Quote for the day

"There are only two kinds of politics. They are not radical or reactionary, or conservative and liberal, or even Democratic and Republican. There are only the politics of fear and the politics of trust.

One says: You are encircled by monstrous dangers. Give us power over your freedom that we may protect you.

The other says: The world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped by the will of men.

Ordinarily that division is not between parties, but between men and ideas. But this year the leaders of the Republican Party have intentionally made that line a party line. They have confronted you with exactly that choice.

Thus, in voting for the Democratic party tomorrow, you cast your vote for trust, not just in leaders or policies, but for trusting your fellow citizens, in the anciety tradition of this home for freedom and, most of all, for trust in yourself." -- Edmund Muskie, November 2, 1970

Derbyshire goes where Coulter's gone...

...and wants to roll back the 19th amendment. Those darn women be votin' for liberals. This cannot stand, obviously. Meanwhile, Newsmax publishes a piece that's a barely restrained endorsement of a military coup. Well, they should have thought of that before stretching the military so thin with two needless wars, because I tend to think that a military coup requires, you know, military personnel, and I find it hard to believe that the paranoid, high-strung teabaggers aren't going to be able to pacify the nation. Unsurprisingly, these pieces not exactly being shouted down by an angry rightosphere--a quick visit to The Corner (no link from me, thanks), for example, reveals no comments on either piece. I just don't know what to make of this, aside from that some portion of the right is perfectly fine with ignoring the democratic rights of people who disagree with them. This is, alas, not a new story...

I also enjoyed this bit: "[Derbyshire] added that the United States 'got along like that for 130 years,' and added that the Civil Rights Act may also lack value because you 'shouldn't try to force people to be good.'" Oh, Lord. I call foul. I've heard this at times from some conservative sources, and it's nonsense. The Civil Rights movement wasn't about forcing (Southern) people to be good. Conservatives who argued that way always missed the point. The point was that black people were denied basic human freedoms and had no way to claim them thanks to a legal framework designed by white supremacists to keep blacks from gaining any political power. There's a really astonishing lack of empathy here, an inability to put one's self into the shoes of the black victims of our own Apartheid system. Not terribly surprising, I suppose, but the truth is that Lyndon Johnson could have given a damn about whether Rufus T. Hicks of Southern Alabama felt the race hatred in his heart. Johnson saw that the real prize was those young black kids who deserved the chance to grow up and to have a chance to be whatever they wanted. Derbyshire is echoing the perennial complaint of white Southerners that Civil Rights was somehow an attack on them. Bullshit, sir. It wasn't. Civil rights was not about them--well it was, to the extent that it was prompted by their abject moral failure to create a just and equitable society, but this notion of Southern victimhood is as pathetic now as it was back in the 60's. Just more evidence that these folks just can't get over themselves, I guess.

But no, there's no racism whatsoever among conservatives enraged at Obama's agenda. We're all colorblind. Nothing more to see here.

Passed on without comment

Heh

Larison:

What is remarkable is that Republican hawks are not embarrassed by it, and they are now so far out of it that they think they are winning the debate. They imagine that they have already become credible leaders on foreign policy, and they think that the rest of the world is now moving their way. That is what Stephens means when he says that neocons are “back,” and he could not be more wrong.

This is the downside of ignoring the truth all the time: you start to believe your own bullshit.

Here's a real waste of time...

The only people who care about Obama's "Czars" are Becktards and cranky senators, and unfortunately one of the latter is a Democrat who's taking this seriously enough to hold a hearing on it. This is just a reminder to me of how silly the separation of powers idea is these days. Parliamentary democracies have no sort of executive confirmation process at all, though there are numerous differences between our system and parliamentary systems--all ministers are legislators, for one thing, and are therefore directly accountable to the people. I can understand having ministerial and legislative types be separate people so that constituencies are served better, but the notion of senate confirmability doesn't really make much sense from that angle. Aside from perhaps judicial appointments, this notion should be either significantly reformed or shelved, as it serves little purpose. Almost all the time during these things, you get large majorities for confirmation and opposition members talking about how the president should be able to pick his (or her, someday) team. So why bother with the middleman? And there are always the times when the opposition decides to oppose nominees regardless of merit in hopes of scoring political points, as has happened with, among others, Office of Legal Counsel nominee Dawn Johnsen and Judge David Hamilton, Obama's appointment to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Surely, this sort of activity doesn't fall under the clause of "advise and consent", as in those cases, we're getting neither.

