Submitted to a Candid World
Archive for July 2009
Fox News Writes its Own Controversy
Expect to be hearing about this from the tattered remains of the PUMA-sphere — according to a poll by Fox News, 32% of Americans want Palin’s next job to be “homemaker,” with Democrats especially likely to pick that response.
Salon calls sexism, but while they might be right, they’re missing the culprit. The question isn’t why Americans responded to the homemaker choice, but why it was included in the first place. The poll gave only a few principal choices for the question,”What do you think is the best job for Sarah Palin now that she has resigned as governor of Alaska?,” with these results (from the raw data):
Click to enlarge.
Context is everything, and viewed against the other options, it’s clear that “homemaker” is the only real option for those that want Palin out of politics altogether. “College professor” is, let’s face it, implausible, and “Other” is always underselected. The fact that it ranks at all in this poll just proves how poorly the entire damn thing was drafted. A more honest poll might mix in popular private-sector political alternatives, like consulting, to break down exactly how the anti-Palin crowd, like yours truly, sees her, as either a complete incompetent mess, or just someone who doesn’t belong in the spotlight, yet. But Fox wasn’t going for an accurate picture. They were trying to build a story.
The only question now is how quickly this poll gets to Glenn Beck. Maybe by next week Obama will be not just a racist, but a sexist, too!
A Belated Farewell to Battlestar: Religion, Clarity, and War
To this point, I’ve avoided writing on the series finale of Battlestar: Galactica – partially because it’s not really over yet, and partially because the subject has been done better by others. Curse you Salon! But I’d like to revisit it, oh these four months later, however briefly.
Life here began out there.
Recall that the original Battlestar series was something approximating a (re?)- fictionalization of the Book of Mormon, to the point that the home of old-Battlestar’s gods, Kobol, is a not-too-subtle anagram of the planet closest to the Mormon God, Kolob. Whatever the original show’s merits (and they are debatable), the writers approached allegory in much the same way as C.S. Lewis — by taking a mallet to the reader’s head (cf., Tolkein, who discovered “monomyth” before Campbell, but abhorred allegory).
New Battlestar (hereinafter, Battlestar) freed itself of its partial indebtedness to Mormonism, except with regards to its placenames. Indeed, its approach to religion generally is all its own, even if, in hindsight, there appears to be little material difference. The Hand of Fate is very strongly felt in the Battlestar universe, to be sure, but not until the series’ ending does it ever approximate benevolence. The colonies destruction is pre-ordained (“All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again”), humanity’s gods have abandoned it, and if the villainous Cylons owe their monotheistic God anything at all, they owe Him everything. Whenever religion functions in the colonists favor, i.e., to guide their way to Kobol and then old-Earth, it functions only to push them back into a cycle of violence that repeats over the millenia — they survive not because “God loves them,” as the ever-present “Number Six” insisted, but because their survival is part of God’s brutally amoral cosmic ballet. Humanity’s triumphs come in breaking the cycle and defying fate: “All of this has happened before…” — “but it doesn’t have to happen again,” Apollo reminds us. Man’s fate is his own.
That is, until the finale, when this reaffirmation of free will comes crashing down. In the series’ two greatest unsolved mysteries — who is Starbuck, and who is the literal voice in Baltar’s head? — God literally fills the gaps. Apparently, they’re both divine messengers. Far from being just a cheap way out, a true deus ex machina if there ever was one, these revelations deprive humanity’s struggle for survival of any real meaning. Starbuck’s quixotic quest to buck Fate, Doom, and whatever God exists in her universe all at once, by finding a habitable world for humanity, with nothing but a ship and her wits, fails utterly. Humans as a species are unequipped for both the goal and the journey, and her Grail quest ends in frustration and bloodshed, providing the cause for Battlestar’s own private little civil war. Ultimately, when Starbuck does lead humanity to its new home, it’s by divine revelation. God saved us. Our only contribution was to shake off the Cylons. And we couldn’t even do that properly.
After the “nature of fate,” the series’ second greatest metaphysical struggle was to define the role of technology, when the good so often goes hand-in-hand with the devastatingly horrific. The question is all too obviously posed by the series premise:
The Cylons were created by man. They rebelled. They evolved. They think – and feel – human. Some have been programmed to believe they are human. There are many copies. And they have a plan.
Man’s relationship with technology is not healthy, at least at the outset. But instead of learning to deal with the very real and very modern challenges of advanced, potentially dangerous science, Battlestar’s heroes, in the finale, decide to simply torpedo the whole damn thing. Given an idyllically beautiful world and a chance for a fresh start, with complete knowledge of the mistakes made and at least an inkling of how to avoid them, the Battlestar crew instead send their ships, and all their supplies and technology more advanced than tents, straight into the sun. They start over. It’s infuriatingly irresponsible to the future generations for whose benefit this step was purportedly taken. Imagine you had a fresh planet on which to rebuild humanity. Imagine solving the great problems of our day, like pollution and overpopulation, before they even existed? Galactica’s crew, somehow, found this opportunity far less than irresistible.
Rather than solving this existential struggle, then, Battlestar’s humanity essentially punts the question to the next generation, and disintegrates into the African tundra. So much for Adams’ patriotic wisdom: “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.” Because their ancestors so thoroughly dropped the ball, not only will the descendants of the colonial “exiles” have to grapple with the ethical and environmental problems that stumped their ancestors, but they’ll have to do it while re-inventing antibiotics. Best of luck!
In the end, though, how much can we complain? Even if the finale was objectionable on a moral level, it was still good TV. And, it’s just a TV show. We’re hardly bound by television characters’ mistakes, and it’s hard to take offense at the shallow worldview that the show embraced only in the last episode, when it had built such a deep, believable, and topical universe for four long seasons. But in a way, that makes the disappointment worse. Science fiction is a powerful lens to evaluate the human condition, capable of creating a philosophical distance that lets us dispassionately analyze our world, and maybe, sometimes, start to fix it. Battlestar strove for and achieved that pinnacle of the genre for a long time. Looking back on earlier seasons, though, and knowing how it ends, it’s a shame they lost the moral clarity that made the show so compelling.
The Party of Fear
The mind reels at the latest dishonest fearmongering to come out of the far right. Fox and Friends, fresh from warning the world of the dangers of miscegenation, where they sounded for all the world like the villains from a new Harry Potter book, turned their razor-sharp wit late last week to the question of the Obama administration’s planned health-care reforms, concluding thusly:
That’s right — state-subsidized health-care is the moral equivalent (or the actual equivalent?) of euthanasia.
But why? Because, apparently, under the Obama system, if you take the public option, doctors would advise you on the cost and benefit of procedures, before letting you make an informed decision about whether to undergo potentially helpful, potentially useless & expensive surgery. One wonders how this is different than or, if different, worse than the current system, where insurance companies seek to avoid paying for even lifesaving or indisputably necessary treatments on a million independent grounds, either by flat-out refusing (Pre-existing condition! Hope you never went without insurance for one hour, because if you did, it’s not covered!), or dragging their heels until the patient loses the will or the time to put up a fight. Compared to the hoops upon duplicative hoops an insurance company places in your way, a consultation that gives the patient the right to opt in or out of treatment sounds like a luxury, and a reprieve from either days upon weeks of battling with the interminable bureaucracy of modern insurance companies, or a denial of care.
Would this outrageous mischaracterization be more or less offensive if it was unique to Fox and Friends? Thankfully, that’s one question we won’t have to answer. Just ask the Washington Times, TownHall.com, American Thinker (which rolls in a lovely little “Obama’s a Muslim” opener), and Republican Senate candidate Andy Martin, all of whom are making the same baseless argument from fear, to say nothing of John Boehner, whose best argument against the government’s healthcare plan has been to build a purposefully confusing chart that both adds irrelevant factors to create the illusion of complexity (note the chart gives no information about what patients will actually experience), and conceals the true complexity of the current system.
All of this points to one conclusion: the Republican Party, whether by virtue of its base or its leaders, is physically incapable of forming an argument for or against a particular policy that, at its core, doesn’t play upon fear. Gays are destroying marriage, how is irrelevant; Iraq has WMDs, no time to stop and examine the evidence; Obama’s a “radical,” no, it doesn’t matter what that means, just repeat it; he’s going to take your guns, please overlook all statements to the contrary; the Fairness Doctrine is coming, nevermind the multiple speeches expressly disavowing it; the terrorists are after us, now’s not the time for free speech, and so on. The Republican “debate” over health care is just the most recent iteration.
Early in Obama’s presidency, Karl Rove, Bush’s now-unemployed political gun-for-hire, argued that Obama builds the Republican Party out to be something it’s not, just to scare people. Well, I suppose he would know.
Guest Post: Obama Needs to Accept His Role as Goatherd in the Health Care Debate
This guest post was submitted by a reader who wishes to be known as “Marlowe.” We thank him for his contribution.
I don’t have my own blog. I am no policy wonk. I am just a working stiff with a family, and I happen to read this blog during lunch. But I am worried: worried about the direction of the debate regarding health care reform. As congress debates, and the details of more proposals come out, we are getting further and further away from the complete overhaul the system needs. I am sure you all are bored of hearing the numbers over and over, for instance, how the amount we spend on health care is much larger than other developed nations for no better results
and that costs are rising faster than inflation, etc., etc.
Sure, Obama has given us broad — and admirable — goals for what he wants from health care reform.
In his press conference last week we learned he wants a plan that
- allows any American currently insured to ”keep what you have”
- provides an insurance exchange
- won’t add to the deficit
- must control cost growth in the future
- will eliminate waste and inefficiency in Medicare
I hope that the press conference, and subsequent town hall meetings, signal additional involvement from the president on the issue, but the president’s own website doesn’t make me optimistic by simply echoing the main (nonspecific) points from the press conference.
Healthreform.gov gives us some reports on what is wrong with the current system and a couple of “success stor(ies) in American health care”: one about heart disease and stroke screening in Nebraska and one about preventing medical errors from Michigan. Excellent programs to be sure. But surely these bright spots are not a road map for an overhaul of the whole system. And while publicly praising places that have developed new models for health care like the Cleveland and Mayo Clinics, we continue to be without proposals from the Obama administration for how to adopt their systems to the entire nation.
I am not the only one feeling frustrated with Obama’s silence:
It would help, lawmakers are saying more frequently in private, if the President would be clearer about how he wants to fix the problem. His strategy of keeping his distance from the legislative machinery while only saying that any final product must meet certain broad principles means that Representatives and Senators have no clue as to what kind of bill he would accept in the end – and what they should be trying to sell to their constituents.
And on Tuesday morning I read in the New York Times that “the fate of the health care overhaul largely rests on the shoulders of six senators” and that “ the group of six has tossed aside the idea of a government-run insurance plan.” While the CBO hasn’t weighed in on the Baucus group’s proposals, the verdict on the other congressional proposals is not good as “bills crafted by House leaders and the Senate health committee do not propose ,the sort of fundamental changes, necessary to rein in the skyrocketing cost of government health programs.”
If Obama has some specifics in order to accomplish his many goals — including that of universal coverage — we need to see them before these various Congressional proposals become entrenched and we end up with a bill that does little to fix the problem, or — worse — fixes nothing at all. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Maybe once in a lifetime.
Obama needs to seize control of the debate. Congress has had plenty of time to group think on its own. Now is the time for Obama to send a nearly complete bill to Congress. Presidents writing legislation and sending it directly to congress is not uncommon for significant and/or controversial legislation. Now, even more than in the past, it is one of the only ways to ensure that the White House’s priorities are reflected in the bill.
Kennedy wrote the Civil Rights Act.
Bush wrote the PATRIOT ACT.
Hell, Lincoln freed the slaves by executive order.
And while he is being more aggressive, how about getting out in front of the torture issue? We need a full accounting of what happened in the Bush Administration (and earlier) so that it doesn’t happen again. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Have a suggestion for a new guest post, to fill this bar exam week? E-mail submissionstoacandidworld@gmail.com.
Glenn Beck Calls Obama a “Racist”; Gets Called on It; and Completely Loses his Cool, in That Order
These are the undisputed facts. Beck, earlier today:
Beck, sensing the coming storm:
Boy oh boy, I guess having an opinion on POTUS is a very bad thing. Today called O a ‘racist’. Media and WH in uproar. Will address on Radio
Oooh, I bet it involves “persecution,” in the form of being criticized when you say something crazy!
Twitter, later the same day (a sampling):
@glennbeck Please be sure to cry tomorrow when you explain your position. Oh how I love it when you cry you sensitive man you. (l)
Check out @glennbeck‘s latest all-caps tweet. Could tomorrow be the day that Milton finally sets the building on fire? (l)
@glennbeck Will hear your explanation tomorrow: A Mormon is going to brand our first Black president a racist: What a historical irony (l)
@glennbeck “He has a deep seated hatred for white people or the white culture” mmm-White Culture?? You sound like a White Supremacist (l)
Ouch. The last two are a little below the belt, admittedly. Let’s see how he handles them.
