Monthly Archives: April 2007

Shameless Hustles and Tax Cuts

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Old hustles never die. Fred Thompson writes in the Wall Street Journal [emphasis added]:

President John F. Kennedy was an astute proponent of tax cuts and the proposition that lower tax rates produce economic growth. Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan also understood the power of lower tax rates and managed to put through cuts that grew the U.S. economy like Kansas corn. Sadly, we just don’t seem able to keep that lesson learned.

One of the triumphs of the Coolidge Administration was the passage of his tax program in 1926; the photograph shows him signing it. The Coolidge program “repealed the gift tax, halved estate taxes, substantially cut surtaxes on great wealth, and reduced income taxes for all,” it says here. The photo is dated February 26, 1926. Assuming that is accurate, We Now Know that the Stock Market Crash of 1929 was only slightly over three years and seven months away. The Great Depression followed soon after.

Calvin Coolidge’s tax program is the bad example that won’t die. I remember just after George W. Bush was “elected” in 2000 some eager young folk of the Right wrote giddy tributes to tax cuts that cited the Wisdom of Silent Cal. But mention of Coolidge vanished rather quickly, and I assume there was some frantic back-channel communication explaining that, um, maybe Calvin Coolidge’s economic policies are not something we want to emphasize. I guess Lawnorder Fred didn’t get the memo.

I’m not saying that the Coolidge tax cuts were the direct cause of the Great Depression. But that decade wasn’t called the “Roaring Twenties” for nothin’. Coolidge paid for his tax cuts by being a scrooge on domestic spending, including vetoes of flood control and agricultural programs for which many folks had dire need. What happened next is right out of the history textbooks [emphasis added]:

Even before 1929, signs of economic trouble had become evident. Southern California and Florida experienced frenzied real-estate speculation and then spectacular busts, with banks failing, land remaining undeveloped, and mortgages foreclosed. The highly unequal distribution of income and the prolonged depression in farm regions reduced American purchasing power. Sales of new autos and household consumer goods stagnated after 1926. [Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty: An American History (Norton, 2005), p. 800]

If the Coolidge tax cuts of 1926 “grew the U.S. economy like Kansas corn,” as Fred suggests, one wonders why sales of new autos and household consumer goods stagnated after 1926.

The stock market did indeed go up a lot during the Coolidge Administration, but much of that was from overheated speculation. It was a bubble, in other words. And when the bubble burst, it burst big.

Fred writes glowingly of the soaring tax revenues and the shrinking budget deficit given us by Dear Leader’s glorious tax cuts. If you want to see what a crock that is, just look at this chart via Ezra Klein.

The other myth cited by Fred Thompson is, of course, the myth of the Reagan tax cuts. The fact is that in 1982, when he realized his tax cuts weren’t growing revenue as promised, Reagan raised some taxes considerably to make up for the shortfall. He also raised taxes in 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, and 1987. Bruce Bartlett patiently explained this in a National Review article written in 2003. In this article the hapless Bartlett wrote that prudent management of the economy required some tax increases. Like anyone on the Right would listen to that.

A few days ago Bartlett wrote an op ed in the New York Times complaining that most of the people pushing “supply-side economics” these days have no clue what it actually is.

AS one who was present at the creation of ”supply-side economics” back in the 1970s, I think it is long past time that the phrase be put to rest. It did its job, creating a new consensus among economists on how to look at the national economy. But today it has become a frequently misleading and meaningless buzzword that gets in the way of good economic policy.

Today, supply-side economics has become associated with an obsession for cutting taxes under any and all circumstances. No longer do its advocates in Congress and elsewhere confine themselves to cutting marginal tax rates — the tax on each additional dollar earned — as the original supply-siders did. Rather, they support even the most gimmicky, economically dubious tax cuts with the same intensity.

The original supply-siders suggested that some tax cuts, under very special circumstances, might actually raise federal revenues. For example, cutting the capital gains tax rate might induce an unlocking effect that would cause more gains to be realized, thus causing more taxes to be paid on such gains even at a lower rate.

But today it is common to hear tax cutters claim, implausibly, that all tax cuts raise revenue. Last year, President Bush said, ”You cut taxes and the tax revenues increase.” Senator John McCain told National Review magazine last month that ”tax cuts, starting with Kennedy, as we all know, increase revenues.” Last week, Steve Forbes endorsed Rudolph Giuliani for the White House, saying, ”He’s seen the results of supply-side economics firsthand — higher revenues from lower taxes.”

Those of you who want a meatier discussion of this issue can find it at Economist’s View (Bruce Bartlett joined in). My only quibble with what he wrote is that, as I remember, the Reagan-era supply siders were not the sober and cautious crew that Bartlett describes.

Naturally, a number of rightie bloggers are linking to the Fred Thompson article with warm approval. I guess anyone dumb enough to think Larry Kudlow is an economist is dumb enough to admire Calvin Coolidge’s tax policy. Sadly, we just don’t seem able to keep that lesson learned.

