“The Conservative Doctrinaire” And The Sheer Inhumanity Of Mitt Romney
“Now later he decided to run for governor of Michigan, and so you can imagine that having closed the factory and moved all the production to Wisconsin was a very sensitive issue to him, for his campaign,” explained Romney, who described a subsequent campaign parade in which the school band marching with his father knew how to play Wisconsin’s fight song, but not Michigan’s.“Every time they would start playing ‘On Wisconsin, On Wisconsin,’ my dad’s political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop, because they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin,” said Romney, laughing.
Thus ended an anecdote Mitt Romney shared with supporters in Wisconsin via a campaign conference call in an attempt to demonstrate that he had some sort of connection with their state. Now, this was far from the first time that the former governor of Massachusetts has said things that reinforce the idea that he is an absurdly wealthy hedge fund tycoon who has no compassion whatsoever for any social set lower than his NASCAR- and major league franchise-owning friends. He has previously let us know, for instance, that corporations are people, that he likes to fire people who provide services to him, and that his passion for sports seems to depend entirely on how the owners he knows will be affected. Romney’s other gaffes show a certain level of cluelessness about the average voter, or at the very least a total inability to relate to them in a way that they can understand. But this quote, as well as the values that underlie it, are far more dangerous, and emblematic of the conservative movement as a whole.
Without a doubt, not even Mitt Romney could be considered gauche enough to have shared this anecdote were he still competing for the primary votes of Republicans in Michigan, but with that win and those delegates safely in the bag, he had absolutely no trouble laughing about how his family eliminated the jobs of perhaps those same voters he was courting not too long ago. But not only does Romney have no shame about sharing this story in public, he did so gleefully in an attempt to show some sort of relationship to the state he is currently campaigning for. In Romney’s mind, after all, the voters of Wisconsin should be happy because they got a factory and jobs, regardless of whether it came at the expense of destroyed hopes and dreams on the other side of Lake Michigan.
Unlike his other gaffes, it’s not just that Romney was too tone-deaf to understand how his comments could sound off-putting to voters. Instead, he actively expected this anecdote to appeal positively to Republican primary voters in Wisconsin. The unfortunate part is, he may be right.
In the same way that Wisconsin’s gain was Michigan’s loss regarding the American Motors factory owned by George Romney, the conservative mentality regarding most aspects of politics, economics and civil rights is by default antagonistic and competitive, and uses the logic of a zero-sum game whereby any party’s gain must necessarily be another party’s loss. If the government provides economic support such as jobless benefits or stimulus, it must necessarily have hurt the economic prospects of those who were still on their feet, irrespective of the benefits of reintroducing that money back into the economy. If the LGBT community gains the fundamental civil right of marriage, it must, by necessity and definition, have impinged on the civil rights of heterosexuals, even if nobody can precisely articulate exactly why. If women are granted access to the medications they need to lead a happy and healthy existence, it can only have come at the expense of the the right of religious freedom, which has now been deemed by conservatives to include the right to impose one’s religious values on one’s employees. If millions of people are successfully added to the insurance rolls, then that must, by logical default, have resulted in death panels or denial of care to other, more deserving people. In the conservative mind, after all, there is only so much of any one thing to go around: consequently, someone must win, and someone must lose.
Mitt Romney is inhumane, and cannot be allowed to assume the presidency. He is not inhumane because he sees no problem with strapping his dog to the roof of his car, or because he is comically inept at small talk. He is not inhumane because he likes to talk about his friendships with sports team owners, or even because he hired a lobbyist in an effort to secure the permitting process for a car elevator in his dream mansion in San Diego. He isn’t even inhumane because he used his position at Bain Capital to destroy jobs, hopes and dreams for his own economic benefit. Most of all, Mitt Romney is inhumane because he, like the conservative movement that surrounds him, does not believe that all Americans can enjoy increased freedoms and economic prosperity, to say nothing of understanding the conditions and policies that would achieve this end.
