The key to understanding this, I’d suggest, is that movement conservatism has become a closed, inward-looking universe in which you get points not by sounding reasonable to uncommitted outsiders — although there are a few designated pundits who play that role professionally — but by outdoing your fellow movement members in zeal.
It’s sort of reminiscent of Stalinists going after Trotskyites in the old days: the Trotskyites were left deviationists, and also saboteurs working for the Nazis. Didn’t propagandists feel silly saying all that? Not at all: in their universe, extremism in defense of the larger truth was no vice, and you literally couldn’t go too far.
Many members of the commentariat don’t want to face up to the fact that this is what American politics has become; they cling to the notion that there are gentlemanly elder statesmen on the right who would come to the fore if only Obama said the right words. But the fact is that nobody on that side of the political spectrum wants to or can make deals with the Islamic atheist anti-military warmonger in the White House.
Strap yourself in; this is not going to be fun.
Look at what has happened in just the past few weeks- Cain’s idiotic 9-9-9 plan seemed to catch on with the idiot right, so now everyone in the Republican field is tripping over themselves to come up with a flat tax plan that is flatter than everyone elses. And in the process, we get this kind of nonsense:
Rick Perry’s plan to scrap the graduated income tax and replace it with a 20-percent flat rate would call for deep cuts in federal programs and grant a major tax cut for the wealthy by eliminating estate and capital gains taxes while sharply lowering the rate the richest Americans pay on the bulk of their income, which is now set at 35 percent.
Mr. Perry, in a speech in South Carolina, said his proposal offers benefits to middle-class Americans by giving a $12,500 deduction for every member of a household while preserving exemptions for state and local taxes, mortgage interest and charitable contributions for anyone making less than $500,000. He also said anyone could file under the current code, where most middle-class taxpayers pay a 15 percent top rate, but with lower personal exemptions. He also pledged to lower the corporate tax rate to 20 percent.
“Taxes will be cut on all income groups in America,” said Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, who promised that taxes could be filed on a postcard-sized form under his plan. “We need a tax policy that embraces the world for what it is, and not what some liberal ideologue wishes it could be.”
Where do we go from there? Who knows. Bachmann will probably release a plan so simple it can be filled out in half a postcard. And so on. And what of these mythical elder statesmen on the right? They are about to become extinct:
Remember, less than a year ago, one of the Republican Party’s elder statesmen said his party would be “beyond redemption” if Lugar faced a credible primary challenge. And yet, he we are, 11 months later, facing the very real likelihood that Congress’ last respectable conservative will be rejected by his own party for not being right-wing enough.
This is one of the reasons I get so frustrated with the pissing and moaning and the “Oh, Obama has let me down” bullshit from our progressive betters in the comments here and elsewhere. It’s like they just don’t understand that we all agree the Democrats aren’t perfect, that we realize the Democrats are pretty bad on a lot of issues, and we realize that in many cases they are just as beholden to corporate interests, and that we realize that Democrats do a lot of really stupid shit and are not serving their constituents well. We get all that. I understand that completely and agree with those sentiments. The fail is plainly visible. For every bright spot like Franken or Sanders or Sherrod Brown, there is a Nelson or Landrieu or McCaskill. But that doesn’t change the fact that THE OTHER FUCKING PARTY IS CRAZY. And I’m not saying that just to be hyperbolic. They are nucking futs. Lunatics. Insane.
So until we exist in a system other than a two party system, I’m with the imperfect losers, happily. At least many of them have their hearts and heads in the right place, and when your choice is them of the frothing nutters, it isn’t even a choice.
Warren Terra
So, Perry wants to halve taxes on our high-income earners, eliminate taxes on those already wealthy and their heirs (high unearned income and estate recipients), and eliminate taxes on the median family household (two kids, $50,000 total income). Because he has a big personal deduction and eliminates payroll tax, he may not even be increasing the burden on the working poor like Cain does. This will be paid for by unicorns, or what?
Short Bus Bully
All those crazy fucks from the Goldwater era are being reborn.
This is going to be the most brutal presidential election I have ever known. I’ll be amazed if we are able to get through it without open violence.
CaptainFwiffo
I’m not getting exactly how Perry’s plan is at all simple, or how it could possibly fit on a postcard. Given that you have the option of filing under what is basically the current system, his new tax code is a superset of the existing tax code. Basically, you have to do your taxes twice, once under the old rates with one set of deductions, then again under his new 20% rate with a different set of deductions, before you can see which is less before you file.
wrb
here come the Naderites
Tom Hilton
Julian Sanchez got there first. But hey, it always bears repeating.
Shade Tail
What’s more, the democrats really aren’t anywhere near as bad as the whiners pretend they are. Most of the frothing about Obama in particular is just head-in-the-ass idiocy. It’s really just a very small cabal of right-wing blue dogs in the Senate who mess everything up, and they can do that because the Senate is a profoundly anti-democratic body. And I mean don’t mean anti-democratic-party, I mean anti-democratic-governance.
Mino
An interesting bucking of the trend in Dayton, Ohio. By a Republican-endorsed mayor, no less.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/10/25/352535/dayton-ohio-welcomes-immigrants/
Ohio to Alabama-send us your folks, we’ll appreciate them. Of course the paper got it wrong: lots of the ones leaving are citizens, not immigrants.
Violet
They really are crazy. I wonder how Dick Lugar is feeling right about now. He might be relieved to get out.
JC
I’m with you Cole.
It’s totally nuts, given the two party system, to not support Obama in that system.
Now, what ways to work outside the system? At least OWS is trying that. Of course, my section of OWS – San Francisco – there are maybe only 10% that are attempting to be productive in making a change. The rest are there for shits and giggles.
Plethded
Good post, right up to the moment you decided to take one of your gratuitous stabs at progressives. It’s odd that someone would point out the stupidity of republicans’ fixation on ideological purity while complaining that progressives don’t agree with many of the administration’s policies.
Warren Terra
@CaptainFwiffo:
High-income earners would be able to file on a postcard. The wealthy (those slavering after the death of the capital gains tax) would be able to file on a postcard. People with large families who know about the $12,500 personal exemption might be able to file on a postcard. The vast majority of Americans would have to do all the work they currently do to calculate their taxes, then do the postcard, then compare.
Comrade Javamanphil
Some kid at OWS smoked pot and played a drum, so, you know, both sides are crazy.
reflectionephemeral
Bruce Bartlett, the world’s last honest conservative, explained last year that we’re “facing political gridlock between the sensible but cowardly party and the greedy, sociopathic party.”
The sociopathic party is the fundamental problem with American politics.
Jim C.
I’m one of those who sometimes struggles to remember the available alternative and to be realistic about what Obama was able to face with what he had to work with. (Nelson, Lieberman, etc.)
This sort of post is a very helpful reminder.
I’d still like to see more outright punch throwing from our president along the same vein of what you see from the future Senator Warren, less preemptive compromising, etc. But you’re right. He’s not perfect, but he’s light years better than the alternative.
Brachiator
Sweet Saint Steve Jobs! You would think that these dopes would at least have half a foot in the 21st century. How about “a tax plan so simple you could file your return with a single Twitter message to the IRS.”
It would still be a dumbass idea, but still…
Mr. Poppinfresh
And the thing YOU seem to be incapable of understanding, Cole, is that those of us who are ready to write Obama and Landrieu and Nelson off is that we know and understand that Republicans are worse and insane. Every time you bring this up, you are taking a big old whack at a straw man, condescending to the people who agree with you on most of these issues while providing cover for the unmitigated assholes in the Democratic party, and in the process doing jack all to improve the dire situation America is in.
There is nothing, not one fucking line in the Constitution or anywhere else, that says American politics must always be a binary choice between Democrats and Republicans. You can maybe take some of this energy you waste railing at people for not clapping harder at the Wall Street handjob machine known as the Obama administration, and maybe redirect it to doing what countless generations of Americans have done before you without fail: starting something new from the ground up.
Because, I hate to break it to you, but it was policies either initiated by Democrats or whole-heartedly endorsed by them that caused 90% of the mess we’re in today. Even if every single Republican was abducted by aliens tomorrow and Democrats ran the country forevermore and a day, they would still fuck you over royally.
So, stop putting words in the mouths of those who could give less of a shit about the Obama administration, and start actually doing something beyond picking the lesser of two evils. For my part, that means linking up with grassroots initiatives and my local Occupy movement; for you, who knows?
It certainly doesn’t involve donating to these idiots anymore, I can tell you that much.
hhex65
@reflectionephemeral: meh, calling the will to compromise “cowardly” is also part of the problem
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Violet: I’m convinced John Warner, Chuck Hagel and a few others just walked away out of disgust/disappointment. Pity they don’t have the guts and the character to actually fight the crazy. Poor useless Christie Whitman at least made an effort with her little book with the sad, whiny title “It’s My Party, Too”.
John Cole
Yes. My gratuitous slap of AGREEING WITH THEM ABOUT THE FAIL OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.
Christ, you whiny fucks.
Uriel
@Shade Tail:
I see what you did there- a hidden Santorum reference! Clever!
singfoom
They are indeed detached from reality. I don’t know how you can actually hold the thought that lowering taxes creates jobs at this point, as no evidence exists to that assertion…
@Shade Tail: From a legislative viewpoint, I completely agree with you. Blue dogs fuck it up for all of us.
On the other hand, perhaps I’m outing myself as a “whiner”, but I have serious concerns about the Obama administrations decisions in reference to non-systemic prosecution of loan origination fraud / the financial collapse and the DOJs decision to deepen the drug war prosecutions in California.
The other issue for me is that the Ds are just as funded by the Corporations and 1%ers as the Rs, due to our “freedom” to allow the rich unfettered “lobbying”.
YMMV, but there are those among us that have actual substantial beefs that aren’t just bitching to bitch.
Cheers.
Cheryl from Maryland
My 87 year old mother in law recently asked what was going on with the Republican party (she is a party switcher). We said they are insane. She agreed. End of conversation.
I’d like to give a shout out to my father, who passed away last week. He was a party switcher as well, usually picking the winner — Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, you get the picture. He started striking out in 2000 — Gore, Kerry.
I knew the President could win in 2008 when my dad in SW Virginia put up an Obama sign in his yard. He had one person say something — where did you get that sign, I’d like to have one myself.
He loved to talk politics. I feel one reason he lost interest in life recently is because the Washington Post and NY Times, whatever their faults, stopped being delivered in his home town.
So, RIP Dad. Sorry you won’t be around for 2012. Although it probably will be bad for your blood pressure.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Cheryl from Maryland: Sorry you lost your dad.
Sentient Puddle
@CaptainFwiffo:
It isn’t, and it can’t.
Perry seems to forget that if you’re leaving the current system as one possible option, then you are by definition adding complexity to the system. This tax plan looks like the result of accidentally mixing two focus group reports together and trying to make sense of the resulting mess.
danimal
Agree with the post, Cole.
I don’t want to get into a flame war, but I will make a comment. I used to like this blog (and the comment section)a lot more before the progressive purity police gummed up every single post with their vanity. I’m not talking about people with an occasional disagreement with the Obama admin or the Dems in Congress, I’m talking about the 5-10 people who crap all over ever post with their anti-Obama idiocy. They are worse than useless if they are trying to help the progressive cause.
I hope posts like this can be effective, though I have my doubts.
reflectionephemeral
@hhex65: Bartlett was talking specifically about the Dems’ failure to push for surplus-era marginal income tax rates, I believe. So you’re right that it’s overstated to call them cowardly on that point, as they’ve come around. I do think it’s fair to point out that some Dems seem to exist solely to be scared of their own shadows, but yeah, you’re right, it’s probably not fair to define them as the “cowardly party.”
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Accusing Chuck Hagel of not having guts is silly. He’s fought more than his share of battles and has no more responsibility than anyone else does to fight the GOP or Blue Dogs for that matter.
