John Roberts’ Troubled Psyche

March 10th, 2010

Chief Justice John Roberts complained yesterday that the President’s conduct during last month’s state of the union address, during which he criticized the Citizens United ruling, was “deeply troubling.” At the risk of reading too much into Justice Roberts’ hand-wringing, I’d like to suggest that it was a highly revealing indication of his personality.

In our book on authoritarianism, Marc Hetherington and I focus mainly on levels of authoritarianism at the level public opinion. We do, of course, talk about political elites and note that certain ones among their number, like Barack Obama and Rudolph Giuliani, exemplify some of the personality dimensions that we associate with non-authoritarianism and authoritarianism, respectively. But we don’t know, of course, how public figures would “score” on the four-question child-rearing battery that we use to determine an individual’s level of authoritarianism. This is why it’s safer for us to talk about the cognitive styles and worldviews to whom elites appeal, rather than to assert whether they themselves fit one type or another. After all, one must always keep in mind that public figures are in some fundamental sense performers and as much as we like to delude ourselves that we can really “know” them from afar, this is an illusion. Is Mitt Romney a moderate Republican, or an aggressively conservative one? I don’t know. I do know that he has played both roles in his political career and that he will say just about anything to get himself elected (and, of course, he’s not alone), regardless of whatever his “real” views might be.

Sometimes, however, high-profile public figures, perhaps when they least intend to, do reveal something meaningful about themselves. And the spectacle of John Roberts’ concern over the fact that he had to sit “expressionless” while President Obama criticized the Citizens’ United ruling during last month’s state of the union address (and was “literally surround[ed]” by presumably menacing members of Congress)  is one of those moments.

Concerning the particulars of Roberts’ apparently jangled nerves on the night in question, Glenn Greenwald writes:

It’s not actually a unique event of oppression or suffering to have to sit and listen to a speech where someone criticizes you and you can’t respond that very moment (but are able, as Roberts just proved, to respond freely afterward).  Even in the State of the Union Address, it’s completely customary for the President to criticize the Congress or the opposition party right to their faces, while members of his party stand and cheer vocally, and — as the reaction to Joe Wilson’s outburst demonstrated — “decorum” dictates that the targets of the criticism sit silently and not respond until later, once the speech is done.  That’s how speeches work.  Only Supreme Court Justices would depict their being subjected to such a mundane process as an act of grave unfairness (and, of course, Roberts’ comrade, Sam Alito, could not even bring himself to abide by that decorum).

As Greenwald points out, Roberts’ whining is especially striking given that:

Federal judges are basically absolute tyrants who rule over their courtroom and those in it with virtually no restraints.  They can and do scold, criticize, berate, mock, humiliate and threaten anyone who appears before their little fiefdoms — parties, defendants, lawyers, witnesses, audience members — and not merely “decorum,” but the force of law (in the form of contempt citations or other penalties), compels the target to sit silently and not respond.  In fact, lawyers can be, and have been, punished just for publicly criticizing a judge.

Roberts is not more obnoxious than other judges - he’s just typical in expecting a particular level of deference to his authority (and that level of deference is surely greater on the Supreme Court than anywhere else). Given how routinely he doles out harsh, probing criticism of people who appear before him and given his formidable professional stature, it’s bracing to see how easily rattled he appears to be and how easily disrupted is his sense of personal security.

And his reaction hints of a deeply ingrained authoritarianism of the kind that scholars have been studying for decades - a desperate need for structure and manners and for a clear and unshakable delineation of roles, an insistence on a strict, unwavering application of rules, irrespective of context and an incapacity to imagine what it might be like to be on one side of a set of circumstances that, when you are typically on the other side, you consider to be the definitively correct order of the universe. And on top of that, a strikingly easily shaken notion of personal security and well-being that, in turn, demands order of the most stringent kind to combat the terrifying disorder and unruliness of the world in which we live.

It’s not only this episode, however, that hints at the extreme degree to which Roberts fits the authoritarian personality framework. In our book, we argue that a hallmark of authoritarianism is a cognitive profile characterized by a rejection of nuance and ambiguity and a need for clear-cut, black and white thinking. Roberts is a highly intelligent man, which is one reason why it’s a mistake to reduce discussions of authoritarian personality to assertions about the stupidity of those who evince those personality traits. Roberts’ reasoning is strikingly redolent of the authoritarian cognitive style, as was evident during the Seattle affirmative action case, decided in June of 2007, when the high court sharply limited the scope of public school integration plans.

