#don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out

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Today I stumbled on a new rightie organization called #dontgo. It’s supposed to be a pushback against Moveon, I think. The web site says it’s a movement! and a revolution!

America needs to come to its senses and start on the path that will bring it victory, not defeat – prosperity, not depression. #dontgo means exactly what it says, Don’t Go.

What does the “#” mean?

Introduction

#dontgo Movement is a collaborative effort being developed by a group of free-market, e-activists who wish to see Congress stay in Washington until a solution for our energy crisis is found. But #dontgo is more than a single issue.

I’ll come back to the e-activists in a minute.

Goals

Our goal is to achieve a tidal shift in American politics from the ground up, utilizing the great potential of the grassroots movement. On a multitude of issues, from energy independence to fiscal responsibility, we plan to return the country back onto the right path.

I think these people needed to think a little longer about what they are trying to accomplish before they launched this mess. On the one hand, they say they want to turn the nation in a new! direction! They want a tidal shift! Yet the title of the organizations says something else. Like, don’t change. Or maybe, please don’t leave me.

How Will We Do It?

We will use what is now described as the “new media” and the “grassroots” to link the people of America with their elected representatives from both sides of the aisle. We will provide the technology to send letters to members of Congress, make phone calls to them, and provide up to date news, and blogging content. In short, we will utilize technology to push the frontier of what constitutes modern politics.

What Does #dontgo Mean?

#dontgo is an expression of what America needs, but not where it’s heading. #dontgo is the warning bell to a nation that is hungry for change, but looking in the wrong direction. #dontgo is a message to all of America, Republicans, Democrats and Independents.

If this “grassroots” organization presents any ideas that are different from what the GOP has been serving up the past several years, I’m not seeing it anywhere on the web site. What I saw on their blog site was the same rhetoric, the same talking points, the same worn-out ideas and the same smoldering resentments we’ve been seeing from the Right lo these many years. The issue #dontgo is pushing more than any other is the Right’s solution to the energy crisis: drill drill drill.

Of which Matt Stoller writes,

In fact, the entire drill drill drill campaign originated with Newt Gingrich, hardly the kind of leadership you’d expect from a real grassroots uprising. His group, American Solutions for Winning the Future, got a large grant from Peabody Coal at about the same time this campaign started, and is backed by the same crew of billionaires helping Freedom’s Watch.

Matt had just been to competing rallies in Washington DC. On one side were volunteers from Moveon. On the other side were “paid staffers from groups like the National Taxpayers Union and Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks.”

Now, this is not to say that the Drill, Drill, Drill campaign isn’t popular. It is. But it is not some movement breakthrough on the right; new political movements are not populated entirely with paid staffers, funded by the extraordinarily wealthy winners of a society, and led by old over the hill political leaders. What is actually going on here is that the 1970s conservative movement is still around and still dominant. Right-wing billionaires are still funding Newt Gingrich, who is still dictating our agenda just as he did in the late 1970s to the mid-1990s. Conservative ‘populism’ in DC is still the same old Brooks Brothers Riot we saw in 2000, ie. paid staffers masquerading as grassroots.

My favorite part of the dontgo — ‘scuse me, I left out the # — #dontgo site is this blog post ranting about the bleeping liberal elite.

#Dontgo Threatens The Liberal Power Elite!

Why is this movement of vital importance to America right now?

For too long, the liberal elite, entrenched in both parties, and their friends in the media have managed to keep the truth from the People, to ignore the issues and concerns, and even the facts, that are relevant to the People, all in their effort to pursue an agenda that was born in the early 20th century (”progressivism”) and that has failed wherever it was tried.

The truth is, of course, is that going back many years real liberals have been shut out of power and mass media, and nothing of our “agenda” has come anywhere close to being “tried” since the 1960s.

