Though he (predictably) eventually degenerated into teh librul media bias, Ross Douthat put this well:
Consider, for instance, the Washington press’s tendency toward what critics have dubbed “bipartisanthink” — in which journalists fetishize centrism and deal making, and assume that the best of all possible legislation, regardless of its actual content, is the kind that has both parties’ fingerprints on it. By conflating the march of progress with the march of legislation through Congress, bipartisanthink allows journalists to take sides and root for particular outcomes without having to explicitly choose sides.
Usually this happens on fiscal issues, where the mainstream press’s attitude for the last few years has often been: “We need a grand bargain and we don’t care what is in it!”
And it’s worth noting that, more often than not, the outcome they’re all rooting for have the support from various monied interests. The think tanks uniformly backed the Iraq War, respecting as always the wishes of their donors and potential donors. I’d argue the Grand Bargain/Fix The Debt stuff is even more blatant:
Peterson has poured an estimated half-billion dollars into schemes so unpopular, so economically unsound and so obviously self-serving that even conservative politicians run from them, as the implosion of the Simpson-Bowles commission illustrates. So Peterson has repurposed his project into what Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) Global Economy Project director Sarah Anderson calls “a Trojan horse” for “filthy rich tax-dodging hypocrites.” With a stable of CEOs, Peterson timed the launch of this new $60 million campaign to exploit the wrangling over the fiscal cliff, the debt ceiling and the sequester. Fix the Debt has signed up prominent Democrats and Republicans as spokespeople (many of whom have undisclosed financial ties to firms that lobby on deficit-related issues) and launched “astroturf” campaigns to create the fantasy that young people and seniors are concerned enough about debts and deficits to support Peterson’s austerity agenda.
See also: Bill Gates, school reform.
Who could be against school reform, fixing the debt, or freeing the Iraqi people?
MattF
Funny how trickle down, trickle up, trickle whatever all end up enriching the wealthy. Why is that, you think?
burnspbesq
Well, nobody.
But how you go about pursuing those admirable goals matters.
some guy
Villaraigoso, Anthony. a proud Petersen stooge.
sb
As a teacher, may I just say how grateful I am to see school reform being discussed more frequently on this site? That’s not to say it wasn’t ever discussed before but it’s happening on nearly a daily basis and I’m loving it. The reformers appear to be getting their long overdue comeuppance. Hell, even Texans are rebelling (strongly) against standardized tests as the be-all/end-all measurement.
So… yeah. Thanks. :)
Walker
@MattF:
Because they control the rate of trickle in either direction.
Turgidson
Dirty hippies who hate America, that’s who.
Step 1: Do you admit schools/debt/Iraq are an issue?
well, yeah, but…
Step 2: Then don’t you think we should do something?
yeah, but only if it makes sen….
Step 3: If yes, why don’t you support the [something] being discussed by the VSPs?
because their bullshit ideas would only make things wor….
Step 4: Either you support doing [this exact version of something], or you want to do nothing, even though you just said we should do “something”. So obviously, you’re an America-hating surrender monkey. /conversation
We have a ways to go yet before we break the discourse out of this rhetorical prison.
some guy
carried interest allowance for the wealthy.
off-shore tax havens for the wealthy.
maybe there is a BJ commenter (above) around who can explain to us why these are so very very very very very very very important to his clients?
shortstop
Now that’s an earworm I can endorse (beats hand on worktable along with internal melody).
Sad_Dem
Seeing this stuff makes me wonder if a historian has compiled some of the expert opinions of the Ottoman Empire from the late 19th century, or maybe what the best and the brightest were advocating in Germany in 1847.
The Moar You Know
Money is awesome. You can buy slaves with it.
To paraphrase a certain saying, if you look around you and you don’t know who the slave is, it’s you.
Quis serviet ipsis servis?
some guy
The U.S. was the third least taxed country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2010, the most recent year for which OECD has complete data.
Of all the OECD countries, which are essentially the countries the U.S. trades with and competes with, only Chile and Mexico collect less taxes as a percentage of their overall economy (as a percentage of gross domestic product, or GDP).
Davis X. Machina
@The Moar You Know: I am honored to be on a blog where someone knows that serviō takes a dative object.
rikyrah
they should force that asshole Ed Rendell to come clean about how much money he’s being paid to shovel this shyt.
maurinsky
@shortstop:
and I’m so grateful to be nowhere.
shortstop
@maurinsky: Really one of my favorite songs of all time.
Frankensteinbeck
All media figures ARE moneyed interests. They don’t need to be influenced by their employers or lobbyists. The talking heads are all 1%ers and see 1%-serving policies as obviously correct. They can worship their Cult of Savvy while suggesting that only partisanship is in the way of coming together and doing what’s right for the nation – fucking over everyone who isn’t a rich, white male. There are damned few voices of reason in that wilderness.
liberal
Even TEH so-called liberal Brookings Institution, IIRC.