In his profile of Roberts for the New Yorker last year, Jeffrey Toobin tells part of the tale:

Race was also at the center of the most important opinion so far in his career as Chief Justice—a case that also displayed his pugnacious style in oral argument. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 concerned a challenge to the city’s racial-integration plan. The Seattle plan assigned students to schools based on a variety of factors, including how close the student lived to the school and whether siblings already attended, but the goal of maintaining racial diversity was considered as well. At the oral argument, on December 4, 2006, the Chief Justice tore into Michael F. Madden, the lawyer for the Seattle school district.

“You don’t defend the choice policy on the basis that the schools offer education to everyone of the same quality, do you?” he asked, and Madden said that he did defend it on those grounds.

“How is that different from the ‘separate but equal’ argument?” Roberts went on. “In other words, it doesn’t matter that they’re being assigned on the basis of their race because they’re getting the same type of education.”

“Well, because the schools are not racially separate,” the lawyer said. “The goal is to maintain the diversity that existed within a broad range in order to try to obtain the benefits that the educational research shows flow from an integrated education.”

Roberts wouldn’t let the issue go. “Well, you’re saying every—I mean, everyone got a seat in Brown as well; but, because they were assigned to those seats on the basis of race, it violated equal protection. How is your argument that there’s no problem here because everybody gets a seat distinguishable?”

“Because segregation is harmful,” Madden said. “Integration, as this Court has recognized . . . has benefits.”

Toobin also recounts the most famous line Roberts has written as Chief Justice so far, in his majority opinion in the Seattle case:

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Toobin notes that this drew an “incredulous dissent” from Justice John Paul Stevens:

who said that the Chief Justice’s words reminded him of “Anatole France’s observation” that the “majestic equality” of the law forbade “rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” For dozens of years, the Court had drawn a clear distinction between laws that kept black students out of white schools (which were forbidden) and laws that directed black and white students to study together (which were allowed); Roberts’s decision sought to eliminate that distinction and, more generally, called into question whether any race-conscious actions by government were still constitutional. “It is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision,” Stevens concluded.

France, of course, meant his “observation” to be satirical. Roberts’ reasoning here suggests he would not have gotten the joke. Of course, many opponents of affirmative action view Roberts’ logic here as impeccable. But it’s hard to believe that, even if you consider affirmative action as unfair on the grounds that it punishes people today for transgressions of which they played no part, or that the historical injustices that originally necessitated affirmative action no longer obtain, that you could actually believe that stopping the kind of “discrimination” that Roberts sees in the Seattle plan, would actually stop the kinds of racism that has historically hurt African Americans (or other minorities).

Roberts is not above play-acting, of course. Toobin’s profile got a lot of attention last year for arguing that, contrary to Roberts’ demure, moderate-seeming and “neutral” tone during his confirmation hearings in 2005, he has turned into a far-right ideologue.  And, in fact, Roberts’ likely pursuit of an aggressively right-wing judicial activist agenda, once he reached the high court, was plain to see before he was approved by the Senate, even for a rank amateur court watcher.

But Roberts’ apparently deep sense of injury over being criticized, the evident insecurity he feels notwithstanding his awesome power and the frankly stunningly simplistic nature of his reasoning (at least when it comes to race and affirmative action) are likely not play-acting. They provide a revealing and I would dare say, troubling window, onto the soul of the man who may head our high court for the next generation.

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Liberal Media Again Serves Right-Wing Interests

March 4th, 2010

It happens all the time, of course. The “liberal” media, in its effort to be even-handed and to inoculate itself from the dreaded slander that it is liberal, engages in he-said/she-said journalism at the expense of actually getting the story right, providing useful context or more generally providing the information necessary for individuals to make informed decisions about politics.

As but only the the latest instance of this endless abdication of journalistic responsibility concerns coverage of the debate about the use of reconciliation to pass health care reform. As Jamison Foser detailed at Media Matters, when the GOP used reconciliation to “ram through” the Bush tax cuts of 2003 (at a cost of $1.8 trillion), the media barely mentioned the term.

