Op-Ed Columnist - Wishing Will Make It So - NYTimes.com

Barton II: Op-Ed Columnist - Wishing Will Make It So - NYTimes.com: "This week, Barton became the star of another hearing, which was convened to grill Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP. The rosy-cheeked Englishman had the kind of dopey sullenness you might find in an underachieving student at the Hogwarts detention room. But Barton seemed smitten, and he apologized to BP for the president’s “shakedown” of the company for a $20 billion fund to compensate the people of the gulf for the effects of the spill. This is perhaps not the stupidest remark any elected official has ever blurted out, but possibly the dumbest that ever came in the form of a prepared statement.
Every Democrat in Washington did the happy dance. The party could not point out too often that if the Republicans took control of the House, Barton would be leader of the House energy committee."

Joe L. Barton

(c) 2010 F. Bruce Abel

Thank you Joe L. Barton.  You have saved the 2010 November election.  ABR.  Stands for Asian Development Bank where my daughter Genny works.  But for today and this season it stands for "Anything but Republicans." 

Op-Ed Contributor - The Rush Limbaugh Victory - NYTimes.com

(c) 2010 F. Bruce Abel

The following post is spot-on, but late by about ten years. Where has mainstream media been? Intimidated, that's where. Democrats too have been intimidated, not just Republicans.



Op-Ed Contributor - The Rush Limbaugh Victory - NYTimes.com: "But the most obvious explanation is the one that’s been conspicuously absent from the gusher of analysis. Republican success in 2010 can be boiled down to two words: Rush Limbaugh."

Two Instances of Deregulation

(c) 2010 F. Bruce Abel

Two instances of deregulation causing "haywire." Last Thursday with (1) unregulated high frequency trading and (2) the BP Oil Spill. Yet what do you think vomit radio is continuing to talk about -- getting rid of government. How can this continue?

It is difficult to parse the "evil government" argument. Under Bush, with the foxes guarding the henhouse in the federal government the feds were horrible.

Rich -- I Just Read This Thoughtful Essay

(c) 2010 F. Bruce Abel

It's not just "immigration" for breakfast anymore. With Limbaugh and Beck and WLW's Bill McConnell, Fox's Sean Hannity, all day, every day, ...

Click on heading for the NYT story.

Now read this from

"Phil in the mountains of Kyushu Japan"
May 2nd, 2010 6:40 am

Yes, nativist white hysteria isn't new to American life.

But it's getting much worse insofar as too many are losing grip on decent humanity for other reasons.

If Americans knew how to see, acknowledge, and connect with "others" as human beings, there wouldn't be so much fear. But Americans have been learning a strange new form of "humanity" which denies nuance, which allows tendencies to stereotyping and to full-blown ignorance.

Consumerism does this most clearly. All advertising says all the most-desired human qualities come simply by buying the stuff marketed to your group. At some level everyone knows this is, to be kindest, a cute joke. But it comes incessantly. As in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," all go to sleep for it to some degrees.

All accept consumerism's beguilements for another reason -- that when the schools practice impersonality, they major-digress away from the engagement with skills for seeing, acknowledging, and connecting with really complicated and ever-elusive real people. Elusive because we all lack cores to ourselves. We all change -- to some degrees. We're all capable of better -- and worse.

I won't list here the ways that schools avoid engagements with the human -- the really human. Well, yes I will: 1) silos of specialization, 2) standardized tests, 3) teachers' own needs to appear de-personalized super-elevated.

And I'll also conclude that this white-hysteria-fear index is getting worse -- by looking again at the perverted form of "humanity" that the Supreme Court has elevated for the corporate form of it in Citizens United.

It's all bad. It's getting worse. But I'm not going to quote Pink Floyd to say "Hey, teachers, leave them kids alone." I'm quoting Pink Floyd to urge teachers and schools to do the opposite: engage more with the human in all its forms and interconnections in all disciplines and all their interconnections.

Herbert

(c) 2010 F. Bruce Abel

What follows is not original of course. But it is noteworthy for its frontal attack. Refreshing.


For decades the G.O.P. has been the party of fear, ignorance and divisiveness. All you have to do is look around to see what it has done to the country. The greatest economic inequality since the Gilded Age was followed by a near-total collapse of the overall economy. As a country, we have a monumental mess on our hands and still the Republicans have nothing to offer in the way of a remedy except more tax cuts for the rich.

