alternative hippopotamus

I really have to pay more attention to McPalin. These right wing nut cases want to raise our taxes: (Steve Benen)

On the substance, Klein is exactly right. McCain’s proposal would count the healthcare benefits Americans receive from their employers as taxable income, leaving tens of millions of middle-class families paying higher taxes and leaving millions more without insurance behind.

But on the politics, I’m not sure if Klein’s observation is quite right. He finds it “amazing” the Obama campaign hasn’t pointed this out yet. But here’s the thing: the Obama campaign has pointed this out. Obama talks about it on the stump, and his team have been writing about it for quite a while.

It hasn’t generated any real interest from political reporters, though, because a) it’s substantive; b) it takes a few seconds to explain; c) there’s no provocative video to accompany the story; and d) it makes McCain look bad.

Now, I’m not objecting just to the idea of someone raising my taxes. I’m objecting to them raising taxes so they can bring more and better wars to the Middle East. Raising taxes to create a better world? That’s socialism. Raising taxes so they can bring Christianity to the infidels? Republicanism.

I really hate it when bright people say things that are just kinda dumb. I also hate to be the blogger who calls them out for it.

Since the Democratic primary the formerly progressive types have split into pro-Hillary and pro-Obama sites. This made a certain amount of sense when the primary campaign was going on, but it doesn’t now. Admittedly, most of the pro-Hillary sites have morphed since the end of the primary, and they’re more like pro-Obama (barely) with significant reservations.

On one hand, it’s tempting to say that this is the nature of a democratic republic. On the other it’s tempting to say that our system doesn’t really know how to deal with the aftermath of a bruising primary. I do recall the Hillary campaign pointing out that it’s okay for the primary to extend into June, because the Democratic party knows how to adapt to these things, even if it goes late into the primary season (or if someone gets assassinated, not that anyone would take an allusion to political assassination in a negative light). Well, I’m not so sure about that.

Lambert at CorrenteWire is such a reluctant supporter of Obama that he says things like this: (CorrenteWire)

And if it’s legitimate to vote for Obama as a blow against racism, regardless of his policies, then it’s equally legitimate to vote for Palin as a blow against sexism, regardless of her policies. And if it’s legitimate to vote for Obama because of his compelling life story, then it’s equally legitimate to vote for Palin because of her compelling life story. And if it’s legitimate to vote for Obama because he’s charismatic and gives a good speech, then it’s equally legitimate to vote for Palin because she’s charismatic and gives a good speech.

These equivalences are blatantly false. I’m quite frankly embarassed for Lambert in this case. What Obama stands for is pretty consistent with the Democratic message, what Palin stands for is consistent with the Bushies. No, tribalism doesn’t legitimize the equivalencing of the two candidates. You know, both Genghis Khan and Joan of Arc were charismatic figures, but that doesn’t mean you can somehow compare their work.

The Prince of Pudding ponders:

What I find interesting about the New Yorker cover is that it’s almost exactly the sort of cover you could expect to find on the front of National Review.

Consider that, for a moment, a work of art so PoMo that its meaning changes based on where it’s published.

In another world, it might be possible for a white guy to satirize the right-wing by dressing the first black nominee and his wife as Muslims and terrorists, and people would get the “joke.” In this world, the Jonah Goldberg’s, Fox Newsers, and Limbaugh’s will get the last laugh at the expense of the haughty intellectuals that run great bastions of progessivism like The New Yorker.

From looking at the various blogs I see the most cited reason for Clinton supporters to back Obama in the GE is potential McBush Supreme Court nominees. And, despite Sidney Blumenthal’s argument that people don’t look at McCain and see Bush, as far as Supreme Court nominees go, he’s beholden to the same coalitions that Bush is. You can predictably expect another Scalia, Alito, or god forbid, another Thomas.

My personal bete noire is everything else. Those right-wing freak show-vaudevillians that tap dance their way through the Bush administration. For instance, I was just reading about Dr. Susan Orr who recently resigned as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs: (Think Progress)

• In a 2001, Orr embraced a Bush administration proposal to “stop requiring all health insurance plans for federal employees” to cover a broad range of birth control. “We’re quite pleased, because fertility is not a disease,” said Orr.
• In a 2000 Weekly Standard article, Orr railed against requiring health insurance plans to cover contraceptives. “It’s not about choice,” said Orr. “It’s not about health care. It’s about making everyone collaborators with the culture of death.”
• Orr authored a paper in 2000 titled, “Real Women Stay Married.” In it she wrote that women should “think about focusing our eyes, not upon ourselves, but upon the families we form through marriage.”

