I’ve really lost interest in defending organizations that are uninterested in defending themselves.
Gawker head Nick Denton (who I know I’m supposed to hate):
What annoys me about the U.S. media? Generally the pompous liberals. I suppose they’re useful, but they’re such losers, with their endless hand-wringing. They don’t know how to fight.
token “liberals” like Doris Kearns Goodwin who tell knee-slappers about the Van Buren administration.
Why does every liberal in establishment media except Paul Krugman have to be such a mealy-mouthed fink? Part of it, I know, is that not many are actually any kind of liberal, but I am sure there are plenty of tv types who vote the same way I do and feel the same way I do about most issues. I don’t think it’s 100% careerism, because I know a lot of liberal people in real life, who have no connection to a media career but are the same way “I want to hear both sides, Michael Moore is too shrill, I’m not a knee-jerk liberal blah blah blah”.
How the fuck did we get here?
AhabTRuler
Ask Cole.
kindness
I prefer to hear the mocking version of the conservative side.
EvolutionaryDesign
30 years of Republicans accusing the discourse of having a “liberal bias”.
Chuck Butcher
As per usual, somebody screamed about something (liberal media bias in this case) long enough for it to become a respectable point of view – then Common Wisdom – then dangerous to engage in, irrespective of the truth of the matter.
Republican fiscal conservative – a term used widely and descriptive of what exactly?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I would say Krugman, and to a lesser extent Maddow and Van Den Heuvel, are the only liberals who’ve been allowed past the gates, at least as the term has evolved since the late ’80s or so. Otherwise you get old school Kennedy types like Mark Shields or upper-middle class types like Cokie representing the “liberal” side, their liberalism consisting of thinking that abortion is okay if one doesn’t talk about, being gay is okay as long as one doesn’t make a fuss about it, and Social Security needs to be slashed.
Comrade Javamanphil
Mostly, I think it is a (mistaken) belief that to be truly liberal you must disagree with BOTH the objectives and the methods of the right.
Mike (Hammer) Kay
“Lie down liberals”
I thought this was gonna be about John Edwards.
matoken_chan
Liberals got here because they had no strategy for winning back ground lost to the right wing. Until liberals stop being purely reactive while whining about how unfair life is, they will continue to lose ground.
.
How often has this blog (or any other liberal blog) A) put forward any sort of strategy for the future? How often has it B) offered up posts expressing bemusement at the unfairness/harshness/illiberalness of life?
.
Consider the difference between A) and B), and you’ll be part way to understanding why we are where we are.
recusancy
Why the dig on Doris? Is she supposed to be out there leading the charge? I like her the way she is.
freelancer
This is not my fucking beautiful house!
This is not my fucking beautiful wife!
Marmot
It’s not too late in the day for a generational war, is it? It was the ’60s woo, with the attendant belief that hating your enemy was somehow harmful to yourself. Like Luke not wanting to strike down the Emperor in anger. WTF?
soonergrunt
How the fuck did we get here?
By maybe liberal being used as a pejorative for two generations?
Omnes Omnibus
@recusancy:
I am not sure it was a dig at Doris qua Doris, rather it was a dig at organizations who will allow only a liberal like Doris on TV.
JPL
@recusancy: Doris Kearns Goodwin was on Newshour years ago tsking Steven Ambrose when he was accused of plagiarism that was shortly before it was discovered she had made similar mistakes. I could forgive her mistakes but not the treatment she gave Ambrose.
dr. bloor
@matoken_chan:
The kindest spin on this question is that you’re new around here, and new around the liberal blogosphere in general. The alternative is that you’re three notches past “moronic asshole” on the Troll Spectrum.
Alex S.
It’s about the decline of old-school liberalism. Where are the vocal union leaders? Consumer advocates? Firebrand liberals? Civil rights advocates?
Michael Moore alone is an isolated target, and he doesn’t have any punch, there is no power behind him. And Krugman, he isn’t alone but the public is illiterate about economics, and economics itself is thoroughly corrupted by money and heavily politicized which means that whatever Krugman says goes through several filters until it gets to someone with power.
And people are simply gullible.
WyldPirate
Well, one part of “how the fuck did we get here” is having a bunch of feckless excuse makers that rush to defend Obama over the same sort of shit they castigated Bush for.
You see it here every day…feckless unprincipled excuse making for failed policies and weak-assed, third way triangulation.
matoken_chan
@dr. bloor:
No, the kindest spin is that you don’t have anything intelligent to say. Yelling “troll” at people isn’t a plan. Nor is writing blog posts about how unfair life is.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@recusancy: Nothing wrong with her, per se, but I remember a Russert era episode of MTP featuring a panel of DKG, Robert Novak, Bill Safire and David Broder. It’s the notion that she (and in this case I guess, Broder, fercrissake) represent ideological balance to a pair of right wing rock throwers like Novak and Safire.
Emma
How did we get here? Follow the money. The news got bought by entertainment companies who only care about the stock price. Being brave is not recommended under such circumstances.
Marmot
@WyldPirate: Yay! Where ya been, Wyld?
Midnight Marauder
@EvolutionaryDesign:
Pretty much. Four decades of bitchslap politics will do that to a country’s political discourse. Liberals are feckless cowards because they choose to be.
Simple as that.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik
How the fuck did we get here?
Well, for starters, the broader public demanding that the hippies be repudiated and made pariahs while the right-wing crazies were embraced like brothers.;
That’s pretty much what it comes down to, like I’ve been saying, Doug. The entire discourse has distilled itself to be solely about hippie punching. If you don’t hate hippies and liberals enough, you obviously hate America. And it’s sadly become THE immutable point of politics in this country now.
Mark S.
Stalking ED Kain, however, is a plan!
Skippy-san
Because liberals in Congress are not necessarily likeable people. For instance The Democrats may be right-but having baggage like Pelosi in charge makes it hard to sway fence sitters (like me). Pelosi is a self re-inforcing narrative that is easy to hate.
Basically the party needs to find its own version of the Tea Party ( and Wisconsin may be providing the vehicle for this) and get some leadership that is less focused on social issues and get the party back to economic issues that the bedrock of the party was built on.
Doug Hill
@matoken_chan:
I’ve expressed my thoughts on this a million times, so much so that I think people get sick of hearing it. Liberals move forward by showing that we are the party of the middle-class, of the poor, of immigrants, of everyone who isn’t a white millionaire. We do this by standing up for unions, for health care for all, for fiscal responsibility by getting everyone to pay their share, for sane immigration reform.
EvolutionaryDesign
@WyldPirate: Do you have this shit on a loop or something? It’s fucking tiring.
stuckinred
@Marmot: Uh, that is total bullshit. Ever hear of the Days of Rage?
dr. bloor
@matoken_chan:
This blog is as good as any at getting people on the phone or to open their wallets when the balls are to the wall for one thing or another in congress.
Want policy and strategy? Take a look at the blogroll. My favorites are Kos and DeLong, although YMMV. In any case, there are plenty to choose from if you want to stop focusing on being a contrarian dipshit and start learning something.
matoken_chan
@Doug Hill:
All very well – but how do you do that when you don’t have a media platform? What’s the strategy that lets us stand up effectively for these causes? Wish lists of things to stand up for are very fine and good things – but without a means of implementing them, we end up right where we are now.
Midnight Marauder
@WyldPirate:
Considering that the problem described in the original post grossly predates the elections of both Obama and Bush, this is perhaps the most moronic screed you have posted so far.
This month.
Steaming Pile
40 years of people insisting there are two sides to every issue, when the truth indicates one sane point of view and one that is, charitably speaking, batshit crazy.
You don’t debate two year olds, cats, or asylum inmates. People need to get that into their thick heads.
matoken_chan
@dr. bloor:
So you don’t have a plan, beyond raising small change, yelling insults and citing the blog roll? Not very impressive.
Corner Stone
@recusancy:
I don’t think she should be leading the charge but two things: 1) she’s the kind of milquetoast non confrontational “liberal” they love to book, and 2) she really sells that “Team of Rivals” bi-partisanship BS to the hilt.
Marmot
@Doug Hill: I agree with all that, but would it be too much to ask Dems and “public intellectual” liberals to add to their talking points a willingness to say, “The conservatives are crazy — they believe our president is a Muslim from Kenya, that cutting federal spending will fix the economy, and that Iraq had WMDs. All of these things are perfectly false.”
Seriously. Why is saying that so difficult for them?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Alex S.:
Where are the old-school Communists who were ready, willing and able to put 9 grams of lead in the back of your head if you so much as looked at them funny?
Liberalism worked when it was a reasonable thinking man’s compromise between the violent nuts on the right and the violent nuts on the left.
stuckinred
@matoken_chan: poser!
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@Marmot:
One distinct problem there is that we have, generously, a bloc of Dems that make up about a third of our Congressmen that tend to agree with the latter two at the very least, and honest to god believe that the best way to win and be effective is to kick their party in the teeth at every turn.
Alison
@matoken_chan: Well, why don’t you lay out your fabulous, amazing, can’t-lose plan and we’ll all sign up for various tasks, like a potluck!
