Category: The Opinionsphere

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The Media The Opinionsphere

This Week With Christiane Amanpour

Max Fisher in The Atlantic describes Christiane Amanpour as an ideal candidate to host This Week. He has me convinced:

Beltway pundits tend to emphasize Beltway concerns, like electoral campaigns and private scandals and colorful personalities.

Foreign reporters’ great strength, however, is their ability to see politics not as theater but as an extension of cultural, social, and economic forces. If Amanpour brings this approach to This Week, it would be more than just a breath of fresh air in the homogeneous Sunday line-up.

Some questioned her ability to be a tough interviewer for the seasoned Washington pols who would appear on her show. It seems a silly objection, especially considering this nugget Fisher pulled out of a recent New York Times article:

Reflecting on her interviews with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, whose reign is considered one of the world’s most brutal since World War II, Amanpour recently quipped, “He would slap you on the back, offer you a drink. He tried to be charming. But many of them do. You have to be on your guard.” Surely she can handle John Boehner.

[Image by Witness.org licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Domestic issues Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Our Unhinged Debate on Health Care Reform (cont.)

Ezra Klein:

I don’t want to exaggerate the importance of the death threats being made against congressmen who voted for health-care reform. Nuts are nuts. But there is a danger to the sort of rhetoric the GOP has used over the past few months. When Rep. Devin Nunes begs his colleagues to say “no to socialism, no to totalitarianism and no to this bill”; when Glenn Beck says the bill “is the end of America as you know it”; when Sarah Palin says the bill has “death panels” — that stuff matters.

I remember listening to the debate the night the House passed the Senate bill and the reconciliation fixes. There are a lot of critiques I could imagine folks on the right making of the legislation. “Regulations to define a minimum insurance benefit will impede innovation in low-deductible plans.” “Congress doesn’t have the will to stick to the cost savings, and until they prove able to do so, we can’t pass a new health-care entitlement.” “The health-care system is broken, and adding a new benefit doesn’t make sense outside the context of radical reform, as it will just create a new set of stakeholders who will resist the necessary changes.”

But totalitarianism? Death panels? The end of America as we know it? These critiques aren’t just wrong in their description of a cautious, compromised reform that uses private insurers and spends only 4 percent of what we spend on health care in an average year. They’re shocking in terms of what the speakers believe their colleagues and representatives are willing to do to the American people.

Read the whole thing. This type of post is what makes Ezra Klein a great blogger and a must-read.

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Barack Obama Domestic issues Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Liberalism and the Punishments of the Free Market

Jonathan Chait riffing off of Representative Paul Ryan:

Liberals do not believe in equality of outcome in most spheres of life. There are myriad punishments for the losers of the free market that liberals can accept: less money, less vacation time, lower social status, more uncomfortable, dangerous, or physically draining work. But the denial of medical treatment should not be among those punishments.

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Conservativism Criticism Domestic issues Liberalism Political Philosophy Politics The Opinionsphere

Thumbnail Sketches of Democrats and Republicans

[digg-reddit-me]David Brooks, yesterday, in the New York Times:

For the past 90 years or so, the Republican Party has, at its best, come to embody the cause of personal freedom and economic dynamism. For a similar period, the Democratic Party has, at its best, come to embody the cause of fairness and family security. Over the past century, they have built a welfare system, brick by brick, to guard against the injuries of fate.

As usual, Brooks’s column was thoughtful. But I had a bit of a problem with his summary of each party, even acknowledging he means each party at its best.

It’s always hard to come up with a thumbnail sketch of each party – because there are always things which contradict what you say. Each party can be said to contain multitudes, even though a casual glance almost always reveals just enough to confirm whatever stereotypes you might have.

