I prefer my scorn raw and unfiltered, which is why I cherish bloggers like DogHouse Riley:
I woke up after about 3-1/2 hours of sleep this morning, and a voice in my head said “The modern Republican party is practically identical to the so-called Fathers’ Rights so-called movement: a pinpoint of pure white hatred and disgruntlement surrounded by concentric gaseous layers of self-aggrandizement, denial of personal responsibility or accountability for the results of one’s actions, and an apodictic certainty that money is the only arbiter of truth.”
But it’s beginning to seem as though even some of the most earnestly credentialled Media Villagers are starting to rebel against a steady diet of lies, bullshit and bafflegab. Proud centrist Matt Miller — CAP senior fellow, NPR co-host, and WaPo columnist — decides to gum some deserving ankles:
… Wealthy political candidates are nothing new, of course. But we’ve never had two wealthy candidates on a national ticket whose top priority is to reduce already low taxes on the well-to-do while raising taxes on everyone else — even as they propose to slash programs that serve the poor, or that (like college aid) create chances for the lowly born to rise.
Call them the Drawbridge Republicans. As the moniker implies, these are wealthy Republicans who have no qualms about pulling up the drawbridge behind them. Such sentiments used to be reserved for the political fringe. The most prominent example was Steve Forbes, whose twin obsessions during his vanity presidential runs in 1996 and 2000 — marginal tax rates and inflation — were precisely what you’d expect from an heir in a cocoon….
The interesting question concerns psychology. Drawbridge Republicans are flesh and blood human beings peddling indefensible priorities. How do they manage it and still feel good about themselves? One possibility is that they’re simply missing the genes for empathy and self-awareness. (Steve Forbes always did seem a bit like a bubble boy whose inheritance left him impervious).
But for today’s GOP ticket that explanation feels off. Romney, for all his awkwardness, campaigned and governed in a liberal state, and he enacted a pioneering universal health care law that’s helped many of modest means achieve health security. Ryan is equally mysterious — the boy-next-door who pays lip service to “upward mobility” yet seems to have no notion his plans would likely produce what liberal analyst Robert Greenstein calls “the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history.”
My hunch is that extreme forms of rationalization and other defense mechanisms help Drawbridge Republicans cope with the cognitive dissonance. The growth of partisan media makes it easy to tune out disquieting dissenting views.
Whatever lies behind it, the rise of the Drawbridge Republicans makes the stakes of this election even higher. If Romney and Ryan actually win on their Drawbridge agenda, the United States will have crossed a scary new Rubicon for a supposedly advanced democracy.
And Greg Sargent asks an interesting question:
This doesn’t happen every day, but Wolf Blitzer did a good job schooling a top Romney official over the campaign’s nonstop dissembling over Obama and welfare.
Is there a single major news organization that hasn’t sided against the Romney campaign on this one?
Violet
Drawbridge Republicans. Perfect image. I’m going to use that.
Abstruse
But even college is becoming less and less of a leg up as it becomes more and more of a necessity to become a middling paper-pusher.
Why do we consider college to be the end all be all of financial success? I managed to make it through Uni, but found success by learning a skilled trade in night classes.
Educate about unions and what they can do for a skilled worker, then train skilled workers.
Mark S.
I like it too. One minor quibble
Of course he has no notion of what his budget would actually do. Ryan is not some policy guru; he’s a fucking idiot who has gotten all of his ideas from Ayn Rand and Reason magazine articles. None of his ideas would work in real life because he lives in a libertarian dream world.
jl
Well, I guess if O’Brien could pull it off, Blitz decided he should give it a try. And by gum, their lies are so easy to debunk that Wolf can do it.
I think the GOP is gone so arrogant and crazy, and so convinced of their own invincibility of peddling any BS they want, they are in danger of pushing the media celebs into fighting back out of self preservation.
