Category Archives: conservatism

Scapegoats

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Today the Olympic torch, having been extinguished and re-lit several times in France, is in San Francisco. I haven’t yet heard what’s going on with it today, but protests are expected, and the IOC is considering scrapping the torch relay in the future.

You probably know that the government of China blames His Holiness the Dalai Lama for causing unrest in Tibet. You probably know this is bullshit. However, the people of China hear only the Chinese government’s side of the story, and they tend to support their government.

Here in the U.S. , wingnuts and the crackpots who lead them continue to promote the idea that either Iran, or al Qaeda (the original one), or both conflated together in John McCain’s addled brain, are the chief culprits behind the violence in Iraq. You probably knew this is bullshit, and if you don’t, Dilip Hiro and John Juan Cole explain it for you.

Republican presidential candidate and war hero John McCain continues to be confused about connections (unlikely) between al Qaeda and Sh’ia Iran. Michael Goldfarb thinks we’re all being picky.

This is getting beyond ridiculous. Sometimes people make mistakes, even liberals–like when Arianna Huffington, in the midst of attacking McCain for just such a gaffe, confused Iran with Syria. Does she really not know the difference between the two? Of course not.

Memo to Goldfarb: Arianna Huffington ain’t runnin’ for President. And McCain keeps making the same mistake.

Clinton supporters believe the Clinton campaign is struggling because media are mean to Clinton. The fact that Senator Clinton’s campaign keeps making big, fat, newsworthy mistakes is not, of course, a factor behind the negative press. Yes, there is some piling on, but she’s giving them so much to pile on about. (See also “Why the Clintons Held Onto Mark Penn.” Interesting read.)

And, as I remember, until the Clinton campaign started losing, the same press had built the Senator and her campaign team into the Most Awesome and Absolutely Unbeatable Political Juggernaut of All Time.

Ezra Klein writes that conservatives have a creative scapegoat for recent economic meltdown — liberals caused the subprime mortgage crisis:

The new line we’re hearing is that the financial meltdown was really the product of the Community Reinvestment Act, a piece of legislation from the late-70s that required federally-insured banks to lend throughout the areas from which they take deposits, including poor neighborhoods, which were being systematically excluded from credit. The legislation, by all accounts, worked. Now, however, conservatives are trying to argue that it’s behind the crisis: If the CRA hadn’t been pushing these banks to make all these unsafe loans, then the birds would still sing and Alan Greenspan could still start each morning by being anointed with the oil of the purest, youngest, olives.

As Robert Gordon shows, however, this is crap.

Well, yes.

Anyway, is there anyone out there actually taking responsibility for something?

Why Wingnuts Are Idiots

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Yesterday I wrote a post about the way our health care system is no longer capable of providing basic, primary care and emergency services to everyone who needs it. There are several causes for this, but the primary cause is that the “system” has been skewed away from preventive and emergency care services (in which there is no profit) and toward the creation of treatments and health care products that do make a profit.

Yesterday’s post focused on a New York Times story about Massachusett, which initiated a “universal” health care program that currently is insuring 340,000 people who had no health insurance before. And now there are not enough primary care physicians to go around. One physician has a 13-month waiting list for basic physicals.

A few wingnuts commented on this same New York Times story. Their take? “See? Socialized medicine doesn’t work!”

Don Surber:

Question: Why isn’t universal health insurance working in Massachusetts?

Answer: Good intentions also lead to shortages in everything. What the New York Times calls “unintended consequences,” I call predictable.

If we didn’t have all these wimpy good intentions, there wouldn’t be a problem. Clearly, that millions of Americans have been cut off from basic health care services is not a problem.

Another rightie, Soccer Dad, concludes that the primary care physician shortage proves Mitt Romney (credited with the Massachusetts health care program) is incompetent. Romney may be incompetent, but the fact is whenever and however the U.S. finds a way to provide decent health care services to those currently uninsured, whether by public or private means, what’s happening in Massachusetts is going to be a nationwide phenomenon.

Put another way, the only reason the insured don’t have massive waiting lines for health care services (in most parts of the country) is that so many Americans have been kicked out of the line.

In other Right Wing news — Yes, Hugh, there were arm bands and book bags in 1968. I was there. Wearing arm bands in protest of the Vietnam War was pretty common, actually.

