Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Greed: Not So Good

I think it’s perfectly OK for the Obama Administration to be taking a good deal of heat for this whole AIG thing. They coulda, shoulda, handled it better. I think they have demonstrated that they’re a resilient bunch who can learn from their mistakes.

But I am kind of enjoying this whole populism trend we’re starting to see. ‘Cause I think it really plays into the hands of people such as myself who just don’t see the need for anyone to get million-dollar bonuses.

The critics of Obama have every right to question how the AIG thing has been handled, but aren’t they also buying into the underlying proposition: that too many folks have been making too much money at the expense of the middle class?

Isn’t that, I don’t know, SOCIALISM????

When conservative Republicans start screaming about the rewards of capitalism, you know we’ve entered a strange and new place.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Jon Stewart vs. the Liberal Media

Conservatives take it as a given that the media is stacked against them. So why has Jon Stewart become the most effective media critic of our time?

He's a bleeding heart liberal. Surely he has no problem with the drive-by media?

(I'm not even bothering with quote marks for this post.)

Stewart's thorough whipping of Jim Cramer this week is another example of why the myth of a liberal media is becoming less believable every day.

Cramer, and his network CNBC, have been exposed as cheerleaders of the worst excesses of capitalism, the inflated, bubble-mentality that has driven this country to its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. They've been out there, defending unregulated capitalism at every chance, waving their arms, shouting "Buy, Buy!" and basically behaving like idiots.

Stewart is just about the only person who has called them on it, and he is right to do so. And it may just be that because he is ostensibly a comedian, he is the only person who *can* call them on it. After all, it's not liberalism that drives our media. It's money. The networks, the newspapers--they are businesses at heart. They are run by businessmen, not political ideologues. (Well, with the exception of Fox, which is run by a fella who is both.)

And calling into question the basic foundations of modern capitalism (which one could argue is failing as spectacularly as communism failed in the 80s) is not something that has been good for business. Journalists, for the most part, have just not gone there.

Satirists like Stewart and Colbert have done a much better job of questioning the status quo. As it turns out, the status is not quo. (I love that line) The emperor, to borrow another line, has no clothes. The parrot has ceased to be. Bereft of life ...

Uh, I got a little lost there. Anyhow, Stewart, time and time again, shows us a media that does not question the status quo, does not really educate or inform, and does not provide any discernible public service, unless you count division and fear as public goods. There's liberal media, there's conservative media, and there's bad media. In the past decade or so, we have been treated mostly to the last of those three.

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

I think I understand what you're doing, but really, the last thing I want to see more of on my TV is Rush Limbaugh.

Ok, so the big thing on the blogs lately is Rush vs. Obama.

You guys probably know I don't like Rush much. I know lots of decent people who have been fans at some point, including an African American single mom I used to work with. But I have never been able to stand him. I think he's probably the worst thing to happen to American politics since Joe McCarthy.

Here's the thing: Rush Limbaugh has never gotten a single vote. He's never worked to solve a problem. He's never had to build a coalition. He's never had to answer to voters. He's never had to face a public crisis. All he's done for 30 years is sit on his oversize behind and spread hatred for people who don't think like him.

Not a role model, in my book.

But I'm not going to analyze the Rush vs. Obama thing. At least not right now. There are lots of smarter people than I doing that:

"Upcoming legislative fights are expected to be brutal, tougher than the stimulus bill. The votes of Specter, Snowe and Collins, critical for passage of the stimulus, are still considered the first gettable Republican votes. The spectacle of Limbaugh as Republican-in-Chief sucks all the oxygen from the room when these moderate Republican senators may want cover for any potential “no” vote – or “no” leverage in negotiations.

"Don’t think the White House doesn’t know that. Gibbs yesterday: “I think maybe the best question, though, is for you to ask individual Republicans whether they agree with what Rush Limbaugh said this weekend. Do they want to see the President's economic agenda fail?” (emphasis added). It’s not about Limbaugh. It’s about Specter, et. al. It’s about winning the budget fight, the health care fight.

"...Not everyone agrees. Today, veteran Democratic messaging strategist Peter Daou panned the Limbaugh strategy, arguing that while it may seem like a good idea today due to irrational Democratic exuberance in the afterglow of the election, in the long term elevating Limbaugh is a mistake because his toxic effect on political debate will ultimately hurt Democrats. Daou, who worked for Hillary Clinton, also mocks the idea of Obama’s powerful campaign as pure myth, instead suggesting that Obama beat Clinton because Limbaugh tore her down for 15 years.

Daou is completely wrong about why Obama won, but that’s incidental. He’s wrong about Limbaugh because Limbaugh is already a tested brand, and the verdict has been rendered. Muhammad Ali, he is not. Independents aren’t going to suddenly start listening to Rush somewhere down the road, just as they aren’t going to suddenly start appreciating Al Sharpton, who also has a brand. Limbaugh doesn’t have any new, dynamic ideas that will one day become ascendant if the Democrats aren’t careful. Limbaugh has precisely the same ideas, and proudly boasts he always will..."
-Sean Quinn- fivethirthyeight.com

---

"But what about the rest of the party? Here’s the duel that Obama and Limbaugh are jointly arranging:

On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.

And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined."
--David Frum - newmajority.com

Or let's just go to Jon Stewart, who also manages to skewer O'Reilly as well: