May 5, 2008

Regulation and the Right

Filed under: conservatism — maha @ 2:54 pm

We all know righties are against government regulation. Well, except when they aren’t.

Background: Brody Mullins and Kris Maher of the Wall Street Journal today claim that Barack Obama won the support of the Teamster’s Union by privately pledging to end government oversight of the Union. Both the Teamsters and the Obama campaign deny there was a quid pro quo. The Obama campaign says Obama was on record in favor of ending the government oversight of the Teamsters back in 2004.

The Teamsters point out that Senator Clinton also had told them she was opposed to the oversight:

The union also noted that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, suggested that she might also support ending the union’s consent decree with the federal government when she spoke to the Teamsters’ general executive board last year.

“You can’t go around dragging the ball and the chain of the past,” Mrs. Clinton said on that occasion — the March 27, 2007, meeting of the board — according to an audio tape that the union made available. “And I think that’s true for anybody, any organization, any individual,” she continued. “And so I would be very open to looking at that, and to saying, ‘What are we trying to accomplish here?’ and see what the answers were. At some point, you turn the page and go on.”

Of course, the Clinton campaign now says Senator Clinton didn’t mean she was actually going to do anything about government oversight, and the Clintonistas have taken up right-wing talking points about the alleged Teamster quid pro quo to slam Obama.

BTW, I believe the oversight under discussion is a consent decree made between the Justice Department and the Teamsters back in 1989 that allows the feds to supervise the Union and Union elections. The Teamsters signed the decree to settle a civil racketeering lawsuit that federal prosecutors had brought against the Union, charging it with being controlled by mobsters.

We’re getting to the punch line — rightie blogger response to the Wall Street Journal story goes along the line of how dare anyone even think about not regulating unions! Here’s an example, from Townhall:

Today’s Wall Street Journal implies that Barack Obama may have offered the Teamsters a quid pro quo in order to win the endorsement. Making matters worse, his “deal” involves looking the other way on the issue of corruption. … Making back-room deals with the Teamsters — now that’s a “new brand of politics”!

In other words, reducing government supervision of the Teamsters is tantamount to “looking the other way on the issue of corruption.” The Teamsters were corrupt in the past; therefore, they will always be corrupt. They are corrupt by definition.

Funny Big Corporations and financial institutions are not held to the same standard, huh? Even as the nation’s economy is reeling from the mortgage crisis, the Right is hollering about unfair regulation of financial markets. Paul Krugman writes,

But while our out-of-control financial system has been bad for the country, it has been very good for wheeler-dealers, who collect huge fees when things seem to be going well, then get to walk away unscathed — indeed, often with large severance packages — when things go wrong. They don’t want regulations that would stabilize the economy but cramp their style.

And now that the financial clouds have lifted a bit, the pushback against sensible regulation is in full swing. Even the Fed’s very modest proposal to curb abusive mortgage lending with new standards is under fire, and there are worrying signs that the Fed may back down.

Here’s another little anomaly. Everybody knows righties are in favor of liberty and personal freedom, right? Well, except when they aren’t.

Art Brodsky writes in Huffington Post that the Right is fighting net neutrality:

Just in time for the House Telecommunications Subcommittee’s hearing tomorrow (May 6) on Net Neutrality legislation, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) and the American Spectator are out with new attacks on the simple idea that people should not have their Internet experiences subject to the whims of telephone and cable companies. …

… The April 28 [American Spectator] blog post, cleverly headlined, “Public Know Nothings,” — a play on Public Knowledge — read like a basic corporate hit job on Net Neutrality of the kind one might read at any number of blogs or by any columnists in the thrall of the corporate world. But the story, combined with Armey’s April 22 Washington Times headlined “Spare The Net,” raise the inevitable question — what is it about individual freedom that “conservatives” like the Spectator and Armey don’t like?