This is the party of trickle down and weapons of mass destruction, the party of birthers and death-panel lunatics. This is the party that genuflects at the altar of right-wing talk radio, with its insane, nauseating, nonstop commitment to hatred and bigotry.

Krugman -- American Ungovernable

(c) 2009 F. Bruce Abel

Today's posting by Paul Krugman about the takeover of the Republican Party by Rush Limbaugh et al, deserves special study. Is America turning Californiaized? And ungovernable during its crisis?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09krugman.html

Hot Air -- Rush Limbaugh Buying a Sports Team in the NFL

(c) 2009 F. Bruce Abel

Some interesting comments.
http://fifthdown.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/goodell-voices-concern-over-limbaugh/

Brooks on The Rush Limbaugh Effect

(c) 2009 F. Bruce Abel


An important piece:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/opinion/02brooks.html?_r=1

Sam Tenenhaus on Bill Moyers Friday Night

(c) 2009 F. Bruce Abel

This interview Friday night caught my eye and now my imagination. When I review the transcript below I notice that it keys more of my "labels" than any other blog I've done.

Tenanhaus pops up -- I knew someone would -- as an apologist for the evil William F. Buckley and thereby sets a new world-view of Buckley. I assume Tenanhaus's book does also.


BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL, Sam Tanenhaus. SAM TANENHAUS: Oh my pleasure to be here, Bill. BILL MOYERS: So, if you're right about the decline and death of conservatism, who are all those people we see on television? SAM TANENHAUS: I'm afraid they're radicals. Conservatism has been divided for a long time -- this is what my book describes narratively -- between two strains. What I call realism and revanchism. We're seeing the revanchist side. BILL MOYERS: What do you mean revanchism?


SAM TANENHAUS: I mean a politics that's based on the idea that America has been taken away from its true owners, and they have to restore and reclaim it. They have to conquer the territory that's been taken from them. Revanchism really comes from the French word for 'revenge.' It's a politics of vengeance. And this is a strong strain in modern conservatism. Like the 19th Century nationalists who wanted to recover parts of their country that foreign nations had invaded and occupied, these radical people on the right, and they include intellectuals and the kinds of personalities we're seeing on television and radio, and also to some extent people marching in the streets, think America has gotten away from them. Theirs is a politics of reclamation and restoration. Give it back to us. What we sometimes forget is that the last five presidential elections Democrats won pluralities in four of them. The only time the Republicans have won, in recent memory, was when George Bush was re-elected by the narrowest margin in modern history, for a sitting president. So, what this means is that, yes, conservatism, what I think of, as a radical form of conservatism, is highly organized. We're seeing it now-- they are ideologically in lockstep. They agree about almost everything, and they have an orthodoxy that governs their worldview and their view of politics. So, they are able to make incursions. And at times when liberals, Democrats, and moderate Republicans are uncertain where to go, yes, this group will be out in front, very organized, and dominate our conversation.


BILL MOYERS: What gives them their certainty? You know, your hero of the 18th Century, Burke, Edmund Burke, warned against extremism and dogmatic orthodoxy.


SAM TANENHAUS: Well, it's a very deep strain in our politics, Bill. Some of our great historians like Richard Hofstadter and Garry Wills have written about this. If you go back to the foundations of our Republic, first of all, we have two documents, "creedal documents" they're sometimes called, more or less at war with one another. The Declaration of Independence says one thing and the Constitution says another.

BILL MOYERS: The Declaration says--


SAM TANENHAUS: …says that we will be an egalitarian society in which all rights will be available to one and all, and the Constitution creates a complex political system that stops that change from happening. So, there's a clash right at the beginning. Now, what we've seen is that certain groups among us-- and sometimes it's been the left-- have been able to dominate the conversation and transform politics into a kind of theater. And that's what we're seeing now.


BILL MOYERS: When you see these people in the theater of television, you call them the insurrectionists, in your book, what do you think motivates them?


SAM TANENHAUS: One of the interesting developments in our politics, in just the past few months, although you could see signs of it earlier, is the emergence of the demographic we always overlook in our youth obsessed culture: the elderly. That was the group that did not support Barack Obama. They voted for John McCain. It was also the group that rose up and defied George W. Bush, when he wanted to add private Social Scurity accounts. It was a similar kind of protest.


BILL MOYERS: There's a paradox there, right? I mean, they say they're against government and yet the majority of Americans, according to all the polls, don't want their government touched. You know, there were people at these town hall meetings this summer, saying "Don't touch my Medicare." You know, keep the government out of my Social Security.


