Greenwald: A Bridge Too Far
I’ve put off writing this post for days, and I still don’t have the words to express my disgust about the “rape analogy heard ‘round the Twitterverse.” In case you’re not up to speed, long story short, I had a Twitter discussion with Marcy Wheeler about the NDAA; a Greenwald supporter quipped that if I saw Obama raping a nun on live TV, I would defend him for it; another supporter quipped that I would fantasize about playing the role of the raped nun; and Greenwald piled on. When asked to account for the clumsy rape metaphor, Greenwald doubled down, claiming that it wasn’t a metaphor, and that he actually believed that I and other Obama supporters would defend Obama if we were to see him raping a nun. Read the rest of this post »
January 3, 2012 2:23 am
Posted in: Uncategorized
132 Comments
Ricky don’t lose that number
He is not a representative of the corporate or financial wing of the party. Santorum certainly wants to reduce government spending (faster even than Representative Paul Ryan). He certainly wants tax reform. But he goes out of his way in his speeches to pick fights with the “supply-siders.” He scorns the Wall Street bailouts. His economic arguments are couched as values arguments: If you want to enhance long-term competitiveness, you need to strengthen families. If companies want productive workers, they need to be embedded in wholesome communities.
It’s hard to know how his campaign will fare after a late surge that he is experiencing in Iowa. These days, he is a happy and effective campaigner, but, in the past, there has been a dourness and rigidity to him. He’s been consumed by resentment over unfair media coverage. As his ally in the AIDS fight, Bono, once told a reporter, Santorum seems to have a Tourette’s syndrome that causes him to say the most unpopular thing imaginable.
But I suspect he will do better post-Iowa than most people think — before being buried under a wave of money and negative ads. And I do believe that he represents sensibility and a viewpoint that is being suppressed by the political system.
I wonder how quasi-endorsements like this—which probably doesn’t matter much but will certainly get a lot of play in Scarboughsphere—happen. Did someone in the Santorum campaign rub Bobo’s thigh under the table just so? Is this just clever attention-getting contrarianism, a centrist Hayekian counterpart to the Paultardism that is sweeping the internets?
January 3, 2012 12:52 am
Posted in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute
69 Comments
Corn fed open thread…
With the Iowa Caucus looming in the news cycle I thought I would offer some guesses as to the outcome. When the dust settles, the final results will matter very little, but the spin will drive the news cycle for a few days, help to shape who stays in the race against Willard, and either bust or inflate Iowa Caucus myth.
Read the rest of this post »
January 2, 2012 11:55 pm
Posted in: Election 2012, Open Thread
64 Comments
Soon it comes ’round to your soul
So we’re on for a discussion with Corey Robin about his book “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin” next Wednesday (January 11) at 8. I’m excited! I highly recommend the book to all of you. One thing I like about it is that it is fairly empathetic/sympathetic to the conservative world view. There were portions of the passages about Burke where I felt I could genuinely understand why someone would be drawn to this philosophy.
One part of modern conservatism that I cannot sympathize with at all—and this is something I’d like to ask Corey Robin about during the discussion—is the embrace of rantings about “thugogracies” and cluster bombs that go straight through the heart of Muslims and the cheapness of Muslim life. How do people—and in those three examples, people who started off on the left—end up as such assholes as Michael Barone and Hitchens and Marty Peretz? That’s a mystery to me, and it’s also a mystery to me why conservatives are so happy to claim such assholes as their own (not Peretz so much, but Barone and Hitchens).
January 2, 2012 10:18 pm
Posted in: Blogospheric Navel-Gazing
85 Comments
Monday Evening Open Thread: St. Willard, Hypocrite
(Jeff Danziger’s website)
From Matt Viser, at the Boston Globe’s Political Intelligence blog:
MARION, Iowa – Mitt Romney, in his final sprint for votes in Iowa, launched into his harshest criticism yet of President Obama, saying that his policies would “poison the very spirit of America and keep us from being one nation under God.”
“I’ve watched a president who’s become the great divider, the great complainer, the great excuse-giver, the great blamer,” Romney said at a garage of an asphalt company in Marion, a suburb of Cedar Rapids. “I want to have an America that comes together. I’m an optimist, I believe in the future of America. I’m not a pessimist.”...
Yeah, give me a quarter-billion dollars in blood money, and I’d be optimistic too, putz. And to think there are courtiers in the Village who’ve wondered how it would be possible for the Democrats to stir up sufficient animous against the Romneybot 2012 model to bring the all-important Spite Voters to the polls in November. I’ve been warning you all: By the time the official coronation takes place in Tampa, every voter in America (and a selection of their smarter household pets) is going to loathe Willard Romney with a bile that could etch the windows of the space station.
