Royal Pains

I’m watching the royal wedding while drinking my morning coffee, enjoying all of the pomp and ceremony and ooohing over Kate’s gorgeous gown and tittering over the Beefeaters (who always make me think of a bottle of gin) and thinking what beautiful children these two are going to have, and I just know I’m going to catch shit from people who think the royal wedding is a silly waste of time. Those people have been all over Twitter and the blogs the past couple weeks, telling everyone the country has more important things to worry about than some superfluous monarch's wedding, and while that may be true I just want to say to you folks: STFU.

I don’t know why we Americans love the British royals but we do. Maybe it’s a chance to live vicariously through our cousins across the pond, maybe it’s the fact that so many British ex-pats live here, maybe it's just our American love of celebrity. But I have no problem setting aside all of the angst and agita and sniping and griping which has consumed us 24/7 and enjoy a real-life fairy tale for a few moments. In fact, I think we need it. We need to turn off the noise and think happy thoughts for a little while.

You know what strikes me watching this spectacle? Seeing hundreds of thousands of people crowd the London streets cheering, waving their Union Jacks, just proud to be British citizens. They’ve got their problems in that country too, but it’s nice to see them turn it all off and enjoy a moment of solidarity. They're jumping in fountains, wearing funny hats, and expressing the pure joy of this historic moment.

Americans had a moment like that not too long ago. It was the inauguration of Barack Obama. Remember that? Remember the millions who descended on Washington D.C. to experience history in person? The millions more who sat glued to their television sets as the nation’s first African American president took the oath of office? Remember how proud we all felt that America had taken this extraordinary step, moved past its painful history and vowed to start fresh?

You know, it’s always been interesting to me that the Glenn Beck types want to bring America back to 9/12 -- the day after we were attacked, when the nation was unified, yes that's true, but it was in fear and sorrow. What does that say about them? If I had to pick a day it would be 1/21 when we were unified by hope and a desire for change.

Since then we’ve been dragged back into the same cesspool of sleazy politics and message manipulation and absurd attacks on the president’s legitimacy not to mention his policies. We've returned to business as usual.

Let’s hope the new royal couple fares better.

All The World’s A Stage

Every day brings a new reason to feel depressed about the state of the nation. For example, let me share with you yesterday’s misery: I read this story in the Scene and was struck by this item:

Perhaps not surprisingly, one Nashville-based lobbyist says paid "grassroots" movements are becoming a part of every major civic project. Indeed, Copeland himself has worked on at least five such high-profile projects in Middle Tennessee in the past five years. Until the fairgrounds, he had done so the usual way in this line of work — covertly.

Here’s a little tip: if you’re paying people, it’s not “grassroots.”

I’m not at all surprised or shocked, at this point I’m basically just numb to the serial manipulations of public opinion which occur on a daily basis.

Our entire system is just so corrupted. Let me run down a few examples:

• It’s been revealed that many of the “real people” who phone in to talk radio programs are actually paid actors reading from scripts.

• Candidates for office have hired temp workers from staffing agencies to hold campaign signs and look like supporters.

• Corporate sockpuppets working for D.C. lobbyists are given phony titles at made-up front groups, then write op-eds, letters, and even make personal appearances to promote their clients' viewpoint.

• Political campaigns pay thousands of dollars to promote certain candidates and positions via paid professional blog commenters.

• Campaigns routinely hire ghost writers to pen Letters To The Editor as “real citizens.”

And this isn’t even including the usual rat-fucking activities by political activists: those doctored and edited James O’Keefe videos, the “serial victims” like Phil Parlock, the fake assassination plots, even the Sarah Palin sock-puppetry. And none of this is new, either. It’s been going on forever.

Yesterday I heard this item in regards to the Nixon tapes:

Everyone knows, for example, that the Watergate scandal came to light with the burglary of the Democratic Party's headquarters by Republican operatives. But there's a tape, says Naftali, where Nixon then plans a break-in of Republican headquarters.

"They would then blame the Democrats for having broken in to the Republican National Committee," Naftali says. "The president discusses how much money it would cost, and how much damage there should be done, and what they should take."

That scheme, and many others hatched by Nixon, never happened, says Naftali, because people in the government said no, "people who received orders that they would not, could not implement.

Of course, that was the Nixon age. Things have gotten far, far worse these days. And I just have to wonder: what is the point of all this message manipulation? To influence “public opinion”? Really?

If every piece of the discourse is suspect, if every “grassroots” movement is assumed to be astroturf, if every “man on the street” is just as likely to be a paid actor as a “real person,” doesn’t that cheapen the entire idea of public opinion? Doesn’t that make public opinion completely worthless as a concept?

So why are y'all wasting your time? And money? What's the damn point?

And who, really, are these machinations directed at? Certainly not us plebes. I have a sneaking suspicion that we've reached a point where y’all are basically just talking over us and at each other. And if that’s the case, can you just get a room already and leave us out of it?

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[UPDATE]::

Here's a Toronto Craigslist ad seeking right-wing commenters to newspaper forums, blogs and Facebook posts. They pay by the hour and "volume of online activity." And then there's this:

Bonuses for controversial postings that heat up a topic or forum thread.

And:

Your writing must be strong, right-wing and use supplied talking points without bogging down in too much detail. You are creating an online persona with a consistent tone. Ideally you can find or make up facts and statistics to stir controversy.

This has me wondering if the ad is for real, or if the ad was placed by a left-winger trying to discredit the right-wing. I'm mean at this point, I can't trust anything.

My commenter who observed that the point is not to move public opinion but make it irrelevant is on to something. But really, when has public opinion ever mattered? It was always a farce. It's not like the powerful class haven't done whatever the hell they wanted anyway.

Top Signs Your Healthcare System Is Broken

5- SPAM e-mail for cheap pharmaceuticals from Canada. Don’t suppose people in Canada get those, do ya? Long ago I wrote about buying a $6 prescription in Norway. With drugs that cheap, it kinda makes spamming people for cheap drugs pointless.

4- Tip jars and fundraisers to pay medical bills. Note to Americans: they don’t have to go begging from friends and neighbors in countries with a functioning healthcare delivery system.

3- This. Note that virtually all of the buyers are connected to healthcare in some way, either as doctors or executives. And we wonder why our healthcare costs keep rising!

2- Medical Tourism. The very existence of an “industry” which exploits the low healthcare costs overseas (and which basically outsources our healthcare) tells you the system is broken. If our system functioned we wouldn’t need to go to Indonesia or Thailand, would we?

(Note the irony that Arthur Laffer, inventor of the infamous “Laffer Curve,” is on the board of one such company.)

1- The Revolving Door. Healthcare executives becoming politicians who then enact public policies that benefit their healthcare companies. Nothing to see here, folks, move along .... it’s true that this fish rots from the head down, which is why there’s such push back on even modest reforms.

Here’s the Tennessee version.

Too many people are getting far too rich off of our current system. American healthcare no longer serves the majority of its customers. Which is precisely why nothing will change without a huge fight.

Capitalism is good for some things, it's good for a lot of things, but it's not good for healthcare and it's not good for prisons. The result is more sick people and more people locked away for no reason. That's just not right.

It Will Be Different This Time, Honest!

I swear, the narrative coming out of Democratic Party circles as Republicans take over the House of Representatives is driving me nuts. The message we’re hearing repeated everywhere is that “now Republicans have to lead,” and “governing is oooh so different from campaigning,” and “put up or shut up”, or as Rep. Anthony Weiner told Face The Nation:

"It's their ship to run now," he said. "That's the responsibility."