SAM TANENHAUS: Yes. This is an interesting argument. Because it's very easy to mock, and we see this a lot. "Oh, these fools. These old codgers say the government won't take my Medicare away. Don't know Medicare is a government program?" That's not really what's going on, I think. I think there's something different. A sense about how both the left and the right grew skeptical of Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson, and the argument was everyone was becoming a kind of client or ward of the state. That we've become a nation of patron/client relationships. And a colleague of yours, Richard Goodwin, very brilliant political thinker, in 1967 warned, "We all expect too much from government." We expect it to create all the jobs. We expect it to rescue the economy. To fight the wars. To give us a good life". So, when people say, "Don't take my Medicare away," what they really mean is, "We're entirely dependent on this government and we're afraid they'll take one thing away that we've gotten used to and replace it with something that won't be so good. And there's nothing we can do about it. We're powerless before the very guardian that protects us."


BILL MOYERS: So, how do you see this contradiction playing out in the health care debate? Where what's the dominant force that's going to prevail here at the end? Is it going to be, "We want reform and we want the government involved?" Or are we going to privatize it the way people on the conservative side want to do? The insurance companies, the drug companies, all of that?

SAM TANENHAUS: I think what we'll see is a kind of incremental reform. Look, we know that health care has become the third rail of American politics, going back to Theodore Roosevelt. The greatest retail politician in modern history, Bill Clinton, could not sell it. But here's another thing to think about. In the book I discuss one of the most interesting political theories of the modern era, Samuel Lubell's theory of the solar system of politics. And what he says is what we think of as an equally balanced, two-party system, is really a rotating one-party system. Either the Republicans or Democrats have ruled since the Civil War for periods of some 30-36 years. And in those periods, all the great debates have occurred within a single party. So, if you go back to the 1980s, which some would say was the peak of the modern conservative period, the fight's about how to end the Cold War, how to unleash market forces-- were really Republican issues. Today, when we look at the great questions -- how to stimulate the economy, how to provide and expand and improve a sustainable health care system, the fight is taking place among Democrats. So, in a sense what Republicans have done is to put themselves on the sidelines. They've vacated the field and left it to the other party, the Democratic Party, to resolve these issues among themselves. That's one reason I think conservatism is in trouble.


BILL MOYERS: You write in here that they're not simply in retreat, they're outmoded. They don't act like it, you know?


SAM TANENHAUS: They do and they don't. What I also say in the book is that the voices are louder than ever. And I wrote that back in March. Already we were hearing the furies on the right. Remember, there was a movement within the Republican Party, finally scotched, to actually rename the Democrats, "The Democrat Socialist Party." This started from the beginning. So, the noise is there. William Buckley has a wonderful expression. He says, "The pyrotechnicians and noise-makers have always been there on the right." I think we're hearing more of that than we are serious ideological, philosophical discussion about conservatism.


BILL MOYERS: How do you explain the fact that the news agenda today is driven by Fox News, talk radio, and the blogosphere. Why are those organs of information and/or propaganda so powerful?


SAM TANENHAUS: Well, there's been a transformation of the conservative establishment. And this has been going on for some time. The foundations of modern conservatism, the great thinkers, were actually ex-communists, many of them. Whittaker Chambers, the subject of my biography. The great, brilliant thinker, James Burnham. A less known but equally brilliant figure, Willmoore Kendall, who was a mentor, oddly enough, to both William Buckley and Garry Wills. These were the original thinkers. And they were essentially philosophical in their outlook. Now, there are conservative intellectuals, but we don't think of them as conservative anymore-- Fareed Zakaria, Francis Fukayama, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Lind, the great Columbia professor, Mark Lilla-- they've all left the movement. And so, it's become dominated instead by very monotonic, theatrically impressive voices and faces.


BILL MOYERS: Well, what does it say that a tradition that begins with Edmund Burke, the great political thinker of his time, moves on over the years, the decades, to William Buckley, and now the icon is Rush Limbaugh?


