Rhetorical Excess

Maybe the guy believes what he's saying. God knows Congress is filled with an impressive amount of stupidity and delusion. Still, at some point you have to wonder: when does it become self-defeating to say such outrageous things? It's one thing to lie and deceive -- pretty much the stock in trade of the right wing of late -- and to assume the heretofore limitless gullibilty of voters. It's another to say things that will certainly be found by voters, eventually, to be false. You'd think, therefore, that rhetoric like this, when it was clear the bill would pass, and that even people inclined to believe such trash will eventually find out how far off the mark it is, would not be the order of the day during the final "debate."

From now until the November elections, Republicans will try to convince the public that their obstructionism was a worthy effort; that trying to fix health care was a misadventure by the Democrats. Surely there are better arguments than this guy is floating. (Floating in this sense, I'd say.) Meanwhile, it'll be up to Democrats to convince them otherwise.

You'd think it wouldn't be hard. Nearly everyone agrees (or, in the case of Republicans, gives lip service to the idea) that health care needs fixing. That it's clear the Democrats have made a serious effort and that the Republicans did nothing but try to stop it, ought to be convincing to a majority of voters. On the other hand, the Republicans are nothing (and by "nothing," I mean "nothing else") if not brilliant at message control. As they've made clear since Barack Obama laid hand on Bible (Bible? I heard it was the Koran!), the Rs and their echo machine on Fox "news" and all of the RWS™ are perfectly willing to shed all connection to fact, to prevaricate in quantity, to swing voters their way. Perhaps they're hoping it'll be after November that the lies will become self-evident; and that since they're only about regaining power for its own sake, the end justifies the means. When people find out, they figure, the Rs will have executed their coup and the truth is moot.

But at least one very staunch conservative, defender of all things George Bush, is worried, and quite candid:

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994...

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law...

...We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

(Kinda puts the lie to the RWS™ claim that the failure of bipartisanship was Obama's fault, doesn't it? On the other hand, that claim was patently false from the beginning, despite its unrelenting ubiquity on the Foxified airwaves.)

So it'll be interesting: one side has all the facts but is incompetent in using them, while the other has none, but has no scruples, as we see in that video clip, in what they'll say to overcome that little handicap. It'll boil down to this: is that portion of the public currently in the thrall of the RWS™ and Fox "news" ever going to wake up and see what's in front of their faces, to throw off the hackles of disinformation and remember what it's like to think for themselves? Or, despite all the coming evidence, will teabaggers continue to rage against themselves, and will the media continue to ignore their role in a functioning democracy?

I'm not taking any bets.

[Added] In the meantime, I hope we'll be seeing more of this as the year wears on:

Transparency

One of many themes of the Party of No is that the process of health care reform (and of the economic recovery act, too) was not transparent. Allow me a contrary view: the problem is it was TOO transparent.

For the first time that I remember, we've been privy to the messiness of legislation: the give and take, the wheels, the deals. Compromise in all its glorious ugliness. So people got excited. They got schooled. They got pissed.

They had to confront the platitudes and plaster them with practicality. They had to answer the most basic of American questions: do you believe in democracy, or not? Turns out, for lots of people, the answer is no. Hell no.

In Congress (to coin a phrase) it would seem the entire Republican party is on the "no" side. Among Democrats, so are several -- but, by contrast, far from all -- members, including (until the day I'm writing this, reportedly) Bart Stupak.* Among the teabaggers, without question, there isn't a democracy believer among them, not a one. Likewise, it must be said, among some on the far left.

Democracy and compromise are joined like Chang and Eng. It's only in the kind of government that the wingnuts claim to abhor that a person can get 100% of what he or she wants, and that's only if that person is the dictator.

I don't like that the health care bill is based on private insurance, allowing the same huge amounts of money to be sucked out of the system and distributed to investors and CEOs. I'd prefer, at minimum, a "public option." Similarly, I didn't like that the stimulus bill spent forty percent of its money on tax cuts. I wish -- but I don't expect -- that all legislation were perfectly to my liking. But that's simply not the way it works. In democracies, it can't work that way. Until the Obama presidency, lots of people were able to ignore that fact. Our problem is that reality has set in. And those same people can't handle it. Given the legacy of Ronald Reagan, namely that we can have everything we want and not have to pay for it (and that government is not supposed to work), it's not surprising that most of those people are on the right side of the political spectrum. But it isn't helpful.

