“The Elephant Doesn’t Exist”: Guns And The Tyranny Of Extreme Rhetoric
Let’s say you’re making lunch in the kitchen while your kids play in the living room. When you come in with their mid-day meal, the place is a disaster. You look at them. They look at you. And before you know it they’re blurting out something like “the elephant did it!”
Now, I suppose there’s something to be said for that argument. It takes a quick wit. Or at least a keen sense of mammalogy. But it’s got one fundamental flaw: There is no elephant. And you know that’s true no matter how hard they argue otherwise.
These days, some on the right have seized on an invisible elephant all their own. They’ve named him Tyranny, and to hear them tell it, he’s big, he’s scary, and he’s tearing up the place. The problem, of course, is that he doesn’t exist—but that hasn’t stopped them from trying to convince the rest of us that he does.
Their latest effort came in the form of a Scott Rasmussen poll that found “65 percent See Gun Rights As Protection Against Tyranny.” If it’s true, that’s quite a finding. It means most of us believe that our government may descend into tyranny and that guns are the right way to protect ourselves from that eventuality.
Of course, there’s good reason to doubt Rasmussen: His polls reliably lean to the right. But for the sake of argument let’s take his findings on their face. How should we reconcile them with the great many other polls that suggest broadening support for gun control? The 55 percent in a CNN/Time poll who say gun controls should be tightened. The 58 percent in an ABC/Washington Post poll who back an assault weapons ban. The 63 percent in a CBS/New York Times poll who support banning high capacity magazines. The 78 percent in the same poll who favor creating a database to track all gun sales in the United States.
If you take the Rasmussen poll on the one hand and all the other polls on the other, it can only mean that there are many millions of us who somehow believe both that Americans need guns to protect ourselves from a government that may turn tyrannical and that we should make it harder for Americans to get guns. This is a, ahem, nuance that Rasmussen fails to address.
And then of course, there’s this: According to a recent Pew survey, only 33 percent of Americans have a gun in their home at all. If so many of us really think that tyranny looms and that guns are our protection but so few of us actually own them…well, we must be a pretty self-destructive lot.
As it happens, there was another poll in the field at around the same time as Rasmussen’s that was about the same issue, and conducted by a similarly conservative pollster—Wenzel Strategies (the pollster for Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, among others). Wenzel asked respondents whether they believed the Second Amendment “exists to allow Americans to have small arms for hunting and self-protection” or “to give Americans the ability to defend themselves against government if it becomes tyrannical?” The results? Forty-seven percent said it’s just for hunting and self-protection. A whopping 8 percent said it’s just to defend against tyranny. And 40 percent said all of the above.
In other words, two polls that can be relied on to skew right, but on the question of tyranny and guns, Rasmussen’s big majority turns into Wenzel’s minority. And a less partisan researcher would presumably find that support is actually significantly lower than is suggested in both.
None of this, however, put the brakes on the Rasmussen poll among the conservative press and punditry. Breitbart, NewsMax, FreedomWorks, etc. all quickly linked to or posted stories like the one Katie Pavlich authored at TownHall.com reporting that “an overwhelming majority of Americans believe the Second Amendment and gun rights are necessary to protect against tyranny.”
Look, I don’t put any more stock in Wenzel than I do Rasmussen. In my view, they both poll in the service of ideology rather than in an effort to uncover actual attitudes and beliefs. (Wenzel used his findings, for example, to suggest that we are more at risk of tyrannical takeover precisely because we don’t think it’s going to happen. Sigh.) And I have no doubt that there are those who actually believe that tyranny is in the offing. But the fact is, most of us, regardless of our political or ideological stripe, don’t believe that. We know the difference between our government and that of other countries in world, between Saddam Hussein and John Boehner. The former subjected Iraqis to years of death squads and oppression. That’s a tyrant. The latter’s subjected Americans to years of weepy incompetence. That’s irritating.
That doesn’t make the tyrannists’ rhetoric any less insidious, however. In asking us to conceive of an America that is profoundly different from the one in which we actually live they seek to conform our public policy to threats that exist only in some kind of make-believe place. When they are successful, the mainstreaming of lunatic ideas (like: We live under the threat of tyranny) makes possible ever more extreme policies (like: We all must have the right to semi-automatic weapons). And when we let that happen, nightmares of a very different kind than those conjured up by the ideologues really do come true.
When you take the invisible elephant out of your living room, you can clearly see what caused the mess (your kids.) And when you take the false threat of tyranny out of the equation, the case against assault weapons is pretty clear too (we don’t need them).
The elephant doesn’t exist. And it’s time for us to say so.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, January 24, 2013
“Crisis To Crisis Management”: Congress’s Continual Game of Political Chicken
The proposal from the House of Representatives to push off the debt ceiling crisis for three months came with an ironic rhetorical frame: If the Senate will, in that time frame, pass a budget, we can start facing our long-term fiscal challenges instead of managing crisis to crisis. Oh, and if they don’t pass a budget all lawmakers will stop drawing salaries.