Ultimately, this is why Barack Obama will be re-elected, and conservatism will fail. Conservative Teen Magazine notwithstanding, younger generations tend to take a more cooperative, collaborative view of the world, and will turn out to the candidates and political parties that embrace this vision. As the conservative movement continues to embrace the doctrinaire plutocracy embodied by Mitt Romney, it will ultimately wither away in all but the reddest areas—right alongside the elderly white Fox News demographic to which it appeals.
By:Dante Atkins, Daily Kos, April 1, 2012
“Content Free Propaganda”: “We The People” And Other Things That Aren’t True
According to a recent study by the University of California, 93% of income growth since the economic collapse of 2008 has gone to the wealthiest 1% of American households. Just 20 years ago, the amount of national income growth earned by the top 1% was less than half that.
So, if you are a right wing movement and not even you can justify concentrated economic and political power like that, what do you do? Well, you produce a video that celebrates “freedom” and shakes its fists at “tyranny” and you hope that the gullible will think the plutocratic takeover of our country is as American as apple pie.
The video is called “We the People” and it looks like it’s gone viral on the Right, collecting more than six million hits. I saw it because a friend of my wife’s thought it was just great and was sure we would too. Guess she didn’t get the memo!
The video is organized like an open letter to President Obama and its tone is a perfect replication of the gauzy, abstract vernacular of Fox News.
As the narrator informs President Obama, We The People “have stated resolutely we reject your vision for our country.” We The People “have assembled across America resisting your efforts to subvert our constitution and undermine our liberty.”
The video is filled with the sort of Americana that appeals to Sarah Palin’s right wing “real Americans.” As the Battle Hymn of the Republic plays in the background, scenes of Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial, a saluting Marine, an Apache attack helicopter, the Preamble to the Constitution, American flags, American flags, American flags and more American flags fill the screen. Even a Bald Eagle makes a guest appearance.
The video claims to speak for We the People but its voice is boilerplate Tea Party Republican: “Our greatest treasure is freedom;” “We believe in the power of the individual;” “Freedom is the capacity of self-determination.”
There are also the Thomas Jefferson-like “long train of abuses” hurled at the President: “you have expanded government, violated our Constitution, confounded laws, seized private industry, destroyed jobs, perverted our economy, curtailed free speech, corrupted our currency, weakened our national security, and endangered our sovereignty.”
And this is why, the video’s producers say, “we” are assembling all across this land, so that “we” can deliver “our” message that: “We will not accept tyranny under any guise;” that the redistribution of “the fruits of our labor is Statism and will not be tolerated;” that “We The People will defend our liberty;” and that “we will protect our beloved country and America’s exceptionalism will prevail.”
At first I thought “We the People” was the kind of parody Saturday Night Live might do as a spoof of right wing propaganda. Even its title was laughhable – “We the People” – as if the 70% of We the People don’t exist who think Democrats are right and Republicans are wrong when it comes to such key questions as whether to tax the rich more, to eliminate subsidies for oil companies or to preserve America’s endangered safety net.
But, at the end of the day, it is also disheartening to see how easy it is for the hard work of raising the level of understanding and debate in this country to all go to waste as vacuous, dishonest, manipulative and utterly content-free propaganda like this is produced to bamboozle even very smart people like those who sent us this insulting piece of reactionary performance art.
Then again, given recent experience, why should we be surprised that so many seem impervious to facts and reason or who now see politics as nothing more than brute force and war — a take-no-prisoners, law of the jungle scramble for survival of the fittest?
But I did like the Bald Eagles.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, March 31, 2012
“The Gas-Price Conspiracy Theory”: Republican Paranoia Strikes Deeper
Stop, hey, what’s that sound? Actually, it’s the noise a great political party makes when it loses what’s left of its mind. And it happened — where else? — on Fox News on Sunday, when Mitt Romney bought fully into the claim that gas prices are high thanks to an Obama administration plot.
This claim isn’t just nuts; it’s a sort of craziness triple play — a lie wrapped in an absurdity swaddled in paranoia. It’s the sort of thing you used to hear only from people who also believed that fluoridated water was a Communist plot. But now the gas-price conspiracy theory has been formally endorsed by the likely Republican presidential nominee.
