliberal2

---
[*] By contrast, in the 2006 midterm elections, over 90% of outside groups publicly identified the source of their funds.

The Tragedy of the Obama: Clueless Barry chapter

2010-10-15T14:09:00.000-07:00

Interviewed by Peter Baker of the New York Times, the Obama, in a move that should give birth to serious concerns that the President of the United States may have suffered some catastrophic form of brain death, "said that he expected Republicans to offer him more cooperation after November's elections, no matter the outcome."

Has to be quoted to be believed:

"'It may be that regardless of what happens after this election, they feel more responsible, either because they didn’t do as well as they anticipated, and so the strategy of just saying no to everything and sitting on the sidelines and throwing bombs didn’t work for them,' Mr. Obama said. 'Or they did reasonably well, in which case the American people are going to be looking to them to offer serious proposals and work with me in a serious way.'"

Doesn't really need any further comment, does it?

--classicliberal2

The Lure of Conspiracy

2010-10-14T22:25:00.000-07:00

It is said that "a lie can make it half way round the world before the truth has time to put its boots on." Mark Twain is credited with saying it. It's unlikely he ever did. It's attributed to him anyway. That attribution turns up all over the internet, which sort of makes the same point as the original quote. Now, we can forget "half way,"and truth can forget about putting on his boots; these days, lies can be instantly transmitted around the world with the click of a button, and the hope of ever setting them entirely straight is fleeting, at best.

In such an environment, it's no surprise that conspiracy theories flourish. Hillary Clinton murdered Vincent Foster, Bush blew up the World Trade Center, Obama is a Kenyan Muslim, and the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati, the Bilderbergs, the Freemasons, and all of those other satanic commie Jewish financiers secretly run the world.

It isn't just the technology that makes this such a pasttime today, though. People are lazy. They don't like to read, certainly not to research. Education levels aren't particularly high. And in the current political climate, reality is being treated, by far too large a segment of the population--mostly, it must be said, the conservative segment--as entirely optional.

These temporal factors exacerbate the problem, but even without them, conspiracy theories have always served some very basic human needs. They give a short, simple explanation for what are, in reality, remarkably complex problems, and they impose stability--a comforting order on a world that, in reality, doesn’t have any. Even when that "order" is something really awful, like a sinister cabal of financiers secretly running the world, people still find it comforting that it exists. People have a hunger for these things. It’s why we have everything from religion to the "9/11 Truther" movement.

A lot of conspiracism begins with a strong grain of truth. It is, for example, a fact that the War On Terrorism [tm] was minted as an ideology to act as a means of getting certain things done that couldn’t be done in its absence. It was used as a means of establishing and maintaining very backwards, reactionary policies which those in power had wanted all along, without regard for the publicly-offered post-9/11 rationale for them. It was used to repress the more enlightened elements, which, of course, dissent from it. The Bush administration used it to drag the U.S. down the ugly road toward fascism, a road on which it is still frustratingly stranded. A “9/11 Truther” sees–or, at least, senses–these things, but rather than following the thread to where it really leads, he becomes lost in irrational speculation, and decides that, since the War On Terrorism [tm] was such a useful weapon for the far right, the whole thing must have been engineered by them, and suddenly you have the insistence that Bush and his thugs were behind the terrorist attacks, and actually dynamited the World Trade Center themselves, with "evidence" manufactured to support the "theory."

Similarly, elements of the current very, very bad recession–the Great Recession?–are being prolonged by elements of, broadly speaking, Big Money. While the public is suffering, U.S. non-financial corporations are, at present, sitting on nearly $2 trillion in cash, refusing to hire or use that money in any constructive way. The financial sector is sitting on an even bigger fortune. And, as was just revealed, the recession--on paper--ended last summer. This leads to speculation that, for example, this is happening because those with all the money and power are angling for a change in government in November. This isn’t unwarranted speculation–the oil suppliers, which are heavily invested in the Republican party, have done this very thing for years, and are doing it this year. The conspiracist absorbs these facts, but doesn’t really try to understand what’s actually going on, choosing, instead, to imagine backroom plots, rather than spontaneous action driven by mutual greed, and some take it even further by writing off the entire recession as some sort of manufactured thing (because it’s allowing the Big Money villains to get their way).

The prevalence of conspiracism is quite unfortunate. A mind is like a computer: garbage in will equal garbage out, and a mind really is a terrible thing to waste. Beyond the level of personal tragedy, though, it's also a loss for society. It utterly wastes energy that could otherwise be constructively used, harnessing that which could help foment constructive change and sending it, instead, careening down blind alleys that lead nowhere. There’s enough real evil out there, and it really does need to be fought. In such a fight, every warm body helps, and the more that are lost to conspiracism, the fewer there are to do what really needs to be done.

--classicliberal2

Buck That

2010-10-02T13:50:00.000-07:00

David Michael Green has written a fantastic piece over at Common Dreams today; "Bucking Up For Barry." It's a compact, harsh little polemic that, with a few words, makes for a solid corrective to the stream of garbage that's recently been publicly pouring forth from several administration figures with regard to the alleged irrationality of liberal discontent with the Obama and the Democrats.

Having, from the beginning, almost entirely locked out the liberals and having then run the whole of his administration in a manner that, a few short years ago, would have been uncontroversially characterized as conservative Republican, the Obama is shocked--SHOCKED--to discover that, with congressional elections looming, the liberals are uninterested in turning up to vote for his party.

Vice President Joe Biden identifies the discontented liberal base as those who "didn't get everything they wanted" out of the administration, and this characterization--that liberal critics are just whiney ideological purists who can't have everything their way--has become popular among administration apologists. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says the liberals will only "be satisfied when we have Canadian health-care and we've eliminated the Pentagon."

To write this off as mere caricature would be to falsely suggest there was any nugget of truth in it at all (a necessary element for an effective caricature). To state the obvious, the disaffected liberals aren't made up of fanatical ideologues who refuse to get with the program because they only got 90% or 95% or some other high figure of less than 100% of what they wanted. It isn't that, with a Democratic president and Democratic supermajorities in both houses, they only got 50% of what they wanted, either. The reason liberals are becoming alienated from this administration and are increasingly uninterested in voting for the Democrats this year is because they've gotten practically nothing from this administration or the huge Democratic majorities in congress.

Well, that "nothing" isn't exactly true. It is true they got nothing when it came to constructing the administration, and it's true they got nothing when it came to this administrations' policies, from health care (where Obama adopted Republican Mitt Romney's corporate welfare bill as his "reform") to the stimulus (pathetically small, and a thing for which Republicans took credit), to financial reform (more of the same).

The liberals did get something from this administration, though.

They got its contempt.

On every major issue, the Obama not only gives in to the Republicans without a fight; he has usually adopted their policies as his own. He won't fight with the Republicans over anything, but he's more than happy to pick a fight with the Democratic die-hards who make up his base of support. The open contempt they've been getting lately from the likes of Gibbs and Biden mirrors the contempt they've been getting all along.

Those of the larger left in the U.S. are in constant disagreement with one another. They've never had the Republicans' reflex of mindlessly lockstepping the goosestep, but the potentially good news for the Democrats--and bad news for the U.S.--is that most of the liberals have shown themselves to be gluttons for punishment. Usually, one need only raise the specter of how much worse it would undeniably be should the other side regain power (particularly true this year, given the current proto-fascist Repub party), and far too many of the liberals are content to shout "thank you sir, may I have another?" A willingness to stupidly tough it out for no discernible gain, however, doesn't necessarily translate into a willingness to show up at the polls in any significant number, which is what the Democrats now need. This year, even what many consider the strongest (and what is, in fact, the most shopworn) of Democratic arguments for holding one's nose and voting Democratic--imagine what the courts will look like if the Repubs win--can't hold any water after the Sotomayor and Kagan atrocities.

The other reason the Democrats should have some hope is, of course, the Republicans, who, in an election year tailor-made for a strong showing by their party, seem far too often determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. In state after state, they've chosen to reject winning candidates and nominate, instead, a seemingly endless string of unelectable flakes, fruit-cakes, and fascist idiots whose every pronouncement alienates everyone who isn't completely insane or a complete imbecile.

It's also a fact that Republican strength this year has, in all the Conventional Wisdom with which we're forever besieged in the era of the 24-hour cable news network, been grossly overstated. The teabaggers may make lots of noise and suck up an absurdly disproportionate amount of press coverage and commentary as a consequence of all that very Big Money behind them, but there isn't even a hint of any sort of groundswell of public support for the policies or candidates they're pimping. Even the more "mainstream" parties' "Pledge to America"--an attempt to retread the 1994 Contract on America--went public with a thud, and, only days later, already seems to have been forgotten. A rainy election day in November would benefit Republicans more than all the teabaggers and Pledges combined.

The most basic thing that is to their benefit is the simple fact that they're the major opposition party. In a two-party state (one that usually more closely resembles a one-party state), the Repubs are, by default, considered the only credible option for expressing frustration at the polls. And people are very dissatisfied with the Democrats this year.

The current crop of Republicans in power would be a horror-show, no doubt, but, as Green points out, the current Democrats in power have also been one. "None of the Above" seems a principled stand to take this year. The same can't be said for voting for either of the major parties.

--classicliberal2

Another Lousy Teabagger Poll

2010-07-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

Alas, we have yet another poll purporting to survey the Tea Party "movement" that, in reality, does no such thing.

Gallup, its source, is a repeat offender on this matter. Its pollsters went down this same road back in March. It's a much-traveled road that leads only to a dead end, yet Gallup and every other major polling organization that has purported to survey the teabagger "movement" has insisted on this same trip to nowhere.

The critical flaw in all of this polling is that all of it is based on samples that don't reflect the actual "movement." This time around, Gallup's pollsters determined their sample by asking respondents if they were "Tea Party supporters." Back in March, they'd asked people if they were "supporters of the Tea Party movement." Pollsters have used variations on this wording to build their samples every time they've set out to survey the teabaggers.

Back in April, I outlined the many reasons why this is a problem, one that renders nearly all of the polling on this matter worthless. If you want to survey the opinions of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, you would build your sample by asking respondents if they, in fact, played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. If, instead, you asked respondents if they were "supporters of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers," it's obvious that the resulting sample is going to be much larger, and the results of the questions asked of that sample will not be representative of the views of the actual Bucs. Why this logic has so doggedly escaped the allegedly professional pollsters who have made such a show of surveying the teabaggers is becoming an enduring mystery.

When Gallup asked for "Tea Party supporters," they got yet another ludicrously high number: 30% of the population. The biggest sample yet. If those at Gallup hadn't given any thought to their methodology before, that result alone should have given them serious pause, as the teabagger "movement" has never shown itself to have anything even remotely approximating those kind of numbers. Obviously, a huge chunk of that sample is made up of people identifying themselves with the "movement" who, in fact, aren't a part of it in any meaningful way, yet they're the ones being surveyed, the data they provide that which is being presented as representative of the "movement."

As I noted at the time, CBS News--seemingly inadvertently--identified this problem in one of the teabagger polls conducted in April, but utterly failed to understand its significance:

"More than three in four Tea Party supporters (78 percent) have never attended a rally or donated to a group; most have also not visited a Tea Party Web site."

In other words, they aren't a part of the Tea Party "movement" at all. Of those who identified themselves as "Tea Party supporters" in that CBS survey, only 20% said they'd actually given money to a Tea Party org and/or attended a Tea Party event. That equals 4% of the general public. That's a number that's also wildly inflated, but it's a lot closer to reality than 30%. But it's the demographics and views of that larger sample that is being persistently surveyed by pollsters and presented as representative of the "movement."

In reality, the "movement" is exactly as I described it back in April; "an astroturf project, a tiny group of more-angry-than-thoughtful conservatives whipped into a persistent lather by a well-financed campaign of misinformation and sent into the street to provide the appearance of a mass movement." If it really commanded the allegiance of 30% of the population--or of even half that--it would be able (depending on dispersion) to dictate, at will, the outcome of the ongoing Republican primaries across the country. In reality, this year's teabagger candidates have been noteworthy primarily for their inability to unseat Republican incumbents in open elections. Even in a teabagger stronghold like Texas, incumbents managed a complete shut-out against them. In contested primaries without a party incumbent in the mix, the teabagger candidates who have succeeded--Rand Paul in Kentucky, Sharon Angle in Nevada, etc.--have quickly become national embarrassments, as the spotlight falls on their nutty, fringe views.

One could make the argument that the teabaggers are of so little consequence that it doesn't really matter that we have so little real polling, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that reasoning, but this polling that so radically inflates their numbers plays their astroturf game of making them look like a great deal more than what they are, and to the extent that it's believed, that can only have a negative effect on our politics.

--classicliberal2

"War On Terror" [tm], justice, & a Justice

2010-05-16T12:13:00.000-07:00

If a tree falls in the forest, with no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? Similarly, if a news story breaks and goes almost entirely unreported, is it a news story? There was news in the case of Maher Arar on Wednesday. That nearly everyone reading these words will respond with a puzzled look--"Who?"--is yet another testament to the effectiveness of the corporate press in the U.S.. Arar's is a great story, mind you, but what should have been his 15 minutes of fame was a consequence of his being one of the victims of the Bush administration's "War On Terror"[tm], and stories like that don't make the news in the U.S.. As it so happens, there's a synchronicitous confluence between it and the thing that is presently making the news in the U.S., the Obama pimping his despicable Supreme Court nominee around the Senate.

But I'll get to that in a moment.

First, some background:

Arar was a Canadian engineer and small businessman, who, in 2002, was flying home to Montreal from a family vacation in Tunisia, and made the big mistake of having a name like "Maher Arar" while switching flights in New York during the Bush administration. He was promptly kidnapped by the administration, thrown in a hole for two weeks, and, without any access to a lawyer or any other basic element of due process, interrogated about his being a member of al Qaida. His problem was that he wasn't a member of al Qaida, but, because--follow this--he once worked with the brother of a man who was suspected of having ties to people in al Qaida, his protestations on this point weren't accepted by his persecutors, and he was packed up and spirited away to Syria.

The Bush administration falsely claimed this wasn't an example of its "extraordinary rendition" game, whereby suspected terrorists are shipped off to foreign soil to be tortured, and that it was, instead, a "deportation." Arar wasn't a Syrian, though. While he'd been born there, he'd fled from there as a teenager, and never returned--he'd been a Canadian resident for 15 years, and a Canadian citizen for 11, yet his entreaties that he be sent to Canada--the destination of any legitimate deportation--were ignored. He was, instead, delivered, by the administration, to Syrian authorities in Jordan, who blindfolded and shackled him, and hauled him across the border to a 3-feet-wide rat-infested cell without light, which became his "home" for nearly a year, during which time he was repeatedly tortured. His torturers demanded answers to the same questions he'd been asked after being kidnapped by the Bush administration. He broke quickly, and "confessed" to whatever they wanted in order to make the torture stop, but, apparently, nothing he said panned out--after 10 months, the Syrians released him, with the declaration that they could find no links to terrorism.

Arar returned to Canada, and, after some recuperation, began looking into legal action against the Bush administration and the government of Canada (which had collaborated with it). In Canada--quite a contrast to the non-story it has been in the U.S.--the matter became a national scandal, and, eventually, the subject of an official commission of inquiry. The commission unequivocally concluded that there was no evidence linking Arar to terrorism, and the Prime Minister issued a formal apology to Arar on behalf of the Canadian government, accompanied by a $10.5 million settlement. Mountie Commissioner Giuliani Zaccardelli resigned his post over the matter.

In the U.S., Arar's suit against the Bush gang--virtually unreported at any stage of the affair--was initially thrown out after the administration invoked the damnable "states secrets privilege" (which the court should gut, instead of using it as a premise for throwing out such suits). Arar appealed, and it was thrown out again. With the government he's suing now being administered by the Obama administration, Arar has taken the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead of prosecuting the crimes of the Bush administration (or merely settling the case), the Obama has done what he's virtually always done when one of these matters has been raised; he's adopted the sins of that administration as his own.[1] His administration has kept Arar and his family on the U.S. terrorism "watchlist," and, on Wednesday, the administration filed, with the Supreme Court, papers asking them to reject Arar's appeal.

That's the same Supreme Court on which the Obama wants to place the horrid Elena Kagan. Should Kagan be confirmed and the court decide to allow the case to proceed, Kagan, who has endorsed the premise of Bush's "War On Terror"[tm] and has publicly supported the administration's kidnapping policies, will ultimately be one of the justices sitting beside John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence "Uncle" Thomas, and Samuel Alito hearing it.

Seems a bit more substantial a matter than the Kagan sit-down photo-ops with Senators presently consuming the news, doesn't it?

--classicliberal2

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[1] As my persistent readers will recognize, this is one of the things ye humble editor most feared; that the abuses of the Bush administration would be defended, instead of rebuked, thus passing into precedent as acceptable.

Kagan For The Court? Obama Screws Us Again

2010-05-12T21:38:00.000-07:00

"'Why do the conservatives always get the conservatives, but we don't get to get the liberals?' Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, asked the Website Politico recently, voicing the frustration of the left when Ms. Kagan was considered a front-runner but was not yet Mr. Obama's selection. 'What the hell is that all about?'"
--New York Times

"This is not 'change I can believe in.' This is more like 'shit I can't believe.'"
--Nice Guy Eddie, In My Humble Opinion, on the Kagan nomination

"Of the many responsibilities granted to a President by our Constitution, few are more serious or more consequential than selecting a Supreme Court justice."

This last--and quite true--comment was uttered almost exactly a year ago by Barack Obama, when he had his first opportunity to name a new Supreme Court justice.

He fucked the liberals who put him in office back then, and, instead of any sort of bold liberal choice for a court from which anything even vaguely progressive had been in danger of extinction for years, he chose another righty to replace the retiring one. The argument, then, was that Sonia Sotomayor was a uniter, not a divider, someone who could build coalitions by convincing waffling conservatives to moderate. She had voted with Republican appointees in nearly every case, and the White House actually pointed to that as if it was some sort of argument for putting her on the court.

Quite a contrast with Obama's Republican predecessor. Junior Bush didn't offer "moderates," or toy around with pointless idiocies like trying to find someone who could build coalitions--he picked reliably hardcore reactionary ideologues who joined with the other reactionaries on the court to form a lockstep voting block that has done incalculable damage to the United States, and, with rulings like Citizens United, threatens to undermine the very fabric of the republic. When Bush initially chose Harriet Miers, whose sole qualification for the position was that she'd been one of his longtime coterie of sycophantish underlings, those on the right rebelled against her lack of a paper trail to show that she'd be reliably reactionary, and the stink they raised led Bush to withdraw her in favor of a better-established extremist.

That history needs to repeat itself now, because, with a new justice to pick, the Obama has chosen to fuck us again. Even harder, this time. Out of a roster of floated names that included some very solid candidates, Obama has chosen the absolute worst of the batch--his own Solicitor General, Elena Kagan--to fill the vacancy left by departing Justice John Paul Stevens.

Stevens was one of only two liberals on the current court, and, though not a down-the-line liberal vote, was, by far, the most liberal. To replace him, Obama has chosen a woman who is strong on corporate "free speech," but doesn't seem to have much regard for human free speech, and who has enthusiastically endorsed the nonsensical legal framework of Bush's War On Terror [tm], including the assumption, by the president, of illegal, unconstitutional, and fascistic kidnapping "powers." Quite a contrast to Stevens, who has been, among other things, a free speech advocate, corporate "speech" opponent, and a solid rock in opposition to Bush's sweeping, extra-legal claims of executive power, most of which have continued over into the Obama administration.

Faced with a court that tacks so sharply to the hard right that it's actually becoming a threat to the nation, Obama is attempting, through this nomination, to move the court even more to the right.

Did the public elect a Democratic president and an overwhelmingly Democratic Senate for THIS? Obama could appoint anyone he wanted, the Democrats could confirm anyone he appointed, and this is what he chooses to do?

In pimping Kagan, Obama, his underlings, and mouthpieces are using the same damn argument they did for Sotomayor; that she will be a "persuader," someone who can build "coalitions," and who can drag Justice Kennedy away from the reactionary block. Elements of the Obama-ass-kissing segment of the blogosphere have picked up on it, as well. I, for one, and really sick of this Mayberry-Machiavellian bullshit "argument." You people wanted your damn "persuader" last time, and we got another goddamn conservative who hasn't "persuaded" anyone of anything (except persuading me that I was right about her all along). What is needed, now, is to take a page out of the conservatives' handbook and get a solid liberal vote for the court. The righties usually win because they don't sit around playing these stupid games about "who can best persuade Kennedy" (who may drop dead tomorrow, for all any of us know)? They pick hardcore reactionary ideologues. And now, Obama is poised to deliver to them their fifth (and sometimes sixth) vote on the most important issues the court will be facing for the foreseeable future.