Lev
But that doesn’t change the fact that THE OTHER FUCKING PARTY IS CRAZY. And I’m not saying that just to be hyperbolic. They are nucking futs. Lunatics. Insane.
This is true. And Obama has done what to combat this? Every time Repubs changed the rules, pushed the envelope, there’s barely complaint from Obama or Reid, and little inclination not to play these games. They had their reasons, I’m sure, but the results have been disastrous.
Mnemosyne
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
So you know and understand that they’re worse and insane and you’re willing to put them back into power anyway?
Congratulations. You have now officially crossed the line from “stupid” to “evil.” You know what Republicans are like, you know what they’re going to do if they get back into power, and yet you refuse to do anything to stop them, preferring to diddle around on the sidelines and throw your hands in the air when Republicans win because, hey, the Democrats didn’t make you love them.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
Thank you.
Bludger
FDLakers INCOMING!
drkrick
@wrb:
Not quite. I’ve seen no evidence of the Naderites doing anything to break the two party system. At max, they monkey wrench it in favor of the GOP.
Mino
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I sure don’t remember seeing “poor useless Christine Whitman” at ground zero without a respirator, do you?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): a former Senator who voted for the Iraq war, the Bush tax cuts, the Military Commissions Act and a whole raft of other things that caused the mess we’re in now (and who, I strongly suspect, regrets a lot of it) has no responsibility to help fix the mess? I disagree.
ornery
Lol … glad to have you aboard, Cole. But there is a certain rabid-reflex going on with some Dem supporters that isn’t really healthy.
I blame Nader.
ericblair
To be fair to Perry, if you’re a middle class taxpaying family you won’t have to do your taxes twice. With the AMT calculation, you’ll have to do them three times. That’s called tax simplification. Hope this helps.
@singfoom:
There are several criminal cases in the works for Wall Street: I’d give them some time since it’s complicated. Also, a lot of what Wall Street did was totally legal, since they paid a lot of good money to lobbyists to make sure it was. The drug crackdown I do have a big problem with.
Lev
@Bludger: FWIW, I still support Obama. But I’m getting tired of the sort of analysis that goes, “Republicans are responsible for all the dysfunction in Washington.” They instigated it, Democrats accepted the new parameters. This must rightly be considered a big mistake on the part of Dem leaders, presumably as a sop to the “unity” concept. This has to be accepted as Obama’s mistake, and considered along with his successes for the full portrait.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
NUMBER 9 WITH A BULLET!
Herman, Herman, who can I turn to?
You give me something I can hold on to
I know you’ll think I’m like the others before
Who saw your name and number on the wall.
Herman, I’ve got your number
I need to make you mine
Herman, don’t change your number
999-9999
999-9999
999-9999
999-9999e-i-ine
.
.
Jay B.
Wow, whadda deal! Where do I donate?
Of course, most, but not all of the crazy, is stored away during the Republican administrations. Well, except when the Democrats help vote for it — like Iraq — or cower in fear, like the Bush Tax Cuts.
The only time the Democrats are worse than when they are in power is when they are supposed to be in opposition. It’s amazing how that works.
Elizabelle
Cheryl: condolences on your father. Sounds like a great guy
Roger Moore
The simple solution is to eliminate all taxes and pay for government by … SHUT UP THAT’S HOW! Don’t be surprised when this is the solution proposed by at least one very serious Republican candidate.
PeakVT
and maybe redirect it to doing what countless generations of Americans have done before you without fail: starting something new from the ground up.
The last successful new American political party was formed in the late 1850s.
ericblair
@Lev:
The problem is that the goopers in the Senate didn’t change the rules; they’re abusing the fuck out of the current ones. Maybe Reid could change the rules, although it would be a tough sell to the Senate Dems and I don’t know whether Reid even wants to (I’d much rather have had a blue-state Dem as Senate leader so he’d have the inclination and capability to take a few hits for the team). I’m not sure what you think Obama can do about Senate rules.
gocart mozart
@Roger Moore:
Since cutting taxes increases revenue, eliminating taxes should increase revenue by INFINITY!!! We’ll all be Reyotch Beyotch!
Satanicpanic
Other than the fact that we haven’t had a viable alternative to the Republicans or Democrats in over a century I’m sure there’s no reason why someone can’t start a third party. Teddy Roosevelt had no luck with it, but who was he anyway? Start one, I bet it will be easy!
gocart mozart
Let’s reanimate Ross Perot
JD Rhoades
@Short Bus Bully:
I’ll be amazed if I don’t end up perpetrating some of it.
bourbaki
@ericblair:
Uh…you got a source for the existence of some of these upcoming criminal cases?
FlipYrWhig
@Lev:
But, see, here’s the thing. You could just as easily, probably more easily, choose to see that the problem is that Democrats in the Senate don’t have enough progressives among their number, so as individuals and blocs they choose not to confront Republican obstruction because, in many cases, they agree with it. You’re right that Obama and Reid haven’t figured out a good way to handle it.
Is that because of something called “the ‘unity’ concept” Obama must have cooked up in order to disappoint you, or is it because when conservative Democrats choose not to play ball there really isn’t much that can be done–because they _like_ the idea of bucking the president and running as independent voices?
I don’t think anyone’s ever figured out a way to bring conservative Democrats in line with the policy preferences of mainstream-to-liberal Democrats. One time it ended up sending the racist populists scampering into the other party.
Chris
@Cheryl from Maryland:
This sounds similar to my moderate-to-liberal dad. From what I can tell, his MO ever since he started voting was to vote for one person in one election, then get disillusioned and vote for the other party in the next election (for Carter because he didn’t like Ford, for Reagan because he didn’t like Carter, for Mondale because he didn’t like Reagan, etc). That trend broke at the same time as your dad’s – he went for Gore in 2000, Kerry in 2004, Obama in 2008, and at this point I’m almost positive he’ll never vote Republican again.
Some people have noticed the crazy. Not enough, but some. Hopefully more of them will come around.
And I too am sorry you lost your dad.
Dee Loralei
@JD Rhoades: Last election didn’t end without some violence. Remember the Conaway girl that got foot stomped by the Paul supporter?
This is gonna get even uglier than 08 and 10 were.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@ericblair: Franken said they pushed for filibuster reform at the beginning of this session, and they couldn’t get to fifty votes. He didn’t name names, just said the old guard was opposed to it, and that even if they had gotten to fifty, they weren’t sure Biden would have voted for it. The veneration some Senators seem to have for the institution is fanatical, and as is always the case, it seems to be only Democrats who allow pointless sentiment to get in the way of their own party. (see also, Barbara Boxer campaigning for Joe Lieberman, Max Baucus sacrificing HCR to his ‘friendship’ with Chuck “Pull the Plug on Grandma” Grassley)
Cheryl from Maryland
@Elizabelle:
Thank you for your kind remarks.
He was an independent thinker – he taught me how to shoot a basketball with one hand, throw a baseball, change oil in a car, use power tools, and so many other things women generally did not learn in the pre Title Nine years of my youth.
His other strikeout in the presidential elections was voting for Humphrey in 68.
singfoom
@ericblair: I understand the complications. And I know of the prosecutions going on. They may end up bearing fruit. But please google “loan origination fraud”. The entire system was rotten, and no one has been hauled for those issues, and it was not legal.
An example of the criminal pipeline:
Unscrupulous realtor helps a buyer buy a way overpriced home, with a LIAR loan, not even caring about even checking the payors ability to pay. Takes his cut.
Bank loans the money, not checking the payors ability to pay, takes their cut, sells the loan to a trance within an investment bank, rinse and repeat. The LIAR loan was designed to allow the banks NOT to care, because then they could brand it AAA when it was chopped up into CDOs.
I am not a lawyer, and perhaps that trail of transactions is not criminal. I also think if the DOJ was dead set on prosecuting the entire rotten system that I’ve referenced above, they would find something that would stick. It would not be the first pony I’ve pined for.
ETA: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/06/first-blame-the-lenders/
and
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/04/collective-embezzlement-origination-fraud/
Read Barry Ritholtz, he says it all much better than I, and he’s been hammering on this for years…
The Other Bob
I think you mean, until we exist in a system where we have two, fully functioning partys.
geg6
I’m with you, John. All the way. Obama Akbar!
Chris
@gocart mozart:
This, actually.
Doesn’t anyone in the Democratic Party know how to ratfuck? If they can do it, why can’t we?
dms
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
This!!!!!
And this: We frequently get this lecture from someone who, within the last decade, thought George W. Bush and company were the greatest things since sliced bread. Are you, Mr. Cole, so young, naive, or stupid, that you don’t know what is essentially a “lesser of two evils” argument has been made every election since time immemorial?
Christ on a @#^%ing stick! Bush and his Republican cohorts were crazy; Reagan was crazy and a doddering old fool; Nixon was crazy. Just because your political awareness started less than ten years ago, and you’ve finally seen the light, doesn’t mean that some of us haven’t been watching this shit for lifetimes, lifetimes that are longer and more informed than yours–informed not only because we read or learned about what was going on, but because we actually lived through it. And you think you’ve got the inside story.
You’re exactly like my oldest brother, who stupidly voted for Bush in 2004 because Kerry was such a bad candidate. Anyone, ANYONE, who voted for Bush in 2004 is either an unabashed idiot or an unabashed ideologue. And then, the very next year, when the Katrina debacle happened, which should have come as no surprise to any sentient human being (and I’m sure didn’t come as a surprise to my brother), his excuse was…well, our system produces two bad candidates. Wasn’t his fault he voted for a repeatedly proved incompetent, empty suit, and liar. It was the system’s fault.
Get off your fat ass and do something to change the system or shut the fuck up, or at least stop lecturing those of us who are smarter than you and have experienced more political life.
Just get over yourself.
Trurl
Shorter Cole: Please hold you nose and re-elect Obama
The “please” only because he’s getting desperate.
Cheer up, sir. Maybe Obama will find more famous Muslims to kill.
FlipYrWhig
@ericblair:
They discussed filibuster reform at the beginning of the new session. It got nowhere. Senate Dems like it and want to keep it. Many of them anticipate that they’ll serve under a Republican president and will want to have weapons to use against that person. Many more of them just don’t believe in giving up the perks and prerogatives that make the Senate powerful as a group, and make each senator powerful as an individual. You’d have to provide a powerful incentive to make them give up something like that, or reform their practices in a substantial and lasting way. But what would they want that’s _better_ than Special Senate Powers?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@dms:
Commenter, heal thyself.
ericblair
@bourbaki:
Here’s one for the Squid itself. I don’t think you’ll hear a lot about them until the indictments come down, because we’re not playing Ken Starr rules anymore. Yes, the article’s from 2010, but Blankfein just lawyered up a couple of months ago. It’s a slow process, unfortunately.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The Senate is the real long-term problem, because it’s so biased toward red rural states and just getting worse. You could argue that some of these states (like N Dakota) are pretty much rotten boroughs where companies can simply buy up the legislators lock stock and barrel. If we can’t get rid of the Senate we’re going to have to neutralize it so this country isn’t held hostage to a couple hundred thousand people in Wyoming and the Dakotas.
JD Rhoades
@Dee Loralei:
Sure do. And some days it’s all I can do not to lace up my old steel-toed Red Wing workboots and go looking for some smug Teabaggers.
David in NY
The problem with a world in which 27% of the population (cf. “The Crazification Factor”) lives in that “inward looking universe,” detached from any real-life considerations, is severe. It means few problems if any can be solved, since a minority in the Congress can block anything. And it won’t just go away. The history of such apocalyptic cults is that, even when faced with facts refuting their basic beliefs (the world did not end last week, after all; Obama has a birth certificate; etc.), they do not accept the real world. They simply adopt a new, faith-based explanation, and continue on their way.
