Tag: this is why

Rove has spent his professional life engaged in political sleaze, so he’s accused Obama of adding “arsenic to the nation’s political well.” Rove ran a White House that embraced a “permanent campaign,” so he’s accused the Obama team of embracing a “permanent campaign.” Rove embraced the politics of fear, so he’s accused Obama of embracing the politics of fear. Rove relied on “pre-packaged, organized, controlled, scripted ” political events, so he’s accused Obama of relying on “pre-packaged, organized, controlled, scripted” political events. Rove looked at every policy issue “from a political perspective,” so he’s accused Obama of looking at every policy issue “from a political perspective.” Rove snubbed news outlets that he considered partisan, so he’s accused Obama of snubbing snubbed news outlets that he considered partisan. Rove had a habit of burying bad news by releasing it late on Friday afternoons, so he’s accused Obama of burying bad news by releasing it late on Friday afternoons. Rove questioned the motives of those with whom he disagreed, so he’s accused Obama of questioning the motives of those with whom he disagrees.

Steve Benen opines the being that is Karl Rove.
And it’s all true, but I’d say it’s also sadly beside the point. The real take-home on Rove isn’t so much that he’s a hypocrite or the political equivalent of sleaze incarnate, it’s that his shtick is treated so uncritically by the mainstream media. Yes, when you hear (and see) him “turned to” as some kind of a disinterested outsider (his chyron blurb usually says “Political Analyst”) on the subject of massive, anonymous campaign financing and how that’s affecting races across the country, and then have those ever-uncritical outlets then fail to mention that Rove, himself, is responsible for one of the largest and most powerful of these organizations, said organization dwarfing the contributions of the very US Chamber that he’s being asked about, well, that is journalistic malpractice. And it’s unsurprisingly coming from one of the “liberal” outlets.
And but so: The goal of Democratic messaging should be that there is no outlet Rove can be on, no microphone he can even approach, no studio he can inhabit without being regaled, and I mean regaled with questions he doesn’t want to answer or even have asked of him in public. That he can, does, and is a paid employee of the #1 cable news outlet shows you just how far The Democrat has to go in terms of messaging before any progress can even begin to be planned, much less realized.
And this is why they fail.

Kevin Drum supplies us with a graph that does more to explain the McDonalds thing than anything else I’ve seen. Red bar is current Mini-Med plan. As you can see, under ACA, the vast majority of McDonalds workers get a better deal; those earning minimum wage get a vastly better deal, in that far more comprehensive healthcare is now free for them.
In fact, only those making more than $12/hr, a tiny minority of McDonalds workers, will pay about what they pay now…and but also get a hell of a lot more useful health insurance.

Indeed: what a failure for the ACA. Yet this failure narrative, unintended consequences, and so forth is precisely what we hear from Our Liberal Media. Again and again.

This is just the sort of graph that needs to be trotted out every time this comes up. Simple and easy to understand. But isn’t. And now even self-identified Democrats are turning against a plan they most likely have no idea about other than what they’ve heard on FOXnews. Because those anchors are at least trying to tell the truth of the story, right?
If you don’t think this is a serious problem you haven’t been paying attention. This is why they fail.

Christie to cancel the region’s most crucial infrastructure project; refusing $3B in fed money, cutting 6,000 potential new jobs

ohhleary:

When you’re still stuck on a train stalled on the tracks in New Jersey twenty years from now, blame this grandstanding fatass.

How, though? Democrats, as currently figured, inevitably claim they are only interested in “looking forward.” This stance means that, in 20 years when the bill comes due, the Democrat sitting in the corner office trying to unwind the mess he/she inherited will take the blame for problems created long ago by policies that the GOP will still be pitching (and winning elections with) and a voter-at-large who remains utterly uninformed but sure likes the sound of all those never-ending tax cuts.