SAM TANENHAUS: Well, in my interpretation it means that it's ideologically depleted. That what we're seeing now and hearing are the noise-makers in Buckley's phrase. There's a very important incident described in this book that occurred in 1965, when the John Birch Society, an organization these new Americanist groups resemble -- the ones who are marching in Washington and holding tea parties. Essentially, very extremist revanchist groups that view politics in a conspiratorial way. And the John Birch Society during the peak of the Cold War struggle was convinced, and you're well aware of this, that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent, who reported to his brother Milton, and 80 percent of the government was dominated by Communists. Communists were in charge of American education, American health care. They were fluoridating the water to weaken our brains. All of this happened. And at first, Buckley and his fellow intellectuals at NATIONAL REVIEW indulged this. They said, "You know what? Their arguments are absurd, but they believe in the right things. They're anti-communists. And they're helping our movement." Cause many of them helped Barry Goldwater get nominated in 1964. And then in 1965, Buckley said, "Enough." Buckley himself had matured politically. He'd run for Mayor of New York. He'd seen how politics really worked. And he said, "We can't allow ourselves to be discredited by our own fringe." So, he turned over his own magazine to a denunciation of the John Birch Society. More important, the columns he wrote denouncing what he called its "drivel" were circulated in advance to three of the great conservative Republicans of the day, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Senator John Tower, from your home state of Texas, and Tower read them on the floor of Congress into the Congressional record. In other words, the intellectual and political leaders of the right drew a line. And that's what we may not see if we don't have that kind of leadership on the right now.


BILL MOYERS: To what extent is race an irritant here? Because, you know, I was in that era of the '60s, I was deeply troubled as we moved on to try to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by William Buckley's seeming embrace of white supremacy. It seemed to me to taint-- to leave something in the DNA of the modern conservative movement that is still there.


SAM TANENHAUS: It is. And one of the few regrets Bill Buckley ever expressed was that his magazine had not supported the Civil Rights Act--


BILL MOYERS: Really?


SAM TANENHAUS: …but you may remember that in the late '70s, he supported a national holiday for Martin Luther King-- BILL MOYERS: Yeah, I remember that. SAM TANENHAUS: …where someone like John McCain did not. I once heard Buckley give a lecture -- brilliant lecture in New York City -- about the late '90s in which he talked about the importance of religion in American civil life. And it was Martin Luther King who was the object.


BILL MOYERS: What changed him? I mean, because he was writing in the National Review about, endorsing the White Supremacy scheme of the country at that time.


SAM TANENHAUS: Well, he actually did that, Bill, a little bit earlier.


BILL MOYERS: '50s?


SAM TANENHAUS: '50s. He did more of it. In the early '60s, even a great thinker and writer like Garry Wills, who was still a part of the "National Review," though he supported the civil rights movement, thought it might weaken the institutional structures of society, if it became too fervent a protest. Now, what the Republican Party did was to make a very shrewd political calculation. A kind of Faustian bargain with the South. That the southern whites who resisted civil rights legislation-- Aand as you know, Lyndon Johnson knew, when he signed those bills into law, he might lose the solid south as it had been called, the Democrats might lose them for a generation or more. And yes, the Republicans moved right in, and they did it on the basis of a state's rights argument. Now, however convincing or unconvincing that was, it's important to acknowledge that Republicans never-- conservatives, I should say, northern Republicans are different-- but conservatives within the Republican Party, because the two were once not, you know, identical-- thought that a hierarchical society and a kind of racial difference-- a sense of racial difference, established institutionally, was not so bad a thing. They were wrong. They were dead wrong. But that sense of animus is absolutely strong today. Look who some of the great protestors are against Barack Obama. Three of them come from South Carolina, the state that led the secession. Joe Wilson and Senator DeMint, Mark Sanford who got in trouble. These are South Carolinians. And there's no question that that side of the insurrectionist South remains in our politics.


BILL MOYERS: When you heard Joe Wilson shout out, "You lie," and you saw who it was, did you think "the voice of conservatism today"?


SAM TANENHAUS: No. I thought "This man needs to read his Edmund Burke." Edmund Burke gave us the phrase "civil society." Now, people can be confused about that. It doesn't mean we have to be nice to each other all the time. Bill Buckley was not nice to his political opponents. What it means is one has to recognize that we're all part of what should be our harmonious culture, and that we respect the political institutions that bind it together. Edmund Burke, a very interesting passage in his great book, the "Reflections on the Revolution in France," uses the words "government" and "society" almost interchangeably. He sees each reinforcing the other. It is our institutional patrimony. When someone in the floor of Congress dishonors, disrespects, the office of the President, he's actually striking-- however briefly, however slightingly-- a blow against the institutions that our society is founded on. And I think Edmund Burke might have some trouble with that.


BILL MOYERS: There's long been a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this coalition that we call "conservative." I mean, you had the Edmund Burke kind of conservatism that yearns for a sacred, ordered society, bound by tradition, that protects both rich and poor, against what one of my friends calls the "Libertarian, robber baron, capitalist, cowboy America." I mean, that marriage was doomed to fail, right?


