Monthly Archives: October 2011

by | October 31, 2011 · 2:04 PM

Political Roleplaying: The Victim

Herman Cain speaks at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition presidential candidate forum, in Des Moines, Iowa, Oct. 22. | AP Photo

By John Stang

The recent sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain reveal a noticeable trend in American electoral politics, playing the victim of a conspiracy can win you points.  Conservatives often attack liberals for “playing the victim” in most situations and getting away with it.  For example, liberals whining about evil corporations stopping on the little guy who wants make a living or even playing the race card.  I would argue that a cohesive political argument starts off with someone being  victim of some wrong, otherwise no problem really exists.

The conservative case of victim-hood come from the liberal elite attacking the very foundations of their moral standing.  More importantly, it has to do with jealousy.  A conservative will often claim that liberals are jealous of conservative popularity.  Ann Coulter is a good example of this rhetoric:

“Liberals are terrified of Herman Cain. He is a strong conservative black man. Look at the way they go after Allen West and Michael Steele and they aren’t even running against Obama. They are terrified of strong, conservative, black men,” Coulter said.

The other route is to say that the allegations against Cain are just a conspiracy to bring him down.  The Daily Telegraph reports:

JD Gordon, the candidate’s spokesman, said he was being “targeted by liberals just because they disagree with his politics.”

What I find moronic about the victim card for conservatives is how they are never really the victim of anything, except for their own paranoia.  Sure, liberals might disagree with Cain’s ideas, but most will just attack the ideas on face rather than just drudging up a story to make him look bad.  Real journalism involves digging into a candidates past and seeing what skeleton’s might show up.   Character assassination comes from finding facts objectively and then people may draw conclusions from those stated facts.

If you think about it, bringing down conservative character is much easier.  Many conservatives are profoundly religious and tout higher moral purity.  Not only that, but often times a conservative will defend the status quo and current institutions as sacrosanct.  With that baggage, one can presume that will be much easier to take down a conservative politician than a liberal that may not have those characteristics.  Finally, no one should forget the dirty tricks of the GOP from the “ratfucking” of elections perpetrated by “Trick Dick” Nixon to Karl Rove’s bag of tricks.  Politics is not a clean game, only Mother Teresea can really compete, and even then her “saintliness” might be in question.

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by | October 28, 2011 · 4:20 PM

The 2012 Republican Candidates: High School Edition

By Luke Brinker

Over the last several months, we’ve learned a fair amount about the 2012 Republican candidates’ policy positions. Michele Bachmann remains as reflexive a right-winger as ever, bragging about her opposition to raising the debt ceiling (as if it applied to future spending, not bills already piled up). Rick Perry supports doing for America just about everything he’s done for “the state uh Texas,” which basically means our national recovery plan will be Drill, Baby, Drill. Ron Paul still hates the Fed. Rick Santorum still hates gays. Jon Huntsman has the quaint idea that he can win the GOP nomination by endorsing science and reason. (No word on whether he’ll be able to revive Nelson Rockefeller and place him back in the vice presidency.) And Mitt Romney is, well, Mitt Romney, as shameless a shape-shifter as ever.

We’ve also gotten a pretty keen sense of the candidates’ personalities. They’ve been around long enough that they could practically have been our high school classmates. Which means it’s an excellent idea to reduce the Republican candidates to high school stereotypes.

Michele Bachmann: The sanctimonious girl from a large family. She’s the one who skipped school the day the biology teacher talked about evolution, and you get the sense that she’s damning you to eternal fire and brimstone whenever she focuses her icy gaze on you.

Rick Perry: The dumb jock. He says stupid, nonsensical things in class discussions (that is, if he says anything at all), but you console yourself with the knowledge that people like him will never be in any positions of real authority.

Newt Gingrich: The arrogant debater who can’t understand why everyone else is so dumb.

Herman Cain: The class clown.

Mitt Romney: The sycophantic teacher’s pet. He sucks up to whomever he thinks he needs to, gives the impression of trying too hard, and despite being thoroughly unlikable, somehow manages to get elected to leadership positions in student government.

Rick Santorum: The sexually frustrated, angry kid with a chip on his shoulder. He feels his immense academic and extracurricular talents are thoroughly unappreciated. An air of bitterness surrounds him.

