“Knuckle Dragging Haters”: Rush Limbaugh Plants Seeds Of Division In Scorched Earth Of Hate
Whenever a conservative is the subject of national scorn — as Rush Limbaugh is today with his leering Dirty Old Man attacks on a lone college student or former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was a few years ago with his cheerleading for Dixiecrat racism — the Right Wing Noise Machine seamlessly swings into damage control mode.
One of the Right’s favorite tactics is to find some example, however tenuous, of liberals committing a similar offense that not only exonerates the earlier conservative outrage but also allows conservatives to call liberals hypocrites for their criticisms of them.
And thus, as New Republic’s Timothy Noah notes, with sponsors abandoning Rush Limbaugh’s golden microphone over his scandalous attacks on Sandra Fluke, all we are hearing from conservatives is that the liberal’s own record on civility is not squeaky clean.
Yet, as Noah says, “liberals get defined pretty broadly by the Right to include rappers, blogger Matt Taibbi calling Andrew Breitbart a “douche” in his obit, Keith Olbermann calling Michele Malkin a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it,” Bill Maher calling Sarah Palin a “cunt” and a “dumb twat,” and Ed Schultz calling Laura Ingraham a “slut.”
Pretty vile stuff. So, how is what Rush did to Fluke any different, conservatives want to know.
It’s different in two ways says Noah. First, he says, “all of the people who were subjected to verbal abuse by the liberal- or left-leaning blowhards and smart-asses mentioned above are public figures.”
And because they are public figures they are presumably accustomed to attacks like these and have the means to defend themselves.
Second, says Noah, none of the liberal media personalities cited by conservatives “is so feared by President Obama or any other Democrat that said Democrat would hesitate to criticize him if the occasion warranted it.
“That isn’t necessarily because Democrats “are braver people,” says Noah. “It’s because there is no rapper or liberal or leftist commentator or talk-radio host or comedian who commands anything equivalent to the knuckle-dragging army of haters that Limbaugh leads on the right.”
And this leads me to the more important point that Noah might have missed: The real difference is that right wing conservatives benefit from Limbaugh’s tirades in ways that liberals do not from the misbehavior of their favorite media personalities.
This is why Ed Schulz was able to take himself off the air without pay for a week for his momentary lapse of judgment and ill-considered remark about Ingraham while Limbaugh is constitutionally incapable of apologizing for three days of continuous attacks against a lone, brave college student. His business model won’t allow it.
All of those sad and lonely guys, pissed off at their wives and girlfriends, driving around in their pick-up trucks or SUV and shouting “hell yeah” whenever Limbaugh takes off after women, would lose all respect for Rush if he ever backed down. So he can’t. And that is why his “apology” to Ms. Fluke was no apology at all but was instead a rather badly disguised attack on the left, which he said would never bully one of its own the way they bullied him.
Apologies are usually delibered with humility not hubris. But this is just one manifestation of the difference between liberal and conservative media in which liberals are merely audiences for their media while conservatives are citizens of theirs — whether it’s Fox “Nation,” Hannity’s “America,” Rush Limbaugh’s “Dittohead Nation.”
Conservative media are about creating a new political party and a new nation not merely a ratings demographic. That is why conservative media figures always respond to criticisms from the left by citing the size of their audience — my tribe is bigger than your tribe so I must be right.
Thus, conservative media is culture-changing in ways that liberal media isn’t. So don’t expect Republicans to sign petitions to boycott Limbaugh’s program anytime soon because there is method to Limbaugh’s madness.
The reason Republicans don’t attack Limbaugh for his outrageous remarks is not so much that they fear his retribution (which they do) but that he makes it easier for the Koch Brothers and other Republican Oligarchs to plant the seeds of their “survival of the fittest” conservative dogmas in the scorched earth of anger and hatred and bigotry that Limbaugh — and Coulter and Hannity and O’Reilly — have plowed for them with outrageous smears just like this that serve to coarsen our political culture.
A liberal society — and by extension a liberal social program with the taxes on the rich that go with it — cannot survive in a harsh climate where empathy and compassion are dirty words that stand for values which have been obliterated altogether. And that is why Limbaugh and the others make the big bucks.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, Salon, March 8, 2012
“Making Exceptions To The Right To Vote”: Bad News For Voting Rights In Swing States
Pennsylvania is a large, crucial swing state that leans a bit more Democratic than its neighbor Ohio. President Obama must win Pennsylvania if he is to retain the White House. That’s about to become more difficult.
Republicans in Pennsylvania’s state Senate passed a bill Wednesday—on a mostly party-line vote—to require that voters show photo identification in order to vote. Governor Tom Corbett, a Republican, supports the bill and will sign it into law once the Republican-controlled state House of Representatives passes it. Voter identification laws disenfranchise those without a photo ID. Multiple studies have shown that people without IDs are more likely to belong to a Democratic-leaning constituency, such as low-income, minority or young voters. It can also fall especially hard on people with disabilities and the elderly. That’s why Democrats oppose such a law. And as the Associated Press reports, “Counties, civil liberties advocates, labor unions, the AARP and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People also objected to the bill.”
