This really is my favorite holiday. Let the Airing of Grievances begin…
It’s A Full On Grudge Festivus
And while we’re on The Airing Of Grievances here today, I’ve got a beef this morning that CNN’s David Gergen seems almost disappointed that the President’s prospects for re-election have improved this year as the GOP has dropped the ball again and again.
Even though House Republicans are now wisely folding their tents, their disarray this week over extending a payroll tax cut has left a sour taste at year’s end in Washington, contributing in no small part to an even bigger political story: the resurrection of President Obama and his fellow Democrats heading toward the 2012 elections.
After the debt ceiling debacle of last summer, the conventional wisdom among many political analysts was that Obama would go the way of President Jimmy Carter, that Republicans would lose a few seats in the House but retain control, and that the GOP would surge into power in the Senate. In short, Republicans were looking for a clean sweep.
Who believes that now? Obama is still highly vulnerable and could lose, but the CNN poll coming out of the field this week reveals a remarkable turnaround, especially in the past month.
Gergen then goes on to completely misread the why of the situation as well, seemingly dumbfounded as to why Elizabeth Warren is looking very good against Scott Brown in Massachusetts, wondering aloud why Jeb Bush isn’t running, and still refusing to give the President any credit for the (extremely modest) economic improvement.
In other words, he’s one miffed Republican, our David. But that’s okay, he does arrive at the correct conclusion through the tortured logic:
Even so, we are witnessing an important change in the political landscape — and it could be lasting. Republicans well remember the mid-1990s when they seized power in Congress and Speaker Newt Gingrich went mano-a-mano with President Bill Clinton. For a while, Gingrich had the upper hand, but Clinton then outmaneuvered him on two governmental shutdowns — and when the momentum turned in Clinton’s favor, he rode it to an easy re-election. No one should doubt that could happen again.
Ironically, it’s Newt himself providing that same impetus. Now that we’re seeing the bottom of the GOP candidate barrel and Orange Julius’s true colors, it’s the Republicans who have been exposed for what they are, and what they can’t do for the country.
No mention of the other big political movement in the last six months either: Occupy Wall Street. Pretty silly stuff here, even from a Villager like Gergen.
Early Morning Open Thread
One of my good and dear friends is about to be discharged with 100% disability from the Army. At 32 years old, he can’t remember what day it is, and sometimes he can’t remember if he’s back here in the states, or in Germany, or in Afghanistan where he got hurt.
Traumatic Brain Injury is the signature wound of these current wars. Gerald, who is one of the smartest people I know, just chatted with me on Facebook and couldn’t remember that I was retired, or that one of the last official acts I carried out was pinning his Sergeant’s stripes on him. Because he couldn’t remember being a Sergeant, unless he sees the rank on his chest.His wife, Lisa tells me that he occasionally can’t remember her name. “I can see that he knows I’m important to him, but he struggles with that sometimes.”
We spent over a trillion dollars on the Iraq war and got nothing out of it but 4500 dead, 30,000 wounded, and a country that’s a hell of a lot closer to Iran than we started, and in so doing, we’ve almost certainly lost ourselves the war in Afghanistan for lack of resources there. I personally know of two men who died of wounds–bled to death–in Afghanistan because we didn’t have the air ambulance assets we needed there. When Republicans ask me why I hate them so, I think of Gerald who can’t remember his wife and I think of Sam and Chris who bled out in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan waiting for help that never came. I think of so many other crimes, and I think of other brothers that won’t ever come home either, but especially I think of them.
Consider this an open thread.
Early Morning Open Thread: K-Thug, Not Quite Shrill Enough
Professor Krugman, on Willard Romney’s “Post-Truth Campaign“:
Suppose that President Obama were to say the following: “Mitt Romney believes that corporations are people, and he believes that only corporations and the wealthy should have any rights. He wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs, forced to accept whatever wages corporations choose to pay, no matter how low.”
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How would this statement be received?…
I, for one, would die a happy woman.
Quite a few Media Village courtiers would also depart this life, or at least be institutionalized on mass-suicide watch.
I believe, and hope, that it would be almost universally condemned, by liberals as well as conservatives…
Phhhtpbt! Spoilsport.
… Over all, Mr. Obama’s positions on economic policy resemble those that moderate Republicans used to espouse. Yet Mr. Romney portrays the president as the second coming of Fidel Castro and seems confident that he will pay no price for making stuff up.
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Welcome to post-truth politics.
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Why does Mr. Romney think he can get away with this kind of thing? Well, he has already gotten away with a series of equally fraudulent attacks. In fact, he has based pretty much his whole campaign around a strategy of attacking Mr. Obama for doing things that the president hasn’t done and believing things he doesn’t believe…
Good column, though — read the whole thing. At least someone with a (modest) bully pulpit is pointing out that Willard “Mitt” Romney is a lying liar, who lies with malice aforethought. Maybe start the weekend festivities off well; chain-mail your low-information relatives and acquaintances.
