“It Isn’t Easy Being Fox”: There Isn’t Enough Liberal Hating To Fill The Day
Fox News has been in the news a bunch over the last two days, with stories like Roger Ailes’ wooing of David Petraeus, and now the discovery by Gabriel Sherman of New York that the network has benched Karl Rove and Dick Morris, though for slightly different reasons. Morris is just an embarrassment because he’s always so hilariously wrong about everything, while Rove apparently angered top management by challenging the network’s call of Ohio for Obama on election night. “Ailes’s deputy, Fox News programming chief Bill Shine, has sent out orders mandating that producers must get permission before booking Rove or Morris.” This highlights something we liberals may not appreciate: it isn’t easy being Fox.
For starters, MSNBC and CNN don’t get nearly as much attention for their internal conflicts as Fox does. That’s not only because there’s a healthy appetite among liberals for these kinds of stories, but also because there seem to be many people within Fox who are happy to leak to reporters about what goes on there, presumably because they don’t like their employer’s politics. Without them, we’d never know about these things. But more importantly, Fox has a lot of people and factions to keep happy. To see what I mean, let’s start with Ed Kilgore’s explanation for the sidelining of Morris and particularly Rove:
Thanks to their high visibility in the 2012 cycle, some MSM and progressive observers seem to be making the mistake of associating Rove and Morris with right-wing influence in the GOP, and assuming that taking them down a notch in FoxLand means some sort of new conservative pragmatism. Are we forgetting who these men are? Rove was the author of every single violation of “conservative principle” by George W. Bush that has enabled wingnuts to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the bitter fruits—substantively and politically—of the Bush/Cheney administration: No Child Left Behind, the Medicare Rx drug initiative, comprehensive immigration reform, and in general Big Spending and Big Government Conservatism. And given his role as the “quarterback” of the entire Super-PAC/501(c)(4) money blitz in 2012, Rove is also nicely positioned to take the fall for a “Republican Establishment” that failed to make ideology and “vetting” the centerpiece of the anti-Obama drive. As for Dick Morris—well, he’s the same unprincipled self-promoter he’s always been.
Putting Rove and Morris “on the bench” is precisely what you would expect from conservatives looking for a way to shift blame after another electoral defeat. The idea that it means Fox is coming to grips with the error of its ideological ways is leap of logic and faith unjustified by anything we’ve seen so far.
Let’s not forget that for a long time, Rove was for conservatives something like what Nate Silver was for liberals in 2012. Not only did he tell them they were going to win, he did so in a way that made them feel smart, by throwing a bunch of numbers at them and seeming to have a unique, evidence-based explanation for the coming Republican victory (the difference was that unlike Silver, Rove cherry-picks his data and always predicts a Republican victory, whatever the actual facts are). And he was and will always be the architect of George W. Bush’s two presidential victories, a considerable achievement. But now he has the stench of defeat about him. So when you put him on the air, it doesn’t make conservatives feel reassured, it makes them feel angry. But not the kind of angry Fox likes (i.e. angry at liberals). The bad kind of angry, the kind that might make you turn your TV off.
And keeping conservatives watching is Fox’s business. But that isn’t always easy, particularly when there are different kinds of conservatives whose immediate goals and beliefs may be in conflict. The one thing that unites them all—hatred of liberals—is what Fox specializes in. But at times like this, with Republicans in Congress going wobbly on taxes and a reexamination of the Republican future in progress, there isn’t enough liberal-hating to fill the day. Which can make it tough for Fox to navigate, since as the house organ of the conservative movement, it needs to keep everyone happy. It needs to simultaneously cater to the establishment, to the Tea Party, to the elite, to the base, and to everyone in between. That can be a difficult juggling act. Fox plays a much more central role in the conservative movement than MSNBC does in the liberal movement, which is good for business, but it also brings complications.
But don’t worry about Karl Rove. He’ll be back on the air before you know it, telling conservatives why their victory is inevitable.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 5, 2012
“Why Sane Bargaining Looks Strange”: Two Can Play The Crazy Uncle Game
An entirely new political narrative is taking shape before our eyes, yet many in Washington are still stuck in the old one.