SAM TANENHAUS: It was. First of all, this is absolutely right, in the terms of a classical conservatism. And here is the figure I emphasize in my book is Benjamin Disraeli. What he feared-- the revolution of his time, this is the French Revolution that concerned Edmund Burke-- half a century later what concerned Disraeli and other conservatives was the Industrial Revolution. That Dickens wrote his novels about-- that children, the very poor becoming virtual slaves in work houses, that the search for money, for capital, for capital accumulation, seemed to drown out all other values. That's what modern conservatism is partly anchored in. So, how do we get this contradiction?


BILL MOYERS: Why isn't it standing up against turbo-capitalism?


SAM TANENHAUS: Well, one reason is that America very early on in its history reached a kind of pact, in the Jacksonian era, between the government on the one hand and private capital on the other. That the government would actually subsidize capitalism in America. That's what the Right doesn't often acknowledge. A lot of what we think of as the unleashed, unfettered market is, in fact, a government supported market. Some will remember the famous debate between Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman, and Dick Cheney said that his company, Halliburton, had made millions of dollars without any help from the government. It all came from the government! They were defense contracts! So, what's happened is the American ethos, which is a different thing from our political order-- that's the rugged individualism, the cowboy, the frontiersman, the robber baron, the great explorer, the conqueror of the continent. For that aspect of our myth, the market has been the engine of it. So, what brought them together, is what we've seen in the right is what I call a politics of organized cultural enmity. Everybody--


BILL MOYERS: Accusatory protest, you call it.


SAM TANENHAUS: Accusatory protest. With liberals as the enemy. So, if you are a free-marketeer, or you're an evangelical, or a social conservative, or even an authoritarian conservative, you can all agree about one thing: you hate the liberals that are out to destroy us. And that's a very useful form of political organization. I'm not sure it contributes much to our government and society, but it's politically useful, and we're seeing it again today.


BILL MOYERS: It wasn't long ago that Karl Rove was saying this coalition was going to deliver a new Republican majority. What happened? It finally came apart. Why?


SAM TANENHAUS: Well, I believe it had come apart earlier than that. I really think Bill Clinton's victory in 1992 sealed the end of serious conservative counterrevolution. We forget that election. It seems like an anomaly, but consider, Bill Clinton won more electoral votes than Barack Obama, despite the presence of one of the most successful third party candidates, H. Ross Perot, another Texan, in American history. But that's not the most important fact. The most important fact is that George H. W. Bush got less of the popular vote in 1992 than Herbert Hoover got in 1932. That was really the end. But what happened was the right was so institutionally successful that it controlled many of the levers, as you say. So, what happened in the year 2000? Well, the conservatives on the Supreme Court stopped the democratic process, put their guy into office. Then September 11th came. And the right got its full first blank slate. They could do really whatever they wanted. And what we saw were those eight years. And that is the end of ideological conservatism as a vital formative and contributive aspect of our politics.


BILL MOYERS: Why?


SAM TANENHAUS: Because it failed so badly. It wasn't conservative. It was radical. It's interesting. Many on the right say, "George Bush betrayed us." They weren't saying that in 2002 and 2003. He was seen as someone who would complete the Reagan revolution. I think a lot of it was Iraq. Now, I quote in the book a remarkably prescient thing. The very young, almost painfully, 31-year-old, Benjamin Disraeli wrote in 1835, he said you cannot export democracy, even then, to lands ruled by despotic priests. And he happened to mean Catholic, not Islamic priests. But he said you actually have to have a civil society established in advance. He said that's why the United States had become a great republic so shortly after the Revolution. We had the law of English custom here. You see? So, we were prepared to become a democracy. There were conservatives who tried to make that argument before the war in Iraq. Francis Fukayama was one, Fareed Zakaria was another-- they're both well outside that movement. There were people in the Bush Administration who tried to argue this -- they were marginalized or stripped of power. What America saw was an ideological revanchism with all the knobs turned to the highest volume. The imperial presidency of a Dick Cheney and all the rest. And we saw where we got.


BILL MOYERS: Here's another puzzle. Back to what we were talking about earlier. You say in "The Death of Conservatism" that, "Even as the financial collapse drove us to the brink, conservatives remained strangely apart, trapped in the irrelevant causes of another day, deaf to the actual conversation unfolding across the land." And the paradox is, it seems to me, they are driving the conversation that you say they don't hear.


