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The Power of Magical Thinking: Reflections on Reagan

February 8, 2011 By 4 Comments

Part One: Fact

The fortieth president turns 100 and a religious cult (also known as the Republican Party) can’t name buildings after him quickly enough.

Is there room for Reagan on Mt. Rushmore?

I’ll leave it to the inimitable Bill Hicks who suggested: “Let’s put him under Mt. Rushmore.”

But on the occasion of The Ill Communicator’s centennial, it is important –if not particularly instructive– to remember what actually happened, and how we got to where we are today: a political landscape where any conservative has learned to praise the holy trinity: Reagan, God and country.

It’s too easy, right?

Has it really come to this? (Has it always been thus?) All some Americans need is a person to play the part and tell them how great they are, how amazing we are, and then, no matter how much the unemployment rate and the deficit spikes, it’s all good because we feel good? It is too easy and that is too simple. But the more one looks at Reagan (the man, the myth, the legend –literally), the more difficult it becomes to reach any other conclusion. What exacerbates the inanity of this (very remunerative, just ask He Who Is Incapable of Shame, our old friend Newt Gingrich) enterprise is the fact that virtually everything today’s wide-eyed republicans want to believe about St. Ronnie doesn’t square with the, well, inconvenient truth of his actual record.

But, after considerable deliberation, oceans of black ink (er…galaxies of electronic ink) and head-scratching intense enough to furrow trenches on sentient scalps, it turns out that it really is that easy.

It is the power of magical thinking, the fulcrum upon which most religious and political momentum swings: all it requires is uncritical, unblinking fealty and you’d be amazed how simple, and ceaselessly restorative this exercise can be for the unenquiring mind. All of a sudden the world shrinks, Santa Claus exists, America is God’s favorite country, God is white, Jesus is a capitalist and the New Testament is a socialist primer.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled, Baudelaire once wrote,  was convincing the world he doesn’t exist. Well, the greatest trick the GOP ever pulled was convincing its flock that the devil does exist. The way to keep the Evil One at bay is to close your eyes and believe a few immutable commandments: no taxes ever on anyone, the media is liberal, government is the problem (by far the most invoked and insidious lie of Reagan’s legacy), and never, ever question The Man –unless he happens to be a Democrat.

How else can you get people to consistently vote for policies that devastate them, counter every teaching of the (honky) Jesus and weaken our country except, of course, for the obscenely wealthy who rewrite the rules as they go along.

So…what does any of this have to do with Reagan?

To paraphrase the not-so-great Donald Rumsfeld: “You go to war with the president you have, not the president you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

So it was in 1981.

We did not go to war, of course, and that may –or may not– be the point. Is there a point (literally, figuratively) to reimagining the causes, effects, errors and triumphs of a particular presidency? It happened. I’m at peace with it (what choice do I have?), and if I refuse to call Washington National Airport by another name, so be it; in fact, Christopher Hitchens put it best when he opined that it was already named after a rather important president, thank you very much.

The good folks at ThinkProgress have done some nice work, reminding people who already know (the people who don’t know and need to read this will never go to that site, naturally) the facts vs. the fabrications. It’s a good primer in the event you find yourself discussing Reagan’s dubious legacy with a true believer. Check it out.

Then, of course, we always have the aforementioned Bill Hicks, who saw through the B.S. (even before it went into the full-power spin cycle) two decades ago:

So let’s review the facts.  Historical fact (as in: the record, on file, which is growing and decaying before our widening eyes) would make it challenging to counter the assertion that Reagan’s enduring legacy is one of exclusion and inequity. Many people would love to argue the point, and many have been. Of course, it always helps to consider who is doing the spinning. As we’ve seen in the very short time since his death (indeed, in an initiative that kicked off years before he even kicked the bucket), a very intense and targeted effort was undertaken to ensure that the beatification of Reagan became the cause nearest and dearest to those who stand to profit the most from his hagiography. Led by the insufferable conjoined twins of neo-con nationalism, Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich, it became good business to do everything humanly possible in the way of rehabilitating an image that was far from lionized in the late ’80s.

