Month: August 2009

Categories
Barack Obama Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Obama’s Promise Was To Break the Hold the Idiocrats Have On Our Society

[digg-reddit-me]It’s pretty clear that our national conversation, our national debate is broken – as Al Gore persuasively argued in The Assault on Reason. On health care – for example – we’re arguing over distractions and barely touching on the issues at stake.

When Barack Obama ran for office, he won in a large part because he convinced Americans he could change the debate – that he didn’t have a stake in the Baby Boomer arguments that had dominated our political debate since the 1980 election – that he would tackle the long-term festering issues these Baby Boomer debates had put off. This was the promise of Barack Obama, the source of people’s hope, the attraction he had for the young and indeed for the aging Baby Boomers themselves.

During his election campaign, he proved at least once that  he could rise above the vitriol of base politics that had accustomed the people to expect Clintons and Bushes to exchange presidencies in dirty campaigns. He broke the cycle that threatened to destroy his candidacy with his speech on race. In the end, he also prevailed over the forces of xenophobia, of racism, of bigotry. The fact that he won was extraordinary and proved something else – that not only was Obama able to raise the level of the national conversation – but that he could inspire a majority of the country to give his new approach a chance. For those who supported him, his failure to change this conversation is the root of their disappointment in him. I still think it’s early – but it has become clear that if Obama cannot fix our national conversation, he will not be able to accomplish most of what he has set out to do.

On health care, Paul Krugman has been gloating that he predicted this – that he knew the right wing would throw everything they had at Obama and at every one of his policies. But Obama never promised to stop people from throwing stuff at him. His promise was to rise above it.

This is what is the base issue at stake in this health care fight – more profound than our unsustainably increasing costs or the thousands who die each year because they are without coverage.

Fareed Zakaria pointed out that in a crisis our system proved it could act. But the financial crisis did not prove our system could handle a crisis; instead, it proved that we were lucky to have individuals in place who appropriated whatever power they needed. And it was the least accountable person in the room – Ben Bernanke – who had the most power and used it the most. Congress, responding to popular pressure, almost destroyed the whole process.

Obama – if he is to tackle any issues after health care – must break this budding idiocracy that derails every attempt to have an adult conversation; he must deflate the growing fears. I can see only one way he can do this – or at least begin to: He has to take the health care bill – and get it through with a strong public option and with end of life counseling. He has to call, “Bullshit.” Explain to the country again the point of these programs and what they will do – and ask anyone who experiences otherwise to contact the White House.

They called Medicare and Social Security and the entire New Deal “socialism” and “tyranny” too. And now they are broadly popular and considered key components of our market-based system. To break these idiocratic forces, Obama needs to force these controversial measures through and allow the Republicans opposing it to demagogue it in every way possible. Then make sure there are strong transparency measures in place. And then let those who predicted a Holocaust look foolish. It’s the first step to discrediting their methods and reforming our national conversation.

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Categories
Economics Financial Crisis Politics The Opinionsphere

Fact-Checking Taibbi: The Sarah Palin of Journalism?

Having cited Matt Taibbi’s well-read Rolling Stone article on Goldman Sachs in a few previous posts, it’s worth taking some time to air some fact-checks of it. (Complete article here.) Megan McCardle has dubbed Matt Taibbi “the Sarah Palin of journalism”  but I wonder what this makes McCardle – whose feeling-based objections to any of the health care reforms on the table seem different only in tone than Taibbi’s hysteric rants on financial companies.

Which is why I cite this article at The Big Money instead – which takes a fact-based rather than feeling-based – look at Taibbi’s article. The takeaway by Heidi Moore is about what I suspected:

The mammoth article disappointingly failed to provide the smoking gun that so many people on Wall Street—who have envied and admired and hated Goldman for much of this decade—would have been delighted to see.

Moore’s piece also points out some of the ways in which Taibbi’s article is misleading – and it’s worth a read. Unfortunately, I do not know have the expertise in the subject to adjudicate these disputes – which essentially involve whether Goldman Sachs was a player or the main player in these various financial disasters.

It’s worth taking a look at Moore’s piece if you were one of the many who has read Taibbi’s. But I think it was pretty clear to anyone reading Taibbi’s piece that it was deliberately over-the-top and overstated.

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Barack Obama Health care The Opinionsphere Videos

They called Medicare and Social Security “tyranny” too.