And why can’t we have civilized debates about important issues? Read this and be amazed — at the psychological projection.

Idiots.

Update: Another idiot speaks —

Why, it must be some kind of doctor shortage! … Could it be, oh I don’t know, lack of incentive?

No, brainless one, there is plenty of incentive. However, all the incentive tilts in the direction of what parts of medical practice that are very profitale (i.e., new technologies and drugs) and away from those parts that are much less profitable (i.e., preventive care) or tend to lose money (i.e., emergency rooms). Your market-driven health care system at work.

And, as Kevin Heyden says, Massachusetts has better health care resources than most other states. So “what will it be like in the Southern states that are mostly rural, or the vast wide open states that grow bigger, the wester you go?”

For years I’ve been hearing health-care experts saying that the nation’s ability to delivery basic medical services to its citizens has been deteriorating, even as we continue to excel at the development of new technologies and drugs for extremely serious illness.

The lack of basic services, however, is one of the factors that is driving up the cost of health care for everyone. It would be far more cost-effective if people got regular checkups and went to doctors at the first sign of illness. However, the millions of Americans who are uninsured or underinsured tend to wait until symptoms are more severe and the illness more difficult (and expensive) to treat.

Here’s just one example — the United States on the whole has world-class hospital neonatal care for infants born prematurely or unhealthy. However, we fall far behind most other industrialized nations in providing basic prenatal care for all pregnant women. Thus, a higher percentage of American babies are born prematurely or unhealthy and need intensive, and expensive, hospital care to survive.

This is what’s called “stupid.” Naturally, wingnuts are for it.

Someone asked in the comments if we have to choose between “unevenly distributed access to health care, and evenly distributed inaccess to health care?” No, we don’t have to choose that at all. Wingnut mythology aside, most industrialized nations provide access to perfectly good health care with no waiting lines to all its citizens. Some do a better job than others, but it can be done, and at a lower cost per capita than we’re paying now. But the longer we pretend that somehow “market forces” are going to solve our health care crisis the worse the inequality will grow, because “market forces” are causing the inequality.

When we do ever switch to universal health care, it will probably take several years to build the medical infrastructure needed to deliver good basic care.

Forty Years

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Today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the web is brimming over with retrospectives. See, for example, Eugene Robinson.

I want to point in particular to E.J. Dionne’s column, however, because he plays one of my own recurring themes — the way the Right exploited racism to take over America. The column begins:

Forty years ago, American liberalism suffered a blow from which it has still not recovered. On April 4, 1968, a relatively brief but extraordinary moment of progressive reform ended, and a long period of conservative ascendancy began.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ensuing riots that engulfed the nation’s capital and big cities across the country signaled the collapse of liberal hopes in a smoky haze of self-doubt and despair. Conservatives, on the run for much of the decade, found a broad new audience for their warnings against the disorders and disruptions bred by reform.

It wasn’t just the riots. Much of white America was still simmering with resentment over court-ordered school desegregation. Also, Lyndon Johnson had initiated New Deal-style programs aimed primarily at relieving poverty among African Americans. Suddenly, whites who had had no problem with “entitlements” before — when benefits went mostly to whites — discovered the virtues of “self-reliance.”

It is easy to forget that the core themes of contemporary conservatism were born in response to the events of 1968. The attacks on “big government,” the defense of states’ rights, and the scorn for “liberal judicial activism,” “liberal do-gooders,” “liberal elitists,” “liberal guilt” and “liberal permissiveness” were rooted in the reaction that gathered force as liberal optimism receded.

Richard Nixon did a masterful job of exploiting fear and prejudice to lure white working-class voters away from the Democrats. And, of course, whites in the Deep South switched their allegiance from the Dems to the Republicans en masse.

The Right-Wing Narrative says that Democrats lost power because George McGovern opposed the Vietnam War, and the Dem Party was overrun by “peaceniks.” But this view of history doesn’t square with what really happened. McGovern’s stand on the Vietnam War was the least of the reasons he lost to Nixon in 1972.

And check out the acceptance speech Nixon gave at the 1972 Republican convention. The first half of the speech was all about race. It was in code, of course, but no adult alive at the time could have mistaken his meaning when he spoke of quotas and tied paying high taxes to the costs of “welfare.” And Republicans are still running on those themes today.