Fortunately, in the week some celebrate his life, we can revisit two fantastic pieces debunking the very cynical (and appallingly successful) attempt to mythologize this very simple and radioactive political poseur. William Kleinknecht here and Will Bunch here do some heavy lifting in the service of truth. And to say the scales covering the eyes of the hoodwinked are heavy is understating the obvious, as Reagan becomes the conservative alternative to Che Guevara. To say that we are in dire need of some uncomfortable (for some) corrections for the sake of perspective, particularly as we see the soiled seeds of this Reagan Revolution bearing full fruit in our imploding economy, is scarcely stating the case strongly enough.

Part Two: Fiction (sort of)*

Like everyone else I know, I grew up—really grew up, if I’ve ever actually grown up—in the Reagan 80’s. Take my childhood, please. Actually, it wasn’t all that bad. During the extreme periods of boom and busted, pro and convicts, the majority in the middle seldom feel the pain, they rarely see the cocked fists and hoisted heels. It’s the people on the poles, the haves and haven’ts, who taste the changes the have lesses can afford to ignore.

But now, after the 90’s—on the verge of oblivion, as always—we have anti-inflation. We’ve got more money than we know what to do with; we’ve gotten so good at counting it we need to make more just to keep up, we keep making it so that we will still have something to do. Capitalism isn’t wrong, but neither is intelligence: you cannot spend money and make money—someone is always paying the tab (and it’s usually the poor suckers who can’t spend it who take it in the ass so that anonymous, ancient bored members can pulverize their portfolios). In other words, working where I work, with neither the best nor the brightest bulbs in the professional firmament, I can see for myself that this has nothing to do with talent, necessarily. It’s about numbers. Like an army, like America. Whether you’re a company or a cult (like an army, like America), you simply want to amass enough manpower so that nothing else matters. Quality? Integrity? Originality? Nice, all, but they’ve got nothing on the numbers. When you’re big enough, you don’t have to beat anyone up, your rep precedes you and quells all contenders. You don’t have to fight anymore. Safety in numbers, sure, but there’s more at stake than simply survival—people are trying to make money.

Look: I’m not unaware of the wealth our deal cutters are creating, and I’m not unappreciative when they sign my paychecks. In the 80’s, or any other time, you had the fat-walleted fuckheads trying to multiply their millions by any means necessary; they didn’t just disregard the reality of putting their foot on nameless faces to divide and conquer, they reveled in it. It wasn’t personal, it was strictly business, and it wasn’t their fault they excelled at it, it isn’t their fault they were born into this. The only responsibility they had was to ensure that all this affluence they had no part in amassing stayed safely outside the reaches of normal, taxpaying proletariat.

Let’s face it: it’s not as though the five or six folks who actually flip the switches and decide who gets what (after, of course, they’ve had theirs) ever consented to this sudden, and by all accounts inexplicable, turn of events. They certainly didn’t plan it this way. And you can be certain they don’t condone it or in any way seek to keep it around if they can help it. But that’s the thing: they can’t help it. They never saw it coming. I definitely didn’t see it coming. I see it every time I look at Otis: who could possibly have predicted this? The guys that—if they were lucky—were going to be chain restaurant managers and counter-jockeys at Radio Shack suddenly had the keys to the kingdom, because they understood how the world-wide-web worked.

But I’m willing to bet some of the money I’m supposedly worth that these unsettled old sons of bitches are very interested in redirecting wealth back into the hoary hands of those used to handling it. How, they must stay awake during the day worrying, can this country continue to run right when so many regular people start getting involved? It happened before, in the 20’s, and if they had to eliminate alcohol for a few years then maybe it’s time to start confiscating computers.

Still, I can’t shake the suspicion that these visionaries are doing many of us a disservice by manufacturing this much money, for making it so easy. Everyone loves their job these days, and it’s for all the wrong reasons. It’s all about the money. The money this and the money that. You lose money to make money, you make money to make money, you take money to make money, you make up anything—to make money. Right now, as the new century sucks in its gut for the changing of the guard, unearned money hangs heavy in the air like encouraging ozone: a soft rain’s gonna fall eventually, inevitably, and everyone will wonder why they’re soaking wet and insolvent.

*taken from a work of fiction, written before it all happened to come true in 2008.

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The Democratic Fault Line

November 3, 2010 By 12 Comments

So, fake tan is the new black?

How do I feel about the idiot winds that blew this astroturf tsunami over our land?