We’re fucked.
Violet
@Cheryl from Maryland:
So sorry for your loss. Your dad sounds like he was a really great guy.
geg6
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
You really are stupid. I’ve hooked up with my local Occupy movement but it doesn’t mean that I or, actually, the majority of the local Occupiers don’t support Obama. You wanna start a new party, go right ahead. I support that. In the meantime, though, we should all fuck off and die during the decade or two it will take you to make it a viable national organization? And that’s assuming that knuckleheads like you aren’t running it because, if it was you or someone like you, it would never get off the ground.
And this is a sentence so full of shit that it just solidifies in my mind that you are too stupid to be allowed to vote, let alone be able to create a new viable political party from the ground up.
Tom Hilton
@John Cole: This is why it’s pointless to try to appease the whiny fucks who call themselves “progressives”.
I’m only half-joking about that.
Mnemosyne
@singfoom:
Here’s the problem with your scenario, though — in it, only the realtor is liable for the chain of events. The bank can plausibly claim that it was the realtor’s responsibility to check the loan, not theirs, so their hands are clean. And the Supreme Court backs them up on that.
The biggest problem with prosecuting the banks is that they spent years making everything they did perfectly legal before they did it. Now we’re nibbling around the edges trying to find the guys who crossed over the line when 90 percent of the completely unethical shit they were doing was within the law.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
And has been pointed out many times by me and others: A winner take all system will always, always, always produce a system where two parties have almost all power. You will not generate a significant third party until you change that. The only other option is to thoroughly destroy one of the existing party; I recomment destroying the Republicans.
different-church-lady
@danimal:
Fixe que pour vous.
General Stuck
Don’t know why Krugman cares, he said the president was a wimp that surrendered a while ago. Wrongly, I might add. But if now, he gets it, then fine. We shall see over time
NR
Vote for the Good Cop! He really has your best interests at heart!
Aet
People have some fundamental confusion over the way that our system of government works. I see it every time left-wingers whinge about how Obama is not doing enough.
In America, our politics are binary. And if we live during a good political era, one of binary choices will not be insane or treasonous. This is not one of those times.
In a two-party system, you can’t form an effective third party unless the third party can poach members from _both_ other parties, and in roughly equal numbers. If you don’t, then all you do is erode the strength of one party, which in turn places the majority in the hands of the party which the third party didn’t weaken.
Furthermore, our political system is basically rigged in that it requires a majority to do something, but a minority to do nothing. This creates a problem, because we all should know that doing nothing about something is the same as being against something.
This is our problem today. People who leave the right-wing usually don’t become left-wing (and vice versa). They don’t even become undecided voters. They just become demotivated. They still have their same values, they just don’t see their representatives as having those values.
Third Parties aren’t some personal startup. They come out of forces bigger than us, not deliberate effort. Billionaires with media empires and armies of mercenary ideologues who were preying on some of the most foolish people alive couldn’t turn the Tea Party into a third party even during a right-wing backlash.
So, stop eroding the progessive movement by claiming its not moving fast enough. Find a way to work with what we have, because its what we have. And you have to participate, because doing nothing is the same as supporting the arguments you claim to hate.
dms
@Mnemosyne:
What you wrote is so much BS, even you should recognize it.
gogol's wife
@Tom Hilton:
Yes, just ignore them. They’re irrelevant. I don’t understand why he always references them in his posts. That’s what really leads to the hijacking of threads.
Violet
OT – Has anyone linked Rick Perry’s Sausage Factory ad yet? The jokes, they write themselves.
Also, too, watch Rick Perry play dress up in his first ever political commercial. Are the Village People missing their cowboy?
(h/t Wonkette)
Jay in Oregon
This post reminds me of this.
Mnemosyne
@dms:
It’s BS to point out that siphoning support from the Democrats will throw the election to the Republicans no matter how many self-justifying stories you tell yourself?
singfoom
@Mnemosyne: We’re about 90% in agreement. The only place where I will quibble is that is the onus of the lender to make sure that the person they are lending money to can pay it back.
The design of LIAR loans is a specific tool to allow banks to wink and nod while ignoring their fiduciary duty to maintain the assets of their shareholders properly. So perhaps they did not commit an actual criminal crime, but the shareholders of several firms are already revolting, and civil cases against the big banks by swindled investors are winding their way through the courts.
I still think (and perhaps this is just hope and faith which I have little of at this point) that the DOJ could use the RICO statutes to go after the entire pipeline. My guess is that won’t happen anytime soon though….
different-church-lady
I find it curious that many people cannot hold all of these thoughts in their heads at the same time:
* Republicans are dangerously nuts
* Obama and dems are not as effective or progressive as we’d like.
* That doesn’t make Obama a complete failure, nor the enemy.
* A third party might be a good thing, but it’s not going to become viable by Nov. 2012.
If they were capable of that then they might realize there’s ways to work towards breaking the two-party/winner take all system without the risk of tipping the present election to the dangerous nuts.
Then again, maybe it’s not that they’re not capable. Maybe they just don’t want to, because they’re actually zealots in progressive clothing.
Samara Morgan
/yawn
its red/blue genetics and social aggregation.
In gaming its called rubberbanding–conservatives are rewarded in social capital for being anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-minority, anti-education. they get “skillups” for teh crazy.
so someone with organic conservative tendency is naturally drawn to the Right…because they are good at it….
the whole republican party is the white christian party now.
here is the meme–
we are just as smart as you snobby academics and scientists and intellectuals– we are smart in a different way, a BETTER way…in the ONLY way that really counts– we are GodSmart™
Tone in DC
And the purity trolls are back.
This election (for Congress too, not just the presidential) will be pivotal for this country, as much as 1968 was, and far too many people are far too willing to repeat the results of 1968.
Maybe they forgot that the Trickster (and his BFFs Cheney and Rumsfeld) WON that election. And the following one.
patroclus
Sorry, but I’m not buying this Stalinist/Trotskyite analogy at all. When Lenin died in 1924 (before Nazi Germany), Stalin, Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev engaged in a power struggle with Trotsky over a number of issues (Russian consolidation v. worldwide revolution; working class proletariat v. government by bureaucratic apparatchik; the theory of permanent revolution) and, generally speaking, Trotskyites took the more purist, more leftist position. Stalin won the power struggle by marginalizing the more extreme radicalism of the Trotskyites.
This is NOT what is going on in modern conservatism in the U.S.; in fact, it is the opposite of what happened in the early days of Soviet Russia. Although the ideology is reversed, the modern “Trotskyites” are dominating modern conservative discourse and the more pragmatic Stalinists are being marginalized.
In my view, Krugman’s historical analogy is both wrong and inapt. If one has to choose an odious non-U.S. analogy, a better one would be the PRC and the lead-up to the Cultural Revolution, where more leftist Maoism, aided and abetted by Kang Sheng and the Gang of 4, flourished for a time. But better, more apt examples actually exist in the U.S. such as the Goldwater period, Mccarthyism and the Clinton impeachment era.
In any event, I’m not too impressed with Krugman’s choice for a historical analogy here…
General Stuck
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
You sir, are a self absorbed moron. I suspect the OWS folks will toss you out, just like they did Ratigan, and the rest of the firebagger crew trying to coopt the movement with whiny butthurt over Obama.
different-church-lady
@NR: When you live in a world where all cops are the enemy then this sentiment makes some kind of sense.
A whole lot of us don’t live in that world.
Chris
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I’d be more than fine with that. Sadly it doesn’t appear in the cards right now, if ever.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
@Tom Hilton:
Fortunately, it is much better, and easier, for lazy, whiny emoballoonbaggers and their Fierceless Leader President Obama to appease Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, the GOP, Wall Street bankstas, the prison industry, the nuclear industry, the MIC, the police/security state industry, etc., etc., etc.
.
.
catclub
@gocart mozart: “Since cutting taxes increases revenue, eliminating taxes should increase revenue by INFINITY”
Of course if that _actually_ happened then government would expand to spend that money, which is the biggest no-no of all in the conservative canon. Luckily, it has not yet come up as a problem. Funny that.
singfoom
@different-church-lady: Count me as one complainer that totally gets all of those ideas at the same time. I may have beef with the current Administration, but I get where we’re at, and the crazies cannot win, that’ll make it all so much worse.
Martin
@Trurl:
Any chance you’re Muslim?
Jay B.
@different-church-lady:
So Tim Geithner isn’t the enemy? Interesting. Along with the stimulus argument, Geithner’s torpedoing (bad cop) of a better foreclosure plan has effectively crippled the economy and severely hurt Obama’s re-election chances. And yet, he’s still in his position. I wonder why?
DFH no.6
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
See, here’s how you and your fellow travelers (I mean that nicely, I really do – would you prefer “ilk”?) demonstrate that you just do not understand how our system of government works (is built within the very framework to operate) vis-à-vis political parties.
No, the Constitution says nothing specific about political parties, nor how many there could be. Many of the Founders (and particularly the most important architect of the Constitution – James Madison) were initially opposed to the very idea of political parties (way too idealistic that, obviously). Didn’t matter – what they created with the Constitution immediately and inevitably became a two-party system anyway. And has been thus ever since.
We are not a parliamentary system, with the potential for multiple parties who, after elections, form coalition governments (often – as in the current case of, say, the UK with the coalition of Conservative and Liberal Democrats – made of ideologically-differing parties).
America’s non-parliamentary system, instead, forces these ideological-coalitions before elections, and thus we have a de facto two-party system in which the occasional third party (with any significant national support) can only ever be a spoiler for one of the two parties in national elections. So binary it is, whether anyone likes it or not.
That can not, and will not, be any different unless and until we change our system of government to parliamentary (which I doubt we ever will – with global warming catastrophes likely just decades away, I expect we’ll be a fascist military dictatorship long before we even get around to abolishing the electoral college).
Seriously, take a good political science course on American government some time. Your ignorance is unhelpful.
singfoom
@General Stuck: That’s a whole lot of ad hominem and generalization. Exactly who is this firebagging cabal trying to co-opt Occupy? I have seen nothing that indicates any kind of part of the movement that you’re talking about when down at Occupy Chicago.
Judas Escargot
@General Stuck:
I thought this was “The Blog Where People Were Allowed to Have Been Wrong in the Past”?
PBO sure did appear to have ‘surrendered’ not too long ago (Bush tax cuts, the debt ceiling fiasco, not even being allowed to speak to Congress at the time of his choosing). You and I even had words about this back then. (FWIW, I never thought him a ‘wimp’, just that he was overly concerned with hurting Republican feefees in the name of whatever post-partisan paradise we’re supposed to have been slouching towards).
Now? Not so much.
I don’t even care if his team finally realized that the GOP really was crazy/evil to let the country burn before giving him anything approaching a policy victory, or if this really was part of some cunning 11-dimensional chess strategy all along. This is the guy I voted for back in 2008.
(One of the few upsides to being such a pessimist is that it can be a very pleasant thing to be proven wrong from time to time).
joeyess
@John Cole: Ha ha ha ha ha…… Thank the FSM for John Cole. I love the smell of misanthropy in the morning/afternoon/night. I’m one too, Cole.
Fuck these whiners
And the whiners ask why. Why? Shut the fuck up, that’s why.
catclub
@Mnemosyne: “The biggest problem with prosecuting the banks is that they spent years making everything they did perfectly legal before they did it.”
Then they invented MERS and ignored any local laws that may have previously applied. Whether they will get away with that is still pending.
Chris
@patroclus:
I think you made a very good point. And your Cultural Revolution analogy was better in the context of communist analogies.
Elliecat
@geg6:
Sure, the poor and vulnerable especially. But they can die knowing that they are being sacrificed for the greater good! Everybody wins!
@different-church-lady:
Can’t or won’t. Or too pure or precious.