Despite the elimination of the public option, despite taking single-payer off the table, despite giving central stage to private insurers, the right say they were ignored. "Left out of the process" as a commenter likes to say. Bullshit on its face: the bill is so centrist that it mirrors prior Republican proposals, and has lost the support of many liberals because of it. The stimulus bill was smaller and built much more on tax breaks than liberals wanted. No matter. Not a vote for either by Republicans, and no support by their loudmouths. In a democracy, among people who believe in, uh, democracy, that simply should not be the case. Yet here we are. And there we go.

The process has been more than transparent. It's made the right wing face something they hadn't heretofore acknowledged: they neither understand nor approve of the most fundamental idea of democracy: compromise. The process was so see-through that it become obvious.

As the right wingers take us further and further toward deliberate diseducation, and away from actual understanding of the real meaning of our form of government, the future looks worse and worse. If everyone listened more to the Stones, we'd be a hell of a lot better off.

____________________________________

* Seems official. So unlike all the Rs, one of the most intransigent Ds was willing to accept some degree of compromise. Sorta proves my point, doesn't it?

Sing, Choir Of Angels!

Profound questions, humorously posed. It's Sunday.

Tell Me Again

These people are just regular Americans loving their country.

Imagine That!

Gee. Seems the House will be voting straight up on the Senate HCR bill, eschewing "deem and pass." Time for The Party of No to go back to calling it socialism.

Okay, they just did.

As we've seen, the teabagging among us haven't a clue. Socialism? In what way? In fact, the bill is so far from socialism that it's likely to be a stopgap at best, on the way to single payer, which, as I've argued, is the only way we'll ever really solve our health care crisis. In my mind, the only question is whether we'll get around to it in time to save ourselves.

Socialism? I wish.

It doesn't matter. People will believe what they need (I wish I knew why), damn the facts.

Prediction: since, as far as I can tell, there aren't very strong controls on costs of health care in the bill, and since the ones that are there don't kick in right away, premiums will likely rise. Not because of the bill; in spite of it. But you can be sure people will point to any increases and blame them on Obama. Which will be funny in at least a couple of ways: premiums have been rising regularly, at enormous rates, for years. And if they keep doing so, won't that sort of, you know, disprove the idea that it's socialized medicine?

File Under.... "Duh"

In comments on this blog, one of the more constant supporters of the teabaggers frequently admits to not really knowing much about politics. Turns out, it's a perfect match. To the surprise of no one who has ever read a sign those angry and uninformed so proudly wave, or has seen an interview of any of those frothy fumers, it's an obvious inference: for people full of rage and certitude, they sure don't know much. Here's an article with proof (you might have to click past an annoying "welcome page"). The author was an economist for Ronald Reagan:

In short, no matter how one slices the data, the Tea Party crowd appears to believe that federal taxes are very considerably higher than they actually are, whether referring to total taxes as a share of GDP or in terms of the taxes paid by a typical family.

Tea Partyers also seem to have a very distorted view of the direction of federal taxes. They were asked whether they are higher, lower or the same as when Barack Obama was inaugurated last year. More than two-thirds thought that taxes are higher today, and only 4% thought they were lower; the rest said they are the same.

As noted earlier, federal taxes are very considerably lower by every measure since Obama became president. And given the economic circumstances, it's hard to imagine that a tax increase would have been enacted last year. In fact, 40% of Obama's stimulus package involved tax cuts. These include the Making Work Pay Credit, which reduces federal taxes for all taxpayers with incomes below $75,000 by between $400 and $800...

...Whatever the future of the Tea Party movement in American politics, it's a bad idea for so many participants to operate on the basis of false notions about the burden of federal taxation. It only takes a little bit of time to look at one's tax return to see what one is actually paying the Treasury, calculate the percentage of one's income that goes to taxes, and compare it with what was paid last year and the year before. People may then discover that their anger is misplaced and channel it into areas where it is more likely to bring about positive change.

Yeah. Like that'll happen. Still, the article deserves a full read.

How truly sad it is that such a large part of the national conversation is being dominated by the ill-informed. How destructive. How dispiriting to know that the Republican ideal of controlling education in order to produce dumbed-down sheep is so effective. How easy it is, as we see every day, to stir up rabble with lies. Such a simple formula: ridicule education as "elitist;" remove science and all ability to judge facts from education, preferably in the name of god; make up stuff; get an entire media outlet to repeat constantly; stir vigorously; drink deeply.

