Category Archives: conservatism

White Whales and Wingnuts

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A lot about wingnut behavior begins to make sense if you understand that in their reality, they are Captain Ahab and we liberals and progressives are Moby Dick. They don’t all want to kill us (a disturbing number do, of course), but mostly they are driven to settle the score with us.

What score? you may ask. The score for whatever they imagine we did to them. It’s not clear to me what that is, but clearly it’s the fire burning in their bellies; their raison d’être. For the Right, life is one long, monomaniacal quest to get even with the Left.

Thus, you can count on them not quitting even when they’re ahead, because in their own minds they are never ahead, or at least never ahead enough.

Along those lines — one of the weirder aspects of the ongoing torture scandal is the way the Right has tried to make it a referendum on Nancy Pelosi. I don’t entirely agree with Matt Yglesias that the Pelosi argument is backfiring. Not yet, anyway. But neither do I think anyone who hasn’t signed up to sail on the Pequod, so to speak, cares about whether Nancy Pelosi was briefed about torture or not.

However, I also think Matt has a point that they could have just accepted President Obama’s wish to move on from the torture question and keep their mouths shut. But they couldn’t do that. They couldn’t pass it up any more than a dog can pass up a tree without saluting.

Steve Benen:

Republicans were getting exactly the result they wanted, right up until they thought to go after Pelosi. Now, the liberal Democratic House Speaker and the conservative Republican RNC chairman are saying the same thing: let’s investigate and get the whole story.

Indeed, Pelosi has been using this to great effect. When the right argues that she’s lying or was somehow complicit in Bush’s alleged crimes, she always responds with the same compelling answer: “Let’s have an investigation and see who’s right.”

As far as the strategy goes, Republicans should have taken “yes” for an answer.

Think Gollum diving into the lake of fire to grab the ring.

Now, I also agree with Steve M that the Right can still control news cycles and still finesse the terrorism question. But the Right does tend to come unglued where Nancy Pelosi is concerned.

See, for example, John Feehery’s “Conditions for a coup in Congress” at The Politico. Feehery’s evidence that House Democrats are on the edge of replacing Pelosi are, um, old. Steny Hoyer ran against Pelosi for Majority Whip in 2001, so he’s a potential rival. The base must be pissed at Pelosi, because Cindy Sheehan ran against Pelosi in 2004.

Yes, a lot of lefties are disenchanted with Pelosi, but a lot of lefties are disenchanted with a lot of people. I think if the base were given the authority to replace somebody in Democratic leadership, the first on the list would be Harry Reid, not Nancy Pelosi.

David Weigel at the Washington Independent calls the Feehery piece a “curious case of media narrative-setting.” Whatever. Feehery is reason itself compared to Mike Huckabee:

Here’s a story about a lady named Nancy
A ruthless politician, but dressed very fancy
Very ambitious, she got herself elected Speaker
But as for keeping secrets, she proved quite a “leaker.”

Which, I submit, says a lot more about Mike Huckabee than it says about Nancy Pelosi. And what it says is damn pathetic. Notice the dig about a woman being “ruthless” and “ambitious.” That’s another tree the Right can’t pass up.

Regarding what needs to be investigated — see Marcy Wheeler’s “The 13 people who made torture possible.” Sorta kinda related — Gary Farber, JAVAID IQBAL.

New Coke

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CNN’s John King reports that the GOP is launching a “rebranding” effort today to shine up the party’s image. The initiative is called the National Council for a New America. Its founders include —

  • John McCain
  • Jeb Bush
  • Haley Barbour
  • Bobby Jindal
  • Mitt Romney

Oh, stop giggling and pay attention. Now, this “council” will report to Republican leaders in Congress, and taking part in the launch party today will be

  • John Boehner
  • Eric Cantor
  • Mike Pence
  • Mitch McConnell
  • Jon Kyl
  • Lamar Alexander

I say they don’t need a new initiative. They need new blood. Maybe even a whole new gene pool. Anyway, these dinosaurs will lumber forth from Washington and hold town hall meetings all over the country so that they can listen to the American people.

