“The Putin Admiration Society”: The Object Of The Right’s “Creepy Crush” Affections
The more Russian President Vladimir Putin cracked down on gay rights, the more U.S. conservatives discovered a fondness for the Russian autocrat. Indeed, support for Putin among social conservatives and leaders of the religious right movement only seems to be growing.
But in recent weeks, the right’s embrace of Putin seems to have expanded well beyond social conservatives and anti-gay activists. Eric Boehlert reported on Friday on Republican media figures backing Putin with growing enthusiasm as U.S. tensions with Syria escalate.
Note that late last month, just hours before Obama addressed the nation regarding Syria, Matt Drudge bizarrely tweeted that “Putin is the leader of the free world.”
More recently, the Putin admiration society has been on full display all across the right-wing media landscape. On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh also seemed to side with Putin…. Limbaugh appeared to be impressed by the fact Russia had compiled a 100-page report blaming Syrian rebels for the chemical weapons attack, not Russia’s longtime ally, President Bashar al-Assad. Limbaugh told his listeners: “Now, I don’t know about you, but what does it feel like to have to agree with a former KGB agent?”
RedState published a piece late last week arguing, “We’ve reached a sad state of affairs when the Russian president has more credibility than [sic] the American president but that is where we are.” Pat Buchanan defended Putin after the Russian leader prosecuted a rock band that played songs Putin didn’t like.
The Washington Times‘ Ralph Peters told Fox viewers last week, “I don’t like Putin, but I respect that guy. He is tough. He delivers what he says he’ll deliver. He knows his people. He presents himself as a real He-Man.”
How far has the right’s wild-eyed contempt for President Obama gone? Far enough that conservatives can barely contain their increasingly creepy crush on the former KGB official with an authoritarian streak.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 9, 2013
“An Alternate Media Universe”: The GOP’s Delusional Far-Right Twitter Bubble Explains Their Misinformed, Kooky Thinking
New York magazine’s Dan Amira takes a look at what accounts members of Congress follow on Twitter, and the results are … depressing. Both sides mainly follow the worst of the awful Beltway media. Pundits obsessed with trivialities and conflict and personalities beat out commentators and reporters who understand policy or political science. So Mike Allen wins! Well, the Hill actually wins, beating out Politico, C-SPAN and its smarter, but more expensive, primary competitor Roll Call. But Allen wins in the list of individual media personalities with the largest followings among members of Congress. That top 10 is pretty much depressing from start to finish, though at least Jake Tapper beats Joe Scarborough.
It’s pretty easy to over-interpret these findings. Few members of Congress have any involvement at all in their Twitter feeds — some of them may not know they have Twitter feeds — so what we’re seeing here are the accounts followed by, most likely, junior staffers. They follow Chuck Todd because, you know, they have to. If they miss some dumb thing Chuck Todd says that people start talking about they will get in trouble.
But when the most-followed lists are separated by party affiliation, interesting trends emerge. Republicans are more in lockstep in their following habits. 71 percent of Democrats follow the White House, the most-followed account for the Dems. Seventy-two percent of Republicans follow Eric Cantor, the seventh most followed account for the GOP. (John Boehner is the most-followed, with 88.7 percent of Republican members.) The Heritage Foundation has more elected Republican followers — 70.4 percent of members — than any actual media outlet or reporter. Even Politico. Even the Wall Street Journal. There’s no comparable organization in the top 20 for the Democrats.
On the pundit list, Mike Allen is at the top of both parties’ lists, proof that bipartisanship is alive and awful in Washington, but only 48.8 percent of Democrats follow Allen, compared to 57.7 percent of Republicans — proof that Democrats remain, as ever, the slight lesser of two evils. The rest of the pundit lists serve as a small window into the root of congressional paralysis and dysfunction.
The two lists have only a few names in common. After Allen, the rest of the GOP top five is all Fox reporters and commentators (including two former Bush administration officials), and the rest of the Democratic top five is Maddow, Chuck Todd, Ezra Klein and Jake Tapper — a plurality for MSNBC if you count Ezra, but not a unanimous win. The only outright conservative on the Democratic list is Joe Scarborough. Conservatives would likely argue (incorrectly but whatever) that Joe Scarborough is also a token liberal on the Republican list.
