Matt Yglesias

Frum on Conservative Paranoia

David Frum’s Spectator article on the political challenges facing the modern Republican Party has a nice ditty on the tide of extreme paranoia sweeping the conservative mediaverse:

Yet to listen to Fox News and other conservative media, you’d think we were living in Czechoslovakia in the final hours before the 1948 communist coup. Anchors end interviews by solemnly pledging to defend liberty and oppose tyranny. The network’s rising star Glenn Beck has mused about the coming turn to totalitarianism — and warned his audience that he has not been able to ‘debunk’ fears that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is constructing an archipelago of concentration camps for political opponents of the Obama administration.

Now to be fair, during the Bush years more than one person passed me this “14 Characteristics of Fascism” document in order to prove that under George W. Bush the United States had become a fascist regime. Overreaction to policies you don’t like is a pretty understandable human impulse. The difference is that mainstream, prominent outlets usually try to restrain that kind of impulse. But this sort of over-the-top rhetoric isn’t burbling from the grassroots up, it’s being driven the very most prominent figures in conservative media and also by a large number of members of congress.

Here, for example, is Representative Michael McCaul who appears to be calling on the crowd to shed the blood of the tyrannical Obama administration:

It’s about our founding fathers who in 1773 threw a little party called the Boston tea party. And fought against tyranny and oppressive taxes, does that sound familiar? We’re continuing that revolution right here in Austin, TX today. Thomas Jefferson once said that the tree of liberty will be fed with the blood of tyrants and patriots. You are the patriots.

I’m sure that 99.9 percent of the people listening to Rep. McCaul understand that this is just hot air and BS. They understand that he doesn’t really mean what he says, and doesn’t really think that what patriots should do is risk their lives in an effort to kill authority figures. But suppose 5,000 people are conservatives and fans of Michael McCaul and 99.9 percent of them remember not to take him seriously. What do the other five people do? Shoot an IRS agent? Try to kill the President? There’s a real need for people in positions of authority to act more responsibly than this.

Tea Bagging

I wanted to note that I’ve seen some liberals accused of sullying the purity of our political discourse by deriding the “tea party” movement with jokes about “tea bagging.” I, personally, have tended to eschew such rhetoric. But I did want to cite this late February Dave Weigel post that provides clear photographic evidence that the other side started it:

Reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson himself.

Conservative Anti-European Rhetoric Reflects Distinctive Southern Attitudes

The fascinating finding in this dKos polling data on people’s attitudes to various locations that frequently serve as right-wing bogeymen is to some extent obscured by the presentation of all the cross tabs. This chart I made boils down the key facts that San Francisco, New York, Europe, and even the dread France are popular among the public at large and even Republicans at large but held in low esteem specifically in the South:

Way back in his 1998 Atlantic article “The Southern Captivity of the GOP”, Christopher Caldwell was warning that “the Republicans have narrowly defined ‘values’ as the folkways of one regional subculture, and have urged their imposition on the rest of the country.”

Like most articles describing why political parties are suffering from deep, structural flaws, Caldwell’s was ultimately undermined by the basic reality that events matter. A combination of poor ballot design, a compliant Supreme Court, and America’s moronic election system put George W. Bush in the White House despite the fact that most people didn’t want him to be president. Then 9/11 changed which issues people care about and led to GOP wins in 2002 and 2004. But you do see that pattern Caldwell identified coming into play a lot nowadays. It’s not really clear why you would think that “disdain for cosmopolitan cities and Europe” should be constitutive of conservatism, but it does seem to be a widespread element of the southern worldview, and it’s increasingly been adopted as the overwhelming posture of conservatism as such.

Taxation With Overrepresentation

Very curious account of a Nebraska Tea Party:

Hundreds of Nebraskans chanted no taxation without representation in protest of increased government spending spawned by the stimulus bill at the state capitol Saturday

The tea party style protest is intended to mimic Revolutionary War era protests where citizens believed they were being unfairly taxed.

Here in Washington DC, your humble blogger and about 600,000 other people are living and paying taxes to a United States government that does not allow us to elect representatives to congress. Whether you think that’s fair or not, what we’re doing is paying taxes without representation. The 1.8 million Nebraskans are very much represented in congress. There’s Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, Rep. Lee Terry, and Rep. Adrian M. Smith in the House of Represenatives along with Senators Ben Nelson and Mike Johanns. Indeed, with a mere 0.6 percent of the nation’s population, Nebraska gets to elect fully 2 percent of the Senators. If anything, Nebraskans have taxation with overrepresentation.

