Category: Republicans

Context

Apparently it is no longer required in quotes printed by conservative columnists, just as it is not required for videos ran by conservative bloggers (let alone for them to be taken seriously by the administration).

Of course conservatives in the media or elected office attacking Democrats or progressives through an out-of-context-to-the-point-of-falsification quote is not new. Only recently, the targets picked by the right have been so absurd that they have fallen apart within themselves. But it’s not any different than finding a single user-submitted video out of tens of thousands and claiming that MoveOn ran ads comparing Bush to Hitler. Nor is it any different from the massive promotion of a couple of numb skulls who claim to be Black Panthers who tried to block voting at a predominantly black polling place on election day in 2008 (let alone then blaming the Obama administration for the Bush administration choosing not to prosecute them). Nor is it different from nut picking a crazed commenter on Daily Kos or Huffington Post who attacked Joe Lieberman along anti-Semitic lines and claiming that Ned Lamont’s supporters were all anti-Semitic.

Taking quotes out of context or finding non-representative individuals and promoting their views as representative of an entire political campaign or party is stock in trade for the conservative movement.

The only remarkable thing about the Breitbart/Sherrod and Zuckerman/Obama instances of missing context is that they are being called out as the dishonest smears that they are.

What Krugman Said

Paul Krugman hits a home run in today’s column:

But if politicians who insist that the way to reduce deficits is to cut taxes, not raise them, start winning elections again, how much faith can anyone have that we’ll do what needs to be done? Yes, we can have a fiscal crisis. But if we do, it won’t be because we’ve spent too much trying to create jobs and help the unemployed. It will be because investors have looked at our politics and concluded, with justification, that we’ve turned into a banana republic.

Of course, flirting with crisis is arguably part of the plan. There has always been a sense in which voodoo economics was a cover story for the real doctrine, which was “starve the beast”: slash revenue with tax cuts, then demand spending cuts to close the resulting budget gap. The point is that starve the beast basically amounts to deliberately creating a fiscal crisis, in the belief that the crisis can be used to push through unpopular policies, like dismantling Social Security.

Anyway, we really should thank Senators Kyl and McConnell for their sudden outbursts of candor. They’ve now made it clear, in case anyone had doubts, that their previous posturing on the deficit was entirely hypocritical. If they really do have the kind of electoral win they’re expecting, they won’t try to reduce the deficit — they’ll try to make it explode by demanding even more budget-busting tax cuts.

In many ways, the fighting that is going on now about taxation, stimulating spending, and the deficit is a good reminder that while these are big questions, the largest question is why Democrats continue to operate under the assumption that Republicans are good faith partners in governance. Doing so only reveals them to be totally ignorant of the reality they exist in, but acting with the expectation that Republicans were bad faith participants in their jobs, would likely damage precious comity on the Hill. Moreover, actually saying in public that the GOP does not care about Americans (as members of government are elected to serve and protect the American public) would probably cause their world to end.

Serious People

Paul Krugman, responding to the stream of lies coming from Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl and other leading Republicans that the Bush tax cuts didn’t cost the US government anything, asks:

How am I supposed to pretend that these are serious people?

Well, frankly, I don’t think you do. Pretending only makes the matter worse. Actual serious people like Paul Krugman and Steve Benen need to get to the point where they can take the last step and call the Republicans liars. It’s not that Republicans possess “invincible ignorance,” it’s that they are liars.

I think calling them liars is actually a charitable reading. It presumes that they are smart enough to recognize both what the truth is and how critical it is to their party’s political success and their friends’ financial success that the truth not get out.  They also know that the mainstream media will never actually call them liars, leaving regular Americans with the sneaking suspicion that something is wrong, but without the economics degree and charts possessed by Krugman.

Alternatively, if you don’t think Republicans are actually smart enough to be lying, rather than praising the grandeur of the their ignorance (after all, isn’t invincibility something we admire in super heroes?), why not just come out and say Republicans are Fucking Ignorant?

