I admit I'm confused by the "Tea Party" movement. It's populist, right? So you'd think they'd want to advocate for government that's actually responsive to everyday Americans and that works in their interest. Right?
Last Thursday, Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock was served with a lawsuit filed by an organization "dedicated to fighting the radical environmentalist agenda" and a Bozeman-based Tea Party activist challenging the state's century-old ban on corporate political spending.
The suit, which also names Commissioner of Political Practices Dennis Unsworth, follows the U.S. Supreme Court's controversial Jan. 21 ruling that blocked the ban on corporate political spending, a ruling Bullock opposed.
The plaintiffs are the Colorado-based Western Tradition Partnership, which calls itself "the leading organization fighting the anti-jobs, anti-taxpayer policy agenda of extreme environmentalist front groups," and Bozeman's Champion Painting, owned by Ken Champion, a member of the Gallatin County Campaign for Liberty and the Bozeman Tea Party. Champion, according to the lawsuit, "is concerned with the way inflation, taxation, and spending are exploiting, impacting, and bankrupting America and Montana's small businesses," and he seeks to spend corporate funds to support candidates with similar political beliefs.
Program director of Montana Conservation Voters notes that the Western Tradition Partnership "would like to eviscerate the very laws that protect Montana's clean air, cold rivers, and public health..."
"I'm pretty nervous about Exxon or Arch Coal or someone else pulling out the stops and airing TV ads in state legislative races where individuals can only contribute $160 each, and where candidates are teachers, farmers and other regular folks."
Of course Exxon or Arch Coal won't run the ads themselves, they'll have the Chamber of Commerce do it for them.
Handing the reins of government to corporations is hardly my idea of "freedom." But based on the rhetoric of the Tea Partiers and other radical conservatives, it's apparent that they have already abandoned any notion that they have any civic responsibility for the state of their government.
And I'm still confused by the news that SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas' wife is starting a Tea Party chapter. As Andrew Cohen notes, her husband is in large part responsible for the government and its interpretation of the Constitution:
What part of the Constitution does she believe no longer means anything? What role does she ascribe to the Supreme Court, and to her husband, in making this so? To what particular "place" would she like to bring the Constitution and who would she like to help her along the way? What part of our current constitutional structure does she believe is leading us toward "tyranny?" And just exactly how does she define that word, tyranny? The same way Thomas Jefferson did or the same way Justice Clarence Thomas now does? And who in official Establishment Washington really fears tyranny anyway?
The idea of someone so close to power, so close to interpreting the Constitution, can lead a chapter of a populist "revolt" against a government based on its relationship to the Constitution is completely surreal.
Not sure what's going on over there in conservative brains. First, it's Ross Douthat pleading for "complexity" in film and literature instead of a simplistic good v evil dichotomy, and now it's Red State's Vladimir nihilistic sophistry on climate change:
One thing a scientist must know is how ignorant we are about a lot of things; otherwise, we don't need scientists to discover new stuff. But the remark points to a naive hubris that is pretty pervasive among a "consensus" in the scientific world.
Just fifty years ago, the few believers in "continental drift" were derided by the geologic establishment as kooks on the fringe of science (if not worse). But evidence accumulated, and the theory, repackaged in the '60s and '70s as plate tectonics, is now recognized as the grand unifying theory of earth science.
So-called "Progressives" have a tendency to evaluate everything in life as if it were a deterministic, zero sum game. What goes up, must come down. In with the good, out with the bad. What goes around, comes around. Input X necessarily results in Output Y.
But real life systems don't often obey these rules; they tend toward chaos and often lead to counterintuitive conclusions. In business, they often create examples of The Law of Unintended Consequences.
The Laffer Curve is a perfect example. To a "Progressive", if you want the government to have more tax revenue, you raise tax rates. Cutting tax rates only benefits "the rich".
But the real world is governed by the chaotic rules of economics and personal choices. Arthur Laffer made the simple observation that if tax rates are zero, tax revenue is zero. If tax rates are 100%, tax revenue is also zero. Somewhere in between is a maximum, and tax rates above that optimum rate actually result in less tax revenue.
Businessmen don't need to have this concept explained, so they tend to be conservatives. Academics, trade unionists and Hollywood types will never get it, so they become "Progressives".
Pretty funny stuff, eh? Of course, the plate tectonics idea is a good example - only it's the Vladimirs of the world who are the left-behind skeptics decrying climate change as kook-ish. As for calling progressives "deterministic" and implying they're simplistic? Bad maneuver using to the Laffer curve as evidence, that over-simplistic and crudely deterministic bow hastily scrawled onto a napkin in a 1974 political meeting and ever since used to support the most simplistic conservative tax-cut rhetoric, that raising taxes invariably leads to lower government revenue, and cutting taxes leads to greater revenue. (Both are canards divorced from the reality of the actual, complex marketplace.)
All this complex thinkin' leads Vladimir to this post: "The Unbearable Complexity of Climate," whose basic premise is that the climate is very complex and we don't understand it completely; therefore, it's possible climate change may not be happening, and, therefore, doesn't need to be addressed. Follow this line of reasoning to its ultimate, late-night-smoking-pot-at-college conclusion, and nothing is worth doing or believing because, ultimately, no system or object is capable of being understood completely. Not climate change, not the existence of your friends, and certainly not the Laffer Curve's efficacy (or lack thereof) for predicting tax revenues.
Why get out of bed in the morning when your alarm goes off, when there's a chance all life on the planet will be obliterated during your morning commute by a wayward asteroid?
