Parabasis

Art and Violence and Health Care and Misdirection

By Isaac Butler

It's ridiculous for we artists (and culture makers) to claim that art has real power when we want grant money and then turn around and say it's essentially powerless and has no effect on people whatsoever and is just stories and pretty pictures and kickin' tunes whenever someone gets mad at us about what we create.  I'm not saying there's a causal relationship between, say, Grand Theft Auto and Sandy Hook, or The Matrix and Columbine--although I can remember seeing the Matrix twice in theaters, once before Columbine and once after, the former with my girlfriend and the latter with my Dad, and finding it much more disturbing time #2 (it's also worth noting that Morpheus's postitioning in the Matrix re: the taking of innocent life is identical to Osama Bin Laden's)-- but it is worth noting at some point that a great number of narratives produced in this country for mass consumption position violence as either (a) redemptive, (b) a path to mastery of some kind or (c) both.

And at some point, we should really talk about that. And those of us who create narratives that include violence within them should think about it. 

Similarly, at some point, we should really have a conversation about access to mental health services in this country.

All of that said as a long  clearing of the throat, I'm with Kevin Drum on this one:

I know that lots of well-meaning people think that movies and videogames really are problematic, and that access to mental health in America is a scandal. And that might well be true. But every minute you spend talking about this stuff is a minute spent doing exactly what the NRA wants you to do. If you want to have any chance at all of passing gun legislation, that's what you should be talking about. Guns. End of story. The other stuff can wait.

 

Some Thoughts On Gun Control

By Isaac Butler

First off, if you want some statistics about gun control, you couldn't do much better than Ezra Klein's "Twelve Facts About Gun Control" which can be found here. He then went on to do some yeoman's work mythbusting the claim that Israel and Switzerland are places with high rates of gun ownership but low rates of gun violence (which would seem to bolster the argument that our gun violence is largely cultural in nature). Those are both worth a read.

I'm going to hand over the metaphorical mic here to a friend of mine who shall remain anonymous. I e-mailed him yesterday to ask him about gun control and what could be done. My friend is a gun collector, a military nut, and a pro-gun control lefty. He also believes-- and, over the years, has convinced me-- that much of what Democrats think is good gun control policy is basically cosmetic bullshit. 

I asked him given his views on gun control, and given the Supreme Court ruling that the 2nd Amendment provides for an individual positive right to bear arms, what could be done in the wake of the Newtown shooting to get a handle on guns? This was his reply. I think you'll note a lot of this stuff is done at the State level. So it might be a good idea for you to familiarize yourself with your state's gun control laws and work to strengthen them, should this be an issue you really care about:

Enforce the existing gun control laws and regulations.  That would be a strong start.  We have really good  federal laws against gun possession by felons, transferring guns to those with mental illness, those who abuse drugs and booze, those with records of non-felony violence, those who have been dishonorably discharged from the military, etc., etc. But prosecutions for violations of these laws aren't all that robust.  DAs will respond to incentives.  If they're incentivized to prosecute drug offenses, they're likely to plea bargain away the gun charges.  Change those incentives.

Massachusetts, California, and some other places have laws that mandate secure storage for firearms.  That doesn't strike me as the world's worst idea.

The state laws allowing private parties to transfer ownership of firearms to others without a record of the transaction is something that should be examined.  That will be contentious.

There are other places where failure to report the theft of a firearm has legal consequences.  Again, I don't see what would be constitutionally threatening.

We've done a good job of pushing down fatalities due to mis-use and criminal use of vehicles by enforcing existing laws and educating the public on how to safely operate in a world full of cars.  A similar approach to guns would show benefits.  In states where state-standardized firearm safety course are required to get a concealed carry permit or a hunting permit there are significant public safety benefits.  The Eddie Eagle program does great work educating kids in firearm safety.

And not to sound bitchy, but stay the hell away from highly technical definition-based regulations.  Banning magazines based on how many rounds they hold or weapons with certain features is flat out stupid and ineffective. It's ineffective because such regulations are invariably written by people who don't understand the technical details sufficiently to focus on aspects that actually bear on the lethality of weapons. It's stupid since you burn political capital and make political enemies - rather than converts - all for zero actual effect (because it was ineffectively written in the first place). 

But . . . you can't concentrate only on the tools.  This is a problem with people.  People are using inanimate tools to hurt other people.  Identifying those people likely to do this is challenging, but it's worth concentrating on at least as much as limiting access to tools.  

There are so many guns in circulation that you're never going to get them all under control.  You can and should try, but it'll take years even if you get serious about it.  So you have to accept that you live in a world where people do bad things with guns.  You should build your systems of protection with this in mind.  We understand that banks are inherently attractive targets to those who want to steal money.  And we proactively protect them.

But now we also understand that places filled with defenseless people are inherently attractive targets to those cowards who want to harm innocents on their way out.  Fine. We should proactively protect those places - not from the tools (guns), but from the predators (people employing guns to hurt people).  

Something to chew on with your morning coffee.

The Brewing Controversy over "Zero Dark Thirty"

By Isaac Butler

Arguments about arguments about arguments can grow tiresome right quick, so I'll keep this short:

Friend of the room Freddie DeBoer has an odd post up about Zero Dark Thirty today. He weighs in to defend Glenn Greenwald's writing about Zero Dark Thirty, a film neither man has seen:

Based on his Twitter feed, it seems he has caused a conflagration for daring to criticize the movie. The typical, and typically cheap, response is that he has no right to judge the movie without having seen it. Which would be true, were he commenting on its quality or its perspective. Instead Greenwald has a very basic point, one that is being roundly ignored: a film that has repeatedly and proudly been sold as "documentary" and "journalistic" contains a lie of profound importance. The movie, by all accounts, shows torture as being an indispensable part of the capture of bin Laden, an idea that has been roundly debunked and specifically denied by many people on the inside of the government. (Adam Serwer, with typical thoroughness and fairness, has the run-down.) To say that your movie is "a hybrid of the filmic and the journalistic," as the writer of the film did, when your movie depicts the use of torture as essential to captuing bin Laden is to tell a lie. And in a country of vitriolic anti-Muslim hatred, a dangerous lie. Whether you've seen the film or not.

(emphasis mine)

Here's the thing. I would agree with Freddie here... except, well, whether or not the film "depicts the use of torture as essential to caputring bin Laden" is not a sure thing "by all accounts". Some early reports, most notably from NYTimes Opinion writer Frank Bruni, claims that it does. 