Before we get to the larger implications of this endorsement, let’s get the facts on gas prices straight.
First, the lie: No, President Obama did not say, as many Republicans now claim, that he wanted higher gasoline prices. He did once say that a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions would cause electricity prices to “skyrocket” — an unfortunate word choice. But saying that such a system would raise energy prices was just a factual statement, not a declaration of intent to punish American consumers. The claim that Mr. Obama wanted higher prices is a lie, pure and simple.
And it’s a lie wrapped in an absurdity, because the president of the United States doesn’t control gasoline prices, or even have much influence over those prices. Oil prices are set in a world market, and America, which accounts for only about a tenth of world production, can’t move those prices much. Indeed, the recent rise in gas prices has taken place despite rising U.S. oil production and falling imports.
Finally, there’s the paranoia, the belief that liberals in general, and Obama administration officials in particular, are trying to make driving unaffordable as part of a nefarious plot against the American way of life. And, no, I’m not exaggerating. This is what you hear even from thoroughly mainstream conservatives.
For example, last year George Will declared that the Obama administration’s support for train travel had nothing to do with relieving congestion and reducing environmental impacts. No, he insisted, “the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.” Who knew that Dagny Taggart, the railroad executive heroine of “Atlas Shrugged,” was a Commie?
O.K., this is all kind of funny. But it’s also deeply scary.
As Richard Hofstadter pointed out in his classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” crazy conspiracy theories have been an American tradition ever since clergymen began warning that Thomas Jefferson was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati. But it’s one thing to have a paranoid fringe playing a marginal role in a nation’s political life; it’s something quite different when that fringe takes over a whole party, to the point where candidates must share, or pretend to share, that fringe’s paranoia to receive the party’s presidential nod.
And it’s not just gas prices, of course. In fact, the conspiracy theories are proliferating so fast it’s hard to keep up. Thus, large numbers of Republicans — and we’re talking about important political figures, not random supporters — firmly believe that global warming is a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a global conspiracy involving thousands of scientists, not one of whom has broken the code of omertà. Meanwhile, others are attributing the recent improvement in economic news to a dastardly plot to withhold stimulus funds, releasing them just before the 2012 election. And let’s not even get into health reform.
Why is this happening? At least part of the answer must lie in the way right-wing media create an alternate reality. For example, did you hear about how the cost of Obamacare just doubled? It didn’t, but millions of Fox-viewers and Rush-listeners believe that it did. Naturally, people who constantly hear about the evil that liberals do are ready and willing to believe that everything bad is the result of a dastardly liberal plot. And these are the people who vote in Republican primaries.
But what about the broader electorate?
If and when he wins the nomination, Mr. Romney will try, as a hapless adviser put it, to shake his Etch A Sketch — that is, to erase the record of his pandering to the crazy right and convince voters that he’s actually a moderate. And maybe he can pull it off.
But let’s hope that he can’t, because the kind of pandering he has engaged in during his quest for the nomination matters. Whatever Mr. Romney may personally believe, the fact is that by endorsing the right’s paranoid fantasies, he is helping to further a dangerous trend in America’s political life. And he should be held accountable for his actions.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 22, 2012
“A Moment Of Silence, Please”: MSNBC And Pat Buchanan Part Ways
It’s officially the end of an era for MSNBC and Pat Buchanan. How … anticlimactic:
My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.
The calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?? […]
Pat then goes on to blame loudmouthed Obama supporters, homosexuals, Jews, and I don’t know, maybe werewolves. Yeah, let’s say werewolves.
Buchanan’s recent book may have been MSNBC’s excuse for finally taking him off the air for good, but it seems mostly to be a “final straw” sort of thing. Buchanan has been mourning the downfall of white America for a considerable time now, so this latest book was hardly new ground for him. He has been accused of anti-Semitism even by such conservative stalwarts as William F. Buckley, and got in hot water a few years ago for a bizarre column proposing that Hitler was misunderstood. No, his pissy statement sells himself rather short on the number of ridiculously bigoted things that would regularly come from his mouth. No matter what he said on air or off, though, the network would always prop him up in front of the television cameras.