Tea Parties

I haven’t said a great deal about the burgeoning “tea party” “movement” because (a) it’s incredibly stupid, and (b) I knew some colleagues were working on some more in-depth efforts in this regard than I could possible stomach. But here’s Lee Fang showing the role of corporate lobbyists in organizing these “grassroots” outpourings of sentiment and here’s Victor Zapanta’s compilation of Fox News’ relentless efforts to hype the tea parties:

Part of the underlying absurdity of this, however, is that it’s just so transparently silly to be pouring so much time and energy into trying to make Barack Obama appear unpopular when he’s not unpopular. There’s such a thing as opinion polling and it can answer this sort of thing pretty conclusively:

People like Barack Obama. Not everyone! 30 percent or so of the people say they disapprove. And in a country of 300 million, that means it’s easy to get together a big meeting of people who really hate Obama. But it’s clearly a relatively modest minority of the population, comparable in size—and probably largely overlapping with—the group of people who approved of the job George W. Bush was doing all the way ’till the end. But even Doug Holtz-Eakin now concedes that the Bush tax cuts should expire.

Bibi Courting Rightwing Bloggers

Apparently there’s an organization called One Jerusalem dedicated to “keeping Jerusalem united under Israeli sovereignty” and therefore making any pace deal between Israel and the Palestinians impossible. And according to this email someone forwarded me, it loves

Benjamin Netanyahu and US conservative bloggers:

From: David Goder
Subject: One Jerusalem Bloggers Call with BENJAMIN NETANYAHU
To: redacted@onejerusalem.org
Date: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 3:53 PM

YOU ARE INVITED TO PARTICIPATE IN A ONE JERUSALEM BLOGGERS CONFERENCE WITH BENJAMIN NETANYAHU

Live From Jerusalem, on Monday, January 12 at noon Eastern Standard Time, Israel’s former Prime Minister will update bloggers on the latest developments in Israel’s War with Hamas.

To access the call, dial (XXX) XXX-XXXX. Participants joining from outside the U.S. should dial (XXX) XXX-XXXX. The Conference ID is XXXXXX.

Benjamin Netanyahu, has been on the forefront of delivering the truth about Hamas, Iran, and the West’s stake in the outcome of this conflict.

Mr. Netanyahu has been criss-crossing the State of Israel reassuring its citizens that Israel’s Defense Forces are committed to eradicating the threat from Hamas.

As head of the Likud Party, he has suspended his party’s election campaign during this time of national emergency.

Mr. Netanyahu has set aside time from his busy schedule to participate in this briefing. He will take questions but given his tight schedule we suggest that bloggers submit questions by e-mail so he can cover as much ground as possible.

Ah, the old suspension of campaign gambit — that never fails! In all seriousness, the one good thing to have come out of this war thus far has been an erosion in Netanyahu’s political position in Israel.

The Right and the News

I don’t agree with much in this Michael Goldfarb item but the last bit is worth quoting:

Still, for online partisan reporting, TPM set the bar pretty high this election. Republicans have no equivalent outlet. Any strategy to revive the party’s fortunes will require developing the kind of online infrastructure the Democrats now have in place, but you can’t do that without a bunch of right-wing Greg Sargents.

The issue, though, isn’t that the right doesn’t have an outlet equivalent to TPM or other progressive sites. There are tons and tons of conservative media outlets, most of them with a web presence, and the web presences of places like Goldfarb’s Weekly Standard blog would be higher if they were breaking interesting news the way ThinkProgress, HuffingtonPost, TPM, Washington Independent, etc. do. What the right lacks are people with the skill to do the job. The one time I can recall the conservosphere leading the charge on a legitimate story, the thing with Dan Rather and the national guard memos, they got tons of traffic and attention. And lord knows the conservative media has lots of money and plenty of staff. But almost none of that stuff is going to people who report competently. Instead, you get a lot of wild conspiracy theories and a lot of commentary. The progressive blogosphere involves plenty of commentary, of course, and relies a decent amount on reporting done by the non-ideological media. But the right, for all its loathing of the allegedly liberal MSM, is actually entirely dependent on it and the cable-Drudge nexus to advance stories. As Goldfard indicates, there’s just no independent capability. But it’s not a lack of outlets that’s the problem.

Surrogacy and Inequality

When egalitarian liberals object to things like surrogate motherhood, I understand where they’re coming from even as I disagree. But what is one to make of something like Ramesh Ponnuru’s apparent egalitarian objections? Differential financial power is objectionable enough that it provides a grounds for banning certain kinds of consensual transactions, but it’s not sufficiently objectionable that we should actually do anything to try to eliminate or ameliorate it?