Just the other day, someone argued in the comments that the next Dem president would be punished for “losing Iraq” the way the Democrats were punished for “losing Vietnam.” Except that I don’t see how the Dems were punished for losing Vietnam. Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975; in 1976, America elected Jimmy Carter as president and gave the Dems a small increase in Congress, expanding the large increase the Dems had enjoyed in the 1974 post-Watergate midterms.

The fact is, once combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam and the POWs came home, America lost interest in Vietnam. The whole bleeping country developed amnesia over Vietnam (except for the extreme Right, a group of people who are never so happy as when they are nursing resentments). As I remember it, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the Narrative emerged about Dems losing elections because of Vietnam. But this was an important narrative for the Right, because it helped them paper over the real primary reason the Right gained and the Left lost in those years. And that primary reason was racism. There were other issues, too, but racism was the foundational issue upon which other right-wing issues would be built.

Right-wing politicians had employed Red-baiting with some success since the late 1940s. But the excesses of McCarthyism had turned off moderates, and the Kennedy Administration had ushered in a liberal resurgence. Eventually, racism would succeed where Red-baiting had faltered.

The success of the racism strategy in the 1960s and 1970s taught at least a couple of generations of right-wing politicians about the importance of wedge issues. As new issues came up — feminism, abortion, gay rights — right-wing politicians embraced them and followed the old racism scenario to exploit them. Meanwhile, the Left crumbled into confusion and single-issue activism.

And as right-wingers gained more and more power over the federal government, the federal government became less and less functional. Because wedge issues may win elections, but they don’t govern a nation.

E.J. Dionne continues,

Forty years later, is it possible to recapture the hope and energy of the days and years before that April 4? Has liberalism spent enough time in purgatory for the country to revisit how much was accomplished in its name and to acknowledge that the nation is better off for what the liberals did?

In “The Liberal Hour,” an important new history of the ’60s that will be published in July, Colby College scholars G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert S. Weisbrot note that for all its deficiencies, the period of liberal sway “demonstrated what democratic politics can produce when public consensus crescendos, when coherent majorities prevail, and when skilled leaders provide direction, inspiration, and relentless energy.”

In the U.S., public consensus, coherent majorities, and skilled leaders providing direction in a positive, not a destructive, way are things only us geezers dimly remember and the young folks have never seen.

And after a few years of near-total dominance by right-wingers of the federal government, 81 percent of Americans say the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction.

It’s 40 years since 1968. Now a black man and a white woman are competing with each other for the Dem nomination. They both face nasty bigotry barriers, and it would be a breakthrough if either were elected. Yet only one of these candidates has shown a real talent for building public consensus. The other one is running an increasingly bitter, and angry, wedge-issue style campaign. I think 40 years of that crap is quite enough.

Update: Wingnut priorities.

Catching Up

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The problem with getting behind in my blogging is that, when I do get back to the blog, so much stuff has happened that I don’t know where to start. And, unfortunately, I have a huge amount of Other work to do today and cannot linger here writing something artful. So I’m just going to sort of free associate for a bit and run through some current items.

Leila Fadel and Nancy A. Youssef write for McClatchy Newspapers, “Is ‘success’ of U.S. surge in Iraq about to unravel?” I knew the surge — as a public relations tool, anyway — was in trouble last night, when I was half listening to Hardball. I heard Tweety ask something along the lines of “Is the surge working?” When Tweety’s catching on to something, you know it’s pretty damn obvious. See also Fester at Newshoggers.

The bobbleheads are beginning to write off the Clinton campaign again, for at least the third time. The Vegetable has her chances of winning the nomination at 5 percent, which makes it a near certainty she’s about shoot up in the polls.

Journalist and brother blogger Will Bunch scored a major coup yesterday with this story. (Senator Clinton is exaggerating? Who knew?) See also “Clinton: Pledged delegates are ‘like superdelegates.’ ”

I have to disagree with E.J. Dionne. He writes,

What’s the matter with conservatism?

Its problems start with the failure of George W. Bush’s presidency …

The problems of conservatism are intrinsic to conservatism. Bush’s failed presidency is just a manifestation of the internal failures of conservatism.

