“Blame-The-Victim Mentality”: Senate Obstruction Through The “Funhouse Mirror”
One of the most durable GOP talking points in support of its plea to gain control of the Senate is that mean old Harry Reid, doing the bidding of scary radical Barack Obama, runs the place like the House (well, the House as run by Democrats when they controlled it!), allowing no debate or amendments. That argument apparently got under the skin of Juan Williams of Fox News and The Hill, not exactly a big liberal, who called it out as the inverse of the truth, using the stalled confirmation of the president’s Surgeon General nominee as an example:
The nation has not had a surgeon general since November 2013 because the GOP is blocking the president’s nominee, Dr. Vivek Murthy. At a time of medical emergency, what is the Republicans’ problem with Murthy?
In October 2012, the doctor tweeted: “Tired of politicians playing politics w/guns, putting lives at risk b/c they’re scared of the NRA. Guns are a health care issue.”
Dr. Murthy, a graduate of Harvard and the Yale School of Medicine, has impressive credentials for a 36-year-old. He created a breakthrough new company to lower the cost of drugs and bring new drugs to market more quickly.
But his big sin, for Senate Republicans, is that as a veteran of emergency rooms Dr. Murthy expressed his concern about the nation’s indisputable plague of gun violence.
When Dr. Murthy was nominated, the National Rife Association announced plans to “score” a vote on the doctor’s nomination, meaning any Republican or Democrat running in a conservative state who voted for Murthy would be punished in NRA literature and feel the pain in their fundraising come midterm election season.
When public anxiety over Ebola became a GOP talking point, 29 House Democrats wrote to Reid calling for the Senate to expose the Republicans for their deceitful strategy. They wanted, and still want, Senate Democrats to push for a vote on the surgeon general nominee and force the Republicans to explain their opposition. Their thinking is that swift action is needed to put a surgeon general in place and give the American people a trusted source of guidance on Ebola.
The Tea Party’s favorite senator, Republican Ted Cruz of Texas, last week agreed on the need for a surgeon general in a CNN interview. But in the funhouse mirror-style so loved by the Republican base, Cruz blamed Obama for the vacancy.
“Of course we should have a surgeon general in place,” Cruz told CNN’s Candy Crowley. “And we don’t have one because President Obama, instead of nominating a health professional, he nominated someone who is an anti-gun activist.”
This is a pretty good example of the kind of blame-the-victim mentality whereby the party of obstruction is projecting its posture onto its opponents. And we can obviously expect a lot more of it if Republicans gain control of the Senate and with Harry Reid out of the way begin cooperating with House GOPers to send bill after bill to the White House.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, October 27, 2014
“Unbridled Opportunism”: Republicans Want You To Be Terrified Of Ebola—So You’ll Vote For Them
The first transmission of Ebola within the United States, from Liberian visitor Thomas Eric Duncan to a Dallas nurse, marked a turning point in the political dialogue surrounding the virus toward an unbridled opportunism. The subsequent diagnosis of a second nurse and other revelations—that she took a flight shortly before she began showing symptoms, apparently with Centers for Disease Control’s approval—have only accelerated it. Obviously a degree of paranoia and sensationalism has colored the Ebola story since long before this week. But this week’s developments provided conservatives the psychological ammunition they needed to justify using the specter of a major Ebola outbreak as an election-year base-mobilization strategy.
Republican candidates like Scott Brown are now in on the game, and so is House Speaker John Boehner. Fox News, with the exception of Shepard Smith, is ginning up more Ebola terror than CNN, which had been the vanguard of Ebola hysteria until this week. Matt Drudge’s call to panic was not only deranged—
self-quarantine
—but unintentionally self-defeating, as one cannot vote if one is self-quarantined.
Engaging in the politics of fear requires a pretense. You can find people who hype mortal danger, without a sheen of plausibility, shouting into bullhorns on street corners. Politicians and their enablers need persuasive stories that make the threats sound real. And the story that many conservatives are telling about Ebola goes something like this: We’d love to eschew hysteria, and we’d love to believe our public health officials can break the chain of transmission within the U.S., but the Obama administration has proven itself untrustworthy.
“This is an episode when people want to trust the government, people need to trust the government and they can’t,” columnist George Will intoned on Fox News earlier this month. “What was happening exactly 12 months ago? A government shutdown and the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov. Since then we’ve had intelligence failures regarding ISIS; we’ve had the debacle of the veterans handling of healthcare; and the Secret Service that couldn’t lock the front door of the White House. So people think this is a gang that can’t shoot straight.”
