Monthly Archives: July 2008

More Media Mayhem

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Michael Grunwald writes for Time that, by any previous predictive measure, the McCain candidacy ought to be toast. However,

It’s also unwise to underestimate the hunger of the media for an exciting race. … The media will try to preserve the illusion of a toss-up; you’ll keep seeing “Obama Leads, But Voters Have Concerns” headlines.

Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei write for the Politico that “McCain gaffes pile up; critics pile on,” but the fact is that McCain’s “gaffes” — which are about big honking geopolitical matters like where Pakistan is — aren’t drawing nearly as much attention as inconsequential stuff Al Gore didn’t even say back in 2000.

The wingnuts are still hyperventilating about John McCain’s “rejected” op ed about Iraq, in which McCain tried to get by with bashing Obama instead of explaining his own position.

Today I learned that a “humor” piece someone wrote about Netroots Nation was “spiked,” and Michelle Malkin says, “So, not only are we not allowed to make fun of Barack Obama, but it appears that liberals in the media have also made ridiculing the left-wing blogosphere off-limits.”

I didn’t go to Netroots Nation this year, I regret, but had I been there I’m sure I could have written something humorous and fun-poking about it. The problem with the “humorous” piece that was ripped down from the website of the Austin American Statesman is that it wasn’t a bit funny. It was just mean. Right-wing humor, in other words. (IMO actual, unvarnished ridicule is rarely funny.)

Malkin has a big chunk of it on her website. But if you want to get the Cliff’s Notes version, see Greg Mitchell at Daily Kos. My impression is that the “writer” of the piece built it entirely from ancient stereotypes of “leftists” without bothering to pull his head out of his ass long enough to notice if the stereotypes still apply.

Genuine wit reveals something real. As Mark Twain said, “Humor is the good natured side of a truth.”

The part of the spiked piece that most offended me is “Pelosi is so far left her title should include (D-Beijing).” Pelosi has shown more cojones, as it were, in speaking out against Beijing and its Tibet policies than any Republican I can think of.

That’s why it wasn’t funny.

Fairness and Flatulence

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The McCain campaign claims that the New York Times rejected an op ed McCain wrote about Iraq. McCain’s campaign fed this to Drudge, who reprinted the op ed. I don’t link to Drudge, but you can find it if you really want it. The Times asked the McCain campaign to write a piece that “mirrored” the one they published by Obama a few days ago.

Remarkably, Daniel Finkelstein of the Times Online (UK) agrees with the New York Times‘s decision.

It wasn’t about Iraq. It was about Obama. If I received it I would have done exactly what the NYT did – send it back and ask them to redraft it so that it was about Iraq and was more, well, interesting.

Why was I only able to say I “think” they “may” be right? Because I don’t know exactly what they asked the Senator’s staff to do to the piece. But if they simply asked for a piece that matched Obama’s because, like Obama’s it was actually about his views on Iraq, well then I am right behind them.

Finkelstein is right that McCain’s op ed is just a big whine about Obama. I think he’s right about what the NY Times meant by “mirror,” also. That makes sense. The wingnuts, of course, think it means they want McCain to write a piece that agrees with Obama’s which does not make sense.

Rasmussen reports that there’s a growing belief reporters are trying to help Obama win. This is an opinion poll, mind you, not a report on the actual activity of journalism. 78 percent of Republicans think the press is trying to help Obama win.

What do you think? I don’t watch the entire media that closely any more. I check in with MSNBC in the evenings, scan through newspapers during the day, and that’s about it. I would say from what I’ve seen on MSNBC that their coverage is kinder to Obama than it was to Al Gore in 2000 or to John Kerry in 2004. Olbermann is unabashedly pro-Obama, of course.

At the same time, I haven’t seen MSNBC (except for Olbermann) be as harsh to McCain as it was to Gore in 2000 or Kerry in 2004.

Does this mean MSNBC on the whole is stumbling around somewhere in the general territory of “unbiased”?

Learned Helplessness

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In his column today, Bob Herbert writes,

When exactly was it that the U.S. became a can’t-do society? It wasn’t at the very beginning when 13 ragamuffin colonies went to war against the world’s mightiest empire. It wasn’t during World War II when Japan and Nazi Germany had to be fought simultaneously. It wasn’t in the postwar period that gave us the Marshall Plan and a robust G.I. Bill and the interstate highway system and the space program and the civil rights movement and the women’s movement and the greatest society the world had ever known.

When was it?

Now we can’t even lift New Orleans off its knees.

Welcome to the 28th year since the Reagan Revolution.