To my mind though, the real difference between the Republican Party and Democratic Party, even only on domestic matters and with each party taken at it’s best, is not fairness versus freedom and economic dynamism versus economic (or family) security. The difference between the parties is not primarily determined by what positive things they seek to provide: I wouldn’t say that Republicans value fairness less or freedom more for example. Rather, the difference can best be summed up by either looking at what each party views as a more legitimate way of achieving social ends or by looking at what each party sees as the bigger threat to citizens.

There are going to be counterexamples and such to this summary, but I think it reveals deeper truths than Brooks’s.

Legitimacy: Republicans attack the idea that government can legitimately be used as a tool to achieve broadly agreed upon ends. They look to private institutions to guide the course of society – the invisible hand even; this means private capital markets, private corporations, and religious organizations. Democrats accept these institutions, but they see the government as legitimate tool as well.

Threats to Citizens. In area of domestic policy, Republicans see the biggest threat to citizens as the government – which they blame primarily for impinging on citizens’ freedoms, creating unfair results, and undermining family security. In the area of domestic policy, Democrats see the biggest threat to citizens coming from corporations, unchecked by the government – which they blame primarily for impinging on citizens’ freedoms, creating unfair results, and undermining family security.

Alternatively, the version of Republicanism becoming more dominant today sees the biggest threat to citizens as coming from an ideology called liberalism – which brainwashes citizens through the media and seeks power anywhere it can – churches, corporations, the media, the government. This view sees politics as a cultural battle.

I’ve tried to make these non-judgmental and descriptive – and I think it is evident which approach makes more sense. Neither political party seems to me to have a very different view of what they want America to look like: They both support personal freedom and fairness, economic dynamism and family security. America has established a complex system of tradeoffs between these values – and few in either party seek to overturn that. They seek slight modifications this way or that – it’s just a matter of rather small degrees of difference. The bigger difference is in how each party sees the path forward – what is sees as the legitimate ends to achieve the necessary changes, and how it diagnoses the problems that need to be changed.

Any alternate sketches of this difference – along the same lines – attempting to be non-judgmental and descriptive – are welcome in comments of elsewhere.

For what it’s worth, I would say the Tea Party and much of the energy on the left comes from those rejecting each of these frameworks – and who see both corporations and government as the problem. I’m not sure what countervailing force they propose though.

Check out an older post of mine for my view of the basic principles of liberalism.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Obama’s Self-Interest Lies With the American People’s; the Republican Party’s Self-Interest Does Not.

[digg-reddit-me]Andrew Sprung – who I read semi-regularly thanks to links from Andrew Sullivan – sees Obama’s success with health care as part of “a recognizable pattern in Obama’s approach to setbacks – pause, regroup, rethink, collect new input, amend and re-present plans, and set a deadline.” You see this in Obama’s response to the loss in New Hampshire, to the Reverend Wright scandal, to Sarah Palin’s selection, to Afghanistan, to being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and now to health care.

But Sprung points out another factor that in some way should motivate some more skeptical voters to trust Obama a bit more:

Another key strategic element for Obama– as a matter of policy rather than politics — was emphasizing cost control at the expense of more generous coverage expansion. That decision reflects I think a fundamental calculation that only effective cost control will enable lasting coverage expansion — and more broadly, only evident progress in deficit reduction will enable a domestic agenda that includes new government initiatives. [my emphasis]

To put it another way: If my livelihood depends on the amount of anger people have towards the government, then I don’t have much incentive to make the government do a good job. Irresponsible governance proves my point. As a pundit or legislator, I have the incentive to make government look as bad as possible.

On the other hand, if my livelihood depends on whether or not I solve a problem, or at least make things a bit better, then I have every incentive to use every tool at my disposal to make sure that happens. Responsible governance then proves my point. As a pundit or legislator, I have every incentive to fix the problem, or failing that, make it look like it’s being fixed.

Obama, aiming for historical achievements, has every incentive to accurately diagnose the problem and take steps to fix it – even for purely selfish reasons. If his reform bankrupts America and undermines our power, he won’t be remembered kindly. The Republicans, aiming for 2010, have every incentive to “throw their bodies on the gears” to destroy the system – because in destroying the system they not only get short-term gains but ideological traction.