[digg-reddit-me]Of those who are opposing health care reform, there are a few general groups:

  • There are those who are wary of any change in the status quo, even while they realize it is unsustainable;
  • There are those who are misinformed on one aspect of the legislation or another – whether they think the plan is “radical” or that it has “death panels;”
  • There are those who are opposed for partisan reasons – one of these is Senator Chuck Grassley who – though he is the key Republican whose support the Democrats are trying to win – admitted he would not support a bill he agreed with if enough Republicans didn’t support it with him; others in this camp are – of course, Bill Kristol who advised Republicans to “kill” reform and Senator Jim DeMint who said he wanted to make health care reform Obama’s “Waterloo;” and
  • There are those are ideologically opposed – who are inciting much of the most extreme rhetoric about this issue. The leadership promoting this – as Rachel Maddow aptly demonstrates – oppose and want to dismantle the programs most Americans support. They consider Medicare and Social Security to be “tyranny” and “creeping socialism” and all those other buzzwords that they are now using against health care reform. In this clip where Maddow confronts former congressmen, majority leader, and one of the major organizers of the tea parties and the anti-health reform activists , Dick Armey:

As Maddow said – it is a very important point. Many of the Republicans participating in this national “conversation” are hiding their true beliefs.

Most Americans do not consider Medicare and Social Security to be “tyranny.” Those who are inciting fears about health care reform do.

Categories
Barack Obama Health care Palin Politics The Opinionsphere Videos

The Maddow-Coburn Debate on Meet the Press; and the Necessity of Violence

[digg-reddit-me]A few observations on watching Meet the Press yesterday. In a lot of ways, I think that show demonstrates the low quality of our political debate today. And yesterday’s show was one of the better, more factually on point, more honest, least full of crap episodes in recent memory. It wasn’t about “gotcha” moments as much as policy and politics. No one there was seriously promoting any of the blatant falsehoods that have determined much of the debate in the rest of the media – the “death panels” and Nazi imagery for example. In many ways, this became a very meta debate about the debate – which is actually a conversation I think we need to have as a country.

David Gregory though seemed determined to take each moment that threatened to lead to acutal honest conflict or insight and “move on” as quickly as possible. With the participants wanting to argue it out, they would talk over him trying to make their point before he ended the game prematurely. Maddow created a few insightful moments with her apparently well-researched appearance. She wasn’t as willing to let the bullshit slide as the others at the table – and she had papers full of research in front of her. Gregory asked some good questions, but let the bull slide. For example, here he asked a serious question of Senator Tom Coburn:

MR. GREGORY: [L]et’s talk about the tone of the debate.  There have been death threats against members of Congress, there are Nazi references to members of Congress and to the president.  Here are some of the images. The president being called a Nazi, his reform effort being called Nazi-like, referring to Nazi Germany, members of Congress being called the same.  And then there was this image this week outside of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a town hall event that the president had, this man with a gun strapped to his leg held that sign, “It is time to water the tree of liberty.” It was a reference to that famous Thomas Jefferson quote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

That has become a motto for violence against the government.  Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, had that very quote on his shirt the day of the bombing of the Murrah building when 168 people were killed.

Senator Coburn, you are from Oklahoma.  When this element comes out in larger numbers because of this debate, what, what troubles you about that?

SEN. TOM COBURN (R-OK):  Well, I’m, I’m troubled anytime when we, we stop having confidence in, in our government.  But we’ve earned it.  You know, this debate isn’t about health care.  Health care’s the symptom.  The debate is an uncontrolled federal government that’s going to run–50 percent of everything we’re spending this year we’re borrowing from the next generation.  You…

MR. GREGORY:  That’s—but wait, hold on, I want to stop you there.  I’m talking about the tone.  I am talking about violence against the government. That’s what this is synonymous with.

SEN. COBURN:  The, the—but the tone is based on fear of loss of control of their own government.  What, what is the genesis behind people going to such extreme statements?  What is it?  We, we have lost the confidence, to a certain degree, and it’s much worse than when Tom was the, the, the leader of the Senate.  We have, we have raised the question of whether or not we’re legitimately thinking about the American people and their long-term best interests.  And that’s the question.

For me that exchange was a head-turning moment. Asked to confront a man who has adopted the same quote that a terrorist did when attacking a building in his own state, a man who is using extreme rhetoric that suggests he would be in favor of assassination, he refuses to condemn him outright. He hedges; he wants us to understand that man – to see him as responding to a world that’s unfair to him.

Gregory at this point seems to let the matter go – but Maddow takes Coburn on. You can tell she’s taken aback too:

I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that a right wing Republican Senator would plead for “understanding” in quasi-defense of extreme right wing rhetoric and threats of violence. After all – what else can he expect?

