When it comes
to the junk-yard dogs of the GOP, barking ferociously over shadows and
dominating media coverage with wild accusations designed to
disenfranchise a Democratic administration, well, we've been here
before, as Paul Krugman pointed out in his recent piece for the New York Times, "It's Witch-Hunt Season." (I'm having trouble downloading the link, so you'll have to take it the old-fashioned way)--
www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/opinion/30krugman.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print />
As Krugman says:
"The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop
witch hunt by his political opponents. Prominent figures on the right
accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of everything from drug smuggling to
murder. And once Republicans took control of Congress, they subjected
the Clinton administration to unrelenting harassment — at one point
taking 140 hours of sworn testimony over accusations that the White
House had misused its Christmas card list.
"Now it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse. Let’s
turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh: “Imam Hussein Obama,” he recently
declared, is “probably the best anti-American president we’ve ever
had.”
"To get a sense of how much it matters when people like Mr. Limbaugh talk
like this, bear in mind that he’s an utterly mainstream figure within
the Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes
the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house
of Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly."
As Krugman astutely explains, there is a significant portion of Americans who simply do not consider any Democratic administration--even a moderate one--to be a legitimate governing body for our country. And they don't just set out to DEFEAT that party and its chief representative so they can take over in the next elections--they set out to DESTROY it.
They do it by putting shit in a beautiful Tiffany box and dressing the pretty blue paper up with a big red, white, and blue bow--and handing it to the American people on a silver platter.
For instance, for all the claims of "grassroots populism" put forth by the Tea Baggers, the truth is that their movement is stoutly funded by the billionaire Koch brothers--libertarians who, if they had their druthers, would dismantle government entirely. (As bestselling author Jane Mayer points out in her piece for the New Yorker, "Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama." )
And most of the Tea Baggers themselves are upper middle class or otherwise rich enough to travel around and go to yet another one of their endless staged rallies, dressed up in expensive star-spangled banner costumes and professionally prepared signs.
Most of them, in fact, take plenty of benefits from the government till they criticize--from Medicare to Social Security to veteran's benefits. Others work for businesses that benefit from plenty of generous tax breaks and pork-barrel earmark grant money. If, in fact, they got their way and elected to the Senate and House and Presidency all the Tea Baggers their little ole hearts desired, they would soon find themselves losing those very benefits as they were dismantled and destroyed in the name of "fiscal responsibility" by the corporate whoremongers who are leaving bills on the nightstands of their GOP allies in congress.
With flags waving, of course.
Although there are responsible Republican leaders who abhor all of this nastiness, but not a single one of them has the balls to say so--not without soon dropping to their knees and begging forgiveness from whatever Limbaugh/Beck/Palin Holy Trinity they offended by daring to be honest.
What has been most maddening about this whole process is the eagerness with which the media rushes to provide a gleaming platform for all the rumors, misinformation, and downright lies put forth by that triumvirate and their sycophants in congress.
And I'm not just talking the Faux-News network, here.
I'm talking about journalists who should know better...but then, maybe they DON'T know better, simply because they are too young to realize when they are being played for a fake headline and 15 minutes of glory.
As Scott S. Purdam points out in his piece for Vanity Fair, "Washington, We Have a Problem," the White House briefing room is filled with correspondents for whom the White House is their first big assignment:
"The life experiences—and thus the sense of perspective, history,and balance—of today’s Washington reporters are qualitatively different from those of their predecessors. An entire generation of Beltway journalists has come of age being taught that the way to succeed is to be a smart—if not smart-alecky—young thing.
"Journalists who should know better ask the damnedest questions, simply to get a rise, as when The New York Times’s otherwise estimable Peter Baker last year asked Obama,with a straight face, if he was a socialist—only to get the obvious denial, plus a follow-up phone call from the president, saying he couldn’t believe the question was “entirely serious.” Or when George Stephanopoulos, who knows more than most journalists about the trivialities and realities of politics, asked Obama to respond to Sarah Palin’s critique of his nuclear-policy review as a “Go ahead, punch me in the face!” posture,only to have Obama say, “Last I checked, Sarah Palin’s not much of an expert on nuclear issues.”
Add to that the "hyperkinetic" atmosphere of cable, Internet, Twitter, and Facebook and there is no longer anything LIKE a 24-hour news cycle, "only one endless, undifferentiated full-color stream of fact, opinion,and attitudinizing, where lies and misinformation flourish equally with truth. It used to be that news outlets had space to report or comment on only a fraction of any day’s events. The pace of events has picked up,sure, but the capacity to assert, allege, and comment is now infinite,and subject to little responsible control."
Throw in viral e-mails filled with breathless conspiracy theories, photo-shopped images of the president and his family, and rumor-mongering, and you wind up with 20 percent of the American people--and a MAJORITY of Republicans--believing most of them.
There are even exhaustive, hand-wringing over-hyped periods of intense scrutiny on the president's personality and whether he is "too cool" or"not emotive enough"--as is pointed out hilariously in James Woolcott's column for Vanity Fair, "One Cool Cat."
The most fascinating thing about this piece is Woolcott's listing of media criticisms at the beginning of the article, culminating with the revelation that those quotes came from the early 1960's and referred,not to Barack Obama, but to President John F. Kennedy, who was also considered to be too aloof, too cerebral, and too "cool" for regular Americans. (Here is where maturity and context can really go along way toward addressing the latest media feeding frenzy.)
After suffering through eight years of a presidency in which the titular figure distinguished himself amidst his massive policy failures only by his knack for coming up with bumper sticker slogans, Woolcott seems to think we're in a bit of addiction withdrawal:
"I think it’s something else that the press corps can’t cup in the palms of their minds, which is: Obama as president has given them no offhand quotable goodies to play badminton with. He’s stiffed them in the catchy-sound-bite department...The second President Bush and his neologisms “strategery” and“misunderestimated,” the verbal back pat“ Heckuva job, Brownie,” and the classic question “Is our children learning?” And Sarah Palin, a godsend to Leno and Letterman, is a gumball machine of goofball quotes, many of them in her special patois. Obama:nothing. Reporters, op-ed writers,cable-news pundits, and bloggers have had to make do with his campaign inspirationals “hope” and “change,” but once you’re sitting at the computer typing out sentences such as“Candidate Obama promised hope and change, but the change he’s brought to Washington isn’t what many Americans hoped for,” it becomes so hard to go on living."
It has been the strategy of the White House all along to connect quick early successes to long-term victories, as Jonathan Alter points out in his book, THE PROMISE: President Obama, Year One. And in order to accomplish that, it becomes necessary to tune out all the crazy distractions demanded by an insistent cable media and blogging atmosphere, much the same way I once had to tune out my squabbling children in the next room when I was working on a book. (I had a rule: Don't interrupt me unless you are bleeding or unconscious. They broke that rule a hundred times a day.)
Consequently they have been able to accomplish a breathtaking amount--and to have the satisfaction of seeing what goes around comes around, when dozens of Republican congress critters raced home on break and campaigned on all the marvelous things the Stimulus package was doing in their districts or states--the same package they had vehemently opposed and vigorously voted against.
(Who can forget Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal passing out giant checks, signed by him, to areas in his state for this improvement or that jobs-creation package--all made possible by Stimulus funds. Or all the Red States who refused to identify the thousands of highway and infrastructure projects underway in their states as having been funded by Stimulus funds--they literally would not put up the signs provided for that identification, leading locals to think it was just routine.)
So far, all but $80 billion of the $700 billion TARP program has been paid back to the government with interest. The American automakers who were near collapse before being rescued by this president are now showing strong profits and are paying back their bail-outs with interest, as well, and hiring back many of the workers laid off during the crises. The Stimulus bill has created or saved millions of jobs nationwide, and health care reforms are beginning to kick in. Wall Street has been reined in with careful regulations and reform, and school systems nationwide are improving as they compete for rewards from the education reform programs put in place by this administration. More than two million acres of wilderness has been preserved, period--by Executive Order. The Lilly Ledbetter fair pay act has been passed.
I don't even have room to list all the accomplishments and legislative achievements that have taken place under an administration not yet two years old.
But perfectionism and complacency can conspire to keep Democrats home in November, thus running the very real risk of turning over Congress, the Senate, and many states to Republica--and Tea Party--control.
Thus, it will be Republican governors who will make the redistricting decisions that could throw even more districts to Republicans, as was done in Texas mid-decade by Tom DeLay and his cronies (which granted six more Republican congress critters from Texas alone). A Republican congress could jam up the White House with hundreds of bogus legal hearings and accusations of ethical or legal violations based on little more than Fox-News rumor-mongering.
(Never forget that Ken Starr wound up spending millions of taxpayer dollars and hundreds of federal agents investigating whether Vince Foster was murdered, driven only by Rush Limbaugh and his paranoid, mean-spirited allies.)
And don't think they won't be licking their chops, looking for any excuse to begin impeachment proceedings, just as they did Bill Clinton, if for no other reason than to dominate network and cable news coverage.
It's a cinch that any other legislative initiatives--on climate change or whatever--will be blocked, stopped dead in their tracks, and we could look forward to years of gridlock followed by a nasty, hateful campaign to run Obama out of office.
IS THIS REALLY WHAT ANY OF US WANTS???
Obama is gambling that, when push comes to shove--it is NOT what any of us,liberals, progressives, and Independents--really wants. As Todd S.Purdam puts it, describing the night that health care reform passed:
“Near the end of the celebration,” Valerie Jarrett recalls, “it must have been, I don’t know, 1:30 in the morning—way past my bedtime. I said, ‘So what are you ... how do you feel tonight?’ I said, ‘How does this compare with Election Night?’”
They were outside on the balcony and the temperature was about the same as it had been on Election Night. “And he said, ‘Oh, there’s no comparison.’ He said, ‘This is so much more important to me.’ He said Election Night was just about—it was all about getting us to this night.We’re actually doing something now.”
Obama’s gamble is that, if you look after the doing of the presidency, the selling of the presidency will look after itself. The short-term price may come in stalled poll numbers, electoral setbacks,and endless contradictory advice from the kibitzers. The payoff, if there is one,lies out on some future horizon. Obama may be right about this strategy,or he may be wrong. But it is the strategy he is following nonetheless."
But the thing is, he can't do it alone. We may not agree with every single thing he does, but that does not mean that we should--as the old saying goes--throw the baby out with the bath water. This is, all things considered, the best shot progressives are going to have for years to come to see the things actually take place that they dreamed of and feared for during the long national nightmare of the Bush years.
This is it. We can't drop the ball now and let petty resentments and perfectionistic passions prevent us from celebrating the VERY REAL GOOD that is being accomplished during this administration.
We can't let the GOP's junk yard dogs and their howling at the moon derail and distract us, because if we do, then they will be unleashed for real, and coming after the things we have all worked so hard for. At a recent meeting of GOP faithfuls, Dick Morris stated that repealing health care reform and dismantling everything else Obama has done, as well as shutting down his progress on anything having to do with climate change--is their goal.
In fact, "There's going to be a government shutdown, just like in '95 and '96 but
we're going to win it this time and I'll be fightin' on your side,"
Morris said at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation Conference on
Friday in Washington."
If we don't vote in November, and all those Tea Baggers and Sarah Palin fawners DO, then this is what we can expect for the next two years, at least. Only this time, it won't just be an annoyance, because the times are different now, as Krugman says:
"It will be an ugly scene, and it will be dangerous, too. The 1990s were a
time of peace and prosperity; this is a time of neither. In particular,
we’re still suffering the after-effects of the worst economic crisis
since the 1930s, and we can’t afford to have a federal government
paralyzed by an opposition with no interest in helping the president
govern. But that’s what we’re likely to get."
It's important that we turn out to vote and to support candidates who we feel will be most likely to enable the administration to achieve those goals. Staying home in a bitter funk because we didn't get the public option in the health care reform package or a bigger Stimulus bill (like, say, the TWO TRILLION that critic Paul Krugman seemed to think was merely a finger-snap away) that we wanted.
What we've got right now are some pretty exciting bragging rights, and a pretty urgent call to keep the momentum going when we cast our votes in November.
Let's prove all those gray-haired pundits and all those scrub-faced White House correspondents WRONG.
Think how much fun the news would be the next day!
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NOTE: Well, Lord knows when I posted Part I of this series, I did not intend to wait two weeks to post Part II, but a routine out-patient procedure at our local hospital went awry and wound up making me VERY ill for a week to ten days, but I'm back now and feeling fiesty, so let's get on with it.
With the last blogpost, I was criticized (mostly over at TPM Cafe) for using as my primary source, the book, THE PROMISE: President Obama, Year One, by Jonathan Alter. The book was compared to a similar flattering book written by Bob Woodward of the Bush administration's run-up to war with Iraq. However, if you really bothered to actually read the entire post, you would see that there were other sources referenced than just this book. It is still my primary source but not my only one, and it is a particularly good one for today's post, because it so thoroughly went behind the scenes during the tense, confusing, and often messy process of passing some of the major pieces of legislation to come out of the president's first year in office.
I will also quote, as well, from the major article by Todd S. Purdam in Vanity Fair, "Washington, We Have a Problem,"
There will be other sources, of course, as well. My purpose for writing this is to make clear to disgruntled liberals and questioning Independents the true choice that is before us come November--not the false ones so often trumpeted on cable TV and the blogosphere--and why it is important that we not lose heart at this critical time, because so much more has been accomplished than most people realize--but it is JUST THE BEGINNING. I think understanding how those accomplishments came about against overwhelming odds is an inspirational story but also an instructive one as we continue to fight for those things we strongly believe in.
First of all, much has been made of the Bush legacy. If you are as big a political junkie as I am you spent eight miserable years watching his administration dismantle and damn near destroy our government--the only reason they didn't get more done was because they finally lost the congress to the Democrats in '06. The government was turned into an arm of the Bush Reelection Committee and then the RNC, and every aspect of it was considered to be at the administration's disposal to use for the purpose of setting up a "permanent Republican majority," as Bush's closest advisor, Karl Rove bragged from his office just outside the Oval Office.
During that time, the fiscal irresponsibility was beyond imagining in its scope and depth. Never before in our nation's history had we, (well, first of all, invaded a country that presented no real threat to us)--but mainly, gone to war and instigated a massive tax cut at the same time. We went to war in two different countries to the tune of tens of billions of dollars every month, and no way to pay for it. In fact, the real cost of the wars was hidden from the budget altogether and funded with Emergency bills, paid for by borrowing almost the entire amount from China.
China was happy to bankroll such follies and make us dependent upon them while, at the same time, undermining us by bribing government officials in both countries for oil, gas, and mineral rights--thus negating Cheney's primary purpose for starting the wars in the first place.
In other words, the Chinese plan was for American boys and girls to fight, bleed, and die in these foreign lands so that, when the wars inevitably died down, not only would we owe them several more generations of our young people in massive loan interest and principal, but they could move in and make off with the spoils of war we made possible for them.
In other words, they played Dick Cheney and his cronies, who thought WE'D make off with all those riches.
The only American entities to get rich off of war were the private contractors who had been bankrolled in no-bid contracts by their friendly CEO vice-president and president. Private contractors provided everything from food and laundry services to the military to dignitary security to pig-trough purging of "reconstruction" contracts that seldom built anything except mega-mansions for their company executives and massive donations to the GOP.
These policies, along with the Republican-led rubber-stamp earmark-palooza extravaganza of No Bill Left Behind, bankrupted the country before President Obama even raised his right hand and took the oath.
As Obama told Alter in an interview, "We have been left with a financial ruin, okay? Let's not bullshit ourselves. We are limited by what George Bush's policies did to the fiscal condition of this country. Our options are capped, confined. Before we even get to health care, to cap and trade, we are dealing with Bush's legacy."
Most of the howlers on the far right don't even realize that the $800 billion TARP Wall Street bail-out they so abhor was not done on Obama's watch--it was a Bush/Paulson policy, signed into law by him before he left office. And if it hadn't been for a Democratic congress insisting on some controls, they would have passed it based on a simple three-page memo written by Paulson and stating, among other vagueries, that none of the entitites involved could be held accountable by the law.
So let's not forget the towering, cascading flood of Bush-caused problems that came pouring down on this administration the first day they were in office, before they'd delegated office space or even gotten the White House computers up and running.
As Alter points out, Bill Clinton left office in 2001 with a $236 billion budget surplus, and George W. Bush was leaving office eight years later with a $1.3 TRILLION deficit, severely limiting the new president's options in the years ahead:
"If health care costs weren't brought under control, there would soon be little money left for anything else. The nation was at at war in two countries, with shadowy struggles against al Qaeda under way in a half-dozen more. Nuclear technology was spreading to unstable regions and climate change threatened colossal disruptions. With all due respect to Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, the Obama team liked to say, he didn't face crises both at home and abroad. If Obama's predicament was less desperate than FDR's, it was also a lot more complicated." (emphasis mine)
As Todd S. Purdam points out in Vanity Fair:
"We think of the presidency as somehow eternal and unchanging, a straight-line progression from 1 to 44, from the first to the latest. And in some respects it is. Except for George Washington, all of the presidents have lived in the White House. They’ve all taken the same oath to uphold the same constitution. But the modern presidency—Barack Obama’s presidency—has become a job of such gargantuan size, speed, and complexity as to be all but unrecognizable to most of the previous chief executives. The sheer growth of the federal government, the paralysis of Congress, the systemic corruption brought on by lobbying, the trivialization of the “news” by the media,the willful disregard for facts and truth—these forces have made today’s Washington a depressing and dysfunctional place. They have shaped and at times hobbled the presidency itself."
This is why constant comparing of Obama to previous presidents, whether FDR or LBJ--mostly by starry-eyed liberals angry that he has not delivered the utopian progressive society that they somehow expected (in spite of the fact that he made it clear in his books and campaigning that he was a pragmatist and not an ideologue)--is lame. What Obama has faced, not just with a legislative branch unwilling to work across the aisle in the interest of what's best for the country, but with a media environment described by Purdam as "the most hyperkinetic, souped-up, tricked-out, combative media environment ever."
As I have pointed out before, no other president in our history has had to face an entire "news" network dedicated to destroying his policies, his legacy, and his chances for reelection 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No other president has had to deal with a so-called "news" network which deliberately employs as their headliners men and women who are planning to run for office AGAINST that president, have PAC funds already set up, and use their media megaphone to raise funds for those PACs. Nor has there ever been a "news" network that actually donates a full MILLION BUCKS to a political opposition organization in the midst of a political campaign.
And yet that same "news" network enjoys a front-row seat in the White House Press Room, where they are permitted to ask questions based upon the rumors ginned up by that same opposition network (rather than the current events all the other reporters ask about)--thus putting those same rumors into the mainstream as legitimate "truth"--and thus provoking yet another faux outrage or fake controversy for the media to obsess over.
Nor, it might be pointed out, has any American president had to face a 24/7 news network and Internet commentary from his own side who, in their stated attempt to "hold the president accountable," instead wind up howling at least as loud as the opposition does, thus creating a Criticism Sandwich where this president is damned if he does, damned if he doesn't, and damned for things he hasn't even thought about doing, and probably never will.