The modern Republican Party is not composed of serious people. They are not good faith operatives in government. They have a vested interest in government failing the American people and are working to ensure that failure occurs. Anyone pretending otherwise may be guilty of joining the Republicans in ignorance, though sadly will likely lack the guile possessed by the GOP.

Repealing the 17th Amendment?

Well this is news to me. Apparently some Tea Party activists are starting to campaign around repealing the 17th Amendment, which made it so senators were elected directly through popular vote, as opposed to appointed by the state legislatures. I suppose there is some intellectual honesty on the part of the Tea Party about the value an appointed Senate was intended to have as a check on federal powers. But it does strike me as bizarre for an allegedly populist movement to be advocating the removal of the popular vote for the functionally more-powerful chamber of Congress. Obviously this is not a movement that is going anywhere; the 17th Amendment will not be repealed.

Heck, between the move to “go Galt” (fall off the economic grid) and repeal the 17th Amendment, is there anything Teabaggers actually want to do along with the rest of us here in America?

Obama Derangement Syndrome

Paul Krugman’s right – it’s not that the Republican Party is more extreme now than in the past sixteen years, it’s that the national press is paying attention to how extreme the GOP has become. I’d take it a step further, though. The Republican Party now has a larger microphone for extremism, as the press is paying attention to it. Everything that was happening in marginal, Paulite circles is now happening in prime-time broadcasts on TV. It’s not just that the press and the country are paying attention to what the Republican extremes are saying, the extremes are saying it louder.

As far as the lack of sense to how the Republican extremists are reacting to the Obama administration (Krugman writes: “The right’s answer, of course, is that it’s about outrage over President Obama’s “socialist” policies — like his health care plan, which is, um, more or less identical to the plan Mitt Romney enacted in Massachusetts”), I think it’s hard to avoid a basic, underlying reality of the right being stricken by Obama Derangement Syndrome. In the absence of rational policy critiques or empirical evidence of Obama actually changing the country (let alone the Constitution), racism certainly arises as a contributing factor to the hatred and fear this president engenders. But racism is not a catch-all explanation (though at minimum a major factor). Throw in the fact that he is a Democrat, that he has a funny name, and is actually running the show now and you start to get a composite explanation for the hatred driving the Teabaggers. While I don’t want to diminish the role racism plays in the rise of the extremist Republican voice, there is also a common thread of Obama Derangement Syndrome.

The important thing to recognize is that Obama Derangement Syndrome does not explain Republican extremism. It speaks more to the volume we hear now. The Republican Party has long been home to extremism and regressivism. We just get to see more of it now.

The Modern Republican Party

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum:

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

Enter newly hatched CNN contributor, Erick “Son of Erick” Erickson:

The Republican leadership remains accommodationist and fearful of being labeled the ‘party of no.’
…
Let me be blunt: any Republican who says we will repeal and replace will themselves be replaced. We want repeal period.

This is not to say we will not offer up our own ideas, of which there are many. This is to say that right now there is no consensus on what to replace this monstrosity with, so instead of nuancing just promise to repeal it. We don’t need cute and clever politicians right now, we need a commitment to repeal Obamacare.

It looks like Erickson and his piece of the Republican Party want to double-down on the radicalism. Good luck with that!

If I had to guess, though, Frum is going to continue to be marginalized by increasingly establishment voices like Erickson. I don’t think the GOP will be able to tear themselves away from the Party of No and in fact will only increase their blind oppositionism to any and all things proposed by President Obama and the Democratic Party.

Monster

Senator Scott Brown:

Newly-minted Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) appeared on Fox’s Neil Cavuto and showed none of the outrage and concern about terrorism that he exuded during his Senate election campaign. Asked for his reaction, Brown said he felt for the families, but quickly shrugged off the attack and transitioned to say that “people are frustrated” and “no one likes paying taxes.”