Media is not everything

I have to commend Andrew Sullivan's take on Andrew Breitbart, rightroots hero:

Breitbart, like Drudge, gets the web. He understands its subversive and rhetorical power: the sheer thrill of the direct access to millions, the fuel that ideology brings to everything, the traffic that anger summons like a dog whistle to the alienated. This is an angry time, and the web helps tap our anger, monetize it, leverage it in intoxicating ways. I don't begrudge him one bit his fury at some liberals' smugness, or the p.c. nonsense of the 1990s, or the cant of a lot of academia. I never came from liberalism, so I never felt I had to shuck it off.

But Drudge has kept himself sealed off as a human being for a reason, I suspect. He's public only as an avatar. It is because this transparent, raging, brutal world is too destructive to the soul and the psyche to remain so exposed in such a raw fashion for so long without serious damage. Drudge is smart. Andrew, I suspect, will realize how smart eventually.

Yep, death happens because the Internet has replaced life for some but it hasn't abolished the real thing. And Breitbart's vulnerable moment in the piece shows how even the enraged and always offensive are sad and defensive at times, vulnerable often. The web has not banished these truths. Ideology is false. Labels obscure. Rage eventually undoes the enraged, even if the anger is merited. And no, media isn't everything. The battle isn't everything.

I don't follow Breitbart's work, but he's always struck me as a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Sullivan, for his quibbles, is able to put this stuff in perspective. It's a good bit of wisdom that all of us netroots types should heed.

The disappearance of reasonable Republicans

What can one make of the screeching behavior of once-reasonable, measured Republicans like Orrin Hatch? This duplicitous op-ed is par for the course. Hatch has always been conservative but used to be of the dealmaking, likable group of conservatives, just like his colleagues Judd Gregg and Lamar Alexander. All three have recently become known, depressingly, as partisan attack dogs.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on here, but I suspect stuff like this is why it's happening. In no universe can Bob Bennett be considered liberal, but he is interested in solving problems and working with Democrats, which is apparently not allowed anymore. These other dudes have seen what's up and are hamming it up for the Tea Party crowd, but they don't really have the knack for it, so they come off as unbelievably obnoxious. It's just kind of sad.

Michael Moore isn't smart

This is rich:

What about instituting a universal single-payer system, something Moore advocated for in his 2007 movieSicko, through a Congress that balked at a watered-down public option? According to Moore, all it takes is courage.

"We've been lied to for so long, and it works," he said. "It's amazing to watch a lie work. Only a strong leader, only a Roosevelt could confront this."

Wait, FDR instituted single payer? Wow, what are we arguing about here? No need to do health care reform, it's all done, Roosevelt did it in 1935! What a fool. And I like the notion that all it takes is courage. I hear that that sort of courage goes well with failing to pass reform and then losing an election. Where was Michael Moore in 1994?

This line of reasoning annoys me because it's so ignorant. Roosevelt was an extremely strong leader, sure. But he took office before the advent of the cable news circus, before the partisan realignment, etc. Plus, he had 75% Democratic majorities in Congress at a time when the filibuster wasn't abused, and at a time when Republicans really were demoralized after several years of the Great Depression. And despite all this, he wasn't able to do everything in one fell swoop. Social Security and the National Recovery Act were mere shells of what Roosevelt wanted, but he was persistent and he eventually won those battles and got much of what he wanted in the end. There is a lesson for Moore to learn here, if he knew anything about politics instead of trying out to be an FDL personality (perhaps?).

This is not to sell Roosevelt's accomplishments short in any way. If you look at the country he inherited and the country (and the world) he left behind, the depth of what the man accomplished pretty staggering. He and Churchill literally saved liberal democracy in the world. But Roosevelt was, like Obama, a pragmatist and incrementalist with moderate inclinations. I have no idea how Roosevelt would fare in this sort of environment, but I suspect he would have run into many of the same troubles Obama has, because these troubles are largely not of Obama's making.