SAM TANENHAUS: Well, you know, they have many mouths, Bill, but they don't have many ears. The great political philosopher, Hannah Arendt once said, in one of her great essays on Socrates, whom she wrote about a lot -- that the sign of a true statesmen, maybe particularly in a democracy, is the capacity to listen. And that doesn't simply mean to politely grow mute while your adversary talks. It means, in fact, to try to inhabit the thoughts and ideas of the other side. Barack Obama is perhaps a genius at this. For anyone who has not heard the audio version of "Dreams from My Father," it's a revelation. He does all the voices. He does the white Kansas voices, he does the Kenyan voices. He has an extraordinary ear. There's an auditory side to politics. And that capacity to listen is what enables you to absorb the arguments made by the other side and to have a kind of debate with yourself. That's the way our deliberative process is supposed to work. Right now, at a time of confusion and uncertainty, the ideological right is very good at shouting at us, and rallying the troops. But, you know, one of the real contributions conservatism made in its peak years, the 1950s and '60s, I think as an intellectual movement, is that it repudiated the politics of public demonstration. It was the left that was marching in the streets, and carrying guns, and threatening to take the society down, or calling President Johnson a murderer. Remember it was William Buckley, who said, "We're calling this man a murderer in the name of humanity?" It was the conservatives who used political institutions, political campaigns, who rallied behind traditional candidates produced by the party apparatus. They revitalized the traditions and the instruments and vehicles of our democracy. But now we've reached a point, quite like one Richard Hofstadter described some 40 years ago, where ideologues don't trust politicians anymore. Remember during the big march in Washington, many of the protestors or demonstrators insisted they were not demonstrating just against Barack Obama, but against all the politicians-- that's why some Republicans wouldn't support it. They don't believe in politics as the medium whereby our society negotiates its issues.


BILL MOYERS: What do they believe in?


SAM TANENHAUS: They believe in a kind of revolution, a cultural revolution. They think the system can be-- what some would say hijacked. They would say maneuvered, controlled, that they can get their hands back on the levers. An important thing about the right in America is it always considers itself a minority position and an embattled position. No matter how many of the branches of government they dominate. So, what they believe in is, as Willmoore Kendall, this early philosopher said, is a politics of battle lines, of war.


BILL MOYERS: So, here, at this very critical moment, when so much is hanging in the balance, what is the paradox of conservatism as you see it?


SAM TANENHAUS: The paradox of conservatism is that it gives the signs, the overt signs of energy and vitality, but the rigor mortis I described is still there. As a philosophy, as a system of government, as a way all of us can learn from, as a means of evaluating ourselves, our social responsibilities, our personal obligations and responsibilities. It has, right now, nothing to offer.


BILL MOYERS: Now, they disagree with you. They think you have issued a call for unilateral disarmament on their part-- that brass knuckles and sharp elbows are part of fighting for what you believe in, and therefore, you're calling for a unilateral disarmament.


SAM TANENHAUS: Well, you know, that's what Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style, is when it's always living on the verge of apocalypse. That defeat is staring you in the face, and the only victories are total victories. Because even the slightest victory, if it's not complete, means the other side may come back and get you again. This is not serious responsible argument. Much of my book is actually about the failures of liberalism in that noontime period of the 1960s. And many of the conservatives simply ignore that part of the argument.


BILL MOYERS: How to explain this long fascination you've had with conservative ideas, and the conservative movement. Why this fascination?


BILL MOYERS: Well, I think it has been the dominant philosophy, political philosophy in our culture, in America, for some half-century. What particularly drew me first to Chambers and then Buckley is the idea that these were serious intellectuals, who were also men of action. Conservatives have kind of supplied us in their best periods-- the days when NATIONAL REVIEW and COMMENTARY and THE PUBLIC INTEREST were tremendously vital publications, self-examining, developing new vocabularies and idioms, teaching us all how to think about politics and culture in a different way, with a different set of tools. They were contributing so enormously to who we were as Americans. And yet, many liberals were not paying attention. Many liberals today don't know that a great thinker like Garry Wills was a product of the conservative movement. It's astonishing to them to learn it. They just assume, because they agree with him now, he was always a liberal. In fact, he remains a kind of conservative. This is the richness in the philosophy that attracted me, and that I wanted to learn more about, to educate myself.


BILL MOYERS: The book is THE DEATH OF CONSERVATISM. Sam Tanenhaus, I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for joining me.


SAM TANENHAUS: Oh, it's my great pleasure to be here.