It could just be that my elitist latte-sipping lifestyle here in the heart of The Village has lead me to the mistaken impression that birth control is part of most people’s life. How distopian do you have to be to associate birth control with a culture of death? How bleak is your general impression of your fellow human beings? I mean, the glass isn’t half empty for Dr. Orr. It’s half zombie.

Aka, Goodbye, Mr Chip-on-His-Shoulder:

I do plead guilty to this: bringing to the attention of superiors at the Justice Department the legal manipulations of ideologues in the Civil Rights Division who passed themselves off as professional civil servants while carrying water for their friends and allies in left-wing organizations like the ACLU. Had I kept silent, I would likely be in a far different position than I am today. But I did not, and those I butted heads with have their revenge.

My own hard feelings will pass. [ed: Hahahahahahahaha.] But the political system has been damaged once more by the poisonous tactics of the left, and there is no reason to think that the whole sorry spectacle will not be repeated again and again and again. So long as such tactics are accepted and even encouraged by politicians and the media, it will become harder and harder to find ordinary citizens willing to submit to the character assassination that now passes for our confirmation process.

My impression of Von Spanky is that he genuinely believes that politicizing the Justice Department is perfectly okay, ’cause the liberal justice gets balanced out by the conservative variety. As if in the Bush administration we do Republican-style justice, and in an Obama administration he can do whatever kind of justice suits his personality. Enforcing the Flag Pin Burning Amendment, for instance, not likely. But, of course he’s in favor of fewer likely Democrats voting. That’s part of his job.

I didn’t realize that Jake Tapper, late of “The Note” is back at the blogging grind. It looks like ABC wanted to open an anti-Obama, anti-Clinton bureau, and found just the hack for the job.

An excerpt, so you don’t have to read it for yourself:

In the National Journal’s annual ratings of senators’ standings on the political prism you have to hang a Left before you find Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois.

Pass Barbara Boxer…Ted Kennedy…keep going.

Pass Sheldon Whitehouse….Robert Menendez…

Keep going….

Oh, look, here’s Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described socialist…

Keep going.

Ah, at the waaaaaaay end.

Senator Obama, good to see you sir.

Somehow I picture Tapper hanging out at a bar with Jeff Gannon and Michelle Malkin, lamenting how the Democrat Party has become the party of cut and run.

I thought it would be interesting to look at two definitions for the word progressivism.

First, wikipedia:

Progressivism historically advocates the advancement of workers’ rights and social justice. The progressives were early proponents of anti-trust laws and the regulation of large corporations and monopolies, as well as government-funded environmentalism and the creation of National Parks and Wildlife Refuges.

Second, Lord Pantload:

The early progressives saw the world as a contest between ethnocultural groups and Yglesias does too. But we don’t really have to prove any arcane point of ideological resemblance in order to rebut his charge of ahistorical reductionism. My book argues that national socialism in this country, which used to be called progressivism, changed its name to liberalism after World War II. Hillary Clinton herself – the virtual embodiment (according to her supporters) of modern liberalism — rejects the liberal label and proudly proclaims her spiritual kinship with the Progressives. Does she understand what it means to link herself to a nationalistic, socialistic, eugenicist project? Do any of today’s self-proclaimed progressives?

I think someone’s been hitting the Cheetos past their bed time.

More later. I’m off to the Drinking Eugenically happy hour.

Keith Olbermann on his countdown to the “worst person in the world:”

The runner-up: right-wing lunatic fringer Jonah Goldberg who has evidently written a book about fascism without knowing what it is. Insisting in an interview that Italy‘s Benito Mussolini was actually a life-long socialist, unless fascism is a left-wing evil, quote, “the only reason he got dubbed ‘the fascist‘ and, therefore, right-winger,” Goldberg claims, “is because he supported World War I.” You don‘t think he was dubbed a fascist maybe, because on February 23, 1919, he created the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento—the Italian Fighting League? Or, that he was viewed as a right-winger because he created the Black Shirts to attack the socialists and the anarchists? Did you do any research at all?

Some questions answer themselves.

Back when I was doing a comedy show I brought in a recurring character named Pavlov Chien. The basic idea was that he was a parody of a conservative. Partly his language was drawn from Orwell’s essay on political speech, partly from a composite sketch of those who profit from the suffering of others, and partly from Jonah Goldberg. As an example of the latter when Pavlov was confronted with his idiocy he would toss off an ad hominem like: “let me know when you’re through reading poetry to your bonsai plants and we can have a real conversation.”