(I will get into that aspect in more detail tomorrow, in Part III.)
The fact that he has managed to accomplish anything at all under these extraordinary circumstances should have those in his own party shouting those accomplishments from the rooftops, but instead, they choose to obsess about this aspect or that angle that didn't play out as they would have wished in a perfect world.
Perhaps, if they'd had a better idea of what was going on behind the scenes, they would have held back some of the worst vitriol and trusted the man to at least do the best he possibly could. And if the White House was less than forthcoming about that process at the time it was going on, perhaps it was because they were reluctant to feed more reason for the howlers to find fault while they were busy working their asses off in 80-hour weeks against impossible odds.
For example--before screaming about "back-room deals," it helps to understand how they came about. As Purdam explains in Vanity Fair:
"Perversely, as the filibuster has become theoretically easier to break,it has been threatened more and more often, simply because the minority party wants to bring business to a halt. In the years since the Republicans were relegated to minority status in the Senate, in 2007,cloture filings, which are often used in response to filibuster threats,have nearly doubled. Because 60 votes are now needed to pass almost anything of significance, this gives wildly disproportionate power to a small number of senators whose swing vote can make the crucial difference. Hence the administration’s desperate—and, ultimately,vain—effort to win the support of Republican senator Olympia Snowe, of Maine, in order to give the health-care bill a veneer of bipartisanship,or the initial decision (later rescinded) to grant Nebraska $100million in Medicaid benefits in exchange for the support of conservative Democratic senator Ben Nelson."
As Rahm Emmanuel pointed out to Purdam, yes, liberals complained that Obama needed to be more like LBJ and "twist arms," but, “If we ever did even attempt to do a third of what Lyndon Johnson did—or Ronald Reagan, or Bill Clinton—we couldn’t do it.” Indeed, Emanuel told Purdam, such efforts would probably have prompted "not just unflattering stories but a special prosecutor."
Another criticism faced by the president and his team was that they entrusted too much to congress, especially when it came to writing the health care reform bill. (To which I always want to reply, What, you think that if he'd presented a bill ready for approval he'd've had more luck than Hillary did when she tried it?)
As Alter writes:
"Besides, he knew something about the vanity of legislators. If a bill didn't seem to be coming from them they would slow everything down and pick it to death. By letting Congress take the lead, he gave lawmakers the ownership necessary for genuine action. One of the oldest adages in civics is that people support what they help create. Had Obama not applied that idea to the stimulus and health care, he would have had much less to show for 2009." (emphasis mine)
I think at least a portion of the landslide of criticism facing the president was provoked by a simple lack of understanding of the legislative process by many of his critics--especially those who were too young to remember what it was like when major landmark legislation was passed. Without a context to set the process into, or some strong background of previous policies, it was too easy for many to expect everything all at once, as they demanded--for example, with health care reform.
Jonathan Alter puts it this way in THE PROMISE:
"Health care had a thousand moving parts, and Obama was determined not to follow Hillary Clinton's course in 1994. He would not develop a big plan, drop it on the Capitol steps like "a stone tablet," and refuse to bargain. That, he told aides, would be the worst of both worlds: "I'd get all the political pain for putting out all the details, but also hit for not fulfilling campaign promises." Most important, the barons of Capitol Hill would feel they had less ownership of the issue. As with the stimulus, if they didn't own it, they wouldn't move it.
"This would mean that after many years of precut deals Congress would have to get back into the messy and often unseemly business of actually legislating, an ongoing and complex process that voters didn't comprehend and the press had trouble covering. It was more comforting, if less realistic, to believe, as many progressives did, that if Obama would simply lead, the docile Democratic Congress would follow." (emphasis mine)
Had Obama indulged in some of the loud, angry, broad political gestures that many Dems wanted him to do in order to show some sort of Bush-style "leadership," he would have likely alienated an already skittish Congress and lost the opportunity to reform anything.
As Alter put it, "Obama wasn't into gestures. He wanted to win."
It is instructive here to point out that many liberal complaints about health care reform are based on the false assumption that THIS IS IT--that the bill, as it stands, is permanent and not subject to any redefining or expanding, and that therefore, failing to go after EVERYTHING we wanted when we had this chance means that the entire bill is worthless.
Again, this is based on a lack of understanding about the legislative process. Let's compare this bill with FDR's crowning achievement of the New Deal: Social Security. Most people assume that Social Security, as it exists now, is the bill that Roosevelt passed in the early '30's, but the truth is that, were he to somehow come back from the dead for a day, he would be astonished at the benefits now available through the Social Security program compared with what he was able to pass in his presidency.
These changes are spelled out in this article, "What Social Security Can Teach Us About the Future of Health Care." As Richard Kirsch points out:
"The history of Social Security after it became law was a great comfort to those of us who watched as the health care bill was continually weakened during the Congressional debate. It’s easy to forget now just how limited Social Security was when it first was enacted. The Act included meager payments to a limited set of workers and left out job categories that included most women and minorities. The NAACP said that it was “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through. ” However, over the next 15 years Social Security was expanded to include surviving spouses and dependent children. Jobs that were dominated by women and people of color were added. The miserly benefits were enhanced over time too but it wasn’t until 1972 that cost of living adjustments became automatic."
So, yeah, even with the longest-serving president in our history overseeing it, Social Security as we know it took shape in increments, over the years and decades, as the original bill was expanded and improved. There is no reason to believe that the same thing cannot be said of Health Care Reform, especially as benefits kick in and people not only begin to enjoy the improvements it has made available to them, but as the worst nightmare-scenarios put forth by the opposition fail to materialize.
Kirsch's article is worth a read in its entirety because it addresses many of the problems expressed by liberal opponents to the bill as it exists, and explains how those problems can easily be worked out, especially because already, it is less toxic a topic than it was before it was enacted, because benefits are already becoming available and people like them.
Other issues with health care reform's legislative process can be boiled down, in large part, to the screaming outrage expressed by many on the left when the bill was passed without a public option--and to address that, I'll let our blunt and outspoken vice president have the last word. Alter says Vice President Biden told him he had more than a few "Don't Bullshit Me" conversations with many of his former colleagues:
"Don't snatch defeat from the jaws of victory," the vice president told them. With progressives, he used what he called the 'Don't Bullshit Me' conversation: "I've known you for twenty years and talked health care with you endlessly in the gym, and never once until this year have I heard you mention the words "public option." Now you're telling me it's the most important thing in the world? Please."
Because of health care reform, some of the most egregious sins committed by Big Insurance on the American people will now be prevented, and common sense reforms are already taking place, such as allowing your grown children to stay on your family health plan until the age of 27. I remember well my son's "aging out" of our health insurance policy while he was still a college student. There was no way we could afford a private plan just for him under the old rules, and even when I found a plan available for students, provided by the university, its coverage was terrible and the process for filing claims a nightmare. For one thing, you had to pay all the hospital and doctor bills yourself and then file for reimbursement, a clumsy and unweildy process that seldom paid off in the long run.
Or consider the case of Christopher Reeve. If you ever read any of the poignant and inspiring books he wrote after the accident that left the former "Superman" a quadraplegic, you will know that one of his ongoing worries was that they would reach the cap on their insurance plan because of all his expenses, and he would no longer be able to pay for his own care, leaving his family destitute. If this can be a worry for a movie star, imagine what it is for regular folks--and now, thanks to health care reform, they don't have to worry about it.
No more can you be turned away from coverage because you have a pre-existing condition, either--something that trapped many people in miserable jobs they hated but could not leave because they had to have the health insurance or risk losing it when changing providers.
Or, if you are a senior citizen dependent upon help with the Prescription Drug Program, you've lived with the ongoing anxiety of knowing that once you reach a certain level of coverage, you would lose it and be out thousands of dollars before re-qualifying for those same benefits--the so-called "Donut Hole." That has now been closed.
These are just several of important changes that came about because of health care reform--all of which would have been lost if the purists and ideologues who were insisting on everything being just right and included perfectly in this bill had had their way. People like Jane Hamscher of Firedoglake would have thrown out the entire bill--and I guarantee you we would have lost the chance to make even modest changes for the next decade at least--which would have caused great suffering among the millions who will be affected by the changes that WERE passed.
As Rahm Emmanuel put it to Jonathan Alter:
"Let's be honest. The goal isn't to see whether I can pass this through the executive branch of the Brookings Institution. I'm passing it through the United States Congress, with people who represent constituents...I'm sure there are a lot of people sitting in the shade at the Aspen Institute--my brother being one of them--who will tell you what the ideal plan is. Great. Fascinating. You have the art of the possible measured against the ideal."
In Purdam's Vanity Fair piece, he mentions the "long time line" demanded by durable achievement; how complex problems demand complicated solutions that take time beyond the 24-hour news cycle or even the next election, as Obama has pointed out many times.
Emmanuel, again, expresses the frustration of making those "durable achievements" against a backdrop of complete media indifference (as described by Purdam):
"They all work punishing hours, because the entire executive branch funnels through the White House. They tolerate, cultivate, and accommodate special interests of all kinds—at once using and being used.They handle congressional prima donnas of every conceivable shade, and make backroom deals they’re not proud of. They manage the press—or try to, in the shortsighted way that the press itself demands—and thus contribute to the spiral of triviality. They acknowledge all of this frankly and, by and large, without whining, as if these are simply things that must be done, and, yes, it’s all worse than ever, and that’s life. Sometimes, too, they get completely caught up in it. Rahm Emanuel—describing how the administration had managed the Afghan surge,which deeply divided Democrats at the very time it was counting solely on Democratic votes to get the health-care bill through the Senate,without either effort derailing the other—works himself into the ultimate insider’s amazement that “not one journalist out of 150” in“this entire fucking town” took note of the White House’s skill. “Nobody put two and two together,” he goes on. “Sometimes I feel like I’m painting by dots around here.”
Purdam goes on to say:
"And yet, to a remarkable degree, Obama has been consistent in pursuing the agenda he said he would pursue. In a speech at Georgetown University in April 2009, he said that he would address health care, access to education, the rules governing the financial system, and energy. He has won passage of significant legislation on the first three—together with the $787 billion economic-stimulus package and a rescue of two of the three big automakers. Rahm Emanuel took pains to remind me that the health-care overhaul, which seemed to go on forever, in the end was passed in just a year."
Just as many in the general public have difficulty understanding the nuances and complexities--and sheer brutalities--of the legislative process, so, too, do many of the reporters covering these events.
The media circus surrounding the modern presidency is unprecedented in its make-up, because it has no gatekeepers outside the major mainstream outlets. During the days of Woodward and Bernstein bringing down President Nixon, the rules were unbreakable--two outside sources had to confirm every quote, and most of them had to go on the record.
Those rules seem quaint by today's frenetic, noisy, white-water pace, and consequently, it has become virtually impossible for a White House to shape the day's events by, say, scheduling major announcements just in time to make the evening network news broadcasts. Adversarial by design, the modern press has become almost oppositional in nature as each outlet attempts to beat the other in breaking big stories--most of the time, with very little vetting or checking of sound sources, as we saw with the Shirley Sherrod debacle, and it's hard for most any White House to avoid being caught up in the rapids.
I will go into that in greater detail tomorrow, in Part III.
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| Posted by Deanie Mills at | | | |
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I've got an old Merriam-Webster paperback dictionary on my desk that I've had since college. Yes I know it doesn't have all the swift new tech-words that modern versions have, and I do use my online dictionary plenty, but I love to just sit here at my desk where I wrote so many books through the years, reach out with my left hand, and grab up that little dictionary, which is still good for all those old-fashioned words.
Like: "FARSIGHTED," which it describes as "able to see distant things more clearly than near."
And it offers up some synonyms, like, "JUDICIOUS," "WISE," and "SHREWD."
So, being the word-lover that I am, I looked those words up, too.
Being "Judicious" means "exercising sound judgment"--and uses such synonyms as "SENSIBLE," and "WISE."
If you look up "SHREWD," you get these synonyms by way of definition, "KEEN," and "ASTUTE."
The word "WISE" pretty much sums it all up, with the same definition as "FARSIGHTED"--"having or showing good sense or good judgment."
Like my battered old pocket dictionary, my Roget's Thesaurus from college (and yes, I do use the online one many times), has the cover torn off and many pages dog-eared, some of them with little book-tabs jutting out, from words I used so much in my writing that I wanted to find a fresh way of expressing them (such is the lot of a thriller-writer--how many words for "fear" can you come up with?)--but it has a synonym for "FARSIGHTED" that I love:
"EAGLE-EYED."
Now, technically speaking, from an opthalmological standpoint, if you are "farsighted," you actually have trouble seeing things up close and need glasses to correct that problem.
But from an ideological point of view, if you are farsighted, then there is nothing wrong with your vision. You are, in fact, a visionary.
This is because you can see things that might take place years or even decades down the road that most other people simply can't see. And when you know, in your heart and in your psychic soul, that these things either WILL happen or SHOULD happen, and there is something you can do to shape that future rather than being bullied by it, and you are a person of talent and brains and principle, then you will do everything in your power to make it so.
And, of course, the whole rest of the world will think you are crazy--or worse. Some may think you are evil. (These are the people who are completely blind about the future and so fear it.) They feel threatened and start looking for ways to stop you.
Some people will believe in you from an idealistic standpoint, and then, when you get into a position of power, they expect you to simply MAKE IT HAPPEN, and when the future begins taking place in incremental steps rather than big sweeping gestures like a wizard might cause with a wave of his magic wand--they might turn on you and call you a disappointment--or worse--a traitor to the cause.
But if you are TRULY farsighted and TRULY a visionary, you ignore those who call you crazy and you ignore those who call you evil and you even ignore those who say you betrayed the dream because things are not happening fast enough or in grand enough ways, because you are not looking at short-term consequences of your actions--you are FARSIGHTED, you are EAGLE-EYED, and therefore, you see far far down the road into a place that is only misty and blurry to the rest of us NEARSIGHTED beings.
I've just finished reading a landmark book on the first year of Barack Obama's presidency: THE PROMISE: President Obama, Year One.
It's an absorbing and fascinating close-up-and-personal analysis of Obama's first year in office and covers every single aspect of that year, from the economic crash that confronted his team even before they took office, to the health care chaos, to the overhaul of Afghanistan policy and the outreach to the world's Muslims, to financial, education, and energy reform, to the media wars. The book's author, Jonathan Alter, a political columnist for Newsweek, was given unprecedented access to the West Wing and to Obama himself--with one caveat that he found immensely frustrating--he could not write about the nuts and bolts of the administration's struggles in Newsweek while he was writing the book; he had to wait until the book's publication. But Alter, a Chicago native, had known Obama since his time as a state senator and had interviewed him many times since, so the White House was opened up to him. Alter shadowed everyone there, from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, on down, from the months after the election--before they took office--until the book's publication this past May.
The picture that emerged was one far different from the one that plays out nightly on cable TV--both right and left--and in the news magazines and newspapers.
This is because those of us in the blogosphere and cable-news echo chamber that makes up the D.C. hothouse, are gasping in the heat and humidity because all we can see in our myopic way is the here-and-now of what takes place in that hothouse. We get all worked up about each days' news cycle and the immediate reaction of those venues to political events or even the repercussions of legislation that makes its way to passage.
We hang on poll numbers and punditry and react to each one as if it is the be-all and end-all of events, and even find fault with the president for the fact that he doesn't seem to be breaking a sweat in the hothouse heat while the rest of us wringing out our sopping clothes.
Doesn't he NOTICE what's going on? Doesn't he CARE?
Well, yes, of course he does--but he doesn't see these things from the same distorted fish-eye lens that we all do. He's seeing waay past the hothouse glass...out into the meadows and down the road and through the woods--all the way into the future. He is seeing much further than the rest of us, and he's seeing it differently.
Alter talks about how the Vulcan Mr. Spock often played a game called "Three-D Chess," on Star Trek, and describes the president's thought processes in this way:
"On many nights he pushed aside the briefing papers and stopped focusing on the immediate issues in front of him. He'd write on his desktop computer (or sometimes by hand) about things 'down the pike,' as he put it, that he wanted his people to think about. Marty Nesbitt (the president's close friend) said the president saw politics as a sequential puzzle. 'He's always thinking, 'If I do this then this could happen--or that could happen.' It's all in terms of cause and effect--like a Rubik's cube.' Anticipating events kept him from feeling swamped by them...'Before everyone else, he's already calculated the relative probability of several different outcomes, so when one of them happens--even though it may be a surprise to others--he's never really surprised.'"
Of all the facts crammed into this book, there is one that stood out for me in bold-faced, backlit type, and that was this one, a direct quote Obama gave the book's author in an interview that concentrated on health care reform:
"'We knew that it would be all-consuming--in the midst of having to deal with this enormous economic crises and two wars--and it would take a lot out of us,' he said later.
"At a minimum, he predicted, it would cost him ten to fifteen points in popularity before passage. And if it failed, he was in deep political trouble. 'I remember telling Nancy Pelosi that moving forward on this could end up being so costly for me politically that it would affect my chances if I were to run for reelection,' the president said. But he told Pelosi that if they didn't get this done now, 'It was not going to be done.'
"So Obama decided early to bet his domestic presidency on health care." (emphasis mine)
Think about that for a minute. We just had eight years of a presidency where Bush's closest political advisor, with his own office just off the Oval Office, had determined that there was going to be a "permanent Republican majority." To that end, he and the Bush administration politicized EVERYTHING, from the Justice Dept (where largely bogus cases were prosecuted that could throw local elections to the Republican) to the Pentagon (where the decision was made that, should Bush invade Iraq, it would help him get reelected because he would then be "a war president.")
After all, who can forget the glorious "golden hour" moment of George W. Bush in his Hollywood-tight flight suit strutting past the "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" banner draped by the White House across an accomodating aircraft carrier--tailor-made for campaign ads? (Pay no attention to those "thugs" in the white pickups barreling down on the troops and setting IEDs in the road by night.) Or those (cue the swelling music) magnificent Hollywood-ready war heroes who bravely fought off the enemy--Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch? (Pay no attention to those troops who are saying that's NOT what happened, because that messes up the campaign ad-ready war narrative we're shaping for our war president.)
Everything, EVERYTHING, was calculated to prop up the administration. Hacks who were loyal to Bush, no matter how puny their qualifications, were put in charge of everything from FEMA to the creation of a new government in Iraq. Rove held meetings (illegally), in federal departments, explaining how to use grant money and other plums in districts that would help throw elections to Republicans, regardless of need in the country.
Consequently, a great American city was drowned in FEMA inefficiency, while Iraq was plunged into chaos, corruption, crime, and civil war while Bush administration gadflies partied in the Green Zone.
Enter Barack Obama.
When he set his sights on health care reform, NO ONE in his administration thought it was a good idea (counting his closest advisors). Even those who grudgingly agreed that something needed to be done, wanted it done in tiny incremental steps that could be passed through Congress relatively easily. They wanted to concentrate mostly on the economy.
