Democrats need to find their own Rush Limbaugh if they’re ever going to win any elections.
I’m not in the habit of linking to committee websites, but this is genuinely funny.
Archives for 2009
The Thin Line Between Socialism and Capitalist Nirvana
Here:
The 2010 proposed rate of 39.60% = socialism.
The 2002-2008 rates of 35.00% = capitalist nirvana.
The 39.6% rate of the 1990’s = socialism.
Everything else = down the memory hole.
That Obama fellow sure is soaking the rich, isn’t he?
The Thin Line Between Socialism and Capitalist NirvanaPost + Comments (137)
Puppy Update
No puppies were harmed taking these photos. First, Guesly sleeping:
And Ginny posing:
More pictures as dad sends them. They are getting really big, and are attending obedience school.
The many manifestos of David Brooks
Reading David Brooks’ “A Moderate Manifesto”, I remembered another manifesto he wrote a few years ago, “Karl’s New Manifesto”, wherein he imagines being visited by the spirit of Karl Marx. He wrote:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Freeman and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and proletariat, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stand in opposition to each other and carry on a constant fight. In the information age, in which knowledge is power and money, the class struggle is fought between the educated elite and the undereducated masses.
The information age elite exercises artful dominion of the means of production, the education system. The median family income of a Harvard student is $150,000. According to the Educational Testing Service, only 3 percent of freshmen at the top 146 colleges come from the poorest quarter of the population. The educated class ostentatiously offers financial aid to poor students who attend these colleges and then rigs the admission criteria to ensure that only a small, co-optable portion of them can get in.
The educated class reaps the benefits of the modern economy – seizing for itself most of the income gains of the past decades – and then ruthlessly exploits its position to ensure the continued dominance of its class.
Yesterday, he wrote:
The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment. Yet the Obama budget is predicated on a class divide. The president issued a read-my-lips pledge that no new burdens will fall on 95 percent of the American people. All the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward.
[….]But beyond that, moderates will have to sketch out an alternative vision. This is a vision of a nation in which we’re all in it together — in which burdens are shared broadly, rather than simply inflicted upon a small minority….Moderates are going to have to try to tamp down the polarizing warfare that is sure to flow from Obama’s über-partisan budget.
I’m sure Brooks would say he didn’t really believe the first manifesto, that it was his alterego David Marx or Slim Brooksie or David Fierce or whatever.
But isn’t it a bit strange to write one column that ends “Undereducated workers of the world, unite! Let the ruling educated class tremble! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win!” and another that suggests that it’s important to make the working class sacrifice even more than they already are in the name of “Hamiltonian moderation”?
Postmodern, post-Clinton liberalism
Froomkin quotes Obama and nails what’s really gone on the last thirty years:
“A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations… were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.”
The inevitable conclusion here is that establishment Washington is complicit in what went wrong. That includes all the people in positions of power who accepted what was happening as simply politics as usual — even as the country was slowly but inevitably headed to that day of reckoning.
After all, since the Reagan era, even mainstream Democratic leaders have internalized the trickle-down, free-market, small-government mentality which Obama now blames for our woes. Few in the Democratic party — or the mainstream media — did much more than watch as the economic playing field tilted further and further to the advantage of the rich.
On cue, David Sanger of the Times wanks:
It (Obama’s economic plan) may also be a postmodern, post-Clinton form of liberalism.
Are the concerns of working class Americans now the issue that dare not speak its name? Is the fact that that the middle class has gotten fucked on health care, on wages, on taxes so distasteful to mention that elite media can only dance around the topic with terms like “Burkean bells” and “postmodernism” and “class warfare”?
The Calculator™
I just heard Peter Orszag, aka, “the Calculator™” quote Toby Keith: “There ain’t no right way to do the wrong thing” while discussing the budget. I got a good laugh out of that.
At any rate, I am going to try to nap for a bit. It is either try to sleep or take a drill to my temple, so I am going for the first option. Decongestants and the neti pot have not fixed things at all, and this sinus headache is killing me, but at least the flu-like symptoms are not as bad as I have had in the past. Staring at this computer screen trying to work is the opposite of fun. If this doesn’t get better, I will head to the doc in the morning, but these things usually clear up after a couple days.
At any rate, here is a thread for you.
Klein on the Budget
Joe Klein seems to get it:
David Brooks writes today as a moderate-conservative anguished by Barack Obama’s budget. I’ve known David for almost twenty years now. We’ve had many wonderful conversations, publicly and privately, over those years, and I value the quality of his mind, his decency, his essential sanity. We both consider ourselves moderates, though of different sorts.
But I disagree with him profoundly about the Obama budget–and so, I would venture, do most moderate-liberals. The budget has to be seen in context. We are at the end of a 30-year period of radical conservatism, a period so right-wing that many of those now considered “liberals”–like, say, Barack Obama–would be seen as moderate pantywaists in the great sweep of modern political history. The past 30 years have been such a violent departure from the norm, such a profound destruction of the basic functions of government, that a major rectification is called for now–in rebalancing the system of taxation toward progressivity, in rebuilding the infrastructure of the country, not just physically, but also socially and intellectually.
I’m really not kidding when I say that Obama would probably be viewed as almost too “conservative” in many regards for some of the center-right parties of Europe. Unless things have changed radically since my comparative politics courses, Obama would probably be in the right wing of a party like the CDU/CSU in Germany. Or, at least the CDU/CSU as it was discussed back when I was taking these courses years and years ago, although I would bet they are still roughly the same. Obama is most certainly to the right of what used to be call the Free Democrats or the Social Democrats. And I am surprised I still remember this stuff almost 20 years later. Good teacher, I guess. Unless, of course, everything I have stated here is wrong, in which case, blame me and not my old prof. I was probably staring at the cute girl two seats over instead of paying attention.