Eh…

Certainly, it sucks to see a party whose signal accomplishment of the last 24 months was to act petulant and say no like a talking point rendered Reductio ad absurdum. Way to go, guys (and gals), you got exactly what you hoped for and other than the collateral damage to your bought-and-sold souls, this won’t be anything but swell for you all (until it comes time to actually govern to the types of people you’ve attracted, who want to eat whatever they wish and not get fat, drink as much as they can and not get drunk, and earn as little as they can and still be…proud Americans, damit!).

Nobody likes a poor sport (that’s why I don’t like Republicans), so I’m content to let these nihilistic blowhards savor their smackdown. As always, you have to hand it to them: they said what they wanted to do, they predicted what they were going to do, and against all (well, not all, but all reasonable) probability, it worked. How it worked is the moral of this particular passion play –of which more shortly. And because we expect less than little from the intransigent GOP, how can you resent them for having the cowardice of their convictions? Particularly when the profiles in cowardice displayed by their political opposition is so…typical.

Yes, I come not to castigate conservatives, or take pot-shots at the tea partiers (it’s been done, and that market will remain bullish, not to mention bullshit-ish, for the foreseeable future). My concern is –and has been for some time– the ways in which the Democrats are congenitally incapable of articulating their achievements, and crafting a message that is either succinct, compelling or consistent. The shame of it is, all they have to do is tell the truth and it would set them (and the rest of us) free.

The lines are already, and predictably, being drawn in the sand. The sycophantic, supine and sensationalistic mainstream media can’t get to the scene of the crime quickly enough: Obama governed too far to the left (because moderate conservatism is the new far-Left)!

I see a lot of passion and animosity on both sides of this Democratic fault line, but whose fault is it?

First off, to echo the likes of the always reliable and amusing Mark Morford, any Dems who sat this one out, “on principle”, should feel very satisified and smug about their audacity of Nope. You really showed them this time, you clever little hipsters! It’s like 2000 only without Nader. If the polling data is remotely correct and a significant number of young voters simply didn’t show, that’s a disgrace: these spoiled brats should have thought long and hard about the difference between mediocrity & mendacity (Democrat TM) and incompetence & imperialism (that new and unimproved Republican Brand). For those of you coming off your parents’ health care plans in the next two years or no longer receiving allowance or beginning to grapple with those student loans, have fun with that. Also: enjoy that job search! Helpful hint: there are a lot of hungry tea-baggers and yes, they would like fries with that.

That said, the onus of this clusterfuck is, sadly but undeniably, squarely on Obama and his uninspired, uninformed and generally underwhelming team of super geniuses. For them to try and pin this one on the progressive base (as they began doing months ago, a harbinger of what was to come as well as an ugly insight into their almost-empty book of ideas), the same base that put in the time to get Obama elected (remember that slightly favored alternative, Hillary Clinton?), goes beyond disingenuous and approaches being outright despicable.

Let’s make it as clear as it can possibly be stated: Obama blew it.

(This doesn’t mean his presidency is over, or that yesterday’s results doom his prospects for re-election; indeed they may improve them in the long –and possibly the short– run; it simply means that what has happened thus far, and what it led to, begins and ends with him and the people he chose to surround himself with.)

For starters, let’s address the dreaded enthusiasm gap: after the fiasco in 2008, was there anyone (not on the GOP payroll) who felt warm and fuzzy about Wall Street or insurance companies? Yet those are the first two entities Obama got in bed with, and his uninspired, uninspiring “reforms” were the inevitable and unecessarily compromised outcomes of that grotesque alliance. Look at the video tapes: Obama has been more harsh with the progressive base, in word and deed, than he ever has been to Big Oil, Big Insurance, The Wizards of Wall St. or the weasels across the aisle, all of whom have used virtually every waking moment to malign and cripple him and his agenda. If you look at the accounts, each time public opinion was practically to the left of where Obama began his negotiations –not where the legislation ended up after the pork-fests and pocket-lining inside the sausage factory. As many others have pointed out, you can’t run as a progressive (we are the change we were waiting for?) and then govern to the right of Richard Nixon. (That said, just because Obama is one thousand times the man for the job McCain would have been, and his policies are a million times better than what the Republicans would want, is no reason to expect sentient, tax-paying voters to applaud this temerity. Guantanamo? Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? Afghanistan? These aren’t the pipedreams of DailyKos disciples, these are the things Obama campaigned on.)