Whether they will allow nonbelievers to attend these town hall meetings I cannot say. I am skeptical any of them can hold a sensible conversation with anyone who isn’t fluent in “conspeak.” Conspeak is a kind of language substitute created by randomly stringing together standard right-wing talking points and buzzwords regardless of dictionary meanings.

For example — At the New York Times, Adam Nagourney and David Herzenhorn write that Republicans are debating among themselves whether they should be working to create a bigger party or a purer party. Here’s a bit —

Patrick J. Toomey, a former head of the Club for Growth whose primary challenge to Mr. Specter led the senator to bow out in the face of what he thought was a probable defeat, said Republicans should be open to a “wide range of opinions on a wide range of issues.”

As Tbogg says, “As long as those ideas are lowering taxes on the rich, drill baby drill, keeping handguns cheap and plentiful, getting rid of capital gains taxes, and re-naming America ‘Reaganland’.”

“But I think fundamental common ground that the vast majority of Republicans share is the belief in limited government, freedom and personal responsibility,” Mr. Toomey said.

The question of how the party should respond to Mr. Specter’s departure was the main subject of a Senate Republican lunch on Wednesday. The party can be a “big tent,” said Senator John Ensign of Nevada, “but here are some core principles: fiscal responsibility, more personal responsibility, looking for a smaller, more effective government.”

In light of what Republicans actually do when they get their hands on the steering wheel of government, what are Mr. Toomey and Sen. Ensign actually saying?

“Fiscal responsibility” means lowering taxes on the wealthy and cutting programs that benefit the not-wealthy, but at the same time making sure the special interests that helped one get elected are well cared for.

“Personal responsibility” means government is to become primarily a tool for protecting the power and assets of the ruling plutocracy at the expense of the interests of the nation and its citizens.

“Smaller, more effective government” is a government rendered incapable of doing anything not covered by “fiscal responsibility” and “personal responsibility.”

Oh, and then there’s “freedom,” which is a system by which corporations are the landlords and citizens are the serfs/sharecroppers/tenants.

I’m betting that the Council’s town halls will not include anyone not a shill or a true believer.

What Do They Expect?

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There are no end of commentaries on the Specter Defection on the web today. The majority opinion from Dems/progressives/liberals is that the Defection might not make much difference in the Senate, short term. They grumble that Arlen is way too conservative, even with a “D” after his name. The real significance of the Defection, they say, is that the Republican Party is coming apart at the seams.

The majority opinion of Republicans/conservatives/troglodytes is “Yeah? So what?”

You know the Defection was a disaster for Republicans when Bill “Always Wrong About Everything” Kristol calls the Defection “good news for Republicans!” What’s coming from the likes of Rush and Lulu are variations on “don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out, Arlen.” And Newt said,

Arlen Specter’s decision to leave the Republican Party in name as he left it in spirit over the stimulus vote is further proof that high taxes, big spending and big government are unacceptable to Republican voters.

This shows us one of the many ways movement conservatives get everything backward. Most political parties exist to represent some part of public opinion. But today’s GOP drives away any part of the public that doesn’t represent its opinion.

In many ways, IMO, the Republican Party is acting like an apocalyptic cult — a small number of true believers waiting for some Big Cataclysmic Event that’s going to change everything, to their advantage. For that reason, present reality doesn’t interest them, because present reality is just a temporary aberration (which it may be, but not in the way they think). Thus, movement conservatives brush off opinion polls that show their positions to be wildly unpopular. They don’t need to worry about election losses, shrinking party membership, an aging political base, or senior senators who jump ship. They don’t need to change with the times. They’ll be vindicated when the Mother Ship arrives. You’ll see.

And they must truly believe in the Event, because they’re betting everything on it. In 2000 they still were shrewd enough to market Dubya as a moderate — a “compassionate conservative” who liked to be photographed surrounded by smiling black children. Now they aren’t even pretending to make adjustments to political reality.

Which brings me to the question — what do they expect? What do they think is to happen that will turn the world back upright (as they see it) and put them on top?

