Month: August 2012

Steve M. is a connoisseur of right-wing media, which may be why is more readily alarmed and prone to pessimism than I am. When it comes to wingnut media, I barely touch the stuff. The only time I watch Fox is when things have gone badly wrong for the GOP and I want to watch them suffer. The right-wing blogs are not in my daily mix, and I only seek them out when I’m really at a loss to find new content. The truth is, I already know what’s going on in those media spaces. Minds are being poisoned. People are being turned into worse people. Hate-flames are being tended. A despicable and dishonorable alternate universe is being erected.

The details hardly matter.

What matters is how people like Chris Cillizza respond to this alternative universe. Do they watch in detached fashion to evaluate the effectiveness of this poison? Or do they take a stand for truth and decency?

Our Republic may be able to survive the existence of a permanent Mighty Right-Wing Wurlitzer of hate and fear, but not if it isn’t more than counteracted by people in the reality-based community.

Paul Ryan gave a speech last night that came straight out of the alternative universe. How it is received by the actual universe is very important. How it is received by the denizens of the alternative universe is irrelevant. They’d say they loved it even if they hated it. They’d convince themselves they loved it even if they were disappointed. Steve M. senses that the Christie and Ryan speeches were like the twentieth MDMA trip for the wingnuts. They’ve consumed those lies so many times that they need ever-higher dosages to get high on them. Ryan and Christie simply didn’t deliver enough milligrams.

It’s an interesting theory that has some merit. But, ultimately, what matters is whether or not people who don’t live in the alternative universe of right-wing media understand or do not understand that they were just fed a pack of shameless and brazen lies. Are they turned into suckers or are they repelled by dishonesty? Who do they trust to arbitrate the issue? And what are those trusted people saying?

That’s why we have to police the corporate media. That’s why we have to call people like Chris Cillizza a loser.

Chris Cillizza does a political winners and losers column periodically, and he’s revived it for the Republican National Convention. Last night’s winners were Susana Martinez, Condi Rice, Ron and Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, and Twitter. The losers were Tim Pawlenty, John Thune, interviews with delegates, and convention floor dancing. Here’s what Chris Cillizza had to say about the most dishonest speech ever delivered at a political convention.

* Paul Ryan: The Wisconsin congressman started very slowly – so slowly that we had begun to put him mentally into our “loser” category. He was halting in his delivery, stepping on applause lines and quotable lines alike. But about halfway through his speech, Ryan found his footing. He made the case against the Obama administration effectively – “They have no answer to this simple reality: We need to stop spending money we don’t have” – and argued just as effectively for Romney. He spoke eloquently about how he and Romney were of different faiths but, at their core, believed the same things. One other note: Ryan’s speech was the best written of any we’ve heard so far at the convention. It was packed with great lines, most of which – particularly in the second half of his speech – Ryan delivered well.

Not one mention of the fact that virtually nothing that Paul Ryan said was true.

Joan Walsh and Brian Beutler begin the daunting job of detailing the stunningly brazen lies Paul Ryan told during his convention speech last night.

Two weeks ago, I slammed William Saletan for his love letter to Paul Ryan in which he all but offered to help run the Ryan for President ’16 campaign if Pres. Obama got re-elected this fall.

There’s no evidence Saletan’s aware of my criticism (nor should there be), but to his credit, there’s now plenty of evidence—provided by Saletan himself—that he read and digested lots of the reaction (positive and negative) to his column.  Perhaps more importantly, Saletan has paid attention to what Ryan himself has said and done in the intervening two weeks—abandon any serious talk of fiscal restraint and demagogue on Medicare like…well, like the entire Republican Party has for the past 2 1/2 years.

Apparently that’s the deal breaker for Saletan:  “But if you won’t stand by your principles when it counts, Paul–if you’re just going to demagogue Medicare like an old-style liberal–then you’re useless to this country. I want my love letter back.”*

Good for Saletan.  Here’s hoping he’s just one of many centrist-leaning pundits and editors who comes to their senses in the next few weeks about what the Romney-Ryan ticket really stands for.

*And that was yesterday morning—before Ryan’s utterly mendacious, misleading and fact-free, stemwinder at last night’s GOP convention.

Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/

55.8 Million Americans Persecuted By Both the Democrats and Republicans

In its 2010 World Drug Report the United Nations estimated that fully 18% or more of the United States population smoked marijuana in 2008 and the number was increasing. (World_Drug_Report_2010_lo-res.pdf, pg. 202)

The Libertarian Party has the numbers it has today, in large part, due to conservatives who oppose the War on Drugs enough that they cannot associate themselves with their natural affinity group the Republican Party.

So too the Green Party holds that same appeal for disaffected Americans who would otherwise have a natural affinity with the Democratic Party. The new Justice Party, led by former Salt Lake City Democratic mayor Rocky Anderson, is attracting voters with their overt opposition to the War on Drugs.  And many Independents, like myself, are Independents because we are fed up with the single minded Drug War policy of the two dominance parties. (Pot smokers are, by and large, middle class white Americans who have the disposable income to buy proscribed intoxicants.)

The War on Drugs has so changed the complexion of the two big parties that their respective candidates can’t poll better than neck and neck at this late point in the election in this diverse nation of ours. Most try to ignore the significance of a large population mischaracterized as undecided when they are really opposed to both major party candidates in part due to this issue.

Has the War on Drugs, cumulatively persecuting and disenfranchising hundreds of millions of Americans in its forty-one years, finally hit its wild card critical mass? Will the outcome of this election hinge on which major candidate can appeal to pot smokers? Or do the Democrats and Republicans all think that they have criminally disenfranchised a large enough portion of this constituency to ignore it at their electoral effect?