Brilliant. Effective. And it's killing us.

[Addendum: Need more proof? Want to see people who have no idea what they're talking about? Here they are, in all their glory:]

Scum/Scam

To be honest (and why not? It's Friday. The Sabbath approacheth.) I've never heard of Debbie Schlussel. Evidently, she's well-known among the right-wing, as a conservative pundit of some repute. And, apparently, some repugnance as well. Pretty, though. And the name has possibilities.

So it's interesting that she's just called Sean Hannity a fraud. Certainly, I've known him as a self-important and remarkably dumb guy, whose dishonesty about fact knows no bounds. At one time, I wondered what his presence on Fox "news" said about that network. (Long since, it became very obvious.) Anyhow, the lady reports:

For the last several years, Sean Hannity and the Freedom Alliance “charity” have conducted “Freedom Concerts” across America. They’ve told you that they are raising money to pay for the college tuition of the children of fallen soldiers and to pay severely wounded war vets. And on Friday Night, Hannity will be honored with an award for this “Outstanding Community Service by a Radio Talk Show Host” at Talkers Magazine’s convention.

But it’s all a huge scam.

In fact, less than 20%–and in two recent years, less than 7% and 4%, respectively–of the money raised by Freedom Alliance went to these causes, while millions of dollars went to expenses, including consultants and apparently to ferry the Hannity posse of family and friends in high style. And, despite Hannity’s statements to the contrary on his nationally syndicated radio show, few of the children of fallen soldiers got more than $1,000-$2,000, with apparently none getting more than $6,000, while Freedom Alliance appears to have spent tens of thousands of dollars for private planes.

There's lots more at the above link, with impressive detail. She reports. You decide.

[From another blog, one can discern early reaction from right-wingers: "TheNextRight’s blogger RBIII tweets at 9:38 AM.

Apparently, allegations about Hannity are more important than that shredding of the Constitution if you’re a ‘Progressive.’

Perfect. Sounds just like the commenters here.]

[Update: here's a response from Freedom Alliance.]

[And now there's an update on the original post to which I linked. She ain't backing down.]

Hardball, Softball

Other than the bizarre amount of interrupting, it was a tough interview of Obama, but I thought the questions were legit. The interview with Bush? Well, he didn't suck his toes like his fellow Foxface.

Can anyone imagine anyone at Fox "news" coming on that strong to Bush? Or Cheney? Or any member of that party for which they are puppets? Me neither.

Nasty

Let's recognize something undeniable. Whatever else is true, these are not nice people.

Follow this video to the 50" mark, and then marvel.

Read this list.

In the same way that right-wing Texans have adopted government control of information, which characterize the dictatorships they claim to hate, so the RWS™ and their lemmings have come to embody that very thing against which they constantly rail: EVIL.

Acid Test

In the blizzard of climate prevarication we've had to endure this winter, because, you know, it still gets cold in January, some important points get lost. It's not just about temperature! That stuff we spew into the atmosphere does damage in many ways.

When we humans burn fossil fuels, we pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where the gas traps heat. But much of that carbon dioxide does not stay in the air. Instead, it gets sucked into the oceans. If not for the oceans, climate scientists believe that the planet would be much warmer than it is today. Even with the oceans’ massive uptake of CO2, the past decade was still the warmest since modern record-keeping began. But storing carbon dioxide in the oceans may come at a steep cost: It changes the chemistry of seawater....

....But there’s a crucial difference between the Earth 100 million years ago and today. Back then, carbon dioxide concentrations changed very slowly over millions of years. Those slow changes triggered other slow changes in the Earth’s chemistry. For example, as the planet warmed from more carbon dioxide, the increased rainfall carried more minerals from the mountains into the ocean, where they could alter the chemistry of the sea water. Even at low pH, the ocean contains enough dissolved calcium carbonate for corals and other species to survive.

Today, however, we are flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide at a rate rarely seen in the history of our planet. The planet’s weathering feedbacks won’t be able to compensate for the sudden drop in pH for hundreds of thousands of years.

There's more. As permafrost melts, and as the ocean changes, we get methane. Lots of methane.

In the past few days (the paper is from a couple of years ago, Sid interjects), the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.

Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.