It may be something as simple as expecting the Democrats, and the Obama Administration, to screw up, driving the electorate back to the Right. That’s not an irrational idea, of course. It could happen. But it’s far from a certainty. What if the Dems don’t screw up? Movement conservatives have no visible contingency plans other than doing everything they can to trip up the Obama Administration and make it fail.

We can go to a more fundamental level and think about what drives the Right. The money in back of movement conservatism — the top of the power pyramid — was always about plutocratic control of government and diverting the nation’s wealth into the pockets of the privileged few. That hasn’t changed. The interesting question, at least to me, has always been to understand who on the Right is in on the joke and who isn’t.

I have long believed that the manipulators, the ones with the deep pockets who set the course, stay out of sight, and that most of the visible Right are true believers. And what I suspect has happened is that sometime in the past eight years the true believers started making the decisions and setting the course. Or else, the plutocrats are so dependent on the support of the true believers they’ve manipulated themselves into a corner. Take your pick.

Update and Bonus Question: One of the commenters at National Journal today said the Specter Defection “demonstrates the growing power of the grassroots, conservative base of the Republican party.” In what alternative reality might that be true?

Devolved

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If you want to know how the American Right came to its current pitiful state, consider: Bill Kristol will be awarded a $250,000 Bradley Prize from the the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

Yeah, that Bill Kristol.

Eric Alterman and Joan Walsh are both appropriately snarky. They both compile sampler lists of the many times Kristol has been wrong. And not just wrong; stupefyingly, jaw-droppingly, what planet does this guy live on? wrong. I don’t need to repeat all that here. Let’s just say that if stupid were an art form, Kristol would be the Mona Lisa.

In any other context but the American Right, Kristol would be buried in obscurity. Since he’s a white man with a college education one assumes he would rise to a middle management position somewhere, in spite of his obvious handicaps. However, in a true meritocracy he’d be put to work doing something that involved simple, repetitive motions but no sharp objects.

Yes, Kristol graduated Harvard magna cum laude in three years and has a Ph.D., his biography says. But, folks, stupid is as stupid thinks. Either Kristol was dropped on his head post-Ph.D. or Kristol’s professors were paid off. There are no other explanations.

But then there’s Jonah Goldberg, both badly educated and intellectually incoherent. His silly cognitive misfirings are published in the Los Angeles Times and by Doubleday. And if Michele Bachmann belonged to any other party but the GOP, party leaders would keep her locked in the attic and out of public view. I could go on, but I’m sure you get the drift.

I want to call your attention to a section of Thomas Franks’s book The Wrecking Crew published in the August 2008 Harper’s.

For some in winger Washington this is an idealistic business, but what gives it power and longevity is that it is a profitable business. I mean this not as polemic but as a statement of fact. Washington swarms with conservative ideologues not because conservatives particularly like the place but because there is an entire industry here that supports these people—an industry subsidized by the nation’s largest corporations and its richest families, and the government too. We are all familiar with the flagship organizations—Cato, Heritage, AEI—but the industry extends far beyond these, encompassing numerous magazines and literally hundreds of lobbying firms. There is even a daily newspaper—the Washington Times—published strictly for the movement’s benefit, a propaganda sheet whose distortions are so obvious and so alien that it puts one in mind of those official party organs one encounters when traveling in authoritarian countries.

There are political strategists, pollsters, campaign managers, trainers of youth, image consultants, makers of TV commercials, revolutionaries-for-hire, and, of course, direct-mail specialists who still launch their million-letter raids on the mailboxes of the heartland. Remember the guy who wrote all those sputtering diatribes for your college newspaper? Chances are he’s in D.C. now, thinking big thoughts from an endowed chair, or churning out more of the brilliant usual for one of the movement’s many blogs. The campus wingnut whose fulminations on the Red Menace so amused my friends and me at the University of Virginia, for example, resurfaced here as a columnist for the Washington Times before transitioning inevitably into consultancy. A friend of mine who went to Georgetown recently recalled for me the capers of his campus wingnut, whom he had completely forgotten until the guy made headlines as the lead culprit in a minor 2004 scandal called “Memogate.” Later he worked for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, teaching democratic civics to Iraqi politicians.

There is so much money in conservatism these days that Karl Rove rightly boasts, “We can now go to students at Harvard and say, ‘There is now a secure retirement plan for Republican operatives.’”

