Category Archives: Republican Party

Still Crazy After All These Years

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Senator Joe McCarthy began his witch hunts by accusing Asian policy experts in the State Department of being Communists, and by the end of his volatile career he had charged General George Marshall, President Dwight Eisenhower, and the United States Army with treason as well. In 1954 the double punch of Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” exposé and McCarthy’s televised bullying during the Army-McCarthy hearings finally brought him down. But before the double punch, in January 1954, 50 percent of Americans polled by Gallup were “highly favorable” of McCarthy.

In other words, 50 percent of Americans thought it perfectly reasonable to accuse General George Marshall, President Dwight Eisenhower, and the United States Army with treason.

And even after his dénouement, and even as the Senate and the Republican Party publicly were turning their backs on McCarthy, he remained a hero to a substantial minority of Americans. Gallup polls said 35 percent of Americans were highly favorable of McCarthy as late as November 1954, after the Army-McCarthy hearings had concluded.

I thought of McCarthy today after I saw this headline on a right-wing blog: “Question: Does Barack Obama Have Any Friends Who AREN’T Communists?” Tail-gunner Joe would be proud.

I believe — this is based on my observations, not scientific research — that Americans on the whole are harder to demagogue now than they were in 1954. But “on the whole” clearly doesn’t include everybody.

I also believe that people get suckered by demagoguery because, on some level, they want to be suckered. The demagogue is telling them something they want to believe, even if it’s nuts. For example, when people are genuinely afraid of something, many people prefer a demagogue to an honest statesman.

An honest statesman tells people that, while there’s a real threat and our options are limited, we can get through this crisis if we keep our heads and don’t let fear get the best of us. The demagogue validates and reinforces fear and promises absolute protection if people will follow him. Lots of people prefer option B. Option A is weak and, you know, French.

The problem with option B is that the demagogue is promising something — absolute protection from the bad scary thing — that he cannot deliver, especially if the bad scary thing is way bigger than he is and not under his control. So the next thing the demagogue does is identify proxy scary things, preferably small and weak ones that won’t bite back. Thus, McCarthy was much less focused on international politics than on domestic threats.

Yes, McCarthy accused the State Department of losing China and made a great show of clearing alleged Communist literature out of U.S. embassy libraries around the world. But most of his targets were domestic and about as threatening to the security of the United States as tapioca pudding. Yes, there had been Soviet espionage cells in Washington, but not one of McCarthy’s targets was ever found to be part of them.

Back to the present: The more volatile people at McCain rallies, especially the ones who booed McCain when he called Obama a “decent man,” are people who want to be demagogued. They don’t give a bleep about McCain’s policy proposals; they want him to lie to them. Apparently McCain has a couple of scruples still knocking about his psyche and isn’t really into the demagogue thing, although he’s been giving it his best shot.

Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is playing the demagogue role to the hilt. She’s got a natural talent for it. I don’t expect her to fade from the national political scene anytime soon.

And then there’s the perennial threat of intellectualism, also a target of McCarthy’s. I give you this rightie blog post, called “Intellectualism & Sarah Palin: Or How The Smarty Pants Set Are Threatened By Someone Who Knows Sense .” It’s a classic bit of anti-intellectual literature; someone should shove it into a bell jar to preserve it for posterity.

In her rantings in favor of “common sense” the blogger in truth is exposing her inner insecurities, neuroses and resentments for all the world to see. She divides the nation into “coastal elites” and everybody else. The “coastal elites” live inside their airy-fairy theories; “everybody else” is practical and makes decisions based on real-world experience. If you’ve read Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life you’ll recognize all the themes.

Here we see why the coastal elite hate Sarah Palin:

Why do they dislike her so?

  1. Her state school education and path to power devalues the elite’s Harvard training.
  2. She’s homespun. Intellectuals despise homespun. They prefer the calculated indifference they’ve worked so hard to master over the years.
  3. Sarah doesn’t seem to care what they think. Perhaps her most grievous error is that she just doesn’t give a moose turd what David Brooks thinks. Everyone should care what David Brooks thinks. And Peggy Noonan. And the rest of the obnoxious snobs.

Speaking as a graduate of the University of Missouri with deep Ozark Mountain roots and who genuinely doesn’t give a bleep about what David Brooks or Peggy Noonan think, I suppose I should love Sarah Palin.

I, um, don’t.

Another rightie blogger links to the one above and expands some of her themes. Buried in this diatribe we see the yearning for a daddy figure who will take over and make everything better:

So if you’re Yin, you may feel anger like anybody else, but you get over it. You live in a world of IF…THEN. The Yang live in a world of protocol. “S’poseda.” You’re s’poseda cut your carbon emissions. You’re s’poseda behave humbly so the rest of the world likes us more.