If the climate is as all-unknowable as Eschenbach claims, then there's a chance that climate change is happening...right? And do you, in good faith, knowing that there's a chance - what with the unknowable-ness of climate - that climate change will make the Earth uninhabitable for humans, do you in good faith sit by, or worse, actively obstruct any measures that might mitigate the possibility of ecological disaster?
That, of course, is countering the argument with their own brand of sophism. In reality, climate scientists do have more than a passing familiarity of climate science, and there is actual evidence of climate change accompanying varying carbon dioxide rates. And we should probably form policy around the evidence at hand.
But just as Ross Douthat isn't really pleading for more complex movies about war, neither are these folks concerned about shades of gray in scientific discourse. They're all engaging in sophistry to obscure facts that are politically unpalatable to them. A climate change "skeptic" represents a political position, not a scientific one. Such a "skeptic" doesn't question climate change, he rejects it out of hand, and opposes any political solution to reduce carbon emissions. Not because there's a good reason to, but because it happens to stake out a position defined by political allies.
And to what end, is the question? To defend the interests of Big Oil?
I saw "The Green Zone" this weekend. Essentially, as AO Scott noted, the film did a pretty decent job of distilling the events and politics of wartime Bagdhad into the action/thriller genre:
To anyone who was paying attention in 2003 and after, this is familiar territory. Mr. Greengrass and the screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, deftly glean material from the historical record, and while they compress, simplify and invent according to the imperatives of the genre - this is a thriller, not a documentary - they do so with seriousness and an impressive sense of scruples. They have clearly studied journalistic accounts of the early days of the war, citing Rajiv Chandrasekaran's vivid "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" as a particular inspiration, and while the picture they paint of infighting among the Americans and growing factionalism among the Iraqis may not be literally accurate in every particular, it has the rough authority of novelistic truth.
At the movie's core is the discovery by an Army officer, played by Matt Damon, that the US government's justification for invasion - Iraqi WMDs - was manufactured.
And watching it made me feel outraged all over again. If anything, the movie should be a reminder of how awful, how devastatingly awful the last administration was, how sick the invasion was, how wrong its supporters were - especially after it was evident it was a sham, a setup, a con job.
Naturally the movie is irking conservatives, who are busy trying to resurrect Bush's reputation. Ross Douthat takes a novel approach for a conservative, and pines for someone to depict the "complexities" of the war, instead of turning it into some over-simplistic story of good vs evil. ("If only Hollywood could be more like George W Bush," writes FDL's Blue Texan, "and embrace a sophisticated, nuanced, shades-of-gray type of worldview - rather than so clumsily dividing the world into good and evil." Or read Daniel Larison's complete smackdown of Douthat.)
Of course, in a way - and not the way Douthat intends - the move is a little over simplistic. For starters, in "The Green Zone," there's much surprise when no WMDs are found and there's shock when it's revealed that the administration had a hand in manufacturing WMD intelligence. Of course, by the invasion, it was pretty clear that there were no WMDs in Iraq, and that the intelligence from the Pentagon was suspect, to say the least.
That is, the move is an over-simplistic flick that augurs how the American public will remember the war, how most are already processing it. Basically, people are remembering that they were hoodwinked, when, in fact, most people had the evidence, heard the dissenting voices, and still supported the war. The public and the media galloped headlong towards Iraq under Bush's banner willingly, despite the plethora of reasonable and well-informed voices that showed there was nothing there...
This post by Ed Morrissey highlighting a peer-reviewed article questioning the role of climate change in strength and frequency of hurricanes is emblematic with what's wrong with the conservative movement.
For starters, there's always been controversy within the scientific community about the effect of warming global temperatures on storms - especially hurricanes. And note that the article cited second-hand from a Murdoch-owned newspaper essentially reaffirms that climate change is real; all that's being questioned is the effect of warming on hurricane severity. There are similar peer-reviewed scientific articles taking the opposite view.
Additionally, Morrissey isn't challenging scientific consensus here (emphasis mine):
In the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, anthropogenic global warming (AGW) activists insisted that the stronger storm systems resulted from the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, making hurricanes increasingly more severe. These claims made their way into the UN's IPCC report and have been a staple of AGW arguments for immediate and drastic action to limit energy production as part of the "settled science" attempt to shut down debate.
Note that it was the media who ran off with the hurricane-strength-influenced-by-climate-change meme after Hurricane Katrina. And so a conservative blogger uses a distorted opinion from a biased newspaper to argue against uninformed opinions formed by the mass media...and concluding that global warming isn't happening.
It's not a stance that represents any discernible ideology. Instead, it's simply contrarian, pernicious arguing intended to confuse for political gain.
Sound familiar? It's the same kind of rhetoric we hear against the stimulus package, denying that the infusion of money failed to create jobs. Or rhetoric against health care, where calls for a rethinking of reform don't actually mean Republicans would like to rethink reform, they're meant to confuse, obstruct.
Thoughtful, rational conservatives exist. Only they're drowned out by the crazies, the Glen Becks and Tea Baggers who cry "socialism" and frame opposing policies, not as ineffective or inefficient or expensive, but as a danger to the very body politic. Any policy put forward by a Democrat is a threat to the fabric of the nation.
In the past, the GOP has always seemed to let the crazies keen and gnash their teeth, while all along they put the adults in charge of policy. You saw that during the Reagan administration, when the president paid lip service to the tax-cut and big-government rhetoric that got him elected, all the while raising taxes and racking up enormous budget deficits.