It is, in my view, imperative that this creature NOT be placed on the U.S. Supreme Court. The conservatives aren't going to stop it--they're already ranting about Kagan the socialist, radical, blah, blah, blah; all the usual bullshit, whatever makes her nomination an organizational flashpoint and fundraising bonanza for their party. If it's to be stopped, it has to be us. The liberals. What needs to happen, now, is a full-scale uprising on the left, a repeat of the right's outrage over Harriet Miers, with a goal of the same ultimate result. In common parlance, the Obama needs a political smackdown laid on his sorry ass over this.

Not that he'll get one. But when even so normally sycophantish an Obamabot as Niceguy Eddie is with me on this, perhaps there's hope after all.

So go forth, my readers! All three of you! Raise hell for breakfast.

Or at least bitch about it a lot.

--classicliberal2

The Homicidal Right (Updated below)

2010-04-18T14:09:00.000-07:00

I sometimes post over at NextRight, a would-be reformist conservative site that mostly just ends up being a part of the omnipresent--and unreformed--American conservative megaphone. The least useful regular among the bloggers there is a reactionary fruit-loop named Skip MacLure, who, on a daily basis, wastes some little portion of the site's bandwidth parroting the lies, libels, and lunacy of that unmedicated element of the American far right that amusingly considers itself "mainstream." He's ground out a new post, "Billy Jeff 1992 Redux" that makes a show of taking offense at former President Bill Clinton's suggestion that the rhetoric of the far right feeds dangerous armed reactionary movements like the Hutaree militia. MacLure:

All that’s missing is Janet Reno and an FBI sniper with a penchant for pregnant women. In 1992 the militia phenomenon was growing in reaction to Bill Clinton’s Presidency.

The sniper reference is to the the FBI standoff with white supremacist Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992. Bill Clinton's presidency didn't yet exist in 1992, nor did Janet Reno's stewardship of the Justice Department.

They'd only just started, in fact, when the 1993 siege of the David Koresh cult's compound in Waco, Texas occurred. It had already been underway for weeks before Reno became Attorney General. MacLure describes that siege as a "massive abuse of power and misuse of the law," adopting, outright, the insane characterization of it offered by the insane militia fascists, then, with no apparent sense of irony, complains that Clinton, during his administration, supposedly found it so easy "to lump Conservatives together with the militias and paint us all with that brush the left loves to use."

If one wants to avoid being lumped in with crazed fascists, it's a good idea not to parrot the bullshit of said crazed fascists. At Waco, there was a doomsday cult led by a madman, the lot of them so batshit crazy that they eventually burned themselves alive, women, children, and all. They were manufacturing and stockpiling a massive and completely illegal arsenal of grenades, explosives, machine guns. No responsible government charged with protecting the public could allow something like that to go unchecked; the very suggestion that it should aligns MacLure with the crazies, who, unsurprisingly, say the same thing about the incident as MacLure. They spent years saying it, in fact. Waco became a rallying point for reactionary loons with guns. A pair of them--Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols--were so outraged by the "massive abuse of power and misuse of the law" that they decided to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma and murder hundreds. They chose the anniversary of the end of the Waco siege as the date to set off their bomb.

These kind of armed reactionaries aren't, in the abstract, the fault of the conservatives. Every political movement will have some small faction of crackpots. The conservatives do bear a great deal of blame for them, though. Nearly the entirety of the American right checked out on legitimate political discourse a few decades ago. The conservatives' decision to refuse to acknowledge the existence of legitimate differences of opinion and to, instead, portray their political rivals as subhuman monsters who want to destroy America (and anything those rivals do as being in pursuit of that goal) created the environment that both built and maintained the armed reactionary movements. When the right was in power, during the Bush administration, the fascists were running the governments, and as Bush's popularity on the right soared, these movements withered to nearly nothing. Now--what a surprise--they're on the rise again.

And what was the conservative response when, early in the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security presciently warned about a potential upsurge in right-wing extremism? To denounce the administration for bashing conservatives and portraying them as a threat. To align themselves, yet again, with the insane reactionaries.

America's prominent conservative figures today do things like tell the public the President is a Muslim, a fellow who isn't even an American citizen, a man who is trying to institute Bolshevism in the U.S., and who pushes for government panels aimed at killing the elderly and the infirm, and even when their followers take their apocalyptic rhetoric seriously and begin threatening the lives of those in government, committing vandalism, adopting intimidation tactics, they choose to amp up the rhetoric, rather than dialing it down, and accuse the victims of overplaying and even outright manufacturing the incidents for political gain. Everyone can see where this is leading, and the conservatives just keep driving it in that direction.

To put the matter bluntly, American conservatism needs to get its shit together in a major way. Its present course is homicidal.

--classicliberal2

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UPDATE (19 April, 2010) -- A gaggle of gun-nuts chose this, of all days, to gather in and around Washington D.C. to demonstrate against federal gun control efforts. The astute follower of American politics, reading that, will no doubt immediately ask, "what gun control efforts?" The momentum, in the states, is directed toward undoing past state-level gun control measures (over half the states having done so in the last two years), the U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down a strict D.C. gun ban on 2nd Amendment grounds, and there hasn't been a single serious federal gun control effort in 13 or 14 years. During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama declared "gun control" to be, in effect, a dead issue, and, in fact, participants in the rally held, today, in a pair of parks in Virginia were able to openly carry firearms because of a law signed by Obama, yet 50 or 60 demonstrators, most of them armed, gathered there to protest for a right no one seems to be doing anything to even try to take away. There was a much larger unarmed rally of the same character at the Washington monument in D.C.

Ye humble editor is an opponent of gun control measures--given the power, I'd erase most of them from the books, which sometimes puts me at odds with my fellow liberals. It's been my observation that gun control is more of a city/country issue than liberal/conservative--urbanites of whatever political stripe tend to be the main backbone of its support. I'm a country boy, though. When I say "gun nuts," that's not to be interpreted as a shot at supporters of the right to keep and bear arms. It's aimed at a particular sub-culture who are so disconnected from reality on this issue that, even while they win at every turn, they see themselves as so persecuted that they feel compelled to organize and show up at events like those today (which were, admittedly, tiny). Not that there's any harm in this sort of demonstration. It's just that there's absolutely no reason for it. Far more disturbing (and certainly marking them as even nuttier) is the fact that they chose today to hold it, the 17th anniversary of the end of the Waco standoff, and the 15th anniversary of the OK City bombing by a pair of crazed reactionaries angry over it. Organizers insist they chose the date not because of any of those things, but because it was the anniversary of the "shot heard 'round the world" that launched the American Revolution.

Of course they did.

--classicliberal2

Boiling Shoddy Teabagger Polling (Update Below)

2010-04-15T22:10:00.000-07:00

To put the matter bluntly, the polling on the teabagger "movement" is a complete mess.

The demographics and the views of the "movement" have been the subjects of a number of surveys so far this year. In late February, there was a report from the Winston Group (a Republican firm), followed, in March, by the USA Today/Gallup poll and the Quinnipiac poll. A CBS News/New York Times poll out this week raised the issue again, and has provoked new conversation on the matter. The general consensus of the polling is that the "movement" is, from a demographic standpoint, not that different from America, while its views are often a good deal more conservative than those of the public.

The problem, underscored by a so-far-entirely-overlooked portion of the newest poll, is that none of these have actually surveyed the teabagger "movement."

They've purported to do so, of course, and the findings have been used by commentators of all political stripes as a basis for analysis of that "movement." I've even used them myself in a few postings to various boards. A closer look at the accumulated data, however, suggests that nearly all of it is essentially worthless insofar as providing a portrait of the actual "movement" is concerned.

Here's why: None of the pollsters bother to use a proper working definition of a member of the "movement." It seems like an obvious first step, if you want to survey those involved. What does it mean to be a part of it? What defines a "Tea Partier?" Obvious though this may be, no one sets any reasonable guidelines, and without them, it's impossible to get meaningful results--all one gets is garbage.

Here's how each of the pollsters who have worked the question went about establishing their sample: Quinnipiac asks respondents if they are "part of the Tea Party movement," without further elaboration. This is the same wording reported by the Winston Group. Their results were, respectively, 13% and 17%. USA Today/Gallup settled the matter by asking if respondents considered themselves "supporters of the Tea Party movement," wording that ropes in a potentially much broader group of people, and they get a much broader answer; 28% so identify themselves. The CBS News/New York Times poll picked their representative group by asking respondents if they were "Tea Party supporters," the same sort of broader wording, but this time, it drew a much narrower response; 18% so identified themselves.

All of the reported information on the demographics and views of the "movement" were derived from these samples. Even the smallest of them, though--13% from Quinnipiac, nearly 1 in every 8 Americans--is obviously wildly inflated (and the largest--28%--ludicrous). The teabagger "movement" has never demonstrated anything remotely approximating that sort of muscle.

In other words, a lot of people are clearly identifying themselves with the "movement" who aren't a part of it in any meaningful way, and it's information on their views and demographics, rather than those of the actual teabaggers, that is reflected in the polls that use them as a sample.

Part of this identification problem is no doubt a consequence of the continuing fall-out from the disintegration of the Republican party in 2008. As this hit rock-bottom last year, large numbers of Republicans had stopped calling themselves "Republicans"--identification with the party hit its lowest point in the history of polling. Those people didn't disappear from the face of the earth. They just started calling themselves "independents." The ranks of the "independents" swelled, and, in last year's elections, all the talk was about how "independents" had suddenly shifted rightward in their politics. They hadn't. There were just a lot of Republicans who'd taken to calling themselves "independents."

Like "independent," the "Tea Party" label has, to an extent, become a substitute for "Republican" by Republicans who don't like to call themselves that at the moment.

The actual teabagger "movement" is, as it has always been, an astroturf project, a tiny group of more-angry-than-thoughtful conservatives whipped into a persistent lather by a well-financed campaign of misinformation and sent into the street to provide the appearance of a mass movement. The wildly inflated numbers are both a part of this project's goal, and a mark of its success.

A part of the new CBS News/New York Times poll that has received no notice gets to the heart of the matter: Of those who identified themselves as "Tea Party supporters," only 20% said they'd actually given money to a Tea Party org or attended a Tea Party event, or both. That equals 4% of the general public (a number that is almost certainly also wildly inflated, but I'll set that aside for now). This wording has to be quoted to be believed: "More than three in four Tea Party supporters (78 percent) have never attended a rally or donated to a group; most have also not visited a Tea Party Web site."

In other words, they aren't a part of the Tea Party "movement" at all. Their "participation" amounts to something like nodding their heads in agreement when some Fox News host praises the teabaggers.

The poll had another noteworthy element: it asked some questions of that small group who were actual teabaggers, somewhat cluelessly identifying them as "Tea Party activists," to differentiate them from "Tea Party supporters." Unfortunately, the pollsters treated the entire exercise as if it was a sidebar. In a move that gives new meaning to "missing the forest for the trees," their questions of the "activists" were only aimed at providing a contrast to the "supporters" who were the central focus. Actual teabaggers, the questions reveal, are angrier and gloomier than the already-angry-and-gloomy "supporters," they think even more highly of cretinous clowns like Sarah Palin and Glenn Back, even more of them think the taxes they pay are "unfair," and even more of them get most of their political information from Fox News.

It seems incredible that, after all this time and all the noise the teabaggers have made, this slim set of facts appears to represents the first real polling data we've gotten on those who comprise the actual "movement." It includes no demographic information, precious little systematic documentation of the teabaggers' views, and is nothing more than a sidebar to the farcical sideshow that is the larger poll. The larger poll that gets the headlines, the one that is mischaracterized as a snapshot of the "movement." Pollsters need to seriously work on improving the shoddy product they've been offering on this matter, and commentators need to stop presenting the teabagger "movement" as accurately represented by it.

--classicliberal2

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UPDATE: The teabaggers invent and circulate wildly inflated attendance figures for every major teabagger event. This is standard operating procedure for astroturf, where, again, the goal is to present the appearance of a much larger movement than exists. Wednesday's "big" rally in Boston, at which Sarah Palin appeared, drew somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 people. As Eric Boehlert wrote, over at Media Matters, "the Boston metro has a population of about 5 million people. And there may have been some high school football games played in Massachusetts last year that attracted a bigger crowd than Palin's rally." The organizers of the event promptly took the high-end estimate and doubled it, claiming there were 10,000 attendees, and the right-wing blogosphere and talk radio has further inflated it to 13,000-16,000 attendees. Not really directly relevant to the question of polling, but par for the course, when it comes to teabaggers.

In Offense At Obama

2010-04-07T11:23:00.000-07:00

My criticism of the President has drawn a post "In Defense of Obama" from Niceguy Eddie, over at "In My Humble Opinion." I'm up to my neck in some other things at the moment, but I thought I'd at least jot out a few remarks in response.

To be honest, I'm not quite sure what to make of "In Defense of Obama." As conservatism has sunk into a fever-swamp of lunacy, liberals have contrasted themselves with their increasingly loony righty counterparts via self-descriptions like "the reality-based community," rhetoric that is, for the most part, entirely warranted. The liberals have even been heard to say "Facts have a liberal bias," and in (and because of) the current political climate, it has usually proven true. Eddie's defense, on the other hand, doesn't justify that assertion. It doesn't even come close. In fact, if the parties involved were reversed, it would look a whole like like one of the products of that right-wing fever-swamp.

Eddie's basic assertion is that Obama doesn't actually care about the votes of congressional Republicans. When, on every major issue, he offers those Republicans one massive concession after another, he does it without any concern for actually drawing any of their votes. "He doesn't care about getting their votes." What he's doing, Eddie says, is trying to draw moderate Republican votes among the populace toward the Democratic party, and "to get the entrenched industries on board," so they don't throw their muscle against reforms.

The idea that Obama considers Republican votes in congress irrelevant--"he doesn't even WANT them"--is, of course, directly contradicted by the whole of the public record (a record about which I've been writing, here, since launching this blog). Obama sang the praises of "bipartisanship" for the whole of his time in public life. He ran for President, in 2008, as the candidate opposed to the partisan bickering he said had consumed politics, and when he was elected, he became seriously unbalanced on the point, seeming to elevate "bipartisanship" above all other considerations. It began before he was even sworn in, when he was assembling his administration and filled nearly every major position with conservatives/Clintonites, almost entirely shutting out the liberals.

The recently-concluded health care fiasco became a fiasco precisely because the Obama's efforts were aimed far too heavily toward achieving "bipartisanship" than passing anything resembling real reform. Single-payer was thrown over the side right up front. The Obama adopted a Republican "reform" plan that was essentially a corporate welfare bill. Instead of pressing for the progressive "public option" he'd initially proposed, which had majority support in both house of congress and overwhelming support among the public, Obama threw it overboard and got behind the Senate Finance Committee's efforts to sabotage it and offer a "bipartisan" plan, shorn of it, crafted by the "Gang of Six." That gang didn't reflect the Democratic supermajority in the Senate--it was evenly split, three Democrats and three Republicans. While Sen. Charles Grassley, the Republican heavy-hitter on the gang, was running around telling his constituents the health care bill contained "death panels" aimed at killing old people, Obama was calling him an "honest broker," and praising the efforts of the gang. The Finance Committee dicked around for months, the entire health care effort brought to a complete standstill so Obama and the Democrats could try to get Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe on board. And so on.

This is what Obama did on health care--pursued "bipartisanship," instead of lifting a finger to fight for any sort of positive reform. It's what he's doing on energy, now. It's what he's done on everything. Eddie suggests this is all part of some brilliant strategy, but setting aside, for a moment, the fact that there's absolutely no evidence to support that assertion, the fact still stands that, in practice, this just makes for really bad policy, the badness of which is completely unnecessary. In all of these major initiatives, Democrats ended up passing the legislation on party-line or near-party-line votes, meaning they could have just passed far better bills but ended up passing mediocre-to-awful ones because of all the one-sided "compromises" that didn't gain them a thing.

Eddie's proposition that Obama is entirely unconcerned with bipartisanship requires us to believe the whole of this administrations' actions are nothing more than some elaborate, extended bit of street theater, and that's basically what Eddie says, claiming Obama is the political genius everyone believed Karl Rove to be. That there's absolutely nothing to affirmatively support Eddie's basic proposition--that Obama considers Republican votes irrelevant and is unconcerned with attracting them--and the whole of the public record to conclusively rebut it doesn't seem to slow Eddie down. I'm left more than a little puzzled by this.

Eddie is right that a lot of what Obama does is to get the entrenched interests behind him, rather than throwing their weight toward the opposition, but that's hardly a mark in Obama's favor. Those entrenched interests are the very ones who profit from the corruption of Business As Usual, and whose profits--the only thing that matters to them--would, in turn, be harmed by genuine, much-needed reform. The Democrats' climbing into bed with them is part of why you get things like Obama flip-flopping on the public mandate, abandoning the "public option," and adopting a health bill that's built around public subsidies for a literally murderous insurance industry (who redeployed their "Harry & Louise" ads, used to kill the health reform effort in the '90s, in support of Obama). Like the constant pointless concessions to Republicans, allowing the entrenched interests to dictate how they're going to be "reformed" makes for VERY bad policy.

I don't want to spend a lot of time addressing the complete misrepresentation of some of my views included in Eddie's "Defense"--that I think we're going in the right direction but not vast enough, that I think there's only a minor difference between the Obama administration and a Sarah Palin administration, etc.. I'll say this much: c'mon, Eddie, I wouldn't do that to you.

Eddie suggests the possibility that, in the future, he may look like the die-hardest defenders of Junior Bush, who, to the bitter end, held on to the illusion that some grand master plan was at work behind that administration.

There's no need to wait for the future, Eddie--it already looks like that. And you know better.

--classicliberal2

The Ongoing Tragedy of the Obama (Energy chapter)

2010-03-31T23:16:00.000-07:00

He's done it again.

Politics is the art of the bargain. You start with a strong position, fight for it as hard as you can, and give in a bit toward the end, some magnanimous concession to the other side to secure a compromise. That's what's done by smart politicians who really want to accomplish something.

That's not what Barack Obama does, though.

Instead, every time the Obama launches a new policy initiative, his goal seems to be to achieve some sort of "bipartisanship," rather than to actually do what the initiative was allegedly intended to do. Toward that end, he rushes forward like a blind fool, giving away the store right out of the gate, demanding nothing in return, and clinging to the hope that the other side will recognize his magnanimity, and fall into a skipping, merry line behind him, singing "Kumbaya" all the way.

He's been in office over 14 months, and this has NEVER happened. Not once.

Nor, of course, will it ever happen, because his conservative rivals have adopted, as their official policy, stopping anything and everything he tries to pass. No matter what it is, they're officially against it.

If they hadn't made their intentions very plain in what they said 14 months ago, no one could argue they haven't made it as clear as crystal to the dimmest wit in the village by their actions in the time since.

The Obama proposes a stimulus plan--he lards it up with wasteful, less stimulative tax cuts in order to try to attract some Republican votes. 40% of the bill. At a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, he gets two. The Republicans' sincerity in opposing the bill can be gauged by the fact that over half of them, after voting against it, then returned home to their states and districts and took credit for all the money the bill is bringing in.

The Obama gets to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead of trying to redress the extreme reactionary tilt of the court, he opts for another conservative to replace the more moderate conservative retiree, driving the court even further right.

The Obama tackles health care, and the first thing he does is cast aside the single-payer approach favored by his base and an overwhelming majority of the public in favor of an industry-friendly, market-based "reform" bill--actually, just a corporate welfare bill--created by Republicans. He initially includes a "public option" component as at least some figment of a bone to the liberals; when it faces criticism, though, he immediately chucks it. He and the Democrats spend the better part of a year watering down the bill in a vain effort to draw Republican votes, and, in the end, have to pass it along party lines anyway--every Republican opposed.

The Obama has even championed their legislative proposals over and over again. The result: They turn against whatever it is, and denounce him as some sort of anti-American sub-man, and the policy as the work of same. The Obama endorses a Republican-authored spending freeze; the Republicans immediately abandon it. The Obama endorses the Republican-authored pay-as-you-go bill; the Republicans immediately abandon it. The Obama endorses the Republican-authored debt commission bill; the Republicans immediately abandon it.

The Republicans have filibustered nearly every piece of legislation, large and small, the Democrats have introduced into congress.

This is the record of the Obama's first 14 months in office. Fourteen months in which the Obama entirely wasted the most significant public mandates given an elected president in the lifetime of most of those reading these words, because instead of pursuing any significant goals, all he seems to want to do is get along with people who have, as official policy, refusing to get along with him under any circumstances.

So now it's time for an energy policy. We're in the opening stage.

Has the Obama FINALLY learned his lesson? Is he introducing bold new initiatives to aggressively develop alternate energy sources, and move away from the dirty, destructive, wasteful energy of the past?

Not a bit of it.

Instead--incredibly enough--he's decided, yet again, to give away the store in search of that fabled "bipartisanship." He recently announced an expansion of nuclear power, and today, he announced an expansion of oil and natural gas drilling in the U.S. A blatant smack in the face of his base (which he proceeded to marginalize via vile Clintonian "triangulation" remarks today), and a reversal of longstanding (and wise) moratoria. The press quotes multiple industry insiders expressing delight at this development. The early Republican response? Surprise, surprise, they're against it! Because, uh,... it doesn't go far enough. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Couldn't he at least have waited until April Fool's Day to announce it, and make it official?

--classicliberal2

Courage, Consequence, and the Iraq Papers

2010-03-29T00:18:00.000-07:00

Karl Rove is now making the rounds in the press pimping his memoir "Courage And Consequence." I'm not sure if Karl is telling us he thinks he's "courageous" with that title, but it's a fact that he faced no consequences for what he did when his puppet was in power. None of the Bushlings have faced any real consequences for what they did, and, with Rove jaunting from one press appearance to another offering a nonsensical, revisionist version of the Iraq mess, I thought I'd devote a post to some of the things they actually did do.

What I'm calling "The Iraq Papers" began life as a series of untitled posts to various boards and groups I frequented over the years. I created them because, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, I so often found myself covering the same ground. Over time, they became an evolving compendium of information on the Bush administration's Iraq policy. For quickie knock-off message board posts that condense this much information, they're not bad, even if they do often sacrifice proper citations for the sake of space. I called them "The Iraqi Papers" because it makes them sound more important than "A Whole Buncha' Message Board Posts On Iraq." In order:

The Road to War

Pre-War Intel Manipulation #1: Browbeating the Intelligence Community

Pre-War Intel Manipulation #2: Bush's Non-Intelligent Estimate

Pre-War Intel Manipulation #3: The Cabal

Pre-War Intel Manipulation #4: Down The Tubes

Pre-War Intel Manipulation #5: Discharges From the Col[o]n

Pre-War Intel Manipulation #6: Satel-Lies

Pre-War Intel Manipulation #7: Anatomy of a Speech

Pre-War Intel Manipulation #8: A Hell of a Punchline

The Iraq Survey Group & Its Conclusions

I've stored them and linked to them through my old Left Hook! Archive, as I do a lot of my old articles. Any comments are, as always, welcome.

--classicliberal2

Frum Here To Eternity?

2010-03-26T10:04:00.000-07:00

David Frum has been cast out of the American Enterprise Institute for heresy. The conservative poobah published an article that argued Republicans' embrace of no-compromise extremism in fighting the health care bill, instead of working with Democrats to shape it, had made it their "Waterloo." The right-wing funders of the AEI didn't like that very much, so out the door he went.

Today, conservative blogger Rick Moran has a noteworthy piece on Frum's fall, and its implications for conservatism (it's here, too). While I certainly don't want conservatives to rule, I do think the continued degeneration of the American right is a very real cause of concern among liberals, not just thoughtful conservatives, because any political viewpoint, party, perspective, "philosophy" needs a credible, perpetual opposition. Without that, atrophy sets in. Moran has offered up a shout against that degeneration, one I thought was definitely worth a word or two.

While I think the piece pretty good, I do take issue with some of its assertions. To be honest, the words "David Frum" and "intellectual" don't really belong in the same sentence, but the words "intellectual" and "conservatism" certainly doesn't belong in the same sentence these days, and it's for a lot of the reasons Frum outlines, so while I'd contest the depth of Frum's Big Brain-ist credentials, I wouldn't say he shows up to an intellectual debate entirely unarmed.

I would say that about most contemporary conservatives. It's certainly true of most of what Moran calls "movement conservatives," but it's also mostly true of what passes, these days, for "intellectual conservatives" as well.

The only reason it can rarely be said about any conservatives of any stripe is that none of them show up for intellectual debates anymore. They just sit around talking amongst themselves all the time, trading favored myths, heedless of the reality that exists outside of their sealed little world. Conservatism has, indeed, turned into "an echo chamber," as Moran characterizes it--I've always called it a bubble--and the unwillingness to tread beyond its confines "marks one as a philistine," just as Moran says. That's a mark born so broadly by conservatism now that it has become virtually a defining characteristic.

That's where Moran gets one wrong--very wrong--because he argues "It is the antithesis of conservatism to close one’s mind and reject alternative viewpoints based not on their relevancy or reason but rather on the source of the criticism." That's not "the antithesis of conservatism" today; it's standard operating procedure, from which the deviations are so few (and so mild when they do occur) they're barely even worth mentioning.

To be fair, Moran, when he speaks of such things, is talking about conservatism as a theoretical philosophy, rather than using, as a definition of conservatism, that which conservatives actually argue and actually do. In this particular context, though, I don't see that as particularly useful. If theoretical conservatism says one thing but an overwhelming number of conservatives believe the opposite, how can that thing really be said to be a tenet of conservatism? In other contexts, such a question wouldn't matter--in this one, it's critical. When Moran decries the lack of "consistency" in contemporary conservatism, he's arguing that conservatives are, in practice, inconsistent with that theoretical conservatism. That's often true, and it makes them hypocrites and even liars when it is, but when it comes to practical politics, as Moran is discussing, how useful is it to define "conservatism" as a thing with which most conservatives disagree? Moran makes a clear division between "conservatism" and what he calls "emotional partisanship." Conservatives fail to recognize such a division, and Moran's efforts to do so in this context smacks of an effort to isolate conservatism from conservatives.

Moran says there is, on the right, "a lack of confidence in what conservatism as a philosophy should be all about," and, to illustrate, he uses the example of conservatives who decry "activist judges," but are the first in line in seeking out "activist judges" when it comes time to challenge Obama's health care law. Does this show "a lack of confidence in what conservatism as a philosophy should be all about," or does it just mean that "conservatism"--the practical kind--never had any real concern for "activist judges" in the first place? The obvious conclusion is the correct one. The much-expressed conservative concern about "judicial activism" was, for most conservatives, just a way to cloak, in loftier, pseudo-intellectual terms, what was, at heart, merely a raw emotional hatred for certain non-conservative rulings. There isn't a "titanic irony," as Moran says, in conservatives charging into court on this; there is merely hypocrisy and a revealing of conservatives' true colors.

With these and maybe a few other caveats, Moran's critique of conservatism is thoughtful and, at times, remarkably relentless in its rhetoric. I'd almost stopped believing that sort of conservative critique of conservatism was even possible anymore. I suspect it won't prove particularly popular on the righty web. That's unfortunate.

--classicliberal2

---

This may be the biggest end-note in history, but it popped into my head when I was reading Moran's piece, so why not throw it in?

Moran makes some comments about the health care bill:

"On health care, it is naive to believe the Democrats were prepared to work with the GOP on anything that would have stopped short of the kind of comprehensive remaking of our health care that eventually passed. This, the GOP could not countenance under any circumstances and remain a viable political party."

But, of course, the GOP did "countenance" what was done. The bill was created by the GOP. It had been a Republican bill, advanced by former Republican Sen. Bob Dole, advanced by Republican Sen. Judd Gregg, advanced by congressional Republicans when they were trying to defeat the Clinton bill way back in the '90s (when--deja vu--Clinton adopted Republican leader Bob Michel's plan as his own and met with the same reaction from Republicans), and advanced and enacted by Republican Gov. Mitt Romney in Massachusetts (which was the explicitly-stated model for the current bill, now law). It's basically the same in every iteration because it was always written by industry lobbyists. Obama's only significant change was to add a public option, which he, of course, almost immediately threw overboard. Except for a few of its reforms which were gutted in the final product (like anti-pre-existing conditions, anti-rescission, etc.), the bill has no history among the liberals at all--it was a Republican project until right up until the Obama adopted it as his own, at which point all the Republicans abandoned it and started screaming "socialism." That's the bill's pedigree.

Moran quotes Bruce Bartlett:

"Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI 'scholars' on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do."

Given its pedigree, it is, in fact, very likely that, at some point over the years, the bill passed through the American Enterprise Institute--elements of it probably even originated there. Moran decries the silencing of the AEI "scholars," but doesn't seem to understand the significance of the fact that "they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do."

Republicans created that bill, which suggests they didn't find it so inconsistent with their "philosophy" before Obama adopted it as his, and utterly precludes their actually finding it as insanely inconsistent as they pretended it to be. They dug a grave for themselves with their reactionary, no-compromise "emotional partisanship," even maintaining it in the face of a president and party who, contrary to Moran's implication, seemed fully willing to give away just about everything in the name of "bipartisanship." Frum was right about that part of it, and we may all be the worse for it.

Incivility & Its Contents

2010-03-25T12:02:00.000-07:00

Having lost the health care vote, congressional Republicans are throwing an extended tantrum this week. They're denying the unanimous consent requests traditionally used to conduct committee hearings, and, as a consequence, most hearings--some of which had been scheduled for months, and featured witnesses pulled in from all over the world--have had to be unceremoniously canceled, the plug pulled on some as they were actually underway. They've been attacking the bill containing health care "fixes," trying to tie it up by plastering it with irrelevant amendments, and the echoes of the announcement that the health care bill had passed hadn't even faded when Rep. Jim DeMint (Clown-SC) called for its repeal. Rep. Randy Neugebauer (Clown-TX) , a reactionary imbecile of the first order, screams "BABY KILLER!" at Bart Stupak while he was speaking on the House floor, then creates a Youtube video attempting to use the notoriety he gained from the incident to raise money.

That sort of thing, you see, is popular with the Republican base. It's the sort of thing that can really bring in the cash. Last year, when Rep. Joe Wilson (Clown-SC) shouted "YOU LIE!" at the Obama, right in the middle of a presidential address to a joint session of congress, he became a right-wing folk hero, and the money rolled in.

Sunday, Republican lawmakers egged on teabaggers protesting the health care bill. In much-reported incidents, teabaggers shouted "nigger" at black Rep. John L. Lewis (D-GA) and "faggot" at homosexual Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA). While congressional Republicans launched daily rhetorical Armageddon against the bill and its supporters, their less stable right-wing followers, who are stupid enough to take their end-of-days rhetoric seriously, launched a campaign of vandalism, death threats, and intimidation against Democratic congressional supporters of the bill and their families. When it had reached the point that the FBI became involved, a handful of Republicans condemned the violence, but, in a manner all too familiar to those of us who have followed the fights over abortion over the years, simultaneously insisted on making excuses for the behavior as something to be expected. The clowns at Fox News took the same approach, taking it a step further in suggesting that Democrats are merely using this to gain political advantage, to smear conservatives, to marginalize opponents of the bill. Glenn Beck told his audience the Democrats are "begging for" violent reactions from opponents.

There are no responsible statesmen on the right anymore. No prominent Republican leader or anyone of any stature among the conservative elite has so far stepped forward to unconditionally condemn this sort of thing, or to do anything to try to defuse the mania driving it. No surprise, really--Republicans hope to benefit from the mania driving it. The right has, in fact, been whipping it up for years, now. They've portrayed the health care bill as a sinister socialist plot hatched by a Muslim socialist/fascist--who isn't even an American citizen--for the purpose of having the government take over health care in order to kill your granny, kill babies, and make you pay to take care of swarthy people with no papers and a shaky command of English. Those on the right stir up the sort of behavior we've seen over the last few days, they make excuses for it, they even justify outright violence, as Rep. Steve King (Clown-IA) did earlier this year when a man flew a plane into an IRS office full of people. When some crazed reactionary "patriot" picks up a rifle and decides to "save" the U.S. from the Kenyan socialist in the White House, the finger of each and every one of the conservatives who have, by words and deeds, brought him to that point will be on the trigger alongside his own.

Too many people, including far too many liberals, become tangled up in the matter of the "incivility" of the Republicans and the larger conservative movement. When it's merited, incivility can be a justifiable and even positive thing. The U.S. doesn't have a monarchy, and I see no reason at all to treat our elected officials with the sort of pompous imitation of reverence afforded to kings and queens. I'm also a firm believer in the idea that people shouldn't fear their government; governments should fear their people. That doesn't mean elected officials should be terrorized. It means they should receive exactly the species and degree of respect they earn. "Incivility" on the right isn't the proper focus for concern. When Joe Wilson shouted "YOU LIE!" at Obama in the midst of a presidential address, the prim and proper pundit class blanched at his lack of manners. Only a very few understood why that behavior was truly objectionable: it was Wilson who was lying. Obama revealed, on national television, that the health care bills didn't cover illegal immigrants. Wilson, like most of his party comrades, had gotten a lot of mileage out of falsely telling his uber-white base that Obama was trying to make them pay for health care for brown people with funny accents, and, seeing that talking point being taken away on nationwide television, he did what he could to buttress the fiction. Wilson's "incivility" wasn't the real issue. If the Obama truly had been lying, Wilson would have been entirely justified, civility or not.

Republican officialdom and the conservative elite aren't damnable because they sew "incivility." That this incivility is usually totally unnecessary makes it a bit of a mark against them, to be sure, but their real "incivility" problem stems from the fact that they've embraced, without reservation, the professional wrestling version of politics offered by Fox News and right-wing talk radio wherein literally everything is a big, loud morality play in which there are no shades of grey, no subtleties, and no honest disagreements, just pristinely good and blackly evil intentions, and no compromise allowed between the two. And certainly no civility. It's nonsense, a simple fairy tale designed to garner ratings by shoveling a certain segment of the population the bullshit it wants to hear. The segment in question is the least stable and most easily frightened--and thus most potentially dangerous--element of the conservative base. The increasingly dangerous atmosphere the conservative elite has created is a direct result of their intentional decision to forgo legitimate discourse in favor of one lie after another calculated to appeal to--and inflame--this element.

I fear these chickens will come home to roost in a savage, tragic, and most uncivil way.

--classicliberal2

Another Post From Me On Health Care

2010-03-24T10:21:00.000-07:00

For a while, now, I've been having a pretty good exchange with Niceguy Eddie, from "In My Humble Opinion," over this health care bill, now law. I'm not a fan of the law. He is, albeit a qualified one. Today, he's put up "One more post on health care, then I'm done," intended as a closing shot on the subject. Eddie offered to let me have the last word, and, while I thought about just posting "Word" and leaving it at that, I decided I'd actually try to hold up my end of things, instead.

To tell the truth, Eddie, I was disappointed to see some of the common misrepresentations of characters like myself--essentially ad hominems--come out again in your post, particularly given the fact that you basically make them the heart of your argument. I'm not some wild-eyed character on an ideological jihad who "puts ideology ahead of pragmatism." I'm sure there are some hardcore single-payer-ites of whom that could be said, but I'm not one of them. My arguments against the new law have always been practical, not ideological. I've always explicitly rejected that notion of making the perfect the enemy of the good, and though I'd prefer single payer, I wouldn't portray it as remotely "perfect." You'd have a better chance of snaring a jackalope in the wild than of finding "perfect" in our politics.

Given this, imagine how disappointing it is to read something like this:

"To say that doing away with the most egregious abuses of the system is not reform is to clearly put ideology ahead of pragmatism, to let the perfect get in the way of the good."

Does the new law do away with the most egregious abuses of the system? That's the question your comment, there, begs. The answer is that it doesn't, and that's one of the major points I've been making against it. The long Rachel Maddow commentary you quote rolls out, at great length, the standard propaganda in favor of the new law. What I've been pointing out is that this propaganda isn't accurate. The new law doesn't do away with pre-existing conditions, it doesn't do away with rescissions, etc. If it did those things, that would be a mark in its favor, but it doesn't, and it isn't. You say "the biggest problems with the for profit system--namely that those profits came from DENYING care, rather than providing it--have been swept away" by the new law, but they haven't, and they won't, under this law, in 2014 or at any other time.

I don't think it's a good idea to base a health insurance system on the profit motive. That isn't because there's something inherently wrong with profit. It's because, with something like health care, people's lives are at stake. Practically speaking, it's always a very bad idea to put lives on a scale vs. profits. That is, in fact, one of the central lesson of human history. With health care, nearly everything that has made the current system monstrous have been a consequence of that profit motive. When you follow, to its source, the trail of whatever outrageous trend, anecdote, pattern of abuse with the current system you can name, you'll almost always find that it tracks back to someone making money. The new law on health care doesn't eliminate that. It doesn't even try to incentivize positive outcomes. It just leaves in place, props up, and makes nearly invincible (by putting their corrupt practices on the public dole) the same rotten interests that brought us to the point of needing reform in the first place.

When it's more cost-effective to deny payment for care than to provide it (as with the case with a lot of the serious pre-existing conditions under the new law), the payment will not be provided. When pay-outs become expensive, premiums will go up. Insurers are not going to eat a loss, particularly for such human considerations as pity or a sense of justice. Those aren't what drive them, and, in fact, are things that play no part in their deliberations.

If such a system could be made to work for people, I'd be all for it, but I'm skeptical that it could, and I know the new law doesn't accomplish it, or anything resembling it.

I've done a lot of ranting about how the new law is going to set up a corrupt triangle of money that will put the insurers' purchase of legislators and manipulation of our electoral process on the public dole, and make real reform impossible. In your post, I find this very important point reduced to this:

"To say this bill is bad because it makes a system you don’t like WORK BETTER, is routing [sic] against the system every bit as much as the Right has been rooting against America since 20 January, 2009. In my opinion the liberal opposition to this bill amounts to no more than: If you make the for profit system work, we’ll never get a ‘single payer’ system. But from my own POV: If the for-profit system can be made to work, WHO CARES?"

No one would. My opposition to the present "reform" effort wasn't driven by the fact that it "makes a system [I] don't like WORK BETTER"; it was driven, in part, by the fact that it won't make it work better, but will make it impossible to fix in the future. That isn't some narrow concern about crushing hopes for single payer in the future; it's about preventing any positive reform. You say "there will inevitably be other issues that come up. We’ll simply deal with them." I find the word "simply" there to be particularly astonishing. You say, of the new law, "This can work. And if it doesn’t? Well… polls show that the American Public will support MORE reforms. So we’ll just keep going until it does, or until we have single payer." Just like the 65+% public support for the public option resulted in its swift-and-easy passage under the current system, right? It was a point repeatedly stressed by supporters of this law to people like me that it represents "progress" and "reform," and that its shortcomings can be fixed later. The truth is that, under this new law, we'll be entirely at the mercy of these government-financed, for-profit entities for the foreseeable future. That is, to put it mildly, not a good place for us to be; any reformer worthy of that title can only view the prospect with abject horror.

That's where I stand, Eddie. While this may signal the end of our back-and-forth on this particular subject, though, I somehow doubt it's going to be the end of this discussion.

--classicliberal2

House Passes Turd, Calls It "Reform"

2010-03-21T22:06:00.000-07:00

That's the word tonight. On a vote of 219-212, the House of Representatives passed the unfortunate health care bill that's been causing such a fuss for so long. 34 Democrats and every Republican voted against it.

Reader Kevin Kelley asks "Based on your analysis, would you believe that there will be no benefits from this legislation?"

Pretty much. It's very clear there aren't any that even remotely counterbalance the costs. To name but one of the latter, the bill provides for what is, in effect, the public subsidy of industry purchase of legislators. Legitimate reformers will rue the day they allowed that to happen.

The truth is that just over 80% of Americans are already at least partially insured. Their insurance is frequently lousy, but more than 70% of them give their coverage high marks, and for a very simple reason: they rarely ever use it. The only effect that 80+% are going to feel from this reform is ever-escalating premiums for ever-decreasing services, as the industry protects its profit margins. As the bill does nothing to curb costs (once we set aside wishful thinking for what it is), medical bills will continue to be a crippling expense, and will remain the top cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. The billions of dollars--31% of total health expenditures--currently devoted to paperwork as a result of the private health insurance system will continue to rise, as new people enter and add to the workload. Health care spending as a percentage of GDP--already near 20%--will rise to new heights, as those new customers get, at best, the same lousy coverage as who are already covered, and, in general, minimal plans that don't really cover anything. The hardest to ensure--those with pre-existing conditions--will remain the hardest to ensure, as companies dodge covering them--among other shortcomings, the penalty for refusing coverage is often more cost-effective than providing the coverage--and raise premiums across the board to make up for any shortfall in either taking them on or denying them coverage.