But let’s get to the real issue at hand. There is no question, none, that Obama had a once-in-a-century opportunity to harness all the uncertainty, anger and energy circa 2008 into doing something significant, and striking a lasting blow for the good. All it would have required was using this ultimate “teaching moment” to prove (and the proof existed anywhere he would have pointed) that deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthiest percentile, fighting unfunded (and, ahem, unpopular) wars and a steadily increasing chasm between the obscenely rich and the working poor put us precisely in the ditch we found ourselves trying to dig out of. That these anti-government obsessions (which, incidentally, unravelled during the Clinton era and should have been permanently put to bed, and probably could have been if Gore had won; thanks again young rebels!) are, in fact, the opposite of patriotic, they are in fact bad policy and utterly inconsistent with the blonde-haired and blue-eyed Jesus the religulous right ostensibly worships. That as FDR showed, government can be, and often is, a force for good, taxes pay for things we actually use, and putting people to work (not to mention avoiding additional and catastrophic layoffs) was the primary impetus of the (weakened, half-assed) stimulus. Oh, and Obama didn’t raise taxes: he cut taxes! Did you get sick of being reminded about that? I didn’t, because I wasn’t.

It’s not that difficult to imagine: one speech, early in ’09, wherein Obama declared: “not only am I going to fund these projects, no American who wants to work will go without on my watch. I’m going to spend this money, because it is an investment on people, and you will be able to measure the results immediately. This is an investment on behalf of our well-being, and if you want to judge me in four years, I will take those odds. And if I’m wrong, the worst case scenario will be an early retirement where I can drive across this great nation over new roads and rebuilt bridges, and take advantage of the radically improved infrastructure that these projects made possible. I’ll walk away from the Oval Office happy and proud, because I’ll know we made a difference, and that is what I was elected to do.”

Instead, he surrounded himself with the exact same charlatans who oversaw the Wall Street (and housing) implosion and ignored economists like Paul Krugman whose chief fault is that he has been right, about everything, all along. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t do the right thing, it’s that he wouldn’t do the right thing. The question still remains: could he do the right thing? Just because Democratic policies make sense, it doesn’t mean the politicians we elect are sensible. On what planet would you put Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, who still had blood and feathers on their face, in charge of the fiscal hen-house? That was an early sign that the best and the brightest were, in an Obama administration, about to become the unseen and the silenced. If you are late to the party, I can’t recommend the heavy lifting that Matt Taibbi has been doing the last two years highly enough: read him and weep.

Obama was either too clueless or (worse) arrogant to believe he actually needed to make a case, and be ready to fight back against the full-scale war the GOP declared on him the second he was elected. (His refusal to bother himself getting involved in the health care brawls all summer of 2009 is the second largest blunder of his presidency: he not only allowed the do-nothing Repubs to define the narrative (wrongly), he let the Tea Party lunatics get a foothold and, with the lack of any consistent, intelligible message, determine that opposing the government was the correct, and patriotic thing to do. By the time he saw the gramatically-challenged writing on the signs, it was arguably too late. Worse, he apparently considered the battle won once the (weak and watered down) health care bill squeaked through last Spring. That was when he (and the mostly useless, or at least unused Biden) should have been making the stops, explaining why it was good (or at least better than Nothing) and what he would continue to do. Instead, he refused to get in “campaign mode”. Meanwhile, against all probability, the masses with their pitchforks and flames, had –for lack of a tangible target for the ire– latched on to the Fox-spewed propaganda filling the inexplicable vaccum of what passes for political discourse.

Put another way: for all his wasted potential and self-inflicted peccadilloes, do you think Slick Willy would have fumbled this one? Are you shitting me? He probably had a recurring fantasy, while in office, that he could have walked into a crisis like the one Obama inherited in order to impose his will. He probably dreamt of getting all up in that sumbitch and working the change from the inside, crawling out of the rotten carcass with grime in his hair and a shit-eating smirk on his face. That rascal would have remained on message and ensured that his people were hammering home the Truth every day. It still astonishes me that Obama (and a great many of the feckless, scared-of-their-shadow Dems) didn’t begin every sentence these past 24 months with the observation “Well, it’s a challenge, but remember: the Republicans had almost unfettered control for the last eight years and this is what happened; we hope nobody ever forgets it.”

