“The Rock Is Beckoning”: An Open Letter To Sarah Palin
Dear Ms. Palin:
I feel sorry for you. I truly do. It must be terribly frustrating to be so irrelevant. To have your rabble-rousing, race-baiting drivel limited to Fox’s Sean Hannity Show in your desperate, pathetic, never-ending quest for attention. You are, put simply, one of the most ignorant, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, hate-filled, polarizing individuals ever to hit the national political stage (thank you John McCain).
Your new video, in which you call for President Obama’s impeachment because of his “lawlessness,” is an unconscionable, unpatriotic piece of garbage. The level of disrespect, condescension, sarcasm and reality-butchering is astounding. To say that your fake-cutesy, sing-songy, snarky delivery is vomitous would be a colossal understatement. You’re also quite tone-deaf, comparing your suffering over his presidency to that of a “battered wife.” There really are no groups you won’t offend, are there?
Impeach Obama? For what, doing his job amid relentless Republican obstructionism and intransigence? For trying to keep government operating efficiently? For growing the economy? For creating millions of new jobs? For caring about 8-year-olds crossing the Mexican border alone? For wanting to find a practical, compassion solution to the immigration issue? For providing everyone health care? For trying to narrow the income inequality gap? For protecting women’s rights? For allowing people who love each other to marry?
That you, like that other heartless conservative Dick Cheney, even have a perch from which to still spew your venomous hate-speak, is unfortunate. No one, not even the Fox faithful, should be subjected to your incendiary bile. You’re a failed, disgraced politician who, despite becoming a humiliating punchline following the 2008 election, refuses to crawl back under your rock. Trust me: no one except Hannity, a few horny white Republican dudes and a smattering of their intellectually bankrupt women are interested in what you have to say.
Ssshhhh….hear that sound? It’s the rock beckoning….
By: Andy Ostroy, The Huffington Post Blog, July 10, 2014
“It’s A Sad State Of Affairs”: Is This Who We Want Driving Our Democracy?
On Tuesday, the Center for Media and Democracy released documents showing that mega-donor Charles Koch was a member of the far-right John Birch Society from 1961 to 1968, when the organization’s work opposing the civil rights movement was reaching a fever pitch.
From publishing materials calling the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King the “biggest” “liar in the country” and the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery a “sham and farce” to promoting pieces railing against the racial integration of schools, the 1960s saw the John Birch Society leading abhorrent attacks on the civil rights movement. According to The Progressive, Charles Koch was not simply a member of the society in name. He funded the organization’s campaigns, helped it promote right-wing radio programs, and supported its bookstore in Wichita.
Sound familiar? Though Charles resigned from the John Birch Society in 1968, he and his brother David are still using their wealth to support right-wing efforts — now through a complicated and secretive web of conservative groups. Put together, the groups in the Koch-backed network raised over $400 million in 2012 and have dumped heaps of cash into campaigns and projects to promote an anti-government and anti-worker agenda.
Unfortunately, today’s campaign finance landscape makes it easy for billionaires, corporations, and special interests to try and bend our political system to their will. In 2010, the Supreme Court infamously ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that corporations can give unlimited sums of money to independently influence elections. This year, the High Court made things even worse when they ruled in McCutcheon v. FEC that wealthy individuals can give significantly more money directly to candidates, parties, and committees than they could before, upwards of $3.5 million per election cycle.
It’s a sad state of affairs. But as the leader of a national network of progressive African American ministers, many of whom are working hard to raise awareness about the dangers of money in politics, I often remind people: Democracy is for all of us. Though it can feel like democracy in America today is only for the few — the elite donor class who can bankroll the candidates of their choice — I have faith that this is not how things will always be.
There’s an important proposal moving forward across the country and in Congress that would help shift the power in our political system away from people like the Koch brothers and towards everyday Americans. This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee is voting on a proposed constitutional amendment that would overturn decisions like Citizen United. Introduced by Sen. Tom Udall, the 28th Amendment would restore legislators’ ability to set commonsense limits on money in elections. While amending our nation’s guiding text is a weighty proposal, our country has a proud history of amending the Constitution, when necessary, to expand democracy and fix damaging Supreme Court decisions.