Foser:

The Senate reconciliation vote occurred on May 23, 2003. In the month of May, only one New York Times article so much as mentioned the use of reconciliation for the tax cuts — a May 13, 2003, article that devoted a few paragraphs to wrangling over whether Senate Republicans could assign the bill number they wanted (S.2) to a bill approved via reconciliation. The Times also used the word “reconciliation” in a May 9, 2003, editorial, but gave no indication whatsoever of what it meant.

And that’s more attention than most news outlets gave to the use of reconciliation that month. The Washington Post didn’t run a single article, column, editorial, or letter to the editor that used the words “reconciliation” and “senate.” Not one. USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press were similarly silent.

Cable news didn’t care, either. CNN ran a quote by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley about the substance of the tax cuts in which he used the word “reconciliation” in passing — but that was it. Fox News aired two interviews in which Republican members of Congress referred to the reconciliation process in order to explain why the tax cuts would be temporary, but neither they nor the reporters interviewing them treated reconciliation as a controversial tactic.

And ABC, CBS, NBC? Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Note that the discussion here refers almost exclusively to the “liberal media” - the New York Times, Washington Post (That the Washington Post is still considered “liberal” has become something of a sick joke, of course), the major networks and CNN.

Speaking of the Post, the other night Rachel Maddow criticized Orrin Hatch for an op-ed he wrote this week for the Washington Post. That op-ed, decrying the Democrats’ potential use of reconciliation to finish the job of reconciling the health care reform bills that have already passed both houses of Congress, was simply full of falsehoods.

Hatch wrote, in part:

“The use of reconciliation to jam through this legislation against the will of the American people would be unprecedented in scope.  And the havoc wrought would threaten our system of checks and balances, corrode the legislative process, degrade our system of government, and damage the prospects of bipartisanship.”

Since Hatch himself has voted for reconciliation-passed bills numerous times, he did feel compelled to add:

“Both parties have used the process, but only when the bills in question stuck close to dealing with the budget.  In instances in which other substantive legislation was included, the legislation had significant bipartisan support.”

This is, as Maddow pointed out, simply 100% false.

Maddow:

In 2003, Republicans used reconciliation to get the Bush tax cuts passed, the tax cuts that exploded the deficit.  They did not get significant bipartisan support for that.  They passed it with 50 votes (and, as Foser pointed, two were Democrats, and one of those two was the un-hinged and already Democrat-hating Zell Miller).  Dick Cheney had to come in as vice president and president of the Senate to break that tie to give them 51.

Two years later, another reconciliation vote, this time, on Medicaid. Republicans were only able to get that one passed using reconciliation, too, because they only got 52 votes for that one—significant bipartisan support.

When Orrin Hatch says, hey, we never use reconciliation for big substantive bills when the vote was going to be close, and when he says that would be unprecedented, he is not telling the truth.  It is a lie. Health reform passed the Senate by 60 votes.  It passed the House by a majority.  And now, Democrats are going to pass the last fixes to align the two bills using reconciliation.

Republicans used reconciliation a lot, for major legislation.  They did it all the time, and they‘re now lying about that record.  Orrin Hatch, in particular, has been there voting with them while they did it, just about every single time.  And now, Orrin Hatch is lying about that in “The Washington Post.”  And “The Washington Post” is just printing the lying.

That Republicans repeatedly lie and adopt positions that directly contradict positions they’ve previously adopted (as with their condemnation of the stimulus package while simultaneously scurrying to their home districts to take credit for its beneficial effects) is bad enough. Much worse, however, is that the liberal media continues to treat falsehoods as if they’re merely just a “side” in a two-sided debate about politics.

But not only is there the problem of repeating deliberate and outright falsehoods as if they’re credible positions. There’s also the repeated willingness of the media to frame issues in a way that facilitates the lying. Republicans want nothing more than to pull their usual black-is-white, up-is-down act by somehow arguing that it would be undemocratic, elitist, and a usurpation of the principle of representative government to allow legislation that has already passed both houses of Congress to be finalized according to majority rule.

And how better to allow that idea to gain meaningful traction than to harp endlessly on the “complicated” “parliamentary” “gimmick” of reconciliation, but only when Democrats are planning to use it,  rather than to report that it’s a common enough procedure that has been used to enact major, and contentious legislation for decades?