(Thomas Frank explored this last idea at some length in his book, The Wrecking Crew.)

[Image not subject to copyright.]

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Election 2008 Health care History Politics The Opinionsphere

The Unhinged Anger on the Right Leads to An Ill-Advised and Unhedged Bet Against Reform.

[digg-reddit-me]There are 2 broad lessons to take from last night:

1. Unhinged Anger Makes For Great Ratings.

“Hell no!” John Boehner frothed, spittle flying as he cursed on the floor of Congress yesterday.

“This health care bill will ruin our country. It’s time to stop it…We’re about 24 hours from Armageddon,” Boehner had claimed earlier.

“Baby killer!” an as yet-unnamed Republican congressman screamed at pro-life Democrat Bart Stupak on Sunday.

“Nigger!” a chorus of protesters chanted to Rep. John Lewis, who also heard such things while being beaten nearly to death fighting for civil rights in the 1960s on Saturday.

“Faggot!” screeched other protesters at Barney Frank that same day.

Just a few days earlier, a disturbing video recorded a man barely able to walk due to Parkinson’s disease being mocked and ridiculed by anti-health care Tea Party protesters.

A short time before that, a conservative millionaire was promising guns to “patriots” concerned about “what was coming.”

This overheated Manichean good-vs-evil rhetoric in which slight changes in wording transform you from a pro-lifer to a “baby-killer,” in which subsidies for the uninsured constitute a “government takeover,” or in which America is about to be overrun by destroyed yet again eventually must discredit it’s purveyors. At least, it must decrease in its effect over time.

Common sense has taught people that “when there’s smoke, there’s fire.” And Republican operatives epitomized by Karl Rove have taken advantage of this. Top-line Republican operatives have adopted with more vigor than the left ever did the tactics of the radical New Left of the 1960s: from attacks on the legitimacy of political institutions (from the CBO – which Rove accused of Madoff-style accounting this weekend– to the Senate Parliamentarian to Congress to the Courts to the media to presidency) to the maxim that the “personal is political.” Unlike the New Left, they have virtually no agenda but to hold onto power and to, having lost it due to incompetence, tarnish the other side enough to get it back. Their hysteric charges represent the triumph of moral relativism. Their escalating outrage is an attempt to fool the American people.

This is how the rage has been created over a bill whose provisions are broadly popular and that is based on a plan offered by Republicans a generation earlier. David Frum cogently explained last night how even those Republicans “who knew better” were driven to bend before this unhinged anger that led the Republican Party to take an unhedged bet against reform, how it provoked them to declare this fight a make-or-break fight, and to take out all stops to their opposition, even though they stood little chance of succeeding:

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

…Yes [such talk] mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

That’s point #1: Cynical politicos out for short-term partisan gain and entertainers trying to get ratings foment unhinged anger to push their party to make a suicidal unhinged bet against reform.

Point #2. This Was Waterloo.

The Republican Party made a huge wager that they could block health care reform, and lost. Senator Jim DeMint rather infamously declared in a secret call to anti-reform advocates:

If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.

Newt Gingrich echoed this point:

This could be the bill that drags his whole presidency down and they look back on it and suddenly the whole thing is unraveled.

Ralph Reed wrote in an email last week:

Our goal: To shock Congress into abandoning Obamacare (which will also effectively end the Obama Presidency and save freedom in America).

That was their game plan, their goal. They wanted a repeat of 1994. Their strategy in opposing the bill presumed it would never be able to pass. They escalated the rhetoric to insane levels. The less hysterical merely called it the “government takeover of 1/6th of the economy.” Bent on manipulating public opinion, the more cynical asked “innocent” questions:

Will America become another failed Cuba-style Socialist state? [Source.]