Consider the conservative movement since the early 1950s — Russell Kirk to William F. Buckley to Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan to Newt Gringrich/Grover Norquist to William Kristol/Jonah Goldberg. Whether you agreed with them or not, Kirk and Buckley at least fit the definition of intellectual. Since the 1950s, however, there has been a steady regression of cognitive ability on the Right; a march from reason. And now the entire conservative movement is collapsing into a puddle of utter imbecility.

I am no social darwinist, but I can’t help but think that one of the reasons for this biological devolution is that the money supporting the Right has buffered its specimens from the “survival of the fittest” rule. A “movement conservative” has no need for intelligence or accomplishment, only connections.

We come to it at last: George W. Bush. Removed from his cocoon of privilege he might have clawed his way up to an assistant mangership at the Crawford Wal-Mart, but only because of his ability to bully the employees. He not only never performed the job of President of the United States; I remain unconvinced he understood what his job was. Like Kristol and Goldberg, we’d have never heard of him but for his pedigree.

Of course, not everyone in conservatism was given a hand up by mommy or daddy. Rep. Bachmann appears to have had humble roots, as did Sarah Palin and many others. For that matter, let’s think about Tom DeLay, John Boehner, and that entire generation of Republican politicians. These examples show us that to be successful in the GOP these days requires stubborn ignorance combined with unscrupulous ruthlessness.

In other words, you’ve got to be dumb enough (or, at least, intellectually lazy enough) to mix with the “legacy” conservatives (or want to, for that matter). But it also helps to have the kind of feral hunger for success that aristocrats rarely muster.

In the case of conservative “journalists,” it strikes me that the older generation — e.g., Bob Novak, Pat Buchanan — had enough brains to be genuinely shrewd. They could be infuriatingly disingenuous most of the time, but when these two were in their prime you knew they knew exactly what they were doing. Current right-wing media stars like Bill O’Reilly or Glenn Beck are, alas, merely pathological.

Writing about Kristol and the state of journalism, Joan Walsh points out that when Kristol’s Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation award was announced, “a Pulitzer Prize-winner in Mesa, Ariz., had already been laid off from his job,” and “a newspaper journalist who was recently shot in the line of duty lost his job a few days ago as well.” Yet Kristol bombs spectacularly at the New York Times and gets a $250,000 award.

One suspects the next generation of movement conservatives will find it challenging to eat with a fork.

The Air, the Air Is Everywhere

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rightwingoverse I’m hoping Salon and Tom Tomorrow don’t mind my borrowing a panel of today’s strip, but I haven’t seen anything that better sums up the current state of the Right than the panel at left. What’s hysterical about it is that it’s not exaggerated.

The Right cannot merely disagree with Democrats and with the Obama Administration. No; every point of disagreement (which is everything the Obama Administration is doing, because it’s them doing it), no matter how minor, is framed not as a bad idea but as The End of the Universe as We Know It.

For example, at the Los Angeles Times Jonah Goldberg explains the role of the Environmental Protection Agency in the evil plot to bring America into the grip of dictatorship. Because the EPA (Goldberg says, ominously) has given itself the power to regulate everything, including the air you breathe.

Nominally, the Environmental Protection Agency’s announcement last Friday only applies to new-car emissions. But pretty much everyone agrees that the ruling opens the door to regulating, well, everything.

According to the EPA, greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide — the gas you exhale — as well as methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride. It is literally impossible to imagine a significant economic or human activity that does not involve the production of one of these gases.

Ah, how diabolical. The EPA can regulate everything that involves carbon dioxide, which is pretty much all air-breathing life forms on this planet.

For a little background, read the New York Times editorial on the EPA policy:

The formal “endangerment finding” names carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases as pollutants subject to regulation under the federal Clean Air Act. This in turn sets the stage — after a 60-day comment period — for broad new rules touching major sectors of the American economy and profoundly influencing how Americans use and generate energy.

The finding is also likely to accelerate the progress of climate legislation in Congress and will give the United States the credibility it lost in international climate negotiations during the Bush administration. The next round of talks is scheduled for Copenhagen in December.