But Obama had maintained from the beginning that for the LONG-TERM health of the economy, there was no way to fix the worst of the problems facing this country WITHOUT tackling health care reform, because the costs were skyrocketing to atmospheric levels, and at this rate, with no reform, the nation's economy was going to collapse at some point in the future--a future OBAMA could see but very few of his closest advisors--not to MENTION his critics--could.
And he RISKED HIS PRESIDENCY on it.
He has said on several occasions that even if health care reform winds up costing him a second term, it will be worth it, because of the good it will do for the country in the long term.
He knew, as the "sausage making" process dragged on, that many of the reforms would not even take place until after the next presidential election, so that he would not likely get credit for changes that would wind up benefitting virtually everybody in the country eventually.
I've never heard of that kind of political courage before. Not anywhere. I've been following politics closely since LBJ was president, and I never saw a president who did not spend his entire first term looking for ways to ensure a second term.
But, to Obama, it was far more important that the good be done--for the welfare of the nation--than it was for him to rack up political points.
As Alter put it:
"If Obama had been as weak and overly conciliatory as some of his liberal critics believed, he would have decided during the transition, or after the Inauguration, or in the spring, or in the dog days of August, to hold off on major health care reform until later in his term. Delaying the bill would have been perfectly consistent with his campaign promise; which was merely to sign legislation by the end of his first four years. Once he made up his mind...The reality was something that aides didn't much like to discuss: the president was moving ahead alone." (emphasis mine)
This, my friends, is the true definition of LEADERSHIP.
All through the book are examples of Obama's leadership--what, as Alter points out--the military refers to as "the habit of command."
For example, in National Security Council meetings:
"Where Clinton would saunter in to National Security Council meetings and sit in the middle of the table in the Situation Room, listening to the NSC advisor call on various subject experts, Obama would purposefully stride in and run the meeting from the head of the table. It was if he had consciously decided to inhabit the role of leader. To do so, he had to project not just great confidence, but enough knowledge of the nuances of national security issues to justify that confidence in a room full of smart and experienced advisors. In that, he unquestionably succeeded."
On his decision-making process:
"The time from thought to action is very short, said (Denis) McDonough, a deputy national security advisor. 'He reads something and says, 'I want to change that,' and, 'I want a plan for this.' He would sometimes deliberate for days, weeks, or even in the case of Afghanistan, months, but contrary to the jibes of Dick Cheney, there was nothing 'dithering' about it. Obama would process a series of questions, facts, and insights that built on one another methodically. Penny Pritzker was struck by his capacity not just to absorb information but to use what he learned later. It was a subtle trait; unless you knew he was a good listener it might seem as if he wasn't registering what you were saying...'Within a very short period of time, you see action.'"
Speaking of Afghanistan, during the process of deliberation, after Gen. McChrystal had mouthed off the first time in protest of the president's policies, according to Alter:
"Obama and his senior staff believed this had Mullen's and Petraeus's fingerprints all over it. They were using McChrystal to jam the president, box him in, manipulate him, game him--use whatever verb you like. The president had not yet decided on a policy and didn't appreciate the military sounding in public as if he had."
As Alter points out, it's almost common now for the Pentagon to roust out young, Democratic presidents who do not have military experience--they'd been doing it since the days of John F. Kennedy. But this was one commander-in-chief they hadn't reckoned on. For one thing, he considered Bush's complete deference to his generals to be an abdication of responsibility, but he also knew that to completely overrule them would weaken his effectiveness and hurt morale of the troops in the field. Instead, he decided to take command:
"It was important to remind the brass who was in charge. Inside the National Security Council, advisors considered what happened next historic, a presidential dressing-down unlike any in the United States in more than half a century. The commander-in-chief now undertook the most direct assertion of presidential authority over the U.S. military since President Truman fired General MacArthur in 1951.
"In the first week of October Gates and Mullen were summoned to the Oval Office, where the president told them that he was 'exceedingly unhappy' with the Pentagon's conduct. He said the leaks and positioning in advance of a decision were 'disrespectful of the process' and 'damaging to the men and women in uniform and to the country.' In a cold fury Obama said he wanted to know 'here and now' if the Pentagon would be on board with any presidential decision and could faithfully implement it.
"'This was a cold and bracing meeting,' said an official in the room. Lyndon Johnson had never talked to General William Westmoreland that way, or George H.W. Bush to General Norman Schwarzkopf. Presidents Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton had all been played by the Pentagon at various points but hadn't fought back as directly. Now Obama was sending an unmistakable message: Don't toy with me. Just because he was young, new, a Democrat, and had never been in uniform didn't mean he was going to get backed into a corner."
This sense of authority and command, of setting goals in spite of political consequences and taking action to see it through--even over the objections of his advisors--not to mention his savvy and cunning to work behind the scenes and garner votes for key legislation in spite of the most polarized and obstructionist Congress since Reconstruction--(thanks to more modern filibuster rules that enable a minority to basically shut down government over the smallest of issues, as Newt Gingrich did to President Clinton in the nineties)--has enabled President Obama to accomplish an unprecedented flood of major legislation in his first year in office and to fulfill literally hundreds of campaign promises he had made, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning database, PolitiFact.com, put out by the St. Petersburg Times.
Of those promises, PolitiFact rates 25 as "major," and credits Obama has having fulfilled, by the end of his first year alone, 20 of them. (Major financial regulatory reform came just a few months later.)
In a major and lengthy article in the September Vanity Fair by Todd Purdum, called, "Washington, We Have a Problem," Purdum discusses the strange disconnect between the sweeping accomplishments of a strong new president, and the public perception of him and his presidency. Conservatives fear he has done too much and wants to institute socialism and some kind of bizarre tyranny over the country; liberals think he has not done enough and--far from being socialist--believe he has sold out to corporate and military interests and betrayed his--and their--ideals, and that furthermore, he is weak and unwilling to fight for them.
Neither perception is anywhere NEAR the truth, and the problem with that most likely lies in the conundrum of being farsighted and yet having to deal with a nearsighted populace. Purdum describes it this way:
"The pace of the modern presidency—or, rather, the pace of modern life, as amplified by the media and by the impatience of the public for action of any kind—has the perverse effect of making the most measured of politicians seem out of sync, and the most visionary policies seem incremental and thus unsatisfying. By definition, it will take years for the result of changes in the nation’s health-care system, or its energy policies or education policies—or anything else of note—to be fully in place, much less fully understood, much less proven effective. Anyone who risks taking on the toughest problems automatically risks being seen as not having done enough about them to get any credit by the time the next news cycle, or election cycle, rolls around. It’s a conundrum that vexes any president: there’s no short-term gain for long-term wisdom."
[...]
"Durable achievement demands a long time horizon—something that the country as a whole seems to have lost. We can’t wait for the carrots to grow—we keep pulling them up to see how they’re doing. Thus, deeply complex problems, from illegal immigration to the BP oil spill—problems that by definition have no quick or easy solution, despite their obvious urgency—become easy emblems of presumptive failure, whatever the president may actually be doing to address them."
[...]
"It’s Obama’s conviction—you hear this from the most senior White House aides again and again, because it reflects the thinking at the top—that by keeping his head down and doing his job he can also pursue a different strategy, one that doesn’t aim to win the day or the week but that looks toward victory in the long run. “You can do your job well,” as Axelrod puts it. “You can bring the troops home from Iraq, and you can move forward on things that will strengthen the economy, and you can hope that over time people say, ‘He had a vision that made sense, and he didn’t play by the crazy rules of that game.’” In this view it doesn’t matter so much whether polls show the public hated the stimulus plan. What matters is that it saved jobs and helped get the economy going again. It doesn’t matter so much that the public is skeptical about health-care reform. What matters is that people start getting access to better options.
"Obama has suffered for his patience, but he has profited from it, too, and whatever you think of his policies, his conduct of the presidency may be an object lesson in how to elude the loonier aspects of our age. From the day he declared his candidacy, the press—and, by extension, much of the Washington insider culture—has underestimated him, and that trend has continued in office."
In this blogpost I've explored the definition of leadership and how President Obama has shown it time and again in ways that might not necessarily break through to his critics--much less the general public. There is a startling statistic in Alter's book that blew my political-junkie mind, I can tell you:
Those who regularly watch Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, Comedy Central, or CNBC or listen to NPR amount to ONLY TEN PERCENT OF THE ELECTORATE WHO VOTE IN GENERAL ELECTIONS.
10%. That's everybody COMBINED.
If you want numbers, that boils down to 12 to 15 million serious news consumers--compared to 110 million voters.
So that leaves it up to those of us who are seriously committed, particularly to this president and his administration and the things they are and have been fighting for, to educate ourselves to the truth about this man who was elected by 53 million people. He is a visionary, and he is unruffled by the ups and downs of daily poll numbers and the media circus as he concentrates on accomplishing as much as he possibly can in however much time is allotted to him.
In my next blogpost I'm going to examine some of the more controversial legislative accomplishments, such as health care and financial reform, from the point of view of what was actually going on inside the White House and Congress--not what has been speculated. I'm also going to get into the media whirlwind faced by this president (which no other president in history has ever had to confront, thanks to the rapid 24-7 development of the Internet as well as cable news--Fox News didn't even exist when Bill Clinton was president, for example, and during the Bush years, it acted as a megaphone and cheerleader for his every fart, which, as we know, is exactly opposite of what Obama must deal with).
And I'll discuss the image that has so provoked commentary--that he is somehow unemotional or uncaring or unresponsive to the public's needs.
I'll provide some interesting statistics that I had not seen before, that say more than anything else what is true and what is not. Because we are facing a mid-term election that carries grave consequences for those of us who would be deeply disturbed to see a Speaker John Boehner or Majority Leader Mitch McConnell--not to mention the far-reaching results should more Republican governors take office and thus control the all-important redistricting, which could hand Republicans even more seats.
I know many liberals have been disappointed in the president. Some are angry. But we all need to focus on one thing, and one thing only right now: THIS IS OUR PRESIDENT. THIS IS OUR TIME.
And unless we want to turn the clock back to the days when Republicans literally shut down the government in defiance of a Democratic president AND THEN IMPEACHED HIM--coming only one vote short of removing him from office--then we need to understand not only what the stakes are in November, but just what we've got to be thankful for.
Right here. And right now.
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| Posted by Deanie Mills at | | | |
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(UPDATE at the end)
We all know the climactic scene in the Wizard of Oz, when the "great and powerful Oz," belching out smoke and thunderous pronouncements on terrified Dorothy and her companions, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow--is revealed by the little dog, Toto, when he pulls the curtain back to show a short little every day man, pulling levers and flipping switches and speaking into a megaphone--much to the chagrin of Dorothy and her crestfallen companions, who have traveled a great distance and endured many trials and tribulations in order to find the great and powerful Oz.
They realize that they have been hoodwinked. Bamboozled. You could even say, "snookered."
Even the faithful Munchkins had no idea that the great and powerful Oz was merely smoke and mirrors; illusion and magic. All this time they had believed in his powerful pronouncements, but now what are they going to do?
Well, that's up to the Munchkins to decide.
Unless you've been living in some kind of Fox-news world, where your exposure to truth and factual content is greatly restricted or otherwise blatantly manipulated, or you don't watch the news at all, then you have heard the story of Shirley Sherrod, the USDA employee who became the latest victim of the Fox News/Roger Ailes/Andrew Breitbart Wizard of Oz smoke-and-mirrors scam.
In a speech before the NAACP last March, she told a story about how, 24 years before, while working for a nonprofit agency, she had a case in which a white farmer, who stood to lose his farm, needed her help. She talked about how he "acted superior to me," and how she couldn't help thinking of all the black farmers who had lost their land, and because of that, she had a hard time sympathizing with the man. She set him up with a white attorney, thinking "one of his own would take care of him," but she did not help him as much as she admits she could have.
Talk about perfect fodder for the Wizard! This feeds right into the Fox News narrative--that not only is the NAACP racist just like the Tea Party, but that there is an ongoing pattern of racism in the Obama administration and you know WHY??
Because he's black, of course! Everybody knows that when a black becomes president, the first thing he is going to do is "get reparations" for slavery and proceed to punish white folks for perceived slights he's had to endure in his life! He's going to foster and tolerate a systematic racist philosophy in every branch of government that is designed to discriminate against whites! AND, he's going to redistribute all our hard-earned money to those lazy, shiftless minorities who didn't work for it!
THEY JUST WANT TO ENSLAVE US!!! It's all they've ever wanted to do ever since they got the vote, right?
So on his website, which I won't dignify with a link, the Fox News-feeder extraordinaire, Andrew Breitbart, who they love because they give him credit for bringing down ACORN with heavily edited, sliced-and-diced, cut-and-pasted videos so faulty that prosecutors studying them said there was no way any criminal activity could be proven because the tapes had been manipulated so egregiously--THAT Breitbart--he took that speech Sherrod had given back behind the curtain and he worked his magic on it, disappearing, for instance, the part where this all took place more than two decades ago, before she ever started working for the government.
Since Fox News gets all their big headlines from Breitbart, because he feeds their media narrative about the bigoted Obama administration, they jumped on it faster than a puppy on a chew toy, and ran the video, making certain that their commentators were properly outraged, screaming that if this was typical of the racist policies within the Obama administration then she needed to be fired! NOW! And this needs to stop! NOW!
The Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, saw the video, as did mainstream reporters, who love the Fox News/Breitbart scandals because they make such good video and instant controversy, which drives ratings. They raced to put up the video; Vilsack, who did not want to be tarred with the oil slick of racism in the USDA ranks, demanded that she be fired, and she was, immediately, RIGHT THEN, as she was driving down the road. (They did tell her to pull over first.)
The White House says they were not involved in this decision; and that may be literally true, but they are also hyper-sensitive to these bogus charges because they know that the news media LOVES them and a story like that will dominate the news cycle for WEEKS.
Right now, they just got benefits passed for the unemployed after weeks of battles. They just got a landmark piece of Wall Street reform legislation--a historic milestone not seen since the Great Depression--passed. The BP oil gusher just got capped and the 24-hour news monsters quit running the damaging video of the oil clouding out of the pipe at thousands of gallons a day--images the president often had to share on-screen whenever he appeared on TV.
Did they REALLY want to spend the next TWO WEEKS debating whether or not a USDA employee was racist? Did they REALLY want THAT to dominate the news coverage?
So, they caved.
Let's move right along, people. Nothing to see here.
But there WAS something to see, and Toto--in the form of ONE vigilant network, CNN, decided to do what NOBODY ELSE EVEN THOUGHT ABOUT DOING: They viewed the rest of the speech.
That's when the tragic truth came out.
Yes, she withheld some of her best help from the white farm family. AT FIRST. But when she saw that the white attorney she took them to could not be bothered to help them; when she saw that they were indeed every bit as desperate as any black family she'd ever known, "I realized it was not a matter of BLACK or WHITE. It was a matter of being POOR. It was about the haves and the have-nots," she told her audience.
After that, she said, she worked hard to help the couple.
CNN took it a step further--again, doing what ACTUAL JOURNALISTS ARE SUPPOSED TO DO.
They interviewed the white couple in question.
And they said, on-camera, flat-out, that Ms. Sherrod had SAVED THEIR FARM; that they considered her a friend, and that she should not be fired but should get her job back.
FOLKS, I'M HERE TO TELL YOU, THIS IS A WATERSHED MOMENT FOR FOX NEWS AND THE MAINSTREAM NEWS MEDIA, AS WELL AS FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
When Toto pulled back the curtain, he revealed a HUCKSTER, a FRAUD.
What Breitbart had done to this woman was a malicious lie.
There is no other way to describe it. He set out to destroy her just to make a point, and he knew FULL WELL what he was doing when he sliced-and-diced, cut-and-pasted, and heavily edited her speech to make her appear racist.
But there is a deeper truth here.
This is hardly an isolated incident, but a clear PATTERN of how Fox "News" pushes a narrative onto the public in such a way that they demand the mainstream media pay attention, as Media Matters so skillfully points out::
"The New Black Pantherstory is in the middle stages of the Fox Cycle -- the process by whichthefalse, ridiculous ramblings of right-wing bloggers and partisan mediahacks can,with a generous assist from Fox News, make it to the front pages ofthe New York Times.
"Put simply, the FoxCycle begins with the blogosphere. Conservative bloggers seize on astory andstart twisting it and injecting falsehoods. Before long, Fox Newscatches onand, usually with Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity playing the lead role,devotesobscene amounts of coverage to the bogus story. The bloggers take FoxNews'heavy coverage as validation of the story's veracity, and before longthey joinwith the conservative network in carping that the rest of the media areignoringit. Soon after, the rest of the media relent and start covering thestory, atwhich point it becomes a mini-frenzy. Then the pundits chime in,crediting FoxNews for giving the story legs and being ahead of the rest of media.Finally,long after the damage has been done and the media have largely moved on,thefacts emerge and the story is confirmed to be junk.
"It's a cycle that'sbeen repeated over and over in the past, with varying degrees ofsuccess. TheACORN videos, Obama's "relationship" with William Ayers, and the"Climategate"non-scandal managed to make it all the way through the cycle, inflictingirreparable and unjustified damage to the community organizing movementand thereputations of respected climate scientists, not to mention thePresident of theUnited States, who was at one point accused of "palling around withterrorists."
When President Obama first started standing up to Fox News and pointing out--rightly so--that they are not a serious news organization but rather a partisan political arm of the Right wing, he was attacked for it by the mainstream press, who stood up for and defended their Fox News colleagues. Much was made of whether or not it was politically savvy for a sitting president to take on a news network. Many pundits stated that it made him look petty and small. Most said it would backfire on him.
So Fox was given a pass by the very people who should have known better--real journalists.
But this. This is different. This is such an egregious case of personally attacking an innocent woman for the purpose of a political hatchet-job by doctoring video YET AGAIN--and the mainstream media was caught out this time, standing there like some Frankensteinian combination of the Cowardly Lion (no courage) and the Scarecrow (no brain)--gawking wide-eyed at the Great and Powerful Oz as he belched smoke and thunder.
Probably the densist denizen of that establishment is George Stephanopoulous, who still seems to think Breitbart deserves a "fair and balanced" interview alongside Eric Boehlert of Media Matters on Good Morning, America .
While Stephanopoulous sat weak and defenseless before him, Breitbart dominated the interview, spewing out his spin-bile, stating, flat-out, that Shirley Sherrod "doesn't matter," that he would not apologize for destroying her life because "it's not about her." It was about, he insisted, the "racism in the NAACP."
Ahhh yes. Fox News does like to go after anyone they perceive has having called them out on their lies. It starts with heavily doctored videos and wide-eyed alarmist news reports about made-up crises, and it goes straight up the food chain to their hacks and hellstars--Hannity, O'Reilly, and Beck.
And as soon as the NAACP pointed out the obvious, that the Tea Party has racists in its ranks, which is obvious to anybody NOT WATCHING Fox news because, Fox News never shows the videos depicting the righteous rednecks spewing their hatred of a black president, undocumented aliens, or anyone NOT a white Anglo Saxon Protestant--then they became the Number One Enemy of Fox News, and from then on, it was their avowed purpose in life to dig up and find examples of racism in the ranks.