Do you think your political affiliation might eventually play into the decision on whether you get the life-saving medical treatment you need? [Source.]

A nation of Terri Schiavos with a National Euthanasia Bill? [Source.]

The more hysterical began to panic about legislation containing death panels, killing grandma, forcing government-mandated abortion, euthanasia, and reparations for slavery, authorizing government jackboots invading your home to take your children for socialist indoctrination, and overall, destroying America as we know it unless we arm ourselves and “prepare for what is coming.”

As the American people find out the answer to all of these questions is a resounding, “No!” – as they find out that the claims were made to monger fear for partisan gain – and that the bill that a plurality of people oppose contains mainly provisions that most people support – as the reality of this reform sinks in, the Republican Party will lose traction. As David Sanger quoted David Axelrod in the New York Times:

“This only worked well for the Republican Party if it failed to pass,” David Axelrod, one of the president’s closest political advisers, said at the White House as he watched the vote count for the final bill reach 219 in favor. “They wanted to run against a caricature of it rather than the real bill. Now let them tell a child with a pre-existing condition, ‘We don’t think you should be covered.’”

Now that the bill has been passed, we can focus on whether the health care plan’s tinkering with our dysfunctional system is making things better or not – as Ross Douthat says. And we can focus on the 10 things health care legislation will do right away. Obama can make his case for what he is doing (again to Sanger): “to sell the government’s oversight role over doctors and insurance companies the way he is trying to sell financial regulation: as a leveling of the playing field, in favor of consumers.” The passage of the bill re-shapes the coverage from “what could happen” to “what it is doing.” And the Democrats are more comfortable with that argument. Perhaps most frightening of all for Republicans, if this bill accomplishes what its supporters claim it will, it will re-shape the political landscape – as Bill Kristol explained in warning Republicans against cooperating in 1994:

It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle-class by restraining the growth of government.

This won’t necessarily benefit the Democrats. Republicans don’t need to keep doubling down on their anti-government rhetoric; but for the present, it seems they will.

Today, the most profound effect though is a different one. By passing this bill, Obama has proved he has yet again broken the backs of the idiocrats who threw every rhetorical, legislative, and political obstacle at him. He has showed the patience and passion which won him the presidency can be translated into presidential achievements. The bill only tinkers. It isn’t dramatic reform. But it’s core accomplishment is dramatic: a change to our core social bargain; as explained by James Fallows:

[T]he significance of the vote is moving the United States FROM a system in which people can assume they will have health coverage IF they are old enough (Medicare), poor enough (Medicaid), fortunate enough (working for an employer that offers coverage, or able themselves to bear expenses), or in some other way specially positioned (veterans; elected officials)… TOWARD a system in which people can assume they will have health-care coverage.

This is an historic achievement. It is a moral one, and it is, counter intuitively, an important step towards controlling societal spending on health care.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

Categories
Barack Obama China Criticism Economics Financial Crisis Foreign Policy Health care National Security Politics The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Must-Reads of the Week: China’s distortionary exchange rate policy, Mario Savio, David Brooks, Ezra Klein, & Dana Priest’s The Mission

Apologies for the very, very light posting. There are quite a number of personal issues I’ve been dealing with – aside from the uprooted tree in my yard and miscellaneous damage.

But let me still give you some must-reads for the week.

1. China’s distortionary exchange rate policy. On Sunday, Keith Bradsher in the New York Times gave a good primer on how China is using currency manipulation and the global trade organizations to gain economic advantages as part of a global strategy to increase China’s power. China has also been using the global financial crisis to further their economic aims:

China is starting to describe its currency interventions as stimulus. But unlike extra government spending in the United States and other countries, currency intervention does not expand global demand, but shifts it from other countries to China.

Paul Krugman followed this up with a column urging action regarding China:

Today, China is adding more than $30 billion a month to its $2.4 trillion hoard of reserves. The International Monetary Fund expects China to have a 2010 current surplus of more than $450 billion — 10 times the 2003 figure. This is the most distortionary exchange rate policy any major nation has ever followed.