Anything more positive and life-enhancing on the agenda tonight?
January 2, 2012 8:46 pm
Posted in: Assholes, Election 2012, Open Thread, Romney of the Uncanny Valley
196 Comments
Newt vs. Willard: The Ewok Strikes Back
(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
One reason the Media Villagers love Newt is that he can be counted upon to give good horserace. From NYMag’s Daily Intel, “Battered in Iowa, Gingrich Plans to Rip Romney in New Hampshire and Beyond”:
... The cause of Gingrich’s downward spiral is clear enough: the relentlessly brutal and brutally relentless negative-ad barrage inflicted on him in Iowa since his surge in late November and early December. Indeed, something like half of the vast number of spots that have run here in that time frame have been assaults on Gingrich. The primary source of those spots has been the pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future, which has spent something like $3.5 million on the effort. Gingrich has done nothing to disguise his ire at this turn of events; as the MSNBC host Alex Wagner has described his recent countenance, “The Teddy Bear is angry.”
What the Teddy Bear has not done, however, is fight back—not in any effective way, at least. But at Gingrich’s second event of the day—another meet-and-greet at another sports bar, this time in Marshalltown—he indicated that his passivity is about to disappear. After chatting and taking pictures with voters for about an hour, the candidate decided to conduct an unscheduled media availability. Among those present was another MSNBC host, Chris Matthews, who more or less took control of the proceedings, goading Gingrich by suggesting that he had let Romney’s super-PAC “kick the shit” out of him.
More than any other candidate in the race—more than most politicians, period—Gingrich is perfectly happy to address process questions, adopting the mien of a hardened political consultant. Comparing himself implicitly to John Kerry, Gingrich complained that he had been “Romney-boated” by the negative ads. “I probably should have responded faster and more aggressively,’’ he admitted. “If somebody spent $3.5 million lying about you, you have some obligation to come back and set the record straight.”
Those are brave words for a one-note fat man. As Steve Benen points out in his Washington Monthly blog:
I’d genuinely love to know whether the disgraced former House Speaker is so far gone, he literally doesn’t remember his own record. As Kevin noted a month ago, Gingrich is largely and personally responsible “for the poisonous state of partisan politics in America today.”
Read the rest of this post »
January 2, 2012 5:00 pm
Posted in: Assholes, Election 2012, Romney of the Uncanny Valley
131 Comments
Not at all the same thing
This is Ron Paul, today, on the Civil Rights Act and how Paul views the Civil Rights Act as leading to the Patriot Act:
Despite recent accusations of racism and homophobia, Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) stuck to his libertarian principles on Sunday, criticizing the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it “undermine[d] the concept of liberty” and “destroyed the principle of private property and private choices.”
“If you try to improve relationships by forcing and telling people what they can’t do, and you ignore and undermine the principles of liberty, then the government can come into our bedrooms,” Paul told Candy Crowley on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And that’s exactly what has happened. Look at what’s happened with the PATRIOT Act. They can come into our houses, our bedrooms our businesses … And it was started back then.”
And this is Russ Feingold, on his opposition to the Patriot Act:
The first caution was that we must continue to respect our Constitution and protect our civil liberties in the wake of the attacks. As the chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, I recognize this is a different world with different technologies, different issues, and different threats. Yet we must examine every item that is proposed in response to these events to be sure we are not rewarding these terrorists and weakening ourselves by giving up the cherished freedoms that they seek to destroy.
The second caution I issued was a warning against the mistreatment of Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, South Asians, or others in this country. Already, one day after the attacks, we were hearing news reports that misguided anger against people of these backgrounds had led to harassment, violence, and even death….
Now, it so happens that since early 1999, I have been working on another bill that is poignantly relevant to recent events: legislation to prohibit racial profiling, especially the practice of targeting pedestrians or drivers for stops and searches based on the color of their skin. Before September 11th, people spoke of the issue mostly in the context of African-Americans and Latino-Americans who had been profiled. But after September 11, the issue has taken on a new context and a new urgency.
Even as America addresses the demanding security challenges before us, we must strive mightily also to guard our values and basic rights. We must guard against racism and ethnic discrimination against people of Arab and South Asian origin and those who are Muslim.
We who don’t have Arabic names or don’t wear turbans or headscarves may not feel the weight of these times as much as Americans from the Middle East and South Asia do. But as the great jurist Learned Hand said in a speech in New York’s Central Park during World War II: “[T]he spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias…
The Feingold speech is long and complex, so read the whole thing.