It's called conscience

Yglesias is baffled by the torture right:

Why was the Bush administration initially so eager to cover up its torture, and conduct its abuses in secret? Once the truth about the Bush administration’s policy of institutionalized torture came out, it turned out to be something that the right thinks works for it politically and they like to brag. But back in the high tide of the torturing, they clearly understood that they were doing something shameful and wanted to keep it secret. And even today they’re ashamed of what it is they were actually doing. In their constant invocations of SERE training as way of showing that waterboarding’s not so bad they reveal themselves. The logic of their arguments is that brutality works and it’s good, but they can never quite bring themselves fully and fulsomely embrace that idea and instead want to turn around and minimize the enormity of their actions. But if the justification of the brutal coercion involved in waterboarding is that it works then why is the semantic argument about torture even relevant?

My guess is that a lot of the torture apologists are actually somewhat conflicted on this issue. They've committed themselves to defending this garbage, but deep down they feel there is in fact something wrong with it. After all, our national identity used to be based in part on the fact that we didn't do stuff like this. I think this theory explains the dilemma quite nicely. I don't think all these people are sociopaths (Rove is the only one that comes closest, in my opinion), but the makeup of the right is such that I don't really expect there to be too many people to stand against this brutality.

My major concern is that the younger generation of conservatives--ones who grew up when their leaders defended torture--aren't going to be particularly conflicted about this stuff. We anti-torture people have a lot of work to do.

Stupak is on the ropes

I moseyed on over to ActBlue and happened to see this on the front page:

Ms. Saltonstall is the woman who announced a primary challenge to Bart Stupak, who has proven himself an odious theocrat once again. I sent her a little cash myself, might have to send some more later. She's raised $20k online in about a day, which I think is pretty impressive.

The why should be obvious: Stupak's behavior has been far beyond the pale. And I'm not going to do the thing about how the Democrats are a pro-choice party and he should not stand up for what he believes in. I find it irritating when Michael Steele says stuff like that and I'm not going to say it myself. It's not even that he opposes this particular health care reform bill. Bart Stupak has proven himself to be solely interested in power politics. He doesn't care about the women whose lives would be impacted by his law, any more than he cares about the tens of thousands of people who die because their health insurance gets cancelled. He's interested in becoming the head of the Pro-life Democratic Caucus and a power player in the House. How do I know this? Because his complaints about the bill are senseless. The Senate Bill very clearly separates federal money from abortion funding--the Nelson/Casey business actually mandates separate checks to be written to pay for insurance for abortion. Stupak is a lying, C-Street fundamentalist, and I'd rather take a chance with someone who isn't of that ilk, like Connie Saltonstall, and accept the risk of her losing the general to someone with Stupak's views. No downside, in my opinion. The good news is that it looks like his coalition is cracking.

I agree with John Cole: he's worse than Lieberman.

Voters still prefer Obama to Bush

Here. I guess Newsmax was hoping for a different result.

The unchanging lameness of Oscar banter

The NYT has a fun example of it.

Chait dings Dean

And he's right, of course. Key line:

"My response was that Dean was temperamentally unsuited to be president -- he had the resume of a moderate but the soul of a radical. His egomania and extreme pugilism made him a poor advocate and an even worse negotiator. His only solution to political impediments is to pretend they don't exist."

I should add that Dean's fear that the GOP would repeal HCR is unfounded. The Tea Partiers want them to, but the Democrats are positively salivating for them to do so. The fact is that the GOP has convinced much of the public that the Democrats' bill is weak, but virtually all of the individual components are popular. Campaigning on repeal would be a disaster for the GOP: they couldn't support full repeal, because then the Democrats would hit them on preexisting conditions. The debate would become one in which Democrats attacked Republicans for wanting to bring back payment caps and preexisting conditions, and the Republicans would be on the defensive with some sort of nuanced position that probably wouldn't play well. This is why Tim Kaine is saying things like, "If they want to run a campaign of bring back the day of kicking people off because of pre-existing conditions, I relish it."I guess Republicans could campaign against "government-run care", but that's just spin and not a plan of action. There is nothing like that in the bill. If the GOP runs against government-run care but pledges not to mess with the pre-existing condition ban, the individual insurance exchanges, the insurance payment caps, etc., I wouldn't be too worried.