To be fair, the debate is larger than the Spectator and Armey. Most congressional Republicans oppose the idea of giving consumers freedom on the Internet. They take shelter in their anti-government, anti-regulation rhetoric, preferring to allow Internet freedom to apply to the corporations which own the networks connecting the Internet to consumers, rather than to consumers themselves.

Brodsky goes on to explain how the Right’s point of view is burdened by a “tragic misunderstanding of how telecommunications policy, markets and technology worked in the past and how they work today.” Know nothings, indeed. (For the record, I believe you probably can find some right-wing bloggers who do have a clue that if Net Neutrality goes, their blogging privileges might go with it.)

Spotlight

April 12, 2008

Elitism for Elites

Filed under: conservatism, Democratic Party — maha @ 12:00 pm

It always amuses me when upper-class people with power and privilege start screeching about “elitism.” Today all manner of political, media and blogging elites — people with advanced degrees who’ve never been to a tractor pull in their lives — are snorting about elitism because Barack Obama said something that anyone with a real redneck background knows to be true — working-class, small-town whites feel left behind, bitter and frustrated.

This remark allegedly is an insult to working-class, small-town whites in Pennsylvania. I have a different perspective. Granted, my background is southern Missouri small-town working-class white, rather than Pennsylvania small-town working-class white, and there are subtle cultural distinctions between the two. While I may have kinfolk in half the trailer parks in the Ozarks, I admit that doesn’t qualify me to speak for Pennsylvanians. But over the past forty or so years small-town, working-class white America has been living through the shared experience of diminishing opportunity combined with increasing financial instability.

In community after community, the old factory or mining jobs that sustained the local economy are gone. Forty years ago, young folks left high school, signed on to jobs that paid Union-obtained wages and benefits, and looked forward to all the trappings of American middle-class affluence — homes, new cars, trips to Disney World. Now the bright young people move away to cities, and those who remain in the small towns sustain themselves — barely — by flipping hamburgers or cashiering at Wal-Mart.

The only ones who aren’t bitter and frustrated are those too young or too dim to realize life was much better a couple of generations ago.

I concur with many of Obama’s critics that the place of guns and religion in American culture is older, deeper, and much more complex than Obama’s remarks reflected. But don’t tell me small-town, working-class white folks in America aren’t xenophobic. They are, deeply, and they have been going back generations. That’s just a plain fact. Believe me, you don’t know the half of it until you’ve lived among them.

What’s rich about the current flap is that the biggest reason small-town, working-class whites have tended to vote “conservative” in recent decades is that the Right has stoked that bitterness, frustration and xenophobia, election after election, and turned it on the Left. As Joe Bageant pointed out in his pretty-brilliant book Deer Hunting With Jesus, small-town, working-class whites learn everything they know about the outside world from highly paid media elites like the perpetually angry and xenophobic Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. Fear and anger are the bread and butter of right-wing politics; it keeps the rubes compliant.

Limbaugh, btw, may be from southeast Missouri, but his family had tons of money. True Redneckland would have been a place Limbaugh visited growing up, but he never had to live there.

And today you’ve got people like John “Power Tool” Hinderaker (highly paid lawyer; graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Law) discussing Obama’s “bigoted opinion, common among urban liberals, of people who live in ’small towns.” I don’t know why Hinderaker put quotes about “small towns”; maybe he thinks there are no such things.

Quoting Oliver Willis:

Apparently Fox, Drudge, and Politico are just tired of a slow news week and are looking for something - anything - to whip up a frenzy over, and of course the go-to people for quotes on this are the elite of elite cons like Grover Norquist and Karl Rove. I mean, when is the last time those guys had a conversation with someone making less than six figures… besides the help?

I’ve long believed you aren’t a real American until you find yourself in some rural Kentucky roadhouse at 1 a.m. singing “Rocky Top” with the rest of the drunks. I dare say this is an experience not many of Obama’s critics have had. I admit that I’m far enough removed from my own roots that I no longer remember the words to “Rocky Top” beyond most of the first verse and the refrain, but I used to could sing it all the way through. I suspect, however, that the small-town, working-class world I grew up in would be utterly alien to the likes of Hinderaker.

