Filed under: Author - ACG,Politics | Tags: Fundamentalism, Political rhetoric, Political symbols, Republican Party, Sarah Palin
Politico can’t stop fawning over a new Sarah Palin web ad.
It was a remarkable display of force—and one that almost no one else in American political life can replicate. [. . .]
But in recent months, by lending her support to a group of successful female Republican candidates, the former Alaska governor has established herself as a GOP political queenmaker. And with Thursday’s video, she moved to cement her image as the country’s leader of conservative women, leading a stampede of “pink elephants.”
It’s almost unseemly. We do realize that a staffer just compiled parts of a few speeches into a 2-minute YouTube video, right? That the ad is a jumble of animal metaphors, and a rehash of culture war tropes, with no actual policy ideas? That, a day later, it’s still under 300,000 page views? And that her meager accomplishments are otherwise unchanged?
The ad actually might be remarkable for its use of one phrase. Note these two quotes, early in the script:
…this fundamental transformation of America… [. . .]
Women, who are very concerned about their kids’ future, saying, ‘We don’t like this fundamental transformation and we’re gonna do something about it.’
Even given Palin’s hitherto underwhelming campaign staff, the centrality of this phrasing, and its repetition, can’t be a mistake. A lot of the conservative movement’s rhetoric rests on “code words,” most often references to broad concepts that in fact imply narrow policy positions, but seek to frame them in valence issue-terms. “Pro-family” means “anti-gay”; “pro-life” means “anti-abortion rights”; valorization of the “traditional family” imports a disapproval of feminism, in all its forms; and attacks on “activist judges” imply disapproval of a set of Supreme Court decisions based on process, when it’s really, still, all about on politics.
What’s a “fundamental change,” then? Well, it’s meant to recall a simpler time, make you think that, now, the world’s spinning out of control, and imply that the change came with Obama’s election. More specifically, from the corresponding images, it’s about healthcare reform — or, Palin’s comic demonization of healthcare reform, as the moment when Obama socialized your fascism, or what have you.
Most basically, it’s a way of turning Obama’s “change” rhetoric against itself, and making you think that standing still is the way to solve our country’s problems — problems that, she hopes, you’ll forget originated with her Party, and its stunning mismanagement of everything it touched.
Will it work? Well, maybe. Mama Grizzlies may know when something’s wrong, but Palin’s counting on them not being able to figure out what’s wrong.
In another one of those little moments that shows just how far from orthodoxy the minority GOP has fallen, the Republican House caucus threatens, plausibly, to vote against a bill funding America’s continued presence in Afghanistan, unless the administration excises non-defense spending (“socialism”).
Lest we forget, Democrats, too, have used defense bills as battlegrounds for larger economic issues: Senate Democrats nearly canned a Bush administration-backed $87 billion war spending bill in favor of an identical bill, to be funded by reversing Bush’s most irresponsible upper-class redistributive tax cuts, but fell just short.
And we payed for it. The distinction between voting against a funding mechanism and voting against the funding itself is tough to draw for a bored public, and eminently spinnable. One such fight functionally ended Senator Kerry (D-MA)’s run in 2004. It’s the stuff Republican dreams are made of: a chance to oversimplify a debate, excise nuance, gloss over irresponsible tax cuts, and make Democrats look weak, all at once!
We could do the same if Obama’s bill comes to a vote, and Republicans stonewall it. The difference between our parties? We won’t. But we probably should.
Filed under: Author - ACG,Politics | Tags: Democracy, Equality, Gay rights, Political rhetoric
Last week, the first-act conflict of Broadway standout Next Fall became moot, when President Obama ordered hospitals to extend to same-sex couples the same basic courtesy enjoyed by traditional couples: the right to visit your spouse in the hospital. It’s about the most uncontroversial decision imaginable: who could deny someone the right to visit the love of their life, even if they don’t approve of their love?
Well, RedState.
Actually, the article agrees at the outset with the premise of the right, but disagrees with its assertion, characterizing it as an abuse of federal power, and a twisting of discretionary funding towards social aims (“Barack Obama Will Decide Who Visits You In the Hospital”).
Fine. There’s something to that. But this is a costless change in policy. It literally hurts no-one, except those who feel some indefinable tear in the moral fabric of their country whenever someone different from them is happy. The order does nothing more than ask hospitals to acknowledge what the wishes of an incapacitated patient would be. It opens a previously closed option, which RedState reads as a requirement that the new option be exercised.
