Tfgray’s Weblog

I’ve been away, watching, but not commenting, on the 2009 elections. Events in the 23rd District of New York, in particular, appear to confirm my earlier prediction of Republican schism. So far, there are two sides to the split: the moderate, centrist flavor and the Extra Spicy conservative. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that the Extra Spicy will itself split into the religious and libertarian factions, most likely just after the 2010 elections. (In a power struggle if they win; in a toxic fume of recrimination if not.)

The results are not all in yet, as I write, but so far Corzine and Deeds have succumbed, Bloomberg has held on in NYC, and Owens leads in New York State. Expect the Republicans to blame the losses on Obama. (Side note: Rep. Joe Wilson, who voted against funding for H1N1 vaccine production, is blaming his wife’s Swine Flu on Guess Who?) I think that Rachel Maddow and Jane Hamsher had an interesting take, however: that Corzine’s loss and Bloomberg’s fairly tight win had something to do with their association with Wall Street wealth. They both outspent their opponents massively and got a loss and a squeaker to show for it. This election is about the electorate turning away from a business-as-usual model that has benefited The Few to the tune of taxpayer billions.

Uncle Pat was on with Chris, claiming that this turn from business as usual would benefit his favorite brand of right wingery, but I have my doubts. I can see where the Right would turn away from the Republican Party, which consistently enlarged the national debt and instituted policies favorable to the wealthy. Unfortunately, the policies favored by the Right will exacerbate the concentration of wealth and pull the support system out from under everyone else. I disagree with his assertion that this is what the American people really want.

Meanwhile, despite Virginia’s amazingly consistent record of voting for a governor of a party opposite the president’s, despite Craig Deeds not particularly good campaign, despite Corzine’s personal unpopularity and so-so record, despite exit polls showing that about 60% of voters didn’t let their feelings for or against Obama affect their vote in the least, with the remainder being split fairly evenly for and against, there will be those only too willing to attribute the state-level losses to the president.

If Hoffman takes the 23rd, expect to hear nothing else for the next year.

This just in: Hoffman has conceded. Gazing into my crystal ball, I see the Extra Spicy crowd coming to the conclusion that if they’d just started backing Hoffman a little earlier, they’d have pulled it off. Chris Matthews was just on with a radio personality I’d never heard of, who announced that “all” Republican leadership must go, although he refused to mention anyone by name.  (Mostly he stuck with the buzzwords “Obama” and “Pelosi.”) Maybe I’m alone in this, but the way I see it, the Republican Party had a safe seat in upper New York State until Palin and Armey stuck their big noses in and dragged in some out-of-towner to hand the election to the Democrats. Encouraged by this turn of events, they plan to take it national, gunning for every Republican incumbent to the left of Attilla the Hun. Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

This should make for an interesting couple of years.

I just read a Huffington Post article wondering why the Right has pretty much abandoned abortion as its flagship issue in favor of the sinking ship of man-on-woman-only marriage.

A couple of points occurred to me:

First, the question is raised in the article as to why the Rightward side of the Christian spectrum is so obsessed with controlling other people’s morality. It’s the same reason that allowed Pat Robertson to blame Katrina on Pagans with a straight face. I noticed some time ago that the most vociferously Christian are prone to throwing Jesus overboard anytime His teachings conflict with the Old Testament.

14 But if ye will not hearken unto me, and will not do all these commandments; 15 And if ye shall despise my statutes, or if your soul abhor my judgments, so that ye will not do all my commandments, but that ye break my covenant: 16 I also will do this unto you; I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it. 17 And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you. 18 And if ye will not yet for all this hearken unto me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins. 19 And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass: 20 And your strength shall be spent in vain: for your land shall not yield her increase, neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruits.

–Leviticus 26

So to these literal-minded people, any violation of Old Testament rules, by anyone, means they will be subject to Divine Retribution. In that context, you can understand how see how same-sex marriage would utterly terrify them. Their heaven will be as iron and their earth as brass because of what some guys are doing in their San Francisco apartment. Burning ague!!

Okay, with that as a given, I would love to look at the results of their direct marketing efforts lately. I’m betting that line of research would prove fruitful. My thesis is that abortion direct mail campaigns have shown diminishing returns. After all, Obama’s very logical position that taking steps to reduce the number of abortions seems to be making inroads: that access to birth control, sex ed that actually educates, support for those women who want to keep their babies, and support for adoptive parents, will do more to reduce the abortion rate than treating children as God’s punishment for having sex.  And then there’s the burnout factor. The issue has been flogged for so long, and to such small effect in changing abortion laws, that one would suspect that, well, the money is not rolling in the way it used to.

