Lance Mannion

“Disability”

Had dinner the Thursday night before last with a group of disability scholars, educators, advocates, and writer and poet-activists with disabilities. Talk around the table touched on many things, but kept coming back around to this story on NPR's This American Life, Unfit for Work: The Startling Rise in Disability in America, by Chana Joffe-Walt. What's “startling” to Joffe-Walt isn't that there's been a rise in the number of disabled Americans, but that there's been a rise in the number of people with "disabilities" collecting disability benefits instead of going out and earning a paycheck.

It's an exasperating piece, exemplifying much of what's wrong with elite journalism and for that reason will probably earn Joffe-Walt all kinds of awards, rewards, and plaudits from her peers. The consensus among my dinner companions was that it ought to earn her a place in hell or at least some remedial time in their classrooms.

Naturally, considering their conditions, situations, experiences, and interests, they were furious at the many ways they felt Joffe-Walt had failed to address real and serious issues regarding disabilities and had implicitly maligned all people with disabilities as cheats and layabouts.

They were in agreement that Joffe-Walt is a complete ignoramus on the subject of disability and they had lots of recommendations for books and articles she should have read and scholars and activists she should have spoken with. But most of them were academics and academics live on the belief that a little reading and a little education can do wonders.

Joffe-Walt isn't ignorant about disabilities or people who have to live with them.

She's completely uninterested in them.

Unfit For Work isn't about disabilities. It's about "disability".

It's a money story. And a too familiar sort of money story. It's a your money story. And your money stories have one of two themes. How you are not making as much dough as you should be or How you are being cheated out of the dough you do make.

Guess which one this is.

For Joffe-Walt’s purposes, disability isn’t a condition or impairment that makes work and life a struggle for individuals.  It’s a classification of taxpayer money being funneled to people who don’t deserve it.

The Right Wing media are loving this. Not only does it give credence to a lie they’ve been pushing, they can count on it to help fuel the angers and resentments they’ve been stoking among the faithful for decades.  Since even before Reagan, the Right’s driving idea has been that the problem with America is other Americans.  Those other Americans.  Joffe-Walt’s story is of a piece with the narrative by which the Right tells itself horror stories of Welfare Queens, the 47 per cent, anchor babies, the food stamp President, Social Security recipients taking lavish vacations in Europe, teachers unions protecting and promoting incompetents, and almost daily dreamed up new nightmares about how they are living it up on our dime.

Joffe-Walt makes the proper sympathetic noises to make sure we know she isn’t heartless, but for all the attention and emphasis she gives it, you might not know from her story that there a people on disability who can’t walk, can’t get around without a wheelchair, can’t breathe without oxygen, can’t see, can’t hear, can’t roam far from a dialysis machine, can’t regulate their bodily functions, can’t plan their week beyond their next round of chemo or radiation, can’t hold themselves together emotionally without medication, can’t stand for more than a moment or make a move without pain, can’t lift, can’t bend, can’t work.

You might not get the sense that she has any sense that many of these people could work, would like to work, but can’t work because they need accommodations and training stingy employers refuse to provide and because they face hiring prejudices based on outdated assumptions and attitudes about the capabilities of the disabled.

None of this is Joffe-Walt’s concern. What concerns her is that there are people who she believes could work and should work but aren’t working because they don’t have to work because they’re collecting disability instead.

Grudgingly, Joffe-Walt acknowledges that some of these people might have been temporarily incapacitated by aches and pains and other lingering effects of illnesses, operations, and injuries you’d think (that is, Joffe-Walt plainly thinks) they’d have recovered from by now or learned to live with. But they aren’t disabled by Joffe-Walt’s lights and it’s only due to their ingenuity at scamming the system with the help of overly-sympathetic doctors, indifferent judges, lazy bureaucrats, cowardly politicians, and shyster lawyers that they’re collecting “disability.”

“I have back pain,” Joffe-Walt tells us. Well, so do I. Somehow I suspect it’s not quite as intense as the back pain of someone who broke their back falling off a scaffold or having a tractor roll over on them.

“My editor has a herniated disc, and he works harder than anyone I know.”

Good for him. And if his job is ever pulled out from under him what sort of work is going to do next?

Operate a backhoe?

Dig coal?

Sweat pipe?

Load freight?

Joffe-Walt apparently thinks that anyone with any pride or self-respect should take any sort of job that comes along, whatever it pays, even if it’s only minimum wage, rather than collect disability. 

It doesn’t seem to have sunk in for her that some kinds of aches and pains that are inconvenient and annoying when you’re doing your job from an ergonomic chair bought by the company and you’re lifting nothing heavier all day than a cup of coffee brought to you by an intern are debilitating, incapacitating, disabling when you’re washing cars, stacking boxes, waiting tables, pushing a mop, or standing all day at a cash register.

“There must be millions of people with asthma and diabetes who go to work every day,” Joffe-Walt exclaims.  Of course there are.  People with conditions like asthma and diabetes and arthritis and emphysema and cancer and herniated discs do go to work every day, dealing with the pain and the weakness and the frustration as best they can until…they can’t.

But Joffe-Walt isn’t really that concerned with how someone’s health might decide whether or not they can work.  She’s concerned, oh so very concerned, with the economic reasons someone might be tempted to go on disability.

People who leave the workforce and go on disability qualify for Medicare, the government health care program that also covers the elderly. They also get disability payments from the government of about $13,000 a year. This isn't great. But if your alternative is a minimum wage job that will pay you at most $15,000 a year, and probably does not include health insurance, disability may be a better option.

Of course it’s a better option. The Medicare qualification makes it far better, all by itself. Not many minimum wage jobs come with anything like adequate health insurance plans. But it’s also a better option because the minimum wage is set way too low.  And it’s not just the money going into pocket that factors into people’s decisions.  There’s transportation. Child care. Sick days---if you have asthma you may be as determined to work any job you can find as Joffe-Walt thinks you should be, but there are going to be days when you can’t breathe, when you will have to call in sick or ask to go home or to the doctor and guess what usually happens to minimum wage workers who ask for those simple considerations.  There’s also the cold, hard economic fact that these jobs have a way of disappearing overnight and people living check to check need to be able to count on the checks coming every week. You have to wonder if Joffe-Walt ever worked a minimum wage job in her life.

Joffe-Walt is also concerned that going on disability is bad for the soul.

But, in most cases, going on disability means you will not work, you will not get a raise, you will not get whatever meaning people get from work…

Ok, clearly Joffe-Walt doesn’t understand what work is for most people.  Meaning from work?  Most people don’t get meaning from their work.  They get a living, if they’re lucky.  Sentimentalists and moralists and working people just trying to keep their own spirits up will talk about how work in itself is ennobling.  But what is ennobling about working most jobs is doing the work despite its being the very opposite of ennobling---degrading, humiliating, disempowering, soul-sapping, mind- numbing, dream-crushing, hope-killing, and back-breaking, and on top of all that it doesn’t pay enough.

Beyond that, Joffe-Walt hasn’t noticed or bothered to notice that one of the reasons for the rise in disability claims is that the Baby Boomers are getting old and they’re starting to break down the way older workers have always tended to do, especially those who work physically demanding jobs, it’s just that there happens to be a lot of them breaking down all at once, just as fifty and sixty years ago there were a lot of children entering grade school all at once.  And a great many people in their fifties and sixties have been thrown out of work by the recession and the reason they won’t be going off disability (until they’re sixty-six and can collect regular Social Security) isn’t their moral degradation but the simple fact that employers don’t want to hire old people, particularly old people who can’t “pull their weight.”  They cost too much.  Joffe-Walt calls disability a form of welfare when she’s not calling it a form of unemployment. (Both terms resonate with Joffe-Walt’s indignation, collecting welfare and unemployment benefits both being as morally suspect as collecting disability in her view. Again: disability and unemployment are earned benefits not charity. We pay for them ahead of time, hoping we will never have to collect, with our payroll taxes.)  But for older workers it’s a form of early Social Security.  I would like to ask Joffe-Walt why she thinks it’s such a terrible thing that someone leaves the workforce at sixty-four because of a bum knee rather than hobbling through until they’re sixty-six working as a greeter at Wal-Mart.

Here Joffe-Walt has put herself in the position of lecturing people who have worked since well before she was born on the moral uplift that comes from earning a paycheck.

But when you get right down to it, the real problem for people with disabilities and people who are on “disability” and everybody else who just needs to work is that the work isn’t there.  One of Joffe-Walt’s sources, a former mill worker who went on disability after a heart attack and a bypass would have gladly gone back to work at the mill if the mill was still there.

Joffe-Walt’s reaction to this is to wax indignant that some bureaucrat advised her source to “suck all the benefits [he could] out of the system” as if that was the reason the mill closed and wouldn’t be reopening.  The problem doesn’t seem to be, in her mind, that there are no jobs for fifty-six year old former mill workers with heart conditions.  The problem, as she seems to see it, is that the system is functioning as if there are no jobs for fifty-six former mill workers with heart conditions. The real problem, as it exists outside Joffe-Walt’s head, is that people are trying to deal with a problem they can’t fix themselves.  Mass unemployment across the country.

Joffe-Walt isn’t completely oblivious. She is aware that unemployment is a problem.  But she has a solution.  The unemployed just need to deal with it.

Somewhere around 30 years ago, the economy started changing in some fundamental ways. There are now millions of Americans who do not have the skills or education to make it in this country.

Ah. Structural unemployment.  This gives the game away.

Everything’s fine.  The system is functioning.  There are just some people who are, well, useless, and if they aren’t going to take the trouble to make themselves useful, there’s nothing we can do for them. Our job is to accept and make the most of the new economic realities.

One of those realities is that even though corporations and the richest of the rich are piling up money at an obscene rate we can’t afford to take care of our own anymore.

Beneath Unfit for Work is the voice of the austerity fetishist, the initiate into the Pain Caucus.

Austerity is failing on a grand scale in Europe.  It hasn’t created jobs.  It’s wiping out more and more every day.  It hasn’t solved the “debt crisis” or the “deficit crisis” or the “crisis of confidence” or whatever “crisis” the Austerity fetishists claim they’re solving.  But the fetishists in Europe persist in inflictiing pain on the poor and the working and middle classes and the fetishists here, in Congress and the Media and, depending on the President’s mood from week to week, the White House keep talking up the need for more pain.

Economists---and not just Paul Krugman, although his warnings ought to be enough---keep pointing out that unemployment here isn’t structural.  It’s mainly due to a lack of demand or as Charles Pierce, no economist, just a man with his eyes open and his head screwed on straight, says every chance he gets, "People got no jobs. They got no money.”  Put people to work, stimulate the economy, the economists and the people with their heads screwed on straight advise.

Oh, no, we can’t do that, say the fetishists. That would cause all kinds of trouble we can’t really define at some date way in the future we can’t really pinpoint.  What we have to do is cut more!  We have to tighten our belts and make more sacrifices.

We meaning, of course, you.  Us.

The not rich who can’t pay out of pocket for what democratic governments supposedly exist to provide.

Krugman has wondered about the Psychological Roots of Austerity Mania and why the facts of economic life as indentified by John Maynard Keynes won’t sink in on the austerity fetishists who are proving Keynes right every day.  Krugman is inclined to think the fetishists are seduced by their own vanity in being thought “serious”.

I’m inclined to think they’re just cruel.

Tea Party types bellow and bluster openly about how they---those others---are a pack of thieves and swindlers, stealing our benefits, making us hardworking taxpayers pay their way.  The more vulgar Right Wing corporatists like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan lecture endlessly about the moochers and the parasites, again those others who won’t work because liberals in government buy their votes with “free stuff”, using the money of virtuous and hardworking wealth-creators.  But for both the Tea Party types and the corporatists the message is the same: They, those others, are what's wrong with America.

The austerity fetishists are more tactful.  They don’t talk in terms of us and them.  They are adept at the language of assumed virtue and their favorite pronoun is we and by its promiscuous use they fool themselves into thinking or, more likely, think they’re fooling the rest of us into thinking their only concern is the common good.

We need to do these things. We have to make the hard choices. We must accept the sacrifices and live with diminished expectations and a lower standard of living for our own good and the good of our children and grandchildren.

Again, of course, by we they mean you, as in the rest of us.

The simplest explanation is usually the best, and since the fetishists are mainly members of the owner class or willing and sycophantic servants and apologists for it, the simple explanation is that they see austerity as a method for creating their hearts’ desire, a desperate class of compliant and uncomplaining workers who will take whatever jobs they can get for whatever the bosses are willing to pay because what other choice do they have?

There’s much moral sniffing of snuff among the Wall Street and Washington elites about how we mustn’t create a culture of dependency. But what the owner class wants is a dependent class of workers, frightened employees who have to depend upon the charity, mercy, and forbearence of their bosses because they can’t depend on the responsible functioning of their government.

But I think there’s even more to it. They aren’t called the Pain Caucus for nothing. Pain isn’t an unfortunate side-effect of austerity. It’s the point. The fetishists want to make people hurt. For our, that is our as in us not them, own good. The intention is to enforce virtue (and to feel virtuous while enforcing it) but that’s a synonym for punish.

They intend to punish us, the mob, for having had the nerve to use government to try to live less desperate lives, for expecting more than we can pay cash on the barrelhead for---like good schools, safe streets, medical care for our children, security in our old age---for thinking that there ought to be more to life than working to make the rich richer, for not realizing we should be grateful that they, our betters, aren’t leaving us to starve and freeze even though they have the power and the right and even the moral obligation to do it, for acting as if we have earned some share in the wealth we’ve helped create with our labor, for demanding to be treated as if we are something more than costs to be controlled or resources to be exploited, for insisting we are human beings like them and that we matter.

For being right about that last one and thereby irritating their nearly atrophied consciences back into life.

