Normally I like Bill Moyers and will follow him almost anyplace he wants to go.
But watching him grin and nod Charlie Rose-style as the 1,000th insipid Centrist burned valuable public television bandwidth driveling on about how both sides are exactly, equally wrong and morally blind was simply too much.
JONATHAN HAIDT: But cooperation and competition are opposite sides of the same coin. And we've gotten this far because we cooperate to compete. So you can say that liberals are more accurate or in touch with how the system works. But I would say they're more in touch with some aspects of how systems go awry and oppress some people, ignore other people. Liberals see some aspects of where the social system breaks down. And conservatives see others. You have to have consequences following bad behavior. That is as basic an aspect of system design as any. And that's one where conservatives see it much more clearly than liberals.
I think I'm a centrist, in terms of liberal conservative. And I feel like I'm sort of, I sort of, like, stepped out of the game. And now that the game has gotten so deadly, I'm hoping that, in the coming year, I can be the guy saying, ‘Come on, people, just, here, understand the other side so you stop demonizing, and now you can argue more productively.
Just what our public discourse needs: one more vapid, Tom Friedman replicant selling the same fucking snake oil, this time with a patina of liberal respectability courtesy of Mr. Moyers.
Still, every now and then -- and regardless of how much Centrist sludge they try to bury the reality under -- a prominent wingnut gets bit by their own rabid dog hard enough to momentarily give the game away. Of course, everyone who makes living selling the Centrist lie quickly closes ranks to pretend it never happens, but some of us watch and some of us remember.
Here is what I wrote back in 2008 when the Pig People momentarily turned on Kathleen Parker.
+ + + + + + + + + + +
Kathleen Parker Finally Gets a good, long look at who's been signing her check all these years.
… this insect specialist is walking around on the Near North Side during rush hour one summer day, talking with a friend. The ambient environment – near an “el” stop and hard by one of the ubiquitous construction sites – was warm-weather busy. As if someone had accidentally knocked over a bee hive full of workers dressed in bike pants, short skirts or business-casual suits and loosened ties.
It was loud.
And that’s when the entomologist stops his friend and tells him the he hears the distinctive chirping of a particularly uncommon species of cricket (BTW, feel free to re-tell this story using the ‘White House’ and Jiminy Cricket if you’d like. With a dollop of AstroGlide it fits like a pair of bunny slippers.)
His friend is dubious, to say the least.
“Quit screwing with me, Dwight (we’ll call him ‘Dwight’),” Larry said (we’ll call the other guy ‘Larry’.) “you know you can’t here a damned thing in this din.”
Ok, “din” is my word. Larry wouldn’t really say that.
Dwight shrugged, and took out a small handful of coins – nickels and pennies and a dime or two, (Possibly exactly the same combination of coins O. Henry used in “The Gift Of The Magi”) – and tossed them up and out onto a temporarily vacant spot on the sidewalk. The instant they hit and started pinging and jangling around, everyone in earshot ceased what they were doing, stopped talking, and turned to look at the source of the sound.
“It’s not how loud it is,” Dwight said. “It’s what you listen for.”
Kathleen Parker Shocked To Find Her Party’s Full Of “Vicious”, “Threatening”, Delusional Wingnuts
By: Blue Texan Wednesday October 1, 2008
Parker, who last week called for Palin to step down, now finds herself the target of a Wingnut Two Minutes of Hate.
"Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should "off" myself.
... "After 20 years of column writing, I'm familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.
Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot."
Suck it up, Kathleen. You've been tossing red meat to a caged rabid animal for two decades. No sympathy when it finally bites you.
Now, she whines:
...when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one's own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk.
I'm truly speechless.
UPDATE
John Hawkins, responding at Right Wing News, writes:
As a general rule, conservatives aren't as nasty and vicious as liberals...
To which I say, Amen Brother!
However I couldn’t quite place which pillar of sweet, kindly Conservative temperance Mr. Hawkins might be citing, so maybe someone can help me out here.
Was it Karl Rove?
Or Tom DeLay?
Or Newt Gingrich?
Was it Roger Ailes?
Glenn Beck?
Tucker Carlson?
Neil Cavuto?
Ann Coulter?
Pat Robertson?
Maybe Chris Wallace?
Lou Dobbs?
Dick Armey?
Robert Novak?
Steve Doocy?
Jesse Helms?
Bob Dornin?
Jerry Falwell?
John Gibson?
Sean Hannity?
Dick Cheney?
Brit Hume?
Rush Limbaugh?
Mary Matalin?
Tony Perkins?
Dick Morris?
Bill O'Reilly?
Phil Gramm?
Michael Savage?
John Hagee?
Monica Crowley?
William Donohue?
Frank Luntz?
Michael Medved?
G. Gordon Liddy?
Or maybe Laura Ingraham?
Once upon a time, in another country, all it took was a scrape of yellow cloth
to instantly dehumanize someone.
Like a switch being thrown, a favorite teacher, neighbor or friend could become
a hated pariah.
An honored member of the community could be morphed into an enemy of the state
in the twinkling of an eye.
And it was possible ONLY because a sophisticated infrastructure of habitual, mindless, daily-repeated bigotry and rage that had been built up decade after decade was annexed by a power-mad clique of fanatics, weaponized, tanked up with rocket fuel, and then let off the leash.
Does this sound at all familiar, Ms. Parker?
Of course as long as the monster worked on your behalf -- as long as it was only gypsies, malcontents, misfits, queers, Jews and commies against whom the propaganda machine ranted by day and and for whom the jackboots came by night -- as long as the bell never tolled for thee -- everything was just fucking peaches and cream!