Am I saying that the pro-life movement are nothing more than a bunch of money-grubbers? No. Of course not. These people are sincerely concerned about saving the lives of babies. However, if you’ll read Thomas Frank’s The Wrecking Crew: How Republicans Rule, you’ll find that there’s a whole cottage industry behind the ideology of the Right, and that frequently the organizations whose names are on the letterheads of the begging letters end up in debt to the mail order houses. (And then essentially blackmailed into additional mailings in order to get out of debt. This time for sure!) So, in light of the $80 million raised by California’s Prop 8 opposition alone, and the fact that legal same-sex marriage is popping up across the country like dandelions in a suburban lawn, it would make sense that this issue would launch a thousand email campaigns. Ditto the Sotomayor nomination, pitched in the most derogatory terms to an audience with a documented dislike of people with non-English-sounding names. The Right is playing to the basest, most ignorant instincts on these issues, and by trying to raise funds with these arguments is displaying the low opinion it has of its base.

In keeping with the devotion to short-term profit displayed by the Republicans when recently in power, it would seem that this money-grubbing bottomfeeder strategy is what currently drives the Party, and is currently driving anyone with a timeline greater than three months and a concern for anything beyond their personal bottom line out of it.

David Souter hasn’t retired yet (not until the end of the Court’s season, next month.) Barack Obama hasn’t nominated anyone yet. But boyola, are the Republicans opposed to his choice.

I have a simple suggestion that will end this partisan rancor while elevating someone entirely appropriate to Judicial Heaven, a person who is skilled in the practice of law, has government experience at the highest level, has very publicly put his regard for the law and the Constitution above his own career, and is, by God, a Republican.

John Dean.

How could they possibly object to him? Actually, it might be amusing to watch the Republican Party fall all over themselves complaining that Obama’s nominee was neither a woman nor a person of color.

(If you’d like to see what Mr. Dean has been up to lately, click here.)

I’ve put off writing this post for years, since it’s hard to phrase it in a way that won’t sound insulting, but I’ll do my best. Social Dominants (read up on the issue here) are essentially people who are entirely convinced of their own superiority and consequent fitness to control others. One of the characteristics of those scoring highly on social dominance measures is the notion they hold that they are just so much smarter than everyone else, and the related belief, “Everyone else is an idiot.”

Ok. Here’s the part that will piss people off: statistically speaking, one half of every population will be below average on some measure. While things like height, weight, and suchlike are no big deal, when the topic turns to intelligence, well, people get cranky. We all want to live in Lake Woebegon, “where all the children are above average.”

So how does this pertain to the Karl Rove “50% + 1″ strategy that served the Republican Party so well for a decade or so? Well, the Party, at least the Country Club faction, which dominated it for a century or so, serves the interests of approximately 1% of the population. All they have to do to win elections is convince about 50% of the population to go along with them, against their own self interest. Why do I bring it up now, at this late date?

Click here.

I long ago noticed that every time you thought the Right Wing could go no lower, they’d rent a backhoe, but Sean Hannity has made it all the way to the center of the earth with this one. And it is a sad fact that a sizable number of Conservatives apparently believe that Stephen Colbert agrees with their views.

You can go back and watch Bush’s body language, hell, his verbal language as he explains his policies. Clearly, he is speaking to people he considers morons. This has been the Right Wing strategy all along, and unfortunately, it worked for a long time. Rupert Murdoch made billions betting on the notion that 50% of the population is intellectually below average.

This is changing, however. As Keith Olbermann pointed out the other night, with no small degree of schadenfreude, Murdoch’s media empire is tanking financially, with earnings down a staggering 47% over the past year.

 And speaking of Hannity, when, I wonder, will someone tell him that, since Jesus said “faith is like a mustard seed,” people who put mustard on their burgers are obviously more spiritual than those who do not? I want to see him process that one, live, on national TV.

Update:

I just came across this quote from George W. Bush, at the 2001 Gridiron Dinner:

“You can fool some of the people all of the

time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.”