My dinner companions were angry that Joffe-Walt didn’t write a very different story focusing on the real problems the disabled face in trying to join the workforce.  But I’m not sure I’d want to read any story Joffe-Walt turned out on that subject.  I’d be afraid that it would be cloyingly sentimental, all about the superhuman achievements of a few individuals who “succeeded” in overcoming their disabilities with the moral, Why can’t you other disabled people be more like these heroes?

She wouldn’t get far into it before she was wondering, sympathetically, if maybe as a society we are being too generous, if accommodation means coddling instead of helping, if the Americans With Disabilities Act puts too great a burden upon employers which costs the rest of us jobs, if it isn’t time we faced up to the fact we can’t afford all these “entitlements”, if it’s really worth the cost of taking care of our own.

And it’d be laced through and through with Joffe-Walt’s pity for the disabled, because pity is easy and easy to fake.

And it’s cheap.

__________________________

My friend, colleague, and boss, the poet Steve Kuusisto, who is blind and who, incidentally, has a herniated disc like Joffe-Walt’s hard-working editor boss, was one of the hosts of that dinner.  As you can imagine, he was less than indifferent about Unfit for Work.  He’s written several posts on it.  The one to start with is this one, Why NPR Doesn’t Understand Disability:

I am for instance a blind man with a graduate degree from the University of Iowa’s “Writer’s Workshop”.  I teach at a major university. With a talking computer and a guide dog I can work productively. When my back aches from a herniated disc the university will provide me with a Herman Miller chair and pay for physical therapy. I have the same disability that keeps 70 per cent of the blind and visually impaired unemployed. My advantages? A combination of luck, education, and white collar privilege.

Here’s an interview the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein did with Joffe-Walt in which Klein does his usual too reasonable best to give Joffe-Walt her due while trying to get her to respond to critics of Unfit for Work, “I thought I knew what being disabled meant.”

Here’s an answering interview Brad Plummer did with Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration in which Pollack explains that Joffe-Walt still doesn’t know what disability means or how disability insurance works, What ‘This American Life’ missed on disability insurance. Kathy Ruffing, a Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, specializing in federal budget issues, has more along the same lines. at Off the Charts Blog, The State of Disability.

Dean Baker is succinct, Planet Money Misses the Boat on Social Security Disability:

…the explanation for this increase seems pretty clear -- the economy is down almost 9 million jobs from its trend growth path. People who would have otherwise been employed find themselves desperate for any means of support due to the inept economic policy that sank the economy. This is a simple explanation that doesn't require examining the moral turpitude of beneficiaries or evidence of corrupt or negligent administrators. Fix the economy and you would remove much of the burden on the program. It is also striking that the projections in the 2012 Trustees Report show the costs again falling below the level projected in 1996 once the unemployment rate gets back down to a more normal level.

And Paul Krugman continues to scratch his head over the President’s apparent eagerness to join the Pain Caucus, Desperately Seeking “Serious” Approval.

Where have you gone, John Galt? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

The infuriating irony of all these Randian sociopaths running around pretending to be wealth creators and excusing their monstrous selfishness on the grounds that they’re the reason the rest of us aren’t starving in the streets, as if there’d be streets without them, is that virtually none of them is the sort of Galtian hero they profess to admire.

They don’t build anything. They don’t create anything. They don’t run anything, they manage.  There are no schools of Business Creation.  Nobody gets an MBB, a Master’s of Building a Business.  The key word in their schools and on their degrees is Administration.  They are trained to be administrators, another way of saying bureaucrat. Bureaucrats do not build, create, or run things.  They maintain the bureaucracy for their own comfort and advantage.

And they don’t want to build anything, create anything, or run anything.  They just want the money that comes from things that have been built, created, and run by other men and women.

They are thieves and pirates, looters, moochers, parasites, and skimmers, and they want the money.  All of it. Now.

_____________________

Sorry. In a mood. Had to vent. I’m better now. Back to The Avengers.

The GOP’s position on our coming to each other’s aid

The GOP's position on disaster aid 1: If you need help rebuilding your house, somebody else has to lose his job.

The GOP's position on disaster aid 2: If you need help rebuilding your business, somebody else's business must close.

The GOP's position on disaster aid 3: If you need help to keep your farm going, somebody else's farm must go under.

The GOP's position on disaster aid 4: If your town needs help rebuilding roads and bridges, some other town won’t be able to rebuild theirs.

The GOP's position on disaster aid 5: If your community needs help holding itself together, some other community must be allowed to fall apart.

The GOP's position on everything: In order for you to get yours, nobody else can have theirs. We're none of us in this together anymore.

Out of the many, one

Last night, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives said, he believes that the bigger the government, the smaller the people.

John Boehner has confused the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution, so his memory of both is probably fuzzy.  He’s clearly forgotten that WE THE PEOPLE are the first three words of the document that establishes a large, strong, centralized government.

The founders, whom the Republicans profess to revere as prophets and whose words the insist we follow as Scripture, proving with both beliefs that they don’t know the biographies and haven’t read the words, had concluded that in order for the people to be the People they needed a bigger government than the Articles of Confederation provided.   In order to share in the benefits and securities of living in a democracy, in order to enjoy their rights as human beings and citizens, the People needed a strong, centralized, bigger government to bring them together, to unite their efforts and their ambitions and dreams, and to be there to rely on in times of trouble, violence, and distress.  In other words:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The Constitution, by enlarging their rights, liberties, and security, enlarged the PEOPLE.

It has gone on doing that, explicitly through the Bill of Rights and amendments, some of which the Tea Party are itching to repeal, and implicitly through judicial interpretation and the passage of laws like the Civil Rights Act.   Which is in fact what the Republicans have against the Constitution. It keeps making the People bigger.

What Boehner said is historically bunk.  Not to mention buncombe.  But it makes sense from the current Republican point of view, which is that the only people who count as the People are white men who vote Republican.

And every Progressive advance has diminished these men in their own eyes because it has diminished their feeling that THEY run the place and get to push everybody else around.

Unions limited their freedom to push workers around.

The Civil Rights movement limited their freedom to push black people around.

Women’s Rights limited their freedom to push women around.

And now, what with gay people marrying and thinking they’re normal and entitled to lives of their own on their own terms, just like anybody else, they’re feeling a limit to their freedom to push the queers around.

All these limits on their freedom have come at the behest of or with the support of big government.

No wonder they feel that the bigger the government, the smaller the people.

The bigger the government grows, that is the more inclusive it becomes, the more protective of the rights of all its citizens, the more solicitous it is of the needs and plights of all its citizens, the less it “belongs” to them.

This is what the Tea Party types mean when they whine about wanting to take their country back.  They want to feel they own it again, they want to feel that they and only they are the People, and they want to feel free to push around anybody they decide aren’t part of the People.

The Republican Party has become the party of weak, little men (and not a few women) who only feel big when they feel free to be bullies.

The meanest angels of our nature

If you can’t stand the heat, try to drive her back into the kitchen.

Somehow I doubt Right Wing Republican Congresscritter Allen West would have thrown the same sort of hissy-fit by email if a male colleague had taken him to task the way Debbie Wasserman Schultz did the other day.

West is standing by his temper tantrum, swaggering about before audiences of similarly oppressed Right Wing men who can’t believe some women have the temerity to think they’re wrong and say so out loud to brag about how no liberal female can push him around.  A class act.

But Booman is right, there’s another issue involved here.  It is weird that a representative from South Florida would join in the planned elimination of Medicare and thus set himself up as the political and economic enemy of his own constituents.

It’s as if West has forgotten where he’s from and thinks he represents a district in California’s Silicon Valley full of twentysomething libertarians.

But…it’s important to keep in mind that the GOP-Ryan plan to balance the budget by breaking the back of the middle class doesn’t touch Medicare for ten years and then the changes only affect the newest cohort of sixty-five year olds!

If you’re on Medicare now, if you’re going to need it within the between now and 2021, you’re fine.

And that’s a key to Ryan’s and the Republican thinking.  They are appealing to the selfishness of voters.  They believe that old people will be happy to vote to screw their own children and grandchildren, younger brothers and sisters out of Medicare if they are convinced that it’s the only way to save their own benefits.

For several generations, the Republican strategy has been to turn Americans against each other.  They’ve been constantly at work identifying others for us to hate, but as each new other is found, it becomes clearer that there is no limit to the other.  It is the circle of us that grows smaller.  If you buy into this us versus them view of the world, you will soon find that there are very few of us, and many, many more of them.  In fact, us is getting very close to being reduced to me and the circle of the other is rapidly expanding, beyond minorities, gays, feminists, liberals, the poor, the unemployed, teachers, firefighters, cops to the point where it now includes family, friends, and neighbors---everybody who might want a piece of my pie!

It may look as though West isn’t representing the interests of his own constituents, but he trying to represent them, them as us, a side of us, anyway, the only side of any of us Republicans appeal to and want to represent, the worst in us, the meanest angels of our nature.

________________________

West isn’t the only Florida politician determined to make life miserable for Floridians.  As George Packer writes in the New Yorker, their own governor has turned against them:

On the afternoon of July 1st, Hartzell was loading the family’s possessions into the rental truck—and brushing off the roaches that had infested the apartment, so that the bugs wouldn’t make the move, too—when a letter arrived from the State of Florida. Four days earlier, Governor Rick Scott, a Republican backed by the Tea Party, had signed a law making it harder for Floridians to collect jobless benefits, and the letter informed Hartzell that he was ineligible for new benefits after losing his job at Target. “I guess it’s just all water under the bridge at this point anyway, being that we’re going to stake a new claim,” Hartzell told his fifteen-year-old son. “Right, Brent?” Then the Hartzells drove ten hours north, to rural Georgia, where no job or house awaited them—only an old friend Hartzell had reconnected with on Facebook, and the hope of a fresh start.

On the day the family moved, there were officially 14.1 million unemployed Americans, or 9.2 per cent of the workforce. Hartzell himself probably isn’t counted in these statistics. In recent years, he has fallen into the more nebulous categories of the part-time employed, the long-term unemployed, and the “marginally attached”—the no-longer-looking unemployed. Economists report that the broader, and more accurate, unemployment rate is 16.2 per cent. Three years after the economic meltdown, nearly one in six Americans are out of work.

In Washington, President Barack Obama and Congress are engaged in high-drama brinksmanship, like members of an ordnance-disposal unit arguing about how to defuse a huge ticking bomb. Obama, securely in character, called on all sides to rise above petty politics, acknowledged the practical realities of divided government, and proposed a grand compromise that would lower the deficit by four trillion dollars. According to the Times’ Nate Silver, Obama’s offer, in its roughly four-to-one balance between spending cuts and revenue increases, falls to the right of the average American voter’s preference; in fact, it may outflank the views of the average Republican. Among other drastic cuts to domestic spending, the President proposes a ten-year, hundred-billion-dollar reduction in federal contributions to Medicaid, a program that helped provide new sets of teeth for Danny Hartzell and his wife just before their move.

The Republicans are also securely in character. They’ve rejected everything that the President has proposed, because Obama’s deal includes tax increases and the closing of loopholes for hedge-fund managers and corporate jets and companies that move offshore. Ninety-seven per cent of House Republicans have taken something called the “No Tax Pledge.” Some Republicans have also proposed that any deal require Obama to repeal the country’s new health-care law, which, had it been in place last year, would have provided the Hartzells with medical insurance, instead of forcing them to rely on charity hospitals for their daughter’s cancer treatment. Representative Paul Ryan’s ten-year budget plan, which remains his party’s blueprint for the future, would impose a fifty-per-cent cut on programs like food stamps and Supplemental Security Income, which, as long as Danny Hartzell remains jobless, represent the Hartzells’ only income. By the last day of June, the Hartzells had twenty-nine dollars to their name. The Republicans in Congress won’t be satisfied until the family is out on the street.

Read all of Packer’s commentary, Empty Wallets, at the New Yorker.

The once-upon-a-time Party of Lincoln has rewritten the Second Inaugural Address.  “With charity for none, with malice toward all…”

Update just to be clear:  I’ve never thought this appeal to our meanest angels would work.  Me, back in May.

In fact, it isn’t working.  But that’s not stopping them.

When the magic starts

Florida’s Junior Senator, Right Wing Republican smoothie, Marco Rubio, wants to know when President Obama’s magic will kick in to save the economy.

That’s easy.  The magic starts when the President finally undoes every stupid, reckless, and irresponsible thing the Republicans and President Bush did when they controlled Congress and the White House for half a decade.

The magic starts when the Republicans in Congress now act like intelligent grown-ups and own up to their mistakes and join with the President and the Democrats to fix the problems and clean up the messes caused by those mistakes instead of looking for ways to continue those mistakes but blame them on the President.

So far all the President has been able to do, without being able to work any magic, is save the financial sector from the complete collapse Wall Street greed and Republican cheerleading and corruption brought on, rescue the auto industry, and reverse the trend from job loss to job creation.

But no magic will happen if the Republicans get their way and regain control of the Senate and the White House unless they can magically make all they did wrong from 2001-2007 right by doing the same stupid, reckless, and irresponsible things all over again.

Can some more prominent Democrats start talking this way and shut up about the unshared shared sacrifice already?

That goes for you too, Mr President.

_________________

To my fellow liberals and leftists who will want to jump in and point out all that the President hasn’t done that you’ve known all along he should have been doing:  I read Krugman and digby and Atrios and Ian too.  And I agree with you.  But you know what?  Come the second Wednesday of November in 2012 I’m not going to find it any more consoling to able to say “I told you so” than it was on the second Wednesday of November of 2010.

Fifty Mississippis

Updated below.

You might have heard.  Friday night, here in New York State, our state legislature did a remarkable thing.

Something good.

In less than a month, we’re going to become one of the very few states where everybody is free to marry the person they love.