Because Stephanoupolous gave him free rein for virtually the entire four minutes, Breitbart dredged up every grievance the Right wing has about the perceived racist slights about them, insisting, for example, that there are "four videos, FOUR VIDEOS" (holding up four fingers)--to show that Rep. Lewis did not get spat upon or called the n-word during the health care reform vote as he was on his way through the Tea Party crowd.
And he insisted that the video of Ms. Sherrod "shows the audience applauding" (holding up his hands in front of Stephanopoulous's face and clapping for demonstrable effect) her racist remarks.
I won't get into Media Matters' calm pointing-out that the applause did not take place when she was making racist statements but later, when she was talking about overcoming her prejudices and helping the poor.
I want to talk about the applause.
This was a black audience. An NAACP audience. She was talking to "my people" as she called them.
AND I WANT TO MAKE SOMETHING PERFECTLY CLEAR TO PRIVILEGED WHITE SOFT-HANDED ASSHOLES LIKE ANDREW BRIETBART AND ALL HIS WHITE FRIENDS AT FOX NEWS, RIGHT HERE AND RIGHT NOW.
THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RACISM AND * PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.*
Repeated hidden camera investigations by such programs as 60 Minutes and Dateline have proven time and time again: If an equally qualified black and white person try to do such simple things as take a vacant apartment, apply for an available job, flag down a cab in an urban area after dark, drive through an affluent area late at night, or even go shopping in an upscale department store, THEY ARE TREATED DIFFERENTLY by the whites who hold the power over them.
Repeatedly, the white person is favored over the black, or the black is suspected of shoplifting or theft or of some other potential crime.
This is life for people of color. It is the very reason their unemployment figures stand at double what they are for whites.
Oh yeah, I know all you people who watch Fox News like to think it's because they are LAZY AND SHIFTLESS but the truth is that THEIR DAY TO DAY REALITY IS DIFFERENT FROM OURS.
So when she said that "he was acting like he was superior to me," and audience members yelled out "Right!"--something the white folks down at Fox news find offensive--they were simply giving a black-church AMEN to a situation every single person sitting in that audience has EXPERIENCED.
THIS IS NOT RACISM. IT IS PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.
This whole ginned-up frenzy about racism in an administration overseen by a black president is crazy. And it is, in itself, racist.
It's based on a deep-seated fear of empowered blacks and other minorities. I've seen it myself in the backlash following major gains by the women's movement--any time you, as a minority, encroach on a white male power establishment, it scares the shit out of them and they will punish you.
But I digress.
HERE IS MY POINT.
The curtain has been pulled back to reveal the Fox News hysteri-cycle. It has been shown NOT to be REAL JOURNALISM.
IT HAS BEEN SHOWN TO BE LIES, BASED ON LIES, USED AS PROPAGANDA TO PRESS A POLITICAL NARRATIVE.
Already, they are blaming the Obama administration for "believing" the video THEY THEMSELVES HYPED.
I'm not proud of this chapter in the Obama saga--and I make no excuses for the ridiculous treatment of a faithful employee, who, at the very LEAST, deserved a fair hearing before being asked to pull over on the side of the road and quit a job after decades of service.
But watch as Fox News dodges responsibility and accountability for their own lies. Watch as they blame Obama for what THEY caused.
And furthermore, watch at the mainstream media, AT LAST, begins to wake up to the fact that THERE IS NO GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ.
That all this hysterical crap ranted and raved on Fox news is so much CRAP THEY MAKE UP.
In the final ten seconds of the interview, as Brietbart was holding up his four fingers about the "four videos" proving Representative Lewis a liar, Stephanopoulous asked Media Matters' Boehlert (who was waaay more quiet than I'd like to see), if he believed those videos were "accurate."
"NO!" he cried just before the commercial break. "NOT ACCURATE."
You see, THIS is what Stephanopoulous SHOULD have said during the Brietbart lie-rade. He should have interrupted and demanded, ''HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO TRUST ANY VIDEOS YOU OFFER AS EVIDENCE WHEN YOU HAVE BEEN PROVEN REPEATEDLY TO DOCTOR VIDEOS INTO VIRAL LIES?"
He didn't, though.
I'm not worried about it. Other journalists will.
This was a turning point for the Munchkins, now that the Great and Powerful Oz has been revealed to be a fraud.
The media outcry will not be where Fox News wants it to be--that Vilsack acted too quickly to fire her--and the NAACP to condemn her.
The spotlight will be on how it is that NOBODY BOTHERED TO DO THEIR JOBS IN THE FIRST PLACE, WHICH IS FIND OUT THE TRUTH, AND THAT LIARS CANNOT BE TRUSTED.
Nobody, that is, but actual journalists, working at a real news network.
So that, maybe the next time Fox "News" hypes a super-breaking hot story...the other networks will shrug, say, Oh, it's only Fox, and go on about their business of gathering real news.
UPDATE: According to Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post, Fox News did NOT cover the Sherood story during the day it broke; rather, it was mentioned on O'Reilly and on Beck. However, Kurtz is reporting strictly on the on-air coverage of the days events. In fact, according to Media Matters , who keeps a close and vigilant eye on these things:
"In fact, FoxNews.com published a story based on the deceptively edited
video before Sherrod resigned; indeed, a subsequent FoxNews.com article
reported that she resigned "shortly after FoxNews.com published its
initial report on the video."
Further, Media Matters quotes extensively from Right-wing media outlets who, originally, had great praise for Brietbart for doing "great work." Furthermore, they give an extensive collection and back-list of Andrew Brietbart's Greatest Hits- of character assassination, slice-and-dice video editing and fact-manipulation-and keep in mind, his work is respected and frequently lauded by Fox News, where he is regarded as a "journalist."
Consequently, although Fox did not trumpet the story on-air until their pundits got hold of it, they did do so online, even taking credit for the administration's reaction later to fire Sherood, so therefore, I STAND BY MY PREMISE, that the constant, constant witch-hunt harping and other egregious Fox New manipulations and castrations of news events has contributed to this whole scandal; both in the administration's over-reaction and in the media hothouse firestorm that responded.
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| Posted by Deanie Mills at | | | |
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If I didn't already know about the Secret Life of the White-Wing Conservatives, I would believe the recent self-righteous outrage coming out of the Tea Party in response to the NAACP challenge that they call out the racists in their midst.
Oh! My gosh! They've been so upset! WE'RE NOT RACIST! WE ARE GOD-FEARING PATRIOTS MERELY WORKING FOR LOWER TAXES AND SMALLER GOVERNMENT. YOU'RE THE RACIST!!!
The thing is, I'm sure that many of these people actually believe that. It explains the self-righteous outrage. Not ME! I'M no racist!
They think that is true because, once upon a time years ago, they had a black maid they were really fond of. Or, when they were in the military, they served alongside people of color and got along just fine.
They don't, however, have any black or Hispanic friends right NOW, just, you know, FRIENDS. People to hang out with, invite over to their homes, send e-mail jokes and inspirational prayer-chains and patriotic flag-waving links to.
There may be black people who attend their Mega-Church--the one with the ampitheater that seats thousands--but they don't really know them all that well. Still, they DO go to church with black people! And there are Hispanics there, too, like the mayor, Ms. Rodriguez. She seems very nice. Her kids go to the same school as their kids, but that's about it. Or they work with a black guy...what's his name? The one over in Marketing...
Or, they've got a cousin with a black boyfriend, and he came to the last family reunion. They didn't speak to him though. Not deliberate! Just busy with other people there, and the couple left early, is all. Besides, he seemed kind of shy. Sat off by himself. Would have been weird to just walk up to him and start talking, right?
Yeah, right.
See, I was going to write the kind of blogpost I normally write, chock-full of links--Oh Lord there are so many links--to prove my points: one, two, three. You could read for yourself the racist blogposts and see for yourself the videos of the rallies and peruse Sarah Palin's ghost-written Facebook screed scolding the NAACP for "divisive politics"--which is REALLY rich.
But I've changed my mind. I'm just going to speak from the heart here, because I've done all those things before, and on this topic.
It's not the loud, public attention-getters that gives them away--it's their Secret Life.
I'm talking about the viral e-mails.
Unlike most progressives and liberals that I know, I live in an extremely conservative area, and just about everybody I know, including many members of my own family, are very conservative.
There's nothing wrong with that. Conservatism has a long and distinguished history in our nation's tapestry, but unfortunately, its good name got hijacked by venal win-at-all-costs politicians and their paid hacks back during the Clinton years: Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, and others on the far right, aided and abetted by Whores of Babylon like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, and others who perverted the conservative doctrine and twisted it into something ugly and unrecognizable, running off any and all liberal or moderate conservative voices in congress and the Senate as Republican in Name Only and forcing the survivors to go against their own principles if they wanted to stay in the Party--while, at the same time, recruiting and funding some of the most unsuitable candidates for office imaginable, just because they were suitably crazy. Their standard-bearer, George W. Bush, sold his soul to the devil of getting and keeping power, and proceeded to ransack the government and leave it a shambles, while provoking some of the most bitter, partisan hatreds we've seen in nearly a century.
Motivated by Clinton-hatred, egged on by warmongering faux-patriotic fever, good people who should have known better found themselves slipping down the slope--abandoning their own common-sense views and gradually embracing more and more extremist rhetoric as "truth," because by this time, they'd been brainwashed into believing the "liberal media" wasn't TELLING the truth and only the Cult of the Crazy could be trusted for this precious inside information.
Fox News came along with its 24/7 megaphone, and before you could say, "HOODWINK" or "BAMBOOZLE" the so-called mainstream media was defending them as a legitimate journalistic organization in spite of the fact that its own commentators were either blatantly running for office on the GOP ticket--and using the Fox platform to raise funds--or raising funds for their own Political Action Committees on Fox--or serving openly as lobbyists and advisors for GOP candidates and raising funds--something NO LEGITIMATE NEWS ORGANIZATION HAS EVER DONE.
(This doesn't even touch blatant conflict-of-interest situations in which on-air personalities hype fear and paranoia about the U.S. dollar and push people to invest in gold while, at the same time, advertising for gold investment companies, thus making themselves filthy rich off the terror they, themselves, have fanned, as Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly both routinely do.)
The explosion of the Internet and social-networking sites like Facebook provided an even more narrow forum for both sides of the debate, really, but studies have shown that liberals DO read a variety of news sources, but conservatives nearly always stick only to friendly sites that reinforce and validate the opinions they have already formed. (I could provide a link to those studies but not today.)
Even when Glenn Beck himself cheerfully points out, as he did on the popular daytime program, "The View," that he is an ENTERTAINER and NOT a JOURNALIST, and even when he admitted--with no remorse--that HE NEVER FACT-CHECKS THE THINGS HE SAYS ON HIS PROGRAM--many right-wingers continue to cling to his program as "proof" of the convoluted theories he, himself, has been proposing.
And then along came a black president.
Barack Obama really did not want to run as the "first black president." He wanted to be the president of--as he so eloquently pointed out at the Democratic convention speech of 2004, "not the Red States of America, not the Blue States of America--but the UNITED States of America!"
Nobody in the mainstream media or the right wing took him seriously for a very long time, until he started winning; and then, it looked as if he might actually WIN this thing and become President of the United States.
I'm not going to go into the public things we all already know about--the massive overkill on Jeremiah Wright and so forth.
It's the viral e-mails I want to talk about--the ones they send to EACH OTHER that don't make the evening news.
The first real, longtime, dear friend whom I loved that I cut out of my life because of these viral e-mails had been sending me one nasty hateful myth-driven viral e-mail after another that I tried to ignore, most of the time.
Then he sent me the caricature.
Barack Obama, drawn hideously out of proportion...with the big lips made so sadly famous in other racist caricatures from the Jim Crow days.
He sent me that e-mail knowing full well that I was a precinct chairman for the Obama for America campaign. He knew I was a Democrat. He knew I was a strong Obama supporter, working very hard for his nomination.
And yet, somehow, he seemed to think it was okay to send me that cartoon.
WHY?
What would have made an old friend--a cop I'd known for 20 years or more, who had helped me research at least one of my books, who I had long adored and with whom I had laughed so many times I can't count them--send me such a thing, knowing how I felt about the man?
I knew that, like many old-school cops, now retired, he had been prejudiced on the job--I'll be honest about that. Many of his generation had been, and they had been terribly sexist, too. I can't count the stupid sexist jokes he'd sent me through the years that I really didn't find all that funny but tolerated because I thought he was a good guy, overall.
But this cartoon, it was really, really MEAN.
And it revealed something so ugly, so hidden beneath the surface, about my friend that I knew I could no longer BE friends with him.
I told him the caricature was racist and bigoted and not to send me anything like that again. When he sent me an angry diatribe in response, I deleted it without reply, removed him from my address book, and cut him out of my life for good. I cannot be "friends" with someone whose soul has such a rottenness in it.
And you want to know the real irony? This same guy was ALWAYS sending me the most syrupy, saccharine Jesus pictures and prayers and sentimental Sunday School stories.
He truly did not see the irony in it. That a man calling himself a Christian could have such hate in his soul.
There have been more.
Just a few weeks ago, there was the "joke." Only, I didn't realize what it was. The subject heading said, "It Had to Happen Eventually."
Open the e-mail. Inside: A photo-shopped photograph of Joe Biden. In cornrows.
HA HA HA HA!!! Right??? Really funny.
I deleted it without comment.
But some of them, they don't dare send to ME, but they send to people who send them to me. Like the one from a couple of weeks ago with the subject heading: "The First Tar-Balls Wash Up on Gulf Shores."
Open the e-mail. A photo of Barack Obama, body-surfing.
HA HA HA HA!!! Right??? Really funny.
Only it's not.
You know why?
Because I DO have friends of color, and the thing is, when you actually have people in your life who you love who are people of color, you don't find these kinds of things funny AT ALL because you know that they are HURTFUL.
THEY HURT PEOPLE. THEY HURT PEOPLE I CARE ABOUT.
It's more than just jokes, though. When you point out that a joke is racist, the one who sent it seems truly baffled.
Why, they just thought it was funny, that's all. Harmless. You liberals get so upset about the silliest things.
But it's not just the jokes.
They send me other viral e-mails. These e-mails accuse the president of the most horrific things. And RIDICULOUS things--like the one where the president and first lady were supposedly on the White House lawn at a state ceremony, and yet when the flag passed by, they BOTH PUT THEIR LEFT HANDS OVER THEIR CHESTS!!!
"Explain this!" they demand, certain that it proves that the Obamas HATE THIS COUNTRY SO MUCH THAT THEY WOULD DELIBERATELY DISRESPECT IT BEFORE THE FLAG (and, apparently, also in front of the official White House photographer on the grounds of the White House at an official ceremony.)
Snopes.com: The photo has been "flipped." Check out the Marine in the background--all his ribbons are on the wrong side of his chest--this is proof that this picture has been photo-shopped, says Snopes. (Check it out yourself. I could provide the link, but not today.)
Again and again they send me things. Again and again I check them out. I can't tell you how many times the explanation is that a CONSERVATIVE BLOGGER WROTE THE PIECE AS SATIRE AND SOMEHOW IT GOT PICKED UP INTO THE BODY OF AN E-MAIL AND SENT ON ITS ROUNDS.
The fact that they believe--LITERALLY--something that The Onion might publish as a joke or Jon Stewart put on The Daily Show if it were about, say, George W. Bush or John Boehner, is not what I'm talking about, here.
What I'm talking about is that they BELIEVE IT AT ALL.
There is a segment of the population that is perfectly willing to believe the most horrible things about this president--and yes, they believed horrible things about the Clintons, too, I'll give you that--but there is a difference here and it's in the jokes.
It's in the caricatures. The Obama-as-witch-doctor. The Obama-as-Curious-George. The Obama-as-Gorilla. The Obama-With-the-Full-Lips.
When I try to refute the e-mail--especially when it maintains that Obama hates the troops, hates the military, wants veterans to pay for their own medical care or some other nonsense, I get one of two reactions: Either they seize on some side issue that is basically unrelated to the subject at hand and start hammering me on that (one man, when we were arguing about health care reform, suddenly demanded that I explain "Obama's policy toward Palestinians!!!") Or, they don't reply at all, which means that I have simply proven them wrong and they refuse to admit it.
I have a couple of conservative friends who will tell me the truth, and when I ask them, "Why do right-wingers, and Tea Partiers especially, hate Obama so much?"
I point out that, yes, we hated George W. Bush with a passion, especially when he lied this country into a war that cost 4,000 lives. But WE NEVER SENT AROUND JOKES COMPARING LAURA BUSH TO A GORILLA. We NEVER WENT ON TALK RADIO AND MADE FUN OF HIS CHILDREN. In eight years, there was one conspiracy theory--the 9/11 plot--NOT A NEW ONE EVERY WEEK.
In other words, we didn't have to make stuff up and we didn't send around these horrible viral e-mails to each other. I was there. I hated Bush because my family went to fight in a war I opposed.
But in all that time, no liberal friend EVER sent me the kinds of things I've been sent about Barack Obama.
And my conservative friends, the ones who will admit the truth, say, "As much as I hate to admit this, and I really really hate to admit this, the truth is, it's race. It has GOT to be race. This is why I no longer listen to talk radio," they'll say, "or why I no longer visit so-and-so's website."
They can't take it anymore, these members of the Republican Party who find this latest development alarming.
You see, not all conservatives are racist.
And, I expect, not all Tea Partiers are racist either. We all know they've got a few token blacks in their movement.
BUT.
IF YOU ARE NOT A RACIST, AND YOU KNOW GOOD AND DAMN WELL THAT RACISM EXISTS IN YOUR MOVEMENT, THEN WHY DON'T YOU STEP UP AND CALL IT OUT???
Instead, they rear up on their hind legs and claim that it's the BLACKS that are racist, not THEM. They claim that the only people bringing those ugly signs WERE SENT THERE BY LIBERALS TO EMBARRASS THEM. They claim that, to call them racist IS TO IMPUGN FREEDOM-LOVING PATRIOTS EVERYWHERE.
This is what they say publicly.
Privately?
They send around another Obama-tar-ball joke, only, they're careful not to send it to the liberals, because, hey, it's not "politically correct."
Is that what they're calling it, these days?
Me, I call it racism.
Because, the bottom line for all of you out there who have sent me those jokes: WOULD YOU SEND THEM TO A BLACK FRIEND or MEMBER OF THE FAMILY (by marriage, obviously)?
If not, why not? Do you fear that person might be OFFENDED by that funny joke?
Oh? And why is THAT?
Of course, this might be a difficult exercise if you don't actually HAVE any black or Hispanic friends--not acquaintances, mind you, but people you really, genuinely, care about. People whose feelings you would never want to hurt.
And, if you don't have friends like that who happen to be black or brown or even gay...why is THAT?
Go ahead. Think about it a while. I can wait.
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| Posted by Deanie Mills at | | | |
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In my previous post, I detailed the media's obsession with "narrative," and how in today's lickety-split world of instant-communications, it's not really possible to create an enduring narrative on the fly; how, it hardly matters anyway because pundits can't resist creating narratives of their own based on personal biases and even grudges they hold in favor of or against a given administration.