Midnight Marauder
@Skippy-san:
I have to disagree with this charge about Pelosi being baggage for the Democratic Party. The only reason that dynamic exists is because Republicans have spent years upon years demonizing the fuck out of Nancy Pelosi and making her seem like one of the most nefarious politicians to ever set foot on Capitol Hill; and conversely, there has been no substantiated or coordinated pushback from the Democratic Party to defend and maintain the name of one of the most effective Speakers of the House this nation has ever seen.
Pelosi is only a self-reinforcing narrative because Democrats have not done anything to rebut or dispute the narrative. People just accept it is some kind of commonly agreed upon fact, as opposed to a mutable variable that can be altered with enough of a concentrated effort.
Donald
I agree with a bunch of what’s been said–“liberal” as a dirty word for 30 years, worthless pseudo-liberal spokespeople on TV and in the press (who in God’s name ever designated Maureen Dowd or Thomas Friedman “liberal” columnists?), and yes, the idea that one defends a person (Obama) rather than a principle (don’t torture people). All of this has combined to make liberalism something of a joke.
matoken_chan
@stuckinred:
Hey, I’d be delighted if bloor had a plan, but, being brutally honest, yelling “troll” on the internet isn’t worth squat. Call me a poser if you like, but I’d really like to see some strategy from liberals, rather than a food fight followed by a self-righteous denunciation of whoever surrendered the flag this time.
Stillwater
Well, we’re soft, ya know?, on crime and terror and drugs. We’d rather reason things out than fight, which is a sign of weakness. So we’re also weak. Soft and weak. Like cuddly little animals. Which we’re also like. Just soft weak cuddly little animals.
Marmot
@stuckinred: Yes. Still too much lovey-dovey and not enough hate from ’60s liberals. Upsets the feeling of being “here, now” or something.
AAA Bonds
FOXNATION.COM FACT:
As of right now, the poll on Fox’s righter-than-Fox-News trial balloon site has 63% of respondents saying that union protests in Wisconsin will “spread to other states”, vs. “fade away” and “too soon to tell”.
They’re far more optimistic than we are.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
And again, we’ve gone from that to having Michael Moore and Al Gore on the left as the absolute most left-wing allowable (and usually only as a punching back) while we get James O’Keefe, Breitbart, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin as the decided mainstream of America.
The left wing nuts were successfully marginalized for the most part. The Right Wing nuts were made the new GOP.
Zifnab
Because there’s some idea that Michael Moore is supposed to be a risen saint. Only the most perfect, flawless, superman can wave the liberal banner. Nancy Pelosi is too old. Al Gore is too fat. Jon Stewart and Barack Obama are too accommodating. None of these people are perfect, so they all suck.
I get this from my roommates all the time.
Roommate: “I hate Hillary Clinton”
Me: “Why?”
Roommate: “I don’t know. She’s just a bitch.”
Me: “I’ve got a few problems with her, myself. But I appreciate most of her policy.”
Roommate: “I don’t know much about her policy. I just don’t like her.”
Me: “…”
Linda Featheringill
@matoken_chan:
My goodness, your writing is making sense today. Even your grammar is complete.
Are you m-c’s dad?
gizmo
Liberals repeatedly make the mistake of presuming that there is a certain amount of good faith in all people. For some reason, they are determined to believe that inside every Republican there is a baseline amount of decency and sanity, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary. Things have to get really bad before the Left takes the gloves off. Wisconsin and Michigan are relevant examples. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the people protesting in the streets in those states actually voted for the asshole Governors who are now trying to take their rights away.
El Cid
@Midnight Marauder: People are flat-out drugged if they think that any other successful Democratic Speaker would be any less hated by the right.
What she’s hated for is strongly and successfully backing actual decent programs. I.e., “liberal”, the moniker being given today for rational, sensible policies.
Just like “populist” is applied to economic policies which make sense, as opposed to being applied to a style of economic politics.
You can come up with any imaginable Democratic legislator, and if he or she stood boldly and continuously for just and reasonable policies (“liberal”), and did so successfully as speaker, his or her name would soon be spat out like venom as a divisive, unpopular, partisan leader.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@AAA Bonds:
Then again, I’m sure 75% of them all believe Obama wants to repeal the 2nd Amendment. It’s less optimism, and more fearmongering to rally the troops. I mean, I hope to god that the protests do continue, but yeah, the poll is probably of those terrified that the Unions exist at all.
Joel
We got here by selection. Mainly because there are very few people willing to stand up for their cause under the bright lights in the face of relentless bullying. There’s the other form of selection at play, too. Those who pass the first criteria are rarely afforded the opportunity to make their case publicly.
AAA Bonds
People who don’t “get” matoko-chan are either ashamed that they know how to read Internet or should learn quickly before it’s too late.
Doug Hill
@Zifnab:
I think Jon Stewart does “both sides do it” too much, I do. He ought to grow a pair while he can so he doesn’t end up like E. J. Dionne and Alan Colmes.
EvolutionaryDesign
@Zifnab: Spot on dude.
Midnight Marauder
@gizmo:
This really is a major problem for liberals in this country, and I find it astounding that so many people could still believe that their political opposition is acting in good faith, or has ever been acting in good faith.
Marmot
@gizmo: This. This-this.
Lev
There are a number of good reasons on here, but I think a large chunk of this is that there hasn’t much of a reward for being a confrontational, loudmouthed liberal in recent times. A lot of liberals are just fine with the Bobo/Charlie Rose sort of model: polite, “both sides” argumentation, quiet. The NPR model. And in politics, you find very few liberal partisan brawlers because people tend to get into Democratic politics through wonkery and the like. Frankly, I think we could use some Barney Franks a lot more, but there it is.
I think, incidentally, that this is changing. The Bush years brought us Olbermann and Maddow, for example, and generally Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I bet more people watch those guys every day than watch David Gregory presents: Three Men And David Brooks every week.
El Cid
I don’t remember a time in the last 20 years when you heard any but a few liberals be weak, retreating, mealy-mouthed in whatever forum you heard from them.
I think you could see and hear such things during Reagan’s slaughter of Central American and Southern African civilians, his backing of apartheid and its wars on its neighbors, and on the S&L collapse.
Maybe I’m mis-unrememberizing.
dr. bloor
@matoken_chan:
So basically you’re saying unless Superman starts a lefty blog and implements a plan to fly the right wing off Planet Zoomicron, it’s ineffectual?
Change is gradual, and it starts with things like raising money for causes and candidates, making sure people turn out for public events, and positing ways to fix things that are broken. Grow up.
AAA Bonds
@The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik:
Yes, you’ve found the point. Their greatest fear is a resistance that bigtime liberals have proven unwilling to support, much less provide.
Shoemaker-Levy 9
Because lefties who stand up for themselves don’t get hired in the first place.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
liberal view points are not going to connect with people who believe in limitless growth and in their own capacity to retire rich. the perceived prosperity of the last 30 years, and the effort to define it as normal, not just attainable, has made people ashamed to be poor, or espouse the politics of people who can’t or aren’t making it.
people, if they don’t believe they are, or will be rich, believe they should be rich, and are embarassed by the fact that they aren’t. thus they feel espousing, or even believing viewpoints that benefit the poor is like them outing themselves as lessers.
really, underlying that, is the inability for liberals to connect to the poor, especially or at least at the voter’s box. many liberal causes that pushed up the agenda aren’t at all the concern of the people who know they are poor, can vote and should vote liberal…
what the hell does someone in poverty care about the environment?
conservatives have grouped their economic base, their values base, their guns and freedom base, so they are easy to get at.
liberals have had a hard time getting the intellectual base, the social equality base, the economic equality bases all together to where they can be motivated.
EvolutionaryDesign
@El Cid: Put perfectly. Effective Liberals are targetsd and marginalized by the Oligarchy.
Corner Stone
@Midnight Marauder: She’s a divisive bitch!
Really? Why do you think that?
Because people are always yelling about how horrible she is!
So, you don’t like her because other people are saying she’s awful?
Well..umm…
Rinse, repeat and re-apply this template to any female Democratic leader.
justawriter
A college buddy of mine is now a winger radio host and he posted this on facebook the other day …
My mind boggled. At this rate the tea party will tarred as flaming pinkos by 2016.
El Cid
I find the notion that people will turn to a blog called Balloon-Juice to find arguments on how to organize for changing the political future of the country and so forth pretty amusing.
There are places I read such things, but it isn’t why I’d read stuff here.
eric
On bbery, so quickly. Because true liberals talk about class and wealth inequality and policies that would “take” money from the corporate bottom to even the playing field and the corporate media players can’t allow that to happen.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@justawriter:
Don’t worry.
We’ll all be rounded up and run over by pick-up trucks for Treason by then, don’t you know.
jwb
@Marmot: I imagine the second they say that on TV, they won’t be invited back on TV again.
AAA Bonds
@El Cid:
Correct. I have plenty of bones to pick with Nancy Pelosi, but she exists independently of reality as a character in the right-wing Passion play. It doesn’t matter who she is.
If you start reading this stuff, you remember the Clinton years, and how they thought of Hillary, Janet Reno, whoever. The Republicans only have one story about powerful Democratic women, really, and right now Pelosi gets to carry it.
jl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I tend to agree with G the F L.