A Question of Fairness

Am I the only one who’s confused by all this conservative organizing against the re-imposition of the “fairness doctrine” on talk radio? I understand why they oppose that move, but why are they putting so much energy into blocking something that nobody is trying to do. A Fairness Act bill was submitted in the House in 2005, but it only 16 cosponsors. No such bill was submitted in the last conference. Barack Obama opposes reintroducing the Fairness Act. And speaking as a paid-up member of the vast left-wing conspiracy, nobody on our side is getting any marching orders about this.

I guess they need something to talk about on the radio shows, but I’d just focus in on Obama’s plan to turn the United States into a socialist dystopia.

Freedom’s Bankruptcy Watch

It looks like billionaire warmonger Sheldon Adelson is feeling the pinch:

Las Vegas Sands Corp., billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s casino company, fell the most in New York trading since going public after saying it may default on debt and face bankruptcy.

The casino owner, which had $8.8 billion in long-term debt at the end of June, said in a regulatory filing today that it probably won’t meet the requirements of loans arranged by Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. unless it cuts spending on developments, boosts earnings at its Las Vegas Strip casinos and raises more capital.

The reversal of fortune is a black eye for the 75-year-old Adelson, who was once America’s third-richest man on the strength of his Las Vegas Sands holdings. The Las Vegas-based company’s dwindling cash flow is threatening $16 billion worth of developments in Macau, China, and Singapore, where Las Vegas Sands is building resorts to cater to wealthy Asian gamblers.

It couldn’t have happened to a slimier, more repugnant person. Ultimately, though, watching these billionaires get their comeuppance is unsatisfying — he’ll still come out of this much, much, much better off than the victims of his union-busting efforts and wars and so forth. Still.

Wingnuts Prepare to Wind the Cocoon Tighter

Fox News’ Carl Cameron reports that Sarah Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent:

Red State’s Erik Erikson plans a purge of those committing crimes against Palindom:

RedState is pleased to announce it is engaging in a special project: Operation Leper.

We’re tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details.

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.

So far, Steve Schmit, Mike Murphy, and Nichole Wallace are all on the leper list.

Manzi: Conservatives Need to Reconnect With Reality

I don’t by any means agree with all of his policy prescriptions, some of which seem wrong and a some of which seem a bit half-baked (understandable in such a short piece), but Jim Manzi’s sketch of what’s ailing the contemporary right seems to be to contain an awful lot of good sense. And beyond sense, it contains a good attitude — a determination to identify policy challenges and then identify policies that will meet those challenge. A ridiculous amount of the past ten years worth of conservative “policy” “thought” has been dedicated to coming up with new rationalizations for why large regressive tax cuts are the solution to the problem du jour.

Frum’s Diagnosis

I’d say this diagnosis from David Frum is largely right:

It’s been evident for a long time, for example, that the average American worker did not benefit much from the Bush economy. Real wages stagnated between 2000 and 2006, while prices of essentials, such as food and fuel, rose. But the Republican party and the conservative movement asserted against the facts that everything was fine — that the Bush economy was the “greatest story never told” and that those who thought otherwise were “whiners.”

Had McCain attempted a more innovative and responsive economic policy, he would never have won the Republican nomination. By the time he got the nomination, he had so firmly locked himself to the Bush economic legacy that he had no space to pull off a Sarkozy. In the same way, had McCain chosen the running mate he wanted, he would have faced a walk-out from the floor of the St. Paul convention center.

I’m going to have more to say about this later, but that’s the basic shape of things. Meanwhile, if there’s a sense in which a spell in opposition will be “good for” Republicans, it’s this. In the opposition, you’re under no obligation to become apologists for the status quo — you can accept that problems are real problems and really problematic. Maybe some Republicans will come to embrace at least some progressive solutions to some of these problems. Or maybe they’ll try to devise new, distinctively conservative solutions to those problems. But it’ll be a situation where, at a minimum, acknowledging the existince of some of these problems would be the natural course of action.

Conversely, this is your progressive mandate right here. Not just for this policy or that, but for solutions and an end to the politics of denial.