Update: For an explanation of why JFK was not a supply sider, see David Greenberg, “Tax Cuts in Camelot?” (Slate, January 16, 2004). For sharp commentary on Fred Thompson, see Taylor Marsh, “Desperate After Dubya?”

Two Editorials

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From an editorial in today’s New York Times:

We have long suspected that there is no one in charge of the Iraq war. How else can you explain four years of multifront failures, including President Bush’s most recent plan to order even more American troops to risk their lives there without demanding any political sacrifice or even compromise from Iraq’s leaders? So we were not surprised to hear that White House officials are looking for someone to oversee both Iraq and the faltering Afghanistan war— and not surprised that they were having a tough time filling the job.

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told The Times he’d decided that “what we need is someone with a lot of stature within the government who can make things happen.” He said that top official would have the authority to “call any cabinet secretary and get problems resolved, fast.”

As Keith Olbermann observed last week –that sounds like the Commander-in-Chief’s job.

Peter Baker and Thomas Ricks wrote in the Washington Post last week that at least three retired generals have turned down the job.

“The very fundamental issue is, they don’t know where the hell they’re going,” said retired Marine Gen. John J. “Jack” Sheehan, a former top NATO commander who was among those rejecting the job. Sheehan said he believes that Vice President Cheney and his hawkish allies remain more powerful within the administration than pragmatists looking for a way out of Iraq. “So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, ‘No, thanks,’ ” he said.

There’s another good editorial in tomorrow’s New York Times:

The more we learn about the White House’s purge of United States attorneys, the more a single thread runs through it: the Bush administration’s campaign to transform the minor problem of voter fraud into a supposed national scourge. …

..,Last week, we learned that the administration edited a government-ordered report on voter fraud to support its fantasy. The original version concluded that among experts “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud.” But the publicly released version said, “There is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.” It’s hard to see that as anything but a deliberate effort to mislead the public….

…charges of voter fraud are a key component of the Republican electoral strategy. If the public believes there are rampant efforts to vote fraudulently, or to register voters improperly, it increases support for measures like special voter ID’s, which work against the poor, the elderly, minorities and other disenfranchised groups that tend to support Democrats. Claims of rampant voter fraud also give the administration an excuse to cut back prosecutions of the real problem: officials who block voters’ access to the polls.

There is one big catch, as Eric Lipton and Ian Urbina reported in The Times last week. After a five-year crackdown, the Justice Department has not turned up any evidence that voter fraud actually is a problem. Only 86 people were convicted of voter fraud crimes as of last year — most of them Democrats and many on trivial, trumped-up charges.

The Bush administration was so determined to pursue this phantom scourge that it deported a legal Florida resident back to his native Pakistan for mistakenly filling out a voter registration card when he renewed his driver’s license. And it may well have decided to fire most of the eight federal prosecutors because they would not play along.

Worse than Nixon, I tell you.

Dems: Back to the Future

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I know you want to read this op ed by Robert Kuttner in today’s Boston Globe:

THREE TIMES in my political adulthood, we have seen the exhaustion of a conservative ideology and presidency. Under Presidents Nixon and Bush II, the ingredients were corruption, corporate excess, and overreach of presidential power. During the 12 years of Reagan and Bush I, the hallmark was the failure of conservative economics.

And twice, the electorate ousted Republicans only to get centrist Democrats, who ran more competent administrations but did little to redress the structure of financial inequality in America.

Now, the third era of conservative Republican rule is collapsing — with the most spectacular mélange of overreach, incompetence, economic distress, and sheer corruption of all. But who, and what, will succeed Bush? The forces of privilege and inequality are now so deeply entrenched in America that it will take a Democratic successor at least as bold as FDR or LBJ to change course.

As much as the wingnuts like to denigrate presidents Clinton and Carter for their alleged liberalism, the fact is they were the two most conservative Democratic presidents of the 20th century. And that by a pretty wide margin. Kuttner calls Carter “the most conservative Democrat since Grover Cleveland.” As president, his policies favored deregulation (of, for example, air traffic and trucking), and he made no attempt to stand in the way of business’s all-out assault on labor. President Clinton accelerated financial deregulation and gave us trade policies like NAFTA. Economic inequality and insecurity widened under both presidents, although not nearly as much as during Republican administrations.

Now, the third era of conservative Republican rule is collapsing — with the most spectacular melange of overreach, incompetence, economic distress, and sheer corruption of all. But who, and what, will succeed Bush? The forces of privilege and inequality are now so deeply entrenched in America that it will take a Democratic successor at least as bold as FDR or LBJ to change course.

I don’t advocate a wholesale return to the policies of either FDR or LBJ, and I don’t believe Kuttner does, either. The point is that we need someone who’s got the cojones to steer the ship of state in an entirely new direction, and bleep the special interests, corporations, and the Right Wing echo chamber.

To change course, America would need to change the terms of global trade and to re-regulate Wall Street, so that deals would no longer be done mainly to enrich financial insiders and squeeze ordinary workers. We would restore taxation based on ability to pay and use the proceeds to create a more secure America of broad opportunity. Labor law would be reformed so that the more than 50 percent of American workers who’d like to join unions could do so without fear of being fired.