University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds repackaged Will’s basic argument in USA Today on Monday. Among those he cited was “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd, who added lost IRS emails, Edward Snowden’s NSA disclosures, and the child-migrant crisis to the litany. Members of the media are enabling this opportunism. They should be anathematizing it.
The competence argument is appealing because it doesn’t require dabbling in pseudoscience or xenophobia—just healthy skepticism of our governing institutions. Moreover, I’m certain this sort of skepticism does help explain why a large minority of people in the U.S. feels at risk of contracting Ebola. But they are at no great risk. That the risk is provably infinitesimal underscores the fact that the issue with Ebola isn’t the virus itself so much as paranoia about it.
Even if each of the failures and crises enumerated above were as unambiguous and damning as the administration’s critics claim, it doesn’t follow that federal health officials aren’t up to the task of controlling Ebola, or that the public at large faces any meaningful risk. It might follow that we shouldn’t believe this season’s Affordable Care Act enrollment period will be glitch-free, and that the Vetrerans Affairs’s problems won’t be solved with new management alone. The point is not that we should never draw inferences from this administration’s previous failings. But it’s a fallacy to arbitrarily extend that second-guessing to the Ebola containment effort, while at the same time happily taking it for granted that the vast majority of things we entrust the government to do will continue apace.
Ebola carries a crucial mix of novelty, visibility, and lethality that ripens it for demagogy. But conservatives have selected a familiar line of demagogy—that you can’t trust the government to administer things and solve problems—and imposed it on to a situation where stoking reflexive distrust of the government tugs at the lid of a big Pandora’s box.
The sad irony is that state and local institutions, so beloved on the right, were apparently out to sea when Ebola arrived in Dallas, and health officials there would have let things drift further into chaos had the federal government not intruded further. Not that they’ve performed flawlessly, but we need more of their expertise and involvement, not less. Texas Governor Rick Perry—who in gentler times plays footsie with secession—is grateful for this intrusion, and has “great faith” that their efforts will succeed. Perhaps he’ll surprise us further by dismissing the idea that the federal officials who’ve stepped up against Ebola shouldn’t be trusted because about a year ago, some federal healthcare website was beset by glitches.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, October 16, 2014
“Under the Dome”: How The Conservative Media Are Keeping The GOP From Moving Past The Same-Sex Marriage Debate
Over the weekend, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee issued a call to arms to conservatives not to give up the fight against same-sex marriage, based on his bizarre belief that no decision of the Supreme Court has the force of law unless Congress passes legislation to confirm it. Because of that, Huckabee says, the fight can continue unhindered no matter what the court does. “I’m utterly disgusted with fellow Republicans who want to walk away from the issue of judicial supremacy just because it’s politically volatile,” he said. “Here’s my advice: Grow a spine!” Huckabee’s legal analysis may be idiosyncratic (to put it kindly), but his position — that this isn’t a fight conservatives should abandon just because they’ve nearly lost it — is one with plenty of purchase among the Republican faithful. And he’s hardly the only one with a media pulpit from which to preach it. In fact, the division within the GOP has a parallel in the conservative media. The presence of hard-liners (or dead-enders, if you prefer) like Huckabee is going to make it all the more difficult and painful for the party to evolve in the way its more sober strategists know it must.
Conservatives worked very hard over a period of decades to build up their own media to serve as an alternative and a counterweight to a mainstream press they saw as biased against them. This project was spectacularly successful, particularly with the explosion of right-wing talk radio in the 1980s and early 1990s, and the launch of Fox News in 1996. It wasn’t until the last couple of years that people began questioning whether it was doing the movement more harm than good by encasing conservatives in a self-reinforcing bubble from which it became increasingly difficult to see the outside world clearly.
Just as there are divisions within the GOP, there are divisions within the conservative media. And just as the party’s conservatives make it hard to make strategically necessary shifts — or simply avoid moving too far to the right — the continued power of hard-line media figures can keep the party from modernizing.
Since 2012, Republicans have been fretting about how they can “reach out” to minority groups, particularly Latinos, in order to widen their appeal beyond the older white folks who are the core of the party. The trouble is that it’s hard to reach out when elected officials within your party keep loudly proclaiming their anti-immigrant views. The same is true on gay marriage. The party’s national strategists would like nothing better than for the issue to go away. They know that the policy outcome is inevitable and public opinion is not turning back, so there’s little point in mounting some kind of rear-guard action against it, one that will only make the party look outdated and out of touch. But as Greg and I both pointed out last week, potential future presidential candidate Ted Cruz is going to force a debate on it in 2016 whether other Republicans like it or not.