The most left-wing people on the Democratic list are easily MSNBC hosts Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow. (And maybe Krugman.) The GOP list has Sean Hannity, Mike Huckabee, Erick Erickson, Fred Barnes and Michelle Malkin. And, well, if you want to know why Republicans are so nuts, let’s look at the fact that nearly half (46 percent) of the Republican congressional delegation follows Michelle Malkin.
If you’re following Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin because you think they are worthwhile voices or useful sources of information, you’re a terribly misinformed far-right kook. If you’re following them because you have to keep on top of whatever Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin are screeching about today, because you know that your constituents consider them worthwhile voices or useful sources of information, that’s just as bad. Because whether the Republican Party is full of true-believing kooks or merely people forced to act like true believing kooks in order to keep their seats, the result is the same: a party that can’t be negotiated with because it exists in an alternate media universe with its own history and set of facts.
Hayes and Maddow, to take the two left-most voices on the Democratic list, are both quite genuinely left-wing, especially for the mainstream national political press, but they are also both reasonable people who are generous — sometimes excessively generous! — to opposing points of views. Hannity invited a notorious anti-Semite on his show as part of his years-long campaign to push the most absurd Obama conspiracies imaginable and Malkin wrote a book defending Japanese internment during World War II. These two both regularly fear-monger over the imagined specter of widespread black mob violence. It’s not just that these two have toxic beliefs and live in feverish fantasy lands, though they do, it’s that taking these two seriously is a dumb thing to do in a country that just elected Obama twice, while also voting for Democrats for Congress in greater numbers than for Republicans. They’re … not quite in touch with the actual mood of the country now, to say nothing of where it’s heading. That may be hard to grasp in the right-wing media bubble, especially for people representing districts made up primarily of angry white people, but it’s true.
As ridiculous as the right-wing pundits are, though, it’s the 70 percent of Republicans following Heritage that is actually more worrying. Heritage has joined the rest of the conservative movement in shifting from pursuing politically achievable conservative policy goals to always advocating for the most conservative course of action even when that course involves apocalyptic consequences and is also impossible. So if you want to know how exactly House Republicans managed to convince themselves that they’ll be able to repeal Obamacare if they just want to bad enough, well, it jibes with everything they hear in their wonderful little self-contained world.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, September 4, 2013
“A Whole New Concept”: On Syria, Congressional Republicans Are Put Into The Position Of Actually Having To Govern
By seeking congressional approval for military action against the Syrian government, President Obama has accomplished something that the nation hasn’t seen in some time: He’s compelled Republicans to divert their attention from their concocted crises to an issue of actual substance.
As the August recess unfolded, Republicans — including a number of prospective presidential candidates — contemplated whether to shut down the government as a protest of Obamacare and whether to refuse to honor the nation’s debt as a cri de coeur against Obamacare or the deficit or Obama himself or perhaps modernity in general. These issues were debated at length, if never quite in depth, on right-wing talk radio and Web sites. That nobody but the hard-core Republican right seemed stirred by shuttering the government and defaulting on the debt mattered not at all.
If the American right increasingly seems to occupy an alternative planet, that’s largely because its media outlets — we can throw Fox News into the mix — dwell on stories so exquisitely calibrated to excite the right that they may not be stories at all. The New Black Panther Party? The Epidemic of Voter Fraud? The calculated perfidy of Benghazi? The impeachable crime of Obamacare (a socialist scam actually modeled on a proposal from a conservative think tank 20 years ago)? It’s not the editorials and opinionating of right-wing broadcasters and journalists that are driving the right into fantasyland. It’s the tales they spin into stories and the time and space they devote to events that never actually happened or that they surreally misconstrue.
By throwing the Syrian conundrum to Congress, Obama has at least confronted Republicans with a real-world choice. Since Saturday, the drumbeat for closing down the government has been muted in its usual haunts.
That’s why the coming collision of libertarian fantasies with reality will be instructive. Can a congressman vote to defund the government and approve a military action in the same month? Or vote to authorize cruise missile attacks while insisting the government default on its debts? All these issues will soon come before Congress in rapid succession.