So, I say this: the Constitution does indeed require advice and consent, but why not flip the notion of confirmation hearings around? Presidential appointments (except for judicial appointments) should go forward unless, say, 60% of the Senate disapproves them. There could still be hearings, but consent will be assumed unless a substantial majority object. And there would be a time limit to object--say one month. If the nomination isn't rejected within a month, then it counts as a confirmation. I think that this would improve matters quite nicely. No other country has our combination of antiquated, consensus-driven political institutions and relatively recent and highly polarized domestic politics. I think this would improve the situation considerably, though I wouldn't be surprised if the Obama team decided not to risk the political capital on it. Roosevelt's court-packing scheme comes to mind as an example of meddling in the institutions of government in a way that isn't technically unConstutional and is likely more democratic, but is politically unwise all the same.

Godwin's Law! And PC!

From a Times review of the Coens' latest, I found this old attack against the brothers' masterpiece Miller's Crossing:

Occasionally the Coens are accused of engaging in grotesque ethnic stereotypes and even of being anti-Jewish. One New York critic took them to task over having Bernie the Shmatte [from Miller's Crossing] whimper and grovel at the feet of a gun-toting gangster “in a wood as bucolic as any birch grove in Poland.”

I would say that this is the most ludicrous piece of criticism I've ever heard, only I don't think it is. I think it's calculated. Miller's casual anti-Semitism is era-appropriate, but the point of the scene described here is that the Jewish character doesn't get killed! And since when are Polish birch groves a symbol of the Holocaust? Am I missing some obscurity here? If Gabriel Byrne had shot Turturro in front of an oven factory or something, there might be a point to be made here. I'm certainly not well-read enough to say for sure that the birch grove metaphor is irrelevant, but for the average person I highly doubt that it is evocative in that way.

It seems to me that the implications of this sort of statement are unexplored. The story of the Binding of Isaac (the Sacrifice of Isaac to Gentiles, though I prefer the Jewish term because it more accurately describes what happens in the story) also includes a Jew begging for his life, presumably takes place in a sylvan area because of the presence of wood, could involve a Jew being burned, and undoubtedly included some whimpering and groveling. Is that story exploitative upon the Holocaust as well? It's one of the key stories in the Jewish tradition. That this critic saw the Holocaust in Miller's Crossing says far more about the critic than it does about the work, as the Coens weren't trying to comment upon it or, indeed, evoke it in any way. Until I read that statement, I would never have thought about that connection.

I tend to dislike the use of the term "political correctness" as I feel it means different things to different people. I've never felt that calling out racism or sexism is "politically correct", other than that it is correct regardless of the modifier. Attacking people who say bitch or nigger is proper because those terms hurt people, and part of living in a society means you have to relinquish your right to be an asshole and try to be sensitive to the needs of others. But stuff like this is something different altogether. There's a difference between, say, saying that we shouldn't use the N-word to describe black people and saying that showing Jewish people suffering is innately anti-Semitic. The former doesn't hurt anyone and might keep racial tensions from fraying a bit, the latter does hurt people--i.e. the Jews--by saying that they cannot be depicted as suffering in certain ways. This sort of political correctness is the sort that can hurt because it is a form of censorship that can impact the way any group is seen by others, and it can provide a distorted picture of Jewish people in general, and that's never been a problem, has it?

Of course, every group in existence has grievance-mongers. Some groups seem to have more than others (white conservatives have made boffo business out of it). I guess Americans of all stripes like to see themselves as victims of coordinated conspiracies--says something about us I guess. I personally don't like to think that way. But I do think there's a clear difference between being PC and just not being an insensitive asshole: sensitivity is about acknowledging the difficulty of the truth and trying not to inflame. Political correctness is about denying the difficulty of the truth and trying to make yourself feel better. The Times quote is pretty clearly the latter.

But, aside from the obvious angle, I think Godwin's Law does apply here as comparing someone to the Nazis is essentially a form of political correctness. The irony, of course, is that the teabaggers that like to compare Obama to Hitler are the same ones that predictably rail against "political correctness" when they are the side that more regularly abuses the concept. Of course, such subtlety seems beyond the town hall screamers.

