Shorter James Othmer:
The internet is not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. That’s why Obama made the right choice in the hard decision between giving an hour long speech on national TV and posting a tweet about it.
Seriously: how dumb do you have to be to get an op-ed placed in the New York Time?
There’s really no other way to describe this post from Chuck Todd of NBC.
*** Fixing the public option fetish: But the speech also will be a failure if progressives — Obama’s second audience tonight — are still obsessing over the public option a week from now. We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again: Obama never made the public option the focus of his health-care ideas, in the primaries or in general election. In fact, he never uttered the words “public option” or “public plan” in his big campaign speeches on health care. But there is no doubt that the public option has fired up the left, and how he sells them near-universal coverage and lower costs — even if it means no public plan — could very well be the trickiest part of tonight’s speech. Indeed, that the White House allowed this to become the be-all, end-all on the left (“Public option or die!”) remains a mystery. On TODAY this morning, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that “there can be no reform without adequate choice and competition,” but didn’t say that choice and competition had to come from a public option.
First, I don’t know of anyone on the left who is campaigning for the public option in a “Public option or die!” context. There is no “die”, merely the desire by a very large number of House progressives to have health care legislation that includes a public health insurance option, something that the President spent seven paragraphs of his speech last night arguing in support of.
Second, Todd is clearly trying to set up a metric in which a week from now he can turn around and the President’s speech was a failure because progressives still want the legislation to include a public health insurance option. There are two things fundamentally wrong with this. To start, Obama never, ever said that the goal of the speech was to stop progressives from supporting the public option as a priority in the bill. To the contrary, the content of the speech clearly shows that he was doing no such thing. He spoke eloquently in support of a public option, though he stopped short of making it a required element.
But perhaps more importantly, it is not Todd’s job to score the process based on whether or not a a particular contingent of the Democratic Party continues to have a specific policy goal. This speech was not an argument against progressives nor was it an argument against the public option. It wasn’t even a plea by Obama to progressives to stop arguing passionately for the public option. Or at least, the speech I’ve watched and read twice wasn’t. Maybe Todd had a different “First Read Only” edition of it that was delivered directly from the floor of the House to Todd’s noggin.
Progressives are not standing in the way of change. Progressives are not blocking the President’s plan for health care. Conservative Democrats and pretty much all Republicans are. Is it possible that the progressive bloc in the House will decide that what is moving forward is unacceptable (eg for its lack of a public option) and as a result will oppose it? Of course. But that is not the scenario now. And, in fact, up to this point the press, the Senate, and the White House all seem to be acting with great certitude that the House is incapable of stopping whatever legislation comes out of the Senate, even if it does not have a public option.
Todd’s bizarre and offensive post does a number of things that no one has done before: cast progressives as key roadblocks to change, set the speech up as Obama’s moment to beat down progressive policy goals, and make clear Obama’s opposition to the public option. Nothing preceding the speech nor during the speech gives Todd any ground to stand on. He’s just making things up and, conveniently, every single bit of his fictional analysis is either a slur on progressives or something that can be used to undermine Obama’s political capital in coming days. What more do you need to know about Chuck Todd and his allegiances?
Chinese communist autocracy is something Americans should all look at admiringly. After all, electric cars are more important than freedom and democracy.
Shorter Shorter Tom Friedman:
Tom Friedman!!11!
There’s been a lot of posts in the last week or so about Megan McArdle of The Atlantic’s insane post in which she poo-pooed the idea that teabaggers openly carrying guns to presidential town halls were in fact dangerous or likely to increase the risk of violence perpetrated as a political act. McArdle has repeatedly demonstrated herself as one of the most willfully ignorant members of the Baby Journalist set (though her pal Russ Douthat gives her a run for her money). But this post really helps redefine one’s perceptions of her idiocy.
Thomas Levenson of The Inverse Square Blog has what will surely go down as the definitive Fisking of McArdle’s puddle of drool in favor of bringing guns to political protests. After dissecting the numerous logical fallacies and intellectual shortcomings put forward by McArdle, he packages the overall rebuttal not with the specifics he’s just put forth, but the common force of history:
But the point I’d finish with here, to counter McArdle’s attempt at a conclusion, is to remind everyone of the intellectual and emotional poverty of McArdle, along with that of those on the right who like her are trying to turn our politics into a game of high-school debate, unanchored in lived experience. She asserts, in effect, and almost in so many words, that the fear of political violence is a mere abstraction — her “symbolic belief.”
She is, of course, totally, utterly, and almost painfully wrong — as everyone knows who can remember back just a few years, read a book, perhaps, …or even managed to recall the fate of a couple of people who shared a last name with someone else famous who died on Tuesday.
Specifically: I was born in 1958. Since then, there have been ten presidents who have served before the current incumbent: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. Of them, one was killed by a rifle. Another had guns drawn on him twice in two weeks. A third was shot outside a Washington DC hotel by a deranged celebrity hound. Three out of ten.
More: Over the history of the presidency, ten out of the first 43 presidents were subject to attempted or successful assassinations. Political violence is a fact of American history.
I think this is a point that most pundits simply refuse to acknowledge: “Political violence is a fact of American history.” It is even more pronounced, as Levenson notes, when it comes to African-American leaders. Yet to McArdle, it is an act so rare that it does not even merit concern at a time when teabaggers are openly carrying military-type rifles in close quarter to the President of the United States. Levenson’s right: she is “totally, utterly, and almost painfully wrong.”