I also defined the difference between governing and story-telling, how most people--average voters and not the beltway echo-chamber--make up their minds on an administration based on results rather than comic-book images presented to them by bedazzled media figures. If the public perceives that a president is working hard to solve problems and is, indeed, doing so, they will forgive him any number of stumbles, as President Bill Clinton's stubbornly high approval ratings proved in spite of an almost constant media barrage of criticism and salacious television images over two full years of his presidency attests.
However, when it comes to the efforts of volunteers to reach out to potential voters and convince them to continue to support a Party's ticket in mid-term elections when even a popular president is not on the ballot, then the issue of narrative does enter into the conversation to some extent, so it helps if we have a story of our own to tell, and that is what Part II is about.
So what IS a "narrative"?
The best description I've found anyplace came from, of all places, Forbes Magazine, in a column on leadership by Nick Morgan written, like so many were, back in March. He used Toyota and the Obama administration as examples, and he explains why the so-called"narrative" is making the media squeal so much:
"The rest of us, however, want only one thing from virtually every organization in the world besides the one we work for. We want it to do its basic job. We want Toyota to make cars that work--safely,efficiently and perhaps even with a little style. We want the White House and President Obama to get things done that are useful and move the country forward.
"We don't keep score. We do pay attention, over the long run, to how well the organization does its basic job. We're simply too busy, too distracted, too information-overloaded to give anything more than 25miles from us more attention than that.
"Which leads to the second issue, the narrative. Because our brains retain stories better than any other form of information, we develop shortcuts to handle all the information we need to in the modern world.The most important shortcut is the narrative. The narrative is the quick story that has developed over a long period of time for any organization, company or important public figure. It's the way we store and organize the information."
He goes on to say that once a "counter-narrative"crops up--like the weak, emasculated one put forth by right-wing pundits and Maureen Dowd, that it's extremely hard to counteract,because it gets stuck in the public's brain.
However,a company--or president--can overcome that by "moving fast and decisively" on issues or on legislation, which is what President Obama then did on health care right after this piece was published, and what he did with BP even as Dowd was whining to her manicurist about how she can't find a man.
In fact, I found another narrative-complainer right after Obama's State of the Union address, in which Ezra Klein, writing for the Washington Post, had said that, yeah, the speech was fine, but it needed "a good follow-through:"
"But the State of the Union only comes once a year. And it's hard to imagine voters buying Obama's narrative of progress and achievement unless they see, well, some progress and some achievements. Obama made a strong statement in favor of health-care reform, but he didn't call on the House to pass the Senate bill, or the Senate to pass modifications,or for any alternative path to be followed. Success here will be measured not in reactions to the speech, but in the outcome of the effort."
And of course, Obama DID deliver. Three months later.
The thing about all these people who demanded that Obama deliver as part of the narrative, was that after he DID deliver, I didn't read any op-eds from them saying, NOW THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKIN' ABOUT!
Why do you think that is?
Last summer, for example, Bob Herbert of the New York Times wrote op-ed after op-ed about how the Stimulus funds had been wasted on tax cuts and that Obama had been obsessed with health care reform and that the nation was crying for infrastructure projects and jobs, jobs, jobs.
This summer, which Vice President Biden is calling, "The Summer of Recovery," more than 500 Stimulus-driven infrastructure projects will begetting underway, creating thousands of jobs all over this country, and I am WAITING to read one Bob Herbert column praising that effort.
(Again,another liberal, mind you.)
Anyway,Morgan winds up by saying:
"That narrative has to be simple, consistent and all about your functional role in the world. You've only got one story. Make it a good one. "
So,what does that have to do with us, the lowly Obama supporters? Isn't it the job of the White House communications office to create their narrative? Aren't we just narrative-consumers out here like everybody else?
Not necessarily.
First,I'll quote from a rousing piece by Kate Zernike in the Times, "Democrats Need a Rally Monkey,"
because she's talking to US, not to the White House, and then, I'll talk to my fellow Obama supporters.
Again,this article was written in early March, before the oil gusher and before health care reform had been passed, when all the pundit poo-bahs were soooo sure that the Republicans were going to kick our asses allover the place in the fall.
One of the people quoted by Zernike said the party was "snakebit" and "once a party's snakebit,it's really snakebit."
Uh...no.
She goes on to quote Stanley Greenburg, a Democratic pollster, who said there were two things that Dems needed to do in order to maintain our governing majority in 2010 and thus, hope to continue to get ANYTHING accomplished without suffering a complete governmental shutdown by the right wing:
"They have to show that they can govern successfully—passing some version of healthcare reform would be his preference—and then they have to frame the election as a choice for Democrats: “Do you want to rally behind your leaders, or do you want to go back to the policies that got us into this trouble in the first place?”
“The energy comes in the choice,” he said.
Ahhh, the CHOICE.
I thought we reached a real tipping-point in the past few days as far as the Dems' ability to point out for prospective voters what that choice really is, when ranking Energy and Commerce Committee Republican Congressman Joe Barton took his chance to grill BP CEO Tony Hayward on the cataclysmic disaster unleashed upon the residents of four states as well as untold millions of suffering marine animals due to his company's reckless pursuit of profit over commonsense--and chose instead to APOLOGIZE to the oil company for the fact that President Obama had demanded accountability from them on behalf of the people.
For young voters especially who may have turned out in '08 but don't really see why it would matter if they voted in '10,for a congressperson they know little about, when Obama himself is not on the ballot--this is the reason.
If the Dems lose the House in '10, then Joe Barton will take over the committee that is responsible for the oversight of regulating companies LIKE BP.
Other Republicans will take back control of committees who are supposed to oversee Wall Street, the environment, health care, and other areas that the Republicans, themselves, ran into the ditch under George W. Bush,and created the problems that President Obama and the Dems have been working so very hard to repair.
And for those voters who may not be so young, but who may be Hispanic, we don't have to say much of anything.
All we have to do is point to Arizona.
In '08, there was a generational divide in the Hispanic vote, as there was across the board. Older Hispanics often voted along cultural lines;pro-life, strong defense, and so on, and so voted for McCain who, even though he rejected it during the campaign,had actually written some pretty good legislation earlier in his Senate career on immigration reform.
That was then. This is now.
The Republican Party has embraced the right-wing fringe nutcase branch of their party, and all the xenophobic, immigrant-hating baggage that entails. In Arizona right now, not only can you get arrested for looking Hispanic and not having proper "papers" on you, but ethnic classes in schools that teach Hispanic culture have been canceled across the board, teachers who speak with Hispanic accents have been fired--flat-out--and now, a new law has been proposed in their state legislature that denies American citizenship to babies born in this country--a clear violation of 14th Amendment rights.
Republicans everywhere embrace this ideology and routinely send around viral e-mails full of nasty ethnic slurs and jokes.
If Hispanics do not turnout in full force and vote Democratic in November, and Republicans take back the House and/or Senate, as well as governorships, they can count on more and more Draconian laws and less and less opportunities for sensible immigration reform, not to mention a steep increase in hate crimes committed against them, particularly in border states.
If Republicans take back the House AND the Senate, they will set about attempting to repeal or overturn everything Obama has tried to do, and they will shut down and obstruct everything he tries to do in the future, and they will, without fail, work on behalf of Big Oil, Wall Street, Big Corporations, Defense Contractors, and any other entity that will look down its noses at the "small people" that President Obama and the Dems have been trying so hard to help.
AND, they will make it their mission in life to get rid of Obama in whatever way they can.
They will search for some sort of bogus impeachment charge, or, failing that, they will simply "Jimmy Carter" him, by making him look like such a failure that he will be sure to lose the White House in 2012, putting them firmly back in power, which is where they feel entitled to be.
Which would put this country right back where we were in the years 2000 to2006.
Think about that for a minute. Talk amongst yourselves. I'll wait.
So, again, what can we do about it?
The first thing we can do is get it through our heads that Obama is in the process of transforming the Democratic Party.
Those of us who remain active in Organizing for America--there are 13 million in the OfA database, but it's hard to gauge how many remain activists right now--realize this, but the old die-hards (those who still bitch about Howard Dean's 50-State Strategy) still don't GET it.
The Democratic Party is no longer meant to function as a gigantic wheezing behemoth of a top-down Frankensteinian monster-machine that plods along like a big cyborg, gobbling up campaign donations and spitting out advertising spots and Party organization-approved plans, where a young volunteer must "pay dues" in the Party machine, work their way dutifully up the chain of command, and so on.
It's more like a living,breathing organism, filled with energy and life, and yes, there is a structure, and you can work your way up, but it can happen pretty fast,and it's based on one thing, and that's your own energy, creativity, and hard work--not the glasses-on-the-nose approval of some appartchik somewhere whose butt you had to kiss.
Outsiders looking in--and that includes the chattering class--have never quite grasped the concept, either. When OfA guru David Plouffe recently announced the new strategy for 2010--that Dems were going to take $50 million and, rather than pour it into the gas tank of the cyborg, they were going to use it to do the unprecedented--go after the first-time voters from the campaign of '08--young people, Hispanics, and African Americans who were swept up in Obama's message and who might not be planning to vote in the mid-terms but who could possibly be persuaded by OfA volunteers--the outcry was swift and predictable in the piece in the Post by KarenTumulty:
"Some veteran Democratic Party operatives are also skeptical that the $50million investment will payoff--except, perhaps, in keeping the grassroots operation alive for Obama's reelection bid two years from now. Some even suggest that the president's team has put his long-term interests ahead of his party's immediate struggle for survival.
"I have zero confidence that they're heading in the right direction here,"says one longtime Democratic organizer who didn't want to be quoted by name criticizing his party's major midterm election initiative. Added another: "I think they're going to come in for a very rude awakening.It's going to be brutal."
"If that turns out to be the case, the doubters say, Democrats will wake up the morning of Nov. 3 wishing they had spent that $50 million on more traditional methods, like television ads, for reaching their base and persuading independents."
Ewww--that was quick--immediately assuming that all the president is trying to do is set up his 2012 operation. As if it would help him very much to RUN in2012 if he lost the House and Senate in 2010 with approval ratings below 50%.
Buried two-thirds of the way through the article is that,in campaign after campaign--mostly gubernatorial, but also in several special elections (Massachusets comes to mind)--all the traditional Party machine methods were used, and those elections were lost.
But what the article does NOT say is that David Plouffe did not come floating down from Mount Olympus and hand down a Dictate to the Party Faithful.
(This is because the article was written by an old political hand who, I gather, does not Get It.)
THEY ASKED US.
For those of you not active in OfA, I'm here to tell ya, they sent out a detailed questionnaire months ago, asking US what WE thought would be the best way to reach out to voters to get them to the polls in 2010,and then they analyzed the results of those polls.
And a clear majority of the OfA activists felt that the smartest use of volunteer time, energy, and money would be to use it to reach out to those first-time voters who were so enthused in '08 but who may have become disillusioned or who may have just gotten busy with their lives and may not realize how important these elections really are to the president and to THEM.
Somebody who took a little more time to analyze this was Matt Bai, writing for the New York Times Magazine, who goes into the uneven love story between President Obama and the Democratic Party. It's a long piece, but worth the read.
Whenever I read political pieces like the one that decries the "waste" of $50million (before it's even spent) and how Obama and his team are going to wake up and regret it, it just reminds me of sooo many articles I read in the weeks and months leading up to his primary victory and then his election victory.
The same pundits who are whining about lack of narrative and are criticizing him for not running the Party properly are the same ones who predicted his downfall time and time and time again. Then never bothered to apologize when they were caught out wrong. Time and time and time again.
So:Here's the thing.
Obama's team is not telling a story.
THEY ARE GOVERNING.
Previous presidents may have gotten these two words mixed up:
STATECRAFT.
STAGECRAFT.
It's easy to do. See--one has a "T" and one has a "G."
One involves working your ass completely off trying to GET THE JOB DONE and one involves USING PROPS AND PRETTY SCENERY IN ORDER TO PRETEND YOU ARE GETTING THE JOB DONE.
(Fools the media every time.)
We Obama supporters who intend to help him stay in the White House and keep his majority in the House and Senate, we will be asked what that story is, though, when we make our phone calls and knock on doors.
And here it is:
1. He--with the help of a Democratic congress--gets the job done. (Stopped a major Depression.Check. Health care reform. Check. Help for BP victims. Check. Student loan reform. Check. and so on.)
The Republicans have voted against every single thing that Obama and the Democrats have tried to do to help the American people and have sided with corporate interests every time.
2. If we stay home and do not vote--or vote for an opponent in the mid-terms--Republicans will take back congress and the Senate, and then the oil companies will be back in charge of regulating themselves; Wall Street will be back in charge of its own oversight; immigration laws will become more punishing, and so on, just like it was under George W.Bush.
And then, in 2012, we could have a President Palin. Then you could see what bumper-sticker governing is really all about.
For those of you who would like to pitch in and do what you can--make a call or two, or whatever--it is so incredibly easy. You can do it from your home computer. Organizing for America gives you all the information and support you need, and since you're already talking to people who voted once for Obama, it can actually be fun!
Visit thisweb page for a video and further instructions.
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| Posted by Deanie Mills at | | | |
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I've been a storyteller all my life, and for the better part of 20 years, made a fair living at it, having had 11 suspense thrillers and one true-crime published by major NY houses, as well as numerous magazine and newspaper articles. One article I did for Writer's Digest years ago, on the the ten things you need to make your dreams come true, was so popular they reprinted it twice and then put it in a book of collected articles geared for beginning writers, as well as another one I did on the difference between suspense fiction and mysteries. (No, they're not the same thing.)
So I know a little something about "narrative" and "story arc," which is why I've been so amused at all the collective clap-trap I've been reading in recent weeks and months as the media has worked itself into a collective feeding frenzy over what they see as Obama's apparent lack of it, as if that matters one flying freaking flip when it comes to passing massive major health care reform legislation or getting a robber-baron oil company to pay all the "small people" the billions it owes them for destroying their livelihoods in its rapacious race to pile up more gold in its coffers.
What finally clarified and caught my attention was this piece in the Washington Post on Sunday by Jason Horowitz, which was not only beautifully written and wonderfully snarky toward his press colleagues, but also substantive. As Obama's close advisor, David Axelrod, pointed out to Horowitz, "so much of the coverage and commentary has to do with the narrative, stagecraft, and the political implications of what the president is doing. When you are president of the United States, the most important thing is that you cope with the disaster. Not, the story line of the disaster."
"Ax" continues:
"The problem, he added, is that the story about the story is mainly what journalists care about now. The administration's actions certainly have political implications and often political motives, but the media's default setting is to process every policy proposal, diplomatic gesture,government appointment and, now, national disaster through that prism."Events occur that don't fit neatly into a narrative," Axelrod said."But that doesn't mean you can defer them, or place emphasis on the storytelling and not the problem-solving."
This is by no means a problem peculiar to Obama. It has been going on for as long as there has been a Washington press corps and a president--probably since there have been scribes and politicians. And a few astute members of the Fourth Estate have been savvy to it:
"In a 1993 New York Times Magazine piece, the late Michael Kelly skewered the Washington press corps, to which he belonged, for its obsession with "perception." Among his peers, he noted a depressing self-awareness that the important action in government was occurring behind the scenes and outside of their grasp. As a result, he wrote, "reporters fashion reality out of perceptions."
The REAL problem nowadays, and what sets Obama's presidency apart from any that came before in this respect, is the real-time urgency of the New Media, not just the 24-hour cable-news beast that Clinton and W. both had to deal with, but the advent of instantaneous blogosphere that competes with even that, which removes any opportunity for the necessary distancing, analysis, and study that a narrative arc might require--as Horowitz put it:
"The narrative has been constantly updated -- Obama's a hero one day, a goat the next -- as ravenous news cycles and impatient audiences demand conclusions, and attention-starved media outlets can no longer subsist on the modest first drafts of history.
"We are struggling to sustain a narrative concept in an age of contemporaneity," said David Shi, the president of Furman University in South Carolina, who is writing the ninth edition of "America: A Narrative History," a popular college textbook. "The demand for analysis and meaning of things right away puts real narrative under attack."
"All of this undermines the traditional notion of a narrative as a slowly developing arc that requires perspective to be properly observed. "A narrative in the true sense means a beginning, a middle and an end,"said Robert A. Caro, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner whose biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson are touchstones of the narrative nonfiction genre. "That's a story."
So, in other words, instead of a novel, we're reading a comic book.
Only, it's not funny.
The problem with comic-book information is that the voting public, with its shorter and shorter attention span, begins to confuse the narrative storyline with the actual POLICY. As Jeremy Jacobs put it in a piece for Campaigns and Elections:
"The term’s use is an example of campaign lingo and strategy spilling over into governing. Campaigns have long focused on developing a compelling narrative then fitting issues into it. Now it appears that the story of whether a bill will pass gets more attention than what is in the bill....
"With the myriad of news outlets, it has become more effective to deliver sound bites that drive a story line rather than policy details. And to public figures, it makes more sense politically to declare victory than risk losing the news cycle by discussing some esoteric detail of a bill.“It seems like things are more and more in terms of a zero sum game,”says Payack. “You either win or you lose.”
We saw this used with particularly diabolical skill by the Bush administration. Nobody knew how to use the so-called "optics" better than Karl Rove and company. Stick their puppet W. up in front of someplace inspirational (think, "Mission Accomplished"), have him declare victory, or say he's got some kind of sweeping "vision" to, say, put a man on Mars or rebuild New Orleans after Katrina, put soaring words in his mouth, do it all on prime-time tee-vee, and you've got a winner. The commentators all have hard-ons and the American public are lulled into thinking something is being done.
Only, it isn't. Truth is, you're not doing diddly-squat. You're not increasing NASA's budget, which sends the agency into a tailspin as they try to accomplish the impossible with nothing. You walk away from New Orleans and turn it over to private contractors to plunder, and you pretty much do the same in Iraq.
When's the next speech?
You'd think the media would have figured out that they were being played but they're kinda dense, it seems.
As I said, this is serious stuff, because as they persist in covering mindless drivel like soundbites "Drill, baby drill!" over substance (see BP and Gulf of Mexico)--it is the American people who pay.
The media, it seems, dull-witted as they are, seem to think that the American people are too stupid to follow the facts of what really goes on in government. Matt Welch put it best in his article for reason.com , when he said, "Imagine what the president could do if only he had a better bumper sticker!"
"It's not hard to see the attraction of such logic. If all there was separating you from your political desires was a perfectly calibrated bumper sticker, imagine all the time you could save once you arrived at the right slogan! Surely beats zero-sum budgetary trade offs, dreary committee meetings, bill "mark-up"exercises, Congressional Budget Office scores, parliamentary maneuverings, or even substantive non-governmental policy discussions on the topics you claim to care about.
"This may be an understandable, if somewhat distasteful,intellectual path to tread for people whose jobs are based on winning elections. After all, politics has always been the systematic organization of hatreds, and hatreds do not linger long on process or policy white papers. Bumper stickers tend to be designed by people who see the target audience as bumps in need of a good sticking.
