“A Tough Week For Sen Pearl Jam”: Rand Paul Spouting ‘Weaselspeak’ Like A Native
I haven’t commented yet on Robert Draper’s much-discussed New York Times Magazine piece entitled “Has the ‘Libertarian Moment’ Finally Arrived?” That’s partly because my instinctive hostility to libertarianism (possibly due to an early high-school brush with the adolescent virus of Objectivism) means I have to calm down and think clearly before writing of such things. And it’s partly because Draper’s piece–while fascinating like everything the man writes–spends a lot of time retailing dubious libertarian claims that this or that generational trend on a scattered assortment of issues means The Movement is on the brink of some national breakthrough (as Draper notes, we’ve heard that before).
But the most interesting part of the piece is the increasingly familiar idea that Sen. Rand Paul has the skills and flexibility to launch some sort of gussied-up version of the Eternally Correct Ideology with enough mass appeal to conquer the GOP and then the nation. It’s analogous to how some movement conservatives looked at Ronald Reagan, who wasn’t as simon-pure as Barry Goldwater by any stretch of the imagination, but was trusted to have the best interests of The Cause foremost in his mind, and knew where to trim and prevaricate in the pursuit of votes. One of Draper’s aging hipster libertarian interlocutors offered a similar analogy of Rand Paul being Pearl Jam to his old man’s Nirvana.
I’ve earlier talked about Rand seeking to advance some sort of Big Tent Libertarianism that’s soft enough around the edges and weasely enough on tough issues to be tempting to many regular Republicans looking for a change of pace without abandoning core anti-government and Obama-bashing principles. He’s been pretty good at it in the past (viz. his election in not-exactly-hipster Kentucky), but as I’ve been noting, he’s struggling now with a pattern of self-contradiction and transparent flip-flopping. As usual, Charlie Pierce sums it up pungently after noting the snares Paul has become entangled in after his flight from DREAMers at a fundraiser with Steve King earlier this week:
America’s brogressive love-puppet speaks the weaselspeak like a native, doesn’t he? He doesn’t want any contact with the berating scofflaws, but he wants them to have work permits, but not in-state tuition. In four or five days, he will likely reverse all three of these reversals of positions. He will feel very strongly all three ways and, also, free pot! All in all, I am disinclined to agree with my friend Bob Draper that we are living through the libertarian moment, at least as represented by Senator Aqua Buddha. This is because “the libertarian moment” is a scam.
Paul has similar trouble sticking to a coherent position on all kinds of issues, from abortion and same-sex marriage (often relying on the usual “federalism” dodge when he’s not taking the most hard-core positions imaginable and/or suggesting these shouldn’t be “priorities” for the GOP) to national security and fiscal policy. The big question is whether in running for president as a first-term senator he has enough base support beyond his old man’s Revolution to ever get to the point where non-libertarians are confronted with the option of finding him acceptable. If I were him I’d go off on a retreat with the Koch Brothers and whoever else he relies on for serious money and advice (leaving the hipsters at home) and hammer out a platform and strategy he can stick to for an extended period of time. The day-to-day improvisation is beginning to sound less like Pearl Jam than the Experimental Blues/Jazz Jam from This Is Spinal Tap.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 8, 2014
“Shameless Fear-Mongering”: It’s Time To Expel Michele Bachmann From Congress
In a recent interview on conservative radio show Faith & Liberty, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) warned that the gay community ultimately wants to “abolish age-of-consent laws, which means we will do away with statutory-rape laws so that adults will be able to freely prey on little children sexually. That’s the deviance that we’re seeing embraced in our culture today.”
Of course, Bachmann offered absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support her claim, most likely because there is none. It’s an outright lie. A supposed inherent link between homosexuality and pedophilia has been disproven time and again. Consequently, the canard that gay people — gay men, specifically — wish to sexually exploit children, which was once commonly held in America, has, more recently, been reduced to fodder for far-right homophobes. Granted, Bachmann certainly falls into that demographic, but the scope of her influence far outreaches that of an average private citizen.