One is a libertarian and one is a liberal. Do we really think they’re saying the same thing? Share the same views on this?
January 2, 2012 3:37 pm
Posted in: Uncategorized
181 Comments
The area’s gray in a one, two, three way
I enjoy presidential primaries in the same way that I enjoy March Madness, but for some reason I’m feeling burned out on this one already.
I am liking TNC’s Paultard-mocking twitter feed, and I’m hoping that a google search for Santorum continues to yield this as the top result. What’s a good place for making fun of Romney?
January 2, 2012 2:30 pm
Posted in: Election 2012
60 Comments
Bowl Game Open Thread
By request. Go Bulldogs!
January 2, 2012 1:14 pm
Posted in: Sports
116 Comments
He never meant shit to me
Commenter lamh finds Santorum talking about the need to stop giving money to black people:
“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money,” Santorum begins. “I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families.”
Only about a third of welfare recipients are African-American. That’s the reality. (And it’s also worth noting that African-Americans get a disproportionately low proportion of Social Security pay-outs, because of lower life expectancies and average wages.)
I hate that American politics has been dominated by the specter of imaginary strapping young bucks buying T-bone steaks with their welfare checks. It’s what I hate the very most about American politics, because it’s so incredibly toxic in so many ways: it’s divisive and hateful, it turns the middle-class against itself, it makes a rational discussion of the role of government impossible, it holds us back as a society more than any other myth I can think of.
So you’ll have to excuse me for not wanting to participate in all the navel-gazing about what liberals “should” think about Ron Paul. The guy has flirted with strapping young buck racism (as well as anti-Semitism) since forever, not just via his (ghostwritten) newsletter but also in his (presumably not entirely ghostwritten) book. His economic ideas would—in my opinion—probably devastate the American middle class.
For a liberal like me, who is primarily interested in the well-being of the American middle-class and in providing opportunity for everyone in the United States, regardless of race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion etc., I just don’t see why I should be “challenged” by Ron Paul. I understand that if you’re a liberal who is primarily interested in civil liberties and a less bellicose foreign policy, then you might be conflicted about Paul. But to me, he’s just another racist asshole who wants to fuck the American middle-class.
January 2, 2012 12:59 pm
Posted in: Burkean bells
170 Comments
You Can’t Handle The Truth
During that 60 Minutes interview with the impressively slimy Eric Cantor, there is one moment that stood out. As Steve Benen notes, when Cantor’s press secretary from off camera yelled that it simply was not true that Reagan raised taxes, Stahl went on to show a clip of Reagan announcing a tax cut and uttering the dreaded “compromise” word. As Benen notes, contrary to the current myth that Republicans push that Reagan never raised taxes, Reagan is actually one of the greatest tax increasers of the modern era.
It would be nice if we could just dismiss these guys as liars, but the truth is even worse. Many of them don’t even know they are lying, they are living so safely inside the cocoon they have created for themselves. They are operating inside a constructed alternate reality, and have been for quite some time. Inside the bubble, vaccines cause cancer, the death penalty is never implemented when it shouldn’t be, Jesus rode on the back of dinosaurs, a semi-meiotic glob of cells is a person, and if you just keep cutting taxes and regulations, the growth fairy will leave increased federal revenues under the pillow.
It’s insane.
January 2, 2012 12:53 pm
Posted in: I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own, Teabagger Stupidity
67 Comments
Kthug’s Slow Motion Nightmare
You honestly have to feel for Paul Krugman and the handful of others who have been telling us all along that austerity policies are bound to fail:
Europe’s leaders braced their nations for a turbulent year, with their beleaguered economies facing a threat on two fronts: widening deficits that force more borrowing but increasing austerity measures that put growth further out of reach.Saying that Europe was facing its “harshest test in decades,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany warned on New Year’s Eve that “next year will no doubt be more difficult than 2011” — a marked change in tone from a year ago, when she praised Germans for “mastering the crisis as no other nation.”
Her blunt message was echoed in Italy, France and Greece, the epicenter of the debt crisis, where Prime Minister Lucas Papademos asked for resolve in seeing reforms through, “so that the sacrifices we have made up to now won’t be in vain.”
While the economic picture in the United States has brightened recently with more upbeat employment figures, Europe remains mired in a slump. Most economists are forecasting a recession for 2012, which will heighten the pressure governments and financial institutions across the Continent are seeing.
Adding to the gloomy outlook is the prospect of a downgrade in France’s sterling credit rating, a move that analysts say could happen early in the new year and have wide-ranging consequences on efforts to stabilize Europe’s finances.
