“No One Was Audited At Bridgegate”: The Classic Conservative Right Wing “So’s Your Old Man” Argument
You know the worst sign for Chris Christie about Bridgegate? The line most of his conservative defenders (and not all conservatives are defending him) are taking isn’t really about the scandal at all. Here’s John Podhoretz at the New York Post:
Most government scandals involve the manipulation of the system in obscure ways by people no one has ever heard of. That is why George Washington Bridgegate is nearly a perfect scandal — because it is comprehensible and (as they say in Hollywood) “relatable” to everyone who has ever been in a car. This is the reason this one is not going to go away so easily, even if one accepts the contention that Gov. Chris Christie had nothing whatsoever to do with it….
And yet, you know what is also something everybody would find “relatable”? Politicians who sic the tax man on others for political gain. Everybody has to deal with the IRS and fears it. Last year, we learned from the Internal Revenue Service itself that it had targeted ideological opponents of the president for special scrutiny and investigation — because they were ideological opponents.
That’s juicy, just as Bridgegate is juicy. It’s something we can all understand, it speaks to our greatest fears, and it’s the sort of thing TV newspeople could gab about for days on end without needing a fresh piece of news to keep it going.
And yet, according to Scott Whitlock of the Media Research Center, “In less than 24 hours, the three networks have devoted 17 times more coverage to a traffic scandal involving Chris Christie than they’ve allowed in the last six months to Barack Obama’s Internal Revenue Service controversy.”
Why? Oh, come on, you know why. Christie belongs to one political party. Obama belongs to the other. You know which ones they belong to. And you know which ones the people at the three networks belong to, too: In surveys going back decades, anywhere from 80% to 90% of Washington’s journalists say they vote Democratic.
In debates from schoolyards to the presidential campaign trail, this is what used to be called a “so’s your old man” argument. It’s not a defense at all, but rather a counter-complaint suggesting that we ought to be talking about something else, or that the perpetrators of one forgotten offense should be brought to justice along with those we’re talking about.
The classic right-wing “so’s your old man” argument was enapsulated in the bumper sticker that sprouted up when Ted Kennedy ran for president shortly after prominently criticizing the policies and practices that led to the Three Mile Island nuclear spill: “No one died at Three Mile Island,” an unsubtle reference Chappaquiddick.
So never mind that the IRS “scandal” has been largely discredited as a scandal at all, or that its “victims” were not New Jersey motorists commuting to work but political activists trying to get a tax subsidy and the power to cloak donors–it’s part of the permanent conservative grievance list and involved alleged abuse of government power, so out it comes again!
That should be cold comfort to Chris Christie, being involved in the lesser of scandals. But that’s the best he can expect from conservative gabbers who don’t really want to help him other than as the enemy of their enemy.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Editor, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 13, 2014
“Birds Of A Feather Stick Together”: Raging Bulls, Christie And Rove
When I saw that Karl Rove had said that Chris Christie’s handling of the bridge-closing scandal would give “him some street cred with some tea party Republicans” and essentially proved that he had the right qualities to be president, I wasn’t just reminded that Rove was the main architect of the U.S. Attorney dismissal scandal (that Christie somehow escaped). I was also reminded of an experience reporter Ron Suskind had when he went to the White House to interview Rove. He wrote about it in Esquire back in January of 2003.
Eventually, I met with Rove. I arrived at his office a few minutes early, just in time to witness the Rove Treatment, which, like LBJ’s famous browbeating style, is becoming legend but is seldom reported. Rove’s assistant, Susan Ralston, said he’d be just a minute. She’s very nice, witty and polite. Over her shoulder was a small back room where a few young men were toiling away. I squeezed into a chair near the open door to Rove’s modest chamber, my back against his doorframe.
Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. “We will f*ck him. Do you hear me? We will f*ck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever f*cked him!” As a reporter, you get around—curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events—but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle, Clarence-the-Angel smile. “Come on in.” And I did. And we had the most amiable chat for a half hour.
This, I imagine, is much like the phone call (or meeting) that Chris Christie made that drove his deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly to initiate the plot to close the Fort Lee access lanes to the George Washington Bridge. Whether the idea was to get a piece of the Hudson Lights luxury development in Fort Lee, as Steve Kornacki proposed on his program this morning, or it was retaliation for the blockage of Supreme Court nominees, as Rachel Maddow has speculated, or it was for some unknown reason, it is very clear that those lanes were not closed because of the lack of an endorsement, or without Christie’s rage being the cause.
