Tag Archives: pseudo conservatism

California’s Dreaming

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I can’t say I have a first-hand feel for what’s going on in California, since I live on the opposite edge of the country, but here’s the story:

Yesterday California voters defeated ballot proposals to deal with the state’s financial problems. These included a spending cap, extending tax increases, borrowing against lottery revenues and tapping dedicated funds.

I take it California voters want to hear some better proposals for dealing with their $21.3 billion budget deficit — something along the lines of mugging the Tooth Fairy.

Jim Christie writes for Reuters:

“The public is under the delusion that they can have everything — have potholes filled, new freeways, a good education system — but they aren’t willing to pay for it … A lot of critical services are going to be cut and there will be serious consequences,” said Jim Hawley of the Elfenworks Center for the Study of Fiduciary Capitalism at St. Mary’s College of California.

There is talk of California getting a cash bailout, along the lines of what’s been thrown at Wall Street. I’m inclined to say no. If the citizens of California are not willing to tax themselves to save their own state, I think they should live with the consequences. This is not like a business failure, in which the bad decisions of a few executives cause a ripple effect of more failure that impacts many blameless people.

Juliet Williams writes for the Associated Press:

Political observers say Schwarzenegger and lawmakers will have little choice but to go after even politically sacred programs such as schools. …

… The choices facing the governor and Legislature are daunting,” said Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. … Many Californians have been hearing about the state’s budget problems but have yet to feel the severity of the crisis. That will soon change, Pitney said.

“For a lot of people, the budget’s been an abstraction. But with the next round, there will probably be serious consequences, particularly in the schools,” Pitney said.

Last week, the governor said he will consider shortening the school year by seven days, laying off up to 5,000 state employees and taking money from local governments, which likely would translate into cuts to police and firefighting services.

Only 19 percent of California’s voters bothered to vote, Williams says.

Michael Finnegan writes in the Los Angeles Times that voters share the blame for the California’s dysfunction.

Nearly a century after the Progressive-era birth of the state’s ballot-measure system, it is clear that voters’ fickle commands, one proposition at a time, are a top contributor to paralysis in Sacramento. And that, in turn, has helped cripple the capacity of the governor and Legislature to provide effective leadership to a state of more than 38 million people.

Clogged freeways, the decline of public schools, an outdated water system and a battered economy are just a few of the challenges demanding action by state leaders. Instead, they are consumed by yet another budget crisis, one that voters worsened Tuesday.

“No one’s really stepping back and confronting the harsh realities that face our state in a critical sense, because of constraints put on our elected leaders,” said Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California. “We’re unable to focus on the long term and the big picture at a time when we desperately need to do so.”

Finnegan’s analysis is very good; I recommend reading all of it.

It’s worth remembering that the Reagan Revolution effectively began in California with the passage of the infamous Proposition 13, which capped property tax rates. Once upon a time California was considered one of the best-run states in the nation, and with the best public school system. In the 1960s California’s schools were ranked first in the nation. Now they are ranked at number 48. Way to go, California.

Update: Via John Cole — Megan McArdle writes,

There is a surprisingly sizeable blogger contingent arguing that we have to bail them out because however regrettable the events that lead here, we now have no choice. But actually, we do have a choice: we could let them go bankrupt. And we probably should.

I am not under the illusion that this will be fun. For starters, the rest of you sitting smugly out there in your snug homes, preparing to enjoy the spectacle, should prepare to enjoy the higher taxes you’re going to pay as a result. Your states and municipalities will pay higher interest on their bonds if California is allowed to default. Also, the default is going to result in a great deal of personal misery, more than a little of which is going to end up on the books of Federal unemployment insurance and other such programs.

But on the other hand, Megan argues, if we bail out California, it would amount to shoveling money into a bottomless pit, and ultimately we’re not helping California by enabling the “lunatics in Sacramento.” But in California’s case one can’t just blame Sacramento. California voters and the referendum system have made the state ungovernable. And I’d like to point out that many other states allow referendums without being as irresponsible as California has been.