Another damn post about the media

Writing about the media is not my favorite subject, but I really am bothered by this new media trend of reporting on the Beck beat, as though it were legitimate news. This is merely another thing that demeans the news media in this country, and I think it's actually pretty easy to explain: the media is liberal, yes, but not proudly liberal, a la HuffPo or Kos. No, it's made up of self-hating liberals. I think this explanation makes quite a bit of sense when you consider stuff like this. If the media were really objective, they'd sluff off objections from both sides about bias and just do their jobs. But because of their self-loathing liberalism, they overcompensate by acting as though Beck (almost typed Bleck, though that's not a bad pejorative) is some tribune of Real America. Beck is an idiot that hardly anyone takes seriously, but the coastally-bound elites figure he must be since he can get massive amounts of angry email sent to them. That they think that Beck is actually influential outside the echo chamber actually underscores how much they actually despise "average folks"--they take for granted most of the right's assumptions that the average guy is ultraconservative when the truth is that the average guy doesn't pay much attention to politics and could really do with less posturing and some actual truth. To be perfectly honest, the activist corps of both parties skew heavily toward the elites. Much of the national conversation at this point is about elites arguing with other elites about which set of elites most resembles actual Americans. I can't think of anything more pointless.

In the end, though, the only thing that keeps the Times and the Post around is the indulgence of their readership, which is obviously well-to-do and liberal. The alternative media of the left is still largely embryonic, while the right's has gone from bloom to decay to zombified in the past few years, but the left's will explode if the Times and the Post decide that their need to be liked by the people who despise them outweighs a need to inform. And that will kill the MSM for good if it happens. I go back and forth about whether the death of "objective" journalism will be a bad thing or not a big deal, but these days I'm leaning more toward the latter, if for no other reason than that we don't have objective journalism now. Frankly, I'd love to have some of that, but even the Times got out of the journalism business when they decided to stop using the word "torture" in the MSM's poignant attempt to make conservatives hate them less. Of course, the opposite is the case, because you don't respect somebody you can push around. It's just sad to watch.

I just wish it weren't necessary for the whole thing to die, and it wouldn't be necessary if the MSM would decide that it doesn't give a shit what the Becks and Limbaughs think about things and just reports the facts. But at this point I'm not that worried about self-hating liberals being replaced with proud liberals. Indeed, I suspect that would make the news media far better, so long as liberals continue to stick with trying to report the truth (however imperfect that quest might be executed at times) instead of adopting the political fundamentalism of the right.

Whoops!

The Massachussetts Republican Party forgot to cite any law in their argument against seating new Sen. Paul Kirk. Seriously. I'm not a lawyer, but I think you kind of have to do that in a court of law. Can today's GOP do anything other than spin?

What about Iraq?

Bruce Bartlett's Forbes article is quite good. He provides an historical analysis of conservative views on balancing the budget (it used to be a central priority, and now it isn't) and basically argues that "starving the beast" hasn't worked, and then culminates with Bush's budget-busting spending programs.

This is all largely correct, but Bartlett doesn't mention the wars Bush wanted to fight on the cheap. In the history of America, wars have traditionally been financed by higher taxes to pay for increased spending. This is how it happened under conservative Republican President William McKinley, and it's how it happened under liberal Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt. Wartime tax hikes, along with the increase in government power that accompanies all wars, are the reasons why the right has traditionally been identified with isolationist politics and virulently resisted involvement in WWII until Pearl Harbor. Bush, however, didn't think that even fighting a war was a good reason to raise taxes. This, to me, stands as the more damning indictment of modern conservatism. It's one thing to think that we should lower taxes without cutting spending. It's another thing entirely to think that we should just put wars on our tab, and that paying for a war is some sort of Randian economic servitude. The first is just often irresponsible. The second is simply insane, and says both that the GOP cares more about keeping wealthy people rich than fighting "the greatest moral challenge of our generation" (which seems to be true), and that the GOP really does feel that historical norms and economic analysis shouldn't be binding upon them, and that they're an institution that essentially exists outside of history. Someone ought to send them a copy of The Glass Bead Game.

Wow

Just wow:

Igor Volsky reports today that Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) has been pushing an amendment to "prohibit the government from defining which benefits should be included in a standard benefit package." Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) noted that basic maternity care ought to be required.

"I don't need maternity care," Kyl replied. "So requiring that on my insurance policy is something that I don't need and will make the policy more expensive."

Interrupting him, Stabenow added, "I think your mom probably did."

Sometimes you just have to marvel at how crazy the modern Republican Party can be. Independent of any sort of ideological or temperamental changes, I think this underscores the GOP's need to start recruiting outside of the old white dude cohort. Of course health insurance should cover maternity care. I find it hard to imagine any reasonable person saying otherwise. It's a common thing to happen, you know. The right's studied indifference to women's issues isn't really a matter of ideology and could be relieved by simply recruiting more female congressional candidates, and by pulling their heads out of their asses. Seriously.