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Watching the Palin-esque farce that is Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, I suddenly remembered that a Democrat was actually last elected to be Governor of Arizona, and could have still held that office if she hadn't been appointed Secretary of Homeland Security.
Chris questioned the wisdom of this back in late 2008, precisely because a Republican was next in line to finish Napolitano's term. While I can understand why a term-limited governor of a medium state would leap at a fairly juicy Cabinet post (DHS has a budget 4x that of Arizona), the people of Arizona have paid a price for this, plus those in any of the other states that adopts copycat laws to Arizona's "papers please" law. I hope Brewer's public face-plant costs her the election, or contributes to some kind of national voter reaction against the various absurd reactionaries but it might not, and Arizonans might have 4 more years of this. The landscape would have favoured the Republican candidate in any case, but Brewer has the added boost of being the incumbent and probably got some unearned credit spending stimulus funds. Obama intentionally walked a batter and now she might just score a run.
I don't follow developments at Homeland Security closely, so I hope Napolitano's tenure there has done enough good to make all this worth it, but right now it's hard to see how any level of streamlining DHS could make up for this. It's an object lesson: Lunatics can do far more damage than competent people can repair, because it's always easier to destroy than create.
One thing I know, this, for once, actually is good news for John McCain.
Here's a real shocker for you: the same people who deliberately misread climate science are now offering a phony explanation for the Alaska primary loss of incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who conceded the race yesterday.
If you listen to the wing nut brigade, they will tell you clean energy/climate legislation did in Murkowski. Phil Karpen -- who, as the policy director of Americans for Prosperity, is as good as on the payroll of Dirty Energy -- said this even before Murkowski bowed out, in an op-ed on FoxNews.com:
"Joe Miller has a narrow lead over Sen. Lisa Murkowski in a surprising Alaska Senate primary. If the absentee ballots break hard for Murkowski she may narrowly escape, but at the moment it looks at least as likely that Miller will pull the upset. If he does, Murkowski's support for energy taxes may be one of the major reasons."
In a sad commentary on modern journalism, this unfounded, inaccurate notion was echoed by Reuters who said, "Murkowski, the most senior Republican on the Senate Energy Committee, has been considered a moderate on several issues and a potential compromise vote on national climate legislation. Miller is on record as denying that human-caused emissions are responsible for climate change."
Even the usually very sharp team at ClimateWire took the bait: "Republican Joe Miller, a former judge with a Yale law degree, showcased Sen. Lisa Murkowski's past support for climate legislation, among other things, before slipping by her at the voting stations Tuesday to capture a 1,900 vote lead with several thousand absentee ballots still being counted."
Well, if there was even a shred of evidence that it was true, this would qualify as an interesting bit of political analysis. Given the lack of evidence, it is just another lie that has filtered in from the crackpot world of climate science deniers to mainstream political reporting.
I don't see any evidence that the particular apocalyptic "my enemies are totalitarian madmen" strain of Birch/Beck/Goldberg conservatism has helped anyone win any elections.
Tristero's piece is very good, very thoroush, and very worth reading. But it proceeds by basically saying, "Okay, even if that were true:"
Let's ignore all the obvious contradictory examples, like Bachmann and Coburn and Tancredo and DeLay and so on and so on and - solely for the sake of argument - go so far as to entirely concede Matt's point: no one gets elected by being a rightwing loon.
I want to take the opposite approach. I want to basically argue that movement conservatives would be nowhere without this sort of rhetoric. It's not always their dominant form of rhetoric--particularly in its crudest, most blatant form, but it's always somewhere in the mix. As I explained back in May, 2008, in "Fox's Faux Populism vs A Shadow Elite--Pt. 1", conservative elites have been playing this game for centuries now:
While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded "elite".
This is a very old game, and it's way past time we got a better handle on it. Before getting into any sort of messy details, it's important to note--ala my diary two weeks ago, "The Ontology of Snark: A Prelude"--that there's a common ego defense mechanism in play here:
Displacement: Defence mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses to a more acceptable or less threatening target; redirecting emotion to a safer outlet; separation of emotion from its real object and redirection of the intense emotion toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening. For example, a mother may yell at her child because she is angry with her husband.
Real, actual conservative elites have been using displacement as a stock in trade for millenia, creating ghost elites for unwitting populists to misdirect their anger at. It was virtually inevitable that Obama's "new politics" of "change" would be targetted with this ancient charge....