In short, all of the problems that form the substance of the arguments for genuine reform are left to fester and worsen.

The problems with the plan all track back to the fact that, instead of reform, it's corporate welfare devoted to propping up a failed, private, for-profit system; as Dennis Kucinich put it (before flip-flopping), it's built on a foundation of sand. Don't ever get any fancy ideas about reforming anything in the future, either, not with those subsidies underwriting the industries' purchase of legislators, and with the Supreme Court just ruling these corporate "persons" can spend unlimited amounts on the candidates of their choice.

It's a bad bill. It shouldn't have been passed.

--classicliberal2

Yes, the Health Care Bill

2010-03-17T12:28:00.000-07:00

Today, Nice Guy Eddie, over at "In My Humble Opinion," jotted out a post on "The Health Care Bill." I started to write a reply, over there, and my comments started to run long, so I decided to turn it into a full-blown posting here:

Those opposing the health care "reform" bill from, broadly speaking, the left are right about it. They aren't opposing the bill out of some blind idealism, as is so often suggested; they're opposing it for very particular reasons, ones they've been articulating in their public remarks on it. In a nutshell, they're against it because it isn't reform. It isn't anything even close to reform. It's a corporate welfare bill, and nothing more. Eddie and some others who've been commenting on it lately have, in my view, missed this entirely, and seem to be functioning under the misimpression that this is, instead, a reform bill. It isn't. It isn't some sort of improvement in the present mess that can be improved even more at some indeterminate point in the future, as it is so often presented. If it was, I’d be supporting it myself. I'm a liberal, but I'm also a pragmatist. The perfect should never be made the enemy of the good, and that isn't how the liberals have approached the current bill.

For all those grating screams of "socialism" from the right, this is, in fact, a conservative Republican bill, written, at various stages, by insurance company lobbyists, pawned off by conservative Republicans as their own, and eventually adopted by Obama as his own (causing all the Republicans to jump ship). That lineage is important, because the bill's conceptual failing is rooted in it.

Eddie asks if the insurance companies make a profit from this and answer "Yes, I'm sure they'll find a way to. They always do." They don't have "find a way," though; the health care bill is the way. Corporate welfare. The bill sets up a corrupt triangle of money. It gives tens-of-billions in government subsidies to low-income people, who, at the point of the government gun, must spend it on private insurance companies, who then route a portion of it into the pockets of politicians in order to keep any positive changes off the table in the future.

Rather than improving anything, the bill makes everything worse. The "public option" was, theoretically, at least, a means of curbing costs by offering serious competition with the private insurers. Without it, there’s absolutely nothing to curb costs. Health care costs rise at many times the rate of inflation every year, and all this bill does is force people into that ever-costlier system on the blind hope that, if more people sign up, costs will go down, because there are more people in the risk pools. This is a "market based" approach, otherwise known as "wishful thinking," the kind we expect to pay off now, though it never has in the past.

The insurers are legally allowed, under the bill, to collude and fix prices. The noxious Slavery Provision forces people to buy private insurance or face a new tax penalty. I can't afford a new tax penalty any more than I can afford private insurance, but that's all the bill offers for someone in my predicament.

Contrary to the false claims of its supporters, this bill does not fix the problem of pre-existing conditions. Companies that continue to refuse to sign up people based on them can, after a lengthy procedure, be fined only $100/day, while those companies that do sign them up, having been barred from charging the individuals whatever exorbitant premium they want, can just raise everyone else’s rates an unlimited amount to make up for the difference, as long as they don't say that's why they're doing it. They're also allowed to continue rescinding policies based on fraud or misrepresentation, entirely defined by them. That's been, for some years, now, their major pretext for rescinding coverage for those who become ill, and, with the current health bill in place as law, we'll simply see the industry miraculously uncover an astonishing epidemic of fraud among those with pre-existing conditions. Another way of getting around it included in the bill: selling those with such conditions only minimal policies.

The bill isn't some "necessary first step" toward reform; it's a huge leap away from reform, and will make it much harder, if not outright impossible, for any real reform to be enacted in the future, because the insurance companies have been given, effectively, a government stipend for their bribery of legislators. The bill doesn't bring us closer to reform--it takes us much further away.

Those among the Democrats who are pushing this seem to have completely lost their minds. They seem totally blind to the mess this monstrosity can create. They don't even demonstrate any rudimentary self-survival instincts--it's very bad politics for the Democrats to pass the bill. It doesn't, in my view, provide for the possibility of any short-term gains--the polling has made it pretty clear that people don't want the bill in its present form. Public reaction is likely to fall somewhere between indifference and outright hostility. Once the bill goes into effect, some years down the road, the Democrats certainly won't be able to bullshit people anymore. They'll be slaughtered at the polls for the mess they’ve made of this--it's why Rahm Emanuel only wanted it to kick in after what he hopes will be the Obama's reelection.

The future, under this bill, is one of premiums that continue to rise for those with insurance, people without the money to buy private insurance being left with even less money, a health insurance industry with federal subsidies, making it even more invincible, and the feds funding, in effect, the campaigns of the politicians the industry chooses to purchase, a job our wonderful Supreme Court has just made a lot easier. It's a bad bill--it needs to die.

--classicliberal2

Conservatism & What Ails It 2: Textbook Boogaloo

2010-03-13T14:54:00.000-08:00

Today comes word that the reactionaries on the Texas Board of Education voted, Friday, to give preliminary approval to a new set of "educational" standards for their state, standards created without any real concern for education, but with a great deal of concern for injecting heaping helpings of the noxious politics of the board majority into the educational process.

Some of the highlights cited by the Associated Press include teachers being "required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a 'constitutional republic,' rather than 'democratic'... " There are "amendments heralding 'American exceptionalism' and the U.S. free enterprise system, suggesting it thrives best absent excessive government intervention."

This has been an ongoing battle in Texas for some time, now. At various stages in the current process, the conservatives have pressed for requiring that students be able "to identify significant conservative advocacy organizations and individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly and the Moral Majority," for injecting global warming denial and creationist rubbish into the standards, for teaching that Sen. Joseph McCarthy had been vindicated. "Experts," such as Peter Marshall, a reactionary fruit-loop preacher from Massachusetts, and David Barton, a Republican party activist, were imported into the process as consultants. While the majority on the board found their politics pleasing, neither has ever had even a minute of formal training as an historian, nor ever demonstrated any genuine grasp of the subject. Barton does, however, seem to have made a comfortable living for himself as a faux historian, publishing right-wing fiction as "history," to the delight of the Religious Right [tm], and a combination of groans and hysterical laughter from everyone with any familiarity with the real thing.

Perhaps most disturbingly, the conservatives have accomplished, or tried to accomplish things like the complete elimination from the standards of any mention of Thurgood Marshall or César Chávez, and the downplaying of the significance of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, in favor of portraying their accomplishments as the work of white Republicans. This week, as the board hashed out the standards, "numerous attempts to add the names or references to important Hispanics throughout history also were denied, inducing one amendment that would specify that Tejanos died at the Alamo alongside Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie. Another amendment deleted a requirement that sociology students 'explain how institutional racism is evident in American society'" (Associated Press). One amendment from the conservatives called for declaring that the civil rights movement led to "unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes."

Call the results Aryan History 101.

So it's going to suck to be a student in Texas, right? But why is it a concern for anyone in states not governed by inbred racists and reactionaries?

Glad you asked. Textbook publishers operate on a national basis, but Texas is one of the two biggest textbook markets in the U.S., and to make sales, those publishers have to tailor their product to meet the state standards. Those textbooks--the ones that suit the Texas reactionaries--will then be sold and used all over the U.S. for the next decade (the next time the state will have a curriculum review).

Get the picture?

Ye humble editor is big on education. An uninformed citizen is adrift on a night-shrouded sea of troubles, forever doomed to flail away in the darkness at a world he can never understand. I'm a history buff, myself. More than that, I'm a history fanatic ("buff" is far too soft a word). If someone characterized my view of history as not only a subject of learning, but the subject, it would only be a mild exaggeration. Merely saying American education in history is woefully inadequate is like merely saying Sarah Palin isn't very bright; the phrase "bold understatement" just doesn't begin to cover it. The long series of polls, surveys, studies documenting Americans' profound ignorance of history go back decades.

Back in 1995, James Loewen published "Lies My Teacher Told Me," which is still the definitive popular survey of the inadequacy of historical education in the U.S. Loewen examined 12 of the major U.S. history textbooks, and outlined their failings in painful detail. The books take what should be the most vibrant, debatable, and interesting subject, and drain every bit of the life out of it. They never use the past to illuminate the present, thus severing, for the student, all apparent relevance of the subject to the present and the future. Instead, "history" is presented through a narrative that reduces it to a series of problems that arose from nowhere and were solved long ago, and "learning" it means absorbing a seemingly endless series of names and dates. Errors abound. Historical events and figures are scrubbed in order to eliminate controversial elements, particularly any that, like racism, may be construed as reflecting badly on the U.S., which is the PC problem. It isn't, as conservatives would have it, a problem with liberal "political correctness"--it's a problem with conservative "patriotic correctness," and, as Loewen documents (without calling it that), it renders much of genuine U.S. history inexplicable.

Adopting Big Brother's dictum that he who controls the past controls the future, conservatives have long waged war on history. In the last few decades, an influential and astonishingly ignorant segment--or, to be more precise, particularly virulent strain--of American reactionaries who insist on viewing absolutely everything through the narrow lens of their twisted contemporary political goals have decided the wretchedly inadequate historical education American schools already dish out doesn't go nearly far enough, and they've wormed their way into positions of power wherever they could in order to make it even worse, with the goal of turning out more brain-dead robots like themselves. What's happening in Texas is just a more extreme example of what has always happened. It's also today's example of why conservatives just plain suck.

--classicliberal2

Conservatism, and What Ails It

2010-03-12T09:26:00.000-08:00

Ye humble editor makes no secret of the fact that he's not a fan of conservatism, but he'll freely concede it can, in reasonably measured doses, be, theoretically, not only a benefit but an indispensable asset to the body politic; challenging new ideas, weeding out the clinkers, and giving strength to the more substantial ones that survive the challenge by pointing out shortcomings in them and forcing their advocates to shore them up. Allowing conservatism to rule is never a good idea, but any politics become stale and decadent without the persistent presence of a credible opposition force, and that's what conservatism should be.

That's theory.

In practice, that's... not our conservatism. Not even close.

In practice, traditional conservatism in its various gradations--and, though these comments may equally apply to them, I'm not referring to the plethora of self-styled "conservatisms" like "Libertarianism" that have little real support on the right--has become something more closely analogous to a cancer in the body politic. It hasn't had any real intellectual muscle in quite some time, and has, in fact, largely become an anti-intellectual movement. These days, it doesn't play any substantial constructive social role at all.

It isn't just that it's stupid, backwards, based on fictions, built on faulty premises. Some research in which I don't put much stock has characterized it as an evolutionary throwback. Some other research with a firmer basis has likened it to mental illness. Whatever else it may be, though, what it really is, at heart, is a character flaw. Conservatism doesn't just cling to the past; it clings to the worst elements of it, the bad ol' days, which it perversely regards as the good ol' days. It clings to these things (which may be real or imagined elements of an imagined past), no matter who it has to run over, injure, even kill to maintain them. Challenge one of their sacred cows and far too many conservatives will cast off any hint of the most basic human decency or sense of responsibility in their fight against you. If most conservative causes aren't morally reprehensible from the outset, they quickly become so via the behavior of their advocates. And, perversely, these battles are often waged, by the conservatives, in the name of the very morality they so often abandon as their first step in the process of undertaking them.

The story in today's press that inspired these thoughts offers an example of the latter, a story about conservatism at work that perked up the ears of ye humble editor. It's a relatively minor example, to be sure, but it's one that hits really close to home for me. A high school in the podunk town of Fulton, Mississippi was preparing their senior prom, and Constance McMillen requested that she be able to bring her date, like everyone else. McMillen's date, however, was her girlfriend, and the school board said, as CBS News reported it, that this "violated their policy against same-sex couples at the dance." The existence of that policy, outlined in a memo circulated at the school, was what had led McMillen to inquire about the matter in the first place, and, incredibly, when she pressed the matter, the school actually canceled the event! Called the whole thing off, just so one queer girl wouldn't be able to take her girlfriend to it. CBS reports McMillen "said she's been told by classmates that she's ruined their senior year," which suggests some of Constance's fellow students are just as twisted and misguided as the right-wing trash in officialdom that caused this situation.

In my own senior year of high school, in another of those small southern towns, I saw these same attitudes at work on someone very close to me. I'm not at liberty to offer many details (it's a long story and would probably be boring to anyone else anyway), but what I saw was very, very ugly, and the experience became one of those things that fundamentally shaped my view of life, of the world, of just about everything. This prom cancellation in Asshole-of-the-World, Mississippi all these years later is a lot milder than what I saw, but the attitudes driving both were fundamentally the same--fundamentally abhorrent, fundamentally incompatible with a civilized society, or even a barbarous one that's worth a shit, and, most of all, fundamentally conservative. A perfect nutshell encapsulation of what contemporary conservatism is, at its heart and behind all the incongruous rhetoric, and, if a very minor affair in the larger scheme of things, still a perfect illustration of why it just plain sucks.

--classicliberal2

Democracy & The Filibuster, Part 2

2010-03-07T09:45:00.000-08:00

Nice Guy replied to my initial response in his "comments" section. Here's today's contribution from me:

The reason to do away with the filibuster is that it's anti-democratic. Not every part of a modern liberal democracy is supposed to be entirely democratic, but the legislature is, and the filibuster, whether used for good or bad (and, historically speaking, it's almost always for bad), is a cancer on that scheme.

Your argument against the tyranny of the majority is fundamentally (and profoundly) conservative--it's the very reason great effort was originally expended, in the creation of the constitution, to minimize democratic influence. The powdered-wig set was terrified that ordinary joes--flush with the foolish notion that, because they were the ones who fought and died to create the country, it was theirs--would take up arms and storm the country clubs, demanding a fair shake. The views of the powdered wigs on this point were fundamentally at odds with both the temperament of the times and of the American culture and character, which were products of that temperament. We never accepted their views, and our history is one of correcting them. We are a liberal democracy, even more so culturally than is reflected in our governing institutions.

That's certainly not to say the tyranny of the majority is something toward which I'm indifferent. When it comes to the general public, the ignorance, the educational deficiencies, the fact that it can and often is duped, that it can react like a frightened herd when faced with crisis--these are all undeniable, and all undeniably matters of concern. Leaving the general direction of the country to the ballot box, as I suggested earlier, could and would lead to some appalling outcomes. I don't even look upon that as a proposition--I accept it as a fact.

Here's the thing, though: I don't think there's any reason to believe those outcomes are any worse than the appalling outcomes we get now. We have most of our history to show for that. Filibuster abuse--if one accepts that any filibuster is not an abuse--is a relatively recent phenomenon. The incredible degree of abuse we see today is, in fact, only 3 years old, with it having become a problem of note less than two decades ago. Launching a filibuster used to be widely considered the legislative equivalent of child molestation. It was practically never done, except in the service of causes like beating back civil rights, and the U.S. kept chugging along anyway (the process was formalized way back in 1917, though, in practice, there had been filibusters going back to the 1830s).

It should also be said, though, that allowing one's position on this matter to be driven by concerns for the outcomes we may get should the filibuster be ended is completely inappropriate. That isn't to say we shouldn't have those concerns--we certainly should--but allowing that to drive your ultimate position on the question is to adopt a Machiavellian ends-justify-the-means perspective that is entirely inconsistent with a democracy. One either believes in democracy or one doesn't. If you believe in it, you have to take the good with the bad.

I do believe in democracy. In fact, I've always been one agitating for making things even more democratic. I'm all for proportional representation in congress. I'd completely eliminate the electoral college. If I had my druthers, I'd probably even do away with the Senate itself. I'm not as settled on that one as on the others, but over the years, I keep asking myself if we really need a House of Lords. At the very least, some neutering of Senate power seems appropriate. Consider that, at present population dispersal, just over 5.6% of the U.S. population, residing in the smallest states (which contain 11% of the total U.S. population), can theoretically elect a sufficient number of Senators (41) to filibuster anything everyone else wants to do. It doesn't work out that way in practice,[*] but that's obviously an intolerable situation for anyone with any real concern for democracy at all, and depending on the forbearance of reptiles is not a sound means of addressing it.

You ask, "Are Supreme Court issues, 'matters for the ballot box?' If you say 'yes' you sound a lot like a Conservative. If you say 'No' then you've undermined a good chunk of your argument." By "Supreme Court issues," I assume you mean things like matters relating to civil liberties. Of course those aren't subject to being eliminated by a majority. Protection of minority rights is an integral feature of a modern liberal democracy, not, as so many conservatives would have it, a deviation from it. My right to free speech can't be legislated away. Well, actually, it can, but that's why we have the courts, to smack down that sort of nonsense. That isn't why we have the filibuster. The filibuster, like the Senate itself, exists to put a stop to change, to short-circuit those durned libruls who are always tryin' ta' make things better fer folks. It's a practice, just as the Senate is an institution, designed to prop up the status quo. The sentiment behind it is consistent with a part of the sentiment that led those powdered wigs to create the Senate in the first place, though the filibuster itself is arguably unconstitutional, by the very scheme those powdered wigs established. My failure to submit fundamental rights to a majority rule does nothing at all to undermine my argument, much less "a good chunk" of it. It is, rather, a matter of apples and oranges.

As I said before, if one believes in democracy, one has to take the good with the bad. I don't think the bad would be as bad as you seem to think. I don't think people are as stupid as you seem to think, either--most of the time, they're either with the liberals or come around to the liberals' point of view over time, and if we accept that as "stupid," we're sort of stupid, too! Maybe we shouldn't rule that out! I don't think we should be looking at possible outcomes as the guide in this matter.

The constitution allows the Senate to make its own rules, but it provides for a majority vote to pass legislation. The filibuster, as it's presently constituted, makes a supermajority necessary. That's the sort of tinkering with the original design that probably should require a constitutional amendment. Calling out--and defeating--the Republicans who have brought us to this place is a good idea, a good use of democracy, but it doesn't fix the institutional problem. As I see it, one can either stand against the filibuster or accept that the constitution got it wrong and that we really should have to have a supermajority to do anything. I don't see much wiggle-room between the two.

--classicliberal2

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[*] The actual numbers still make the point, if much less dramatically--at present, Democratic Senators represent 74.9% of the population, while Republican Senators represent 48.7% of the population (there being overlap between states that have mixed Senate delegations). The minority is still running everything.

Democracy & The Filibuster, Part 1

2010-03-06T10:53:00.000-08:00

This post began as an exchange with Nice Guy Eddie over at "In My Humble Opinion." Any movie buff remembers Nice Guy Eddie Cabot, the lovable gangster boy with the impeccable fashion sense from RESERVOIR DOGS. Eddie appeared to have been shot to death at the end of that opus, but his apparent death became one of the great mysteries of cinema, because, in that grand showdown that finished off the cast, no one was pointing a gun at Eddie when the bullets started flying. And, as it turns out, Eddie didn't die at all. Instead, he started a blog. He's mellowed a lot in the intervening years, as it turns out--his opinions often do seem humble. Yesterday, he jotted out some thoughts on "Filibuster Reform," and I thought I'd add my two cents (to note the obvious, my reply, recorded below, will probably make a lot more sense if one reads the post to which it is a response):

The reason the Republicans' proposed "nuclear option," during the Bush administration, was so heinous wasn't because it would have limited the filibuster against judicial nominees--it was because they were proposing changing the rules of the Senate on a majority vote. The rules of the Senate can only be changed by a 2/3 majority or more. The idea is to make the basic rules by which the institution operates ones with which pretty much everyone agrees. Republicans were proposing to simply ignore that. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), who has tried to essentially repeal the filibuster for at least 15 years, even came out strongly against this, correctly noting the potentially horrendous damage that could be caused if the bodies' basic rules could be changed at any time by majority vote. The situation with the Massachusetts legislature is a rough example of the sort of shenanigans that could become commonplace.

Harkin's initial roll-back of the filibuster died a bloody death back in 1995--as I recall, it only got something like 13 votes [Edit: 19, actually--it died on a vote of 76-19]. He drags out the bill every so often. It has never gone anywhere.

