Yglesias on the manufactured Fairness Doctrine controversy:
It’s very strange. Political movements mischaracterize the other side’s general goals all the time. But I’ve never heard of anything like the current conservative mania for blocking a particular legislative provision that nobody is trying to enact.
Part of this blog’s continuing coverage of the manufactured Fairness Doctrine controversy, especially as related to net neutrality:
Cracked.com lists the Top 15 Most Cringe-Worthy James Bond Puns. This is the least cringe-worthy:
Bond is in bed on top of Dr. Christmas Jones, a brilliant nuclear scientist convincingly portrayed by Denise Richards, who, like all brilliant female nuclear scientists, looks like a supermodel and dresses like Lara Croft.
Then James says, “I thought Christmas only comes once a year.”
The saddest part is knowing the entire reason they named her “Christmas” was so they could set up that orgasm joke at the end of the movie. So in the Bond world, girls can grow up to be nuclear physicists, but they still get stripper names.
Bond girls (as you’ll see) tend to get worse names than this, and Christmas was probably something like “Vixen McLegs” or “Chesty Evildoer” in earlier drafts. Then, they thought up the joke and went back in with Microsoft Word and reverse engineered all the “Aslyn Boobsaplenty” entries into “Christmas Jones.” Yes, screenwriters get paid good money to do things like that.
The wonks at ThinkProgress are impressed with the Republican up-and-comer’s plan.
In Europe during most of the twentieth century (here come a few shameless generalizations), the political thinkers of the right and the left have pictured the best of all societies as something other than democracy. The better world of their fancy might have been (depending on party affiliation) feudal, fascist, Communist, or revolutionary socialist in one of several versions – but it was not likely to be democratic in any ordinary sense. In the European imagination, democracy was a politics of compromise and true. It evoked a spirit of tolerance, moderation, caution, sobriety, rationality, and fatigue, which might amount to wisdom, but also to mediocrity. Democracy was something to arrive at only when the bright dream of exterminating one’s enemies no longer seemed within reach and the notion of a truly superior society had been abandoned. It was a “secondary love derived from a primary hatred,” in Andre Gluckmann’s phrase.
Paul Berman in A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968, pages 49 – 50.
What blog type am I. Typalyzer answers the question. (H/t Andrew Sullivan.)
The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.
They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.
I think this type may be a bit too common though – as Daily Kos, Think Progress, and about a half dozen other sites I tossed in all came up as “The Thinker” too.
I liked the graph though.
I have to agree with Stanley over at 37Signals.
[digg-reddit-me]Cardinal Stafford, a prominent American Catholic close to Pope Benedict XVI, launched into a vicious tirade against the newly elected President of the United States, Barack Obama, last week. He incorporated some boilerplate conservative attack on the state power reminiscent of Ronald Reagan (implying socialist tendencies in the President-elect); he stated that America would be experiencing the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane before it’s Crucifixion and destruction in the coming years, comparing America to Jesus and Barack Obama to Pontius Pilate; he stated that America as a nation was suicidal and has been “thrown upon the ruins;” and then, he used three curious words to describe Barack Obama: “aggressive, disruptive, and apocalyptic.”
As a Catholic I am offended by Cardinal Stafford’s extreme politics delivered without distancing himself from his official capacity as a “prince of the church” or official rebuke from the church. It is not just what he said – but when and who he is. One thing that surprised me in the aftermath of this election was the number of Republicans, conservatives and other McCain supporters who came to me – as a person who had argued with them in favor of Obama – and expressed their cautious optimism about Obama and their pride in America for having elected him. Cardinal Stafford though seems to lack such common grace.
He joins the small cadre of movement conservatives who – rather than giving President-elect Barack Obama a chance to govern even for a few days before declaring the end of civilization – has decided to preemptively attack Barack Obama, the American people and our democratic choice. Rush Limbaugh has begun to call the financial crisis “the Obama recession” – because he clearly can see that Obama caused it by running for president. Steve Marlsburg, while talking to a prominent Israeli, encouraged her to press her leadership to launch a preemptive strike on Iran – so America would already be embroiled in yet another war in the Middle East before Obama comes into office. Michael Savage proclaimed that all competent white men would be fired from their jobs at fire and police departments and that America had been destroyed by this election. While most Americans, and many in the world, hope and pray that Barack Obama will have the strength and resolve to face the challenges that face us collectively, these men choose instead to fan the flames of fear and violence in uncertain times. They are demagogues whose latent anger at America has been unleashed by the election of a progressive in a time of crisis.
Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and Steve Marlsburg are all radio shock jocks though – whose job it is to be outrageous. The fact that an Eminence has outstripped all of these men for sheer outrageousness and for blatant fear-mongering is telling. Pope John Paul II’s long reign had many legacies – but the most lasting may prove to be his politicization of the clergy, and especially the hierarchy of the Church. In America, he encouraged a culture that rewarded conservative ideology and encouraged a hierarchy-centered approach whose focus on minimizing scandals to protect the church’s power led to child abuse scandals. But the more direct result of this politicization has been the gradual movement of the church hierarchy away from the Body of the Church and its transformation into an arm of the Republican Party. Bishops, using their sacramental authority as a political public relations tool to aid the Republican Party, have publicly stated their desire to deny Communion to John Kerry (while he was running for president), to Kathleen Sebelius (after she endorsed Obama) to Republican lawyer Douglas Kmiec (after he endorsed Obama on pro-life grounds) to Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden (in the lead-up to the 2008 election). Now, post-election, some priests have begun to equate Catholicism with voting Republican so completely that they see any support for a Democrat as a mortal sin, and are denying Communion to anyone who voted for Barack Obama. And now we have a cardinal warning of the Obama apocalypse.
The Church – 54% of whom voted for Obama in America and a greater percentage who wished him to win abroad – sees it differently than the old cardinal and the politicized clergy.
For many years, the Catholic clergy have had their radical leftists and their reactionaries – but the great mass of priests have been moderates of various sorts. Today, we are seeing the fruits of thirty years of promotions of the most conservative ideologues, the fruits of a church hierarchy that no longer has any appeal except to the sexually repressed, morally corrupt, or fanatically certain, and the result of the gradual dying of the older generation of priests from a less ideological era and the emergence of the Baby Boom generation into leadership positions among the bishops – prolonging the 1960s culture war within the American Church. We are seeing the politicization of the church hierarchy. Sometimes it seems as if the more radical elements are deliberately attempting to provoke a schism, to sow disunity in the Church, so that they, with their monopoly on the institutional power of the church can declare themselves the uncorrupted Remnant.
I have never felt more distant from the Catholic church than I do now; yet I have rarely felt more one with the community of Catholics around the world and in America, more hopeful about the future, or more certain of my path and America’s path.
The Catholic Church has survived far worse men than Cardinal Stafford and the current hierarchy – it has survived popes and cardinals driven by an insatiable lust for power; it has survived warmongers and thieves who claimed their evil was done in the name of God; it has survived the greedy and corrupt, who used the institutions of the church to protect themselves; it has survived it’s war on reason and science in an age of reason and science – until it came to terms with these forces; it has survived it’s condemnation of democracy and freedom – until it came to terms with them; it has survived as popes and cardinals and bishops transparently used their moral authority to profit for themselves – until these rules promulgated for private purpose became enmeshed in tradition; it has survived it’s attempts to declare itself the sole source of Truth in the world; it has survived a plague of child molestation – enabled and covered up to the highest levels of the church. The Catholic church has survived – and it will survive this too.
The corrupt institution – through all of this – has survived because of the faith and good sense of the Church, the people and their sensus fidelium.
As Cardinal Stafford misuses his office to promote fear of apocalypse and as reactionary priests use the sacraments to provoke a schism, it should be remembered that this too will pass, and that as Christ challenged the Pharisees, so we too must challenge the corrupt institutions of our church. What we need to get past with Baby Boomer church politics is a new generation of leadership for the Catholic church, an Obama-like figure able to move past the debilitating culture wars and partisan politics to focus on the true business of the church.
It’s hard to see new leadership arising from the politicized clergy – but God does work in mysterious ways. Remember – just four years ago, it was almost inconceivable that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama could be President of the United States. Yet here we are. Know hope.
Marin Cogan in an investigative piece in The New Republic has trouble finding any media-reform liberals or Democrats who are actually want to bring the Fairness Doctrine back or are trying to do so.
As Kevin Drum points out at The Washington Monthly:
Given the collapse of the Republican Party’s electoral fortunes, folks like Limbaugh and Michael Gerson have to create a rallying cry, and there’s no better way to whip up the Republican base than to make far-right activists feel like victims. “Liberals are coming to take away your talk radio!” is, obviously, pretty effective.
At the same time, a conservative effort is underway to label legislation protecting net neutrality (which prevents the internet from being structured to favor certain sites over others and was one of the founding principles of the internet) a “Fairness Doctrine for the Internet,” which may be the only chance the big corporations who oppose net neutrality have to stop it – as Adam Reilly of The Boston Phoenix pointed out, citing me.
It seems the Fairness Doctrine is one of the key components conservatives will be using to keep their partisan backs up in the coming lean years – as well as being a potential fundraising tool.