But the problem is that the reasonable people are losing control. The worst of Bush Jr's administration happened as a result of sticking too close to the rhetoric. Deregulation, runaway spending, and tax cuts for the wealthy led to financial crisis and huge budget deficits. Delusional war game theories led to the "Bush Doctrine" -- preemptive invasion and perpetual war. And now it seems the rational people have gone away, driven off by the Roger Koopmans of the right.
It's too bad, especially during the time of crisis we're in now. Rampant unemployment...budget deficits, spurred largely by rising health care costs...potential global environmental catastrophe...and for each, the conservative response has been denial.
I find the graph in this report to be very revealing...
Turns out "convervative" to "very conservative" Americans actually like big government:
Very few conservatives said they favored reducing (or cutting out altogether) spending on any program. The least popular program proved to be childcare -- with a grand total of 20 percent of conservatives saying they'd slash it. The most popular is highways; only 6 percent want to cut spending there. Even bugaboos like welfare and foreign aid fare well, attracting the ire of only 15 percent of conservatives. Amazingly, the survey found that, on average, 54 percent of them actually wanted to increase spending.
Not a surprise, actually. It's fun to trash "big government," call for "reduced wasted spending," but it's another to actually go ahead and do something about it.
Of course, the mainstream conservative movement is hopelessly befuddled when it comes to policy.
I don't know who originally coined the axiom, "First, do no harm," but that is what the government needs to do in order to get us even close to thinking about an economic recovery. As Congress debates and the President presses for sweeping changes in health care, climate change (cap & trade), card check, different tax rates for investors, different rates for income tax payers, death tax revisions, huge financial and banking reforms, and record deficit spending, my question is this - who would want the risk of hiring new people in a time of record uncertainty? And not just economic uncertainty, but uncertainty largely created by government officials and regulators.
It's not an easy time to be a business owner right now, especially a small business owner. I think most are thinking they are safer just treading water than trying to expand, and it's due in large part to many things being debated in Congress right now. If we want to get our people back to work, we must first understand what's been keeping businesses from hiring new people. Tax credits aren't going to get people back to work in any large numbers.
Jon doesn't come right out and say it, but it's the obvious rationale for the policy of status quo - which means deregulation, corporate subsidies and tax breaks, etc & co. Of course, the kicker is this: the crises that are causing so much instability are the targets of the policies Bennion is singling out. The global financial crisis. Global warming. The health care crisis. All of which are the direct results of the kind of pro-corporate status quo that the Montana Main Street blog is paid to represent.
But Bennion is right. These problems aren't going to be solved with your usual run-of-the-mill tax credits. We need something else that address the roots of the crises that face us.
Which brings me to Cory Pein's profile of economist Samuel Bowles:
"Inequality," she says, "really holds us back."
Bowles offers a key reason why this is so. "Inequality breeds conflict, and conflict breeds wasted resources," he says.
In short, in a very unequal society, the people at the top have to spend a lot of time and energy keeping the lower classes obedient and productive.
Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls "guard labor." In a 2007 paper on the subject, he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim: Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth from would-be Robin Hoods.
The job descriptions of guard labor range from "imposing work discipline"-think of the corporate IT spies who keep desk jockeys from slacking off online-to enforcing laws, like the officers in the Santa Fe Police Department paddy wagon parked outside of Walmart.
The greater the inequalities in a society, the more guard labor it requires, Bowles finds. This holds true among US states, with relatively unequal states like New Mexico employing a greater share of guard labor than relatively egalitarian states like Wisconsin.
The problem, Bowles argues, is that too much guard labor sustains "illegitimate inequalities," creating a drag on the economy. All of the people in guard labor jobs could be doing something more productive with their time-perhaps starting their own businesses or helping to reduce the US trade deficit with China.
And think off all the service workers laboring to justify the inequities of our system. Like the Montana Main Street blog. Why, Fox News, too, is essentially "guard labor," isn't it? Working tirelessly to protect the status quo and its economic inequities, producing nothing of actual value?
Bowles' suggestion is a one-time sum of $250,000 for every American when they turn 18, allowing them to go to college or start a business and break individuals out of the rut of poverty. Not sure if I'd go there, but a nice alternative would be to give generous tax breaks to those in the lower strata of tax brackets while levying higher taxes on those that earn more.
Roger Koopman and his friends are up to their usual tricks, this time circulating a purity test:
In a repeat of 2008, former Bozeman Rep. Roger Koopman has set his sights on state Republicans who he accuses of being too liberal, or RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). Koopman, the chairman of the newly formed Montana Conservative Alliance, says his group is mailing questionnaires to every GOP candidate and, based on their results, will identify who will be supported and who will be targeted.
In the last legislative election, Koopman and his cronies dislodged three moderate Republicans in primaries.
I know there are leftys out there who would apply the same Koopman-esque tactics to the Democratic party - and certainly I heartily support running good progressive candidates against bad candidates - but Koopman's style demands strict ideological adherence to a narrow set of simplistic "principles" under all conditions. What you get from that kind of process is a pack of simplistic, narrow-minded legislators applying simplistic cookie-cutter policies to complex problems with monomaniacal fury.
That's not a good thing.
I will say that pundits and media outlets have an irrational love of "independents." There's a romanticized vision out there that an "independent" is somehow a fierce, pragmatic thinker free from the pull and tug of mindless partisanship, bravely inhabiting the small strip of no-man's land between the two political parties. But in reality, independent voters are anything but a homogenous bloc. Maoist lefties and white supremacist righties both consider themselves "independent." Others are independent because of a single issue. Abortion, for example, may push a economic progressive, say, to vote for a rightwing pro-life Republican. Others are partisan, but call themselves independent to foil pollsters or because they like the idea of being independent. Others are partisan, but switch their vote to punish a politician for not upholding her party's values - like in the case of the recent Massachusetts special Senatorial election.