This doesn’t make much sense, but it’s a growing rhetorical strategy on the right: characterize options as requirements, or choice as mandate. Just so, the public option became, for all rhetorical purposes, a single-payer system. And, when arguing against gay marriage, we never hear about the individual couples, but about how the way others live their rights means you’re legally required to accept it. That’s not how the law works.
It’s obviously also an incredibly self centered way of looking at the world, and one at odds with our history (“Oh, so now we’re free from England… so you’re saying we have to govern ourselves!??! Fascists!“). But it’s probably the only way to argue against freedom.
Filed under: Author - ACG,Politics | Tags: Calvin and Hobbes, Comics, Entertainment, Political rhetoric, Republican Party, Socialism
Basically Calvin, minus the vocabulary, sense of irony, and capacity for introspection.
Filed under: Author - ACG,Politics | Tags: Law, Media, Political rhetoric, Politico
Yesterday, Politico purported to cover a “controversy” over Goodwin Liu, a young, brilliant law professor recently appointed by President Obama to the Ninth Circuit. The appointment, of course, is stalled, because to the Republican Party, nothing — not staffing the TSA, or filling the federal bench — could possibly be as important as revitalizing the flagging culture wars.
I say “purported” because, throughout a three page article covering the issue, we learn nothing about the man at the center of it, Goodwin Liu, what his legal philosophy is, and why it’s controversial enough to spawn a legitimate controversy, nor are we linked to resources that we can investigate, to form our own opinions. Instead, we hear simply that Liu has made “incendiary statements on issues such as affirmative action, school busing and constitutional welfare rights.” But any statement on these issues is a fortiori “incendiary.” Especially when framed as such. This is the Politico metareporting style at its finest — assume a story, and report on the fallout, thus depriving the audience of the right to make a choice about whether to care, and whether those who do care ought to, as well.
We might forgive this practice elsewhere, but when it comes to the federal bench, it’s an especially grievous dereliction of duty. Judicial issues uniquely lend themselves to mischaracterization. The issue of “welfare rights,” which Liu is apparently accused of defending, presents the paradigmatic case. To nonlawyers, combining the word “welfare” with “rights” triggers concerns about the overextension of the welfare state, and suggests a failure to incentivize productive behavior (layman’s terms: “GET A JOB!”). To even a first-year law student, though, the question is more complicated, presenting a valid and vital field of research. Legally, the question of “welfare rights” is never whether or how to imply entitlements: it’s how, and when, an extant entitlement can be extinguished. This isn’t a political question; it’s a constitutional one, and there’s no real argument that it’s not. Basic procedural due process requires some form of notice and review before any vested right can be revoked. See Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. 319 (1976).
Politico surely has a staff of lawyers. At least, they must, to sue all the small-time bloggers who use names that sound like theirs. So they’re able to look in to exactly what Liu has written, and tell their audience whether this a real controversy, or a made up one. They just don’t care to do so, because that’s not the point of their publication, and in fact, it’s not the point of any right-wing attacks on prominent jurists. Responsible inquiry is the enemy of the knee-jerk reaction upon which the Republican Party now relies.
Filed under: Author - ACG,Politics | Tags: Conservatism, Erick Erickson, Fundamentalism, Political rhetoric, RedState, Republican Party
This statement may be incredibly obvious, but just in case:
The chief (only?) Republican strategy lately takes the form of a dishonest attempt to equate the fact that a given political issue implicates a principle, with the opinion that it in fact destroys the principle. Let’s canvass common examples:
- Government expenditure tends to implicate the question of fiscal responsibility. Therefore, any spending measure independently and on its own force destroys the budget.
- Regulation tends to implicate the question of the limits of regulatory power. Therefore, any regulation necessarily violates the Commerce Clause.
- Federal programs tend to implicate state sovereignty. Therefore, any regulation violates whatever power is left in the residual Tenth Amendment. (Nota bene: this is a case where the premise isn’t even true.)
- A commitment to decency tends to trigger personal impulses to suppress potentially offensive commentary. Therefore, urging self-restraint is the equivalent of government suppression of speech, somehow (?). This is a Palin favorite.
- Civil rights (e.g., freedom from search & seizure; the guarantee of trial by jury) sometimes require that we trade away safety. Therefore, independent of the right’s textual existence, any recourse to any right compromises national security.
- Rules of criminal procedure circumscribe the government’s ability to try accused criminals. Therefore, independent of any requirement that the rules be used, their reference or use constitutes the complete abdication of the government’s ability to convict the guilty.