Update: Rightie bloggers are rejoicing this outcome and see it as validation of conservatism. Just wait until the 2010 midterms! Allahpundit laments that voters “love their government goodies even though they manifestly can’t afford them.”

“Government goodies,” of course, are things like decent public schools, a criminal justice system, firefighters, bridges that don’t fall down, etc. America used to be able to afford those things. “Used to,” as in “before Reaganism.”

Sticks and Stones

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The head in The Politico says “GOP, RNC to rebrand Democrats as ‘Socialists,'” which made me wonder if I’d enter some Star Trek time warp-loop anomaly. Wasn’t the “S” word the big gun that was supposed to save the McCain campaign last summer?

But the story is that the RNC is going to vote on a resolution that will rebrand the Dems as the “Democrat Socialist Party,” and force party chairman Michael Steele to use that term whenever referring to the Dems. Steele is on record as believing the “Democrat Socialist” idea is just dumb.

As Ron Beasley says, “You know what a sorry state the Republican Party is in when Michael Steele is the voice of reason.”

I’m wondering what happened to the old standard insult, “liberal.” Twenty years ago, it was the only code word the GOP needed to defeat Michael Dukakis. But now it seems the word “liberal” has not only been drained of meaning; it’s been drained of connotation, color, inference, and association as well. It’s now as bland as cottage cheese. Who’s afraid of the “L” word any more?

I can’t imagine “socialist” is exactly the firebomb it once was, either. It’s been a long time since red-baiting was the sure-fire way to win an election. It was replaced by race-baiting at least 40 years ago. But then race-baiting was replaced by feminist-baiting, atheist-baiting, gay-baiting, and most recently immigrant-baiting, and the voters aren’t biting the way they used to.

But maybe the GOP is on a nostalgia kick. Wake me up when Eric Cantor says Nancy Pelosi is “pink right down to her underwear” (said by Richard Nixon of Helen Gahagan Douglas, California Senate race, 1950).

Ayn Rand and Infantile Omnipotence

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If you’re in the mood for something a little weightier than the ever-popular “righties stink,” check out this essay on Ayn Rand and Thomas Hobbes by Mary Midgley at The Guardian.

The basic theme is that both Hobbes and Rand wrote about the individual in relation to society, but came to opposite conclusions. Hobbes stressed the individual’s need for security, and he promoted the ideal of a strong commonwealth with a powerful sovereign at its head. Rand went in the other direction, warning of the evils of “collectivism” and promoting absolute individuality to the point of denouncing altruism as evil.

Hobbes’s ideas belonged to the age of the Sun-King, Midgley says, and Hobbes has little to say to us today about dealing with intolerable government. Rand, on the other hand, is still influencing politics. “Noam Chomsky has called her deeply evil,” Midgley writes. “This may seem like taking her too seriously, but we surely do need to take seriously the ideas that she stands for.”

This paragraph seems to me to be especially insightful:

What chiefly emerges here is surely how important it is, when we are confronted with these extreme and simple doctrines, to understand the guiding visions behind them and in particular, just what danger they aim to protect us against. Rand’s guiding vision is clearly what used to be called infantile omnipotence – the childish hope of total control – and her doctrines have great influence because that hope is still always strong in the depths of our hearts. The fear that haunts her is the fear of having to obey someone else. This fear, intelligently disciplined, does indeed lie at the root of our emphasis on liberty, but there is nothing to be said for erecting it on its own into a “heroic” stance of self-admiration.

I’ve long felt there was something both infantile and desperately fearful at the base of Randism. And for all their supposed admiration for rational thought, there is nothing rational about an ideology that denies the basic nature of humans and human civilization. We are social creatures who depend on each other and live for each other, whether we like it or not. Civilization may have come up with ways to make the interdependence impersonal, but we are still interdependent. Individual humans, isolated from other humans and from civilization, do not survive well.

