Nihilists Indeed.

I will just out source this whole thing to Joe Klein.  Indeed the GOP has become the Party of Nihilists. I’ve been trying to spell a lot of this out for a while.  I was happy to find this one.

 

There are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection. There are others who mistrust the use of military power under almost any circumstances. But these are policy differences, matters of substance. The most liberal members of the Democratic caucus — Senator Russ Feingold in the Senate, Representative Dennis Kucinich in the House, to name two — are honorable public servants who make their arguments based on facts. They don't retail outright lies. Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party

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Word.  I could probably quote this whole thing.

The news is bad, but FOX is awful

It should be clear to anyone who thinks that FOX news a very clear ideological agenda.  Yes MSNBC has 3 progressives in prime time but studies show that their day to day news coverage is still very conservative. FOX is a different animal entirely.  Check the results of this poll done my MSNBC:

 

Here’s another way to look at the misinformation:

In our poll, 72% of self-identified FOX News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79% of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69% think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75% believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly. But it would be incorrect to suggest that this is ONLY coming from conservative viewers who tune in to FOX. In fact, 41% of CNN/MSNBC viewers believe the misinformation about illegal immigrants, 39% believe the government takeover stuff, 40% believe the abortion misperception, and 30% believe the stuff about pulling the plug on grandma. What’s more, a good chunk of folks who get their news from broadcast TV (NBC, ABC, CBS) believe these things, too. This is about credible messengers using the media to get some of this misinformation out there, not as much about the filter itself. These numbers should worry Democratic operatives, as well as the news media that have been covering this story.

The 41% for CNN/MSNBC is still way to high, but 79%? What the fuck?  And remember FOX is the network whose viewers to this day by equally troubling percentages believe that Saddam Hussein attacked us on 9/11 and that we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq even though neither is true.  This is not a coincidence, a separate study by media matters showed that FOX favors anti reform commentators by a 6 to 1 margin.

The Curse of Optimism

 

I always tried to approach politics with the understanding that if I intend to genuinely care about this stuff I have to be ready to have my heart broken… repeatedly.  I still feel that way, but it’s never been this difficult before. Maybe it’s because there hasn’t been a Democrat in the Whitehouse in my adult life and it takes the Republicans being out of power to appreciate how truly fucking insane they are. Pundits and conservatives talk about these watered down, milk toast, conservative, corporate fucking Democrats like they are Chairman Mao, Stalin, and Hitler all rolled into one. Meanwhile I sit here hoping and praying for just one strong, intelligent, capable, true liberal to find himself in even a modest position of influence. Is this really where we are now? 

I remember catching my first whiff of conservative rot during the presidential campaign when the cons broke out the “be afraid of liberals” marketing.  I just kept thinking, “Really? Are they talking about the far left Hillary Clinton?” “Do they even know what the DLC is?” “Are these people serious?” To answer my own question, yes, they are serious. They are also ignorant, misguided, generally stupid, and wrong about almost everything, but they are dead fucking serious.  So what are you supposed to do when people just don’t care about the facts? What are you supposed to do when the fundamental foundation of conservative ideology (me first, fuck everyone else) bubbles up to the surface and spills out into our political discourse like bloody, rancid, boiling shit? I wish I knew, I just keep reading, keep correcting people when I hear nonsense, I call my Senators and Congressman, I go to meetings, I write letters to the editor,  hoping that in aggregate all of that will make some kind of difference.  But I still feel so helpless, like I’m staring down a bunch of angry villagers with torches and pitchforks trying to hold them at bay with line graphs and pie charts. *sigh*

 

 

 

 

Matt Yglesias is spot on with this post, Democrats have been giving to much away from the begining. Matt puts it better than i could.

He says:

Grassley Says He Would Sabotage A Health Care Bill Whose Provisions He Favors in Order to Advance Partisan Agenda

As you can read here and here Chuck Grassley was on MSNBC earlier today explaining that he might vote “no” on a health care bill even if he thinks it’s a good piece of legislation if that bill doesn’t get support for other Republicans besides Grassley:

In an interview today on MSNBC’s “Morning Meeting with Dylan Ratigan,” Senate Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R) said he’d vote against any health-care reform bill coming out of the committee unless it has wide support from Republicans — even if the legislation contains EVERYTHING Grassley wants.

“I am negotiating for Republicans,” he said. “If I can’t negotiate something that gets more than four Republicans, I’m not a good negotiator.”

When NBC’s Chuck Todd, in a follow-up question on the show, asked the Iowa Republican if he’d vote against what Grassley might consider to be a “good deal” — i.e., gets everything he asks for from Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D) — Grassley replied, “It isn’t a good deal if I can’t sell my product to more Republicans.”

Grassley’s being a jerk, in other words. But what on earth is Max Baucus doing? He’s chairman of the committee. There are 60 Democratic Senators. He should write a bill and bring it to the floor. In fact, he should have done so a month ago. Instead, he’s given veto power over both the substantive and procedural aspects of reform to a man who’s not even pretending to be negotiating in good faith. If we assume that Baucus actually wants to see reform happen, he’s going about it in a very strange way. If you want to see reform enacted, Baucus needs to just write a bill he likes, talk to Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe about what kind of special lobster subsidies they’d like to see in it, and then you pass the thing. This isn’t brain surgery.

Horseshit. The mechantions of political institutions matter, you would think that sweeping victories in the house and senate last november never happened.

