Tag: Politics

Cheap Premise

The Atlantic and author Christopher Hitchens, trying to declare Western Civilization dead because Jon Stewart pokes fun at our political discourse (and out-polls his Serious Journalism counterparts in the “most trusted” category while doing it), goes completely off the deep end intellectually just two paragraphs in:

And if any one thing undid Governor Palin as a person who could even be considered for the vice presidency, it was the merciless guying of her manner and personality by Tina Fey.

Uh, no. If any one thing undid Governor Palin, it was her brazenly obvious lack of qualifications for that job coupled with an obvious absence of the sort of desire or drive needed to get her ready in the several months available prior to the general election (or, for that matter, her debate with Biden). Her unceasing reliance on “You Betcha!” and other equally trenchant bits of commentary in the face of any and all questions is what created, powered, and was ultimately the thing that resonated in the Tina Fey bit. Fey was simply the person most visibly pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. The imitation was so effective that viewers couldn’t help but realize that there was nothing else in there but the scare quotes, nonsensical rambles, and the closing catch-phrases. Had Palin been an unquestionably qualified (but green) candidate with a similarly idiosynchratic library of quips and old-fashioned truisms, she still would have been mocked, just as any national political figure’s most obvious tics are mocked, but simultaneously would have been accepted as an otherwise serious player on the national scene, admittedly one with a folksy shtick. Big deal. Suggesting otherwise is the real infantilization of the American discourse. And Jon Stewart and his ilk aren’t the ones responsible for any of that. Makes you wonder why his “Trust” numbers are so high.

Right Germany

Rick provides nice followup to this bit of Lemkin wisdom in a New Yorker piece:

…it’s not as if German conservatives are a bunch of crazy far-right nihilists. This is not the Republicans we’re talking about. Both the CDU and the FDP recognize the urgency of global warming. Neither of them has a problem with gays. (The FDP’s leader, soon to be foreign minister, is the country’s other openly gay political bigwig.) Nor do they have a problem with allowing a woman to end a pregnancy if she feels she must, or with telling kids to use condoms if they can’t resist having sex, or with the theory of evolution, or with gun control—or, for that matter, with “socialism.” The vast majority of Germans, including most CDU voters and probably even most FDP voters, have no desire to junk the basic architecture of German social welfare, which, of course, is mainly the creation of the SPD. That’s another reason the SPD found it so difficult to get fired up and ready to go.

Thanks, Rick!

Explain that to me

Barack Obama reports, you decide:

“I was up at the G20 – just a little aside – I was up at the G20, and some of you saw those big flags and all the world leaders come in and Michelle and I are shaking hands with them,” the president said. “One of the leaders – I won’t mention who it was – he comes up to me. We take the picture, we go behind.

"He says, ‘Barack, explain to me this health care debate.’

"He says, ‘We don’t understand it. You’re trying to make sure everybody has health care and they’re putting a Hitler mustache on you – I don’t – that doesn’t make sense to me. Explain that to me.’”

via Jack Tapper

Center-right (in Germany)

The MSM is lately trumpeting the German elections having created a “center-right” governing coalition as though that construction has meaning, or at least the same meaning in the United States as it does in Germany. And, of course, it plays to their MSM-preferred storyline that the “split-the-difference” solution is not just better politics, it’s better policy. Which is utter nonsense. But, for context, let’s review just what were the two key issues of the recent German elections:

-modest middle-income tax relief

-work toward a strategy for the eventual withdrawal of the more than 4,200 German troops in Afghanistan

The first is and was a key Obama plank. Everyone, and I mean everyone, on the “right” in Congress voted against that. Some Democrats on the right did too. The second wouldn’t even be on the table of a nationwide election in this country unless you’re Dennis Kucinich, or some other denizen of the “far” left. The fact is, our political spectrum has been radically re-formulated; this began with Reagan and accelerated mightily under W. Bush. Today’s bipartisanship, such as it exists at all, is between left- and right-of center Democrats. This seemingly obvious fact is, as yet, utterly unknown to the MSM. I’ve seriously never, ever seen mention of it outside the progressive blogosphere. It just isn’t said. Keep walking.

Anyway, back in Germany, it would seem the main point of contention comes down to:

the Conservatives disagree with the Liberals on some policy issues, for instance on how much regulation the finance sector needs or on the right balance between strengthening security measures and protecting civil rights.

That (at least) sounds vaguely familiar. Again, though, in the US, the GOP is categorically against any new financial regulation. Hell, Palin is going around saying there’s still too much financial regulation. But, I think we can rest assured: in Germany, “conservatives” are categorically for universal healthcare, support relatively high tax rates (compared to the United States; these very “center-right” Germans support raising corporate taxes, for instance), and are calling for a less aggressive global military stance (again, relative to the US).  Does anyone out there believe that any of those policy positions would fly in the modern GOP? At any level?

But, by all means, let’s simplify matters and just pretend that the German-GOP had big gains in the most recent German election cycle. As always, bad news for the Democrat.

The idiocy of Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck wants to have a national day of prayer and fasting, and points to Thomas Jefferson as someone who was all for that sort of thing. Fortunately, Thomas Jefferson weighed in on just exactly this sort of issue:

First, on the issue of prescribing such observances:

I consider the government of the U S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment, or free exercise, of religion, but from that also which reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the U.S. Certainly no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the general government. It must then rest with the states, as far as it can be in any human authority.