Krugman may have implied as much when he wrote that his evolution as a NT Times economists was unexpected. Krugman wrote that the vision for his column was to be a semi wonky column in the Kristof vein, except focusing on economics.
Then the GOP started lying about the expected future surpluses and the effects of high end income tax cuts, and Krugman called those as he saw them rather than pulling his punches.
Then came Iraq, and then the GOP went completely insane.
I have wondered whether Krugman would ever have been offered the column if the NY Times had known what would happen.
It it was a ‘mistake’ of some kind on the NY Times’ part, then we can conclude that sometimes mistakes are very good things.
jwb
@Linda Featheringill: This doesn’t sound at all like the old m_c. Either it’s someone else, or she’s on serious meds.
pablo
Maybe NPR should have a job action? Meh.
MikeJ
@jl:
Were you even alive during the 90s?
Mnemosyne
Natural selection. Actual liberals have been carefully weeded out and replaced with “liberals” in an extensive media breeding program.
jl
@MikeJ: Sorry, I should have typed ‘more insane’.
Mwangangi
@Steaming Pile: @32 Co-sign.
Stillwater
@Corner Stone: Just like Tom Delay said: she’s uppity. How can you argue with that?
Midnight Marauder
@El Cid:
No doubt, this is accurate. But what I was referring to (and should have done a better job stipulating) is the amount of Democrats and “independents” that find Pelosi and her efforts to be so loathsome. We all know that the right is going to vehemently despise anyone who can carry the banner for liberalism in a way that results in real world policy victories and constructive endeavors to change the rhetorical bent of this country’s discourse. But I encounter a disturbingly high number of people who profess to be liberals or members of the Democratic Party that simply hate Pelosi not because they necessarily disagree with her on policies issues or the real world accomplishments she has under her belt, but because they find her to be “too divisive” for getting anything done. Regardless of the actual legislation she gets passed.
I don’t know what else to call it except an utterly debilitating self-inflicted wound continuously fired by liberals.
stuckinred
@jwb: POSER I say!
Mr Furious
This is the stupidest bullshit in the whole thread thusfar, and considering m_c is here, that’s saying something.
I want somebody to give me an example of Pelosi living (down) to her terrifying media-driven stereotype. She might be the most effective politician of the last generation considering the hurdles she has to overcome. The only thing self-reinforcing thing about her is the fact that she’s a woman.
Superluminar
You know, I think discussing strategy and all has some value and needs to be done, but I think the big problem is not with ourselves as liberals or even “liberals”, it’s with the wider population. Conservatives have had (and I think always will have) an advantage over us, in that most people’s reflexive response is to be suspicious of change/ extending rights to others. This is by no means limited to the US-the world over it is easier to appeal to the reactionary instinct in all of us, making the case for tolerence and equality is always the hard option. I’m honestly not sure what the answer is here, it’s pretty depressing. I might just go back to snarking…
sherifffruitfly
We got here by the long and hallowed practice of no white person – no matter how liberal – wanting to be seen as pro-brown folks.
That White Unity practice basically cinches the rest of the game.
Paula
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
You’ll probably repeat this again in 2 months’ time because many people apparently believe that the American public is secretly liberal. The polls said so!
Marmot
@Corner Stone:
Not to step on your point, but it’s a paint-by-numbers approach that’s not limited to female and Black Dems.
The conservatives have done this with every Dem politician and outspoken liberal in my conscious memory. Bill Clinton was on the wrong side of the culture war — and an oral sex recipient!; Gore was a serial fabricator; Kerry was French-looking and a traitor; Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya.
Why would anyone take Republicans seriously? They’re character assassins more than anything. But big-time liberals can’t bring themselves to say it out loud and in public.
mk3872
One of the most successful ventures of conservatives over the past 20 years has been to label the MSM as liberal.
This means that the MSM is afraid of the strong-willed liberal types because they might get yelled at by Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly.
So instead we get meet middle-of-the-roaders representing the “left” of America, meaning that the “middle” is actually center-right now.
Give the Kochs & cons credit, they worked this angle very hard over the past couple of decades and it is paying off.
Liberty60
Just getting ready to go to my MoveOn rally, but I as I reviewed the words that I am going to speak tonight, I had the same thought- “how did I get here?”
How did amiddle of the road republican in 1996 end up in 2011 leading chants that talk about the “oligarchy” and “moneyed interests” and loudly proclaim the need for the working class to defend ourselves against Wall Street?
Meanwhile the soft liberals that i used to jeer at are panicking and losing support both left and right.
What we are seeing I think is a sharpening, a polarization where the old yuppie liberals have long ago joined forces with the conservatives in all but the name, but meanwhile the blue collar conservatives have split to join either the populist left or populist right.
I don’t mourn for NPR, that bastion of yuppie statusville.
I do mourn for the waitress who cant afford her chemotherapy.
MikeJ
Shouldn’t this thread be merged with the Nixonland thread? 40 years of working the refs got us where we are.
We all know they work the refs, and yet we won’t do it. It really is difficult to get a sizable number of liberals to say things they know are false to advance a political agenda. It;s easy for Republicans.
stuckinred
@mk3872: It started with Murrow and then Cronkite. You’re about 50 years off.
Citizen_X
@Corner Stone: Case in point, this guy, just up the page.
Seriously, Skippy-san, WTF? “Baggage like Pelosi”??? “Pelosi is a self re-inforcing narrative that is easy to hate”??? Talk about swallowing the right-wing media memes hook, line, and sinker. She was a damned effective Speaker, without a bone of apology for it. She was exactly the opposite of what this whole thread has been about.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik
To illustrate a point, from Dave Weigel, via Steve Benen:
GOP still fear ACORN will steal elections..
In other words, the organization has been defunct for nearly half a year. And yet, it’s still the successful bogeyman of voter fraud to which the engine of disenfranchisement is running on.
And our stalwart Democrats, ever forceful….were all too fucking eager to help hammer in the stakes because they were piss scared of some poor brown folks filling out forms being used against them by the great Americans of the GOP.
In other words, a group that had been successfully demonized and destroyed, still terrifies the GOP enough that
sukabi
How the fuck did we get here?
follow the money….from the “news personalities” pockets ….. right back into big corp’s wallets ….. that’s how we got here.
adding, we get all the info big money wants us to have… which ain’t much, but just enough to keep us fighting among ourselves…
cleek
people in the US expect “conservatives” to be outspoken, cantankerous, pitchfork-waving assholes. liberals are supposed to be the accepting, accommodating, tolerant folk.
’twas ever thus (as long as i’ve been alive, anyway)
AAA Bonds
@dr. bloor:
You don’t know the half of it.
The earliest Superman stories had:
*Superman forcing a warmongering arms dealer into enlisting with the soldiers his shells were killing, in the war he provoked
*Superman masquerading as an English-poor immigrant worker to trap a wealthy mine-owner in his own unsafe mine until he promised to improve conditions
*Superman wrecking a whole factory of unsafe-at-any-speed autos following a series of deadly crashes
*Superman buying up a bunch of toxic assets sold by successful Wall Street crooks to pensioners, and using them to swindle the same crooks out of millions of dollars, which he donated to an inner-city project to rehabilitate criminal youth
Today’s left wishes they had the cojones displayed by the “male power fantasy” of the late 1930s, which involved bringing rich and powerful people to account. You ever wonder why cinema had so much Robin Hood in it back then?
Corner Stone
@Marmot: Agree with your larger point, but the “divisive bitch” is used primarily to influence nominal Democratic voters. People who should be rooting for Pelosi feel queasy about her due to these kinds of repeated demonization efforts.
We already know Republicans are going to hate her, sight unseen. It’s the people on “our” side that I have a problem with.
ETA, and I see Midnight Marauder already made this point.
***shakes fist***
jl
I agree with commenters above who say to not pay too much attention to what the GOP and their hack pundit factory says. Otherwise you will fall into the Big Sleep scenario:
Marlowe: You know what he’ll do when he comes back? Beat my teeth out, then kick me in the stomach for mumbling.
They operate with the Beria KGB rulebook: give me a man and I will give you a case.
No matter what you do, if you get anything accomplished, or even speak your mind you will be attacked for being something. Divisive, too rash, too timid, paleoliberal mouthing obsolete dogmas, radical murderous totalitarian revolutionary, something, anything.
Makes no difference whether it makes any sense at all, as long as the loud nonsense results in a tactical advantage for the battle of the day, they go with it.
Zifnab
@Doug Hill: True. But I still think he’s a valuable liberal voice. For instance, Stewart was out there pushing the 9/11 responder bill when almost no other media outlet would give it more than 5 minutes.
I mean, Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” movie actually ticked me off at the end, when he dropped the sappy “Why don’t you love children?” card on Charleton Heisten. But he does better investigative reporting and more timely documentary journalism any given day then all three cable news networks combined.
I’m not going to throw either of them out with the bathwater.
Brachiator
The plight of liberals reminds me of something I recently read about the Cavaliers, defenders of England’s Charles I, in the 1640s:
This is not to say that liberals are wrong about anything.