As long as it's just those people, Good Germans like Ms. Parker will always be more than happy to make a little bank firing up the mob. Only too willing to smirk and sneer and turn a little profit raging up the pig people in the service of demonizing anyone who doubts the infinite wisdom of the Dear Leader or the infinite goodness of the Christopath cabal that runs the GOP, ‘cause it all sounds just like sweet, sweet music…just as long as its being directed at the dirty Jews Liberals.
But now the monster has turned on its creator, and Good German Kathleen has finally heard an inkling – or an oinkling – of the baying, shrieking hordes whose bloody-mindedness we on the Left have been trying to curb for the last generation.
So, as a newly Displaced Pundit stranded in Liberal Casablanca, let me save you some time and trouble and tell you what won't work.
For about the last 30 years, we tried on the Left the sweet-reason thingie.
Didn’t work at all.
We tried the “compromise” thingie.
Got called weak and cowardly for our trouble.
We tried the “Hey, lets elect the most Centrist President we can find. A Republican-lite Southerner, that’ll give the Right almost everything they ever wanted. Welfare reform, NAFTA, DOMA, GATT, a balanced budget, surpluses, and a military victory.” thingie.
For our sins we got eight years of partisan hearings, government shutdown, slander, and impeachment, because while Conservatism might have been a movement once upon a time, too many of us failed to realize until it was too late that today's Conservatism is a moral dumpster fire of bigots, fundies, homophobes and imbeciles.
It is a disease that took over the country by screaming that everyone who disagreed with it was a god-hating traitor, and if you expect one iota of pity from anyone on this side of the moral Universe for finally getting bitten by the mad dog you’ve been feeding all these years, you can go fuck yourself with a steam hammer.
Once that disease is eradicated, we'll get right back to playing nice.
But until then, Anna Karenina, your locomotive is waiting.
Just to prevent any misunderstanding on the part of anyone on Team Romney who have mistaken your occasional expressions of faux horror at the shambling, Gorgon killbot your Party has become for an unwillingness to go immediately and enthusiastically back to work for the shambling, Gorgon killbot Party, have you considered just going all the way and renaming your Daily Beast column, "Please for the love of God and the Angel Moroni why won't Mitt Romney hire me already?!?"
I mean, since it's loyalty first and everything else second with you guys anyway it won't cost you anything: you'll still be able to use your position to smuggle wingnut goofs like Ramesh Ponnuru and Ann Coulter back into mainstream acceptability (for which they will, in turn, owe you big once they get their own shows on CNN) and Andrew Sullivan has made it clear that he'll continue to drive ten thousand people to your site every day, rain or shine, no matter how big a fool you make of yourself, so what's to lose?
“The Lesser of Two Evils” -- Why Progressives Lose Posted on 02/02/2012 at 7:02 am by Bob Cesca
[My latest for The Huffington Post]
There comes a time during just about every general election cycle when a faction of progressive Democratic voters begin to harrumph and gripe about the two party system. Specifically, the following remark jumps back into popular discourse: “we’re choosing between the lesser of two evils.”
The off-handed rejection of the Democrats as “less evil” rapidly descends into hectoring and in-fighting on the left about either supporting a third party or drafting a primary challenger to oppose the Democratic nominee, presidential or otherwise. In fact, this time around, some progressives are even considering a vote for Ron Paul, the most conservative member of Congress in the last 75 years, even though his positions on a variety of issues, namely civil rights and reproductive rights, are indefensible.
Naturally, much of this point of view can be attributed to generalized frustration with the two party system and the ugliness of electoral politics. But there’s a trend among influential progressives that’s almost as frustrating as the system itself. Whenever the Republicans are in charge, progressives unite to defeat and replace the Republican leadership with Democrats. But when the Democrats are in charge, progressives have a tendency to hypnotically lapse into contrarian, too-hip-for-the-room ambivalence, apathy and an “everyone is evil” defeatism. Thus, support for Democratic Leader X is weakened — often with disastrous consequences, the least tragic of which being a reemergence of the previously ousted Republican leadership.
In 2000, this attitude won enough progressive votes for Ralph Nader to literally change the course of history. Widespread voter fraud aside, Nader achieved 97,488 votes in Florida. If just 538 of those votes for Nader had been for Al Gore instead, the history of the last 10 years might have been significantly different. But Nader’s involvement, along with high profile endorsements from progressive heroes like Michael Moore, delivered an election-altering percentage of votes to Nader.
The word on the street was the familiar and laughable notion that Gore and Bush were basically the same person. Both candidates and both parties were painted as equally crooked and corrupt, and the system was irrevocably stacked against the people. So otherwise smart progressives backed Nader as an antidote to the crippled system — a truly “progressive” antidote, unlike Gore.
Knowing what we know now, how seriously naive was that?
Even though he ran a flawed campaign, Gore would have been a vastly different president than George W. Bush in almost every respect. Of course he might have been impeached by the Republicans after 9/11, but I don’t want to skew too deeply into an alternate timeline. The point is that Nader has since disintegrated into a careerist troll and Al Gore has become a progressive lion. ...
is being re-released in 3D (so the boring awfulness will now shamble right off the screen and into you lap) I figured it was time to re-release the one good thing inspired by the "Phantom Menace": the best online movie review in the history of online movie reviews.
Finally let me vent some frustration about the Democrats. I open up Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook this morning and I see the big headline, “Administration To Make Digital Textbook Push.”
That’s what the Obama revolution has come to. The country is facing decline and trillion-dollar deficits and the administration has decided to focus its energies on digital textbooks. What about the nation’s pressing eraser shortage? Or the way parking spaces at the mall seem to get narrower year by year? Surely there are dozens of completely trivial issues they can latch on to in order to mask their absence of larger plans.