But it turns out that torture's place within the movie (beyond that it takes up the film's first 45 minutes) is up for some debate.  Spencer Ackerman, who has seen the movie, recently weighed in with a more detailed reading than Bruni's that makes the case the film isn't pro-torture at all, that Bigelow is getting "a  bum rap." Freddie dismisses Ackerman's writing in the same post thusly:

 I think liberals want to be forced to support torture. ... That's why writers like Spencer Ackerman exist, to present the proper level of squeamishness and showy moral grappling-- to say that these scenes "can make a viewer ashamed to be American, in the context of a movie whose ending scene makes viewers very, very proud to be American"-- before the torture happens anyway. The key is to go through the moral indigestion but to eventually get to the all-American pride. There's a whole cottage industry, like that, for fretting liberals who want to get to the tough guy routine in the end.

As if that's the argument Ackerman is making. Which it isn't (the argument he's actually making is "The torture on display in the film occurs at the intersection of ignorance and brutality, while the vast, vast majority of the intelligence work that actually does lead to bin Laden’s downfall occurs after the torture has ended.") Or as if Spencer Ackerman didn't have a multi-year history of documenting and condemning the Bush torture regime. 

This seems very strange. Given a choice between a critic who has seen the work in question and one who hasn't, one should always take the former more seriously. Freddie says this distinction doesn't matter because aesthetic quality isn't being discussed.  But meaning is. And meaning is often open to interpretation, and thus requires actual engagement with the materials to discern. Freddie seems absolutely positive that Greenwald has the correct interpretation and that, sans evidence, Ackerman is acting in bad faith. These both seem curious leaps in judgment. 

I have some issuees with Ackerman's piece. He doesn't grapple with the positioning of 9/11 within the narrative, or counter Bruni's problems with same. Nor does he really talk about whether or not torture's failure within the narrative should've been makde more overt. I'm also not sure I'm going to see Zero Dark Thirty. I like Bigelow as a director but have no interest in watching someone get waterboarded. Or 45 minutes of back to back torture scenes. And, as someone who was there, I'm really really fucking sick of 9/11 and it's place in our culture and I thought once Bin Laden was dead, we'd be able to move on. How very, very wrong I was. 

But should I choose to not see the film, I also know that I am limiting my ability to talk about it. I can talk about how it is being interpreted by other people who have seen the movie, but I can't actually weigh in substantively on it. I haven't seen it, and in choosing not to see it, I've given up that right. 

UPDATE: Another lefty who has actually seen Zero Dark Thirty weighs in on the film and explains why, in his opinion, it is definitely not pro-torture.

Link Grabbag

By Isaac Butler

Hey Parabasites... I've been very ill with a stomach bug, holidaying and grading my ever-loving ass off lately, and am seriously backed up on work, so I apologize for the light state of posting around here.  In the meantime, I am going to try to regularly post links to some of the stuff I discover while researching procrastinating.  Enjoy!

Theater: Over at The Taylor Trash, we have some handy words of advice for the young, aspiring theater critic. Meanwhile, Alison Croggon, one of theater blogging's OG's is hanging up her spurs. There's so few of us left now! Meanwhile, Bitter Lemons writes about a recent article in the LA Times about the recent(ish) trend for shorter plays and concludes that plays must be getting shorter because kids these days can't write and audiences are now stupider than they used to be. Comments section fury ensues.

Literature: Roxane Gay has some unkind (and well deserved) words for Simon & Schuster's new selfpublishing venture.

Grant Morrison pens an epic--and it really is epic-- smackdown of Alan Moore over at Comicsbeat.  Morrison seems clearly in the right vis-a-vis both their decades long animosity for one another and the larger philosophical questions of influence, pastiche and originality. Alan Moore's schtick has long been to create work that openly builds on and gleefully steals from previous creators and then claim that he is a sui generis genius and everyone else is ripping him off. If one applied Moore's own standards for what "original" is to Moore's work, you'd have to argue that great amounts of it is deeply unoriginal, including Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Lost Girls and Swamp Thing. That said, Morrison goes into such picayune detail about each slight that I'll applaud you if you can get through the whole thing in one sitting.

Charles Simic is now a blogger? Yes. And he's awesome. 

UNCATEGORIZABLE: Glenn Beck is hawking a toy Obama submerged in a jar of his (Beck's) urine. I'm more surprised by the fact that he's heard of "Piss Christ." McSweeney's brings us "Artisanal Baby Naming." 

 

Re: Old Wine, New Bottles

by 99 Seats

What Josh Marshall says:

The Obama presidency has led the GOP to make verboten a series of policies it either pioneered or which at least some significant segments of the party embraced. So it’s not just that the GOP is living in the ‘past’. I agree with their stalwarts that this is a sort of misleading way to put it. But the ‘Iron Wall’ policy vis-a-vis Obama has put the party in a position in which it is quite hard to play in a national (as opposed to a midterm) election.

I say this ad nauseum: conservatisim never fails, it is only failed. The post-election discussion is already hovering around the idea that Mitt Romney was a bad candidate, that the GOP needs a better standard bearer or better messaging. This ignores the basic fact: the GOP needs new ideas.

Mitt Romney was not a great candidate (though he was also clearly the best candidate of the GOP field), but, in the end, what hog-tied him was the policies. Focusing on his lack of connection or robotic demeanor downplays that people rejected his ideas. I've talked about the Romney campaign's failure in transactional politics before. I think we can expect that on a larger scale, especially as the demographics of the nation continue to shift. Lindsay Graham was right: they're not making enough angry, white men anymore. And besides angry white men, who benefits from the current GOP platform? Pretty much nobody.

Selling that, selling racial and gender resentment, with a brown face or a female face won't solve the basic problem. When people hear about the ideas, they will recoil. This isn't a problem of marketing. It's a problem of the soul. The GOP needs to search for one.

The Work Ahead

By Isaac Butler

Election nights are beginnings, not endings. It's easy to lose sight of this, given how much work and money goes into just getting your guy into office.  Elections provide much easier, cleaner narratives. Governance is messy, confusing, tedious, easy to lose track of.  

But there's a lot of unfinished work, and several serious threats on the horizon. And by threats, I do not mean from the GOP. The GOP is the GOP. They're going to do what they do. Our job in resisting that threat is to keep them from being elected, to try to keep the Senate and win back the house in two years, which will be nearly impossible. The threat in governance comes instead from the bigness of the tent of our party and the center-right bias of our media. And the unfinished work comes from our inability to push the Democratic party sufficiently to the left on several key issues.

The biggest threat, and the one that will come up the soonest (likely before Obama is even reinaugurated) is to the social safety net.  Thos threat comes not from the GOP, but rather directly from Obama himself.  The President has threatened time and again to put Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on the chopping block for a grand bargain, and, with his rhetoric of reigning in the "excesses" of the 60's and 70's, seems to sincerely believe that cutting the social safety net is a good idea.  Furthermore, with the terrible Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan as a basic model, Washington is captivated with the idea that making life harder for the poor and elderly is a winner both economically and at the ballot box. 

