If you win the NCAA championship, you come to the White House. Well, if you’re a young person and you produce the best experiment or design, the best hardware or software, you ought to be recognized for that achievement, too.
Indeed this election really is all about The Democrat being a secret Socialist…and, as Chait notes: the obvious cure here is a big tax cut for the top 2%. What other possible course of action is even possible with a graph like this?
Earlier this summer, when Helen Thomas said Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and return to Germany, among other places, The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz appeared to share the widespread outrage. The nation’s most prominent media writer noted Thomas’s history of “spewing bias and bile,” and asked, “why wasn’t she reined in earlier?”
So you might have expected that Kurtz would again have been on the case when Martin Peretz, the editor in chief and long-time owner of The New Republic, blogged earlier this month that “Muslim life is cheap.” Peretz added: “I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”
After all, with the country awash in ugly anti-Muslim sentiment, calling out this kind of bigotry is more important now than ever. And yesterday, Peretz, a former Harvard professor, was removed from the list of speakers at an upcoming university event. But, as far as we can tell, Kurtz hasn’t said a word about Peretz’s comments.
Do yourself a favor and click through.
I happen to think that liberals should be open to Social Security cuts as part of a balanced package of deficit reduction.
I guess the name is meant to imply they are really focused on changing the Constitution in every conceivable way. Jonathan Chait helpfully collects the most recent examples:
- The Flag Desecration Amendment
- Balanced budget amendment
- Supermajority to raise taxes
- “Parental rights” amendment – the right of parents to “raise their children as they see fit, introduced last year by Jim DeMint and Peter Hoekstra.
- Human life amendment, banning abortion
- The Federal Marriage Amendment, banning gay marriage
- Believing that the DC Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, Lisa Murkowski proposed an amendment giving the District a single voting representative.
- Last year, Jim DeMint introduced a term limits amendment (3 terms in the House, 2 in the Senate).
- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told The Hill on Monday that Congress “ought to take a look at” changing the 14th Amendment, which gives the children of illegal immigrants a right to U.S. citizenship.
McConnell’s statement signals growing support within the GOP for the controversial idea, which has also recently been touted by Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
Added to the necessary questions queue: To save us some time, which parts of the Constitution do you actually like and wish to preserve?
Jonathan Chait isn’t too worried about consequences of the failure of the Senate’s cap and trade bill to find support:
I don’t think the failure of a bill means the planet will burn. I think it means that the Environmental Protection Agency will take over the issue. This isn’t ideal from an economic point of view. But it is ideal from Congress’s point of view – or, at least, the conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans who hold the deciding votes in Congress.
I agree up to a point. But I think the biggest winners here will be the far right. This sort of quiet expansion of governmental powers plays right into their hands; likewise, they have a base that’s already sure the EPA is right up there with [Godwin’s law alert] the Gestapo, meddling as they do in our water and air and such when the little guy with a massive industrial waste stream is just trying to get by. Likewise, it will be taken as yet more “proof” of the creeping Socialization of everything.
This is usually the moment that sensate individuals take recourse to the facts: why, cap and trade is a Republican idea, and Republicans are the ones stopping it; this means it is they who will suffer the consequences.
To which I say: don’t worry your pretty little head about that; the facts do not matter. This is additionally one of those cases where it is genuinely Bad for the Democrat; this outcome dispirits the base and empowers the opposition.
Were I an optimist, I might say that the administration and its cronies will easily foresee this eventuality, and be ready to combat the inevitable “it’s not enough for the government to take our water and other precious bodily fluids and poison them with fluoride and God knows what other Communistic contaminants, now they want to control the air we breathe” style-nonsense that will inevitably emit from the maw of the far right. Yes, theoretically optimistic me opines that the various trans-limbic individuals inhabiting American polity will furthermore soon begin their own inoculations against such future tropes so that, when said tropes arise, the public will be well prepared to disregard the new, and incompatible information. After all, it is well known that fact-primacy is everything in the current environment.
But I am not an optimist.
I’m relieved to see that [Bill] Kristol draws the line somewhere –I would have thought his line would be “leading an armed coup,” and even then I wouldn’t be totally confident Kristol would side with Obama over the offending general.
Real men don’t need experts to tell them whose asses to kick.
By far the best analysis I’ve seen on this total non-issue.
For the tl;dr sect: right-wingers have built a closed information loop based on false premises re: true cost of healthcare reform with regard to a key pre-existing condition that’s not addressed by the reform package at all (this being the annual “doc fix” legislation). A permanent doc fix, when and if it comes, will either be paid for or not; it won’t alter the cost or savings of the reforms as passed one way or the other.
Jonathan Chait looks over Paul Ryan’s economic proposals, notes their direct and admitted lineage to the pop-philosophy of Ayn Rand, and the worshipful treatment it receives at the hands of many in the right, including Ryan himself. He furthermore folds in the lunatic ravings of Jonah Goldberg (author of Liberal Fascism, which makes the stunning, transitive “discovery” that American liberals like social programs, the Nazi party was made up of National Socialists, thus American liberals are Nazis) and opines:
They’re written by people who don’t understand liberalism and the left at all, and are thus unable to present liberal ideas in terms remotely recognizable to liberals themselves. The specific lack of understanding lies in an inability to grasp the enormous differences between American liberalism and socialism or communism, seeing them as variants on the same basic theme.
[…]
The result is a tendency to see even modest efforts to sand off the roughest edges of capitalism in order to make free markets work for all Americans as the opening salvo of a vast and endless assault upon the market system.