Elites Create Their Demon Others It's relatively easy for an elite to create a "shadow" elite, meaning something akin "shadow" in the Jungian sense of the unacknowledged dark side of the self. The mass of people resent the elite for things the elite cannot admit or accept about itself--above all, the arbitrariness and injustice of its position in the world--and so it projects its shadow onto another group. Because this involves disowning something fundamental of itself, the mechanism involved for the elite is more projective identification than projection, per se:
Projective identification is used to project the bad object into (not onto) another person so it becomes a part of that person.
The person then identifies with that other person, and hence has means to control them.
The person projected into may consequently be pressured to behave congruently with the projective phantasy.
This description captures quite well the enormous investment of time, energy and money we see on behalf of conservatives pushing the meme of "liberal elites", and devising various ways of getting "liberals" to act out their appointed roles.
The more extreme forms of demonizing liberals work very well for conservatives, in large part because they resonate with this broader narrative framework that they have repeated and reinforced countless times over the centuries. Of course, that's not all there is to it. There are cognitive motivations and biases that predispose conservatives to see the world this way. And what Matt is doing is invoking a counter set of cognitive motivations and biases--ones that are generally much sounder and saner, but that totally mislead when one is trying to understand and respond effectively to conservative attacks.
Those biases are the foundations of the dominant 18th Century Enlightenment model of disembodied reason. And late 20th and early 21st century cognitive science has definitively shown those biases to be false. Facts do not persuade people apart from narrative frameworks. When the facts contradict the framework, the facts are rejected, not the frame. Indeed, that's why folks like Matt stubbornly hold onto their false models of reason.
Of course this is all very high-level stuff I'm arguing here. But it dovetails very well with the specific history of movement conservatism, particularly since the New Deal and WWII, as it consistently failed to develop any sort of positive, pragmatic framework for dealing with America's realworld problems, and only managed to win elections by promoting paranoid us-vs-them narratives of seemingly limitless scope--McCarthyism in the early 50s (based on Nixon's smear campaigns that first won him a seat in Congress), racial backlash and the culture wars beginning with Goldwater 1964 and Nixon in 1968, honed to perfection by Reagan in 1980, and systematized by Gingrich in 1994--but never, ever actually solving any of the problems that it promised to.
And yet, when it comes down to it, Yglesias is basically trying to argue that nothing conservatives have done along these lines has been politically successful.
Which is utterly, downright delusional.
Am I twising his argument beyond his meaning? First off, I'd say that if I am, then his argument doesn't hold much punch. But here's what he said in complete context:
Here's the Washington Post editorial board in making an endorsement in this year's Ward 5 Council race in DC:
In Ward 5, first-term council member Harry Thomas Jr. is facing challenges from Kenyan McDuffie, Delano Hunter and Tracey D. Turner. With the notable exception of the courage he showed in voting for marriage equality, Mr. Thomas has been a major disappointment. He pretty much defined his role as trying to stop anything -- no matter how sensible -- sought by the mayor. He led the effort to prevent school facilities chief Allen Y. Lew from overseeing park projects and has been the union's main champion in trying to thwart needed reforms in the schools and government workforce. Particularly distasteful was how he allowed racial demagoguery to derail the nomination of Ximena Hartsock as parks director.
Both Mr. Hunter, a community organizer with Brookland Manor, and Mr. McDuffie, a lawyer who worked in the Justice Department civil rights division, are better alternatives. We give the edge to Mr. Hunter, an engaging newcomer who is running a grass-roots campaign. He has an intimate knowledge of the needs of the ward and has smart ideas on how to tackle issues such as truancy and joblessness. Mr. Hunter is not a supporter of marriage equality, but he is not the homophobe his critics make him out to be, but rather someone who thinks there is a way to provide equality for gays while respecting the beliefs of religious groups. He said he would not seek to change the law.
Two things. First, the Post ed board has steadily supported marriage equality in the past. That's why it makes no sense to laud Councilmember Harry Thomas, Jr. for courage in voting for the marriage bill, then go on to laud Hunter for being "someone who thinks there is a way to provide equality for gays while respecting the beliefs of religious groups." Well gee, doesn't that sound all common-sense, can't we all get along-like.
In truth, if the ed board recalls, the marriage bill itself was titled the Religious Freedom And Civil Marriage Equality Amendment Act 2009 for a good reason: it did not require religious institutions to perform marriages in violation of their doctrine. So using their definition of "courage" and their past support of the bill, Hunter should have voted for the damn measure. But we know he wouldn't have, because also in truth, as Chris Geidner documents, Hunter is a fan of, and supported by, the extremely homophobic National Organization for Marriage. If memory serves, he was also the only DC candidate to show up at their rally a few weeks ago at the Capitol, too. Chris:
Hunter attended the National Organization for Marriage's "Summer for Marriage" D.C. final tour stop at the U.S. Capitol grounds on August 15. As noted by Bob Summersgill at the GLAA Forum, NOM then sent a mailer out in support of Hunter. He earlier received NOM support from fliers produced by NOM in opposition to D.C. marriage equality supporters, including Thomas.
