“Liberal Fascism” And Other Rightist Deceptions: The Republican Tyranny Of Cliches
It turns out that for $50 and the time it takes to fill out an application you too can be a Pulitzer Prize Award nominee. Well, actually, you can’t. All you really get for your 50 bucks is the right to call yourself a Pulitzer Prize “entrant.”
But that hasn’t stopped conservative blogger and book author Jonah Goldberg (last year’s #7 on Alex Pareene’s popular Salon “Hack List”) from falsely claiming on the dust jackets of his last two books that he’d “twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize” — until his faux honorific was exposed as (to use Pareene’s words) the “utter bullshit” it was.
According to Bill Dedman who writes for msnbc.com, when Goldberg’s “résumé inflation” was first pointed out to him, Goldberg claimed he hadn’t meant to mislead anyone and later had it removed from his National Review Online bio.
Goldberg’s publisher, Penguin Group (USA), said the error was unintentional and promised to also remove the Pulitzer reference from future reprints just as it would “any other innocent mistake brought to our attention,” reports Dedman.
I know a Pulitzer Prize winner. I work with a Pulitzer Prize winner. A Pulitzer Prize winner is a friend of mine. And you, Jonah Goldberg, are no Pulitzer Prize winner — nor even a “nominated finalist,” only three of whom are chosen in each category by Pulitzer juries out of the thousands of wanabees just like you.
But I am not surprised Goldberg would twist the meaning of words to artificially enhance his standing or the interests of those he serves since twisting words and ideas is what Goldberg does for a living. It’s why he has a job at all in the conservative movement.
Pareene calls Goldberg “a uniquely pathetic figure in contemporary conservative thought,” who wants to be taken seriously as an intellectual but is “the world’s laziest thinker.”
But to me, the National Review Online editor-at-large is a reverse barometer of everything that makes right wing conservatives most nervous about themselves.
Four years ago, when charges of actual fascism against conservatives were hitting just a little too close to home as Tea Party Republicans were veering sharply to the far right, Goldberg achieved bestseller status while throwing pursuers off the scent with his laughable, if lucrative, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. It’s a book that left many puzzled reviewers wondering: “Secret History? Why secret?”
So, to judge by Goldberg’s most recent literary effort — A Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas – conservatives must be worried Americans are starting to take to heart what scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein recently said about them: “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”
We’re likely to see much more of this sort of thing moving forward as conservatives commission people like Goldberg to attack liberals for whatever is worst in themselves in a classic expression of “I am rubber and you are glue” projection.
But the hard truth is that liberals who believe in democracy will always be at a disadvantage against conservatives who don’t because, while respect for opponents and openness to their dissenting points of view is a defining quality of the liberal worldview, conformity to orthodoxy is at the core of the conservative one. And the strangulating rigidity only gets worse the further conservatives move to the right.
What makes neo-conservatives in particular such formidable opponents is that most of their intellectual (and genetic) forbearers began their political careers on the totalitarian left and never really abandoned its thuggish, anything goes ways in pursuit of a one-party monopoly of power — even when the one-party state they hoped to create was a rightist one.
And one of the worst offenders is the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer.
Take Krauthammer’s column just this week in which he calls President Obama a “divider-in-chief” running a “slice-and-dice” campaign.
Kruathammer’s specific complaint is the fear-mongering he accuses the President of waging whenever Obama charges Paul Ryan of wanting to cut Pell Grants by $1,000 per student, which the Ayn Rand devotee does in a House budget he calls “Pathway to Prosperity.”
The President arrived at the $1,000 figure by taking Ryan’s total non-defense discretionary cuts and applying them evenly across the board to all existing programs. Ryan says that’s not true but refuses to say why or specify how much he does intend to cut individual programs.
While Ryan keeps those cuts close to the vest so he doesn’t have to pay the political price of defending them, Krauthammer helpfully steps in to call Obama a liar for attacks against Ryan that Krauthammer says are a dishonest “fabrication” meant to be nothing more than “a great applause line.”
But as Greg Sargent points out, the White House has openly admitted it is making assumptions about Ryan’s budget in the absence of details Ryan won’t provide himself.
“Ryan wins conservative adulation from the likes of Krauthammer for his pose as a deficit scourge, even though he isn’t detailing the actual consequences of his proposed deficit reduction policies in any meaningful way,” says Sargent. “And anyone who even tries to game out the consequences of Ryan’s plan gets attacked for inventing them out of thin air. Neat trick, eh?”