Even today, in his uninspired (and, for true believers, truly frightening) news conference, Obama just can’t bring himself to invoke FDR. Remember “I welcome their hatred”? What part of that does he not understand? Did you see Obama on Jon Stewart last week? “Yes we can, but…” Wow. Ill-considered decisions and mistakes aside, day truly is night if the one thing Obama could count on –his rhetorical majesty– has so utterly deserted him. And whether or not you believe a more provocative, even confrontational commander-in-chief could have yielded better results (I did, and do), if you think some (many?) of the on-the-fence moderates (the same sorts who voted for George W. Bush because he was the kind of guy they could enjoy a (near) beer with) would not have appreciated some decisive rhetoric (or decisiveness, period), particularly if it was spoken with a modicum of authenticity, you are either irretrievably cynical or hopelessly naive.

This is the rub: does Obama have it in him? Does he really care? Does he, as late as today, even get it?

Would a more progressive acumen have made a difference? We’ll never know. But it seems sufficiently clear that the (mostly welcome) fate of the craven Blue Dogs underscores, once again (will they never learn?) that being Republican-Lite is not the answer. Indeed, it is the proven recipe for disaster and will continue to be in our increasingly debased political culture. It’s hard enough to fight against these fuckwads; it certainly doesn’t do you any favors when you do their work for them.

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A View To A Kill or, It’s The End of the World As We Knew It (And I Feel Fine)

March 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment

  

Here’s how bad it’s gotten: David Frum, the dude who used to write speeches for the worst president we’ve ever endured, has written the most lacerating epitaph for The (Tea) Party of No, here. The entire thing is a must-read, and the closing paragraph demands to be quoted in full:

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

Here is the really ugly part: Frum is not Monday morning quarterbacking. He was practically pleading with anyone who would listen how (self) destructive this unified and unyielding obstruction would be in both the short and long term. In fairness, the G.O.P. had deluded itself into thinking that the fantasy they were spinning was gold, not shit. And there were plenty of cowards and co-opted folks in the media and inside the Democratic party who still hadn’t figured out how to stand up to bullies. (Instant update and mid-post edit: holy shit, look who just got “terminated” by AEI. You really can’t script this stuff better, and how made-to-order this full-scale Republican implosion is unfolding. Can you say MISSION ACCOMPLISHED? Holy shit.)

Of course this problem was exacerbated in no small measure by Obama himself being way too cool and detached on the sidelines as the Fox News and RNC fear factories spewed out their garbage and took control of the narrative (and I’ll never forget, or forgive the cynical and craven Rahm Emanuel for folding like a shanty house in a hurricane the second Scott Brown pulled off his big upset in Massachussetts). Finally, at almost the last possible second, Obama joined the fray, inspired more by the need for survival than anything else. But to his eternal credit, he rolled up his sleeves and went to work. As we saw, the results were immediately apparent and quite positive.

Can we now, at long last, acknowledge what many of us suspected all along: the bill was never “wildly unpopular” with the general public. Or, to put a finer point on it, more than a little of that disenchantment was actually coming from Democrats who (correctly) felt the bill was not strong enough. But, as many of us suspected all along, when push came to shove of course they would endorse even a rather weak and watered down bill for two primary reasons. One, virtually any bill was better than the alternative the G.O.P. was offering, which was nothing (well, more tax cuts). And two, the Republicans absolutely meant it when they bragged that killing health reform would kill Obama’s presidency. In hindsight, if only a handful of Republicans had crossed the aisle, it’s likely the bill would have failed. By doubling down on the obstinance they have practically patented at this point the Republicans essentially dared the Democrats to pull together and see this through. Without that total, and arrogant, defiance, I’m not at all certain the Dems, famous for their inability to do anything, would have gotten the ball across the goal line.

As always, the so-called Liberal Media was about as useless as usual (and their general incompetence increases in direct proportion to the overall degeneracy of our political discourse). Obsessed with the trivial horse-race aspects of who won the most recent news cycle, and handicapping the odds and chances of whether some bill (any bill) might pass, they did less than a little to help dispel the truly hysterical talking points and outright falsehoods the right wing noise machine was expelling into the air.