The Obama Administration has already proposed some very large and ambitious undertakings. Some you may agree with. Some you may not. Some you may thing don't go nearly far enough (I, for example, understand just how ambitious, deeply-focused and multidimensional the White House's manufacturing initiative could be if the are really going to get behind it and push.)
But it doesn't matter because nothing Obama Administration proposes (with the following, "everybody diving for cover" exception) is ever going to make it through the legislative abbatoire that is the Republican congress.
I could pound this simple fact home with example after example for hours, but really, why bother?
Mr. Brooks already knows all this, just as Mr. Brooks also knows that these facts doesn't matter because Mr. Brooks is not in the "truth" businesses.
He is in the "telling politically comforting Conservative lies" business.
The troubles faced by President Obama are not very different from the troubles faced by the presidents before him. Yet with each successive presidency these similar problems become more extreme in nature. Focusing on the particular personality of a particular president will miss the point—as we'll see again in obverse at whatever time the next president takes office.
Except there is no Liberal Hate Radio.
There is no Liberal Fox News.
There is no Liberal Regnery Press.
There is no Liberal wingnut welfare system that makes sure that its writers get paid.
There is no Liberal Grover Norquist.
There were no years and years of sham hearings and kneecapping special prosecutors used to grind the Bush Administration to a halt.
And despite richly deserving it, George W. Bush was never impeached.
I could go on for hours, but really, why bother?
Mr. Frum already knows all this, just as Mr. Frum also knows that is doesn't matter because Mr. Frum is not in the "truth" businesses. He is in the "telling politically comforting Conservative lies" business.
Step One: Take one, cogent, well-written Digby post which -- in passing -- cuts a deep, bloody gouge out of Andrew Sullivan's massive and painfully well-documented professional and ideological hypocrisy.*
Step Two: Lop off a big chunk of the piece's inconvenient "context" which gives it its moral and political momentum.
Step Four: Ignore the hilarious irony that the willfully obtuse narcissism with which your rebuttal is written was exactly what Digby was taking you to task for in her post.
Step Five: Make sure your blog does not accept comments.
Some choose to go to the Moon. Some choose to believe that the purpose of government in a representative democracy is to take up the greatest educational, environmental and economic burdens and challenges that we face as a nation, and that rational people contending in the public arena is the best way to thrash out our differing priorities.
And some choose to believe the Earth is 9,000 years old. That any collective action taken on behalf "We The People..." is evil. That any government beyond sending them Social Security checks and cutting their taxes is evil. That rationality is elitist. That facts are irrelevant. That any opposition to their disastrous superstitions and paranoia is evil. That compromise is evil.
For the former, there is now no greater cultural imperative than insuring the electoral extinction of the latter.
The safe and orderly demolition of the Right is our generation's Moon shot.
Paul pursued strategy of publishing controversial newsletters, associates say
By Jerry Markon and Alice Crites, Published: January 27
Ron Paul, well known as a physician, congressman and libertarian , has also been a businessman who pursued a marketing strategy that included publishing provocative, racially charged newsletters to make money and spread his ideas, said three people with direct knowledge of Paul’s businesses.
The Republican presidential candidate has denied writing inflammatory passages in the pamphlets from the 1990s and said recently that he did not read them at the time or for years afterward. Numerous colleagues said he does not hold racist views.
But people close to Paul’s operations said he was deeply involved in the company that produced the newsletters, Ron Paul & Associates, and closely monitored its operations, signing off on articles and speaking to staff members virtually every day.
“It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. . . . He would proof it,’’ said Renae Hathway, a former secretary in Paul’s company and a supporter of the Texas congressman’s.
The newsletters point to a rarely seen and somewhat opaque side of Paul, who has surprised the political community by becoming an important factor in the Republican race. The candidate, who has presented himself as a kindly doctor and political truth teller, declined in a recent debate to release his tax returns, joking that he would be “embarrassed” about his income compared with that of his richer GOP rivals.
Yet a review of his enterprises reveals a sharp-eyed businessman who for nearly two decades oversaw the company and a nonprofit foundation, intertwining them with his political career. The newsletters, which were launched in the mid-1980s and bore such names as the Ron Paul Survival Report, were produced by a company Paul dissolved in 2001.
The company shared offices with his campaigns and foundation at various points, said those familiar with the operation. Public records show Paul’s wife and daughter were officers of the newsletter company and foundation; his daughter also served as his campaign treasurer.
Jesse Benton, a presidential campaign spokesman, said that the accounts of Paul’s involvement were untrue and that Paul was practicing medicine full time when “the offensive material appeared under his name.” Paul “abhors it, rejects it and has taken responsibility for it as he should have better policed the work being done under his masthead,” Benton said. He did not comment on Paul’s business strategy.
‘I’ve never read that stuff’
Mark Elam, a longtime Paul associate whose company printed the newsletters, said Paul “was a busy man” at the time. “He was in demand as a speaker; he was traveling around the country,’’ Elam said in an interview coordinated by Paul’s campaign. “I just do not believe he was either writing or regularly editing this stuff.’’
In the past, Paul has taken responsibility for the passages because they were published under his name. But last month, he told CNN that he was unaware at the time of the controversial passages. “I’ve never read that stuff. I’ve never read — I came — was probably aware of it 10 years after it was written,’’ Paul said.
A person involved in Paul’s businesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid criticizing a former employer, said Paul and his associates decided in the late 1980s to try to increase sales by making the newsletters more provocative. They discussed adding controversial material, including racial statements, to help the business, the person said.
“It was playing on a growing racial tension, economic tension, fear of government,’’ said the person, who supports Paul’s economic policies but is not backing him for president. “I’m not saying Ron believed this stuff. It was good copy. Ron Paul is a shrewd businessman.’’