Karl Rove can obviously relate.
By: Maritn Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 12, 2014
“The War Over Poverty”: The Problem Of Poverty Is Part Of The Broader Problem Of Rising Income Inequality
Fifty years have passed since Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. And a funny thing happened on the way to this anniversary. Suddenly, or so it seems, progressives have stopped apologizing for their efforts on behalf of the poor, and have started trumpeting them instead. And conservatives find themselves on the defensive.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. For a long time, everyone knew — or, more accurately, “knew” — that the war on poverty had been an abject failure. And they knew why: It was the fault of the poor themselves. But what everyone knew wasn’t true, and the public seems to have caught on.
The narrative went like this: Antipoverty programs hadn’t actually reduced poverty, because poverty in America was basically a social problem — a problem of broken families, crime and a culture of dependence that was only reinforced by government aid. And because this narrative was so widely accepted, bashing the poor was good politics, enthusiastically embraced by Republicans and some Democrats, too.
Yet this view of poverty, which may have had some truth to it in the 1970s, bears no resemblance to anything that has happened since.
For one thing, the war on poverty has, in fact, achieved quite a lot. It’s true that the standard measure of poverty hasn’t fallen much. But this measure doesn’t include the value of crucial public programs like food stamps and the earned-income tax credit. Once these programs are taken into account, the data show a significant decline in poverty, and a much larger decline in extreme poverty. Other evidence also points to a big improvement in the lives of America’s poor: lower-income Americans are much healthier and better-nourished than they were in the 1960s.
Furthermore, there is strong evidence that antipoverty programs have long-term benefits, both to their recipients and to the nation as a whole. For example, children who had access to food stamps were healthier and had higher incomes in later life than people who didn’t.
And if progress against poverty has nonetheless been disappointingly slow — which it has — blame rests not with the poor but with a changing labor market, one that no longer offers good wages to ordinary workers. Wages used to rise along with worker productivity, but that linkage ended around 1980. The bottom third of the American work force has seen little or no rise in inflation-adjusted wages since the early 1970s; the bottom third of male workers has experienced a sharp wage decline. This wage stagnation, not social decay, is the reason poverty has proved so hard to eradicate.
Or to put it a different way, the problem of poverty has become part of the broader problem of rising income inequality, of an economy in which all the fruits of growth seem to go to a small elite, leaving everyone else behind.
So how should we respond to this reality?
The conservative position, essentially, is that we shouldn’t respond. Conservatives are committed to the view that government is always the problem, never the solution; they treat every beneficiary of a safety-net program as if he or she were “a Cadillac-driving welfare queen.” And why not? After all, for decades their position was a political winner, because middle-class Americans saw “welfare” as something that Those People got but they didn’t.
But that was then. At this point, the rise of the 1 percent at the expense of everyone else is so obvious that it’s no longer possible to shut down any discussion of rising inequality with cries of “class warfare.” Meanwhile, hard times have forced many more Americans to turn to safety-net programs. And as conservatives have responded by defining an ever-growing fraction of the population as morally unworthy “takers” — a quarter, a third, 47 percent, whatever — they have made themselves look callous and meanspirited.
You can see the new political dynamics at work in the fight over aid to the unemployed. Republicans are still opposed to extended benefits, despite high long-term unemployment. But they have, revealingly, changed their arguments. Suddenly, it’s not about forcing those lazy bums to find jobs; it’s about fiscal responsibility. And nobody believes a word of it.
Meanwhile, progressives are on offense. They have decided that inequality is a winning political issue. They see war-on-poverty programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and the earned-income tax credit as success stories, initiatives that have helped Americans in need — especially during the slump since 2007 — and should be expanded. And if these programs enroll a growing number of Americans, rather than being narrowly targeted on the poor, so what?
So guess what: On its 50th birthday, the war on poverty no longer looks like a failure. It looks, instead, like a template for a rising, increasingly confident progressive movement.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 9, 2014
“The Circle of Scam”: Welcome To Conservative Politics, Where Everybody’s Fleecing Somebody
I’ve long held that what William Goldman said about Hollywood—”Nobody knows anything”—is equally true of Washington. At the same time though, people in politics are particularly adept at finding those who know even less than they do, and scamming them into giving over their political support or their money, or both.