There’s a reason for all this secrecy, says Sargent. “If Ryan were to spell out the consequences of his vision in any meaningful detail, it would be deeply unpopular. Similarly, any reasonable assumptions about what his vision would mean in the real world also risk making it deeply unpopular. So they must be attacked as fabrications. This is worse than a shell game. It’s a shell game without the pea.”
The Ryan Budget is a variation of the supply-side “voodoo” economics that Republicans sold to a gullible public 30 years ago. Back then, the idea that tax cuts for the rich paid for themselves allowed Republicans to cut those taxes without facing political heat from liberals for cutting popular programs or incurring the ire of traditional, green eye-shade conservatives like David Stockman, who worship God, Country and Balanced Budgets in that order.
Conservatives always knew supply-side economics was a hoax and said so privately to one another. But they understood the political value of painless tax cuts a generation ago just as today Paul Ryan understands the value of massive budget cuts to popular programs — with details To Be Named Later.
Going further, Krauthammer says Obama’s criticism of Ryan’s dishonest budget “makes a mockery” of the President’s “pose as the great transcender, uniter, healer of divisions.”
It’s touching that Krauthammer cares so much about unity considering that the Republican Party he defends is the most conservative it’s been in a century. And as Robert Draper points out in his new book on the Tea Party Republican House, conservatives were meeting the very day Barack Obama put his hand on the Bible to become America’s 44th President in order to plot not only how Republicans could win back political power but also how they could put a grinding halt to the entire Obama legislative agenda before it even got off the ground.
For the minority Republican Party that had lost the two previous national elections, “bipartisanship” meant a liberal Democratic President governing as a right wing Republican — or not at all.
“If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority,” Draper quotes one Republican Congressman saying at that first strategy meeting on Inauguration Day 2009. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.”
As Jamelle Bouie at American Prospect explains: “In other words, there was nothing President Obama could have done to build common ground with Republicans. From the beginning, the plan was to relentlessly obstruct Obama, regardless of whether that was good for the country. The GOP’s high-minded rhetoric of compromise and bipartisanship was bunk.”
Krauthammer uses words like “divider” and “divisive” cynically like the Bolshevik-style propagandist that he is in order to score a few cheap political points not illuminate a political truth.
For the true-believing right winger, “divisiveness” on the part of adversaries is merely the mirror image of the rigid “conformity” to conservative orthodoxy which the right wing worldview demands.
And isn’t that what Krauthammer really means when he accuses Obama of hypocrisy in not finding greater unity with a party for whom the only possible unity is the one that demands abject capitulation and unconditional surrender from all those outside the Republican Party itself?
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, Salon.com, May 11, 2012
“You’re Under Oath”: Which Party Creates More Jobs?
Here’s a little something everybody ought to know about, from Bloomberg News. They tallied up private-sector job creation since Kennedy’s presidency. Democrats have held the White House for 23 of those years, according to Bberg, and Republicans 28. So fill in this blank: The U.S. economy has created ___ private-sector jobs in the Democrats’ 23 years, and ___ such jobs in the Republicans’ 28 years.
Before we get to the answer, let’s toss in a little background. The political scientist Larry Bartels published a book, Unequal Democracy, on precisely this subject in 2008. I reviewed it for The New York Review of Books. It was interesting because social scientists like Bartels don’t want to think that politics really drives events, but Bartels looked at the evidence on job creation and economic growth under every president since Truman and reached certain inevitable conclusions.
Does that give you any hints? I’ll tell you: Adjust your first-instinct numbers. Then adjust them again.
Ready? Now I’m just killing time so that the answer will be below the fold.
The answer is that 42 million jobs were created under Democratic presidents, and 24 million under Republicans. You can check out the chart here. The champion of course is Clinton, with 20.8 million under Bberg’s numbers. Then comes Reagan at 14.7. Then come Johnson and Carter (yep, Carter). Then Nixon. And so on.
George W. Bush? The private sector lost 600,000 jobs. Imagine. In eight years, he did not create a single job. Obama is now in positive territory to the tune of 40,000, so even though Dubya handed him the biggest economic catastrophe in 80 years, he at least is in the black.
Anyway. The numbers are amazing. And it gets even better. Bloomberg’s Bob Drummond also counted up the number of public-sector jobs created in the respective 23 and 28 years. Results: Federal, state, and local government payrolls grew by 7.1 million under Republicans, and 6.3 million under Democrats.
So drink this in: Private-sector job growth is massively greater under Democrats, and it’s Republicans who’ve increased the public tit.
