Tag: this is why

As I’ve said before, lots of Glenn Beck listeners aren’t in on the joke. Unlike Roger Ailes, Jonah Goldberg, and every staffer at the Heritage Foundation happy hour, they don’t realize that the Fox News Channel puts this man on the air fully understanding that large parts of his program are uninformed nonsense mixed with brazen bullshit. When a Fox News host tells these viewers, “I’m not going to treat you like you’re a moron,” playing on their insecurity about other media outlets talking down to or lying to them, they take it at face value. What sort of callous, immoral person allows these viewers to be played for fools?

Conor Friedersdorf getting to a one-sentence sketch of Roger Ailes. Until the broader sphere progressive politicians and media in general deals with that “I’m not going to treat you like you’re a moron” part, we’ll get nowhere.
As Friedersdorf says, Ailes et al. “ought to be objects of disgrace, akin to any other manipulative huckster who preys on the elderly.” That they aren’t is why we fail.

Random Thought #371

politicalprof:

It should be remembered that no one—and I mean no one, of any party—who advocates more tax cuts for Americans, whether businesses or individuals, is serious about solving the American national deficit. The only reasonable response to anyone who follows a statement about the need to reduce or cure the United States’ national debt with a statement about the importance of more tax cuts is to laugh at them until snot runs out of your nose.

That this isn’t already the widespread response and being ceaseless spread and solidified by Democratic operatives as politicians of all stripes take to the hustings come 2012 is precisely why the Democrats fail. Period.

Until they accomplish that one thing: lancing the festering boil that begins with the merely foolish Laffer Curve and ends now with the grade-A, unadulterated horseshit in which tax cuts never even need to be budgeted for, and then successfully turn all of that into a massive and truly, viscerally horrifying joke that all representatives of the Tea Klan and their GOP enablers must run, run from at each and every stop (see: “maximum acceleration on BullshitOne, Charlie, they’ve got the pitchforks out here too!”), well, until that day: we’ll get precisely nowhere in this country.

Since all the evidence says that elections depend on the rate of change of unemployment, not its level, this is actually bad news for Obama: he’s setting himself up for an economic stall in the months leading into the 2012 election.

Paul Krugman, caught in the act of being exactly right. Couple this with the decision to let these Bush tax cuts expire in an election year again, and you’ve got recipe for disaster.
On what planet do these (so called) Democrats live? Do they expect to learn from the messaging disaster they perpetrated in the ten year leadup to this battle? Nothing I’ve seen from anybody, dog catcher up to President, has shown me that they have any chance of even budging the conversation, much less crafting a winning electoral message on this in the face of a still-stagnant economy and ~10% unemployment come 2012.
Obama’s determination to be the “next Carter” is really remarkably strong. I’d say he’s one killer rabbit away from being little more than a punch-line.
Get out there and fight for something, anything. What is so hard to understand about that? Why is it so terrifying for them? This is why they fail.

WHY THEY FAIL

[Axelrod said that] separating out different categories of tax cuts now – extending some without extending others – is politically unrealistic and procedurally difficult

God almighty Christ is there a clearer possible enumeration of why this administration is failing in the eyes of the public? This sentence alone should cost Axelrod his job. Period
Procedurally difficult? How? They all expire at the end of the year. You write a law enacting the sub-$250k part. You put it to a vote. It passes or it doesn’t. We’re meant to believe this is too hard? Yes, it’s “politically unrealistic” because Republicans will oppose it. THAT’S WHAT YOU WANT THEM TO DO, YOU FUCKING IMBECILE. You want to force them to a) take a hard position publicly -or- b) genuinely compromise with you and your still giant majorities and continue only the sub-250k cuts. Instead, after the events since 2008, you apparently still believe it’s best to begin negotiations from the GOP position and then see what sensible add-ons they want once this thing hits the floor. And you wonder why the public loses faith and doesn’t turn out to vote you and yours back in?
Do you seriously expect me to believe that you just do not understand politics at any level? That you are that dense? Or are you just suffering from an overtight necktie? Your job is to help us; not to fuck us up. Does that seem clear to you? I know I’m the one out here “on drugs,” but still. Statements like this makes me think maybe life under our Tea Klan theocratic overlords would, if nothing else, at least be more sensible from a beliefs-vs-governing-stance viewpoint than anything I’ve heard emitted from the raging shitspew that’s been coming out the maw of the national Democrat since November 2nd.