Here's one of their mailers talking about "homosexual activists" (h/t Right Wing Watch):
This is the company Hunter keeps- and embraces by going to their rally. Of course, the ed board realizes this and how controversial it is, or they wouldn't have taken pains to try and muddy Hunter's position.
Which brings me to the other point, which is how rapidly the old "I support equality for gays and lesbians because I support civil unions, just don't call it marriage" position, or whatever nonsense is spouted about marriage being a religious institution, is running out of steam. It's running out of steam with traditional organizations like Equality California, whose PAC no longer endorses candidates unless they support marriage equality. It's running out of steam with activists, donors and voters. You can't say "I support equality" and then say you oppose the freedom to marry for same-sex couples, and I could go on all day about why. So it's dishonest to pretend like Hunter is just a fair-minded fellow who wants equality for the LGBT community, just as long as no one calls it "marriage"- not only because he doesn't, but because even if he did, he's still not worth going out of anyone's way to support. And that's something, by the way, that I think Obama will find that out in 2012 if he stays where he is.
Update: Jeffrey Richardson of the local Stein club is right. The LGBT community can decide for itself what defines homophobia.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Joy Gordon, what effect did the sanctions have on things like mortality, on public health, on education?
JOY GORDON: The sanctions--again, this is in combination with this initial devastation of all of Iraq's infrastructure--the impact was enormous. Child mortality spiked, increased by 250 percent. A country that had had negligible levels of things like cholera and typhoid, those were off the charts. There were epidemics of waterborne diseases that never really came down....
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And the estimates that at least half-a-million children were killed as a result of these sanctions?
JOY GORDON: It's called the excess child mortality figure, which is-which means, really, how many children under five died during sanctions who would not have died without the sanctions. And that number is highly contested. The Iraqi government claimed one thing for a while; other groups claimed things for a while. But in the end, if you look at the best data and the most reliable data, it seems that it must in fact be over half-a-million children under five were dead as a result of sanctions.
Obama kept a major campaign promise, but didn't get much for his efforts. That seems to have been a fairly common theme from the Chris Matthews precincts of Versailles. To see just how myopic this narrative was, you only needed to tune in to Democracy Now! yesterday, which had two excellent pieces on the sham "end" of the Iraq War.
First was an interview with Nir Rosen, "Iraq Is a Shattered Country", dealing with the ignored reality on the ground that President Obama made no mention of whatsoever. Second was an interview with Joy Gordon, "Invisible War: How Thirteen Years of US-Imposed Economic Sanctions Devastated Iraq Before the 2003 Invasion", which has a great deal to say about how the Clinton Administration killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi childrens and infants. This is the true face of the Democratic Party foreign policy--almost indistinguishable from its Republican counterpart when it comes to the impact on dark-skinned people around the globe.
First, the beginning of the interview with Nir Rosen:
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: For more, I'm joined on the line from Baghdad by independent journalist Nir Rosen. He's been covering the Iraq war since 2003. He's now a fellow at the NYU Center on Law and Security. His forthcoming book is called Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World.
Nir Rosen, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you respond to what President Obama said last night in his Oval Office address and what you're seeing on the ground in Iraq right now?
NIR ROSEN: Well, I was offended by it. He spoke mostly about American soldiers and their suffering and their sacrifice, and the only time he came even close to mentioning that Iraqis had a hard time these last seven years is when he mentioned their resilience. He said that the US has paid a high price, a huge price. Not as huge as the Iraqis have paid. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed. Tens of thousands of Iraqis who were rendered in American detention, their lives ruined for years, children who didn't know where their fathers were. A couple of million displaced internally and abroad. Iraq is a shattered country. He said we persevered because we share a vision with the Iraqi people. Most of the Iraqi people, their vision has been, for the last seven years, that the Americans would withdraw.