Amen to that.

Of the Democratic presidential front runners, Kuttner says that Sen. Hillary Clinton would run a competent administration, but she would put budget balancing ahead of social spending (Kuttner explains in more detail why he thinks that’s bad), and she is “raising distressingly large sums from Wall Street.” In other words, she is likely to pursue fairly conservative policies; the big difference between her and just about any Republican is that she would govern with greater competence. As president she’d give us much of the same ol’ thing, but with improved “metrics.”

Sen. Barack Obama shows enormous promise, but I agree with Kuttner that he’s developed a touch of “front-runner disease — being distressingly vague about what he’d actually do.” John Edwards is most likely of the three to govern as a true economic progressive, Kuttner says. I worry that his lack of foreign policy credentials could hurt him.

But, Kuttner closes, “How many times does conservatism have to fail before we get a successor who reclaims American liberalism?”

That’s a good question. The last time conservatism failed utterly and spectacularly was at the end of the 1920s. Franklin Roosevelt won four presidential elections not only because conservative domestic policy enabled the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, but because right wingers of the 1920s and 1930s for the most part were isolationists who thought Hitler and Mussolini were reasonable guys we could do business with. The Great Depression and World War II provided overwhelming empirical evidence to the American people that the Right had been wrong.

Although moderate Republicans (e.g., Dwight Eisenhower) emerged from the FDR years with some appreciation for what he had accomplished, the more extreme Right nursed a seething, resentful rage against all things New Dealish. The Cold War gave them a means to rehabilitate themselves. By a campaign of “hysterical charges and bald-faced lies” the Right persuaded much of the country that Democrats were soft on communism and lax on national security. And in the 1960s through the 1980s the Dems’ association with civil rights, equal opportunity, and antipoverty programs caused a flood of white middle class Americans to switch their votes from Democratic to Republican.

In part through skillful manipulation of mass media the Right has been able to dominate our national political discourse since the late 1970s. In spite of the Right’s incessant whining about “liberal media,” Americans have had the right-wing perspective of just about everything pounded into their heads lo these many years, whereas real liberals and progressives (as opposed to moderate-to-conservative political hacks who play “liberals” on television) were all but banished from public view. Were this not the case, I think liberalism would have been reclaimed years ago. And if Republicans had enjoyed the same advantage in 1936, FDR might have been a one-term president.

However, there are other differences between today and earlier times. Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, the two presidents who preceded FDR, certainly ran flawed administrations. Hoover in particular was blamed for many bad things, not all of which were actually his fault. But IMO neither president was as spectacularly ridiculous at the job as is the current Creature in the Oval Office. And unlike the hapless Hoover, who inherited a disastrous economic situation, Bush was handed a nation in pretty good shape, economically and otherwise, and thoroughly trashed it. Although I don’t think Bush was the mastermind behind 9/11 any more than he was the mastermind behind Hurricane Katrina — face it, truthers, Bush isn’t competent enough to have pulled it off — after Katrina the American people saw for themselves that Bush has no clue what he’s doing. And I think by now most of ’em have realized his allegedly great leadership after 9/11 was mostly hype.

Further, most of today’s self-described conservatives are really pseudo-conservatives. Conservatives used to be mostly temperate and cautious people who were not utterly opposed to progress as long as it didn’t happen too fast. Today’s “conservatives” are radical absolutists who are aggressive and uncompromising. They can neither govern nor work with anyone else to facilitate governing. They have utterly bleeped up the nation, and the nation will remain bleeped up as long as they are in charge. And I think many Americans are, finally, catching on to this.

The True Believers on the Right will never, ever admit to their mistakes, nor do I expect their media infrastructure to be dismantled anytime soon. But I have one hope — that most of the American people are getting heartily sick of these clowns.

And if the next President is truly great, maybe the creatures will be driven so far underground they won’t make a comeback in my lifetime, anyway.

Their Own Petard

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The business with the missing emails and Lurita Alexis Doan, the U.S. Attorney purge, destabilization in the Middle East, festering rot in New Orleans, and even the President’s search for a “war czar” seem to me to be coming together into one big, hard, ugly knot. Because, when all is said and done, at the root of each of these issues is the simple fact that our government was taken over by people who don’t give a bleep about governing.

Let’s take the email scandal. Even assuming there’s nothing incriminating in the missing emails, shouldn’t it be troubling that White House staffers — people whose salaries are paid by our tax dollars — were expected to spend so much time on Republican Party business they were issued RNC laptops and blackberries on which to conduct that business? Further, these staffers allegedly were so careless about keeping the government’s business separate from the party’s business that much government business was conducted via RNC email servers.

Going further: It’s always been obvious to everyone that Karl Rove is, primarily, a Republican Party operative. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a Republican Party operative. But why is he drawing a government salary? Why does he have top security clearance? Why does he sit in on Cabinet meetings?