Duberstein for Obama

Via Tim Fernholtz, a Newsweek article from 2000:

About two years ago McCain began talking to Ken Duberstein, Reagan’s last White House chief of staff and a close friend of Gen. Colin Powell’s. McCain wanted to know: was Powell thinking of running? Left unstated was the reality that there wasn’t room for two American heroes in the presidential race. Duberstein assured McCain that Powell would stay out of the campaign, and the two men began talking about “upping McCain’s profile,” says Duberstein. McCain, who had a book coming out about his own military career, had watched with fascination as Powell ran a book tour in 1995 that resembled a coronation parade. “How did Colin do it?” McCain wanted to know. The senator also quizzed Duberstein about President Reagan. How had the Gipper won over so many Democrats as well as Republicans? Duberstein offered contacts (his corporate clients include Goldman Sachs and General Motors) as well as sage advice. He began to quietly expose McCain to corporate bigwigs (and potential campaign donors), hosting a breakfast for 25 business leaders with Henry Kissinger in New York that December.

Today, Duberstein says he’s voting for Obama:

Former Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria this week he intends to vote for Democrat Barack Obama on Tuesday. [...] Duberstein spoke with Zakaria about his final days in the Reagan White House. The Reagan official, along with Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, also discussed the transition process to a new administration.

On some level, I sort of regret seeing people like this hop onto the Obama bandwagon. Realistically, at some point the Republicans are going to come back into power and I’d prefer that to be a less-crazy version of the GOP. That’s going to require less-crazy people, people like Duberstein, to exert some influence and have some credibility.

Rush Against the Intellectualoids

One interesting quirk of the current situation is that the Republican Party seems overwhelmingly likely to respond to a John McCain defeat by trying to cocoon itself more deeply in conservative orthodoxy. On some level, that’s pretty well understood, Ross Douthat is right that this Rush Limbaugh monologue laying the groundwork really deserves to be read and savored on its own accord.

The use of the term “intellectualoid” for conservative media figures with whom Rush disagrees is a pretty fascinating development.

The Precriminations

Like a lot of progressives, I’ve been enjoying the recent leaks out of conservoworld with different factions pointing fingers and accusing each other. These are some decent precriminations, and if things go the way the polls indicate, they’ll lead to some fantastic recriminations in November and December.

It’s worth saying, though, that there isn’t really much cause for it. The fact of the matter is that the unpopularity of George W. Bush and the Republican Party made for an unpromising situation, then along came an opponent who’d raised a ton of money and as summer turned to fall the economy started skidding downward. Under the circumstances, it’s just intrinsically difficult for a conservative candidate to win. McCain and his team have engaged in a lot of embarrassing flailing around over the past few months, and they’d do themselves a favor to avoid a lot of embarrassing post-election flailing. Doubt it’ll happen, though.

Republicans Who Aren’t Idiots: Rep. Mica is an Idiot

Representative John Mica (R-FL) does what rightwingers do, and blames Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the financial crisis, and then he links them to Barack Obama and suggests that Obama is to blame. Alan Greenspan, Christopher Cox, and John Snow all explain that he’s wrong:

Those guys, though all conservatives and Republican appointees, are no doubt part of the vast liberal/ACORN/Weathermen conspiracy.

“Vote McCain, Not Hussain”

It takes a while for the conservatives in the crowd to get “on message” here, but they come up with a chant that I think could catch on at McCain-Palin rallies nationwide:

The part where they just hell “terrorist!” a lot is nice, too.

White Solidarity

Ryan Powers observes that conservative talk radio host Michael Savage thinks that “the only people who don’t seem to vote based on race are whites of European origin.”

This is a pretty bizarre point of view. It’s quite common to see African-Americans voting in droves for a white politician. By contrast, you almost never see a black politician win a majority of the white vote. And for a long time southern whites oriented their partisan affiliations entirely around their goal maintaining a white monopoly on political power.

Ayers Video

Some wingnuts put together this ad which they deem “the McCain ad you’ll never see.” Presumably they think you’ll never see it because McCain is too weak-kneed to air it. In fact, you’ll never see it because it’s way too long and also incredibly unpersuasive:

The collective meltdown over at the Corner over the past few weeks makes me tempted to say that a lot of folks have oozed down to Mark Steyn’s level, but actually Steyn’s getting dumber, too, as witnessed by his huzzahs for the ad and puzzlement that no wealthy 527 donors want to pick it up. But here’s a clue — the ad, while a damning indictment of Bill Ayers, has nothing on Obama. There’s not even a proper insinuation of wrongdoing here.

The Annals of Spin

Rep. Michelle Bachman introduces us to the subtelties of universal quantification:

Despite the way the blogs and the Democratic Party are spinning it, I never called all liberals anti-American, I never questioned Barack Obama’s patriotism, and I never asked for some House Un-American Activities Committee witch hunt into my colleagues in Congress.