Another way of saying this is that we are about to allow gay people to marry.

We’re going to do this because four Republican state senators did the right thing.

Jim Alesi, Roy McDonald, Stephen Saland, and Mark Grisanti.  Mensches all.

The final vote was 33-29.  The thing to remember about those 29 no votes is that this is New York, most of those people aren’t haters, they’re just old Catholics.  In a few years they’re going to be sorry they didn’t vote yes.  A few years after that, they’ll think they did.

Our governor, Democrat Andrew Cuomo, worked long and hard to make this happen and I’d be a little more proud that I voted for him if he wasn’t generally so smug and too easily self-satisfied and I didn’t know he’s going to spend the next week breaking his own arm patting himself on the back while, meanwhile, you know, he’s in effect raising my taxes so millionaires don’t have to scrimp and save anymore to afford gas for their Beemers.

This is going to be a great state to be a gay hedge fund manager.

Still, it’ll be a pretty good state for the rest of us too, and we’ll be helped out by all the gay people from other states who move here to be free.  Give us your tired, your poor, your color-coordinated…

I’m being a wise-guy because this is really choking me up.  I’m so proud to be from here.

And, yeah, it’s not fun that we’re going to have to pay more to send our kid to college just so those millionaires don’t have car pool, but at least here in New York, even though we have to make cuts, we’re not about to reduce our school spending to less than Mississippi’s.

They just did that down in North Carolina.

That’s the richer, more enlightened, less crazy Carolina.

And over in Wisconsin, where our Republicans, including most of the ones who voted no, would be blackballed from the Party as RINOS, their Republican governor has submitted a budget that devastates the state’s education system and throws countless poor people’s children to the wolves.

So, yeah, I’m not just proud to be a New Yorker, I’m relieved.

Which is why this column at the Nation rubbed me the wrong way.

Hurrah! New York has, at long last, decided to join the twenty-first century and recognize the right of same-sex couples to civil marriage.

You know the difference between liberal self-righteousness and Right Winger self-righteousness?  Right Wingers are all, “You’re going to hell and I’m going to laugh” while liberals are “I’m going to heaven, why aren’t you?”

Excuse me?

How many other states have done this?

New York isn’t late in following the pack. There is no pack.  There are barely more than a handful of us.  We’re all helping blaze a difficult trail.  And it’s a trail an awful lot of other states have no intention of following any time soon.

And, anyway, there is no 21st century.  Calendars aren’t maps.  They are organizing devices that we use to sort what’s coming up from what’s past.  But to the degree there is a 21st Century we are only eleven years into it.  Eleven years into the 20th Century do you think people were saying, “You know, in the next 80 years we’re going to live through two horrific world wars, Germany will turn the murder of millions of people into an industry, totalitarian regimes will arise in China and Russia that will slaughter tens of millions of their own people, in large swaths of Africa ethnic wars and mass starvation will be the norm, and the United States and Russia will invent weapons with the potential to wipe out all life on the planet and then spend forty years pointing them at each other and barely avoid using them”?

I’m not predicting the 21st Century will be another ninety years of hell on earth, although, given the history of the human race, it’s a good bet.

But I am saying that the 21st Century isn’t some hip, happening cafe where all we cool kids are hanging out waiting for other people to get with it.

There is no 21st Century.  There won’t be anything to describe as the 21st Century until the historians get to work on it a hundred years from now.  Right now there is just…right now.  And right now things in the United States are a mess.

And getting messier.

There are a whole lot of angry Right Wingers out there, and while they just lost one in New York, they are winning in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, and more than half the other states in the Union.

For every person who said after Friday night’s vote, “Hooray” or “Thank God” or “It’s about time”, there was at least one person screaming in rage.

Those four gutsy Republicans here could lose their seats for doing the right thing and it won’t be to liberal Democrats.  It’s possible that come 2013 New York could have four Tea Party type state senators.

I don’t think that’s likely, but it’s a possibility.  What is more likely is that come 2013 the United States Senate will be controlled by Republicans.  Come 2017 we could have a Republican President, a Republican controlled House, and a Republican controlled Senate again. And what happens to the 21st Century then?

It gets repealed.

There are millions and millions of people in the United States who don’t want to live in the 21st Century, wherever or whatever that is.  They weren’t all that happy living in the latter half of the 20th Century and if they could work their will---and they are furiously trying to work it---they would drag us all back to the last decade of the 19th Century.

Two tribes of Vandals have united to do this.

The first is the kleptomaniacal corporatists who are obsessed with the desire to own all of it.  All of it.  If you have any of it, they want it, and they’ll take it.  I don’t blame the corporations.  Corporations have no minds, no souls, no ambitions or desires.  What they have is employees and a great many of these employees are narcissistic sociopaths.  They don’t give a damn about the corporations they work for and would gladly run them into the ground---and routinely do---as long as when the last lawyer leaves the premises they themselves are left happily sailing off into the sunset with their piles of loot.  These are people who if they wouldn’t chase a windblown dollar bill off a cliff it’s because they’re too busy chasing a fiver out into heavy traffic.  These are people who went into business for the same reason Willie Sutton went into banks.  The difference is that Sutton didn’t figure out how to pay off the bank managers so they’d open their vaults for him.

The other tribe is made up of mainly white, mainly middle-aged, mainly middle class, mainly but far from exclusively Southern and Middle Western political and cultural reactionaries who sincerely believe “their” country has been stolen from them.  Of course, all that’s happened is that they’ve woken up to the fact that the world contains more than their hometowns and was not made exclusively for them, but they aren’t taking the news well.

They are determined to take it back.  And if they can’t, they are willing to burn the place down around them so that THEY---who are we---can’t have it.

If the choice is between living in New York in the 21st Century and Mississippi in whatever part of the 20th Century they believe was ideal---usually that means the years of their childhoods---then they would rather live in Mississippi than share any part of New York with the likes of us.

They are wrecking their own states.  They are trying to wreck all the others.

Just for the sake of keeping things focused, let’s leave aside what they want to do to the economy, to the environment, to education, to women’s reproductive rights, to their civil rights.  The Republicans in the House want to bring back Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  They think it’s an impeachable offense that the President decided not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act.  They talk seriously about introducing a Constitutional Amendment that would define marriage as a purely heterosexual institution.

New York may seem to you to be late to your party.  But to a great deal of the rest of the country, we’ve proved, again, that we aren’t part of America.  Which would be bad enough, if they were willing to let us go.  But their object is to re-colonize us.

The President doesn’t seem able to confront this or acknowledge it or even admit it, either because he doesn’t have the ability or the temperament or the will or the conviction.

The Media seems determined to pretend it isn’t happening, that this isn’t the goal.  To them, Michele Bachmann is a cute story.  Chris Christie is just what the doctor ordered.  Paul Ryan’s a statesman.  Wisconsin, they never heard of it.  Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, who needs ‘em?

If the 21st Century is like a place, it’s like an only recently discovered continent, so far unexplored, where Vermont and Iowa and New Hampshire and Massachusetts and New York have established precarious beachheads.  And it’s a real possibility that when we hack our way farther inland we’ll find that the Right Wingers have gotten there first and made the place look an awful lot like Mississippi.

_____________________

Updated Tuesday morning: Mark Grisanti, one of the four Republicans who voted yes, is already taking heat from the Republican Right.  The interesting news is that if he’s challenged in 2012 from the Right, we’re not likely to wind up with a Tea Party type taking his seat.  It’d probably go to a Democrat.  Some guy named Mark Grisanti.

The quotable Bob Herbert: On the incorporation of the Amalgamated States of America, Ltd.

Fun.  We live in a country that would prefer to close libraries than ask millionaires to pay a little extra in taxes or multi-billon dollar corporations with whopping big government contracts to pay any taxes at all.

Last chance to quote Herbert as a New York Times columnist.  This is from his final column there:

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Read the whole piece, Losing Our Way.

They neglected us to warn us how they intended to grow up to be sociopaths and thieves

Obviously, the corporate elites who run the country and their bought and paid for flunkeys of both parties in the federal and state governments and their media toadies think all of us who don’t make a million bucks a year are chumps and losers who deserve the screwing we’re getting from the economy they’ve wrecked.

The thing is we shouldn’t be surprised.

After all, we knew them when.

Back in high school and college.  While the rest of us were planning to become teachers and doctors and nurses and cops and librarians and firefighters and artists and musicians and scientists and small business owners and pastry chefs and architects and carpenters and car mechanics and engineers and rabbis and ministers and airline pilots and soldiers and sailors and Marines and other useful sorts of citizens, they were dreaming of the day when they would own lots of toys and sneer openly at people who did the real work of keeping the country running and afloat.

If only they had mentioned this.

They could have told us, “Yes, we look like a bunch of sly and selfish and arrogant jerks, but that’s only because we know we’re going to own this country soon and when we do we’re going to make sure that as much of its wealth, the wealth you produce, winds up in our pockets.  We’re going to wreck whole industries and ship those jobs oversees to be done by children at slave wages.  We’re going to fix the tax codes so that more and more money flows into fewer and fewer hands.  We’re going to pump up our own stock portfolios by creating not one but two ridiculous bubbles and when the second one bursts and the entire economy seems headed for the dumper we’ll get our paid flunkeys in Congress to pick up the tab with no strings and no promises that we won’t do it all over again.  We’ll freeze your wages, threaten to take away your jobs, begrudge you benefits and use every opportunity we get to take them away from you, and make you so afraid of losing everything that you’ll not just take whatever crap we dish out, not just thank us for it, you’ll admire us for it and think how smart and awesome we are and how stupid and useless you are.  And then we’ll use our bought and paid for media toadies to tell you that it’s all the fault of people who have it worse off than you, and guess what?  Enough of you will believe it that you will vote to send more of our bought and paid for politicians to Congress where they can cut more of our taxes and more of your benefits and all the while boast how they’re doing the good work you want them to do!”

I don’t know what we could have done if they had told us.

Not made the mistake of embarking on careers that didn’t pay us big bucks to screw around with other people’s money, maybe.

Given them all the tar and featherings they’ve all since earned a dozen times over?

Paid more attention to what they were up to and not fallen into their traps.

Noticed when their influence in Washington and the state capitals began to result in more laws and tax breaks that penalized us and rewarded them and nipped it in the bud by not voting for their bought and paid for political flunkeys?

Well, a lot of us did try that last one.  We just didn’t catch on that they had bought politicians on both sides of the aisle.

I don’t know what we could have done or would have done.

But maybe they did tell us.  And maybe we just didn’t believe that anybody that young and otherwise so like us could be planning to live their lives as vultures and jackals.

Or maybe we just didn’t believe that jerks that obvious and that greedy and that sociopathic and selfish would get through their twenties without winding up in jail or in pieces in landfills.

Maybe in a conversation in line in the cafeteria or at a bar after showing our fake IDs we said something like, “When I graduate I’m going to become a teacher and dedicate my life to helping kids from disadvantaged backgrounds develop the skills they need to work their way up into the middle class.”

And they said, “When we graduate we’re going to go into the business of tricking your former students into taking out booby-trapped mortgages and make our fortunes off of playing around with those mortgages and too bad for the suckers who fell for our tricks.”

And maybe they added, “And by the way, when all our scheming results in all fifty states collapsing in financial disarray, we’re going to see to it that you get royally fucked.”

And we replied, “Ha ha, very funny, asshole,” and walked away and forgot about them.

Tread onto others before they can tread onto you

Don’t Tread on Me, the old American battle cry, is supposed to express some sort of great national virtue.

Pretty much, though, those who’ve adopted it as their creed seem to think they have no neighbors to whom they owe any consideration and for them Don’t Tread On Me means simply I Get To Do Whatever I Want to Do and Goddamn Anybody Who Tries To Tell Me Different.

I think it was John Cole who noted the absurdity that here at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century the Republican Party has decided to mount the barricades to defend a piece of 19th Century technology.

The incandescent light bulb.

The charge is being led by Congressman Joe Barton.  You remember him.  He’s the corporate toady who apologized to BP because the President was making them pay for the damage their negligence and incompetence caused.

Barton is a Republican politician from Texas which makes him by definition a Big Oil stooge.  Everything the man says from Good morning to Good night translates as God bless Our Addiction to Fossil Fuels.

Naturally he hates and despises any and every conservation measure that results in the nation’s burning less oil to heat, cool, and power itself. 

A drop of oil saved is money stolen right out of the pockets of his Big Oil bosses.

Every word that comes out of Barton’s mouth should be treated as a paid advertisement for ExxonMobil.  But the country and in particular his Party is full of Don’t Tread On Me Types who like to hear politicians tell them how right and brave and patriotic they are to be childishly selfish and self-centered and they are flattered beyond all get-out by boilerplate like this from Barton:

“From the health insurance you’re allowed to have, to the car you can drive, to the light bulbs you can buy, Washington is making too many decisions that are better left to you and your family,” Mr. Barton said when he introduced his bill in January.

Ok, let’s quickly get past the fact that nobody’s being told what health insurance they’re allowed to have, they’re being told they have to have some kind or pay a fine and nobody’s being told what kind of car they have to buy, auto companies are being encouraged to start building cars that don’t need to burn as much gas as cars do now, which sometime in the hopefully not too distant future might mean that anybody buying a new car will be forced to buy a car that gets more than fifty miles a gallon, which I don’t think many people will think of as a hardship.

Think about the attitude Barton’s appealing to and trying to exploit here.

I’m not an enthusiastic fan of florescent bulbs, by the way, and I feel the pain of the Easy Bake Oven folks.  But I’m definitely not a fan of high electric bills and forty-five dollar fill-ups at the gas pump, and it’s hard for me to imagine anybody else is.

But, while unrestrained selfishness as a social good has always been the fundamental principle of Republican politics, the rise of the Tea Party has turned it into the be-all and end-all.