And it’s a policy that seriously damages the rest of the world. Most of the world’s large economies are stuck in a liquidity trap — deeply depressed, but unable to generate a recovery by cutting interest rates because the relevant rates are already near zero. China, by engineering an unwarranted trade surplus, is in effect imposing an anti-stimulus on these economies, which they can’t offset. [My emphases.]

My first attempt to make sense of this issue here.

2. Mario Savio. Scott Saul of The Nation follows up with an excellent profile of Mario Savio who at one point seemed poised to lead the 1960s radical New Left, but who then dropped out of public view:

Savio was a revolutionary and civil libertarian, logician and poet, scientific observer and self-aware partisan–and in his heyday a virtuosic extemporizer who seemed not so much to perform all these identities as to incarnate them. He was, in short, an icon of possibility for his generation of student activists; and so it’s a great historical riddle, tinged with pathos, why he was, in Berkeley in 1964, the lightning rod of his time and, almost immediately afterward, a man who couldn’t conduct the energy he’d summoned.

3. David Brooks on Obama. David Brooks wrote an excellent column last Friday arguing that both the right and left have Obama wrong, as they accuse excessive fealty to an extreme left wing ideology and of being a weak, passive, unprincipled traitor respectively. Brooks describes Obama as I have always understood and described him – and in fact, as he has described himself:

Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy — from his book ”The Audacity of Hope” to his joint-session health care speech last September — he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs.

4. Ezra Klein. Ezra Klein best summarized the CBO score released yesterday and how it gave the Democrats exactly what they needed:

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill cuts deficits by $130 billion in the first 10 years, and up to $1.2 trillion in the second 10 years. The excise tax is now indexed to inflation, rather than inflation plus one percentage point, and the subsidies grow more slowly over time. So one of the strongest cost controls just got stronger, and the automatic spending growth slowed. And then there are all the other cost controls in the bill: The Medicare Commission, which makes entitlement reform much more possible. The programs to begin paying doctors and hospitals for care rather than volume. The competitive insurance market.

This was a hard bill to write. Pairing the largest coverage increase since the Great Society with the most aggressive cost-control effort isn’t easy. And since the cost controls are complicated, while the coverage increase is straightforward, many people don’t believe that the Democrats have done it. But to a degree unmatched in recent legislative history, they have.

Klein then succinctly explained what was missing from the Republican approach to the deficit that this health care bill – to its great credit – attempted to address:

Our long-term deficit is not a function of our current spending, which is manageable. It is a function of our expected spending growth, particularly in health care. With the system growing at 8 percent a year and GDP growing at 2 percent or 3 percent a year, there’s a real long-term problem there. But you can’t cut, or even tax, your way out of it. If you cut 5 percent from the system in one year, that cut disappears by the next year.

5. The Mission. I’m currently reading this 2003 book by Dana Priest who writes for the Washington Post on the military’s mission and how it evolved after the Cold War through the 1990s and into the War on Terror. Absolutely excellent. I highly recommend it.

[Image by me, this morning.]

Categories
Barack Obama Brazil China Criticism Economics Foreign Policy Health care National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

Must-Reads of the Week: A history lesson, Reconciling Chart, Theism, Starbucks, the New Global Middle Class, the Beijing Consensus, and the Traitorous Supreme Court

A history lesson in ramming through one piece of legislation. Ezra Klein gives a short history lesson describing the tactics used by Republicans to “ram through” the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit.

Reconciling chart. The New York Times provides a chart of all the times reconciliation has been used.

Theism. Andrew Sullivan provides a beautiful quote from David Foster Wallace making what may be the best case for theism generally that I’ve seen.

Starbucks. Greg Beato for Reason has an interesting if annoying skewed take on Starbucks and its attempts to stay hip. His history and overall point is interesting, but the point of view he injects, his contempt for his less capitalist brethren, is irritating.