Of course, there’s always going to be some overlap between politics and government. But let’s have some perspective. In 1998 the House held bleeping hearings on the White House Christmas card list. Republicans were shocked, shocked I tell you, when they learned that some of the people who received Christmas cards from President Clinton were Democratic Party donors. And Republican congressman Dan Burton actually investigated the use of White House staff, postage, and stationery to answer mail addressed to Socks the bleeping cat.

Does that mean we can impeach Barney for those cutesy-poo Christmas videos?

Although there might be a fuzzy line between White House public relations (e.g., the Christmas card list; letters from Socks the cat) and partisan politics, as long as the Christmas cards were not soliciting campaign funds and Socks was not making charges against his master’s political opponents, what’s the big bleeping deal?

But of course, It’s OK If You’re a Republican. Joseph M. Birkenstock wrote in Salon (June 13, 2003),

Once upon a time, using the political power of one’s office to gather more power resulted in literally dozens of congressional investigations of the Clinton administration including, and I’m almost positive I didn’t just make this up, a taxpayer-funded investigation into the White House Christmas card list. During the Bush administration, the use of Vice President Dick Cheney’s official residence at the Naval Observatory for a Republican Party fundraiser, private briefings for top Republican donors by Bush Cabinet officials, and the simply astonishing use of the federal police authority of the Department of Homeland Security to intervene on behalf of the Texas Republicans in Tom DeLay’s shameless mid-decade redistricting power grab, have thus far resulted in a couple of watery editorials. So don’t expect much of an apology about the naked use of power to beget power from this administration.

On the other hand, in 1997 Vice President Gore admitted he had made campaign fundraising phone calls from his White House office, which is a violation of federal law, but he brushed it off with his “no controlling legal authority” speech. I’m as big an admirer of Gore as anyone, but to this day that episode disappoints me. It would have been better had he said “yep, sorry, I shouldn’t have done that” and paid a fine or done community service or whatever. I’m just putting this out there to say yes, I remember it, and I’m not making excuses for it. Except … wait a minute … is it possible the Vice President used his own cell phone to make the calls? Possibly not, but if he did, how would that be different from what Karl Rove et al. were doing in the White House with their RNC laptops and blackberries?

According to the finger-wagging editorials from 1997, Vice President Gore violated Section 607 of Title 18 of the U.S. Criminal Code, which states there is to be no solicitation of campaign funds in federal government offices. The law isn’t voided just because someone is using his own blackberry. Even so, we don’t know if anyone in the Bush White House was soliciting campaign funds, so let’s go on …

Right now details about the emails are coming out rather quickly. We can fairly accurately call it a “growing controversy,” I would say. But before we get too bogged down in details, can we take a moment to think about where governing ends and politicking begins?

After the dust settles, some legislators might want to revise federal code about political business conducted in the White House. That might be a good idea. However, I don’t think it’s possible, or necessarily desirable, to write laws that cover every possible contingency and keep the entire White House staff under constant surveillance to be sure the law is being followed. I think the biggest insurance against gross abuse is to elect presidents who are genuinely interested in governing. Then, one would hope, those presidents would appoint people to work in their administrations who were experienced in and dedicated to good government.

President Bush, on the other hand, consistently appoints people who are Republican operatives first and servants of the People second, if at all. And just about everything in government that could be bleeped, is bleeped.

Acts of Unkindness

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Now that the Duke University rape case involving members of the lacrosse team has been dismissed for lack of evidence, the Right has formed a howling virtual mob and targeted the plaintiff complainant. In the New York Post, John Podhoretz writes “Let the liar be named and shamed,” and a number of rightie blogs have picked up on this, posting photos of the young woman who had made the charges and repeating her name several times in boldface letters.

When the allegations of rape first became public I made a decision not to write about the case until there was a conviction. Hence, I didn’t write about it. I’ve seen innocent people convicted in media and by public opinion many times before — Richard Jewell and Wen Ho Lee come to mind. It can be particularly tempting to assume guilt when a situation seems so familiar — rich white boys abusing a poor black girl. But isn’t that the essence of bigotry — making assumptions about an individual based on what you think “his type” is like?

On the other hand — “innocence” is not necessarily innocent.

In 2005 many bloggers took up the cause of a 17-year-old Oregon girl who accused three men of raping her. I’ll let Shakespeare’s Sister explain —

A 17-year-old girl went to police at the urging of her friends after she was allegedly gang-raped by three men, including her boyfriend. The men testified that the act was consensual. After reviewing all the information and statements, prosecutors decided they didn’t think they could prove a rape allegation, and so declined to prosecute the case.

Instead, they prosecuted the victim for filing a false police report. Yesterday, she was found guilty.

The victim has never recanted her story. Instead, the decision was based on the judge’s opinion that the three men were more credible, in part because a police detective and the victim’s friends testified she did not “act traumatized” in the days after the incident. …

… Let me give you some more information—something that is only a possibility because The American Street’s Kevin Hayden has known the victim nearly her whole life. He attended the trial. He noticed that the prosecutor repeatedly referred to the attackers as “boys,” even though they were grown men and the victim was 17. He noticed that the judge acknowledged he had found inconsistencies in all of their stories, but, inexplicably, decided that the same reasonable doubt that kept prosecutors from pursuing charges against the attackers wasn’t enough to keep him from finding the victim guilty.