Um, no. We are not talking about any lack of understanding here, unless you count “willful lack of understanding used towards cynical goals” as falling under that rubric. If anything, they understand liberalism all too well. The work of Jonah Goldberg et al. is entirely predicated on making fantastical statements with little or no logical underpinning in the cynical hopes of selling a few books to the choir. Period. No different from Ann Coulter or, for that matter, Glenn Beck, though his brand of hucksterism veers more towards that of a TV preacher hawking prayer rags than actual “political thought” insomuch as you can call the Goldberg-style spew “thought.”
Their weapon is precisely in understanding that the Left will dutifully take these ideas up, just as Chait does here, as though they are seriously offered, based on serious thought, are entirely legitimate points of view, and thus worthy of serious discussions and/or use as the basis of policy negotiations going forward. By doing so, the Left signals that, far from being abject lunacy, these are the points of discussion and arguments for the political class, and thus are the goalposts ever moved rightward.
It’s the logical fallacy of “when did you stop beating your wife?” writ large, and the right uses it relentlessly and with disheartening effectiveness. Say: “Well, the Democrat isn’t a Nazi because…” and you’ve already lost, no matter how the thought ends; you’ve implicitly agreed that there is some reason to make a Democrat/Nazi connection and/but here are the rational arguments against such a thesis. This is horseshit. Induce laughter at the mere idea, the immense foolhardiness of it all, and you’ve won. Same idea goes for Palin, and all the rest of this anti-intellectual crowd. They must find themselves automatically marginalized from “Washington Society” until such time as something rational emerges from their festering maw. More than anything, they crave the attention. That is why it must be removed.
That the progressive or liberal thinkers in this country continue to entertain Goldberg et al. as rational, serious contributors to the dialogue of this country going forward is precisely how you lose. I agree that you can’t just ignore them, but you must never, ever imply that there’s even a grain of truth to what they are saying; they must, therefore, be made objects of derision. Their output is, after all, utter foolishness. You may as well let reports of Bat Boy in the Weekly World News drive Medicaid policy and coverage limits. As Rachel Maddow recently noted:
They are not embarrassed. Charging them with hypocrisy, appealing to their better, more practical, more what’s-best-for-the-country patriotic angels is like trying to teach your dog to drive. It wastes a lot of time, it won’t work, and ultimately the dog comes out of the exercise less embarrassed for failing than you do for trying.
When these folks move to stop efforts to “sand off the roughest edges” they are not moving to compromise. They do not begin with “the best intentions.” They are moving to destroy, utterly, the progressive position and are willing to do so by any means at hand; and, they are not embarrassed. They don’t care how they look in the process, because their treatment thus far has shown that how it looks won’t matter. Not long-term. This is why they never apologize, never compromise, and never even bother to negotiate in good faith. It is because they fear no reprisal of any kind. So there’s no cost to these actions.
You, the progressive, must be prepared to move as ruthlessly. That the left’s first impulse is, inevitably, to find the “serious person” middle-ground is precisely why the country ends up with policies far to the right of the position of most Americans on any given issue. That this policy is then called “centrist” is precisely what is systematically making it harder and harder to even “sand off the roughest edges,” precisely because yesterday’s far-right position is today’s tomorrow’s “sensible, centrist compromise.” And, to add insult to injury, recent history has found Democrats coming to the table already having given away anything resembling a center-left policy; thus, any “compromise” made to push a bill through only results in de facto GOP legislation. Which, of course, they proceed to filibuster anyway.
The Democrats have got to start re-framing everything, every issue, soup to nuts. It won’t come easily, and it won’t be a short term project. Yes, this will also mean doing politically uncomfortable things like prosecuting Bush administration law breakers. But, more to the point at hand, it means screaming out every hour of every day of every week for the next decade or so, relentlessly and unavoidably, the moral, intellectual, and ultimately patriotic bankruptcy of the right. The American people need to be so sick of hearing about this stuff that they want to cry. Then, a few years after that, we’ll find that the polity have quietly and progressively become inoculated to the sort of brazen bullshit routinely peddled today such that they will simply not listen to it anymore, will react negatively and automatically to it, and the various outlets of today’s noise machine will gradually find themselves ignored. Accordingly, the right wing noise machine will cease to exist. Simple demographic shifts in the country will help, but the Left must act as well.
You can see faint instances of this in the last election. Noun/verb/9.11 and several other right-wing memes simply didn’t hold sway over voters anymore; all the while, users of these levers were made to look all the worse as the public finally saw at least some elements of the emperor’s new clothes. Unfortunately, those changes came about organically or accidentally for the most part. The Democrats need to see to it they begin to come about systematically.
This means message discipline. Part of the problem of the W-induced Democratic tidal wave was that it returned the Democrats to control before they had spent sufficient time in the wilderness to hone their message, to feel, deeply, the fierce urgency of now such that, when power came, they acted. Ezra Klein, commenting on Democratic resistance to using reconciliation to finish health insurance reform legislation, notes:
At this point, Democrats have passed health-care reform bills through the two legislative chambers charged with considering them. The president stands ready to sign the legislation. The roadblock is that 41 Republicans have sworn to use a parliamentary maneuver to obstruct any effort to smooth out differences between the bills. It’s pretty clear who’s stepping outside the traditional workings of the process here. Yet Democrats have allowed the other side to make it look like they’re the ones who are bending the rules! It’s completely astonishing.
It’s not astonishing, Ezra, it’s simply how things are done by the Left in D.C. today. Everything, and I mean everything that progressives get up to in this country needs to be aimed at this long term goal: re-framing the tenor of the political discourse in this country. Nothing in the near term matters as much as resetting the frame for political discussion back to where it was pre-Reagan. Nothing. You start with the lowest hanging fruit: jobs, bankers, Wall Street. The GOP literally has no defense to offer in these arenas. Make them pay for it.
Lemkin 