Month: January 2011

As the world darkens, the shafts of light seem brighter somehow.

As a long-standing Palin hysteric, I have to confess a mite less concern in 2011 than at any time since she has been farcically commanding the attention of the political class. Not much has changed essentially: Palin's favorable ratings remain roughly where they have been. Yes, the GOP elite has finally turned against her, led by Krauthammer; and the GOP's capture of the House has undermined the sense of urgent oppositionism that fueled her rise. But she remains the great unknown of the GOP primary race, still commands slightly creepy encomiums from Pawlenty, and is the de facto front-runner, with raw political talent and literally a cult following.

So why the shift? I think the reality series might have done it. It was quite an achievement, but even as executive producer, with final control of editing, Palin couldn't help but destroy her own mythology.  The best piece I've yet read on this is here – tellingly in USAToday. It agrees with many red state critiques of the show: that Palin obviously is a phony in her huntin' and shootin' schtick. Money quote:

The caribou hunt episode provides a centerpiece of the series' excesses, as well as Palin's ineptitude. According to script, it's Palin's turn to replenish the family's dwindling freezer with wild meat — from an Alaska point of view, all good. But the logistics of the trip defy common sense. Instead of hunting within reasonable distance of home, her party flies 600-plus miles to a remote camp in multiple chartered aircraft. This isn't subsistence but the sort of experiential safari popular among high-end, non-resident sport hunters. For all that, Palin ends up with a skinny juvenile cow caribou. Boned out, we're talking maybe 100 pounds of meat, at a staggering cost per pound.

Faced with that hapless animal, this darling of Second Amendment supporters nervously asks her dad whether the small-caliber rifle kicks. Then, even more astoundingly, her father repeatedly works the bolt and loads for her as she misses shot after shot before scoring a kill on the seventh round — enough bullets for a decent hunter to take down at least five animals. (Given Palin's infamous tweet "Don't retreat, reload," we can infer she plans to keep her dad close by.) Later, Palin blames the scope, but any marksman would recognize the flinching, the unsteady aim and poor shot selection — and the glaring ethical fault of both shooter and gun owner if the rifle wasn't properly sighted. Instead of some frontier passion play, we're rendered a dark comedy of errors.

The mama grizzly meme is also debunked:

From the opening credits, Palin's not actually leading, as the show's stirring theme song (Follow Me There) suggests. Instead, she's tucked far under the wings of professional guides, friends, or family members — in a curious subtext, almost all males.

They instruct and coddle her along, at one point literally hauling Palin uphill on the end of a rope. Even post-production editing can't hide a glaring, city-slicker klutziness.

Notice how difficult it would be for a blue stater to take on Palin's cred. But Palin could not help herself. She is drawn to the exposure of her own lies like a salmon into her husband's net.

This is called self-destructive behavior. And it soothes the troubled soul.

(Photo: Eric Thayer/Getty.)

Yaniv Reich comments on the "brilliant, must-see video" we posted yesterday:

What is most remarkable about this short satirical piece is how realistic it is. It can be considered satire, but it unfortunately reflects far too common thoughts that have infected Israeli critical thinking capacities. Like conservatives who can’t tell that Stephen Colbert is mocking them, I suspect a number of right-wing Israeli hacks will self-identify with this video. Maybe they’ll even try to redesign early childhood education around these innovative ideas.

How many times have we heard these same arguments, not only from Im Tirzu (the right-wing Israeli NGO), FM Evet Lieberman and his proto-fascist allies, PM Netanyahu, but from “left-wing” Labor leaders like Barak, “centrist” leaders like Tzipi Livni, my beloved family members, “liberal” and otherwise?

By the way, the Israeli comedy show that made the skit, Eretz Nehederet, also created the genius Angry Birds peace process video we posted earlier this week.

Prairie Village, Kansas, 9 am

A gay fish retires.

A reader writes:

Obtuse? Based on one guy's quote?

The overwhelming reaction of "the professional left" to the Daley pick has been to sigh and shrug and say we'll see. And anyway, why is Adam Green obtuse, but Ezra Klein, who said the same thing, thoughtful?

Look, if the health care bill eventually works — rather than jamming us all with crappy unaffordable corporate insurance we can't opt out of or use — then Obama will be a progressive hero in 20 years. If not, he won't.

Worrying whether it will work or not – and that a "corporate" approach to it increases the chances it will not – is not obtuse. It's completely legitimate. The same goes for financial re-regulation. And Daley opposed both of them for corporate reasons.

The "professional left" worries with reason that corporatism will hollow out all of this so it has no benefit on the ground for actual humans. That's based on observation and experience. And hell; you agree with it.