The only reason why the social safety net was preserved in the Debt Ceiling Debacle is that the GOP refused to take "yes" for an answer.  I'm not confident that, as we near the "fiscal cliff" the same thing will happen.  Many have said that Obama's Grand Bargain was simply a bluff, and with the fiscal cliff putting him in a much better bargaining position, he will work to protect entitlements. I don't know how many times Obama has to say that he wants to cut the social safety net before people will believe him, but here's that off the record interview he did with the Des Moines Register. He says within it that he wants to use the grand bargain and Simpson Bowles as a model for reducing the deficit, and he plans to stick by his pledge not to return to Clinton-era tax rates for those making under $250K a year. In other words, our President wants to keep taxes unreasonably low, and cut the social safety net to do it. He doesn't want to do it to the extremes of the other party, but he wants to do it.

If the Presdient fails to do this, if no bargain is met, we hit the fiscal cliff, which may send us in the short term into a second recession but also would also pull the status quo of the Federal Government far over to the left by raising taxes to Clinton-era levels and making the majority of cuts in defense. In other words, the power is actually in the hands of the progressive wing of the Democratic party here. We've elected solid progressives like Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin. We have to make sure that electing better Democrats leads to a better-acting Democratic party. And that's only going to happen if we keep the pressure on.

I cannot begin to express how excited and relieved I was by last night's results. How good it felt. I was also two sheets to the wind and eating afghan pizza in a basement in Minneapolis, but I'm pretty sure it had more to do with watching progressives win on social issues, win key Senate races and retain the Presidency.  I worry that we'll think the hard work is done, that we'll relax. Now is obviously a time for joy, but in the midst of our celebrations, let's not forget what lies ahead. 

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias has an important reminder: The fiscal cliff is not a cliff. 

Our Mythology Under Lock and Key

By Isaac Butler

I'm guessing 0% of the readers of Parabasis failed to notice that Disney has aquired Lucasfilm to the tune of $4.05 billion dollars (or roughly 63 Spider-Men).  Much attention has focused on the Mouse's decision to churn out a new Star Wars movie every few years, with people worried, after the prequels, about what little legacy of quality that franchise has left. 

I'm a little less concerned about that.  What I am concerned about is Disney's ongoing intellectual property aquisition strategy. 

Disney owns Pixar, Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm. This means they own Buzz and Woody, Indiana Jones, Luke and Leah and Han (who shot first, damnit). They own Captain America and the X-Men. They own Luke Cage and Iron Fist. They own Daredevil. They own Jareth. They own the gang from American Graffiti. They own the Brownies from Willow. On top of this, they continue to own the properties they've created as well.  Mickey and Minnie. Belle. Ariel. Ursula. 

Disney is also one of the prime movers behnd the Copyright Extension Act of 1998.  In fact, their lobbying efforts in favor of the bill were so intense that it got nicknamed The Mickey Mouse Protection Act (poor Mickey was about to enter the public domain and who knows what the grubby plebes would've done with him!). As I wrote about over at Howlround, the copyright term extension act insures that no works have entered the public domain since, and none will enter until 2019.

Now, 2019 is only seven years away (I hear you exclaim).  I don't want to be hysterical here, but I seriously, seriously doubt Disney is going to roll over and let Mickey enter the public domain that easily.  I would guess that, in the lead-up to 2019, we'll be looking at a serious effort on the part of Disney and other Intellectual Property-based companies to continue extending the copyright term another twenty years or so.

What this means is that Disney is hoarding up the closest thing 20th and 21st century culture has to folk tales and mythology, and locking them up in a safe where we can't touch it without getting sued. As artists, we should be deeply troubled by this. And for those of you who think that things like Fair Use and Parody exemptions will protect, you're wrong. It's not like a lawsuit magically goes away because it's spurious. It costs money to fight these things, as David Adjmi recently found out .  As This American Life discussed in the software industry, overly expansive IP laws combined with powerful, litigious companies are a toxic combination that squeezes out creativity and limits the possibility of what we can achieve.

This is what you should be worried about. Not what Star Wars VII might look like, but what our work begins to look like when our shared mythology is off limits.

Here's the thing though: there is no way to solve this problem without giving something up.  And that something is the amount of time our own copyright over our own work lasts. Fair Use is an ad hoc system cobbled together by appellate judges. It's chaotic and contradictory and not a lasting solution.  Parody exemptions don't work when you have to bankrupt yourself to prove them. The only way this problem gets better is if we creative folk fight to lower the amount of time that copyright lasts to something more reasonable and more fitting with copyright's original stated mission of encouragin creativity and the useful arts. 

That means that we as writers need to get used to our work going into the public domain sooner.  Possibly within our lifetimes. I know that it feels like we're giving something up. But for most of us, we aren't. The current copyright system only really protects the very wealthy and the very well-known, those who can still make money off their work decades after it was made.  The number of Van Goghs in this world are few and far between. Just like with our tax system, I don't think we want to be supporting a regime that benefits the few and powerful simply because we hope to one day be one of them.

Declassified

by 99 Seats

I have been crazy-super-busy of late, but I did have time to see ARGO. Which is a pretty fine film, all told, despite the very bizarre choice of casting Ben Affleck as a man named Tony Mendez (it's funny watching the movie hold back his last name as long as it possibly can). Affleck is a confident, assured director, the movie looks good and the story is pretty compelling. It also fits in the sweet spot for "based on a true story" type deals: the story is new and unknown enough that the outcome is in doubt the whole time, even if you kind of know that it's not in doubt at all. The supporting cast, particular John Goodman, Alan Arkin and Scoot McNairy, is all grand. So...yay, good movie!

But, of course, during the movie, I couldn't get the other spectacle of the week out of my head: Mitt Romney's attempt to "gotcha" President Obama during the town hall debate over the administration's shifting rationales for the attack on the embassy in Benghazi. It was clearly one of the most compelling moments of the debate and, even the campaign. And, ahead of the "foreign policy" debate on Monday, it's looking to loom large in the rest of the campaign.

The moment was interesting not just for the failed gotcha, or the live fact-checking, but also because it offered a quick glimpse into the fevered world of the far right. Romney was caught completely flat-footed by the facts. He was totally convinced that President Obama hadn't used the phrase "act of terror." This is a shibboleth on the right, something that, over the last few months, has become an article of faith. Except for the fact that not only is not true, it's easy to show that it's objectively not true. And yet, conservatives believe it. In fact, it's so important to their beliefs that they're now engaged in semantic hair-splitting to back up their larger point: for some nefarious reason, the administration is invested in covering up the circumstances of the Benghazi's attack.

Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo have done really great work following this line of thinking on the right. They also note that, in the WaPo, David Ignatius is reporting that the CIA supports the "smoking gun" of the Benghazi myth: Susan Rice's description of the attack as at least partially springing from protests over the much-reviled Innocence of Muslims video, hastily arranged and not professionally carried out. Of course, there remains an ongoing investigation, so it's likely more facts will come to light.