But the person who wins my prize for hitting the nail slam-BANG squarely on the head--that the whole problem with the "narrative narrative" is that it's the difference between campaigning, and GOVERNING, is Robert Shmuhl, in Politics Daily :
"What's missing in this nostalgia for narrative of 2008 vintage is there cognition that campaigning and governing are related -- but distinct-- pursuits. Seeking office is essentially an enterprise of communications: of saying what someone might do after winning an election. Actually accomplishing what's been proposed earlier involves much more than words -- or even "a compelling narrative."
"Mario Cuomo receives credit in quotation books for the chestnut "You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose."
"In presidential terms, prose encompasses the language that's used in dealing, for example, with the many-minded members of the Senate and the House about legislation. If specific elements of, say, health care reform aren't clearly shaped and presented, then the House and Senate will follow their own lights,necessitating the bargaining back-and-forth to arrive at an acceptable bill, if that's even possible."
This is something I have tried and tried to explain to my more ideological Democratic friends on the left, those who claim that Obama has not only lost the narrative, but his principles as well, that he has "sold out" or otherwise no longer cares about progressives. It's very easy to sit in a pundit's chair or stand on a street corner with a sign on your shoulder and shout your principles to the heavens--or even type them in a blogpost--but to get down to the brass tacks and try to get hundreds of people from hundreds of different districts all over this great country to go along with what you are trying to do is an entirely different matter.
There will have to be trade-offs because that's the way it's done.
(Hell, did you never watch an episode of The West Wing? Or any movie ever made about politics of any kind? EVER?)
So. Anyway. The problem with the media's obsession with "narrative" is that, in their insistence that Obama come up with one to their liking, they proffer their own suggestions, and when he fails to fall down at their feet in gratitude, they get their little egos hurt.
Such as, when Thomas Friedman of the New York Times suggested that the Obama administration should adopt a narrative of "nation-building at home."
When a few weeks passed and he hadn't been congratulated on his brilliance by anyone from the West Wing, he got pissed and wrote a follow-up column in which he actually put the term in italics. Just in case they'd missed it the first time, a fact which amused several of the reporters I've quoted in this piece no end.
They also quoted Frank Rich, who had written on the subject, at length, in March, in a piece called, "The Up or Down Vote on Obama's Presidency:
"And if there’s one note that runs through many of the theories as to why Obama has disappointed in Year One, it cuts to the heart of what had been his major strength: his ability to communicate a compelling narrative. In the campaign, that narrative, of change and hope, was powerful—both about his own youth, biography and talent, and about a country that had gone wildly off track during the failed presidency of his predecessor. In governing, Obama has yet to find a theme that is remotely as arresting to the majority of Americans who still like him and are desperate for him to succeed."
He goes on to complain that "pragmatism is about process, not principle. Pragmatism is hardly a rallying cry for a nation in this much distress..."
Well, I would like to point out a couple of things to Mr. Rich. He wrote this column on March 7, when the whole future of health care reform was in complete doubt by every single pundit who was pontificating at the time. In fact, one of the op-eds I found to quote here was dated March 18 and said that if the president couldn't deliver on health care, it was over for him. And he signed the bill into law on the 23rd--FIVE DAYS LATER.
I would also like to mention that you can diss "pragmatism" all you want to, but as I stated in my last blogpost, Bush gave a stirring, inspirational speech from Jackson Square after Hurricane Katrina telling the suffering people of New Orleans that he would never forget them, and then he promptly walked away and did JUST THAT.
Obama may not have stood out on some pier in kleig lights with a bullhorn in his hand shouting that he would not forget the people of the Gulf, but he sat down with BP and FORCED THEM TO SET UP A FUND THAT DOES NOT FORGET THE PEOPLE OF THE GULF.
Now, WTF do you want? Bumper stickers or RESULTS?
I would also like to shine another little light on that fickle little thing called "narrative."
The storyline is in the control of the storyteller, and any reporter with a keyboard can tell whatever story they want.
Maureen Dowd, also a New York Times columnist, was kicked off the campaign plane during the '08 Obama campaign for reasons that nobody really knows for sure, and she has been on a vindictive, vengeful crusade ever since. Her columns are personal and mean-spirited and might as well be written by Ann Coulter.
In HER piece on "narrative, "A Storyteller Loses the Storyline," she uses emasculating descriptive terminology such as this: "Instead of buoyant, he seems put upon. Instead of the fairy dust of hopefulness, there's the bitter draught of helplessness."
When Obama warned the huge crowds in Illinois on Memorial Day who'd turned out to see him at the veteran's cemetery during a terrible thunderstorm, that they could be struck by lightning and should wait in their cars, Dowd referred to it as "shooing people off the soggy field," and stated that when he arrived at Andrews Air Force Base later that night he was "tired-looking," and that the service people who were there to see him were "subdued" and had been "rounded up by the White House advance team."
"The oil won't stop flowing," she dug in, claws dripping, "but the magic has."
So, as an Obama supporter who has watched our beleaguered president, what are we supposed to do?
He has, in fact, accomplished more than any other president in his first year in office in modern memory, with the possible exception of FDR, and as he told Jonathan Alter for his book, "The Promise: President Obama, Year One- -FDR did face a Depression when he came into office, but he did NOT also face TWO WARS.
The health care reform legislation is, as Joe Biden put it so succinctly--a Big Fuckin' Deal. Financial Reform legislation is in sight. The Lilly Ledbetter Act is signed, sealed, and delivered, so to speak. The family planning ban on foreign aid has been lifted. More than 2.5 million acres of wilderness has been preserved for future generations. BP has been held accountable for billions in losses to the people on the Gulf. These are major accomplishments and are only a tip of the iceberg.
But all the media can obsess about is the stupid miserable "narrative" that Obama has apparently "lost."
Understand, the voters, by and large, don't really CARE about this stuff; however, there ARE things that we, as supporters, can do to reach out to voters and tell them our own damn story in such a way that they--unlike the pundit poo-bahs and the media mouthers--never will.
Turn to Part II and I'll show you how.
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| Posted by Deanie Mills at | | | |
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We give the President more work than a man can do,
more responsibility than a man should take, more pressure than a man can
bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use
him up, eat him up. And with all this, Americans have a love for the
President that goes beyond loyalty or party nationality; he is ours, and
we exercise the right to destroy him.
--[John Steinbeck, America and Americans
(1946), p. 46]
Over the past month or so, since the terrible catastrophe in the Gulf, when I found myself unable to write because of the profound depression that settled over me--the grief over the loss of sea life and the death of a way of life for so many who live and make their living on that body of water--and as I fretted over how this was impacting the president and whether or not he was acting or reacting in the "right" way, I began to think about leadership; what makes a good leader, and what we, as a nation, expect of our leaders, and how, over the past decade, our concept of leadership got so perverted and twisted out of shape by flim-flam men and media fakery.
The loudest voices have, of course, been screaming for our president to make a grand, emotional, sweeping gesture down on the Gulf, and those voices, we all know, have not all been conservative Republicans:
"The president of the United States could've come down here, he could've
been involved with the families of these 11 people" who died on the
offshore rig, (James) Carville said. "He could've demanded a plan in
anticipation of this."
"It just looks like he's not involved in this," an angry Carville said
on "GMA." "Man, you got to get down here and take control of this, put
somebody in charge of this thing and get this moving. We're about to die
down here."
Of course, like most other media spokespersons that I have watched in the past weeks, Carville's memory was highly selective. It seems he--and they--forgot completely that President Obama DID, actually, visit the Gulf once before, back on May 2, when he went to Venice, Louisiana , and said, among other things:
They
gave me a sense of how this spill is moving. It is now about nine miles
off the coast of southeastern Louisiana.
And by the way, we had the Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, as well
as
parish presidents who were taking part in this meeting, because we want
to
emphasize the importance of coordinating between local, state, and
federal
officials throughout this process.
Now,
I think the American people are now aware, certainly the folks down in
the Gulf
are aware, that we're dealing with a massive and potentially
unprecedented
environmental disaster. The oil that is still leaking from the well
could
seriously damage the economy and the environment of our Gulf states and
it could extend for a long
time. It could jeopardize the livelihoods of thousands of Americans who
call this place home.
And
that's why the federal government has launched and coordinated an
all-hands-on-deck, relentless response to this crisis from Day One.
After
the explosion on the drilling rig, it began with an aggressive
search-and-rescue effort to evacuate 115 people, including three badly
injured. And my thoughts and prayers go out to the family of the 11
workers who have not yet -- who have not been found.
When
the drill unit sank on Thursday, we immediately and intensely
investigated by
remotely operated vehicles the entire 5,000 feet of pipe that's on the
floor of
the ocean. In that process, three leaks were identified, the most
recent
coming just last Wednesday evening. As Admiral Allen and Secretary
Napolitano have made clear, we've made preparations from day one to
stage
equipment for a worse-case scenario. We immediately set up command
center
operations here in the Gulf and coordinated with all state and local
governments. And the third breach was discovered on
Wednesday.
But that's okay, James. I assume you were too busy with your T.V. appearances to take note. Carville's been so busy, in fact, that he may not realize that his angry diatribes against his own president are now being used in Republican fund-raising e-mails, which I'm sure was the idea of his wife, Republican strategist Mary Matalin, who stood beside him during one interview.
Another thing Carville might not have noticed during his busy Bash-Obama tour is that the president had Adm. Thad Allen of the Coast Guard--you know, the guy who's in charge of the entire recovery mission and who is in closest contact with BP--call James Carville to see if he could alleviate any of his worries and fears, but the call went to voice mail and, so far, Carville hasn't called him back.
Apparently, he's busier than Adm. Allen right now.
So, since the Ragin' Cagun is so hysterically outraged at the terrible horrible no good job our president is doing at assuming leadership of this crises, I assumed that he was equally horrified at the job President Bush had done following Hurricane Katrina, so I spent no small amount of time this morning looking up various configurations of "James Carville, " "President George W. Bush," "Hurricane Katrina," "August, 2005," "September, 2005," and so forth on Google. I went through 10 or 12 pages, and the only time James Carville's name popped up with those references, they ALWAYS included a reference to 2010 and Barack Obama, so apparently, he had very little to say on-air or publicly in criticism of George W. Bush in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
My Google-search revealed that Carville moved to New Orleans following Katrina, so maybe not living down there had something to do with it, I don't know. But apparently he was not on all the talk shows and news programs railing against President Bush at the time because if he was I could not find it, although, if you Google references to "James Carville, "Obama," and "BP," you can find page after page of references to Carville's rants.
I guess he likes to reserve his hottest vitriol for former opponents of the Clintons.
But, in all fairness to Carville, he's not the only Democrat going after Obama for what they perceive to be his lack of leadership these days. Bob Herbert ripped him a new one in this morning's New York Times:
With all due respect to the president, who is a very smart man, how is
it possible for anyone with any reasonable awareness of the nonstop
carnage that has accompanied the entire history of giant corporations to
believe that the oil companies, which are among the most rapacious
players on the planet, somehow “had their act together” with regard to
worst-case scenarios.
These are not Little Lord Fauntleroys who can be trusted to abide by
some fanciful honor system. These are greedy merchant armies drilling
blindly at depths a mile and more beneath the seas while at the same
time doing all they can to stifle the government oversight that is
necessary to protect human lives and preserve the integrity of the
environment.
President Obama knows that. He knows — or should know — that the
biggest, most powerful companies do not have the best interests of the
American people in mind when they are closing in on the kinds of profits
that ancient kingdoms could only envy. BP’s profits are counted in the
billions annually. They are like stacks and stacks of gold glittering
beneath a brilliant sun. You don’t want to know what people will do for
that kind of money.
Ooooo-kay. Evil robber barons. Can't be trusted. Got it. Soooo...what's the president supposed to do? Well, apparently, according to Herbert, he can't trust the government, either:
When is the United States going to get its act together? Will we
learn anything from this disaster or will we simply express our
collective dismay, ignore the inevitable commission reports (no one pays
attention to study commissions), and bury our heads back in the oily
sand?
President Obama said on Thursday that his administration was “moving
quickly on steps to ensure that a catastrophe like this never happens
again.” Well, he can’t ensure anything of the kind. And, in fact, his
corporate-friendly policy of opening up new regions for offshore
drilling (that policy is only temporarily halted) will all but guarantee
future disastrous spills.
The U.S. will never get its act together until we develop the courage
and the will to crack down hard on these giant corporations. They need
to be tamed, closely monitored and regulated, and constrained in ways
that no longer allow them to trample the best interests of the American
people.
In an ideal world, I would absolutely, wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Herbert, no question about that. But this is a world in which half of our congress and Senate is held by a party who wants nothing more than to shut the president DOWN, and by a party of his own sprinkled with conservative sympathizers who are pro-gun, pro-life-pro-business, anti-regulation--well, you get my drift.
In the Real World, I'm afraid, Mr. Herbert, Mr. Obama has to GOVERN. And he has to do it with a recalcitrant, reluctant, obstinate congress who fights him every time he opens his mouth on every single little solitary thing. In other words, the man is doing the best he can with what he's got to work with, and it is far from perfect.
And yeah, he's made mistakes in the SIXTEEN MONTHS he's been in office.
But I digress. We were talking critics of leadership. Here's another one from the left, Charles Blow , also from that liberal rag, the New York Times.
There are many things at which the president is extraordinarily gifted.
Emoting isn’t one of them.
Thursday, in the opening remarks of his press conference, the president
said: “Every day I see this leak continue I am angry and frustrated.”
I wasn’t feeling it.
At the end of the piece, he even gets kinda personal with the president:
Mr. President, I know that you have a self-professed aversion to
appearing angry, but in this case you have every right to be angry and
to openly empathize with the anger of others. Otherwise, by running from
one label, you risk earning another — incompetent. You feel me?
Of course, I have read many, many things from conservatives who have derided Obama for being "detached," too "cool and unemotional," too "remote," too "unfeeling," not to mention the fact that everybody seems to think that he's, basically, not been doing anything--including Carville, although I would like to make the point that this is, basically, NOT TRUE:
Fox & Friends guest hosts falsely suggested that there
was a "lack of cleanup going on" in the Gulf Coast oil spill and falsely
suggested Louisiana's barrier plan had been ignored. In fact, cleanup
of the oil spill has been ongoing for more than a month, and the Army
Corps of Engineers responded to the barrier plan -- the effectiveness
of which is being questioned -- and raised concerns that it would push
oil into the Mississippi.
Be that as it may, it seems that we the people seem to think that what is needed at a time like this is for a great moving display of--well, here, let's let the stirring words speak for themselves.
They were spoken just after another terrible national disaster had occurred, by another president, and afterward, all the pundits and talking-heads and op-ed writers on both sides of the aisle felt that this president had shown great leadership, and his poll numbers went up, and everybody felt greatly comforted and encouraged and hopeful. It was a wonderful moment and a beautiful speech. Here is part of it. I want you to feel as inspired as I did, and then, afterward, I'll explain where and when so you can read the whole thing for yourself:
We are the heirs of men and women who lived through those first
terrible winters at Jamestown and Plymouth, who rebuilt Chicago after a
great fire, and San Francisco after a great earthquake, who reclaimed
the prairie from the dust bowl of the 1930s.
Every time, the
people of this land have come back from fire, flood, and storm to build
anew -- and to build better than what we had before. Americans have
never left our destiny to the whims of nature, and we will not start
now.
These trials have also reminded us that we are often stronger
than we know with the help of grace and one another. They remind us of a
hope beyond all pain and death -- a God who welcomes the lost to a
house not made with hands.
And they remind us that we are tied
together in this life, in this nation and that the despair of any
touches us all.
I know that when you sit on the steps of a porch
where a home once stood or sleep on a cot in a crowded shelter, it is
hard to imagine a bright future. But that future will come.
That's beautiful, isn't it? And it wasn't just beautiful words, either. The speech was chock-full of information of concrete things that were going to be done for the survivors of this catastrophe, help that was on the way, recovery and rebuilding that had already begun, federal money and help that had been mobilized.
It was just the kind of LEADERSHIP that we have come to EXPECT from our presidents, and boy WE GOT IT, on that day, SEPTEMBER 15, 2005, IN JACKSON SQUARE, NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA.
That's right. President George W. Bush and his crew came in, set up generators, lit up the square--residents said later they were the only lights in the entire area, and that when the president left, they took the lights--and the generators--with them.
All right, okay, he gave a speech, he talked about things he was putting before Congress.
So...what happened at the State of the Union address, FIVE MONTHS later?
In the president's State of the Union speech last year, delivered just
five months after the disaster, the devastation merited only 156 words
out of more than 5,400.
Say WHAT?
That's right. He had already turned his attention away from the Gulf and moved on to other things. In other words, you bet he knew how to make the big bold dramatic "leadership" gesture. NOBODY knew how to do it better with the exception of Ronald Reagan. Just like nobody knew how to pose himself in front of "the troops" and act as if he loved them, then send them into battle with shoddy equipment and crappy weapons and insufficient troops in an open-ended mission in an endless war. But hey, he sure loved the troops because the camera loved him in front of them, right?
But I digress. What was Bush saying about New Orleans at the State of the Union in January of 2007?
Crickets:
New Orleans is still a mess and the pace of recovery across the Gulf
Coast from Hurricane Katrina's strike remains achingly slow after 17
months. But none of this captured President Bush's attention on the
year's biggest night for showcasing policy priorities...
On Tuesday night...Katrina
received not a single mention.
"At this time I almost broke my
TV, knocked it off the stand," Chris Davis, told CBS News chief
investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian. Davis, a Vietnam
veteran, is one of the displaced residents from New Orleans now living
near Baton Rouge, La.
"People were already feeling forgotten. I
think this may potentially reinforce that," Toni Bankston, a mental
health caseworker, told CBS News.
It is true that President Obama can give wonderful, stirring speeches that can inspire and motivate, but it is also true that he can roll up his sleeves and work like a pack mule when there is a crises at hand, and the fact of the matter is that the White House has been submerged in this thing from the beginning, without the flowery words or television cameras.
What happened with Bush was that he and his handlers knew from Day One when he started running for office and decided to buy himself that Reaganesque "ranch" that if you just propped him up in a stirring location (think "Mission Impossible") that the sound-bite savages would drool all over it for a full 24-hour news cycle and they would own it, they would not have to have any substance behind it.
So when, for example, he announced this "vision" to put men on Mars, it sounded fantastic! Wonderful! Visionary! And there were great sound-bites to it, too! But the TRUTH is that he gave NASA NO money to meet that goal, and they've been scrambling to find it in-house, which is one reason their space program was in such disarray when Obama took office.
As we say in Texas, Bush's entire presidency was "all hat and no cattle." (Just like his fake ranch.)
But we got spoiled to it and now we expect it of our new president. We get disappointed in him when he doesn't come swaggering out with that weepy break in his voice and that tear in his eye that Bush used to get, or that big bear-hug that Clinton used to have, and we think that somehow he's just not doing his job.
But if you would really, truly like some real, true perspective--historical, ethical, philosophical, and practical, on what leadership means, I strongly suggest you read the following essay, "Gleaves Whitney on Leadership."