It was a sickening case. But the moral is that just because a rape charge is dismissed doesn’t necessarily mean the plaintiff lied or made the whole thing up. In the Duke case perhaps the young woman did make up the story for malicious reasons, or perhaps something happened that evening that genuinely distressed her. We don’t know. Neither does John Podhoretz or any of the several rightie bloggers who are making the Duke plaintiff a target of scorn, derision … or worse.

In our justice system people are assumed to be innocent until proven guilty. That goes both ways, righties. What some of you are doing today is no less heinous than making assumptions of guilt about the defendants. In particular, by exposing her identity and making her the object of ridicule you could be setting up the young woman to be a target of genuine violence or abuse. The world is full of sick puppies who might feel they are justified to “punish” — in the form of assault or homicide — a young black woman for daring to file charges against white men.

Just leave it alone, all of you. Even if the worst of the assumptions about her actions and character are true, it’s not up to a mob to hand out “justice.”

Along these lines — let me second what Natasha at Pacific Views said of this Kos post. Yes, we all get “idiotic” emails. I’m sure Kos gets ’em by the bucketload. But I can say from my own experiences that being the target of a hate swarm can be, at the very least, unnerving. This is especially true if the swarmers don’t limit themselves to insulting emails but proceed to threatening and obscene phone calls, which has happened to me a couple of times. The swarmers were trying to intimidate me into shutting up, obviously, and it’s more than unnerving to realize that some of them knew where I lived.

There’s a reason it’s always bad form for a blogger to publish the street address and phone number of someone he doesn’t like and then sic his readers on ’em.

In my case the swarms died down in three or four days. The only action I took beyond filtering out their comments on the blog was to ignore them, and the creeps lost interest and went away.

Kathy Sierra was so upset by the tsunami of hate against her that she canceled travel plans and locked herself in her home. The threats against her went on for weeks, she said. Threats — and her home address — were posted on other blogs.

This is not to be shrugged off. Misogyny, like racism, is pervasive in our culture, and there are plenty of violent men who need very little encouragement to take their rage out on a woman who has been singled out as worthy of punishment.

I agree with Kos that the inane “blogger code of conduct” is not going to stop what happened to Kathy Sierra. But that doesn’t mean we should shrug it off. Very often men who assault women — and whites who assault blacks — feel they are justified in doing so. And they interpret expressions of misogyny and racism in our culture and among their peers to be permission. But “boys will be boys” is no excuse, and neither is “idiots will be idiots.”

That’s why I’m glad to see the recent backlash against Don Imus. About time. Racist and sexist rhetoric does real damage and can sometimes escalate into something worse. Hatemongers will push their hostility further and further, rhetorically and physically, until they are stopped. And in my experience the one thing that really does make them pause is overwhelming public disapproval. If they get a clue that the society they live in is not, in fact, winking and nodding at them that their bigotry is acceptable, the bigots will at least be more circumspect about their bigotry.

War Showdown Update

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For the past several days I’ve been meaning to write about the anticipated showdown between Congress and the White House over the Iraq “emergency” supplement appropriation. And I keep running out of steam before I get to it. But Bob Geiger has been writing most of the stuff I’ve been wanting to write, so I’m going to link to some of his posts on this matter, and if you read them we’ll all be caught up. So here we go, in chronological order so you can see how the issue is developing:

April 2

“Democrats Move To Cut Bush’s War Funding If Iraq Withdrawal Vetoed”

“Text Of Feingold-Reid Bill”

April 3

“Feingold-Reid Bill Presents Another Democratic Gut Check”

April 5

“Democratic Senators: Just Say ‘Yea’”

April 9

“Feingold-Reid To Be Introduced As Troop Deaths Mount”

April 10

“The Iraq-War Debate – Don’t Follow The Money”

April 11

“Feingold-Reid Bill To End War Formally Introduced”

“Reid And Reed Respond To Bush”

Caught up. Whew!

Who You Callin’ “Conservative”?

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One quick follow-up to yesterday’s “Not Funny” post — today all manner of people are scrambling to disown Don Imus and blame his reign of (rhetorical) terror on their ideological enemies. For example, rightie Brian Maloney says some people (identified as “key leftists”) are calling Imus a “conservative.” Maloney writes, “That’s despite his endorsement of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race and past tirades against the Bush Administration from a decidedly leftist perspective.” Maloney doesn’t explain what he means by “decidedly leftist perspective.”

Maloney provides one example of Imus being called a “conservative,” from a Media Matters press release quoting David Brock, who says,

“More and more Americans are coming to understand the damage done by major news organizations providing a platform for bigoted commentary and other conservative misinformation, and they are demanding change. MSNBC’s decision is an important step in the right direction.”