Getting Older

Last night I was sitting at home relaxing, letting the weekend wind down.  I was reading that Paxon paper again, The Five Stages of Fascism, and I just started seeing all of the pieces come together.  It’s difficult for me to describe. It was little pieces of vaguely associated images, sound bytes, feelings, pieces of old conversations that flirted with the edge of my understanding all interacting, being reinforced by each other as well as by new information ultimately revealing a richer more profound picture of the world. I felt a thread tie together all of these things that seemed completely unrelated even irrelevant outside of their mutual context.  It could be that I have been reading A LOT lately; I always enjoyed the elevated level of conscious thought that comes after spending a couple weeks neck deep in a few books.  The near instant access to even seemingly irrelevant associated information, having everything you want within reach when you need it… I think maybe that is what power feels like. But last night was different; more than just a heightened level of intellectual awareness, there was a Zen quality to it, a feeling of seamless yet interconnected understanding.  

When the young think about aging they think about getting fat and wrinkly, they think about responsibility and sickness, children and death.  Why would we think of it any other way, having only witnessed those things from a distance as we approach in an inevitable progression? But there is more to it of course, there are advantages to age and experience that youth cannot fathom. When you are young “experience” (whatever that is) seems like a hallow substitute for a healthy body and seemingly limitless potentiality.  Now, I’m only 27. I don’t exactly have one foot in the grave. But, if what I experienced last night was a harbinger of some expanded understanding of the causal tapestry of existence then the kind of person I am is exceedingly conducive to the gifts that age and experience bring and I am looking forward to it. Of course it could have just been a simple moment of clarity in which case this whole post is just so much piss in the wind…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fascism

I always hesitate to use the word Fascist referring to right wing politics and politicians, it’s one of those words that’s been used as a pejorative for so long that it has ceased to mean anything other than “something I don’t like.” But I have been thinking about it a lot lately because of the town hall chaos, you hear people yelling these things, “COMMUNIST, FASCIST, SOCIALIST!!” You have to wonder if these people have ever taken a political science or history class. Do they even know that Hitler and Stalin weren’t fond of each other precisely because one was a communist and the other was a fascist? Words do mean things, and those words mean different things. So how can the American left be all of these things simultaneously? Anyway, I just read this piece over at AlterNet which then directed me to this paper by Robert Paxton which caused me to reexamine my relative ambivalence on the word “fascism.” I know I know, AlterNet is just another far left website and Robert Paxon is just another liberal elitist intellectual Rhodes Scholar with an MA from Oxford and a PhD from Harvard; not as credible as a wing nut in a powdered big on YouTube calling himself Thomas Paine but we liberals have to make due with what we have. Check them out if you can.

Federalism is dead

Conservatives want to talk about globalization and free trade and the United States competing “in the new global economy” and yet their collective heads explode if you try to talk about some kind of national educational standards or god forbid a national healthcare program. How am I supposed to take these people seriously? How in the blue fuck are we supposed to compete in a “new global economy” if the high school graduates from half of the states are functionally illiterate or we don’t teach science, or if German and Japanese companies don’t have to pay the cost of health insurance for their employees but American companies do (GM spends more on healthcare per car than it spends on steel)? And while we are at it, how are we supposed to do that without protecting American workers? I ask that because what “the new global economy” and all these trade agreements really mean is that capital, companies, and goods can move across national borders without restriction. People can’t do that. So without some protectionism we are just creating a situation where American workers are forced to compete dollar for dollar with the Chinese or people in the 3rd world who make nothing by comparison. This creates downward pressure on wages and increases corporate profits but actually harms your average person. I didn’t see the price of Nikes go down when they moved their manufacturing operations to Indonesia did you? I call bullshit on the whole thing.

these fucking people

These tea bagger idiots blow my mind, for 8 years while the republicans expanded government, started illegal wars, wiretapped and data mined Americans without warrants or judicial oversight, passed a 1.5 trillion dollar tax cut for the wealthy without giving the slightest consideration to budget shortfalls, torture, rendition, the repeal of posse comitatus, denial of habeas corpus, I can go on and on Not only did they not protest, they were chearleading the whole thing. These people are so fucked. I guess this all fits pretty well with the conservative world view though. How many worthless conservatives do you know that put on the show at church every Sunday and talk about holiness and bla bla bla, but you know not to turn your back because they will fuck you over in a second? That’s a microcosm of the entire conservative movement.

This tea bagger bullshit is the political equivalent to a 6 year old girl putting her fingers in her ears and going “la la la la la I cant hear you la la la la” somebody get these people internet access, fucking library cards, something I don’t know. I just can’t believe things are like this. Healthcare seems like a pretty simple issue morally. I don’t know if it’s willful ignorance or just old fashioned deception but its getting ugly out there. You see these people just screaming and angry and… and wrong, just completely misinformed about the most basic and fundamental issues. Maybe it seems scarier to me because I do my homework and know how truly absurd the things these people think really are. “READ THE BILL!!!” they say. What bill are they talking about anyway? There are 5 different bills, 4 in the house and then the Baucus bill from the Senate Commerce Committee that no one has even seen. I am terrified by the unabashed ignorance of it all; the tales of the government euthanizing grandma, and rationing, death panels, and a government takeover of Medicare (WTF!). Socialized medicine oooooohooooooo. Has everyone gone insane? And the democrats think we can compromise with these lunatics? One side is, for all its faults, trying to pass substantive reform on an issue that desperately needs it… the other side is MAKING SHIT UP.

These fucking people….