Now, really, nothing has changed, obviously, from one day to the next. You have 50,000 troops who remain here. When Iraq occupied Kuwait, the Americans said that as long as there's one Iraqi soldier left in Kuwait, Kuwait remains occupied. So the presence of 50,000 troops in Iraq forecloses many options, precludes many options for the Iraqis, with the implied threat. At the same time, the Iraqi security forces, I think, would like to have a continued relationship. And while Iraq is sort of occupied, it's also sort of sovereign. You don't see--you haven't seen really for the last year in most parts of the country American soldiers on the ground. So, nothing changed today. The big change, you could say, was a year ago, when the Americans withdrew from cities and mainly stayed on bases. And we've had a test since then of the Iraqi security forces in their ability to handle the situation. And I'd say they, more or less, can handle it. It's not very pretty....
But the broader view has to encompass a much longer time-frame:
The last thing I want is for Alan Simpson to depart from the Catfood Commission. He is such a perfect embodiment of it's ignorant, mean-spirited mendacity that if he didn't exist, atheists would be praying 24/7 for his creation.
Yet, I also think that it's great that people are calling for his ouster. It's the best possible way to bring heat to bear on the commission itself. Could it go too far, and get rid of him, leaving the commission free to do its dirty work? Possibly, given his latest outrage, attacking veterans:
The system that automatically awards disability benefits to some veterans because of concerns about Agent Orange seems contrary to efforts to control federal spending, the Republican co-chairman of President Barack Obama's deficit commission said Tuesday....
"The irony (is) that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess," said Simpson, an Army veteran who was once chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee.
But, that's the kind of warm and cuddly guy that Simpson's always been. And my bet remains that the more we push to get him ousted, the more he'll dig his heels in--and more importantly, the more Obama will do the same. While this dynamic usually works against us, this time could be different. This time it could work to heighten the public awareness of the grand theft being planned, which could in turn make it much harder to pull off.
It was just about a year ago that we were hearing stories about President Obama's intention to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Again. The president's most ardent defenders insisted that we shouldn't listen to unnamed and anonymous sources, and should instead wait and see what happened. And then when he escalated, pretty much as had been reported, we were told that it was the right move, and we should support it. The same dynamic played out with the public option. For months, while it became increasingly apparent that the president wouldn't fight for a public option, we were told that he kept saying he supported one, and we didn't know what was going on behind the scenes. When the public option was punted, we were told that it never had been all that important, anyway, and the health insurance bill that was passed was all kinds of wonderful, so we should just be appreciative and grateful.
The same dynamic is playing out with the Catfood Commission. We are being told not to worry, and that Social Security won't be gutted, and it's just an advisory committee, and on and on. And it seems likely that there is an element of truth in the defense, but only an element. It doesn't seem likely that Social Security will be gutted, but don't be surprised if it is incrementally stripped down. An older retirement age. Less benefits. Things that can be defended by those reflexively inclined to defend. We'll hear that it wasn't as bad as we'd feared, so we should accept it and support it. But as with the incremental rollback of reproductive rights that was folded into the health insurance bill, it's the momentum that will matter most. Democrats buying into Republican framings. Democrats leading a movement backwards. Democrats refusing to stand on principle, on issues that should be core Democratic principles.
Simpson's presence in the mix needs to be seen in the light of this now-clear pattern of betrayal by Barack Obama and his allies. (Still think that sort of language is too tough? Check out glacierpeaks in quick hits pointing to a UK Guardian commentary on Tony Blair's just-released memoirs, titled "Blair the zealot: a mindset closer to a pathology than politics".)
Simpson's presence is a strategic gift to us, and the gift is only as good as our attacks on him make it.
So, by all means, let's call for Simpson to go. The worst that could happen is that he's actually forced to leave. And then we'll just have to go after all the rest of them, calling them "Simpson clones."
Which they are.
p.s. Simpson's latest embarassing dust-up with a real Social Secruty expert is chronicled by Ryan Grim at Huffpo: "Alan Simpson Calls Recipient Of Angry Letter". The expert is Merton Bernstein:
Two new reports combine to present a picture of how our economy works sharply at odds with the rightwing narrative of blaming immigrants and praising the rich as "creators of wealth" who need hefty tax cuts in order to continue "creating wealth" for the rest of us. It should come as little surprise to progressives that this last claim is pure bunk, that CEOs are rewarded for cutting jobs, not creating them. But the news about immigrants may surprise even those who read Open Left regularly. (More below.)
Meanwhile, the 17th annual executive compensation survey from the Institute for Policy Studies "CEO Pay and the Great Recession," shows that CEOs of the 50 firms that have laid off the most workers since the onset of the economic crisis took home 42 percent more pay in 2009 than their peers at S&P; 500 firms.
From the IPS press release:
"Our findings illustrate the great unfairness of the Great Recession," says Sarah Anderson, lead author on the Institute study. "CEOs are squeezing workers to boost short-term profits and fatten their own paychecks."