That asshat O’Hanlon also supports
obsolescent high tech productionballistic missile defense IIRC.some guy
they should force that asshole Ed Rendell to come clean about how much money he’s being paid to shovel this shyt.
they should force that asshole Antonio Villaraigoso to come clean about how much money he’s being paid to shovel this shyt.
they should force that asshole Kent Conrad to come clean about how much money he’s being paid to shovel this shyt.
they should force that asshole Vic Fazio to come clean about how much money he’s being paid to shovel this shyt.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@rikyrah: He was on MSNBC last week bragging (!) about how his work with fix the debt has given him new perspective on how CEOs think, and if he doesn’t get more airtime than any other regular panelist on EventheLiberalMSNBC, I’d be surprised. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him on Rachel Maddow. I always wonder how much decisions like that are deliberate
Mr Stagger Lee
Tom Tomorrow, as usual kicks ass!
Chris
@Davis X. Machina:
Romanus eunt domus?
Davis X. Machina
@Chris: ohē! ne tam barbare dicas!
ericblair
@Turgidson:
Otherwise expressed as:
Schools/debt/Iraq are problems.
We must do something.
Giving money to rich people is something.
Therefore we must do that.
LOGIC, libtards!
Villago Delenda Est
Pete Peterson would be a good choice to ride in the second tumbrel.
The first tumbrel is reserved for the four living scumbags who installed the deserting coward into office in 2000.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
FYWP and –
I agree with this and I think it’s probably the most elementary reason why the phrase “DC is wired for Republicans” is true and, IMO, was probably true even when the Democrats were the electorally dominant party. Because the media talking heads and the rest of the court of Washington tends to come from the same demographic as Republican high society.
liberal
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Hmm…a certain dead white European male had it figured out a couple centuries ago: All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
How the hell did he figure that out w/o hob-nobbing with the Fix Teh Debt sociopaths?
scav
bar bar bar, baaaar , bar bar Bar Bar.
maurinsky
@shortstop:
On one of the (if not the) greatest albums of all time.
ranchandsyrup
In the imaginary mountains of Colorado, one producer is asking another producer, “How in the heck did the landed gentry let the feudal system die?”
Bloody Peasants!
Chris
@ericblair:
Actually, the worst part is when they do it to things that actually AREN’T problems, or at least not even in the Top 100 on a list of Most Pressing World Problems.
Iraq is one example, a country that had been so thoroughly defanged, contained and placed under 24 hour surveillance that lil’ old Cuba probably presented a more immediate threat to the security of the nation. Wingnuts turned it into the issue of the day nevertheless by simply shining pictures of 9/11 through the media again and again, saying “imagine if that happened with a WMD!” and letting people’s imaginations do the rest – ignoring the fact that Saddam had zero ties to the 9/11 attacks and zero capacity to produce WMDs anymore.
schrodinger's cat
If money is speech, then it is not really surprising that the ones with most money are the loudest.
shortstop
@maurinsky: It has a permanent spot in my top five.
Fred
It matters little which party is in charge of which branch, the same corporations are still behind the scenes pulling the strings that make the puppets dance. And gerrymandering has ensured that the puppets don’t get switched out too often to control.
gene108
@Chris:
Democrats ARE the dominant electoral party. Control the White House 12 of the last 20 years, the Senate for most of the last 20 years, though Dems have had trouble holding onto the House.
The Beltway media still goes out of its way to grovel before Republicans.
PeakVT
@gene108: It’s a stretch to call Democrats “dominant”. Over the past 20 years, while the Democrats have controlled the Presidency more, the Senate has been even split, the House mostly in Republican control, and a majority of states in Republican control. If you do look at conservative vs liberal instead of just party labels, conservatives are arguably the dominant faction as a lot of Democrats from the South and Plains are pretty conservative.
The media’s bias has a lot more to do with corporate control and the personal interests of well-compensated hosts and pundits than who actually controls the levers of government.
Mino
With the takeover of the states, even social progress, excepting GL policies, is being eroded, from abortion to voting rights.
Certainly our economic policies and, arguably, foreign policy, remains neolib, which is all but indistinguishable from conservative.
Chris
@gene108:
@PeakVT:
Thanks Gene, and PeakVT too. I was thinking of the mid-20th century era when the Democrats were dominant electorally and politically – e.g. they not only had a majority of the popular vote but a majority in Washington, enough so that Republicans at the national level had to run as toned down versions of them in order to win.
gene108
@PeakVT:
I’d argue Dems from the South or Midwest would be more liberal, if being more liberal would help them win.
The political reality for them on the ground dictates their positions, whether we like it or not.
No it’s not.
When Obama steps down in Jan 2017, Democrats would’ve held the White House for 2/3’s of the time for the last 24 years.