It’s been said that the Tea Party has put the whole country at the mercy of a group of angry, misinformed old people.

But, really, what’s happened is that we are at the mercy of a group of angry, misinformed adolescents with gray hair.

They are people who, like spoiled teenagers, think the world was created to revolve around them and exists to serve their needs and, like teenagers whining about parents making them do chores and clean-up their rooms, regard any attempt to make them think about other people for a change as not just an infringement on their freedom but an assault on their very identity.

The Tea Partiers don’t have a coherent platform or agenda.  They often contradict each other and themselves.  But there is one thing on which they are in consistent agreement.

They see themselves as having no responsibilities as citizens of the United States.

For them, being a citizen means chiefly the right to tell other people to go to hell.

How dare the government tell me I can’t go out and get hit by a bus and then expect the government to pick up the tab for my medical bills!

How dare the government tell me what kind of big metal box I can put on government built roads and  send flying down the highway aimed at other people riding in big metal boxes they’ve sent flying down those government built highways!

How dare the government tell me how much oil I can burn and how much of the resulting poisons I can pump up my chimney to foul the air my neighbors have to breathe!

How dare the government expect me to pay taxes to build schools, maintain roads, repair bridges, muster an army!

How dare the government tell me I have to help pay the cops who patrol my streets, the firefighters who will risk their lives to save my burning house, the teachers who prepare the future generation to be good citizens and productive workers so that I can spend my old age in a caring and prosperous society a decent wage for their time and trouble!

How dare the government tell me I owe anybody any respect, aid, or consideration!

Don’t tread on me!

Now stand still while I tread all over you.

You can’t have a society of grumpy old men. Grump the Last.

Finally!  Click on the links for the first, second, and third Grumps.

If P.J. O’Rourke’s grumpy little post, I Think We Lost the Election, had struck me as just another irritable belch at having to stomach the usual idiocies of politicians I think I wouldn’t have bothered to write about it or write so much about it, at any rate.

I might have been content to point out that the government of bored, restless, and irritable amateurs who would really rather be doing something, anything, else than running the country, which O’Rourke claims to think is the ideal, would be a government run by the Sarah Palins of the world.

Or I might have gone off on how a government of bored, restless, and irritable amateurs is what the Tea Party’s trying to give us.

More likely, though, I’d have pointed out the hypocrisy behind the post.  It’s a vanity, and a pose, on the part of many Republicans that their politicians aren’t really politicians and that their side never plays politics.  Democrats are the party of the professional---read, corrupt---politicians and Democrats are the ones who insist on politicizing every issue, as if there can be an issue that affects the entire polis that isn’t political.

This pose is a cover.  It’s a way of arguing that they should be the only ones to run things.  For our own good, we should take politics out of the hands of the politicians---read, Democrats, especially liberal Democrats---and hand it over to the high-minded and self-sacrificing amateurs---read, Republican elites---who will of course put aside their own narrow self-interests when deciding how best to run things.

Probably, then, I would have gone on to write some of the same things I wrote in the first post in this series about the Republicans’ not so secret desire to bring back an aristocracy and with it a return to Feudalism.   But there’s a good chance I’d have stopped there with just the one post and not gone on to churn out four.

Maybe, if I’d really thought O’Rourke was simply grousing about the all too typical venality and ineptitude of too many people in public office, from boards of selectmen on up to the United States Senate, I’d have agreed with him.

I live in New York.  Watching the clown show that is our state legislature is not inspiring. 

I’m happy, and relieved, that Tea Party darling and habitual sender of NSFW emails Carl Paladino, won’t be our next governor, but if he’d won he’d have been far from the biggest idiot and worst excuse for a human being in Albany.

And it’s hard not to think the worst of politics and politicians when you look at Congress these days, where we have now divided the government between two sets of incompetents, one made inept by cowardice and the constant bending over backwards to serve two masters, the people and the banks, and the other made inept by stupidity, greed, rage, and a general and thorough misunderstanding of the purpose of democratic government or, among those few who do understand it, a hatred of that purpose---for them incompetence is a deliberate method of sabotage.

We don’t live in a society composed entirely of fools, incompetents, and thieves, but we seem to want a government in which they are way over-represented.

But I don’t agree with O’Rourke because I don’t think he’s simply being irritable and cynical about some politicians.

And I don’t think that because he didn’t build his post around his suspicion that all politicians are fools, incompetents, and fools.  He built it around a cynical certainty that voters are. This passage is the real heart of his post:

In a free country government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference. The teacher is a pompous twit. Our child is a lazy pain in the ass. We undertake this social obligation with weary reluctance. And we only do it at all because the teacher (political authority) deserves cold stares, hard questions, and maybe firing, and the pupil (that portion of society which, alas, needs governing) deserves to be grounded without TV and have its Internet access screened and its allowance docked.

O’Rourke’s analogy only works if you agree that the default position to take with teachers is that they deserve to be fired---that is that most of them are fools or incompetents if not thieves, although probably thieves too, because fools and incompetents who take taxpayers’ money even though they’re fools and incompetents are robbing taxpayers---that is, that there’s no difference between the fool, incompetent, or thief teaching your kids and the fools, incompetents, and thieves running the government, a thought that’s easily extended, because that’s what it implies, that anybody and everybody in a position of public trust is not to be trusted.

But  it goes farther than that.  You have agree to the premise that the entire electorate is made up over-grown and spoiled children.  Which is to say that we live in a country made up of lazy brats who want everything handed to them.

And where are you supposed to see yourself in a society made up of children and run by fools, incompetents, and thieves?

Where O’Rourke sees himself.

In the position of one of the few intelligent, hardworking, honest adults.

As part of the portion of society that doesn’t need governing and, therefore, has no use for the government.

This post, which really isn’t just another piece of lazy writing on O’Rourke’s part, perfectly expresses the Right Wing Republican attitudes towards democratic self-government.

It shouldn’t be allowed to continue.  “We,” that is the O’Rourkes of the world, won’t win an election until the running of the country is put entirely into “our” hands.

What I’ve been getting at---and what I’d have gotten to a long time ago if I was a better writer---is that O’Rourke’s  little post sums up the the great big assault on democracy the Right has bee perpetrating since, well, forever.

And the general tactic has been to try to convince “us” that “they” aren’t worth our trust.

In this, O’Rourke, as an apostle of this point of view, goes Scrooge one better.

As I wrote in an earlier post, Scrooge isn’t actively engaged in breaking the connections the bind society together.  He doesn’t set out to infect other people with his misanthropy.  He isn’t a missionary in the work of unspreading Christmas cheer.  All his mean and nasty jokes, his declarations of cynicism, suspicion, and contempt, all his bah-humbugging are in answer to other people’s attempts to connect with him.

He’s explaining himself not trying to convert them to his opinion that other people are nothing but fools, incompetents, and thieves.

To keep things within the confines of the book, where Dickens doesn’t expect such things to be kept, but for the purposes of making the point, we’ll keep them there to say this: Scrooge doesn’t try to ruin anybody else’s Christmas.

'Nephew!' returned the uncle sternly, 'keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.'

'Keep it!' repeated Scrooge's nephew. 'But you don't keep it.'

'Let me leave it alone, then…'

There’s no point in his conversation with Fred, or in his conversations with anyone else, where Scrooge does or says anything to discourage someone from celebrating Christmas.  As Fred points out, no one suffers from Scrooge’s refusal to celebrate Christmas but Scrooge.  And, by the way, any production of A Christmas Carol that has Scrooge firing Bob Cratchit on Christmas Eve is a production that doesn’t trust its audience or doesn’t trust its source material.  Scrooge doesn’t do anybody much good, but he doesn’t knowingly do them any harm, although he, like all of us, have an obligation to know it.   In his infamous exchange with the portly gentlemen collecting for charity---“Are there no prisons?  Are there no workhouses?” ---when he’s told that many people would rather die than go to the workhouse, he follows up his horrific joke “If they would rather die, then they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population” by telling the gentlemen that he doesn’t “know it.”  He means that he doesn’t believe people would rather die.

The gentlemen are aghast.

“But you might know it,” one says, and he means Scrooge ought to take the trouble to find out the truth.

But Scrooge snaps back:

'It's not my business…It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's.’

Again, this is Scrooge’s sin, going about his business as if he has nothing to do with other people.  He wants to deny his connections with other people, but he doesn’t see it as any of his business if other people want to continue their connections with each other.

Scrooge won’t go to his nephew’s Christmas party, but he won’t try to stop anyone else from going.  He won’t try to stop Fred from having a party.  He thinks Bob Cratchit is a fool for wasting the little money he makes celebrating Christmas, but he still gives Cratchit the whole day off, and notice Scrooge assumes he has the power and the right to make Cratchit work on Christmas day.

O’Rourke and the conservative elites he speaks for are asking us not to go to the party.  They’re trying to convince us we should be annoyed at those fools, incompetents, and thieves who want the whole day off and not let them have it.

It’s not enough that, Scrooge-like, we think of everybody else as fools, incompetents, and thieves.  We’re meant to go Scrooge one better and deal with them as fools, incompetents, and thieves.

O’Rourke and the anti-democratic elites want to ruin Christmas for everybody by killing people’s Christmas spirit, which Dickens has Fred define as having nothing specific to do with Christianity, and everything to do with Christ quoting the golden rule:

'There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,' returned the nephew. 'Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

O’Rourke and company pervert the golden rule.  Instead of treating others the way they would like others to treat them, they preach:  “Treat other people as if they were all fools, incompetents, and thieves.”

The Tea Party’s rallying cry, “We want to take our country  back” is based on the selfish certainty that to share the country and its benefits with people they don’t like is to have lost it.  It’s all or nothing with them.

But they’re cowards in not being able to face up to their own selfishness, so they’ve found an excuse for it.

It’s not, they would say---do say---that they’re not willing to share.  It’s that they’re not willing to be robbed.

Or taken advantage of.

They’d gladly share with “them” if only “they” deserved it, if only “they” weren’t all fools, incompetents, and thieves demanding a share in what they haven’t earned or deserved.

And here’s O’Rourke, glad to tell them they’re right and to make them laugh in self-congratulation at it.

Democracy, says O’Rourke, is a humbug, and people who buy into his humbugging are meant to shut up their hearts and treat their fellow Americans as other races of creatures bound on other journeys and the government that represents “them” as being like “them,”  something “other” to hold in suspicion and contempt.

A very useful attitude for them to have, from the point of view of the corporate elitists who want to run things as they see fit, for their own benefit, and who don’t, under any circumstances, want to share.

You can’t have a society of grumpy old men. Grump the Third.

Click on the links for Grump the First and Grump the Second.

There can be something cathartic in thinking the worst of your fellow human beings.

Everybody isn’t a fool, an incompetent, or a thief, but there are enough fools, incompetents, and thieves out there that it can feel that nobody’s smart, nobody knows how to do their, job, and nobody’s honest.  And even the wise, competent, and honest are only usually so and all too often don’t think, screw up, or give into temptation.

Plus, thinking the worst of everybody else is an effective distraction from having to think the worst of yourself.  It’s a miserable feeling, walking away from a situation knowing that you’ve just made a fool of yourself or showed yourself up as an incompetent or cheated somebody somehow, so it’s a morale boost to be able to tell yourself that as bad as you are everybody else is worse, even if you can’t make yourself believe it for very long.

But for as long as it takes to indulge your private little grudge against the world or to laugh at a cynical joke, nod knowingly over essay by H.L. Menken, watch a episode of The Simpsons, read a novel by Evelyn Waugh, smirk at the news or a Leno monologue, or exclaim, “You said it, P.J.” after reading a blog post, you can take some satisfaction in “knowing” that people stink and they’re stupid and to hell with them.

It feels good because it’s a way of facing up to a nightmare.

What if everybody else was a fool, an incompetent, or a thief?

Our lives would be impossible because our society couldn’t function.

Human beings need to live together to survive and in order to live together they have to be able to rely on each other.

Of course there are situations it’s best to go into assuming that everyone else in it is a fool, an incompetent, or a thief, but most of us aren’t spies, undercover cops, or politicians trying to work out a deal together, so we don’t have to face those situations regularly.

In almost all our daily comings and goings we have to trust that other people won’t be foolish, won’t be incompetent, and won’t be dishonest.  What’s more in most situations things only work if the people we’re dealing with know we’re trusting them to at least try not be foolish, incompetent, or dishonest.

The wise-to-the-ways-of-the-world blowhard who goes into stores and restaurants letting the clerks and waiters know he’s onto them and he’s not about to let himself get gypped is, besides being a bully, a fool, because one way or another he’s going to get gypped by the clerks and the waiters to spite him.

He’s going to eat a lot of meals out that have been creatively flavored back in the kitchen.

In order to survive we have to live together and live together amicably.  That doesn’t just mean not resorting to maces and axes to settle all quarrels and finalize business transactions and real estate deals.  That means treating each other with respect, consideration, sympathy, and a reasonable degree of trust.

Living together means forming a society and a society is an agreement between people to be, well, social.

And sociable.

The members of a society have agreed to live together as a group for their mutual benefit according to a set of rules that if adhered to assures their mutual benefit.

In an ideal society the rules are not onerous or arbitrarily restrictive nor do they favor any members over others; everybody shares in the benefits equally and those benefits will be relatively abundant---that is, in a wine-tasting society there will be a variety of good wines to sample at every meeting, while in a large society, like a town, a state, or nation, the benefits will include security, safety, a reasonable amount of material and spiritual comfort and the freedom for individuals to pursue their idea of happiness without, of course, threatening other people’s security or safety, robbing them of their material comfort, or denying them their freedom to make themselves happy (with the same caveats).