No, it’s not! It’s totally not! Because, they’re Republicans, which means they can do whatever the fuck they want and no one ever calls them on it, ever. Like, when Peggy Noonan famously claimed in a 2008 Wall Street Journal op-ed that “At least Bush kept us safe,” which neatly overlooked Nine-Fucking-Eleven, the anthrax attacks, Hurricane Katrina, etcetera, etcetera. Heh heh, we all know that shit was Clinton’s fault!

Or how about the time Karl Rove wrote, also in the Wall Street Journal, that President Obama’s stimulus package is “the biggest peacetime spending increase in American history,” forgetting that it’s not peacetime, asshole, we’re still embroiled in the two wars started under your watch.

In a sane world, someone over at the Wall Street Journal might have pointed these things out before running these pieces to begin with. But this is not a sane world, this is a world where Republicans are allowed to get away with saying and doing whatever they want. Republicans are Teflon, Democrats are glue. When will the Dems figure this out?

You know, you can never, ever say anything about what a budget-buster the Iraq War has been without someone pointing out, “Well, Democrats voted for it toooooo!” Yeah, but they wouldn’t have if a) Republicans weren’t fearmongering 24/7 about smoking guns being mushroom clouds, b) Republicans weren't given free rein to question the patriotism of anyone who had the temerity to doubt the Bush Administration’s war rationale, and c) Bush Administration officials, in collusion with the media, hadn't personally threatened and intimidated war critics like Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson. So get over your damn selves.

Yeah, we all know this routine. As long as there is one liberal within 30 yards of a bad decision, that is the person who is getting the blame. Wake up, Democrats.

Democrats never, ever remember this stuff. They never remember that the media is not liberal, that the networks and cable news bots are infatuated with sniffing Republican shorts and will rarely call Republicans on their lies, spin and revisionist history.

I mean, I don’t recall hearing a lot of media hacks rushing to correct the lies of Rush Limbaugh, who claimed Obama tanked the economy as payback for racism. This only makes sense if you are insane, and also if you forget who was president in fall 2007, when the economy actually crashed. Remember how John McCain was going to suspend his campaign and rush to Washington to fix the economy?

Ah yes, but the Democrats took the Senate in the fall 2006 elections, so everything that happened after that is their fault! Heads we lose, tails they win.

Already today we are seeing Republicans rewrite their brand-new House rules to suit their agenda. You know, like how deficits matter except when they don’t, which would be when pushing for war and tax cuts and pretending that a repeal of healthcare reform won't add $230 billion to the deficit.

Got it, Democrats? It’s always Republican Rules. IOKIYAR is the guiding principle of modern American governance. Republicans can get away with everything and anything, Democrats cannot.

So don’t be pushing this pablum about how “Republicans have to govern now.” No, they don’t! They just have to show up on some Sunday morning bobblehead show and mouth some bumper sticker bromide about Freedom and Real America and What The American People Want and blargheddy blargh. It's not like anyone in the media, save maybe Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, ever holds their feet to the fire.

This will only change if Democrats finally grow a spine and really wise up and make a big stink about this hypocrisy. And that won't happen until they stop caring about what Tweety and David Broder think, and start really pushing back.

But I don't hold out much hope.

The Problem With Pragmatism

Thinking about the scold we Lefties got from President Obama the other day, and the scorn he got from us in return, and the criticism bloggers and journalists are heaping upon each other as they pick a side, it all seems to boil down to one thing: When it comes to policy-making in modern-day Washington, you either think something is better than nothing, or you think nothing is better than something.

If, like President Obama and some of our Democrats, you think something is better than nothing, then compromises on the tax bill and healthcare reform and the stimulus package and Afghanistan and GITMO are acceptable, pragmatic actions. But if you take the long view, then such pragmatism does more harm than good. Sometimes, nothing is better than something.

Or, to put it another way: if you have a blister on your thumb, then amputating your arm is definitely a radical, foolhardy move. Unless you’re a masochist, you will opt for a Band-Aid instead. But say you’re Aron Ralston, and you aren’t dealing with a blister but instead are trapped beneath a boulder. In that case a Band-Aid is useless and foolish; amputating your arm to save your life is the pragmatic, albeit drastic, solution.

The trick in politics is knowing when you have a blister and when you are trapped by a boulder. And some of us progressive-types are saying the Democrats are trapped by a boulder right now. What’s at stake isn’t simply a piece of legislation here and there or even an election or two, it’s the entire legacy of the New Deal. And perhaps the sooner everyone wakes up to that reality, the better.

Three weeks before President Obama threw a bucket of cold water on the liberal base, James K. Galbraith articulated the conundrum that is the Obama presidency in a speech ominously titled, “Whose Side Is The White House On?”

The historian and economist said:

On the topics that I know most about, the administration is beyond being a disappointment. It’s beyond inept, unprepared, weak, and ineffective. Four and again two years ago, the people demanded change. As a candidate, the President promised change. In foreign policy and the core economic policies, he delivered continuity instead. That was true on Afghanistan and it was and is true in economic policy, especially in respect to the banks. What we got was George W. Bush’s policies without Bush’s toughness, without his in-your-face refusal to compromise prematurely. Without what he himself calls his understanding that you do not negotiate with yourself.

[...]

The president deprived himself of any chance to develop a narrative from the beginning by surrounding himself with holdover appointments from the Bush and even the Clinton administrations: Secretary Geithner, Chairman Bernanke, and, since we’re here at Harvard, I’ll call him by his highest title, President Summers. These men have no commitment to the base, no commitment to the Democratic Party as a whole, no particular commitment to Barack Obama, and none to the broad objective of national economic recovery that can be detected from their actions.

This is all correct, and there’s more ... lots more. Go read Galbraith’s entire speech. He outlines point-by-point how the Obama Administration failed by advocating weak policies, by campaigning as a man of the people then siding with the banks and Wall Street.

The question is, what do we do now? Where do we go from here? Galbraith and others believe we are now lodged behind a massive, conservative boulder, and Band-Aids -- pragmatic, legislative compromises -- do more harm than good. If the Democratic Party is going to continue to exist as a political force, then they need to start showing they stand for something. That may mean some legislative failures to score some ideological wins.

Stupid? Maybe, if you’re talking about some legislative initiatives. But the country faces huge challenges right now. Big battles require big actions. And with every compromised, pragmatic vote, Democrats saddle themselves with Republican baggage. They lose the argument. George W. Bush launched his disastrous, budget-busting war of choice in Iraq, but Democrats voted for it too, and there we are. Learn that lesson, Democrats.

In two years no one will remember that the Republicans were being really mean on tax cuts. They’ll just remember that when the Democrats had majorities in the House and Senate and the White House, they gave millionaires a tax cut that isn’t offset by spending cuts. So the Republicans will also remind everyone that Dems added 900 bazillion jillion dollars to the deficit, because that’s how our narrative works. Republicans rule the media, and I promise you we’ll suddenly be a nation of fiscal hawks again when it comes time to spend money on things like Social Security and Medicare and social safety nets.

That’s how it works when you have one political party bent on destroying the greatest achievement of another political party.