That's a long way of saying that "moderates" don't really represent "independent" voters. But a moderate politician does make sure that constituents from both sides of the political divide are represented - which isn't a bad thing. (In the national health care debate, for example, Blue Dog Democrats did bring legitimate concerns about the effects health care legislation would have on state budgets and small businesses.)
In the case of the Montana Republican party, that's crucial. That's because efforts of folks like Koopman have transformed the state Republican party into a truly radical political movement that seeks to advance the interests of a tiny faction of the state's voters.
I'm not going to be around much in the next couple of days, but I thought I'd leave you with this little tidbit from some rightie blogger:
Islam wants to destroy the West.
Islam is not a religion: it is a political, commercial, ideological, and criminal organization disguised as a religion so that it can use Liberals within our own borders as Fifth Column enablers of its attacks upon US interests.
Wait! I thought it was the right that was so gold-durned religious!
Ugh. Mark Steyn's recent column about the Underwear Bomber reminds me of all that was so egregiously wrong about the past decade.
It's odd actually - but, personally, the last decade has been pretty incredible. The birth of my children. Attending graduate school in Missoula, the swirl and rush of the 2006 election campaign, the completion of the work in 2008. Other things, too, like the Red Sox finally cracking it open - not once, but twice - the dominance of the Patriots, some memorable trips to faraway places, a brief and enjoyable hiatus in the Bay Area, these things made the naughties, for me, pretty swell.
But on a wider level, the naughties were a stinker: 9/11, sinking earnings and a flat-lining economy, looming ecological disaster, the Bush administration, Iraq and the associated collapse of the media, a bungled Afghanistan, Dick Cheney, the hamstringing of progressives on health care reform, Blackwater, and torture, just to name a few off the top of my head. An evil, vile time, and lot of the most reprehensible events that occurred are clearly lain at our own feet.
And why? Read Steyn's simpering, fear-soaked column wringing its hands over airport security and cloaked in gutless he-man bravado. It's a voice worshiping Armageddon, and demanding you, too, get on your knees in obeisance to his fear, cloaked in nationalist rhetoric, and demanding the blood sacrifice of liberals. It's craven, calculated, political, and completely amoral. And that's what drove us to Iraq, to the loss of habeas corpus, to torture: the careful manipulation of fear for partisan, political gain.
I remember when it began: with John Walker Lindh's capture a few weeks after 9/11. Say what you will about the man - whether he's a traitor addled by religious fervor or a misunderstood pilgrim caught up in events - there was something rotten about his treatment after capture...the beatings, the torture, the quick application of "justice," and the weird gag order imposed on him and his family that forbids them to speak about his handling by the US government, clearly none of which serves our national security interests.
But the really notable element to come out of Walker Lindh's capture was the rhetoric coming out of the right that was prominently featured on cable television talk shows. Remember this?
We need to execute people like John Walker [Lindh] in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors.
Ann Coulter said this, January of 2002. Later Coulter hid behind her claim it was a joke, but it wasn't funny when I heard it sitting on my inlaws' couch in Berkeley, California, when she and her ilk d*mned an entire metropolitan area of several millions as treasonous because of Walker Lindh. What was notable, though, was that it marked the end to that that post-9/11 feeling of unity that was so pervasive everywhere. Coulter's remarks were an announcement, a piercing fanfare, that 9/11 was going to be crassly exploited to go after the left, politically.
To be fair, what really sunk us was that a lot of lefties - and notably, the media -- bowed down for fear of appearing "weak." Still, it was right-wing fear that moved them. And that grating, arrogant, fear-laden tone is what I'll remember most about the politics of this decade...
Ugh. So I wake up to this video clip posted on 4&20 blackbirds of Baucus mangling his way through a speech on the Senate floor, and find out that conservatives - led by Drudge - are using the clip to claim that Baucus was drunk in Congress.
Assholes.
Anyone who's ever seen Max Baucus give a speech knows this is somewhat representative of the way he speaks in public. He's a crappy public speaker, okay? And that's when he's not upset or tired, as he obviously is while giving this "speech."
Anyone who actually knows Max understands that he has struggled for years with what many of us believe to be the remnants of a childhood speech impediment that he is too proud to admit that he suffered from and is, likewise (and rightly if it is true), too determined not to let stand in the way of a career in public service. I do not know this definitively to be true, but strongly believe that this is the case.
A Max speech will not be confused any time soon with an Obama speech, nor would anyone in Montana expect it to be. (Perhaps conservative bloggers elsewhere are confused). When Max is excited, as here, in public (and in private) sometimes he tends to slur his words. Again, nothing new for anyone who has seen Max excited or, as very likely in this case, utterly exhausted in the marathon of the health care debate. I have seen both excited and exhausted Max. I also would be absolutely stunned if Max went to the Senate floor intoxicated and see nothing here other than a tired and excited Max, struggling as he normally does to communicate what is in his head and heart.
I've seen Max speak dozens of times. I've been at informal events where there's plenty of alcohol. I've never seen the Senator publicly drunk, or even drinking alcohol. The dude runs marathons, people. He's a health nut, not a drunk.