The only solution is careful messaging, right across the board, for decades, that informs the public, slowly but surely, about each of these decisions and their inevitable consequences. But, when handed somebody’s house burning down for lack of a $75 annual fee to use fire services, we are instead greeted by the sounds of Democratic silence. When a bridge collapses: sounds of silence. When people get sick because food is production isn’t being inspected and is thus contaminated: sounds of silence. When people die in the streets of the richest nation in the world because they can’t afford food anymore or caught a (fucking) cold: sounds of silence.

This is why they fail.

Christie to cancel the region’s most crucial infrastructure project; refusing $3B in fed money, cutting 6,000 potential new jobs

Squashed: Don’t worry about the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell vote

squashed:

Today the Republican’s defeated a Democratic effort to bring a defense authorization bill to the floor that included a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Now both sides can use it as an election issue.

This did not remove the repeal from the defense authorization bill. […]
[It] is a critical bit of legislation. It will make it to the floor before the end of the year. Somebody will introduce an amendment to get the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell out of the bill. The amendment will fail. The bill will pass. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will be repealed.

It’s not so much about whether the package will squeak through (with DADT and DREAM intact), it’s about deflating the effect of said (inevitable) passage. Now it will pass post-midterms, and nobody but nobody will even know it happened.
This was never about the policy, it was about denying The Democrat a win, no matter how incremental, that might give the base even the least bit of wind in its sails. And, once again, rather than fight or force the GOP to eat a massive shit sandwich while winning the day (see: Troops, why does John McCain want them to die?), the GOP is handed this victory entirely without cost, while the democratic base sees yet more fecklessness and one more reason not to bother come November.

It is better to be strong and wrong than weak and right. This is why they fail.

Squashed: Don’t worry about the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell vote

Why Does John McCain Want To Kill Soldiers?

Why does Susan Collins hate the military so much that she wants them to starve to death while those brave men and women are out there fighting and dying in harms way? How dare she endanger funding for even a second over procedural concerns.

These and other simple frames are things you will never hear from the mouth of The Democrat. They, after all, have the facts on their side. Why, this amendment doesn’t actually even end DADT at all, it simply creates a mechanism by which [blah de blah de blah blah blah]. Why, those little devils actually used the same mechanism to pass DADT when [blah de blah de blah blah].

Repeat after Lemkin: The Facts Do Not Matter.

John McCain hates soldiers. Period. There is no other possible explanation.
When asked to apologize, up the ante (not only does John McCain hate soldiers, I’m fairly sure he is committing an act of treason by blocking this legislation).

It’s this ceaseless inability to identify whatever policy the Democrat prefers and fight for it, whatever may come, that really poisons the electorate. As The Big Dog himself once said:

When people are insecure, they’d rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who’s weak and right

“Weak and right” so perfectly sums the modern Democrat that it really should have made the exciting new website redesign and bumper-sticker that we’re all so pumped up by.
And nothing, nothing depicts the modern Tea Klan GOP’s limbic politics more perfectly than “strong and wrong.”

This is why | Exhibit 4,252

Eager to bridge a daunting enthusiasm gap, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine recited a list of President Barack Obama’s accomplishments Wednesday to an auditorium packed with George Washington University College Democrats.

It came as he unveiled a new website, a new logo and a new slogan for his party: “Change That Matters.”

Wow, this sort of crazy, “out of the box” “thinking” will really “move” the public and reassure them that The Democrat is “here to lead.” Just wait ‘till the GOP sees this unstoppable package of Democratic Fury.

After all, who needs to go around rocking the boat by pushing policy and an eat-shit, GOP legislative calendar built on top of concrete and popular ideas when you can reboot the web design?

This is why they fail.

Can I Finish? Can I Finish?

We can’t let the people who’ve been hit hardest by this recession and who we need to create the jobs that will get us out of it foot the bill for the Democrats’ two-year adventure in expanded government.

–Mitch McConnell

May as well unpack this idiocy, since I know there not a living Democratic strategist or seat-holder that will deign to do so.