Despite criticism from many economists, though, most European governments are sticking to austerity plans, rejecting the Keynesian approach of economic stimulus favored by Washington after the financial crisis in 2008, in a bid to show investors they are serious about fiscal discipline.
This cycle was evident on Friday, when Spain surprised observers by announcing a larger-than-expected budget gap for 2011 even as the new conservative government there laid out plans to increase property and income taxes in 2012.
Indeed, even in the country where the crisis began, Greece, the cycle of spending cuts, tax increases and contraction has not resulted in a course correction, and the same path now lies in store for much larger economies like those of Italy and Spain.
“Every government in Europe with the exception of Germany is bending over backwards to prove to the market that they won’t hesitate to do what it takes,” said Charles Wyplosz, a professor of economics at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. “We’re going straight into a wall with this kind of policy. It’s sheer madness.”
Rather than the austerity measures now being imposed, Mr. Wyplosz said he would like to see governments halt the recent tax increases and spending reductions, and instead cut consumption taxes in a bid to encourage consumer spending. More belt-tightening, he said, increases the likelihood that Europe will see a “lost decade” of economic torpor like Japan faced in the 1990s.
He has to be pulling his hair out.
January 2, 2012 12:42 pm
Posted in: Foreign Affairs, Free Markets Solve Everything
36 Comments
Balloon Juice book club
I just finished reading “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin” by Corey Robin. I bought it on Kindle, if you want a hardcopy you might check out this independent book store site. Let’s shoot to read the first chapter and start discussing it next week, for those who are interested.
If could summarize the book in a few lines, I would go with cleek’s classic:
today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today: updated daily.
Here’s John Quiggin’s take on the book:
Robin’s thesis is that claims like Oakeshott’s about conservatism (and also, those of Hayek about classical liberalism) are nothing more than a mask for attempts to resist, and where possible, roll back the claims of the working class against their rulers.
I think this is broadly correct. Although there are people with the conservative disposition described above (and also, people who are attracted by radicalism as such), there is no inherent correlation between conservatism as a disposition and support for the political views commonly associated with conservatism.
There is an accidental association reflecting the fact that, taking the last two or three centuries as a whole, the ruling class has mostly been losing ground. First, the aristocracy was forced to share power with the bourgeoisie, and, then for most of the 20th century, the working class gained ground against the power of capital. Under such circumstances, people of conservative disposition will generally be found in opposition to the progressive demands being put forward by workers and their supporters.
And here is something I read by Peter Beinart on Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, the subject of a controversy that we discussed last week:
Although ultra-Orthodox Jews claim to reject religious innovation, ultra-Orthodoxy is constantly innovating because it is based, above all, on the rejection of secular values. And since secular values change, ultra-Orthodoxy does too.
And so it is of course with fundamentalist Christianity: it has become obsessed with homosexuality in large part because the last 30 years have been a time of progress for gay rights.
The alacrity and ease with which Republicans went from supporting (and in Romney’s case implementing) health care systems along the lines of ACA to treating ACA as the most horrible soshulist thing evah makes perfect sense in this context: ACA is bad because liberals passed it. Full stop. If Democrats had passed Medicare Part D, it would be the worst thing evah too.
Update. Quasi-reformed Mark Lilla has an interesting (mostly negative) review of Robin’s book here (via). I don’t agree with it, because it devolves too far into predictable Sullivan-style “we conservatives didn’t used to be like this” stuff, but it’s interesting, but it’s probably the best predictable Sullivan-style “we conservatives didn’t used to be like this” defense that I’ve read.
January 2, 2012 11:02 am
Posted in: Burkean bells
76 Comments
Yes, Jesus Loves Me
For the polling tells me so.
Rick Santorum is locked in a virtual 3-way tie in Iowa in the latest PPP poll and is less than 2 points behind Bishop Romney in 538’s projections.
I just can’t believe that a deity-free universe would let Santorum win. If he does, it’s a clear message from the Almighty that he wants us to stop paying attention to Iowa, and that he’s taking his revenge on the Republican Party for fucking up his image. I may have to make a full and complete confession and begin regular communion if Rick takes the caucuses, because a Santorum win makes the fear of eternal damnation suddenly seem rational.
January 2, 2012 10:05 am
Posted in: Election 2012
102 Comments
Marketing Fail
I find it interesting when something so obviously ridiculous makes it through all the different layers of a corporation and their outside consultants. The marketing department, the advertising agency and even the printer missed the obvious on this one at a local gas station chain.
January 2, 2012 8:37 am
Posted in: Humor
50 Comments