In other words, playing safe is a nice easy gig. But if the garbage stinks so bad that it is transparently laughable, then the celebs will start to worry about their ratings (as in, people turn the tube off or watch O’Brien instead of Blitz). And, their focus group and appeal scores (I think it’s called the ‘Q score’) start to go in the tank when people just say that the celebs are hacks or idiots.
If the GOP were smart, and I think Romney would want to be smart if he could, you need to give the media celebs a safe place where they can just pretend to referee BS (Edit; I really meant ‘he said she said’). But the wingnuts demand the full loon, all the time, on every issue.
Mark S.
Also, too, can we take that one stupid troll’s name out of the mod filter? The one that had the same name as the libertarian think tank?
PeakVT
…help Drawbridge Republicans cope with the cognitive dissonance.
I think they simply don’t experience it. A normal person trying to hold the beliefs that Ryan does in light of his life experience would be instantly reduced to a gibbering heap.
Ash Can
Chickens, roost, etc.
Hill Dweller
@Ash Can: The new welfare ad they released this morning(the 3rd tv ad in 11 days) has already aired tonight during Letterman. It cited a Richmond Times-Dispatch op-ed, but forgot to mention the paper has actually refuted their own op-ed. Yes, the paper debunked its own op-ed. Why not check the facts before publishing the op-ed?
Nevertheless, Willard is doubling down on the welfare attack. It must be polling well. Telling white people their money is being given to blah people has always worked in this country.
Villago Delenda Est
@PeakVT:
Paul Ryan is the sort of person that George Orwell was warning us about.
The prophet Nostradumbass
“the so-called Fathers’ Rights so-called movement”
They’re a subset of the MRAs, or “Men’s Right’s Activists”. Those people are fucking insane. Have a look at Reddit sometime, or manboobz.com for someone who wades through that shitpile, so you don’t have to.
shecky
When Matt Miller is starting to take sides, you know the situation is insanely broken.
MikeJ
@PeakVT: The Cognitive dissonance requires cognition.
Seebach
Wait… Wolf Blitzer is pushing back against Romney?
Wow.
Dennis SGMM
The Republicans seem to be intent on testing H.L. Mencken’s aphorism:
Peter
@Hill Dweller:
it probably is, and that’s probably why, but I think he’s making a big mistake by doing so.
Journalists are not his friends, despite how it may seem. They’ll usually carry his water for him, but it’s not because they like him. It’s because journalists need motion; if they’re going to keep reporting on a single topic, they need an unfolding story to follow, with daily new developments. Blandly reporting Republican lies and sensationalism usually provides that in a pre-packaged formula, so they do that. And it works for both of them, like a hideous symbiosis, because the Republicans are always moving on to the next lie or distortion. There’s always something new for journalists to glom onto.
But this is just repeating the same lie, over and over again. There’s nothing new. There’s nowhere for our failed media experiment to go with it…except to take the bold step of calling a spade a spade, like some of them are starting to do.
Mark S.
Geez, it was Sununu again getting schooled by a CNN newsreader? Doesn’t Romney have anyone else to send?
Atticus Dogsbody
Ladies and gentlemen, look with wonder! This is how journalism is done
youtube.com/watch?v=H6pBridOuoU
I love the victim’s meek “thank you” at the end.
Calouste
@Atticus Dogsbody:
Wow, can you imagine a US newsreader starting an interview with a major politician with “You were pretty loose with the truth today.”?
TheMightyTrowel
@Atticus Dogsbody: God. Tony Abbott. He makes me ashamed of my Oxford degree. He’s such a slimey politico, perfect example of Smarmasaurus australianicus.
karen marie
@jl:
A bridge too far, as the kids say.
Also too, this might make some of you feel less stabby.
Chuck Butcher
I guess once Scarborough manages it, Blitzer can risk it…
what a bunch of fuckwads to take a week and a half to get around to what was right there for anybody to see a week and a half ago.
Obama and the Democrats are what they are, but as Rummy noted – you go to war with the Democrats you have.