An ideal society is tolerant, forgiving, and somewhat elastic.  People are free to come and go as they please---new members are welcomed and accommodated with good cheer, anyone who wants out leaves with the assurance there are no hard feelings and they’ll be welcomed back if they change their minds.

In an ideal society everybody who can pitch in pitches in and those who can’t are taken care of.  Everybody recognizes that they’re all in this together.  They know they have to depend on the other members of the society and they expect to be depended upon in return.  And in order for it to work, everyone must be responsible to and responsible for each other.  It all falls apart if the members can’t depend on each other or if they feel they can’t.

They have to trust each other and of course they won’t if everybody thinks the worst of each other, if everybody thinks everybody else is a fool, an incompetent, or a thief.

I suppose you could build a society around the expectation that everybody in it is a fool, an incompetent, or a thief, but that would have to be a prison, wouldn’t it?

The thing about an ideal society or a society that strives to approach the ideal is that in making room for each other to pursue their individual ideas of happiness, the members also make room for misfits of all kinds, including people who don’t really want to be members of the society---like Ebenezer Scrooge--or who want to be members only up to the point of sharing in its benefits and not its mutual responsibilities---which is not like Scrooge but the kind of people Scrooge thinks everybody else is.

But a truly sociable society can accommodate an anti-social type like Scrooge.  Scrooge’s problem is that he refuses to acknowledge his connectedness to other people not that he actively tries to disrupt the connections between others.  He admits to contributing, begrudgingly, resentfully, and as minimally as possible, to society.  He simply refuses to admit that society gives anything back to him in return.

It’s hard to imagine, though, Scrooge forming a society of any kind on his own or wanting to unless for his own exclusive material benefit.

If other people want to join his society for their material benefit, fine, but they’d better be aware that the point is for him to make money.

To the degree that Scrooge admits to belonging to any society, it’s a society limited to people with whom he can do business.  People are part of that society as long as they help him do business, that is, make money, and he owes them only the money he’s forced to spend on his way to making more money for himself.

This is a petty, mean, and joyless idea of society, but even it still works best if its members trust each other, to some degree, and don’t think and expect the absolute worst of each other.

Scrooge thinks the worst of everybody.

As far as he’s concerned, everybody else is a fool, an incompetent, or a thief, probably all three together.

At length the hour of shutting up the counting- house arrived. With an ill-will Scrooge dismounted from his stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerk in the Tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out, and put on his hat.

'You'll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?' said Scrooge.

'If quite convenient, sir.'

'It's not convenient,' said Scrooge, 'and it's not fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you'd think yourself ill-used, I'll be bound?'

The clerk smiled faintly.

'And yet,' said Scrooge, 'you don't think me ill-used, when I pay a day's wages for no work.'

The clerk observed that it was only once a year.

'A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December!' said Scrooge…

Scrooge’s attitude towards all his fellow passengers to the grave is epitomized in his treatment of Bob Cratchit here.  Cratchitt is a fool because anyone who celebrates Christmas is a fool.  Cratchit is an incompetent, well, because who else but an incompetent would work for Scrooge at the wages Scrooge pays, but he’s also incompetent in not having his priorities straight--- “'There's another fellow,' muttered Scrooge; who overheard him: 'my clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I'll retire to Bedlam.'”---and in being lazy enough to look forward to a day off.  And he’s a form of thief for wanting to be paid for doing no work.

But Scrooge doesn’t seem to blame Cratchit for any of this.  He knows that Cratchit is backed up by society.  Society expects Scrooge to not just overlook foolishness, incompetence, and thievery, but to reward it.

What kind of society would expect that except a society made up of fools, incompetents, and thieves?

Now, onto Ebenezer O’Rourke.

Wait.  I shouldn’t call P.J. O’Rourke a Scrooge.

That’s not fair to Scrooge.

End of Grump the Third.

You can’t have a society of grumpy old men. Grump the Second.

Grump the First is here.

P.J. O’Rourke:

We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren’t there…

America’s elected and appointed officials ought to be longing to return to their personal lives and private interests. They should feel burdened by their powers, irked with their responsibilities, and embarrassed at their prominence in the public eye. When they say they want to spend more time with their families, they should mean it.

A small group of decent-hearted and intelligently self-interested people might agree to live loosely together, abiding to a mutually decided upon set of rules that don’t weigh heavily on anyone’s shoulders.  And they might make a very pleasant little society.  But over time, as some people die off or move away, and new members are born or strangers attracted to the little society’s decencies and comforts ask to join and are admitted, there will be some people who will decide that this rule or that rule or all the rules don’t apply to them.

When that happens the orderliness and the safety of the little society will be threatened and the other members will have to take steps to bring the rule-breakers back into line or drive them from the circle.

They will have to give themselves what are essentially police powers.

Now the little society has to decide how they will exercise those powers and in which of them they will invest those powers.  They can try to spread the powers out among the group, which can be inefficient or they can hand it all over to one strong man or something in between.  Whichever way they decide, they’d better have a way of supervising and controlling the exercise of those powers or they’re going to wind up with mob rule or under the tyranny of a warlord.

Basically, they need too add a little more governing power to their government.

If things are managed---governed---well, life inside that little society will grow safer, more orderly, and more secure.  Possibly happier.  The little society will thrive and more people will join it.  More babies will be born, more children will grow up to be adults, more adults will live into old age.  More outsiders will ask to be admitted.

Now instead of having a tribe or a clan you have a village.

With a village you have houses and ways to get from one house to another.  You have streets to keep clear, property to protect.  With all these people rubbing up against each other, you’ve got frictions that have to be dealt with before they burst into flame.  That means the little society must police itself a little more energetically and it must offer a means of settling disputes that don’t involve fights in the street and murders in the dark.  That means some form of court system.

Suddenly, in addition to having to supervise its police, the little society needs to supervise street sweepers and fire brigades, lawyers and judges.

If things continue to be managed---governed---well, the village will grow into a town, the town might grow into a city.  The streets will get busier.  That’s traffic that has to be regulated and controlled.  Trade will increase.  More sources of friction there, more need for regulation, policing, and adjudicating.

Other towns and cities, similarly well-governed and thriving, might like to do business with yours.  More roads.  More traffic.  More money changing hands.  More people and property to protect.  More sources of friction.

You’ve got all these workers to hire and fire, all this building and repair work to do, all these citizens to look out for, to serve and protect, if they’re good citizens, to keep in line if they’re not, all these rules that have to be enforced, all these departments that have to be administered, all this money that has to be spent and taxes or fees that have to be collected to pay for it all---do you really want all this handled by bored and restless amateurs with other immediate and to them more pressing demands on their time, energy, and attention?

This was tried once in a centuries-long failed experiment usually referred to as Europe from the about the time of the fall of the Roman Empire until about 1850---until the end of World War I in some parts.

Feudalism, in its harsher forms during the Middle Ages, and its more benign form after the rise of moneyed and meritocratic aristocracy to rival the old landed and hereditary aristocracy, worked fairly well, at least from the point of view of the aristocrats.

Feudalism is essentially a system in which bored, restless, and self-entitled amateurs run things in ways they expect will have maximum benefit for themselves, in the way of profit and safety and continuation of their place at the top of the heap, with the expectation that their self-interest, compassion, and senses of duty and responsibility will make sure things work out for the profit and safety and continued well-being of everybody else.

When you look closely at the grousing of supposedly small government and libertarian conservatives like O’Rourke, you often see that what they want is a return to feudalism.

They want an aristocracy of like-minded people---that is, people who think like them---to run things as they see fit and for the rest of us to shut up and leave them alone to run things as they see fit.

But what you usually see are anti-social grumps who just want to be left alone, period, to go about doing what they think is best for them with nobody telling them they can’t or shouldn’t do this or that or that they might think about what’s best for other people once in a while.

They especially don’t want to be asked to help pay for bringing about what’s best for anybody else.

There’s something inherently Scrooge-like in them, and I’m not calling them misers, because, if you remember, Scrooge’s failing isn’t that he’s a miser, it’s that he’s an oyster---secret, self-contained, solitary:

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, 'My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?' No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men's dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, 'No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!'

But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call 'nuts' to Scrooge.

“Warning all human sympathy to keep its distance…”

Scrooge’s tight-fistedness is symbolic of his refusal to recognize a connection between himself and other people or to admit that they have any demand on his time or attention, never mind his money.

Not coincidentally, Scrooge has a very low opinion of other people.  He treats them all as he treats Bob Cratchitt, as a combination of fool, incompetent, and would-be thief.

The O’Rourkian philosophy of limited government is based on two unshakeable principles.

The first is that things are just fine as they are or at least as fine as they’re ever going to be---which is true in that things as they are are working out just fine for them---and anyway trying to change things is bound to make them worse---which is also true in that trying to change things will inconvenience them, by raising their taxes, probably, but also by asking them to care.

The second is that other people are no damn good. 

Quiz the O’Rourkes of the world and they’ll tell you, usually in no uncertain terms, that they have a Scrooge-like opinion of their fellow men and women.

Everybody---everybody else, that is---is a fool, an incompetent, or a would-be thief, which turns out to be a very useful thing to believe because it provides an instant defense against arguments that they are somehow responsible for and obligated to other people.  Nobody deserves your help if everybody is by definition and natural design undeserving.

At the heart of O’Rourke’s grumpy old man post about elections not changing anything until we stop electing professional politicians to office is the Scrooge-like belief that it’s not just professional politicians who are fools, incompetents, and thieves.  Everyone who collects a government paycheck---especially teachers---and all the other kids in his kids’ school and their parents are also fools, incompetents, and a form of thief, which pretty much amounts to an argument that the public school system is dedicated to employing and serving the undeserving but also, by extension, that all public services are dedicated to employing and serving the undeserving.

And that boils down to any government actively dedicated to solving problems and making life better for its citizens is dedicated to taking O’Rourke’s tax dollars and handing them over to fools, incompetents, and thieves.

Worse, from the grumpy old man’s point of view, it’s a government dedicated to not leaving him alone to mind his own business without having to worry about society and to reminding him that he is a part of it and therefore responsible in some part for its other members:

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,' returned the gentleman, 'a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink. and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned -- they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can't go there; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, 'they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides -- excuse me -- I don't know that.”

“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.

“It's not my business,” Scrooge returned.  “It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

End of Grump the Second. Click on the link for Grump the Third.

You can’t have a society of grumpy old men. Grump One.

Was there really ever a time when P.J. O’Rourke was funny?

I remember there was a time when I felt obligated to think he was.  That was a long time ago, back when he first appeared on the scene.  After all, there was supposedly no reason a conservative couldn’t be funny and there were plenty of reasons to think life in a liberal society was funny.  Life is generally ridiculous for human beings, no matter how liberally a society has ordered itself, and on top of that I knew enough liberals who were insufferable human beings and deserved ridicule, including myself.  In that way liberals have of siding against themselves in an argument, I was more than willing to accept a good satirizing from the right, although as the likes of Mark Twain, Walt Kelly, Garry Trudeau, Russell Baker, Woody Allen, Lily Tomlin, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin had made clear, liberals were pretty effective and funny when it came to satirizing themselves.

But I was more than willing to give O’Rourke a chance.

I don’t remember though ever responding to anything he wrote with more than a grim smile and a rueful shake of the head.  I gave up reading his stuff without noticing I’d given it up and definitely without missing it, because what struck me about O’Rourke wasn’t that he was a conservative, it was that he was a very grumpy young man.

And a grumpy young man who couldn’t wait to be a grumpy old man.

I was a grumpy enough young man on my own.  I didn’t need the encouragement.

Now I’m a grumpy old man.  But guess what.

O’Rourke is too.

Here’s an example of a recent bout of grumpy old man O’Rourke’s grumpery, which I wouldn’t have found on my own, Andrew Sullivan had to find it for me, and thanks a lot for that Andrew.  O’Rourke:

I think we lost the election on November 2…

We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren’t there…

In a free country government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference. The teacher is a pompous twit. Our child is a lazy pain in the ass. We undertake this social obligation with weary reluctance. And we only do it at all because the teacher (political authority) deserves cold stares, hard questions, and maybe firing, and the pupil (that portion of society which, alas, needs governing) deserves to be grounded without TV and have its Internet access screened and its allowance docked…

America’s elected and appointed officials ought to be longing to return to their personal lives and private interests. They should feel burdened by their powers, irked with their responsibilities, and embarrassed at their prominence in the public eye. When they say they want to spend more time with their families, they should mean it.

I can’t be sure, but I think Sullivan linked to this fatuous bit of grousing by a cranky old Republican approvingly.

I think it speaks to Sullivan’s innocent faith in the goodness and niceness that will return to the land when the nation finally limits itself to the small government conservativism of his dreams.

And, superficially, O’Rourke seems to be calling for the libertarian dream of that government which governs least.  Politicians who don’t want to take the time to run things won’t burden us all with a government that takes time to run, one with lots of rules but also, you know, one that provides lots of services.

It’s a cliche that the first disqualification for holding public office should be wanting to hold that office.   And it’s a cliche because there’s a truth in it.  Who in their right mind would want the job?  Who with any normal amount of modesty and self-knowledge would think they deserved the job or could handle it?  Standing for public office is a declaration of dangerous arrogance.   Only the foolish, the power-mad, or those who see an advantage to themselves, usually in the form of a profit, would want the job?

You’d think.

But it turns out that an amazing number of well-meaning, decent-minded, self-reflective people who, seeing problems that need to be solved and recognizing in themselves some talent for solving problems, feel drawn to the job both by the personal satisfaction of putting their talents to work and a sense of duty and responsibility to put those talents to work for the general good.

It’s a good idea to keep a close eye on politicians in order to protect ourselves from the foolish, incompetent, power-mad, and thieving. 

But it’s not necessary to think that every politician is foolish, incompetent, power-mad, and thieving in order to do it.