The U.S. government has obligations to the American people even more fundamental than seeking to stop the use of chemical weapons that are killing innocents in a foreign land. It provides pensions to the elderly, health coverage to the old and the poor, and, in a few months, it will help Americans without health insurance buy private coverage. It has obligations that conservative opposition has kept it from meeting — among them, repairing and modernizing the nation’s infrastructure and creating the jobs (say, by repairing the infrastructure) that the nation’s private-sector employers are unable or unwilling to create.
Conservatives routinely disparage such basic government functions. But even right-wing media have to acknowledge the legitimacy of government when employing the armed forces is at issue. Whether it is wise or prudent to employ those forces is always the most legitimate of questions. Whether the nation should halt such actions, or the payment of its pensions and health-care obligations, because the government should stop functioning altogether until Obamacare or Obama or modernity just go away is not.
In theory, House Speaker John Boehner, who has spent decades in government, does not support its abolition. In practice, he has been cowed by his party’s libertarian right and by the increasing dissolution of other strains of Republicanism, which is why he has occasionally threatened both closure and default. As the share of Americans who support and identify with Republicans shrinks in the polls, the faithful who remain have taken on the aspects of a cult — secure in the knowledge of “facts” that aren’t facts, passionate about causes whose very existence bewilders their compatriots, determined to punish any believers who stray from the fold.
Now Syria has popped the balloon of their insular summer. Right-wing Republicans may decide not to authorize a strike because they want to embarrass the president, but even they must know that there’s more at stake than their war on Obama: life and death; the future of a crumbling country and a volatile region; our own security as well as U.S. credibility. There may even be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in what passes for their philosophy.
By: Harold Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 3, 2013
“Rush Limbaugh Is Finished”: With Or Without Cumulus, His Political Power Is Much Diminished
Cumulus Media, the second-largest broadcast radio station owner in the country, may drop Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity from its stations, according to Politico’s Dylan Byers. Limbaugh and Hannity are the two highest-rated right-wing talk radio hosts in the country. Byers says they currently air on “more than 40″ Cumulus-owned channels (in markets that include New York City). Limbaugh is highly rated but maybe not that profitable, especially since the boycott took off.
This would be something of a blow to Limbaugh, especially if it meant losing his “flagship” station, New York’s WABC. On the other hand, the show is syndicated by a company owned by the largest owner of radio stations in the country. They’ll likely be able to find a home for him in the most of the markets he’d lose if Cumulus ended his contract.
Of course, while Byers reports that Cumulus has decided not to renew Rush Limbaugh’s contract, reports today describe Limbaugh as ditching Cumulus for WOR, a company owned by Clear Channel.
Whether Limbaugh ends up parting ways with Cumulus or whether this entire Politico article is part of one side’s negotiating tactics almost makes no difference. Limbaugh will remain on the radio in most of the country, with millions of listeners. In a month he may still announce that his contract with Cumulus has been renewed. But however this shakes out, it will still be the case that the Limbaugh Era is over.
The Limbaugh Era spanned roughly Clinton’s inaugural through Bush’s reelection, with his powers peaking, obviously, at Clinton’s impeachment. This was when Limbaugh could create political stars, sink legislation and nearly take down a president. The mainstream press took notice of him and then became completely obsessed. At that time, his army of listeners was enough people to constitute a formidable electoral coalition.
He still has a lot of listeners. The Limbaugh problem, though, is simply a reflection of the GOP problem: His followers are an aging and, consequently, shrinking group of conservative white people, in a country that is rapidly getting less white. The Limbaugh people are still large in number, but their power is diminishing. (Their power has been diminishing for years, in fact, which is how Limbaugh and his less talented peers came to lead them in the first place.)
The first thing to remember is that no one actually has any clue how many people listen to Limbaugh with any regularity. Limbaugh’s audience certainly sounds massive at 14 million weekly listeners, but that supposedly represents any person who tunes into Limbaugh’s show for any period of time over the course of a week. At any given period in his show, though, an average of three million people are tuned to Limbaugh. That’s not nothing, but it’s close. It wouldn’t crack the top 25 broadcast TV shows. And radio ratings involve even more guesswork and estimation (and spin) than television ratings. Limbaugh said his audience was “20 million” 20 years ago and people have just been repeating that number ever since, but no one actually has any clue.