I suppose my point is: if any people out there take Sarah Palin’s statement that children will be put to death by “death panels” if Obama’s health care plan succeeds seriously; if any people out there seriously believe a Holocaust is about to take place if this health care reform is passed; if they believe that their children are going to be indoctrinated into an atheistic faith in Obama if health care passes; if they believe that their grandparents of their children are in danger – if someone believes any or all of these things, then violence is justified.

We make heroes out of the men who tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler. If we now say that Obama is another Hitler, aren’t we advocating assasination? If we say our child will be killed by Obama, aren’t we implicitly endorsing violence to protect our children?

How can we – as a society – have an adult conversation about the pros and cons of the specific health reforms being considered with this unhinged debate? We can’t. Instead, we just have to let the unsustainable status quo stay in place.

Categories
The Web and Technology

Brief Thoughts for the Week of 2009-08-14

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Criticism Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Mad Men, Catholic NYC, Ezra Klein, Social Security, Jon Stewart, Jared Diamond

1. Mad Men. Bruce Handy has an excellent piece in Vanity Fair describing the creative process and background of Matthew Weiner’s period piece, Mad Men:

Mad Men is too clear-eyed about its period to be called nostalgic—Weiner loves writing anti-Semitic wisecracks for his admen and showing pregnant women with cigarettes dangling from their lips—but at the same time there can be a yearning tug, even an ache, in the intensity of the show’s backward gaze. Maybe it’s a kind of wised-up, at times even loathing nostalgia—precisely the kind of contradiction that drives the show creatively.

2. Catholic in Manhattan. Carlene Bauer writes in Salon about how she came to convert to Catholicism while living in New York City. A moving piece for me. This is her description of the Rite of Election:

On a damp, cloudy morning back in New York City, on the first Sunday of Lent, our church’s group of converts met at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to attend the Rite of Election, a ceremony in which all the catechumens in the city’s diocese declared their intentions before God and Cardinal Egan. Once our names were called and we stood before the altar receiving a blessing, there was apparently no turning back. There were hundreds of people there, faces of many colors. But then the priests before us: corpulent, white, reminding me of all the stories I’d heard about the princely class that lived like kept women in their rectories. Fat white men lording it over the faithful. Here was the other Catholic Church, the church that, in all my excitement, I’d been suppressing my knowledge of. It was the church that came to mind for most people when they thought of the Catholic Church, the one that turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse of its children, that would not let women become priests or let their priests marry, that castigated its liberation theologians. The moneyed, secretive, inflexible machine.

How many people would I have to climb over to run down the aisle and out onto Fifth Avenue? This really was intellectually irresponsible. The pope, Mary, Padre Pio, Pope Pius, Opus Dei, the sexual abuse, the forbidding of birth control, the official stance on homosexuality. I wouldn’t marry someone if I had to ignore this much sin and dysfunction. Or would I? But think: Why had I come all this way? And who had led me here? Dorothy Day had submitted. And if it was the church of Dorothy Day, it was the church of Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, Graham Greene, and Flannery O’Connor. A church of dissenters and mystics.

3. Ezra Klein on Health Care. By far the best blog to read to understand the policy and politics of health care reform is Ezra Klein’s at the Washington Post. A recent point:

In part, that’s why the debate has had to move toward fear-mongering and lies: There just aren’t that many scary elements in the bills, because the legislation is oriented toward preserving the existing system and avoiding points of controversy.

4. Social Security Sucked When It Was Passed. Paul Begala – who advised Bill Clinton that it was better to have no bill than a flawed bill in 1994 – is now making the alternate case. He makes it by invoking history – specifically Social Security:

The right has far more modest goals: At every turn, its members seek to advance their power and protect privilege. I’ve never seen the Republican right oppose a tax cut for the rich because it wasn’t generous enough; I’ve never seen them oppose a set of loopholes for corporate lobbyists because one industry or another wasn’t included. The left, on the other hand, too often prefers a glorious defeat to an incremental victory.

Our history teaches us otherwise. No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt’s original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers — a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn’t even cover the clergy. FDR’s Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn’t work, you got nothing from Social Security.

5. Consevatives Love Jon Stewart. Jacob Gershman explains why in New York magazine:

Conservatives like Stewart because he’s providing them a platform to reach an audience that usually tunes them out. And they often find that Stewart takes them more seriously than right-wing political hosts, who are often just using them to validate their broad positions, do. Stewart will poke fun, but he offers a good-faith debate on powder kegs — torture, abortion, nuclear weapons, health care — that explode on other networks.