It is that we have been outmaneuvered by the conservatives. Bush and Cheney went to war in Iraq in part to show America that liberals were wrong about Vietnam. This did not turn out as planned militarily, but they brought millions of citizens around to the idea that fear, complaisance and bigotry was an essential aspect of patriotism.
And now, goaded by the Tea Party and the Libertarian fringe, the GOP is fighting hard to roll back every progressive program since FDR. And they are winning because they have the energy, the majority in the House and a substantial portion of frightened and angry voters behind them.
Liberals need to stop whining and navel gazing and learn how to win the war of ideas with the voters.
El Cid
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
A lot of them live in areas normally considered “the environment”. With rivers poisoned by waste. And groundwater. And breathing air fouled by shit-lagoons from animal processing or from incineration or giant waste dumps always sited near them. I’ve known quite a few very poor people who became hell-raisers about the issues affecting them, and at some point realizing that whether they liked it or not or wanted to associate with types of people they found or imagined unlikeable, they were now environmental activists.
Poor people care a great deal more about “the environment” than they’re given credit for, as long as you work on understanding how it is and in what terms they’re discussing. A hell of a lot of movements in South America formed around such issues of their being attacked by economic interests and their government backers via environmental destruction, and their outrage helped topple politicians and halt (for a while, at least) some particular form or area of plunder.
“Environmental justice” gained some cache for a while in this country as a way of describing struggles over damage to local and larger environments as they were sourced in racial and regional and economic warfare. The issue grew important enough that it was incorporated in various federal agencies as a thing to have meetings and sub-offices around and issue lots of reports. Like the EPA.
I don’t hear much about that anymore. It’s there, but I guess that since it’s much less a potential threat to businesses and their fawning worshipers who wish to run wild over the Earth than notions of delaying global warming (planetary heat budget increase), it’s not yet worth a bunch of right wing denunciations. ACORN! Black Eco-Terrorist Panther Muslims!
Reality is, though, that there are issues which must be attended even if they aren’t yet grasped or supported by those of us with few resources.
The poorest among us, though, and the much larger group of the lower earning working classes, would be less cynical about such issues as typically discussed if they weren’t being fucked over continuously by the political establishment and the economic system’s cruelties enabled by the aforesaid.
HBuellA
Who was the DNC chairman? We sure as hell knew who was the RNC chairman. You even had to dig to find out which Dems were running in the last election locally except for the governor. I never saw 1 ad for anyone on TV.
I am sure Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are nice people. Did they ever raise their voices at least once instead of speaking softly? I really miss Ted Kennedy’s voice when he wanted to drive a point home.
Leaders? WI showed us it took the common people to raise their voices and yet there hasn’t been any leader nationally or local to really show some passion for them. I exclude the 14 Dems from WI in my rant for they were alone just like the people on the street.
Stillwater
DougJ asks how we got here. Is it really that hard to understand? For the last thirty years (and longer than that really, it just took 15 years to coalesce) the right has increasingly presented itself as the standard bearer of American ideals; co-opted or intimidated the media into going along for the ride, a media which is in any event funded and owned by some of the wealthiest people in the country; normalized mockery as a form of political debate because they have no compelling ideas except that mockery can and will shape public opinion; retreated from reason in favor of gimmickry, lies, illegalities, corruption, procedural tricks, did I say lies already?, and force specifically to marginalize liberals and create wedges in the common-sense values people hold which they’re ashamed to admit they believe in.
Corner Stone
@The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik: They peed themselves to race to the front of the line to co-sponsor the bill to strip ACORN.
Like the line Obama used, “It’s like they take pride in being ignorant.” (summary)
It’s like our Democratic politicians don’t actually want to be re-elected.
Mr Furious
Any “liberal” who throws Pelosi under the bus is no liberal at all in my book. They’re the biggest part of a giant fucking problem.
cleek
@MikeJ:
“conservatives” are effective at working the ref because it’s apparently easy to get conservatives to work together. they’ll fall in line behind anyone who can name a threat to “Our way of life”. liberals would rather accuse each other of not being liberal enough than work together to get anything done.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@Corner Stone:
And now we get to relive it with NPR now too.
Fun, huh?
Suffern ACE
@The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik: The millions of members in the New Black Panther party will take up their organizational mantle.
PIGL
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: go diaf.
FlipYrWhig
Two things, not unrelated:
1. A philosophical notion that the attitude or mentality of being “liberal” is to be constructive, respectful, tolerant, and open to the possibility of being wrong. “Liberal” as in the sense of “liberal arts”: debate, deliberation, exchange, not shouting, not bullying, not belittling.
2. A political-class-wide hangover since 1968, where it’s both internalized and externalized that people who are not already liberals are horrified to see what Chris Matthews called “sweaty, yelling people.” Lots of people who came of age politically in that era have concluded that middle-of-the-road Americans turned against liberals and Democrats because they saw them as rude and violent, breaking down order. So anyone who wants to get through the media and consultant gauntlet has to eschew combativeness, because combativeness gives pundits flashbacks to the Days Of Rage.
BR
@Mr Furious:
Yup. Compare the likability of Obama and Biden to Bush and Cheney. Compare the likability of Clinton and Gore to Papa Bush and Quayle. There’s no contest.
sukabi
@Mr Furious: The only thing self-reinforcing thing about her is the fact that she’s a woman.
and that’s precisely what the main problem is… she’s highly effective, doesn’t take any shit, is able to break balls when needed, and she’s a woman…. if she was a man, all the talking heads that have helped in pushing the “power-hungry crazy bitch” line would have splooged all over themselves with cheers of “this is how a REAL MAN runs things.”
BR
@Corner Stone:
I hate to say it, but I think Frum was right in saying Dem politicians hate their base and GOPers are afraid of theirs.
cleek
@FlipYrWhig:
yep.
fear of being called a dirty bomb-throwing hippy keeps our liberals sedate, while giving “conservatives” the freedom to act as crazy as they want.
Nixon smiles from hell.
jl
IANAL, but do remember some lawyer and legal jokes.
If you have the facts, pound the facts, if you have the law, pound the law, if you don’t have either, pound the table.
The GOP and their reactionary allies are experts at pounding the table, and it has been, so far, in the financial interests of most of the corporate controlled media to allow them to do that constantly. In fact, the media likes table pounding because it fits in with their understanding of how to get ratings.
A lot of US opinion media shows are really reality shows with ugly old rich people. Maybe they were the first reality shows.
On the optimistic side, some liberals and progressives who are not distracted by the sure thing main chance of cash on table pounding reality shows, and playing whatever is scripted for them, are breaking into corporate media. Klein and Krugman come to mind. There is no organized well financed effort behind it, though. No match for the bogus opinion factory on the reactionary right. That is a problem.
AAA Bonds
@El Cid: Another interesting Fox Nation Fact: FoxNation.com is the only place I see Erin Brockovich mentioned regularly anymore.
Why do people have such a hard time with this? Karl Rove’s plan works for them, and it’ll work for us: attack their strengths.
Marmot
My comment! She is disappeared!
El Cid
@Midnight Marauder: Again, it would be the same with Democrats no matter who the Democratic politician was if it was someone who actually stuck to his or her guns and pushed through decent (“liberal” as they’re called) policies.
Sure, someone who did a lot less of that and a lot less intensely would enjoy more support, but then, they wouldn’t have had the strongest legislative session in the House since the New Deal. Or have passed anything that Republicans really opposed.
Maybe, maybe there would be some living embodiment of a folksy, Western or Southern country stereotype, who fought in 6 different wars with 800 medals for valor, and so on and so forth, who could pursue such a radical and divisive (i.e., successfully-backed sensible policies) an agenda as Pelosi.
But as to the Democrats I know who can’t stand Pelosi, I think it isn’t just how she looks (they hate how she looks) or how she talks (that too) or that she’s from San Francisco (frightening thunderclap).
Maybe if it were a male more appealing to average Democrat voters, it might help initially. After a while of pushing stuff through and blocking stuff like Pelosi, they too would suddenly transform into hated librul ayleet stereotypes.
BR
@AAA Bonds:
I agree in theory. But do you have some suggestions on what this might look like in practice?
Midnight Marauder
@HBuellA:
This is absurd. Let’s look at one of the most memorable quotes Pelosi had during the battle over the Affordable Care Act:
Was that not loud enough for you? Were you not paying attention as closely as you thought? For fuck’s sake, this is why our side keeps losing. It’s filled with a bunch of know-nothing clowns complaining about things that have already happened, but that exist outside of their awareness and desire to inform themselves to prevent bitching out of ignorance.
AAA Bonds
@sukabi:
The only reason that the take-no-shit angle even exists on Pelosi is because she’s a woman – it’s not a question of any actual qualities Pelosi has, whether she takes shit or doesn’t or whatever. There’s only one Republican narrative on women.
If a guy were in charge of the House Democrats, you wouldn’t hear anything but about how gutless and effeminate he is. It wouldn’t matter how he behaves either.
hilts
Chris Hedges provides an interesting analysis
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_creed_of_objectivity_killed_the_news_business_20100131
sukabi
@AAA Bonds: I know that, it was my point.
