Life Of Illusion (The Director's Cut)

Latest Newspaper Column: 

[Note: this is the unedited version. The one in the paper eliminates the first paragraphs because the editor was afraid the Party of Love might firebomb the newspaper office.] 

So now, at long last, the election is over, and President Barack Obama will have his second term. Before we get to our discussion of what happened and why, let me just take the time to say: HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!

Ahem. On to the post-election analysis.

I’ve said before that Mitt Romney was destined to be the John Kerry of the Republican Party. Each man was a rich, entitled Massachusetts moderate trying to convince his party's skeptical base he was one of them, despite having once supported the thing that that base purported to despise most (the Iraq War in Kerry's case, the individual mandate in Romney's). Both Kerry and Romney ran against controversial incumbents, with a central message that amounted to “I’m not him.” And both fell short. But Mitt Romney fell much shorter than Kerry. Why? Perhaps because the “him” Romney was running against didn’t exist.

The imaginary Barack Obama that the Republicans were running against bore little or no resemblance to the actual man in the White House. Imaginary Obama was a scowling, far-left radical, a socialist, a fascist or a communist, depending on who was yelling into the mike at the time. Imaginary Obama was simultaneously an evil schemer who was plotting 24/7 to destroy America and a guy who was too dumb to get into college without affirmative action or to speak without a teleprompter. Imaginary Obama was a divisive, harshly partisan figure, hated by all, even his former supporters. Worst of all, he was an incompetent, a miserable failure at absolutely everything he touched.

The problem with this strategy is that the actual Barack Obama that non-delusional people could see was a smart, calm, moderate with good likability ratings who’d brought the unemployment numbers down at a steady if sometimes maddeningly slow pace, saved the auto industry, and brought Osama bin Laden to justice. People heard the Right dismissing every bit of good news, crying doom and gloom, and insisting “everything’s getting worse,” looked around, and went, “hmmm, it really isn’t.”

Then along came Sandy. The quick Presidential response to the hurricane and the grateful reaction of Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who only a few weeks before had been savaging Obama at the GOP convention, blew away any lingering doubts non-delusional voters may have had about both the President’s competence and his ability to work with Republicans.

As the polls showed the President pulling further and further ahead in crucial swing states, Republicans began pulling the blanket of delusion over their heads. Pundits like Dick Morris, Karl Rove, Michael Barone and even the usually sane George W. Will predicted a Romney landslide, with Will predicting 321 EVs for Romney.

 One expects this sort of thing from hacks like Morris, Barone and Rove, but Will really should have known better. The polls were “skewed,” they insisted, because they assumed that Democratic voter turnout would be the same in 2012 as it was in 2008. That wasn’t going to happen this year, they asserted with the all the misguided and uninformed bravado of a latter-day George Armstrong Custer.

Actually, had you asked earlier in the year, I might have said you had a point. There were a lot of disaffected Democrats, particularly on the Left. (Anyone who says liberals all think the same has clearly never been around any). But that was before the GOP, some of its prominent supporters, and its candidates began taking extreme radical positions on things like abortion, contraception, gay rights, and immigration, and saying things that frightened, offended or ticked off Latinos, LGBT people, African-Americans, and especially women. That fired up the very constituencies the GOP had told themselves would stay home.

So thanks, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Bachmann, Todd Akin, Rick Santorum, John Koster, Richard Mourdock, etc.! You fired liberals up and damaged the GOP brand with moderates, probably for years. And right wingers, dwelling as they do in their tightly woven cocoons where only Fox News and talk radio can penetrate, never even saw it. They still don’t. But numbers really don’t lie.

Now that the Republican leadership has failed in their stated number one goal of making Barack Obama a “one term president,” what will they do? Will they actually start pushing bills other than futile grandstanding attempts to “repeal Obamacare”? Will they actually deal in good faith on the budget?

Well, we live in hope. But first they’re going to have to do is stop deluding themselves that everyone hates the President and the Democrats as much as they think they do and that they’ll be rewarded for obstructionism. Reality, it’s said, has a well-known liberal bias, but it’s still reality. 

Doghouse Riley on the Crazy Eyes Cover and the Myth Of "Liberal Media"

Bats Left/Throws Right:

....whatever's wrong about that Newsweek Bachmann cover--and, somehow, no one to my knowledge has mentioned "being the sort of country where a religiously mazed Bible saleswoman rates any sort of national news coverage"--it's not an example of Librul Media bias which makes FOX look good. Liberal Media? It's fucking Tina Brown. It's marketing. It's the reduction of everything to celebrity gossip as perpetrated by the Roone Arledge of Literacy...

