Tone It Down
As you undoubtedly know, Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was shot today, along with several others, 6 of whom are dead. The shooter seems to be someone who is mentally unbalanced. Assigning a party title to the shooter is likely nonsensical, but what is relevant and indeed important is the level of violent rhetoric related to current politics. And despite media attempts at false equivalency, we all know where the violent rhetoric is coming from. In the words of the Pima, Arizona County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik:
I’d just like to say that when you look unbalanced people-how they are-how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government—the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous and unfortunately Arizona, I think, has become sort of the capitol. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.
Giffords was one of the lawmakers referenced by a rifle crosshairs on Sarah Palin’s infamous “Hit List” map, which she introduced with the message, “”Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!“ Giffords has had more than her share of violent rhetoric aimed at her by the Tea Party and others, including indirect wording by her Tea Party opponent.
Debate is fine, disagreement is fine, argument and opposition are fine. But this whole wave of ”Second Amendment solutions“ and other violence-based hot air coming from the right wing is simply and clearly unacceptable. To claim it’s not relevant is bullshit, and if you have your opinions to to opposite, fine, but You. Are. Wrong.
I am struck by the parallels of this to the Pentagon shooter incident last year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Pentagon_shooting#Perpetrator
Same general “Alex Jones”-inspired paranoia, drug abuse, oddball currency fixation, and general mental unbalance.
These are the kinds of people that give left-libertarianism (my personal brand of politics) a bad rap.
I think the most intelligent comment I read today on this was this:
The odd thing is that Palin was rabble-rousing about the ACA of all things.
Something that was so milque-toast a reform that the Republicans proposed damn near the same damn thing in 1993 (but backed off due to its cost — not its Constitutionality — once “HillaryCare” was defeated).
Here’s my initial reaction, before the shooter’s name was released:
America just took a body blow today, regardless.
Today, 11:34:09 AM PST
It’s too bad she got shot. On the other hand, many politicians seem to think that they can simply ignore the public will and vote for horribly unpopular legislation in imperial fashion. Maybe this will remind some of them of the mood of the voters that they’re screwing. This guy may be crazier than most, but there’s quite a few who are just as angry.
And GK continues to stir the shit. Unbelievable.
“Horribly unpopular legislation”
Favorable: 42%
Unfavorable: 40%
Don’t Know: 18%
http://motherjones.com/files/images/blog_healthcare_poll_kaiser.jpg
Favorable: 43%
Oppose, too liberal: 37%
Oppose, not liberal enough: 13%
No opinion: 7%
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/affordablecareact-1.jpg
That’s pretty f—ing good considering the conservative full-court BS agitprop campaign that’s been waged against this conservative bill — a retread of what the Republicans themselves proposed in 1993 — for over a year now.
Christine O’Donnell got 40% of the vote in Delaware. 70% of church-goers — the dominant Republican deme — don’t believe in evolution, so it’s not surprising that so many of them have their heads up their asses about the PPACA.
“Imperial fashion”. Yes, Geoff, the Senate, which gutted both the House Democrat version and told Obama what the score was going to be is an “Imperial” institution.
The stuff your write here isn’t that much more coherent than the AZ loser’s timecube crap. I only respond to you because I consider your positions to be similar to a:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBUmyrp0-QU
I get no enjoyment out of it, it’s just a chore to marshall the facts that counter your ever-predicable spew.
Understand that I have no illusions that this dusty little corner of the web is any great shakes, or even ranks as a minor wag. It’s nothing more than a personal blog where many people are kind enough to stop by, read my rantings, post their thoughts, argue, and hopefully all of us, myself included, learn some stuff. I know I have, and hope to keep doing so.
I have a very strong conviction regarding the fostering of freedom of expression, even in private venues, and try to uphold that conviction on this blog. To that end, Geoff has been welcome here for many months despite what, in my opinion, is clearly trolling behavior. He often says things that piss me off royally, but I never even considered shutting him out of these discussions before; an open forum is an open forum. I did not restrain myself so I could argue with him–I stopped trying to do that a while back. I did not abide his presence for amusement–he is a constant annoyance, and seeing his posts here is a low point of my day. I simply decided to try to ignore him, hoping he would wander off on his own, but prepared to see him continue his behavior for quite some time.
I have my limits, though. What is posted–and I keep it and quote it both to condemn it and to demonstrate why I take this action–goes beyond simple trolling. It is sickening, despicable, and inexcusable. Perhaps this is just another troll, but if so, it goes too far. I know that Geoff would protest that he is simply pointing out a “fact,” but what it is–and I see no two ways about this–is simply amplification of the most contemptibly reprehensible sentiment in the American system today: don’t cross a political line or someone will do physical harm to you. The appallingly heartless “too bad she got shot” comment, signifying not compassion but instead no more than the bare minimum human acknowledgement to tragedy, by all appearances begrudged, before spouting what is effectively an unveiled threat to open political discourse–no better than a terrorist credo–simply underscores the moral depravity involved in the statement.