The decision-making is always externalized to someone else. And that “someone else” is always some vague, non-corporeal, undefinable entity. “Them.” “The People.” “Everybody.” “Us.” “Out There.” You dare to make this distinction, after awhile you see this everywhere. I see it in this Charles Gibson interview with The Messiah — Gibson explicitly asks him “what will you do different from what the current administration is doing now” (or some such)…and here comes the reply. The People have lost confidence. It’s always someone else making the decision that matters.

People who populate this whole other world, have good reason to be jealous. Once they own a task, a task that depends on real decisions being made by an individual who’s directly responsible for how things turn out — they’re lost. And they know it. They’ve spent too much of their lives living theoretically…spooning out the right answers to please others. Ignoring cause and effect.

Government of the people, by the people and for the people be damned. This guy wants a dictator.

(Also, dude, if you are so concerned about cause and effect, you might want to consider the effects of not cutting carbon emissions. And I’m not sure you understand yin and yang. Yang is male, direct, assertive, rational, bright, clear. Yin is female, indirect, reticent, emotional, dark and murky. Obviously some male chauvinist guy came up with the yin and yang dichotomy, but that’s what it is.)

If you read these two posts, you see what I mean about absolute protection. Both writers seem to believe that the United States can absolutely protect itself and solve its problems without the cooperation of anyone else on the planet. They don’t want to believe there are big, scary things that we cannot control or bomb into oblivion.

Just as, fifty-something years ago, Americans didn’t want to believe that China was not ours to lose, or that Joe McCarthy’s threats and blustering would not protect them from the Soviet Union.

Still crazy after all these years.

Time and Tides

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I don’t expect the “Troopergate” report released tonight to make a big difference in the presidential campaign. People who still love the Moosewoman will dismiss it as “political.” People who don’t think much of her will still not think much of her.

More interesting to me is that today McCain supporters booed and jeered at McCain when he said Barack Obama is a “decent person.”

Not Exactly the Better Angels of Our Nature

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Headline on the New York Times website: “Global Markets Dive in Relentless Selloff.” A British news site says this is Freefall Friday. By 9:30 this morning the NYSE was down more than 460 points.

On the plus side, nobody’s complaining about the “angry Left” any more.

Adding to the links in the last post — at the Washington Post, Michael D. Shear and Perry Bacon Jr. write “Anger Is Crowd’s Overarching Emotion at McCain Rally.” Anger my ass; this is white-hot rage. See also “Panic attacks: Voters unload at GOP rallies” by Jonathan Martin and “Is Negative Rhetoric a License to Taunt?” by Russell Goldman.

Steve M asks if the Right really is more deranged than during past elections. In many ways, no. But in some ways, yes.

The difference now is that, in the past, they were winners. This is not just in the sense of winning elections. I believe in recent years they felt some sense of power, of control, especially with George Bush in the White House.

How many times have we observed that the only thing holding the conservative coalition together was resentment — of liberals, of intellectuals, of Europeans, of anything that picked the scab off their inner insecurities? For a time, George Bush gave them the upper hand. He was their middle finger by proxy, extended to the rest of the world.

However, now it’s starting to dawn on them that they are losing. This could get dangerous. Think cornered, wounded animal.

It’s gotten so bad that even David Brooks is beginning to catch on. In the past several years “Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare,” he writes.

And for how many years have we progressives been saying that? But whenever we brought it up, we were told we were the ones trying to play “class warfare.” Brooks continues,

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

The Right has been running against the mythical “liberal elite” for a lot longer than 15 years. You might remember Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published in 1963, that documents disdain for the educated class as a whole going back to the colonial period. In the early Cold War era — heyday of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy — merely discussing Communism with scholarly objectivity was attacked by the witch-hunters as disloyal.

Now, Brooks notes, the GOP has not only alienated the highly educated regions of the country, it has blown off entire professions.

Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

So now the modern GOP has been stripped down to its core social pathology, its soul laid bear for the world to see. And it ain’t pretty.

See also:

A Conspiracy So Immense

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Hilzoy says the gang at The Corner “seems to have gone well and truly insane.” I don’t know where she gets the “seems.”

The wingnuts discovered that in his 1996 state senate campaign, Obama was endorsed by the New Party, a branch of the Democratic Socialists of America. Some 12-year-old New Party campaign literature identifies Obama as “a member,” and of course it doesn’t occur to the wingnuts that a fringe group would ever resort to padding and propaganda.