I don’t have any problems with what used to be moderately conservative positions, such as being cautious about raising taxes, spending the people’s money, and getting entangled in foreign problems we would do well to leave alone. A moderately conservative perspective needs to be represented in government as a counterweight to some of the flightier impulses of progressivism. By the same token, conservatism needs progressivism and its flightier impulses to keep it from being utterly stuck in the mud. And democratic government itself can only survive when it respects the values of liberalism.

The problem with conservatism is that, when taken to extremes and logical outcomes, it turns into a nasty, brutish thing that destroys everything it touches. And the problem with the Republican Party is that, in the 1970s, it was infiltrated and taken over by hard-core ideologues who were determined to take the GOP and the rest of the country to those extremes and logical outcomes.

And once the extremists had complete control of all branches of government, with no effective counterweights, they proceeded to destroy everything they touched.

You can argue — hell, I’ve argued — that any ideology, taken to extremes, will implode and self-destruct. Ideology is a bit like medicine; a bigger dose is not necessarily a better dose. One pill every four hours might cure you, but four pills every one hour might kill you.

Well, Other duty calls. Gotta go.

Dog Whistle Time

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Here Wingnuts! Good doggies! Wanna play fetch? Here’s the stick; go get it!

Update: I just realized why so many clueless wingnuts who don’t get the joke are dropping by. This is linked at Protein Wisdom (collective IQ of bloggers and readers = 27)! OK; comments off.

Today in Wingnutland

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If you watched last night’s debate, you might remember that Senator Obama spoke of an Army captain whose rifle platoon was sent to Afghanistan short of men and munitions. Today the Right has been on a foaming-at-the-mouth rampage about it, calling Obama a liar. Well, some people did some fact checking, and confirmed Obama’s story. See, for example, Jake Tapper and Phillip Carter. Not that actual facts will sway the wingnuts, of course.

Update: See also Balloon Juice and Hubris Sonic.

Update 2: NBC News also confirms Obama’s story, but the Pentagon denies it. See also Hilzoy.

Joe McCarthy Is Alive and Well and Writes for AIM

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This is too funny. At the hilariously misnamed Accuracy In Media (AIM), Cliff Kincaid is on a tear about Barack Obama’s connections to international Communism.

In “Obama’s Communist Mentor,” Kincaid charges that Obama was imprinted with the cause of Communism by a “mentor,” Frank Marshall Davis. Back in the early 1950s, Davis (along with about half of the population of North America) was identified as a Communist by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Now it comes to light that this same Frank Marshall Davis was a friend of the family who gave young Barack fatherly advice before he went off to college. Hence, Obama is a Communist dupe.

Somehow, I don’t think Red-baiting is going to work on the young folks.

Yet, it gets crazier. Lisa Schiffren writes at The Corner (hat tip Too Sense):

… Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics. (During the Clinton Administration we were all introduced to then U. of Pennsylvania Professor Lani Guinier — also a half black/half Jewish, red diaper baby.)…

… Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from persuing the questions which might arise about how Senator Obama’s mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate student. Love? Sure, why not? But what else was going on around them that made it feasible? Before readers level cheap accusations of racism — let’s recall that the very question of interracial marriage only became a big issue later in the 1960s. The notion of a large group of mixed race Americans became an issue during and after the Vietnam War. Even the civil-rights movement kept this culturally explosive matter at arm’s distance.

It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution. To be sure, there was much to be discontented about, for black Americans, prior to the civil-rights revolution. To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn’t buy the commie line — and showed more faith in the possibilities of democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display in Moscow.

Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family’s background, now that his chances of being president have increased so much.

In other words, race mixing is subversive. Lisa — racist, much? See also the good Roger Ailes (’tis a hoot).

BTW, those Gen-Xers who think the ruination of American politics came about at the hands of Baby Boomers — read up on the late 1940s and early 1950s, folks. That’s when it went crazy, IMO. The Flower Children were just reacting to the insanity.

And for those of you who enjoy looking back on the Good Old Days, here’s an oldie but goodie — highlights of the Army-McCarthy Hearings from That Wonderful Year, 1954.

Numbers and Wingnuts

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One of Bill Kristol’s New York Times‘s columns has been republished on the Guardian web site. You can read it if you like, although to be frank I didn’t get past the blurb — “It is beyond Democrats to concede that Bush’s troop surge has been a substantial success.” Of course, it is beyond a neocon to concede that the principal objective of the surge has not been accomplished. The surge was supposed to buy the Iraqi government some time to pull itself together. Instead, the political situation in Iraq continued to deteriorate, surge or no surge.