The notion that all professional politicians are incompetent or corrupt or both is more prevalent on the right, these days, because it’s a useful notion for conservatives who want nothing more from government than to be left alone to make themselves as rich and comfortable as they can without guilt or responsibility.

Politicians who want to solve problems tend to be liberal.  Solving problems means doing things.  Doing things usually means spending money.  Doing things also means admitting that things need to be done, that there are problems with the way things are that need to be solved.

That means admitting that a system you happen to be profiting from might have to change, putting your profit, which may be spiritual or psychological as well as material, at risk.  It may mean admitting that your profit under the old way was somehow undeserved.  It may mean admitting that the other people’s failure to profit under the old way was not their fault.

It means admitting that you have some responsibility to help bring about the change.

It means that other people have a claim on your time and attention, not to mention money.

Nothing makes a grumpy old conservative grumpier than the idea that he owes something to other people, especially any of his money, but also any of his concern.

End of Grump the First. Click on the link for Grump the Second.

Second, somewhat positive thoughts about the Catfood Commission

Actually, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles may have done us all a favor by laying out exactly what has to happen if we’re to sink the deficit without raising taxes on the rich and the affluent upper middle class and without making significant cuts in defense spending (their recommended 15 percent is half of what needs to be done) and without telling the Big Banks and the Big Business Interests they have to stop playing with the economy as if it’s their personal board game.

Simpson and Bowles have drawn up a responsible conservative Republican plan for tackling the deficit.

The thing is there are no responsible conservative Republicans in Congress because the American people don’t want responsible conservative Republican government.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean they want responsible liberal Democratic government instead.

They want Tea Party government whose philosophy can pretty much be boiled down to “Everything for me and none for thee.”

As digby has been quick to spot, the Washington Insiders are already rallying round the idea that the reason this Very Serious Proposal for ending the deficit made by Very Serious People won’t get to do the Very Serious Job that all Very Serious People know has to be done is that unserious people on the extreme right and extreme left are going to get in the Very Serious People’s way.

But, leaving aside question of to what degrees  liberals and true conservatives are at the extremes of their respective parties, the only responsible and serious plans for cutting the deficit are coming from the far Right and the not quite as far left Left.

Those on the Right want to cut everything to the point that we’d pretty much be left with a federal government that does nothing but guard the borders and put out forest fires.

That’s horrifying, and a little nuts, but it’s serious and responsible in that we wouldn’t be enjoying services and benefits we weren’t paying for.

Those on the Left, liberal Democrats, want to sink the deficit by raising taxes back to Clinton era levels, reining in out of control Medicare costs, making meaningful defense cuts, and increasing revenue by creating more and higher paying jobs.

The people who aren’t serious are establishment Republicans and so-called moderate Democrats.

Establishment Republicans, which is to say the ones who will control the House and lead the minority in the Senate, only want to cut taxes on the rich, de-regulate Wall Street and Big Business, raise not lower defense spending, and screw the poor and the blue collar middle class in ways that don’t inconvenience their own white collar middle class voters.  Their only “serious” plan to cut spending is to take nickels and dimes away from people for whom nickels and dimes are the difference between paying the rent and buying groceries this week.

“Moderate” Democrats are Democrats who think that their only hope for saving some liberal programs is to convince establishment Republicans to start acting like responsible conservative Republicans and then compromising on everything with them.

The result of this brilliant strategy is a Democratic President seeming to propose major cuts in Social Security!

Bugs Bunny’s from Brooklyn and if Bugs ain’t a real American nobody is

This op-ed by mild-mannered eugenicist and Social Darwinian Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve or How I Spent My Summer Vacation Proving I’ve Never Read a Thing by Stephen Jay Gould, has gotten a deserved fisking all around the blogosphere but I want to throw in my two cents.

Murray’s thesis, not explicitly stated, but clear enough is that there are such animules as Regular Murkins and these Regular Murkins are more real, more worthy, more anything good you care to list than all other Murkins, and the elitists who look down on the Regular Murkins and sneer do so at their own electoral and cultural peril.  The Regular Murkins are tired of being looked down on and sneered at and they’re riled up, so watch it, you white wine drinking, Francophiliac, NPR supporting, liberal Irregular Murkins!

Murray, being a Republican propagandist and supporting the Republican agenda to deny all social services and societal and cultural goods and privileges to any one who doesn’t vote Republican, pretty much defines Regular Murkins in the good old Republican way.  Socially conservative white folk living in the small towns and small cities of the Midwest and the South and the more rural and therefore more reliably Republican districts in otherwise Democratic states, excluding New York, California, and Massachusetts because as everyone knows nobody but big-city dwelling white wine swilling elitists live in those states.

Which is to say he defines Regular Murkins as a distinct minority among all Americans.

Far from spending their college years in a meritocratic melting pot, the New Elite spend school with people who are mostly just like them--which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege. Few of them grew up in the small cities, towns or rural areas where more than a third of all Americans still live.

Note that?

“…where more than a third of all Americans still live”?

See, Murray’s problem here is that if more or less of a third of all Americans live in small cities, towns, and rural areas, then more or less two thirds don’t!  And---I’m glad to do the math for Murray---one third is significantly less than two thirds.

Murray’s thinking here is that people who grew up in places where the vast majority of Americans live are not authentically Murkin.  Most Americans don’t live in America.

There are a few other qualifications for being a real Murkin by Murray’s lights.  Watching Oprah, following NASCAR, taking a Carnival cruise, reading Left Behind novels, being an Evangelical Christian or having a friend or relative who is one, not going to college, working in a factory, belonging to the Rotary or the Kiwanis club.

There’s a contradiction in the list.

Members of the local Rotary and Kiwanis clubs are unlikely to work in factories, as DougJ notes in a post at Balloon Juice:

I grew up in a small town and from what I have seen, this is correct: the members of Rotary and Kiwanis clubs tend to be fairly well-off and college-educated, small businessmen, etc. as opposed to blue-collar workers.

Doug’s post also includes some numbers Murray didn’t bother to gather for himself:

“Murray’s imaginary U.S.A.Time and again, this essay describes as “mainstream” or “quintessentially American” things that the vast majority of Americans don’t do: living in a small town (80% of Americans don’t), reading Harlequin romances (85% don’t), watching The Price Is Right or Oprah (more than 90% don’t), belonging to Rotary or Kiwanis (99+% belong to neither.)”

Which leads to a natural conclusion:

“It isn’t just “elites” who don’t do these things; the average person doesn’t do them. (Nor follow NASCAR.) They’re not even majority behaviors among the groups where they’re more prevalent: the rural-and-small-town, the poorly educated, the old. So Murray’s quarrel is actually with the REAL mainstream America, is it not?”

That’s what it sounds like, and that’s what it is in effect, but what Murray is trying to do Other-fy what he calls the New Elite who are implicitly smart, successful people who don’t happen to vote Republican.

As Andrew Sullivan points out, it’s the old Nixonian gambit of inciting middle class resentment towards people you suspect might be better than you or of at least having an easier and happier time of it than you are.

Murray defines his New Elite in a way that makes these elitists sound like as many Republicans I know as Democrats, upper middle class children of the suburbs with good college educations working in offices located in big cities and the exurban rings around them.

But he gives his Republican readers an out.  They can fail to recognize themselves as members of the New Elite by falling for Murray’s appeal to a false egalitarianism.  Republican elitists may not watch Oprah or read any Left Behind novels, they may take expensive vacations to fancy places, but they know better than to openly sneer at people who watch Oprah and read Left Behind novels and take whatever vacations they can manage in Orlando theme parks or aboard Carnival cruise ships.

Democrats and liberals sneer at these things, of course.  (At Oprah?  Really?)  How do we know they sneer?  Because we say they do.  It’s a fairly consistent Right Wing habit of mind, treating an accusation you make because it flatters your vanity as though it’s an objective fact the people you accuse openly admit to.

Ok, not just Right Wingers are guilty of that one.  That’s a weakness of human nature.

What it gets down to is that Murray is flattering the vanity of a vital block of Republican voters who are no more regular in their Americanness than any other Americans.  In the same way Right Wingers got to feel like soldiers and Marines during the early days of the War in Iraq by talking up blood and death in the name of those doing the actual fighting and bleeding and dying, upper-class, college-educated, suburban and city-dwelling elitists whose ambitions for themselves and their children is to be members of the New Elite Murray appears to hold in contempt, can feel like salt of the earth working folk just by claiming sympathy with a thoroughly romanticized and safely distant class of real Murkins.

But I want to get back to this idea that real, regular Americans are only to be found in small towns and small cities in the South and Midwest and Republican-voting rural areas elsewhere.

This isn’t Murray’s invention.  It’s the central tenant of Know-Nothingism in America.

“Real Americans, the only Americans whose votes and opinions and interests count are the Americans who are most like me.  The ones who live where I live and live and think as I live and think!”

It’s the core belief of the Tea Party who are endlessly whining about how they’ve been shut out of the governing of their own country because they got outvoted in the last couple of national elections.

They won’t stop whining about it after Tuesday either.  They feel shut out no matter how many elections they win because the very existence of people who are not like them and don’t want to be like them and are still happy and successful drives them insane with jealous rage.

This jealous rage extends to their religion.

Real Americans live where they live.  Real Christians go to their churches.

Which ticks off regular commenter PurpleGirl who wrote in a a couple of paired comments on my post last week, Theirs is the Lord our God, we are to worship no other gods before theirs:

Brooklyn was known as the "The City of Churches." And now, a century after its incorporation into New York City, it can still be called The Borough of Churches. Of course, I think, any of the boroughs comprising NYC can be called that. Between large stone edifices, smaller clap-board buildings, and store front using congregations, I think this city is awash with special, spirit filled spaces: Christian of all stripes, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and everything in between. Take a walk in any neighborhood and you find these spirit homes. This place compares very well to any little Southern berg for its spirit-filled people…

I get mad that places like NYC get portrayed as being not religious or not sufficiently religious compared to other areas, and this includes most of the Northeast and other so-called liberal areas. People are religious, period, in their own ways. It annoys me to no end that so many RTCs (as Fred Clark calls them) believe they have a lock on spirituality or religiousity.

Yeah, but most of those churches are Catholic and what do Jews and Muslims know about God anyway?

Besides, they’re New Yorkers, and we know what they’re like.

Woody, a Brooklyn native, said it:

Don't you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.

Like I said, Murray didn’t invent this idea.  And it’s not just a self-flattering delusion of the Right.  Elitist media types have been pushing it for decades.  Real Americans are white, Christian, Republicans living in the Midwest and the South.

Brooklyn?

Might as well be France.

And “Y’all” is a more American way to talk than “Youse guys.”

Saving the women and children of Afghanistan?

Updated.

I want our troops out of there now!  I want the war over now! I want our troops to come home and the war to be over and all the women and children of Afghanistan to be safe from retaliation by the Taliban when they take over after we go and…

Um…

Damn.

Up until recently---until almost now, in fact---whenever I approached in my head the conclusion that we should get the hell out of there I ran into this wall:  If we leave, I said, we are leaving all the women and children to the mercies of the Taliban, who are merciless.  At least while we’re there, some of the women and children are protected.  They get to live in something close to the 21st Century.

But it may be that the number of women and children we are protecting is much smaller than I thought.

And it is a fact that there’s not much point in “saving” people from the Taliban by getting them killed in the war or, as it is turning out, by killing them ourselves.

The moral calculus in Afghanistan is beginning to look like the one that applied in Iraq. 

One of the justifications for taking out Saddam Hussein was that among his many evils he was systematically murdering his own people.  What happened after we went in is that the people began systematically murdering each other. 

The difference between life under Saddam and life under US occupation is that instead of having to worry that they would be scooped up by Saddam’s secret police and tortured and murdered in his prisons Iraqis had to worry that they would be blown up when they went to the market to buy bread.

Women and children began to die in greater numbers.

Some were being blown up by other Iraqis.  Many others were being blown up and shot up and otherwise slaughtered by us as “collateral damage.”

Add to these deaths the uncountable deaths caused by our having wiped out the country’s infrastructure.

How many people died because they couldn’t get to the hospital because the hospitals had been bombed into rubble?

How many have died of malnutrition, tainted water and food, treatable diseases, stress, and heartbreak?

How many women, thanks to our having allowed Iraq to turn into a more fundamentalist Islamic state, have been murdered by the men in their lives acting out their rage and hatreds and perversions under the umbrella of Sharia?

We didn’t stop the killing.  We just changed who would be killed and how they would they die.

How they are still dying.

If that’s all that is happening in Afghanistan or if that’s all that will happen if we leave---a different set of people will die in a different way---then we are not doing any good there.

The justification for going into Afghanistan a decade ago was to get Osama bin-Laden and smash al-Qaeda.  We’d have left the Taliban alone, we’d have left Afghanistan alone, if the Taliban had handed over bin-Laden.

The Taliban refused.  We went in.  And we let bin-Laden and al-Qaeda get away.

With them we let get away our justification for invading.

In the process, though, we drove the Taliban out or at least into the darker regions of the farthest edges of what looks on a map like a country.

And now we had a justification for staying.

It would have been a great victory for humankind if we’d been able to keep the Taliban trapped in those dark regions at those far edges.  Greater still if we’d been able to eradicate it.

But George Bush and Dick Cheney never cared about Afghanistan.  Not enough oil.  Too far from Israel.  Useless to Iran or for putting pressure on Iran.  And the troops were needed for Iraq which had oil, was close to Israel, and could be turned into a fortress aimed at Iran.

The Taliban regrouped and began to inch their way back.

The more territory they controlled, the fewer women and children we were protecting.

I’m not sure how few is too few to be worth the cost in American and Afghani lives anymore.

I think it would be a great thing, practically a victory, if we could draw impenetrable circles around places like Kabul.  I’ve read concerns that we are going to be in Afghanistan for the next 60 years, just as we’ve been in South Korea.

