“Heads-Up”: Republican Post State Of The Union Whining Today
Here’s a heads-up: After President Obama delivers his State of the Union address tomorrow, Republicans will wave their hands in front of their faces and whine that it was viciously, horribly, frighteningly “partisan.” And what will this partisanship consist of? Hold on to your hat here. He’s expected to argue for the same policies he has been arguing for and pursuing for the last four years. If the Republican members of Congress restrain themselves from shouting “You lie!” during the speech, it’ll only be because of their superior breeding and manners.
This, of course, is a follow-up to Obama’s inauguration speech, which was condemned by Republicans not because he said anything mean about them, but because he talked about some of the policies he prefers. That, you see, is “partisanship,” and when the other side does it, it’s beyond the pale. So in today’s Politico, under the headline “Obama’s State of the Union: Aggressive,” we read, without any particular evidence for the assertion, that the SOTU “will be less a presidential olive branch than a congressional cattle prod.” Surely this will be the first time a president ever used the speech to encourage Congress to pass legislation he supports. “That strategy has its dangers,” the article goes on. “If Americans perceive Obama as too partisan, he’ll lose a serious share of his personal popularity.” All that’s missing is a quote from Bill Galston explaining how the President is courting doom by not adopting Republican policy positions (I assume Galston was busy over the weekend).
You might say that because he originally ran for office promising to bring Republicans and Democrats together, Obama has a special responsibility to be accommodating to the other side. But let’s not forget that nearly every president comes into office promising to bring Republicans and Democrats together. Remember George W. “I’m a uniter, not a divider” Bush? Bill Clinton said it, too. But Obama seems to get an unusual amount of criticism from both his opponents and folks in the media for doing the same things that every president does, with every article an opportunity to remind readers that in 2008 he ran promising to bring people together.
Let me offer a prediction about tomorrow’s speech. There will be a good deal of now-familiar language about how he’s open to ideas from anywhere, and how if we all just be honest with each other we can come up with common-sense solutions to our problems. He’ll make a couple of good-natured jokes at his opponents’ expense (something Ronald Reagan particularly loved to do in his SOTUs). And he’ll go into numbing detail about his policy agenda. In other words, it’ll be a lot like every other SOTU in the last 20 or 30 years. And afterward, Republicans will cry that it was the most partisan State of the Union speech they’ve ever heard, and claim that they were all ready to work with him, but after being so terribly insulted, they just have no alternative but to oppose everything Obama wants to do, hold up his nominees, and proclaim him to be the enemy of American values.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 11, 2013
“Genuinely Crazy Or Brain Dead”: Republican Congressman Steve Stockman Invites Ted Nugent To State Of The Union
Ted Nugent, the unhinged former rock star who’s now best known for his repeated threats against President Obama, will be in attendance at the president’s State of the Union address Tuesday night.
Nugent’s invitation comes from genuinely crazy congressman Steve Stockman (R-TX), whom Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy has aptly described as “the closest his state ever came to electing a gun.” Stockman — who is supported by every major “gun rights” organization, has sponsored legislation banning all background checks, waiting periods, and registration of firearms, and threatened to impeach the president over his gun safety executive orders — presumably invited Nugent as a counterweight to the more than 20 gun violence survivors who will be in attendance.
“I am excited to have a patriot like Ted Nugent joining me in the House Chamber to hear from President Obama,” Representative Stockman said in a statement Monday. “After the address, I’m sure Ted will have plenty to say.”
Nugent has had plenty to say leading up to the address. An NRA board member, Nugent has repeatedly threatened Obama over the president’s support for gun safety measures. In January Nugent referred to Obama as “an evil, dangerous man who hates America and hates freedom” and warned “if you want another Concord Bridge, I got some buddies.” In April, 2012, Nugent’s claim that he “will either be dead or in jail by this time next year” if Obama won re-election drew Secret Service attention.
Stockman’s decision to invite Nugent is almost certain to backfire on the Republican Party politically, given the contrast it creates with Republican leaders such as Eric Cantor’s attempts to moderate the GOP’s tone. If Republicans really want to stop being the “stupid party,” then step one should be staying far, far away from the likes of Nugent.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, February 11, 2013
“Yep, It’s A Problem”: Chris Christie Is A Bit Of A Hothead
We all know Chris Christie is a bit of a hothead. I mean, it’s a bit like saying a hothead is a bit of a hothead. It’s not observation but truism. Republicans love him or loved him for it. And Democrats started to too because his blow ups don’t all follow ideology. There was this time back in 2011 when he flipped out at a reporter for questioning whether a Muslim-American judge he’d appointed to the bench might be a security risk or sympathetic to al Qaeda.
Then there was Sandy. Republicans were irate; Dems cheered. What it all really comes down to is that in addition to being a very big man Christie is clearly a big-hearted man. I don’t mean that in the sense that he’s necessarily a great guy in every respect. But he doesn’t do artifice well. He has his emotions on his sleeve. And on his lapel and his pants and his hat if he’s wearing one. He’s just all out there in the 24/7 run of performance art called being Chris Christie.
But this calling the “hack” doctor thing strikes me as a big deal. Not in the sense of the fate of the republic being at stake but in the sense of Christie’s future above the rank of governor.