But, after seeing ARGO, I think there's a larger point about how government works, especially in regards to national security, to consider. Because this isn't the first time the charge of "shifting narratives" has come into play for the Obama administration: similar charges were made about the story of the assassination of Osama bin Laden. I think it's easy to lapse into cynicism and paranoia about all of this, especially after the Bush years and their vast politicization of the national security infrastructure (threat level Orange, anyone?), but, beyond that, there's the very real question of how much honesty does our government owe us, particularly about actions outside of our borders.

For those who don't know, Argo tells the story of the rescue of six US embassy workers and diplomats from Tehran after the fall of the Shah and the taking of the US embassy there, when 52 hostages were taken. The film does a great job of capturing the chaos and unpredictability of that time, both here in the US and in Iran. Revolutions are messy, sometimes scary things, as we all know, and the Iranian revolution was no different (for another great take on it, you simply must read/see Persepolis, if you haven't). At any time, the US diplomats in Tehran could be captured, killed, tortured. A CIA agent develops a just-crazy-enough-to-work plan to get the 6 diplomats, who are hiding in the residence of the Canadian ambassador, out: have them pretend to be a film crew, complete with a whole fake movie. The play is indeed just crazy enough to work and so it does...at great personal and professional risk for all of the CIA agents involved. And when it does work, their great job is celebrated in their office for a few seconds and then classified and buried. In the film, that indignity is compounded by the official cover story: that the Canadians (CANADIANS!) pulled it all off on their own. (In addition to the casting issue, there does seem to be some legit controversy about the portrayal of the Canadian ambassador who is mostly seen nobly cowering in fear.) It's grimly noted that, if the CIA had taken credit, the remaining hostages would have paid the price. So no credit was given, an award was given in a secret, private ceremony and then immediately taken back and not conferred until the '90s. There's a great, stiff-upper-lip, all-for-country feel to the latter part of the movie. They don't do it for the glory, these CIA agents.

I'm kidding a bit, but it does raise the obvious question about current events: is it really so implausible that the CIA (and the FBI, which is investigating the Benghazi attack) would want a false story about our working theory of the attack to be the "official" word? Let's say you're the person who pulled off a successful, well-planned and coordinated attack and you hear that we're looking at a disorganized spontaneous attack. Maybe you'd lower your guard a little bit and not expect to get caught. I mean, I just watch a whole lot of cop shows and this is a pretty common ploy. Let's remember that this is still the investigation of a crime.

But there is also the larger picture. A lot of the current dissatisifaction with the administration from the left comes in the realm of "national security," how wars are prosecuted and how the government decribes it. I'm not arguing that the government has complete latitude to tell its people untruths (again, see the Bush years for the worst of that), but...isn't there some room for, well, less than truthiness, in service of larger goals, that may not be obvious to us here? I can see how attractive the charges of "liar" are, especially to the GOP, whose standard bearer has, shall we say, a bit of a problem with that. But I can also see how compelling the desire to "get to the bottom" of things is. It's just not always appropriate. Argo hasn't really entered the political conversation (and it shouldn't...it's a pretty apolitical movie), but it does reflect our time. Carter lost the 1980, in no small part, because of his perceived weakness on the Iran hostage crisis. Having the Canadians take credit for a major coup must have added fuel to the fire, but still, they took the hit. I'm glad that the Obama administration is standing up with some passion (I don't think he needed an anger translator for that section of the debate), but I'd also like them to articulate a little more clearly how it fits into his vision of how government works.

Two Quick Thoughts Re: "Binders Full of Women"

By isaac Butler

(1) Binders Full of Women is clearly the meme of the night, giving birth to, amongst other things, this magical tumblr. But if you actuall look at the transcript, at the substance of what Romney said... what he was actually articulating was a robust case for and textbook example of affirmative action at work. He looked at his staff, it didn't have enough women in it, he put in great effort to try to fix this problem. He was, to put it in right wing parlance, showing "preference" for women which means (given the limited number of jobs available in his administration) "discriminating" against male candidates.  But when you actually explain what that "preference" and "discrimination" look like, and when you describe the problem that needed to be solved, it doesn't really seem so scary. This is no different from what colleges do when they take into account race as one of many factors in deciding who will attend their schools. Somehow, now that he's the candidate, I doubt that many on the Right will mind this.

(2) This is why I was quite disappointed as a human (although excited as a partisan) to find out that Romney's "Binder Full of Women" story is actually a lie.  The binder full of women was put together by a women's advocacy group before the winner of the election was known and presented to Governor-elect Romney as part of a concerted effort to get him to hire more women. Which he did. But the women he hired he tended to put in charge of departs he either did not care about or was in the process of trying to eliminate. He took, in other words, an opportunity to increase diversity and instead practiced tokenism. Maybe he was a right winger all along after all. 

Why Do You Vote?

By Isaac Butler

The comments to 99's recent post, this post by George, this post by Freddie and  writing on the subject over at TBogg and Balloon Juice have got me a thinkering...

It seems to me the main issue here is a fundamentally disconnect on questions fo why we vote for President. I simply do not believe that in our current governmental system and the rules of how the Federal Government works that voting for President is a moment for personal self-expression. I believe it's a moment when we choose between the available options on who would do the best job running the Executive Branch of the country, which includes managing an enormous bureaucracy, appointing a wide slate of other executives (and judges) and working with the Legislative Branch to craft and pass laws.  There is no way that any candidate who is not a Republican or a Democrat can reasonbly be said to have the capacity to do those things, as many of them involve working with an entrenched two party system in the legistative branch.

I think there are all sorts of times when voting is to some (or even a large) extent about "voting one's conscience." Voting for specific bills, for example. Or voting in primaries. Since Freddie brings up this issue let me just say: I would've supported a primary challenge to Obama from the left. I might've even voted for whomever it was.  But it is simply a category error (in my view) to apply this rubric to the vote for President, because the President is not a King and does not single-handedly have the power to enact laws or fix problems.  

In this instance, it's helpful to think about many of Obama's larger failures as President.  Many of them can be traced to the legislature rather than to him. Cap and Trade was passed by the House and died in the Senate.  Olympia Snowe was never going to vote for a larger stimulus. Ben Nelson was never going to vote for a Public Option. Closing Guantanamo was a nonstarter.  The White House proposed a much stricter financial reform bill than what they got. 

Furthermore, the reason why Obama has been such a disappointment on civil liberties, international law and foreign policy is because (say it with me now) the. progressive. positions. on. these. issues. have. no. constituency. and. are. not. popular. It seems to me that, were one passionate about chanings these issues, changing that reality is where your money and time should be going. Not that you can't do both! I have friends who are! 