Predictable. I told you many things this week that no one else is willing to say.This was the least damning to them.FIND YOUR VOICE & Stand (l)
Many emails and tweets. I MAKE MY CASE AND YOU DECIDE TOMORROW ON RADIO FIRST THING TOMORROW AM (l)
Thinking that you’re the only person out there willing to “tell it like it is,” and that everyone’s coming to get you, is a textbook case of delusions of grandeur. The violent screaming, echoed in the regular all-caps “tweets,” only makes it better. Why does this man still have a microphone?
Guest Post: the “Moderate” Label
Thanks to Mike at The Big Stick for providing this guest post! Frequent readers will know Mike as a conservative with whom we here often agree, but who also provides a very intelligent and quick opposition voice. That is to say, we don’t always agree on everything. But, the GOP could benefit from rebuilding itself around Mike’s perspective, and, without further ado, this note on political “branding”:
Erin over at Beliefnet had an interesting question awhile back that I never got around to discussing. She asks, “What exactly is a moderate?”
What does it mean to be a “moderate” in terms of either political party today?
I think that for a Republican, “moderate” pretty much does equal, “liberal on social issues,” which means that they’re in favor of abortion, opposed to abstinence education on principle, in favor of gay marriage or, if not quite there, willing to champion gay civil unions, and inclined to think that the “culture war” issues are a waste of time. But it’s more than that–I think Republican moderates are also more concerned about the environment, more willing to propose big-government solutions to certain problems, and less concerned about how Wall Street is doing than more conservative Republicans are; they are also willing to join with Democrats to vote against their own party on as many occasions as seem necessary to them.
I would say I’m basically in agreement with Erin on that definition. In much the same way that liberals began to use the term ‘progressive’ as a codeword when ‘liberal’ became a political slur, I think a lot of socially-liberal Republicans, equally fearful of the L word, adopted moderate as a vaguely descriptive modifier. I’ve gone on record many times as being adamantly opposed to this for the primary reason that when they call themselves ‘moderate’ the implication is that anyone to the right of them is extreme. As one example, it is unfair to characterize the pro-life position of most Republicans as extreme when it is quite mainstream.
Just like ‘progressive’ only seems to exist on one side of the aisle these days, it appears ‘moderate’ is primarily only applied to certain Republicans and rarely a Democrat. Erin asks the same question:
Now, here’s where it gets tricky, because you’d think that by those criteria a “moderate” Democrat would be a pro-life social issues person who is fiscally more conservative than the rest of his party, and thus willing to vote on the Republican side of these issues–that “moderate” would mean a bit more to the center compared to each party’s natural orientation (Republicans toward the right, Democrats toward the left). But that’s not how it usually works, is it?
It’s not, for instance, that there aren’t pro-life Democrats, but they’re hardly looked at as the “moderate” wing of the party most of the time. It’s as though supporting Roe v. Wade/Doe v. Bolton is, for either party, a litmus test of one’s “moderate” status, despite the fact that many Americans, even those who are pro-choice, would limit abortion more than those two court decisions allow [snip]… The same is true about the other social issues; “moderate” doesn’t mean a willingness to examine one’s own party’s stance on any of them, or even to reflect public opinion, but an automatic toeing of a line that keeps being redrawn (e.g., where it was once “moderate” to be mildly in favor of civil unions for gay couples, it will soon be the case that the “moderate” position will be defined as the willingness to work for gay marriage laws to pass, etc.).
The same’s true on the fiscal issues: a “moderate” Democrat is someone who pretty much accepts the Democratic Party’s views on them all, though I know there are occasional exceptions. It’s as though we’ve redefined “moderate” to mean “a Democrat (except for a handful of far-left types), and those Republicans who agree with them,” which isn’t really much of a definition at all.
I also think it’s important to note that ‘moderate’ is often substituted for ‘Centrism’ when referring to certain politicians. That’s unfortunate because Centrism may be the most reprehensible of the political dynamics because as Daniel Larisonsays, it often just represents a rough triangulation between existing positions. I often refer to self-described Centrists as having a ‘compromise fetish’. Often in politics there is nothing inherently wrong with conviction on either side of the aisle. Sometimes liberal ideals are worth fighting for and sometimes the same is true for conservative policies. Compromise by default is a watering down and a retreat from first principles.