President Obama’s victory blew up the framework created by the 2010 elections, which forced him to play defense. Now, he finally has room to move. That’s the only way to understand the ongoing budget talks.
This has several implications. First, why was anyone surprised that Obama’s initial offer to the Republicans was a compendium of what he’d actually prefer? We became so accustomed to Obama’s earlier habit of making preemptive concessions that the very idea he’d negotiate in a perfectly normal way amazed much of Washington. Rule No. 1 is that you shouldn’t start bargaining by giving stuff away when the other side has not even made concrete demands.
Second, Obama made clear that he will not allow the fiscal calendar to set his priorities. Past actions by Congress established this wacky set of deadlines requiring frenzied decision-making. This does not mean the deficit is the nation’s highest priority. It isn’t. Speeding up economic growth is the most important thing now.
Thus did Obama’s opening proposal call for measures to boost the recovery, including an infrastructure bank, a public-private partnership that ought to appeal to Republicans. And he was right to insist upon an extension of unemployment insurance and another year of the payroll tax holiday or some equivalent way to keep middle-class purchasing power up. Raising taxes on the wealthy won’t damage the economy. A sudden drop in the take-home pay of the vast majority of U.S. consumers would.
Third, House Republicans have, so far, been unwilling to assume any risk to get what they claim to want. They seem to hope a deal will be born by way of immaculate conception, with Obama taking ownership of all the hard stuff while they innocently look on.
Obama went that route in 2011 when he feared that Republicans would bring down the nation’s economic house by failing to pass an increase in the debt ceiling. This time, he doesn’t face that risk.
If we go past the so-called “fiscal cliff” deadlines and all the resulting budget cuts and tax increases come into force, the administration can minimize the damage. It can delay the implementation of new tax tables so billions of dollars are not suddenly sucked out of the economy. There is no law requiring that budget cuts be implemented upfront or spread equally across the year. Obama can publicly announce he is delaying any cuts, on the theory that Congress will eventually vitiate some of them. And he can make sure the bond markets know of his plans well in advance.
This is not pretty, and it’s not ideal. But the only way to keep the next four years from becoming another long exercise in gridlock and obstruction is for Obama to hang tough now. And he has every right to.
Republicans claim they are fighting for cuts in entitlement programs, particularly Medicare. Fine. Let them put their cuts on the table. So far, all we have are words. Obama has outlined $400 billion in savings from Medicare. If this isn’t enough, the GOP’s negotiators should tell us how to find more. And having individual Republicans toss out ideas is not the same as a detailed public counter-proposal.
Republicans also say tax reform can raise enough money so we can avoid rate increases on the wealthy. Fine. Let them put forward a comprehensive plan so we can judge it. Their problem is that tax reform can’t produce the revenue that’s needed, but let’s at least see what they have in mind.
Obama is criticized for making life difficult for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) who has to bring around a rather right-wing caucus. Sorry, but demanding this sort of solicitude doesn’t fly anymore. Boehner rather brilliantly used the “I have to deal with this crazy uncle in the attic” gambit to extract a lot of concessions in 2011. Republicans walked away from the great deal Boehner won for them. The intervening election means they won’t get a similar gift this time. Obama has to win something for his own progressive supporters who rightly feel empowered by November’s results. Two can play the crazy-uncle game.
So a normal negotiation looks strange only because the past two years have been so utterly abnormal, driven by tea party extremism and an irrational hostility to Obama, a fundamentally moderate man who has already shown a willingness to offer more than his share of concessions. Boehner knows this, which is why everyone (especially Wall Street) should calm down.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 2, 2012
“The Pretzel Logic Of The Right”: Another Perceived Attack On The Sovereignty Of America, God And Family!
It’s hardly news any more when conservatives oppose ratification of a treaty reflecting widely shared American values. Concern for U.S. “sovereignty,” often based on conspiracy theories about the United Nations and other multinational organizations the U.S. helped create, has become a reflexive excuse for a kind of rigid unilateralism once associated with the John Birch Society or even older, isolationist conservatives.
But the current conservative fight to kill ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is especially interesting because the most avid opponents are the cultural conservatives who often profess solidarity with the disabled as part of their fight against legalized abortion. Anti-choicers and home-schoolers, however, have declared war on the convention on the theory that it confirms the “reproductive rights” of people with disabilities, and/or might confer other rights upon them that intefere with the absolute power of the family (presumably a servant-leader male-directed family) to raise children as they wish.