And if we’re going to play Joe McCarthy’s old “guilt by association” game, let’s talk about John McCain sitting on the board of the U.S. Council for World Freedom, a group linked to former Nazi collaborators and ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America.

Never mind that. The New Party and ACORN (boogaboogaboogabooga!) have infiltrated and hijacked the Democratic Party. See, the entire Democratic Party is nothing but a front for socialist world domination.

I wonder if we shouldn’t just open some Evil Empire amusement parks so that the wingnuts can act out their fantasies in a safer environment.

You know the Right has slipped its tether when even David Frum is telling them to chill out.

Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for a man who may well be the next president of the United States, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting.

A McCain supporter was arrested for threatening to empty his shotgun at the California Louisiana registrar’s office unless he got his voter registration card faster. Someone at a Palin-McCain rally shieks “kill him!” at the mention of Obama and Ayers. We’re going to be very lucky if no one else flips out and launches a killing spree.

Right, Meet Reality

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I think McCain was at his worst last night when he used lines that are sure-fire winners when thrown at a right-wing audience but which leave the rest of us cold or confused.

For example, on the Right, General Petraeus is the second coming of Robert E. Lee. To the Left, he’s a tool. To Independents, he’s some military guy they may vaguely associate with the Bush Administration, or not. To the Right, everything Petraeus says is gospel. To the Left, it’s suspect. I believe that to most Independents it’s white noise — just more of the endless bullshit about the endless war, and who knows what to believe any more?

McCain says Petraeus as if he expect the audience to genuflect at the sound of the General’s name. Memo: They ain’t genuflecting.

Also, if you were watching CNN, whenever McCain deployed the words Iraq, Petraeus, surge, victory and success together in near proximity, you saw the squiggly lines go flat. I don’t think most people bleeping care about the bleeping surge or a bleeping victory in Iraq. Iraq itself represents the Ultimate Bleepup to most people, and nothing associated with it can ever be made shiny.

And how long will it take the Right to notice that “fourth generation” wars don’t end in victory? At best, they sort of taper off into reasonably favorable conditions. Victory is obsolete. And I think many people who are not right-wing ideologues understand this on some level, even if they cannot always articulate why it is so.

The United States stayed in Vietnam way too long because our political and military leaders continued to pursue the mythical beast of victory. Some of McCain’s talk about bringing troops home with “victory and honor” could have been picked up verbatim from 1971 or so. It was dumb then; it’s insane now.

I also think McCain comes across as a dolt whenever he continues to harp on some right-wing talking point that Obama, clearly and calmly, has just demolished. For example, in both debates McCain continued to claim that Obama will raise just about everybody’s taxes, even after Obama stated and re-stated his actual tax proposals. This is an especially poor tactic (but not a strategy, Senator McCain) when the opponent standing next to you is such a likable guy. Here’s this nice fella, and that nasty McCain’s calling him a liar.

As I remember, when McCain said “Well, you know, nailing down Sen. Obama’s various tax proposals is like nailing Jell-O to the wall. There has been five or six of them and if you wait long enough, there will probably be another one,” the squiggly lines dropped. I bet that brings down the house at McCain rallies, but in front of a non-partisan audience a line like that is just pettiness.

Memo: Ronald Reagan is still dead. And, as more than one blogger has written today, “I knew Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt was a friend of mine, and you, Senator McCain, are no Teddy Roosevelt.”

You get a glimpse of McCain’s real problem in this post by The Weekly Standard‘s Fred Barnes:

The candidates were queried on a narrow range of foreign, economic, health care, and environmental issues–the stuff they talk about every day at rallies and fundraisers. These didn’t come close to what voters at a real town hall meeting might have asked. There was no mention of abortion, immigration, moral values, same sex marriage, guns, their role models, their view of the presidency, or their religious faith.

In other words, the questions didn’t come close to what right-wing ideologues hand-picked to fill up McCain town hall meetings might have asked. Instead, it was boring stuff about foreign, economic, health care, and environmental issues.

Barnes is right that the candidates — well, Obama anyway — address these topics in their stump speeches. However, most of the nation has not heard the stump speeches. For most voters, the debates provide the only view of the candidates outside of commercials and brief news clips they are going to get. That’s really sad, and we need to change that, but that’s how it is.

Barnes continues,

Rather than an unrehearsed town hall meeting, the Commission on Presidential Debates let NBC anchor Tom Brokaw to select the questions. The result was questions that reflected what interests an East Coast newsman. Nothing wrong with that, except this was supposed to be a town hall debate in which the concerns of average folks would be front and center. They weren’t.