But hey, when you demand purity, you don’t have to get off your ass and do anything. Certainly not get your hands dirty.
kc
Mr. Perry, in a speech in South Carolina, said his proposal offers benefits to middle-class Americans by giving a $12,500 deduction for every member of a household
Damn, I need to hurry up and breed.
different-church-lady
@Mnemosyne:
Cut. Print that one.
David in NY
@patroclus: Picky, picky. It’s not the position on a left-right spectrum that’s the key to Krugman’s analysis; it’s the total lack of any truth in the Trotskyists=”left deviationists” and also Trotskyists=Nazis equations, which were silly, but accepted all around by Stalinists.
Understand? It’s the total lack of necessity for political attacks to relate to real facts that’s important.
Ed: not only “lack of truth” but “internal self-contradiction”
Violet
@kc:
If Mississippi gets their way and embryos are declared people, you can just keep a few frozen ones in the deep freeze and collect all the deductions you need!
General Stuck
@singfoom:
Not much ad hominem, as Krugman said precisely what I said he said, and more than once. It is a generalization over my comment about those that would try to coopt the OWS movement, though the example of Ratigan and his scorched earth dems (Obama) bad as republicans is accurate in my opinion.
I took the overtone of saying fuck Obama and his supporters, as a general sense of the OWS are the alternative to party politics and support of a sitting POTUS for more pure Ideals.
The Polling I’ve seen on these people, is that they are overwhelming supporters of Obama, even if many have not bothered to vote recently. And I trust they realize the only chance for change is at least covert support for one of our two political parties, and the goal should be to get more dems elected, to the point the numbers game for making sausage and change, is beyond the reach of bad dems like B Nelson and Lieberman, among others.
If they get to thinking they are above such things, on the whole, even as an undercurrent, then they will likely go the way of much sound and fury, and that is about it. That doesn’t mean they jump headlong into partisan politics and preferred candidates, they shouldn’t IMO. But it also means they don’t set themselves up to the political alternative to Obama and democrats, that some want to make it. That is my take, and by no means do I have a certain lock on what is going on now. I, nor anyone else does at this point, imho.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Violet: Appreciate your kind thoughts.
David in NY
That was “internal self-contradiction” (racing the edit clock)
Never mind, thought I didn’t beat the clock, but I did.
Mr. Poppinfresh
Explain Canada. Go on, I’ll wait. I’m sure you have a winning explanation for the rise of the NDP in the last election as a more-left alternative to the useless, dare I say Democrat-esque Liberal party.
Why would I vote for somebody who is wrong on 95% of the issues I care about? Why? Because the other 5% are worth totally selling out any dreams of a better tomorrow for? Sorry, they aren’t. At some point, you need to actually decide if you want to stand up for this shit, or if you just like the IDEA of being in favour of it but are willing to actively vote for people determined to never, ever have it happen.
What have the Democrats done about the PATRIOT Act? NSA wiretapping? Meaningful Wall Street reform? Who signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall? Has that repeal been undone?
Have we stopped extra-judicial killings overseas? Has any meaningful investigation been conducted of CIA abuses? Has immigration reform happened? Marijuana legalization?
I could go on, and on, and on… simply, rather than give up on those things that matter to me, I would rather fight for them. I’ll fight through a third candidate or an alternate movement or whatever, simply because candidates #1 and #2 aren’t going to do shit about any of this, ever.
The fact that the Democrats have a legion of thralls like you willing to call people evil for not gleefully signing up to throw their principles overboard for The Team is part of the problem, here- your stupid, useless party matters more than lives, the economy, all of it. I’m evil because I won’t actively work to help people do shitty, terrible things in my name? Fuck that. If I have to work the rest of my life to build an American version of the NDP, I will. I’d rather lose every election voting for somebody who does what I believe in than pretend a vote for Ben Nelson is somehow anything less than cowardice.
I mean, that’s the only rational conclusion, since you are knowingly voting for people who will do nothing about any of this stuff, or even actively pursue bad options. Obama and Barney Frank on Wall Street is a perfect example of this.
Honestly, voting for Obama because he undoes DADT (and little else), despite him being horrible for your economic interests, is the exact mirror image of Republicans voting against their economic interests in order to shit all over gays. It’s great that at least one party is on the right side of history and morality, but ultimately they are both using these social issues that impact 4% of the population in order to get a free pass to shit on 100% of the population all of the time.
Whatever, I didn’t expect coherence from you historical dead-enders. Either way you are a doomed species: either the Democratic party will cease to exist as we know it as a “left-wing” party, or America will cease to exist as we know it as a country. Either way, you assholes aren’t going to stop that by voting for Blue Dogs who are actively working to speed up America’s transformation into a neofeudal state, I can promise you that.
General Stuck
@Judas Escargot:
You see now, I think this is utter bullshit. Obama, and every president is president of everyone, unless they are like now campaigning in campaign season. Where it is then allowed by the media and public, to become hyperpartisan. That means making the effort to work with the other party, as best as could. It is being presidential, This is true for every president.
Obama, in real terms of leg, has given very little up since Jan, this year, to the republicans. And what he did give up, turned into pixie dust under closer scrutiny. I don’t remember us having words about this, and I won’t try to be nice about the rest of your comment, as I think it is full of shit, by and large.
edit – and if you had bothered to quote my whole comment, you would have seen that i don’t hold any grudge for Kthug, or anyone else, so long as the change of heart and tone is sustained and honest.
singfoom
@General Stuck: Fair enough. I agree with most of what you said, but I don’t think they have made the decision that electing better Democrats is the best way to achieve their aims.
I’m not convinced that it won’t go that way, but IMHO I don’t think you’ll see OWS endorsing covertly or overtly and rather leading the way in a conversation about the problems that ails us.
But you’re right, a damn fluid situation, that is changing every minute…
Keith G
1. Dr K is correctomundo once againt reminding some of you that he is not a, how do you say, firebagger?
2. @Cole:
What a tender flower that such a relatively small number of commenters out of such a large pool can leave you so frustrated. Poor dear.
singfoom
@Mr. Poppinfresh: Just as an aside, there are those of us who have participated in Occupy and also get the idea of voting for the dems in the short term.
I can respect the fact that you come to a different conclusion, but I honestly think the change we want requires people at the ballot boxes AND in the streets, and both groups of people need each other. YMMV, but insulting those of us who are voting while holding our noses doesn’t really get you towards your goals. And those insulting you are falling into the same trap.
Donald
” But that doesn’t change the fact that THE OTHER FUCKING PARTY IS CRAZY. And I’m not saying that just to be hyperbolic. They are nucking futs. Lunatics. Insane. So until we exist in a system other than a two party system, I’m with the imperfect losers, happily.”
Um, a lot of us who despise the Democrats get that. I might even vote for Obama in 2012. (It doesn’t really matter if I do or not in my state–if Obama has a close race in New York he can’t win anyway.) I just don’t get why you’d “happily” support the lesser of two evils. To use my favorite analogy for American politics, the Republicans are driving us towards a cliff at 120 mph, and the Democrats only want to drive us towards the cliff at, say, 40 or 50 mph. Yippee. Still, given that choice, I go with the slower form of suicide.
Corner Stone
@JD Rhoades:
Man! May I say you are simply rockin’ the crankypants today.
David in NY
@Mnemosyne:
Well, I’m not entirely sure. I think they were explicitly selling securities as “safe” because they were “diversified” “tranches” of different levels of risk, while knowing that every “tranche” was shit. I think the internal e-mails essentially said this. That’s fraud probably, unless it’s totally buyer-beware out there, no matter what the representations were, or there no representations at all.
Where your analysis does really fit is the Enron situation, where Lay could reasonably say he was relying on the clearance of “mark-to-market” auditing by the authorities, and on Skilling for the facts, when the “mark-to-market” they were using was simply “mark-to-fantasy” and should never have been approved.
Calouste
@DFH no.6:
You confuse a government system (parliamentary vs presidential) with a voting system (first-past-the-post vs proportional representation). They are two different concepts. The UK has a FTPT system and that they now have a coalition government is a quite rare occurence.
Corner Stone
@dms:
HAHAHAHAHAHA!! Ooooohhh, mercy. That’s some funny, funny stuff.
No, she absolutely is incapable of recognizing it.
Mr. Poppinfresh
@DFH no.6: Oh, I almost missed this one too.
You DO realize that most of the shitty, terrible theories that predict the number of effective political parties are based on how many representatives are selected from a given region, right? At least when the other dumb-bell talks about “winner take all systems producing two parties,” he has clearly actually read these papers, even if he reaches a conclusion that has counterfactual examples all over the world that blow it apart.
You, however, clearly have never heard of this stuff, and have no idea who the fuck Arend and Lijphart are or what the Molinar index is.
Take a basic poli sci course, indeed.
General Stuck
@singfoom:
My comment may have been muddled on this score. I agree they should not be seen, or actually getting involved at all with partisan politics and candidates and should stick to the simple message of something is wrong with our national economic life, and needs changing. BUT, I also don’t think they should openly oppose candidates or the dem party. And the same goes for Obama, and his campaign. he needs to give them plenty of space, but also be a kind of thoughtful wingman, and vice versa.
NR
@Mnemosyne: It’s BS to claim that the Democratic party “has” votes that can somehow be “siphoned” away.
Here’s a hint: The Democratic party is not entitled to my vote. Nor anyone else’s.
different-church-lady
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
Because you’re gonna even less of what you want by letting the nuts win?
I think maybe I finally see something here: there’s a lot of people out there who don’t understand the difference between working for a candidate and voting.
You wanna vote third party? Go for it. Just don’t confuse voting for a third party with making that party viably electable. Those are two different activities.
And don’t confuse tearing down the guys who are even slightly on your side with building up the fringe* candidates who are more. Maybe a whole lot less of what’s wrong with Obama and a whole hell of a lot more about who you think is going to do a better job and you might start to convince me that’s it’s not about complaining, it’s a about actual progress.
(*Clarification: I meant no insult by the term “fringe” — I only meant candidates who have no practical chance of winning under the current 2-party reality.)
Mr. Poppinfresh
@singfoom: I usually vote Dem, too, at least I do if I feel I can squeeze enough out of the candidate to justify 51% good vs. 49% evil. I’m more than halfway tempted to move to Vermont so I can have Sanders for a Senator and bask in the glory that is Berniestan.
Obama is currently well under that threshold, though. That’s all this is about, really. I’m not totally irrational when it comes to practicality- I just refuse to hide behind a label that is supposed to comfort my tender liberal sensibilities, while horrible shit is perpetrated under that banner all day long.
I’m not a Democrat, I’m a left-wing independent with dreams of a better day. That day really doesn’t include the current Democratic party any more than it does the current Republican party.
different-church-lady
@Donald:
Well, it might help if that were mentioned every once in a while.
patroclus
@David in NY:
Well, if that is Krugman’s point, why bring Stalinists and Trotskyites into the discussion at all? Certainly, propagandists for political factions worldwide have, while criticizing their opponents, made stupid untrue statements before and in much more relevant contexts to modern conservatism in the U.S.
A better analogy would be something more recent and more relevant and more U.S.-centric and would also get the left-right spectral analysis right.
I think Krugman just wanted to compare modern conservatism’s propagandists to Stalinist propagandists as a means of insulting them and didn’t really care whether he got the historical analogy right. As I said, I’m not impressed.
Mr. Poppinfresh
@NR:
If some of the bomb-throwing, name-calling assholes in this thread understood this distinction, I think there would be a lot less acrimony here and a lot more helpful discussion of practical steps.
Daily Kos has a great tag line- “Electing more and better Democrats.” I respect that, but I don’t agree with it. My tagline would be, “Creating better candidates I can vote for.”