I was reminded of this reading this bit in Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism blog. Here, he’s responding to a query from an academic:

Finally, you make it a point of stressing that you’re not accusing liberals of being fascists; but if that’s not what you’re doing, then I suppose I don’t really understand what the point of your book is. If someone lists the points that I have in common with a serial killer, it’s not really important unless those traits lead to killing people. If Jeffrey Dahmer and I both enjoyed chocolate ice cream and preferred spy novels to period fiction, it doesn’t hold that I would share, in any way shape or form, the features that make Dahmer exceptional: being a cannibalistic murderer. To list our shared interests, then, is either to imply that I might share in his murderous tendency or to merely make a list of useless trivia. Neither seems very intellectually serious or interesting to me.

I love this criticism!

Correcting arguably the biggest and most slanderous spin of the 20th century – that fascism and national socialism are somehow related to classical liberalism — strikes me as a pretty worthwhile subject for a book.

How is it that every allegedly racist sin committed by any Republican going back 50 years is relevant to today’s politics (so says Paul Krugman et al), but the eugenic and fascistic foundation of American progressivism – and hence American liberalism – amounts to intellectually unserious and uninteresting “trivia”?

Why is it relevant? One answer might be that because people such as yourself are constantly looking in the wrong direction for the fascist peril, you won’t spot it when it arrives.

Also, you are again condoning the slander of conservatives in this formulation because you have no condemnation for liberals who use the f-word against conservatives and, like so many other liberals, you only now suddenly think it’s unfair – and trivial!!! — when the arrow is more turned in your own (and more accurate) direction.

(Though I grant I’m using you as a stand-in for others, you may have spent your days in Beirut denouncing Namoi Wolf, Christopher Hedges and the legions of other liberals who have accused today’s conservatives of being Nazis and Fascists, including Ezra Klein just last week).

You assert that Fascism is synonymous with bigotry, murder and genocide and yet you don’t offer even the slightest concession that American conservatives aren’t fascists, you just suggest that connection of liberals with fascism is “trivial” so long as I’m not calling liberals Nazis.

Meanwhile, I don’t share your definition of Fascism and never would use it in that way against liberals. But, I’m the slanderer according to so many of my critics.

Your Jeffrey Dahmer metaphor is interesting. Dahmer was a damaged person. He was raised wrong. He learned the wrong lessons. And horrible things resulted. Well, lots of people are damaged, raised wrong and taught the wrong lessons but don’t turn out to be serial killers. They just lead sad lives in one way or another, often causing serious harms that admittedly don’t rise to the level of a cannibalistic serial killer. You suggest my book is pointless because so long as liberals aren’t like Nazis, there’s nothing worth saying about them with regard to progressivism’s “elective affinity,” (historian Peter Vogt’s words) for fascist methods and philosophy. Meanwhile, I’m saying that there are still plenty of bad things that don’t rise nearly to the level of Nazism’s badness which still warrant attention and concern. You and other critics claim that you believe Nazism was the maximum evil of the 20th century, but the argument you employ actually suggests it was more like a minimum. It’s like you’re saying, so long as damaged people don’t become flesh-eating serial killers, why get worked u? As long as the problems with liberalism don’t reach the level of Nazism or the Holocaust, well, then who cares?

I do, that’s who.

It may just be my overactive imagination, but reading the above I can picture Jonah starting to growl, then bark, then saliva dripping from his mouth he reaches the peak of his crescendo: It’s like you’re saying, so long as damaged people don’t become flesh-eating serial killers, why get worked u[p]? As long as the problems with liberalism don’t reach the level of Nazism or the Holocaust, well, then who cares?

It’s this sort of response that makes Goldberg the perfect living caricature of a conservative. A normal person, if asked what the point of writing a book called “Liberal Fascism” is, would say: To make a lot of money, stupid. Or: because it makes me mad when people call me a fascist. Or: I don’t like it when liberals pass laws against stuff that I like. That, and I suppose that at some point in their careers, all wingnuts have to make their bones by writing a screed against liberals.

To add to this, there’s the very funny habit Goldberg has of defining things in such a way that all debate is moot. If we define a fascist as someone who believes in regulation reducing pollution, limiting the use of hand guns, and favoring affirmative action for those classes that have historically been discriminated against, then yes, indeed liberals are fascists.

To be clear, I don’t believe that conservatives are fascists. Though, I do believe the tendency to authoritarianism is primarily a right-wing phenomenon. And, I do find it telling that Goldberg makes such an effort to ignore authoritarianism in this discussion.