Now, some sophisticates will say well, you can’t really measure these things from the day a president took office. Better to start when that president’s policies started taking effect. But that is exactly what Bartels did (read my Review piece for details)—and it still came out to a huge advantage for Democratic presidents. In fact, the Obama jobs numbers would be pretty terrific under this methodology, because he wouldn’t have all those Bush-created job losses hanging around his neck. And at the front end, Dubya got credit for some jobs that Clinton’s policies actually created.
If I were the head of the DNC, I’d buy a billboard on a prominent roadway in every county in America and slap these numbers up there.
By: Michael Tomasky The Daily Beast, May 10, 2012
“If Obama’s Fer It, I’m Agin’ It”: Obama’s Embrace Of Marriage Equality Is Very Smart Politics
In the case of Mitt Romney, when it comes to civil rights issues, he is not his father’s son.
His dad was a good guy—as Michigan’s governor, he marched for civil rights, embraced women’s rights and helped labor unions to obtain fairer treatment at the bargaining table in Michigan—and it was always reasonable to hope that the kid would inherit at least some honorable qualities.
But Mitt Romney’s response to President Obama’s announcement of support for marriage equality has been so tone deaf and exploitive that I suspect even George Romney would be disappointed in the kid. The presumptive Republican nominee for president says: “I do not favor marriage between people of the same gender, and I do not favor civil unions if they are identical to marriage other than by name.” And his campaign has indicated that it intends to make a big deal about the president’s shift in stance. Romney’s senior adviser, Ed Gillespie, says the Romney camp is prepared to campaign on the issue of enacting a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.
So one of the wealthiest and most elite men ever to seek the presidency of the United States will campaign on a promise to use the constitution of the United States to bar equal protection under the law.
This is not the way Romneys used to respond to the march of social progress.
When President John Kennedy clearly and unequivocally embraced the civil rights cause—by very publicly inviting the organizers of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to the White House—George Romney was the rising star of the Republican Party and a potential rival to Kennedy. Yet, he hailed the president for doing the right thing. Indeed, he prodded Kennedy to do a bit more.
Mitt Romney, on the other hand, seems to be in the “If Obama’s fer it, I’m agin’ it” camp. And there are no signs that he will try to guide his Republican Party toward a moderate stance on what remains a hot-button social issues. Which, of course, explains why President Obama is likely to win the 2012 election over the lesser Romney.
Obama’s embrace of marriage equality, while typically tortured and over-cautious, was entirely appropriate morally.
It was also VERY smart politics.
National polling shows that most Americans favor marriage equality, but there remains a solid 45 percent that is opposed.
On the surface, that might seem like a serious concern for a politician who would prefer to be liked to everybody—or, at the least, most everybody.
But presidential politics is not a national affair. It is a series of state elections. And opposition to marriage equality is disproportionally concentrated in the south, border states and the interior west—where Obama is never going to win.
There are also pockets of significant opposition in some battleground states, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. But, again, the most fervent foes of same-sex marriage have a lot of other problems with Obama. So his shift in stance is not pushing away many voters. Even among the older voters of Florida, who may not be all that comfortable with “the love that dare not speak its name” speaking its name, there are other priorities—like keeping Romney and Paul Ryan from bartering off Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
So Obama’s not risking much by endorsing same-sex marriage. But he is gaining a lot.
The greatest challenge for Obama’s 2012 reelection strategy is—or, perhaps we should say, “was”—a lack of enthusiasm among the young voters who got so excited about his 2008 campaign. And young voters like marriage equality, a lot. It polls over 70 percent, according to Gallup. Indeed, polling suggests that, among all the Republican Party stances that most trouble young voters, it is the GOP’s opposition to LGBT rights that most unsettled them.
Smart Republicans, and there really are quite a few of them, recognize this reality.
That’s why the party’s LGBT wing—and, yes, there are gay and lesbian Republicans—is objecting so loudly to Mitt Romney’s morally and politically inappropriate response to Obama’s statement.
Marriage equality has captured the nation’s attention, and the response to President Obama’s announcement is evidence of the tide turning in favor of equality for all. Log Cabin Republicans have long believed that supporting the freedom to marry is the right thing to do and the president’s joining this effort is in the nation’s best interest. That said, Americans can be certain that the president would not have made this decision at this time if it were not in his best political interests. In addition to energizing his base and distracting attention from a failed economic record, the trap is laid for any Republican who responds with intolerance,” said R. Clarke Cooper, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans. “Already some in the GOP are taking the bait with former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie bringing up the twice-failed Federal Marriage Amendment and the unfortunate vote on Representative Heulskamp’s (R-KS) amendment re-affirming DOMA last night. Democrats are eager to fundraise off of this issue. It is in the best interests of Republican candidates to be measured and disciplined in response, recognizing that a generational shift has occurred.”