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It’s Not that Complicated

February 16th, 2010

This morning’s New York Times had a lengthy article - nearly 4,500 words - about what it describes as a Tea Party-driven rebellion. The article is a depressing example of the so-called liberal media’s insistence on painting right-wing extremism in as reasonable a light as possible and is of a piece with an article that appeared in the Times last August that portrayed as “respectable” ill-informed, right-wing and racially motivated opposition to health care reform.

Repeatedly, Barstow trips over himself to suggest that the movement is a good old-fashioned non-partisan movement, in that it has disdain for both the Republican Party and Democratic Party, that some of its critiques are shared by people on the left (like its antipathy for the Federal Reserve) and in its opposition to certain GOP politicians, like Meg Whitman, Charlie Crist and Mark Kirk (though, in cataloging the bills of particular against those three politicians, it turns out that their sin was taking typically liberal positions on things like climate change, stimulus spending and support for Van Jones, the activist and former Obama green jobs “czar” who was the subject to a Glenn Beck-led campaign of vilification, leading to Jones’ ouster) .

In American political discourse, such ecumenical contempt is meant to signal independence of thought and is, therefore, to be taken seriously and treated with admiration. Yes, Barstow acknowledges that the tea party movement is predominantly a movement of the right, but that’s so obvious as to be meaningless to point out and is only an obligatory throw-away. He works assiduously to tout its independent bonafides, as when he writes that “these people are a significant undercurrent within the tea party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement…” and when he asserts that while some tea party groups are appendages of the local Republican Party, “most are not.” (How does he know that?) Similar examples abound in the article.

But by burying the obviously ugly impulses and hatreds of many of the movement’s elements, as well as bending over backwards to avoid making the salient point that one of our two major political parties is becoming a haven for racist extremism, Barstow ends up writing what amounts to a sympathetic puff piece, an Olympic-telecast-like human interest story that might as well have been placed in the style section.

It is notable that no variant of the word “race” (such as “racism” or “racist” ) appears until well past three thousand words into the article (at which point most people have stopped reading). The word “racist” finally appears in the context of a denial, when an emerging tea party leader, Richard Mack,  whom Barstow describes as having support among militia types, speaking to an “overwhelmingly white audience.” At that point, Mack felt the need to say, ‘This meeting is not racist.”  Of course not. After all, Mack said so. (The second appearance of the word “racist” is also in the context of a denial - a report about right-wing extremism published by the Justice department last year is treated with “open scorn,” Barstow tells us, by members of the movement who bristle at the suggestion that they’re “racist wingnuts.”)

But the sudden wave of terror concerning the death of America, about which tea party gatherings across America are screaming, begs the question - one that Barstow does mention, but only  in the briefest passing: Why is this concern about excessive banking influence, indifference to the economic struggles of ordinary Americans and the erosion of American liberty only getting such traction now, after the presidency of George W. Bush, a presidency that, by any sane reckoning, was replete with these features?

As I wrote last Fall, it’s because “tyranny” is not the ultimate, animating impulse behind this movement - redistribution is. And that concern has inescapably unpleasant implications. At the time I argued that:

every time you hear another right-wing ring leader, whether it’s the aforementioned Limbaugh or Beck, or Michelle Bachmann or Sean Hannity lament the loss of freedom and the imminent imposition of tyranny, it’s important to remember what galls the modern American right about Obama is not the loss of freedom itself, but the extent to which he represents, in their collective imagination, the loss of prerogative (what folks used to call “status anxiety.”) They believe that Obama’s redistributionism means less for them and their kind - the true, deserving “real” Americans - and more for those who should know their place rather than despoil America with their grubby insistence on government entitlements. Whether it’s illegal immigrants, gays, or brown-skinned people more generally, the modern right may have some sympathy for individuals in need, but as collective groups, it’s an outrage that government wants to help them at the expense of the real Americans.