The Republican Party is on the hunt, or at least part of it is. If you’ll scroll back a bit, you can read my prediction that the Party would split in to the Country Club, Social Conservative, and Libertarian factions, which we’re starting to see. The Libs and the Socials (I really love being able to apply those abbreviations to the Rightward side of the spectrum) have their philosophies pretty well hammered out and, despite repeated evidence that the majority of Americans do not share them, are convinced that eventually the rest of us will smarten up and see things their way. The Country Club set, however, is looking for new ideas. As John Stewart notes here, they pretty much rule out wide swaths of ideas before opening up the floor for questions, thus freeing themselves to just say no to everything that won Obama and the Dems the last election.
Although this is billed as a listening tour, the clips that I saw mostly featured the three official “listeners” giving opinions and those whose ideas they sought asking questions that sort of boiled down to “What’s in it for me?” (Example: “What are you going to do for small business?”)
I will allow that news organizations are more interested in quoting famous people than ordinary ones and that maybe the group wants to keep those new ideas to itself until they can polish them up a bit, but still. I’d like to ask some questions. Maybe someday they’ll make it out to a pizza place in my neck of the woods (I would highly recommend Wallery’s over in West Salem, OR.) But in the meantime, in the interest of letting them prepare, here are some questions I have. After all, they say they’ll listen to anybody.
Oops! Well, I just found out that the “Listening Tour” has been canceled by executive order of Rush Limbaugh. Still, I don’t want to tell them anything, just ask questions, so my offer stands. Here are the questions:

• America is a place where people can work hard and get rich. But what if some of the strategies used to get rich harm other people? For example: A company can save millions by not installing pollution controls. This can create a health care crisis, with millions of people suffering from things like asthma and cancer. Given that the Republican Party is against universal health care and has been against environmental regulation for the past 3 decades, how do you propose to deal with this problem?
• The Republican Party places a high value on individual effort and feels that government should have as little input into the private sector as possible. Often the pioneers are cited as role models, people who heroically tamed the wilderness, turning it into productive farmland. However, this view of history ignores the Homestead Act, by which the government gave away millions of acres of land for free or a small filing charge, and it ignores the role of the US Army and the US Bureau of Indian Affairs (both taxpayer-supported government agencies) in wresting that land from its original owners. It ignores the fact that the railroads were given rights of way, which they then leveraged via bank loans to construct the railways. (Both of these programs were signed into law by Abraham Lincoln.) What is the modern Republican equivalent of the Homestead Act? What are the industries of the future and how would a Republican-led government create an environment favorable to their establishment?
• Governor Romney, you are a highly successful businessman. You made your fortune buying up failing businesses and restoring them to profitability, which is a good thing. You’ve discovered a business model that works and have been busy replicating it. At the same time, banks make a tidy living making loans. They too, have found a successful model and use it over and over : lather, rinse, repeat. So we have a situation in which American businesses reduce their domestic labor force, sending jobs overseas, and people who previously could make their payments no longer can, and the whole economy falls apart. Can you see how this is like two freight trains, each intent upon its own journey toward riches, racing toward a place where the tracks intersect? Is there a role for regulation? If it’s not the government that regulates, who or what would? Given that business executives are trained to seek short-term profit, who looks out for the long-term interest of the nation?
• Republicans frequently cite the Founding Fathers and the original principles of our nation. Benjamin Franklin once said, “All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.”
  Walmart is an example of an organization that has successfully used government programs (the Interstate highway system to move goods, Medicaid to provide its employees with medical benefits). Why does the Republican Party oppose asking those who have benefited the most from the system to contribute a higher percentage toward its support?
• Who does menial tasks (harvesting, cleaning, food prep, etc.) if the wages for such work are too low and the working conditions too dismal to attract American workers? How do you balance the need to get those jobs done without mandating higher wages and decent working conditions or bringing in impoverished people from other parts of the world to do those jobs?
• Given that everyone understands the importance of Education in individual and national success, why do Republicans favor policies that divert funding from the public school system, weakening it?

It seems to me that until the Republican Party addresses these issues in terms other than the boilerplate terms “freedom,” “traditional values,” and “low taxes,” they will doom themselves to increasing irrelevance.

After watching a TV clip re Obama’s little gift from Chavez, learning that the book is now #2 on Amazon.com, and that #1 is Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, I went and checked out Mark’s book. I already have decades worth of reading under my belt re El Norte’s not too shining historical relationship with our fellow American nations.

Levin begins, of course, with the ringing words of the Declaration–well, actually, that comes a page or so later, after he defines Conservatism as “…a way of understanding life, society, and governance.” He then goes on to cite a number of Enlightenment figures as having given birth to Conservative thought. Locke, Montiesque, Adam Smith.