Here’s what TPM Reader JL just wrote in …
Christie never had the remotest shot at the nomination. At least not after Sandy. But he had a shot at making some noise. Not anymore I suspect. And I say that as something of a fan.The thing is that to take CC seriously as a prez candidate you have to believe that his anger is an asset that he deploys deliberately and skillfully. Which often appears to be the case. But if it starts to look like the anger controls him rather than the other way around, his appeal really plummets.
I suspect the ill advised phone call was a pretty big deal. If I were he, I’d be working overtime on damage control.
This strikes me as exactly right. Calling this women up and berating her over the phone is the sign of someone whose anger has the better of him and lacks impulse control.
Governors don’t have armies or security services. So if they’re a bit nuts or reckless it’s not that big a deal. People evaluate presidents very, very differently.
By: Josh Marshall, Editor and Publisher, Talking Points Memo, February 8, 2013
“Real Guns Vs Virtual Guns”: Curious Conclusions That Overlook The Evidence
It’s been nearly two months since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., and in that time, there’s been quite a bit of debate about gun violence. Some of it, however, has led segments of the population to draw curious conclusions.
Last week, for example, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) told MSNBC, “I think video games is [sic] a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people.” It was an odd thing for anyone, least of all a sitting senator, to say on national television.
But the sentiment, however strange, appears to reflect the opinions of Alexander’s party.
As Republican leaders insist that the debate over gun violence in America should also address the role of violent entertainment, the latest findings from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling released Thursday showed that the vast majority of GOP voters nationwide believe video games are a bigger threat than guns.
Given the choice between the two, 67 percent of Republican voters said violent video games represent a bigger threat to safety than guns. Fourteen percent said guns are the bigger safety threat.
I’ll gladly concede that societal violence is an extremely complex, multi-faceted problem, and there are cultural factors to consider.
But to think virtual guns pose a more serious threat to the public than actual guns — by a lopsided margin — is to overlook the available evidence.
To reiterate what we discussed last week, even if we put aside the irony of the underlying point — blaming simulated, pixelated guns is fine; blaming actual guns is not — these arguments aren’t new. Plenty of officials have been arguing for years that violent games desensitizes young people to violence and contributes to a larger corrosive effect on the culture.
There’s just very little evidence to support the claims. Hunches and cultural criticisms notwithstanding, social science research does not bolster the contention that gaming and gun violence are connected. (Adam Lanza was reportedly obsessed with “Dance Dance Revolution” — which is a game, as the name suggests, about moving feet, not shooting weapons.)
For that matter, the United States is not the only country with young people who play a lot of video games, but it is the only country with high rates of gun violence.
Gaming is a huge cultural phenomenon in countries like South Korea, England, Japan, and Canada — and they’re all playing many of the same games Americans enjoy — and yet, none of these countries comes close to the U.S. when it comes to deadly shootings.
And why not? Sociologists can speak to the differences in more detail, but I suspect it has something to do with access to firearms. It may seem tautological, but let’s state it for the record anyway: societies with fewer guns have less gun violence, whether they’re playing “Halo” or not.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 8, 2013
“Wah, Wah”: When Did The Republicans Become Such Whiners?
When did rural, Republican voters become namby-pamby whiners? A number of things have bothered me about the GOP plan to gerrymander the Electoral College, not least of which being the anti-democratic (as opposed to anti-Democratic) quality to it—what I have characterized as an iniquitous attempt to bargain with an unfriendly reality, and what New York Magazine‘s Jonathan Chait calls winning without actually having to win.
Sure the shameless power grab is deeply annoying. But so are the pusillanimous excuses foisted by its advocates.
In case you missed it, some swing-state Republicans want to change the way their states allot electoral votes. The states in question all went for Obama and have Republican governors; the scheme floated would allocate electors by congressional district, in many cases awarding the majority of electoral votes to the candidate who got a minority of the votes. Like I said, it’s a pretty transparent attempt to rig the Electoral College, and as such has mostly collapsed under its own weight as the media and the public focus on it.
But it’s worth listening to the excuses proffered for the idea. Virginia state Sen. Charles Carrico Sr., who sponsored the defunct bill in the commonwealth, told the Washington Post that his constituents “were concerned that it didn’t matter what they did, that more densely populated areas were going to outvote them.” And, as Chait relays, there’s Jase Bolger, the speaker of the Michigan house:
I hear that more and more from our citizens in various parts of the state of Michigan, that they don’t feel like their vote for president counts, because another area of the state may dominate that or could sway their vote.
Or to sum up Carrico and Bolger: “Wah!”
Their constituents worry that they might lose elections because their views are in a minority? Suck it up and try to talk your way back into the majority. They don’t feel like their vote counts because they might lose? Losing is a part of life and it’s concomitant with politics in a free society. Participating in the political system is a right—winning is a privilege that has to be earned by dint of getting a majority of your fellow citizens to cast their precious ballots for you. (And, by the way, voting is a right which tends to be much easier to exercise in rural areas than in urban ones where lines can stretch for hours.)
And guess what—the fact is that being in the political minority is neither an excuse not to vote nor an excuse try to rig the process.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, February 7, 2013
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