The articles included racial, anti-Semitic and anti-gay content. They claimed, for example, that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “seduced underage girls and boys’’; they ridiculed black activists by suggesting that New York be named “Zooville” or “Lazyopolis”; and they said the 1992 Los Angeles riots ended “when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.’’ The June 1990 edition of the Ron Paul Political Report included the statement: “Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.”
It is unclear precisely how much money Paul made from his newsletters, but during the years he was publishing them, he reduced his debts and substantially increased his net worth, according to his congressional and presidential disclosure reports.
In 1984, he reported debt of up to $765,000, most of which was gone by 1995, when he reported a net worth of up to $3.3 million. Last year, he reported a net worth of up to $5.2 million.
...
The idea that Ron Paul would neither know nor care nor ever hear even a single word of feedback about what was was going on with his cash cow was always ludicrous.
And anyway, I don't know what the big surprise is: the is exactly the same strategy Fox News, Hate Radio, Regnery Press, etc. uses to reliably rake in billions of dollars and millions of votes year after years after year.
"Today's "conservatives" would use the impeachment provision to oppose an elected president's fiscal policies. If you want to to grasp just how much contempt they really have for the Constitution and the institutions of government - something actual conservatives care about - absorb that fact." - Andrew Sullivan
Resolved, That William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited...
Introduced December 15, 1998
Let's see now...January 2012...minus December 1998...carry the Y2K problem...equals...a long ass time ago, Mr. Sullivan.
More than enough years of Conservative treachery and treason clearly visible as far as the eye can see for anyone with a functional cerebral cortex and a conscience to figure that the GOP is an irredeemable shitpile of bigots, Christopaths and plutocrats, who will never stop hag-riding this country from one disaster to another until they are driven to political extinction.
I didn't write this: I lifted it from "DUGLARRI" in the comment section of this New Yorker article, added one additional line at the end and posted it here because I felt it needed some additional air time.
The Lament of the CEO
I didn't complain when we sent the assembly jobs overseas because I'm not an assembly worker.
I wasn't concerned when we sent the tech support to India because I'm not in tech support.
I didn't sweat when we sent the R&D overseas because I'm not a scientist.
I wasn't worried when we sent finance, legal, and marketing overseas because I'm not a marketer, or a lawyer, or a finance person.
Now one of my former suppliers is selling a new product just like mine, but for half what I can sell it for.
I won't complain now, either, because I'm too busy looking for a new job.
Someone on a previous comment thread wanted to know what I did for a living since I "can't get a job in journalism" and since Willard Romney is a fine, hardworking Murrican and not a mooching, useless Liberal eater like me.
Or something.
So, here you go, expanded a little from what I left in my own comment section, with name and dates fuzzed out to protect the insolentindolent innocent.
My job?
I am currently unemployed and looking for full time work.
Over the last 3 years -- since being laid off from a very demanding, multi-disciplinary position (everything from performance management to writing white papers to managing remote facilities) at which I worked for 10 years, and routinely put in 80-100 hrs/week (no overtime when you are in management) -- I have been underemployed, and have worked several part-time or temporary contract gigs for organizations which desperately wanted to bring me on full time but had their budgets slashed as a direct or indirect result of the Great Recession.
I have also just about exhausted everything I carefully put aside for a rainy day during those years because I never imagined it would rain so long and so hard.
In the past I have been (since leaving puberty behind and in no particular order) a computer programmer and systems analyst, a college professor, corporate trainer, an IT manager, research manager, editor, grant writer, regular writer, senior executive in charge of damn-near-everything from speechwriting to strategic planning to making the PowerPoints look purdy, a policy wonk, performance management guy, project manager, department reorganizer, consultant several times over, a direct social service provider and much more.
I have briefed congressional staff on more than one occasion, prepared bosses for public hearings, and addressed foreign delegations.
I have been on the radio several times, done public speaking, and sold a few stories here and there.
I have made many inquiries about work in the journalism/pundit trade -- in print or in front of a mic and/or camera -- and have never heard back from anyone. I have sent out lots of resumes and inquiries for many other things and, for the most part, have never heard back from anyone. I don't take any of that personally because shouting into an abyss is just how it is in the working world today.
On my last gig, I was heavily recruited for a full-time job by both my boss and his boss. I went through an intense, week-long series of interviews and psych, IQ and "cultural fit" exams. After they were done, I was told I had a virtual lock on the job. That I was perfect for it. My boss was excited. His boss was excited. HR was excited because the number of hoops they had to leap through to hire anyone at this place exhausted them and they were always glad when it looked like the end was in sight. Then, two days before my temporary contract ended, the president of the organization abruptly decided that she wanted to move in a "different direction". My contract was not extended and I was let go. My boss was in tears. His boss apologized. HR was stunned. I have not been able to find anything since.
I have also written and Photoshopped this blog almost every day for going on seven years -- rain or shine, 80-hour-work-week or unemployed-and-getting-discouraged -- and podcast every week with Blue Gal (the 112th straight episode will drop tomorrow) which, all combined and despite the incredible kindness and generosity of my readers and our listeners, brings in considerably less than what a single, minimum wage/no benefit job would pay.
I am, of course, also an amateur historian, amateur paleontologist, definer of civilization and leader of the civilizing forces...but it turns out those gigs only pay a living wage when you can get casino moguls to write you multi-million-dollar checks :-)
The address made plain what has been increasingly obvious for some time. After flirting with the role of the reasonable centrist after his party’s defeat in 2010, President Obama has decided to run for re-election as a full-throated liberal populist.