I looked at that, and it occurred to me that those men were the radicals of their day. They proposed ideas that were utterly opposed to the European hierarchical world view and allegedly “divine” right of kings to rule. They bolstered their argument against a divinely-sanctioned rule of the masses by the nobility with the assertion that God, indeed, was on their side. In fact, the “Conservatives” of that day, those who wished to “conserve” the existing social order, were staunchly on the side of the King, “For God and King,” as they proudly put it.

Maybe the problem is that the Conservatives need a new name, at least those who wish to parade under the banner of Enlightenment philosophers. Was it not American Conservatives who instigated Jim Crow laws and resisted the dismantling of segregation? Was it not American Conservatives who opposed Roosevelt’s opposition to the rise of Nazi Germany and his support of Britain under the Lend Lease program? Was it not Conservatives who opposed–violently–the right of American workers to peaceably assemble and freely associate in unions?

Maybe this is the real dogfight in the Republican tent. The intellectual heirs of those noble Liberal philosophers (which is what they called themselves) are somehow trapped in bed with the intellectual descendants of those who burned witches and homosexuals at the stake. They are in bed with those who never found a war they weren’t willing to send someone else’s kids to fight. With those whose allegiance to their right to property transcends any other consideration, such as other people’s lives, liberties, and property. Those who voted to deregulate interest rates and restrict debtors’ access to bankruptcy. To dismantle environmental protections. To grant no-bid contracts to war profiteers.

You can go to the above link to the book and read the first few pages. He segues pretty quickly from his noble definition of Conservatism to equate Liberal philosophy with”Statism,” or a blind belief that the bigger the government, the better, by which definition that Conservative darling, Mr. Bush, must be the biggest Liberal of all. I also could not help but notice that he did not quote a single liberal or cite a single source to back up his claim on that topic. Liberals, he maintains, are just gung-ho to destroy the individual in their quest for the perfect state. We are imperfect human beings, he asserts, but Conservatives understand that, and don’t get too bothered by it. Which somehow explains why prison populations ballooned under the Bush Administration and Republicans were able to win elections by such tactics as calling triple amputee Max Cleland a coward and that whole thing about John McCain’s alleged “black baby.” 

After eight years of warrantless wiretapping and torture under Bush, it’s the Liberals who are trying to destroy our Constitutional underpinnings. (Okay, I’ll admit Obama has me nervous on that point these days.)

But still, yikes!

Although I give him credit for his historical references to Locke, et al, I find him engaging in the usual Right Wing game of attributing every evil to The Other, and all virtue to one’s co-believers.

Here’s my definition of Conservative, “One who wishes to hold onto current structures, because one finds an advantage in the existing structure.”  For example, Jim Crow kept Blacks from obtaining decent wages and equal treatment under the law. While I grant that abortion opponents sincerely believe in the sanctity of unborn life, lack of choice regarding the number and spacing of one’s children does put women at a disadvantage in the work force, giving men an advantage when it comes to hiring, promotions, and raises. Discrimination against gays likewise diminishes their earning potential. Environmental regulations, their opponents freely admit, gunk up the profit machine by insisting that they clean up after themselves and leave at least a couple of stones unturned now and again.

If the vision of the Founders was truly enacted, there would be no discrimination against anyone. Period. The notion that the Founders were religious men has been disproven over and over. They were Deists, Freemasons, for god’s sake, believers in God as Reason, not as a spiritual being. The notion that the Bible is the source of all morality is likewise ignorant nonsense. While Social Conservatives do sincerely believe that they have cornered the market of Moral High Ground, the agenda of the Republican Party has long been the protection of a wealthy minority by means of an appeal to anyone who will turn a blind eye to their own self-interest in order to further their own hobbyhorse: ending the right of a woman to choose; diminishing the right of blacks, gays, or anyone defined as “other” to compete freely in the workplace; ending those pesky laws protecting air and water; secession from the United States.

High-flown rhetoric aside, this is the working definition of the current Conservative movement, and its near total dominance under Bush has sown the seeds of its destruction. As people are forced by economic events to notice that their own interests have been damaged by Republican policies, they leave. Of course, a parallel trend will take place, as the number of those who feel that they cannot compete in the workplace unless the deck is stacked in their favor will rise, as well.  Not a good trend, that one.