Now, don't be frightened. Yes, it is dense, and yes, it is long. But this is a holiday weekend, and it is conversational in tone, broken into easy-to-read segments, and fascinating. Most of his historical comparisons are recent--Bill Clinton, Franklin Roosevelt, JFK, Reagan, and so forth. If you get to a paragraph that seems boring--some go back to ancient Greece--skip over it but don't quit--I urge you to scroll on down because it gets better and better as it goes on, delving into the qualities that mark a true leader, and why.
One thing that interested me, for example, was on the concept of CHANGE. A true leader, he says, sees visionary, dramatic change, and he sees it far into the future--not just until the next election. Those who insist upon just incremental, easy-to-absorb steps LEADING to change, he says, are MANAGERS, not LEADERS.
Ultimately, I found that President Barack Obama possessed almost all of the qualities of a true leader listed in this article. The one area where I thought he and his team fell down sometimes was in their ability to ANTICIPATE how their policies would be accepted or received by most people, but in all the other areas, which is truly extraordinary, I saw this president excel.
At the end of the piece, Mr. Whitney discusses how the savagery of the 24-hour news cycle and the Internet make a practice of tearing down leaders before they can even find their footing--and that is where I found the quote that ledes this piece.
But at the very end, he simply reproduces Rudyard Kipling's marvelous poem, "If," that says, in part:
If you can keep your head when all
about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
[...]
If you can talk with crowds and
keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man {substitute leader} my son!
Corny, to some extent, yes, but still applicable today, particularly in the light of leadership.
I'm not saying everything the president has done has been right--he's not saying that either. There are days, as I joked to a friend, that I've felt as if we've had our "first lover's quarrel," meaning, though I've approved of most everything else he's done since taking office, I've been upset over his handling of this.
(Mr. Greaves even talks about how we "fall in love" with our leaders, in the sense of a sort of friendship, using an aide to Teddy Roosevelt as a wonderful example.)
That said, I do think that one thing about this administration you can trust--and one of the qualities of true leadership mentioned in the essay linked to above (and most definitely NOT present in the last administration)--is its adaptability.
In other words, when they are making a mistake, they course-correct.
And one more thing.
THEY KEEP THEIR PROMISES.
According to PolitiFact, a nonpartisan website that has been tracking President Obama since he took office, he made something like 500 campaign promises. So they've been watching to see if he's kept any of them. And so far, the record is pretty damn impressive. I'm having trouble picking up that link so here it is like this:
ttp://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/
In the first 16 months the man has been in office, he's kept 113 promises, and a whopping 253 are in the works.
He has "compromised" but gotten somewhere, at any rate, on 34 more.
That makes 400 promises that have either already been kept or are on the way to being kept in one form or another
He has only broken 19.
And that's just in the first 16 months, while working with only half a congress, while the other half has made it their mission in life to obstruct and shut down--if not outright impeach--him.
(It's a fascinating website, and describes each one as it is fulfilled; a fun place to visit for Obama supporters.)
So, he says he's doing all he can to find out how this horror occurred and gather the best minds on the planet to fix it and clean up what's out there as best we can, and help the people along the Gulf shore who make their living off the water, then based on his record so far, I'd say we can believe him, even if he doesn't stand out in front of a bunch of bright lights, tear up, and deliver a stirring speech.
In the meantime, consider this, all you naysayers like James Carville who are so intent on dumping on the President:
WHAT'S THE ALTERNATIVE?
Do you really want to see him defeated in 2012 and somebody like, oh, Mitt Romney or, God forbid, Sarah Palin get into the White House in his place?
Do you HONESTLY think THEY would do a BETTER JOB?
If so, then just keep on bitchin.'
It's one thing to keep the man accountable. Yes, we should all hold him accountable--and he'd be the first to say so.
But the man needs us to have his back, too. And right now, he's getting savaged from the right AND the left, and when the right is using hacks from the left to fund-raise, you know you are in trouble, man.
Do your homework--not just on the mess that's out there, but on what the White House has really been doing.
People on the scene--not just academics called up by cable-news producers who've been nowhere near the site--say the best minds in the world have been hard at it from the beginning:
As someone from the oil industry wrote in to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo :
At BP's West Houston complex, there's a command center filled with
personnel from around the industry working with BP engineers. Several
drill ships are in place. Tons of workboats are on site. There are 5
or more ROVs roaming the wellhead monitoring and cleaning things up.
They're already bumping into each other because they normally work solo
while tied to a ship by a mile long umbilical cable. They don't need
more ROVs down there adding to the traffic. All these efforts are
reported heavily in the Houston Chronicle and nola.com, but doesn't seem
to get much for national coverage. If you only monitor the national
coverage, you'd think BP is going it alone while we all sit by, but the
reality is this is an industry-wide effort because we all know what's at
stake.
On having Obama "do more," WTF is he supposed to do? Everybody seems
to be calling for more fire in his belly and scary, threatening
speeches. What does that accomplish? It's like people want him to do a
dramatic speech like post-9/11 about bringing the criminals to justice.
It does nothing to actually plug the damn well.
I've seen many of the same "experts" come on various programs with the same half-baked ideas, and the anchors don't know but to take them seriously, and those ideas made it into the president's news conference, forcing him to respond to them patiently, carefully, explaining why--even though they may have worked on one kind of oil spill 30 years ago in one kind of body of water using one kind of technique, they would not work HERE.
Politics is perception, they say, and the perception right now is that President Obama isn't doing very well at taking leadership of this crises. He has made some mis-steps, true. But I think that it might be helpful if those of us in his own party would, once in a while, cut him some slack, give him the benefit of the doubt.
At the news conference, he pointed out that he grew up in Hawaii where, he said, "The ocean is sacred," and he hesitated just for a moment. In that moment, I saw everything I needed to see in his eyes. He does not like to choke up on-camera, but for him, that was an emotional moment. To him, the ocean IS sacred.
Everybody else pointed out the story about his little girl, Malia, asking if he'd "plugged the hole yet" as his "human" moment, but for me, it was that one right there. The ocean is sacred and he knows what it means to grow up on or near the sea and to love it. He is doing everything he can.
And trust me. I have no doubt that if he'd come out with some big speech, they'd have been crawling all over him, crying that he was "politicizing the tragedy."
People on the right HATE this man and want to destroy him. They do not want to run him out of office. They want to destroy him. Even now they're ginning up some crazy impeachment scheme after spending more than a year chasing after bogus claims that he wasn't qualified to BE president because he wasn't born here.
I, for one, consider him to be one of the greatest leaders of his generation, and I believe that in spite of everything he will go down in history as a great president, IF, we, as a party, do not contribute to that destruction.
Carville, do you feel me?
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Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't
believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When
I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes
I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
(Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 5)
from the website: "Lenny's
Alice in Wonderland Quotes":
Recently, a series of back-and-forths I had with conservative friends
and family in various forums, either e-mail or social network comment
sections, left me profoundly depressed, and not just depressed, but
positively mystified, because each "debate," if that is what you want to
call it, for lack of a better word, followed the same, eerie pattern:
First, they would accuse me of being a "far-left liberal," and all that
entailed, right off the bat, hand's down, whether they knew me well or
not. If they were family--and some were--they knew full well that I
voted as a registered Independent for many years and had, in fact, cast
votes for Ronald Reagan (twice) and George H.W. Bush (once), and that I
was from a military family whose son had fought in a war (twice) and who
supported the president's Afghanistan policy--NONE of which endears me
WITH the "far-left liberal" community.
None of that mattered.
I was still "far-left liberal."
Second, they would accuse me of being "close-minded" and "unwilling to
consider other viewpoints."
Why?
Well, because I wouldn't watch Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck.
Again, and again. And again. AND AGAIN I listed for them eight or ten
CONSERVATIVE news columnists that I read DAILY, from George Will to
David Brooks to Kathleen Parker to Russ Douthat to Peggy Noonan to
Michael Gerson and on and on--but it was as if there was some kind of
psychic BLANK SPACE in that portion of the comment or the e-mail.
They would come back and say things like, "You should watch Glenn Beck
because he really makes sense."
And I'd say, "So did John Nash, the brilliant mathematician who was
portrayed in the movie, "A Beautiful Mind,"--to whom Glenn Beck
has compared himself, I might add--and who, we all know, was CRAZY."
I'd mention, again, the conservatives I read--even throw in somebody
like Charles Krauthammer just to see what they'd say.
Nothing.
Back to, "You're close-minded because you won't consider other
viewpoints than the far-left news shows you watch."
So, I'd seize on that, and I'd say, "I don't WATCH news programming. I
don't watch Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews,
either!" (at least, not very often) "I READ! I read the New York
Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal,
the L.A. Times, the London Financial Times, the U.K.
Guardian--Jesus! It's not like I read the New York Times,
which I know you consider liberal, and then run over to Daily Kos to get
my opinion validated and then steam off and spew out an angry blog!"
Then they would get mad and say, "Oh well, I guess you think I'm STUPID
because I don't read all the stuff YOU read, just because I don't have
TIME..."
And I'd say, "Not at all. All I'm saying is BRANCH OUT and not trust
just ONE NEWS SOURCE because you are only getting ONE SLANT to your
news!"
And they would insist that FOX news was "fair and balanced," not like
the "far-left liberal news" that they were certain I was watching.
These arguments were so one-sided and impossible that I started to feel
like Alice through the Looking Glass--I could not reply or respond to
them.
In one instance, a family member sent a viral e-mail showing a
photograph of the president and first lady holding their LEFT hands over
their chests as some sort of subversive salute to the flag ON THE WHITE
HOUSE LAWN and demanded I explain THAT by God.
Of course, Snopes.com did so immediately, showing that the photo had
been photo-shop "flipped," and that the Marine in the background was wearing his
uniform ribbons on the wrong side of his chest, as proof.
STILL, they were suspicious of Snopes.com! They kept pushing and
pushing, until I just started to delete the e-mails altogether because
you cannot reason with this kind of psychic blindness, and I was really
starting to despair...
Until I heard about "EPISTEMIC CLOSURE."
It was originally defined by Julian Sanchez back in March in a brilliant
blogpost: "Frum,
Cocktail Parties, and the Threat of Doubt":
"One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative
movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic
closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and
cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of
course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed
out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore
ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well,
they disagree with the conservative media!)"
Now, to be perfectly clear on what Sanchez meant, I actually looked up
the word "epistemic" in my handy online dictionary. It is from the
Greek, and means:
"of or pertaining to knowledge or the conditions for acquiring it"
Ah-HA.
(Back in my hard-core feminism days, this would be what Gloria Steinem
would refer to as a "click!" moment.)
But Sanchez doesn't just point out the danger of closing the loop on
knowledge to a limited, approved number of sources--he goes on to point
out how "apostates"--those insiders who dare to criticize either one of
those sources or one of the approved conclusions therein--get shunned
and kicked out of the inner circle, attacked, diminished in stature, so
that they are no longer on the "approved" list of sources and therefore,
no longer to be included in the approved loop, which has just gotten
smaller:
"Think of the complete panic China’s rulers feel about any breaks in
their Internet firewall: The more successfully external sources of
information have been excluded to date, the more unpredictable the
effects of a breach become. Internal criticism is then especially
problematic, because it threatens the hermetic seal. It’s not just that
any particular criticism might have to be taken seriously coming from a
fellow conservative. Rather, it’s that anything that breaks down the
tacit equivalence between “critic of conservatives and “wicked liberal
smear artist” undermines the effectiveness of the entire information
filter. If disagreement is not in itself evidence of malign intent or
moral degeneracy, people start feeling an obligation to engage it
sincerely—maybe even when it comes from the New York Times. And there is
nothing more potentially fatal to the momentum of an insurgency fueled
by anger than a conversation. A more intellectually secure conservatism
would welcome this, because it wouldn’t need to define itself primarily
in terms of its rejection of an alien enemy."
Ahhhh...
Sanchez is not only getting closer, but he hit the nail on the head,
according to one of the more famous of those "apostates," David Frum,
who dared speak out and criticize the company line and was summarily
told "OFF WITH HIS HEAD!"
He, quite literally, did travel to China on business, and upon his
return to the United States, had this wry observation to make, in his
blogpost, "Groupthink
at the National Review" (which we all know, fired him over one
uncomfortable position he took with which they disagreed):
"How wonderful to return to a free country, I thought as I stepped off
the plane from Beijing at Washington Dulles. No more censorship, no
more official lies, no more kowtowing to high officials who gained power
by their mindless repetition of party dogma…
"Then alas I opened my browser and read the dump-on-Manzi comments on
NRO’s The Corner. Manzi had deviated from the One Correct Way of Mark
Levin Thought, and all his former colleagues had been summoned together
to Denounce and Struggle Against Him.
"Not one stood up to be counted in Manzi’s defense, not even
colleagues whom Manzi might have had reason to regard as close personal
friends...
"What makes this episode all the more remarkable is that Manzi is
actually a member of NR’s board of trustees – i.e., somebody who might
claim a little more scope to speak his mind. But even for trustees,
there are limits, and Manzi crossed them"
I dunno what-all was going on here, but I gather a National Review
trustee dared to contradict a popular but particularly boneheaded
entertainment right-wing talk-radio host on global warming.
"OFF WITH HIS HEAD!"
And he's not the only one.
Soon after David Frum's head rolled, Bruce Bartlett posted a blog, "David
Frum and the Closing of the Conservative Mind," in which he
detailed not only his own head-chopping experience but a very real
example of epistemic closure in the conservative loop:
"As some readers of this blog may know, I was fired by a right wing
think tank called the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2005 for
writing a book critical of George W. Bush's policies, especially his
support for Medicare Part D. In the years since, I have lost a great
many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, DC.
"Now
the same thing has happened to David Frum, who has been fired by the
American Enterprise Institute... Since,
he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly
something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had
noticed any comments by AEI "scholars" on the subject of health care
reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not
to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama
was trying to do.
"It saddened me to hear this. I have always hoped
that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first
to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is
being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will
slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn't already."
Yeah, I believe I'd say to the good Mr. Bartlett: Too late.
In response to Julian Sanchez's original piece on epistemic closure,
Jonathan Chait wrote a response in The New Republic, "The
Right and Epistemic Closure," in which he faces conservative
arguments that liberals do much the same thing when they get their news
from Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo and MSNBC and Rachel Maddow
or Jon Stewart, but adds a cogent and necessary point:
"The difference is that liberals do not see these outlets as replacements
for the news. In the conservative worldview, mainstream media is not
just flawed but fatally tainted by deep ideological hostility. Millions
of conservatives believe the only sources of credible news are
Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the like -- even a figure like Clarence
Thomas once told an interviewer that his sole sources of news are
Limbaugh and the American Spectator. Liberals may seek out ideologically
friendly sources to augment their information intake, but the
phenomenon of total epistemic closure that Sanchez describes is almost
entirely limited to the right."
THIS, then goes right at the heart of the arguments I was having with
right-wing family and friends, and why I thought I was talking to
them--metaphorically--face to face, only to find, when I reached out,
that my hand was smashing into a plate-glass window. They were not
hearing me. To them, ALL NEWS EVERYWHERE FROM ANY SOURCE was
suspect--one 80-year old family member even commented that my college
education amounted to "liberal propaganda"--and ONLY Fox news, and to
some, those maddening viral e-mails sent to them by fellow
right-wingers, could be trusted as accurate.
Sanchez's column provoked a storm of to-be-expected defensiveness from
the right, and the arguments were tiresome and predictable, falling
pretty much into the: LEFT-WINGERS DO IT TOO NYAH-NYAH argument.
Still, in his devastating follow-up post, "Epistemic
Closure, Technology, and the End of Distance," Sanchez levels those
arguments with the simple example of young Constance McMillan, from
small-town Fulton, Mississippi, who wanted to take her lesbian
girlfriend to the senior prom and wear a tuxedo. When the high school
canceled the prom rather than permit it, the ACLU took up her case, and
in the end, she was permitted her prom, but it was only her and a few
sympathetic students, including the disabled and some minorities, who
attended. Parents threw a prom for the "real" students, and set up a
website to attack little Constance for ruining their fun by simply
trying to be herself.
Sanchez points out that, when the website became public knowledge and
links went out, it was FLOODED with positive reinforcement for Constance
from ALL OVER THE COUNTRY, which shocked and SHUT UP the mean girls and
boys of Fulton, Mississippi and their bigoted parents.
Sanchez's point is that this increasingly narrow conservative loop
mistakenly thinks that it represents a large segment of the American
population's thought, when in reality, it is often shocked to learn that
it does not.
On April 9th, Jonathan Chait examines the phenomenon more closely in his
post,
"The Great Epistemic Debate," and describes the two schools of
thought, liberal and conservative, as best he can, namely, that
conservatism is monolithic, whereas liberals are not as prone to
groupthink.
But my favorite description of this difference came from a conservative
columnist who just won the Pulitzer Prize, Kathleen Parker. She writes
for the Washington Post, and first came to my attention when, during the
campaign, she dared to say that Sarah Palin was not qualified even to be vice-president, much less president, and was flooded with some 12,000
e-mails--mostly from right-wingers--cursing her and many, sending
death-threats.
At that time, she wrote, "Dixie Chicks, I hear ya."
So I laughed when she was describing the health care summit President
Obama called between Democratic and Republican senators, and she said
that, when they walked into the room the Republicans were all carrying
EXACTLY the same briefing book, period, and they were all carrying it in
the same way, cover out, so the television cameras could show it.
The Democrats, she said, came in carrying all kinds of stuff--each one,
something different.
So, from the get-go, we are a different mind-set. We Dems value
individualism. They SAY they value it, but in truth, they fear it,
because whenever it shows up in their own Party, they say, "OFF WITH
THEIR HEADS!"
By the time two weeks had passed from Mr. Sanchez's first posting, the
conservative blogosphere was in an uproar, and who better to take 'em on
than Andrew Sullivan?
In a slice-and-dice piece entitled, "The
Closing of the Conservative Mind, Ctd.," the former
conservative-turned-Obama supporter takes on right-wing critic Jonah Goldberg, who'd become
outright obsessed with the whole epistemic closure thing, which he was
certain that, whereas okay yeah maybe it DID exist it was also on the
liberal side nyah nyah and all the worst problems facing this country
had been caused by them anyway, to which Sullivan replied:
"Ah, yes. In the middle of the Bush administration's extreme extension
of
executive power and secrecy in the war against Jihadist terror, as the
GOP was spending like inebriated seamen on pork, entitlements and
defense, as Wall Street was gambling in a manner that wild-eyed liberals
like Richard Posner and Alan Greenspan have conceded was recklessly
irrational, as the Republicans embraced successful nation-building in
Iraq and Afghanistan as the sine qua non of American national
security ... Mr Goldberg decided that the real crisis was "liberal
fascism."
"To do so in that context is simply surreal. But inordinately successful
in the ideological-industrial complex that is enriching so many pundits
and killing conservatism as a serious attempt to govern the world as it
is. It's successful because the untethered bromides of the utopian right
are far easier to market than the awful choices and hard compromises
that the US now has to grapple with. But contemporary "conservatives" - a
lethal blend of denial, distraction and derangement - are not
interested in hard choices. They are interested in an alternative
reality, sustained by exactly the epistemic closure Goldberg wants - ah,
the circle closes - to distract from."