MikeJ
@cleek: LIberals want to show that they’ve really thought the problem through and come to their point of view honestly. The easiest way is to disagree with somebody on your side.
Republicans (I won’t call them conservatives) revere Reagan and his 11th commandment.
(BTW, I didn’t leave your site in a snit or anything. My internet activity was sharply curtailed by time zones and stupid people making me do things for them in exchange tokens that can be used for goods and services. I want more Tune Nameage.)
El Cid
@cleek: I think that when it comes to politicians and party institutions and other elite Democratic persons and groups, when it comes to economic and basic governance models, it’s more of a fear of too strongly opposing the class war against the population by the super-rich launched most intensely in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Economically sane policies aimed to aid the majority of the population and to fiercely oppose their exploitation (“ultra-liberal”) are directly contrary to the interests of the super-rich persons and corporations who hold such a ridiculous amount of power at every level of the political system, even more extremely now.
To pursue strongly Democratic policies is to oppose the nation’s rich elites. To pursue them weakly is always opposed but if moderated enough, it can happen.
Even then, they’re not going to give up. Ever.
They want every fucking penny, they want it now, and they want you and me to suffer any consequences and pay for any cost. And we will.
Stillwater
@BR: I hate to say it, but I think Frum was right in saying Dem politicians hate their base and GOPers are afraid of theirs.
I disagree. I think this is one hundred percent right wing framing. GOPers have historically had to point blank lie to their constituency (that’s changed just a little with Teabaggers getting elected), so – in my view – they look on their base with a loathing and condescension that only the duper can look on the dupee. I think thay hate em.
Dems, on the other hand, live in fear that their corporate-loving power-adoring giveaways will be exposed. They don’t hate their base, cuz they actually share many of the same values. But when your ambitious, duty calls.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
The technical term for the cause is “balloonbaggerism.”
.
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justawriter
@AAA Bonds: Don’t forget the Superman radio show where the writers worked with Stetson Kennedy in the 1940s to undermine the Klan by revealing embarrassing details of their Sekrit Seremonies.
Turgidson
@Midnight Marauder:
Yup. Pelosi is one of the ultimate victims of the “if you say it enough times, it becomes true” strategy. She’s tough and apparently didn’t get the memo that she belongs at home baking apple pies…? Is that why she’s hated?
I’ve asked numerous people, some righties, some non-political types, some Democrats even, why they don’t like Pelosi (usually after some unprompted negative remark about her), and I have yet to get a coherent answer with any examples of her bad acts. Which makes me think they’ve just been told to hate her so many times that it just must be true. Consider – I live in San Francisco, so even among the rightards I’ve discussed this with, that wasn’t, alone, evidence of her evilness the way it would be with people elsewhere who think everyone here is a godless commie.
She’s a successful liberal legislator with the audacity to both be from San Francisco and have a vagina. And that’s all the evidence Republicans need to paint her as demon spawn. Can’t stand this country sometimes.
different church-lady
{drums fingers}
OK, I’m looking at Doris Kerns Goodwin and I’m looking at Jane Hamsher, and I’m thinking, “Is there really nothing in between these two extremes?”
AAA Bonds
@BR:
Yes, I know what it might look like.
Thousands, if not millions, of liberals reading Fox Nation and Fox News everyday, understanding how far-right trial balloons are floated, selected, and modified for center-right audiences, and then going on attack like Rove does when he’s NOT on camera – through preemptive shaping of the narrative, while those promising trial balloons are still low to the ground and easy to shoot down.
You have to steep yourself in right-wing media to do this, from Townhall.com to CNBC. You have to develop a twisted sense of admiration for the strengths of conservative positions, and hit them where they don’t think they can be hurt. I’m trying my best.
Notable people employing this tactic include Matt Taibbi, who mingles with the right-wing masses every chance he gets, and Dave Sirota. Mark Ames is probably the Ur-model, although I doubt he’d stand for me calling him a Republican-hunting left-winger.
What’s important about all those folks is that they bother to pay attention to right-wing media, write nasty things about people with unbound egos, and scoff at allegiance to the Democratic political elite when it goes against common sense.
Krugman is likely the most famous offensive player our side has today, but Taibbi is the most powerful – because nowadays even the financial press admits that oil prices right now have far more to do with unregulated speculators than with any actual disruption in the chain.
The documentary Inside Job was showing at theaters in Raleigh as of the end of February, but not in the heads of any powerful Democrats as far as I could tell. People need to learn that it works: attack their strengths.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
@Midnight Marauder:
.
.
Well said. President Obama has not acted in good faith.
.
.
Chuck Butcher
Lemme see, in a place like this – liberal – I find it neccesary to label myself as left and am regarded as such rather than an enthusiastic liberal. And yes, I’d not accept the label liberal as today defined.
The Truffle
@Midnight Marauder: Which liberals are you talking about? Rachel Maddow? Amy Goodman? Kos? Quit repeating the old “liberals = wimps” canard.
jwb
@jl: Yes, because all the loud mouthing proves that the target is divisive. And the fact that we hear the loud mouthing from all channels means that those who have neither the capacity nor the inclination to pay close attention will think that there must be something to the charges because how else could all the channels agree that the target is divisive?
Cermet
Simple Doug, most liberals (and as I found out here) are too much cowards themselves to get behind people who are forceful and fight the vested interest and liars with a strong voice – hearing these strong voiced liberals makes them feel inferior and rather than addressing their own ignorance, they then join these lackys of the rich and help fight against their own interest. The few liberals that endure this realize, sooner or later, that the battle is lost before the war is over – liberals need a backbone and must realize that ignorance is their enemy and that the wealthy will use that too, against them.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@stuckinred: Yeah. “matoken-chan.” Not the same person at all. Hell, I knew that from the post when I read it and said “Uh … what?” and then realized that it’s a spoof name. Kind of a funny one, but one that’ll be confusing as hell when the real thing comes back around. You know what they say, say her name three times …
AAA Bonds
@sukabi:
Sorry, but no, it wasn’t.
You said that if a man was in her place, the media would have “splooged all over themselves” at how tough he was acting.
I said, in turn, that this wasn’t true, that if it were a man in her place, they’d have the storyline from the Republicans that he was a big wussy pushover.
The larger point is that the narrative doesn’t depend on how ‘tough’ someone is.
Whether or not Pelosi is ‘tough’ is a matter for debate, specifically, for debate by people that I don’t want coming to my party.
But the Pelosi Story doesn’t have anything to do with that. You’re right insofar as it depends on her being female, though.
hilts
@different church-lady:
Amy Goodman, Laura Flanders, and Katrina vanden Heuvel are all smarter alternatives to Jane Hamsher and they don’t have her irritating personality.
jwb
@cleek: I think it helps that they own most of the media as well. Easy to get the refs to call it your way, when you are paying them.
liberal
@Skippy-san:
God, what a blithering idiot you are. While I don’t carry water for Nancy Pelosi, how is she any worse than most politicians?
Furthermore, anyone who’s a fence sitter these days needs to get their goddamn head examined. It’s fine to think that the Dems are lacking trait X, that Obama isn’t Y, and so on, but the Republicans are pure, unadulterated, evil, no good shits. And if you’re a fence sitter, you’re part of the problem.
BR
@Stillwater:
Maybe that was true at one time, but in the last decade many if not most GOPers in congress are dumb as bricks and actually believe the same nonsense their base does. If anything, it’s a few meme-makers in the GOP that are lying to them all.
liberal
@jwb:
This is something that drives me crazy about those morans who push that study from a decade or two ago that shows “most journalists are Democrats/liberals/whatever.” As if the controlling opinion isn’t that of the owners.
jwb
@AAA Bonds: Yes, the charges would be different, but a male Pelosi’s position and with her abilities would be demonized just the same.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@El Cid:
i’m not saying they shouldn’t care, just that the issues seem absurd, when dealing with more practical matters like the lack of a grocery store in the area, or getting the emts to come without a police escort.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
@Midnight Marauder:
.
.
Yes, let’s – “Impeachment is off the table.”
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stuckinred
@Evolved Deep Southerner: tigers comin up
Stillwater
@cleek: liberals would rather accuse each other of not being liberal enough than work together to get anything done.
Cmon, bro. All these infighting spastic liberals sure got alot done the first two years of Bog-O’s term. Not everything we’d like, and a continuation of some stuff we’d rather see changed. But somehow there’s a continuity that runs through all the discord.
hilts
@The Truffle:
Rachel Maddow is capable of doing a credible job but she relies far too much on comedy to make her points. I’ll take Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now any day of the week over The Rachel Maddow Show.
Stillwater
@BR: Not true. They ran on a platform they instantly rejected once in office.
HBuellA
@Midnight Marauder:
FYI I pay a lot of attention. I know Nancy Pelosi did a lot of what some thought was highly impossible and I cheered her on. What I was referring to had nothing whatsoever to do with her accomplishments as a Speaker. Being out front and being vocal is meaningful in so many ways.
Again FYI we cannot rest on what is in the past,ignore the present and succumb in the future.
note: Name calling your own is why we keep on losing as well.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Midnight Marauder: .