That's why every time the idiots at Fox "news" ran outside this winter, saying "it's snowing, it's snowing," like kids looking for their galoshes, the national brain lost another quantum of gray matter; and we got still closer to disaster of our own making, happy to be relieved of responsibility, drinking from the punchbowl while ignoring what we've put in it

Call It What It Is

The thing that knows no bounds. Congressional Rs, the RWS™, and all those that believe them are in an uproar over the possible use of a legislative technique called "self-executing" something or other. It's unconstitutional, they roar. Except when THEY used it themselves (35 times), and the Ds claimed it was unconstitutional, it went to court. And was found constitutional. Of course, there's also the fact that anger is easy; understanding is hard.

I'm not saying hypocrisy is the domain of a single party. It's just that the Rs do things they decried in the past with a level of abandon never before seen, rousing their receptive rabble, ignoring their own past without an iota of shame. Counting on the willful ignorance of their followers, they know they'll get away with it. As can easily be confirmed in the darkest recesses of comment threads even here, there's no chance their true believers will recall (or even check) what happened in that dim past... of the last administration. With the impunity that springs from the support of the unquestioning, they prevaricate with the passion of the possessed.

By hypocrisy.

At least when Nancy Pelosi lies, she blinks a lot.

USA!! USA!! USA!!

Some there are who -- depending where their heads are on the timeline of inevitability -- either fear or rue the fall of the US from world dominance. Me, I don't much care about global rankings; but I DO care about the reasons for the decline. It's one thing to get edged out in a hard-fought and keenly met fight; sooner or later tides turn. It's quite another to have deliberately stabbed oneself in the brain. (Nor is the aforementioned reference singular: Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are the evident leaders of a movement based on deriding intellect, rejecting fact, and literally honoring its own ignorance. And, based on surveys, who can doubt they're riding a wave?)

So I was pleased to read this article (thanks for sending it, JB) in which I learned that there's at least one American still striving to be number one:

Donna Simpson, from New Jersey, weighs 273kg but told the Daily Mail newspaper she had her heart set on reaching her goal weight of 1000lb (450kg) in two years.

The 42-year-old already holds the title of the world's fattest mother after giving birth to her daughter in 2007 when she weighed 241kg.

"I'd love to be 1000lb ... it might be hard though, running after my daughter keeps my weight down," Ms Simpson told the Daily Mail.

In the article, there are several interesting details:

Her 49-year-old partner Philippe — who she met on a dating site for plus-size people — was encouraging her to reach her goal, she said.

"I think he'd like it if I was bigger ... he's a real belly man and completely supports me," she said......In order to pay for the enormous amounts of food she is eating — her weekly grocery bill is $815 — Ms Simpson makes money by running a website where men pay to watch her consume fast food.

Really, it's an all-American story, full of family values: she has loving support, and she's self-employed. And who knew there were "belly" men? (Well, maybe I am, too, if by "belly" this is what you mean. Just enough sweet softness over the recti to make it a touchable two-pack.... um... I digress... Sorry....)

The lady is an inspiration. I may have to get a web-cam. Let me know what you'd pay to watch me do.

So, you go, girl. Take our country over the top. We're right there with you (as long as you don't end up in our particular insurance pool, and as long as we're not playing teeter-totter.)

Idiocracy

Like a lot of liberals I'm not thrilled with the Senate health care reform bill. There's much to criticize. But whatever it is, it is mostly certainly NOT socialism; in fact, my problem with it is that it's too much of a giveaway to the capitalist for-profit money-takers-from-actual-care that we know as insurance companies.

So, whereas it's fine to hear criticism, and even to lump it under a meaningless term like "Obamacare," it's beyond disheartening to think that the loudest voices out there, the ones behind the protests and the deceptive attempts to derail reform (as in insurers taking over movements to preserve their money, and the RNC surreptitiously taking over movements to preserve or return to power) have no f*cking idea what they're talking about. And that they listen to morons like Steven King. (No, not that one.)

I've yet to hear any of these paranoid lunatics even asked -- much less made to answer -- exactly what freedoms have been taken away in the last 15 months. Nor has anyone been forced to explain in what way any of the Obama initiatives are leading us toward socialism. As banks pay back their loans, as car companies head back to solvency and return to independence.

