“Intensive Fear-Mongering”: Who’s Distracting Attention From His Record Now?
In an earlier post today, I discussed at some length the anger of Republicans over Barack Obama’s efforts to “distract” voters from his record and suggest they take a long look at what life under a Romney administration might look like.
This afternoon, though, it was Mitt Romney playing the distraction game in a speech to the National Rifle Association.
Mitt, you see, has rather a poor relationship with the gun lobby, having signed a couple of bills as governor of Massachusetts they really, really didn’t like, while refusing until he started running for president to give them toadying fealty to which they feel entitled from GOP pols. He also can’t boast of much of a repertoire of hunting and fishing stories, since he’s only recently taken up the hobby of slaying game. I’d be willing to bet he doesn’t even own one of those big Second Amendment belt buckles with a fierce, gun-wielding eagle on it.
I’m sure Romney would have been happy to regale the NRA crowd with lurid reminders of the Obama administration’s relentless efforts to restrict gun rights–except they don’t actually exist, unless you buy the right-wing conspiracy theory that the botched “Fast and Furious” operation was some devious effort to set the stage for more regulation of gun dealers.
So instead Mitt did some intensive fear-mongering about what Barack Obama, released from the political constraints of re-election, might do to express his hatred of freedom:
Romney further pressed his vision of the fall election as a defining choice between two different destinies, and accused the Obama administration of curtailing Americans’ personal, religious and economic freedoms. He referred to the NRA as a single-issue group — that issue being freedom.
Eighteen minutes into his speech, Romney pivoted to Second Amendment issues, pledging to stand up for the rights of hunters, sportsman and other gun owners, and accusing the president of failing to do so.
It’s unclear to me why it’s okay for Romney to posit the election as “a defining choice between two different destinies,” with special attention to the potential impact on the shape of the Supreme Court, but if Obama does the same thing, it’s an outrage.
Let’s have some of the same sauce for geese and ganders, please.
By: Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 13, 2012
“Demagogic Paranoids”: Communism’s Collapse Leaves GOP Far Right Without A Real Foe
When Allen West, the Republican congressman from Florida, said he had “heard” that up to 80 members of Congress were members of the Communist Party, but refused to say who they were, I began once again to worry about the declining standards of excellence in American life. Once upon a time, Joe McCarthy (eventually) named names.
Oh, what a falling off was there! To see figures like West stumbling around and accusing liberals of communism, the Democratic Party of socialism, Obama of militant Islamic sympathies is like watching a Broadway revival of Oklahoma! performed by tone-deaf weightlifters from Bulgaria. There were once high standards for rabble-rousing. Think Father Coughlin. Think Joe McCarthy. Think Pat Buchanan. They played on American paranoia as if on a violin. (OK, fiddle.) They had a unified vision of conspiracy that encompassed Jews, blacks, Zionist bankers, greedy plutocrats, and Bolsheviks. The problem with today’s demagogic paranoids is that they are struggling with the same relativistic, politically correct universe as everyone else.
Consider the Jews. Completely off limits. Partly this is because of the presence of Jews in every dimension of American life, but it’s also because Jews are spread across the political spectrum. Back in Father Coughlin’s time, finding a Jewish Republican was something like searching for the afikomen on Passover. Even during McCarthy’s heyday, right-wing Jews were still a rarity, despite the Jewish Roy Cohn at McCarthy’s side. But since the rise of the Jewish neoconservatives in the 1980s, there have been a substantial number of Jews on the right. If you had had Sheldon Adelson in 1950, you might never have had the Hollywood 10.
The same goes for Zionist bankers, a staple of right-wing conspiracy-mongering rhetoric. You can’t use “Zionist” as a slur because Israel is that holy ally who is constantly being betrayed by Obama and his ilk. Then, too, it’s hard to go after bankers when your entire political agenda revolves around ensuring that the wealthiest people in the country—i.e., bankers—pay as little in taxes as possible. As for greedy plutocrats, goodbye also—and hello!
That leaves blacks, who gradually usurped Jews as the right’s favorite national specter. But just as Jews became “normalized” throughout American life since Father Coughlin’s tirades in the ’30s, so have blacks followed, though more slowly and painfully, a similar process since Reagan’s welfare queens. It’s hard as well to get the rising numbers of prominent blacks in the GOP to reliably pursue the subtle context of racial politics. West himself denounced George Zimmerman after the killing of Trayvon Martin.
But the most important element of right-wing demagogic populism is the most impossible to retrieve: Soviet communism. Commentators and pundits love to draw tiresome analogies between today’s Tea Partying radical right and the rise of the radical right in the Goldwater, John Bircher, National Review ’60s, but there is simply no basis for comparison without the Cold War. Bolshevism was the linchpin that held all the other facets of conspiracy together. Jews, unions, Zionists, even plutocratic bankers somehow all comprised a tainted trail that always led back to Moscow.