The AP also notes, “The County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania has warned lawmakers that adding the additional step of requiring poll workers to check photo IDs will create longer Election Day lines at polling places.” Long lines at polling booths can cause people to give up and go home. That happened in many Ohio polling places in 2004. Some experts, such as Mark Crispin Miller of New York University, argue that those problems in Ohio may have thrown the election to President Bush.
The Pennsylvania bill is actually more moderate than many of its progenitors in states such as Georgia. Valid identification includes a student ID card from a Pennsylvania college or university, identification from a personal care home or employee cards for county or municipal workers. Voters without identification will be able to cast provisional ballots. However, they would then have to return within six days to prove their eligibility. Such an onerous burden will often go unmet, meaning votes will be thrown out.
Pennsylvania would become the third-largest state, after Texas and Florida, to require voters to produce photo identification. Florida is another large, important swing state. Voting rights have long been a contentious issue in Florida. Many Democrats and civil rights leaders believe that Governor Jeb Bush’s administration allowed George W. Bush to beat Al Gore in Florida in 2000 by ordering a purge of the names of felons from voting rolls. Such purges often ensnare legitimate voters with the same names and prevent them from voting. Thanks to the War on Drugs, felons in Florida are disproportionately black and Latino, as are people with the misfortune to share their names.
African-American Democratic state senators in Florida are trying to find ways to expand opportunities for citizens to vote, but Republicans are stymieing them. As the Miami Herald reported on Wednesday:
Deciding that the proposal was off topic, Senate leaders refused to allow African-American senators to tag a proposal expanding early voting onto voter identification legislation.
Sen. Chris Smith, D-Ft. Lauderdale, filed an amendment to HB 1461 that would have given counties the option of opening early voting locations on the Sunday before an election day. Last year, the Legislature approved sweeping new election law that, among other things, limited early voting hours and prohibited early voting within 72 hours of an election.
Don’t worry, though, that Florida Senate Republicans have abandoned civil rights altogether. They made sure to amend the bill to prevent voting clerks from scanning the photo IDs they require voters to show. As the Herald reports:
Senators approved a different amendment sponsored by Sen. Joe Negron, R-Stuart. That proposal allows voters to opt out of having their driver licenses scanned at the polls.
The state’s supervisors of elections requested the option of scanning licenses, saying it will expedite the registration process during high-turnout election days. But Negron said civil liberties were at stake and people should be allowed to vote without potentially giving poll workers access to private information.
“This is the defining moment of the Libertarian caucus of the Senate,” Negron said while urging senators to approve his amendment.
It passed on a voice vote, eliciting cheers from conservative senators.
“Freedom,” Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, shouted after the vote while pumping his fists in the air.
This is a twofer for Republicans: they get to pose as defenders of small government, while ensuring long lines thanks to the ID requirement. Tea Party Republicans say they support civil liberties, but they make a big exception for the right to vote.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, March 8, 2012
Republican “Field Of Hawks”: Apocalyptic And Less Than Forthright Rhetoric
Unless Ron Paul somehow wins the nomination, it looks as if a vote for the Republican presidential candidate this fall will be a vote for war with Iran.
No other conclusion can be drawn from parsing the candidates’ public remarks. Paul, of course, is basically an isolationist who believes it is none of our business if Iran wants to build nuclear weapons. He questions even the use of sanctions, such as those now in force. But Paul has about as much chance of winning the GOP nomination as I do.
Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have all sought to portray President Obamaas weak on national security — a traditional Republican line of attack. They have tried to accuse Obama of being insufficiently committed to Israel’s defense. In the process, they’ve made bellicose pledges about Iran that almost surely would lead straight to conflict.
Santorum’s apocalyptic rhetoric about Iran practically takes for granted an imminent clash. Gingrich would essentially abdicate the decision to Israeli leaders, giving them the green light for an attack whenever they choose.
Romney, the likely nominee, has been somewhat more circumspect — and less forthright. He published an op-ed in The Post this week blasting Obama’s foreign policy as “feckless” and promising that, under a Romney administration, things would be different. He then went on to outline the steps he would take in dealing with Iran — most of which turn out to be steps Obama has already taken.
“I will press for ever-tightening sanctions.” Check. “I will speak out on behalf of the cause of democracy in Iran and support Iranian dissidents.” Check. “I will make clear that America’s commitment to Israel’s security and survival is absolute.” Check. “I will buttress my diplomacy with a military option.” Check.
Romney’s only new initiatives would be to make Jerusalem the destination of his first foreign trip and to deploy an additional aircraft carrier group in the region. I imagine the intent would be to show Iranian leaders that they are isolated and under siege, but I think they get that already.