From a working-class perspective, the three presidential candidates represent different slices of the elitist pie. You’ve got Senator Hillary Clinton, who grew up in an affluent suburb of Chicago and graduated from Yale law school; Senator John McCain, son of a four-star admiral and U.S. Naval Academy graduate; and Barack Obama, the biracial graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law.

American politicians going back to Andrew Jackson have emphasized the more common aspects of their biographies to appeal to voters. Failing that, one might get away with affecting folksiness as George W. Bush does. But politicians need to be careful when they presume to speak for the folks.

“It’s being reported that my opponent said that the people of Pennsylvania who faced hard times are bitter; well, that’s not my experience,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience at Drexel University.

Does anyone besides me find that hysterically funny? Of course it’s not been her experience. The only time she speaks to small-town, working-class commoners is when they’re lined up to shake her hand at a photo cop. She’s never been one of them. Obama has never been one of them, either, but he’s not pretending to be. Senator Clinton may think she’s found a talking point that will help her keep the lead in Pennsylvania, but she might want to be careful about portraying those small-town, working-class folks as being happy and optimistic.

Oliver Willis makes another good point:

It’s intriguing that Dems are never supposed to voice any criticism of rural America (which isn’t what Sen. Obama did) but Republicans are allowed to insult San Francisco, Massachusetts, the coasts, etc. It’s like there’s a double standard or something.

It’s all part of the Right’s elitist program of selling snake-oil to the rubes.

Update: See also Ezra Klein and Marc Ambinder.

Update 2: See also Steve Benen, John Aravosis and John Cole.

Spotlight

April 10, 2008

Why Wingnuts Are Idiots, II

Filed under: conservatism — maha @ 7:36 am

Because, you know, whenever one “lib” says Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be set free, then (wingnuts figure) all “libs” must want Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to be set free.

Idiots.

Hawkins has a couple more brain cells than many of the rest of his tribe, which is frightening. One wonders how they manage to dress themselves.

The real issue in the years to come is not what’s to be done with KSM. At this point he’s probably not capable of doing much but huddle in corners, hugging his knees and talking to his imaginary friends.

No, the real issue is going to be separating fact from fiction. After four years of detention and torture, KSM confessed to personally decapitating Daniel Pearl. I understand he confessed also to masterminding the September 11th attacks, the Richard Reid shoe bombing attempt, the Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and various other foiled attacks.

And maybe he did those things, or maybe he just said he did to stop the torture. We’ll probably never know, because cases grow colder as time marches on. And we’ll probably never be able to put KSM on trial.

Speaking as an eyewitness to the destruction of the World Trade Center, I would like to say that it is more important to me to find out who really was responsible than it was to pick a scapegoat that fits the Bush Administration’s propaganda du jour and torture him into confessing. KSM was a dangerous guy and (note this, Hawkins) I don’t advocate releasing him, but neither do I accept on faith anything the Bush Administration says.

ABC News reported yesterday that “enhanced” interrogation techniques were not just approved in the White House; they were choreographed in the White House.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

And anyone who doesn’t think Condi was keeping the President fully briefed on these meetings gets to sit in the corner wearing the dunce cap.

Rightie genius macsmind writes,

There is nothing inherently wrong with the President of the United States and his key advisors having such discussions on what to do with the tiny little fact the article misses that these were TERRORISTS that wanted to kill AMERICANS.

And we know that because the Bushies said so! Brilliant!

The phrase “war crimes” is being tossed about. I am skeptical the Gang of Six Plus One will ever be indicted in this country. However, their foreign travel opportunities may be severely limited in future.

Well, I’m sure the government of China can show them a good time. They have so much in common.