Why The Tea Party Failed

Yeah, I'm going to use the past tense there. It's true that the Tea Party movement exists and will exist for a little while longer, but I think it should be clear by now that they will have no real impact on the political scene. They've become little more than an appendage for the Republicans--something used merely to advance conservative memes--and perhaps it was impossible that they would become anything else. Some might argue that the Tea Party types haven't failed, that they're moving the electorate to the right, but that was somewhat inevitable in a period of Democratic governance during a recession. If the Tea Parties had never existed, what would have happened? The right would have still become hypocritical on spending. There would have been the same sort of relentless attacks on Obama. What's happening now is little different from what Republicans did in 1993-4. The Tea Partiers have merely given Republican operatives some visuals to testify to the power of their message. But the Republican Party has not changed very much.

Here's how I see it: the GOP has many problems at this point, but probably the biggest one is that its supporters are thoroughly captured by its elites. Because much of the Republican base is animated by the culture war message rather than by strict policy proposals (not a risky assumption, I should think), they can be fairly easily manipulated by the conservative elite, whose interests largely don't lie with solving big problems or helping their constituents, so much as enriching very specific groups. They make big promises and don't follow through on them, and then invoke the specter of the evil liberals to justify inaction. This is where you get the (accurate) accusation on the left that the GOP is run largely by grifters: you have almost a perfect set of circumstances for widescale corruption.

I think that the Tea Parties understand this on some level. They get that it's incompatible to both extol the virtues of the free market and then bail out the big banks. The problem is that they share very little substantive policy differences from the mainstream conservatives, and they don't really have much space to launch the critique that it would make sense for them to make. It would make sense for them to decry corporate collusion with government and to back regulation and legislation to reduce it, but this is a tacit admission that capitalism isn't a uniquely just system that gives everyone what they deserve, and that the Republican approach to the market is flawed. Most of them aren't ready for that. The Tea Party movement has not correctly identified its enemies, preferring to make partisan attacks instead of getting the Republicans' house in order and demanding accountability. There has been little backlash against the people who misled them for all these years: I've heard of little anger at Karl Rove, or Bill Kristol, or Fox News among these folks (or, at least, among Dave Weigel's persistent reporting on them, as well as some of the random conservative blogs I read). In fact, Fox News is more popular than ever, despite having fed these very people lies for many years. The deep-down fear of liberalism pushes them back to the very people who failed them because the alternative is unthinkable, or perhaps merely unthought. What the Tea Party movement seems to me to be is a movement that is trying to rebel with a group with which it agrees with almost everything. There is little imagination within the movement, less vision, and it overwhelmingly reeks of futility and chaos. It's like some late-90s pop-punk group raging at the system underneath a Doritos banner. Or, to use a political metaphor, I'm continually reminded of liberal hawks' decision to turn against the Iraq War in 2005-06. The tide was palpably turning against the war, and many of these hawks needed to pivot away from defending it, but the problem was that their ideology--which found American hegemony, national security ideology, and the notion of preemptive war acceptable--didn't allow much space for critiques of the war. Eventually, they decided to criticize Bush's conduct of the war, which was handy because Bush did such a poor job of it, but it was weak as far as these things go. The Tea Parties folded their complaint against the bailouts into a complaint against spending, which is fair enough I guess, but it is about as obvious as the liberal hawks' rationale and it doesn't really try to solve the problem that was, for a time, their raison d'etre.

This is why I think calls for some sort of right-left populism are misguided. I think that such a dialogue could be interesting, and I think that some of the same things motivate populists on both sides, but I have seen little evidence that this sort of right populism has a substantive case to make on these issues that differs from standard Republican thinking. Perhaps dialogue could discover some common ground, but I doubt there would be too much trust on either side. They've chosen to base their movement around spending, but anyone who actually thinks that a Tea Party-powered Republican majority would actually take action on this issue is sorely mistaken, as can be seen with Paul Ryan's neglected budget ideas.

Here's some SAT prep for you all

Mitt Romney:Tarp::Hillary Clinton:Iraq War. Well, somebody has to be the new jester of politics since Harold Ford got out of the NY Senate race.

(h/t: Larison)