...We heard this crap about Sarah Palin. We heard it about George W. Bush, more to the point, and look where that got us. Nobody said it was unethical to make fun of John Kerry, or Al Gore, or Mike Dukakis. It's just well past time for forty-something male commenters to acknowledge that this is no one-sided game, that this sort of thing is the Right's great stock in trade--the bumper-sticker witticism, the Messiah caricature--and demanding unilateral disarmament from the Left, let alone from "The Left", is ridiculous.

Doghouse Riley's become one of my daily must-reads. Check him out.

And while you're at it, check out this compilation showing both conservatives and liberals being dinged by sensationalistic covers.

So spare us the whining, Bachmanniacs. We'd all be better served if both parties were going after the press for perpetrating this shallow, "optics"-obsessed, narrative-driven bullshit that they call journalism rather than whining about how they're "in the tank" for the other side. The mainstream  media just generally  sucks all around. Claiming that they're taking sides just gives these idiots the cover of saying "well, both sides are saying we're being unfair to them, so we must be balanced."

Crazy Eyes and the Right Wing Cult of Victimhood

Latest Newspaper Column:

This past week, those on the American right stopped patting themselves on the back for nearly causing America to default long enough to engage in another of their favorite pastimes: whining that they’re being picked on.

This time, the source of the injury to their delicate feelings was the cover of Newsweek, featuring the visage of Michele Bachmann.

The cover photo, over a headline dubbing her “The Queen of Rage,” showed Bachmann looking pretty much like she’s looked in a lot of pictures and videos, including her much-parodied response to the State of the Union address: staring off into space, wide-eyed, as if she’s watching a troupe of fairies dancing in a mystic circle only she can see.

Republican fairies, naturally. Non-gay ones.

Of course, to the right, running an accurate photograph of their current icon is like quoting her past statements accurately: proof of a vast left-wing conspiracy in the media.

“Can anyone really say with a straight face that the mainstream media is not totally biased against conservatives?” a conservative blogger at a site called “Freedom’s Lighthouse” complained.

Gee, I don’t know, dude. Maybe you should ask Anthony Weiner how the media go easy on liberals. Or you could ask Bill Clinton, who was once shown on a Time magazine cover with his face printed as a frightening-looking photo negative, over the headline “Why People Don’t Trust Bill Clinton.”

Actually, Bachmann’s supporters should  be ecstatic about the Newsweek cover, because once they begin their customary temper tantrum, it’s like throwing a switch that sends the talking heads and chattering pundits of the allegedly “liberal” media into their own customary fits of blather about their favorite subject: themselves. Was the picture unfair? Are we sexist? Would anyone in the media distort appearances to try to make a male Democratic front runner look unhinged for the sake of a story?

Maybe you should direct that last question to Howard Dean.

Meanwhile, something a lot more substantive that can and should be more closely examined about Bachmann gets pushed to the back burner: the fact that the woman who’s so given to railing about government spending and programs isn’t shy about benefiting from them herself.

She’s been a vocal critic of federal home loan programs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even while she and her husband were taking out a $417,000 home loan backed by those agencies. The Bachmann family farm received $251,000 in federal farm payments between 1995 and 2006, and Michele took $50,000 in profit out of the place in 2008.

The clinic run by Bachmann’s husband received money from Medicaid, a program she decries for “swelling the welfare rolls,” until her hubby got caught taking it. At that point, according to a Bachmann spokesman, Medicaid became “a valuable form of insurance for many Americans.”

Then, as a congresswoman, Bachmann frequently appealed to agencies like the EPA (which she’s suggested she’d eliminate if she were president), the Agriculture Department, and the Department of Transportation for funds from the very stimulus programs she once dubbed “fantasy economics.”

She also praised Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack for using government money to help prop up the struggling pork industry in her state and urged him to continue to “stabilize prices through direct government purchasing.”

The website Politico has referred to this sort of behavior as “selective socialism.” It’s the sort of thing we’ve gotten used to from the right, which, as I’ve said before, often reminds me of a teenager screaming at her parents “I hate you, you ruined my life, I wish you were dead!” then demanding a ride to the mall.

Maybe, like the tea partiers who want to “keep the government’s hands off Medicare,” Michele Bachmann is actually so unhinged that she truly doesn’t regard it as government spending if it’s spent on her. Or maybe she’s just another grifter assuring the rubes that she’s the only one who’s looking after their interests while she pockets government cash with both hands.

In any case, those are bigger questions about Bachmann than the superficial one of whether or not the Newsweek cover made her look bad.

Modern media types, however, are ­notorious these days for concentrating on style (or “optics,” to use the new buzzword) rather than substance. They’re more ­interested in fretting about whether they’re “balanced” than in whether they’re ­reporting the truth.

That’s not because they’re liberal. It’s because they’re lousy at their jobs.

Bachmannia!

