Here’s what I don’t get.
House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said Sunday that Democrats “just didn’t get the message from the voters this election” if they make Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) their next majority leader.
“I mean, the voters outright rejected the agenda that she’s been about. And here they’re going to put her back in charge,” Cantor, in line to become the House majority leader in the next Congress, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“I mean this is the woman who really, I think, puts ideology first, and there have been no results for the American people,” he said. “And that seems the direction they want to take again. It just doesn’t make sense.”
How can Eric Cantor say that Democrats didn’t get the message when the Republicans didn’t change their leadership after the 2008 elections? And that was the second straight election that they lost in a big way. On top of that, I can’t think of anything they plan on doing differently this time around from what they did last time.
Totally agree. But I actually don’t have a problem with what the Republicans are trying to do. They won and they are trying to squeeze the most from it and frame their victory. To respond to their chest-pumping with logic is ridiculous. We didn’t beat our chests hard enough after 2008- that’s the problem. Obama decided to let his enemies recover and rest after the 2008 election, and some people said he needed to really go after conservatism, the big banks, etc. He took a different approach and here we are.
Cantor is able to say that because facts, logic, and consistency do not matter to the Republicans – winning does. While we should certainly stay in the reality-based community, we need to start fighting as aggressively as they do, otherwise we will be in the exact same situation two years from now.
One place to start is on tax policy, with major provisions regarding income taxes, estate taxes, and the stimulus tax cuts expiring at the end of the year. Let’s push the Democrats to hold a vote on extension of the tax cuts for incomes under $250,000 and the stimulus tax cuts, and force Republicans to either give the Democrats a parting victory or to hold those tax cuts hostage in their effort to give further tax relief to the rich.
http://www.winningprogressive.org/urge-the-democrats-to-use-tax-policy-to-fight-for-the-middle-class
“Cantor is able to say that because facts, logic, and consistency do not matter to the Republicans – winning does.”
Exactly.
By the same token and for the very same reason(s), your general approach elsewhere, including the routine use of “progressive” misses much of the important points about the present dilemmas.
“Progressive” when used euphemistically to mean “liberal” is a term which screams “We surrender!”, it’s a sop and an admission that the terms of the debate have been settled and exclude the frank use of “liberal” with all the importance that once went with it and must again if your intentions (as I read them, at any rate) are ever to have a prayer of regaining currency.
Most of the debate is today a missed and wasted exercise. The neo-con dogmas, routinely accepted and taught universally as standard social and economic gospel have come to dominate not only the entire spectrum of elite “conservative” thinking, particularly as this is indoctrinated in MBA programs around the world, but also a great deal if not nearly all of the general assumptions now automatically accepted among many who consider themselves belonging to any part of the “liberal” and “Left” spectrum.
Such stuff as sloganeering, including “Winning Progressive When Progressives Vote, Everyone Wins”, no matter how phrased or how well intentioned by those who adopt it, is itself a failure to grasp how the consumerist mediocrity co-opts and degrades all thought, dulling critical faculties, by the very act of practicing such public-relations-centered mumbo-jumbo. To grasp our predicament necessarily implies seeing through such trips and traps of convention. By getting liberals to adopt the weakened vocabulary styles and the public-relations mind-sets and assumptions means to already divert, divide, co-opt, sow confusion and generally promote a sterile and empty approach to real issues–which haven’t and generally don’t change over decades.
A hyper-techno society which carries implicitly within it all that corrupts and empties civil discourse and political thought and practical action has poisoned the whole spectrum of the public’s civic political life.
This is explained and elaborated better in the new book by Georges Corm. When it comes to be translated in English, it will be absolutely essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we have arrived at this pass.
link to book at publisher’s site:
http://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/catalogue/index-Le_nouveau_gouvernement_du_monde-9782707164193.ht
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A hasty semi-corrected “Babelfished” translation from the publisher’s blurb about the book reads,
( Note: DO NOT PATRONIZE AMAZON.COM !!! )
They have a bunch of cranks and crooks who are going to try and gut the welfare state for real.
Your larger point still stands, and my Representative is still a douche.
I’d say Republicans missed the message.
Once again, Booman… They just say shit that they think will work (= the media and lefty bloggers will cheerily repeat it). Whether or not it’s true is irrelevant to them. Whether or not it’s hypocritical is irrelevant to them.
It’s not complicated.
They’d much rather have a potato to mash rather than a hard nosed political operative who will knock the caucus in line. Ditto that for the 2012 elections.
The Republicans enjoy a structural advantage. Their party is full of ignorant, gullible dipshits. Makes the leadership role a lot easier.
The words were directed towards driving their narrative into the minds of less informative listeners than you. The narrative is going to be that the Democrats are still the same, so there is no reason to listen to them or vote for them.
You can take nothing from these clowns at face value. You have to look deeper and recognize that sometimes a cigar is not simply a cigar.
More specifically, the words were spoken in an interview by Chris Wallace on Fox news. Cantor knows that what he’s saying is complete hypocrisy, given that Republican leaders did not resign after 2006 and 2008, but intellectual consistency is not the point. He is just repeating and repeating the Republican meme (that the elections show that voters have completely rejected the democratic program) in front of an audience which is unlikely to know any better and with an interviewer who is unlikely to challenge him.
Although I suppose it is worthwhile, a la Steve Benen, to call out Republicans on their hypocrisy, it would be a mistake to think that the battle can be won or lost based on intellectual discourse. That is not the battle the Republicans are fighting, and we do ourselves a disservice if we get emotionally engaged by their BS, which is completely and utterly predictable.
I knew we were in trouble a long time ago when there was such a celebration of the Palin-esque ignorance within the ranks of the Republican base. When it became fashionable to demonstrated your Real Amerikkan-ness by cheering and celebrating blatant and voluntary stupidity. When people, particularly white males, felt like they might, in some sort of weird, deviant way, maybe cop a little figurative “feel” of old Sarah, by pulling that lever for her and supporting her Tea Party.
It was, and still is, profoundly creepy.
Cantor is trying to dictate who he will be up against when he becomes majority leader. He would much prefer a guy who can split the Democratic caucus by leaning toward the Blue Dogs who are left (30 of them are supporting Steny Hoyer, a list of familiar names).
It’s not hypocrisy at all, it is political posturing over against “San Francisco values”, which is a dogwhistle for “the homosexual agenda”.
If you look at who was defeated, Cantor is lying about a rejection of Obama’s (and Pelosi’s) real agenda.
And the party of all ideology, all the time is just delivering the sucker punch of projection to the media audience to allow them to continue to fight practical solutions with ideological objections.