But what I really want to call your attention to is one of the comments, which doesn’t have a direct link. “Hotbed” writes,

But let’s do the math:

1) The World Health Organization says that in the three years after the invasion 151,000 Iraqis died in random violence.

2) During Saddam’s 24 years in power, he started the Iran-Iraq and Gulf wars (in which about one million people died) and exterminated at least 500,000 of his own people.

Let’s work out the annual averages:

62,500 violent deaths per year under Saddam
50,000 violent deaths per year under the occupation.

So the latter figure will have to rise substantially, and continue for another 20 years, for the anti-war lobby to have been “right” about Iraq, Bush etc.

Never mind that Hotbed is using a lowball estimate of deaths per year under the occupation and a high estimate of deaths under Saddam. Never mind 3,923 dead U.S. soldiers as of today. Never mind that over 4 million Iraqis have been displaced. Never mind that the Middle East is now less stable than it was before. Never mind that the cost so far is approaching $486 billion. Never mind that the invasion of Iraq served absolutely no vital interest of the United States. Hotbed has the numbers! We’re a success!

In the recent “Morality and Wingnuts” post, I wrote about right-wing blogger reaction to the New York Times article on violent crimes committed by veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of expressing sympathy and concern for veterans who lacked support for war trauma, the righties went into big-time defensive mode and accused the New York Times of bashing vets.

I wrote,

This blogger (who tags his post “NY Times liars scoundrels scumbags”) calculates that 121 homicides among the number of returned veterans is actually below the national homicide rate of the general population — “one-half to less than one-third as much.” But the blogger calculates that there are 1.99 million Iraq/Afghanistan veterans, and I don’t believe that’s accurate. (Note to wingnuts: By saying “I don’t believe” I acknowledge that I don’t know what the number is and could be mistaken.) …

… I would like to know how the real homicide rate of the vets compares to non-vets of the same age group, particularly among males, who commit nearly 90 percent of homicides. It’s possible that the rate among the vets is pretty close to average.

Michelle Malkin provides a correction. According to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the actual number of discharged veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan is 749,932, not 1.99 million. If there were 121 homicides among that number of people (the New York Times considers 121 to be a minimum, not the actual total), then the homicide rate would be 16.1 per 100,000. This is lower than the going homicide rate of 20 per 100,000 rate for white males aged 18-24. But some of the vets are older, and some are women, and the 121 is probably a low number. As I said, it’s possible the homicide rate of discharged veterans is pretty close to average for that demographic group.

And numbers don’t show us what individuals are going through. When you look at individual cases as the New York Times did, it does appear that some of those homicides were related to war trauma. The point of the NY Times article was not that veterans by nature are homicidal maniacs, but that there is inadequate screening and support for post-traumatic stress and veterans and their families are suffering for it.

But in Rightie World, pointing out that veterans have all the vulnerabilities normally associated with being human is bashing the troops. Can’t have that.

And if they can produce some numbers to show that there’s no problem, then there’s no problem, never mind the real-world experience of actual flesh-and-blood people. See Malkin’s headline: “Hey, NYT: 99.98 percent of all discharged Iraq and Afghanistan vets have not committed or been charged with homicide!”

From the New York Times story that has Malkin in her usual steaming outrage mode (I swear, that girl is going to wear out her nervous system one of these days) —

About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives, among them 2-year-old Krisiauna Calaira Lewis, whose 20-year-old father slammed her against a wall when he was recuperating in Texas from a bombing near Falluja that blew off his foot and shook up his brain.

A quarter of the victims were fellow service members, including Specialist Richard Davis of the Army, who was stabbed repeatedly and then set ablaze, his body hidden in the woods by fellow soldiers a day after they all returned from Iraq.

And the rest were acquaintances or strangers, among them Noah P. Gamez, 21, who was breaking into a car at a Tucson motel when an Iraq combat veteran, also 21, caught him, shot him dead and then killed himself outside San Diego with one of several guns found in his car. …

…The Times’s analysis showed that the overwhelming majority of these young men, unlike most civilian homicide offenders, had no criminal history.

Statistics say these episodes are not a problem, say the wingnuts. Stuff happens.

Update: Enjoy the video —