With the voices of everyday Americans increasingly being drowned out by the likes of the Koch brothers, fixing our democracy can’t wait.
By:Minister Leslie Watson Malachi, The Huffington Post Blog, July 9, 2014
“Why Obama Makes The GOP Panic”: The Party Of Lincoln Has Metamorphosed Into A Confederate-Accented Political Cult
If you pay too much attention to opinion polls, as most people do, doubtless you’ve heard that a plurality of voters has judged Barack Obama the worst president since World War II. Thirty-three percent, to be precise, which as it conflates almost exactly with the number of hardcore Republicans, merely tells you something you already knew: GOP partisans dislike Obama with irrational zeal.
In short, the Quinnipiac University survey reveals more about them than about Obama. But hold that thought.
A presidential poll whose results might be worth heeding would measure the opinions only of people who could actually name the 12 U.S. presidents since 1945. I’m guessing that’d be maybe 10 percent of the electorate, tops.
Anyway, to put the bad news about Obama in perspective, back in 2006 when George W. Bush was in his sixth year in office — typically the nadir of a two-term president’s popularity – the same Quinnipiac poll found that 34 percent of Americans judged him the worst since 1945.
Even the sainted Ronald Reagan’s job approval numbers took a sharp drop during his sixth year due to the Iran-Contra scandal — selling missiles to Iran to finance right-wing terrorists in Nicaragua.
This year, however, a reported 35 percent in the Quinnipiac survey judged Reagan the best president since World War II. Apparently all is forgiven, forgotten, or — equally likely — never known.
Bill Clinton came in second at 18 percent; JFK third with 15 percent. Democrats, see, split their “best president” choices pretty evenly among Clinton, JFK and Obama. Meanwhile, 66 percent Republicans chose Reagan, a sharp rebuke to ex-presidents named Bush.
Indeed, some 28 percent in the 2014 survey still think that Dubya established a new low in presidential ineptitude. More significant, exactly 1 percent called Bush the best. One percent!
Even Nixon, who resigned the presidency ahead of impeachment, got one percent. Gerald Ford, who pardoned him, got one percent.
Historians agree about Dubya. A recent Siena College survey of 238 “presidential scholars” called Bush the fifth worst in U.S. history, and the only chief executive since 1945 to make the bungler’s Hall of Fame.
(Only one post-WWII president made the historians’ Top 10: Dwight D. Eisenhower, a judgment I wouldn’t dispute.)
Politically, the make-believe rancher turned portrait painter has become The Man Who Wasn’t There. Because Bush’s record is pretty much indefensible — asleep on 9/11, imprudent tax cuts, an unfinished war in Afghanistan, weak job creation, a financial meltdown that damn near destroyed the world economy, trillion-dollar budget deficits, an unjust, failed war and unfolding geopolitical catastrophe in Iraq — Republicans not named Dick Cheney make no serious effort to defend it.
Instead, they insist that the world began anew with the inauguration of Barack Obama. All references to the astonishing mess his predecessor left behind are forbidden lest one be accused of playing the “blame game.”
Rhyming slogans often prove irresistible to simpletons.
OK, so Obama asked for it. Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum gets that part exactly right:
For years, I really didn’t believe the conservative snark about how Obama supporters all thought he would descend on Washington like a god-king and miraculously turn us into a post-racial, post-partisan, post-political country. Kumbaya! The reason I didn’t believe it was that it never struck me as even remotely plausible.
Of course Obama promised to transform America. “That’s what presidential candidates do,” Drum adds. “I believed then, and still believe now, that Obama is basically a mainstream Democrat who’s cautious, pragmatic, technocratic, and incremental…[But] by now, the evidence is clear that millions of Obama voters really believed all that boilerplate rhetoric.”
Hence bitter disappointment on the sentimental left. Oh, you wanted single-payer health care? So tell me where Obama was supposed to get the votes.
However, the real believers in Barack the magic enchanter have been Republicans. His presidency has driven a substantial proportion of the GOP electorate completely around the bend. To a remarkable degree, the party of Lincoln has metamorphosed into a Confederate-accented political cult on apocalyptic themes suggested by fundamentalist theology.