6. Jared Diamond. David Pilling profiles one of the top intellectuals of our time for the Financial Times. This little clip seems to capture both Pilling’s writing style and the serendipity of Jared Diamond’s world:

Thus did the pomegranate boom begin, and the fruit make its way to the refrigerators of 21st-century America. The story somehow captures Diamond. We have the awe of ancient civilisations, the physical explanation of the fertile soil of ancient Mesopotamia and modern California, and the accident of his friend’s financial resources and ingenuity. In this way, all things, big and small, come to pass.

Categories
Health care

The Smearing of Britain’s National Health Service

[digg-reddit-me]Alex Massie is probably right that there are “two essential truths in international health policy,” namely that:

No-one sees fit to copy the National Health Service and no-one sees fit to copy the American system.

But even given this, the right wingers have taken smearing Britain’s National Health Service too far. Chuck Grassley claimed, for example, that “Sen. Edward M. Kennedy would be refused treatment for his brain tumor in England.” As Matt Yglesias pointed out:

[T]here’s actually a two-fold lie here. First Grassley falsely implies that congressional Democrats are proposing to create an NHS-like system. Second, he lies about how the NHS operates. And he pays no price for it.

And despite what Cassandra over at Villainous Company has to say, Grassley is lying. Calling Yglesias an “evil-monger” and saying that “Google is not Matt Yglesias’s friend,” she claims that the drug Senator Kennedy is being prescribed for his tumor is prohibited by the National Health Service. Her source? An “expert” quoted by NewsMax – who forgets to mention that the drug – Temodar – was invented in Britain and has been prescribed by the National Health Service since 2007 2005. The “expert” also claims, the drug would be “available to every American.” Which is true. Every American who can pay for it. And the same was true in Britain even when the National Health Service did refuse to prescribe the drug. Now, of course, in Britain, the drug is actually available to everyone in that country – whether they have the money to spare or not.

This two-fold lie about the National Health Service  is one of the pillars of the right wing smears against the proposed Democratic health care plan – most disasterously used of course by the Investors Business Daily in discussing Stephen Hawking. Hawking later told the Guardian:

I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS,

But that’s still not the point. This whole conversation about Britain’s National Health Service is a distraction. Very few Democrats or liberals or progressives want anything resembling the British system. What is at issue is a plan to improve upon the system we currently have – modest steps. Though, as Ezra Klein explains, the modesty and popularity of what the Democrats are proposing is the reason Cassandra, Senator Grassley, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and other right wingers are pretending the Democrats have proposed something else:

In part, that’s why the debate has had to move toward fear-mongering and lies: There just aren’t that many scary elements in the bills, because the legislation is oriented toward preserving the existing system and avoiding points of controversy.

And so, we face this unhinged debate about totalitarianism – a fearful fantasy – instead of a reality-based discussion of the system we have and how it can be improved upon. Which is why the right wingers spreading these lies and smears and distractions just so they can achieve a political victory and slingshot their way back into power as they did in 1994 should be ashamed.

Categories
Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

The Smearing of Ezekiel Emanuel

One of the more extraordinary things in the current distraction that is the right-wing response to health insurance reform is the smearing of Ezekial Emanuel. He’s quite an interesting figure – and the views being attributed to him are actually exactly the opposite of the ones he has consisently held for many years…

Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic:

In the course of his writings, which span academia and popular publications, he has argued forcefully and clearly against physician-assisted suicide. Yet somehow Emanuel finds himself accused of–wait for it–advocating physician assisted suicide.

Michael Scherer in Time:

“I couldn’t believe this was happening to me,” says Emanuel, who [spent] his career opposing euthanasia and working to increase the quality of care for dying patients…

In her Post article, McCaughey paints the worst possible image of Emanuel, quoting him, for instance, endorsing age discrimination for health-care distribution, without mentioning that he was only addressing extreme cases like organ donation, where there is an absolute scarcity of resources. She quotes him discussing the denial of care for people with dementia without revealing that Emanuel only mentioned dementia in a discussion of theoretical approaches, not an endorsement of a particular policy. She notes that he has criticized medical culture for trying to do everything for a patient, “regardless of the cost or effects on others,” without making clear that he was not speaking of lifesaving care but of treatments with little demonstrated value. “No one who has read what I have done for 25 years would come to the conclusions that have been put out there,” says Emanuel. “My quotes were just being taken out of context.”

Alex Koppelman in Salon also took on the smears.

Categories
Barack Obama Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Right wingers, desperate to return to power, turn to the man they demonized, Saul Alinsky

[digg-reddit-me]A while back, I described what I saw as a characteristic of reactionaries to “internalize” an exaggerated view of their enemies’ ideology and tactical supremacy. Because of this, I wrote:

What ends up happening in many of these reactionary groups is that they construct themselves on a model based on their worst fears of their enemy.

