For the record, I do the exact same thing I’ve always done. It’s just that my neighborhood has gone to shit. Actually, my whole country has gone mad, so I guess I shouldn’t complain that much that my audience has as well.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
This nation fell for distractions because they bombarded the airwaves all during ’16 to the point where the noise was so loud no one could uncover much less debate any of the policies.
And now the distractions are coming again. We can chase them, promote them, laugh and cry about them but in the end we can’t be lazy about where they fit in reality. Entertainment ok. Time wasters yes. Important no.
Yes you have and it’s deeply appreciated. True.
Measured sanity led the left to historic shortcomings in Congress and the loss of the White House to a manifestly unqualified, cognitively impaired, dangerously unstable, possibly traitorous grotesque.
Obviously, obviously, the wild bullshit in the right-hand column here is wild bullshit, and otherwise-intelligent posters approach the ‘Russian collusion’ story the way flat-earthers approach the solar system. But how much of this is because we’re now living with the consequences of an approach to politics that’s respectful of the truth, and of policy, and of tradition and bipartisanship and ‘we are one America’, and the consequences are beyond fucking grave and smack into existentially terrifying?
I’m not sure how much of this is conscious, but is the leftwing tinhattery in part an acknowledgement that we’re working not again a political movement but a fervent religious one, and we cannot beat them by doing ‘the exact same thing’ we’ve always done.
We all know the cliche about doing the same thing and expecting different results.
I’m not sure that two massively passionate and misinformed movements facing each other across the red-blue divide is good in any way, but I know for certain that our current system is fundamentally broken. And I don’t believe that the left has the same capacity to adopt misinformation as the right. Not nearly. So the question for me is, do we need more passion, more religious fervor even when it’s based on articles of faith instead of rational analysis?
The priests of logic have failed us. Our elites didn’t just lose to the fervent ignorant rabble, they were humiliated, and not just in one election, for years. And if you try to talk to them about passion, about motivating actual human beings instead of writing policy papers, they tell you ‘grow up.’
I don’t know any of the people the author mentions. I don’t recognize a single name. Obviously this is false equivalence. But I wish we could ask if there’s any utility in tinhattery instead of just tut-tutting about the rubes. The passive construction of ‘our neighborhood went to shit’ is deeply telling. It’s our fucking neighborhood. Though some combination of actions and inactions, we’re the ones who shitted the place up.
In the immortal words of Alec Graham: “He seemed to be talking English”.
WTF?!?
This might clarify: http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2017/7/2/11276/73850#3
Well ultimately, it worked.
In the meantime, while the distractions were going on, Ohio Gov. Kasich was lambasting the Senate’s health “care” bill and vetoing an attempt by his legislature to freeze Medicaid expansion. Mitch McConnell requested a CBO score of a Ted Cruz proposed amendment to the Senate bill that would allow substandard insurance plans again. And we learned that the Senate bill, if it became law, would end health insurance rebates (an underappreciated facet of ACA). So be distracted by all the covfefe if you must, but realize that if you stare into the covfefe, the covfefe stares back at you. There’s real work to be done and real damage that can be done if we’re focused on conspiracy mongering and/or continuing to litigate last year’s election.
Don’t pretend Kasich is some kind of heroic Republican. He’s not. Look at his record. He’s just playing the GOP dominated Ohio legislature so he looks less extreme. It’s manufactured PR bullshit.
I don’t have to pretend a god-damned thing about Kasich, nor do I consider him some heroic figure. It is still noteworthy and newsworthy that GOP governors in states that have Medicaid Expansion (or who belatedly realized it was a very good idea) are not too keen on what has been going on in Congress in recent weeks and months.
As a member of the Labor movement, and as someone who will never forget his fervent support for a Federal balanced budget amendment, few outrank me in thinking poorly of John Kasich’s historical contributions to the body politic.
But on the ACA repeal bill, I don’t see any Republican who is more helpful to our efforts to preserve the law and defeat McConnell’s Bill right now. I’m grateful for Governor Kasich’s help; he’s been unequivocal and accurate in his criticisms of the repeal/replace Bills.
I think you’re neglecting the fact that accepting the help of an insufficiently progressive politician to defend Obamacare threatens the purity of our precious bodily fluids.
Then, too, defending Obamacare itself is being insufficiently pure, what with its massive giveaways to Big Pharma and Big Medicine and Big Insurers, to say nothing of its failure to provide the Holy Public Option. Better to burn it all down, which will assuredly usher in the halcyon era of the Blessed Single Payer.