J
@patroclus: Huhh!?? Krugman’s point was not to match factions within the old Russian CP to mirror image left to right divisions in present-day Republicanism, but to compare the willingness of the Stalinists to spout any kind of self-contradictory nonsense about their opponents to its Republican counterpart.
David in NY
@J: I said that, but you said it better.
patroclus
@J:
Well, that obviously wasn’t his point because he got the historical analogy badly wrong. If all he wanted to say was that Soviet propagandists made stupid untrue statements and that modern conservatism’s propagandists make stupid untrue statements, he could have said that rather easily without botching the Trotskyite stuff.
David in NY
@patroclus: Oh, come on. First of all, that’s his point because he says it is. Read the damn post. Second of all the Trotskyists are just the Stanlinist’s opponents (think “Republicans” whose opponents are “Democrats”), and the Stalinists can say any damn self-contradictory stuff about them, just like the Republicans can. Honest, it’s what Krugman’s post actually says.
And I don’t care whether you studied all this in college or went to CUNY in the 30’s, or your father did, or whatever your shtick is. Krugman’s point does not rest on the line-up of early Soviet factionalism; it rests on the ability of close-minded sectarians of all sorts to fall prey to internally inconsistent fantasies about their adversaries.
zoot
Fool.
what you lose in your pontificating is that:
a) every progressive recognizes what you say,
b) obama is not in the position of nelson, or mcgaskill, or landrieu… he’s the effing POTUS. His republicanist, corporatist stances kneecap all the democrats that could do something useful. The damage he wrecks on progressivity is far greater than the conserva-dem stooges in Congress.
c) obama’s trying to out republican, republicans is plain vulgar sick. His insisting on SS cuts when NONE ARE NEEDED; his offering up estate tax cuts when none were asked for; his cutting the payroll tax while offering lying foolery that it will get repaid is so disgusting and contemptible there are no words.
d) obama’s wasted first 2.5 years of moving the dialogue and policy to the right, his dismissal of anything remotely progressives, and his pee-capitulation “negotiating” style [cough] have done more damage to progressive policies than republicans could ever have done on their own.
e) his too late recognizing what a fool republicans have made of him, having played him like a Stradivarius is a DAMN embarrassment, especially given how stoopid republicans are, and how easy the opposite should have been.
we may have to vote for obama because of the SCOTUS, but it is the most sickening vote I’ll take in nearly 30 years of voting for Democrats.
Brandon
This might be a dumb ‘false equivalence’ question, but what is the difference between primarying Lugar and advocating like John does for primarying blue dogs?
Zagloba
Nothing at all, except the part where every voter is represented by one seat in (each house of) the legislature, and every legislative seat is elected by plurality vote.
Maurice Duverger would like a word with you now.
Satanicpanic
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
Uh, they have a parlaimentary system? But theories aside- why hasn’t anyone come along and created a viable third party in well over a hundred years? There is clearly something in our system that makes it all but impossible, what you think it is?
NR
@Mr. Poppinfresh: Productive discussion would have to focus around what the Democratic party can do to earn the votes that it so desperately needs.
Instead, we get a disgusting attitude of entitlement around here, where anyone who votes for a third party is somehow stealing votes that “belong” to the Democratic party.
That kind of attitude may be big-D Democratic these days, but it certainly isn’t small-d democratic.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
Answer #1: The late and muchly missed Jack Layton. Where’s your answer to him?
Answer #2: The Conservatives took an outright majority in those elections. What’s your answer to that?
Brachiator
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
Here’s the problem. A lot of self professed progressives can’t get candidates elected, but then magically expect everyone to do their bidding. Most of you people are like some city that used to be great 100 years ago, and don’t realize that time has passed you by.
Nobody gives a rat’s ass about your promises, predictions or half baked binary oppositions.
America won’t “cease” to be a country. Vile people are trying to transform it into something twisted and evil. The only question is what are you going to do, aside from sit in the corner and sulk, to keep this from happening?
doofus
@patroclus: Really? You want to be pedantic about an insult?
David in NY
@patroclus: He didn’t botch his analogy. You’re reading the botch into a perfectly valid point. I think it’s indisputable that the Stalinists made the internally inconsistent arguments that the Trotskyites (whatever they actually believed) were “left deviationists” on the one hand, and fascist sympathizers on the other. Krugman’s only point was that the ability to indulge such self-contradictory thinking without blinking is characteristic of “a closed, inward-looking universe in which you get points not by sounding reasonable to uncommitted outsiders … but by outdoing your fellow movement members in zeal.” I don’t think that’s an inaccurate description of the thought-mode of Stalinists.
geg6
Brandon @129:
I can’t speak for John, but the difference I see is that the primarying of Lugar has a very good chance of working. Whereas primarying a Blue Dog from the left won’t, either because the Blue Dogs are reflections of their constituents and would crush a challenger from the left or it would weaken the winner so that a Republican would win the general in a cakewalk. I know that’s exactly how it’s worked in my neck of the woods. No candidate running under Poppinfresh’s Magical Purity Pony Party would get more than a dozen votes in my district (and yes, it’s been tried many times). So I hold my nose and vote for him because he’s better than any of the GOPers and I care more about the country, my family, and my neighbors than to subject them to pure evil. Not very good or only partly bad is the best option and I won’t apologise to self-involved assholes who’d rather throw all these people under the bus in order to thump their their chests and crow about the pure, pure ideology. Fuck that shit. I got over that shit when I left my twenties.
Mr. Poppinfresh
@Zagloba: Did you even read your fucking link, guy? There are enough serious counter-examples to Duverger’s “law” that even he admitted it had severe problems.
And yes, I have read more about Duverger’s “Law”, and the enormous problems with it, than you ever fucking will. I have read critiques, repurposings, synthesis models, etc. etc. etc.
More to the point of our discussion, one of the questions most frequently posed of Duverger’s Law is whether or not it takes into account the difference between a political party as a “corporation” (the shell, the brand, whatever you want to call it) and a political party as a “movement”, the core constituencies that make it up. Does the change in character of the Democratic party post-Dixiecrat exodus change our understanding of what it means to be a Democrat? Obviously it does, duh. Do Sufferagettes or the Anti-Saloon League count as parties? These were major political movements that transformed legislation in the most powerful way possible, after all- does that matter more than the fact that they weren’t Democrats or Republicans?
In short, who the fuck cares if there remain only two “parties”, if those parties are turned inside out? Turn OWS into the next Anti-Saloon League and hijack whichever party you’d like, just as it has always been done throughout American history. The only thing stopping you is your need to kowtow to establishment power and give strength to a two-party paradigm that, at the end of the day, needs your fucking vote more than you need it.
Wee Bey
Why don’t our Firebaggers vote for Democrats for federal offices and run their pure candidates for local office?
DPirate
Voting democrat is only slightly less lunatic than voting republican. Voting Obama is at least slightly more lunatic than voting Other Democrat. As of today, voting Disney Character is the sanest choice.
David in NY
@doofus: I think he must have majored in Soviet history or something. It’s all about him. Why I give a shit I have not figured out — I guess such a self-involved misreading of something just annoyed me.
Mr. Poppinfresh
@Brachiator: I suppose you consider doing anything but voting for your chosen corporatist is “sitting in the corner and sulking”, and voting for the same corrupt assholes who killed Glass-Steagall etc. etc. is “doing something”, yes?
If that’s the case, then I will be “sitting in the corner sulking”, which in my case will take the form of grassroots organization and a refusal to play their game anymore.
Shit, if it was up to you, women STILL wouldn’t have the fucking vote. Idiot.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@NR:
Yeah, if only everyone could be as substantive and policy-oriented in their comments as you, Donnie.
Bill Arnold
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
Interesting. Not 75% vs 25%, not even 55%/45%, just 51% vs 49%. That’s an interesting perspective you’re viewing American politics from.
patroclus
@David in NY:
Oh come on. Krugman completely botched the historical analogy and confused his point by larding the post with arcane Trotskyite stuff that actually, when examined for historicity, displays the opposite of the problems with modern conservatism in the U.S., i.e., going ever wildly rightward and more kooky, that he was trying to explain. There are far better analogies that he could have used to make his point better, but he didn’t use them. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree, I’m not impressed by this Krugman effort. He can do far better.
singfoom
@Mr. Poppinfresh: Can you articulate a path to that better future without pushing the Democrats to go towards that?
How does electing Republicans or causing Democrats to lose to Republicans lead to that better future. That’s my question…
David in NY
@geg6: But the “tea party” has succeeded by, say, scaring Olympia Snowe to death. The successes of nut-case kamikaze candidates like Sharron Angle have her, and other main-line Republicans, scared out of their wits, even if there is no future in any of their candidacies in a general election.
Could a left movement do this? I kind of doubt it now, and maybe it’s not the time to risk losing three senate seats. But in the long run, maybe. Unless of course, the left challengers always lost, in which case not so good. I mean, the Lieberman-Lamont set-to didn’t work out so well.
Mr. Poppinfresh
@geg6: A majority of Americans agree with me on key things like Wall Street reform, single-payer, all of this shit. We’ve talked about that here dozens of times.
So what’s stopping us from doing what the ASL did in the lead-up to Prohibition, and simply saying “Here is our list of demands, if you want my fucking vote DO THEM”? Are you terrified of actually withholding your vote from people who never do what you or the American people want them to do? Because that’s dumb and self-defeating.
If you happen to live in a region that disagrees with the majority on these issues, that’s fine, but don’t pretend you’re doing the world a service by voting for somebody from the Neofeudalism Party just because they happen to have a D next to their name. That D isn’t a magical talisman that stops them from being an asshole or you from being an asshole-enabler. Just FYI.
PeakVT
@Brandon: The teabaggers are primarying politicians who are already in 90% agreement with their positions but who simply aren’t bloodthirsty enough. And the teabagger victims don’t spend a lot of time tearing down their own party. People who advocate primarying Blue Dogs (I don’t think Cole has done this all that much) are going after people who don’t agree with the party 90% of time, and that take very visible positions against their own party. If a Congresscritter wants to vote against the party line, so be it. But they should shut the fuck up about it, not act like Nelson and Stupak did. And aside from the party loyalty issues, Conservadems have frequently voted for things that are objectively bad for the country, like Bush’s first tax cut and the Iraq War, or watered down bills that would be good for the country. So, yes, that equivalence is false. The correct equivalence would be between teabaggers and people who want to primary Bernie Sanders.
andrewsomething
I never get here soon enough. I always seem to read a post here after it’s reached over 50 comments. By that point I’m not sure who pisses me off more, the handful of “let’s vote third party” people or the mass of “anyone to the left of Obama is a Republican agent trying to throw the election” people. The whiners or those whining about the whiners…
Hell, I hate it that I just used the term whiners. The real whiner are the CEOs who need Obama to talk pretty to them even though they wouldn’t have a job if it wasn’t for us bailing them out.
Mnemosyne
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
Neither is your third candidate nor your alternate movement, because if they can’t get elected, they can’t do shit to change things.
This is what the left seems to have forgotten: if you can’t get your candidates elected, you can’t change anything. At an absolute fucking minimum, you have to find elected officials who are willing to vote for at least some of the things you want, because if you can’t, you get nothing.
You may be fine getting absolutely nothing you want, but telling other people that they should be fine with losing access to birth control and union representation today because you’re totally going to give them pie in the sky 30 years from now is bullshit.
So, again, you’re perfectly fine with letting the Republicans turn back the clock on civil rights, on union rights, on healthcare, just as long as you can feel pure at heart?
tBone
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
This is pretty much my 7-year-old’s reaction when he loses at Wii bowling. But good luck with that grassroots organization.
singfoom
@Mr. Poppinfresh: I totally get where you’re coming from, but again, I ask you where’s the progress towards the goal by not supporting the Dems?
