Monk

It's been a while since we got something from Pat Robertson. Sometimes I think he has died, but maybe the media is getting better at ignoring him. For myself, I love the snappy and striking quote and can ill resist him.


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During Thursday’s edition of The 700 Club co-host Kristi Watts read a letter from a woman who wanted to know why men stopped dating her when they learned that she had adopted three daughters from three different countries.

“Can I answer?” Watts asked. “I was going to say because they’re dogs. … That’s just wrong on every level.”

“No, it’s not wrong,” Robertson disagreed. “A man doesn’t want to take on the United Nations, and this woman’s got all these various children and blended family. What is it?”

The TV preacher then told a story about his “dear friend” who had adopted a son with brain damage and the boy “grew up weird.”

“You just never know what’s been done to a child before you get that child,” he explained. “What kind of sexual abuse, what kind of cruelty, what kind of food deprivation, etc., etc., etc.”

“So, you’re not a dog because you don’t want to take on that responsibility,” Robertson added. “You don’t have to take on somebody else’s problems.”

“OK, let’s get to the next question. I’m in trouble.”

-- News-LJ

I’d been wondering how long it would take Republicans to realize that Paul Ryan is their guy.

He’s the cutest package that cruelty ever came in. He has a winning air of sad cheerfulness. He’s affable, clean cut and really cut, with the Irish altar-boy widow’s peak and droopy, winsome blue eyes and unashamed sentimentality.

Who better to rain misery upon the heads of millions of Americans?

[...]

Ryan should stop being so lovable. People who intend to hurt other people should wipe the smile off their faces.

-- Maureen Dowd at The New York Times

Apparently our rich folk feel as though they are besieged by we "do-nothing animals":

But over the past few months, it’s become clear that rich people are very, very afraid. Sometimes it feels like this was the main accomplishment of Occupy Wall Street: a whole lot of tightened sphincters. It’s not a stretch to say many residents of Park Avenue harbor vivid fears of a populist revolt like the one seen in The Dark Knight Rises, in which they cower miserably under their sideboards while ragged hordes plunder the silver.

[…]

More often than not, fears like these manifest as loathing for the current administration, as evidenced by the recent wave of Romney fund-raisers in the Hamptons. “Obama wants to take my money and give it to do-nothing animals,” one matron blurted at a recent party at the Pierre for Dick Morris’s Screwed!, the latest entry into a growing pile of socioeconomic snuff porn geared toward this audience.

When there are such wildly divergent perceptions as these, between the rich and the commoners, between conseervatives and liberals, between Republicans and Democrats, where can we hope for compromise and community. This nation really may be coming apart at the seams.

Another note on the febrile extremism of today's Republican Party. Though, I suppose it could be said that they are just very, very pro-'having more babies', which can sound kind of nice, if you don't think about it too hard.

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A House Republican lawmaker likened the implementation of a new mandate that insurers offer coverage for contraceptive services to Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks against the United States.

Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Kelly (R), an ardent opponent of abortion rights, said that today's date would live in infamy alongside those two other historic occasions. Wednesday marked the day on which a controversial new requirement by the Department of Health and Human Services, which requires health insurance companies to cover contraceptive services for women, goes into effect.

"I know in your mind you can think of times when America was attacked. One is December 7th, that's Pearl Harbor day. The other is September 11th, and that's the day of the terrorist attack," Kelly said at a press conference on Capitol Hill. "I want you to remember August the 1st, 2012, the attack on our religious freedom. That is a day that will live in infamy, along with those other dates."

-- News-LJ

Even "The Economist" magazine, a libertarian rag, hits on our Republicans.

Our prejudice is firmly in favour of a leaner state, but the Republicans need to recognise, as their intellectual forebears did from Adam Smith to Abraham Lincoln, that government has an important role to play in a capitalist economy, providing public goods and a safety net. Teddy Roosevelt broke up over-mighty companies, rather than doling out tax breaks to them. Why on earth are people who champion a small state supporting an expensive war on drugs that has filled the prisons to bursting point without reducing the supply of narcotics?