Chuck Butcher
@Chuck Butcher:
Any questions should be answered by NBC/WSJ Poll – Whites Romney/Obama 53/40
jayackroyd
@Mark S.:
That’s right, but the way I’d put it is that he’s grown up in the environment of the Big Lie, that tax cuts shrink the deficit, that we (the GOP) are deficit hawks. He, unlike Cheney (“Reagan proved deficits don’t matter”) actually BELIEVES this nonsense. He’s 42. He’s heard these lies his whole life, and he’s internalized them.
One wonders, though, how he rationalizes his inability to actually construct an actual budget balancing plan.
dance around in your bones
I was just typing the most perfect, witty, erudite and yet pithy comment on ol’ Balloon Juice here…..it was gonna slay everyone with its brilliance.
Then I woke up. I was just dreaming. (You know you’ve been hanging out here
too mucha hell of a lot when you start dreaming about BJ…………not that there’s anything wrong with that ;)I guess I’ll have to go back to sleep and see if I can re-create that comment, damn it.
It would have been killer.
jayackroyd
@dance around in your bones:
I think it’s sorta worse that you wake up from your dream, and then dash madly, Rosie-like, to your computer to document it.
gene108
Just further proof that the liberal
lamemain stream media is in the tank for Obama, because they realize their boy can’t keep up with the fundraising of Romney or the intellectual superiority of Republican ideas; therefore Odumbo needs all the help he can get to have a shot at re-election.The gist is the MSM questioning Romney will only reinforce right-wing victimization at the hands of the liberal MSM. It probably won’t have the impact we hope it will on the election.
dance around in your bones
@jayackroyd:
No, no – I dashed madly to my computer to see if I HAD actually typed it.
Imagine my dismay.
Older_Wiser
@Abstruse: I agree with you totally. For years, I tried to resist the lure of corporate work. I didn’t want to be part of The Machine, but armed only with office skills, never made enough as a single mother to even open a small business of my own. And I wasn’t going to allow any ambition of mine to screw over others (something rampant in the corporate work place).
The 2 times I did factory work (union jobs), the pay was comparable to office work; the Teamsters were awful about working conditions and women, quite reactionary at the time, but the IBEW was magnificently progressive. Unfortunately, there are fewer of those jobs, and I noticed even in the ’80s that some 4 yr college graduates were being eased into office jobs that had only required a HS education. I worked in offices from the 1950s as a teenager until the 1990s and have seen everything imaginable, but it wasn’t until the late 60s that I understood why I wasn’t getting anywhere while lesser men were getting promotions–so I joined the women’s movement and turned left. I still don’t think it helps other women, or the working class, to have women (or people of color) as the presidents or CEOs of corporations any more than having men there–they all follow the corporatist agenda–it becomes do or die. How many women actually give a damn if IBM’s CEO is allowed to join the exclusive Augusta Country Club, for instance? Or Condi Rice? It is meaningless to most working women to see a few tokens get some privilege.
Jeffro
@jayackroyd:
I think his plan, like all of the R’s tax-cutting, is simply about taking as much rich people’s money off of the table as possible. There’s no need to balance anything, it’s sheer starve-the-beast stuff.
kay
They’re flooding Ohio with this ad, because Romney’s screwed if he can’t get 60% of the white vote which no one since Reagan, master race-baiter, has been able to pull off.
It’s impossible to refute these lies once they stick.
Why did media give them 2 weeks, carte blanche, to spread the lies?
Abject failure. Too late to cover their ass on this one. Maybe if they hadn’t spent a solid week chasing Joe Biden and parsing every word he said, they woulda caught this before it became truth?
Big win for the GOP, with a HUGE assist from political media.
The one and only way to get around them is one voter at a time. It’s hard, grinding work but I’m convinced one has to somehow find a way AROUND them. The last press conference I saw was all bullshit whiny questions on TONE. “Is Obama running a negative campaign?”
But fuck them, really. They make everything imeasurably harder. If he wins it will be as much fun to beat these “professionals” as it will be to beat Romney.
Nothing they say is at all relevant to normal people anyway. No one gives a shit about “tone”.