We’re apparently meant to believe that those

“who’ve been hit hardest by this recession”

are uniformly located in that >$250k/yr bracket. And, I guess it’s true, Time tells us that:

A wealthy Boston matron has forsworn her weekly massage and canceled the family’s spring skiing trip to Utah.

A West Coast tycoon has sold one of his two yachts. A socially prominent Manhattan couple has switched from vintage to nonvintage champagne, while some of their affluent friends provide only California jug wine—in Waterford decanters. A Los Angeles millionairess, Elsie Pollack, now features chili at her dinner parties; another wealthy hostess has replaced cut flowers with synthetic centerpieces. A Chicago industrialist has turned in his Cadillac for a relatively miserly Mercedes 220 with a diesel engine that gets up to 32 m.p.g.

So they pretty much may as well commit suicide rather than face those living conditions. We can only assume that the lower-income individuals still blessed with jobs are likewise switching to different $70,000 cars with marginally better gas mileage. Or, I guess, we can look at silly things like the proportional tax rates by income, courtesy New York Times:

My God, it’s almost as if the poor (and relatively poor) are and have been bearing most of the weight of running this country (as measured by proportion of income) for a long time now. Who knew?!? We’re also meant to forget they are the group more likely to have lost homes, jobs, and every thing else as a direct result of this downturn. And will be more likely to end up in a lower-wage, lower-opportunity job as a result of long-term unemployment. But pity the very rich. They’ve had to get new cars and switch wines.

Then there’s this:

“the Democrats’ two-year adventure in expanded government.”

Has government increased in size over the last two years? Over the last 50 as a share of GDP? Again, let’s go to the charts, this one courtesy of Econobrowser, showing the non-defense consumption and gross investment (by government) as a share of GDP:

Astounding! How will the Republic survive that kind of Socialistic tidal wave?

This is why they fail.

This is why | Exhibit 4,251

“The Bush tax cuts are sunsetting by design, due to legislation that almost the entire Republican leadership supported,” one senior House Dem leadership aide says. “President Obama and the Democrats want to implement the `Obama tax cuts for the middle class.’ It provides a nice contrast between what the current administration is proposing and what Republicans did in the past.”

“We’re kicking it around,” adds one senior Senate Democratic aide.

You should have been “kicking it around” in January of 2009. Or earlier. What the fuck do you think a legislative majority is for?

This is why they fail.

Honestly, nobody deserves to lose as much as this lot does. Just completely beyond belief.

Maybe they should take a meeting on it and form an exploratory commission to establish the Blue Ribbon Panel of 2012 sometime in early December. Nothing but time, after all.

(h/t The Plum Line)

Boehner’s Deficit

Rep. Boehner called for bipartisan cooperation on two new proposals: First, to pass a spending bill now at the 2008 level and second, to extend the current tax rates for two years.

Lest you think this was just another case of unsubstantiated example-making, rest assured that Boehner not only wants to continue Bush policy, he wants to continue it exactly, right down to the spending levels in place when W finally scuttled out of office. He provides no context as to why, how this helps the budget deficit long-term, or anything else for that matter. I’m seriously not sure he’s aware that those are even issues worth considering.
Left out entirely, of course, is the fact that while spending on a 2008 budget would be a smaller line item in comparison to 2010 or projected 2011 levels, keeping the full tax cuts puts us on the hook for vastly more deficit spending and, of course, spiraling debt. This is, apparently, completely okay. After all, one need not pay for tax cuts, or even budget against them in terms of available revenue. They are free. Always were, always will be.

Even as he says all this stuff, he goes so far as to call it all a “compromise.” Which, Webster’s apparently will tell us is when the GOP gets whatever it wants and the Democrat agrees to give it to them. This, by the way, is also a principle the GOP is on record as being the only acceptable way for Obama to govern: as a seat-warmer until a GOP President can be elected. No other changes allowed, voters be damned. All this with an apparently straight face. And is not challenged by the media or laughed at and mocked by the public at large. Or even by a back-bench Democrat.

This is why we fail.