I’d go you one better than that: Pelosi’s troubles started with Steny Hoyer and god knows who else. Simple ambition– he thinks she stole his rightful place– plus I strongly subject a healthy dose of misogyny, though I don’t have any evidence for that. Throw in actual right-wing Democrats– Ike Skelton, Heath Schuler–a couple others who’s names escape me, and wind-sniffing cowards who want to pose as reasonable by distancing themselves from the “San Francisco Liberal” and it’s a wonder she got anything done at all.
Then of course there were the firebaggers (though they weren’t called that then) who wanted to dump her back in ’07 when she spoke the inconvenient truth that impeachment was off the table for Bush et al
stuckinred
@hilts: whoop tee fucking doo
Stillwater
@Stillwater: Except for repealing the ACA. I’ll give’em credit for a Stuck-like obsession with proving a trivial point on this score. But it won’t fly, since they have no alternative.
AAA Bonds
@jwb:
Oh, that’s where all of us agree, I think.
I am just grossed out by any myth about the ‘toughness’ of a politician at that level, in this day and age, whether it’s positive or negative. That sort of foggy impression immediately makes me doubt anything the writer has to say.
Note that the Republicans don’t swoon regularly over McConnell and Boehner. I think most Democrats have their heads on straight about Reid: he’s rich and powerful, and we’re not, so we have to take him to the woodshed sometimes.
Mike in NC
@AAA Bonds:
Movies like “The Grapes of Wrath” couldn’t even get made today.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@stuckinred: T’ell widdim. I don’t watch roundball – I admire the skill of those athletes, sure, as I admire any kind of skilled athlete, because I’m not one. But worse than that – and it’s terrible to say of a place that keeps a roof over your head – I just can’t get enthusiastic about Clemson athletics in any way, not even football. The only times I’ve been emotional about a Clemson vs. Any Team Other Than Georgia contest was a couple or four years ago when Clemson played Tennessee in some shit bowl. It was the year the Vols players talked shit about wishing they had higher quality competition, were disappointed in the bowl they ended up. Clemson dismantled their asses and, yes, I was whooping and hollering at the television that night. But that was my hatred of Tennessee, not a love of the place I go every single morning to work. And I feel bad about that.
Yo, bro. If you want to keep talking, step over to the open thread when you get a chance. Don’t want to disrupt the liberal soul searching.
Shoemaker-Levy 9
@Turgidson:
Pelosi is arguably the most effective politician of recent times. If you look at all the announced policy priorities of Dem leadership, how many has she failed to pass? All while having a self-identified conservative caucus within her own caucus? Hard-core conservatives of course have a coherent reason to dislike her, but I’d wager a large sum of money that if you asked all the others who don’t like her to articulate the reasons why they either wouldn’t be able to or would offer a bunch of vague stupidity in response.
Marc McKenzie
@matoken_chan:
Took the words right out of my mouth, Matoken.
BR
@hilts:
Sorry, Amy Goodman might have good content, but her style is of another era.
If he wasn’t a centrist economist, I’d say that Austen Goolsbee is my favorite Dem counterpuncher / go-on-the-offense guy.
stuckinred
@Evolved Deep Southerner: i’m there
MikeJ
@BR:
I remember the last time I listened to her. It was when she called Clinton a war criminal for keeping the no-fly zone over Iraq in the early 90s.
hilts
@stuckinred:
@BR:
A single broadcast of Democracy Now contains far more useful information than a single broadcast of The Rachel Maddow Show. Enjoy your bread and circuses and give my regards to the Rachel Maddow Show players.
AAA Bonds
@Mike in NC:
Exactly. And if the next Superman movie script had Our Hero posing as a Mexican mine-worker to bring down an ersatz Don Blankenship, would it ever see the light of day? Yet, in the 1930s, those comics sold millions of copies.
This is the narrative we need back, and honestly, with films like Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action, I thought we were about to do it. That was ten years ago or so.
Nick
@BR:
GOP actually HAS a base, while the Dems just have a series of conflicting single issue groups each fighting over the title of “base”
cleek
@MikeJ:
i have one planned.
CT
@MikeJ:
Bingo. Part of the self ID of many liberals ( including myself) is the idea that we’ve all independently reasoned ourselves into liberal political positions. As you said, disagreeing with other liberals is a good way to prove one’s intellectual independence. Also, I think we share a distrust of emotional appeals to voters, seemingly prefering to focus on policy issues. During the primary campaign, with all the discussion of differences on the health care plans between Obama and Clinton, I thought, “there’s no way this discussion could ever take place in a GOP primary-they just don’t care about that stuff. Put it this way-only in the GOP would an airhead like Gingrich be considered an intellectual, and only in the Dem party would being boring ( a la Gore) be almost a plus.
terraformer
Because the oligarchs have successfully changed the discussion to be one in which we are re-litigating (in legal terms) settled law.
Any time we’re having to defend and educate about why a stance of, say, tax cuts for the rich, does not lead to prosperity for anyone but the rich is time spent not discussing how the banksters and their political puppets fucked us all over.
Any time we’re having to seriously discuss the whether the background of this website is white (as liberals say) or black (as conservatives say), instead of the objective fact that it is white, is time not spent on rational discourse.
Nick
@Marmot:
Actually a lot of them, including Obama himself, have said this exact thing
hilts
@Stillwater: @BR: @Nick:
When did Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush or their senior spokesmen ever express the kind of jaw-dropping contempt for their core supporters that Obama and his spokesmen have expressed towards their own base?
Elia
Has anyone mentioned something like the fact that a lot of these high profile liberals are wealthy and travel in wealthy circles and likely get unconsciously influenced by that fact?
Nick
@HBuellA:
Most of the so-called “Obots” have been telling you that since Day One.
The “common people” did not want any leader nationally to show some real passion for them…because that personality would suck up all the attention from the “common people.”
Sly
Liberalism, for better or worse, has always privileged rational thinking as the guiding faculty of human behavior. But a common failing of reasonable people is that they think everyone else is just as reasonable. They aren’t. In the case of Krugman specifically, a lot of his scholarship deals with how the model of rational expectations is, to be not as diplomatic as he would, a lot of bullshit.
You could make all the arguments in the world to, say, a conservative businessman why national health insurance and a robust union system would be beneficial to his economic security. And you’d be right. But you’d also be missing the point. National health insurance and a robust union system takes controlling the costs of labor out of his hands. He gains economic security, but that security is beyond his immediate control and he can no longer take personal credit for it.
In other words, your arguments appeal to his wallet, not his ego. And if you hang around businessmen long enough, you’ll soon find out that the latter is much more important to him.
The other failing, specific to political liberals, is that they actually think they’re being reasonable to begin with. The modern left in particular has embraced a full-scale mythology pertaining to the “Golden Age” of the New Deal (or, more recently, and more laughably, the Johnson Administration). There is no interest in learning about the processes through which the related policies were enacted, especially in terms of how they were all negotiated, nor is there any interest in a critical examination of the ways in which these periods impacted American political culture for the worse.
Alex S.:
They allowed themselves to become “special interest groups” by narrowly focusing in on a set of specific issues that did not have an easily demonstrative impact beyond their own constituencies. Can’t really blame them for that, though. Conservatives played a large role in that process as well.
They became perceptually fragmented, while opposing interests became perceptually united. This is one of the main hallmarks of the post New Deal era: business interests went from fragmented to consolidated, while popular interests went from consolidated to fragmented.
AAA Bonds
@Elia:
Every chance I get?
People need to remember:
1) Democratic leaders are rich and powerful. They are part of a political and economic elite.
2) Most of us are not rich and powerful and never will be. We are not part of a political and economic elite.
3) Often our interests are against the consensus of the elite, so we have to force them to comply as best we can. Often, our leaders will be our foes.
For all the chatter about how Republicans can’t look after their own interests and confuse their needs with the desires of the wealthy . . . they understand all of this about their own politicians. Their talking heads, that’s another story, but then again, Democrats suck at grasping that one too.
Elia
@Sly:
I’m not following you here but I’m interested. Are you talking about Civil Rights back-lash etc?
Suck It Up!
What’s wrong with Liberals? Could be they believe that all of their problems are always caused and perpetuated by some outside party? these types of threads always turn into how the Dems in congress and the establishment have screwed up. Yep, nothing wrong with liberals whatsoever. the poor things.
Viva BrisVegas
Why are media liberals so mealy mouthed compared to conservatives?
That’s easy, the Democratic Party is still operating as an 18th Century political coalition, while the Republicans have discovered 20th Century political party discipline.
In media, consistency generates the dominant meme. The Republicans have been consistent, if crazy, for 30 years. By contrast the Democrats have been as consistent as a troop of chipmunks on speed.
Look at how policy is delivered in the rest of the civilised world. If a political party decides on a policy, everybody in the party gets behind that policy or else gets out of the way. That is how the Republicans are operating now.
So just what is the Democratic Party policy platform? What are the policies media liberals are supposed to be arguing for? The Republican platform is pretty obvious, social control of the poor and economic freedom for the rich, and everybody in the party is onboard for that. Even the ex-maverick.
Not so the Democratic Party. Sure the media has inbuilt biases towards Conservatism, but there is no coherent liberal policy to present, only competing liberal policies. This ensures that the liberal message is diluted even before it gets to the talking head stage.