The New Global Middle Class. Rana Foroohar and Marc Margolis in Newsweek describe the new “global middle class” which “is more unstable and less liberal than we thought.” The examples they give are rather frustrating though. Brazil’s middle class is described as “more unstable and less liberal” because they applaud “more state control of the oil industry to keep out greedy foreign firms” and that “they don’t need outside advice on how to structure their societies, thank you.” The Russian middle class’s support for Putin and the Chinese support of the Beijing consensus are also cited and are much better examples proving their point. An interesting article, that touches on some gradually evolving issues in a way that most articles do not – but it seems to harness facts to reach their end rather than allow the facts to dictate the result.

The Beijing Consensus. Yang Yao in Foreign Affairs speculates that the Beijing Consensus – “a combination of mixed ownership, basic property rights, and heavy government intervention” – may be eroding. And as “the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) lacks legitimacy in the classic democratic sense,” and “has been forced to seek performance-based legitimacy instead, by continuously improving the living standards of Chinese citizens,” the end of this consensus would lead to “greater democratization.”

The Traitorous Supreme Court. Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy takes on the Andrew McCarthy/Liz Cheney line of attack calling those attorneys currently in the Justice Department who represented some of those branded terrorists by the Bush administration asking this question:

Does McCarthy think the Justices of the Supreme Court are guilty of aiding the enemy, and that (if we treat them like everybody else) they should be “indicted for coming to the enemy’s aid during wartime”?

[Image by me.]

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Politics The Opinionsphere

Does the real Krauthammer believe Obama is trying to destroy America or not?

[digg-reddit-me]Back in October, Charles Krauthammer attempted to synthesize the Republican narrative about Obama into what I have termed, “The Unified Theory of Obama,” that, in its many parts has been adopted by Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and many others. Krauthammer took the many individual stories harped on by each of these right wingers and unified them into a single theory. He maintained that “The current liberal ascendancy in the United States–controlling the executive and both houses of Congress, dominating the media and elite culture–has set us on a course for decline.” This course is not – in Krauthammer’s telling – accidental. This New Liberalism has chosen to “gradually, deliberately, willingly, and indeed relievedly give” up American dominance. The domestic and foreign policy of New Liberalism “work synergistically to ensure” that America will lose power through the “demolition of the moral foundation of American dominance,” “engaging in moral reparations” for our many imagined sins, dithering over Afghanistan, preferring “social goods over security needs,” undermining the individualism at the heart of America’s dominance, &tc.

Krauthammer lays out no general principles unifying his highly partisan interpretation of various Obama administration actions aside from a deliberate attempt to ensure America’s decline in power. Why do liberals want to address climate change? Because it will cause America to decline in power. Why do liberals want health care reform? Because it will cause America to decline in power, making us more like European social democracies. Krauthammer doesn’t see much reason to dwell on the positive reasons for any liberal agenda.

Krauthammer’s thesis is that this New Liberalism advocates a foreign policy “designed to produce American decline” and a domestic policy that is “not designed to curb our power abroad. But what it lacks in intent, it makes up in effect.”

Fast forward five months, and see if you can tell the individual writing this column still thinks Obama is subjecting America to an assault designed to destroy its power:

True, the rotation of power inevitably results in stops and starts and policy zigzags. Yet for all its inefficiency, it ultimately helps create a near-miraculous social stability by setting down layers of legitimacy every time the opposition adopts some of its predecessor’s reforms — while at the same time allowing challenges to fundamental assumptions before they become fossilized.

Krauthammer’s columns are meant to function differently than his long-form more “intellectual” pieces. They are supposed to pull less partisan readers towards him, to influence them, to pry them away from liberalism; his longer pieces are directed at a more partisan audience, and are supposed to represent some intellectual foundation.