Maloney provides another example that purports to be of a “key leftist” calling Imus a “conservative,” but the word conservative doesn’t appear anywhere in his example. The quote is from Air America founder Sheldon Drobny, who complained that some “idiot commentator” had called Imus a liberal, which is absurd. I’m not sure what point Maloney thought he was making by highlighting this quote. He either thinks it is self-evident that Imus is a liberal (which is absurd), or that saying that someone is “not a liberal” is the same thing as calling him a “conservative.”

Actually, it’s very common for people to be neither liberals nor conservatives in any meaningful sense of those words, and I’d say Imus is a good example. I think David Brock misspoke when he used the word “conservative” in conjunction with Imus. True conservatives are an endangered species in America these days. George W. Bush isn’t one, and I doubt Brian Maloney is, either. Most of the critters one bumps into these days who identify themselves as “conservatives” are really pseudo conservatives, per historian Richard Hofstadter. Imus doesn’t fit into any category neatly, but I’d say he’s closer to being a pseudo conservative than anything else.

Instapundit and Moe Lane of RedState chime in and express outrage that anyone would dare call Imus a “conservative.” Lane writes,

Not much else to say, except: frankly, you can keep him, guys. He ain’t one of us (although I fully expect the first round of duckspeakers claiming otherwise within the next twenty four hours); he’s your problem, so you deal with him. I don’t particularly feel like catering to your side’s delusion that all sin comes from the Right, so I shan’t; and I encourage my compadres to do the same.

The only links provided by Instapundit and Lane link either to each other or to Brian Maloney. So, basically, these fellas found one example of someone using the word “conservative” in a press release about Imus and they’re whining about all “leftists” everywhere. A number of other rightie blogs are joining this circus, and it’s possible one of them has come up with another example, but frankly I’m not terribly interested in sniffing this out any further. As I said, I wouldn’t call Imus a “conservative.”

At the same time, support for John Kerry in 2004 is hardly proof of anyone being liberal. By 2004 the two or three genuine conservatives left in America had abandoned George Bush. And since the principle and bedrock value of American liberalism is equality, a hard-core bigot like Imus cannot be a “liberal” any more than a cold-blooded critter that lays eggs can be a “mammal.”

Digby spoke to this “ideological confusion” yesterday.

I just had a conversation with a wingnut in which I was held responsible for Imus because the so-called liberal media were his strongest defenders so therefore, they are racists, which makes me a racist also. Did you get that logic? That’s where they’re going with this, folks.

I have written before about my pet peeve that people believe the mainstream media represent liberalism, particularly the alleged liberals of the punditocrisy. (Think Richard Cohen.) And because of this, they also don’t have a clue what “liberals” really believe in since politicians babble in politico speak and these sanctioned pundits and talking heads are so incoherent that they rarely make any sense.

Regardless of their designated perch on the media political spectrum, the fact is that these people are part of a decadent political establishment, which has almost nothing to do with liberalism anymore (if it ever did.) But the successful conflation of “liberal” and “media” has brought all the disgust at the pompous clubbiness of the media gasbags down on our heads and I resent the hell out of it.

Digby goes on to explain that she doesn’t particularly feel like catering to the rightie delusion that all sin comes from the Left. Amen, Digby.

Update: See also Pam of Pam’s House Blend.

The Media-GOP Complex

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Via Jane Hamsher, Jim Lobe writes about efforts at diplomacy in the Middle East,

Sensing an increasingly dangerous impasse, the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives — in this case, Nancy Pelosi, backed by a growing bipartisan consensus that the administration’s intransigeance will further reduce already-waning U.S. influence in the region — tries to encourage regional peace efforts by engaging the target directly.

But, worried that her quest might actually gain momentum, administration hawks — in this case, led by Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams and Vice President Dick Cheney — accuse the speaker of undermining the president and, working through obliging editorial writers at the Washington Post, among other sympathetic media, including, of course, the Wall Street Journal, attack her for “substitut(ing) her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president.”

Elliot Abrams was part of a similar campaign during the Reagan Administration to torpedo work by then-House Speaker Jim Wright in Central America. Jane and Mr. Lobe both provide details.

Randian at Daily Kos says that the Republican Jewish Coalition, a GOP front group, is swiftboating Nancy Pelosi. Randian has more information on the RJC — be sure to check out who’s on the board of directors. David Flaum, the RJC National Chairman, is also a member of the Scooter Libby Defense Fund. There’s also a connection to Sam Fox, a big donor to Swift Boat Veterans For Truth who recently was rewarded with a recess-appointment ambassadorship.

RJC is running a shamelessly deceptive ad against Pelosi; read about it and watch it at Think Progress.

Not Funny

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[Update: MSNBC dropped Imus altogether. Maybe they’ll do something really outrageous and put a real news program on in that time slot? I’m not holding my breath.]

[Another update: Don’t miss the Steve M. smackdown (figuratively speaking) of Little Lulu.]

Some time in the mid to late 1970s I was working for a small book publisher in Cincinnati. One of the contracted authors was a professional after-dinner speaker; this guy made a living traveling around the country entertaining Kiwanis and Lions and Elks. He was especially prized as a humorist, and my employer was publishing a collection of his tried-and-true jokes.