But what’s the problem with that?

How many wars have been fought in South Korea since 1952?

How many American troops have died there in combat?

How many South Koreans have become collateral damage?

South Korea is a thriving, bustling, prosperous, happy, civilized nation, thanks to our presence there.

But we can’t create or protect a South Korea-like nation in Afghanistan because we can’t draw a single line across the country, mass our troops along it, and say to the Taliban as we say to North Korea, Do Not Cross.

There’s no country there.  There are no South Koreans.

The best we might be able to do is create little pockets of South Korea-like micro-nation states.

President Obama has begun to brag about our leaving Iraq.

At this point, I’d almost rather we stayed in Iraq, pulled all our troops out of Afghanistan, and turned Iraq into our new South Korea and instead of building a Fortress Iraq we made it the world’s biggest refuge camp for all the people of Afghanistan who want to flee life under the Taliban.

Almost.

____________________

Maha’s been thinking along the same lines:

The only fix to this problem I can think of is to turn back time to 2002, when the Bush Administration lost its focus (if, indeed, it ever had any focus) in Afghanistan because it was obsessed with Iraq. Which is to say, there are no fixes. This is a terrible situation that should not have been allowed to get this bad, but it was allowed, so there it is. And while the impulse to keep lots of troops in Afghanistan indefinitely to protect women from the Taliban is honorable, it doesn’t seem to me to be possible. How many troops? How long? At what cost? There’s a point at which resources run dry.

If the issue is protecting Afghani women, it seems to me the most practical thing to do is to establish lots of guarded safehouses (I’d be OK with leaving troops in country for that purpose) as well as helping women leave Afghanistan, with their children, and begin new lives elsewhere. Ultimately it’s Afghanistan itself that’s got to find the will and the means to rid itself of the Taliban.

And she links to this post by Greg Mitchell at the Nation responding to Rick Stengel’s article in TIME Magazine.

Updated: Andrew Sullivan posts a Dissent of the Day from a Marine who has served in Afghanistan.

Not a religion!

Updated.

Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for Senator in Nevada, apparently believes that God allows rapes to happen as alternative way to bring beautiful babies into the world and that a rape victim who gets pregnant by her rapist shouldn’t want or need an abortion because God wants her to have that beautiful baby.

It’s all part of His plan.

Listen to Angle talking about His plan on Huffington Post.

For thirty years now the lamestream media---thanks for your one and only contribution to the culture, Sarah Palin---has covered the Radical Religious Right not only as if their twisted, 19th century brand of apocalyptic authoritarianism is a just folks brand of Christianity but as if it is Christianity. 

There are no true Christians except Right Wing Fundamentalists, just as there are no true Americans except Middle Western and Southern Reactionaries.

It’s not Christianity.  It’s practically its opposite.  It’s a dark religion of shame and hatred built around the superstitious appeasement of a capricious and malignant God who plays games with people’s lives and enjoys making them miserable.

The Anti-Abortion side of it turns it into a fertility cult in which women are the sacrificial offerings.

What the Wev says.

Update:  Via Andrew Sullivan, good Christian Sharron Angle’s version of WWJD?

Robert Downey Jr, clean and sober but not an iron man no matter how he votes

Please tell me that when Robert Downey Jr implies he’s not a liberal anymore it’s because he’s become a communist.

Robert Downey Jr. indicated time in prison has changed his outlook on life and his political views, saying: “I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal.”

Not another one.

Few weeks back I wrote a post about Kelsey Grammer’s stumping for a Political Party that basically despises people like him and his friends.  I focused on Grammer’s bohemian, Coastal elite, and gay-friendly lifestyle and career, but I could have gone on to point out that as a former coke addict and essentially a criminal Grammer has even fewer friends among the Republican base who, when they are feeling particularly forgiving and tolerant, are of the lock ‘em up in some hell hole and throw away the key school of thought.  In grumpier moods, branding, behandings, and stonings make sense to them.

Grammer’s way of life, his career, and his ability to continue his career after continued demonstrations of a willingness to self-destruct and take many people out with him are things he owes to liberals.

I don’t usually pay attention to the political views of celebrities, even celebrities whose political views I agree with---really, do I want to think about being on the same team as Alec Baldwin?---so the first I heard that Downey’s a Republican was this morning when I came across this while looking for articles on Gwyneth Paltrow that included sexy pictures of her.  As I read it, I had a second of hope that Downey’s experiences had radicalized him.

Nope.

What Downey meant was you don’t spend twenty years screwing up your life and the lives of anyone who has the misfortune of loving you or of having to depend on you to make their living and having your ass and career saved time and time again by people who are for the most part liberals and feel any gratitude towards them.

You don’t think about what those liberal friends and colleagues did for you because they believe that the best way to deal with drug addiction is education, treatment, and decriminalization and say, Thank God for them.

You don’t earn yourself the punishment usually meted out to criminals because you have been, well, actually a criminal yourself, and go to jail, and have to live and get along with other human beings who are criminals like you and develop any sympathy or compassion for their mistakes and sins, which, as it happens are like your mistakes and sins.

You don’t look back over your shoulder as you walk out the prison doors and onto the set of a major motion picture where you are about to earn millions of dollars for pretending to be a hero and think, There but for the grace of God, a lot of luck, and the efforts of many liberal friends would still be stuck I.

You don’t look in a mirror and see a weak, pathetic, desperate, self-indulgent, self-destructive narcissist and pray for the strength and help you’ll need to be stronger and braver and more resistant to those temptations in the future.

Nope.

You look at your liberal friends with their liberal views and you think, What chumps they were, sticking their necks out for the likes of me.  Suckers.

You listen to them discuss treatment and education and decriminalization and the impact of poverty and joblessness and how the war on drugs is really a war on some people, mainly the poor, who use drugs, and you think, Bleeding hearts.

You look at your fellow criminals and think, Hey, at least I never had to rob a liquor store to pay for my habit.  Why can’t they be millionaire movie stars with friends in high places and sycophantic flunkeys willing to enable and pay for their addictions?  Losers.

You look at yourself up on the movie screen and congratulate yourself on being exactly like the fictional character some liberals created for your to play and you think, Hey, I’m rich, I’m famous, I’ve conquered my vices and bad habits.  I’m exactly like Tony Stark.  I am the heroic type, clearly.  I am Iron Man.

And maybe you need to because you know that only way you can be like Iron Man is to deny you are or ever were what your history says you are and were.

But do you really need to add, And too bad for anybody who isn’t Iron Man?

Which is what it means these days to vote Republican.

__________________

I don’t care about celebrities’ political views because they are the irrelevant to the reason I pay any attention to celebrities at all, which is that they have a talent that commands attention and respect.  Kelsey Grammer is a great comic actor.  Alec Baldwin is funny on 30 Rock.  Robert Downey Jr. may very well be the best actor working in the movies today.  In Iron Man 2, he isn’t Iron Man.  But he is Tony Stark, who isn’t Iron Man either, which is one of the things that make this movie and the first one good.  Review coming.

Update:

Review has arrived.

Arizona’s bad, Oklahoma’s worse

Updated again, Thursday night.

Increasingly, it’s clear that when Right Wing Republicans talk secession they don’t mean seceding from the Union.  They mean seceding from the 21st Century.

Strict Abortion Measures Enacted in Oklahoma

HOUSTON — The Oklahoma Legislature voted Tuesday to override the governor’s vetoes of two abortion measures, one of which requires women to undergo an ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus before getting an abortion.

Though other states have passed similar measures requiring women to have ultrasounds, Oklahoma’s law goes further, mandating that a doctor or technician set up the monitor so the woman can see it and describe the heart, limbs and organs of the fetus. No exceptions are made for rape and incest victims.

A second measure passed into law on Tuesday prevents women who have had a disabled baby from suing a doctor for withholding information about birth defects while the child was in the womb.

Opponents argue that the law will protect doctors who purposely mislead a woman to keep her from choosing an abortion. But the bill’s sponsors maintain that it merely prevents lawsuits by people who wish, in hindsight, that the doctor had counseled them to abort a disabled child.

For “people” in that last sentence read “women”---actually read “poor women”---who not only must be forced to bear children but also must be denied any help in raising them.

There’s a consistency of Republican thought here.  The yahoos in the Sooner State and Republicans everywhere else agree---in a lawsuit, it’s never the rich and powerful who are at fault; the plaintiff is always seeking to deny personal responsibility while making a fast buck.  That’s why they’re all obsessed with tort reform.

The object is to protect the wealthy from the mob.

The sentimentality of these evil-minded men about fetuses is astounding.

“The goal of this legislation is just to make a statement for the sanctity of human life,” State Senator Todd Lamb, the majority floor leader, said in an interview after the vote. “Maybe someday these babies will grow up to be police officers and arrest bad people, or will find a cure for cancer.”

Police officers and research scientists.  It’s the 1950s inside the cliche closet in this guy’s head.  You can’t tell me that in his weepy daydreams all the grateful babies Lamb believes he’s saved aren’t little boys.

Unless he was cut off and he meant to add “nurses and elementary school teachers.”

Ah, the good old days, when women didn’t have real careers, just jobs they held for the sheer joy of helping people until they met a good man and settled down and started cranking out babies without complaint or any expectation of state aid.  A card on mother’s day and beatification in Gerber Baby Food ads was enough for them.

The Democrats need to start running on this right away.  If the Republicans win back the majority in Congress these are the Republicans who will be in charge---the ones who want to turn the whole country into Arizona for Hispanics, turn it into Oklahoma for women, turn it into West Virginia for working people, turn it into Hooverville for the old and the sick, and turn it into a theocratic police state run by ignorant, women-hating, bigots for all of us.

Update, as if you need to hear more about stupid state legislators:

As Charles Pierce says, the idiot state legislatures are the farm teams for the national parties. Some of the nitwits proposing and passing Oklahoma’s anti-women who get pregnant without our permission law and Arizona’s making Welcome to Checkpoint Charlie the new state motto and laws in other states like Georgia’s prohibiting the planting microchips in people, and Nebraska’s making it a crime for welfare recipients to buy cigarettes, not too mention practicing the usual sorts of blockheadedness, mis- and malfeasance, run of the mill corruption in Boston, Albany, Boston, Harrisburg, Springfield, and Sacramento, as well as in the redder and redneckier state capitals are going to be in Congress some day, “sooner than you think.”

Updated with more and scarier clowns:

At TPM, Jillian Rayfield has a run down of some of the wilder experiments taking place in the “laboratories of Democracy” known as state legislatures.

Having your conservativism and eating your liberalism too

The only reason for letting Kelsey Grammer blather on about his politics in this interview in New York Magazine is the irony of a Conservative Republican playing a cheerfully out and happily married gay man in a musical comedy that gets a lot of its laughs from making fun of the French version of a Conservative Republican’s discomfort at discovering his daughter’s future mother-in-law is a female impersonator who goes by the stage name of Zaza.

But that’s acting.  Grammer has played George Washington, and that was probably far more of a stretch for him, which isn’t a knock on Grammer.  Washington is a stretch for any mere mortal to have to play.  Grammer was never less than brilliant on Cheers and it’s amazing how fresh and alive he was able to keep the character through the many years that followed on Frasier.  I’ll bet he’s very good as Georges in La Cage aux Folles.

So given the context---it’s an interview with an actor talking about the ways he’s not like the character he plays and how he deals with that challenge---I’d expect a reporter to treat Grammer’s glib summaries of his political views the way he’d treat other actors’ remarks about their passion for French cooking or how they’ve been Cub fans since they were kids or the ways Scientology has enriched their lives or how their work for PETA is so rewarding, as amusing eccentricities that humanize the subject, and not quiz him on the fatuousness of some of his opinions like:

He’s pro-choice but he “doesn’t advocate for abortion.”

Really?  And who does?

He doesn’t think the Stimulus has stimulated anything.

Have you bothered to look at the statistics, Kelsey?

He’s “unmoved” by health care reform because “If it takes six weeks to get a license plate, imagine what they’ll do with an MRI”.

First, who’s they?  The Feds?  License plates are given out by individual states.  Second, What state takes six weeks to get you your plates?  Here in New York you only need new plates when you buy a new car and aren’t trading an old one in, in which case you can transfer the plates new one, and the turn around on new plates is practically overnight because the dealer wants you to be able to take the car home right away, unless you want vanity plates, in which case if you insist on plates that say “IMLSNNG” you deserve to wait.  Third, when was the last time you personally applied for new plates for your car or visited the DMV as opposed to sending one of your people to handle it for you?  And fourth, most people already have to wait for an MRI, it’s called making an appointment when one’s available, and a lot of people have to wait longer because their insurance company has to think over whether they’ll allow it, and many people can’t get one at all because they don’t have  insurance and they can’t afford it so that if they have something that will kill them unless an MRI finds it they will die from it.  Asshole.

Oh well.  At least he doesn’t think Sarah Palin’s ready to be President, although he’s a jerk for saying that the reason Palin polls so abysmally among women---that is, even more abysmally than she polls among men---is that other women hate her because she’s attractive.

But there is one issue on which I think the reporter, Adam Sternbergh, would have been right to press him, considering the themes of La Cage aux Folles and the fact that Grammer was the only straight man in the main cast of Frasier.  The reporter mentions David Hyde Pierce, who played Niles.  But John Mahoney, who played Marty Crane, and Dan Butler, who played the sports talk radio jock Bulldog Briscoe, are also out, having taken considerably more of a risk to their careers than the one Grammer thinks he took by “coming out” as a Republican in Hollywood.  Hasn’t hurt Clint Eastwood much, has it, Kelse?  I’d like to know what Grammer supposes they think about their friend and former colleague stumping for the political party intent on denying them their rights?