The 50 top CEO layoff leaders received $12 million on average in 2009, compared to the S&P; 500 average of $8.5 million. Each of the corporations surveyed laid off at least 3,000 workers between November 2008 and April 2010. Seventy-two percent of the firms announced mass layoffs at a time of positive earnings reports.
Highest-Paid "Layoff Leaders":
Fred Hassan, Schering-Plough: Hassan received a $33 million golden parachute when his firm merged with Merck in late 2009, while 16,000 workers faced pink slips. Hassan's total 2009 pay of nearly $50 million could cover the average cost of these workers' jobless benefits for more than 10 weeks.
William Weldon, Johnson & Johnson: Weldon took home $25.6 million, more than three times as much as the S&P; 500 CEO average, at a time when his firm was slashing 9,000 jobs and facing a massive drug recall scandal.
Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard: While his failure to cover up a relationship with a contractor/erotic film star has been banner news, Hurd's slashing of 6,400 jobs last year has largely escaped the headlines. After getting the axe himself in August, Hurd added more than $28 million severance to his 2009 pay package of $24.2 million.
In contrast, it turns out that immigrants serve as a medium- and long-term stimulus to the economy:
The Effect of Immigrants on U.S. Employment and Productivity
By Giovanni Peri
The effects of immigration on the total output and income of the U.S. economy can be studied by comparing output per worker and employment in states that have had large immigrant inflows with data from states that have few new foreign-born workers. Statistical analysis of state-level data shows that immigrants expand the economy's productive capacity by stimulating investment and promoting specialization. This produces efficiency gains and boosts income per worker. At the same time, evidence is scant that immigrants diminish the employment opportunities of U.S.-born workers....
I never thought we'd see a Republican Communist - and certainly not one who is the nominee for U.S. Senate in a major swing-state. But as the Wisconsin State Journal shows, in these strange time, even that seeming oxymoron now exists:
U.S. Senate candidate Ron Johnson was on the Wisconsin Radio Network Monday, chatting about jobs and the economy. But after the host asked him about his free market philosophy, Johnson ended up kind-of praising the current business climate China instead...
Johnson veered onto the topic of China, and how casino entrepreneur Steve Wynn has already started building businesses in Macau.
"He's also creating resorts in Macau in China, communist China. And his point is, the level of uncertainty, the climate for business investment is far more certain in communist China then it is in the U.S. here," Johnson said. "We've created such a high level of uncertainty in this economy because, quite honestly because of the agenda that Senator Feingold represents."
This is pretty explicit: Johnson is praising a communist Chinese government and its state central planning for (allegedly) creating laudable certainty in that nation's economy - all while criticizing America's economy for not being equally communist, state-planned and stable.
If you think I'm the only one who caught this, think again. As the Wisconsin State Journal notes, the host of the radio program "sounded a bit baffled" by Johnson:
"Ron...but Macau is in China. China is a socialist-planned economy," he said. "The level of uncertainty...isn't the level of uncertainty part of a side-effect, if you will, of our, of our democracy?"
The host, of course, is exactly right. In a republican democracy, where the people (via their governmental representatives) have some shred of control over economic policies, things can change from time to time. That's the whole friggin' point of democracy, after all - to give citizens some power over their own lives, society and economy.
By contrast, in an authortarian communism like China, citizens have little or no control over economic policies. While that may foster "certainty" for corporations in the form of no significant labor, environmental or human rights laws, it deprives citizens a lot of other things that makes a nation vibrant and admirable (like, say, a minimally acceptable standard of living).
But that's really the Republican vision when you strip it down to its core. The GOP, like the Chinese government, is about the fusing a corporate form of communism with total authoritarianism. They genuinely believe it would be better if corporations could use government power to get whatever they want in the name of "certainty" - and have no annoying elections or democratic institutions get in the way on behalf of the public.
We can thank Wisconsin Republican Senate nominee Ron Johnson for at least being honest about his party's extremist vision. While most Americans probably don't see Chinese communism as the way forward, Republicans clearly do - and we can thank them, at minimum, for letting us know how they see the world.
Two new reports combine to present a picture of how our economy works sharply at odds with the rightwing narrative of blaming immigrants and praising the rich as "creators of wealth" who need hefty tax cuts in order to continue "creating wealth" for the rest of us. It should come as little surprise to progressives that this last claim is pure bunk, that CEOs are rewarded for cutting jobs, not creating them. But the news about immigrants may surprise even those who read Open Left regularly. (More below.)