You know what my big deal is and what I really hope for OWS? I hope we can get a constitutional convention together to define a person as a legal citizen when it comes to voting and speech rights.
That is dependent on the legislature acting. As much as I support OWS and think they’ve done great things to move the conversation back to the left, unless you’re down with violent revolution, the ballot box is all we have.
In order to reform the system, we have to get involved with the system at some level. If the Republicans win, nothing will happen towards that score.
I say this as someone who has gotten called firebagger and other names, and I have serious beefs with the O administration, but in order to get the money party D & R out, we have to support the slightly less evil option at the moment.
Does it feel good? No.
Do I like doing it? No.
I don’t see another option. Do you?
Mr. Poppinfresh
@singfoom: Turn OWS into a political movement modeled on successful national movements in the past. You raise funds, campaign, do literature, all of it. You build an awareness of what the problem is, and articulate how you want those problems to be addressed. Since most people agree that single-payer healthcare would be great and Wall Street sucks balls, it’s not going to be hard. Hell, people are willing to send Colbert money just to point it out obliquely- imagine what an actual MOVEMENT would do!
So now you have money and momentum, let’s steal another play from the Teetotalers. You take your list of demands- short and sweet- and you offer to throw your support behind a candidate who supports those issues. Heck, the Tea Party can do it with unpopular ideas like privatizing Social Security, why can’t we do it with “Real Wall Street reform” that everyone thinks is the bee’s knees?
They need your fucking vote. Use it as a weapon. Stop apologizing for people who won’t do what you want, and use all this fucking power you have. You have the internet, you are passionate, literate, you have a free vote in a free society- GET ORGANIZED AND STATE YOUR CASE. Like I said, look what Colbert can do for a fucking stupid comedy show!
David in NY
@patroclus: Wow. I think Krugman was crystal clear. And I’d say from the response to your comment here, that most who’ve read your comment agree with me. If anything has been obtuse here, it was your comment itself. The arcana of Soviet factionalism is, well, irrelevant to Krugman’s actual point. Sorry, but that’s how I see it.
General Stuck
Left wing. Nihilistic all or nothing types are necessary, Someone has to speak up for a better Apocalypse, so as not to let the wingnuts own the issue.
doofus
@David in NY: See, I’d really like Krugman to compare conservatives with Hitler Stalinists. That’d be better. I hate them.
Brachiator
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
Yawn. You got no candidate. You got no point.
And what exactly is your grassroots organization going do do, apart from the navel gazing?
Here’s the thing. You don’t know me, or what I believe, or what I’ve done in my political life. Only children and fools stoop to this type of ignorant, and uniformed attempt at a dig.
Sad.
Zagloba
For one thing, anyone who believes (as I do) that a single-seat-district + plurality-vote system disenfranchises voters who are in a persistent minority in their district. That’s who fucking cares.
And I find your notion that I kowtow to the system amusing, considering that I work as hard as I can to undermine that two-party system. I just know enough to not fight the fucking math when I do it.
Mnemosyne
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
It’s hysterical that you’re talking about this like it’s some brand-new strategy. The left has been withholding their votes from the imperfect Democrats since 1968. How’s that working out for us so far? I guess 40 years of fail isn’t enough — we just have to withhold those votes even harder next time and then they’ll totally come around, right?
The problem we have with Democrats right now is because of people like you who withdrew from electoral politics and let the right wing flood the school boards and local city councils so they could work their way up to national politics while we sat around with our thumbs up our asses deciding that the latest crop of candidates weren’t quite pure enough for us to vote for. But you can feel good about yourself when you tell yourself that the current crop of candidates aren’t good enough for your taste, so that’s all that matters, isn’t it?
Mr. Poppinfresh
@Mnemosyne:
So you’re fine with Obama’s entire economic policy being written by ex-bankers who pander to Wall Street, his pechant for wars, his (mis)use of executive power for everything from illegal wiretapping to Gitmo remaining open, just so long as you can feel like your team is holier than theirs?
I can play this game all fucking day, buttercup.
The real question is, why aren’t you people interested in creating a network of like-minded individuals dedicated to finding better candidates and primarying really bad ones? If the Tea Party can do it for terrible, unpopular ideas, why are you so afraid of airing better ideas and challenging the Democratic status quo of corporatist money-whores?
Because right now all I see is a lot of reflexive hippy-punching gussied up as pragmatism. Why all this fear-mongering, when we have no idea who Obama’s opponent is or what the necessary margin of victory will be? Maybe he won’t need ANY of our votes because Republicans realize he’s their dreamboat come to life- plenty of time for things to play out before I’m faced with your apocalyptic vision of election day choices.
In the meantime, though, I can say loud and proud that I think Obama is a fucking disaster so far. He told us to “make him” do stuff we want, so I will, by hook or by crook. Maybe on election day I’ll vote for him, but until then I’m going to fight him on every stupid fucking decision he makes.
singfoom
@Mr. Poppinfresh: I would stay away from comparisons to the TP. They were astroturfed and 1% funded.
I don’t think OWS can be turned into a third party. And if it does, it won’t be effective before the 2012 Presidential elections.
I think it can be harnessed to provide political cover for cowardly Democrats who are vulnerable.
Who knows what will happen. All I know is that barring some huge event, there will only be 2 real games in town come 2012, that’s D and R, and D is less evil.
You want to withhold your vote because they’re not pure enough for you? I think that’s a false choice that leads to a path opposite of what you want.
But it’s your vote.
General Stuck
I think the founders new full well the powder keg of a country they had on their hands. One with exactly two clear and largely conflicting world views, north and south. So they drew up a republic with power spread out over three branches, with each one to keep an eye on the others. And created a Senate for “extended debate” from which we created the “cloture vote”, to really slow shit down, and give the minority some power. And all of it to purposely make “change” a slow and often cumbersome process. That is the tradeoff. Stability of a country of two minds, with needed change subject to obstruction. It has worked, mostly, but slowly. Otherwise, we would be a giant yo yo surrounded by water and worried neighbors. It ain’t near perfect, but did I say stable?
The old farts could see only a viable two party system for this hells half acre, and made a form of government to fit that bill. A third party can sometimes make a difference, ie Ask Ralph the mouth Nader. But they will never govern directly. just how it is. Gracie
Mnemosyne
@David in NY:
That’s the problem, though — the right wing has crazy candidates like Sharron Angle who are chomping at the bit to run, because they have a huge pool of crazy candidates who worked their way up through the party. Angle was first elected to the Nevada Assembly in 1999 and has been in politics ever since.
Where are the Sharron Angles from the left? Who’s working their way up through the system in their state to position themselves for the next level? Our bench is very shallow, unfortunately.
doofus
@andrewsomething: Shut up whiner!
Mr. Poppinfresh
I love how people keep talking about “witholding” votes.
It’s not election day yet. Not a single one of you is articulating a reason why Obama is great.
This is priceless. I couldn’t have picked a better bunch of useful idiots to make my point for me.
@singfoom: The only comparison I make to the TP is to say “if they can make such a splash with such terrible unpopular ideas…” We have plenty of money, too, you know- plenty enough to fund a non-party political movement in the historical model I’ve outlined.
Seriously, why not?
General Stuck
yes, quite the conundrum, it is all very poor the blood pressure to straddle the wanker fence. I finally caved from efforts of civility, and took a more fuck you approach. It hasn’t won me any awards for congeniality. but the BP thanks me.
gbear
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
Why don’t you give us a list of elected world leaders that you think have been fabulous. I really want to see it. Confine your list to those who have actually been elected to their leadership position by the citizens of their country. Don’t bother naming anyone who hasn’t actually won an election. Don’t name anyone who’s just on your wish list. I want to hear which leaders you consider perfect enough to deserve your support. Put up or shut up, as the saying goes.
Mnemosyne
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
I notice that you completely ignored the actual, practical problems that the Republicans who were elected in 2010 are creating for ordinary people right now. You completely ignored that Ohio is desperately trying to regain collective bargaining rights for its workers at this very moment in favor of your pie-in-the-sky, we’ll totally fix things later worldview. But let’s leave that aside for now.
Of your list, which will be fixed by electing a Republican president in 2012? Will President Romney not appoint banksters to his cabinet? Will President Perry not start any new wars? Do you really think that President Cain is planning to shut down Gitmo?
I have that network. It’s called the Democratic Party. I can work on the local level to support candidates like my current Assemblyman so he has a base to work his way up and gain higher office. I don’t need to re-invent the wheel.
You may not have noticed, but the Tea Party didn’t form a third party. They all ran as Republicans. They took the party over from the inside. They ran their guys in Republican primaries as Republicans and won as Republicans.
And yet you still think your best bet is to form a third party because argle-bargle purity!
Mr. Poppinfresh
Oh god, what delicious timing.
singfoom
@Mr. Poppinfresh: Winning attitude there, insulting people. Hey buddy, I’m not going to hold your hand and assure you that Obama is great, because I don’t think it. But calling us useful idiots when I’ve stood here and played nice and explained my position without sniping you is just rude.
I’m pissed at the administration for not going after the banking sector and loan origination fraud with RICO statutes.
I’m pissed at the administration for their drone strikes. For their continuation and escalation of the drug war.
These things I’m pissed at? They pale in comparison to the possibility of a Republican President in 2012 that will probably nominate 2 people to the SCOTUS.
And adding OWS is not going to change that fundamental dynamic. The TP was partisan and funded and had all of the media behind it. OWS has the opposite, they are ideologically non-partisan, they said it multiple times in multiple GAs I have gone to.
So I just don’t see them becoming a third party. You disagree with voting for O in 2012 is the best way towards progress?
You think there’s an option C)Magical Independent Candidate?
Go vote for them come 2012. Just don’t expect any sympathy and definitely expect antipathy when the Republicans finish rolling back the new deal, and know that D turnout in 2012 helped them there.
doofus
@Mnemosyne: As Mr. Poppinfresh shows, the Democrats are not pure enough to join and change from the inside out. Complaining about Obama is much more satisfying than that.
Mnemosyne
@doofus:
I just want Poppinfresh to explain why, if the Tea Party is such a successful model of how to change things, we’re supposed to do the opposite of what they actually did to be successful.
Mr. Poppinfresh
@gbear: Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, Jyrki Katainen, Ma Yingjeou (don’t agree with him on a lot of foreign policy stuff, but such is life)…
Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir in particular is a dreamboat.
patroclus
@David in NY:
The analogy was botched. By Krugman. The Trotskyites were the ones that tried to demonstrate their zeal by sounding and taking positions that were ever more leftist; just like today’s modern conservatives (on the right) and the Maoists in the run-up to the Cultural Revolution (on the left). So what Krugman is decrying as “Stalinist” was really “Trotskyite” in actual historical fact. Krugman messed up his point badly and your only defense of him is that he was making a different point (Stalinists were stupid propagadandists) that had nothing whatsoever to do with Trotskyism or the actual left-right paradigm which is the heart of his post.
Krugman is usually far better in his columns and posts. This one was a particularly ahistorical one; in which the actual left-right historical spectral analysis was badly missed and his underlying point was left confusing.
General Stuck
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
That provision is worth 10 billion spread out over 10 years, so hardly a major policy setback. Though if it turns out like TPM reports, payed for by reduction of Medicaid, it would be a political win. Mr Beutler sometimes gets ahead of himself on these things, and ends up inaccurate. We will see.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Mr. Poppinfresh: “I’m not a Democrat, I’m a left-wing independent with dreams of a better day.”
The problem with this is that your dream will require a nightmare to be realized. Your third party will need to draw from both parties to stand a chance of victory without throwing an election to the greater of the two evils we now face.
Good luck with that. While you are looking for your dream do keep an eye out for unicorns that poop Twinkies and pixie dust.
You are more likely to find one of those first. Take pictures if you do run into one.