Geoff, you are not welcome here. Please take your comments somewhere else.
I want to thank Geoff.
Geoff taught me one thing:
when you get right down to it, to be a movement conservative, at its core, there has to be some kind of mental defect (and I don’t mean ‘stupid’ or ‘dumb’ or unintellegent). I mean, you have to be sadistic or a sociopath or some other sort of thing. How else could you think it is okay to have a health care system that allows for 41,000 of your fellow Americans to needlessly suffer and die? Those kind of numbers should produce a desperate cry to do something to fix it. The hole motive behind the war on terror, the emotion that launched the war on Iraq, was all over the loss of life of merely 3000 people, to which we’ve spent three trillion dollars. How can 41,000 of your fellow countrynen dying needlessly be okay? One has to be either sadistic, or a sociopath. Geoff taught me that. I want to thank him for that.
Having said that, I can’t say I’ll miss him, but I’m disturbed that there is people like him out there walking around.
On to my comments on the meta framing.
I think another reason for ‘crosshairs’ rhetoric is intimidation and trying to imbue in many a sort of Stockholm syndrome conversion to their views. But in my mind much of that sits on top of a sort of mental illness: sadism and sociopaths.
Underneath all of this is the quest we all have for traction: to somehow get bettter control of our lives.
In the background is a failing economy, a failing political system, a shrinking middle class and the war on terror.
The shrinking middle class is the big thing. Values/morality is a middle class characteristic. A society that appears to have decreasing morals is simply a society with more people falling out of the middle class, usually economically, and then culturally. Kapra tried to demonstrate a bit of that in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” when he showed what Bedford Falls would be like without George Bailey and with a shrunken middle class, Charlotte Bix is carted off to prison.
Gandhi made the connection: poverty is a form of violence. The shrinking middle class is a form of slow motion violence going on and it is going to trigger violent reactions from time to time.
I think the voilence we hear about like this always comes from people who are economically bubbling between middle class and poverty. If you win the lottery, it manifest in elation. If you are falling out of the middle class it manifest in stress – you feel the slow motion Gandi violence. The stress manifest in illness. The search for traction, emotional as well as economical leads to willing ears.
The problem has a paradoxical component. When the middle class shrinks, society appears less value/morality oriented. That pushes many who remain in the middle class to the right to demand more values/morality in our politics: here you have the Republicans creating the problem and reaping the benefits at the same time, they shrink the middle class and that causes a reaction where more people move to the right politically.
Likewise the Republicans have shrunk the middle class, inflicted voilence on many people, provoking a reaction by those on the receiving end, and using the Tea Party, they are able to ensure that at least some of that reaction is not against them, but against the very party that created and is struggling to save the middle class: Democrats. Obviously this is more emotional than anything else.
So you have fringe people, some mentally unbalanced, some outright sick, flailing about in search of traction, and vitriolic right wing rhetoric provides a sense of the kind of traction they long for and dream about.
In that sense, Murdock and Limbaugh and their accompanied empires and coalition of confederates (which includes Palin etc…) are just opportunist both manifesting and capitalising on the entire enterprise: making money off people who’s wealth and well being is shrinking. There’s a lot of money and political power to be harvested from it. I guess you could say, the sickness starts at the top.
Want some heart warming good news to give you hope?
As a point of comparison and contrast, while our society is becoming more violent, I want to point out this example in Egypt where they are doing the opposite (simply wonderful):
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/we-either-live-together-or-we-die.html
Believe it or not, there is a silver lining to this story (besides her likely survival). Let us be grateful that, compared to other parts of the world, the United States is a country where – at least in this present time – assassination attempts are very uncommon. Last week began with a successful political assassination in Pakistan that is going to have a far more chilling effect on that part of the world than yesterday’s would have, even if it were successful. In the United States, we can hope this will be just an anamoly. In Pakistan, it’s just part of a current trend.
Steve:
I agree, but only to a certain degree. While we are in way better shape than many if not most parts of the world, that is altogether not a very reassuring thing. We are always (hopefully!) going to be better off than someone else, and that we’re in better shape than Pakistan is less comforting than if we were in better shape than, say, France, Japan, or England.
Secondly, the problem is that this is not an isolated event. There has been an uptick, or so I perceive, in overt threats and attempts at violent political acts. The man who crashed his plane into the IRS building in Texas; the man who shot three policemen in Pittsburgh because he believed the FEMA concentration camp story; the Tennessee church shooter; the man who drove to commit mass killings at the ACLU and the Tides Center because of what he heard on Glenn Beck’s show; the guy who opened fire on guards at the Pentagon… all attacks provoked by fears of government, most if not all fueled by the right-wing vitriol. This is not even counting the incidents like the shooting at the Holocaust Museum or the shooting of Dr. George Tiller, which are the types of attacks which may have happened at any other time but nevertheless did have elements of right-wing vitriol connected to them.