Dowd -- This is Her Best

Mark and Marcos:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opinion/28dowd.html

Krugman --California, a State in Paralysis

In many ways this article is core. After all it limns the proper cause of California's and the Republican's idiotic theories of government and downfall.

Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, deregulation in all its forms, including Proposition 13.

God help the rest of the country too.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/opinion/25krugman.html

Steele on Rush Limbaugh Gaffe

All a put-on???

video cllip included:

http://blow.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/steele-ridiculous/


later comments are pretty good so keep reading on the attached clip above.

Rich -- Good Again

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/opinion/15rich.html

Colloins -- Steele and Limbaugh and Other Republican Things

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/opinion/07collins.html?_r=1

Herbert -- Playing With Fire

Op-Ed Columnist
Playing With Fire
comments (303)

new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/opinion/07herbert.html
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By BOB HERBERT
Published: February 6, 2009
It was good to see the president, ordinarily so cool, so accommodating, exhibiting some real fire the other night. It seems to have done some good.
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With the economy in deep, deep trouble, and Americans suffering by the tens of millions, the Republicans spent much of the week doing their same-old, bad-faith Neanderthal two-step: trying their best to derail the economic stimulus package working its difficult way through Congress.
“This bill is stinking up the place,” said Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina who not only opposed the legislation but wanted to make sure that no one would mistake him for a class act.
One of the goals of the package, of course, is to begin cleaning up the holy mess that resulted from the long, dark night of G.O.P. control in Washington. President Obama went out of his way to get a substantial number of Republicans to make a genuine effort to move the economic revitalization process along, but was rebuffed, and in some cases contemptuously.
On Thursday night, he struck back, attacking Republican intransigence and its failed policies of the past. On Friday morning, with the government reporting that nearly 600,000 more jobs had been lost in January, the president went public again, stressing how irresponsible it would be to do nothing in the face of the growing crisis.
Neither the job losses nor the president’s prodding was enough to prompt much of a response from the Republicans. But by Friday evening, it appeared that a small number of G.O.P. senators, enough to assure Senate passage of a revised (and watered-down) stimulus package by a very slim margin, had come aboard.
But only a small number. Even as the report of an agreement was being circulated, Senator Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, was bad-mouthing the package on CNN. “This bill is a disaster,” he said.
It’s been clear for years that the G.O.P. is a party without a heart. But its pointless obstructionism, its overall lack of any serious response to what is a clear national economic emergency, seems to indicate it’s also a party without a brain.
Republicans in Washington have behaved like a milling crowd standing in the way of firefighters trying to respond to a devastating blaze. The best that can be said for the party is that a few senators seem to have been able part the crowd enough to let the rescuers begin to inch forward.
President Obama addressed Republican inflexibility on Thursday night when he said at a gathering in Williamsburg, Va., “Don’t come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis.” He added that without swift action on the stimulus bill, “an economy that is already in crisis will be faced with catastrophe.”
The report of January’s enormous job losses came roughly a dozen hours later. It was the latest in a long and hideous pattern of employment woes, much of it resulting from the G.O.P.’s obsession with destructive supply-side economic voodoo.
On the front page of The Times on Friday was an article that said the number of women on the nation’s payrolls is poised to pass that of men for the first time in American history. This is not because women have been doing so well, but because men have been doing so poorly.
As I was reading the article, I thought of all the guys who used to listen to Rush Limbaugh while driving to or from work but are now tuning in from their living rooms because the benefits of the G.O.P.’s right-wing, tax-cutting ideology never trickled down to them and they are now jobless.
“Since the start of the recession,” as Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, points out, “the U.S. economy has shed more jobs than the total population of Chicago.”
The Republicans still don’t get it. Most act as if they don’t understand that in this radical economic downturn the demand for goods and services has fallen off a cliff, and that government spending is needed — and needed quickly — to replace a large portion of that lost demand.
The goal is twofold: to alleviate some of the enormous suffering (something that is easily understood if you have a heart), and to revive the battered economy (equally easy to understand by anyone with a brain).
Senator John McCain echoed many of his Republican colleagues on Friday when he indignantly asserted, “This is not a stimulus bill; it is a spending bill.”
It was an objection that had been addressed by an incredulous President Obama on Thursday night. “What do you think a stimulus is?” the president asked, his voice rising. Spending, he said — to laughter from his audience — “is the whole point.”

http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/02/07/opinion/07blow2.html

Krugman is Deadly Serious

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/opinion/06krugman.html?_r=1

Carville on Rush Limbaugh's Latest

Hard hitting as you would expect:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/01/carville.rush.limbaugh/index.html

Good Quote re Madoff

"We should all recognize that the inadequate oversight of all the recent financial scandals can be traced to the political mumbo jumbo of that dynamic duo of the eighties, Maggie and Ron, soulmates of the Transatlantic conservative political Ponzi game. They sold too many voters that “government is the problem” and the markets will regulate themselves. Now their respective nations are smoldering in the ash heaps while the practitioners aree still collecting obscene bonuses. The root problem is greedy capitalismwithout governmental supervision."