Some parts of the conservative media will do the same thing. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters observes that in most of its programming, Fox News has all but stopped talking about same-sex marriage. But that’s not going to silence Huckabee (whose show runs on Fox on the weekends), or Rush Limbaugh, or many of the other radio hosts with huge audiences. As long as they press the issue, the Republican base will still demand that candidates proclaim their objections to the changes taking place in the country, and the harder it remains for the party to move past its vehement opposition to marriage equality. Everyone knows that evolution will have to take place eventually, but the conservative media have the power to make the transition inordinately painful.
Fox’s abdication of the marriage issue demonstrates that the network functions as the semi-official organ of the Republican Party. Roger Ailes may be in business to make money, but he won’t do so in ways that harm the interests of the GOP. The same, however, can’t be said of everyone with a large conservative audience. On a whole range of domestic issues, from immigration to marriage equality to reproductive rights, they’re going to continue pulling the party to the right even when it has to turn back to the center or risk electoral disaster (like, say, the election of a certain former secretary of state to the White House). Conservative media have been great at keeping the rabble angry and excited, getting them to the polls and getting them to open their wallets. But when the party needs to take a cold hard look at reality and evolve or get left behind, the same media are going to be an albatross holding it back.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 13, 2014
“Hyping The Threat”: Fear And Anxiety Are Bigger Threats Than Ebola
During the summer, I got hooked on a TNT drama called The Last Ship, an apocalyptic thriller about a global pandemic that wipes out most of the human population. As it happens, the telltale signs of this killer plague bear a striking resemblance to the symptoms of the Ebola virus.
Indeed, Hollywood has been inspired by Ebola for decades, almost since the virus was first identified in 1976. But in those fictional crises, including that portrayed in the 1995 film Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman, the virus has changed — either through mutation or human intervention — to become airborne, like smallpox and tuberculosis. If you are a screenwriter, you need that element of quick and easy contamination to sustain edge-of-your-seat suspense.
Characters in The Last Ship, for example, enter unfamiliar territory fully clad in protective gear for fear of suddenly sharing space with an infected person. They dare not breathe the same air if they expect to survive.
Real-world Ebola, however, isn’t that easy to catch, according to experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It has caused a devastating pandemic in West Africa, where the medical infrastructure is poor to non-existent, but it won’t come close to that here, they say.
Still, judging from the news media, lots of my professional colleagues have seen Last Ship and Outbreak. They’re in full panic mode, hyping the threat and speculating about the possibility of a global pandemic that swamps the Western world as it has West Africa. That hysteria has only increased since Thomas Eric Duncan died last week in a Dallas hospital, becoming the first Ebola fatality in the United States.
As Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University, told The New York Times, “… at the moment, we have a much larger outbreak of anxiety than we have of Ebola.”
That’s partly due to the madness of partisan politics, where critics of President Obama look for any reason, rational or not, to blast him. Fox Not-News has had a steady stream of commentators blaming the president for Ebola patients in the United States, as if he’s the mad scientist of a Hollywood thriller.
But the 24-hour news cycle also demands hysteria, whether from liberal commentators or conservatives. Fear is one of the most powerful of human emotions, and it drives eyeballs to the TV screen and clicks online. If there is no genuine crisis, a manufactured one will have to do.
It’s also true, psychologists point out, that human beings have difficulty assessing risks. Many Americans, they note, have a fear of flying and would rather drive a long distance because they believe it’s less dangerous to do so. But numbers show that commercial aviation is much safer than doing battle with your fellow road warriors.
In 2012, the last year for which statistics were available, 33,561 people died in motor vehicles in the United States. The number killed in commercial airline accidents that same year? Zero.
If humans better understood risk, we’d focus more on the refusal of some Americans to have their children vaccinated against highly contagious childhood diseases. There is little risk from inoculations, but a grave risk in allowing an illness such as measles or whooping cough to get out of control.
Meanwhile, Ebola is indeed wreaking havoc. Just ask Sama King, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Sierra Leone, one of the countries that have been hardest hit. After 30 years in her adopted country, much of that in Atlanta, she was thinking of returning to the place of her birth. But she has had to put that off to become an activist and fundraiser instead.
“We are grateful for what the international community has done, but it needs to do more. If (international agencies) had intervened earlier, we wouldn’t be where we are now,” she said.
King has worked to increase awareness of the pandemic and to raise money for food and protective gear. She is now focusing on the many orphans left behind in Sierra Leone, children who have nowhere to go, whose relatives may be afraid to keep them because of the stigma associated with Ebola.
Now that’s a genuine crisis.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor at the University of Georgia; The National Memo, October 11, 2014
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