The effect on the radical right of the loss of communism is incalculable. The right wing is like a vulnerable adolescent who has suddenly been jilted. Hatelorn, you might say, the right is on the rebound from one substitute bête noire to another, but nothing sticks because there is no unifying adhesive on the order of the menace from the Kremlin. This is why you get the utter weirdness of the right talking about Obama’s Washington as if it were actually Soviet Moscow: a totalizing, centralizing monster out to collectivize American life and crush personal freedom and individual rights. There was a time when Stalin’s murder of tens of millions haunted the American imagination. Now it’s the possibility that everyone can have his tonsils out for free.
From hipsters to Mad Men to A Streetcar Named Desire to pompadours and victory rolls, nostalgic revivals are everywhere. In the political realm, expect the next six months to be full of retro-red menace, as the GOP searches desperately to recapture the love of its life.
By: Lee Siegel, The Daily Beast, April 12, 2012
“Content Free Propaganda”: “We The People” And Other Things That Aren’t True
According to a recent study by the University of California, 93% of income growth since the economic collapse of 2008 has gone to the wealthiest 1% of American households. Just 20 years ago, the amount of national income growth earned by the top 1% was less than half that.
So, if you are a right wing movement and not even you can justify concentrated economic and political power like that, what do you do? Well, you produce a video that celebrates “freedom” and shakes its fists at “tyranny” and you hope that the gullible will think the plutocratic takeover of our country is as American as apple pie.
The video is called “We the People” and it looks like it’s gone viral on the Right, collecting more than six million hits. I saw it because a friend of my wife’s thought it was just great and was sure we would too. Guess she didn’t get the memo!
The video is organized like an open letter to President Obama and its tone is a perfect replication of the gauzy, abstract vernacular of Fox News.
As the narrator informs President Obama, We The People “have stated resolutely we reject your vision for our country.” We The People “have assembled across America resisting your efforts to subvert our constitution and undermine our liberty.”
The video is filled with the sort of Americana that appeals to Sarah Palin’s right wing “real Americans.” As the Battle Hymn of the Republic plays in the background, scenes of Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial, a saluting Marine, an Apache attack helicopter, the Preamble to the Constitution, American flags, American flags, American flags and more American flags fill the screen. Even a Bald Eagle makes a guest appearance.
The video claims to speak for We the People but its voice is boilerplate Tea Party Republican: “Our greatest treasure is freedom;” “We believe in the power of the individual;” “Freedom is the capacity of self-determination.”
There are also the Thomas Jefferson-like “long train of abuses” hurled at the President: “you have expanded government, violated our Constitution, confounded laws, seized private industry, destroyed jobs, perverted our economy, curtailed free speech, corrupted our currency, weakened our national security, and endangered our sovereignty.”
And this is why, the video’s producers say, “we” are assembling all across this land, so that “we” can deliver “our” message that: “We will not accept tyranny under any guise;” that the redistribution of “the fruits of our labor is Statism and will not be tolerated;” that “We The People will defend our liberty;” and that “we will protect our beloved country and America’s exceptionalism will prevail.”
At first I thought “We the People” was the kind of parody Saturday Night Live might do as a spoof of right wing propaganda. Even its title was laughhable – “We the People” – as if the 70% of We the People don’t exist who think Democrats are right and Republicans are wrong when it comes to such key questions as whether to tax the rich more, to eliminate subsidies for oil companies or to preserve America’s endangered safety net.
But, at the end of the day, it is also disheartening to see how easy it is for the hard work of raising the level of understanding and debate in this country to all go to waste as vacuous, dishonest, manipulative and utterly content-free propaganda like this is produced to bamboozle even very smart people like those who sent us this insulting piece of reactionary performance art.
Then again, given recent experience, why should we be surprised that so many seem impervious to facts and reason or who now see politics as nothing more than brute force and war — a take-no-prisoners, law of the jungle scramble for survival of the fittest?
But I did like the Bald Eagles.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, March 31, 2012
“At The Heart Of An Ideology”: Republicans Are Causing A Moral Crisis In America
There is moral crisis afoot! So say the Republican candidates for president, their pals in Congress and in state houses. Abortion, gay marriage, contraception— contraception, for Pete’s sake — things that so shock the conscience that it’s a wonder The Washington Post can even print the words!
Here’s something I bet you wouldn’t think I’d say: They’re right. There is a moral crisis in the United States. The only thing is — they’re wrong about what it is and who is causing it.
The real crisis of public morality in the United States doesn’t lie in the private decisions Americans make in their lives or their bedrooms; it lies at the heart of an ideology — and a set of policies — that the right-wing has used to batter and browbeat their fellow Americans.
They dress these policies up sometimes, give them catchy titles like Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity.” But they never cease to imbue them with the kind of moral decisions that ought to make anyone furious. Ryan’s latest budget really is case in point. It’s a plan that says that increases in defense spending are so essential, that massive tax cuts for the wealthy are so necessary, that we must pay for them by ripping a hole in the social safety net. The poor need Medicaid to pay for medicine and treatment for their families? We care, we really do, but the wealthy need tax cuts more. Food stamps the only thing standing between your children and starvation? Listen, we feel your pain. We get it. But we’ve got more important things to spend money on. Like a new yacht for that guy who only has one yacht.