While many of us fought to preserve over $20 billion of annual health care money which now flows from our Federal government to our State government by calling and demonstrating to preserve the ACA, others decided to spend their time last week issuing explicit threats to the Speaker of the California State Assembly for failing to pass a single payer health care plan RIGHT NOW.
I believe a well-run single payer program or universal coverage system would be far superior to our current programs. But what’s astonishing to me is that the people who are spending time committing rhetorical arson against Speaker Rendon are presuming they have won the argument with the voters and only corruption by top State Democratic Party leaders stand in the way of health care nirvana.
I can assure you I am not overstating the circumstances here. Comments threads on purer-than-thou websites are full of “Vichy Democrats” and other epithets over this issue, and I’ve been involved in a number of face-to-face discussions with liberals who are unwilling to attempt to use the art of persuasion. They appear to find it emotionally rewarding to browbeat their fellow liberals and Democrats instead.
The current polls of California voters on single payer show that support craters to the low 40 percentiles when you ask voters if they would be willing to pay more taxes to finance the system. The facts show that the public argument for single payer has not been won here. I want my fellow liberals to use effective persuasion techniques to win that argument.
Quickly abandoning persuasion in favor of name-calling will never build the extremely broad coalition which would need to work together to defeat the extremely wealthy interests in our current health system which would spend more than $100 million to defeat a Statewide ballot measure.
Let’s learn together, as frustrating as the wait can be. Failure to learn will deliver us regressive results over and over again.
I see people on Twitter trying to rehabilitate Ana Navarro, David Frum and Louise Mensch(who that article mentions). Those three aren’t your friends. They never will be. But suit yourself.
David Frum and Ana Navaro were never liberal as far as I know, so it’s not a matter of “rehabilitating” them. But, they’re as hard-hitting on the disastrous lack of qualification of Trump to be anything other than a spectacle, and have been from the outset. I appreciate that without feeling I have to agree with them on anything else.
As for Louise Mensch, I don’t know what she is other than a complete wack job. She shares very little with Navaro and Frum.
At this point, Louise Mensch is rightly treated as a sideshow. My gut feeling was that she was a bit off, and I am glad I trusted my gut on that. My suspicion is that Phil is wanting to drill down on one thing in order to deflect from the valid point that a good many people from multiple perspectives are unhappy with the Congressional repeal, and more importantly that McConnell is still pressing forward while too many are sleeping or drinking the purity kool-aid. The fact that Trump’s tweets are a bit of a distraction is something concerning to the extent that it makes mobilization of opposition more difficult to manage. The latter is something that I simply have no patience for. In the meantime, lives in my family are literally on the line here. So I really don’t give a flying fuck about how triggered someone gets because I dared to mention Kasich’s criticism of the Senate health “care” bill. I care right now about one thing and one thing only, and that is protecting the ACA from an immediate threat.
LM is a special case, seems to be a rw troll, spewing extreme points to discredit left. from what i’ve read also seems to leak confidential material for her own purposes [or claim to], funded by Murdoch.
The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. However my enemies enemy is still my enemies enemy, and if they can make my enemy bleed and I can’t, I’ll let them do what they can to make my enemy bleed for now. Just because we use them doesn’t mean we have any loyalty to them.
Not to mention “Divide and conquer.”
The US has never been a purity test.
Consider viewing in Spielberg’s Abraham Lincoln; like Hilary said, it’s a master class in politics among other things.
You mean THE Hillary Clinton? THE neoliberal sellout to the oligarchs?
Thank God we dodged THAT bullet! Otherwise we would be in a war with Russia, who happens to be the last bulwark against American hegemony in the world.
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Damn, I had forgotten all the confident predictions about what that warmongering b*tch Hillary would do.
Kasich is kissing the ass of the hospitals. Why is he when Abbott and other right-wing governors ignore them? Wish I knew. Maybe the admin of those hospitals have contributed to his campaigns whereas they either haven’t or been dwarfed by other donors in places like Texas.
You ask a very good question: why does Governor Abbott ignore the Texas Hospital Association while opposing Medicaid expansion while Governor Kasich does battle with his own State Legislature to preserve Ohio’s Medicaid expansion?
Governor Kasich has actually made the case over and over and over again: people with low incomes in his State need health care and the ACA’s financing of State Medicaid expansions is delivering health care to poor people in his State. He’s making both the practical and moral case that you and I would make. We should avoid being cynical about the motivations for his support.
Kasich’s rhetoric has been forthright and outstanding, and he’s ramping it up now that the threat to the ACA is particularly acute. It’s very welcome. When he supports regressive policies I’ll oppose him, but Kasich has been helpful to our movement in recent weeks.