I don’t blame Reagan entirely for our state of learned helplessness, mind you. And Bob Herbert wasn’t writing exclusively about government. But by persuading people that “government is the problem” I think the Reaganites caused a shift in how Americans understood government. And this put the nation on the road to learned helplessness.

Even as late as the 1960s, most working- and middle-class white Americans (I realize African Americans had a different experience of things) felt that the government was theirs. Certainly people complained that Washington did plenty of boneheaded things, but still there was a belief that We, the People could accomplish great things by means of government. This may in part have been a legacy of FDR, who had a gift for evoking a “we’re all in this together” sentiment among America’s ordinary citizens.

But today, people treat and speak of “the government” as if Washington DC were occupied by space aliens taking orders from Mars, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Government can’t, or won’t, respond to the needs and concerns of ordinary Americans, and ordinary Americans no longer expect anything from government.

Thanks loads, Ronnie.

I’ve given this speech before, but I still think it’s critical that ordinary citizens be reconnected to the idea that government is “of the people, by the people, for the people.” It’s ours. It’s us. There’s nothing wrong with using government to solve problems that are not being solved by other means.

There’s a lot government cannot do. But, dammit, there’s a lot it can do, if people have the will and the leadership to see it done.

On a sorta kinda related note … yesterday David Brooks wrote one of his most bone-headed columns ever. I wanted to respond to it yesterday but was busy fighting off Shugden culties.

In “The Coming Activist Age,” Brooks said “periods of great governmental change have often been periods of conservative rule.” Really? Change? Conservative rule? Um, Coolidge? Hoover? Nope, can’t be. But lo, Brooks’s main example was Theodore Roosevelt.

You might disagree with TR’s ideas about foreign policy, but in the context of his times TR’s domestic policies made him one of the purest progressives who ever sat in the Oval Office. And after he left the White House he went further Left. His “New Nationalism” speech is the foundation of modern American liberalism.

Apparently John McCain is going around saying he wants to be the new Theodore Roosevelt. A Times letter writer responded,

Is John McCain aware that Theodore Roosevelt was not a conservative? On virtually every domestic issue — race relations, the environment, the role of government in the economy — T.R. was what today would be labeled a robust liberal, and the leading conservatives of his day, like Mark Hanna, hated and feared him.

There’s nothing of TR in McCain, I say.

One more interesting read — Sasha Abramsky, “Putting ignorance on a pedestal.”

Interesting Times

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Sorry I’ve been scarce. I need two of me to keep up with things sometimes.

Yesterday hundreds of Shugden Dorje devotees and Dalai Lama supporters clashed outside Radio City Music Hall and had to be separated by NYPD. I’m sorry I missed it.

If you’ve seen the Shugden groupies — they go around protesting His Holiness the Dalai Lama everywhere he speaks — you may have wondered what their issues are. I just wrote a long backgrounder on the other blog. Essentially, the Shugdenistas are a fundamentalist cult, and what’s going on is a power struggle within Tibetan Buddhism.

The leaders of the Shugden sect recruit lots of soft-headed westerners, feed them highly revisionist versions of Tibetan history and Buddhism, and get them all worked up into believing His Holiness is an enemy of religious freedom. But the protesters really are just pawns in a bigger game. And you can bet China is involved. This is all explained on the other blog.

So if you see the Shugden culties in the future, just ignore them. And pity them, if you like.

Notice to Shugden culties: If you want to argue with me, go to the Buddhism forums. Any nonsense you leave here will be deleted.

It’s the Stupid (Republican) Economy

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I think somebody ought to have an ad featuring these McCain quotes from a January 2008 debate running 24/7 —

Q: Are Americans better off than they were eight years ago?

A: You could argue that Americans overall are better off, because we have had a pretty good prosperous time, with low unemployment and low inflation and a lot of good things have happened. A lot of jobs have been created. … We need to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which I voted for twice to do so. … I think we are better off overall if you look at the entire eight-year period, when you look at the millions of jobs that have been created, the improvement in the economy, etc.

This should be juxtaposed with a clip from Dubya’s Tuesday press conference.

He’s not worried.

On a day that saw one economic bombshell after another, President Bush squinted, smirked and grimaced into the future Tuesday, declaring – contrary to a growing mountain of evidence – that the country’s financial system is “basically sound.”

“I’m an optimist,” a sometimes testy Bush said in his first White House news conference since April. “I believe there’s a lot of positive things for our economy.”

Dan Froomkin cites an AP poll that says “by a 2-1 margin, Americans believe McCain would generally continue Bush’s economic policies.”

