Month: November 2010

A collection. The most creative:

Another Dish fave:

Many more here.

A reader writes:

You asked “Is this a politics?” Yes, it is! I started my working life (in the early 90s) on the Hill but now, despite being stuck living in DC, I find politics as currently practiced almost entirely intolerable. A glance at the Sunday papers “reveals” President Obama to be, among other things, humorless, self-regarding, elitist, arrogant, out-of-touch, and a totally crap communicator. Also: responsible for pretty much everything that ails the world right now. Why people think “now” is so much worse than two years ago, I cannot imagine, and why people think that putting John Boehner in charge of the House and booting Mike Castle out of Congress–I am stupefied. I only hope that, whatever happens tomorrow, it lances the boil, and that we collectively get over our precious “anger” and begin process of growing/waking up.

Another writes:

I’m a Niebuhr/Stewart pragmatist, not any less engaged for being ironical about any given political passion. (I also happen to believe in God and love my country and believe it has been uniquely blessed — though I don’t think those beliefs have much of an explicit role to play in my politics, literalism being the antithesis of God and static ideology being poison to civility and practical reason.) I believe in limited government and personal responsibility, but also believe that 10%+ unemployment and 35%+ without any health insurance in the wealthiest country in human history is simply unacceptable (reasonable people can disagree on cause and solution). I believe in the great engine of free enterprise, but also believe that lack of proper regulation of the financial industry and monopolies will erode the commonwealth just as quickly as over-regulation will.

I believe torture and indefinite detention without trial are inhumane, immoral, and simply ill-advised, even as I recognize that there exist people nearly irredeemable in their bad intentions toward the free world. I believe human life is incomprehensibly, irreducibly complex; that each of us is both lovable and flawed; that no one — not scientists, not artists, not intellectuals, not saints — has any sort of monopoly on truth . I believe civility is a necessity in democracy. I believe there is usually more truth in laughter than in the feeling of self-righteousness.

I feel less alone today in my politics than I did Friday.

Another:

You wrote:

“But it is an identity politics: proud of being educated, sick of being stereotyped, interested in facts and reality, fed up with being condescended to … and deeeply worried about the direction in this country.”

This is right; but it’s funny you don’t name the identity, which is white cultural liberals. Every last one of them, if they were to run for office in all their reasonableness, would be carpetbombed by Republican ads calling them “Pelosi liberals.” But this is who they have always been, at least in my political lifetime, which begins roughly with the Carter administration. The key fact to understand in assessing them is that white cultural liberals are not a cultural plurality. Not close.

If voting in this country were restricted to white people, white cultural conservatives would trounce them endlessly. You doubt that? Take a look at Oklahoma. (Not that only white people vote there, but you know what I’m saying.) And then take a look at the historical success of cultural liberalism in this country generally. White cultural liberals, of which I am one, only come anywhere near power because they make common cause through the Democratic party with blacks and Hispanics.

The significance of Obama’s election was not the elevation of some quietly dominant class of the ironically reasonable. It was, rather, a question of mathematics. It marked the first time in history that a coalition of “others”: white liberals, blacks, Hispanics, etc., was bigger than the coalition of Real Americans. That coalition is new and fragile in the short-term; hence what’s likely about to happen. But the ethnic math is enduring. Without that math, the crowd in D.C., with which you and I feel kinship, is nothing more than Karl Rove’s “Fifth Column” bait. Believe me, conservatives don’t fear them, they depend on them. There’s a reason why conservatives continually use liberal as an epithet.

Now I adore I think Jon Stewart, and I think he understands all this. I think it was a hugely political rally in that it sought to normalize white cultural liberals and rescue them from the punchlines of attack ads. And look at how successful it was: he’s got you, scourge of liberals, pretending that the crowd with which you so identified, wasn’t liberal at all — but something new. Go ahead and keep telling yourself that. But trust me, we’ve always trafficked in irony, and, in general, we’ve always been pretty reasonable.

I’m not sure I buy the idea that cultural or social liberalism is so isolated in this country. A majority of Americans support marriage equality, a near-majority supports legalization of marijuana, abortion remains legal after decades of conservative nominees to the Supreme Court, the Tea Party is claiming the mantle of feminism, there is a racially miscegenated president, most Republicans have had at least two wives, and Adam Lambert was an American Idol star. If we’re talking culture, the live-and-let-live crowd have won, while the religious right has screamed the loudest.

I think there is a socially liberal, fiscally conservative plurality in this country, which was supplemented by a big minority/liberal revulsion against the GOP in 2008. Since I don’t believe the GOP is on the verge of running back to the middle, and because their only viable candidate in 2012 is called “Bush”, I don’t think this coalition is dead.