“The unhinged versions of this sensibility,” notes Jonathan Chait “held that Obama had launched a sinister ideological assault on the Constitution and American freedom, perhaps in the name of Islamism, or socialism, or, somehow, both.”
Mentioning Obama’s race as one cause of GOP panic is even more forbidden than bringing up George W. Bush. You want to argue about it? Check the comment lines to any online article about Obama, and then get back to me.
It’s in the Bible: “The guilty flee, where no man pursueth.”
Along with existential panic goes an inability to keep things in proportion. Benghazi equals invading Iraq. The IRS “scandal” equals Watergate. Forty-five consecutive months of job growth and shrinking budget deficits get airbrushed out of the picture.
Over time, fear will abate. Then we’ll see what we see.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, July 9, 2014
“They’ll Be Waiting A Long Time”: The Illusory Conservative Campaign For The “Right” Minority Voters
I’ve been pretty harsh about the racial aspects of Team Chris McDaniel’s argument that the MS GOP SEN runoff was “stolen” from him. But let’s bend over backwards to be fair and adopt Dave Weigel’s interpretation of what hyper-conservatives mean when they complain about the “wrong kind” of appeals to African-Americans:
The Tea Party, a movement that helped elect Allen West to Congress and helped make Herman Cain—Herman Cain!—a presidential contender, and wants to elect Mia Love to Congress in Utah, believes that conservatives can win black votes while remaining conservative. When West talks about escaping “the liberal plantation,” that’s what he means. The “racist” party is the one that wins black votes by promising largesse, and the colorblind party aims to win them by talking free markets and social values.
Taking this seriously, of course, means ignoring the thousands of dog whistles blown during the endless Tea Party efforts to demonize “looters” and “food stamps” and “voter fraud”–and of course, the first African-American president. There’s no binary choice on the table either to offer minority voters “largesse” or to attack their integrity, work ethic, and even patriotism for participating in federal programs when they qualify for them. The whole “plantation” meme beloved particularly of African-American conservatives is an ongoing insult bordering on a blood libel, which is why you don’t find many African-Americans supporting Allen West or Herman Cain.
But intentions aside, if conservatives are waiting for the “right” kind of Republican appeal to attract the “right” kind of minority voters, they’ll be waiting a long time. The simple fact is that the already-meager Republican share of the minority vote has been steadily sliding since the GOP began its latest lurch to the Right. George W. Bush won 11% of the African-American vote and 44% of the Latino vote in 2004. In 2008 John McCain won 4% of the African-American vote and 31% of the Latino vote, and in 2012 Mitt Romney won 6% of the African-American vote and 27% of the Latino vote. That’s a pretty calamitous decline, and any conservative unwilling to admit that endless GOP attacks on “redistribution” and “illegal immigrants” and “welfare” has nothing to do with that is either dishonest or smoking crack.
Check out the language in this tweet over the weekend from McDaniel campaign manager (and state legislator) Melanie Sojourner, made in the course of saying she’d never endorse the “race-baiting” Thad Cochran:
Throughout my campaign and since I’ve repeatedly made comments about how I felt the Republican Party was doing itself a disservice by not reaching out to conservative African-Americans. Where I’m from, in rural Mississippi, I grew up knowing lots a [sic] God-fearing, hard-working, independent conservative minded African-American family’s [sic]. On the McDaniel campaign we had two young men from just such family’s on our staff.
Sojourner’s idea of “outreach” seems to be to wait for minority voters to develop sufficient character to vote for the GOP exactly as it finds it today. That presumably means accepting conservatives have been right all along–dating back to Jim Crow–about the evil nature of the Welfare State and a federal government large and strong enough to support civil rights laws.
Do people like this really believe in their heart of hearts they’re being “color-blind?” I cannot peer into their souls, but it’s no more or less plausible than the constant complaints from southern white conservatives I heard growing up that segregation was good for both races. Lord knows anything’s better for African-Americans than being consigned to the plantation of dependence on Washington for help in feeding one’s kids and gaining access to health care and keeping open threadbare public schools and securing the right to vote. Perhaps if the GOP becomes even more conservative the great minority voting breakthrough will finally occur.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 8, 2014
“Fundamentalist Constitutionalism”: Punctuation Marks, Antonin Scalia, And The Farce Of “Originalism”
I have no idea whether Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is heading to the beach this summer now that he has made America safe for religious employers to discriminate against their female employees. Nor do I have any idea whether Danielle Allen’s new book “Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality” is on his beach-reading list. But it should be.