I will be hearing the welfare lie repeated as fact for the next 80 days. If Obama wins, I will be hearing it two years from now, like I’m still hearing about death panels.
That’s THEIR failure not to report the truth. That’s the damage done. It lasts YEARS.
danielx
How anyone (and most especially women) not steeped in the drivel of Ayn Rand could vote for Paul Ryan is beyond me. He’s sort of like a younger version of Newt Gingrich, and equally a stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.
But hey, he’s got the steely blue eyes and a decent head of hair (Vice President Goodhair!) and can get out a coherent sentence every so often, so of course he’ll draw votes…
The graphic genius that is Driftglass:
driftglass.blogspot.com/2012/08/plan-ryan-from-uter-space.html
mileslarboy
Speaking of Wolf Blitzer, did you catch him yesterday on CNN? At the end of an interview with John Sununu he gushes “See ya in Tampa!” Ole buddy ole PAL!!! Tough journalism!
WereBear
NOTHING impacts the 27%. You could have Jesus His Own Self descend from heaven on a jetski and thunder that he absolutely meant that stuff about taking care of the poor and sick, simulcast on every electronic device in the entire world, and from rocks in places that didn’t have electricity.
And the wingnuts would mutter that they aren’t supposed to follow false gods and they really have their doubts because the Bible doesn’t say Jesus will return on a jetski and the whole thing would start again the next day.
Triassic Sands
This has long troubled me. I’ve finally come to the conclusion that most of the Republicans have been so brainwashed by decades of the thoroughly odious Ayn Rand and her repellant theory of virtuous selfishness (and Rand is hardly the only source for the idea that selfishness is constructive and good) that there is no longer any room in their lives for empathy or compassion. “Compassionate conservatism” was just two incompatible words juxtaposed to provide snappy soundbites for the MSM and to allow greedheads like Bush to pretend they care about those “less fortunate.” How do they feel good about themselves? They’ve all become expert at living in a fantasy world where truth, facts, reality itself are ignored, denied, wished away. They think the nicest thing they can do for a poor person is to cut them off from any and all assistance and then humiliate them until they get a high-paying job (which doesn’t exist). They feel good about themselves because they hate everyone who isn’t like them at the same time they create make-believe villains and enemies who must be vanquished by courageous conservatives.
However, imagine a one party system in which Bush or Ryan were president. Social Security? Gone — privatized out of existence. Medicare — ditto. Medicaid — gone, period. The minimum wage? Abolished. SNAP, workers comp, and unemployment — POOF! Progressive taxation? Gone. The estate tax? Gone. And so on.
Once they had succeeded in creating their capitalist Utopia, Republicans would have to pour billions into law enforcement, the courts, and the penal system. The Defense Department might finally have the carte blanche it had so long desired, but where would the money come from with taxes, especially those on the wealthy, cut to the bone?
The truth is the GOP should hope they never get that kind of power, because their philosophy can’t and won’t work and they would completely destroy this country in less than a decade.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Something else to make people feel less stabby.
Quincy
The people the ad is reaching aren’t watching Morning Joe or the Situation Room. Not sure how we fight it. OFA needs to push back hard with ads calling Mitt a liar right now.
Omnes Omnibus
@Triassic Sands:
IIRC the DoD keeps getting more in its budget from GOP Congresses than it requests.
Pope Bandar bin Turtle
@dance around in your bones:
Nuthin’ wrong with dreaming out BJs!
Maude
@jayackroyd:
23, Denial. You can’t argue with belief. Someone can believe that the waters will part for him and when they don’t he still believes the same thing. I see this a lot around here.
It is ignorance and incompetence. People can be mentally lazy to the point where they believe that everything they think is right.
jwb
So Twitter thinks this is what we are all going to be talking about today. Fortunately, Nate has already shot it down.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Chuck Butcher:
Now if Mitt was actually anywhere near the 63 he needs to win election, he might have something.