Mr. Poppinfresh
@singfoom: Fair enough comment on the ‘tude. I got riled up by some of the rudeness and hostility above, and shouldn’t have started slinging it myself. My apologies.
Again, people seem to be hung up on the idea that I’m advocating a third political party, lock stock and front offices. I’m not. Ya’ll should watch Ken Burns’ new documentary Prohibition, with a careful eye to how that particular constitutional amendment was passed. THAT is true power, and it was utterly removed from the two-party system of the day.
@Mnemosyne: Uh, are you really incapable of understanding the distinction between agreeing with the Tea Party’s policies, as opposed to thinking that the Tea Party’s existence is a good modern example that Americans are willing to participate in political movements that market themselves as being outside the establishment of a given political party?
Just because the TP got absorbed by the Republican party doesn’t mean that a) it started that way and b) the participants see themselves that way. Americans are hungry for political alternatives, as the alpha and omega of my point.
Seriously, where did I ever say we should do the opposite of that? Really now, dude.
FlipYrWhig
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
Here’s the problem. There aren’t enough of you. It’s as simple as that. What should “left-wing independents” do _while_ building their better day and _making_ more people like them? I would humbly submit that voting for the least harmful option is the right strategy. And I would also less humbly submit that the notion that the Real Left Wing Party could anytime soon, or, really, _ever_ field a majority in the USA is spectacularly quixotic.
So here’s what would happen. The Real Left Wing Party would win some races, but not a majority. In order to make legislation, they’d have to assemble a coalition with the next most leftwards party and maybe pick off a few right-wingers with heterodox views, say on executive power or finance capital.
Guess what? We have that now. And no one thinks it’s working very well in bringing about that better future of your dreams. The frustrating thing isn’t who the president is. The frustrating thing is that Americans don’t really like liberals and lefties enough to support a muscular left-wing politics. And, accordingly, in the meantime, you suck it up and vote for the leftmost of the candidates on your ballot, which is probably the Democrat, even if he’s a “corporatist.”
That’s the reality of being farther to the left than the majority of Americans. You do what you can to convert the people to your views, yes. And, furthermore, in the meantime, because that missionary project is going to take decades at the very least, you vote strategically for the best, or least bad, option. It’s really not that hard to figure out.
different-church-lady
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
Or something entirely different will happen. It’s difficult to say…
Mr. Poppinfresh
Your resident whipping boy would like to inform you that he’s heading out for delicious Afghan food and will therefore no longer be around. This is a courtesy to you, since I don’t want any of you to feel like you’ve wasted a perfectly good straw-man, an opportunity to jam words in my mouth, or some good old fashioned hippy punching in the form of unnecessary ad hominems*. My apologies.
(*I never get sick of being called a “Firebagger” despite literally never reading that website. Really does you credit when you do that, chief.)
patroclus
@David in NY:
Wow. Unfortunately, the arcana of Stalinist factionalism is relevant whenever and wherever the Stalinist/Trotskyite divide is brought up. That Krugman would so badly botch the analogy (Trotskyites were the far leftists; and the situation is directly opposite of today’s conservative discourse) is very surprising, given that he usually uses more apt and accurate anaolgies and arguments. But he got this one completely wrong; thereby confusing his point.
If he wanted to make the more simple point that you think is crystal clear, he should have used a better analogy and gotten the history right.
Mr. Poppinfresh
@FlipYrWhig:
Orly?
Mnemosyne
@patroclus:
Actually, I didn’t think that was Krugman’s point. I thought his point was that the Stalinists would make arguments against the Trotskyites that were self-contradictory, like by claiming the Trotskyites were simultaneously too far left and working for right-wing fascists like Hitler. You know, the same way the Republicans keep insisting that Obama is a communist who’s exactly like Hitler.
patroclus
@Chris:
Thanks, Chris. I didn’t realize such a simple historical point would be so vehemently disagreed with. I guess some feel the need to defend Krugman even on the rare occasions when he gets things so badly wrong.
different-church-lady
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, I have utterly no dobut.
El Cid
I’m sick and tired of all these complicated tax plans which last more than 1 syllable and which takes me any longer than a single blink to fill out. Anything else is ty-
different-church-lady
@Mr. Poppinfresh: Yeah. Except that roughly more than half of those people who went to the polls in 2010 voted for candidates who utterly resist doing those very things.
Weird, huh?
Mnemosyne
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
Oh, sweetie. You actually thought that the TP was anything other than Republicans from start to finish? You really thought it was some kind of rebellion against the Republican Party?
The TP is, was, and always has been Republican from top to bottom, and they knew what they wanted from the very start: to take over the Republican Party and re-make it in their own image. To think that they were in any way trying to form a viable third party is insane. From Day One, they wanted to change the Republican Party, not start their own third party.
I’ll walk you through this:
The Tea Party was never a third party. They were always wholly Republican.
You said we should be like them and form a third party.
Since the Tea Party was never a third party in either intent or form, either you think we should use the same strategy they did (take over the Democratic Party from the inside) or you think we should do the opposite of what they did (form a third party).
You can’t say that we should form a third party like the Tea Party did, because they didn’t do it in the first place. That’s why it’s insane to say, “The Tea Party was so successful that we should totally form a third party!”
General Stuck
No they are not. They are hungry for what they have been hungry for the past 70 years, a solid middle class life with some financial and job security. They don’t care that corps make a killing, long as they get that white picket fence largely without the worry of job loss.
Politics to them is a necessary evil, and right now they are paying attention more than usual because they are fiscally afraid. The problem with your fantasies is that you don’t focus on the core problem, and that is money in politics. In large amounts. Any third party is going to have to navigate that course, and even more so with CU.
Most of The dems in office realize the problem and would be willing to fix it, if they had the numbers of progressive types to vote for the radical change that is needed. There is no one in the GOP that wants anything to change, lest it be for mo money for them and their friends. So, until money is out of politics, or by deprivations, the large majority of voters put the progressives in charge, these folks have to play that game to get elected in the first place. That is why something like OWS has so much potential, not as a entity for an alternative to politics, but as a source of information coming from ordinary people, bypassing the filters and special interests the system is riddled with. Democrats of good intent will respond as such, but they follow the people, because there are no heroes in politics. Only people who want something, and people who want something else. Idealism is a good thing when married to practical reality. Otherwise, it is just fancy navel gazing.
FlipYrWhig
@Mr. Poppinfresh: Great! So, will people vote for the Smash Corporate Greed party over the already-existing parties because they’ve become single-issue Smash Corporate Greed voters? That’s where it starts to fray. You can call yourself a “Republican” or a “conservative,” approve of taxing the greedy rich bastards, and then go right back to voting for a candidate who is inimical to the idea of taxing the rich bastards, because it’s not a make or break issue for you. You could even be a flaming Biblical literalist and signal your support for taxing the rich and ending corporate greed. But I really don’t think your next step is going to be voting for the left-wing party.
Look at what happened to gun control as an issue. The NRA demagogued the hell out of it. Now even Democrats can’t bring up controlling guns, not even after mass shootings. It worked! But they didn’t form the Gun Party to do it.
If the big idea is for the objectives of Occupy Wall Street to have a similarly resounding success, why wouldn’t the way to accomplish that be to organize on the issue/s _and at the same time_ to take up the battle from within the two-party system?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mr. Poppinfresh: Polls also showed the American people ‘wanted’ a public option, by huge margins. Name one Republican or Blue Dog who lost his/her seat for opposing it. What people say they want, and how they vote, are two very different things.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
That’s your problem, you see a molehill and are declaring “There’s my mountain!”
Just because a majority of people support OWS does not mean that they are all like you. I bet many people who support OWS would flee it if you were able to it take over and turn it into your third party movement. Why? Because OWS is currently non-partisan and you want to turn it into a partisan movement.
Is that you Dylan Ratigan?
@different-church-lady:
It’s easy to have lots of time on your hands when you do nothing but lose elections.
patroclus
@Mnemosyne:
I think he was trying to make that point too, but he makes mistakes there as well. When the Stalinists were arguing that the Trotskyites were “left deviationists” was in the mid-1920’s during the power struggle to succeed Lenin. That is, unlike modern conservatism in the U.S., the Stalinists succeeded in marginalizing the then more extreme purist leftist elements within their party
Nazi Germany did not arise until 1933 and Trotsky and Trotskyites were either in exile, murdered or imprisoned or, at the least, not a particularly viable party faction thereafter. By then, the Stalinists would label all opponents as “Trotskyites” and, when the war came (after the Poland carve-up) as also aiding the Nazis. Even if it had little to do (actually) with Trotsky himself or any remaining Trotskyites.
So, to say that the Soviet propagandists were making those arguments at precisely the same time with the same degree of weight is a bit of a stretch. I think it is more accurate to say that they did make both sets of arguments; but at different times and in different contexts.
In any event, modern conservatism does not resemble that period of Soviet history; if it did, the more pure extreme “Trotskyites” would be losing. When in fact, the extreme elements of modern conservatism in the U.S. are currently prevailing (amongst their faction).
As I said upthread, if one must choose a non-U.S. communist-related analogy, the PRC in the run-up to the Cultural Revolution is far more apt. The Maoists propagandists were certainly just as bad as the Stalinists(with just as many self-contradictions); if Krugman had used this analogy instead of the botched ahistorical one, he would have gotten the left-right spectrum analysis right and he would have written a better column.
Mnemosyne
@Judas Escargot:
I really think a lot of people got hold of the wrong end of the stick: he wasn’t trying to spare John Boehner’s and Eric Cantor’s fee-fees. He was trying to spare the fee-fees of the idiots who voted for Boehner and Cantor in 2010. He didn’t want to look intransigent because the Republicans had just won one of the largest House majorities in history and he didn’t want to alienate the voters who had created that majority.
It may be a subtle difference, but I think it’s a big one. All of this kabuki has been played out for the benefit of Republican and independent voters, not politicians. We can debate the wisdom of that, especially given how his ratings among independents tanked, but we shouldn’t be under any illusions that he was playing nice with Republican politicians because he didn’t want to hurt the politicians’ fee-fees.
Omnes Omnibus
I think that one of the things that separates “Obots” and “Firebaggers” is the degree of risk aversion in each. We probably have policy desires that are an 85+% match. Some are willing to accept at best incremental progress or at worst no regress, rather than risk losing everything. The others look at the same situation and say, with Keynes, “in the long run, we are all dead,” and want faster action now even at the cost of higher risk.
General Stuck
@Omnes Omnibus:
It’s not a matter of what anyone “wants”. It is a matter what our system of government makes available to happen when certain numbers are reached. I don’t think it has much to do with “risk”.
Mnemosyne
@patroclus:
So Krugman is right, then. He’s not making any kind of date claim here — he’s claiming that there was a time when Stalinists simultaneously claimed that their enemies were Trotskyites who were aiding Hitler. You’re saying that, yes, that did happen at one point, though it was after the Trotskyites were an actual political faction competing for power in the Soviet Union.
I think you got a little hung up on figuring out which specific period of time Krugman must have been referring to and missed his larger point about parties that make self-contradictory claims.
El Cid
Trotsky’s left-wing extremism had him dissenting from Stalin’s view that social democratic reform parties were just as bad as the actual fascists, given that they stood in the way of complete revolution.
Thus the nonsense term of “social fascism”, in which Comintern followers in and outside the USSR held that the social democratic parties supported the fascists and the fascists in turn supported them.
So, FDR was a “social fascist”. And so on.
The Comintern types gave this up when the actual fascists arrested and killed the Communists, when the social democrats did, well, much less of that.
This was a Trotskyite dissent which was far less extremist than the mainstream of Communist thought as it followed Stalin’s bureau.
Trotsky openly argued that the left should support reformist social democratic parties at that historical moment (1931) in a de facto alliance against fascism — but only as a method to use any opportunity to come out stronger and to vanquish social democrats (as maintainers of the bourgeois state) in turn.
