Tag: GOP

Ratfucking 2010 style

Dave Weigel lays it out:

One of the more jarring passages in Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland” is his recounting of a popular myth that went around Iowa in 1966, the year of the conservative backlash against the Great Society. The myth was that black gang members on motorcycles were going to head from Chicago to ransack Des Moines. Reading this in 2008, it sounded preposterous, the kind of thing that no one could believe in the country that was about to elect Barack Obama. But [Fox’s Megyn] Kelly, under the guise of journalism, is working to create a rumor like this in 2010. Watch her broadcasts and you become convinced that the New Black Panthers are a powerful group that hate white people and operate under the protection of Eric Holder’s DOJ. That “Megyn Kelly DESTROYS Kirsten Powers” video that I mentioned begins with her introducing a clip of a town hall meeting with Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Ca.) in which he gets an angry question about whether the DOJ has a policy of not prosecuting African-Americans.

“I am extremely sure that we do not have a policy at the Department of Justice of never prosecuting a black defendent.”

The crowd rises up. “Yes you do!” shouts one voter. When Sherman says he doesn’t know much about the Panther case, the crowd erupts in boos. They’ve been driven to fear and distrust of their DOJ by round-the-clock videos of one racist idiot brandishing a nightstick for a couple hours in 2008.

The facts do not matter. This is precisely why people like Mr. Frazee are critically under-informed; it’s not so much that they don’t pay attention, it’s that if they are paying attention, it’s most likely they are watching FOXnews. Furthermore, anyone that grew up in the age of Cronkite has an implicit trust of television news: they simply must be making at least some effort to give us factual information…sure, it’s hyped here and there, but it must be all basically true. That’s just how it works.

And, in classic Dunning-Kruger fashion, they have no way of testing that hypothesis, are assured of their facts, and contrary, accurate information will only cause them dismay and harden their attachment to the preexisting falsity.

Unemployment extension: we cannot possibly afford such a deficit exploder; won’t you please think of the children?

Bush tax cuts: Why, we can’t afford not to extend those indefinitely. And no, we don’t need to pay for them in any way. In fact, it would be irresponsible to pay for them.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2010 GOP. An opponent whose nut(s) The Democrat finds utterly impossible to crack.

(graph via Ezra Klein)

There’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue, they increased revenue because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject.

Mitch McConnell who has apparently never seen this.
If we had a functional press corps, somebody would be counting down to the reveal of just such a chart directly beside or behind him on live television. We’ve got the whole day to fill, Mitch-O; you’ll be delighted to hear that we don’t have to “leave it there.” Let’s dig into this so we can really get your views, in depth.

Letter to the President

This is how you are perceived:

Even before his unemployment checks ended, Dwight Michael Frazee’s days were filled with the pursuit of any idea that could earn him a buck. But few are working out, and now his nights are filled with dread.

[…]

Frazee, who is married and has a 5-year-old daughter, is in a financial free fall with no safety net.

“My life has been total stress. I sleep maybe four hours a night, worrying about money,” he said. “I understood the president and Congress had to stabilize the banks, get Wall Street going. I figured something would be done for middle-class Americans, that they couldn’t abandon us. But I was wrong.”

“President Obama talks a lot about making the victims of the gulf disaster whole, but what about the victims of this economic disaster?” Frazee said. “Nowadays, he seems mostly concerned with image. Now, he doesn’t want to be seen as a big spender. But people need help.

Please do note that at no point does Mr. Frazee mention the Republicans, "the party of No,” filibusters, Code Brown, and even deficits only come up tangentially.
When you lose control of the House come November, your advisers will most likely hide behind a lot of nonsensical crap along the lines of “the facts are on our side.” If you believe them, even for a second, then this is why you will fail. The facts do not matter; perception is everything.

You needed to be out there every day for over a year now framing the GOP as the obstruction to economic progress and primary engine of pain and suffering in the streets of America. That the GOP wants Mr. Frazee and everyone like him to Go Die in the Streets. Everyone in your party needs to be doing the same thing. None of you are, even now. None of you even seem vaguely aware of the issue in the abstract. This is why you fail.