The fact that many on “our side” seem unable to execute this move might go a long way toward explaining why we have found it so difficult to move the ball down the field. Obviously, Kasich has a lot of other internal rationales for doing what he is doing, and most of them might well be seriously at odds to what I would like to see done. But people simply discounting it as window dressing, public relations bullshit does not do one damn thing to help us save the ACA or preserve the existing benefits for the most vulnerable among us. No one is asking anyone to support any of the other bullshit that Kasich has proposed over the years. But people blowing off his comments and efforts, which have put him severely at odds with Party base, serves no useful purpose when looking at the long game. It is foolish and short-sighted.
Governor Kasich has actually made the case over and over and over again: people with low incomes in his State need health care and the ACA’s financing of State Medicaid expansions is delivering health care to poor people in his State.
He is as long as it doesn’t involve a woman’s right to chose. I’m cynical because while he’s doing mostly the right thing it still smells given his history(he was the vacation substitute for Bill O’Reilly on Fox News for a long time) and the fact that I wonder if he still harbors higher political ambition.
I agree with you, Don. Kasich is not my favorite and he’s wrong-headed on lots of things for Ohio, but he’s sincere about the opioid issues. Ohio leads the country in drug overdoses and it’s taking a huge toll on our economy, law enforcement and the lives of everyone in communities across the state.
Our Lt Governor Mary Taylor recently acknowledged publicly that two of her sons are addicted to drugs. Kasich knows her and her family well and I’m sure that seeing this horrible nightmare happening to not just nameless people across the state, but to friends with whom he’s known for a long time is moving him to make sure this issue doesn’t get buried.
Rob Portman has Kasich’s ear as well, and Portman is a relentless voice for fighting the drug issues here in Ohio. He’s been a real advocate for funding for drug rehab shelters and education about opioid addiction.
So, yeah, unfortunately we can’t always get Republicans who are willing to break rank and speak up for the people, but in this case we have. I will deal with their shortcomings on other things, but they’re really dedicated to Ohio’s drug epidemic.
I am hopeful about Portman, but his history of caving is simply so reliable that I have a hard time believing he will buck the Party for very long. I hope I’m wrong, but if I had to put money down somewhere, it would be on him folding.
As for Kasich, I hate almost all of the man’s politics, but I do believe he is being genuine here. I have had the opportunity to take part in a couple of small group gatherings with him in the last few years to discuss both drug and mental health issues, and I believe his concerns about these issues are very real.
The great think about Kasich shouting from the rooftops as he has is that he’s giving Senator Portman no cover whatsoever. The Governor says the Bill is rotten and that he’s talked to Portman about the reasons for his opposition.
btw Ben Sasse’s retrograde statements about repealing the ACA persuade me you’re right about him. should have known from the vanity of his extra tall hair as well though. my bad – I was too optimistic
I expected Senator Sasse to be cleverer in his response to the health care negotiations. But he is extremely conservative, in the modern movement sense- “terminate government programs everywhere you can” appears to be his North Star.
He was on a local radio show last month hawking his book, and his schtick. In response to Sasse’s pious criticism of unnamed over-the-top political rhetoric, the show host asked Sasse about his statement during his 2014 campaign that the ACA was the worst law in the history of the United States. Sasse flatly denied he had ever said such a thing. The host came back with the date/time/place citations, and Ben said blah blah don’t recall that blah context blah.
So yeah, he’s a counterfeit “reasonable Republican.”
he seems libertarian. I had thought his connection w education would give him a clue re: some fed. programs. also his involvement w one of the Senate investigations. I guess he’s blinded by self serving ambition – also seems to have a peter pan syndrome quality inappropriate to the times.
He is an extreme libertarian, albeit one who presents his radical proposals with temperate language.
The two Senators who are now publicly advocating for repealing the ACA without an immediate replacement are Ben Sasse and Rand Paul.
The great think about Kasich shouting from the rooftops as he has is that he’s giving Senator Portman no cover whatsoever. The Governor says the Bill is rotten and that he’s talked to Portman about the reasons for his opposition.
GOPers are famous for finding empathy if and only if they have a personal connection to someone with a problem their doctrinaire rightwing extremism normally forbids helping.
The Portman mention was fortuitous in this regard, as he famously “came out” for gay rights only once his son came out as gay.
See also Orrin Hatch supporting stem-cell research because he had a sister(?) with Parkinson’s who potentially stood to benefit from it. (Funny that in that case he believed in science, as well!)
The reliability of this principle, along with your description of Portman’s positions re: addiction leave me surmising somebody close to him has this problem, too . . . who knows, maybe even the gay son!
He remains (by choice) a GOPer, after all.