Barnes might think it’s elitist of me to say this, but I don’t think Barnes would recognize the concerns of average folks if they bit his ass. In fact, polls say their priorities of concerns are pretty much inverse of what Barnes thinks they are.

Last night and this morning some on the Right lambasted McCain for not bringing up Bill Ayers or Reverent Wright or the host of other red herrings the Moosewoman has been throwing lately. But he did not, and this shows us that at least some of McCain’s handlers make occasional visits to the real world.

The base can’t get enough of Ayers and Wright. The base is more interested in Obama’s alleged Muslim-terrorist ties than in the financial crisis. The base is out of its bleeping mind. But to Americans who are not lunatics, the sleazy allegations and hate speech the McCain campaign uses to fire up the base would have been shockingly out of place in last night’s debate. Think nude poll pole dancing at a church supper. It would have damaged McCain a lot more than Obama.

Put another way — the Right’s fantasy narratives and agenda cannot survive outside the Right’s fantasy world. Forced into a real-world context, they dissipate like smoke.

Clicking for America

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This is for all the uncommitted voters the cable networks round up to be in their focus groups and who say they wish the candidates would be more specific —

If you want details, don’t wait for details to be spoon fed to you through mass media. The candidates’ websites have the details. All you have to do is click and read.

And, to say one nice thing about the McCain campaign, I think their issues page is better designed and more inviting to read than the Obama issues page, which is a bit sterile in contrast. On the other hand, when you get beneath the interface, some of McCain’s content is a bit dated. His “Relief for American Families” section still promotes a summer gas tax holiday, for example. And much of the content is vague. You read that John McCain is going to act decisively to achieve this or that goal, but often the “how” is missing.

On Obama’s site you get how up the wazoo.

  • He has bulleted lists.
  • He has lots of bulleted lists.
  • His bulleted lists have bulleted lists.

So, next time you hear people complain they want more details on how the candidates stand on issues, please email them the URL to this post and tell them they don’t even have to get off their lazy butts to find the details. Just click. Do it for America.

Post-Debate Thread

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Flipping back and forth between CNN and MSNBC, it seems on the whole a consensus is forming among the bobbleheads that this debate was not a “game changer.” McCain needed a “decisive win,” Wolf Blitzer says, and he didn’t get it.

McCain was less dismissive of Obama as in the first debate — I don’t believe he said Obama “didn’t understand” this time — but he still seemed condescending, and I don’t think this is helping him.

Taegan Goddard gives it to Obama.

Tonight’s debate wasn’t even close. Sen. Barack Obama ran away with it — particularly when speaking about the economy and health care. Talking about his mother’s death from cancer was very powerful. On nearly every issue, Obama was more substantive, showed more compassion and was more presidential.

In contrast, Sen. John McCain was extremely erratic. Sometimes he was too aggressive (referring to Obama as “that one.”) Other times, he just couldn’t answer the question (on how he would ask Americans to sacrifice.) And his random attempts at jokes (hair transplants?) were just bad.

Update: From the Right — Andrew McCarthy at The Corner —

We have a disaster here — which is what you should expect when you delegate a non-conservative to make the conservative (nay, the American) case. We can parse it eight ways to Sunday, but I think the commentary is missing the big picture. …

…Now, as the night went along, did you get the impression that Obama comes from the radical Left? Did you sense that he funded Leftist causes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars? Would you have guessed that he’s pals with a guy who brags about bombing the Pentagon? Would you have guessed that he helped underwrite raging anti-Semites? Would you come away thinking, “Gee, he’s proposing to transfer nearly a trillion dollars of wealth to third-world dictators through the UN”?

This view of Obama is a complete fantasy, of course, but let’s go on …

Nope. McCain didn’t want to go there. So Obama comes off as just your average Center-Left politician. Gonna raise your taxes a little, gonna negotiate reasonably with America’s enemies; gonna rely on our very talented federal courts to fight terrorists and solve most of America’s problems; gonna legalize millions of hard-working illegal immigrants.

McCain? He comes off as Center-Right .. or maybe Center-Left … but, either way, deeply respectful of Obama despite their policy quibbles.

McCain was hardly “deeply respectful” of Obama.

Great. Memo to McCain Campaign: Someone is either a terrorist sympathizer or he isn’t; someone is either disqualified as a terrorist sympathizer or he’s qualified for public office. You helped portray Obama as a clealy qualified presidential candidate who would fight terrorists.

The plain fact is that Obama is no terrorist sympathizer, and I think the American people finally are getting a close enough look at him to know that. However, they are also getting a close enough look at McCain to know he is an asshole.