Related: If you can get your hands on the August issue of Harper’s, there’s a great article in it by Thomas Frank called “The Wrecking Crew: How a Gang of Right-Wing Con Men Destroyed Washington and Made a Killing.” There’s only a PDF version available on the site.

What’s Wrong With John McCain?

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A couple of videos for you today. The first, via Josh Marshall, shows some of the crew at MSNBC discussing John McCain’s juvenile ad campaign. Their conclusion? John McCain is so honorable he must be too out of it to understand his own ads.

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The other shows McCain just plain out of it, via Jed Report:

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Yet the two candidates are currently tied in the polls. I’m here in New York, where Obama will win easily, and I don’t know how people in other parts of the country are perceiving the campaigns. Any ideas?

The Uppity Black Guy

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Over the weekend David Gergen said,

“There has been a very intentional effort to paint him as somebody outside the mainstream, other, ‘he’s not one of us,'” said Gergen, who has worked with White Houses, both Republican and Democrat, from Nixon to Clinton. “I think the McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it, but it’s the subtext of this campaign. Everybody knows that. There are certain kinds of signals. As a native of the south, I can tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, ‘The One,’ that’s code for, ‘he’s uppity, he ought to stay in his place.’ Everybody gets that who is from a southern background. We all understand that. When McCain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, ‘I’m against quotas,’ we get what that’s about.”

Exactly what I said last week:

Since the old angry black man stereotype wouldn’t work, the GOP has reached even deeper into white America’s racial memory and brought forth — the uppity black man stereotype.

A lot of bloggers and pundits jumped on the subliminal message of putting Paris Hilton and Britney Spears into the “celebrity” ad, but not so many caught the more dangerous (IMO) subtext of uppity-ness. Maybe you have to be a certain age or have a southern background to see it. But this is what really needs to be pushed back, hard. And now. And Obama can’t do it himself, because he doesn’t want to be “the black candidate.” Others must do this for him.

Regarding the “Praise the One” ad — I’m not sure the Right is acting out of jealousy. There’s a lot of resentment there, of course, but I think they fear Obama’s popularity more than they are jealous of it. I also want to remind everyone that it was the Hillary Clinton campaign that began the meme of Obama the Messiah and his supporters as brainless cult followers. Thanks loads.

Update: Read also “Obama’s crime? Acting too presidential.”

No Change of Direction for Conservatism

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Here are a couple of articles that ought to be read together. The first is in today’s Washington Post, by Greg Anrig — “McCain’s Problem Isn’t His Tactics. It’s GOP Ideas.”

There’s so much of this I’d like to excerpt I have to ask you to read the whole thing. He begins by talking about how hard it has been in the past several years for progressives to get a word in edgewise in our national conversation. Righties just mocked us, interrupted us, and shouted to the world that government is the problem, all hail free markets.

But now, seemingly all of a sudden, conservatives are the ones who are tongue-tied, as demonstrated by Sen. John McCain’s limping, message-free presidential campaign. McCain’s ongoing difficulties in exciting voters aren’t just a tactical problem; his woes stem largely from his long-standing adherence to a set of ideas that simply haven’t worked in practice. The belief system and finely crafted policy pitches that enabled the right to dominate the war of ideas for the past 30 years have produced a relentless succession of governing failures, from Iraq to Katrina to the economy to the environment.

Right-wing “solutions” to the nation’s problems have failed. They have failed spectacularly. Righties can whine all they want to about how George W. Bush isn’t a “real conservative,” although they were happy to claim him while he was still popular. The fact is that the Republican Party had nearly total control of the federal government for long enough to put their “ideas” into effect. And their “ideas” don’t work.

So now what? In new books, two conservative stalwarts, former House speaker Newt Gingrich and the anti-tax guru Grover Norquist, don’t even bother wrestling with such failures. Instead, they argue for an even stronger dose of the medicine that has, so far, produced mainly toxic reactions. They owe their fame to denigrating the government, so one can hardly blame them for sticking with the program. For conservatives to abandon the arguments that have served them so well politically for so long would be akin to a Fortune 500 company dropping its core business when it recognizes that the market for its product is rapidly disintegrating.