The Log Cabin Republicans are not always right.
But they are right on this issue. As Cooper says, “Governor Mitt Romney’s statement in opposition to not just marriage but civil unions jeopardizes his ability to win moderates, women and younger voters, especially as a large majority of Americans favor some form of relationship recognition for their LGBT friends and neighbors. Ultimately, the response of the Republican candidates this election cycle will determine not just endorsements by Log Cabin Republicans, but the votes of millions of Americans who are simply tired of the culture wars.”
Unlike George Romney, who embraced the future and urged his party to do the same, Mitt Romney is not just clinging to the past. He is presiding over a campaign and a party that appears to be intent on pretending that this is 1912, as opposed to 2012. That miscalculation is explains why the the Obama camp is so enthusiastically highlighting the president’s new position—and why savvy Republicans are so fretful.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, May 10, 2012
“Atta Girl”: Mitt Romney Was A High School Gay-Bashing Bully
Mitt Romney, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, was a gay-bashing high school bully who said, “Atta girl,” to effeminate boys and shockingly had a days-long emotional attack that culminated with him pinning down a gay classmate and cutting off his bleached-blond long hair. Governor Romney claims he has no memory of any of these incidents that date back to 1965, according to a lengthy and heart-wrenching exposé in today’s Washington Post. An excerpt:
John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.
“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.
A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be named. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored their recollections.
“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”
“It was a hack job,” recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious.”
The Post article concludes with an emotional note about John Lauber:
He came out as gay to his family and close friends and led a vagabond life, taking dressage lessons in England and touring with the Royal Lipizzaner Stallion riders.
His hair thinned as he aged, and in the winter of 2004 he returned to Seattle, the closest thing he had to a base. He died there of liver cancer that December.
He kept his hair blond until he died, said his sister Chris. “He never stopped bleaching it.”
But Lauber was not the only target for the gay-bashing Mitt Romney.
In an English class, Gary Hummel, who was a closeted gay student at the time, recalled that his efforts to speak out in class were punctuated with Romney shouting, “Atta girl!” In the culture of that time and place, that was not entirely out of the norm. Hummel recalled some teachers using similar language.
Saul, Romney’s campaign spokeswoman, said the candidate has no recollection of the incident.
Yes, it was 1965, a different time, when these acts of anti-gay bullying were not just ignored or accepted, but often condoned.
But the handful of Mitt Romney’s classmates who either participated or didn’t stop it, not only remember his gay-bashing, they feel terrible about it. For Romney to not remember, and thus not be affected by his own gay-bashing, speaks volumes about his character.
The Romney campaign, and others, no doubt would say it was 1965. It doesn’t matter. But Mitt Romney married his wife Ann in 1969, just four years later, and that certainly matters in his campaign.
And they have on their campaign website a video that shows Mitt’s life, beginning with 1968, with the note:
“I think there’s one word that would be high on my list of a few words you would describe Mitt with. It would be trust. I think the qualities Mitt would bring to the Oval Office would be integrity, intelligence, an ability to see a problem and see a solution and make people recognize that he has those leadership qualities that would unite many people.” – Ann Romney
At what point do your actions matter?
By: David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement, May 10, 2012
“Redefining Compromise”: The Radicalization Of The GOP
Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), a member of the House Republican leadership and the chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, was recently asked about lawmakers’ capacity to compromise. As Robert Schlesinger noted, his response was illustrative.
“Compromising is one thing as long as you’re compromising and moving in the direction of your principles,” the right-wing lawmaker said. “If you’re compromising and moving away from the direction of your principles, I’m not sure it’s a compromise.”
And I’m not sure if Price has access to a dictionary. “Compromise” involves give and take, with concessions on both sides. To reach a resolution, compromise necessarily involves rivals accepting something less than their original goal.
I thought of Price’s recent comments again this morning after hearing the latest from Richard Mourdock, the Republicans’ U.S. Senate nominee in Indiana. He told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd this morning, among other things, “I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”
This wasn’t a slip of the tongue. Mourdock also told CNN that bipartisanship means “Democrats joining Republicans to roll back the size of government,” and he told Fox News, “I have a mindset that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”
In this guy’s mind, the only acceptable “compromise” is the one in which he gets what he wants.
Remember, Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein, centrist political scientists with enormous establishment credibility, have explained that American governance is broken because the Republican Party is “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
As Mourdock helps demonstrate, the radicalization of the GOP isn’t over. The costs for the nation will likely continue to be severe.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 9, 2012
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