2021 Will Be Welcomed as a Liberator, and Will Pay for Itself

I'm going to cheat and fiddle with the timestamp on this post, because I really truly did intend to post it yesterday.

On Wednesday the libertarian writer and Cato Institute wonk Julian Sanchez posted this in response to a deranged tweet from a Trump Republican:

It seems that by "the party that always wants larger, costlier government" Sanchez meant to refer to the Democrats.  It's hardly obscure that although Republicans like to campaign against big-spending and big government, when they are elected they increase spending, raise the deficit, and increase government surveillance into ordinary citizens' lives.  It's arguable that what matters is not the amount of government spending, but what and whom it's spent on.  Or other considerations, as when Barack Obama perpetrated a hiring freeze for government employees in the middle of an economic crisis.

That Sanchez got an obvious point so wrong discredits him, which reminds me of something else.  It's difficult to know whether every Republican who wants to overturn the 2020 presidential election has any evidence or other basis for their belief that the election was stolen.  But it appears that most if not all such Republicans also believe that Joe Biden is a radical-left socialist, which is delusional in a classically Republican way.  The only mitigating factor could be that many Democrats believe that Biden is a "progressive," which is just as delusional but in a classically Democratic way.

But Here's a Rat's Ass

A former co-worker, a lovely person in many ways but nonetheless a fascist, shared this meme on Facebook today.

That's odd. Social Security, Medicare, public education, police (when they're doing their job), the fire department, the military (in principle -- and my friend is another one of those "Support Our Troops" people anyway), all kinds of public health service, disaster relief, public roads, public libraries -- do I need to go on? These are all government protecting and caring for us, giving a shit. It doesn't really matter whether a given politician cares or not, it's the government's job to protect and care for us -- "to promote the general Welfare," as it says in the preamble to the Constitution -- and it does that, quite a lot.

It could do more, I suppose, and do better what it already does. But Republicans and a lot of voters don't want it to. They want to get rid of government so that everyone who isn't rich can die. They expect the government to take care of them, but the GOP voters are surprised when it turns out that the guys they voted for don't give a shit about them, but only about the rich. They're deathly afraid that someone else - someone black, someone brown, someone slightly poorer than they are, an immigrant, a (gasp) undocumented immigrant -- might get something from the government, and in order to deny others they're perfectly willing to give up those benefits themselves. Archie Bunker was a perfect example of this mentality. Now he and his kind are reaping the whirlwind. But go on, Archie, support Donald Trump; do you think he gives a shit about you?

This Man Must Be a Self-Fulfilling Prophet

Why does this meme-maker write as though most of "2010's America" didn't support government-run healthcare, expanding Social Security, raising taxes on the rich, and all those other "socialist" programs and policies? Why do people who think that they're smarter than Republitards accept and spread the corporate media / Republicrat propaganda line that the US today is right-wing? Yes, there are people who want to eliminate social programs, but they are a minority. Often they are even a minority of Republicans.  To talk as though they represented America in this decade is not only dishonest, it's siding with them by taking their claims as fact.
 
And it's not as if there weren't many in 1930s America who opposed the New Deal. FDR had to work against a lot of opposition. Probably about the same proportion of the population. Much of the opposition that didn't come from the wealthy came from working-class whites who didn't want the New Deal programs to help blacks -- in other words, to prevent the enactment of any program that would benefit anyone beside themselves. This meme perpetrates historical ignorance, and worse, misinformation.  It also encourages liberals and progressives to believe that the obstacles to improving life for most Americans come from the vast majority of Americans, thus giving themselves an excuse for failure in advance.  As Whatever It Is I'm Against It wrote of their hero and role model, "It’s pretty much always Obama’s working assumption that he will lose any fight. And then, funnily enough, he does."

Already It Was Impossible to Tell Which Was Which

Okay, I don't disagree that the Tea Party minority in the House who've shut the federal government down are bad people; their account of what is wrong with the government, and what would be a good government, is irrational, misinformed, dishonest, self-serving.  Is that understood?