Sara Robinson wrote a prescient essay earlier this year (h/t Jeff BlakelyBlakley of Turning Points) exploring the promise of Barack Obama – and how the country was ready for change.
She applied the lessons of Crane Brinton’s Anatomy of a Revolution (by way of the sociologist James C. Davies) to our current moment and to understanding Obama’s campaign. I’m not entirely convinced by the essay – as I don’t think America was or is as near to revolution as Sara Robinson suggests. I think that one of the touches of genius marking our political structure is that it allows change to come well before revolution is needed. And in our current age, the greater threat than revolution is apathy.
Which is why one of the first points Robinson brings up to suggest that we could be on the verge of revolution strikes me as off. One of Brinton-Davies pre-conditions of revolution is a economically advancing society that suddenly crashes. We are certainly might be headed there – more clearly now than back last winter when Robinson wrote this piece. But the most Americans today – especially younger Americans – have been lacking in that precise quality that comes from economic progress Robinson deems essential to a revolutionary people – what she calls “the kind of hopeful belief in their own agency that primes them to become likely revolutionaries in an era of decline.” (A phrase I have used before to describe this hopeful belief in one’s own agency is “engagement with power.”) Neither today’s youth nor today’s middle aged seem to have that belief – at least not in a political sense. There is a kind of hopeful belief in entrepreneurship – but that focuses on private actions and success in the market – very different from revolution.
However, since Robinson has written this article, it seems that people have become engaged with power again – in the Obama movement, in his campaign, and in the election. Although apathy is still quite real, and if Obama is able to continue to inspire people to participate in politics, he may end up creating an engaged citizenry – which is the key ingredient in both a successful democracy and a pre-condition for revolution.
Robinson also makes an excellent point regarding the essence of pragmatism in ensuring stability in a society such as ours:
Now, we’re also about to re-learn the historical lesson that liberals like flat hierarchies, racial and religious tolerance, and easy class mobility not because we’re soft-headed and soft-hearted — but because, unlike short-sighted conservatives, we understand that tight social cohesion is our most reliable and powerful bulwark against the kinds of revolutions that bring down great economies, nations and cultures…[The] headless ghosts [of past plutocratic nobilities] bear testimony to the idea that’s it’s better to give in and lose a little skin early than dig in and lose your whole hide later on.
Again – I’m not sure that we, as a society, are at the point when the elites (the ones Sarah Palin palled around with rather than railed against – the corporate and conservative ones) need to worry about their heads. But the overall point – that everyone in society must give up something, that pragmatism must rule over pure self-interest or ideology – that point is essential.
I suppose I tend to read this essay as an argument for smart policies to prevent revolution rather than as a prescription, which is consistent with my conservative politics based mainly on trying to prevent a revolution from being necessary. That perhaps is the best way to understand and define Rooseveltian liberalism.
Where is the evidence of the supposed partisan wrangling that we hear so much about? Just examine the question dispassionately. Look at every major Bush initiative, every controversial signature Bush policy over the last eight years, and one finds virtually nothing but massive bipartisan support for them — the Patriot Act (original enactment and its renewal); the invasion of Afghanistan; the attack on, and ongoing occupation of, Iraq; the Military Commissions Act (authorizing enhanced interrogation techniques, abolishing habeas corpus, and immunizing war criminals); expansions of warrantless eavesdropping and telecom immunity; declaring part of Iran’s government to be “terrorists”; our one-sided policy toward Israel; the $700 billion bailout; The No Child Left Behind Act, “bankruptcy reform,” and on and on.
Most of those were all enacted with virtually unanimous GOP support and substantial, sometimes overwhelming, Democratic support: the very definition of “bipartisanship.” That’s just a fact.
Moreover, Bush’s appointments of judges were barely ever impeded, resulting in a radical transformation of the federal courts. Other than John Bolton and Steven Bradbury, not a single significant Bush nominee was blocked. Those who implemented Bush’s NSA program (Michael Hayden) and authorized his torture program (Alberto Gonzales) were confirmed for promotions. The Bush administration committed war crimes, broke long-standing surveillance laws, politicized prosecutions, and explicitly claimed the right to break our laws, yet Congress did nothing about any of that except to authorize most of it, and investigated virtually none of it. With regard to many of those transgressions, key Democratic leaders were briefed at the time they were implemented and quietly acquiesced, did nothing to stop any of it. Both parties are in virtually unanimous agreement that our highest political leaders should be exempt from accountability under the rule of law even for the grave crimes that have been committed.
As The Washington Post‘s Dan Froomkin observed at the end of last year: “Historians looking back on the Bush presidency may well wonder if Congress actually existed.” How much more harmonious – “bipartisan” – can the two parties get?