Today’s prediction:

What passes for the Republican Party will become increasingly shrill, as those with any degree of moderation will become alienated from it. If the pronouncements of Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh, Malkin, Bachmann, et al signify a trend, the Party is looking to the militant fringe to bolster its numbers, pulling them in from the smaller parties to the Right, including the secessionist movement. (You’ll notice they’ve been making a full-court press for that constituency the past few months.) If you’ll read my earlier posts on Authoritarianism, you’ll find that such control freaks generally despise their followers as easily-manpulated idiots, and assume that they can, with a combination of smoke, mirrors, appeals to traditional belief systems, and cold hard cash, extend their control indefinitely.

Just like the Saudis fund the Jihadists, thinking to channel their religious beliefs to turn their aggressive instincts outward, toward the Other, in order to protect their own status and wealth.

Ask anybody. The Saudis are very Conservative.

It’s been a fascinating few weeks. Mexico is pretty close to a Feds vs. Heads civil war, armed by us, Iraq continues to be a dangerous neighborhood, Afghanistan gets worse, and prepares to add us to the list of empires that ended their existence by invading them, screwy things continues to go on on Wall Street, with the screwers being paid handsomely by the screwees via the magic of the Bailout.

The Right has lit a major firestorm over Obama’s use of the teleprompter, which is sort of like criticizing him for being able to read. Michael Steele has declared  that his feud with Limbaugh, and subsequqent groveling was a deliberate strategy to “discover who the enemy is and who’s inside the tent.” I’m not sure whether he ascertained that Limbaugh is the enemy or “inside the tent,” but I sure wish that the interviewer had asked. Michelle Bachmann is determined to protect us against our dollars not being the world’s default currency, by writing a bill that prevents us from doing something that has nothing to do with creating a worrld currency. House and Senate Republicans unveil their budget  outline  template, or, in the words of Captain Barbossa, “More like guidelines, actually.” I really like the part about how we will get out of debt by reducing taxes by 30% on the taxpayers who allegedly pay 87% of all income tax. Palin’s high schoolish V.P. debate performance was due to her not being able to get anyone to pray with her beforehand, not due to any lack on her part. Glen Beck wrapped a dead fish on his show [I could not, for the life of me understand the point., but he seemed to think he was pretty funny naming it Larry and talking to it.] Oh, and Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurtzelbacher is horny.

 It’s sad to watch a once, or at least occasionally, great party (Lincoln, Eisenhower) fall into babbling incoherence. It’s even sadder to realize how much power they still wield. It’s frightening to think that there are 16 nationally elected Democrats who are willing to stand with them against President Obama’s budget.

Joe Conason, writing at Salon, brings up an interesting point. Okay, don’t be put off by the title, “Dick Cheney Was Right.”

Remember, back in the day, when Republicans insisted that “Deficits don’t matter?” I mean before they lost their shirts in the last election and decided that Deficits Will Destroy Us?

Joe makes a good point. Deficit spending got us out of the Great Depression. The humungous deficit spending package known as WWII not only stopped Fascism, (“The unification of State and Corporate power,” per Benito Mussolini) but also created the industrial base for three decades of unparalleled, widespread prosperity. To use the household metaphor that Republicans are so fond of these days, there’s a difference between borrowing to, say, build a house and borrowing to, say, go on a foreign adventure. There’s a difference between spending that hard-borrowed cash frugally on projects that will bear fruit later on, like, say, planting fruit trees or putting your kid through college, and blowing it at the casino.

It’s not the size of the deficit, it’s how you use it.

I heart Megan McCain. She’s the Athena of the Republican Party, doing long-overdue battle with the Harpies. So far, so good. Maybe the Party can be pried loose from the death grip of the extreme Right.

But still, the fact that the biggest thing in the Republican Party right now is, essentially, a trash-talking match in the girls locker room (“She’s fat!” “Kiss my ass!”) doesn’t bode well for the  Party of Ideas.

And what about the Rushbo? Over in Limboland he’s sticking up for the outsized payouts to the guys who trashed the economy. Apparently his philosophy is that destroying global capitalism is a tough job, but somebody had to do it. I’m wondering if his legions of working class dittoheads are going to parrot that one, particularly those employed in the automotive industry, or if he just self-destructed. The concept of Rush Limbaugh jumping the shark brings up amusing, but highly disturbing, mental imagery.

Just a note pertaining to a previous post, Their Pork, Your Pig Farm, My Porkchop:

Pig odor is not just about aesthetics. Eau de Hogfarm is linked to a host of ailments including depression and asthma. You can read about the scary details here. Kudos to Salon.com.

Like other environmental issues, it’s a public health issue. Why do Republicans think that’s so funny?