Perhaps the problem, other than unmitigated greed, is that their new inellectual light is Ayn Rand, which is a bit of a falling off from Smith and Lincoln. Of course, she probably would agree that this War on Drugs is misguided, but the Republicans still need to secure votes and must hit on popular hot-button issues, and, well, putting as many blacks and latinos away in prison can never be an entirely bad policy, as far as they are concerned, and is worth every penny.

(Source: Sully's Dish)

These are tough times to be a liberal Democrat. It has been for a few decades, and it only seems to be getting worse. Yet, we do enjoy these little glimmers in the reportage that suggest a growing understanding of how corrupt and greedy our Republicans have been getting in their growing power. It is doubtful that this matters electorally, but I sometimes like to keep these the-world-is-ending-and-it's-the-Republicans'-fault riffs. I know it makes me feel a little better to get some confirmation of what we know.

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As a local GOP official after President Obama’s election, I had a front-row seat as it became infected by a dangerous and virulent form of political rabies.

In the grip of this contagion, the Republican Party has come unhinged. Its fevered hallucinations involve threats from imaginary communists and socialists who, seemingly, lurk around every corner. Climate change- a reality recognized by every single significant scientific body and academy in the world- is a liberal conspiracy conjured up by Al Gore and other leftists who want to destroy America. Large numbers of Republicans- the notorious birthers- believe that the President was not born in the United States. Even worse, few figures in the GOP have the courage to confront them.

Republican economic policies are also indefensible. The GOP constantly claims that its opponents are engaged in “class warfare,” but this is an exercise in projection. In Republican proposals, the wealthy win, and the rest of us lose- one only has to look at Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget to see that.

As Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein have written, “the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” Its reckless behavior helps drive the political dysfunction crippling our nation.

In the end, it offers a dystopian vision of our future- a harsher, crueler and more merciless America starkly divided between the riders, and the ridden.

-- Michael Stafford at MSNBC

Jordan Michael Smith takes on one of the icons of American conservatism, Thomas Sowell, one of the very few black intellectuals who will carry the right-wing political banner, if not the only black intellectual of any renown. Mr. Smith discusses Sowell's book "A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles":

According to Sowell, American political debates follow two parallel lines tracking distinct visions of human nature. Those on the left have an unconstrained view of man, and those on the right have a constrained view. The unconstrained view holds that humans are perfectible creatures sullied only by their flawed social environments. With the proper education and social support, man can become an altruistic, even Christ-like being. Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the unconstrained thinker par excellence, holding that “men are not naturally enemies” and that the individual “is born free but everywhere is in chains.” Man is inherently rational in this perspective. With proper organization and education, universal peace is attainable, as is the eradication of poverty, violence, and disunion. John Kenneth Galbraith was a recent example of a thinker with an unconstrained view of human nature, according to Sowell.

In contrast, the constrained vision sees man as a beast, held in check by customs, traditions, and coercion. Adam Smith, the Federalist, and, especially, Edmund Burke epitomized the beliefs of the constrained view. Moral and intellectual limitations define the perspective of this outlook, which believes above all in the “general infirmities of human nature,” as Burke put it. War is ineradicable, as are class conflicts, hatred, and evil. The ideas of Friedrich Hayek represent the humility of the constrained view, writes Sowell.

For Sowell, these taxonomies go far in explaining political debates. “Conflicts of visions affect not only such large and enduring issues as economic planning versus laissez-faire, or judicial activism versus judicial restraint, but also such new issues as the most effective modes of Third World development, ‘affirmative action,’ or ‘comparable worth,’” he writes. “In each of these controversies, the assumptions of one vision lead logically to opposite conclusions from those of the other.”

