Month: September 2010

Well, family is family, and, as we know, Republicans have had few problems backing a party that would disenfranchise and persecute their own families – from Cheney to Rove. But the O'Donnell family seems to me to have reached a whole new level of cognitive dissonance. David Corn and Suzy Khimm note: that Christine O'Donnell's sister, Jennie, is an out lesbian with a very, er, blue state profile. Indigo, actually:

Her long list of Facebook "likes" include "The word 'Fuck,'" Christine O'Donnell for US Senate, the No H8 Campaign (which opposed a 2008 California ballot proposition to ban gay marriage), the Dalai Lama, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

And this is how she describes her life:

I have studied and practiced many therapeutic methods, as well as many different spiritual practices, such as; The Eastern Philosophies of Buddhism, Taoism, Sidha yoga with Brahma khumaris and other yoga practices for self realization. Western philosophies of Christianity, Science of mind, Course in miracles, Catholicism, Native American Spiritualities, Judaism, Muslim, Sufi, Ancient Alchemy of the Emerald Tablet, Metaphysics, Wicca, Pagan and many other world spiritualities.

Will the Christianist base support a candidate whose sister has studied Wicca and pagan spiritualities and supports marriage equality for gays and lesbians? Apparently, Jennie believes that much that has been written about her sister is untrue. She affirms her:

support of my sister,no matter what lies were made up about her…oh.. p.s. haave you heard the latest? she's homophobic… gotta laugh

No, Jennie. Gotta cry.

Greenwald asks:

I'd really like to hear what it is about Christine O'Donnell, or Sharron Angle, or any of these other candidates that sets them apart from decades of radical right-wing elected officials who came before them?

I think what the tea-partiers would say is that they are for real – that, unlike Bush, they won't spend the country into oblivion, that they won't bail out the banks, that they won't pass unpaid-for entitlements, that they actually will make sure that abortion is illegal, that they will round up illegal immigrants and enforce the border, and will not pretend that we are not fighting Islam in a civilizational war. And that they will refuse to raise taxes even if it means the most radical dismantlement of the entitlement state since the New Deal.

Now you can argue that this kind of extremism was always part of the picture, but the Rove method was to use these convictions, not actually share them. Bush increased spending radically, added a huge unpaid entitlement to the next generation, pandered to Hispanics, favored immigration reform, did nothing to prevent legal abortion, felt awkward demonizing gays, pretended he wasn't torturing prisoners, did not kill enough Iraqis, and made a major point about not having a fight with Islam as such. The base wants to get rid of any of these nuances and get the real thing.

It isn't class snobbery. It's the difference between those who use far right convictions and those who actually hold them. That's why Palin's chief campaign tool was a Down Syndrome child. It proved that she was serious about banning all abortion because, unlike Rove, she really believes it's murder. It's authenticity. And once unleashed, it's very hard to stop.

(Photo: O'Donnell supporters exulting on primary night. By Mark Wilson/Getty.)

James Ledbetter is alarmed by the growing number of Americans drawing disability insurance.

In an article about Paul Ryan's road-map, William Voegeli writes:

A growing cohort of critics has already begun writing obituaries for the republic, arguing that our fundamental problem is not that we don't have a government as good as our people, but that we do. We're sinking beneath the waves, in other words, because Americans are implacable children who demand an extensive welfare state and low taxes, and refuse to acknowledge that the two are irreconcilable…

But maybe that's not true. Too few politicians have treated Americans as adults, capable of realizing that our social insurance system cannot, over the long haul, confer more in benefits than it secures through taxes… Leaders worthy of the name must find the language that will make their fellow citizens understand the dimensions and urgency of the fiscal crisis. If their statesmanship is repudiated by voters who demand both New York City's social welfare system and Idaho's tax structure, then we'll have a compelling empirical basis for predicting what the collapse of the American experiment in self-government will look like. We should not conclude that a government of grown-ups, by grown-ups, and for grown-ups will perish from the earth, however, until we've made strenuous efforts to re-establish it.

Increasingly, the GOP's thought leaders aren't politicians, but highly paid entertainers. Can "leaders worthy of the name" emerge with Palin, Limbaugh, and Beck calling the shots? And you think Pelosi could do such a thing? Or Reid?

Australian officials ban an advertisement that they say promotes euthanasia, an illegal act:

The advert was knocked back by Free TV Australia, which regulates all advertising material for free-to-air commercial stations, saying it would probably breach television's code of conduct. The code "states that material which promotes or encourages suicide will invariably be unsuitable for television," it said in a statement. "Free TV Australia expresses no view on the ethical and legal debate surrounding voluntary euthanasia and has no interest in suppressing debate on this sensitive issue," it added. … Exit International, which made the advert … rejected the proposition that the advert promoted suicide, describing it as a political statement about the fact that euthanasia was illegal in Australia.

Long live the Internet.

Hitch reviews A Journey, by Tony Blair, doling out praise when it is due, but saving as the best insults the ones Blair wrote for himself:

Looking back on his decision to resign when he was—if he does say so himself—“at the height of [his] powers,” he notes ruefully but unironically, “My constituency in the media had evaporated.” It is an oddly telling phrase, as if nobody had ever whispered to him that this is what happens to people who look upon the media as their “constituency” in the first place.

Russ Smith finds Beinart’s parallel wanting:

[Y]es, loudmouths like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich (whom Beinart cites) are quick with a slur against Muslims to audiences they consider appropriate and advantageous to their own political goals. But if Beinart’s going to raise the Joseph McCarthy specter, shouldn’t he at least provide some evidence of Congressional inquisitions of Muslim-Americans (which haven’t occurred under the presidencies of either Bush or Obama), blacklisted men and women in academia, entertainment or even those applying for a mortgage or credit card, or mass deportations borne of rampant Islamophobia? After all, it’s not as if the United States has made it a crime for Muslim women to wear a burqa or other full-body robes: no, that was France—France!—the allegedly enlightened European intellectual paradise that Hollywood liberals often threaten to move to if a Republican is elected president.

(Hat tip: Matt Welch)

Apart from the historical irony – and the fact that a tea-party in England tends to include cucumber sandwiches – Massie underlines the main reason why:

The establishment party controls who is put on the ballot even in the so-called open primaries and, generally speaking, the party isn't going to risk putting forward for selection the British equivalents of O'Donnell or Rand Paul. Genuinely open primaries could change that and that's why no party, I think, has any desire to emulate the openess of the American system. Sometimes, you see, the "wrong" people win.  For all David Cameron's talk of a new, more open kind of party politics the truth is, that for understandable reasons (from the leadership's perspective that is), it's only a degree more open than previous methods of selecting candidates.

I know that the Tory leadership has been particularly worried about the influence of small groups of Christianists potentially hijacking local nominations. But their numbers are mercifully minuscule compared to the US – which is why the British Conservatives have been able to tackle public spending directly without the baggage of religious dogmatism.