Like the many of his compatriots within the ivied cloister of our Establishment Punditocracy -- from David Brooks and his ludicrous asymmetriphobic obsession with Centrism to Tom Friedman and his embarrassing public extrusions of rambly, malformed English in defense of Third Party fairy tales (from the Columbia Journalism Review) --
Over the weekend, The New York Times op-ed page published one of Tom Friedman’s periodic columns about the need for a uprising of the “radical center.” It was, unsurprisingly, terrible. Though the details of these columns change with each iteration—this one relied heavily on a new initiative called Americans Elect, which brings together two of Friedman’s favorite things, wealthy people and the Internet—the basic wrongheadedness does not.
Friedman’s idea seems to be that if only we can find some reform that will allow us to “break the oligopoly of the two-party system,” it might, someday, be possible for someone who holds 90 percent of Barack Obama’s stated policy positions—plus support for a carbon tax—to assume a position of power. Then, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear—maybe because some fantasy vice president (Michael Bloomberg?) applies some of his “pragmatic independent” pixie dust?—political dysfunction disappears, and a magical new era of “superconsensus” to solve our “superhard” problems is ushered in. Startlingly, this consensus seems to closely reflect many of Friedman’s personal policy preferences.
Friedman has been engaged in third-party wishcasting for at least five years now; Brendan Nyhan’s excellent, running blog post on third-party media hype records that back in the 2006 election cycle, Friedman longed for a “Geo-Green Party.” His “radical center” phase, though, seems to be inspired by the Tea Party era. Friedman has devoted columns to this mythical middle at least three times since spring 2010. They’re as predictable as the tides, or a hackneyed lede about a conversation with a taxi driver or tech entrepreneur.
-- I long ago lost interest in the meat and taters of what Mr. Douthat had to say about pretty much everything.
Instead, like Brooks and Friedman, it is the mere fact of Mr. Douthat's existence that I find fascinating. As if the Opportunity rover had suddenly spotted a Fiddler Crab wandering the surface of Mars while singing honky-tonk in Portuguese, or an archivist had unearthing a manuscript proving that Leonardo da Vinci was 77 meters tall and that he invented bar codes and Velcro, it would not be the physical size of such discoveries -- their weight or height -- that would make them profound, but the implications of those discoveries which would reorder our thinking about the Universe.
Thus it is with Ross Douthat -- a silly little man scuttling across the surface of a world where every notion of common sense and meritocracy says he should not be. And scuttling right along beside him? Mr. Brooks and Mr Friedman, each also blithe defying the laws of logic and competence and prospering in an environment where they really, really have no business existing at all. All protected within an expensive and well-maintained media bunker which prevents any of the consequences of their follies and idiocies from blowing back on them in the slightest degree.
It is a puzzle, and as someone who is both very interested in how all kinds of organizations perform -- in how and why they succeed or fail or bamboozle themselves into committing suicide -- and who also loves fiddling with minimum information puzzles, I find it almost irresistible to try and deduce what possible concatenation of dysfunctions, delusions and very poor management decisions must have taken place at the New York Times to result in them simultaneously ensconcing Messrs. Douthat, Friedman and Brooks together on the editorial page of America's Newspaper of Record.
UPDATE: When I wrote this long piece today, I swear I had no idea how perfectly it would tongue-in-groove fit together with the manufacturing and job training sections of Barack Obama's State of the Union speech. I had just effing had it with David Brooks (once again) getting away with dropping another steaming load of pernicious Centrist claptrap into the pages of the NYT.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
If I had never written a blog post in my life, I believe the sheer brass of
Mr. Brooks' calculated malfeasance today would inspire me to learn Blogger or WordPad just so I could publicly detail the cardinal and venial sin he commits against honest journalism this time around.
You see, in a Basic David Brooks Column/Variation #3 (a heartwarming tale of human spirit overcomingness cribbed from somewhere bolted to yet another completely dishonest indictment of "Both Sides") you might have to run a couple of hydrostatic tests on the thing to find the bad weld or the false bottom -- not that hard, but it does require some experience.
Free-Market Socialism ... The idiocy of our current political debate is that neither side seems capable of talking about the interplay of economic and social forces. Most of the Republican candidates talk as if all that is needed is more capitalism. But lighter regulation and lower taxes won’t, on their own, help the Maddie Parliers of the world get the skills they need to compete.
Democrats, meanwhile, have shifted their emphasis from lifting up the poor to pounding down the rich. Democratic candidates no longer emphasize early childhood education and community-building. Instead they embrace the pseudo-populist Occupy Wall Street hokum — the opiate of the educated classes.
This materialistic ethos emphasizes reducing inequality instead of expanding opportunity. Its policy prescriptions begin (and sometimes end) with raising taxes on the rich. This makes you feel better if you detest all the greed-heads who went into finance. It does nothing to address those social factors, like family breakdown, that help explain why American skills have not kept up with technological change.
-- and he did it on a topic I just happen to know oodles about: labor markets, education and training systems, the huge and ever-growing training gap, manufacturing, etc.
... If President Obama is really serious about restoring American economic dynamism, he needs an aggressive two-pronged approach: More economic freedom combined with more social structure; more competition combined with more support.
As a survey of nearly 10,000 Harvard Business School grads by Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin makes clear, to get companies to locate their plants in the U.S., Obama is going to have to simplify the tax code, cut corporate rates, streamline regulations, make immigration policy more flexible and balance the budget over the long term.
To ensure there’s skilled labor for those plants, Obama would have to champion different policies: successful training programs like Job Corps, better coordination between colleges and employers, better treatment for superstar teachers, more child care options and better early childhood education.
...
Yes, I am forced to confess that in addition to have versed myself thoroughly in things like science fiction (both canonical and arcane), I also own and have actually read such action-packed bodice-rippers as:
"Skill Wars: Winning the Battle for Productivity and Profit"
"The 2010 Meltdown: Solving the Impending Jobs Crisis"
"Trying Hard Is Not Good Enough" (on how to correctly measure and make sense of system changes)
"Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education"
"Creating Public Value -- Strategic Management in Government"
I have a bookshelf full of the stuff which I am in the process of putting up for adoption because,
I honestly don't know if I will ever again have chance to use in a professional capacity, and
These aren't the sorts of tomes that any sane person would haul around for recreational reading.
I'm also the sort of wonk who has a dozen board-feet of policy documents quietly oxidizing somewhere in cold storage, along with the regs for various government training
projects and initiatives, reviews of high school and community college curriculum and just an ass-load of material on what are known as "sector-based" programs because they figure out what sectors are most active and long-term viable in the local economy and then concentrate on getting all the players -- labor and management, business and gummint -- to work together to strengthen that sector for everyone's mutual advantage.
And working together on a local level is key, which is why flogging the President of the United State for not being able to force the owners of some metal stamping plant in Peoria to play nice with the members of the local school board is just one of the many, many layers of infantile incomprehension at how the real world really works with which Mr. Brooks' horseshit hoagie is piled high.
For example, does Mr. Brooks have any any idea how many hundreds of thousands of dollars -- sometimes million of dollars -- it costs to set up and maintain a decent manufacturing training program at a community college? Does the factory Mr. Brooks mentions -- "Standard Motor Products, which makes fuel injectors" -- exist within a cluster of similar plants where the pool of potential trainees who might all need similar training on similar machines makes such a large capital investment makes sense...or would such a facility stand idle most of the time?
Given the high demand for these skills, and the high wages that go along with them, how exactly does Mr. Brooks plan to lure competent machinists off the factory floor and into the classroom to teach his programs? Will
Mr. Brooks' program(s) offer academic credit, industry certification or will he force the local community college board and business leaders to build a curriculum that will do both? Will the credit be transferable to the nearest four-year institution, or will a student who want to move onward and upward discover find that his hundreds of hours have been consigned to some non-degree-seeking Adult Ed limbo and have to start over?
Will there be night classes for the locals who already have a job but need to upgrade their skills?
Are you going to drug-screen people?
Oh, and who exactly is paying for all of this? Because regardless of what Mr. Brooks seems to believe, the President of the United States does not personally stand outside every unemployment office and community college in America asking people what they want to do with the rest of their lives, testing them for aptitude and then handing out vouchers for whatever their school will cost. That money may come from a lot of different sources , but if you want your local employment and training system to foot any of the bill, then you'd better make damn sure the whole thing is certified by the local workforce board.
Any such system will, of course, have any number of strong advocates for spending all of these scarce resources on entirely different things like training nurses or long-distance truck driver, so I assume Mr. Brooks has figured out a way to set up the hundreds of local governing bodies that will make all these very local decisions in a way that will keep everybody happy, or at least willing to forgo sabotaging the entire enterprise. Or is assuming that the President will attend to each of these concerns personally?
By the way, the local factors and considerations I have ticked off so far? These are just the ones I came up off the top of my head after an exhausting trek across the state last night and they barely scratch the surface. We could, for example, kill a mighty good bottle of scotch and not cover the half of variables involved in hashing out the pros and cons of
"distance-learning" (Will it be permitted? Encouraged? Prohibited?) or putting newbies and experience workers in the same classroom?
And after that, if you then wanted to talk about the horrors of trying to get a community college to risk its financial security to re-calibrate its 20-years-out-of-date degree program (and its 20-years-out-of-date instructors and equipment) in order to graduate students with industry certifications you would also have to agree to make time to solve the problem of getting some pterodactyl in a company's HR department to risk their job security by re-calibrating their 20-years-out-of-date job descriptions, rustic workplace culture and often just-plain-ridiculous expectations, because it ain't just public institutions who have failed us.
We would also need to talk about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka "da stimulus") which Mr. Brooks failed to mention spent hundreds of millions of dollars (while working inside an absurdly constricted 18 month spending window) advancing every one of the issues he is bitching about.
We would also need to talk succession planning, employee buyouts, and a culture that says encouraging a student to take up a trade instead of focusing on college is an insult and possibly racist, because they are all interrelated and all in urgent!urgent!urgent! need of attention.
As I said, if this were my first blog post, I would take my freshly-minted, community college trained, industry-certified blogging skills and write a long, shapely jeremiad encompassing all of this. I'd spill 10,000 words wondering how Mr. Brooks can keep getting away with dropping such grotesque distortions into the op-ed pages of the New York Times.
Wondering who -- by name -- permits this disgrace to go on and on and interminably on?
Wondering who keeps allowing Mr. Brooks to just wish away ugly reality of the fanatical and united opposition that this President faces on Every. Single. Fucking. Issue. so that he can spew his malevolent Centrist lies again and again and again.
But this is not my first blog post. This is, in fact, getting up toward my 3,700th, and I know for sure that I will never get an answer to any of questions no matter how many times I ask them, no matter how often they are email to the people involved, and no matter what font I use.
And yet, if only for the sake of ordering my own thoughts -- and for the sake of a notation made in some future record of this time and place that back in the Bad Old Days when clowns like Mr. Brooks were paid vast sums of money and given virtually unlimited access to the American media, there were at least a few voices pointing out that our media Emperors had been bare-assed nekkid all along -- I feel compelled to carry on.
But rather than wrenching my back carrying more adjectives down from the attic, allow me to restate Mr. Brooks' key paragraph --
To ensure there’s skilled labor for those plants, Obama would have to champion different policies: successful training programs like Job Corps, better coordination between colleges and employers, better treatment for superstar teachers, more child care options and better early childhood education.