The current spate of violence motivated by political vitriol is something I think we should be very much worried about. We have to remember that this is not happening in a vacuum–more and more, we see people in positions of authority and respect, from radio hosts to news personalities to politicians all the way up to the governors’ offices making covert and even overt references to violence, strengthening the idea that shooting whomever you’re mad at is a legitimate form of political discourse. The bland acceptance by people like Geoff, forwarding the idea that you’d better bow to our political ideology or else, is frightening mostly because of how the growing right-wing establishment is fostering this mindset.
I fear that this is not just some isolated event, but a trend that will only worsen over time. For the time being, I am worried about copycats–people who see all the attention over this and might go out to try to assassinate their own local politician. But in the long run, I am worried about this becoming a new norm.
Now, you might think that even the worst of the right-wingers would never do this–but remember after 9/11, how readily and enthusiastically right-wingers grasped the terror attacks as a political tool, realizing that the sheer terror of the attacks could be used for their own benefit. They did not hesitate to use it to its fullest degree, and have not forgotten the power of fear and terror. As Geoff kindly demonstrated, it’s the new mindset. Make your followers fear your political opponents, then make your opponents fear your followers.
Perhaps I am just forgetting that stuff like this happens with similar frequency every time there’s a Democrat in office, but somehow I don’t think so. The cry for violence, with a nod-and-a-wink implied go-ahead from right-wing politicians and pundits, is too prevalent and there are too many nut cases out there who are being pushed over the edge by it.
It’s also important to note that the uptick in political violence nearly ALWAYS originates from the Right fringe, not the Left fringe.
On the Right, we have Timothy McVeigh, Byron Williams (TIDES Foundation would-be assassin), and then the nut-job who carried out yesterday’s rampage in Arizona.
[All of them we avid FOX News devotees and gun owners. Small coincidence there…]
On the Left Fringe, we have such dangerous elements as Cindy Sheehan, Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin and Code Pink.
Yes, we can all agree that those Left Wingers have been extremely influential on stirring up the class warfare, increasing violence and assassination attempts on political figures. Alec Baldwin should be put away for good…
http://i25.tinypic.com/2qcfk3n.jpg
These people are still out there, and they’re among the ones who have been successfully manipulated to believe mandated private health insurance minimums with substantial Federal subsidies (that essentially limit household expenses to 10% of income) is the next step on the road to communism.
We have a deeply, deeply damaged electorate. The pivot of the Heritage Foundation on the issue of the mandate — from a conservative principle of personal responsibility and improving a deeply flawed an inefficient status quo — to a sheerly political reaction to the Democrats actually getting the damn thing through the legislative obstacle course — is breath-taking not that they are engaging in this revisionism but breathtaking that so many Americans are falling for this deception.
Then again, we’ve had Rush, Fox, the NRO, Peter Peterson, the Federalist Society, Cato, and the rest of the conservative message machine pounding on “ObamaCare” for an entire year now, with just vague agit-prop.
It is true that the new system is resulting in higher health insurance costs for people who already had access to health-care. BCBS estimates this at 5% in general and “up to” 17% for men who now have to share their risk pool (and thus health costs) with women.
(The latter 17% rise though should net out to zero across the population as women will pay correspondingly less for their health coverage)
I, frankly, do not see any material reason to object to “ObamaCare” at this time. The changes to establish minimum levels of coverage in the market are an important method to increase transparency to consumers about what they’re actually getting for their (and our tax) money.
The one weakness is the lack of cost controls, but we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it later this decade.
Republicans revealed their deep and essential non-seriousness in this matter with the title of H.R. 2: Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.
What a bunch of clowns. Then again, if the American people keep electing them, who are the real clowns?
Again, people inciting to violence against liberals (S.P.) or liberal organizations are not liable (remember San Francisco Glenn Beck, etc?).
Secondly, the guy is just “mentally unstable”; a non-white attacker would have been considered “an islamic brain washed terrorist”.
Cross haired map (not on Palin’s site anymore):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/24/sarah-palins-pac-puts-gun_n_511433.html
Wow, I love your logic here. It seems Right-wing media can just spew incendiary language, lies, conspiracies to fire-up their radical fringe, yet take no responsibility for any shootings, assassinations or deaths of innocent by-standers that may result. The hosts are covered by the first amendment, so they see no need to tone things down. They make no apologies and keep the rhetoric going, following the usual talking points.
But the point that the Right is blind to; freedom of speech can and does have consequences.