Here’s Galbraith’s take:

What is at stake in the long run? Two things, mainly, in my view. First, it seems to me that we as progressives need to make an honorable defense of the great legacies of the New Deal and Great Society — programs and institutions that brought America out of the Great Depression and bought us through the Second World War, brought us to our period of greatest prosperity, and the greatest advances in social justice. Social Security, Medicare, housing finance — the front-line right now is the foreclosure crisis, the crisis, I should say, of foreclosure fraud — the progressive tax code, anti-poverty policy, public investment, public safety, and human and civil rights. We are going to lose these battles– get used to it. But we need to make an honorable fight, to state clearly what our principles are and to lay down a record which is trustworthy for the future.

Beyond this, bold proposals are what we should be advancing now; even when they lose, they have their value. We can talk about job programs; we can talk about an infrastructure bank; we can talk about Juliet Schor’s idea of a four-day work week; we can talk about my idea of expanding Social Security and creating an early retirement option so that people who are older and unemployed or anxious to get out of the labor force can leave on comfortable terms, and so create job openings for younger people who, as we’ve heard today, are facing very long periods of extremely aggravating and frustrating unemployment; we can talk about establishing a systematic program of general revenue sharing to support state and local governments, we can talk about the financial restructuring we so desperately need and that we’ll have to have if we are going to have a country which has a viable private credit system and in which large financial power is not constantly dictating the terms of every political maneuver.

We are not going to get these things, but we should have a clearly defined program so that people know what they are. And then, frankly, as was said earlier today, said most elegantly by Jeff Madrick, in the long run we need to recognize that the fate of the entire country is at stake. Its governance can’t be entrusted indefinitely to incompetents, hacks, and lobbyists. Large countries can and do fail, they have done so in our own time. And the consequences are very grave: drastic declines in services, in living standards, in life expectancies, huge increases in social tension, in repression, and in violence. These are the consequences of following through with crackpot ideas such as those embodied in the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission, as Jeff Madrick again outlined, such notions as putting arbitrary limits on the scale of government, or arbitrary limits on the top tax rate affecting the wealthiest Americans.

Yes. Yes, yes and more yes. Dear God, Democrats, but yes.

As the old addage goes, if you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything. Dear God, Democrats, quit falling for anything! Stand for something! You may not get it but you will have gained something else: your spine. Your right to Leadership. And you will have defended your legacy.

You will need these things moving forward. Galbraith’s speech is sobering, even depressing. He does not paint a picture of lollipops, puppies and rainbows. He says, indeed, that “we are heading now into a very dark time.” I believe he’s right.

Someone -- I don’t remember who, I think it may have been a commenter over at Balloon Juice -- pointed out that what people are really angry about is the realization that Washington is irreparably broken. Obama came to Washington promising to change the way things are done and he has failed miserably. With both houses of Congress and the White House, people hoped that partisan gridlock and party-over-country politics were history.

That didn’t happen because it was already too late. We can’t fix things the old-fashioned way. We need to wake up and smell the oligarchy, adjust our sails, and move forward accordingly.

This Play Never Changes

Ronald Reagan, back when he was a card-carrying member of Hollywood's Liberal Elite, railed against corporatist Republicans profiting from the exploitation of working people. Change a few words here and there and you have a campaign speech from the 2010 midterms.

The more things change, the more they don’t. Our political rhetoric has reached stasis. Right and left now cancel each other out.

The cast of characters may change but the play remains the same.

The Pause That Refreshes

Well, that was interesting.

I really did take a month off and let me tell you, it was fabulous. I read. I wrote. I read some more, and I wrote some more. I rested. I walked, and I ran. And I cooked. I took a trip to New York City, and basically enjoyed life for a month.

And I unplugged from our political discourse, as much as it is possible in this day and age to do such a thing. I kept abreast of the basic news but politics no longer consumed my life. I was a much happier camper as a result.

I’ve said this before, like a thousand gazillion times, and my hiatus hasn’t changed my mind: 99.9% of the bullshit that happens in our discourse is totally unimportant. The latest Sarah Palin Face-Tweet, the newest intolerant Glenn Beck rant, the thing that has Ed Schultz’s boxers in a twist or put the Great Orange Satan in a tizzy does not, in the grand scheme of things, matter one iota. It’s noise and diversion. It’s manipulation, and unhooking from the madness is a wonderful thing.

We’ve been here before. Nothing is new, and yet everything is different. Our traditional news media has failed us, following rabbit trails like the "TSA outrage” story that wasn’t. Can I tell you people how disappointed I was not to get groped by the TSA when I flew to New York over Thanksgiving? The body-scanner machines at the Nashville airport weren’t even in use when we traveled. There were no lines, no scenes, no outraged travelers waving copies of the Constitution.

Ah well, it’s not the first time the media has failed us. William Randolph Hearst is the antecedent to Rupert Murdoch, after all. “Remember The Maine” foreshadowed Saddam’s WMDs. How interesting that Chandra Levy’s real killer was convicted in the same month we had another phony media-created story. Gary Condit’s career was ruined by the same yellow journalism hungry for blood which has always reared its ugly head. And yet, justice for Chandra was served, the media be damned.

Time marches on. The media pathetically clings to its outdated “cyber-Monday” narrative, useless as a reflection of modern buying habits but very useful for online retailers. With my inbox flooded with dozens of cyber-Monday discount offers, I asked that eternal question: is the news media in service to commerce, or is it the other way around? I still haven’t a clue. Regardless, it’s money which drives our narrative, not politics. It’s not that the media it too liberal or too conservative, it’s that it’s too profit-oriented. Same as it ever was.

It’s all so much nonsense. Every president since George Washington has been accused of doing outrageous things, undermining the Republic, threatening our way of life. And yet we’re still here.

It’s true that every utterance is amplified to the hundred-millionth degree by the megaphone that is the modern media. But we have a choice. You can choose not to listen to talk radio, watch cable news, surf the blogs or believe the bullshit e-mail someone forwarded to you.

I’m so old I remember when Eisenhower was considered to be a tight-assed right-winger, yet liberals today quote his 1961 warnings about the military-industrial complex as if they were the words of Noam Chomsky. We can get riled up at the thought of BP-apologizer Rep. Joe Barton chairing the House Energy & Commerce committee but that won’t stop the juggernaut that is green energy investment. Fox News bobbleheads can spread the seeds of doubt about climate change all they want, News Corp. still has a corporate carbon-neutral initiative that would make the American Petroleum Institute’s head explode. So really, none of this shit matters. What will happen is gonna happen.

I’m not entirely back yet. I started on a project in November which I want to finish. I'm enjoying life outside of blogging. I may check back with y’all later, though.

Happy Holidays.

Only In New York: Santas Dancing In Midtown Manhattan

Government Is Not A Business

Can we please, pretty please, retire that tired old canard that “government needs to be run like a business”? I absolutely despise that little piece of conventional wisdom which politicians repeat each election. It’s bullshit.

Government cannot run like a business because it’s a completely different entity.

As the Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik writes today:

It would be obvious to any business person who had spent a day in public administration that government and business are antithetical. That's not a flaw in the system. Government exists to take on precisely those tasks the private sector can't or won't do.

These include caring for the penniless; maintaining common amenities such as parks, schools, and universities; and creating infrastructure with broad value but unspecific beneficiaries, such as freeways and the Internet (which in coming days undoubtedly will be used by many readers to inform me by e-mail that they don't see how government serves any purpose).

Most of these functions can't be made to "pay" in the sense that a business strategy does. But they can be neglected or privatized only at great cost to society.