The basic idea that crisis to crisis management is the worst form of governance for our country is right on the money: Short-term continuing resolutions and other stop-gap measures ensure inefficiency because government agencies are hamstrung by their inability to plan beyond a few months. And absolutely the Senate should present a budget that lays out a vision for how to put our country on a path towards a healthy fiscal future. But, the politics over the debt ceiling in the last three years have been a leading contributor to the culture of avoiding hard decisions in favor of incendiary rhetoric we see in Congress today.
The debt ceiling debate in the summer of 2011 spawned the so-called “super committee” and so-called “fiscal cliff.” So, in the past two years we’ve seen the creation and failure of the super committee, an underwhelming fiscal cliff deal that paired special interest tax breaks with an increase to the rates for higher income individuals, and a short delay of the looming threat of sequestration, the across the board spending cuts that were supposed to motivate the super committee—and Congress—to come together to act. In the next two months we have another opportunity to avoid the sequester and the expiration of the current continuing resolution, the bill that funded government for six months at fiscal year 2012 levels in lieu of passing actual appropriations bills. And of course a debt ceiling vote is on the horizon.
All of these crises are manufactured. Those willing to put off raising the debt ceiling to make a political point are willing to hurt our economy and our standing in the world to make that same point.
At the root of these manufactured crises are a winner-take-all approach to the disagreements between and even within the political parties. At each crisis, Democrats and Republicans demand a total victory and a grand bargain only to end up placating one another with crumbs of a bad deal and promise to revisit the issues at the next manufactured crisis. Our nation cannot afford this continual game of political chicken. We cannot afford the impact of defaulting on our debts. Policymakers need to work together and come up with reforms to spending, taxes, and entitlements. No more political theater, no more back room discussions on grand bargains. It’s time for the hard work of legislating solutions to the nation’s fiscal challenges.
“The Big Freaking Deal”: Progressives Might Want To Take A Brief Break From Anxiety And Savor Their Real Victories
On the day President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, an exuberant Vice President Biden famously pronounced the reform a “big something deal” — except that he didn’t use the word “something.” And he was right.
In fact, I’d suggest using this phrase to describe the Obama administration as a whole. F.D.R. had his New Deal; well, Mr. Obama has his Big Deal. He hasn’t delivered everything his supporters wanted, and at times the survival of his achievements seemed very much in doubt. But if progressives look at where we are as the second term begins, they’ll find grounds for a lot of (qualified) satisfaction.
Consider, in particular, three areas: health care, inequality and financial reform.
Health reform is, as Mr. Biden suggested, the centerpiece of the Big Deal. Progressives have been trying to get some form of universal health insurance since the days of Harry Truman; they’ve finally succeeded.
True, this wasn’t the health reform many were looking for. Rather than simply providing health insurance to everyone by extending Medicare to cover the whole population, we’ve constructed a Rube Goldberg device of regulations and subsidies that will cost more than single-payer and have many more cracks for people to fall through.
But this was what was possible given the political reality — the power of the insurance industry, the general reluctance of voters with good insurance to accept change. And experience with Romneycare in Massachusetts — hey, this is a great age for irony — shows that such a system is indeed workable, and it can provide Americans with a huge improvement in medical and financial security.
What about inequality? On that front, sad to say, the Big Deal falls very far short of the New Deal. Like F.D.R., Mr. Obama took office in a nation marked by huge disparities in income and wealth. But where the New Deal had a revolutionary impact, empowering workers and creating a middle-class society that lasted for 40 years, the Big Deal has been limited to equalizing policies at the margin.
That said, health reform will provide substantial aid to the bottom half of the income distribution, paid for largely through new taxes targeted on the top 1 percent, and the “fiscal cliff” deal further raises taxes on the affluent. Over all, 1-percenters will see their after-tax income fall around 6 percent; for the top tenth of a percent, the hit rises to around 9 percent. This will reverse only a fraction of the huge upward redistribution that has taken place since 1980, but it’s not trivial.
Finally, there’s financial reform. The Dodd-Frank reform bill is often disparaged as toothless, and it’s certainly not the kind of dramatic regime change one might have hoped for after runaway bankers brought the world economy to its knees.
Still, if plutocratic rage is any indication, the reform isn’t as toothless as all that. And Wall Street put its money where its mouth is. For example, hedge funds strongly favored Mr. Obama in 2008 — but in 2012 they gave three-quarters of their money to Republicans (and lost).
All in all, then, the Big Deal has been, well, a pretty big deal. But will its achievements last?
Mr. Obama overcame the biggest threat to his legacy simply by winning re-election. But George W. Bush also won re-election, a victory widely heralded as signaling the coming of a permanent conservative majority. So will Mr. Obama’s moment of glory prove equally fleeting? I don’t think so.
For one thing, the Big Deal’s main policy initiatives are already law. This is a contrast with Mr. Bush, who didn’t try to privatize Social Security until his second term — and it turned out that a “khaki” election won by posing as the nation’s defender against terrorists didn’t give him a mandate to dismantle a highly popular program.
And there’s another contrast: the Big Deal agenda is, in fact, fairly popular — and will become more popular once Obamacare goes into effect and people see both its real benefits and the fact that it won’t send Grandma to the death panels.