If that’s what the public thinks, good luck trying to win this thing.

With due respect, I think tonight was a disaster for our side. I’m dumbfounded that no one else seems to think so. Obama did everything he needed to do, McCain did nothing he needed to do. What am I missing?

What the Right is missing is that the rest of the country, finally, is moving on from the fantasyland they live in

Live Blog

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Whew! I fell asleep and just woke up in time. Here we go.

First question about economy. Fastest solution to bail out retirees?

McCain wants to buy and renegotiate all bad home loans. He’s going to pay for this?

I think Obama is going to have to be careful not to get sucked into spending all his time defending his past record from McCain’s, um, imagination.

McCain has figured out that the financial crisis has something to do with bad mortgages. Swift.

Now he is going on about how great American workers are. So get them jobs, John.

McCain a “consistent reformer”? Please. Does anyone believe that?

I’ve just switched to CNN to watch the wiggly lines. McCain is speaking. The line is flat.

Will McCain please be asked to explain his health care “plan.”

Obama is speaking, and Miss Lucy (my feline roommate) just went crazy running around the room. I think she is an Obama fan.

Someone asked which sacrifices citizens can make for their country, and McCain goes on about earmarks and cutting government programs.

Obama speaks up about a call to service. The American people want to engage in meaningful change. Save energy in your home. Fuel-efficient cars. Peace corps.

Revealing, I think, that McCain only thinks in terms of what Washington does, not what Americans can do.

McCain comes on and says Obama is going to raise taxes.

He wants a commission on Medicare. To do what? He’s not making sense.

Climate change — McCain says the best way to fix it is nuclear power? That’s it?

Obama — calls climate change an opportunity; new technology can help grow economy. Government working with private sector.

I never know how these guys are coming across to undecided voters.

Obama brings up McCain’s health care “plan.” I think most people understand that $5000 for a family can’t buy health insurance. Ooo, he brought up “gold plated” health care.

Obama – we need the money we’re spending in Iraq here in the U.S. This needs to be repeated, repeated, repeated.

McCain is going on about Iraq and Petraeus and the line goes flat.

Now McCain isn’t making sense. Obama didn’t say he would attack Pakistan. We’re going to succeed in Pakistan the way we succeeded in Iraq. I’m not sure he understands that most people don’t consider Iraq a “success.”

He keeps saying Obama is going to attack Pakistan, which he clearly didn’t do.

Once again, McCain talks about General Petraeus. General Petraeus is beloved on the Right but I don’t think the majority of the American people feel anything about him one way or another. Throwing the name “Petraeus” around just doesn’t sing for most people.

The BooMan: “McCain sucks harder than a vacuum.”

McCain’s “league of democracies” idea is just surreal.

Passing on the American Dream to the next generation. Good closing statement. Not exactly answering the question, but good closing statement.

McCain is talking about a “steady hand at the tiller.” That would be Obama.

OK, it’s over. Now we’ll hear the bobbleheads talk about how McCain was so much better this time and probably won the debate.

Rachel Maddow: McCain was swinging and missing. Obama seemed more relaxed than McCain.

Pat Buchanan thinks McCain won the debate. Big surprise.

Update: The CNN quickie poll is coming through — Obama won.

The Base, Debased

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Dana Milbank provides an up-close-and-personal look at Palin-McCain supporters:

In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

Palin’s hatespeech doesn’t always work:

The angry GOP vice presidential nominee even found a way to blame the market decline on the yet-to-be-enacted tax policies of the yet-to-be-elected Obama.

“If you turn on the news tonight when you get home, you’re gonna see that, yah, this is another woeful day in the market, and the other side just doesn’t understand — no!” she said at an afternoon fundraiser at the home of mutual fund giant Jack Donahue. “Especially in a time like this, you don’t propose to increase taxes. The phoniest claim in a campaign that’s full of them is that Barack Obama is going to cut your taxes.”

Of course, Obama never promised to cut taxes for people at $10,000-a-plate lunches in air-conditioned tents on waterfront compounds. And the crowd — among them New York Jets owner Woody Johnson — reacted without applause to Palin’s Joe Six-Pack lines. After they didn’t strike up the usual “Drill, baby, drill” or “USA” chants, Palin, rattled, read hurriedly through the rest of her speech.

Josh Marshall reports Palin-McCain rally attendees yelling “terrorist!” and “kill him!” at mention of Obama’s name, “though it’s not clear whether the call for murder was for Bill Ayers or Barack Obama. It didn’t seem to matter.”

“These are dangerous and sick people, McCain and Palin,” Josh says. Yes. As are the mobs who support them.