Thank you! Jeeebus, nothing annoys me more than hearing how government needs to be run like a business. No, it doesn’t! It can’t! I remember working for a Big Government Agency tasked with operating a National Recreation Area and being told we had to apply for-profit business practices to what we did. I’m sorry, but just how is that supposed to work? How do you make money break even off of maintaining hiking and mountain biking trails, campgrounds, and wildlife habitat? Especially when you have small businesses in the local town complaining about unfair competition from said Big Government Agency? If we operated like a business, then what would be left for the real businesses to do? It was laughable idea. We ended up having to explain that no amount of T-shirt and baseball cap sales and hunting permits would ever make us turn a profit break even. [Note: I hit send too soon on this one, but of course all government is not-for-profit -- another reason why it can't operate as a business. We weren't tasked with making a profit but they did want us to try to break even and they gave us a few years to do it which was just stupid.]

Government and business are separate entities. We need both to function as a democracy. Trying to turn one into the other is what has led to disasters like Soviet-style Communism and Mussolini-style fascism.

Another problem, which I've discussed elsewhere, is that we do not -- can not -- put a monetary value on things that are quite literally priceless. Things like watershed, clean air, clean water or the soil erosion protection which forests provide. As I wrote last spring:

But it’s bigger than that. We also don’t factor in the value of what we’ve lost when we destroy those mountains and streams. We don’t consider that a forest isn’t just a piece of land or something pretty to look at or even the economic value of its timber. It’s a living system and it performs a function. Forests and streams provide water storage, flood management, even reduce the severity of floods. Trees take the Co2 and pollutants out of the atmosphere and replace it with oxygen, earth’s natural breathing mechanism provided to us, free of charge.

And here’s the thing: we haven’t invented a substitute for these natural living systems! When they’re gone, we’re all screwed. We have no air-scrubbers, no one has created the photosynthesis machine. The reason we can’t put a value on this is because it is truly priceless. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

I was writing about the environment but there are a whole bunch of non-easily quantifiable things. The education of your work force. The health of the population. The knowledge and experience of our senior citizens. Anyone who wants to be governor and tells you they plan to operate the state like a business is obviously not factoring in a whole bunch of things for which we cannot attach a dollar value because they are literally priceless.

And it's hard for me to take these business sector politicians seriously. So many of them have little respect for what government does anyway -- many of them don't even vote. As Hiltzik wrote:

Engagement in democracy starts with participation in the ballot box. That's the real significance of Whitman's and Fiorina's well-documented failures to vote over the years. This isn't a "mistake," as Whitman likes to call it. A mistake is getting the address of the polling place wrong, once. Not bothering to vote year after year? That's contempt for the very concept of democracy.

I couldn't agree more. Electing to office someone who not only holds the very concept of democracy in contempt but also misunderstands the function and role of government is the worst sort of mistake.

Jon Stewart & The Celebrity Ball

Wow. How the hell did that happen?

How did Jon Stewart become the only liberal who can get the national media’s attention?

For years we Lefties have decried how the media ignores liberals, liberal rallies, liberal messages. Hundreds of thousands of people protest the Iraq War and the media can barely bother to mention it. The national news media descends on Nashville’s Tea Party convention -- one reporter for every three conventioneers -- and reports dominate the news cycle for over a week. But Netroots Nation draw twice as many attendees? Crickets. Glenn Beck’s D.C. rally gets covered ad nauseum, while the One Nation rally a few weeks later is barely noticed. There’s wall-to-wall coverage of the CPAC convention every year, but liberal conferences are ignored.

Heck, even CNN has cut away from President Obama’s events, though they covered every campaign appearance by President Bush.

With this in mind it’s been really interesting to see the mainstream media’s embrace of Jon Stewart. Obama’s appearance on The Daily Show dominates the news this morning -- even getting covered on my local news stations. The Stewart/Colbert rally has been covered in the national newspapers for days. What all this tells me is that, at least in the eyes of the national news media and punditry, liberals have a leader and his name is Jon Stewart.

As an observer of our politics and media I have to say I find this fascinating. How did a New York comedian get elevated to “influencer” status -- beyond even the President of the United States, or past presidents like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter? Is it because Stewart is an entertainer, like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck? Does our media pay more attention to entertainers than they do policy makers and politicians? It would appear so.

I mean, thank God. Thank God the Left finally has someone who can get the attention of the corporate media because, as I’ve said often enough, it seems like most of the time we’re shouting into the wind. And unlike Limbaugh and Beck, whose unyielding defense of all things conservative often requires them to stretch into absurd ideological contortions, Stewart calls bullshit on the Democrats as often as he criticizes the right.

I just find this fascinating. If I were ever to interview Jon Stewart I would want to ask him if he’s even aware of his influencer status, how the hell he thinks this happened, and what he plans to do with this responsibility.

I also don’t get liberal talkers such as Bill Press who have criticized Stewart and Stephen Colbert for holding their rally right before the election, as if everyone who is going to be on the National Mall could instead spend the weekend knocking on doors and phone banking. That just misses the point, doesn’t it? The point is the very last thing the folks attending this rally would do is spend their weekend campaigning. They’d be attending kids’ soccer games and watching college football.

No, this rally is garnering national media attention -- finally we get some fucking attention! Thank you, Jon Stewart, for accomplishing what actual door knockers/phone bankers and other activist-types have failed to achieve. You're getting the word out. And this can only be a good thing.

This tells me something important. I guess what we Lefties have missed is that, basically, this is how it works these days. If you want the media’s attention you have to be an entertainer. You have to dress up in funny costumes, say crazy things, and basically put on a show. I don't mean a street theater show, which liberal groups like Code Pink have been doing forever. I mean a real show.

So now that we know this, I expect every liberal gathering, press conference, rally, policy conference, legislative battle, candidates' forum, etc. to be an entertainment extravaganza. This should be easy for us, we apparently specialize in all things Hollywood after all. Think about it: the Tea Party has Pat Boone and Ted Nugent. We've got pretty much everyone else. This should be a no-brainer.

So come on, Liberals. It's show time. Want cap-and-trade legislation? A public option in your healthcare bill? Net neutrality, Wall Street reform, and an end to the endless wars? Then get the best writers you have in a room and storyboard it. Write the theme song. Cast it as you would a blockbuster movie. Roll it out with all of the promotion of a new Bruce Springsteen or Madonna album. Do it like they did in "Wag The Dog.”

I mean, apparently this is the secret. This is what it takes. We can do this.

Holy Crap We’re Living In A Tim Robbins Movie

I’m not really sure what prompted John Cole of Balloon Juice to dig through the memory hole and find this trailer for the 1992 Tim Robbins political satire “Bob Roberts” but it has caused me great gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair. Well, not really, but watch it and tell me aren’t looking at the modern-day Tea Party:



Here’s the thing. I remember going to that movie with a girlfriend, and sorta liking it and sorta thinking ... “Naaah! Too outrageous! Too crazy!”

Seriously. We both were sort of stunned by it for a second, especially the ending (which I won’t divulge here for any who haven’t seen it), and then brushed it aside as waaaay too unrealistic. I mean, especially the whole Revolutionary War costume stuff, which I recall was extremely hilarious and decidedly over the top. No way in hell anyone would march around in tricorn hats and knee britches outside of Colonial Williamsburg, right?

And oh my God. All it took was 18 years and the Gingrich Revolution and here we are. Holy crap. We’re all living in a Tim Robbins movie!