In the same interview Bachmann went on to state that the gay community also wishes to legalize polygamy and enact “hate-speech laws across the United States” in order to bring about the “rise of tyranny.”
This latest incident isn’t Bachmann’s first foray into the arena of blatant homophobia. She’s been peddling inflammatory myths about the gay community and representing those myths as indisputable truths throughout her stint as a congresswoman, all the while insisting that her message “is to spread goodness and joy and wholeness and healing.”
In the marketplace of shameless fear-mongering, Michele Bachmann can certainly hold her own amongst the usual cast of right-wing characters. However, a great deal of Bachmann’s rhetoric is typically irresponsible and borders on slander. For instance, in another recent interview Bachmann implied that unaccompanied minors fleeing the violence in Central America, who have come in large numbers to the Southern U.S. border, will be allowed into the country by President Obama so they can be put into foster care and used for “medical experimentation.” How much longer will Bachmann be allowed to make such wild, completely unfounded accusations with impunity?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for individuals being able to freely express an opinion. And I understand that it’s important to play to your audience. But these are no mere opinions, and Bachmann is no mere individual. And this latest incident isn’t Bachmann’s first foray into the arena of blatant homophobia. What Bachmann is doing is presenting an erroneous and incendiary scenario as truth. We’ve heard it before, but what makes this instance all the more disturbing is the simple fact that Bachmann isn’t some washed-up 1950s-beauty-pageant contestant, nor is she some huckster televangelist. Bachmann is a member of the Congress of the United States. She has the power to introduce bills and resolutions, and to vote on whether or not they should be enacted into law. When Bachmann was sworn in for her fourth and current term in Congress, she stated on her website, “It is a true honor to represent the citizens of Central Minnesota in the United States Congress.” Given her opinion of the gay community, I don’t believe Bachmann is genuinely capable of fulfilling that duty, nor does she have any inclination to do so. After all, Bachmann must be aware that a segment of the population of Central Minnesota is made up of gays and lesbians. Otherwise, Bachmann & Associates, the counseling center founded by Bachmann’s husband, Marcus, wouldn’t have considered it necessary to offer conversion “therapy” to its clients. And Bachmann has campaigned tirelessly against same-sex marriage in Minnesota throughout her political career.
Bachmann has hinted that she will not seek reelection at the end of her current term in Congress. She has also vaguely hinted at another run for the U.S. presidency. I don’t think there is even the slightest chance that Bachmann could be elected to run the country. History has proven that. Regardless, I believe she should be expelled from Congress. Our system of government was created to be “of the people, by the people and for the people.” The “people” includes the LGBT community, and government officials such as Michele Bachmann are not only not for us; they are pathologically against us. Personally, I don’t believe my tax dollars should be used to pay the salary of someone who wants to convince the world that my ultimate desire is to be able to legally molest children.
By: Walt Hawkins, The Huffington Post Blog, August 9, 2014
“Inequality Is Natural”: The Big, Long, 30-Year Conservative Lie
First came Occupy Wall Street, and its pitch-perfect slogan on inequality: “We are the 99 percent.” After that movement fizzled, Thomas Piketty, the handsomely ruffled French professor, released a 685-page book explaining that we really were living in a new Gilded Age in which the wealth gap was as wide as it had ever been. Finally, in June, one of the plutocrats sitting atop the piles of money he made in the digital revolution, Nick Hanauer, wrote an article in Politico magazine—it’s the most-shared story ever on Politico’s Facebook page—warning that the pitchforks were coming, and rich people like him should advocate for a healthier middle class and a higher minimum wage.