That one actually seems crystal clear without recourse to old TJ, but, in this day and age, it pays to be thorough. But hows-about the more sly, more thoroughly “modern” version of said observances in which the President (or a similar authority) simply encourages folks to pray or fast or what-have-you:

But it is only proposed that I should recommend, not prescribe a day of fasting & prayer. That is, that I should indirectly assume to the U.S. an authority over religious exercises which the Constitution has directly precluded them from. It must be meant too that this recommendation is to carry some authority, and to be sanctioned by some penalty on those who disregard it; not indeed of fine and imprisonment, but of some degree of proscription perhaps in public opinion. And does the change in the nature of the penalty make the recommendation the less a law of conduct for those to whom it is directed? I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct its exercises, its discipline, or its doctrines; nor of the religious societies that the general government should be invested with the power of effecting any uniformity of time or matter among them. Fasting & prayer are religious exercises. The enjoining them an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises, & the objects proper for them, according to their own particular tenets; and this right can never be safer than in their own hands, where the constitution has deposited it.

Exactly right. Why, it’s almost as if this country was founded by deists who were looking to completely separate the respective functions of church and state. Just don’t tell Glenn Beck; such facts get in the way of his preferred narratives.

So, which recent or current President would Jefferson judge as more dangerous to the Republic? And exactly which part of Glenn Beck’s daily spew would Jefferson recognize as even American, much less the work of a self-proclaimed “Constitutional Scholar”?

People [should] have called for the resignation of Tom Delay back in the day because a hammer can’t be the Majority Leader. After all, hammers are inanimate objects and it’s an affront to American values to have a lifeless tool at such a high office.

–Ezra Klein commenter etdean1

So why have you (unless you’re a massive news junkie) never have heard of [any of this]? Because for all the right’s whining about the liberal media, the mainstream media aren’t ideologically committed to party warfare in remotely the way that the conservative media are.

–Michael Tomasky (in this generally excellent roundup of the ACORN dust-up).

The Flashpoint

“[Obama said] ‘everyone should get the same deal as members of Congress.’ But you take the text of these bills, and not only are you not getting the same deal as members of Congress, who get a dozen or more choices in the D.C. area, but people aren’t going to get any choice at all. It’ll be tethered to a policy that many people might think is pretty crummy. Some of those policies will be high-deductible, going up 10 or 12 percent a year. And people are going to think that’s pretty crummy.

[…]

As for the people who don’t have coverage and are making $65,000, those people look at Washington and see us saying you’ll have to pay 13 percent of your income, and then we’re going to clobber you with all these co-pays and deductibles, and some government official comes and says, ‘We’ll give you an exemption’? No middle-class people will be attending rallies holding signs saying “thank you for my exemption!”

— Ron Wyden, speaking the Truth from on high, via Ezra Klein

GOPLand in Bad Decline

An excellent Boston Globe op-ed describes the current, historically bad state of the Grand Old Party, held hostage as it is by the most extreme elements of its fringe membership. I’ve even put it in graph form:

Pretty easy to gather that, compared to everybody else, Democrat and “Independent” alike, self-described Republicans hold very different views on the issues of the day. And it’s not as though, were these folks asked about immigration or abortion, they’d suddenly step back into some region of the non-lunatic spectrum. GOP identifiers largely believe (to the tune of 58%) that the President of the United States is a secret Muslim born in Kenya, after all. And that he’s furthermore planning to usher in a Socialist Empire of some sort. People are certainly entitled to their insane views; the problem is, as the article notes:

In America, we don’t really have splinter parties. When one of our parties goes crazy, it doesn’t slide to the margins.

Yep. It’s not as though this is some tiny, ad-hoc group’s take on some arcane local zoning issue we’re talking about here. This is a national party competing for the Presidency. We either need more choices, or need the GOP to sort itself out, and fast.

But, far from dusting itself off and letting some cooler heads prevail, the modern GOP just pushes the crazy meter even further along. Here’s the man that delivered the response to Obama’s joint-session address on the subject of the President’s citizenship:

STARK: What do you personally believe, I mean – do you think there’s a question [surrounding Obama’s citizenship] here?

BOUSTANY: I think there are questions, we’ll have to see.

Alright, they must have chosen Boustany because of some sort of unique ability or achievement in the healthcare and its administration in LA. Or not:

…ranked Louisiana dead last in 2008 among the 50 states for the overall health of its people, hugely because of its high percentages of people without health insurance, preventable hospitalization, infant mortality, cancer deaths, cardiovascular deaths, and overall premature deaths. The Trust for America’s Health had similar findings in its 2008 rankings. The infant mortality rate in Louisiana, according to the United Health Foundation report, is more than triple that of Slovenia and the Czech Republic.

And yet, apparently, this is the best the GOP had sitting on the bench, waiting to make an important speech to an audience who’d just watched Obama make his case.

Worth noting the ending of the afore-linked op-ed:

Maybe Democrats should be happy that Republicans have been reduced to a lunatic fringe. But the lunatics still have their seat at the table, and someday they may be sitting at its head again. What then?