EDIT: 2004 is the ONLY ELECTION in the last 20 years, where the Republican candidate got a majority of the popular vote and that was the closest re-election margin for an incumbent in a long, long time.
They’d have maintained control of the Senate for most of that time.
State governments get flipped from Democratic to Republican and back again.
2010 was a wave election for Republicans. The current make-up of state governments isn’t representative of actual political divisions/trends over the last 20 years and I’d bet some of the Republican gains would reverse in 2014 and 2016 and the control of state governments will be more balanced soon.
Economically, yes conservatives are ascendant, but I think that will change as more and more people are ground under what is a stagnant or deteriorating economic situation for them.
On social issues liberals have whupped the snot out of conservatives, as evidenced by: (1) bi-racial President, with black wife and black kids, (2) repeal of DADT, (3) gay marriage being passed in several states, (4) interracial marriage/dating not being a big deal, etc.
The media still treats everything Republicans say as very, very serious, even though they have utterly lost on social issues, while paying very little attention to Democratic ideas.
The minimum wage increase, something President Obama mentioned in the SoTU speech, is supported by 70% of Americans. It’s come up on state ballot measures for the last 10 years. It’s passed usually with overwhelming support of the electorates.
There’s no talk about this, because it’s just not something the D.C. media is wired to realize is really a big f’in deal, whereas they spent considerable time on what happened at our consulate in Benghazi, Libya on 9/11/2012, because Republicans started harping about it.
For all the political success Democrats have enjoyed, the media is wired for Republicans and unless there’s a 1930’s style take over by Democrats, there’s nothing Democrats can do to deprogram the media from their Republican fixation.
gene108
@Chris:
I think a generation or two of Americans were so traumatized by the Great Depression that they accepted the wisdom of the New Deal as the best course of action for the country.
It wasn’t until Goldwater in 1964 that you had people, who decided to try and revolt against the New Deal, when America had been financially stable for a generation.
I don’t think it was Republicans becoming Democrats-lite for political purposes, but rather a real belief shared belief in what pulled America along in the 1930’s.
Turgidson
@gene108:
It seems that it is becoming more obvious as time marches on that the post-war/post Depression era of (relative) egalitarianism was the anomaly, not what preceded it or what has been developing since St. Ronaldus Magnus took office and elevated greed into a national virtue. As you note, the trauma of those two events created a real, though temporary and tenuous, sense of broad, though not unanimaous, agreement that it was preferable for government to intervene in economic affairs for the sake of stability and fairness.
burnspbesq
@some guy:
Not sure who you have in mind. My clients are diligently trying to pay the right amount of tax (and no more or less) in every country in which they operate, in accordance with the vauge and inconsistently interpreted laws of those countries. They’re no different than you in that regard.
Turgidson
@Turgidson:
I should note that the “government should intervene” ethos hasn’t really gone away – but the assholes who might have opposed the New Deal at the time or wanted to destroy it are now directing their effort toward steering government intervention toward ends that enrich them, and gradually undermining the government functions that prevent said enrichment, rather than directly attacking it root and branch. If you can’t beat it, bribe it.
dollared
@Chris: You know, maybe I’m just a really crusty Yankee, but I also think another reason DC is wired for Republicans is that it’s an island in the Confederacy. And, given the number of military people in DC, and the fact that more northerly East Coast kids have other opportunities – Wall Street and Silicon Valley for the smart kids from NY and Mass – it strikes me that DC just attracts a lot of the southern elite.
Chris
@Turgidson:
Everyone wants government to intervene on their behalf, not just rich capitalists, no matter how much they scream against “big government” or “federal government” in the abstract. The Republicans discover this to their displeasure whenever they put an actual plan for the privatization of Social Security or Medicare on the table and a big chunk of the people who’d been with them up to that point blink.
The myth of some vast hidden Department Of Affirmative Action For Lavish Assistance To Undeserving Minorities exists for a variety of reasons – one of them is to allow people to reconcile their belief that “government should be shrunk” with their belief that “but I don’t want any of my services interrupted.”
Chris
@Turgidson:
Since FYWP won’t let me ETA the previous comment –
Wasn’t that always true, the part about rich capitalists using the government to enrich themselves because if you can’t beat them, join them? Weren’t the trusts of the Gilded Age just as plugged into the government as their descendants today, including in terms of using paid politicians to direct tons of money their way?
I always thought the innovation of the New Deal (and to a lesser extent the Progressive Era) wasn’t in making government bigger so much as allowing regular people to count on it in the same way the rich already did.
Chris
@dollared:
My main point was simply about income and class, which would hold true no matter where the seat of government was. But you make a good point as well.
Having grown up in the area for half my life, I tend to project most of those prejudices onto northern Virginia. It’s not entirely fair, but the Pentagon/Langley network with all the bureaucrats and contractors that revolve around it is definitely the spiritual home of that kind of conservatism.