This if-and-only-if personal experience is a fascinating phenomenon – I guess I just fully became aware of it and find it interesting. Of course it’s human nature to some extent but the weight of anecdotal evidence suggests it’s stronger in your modern Republican.
And the empathy doesn’t seem to spread – the others don’t learn from the experience of the first person. Seems like each has to learn the lesson from personal and direct experience.
Has anyone done any real research focusing on this pattern?
And that really is important to understand. Republicans as a group appear to lack the capacity for Sympathy (The ability to relate and attempt to understand others even when you have not been affected or effected by the issue at hand.) but, and I find a small amount of hope in this, do still seem to at least partially have a sense of empathy (The ability to relate and attempt to understand others when you have been affected or effected by the issue at hand.) from time to time.
certainly not the “or effected” part) is quite right.
Without bothering to look it up, the distinction in my mind is something like:
sympathy — feeling bad for someone based on the circumstances they’re experiencing (without necessarily being able to relate to those circumstances personally); for example, sympathy can be condescending.
empathy — feeling bad for someone based on an ability to see/feel/imagine yourself in the same/similar circumstances, and what that would feel like (i.e., “there, but for the grace of god, go I”). As Big Dog Clinton famously put it, “I feel your pain.”
And who knows, I could be right! It could happen! Stranger things have.
The thing is, if you want to reign in Trump, and the republican held congress……..YOU ARE GOING TO NEED, AND DEPEND ON REPUBLICANS!
I know that is shocking. I know the ‘purity patrol’ will not like it, but there it is.
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The difference of opinion revolves around whether Republicans are fractured enough to frustrate themselves or whether Democrats have to cave on something in the (somewhat weak) hope that some Republican will break ranks.
Not reading the article, I don’t understand the refernces to Kasich unless he is shafting his own legislature’s rush to end Medicaid. In that case, sit quietly and let him veto a Republican bill.
Its true, I’ve fallen for the sensationalism of it too. Its also really hard to figure out who is a good source vs who is just making up sh*t. Who would have thought that @PwnAlltheThings was going to be a legit source?
I also think that trolling has been taken to the umpteenth level. Clearly Russia is funding troll/Deza farms, but independent actors, and perhaps Breitbart-types are also engaging.
But with such a rich source of wrong-doing, its hard to not wish the frog-marching would come swiftly and for a vast swath of wrong-do-ers.
(The belief that frog-marching will commence soon helps allay the fear of REAL THREAT that Cheeto-Jesus’s administration is gonna get us all killed before his term is up is a comfort.)
dude, I have entirely gone over to excrement in fervent belief that even if we de-monopolize the rural areas and work to make family farming a livable job again, they is still gonna hate on us somethin ferocious.
these poor sods have been programmed by masters, for generations, and they didn’t need much coaxing to begin with to find an ‘other’ to hate on. just now it’s us. all of us.
so yeah – try and herd those racist fuckers into the fold and feel bad that the rest of us have gone to shit. they ain’t never coming back.
“He hates the same people I hate, give me the damn ballot”.
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What the hell kind of bullshit is this? We’re the problem? I couldn’t get two sentences into it.
Some of the madness comes from talking about two different Senate scenarios at once.
1. Democratic unity to force Republicans to pass Obama repeal by themselves.
2.Democratic unity in setting the terms for Democratic votes for anything when McConell or Ryan come for votes.
The debate is between those who assume that a certain number of “centrist” Democrats can be bought off by cleverly worded amendments or promises of appropriations (we know now that earmarks are back at least on the GOP side, up to $118 billion of them),
The other side are those who insist that Democrats can and should stand firm to extract the most they can for their votes.
Democratic Senators are not clearly signalling but trying to hold their options open.
Given the anxiety, that makes for a chaotic environment for political discussion.
Because the article is paywalled, I can’t read it to understand what you mean by “your neighborhood”.
“your neighborhood” (his and ours) refers to what some used to call “left blogistan”. The article is critical of how left blogs and social media circulate “information” from highly questionable sources like Louise Mensch.
If we can defeat Senate leadership’s attempts to pass the ACA replace Bill through reconciliation, then an ACA repair Bill would need eight Senate Democrats. That’s a lot of power for us, providing us a lot of targets to pressure to hold firm for a true repair Bill.
If we were needing to count on Senators Manchin and Heidkamp now, as we were needing to count on Senators Lieberman and Lincoln and Nelson and many others during the ACA’s passage, then I’d be less optimistic.
What we see in the current discussions is that even an ideologically cohesive Republican Party which has made ACA repeal one of its Great White Whales is having trouble finishing the deal. That’s because, as the President has discovered, passing broad Federal health care reform is very hard. That’s why it’s been done so rarely.