-- and use Teh Internet to make my case.
Here is a video of Candidate Obama pointing to an innovative Chicago high school -- Austin Polytechnical Academy -- by name as an example of what his administration wanted to do. This school was created in one of Chicago's toughest neighborhoods -- a neighborhood which had been destroyed by decades of deindustrialized, disinvestment and vulture capitalism.
A year later, here is Senator Dick Durbin visiting the same school and listening to the kids tell him him about coffee manufacturing
Here is the same school featured on the News Hour.
Here is President Barack Obama addressing a joint session of Congress last year and asking for their support for his job's plan:
"Already, we've mobilized business leaders to train 10,000 American engineers a year, by providing company internships and training. Other businesses are covering tuition for workers who learn new skills at community colleges. And we're going to make sure the next generation of manufacturing takes root not in China or Europe, but right here, in the United States of America"
Here is President Barack Obama begging Congress to help him provide the unmployed with temporary assistance and a path to finding permanent employment:
Here is President Barack Obama asking Congress to help him make "America more competitive for the long haul" by doing what is necessary to "out-build and out-educate and out-innovate every other country on Earth"
"As I've argued since I ran for this office, we have to look beyond the immediate crisis and start building an economy that lasts into the future -- an economy that creates good, middle-class jobs that pay well and offer security. We now live in a world where technology has made it possible for companies to take their business anywhere. If we want them to start here and stay here and hire here, we have to be able to out-build and out-educate and out-innovate every other country on Earth."
Here is a link to the Department of Labor's Annual reports page, which is packed with information from all 50 states and every major metroplitan area on the progress that has been made in trying to fix the decade's old problem of getting people into good jobs with a decent future
I could go on like this for another 100 pages, but I hope I have made my point.
I should also mention that to find these "Obama + manufacturing" videos online, one has to be willing to wade through an ocean of Republican bile, lies and unified, fanatical opposition to Every. Single. Fucking thing President Obama has proposed: a unified, fanatical opposition which Mr. Brooks simply refuses to acknowledge because doing so would screw up the incredibly lucrative Centrist scam off of which he and so many others like him parasitically feed.
But whatever the craven Mr. Brooks chooses to pretend, over in the wingnut universe where most of his Republican jackal pals reside, the auto industry -- that pillar of the manufacturing industry in America and creator of the very jobs Mr. Brooks is talking about -- was not and is not discussed as just another market sector need of "lighter regulation and lower taxes" but as a massive front group for Evil Union Thugs which should have been allowed to crash and burn (taking all of its second- and third- tier suppliers with it)
in a glorious bonfire of pure freedom-luvin' laissez-faire capitalism.
And this truly deranged idea -- that what the American Economy most needed in the depths of the Great Recession was massive, collapse which would have put additional millions out of work -- was not a belief the fringe nutjobs whispered about in quiet rooms: it was a broad, wingnut consensus which virtually the entire Conservative brain caste including GOP candidate and future-David-Brooks-meal-ticket, Willard Romney
was only too happy to shout from the rooftops.
Weird how Mr. Brooks seems to have overlooked or forgotten all of that, isn't it?
Mr. Brooks also seems to have overlooked or forgotten the fact that even modest, non-partisan legislative efforts like the Strengthening Employment Clusters to Organize Regional Success Act -- which was designed to target funding directly at the issue he identifies --
Strengthening Employment Clusters to Organize Regional Success Act of 2011 or SECTORS Act of 2011 - Amends the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 to require the Secretary of Labor to award renewable three-year competitive industry or sector partnership grants to eligible entities to develop strategies that: (1) encourage growth and competitiveness through work with employers within a targeted industry cluster; (2) help workers move toward economic self-sufficiency and ensure that they have access to supportive services; (3) address the needs of firms with limited human resources or in-house training capacity, including small- and medium-sized firms; and (4) coordinate with entities that carry out state and local workforce investment, economic development, and education activities.or workers including, steadier employment with increased earnings and better access to benefits.
-- are doomed to die quiet, cloakroom deaths so long as they face the united and fanatical opposition by the leaders of Mr. Brooks' Republican Party. And everyone knows it.
Just like he somehow manages to overlook or forget the fact that, in the wingnut universe,
the mere suggestion that the United States should maybe have an "industrial policy" so that we can start to catch up with with the rest of the advanced manufacturing countries is spoken of as if Barack Obama was trying to hand the nation's nuclear lauch codes over to Cesar Chavez.
Just like he somehow manages to overlook or forget that over in the wingnut universe the appointment of Ron Bloom to coordinate Administration manufacturing policy was treated as definitive proof of a massive, secret, Maoist plot to destroy America being led by the malicious Communist-in-Chief.
...a clip of GOP Party boss and the most popular Conservative radio host in history -- Rush Limbaugh -- explaining that Barack Obama is a Marxist for the 851st time
...and a montage of the most influential Conservative liars in American history explaining that Barack Obama is, as the young people say, everything but a child of God.
If the last seven years and +3,600 posts have taught me one thing about blogging, it is that we pottymouthed Liberals will never be a serious impediment to Mr. Brooks in any way. We will never be able to prevent him from using his national platform to repeat his pernicious lies over and over again. We will never be able to undo all damage he does, or deprogram all the credulous readers who believe every word he says.
Mr. Brooks makes a handsome living tells plutocrat-pleasing lies, and there is nothing we can do about that.
What we can do, as citizens, is tell the truth as we know it, as best we can, in any venue which is available to us and hope it does some good.
And the truth is, while I strongly disagree with many of the specific policy prescription the Obama Administration has offered up to pull us out of the terrible and widening hole our manufacturing economy is in, President Obama inherited a manufacturing education and training system that was not a system at all. It was disaster; a series
of make-do patches that had been slapped onto an economic sector which has been in full retreat for 30 years.