I had to watch my New York Football Giants beat the New England Patriots again. So, catch me up to speed on the convention tonight. What has happened so far?

Matt Taibbi has a timely explanation of how Mitt Romney made his fortune. It’s kind of long and the first fifth of it is pretty much contentless diatribe, but it does finally get to the point. If you come to really understand how a leveraged buyout works and why they can be so ridiculously lucrative, you probably will be more interested in forcibly separating Romney from his money than you will be in voting for him.

The leveraged buyout is really not an essential component of free-market capitalism. And a few tweaks in our tax laws would make them both less common and less destructive. It’s hard to define what Romney did as anything other than looting.

Steve Benen has been pointing this out for a while:

This year is supposed to be a cycle ripe for the Republicans’ picking, but they’re stuck with a candidate they don’t really like, an agenda they can’t tout because the American mainstream would disapprove, and an opponent they consider awful, but unable to attack with legitimate attacks.

I think they could go after him with legitimate attacks, but for some reason they don’t really emphasize them. Instead, they make up crap about welfare and Medicare, and treat a centrist health care plan inspired by their own nominee as the second coming of the Bolshevist Revolution.

The GOP is really just high on their bullshit. That’s problem number one. Remember this from January 2010?

Mr. Obama told members of the House GOP at a Baltimore retreat that their decision to tell their constituents he is “going to destroy America” had made it virtually impossible for them to vote with Democrats on even moderate policies, at least if they didn’t want to jeopardize their reelection prospects.

Perhaps the most striking moment in the president’s appearance – which was reminiscent of a Prime Minister appearing before the British Parliament, though far more polite – was when the president complained that some Republicans had suggested his policies, which he cast as relatively moderate, were in service of a “Bolshevik plot.”

There was some applause following that comment – apparently not an endorsement of the president’s point, but rather the notion that he was, indeed, a Bolshevik. The moment seemed to point to the futility of the president’s message – the GOP is not suddenly going to start portraying Mr. Obama and the Democrats as moderate realists, especially when Republican Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts suggests the current strategy has been working just fine.

It did work fine for a while, particularly during the 2010 midterm elections. It worked for the extremely narrow purpose of winning elections, although plenty of Republican officeholders lost their careers in the resulting chaos, in spite of doing little to nothing to help the president. They lost to people who were high on the bullshit.

And that gets to problem number two. There really isn’t anything the GOP base agrees that the federal government should do aside from garrisoning the Middle East and Central Asia, and building a moat on the Mexican border. And, because Romney is so cautious and deferential to the base, he has no positive message. He has no message on education. He has no message on climate change. He has no alternate vision on foreign policy. He isn’t talking about veterans. He isn’t talking about Native American policy. He has nothing to say about prison reform. And he opposes all progressive change on social issues.

He can’t say what he wants the government to do. Close to 100% of his rhetoric is about what he wants the government to stop doing. They’ve delegitimized the federal government to such a degree that they can’t actually run it. They can’t even articulate a theory of how they’d run it.

That’s why we’re seeing a convention completely devoid of content. It’s also why they’re more comfortable telling lies than offering alternatives and honest criticism.

In a demonstration that blacks like Condi Rice, Michael Steele, Ron Christie, Artur Davis, Allen West, and Tim Scott are less tokens than statistically insignificant, a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed zero percent support for the Romney/Ryan ticket among African-Americans. That said, the GOP ticket probably isn’t too pleased with headlines about two conventioneers getting ejected for throwing nuts at a black CNN camerawomen and saying, “This is how we feed the animals.”

There are bad apples in every crowd, but it’s hard to imagine the level of hate those two people must feel toward black people to behave that way. The RNC Convention released an official apology, but that won’t change the bad optics.

It’s one of the tensions community organizers live with:  how much do you boast about your accomplishments?

On the one hand, if you (and by “you”, I mean the organization and the leaders the organizer works for) don’t take credit for and talk about your victories, your opponents will either belittle them or claim them for themselves, while your followers may feel like all their work was in vain.

On the other hand, if you do take credit for and talk about your victories, your opponents will either say you’re bragging too much, or that you really are the dangerous un-American subversives they feared and warned against.

As a result, in the post-Alinsky era (e.g., in 1980s Chicago where a young Barack Obama worked as an organizer), many veteran community organizers—already distrustful of media hype and the double-edged sword presented by television news—settled into a modus operandi of 1) working to make sure the organization’s stories of victory were told well and often internally, while generally keeping a low profile in the wider political and media universe.  This was even more true for victories that represented significant changes in (and therefore threats to) the status quo.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying I’m pleased, but not surprised by the story told in Michael Grunwald’s The New, New Deal about the remarkable success of and ignorance about Pres. Obama’s first major legislative accomplishment:  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), also know as “the stimulus bill”.  I’m not surprised the Recovery Act stopped the 2007-08 recession dead in its tracks.  I’m not surprised the Recovery Act was:

   
• “by far the largest energy bill in history”,

   

• “included the most dramatic federal education reforms in decades”, and

   

• “launched the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower”.

And I’m especially not surprised that virtually the entire Washington press corps not only missed the real story about the Recovery Act, but actually got it wrong—swallowing the Republican propaganda campaign that the ARRA failed to stimulate the economy in the short-term and was a waste of money in the long-term.

Grunwald summarized the story in a Monday post well worth reading on Josh Marshall’s TalkingPointsMemo.

For its part, the Obama campaign seems to have settled on the somewhat grim and determined sounding slogan of “Forward.” for the fall campaign.  Grunwald’s book tells the story of how far we’ve come in the past 3 1/2 years, what “Forward” would look like for the next 4 years, and why it’s a fight worth making for progressives—even, or perhaps especially, for those progressives who are disappointed Pres. Obama hasn’t accomplished more in his first term.

Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/