Really, really execrable. Just the worst, most defeatist, circular-firing squad shit I’ve seen coming out of this administration ever. Why not just go into the Rose Garden with Biden and abdicate the day Boehner is named Speaker and make him President? For life, if possible.

Honestly, if this is the way you plan to govern in opposition you may as well just cede the whole thing right off the bat.

[END BLOODRAGE]

WHY THEY FAIL

…granting ad arguendum that the 111th Congress engaged in liberal overreach, which Senators who win today would have lost had the Affordable Care Act included a public option linked to Medicare? The answer seems to me to be nobody. Which Senators who win today would have lost had the 111th Congress passed a cap-and-trade plan through reconciliation? Here, it looks like Patty Murray. Would a “scaled back” health care plan have saved Blance Lincoln? Clearly not.

Matt Yglesias makes a point that far too few will. They fail not because of some mythical “liberal overreach” (which really translates into “not enacting a GOP-approved slate of policies”) but because they operate from such a terrified, defensive crouch that every policy that emerges seems horribly compromised in some respect.
I’ve said all along that even one signature policy plus a bunch of spectacular failures at the hand of GOP obstruction is better than a whole passel of half-measures and partial, piecemeal victories that each require 25 minutes of explanation every time they’re brought up, and, of course, that most of the party ultimately just runs away from anyway.
For the thousandth time: It is better to be strong and wrong than weak and right. Maybe we’ll learn that over the next two years. Maybe not.

To the extent that Democrats do worse even than the economy explains, one can point to a number of factors. Given that the stimulus was inadequate — which was obvious early on — Obama could have tried to warn Americans of a long hard road ahead, and placed blame on Republicans; instead, the WH kept pretending that things were going swimmingly, never once acknowledging that the original plan wasn’t sufficient (they still haven’t). Remember the Summer of Recovery?
Worse, since the fall of 2009 the White House has systematically adopted Republican positioning on the budget; remember how the State of the Union included a freeze in domestic spending?
Policy on other fronts seemed almost designed to cede populist sentiments to the right: not even a hint of tough positioning against Wall Street, totally limp policy toward China, and more.
On the organizational side, it’s still mind-boggling how the White House deliberately shut down the whole network of grass-roots organizing that helped put Obama there in the first place. All that idealism, all that energy — and they were told to go away and let Rahm Emanuel do his deals in peace.
So again: it was mainly the economy, with the effects of a bad economy reinforced by Obama’s consistent policy of undercutting both messages and movements that might have helped Democrats weather the economic storm.

Paul Krugman, giving us some non-BINGO based analysis.
I tend to agree, but word it differently: shit sandwich. That the GOP was not forced to eat one each and every legislative day is your two-word, non-BINGO analysis of the 2010 cycle. Instead, the Democrat whisked in, grabbed said sandwich, slathered the contents onto his hands and said: “Look what you almost stepped in, GOP!”
Time and time again. This is why they fail.

Delusion, Failure, Recrimination

Jonathan Chait ably describes the Republican cycle:

The loop begins with Republicans gaining power on the basis of promising to cut unspecified programs, or perhaps programs accounting for a tiny proportion of the federal budget. That is the stage of the cycle we are currently in. Then Republicans obtain power and have to confront the fact that most spending programs are popular, and so they must choose between destroying their own popularity by taking on programs like Medicare, or failing to materially cut spending. So they settle on tax cuts instead of spending cuts. Then eventually their supporters conclude that they have been betrayed by their leaders, and cast about for new leaders with the willpower to really cut spending this time.

I’d add that even if they zeroed the entire non-defense discretionary budget they’d still be less than halfway to balance. And that’s before they formalize the permanent status of the Bush tax cuts and inevitably start adding in new tax cuts, which, of course, never have to be budgeted or paid for.

That the previous paragraph is news to most Americans is why the Democrats fail. And, just to name one, the elimination of the NIH and NSF through this zero budgeting process would basically doom the United States to second or third tier status in science, research, and development for decades, if not forever. So there’s that.

But let’s not talk details.

Delusion, Failure, Recrimination

The Rodeo Clown

lemkin:

This is why you have to point out O’Donnell’s foolishness early and often: [paint other Tea Klanners with her foolishness, blah blah blah]

jasencomstock:

This is not true.  We are not having a constitutional debate between lawyers.  Rush Limbaugh is not going to change his mind on this, neither is O’Donnell- just as you are not going to change your mind on this, or the 2nd amendment, or the 10th.  For the most part, the vast vast majority of Americans are not going to change their minds either. 

“Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.”

A large segment of the population wants to believe this and you cannot take it from them by pointing it out. 

This is indeed precisely where we disagree, but for different reasons (I think, anyway). We don’t need to convince (nor, as you point out, are we going to) the Limbaughs and Palins of the world; and but also I feel like these sorts of unreachable Tea Klan true believers are a relatively small fragment of the population; low-information voters, on the other hand, can be swayed by the red meat that those same individuals peddle, but (and more importantly) I’ve found that those low-info voters also deeply understand various foundational concepts implicit to the country or, more accurately, to our national conception of civics and civic duty. Importantly, they also make up most of the electorate. And these same low-information folks might well holler “hells yeah!” at a “Taxed Enough Already!!!” chant, but would recoil in horror if they really understood the full depth of the fundamental changes these folks want in how the country would operate and the foundational ignorance of many of its most prominent proponents.
You can pick off huge numbers of folks that are simply angry, but don’t buy the whole line; but to do so: you have to be having that conversation. Constantly, but also respectfully. Otherwise they’ve got nothing to compare these Tea Klan positions to. The Tea Klan is all fired up; the Democrats are sitting quietly talking about comparative top marginal tax rates over time. By consistently and firmly pointing out the idiocy, you begin to pick off topics near and dear to the Tea Klan. They simply can’t be mentioned anymore because the audience will tune-out, sigh, or laugh. Inoculation is key, though: people have to approach some new Tea Klan candidate armed with some basic and memorable information they’ve retained from the last time these folks were out on the hustings. Thus you progressively and inevitably marginalize and ultimately eliminate as a political force the Tea Klan (by taking away its rhetoric and, essentially by equating said rhetoric with foolishness or hard-hearted and ultimately unamerican concepts) and, in large part, you deeply wound the GOP itself for its role in enabling these crazies.
After all, we must never forget that polls show the GOP is (still) historically unpopular. There are reasons for that, and they extend well beyond “party of Bush” type recent history. We need to call attention to the darker veins of this stuff early and often. That the national party apparatus is constantly afraid to do so is precisely why they fail.

In a New York Times/CBS News Poll last month, fewer than one in 10 respondents knew that the Obama administration had lowered taxes for most Americans. Half of those polled said they thought that their taxes had stayed the same, a third thought that their taxes had gone up, and about a tenth said they did not know. As Thom Tillis, a Republican state representative, put it as the dinner wound down here, “This was the tax cut that fell in the woods — nobody heard it.”

What if a president cut Americans’ income taxes by $116 billion and nobody noticed?(via southpol)

OR:

This is why they fail.

Source: The New York Times

What Anti-Foreclosure Deadbeats?

Today’s edition of What Atrios Said:

If Citi doesn’t own the mortgage then the woman doesn’t owe them any money. If Citi doesn’t own the mortgage then it isn’t the case that “perhaps” they shouldn’t foreclose on her, it’s the case that they have no legal right to foreclosure. Citi can’t just take possesion of a house, or decide someone owes them money, just because they say so.

And, yes, maybe one day Fannie will get around to a foreclosure process, but Citi cannot just assert control of the mortgage and the property on their say so.

[…] the [conventional wisdom] just seems to be “well, she deserves to lose her house so it doesn’t really matter who takes it from her.”

That this whole thing is so utterly small-c conservative just makes it all the more deadly to the GOP and their Tea Klan enablers. I mean it’s fundamental property rights, and a partial reason for the founding of the nation in the first place. It’s a political hydrogen bomb to use against the anti-modification crowd, which, not coincidentally is made up of the GOP establishment (but would be an issue that quite conveniently rends them from the arms of their anti-bank Tea Klanners) and the Blue Dogs that Rahm, back in his DCCC years, so lovingly forced down our throats without ever bothering to ensure they’d, you know, vote with leadership on key initiatives.
This is why you will never hear a Democratic candidate utter so much as a peep about it. It’s just too goddamned explosive. Wouldn’t want to get all shrill in a way that would make a few Blue Dogs uncomfortable, now would we? Once the GOP wins every available seat in the House and Senate, I’m sure they’ll be ready to work with the President on serious policy initiatives. And we certainly don’t want to irritate them prior to that coming to pass. Right?

What Anti-Foreclosure Deadbeats?