Where I begin to part company with Democratic partisans is on their conviction that because their opponents are irrational, they must, by the process of elimination, be rational, well-informed, and concerned only with the common good.  Not only doesn't it follow logically, it's fairly obvious that many if not most Dems are fighting irrationality with irrationality, batshit crazy with batshit crazy.  And hell, I don't know, maybe that's the right thing to do.  The Tea Party's irrationality, combined with generous corporate support and the use of that support to do some grassroots organizing, has taken them pretty far.  I'd like to think it won't get them much farther, and that the present crisis will leave scorched earth behind it where the Republican Party formerly stood.  It would be even nicer if the Democrats learned something from the shutdown in their turn, and stopped trying to out-batshit the Right, but that of course would be irrational for me to believe.  It's "cynical," as I was told last week by one Obama devotee, to judge the Democrats by their record; it is not cynical to judge the Republicans by theirs.

So, I'm now seeing a meme featuring Elizabeth Warren denouncing the shutdown in these terms:

There's actually been some pushback against this one.  Some anarchists (and fellow-travelers like me) have pointed out that anarchism does not mean something like "every man for himself" (that would be free-market capitalism, as it's laughingly known), and that Warren is simply using the word to mean something like "uppity troublemakers I don't like," which is hardly a contribution to reasoned discourse.   (She doesn't like real anarchists anyway: she fell into the corporate elite line on the Occupy movement, for example.  But then so, in the end, did most mainstream Democrats.)

An old friend linked to a rant by a Methodist minister somewhere, and added his own layer of froth to it:

This is EXACTLY right. So much bull shit propaganda is speed out to the public as "facts". These are the real facts. The moderate - and trainable - on both sides need to come together to permanently oust these tea party legislative terrorists. It's time to take back our country with reason and compromise. These are NOT bad words and what WILL get our government working again.

"Moderate" is a "bad word," in my opinion, for reasons I've given before.  "Trainable" is even worse.  Just off the bat, who's going to do the training?  Our government wasn't founded to "train" us, or our elected representatives.  "Reason" is an okay word, but there's no reason in my friend's words.  "Compromise" is a bad word, since in practice what it has meant during the Obama administration is that the Republicans have been handed much of what they want, and are thereby emboldened to demand the rest of it later.  And it's hilarious of my friend (and he's far from alone among pious Democrats) to demand compromise, when both sides here are refusing to compromise.  That is not necessarily a bad thing, because there are times when one must not give in.  Obama and the Democrats have decided not to compromise any further on the Affordable Care Act.  Their supporters agree that they shouldn't.  So this time, right now, compromise is a bad word.

After a few snarling comments between us, my friend wrote exactly that: "There is no compromising on this issue," he wrote. Wait a minute, didn't you just demand compromise a few minutes ago?  Compromise isn't a bad word, and all that?  It's convenient, if not exactly gratifying, to have such a blatant textbook example of doublethink in action.

Then I got in e-mail a link to a Daily Kos post, "President Obama NAILS IT in one sentence," by a writer using the pixelname MinistryOfTruth.  Once again reality leaves satire gasping in the dust, since in Orwell's 1984 "The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink."  And credit where credit's due: the Daily Kos writer seems to have mastered doublethink in that pseudonym -- there's no indication that he or she is aware of the irony in that choice of name.

But I digress.  What is Obama's one sentence that NAILS IT?  "The American people elected their representatives to make their lives easier, not harder."  Okay, I know I'm like hypercritical, but I'm not impressed.  But Minitrue thinks it's so nice it should be quoted twice:

This is what a dying Republican party looks like. I'm glad President Obama has brought out the BIG STICK.

President Obama: The American people elected their representatives to make their lives easier, not harder

... though in neither case does that sentence, as quoted, end with a period.  As for "BIG STICK" -- no, I shouldn't, but I will anyway.  But I knew Sheriff Bart, and President Obama is no Sheriff Bart.  MinistryOfTruth returned to the BIG STICK in comments, again with remarkable unselfconsciousness.