I think it's fair game for folks to attack his politics, to go after his judgment in nominating US attorneys, to question his too-cozy relationships with lobbyists, but, of course, that kind of behavior is just fine with conservative bloggers, isn't it? After all, that's the kind of government they're fighting for.
I know some among my circle of progressive friends are a little nervous about conservatives wanting to create a "citizen grand jury" for Montana, but I think it's a fantastic idea!
Just imagine! As soon as the law's passed, we can start convening these things to use against the right-wing zealots behind this thing! Duane Sipe, the initiative's sponsor; Richard Stevens of "Freedom Action Rally"; and Sen. Verdell Jackson of Kalispell. Constitution Party members, Tea Baggers. It wouldn't be hard to drum up some reasons, right? After all, these people believe the income tax is illegal, that most kinds of government activity is illegal, etc & co. I think we can confidently say their tax returns probably could use a good looking-over, right?
But, whoa! I'm getting wa-a-a-a-a-y ahead of myself here. You don't actually need a reason to convene a citizen's grand jury, you just need signatures from half of one percent of a county's registered voters! There'll be time enough after the signatures are gathered to figure out what the grand jury should investigate, because it's the jury that has "sole control" over the "length and depth" of investigations.
And the best thing? You don't even need an indictment to do damage! Isn't that great? Because the proceedings of the grand jury are completely public! That's right! And because of a grand jury's broad powers to call up evidence and testimony (and no sneaky hiding behind the 5th amendment for the accused in a grand jury!), all sorts of irrelevant evidence can be brought up to damage the investigated's reputation. Heck! And you can present all kinds of weak evidence that makes the defendant look guilty in the court of public opinion!
And think about all the costs someone under endless investigation would have to bear! All those trips to Missoula - on work days, of course - toting a lawyer along, the endless depositions, examination of evidence, research, etc & co. Really, if the costs of being investigated by a politically-motivated grand jury doesn't drive these people out of Montana...
And why stop there? How difficult would it be to, say, gather enough signatures to call a citizen's grand jury to look into Dennis Rehberg's role in the Flathead Lake Boat Crash? An afternoon at the Missoula Farmer's Market? And while we're looking into Rehberg's drinking habits, we can examine his finances, his connections with lobbyists (like Leo Giaocometto!), hell! We can check out his family, make sure they're on the up-and-up, right?
And we can do the same to whoever opts to run against Tester in '12. Or to current legislators. Krayton Kerns! Scott Sales! Just to name a few. And some old names from the past - Marc Racicot! Tim Fox! Judy Martz!
Clever name, isn't it? "Citizens" grand jury? Because, really, it's just a means for a small group of radicals to terrorize their neighbors. Like the "Committee of Public Safety"! Or the local "citizens councils" (or "Soviets" in Russian)! It's a slap to democracy. In fact, all through the report, the brain trust behind these grand juries derides democratic institutions - appointed judges and elected leaders, the entire legal system.
But it's your system. You vote, you have the power to make and change the rules. So, make no mistake, it's not the government these people can't stand, it's you.
The California con man who failed in his bid to take over an empty Montana jail testified Friday that he is out of money, does not have the corporate backing he once claimed and even struggles to pay rent on his apartment.
Yes, Hardin officials and former Billings Gazette reporter Becky Shay are looking pretty d*mn stupid and gullible right now, but the biggest losers in all of this are the right-wing conspiracy theorists who drummed up the usual paranoia of one-world-government and military takeovers around what amounted to a minor con-man's false promises...
Here's a typically sensationalist story from the English paper, The Daily Mail, about how parents are not allowed to play with their own children in some parks, because they haven't been vetted by police to make sure they're not pedophiles. Pretty crazy stuff, I guess, but then I'm not crazy about a lot of England's public security measures, like its system of cameras on public streets.
Whatever. That's England. Who cares, right?
No the interesting thing is the reaction from the American right to this kind of news. Check it out. Hot Air says the UK made "domestic surveillance into an art form." Over at the Corner, Mark Steyn writes, "increasingly in Britain, the state's basic assumption is that everyone's a pedophile until proven otherwise," and hints darkly that this is the way "free societies...retreat incrementally...into a totalitarian hell." Jill at Pundit & Pundette is more explicit, and links England's park problem as a natural progression of other stories involving President Obama. Moonbattery dubs the incidents in England as "classic moonbat logic."
Uh...doesn't this kind of thing actually stem out of conservative policies? I mean, it wasn't long ago that Mark Steyn was advocating for absolute state power in monitoring its citizens - here in the US - in his defense of the Bush administration's unconstitutional domestic spying program. In that case, Steyn argued that it was better to preserve Americans' safety than their freedom from unwarranted government monitoring. And it was Mitt Romney who famously said, "our most basic civil liberty is the right to be kept alive."
And the whole pedophilia fear mongering stems from the right, too. Congress' first attempt to censor the Internet - in the name of children - came in the mid-1990s, as a group of conservative Senators - including Orrin Hatch, James Exon, and Slade Gordon introduced, and pushed through Congress, the "Communications Decency Act," which was later declared unconstitutional. The CDA was the brainchild of the US Christian right; the Christian Coalition's "Contract with the American Family" listed enacting legislation to censor the Internet in the name of protecting children from obscenity as one of its major goals. Conservative and notorious anti-obscenity Ed Meese DoJ appointee, Bruce Taylor, drafted the CDA for Senator Exon.
And conservatives have in the past tried to get government to assume that certain adults are pedophiles, without evidence, without convictions. I'm talking about, of course, conservative opposition to adoption by gay parents based on the claim that gay men are inherent pedophiles.