I've been in favor of eliminating the procedure for even longer than that. No one else is, and for the reasons you outline--they all imagine themselves in the minority faction in the future. It's a shortsighted and stupid Machiavellian way of looking at it. The general direction of the country, for better or worse, is, properly, a matter for the ballot box. As the past year has vividly demonstrated, those elections are completely meaningless if the minority party--a minority reduced to one of its lowest levels in decades by the last election--can simply stop everything the majority tries to do. A MOST noxiously reactionary breed of Republican ran the country for 8 years, people threw the bums out, and, over a year later, they're still running everything.

The Bush years also demonstrated the inverse: the pointlessness of having something like the Senate filibuster, without an opposition with any semblance of a spine. Bush and the Republicans steamrolled everything they wanted through congress anyway; it didn't put a stop to a single major piece of Bush-proposed legislation. There was no oversight of what was happening in the executive branch. The filibuster was useless.

It needs to be stopped. I don't know the details of Sen. Bennet's proposal, but if it gets rid of the filibuster, more power to him. He's going to need some moral support, because that's the only kind of support he's going to get.

--classicliberal2

Pressing The Depressing Press For A Little Press

2010-03-04T12:09:00.000-08:00

The top political story of the past year is money in politics, but that's the case with every year, and, viewed as mere business-as-usual, it isn't really "news" at all. The details are always different, but the story is always the same. That's how most of those in the corporate press look at it, anyway. Given the weight it merits, it should lead the evening newscasts every night--given the weight they assign it, it's barely even mentioned. U.S. politics are all about money. It overwhelms every other consideration. A lack of understanding of this basic fact precludes any understanding of U.S. politics.

The corporate press tends to present politics as, instead, a battle of personalities and of competing ideologies. It's no easy task. Ignoring a 2,000-lb. gorilla in the room never is, and a 24-hour news cycle makes it that much tougher to pretend it doesn't exist.

Money isn't the only gorilla, though. This particular one has several big gorilla babies the press either entirely ignores or mentions only in passing, and without reference to parentage. The biggest of these babies, for more than a year, has been Republican obstructionism in congress. If you get your news from most of the corporate press, you don't know a lot about it.

Barack Obama won the 2008 election in spectacular fashion, crushing Republican John McCain by nearly 10 million votes. His party, which had already won the congress two years earlier, heftily increased its majorities in both houses, almost achieving, in the Senate, a 60-vote filibuster-proof supermajority. Conventional wisdom held the election to be historic.

What a difference a year makes, eh?

The immediate aftermath, of course, was that Republicans embraced a strategy of obstruction, declared their opposition to anything and everything of any significance that was proposed by Obama and the Democrats, and used and abused every trick in the book to stop it all. Even when Obama and the Democrats adopted Republican proposals as their own, the Republicans who had made the proposals turned against them.

Entire volumes will probably be written about the remarkable opportunity the Obama squandered in his first year. He rode into office via landslide, and his popularity soared to even greater heights as he was sworn in, while public identification with his Republican opposition hit its lowest point in the history of polling. The world was his oyster, and instead of boldly seizing the moment and wringing some progress from it, he embraced the politics of compromise, accommodation, "bipartisanship," seemingly oblivious to the opportunity before him, oblivious to the ugly political reality of the contemporary American right, oblivious to the fact that you can't compromise when there's no one with whom to make a deal. Simply put, Obama blew it. One must judge him, in this monumental failure, as, at best, tragically misguided, and, at worst, utterly contemptible.

It probably isn't any surprise to my regular readers that I've leaned toward the latter conclusion; it's been mine since prior to the Obama's inauguration, when the administration he set about building made plain what was to follow. Everything that eventually did happen was a foregone conclusion. A shame, really.

But my contempt for Obama isn't my subject today. Today, I have some other contempt to spread around. Maybe I'll even offer something that amounts to--gasp!--some serious criticism of a theoretically important institution!

That institution is the press. I've never made any secret of the fact that I am, to put it mildly, not a fan of much of it. In theory, it's indispensable. In practice, it's reprehensible. It's supposed to be a watchdog on the powerful. At this, it fails miserably.

Republican obstructionism, particularly in the U.S. Senate, has been the biggest of that big gorilla's big gorilla babies in the past year. Consider this, for a moment. Why hasn't it been the #1 story on the nightly newscasts every night for most of the past year? I mean, since money-in-politics can't be directly touched. The Demos rode in on that wave of enthusiasm in 2008, but, through the Senate filibuster and various other abuses, Repubs--the losers of the election--have managed to stop just about everything Obama and the Demos have advanced. There were 75 cloture votes in the Senate last year. To put that number in perspective, the 2nd-most-frequent use of cloture in an entire two-year congress in the entire history of the United States was 82 votes. The Republicans nearly tied it in only one year. These same Republicans set the current #1 record for cloture votes in a congress, as well--when they lost both houses in 2006, the next two years saw 139 cloture votes, over double the average of the previous five congresses. They're going to beat that record with this current congress. They're being allowed, by the press, to do so. Their behavior isn't scandalized. It isn't reported in any sort of sustained, systematic way that would inform the public what's happening. For the most part, in fact, it's barely even reported at all in most major media outlets. Repubs obstruct everything, then say the Demos' policies have failed; Obama and the Democrats see their approval ratings tank.

Not that Obama and the Demos aren't mostly to blame for that. If they'd just decided to go through the Republicans right from the beginning, they wouldn't be in this position. Their efforts at accommodation have done them in, and its impossible to have any sympathy for them. I have to believe, though, that if the press was doing its job, and if the public had gotten, from it, a sustained, systematic narrative of this extraordinary campaign of obstructionism, public disapproval would be tilted rather differently.

That sort of sustained work by the press would have also put the just-concluded Jim Bunning situation in its proper perspective. Over the weekend, Sen. Bunning (Clown-KY) decided to launch a one-man crusade against extension of unemployment benefits, holding them up and allowing them to expire. Bunning's behavior has been treated by the press as some sort of anomalous outrage, when, placed in its proper perspective, it's perfectly consistent with his parties' behavior. The press reacted the same way (when reporting the matter at all) when, a few months ago, Sen. Tom "Payola" Coburn (Clown-OK) was holding up veteran's benefits. Anomalous. No sense of context. Sen. Richard Shelby (Clown-AL) blocks over 70 Obama nominees to national security-related posts because he wants a pork project for a foreign-owned company in his state, instead of an American-owned company elsewhere. It was barely reported at all, and when it was, it was the same routine. Anomalous.

Without the proper framing provided by sustained press coverage, something like the fight over health care reform can't even be understood by the broader public. The press aversion to the mother gorilla has already robbed the public of any real opportunity to understand what's driving the debate, but the aversion to the big gorilla baby has also left them mostly in the dark about the mechanics of the debate itself. Repub obstructionism is part of a conscious party strategy to bury anything the Demos try to do, then to try to bury the Demos themselves for being failures at governing, which would be very clear if sustained, systematic reporting on it had started with the obstruction campaign, the day the Obama took the oath of office. For that matter, Repubs, as I said earlier, first amped up the use of the filibuster to insane proportions two years before that, after they lost the congress. Again, this would have been clear, if the press was doing its job. Absent those needed months (and years) of context leading up to the health care debate, the coverage, instead, actually lends credibility to Repub suggestions that there's something terribly wrong with reform efforts, even if the coverage never explicitly says so. Otherwise, why would the Repubs be fighting it so fiercely?

The health care "reform" proposal advanced by Obama is based on several Republican health care "reform" proposals, but, initially, with a public option tacked on for cost-control purposes (something the Obama quickly abandoned when faced with criticism from the right).[*] That's a pretty damn important fact when Republicans start screeching about "socialism" and "government takeover," railing against the Demos exclusion of Repub ideas from the process, and going to such insane lengths to stop anything from passing. Pretty damn important, but good luck in ever hearing about it on the evening news.

Instead, Repub anti-reform propaganda--even blatant lying--is allowed, time and time again, to gain serious traction. When the charge of "death panels" aimed at killing old people was packing the congressional town-hall meetings with ranting idiots, it was almost impossible to get the press to do any significant reporting on the basic fact that there weren't any such "death panels," and that the proposal being used as a basis for the charge was an uncontroversial measure about a totally different matter that had been written by Republicans and had very broad support in congress right up until the point it became more convenient for one side to lie about it. At the height of the hysteria, Media Matters ran a piece aimed at documenting the many times the lie had been debunked in the press, but mostly succeeding in demonstrating what I've been describing about the shallow press coverage. While many major press outlets had, indeed, been critical of the lie, the criticism was relatively rare, and usually limited to a stray comment or two. Very few dedicated stories. No systematic reporting.

Now, Democrats are considering using the congressional reconciliation process to iron out the differences between the House and Senate health care bills. Repubs are behaving as their usual outraged selves, presenting this as some sort of unprecedented use of a procedural gimmick to force health care reform on an unwilling public, and they're getting lots of stenography of these baseless charges in the press. Sen. Orrin Hatch (Clown-UT) just authored a compendium of these lies, and the Washington Post saw fit to publish it. Over at Media Matters, Jamison Foser has just written an illuminating article on the matter, offering, in the process, yet another example of how journalistic failure has impacted the health care debate. Foser examined how the corporate media covered the Repubs' use of the reconciliation process to pass George Bush's 2003 tax cut legislation. Simply stated, they didn't. The reconciliation process was treated as a non-story. It wasn't scandalized. The fact that it was even being used at all was barely even mentioned. Now, though, Repubs are expending a great deal of effort to make it appear a scandal that Democrats are considering doing what they've done. If the press had been providing the proper coverage of Republican obstructionism for the past year (or the past three), the wider public wouldn't even need to know the details--it would immediately recognize the bullshit being shoveled by Republicans over this matter as just the latest from a big pile of bullshit aimed at obstructing Democratic proposals.

If the obstructionist story had ever been given the weight it deserved, the public would be sick of it very quickly, and up in arms about it within a month.

The corporate press simply won't act as an effective watchdog, which is what it's supposed to be, and, more importantly, what we so desperately need it to be. It is, instead, lazy, incompetent, often ill-intentioned, and unaccountable. That's why it needs watchdogs.

Unfortunately, our biggest watchdog, Media Matters, has been dropping the ball a lot lately. Nearly all of its work, for a few months, now, has been devoted to debunking fictions circulated by Fox News. Now, it's true Fox News is a cancer on the U.S., but it's also true that bashing them is like shooting elderly, arthritic fish in a very small barrel. The real problems with the press are found in the sort of deficient coverage I've been outlining, and it's the big news operations that are falling short. Media Matters barely touches them at all anymore.

So what's left are mostly no-name assholes like me, blogging away to little notice.

The corporate press needs its watchdogs. Their mission has to be a hell of a lot larger than just following whatever the idiots on Fox are lying about at any given moment. I went over there for a few days and griped about it, and today's output was an improvement. Foser's piece was a most welcome change. I hope they find their way again.

--classicliberal2

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[*] The reason the "Democratic" proposal for "reform" is identical to those Republican plans is a story in itself--they're both written by industry lobbyists. Good luck seeing that on the evening new, too.

Bye Bye, Bayh. And Take Your "Bipartisanship" With You. (Updated below)

2010-02-16T20:42:00.000-08:00

"Bipartisanship" is virtually worshiped by the "mainstream" corporate press whenever even a hint of a "threat" of liberal reform is in the air. Always when there's a Democrat in the White House, it's the warmest and fuzziest of warm-and-fuzzy notions, something toward which all Democratic politicians should strive, and of which only a madman wouldn't recognize the merits.

It's also a concept that has, in and of itself, absolutely no value. Embraced as a virtue, it's actively pernicious. Cooperation and compromise between competing political factions are a necessary feature of a functioning liberal democracy. They're not something one actively tries to do; they're what one is willing to do in the name of a larger good in order to get things done. In a two-party state that's already virtually a one-party state, though, "bipartisanship," in the way it's meant by those who are forever pimping it, is something very different: even less choice for a public that is already denied any real choice at the ballot box.

Scott Erb, his World in Motion, used the circumstance of Sen. Even Bayh's decision to retire from congress to write some thoughts about "bipartisanship." He defines it differently from most of the "bipartisanship" pimps; to him, it's typical democratic diplomacy. In his ultimate conclusion, though, he's doubtful:

"At base bi-partisanship does not mean anti-partisan. It literally means two partisan groups figuring out how to come to some agreement on how to solve problems, recognizing neither side will be completely happy with the action. It means that even as laws are passed, the debate and discussion continue--no one ever truly wins, no compromise is ever final. It also means that each side recognizes that they do not hold a monopoly on truth, both sides operate on good faith. It means rejecting the kind of personal attacks and venom that too often percolate within the political discourse. It’s only possible when political disagreement is not a cause for personal dislike or disgust. Bayh’s departure indicates that he does not think the politicians in Washington are capable of that kind of productive partisan cooperation. He may be right."

I'd certainly cross out that "may be." I don't think there's any "may be" to it. The "may be" came off of it years ago. Ye humble editor has been warning of the pernicious effects of the sort of "can't-we-all-just-get-along"-ism embraced by the Obama administration since before there was an Obama administration. It's probably the single subject about which I've written more than any other since the birth of this blog. It isn't just that the notion, as it is popularly understood, is bad and limits choice; it's that it isn't even possible in the current political climate, because you have a conservative Republican party in the stranglehold of cretins, crackpots, and conspiracists who will allow for no compromise, no cooperation with a majority opposition they consider a fundamentally anti-American alien cancer.

The Obama's first year was a frustrating tragedy because he so completely failed to understand this. He prefaced his every major proposal with massive concessions to Republicans, to no avail (except to drive the ultimate policies even further to the right, just as this writer warned would happen, and to help alienate his base). Republicans have been in lock-step opposition, filibustering almost everything (an abuse of the filibuster that has no historical precedent).

Not that these Republicans are actually against all of these things, mind you. Rather, Republicans have made a conscious decision to oppose anything of any significance supported by the Obama.

Examples demonstrating this are legion.

The Obama himself recently noted the fate of the PAYGO bill, which would have required new programs be paid for by cutting existing ones; as soon as the Obama announced his support for it, seven Republican Senators who had co-written the bill (four of whom had voted in favor of identical legislation four years earlier) flip-flopped and came out against it.

The same thing happened with the proposed debt commission: five Republican co-authors of the legislation jumped ship the moment the Obama announced his support for it.

When the Obama proposed a freeze on non-military spending, the same thing happened. Even John McCain, who had made it a part of his presidential platform, flip-flopped.

In an effort to draw Republican votes, the Obama larded up his "stimulus" bill with the wasteful, less stimulative tax cuts favored by Republicans. All but two Republicans in the Senate voted against it. The rest made a grand show of ranting against the "socialist" bill in outlets like Fox News, and going on about how it wouldn't work, but, as liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow documented last week, 29 of those same Republicans who voted against and denounced the bill then went to their home states and took credit for the projects it was helping fund, and praised its effectiveness. [see Update below]

When the Obama was given the opportunity to nominate a new Supreme Court Justice--a very important nomination that would have allowed him to begin to redress the insane rightward imbalance of the court--he chose, instead, another damn conservative. Republicans denounced her as a racist, and 31 of the 40 Repub Senators voted against her.

The Obama began the health care debate by throwing over the side the liberal option (single payer). Wouldn't want to be called a "socialist" by the conservatives, right? He chose, instead, to push for a proposal that mimicked, in every significant particular, Republican health care plans offered by Mitt Romney (when he was governor of Massachusetts), former Senator Bob Dole, and Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. The final Senate bill was virtually identical to the Gregg proposal; Gregg's response was to write a little manual to his Republican colleagues on how to obstruct the bill's passage. The Obama initially added a "public option" that would have amounted to some little bit of real reform, but when faced with criticism from the right, he quickly chucked it over the side, too. And, of course, Republicans have spent months portraying the industry-friendly, market-based Republican plan adopted by the Obama as a "socialist" government takeover, and the newest line, making the rounds on the right, is that Obama and the Democrats have steadfastly refused to even consider Republican health care ideas.

This is why "bipartisanship" isn't possible in the current political climate. Republicans refuse to work with Democrats on anything, even when Democrats adopt conservative Republican policies. If the Obama ever wants to accomplish anything, he's going to have to come to terms with this basic fact, and stop trying to be so accommodating. He's already wasted a year.

--classicliberal2

---

UPDATE (2 March, 2010) -- The day after I wrote the above, ThinkProgress released a report documenting the fact that an astonishing 110 congressional Republicans--over half of all of the Republicans in congress--are guilty of "stimulus hypocrisy." They voted to kill the bill, then returned to their home states and districts to take credit for the projects it has funded.

--classicliberal2

Good Greife! Or is it?

2010-02-02T15:37:00.000-08:00

"Barack Obama finds himself stuck between a rock and a hard place, or should I say, between Democrats and Republicans. In an attempt to please them both he has satisfied neither."

So begins a new blog entry by Brandon Greife over at NextRight, and in a world in which most of his fellow conservatives try to portray the Obama as some sort of wild-eyed socialist radical, it seems the beginning of a more level-headed evaluation of the Obama administration. Unfortunately Greife's analysis goes off the rails in working from some popular-but-fictional premises. Seeing as how I've written about those fictions in the past, I thought I'd bang out a few words on the subject.

The most glaring is the longest-standing of the batch, this mythical narrative of the Clinton administration:

"After a disastrous first two years in office, in which Clinton was lambasted for a liberal agenda that included failed attempts at health care reform and gun control, he course corrected. His march toward the right was highlighted by bipartisan achievements such as welfare reform and a balanced budget and crowned with his famous line, 'the era of big government is over.'"

Way back when (during the 1996 presidential campaign, to be exact), this narrative had already taken shape--and taken hold--and I wrote a corrective, documenting the fact that:

"As an examination of the Clinton administration, this doesn't even reach the level of shallow analysis. Nor was it ever intended to; it is no more than a political myth manufactured by those on the right to serve their own narrow ends... Not only does the record fail to bear out this interpretation, it shows exactly the opposite; that Clinton is a conservative, ran as a conservative, and, in the words of Progressive editor Mathew Rothschild, 'has governed as a Republican.'"

Clinton was, in fact, more conservative than his Republican predecessor. It's noteworthy that Greife, in searching for examples of Clinton's "liberal agenda," doesn't have much from which to choose. He picks an old favorite in Clinton's health care effort, but, in the real world, Clinton refused to even consider the liberal option (single payer), opting instead for an industry-friendly proposal lifted, almost entirely, from a conservative Republican reform bill then in congress. Greife's second example is Clinton's "failed attempt" at "gun control." That didn't fail, though; it was a part of Clinton's crime bill in 1993. That crime bill was, in almost every particular, identical to the crime bill assembled (but not passed) by Clinton's Republican predecessor, George Bush, who, of course, didn't have a liberal bone in his body.

Greife continues, arguing that "in words as well as deeds, Clinton grasped the fundamental truth that this is a center-right nation." This is a popular myth--or, to call it what it really is, delusion--among conservatives, and Greife backs it up with--surprise, surprise--polling data on ideological self-identification. In a world in which decades of conservative demonization of the word "liberal" always leads large numbers of liberals to tell pollsters they're "moderate" and even "conservative," self-identified conservatives always significantly outnumber self-identified liberals in such polls, and the small number of self-identified liberals always ends up being used, by conservatives, as the "evidence" of the conservative bent of the public. It's something about which I've written before. Conservatives are fooling themselves on this one, big time. As I wrote in that earlier piece back in November:

"The hard, cold political reality facing the right today--the one that's still there after the poll results, and after all that back-slapping--is that the U.S. isn't a conservative nation. What's more, that conclusion isn't even particularly controversial for anyone who has examined the matter in any detail; for the most part, it isn't even close. Public opinion is more heavily polled in the U.S. than in any other country on earth. On issue after issue, Americans are not only with the liberals, but with them overwhelmingly... One is hard pressed to find a single major public policy issue on which the liberals don't hold an overwhelming advantage in public sentiment."

And I offered lots of examples.