It’s hard to point to a single priority of the Republican Party these days that isn’t steeped in moral failing while being dressed up in moral righteousness. This week, for example, they are hoping the Supreme Court will be persuaded by radical (and ridiculous) constitutional arguments to throw out some or all of the Affordable Care Act. Sure, you could argue that it’s really nice to make sure 31 million people who didn’t have health care can get it. Sure you could make the case that lifetime limits are a bad thing, that women shouldn’t have to pay more for health insurance just because they’re women, that the United States shouldn’t be a country where you die because you lost your coverage when you lost your job. But then again, liberty. Let’s not forget liberty. Also, freedom.
It is a very strange thing that the people who lecture most fervently about morality are those who are most willing to fight for policies that are so immoral. They watch Wall Street turn itself into the Las Vegas strip, take the economy down and destroy people’s lives and livelihoods. To that they say, “By God we need less regulation. Get me the hose, I have things to water down!” They see a CEO of a bank or a corporation, someone who passed off all of the risk and took on all of the reward, and they say, “Get that man a bigger bonus! In fact, get him two!”
They see corporate interests flood the political system with unfathomably large sums of money, they see lobbyists defining the terms of debate, and they say, “Now this . . . this is what democracy should look like.”
They see an environmental crisis spinning out of control, the effects of climate change being felt already, the possibility of the biggest natural disaster in modern human history. To which they ask, “Anyone know if we can drill this hole any deeper?”
So yes, Rick Santorum. Yes, Mitt Romney. Yes, Paul Ryan and Republican politicians all over this nation. You are right, as right as you’ve ever been. There is a moral crisis in this country. A horrifyingly, back-breaking, bankrupt-the-core-of-this-nation style crisis. But it isn’t women or the poor or the middle class or the gay community or health-care advocates or environmentalists that are causing it.
It’s you.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 27, 2012
“Operating On The Fringe”: Are Conservatives Getting Crazier?
Every four years, presidential candidates from both parties say, “This is the most important election of our lifetimes.” Reporters predict that this will be the most negative campaign in history. Partisans say that if their side loses, the disaster will echo through decades, and we believe that our opponents are more dastardly than they’ve ever been. And over the last couple of years, we liberals have looked at conservatives and thought that they have reached levels of craziness unseen before.
So historian/author/smart guy Rick Perlstein, who knows more about the conservative movement of the last half-century than pretty much anyone, warns us that what we’re seeing now is really nothing new:
Over fifteen years of studying the American right professionally — especially in their communications with each other, in their own memos and media since the 1950s — I have yet to find a truly novel development, a real innovation, in far-right “thought.” Right-wing radio hosts fingering liberal billionaires like George Soros, who use their gigantic fortunes – built by virtue of private enterprise under the Constitution – out to “socialize” the United States? 1954: Here’s a right-wing radio host fingering “gigantic fortunes, built by virtue of private enterprise under the Constitution … being used to ‘socialize’ the United States.” Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, “fed up with elitist judges” arrogantly imposing their “radically un-American views” — including judges on the Supreme Court, whose rulings he’s pledged to defy? 1958: Nine Men Against America: The Supreme Court and its Attack on American Liberties, still on sale at sovereignstates.org.
Although Perlstein acknowledges that “What’s changed is that loony conservatives are now the Republican mainstream, the dominant force in the GOP,” this is what makes all the difference. You can still make the case that conservatives are crazier now, because the key factor isn’t the craziness of the craziest idea circulating among them—say, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and successfully engineered a massive conspiracy to cover it up, as opposed to the idea that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent—it’s how widely those ideas are held, and by whom. The conspiracy theories and hate-driven beliefs find purchase not just on the fringe, but among elected lawmakers, influential media figures, and in many cases, a majority of Republican voters.
So when they gain power, real people’s lives are affected. For example, many conservatives never stopped believing that women who make their own sexual decisions are dirty sluts, but since so many Republicans won office in 2010, that belief translated into a torrent of legislation. In 2011, a record 92 pieces of state legislation restricting abortion rights were enacted, along with measures to restrict access to contraception and renew the failure that is abstinence-only sex education.
And in the Republican party of today, looniness practically operates on a ratchet, moving only in one direction. That’s because there are almost no moderates left in the party to push back. In order for a party to undergo an ideological shift, it needs an internal force willing to champion that shift. Let’s say the GOP suffers a big defeat in this year’s elections. Who is going to successfully argue that the party needs to turn its back on its nuttiest elements? All the moderates who have retired in disgust or been purged in primaries? They’re gone, and the Republicans who are left couldn’t care less what they have to say. No, if the Republicans lose, everyone in the party will agree that they only lost because they weren’t conservative enough, that they didn’t take on the hated Barack Obama with sufficient venom and fury. And the center of gravity within the party will move even farther to the fringe.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 19, 2012
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