And, yes, this is a case in which this Stalinist line of argument on social fascism — in its broadest form, despite many actual instances of social democrats supporting fascists, because so many of them opposed leftists — was self-contradictory.
And self-serving.
And noting this doesn’t require a particular love of Trotsky, nor ignorance of the actual activities of US Communists in matters far afield, such as the defense of African Americans, the founding of national trades unions, and the fight for workers’ basic rights and power in the South.
Omnes Omnibus
@General Stuck: You and I are kind of on the same side of that divide. I just think that sometimes it is useful to remember that, for those arguing in good faith, the disagreements, however heated, are over tactics or even strategy, but not goals.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
I think that’s pretty accurate, but I think you’re leaving out that the ones who want faster action now are generally the ones who have the least to lose. It’s easy to talk about the sacrifices we’ll have to make to change things when you’re straight, white and male and aren’t in danger of losing much of anything even if the project fails.
It’s one thing to be a domestic worker in Montgomery participating in the bus boycott with the knowledge that you could very well lose the paycheck that you desperately need. It’s another to be a white, college-educated dude today who’s insisting that it’s okay if union workers lose their rights because it’s all for the greater good.
General Stuck
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yes, I know:)
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: As I noted to Stuck above, I think the broad point is worth mentioning every once in a while.
ETA: Probably too late already on this thread since tempers have already flared.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
FWIW, I don’t necessarily think that Poppinfresh is a bad person, just very very naive. I mean, really, believing that the Tea Party was an independent political movement that was trying to form a third party that just happened to get hijacked by the Republicans? Seriously?
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: I have decided to be Switzerland in this particular battle. Send me your valuables, I’ll hold onto them for you, and, years from now, I will make you fill out multiple forms to claim them before denying that you have a established a viable claim.
chrome agnomen
@Brachiator:
carried to its logical (?) conclusion: no tax returns at all !!!
General Stuck
@Mnemosyne:
I kind of think it was somewhat spontaneous in the very beginning. Though I wouldn’t call it “an independent political movement” so much as a lynch mob.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well, I do need someplace safe to store these Rembrandts until things calm down a little …
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: I have a vault. Well, a room. It is very nice though.
SiubhanDuinne
@Cheryl from Maryland:
Doesn’t matter that he struck out in 1968. He was right.
And I’m late here, but you also have my sympathy on the loss of your dad. He sounds like someone I (and probably a lot of us around here) would have liked. A lot.
J
@David in NY: David,
Missed your comment. Not sure I said it any better, but–er umm–if I may be permitted to say so, we are both right.
Mnemosyne
@General Stuck:
Yeah, but I think the spontaneity was, “OMG the black guy won!” and not some statement about the failure of the two-party system. It was poutrage that the Republicans weren’t in charge anymore, not an attempt to form a third party.
SiubhanDuinne
@Samara Morgan:
As soon as you yawned, it went contagious and made me yawn and get sleepy. So I drifted off and didn’t read another word you posted.
General Stuck
@Mnemosyne:
Agreed
SiubhanDuinne
@kc:
I’m a 69-year-old childless female. Guess it’s too late for me, huh?
Corner Stone
Just saw this in the right hand side comments list. Thought it completely fit.
Djur on Open Thread: Would-Be Armed & Dangerously Stupid
General Stuck on Kthug Gets It
different-church-lady
@Corner Stone: Must we have this violent rhetoric?
different-church-lady
@SiubhanDuinne: Psst: adoption.
Neutron Flux
@General Stuck: Very nice.
Neutron Flux
@General Stuck: Very nice.
different-church-lady
@SiubhanDuinne: Psst: adoption.
@General Stuck:
The things the corps forgot is that a successful parasite does not kill its host. They decided the relationship was way to symbiotic and tried to leech the thing to death.
joeshabadoo
It’s time to stop using the word crazy.
They clearly aren’t all crazy and instead are doing this deliberately. G W knew who his base was and even said it on film, these guys know too.
Sasha
@Cheryl from Maryland:
Considering the shenanigans surrounding the 2000 and 2004 elections, you dad may still technically hold a perfect record. :)
My sympathies on the passing of what sounds like a remarkable man and father.
Sasha
@Jay B.:
Because since the GOP is utterly hellbent on opposing Obama in even the most minute matters, if Geither actually left his position, the Republican Party would block the nomination of any Obama appointee for Treasury Secretary unless he or she was a wild-eyed supply-sider who held a economic position intersecting between Ron Paul, Paul Ryan, and Ayn Rand. (In other words, the position would remain vacant until after the 2012 election.)
Sasha
@Brandon:
The biggest current frustration with Blue Dogs isn’t their purity (or lack thereof), it’s the fact that they vote with Republicans to maintain filibusters — even when it’s clear that the GOP only is interested in blocking legislation for the sake of blocking legislation. If a Blue Dog wants to vote against a measure, by all means do so, but they should vote with the caucus to allow it to come to the floor. So much bullshit could have been avoided in the 111th Congress if those GD BDs would have simply allowed measures on the ACA to come to the floor rather than grandstand and extort the maximal benefits for a vote to allow a vote.
With TPs and Lugar, it really is a purity issue and 99-44/100% pure still isn’t enough.
zoot
hey cole (you friggin moron), go read Digby’s “Over before it began”
obama sucks. plain and simple.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@zoot: You’re a fucking moron. Plain and simple.
William Hurley
JC, you’ve chosen to highlight a very salient point made, today, by Krugman and in days and decades past by many observers of groups or movements that rely on in-group identity as the central galvanizing attribute.
As someone here has likely already written or referred to, over the course of the various cultural “reinventions” demanded my Mao, the zealous were in the position of having to create enemies to then demonize and prosecute (to put it politely). So too in the former Soviet block states, which I thought the film “The Lives of Others” captured so elegantly.
Still, the political left is far from immune from these insidious impulses to protect and cleanse. As with the other examples, too close scrutiny of or hunt for “enemies within” necessarily skews the one’s perception and dooms the entire enterprise. So it is with Obama. There seems to be a willingness to adopt a defensive position among o-bots that forecloses on the many glaring short-comings he embodies as a candidate that – if papered over, denied or trivialized – will ensure his defeat in 2012.
To point, this very day Reuters published an analysis-styled piece evaluating the effect of the election that the unemployed will have. Reuters’ conclusion aside, the very fact of this demographic group’s size, age and frustration should fuel any politician’s sense of urgency as the un- and under-employed will number 30,000,000 or more working
(voting) age Americans come election day.
Janet Strange
@Mnemosyne:
Thanks for pointing this out. Drives me crazy when people go on about Obama being too “nice” to evul Republican politicians. Like he’s somehow clueless about how evul they are.
The man is not stupid. He knows exactly how evul they are. Probably knows aspects of their evulness that we can only guess at. He’s a very intelligent politician. And good politicians know that you don’t get votes by saying to potential voters, “Hey moron! Don’t be a stupid as you were last time! Vote for meeeee this time.” That just doesn’t work.
Paul in KY
@Cheryl from Maryland: My condolences. Your dad sounded really cool.
Paul in KY
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): If Hagel had any principles, he would have switched over & became a Democrat.
Tom Maguire
Re: “The key to understanding this, I’d suggest, is that movement conservatism has become a closed, inward-looking universe in which you get points not by sounding reasonable to uncommitted outsiders — although there are a few designated pundits who play that role professionally — but by outdoing your fellow movement members in zeal.”
John does a nice job of illustrating that exactly that dynamic is in play on the left.
Paul in KY
@patroclus: Give it a rest, commisar. Mr. Krugman is not a Russian History expert.
EvilleMike
@Shade Tail: There are plenty of reasons not to vote for Obama. He’s done nothing to fix any number of problems – Gitmo, Rendition, Torture, Assassination, Domestic Spying, etc. You can’t pretend these things away, and you won’t get anywhere if you start behaving like the Repubs and insisting that everybody vote with their eyes closed.
But knowing the whole thing sucks; that there are no particularly good alternatives; thinking your way through it; and then making a decision on which way to go from here – that’s how reasonable responsible grownups act.
vernon
Shorter John Cole: “You guys, Bad Cop is really BAD, which is why I’m going along with Good Cop, happily!”
Svensker
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
Parliamentary system, dude. You will also note that the Conservatives only got about 35% of the vote but they now control the entire government for the next 4 years. Plenty of time to destroy lots of the good stuff in Canada. The Conservative douchebag mayor of Toronto is trying to privatize everything in sight while he’s got the chance.
If you can get a viable third party going in the US, one that will actually win elections and not just siphon off votes from the Dems, god bless you. Go for it. At the moment, I see no sign of that happening.
Rome Again
@Lev:
Uh, yeah… cause nothing says “Obama’s Fault” like Republican filibusters and “Party of No Re-Election!”
Rome Again
@EvilleMike:
If he had nothing left to do, I would see no reason to re-elect him. He’s NOT DONE YET!
Rome Again
All I know is that after spending lots of time reading how many Freepers will NOT vote for Romney under any circumstances, if he is the GOP nominee and he is elected, I’m blaming Firebaggers.
Rome Again
Third party will be really difficult to get Democrats to sign onto. Many of us have created these little humans from our own bodies and we are not willing to force them to live through a Republican-created plutocratic nightmare.
Republicans don’t seem to have the same concerns for their progeny. Why not let THEM create the third party (which many of them are talking about doing already) and then we can have more mandate to create more progressive policy after the GOP vote is split. I can’t believe Republicans are about ready to hand us a win just because they find they have no palate for Romney; meanwhile OUR side is going to throw away this golden opportunity! WOW, just genius guys.
NO! I won’t vote third party. No way, no how, and many others won’t either.
Pococurante
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
GOP accomplishes nothing, spins it as a win. Nothing new about this tactic.
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
None of these folks could be effective in today’s America. But it certainly helps explain where you are coming from.
Didn’t you used to post a lot early in the last decade on game sites? Name rings a bell.
Edit: Link failure from a comment on the article you linked to:
Two hours ago in this thread…
hewhohasnoname00 wrote the following:
TPM’s reporting is off-base. The White House (WH) hasn’t done anything here, except say that they agree that a provision that was present in the original American Jobs Act should be passed, and a provision that will help determine how subsidies and cost-sharing reductions for the healthcare exchanges will be restructured. With regard to the 3% withholding on vendors, the WH statement says: “The Administration would be willing to work with the Congress to identify acceptable offsets for the budgetary costs associated with the repeal, which could include but are not limited to ones that are in the President’s detailed blueprint outlined to the Congress on September 19, 2011.” It’s worth noting that the administration is hasn’t said that it will accept ANY Republican proposal, and is using the blueprint outlined in the AJA as the blueprint. http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/… With regard to the modification of income calculation for eligibility for certain healthcare programs, the WH stated: ” Beginning in 2014, this income definition will be used to determine financial eligibility for Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and for premium tax credits and cost-sharing reductions available through Affordable Insurance Exchanges. The Administration looks forward to working with the House to ensure the bill achieves the intended result.” Here it’s important to note that this move would further clarify eligibility for Medicaid under the ACA. If someone does not qualify for Medicaid ( income <133% of the federal poverty level) under the ACA, they will still qualify for subsidies from 133% to 400% of the federal poverty level to obtain insurance via the Exchange. The change does not result in a loss of care, as implied by the article. That said, on the overarching maneuvering going on here, I think TPM is being a bit too hyperbolic. Nothing has been agreed to. Additionally, it's not impossible for the WH to say that it supports the passage of these items, but only on a conditional basis, which is essentially what they've done. For the first one, the WH wants "acceptable offsets" as a condition of support. For the second one, the change needs to achieve the "intended result" (i.e., no reduction in care) as a condition of support. This is hardly a Republican "victory."