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/gun-activists-create-atmosphere-that-fosters-political-violence
On the other hand, I see no violence resulting from Left-wing news/commentary. Maybe we have a different agenda; it’s called telling the truth. FOX News could learn a lesson there perhaps…
But if FOX News actually told the truth, they would lose viewers; if the GOP actually told the truth, they would lose votes. Their whole political machine is based on lies and fabrications.
http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=165041
Actually, he would be considered the same threat as a white attacker. They are both in the same box: Radical Right Fringe. Terrorists are terrorists, regardless of complexion or origin. And they should be punished as such.
While Palin’s removal of the map is commendable, how much of that is just covering her own arse? Why do we need crosshairs on a national map anyhow? Is that adding anything to the need for more discourse and discussion? Are crosshairs on a map a part of the political process?
Clearly, it was just a means of inciting more violence from the fringe, and that is exactly what resulted. Palin removed it for obvious fear of backlash.
This is typical Palin crap; the same old “Don’t retreat–reload” hype. As memory serves, it was “Drill, baby, drill”, until the Gulf accident, after which, suddenly, Sarah Palin became mysteriously quiet.
I don’t expect any apologies or change of tone from Palin after this incident, do you?
Although the Right once stood for “personal responsibility”, I haven’t seen anyone on the Right advocate responsibility for (or even criticism of) this horrific shooting.
“Always” in terms of this generation, yes–we should remember, however, that back in the 60’s, violence often came from the radical left. Interestingly, though, the most significant assassinations–Martin Luther King, Jr., the Kennedys–were of left-wing leaders, and not by left-wing radicals (assuming you don’t buy in to some of the more interesting conspiracy theories). There was violence on both sides back, more of the equivalence that is falsely portrayed today.
Ken is spot on here in his response. This, interestingly, was the topic of my last attempt to debate with Geoff, IIRC. His take was that Beck’s rantings against the Tides Foundation was just “opinion” and therefore all was fair game. Beck could conjure up any manner of imagined conspiracy, make any claim of nefarious plotting on the part of SEIU, Tides, the ACLU, etc., and not be liable for the consequences–it was just “opinion.”
I disagree profoundly, of course. Those on the right today act as if they can say and do anything and, so long as they do not literally say, “go pick up a gun and kill those people over there,” they are free of responsibility.
They believe this to the extent that they can get on a platform and speak to an audience they know is filled with frightened, angry people, many on the edge already, shout angrily and vigorously that certain people and organizations are part of a conspiracy to destroy the country and bring it to a state of dictatorship where the audience will see their children shot by evil black people, and even in some cases give the addresses of these people and places, and rail that “something must be done”–interspersed with fantasy killings (like Beck’s poising of Pelosi) and thinly veiled, smug insinuations of gun violence–and then they step back when shootings take place against the people and places they targeted and say, “Hey, I never told anyone to do that!”
It is, in fact, a very real form of terrorism. You can bet any amount you like that Republican politicians–so long as they do not buck their party or aggravate their base–are not fearing gunmen attacking them–but you can bet just as certainly that Democratic politicians surely are. I have little doubt that secretly, internally, people like Palin and Beck–even though they may even believe that they are sorrowful about the shooting of Giffords–are in fact now smugly aware that their power to intimidate has increased significantly, that the next time they put out a target list or rail against someone they don’t like, that their targets will tremble at the Voice of Sarah or Glenn.
If you doubt me, just look at the essence of Geoff’s comment above. “Too bad she got shot, but if you make people like me mad, that’s the price you pay.”
This is the right-wing’s new weapon: physical violence, using the people they terrorize as shock troops. After 9/11, they found a potent form of power in the fear the terrorists created, and it served them incredibly well; it won them elections and allowed them to steamroll through the most extreme of agendas. They like this tool and will not surrender it easily.
IIRC I was more on GK’s side of that debate. Germany and the UK have laws that go against the American tradition of freedom and I don’t think we need them here.
Though it also needs to be said that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. I don’t have any answers other than we need more 民主儀ism in this country not less. And that’s the problem, half the political spectrum is rejecting the very solution we need to get them back from the brink!
Actually, she tried to silently position to if we allowed drilling closer to shore (and inshore in ANWR) then we wouldn’t need to drill in more difficult areas like the deep gulf. There’s truth to that but she never qualified that, she was more ‘drill everywhere all the time’.
Close to the essence, though I think the ‘like me’ is an unfair characterization of what kind of problem GK had. He was more in the alpha inner-party group stirring the shit than the beta and gammas that are actually supposed to be donning the SA uniforms, getting in the trucks, and cracking heads on the streets.
GK in his above continued the general framing that the ACA is bad law and is “screwing” people. I don’t see how ACA is “screwing” anyone, really. It’s all part of the Big Lie that the VRWC decided into needed to deploy in the battle to retake Congress in 2010 and the WH in 2012.
cf. DeMint’s “Waterloo” comment from 2009 and McConnell’s “make Obama a one term president” late last year.