Thus it’s not surprising that Rick Santorum is at the head of this particular parade in the Senate, which raises the ire of WaPo’s Dana Milbank:
The former presidential candidate pronounced his “grave concerns” about the treaty, which forbids discrimination against people with AIDS, who are blind, who use wheelchairs and the like. “This is a direct assault on us,” he declared at a news conference….
[Mike] Lee, a tea party favorite, said he, too, has “grave concerns” about the document’s threat to American sovereignty. “I will do everything I can to block its ratification, and I have secured the signatures of 36 Republican senators, all of whom have joined with me saying that we will oppose any ratification of any treaty during this lame-duck session.”
Lame or not, Santorum and Lee recognized that it looks bad to be disadvantaging the disabled in their quest for fair treatment. Santorum praised Lee for having “the courage to stand up on an issue that doesn’t look to be particularly popular to be opposed.”
Courageous? Or just contentious? The treaty requires virtually nothing of the United States. It essentially directs the other signatories to update their laws so that they more closely match the Americans with Disabilities Act. Even Lee thought it necessary to preface his opposition with the qualifier that “our concerns with this convention have nothing to do with any lack of concern for the rights of persons with disabilities.”
Their concerns, rather, came from the dark world of U.N. conspiracy theories. The opponents argue that the treaty, like most everything the United Nations does, undermines American sovereignty — in this case via a plot to keep Americans from home-schooling their children and making other decisions about their well-being.
And so, Santorum brought his famous daughter Bella, who suffers from a severe birth defect, to the hearing where he fought against acknowledgement of the rights of people like her.
This is where the pretzel logic of the Right can lead.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 27, 2012
“The Man Needs An Intervention”: Wayward John McCain And The Two Rices
What is going on with John McCain? Maybe he just despises Barack Obama so completely that he almost can’t help himself. That’s one option. Another is that he has decided for whatever reason to finish his Senate career as a full-out tea partier. A third is that he’s just a nasty man, which is pretty widely known to be true in Washington.
Hard to say. But this jihad of his against Susan Rice really is about the nastiest thing we’ve ever seen him do. Rice had nothing to do with security at the Benghazi consulate. Nothing. That just isn’t her portfolio. The only thing she had to do with Libya, in any substantive way, is that she worked like a dog to assemble the coalition that toppled Muammar Ghaddafi, and she did an outstanding job at that. Indeed, as Eleanor Clift reported for the Beast back in January, Rice did travel once to Benghazi and was given a hero’s welcome there.
All Rice had to do with the Sept. 11 Benghazi attack was that she happened to be the one who was sent out on television that fateful Sunday in September to state the talking points. As the Wall Street Journal has reported, and as I’ve passed along to you previously, she said what she was told that morning to say, and intelligence was being revised toward a conclusion that the attack was a terrorist act at the very moment that she was on the air.
McCain knows all this. He just wants a scalp, he and Lindsey Graham, over the whole Benghazi thing. And he wants to show he’s relevant. The two of them are trying to make do with Kelly Ayotte now in the old Joe Lieberman role, but they’ve lost their bipartisan cover, which takes their whining and wailing down one notch on the legitmacy big board, and even the new independent coming into the Senate, Angus King, said yesterday that he thought McCain was out of line in his attack on Rice.
Now let’s bring in another Rice, Condi. Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post had the great idea today of comparing how McCain is conducting hmself now vs. what he said when Condi was up for secretary of state in 2005:
[Condi Rice] was confirmed by a vote of 85 to 13, which were the most negative votes cast for a secretary of state in 180 years. (One of those “no” votes was from John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, who is vying with Susan Rice to be the nation’s top diplomat.)
Ironically, the key issue then was Condi Rice’s public use of intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. Now McCain and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) are seizing on Susan Rice’s citing of initial intelligence about the Benghazi attack to disqualify her.
Here’s what Condi Rice said on a Sunday television show in 2002, “We know that he [Saddam Hussein] has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon. The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
No weapons of mass destruction, let alone nuclear weapons, were ever found.