So there I was reading his manuscript, but I wasn’t laughing. Mostly, I was appalled. At least half of the “jokes” were aggressive and nakedly hostile put-downs of women. There was a whole section devoted to Ugly Wives, for example. And then I came upon an anecdote about a fellow buying a fishing rod. The punch line revealed he was buying the rod to beat his wife.

I blue-penciled that puppy out of the manuscript faster’n you can say “male chauvinist pig.”

The author complained to the managing editor, saying that I had no sense of humor. The managing editor, also a woman, read the “joke” and backed up my decision. It stayed out.

The truth was, if I’d deleted everything in that manuscript I found offensive there wouldn’t have been enough material left to fill a moderately sized pamphlet, let alone a book. (As a junior staffer, I didn’t have the authority to request the amount of revision I desired, which involved stuffing that manuscript someplace where the sun don’t shine.) But at the time, most of this “humor” was representative of much “humor” we’d all seen on television and in movies. It was mainstream stuff, in other words, although less so in the 1970s than it had been in the 1950s and 1960s.

I often wish someone would research the stand-up comedy routines presented on such venues as the Ed Sullivan Show and analyze how much of it amounted to complaining about women. Mothers-in-law, women drivers, nags, and of course ugly wives were the meat and potatoes of comedy in those days. A comedian — always male, of course — had only to say “my mother-in-law!” or “women drivers!” and roll his eyes, and the audience would howl. Thanks in large part to second-wave feminism, by the late 1970s television comedy had mostly moved on to other topics, but our author from the rubber chicken circuit was still telling the same jokes he’d been telling for twenty years.

And if he’d published his joke collection a decade earlier, the fishing rod story would have stayed in, and it’s unlikely anyone would have had second thoughts about it.

By now you’ve guessed I’m going to talk about Don Imus. Yes, but I also want to look at the use and abuse of put-down humor generally.

For some reason, in the years after World War II American society went on a woman-hating binge. You might remember that in The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan cataloged considerable differences in the way women were portrayed in popular culture in the 1950s to early 1960s (Mystique was published in 1963) compared to the 1930s. Women in the 1950s were seen as considerably dumber (remarkably, even women’s magazines were “dumbed down” in the 1950s) and more helpless. About the same time it became trendy among psychiatrists to blame all manner of pathologies on bad mothering and to declare that a woman who wasn’t interested in being a housewife and mother must be neurotic and needed psychiatric help.

I honestly don’t know why this was happening, but I remember it well. And as I remember it, second-wave feminism began as a backlash to the postwar put down of women and only later expanded to challenge sexism throughout human history. It’s also clear to me that the pervasiveness of misogynist humor in those years helped keep women “in their place.” Believe me, the wife jokes you might have heard the late Henny Youngman or Rodney Dangerfield tell were mild compared to what was common fare in the 1950s, and those two gentlemen — Dangerfield in particular — usually told their jokes in a way that made the joke on themselves as much as their allegedly ill-favored wives. (Dangerfield sample: “My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.”) The jokes of the day carried the subliminal message to women that we’d better not be ugly, or shrews, or nags, or assume competence in anything but cooking and housecleaning.

This morning I googled “psychology of humor” and came across this book, big chunks of which are available for reading online. Humor is a social phenomenon, it says, that can be employed to many ends, both beneficial and malicious. It’s common for people to express genuine hostility in the form of teasing, for example. “Some of the social functions of humor can also be quite aggressive, coercive, and manipulative,” it says at the bottom of page 17.

Some researcher in the 1930s made the brilliant discovery that Jews found anti-Jewish jokes less funny than did non-Jews (page 51). On the other hand, the text continues, a survey done in 1959 claimed that an audience of blacks laughed at anti-black jokes as much as a white audience did. (It doesn’t say if a black or a white comedian was telling the jokes; seems to me that would make a big difference on how the audience perceived the humor.) And I see on pages 51-52 that some guy named Cantor in 1976 “found that both female and male college students showed greater appreciation for disparagement humor in which a male had the last laugh at a female’s expense, as compared to jokes in which a female disparaged a male.” Somehow I suspect that wouldn’t be true now.

But I think that illustrates the damage put-down humor can do. Women (or a racial minority) raised in a culture in which women are pervasively ridiculed are likely to internalize that ridicule and see themselves as worthy of ridicule. And those women in college in 1976 had been raised in a culture that had relentlessly ridiculed women. I don’t doubt that generations of vicious racist humor had a psychological impact on African Americans as well.

Like my author from years ago, Imus probably thinks some people have no sense of humor. But there’s a big difference between Imus insulting the political and media elites who are guests on his program and calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed ho’s.” If he and his defenders can’t see that, there’s something seriously wrong with the lot of them.