Harold Meyerson has a must-read column on McCain’s economic policies in today’s WaPo.

… as McCain tries to balance the tattered libertarianism of Reaganomics with the financial exigencies of the moment, he and his campaign have moved beyond inconsistency into utter incoherence. He vows to balance the budget while also cutting corporate taxes and making permanent the Bush tax cuts for the rich — even though the rich and corporations made out like bandits during the Bush “prosperity,” while everyone else’s incomes stagnated. McCain squares this circle by vowing to cut entitlements, a move that would reduce, rather than enhance, consumer purchasing power at a time of economic downturn (or any other time, for that matter).

Whether Americans are even experiencing a downturn has been a matter of some dispute in the McCain camp, since former senator Phil Gramm, until last week one of McCain’s chief surrogates on economic issues, deemed America a nation of “whiners” mistaking subjective insecurity over the economy for an objective economic fact. For McCain, who had the misfortune to be campaigning in Michigan the day that Gramm’s remarks dominated campaign news, Gramm’s insensitivity was appalling. But McCain has never expressed any concern that Gramm wrote the legislation that enabled the $62 trillion credit default swaps market to remain unregulated, which, as David Corn documented in Mother Jones, meant that banks and hedge funds could accumulate liabilities that they could not cover if the markets — most particularly, the subprime mortgage market — went south. To the contrary, McCain has viewed Gramm as one of his economic gurus. “There is no one in America that is more respected on the issue of economics than Senator Phil Gramm,” McCain declared in February. …

…One problem is that McCain himself has no real ideas about how to fix the economy, which leaves his tetherless surrogates free to roam the policy landscape. An even deeper problem is that standard-issue Republican economic policy has run out of plausible mantras. The ritual extolling of markets and denigration of government make no sense at a moment when a conservative Republican administration is rushing to save the markets through governmental intervention.

Or, to use Reagan’s construction: Republican economics is not the solution to our problem; Republican economics is the problem — for our nation, surely, and also for candidate McCain.

Irony Deficiency

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The controversy over the New Yorker‘s Barack Obama cover once again reveals the humor rift in American politics. Yes, it’s a joke. Yes, I get it. But I don’t think it’s funny. It was a damnfool thing to put on the cover of the New Yorker.

Gary Kamiya complains that we lefties have lost our sense of humor:

After 9/11, some pious nitwits, suffering from an America-centrism akin to the medieval belief that the Earth was the center of the universe, intoned that “irony was dead.” Seven years later, they’ve been proven right — but not in the way they intended. Irony may have been killed, but not by sincerity — it’s been killed by cynicism. Vast swaths of the left have apparently been so traumatized by the Big Lie techniques employed by the Bush administration, its media lickspittles like Fox News, and the right-wing attack machine, that they have come to regard all images or texts that contain negative stereotypes as too politically dangerous to run. If you satirically depict Obama as an Islamist terrorist, in this view, you are only reinforcing and giving broader currency to right-wing smears.

Since the essence of satire is exaggerating negative stereotypes, this means that satire itself is off limits.

I see his point, but I still don’t think the cartoon was funny. Yes, we’re frightened, and we should be. Cartoons have power. The Creature “won” the past two presidential elections in part by caricaturing Al Gore and John Kerry and turning them into cartoons. People often joke about dangerous things, but the jokes aren’t funny when the danger is real and imminent.

Jonathan Alter:

In the same way, the New Yorker cover, now being displayed endlessly on cable TV, speaks louder than any efforts by Obama supporters to stop the smears (though it doesn’t help that barackobama.com makes it hard to navigate to the truth-squading). As the author Drew Weston has shown, negative images burn their way into the consciousness of voters in ways that cannot be erased by facts. With one visual move, the magazine undid months of pro-Obama coverage in its pages.

We live in a nation in which large chunks of the population are irony-challenged. Jonah Goldberg, for example. As BooMan says,

The fact that people like Jonah Goldberg support the literal interpretation of The New Yorker cover explains perfectly why it failed as satire.

Fairy Tales

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E.J. Dionne wrote a column last week in which he said that free-market economic theory has collapsed.

You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn’t matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to “grow the pie” is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is “protectionism.”

The old script is in rewrite. “We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation,” Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.

To which I say, ha. Since when does the Right let anything like real-world experience or empirical evidence get in the way of a good fairy tale?

I’ve been watching today to see who’s commenting on the Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac crisis, and it’s mostly been us Leftie bloggers, with a few moderate Right exceptions. The Right is already coming up with creative ways to blame the Left. It’s what they’re good at.