This is a really breathtakingly poisoned political environment. The media environment is so much worse now than any previous decade, with Fox owning the WSJ, and the NRO being the one-stop message shop of the right, along with the numerous Rush clones on radio maintaining message discipline and the attack drumbeat.
The conservatives and hereditary wealthy never got “over” the pounding they took from the left in the 1930s, and they’re doing their best to defend themselves from any neoleftism.
One thing I think I figured out last week (about opposition to the ACA) was that the health reform bill does basically put the top 10% of the country on the hook for the 90% of the rest of the country’s medical bills, since that’s the premium subsidy structure that middle America will receive from the general fund, and basically only the top 10% of the country pays into the general fund.
So there is that oh-so-very rational reason to want to kill ACA before it kicks in in 2014.
There is a sickness going on in this society, and with all due respect, straining to make a connection between Palin’s “hit list” and this shooting is not only the wrong way to analyze it, it’s also reductive. If you want to claim there’s a connection between the two, without any evidence, that’s all very easy. And maybe we’ll succeed in toning down the rhetoric, for a little while. But what are we left with? A violent culture with a band-aid on it. And what are we going to do about that? What we’ve always done: a) pay lip service; then b) nothing much.
I’m not saying rhetoric doesn’t have its consequences. If you’re going to convince people that the government is setting up death panels in order to kill people, then it’s a no-brainer that members of the populace will feel justified and empowered enough to take up arms against the government. It’s only a matter of time. Frankly, it’s this rhetoric I’m concerned about, not a bunch of pictures showing candidates being targeted. “Mental illness” does not mean “stupid” and I think people are intelligent enough to know a visual metaphor when they see one. It’s a politician’s outright lies to frighten people with (and win their votes) that causes the real damage. So I give Palin a pass on the “hit list” on the one hand while condemn her verbal propaganda on the other. She loses, in any event.
But what about THIS case? If anyone has severe mental issues, this guy does. And as such, it’s futile to accurately designate a single cause for his motivations. Do we know that he had any knowledge of Sarah Palin’s “hit list”? Did he care a whit about “death panels”? Probably not, but who knows? I’m sure there’s a very long list of contributing factors: the availability of guns (and it’s too late to do anything about that), the difficulty of getting the mentally ill adequate treatment, neglectful parenting, lack of a support system, etc. And when there are so many factors on the list, a tragedy like this one is labelled “a random act of violence”, something that’s impossible to prevent.
Does Sarah Palin belong on this list? As one of many pieces in the puzzle, maybe. But surely she’s not the primary reason, nor is she the only reason as to why politics has taken such a brazen tone in the U.S. or the state of Arizona. The shooter, meanwhile, looks like your garden variety anti-government paranoic, not someone motivated by partisanship at all. A look at the list of favorite books makes him pretty tough to pin down.
I disagree. Commonsense restrictions in this area do have their incremental but cumulative effects over time.
The Tides Center assault guy couldn’t outgun the cops thanks to California’s gungrabbing laws that are on the books.
The AZ assassin was able to buy a high-cap mag for his glock thanks to the federal assault weapons ban been allowed to sunset IIRC in 2007. I think several people are dead now, thanks to that failure at the national level.
We can walk this back, but not instantly. It’s got to be incremental.
But surely she’s not the primary reason, nor is she the only reason as to why politics has taken such a brazen tone
Nobody’s saying that she is, though she is a major part of the nativist, christo-fascist, astro-turfing, “Tea Party”, radical right movement that’s gone well beyond Goldwater in ’64 and the Nixon-Ford-Reagan stuff.
These are the ressentiment cards the hard-right is playing now. Deal with us or you get to see us do crazy shit like start blowing up Federal Buildings again. It’s ugly and it’s something the American people themselves have to start rejecting.
So far, this rejection response isn’t really happening. The closest we got to it was the “Rally for Sanity” last year. That was a start, but only a start.
@Luis
Sorry, Luis! Forget about freedom of expression, tolerance, and all that politically correct jazz. On the one hand, I think you give too much importance to Geoff by being pissed off by his utterances. On the other, it is all to the good in this blog having someone with opposite views to those of the majority, no matter how preposterous. Obviously Geoff is not an ignoramus talking for the sake of talking: he is well educated and well documented. How he interprets his information is another matter. There was a French revolutionary, an atheist, who didn’t allow his son to get bad grades in religion: how are you going to fight it if you do not know what they are talking about? Geoff is an asset to this blog and I, for one, will miss him if you ban him. Rather disappointing: being here to hear our own echoes, is not too much fun. It shows a weakness on your part.
I kinda agree with Sousa, but I kinda don’t.