So when a Randbot says, “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine,” that’s both a scream of denial and a tantrum.

Disconnections

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During my recent adventures in physical therapy, I overheard an elderly woman, also in physical therapy, talking about a relative who had received bad medical care while traveling in Italy. Then she shook her head and made a disparaging remark about “socialized medicine.” I wanted to ask her if Medicare paid for her physical therapy, although I didn’t. I suspect that if I had told her Medicare was “socialized medicine,” she wouldn’t have believed it.

I thought of this woman as I read Joe Conason’s article in Salon called “Stop ‘Hillary-care’ now!” He calls the Right’s attempts to scuttle health care reform pathetic, and on many levels they are. But that doesn’t mean they won’t work.

Conason writes that the Right’s strategy is to stoke fear of government bureaucrats.

But as his memo indicates, that task is becoming more difficult as the actual conditions that Americans confront grow worse. No longer is it sufficient to deny the reality of crisis in the healthcare system — and if Republicans continue to do so, the overwhelming majority of the American public that is demanding reform will dismiss them. What Luntz urges his party to do instead is to redefine the crisis not as an existing problem of millions of uninsured families and unaffordable care, but as a looming threat of government medicine run amok.

Maximizing fear is the true message of the Luntz memo: fear of government-run healthcare, fear that bureaucrats will intercede between doctors and patients, fear that those same faceless bureaucrats in Washington will deny lifesaving procedures to helpless people. He urges the Republicans to promote “horror stories” about care delayed and denied in countries with national health insurance. If they heed his advice, we can expect to see ads warning that “your child could die” because government bureaucrats held up a critical operation until it was just too late.

Of course, bureaucrats at private insurance companies have been doing these terrible things for years, but we’re not supposed to notice.

Conason reports something said by Republican Senator Jon Kyl: “Imagine needing a new hip that will make it easier to get around, but just because you’re over 75, the government denies you that surgery. We can’t allow that to happen in America.” But Medicare pays for hip replacements all the time. So won’t Americans notice how absurd the GOP’s arguments are? I say some will. But some won’t.

The Right has done an amazing job of turning Americans into people with bifurcated brains. There’s a clear cognitive disconnection between “big expensive government programs” and “programs I like (that are run by the government).”

Remember this Bushism from the 2000 presidential campaign?

We trust individual workers, and so our plan says we’re going to keep the promise to our seniors. But we’ll allow younger workers at their choice to invest some of their own money in the private markets to get a better rate of return so that the Social Security promise will be kept.

And this frightens some in Washington. Because they want the federal government controlling the Social Security like it’s some kind of federal program. We understand differently though. You see, it’s your money not the government’s money.

Of course, Al Gore pounced on that remark, and in a sane world candidate Bush would have been hooted out of the campaign. But Bush was not hooted out of the campaign, and I think that’s partly because many of the people who heard the “like its come kind of federal program” remark didn’t catch the problem with it.

And I know in my bones that you could find people who have been denied care by insurance companies, or who have no insurance at all, who are opposed to “socialized medicine” because they don’t want “government bureaucrats” making decisions about health care.

Conason writes,

In a typical Luntz language memo such as this one, he commands Republicans to repeat certain words and phrases over and over again, on the humiliating assumption that both they and their constituents will behave like mindless stooges. His underlying aim is to strip words of their meaning to evoke automatic responses — and to shut down rational thought.

Yes. And y’know what? They are really good at stripping words of their meaning to evoke an automatic response. Think of what the Right has done to “liberty” and “freedom” for example. They play “freedom” like a trump card. It doesn’t matter what they’re defending, including torture and warrantless wiretapping; once “freedom” is thrown on the table, the trump card is supposed to win the hand. But within the context of the ideas they are defending the word “freedom” has no meaning.