So there they are today, in DC, those righteous protesters, filled with anger and certitude and disinformation swallowed whole, taking cluelessness to unseen levels, making self-destruction an art form. Taking a page from the movie and sticking it in their own ear: I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to understand it anymore!

I do have a question, though, which I hope someone can answer: is this lady a protester of the tea-baggers, or can't she read, or is she simply bereft of irony?

Fareed At Last, Fareed At Last

I've always admired Fareed Zakaria: he's obviously bright, and is extremely knowledgeable about foreign policy. Whereas he seems generally an admirer of President Obama for his thoughtful approach to foreign affairs, I think he's also open-eyed, circumspect, and honest. So I find this article heartening. And, as usual, my reaction is based entirely on the fact that it says something I've been saying for a while: Pakistan seems much more on board with us since Obama came to office. That's a very good thing, and one for which the current administration deserves significant credit.

First, the Obama administration de-fined the problem correctly. Senior ad-ministration officials stopped referring to America's efforts in Afghanistan and instead spoke constantly of "AfPak," to emphasize the notion that success in Afghanistan depended on actions taken in Pakistan. This dismayed the Pakistanis but they got the message. They were on notice to show they were part of the solution, not the problem.

Second, the administration used both sticks and carrots. For his first state dinner, Obama pointedly invited Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—clearly not Pakistan's first choice. Obama made clear that America would continue to pursue the special relationship forged with India under the Bush administration, including a far-reaching deal on nuclear cooperation. But at the same time, the White House insisted it wanted a deep, long-term, and positive relationship with Pakistan. Sens. John Kerry and Dick Lugar put together the largest nonmilitary package of U.S. assistance for the country ever. Aid to the Pakistani military is also growing rapidly...

There are caveats:

These results are still tentative. Pakistan's military retains its obsession with India—how else to justify a vast budget in a small, poor nation? It has still not acted seriously against any of the major militant groups active against Afghanistan, India, or the United States. The Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani group, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and many smaller groups all operate with impunity within Pakistan. But the Pakistani military is doing more than it has before, and that counts as success in the world of foreign policy.

The Af-Pak region has defied outside influence forever, and it remains extremely fractionated and tribal. Still, it seems a ray of hope: a much-needed and long-awaited one.

Enemy Mine

Psychological research is fuzzier than most. Exes and ohs are less rigid, numbers not easily applicable. Still, it often produces ideas worth chewing. Here's an example which, happily, comports with a central belief of mine:

A research team led by social psychologist Daniel Sullivan of the University of Kansas reports on four studies that suggest people are “motivated to create and/or perpetually maintain clear enemies to avoid psychological confrontations with an even more threatening chaotic environment.” When you place their findings in the context of the many threats (economic and otherwise) people face in today’s world, the propensity to turn ideological opponents into mighty monsters starts to make sense.

Of course I'd like to think that it doesn't apply to me: my warnings about the RWS™ are accurate, whereas their railings about Obama, as well as those of the tea bagging conspiracy theorists, are insane. Rather than giving me comfort, rather than helping me avoid angst, my feelings about those guys are deeply disturbing. Still, it's possible it's a human thing.

Deliberately or not, governments often seem to understand the need for scary enemies. Traveling in the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, I concluded as much as I observed the ubiquitous demonization of the US. (In that case, I intuited that it was because their socialist paradise was a delusion, and the only way to make it -- and its people -- work was to create an existential enemy.) In the disproportionate reaction to terrorism coming from the right side of our own political spectrum, I hear echoes. It's not unlike the response to communism a few decades ago. Diverting attention and energies from power-grabs and oppression, cranking up a perpetual enemy works wonders. Right, Dick?

I wish we had the ability to see ourselves in terms of our frailties and failings. I wish we could get a little more meta, and recognize how our fears and needs enter into, distort, and color our beliefs. If so, might we rise above, at least a little, the hyperpartisanship that is destroying us? Might we see what we are doing to ourselves in giving a platform to, and following, such damaged souls as Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly? Could we understand the unworthy -- if human -- need behind it?

Well, people might say, I'm demonizing those guys as much as they demonize me. I'm just proving the point of the study at the center of this post. Am I, though? Is it all of a piece? Is there no difference between my point of view and that of Glenn Beck? Do people who think like I do have the same blinders as those who revere Glenn? Is paranoia the same as pointing out reality? I don't think so. He's crazy. I'm not.

But maybe I'm not meta enough.