Spotlight

April 8, 2008

Scapegoats

Filed under: Iraq War, conservatism, Democratic Party, Asia — maha @ 3:49 pm

Today the Olympic torch, having been extinguished and re-lit several times in France, is in San Francisco. I haven’t yet heard what’s going on with it today, but protests are expected, and the IOC is considering scrapping the torch relay in the future.

You probably know that the government of China blames His Holiness the Dalai Lama for causing unrest in Tibet. You probably know this is bullshit. However, the people of China hear only the Chinese government’s side of the story, and they tend to support their government.

Here in the U.S. , wingnuts and the crackpots who lead them continue to promote the idea that either Iran, or al Qaeda (the original one), or both conflated together in John McCain’s addled brain, are the chief culprits behind the violence in Iraq. You probably knew this is bullshit, and if you don’t, Dilip Hiro and John Juan Cole explain it for you.

Republican presidential candidate and war hero John McCain continues to be confused about connections (unlikely) between al Qaeda and Sh’ia Iran. Michael Goldfarb thinks we’re all being picky.

This is getting beyond ridiculous. Sometimes people make mistakes, even liberals–like when Arianna Huffington, in the midst of attacking McCain for just such a gaffe, confused Iran with Syria. Does she really not know the difference between the two? Of course not.

Memo to Goldfarb: Arianna Huffington ain’t runnin’ for President. And McCain keeps making the same mistake.

Clinton supporters believe the Clinton campaign is struggling because media are mean to Clinton. The fact that Senator Clinton’s campaign keeps making big, fat, newsworthy mistakes is not, of course, a factor behind the negative press. Yes, there is some piling on, but she’s giving them so much to pile on about. (See also “Why the Clintons Held Onto Mark Penn.” Interesting read.)

And, as I remember, until the Clinton campaign started losing, the same press had built the Senator and her campaign team into the Most Awesome and Absolutely Unbeatable Political Juggernaut of All Time.

Ezra Klein writes that conservatives have a creative scapegoat for recent economic meltdown — liberals caused the subprime mortgage crisis:

The new line we’re hearing is that the financial meltdown was really the product of the Community Reinvestment Act, a piece of legislation from the late-70s that required federally-insured banks to lend throughout the areas from which they take deposits, including poor neighborhoods, which were being systematically excluded from credit. The legislation, by all accounts, worked. Now, however, conservatives are trying to argue that it’s behind the crisis: If the CRA hadn’t been pushing these banks to make all these unsafe loans, then the birds would still sing and Alan Greenspan could still start each morning by being anointed with the oil of the purest, youngest, olives.

As Robert Gordon shows, however, this is crap.

Well, yes.

Anyway, is there anyone out there actually taking responsibility for something?

Spotlight

April 6, 2008

Why Wingnuts Are Idiots

Filed under: Health Care, conservatism — maha @ 6:48 am

Yesterday I wrote a post about the way our health care system is no longer capable of providing basic, primary care and emergency services to everyone who needs it. There are several causes for this, but the primary cause is that the “system” has been skewed away from preventive and emergency care services (in which there is no profit) and toward the creation of treatments and health care products that do make a profit.

Yesterday’s post focused on a New York Times story about Massachusett, which initiated a “universal” health care program that currently is insuring 340,000 people who had no health insurance before. And now there are not enough primary care physicians to go around. One physician has a 13-month waiting list for basic physicals.

A few wingnuts commented on this same New York Times story. Their take? “See? Socialized medicine doesn’t work!”

Don Surber:

Question: Why isn’t universal health insurance working in Massachusetts?

Answer: Good intentions also lead to shortages in everything. What the New York Times calls “unintended consequences,” I call predictable.

If we didn’t have all these wimpy good intentions, there wouldn’t be a problem. Clearly, that millions of Americans have been cut off from basic health care services is not a problem.