GK went well beyond being a person who brought the conservative argument to this blog.
GK was neither “well-educated” or “well-documented”. Quite the opposite.
He was more often just simply lying or devolving into elementary fallaciousness whenever and wherever his argument ran out of steam, which generally happened in every thread.
One of the more noteworthy (to me) occurrences happened when we were talking about Stalin, and he came up with the assertion that the allies had done public polling in the SU after WW2 about Stalin. This was an obvious an outright lie that exemplified his total approach to argumentation on the internet.
His kneejerk reaction to stuff outside the lying was simply derivative of the NRO viewpoint, which we already know and Luis doesn’t necessarily need his comments section to be just another battleground between NRO neoconservatism and his opinions.
I do agree that getting pissed off by GK is just letting him win. At some point you just have to allow that he is a very damaged individual, something of a functional retard, either via Aspergers or so other social disorder.
It shows a weakness on your part.
I disagree. GK’s main approach was simply derailing the conversation to his ends. F— that. Let GK do that on his own blog.
As an example, let’s look at GK’s above:
It’s too bad she got shot. On the other hand
He equivocates immediately. This is a sociopath talking.
many politicians
vague, “citation needed”
seem to think
weasel words
that they can simply ignore the public will
This is a lie. The “public will” was actually for single payer!
“If a public plan were run by the states and available only to those who lack affordable private options, support for it jumps to 76 percent. Under those circumstances, even a majority of Republicans, 56 percent, would be in favor of it, about double their level of support without such a limitation.
“Fifty-six percent of those polled back a provision mandating that all Americans buy insurance, either through their employers or on their own or through Medicare or Medicaid. That number rises to 71 percent if the government were to provide subsidies for many lower-income Americans to help them buy coverage. With those qualifiers, a majority of Republicans say they support the mandate.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/19/AR2009101902451.html
Also, philosophically, this is a *representative* democracy that is not driven by public polling but by considered debate and a longer-term determination of the public interest, which is often divergent from what people say they want to public polls.
This is why the Senate has 6 year reelection cycles!
And citing public opinion is also intellectually dishonest given the immense amount of anti-administration propagandizing that has been going on in this country by Fox, WSJ OpEd, NRO, the PalinUSA phalanx of the Tea Party astroturf element.
It’s a miracle support for the damn thing is still as high as it is. Imagine if there were actually the same amount of effort being expended in positive propaganda.
and vote for horribly unpopular legislation
Another lie, as I documented in my above.
in imperial fashion.
bizarre NRO framing of the debate that Obama somehow rammed health care reform through the Congress, when the exact opposite is the real truth — Obama got the bill the Senate could create, nothing more, to the immense disappointment of the liberal caucus of the House and the left faction of the Democratic party in general.
THIS IS THE OPPOSITE of “imperial fashion”!
Maybe this will remind some of them
Here we are starting to get into the psychosocial aspect of this issue, talking about what sociopaths like GK like about what happened in AZ yesterday.
of the mood of the voters that they’re screwing.
This a repeating of the messaging of the Big Lie. That the ACA is “screwing” “the voters”, when the EXACT opposite is the truth.
So there are 2 errors in this statement, the second one being that ACA is “screwing” somebody.
ACA is going to be an immense benefit to millions of Americans, basically everyone making under $90,000, who will have their outgo on health care expenses limited to 10% of gross income.
The first part is a statement that is fallaciously taking the part “unhinged right wingers” for the whole (“the voters”), as, obviously, those who are angry now are PART of the electorate, and not ALL of the voters. GK elided that to embiggen his argument. This is how he rolls, jamming as much fallacy and sloppy argumentation into every utterance he can.
Being a lawyer by training, this is not really sloppiness, it is by design. It is an ugly form of argumentation that takes effort to wade through and dispose of.
It’s useful to do so as an intellectual exercise, but tiresome for every f—ing GK post he writes.
GK is totally wrong about how unpopular ACA is, and the important the electorate harbored for reform.
“According to a New York Times/CBS News poll in February 2007,[49] 54% of respondents said that “fundamental changes are needed” in the health care system, and 36% said that “Our health care system has so much wrong with it that we need to completely rebuild it.” 57% were dissatisfied with the quality of health care in this country, although 77% were satisfied with the health care they themselves received. 81% were dissatisfied with the cost of health care, and 52% were dissatisfied with the costs of their own health care. 65% said that providing for the uninsured was more important than keeping costs down. 95% said that it is a serious problem that many Americans do not have health insurance. 64% said that the federal government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans, and 60% would pay higher taxes to do so. But only 43% said that it would be fair for the government in Washington to require all Americans to participate in a national health care plan funded by taxpayers, compared to 48% who said it would be unfair.”
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/03022007_poll.pdf
This guy may be crazier than most, but there’s quite a few who are just as angry.