However, this is all because of what I think a vote for President is really for.  You might disagree. I'd love to know: Why do you vote for President? What is a vote for President for to you?

Quote Of The Day

By Isaac Butler

"A public service reminder: Simpson-Bowles is terrible. It mucks around with taxes, but is obsessed with lowering marginal rates despite a complete absence of evidence that this is important. It offers nothing on Medicare that isn’t already in the Affordable Care Act. And it raises the Social Security retirement age because life expectancy has risen — completely ignoring the fact that life expectancy has only gone up for the well-off and well-educated, while stagnating or even declining among the people who need the program most."

-- Paul Krugman

Dispatches From An Alternate Universe

by 99 Seats

I want you to remember these two articles. Read them both now. I'll wait.

Did you read them? Okay, let's discuss.

In six months, if President Obama wins re-election, I will send these links to my liberal friends who don't understand why, after receiving a public rebuke at the ballot box, the right remains in thrall of the "crazies." They will wonder why there wasn't a purge of the fringe elements and why the congressional GOP, most likely a few members smaller, aren't moving to the center and compromising. These two articles explain why perfectly.

The first, the polling article (h/t Isaac), is basically gibbering insanity. But the kernel of it is this: any poll showing Obama with a lead is oversampling Democrats and therefore skewed and not can that poll not be trusted but the polling outfit is in the tank. This is the beginning of the "Obama stole the election" meme that we'll be dealing with. We got a small taste of that with the campaign against ACORN, but with no ACORN to blame, it will actually get larger and more elaborate.

The second, primarily about Sarah Palin advising Romney to "go rogue" (whatever the hell that means), is also indicative of everyone's old friend, epistemic closure. First off, it assumes that Romney's struggles have nothing to do with his policies and statements, but instead with how he's framed them, with the added implication that he's hiding some worse truth. We're talking about a candidate who has repeatedly implied that the US is on the path towards becoming Greece. I don't really seeing how he's underselling the state of our economy. (For the record, we are not in any danger at all of becoming Greece. Not even slightly.) In the world of dog-whistle, there is the idea that Romney needs to take the gloves off and start running Jeremiah Wright and birther ads. But more importantly, the machine is starting up with another hoary old chestnut: conservativism never fails; it is only failed. Romney, who advocates low regulations, low taxes on top earners, voucherizing Medicare, privatizing Social Security, turning Medicaid over to the states, a federal ban on abortion and marriage equality, self-deportation and war with Iran, is insufficiently conservative. If only he would publicly hold some conservative ideals and see how popular they would be.

The other part that amazes is this:

“They not only need to use [Ryan] out on the trail more effectively, they need to have more of him rub off on Mitt because I think Mitt thinks that way but he’s gotta be able to articulate that…. I think too many people are restraining him from telling [his vision],” Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker told a radio interviewer Friday.

Where’s the evidence of Romney’s so-called “bold choice” in picking Ryan? others ask.

“Even in Wisconsin, I think he’s being underused,” Charlie Sykes, the radio host who interviewed Gov. Walker, told Politico. “I guess what’s frustrating is especially now that we’re embroiled in this conversation about the makers versus the takers, where is Paul Ryan? He is eloquent, he knows the numbers, he can frame this in a very compelling way. The fact that he is not front and center on some of this is, I think, a lost opportunity.”

Um. There was a time that Paul Ryan has a chance to express his beliefs and ideas in a very public forum. Remember how that went? Remember this? Apparently GOP consultants don't. They seem to believe that Paul Ryan can be some kind of honest broker or straight-talker. This is simply crazy. And completely ignores reality. What kind of reckoning can there be when there is practically a cottage industry generating opinions that have nothing to do with reality?

So...remember this. Remember these stories when you're trying to understand what's happening in our politics.

Everything I Say Is A Lie. Including That.

by 99 Seats

I was thinking about posting a comment to Isaac's post here about believability and lies, but I decided to just do a separate post, because the issue of truth and lies is, well, important, especially in politics right now.

I have a few "libertarian" or "independent" or "apolitical"* friends in my FB and Twitter worlds (and I know we have a reader or two here from the right end of the spectrum) and I've noticed in recent weeks a common thread popping up. When the discussion about honesty in politics comes up, usually one of them chimes in with a dismissive post about how ALL politicians lie, so you can't trust anything any of them say at any time. This response usually comes up like this: a liberal or left-leaning person points out an outright un-truth that someone on the right has said, the "libertarian" says Obama lied about something, too and then it's pointed out that that "lie" isn't really a lie, then we get, "Well, everyone lies, so it doesn't really matter." Except it does. I think it matters a lot.

Isaac ends his post with this:

I guess the real question I have here amidst all of this is... how are we to determine what candidate statements we take seriously and which we don't?  Obviously, I like Obama so I'm inclined to believe him. I don't like Romney so I'm inclined not to. But that seems a very poor way to go about judging this whole thing. 

Here's the thing: it isn't really a matter of personal like or dislike. I'm a big ol' leftie, so I find Obama's arguments persuasive. I understand how someone who is right-leaning can find Romney's arguments persuasive. Those are things open to personal feelings. Facts, though, are not. When we're talking about whether or not something is true, it's pretty simple: it's either true or it's not. And that is often fairly apparent, if you take more than one second and do the minimum amount of research. Just Google it. And then (and this is actually key) read the things that come up.

The "independents" I'm talking about, as far as I can see, don't seem to want to do that. They make a statement, hear an alternate statement, then throw their hands up and walk away. That's also how our press acts. We're reaching a point, as many, many people have noted, where our political pundit class is helpless to confront outright lies. The push to remain "neutral" and "cordial" means not actually calling someone a liar when they are. But it also means that the very idea of lies has changed.

I'm not a Pollyanna. All of my life, politicians have bent, altered, sweetened, curved facts to fit the narrative they're selling. You couldn't quite trust what they said. In the most famous example ever, it depended on what meaning of the word is. They promised the moon, possibly knowing they can't deliver it. Okay, fine. Not exactly honest, but not lying. Not really. When people say Obama lied, they point to the claim that he created 4.5 million jobs, repeated regularly at the DNC. It's, at best, truthy. This is often paired with the Romney "claim"** that Obama has sought to waive work requirements for welfare recipients. By all objective measure, there is no truth to that "claim." It's an actual lie. Can we really say that both politicians are "lying?"

And yet...we do. Obama promised a number of things, particularly in the realm of indefinite detentions, Gitmo, Bush-era anti-terrorism policies and didn't follow through. Disappointing, yes. But not lies. Paul Ryan's RNC speech was full of statements that are objectively not true. Those are lies. There is a difference between those two. If we let liars continue to determine what is true, we do so at our peril.