Another rightie, Soccer Dad, concludes that the primary care physician shortage proves Mitt Romney (credited with the Massachusetts health care program) is incompetent. Romney may be incompetent, but the fact is whenever and however the U.S. finds a way to provide decent health care services to those currently uninsured, whether by public or private means, what’s happening in Massachusetts is going to be a nationwide phenomenon.

Put another way, the only reason the insured don’t have massive waiting lines for health care services (in most parts of the country) is that so many Americans have been kicked out of the line.

In other Right Wing news — Yes, Hugh, there were arm bands and book bags in 1968. I was there. Wearing arm bands in protest of the Vietnam War was pretty common, actually.

And why can’t we have civilized debates about important issues? Read this and be amazed — at the psychological projection.

Idiots.

Update: Another idiot speaks –

Why, it must be some kind of doctor shortage! … Could it be, oh I don’t know, lack of incentive?

No, brainless one, there is plenty of incentive. However, all the incentive tilts in the direction of what parts of medical practice that are very profitale (i.e., new technologies and drugs) and away from those parts that are much less profitable (i.e., preventive care) or tend to lose money (i.e., emergency rooms). Your market-driven health care system at work.

And, as Kevin Heyden says, Massachusetts has better health care resources than most other states. So “what will it be like in the Southern states that are mostly rural, or the vast wide open states that grow bigger, the wester you go?”

For years I’ve been hearing health-care experts saying that the nation’s ability to delivery basic medical services to its citizens has been deteriorating, even as we continue to excel at the development of new technologies and drugs for extremely serious illness.

The lack of basic services, however, is one of the factors that is driving up the cost of health care for everyone. It would be far more cost-effective if people got regular checkups and went to doctors at the first sign of illness. However, the millions of Americans who are uninsured or underinsured tend to wait until symptoms are more severe and the illness more difficult (and expensive) to treat.

Here’s just one example — the United States on the whole has world-class hospital neonatal care for infants born prematurely or unhealthy. However, we fall far behind most other industrialized nations in providing basic prenatal care for all pregnant women. Thus, a higher percentage of American babies are born prematurely or unhealthy and need intensive, and expensive, hospital care to survive.

This is what’s called “stupid.” Naturally, wingnuts are for it.

Someone asked in the comments if we have to choose between “unevenly distributed access to health care, and evenly distributed inaccess to health care?” No, we don’t have to choose that at all. Wingnut mythology aside, most industrialized nations provide access to perfectly good health care with no waiting lines to all its citizens. Some do a better job than others, but it can be done, and at a lower cost per capita than we’re paying now. But the longer we pretend that somehow “market forces” are going to solve our health care crisis the worse the inequality will grow, because “market forces” are causing the inequality.

When we do ever switch to universal health care, it will probably take several years to build the medical infrastructure needed to deliver good basic care.

Spotlight

April 4, 2008

Forty Years

Filed under: Republican Party, conservatism, Democratic Party, liberalism and progressivism, American History, big picture stuff — maha @ 1:47 pm

Today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the web is brimming over with retrospectives. See, for example, Eugene Robinson.

I want to point in particular to E.J. Dionne’s column, however, because he plays one of my own recurring themes — the way the Right exploited racism to take over America. The column begins:

Forty years ago, American liberalism suffered a blow from which it has still not recovered. On April 4, 1968, a relatively brief but extraordinary moment of progressive reform ended, and a long period of conservative ascendancy began.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ensuing riots that engulfed the nation’s capital and big cities across the country signaled the collapse of liberal hopes in a smoky haze of self-doubt and despair. Conservatives, on the run for much of the decade, found a broad new audience for their warnings against the disorders and disruptions bred by reform.

It wasn’t just the riots. Much of white America was still simmering with resentment over court-ordered school desegregation. Also, Lyndon Johnson had initiated New Deal-style programs aimed primarily at relieving poverty among African Americans. Suddenly, whites who had had no problem with “entitlements” before — when benefits went mostly to whites — discovered the virtues of “self-reliance.”