Latest Newspaper Column:

So another Republican candidates’ debate has come and gone, and the GOP’s newest rising star is Mrs. Crazy Eyes herself, Mrs. “Armed and Dangerous,” Mrs. “we need to slit our wrists to stop health reform”: Congresswoman Michele Bachmann.

The consensus is that Bachmann “stole the show,” first by announcing her candidacy at the outset of the debate (as if being at the debate itself wasn’t announcement enough), and then by doing better than anyone expected. That is to say, she didn’t say anything egregiously stupid or inflammatory. Plus, she managed to look into the right camera this time.

Actually, that last part may not be a good thing. I can’t help it; every time I look at Bachmann’s wide, blank eyes, I get a chill down my spine and a flashback to Martin Sheen’s insane president character in the movie version of “The Dead Zone.” (“Mr. Vice President, the missiles are flying. Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”) But right now, the right loves them some Bachmann. I’ve started calling it Bachmannia.

Bachmannia, like its predecessors Trumpmania and the short-lived Newtmania, arises out of the right’s desire to find a candidate who’s ABR — anyone but Romney. An awful lot of pundits seem to regard Mitt Romney as the guy to beat. He’s got the money, he’s got the organization, and he sure does have good hair.

But this time around, Romney’s got the same problem he had last time, as far as primary voters are concerned: a lack of ideological purity. As governor, he supported a regional “cap-and-trade” compact to reduce greenhouse gases and global warming.

Not only was his so-called “Romneycare” plan cited (repeatedly, and with great glee) by Democrats as a template for federal health care reform, but the “Commonwealth Care” health insurance program for low- and moderate-income Massachusetts residents also provides coverage for (horrors!) abortion.

He’s always been against gay marriage, but he once sent a letter to the Log Cabin Republicans stating, “We must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern” and promising that he’d be a stronger advocate for gay rights than Teddy Kennedy.

None of this would likely hurt Romney in the general election, so long as he stuck to the “cut taxes” mantra that’s become the GOPs’ version of the Jedi mind trick — say it enough times in a deep, assured voice and the voters will believe any other damn fool thing you tell them.

Unfortunately, the modern Republican Party is not being run by sane people. Dick Armey’s Freedomworks ­organization has threatened to unleash the hounds (and part of the group’s $25 million war chest) to bring Romney down. Conservative activist Joe Miller, of Alaska, has already registered the domain name StopRomney.com. And so on.

Some political analysts are predicting that the only way Romney’s going to blunt those attacks is to have what little spine he has completely removed and grovel like a whipped cur to the wingnuts. He’s well on the way; his twists and turns as he tries to explain why an individual insurance mandate in Massachussetts is reasonable, rational health care reform, but it’s Hitler-level tyranny as part of “Obamacare,” would be hilarious if they weren’t so pathetic.

I’ve got news for Mitt, anyway: Kissing up to these people never works. When true believers hate, they hate deep and they hate forever. As Democrats never seem to learn, trying to placate the right only earns you more contempt.

If Romney actually had the gumption to stand up to the far right (or do what the Democratic Party establishment does to its far left wing, i.e., ignore them), he might have a shot at winning the general election. But so far he’s showed no signs of having anything like that kind of courage.

It’s the Republican dilemma: Anyone moderate enough to draw the independent voters needed to win the general election has no chance of getting past the wingnut gauntlet known as the GOP primaries. So they may very well end up with Bachmann or someone equally out to lunch.

Then their only strategy for victory is to do what they so often falsely accused liberals of doing: hoping for America to fail. They’ll hope for America’s economy to remain sluggish, for unemployment to remain high, or even for an actual double-dip recession. At which point, even sane people will be angry enough and desperate enough to put a complete lunatic like Bachmann in charge.

State of the Union

Latest Newspaper Column- The Pilot:

In President Obama’s State of the Union speech this past week, he continued some of the same themes of unity and bipartisanship from his speech in Tucson a couple of weeks ago.

“We are part of the American family,” he said. “We will move forward together, or not at all.”

But the greater challenge may be not just creating a unity of purpose between Republicans and Democrats but getting members of the two parties to get along with the people who are allegedly on their own side.

Rep. Paul Ryan was picked to give the traditional response from the loyal opposition. Ryan’s speech was, like all Republican rhetoric on the deficit, long on exhortations to cut ­spending but awfully vague on exactly which spending to cut. This may be because Ryan’s own plan, dubbed the “roadmap,” calls for severe cuts in Social Security and the dismantling of Medicare, two huge benefits paid to the GOP’s most loyal constituency: senior citizens.

It’s quite a balancing act the Republicans do. If they really tried to make the cuts that would be required to balance the budget without tax increases, their elderly supporters would storm the Capitol (albeit very slowly) and drag their congressman down the street by the heels behind their little Medicare-funded Rascal scooters.