"Millions of Americans voted for a government that makes our lives better, not harder," wrote Ministry of Truth.  But instead they got a government that entrenched health care in the hands of private corporate insurance companies, that refused to hold Wall Street accountable for the crash of 2008, continued and escalated wars that killed and injured more people of various nations and made the US more hated and therefore insecure, that capitulated in advance to the Republicans by extending upper-bracket tax cuts before negotiations on the stimulus had even begun (via), so that the economy continues to stagnate -- except for the very rich.  But then, the One Percent elected their representatives to make their lives easier, not harder; and President Obama is their representative, all that stands between them and the pitchforks and torches.

Though I'm the first to point out the limits of reason, reason is important to me.  When the Right mounts its deranged campaigns, I look to evidence and reason to try to keep my balance.  The Democrats, all too often, join the Republicans in hysteria and irrationality.

"The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought," Orwell also wrote in 1984.  Which party?  Both parties.  And they're winning.

Soy Huevon...

... So I'm just going to recycle some online discussion for today's post.  My work week is over until Monday, so I promise to write something more substantial tomorrow.

Anyway, a number of people have linked to this clip from the Jimmy Fallon show, which finds that a surprising number of Americans object to "Obamacare", but not to the "Affordable Care Act," even though those are merely different names the same legislative package.  One of my Facebook friends did, remarking "Do you think an informed citizenry is essential to a democracy? Er....."; and one of his other friends linked to this clip, which apparently (I haven't watched it yet) shows that some "Obama supporters actually hate Obama's policies."  That wouldn't surprise me; I've often pointed out that many vocal Obama supporters have no idea what his policies are.  ("He stopped the wars!"  Not.)

I commented: I don't deny that many Americans are horrifyingly ignorant about our history, our government, and our elected officials. I get my nose rubbed in that ignorance every day. (Though even more, as someone once said, the trouble isn't that people aren't ignorant -- it's that they know so much that isn't so.) But I've been thinking again: I see Democrats calling the Republicans idiots a lot. But suppose that's so: what does it say about the Democrats, including Obama, that those "idiots" keep beating them, over and over again? It's a popular line in many action/horror movies, that the villain says that Good is weak and ineffective, while Evil is powerful and effective, and so will triumph in the end. The Democrats are oddly ready to agree with and confirm that claim, it seems to me (though only if I agree that Democrats are good, which I don't).

Also, as far as I'm concerned, the only real impediment to an informed citizenry is the laziness of the citizenry themselves. People love to complain about how the Media are sapping their precious bodily fluids and all, but I call bullshit. What we need to know is out there, but no one is going to hand it to you -- in fact, wanting to have it handed to you is why we're in trouble now.

Not long after I wrote that, another friend posted a quotation from the liberal comedian and soft-edge satirist Andy Borowitz: "I wasn't happy about the country being controlled by the richest one percent, but I really hate it being controlled by the dumbest one percent."  Which provided a good example of the complaint that the "idiots" are winning.  My friend objected when I said so, saying that "I really don't think the idiots are 'beating' Obama and the Democrats in the present instance." This, in the middle of a US government shutdown engineered by the "idiots!" I linked to Derek Thompson's recent article which pointed out that although Republicans lose various battles, over the long term they've been winning the spending war -- the Democrats keep caving in to their demands.  That's leaving aside the fact that Obama is in close agreement with the "idiots" on many important issues, disagreeing only on a few social issues.

Someone just commented on my comments that the Republicans win because "they're generally the favorites of people with lots and lots of money."  Which doesn't affect my point, since it indicates that "idiocy" is no obstacle to accumulating lots and lots of money; and ignores the fact that the Democrats also take in lots of money from the rich.  Obama raised more money than his opponents in both 2008 and 2012, much or most of it from the wealthy.  That could be one reason Democrats love to accuse the Republicans of idiocy: to divert attention from their own devotion to the wishes of the rich.  I think I'm onto something here.  But I need to blog more, and comment less on Facebook.