On the other hand, I can think of times in which a majority of the American people saw through the sham. I’m thinking of the privatized social security scheme Bush tried to sell, and the Terri Schiavo debacle. I’ve thought for years that eventually the percentage of Americans with really bad experiences with the health care system would grow into a critical mass. And when that happened, I thought, maybe we could get reform.

But then there are lobbyists. Someone should work out a citizen-to-lobbyist influence ratio, as in how many irate citizens does it take to cancel out the influence of one lobbyist? It would be a really big number.

Then again, citizen opinion must count for something, or the Right wouldn’t even bother to scam us, nor would the insurance industry have paid for those “Harry and Louise” ads of yore. Perhaps all is not lost.

Pity the Poor Hedge Fund!

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This follows up the last post, on “Why Is There an Economy?” A blogger named Corky Boyd is outraged that the Obama White House is strong-arming business.

Yesterday (May 1) on Detroit’s Frank Beckman’s morning talk show (WJR), bankruptcy attorney Tom Lauria made the incendiary accusation that the members of the White House had threatened to use the “the full force of the White House Press Corps to destroy” his client’s reputation if it didn’t acquiesce to highly unfavorable terms of the government’s proposed Chrysler restructuring plan. Because of the strongarm tactics, Lauria’s client dropped its opposition. …

…There is a pattern here. Financial institutions holding billions of Chrysler’s secured debt are being held hostage by the TARP loans they are not permitted to pay back. They are being forced to accept just pennies on the dollar for loans they made in good faith less than two years ago. Just like mob loan sharks, the administration wants them under its thumb so they can extort more and more concessions.

This is an abuse of power that goes beyond Nixon.

Oh Noes! Why is the White House being so mean to the nice businessman?

Here’s the reason: The client who is being strong-armed is hedge-fund manager Perella Weinberg Partners LLP. Perella and a couple of other hedge funds that owned a part of Chrysler’s debt have been obstructing Chrysler’s attempts to restructure itself and avoid bankruptcy. The hedge funders wanted Chrysler liquidated so they could take their money, and too bad if the loss of Chrysler sets off a chain reaction of failed suppliers and other businesses that send the entire American economy into a tailspin. Not to mention what would happen to the retirees, who would lose their pensions, etc.

Lisa Lerer at The Politico explains what happened.

“Bankruptcy is only required today because of the greed of a few hedge funds that held a fraction of Chrysler’s debt,” said Rep. Candice Miller, (R-Mich.) “President Obama today stated that he did not stand with these hedge funds and neither do I.”…

…“The administration put a great deal of pressure on those entities to go forward,” said Rep. Gary Peters, (D-Mich.) “They gave these hedge funds every single possible opportunity to accept the deal.”

Last night, the Treasury department sweetened their $2 billion cash offer to holders of Chrysler’s secured debt by $250 million. The secured debt holders would have gotten the cash in exchange for retiring roughly $6.9 billion in debt. The administration also extended an original 6pm deadline to continue negotiating through the night.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, (D-Mich.) blamed the breakdown in negotiations on three large hedge funds – Oppenheimer Funds, Perella Weinberg Partners and Stairway Capital.

“We’ve been working with them every day, last night, and up until this morning,” said Stabenow. “They pushed as hard as they could.”

The White House strong-armed Perella Weinberg Partners into signing on to the $2 billion deal in order to leave something left of Chrysler to restructure. This in turn will, it is hoped, save thousands of jobs (you’re saving not just Chrysler, remember, but also suppliers) and at least some portion of employee health and retiree benefits. And this is good not just for the employees and retirees, but for the state and local economies in which these businesses are located.

In other words, three hedge funds tried to hold a chunk of our nation’s economy hostage, and the White House didn’t let them get away with it. And this meathead blogger says the White House is abusing power. Jeez louise, people are stupid.

Update: A mouthpiece for Plutocracy called “Founding Bloggers” links here, saying,

Right on cue, here is a liberal blogger that makes the case against the evil capital investors who would dare exercise their rights under contract.