It’s a plain fact that expressions of malice are often disguised as humor. I found this in a Psychology Today article:

This aggressive type of humor is used to criticize and manipulate others through teasing, sarcasm and ridicule. When it’s aimed against politicians by the likes of Ann Coulter, it’s hilarious and mostly harmless. But in the real world, it has a sharper impact. Put-down humor, such as telling friends an embarrassing story about another friend, is a socially acceptable way to deploy aggression and make others look bad so you look good.

When challenged on their teasing, the put-down joker often turns to the “just kidding” defense, allowing the aggressor to avoid responsibility even as the barb bites. Martin has found no evidence that those who rely on this type of humor are any less well-adjusted. But it does take a toll on personal relationships.

The author of this piece and I disagree on the alleged hilarity of Coulter. Coulter’s “humor” is about as close to pure hate speech as “humor” gets. Real humorists don’t wish for people to be poisoned or assassinated, for example. There may be a fine line between “poking fun” and hate speech. But when you go from, say, Bob Hope’s “Carter wants to go to Washington. He’ll feel right at home there – he was raised on a nut farm” to Coulter’s “We need somebody to put rat poison in Justice Stevens’s créme brulée,” I say you’ve crossed that line.

There is no question much hostile rhetoric is being flung from all partisan sides these days, and some of this rhetoric is in the form of humor. Bob Geiger puts together a wonderful selection of political cartoons every Saturday morning, which I usually link to. I’m sure righties find many of these cartoons offensive; frankly, some of them aren’t the least bit humorous, even to me, but they make valid points. It’s also true that much humor is in the eye of the beholder. But I think political cartoons should be judged by the point they make. Is the point true? Or is it just about mocking someone the viewer doesn’t like?

I love the way Mike Luckovich draws George W. Bush — a furious, strutting little man with big ears (here’s another example). Luckovich captures the essence of the inner George Bush, IMO. On the other hand, now that Nancy Pelosi has been labeled Public Enemy Number One by the Right, the righties are going all out lampooning her. Here’s an animated GIF making the rounds today. It’s not just hateful; it’s also dishonest. The point it’s trying to make is a lie. Righties might drop by here and call me a hypocrite for approving Luckovich but not the dumb GIF. I don’t think so, but that’s me.

This is a huge topic that would take a lot more blog posts to full explore, and I’ve gone on way too long. To close, I give you Colbert —

Update: Well, I thought I was done, but I guess I have to keep writing — Today’s question is if what Imus said about “ho’s” is bad, isn’t it just as bad coming from rapper?


Kevin Drum gets it:

A slur aimed at specific people is obviously different than a generic slur in a rap song, but it’s not that different. If one is offensive, so is the other, and it’s hard to argue that the cesspool of misogyny in contemporary rap has no effect on the wider culture. It’s not that this excuses what Imus did. It’s just the opposite. If we’re justifiably outraged by what Imus said, shouldn’t we be just as outraged with anybody else who says the same thing, regardless of their skin color?

Exactly. On the other hand, Fontana Labs writes,

Data point: the thought police of the academy have managed to mold my psyche to the point where Imus’s remark is genuinely, viscerally unpleasant to me, both in its stupid racism and the way it pollutes what should have been a moment of enjoyment and pride for the Rutgers team. On the other hand, I can listen to mainstream hip-hop without cringing at, or feeling indignation toward, the sex and the violence. What explains this awkward conjunction of attitudes? One hypothesis: I’ve accepted, at some level, the presence of lyrics like these as features of the genre, and in doing so I ignore them.

Back in the 1960s we talked a lot about “consciousness raising.” We’d lived in a culture in which sexist and racist rhetoric was ubiquitous, like air. We read and heard things all the time that would be shocking now, and thought nothing of it. It took a lot of work and a lot of courage on the part of civil rights and feminist activists to get people to realize how bleeped up that was, and how damaging it was. Essentially the rhetoric was being generated by a dominant group to keep subordinates “in their place.” And I don’t see what’s different about sexist rhetoric in rap music. Ignoring this stuff isn’t necessarily a healthy sign.

Update2: A rightie blogger is calling TBogg out for writing this of Condi Rice:

Oh oh….looks like a pouty Brown Sugar is going to ask Daddy to buy her another pair of Ferragamos. Or invade another country.

Racist? Or just a fair slam of Condi Rice? The rightie argues,

… of course, Ms. Rice not being authentically black or even authentically female, she’s just getting what she deserves, because the Rules of PC only apply to the Right. The Left, regardless of who is in power, is *always* speaking truth to power and therefore exempt from any such considerations.

But Tbogg doesn’t say she isn’t “authentically black or even authentically female.” The “Ferragamos” remark reminds us of Condi’s shoe shopping while New Orleans drowned; that’s a fair slam. “Invade another country” is a fair slam also, given the role Condi played in stampeding the nation into Iraq. The question is, is it racist per se to mention Condi’s skin color in any way? I would argue the “brown sugar” remark is more sexist than racist, because it implies that Bush is her “sugar daddy.” But I think calling her “brown” is only an insult if you think there’s something wrong with being brown. If Condi were caucasian would mention of her red hair or blue eyes have been an insult per se? I don’t think so. Maybe I’m wrong, though.