This contempt for the “other” is key to understanding why the concrete erosions of basic American freedoms during the Bush years were cheered on by the American right. In the popular imagination, the face of those whose freedoms were being denied was a brown one, specifically a Middle Eastern one. In the worldview of the contemporary American right, those faces are not a legitimate part of America (even when they’re full-fledged American citizens). In fact, that effort - to de-legitimize brown skin as a fundamental part of the American fabric - has become a core feature of the contemporary right (or at least, to make sure brown skin knows its proper place). It’s at the heart of the insane birther movement - the entirely baseless claim that the current president was not born in America. Needless to say, Obama’s place of birth isn’t the problem. It’s the double indignity of a mixed race, brown-skinned man with a Kenyan father insisting on the proposition that the government can, and should, do something to aid those less fortunate, including many who do not fit the right-wing’s view of authentic Americans.

Never mind that Obama’s actual efforts to help the less fortunate have proven to be tepid in important respects. Obama’s actual moderation (or political weakness, if you like) only casts into sharp relief the truly irrational, hatred-driven agenda of this new version of the new right.  Near the end of the article, Barstow does quote a couple of civil rights activists who express concern over things like the “puzzling return of racist language and violence,” though Barstow is quick to note that one of the activists he spoke to thought it would be unfair to attribute any of those things to the tea party movement.

Of course, one of the signature events of the tea party movement was the gathering in Nashville two weeks ago of the Tea Party National Convention, which received widespread media attention. In his opening address to the convention, the transparently racist Tom Tancredo attacked President Obama and the cult of multi-culturalism and said that “People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. Tancredo also charged that Obama won the presidency because “we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote.”

As Delvin Burghart put it:

Tancredo, an immigrant-bashing former Colorado Congressman who founded the House Immigration Reform Caucus, appeared to have missed the irony in his rant.  The immigrants he despises are required to take a civics test to become citizens and earn the right to vote, while people born here, like those in the crowd, do not. He also seemed to forget the racist use of literacy tests to keep African-Americans away from the polls under Jim Crow segregation. The Tea Party crowd on hand in the ballroom enthusiastically responded to Tancredo’s racial remarks.

Let me insert here the obligatory disclaimer - not every right-wing opponent of Obama is a racist, nor is every opponent of health care reform and reasonable people can be worried about the size of the federal government and the growth of the national security state. But one presumes that the Times devoted such massive space in its news section to this story because they think this movement has significant implications for American politics and want their readers to have a better understanding of it, not in order to make simple disclaimers.

Maybe Barstow and his editors assume that most of the paper’s readers believe the tea partiers are a bunch of racists and so they want to balance the scales.  But if that’s the case, can’t they do better than to ignore almost completely the issue? Don’t they have the chops to take on the issue and then make serious arguments as to why its racism has been overstated or mis-represents what the movement is really about?

There’s nothing wrong with covering the tea party movement, or pointing out that it contains many disparate elements or that some of those elements have principled objections both to Republican and Democratic party policy positions. But this article is more insidious than all of that - it is a white wash - an attempt to paint a respectable, sanitized version of the movement while willfully ignoring its true significance - as a vehicle for the GOP to incorporate into its ranks ever uglier and racist elements.

One suspects that this is less an exercise in balance (it certainly offers no serious insight or perspective) than it is another example of gutlessness - a fear that failure to treat the rabid right with kid gloves will bring upon the Times an unwelcome outpouring of anger from a movement that, regardless of what the Grey Lady writes, will always consider the paper the house organ of a liberal, multi-cultural conspiracy to destroy the “real” America.

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Zirin on Tiger Woods

December 1st, 2009

Dave Zirin explains to Rachel Maddow the real Tiger Woods scandal.

Good stuff.

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More War

November 26th, 2009

Though he won’t formally announce this until next week, reports indicate that President Obama is about to authorize an additional deployment of 34,000 US soldiers to Afghanistan.

Last night on Charlie Rose, Arianna Huffington complained that this was a reversal of what Obama argued during the 2008 Democratic convention, that “the greatest risk for the U.S. in Afghanistan would be to do the same old thing, play the same old politics, with the same old players and then expect different results.”

But the truth is, escalation in Afghanistan was always the most likely course of action and Obama himself, leaving aside the platitudes of a convention speech, promised as much.

As I wrote in September 2008, after the first Obama-McCain debate, both candidates were promising more war:

John McCain has surrounded himself with foreign policy advisers that include the most fanatical elements of the neo-conservative movement. His relish for further war-in Iran and Syria, as well as Iraq, is a fact.