Early Morning Open Thread: K-Thug, Not Quite Shrill EnoughPost + Comments (39)
Regardless of ideology
Tyler Cowen is one of those libertarians that the Atlantic crowd is always heh-indeeding as some kind of a genius. Whenever one of these widely heh-indeeded types pops into my head, I google their name along with the words “Iraq War”. Sometimes not much of interest comes up, sometimes something comes up from 2007 or so where they criticize the war in retrospect, and I have to muck around to find what they wrote during the run-up. It’s an interesting exercise. I was quite surprised to learn that Mike Kinsley opposed the Iraq War, for example.
Anyway, I did this with Tyler Cowen and found this:
Like Randy Barnett (easiest to just scroll down), I have had libertarian leanings for a long time but support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq…
Cowen goes onto castigate some obscure, rarely heh-indeeded libertarians for opposing the war, with an argument that consists mostly of the usual bed-wetting about suitcase nukes.
It made me wonder if we’re unfair to libertarians here. Yes, the Reasonoids are war-mongers and Koch whores, as is Cowen. And they’re among the most prominent self-described libertarians. But maybe they’re prominent precisely because they are war-mongers and Koch whores.
There’s no actual libertarian political base, so it’s completely at the discretion of the establishment who becomes a prominent libertarian. Nobody buys Reason magazine so it doesn’t matter how it sells, readers of the Atlantic are probably center to left-center by-and-large so they don’t care whether it’s McMegan or some other Randoid who provides glibertarian contrarianism for the magazine, etc.
Most of the so-called liberals you see on tv are indeed corporatists and Iraq War supporters, but not all of them are. Krugman is on sometimes, for example. If the liberal audience were as small as the libertarian audience, maybe tv and widely heh-indeeded liberals would be 100% corporatists and Iraq War supporters.
Thursday Night Open Thread
Too good not to highlight, and I most sincerely hope that by tomorrow it’ll be out of date.
What else is on the agenda for the Last Dash Xmas Run-Up?
The Most Wankeriffic Thing You Will Read for the Rest of the Year
Bill Adair, at Politifact, attempting to justify their bullshit Lie of the Year:
At a Republican campaign rally a few years ago, I asked one of the attendees how he got his news.
“I listen to Rush and read NewsMax,” he said. “And to make sure I’m getting a balanced view, I watch Fox.”
My liberal friends get their information from distinctly different sources — Huffington Post, Daily Kos and Rachel Maddow. To make sure they get a balanced view, they click Facebook links — from their liberal friends.
Both sides do it! Except, of course, Limbaugh, Newsmax, and Fox are lying, and HuffPo is hardly a liberal site.
It gets worse:
We’ve read the critiques and see nothing that changes our findings. We stand by our story and our conclusion that the claim was the most significant falsehood of 2011. We made no judgments on the merits of the Ryan plan; we just said that the characterization by the Democrats was false.
And you are wrong, and you are idiots. As someone on twitter quipped, if someone bought Politifact and turned it into a direct mail organization, if you said they had killed Politifact, you would win a Lie of the Year award. Cripes, even the NRO agrees calling the plan to end Medicare is not a lie, because REPUBLICANS DO WANT TO END MEDICARE and that is precisely what the bill proposed.
And the grand finale:
Ezra Klein of the Washington Post wrote that this episode was proof that the nation is so divided that “the ‘fact checker’ model is probably unsustainable.”
The most over-the-top response (was it tongue-in-cheek?) was a rant from Jim Newell in Gawker under the headline “Why PolitiFact is bad for you.” He conveniently ignored the fact that our fact-checks are based on hours of journalistic research and portrayed them as the work of rogue bloggers with a gimmicky meter.
“PolitiFact is dangerous,” he said.
Really? It’s dangerous to put independently researched information in the hands of the citizenry?
We got other silly comments from readers who declared we were “a tool” of the Republicans, Fox News and the Koch brothers. Their reaction is typical these days. To paraphrase George W. Bush, you’re either with us, or against us.
In reality, fact-checking is growing and thriving because people who live outside the partisan bubbles want help sorting out the truth. PolitiFact now has nine state sites run by news organizations around the country that employ more than 30 full-time journalists for fact-checking. We’ve inspired many copycat sites around the nation and roughly a dozen in other countries.
And yet, for many of our readers, the love for PolitiFact has always been conditional. They love us when we confirm their views that the other side is wrong — and they hate us when we don’t.
The Broderesque pablum is rife here- “Because both sides attack us, we must be doing something right.”
Klein Jim Newell is right. Politifact, as it is now, is dangerous, because it gives a veneer of objectivity to the kind of journalistic false equivalences which have run this country into the ground, and in this case, deemed an outright truth to be a lie. With that kind of intellectual dishonesty being pumped into our political discourse, you are fucking a right politifact is dangerous.
The Most Wankeriffic Thing You Will Read for the Rest of the YearPost + Comments (89)