This is an institutional problem. The Democratic Party is a broad church in which everybody shouts different things at the same time. The Republican Party has dogma which it can and does present at every opportunity with a single voice.
As a result the Democratic Party doesn’t even have a message for media liberals to present. In fact the Democratic Party isn’t even liberal.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Evolved Deep Southerner: I found the spoof name quite clever, especially given how lucid the posts are. As for the spoofed, personally, I’d rather conjure SPandT instead. Anyone care to join me?
Suck It Up!
People Power!!! the protesters in WI and all those other states are doing fine. I love the fact that they aren’t all being led by some national leader or high profile politician. I suspect that that is why there is so much support for them. We have to stop waiting for someone to move us because the GOP will just roll over this country.
AAA Bonds
@Suck It Up!:
^ I’d admire this post if it wasn’t laughably inaccurate about the actual thread he’s trolling.
You gotta put a little more honey in the vinegar, even here in Squaresville
Mnemosyne
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
When your kid is constantly in and out of the ER because the air pollution in your neighborhood keeps causing severe asthma attacks, you care about the environment, and you consider it to be a very serious and immediate problem.
But people don’t necessarily identify it as an “environmental” problem, because the majority of the environmental movement these days focuses on blocking more development in suburbs and exurbs rather than cleaning up toxic sites in urban areas. And it’s not like the Bush EPA was doing to do jack shit to help.
AAA Bonds
In other words I don’t know if there’s a blog where liberals engage in more public self-mutilation than this blog right here, Balloon Juice, this one.
Steeplejack
@Skippy-san:
WTF?! So the conservatives are winning because they have “likable” people like John Boehner and Mitch Daniels in charge? What are you smoking? And Nancy Pelosi is “easy to hate”? To me she seems like one of the sanest, most “normal” ones of the bunch.
Steeplejack
@Midnight Marauder:
What you said.
Suck It Up!
@hilts:
Online liberals or the Professional Left and their followers are NOT Obama’s core supporters. NEVER have been. NEVER will be no matter what he dos. THAT is also another major problem with todays “Liberals” – self-centered as hell. Obama’s core supporters range from near socialists to what some of you call DINO’s. Your numbers and importance are way smaller than you’d like to admit. Check Obama’s poll numbers within the Dem party. Check what happened to Obama’s numbers after the tax deal while Keith was declaring that Obama just lost his base.
hilts
@Skippy-san:
How likable are John McCain, Michele Bachmann, Paul Broun, Jim DeMint, Steve King, and Allen West?
justawriter
This discussion reminds me why being a librul is so taxing for me. We can’t even agree that having any liberals in the media is a good thing because Amy G is boring and Rachel M is flighty and Big Eddie is too mean and Michael Moore is fat and Jon S is a wimp and on and on and on and on. On a larger scale, this infighting between liberals, progressives, lefties, whatever we’re calling ourselves this week is one of the reasons the Bayhs and Liebermans are able to snatch the leadership of Democratic Party away from people who actually support our agenda, or at least those parts of the agenda we aren’t slagging each other about.
Sly
@Elia:
It’s the same for every topic. If you want to talk about it in terms of Civil Rights legislation, a good start would be investigating what members of the Civil Rights movement wanted in terms of Federal policy, how those wants translated into the legislative and judicial processes, and whether or not the result of that process tells you if they got everything they wanted.
Hint: They didn’t.
Or you can investigate the extent to which social movement leaders like MLK were beloved by the masses. Hint: They weren’t. MLK in particular, while he was alive, was an object of revilement, and not just from white people. But if you believe in liberal mythology, then you probably believe that every Democrat over the age of 65 marched with Martin Luther King.
Same with the New Deal. You’ll hear a lot of modern liberals point to the New Deal as the pristine example of liberal ideology put into practice. But the process of creating the New Deal was not ideological driven; it was driven by the pragmatic sensibilities of the legislators and administration officials (at the state and national level) involved in its construction, as well as the myopia of a largely fragmented business class. It was, in essence, implemented in an ad hoc fashion.
The problem with modern liberalism, I contend, is that it has become mired in too much mythology. Liberals sit around telling stories about the glory days of when liberals stood strong on principle without realizing that every major and lasting policy change in American history, liberal or conservative, was negotiated. Democracy: Feature, not a bug.
Furthermore, I will make a bet that, in fifty years, if that trend continues, the left will absolutely worship Barack Obama just as the modern left worships FDR. Much more than any of the sub-moronic “Obot” caricatures that fly around today.
Elia
@Sly: Oh you’re making the historical argument. I thought you were critiquing the way Dems use the democratic processes or something…Anyway, I agree with you.
But I’m so sick of this silly dichotomy over and over where you either think Obama is brilliant and tragically hampered by the evil Professional Left; or an abject disaster who isn’t even liberal to begin with.
priscianus jr
How did we get here? At one time the Democratic Party was something like a labor party. Then it got very complacent. And the unions themselves got very complacent. That was very obvious during the 1960s, when the labor movement supported the Vietnam War. It wasn’t until the fall of Lane Kirkland in 1995 that the labor movement could start to get its act together. But by that time it had become seriously weakened. Starting with Wisconsin, I think the unions will be an important and positive force in this country.
Midnight Marauder
@The Truffle:
The vast majority of liberals in this country, both famous and not famous. There is no need for specification; the type of person we are discussing is innumerate.
And if you think my argument can be boiled down to “liberals=wimps”, I would encourage you to go back and give it another, stronger read.
Midnight Marauder
@HBuellA:
I am rather sure that Republicans have used name calling to great success on their side. The term “RINO” and the phrase “What are you, some kind of gay?” come to mind right now.
We are not losing because we keep calling each other names. We are losing because we are not working smart enough.
Nick
@hilts:
When you’re a ignorant hateful spiteful bigot, which half the country is, very likable.
Sly
@Elia:
For what it’s worth, I think Obama is an eminently reasonable and pragmatic person, who believes others can be as eminently reasonable and pragmatic as he is. As such, those amenable to convincing argument will likely provide him with some measure of support. Those stuck in mythology, whether that mythology is of the right or left, will not.
As for the “11th Dimensional Chess” argument, I’ll only say that this is a game elected officials must play. to get things done. Everything is a negotiation, even a political campaign where all you’re doing is castigating you’re opponents, because that is how political opponents speak to one another, not just their supporters and detractors.
“You know that policy you want to enact? Look at all the people I have in my corner who are opposed to it. You better come back to the table if you don’t want this to get messy.” This is the part of political negotiation that “reasonable people” sometimes miss. The administration tends to miss it, and I attribute it more to Obama’s lack of comfort with demagoguery than anything else. And I don’t exactly fault him for that, either. Demagoguery, while a necessary part of politics, can be very a dangerous thing when those who employ it do so to the exclusion of everything else.
sukabi
@AAA Bonds: I was thinking in particular about how Tweety and a bunch of others like him keep longing for a “real man” to lead… this was on full display during the first 2/3’s of Bush’s terms…. when they start yammering on about what “qualities” this or that presidential candidate possesses it’s all about the “macho”… they’re still doing it now… and they’d do it in a heartbeat again if one of the R’s in the house or senate started to make any kind of sense and presented a “tough guy” image… although, if it were a Dem, they’d focus on how he didn’t know “what real American’s like”…. so I’d say there’s definitely a bias toward faux Republican “tough men”.
4jkb4ia
@MikeJ:
I was going to bring up Nixonland too, but it was more than working the refs there. It was appealing to the media’s sense of themselves as a class and as having immense power. If your media outlet thinks of itself as practicing professional journalism it will not allow Andrew Breitbart and Erick Erickson anywhere near it. But if it thinks of itself as representatives of a class which would like to put on the Charlie Rose show every day but the mass audience won’t allow it, then Breitbart and Erickson can get on because they have a mass following out in Blogtopia. We can see that Jane and Markos could get on TV (Markos was even on Charlie Rose when “Crashing the Gate” came out) because they can pass themselves off as a phenomenon with a loyal following, too.
Bob Herbert, DougJ. He’s got the same platform as Krugman and he is far from a mealy-mouthed fink. He just doesn’t have a Nobel.
Bill Arnold
@Skippy-san:
I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about. The stuff I’ve heard second hand is simply weird, like complaints that the third in line for the presidency after the VP (and this is post 9/11, with enhanced security concerns) used a jumbo military aircraft (not true) to fly to her home district on a regular basis. (Snopes has the rundown on the various chain emails.)
bottyguy
Paul Krugman is not part of the media establishment, his media gigs are not his career, they are a sideline, a hobby. He has a fine career as an economics professor in which he has done very well. Because of this he isn’t worried about loosing his side gig because he hurts the feelings of some supposedly powerful politician.