But then, after Ryan’s response, something unusual happened. CNN broadcast another response from another Republican, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who claimed to be giving the “tea party” reaction.

You can always depend on Bachmann to bring the crazy, and she didn’t disappoint. She delivered the whole speech staring off camera, as if she couldn’t bear to look the American people in the eye.

As it turns out, she was looking into another camera, the one broadcasting to the tea party faithful via the Internet, which was also the camera with the teleprompter. It seems that teleprompters, like everything else the right claims to despise, are just fine if you’re a Republican.

And what would a speech from Rep. Crazy-Eyes be without a heaping helping of paranoid fantasies and outright fabrications?

Fresh from her interview in which she asserted that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly to eradicate slavery,” Bachmann doubled down on the misinformation, repeating ­frequently debunked claims that “Obamacare” would result in “16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing” the bill and bizarre warnings about “government bureaucrats telling you what light bulbs to buy.”

CNN’s decision to air the speech drew criticism from some Republicans. One aide sent out an e-mail calling it “irresponsible journalism” for CNN to aid Bachmann in her quest to become the GOP’s loosest cannon.

The most surprising criticism, however, came from a tea party group in Bachmann’s home state.

“Please call Michele Bachmann’s office and tell her that she does not speak for the tea party,” the group said in a mass e-mail. “The Tea Party Patriots Organization is a grassroots organization. One person has no right to speak for the whole organization.”

Wow. Too crazy for the tea party. That’s pretty impressive.

On the other side of the aisle, the president got some ­immediate pushback from his own party. In response to his promise to veto any legislation that arrived on his desk with so-called “earmarks,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sniffed that it was a “great applause line” but that Obama “should back off and let us do what we do.” Which is, apparently, diverting as much ­government money as possible to their states or districts to keep the voters happy.

It’s another one of those dirty secrets closely held by ­lawmakers of both parties. Everyone pretends to deplore “pork” or “earmarks” or whatever they’re calling it this year, but every legislator knows their voters won’t keep loving them if they don’t bring some of that federal money home to them. It’s the one thing both parties have always seemed to agree on.

Even Republican Leader Mitch McConnell was resisting a proposed earmark ban until someone from the tea party put a severed horse’s head in his bed or something and caused him to reverse himself, at least in public.

It remains to be seen if this will continue, or if GOP lawmakers will revert to their traditional stance that it’s not “government spending” if the money’s going to their district or their big campaign contributors.

Meanwhile, the two parties continue to squabble, not just with each other, but also among themselves. Maybe what we really need is not just bipartisanship, but multi-partisanship.

NV Senate Candidate: You Can't Be Mean to Me! I'm a Girl!

The Washington Monthly:

Nevada Republican Senate Candidate Sharron Angle:

"...dirty tricks Harry [Reid] is up to his dirty tricks one more time and he's just trying to hit the girl," Angle said on the Alan Stock Show.

"You know, isolate that Sharron Angle, marginalize her and then demonize her," she said in a separate appearance on the Heidi Harris Show. "And he has been doing that to me and what we need to do is say, 'you know Harry, it's not going to do you any good to hit the girl.'"

It's the same bullshit we've seen in regards to Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. Any time they're criticized, one of their supporters is bound to come out with some faux-feminist claptrap like "Sexist! You're just afraid of a successful and powerful conservative woman!"

UPDATE: As someone reminded me, the die hard Hillary Clintonites (aka PUMAs) did the same thing. And they were idiots, too.

You can't have it both ways. You can't claim to be a feminist and then try to use your gender as a shield from criticism of your actual record.

And isn't calling a woman a "girl" supposed to be a no-no? Guess IOKIYAR!

You Have Not Thought This Through

Think Progress tells the story of what happens when a fake conservative like Michelle Bachmann invites a real small-government, limited-intervention conservative like Ron Paul to appear with her:

As Paul spoke passionately about ending all military operations and keeping government out of people’s “lifestyles,” a lone heckler began to shout, “Tell her!” Bachmann remained serene, hands folded in her lap, facing Paul. Bringing up Obama’s announcement that Iran had secret underground nuclear facilities, Paul announced that he had had enough of “fear-mongering” for the sake of the “military-industrial complex.” Bachmann, who once advocated nuking Iran, kept her eyes trained on Paul as her heckler repeated, “Tell her! Tell Michele! Tell her!”

I've noted before that Ron Paul was the only "conservative" running for President last year who actually espoused any real conservative principles, and the other "conservatives" (who were really Daddy-state authoritarians masquerading as conservatives) treated him like a lunatic. I suppose Crazy Shelly Bachmann, who really is a lunatic, figured she and Paul would be kindred spirits.

Look how wrong you can be.