Triassic Sands
@Omnes Omnibus:
Getting a “carte blanche” means that there would be no need for congressional hearings and discussion of the budget. The DoD would simply submit its budget request and it would be filled to the last dollar without further consideration.
Although Congress does continue to fund unneeded (and even unwanted) programs, it hasn’t given the DoD anything like a carte blanche. When Congress funds a program that the Pentagon doesn’t need or want, it’s because of the desire on the part of senators and representatives to fund jobs in their states or districts. It’s not about the DoD at all.
RaflW
I know we’ve all been grumbling for years about the shitty 4th estate. But this election really is a major test of the role of a free press in preserving democracy.
For our government to function – and this is still, in formula if not in current action – a government of the people for the people, we must have an electorate that is informed and ready to make real decisions.
When one party has fully crossed the rubicon into Orwell-level propaganda, the press has an urgent role to play in dispeling the propaganda, not echoing it.
Having some columnists start to say things like Miller has, or a few peeps from Millbank, or one carefully worded AP news story, hey that’s swell.
But a major network needs to stand up and say they won’t run another Mitt-approved ad that outright lies about Obama and welfare. I know there are rules about accepting ads, but have some cojones and pride in journalism, people. Being an arm of the propaganda machine with hand reached out for the millions is destroying our republic. As we watch.
The crisis of confidence in media is a self-inflicted wound. There are cures, but they may require the patient to change habits to avoid untimely death. Courage at the managerial, advertising and news-editorial levels are needed.
Failing that, news consumers need to help them find a more base motive to save their own asses by doing what’s right rather than what’s easy.
jurassicpork
Does Fox News count? I know, ha ha ha ha ha! I kill me.
SenyorDave
@Atticus Dogsbody: I think I’m in love. This woman’s style is awesome! She actually calls Abbott on his bullshit, and never lets up.
Omnes Omnibus
@Triassic Sands: I see what you are saying. Can we just call it fascism and call it a day?
El Cid
@SenyorDave: There’s actually a very good weekly program from the public ABC called “Media Watch” which quite regularly compares reality with its media coverage, and the subject of the Carbon Tax has frequently come up. You can watch it free online.
I always enjoy it, even when it seems a very local topic, but it might be more enjoyable to scan through and find some issues with more parallels here and internationally.
El Cid
@Omnes Omnibus: I think it’s basically your typical 1960s / 1970s US-[backed] right wing sub-fascist junta dictatorship in South America, dedicating all the nation’s resources to its richest families and largest landholders and agro/extractive titans and its US / Western investors.
Just like today’s round of “austerity” programs can be studied in retrospect, from beginnings to dominance to collapse and rejection from the US / IMF / World Bank programs of “structural adjustment” and “austerity” imposed upon Africa, Latin America, and Asia to rob tons of cash from the poor and hand them to the richest foreign investors, all supposedly for their benefit and then generally resulting in apologies from the IMF and World Bank decades later for the resulting catastrophes.
WereBear
@RaflW: True. But it’s not going to happen.
However, the Internet is throwing up an alternative. While it has its own problems, it is killing corporate news media, and that is corporate media’s own fault. It’s not fancy graphics or access or Q score or anything else they tell themselves it is.
News is about facts and accuracy. When you get more of that from The Daily Show, that is what people will watch.
quannlace
Forbes, oy! What was his latest memorable statement on Fox News? That there’s nothing wrong with shaming people who are on welfare.
Scumbag.
Shawn in ShowMe
@WereBear:
Without the corporate media, Left Blogistan wouldn’t exist. Left Blogistan lives to … comment on corporate media. The polls front-pagers love to dissect are paid for by corporate media. The progressive icons of Left Blogistan often land TV and newspaper gigs with corporate media. The patron saint of this blog, Charles Pierce, writes for Esquire Magazine which is owned by … the Hearst Corporation.
One day Left Blogistan might figure out they have enough money to simply buy a controlling interest in a corporate media company. Until then, I intend to enjoy the cat pictures.
WereBear
@Shawn in ShowMe: Yes, it’s value added.