It is easy to forget that the core themes of contemporary conservatism were born in response to the events of 1968. The attacks on “big government,” the defense of states’ rights, and the scorn for “liberal judicial activism,” “liberal do-gooders,” “liberal elitists,” “liberal guilt” and “liberal permissiveness” were rooted in the reaction that gathered force as liberal optimism receded.

Richard Nixon did a masterful job of exploiting fear and prejudice to lure white working-class voters away from the Democrats. And, of course, whites in the Deep South switched their allegiance from the Dems to the Republicans en masse.

The Right-Wing Narrative says that Democrats lost power because George McGovern opposed the Vietnam War, and the Dem Party was overrun by “peaceniks.” But this view of history doesn’t square with what really happened. McGovern’s stand on the Vietnam War was the least of the reasons he lost to Nixon in 1972.

And check out the acceptance speech Nixon gave at the 1972 Republican convention. The first half of the speech was all about race. It was in code, of course, but no adult alive at the time could have mistaken his meaning when he spoke of quotas and tied paying high taxes to the costs of “welfare.” And Republicans are still running on those themes today.

Just the other day, someone argued in the comments that the next Dem president would be punished for “losing Iraq” the way the Democrats were punished for “losing Vietnam.” Except that I don’t see how the Dems were punished for losing Vietnam. Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975; in 1976, America elected Jimmy Carter as president and gave the Dems a small increase in Congress, expanding the large increase the Dems had enjoyed in the 1974 post-Watergate midterms.

The fact is, once combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam and the POWs came home, America lost interest in Vietnam. The whole bleeping country developed amnesia over Vietnam (except for the extreme Right, a group of people who are never so happy as when they are nursing resentments). As I remember it, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the Narrative emerged about Dems losing elections because of Vietnam. But this was an important narrative for the Right, because it helped them paper over the real primary reason the Right gained and the Left lost in those years. And that primary reason was racism. There were other issues, too, but racism was the foundational issue upon which other right-wing issues would be built.

Right-wing politicians had employed Red-baiting with some success since the late 1940s. But the excesses of McCarthyism had turned off moderates, and the Kennedy Administration had ushered in a liberal resurgence. Eventually, racism would succeed where Red-baiting had faltered.

The success of the racism strategy in the 1960s and 1970s taught at least a couple of generations of right-wing politicians about the importance of wedge issues. As new issues came up — feminism, abortion, gay rights — right-wing politicians embraced them and followed the old racism scenario to exploit them. Meanwhile, the Left crumbled into confusion and single-issue activism.

And as right-wingers gained more and more power over the federal government, the federal government became less and less functional. Because wedge issues may win elections, but they don’t govern a nation.

E.J. Dionne continues,

Forty years later, is it possible to recapture the hope and energy of the days and years before that April 4? Has liberalism spent enough time in purgatory for the country to revisit how much was accomplished in its name and to acknowledge that the nation is better off for what the liberals did?

In “The Liberal Hour,” an important new history of the ’60s that will be published in July, Colby College scholars G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert S. Weisbrot note that for all its deficiencies, the period of liberal sway “demonstrated what democratic politics can produce when public consensus crescendos, when coherent majorities prevail, and when skilled leaders provide direction, inspiration, and relentless energy.”

In the U.S., public consensus, coherent majorities, and skilled leaders providing direction in a positive, not a destructive, way are things only us geezers dimly remember and the young folks have never seen.

And after a few years of near-total dominance by right-wingers of the federal government, 81 percent of Americans say the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction.

It’s 40 years since 1968. Now a black man and a white woman are competing with each other for the Dem nomination. They both face nasty bigotry barriers, and it would be a breakthrough if either were elected. Yet only one of these candidates has shown a real talent for building public consensus. The other one is running an increasingly bitter, and angry, wedge-issue style campaign. I think 40 years of that crap is quite enough.

Update: Wingnut priorities.