Ron Paul: The slightly strange kid who repeats verbatim the paranoid crap his crazy uncle says at Thanksgiving.

Jon Huntsman: The cool cat. He’s rich but doesn’t flaunt it, excels in academics and school clubs, plays an instrument (a cool one, like the guitar), and is a decent athlete. Despite his successes, he seems refreshingly nonchalant.

America, take your pick!

 

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by | · 11:38 AM

Good Luck Repealing “Obamacare”

By John Stang

A constant campaign platitude of most GOP presidential candidates is a pledge to repeal President Obama’s signature healthcare law, demonized as “Obamacare.”  Mitt Romney is out in front on this, indicating that he might be overcompensating for having the bill modeled after his own reform plan in Massachusetts.  The Wall Street Journal explains Romney’s plan:

Mr. Romney has proposed signing an executive order on “day one” offering waivers to any governor who wants his or her state to opt out of the law. His rivals note that by law, such waivers can’t take effect before 2017. The move would also leave untouched the focus of conservative opposition: the requirement that individuals carry insurance or pay a fee. Mr. Romney said he would follow this on “day two” with legislation to repeal the law, using a Senate tactic called budget reconciliation. That would require only 51 votes to succeed, a total the GOP might reach after next year’s election.

Got it: day one, executive order giving states an option not to be part of the individual mandate and day two is senate reconcilation.  Reconcilation is a parliamentary tactic used for budget bills, it only requires 50 votes instead of the normal 60 to avoid a filibuster.  Without going into the nitty-gritty of why this process is necessary, just understand that the healthcare bill was passed with the use of reconciliation after Scott Brown won in Massachusetts.   Oh, the irony!

All this is much easier said than done, as with any political promise.  The individual mandate is the part of the law that Republicans hate and want to see repealed, but there are also provisions, such as reforms to hospitals and eliminating the denial of coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, that remain very popular.  Rounding up the votes will  not be easy either.  Republicans will need a majority in the senate, or, God forbid, work with the other side to get votes.  If you want a glimpse at failed presidential promises, Obama signed an executive order his first day in office declaring the detention center at Guantanamo Bay to be closed within a year, and it has not happened yet.  Does “Read my lips, no new taxes, mean anything?  Congress does not move with the will of the president.  If Romney wins, he will learn that soon enough.

One final thought to consider is how the GOP will be perceived by repealing the law if the economy is in bad shape.  The Obama administration was criticized that more economic measures should be taken by the government, that was not part of the stimulus, and that more energy needed to be placed on jobs instead of healthcare.  While healthcare and economy are both intertwined, that was not explained very well.  If Romney, or the any GOP candidate, gets into office with unemployment still at 9% and they want to focus on repealing healthcare instead of creating jobs, then that will not sell well with the American people.  The lesson here, fighting for your idealistic cause when not everyone thinks that is top priority can make you seem like just a purist more than a leader.

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by | October 26, 2011 · 2:43 PM

Steve Jobs: A Visionary Prick

By Luke Brinker

Ask your typical person what she’d think of a man who abandoned a daughter he fathered out of wedlock; continued to question whether she was his daughter even after a paternity test established that he was the father; impregnated another woman and then asked friends whether he should marry that woman or another, “prettier” one; bullied employees; made a point of exposing coworkers to his body odor; chose not to engage in any philanthropy despite an estimated $8.3 billion net worth; and displayed all the classic signs of narcissism, and she’d probably tell you that you had just defined “asshole.” But because millions of people consumed his products and developed a cult-like devotion to him, much of the media deified the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs when he died earlier this month. With Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs now available, much ink has been spilled discussing some of the more unsavory sides to Isaacson’s subject. Maureen Dowd and Farhad Manjoo are but two of the latest idol-smashers. So what are we to make of Steve Jobs?

His business acumen is undeniable. Enough has been said about that, so I see no need to rehash it here. Of course, it’s not quite accurate to say that Jobs was a spotless businessman who may have been slightly neurotic in his personal life. As Harold Meyerson notes,  Jobs’s Apple was just as complicit as other multi-national corporations in the exploitation of cheap foreign labor. And not only did Jobs refuse to sacrifice any of his personal fortune to charity, he also ended Apple’s corporate philanthropy program when he returned to the helm of the company in the late 1990s.