Her precise words:

MATTHEWS: So you think Barack Obama may have anti-American views?

BACHMANN: Absolutely. I’m very concerned that he may have anti-American views.

So, indeed, she left open the possibility that some liberals, though not Obama, may not be anti-American. Similarly, rather than ask for a House Un-American Activities Committee witch hunt into my colleagues in Congress what she asked for was a media investigation into whether her congressional colleagues’ anti-American views.

Block the Vote

Via Sam Boyd, irate McCain supporters gather to protest and heckle a crowd of people . . . voting . . . in North Carolina:

Photographer Joe Eddins and I headed over to the closest one and found a steady line of voters hoping to cast ballots early. Most seemed to be Obama supporters and several had come from the rally. Nearly all the voters were black.

Also at the polling site was a group of loud and angry protesters who shouted and mocked the voters as they walked in. Nearly all were white.

As you can see from these videos, no one held anything back. People were shouting about Obama’s acknowledged cocaine use as a young man, abortion and one man used the word “terrorist.” They also were complaining that Sundays are for church, not voting.

Of course there’s no way to tell who some people standing on a line are going to vote for. You can, however, tell whether or not the people standing on the line are mostly black and decide you want to stage a protest against the abomination that is black people exercising the franchise. As Boyd observes “These folks are going beyond the McCain campaign’s previous attempt to demonize ACORN and doing something that looks very much like voter intimidation — especially disturbing considering the history of racist violence surrounding voting in the South.”

Nordlinger: Why Won’t Press Start Covering Fictitious Fraud?

There is no evidence of any non-trivial number of people casting fraudulent ballots. Given that reality, I find it remarkable that allegations of “voter fraud” each and every year manage to get a non-trivial quantity of press coverage. But Jay Nordlinger thinks the press ignores these stories and that America will only stand up and demand a stop to fraud that isn’t happening when the media starts doing its job and covering fraud that isn’t happening:

Do you remember when the Gore people handed cartons of cigarettes to homeless people, to entice them to the polls, or register Democratic, or whatever? We righties had a lot of fun with that — because Gore was Mr. Anti-Tobacco, you’ll recall. (That’s before he went Global Warming.) But it takes more than righties having fun — it takes the big people saying, “This is a story.”

If it’s true that Al Gore’s campaign staff was giving homeless people cigarettes in order to entice them to go vote, that would indeed be funny because Gore was Mr. Anti-Tobacco. On the other hand, it would be strange for the press to give widespread coverage to these instances of election fraud given that it’s not election fraud. For the press to provide widespread coverage of people voting illegally, there would need to be instances of people voting illegally. Nordlinger, even amidst whining that the press isn’t covering fraud, can’t produce an example of fraud for people to cover. Just as when the Bush Justice Department brought inappropriate and illegal political pressure to bear on US Attorneys across the country to investigate voter fraud, they could barely come up with anything to investigate. It just doesn’t happen. Among other things, the secret ballot makes it a little impractical to bribe people to vote for your candidate.

Annals of Conservative Paranoia

I was in a cab just now and the driver was listening to some of the old-fashioned conservative talk radio. The host’s subject was a bill in (I believe) New York State that was going to have public schools tracking body mass index information for schoolchildren. This sounded like a reasonable enough idea to me, but the host kept repeating it over and over again in an outraged tone of voice as if it was an obviously absurd idea. Finally, he started to explain — correctly, I thought — that once this data started coming in, people were going to start citing it as showing that there were problematic levels of childhood obesity and arguing for some new policy initiatives to combat it. And, again, he kept repeating this like it was clear that childhood obesity prevention programs were the worst idea imaginable. The trump card to his argument, basically, was that these new programs would cost money and some of that money would go to salaries for implementation, so really the “only” reason people were agitating for this BMI tracking was to fatten up the bureaucracy. This was allegedly comparable to the greed-based reasons behind the anti-smoking campaigns of the past several decades.

Not un-comparable to some paranoid ideas you hear on the left, but interesting to hear it nonetheless. Then the driver corked off a doozy. Like cab drivers across the country, he explains that MSP area cab drivers have been hurting due to gas prices. Thus, he said, they’d been agitating for about a hear for approval of a fare hike by the relevant regulatory authority. Finally, one got approved and it took effect five days before the GOP convention. This he explained as part of a “liberal agenda” to somehow stick it to the Republicans.

Next up — ads for gun shops.