Just resting.

Älvsjö, Sweden, 10.23 am

"I really don't know. For either one of us to is quite speculative," – Alaska governor Sean Parnell, asked whether he thinks the Earth is 6,000 years old or 6 billion.

"I get such a sick pleasure that I rule your world. Yes, that is dysfunctional. I admit it," – Andrew Breitbart, addressing a Media Matters employee.

Edmund Morris performs an intellectual Cirque du Soleil act trying to shoe-horn this election into … 1910s. The Tea Party as an echo of the Progressives? Oookaaay. Louis P. Masur, meanwhile, draws a parallel between Obama's standing today and Abe Lincoln's after his midterm election in 1862. Another stretch, but I would not under-estimate Obama's ability to pivot and come back:

Lincoln's opponents, as might be expected, interpreted the election as a repudiation of the administration and called on Lincoln to withdraw the Emancipation decree and restore habeas corpus; some even demanded that he start negotiations for peace.

Lincoln, however, viewed the elections differently. He understood that voters were unhappy with the war, particularly the stagnation of the Army of the Potomac, which had failed in its attempt to take Richmond, the Confederate capital. "I certainly know," he said, "that if the war fails, the administration fails, and that I will be blamed for it, whether I deserve it or not. And I ought to be blamed, if I could do better."

And so he set out to do better. The election results, rather than demoralizing him, energized him to be even more aggressive …

A reader writes:

I was hoping you'd ignore Ladybug-gate. O'Donnell publicly (and quickly) blamed her opponent for the Gawker story.

Sadly, she offered no details on how her opponent arm-twisted her friends to sell photos and a tacky story to a gossip website. Nor did she explain why her opponent would be more interested in her old Halloween costume instead of her finances. Oddly enough, Ladybug-gate completely buried the news of the resignation of her fifth campaign treasurer in two years. The Gawker story ran a mere two hours after the AP story on her treasurer. Guess the Lord works in mysterious ways.

Bottom line: I had sympathy for her until she used the Gawker smear to smear her opponent – without a scrap of corroboration that his campaign was in any way involved in this pathetic story.

The hook-up wasn't hypocritical, but O'Donnell celebrating Halloween appears to have been.

Say this for the GOP establishment, or what's left of it. They haven't even stopped riding their tiger before they plan slitting her jugular:

"There is a determined, focused establishment effort … to find a candidate we can coalesce around who can beat Sarah Palin. We believe she could get the nomination, but Barack Obama would crush her," said one prominent and longtime Washington Republican. "

Top Republicans fear the dynamic that played out in many of this year’s intraparty Senate contests — especially in comparatively small states like Nevada, Alaska, Utah and Delaware, where tea party activists helped topple establishment favorites — could easily be repeated in early-state presidential caucuses and primaries …

"If she runs, she runs right at the establishment," said a top adviser to a rival campaign. As witnessed in recent weeks, she would have powerful backup — at least at the outset of a campaign — among conservative media figures, especially Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.

But notice Palin's clueless response.

She and her publicist, Greta van Susteren, and her political party, Fox News, react by being "horrified" by the Politico piece, and trashing it: "I'll just ignore this crap." Why ignore it? Why be horrified? Isn't it political gold-dust for a "rogue" candidate that the establishment wants to stop you? What she should have said is exactly what Limbaugh said in response to GOP collywobbles:

“It could also be they're scared to death that [if] Palin wins, it's the end of them — the Republican establishment.”

Palin's vanity is her weakspot. She wants to be the Republican Queen Esther and the Tea Party's Joan of Arc. At some point, she needs to pick which delusional fantasy she's going to run on, and stick with it.

It will explain a huge amount about Tuesday's races, and is encapsulated by the latest polling from Alaska:

How can McAdams be so much more popular than Miller yet still be trailing the race? It's because 92% of the small group of voters that does like Miller is planning to vote for him. But only 56% of the voters with a positive opinion of McAdams are intending to cast their ballots for him, while 31% of them are going for Lisa Murkowski.

The results tomorrow will be the results of those who were motivated enough to vote. That's the bleeding obvious, I know. But it presents big problems for a victorious GOP. It will be very hard for them not to be emboldened by their base turnout to do things, or, rather, do nothing, in ways that could come back to haunt them.

Their philosophy remains unchanged (from David Vitter):

Just to be clear, the premise that I disagree with is that to avoid a tax increase, we somehow have to pay for it.