Well, it’s not like he died or anything. We’ll still be hearing from him. Maybe Fox News will give him a home, since that seems to be where discredited pundits who have otherwise worn out their welcome in polite company go to ply their trade.
By: Hunter, Daily Kos, February 16, 2012
If The Republicans Lose In 2012, Expect Business As Usual
Parents of spoiled children are known to dread Christmas morning on years when it isn’t certain that the present inside the box is what little Chase or Caitlin wants. “Are we in for a tantrum?” they think to themselves. It is with similar trepidation that George Packer is observing Election 2012. If Mitt Romney wins the nomination but loses the general election, the GOP “will continue down into the same dark hole where Palin, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Santorum, and now Gingrich all lurk,” he writes, drawing on lessons he gleaned from Election 1972.
All plausible! So are the rebuttals that Noah Millman and Daniel Larison offer. But my theory about what happens if the GOP loses is based on the proposition that the future of the conservative movement and its influence on Republicans is a business story as much as a political one.
Think of it this way. If Mitt Romney loses, these are all things that you can count on happening:
Fox News is going to keep stoking the cultural resentments and victimhood pathology of white conservatives, and rewarding politicians who appeal to that ethos with lucrative commentator contracts politicians. Put another way, the incentives for more Sarah Palins and Michele Bachmanns will be there.
Rush Limbaugh is going to keep attracting a sizable audience with his talent for the medium, his schtick implying that the Obama “regime” is illegitimate, and his endless ability to flatter the prejudices of his audience.
The conservative publishing market will keep rewarding Mark Levin-style books that proceed as if America is engaged in a simple binary struggle, with liberty on one side and a series of interchangeable bogeymen on the other: tyranny, utopia, radical Islam, political correctness, liberals, secularists, etc.
See, all the commentary you see about the right and its future takes as its starting point the notion of 2008 as a historic defeat. For folks whose highest priority is conservative governance, that’s what it was — eight years of frustration, betrayal, and disillusionment, culminating in a huge defeat.
But the period from 2000 to 2012 has been lucrative as hell if you’re Roger Ailes or Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin or Andrew Breitbart or Sarah Palin. That isn’t to say they don’t earnestly want Republicans to win, or that they’re faking their preference for conservative governance. It’s just to say that advancing their careers or enterprises is seemingly their priority. As swimmingly as that project is proceeding, why would anyone expect them to change course?
It isn’t their reality that’s come crashing down. They’ve never been so successful before in their lives!
This is what happens when an ideological movement basically merges with a collection of for-profit ventures. Incentives no longer align. Ends and means get mixed up. Herman Cain book tours turn into seemingly viable presidential campaigns. And Donald Trump is asked to host a debate.
Movement conservatism’s entertainers aren’t the only people influencing the Republican Party, as is evident at four year intervals, when the GOP electorate chooses a champion the entertainers hate. But most GOP voters aren’t political junkies. In between elections, when most Republicans stop paying attention to politics, the relatively sizable Fox News and talk radio audiences can wield disproportionate influence on everything from legislative agendas to off-year elections. And TV personalities, talk-radio hosts, and ideological Web sites serve as the right’s intellectuals, determining what ideas get out to the junkies, and later to the rank-and-file.
The right has other intellectuals who actually care about things like policy, governing, and intellectual honesty. What many of them don’t realize is that until they meaningfully challenge the Conservative Entertainment Complex, their ideas and the direction they hope to push the conservative movement is always going to be overshadowed: by Birthers, or a righteous Andrew Breitbart/James O’Keefe crusade against ACORN, or the Glenn Beck show, or months of speculation about whether Sarah Palin will run for president. That is to say, they’ll be overshadowed by what looks like a part of the political movement, but is largely a moneymaking venture.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, February 2, 2012
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