I do think Obama's his own man and this doesn't matter very much. But in your zeal to make sure you're never identified with "the left", with whom you agree on virtually everything that's not abstract, you keep coming up with these ridiculous abstract, false equivalences that are just lame.

My own impression of the left-liberal response online differs, but these things are subjective. As to the final swipe: feh.

Take healthcare reform. If I had my druthers, as I've written many times, I'd prefer a much more free-market system, separate from employment, with a subsidized catastrophic baseline of support. I can see how Obama's reform tried to find a path through the middle and, given the practical alternatives, wish it well. Maybe David Brooks is right and we will one day end up with single-payer or a total dust-up. I don't know. What I do know is that the reform we have for the foreseeable future needs intensive vigilance and executive expertise, and that its principles – universality and cost-control – are, to say the least, in tension. If Daley brings a private sector realism to an administration attempting something really hard to make government work in a critical area, I can see the rationale behind his appointment. Which is neither "right" nor "left" – but very Obama.

 

Ezra Klein finds a harrowing graph: 

The fine folks at the Hamilton Project sent me this (frankly terrifying) graph showing how long it would take to reverse our job losses at various rates of payroll growth. Note that every line on here is showing vastly more job growth than we've seen for any sustained period thus far in the downturn.

CBPP provides several charts on the recession thus far. So far, Don Peck is still prescient. Catherine Rampell notes that the drop in the headline number was because "so many people simply gave up looking for jobs." So much for that 300,000 number. Calculated Risk: 

This was a mixed report. The 103,000 payroll jobs added was below expectations of 140,000 jobs, however payroll for November was revised up 70,000 and the October payroll was revised up 38,000.

Indiviglio:

You can see that leisure & hospitality and health care [sectors] were the only really significant winners in December. Construction and government jobs continued to decline, with local government leading the layoffs. You can expect to see these two sectors continue to suffer in coming months due to continuing real estate market woes and fiscal difficulties at the state and local levels.

It's an interesting question. Matt Yglesias thinks the media elite runs the conservative movement. Proof:

Suppose there’s some sellout that John Boehner wants to implement. Boehner recognizes that he needs to pair this with a symbolic but meaningless gesture. Now suppose he sits down in a room with Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Donohue, and David Koch and persuades all three of those people that this is the right way to proceed. Then the next day, Boehner unleashes his symbolic gesture and his compromise, and the coverage of it on Fox News, The Rush Limbaugh Show, and the Fox-affiliated radio shows is all positive. That alone gets you the three most popular talk radio shows, the television network, The Weekly Standard, a dose of influence at every single conservative think tank in America, and the important organizing efforts of Americans For Prosperity.

How far is a right-wing challenger going to get with those forces arrayed against him?

Not far. And the basic principles of elite signaling indicate that support among that group will lead to more support. It wouldn’t be a smart move for Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney to get on the wrong side of Rush & Fox. Jim DeMint might or might not find it useful to act as a rightwing defector from dealmaking, but he wouldn’t actually get anywhere without conservative media to back him. In essence, coordinated action among a very small number of people can cut the oxygen off from the tea party fire any time they want to. So the question becomes not how “the tea party” will react, but how a relatively small number of influential conservative media figures will react.

This strikes me as overstating elite conspiracy theories. The swinging dicks that Yglesias namechecks tend to support Team Red, but that doesn't mean their self-interest aligns so neatly that they would sit down in a room together and collude. Issues that divide the right, like immigration, have proved as much in the past. Look at CPAC's inability to grapple with a handful of right-leaning homosexuals.

But one begins to worry that Tea Partiers are overly credulous when it comes to conservative elites. So many of its members trust the factual veracity of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, and imagine the motivating factor of everything they broadcast is ideology, when profit and ego are inherently alloyed in the mix. These voices are incentivized to make a huge deal out of something like earmark reform, while steering clear of more consequential policy failures – especially when they're fraught with divisive controversy or cannot be distilled into useful soundbytes. They remain the only way to really reform conservatism, while being the main forces restricting it to a form of entertainment.

Clive Crook eulogizes Denis Dutton's Arts & Letters Daily. I agree totally with Clive – and find the idea of an "irreplaceable" aggregator something of a new landmark in web media. I mean: what did Denis Dutton do? He compiled a variety of links to interesting pieces, columns, reviews, essays, etc. He wrote the briefest of content lines. But it was in this economy of style and truly liberal spirit that his genius lay.

He created a space for so many others simply by being who he was. Online, no one had to give him a license for that. And a man as urbane and as well-read and as curious as Clive doesn't know what to do without him. Somehow, death brings to life the very acute intimacy of the mass media we now have.

She's back. But Kevin D. Williamson is surely right – whatever else you think of Helen Thomas, she can't write.