I cited a few examples – from the John Birch Society organizing in self-sufficient cells like they imagined the Communists did to Dick Cheney’s presumption that terroristic violence was supremely effective. Now, with the rise of the anti-health insurance reform movement, we see another example of a reactionary movement that has internalized an exaggerated view of their enemy – and then adopted it for themselves.

As David Weigel firmly establishes in a piece for the Washington Independent, the tactics and strategies behind these town hall disruptions and other attempts to block health insurance reform are linked to the right-wingers’ reading of Saul Alinsky – who many right-wingers see as Obama’s closest mentor (though Obama never met him.) Alinsky and his methods were widely discussed by right wingers in the lead up to the election – and they took on the air of a biblical text after it – as every word or action by the Obama administration has been explained by reference to an obscure reference to something Alinsky wrote. The interest of the right-wing in Alinsky has actually caused his books to jump up the book charts. (Tellingly, Amazon’s reccomendation engine demonstrates in its “Users Who Purchased This Item Also Bought” section that the buyers are mainly right-wing.) And a new book will be coming out soon adopting Alinsky’s techniques for right-wing activists.

Though these right wingers have taken to calling themselves “Alinsky-cons,” one thing these right wing activists seem to have missed about Alinsky was his focus on community organizing and engagement with power. This is the part of Alinsky that Obama has adopted – as he has sought to demonstrate his good faith to his opponents, and to engage them as if they were acting in good faith – in other words, to use civility and respect as political weapons. As Mark Schmitt wrote in  piece for The American Prospect:

One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that’s not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists – it’s a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict. It’s how you deal with people with intractable demands – put ‘em on a committee. Then define the committee’s mission your way.

But these right wing protesters are not trying to demonstrate their good faith efforts to engage with reality and to win over undecideds. Instead, they are seeking to stop debate and discussion and to deliberately simulate that their opinions are common. They offer no solutions to the problems health insurance reform addresses – only chants to be used to overpower those who want to discuss the solutions they are offering.  One veteran community organizer and a student of Alinsky’s method described his response to the right wing adoption of Alinsky:

“They polarize,” said Galluzzo. “They’ve got that part down. They do direct action. But that’s not the kind of organizing we do. We end up building relationships with the people we oppose. I’m not going to go up to Mayor [Richard] Daley and say ‘you’re just a Nazi.’ I want to end up working with him.”

But according to Galluzzo, if Alinsky could take a look at the Alinsky-cons, he’d call them “petty protesters” who want to destroy the system without offering solutions. “If you just go around calling people assholes,” Galluzzo said, “you’re not going to get anything done.”

While Alinsky’s methods were designed to force those in power to be accountable to the people they have power over, these Alinsky-cons have adapted Saul Alinsky’s methods to simulate a large opposition. As an influential memo by one of the right wing groups organizing these sessions advises:

Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.

And while Alinsky’s methods are supposed to start a conversation with those in power, the methods of the Alinsky-cons have a different aim – as Paul Grenier quoted a right wing organizing memo in the Baltimore Sun:

Try to rattle [the congressman], not have an intelligent debate.

The deliberate method of these Alinsky-cons is to distract the public from the actual reforms at issue – by combining Rovian fear-mongering with Alinsky’s disruptive methods. And what you get is a big mess – and the preservation of the unsustainable status quo.

Categories
Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

The Right-Wing Canard of ‘Rationing’ and Health Care Reform

I came across this post by John Holbo at Crooked Timber somewhere in my web travels yesterday. (My guess is a Yglesias tweet. Because later, I came across it again on Yglesias’s blog.) Holbo makes a few good points about the use of the term “rationing” by opponents of health care reform:

Guaranteed minimum healthcare doesn’t forbid anyone to seek more on the private market – paying out of pocket, extra insurance. No more so than a guaranteed minimum income would forbid you to get a job to earn more than the minimum. So guaranteed minimal healthcare doesn’t ensure its minimum by positively forbidding anyone to get more. So it isn’t really rationing… There just isn’t going to be any attempt by the government to ration healthcare, as opposed to its own spending of taxpayer money. Because: why would there be?

Yglesias seconds this:

[C]onservative appear to have concocted a special one-off meaning of the term “rationing” to apply to government guarantees of basic health insurance coverage. They observe that insofar as the government guarantees basic health insurance coverage to everyone, the government probably can’t actually deliver an unlimited quantity of health care services without breaking the bank. Therefore, at some point someone will probably not get some service he or she might [want]. This is rationing and it’s evil and the solution, for unclear reasons, is for the government to deliver no guaranteed services whatsoever since . . . well . . it’s not clear how that’s better since either way you could still pay out of pocket.