Month: September 2009

Ezra Klein explains the trouble:

The absence of any Republican support makes it hard for [Baucus] to justify his compromises. And his compromises make it hard for the Democrats on the committee to support his bill.

Hence my suspicion that the public option could return.

Matt Welch puts out a plea:

[If] the Tea Party movement is significantly animated by racism or appeals to white racial resentment, we will certainly find out about it, and it will lose whatever popularity it has now, because racism in this country is genuinely unpopular. And by the same token, if the Great Klan Hunt fails to turn up more than just a fringe scattering of kooks, it may be time for some on the Air America left to begin considering that limited government sentiment is not automatically a form of sublimated racism.

My two cents is that if Glenn Beck emerges as the leader of this thing (and he could make an arguable claim right now), then there will be a hard cap on growth of its popularity, and a flourishing cottage industry of Beck-monitoring that will turn up daily outrages to feed the evil/stupid/insane/racist narrative. This will be great for Glenn Beck; for the rest of the new protest kids, maybe not so much.

Nate has a good take:

Some of this is Baucus's chickens coming home to roost. When you make a unilateral decision to negotiate with only five other people from a 23-person committee and 100-person Senate, and two of those five people have clear electoral disincentives against supporting any plan that you might come up with, the negotiations are liable to end in failure far more often than not. The flurry of on-the-record statements against Baucus's reform plans — not "leaks", not trial balloons — points toward a defective process.

And that may suit Democrats just fine.

I suspect we will see a few more twists and turns on this yet – and even a left-liberal revival.

Dreher whacks Limbaugh; Goldblog whacks Drudge. Conor echoes. Dreher reveals the conscience of a real conservative:

Look, I think it's important to talk about black male violence, or at least as important as it is to talk about any other important social trend. I don't think we should be squeamish about discussing it in a responsible and fair-minded way, despite what the politically correct say. But good grief, Limbaugh is up to something wicked. He's plainly trying to rally white conservatives into thinking that now that we have a black president, blacks are rising up to attack white kids! Christ have mercy, what is wrong with these people?

I won't have anything to do with it, not even tangentially, which is why I took down the post. I can't see this as anything other than Limbaugh deliberately trying to whip up racial fear and loathing of the president. This goes far, far beyond tough criticism of Obama. Does that man Limbaugh have any idea what rough beast he's calling forth?

If you find some others on the right willing to stand up to this evil, let me know.

Jason Magbanua writes:

Canon Philippines lent us a pre-production model of the 7d. We got it Tuesday 6pm and had to return it the following Thursday at noon. We wanted to document something truly Filipino and came up with the idea of shooting a “Perya”. There really is no direct equivalent in English. It’s not as grand as a carnival, not as permanent and posh as an amusement park, there are no pumpkins nor cows in competition like a country fair. It is what it is – a Perya.

A reader writes:

At first your little jab that the House formally rebuking Wilson is "a petty move, which it was" aroused my ire. I immediately thought to myself, "Really. Formally rebuking a member of congress for yelling at the president is petty? What are liberals supposed to do when this happens? Roll over like we do on everything else?"

The man disgraced himself, to be sure, but he added wind to the sails of those who think our president Obama is somehow illegitimate. He was rightly rebuked.

But then I stepped back and thought for a minute. We have become fond of saying that no Democrat did that during a Bush address. Okay, fine. But what if one had?

What if Dennis Kucinich–to lift a favorite liberal out of my head–had stood up and declared Bush a liar during a State of the Union? How would I have really felt? After all the finger wagging, how would I have felt?

Like I'd been given water in the desert.

So while it is appalling and galling that a Republican stands up and yells it less than a year after President Obama was elected, after we held off for eight long tortured years, I have to admit some of my outrage over Wilson is hypocritical. And you're right, it was petty.

This I should have known, but didn't. And it does reveal some of the contours of the latest rebellion against modernity and embrace of fundamentalist religion at the heart of the American right:

"Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recasting the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by the French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment … The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser).

Fascinating. The author, Willard Cleon Skousen, has a long history in the annals of conspiracist far-right. I figured it would get worse on the right before it got better. But this trend – a combination of theoconservatism, American exceptionalism and populism – is truly disturbing. Mormonism is its natural religious base: the supremely American religion.

Jonathan Chait's review of two books on Ayn Rand has sparked some response. His characterization of Rand's movement:

Ultimately the Objectivist movement failed for the same reason that communism failed: it tried to make its people live by the dictates of a totalizing ideology that failed to honor the realities of human existence. Rand’s movement devolved into a corrupt and cruel parody of itself. She herself never won sustained personal influence within mainstream conservatism or the Republican Party. Her ideological purity and her unstable personality prevented her from forming lasting coalitions with anybody who disagreed with any element of her catechism.

Freddie and Will at Ordinary Gentlemen applaud the essay for different reasons. Brian Doherty objects. Chait's larger argument about wealth, luck, and taxes:

For conservatives, the causal connection between virtue and success is not merely ideological, it is also deeply personal. It forms the basis of their admiration of themselves. If you ask a rich person whether he ascribes his success to good fortune or his own merit, the answer will probably tell you whether that person inhabits the economic left or the economic right. Rand held up her own meteoric rise from penniless immigrant to wealthy author as a case study of the individualist ethos. "No one helped me," she wrote, "nor did I think at any time that it was anyone’s duty to help me."