Then there was Jobs the man. It’s clear that Jobs was an incredibly narcissistic individual. Others existed primarily for his own pleasure, and the wishes of even his closest family and friends seemed to matter very little to Jobs. In her column, Dowd relates an anecdote about a shopping trip Jobs took with then-girlfriend Joan Baez. When she mentioned she couldn’t afford a dress he suggested for her, he left her hanging high and dry while stocking up on clothes for himself. Upon receiving his cancer diagnosis, Jobs ignored the desperate entreaties of his wife and children to receive traditional, rigorous cancer treatments, instead opting for unscientific New Agey remedies.  Jobs was also given to eating disorders, uncontrollable sobbing, and other bizarre behavior, like washing his feet in the office toilets.

Perhaps Jobs was such a success in the corporate world because of, not despite, his off-balance personality. In his recent book, A First-Rate Madness, Nassir Ghaemi links great leaders with mental instability. Jobs was certainly a formidable force in American business and a bit of a whacko. Whackos dare. Whackos challenge the conventional wisdom. In short, they “Think Different.”

Isaacson’s overall depiction of Jobs is a favorable one, and despite laying bare many of the businessman’s flaws, the book continues in the long tradition of exalting his visionary mind. Not everyone will see Jobs in that same light, however. In our Manichean society, we have a propensity to assign people labels of “good” and “bad.” In today’s Fox News world (which Jobs, like any semi-educated person, decried), we don’t “do” nuance. There’s nothing wrong with saying, however, that in his short life, Jobs secured his place among the greatest innovators of his age, even if he was not someone with whom we’d want to have lived.

Photo Source: Getty Images

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by | · 11:11 AM

It’s Hard Out Here for a Plutocrat

By Luke Brinker

“We are the one percent” isn’t exactly a compelling response to the Occupy Wall Street’s movement “We are the 99 percent” mantra. So many conservatives have followed the lead of right-wing blogger Eric Erickson, proclaiming “We are the 53 percent,” referring to the portion of the public that pays federal income taxes. Forty seven percent of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes because they either don’t earn enough money to qualify, or their eligibility for tax breaks cancels out what they owe. (Of course, these workers pay federal payroll taxes, in addition to taxes imposed by states and localities.) Others argue that OWS vilifies the nation’s most productive people; after all, even though they only make up one percent of the income distribution in the U.S., the top one percent paid nearly 37 percent of all federal income taxes in 2009. Critics of OWS bandy numbers like 53 and 37 to assert that OWS stands for the lazy and the moochers, not the job creators. If only President Obama and left-wing demonstrators stopped being such meanies toward the maligned rich, they’d spur a new wave of hiring, innovation, and economic recovery.

You can adopt these Fox News talking points, or you can choose to look at evidence. (Evidence, of course, is highly suspect among a political faction that denies global warming and evolution, but I digress.) The New York Times (citing a CBO study) reports today on the arrival of a New Gilded Age. The top one percent took home 23.5 percent of the nation’s income in 2007, continuing a trend that started in the deregulatory years of Reaganomics. (At the outset of the Reagan administration, the top one percent’s income share was roughly 10 percent.) The only time in recent history with such a distortion in income concentration was in 1928, when the top one percent earned 23.94 percent of the national income. It’s no coincidence that these two data points – 1928 and 2007 – occur right before the emergence of severe economic meltdowns. When a tiny elite controls so much of the national wealth, that dilutes the purchasing power of lower and middle class consumers. (Beyond a certain point, the rich merely start hoarding their cash, not spending it in the economy.) You don’t need to be a bleeding heart to see why extreme income inequality is a bad thing. Not only is it morally troubling, but it’s also a recipe for economic disaster.

Of course, wealth is more than just annual income. When it comes to net worth (one’s assets minus liabilities)and financial wealth (stocks, bonds, and the like), the figures are no less tilted toward the wealthy. Take these charts from Professor G. William Domhoff at the University of California, Santa Cruz:

Those poor plutocrats. They control 43 percent of the nation’s financial wealth, 35 percent of its net worth, nearly a quarter of its annual income, and spend much less of their money on day-to-day necessities – and they’re faced with the cruel, unfair, un-American burden of paying 36.7 percent of federal taxes.

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