I decided to do some digging in the memory hole myself and see what folks said about the film back then. Here’s the New York Times’ review:

"BOB ROBERTS," written and directed by Tim Robbins, who also plays the title role, is a very funny, sometimes prescient satire of American politics, and of the comparatively small, voting portion of the electorate that makes a Bob Roberts phenomenon possible. Recent events haven't completely overtaken the movie, but they do indicate just how wild a satire must be these days to remain on the cutting edge of the outrageous.

In the person of Mr. Robbins, whose performance is a career-defining achievement, Bob Roberts is a smoothly ingratiating, guitar-playing businessman, a self-made millionaire who wants to be the next United States Senator from Pennsylvania. He's good-looking, but in the way of a familiar television personality, not of a major movie star. His charisma doesn't intimidate.

He's young, healthy and sincere. More important, he appropriates gestures and language associated with 1960's protest movements and uses them in the cause of his own brand of 1990's right-wing rabble-rousing. He calls himself a "rebel conservative." He's the kind of guy who answers a young fan's letter by cautioning her not to do crack, adding, "It's a ghetto drug."

Welcome to the modern Tea Party. So desperate for some cultural relevance that they’ve appropriated the words, language and actions of the ‘60s protest movement, the most culturally revolutionary movement this nation has produced.

But there’s more:

When Bob strums his guitar and sings such upbeat numbers as "My Land," "Times Are Changin' Back" and "Wall Street Rap," he is selling family values and patriotism and assuring his supporters that, in effect, it's their duty to "take, make and win by any means," even if they can't. Among other things, Bob understands the appeal of an ultra-conservative political and economic policy even to those who have nothing: anticipating the day when they do have it all, they want to make sure they will be able to keep it.

Let me remind everyone that this is the New York Times review. The New York Times talking about the "comparatively small" voting block that votes against their own interests and adheres to these fringe right wing ideas. Eighteen years ago they called the scenario presented in this film a "wild" satire. Heh.

And it's the same New York Times which, 18 years later, now covers the Tea Party as a serious political movement, not a piece of corporate astroturf political theater starring that same “comparatively small, voting portion of the electorate” who are easily manipulated because they’re scared and the economy sucks. What was once written off as a wild satire is now Very Serious front page news.

So all of this time I’ve been yammering on about how the battle is on the cultural front, and here we have this movie from 18 years ago predicting exactly where we are today, and not a damn thing has changed save one thing: the crazy is now mainstream. What was once satire and cartoonish is now Very Serious political thought. Crazy.

If nothing else, it really illustrates how long we’ve been in this political morass. You young kids, I hate to disillusion you, but consider this an inspiration. Clearly my generation fucked things up and didn’t have the brains or guts to change the political landscape, even though apparently we were given ample warning. So, it’s up to you.

And to the Tea Party I have this to say: apparently, we Hollywood Liberal Elites have been making fun of you guys for nearly 20 years. Suck on that!

And to Tim Robbins and the Weinstein brothers and anyone else involved in this film, I would like to remind you: in two years we have a presidential election. And if you don't re-release this film on Blu-Ray DVD in a special 20 year Anniversary Edition with commentary and analysis and Tea Party references and all that, then I am personally revoking your Dirty Fucking Hippie Membership in the Hollywood Liberal Elite.

Just sayin'.

Making A Statement

Damn, y’all. I don’t watch The Simpsons but I read about Banksy doing their opening sequence and ... well ... damn. Watch it for yourselves:



Kind of the perfect illustration of what I was saying when I wrote this about how to change the world:

If voting doesn’t work, and boycotts don’t work, what will? Increasingly I’m convinced that the only thing that will change the world, indeed the only thing that ever has, is the creative arts. Music, literature, art, film: these things hit people on an emotional level, they can transform one’s view of the world and engage people in a way that politics does not.

I’m increasingly convinced that this is correct.

More on the segment here.

Silent No More

Yeah I know the “silent no more” meme is a favorite Teanut rallying cry but we Lefties find it amusing considering how conservatives basically rule our national discourse. Glenn Beck farts and the media rushes to cover it; Breitbart pulls some vicious lies out of thin air and organizations lose their funding, people lose their jobs, and the national news media takes it as gospel truth.

So while we DFH’s don’t seem to have the same credibility or news-making ability as the folks on the right, we can eat least talk to our neighbors, colleagues, coworkers, etc.

And it seems that we are. I’m hearing more and more stories like this one and this one. John Cole writes:

I made a vow, though. In the interest of politeness, I’ve ignored this stuff in public before. I figure I will do my ranting online. But not any more. Any time I am confronted with this nonsense in the future, I am aggressively and publicly challenging these idiots. I can’t take it any more. The damage Rupert Murdoch and those like him have done to this country needs to be countered.

Good advice to us all. Don’t be afraid to speak out, liberals. Don’t be afraid to rock the boat a little, to make things a little uncomfortable around the dinner table every now and then. Don’t be afraid to “reply all” to that ridiculous e-mail your relatives sent about Michelle Obama banning Christmas because sure as God made little green apples, it will reappear on a wackadoodle politician’s lips a year later.

We’ve been too polite -- to our detriment. We figured no one would take the Glenn Becks and Michelle Bachmanns seriously. We were wrong. Use your voice, liberals.

We Live In Strange Times

Here’s a very strange scenario. I caught an interview with Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-MI, on the radio yesterday. It appears that there has never been a time in U.S. history when the unemployment rate has exceeded 7% and the U.S. Congress has failed to pass an extension of unemployment benefits. Never.

We are now in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, with unemployment still near 10%. Amazingly, it appears our U.S. Senate may do what it has never done: fail to pass an extension of unemployment benefits. Of course, Republicans are filibustering the bill and of course Democratic Senator Ben Nelson, whose state has an enviable unemployment rate of 4.5%, has joined it.

This is very odd. Why would the Senate do this? Nebraska’s modest unemployment rate notwithstanding, there are unemployed people all over the country: red states, blue states -- even that 4.5% in Nebraska. With an election a few months down the road, why would you want to look like you aren’t responsive to the people in your state who are out of work? Why would you want to keep these people from having money to spend, when the economy depends on people spending money?

I’ve heard the argument that Republicans want the economy to keep sucking so they can blame the Democrats and the Obama Administration. The worse things are for Americans, the better Republicans look; at least, so goes the argument. And I realize not everyone pays attention to this stuff. But if you’re out of work you’re surely paying attention and if your unemployment benefits have run out, you surely know who is trying to hammer out an extension and who is blocking it.

For years no matter what your party affiliation it was generally deemed a good idea to at least put up the pretense of caring about the people in your district and state. You wanted to look like you “felt their pain,” that you understood where people were hurting and you were there to help. This is why every time unemployment rose above 7% Congress was quick to pass an extension of unemployment benefits.

These days we have a disconnect. For some reason, Congress doesn’t feel like there is a penalty to be paid for their inaction. Even if it were true that Republicans could mine the misery of the unemployed into electoral gold in November, what makes them think they won’t suffer some of the same blowback? If it’s true that politicians are facing an “anti-incumbent” backlash, and with Tea Partiers trying to oust less pure conservatives from the ranks of the Republican Party, wouldn’t you want to look like you are concerned about people in your state who are out of work?

I don’t get it. But hey, maybe someone can explain it to me. And I’m not the only one asking, too. Yesterday, Bob Herbert wrote:

What’s needed is the same sense of urgency about helping struggling families and putting people back to work as the Bush and Obama crowds showed when the banks were about to go bust. That sense of urgency is always missing when it’s ordinary people who are in trouble.

[...]