But in 2005, McCain and Graham fiercely defended Condi Rice from Democratic attacks of “lying,” arguing she had been misled by intelligence. “I can only conclude we’re doing this for no other reason than because of lingering bitterness at the outcome of the elections,” McCain complained when Condi Rice’s nomination came to a vote.
Amazing. The man needs an intervention. Isn’t there anyone who loves him who can tell him what he’s doing to what remains of his reputation?
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 15, 2012
“The Inconvenient Truths Of 2012”: A Party That Wants To Govern Has To Do More Than Run Against Government
Human nature and politics being what they are, Republicans will underestimate the trouble they’re in and Democrats will be eager to overestimate the strength of their post-2012 position.
Begin with the GOP: As Republicans dig out from a defeat that their poll-deniers said was impossible, they need to acknowledge many large failures.
Their attempts to demonize President Obama and undercut him by obstructing his agenda didn’t work. Their assumption that the conservative side would vote in larger numbers than Democrats was wrong. The tea party was less the wave of the future than a remnant of the past. Blocking immigration reform and standing by silently while nativist voices offered nasty thoughts about newcomers were bad ideas. Latino voters heard it all and drew the sensible electoral conclusion.
Democrats are entitled to a few weeks of reveling because their victory really was substantial. Obama won all but one of the swing states and a clear popular-vote majority. The Democrats added to their Senate majority in a year that began with almost everyone predicting they’d lose seats. They even won a plurality of the vote in House races; Republicans held on because of gerrymandering.
Just as important, the voters repudiated the very worst aspects of post-Bush conservatism: its harsh tone toward those in need, its doctrinaire inflexibility on taxes, its inclination toward extreme pronouncements on social issues, and its hard anti-government rhetoric that ignored the pragmatic attitude of the electorate’s great middle about what the public sector can and can’t do. If conservatives are at all reflective, we should be in for a slightly less rancid and divisive debate over the next couple of years.
Yet Obama and his party need to understand that running a majority coalition is difficult. It involves dealing with tensions that inevitably arise in a broad alliance. Democrats won because of huge margins among African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans, but also because of a solid white working-class vote in states such as Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, particularly from union members. Obama needs to think about economic policies that deliver benefits across this wide spectrum of less well-to-do Americans. A longing for balanced budgets is not what drove these voters to the polls.
At the same time, there was a substantial middle- and upper-middle-class suburban component of the Democratic coalition that is moderate or liberal on social issues and sees the GOP as backward-looking. Many voters in this group bridle at sweeping anti-government bromides because they care about essential government functions, notably education. But they are certainly not classic New Deal or Great Society Democrats.
Such voters are central to what has become known as the “Colorado strategy.” It’s a view that the Democrats’ long-term future depends on moderate, younger and suburban voters, especially women, combined with the growing Latino electorate. And in Colorado itself, this strategy worked exactly as advertised.
As Curtis Hubbard, the Denver Post’s editorial page editor, noted, Obama won big in the party’s bastions in Denver and Boulder. But he also won Jefferson and Arapahoe counties, key Denver-area swing suburbs, and, a bit farther away, in Larimer County around Fort Collins. The Democrats’ victory here had depth: The party recaptured the state House of Representatives while holding the state Senate.
Managing a coalition that includes African Americans, Latinos, white working-class voters and suburbanites in the new and growing metro areas will take skill and subtlety. And Democrats need to recognize that some of their core constituencies — young people, African Americans and Latinos — typically vote in lower numbers in off-year elections. The party requires a strategy for 2014.
But these are happy problems compared with what the GOP and the conservative movement confront. They need to rethink their approach all the way down.
Many conservatives seem to hope that a more open attitude toward immigration will solve the Republicans’ Latino problem and make everything else better. It’s not that simple. For one thing, a more moderate stand on immigration could create new divisions in the party. And its weaknesses among both Latinos and women owe not simply to immigration or to social issues, respectively, but also to the fact that both groups are more sympathetic to government’s role in the economy and in promoting upward mobility than current conservative doctrine allows.
A party that wants to govern has to do more than run against government. For the right, this is the inconvenient truth of 2012.
By: E. J. Dionne Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 14, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 