Why Johnny Can't Blink

But for the time being, the administration has blinked.

Oh, noes!  They've never done that before!  Well, hardly ever.  Well, usually.  Only politically naive professional leftists would have expected the President to do anything else.

Also from The Atlantic today, Republicans are indignant that Democrats are concern-trolling them, which the Republicans would never do, especially now that the party is "down-and-out" and the Democrats are "triumphant." A lot of conspiracy-theory mongering in there too, which is amusing when you consider how respectable politicians and pundits despise conspiracy theories floated by their opponents.  I guess there just isn't enough going on right now for people really to worry about.

The Impossible Takes Longer

Once again RWA1 has come through for me (unintentionally, of course), this time with a link to a Wall Street Journal op-ed on the "GOP's Payroll Tax Fiasco: How did the Republicans manage to lose the tax issue to Obama?"

The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.

Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.

The writer labels Obama's payroll tax cut as a "tax holiday," which is fair enough. He could have done the same of Bush's tax holiday for the rich, which the Republicans have been so insistent on prolonging, but the writer chooses instead to see the expiration of the tax holiday as a tax increase. Such deliberate obfuscation doesn't help solve our problems, but it may help explain why the Republicans are in such trouble politically right now.

Most Americans favor higher taxes for the wealthy, and the Republicans have been vocal and self-righteous about opposing them. Obama has not been particularly clever in exploiting this, but he didn't need to. Most of us, regardless of our party, have seen the same people who nearly destroyed the world economy carry on almost untouched by the depression. While unemployment rose and people lost their homes by often dubious foreclosures, CEOs and other executives were given extravagant bonuses, even when their companies lost money or collapsed altogether. The Republicans called for more austerity, resisted extensions of unemployment benefits, blocked even Obama's tepid stimulus measures, and fussed over the deficit while many people lost hope for their future. Democratic operatives have been working themselves into a vindictive frenzy because Obama has been criticized from the left, but not to worry: the Republicans have worked hard to make themselves less popular than Obama.

Apart from the propaganda in pro-Obama media, I've been getting e-mail from the source, denouncing the Republicans for wanting to raise "a typical family's taxes by more than $1,000 next year" by letting the payroll tax holiday expire. Obama, by contrast, wants to "[e]xtend and expand the tax cut, helping 160 million people and letting that same family keep $1,500." That's all very nice, and I like extra money as much as anyone else, but even $1,500 is not that much money. It's just over $100 a month, which is not going to help a family with children very much. Of course Obama's playing politics with his tax holiday, but so did the Bush administration, which tried to distract attention from its service to the top 1% with a couple of "tax rebates" -- remember those? -- in 2001 and 2008, which gave the typical family a one-time payment of a few hundred dollars. (Three hundred in 2001, three hundred to 1200 in 2008.) Besides, lowering the payroll tax means lowering the amount of money that goes into the Social Security fund, which is not a good idea to put it gently. (According to Josh Bivens, though, "the legislation that cut the payroll tax also instructed Treasury to credit the Trust Fund for the lost revenue – but since when has being factually wrong defanged a political argument? And who’s to say that the next year of payroll tax cuts will maintain this commitment to hold the Trust Fund whole?")

The op-ed writer also talks about the huge tax increases that will happen in 2013 if the Republicans can't find a way to win the public's confidence. Nothing he mentions suggests that the top brackets are going to pay a lot more if their tax holiday expires, and with good reason: their top marginal rates weren't that high before the holiday, certainly compared to what they were in the 1960s. I'm also skeptical about the writer's claim that Obama has "spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases," which is familiar right-wing boilerplate. They were saying it in 2009, and it was false then. The WSJ editorial page has never been known for factual accuracy either -- rather the opposite.