The decision has been a long time coming. Two years ago, the United States Supreme Court ordered the agency to determine whether greenhouse gases harmed the environment and public health and, if so, to regulate them. Scientists at former President George W. Bush’s E.P.A. largely agreed that greenhouse gases are harmful and should be regulated. In December 2007, the agency forwarded an endangerment finding to the White House, where senior officials promptly suppressed it, refusing even to open the e-mail to which it was attached.

Talk about judicial activism! The Supreme Court was in on the plot two years before Obama became President! Of course, what you don’t see anywhere in Goldberg’s column is anything resembling a reasoned, documented argument why the EPA’s policy regarding greenhouse gasses is not the best approach for, you know, protecting the environment.

BTW, here’s the background on the Supreme Court decision, which passed by a 5-4 vote, the usual dissenters (Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas) dissenting. More here and here.

But, you know, there’s a list that goes on and on. The marginal tax rate for millionaires is bumped up by 3 percent, and the wingnuts start screaming about econo-fascism. (Because, you know, calling it socialism isn’t working.) What you don’t get is anything resembling a reasoned, factual discussion of Obama’s actual tax policies (as opposed to the fantasy Obama tax policies the Right complains about) and why they might not be a good idea.

For that matter, someone explain why wingnuts scream bloody murder when someone suggests paying taxes is patriotic. They say they love America, but they don’t want to pay to maintain it? Isn’t that a bit like saying you love your children, but not enough to be bothered to feed and clothe them?

A rightie might argue they are only opposed to taxes that are too high or unfair taxes — taxing some people at a higher rate than others. OK, fine. Then stop fomenting hysteria and attempt a reasoned, factual discussion. (Clue: A fact is generally defined as something that has objective, verifiable reality; it is not anything you want to believe because it fits your prejudices.)

In other news, the lying aggregate of fecal matter known as “Newt Gingrich” went ballistic because President Obama not only shook hands with Hugo Chavez; he smiled and shook hands at the same time. Satyam Khanna points out at Think Progress that lots of presidents have shaken hands with dictators and smiled while they were doing it.

Gingrich said on NBC,

How do you mend relationships with somebody who hates your country, who actively calls for the destruction of your country and who wants to undermine you?

Which brings me back to the cartoon at the top of the post. We turn once again to Richard Hofstadter, here quoting Theodore W. Adorno:

The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere … The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

How much more spot on can one get? They’ve somehow simultaneously staked claims on both “love it or leave it” super-nationalism and “hate the Gubmint” anarchism, which may be unprecedented.

On Request

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Patterico wants all bloggers to embed this video. So I watched it, and said yeah, sure.

You’ll recognize reporter Susan Roesgen of CNN from an earlier post. Roesgen’s work as shown on the earlier video was clumsy. She was over her head, I think, and obviously got rattled. I felt a lot more sympathy for her in the video above.

The thing is, righties are linking to this video as if it vindicates them somehow. I think it makes them look worse. Don’t stop the vid until you see the guy delivering the speech about how Hitler was a socialist. Classic.

Roesgen is getting the Dan Rather treatment now, btw. The righties are digging for everything they can find on her so they can smear her.

Update: Glenn Reynolds is bragging about how genteel, polite, and multi-racial the “tea parties” were. Yes, and I’m Prince Charles.

Update: See also No More Mr. Nice Blog.

Catching More Flies With Honey

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Right now The Usual Wingnuts are having a fit because President Obama shook hands with Hugo Chavez at the Summit of the Americas meeting in Trinidad and Tobago. In other words, the President is behaving like a grownup, and we can’t have that!

What the wingnuts won’t tell you: “Obama drives Chavez out of limelight”

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez was greeted like a rock star by onlookers when he arrived at a 34-nation summit — but only because Barack Obama had slipped through a back door.

A short while later, a roomful of dignitaries from every nation in the Americas except Cuba met the U.S. president with thundering applause and a few whoops. Some stood up to clap.

No one else got as warm a reception, and Obama was repeatedly interrupted by applause as he promised an “equal partnership” with the region, including a bid to mend relations with Cuba.