Basic childhood education was and is a tragedy.
High schools were and are a catastrophe.
Programs for vocational education which provided exactly the kind of training and direction Mr. Brooks is whining about
have been underfunded and understaffed to the point of collapse for decades while their advocates were marginalized and
ignored. This happened because up until very recently we were content as country
to let our manufacturing base slide into the ocean -- because everyone knew were were all gonna get rich going into computer programming!
As thousands of small, neighborhood companies vanished -- many for no reason other than a lack of succession
planning by their owners -- America shrugged because who cared about a lot of old factories in bad neighborhoods anyway
when everyone knew were were all gonna get rich in the stock market!
As Reaganomics came into full, horrifying flower -- as we sleepwalked into became an importer/debtor nation instead of an exporter/creditor nation -- the informal but absolutely critical pipeline of skilled workers was permitted to dry up and blow away because everyone knew were were all gonna get rich off of real estate!
And then it all fell apart almost overnight...and suddenly everybody wanted to know why the schools weren't working, why their mortgages were underwater and where all those good factory jobs had gone.
But answering those questions honestly and in full measure -- telling the simple truth about where we are, how we got here, who is working to solve our problems and who is working to oppose every solution -- would not only fail to stroke a single plutocrat's egos, but would also freak the shit out the Great Wad who still believe in Centrist fairy tales.
Which is is why you will never read about it under Mr. Brooks' byline in the New York Times.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
In the middle of lambasting the Right for being what they were long before he suddenly noticed, Mr. Sullivan has been trying to pick a fight with Fox News for a couple of weeks now, going so far as to repeatedly state that he had been blacklisted (one example here):
Listen to Limbaugh, the GOP's chief spokesman. How does a Romney channel that level of viciousness and rage? Listen to Hannity. How does a smooth manager reach a base that wants the same Manichean approach to foreign policy, in which there is only ally (Israel) and enemies everywhere else (Europe, China, the Arab world, Russia)? Read Mark Levin. There are only two options now on the table, as he sees it: freedom or slavery. And a vote for Obama is a vote for slavery.
This is the current GOP. It purges dissidents, it vaunts total loyalty, it polices discourse for any deviation. If you really have a cogent argument, you find yourself fired - like Bruce Bartlett [or?] David Frum - or subject to blacklists, like me [on?] Fox.
I understand how he feels, but Jeez, why single out Fox?
I mean, I always thought being completely ignored by the media no matter how cogent your argument, no matter how pungently or silkily you make it and no matter how many times and in how many venues you repeat it was pretty much the working definition of "blogger".
But I was wrong and I admit it -- being completely ignored by the media is, of course, the working definition of "Liberal blogger".
After all, regardless of the raving idiocy of their individual positions and pronouncements, from Pammy Atlas to Michele Malkin to Erick son of Erick
to Dana Loesch to Ramesh Ponnuru to Box Turtle Ben Domenech, to Andrew Brietbart to Chicago's own mini-Brietbart, Warner Todd Huston...Conservative bloggers have come to expect a level of community support, respect, remuneration, media acknowledgement and even deference that Liberal bloggers long ago gave up even dreaming about.
We on the Left stand on our orange crates and shout into the Conservative and Centrist wasteland that our public dialogue has become.
We on the Left hear nothing but the wind answer us back because the goons and con men who own that wasteland -- who made that wasteland -- do not dare acknowledge that we are here and that we have been right all along.
Being a Liberal blogger, I never expect Mr. Sullivan to reply to or even acknowledge the dozens and dozens of very well-reason critiques I have laid at his door over the years, any more than I expect, say, David Brooks to take any note whatsoever of the Liberal blogosphere's fusillade of well-reasoned rebuttals and refutations that strafe his bi-weekly Reasonable Conservative midden pile to bits every single week of the year. Any acknowledgement of the legitimacy of Liberal critiques and the overwhelming superiority of the Liberal batting average compared to the Conservative and Centrist batting averages on issue after issue would immediately reveal both the core tenet of the Right ("The Left is wrong all the time on every single issue") and the core tenet of the Center ("The Left is exactly half-wrong all the time on every single issue") to be as ridiculous as Flat Eartherism, and publicly turn their well-remunerated spokesmodels into unemployable laughingstocks.
So that's never gonna happen.
But my fellow Weblog Award winner Andrew Sullivan is not a Liberal blogger. He is a Conservative blogger and he feels his is owed an answer -- owed the courtesy of a reply from people who have so far only paused between their many, other lies long enough to take a dump on his work before returning to their regularly scheduled propaganda.
So, let's go over that definition of "blacklist", shall we?
black·list [blak-list] -- noun:
1. a list of persons under suspicion, disfavor, censure, etc.: His record as an anarchist put him on the government's blacklist.
2. a list privately exchanged among employers, containing the names of persons to be barred from employment because of untrustworthiness or for holding opinions considered undesirable.
Mr. Sullivan is the leading traffic-driver for the one of the largest news sites in the world.
He gets his books published at-will.
He can appear on teevee programs ranging from "C-Span" to "Real Time" to "Hardball" to "Anderson Cooper 360" very much as it suits him.
He can get his often ridiculous opinions printed in prominent, global-reach newspapers and periodicals ranging from "The Atlantic" to "The New Republic" to "The New York Times" whenever he pleases.
And two weeks ago, his boss handed him the front page of "Newsweek" magazine.
See, this is not the media biography of someone who has been "blacklisted": this is the media biography of a fully-initiated member of the Club.
However if you would like the know what the media biography of someone who has been blacklisted looks like, it's pretty easy.