With our help, the banks and Wall Street have done fine. Better than they had any right to expect. It’s the ordinary folks outside the casino, in the real world, who are still in desperate need of help. But in a society of, by and for the rich, that help will be a long time coming.

I wonder if it’s as simple as that? This is the plutocracy argument, that a government of and by the wealthy is also only for the wealthy. Historically, times such as these are followed by populist surges and reforms. I’m just wondering if we’re there yet? The Tea Party, for all the media attention, seems bent only on reforming the Republican Party, and not in a good way: these far-right candidates support policies that further establish the plutocracy, not dismantle it.

True populism, it seems, is dead. Where are the "ordinary people"? The ones Washington has been giving the middle finger to for the past few months? Clearly there is some feeling that the "ordinary Americans" hurting right now won't lash out in some way, either through civil unrest or at the voting booth. Washington seems to think that it can ignore the needs of ordinary Americans for some reason, and I really don't get it.

It defies logic.

In Which I Tell Digby & Atrios That They Are Wrong

Good Lord but there’s nothing I hate more than having to defend someone like Sharron Angle or Sarah Palin. I find them both repugnant. I do not support them in any way. But dammit people, when you attack someone’s religion out of your own secular ignorance, I just have to say something.

Look, I tried to hold my tongue last week when everyone chortled on the Twitters about how Palin said we need to pray for Divine Intervention to stop the oil spill. I was really hoping the Sharron Angle abortion-rape thing would blow over but then Digby did this post which got picked up all over the lefty blogosphere, from Atrios to Think Progress to the Huffington Post.

Sigh.

So here I go. Here’s the quote, pulled from a radio interview Angle gave back in January, in which she explains why she is against abortion even in the case of rape or incest:

MANDERS: So, in other words, rape and incest would not be something?

ANGLE: You know, I’m a Christian, and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things.

This has caused Digby and other liberal bloggers, people whom I respect and admire greatly and agree with pretty much 99.9% of the time, to raise the red flag:

On the other hand, Angle seems to see conception by rape and incest as something God purposefully directed and so the results of which are something the birthing vessel must embrace. That's a very disturbing point of view no matter where you come out on the issue.

This prompted Atrios to write:

But having the view that raped and impregnated women are all part of God's plan, well, interesting God you've got there.

Oh for Chrissakes, people. That’s not what she’s saying, okay? That’s not what Christians mean when they say “God has a plan,” and “have a little faith,” alright? I swear, are you folks being intentionally obtuse for the sake of scoring a cheap political point or are you really just that out of touch with the faith community that you don’t know what Christians mean when they say “God has a plan”?

I'm going with the latter only because this reminds me of the liberal uproar when Sarah Palin said people should "pray that there is a plan and that this plan is God’s will" regarding the Iraq War. Somehow that got twisted into “the Iraq War is God’s plan," but Christians know that’s not what she meant.

Look, no one is saying it's God’s plan for war or for a woman to be raped, or for anyone to be sexually molested. What they are saying is that even though these horrible things may happen, God has a plan to pull us through. God will make it right. God will create a blessing where humans create tragedy. That is what it means to say “God has a plan” and “have a little faith.” Every Christian regardless of their political persuasion knows what that means. Twisting the words around to make them horrible does not help your cause, it just makes you look like asses. It makes you look intolerant. And ignorant.

Look, liberals, I love you. I’m one of you. But for crying out loud, just leave the Christianity stuff alone, OK? When someone explains the religious basis for their policy views, how about saying, “your religious views may inform your views about national policy but I do not share your religious views. Therefore, I do not want you imposing them on me in the form of laws.”

Let me put it another way. When Sharron Angle says that she’s a Christian and believes God has a plan and people just need to have faith when something awful like rape or incest happens, it’s perfectly acceptable to respond with, “that is an excellent reason why you personally would not choose to have an abortion if you were raped or sexually molested. However, that argument does not give you the right to tell me what to do when faced with the same situation. You cannot force me to share your faith.”

I'm a political progressive and liberal Christian, and I do feel there is some truth to the conservative Christian lament that liberals are intolerant of Christianity. Honestly, I don’t know what it is with liberals and evangelical Christianity, because everyone was perfectly able to defend the Liberation theology of the black church during the whole Rev. Wright kerfuffle, and everyone is perfectly able to defend Islam and every other religion out there. But as soon as evangelicals express a belief about their faith people seem to go off the rails.

This is something liberals need to examine carefully because there are a growing number of liberals who are also people of faith. The “Moral Majority” is dead, there’s a whole generation of evangelical Christian kids who care about things like climate change and poverty and ending war, and attacks on peoples’ religious views to score a political point does not build a dialogue with these folks. It builds a wall.

I suspect part of the issue is most secular folks aren’t fluent in “Christianese,” the language of evangelical Christians honed over years of Bible study and Vacation Bible School and Christian radio and twice weekly church services and whatnot. I spent years in Christian music so I know what Christainese is. Heck, Michael W. Smith wrote a song about it. And look, going on the radio and saying "I believe God has a plan, which is why I'm against abortion" is a perfectly normal thing for a Christian to do, and it's a perfectly normal thing for a politician pandering to Christian voters to do.

Twisting that into "A-Ha! You believe God wants women raped!" is just wrong. It's bullshit. And if it's pissing me off, then it's got to be pissing off other people of faith, people with whom progressives actually have a lot in common.

So cut it out.

Things I Don’t Give A Crap About

• I don’t care that Obama went golfing over the weekend because unlike some previous presidential persons I could name, he’s actually working when he’s not on the links and getting shit done, like wresting $20 billion from a corporate polluter to help people affected by an ecological disaster. So zip it.

• I don’t care that Tony Hayward went yachting over the weekend because, for crying out loud, he’s a rich asshole and that’s what rich assholes do: they go yachting. Though, just as an aside, I am amused that his boat is named “Bob.”

• I don’t care that some Swede said he cared about “the little people” when he obviously meant to say he cared about “the little guy.” He’s not a native English speaker and it’s not the first time a foreigner mangled an American euphemism. The whining and moaning about that one made us all look like assholes, and the last thing we needed was for the establishment media to join in the fray, pointing their fingers and laughing. People can snicker about this stuff all they want but that doesn’t mean the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, CBS News, etc. need to blast it all over the place.

• I don’t care that Sarah Palin told people to pray for God to stop the oil spill. President Obama basically said the same thing in his Oval Office speech last week. Frankly, if someone wants to pray for some Divine Intervention over this disaster, where’s the harm? While you’re at it, light some incense, say a chant, visualize a pink bubble, sacrifice a goat, howl at the moon, or do whatever it is your particular belief system dictates. I think it’s pretty obvious that we need all the help we can get at this point.

Now that we have that cleared up, here’s what I do care about. I care that our discourse is so unbelievably stupid in this country. I care that we keep focusing on the trivial shit instead of trying to figure out how to solve our problems. I don’t happen to think there’s a national obsession with politics but our pundits apparently do. Yes that's their job but lately they seem to have gone off the deep end and anyway, as Adam Nagourney pointed out over the weekend, we're all pundits now. Maybe instead of spending so much time worrying about the political process we should be worrying a little more about what policies are needed.

Today John Cole writes:

Can you imagine going through life with all this artificial nonsense dictating your decision making process? I like those shoes, but do they make me look “weak?” I really would like some spicy mustard on my sandwich, but is it too “elitist?” My employee is a mouthy little shit who gets the job done, but do I have to fire him to show I am “tough” even if doing so hurts my business? Sure, I’d like to go to the opera, but will that make me look like a pussy?