If GK had only said this, Luis would not have banned him. It’s the parade of lies and distortions that preceded this objective statement of fact that makes me agree with Luis’ decision to cut GK off from adding his crap to Luis’ comment section.
Look how much effort it took for me to tackle all the bullshit GK compressed into his toss-off remark.
Like I said, f— that.
correction above, not ” the public was actually for single payer!” but “was actually for the public option (and the mandate)!
It’s one of the “I told You”s.
How sad though
What follows is what I think is one of my more profound post, perhaps ever… so I hope you can make it through. I apologize for the length.
Also, as an aside, I should say that I’m a little bit obsessed with this event. Part of it is I went to the University of Arizona (and Pima Community College one semester for French). My one Aunt, Uncle and Cousins lived maybe less than a mile from the corner of Ina and Oracle where this happened. It’s a prime location, and I’ve driven through it many times. I used to occasionally walk up to that corner when staying with them and wanting to get out of the house. My other Aunt and Uncle lived across town, but now live less than two miles from the spot – so it strikes a bit close to home for me.
I think Paul Krugman nailed it when referring to what he called “eliminationist rhetoric” – the desire to eliminate the opposing party from the debate.
They will find incidents of vitriol on both sides, but the eliminationist rhetoric is the key, and that is solely a Republican/Conservative phenomena. It exist mainly because the Republicans cannot win debates on the merits. The shout downs at Town Halls were designed to eliminate the debate because the debate couldn’t be won on the merits.
This is inevitable occurrence of an ideological construct having outlived its usefulness. All philosophies answer soundly the questions at their core but increasingly become less operable as you move away from the core, until you get out at the fringe. I person born in the Yukon’s mother might tell him never be outside without a coat on or you’ll die. It’s a life saving universal truth in the Yukon. But lets say he gets a scholarship to attend the University of Arizona and decides to walk there. At some point he either sheds the coat or dies. The fundamentalist mindset, recalling how the mantra saved lives, will keep wearing the coat. The pragmatic person will shed the coat and live. Like the coat, any validity to movement conservativism has been warn out a long time ago. Back when it had some validity Conservatives gained ascendancy. They don’t want to lose that. The only way to sustain it is to eliminate the debate, and that means incivility, repression, implications of threats and harms and the occassional unhinged person acting on those messages.
Now take this analogy and extend it to economic policy. Economics is dominated by supply and demand. Government policy can emphasize one side or the other. What should it do? Well when you have too much supply, you have deflation (you also get investment bubbles and pressure to deregulate), therefore you should have demand side bias policies. Where you have too much demand you have inflation, therefore you should have supply side bias policies. In the late 1970s the U.S. suffered from stag-flation (inflation without growth). In the context of Reagan coming to power, supply side bias policies were plausibly called for – an maybe should have lasted 4 to 7 years (since supply is only 30% of our economy). The Republicans rode to ascendancy at this time. They’ve rasped nostalgic on Reagan ever since. To continue in ascendancy they’ve had to increasingly turn to vitriol to stifle debate. By 1999 though, we had reached supply side saturation and were suffering from deflationary pressure, investment bubbles and uber-deregulation. Despite this evidence, Bush pored the coals on supply side policies, and the result was the melt down of September 2008 (the early warning tremor occurred in August 2007). In 2009, demand for automobiles had fallen from a recent high of 17million to below 10 million. That’s side by side equivalent to the fall in aggregate demand in the great depression. Yet the supply side policies still continue – and Obama went off the deep end with it when he extended the Bush tax cuts. I think he suffers from Stockhold Syndrome – a biproduct of the vitriol, as well as being dazzled by the wealth and power of the wealthy and powerful (the same thing happened to Reagan, he was once the President of the Union, and a democrat, but he too became mesmerized by the baubles on the other side).
Like the kid from the Yukon wearing the coat, in regard to supply side economics, we are long past the point where wearing the coat of supply-side economics makes any plausible sense. But the ascendant party wants to continue in their ascendancy but can’t seem to abandon their policies. Since their policies in regard to economics, or health care or a whole host of topics and issues no longer make any sense at all, they are left with an over reliance on eliminationist rhetoric.
That’s what I think this is all about.
Part of the flaw then is in our system and it’s always been there. We need a system that allows for fluidity in policy adjustments. This is something that I’ve always admired about the English. From 1688, their system appears remarkably evolving: they had no revolutions during the Napoleonic era, or in 1848, nor a lurch to fasicsm in the first half of the 20th century… just evolving, adding to the franchise until they became completely democratic in the 19th century. We on the other hand go through violent corrections.
Actually, the 1970s were more a population phenomenon, with an adjustment from the gold-backed strong-dollar regime of Bretton Woods to the modern currency regime of US as the reserve currency among other, lesser currencies.