Again, I agree with Erin. ‘Moderate Democrat’ is a term we rarely use anymore. If you’re inclined to vote with the GOP on some issues or maintain a traditionally conservative stance, then you’re a ‘Blue Dog Democrat’ which means you will get almost as much scorn from the Left as Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe do from the Right. So why the difference in terminologies? This is a branding success for Democrats that should not be under-estimated. If you are a Republican that votes with Democrats then you are a ‘moderate’ i.e. less extreme. If you are a Democrat that votes with Republicans sometimes then you are a Blue Dog which seems to mean unreliable and a candidate for primary challenges.
Ultimately, labels do matter and they do play a big role in our perception of politicians. What would be ideal is if we could move away from this towards defining issues rather than people. Therefore if you’re a Democrat people won’t automatically assume you’re a gun-grabber, or if you’re a Republican people won’t automatically assume you support capital punishment. If people were more inclined to identify their positions versus their whole selves, just think how likely we would be to see a series of revolving coalitions built around issues, versus your voter registration. Unfortunately the likelihood of that happening in the US political system is very slim. Labeling people benefits politicians the most so there is little incentive for them to move away from that.
Mike blogs regularly at The Big Stick, which recently rebuilt a focus around urban planning, development, and the urban/rural divide. Have a suggestion for a new guest post, to fill this bar exam week? E-mail submissionstoacandidworld@gmail.com.
Good Luck to NY Bar Exam Students!
Today is the first day of the New York state bar exam, where future commercial litigators, appellate advocates, politicians, academics, and deal makers have to pretend to care about trusts, wills, the Rule Against Perpetuities, and divorce, while memorizing motion deadlines that any practitioner could easily look up, if they ever cared. The horror.
Good luck to all, and remember: it is a good day to die! Q’apla!
Basic Media Responsibility
Thank you, heroic co-blogger, for your kind words! I’d also like to point out, that by merely graduating from an ABA accredited law school, I’m already more of a lawyer than Orly Taitz will ever be. Amazing!
Let’s set aside that embarassment to the human race, and turn to another. The last week has seen a palpable “mainstreaming” of the “birthers,” as Lou Dobbs and other formerly sensible, if hopelessly flawed Republicans embraced the scurrilous myth that Barack Obama — the duly elected President of the United States – was somehow born in a foreign country.
For shame. Those shills continuing to boost the birth certificate non-issue are insults to the collective American intelligence, and those in the media who even give the issue airtime should be drummed out of their profession. Have we fallen so far that our media must now resort to a racist lie, packaged in quasi-treasonous deception? Where, on any side, are television’s investigative reporters unblemished by their colleagues’ sins? Fox has Hannity peddling this fraud, of course, but this we expect: but CNN, too? The active goal of any reporter in the modern era ought to be to raise the level of discourse in American politics, by informing viewers and cutting short the cursory blowhards that democratic politics so often inspires. Instead, the media has seemingly outpaced the political class in the race to the bottom. Does this generation, so desperately in need of one, even have an Edward R. Murrow?
A great nation requires a great people, which in turn requires a media with more than a basic level of competence, and a decent respect for their role in the electoral process. Something is fundamentally flawed with an incentive structure that put Lou Dobbs, Glenn Becks, and – to a lesser extent – even your Olbermanns so much as near a microphone.
Mark my words: if this media failure goes unrepented, we shall regret it. To be sure, the GOP has a problem with its base — but it doesn’t have to become our problem.
I make one exception to my condemnation of this week’s media. One limited exception:
Not Chris Matthews generally, but this clip’s Chris Matthews, specifically. Well done.
“Call Me: Orly Taitz … Your One-Stop Shop for All Things Tooth, Legal, and Shelter Related”
As loyal readers … or anyone who happened to see Monday afternoon’s post knows, our fearless leader is feverishly preparing himself for a two-day stint in Chelsea next week, where he will dazzle and amaze the New York State Board of Law Examiners with a singularly brilliant performance on his bar examination.
I am sure you all will eagerly join me in wishing him both a good breakfast and timely subway ride on each testing day as I am equally certain you will enjoy this clip from Wednesday’s Daily Show, wherein none other than Orly Taitz (arguably ACG’s favorite modern marvel) receives no short shrift from John Stewart. The whole clip is a hoot and a fitting tribute to ACG, but at the very least, you must experience Ms. Taitz … and her eyelashes (beginning 2:34). Do it for comedy. Do it for ACG. Do it for Y-O-U.