From a comment on a Kristoff article on the foundations which were invested in Madoff

Obama on Fox

I forgot to watch or tape this. This is more crucial than the convention speeches. Facing down "Rush Limbaugh." Not him of course, but his minion Bill O'Reilly.

The TV Watch
Obama Steps Into O’Reilly’s ‘No Spin Zone’

new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/us/politics/05watch.html

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: September 5, 2008

It was billed as the ultimate smackdown, and it certainly promised to be a wonk vs. wacko match: the cerebral, conciliatory Senator Barack Obama versus Bill O’Reilly, Fox News Channel’s most irascible, combative anchor: a commentator who calls liberals “loons” and “pinheads” and on Thursday’s show described reporters scrutinizing Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as “sniveling, left-wing, wine-drinking, brie-eating.”
The topic was national security, and their tone was civil, but thankfully not too civil: Mr. O’Reilly, as is his wont, spoke brusquely, interrupted, argued and didn’t let his guest off the hook. He told Mr. Obama he had “bloviated” in parts of his convention speech, but congratulated him on his early opposition to the war, saying he had been “perspicacious.”
Mr. O’Reilly then demanded that his guest admit that he was wrong to oppose the military surge. Mr. Obama didn’t give in; he repeated previous qualifications but did go farther, and less equivocally, than before in acknowledging that the surge had worked. “It’s succeeded beyond our wildest dreams,” he said. Mr. Obama is known for the subtlety and nuance of his answers; Mr. O’Reilly has no patience for either. And accordingly, they had a bracing exchange, in what was the first of four segments to be spread over four days.
Mr. Obama has talked to Fox News reporters quite a few times since the primaries began: he sat down with Chris Wallace in April. But this was his first appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor,” and its host has had a prickly relationship with the Obama campaign. Mr. O’Reilly has had to apologize for an unfortunate turn of phrase when discussing Michelle Obama, played videos of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. early and often, and is still underscoring Mr. Obama’s association with William Ayers, a member of the violent Weather Underground in the 1960s (a topic Mr. O’Reilly gleefully said would be debated in Monday’s segment).
Mr. Obama gave no hint of rancor and remained pleasant, respectful and good-humored, but he did adjust his pace and wording to suit his speed-talking host.
The best political interviews knock the subjects off their chosen script, either by getting a rise out the guest or eliciting an unexpected answer. Mr. Wallace of Fox News, who has managed to rattle both Bill Clinton and Karl Rove, is one of the best at goading subjects into unplanned sincerity. And of the network anchors, Katie Couric has stood out more than her rivals.
Her move from NBC to CBS was supposed to be a triumph for the network, and turned out to be anything but. CBS News is still a distant third in the ratings, behind NBC and ABC. Yet during this political cycle and especially during the conventions, CBS’s political team has provided some of the best coverage and Ms. Couric has had more notable interviews. Charlie Gibson of ABC News has a more soothing, avuncular style, and Brian Williams of NBC News is more polished and urbane, but Ms. Couric gets more interesting answers.
On Wednesday night, the CBS anchor asked Senator John McCain’s wife, Cindy, about her views on abortion, and discovered that Mrs. McCain, usually so impenetrably poised and well prepared, had difficulty describing her husband’s position on Roe v. Wade, or her own. (She said he did not want to overturn it, until Ms. Couric assured her that he did oppose Roe v. Wade. Mrs. McCain, looking a bit confused, then said she, too, wanted the legality of abortion to be determined by individual states.)
At the end of the interview, Ms. Couric told her viewers that the campaign had clarified Mrs. McCain’s position: “They told us that, like Laura Bush, Mrs. McCain does not favor overturning Roe v. Wade, which guarantees the legal right to an abortion.”
Especially on a day when the staunchly anti-abortion Governor Palin was being acclaimed by the Republican convention, it was a good question to ask and as, it turned out, a hard one to answer.