But what I want to know is who the real Charles Krauthammer is. Does the real Krauthammer believe Obama is trying to destroy America or not?

[Image not subject to copyright.]

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The Opinionsphere

Preparing “Patriots” For What Is Coming

[digg-reddit-me]Oh TownHall.com emails, the gift that just keeps giving. I had no idea how interesting they would be when I signed up! Or how popular the site was!

I expect to see right wing propaganda in these emails. And over-the-top propaganda that pushes the limits of credibility. Oftentimes, propaganda that is then adopted by more mainstream right wingers. (See this graphic illustrating how “ObamaCare=Gov’t funded abortion and euthanasia.”) Although sometimes not. (See Chuck Norris claiming that health care reform is actually about socialist jackboots forcing their way into your home to “educate” your children.) Such claims frankly seem a bit idiotic and conspiratorial for me to respect anyone who pushes them.

And TownHall.com and its advertisers apparently agree, as they also send out blatant scams and get-rich-quick schemes.  At least once, they combined the political propaganda with the get-rich-quick scheme leading to the actual headline: “How a Ruthless Government Conspiracy Could Make You $97,500 Richer by March 2010.”

But today, I just received the first email that gave me a sense of foreboding. I have nothing against guns. I believe in the right to bear arms. And sure, it bugs me that right wingers use the term, “patriot” as a synonym for right wing. And yes, once again, TownHall.com is using its hallowed patriotism to make a few quick bucks. But given the grand conspiracy theories being fed, like some sort of psychosis-inducing drug, to the readers of TownHall.com readers, is this email anything other than a call on its readers to be ready to use violence in some civil war against Obama?

Especially the two headlines: “Millionaire Patriot Wants YOU Armed and Trained!” “Because he wants every responsible American citizen prepared for what is coming…”

The right wing has abandoned any serious attempt to develop ideas on how to govern. Now, the right wing merely excites its base by turning news and politics into the plot of a thriller. (I call this plot the Unified Theory of Obama.) If you watch Fox News, they can provide you with the ominous background music. All the morally-polarized archetypes are there. The foreign-looking men in dark lighting. The weak-kneed liberals ashamed of America who apologize for how we defend ourselves. The many who have been duped by a charismatic leader who, once the shades fall from their eyes, will look with newfound respect upon those who saw this coming all along. And of course, the few, the righteous vanguard of freedom – the patriots. During the Bush administration, the story was simple: George W. Bush was a patriot who was being undermined by the liberals determined to coddle the terrorists who were on the verge of destroying America. Bush’s fellow patriots just needed to keep voting Republican, and all would be alright.

But then things got more complicated. Now according to this plot, a possibly foreign man, possibly a secret Muslim, but at least someone sympathetic to terrorists and socialists has taken over. He even promised to “stand with the Muslims” when things turned ugly! He is jamming socialist bills down the American people’s throat! He is taking over the entire economy: the financial industry, the auto industry, and soon the health care industry (Government takeover of one sixth of the economy!) and then the internet (Net neutrality is the government takeover of the internet!!) and energy (cap and trade).

“What is coming” is clear to all red-blooded Americans: a civil war. The threat is so imminent that a growing group of men and women have taken an oath not to obey certain orders from the federal government involving shooting at non-violent citizens.

Given this context, this theory of Obama, the message is clear: All patriots should get guns before Obama, like Hitler before him, tries to take them away, so you can be “prepared for what is coming.” And you won’t be alone. Because this patriotic millionaire has put aside some handguns he will give you for FREE, if only you pay the reasonable fee of $1,000.00 for some training. But that’s not all, all you good patriots will get a free DVD! So, do your duty, support gun rights and protect capitalism: Give “Dr.” (aka Chiropractor) Ignatius Piazza your money!

Nothing wrong with making a few bucks on people’s panic. That’s the great thing about the right wing: Even when calling on citizens to get armed for the coming civil war, capitalism always comes first.

The full email is below the fold…

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