He’s writing about all of the McChrystal nonsense, and the growing meme that Obama has to fire McChrystal not because of anything related to the mission in Afghanistan but for political reasons: that not firing him “says something” -- to whom, I’m not sure. I guess to the pundits who increasingly feel like they were the ones elected. Hey guess what, Chris Matthews: I know there are some Republicans who send a shiver down your leg at the mere thought of them running for president in 2012 but for crying out loud that's two years away and in the meantime there's some actual governing that people are trying to do.

We have some serious stuff to work on, people. We need to figure out how we’re going to get off the oil tit, how we’re going to put people back to work, how we’re going to extract ourselves from the stupid, expensive wars the last Administration committed us to.

The endless yammering over superficialities is not helpful or productive.

It's Always Good News For Republicans

Picking apart the media narrative generated by yesterday’s election has been interesting, to say the least. According to the media gatekeepers, Rand Paul’s win shows the power of the Tea Party, while the success of progressive candidates supported by MoveOn simply shows voters’ “anti-Washington mood.”

Neat how that works. Indeed, yesterday’s election was a big win for MoveOn candidates. Don’t expect our media to point that out, though.

In fact, the “liberal” NPR struggles mightily to avoid stating the obvious:

It's hard to make the case that Specter's defeat in Pennsylvania is a sign Democrats want to move the party further to the left.  Thirty years in office, mostly as a Republican, made it tough for him to sell himself to his new party.  Ultimately, it was really about Arlen Specter.  And voters apparently had had enough.

Really? How do you figure? Pennsylvania Democrats wanted a real Democratic candidate, not a party-switching Republican. That certainly doesn’t speak to voters wanting to move rightward.

Remember how just last week the New York Times told us that the battle for Jack Murtha’s congressional seat was the real midterm bellweather? Democrat Mark Critz won that race handily, which today the Times refers to as simply "a bright spot" in a wave of anti-incumbent sentiment. Hmm. Can't help but think what the headline would be today had Critz been a Tea Party candidate.

Meanwhile, Rand Paul is already using words like “mandate” to describe his victory in a party primary. Interestingly, a solid string of Democratic wins is apparently not sexy enough for our mainstream media:

That makes ten straight special elections to fill House seats in which Democrats have either retained or stolen a seat. You have to go back to May 2008, when Steve Scalise replaced Bobby Jindal, to find a Republican victory. (Of course, Scott Brown won a special election in January. But the GOP probably has more realistic hopes of flipping the House in November if there is a genuine “wave” a la 1994.)

So just to recap: when a Tea Party candidate wins a primary race, it's the sign that Democrats are in trouble and the Tea Party is a force to be reckoned with. When MoveOn candidates win their primary race, it's a sign that Democrats are in trouble and there's an "anti-incumbent mood" among the voters.

Okie dokie. Remember folks: it's always good news for Republicans.

(MoJo's Nick Baumann has more...)

Nut Allergies

Here’s where I apologize to my readers for politicizing something that shouldn’t have been politicized. John Patrick Beddell suffered from bipolar disorder, a brutal disease that knows no politics. I was wrong to label him a right-wing nut.

I jumped on that Christian Science Monitor story because frankly I was pissed off. Pissed off that we had yet another senseless shooting, pissed that yet another unhinged person managed to get their hands on a gun, pissed that yet another symbol of the United States government was targeted. After weeks of wall to wall media coverage of the conservative hate fests known as the Tea Party Convention and CPAC, both of which peddled in paranoia about birth certificates, immigrants, America-hating liberal “socialists,” death panels, terrorists, etc., I reacted. So I’m sorry.

And here’s where I piss you all off again.

If this incident proves anything it’s that everyone has nut allergies. No one wants to claim their nuts, and it’s been interesting to see where people draw the line here. Beddell espoused virulent anti-government views on his podcasts and politically claimed Libertarian affiliations. So we lefties have labeled him a right-winger.

Meanwhile, the right-wingers claim that because he was a 9/11 Truther, he must have been a lefty. As an aside, it’s news to me that 9/11 Truthers are lefties--we’ve always associated the 9/11 Truthers with the far right fringe--the anti-Semitic, Stormfront, Klan crowd who claim Jews were tipped off not to go to work at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. And for crying out loud, the Tea Party candidate for Texas governor was a Truther. So I learned that no one wants to claim the Truthers, either.

So listen, folks. I’ll be the first to admit when I’m wrong but that street goes both ways. John Patrick Beddell suffered from mental illness, end of story. So did all of them, that's obvious. I mean, anyone who does something irrational like shooting up a Unitarian Universalist Church production of “Annie” because they hate liberals is nuts. But it seems to me that we have more nuts getting off their sofas and actually taking action these days. And I have to wonder why that is.

We live in a time where there’s inflammatory hate speech dominating the airwaves and the vast majority of it is coming from the right. Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck and the rest pollute the airwaves on a daily basis with outlandish lies blaming Democrats, liberals, President Obama, Nancy Pelosi etc. with every imaginable sin against God and country. I don’t see anyone standing up to that, in fact, your politicians have embraced it.

So I want to see a scintilla of responsibility from your side of the aisle. Your grassroots movement is hawking stuff like this, and your protestors are showing up with signs like this one (and they aren’t even true since several of you made a point of bringing your warm gun to an anti-government protest). Your leadership conference features a Pelosi pinata and Harry Reid punching bag. You’re breeding paranoia, filling peoples' heads with bizarre conspiracy theories about FEMA re-education camps and the U.S. Census and claiming liberals are attacking Christianity and all sorts of irresponsible crap that isn't remotely true. No one on the right has said that any of this goes too far, in fact, y'all are pumping your fists in the air going "fuck yeah!"

So don't act shocked when your movement gets blamed when someone of any political stripe goes off the deep end. Y'all need to dial back your rhetoric a couple notches.

Funny Things To Get Upset About

I have to point out something about the right’s snickering over Obama’s use of a teleprompter. The point seems to be that Obama is a two-dimensional media star, someone who needs to be coached or scripted and is somehow something less than genuine and extemporaneous.

Alarmingly, this has been picked up as some kind of inside joke among reporters within the mainstream press, even creating the oft-repeated lie that “he used a teleprompter at a school!” (he didn’t). The hypocrisy is not just that every other politician of the modern era uses a teleprompter. The hypocrisy--and I’m talking to our illustrious mainstream media here--is that for eight years the Bush Administration created all sorts of made-for-prime-time phony media moments, which the MSM gobbled up like a starving man at the all-you-can-eat buffet.

The obvious, most notorious example of this was President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment, a staged piece of political theater the media gleefully celebrated, from the manly flight-suit landing to the banner to the speech declaring

"In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

Only months later, when Iraq spiraled into chaos, did the media start to question this stunt, and they saved most of their criticism for the actual banner. Yet they were present on the USS Abraham Lincoln. They saw that the aircraft carrier was close to shore, that it had been turned so land would not appear within camera range. They knew the President could have helicoptered to the vessel, that a jet landing wasn’t needed, that it was just theater staged for them. Yet they said nothing at the time. They were complicit. Hey, they must have thought; it's good TV!

There are dozens and dozens of examples of this kind of theater staged for the media during the Bush Administration. Using a teleprompter during a speech kinda pales by comparison.