You know this is just another attempt to change the subject, right?
This diary is not about either #1 or #2. Neither was the linked article.
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er, late to the feast, but …
WTF?!?
I posted Coppins’ essay to my three lists roughly an hour before Booman posted this, ie before seeing Booman’s rec. (Jes’ sayin’)
It’s a good reminder, with good examples and good warnings.
Frex I’ve posted links to Seth Abramson because I thought his posts on Flynn / Prince / Comey were plausible … I didn’t know that he was, you know, unreliable.
Who knew that HuffPo featured loons? Not me … that’s a value-add for Coppins …
But I think Coppins is a bit hard on us, as in “both-sider-ism”.
We don’t have a Pole Star … alt-righties have Breitbart and Infowars. Frankly, Nova Pravda has been a disappointment. (Regrettably, WaPoop is more even-handed than Nova Pravda. Case in point, Jennifer Rubin. Who knew?!?)
Humans see patterns in random phenomena … absent a guide, it’s not surprising that lefties would look for any guide to a world that makes no sense. Meaning America with President Trump.
And we’re social animals. We network. We rely on reliable informants (cough*Booman*cough) because we can’t verify everything ourselves…
… which leaves us vulnerable to scammers…
… but are we as vulnerable as righties?
Leaving it to the reader to respond.
I think we are not nearly as vulnerable. The Coppins article is a useful undertaking, and its a good example of WHY we are less vulnerable. Anyway, I’m here on the tribune because I appreciate what happens here, well reasoned, cited and sane discussion of reality. And I think most on the left want it that way, even if it makes them sick to their stomach to have to face up to things like how do you deal with the need for a +10 on the generic house ballot just to break even on election day.
What’s happened on the right is they’ve lost interest in logical and fact-based arguments to validate their ideology, because there are no such arguments anymore. So they need to construct a fantasy world, and fake news is extremely useful in that regard.
We consume news and commentary differently than they do. I think Coppins’ point is “but for how long?” but if I see a headline like “Trump does something terrible on a golf course” I am not clicking that, and I immediately know that the source of that story is not a credible journalistic outlet or ethical source of information. There is no useful info in the headline, and its designed to not give any useful info. That’s the opposite of journalism. If that’s not restricted to the outbrain stuff at the bottom of the page, the whole site is suspect and I won’t be visiting anymore.
. . . reading!
What a concept!
This article is merely a re-hash of a re-hash of a re-hash. Mainstream media failed in 2016. Intelligence services and other people in the know have decided that they will fight fire with fire. Its messy. But is it effective? If it is, I’m happy to promote Louise and Claude and Eric, et al.
Afterall, this happened: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/how-us-presidents-missed-the-russia-threat–
until-it-was-much-much-too-late/2017/06/29/d1dadbe0-5ce7-11e7-a9f6-7c3296387341_story.html?tid=ss_fb
&utm_term=.994aaf7d2e0c
that wapo link doesn’t work.
>>Mainstream media failed in 2016.
Yes, and so did blogs and other non-mainstream media.
Peddling nonsense is, at least some of the time, effective. I don’t agree with your willingness to promote it. I’m not at all convinced that there’s any intelligence behind the likes of Louise Mensch.
It’s not effective. These characters simply exploit anger at Trump.
There we go again … opinion by Anne Applebaum, columnist. Funded by New Zealand billionaire operating in London in an organization called Legatum. London which is flooded by wealth from Soviet thieves in the Yeltsin era when Bill Clinton was president. Exiled billionaires running anti-Russia propaganda outfits such as The Interpreter. U.S. citizen Anne Applebaum who nearly became First Lady of Poland (married to ex-CIA agent Radek Sikorski of Afghan War fame fighting the Soviets in the 80s alongside the forces of Saudi mujahideen). In 2014, Applebaum and Peter Pomerantzev launched Beyond Propaganda, a program examining disinformation and propaganda, at the Legatum Institute. Yeah, nice piece of shit you believe in.
You know, I’m no fan of Applebaum but it’s pretty fucking rich to see you criticizing anyone’s sources given the “quality” of the links you regularly provide to build your alternate reality in the diaries.
If you have any complaints about the statements she makes about the rise of Putin’s revanchist kleptocracy then make them.
Your neighbourhood? Over here somewhere to the left of Emiliano Zapata Satan’s spawn and the lost tribes of Lavrentiy Beria wrestle in the mud for bragging rights to a world historical narrative less grounded in geopolitical reality than my border collie’s.
Hated by the Right. Mocked by the Left. Who Wants to Be ‘Liberal’ Anymore?
Touching, or no?
Interesting view. NYT alert due to limited monthly access.