Greife, working from his faulty premises, thinks "Barack Obama will be compelled to adopt many conservative positions, or at the very least let Republicans into the room." Obama has "let Republicans into the room" from the beginning--they are, in fact, running large parts of his administration, and his every major initiative has seen him granting massive concessions to the conservatives and Republicans before any debate even begins. He has bent over backwards to accommodate them. Bent so far, he's nearly broken his own back. Congressional Republicans simply won't work with him on anything, and for a very obvious reason: The Republican party is, collectively, mad. Not mad as in "angry" (though they're always that), but mad as in "hatters." Crazy. Made up of ill-informed half-wits and conspiracist crackpots. These aren't the fringe anymore--they are the party. A new Research 2000 poll of Republicans released earlier today outlines this sickness. Some of the highlights (lowlights?):

--Should Barack Obama be impeached or not?
39% said yes, 29% "not sure," only 32% said no.

--Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, or not?
58% said either no, or they weren’t sure.

--Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?
63% said yes, another 16% said they weren’t sure; only 21% no.

--Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win?
57% chose either "yes" or "not sure."

--Do you believe ACORN stole the 2008 election?
76% chose either "yes" or "not sure," only 24% "no."

--Do you believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama?
53% said yes, only 14% said no.

--Do you believe Barack Obama is a racist who hates White people?
64% said either yes, or not sure; 36% no.

And so on. The idea that Republicans are politically invested in refusing to work with Obama or the Democrats on anything isn't just some Democratic party talking point. It reflects the political reality found in this polling data. A massive shift to the right and away from sanity itself has occurred, and the Republican base won't tolerate any "bipartisanship." Cooperation with Obama or Democrats is equated with treason. Look at what happened to Lindsey Graham when he merely suggested he may work with them on global warming; suddenly, one of the most conservative members of congress finds himself labeled a RINO, and is heckled by reactionaries calling him a traitor and demanding to know when he’s going to change parties. John McCain, who, less than two years ago, was the Republican choice for their presidential candidate, is now being primaried by former Republican congressman J.D. Hayworth, whose remarkable physical resemblance to Hermann Goering is matched only by his political similarities. All through last year, Republicans accelerated their efforts to rid the party of any and all who don't toe the most extreme right line (a line utterly alienating to the general public Greife mistakenly believes is politically closer to it). The Obama, speaking at a town hall in New Hampsire today, offered, in a different context, a perfect example of how this manifests itself in congress. Seven Republicans signed on to the PAYGO bill, which would have mandated cutting funds from some existing program (rather than taxing or borrowing) to pay for any new one. These Republicans were enthusiasts of the bill right up until the Obama announced his own support for it, at which time they became terrified of being seen as collaborators and immediately withdrew their backing.

The biggest obstacle to Republicans taking advantage of any slip-up by the Obama or the Democrats is the Republicans themselves. Greife concludes: "Republicans cannot rest on the knowledge their foe is suffering, we must pick up the mantle of real reform." Given the political reality of the moment, the image this immediately calls to mind is the scene in THE BIG RED ONE wherein the nutcase in the asylum snatches up a machine gun and starts mowing down his fellow inmates with chants, to the American troops, of "I AM ONE OF YOU! I AM SANE!" That's reform for you. If you're a conservative Republican, at least.

--classicliberal2

U.S. Supreme Court Legalizes Corruption Undreamt Of

2010-01-21T14:45:00.000-08:00

Some of the earliest commentary has centered on the overreach of the court in issuing their appalling ruling, today; the fact that the ruling went so far beyond the scope of the campaign finance reform case that was before the court, the blatant activism of it, the disregard for the consequences of it. Few, so far, seem to grasp the full implications of it. This is an historical decision. An historically bad one, belonging, at birth, in the same dustbin of history as Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Kelo v. New London, Bush v. Gore (the latter two the work of some of the clowns responsible for today's decision).

To put the matter in its proper perspective, the court has very likely just brought down the curtain on the last vestige of democracy that existed in the U.S. The right-wing majority empowered by too many years of ultra-conservative and quasi-fascist infestation of the White House has, in one fell swoop, just, in effect, removed all impediments to corporate interference in U.S. elections. Building on the dual fiction that money equals speech and that corporations are "persons" (an abomination imposed on U.S. law by a right-wing court of a previous era), the court held that these corporate "persons" can now endorse candidates. They can spend as much as they want promoting them. Restraints on their activities in the political arena imposed by campaign finance laws have been swept aside. The already corrupt system of all-but-open bribery popular efforts had attempted to reform has now been replaced by one of official, open, limitless bribery, given the false patina of free speech, and sanctioned by the highest court in the land.

And woe is us, indeed.

--classicliberal2

An Appendix For Boehlert on "Liberal Media Bias"

2009-12-27T11:52:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week, Eric Boehlert had a noteworthy piece over at Media Matters, bidding "farewell to another decade of 'liberal media bias.'" In the real world, of course, there isn't any such creature when it comes to the corporate press, and Boehlert assembles an impressive little catalog of information aimed at setting the record straight on the point. Such a catalog can never be thorough enough, though, particularly in the space of a mere column, and, given the significance of the subject, I thought I'd add to it.

Boehlert begins at the dawn of the decade:

"The orgy of resentment that erupted toward Gore during the 2000 campaign season was likely unprecedented in American politics, as media elites did very little to hide their disdain for Gore. For years, they mocked him, bad-mouthed him, and made up nasty stories about him. (Hint: Inventing the Internet.)"

Fairly strong wording, but not strong enough, in my view, not by half. Not for what was happening at the time. Boehlert uses quotes from media figures about the hatred of the press for Gore, but, back in 2000, I focused on the actual results of this hatred, and provided more than a "hint" of the stories that were, indeed, being routinely fabricated from whole cloth, then repeated ad infinitum in an all-out effort to personally destroy the Democratic candidate. Assembled a catalog of my own about the extensive--and intensive--press efforts, and I'd offer it (and a brief follow-up I assembled, as well) as an appendix to Boehlert's piece.

"And how did the same press corps spend the years between Gore and Obama?" asks Boehlert. "Lying down for Bush, of course." I wouldn't characterize what occurred as "lying down," as that implies passivity, when, in fact, the press corps was largely an active, enthusiastic advocate for Bush for nearly the entirety of his time in the White House.

Specific examples of what Boehlert calls "lying down" are, as Boehlert notes, "too many to count." I would note that the press hatred of Gore in his contest against Bush continued into the ugly post-election dispute in Florida, where the press was in-the-tank for Bush, offering daily news "reports" that were essentially thinly re-written press-releases from the Bush campaign and the RNC, with no effort to correct the ludicrously false claims and implications contained therein. The corporate press was largely responsible for Bush's "victory," in Florida and thus nationally, just as it had been largely responsible for the closeness of the election in the first place. Months later, when a press consortium completed their recount of the Florida ballots and found that Gore had, in fact, won the state by every available counting standard, the story was buried--mostly ignored, or reported under blatantly misleading headlines that falsely suggested Bush had actually won. No one noticed, in any case.

The election aftermath was, of course, nothing compared to how deeply the press embedded itself in Bush's orifices in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S.. To get some idea of how bad this became, I'd quote right-wing activist/liar/fraud/clown Brent Bozell. Bozell's Media Research Center devotes itself to bitching about alleged "liberal bias" in the corporate press, a breed of bitching in which any hint of less-than-absolute-true-believer devotion to right-wing causes is written up as a sign of hopeless media dedication to heathen liberalism. That doesn't leave Bozell and co. with much to write about, of course, so they often just have to lie, mischaracterize, and misrepresent in order to have anything to sell. They can find "liberal bias" in a facial tic. After the terror attack, Bozell defined the mission of the MRC as open propagandist for the state:

"We are training our guns on any media outlet or any reporter interfering with America's war on terrorism or trying to undermine the authority of President Bush."

With all of that as prologue, here's how Bozell characterized the performance of the press after the terror attacks:

"...in the unforgettable present, as now our own land has come under attack, as our own citizens have died needlessly in collapsing heaps of metal and cement, as the crushing reality hits that our very freedom is now imperiled, our national press corps has responded, showing that in a real crisis, they are the best of the best. I know I speak for millions when I offer a heartfelt thank you to our entire national media for their sobriety, their sincerity and their refreshing sense of national purpose. Like all our leaders, they have responded to tragedy by showing us how to display the best of ourselves when we're feeling the worst."
--MRC head Brent Bozell (9/17/01)

Over the next few weeks, Bozell would, from time to time, use his column as an opportunity to slander a few critics of the "War On Terrorism," but his position on the press remained unchanged:

"Surely, the media are doing something right when this Blame America First crowd accuses them of 'pandering to the public's appetite for revenge.' In this conflict so far, our media have not succumbed to the above-America lobby, that the high calling of journalism is all about alienated 'independence,' somehow above being a neighbor or a citizen. They have suffered with all of us, and they are welcome in our saddened homes."
--Bozell (9/21/01)

"Much has been written about the terrific job done by so many in the wake of the Sept. 11 horror. Now Hollywood is weighing in, and it's played it well so far."
--Bozell (9/26/01)

This continued for months:

"...in this struggle, the far left is all alone, thoroughly out of the mainstream of political thought. As America struggled to process the toll of death and destruction, even the media elite cast aside their usual usual wartime cynicism. In the days following Sept 11, there was no wave of obnoxious claims that this President Bush had something to prove about his manhood or his military record. There was no declaration that this was somehow a conflict masking greedy designs for oil or other resources. There were no breast-beating demands for a reporter on every secret mission. As the war began, there was very little liberal bias, and conservative critics could only respond by thanking the media for the sobriety of their coverage. This must be driving [liberal columnist] Norman Solomon nuts."
--Bozell (1/3/02)

The assessment of one of the most rabid partisans in the business, an open propagandist for the state who feigns the ability to spot "liberal bias" in a reporter's cough.

With regard to press coverage of the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, Boehlert notes:

"A survey conducted by the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which focused on the first two weeks of February 2003, found that of 393 people interviewed on-camera for network news reports about the war, just 17 percent of them expressed skepticism about the looming invasion."

Unmentioned is that FAIR followed up on that survey, beginning the day Bush launched the war, and continuing for three weeks. This one cast an even wider net--it examined the Iraq coverage of the three networks, PBS Newshour, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports, and Fox’s Special Report with Brit Hume. In this period, there were 1,617 sources appearing, but the results were even worse than before:

"Nearly two thirds of all sources, 64 percent, were pro-war, while 71 percent of U.S. guests favored the war. Anti-war voices were 10 percent of all sources, but just 6 percent of non-Iraqi sources and 3 percent of U.S. sources. Thus viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war; with U.S. guests alone, the ratio increases to 25 to 1... While the percentage of Americans opposing the war was about 10 times higher in the real world as they were on the nightly news (27 percent versus 3 percent), their proportion of the guestlist may still overstate the degree to which they were able to present their views on U.S. television. Guests with anti-war viewpoints were almost universally allowed one-sentence soundbites taken from interviews conducted on the street. Not a single show in the study conducted a sit-down interview with a person identified as being against the war."

Boehlert covers the pro-war position of the New York Times, but, remarkably, fails to mention one of the most important aspects of it; the dismal "work" of Judith Miller, who, in a series of "scoops" in the Times, acted as a stenographer for phony administration claims (often provided by phony "defectors") about Iraqi WMD programs. Though these stories wouldn't have held up under even minimal editorial scrutiny, they were approved and even placed on the front page of the Times. They became national news, picked up throughout the corporate press, and helped sell the public the administration's lies about Iraq. Miller was allowed to continue her streak for more than a year (after it became apparent there had been no Iraqi WMDs for years, she pimped the completely baseless "theory" that they'd existed, but had been moved to Syria before the invasion).

This wasn't the Times' only service to Bush. When, in 2005, it reported that Bush had been running a completely illegal surveillance operation, this uncharacteristic effort at legitimate reportage led right-wing critics to call for the prosecution of those at the Times. Unfortunately, just when it looked as if the Times had done something right, it emerged that the paper had actually uncovered the story during the 2004 presidential campaign, and had sat on it for a year instead of reporting it, thus helping ensure Bush re-election.

The best one can say is that it eventually did get reported. In a period of years when virtually nothing coming out of the administration bore any resemblance to the truth, it was difficult to find stories critical of Bush anywhere. Boehlert mentions the complete failure to report on the Downing Street memo, and while that is certainly one of the most egregious examples of the utterly broken nature of the corporate press, it's only one of enough examples to fill an encyclopedia. For 8 years, Bush was allowed to sit in governance over "the land of the free" and establish the framework for a monstrous dictatorship while the press cheered him on and left the public, which it's supposed to inform, almost entirely unaware of what was really happening. It's still mostly unaware, and that--the measurable results--is really the final nail in the coffin of right-wing nonsense about "liberal media bias."

Dawn of the Pre-Fab Pols?

2009-11-10T12:35:00.000-08:00

"I think this is a referendum on a lot of what's been going on in the country, which is moving radically to the left."
--Sean Hannity (2 Nov., 2009)

"This is where conservative Americans are drawing the line. New York-23. This is where we are fighting, this is where we will take a stand against both the liberal wing of the Republican Party and Obama and the Democrat [sic] party."
--Rush Limbaugh (3 Nov., 2009)

The battle over New York's 23rd congressional district easily made for the top sideshow of this off-off-year election season. It's a very strong Republican district, but it's a moderate Republican one, and when DeDe Scozzafava, a moderate Republican, was chosen as the party candidate, the ideological jihadists that have come to dominate the American right drew their long knives and went for the kill. The teabaggers, Fox news, and right-wing talk radio moved in. Scozzafava was angrily denounced as a RINO (Republican In Name Only), a "liberal," a "Democrat-lite" candidate--not conservative enough, and completely unacceptable because of it. The righties chose, as their alternative champion, Doug Hoffman, a bookish, clueless, and extremely conservative candidate of the state's Conservative party, and threw their full and considerable weight behind making him the next congressman from NY23. As Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, and other establishment elements of the Republican party saw the disaster that was in the making and moved in to advise against it, the Hoffman-ites elevated the importance of the contest to a referendum on the future and the very soul of the conservative movement. Scozzafava, demonized and low on funds, withdrew from the race, and endorsed the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens. Last week, on election day, Owens destroyed Hoffman, becoming the first Democrat to represent the region in congress since 1857.

No, 1857 is not a misprint. And the district has been in Republican hands since 1871.

The conservatives pimping Hoffman were right about his candidacy being significant, perhaps even of major significance; they just completely missed the mark on why. Hoffman didn't even live in the district he sought to represent--he hadn't lived there in nearly a decade. While refusing to speak in anything more than vague generalities about national issues, he demonstrated a complete lack of knowledge of the issues of local concern he would have to address as a member of congress if elected.[1] He ducked the candidates' debate, and mostly stuck to "campaigning" via appearances in national right-wing media outlets. Unable to raise money in "his" district, he had to depend, for funding, on his own personal wealth, and on massive donations from the conservative forces backing his candidacy, all of them outside both his district and the state. And they spent a bloody fortune (final figures won't be available until the next filing, but just one of Hoffman's benefactors--the Club For Growth--ponied up in excess of $1 million).

All of this points to Hoffman's real significance: he was, like the teabagger "movement," a fiction. A fabrication. A made-up candidate, built from huge injections of right-wing money, free access to a massive propaganda outlet in the form of the right-wing press, and endorsements by such figures as teabagger darling Sarah Palin and teabagger inventor Dick Armey (who took his FreedomWorks astroturf outfit to the district to stump for Hoffman). He was put together like a dummy corporation in the Bahamas and wheeled out to read his lines. He was astroturf.

Eric Boehlert has a column, over at Media Matters today, that posits the notion of Hoffman as a "media candidate," a creation of right-wing media. The contribution of the right-wing media to creating Hoffman is indisputable, but I think Boehlert focuses too narrowly on it to the exclusion of everything else I've just been outlining.

The teabagger "movement" has been waging ideological jihad against Republicans, and that's what Hoffman was created to do, so much so that the conservative elements who backed him declared his loss a moral "victory." The reason the party backed a moderate Republican in NY23, of course, is because NY23 is a moderate Republican district, and the party establishment didn't think a hardcore conservative could win it (a notion that now has the election results to support it). It's certainly not representative of the Republicans' standard operating procedure, particularly in recent years. Reading through the fever swamp that is the right-wing blogosphere, though, the portrait of the Republican party offered by the purists is one of an entrenched, overly moderate, even "liberal" party establishment that throws its support behind like-minded candidates, rather than conservatives. The purists are furious over this. They want the party to move radically to the right, and adopt an unwavering purist line, unattenuated by pragmatic considerations.

The narrative they offer, of course, bears no resemblance to reality. Where, after all, is this wave of "moderates" and "liberals" in the Republican party? You certainly don't find them in congress. The Obama's stupid "stimulus" plan got the votes of a grand total of 2 Senate Republicans. One (Arlen Specter), was then driven out of the party by the purists. The other (Olympia Snowe) became the sole Republican in congress, to date, to sign on to any iteration of health-care reform at any stage of the process (and even then, she said she was only doing it to keep her hands in the process).

So where are they? I read and sometimes participate in a conservative site called "The Next Right." A few days ago, I asked that question of the many teabagger jihadists there. None of them had good answers. Some threw out names like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, even George W. Bush!

Yes, George W. Bush, who enjoyed the fanatical devotion of the American right throughout his term--probably the most popular president among conservatives in the history of polling. The ABC/Washington Post poll asked respondents in January, as Bush was leaving office, to offer an overall rating of his administration: A whopping 82% of conservative Republicans rated him a success; 53% "strongly." If Bush was anything other than a devout conservative, it would come as a complete shock to the American right.

John McCain was, of course, crushed in last year's presidential election in large part because he was a Bush clone. He had a lifetime rating of 82.3% from the ACU (American Conservative Union),[2] and, as Congressional Quarterly pointed out, McCain voted for Bush's position 90% of the time during Bush's first 7 1/2 years in office. In the year leading into the election, he was with Bush 95% of the time, making him Bush's top ally in the congress--in the first half of 2008, he had voted with Bush 100% of the time.

It wasn't a surprise to me that Lindsey Graham's name was thrown out. He became a target of the purists earlier this year, as teabaggers appeared at his "townhall meeting" to heckle him, denigrate his conservatism, ask him when he planned to switch parties. In the real world, of course, Graham is even more conservative than McCain. The reactionary Family Research Council granted him their "True Blue Award," Americans for Tax Reform has named him "Hero of the Taxpayer," Graham has an 89.79% rating by the American Conservative Union, and is persistently ranked among their "Senate Standouts" (made up of the 20 most conservative Senators). He has more "honors" from similar right-wing orgs than can be easily counted. The notion that Lindsey Graham is some sort of RINO or moderate or "liberal" or anything other than a very rock-solidly conservative Republican says nothing about Graham and everything about the reactionary idiots who make such claims.

And these were the examples I was given. Even if we ignored reality and pretended as if every one of them was legitimate, does such a small number really justify the ludicrous narrative we've been given by the purists? Is it worth the amount of rage we've seen, or the remarkable degree of it, or the extraordinary expenditure in time, effort, and money advanced to combat it? I can see no case for it, even if we ignored the fact that these are all extremely conservative politicians, and if we aren't willing to ignore that--as there's absolutely no reason to do so--there's certainly no case for it.

What really places the teabagger narrative in a realm of fantasy that, in any other context, would earn its purveyors a slot in a mental health facility, is the fact that, in the real world, the Republican party, which has been driving out its moderates for years, now, is, today, as far to the right as it has been in the lifetime of anyone reading these words. One of the simple souls who threw out McCain as an example of a mushy moderate Republican inadvertently demonstrated this when he pointed out that John McCain's 82.3% conservative rating from the ACU only made him the 39th most conservative Senator by the ACU's estimation. McCain only disagreed with the ACU--hardcore conservatives--17.7% of the time, and even that only puts him as high as #39.

The purists present themselves as great knights on white horses waging the Good Fight against an implacable Dragon, that being Republican heresy. The astroturfers behind the teabagger contingent know better, but seem to have concluded that whatever can drag the Republicans even further to the right will serve their ends. They've had great success, this year, in manufacturing a "movement." Doug Hoffman was an experiment, an attempt to do the same thing with a candidate. He failed, but I doubt he's going to be the last. The astroturfers have already told their minions his loss was a "moral victory." As one who doesn't want the right to rule, I can only hope they continue with such "victories," but as one who sees the need for an effective, credible opposition, I must concede this has been an unfortunate turn of events.

--classicliberal2

---

[1]Asked questions about these subjects by the editorial board of the local Waterton Daily Times, Hoffman, lost at sea, became quite frustrated--"flustered and ill-at-ease"--and angrily complained that he should have been given such questions beforehand.