4jkb4ia
In the comment I made at EW’s that for all I know was um, circulated around here, I mentioned that the NYT has two hats. They are the Western press who is responsible for exposing human rights abuses so that the dictators performing them cannot take comfort from their silence. But they are also responsible for representing American national security interests, and that can frighten them. And much of the establishment media is of course much worse and does not dare to report or editorialize even as strongly as the NYT does. Their third hat, which they have had as long as I have read them (about 1996 on), is to represent respectability and conformity for their upscale class of readers. They are the thing that the people with more passion and fire and innovation react against–the ground media. So you won’t get passion and fire and innovation from the left or the right in an environment like that, or as someone said above you won’t hire someone to get those things. You will be more likely to get it from the right because someone like Safire or Douthat is the tame animal in the left-biased zoo.
/in the spirit of the parenthesis to that comment, I will never have a beer with John. I will never pass myself off as a real friend to him. “Ruling passion” was a dumb, dumb choice of words. I have lived too long. I am really crying inside.
4jkb4ia
Well, left-of-center-biased zoo anyway.
4jkb4ia
@200:
Robertson Davies noticed this kind of thing in The Lyre of Orpheus, which is 1988 (so Frank Rich has this role at the Times), where he has the throwaway line about the New York theater critic with the enormous power to ruin musicals who has come to review the opera because he’s at Stratford anyway. His position gives him the power to shape what thousands of New York readers think of Arthur of Britain whether he understands it or not, or whether he can tell that Schnak is a Doctor of Music.
(And edit worked! What is the world coming to?)
Scott de B.
It’s interesting hou much progressive complaining about weak, sell-out Democrats resembles conservative complaining about weak, sell-out Republicans in the 1950s and 60s.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
“mealy mouthed fink” – best use of the word fink ever.
And yes: Excellent question. No answers from me. Just a lot of simmering anger.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
Also: I just read that Fallows piece and kind of loved it.
Turgidson
@Shoemaker-Levy 9:
Well yes – on policy grounds. Those people are wrong of course, but yes, they have an acceptable reason to oppose her. But the bedrock of Pelosi hate wasn’t really about policy until she became Obama’s unflinching ally in sockulism, tyranny, sharia law, and whatever else. It was just about her.
Were they imputing their Hillary Clinton hate onto her? I mean, I just can’t think of anything she actually did to deserve the hate she’s had to deal with since she became prominent in leadership. Pelosi being a bitch, or whatever she’s most often accused of being, just became something people accepted.
Skippy-San
You guys can yell all you want- but the true believers are not the ones you need to convince. It people in the middle you have to sell- and in that regard Pelosi is turnoff. Especially when she does abusive things like misuse military airplanes etc.
The Republican narrative maybe bad but don’t kid yourself the tax thing strikes a cord with many people. Since people are not paying attention to the wars ( and don’t underestimate the effect of people who were against the war in 2008). Unfortunately there will not be a Sarah Palin on the ballot in 2012.
Nutella
It’s like the vast majority who insist they’re not feminists and when I ask them why exactly they’re against equal rights for women they get all upset because of course they’re for equal rights!
What the hell does the word mean then? Being a feminist or a liberal doesn’t mean you have to agree with all the other feminists or liberals about every tactic and every individual goal, but if you’re not willing to call yourself a feminist or a liberal then you are identifying yourself as against their overall positions.
Why people have to call a spade an entrenching instrument rather than just an damn spade, I don’t know.
Nutella
@Turgidson:
Pelosi’s a powerful woman. HRC is a powerful woman. Women with power are hated.
SATSQ
Cain
Y’all need to just turn off your tv.. if every liberal does that.. we’ll get somewhere. Media blackout.
FlipYrWhig
@Skippy-San: Give me a damn break. The only reason to find anything objectionable about Nancy Pelosi is her actual political views. She is in no conceivable way irritating, obnoxious, or anything of the kind. If she were something other than a Democratic politician, and Joe Schmoe met her, he would find her perfectly pleasant.
Barney Frank is rumpled and talks funny. Anthony Weiner has a skinny neck and a big mouth. There are things about them _as people_ that might rub people the wrong way. What is there about Nancy Pelosi that qualifies?
Scott de B.
It’s difficult when so-called liberals spread Fox News lies such as the story that Pelosi “misused” military aircraft. There is not a shred of truth to that claim.
eemom
@FlipYrWhig:
I haven’t read this thread, so someone might have pointed it out already; but just in case they haven’t, don’t waste your time arguing with “skippy-san” about Nancy Pelosi. He’s a misogynist to the “sick fuck” level. Just click his handle, check out his blog, and you’ll see what I mean.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@Mnemosyne:
the point is, one of the problems liberals have, is we don’t embrace the groups that would embrace us. if we want turnout, we get to work on the problems that matter to the people we want to turn out.
i don’t disagree with the environmental agenda, or that it can benefit everyone, what i am saying is, if we want a stong, almost gop like fanatical turnout, every election, we have to go do the things the people we are looking to turn out, prioritize, not convince them that the issues we present are the ones they should care about.
guns, god, and flag waving work for the gop, because their base cares about those things. it allows them to do other things. it allows them to shove other things, because they have met their base at the point where they turn on and turn out.
Hart Williams
What I don’t see here is the observable truth. I’ve watched “inside” Democratic politics in three states in the past thirty-some years, and was even a delegate to the 2000 DNC in LA (“The kiss.)
It’s easiest seen in starkly Darwinian terms: anyone in Democratic politics who shows spine, who fights back, or otherwise stands up to the thugs invariably OFFENDS some precious liberal, and all gravely shake their heads and “tch tch.”
No one will “get your back,” and, thus, Liberal Natural selection has been weighted to Invertibrates. The power structure has become spineless; the politicians know that unless they are spineless they won’t be elected, and the rank and file tend to be more the former than the latter.
In the “New Deal” days, and up through the ’60s, Liberals had dirt under their fingernails, and holes in the knees of their jeans. The movement towards academic liberalism and NEVER OFFENDING ANYONE FOR ANY REASON has produced the spinelessness that we now decry.
It won’t go away until people like Alan Grayson are supported and applauded and not dropped like fake dog poop that you just realized isn’t fake at the first potentially “offensive” statement Grayson makes.
Was his commercial REALLY more obnoxious than any random 30 seconds of Limbaugh or Beck?
Nope. But he was (as poster child for this jeremiad) left to twist in the wind this fall. As Franklin said, If we do not hang together, we shall most assuredly hang separately.
Right now, we’re pretty well hung in the latter sense.
Until liberals back other liberals (even if they have to hold their precious little noses), nothing will change. Generally a Liberal in a controversy has to be PERFECTLY correct and without sin, while any Kkonservative can be bat-shit crazy and racist and filled with every ugliness imaginable, and THEY will back his (yes, almost always ‘his’) play.
And yet, we show off our prowess with the violin while Rome burns.
Support vertibrates and this will change. Stick with invertibrates and it won’t. It’s that simple.
Judas Escargot (aka ninja fetus with a taste for bruschetta)
(Damn. The good threads are always done by the time I get here.)
My answer, BTW: Being a liberal is hard work. Most Americans are lazy and fearful.
It requires a strong constitution to keep that commitment to something called “Objective Truth” (whatever that may be), especially when virtually every signal coming at you from the outside world is telling you to give up, you don’t matter, your thoughts don’t matter, you’re just a liberal loser, etc.
Not every adult has what it takes to inhabit that intellectual space.
scandi
I think I’m just going to refer to the media as “the conservative media” from now on.
Stefan
Because liberals in Congress are not necessarily likeable people. For instance The Democrats may be right-but having baggage like Pelosi in charge makes it hard to sway fence sitters (like me). Pelosi is a self re-inforcing narrative that is easy to hate.
Nancy Pelosi, a kindly Italian grandmother of seven who’s been married for forty years, is easy to hate? What is wrong with you? What, precisely, about Nancy Pelosi do you find hateable? Which positions/votes etc. were particulary evil and vile?
Face it, the only thing that makes her “easy to hate” is the fact that Fox and the right-wing media constantly demonize her — but they do that to any major Democratic politician, and thus brainwash rubes like you. If the Virgin Mary had been the Democratic Speaker of the House, after a few months I’m sure that there’d be tons of low-information voters like you that would be spouting off about how having baggage like the Mother of God in charge made it problematic to like the Democrats….
Corner Stone
@Judas Escargot (aka ninja fetus with a taste for bruschetta):
You expect us to wait up to 9 months for your comment?
4jkb4ia
I know what Hart Williams is talking about–John Emerson mentioned people he knew who looked at Grayson and said “I don’t want to win like that”–but that commercial was more than offensive. It was MISLEADING. You lose the right to criticize the other side’s lies when it becomes IOKIYA(the right kind of)D. Or at least the right kind of D.
(Edit worked again!)
CaliCat
The only reason there is the identification “progressive” is because hoards of liberals (yes, even the self-described non mealy-mouth ones) ran away from the term “liberal” because the right-wing made it all icky and bad. I think the progressives who fancy themselves straight-shooters/non-milquetoast/whatever need to look in the mirror and ask themselves what is wrong with simply self-identifying as liberal? Dump the term progressive and maybe I’ll listen to your sanctimoneous rants about the mealy-mouth liberals you claim to revile. In other words, simply calling yourself progressive is a from of mealy-mouthism and an acquiescence to right-wing propaganda.
Oh, and speaking of token liberals, nice quote from Jane Hamsher.