Over at the Swash Zone today I was reminded of Shoshana Johnson. For those who don't remember:

One of them was Specialist Shoshana Johnson, who would spend her 22 days in captivity with gunshot wounds to both legs. While the media frenzy was focused on the rescue of Lynch, the eventual rescue of the others by the Marines went largely unnoticed.

Ms Johnson, the first black female POW, came home but her troubles were far from over. While her physical wounds would eventually heal, her mental health was more precarious. To add insult to injury she not only suffered from PTSD but also had to endure being misaligned as being greedy for challenging her disability rating so that she could get better benefits.

The whole “Saving Jessica Lynch” storyline was even more embarassing for America’s media elites than their failure to adequately cover the Mission Accomplished incident.

The story was a highly packaged piece of Pentagon propaganda which our media again swallowed whole, sometimes even embellished on their own. Who can forget the exaggerations and outright fabrications of her story, the glowing NBC made-for-TV movie, the way the media completely ignored Shoshana Johnson and other members of Lynch’s unit? Even Lynch found this disparity upsetting.

There are tons of examples, Bush fielding softballs like “can I pray for you,” and “will you pray for Oregon,” and on and on and on. Funny how all of that has been forgotten amid snickers over Obama’s use of a Teleprompter.

You know, I expect the righties to try to make political hay out of anything they can get their hands on; a teleprompter seems kinda stupid, but whatever. But why is our media finding this funny?

The White House Press Corpse likes to be in on the joke, but what they don’t get is that they are the joke.

This really shows there are two sets of rules, one for Democrats and one for Republicans. For Democrats, even using a Teleprompter shows what a phony someone is. For Republicans, expensive and highly staged theatrical productions are no big deal, because it’s good TV.

Kabuki Theater

Does anyone dispute the notion that our nation’s political discourse is mere Kabuki Theater designed to distract from what’s really important? If so, this should dispel all doubts:

Former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin announced today that she will campaign for a handful of prominent conservative candidates this year, including her former running mate Sen. John McCain.

Are you fucking kidding me? After all the election post-mortems and passing of blame, after "Going Rogue,” which was basically one big venting of campaign spleen, to retaliation by McCain campaign head Steve Schmidt, and all the agita in between?

Remember McCain intentionally not mentioning Sarah Palin in his list of "GOP stars”? Remember Sarah Palin on vacation in Hawaii this Christmas wearing a campaign visor with McCain’s name X’d out?

I guess it’s all bygones.

So I’m thinking we’re all pretty much stage props in this theater of the absurd called American Politics. What do you think?

Your Modern Conservative Inferiority Complex

Quite possibly the best thing I’ve read on politics in a long, long time. It’s old and I don’t know how I missed it. But go read it. Now. I’ll wait.

{waiting ... waiting ... waiting ....}

Okay, I think there’s a lot of truth to what Sanchez says. And conservatives are not gonna like it. But too bad. There is so much incoherence running through the conservative base right now that when trying to make sense of what those folks are complaining about, all we can conclude is that the problem is not political but psychological.

A big chunk of you folks live in an alternate universe. We’ve got Tea Party ralliers saying they want to “take their country back” (From what? And from whom?). They want to “stop government control of (fill in the blank),” when they had one branch or another of the government for over 15 years. They want to stop “socialized Obamacare” when the proposed healthcare bill is so far removed from anything resembling government-controlled healthcare that those of us who pay attention to the facts not the spin are just going, “huh?”

There’s been talk of death panels and FEMA re-education camps and all sorts of wacko stuff that’s way off the radar (the latest is Obama--aided by ACORN--intentionally ruining the economy. No one seems to remember that the economy tanked while Bush was still in office.) You’ve got folks like Michelle Bachmann wishing you a Merry Christmas as “a federal official”, as if there’s something subversive in that (and the Tea Party Nation, on cue, cheers.) You’ve got Carrie Prejean acting like some persecuted Joan of Arc because people happened to notice she made a sex tape and posed topless and campaigned for a political group, all in violation of her pageant contract. But Larry King asks why she dropped her libel lawsuit and he’s being “inappropriate.” Sarah Palin, well, just about everything she says is beamed in from some alternate reality.

Here in Nashville we’re gearing for an onslaught of wackadoodle when the Tea Party folks hold their convention in early February. And let me just say right now: it’s like you guys are speaking some kind of secret language of disaffection and alienation that the rest of the country (including a lot of Republicans) just don’t get. You folks need to broaden your messaging beyond the bumper sticker bromides and develop some coherent, substantive, arguments so we can all figure out what you folks are so mad about. Because right now it looks like you're just pissed off about being pissed off. I'm trying to understand you, really I am, but I can't get past the placards that use words like "socialism," "communism" and "fascism" as if they were interchangeable.

There’s been this sense of persecution from the right going back even into the Bush years and it’s truly puzzling to those of us in the reality-based community because we don’t understand what folks who have been in control of everything since forever are complaining about.

So I think Sanchez has hit the nail on the head when he writes:

What we saw in ‘04 was fury at the realization that ascendancy to political power had not (post-9/11 Lee Greenwood renaissance notwithstanding) brought parallel cultural power.  The secret shame of the conservative base is that they’ve internalized the enemy’s secular cosmopolitan value set and status hierarchy—hence this obsession with the idea that somewhere, someone who went to Harvard might be snickering at them.

Harsh, yes, but I also think there’s truth to that.

We saw it in the right-wing attack on the Dixie Chicks and we see it in the right-wing hissy fit over the film “Avatar.” As Salon.com’s Andrew Leonard noted, the free hand of the market has spoken and it’s got right-wing knickers in quite a twist:

Simplistic left-wing environmentalist propaganda, as realized by Cameron, turns out to be spectacularly popular! Ouch! That's gotta hurt. For right-wingers convinced that a cap-and-trade mechanism to restrict greenhouse gases is an affront to American values, it must be extraordinarily galling to see  the explicit environmental message of "Avatar" embraced so heartily.

Nothing says "fail" louder than a conservative "backlash" against a film that's already grossed over $1 billion worldwide. The problem for conservatives, says Sanchez, is a psychological one, not a political one. This means there is no cure for what ails them in mainstream Republican circles. Because what you are looking for is a cultural impact, and that’s not happening, no matter how many branches of government your fingers are on.

We saw this national inferiority complex manifest last year when the National Review released its Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs list and "Best Conservative Movies of the last 25 Years" list. At the time I wrote:

The poor dears. For years the conservative movement has tried desperately to prove their ideology has some kind of cultural relevance beyond the tiny clique of like-minded souls sequestered away in their alternate universe so aptly named "The Corner." Meanwhile, the rest of us just scratch our heads in puzzlement.


So now they've got a "movement" which David Broder compares to the hippies of the '60s and the feminists of the '70s. Can the movement be sustained? Even Broder doesn't know for certain because, as I said at the beginning of this piece, anger for anger's sake is not a movement that will be sustained.

Sanchez calls the Tea Partiers a "doomed project":

Even if conservatives retook power, they wouldn’t be able to provide a political solution to a psychological problem, assuming they’re not willing to go the Pol Pot route. At the same time, it signals a resignation to impotence on the cultural front where the real conflict lies.  It effectively says: We cede to the bogeyman cultural elites the power of stereotypical definition, so becoming the stereotype more fully and grotesquely is our only means of empowerment.

And no, I don't think remaking "Red Dawn" is going to satisfy you. Because your modern conservative base suffers from a vast inferiority complex. You don't want political power -- you had it for years! For nearly an entire decade. What you want is cultural power. And unless you dial back the crazy, I don't see that happening.