And here is what I said to a friend last week: “If/when this bill actually passes you are going to quickly see the shameless media transition from the Obama’s presidency is doomed! meme to the Obama back on track! and all of a sudden we would begin to once again hear the t-word (transformative) associated with his presidency. In fairness, both of those assumptions are more or less accurate: if the bill had failed, it would have emboldened the Republicans and further intimidated the feckless Democrats (and we likely would have seen increased –and detrimental– influence from that paper tiger Rahm Emanuel); on the other hand, with the bill passing, it allows Obama and his party to regain (and more importantly, articulate) the narrative. Both parties knew what was at stake, although it (typically) took the Dems about eight months too long to feel the necessary urgency. For this alone, the oft-ridiculed Harry Reid should get his moment in the sun and be properly lauded for hanging in there and doing a ton of heavy, often thankless lifting. Likewise, Nancy Pelosi has gone from being a controversial figure to an instant legend: she, like Obama, was overlooked and underestimated, and it came back to bite her opponents in a big way. And man must that bite sting.

Lo and behold, look what happened to those opinion polls, literally overnight. Kind of hard to say the “majority” of Americans hated this bill, huh? And more importantly, that was always a bogus formulation. It was pretty obvious to anyone not at a tea party or on the NRCC payroll that more than a little of that antipathy was coming from the left. These folks (quite understandably) believed the bill was not strong enough: they (we) knew that this same bill was arguably to the right of what Nixon advocated in the early ’70s (!) and it was certainly close, if not a tad milder than what Bob Dole endorsed less than two decades ago (!!). Regardless, we understood that when putsch came to shove, (something made infinitely easier courtesy of the Republicans’ very vocal and uninhibited declaration that their sole intention was to stand as one in obstruction to the bill, and Obama) many of them would unite in support of this initiative. And that’s pretty much what happened.

So what about the independent voters?

Well, this coveted and often capricious demographic generally makes or breaks a sitting president and his legislation. How bad will the mid-terms be for the Dems? I felt they never would have been nearly as bad as many were predicting last month (or last week for that matter); I feel the prospects are much better now. In part because today, as much as ever, perception is reality: Obama (and this bill) is a winner. Equally important, people do tend to appreciate a leader who can get things accomplished. That he hung in there and did something presidents have been attempting to achieve for almost a century is also a self-fulfilling historical narrative. Obama has injected life, meaning and import into his first term.

To the victor go the spoils, history is written by the winners, etc. But it’s more (and less) than that: just as the fairly hysterical media coverage post-Brown did not paint an accurate portrayal of what was really going on, or what was likely to happen, the surprise passage of HCR is not going to transform moderates into liberals. It doesn’t need to. Unless the bill begins rescinding peoples’ coverage because of pre-existing conditions or bankrupting families who can’t pay their bills (oh wait, that’s what is already happening), it stands to reason that HCR will never be more unpopular than it was last Saturday. After Sunday, the bill can only get more popular in direct proportion to the number of people who realize it’s not only not the end of the world, but actually a pretty swell thing. This transformation is already underway(not just the big shift in public opinion in recent polls); each day that goes by without any of the more outrageous Republican predictions coming true is another opportunity for T&R (Truth and Reality) to vanquish the hysteria.

There was a good reason Karl Rove lost his shit on Sunday while David Plouffe toyed with him (and showed, about ten years too late, the most effective way to defuse this braying rodeo clown). Rove knew what everyone else on his team was figuring out: they threw everything they had, and everything they could possibly fabricate, in the monomaniacal pursuit of defeating HCR. And they still lost. The reason they wanted to beat it so badly was not because The Party Of No has the best interests of anyone at heart; it’s because they knew this would be political gold for Obama, and Dems for decades. Think about it for a second: if they even half-believed a fraction of the dire repercussions they were robotically shrieking about, they would have happily gotten out of the way and let Obama have his way. Because, if it was going to be so awful, and it was so clearly against the will of most Americans, the Dems would pay a very dear price for their assumptions. Of course, what is becoming increasingly clear, from the stimulus to HCR, is that during one of the worst years Americans have endured since The Big D, Democrats have scrambled and strategized to make things better while The Party Of No has held their breath, sucked their thumbs and egged on the worst elements of the lunatic fringe that now bolsters their base.