Spotlight

March 25, 2008

Catching Up

Filed under: Iraq War, Republican Party, conservatism, Democratic Party, liberalism and progressivism, blogging — maha @ 10:36 am

The problem with getting behind in my blogging is that, when I do get back to the blog, so much stuff has happened that I don’t know where to start. And, unfortunately, I have a huge amount of Other work to do today and cannot linger here writing something artful. So I’m just going to sort of free associate for a bit and run through some current items.

Leila Fadel and Nancy A. Youssef write for McClatchy Newspapers, “Is ’success’ of U.S. surge in Iraq about to unravel?” I knew the surge — as a public relations tool, anyway — was in trouble last night, when I was half listening to Hardball. I heard Tweety ask something along the lines of “Is the surge working?” When Tweety’s catching on to something, you know it’s pretty damn obvious. See also Fester at Newshoggers.

The bobbleheads are beginning to write off the Clinton campaign again, for at least the third time. The Vegetable has her chances of winning the nomination at 5 percent, which makes it a near certainty she’s about shoot up in the polls.

Journalist and brother blogger Will Bunch scored a major coup yesterday with this story. (Senator Clinton is exaggerating? Who knew?) See also “Clinton: Pledged delegates are ‘like superdelegates.’ ”

I have to disagree with E.J. Dionne. He writes,

What’s the matter with conservatism?

Its problems start with the failure of George W. Bush’s presidency …

The problems of conservatism are intrinsic to conservatism. Bush’s failed presidency is just a manifestation of the internal failures of conservatism.

I don’t have any problems with what used to be moderately conservative positions, such as being cautious about raising taxes, spending the people’s money, and getting entangled in foreign problems we would do well to leave alone. A moderately conservative perspective needs to be represented in government as a counterweight to some of the flightier impulses of progressivism. By the same token, conservatism needs progressivism and its flightier impulses to keep it from being utterly stuck in the mud. And democratic government itself can only survive when it respects the values of liberalism.

The problem with conservatism is that, when taken to extremes and logical outcomes, it turns into a nasty, brutish thing that destroys everything it touches. And the problem with the Republican Party is that, in the 1970s, it was infiltrated and taken over by hard-core ideologues who were determined to take the GOP and the rest of the country to those extremes and logical outcomes.

And once the extremists had complete control of all branches of government, with no effective counterweights, they proceeded to destroy everything they touched.

You can argue — hell, I’ve argued — that any ideology, taken to extremes, will implode and self-destruct. Ideology is a bit like medicine; a bigger dose is not necessarily a better dose. One pill every four hours might cure you, but four pills every one hour might kill you.

Well, Other duty calls. Gotta go.

Spotlight

March 19, 2008

Dog Whistle Time

Filed under: conservatism — maha @ 3:39 pm

Here Wingnuts! Good doggies! Wanna play fetch? Here’s the stick; go get it!

Update: I just realized why so many clueless wingnuts who don’t get the joke are dropping by. This is linked at Protein Wisdom (collective IQ of bloggers and readers = 27)! OK; comments off.

Spotlight

March 8, 2008

Stupid Is Where Stupid Advertises

Filed under: conservatism — maha @ 9:10 am

Righties: Inherently gullible?

Spotlight

February 22, 2008

Today in Wingnutland

Filed under: conservatism, Democratic Party, elections — maha @ 10:11 pm

If you watched last night’s debate, you might remember that Senator Obama spoke of an Army captain whose rifle platoon was sent to Afghanistan short of men and munitions. Today the Right has been on a foaming-at-the-mouth rampage about it, calling Obama a liar. Well, some people did some fact checking, and confirmed Obama’s story. See, for example, Jake Tapper and Phillip Carter. Not that actual facts will sway the wingnuts, of course.

Update: See also Balloon Juice and Hubris Sonic.

Update 2: NBC News also confirms Obama’s story, but the Pentagon denies it. See also Hilzoy.

Spotlight
— Next Page »