- Gay marriage relaxes one part of traditional societal limitations on the marriage tradition. Therefore it obliterates all societal limitations. On everything.
Numbers one through three figured prominently in what passed for a health care “debate” in this country.
Each argument, clearly, relies on a deep-seated dishonesty, but the sin of the tactic goes deeper still. This type of argumentation implicitly rejects a middle ground. When every step down a road implies reaching the destination, there’s no honest way to reach a compromise. If you want to know why we never saw any bipartisanship in the health care debate, that’s your answer. By their rhetorical choices, the Republican Party sold their constituents, and ultimately themselves, on the concept that bipartisanship implied a complete loss. The result is people like this.
Filed under: Author - ACG,Politics | Tags: Health care, Healthcare, Political rhetoric
From “socialism” to “death panels,” it should be clear to anyone who makes an honest approach to the issue that the Republican strategy, from day one, was nothing but a scorched-earth rhetorical assault, light on substance to the point of complete avoidance. Any real clash we saw occurred at the existential level: “small government” is good, “spending” is bad, government regulation is “unconstitutional,” etc. Consequentially, although, as noted during closing debates, the final health care bill includes over 200 Republican amendments, it lacks any real allusion to Republican principles. That’s not a function of our refusal to accept input — Obama offered concessions, but was rejected at every turn — it’s a function of the Republicans’ complete refusal to bargain in good faith. Now they’ll pay for it, in a couple significant ways.
Despite this, Republicans seem happy. To discern why, we might attempt this post hoc thought experiment: what, if anything, did Republicans gain for their efforts?
Two things: time, and the death of the public option.
The former comes as proof positive that to the GOP, obstructionism is a value. The latter is odd because of this point: the public option would’ve cost somewhere in the ballpark of $850 billion, and saved $110 billion over ten years. The current plan will cost over $940 billion — while resulting in larger long, long term savings. By screeching about “socialism” and “fiscal restraint,” the GOP torpedoed a bill that was more effective, in terms of both cost and coverage, and re-injected a dose of paranoia and irrationalism into the public discourse.
Even if we give the Republicans the benefit of the doubt, and imagine that the latter is just a means and not the end itself, that’s a pretty terrible result. At the beginning of this long struggle, Democrats could reasonably have wondered if any victory would, by the end, look largely Pyrrhic. Now we have to ask whether Democrats haven’t just dealt the Republican Party a defeat, but a total defeat, the kind from which an ideology, or a particular method of governing, never truly recovers. Not a Waterloo, but a Zama. To see if they’ve learned anything, I imagine we’ll have to wait for the next controversy.
Filed under: Politics | Tags: Erick Erickson, Jerks, Political rhetoric, RedState
From Erick Erickson, somehow a CNN correspondent now, for no goddamn reason:
But whether this legislation actually passes or not, the GOP can now do a couple of things:
1. Pledge immediate repeal in toto of Obamacare should it pass. No nibbling at the edges — the whole thing and we pledge our lives, fortunes, and honor to crushing any member of Republican leadership who refuses to get on the full repeal bandwagon.
From the Declaration:
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.
Now, I don’t begrudge conservatives their right to play dress-up, but this is a bridge too far. The Founders’ pledge of “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor,” was a literal pledge: by putting their names to the document, they in fact gave up their lives, and in fact committed all their resources to the defeat of an implacable foe who, if victorious, would lynch them, their families, and their friends, before surely decimating the country they sought to free.
By way of comparison, Erickson writes a blog. There, he tells people to send gag gifts to unpopular politicians, and calls Supreme Court justices pedophiles. Especially because his honor was long ago forfeit, he has nothing on the line here. It’s fine to spin pathos-laced equivalences with the Revolutionary War era, but to pretend that you’re actually risking as much as they did, well, that’s just insulting.
Filed under: Author - ACG,Politics | Tags: Conservatism, Political rhetoric, Political symbols, Republican Party
The Republican Party doesn’t really believe Obama’s a socialist — but they think that you’re just dumb enough, and motivated by “visceral” and “reactionary” “fear,” that you might. The cynicism is staggering, but shouldn’t be the least bit shocking. This is what astroturf movements look like.
Filed under: Author - ACG,Politics | Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Political rhetoric
By all accounts, this country’s partisan rancor — much of it needless, and premised on false ideas about each others’ identities — is set to get worse, before it gets better. This President’s Day, both sides should consider these words, written for a time more difficult still:
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
We’ve emerged from worse, to come to a still stronger consensus.