I thought of this when reading the long investigation The Washington Post published the other day on the byzantine network of organizations the Koch brothers have established or funded to funnel their ample resources into politics. There are dozens of groups involved, and money moves back and forth between them in intricate ways. The Post was able to trace $400 million they spent in the last election, but since there were a number of organizations whose money they weren’t able to track, the real number is almost certainly higher. As a tax law expert quoted in the article says, “It is a very sophisticated and complicated structure … It’s designed to make it opaque as to where the money is coming from and where the money is going. No layperson thought this up. It would only be worth it if you were spending the kind of dollars the Koch brothers are, because this was not cheap.” The Koch brothers no doubt can avail themselves of the most skilled and creative accountants money can buy.
But they sure didn’t get much for their money. Barack Obama, you might have noticed, is still the president, and Democrats did quite well overall in 2012. Perhaps there was no way for the Kochs to change that even with a mid-nine-figure investment. But what it appears happened is that these brothers, who are no doubt savvy businessmen, got taken to the cleaners by their consultants (Matt Yglesias had the same thought I did about this).
You see, political consultants don’t always have standard rates that they use for all their clients. On one end, this may mean that the firm accepts a smaller profit to do some work for a do-gooder nonprofit. On the other end, it means that for a client the consultant knows has deep pockets, the same services will be marked up, maybe by a little, maybe by a lot. If you were a Republican polling firm and the Kochs came to you asking you to do a poll that you ordinarily charge $50,000 for, maybe you could just bump that up to $75,000. They probably won’t notice the difference, after all. And maybe you convince them that they need to conduct six or eight such polls over the course of the year. The direct mail consultants are doing the same thing, and you can bet the media consultants are doing it too, because those guys pull money from clients like nobody’s business. And it isn’t like the Kochs are going to be going over the contracts line by line, right?
Each individual consultant may only be padding his own bottom line by $50,000 here or $100,000 there, but there are so many people involved and so many millions passing hither and yon that by the time its over, the results at the ballot box may be discouraging but a lot of already successful Republican consultants are thinking it’s finally time to get that beach house.
There’s another scam going on at the same time, which is that many of these efforts are aimed at recruiting regular people to be the Koch’s ground troops, to put a “grassroots” face on what is most assuredly an elite project. The Kochs have sincerely held political beliefs, which by pure coincidence happen to line up perfectly with their economic interests. They’d like it if there were fewer regulations on corporate behavior and lower taxes on the rich, among other things (that isn’t to say they don’t also have beliefs on non-economic topics like abortion as well, because I’m sure they do). If you can convince a bunch of middle-class folk to go stand outside in their tricorner hats braying about the Founders and the Constitution as they press Congress to lighten the burdens on our nation’s beleaguered plutocrats, then it’s all worth it.
So the Kochs are getting scammed by their consultants, and they’re scamming the people whom those consultants are persuading, and meanwhile there are plenty of other scams around too. Today Rush Limbaugh went on the air and told his millions of listeners that the “polar vortex” is not an actual thing that meteorologists have documented, but something the media made up in order to make the current cold wave not contradict their existing global warming hoax. Does Rush Limbaugh believe this? I doubt it. But treating his audience like a bunch of gullible fools is part of his business model.
You can find regular people who think that if “global warming” were real, that would mean it will never get cold again. But that’s not because they’re dumb (though they may be). It’s because that’s what people they trust have been telling them for years. Every winter, whenever there’s a cold snap or a big snowfall, a parade of doltish Fox anchors goes on the air hour after hour to say, “So much for global warming! Suck it, Al Gore!” Or as Ted Cruz said today, “It’s cold! Al Gore told me this wouldn’t happen!” Har, har! And those Republican voters, made ever stupider by the media figures they adore, make sure the people who represent them won’t allow anything to be done to address climate change. And you know who benefits from that? Why Charles and David Koch, who are in the oil business. They make money, the consultants make money, Rush Limbaugh makes money, and the only people in the equation who don’t make money are the suckers at the bottom.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 7, 2014
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