Such is the principled case that Mr. Sowell proudly espouses. Mr. Smith argues that the reality is murkier, and that if you follow the actual positions that Sowell has taken over the years, you would have to look to other factors to account for his politics. For instance, when it came to the recent Iraq war, Mr. Sowell was among the hawks suppoting President George W. Bush's call for a regional democratic transformation, which hardly suggest a constrained vision of man. Interestingly, when our efforts turned into a debacle, Mr. Sowell was willing to change course and started speaking again of the limits of nation-building and the limits of human nature, but this suggests pragmatism more than principle, or as Smith writes, "Sowell does not so much subscribe to a political philosophy as adopt and abandon ideas whenever convenient to do so from a partisan standpoint."

Mr. Smith also raises gay politics to make his point. He brings out Sowell's statement from 2005: “What the activists really want is the stamp of acceptance on homosexuality, as a means of spreading that lifestyle, which has become a death style in the era of AIDS.” As Smith counters, “The notion that homosexuality can be spread to those who don’t want it reveals a tremendously malleable view of human nature.”

The point is that the difference between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats is not that liberals are dreamy and Republican conservatives are hardnosed in reality. If you look at the issue of climate change, for instance, who is in hard denial? My own view is perhaps crass, which is thus: if you want to predict where Republicans will be on an issue, you only have to ask what do the millionaires and billionaires want, and that is where they will be. When it comes to social issues, such as gay rights and abortion and race, where it is not clear where the monied interests naturally lie, then we see a more cagey politcs in which Republicans try to secure popular support by providing a politcal home for popular prejudice (so long as it does not impinge on money interests). Perhaps this is a bit reductionist, but, yeah, I think that money goes far in explaining Republican politics, the politics of plutocracy. This is not to say that Democrats do not value wealth, but at least Democrats see other interests as being important too.

A couple of colorful instances of racial antagonism have made it into my news feeds over the past couple of days. It is difficult to know what to make of anecdotal evidence, whether we are getting worse or whether these are isolated cases. Personally, I am inclined to associate the growth of right-wing politics with racism, but how tight that association is, I cannot say.

In the first instance, we have a black school principal in Brooklyn, Ms. Greta Hawkins, who disallowed the singing of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" at a kindergarten graduation. She has since gotten a lot of nasty messages. Here is the more provocative one showcased in the news story:

"You are a filthy, dirty, ugly subhuman gorilla... Lets hope that AIDS will do what sickle cell anemia failed to do, exterminate your whole simian race."

Though, it should be said that Ms. Hawkins also barred Justin Bieber's "Baby", and so this could just be about some excitable Bieber fans, but probably not. Personally, I suspect she simply has a decent aesthetic sense for good music.

In the other case, we have a Tea Partier, Ms. Inge Marler, who was apparently a little too comfortable in her speaking engagement, as she let fly this joke:

Marler describes a black child asking his mother what a democracy is.

‘Well, son, that be when white folks work every day so us poor folks can get all our benefits,’ the mother responds.

‘But mama, don’t the white folk get mad about that?’ the boy asks, to which she replies: ‘They sure do, son. They sure do. And that’s called racism.’

Now, the Ozark Tea Party, the hosts of this rally, are reported to be shocked by these remarks, "Oh, my gosh!" But, you know, old habits die hard, and in these politically correct times, one must be discreet.

The big question here is whether the evident failure of austerity to produce an economic recovery will lead to a “Plan B.” Maybe. But my guess is that even if such a plan is announced, it won’t amount to much. For economic recovery was never the point; the drive for austerity was about using the crisis, not solving it. And it still is.

-- Paul Krugman at The New York Times

It looks like Mr. Krugman has found the answer to that conundrum that was bothering him, about why conservative governments should be so locked into their ideas to cut social programs in the face of depressed economies, when all the economic knowledge we have points to using greater government spending, not less. The answer: conservatives do not care about the problems of their depressed economies, because the wealthy are not hurt by them, but only the poor and the middle-class. High unemployment, for instance, is hardly a problem for the wealthy. Accordingly, conservatives are taking advantage of the problems to shrink government and further consolidate plutocratic rule. As with cutting taxes, shrinking government programs for the common people is always their answer to any problem. This is what they are always about.

You can see Krugman in action at the BBC.