Obama’s position on Afghanistan is also disturbing. Few people would have denied the US the right to respond militarily in Afghanistan after 9/11. But, seven years later, our escalating presence in that country is only driving it further back into the hands of the Taliban. American bombings there repeatedly kill Afghan civilians and our increasingly provocative incursions into Pakistan threaten to de-stabilize a nuclear-armed country that has strongly and fanatically anti-American elements. A major military escalation there-as Obama proposes-could well inflame the situation further.

Furthermore, it’s no longer clear what, if any strategic value, capturing or killing Bin Laden has, as Obama repeatedly vowed to do. Al Qaeda is a diffuse network in dozens of countries, as Obama himself pointed out. And, the 9/11 plotters mostly prepared for their attack in places like Florida.

In short, the answer to terrorism is not necessarily conventional military action. Obama may know this, but, he’s still unwilling to challenge the fundamental, disturbing prerogative at the heart of American foreign policy: our unique right to project military force anywhere in the world, regardless of the consequences for innocent civilians.

Obama offers depressingly little in the way of “change” here. Is his position politically necessary? Perhaps. Is it disturbing and insidious? Certainly.

Our country’s militarism has reached pathological proportions, as Andrew Bacevich has argued eloquently for years. It threatens our national security, undermines the prospects for an ambitious domestic agenda and does more harm than good to the intended targets of our aggression, including the innocent civilians we’re ostensibly trying to protect and the sound governments we’re supposedly trying to establish.

Obama is about to sign off on more death, more wasted money, more failed diplomacy. But no one can really claim to be surprised.

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Remember When…

November 23rd, 2009

…all the way back in June, Paul Starr warned that the public option that ended up getting negotiated might be so weak that it would be worse than no public option at all.

Well, we may have reached that point, as Josh Marshall notes here and Robert Reich details here.

This is the product of a corrupt and broken political system.

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Toobin on Stupak

November 17th, 2009

Via Coates, Jeffrey Toobin has an incisive take on the Stupak amendment and its larger implications. He explains clearly why the Stupak amendment, if not modified, means that:

Today, most policies cover abortion; in a post-Stupak world, they probably won’t. With a health-care plan that is supposed to increase access and lower costs, the opposite would be true with respect to abortion. And that, of course, is what legislators like Stupak want—to make abortions harder, and more expensive, to obtain. Stupak and his allies were willing to kill the whole bill to get their way; the liberals in the House were not.

The President is pro-choice, and he has signalled some misgivings about the Stupak amendment. But, like many modern pro-choice Democrats, he has worked so hard to be respectful of his opponents on this issue that he sometimes seems to cede them the moral high ground. In his book “The Audacity of Hope,” he describes the “undeniably difficult issue of abortion” and ponders “the middle-aged feminist who still mourns her abortion.” Elsewhere, he announces, “Abortion vexes.” The opponents of abortion aren’t vexed—they are mobilized, focussed, and driven to succeed. The Catholic bishops took the lead in pushing for the Stupak amendment, and they squeezed legislators in a way that would do any K Street lobbyist proud. (One never sees that kind of effort on behalf of other aspects of Catholic teaching, like opposition to the death penalty.) Meanwhile, the pro-choice forces temporized. But, as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed not long ago, abortion rights “center on a woman’s autonomy to determine her life’s course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.” Every diminishment of that right diminishes women. With stakes of such magnitude, it is wise to weigh carefully the difference between compromise and surrender.

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“The Greatest Theft and Cover-Up Ever”

November 17th, 2009

This is from July, but I am just getting to it now. The relentless Dylan Ratigan and Eliot Spitzer explain clearly, in eight minutes, how it was that the US taxpayer committed trillions to banking institutions in exchange for garbage.

And here’s Tim Geithner squirming his way through a Q and A with Elizabeth Warren about why institutions like AIG had to receive 100 cents on the dollar for their bad debts for the sake of their counterparties, creditors, employees, etc., but companies like GM, which employ millions of blue collar workers, didn’t.

It makes listening to discussions about whether we can “afford” health care reform impossible to listen to without getting, well, sick.

And it makes this article I wrote in January seem almost quaint.

Update: And if you want to be too mad to think today, spend another ten minutes with Professor Warren.

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What He Said, Bob Somerby Edition

November 14th, 2009

Yesterday, The Daily Howler highlighted a column by Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, about GOP falsehoods on health care reform (HCR). Somerby notes that Marcus wrote a “very good column,” pointing out the repeated lies uttered by House Republicans during last Saturday’s floor debate.