“Political violence is a fact of American history.” We can only hope that it is not a fact whose empirical repertoire is enhanced during this administration or any other. But it is impossible to be aware of the role violence has played as a means of furthering political arguments in American history and not be deeply afraid for what might come next in our country. As Atrios is wont to say, “I wonder just what it is about Obama that inspires such lunacy…” But we all know the answer to that question and as such, we must be reminded that a distinct subset of political violence in America is violence perpetrated by white racists against African-Americans. Levenson makes a similar observation regarding the historical danger and the need to take the threats against Obama even more seriously.
I hope with all sincerity that none of these nut jobs who bring guns to political rallies and Obama town halls, carrying signs that refer to watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, decide to act on their image and use the guns they carry. But it is fundamentally naive and dangerous to assume that the addition of firearms to political protests does not increase the risk of violence, as McArdle does. We should all hope she’s right, but if she is, it won’t be because she’s made a persuasive argument and only that people aren’t as crazy as they seem and/or the Secret Service is phenomenally good at what they do. At this point in time, though, I would not bet against the Obama administration being free from political violence perpetrated by right wingers, though I hope I am wrong.
(Via The Poor Man Institute)
In addition to generally being a shitty columnist who writes uninformed and self-indulgent conservative columns, the New York Times’ Russ Douthat is now making words up.
Atrios says it’s Marc Ambinder. I believe that is an assumption by activists based on gut hatred of Marc Ambinder.
So sayeth his Twitter feed.
Of course, O’Reilly has tried to demonize Netroots Nation before. Back in 2007, when it was still called Yearly Kos and there was to be a Democratic presidential candidates forum at the event, BillO went on a weeklong campaign against Daily Kos and the convention. It was effectively put to a stop when Chris Dodd went on The O’Reilly Factor and whipped O’Reilly’s ass on the issue.
New York Times headline: “Obama Complains About the News Cycle but Manipulates It, Worrying Some.” Key quote of wankiness:
“I’m really perplexed. It’s unbelievable,” said Karen Hughes, Mr. Bush’s White House counselor. “They’ve taken his greatest political asset — his gifts as a communicator — and totally diluted them. It’s been especially notable in the last couple weeks.”
Are you getting this? Because Obama is effectively communicating with the public regularly through the press and press conferences, Bush minions and media watchers are in a tizzy. He’s communicating too much. Sorry Karen, but elections have consequences. One of them is that a new president will be on TV a bunch talking about what he is doing to solve major problems like fixing the economy and increasing health insurance coverage.
The whole thing is just too rich. The press complaining that the president is on TV too much is kind of like casino owner complaining about the long lines at his slot machines: they’re both the cause of their complaint, which happens to be their business model.
Based on rigorous polling of myself, Democrats are failing just like Republicans failed. So there.
DougJ at Balloon Juice rightly points out that Brooks failure to mention Iraq as being pretty important to the history of the Republican Party’s failure during the Bush years. Implied but unmentioned by DougJ is that Brooks’ claims of Democrats walking the same failed strategic path as Republicans doesn’t hold water without a failure of parallel scale and unpopularity. Seeing none, let’s swiftly move on from Brooks’ idiocy and never mention this column again.
Glenn Greenwald’s interview of the Beltway Conventional Wisdom Chuck Todd is pretty extraordinary. It’s hard to imagine a more vivid illustration of two world views colliding: that of someone who believes in the rule of law and someone who thrives in the Beltway petri dish of insiderism and self-congratulatory hackery. Todd dismisses upholding the rule of law as “idealistic” and any effort to apply US law to the actions of Bush officials as something that isn’t possible, as far as I can tell, because Washington DC wasn’t constructed on the summit of Mount Everest.
Todd espouses a fundamental problem with the notion that any efforts to hold Bush officials to account through investigations and prosecutions would lead to political debates on cable TV. I don’t get this objection. What is wrong with the country hearing a debate between people who want to enforce the law and people that want to sweep lawbreaking under the rug, even if the former tend to be Democrats and the later tend to be Republicans and Beltway journalists like Chuck Todd? Would it be political because the American people would be so repulsed by the GOP desire to establish a separate system of justice for Republican political elites who controlled the country for eight years from the Bush White House, and as a result GOP electoral prospects would be hurt? Todd never really elucidates why a legal process being perceived from the outside as political is actually bad. Glenn asks him what’s wrong with there being a national, nightly debate on torture and the rule of law, but Todd seems to use the word political as a catch-all excuse that is functionally vacuous.
In the end, while Greenwald and Todd have a long conversation, I am left feeling repulsed by the attitudes Todd displays, as one of Washington’s premier political journalists, towards investigating wrongdoing perpetrated by politicians and their staff. It shouldn’t be hard for a journalist to say there should be openness and accountability in government (especially in regards to clearly illegal actions), but Todd utterly resists any of Greenwald’s arguments from having a place in reality. Apparently while Todd can intellectually grasp what should happen in an “ideal” America, he doesn’t believe the America of our ideas exists in “reality.” That one of the biggest names in the DC press has such a low opinion of America as it exists today is simply depressing. As a result, I doubt we’ll ever see Chuck Todd or his peers in the Beltway elite ever endorse the validity of meaningful investigations into the crimes of the Bush administration. This behavior almost certainly reduces the likelihood that such investigations will ever actually exist, as it’s clear the White House is inclined to take significant cues from the Beltway Conventional Wisdom machine on this issue.
You can read the transcript here or listen to the audio here.
Hold Fast 