DENIAL. DISTRACTION. DERANGEMENT.
I liked those words so much that I almost put them in my title, but even Andrew
Sullivan couldn't top Alice in Wonderland to describe what's going on
here.
In the end, Sullivan referred us all to an outstanding post that is long
but well worth your time and trouble to read, by Conor Friedersdorf,
called, "Weaseling
out of Things is Important to Learn. It's What Separates Us from the
Animals...Except the Weasel."
In this post, he dissects and destroys every single argument out there
that the conservatives are putting forth to deny, distract, and crazy-up
the argument that they are not indulging in epistemic closure through
closed information loops and knowledge control, and through swift
beheading of apostates.
Like all thoughtful conservatives I have read in the past couple of
years, he expresses growing alarm at the very real problems facing our
country and our planet and the dearth of serious ideas being put forth
by conservatives to deal with them. As he points out, during the
campaign, every Democratic candidate had some form of health care reform
to discuss at length in debates and Republicans had nothing except some
vague Romneycare at the most, and at the least, constant harrangues of
Hillarycare.
And like most thoughtful conservatives, he took a dig at Sarah Palin,
because they all know that the kind of cutesty sound-bites that she's so
good at putting together may be popular to people like the ones arguing
with me in e-mails and comment sections but, at the highest levels of
government, where these desperate problems need powerful and careful solutions,
they don't get the job done, and should she or someone like her actually
garner enough votes to get elected, the country will be in very serious
trouble.
I've tried to explain to my deaf and blind right-wing family and friends that painting all supporters of Obama with a broad "far-left liberal" brush is counter-productive and not even true. My son is an Independent, a former Marine and Iraq war vet; my husband a Vietnam combat vet and moderate Republican; my daughter, a Hollywood actress. They all supported Barack Obama, but you can't slap the same brush across all three of them--it's insulting.
They are individuals with their own life experiences and own intelligent analysis of how current events affect their lives--they are NOT "Kool-Aid drinkers."
Makes no difference to the Glenn Beck followers and Sarah Palin fans. They are not listening. Socialists, all!
It is ironic to me that as much as the right-wing tried to portray Obama supporters as blank-eyed members of some sort of feverish cult, the truth is that cults actually work by RESTRICTING access to information--that is the FIRST thing they do to ensure loyalty of their followers. They work by trying to separate you from your family and friends by making them seem "other," or somehow "suspect," and to be feared.
The right-wing media machine works 24-7 to portray Obama as a subversive non-American who is working to undermine the constitution of the United States and deny "real" Americans their liberty. He is to be feared; his policies are deliberate attempts to weaken America and make us vulnerable to our enemies.
Anyone who disagrees with that is portrayed as somehow "unAmerican," or at least caught up in the cult of worship of him as some kind of messiah--yet another character (anti-Christ?)--to be feared or at least deeply suspected.
And any source of information that says otherwise is immediately tainted and stained with the LIBERAL label--NOT TO BE TRUSTED OR EVEN BELIEVED. Any poll, any statistic, any research finding, unless it comes from an approved conservative "think-tank."
If someone within the approved loop dares to speak out, they are "shunned" and excommunicated from the inner circle--banished to the dreaded LIBERAL MEDIA circuit, to be mocked, derided, and scorned--not to mention, FIRED, their livelihoods (and family health insurance) CUT OFF.
Which is quite a threat, don't you think?
This is epistemic closure.
And, I might add, it's what cults do.
And this is why we can't get into arguments with our conservative family and friends, period. They start from a place of utter contempt for our beliefs--and even, by extension, to some extent--us.
There is nothing we can say that they will respect, in spite of their protestations that they want to hear what we have to say because they are willing to listen to facts and figures that might change their minds.
In the upcoming months, my friends, my advice is this: Confine your remarks to Independents, disgruntled Dems thinking of not voting at all, people who haven't voted yet and haven't decided what they want to do, and so forth.
Anything else is a complete waste of energy and, in the long run, will only cost you a beloved friend or family member, and it is not worth it.
For the record, I will close by saying this: My right-wing, proudly gun-nut friend Robby, God bless him, called me up when he knew I was upset about this. He said that he knew that I was NOT close-minded, and that the dirty little secret was this: "We're out of power and we're pissed off about it. We want back in control, so some people attack others in arguments because they really don't have anything meaningful to say. In your case, they're not as well informed as you are, and they know it, and it pisses 'em off sometimes. Now, I'll argue guns with you all day long because that's my area of strength, but I won't argue other things. Still, I don't listen to talk radio any more because it bothers me, how extreme the talk has gotten in some ways. I worry about the safety of the president. I don't agree with a lot of what he's done, but I would never wish any harm on him, and I think everybody needs to chill out. There is no need for a lot of the rhetoric I hear on these radio shows, and I won't listen to it."
If conservatives like Robby can be run off by this closed loop, to some extent, then there are others who might not just turn off talk-radio, but turn off the Party altogether, and cross over to the Independent column.
They might be willing to listen.
And that's a start.
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I think it hit me harder than most folks, at least, most folks who
weren't there, or didn't have loved ones there, or who didn't live
there. People, I'm talking about who, like me, watched it on TV.
People who'd never been to Oklahoma City, I mean, unless they were
passing through or stopping at an airport.
Most Americans.
It hit me harder because, unlike most Americans, I'd spent the better
part of a year crawling around inside the head of the Tim McVeighs of
the world, trying to understand just what kind of mind would consider
the bombing of a building full of everyday Americans to be an heroic act
of war, and the murder of babies to be "collateral damage."
In the early minutes following the first horrific, shocked TV images of
the gutted, smoke-billowing building, the bleeding survivors, the grim
rescue workers, the stunned and terrified families waiting behind police
lines, television commentators were already speculating that Muslim
terrorists might be responsible, as they had been for the bombing of the
World Trade Center in 1993.
I don't suppose many other Americans did what I did when I heard that.
My head swiveled around to glance at the calendar, and as soon as I saw
the date, I knew otherwise.
April 19. High holy day to right-wing extremists bent on revenge for
the Branch Davidian tragedy that had taken place in Waco just two years
before.
I knew.
Right then, in spite of what all the TV journalists and commentators
were saying, I knew that Muslims were not behind this terror. I knew it
was someone avenging the Waco deaths. I had seen and heard and read
too much during the previous year while researching the book I was
writing at that very moment,
ORDEAL,
and I knew that my worst nightmare had come true.
I knew, in fact, that the plot I'd sketched out months before for my
work of fiction, and which I was 400 pages into writing, was pretty much
taking place in real-time, right in front of a nation's--and my
own--helpless gaze.
I'd spent months in a netherworld of right-wing militia paranoia,
hatred, and rage, attending their rallies and conferences, reading their
underground books, pamphlets, and other publications, browsing their
gunshows, talking to their militia zealots.
The misinformation surrounding the events that had transpired in Waco
had reached mythic proportions. At one conference, guest speakers
conducted seminars dispensing outright lies purported to be facts based
on such things as autopsy reports of federal agents who'd been killed in
the shooting that day. But the information was patently false. I knew
because I had the actual reports myself, copies of which had been given
to me by a friendly Texas Ranger.
I learned, years later, that Timothy McVeigh had attended that same
convention.
During that year I learned that an entire survivalist militia movement
was underway, preparing for war on American soil against THE GOVERNMENT
and anyone who worked for it--IRS agents, game wardens, ATF
agents--anyone above the county level was considered fair game. There
was bountiful information out there--this was before the Internet was as
ubiquitous as it is now, and before FOX news, mind you, or even Glenn
Beck on TV--on how to stockpile and bury weapons and ammunition, how to
make your own bazooka at home, how to form your own militia, how to
hoard food and gold, home-school your children, form an underground
railroad to keep felons away from law enforcement, how to make
explosives, and so on.
Rhetoric was hate-filled and the Clintons, who were in office, were the
devil and Satan's spawn, and there was no rumor, no myth, no lie
unbelievable enough about them that it would not be circulated with
absolute certainty. They--and anyone who worked for them--were evil.
All that whole year I had this horrible nameless, shapeless dread that
something terrible was going to happen, and I begged my conservative
family and friends to tone down their rhetoric on the Clintons and other
things but nobody would listen to me. Everybody thought I was being
silly.
Until they arrested Timothy McVeigh.
And he gave his name, rank, and serial number.
And the feds showed him the dead babies and he shrugged and said,
"Collateral damage."
After that, everything seemed to settle down a little bit. People
stopped screaming about war all the time. Ken Starr insisted that the
Clintons didn't really murder Vince Foster. The president got impeached
but they couldn't throw him out of office. And then a Republican got
put in the White House and everybody on the right was happy and they REALLY shut
up. After 9/11, they were quiet because then they had a REAL enemy to
hate and fear.
So you could go to work at the IRS and not fear for your life.
Until Barack Obama, anyway. And now, here we go again.
And again, I am begging my conservative family and friends to tone down
the hate rhetoric and all they do is say that we did the same thing
during the anti-war demonstrations and I call BULLSHIT.
We had, what? Cindy Sheehan? Code Pink?
It has been FORTY YEARS since there has been ANYTHING on the left
anywhere NEAR comparable to what we see on the right--nowhere on the
left do we see stockpiling of weapons and ammo, explosives and militias
and talk of civil war.
NOWHERE.
Even during the height of the protests against the Iraq war, NOBODY
talked about seceding from the union--ESPECIALLY FROM THE OFFICE OF A
STATE GOVERNOR.
NOBODY from the Democratic party stepped out on the balcony of Congress
and egged on anti-war demonstrations and went out into the crowd and
waved their own flags at them, the way we've seen the right wing do
their crowds during the final debate of the health care reform rallies.
NOBODY from MSNBC called out anti-war rallies, organized them, raised
funds for them, covered them exhaustively all day long, cheer-led for
them, and started an entire political movement based on them, the way
FOX news has done the anti-government Tea Party rallies.
NOBODY from the political left attended a George W. Bush rally wearing
EXPOSED FIRE ARMS and holding up signs quoting the same T-shirt Tim
McVeigh was wearing the day he bombed the Murrah building, about how the
tree of liberty has to be watered with the blood of tyrants.
So please, conservative friends, don't tell me it's the same thing.
I have been down this road before, and it's not the same thing. And you
know it.
Tonight, on MSNBC, at 9 p.m., 8 p.m. central, Rachel Maddow is hosting a
program called,
The
McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Tyrant.
For the first time in history, we will be hearing Timothy McVeigh's own
words. Although he never spoke to prosecutors, he hand-picked a couple
of reporters from Buffalo, New York, and he spoke to them for more than
40 hours, in detail, about exactly what he did, how, and why.
MSNBC has boiled those tapes down to an hour-long broadcast, and has
done a re-enactment of the crime.
What is particularly chilling, from this writer's point of view, is that
the words he uses so enthusiastically to present his thoroughly
unrepentant story, are the very same words we hear at these rallies
today: anti-government, words of war, words of arming to fight, words of
extremist hatred against a nameless, faceless "government" foe.
Just this weekend, for example, at a rally in South Carolina, here are a
couple of quotes that were
put
up on video right here at TPM:
"Pastor Stan Craig, of the Choice Hills Baptist Church, was
particularly
angry about the state of Washington, saying he "was trained to defend
the liberties of this nation." He declared that he was prepared to "suit
up, get my gun, go to Washington, and do what they trained me to do."
and
"Dan Gonzales, who Chairs the Constitution Party in Florida, asserted
that "this is the end of America right here," and if the Tea Partiers
"don't get to work we're going to be fighting in the streets."
The worst I ever heard any liberal say during the heaviest fighting in
Iraq and the worst outrages of the Bush administration was that they
might move out of the country.
MOVE. Not FIGHT IN THE STREETS.
As President Clinton pointed out so beautifully in an op-ed today in the
New York Times, the people McVeigh murdered on April 19, 1995 were not
nameless, faceless GOVERNMENT:
"Most of the people killed that day were employees of the federal
government. They were men and women who had devoted their careers to
helping the elderly and disabled, supporting our veterans and enforcing
our laws. They were good neighbors and good friends. One of them, a
Secret Service agent named Al Whicher, a husband and father of three,
had been on my presidential security detail. Nineteen children also lost
their lives."
He also said:
"Finally, we should never forget what drove the bombers, and how
they
justified their actions to themselves. They took to the ultimate extreme
an idea advocated in the months and years before the bombing by an
increasingly vocal minority: the belief that the greatest threat to
American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not
protect our freedoms, but abuse them. On that April 19, the second
anniversary of the assault of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco,
deeply alienated and disconnected Americans decided murder was a blow
for liberty.
"Americans have more freedom and broader rights than citizens of
almost any other nation in the world, including the capacity to
criticize their government and their elected officials. But we do not
have the right to resort to violence — or the threat of violence — when
we don’t get our way. Our founders constructed a system of government so
that reason could prevail over fear. Oklahoma City proved once again
that without the law there is no freedom."
Yes, that is the KEY.
President Obama is not a TYRANT. He was ELECTED president by 69
MILLION PEOPLE.
When disgruntled losers--meaning, Republicans and Tea Partiers (who
are Republicans) whose candidates lost--throw rallies in which they
carry guns and threatening signs, and when elected members of congress
receive death threats for casting votes they disagree with--THAT is
tyranny!
They are THREATENING my freedom when they threaten my elected
representatives with violence because they are not getting their way.
It is mob rule.
You can't tell me a single "founding father" ever postulated such a
thing.
Clinton writes:
"Criticism is part of the lifeblood of democracy. No one is right
all
the time. But we should remember that there is a big difference between
criticizing a policy or a politician and demonizing the government that
guarantees our freedoms and the public servants who enforce our laws.
"We are again dealing with difficulties in a contentious, partisan
time. We are more connected than ever before, more able to spread our
ideas and beliefs, our anger and fears. As we exercise the right to
advocate our views, and as we animate our supporters, we must all assume
responsibility for our words and actions before they
enter a vast echo chamber and reach those both serious and delirious,
connected and unhinged.
"Civic virtue can include harsh criticism, protest, even civil
disobedience. But not violence or its advocacy. That is the bright line
that protects our freedom. It has held for a long time, since President
George Washington called out 13,000 troops in response to the Whiskey
Rebellion.
"Fifteen years ago, the line was crossed in Oklahoma City. In
the
current climate, with so many threats against the president, members of
Congress and other public servants, we owe it to the victims of Oklahoma
City, and those who survived and responded so bravely, not to cross it
again."
Yes. Oklahoma City, where 168 empty chairs stand to commemorate lost
souls who will never sit in them again. At night, those chairs glow
like stars, up to the heavens.
Do we really want to turn back that clock?
Understand, as liberals and progressives, we are not immune to hate
talk and paranoia. I hear it all the time in comment sections on blogs
and Facebook. As a Marine mom from a military family, you would not
believe what I sometimes hear from dedicated "peace activists" who call
my son (who is no longer active duty) a murderer and worse.
The hate-rhetoric can cut both ways, and it needs to be toned down,
because all it takes is one John Hinkley, one Tim McVeigh, one lonely
irrational seething hater to be provoked, to be VALIDATED by what he
hears on the blogosphere and on talk-radio and TV.
But I gotta say, it's worse on the right-wing, and what frustrates me
the most is that so many of them refuse to take responsibility for it.
However, I would be remiss and unfair if I refused to give a nod to
those who DO.
In his piece, "Tone
Down the Hatefulness in Politics," Michael Gerson called out Sarah
Palin, Gov. Bob McDonnell, and others, as well as some liberals who
were hard on Bush (to be fair)--but I like what he says here:
"The most basic test of democracy is not what people do when they
win; it
is what people do when they lose. Citizens bring their deepest passions
to a public debate -- convictions they regard as morally self-evident.
Yet a war goes on. Abortion remains legal. A feared health-reform law
passes. Democracy means the possibility of failure. While no democratic
judgment is final -- and citizens should continue to work to advance
their ideals -- respecting the temporary outcome of a democratic process
is the definition of political maturity.
"The opposite -- questioning the legitimacy of a democratic outcome;
abusing, demeaning and attempting to silence one's opponents -- is a
sign of democratic decline. From the late Roman republic to Weimar
Germany, these attitudes have been the prelude to thuggery. Thugs can
come with clubs, with bullhorns, with Internet access.
He mentioned, too, how Sen. Tom Coburn has been attacked by
conservatives for saying that Nancy Pelosi was a nice lady. And added, "I
don't hate President Barack Obama. There. I've said it."
In the second column she wrote after winning the Pulitzer Prize,
conservative columnist Kathleen Parker zeroed in on, "What
Americans Can Do to Discourage Future McVeighs."
Like Gerson, she, too, took issue with Sarah Palin's gunsights over
Democratic congresspeople's districts and the language of "reloading."
"Words matter," she says, and she knows whereof she speaks.
During the '08 campaign, she wrote a column in which she dared to say
that Sarah Palin was not qualified to be vice-president, much less
president. In return, she was flooded with some 12,000 e-mails, most of
them hate-filled vitriol, and not a few death threats--all from
conservatives--which unnerved her to such an extent that she wrote, "Dixie
Chicks, I hear ya."
In fact, she quotes the following e-mail she received recently:
"Sorry, honey, but we don't need the squishy middle right now. We
need
the hyper patriots, the combat vets ready to defend the constitution
with arms if necessary."
--and goes on to add:
"The distance between such thinking and recent examples of overt
hostility seems too little. In this space, the unthinkable becomes
plausible. "
She lays out the responsibility of the press, as she sees it, at such
times:
"The challenge for all, but especially the media, is to find a
balance
between vigilance and restraint. How do we expose the unhinged without
emboldening them with attention? Inevitably, the lone operator hears his
own name summoned from the crowd.
"The only palatable answer is what conservatives say they love best:
self-control and personal responsibility. When someone spews
obscenities, shout them down. When politicians and pundits use
inflammatory language, condemn them.
"When you choose to remain silent, consider yourself complicit in
whatever transpires."
These voices of reason--more of whom speak out almost daily on the
left--need to keep speaking out, and we need to continue the drumbeat
here at home, to our family and our friends.
When we get viral e-mails spewing hatred from a right-wing family
member or friend, it would be wise to refrain from a screaming match in
return. Rather, simply snopes.com it and send them the refutation.
Just let them see that it is inaccurate or misinformation. It will
simply deflate their angry red balloon. They won't always admit it or
get back to you, but they will see, in time, that somebody, somewhere is
making fools of them by continuing to send this garbage to them, just
to provoke.
Answering the hatred, rage, and paranoia with more of your own only
fans the flames and gives them more of what they seem to want, which is
provocation.
And even when we agree with each other, we should be careful with our
speech, I think. It's not necessary to use some of the words of
violence that I sometimes encounter even among people I consider
peace-loving.
We need to all sit back, take a deep breath, and remember April 19,
1995.
Because there is nothing we have to say that is worth that.
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