[2] The ACU ratings aren't comprehensive--like most orgs that offer such ratings, it cherry-picks issues in order to put its favored politicians on top. Still, their lifetime ratings do represent a far broader cross-section of a politicians' career than the ravings of the clown who wanted to make a fight of this--like any purist, he picked out three or four examples of non-conservative "heresies"--several of which weren't non-conservative heresies--and rested his entire case for the apostasy of pols like McCain on them.

Astroturfed Sound & Fury on the Capitol Steps

2009-11-07T12:37:00.000-08:00

A little over a week ago, the psychotic Rep. Michelle Bachmann (Clown-MN) teamed with the astroturfers behind the teabagger "movement" (she's one of their darlings) to call for a big rally against offering affordable health care to the public. It all came together Thursday in a comedy of errors on the steps of the Capitol.

The teabaggers displayed their usual charm, waving signs promoting "birther"-ism, comparing health care reform to Dachau, and denouncing the Obama as a rank socialist. The latter sentiment was offered by most of the large number of speakers who took a turn at the mic. Mark Levin, brainless reactionary talk-show host, even said the Obama was looking to overturn the American Revolution.

House Republican leader John Boehner makes a poor imitation of a fiery orator--he has one of the most monotonous monotones in D.C., and perpetually bears the stiff, uncomfortable expression of a man trapped on a long elevator ride with someone suffering extreme outbursts of flatulence--but, for this occasion, he gave it has best shot, and with some amusing results. Ever suspect Boehner wouldn't know the Constitution if he was looking right at it? If so, then Thursday's little event was tailor made for you. In the middle of his remarks, he whipped out what he said was his personal copy of the U.S. Constitution, and, sternly waving it as a voodoo fetish against the evils of health care reform, proceeded to recite what he called its "preamble." What he actually recited was the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

Somehow, "doh!" just doesn't sufficiently cover that one.

Perhaps even more amusing is the fact that, if any of the assembled teabaggers recognized the gaffe, they didn't bother to react to it.

Boehner was only one of perhaps two-dozen Republican members of congress who decided it was more important to make asses of themselves before a bank of cameras and a crowd of like-minded idiots than to actually do the job they were elected to do. One of the most amusing footnotes to this whole affair, in fact, was how a large number of Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee blew off a hearing on the reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act to attend, and, as a consequence, several Republican-sponsored measures strengthening that act were narrowly defeated.

So at least something good came out of all of this.

In the afterglow of the event, Bachmann appeared on Sean Hannity's Fox News show to offer the astroturf version of the final analysis of the day's events. Today's rally, she delightedly exclaimed, "was totally word of mouth. This was nothing that we organized, nothing that we planned. We didn't order one bus, one carload. Nothing. Complete word of mouth." This is an important point, when it comes to astroturf--it needs to be made to look real, instead of like astroturf. But, of course, it was astroturf; for a week before the "spontaneous" rally, the event was heavily promoted on Fox News and by the two main teabagger astroturf orgs, FreedomWorks (whose president even spoke at the rally) and Americans For Prosperity. The latter even provided a lot of the crowd, offering an unknown number of free bus rides for "spontaneous" demonstrators from all over the country (an AFP coordinator was caught on camera saying they had at least 40 buses bringing in people). Fortunately for the astroturfers, much of the press followed its usual pattern of "reporting" on the event without going into what was behind it, so the astroturfers mostly succeeded again. The only possible positive spin on the horrific, kill-crazy rampage that happened in Texas that same day is that at least it kicked this sorry sound-and-fury out of the top news-story slot that day.

--classicliberal2

A Conservative America?

2009-11-01T11:21:00.000-08:00

An August Gallup poll yielded up an intriguing result: nationally, self-identified conservatives outnumbered self-identified liberals by a margin of 2-to-1, and outnumbered them in all 50 states, as well, usually by large margins. This led to much back-slapping in conservative circles in the days and weeks after the poll's release. Right-wing talk radio offered "told you so"s. The conservative blogosphere rubbed its belly with a contented sigh. The Media Research Center whined about the lack of press coverage given the finding. The results played into a well-worn conservative narrative spun over the decades about the U.S. being, at heart, a conservative nation, and hyping the results was, it seems, a handy way to bolster morale at a time when conservatives seem to be on the ropes. Unsurprisingly, there wasn't a great deal of attention given to what the poll really meant.

The hard, cold political reality facing the right today--the one that's still there after the poll results, and after all that back-slapping--is that the U.S. isn't a conservative nation. What's more, that conclusion isn't even particularly controversial for anyone who has examined the matter in any detail; for the most part, it isn't even close. Public opinion is more heavily polled in the U.S. than in any other country on earth. On issue after issue, Americans are not only with the liberals, but with them overwhelmingly.

A few Google searches offer a glimpse of the polling this year:

--An AP/Roper poll from October showed that 64% of Americans oppose the war in Iraq. 67% told the CBS/New York Times poll in September that the war wasn't even worth fighting. Though conservatives have been utterly opposed to setting a timetable for withdrawal, the public has supported doing so for quite some time. A Newsweek/Princeton poll from April asked about Obama's then-proposed timetable for withdrawal by 2010 and found that 74% said that was either "about right" or wanted to withdraw even sooner.

--On the matter of health care, Americans have favored a single-payer plan, wherein the government provides health insurance for all, by about 60%, a number which has been stable for years. This is well to the left of any of the health care "reform" measures presently being debated in congress.

--66% told the CBS/New York Times poll in June they favored either gay marriage or gay civil unions. More importantly, opposition to such arrangements are centered in older adults (those over 40) and heavily concentrated in the elderly (those over 65)--the younger generations to whom the future belongs have adopted the more liberal views.

--The polling on global warming has shown huge majorities (over 60%) concerned about the problem for the last 11 years (and probably further back--that's the info I was able to track down with a Google search). The number, as measured by Gallup in May, had dropped from the year before (down to 57%), but it has briefly gone down before, and the long-term polling is very clear on the point. The boilerplate conservative position, on the other hand, is, of course, that global warming is either "exaggerated" or an outright hoax (the same Gallup poll showed that 66% of Republicans held to that view).

--A solid majority of Americans favor abortion rights, and have for decades. The Republican party platform position--a blanket ban on abortions without exception--polls at 6%-11%. A CBS/New York Times poll in June asked "in general, do you think the Court's decision [in Roe v. Wade] was a good thing or a bad thing?" 62% said it was a good thing vs. 32% bad. An interesting finding from that same poll is that, while (unsurprisingly) 74% of Democrats said it was a good thing, 40% of Republicans also said it was a good thing vs. 51% bad.

--In January, the ABC/Washington Post poll found that, while 55% of Republicans opposed loosening Bush-era restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, 59% of Americans favored doing so. Support has generally hovered around that level for a few years, now, and a more recent Pew Research Center poll in July found no change--support still at 58%.

And so on. One is hard pressed to find a single major public policy issue on which the liberals don't hold an overwhelming advantage in public sentiment.

Conservatives hold a different kind of advantage, though, that of money. Lots and lots of money, which is made available to them because they're the natural allies of the Establishment.

Any liberal movement has to start from nothing, or virtually nothing, and build itself the hard way, from the ground up. They are grassroots efforts that have virtually nothing in the way of resources, are generally marginalized, often feared and despised, even criminalized, and have to fight like hell, often for decades, to get anything at all. Look at the movement for extending marriage benefits to homosexuals. Twenty-five years ago, it was the pipe-dream of a hated micro-minority, and probably wouldn't have polled out of single digits. Today, it's not only a majority position; it's an overwhelmingly majority one.

Conservatives, on the other hand, rarely have to build anything. They find millions of dollars available to them on the first day they launch a "movement." Money from powerful interests looking to maintain their prerogatives, or looking to keep the general public fighting amongst itself over hot-button wedge issues in order to keep it from challenging those prerogatives. If one is a conservative, that must feel great, but that money is as dirty as an old carburetor, and conscientious conservatives--if the breed isn't entirely extinct by now--haven't really come to terms with that. Their vastly superior monetary resources have meant conservatives are grossly overrepresented in just about every major institution. It also seems to generate a significant disconnect between the conservatives and the general public. Because they can call upon such vast resources at the drop of a hat, the conservatives are insulated from the concerns of the very real people they claim to represent, rather than being born of those concerns. Because they can so easily appear to have a significant advantage by virtue of their greater visibility, they believe they do have that significant an advantage. This gives them a warm security blanket beneath which they can proclaim America The Conservative.

It just isn't there in the public opinion data, though. Not even close. Self-identification as "conservative" outscores self-identification as "liberal" only because the omnipresent American conservative machine has spent decades of time and a kingdom's fortune demonizing the word "liberal." Most people aren't ideologues or policy-wonks, and don't give a great deal of thought to what catch-all word may most precisely describe their politics. "Liberal" is, for them, only a word they perceive as having acquired some sort of negative taint in political discourse. They shy away from applying it to themselves. But for all that conservative money and noise and all the advantages it appears to give the right, the people are still with the liberals--and with them overwhelmingly--on the issues.

Just ask them.

--classicliberal2

MONEY!!!

2009-10-13T17:32:00.000-07:00

Money isn’t "an issue" in U.S. politics. It’s virtually the only issue. If given even half the weight it merited, it would lead the news almost every night. Instead, it's something on which the press simply doesn't report at all. Stray stories, here and there. It's sometimes scandalized, but the very little reporting that does appear occurs in a vacuum. No consistent narrative. No follow-up. Certainly never anything remotely approximating the sort of feeding frenzy that regularly accompanies stories about sex, crime, or, more recently, dead pop stars.[1]

Without the money angle, most political stories become inexplicable. The “mainstream” corporate press largely portrayed the teabagger phenomenon, to name one of the prominent recent examples, as a genuine “movement,” instead of what it actually is, a 100% corporate-invented astroturf campaign fueled by nonsense spread by right-wing media outlets (themselves huge corporate interests). The facts about the actual forces behind the "movement" are readily available. On the internet, they're literally only a quick Google search away. But someone who stuck to most “mainstream” corporate press outlets would know virtually nothing about it, except that there was this sudden, loud uprising of angry, anti-Obama mobs. The goal of astroturf is to give the impression of a genuine grassroots campaign--when, as has happened here, the press treats it as one, the campaign has succeeded.

The Center for Responsive Politics calls their website opensecrets.org. The information they collect isn't really "secret." It's all publicly available. It's "secret" because, among other things, the press, which is supposed to be a watchdog about such things, won’t, as a rule, touch such information with a 10-foot pole. Common Cause issued one of their "Legislating While Under the Influence" reports on health care industry contributions to congress, and you’ll learn more about health care reform by reading its relatively few pages than you’d learn from the combination of every report of every network newscast on the subject.

One "secret" kept by the press is that Sen. Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is the top recipient of health-care industry donations in the congress.

An even better-kept secret is that Baucus allowed the former Vice President of Wellpoint to write "his" bill. Everywhere in the press, it's just "the Baucus bill." And, since it's the most conservative health care bill in congress (and the one that offers no real reform), it's more often than not being treated, by the press, as the only one. There are actually four others that long ago passed out of the relevant committees of both houses--the ones dealing with health care--whereas the Wellpoint bill is being hashed out in the Finance Committee.

The health care industry spent a fortune getting politicians (including the Obama) to support provisions mandating that everyone carry health insurance. Wellpoi… er… Baucus included a provision making health coverage mandatory, and imposing a tax penalty on anyone who fails to comply.[2] This sets up a dynamic one would think our watchdog press would find interesting: The Wellpoint plan publicly subsidizes Americans' purchase of health care. It also creates, at the point of a gun, millions of mandatory new clients for the current nightmare of a health insurance industry. The government subsidies to those new clients go, of course, to those insurance companies, who, in turn, spend millions of dollars purchasing politicians like Max Baucus.

What a deal!

If the press would report ANY of this, the “Baucus” bill would have been dead before it ever began, but that would require abandoning the fairy-tale narrative of American politics as a battle of competing ideologies and dealing with what actually makes the trains run on time.

--classicliberal2

---

[1] The reasons for this are many and varied. Among a great many other things, the media orgs are, themselves, huge corporate interests with their own chunk invested in the process Their even-bigger-money ownership has even more money in it.

[2] That wasn't strong enough for the industry, which wanted criminal penalties--jail time--for those who failed to carry health insurance. The failure of the bill to include this is largely responsible for the last-minute industry push against reform which has so befuddled the corporate press this week--again, if you don't follow the money, the story is inexplicable.

Revisiting RUSH LIMBAUGH: AN ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION

2009-09-19T16:43:00.000-07:00

Back in the 1990s, I wrote a book about Rush Limbaugh. It was never entirely finished, and, of course, never published. In later years, a lot of it was lost via a computer horror story too ridiculous to describe with a straight face. I still have large portions of it, though, mostly just rough drafts of some chapters or portions of chapters, sometimes just the notes for them. A great deal of research went into it, which was, of course, wasted when I lost the book. Maybe it was wasted even before that--wasted on an unworthy subject.

But maybe, it isn't entirely wasted after all.

Yesterday, I wrote about how the right uses wedge issues to keep the public fighting among itself as a means of precluding its combining into a force that could threaten the prerogatives of the U.S. money elite that dominates and controls government in the U.S. at the expense of that public. It's a brand of class warfare, and a large portion of American conservatism goes along with it.

As it so happens, one surviving section of the Limbaugh book was a sort of economic interpretation of Limbaugh's commentary that dovetails rather nicely with what I wrote yesterday. Limbaugh poses as a sort of "populist"--offering the kind of pseudo-populism relied upon by conservatives to rally the public to their cause--but beneath that noise, the only consistent feature of his commentary is hardcore class warfare waged on behalf of the wealthy and powerful, often taken to such an extreme that he could pass as a Marxist's caricature of a "Capitalist."

Here's the excerpt from the book. Any comments are, as always, welcome.

ACORN, American Politics, & the Conservatives Who Make 'Em That Way

2009-09-18T09:13:00.000-07:00

One of American conservatism's favorite targets, in recent years, has been the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. ACORN is, as it describes itself, "the nation’s largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people." They help poor people. They've been doing it for nearly 40 years, now. Some of their work has received federal funding. One aspect of their activities--their voter registration efforts--has become a flashpoint for right-wing ire in more recent years, particularly in the last two, as those efforts are, like everything else ACORN does, aimed at those of moderate income, who, of course, tend to vote Democratic.

The conservative critics have drawn from their usual playbook in smearing the organization, layering lies upon lies in the hope that they can bury ACORN before any glimmer of the truth is able to penetrate. Alleged involvement of a dozen ACORN volunteers in voter registration fraud--fraud committed against ACORN--is used as "evidence" of the corruption of the entire enterprise. ACORN's forwarding of phony registrations to state governments is used in the same way. Omitted from the conservative accounts: the fact that those states legally require ACORN to do this, and the fact that ACORN does make efforts to flag, for those states, registrations they believe phony. "ACORN" has been adopted by internet conservatives as shorthand for "voter fraud,"intentionally conflating registration fraud (the actual charge falsely imputed to ACORN) with vote fraud.

Right-wing activists recently set up a "sting" against ACORN. One posed as a pimp, another as a hooker, and they entered various ACORN offices seeking tax advice on how to set up a brothel staffed by underage girls, advice they actually received. They carried hidden cameras, recorded the whole thing, and, a week ago, released edited versions of their work to various right-wing outlets. This has caused a sustained furor on the right, with the standard ever-escalating rhetoric. This "proves" the irredeemable corruption of everything ACORN touches, proves that everything its right-wing critics have said about it is true, etc.

A lot of the story has fallen apart in the last few days, in spite of worming its way into the mainstream press. The activists involved, who have appeared regularly in conservative press outlets, have studiously avoided any appearances in non-conservative forums. They've failed to release complete videos. They've claimed the four ACORN offices at which they actually succeeded were the first ones they visited, and that they'd never been turned away by any office. When an ACORN official disputed that, saying they'd approached her in Philadelphia and she'd sent them packing, they went on Fox News to call this a lie, and to demand ACORN apologize. As it turns out, the official in question had actually called the police after her encounter with them; she's now released the police report on the incident for all to see.[1]

That's funny.

What isn't funny is that the Senate, a few days ago, reacted to the story of the "sting" by voting to cut off federal funding of ACORN.

Now, ACORN, in spite of some insane conservative claims to the contrary[2], never got much from the feds, and a loss of those funds probably won't make that big a difference to the organization, but the whole affair is illustrative of the Alice-in-Wonderland nature of contemporary American conservatism, and points to some larger fundamental problems with American politics.

Rock-solid Glenn Greenwald wrote about this yesterday:

ACORN has received a grand total of $53 million in federal funds over the last 15 years--an average of $3.1 million per year. Meanwhile, not millions, not billions, but trillions of dollars of public funds have been, in the last year alone, transferred to or otherwise used for the benefit of Wall Street. Billions of dollars in American taxpayer money vanished into thin air, eaten by private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, led by Halliburton subsidiary KBR. All of those corporate interests employ armies of lobbyists and bottomless donor activities that ensure they dominate our legislative and regulatory processes, and to be extra certain, the revolving door between industry and government is more prolific than ever, with key corporate officials constantly ending up occupying the government positions with the most influence over those industries.
...

So with this massive pillaging of America's economic security and its control of American government by its richest and most powerful factions growing by the day, to whom is America's intense economic anxiety being directed? To a non-profit group that devotes itself to providing minute benefits to people who live under America's poverty line, and which is so powerless in Washington that virtually the entire U.S. Senate just voted to cut off its funding at the first sign of real controversy--could anyone imagine that happening to a key player in the banking or defense industry?

Stirring up anger against some powerless, relatively insignificant entity like ACORN is a standard practice of the American conservative elite It's a tactic, the goal of which is to keep the general public battling amongst itself in order to prevent it from combining and presenting a potential threat the the prerogatives of the wealthy, the powerful, the corporate interests who actually control the U.S.

Nearly every "issue" that has made conservatism a mass movement in the U.S. is of this nature. Some enemy is identified, usually something or someone of no real consequence, and the full venom of the right is unleashed against it. We're told the real problem with America is illegal immigrants with brown skin and a different language, baby-killing abortionists, pointy-headed intellectuals at colleges, hedonistic homosexuals, welfare recipients, godless heathens who remove prayer from schools, socialist would-be dictators, liberals, and the Hollywood "elite." At this rhetoric's most extreme, we're told there is, being waged against the U.S., a "culture war," a phrase and concept lifted directly from the Third Reich.

The effectiveness of those who respond to this sort of rhetoric is usually minimal, insofar as the phony "issues" they've adopted are concerned. Abortion remains legal, government continues to stay out of the business of endorsing religion, homosexuals are not officially condemned by the State, etc.

Organization around these issues is, however, remarkably effective at implementing policies that are to the benefit of the, broadly speaking, money elite in the U.S.. Which is, of course, the point of the exercise. Vote for a candidate who promises to ban abortion, all you get is an elected official who votes for trade policies that deindustrialize the country to the benefit of that elite. Vote for someone who promises to keep the homos in line, all you get is an elected official who votes for tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. Vote for the candidate who promises to ban flag burning, all you get is an elected official who votes to take away your right to sue your doctor when he goes into surgery drunk and leaves you a quadriplegic. And so on. Often the populations affected the worst by these policies are the very ones that react most strongly to the wedge issues, and empower these policies' implementation.

The conservatives go after ACORN because ACORN's voter registration efforts are aimed at demographic groups who tend to vote Democratic, but liberals and the left in general are challenged by them much more broadly--to the point that words like "liberal" and "socialist" have become curses--because the left is seen as a potential challenge to the prerogatives of the money elite. The economy is said to function like a force of nature. Deindustrialization is, in this view, like a flood or a hurricane or an earthquake, rather than a predictable consequence of entirely intentional right-wing policy. Worse, any sort of progressive policy proposals are presented as "socialist" intrusions, the actions of a Bolshevist state. When the U.S. government began its run of massive bailouts of failed businesses last year, there was public anger. When it turned out the executives at AIG were getting huge bonuses, even while being bailed out, there was even more anger. The conservatives have worked tirelessly to harness this anger and redirect it away from businesses and toward the government, constructing a scenario wherein the bailouts aren't a consequence of the total domination of Washington by business interests, but are, instead, a socialistic power-grab by the would-be Bolshevist in the White House (and that all of these bailouts were actually undertaken by Obama's conservative Republican predecessor is quietly buried).

These aren't insignificant matters. The intensity of the conservatives' focus on ACORN in recent days and the remarkable degree of hatred and bile poured upon what is, in the end, a small, relatively insignificant entity is inexplicable without an understanding of them. American conservatism itself is inexplicable without that understanding.