In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — a pro-Israel lobbying group — Romney was much more specific in establishing his bottom line: “We must not allow Iran to have the bomb or the capacity to make a bomb.” It is difficult to imagine how this statement can lead anywhere but to war.
U.S. policy under Obama — and previous administrations — has been that it is “unacceptable” for Iran to have nuclear weapons. The clear implication is that, while military force is an option that could be employed at any time, including the present, force will be employed if Iran tries to make a bomb.
To say that Iran must never have “the capacity to make a bomb,” as Romney does, is to draw a line that has already been crossed.
Does capacity mean having the fuel for a bomb? Iran knows how to produce the enriched uranium that would be used in a bomb, and while U.S. air power alone — unsupported by ground troops — could destroy or damage most of the enrichment facilities we know about, the Iranians could have the program back up and running within a few years.
Does capacity mean the expertise necessary to construct a bomb that would actually explode? If so, will Romney order an attack whenever intelligence agencies report that a librarian at some Iranian university has ordered a textbook in advanced metallurgy from Amazon.com?
The truth is that every nation with sufficient wealth and scientific infrastructure has the capacity to build a bomb if it really wants to. An attack is likely to increase the Iranian regime’s resolve, not lessen it. Bombing Iran every few years is not a realistic option and in any event would not be effective in the long run; when the Iranians rebuild their facilities, they will surely do a better job of hiding and bunkering them.
The United States and its allies should seek to eliminate the Iranian government’s will to make a bomb, not its capacity. I hope Romney realizes that, while sanctions and diplomacy may not be working as well as we’d like, they’re the best tools we have — and that an attack at this point gets us nowhere. But if he believes his own rhetoric, this election may be about more than the economy. It may be about war and peace.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 8, 2012
“Scratching Their Heads”: A Bad Week For John Boehner And House Republican Leadership
Speaker John Boehner is having a bad week. First, his members weren’t able to agree on a budget. For a time, it didn’t look like they would be able to agree on a budget. They would have to join the Senate Democrats in simply skipping the budget process. And now, it looks like the only way to pass a budget is to propose one that undercuts the spending levels agreed to in the debt-ceiling deal — a deal that Boehner signed onto, and a reversal that sets up an unnecessary and likely unwinnable battle with the Senate.
Then, there was the push to bring Rep. Jeff Fortenberry’s “Respect for Rights of Conscience Act” to the floor. This legislation was the House version of the Blunt Amendment, and it would have amended the Affordable Care Act to permit any health-care plan, whether religious or not, to refuse to cover birth control. More than half the House had already signed on to co-sponsor the bill. It looked like an easy slam dunk. At least, it did before the Senate defeated the Blunt amendment, and Rush Limbaugh said something dumb, and the politics of this issue turned sharply against the GOP. Now the bill looks like an ugly distraction from jobs, jobs, jobs. It’s currently on ice in the Energy and Commerce Committee.
Which brings us, of course, to the Energy and Commerce Committee, site of Boehner’s most frustrating struggle. It was months ago now that he shepherded the Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act — better known as his highway bill — through five committees. His office put muscle behind the legislation, blasting out a constant stream of press releases on its many virtues, and Boehner himself delivered a speech endorsing the bill when it came to the House floor.
But the legislation has languished. Some Republicans don’t like the spending. Others don’t like the changes to mass transit funding. Some want the ability to add earmarks. Another group doubts the highway bill is the place to expand offshore oil drilling. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood — a former Republican congressman from Illinois — told Politico it was “the worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen during 35 years of public service.”
On Wednesday, in a closed-door meeting, Boehner tried to persuade his colleagues to save the bill. “Even the Senate — the do-nothing Democratic Senate — is going to pass something,” he said. But while Boehner’s speech might have helped a little, Jake Sherman reports that “GOP lawmakers are still opposing the measure in alarmingly high numbers,” leaving “Boehner and the Republican leadership scratching their heads about what went wrong.”
They must be doing that a lot lately.
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post, March 8, 2012
“Enduring In Stranger Forms”: The Reagan Era Is Still Going
Religious leaders and religious communities are mostly united on the idea that we humans are bound together in a web of reciprocity and mutual support – and that there is something godly about such interdependence. Thus, for example, Gov. John Winthrop, adjuring the company that was about to sail from Southampton to the New World in 1630:
We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.
Ethicist and historian Gary Dorrien finds very little of Winthrop’s spirit in the never-ending attacks mounted against progressive taxation by today’s Republicans: they all like the “City Upon a Hill” part of Winthrop’s sermon, but they ignore the part about what it takes, values-wise, to deserve that hilltop. – eds.
The Reagan era was supposed to have ended in November 2008—killed off by 30 years of flat wages and capitulation to Wall Street leading to a colossal financial crash. But today the Reagan era is enduring in stranger forms than ever.