After debunking one whopper after another, Marcus asked in exasperation:

“You have to wonder: Are the Republican arguments against the bill so weak that they have to resort to these misrepresentations and distortions?

Somerby:

“You have to wonder?” Actually, you don’t—if you’ve been alive on this planet during the past few decades of Republican disinformation about American health care. What Marcus saw is par for the course.

…

The Republican Party has been spreading disinformation about health care for a very long time now. (If only she’d been able to see Candidate Giuliani parade about during Campaign 08!) Citizens have been handed familiar, well-scripted howlers—and since no one like Marcus ever speaks up, many citizens tend to believe the things they have endlessly heard. They’ve been told that “we have the best health care system in the world.” They’ve been told that “European-style health care has never worked anywhere it’s been tried.” They’ve been handed all manner of bull-roar and crap about waiting lists and long lines. And of course, they haven’t ever really been told about our astonishing level of spending.

Had Marcus only been awake, she would have seen this disinformation campaign at work for the past several decades.

She would have seen something else, of course: The utter failure of the mainstream press to respond to this torrent of disinformation. And failure of the “liberal” world. And the failure of the Democratic Party, including its most fiery liberals.

Of course, as depressingly true as Somerby’s point is here, it’s worse than that. Somerby politely declined to rehash Marcus’ generally poor record as a columnist. She’s not merely been asleep about key issues. She herself has been an active peddler of “misinformation,” for example on social security “reform.” (Of course, lying about social security is a virtual mandate in the editorial and op-ed pages of the Washington Post). More broadly, she has been a faithful practitioner in the beltway pundit art of a pox-on-both-their-houses cynicism - whereby pundits demonstrate their cool and independence of thought by arguing that “both sides” engage in the same kinds of political tactics, all while hypocritically lecturing the American people not to expect “too much” from the political process even as they defend privilege. In this spirit, we’ve seen Marcus engage in idiotic false equivalencies, mindlessly defend government power and secrecy, and ignorantly opine on the government’s responsibility to deal with a severe economic downturn, among many other failures.

Arguably the most significant development of the last thirty years in America has been the extraordinary transfer of wealth up the income ladder, making the United States one of the most unequal societies in the world. During that time, executive power has increased dramatically, America has become the world’s number one incarcerator and the wealth, access and privilege of those at the top have reached levels in ways that would have been unimaginable three decades ago, all while the United States has become an unchecked global military colossus. All of these developments have been possible for three principle reasons:

1) This has been the outright agenda of the Republican Party since 1980 - to transfer more wealth to the wealthy, increase executive and policing power, promote militarism - all of which was to be paid for by squeezing the majority of Americans.

2) The Democratic Party’s failure to fight anything but a rear-guard action against these developments when not actively collaborating in them.

3) the mainstream media’s refusal to acknowledge these central developments in American life, preferring instead to focus on petty trivialities, false equivalencies and rationalizations for their own increasing privilege.

That Marcus suddenly realized this week that the GOP was lying about health care reform, whose urgency is a direct consequence of the thirty year upward redistribution of wealth, access and privilege is just one more reminder of how utterly our gatekeepers of public discourse have failed us.

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What Passes for Reasonable

November 13th, 2009

David Brooks has an especially insipid column today, touting the virtues of John Thune, Republican senator from South Dakota, as a viable contender in 2012. According to Brooks, Thune’s chief virtues include the fact that he’s tall and handsome, and that he carries on quiet conversations, rather than ranting loudly. As Yglesias writes, none of this changes the fact that Thune is a down-the-line right-conservative who has no demonstrable agenda for anything. He’s also a serial repeater of false right-wing talking points and an avowed opponent of any reform of health care. Oh and a member in good standing of a bizarre and secretive Christianist group known for sleazy sexual activities and has pushed radical legislation to expand conceal and carry gun laws.

Brooks more or less acknowledges at the end of the piece that on the critical question of middle class economic anxieties, Thune has nothing to say. But since Thune’s views are no more vacuous than Brooks’ own, I guess it’s all good. And besides, Brooks points out that Karl Rove says the tide is turning against Obama and the Democrats, so it must be true.

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