The debate over inequality is now raging, and most Americans are unhappy about the widening divide between the haves and have-nots. Hanauer has been making the same case for years, drawing heaps of both praise and scorn. Forbes magazine has alternately called Hanauer insane and ignorant. His TED University presentation calling for a $15-minimum wage was left off the organization’s website because it was deemed too “political.” That’s nothing next to Piketty’s detractors, who at their most extreme accused him of twisting his data.
Hanauer and Piketty inspire these broadsides because they are challenging, in a far more aggressive way than plutocrats and economists usually do, the conservative economic orthodoxy that has reigned since at least the 1980s. Under Ronald Reagan, we called it trickle-down economics, the idea that the men who can afford their own private jets—they’re usually men—deserve gobs of money because they provide some special entrepreneurial or innovative talent that drives the American economy.
That’s well known. Far less often discussed is the flipside of this belief: that helping the less well off will dampen the American money-generating engine—that it will hurt growth, because the only thing that inspires the “job creators” to work so hard is the promise of insanely vast financial rewards. Poverty is a necessary evil in this worldview, and helping the less well off creates a “culture of dependency,” which discourages work. “The United States thrives because of a culture of opportunity that encourages work and disdains relying on handouts,” Matthew Spalding of The Heritage Foundation wrote in 2012, neatly summing up the conservative ethos.
Conservatives have dominated discussions of poverty for a generation with arguments like this one. It’s completely wrong. It’s more than that—it’s just a lie, concocted as cover for policies that overwhelmingly favored the rich. But it took the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression for many economists, liberal or not, to finally say publicly what many had long argued: Inequality is bad for the economy.
The latest to say so is the rating agency Standard and Poor’s, not exactly a bastion of lefty propaganda. An S&P report released August 5 says that rising inequality—gaps in both income and wealth—between the very rich and the rest of us is hurting economic growth. The agency downgraded its forecast for the economy in the coming years because of the record level of inequality and the lack of policy changes to correct for it. The report’s authors argue against the notion that caring about equality necessarily involves a trade-off with “efficiency”—that is, a well-functioning economy.
To be sure, they’re not making a case for a massive government intervention to help low-income Americans. They discuss the benefits of current policy proposals—like raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour—with the caveats that such changes could have potential negative consequences—like dampening job growth. (Most economists agree that such a small hike wouldn’t have that impact.)
At its core, though, the S&P report does argue that pulling people out of poverty and closing the gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent will increase economic growth. The authors argue for some redistributive policies, like increased financial aid for post-secondary education. “The challenge now is to find a path toward more sustainable growth, an essential part of which, in our view, is pulling more Americans out of poverty and bolstering the purchasing power of the middle class,” the authors write. “A rising tide lifts all boats…but a lifeboat carrying a few, surrounded by many treading water, risks capsizing.”
It’s an important moment for such a debate. The Great Recession was a great equalizer, a crisis in which many in the middle class, and even upper-middle class, fell all the way to the bottom and relied on the government safety net. They learned what anyone who cared to look at the data already knew: The vast majority of people relying on government benefits are suffering a temporary setback that they will recover from, as long as they have a helping hand. The holes in the safety net also became more apparent. Even Paul Ryan, the Republican congressman from Wisconsin who has set his blue eyes on higher office, adequately diagnosed many of the problems with anti-poverty programs when he introduced a new plan last month. (Whether he would actually want to pay for the changes he calls for is debatable.)
Closing the gap by lifting low-income families out of poverty could do more to help the economy than any number of tax credits for “job creators” might, which is what Hanauer argued in Politico. And the S&P report puts more support in his corner.
On the question of what to do, there is widespread agreement on boosting educational attainment and increasing salaries at the bottom end. Policymakers have had a lot of time to think about how to help the middle class, since real wages began declining in the mid-1970s. Many of the problems of inequality have policy solutions ready to go, spelled out in a white paper stuffed in someone’s desk drawer. Why has it taken so long to think about addressing it? Was the political might of the right so overwhelming that they couldn’t speak up until people like Hanauer saw, as he warned in his essay, that the pitchforks would be coming for them?