What the pea-brains aren’t noticing is that there are vast numbers of contracts that are being shredded or amended because of the plight of the automakers. These include contracts with suppliers and, probably, dealers as well as workers. Everybody else is taking a hit. The White House is trying to spread the pain around so that there’s something to salvage and the overall U.S. economy doesn’t take a bigger hit than it’s already taking.

In a perfect world the automakers would be making a profit and the capital investors would be making a nice return on their investment. But when the Titanic is going down it’s not the time to complain that you paid for a cabin with a better view and want a refund.

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.

Wingnuts and Women

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© <a href='http://www.dreamstime.com/Rcmathiraj_info'>Raja Rc</a> | <a href='http://www.dreamstime.com/'>Dreamstime.com</a>

How Wingnuts View Women
© Raja Rc | Dreamstime.com

R.S. McCain–the guy who thinks it’s perfectly normal to raise girl children to be sex slaves, as long as you’re Christian–shows us how a male wingnut understands women — not as human beings, but objects that men do things to.

I agree with Jesse Taylor — there’s a lot of pathology on display here.

Update: It’s astonishing to me that I have to spell this out more explicitly, but apparently I do — If you want to know what shocked me about McCain’s post, please read again what I wrote above — the male wingnut understands women not as human beings, but as objects that men do things to. Note also the photograph. These are clues.

Basically, what McCain says in his post is that women are objects who must be either used or protected by men. He gives women no respect as autonomous human beings. To McCain, women are projections of men — of lust, scorn, idealism, whatever.

I bolded the two sentence above because it gets to the heart of my problem with McCain’s post. He may see himself as “chivalrous,” but his attitude toward women is the same as a rapist’s attitude. That he has assigned himself the role of “protector” makes little difference; it’s just the flip side of the same uber-patronizing coin. McCain may not rape women physically, but he is a rapist nonetheless because he denies their humanity.

Now, let’s walk through McCain’s post. This paragraph:

Who cares that she’s not even old enough to buy a pack of cigarettes legally? Get her drunk on wine coolers, get what you want, then the next morning, take her to CVS to get Plan B and make sure there’s no chance the slut will show up in a few months talking child support payments and DNA tests.

First off, the narrative above describes what is commonly called “date rape.” Let’s be clear about that.

Second, who is not actually participating in this narrative? The woman is not participating. The man gets her drunk, uses her body, and then takes her to CVS for Plan B. At no point in this narrative is the woman presented as a person with free will who can decide for herself what to do. The man is the only participant. The woman is just a doll. She is not a human being, but an object. This is a rapists’ attitude, of course.

Next paragraph:

So guys, if you screw a 17-year-old and “forget” to use a condom, remember: Nothing says “thanks a lot, you cheap whore” like the gift of Plan B!

As joan 16 says, “cheap whore” was a slip of the mask. It may be that he was mimicking the attitude of a man using a 17-year-old for sex, but where is his concern for the 17-year-old who has been used? Does he think 17-year-old girls were never used for sex before Plan B was available? Does he think that denying Plan B to a 17-year-old who has been raped is an act of compassion for her? Does he think that men who date rape women are thinking of long-term consequences at all at the time?

Further, does he think that all 17-year-olds who have sex do so in a date rape scenario? Isn’t it possible that two teenagers sometimes give in to nature’s most compelling temptation? One may not approve of sex outside marriage, but the girl who gives in to the temptation is no less a human being afterward than the boy, and she is entitled to the same respects and considerations due to any other human being.

Instead, McCain is saying girls must conform to his projected expectation of being “pure,” or he will re-assign them the alternative projected status of “cheap whore.” Out of his sight, she has no reality at all. He has no perception of or empathy with her life and the realities of an unplanned pregnancy.

For those of you who didn’t see that, I rather doubt that my spelling it out is going to make any difference. But there it is.

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.