--classicliberal2

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[1] The ACORN employee they caught on camera at one of their "successes" said she saw through their ruse immediately, didn't take anything they said seriously, and plied them with ridiculous comments. She told them she'd murdered her husband, and this was picked up by those pimping the story as a shocking revelation, and actually spurred an investigation by law enforcement. As it turns out, her ex-husbands are all alive and well.

[2] Sean Hannity put the amount in the "trillions." The actual amount is a little over $3 million/year for the last 15 years.

"Grassroots" Astroturf

2009-09-17T11:16:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, a gaggle of demonstrators descended on the nation's capitol to protest... something. They'd been organized by the same well-financed astroturf orgs that have been behind pretty much all of the major anti-Obama demonstrations to date, and, during the proceedings, Matt Kibbe, the president of Freedom Works (the major astroturfer involved), took to the stage to proclaim that, according to ABC News, the rally had drawn 1.5 million people. Within a short period, right-wing Twits and creatures like Michelle Malkin had escalated that figure to 2 million, and it had circulated around the world. As it turned out, of course, Kibbe had lied. There was no such ABC News report. There was no such estimate. Malkin, the Twits, and the rest had taken Kibbe's lie--an astroturf lie--and inflated it by another half a million. The actual turnout for the event was a modest 60,000-70,000. Amusingly enough, the buzz, throughout this week, has been a sustained whine from the right about how the corporate press didn't take this event seriously enough.[*]

These astroturf "protests" are culturally significant, just not in the way the complainers would have you believe. They're noteworthy because they point to the social cancer that is the Bubble People phenomenon on the right. They also point to the fact that this--a very large segment of the population--can be organized relatively easily by well-financed astroturf groups and made to look, on the surface, a lot like a real grassroots mass movement. That's what astroturf movements exist to do. This has been perhaps the biggest success story of their history.

Those on the right, even some otherwise thoughtful voices, have tended to defend the protests as legitimate expressions of grassroots unrest, either setting aside their artificial origins or arguing those origins are irrelevant. Such arguments aren't even close to sustainable, though. This illusion of a movement lacks anything that would remotely resemble a program, above and beyond "WE HATE BARACK OBAMA!", screamed to the heavens with equal measures of vigor and froth. The tea-baggers, the townhall disrupters, the capitol marchers--what exactly is their program? That they're furious about "death panels" and illegal alien coverage in the health care bill? That they're furious a man who isn't a U.S. citizen, and probably even a Muslim, is being allowed to be President? That the administration is trying to implement socialism or fascism or some other black -ism? It's all just nonsense, a tapestry of falsehood spun for the purposes of organizing those who have been conditioned in such a way as to remove their capacity for critical thought, when it comes to the voices inside their closed bubble. This illusion of a movement has no goals, it has no program, it doesn't even have a central organizing principle other than irrational Obama hatred. And, of course, the further implication of this is that, as a "grassroots" movement, it can't really lead to anything, either, except maybe getting Barack Obama shot by some unhinged right-wing nutcase "patriot" who thinks he's saving us all from the next Hitler.

That isn't to say the astroturfers behind all of this don't have very definite goals. As they've stated, their big one, at present, is to defeat any health care reform. Create the illusion of a mass movement to scare those in congress and get lots of press doing it, which provides an ever-expanding platform for spreading further misinformation that turns public sentiment. This is what they're paid to do. This is what they've proven remarkably effective at doing this year.

This is what the "protests" are, what's behind them, why they're significant. This is not, however, how they're covered by the corporate press. If anyone has cause to complain about that coverage, it isn't those who have been doing the complaining this week.

--classicliberal2

---

[*] In a related story, the Wall Street Journal reported that Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) has just "released a letter he sent to Washington’s Metro system complaining that the taxpayer-funded subway system was unable to properly transport protesters to the rally to protest government spending and expansion." As it that wasn't enough, Brady, himself, voted against funding for the Metro system earlier this year.

Sept. 11th & Its Discontents

2009-09-11T18:25:00.000-07:00

Eight years ago today, terrorists hijacked a series of aircraft and flew them into New York's World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Yes, this is That Day, and elements of our mass media never fail to make it a point to wallow in the event. "Our top story tonight: The people killed by terrorists 8 years ago are still dead." The History Channel, particularly egregious, has offered a veritable misery-fest dedicated to reliving the event, second by second, over and over again, all day long.

I'm rather tired of this sort of thing. Truth be told, I've been rather tired of it since not long after the actual event occurred. At some point, one simply wants to say "get over it, people." That's not logical, though; it's an emotional response, something 9/11 is very good at eliciting. Wearying under the lash of 9/11 fatigue in the years immediately following the attacks, I wrote a short piece putting the event in context, comparing the number of deaths to any number of things that kill us in far greater numbers and that are much bigger problems, but that we don't choose to dwell upon, either with fanfare or with anything else, much less direct the insane amount of resources to combating. I've written a few versions of it over the years--I drag it out every so often, rework it, and repost it in various places. In the early years after the event, it probably drew more negative responses than anything I've ever written. In more recent years, though, it has seemed to get a more balanced response. People have come to see the logic of it. The logic hasn't changed, mind you--it's as unassailable now as when I originally wrote it. It's just that distance seems to be allowing people to come to their senses about it, to face that logic and not react so emotionally.

...which was sort of the point of the piece in the first place.

I don't want to seem unkind or uncaring. 9/11 was a terrible moment. There's still unfinished business related to it, as well. Thanks to George Bush's incompetence, his decision to divert our available resources to a dead end in Iraq, and his eventually falling into what looked like a mutually beneficial love affair with al Qaida, we still don't have the head of the bastard bin Laden, who masterminded the attack. We aren't going to get it by reliving the attack itself, either. I just don't see any point in continually reliving it, and that's all the many "remembrances" of it that have come to us through our media do. They have no higher aim. They accomplish nothing more. We need to move beyond that.

The difficulty in moving beyond it begins with the existence of so much footage of it. Giving television people good footage is like giving them the opportunity to say "penis" on the air--they're all over it. It's also something that can be milked as a simple, emotional "human interest" story, which the corporate press always prefers to serious news of any complexity. It's also a fact that those in the Bush administration worked tirelessly to keep the event as close to an open wound, in the public consciousness, as possible, so they could hitch their political fortunes to it and milk it for every vote it was worth.

These--the things that have kept it alive--are also some of the best reasons this constant "wallow in 9/11" mill needs to stop. Don't forget what's happened, but stop dwelling upon it. Let the dead rest.

--classicliberal2

The Ongoing Tragedy of the Obama (Health Care Chapter) (Updated below)

2009-09-09T20:30:00.000-07:00

Tonight, the Obama went before a joint session of congress to try to sell his version of health care reform. His speech had some good moments, as speeches go, and if being President of the United States required little more than giving speeches, I have no doubt the Obama would be remembered as one of the greats.

Unfortunately for the Obama, the job requires something a great deal more than words, and tonight's speech is primarily of interest as a monument to how very little the Obama seems to have learned in his time in office.

The thrust of the Obama's speech is, as usual, the same Rodney King-ism ye humble editor spends so much time excoriating on this blog. Instead of solidly embracing a liberal policy and fighting for it, the Obama is once again stuck on "Can't we all just get along?" He's still trying to find compromise with those who don't want any reform, cooperation with those who have spent weeks accusing him of wanting to allow federal bureaucrats to kill the elderly, the infirm, the "unproductive," still looking for some mythical common ground, the warm-and-fuzzy concept so beloved of the pundit class, "bipartisanship."[1]

The Obama was elected in a landslide that also brought a large majority for his party in the House of Representatives and a fillibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate. What part of that suggests to him a public mandate for "bipartisanship" I can't even imagine. Time and time again, though, that's where he goes, and it's where he went tonight, throwing in a heaping helping of the vile triangulation of Bill Clinton, a tactic which draws a false equivalence between the liberals and the conservatives and rhetorically marginalizes both.

Given this, a few moments stood out. It was actually refreshing to see the Obama finally take on the "death panels" charge that has been leveled at health care reform for weeks. With a candor almost entirely absent from politicians at such events, he skipped any euphemism and called it exactly what it is: a lie. The Democratic members in the chamber erupted into applause at that moment. The Republicans, who have always known the charge was a lie, sat on their hands and looked as disgusted as if they'd just been served a shit sandwich. Immediately after that, when the Obama correctly pointed out that the health care bill didn't, as so many of its opponents had alleged, cover illegal aliens, Republicans, who knew what the Obama said was the truth, began to bark objections, and Rep. Joe Wilson, Republican and first-rate scumbag from South Carolina, loudly shouted "You lie!"

These moments made for quite a contrast. The Obama calls, at great length, for cooperation and bipartisanship; those in the other party sit on their hands looking disgusted when he calls a vicious lie what it is, then call him a liar for telling what every one of them knew to be the truth. It makes Republicans look bad. It makes the Obama look even worse.

To handle the Republican response, the Republicans chose Rep. Charles Boustany of Louisiana. Boustany was appropriate for a number of reasons. First, he is, like most Republicans now, a crackpot who dabbles in "birther" conspiracy theories about the Obama not even being a U.S. citizen. Next, he's an exceedingly stupid man, who had apparently written his "response" before having read the Obama speech; what little of his rambling that was comprehensible was nonsensical, and the entirety of it was badly read, in a monotone, from a cue card the congressman seemed barely able to read. Boustany rolled out the tired Republican mantra of malpractice tort "reform," and that's the other part of what made him a perfect messenger for the Republicans--before coming to congress, Boustany had been a surgeon, and had been repeatedly sued for malpractice. His patients/victims had won millions.

One expects this sort of thing from conservative Republicans.

One doesn't expect it from more responsible elected officials, though, and that's why the Obama's can't-we-all-just-get-along call, in his own speech, for allowing states to begin experimenting with malpractice tort "reform"--measures aimed at preventing us from suing butchers like Boustany--was particularly depressing.[2]

As all two or three of my regular readers have probably guessed, I'm quite tired of this administration. I've been tired of it since before it took office, actually. I really do think Obama had a spark within him, a little glowing ember that could have flared up into his becoming something akin to a great president, as such things are usually judged. It has always been there. I even saw it in parts of his speech tonight. He's wasted his chance, though. He wasted it before he was even sworn in. Barring some horrendous catastrophe or scandal in the years ahead, he's limited his place in the history books to being the first person elected to the presidency who wasn't entirely white. A few centuries from now, that won't be impressive enough to make him more than a footnote. His complete failure to seize the opportunity open to him is a genuine tragedy. Probably not one that should seem unexpected in this day and age, but a tragedy no less.

--classicliberal2

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[1] And his plan has gotten worse. Tonight, he pooh-poohs the importance of the "public option," while embracing the idea of a legal mandate that everyone carry health insurance (a notion he'd previously rejected).

[2] Malpractice suits account for only between 0.46% and 2% of total health outlays--completely eliminating all malpractice suits would do nothing to reduce health care costs. Attacking our ability to sue serves only the conservative interest in creating an overclass that is impervious to any public accountability.

UPDATE (10 Sept., 2009) -- "Bipartisanship"--the thing the Obama seems to worship above all other things--requires two parties. The conservative base position is opposition to any real health care reform, anything that curbs the prerogatives of their corporate paymasters. Multiply anything by zero, and you still end up with zero. You can’t “compromise” with people who will not compromise. Obama has made a big, grand speech where he’s all about compromise, cooperation, bipartisanship, and the response of the other side was to sit on their hands and look absolutely disgusted when he called the “death panels” lie what it was, then to actually call him a liar for telling the truth about the health plan not applying to illegal immigrants.

Obama began the health care debate with his usual massive concessions to the other side--in an attempt to curry favor with the conservatives, he threw out the single-payer approach favored by the liberals (and the sane) in favor of yet another byzantine plan that preserves the failed private insurance industry. And after that HUGE concession, he comes to the liberals again and says “you have to compromise more.” The conservatives call him a liar, tell the public he wants to kill old people, don’t give up a damn thing, or even indicate that they’re willing to give up anything, and he’s telling the liberals “you have to give more,” and even engages in vile Clintonian triangulation in order to marginalize them, the very people who elected him.

It’s a crock. Obama wasn’t elected to behave like this. The public didn’t elect a candidate on a liberal ticket and huge majorities for his party in both houses of congress so conservative Republicans could continue to run everything.

It’s also worth noting--indeed, it’s a matter of critical importance to this discussion--that, if the goal of health care reform is to come up with something that works, the idea that this sort of continual compromise is what will produce that result (particularly when it’s only being done by one side) is an entirely fallacious assumption. All health care reform ideas are NOT equal. The status quo is unsustainable. That can be documented with hard numbers. The conservative preference for maintaining the status quo with very few real changes--their “reform” idea--merely continues an unsustainable course. Stitching bad ideas to good ones only makes the good ones less good.

That could be seen as an argument against any effort at compromise, but that isn't why I offer it. I offer it because it's worth a thought, in light of the political reality on the ground (as I've just outlined). Attenuating a great idea until it's just a good one (or merely a workable one) can be justified if the compromise will work, and if embracing it will build a broad base of support for it. In my view, there's no indication that either is the case, here.

Rodney King vs. Healthcare Reform

2009-08-19T15:03:00.000-07:00

I launched this blog in its original form just after Barack Obama's election, and, in that time, the single topic I've probably covered more than anything is the Obama’s Rodney-King-ist politics. Instead of adopting a position of strength and fighting from it, Obama says “can’t we all just get along?” He begins by giving all sorts of concessions to the other side right up front in the hope that this will bring them over to his side. In a world in which there existed a reasonable, responsible opposition party, this sort of thing may inspire that opposition to be magnanimous and work toward a compromise. The practical reality of the present, though, is that no such reasonable, responsible opposition exists. If the Clinton years taught the Demos anything, it should have taught them that. Obama is a Democrat. If he was to adopt outright Republican policies (as did Clinton), the right would still try to crush him. Not just to beat him but to destroy him (as they did with Clinton).

Obama's Rodney-King-ism has been devastating to his effectiveness. It wrecked the “stimulus” bill. He gave up nearly half of that in wasteful, less stimulative tax cuts in the hope of getting Republican votes. At a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, he got two such votes. And he didn’t learn from that. That failure to learn has, in all likelihood, now done in much hope for real health-care reform.

A single-payer plan is the best available option for reform, but the Obama refused to even consider it. The single-payer advocates weren't even allowed a seat at the table. To garner favor with those whose favor he will never win, the Obama shunted single-payer aside and tried to weasel and kowtow to the right by cooking up another damned "reform" plan that preserves a private insurance system that doesn't work, is doomed to eventual collapse, and that is bleeding the country dry as it dies. Faced with reactionary rent-a-mobs organized by corporate interests trying to defeat ALL reform, those in the White House spent this past weekend backing away from even the meager "public option" element of their initial plan, even as scumbag Sen. Charles Grassley, the Repub point-man on negotiating with the Demos, publicly admitted he'll probably vote against whatever compromise he works out anyway.

The Repubs are quite Machiavellian on the matter--with a Rodney-King-ist, they can afford to be. With Obama’s help, they’ve set it up so they win either way. Here’s what they want to happen next:

a) Nothing at all, which is their preference, and which would significantly weaken the Obama, or

b) for something to pass that’s watered down, industry-dictated crap that does nothing to control costs, and will only make the situation worse, but that will be labeled “health care reform.” It will fail, and the right will blame its failure on government, and use it against Democrats.

It's a win-win situation for them, a lose-lose situation for the public. Did that public hand the Democrats such an overwhelming electoral victory last year for this?

--classicliberal2

Attack of the Bubble People

2009-08-18T13:07:00.000-07:00

Over the years, I've written about a great many problems faced by American political discourse. One, in particular, plagues U.S. politics, maybe more seriously than all of the others combined.

Simply stated, there is a large and growing segment of the population on the political right that has increasingly opted to seal itself in what amounts to an alternate universe, and never have any more than superficial commerce with reality. They exist, more and more, in a bubble of their own puerile political fantasies. I call them the Bubble People.

There have, obviously, always been people who would, for one reason or another, behave in this manner, and they’ve always existed across all segments of the political spectrum (today, for example, we see some simple souls on the left who suggest George Bush Jr. was responsible for the Sept. 11th attacks). The difference is that such people have always been a very small portion of the population, and have always been regarded as the fringe nuts they were. Today’s conservative Bubble People are just as nutty as any of the Bubble People of the past, but they’re a HUGE segment of the population, to the degree that they’ve more-or-less managed to go mainstream.

These Bubble People are, in part, an outgrowth of our drone culture, but they’re primarily a side-effect of a massive, well-funded effort, operating within that culture for decades, to create a reliable constituency for the right. Millions of dollars have gone into constructing the bubble, which includes right-wing radio, the Fox News Channel, a huge network of think-tanks, publications, internet sites, and so on, and a great deal of time and effort has been spent conditioning the Bubble People to believe only the voices forever echoing within the bubble, primarily those of the American conservative elite. Those voices are the source of The Truth. Anything outside those voices is to be distrusted, and anything sourced to any other political view is to be dismissed outright, without regard to any fact other than their political orientation.

When you see the current waves of drones who are turning up, on command, at the townhall meetings about health care across the country, you’re seeing the Bubble People. They’ve been told, by the conservative elite, that they should be terrified of health care reform, and that elite has used, as a rallying point, the idea that the health-care proposal includes “death panels,” bureaucrats who will be empowered to decide to pull the plug on the elderly and the infirm.

If a reasonable person heard such a thing, his instinct would immediately be to dismiss it as almost certain balderdash, even if he knew nothing more of it. The concept of "reasonable" doesn't exist in the bubble, though. It's absurd to have to point out that no such provision exists in the bill. It isn’t in it. It has never been in it. No one, in fact, has ever even suggested it. Not once. Nor would they. But hundreds of people turn up, on command, at these townhall meetings to scream, cry, rant, threaten, and employ violence in order to shut down any discussion of the matter, based on their contention that the socialist in the White House wants to pull the plug on granny. In a rare bout of responsible journalism, the corporate press has reported, umpteen times, that no such provision exists. These rent-a-mobs have remained completely impervious to this. They’re being told by the conservative elite--the only voices allowed in their bubble--that it does, and, to them, that’s The Truth. Reality never penetrates.[1]

That they would so passionately believe their political opponents would craft such a grisly provision and never even question it says everything about what they've been conditioned, within the bubble, to think of those with different points of view.[2]

And when one sees the signs and banners, waved by demonstrators at these events, that say things like “Keep your grubby government hands off my Medicare,” it becomes obvious something has gone terribly wrong.

The decade+ campaign, through the '90s and beyond, to destroy Bill Clinton was the first indication that the Bubble People were getting completely out of hand, but even the impeachment fiasco--essentially an attempted coup against an elected government, with all the attendant implications--didn’t have even remotely as wide-ranging an effect as the Iraq misadventure. The Bubblers were the backbone of the support for that insane policy, and it's probably the most obvious and visible sign of the very real danger presented by them, danger not only to the United States but to the rest of the world.

Because of the data available, I like to use, as a stock example of the trouble with the Bubblers, the 2004 presidential election. Consider these facts about that election, courtesy of the University of Maryland:

“…72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing them (25%). Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had actual WMD and 57% also assume, incorrectly, that [Bush weapons inspector Charles] Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program.”

“…75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission.”

And so on. There’s more--this was, by far, the single most important issue of that campaign, and Bush’s supporters were wildly misinformed about every significant point of it.

The implications?

The President of the most powerful nation in the history of the world was sent back into office by an electorate that based its decision on pure fantasy.

THAT is a problem.

--classicliberal2

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[1] The Bubble People are appearing at these events at the behest of organizers who openly avow they want no health care reform at all. The Bubbler's tactics, fed them by these handlers, has been to shut down discussion. This, alone, bespeaks a serious disconnect from reality. Health care in the U.S. is on an unsustainable course, at present. This can be demonstrated in any one of dozens of ways, without resorting to any sort of shaky speculation. Something has to be done. That doesn’t mean the current proposal is what should be done--I certainly don't think it is--but that’s the beginning of a discussion. The Bubble's handlers don't want a discussion, and the Bubblers, completely oblivious to the reality of the health care crisis, are preventing one from taking place.

[2] The Bubble People would be a problem even if those who constructed their bubble were honest. There's little honesty in the American conservative elite. The image of the liberal Democrat as the evil socialist who would kill old people, adopted as reality without a moment's hesitation by the Bubblers, is just one of the vile creations of that worthless yet omnipresent elite.