When I was growing up, everybody sat down and watched “the news.” It was considered a minimum information level.
Now, skimming the headlines is enough, except some blogger corrects the record and it goes all over social media. It’s not the monolithic thing it used to be; it’s not what Fox is to their captive audience.
That’s the huge change.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@karen marie:
That’s another Mitt failure because while Mittens loves saying “Economy bad, Obama’s fault” Mitten can never work up the courage to say what he would do differently. So far economic Plan Romney has been Tax Hikes + Reduced Services = Prosperity!
Culture of Truth
I think some, not all, but a few true believers, have managed to convince themselves that the poor would be better off under a Randian paradise; the Democratic party thrives only by bribing poor people with handouts, and worse, purposely keeps them dependent on these benefits for electoral success and enlargement of government, a self-perpetuating system that eventually leads to 90% living on handouts and 10% doing all the work, until the 10% go galt and society collapses.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@kay:
Speaking as a Reagan Dem that’s not how it worked with him. His argument was basically the Left was placing ideology above reality. Since then the Republicans have educated us all on what real willful blindness looks like
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Culture of Truth:
You ever talk to a Libertarian? They are utterly convinced that if they had their way the economy would grow at 5%+ a year forever and there is no such thing as limited resources. Basically they think the poor are poor because the man is keeping them down with artificial shortages.
Nickws
@SenyorDave:
Don’t get too excited, Leigh Sales is still a graduate of Lateline’s Friday forum tosh; if 7:30 is ever desperate enough to have self-styled powerbrokers like Kroger and Howe on to whore their spin Leigh would no doubt return to her old ways of treating them like Very Serious People.
One good interview doesn’t undo all that work she did to help run down Aunty’s rep for legitimate political journalism.
Yet even considering all that, she’s still head and shoulders above Uhlmann…
Original Lee
OTOH, Obama’s campaign is trying out some new stuff to sidestep the MSM. I was on Zynga this morning and got a popup to watch an ad for more game credits, and the ad was about Rmoney’s stance on abortion! Gotta give these guys some props for creativity.
Some Loser
I didn’t read the whole thread through yet, so pardon me if someone has already said this, but . . .
Paul Ryan is not a true believer. He is no more a believer of the nonsense he spouts than George “Dubya” Bush was. He is no less a liar than Romney.
Why does he do all things he do? Easy. He is an asshole. If he wasn’t an asshole, he wouldn’t be a Republican. There is no need to speculate beyond that. Some people are just mean, nasty, bigoted people who relish seeing other people suffer while they live the life. Ryan is one of those people. Hypocrisy has never stopped a Republican before, so why would it now? Seriously, types like Ryan and Romney are not new; they’ve been with us for a while. The only thing different is the packaging.
Roy G.
I think there is an interesting Authoritarian dynamic here: For a good long time, the alpha male Republicans have been cowing the media, and a good percentage of the public, and making them line up behind the b.s. parade. Now that their weaknesses are finally showing up in gaping holes, the Authoritarian faction that exists to ride on the coattails of winners is realizing they are backing a loser, which they cannot abide.
For many, it has less to do with politics than with associating with a ‘winner.’
Someguy
@Chuck Butcher:
Which pretty much is the proof that this is a racist country, and that the KKK aren’t the only people to hold with white supremacist ideas.
LanceThruster
@Violet:
I had referred to the GOP “business friendly” analogy as climbing the ladder then pulling it up behind them.
Ruckus
@WereBear:
You are correct of course.
The Talivangelicals have created their own religion, one that transcends the bible to the point that they only use the it as a talisman, not as a text.
Blue Meme
@shecky:
Yeah, but betcha Matt Miller doesn’t take sides. He, like the rest of the mainstream commentariat, will give us a quick Friedmanesque “bothsidesdoit”, followed by identification of the precise whereabouts of Truth and Virtue, which happen to sit at the precise midpoint between Ryan’s bugfuckery and however close to it Obama has moved this week.
It’s like a Zeno’s Paradox of Punditry.