Finally, progressives have the demographic and cultural wind at their backs. Right-wingers flourished for decades by exploiting racial and social divisions — but that strategy has now turned against them as we become an increasingly diverse, socially liberal nation.
Now, none of what I’ve just said should be taken as grounds for progressive complacency. The plutocrats may have lost a round, but their wealth and the influence it gives them in a money-driven political system remain. Meanwhile, the deficit scolds (largely financed by those same plutocrats) are still trying to bully Mr. Obama into slashing social programs.
So the story is far from over. Still, maybe progressives — an ever-worried group — might want to take a brief break from anxiety and savor their real, if limited, victories.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columist, The New York Times, January 20, 2013
“Let’s Compromise, Do It My Way!”: The Republican Fever Has Not Yet Broken
I am grateful for some of the signs emanating from the Right yesterday indicating a willingness to accept the 2012 election results, and/or to stop treating the president of the United States as though he’s some sort of alien usurper of power. But let’s don’t get carried away in suggesting “the fever”–as the president referred to Republican radicalism and obstructionism during the campaign–has indeed broken.
Consider the headlines about Eric Cantor’s effusive expressions of good will and bipartisanship yesterday: “Cantor: Time for Washington to ‘Set Aside” Differences” is how CBS put it. Sounds good. But what, exactly, was Cantor talking about?
House Republicans announced last week their decision to hold a vote to raise the debt ceiling, potentially averting a contentious debate many expected to go down to the wire this February. Cantor said today House Republicans are committed to working on passing a federal budget “so we can begin to see how we’re going to pay off this debt; how we’re going to spend other people’s money, the taxpayers’ money; and begin an earnest discussion about the real issues facing this country.”
“I think times demand as much,” he said. “It’s time that Washington get with it, and that is why I believe, hopefully, the Senate can see clear to doing a budget, putting a spending plan out there for the world to see… So we can begin to unite around the things that bring us together, set aside the differences, and get some results.”
Do you see any change of position here, other than the already-decided House GOP decision to not to stake everything on a debt limit hostage-taking exercise at the end of February? Best way I know to translate what Cantor is saying is: “Let’s see how much agreement we can get on the elements of our agenda,” which are entirely about domestic spending, not defense spending or revenues, and involve direct benefit cuts, not ways to rein in health care costs.
Yes, it’s a good thing that for whatever reason congressional Republicans have decided not to blow up the U.S. economy if they don’t get their way in fiscal negotiations. But for the moment, their way or the highway still seem to be the only options they comprehend.
By; Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 22, 2013
“A Renewed Alligance”: Echoes Of FDR, President Obama’s Inspiring Address Links Freedom With Security And Dignity
So much for the “Grand Bargain” – or at least for the not-so-grand gutting of Social Security and Medicare that the “very serious” thought-leaders of Washington political and media circles have always found so appealing. Whatever President Obama may have contemplated up until now, his second inaugural address, delivered yesterday on the steps of the Capitol, bluntly repudiated Republican arguments against the social safety net – and forcefully identified those popular programs with the most sacred American values.
“We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity,” said Obama – not only because it is the responsibility we have to each other as human beings, but because security and dignity, for every man, woman, and child, are the existential foundations of freedom.
“For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn,” he said. “We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us at any time may face a job loss or a sudden illness or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative. They strengthen us.”
In a modern nation, suggested the president, those commitments are indeed fundamental to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is essentially the same message articulated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his 1941 “Four Freedoms” State of the Union address, which included employment, social security, and health care as defining aspects of a truly democratic society.
Every liberal and progressive (and presumably every conservative and wingnut, too) recognized that moment as renewing Barack Obama’s allegiance to principles that have sustained the Democratic Party since FDR. Far from undermining freedom, enterprise, and productivity, as right-wing propaganda insists, the president argued that those guarantees – still cherished by the overwhelming majority of Americans — have strengthened the nation.
Obama acknowledged the financial problem that rising health care poses for Medicare; eventually, he said, the federal budget must be stabilized, with “hard choices” ahead. Yet that objective will not be achieved, he pledged, by undoing the ligaments of security and liberty that American leaders have stitched together over the past century, nor by pitting younger people against their parents and grandparents (as the opponents of Social Security and Medicare habitually attempt to do). He pointedly rejected “the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.”
Precisely what the president means when he talks about hard choices should be revealed next month, when he will no doubt feel politically obliged to discuss how to reduce the deficit in his State of the Union address. Troubling signals have emanated from the White House that he might accept sharp and unnecessary cuts in Medicare and Social Security to achieve the “grand bargain” – which Washington’s conventional wisdom often defines as the only legacy worth pursuing for him.
Indeed, Obama has sometimes appeared to be listening when such very serious types, the over-privileged and under-informed, complain about burdensome “entitlements.” Those worthies might well have assumed that he would ultimately implement their mindless, heartless, and destructive proposals.
But in yesterday’s inspirational new beginning, this country’s 44th president set forth a very different expectation, promising hope and not disappointment to the people who re-elected him. The responsibility of his most devoted supporters will be to hold him true to it.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, January 21, 2013
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