 

*I use the quotes here because, in general, these people parrot right-wing memes and ideas, hold right-wing values, and yet claim not to be right-wing. I'm unconvinced.

**For obvious reasons, I refuse to honor that lie by using the weasel word "claim."

The Believability Gap

By Isaac Butler

Until Mother Jones released the Boca Tapes, one of the problems Democrats have been having in this race is a believability gap.  For example, when pollsters told their random sample of voters about the Ryan budget, many people responded that they did not believe that the Ryan budget possibly could contain what it contains.  Multiple times stories have come out where the GOP has said something or done something that simply feels like it could not possible be true.

I'm a far hardercore partisan than my wife. And one thing that will often happen is that I'll alert her to some craziness on the part of the Romney campaign and she'll say "is that true? where did you read that?" for fear that I read it in some far lefty rag that spinning some perfectly innocuous story into crazyland territory.

I'm pretty sure the Boca Tapes, where Romney wrote off almost 50% of the country and insulted them--including by his own statistics all veterans and active duty mlitary and the elderly--have put an end to this.  But the still, the question of belief persists.

I'm a bit obsessed with belief right now, because of the book I'm working on, a large part of which deals with Christian Science (the religion in which I was raised) a religion that believes that thought and belief have the power to shape the world around us in an overt way.  In the particular case of the campaign, there have been a few moments where I wonder what really happened, and sans evidence, what I believe.

Take the announcement from Paul Ryan last night that in 2011 he accidentally failed to report 20% of his income. Now this is a minor issue, obviously. He's already gone back and paid the missing taxes with a $60 penalty.  But still... Did Paul Ryan simply forget to put the income from his mother-in-law's living trust in his tax forms?  I mean, $60K is a lot of cheese.  It's a full fifth of his earnings. You'd think he'd remember something like that or that his accountant would catch it. So I find that hard to believe. Similarly, I find it hard to believe that a guy with a rising national profile would deliberately cheat on his taxes thinking he would be able to get away with it. 

This is not a particularly important thing to be in doubt about. Far more important are the assertions that candidates make on the trail, the things they promise to do, the plans they develop and distribute. It's fairly clear that no one really know what Romney would do as President. he seems wholly captured by the tea party right now, but Scott Brown seemed so too when he was running for Senate in Massachusetts and essentially told them to go fuck themselves as soon as he was elected. Grover Norquist has said all the GOP needs is a stuffed suit that will sign whatever is put in front of him (they should've nominated Norm Coleman if that's what they wanted). 

I guess the real question I have here amidst all of this is... how are we to determine what candidate statements we take seriously and which we don't?  Obviously, I like Obama so I'm inclined to believe him. I don't like Romney so I'm inclined not to. But that seems a very poor way to go about judging this whole thing. 

Two Thoughts On The Secret Romney Tapes

by Isaac Butler

1. Romney: I don't know why people are going around and saying that these tapes reveal "the real Romney," or tell you anything about what Romney "really thinks" or "really believes."  If there's one thing we've learned about W. Mitt Romney, it's that he tries really hard to tell whomever he's talking to what he thinks they want to hear. The reason why this hamstrings him in a national election in today's media age is that he can't say radically different things to different groups of people.

But in this particular room, he had no other constituency that he thought might be listening in.  And so he's speaking this particular audience's language. Yes, what he said was abhorrent. I am absolutely not defending it. But if you watch all of the videos, it seems clear that this is a guy who is surrounded by wealthy donors who are asking him in no uncertain terms to take actions that would 100% suicidal to any chance he has (had?) at the Presidency. And so he says over and over, "Well, you know I agree with you but the American people aren't going to like that and so I can't do it because people like Obama."  

I see no evidence in these tapes that "The Real Romney" has been revealed, except to the extent that the Real Romney had already been revealed: A man without deeply held principles who well tell people what they want to hear in order to seek power for its own ends. I felt the same way when people claimed that "The Real Romney" was the moderate, technocratic Governor of Massachusetts.  There is no Real Romney, folks. He might be the world's most inept shapechanger, but he's mercurial nonetheless.

2. His Audience.   I hope that videos like this put the lie to most conspiracy theories.  In order for a conspiracy theory to work, you'd have to count on people like these idiots being able to pull off some kind of massive snowjob on the American people.

Seriously though, a friend of mine posted on facebook that the videos made him sad rather than angry. Sad because he had always assumed that super-wealthy folks knew how the world works and were lying to us for their own financial benefit.  That the audience there was stupid enough to really accept that 47% of Americans pay no taxes, live on welfare, and count on the Government for free housing was disheartening.   And it is very strange to see what kind of bullshit people will come up with to justify a lifestyle that most of us think is obscene. 

If It Bends...

by 99 Seats

While I'm not wading into the very worthy conversation about the validity of comedy or tragedy, one thing that comes up often is why is there so little conversative comedy. The realm of satire seems to belong entirely to the progressives and the left side of the ledger. Last week, we had a pretty good example of this, and, I think, an object lesson on where conservatism loses its comedy mojo. Via Yahoo! News:

Two spoof Twitter accounts for President Barack Obama emerged from speeches at the Republican convention last week. The first, @FadedObama, was inspired by this line from Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan: "College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life." As of Tuesday afternoon, it had been mentioned on Twitter 182 times and attracted 194 followers.

The second, @InvisibleObama, sprang (of course) from Clint Eastwood's interview with an absent Obama Thursday evening. That account has 66,797 mentions and 68,193 followers.

(Emphasis mine.)

The Yahoo! article says that the difference between the two was timing; the @FadedObama went up 13 minutes after Paul Ryan's speech while @InvisibleObama went up within seconds. Yeah, that may account for it. There's also a part of it about narratives: after Paul Ryan's speech, most of the conversation focused (rightly, I would add) around the many, many falsehoods and misrepresentations in his speech, not one small, throwaway metaphor, while after Clint's performance, well, the chair was the whole game, wasn't it? It was the key part of the event. But there's another part of this.

@InvisibleObama is funny. @FadedObama isn't.

I say this not as a progressive. I say this as a kinda-sorta funny person. I don't think there's any argument on this. Here's a typical @FadedObama post:

You know I'm going to fade. My hair literally faded during my first term

— Faded Obama Poster (@FadedObama) August 30, 2012

And here's an @InvisibleObama post:

On this Labor Day, take a moment to remember that today is the last day it's appropriate to wear invisible seersucker anything.

— Invisible Obama (@InvisibleObama) September 3, 2012

Actually, that wasn't fair. That was one of the funnier @FadedObama posts. I put my finger on the scale and it's still lost (sort of like arguing with an empty chair and losing, but I digress).

The @FadedObama Twitter feed is nothing but recycled Obama jokes and jabs: birther stuff, media star stuff, food stamp jokes, a Nancy Pelosi joke. Stuff that really only appeals to conservatives and re-inforces the conservative world view. And pretty much just stated outright. It's a collection of talk radio lines.