Republican leaders want to bust unions and give another tax cut to corporations and the rich, plus eliminate taxes on capital gains and inheritance. They want to privatize Social Security, turn Medicare into a voucher program, reduce Medicaid to block grants, and abolish the Affordable Care Act. They want a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution that caps federal spending at 18 percent of the total economy, a figure last reached in 1966. They took the nation hostage in a debt ceiling drama to win an atrocious budget deal. And much of the Republican Party thrives on conspiracy theories about America’s first black president.
It should be politically fatal to lurch so far into a bizarre-world of anti-government ultimatums and related obsessions. But the Republican Party tells a story of our time that many Americans find compelling. It is the Reagan story about a great people being throttled by a voracious federal government. According to this story, government is always the problem, Americans are over-taxed, and America has a debt crisis because Democrats overgrew the government. Every Republican contender for president tells this story, notwithstanding that Americans are not over-taxed and it was chiefly the Republican Party that exploded the debt.
From the early 1970s through the 1990s, Americans averaged 27 percent of their income on federal, state, and local taxes. Today that figure is 23 percent, a 53-year low. As a percentage of GDP, American taxation is at its lowest level since 1950, 14.8 percent—well below the take of other wealthy nations.
More importantly, the debt problem is a byproduct of tax policies that have fueled massive inequality since the early 1980s. It cannot be solved with any moral decency without rectifying the legacy of Ronald Reagan, who led the Republican Party and many Democrats into temptation by contending that deficits don’t matter because tax cuts pay for themselves. When Reagan took office in 1981 the national debt was $907 billion and America was the world’s leading creditor nation. In eight years Reagan tripled the national debt and turned America into the world’s leading debtor nation. Reagan slashed the marginal tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent, and the top rate on capital gains from 49 percent to 20 percent, fueling a blowout for inequality. George H. W. Bush, vowing to maintain Reagan’s winning approach, let the debt escalate to almost $4 trillion, which scared him enough to break his vow, raise the marginal rate to 35 percent, demoralize his party, and lose a second term.
The only break in America’s post-1980 record of escalating debt was the Clinton Administration, which raised the marginal rate to 39.6 percent and rang up budget surpluses of $70 billion in 1998, $124 billion in 1999, and $237 billion in 2000. Had the U.S. stuck with Clinton’s fiscal policy, the cumulative budget surplus would have reached $5.6 trillion by 2011, wiping out the national debt.
George W. Bush quickly squandered all of that. His tax cuts blew a $2 trillion hole in the deficit. He charged the expenses for two wars, officially over $1 trillion, with long-term costs that will triple that figure. He added a $1 trillion Medicare prescription drug benefit without paying for it either, creating the first entitlement in American history lacking a revenue source. Then the casino economy that Clinton and Bush deregulated crashed. In eight years the Bush administration piled up new debt and accrued obligations of $10.35 trillion, and doubled the national debt from $5.7 trillion to $11.3 trillion. Bush amassed more debt in eight years than America’s previous forty-two presidents combined, and the record keeps growing, as three-quarters of the debt amassed on Obama’s watch is the outgrowth of Bush’s unpaid tax cuts, unpaid wars, and unpaid drug benefit, and much of the rest is cleanup for the financial crash.
Obama inherited a deflating economy teetering on an outright depression, a skyrocketing debt, and two wars. When he took office the economy was shrinking by 6 percent annually. Had these losses continued, the U.S. would have been in a depression within 9 months of his inauguration.
Obama averted a depression with a modest, under-funded stimulus that Republicans condemned as outrageously radical, Socialist, and un-American. This absurd position enabled Republicans to win a huge political windfall, which has made the Republican Party crazier than ever.
Mitt Romney proposes to cut income tax rates by 20 percent and the corporate rate by 10 points, plus abolish the estate tax. Rick Santorum proposes to cut the marginal rate by 7 points, reduce the number of tax brackets from six to two, cut the corporate rate in half to 17.5 percent, and eliminate the estate tax and corporate taxes in the manufacturing sector. Newt Gingrich proposes to install a 15 percent flat tax for income and to abolish the capital gains tax, so one-percenters like Romney could pay no taxes at all instead of 14 percent. All of these plans wildly exceed George W. Bush’s disastrous cuts of 4 percent in the marginal rate and 5 percent in capital gains, with no compensating proposals to eliminate shelters and loopholes. All would reduce federal tax revenue by at least 40 percent.
We are supposed to rest assured that Republicans would find savings by breaking America’s social contracts on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. But Americans support Medicare by 85 percent, and over two-thirds believe that the wealthy should pay more taxes. This is the year, and the election, in which the Reagan era really needs to be ended.
By: Gary Dorrien, Religion Dispatches, March 7, 2012
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