It’s a loaded term, particularly in light of the very recent outbreaks of violence, threats and manufactured outrage, but a day of reckoning is imminent. And it’s not for the party being targeted by this illiterate mob of mouth-breathing imbeciles; it will be for the party that has cynically, and eagerly, stoked the flames of this tea party silliness. These idiots were useful for the farcical “town hall meetings” (speaking of manufactured outrage, and an unhealthy dose of straight-up racism), and to provide flesh to bolster the dubious proclamations about how unpopular health care reform was/is. Now that the battle is over, and now that so many of these “real Americans” have exposed themselves for who they really are, it’s going to be difficult for the G.O.P. to disown them at the very moment that their association may finally be unwelcome.

But, as the song goes, breaking up is hard to do. It was truly disgusting to see the contemptible Eric Cantor go from expressing tepid disapproval at reports of violence and paranoid hostility to shifting the blame to Democrats. Look, one need only read this blog (filed under “Politics”) to see that I have few qualms calling out my own side for its inanity, incompetence and self-absorption whenever it’s warranted. But at this particular moment in time, there is no getting around the fact that one party alone is associated with this ugliness. That violence is being encouraged is a repugnant enough thing; that it’s underscored by explicit racist, homophobic, nationalistic rhetoric is another. That this racist, homophobic, nationalistic rhetoric is funneled out ’round the clock by a major propaganda machine disguised as a “news” network is yet another. That a major political party is applauding and abetting this sewage is still another. That it has been kicked up a notch by that party’s recent VP candidate finally begs the question: is there a bottom here? At what point does a semblance of shame or propriety or, when all else fails, the impetus for political survival override this insanity?

As always, only time will tell. In the meantime, it’s equal parts encouraging and appalling to see what’s left of the Republican Party doubling down on denial and the fake fury that is born out of fear. For the sake of all our moral and responsible citizens, let’s hope they continue racing furiously in the other direction while Democrats –and the future of progress they represent –leave them in this moribund fantasy land of their own making.

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Tar and Feather Time?

February 10, 2009 By 2 Comments

From Truthdig, courtesy of RJ Matson (The St. Louis Post Dispatch).

Not much to add here, but something does occur to me. The tax cut maniacs are single issue obsessives for the simplest of reasons: tax cuts don’t work. Lest that sound too cute by half, or like I’m invoking some Orwellian doublespeak, it’s much less complicated (and more insidious) than that. This mantra (that tax cuts spread wealth, create jobs, and stimulate er…the economy) has proven to be patently false, often, in spectacular fashion. First during the Reagan years, and now during the Bush catastrophe. Indeed, even now it is screaming out its impotence right before our foreclosed eyes. But here’s the rub (literally): the folks who propagate this myth and define this debate (the ones with actual power, not the millions of beguiled True Believers who continue to blame the government instead of the scheming autopilots who intentionally debase it) have little to lose and quite a bit to gain. Put simply: these folks are not merely shameless and without souls, they are also remarkably shrewd. It’s not that they actually believe increased and unceasing tax cuts, particularly for the wealthiest percentile, are viable in any demonstrable way; it’s precisely the ways they fail as a strategy that makes for such a win/win proposition.

Check it out: in the short-term, tax cuts put more money in your pocket. Well, at least if you’re wealthy. And the wealthier you are, the more money you get. See? The other folks, not so much. Sure, it seems swell to get that extra few hundred bucks, but those Benjamins are not going too far when, at the same time, your health care premiums have doubled. Or additional benefits are cut at work. Or your credit card interest rate is jacked up. Get the piture? But here’s the ugly beauty: these cretins know it will cause the economy to bloat, then implode. And that’s usually the time a Democrat gets called in to clean up the mess (see: Carter, Jimmy; Clinton, Bill and Obama, Barack). The more indebted the U.S. is, the more government programs get cut, and the less efficient government is as a result. So that Republicans can point and say “See? We keep trying to explain that the big, bad government isn’t going to help you; and do you want these inefficient programs taking hard-earned money out of your pockets?” And the cycle continues again.