Don’t Forget More Tax Cuts

Jonah Goldberg: For a year or so, Republicans have been the so-called party of no. Contrary to the expectations of its critics, that tactic has been good for the GOP. It seems that the “tea parties,” America’s natural antibodies to Obamaism, have provided some vital stem cell therapy, helping to regrow the Republican spine. But that spine is only valuable if you use it for something….Now is the time for the GOP to call Obama’s bluff and offer a real choice. My personal preference would be for the leadership to embrace Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s “road map,” a sweeping, bold and humane assault on the welfare state and our debt crisis. Doing so might come at the cost of trimming the GOP’s victory margins in November, but it would provide Republicans with a real mandate to be something more than “not-Obama.”
Kevin Drum: I would pay cash money if the Republican leadership would promise to actually do this. Goldberg thinks that liberals aren’t popular? That’s peanuts. If Republicans made a serious run at passing Ryan’s road map the party would end up just slightly more popular than the Taliban. I think there would literally not be a single demographic or interest group in the entire country still supporting them. Even the tea partiers would start pretending to be Democrats. Hell, they’d probably take up the cause of repealing the 22nd amendment and allowing Obama to be elected president for life […] I dare them. I double dog dare them. Let’s hear about how you’re going to cut federal spending by a trillion dollars over the next five years and by a third over the next 50. Details, people. Let’s hear ’em.

[You] should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes; surely Congress has the authority, and it would be right to – if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending, and that’s what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.

John Kyl, apparently thinking he’s making sense on FoxNEWS Sunday.
So, translating this into the Earth language known as English: spending money on people who just need to suck it up and go die in the streets is always wrong, whether or not the cost of that spending has been offset by equivalent cuts or revenue from elsewhere.
Spending money to lower tax rates, on the other hand, is always right and, in fact, that money should never be offset; or at least an offset should never be an impediment to going right ahead and spending the money.
These people could very well be running the House next January and the whole country come 2012.
(via Ezra Klein)

The Unemployed can Go Die in the Streets

In which thebroadermarket summarizes a theoretical, GOP-derived wonderland that we here at Lemkin refer to as “Go Die in the Streets”:

Thus, one is left with a situation in which the unemployed would find few opportunities for work, while simultaneously seeing their social safety net dry up. Meanwhile, the lucky employed would see the security of their labor jeopardized at the expense of allowing the financial marketplace to continue to operate relatively uninhibited. I am not one prone to hyperbole, but this just seems like a raw deal.

Read the whole thing

I am prone to hyperbole. But that would be shrill.

I know at least 7 [GOP] senators, who I will not name, but were made to make a commitment under threat of losing their chairmanships, if they did not support the leadership on every procedural vote, every single thing we did, from the important to the not so important, required (for the first time in modern American history) […] required 60 votes. All the sudden a majority became 60 instead of 50

Joe Biden, reflecting on GOP obstructionism.
I’d argue in a similar vein as Yglesias: it’s not remarkable at all that the GOP extracted this kind of stern loyalty. What’s remarkable is that The Democrat did not. Not even on procedural votes can Democratic Leadership count on the caucus voting in lockstep (and then being free to vote their conscience on final passage).
Likewise, such fealty is also not required on keystone issues such as healthcare insurance reform, or more recently on FinReg. Say what you will about whether or not Feingold is in the right by withholding his vote for FinReg (in favor of some theoretically better but functionally nonexistent “other bill”), the fact of the matter is that in so doing, he’s empowered Code Brown to set the agenda for FinReg, and The Democrat has dutifully sent the bill to the American Taxpayer instead of the largest banking interests in the world. And now will get to take the blame for it. Because, rest assured, the GOP will run on that. And won’t be troubled in the least by the facts that they were directly responsible for that change and many, many others just like it. The facts do not matter.