You have probably heard about the book and its assertion that there is a significant typo smack in the middle of the Declaration’s most famous part. We read the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” with a “.” at the end. It’s not there in the original, according to Prof. Allen. It was added in later versions, as a mistake or perhaps even as a small spot of errant ink. The result, Allen asserts, is a dramatically different meaning to the entire document.
Historians will debate the conclusions Allen has drawn from her detective work, but those conclusions aren’t the reason Scalia ought to read the book. Rather, it is that starting premise about the punctuation that should give him pause (I know, it won’t) because it succinctly puts the lie to the entire enterprise of Constitutional “originalism” upon which Scalia has built his career.
Originalism, briefly put, is a jurisprudence resting on the following wobbly assumptions: the Constitution only has one meaning; that meaning can be known without ambiguity (by those smart enough to read it); all laws ought to be judged against that singular, unchanging meaning. Not too long ago originalism resided on the lunatic fringe of legal thinking, sort of like Ayn Randian economics. Over the last generation it has entered the mainstream, sort of like Ayn Randian economics, and no one has been more responsible for that than Antonin Scalia.
Opponents of originalism have often argued instead that the Constitution needs to be a “living” document, adaptable to a changing society. That view became prominent a century ago as legal thinkers, among them Woodrow Wilson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, tried to reckon with a rapidly changing industrial society. And to these Scalia and his comrades have said that the Constitution is resolutely dead and should be read historically, not in light of contemporary society.
But as the business of the pesky punctuation in the Declaration of Independence reminds us, words can mean different things and can be read in different ways. and even small changes in a sentence can yield different ideas. We know what Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy says, but any high school junior can tell you that it might have any of several meanings. Or all of them. Or none of them.
Pretending that reading a document like the Constitution is a simple, transparent and an entirely objective and neutral task is naïve at best, intellectually dishonest at worst. All acts of reading are necessarily acts of interpretation, and as a consequence there are no objective truths nor single meanings. The most we can do is achieve a best consensus, recognizing that it might change in the future.
Scalia knows all of this, I suspect. I don’t think even in his extraordinary arrogance and self-regard he believes he can know exactly and perfectly what was in the minds of all the delegates who wrote the Constitution. And indeed, whatever one thinks of Scalia as a jurist, his track-record as a historian is shoddy, filled with cherry-picked examples, incomplete understandings and downright risible conclusions. The history Scalia presented as part of his majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller wouldn’t pass muster in my undergraduate seminar.
Scalia’s real goal in promoting “originalism” is to remove Constitutional issues from the realm of political debate altogether and treat them instead as theological dogma.
“Originalists” like Scalia read the Constitution in much the same way that fundamentalist Christians read the Bible. In the world of those conservative Christians, the Bible says what it says, there is no room for any interpretation of it, and the Bible is inerrant. In fact, we might coin a new term, “fundamentalist Constitutionalists,” since there is now a small but growing number of people convinced that the Constitution, like the Bible, may have been written by men but was actually inspired by God.
While this kind of reading may be intellectually indefensible – or downright silly – it does have the advantage of bestowing extraordinary power on those who can claim to possess The Truth, whether huckstering evangelical, tyrannical bishop, or snarky Supreme Court justice.
Ironically, of course, we will look back on “originalism,” or “fundamentalist Constitutionalism,” as being entirely of its political and cultural moment. One hundred years from now, we will see it as engineered by revanchists like Scalia who recoiled at the dramatic social changes of the recent past – civil rights, feminism, gay rights, and more – and thought they could use the Constitution to retreat into a past largely of their own invention. Future scholars might even debate what, exactly, Antonin Scalia meant as they parse his body of writing, and might find that his very words could be subject to multiple readings. That would be the final, most delicious and fitting irony for “originalism.”
By: Steven Conn, Author/Professor, Ohio State; The Huffington Post Blog, July 7, 2014
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