The writer had some recommendations for the Republicans, which RWA1 endorsed. Here they are:

At this stage, Republicans would do best to cut their losses and find a way to extend the payroll holiday quickly. Then go home and return in January with a united House-Senate strategy that forces Democrats to make specific policy choices that highlight the differences between the parties on spending, taxes and regulation. Wisconsin freshman Senator Ron Johnson has been floating a useful agenda for such a strategy. The alternative is more chaotic retreat and the return of all-Democratic rule.

All-Democratic rule!? Oh, noes! While I was writing this post the news went out that the Republicans did cut their losses and extended the payroll tax holiday. ABC News reported that

A muted House Speaker John Boehner announced today that Republicans have decided to accept a short-term extension of the payroll tax cut, preventing a hike in taxes just nine days before the tax break expires for 160 million Americans.

Boehner has a mute button? Why weren't we told this before? But I don't think the Republicans are going to have much success highlighting "the differences between the parties on spending, taxes and regulation," because the Republican "differences" are political concrete overshoes. Not that I'm concern trolling here, mind you. I'm perfectly happy to see the Republicans suffer a humiliating defeat on everything, so I can concentrate more on criticizing the Democrats.

By the way, the WSJ also features something I can't resist passing along: "How to Sneak in Sports on Christmas", by one Jason Gay (which must be a pseudonym). It's sort of like the op-ed piece: how to do what you want to do, no matter what anyone else thinks, while still feeling totally justified and put-upon.

There are 13 NFL games on Christmas Eve, and five juicy season-opening NBA contests on Christmas Day, and at some point, you're going to be following a game on your TV, or your phone, or your high-tech germ tablet, and a disapproving person is going to scold you and tell you to shut that thing off and show some respect. And you will feel ashamed, and promise to pay close attention for the rest of church, or your child's first Christmas.

"In church"? Jason Gay is visualizing some guy in the pews with an iPod plugged into his ear, hunched over the tiny screen as he pretends to be kneeling in prayer. Will Tim Tebow be playing on Christmas Day? Where are the War on Christmas partisans? Somebody call the American Family Association! It's hard to believe that Jason Gay isn't writing satire, but he seems to be entirely serious.

I count myself lucky, though. If I were attending a normal American family Christmas, I'd probably be stuck among people who made those games a family activity, and I'd be trying to sneak in some reading against their attempts to shame me for not caring about the "important games."

Till the End of the Age

Steve Kornacki at Salon briefly dared to tone down his adulation of President Obama after the debt deal, but he can't quite let go of it. Today, for example:

If there was ever a chance that there'd be a follow-up to the now clearly inadequate stimulus that Obama pushed through Congress at the start of his presidency, it vanished for good (or at least through the 2012 election) last November, when the GOP reclaimed the House and increased its share of the Senate. We knew then that the scale of collaboration between the president and the 112th Congress would probably be limited, at best.

It depends on who "we" are, I guess. There has been plenty of collaboration between Obama and Congress in this session, in the form of Obama collaborating with the Republicans. The stimulus bill was "clearly inadequate" when it was passed, and we who pointed that out were not surprised to see Obama scaling up his concessions to the Right as his term went on. (Of course, we who noticed such things, the premature anti-collaborationists as it were, were and are taken seriously only as "professional leftists" who didn't want to President Obama to succeed. Which was true, if success is to be measured in terms of enacting the Republican Right's agenda, as it has proved to be.)

Kornacki continues:

Five dozen districts that voted for Obama in '08 are now represented by Republicans. If Democrats can pick off half of them in '12, and keep their losses to a minimum elsewhere, they'll be in position to win back the House -- making it possible for Obama to enjoy a productive relationship with Congress again.