The right has never shied from intrusive government intervention in the name of safety. And safety in the name of our children has been conservative Christians' calling-card since...well, my whole lifetime. If the US adopts the ridiculous playground policies reported in the English newspaper, it'll be because of conservative pressure, not liberal.
I know this is an old theme, but the same folks crying "totalitarianism" now, during the Obama administration for a slew of policies and programs that are distinctly un-totalitarian, were the biggest supporters of Bush policies - the politicization of the DoJ, torture, domestic spying, manufacturing evidence to lead the country into war - that actually did invest the White House with extralegal powers.
The fellas as The Corner are p*ssed off! What's this witch hunt against poor old Rush Limbaugh? The "race baiters" are out after him, lobbying against his ownership of the St. Louis Rams! Take it away, Andy McCarthy! Those liberal do-gooders are leveling "phony attacks" against Rush Limbaugh! Plus, Andy had ethnic friends! He knows Rush's racist jabs are just folks having fun! And Mark Steyn, that guardian of truth! Those claims against Rush are faked!
Oh, and Mark's column yesterday totally, one-hundred-percent proved that Rush is noway, nohow, never-ever said anything offensive, like ever!
What's the theory here? He said these things on the air in 2006 and nobody noticed? 2001? Maybe 1995, back when Clinton was blaming him for Oklahoma City? Hey, let's not get hung up on details. Just because nobody can find any evidence anywhere of Rush saying these "quotes" doesn't mean he didn't say 'em.
Yeah, because we all know the traditional media is the penultimate champion of virtue.
But...er..."Barack the Magic Negro" happened. And then there were those comments on McNabb when Limbaugh had his gig on ESPN. That's just two incidents I can think of off the top of my head. Weren't those alone enough to for y'all to want to keep Limbaugh away from your kids, let alone, you know, a major sports franchise? And Andy? Since you were friends with the ethnics and all, and you kids used to crack the racist jokes with one another - how would your friends feel about you cracking those same jokes to a room full of white men? I'd imagine they wouldn't find it so funny. You know, because that's exactly Limbaugh's audience.
Not sure why these folks want to circle the wagons around someone like that. But, trust me, it's not too flattering to be running point for a (former?) dope-addled racist demagogue.
Kathy Kattenburg explains better than me why motive is irrelevant in the Sparkman murder:
Now, these details still do not tell us whether Starkman was killed because he was a Census worker, or whether he was killed because, in the course of doing his Census work, he happened to come upon an illegal activity. But they do make it crystal clear that Starkman's killers wanted him to be found like that. Which means - obviously - that this was a message killing. It was a political statement - an act of terrorism....
It's irrelevant whether Sparkman's murderer(s) were meth dealers or government-haters. Either way, Bill Sparkman was killed because he was, as the message on his body crudely proclaimed, a "fed." And whether his killers were fans of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, or not; whether they knew that a member of Congress had declared her proud intention to violate federal law and encouraged others to do so, or not; whether they had picked up on the Republican Party's many, many anti-government "hate minutes," or not, does not mitigate the dangerous and irresponsible game that conservative public figures, lawmakers, and prominent bloggers/pundits are playing when they go beyond criticizing specific political figures or particular political viewpoints, and start to attack government itself, along with the very notion of public service. Public discourse is increasingly shaped by the voices of those we elected to make government work for us - all of us - refusing to support the public process they swore to uphold, and actually making it their task to destroy government from within, to tear it down and put it down and have us believe that good government is a joke and government institutions a source of evil and danger, such that violating the law is an act of patriotism. And when they do this, they are responsible - for implicitly condoning and encouraging hatred, for stirring the embers and for fanning the flames and for the "unintended" and "unfortunate" consequences when, as flames do, they burn out of control - for being, in Natalie Cole's exquisite words, "silver tongues bearing fruit from poison lies."
In short, those that spent their rainy-day savings to send Robert Stacy McCain to Kentucky to prove - what, exactly? Sparkman's killers love their government? don't watch Glenn Beck? - have wasted their money.
Update:Unbelievable. From the same folks who froth at the mouth about jumping to conclusions, etc & co. Completely classless and disrespectful.
More gruesome details about the death of Census worker, Bill Sparkman, have emerged that make it obvious that - regardless of motive for the killing - Sparkman's killer was, by stripping Sparkman, binding his hands and feet with duct tape, scrawling "fed" on his chest, and attaching his Census ID card to his head, was participating in an exceptionally violent and lunatic way with the anti-government rhetoric promulgated on cable television and talk radio.
As Faiz Shakir writes, "Regardless of what the motive for the killing may have been, why would a murder(s) take such pains to so blatantly convey anger, fear, and vitriol towards a Census employee?" It's either passion stirred by the talk show propagandists, or a conscious draw away from the real reasons for the murder. Either way, anti-government ideas were never far from mind while Bill Sparkman was bound and hung.
Read Richard Benjamin's post on HuffPo. In it, he spins Sparkman's murder as the narrative of a crumbling infrastructure, a dynamic American electorate, and the lingering death of America's middle- and working-classes. In short, the pressures caused by growing minority populations coupled with the decline of American manufacturing, the decline of real wages, and the rising instability associated with foreclosures and rising medical and insurance costs, puts the 2010 Census into a highly volatile context - which is being whipped up into a froth by the Glenn Becks and Michelle Bachmans. Sadly, it's the Bill Sparkmans - the "perma-lancers," as Benjamin calls them, the ordinary Americans taking on multiple jobs to make ends meet - who are on the front lines here.