It’s all these guys know. What else can you expect? A few moderate conservatives have argued for a somewhat more activist government and suggested the Right ought to stop trying to drown the government in a bathtub. Rush Limbaugh had a fit about this, of course.

“We have some Republicans who seem hell-bent in throwing away the one proven winning formula twice that won 49 states,” he said. “If you want to big-tent the Republican Party, go right ahead. You start big-tenting conservatism, and you’re going to have it end up meaning nothing.”

Here’s the real problem (emphasis added):

It’s bad enough that opening up the conservative agenda to energetic government would lose Limbaugh. Worse, it would alienate the wealthy business executives and scions who have financed the formidable network of right-wing institutions that includes think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, activist groups such as Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and a plethora of conservative media outlets. That money flowed because its sources benefited directly and enormously from such policies as tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. Those sugar daddies are unlikely to find much to be enthusiastic about in a Grand New Party, and their money will largely determine whether and how conservatism will transform itself.

From here, head on over to The Guardian and read Ian Williams attempt to explain Rush Limbaugh to British readers:

A distinctively American phenomenon, his partisan rants would lose any British station broadcasting him its license.

Today is the official culmination of the Limbaugh dancing week – but meaner souls will think it overshadowed by last Sunday’s events, when Jim Adkisson, a Tennessee aficionado of conservative talkshows, took their hosts’ invective all too literally and shot up a “liberal” Unitarian Universalist congregation, killing two and wounding six congregants watching a children’s musical. Caught up in a world of conservative talk radio, he reportedly expected to be able to carry on shooting unimpeded by the spineless, gay-loving pacifists, and was surprised when they tackled him and brought him down. …

…For the Limbaughs of this world, gays, blacks, liberals, feminazis, Clintons, Obamas and all the rest of his Grand Guignol dramatis personae are unpatriotic, not real citizens, maybe not even human. They deserve neither rights nor respect. This is Bush’s Radio G’tmo. It epitomises the ethos of the age.

Here’s the critical part:

Rory O’Connor’s book Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio, details the right-wing talkshow universe and makes the point that it was not just Limbaugh’s native charm that got him launched on the airwaves. Rather, the concentration of media ownership, under a complaisant FCC, paved his way, along with the inspired political entrepreneurship of Fox CEO Roger Ailes, who offered the show free to local stations.

Adkisson and other angry listeners are more often than not the victims of precisely those unregulated concentrations of capital that put Limbaugh on the air, Chinese goods on the shelves of Wal-Mart and them on welfare. With Democratic leaders too wary to bite the hands that write the contribution cheques, but also too residually honest to invent scapegoats, no wonder an incisive populism can win listeners.

Where am I going with this? First, the Republican Party has boxed itself in. Having drummed the old Rockefeller Republicans out of the party in favor of dittoheads and Reaganobots, and dependent on deep-pocket hyperconservative donors and the media infrastructure they finance — the GOP can’t change. It doesn’t matter what the public wants and what opinion polls say; Republican candidates, especially on the national scene, can do no other than offer the same swamp water they’ve been offering for years.

So John McCain runs a content-free campaign that consists entirely of calling his opponent an empty suit (sotto voce — and he’s black!).

On the other hand, plenty of dimwits still buy whatever Faux Nooz and rightie talk radio are selling. People who are regular viewers of Faux or listeners of Rush are not likely to ever hear any other perspective. However, the dominance of Faux Nooz is eroding and more people listen to Rush’s commercials than they do to Rush.

However, I think as long as these losers have any following at all, they will not change direction. They’re going to have to be utterly abandoned by the public before they wake up and realize they’ve, y’know, been utterly abandoned. Then they’ll have to go through a phase of blaming liberals for their abandonment before somebody steps in and takes over the GOP.