Wait a minute. That "productive relationship with Congress" gave us that "clearly inadequate" stimulus bill, the corporate-subsidy Affordable Health Care Act, and an ongoing failure to keep the progressive-sounding promises Obama had made during his campaign, because the nasty partisan Republicans wouldn't cooperate with the President. Obama and his apologists were big on excuses for their failures when they controlled both houses of Congress and the White House; I don't believe their situation is going to be as advantageous after November 2012 as it was after November 2008, but even if they did, would it make any difference? If they couldn't -- or wouldn't -- do better then, they won't be able to do better after the next election.

Realistically, this may be the best case scenario for Obama and his supporters -- gut it out for the next 15 months, eke out a small but impressive-seeming win, then hope the Republicans of the 113th Congress decide its in their interests to be just a little bit more open to collaboration.

For the rest of us, a President a little bit less open to collaboration would be better, but that's not a best-case scenario, it's an impossible dream.

Just a Piece of Parchment

I happened on this amusing cartoon yesterday. I am not sure whose link directed me to it; it was originally posted at the right-wing blog Get Liberty, which bills itself as favoring limited government. As far as I can tell from its archives, Get Liberty only became concerned about unlimited government in March 2009; before that, though some of their material criticizes former President Bush for abandoning free-market principles, they don't seem to care if their critique of big government is accessible to readers. (P.S. Well, no wonder!) Articles like this turn up in a search, but they're still warnings of what Obama will do to those who dare to criticize him, with convenient amnesia about the Bush Administration; or this one, begging President Bush to call Congress back into session, if it please you Sir, if you're not playing eleven-dimensional chess to ensure "success this November." There's a marvelous cognitive dissonance in seeing Get Liberty urge Bush, of all Presidents, "to make that abundantly clear to the rollicking, frolicking House leadership that has put their fun in the sun above the nation’s energy needs." They even admit gloomily, "Whether flying off to the China Olympics or holing up with Vladimir Putin, the President surely doesn’t seem to be" listening to the People. Bear in mind that they're talking about a President notorious not only for his own long vacations, but for his inattention and absence during national emergencies. These guys are as pious in their hopes as liberal Democrats who hope that President Obama will at any moment drop the mask and reveal himself as a fighting progressive. You can't stuff money into the pockets of the rich (which Bush always made clear was his purpose in life) with a small government, dummies! Hell, even with a big government, Bush wasn't able to spend all the TARP funds he wanted on welfare for the suffering, deserving wealthy.

I also enjoyed this cartoon, which sees Rush Limbaugh's failed bid for a football team as a victim of McCarthyism, another odd call for the Right, which has been trying to rehabilitate the late Senator from Wisconsin for half a century, but remains ever-vigilant about New McCarthyisms. Unfortunately, Get Liberty are unable to avoid New McCarthyisms of their own: they denounced Sotomayor as a "self-declared racist termagant." (They also don't seem to know what "self-declared" means. Making statements which others construe as racist does not constitute declaring oneself a racist, or Limbaugh would also be a "self-declared racist.")

It does seem to be true that Sotomayor wasn't questioned adequately by the Senate; but the failure was bipartisan. Avedon at the Sideshow mentioned a right-winger who was "whining about how hard it is to pronounce 'Sotomayor' - which I thought was pretty rich coming from an Armenian." Later she linked to a Frank Rich column that provided an overview of the Republican political clown show, which was unconcerned about the Constitution but very concerned about putting a Latina, even a conservative one, on the Supreme Court. FAIR did some stories too.

As always in cases like this, I have to wonder when Get Liberty began worrying about the Constitution. Certainly not during the Bush administration, when their President was quoted (and three witnesses concurred) telling Republican leaders in 2005 that he could do whatever he wanted. It was one of Bush's own aides, presumably a loyal Republican, who warned him that there was "a valid case that the provisions in [the Patriot Act] violate the Constitution."

"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"

[The Bush quotation appears to be bogus.]  And, of course, the last thing the gang at Get Liberty wants is a new President who takes the Constitution seriously, unless they want to see most of the Bush administration in the dock for multiple high crimes. And I don't think they do.