On gay marriage, Grammer says he thinks the government should stay out of it.  But that’s a position that only makes sense if you believe that that means the government should get out of the marriage business altogether and not give legal sanction and the rights and benefits and status attendant on it to any marriages, straight or gay.  And that’s not a serious part of the debate.

The debate is between those of us who believe the government shouldn’t discriminate between straight and gay marriages when it gets involved and those who believe that the government should get more involved to the point of banning gay marriages and denying gay couples all the rights, benefits, and status that straight couples enjoy.  So, Mr Kelsey I’m An Out and Proud Republican Grammer, which party supports the former course and which party supports the latter to the point of actively getting bans against gay marriage on state ballots and regularly nominating outspoken homophobes for public office and shaming its own gay members into barricading themselves into steel-doored closets?

There are Republicans who actively oppose their own party’s stand on gay marriage and rights for homosexuals.  They are out and they’re proud of their stand for civil rights for all Americans.  Why isn’t Grammer?

There is a point beyond this.  Grammer doesn’t live as if he believes in his own political views.  It’s not just that he travels in circles where gay people and their spouses aren’t just tolerated but welcomed without a second thought.  He clearly isn’t homophobic himself.  And it doesn’t stop there.

Grammer doesn’t live anything like a Republican-approved lifestyle.  He lives the life of the sort of big city liberal Republicans affect to despise.  And as far as I know he’s quite happy with that life and has no plans to change it.  He’s not about to move to any place Republicans regard as part of the “real America.”  He’s not leaving Hollywood or New York for Topeka, Biloxi, or Wasilla.  He’s not about to give up acting to start an oil company, become a hedge fund manager, or a cattle rancher.  I don’t know if he goes to church and I don’t care, but it’s pretty hard to imagine him in the front pew at St Patrick’s, although it isn’t hard to imagine him leading the choir at the nearest Baptist mega-church---but that’s Frasier I’m seeing bouncing around in a purple robe and singing it joyfully.  Grammer himself?  Religion doesn’t seem to be something he’s given much thought lately, an odd thing for a Republican these days.

Now, I don’t believe that any Republican should have to go live in Topeka, Biloxi, Wasilla, or anywhere else on Sarah Palin’s short list of places that count as the real America.  But I do believe that happy and contented East and West Coast elitists like Grammer---and conservative members of the punditocracy in Washington---should stop talking as if they believe that the lives lived in places like Topeka, Biloxi, and Wasilla are more “authentically” American than lives lived in Brooklyn, Brookline, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, or San Antonio and that the people in the one set of places are more American than the people living in the other.

And it’s probably too much to ask, but could they acknowledge that the lives they live in the most decadent parts of decadent Blue America have been made possible for them by liberalism?

Grammer could respond that Los Angeles and New York were built through the efforts and with the money of stalwart capitalists of a conservative bent, and that’s true to the degree that you believe that all capitalists are conservatives as all actors are liberals and that those capitalists intended the cities that got built up around them and you forget the people who did the actual physical labor to build them.

But those cities, all cities, have been made livable by the efforts of Progressive government of a kind that used to be practiced by both Democrats and Republicans but which the Republican Party now claims to oppose in any form.  Public works?  When did the government ever create a job? (Besides the one my brother now holds at the construction company that got the contract I steered their way?)  And artists and intellectuals can make livings in those cities because of progressive attitudes towards art, education, science, and culture that the base of the Republican Party practically equates with Satanism.

It’s very easy for Kelsey Grammer to be a Conservative Republican because so many people around him are busy at the hard work of not being one.

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Nothing like it in my memory!

The bill’s flawed.  The process was ugly.  There’s still a lot of work to be done and who knows what will happen in November.

But I don’t care.

They did it!

They did it.

Nothing like this has happened in my memory.

I was too young to be paying attention to the last great Progressive legislative victories on Civil Rights and Medicare and Medicaid.

Since then all the victories have been in one way or another occasions more for sadness than celebration.

Ending the war in Vietnam, running Richard Nixon out of town, saving Bill Clinton.

Even preventing George Bush from destroying Social Security.  That was holding the line.  Which has pretty much been the Progressive record for the last thirty years.  Holding the line against Right Wing Corporatist and Right Wing Christianist assaults on the New Deal, the Great Society, Civil Rights---for African-Americans, women, gays, immigrants, and just about everybody who isn’t “us”---and the Social Contract.

Holding the line and making smaller-scale improvements to programs already in place, expanding rights and benefits incrementally---although much of that work was left to the courts---and undoing some of the harm done by stupid and mean-spirited Republican legislative and executive and, lately, judicial decisions.

Progressivism, at least in Washington, became a defense of the status quo.

This is different.  This is progress.

We can argue later about how much or how little.

But the bill, soon to become the law, is significant for what it signifies as much or more than for what it actually does.

It is the first time since the passage of the minimum wage and child labor laws and workplace safety regulations that it’s been said in law that profits do not matter as much as a human being’s life.

I know.  It doesn’t say profits don’t matter.  But it does say that from here on out no one will die so that people working in the insurance industry can get their Christmas bonuses.

It will take a few years before that’s what actually happens.  But think about it.  For a hundred and thirty years, the guiding principle of the party of Big Business has been that the right of the privileged few to make gobs of money trumps the rights of the rest of us to anything else, a decent wage, a decent job that doesn’t kill us or make us sick, a secure old age, clean water, clean air, food that doesn’t poison us, and, when we or our kids get sick, the right to get treatment without having someone else decide whether or not we can get it based on whether or not it is profitable for them.

And this victory is significant because it is a significant defeat for the the forces of Right Wing reaction.

No movement whose adherents spit on people they disagree with, let alone on United States Congressmen, call anyone nigger, let alone heroes of the Civil Rights movement, jeer and cheer when one of their own calls another human being a faggot, believe that they are the only real Americans, the only ones whose votes and opinions count, the only ones with rights, and raise signs and banners advocating violence and murder just because they’re not getting their way can be allowed to get its way.  No politician who cheerleads for that movement and eggs its followers on and stokes their anger and encourages them to believe that the proper functioning of republican democracy is illegitimate and the duly-elected President of the United States is their enemy can be allowed to go home to his or her district and brag about how they helped win another one for the cause of Right Wing Reaction.

It’s a flawed bill.  There’s a lot of work left to do.  The challenge to women’s rights is serious and dismaying.  The fight isn’t over, on health care, reproductive rights, or any other front.  As Peter Daou says, the fundamental dynamic hasn’t changed and the “GOP and rightwing attack machine will [continue to] do everything possible to destroy Obama's presidency”.

And don’t think for a minute that John Roberts and his fellow Republican Party stooges on the Supreme Court aren’t already looking forward to their chance to declare the whole thing unconstitutional.

And like I said, who knows what’s going to happen in November, except to say that whatever happens, it’s going to happen after a rough and ugly campaign.

Bur right now, I don’t care.

They did it.

They did it!

Last night I said on Twitter God bless Nancy Pelosi and one of my followers said that he appreciated the sentiment but he doesn’t believe in God.  I replied that I don’t believe in Him either, but Nancy Pelosi does and at the moment whatever Nancy Pelosi says goes with me.  God bless her!

And God rest Teddy Kennedy.

__________________

Related reading:

From Crooks and Liars, Ten immediate benefits of HCR.

From Kathy Flake, Armageddon.  Next door to Waterloo.

From Andrew Tobias, A Great Day for America.

A Progressive dissent from Jane Hamsher, submitted by regular reader Mac Magillicuddy.

Paul Krugman: Fear Strikes Out.

Kiko’s House.

Atrios’ Great Big Health Care Reform Post.

Adam Serwer, The American Prospect: A Diversity Win.

More as I find ‘em throughout the day.

There is no death, there is the Force.

Hi, I’m Oliver Mannion and that title is the final line from the Jedi code. Now I corrected my dad about the Force in his Up review. He said the Force may represent the good in everyone. This is not true. The Force is indifferent. It has a light and dark side as they say in the movies. A yin and yang. And since I’m talking about about Star Wars stuff I would like to say love does not lead to the dark side. It is passion that does that. Now to quote Jolee. What. Who’s Jolee you ask? He is a character from Knights of the Old Republic a great Star Wars game. He is an old man with a dry wit who you find on the Wookie’s home planet. He used to be a Jedi before he crashed there. He was also in love. He is my favorite character in the game. Anyway if you talk to him enough when you gain enough levels he gives you this advice:Love does not lead to the dark side. Passion can lead to anger and hate but passion is not the same thing as love. Controlling your passion while in love is what they should teach you to beware! But love itself will save you not condemn you. Wow that was a tangent. But to quote Jolee again:I’m old damn it! I’m entitled to a rant now and then!

The coming end of my liberalism. Wish I could predict the same for the President’s.

A proud old commie taught me that the real enemies of the Left are Liberals.

Lefties want to make the world all over new.

The Right, the old commie said, breaks things, refuses to fix what’s broken, makes things that worked not work, screws it all up to the point that the People learn to hate the system.

That's where the Left is all set to step in to make things all over new.

But Liberals like the system and they have a bad habit of trying to save it.  Liberals fix things and make the People think the system works again.

This is why it might seem that a lot of Lefties in the blogosphere either hate Barack Obama or are looking for excuses to hate him.

President Obama is a Liberal.

Please.

Don’t bother with the “He’s a really a Republican in disguise” complaint.

That just makes me think you’re a Lefty looking for that excuse.

Or tell me what Republican would have signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act?

What Republican would have saved the auto industry?

What Republican would be trying to get through even the woefully inadequate health care bill we still may not get even thought it’s so weak?

Teddy Roosevelt’s dead.

Obama’s a Liberal.  And like a good Liberal he’s basically conservative.  He likes the system.  He believes that when run right and kept in repair it works.

And why wouldn’t he believe it?

Look at how well it has worked for him!

Liberals like the system and all they want more out of it is to give more people the opportunity to reap its benefits.

The President’s goal is to fix the system.

So, to put it simply, if he succeeds---a big IF, and by succeed I mean that the economy recovers, health care reform passes, and enough people are happy about it and start liking the system again, the Left will not get to tell people how make the world all over new.

I am a Liberal.

But I’m less Liberal than I used to be.

I feel myself moving Left.

When the system worked it did what Liberals like me wanted it to do.  It opened up opportunities, it spread the wealth, it gave a leg up to those who needed it, it built things.

It seemed worth fixing when and where it broke down.

It’s been a long, long time since the system worked the way it was supposed to, and it’s looking as though it will not work that way again.

Ronald Reagan and thirty years of Right Wing rule have broke it but good.

Possibly beyond repair.

Definitely beyond repair if the Right Wing, which includes and is run by the Corporate Elitists, continue to wield the power they wield.

The Tea Partiers will get bought off and co-opted the same as the Religious Right.

It’s probably even wrong to say the system’s broken.

The system’s been replaced.

What we have now is a system run by corporate elitists who regard the rest of us as the enemy.

When they don’t regard us as targets.

The system has been turned against us.  The object isn’t to provide jobs and opportunities.  Those cost too much.  The object is to wring every last nickel out of us it can.

But the President has been reluctant to acknowledge this.

Sometimes he seems to be deliberately not noticing, as if he’s averting his eyes.

Yesterday he talked about the fat cats.

But will he see fat cats in the room when he meets with “business leaders”?

I doubt it.  He will probably “see” a group of well-meaning men and women who like the system---the old system as it appealed to Liberals---and want to see it fixed.

He will see people like his friends and advisors, people who have benefited from the system---the old system---and want to see other people have the opportunity to benefit from it too.

Forget Matt Taibbi’s “They’re all in on it together!”

This isn’t corruption in the usual sense.

It’s corruption by good intentions.

The President is surrounded by very smart, very successful, very talented people who benefited from the old system, none of whom, as far as we’ve heard, has noticed that the old system is broken to the point of being irreparable.

They are all in agreement that the system needs to be fixed and that it can be fixed.

So they spend their time coming up with plans to fix it.

Which means they spend their time talking about policy and throwing around numbers.

They don’t talk about what’s happening out here, to the rest of us for whom the system has not only ceased to work but on whom it has turned.

We know who our enemies are.

The people the Obama Administration is trying to enlist in the cause of fixing the system.

Our enemies now appear to be the President’s friends.

The President thinks these “friends” want to help him fix things or that they can be persuaded to help.  He’s convinced he needs their help.  So he puts a lot of time and energy into trying to persuade them.  That’s the way Liberals work.  They bring people with an interest in fixing things together and figure out how to get them to cooperate on going about it.

The banking and finance industry is one part of the system that this old Liberal doesn’t want to see fixed.

I want it torn out like an old sink and completely replaced.

Unfortunately, the Obama Administration has been treating it as though it’s a load bearing wall.

It hasn’t sunk in that these people don’t want to fix things.

But while they command his attention it looks as though they matter to him a lot more than we do.

It’s discouraging.

Nobody in Washington with any power seems to be on our side.

It’s making people angry.

I don’t know if many Lefties are thinking this is a good thing, that if enough people get mad enough, they will join together to ask the Left to tell them how to make the world all over new.

The trouble is that most people are Liberals---in the sense that they liked the old system.  What I suspect they want is they want back the system as it was.

But if that system is broken beyond repair, all that President Obama is going to prove is that the Democrats can’t help us.

But I don’t expect that people will then turn to the Left.

So it seems as though are only hope is that the President does.

That he stops being a Liberal.

Another futile note to my fellow progressives: On the definition of “nothing”

When you say, “President Obama has done nothing” please understand that “He hasn’t done exactly what I wanted him to do” or “I don’t like the things he’s done” or “I don’t believe that what he has done has worked or will work in the ways I think they should work” or “The things he’s done have not increased my own good opinion of myself” are not definitions of “nothing” the rest of us are obliged to accept.