Regardless of its size, this audience is not being replenished with fresh blood. When the Obama people decided, early in his first term, to basically call as much attention to Limbaugh as possible, as part of an effort to make him seem like the unofficial leader of the modern Republican Party, that was because they knew that Limbaugh is among the least popular human beings in the country, especially with people below the age of 40. The strategy did briefly shove Limbaugh back into relevance, but what exactly did he accomplish with that relevance? After an election year in which he openly, depressingly begged for Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic nomination, simply so that he could relive his glory years of Clinton-hating, Limbaugh spent the first months of Obama’s presidency attempting to derail the stimulus for some reason, and he failed. The Tea Party freakout, and subsequently the 2010 elections, had nothing to do with Rush. He hated Romney during the 2012 primaries and his eventual awkward support for the Republican nominee was worth nothing.
Like Matt Drudge, who still drives traffic but not the news cycle itself, Limbaugh is a relic of the ’90s. He’s been finished for years. Unfortunately he and the dying conservative movement are going to do their best to destroy the country as it leaves them behind.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, July 29, 2013
“Facing A Groundswell”: The Plotting And Scheming Of An Assorted Cast Of Cringe Worthy Conservative Clowns
If you’ve ever found it curious that far-right media activists all seem to say the same thing at the same time about the same issues, it’s not your imagination. David Corn offers an explanation.
Believing they are losing the messaging war with progressives, a group of prominent conservatives in Washington — including the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and journalists from Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner — has been meeting privately since early this year to concoct talking points, coordinate messaging, and hatch plans for “a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation,” according to documents obtained by Mother Jones.
Dubbed Groundswell, this coalition convenes weekly in the offices of Judicial Watch, the conservative legal watchdog group. During these hush-hush sessions and through a Google group, the members of Groundswell — including aides to congressional Republicans — cook up battle plans for their ongoing fights against the Obama administration, congressional Democrats, progressive outfits, and the Republican establishment and “clueless” GOP congressional leaders.
There’s quite a bit to Corn’s scoop, including the fact that Groundswell really has no use for Karl Rove’s effort to protect more electable Republicans in GOP primaries.
There’s also quite a cast of characters at play, led in part by Ginni Thomas, and including an ignominious assortment of cringe-worthy clowns, including former ambassador John Bolton, former Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), Ken Blackwell, Frank Gaffney, Jerry Boykin, and Capitol Hill staffers, including a top aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
Groundswell has collaborated with conservative GOPers on Capitol Hill, including Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Cruz and Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), a leading tea partier. At its weekly meetings, the group aims to strengthen the right’s messaging by crafting Twitter hashtags; plotting strategy on in-the-headlines issues such as voter ID, immigration reform, and the sequester; promoting politically useful scandals; and developing “action items.”
That may make Groundswell sound kind of scary, but there’s reason to believe these right-wing activists — surprise, surprise — aren’t especially sharp.
Notes from a February 28 Groundswell gathering reflected both their collective sense of pessimism and desire for aggressive tactics: “We are failing the propaganda battle with minorities. Terms like, ‘GOP,’ ‘Tea Party,’ ‘Conservative’ communicate ‘racism.'” The Groundswellers proposed an alternative: “Fredrick Douglas Republican,” a phrase, the memo noted, that “changes minds.” (His name is actually spelled “Frederick Douglass.”) The meeting notes also stated that an “active radical left is dedicated to destroy [sic] those who oppose them” with “vicious and unprecedented tactics. We are in a real war; most conservatives are not prepared to fight.”
The right’s preoccupation with manufactured fake scandals, however, is coming into sharper focus.
The notes from the March 20 meeting summed up Groundswell griping: “Conservatives are so busy dealing with issues like immigration, gay marriage and boy scouts there is little time left to focus on other issues. These are the very issues the Left wants to avoid but we need to magnify. R’s cannot beat Obama at his own game but need to go on the offense and define the issues.” The group’s proposed offensive would include hyping the Fast and Furious gun-trafficking controversy, slamming Obama’s record, and touting Benghazi as a full-fledged scandal.
To be sure, there’s nothing illegal or necessarily untoward about this kind of coordination, but the fact that these folks feel the need to get together to plot and scheme, as part of their perceived “war” with the left, explains quite a bit about the problems with much of the political discourse.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 25, 2013
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