A loss of trust

Brilliant:

Every time someone gets something thing wrong in a consequential way, the loss of trust should advance, ratcheting up with each such error detected, to the point where it becomes the safest default position to assume that someone — McArdle, for example — is always wrong till proven otherwise.

I think similar things could be said about Tom Friedman, Joe Lieberman, and Conventional Wisdom.

Thomas Levenson also points out that McArdle’s attack on Warren is of the Breitbart variety:

And that leads me back to the thought that got me going on this post. It seems to me that what we read in McArdle here is a genteel excursion into Andrew Breitbart territory. Like the Big Hollywood thug, she misleads by contraction, by the omission of necessary context, by simply making stuff up when she thinks no one will check (again, see the footnotes for examples). And like Breitbart, she does so here to achieve a more than on goal. The first is simply to damage Elizabeth Warren as an individual, to harm her career prospects.

As I said earlier, the actions of Breitbart are simply part of the basic toolkit deployed by rightwing pundits and operatives. Seeing it used by McArdle is no more surprising than seeing it used by Zuckerman or Breitbart.

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.

Elizabeth Warren & the CFPB

This weekend, the New York Times published an editorial supporting Elizabeth Warren to run the newly-created Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. This is a big step forward and sign that conventional wisdom is aligning behind much of the progressive online community to support Professor Warren. The Times makes very clear that Warren is simply the best for the job…and for good reason: the banks know she will be an effective protector of consumer interests. “The banks don’t oppose Ms. Warren because she doesn’t get it. They oppose her because she does.”

I would love to see Professor Warren nominated. I started reading her posts at TPM Cafe’s Warren Reports back shortly after the site launched. She provided advice to the Dodd campaign when we were building out a bankruptcy reform plan. And she has been a tireless advocate for the middle class. She is a real leader who can effectively explain complex financial machinations and use understanding and transparency against a financial system that is built to obfuscate real costs to working people.

As of now, I really don’t know how likely it is that the Obama administration will nominate Warren to run the CFPB. It’d be great if they did, as it would be a sign that they are truly committed to making this new agency as powerful and impactful as possible. Certainly there are others who could do the job, but Warren’s leadership on this issue deserves to be recognized not just by activists who share her views, but by those who can lend power to her views.

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.

Debunking Colonialist Apologists

As has always been the case in human history, being an apologist for the colonizing activities of empires is a desirable and rewarding business. One notable China apologist posing as an academic in Hong Kong is Barry Sautman, who recently has published a number of essays and even a PowerPoint presentation in which he puts for “historical” evidence for Tibet always being a part of China, since time began. Over at Rangzen.net Professor Elliot Sperling takes on Barry Sautman’s polemical case on Tibet’s historical status. Sperling does this by simultaneously using primary sources where Sautman is using only secondary or tertiary sources, as well as by exploding internal inconsistencies in Sautman’s writing.

Sperling’s piece is well written and you don’t have to be intimately familiar with the history of Tibet and China going back thousands of years for his case against Sautman to be devastating. I definitely recommend giving it a read.

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.

Chuckles the Sensible Woodchuck

ChucklesTheSensibleWoodchuckLast month I mentioned a brilliant cartoon by Tom Tomorrow that effectively lampooned how the American right as bizarrely warped perceptions of the positions held by President Obama. In it, Tom pointed out the irony of the right portraying Obama as a crazed liberal, when in fact most of his actions show he is a centrist with some strongly rightwing views on executive power. At the time, Tom and I got into a back-and-forth on Twitter, as I viewed his toon as showing pretty clearly the same sort of dynamic from the left, wherein the President has taken positions that are similar or even more extreme than Bush on many issues, yet some Democratic supporters gloss over what this means. I tried to highlight the behavior on the left as similar laughable to what Tom described on the right.

I missed it at the time (I was on vacation), but a couple weeks ago, Tom did a new cartoon describing the similar phenomenon of liberal attitudes on Obama. Part of the point that Tom makes so well in this strip (and people like Glenn Greenwald have made repeatedly since early 2009) is that liberals cannot and should not change their assessments of a President’s actions dependent on what party that person belongs to and whether or not you voted for them. If you’re changing your views or apologizing for a politician who has not met your expectations, something is wrong.