Chavez didn’t speak at the opening ceremony and had to be content sitting quietly with the other leaders. It was a big change from the last Summit of the Americas in 2004, when he led the pack in defeating a hemispheric trade accord spearheaded by his nemesis, former U.S. President George W. Bush.

Though Chavez remains hugely popular among Latin American leftists, he has been considerably weakened by Bush’s departure and Obama’s arrival. He’s also less powerful because his oil-rich nation can’t simply buy as much good will now that oil prices have plunged.

“In the end, Chavez is a product of Bush,” said Marta Lagos, director of the Chile-based Latinobarometro polling firm. “Chavez would have never existed if Bush hadn’t opposed him the way he had.”

Can we just say that the wingnuts lack an appreciation of the power of good public relations, as opposed to throwing temper tantrums or behaving like your neighbor’s teenage brat who was never taught manners?

Along these same lines, I wanted to say one more thing about the tea parties — there is a debate on the Left about how seriously we should be taking the tea party “movement.” I do think it should be taken seriously as a potential cause of violence, but as a force that will turn the nation against President Obama — I don’t think so.

Awhile back, while we were debating the effectiveness or lack thereof of the antiwar protests, I took a look at mass demonstrations in history, noting which ones were effective and which ones weren’t, and formulated the “Bigger Asshole” rule: Effective demonstrations are those that make them look like bigger assholes than us.

It’s important to be clear how mass demonstrations “work.” Demonstrations should be viewed as a form of public relations. The point of them is to win public sympathy to your cause. They can also be tools for organizing, among other things. But demonstrations are a dangerous tool, because they can just as easily work against you as for you.

The really great mass protest movements — the prototypes are Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement — “worked” because the public at large sympathized with the protesters. The protesters behaved in a way that demonstrated they were worthy of respect, and the Powers Than Be they were protesting — whether redneck southern sheriffs or the British Empire — behaved like assholes.

On the other hand, a kid in a “Buck Fush” T-shirt screaming “No blood for oil!” over a megaphone for an hour and a half is just obnoxious. And don’t even get me started on the endless scatological references to “Dick” and “Bush,” the silly costumes, giant puppets, and often juvenile street theater that are standard features of leftie demonstrations and which broadcast the message “We are not serious; we are clowns in Clearasil.”

(Although I did like “Billionaires for Bush.” Humor is a good PR tool, when it’s really humorous.)

The true measure of “success” for the recent tea parties is not the number of people who turned up for them. (The final total may have been 300,000 nationwide, which does not impress me given the way Fox News pushed the parties. If there were a genuine groundswell of support for the “cause” I would have expected many more people than that.) The real measure is whether the tea parties gained public sympathy for the partiers. And from here I can’t see that they did.

If leftie demonstrators tend to come across as immature and unserious, I’d say the rightie demonstrators come across as frightening. They are dumb but sinister, like a beast defending its territory. I can’t imagine that someone who is not already inclined to think the way they think would have felt sympathy for them.

Update: See also Comments From Left Field.

Tea Leaves

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Nate Silver estimates that yesterday’s “tea parties” altogether drew about 250,000 participants. Chris Good puts the number of tea partiers a lot lower, at a mere 25,650, but Nate is the numbers guy so I’m going with his estimate.

As many have pointed out, there were more people than that in some anti-war protests in New York City alone. However, I’ve seen some hand-wringing on the Left from people who say that the tea parties show the wingnuts are catching on to online organizing. We should be afraid.

I don’t think so. I believe most of the people who showed up to tea party yesterday were not “organized” online but by Fox News and talk radio. They may have been told how to go to a website to find the closest tea party, yes. But considering all the hype the tea parties have received from electronic mass media, a turnout of 250,000 nationwide falls way short of impressive.

On February 15 2003, between 6 and 10 million people in about 60 countries around the world participated in a day of protest against the invasion of Iraq. At least 300,000 to 400,000 of us — and those are the lower estimates — were jammed together on First, Second and Third avenues that day. This organizing was done almost entirely online. And in the U.S. this achievement was largely ignored by news media, even in New York, both before and after the event.