The spin always outperforms the true story. We’ve seen it before (there were people, then, and there are actually people, now, blaming FDR for making government too intrusive; there are people, discussed here recently, who point to the “Reagan Revolution” as a time when the free market prevailed and prosperity abounded, despite all annoying evidence to the contrary), and we’ll see it again. In fact, we are already getting a taste: listen to the blowhards bitching about the Big G (Government); nevermind that the size of government increased the last 8 years.

Look: politicians of either party will always be politicians, and to a certain extent, people are people, no matter who they vote for or what they believe (because the bottom line is, the overwhelming majority of us have to work and pay bills and our taxes are non-negotiable). Or to put it less kindly, we are all of us sheep, hoping the grass in our pen doesn’t stop growing. And that’s the way it’s always been, so there’s nothing really to begrudge: it takes people to make a democracy, after all (like, literally: no matter how mendacious or benevolent the party in power at a particular time, without the citizens, and our taxes, our labor and our consensus, we glide right past aristocracy and into oblivion). The only folks we can, and should, reserve our contempt for are the relative handful actually in power, often scheming behind the scenes: the ones who can make or break lives with the policies or decisions they implement; the ones fully aware how much their temporal and short-sighed intentions affect innocent lives. Those are the ones for whom we should break out the tar and the feathers.

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The Intellectual Super Bowl: Frank Rich, still undefeated

February 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

MVP! MVP! MVP!

If, like me, you were unable to get through a day this past fall without visiting at least a half dozen (often more) blogs, sites and newspapers (Glenn Greenwald @ Salon? Check! Andrew Sullivan @ Daily Dish? Check! The usually accurate analysis at The Nation and Mother Jones? Check. AlterNet and truthout? Yup. The fantastic critical mash-up of all-things progressive at topplebush.com? Hells yeah. Always keeping an eye out for The Hitch because, even when he’s off his liquid meds, he’s always good reading: he writes better on his worst day than 99.9% of humans can accomplish on their best. And, of course, when he’s on, he’s on. And even as a site like The Huffington Post becomes fonder of itself–and its ankle-deep celebrity commentaries–than good writing, it, like its cousin Daily Kos does more good than ill, it just requires some screening to separate the insight from the onanism). You get the picture.

But if I were to single out the one writer whose work, week in and week out, is not only invaluable but imperative, I would without the slightest hesitation give the nod to NYT’s Frank Rich. Rich has been around for a while, and written brilliantly about the arts, culture and politics. It’s for the latter that he has been my go-to guy for the last several years. I am confident I could revisit any single piece (he is featured each Sunday in NYT’s Op-Ed section) from this time period and pull out several quotes to illustrate his trenchant take on the mess America has been making. It’s not a simple matter of  exemplary intellect and writing (though these things offer their own manifold rewards), it’s that his inerrant eye holds up, months and years later. Rich warrants repeated reading, period. In this regard, his oeuvre is very like art, and that is just about the highest praise I could offer. Here’s a taste, from today’s column (check it, here):

What are Americans still buying? Big Macs, Campbell’s soup, Hershey’s chocolate and Spam—the four food groups of the apocalypse.

Also from today, he eschews the shooting fish in a barrel target practice that was, let’s face it, so simple (if maddeningly obligatory) during the clown-prince Bush’s recent reign, and hones in on the bigger, messier picture:

The crisis is at least as grave as the one that confronted us — and, for a time, united us — after 9/11. Which is why the antics among Republicans on Capitol Hill seem so surreal. These are the same politicians who only yesterday smeared the patriotism of any dissenters from Bush’s “war on terror.” Where is their own patriotism now that economic terror is inflicting far more harm on their constituents than Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent W.M.D.?

Here’s the thing: Rich ties in seemingly all the threads (speaking of today’s effort and his work in general); he does not take just one topic–no matter how large or pressing–and put that in his sights, though that would be entirely suitable and satisfactory. Rather, he really does summarize the lay of the land, moving from mark to mark, seamlessly weaving a tapestry of analysis. This, of course, is much harder than it looks. Hence, this explains why his contributions are so crucial.

I hope we get to a place (sooner and not later) where his input is not so welcome, and necessary. But I don’t expect that to happen, so long may he run.

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