This is a good time to excerpt from Adam Gopnik's reaction to the Oklahama City bombing, "Violence as Style":
Timothy McVeigh may be a nut, but nuts don't fall far from the tree. Fifty years from now, historians are unlikely to wrote, "In the mid-nineties, politicians and talk-show radio created an atmosphere of poisonous hatred against the national government. Also in a completely unrelated development, somebody blew up the federal office building in Oklahoma City"....The problem is not that the militias have been mysteriously infiltrated by extremists but that the federal government has, especially in the past two years, been inflated into an imaginary hate-object big enough for a nut. That's happened with the enthusiastic help of "mainstream" right-wing paranoia: Bill Clinton is an illegitimate President; liberals are the enemies of normal Americans; gun control is a conspiracy to tyrannize the populace; a New World Order is being put in place by foreign bankers. These are the ideas of Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan and the N.R.A. - ideas, in other words, that a section of the "responsible" right in this country has spent the last few years legitimizing and circulating. It is no great exaggeration to say that The American Survival Guide is just The American Spectator with bazooka ads.
Of course, the difference is that the militia right comes armed with ideas and guns, whereas the mainstream far right comes armed only with ideas. Not a meaningless difference but not a decisive one, either, as we discover when the ideas being promoted are the kind whose logical consequence is to make somebody else want to go pick up a gun. It turns out that there isn't one world of cultural theater and another world of real acts. The terrorists, though, had come to believe they weren't bombing a building full of people but obliterating an abstract object of hate. The "grievances" that are said to have moved them seem, on examination, curiously bloodless - things seen on television and in "instructional" videos rather than actually experienced. The people who had helped teach them to view the world as a set of easy abstractions, rather than as intricate arrangements made by human beings and inhabited by them, are under no obligation to take the blame for what happened. But it would be nice to see a little more remorse.
The left learned long ago to shut out its potentially violent fringe rhetoric from mainstream discourse, thanks to the hard lessons it learned about political violence in the sixties. Despite Timothey McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, the right refuses to acknowledge the dangers in abetting racist, nativist, homophobic, and virulently anti-government rhetoric. But blood has already been spilled in Pittsburgh. And Kansas. And, now, in Kentucky. Where next?
As you might expect, buzz over healthcare reform continues to heat up as we march towards the president's speech tomorrow.
First, notmanyfolks think too highly of Baucus' rumored proposal floating around the Senate Finance Committee.
Ezra Klein's taken some (deserved) heat for tweeting support for Baucus' proposal, but he's the same guy that wrote this post, "What Happened to Last Year's Max Baucus?" speculating the reason behind the yawning gulf that separates Max Baucus' white paper from the recent proposals he's doling out in committee, still relevant today:
...Baucus pulled a bit of a bait-and-switch. That paper proved less his plan than his effort to articulate the Democratic consensus in such a way that Democrats were comfortable with him leading the debate. In particular, Kennedy had to be happy with that paper, because Kennedy was the threat to Baucus's leadership.
But Kennedy's illness took him out of the game. Baucus no longer needed to worry about Kennedy stealing the leadership of health-care reform away from him, which meant he stopped looking over his left shoulder. The effect was a bit like shutting down a primary challenge against Baucus: His surprising leftward lurch stopped entirely, and he drifted back to the more centrist approaches that had defined his career. It's hard to say how the process would have differed if Baucus had spent his days worrying about keeping Kennedy onboard, but it seems possible that the practical impact would have been to keep Baucus closer to the paper he'd written to attract Kennedy's support.
Makes you wonder how this debate would have gone if Kennedy hadn't gotten sick, and Clinton hadn't accepted a post as Secretary of State.
And then it's important to remember that there are two bodies in Congress, and that the House will have as much say about how reform takes place as the Senate. The LA Times has a nice little primer on the difference between the House reform bill's and what's being discussed in the Senate - which only underscores how superior the House bills are.
Also, according to The Hill, 23 House Democrats have said they won't vote for any of the reform bills that have been discussed. Pelosi can afford to lose only 38 members of her caucus total; the defection of the 23 gives the progressive bloc all the more power, as only 15 have to keep their promise to vote against any bill without the public option to kill toothless reform.
And let's not forget to poke conservatives on this issue. There's been no leadership from the right. There's been no acknowledgment that there even is a problem with health care in this country. The Republican strategy all along has been to kill this bill and continue the status quo, and by any means necessary, even if that means obfuscating, Red baiting, and stirring up racist resentment to do so. Hugh Hewitt's post is on reform is unusually bald in this regard. He admits the goal is the status quo, and he ends his post by pimping for the RNC and the NRSC: a nice reminder that the ultimate goal of TeaBagging and Hitler signs and shouting down your neighbors is to put Republicans back in Congress and back at the lobbyists' teats.
Over at ECC, I read Greg's soothing call for "objectivity" on the GOP-led efforts to thwart health-care reform:
You see, there really are two sides to every story. That doesn't mean that you can not 'pick' one of those sides, strongly believe you are right, and actually be right. It just means that every time you take a position on a matter, you had better understand that there is a different position somewhere that someone else thinks is right....
...We've never, ever seen anyone one with a leftist agenda disrupt any sort of a government meeting, have we? That's because they're nice, and people on the right are "violent" and "authoritarian." Remember a few years ago when there was a study or a few studies claiming that people leaning right are dumber than liberals? (By the way, Mark has pointed me to "studies" too...no doubt funded by tax dollars!) Who was the last Republican Presidential candidate who was not generally mocked as stupid? Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, these men are geniuses. Reagan, an amiable dunce. President Bush (W), a Yale graduate is an idiot.