By: Monica Potts, The Daily Beast, August 8, 2014
“The Inevitability Of Republican Reactions”: Opposition Is A Republican Action, Not A Republican Reaction
Ron Fournier of the National Journal has become (to liberal bloggers anyway) the embodiment of multiple sins of the Washington press corps. Most notably, there’s the High Broderism, in which the blame for every problem is apportioned in precisely equal measure to both parties, and the embrace of the Green Lantern theory of the presidency, in which anything can be accomplished, including winning over a recalcitrant opposition, by a simple act of will from the Oval Office. The latter’s most comical manifestation is Fournier’s frequent pleas for President Obama to “lead,” with the content of said “leadership” almost always left undetailed (though one suspects it might involve giving a great speech, after which Republicans would decide to come together with Democrats to solve the nation’s problems).
Though lately I’ve been trying to limit my pundit-bashing to once or twice a month, I couldn’t overlook this passage in Fournier’s latest column expressing his dismay that Obama might take some executive actions in areas where Congress hasn’t done anything, like immigration or corporate inversions. While I’ll give Fournier credit for acknowledging that to know whether such actions are good or bad we’d have to look at each one individually (a remarkable concession), I can’t stomach this:
For argument’s sake, let’s say Obama is right on the issue and has legal authority to act. The big question is …
Would it be wrong to end-run Congress? Another way to put it might be, “Would more polarization in Washington and throughout the country be wrong?” How about exponentially more polarization, gridlock, and incivility? If the president goes too far, he owns that disaster.
Fournier is saying that even if Obama is right on the merits of an issue and has legal authority to take a particular executive action, to go ahead and do so is the same thing as creating “exponentially more polarization, gridlock, and incivility.” But it takes two to tango, or to create polarization. (Gridlock and incivility, one party can do on its own, as we well know.) In other words, Fournier is saying that when Republicans react to an executive action by remaining firm in their obstructionism and being uncivil about it to boot, it’s one person’s fault: Barack Obama.
Isn’t it long past the time when we were able to put aside the quaint notion that Republican actions are determined in any meaningful way by what Democrats do or don’t do?
It isn’t only journalists who have believed this; for some time; Democrats believed it, too. Many Democrats voted for Obama in the 2008 primaries because they were worried about the ferocious opposition Hillary Clinton would engender from the GOP. As they quickly found out, that opposition is a Republican action, not a Republican reaction. I remind you (for the umpteenth time) that on the very day Barack Obama was inaugurated, Republican leaders met for dinner and decided to oppose anything and everything he tried to do. Politically, it was a pretty smart move. But it wasn’t because Obama hadn’t reached out to them and they were mad—he had only been president for a couple of hours. Within weeks, they responded to the fact that Obama hired people to work in the White House by accusing him of appointing a group of unaccountable “czars” who were wielding tyrannical power.
On this subject, there are basically two kinds of Republicans. There are those who understand that maximal opposition will yield lots of political benefit for them, and there are those who genuinely believe that Obama is an evil Kenyan Marxist tyrant trying to destroy America. When it comes to things like how they react to the administration’s policy initiatives, the distinction doesn’t matter. They both arrive at the same place, whether through clear-eyed political calculation or wild-eyed hatred. And nothing—nothing—President Obama does or doesn’t do makes a bit of difference.
To read Fournier, you might think that if Obama came out and said, “Fixing immigration is really Congress’ responsibility, so I’m not going to do a thing until they put a bill on my desk,” Republicans would respond, “We appreciate the trust the President is putting in Congress, so we’re going to get right to work passing comprehensive immigration reform.” But of course they won’t.
If we know anything about the way today’s Republicans react to this president, it’s that nothing he does really matters. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. There will be gridlock and incivility if he does things they don’t like, and there’ll be gridlock and incivility if he does nothing at all. To think otherwise you have to ignore everything that’s happened for the last five years.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 7, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 