The @InvisibleObama feed? Yep, partisan jabs. But also a personality. And a personality that fits Twitter. The voice of @InvisibleObama is similar to the other Twitter faves, like @SarcasticRover: snarky, spiky and, well, sarcastic. But it's also a lot of regular comedy about being invisible.

Conservative comedy tends to be much more like @FadedObama: jokes that make conservatives laugh. Good satire, though, like good comedy, has further reach, builds better gags. Conservatives would do well to put comedy above party.

The Life of the Party

by 99 Seats

So, yeah, that happened. And yeah, we all watched it. Except for the folks who watched the US Open. And it was as bizarre, as unsettling, as disturbing as everyone said.  When I watched, I was confused, certainly. And then I got the gag and it was...lame, yes. Occasionally funny-adjacent, with built-in laugh and applause lines. But mostly, I was confused. And I still am. I'll get to that in a second. It did, though, show the exact problems with the modern Republican Party and modern conservativism that I was talking about.

Most of the post-show talk has hovered, probably rightly, around Mitt, his reaction and the decision process that ended with Clint Eastwood on stage, doing improv with an empty chair for eight minutes. It does say a lot about Mitt, his speech, our politics and our media that we're all talking about the appetizer and not the main course. But that's not what I'm wondering about, nearly 24 hours later. Here's my question: Why did Clint Eastwood do this?

Let me be clear: I'm a fan of Clint Eastwood, as an actor and a writer/director. I get the complaints that people have about his recent work, but I still like him. I'm under no illusions about his politics, though and never have been. I thought I knew his politics pretty well, in a basic way: he's a moderate Republican in the classic modern mold. Pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-women's issues (relatively), environmentally conscious. And the record bears that out. He identified more as a "libertarian." Which is how most of my right-leaning friends identify and often with the same basic profile: to the left on "social" issues, big on a lack of government influence in their lives, hawkish on war. He's eschews labels and such, has endorsed Dems and Republicans, votes the person, not the party. And yet...he endorsed both McCain and Romney and, at the very least, agreed to introduce the guy who was going to introduce Mitt Romney at the RNC in a significant primetime slot. Why would he do that? I'm asking seriously. Mitt Romney is running as a pro-life, hard right on social issues, who is hawkish on war and "pro"-business. In terms of beliefs, there doesn't appear to be a lot of overlap there. What was Clint endorsing?

For the last few years, there have been near-constant conversations about the end of the moderate Republican, the person exactly like Clint Eastwood (and, frankly, like Mitt Romney of a decade ago). Giving a moderate a prime spot at the convention seems like the perfect time for a full-throated defense of moderate conservatism. Or at least to have a major American figure stand up and say, "I don't agree with Mitt on everything, but we share these values and that's important. This party can stand disagreement." That would have been an impressive thing that we'd all be talking about. Even if it wasn't about Mitt (pretty much like all of the other significant speeches), it would have been about something.

Instead, what did Clint say? A cheap joke about the "lefties" in Hollywood. An Oprah joke. A Biden joke. Jabs about Obama being a hypocrite, an attorney, his inauguration. A complaint about Obama not closing Gitmo. A complaint about trying terrorists in civilian courts, followed immediately by noting that Obama doesn't actually do that. A complaint about Obama both not bringing the troops home from Afghanistan AND about Obama setting a date for the troops to come home. He did also note that 23 million people are out of work. That was largely it. And the crowd ate it up. Seriously. I watched it and they all loved it, every second.

What does that say about what's important to the Republican Party. Not policies, reality, the problems facing the country. Jokes and jabs that get laughs and cheers. Substance-and logic-free attacks. And attacks that are mostly about things that are about how Republicans feel about things. Even if the bit had worked perfectly, cleanly and clearly, it doesn't seem like the substance would have changed.

I can hear the arguments winding up right now. "But...it's the convention! It's a big show! It doesn't mean anything!" Except...it does. Because the question still stands: why would Clint appear here? Why would he want to endorse someone who doesn't agree with a number of his beliefs? Why would he stand on a platform that calls for the outlaw of abortions, gay marriage and critical thinking? (No, really, the GOP platform speaks out against critical thinking.)

Parties are supposed to be about the things you believe, the way you want the world to be. Does Clint want to live in Mitt's world? Does Mitt want Clint to have a say in his? It doesn't seem like it.

But Mitt was glad to trot out a cardboard cut-out of a tough guy to make jokes and throw cheap shots and pretend that it's tough talk. And Clint was certainly happy to go along with it. I'm willing to bet that, for Clint, it had to do with the Super Bowl Chrysler commercial, which, in conservative circles, was seen as an endorsement of Obama. (Odd enough that we get the whiplash of Obama both being blamed for not keeping a factory open and for being blamed for saving Detroit in the first place, all by people who claim that the free market should have no interference from the government.) It doesn't strike me as impossible that Clint felt his brand was damaged by the Chrysler ad and wanted to make peace. Maybe not. Maybe he just wanted to do it.

Either way, given a national stage and audience, he opted for nastiness and cruelty, for an incoherent litany of things that largely add up to "We don't like you, President Obama." And his party loved it. Because, at the end of the day, modern Republicanism is defined by that: they don't like things. Period. They don't have solutions to problems, they don't have answers to questions. They're trading on dislike, disdain and anger. Lindsey Graham said as much. It's a party of pure id.

The other moment that should define the Republican Party was this:

That is the modern Republican Party. Doing something about global warming is a silly, silly notion that has nothing to do with helping your family. Which should come as a surprise to the good people of Louisiana. And Tampa.

Jamelle Bouie nailed the line of the night about Clint Eastwood: "This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama." I say take it one step further: Clint Eastwood's speech was the perfect representation of our politics. Tearing down someone who believes most of the things you believe in defense of someone who looks like you and makes you feel better about yourself. It's not a good place for us to be.

The Vanishing

By Isaac Butler

Kevin Drum is curious about the disappearance of George W. Bush from our daily life and our popular consciousness. He makes a lot of good points, namely that we shouldn't be surprised because by the time he left everyone on both sides of the aisle hated him and his legislative record is very, very thin beyond the Patriot Act.

I think there's two other layers to this that Kevin doesn't discuss that are worth contemplating.  The first is how Bush's disappearance from the public eye works as a metaphor for what he really achieved, which is to say that his two terms fundamnetally determined everything that's come after them.  There's the economy he broke, the executive branch he stuffed with bible school graduates and incompetents and the two disastrous wars he got us into. All of these have meant that his sucessor, both Barack Obama and whomever will come after him, are stuck with the aftermath. We're still, four years later, cleaning up George W. Bush's messes (if anything, one of my chief Obama criticisms is that he hasn't gone far enough in doing so). And of course there's Roberts and Alito and all the other hyper-conservative judicial appointments. 