Total employment rose from 70M in 1970 to 90M in 1980 so there was in fact lots of growth. Unemployment was high because the baby boom was flooding into the workforce — the front half of the BB was born 1946-1954 and was thus aged 16-24 in 1970.
It’s my theory that this demographic flood was also contributory to the high inflation as credit growth combined with the booming rise in adult consumers prompted increase demand for goods, especially housing. Rising productivity and wages added fuel to this fire.
The reaction to the inflation was finally very high interest rates which throttled back the credit expansion, but this was only a temporary restraint and they were lowered again 1983-1987, which just brought the credit bubble back with more force.
As for St Reagan, they don’t teach the fact that the national debt nearly tripled under his watch. This was the big secret of Reaganism, but the 1990 recession and subsequent housing crash 1990-1995 was a foretaste of what was in store for us 2001-2002 and 2007-now.
February 2007, actually.
My thesis about the Bush era is a bit simpler, it was just a $6T credit bubble on the order of what happened to Japan in the late 80s, where rising real estate valuations were cycled back into corporate investments, with a feedback loop and mania for real estate.
The Bush Boom of 2003-2007 was fed by household debt DOUBLING from $7T to $14.4T:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CMDEBT
But wages did not rise that much. What was the insidious part of the boom was that rising real estate values were being borrowed against not just by corporations but by millions of American households. This funded trillions of dollars of consumption and millions of jobs.
Once the Home ATM ran out of money in 2007, massive collapse was inevitable.
It’s a tough call. We’re in a very precarious state now and deficit spending is in fact Keynesian. The tax cuts are over-weighted to the wealthy (who are looking for rents not necessarily capital-creating investments any more) but that was the best deal Obama was going to be able to get now that the Dems have lost the House.
(People don’t really know this, but the House is an equal institution to the Presidency in Constitutional power. It is the voice and regulator of the people and enjoys pride of place at the top of the Constitution.)
The solutions necessary to get the economy back on track are politically difficult but possible. We need much higher taxes. Conservatives call these job-killing, but what they really are is rent-killing. The rent is in fact Too Damn High in this country.
@ Troy:
All good points, especially about the entry of baby boomers into the economy in the 1970s.
But my point still stands, I think. Reagan had debate points which were plausible. Whether or not they were correct is less, but still material. Even if they were correct (and I’m not saying they were) as time goes by, conditions change and so they can’t be correct. If the question is “what do we do now?”, over time what we did in January 1981, even if it did have some traction, is going to have less and less traction over time.
And that creates the problem for Republicans. They came into ascendancy with a canned answer that was a plausible answer for the question in January 1981, but it if was then, over time it cannot be. Now the Movement Conservatives are desperate to maintain their ascendancy, but their canned answer is less efficacious (or ‘efficable’ to coin a new term) than it ever was. To stay in ascendancy they have to rely on all kinds of perversions and contortions: such as denying facts, swift boating opponents, embracing racism/racists, lying, controlling media, shouting down the opposition and other sorts of eliminationist rhetoric.
The description of ‘supply’ versus ‘demand’ that I use is then, sort of, a metaphorical description to make the point – I want to allude to the idea that even if they had a plausible point at one time, which probably they did not given the massive deficits and the dystopia their ascendancy has spawned, over time their ideas become less and less efficable and therefore it becomes impossible for them to win a debate on the merits. Things were and are a lot more complicated then – as you say, for one Baby Boomers were coming on line. (They should be going off line over the next decade, hopefully creating some opportunities for many suffering now).
I’ve thought a little about the lackluster job creation compared to government spending, as you’ve pointed out. How can $700 billion in stimulus not create ten or twenty million jobs? And the answer is in the tax cuts for the rich. Ezra Kline said on MSNBC that a dollar tax cut only generates 50 cents in stimulus.
Until we abandone supply side policies are country will be messed up.
I totally agree. So does Tom Toles:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/tomtoles/2010/12/imbalance_of_payments.html
(read his blog post too, it’s spot on)
One of the core realities is that there were winners and losers with trade globalization that really got going in the 1990s.
Millions of jobs left the country. We got immense savings by shifting to cheaper-labor countries, but this money ended up in the already-wealthy’s hands, leaving those most negatively affected by this change totally screwed.
We need to get more economic opportunity driven down to all levels of society and all regions. The free market isn’t going to do this since there’s no money in it for them.
That’s were government has to step in.
I don’t have any great policy suggestions other than that — I’m not a big fan of what Japan has done to “stimulate” the economy nor what we have done so far, either.
To go into it in any detail would be better done on my own blog, LOL.
My guiding principle though is that everyone should have access to that which is necessary to become and remain a productive member of society.
So there should be lots of “stimulus” jobs in education, health care, local transportation, construction, rehabilitation, child care. All that social ist stuff.