The strip definitely worth a read and I hope/imagine the new character, “Chuckles” the Sensible Woodchuck, will be a recurring one in this strip.

Remember When Walking Away Was Immoral?

Well, shock of shocks, it turns out that not only is walking away from properties that are underwater something that businesses do all the time, but rich people are doing it with their homes. The New York Times has a long, detailed analysis of people who are underwater and just walking away from their homes rather than paying more and more. Of note:

Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.

More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars is seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.

By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.

Though it is hard to prove, the CoreLogic data suggest that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment.

So, to put it a different way, homes with mortgages over one million dollars are 75% more likely to be delinquent than homes with values under one million dollars. And if mortgage delinquency is the big underlying cause of the popped housing bubble (see what happened when Wall Street started packaging subprime mortgage backed CDO tranches that couldn’t muster a Triple A rating together to get ones that magically did), then the blame cannot rightly be placed on poor people who took out mortgages they couldn’t pay to buy houses they couldn’t afford. As Duncan Black writes, “As is so often the case, the mainstream media got it completely wrong initially, painting it as a “subprime” crisis due to bad behavior by unworthy brown people.”

Beyond the straight economics of who and what caused this crisis, it’s important to note that there has been a strong push in the media and from the CNBC types to define strategic defaul as inherently immoral (even though businesses do it daily). The morality play targeted largely poor minorities and intrinsically sought to taint anyone who does decide to walk away with the tinge of culpability for nearly bringing down Wall Street. Of course, walking away is neither immoral, nor as we now see, limited to the subprime sector.

Alterman & 12 Dimensional Chess

At the end of a long, thoughtful and dare I say, Must Read piece in The Nation on the structural hurdles in American politics and the media that prevent a truly progressive presidency from being realized, Eric Alterman writes:

What’s more, one hypothesis—one I’m tempted to share—for the Obama administration’s willingness to compromise so extensively on the promises that candidate Obama made during the 2008 campaign would be that as president, he is playing for time. Obama is taking the best deal on the table today, but hopes and expects that once he is re-elected in 2012—a pretty strong bet, I’d say—he will build on the foundations laid during his first term to bring on the fundamental “change” that is not possible in today’s environment. This would be consistent with FDR’s strategy during his second term and makes a kind of sense when one considers the nature of the opposition he faces today and the likelihood that it will discredit itself following a takeover of one or both houses in 2010. For that strategy to make sense, however, 2013 will have to provide a more pregnant sense of progressive possibility than 2009 did, and that will take a great deal of work by the rest of us.

In effect, Alterman writes twenty some odd pages of thoughtful analysis as to why Obama is and will continue to be a serial compromiser and throws it out the window. Nothing in Alterman’s analysis suggests previously that Obama is forestalling meaningful change to remain electorally safe and then will act boldly once he is a lame duck. And there’s nothing in the Obama administration’s rhetoric in the first year and half of his term, nor the two year campaign which preceded it, wherein Obama has suggested that he’s simply holding fire until he gets past 2012.

Moreover, not only are we not seeing this plan put forth by Obama, there are no predictions that I know of that suggest that between now and January, 2013, the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate will increase nor that there will be meaningful filibuster reform. In fact, Alterman has already identified filibuster reform as a necessity for political change, while he bemoans that Senate leaders have not gotten behind it. So not only is Obama not out there saying he’s holding fire deliberately, but the congressional landscape he will need to actually open fire is likely to erode from where it was in January, 2009.

Alterman does a tremendous job explaining why realizing progressive change is hard. But it makes absolutely zero sense for any progressive to hold out hope that President Obama is in fact playing twelve dimensional chess and waiting an entire term to do Really Big Progressive Things. Rather than hold out any hope that President Obama will improve his behavior if re-elected, progressives need to focus on (1) improving the political and media landscapes that currently impede change and (2) forcing the Obama administration and Congressional leadership to govern as progressives now.