But beyond that, don't we also want Bush to disappear?  Don't we all need, psychologically, to blame it all on him and having him vanish?  After all, Democrats voted to approve much of his agenda. Tom Daschle okayed the War in Iraq and then snapped to the reporters that "we would like to move on," as if the decision about going to war was a simple annoyance to him.  Virtually no one voted against the PATRIOT Act.  Obama continues many of Bush's most troubling policies where it comes to civil liberties and habeus issues.  We still extrajudicially murder people. Killing Bin Laden hasn't ended the failing war in Afghanistan. Bush has disappeared in the same way our own reckoning with what we did during his eight years disappeared.  Were he to come back, we'd have to confront those secret shameful parts of ourselves. 

I Think It's Time To Admit It

by 99 Seats

I've largely avoided political talk around here because, well, I find myself alternating between depression and anxiety as the Silly Season unfolds. But, after the Ryan pick, the Niall Ferguson article, the Todd Akin mess, the welfare flap, the serial mendacity of Mitt Romney, and after a few months of watching the politics unfold in the single worst arena for discussion, Facebook, I feel like I need to say something. And I think we need to face something.

The Republican Party no longer exists. Not as a political party. Conservatism no longer exists, not as a governing philosophy. It's a marketing campaign.

Earlier this year, Steve Benen at the Maddow Blog noted that Mitt Romney had very little to offer the constituents he met. Benen wrote:

But Romney's in a tough spot, because he doesn't have much of anything to trade in exchange for votes. He meets a struggling firefighter, but Romney can't promise to boost salaries for first responders, because the his platform calls for the opposite. He meets struggling college students worried about tuition costs, but Romney can't promise more Pell Grants or expanded access to student loans, because he fully intends to end the federal government's role in helping young people afford higher education.

This continues today. Outside of the very wealthy, there is nothing in the Romney-Ryan budget that helps actual people. It includes less money for public services, less money for student loans, less money for healthcare, less money for just about everybody, except the very rich. It's tempting to think that the Republican Party is the party of the rich, but that's not really true, either. Because the rich will hurt, too.

This matters for artists, too. When pressed to say what he plans to cut in order to balance the budget, Romney goes after the NEA (and Amtrak and PBS). Which is ridiculous because those programs make up a miniscule part of the federal budget. This is not a serious plan for deficit-cutting. And, if you are among the super-rich, you're more likely to enjoy and support the arts. Which means your opera, your symphony, your theatre will want more money from you. Yes, you'll get a tax break on it, but it's still money out of your pocket.

A couple of things about all of this: it does no good. Slashing funding for education, tecnnology, scientific research, health care advancements, none of that actually makes America stronger. It's counter-productive to Romney's "rebuild" America rhetoric. It also doesn't actually make the deficit any better, since it includes massive tax breaks. It's also, all of it, largely unpopular. The American people are a confused, difficult people to govern. The number one thing on our list to cut to balance the budget, foreign aid, is just about the smallest drag on the budget. We don't want to cut the other stuff, but we want the budget cut. It's a hard row to hoe, I get that.

But what the GOP and the Romney campaign are doing isn't threading the needle. The Obama budget tries to do that. What the GOP and Romney campaign is doing is, well, A) lying. Straight-up lying to the people they met. And B) marketing to a demographic, not serving a constituency.

The Romney campaign's rhetoric of "freedom," "accountability," "ending bureaucracy," "rebuilding America" is pitched perfectly to attract a certain kind of voter, to make a segment of the population feel like Romney is one of them and has their concerns in his heart. He's not and he doesn't. Like McDonald's pandering to a community struck by obesity and diabetes, he's offering people the worst possible choices and presenting them in coded ways that make them think he really knows them.

This extends to modern conservatism, which has morphed into a cult that believes government should be small enough to fit in a woman's uterus or a gay person's bedroom, that believes that any restriction on the 2nd Amendment at all is an assault on the Constitution, but invasive searches of certain segments of the population are totally fine. Who exactly are they serving? Whose best interest? Again, it's tempting to say "straight white men," but, as was pointed out during the debates on the Montana abortion law, the lack of available abortions means, if you knock a woman up, you have to marry her (or at least take care of the child). We like to say it's a party of business, but global warming, a lack of immigrant labor, products that sicken and hurt your customers are generally not good for business in the long run. Like lowering taxes by cutting services, eventually, this costs you.

But hearing it makes a certain population feel good. I'm not going to get into psychologizing that part. But it does. They listen to this rhetoric and feel good, good about their lives, their choices. So they vote for it. From 2000 to 2008, we saw how that worked out. Hell, we're still seeing how that's working out, since the same people are basically in charge of our government now, no matter who is in the White House. They're calling the shots and are still calling the shots on the basis of what makes their audience feel good, not what's actually good for them.

For a while now, I've been referring to the GOP as the Party of Your Asshole Uncle. "Pissing off liberals" has been a major part of their raison d'etre since William F. Buckley's days. Which is, I suppose, fine...if you're a jerk who likes needling your city mouse brother and his kids at Thanksgiving. It's not really when you plan to lead a country of 300 million people. To do that, you need a governing philosophy. Not a bunch of slogans and cheap jokes. Until the Republican Party can actually come up with a governing philosophy that makes sense for an incredibly wealthy, increasingly diverse, unimaginably powerful and influential, modern nation of 300 million people, I don't think they should be treated as a serious party.

A Kind of Holding One's Breath

by 99 Seats

I haven't written much about politics here lately. That's partly due to the personal stuff going on in my life. But it's also partly due to what Nate Silver notes here: in terms of the presidential election, nothing much is changing. It remains a close race, with some structural advantages given to President Obama and some structural disadvantages clinging to Mitt Romney. Oh, there are dust-ups and whatnot, but when the dust settles, nothing has changed.

Obviously the fall presidential election is massively important and, maybe even more obviously, presidential politics are not the only significant politics happening. But they take up a lot of oxygen and every single twist and turn is reported breathlessly. So now we get a half a news cycle about the NAACP booing Romney, followed by half a news cycle of when did Romney leave Bain, when it will probably be time for more shenanigans about Eric Holder and the completely fabricated "Fast and Furious" mess or some other foreign policy "gaffe." It all feels a bit like wheel-spinning to me.

We're waiting, waiting for the actual campaign, for the debates and, in a way, for the day itself. There don't seem to be a lot of convincable voters out there, so the question that looms seems to be who will get their voters out. And, more disturbingly, how many of them will actually be allowed to vote. It's also intriguing/disturbing how little policy seems to actually matter in an election everyone acknowledges as important. Maybe it will in the fall. Maybe not. It just feels like a long way to wait.