For that matter, the immigration marches of a couple of years ago were considerably bigger and more impressive.

So the shills on Fox News were able to stir up 250,000 of the hard core, “low information” whackjob Right, a crew far more alarming than inspiring. There are plans for a bigger event on July 4, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the powers behind yesterday’s tea parties quietly drop plans for follow-up events.

Update: I think somebody needs to have a talk with this guy.

Almost Christmas, and Other Reflections

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So I stayed up late last night to finish and efile my taxes. Filing the taxes always fills me with the same warm glow I feel after Christmas. In both cases, I cheer myself thinking it will be a whole year before I have to deal with it again.

So today’s the day the True Believers will take to the streets to protest the marginal tax rate rising 3 percent for millionaires. Joan Walsh points out that most of the people who will show up for the tea parties have just had their taxes reduced. Walsh writes,

Of course, the real irony, maybe even tragedy, of the Tea Party movement is the fact that it’s Obama who kept a campaign promise and lowered taxes on roughly 95 percent of American taxpayers. How many folks attending the protests do you expect will know that? There may even be a significant percentage of Tea Partiers who could be penalized by high-balance fees by the credit card companies or who might ultimately need help with their mortgages. Sucks to be those guys! Expect the president to spend much of April 15 talking about his tax cuts and other assistance for struggling, middle-income Americans. Let’s hope his message gets through, even to some of the Tea Party attendees. There’s still so much class-unconsciousness going on.

I am reminded of the mass insanity that struck New Jersey in the 1990s. When Democrat James Florio became governor in January 1990, he faced (to his surprise, I understand) a nasty $600 million budget deficit left him by outgoing Republican Thomas Kean. The state Supreme Court also had issued an order to equalize spending between suburban and city schools, and obeying the order required finding a whole lot o’ money to send to city schools.

So to raise revenues, Florio proposed a 1 percent sales tax hike plus a rise in income tax. The income tax increase was progressive, beginning with a small rate increase for individuals making $55,000 (it’s 1990, remember) and rising to a very big tax increase for those in the very top income bracket.

As a result, the whole state went ballistic. “Dump Florio” bumper stickers bloomed on vehicles all across New Jersey, including old clunkers being driven by people whose income almost certainly was below $55,000. I remember the woman who was my manager at the time actually circulated a petition among employees calling for Florio’s ouster, which no doubt was against company policy, but no one she supervised would have been affected by the income tax hike; just her.

At one point I realized this woman’s clerical assistant was in terrible distress worrying how she was going to pay the awful income taxes. I told her that her taxes weren’t going up (the salary scale at that company was fairly standard; people in her position made $18,000-20,000). She didn’t believe me. I found a newspaper article that explained the tax rates. She was stunned and relieved, but then asked why everyone was making such a fuss. You tell me, I said.

The answer was, of course, that people in the top income brackets (who really did get a big increase) have a really big microphone. No doubt some smart Republican political operatives were “helping” generate hysteria to bring down the new Democratic governor. People who got most of their news from radio, television and other people just heard there was a big tax increase and went marching against it. One fellow who was “promoted” (again, one saw many manipulative hands behind this) as the head of the anti-tax movement not only lacked the income to be affected, but reporters noticed that his kids’ school system was among those that would benefit from increased state aid. To this day the guy probably doesn’t realize he was being used.

Later that year, the Republicans came very close to ousting U.S. Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ). Bradley stayed out of the New Jersey state tax issue, neither defending nor criticizing, and Christine Todd Whitman ran against him almost entirely on the question of why Bradley was not speaking out against Jim Florio’s taxes. And she damn near beat him. This put Whitman on the map politically, and she became governor of New Jersey in 1994. I say again, there were some smart political operatives in the shadows, whipping up tax hysteria as a wedge issue.

Anyway, regarding today’s planned “tea parties” — I hope no one is stupid enough to show up to counter-protest. Yes, righties crashed plenty of anti-war and anti-Bush marches and rallies. But the Rightbots already see themselves as victims and martyrs being oppressed by the evil forces of Libruhlism, and taunting them just reinforces their cherished sense of victimhood. You can taunt them here all you like, of course.