Yes...how...how...reasonable! And it's...true...sort of...
But wait. What's the "other" side of the story? The outrage over the recent spate of Republican-led protests isn't about acknowledging conservative opposition to Democratic health care reform. It's about a concerted effort - by quasi-legal means - to kill reform. Not to alter it, not to influence it, not to offer compromise, or to put forth a conservative solution - or even a coherent worldview, competing ideas, an alluring image of what's right and proper. No, this is plain, politics, brutish and ugly, not meant to open the doors of democracy and debate, but to slam them closed.
And this isn't some kind of tit-for-tat: the disturbances of Baucus' committee hearings on health-care by single-payer advocates was in favor of widening debate in the hopes of forcing representatives to at least consider a powerful and beautiful idea. Those disturbances weren't thuggish or malicious or wrapped in lies and racist, nativist fury.
It's a prominent conservative repeating AM-radio canards to her gullible followers. It's Republican political operatives masquerading as "ordinary moms" at protests to foster the illusion of a seething mass. It's death threats made to union members. It's a anti-health-care-reform activist urging his followers to "carry" and "hurt badly" ACORN/SEIU members that oppose them at protests. It's a concerted effort by the Republican party to deliberately mislead Americans as to what the health care legislation actually contains.
There are days when I look at the modesty of the plan -- which would cover 40 million people, impose some small taxes on the rich, curb the worst excesses of the insurance industry and not affect the overwhelming majority of people at all -- and the pitch of the rhetoric and really wish that the plan on the table was actually worth this much controversy and rage. It is evidence for the view that the difference between proposing something really ambitious and something pretty modest is that the modest plan gets you more industry support. The political mobilization and polarization will be the same either way.
Back to the Steven Pearlstein op-ed. "The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers, on the effort to reform the health-care system," writes Pearlstein, "have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage....They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems."
After describing what's actually in the various proposals (as opposed to the blustering hyperbole and lies supplied by the right), Pearlstein concludes:
Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society -- whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.
If health reform is to be anyone's Waterloo, let it be theirs.
Sadly, the likely reform will be as Klein described it, "pretty modest," and not "worth this controversey and rage." It's hard to muster the troops to support something devoid of meaning and largely inconsequential. Unless, of course, you poison the troops with birth certificates and Red-baiting.
I haven't given the Tea Baggers' protests much attention - they're obviously a small minority of Americans riled up by professional provocateurs; the less said, the better. Except things are quickly spiraling out of control. It's bad enough these people are disrupting public town meetings on one of the most critical issues facing the country, but the protests in Tampa Bay and St. Louis broke out into violence...
Honestly, it's not surprising given the increasing political marginalization of these people and their increasingly hysterical rhetoric.
But while the organizers are as crass as they come, I haven't seen any evidence that the people disrupting those town halls are Florida-style rent-a-mobs. For the most part, the protesters appear to be genuinely angry. The question is, what are they angry about?
There was a telling incident at a town hall held by Representative Gene Green, D-Tex. An activist turned to his fellow attendees and asked if they "oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care." Nearly all did. Then Representative Green asked how many of those present were on Medicare. Almost half raised their hands.
Now, people who don't know that Medicare is a government program probably aren't reacting to what President Obama is actually proposing. They may believe some of the disinformation opponents of health care reform are spreading, like the claim that the Obama plan will lead to euthanasia for the elderly. (That particular claim is coming straight from House Republican leaders.) But they're probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they've heard about what he's doing, than to who he is.
That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that's behind the "birther" movement, which denies Mr. Obama's citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don't know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn't be surprising if it's a substantial fraction.
And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.
And to underscore this point, here comes Peggy Noonan in the pages of the WSJ calling on Democrats and the president to respect the Tea Baggers, claiming that they represent a majority of Americans on health care reform...despite all the evidence and polling that Americans actually want a system that's more progressive than what the president has suggested...and any violence that occurs will be the inevitable result of the president's...er...democratic impulses...er...
At what point does the traditional media call out the Becks and Limbaughs and the Fox News hosts and Republican politicos who stoke the flames of hatred? At what point does the media do a full attack on the political misinformation campaign on health care reform?
As a columnist who regularly dishes out sharp criticism, I try not to question the motives of people with whom I don't agree. Today, I'm going to step over that line.
The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.
Ah...remember the good ol' days, when Jonah Goldberg said that liberals were fascist because, well, some of us are vegetarian (Hitler was a vegetarian!) and some of us are gay (some Nazis were gay!)?
It's important to remember that what made Nazis bad wasn't that they cleaned up their country's water supply (like liberals want to!), or had an anti-tobacco campaign (like liberals!), or spent taxpayer money on infrastructure (liberals!!!), but because they riled mobs with nationalist and racist and nativist rhetoric, because they used violence to achieve political ends, because they scrapped democratic processes, instituted a dictatorship, arrested and tortured any who opposed them, invaded other countries without provocation, and murdered millions in concentration camps.
I'm not saying Tea Baggers are the new, American Brown Shirts. But is it hyperbole to point out that there are disturbing anti-democratic and violent impulses behind this new right-wing movement? I don't think so...
Tea party members plan to be out in full force to protest President Barack Obama's health care initiatives during his visit to the Bozeman area next week.
Let's hope the Tea Baggers keep their people respectful. It wouldn't help our state's reputation much to have crazed right-wingers rioting at a presidential town hall meeting.
