Joe Sixpacks, Soccer and Hockey Moms – Pay Attention

I’m not sure what it is about our current economical crisis that some people don’t understand and I’m surely not wise enough or patient enough to try to convince them that their view of the country is badly screwed. I think people everywhere are feeling frustrated, angry, scared, confused and uncertain, but for those who still think that Republicans are the answer, you probably need to see a psychiatrist – and soon.

I could feel some of my own frustration in Bob Herbert’s column today and rather than give you a few quotes, I feel it is well worth the whole read.

October 11, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist

The Mask Slips

By BOB HERBERT

The lesson for Americans suffused with anxiety and dread over the crackup of the financial markets is that the way you vote matters, that there are real-world consequences when you go into a voting booth and cast that ballot.

For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be.

Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression.

Mr. Bush was never viewed as a policy or intellectual heavyweight. But he seemed like a nicer guy to a lot of voters than Al Gore.

It’s not just the economy. While the United States has been fighting a useless and irresponsible war in Iraq, Afghanistan — the home base of the terrorists who struck us on 9/11 — has been allowed to fall into a state of chaos. Osama bin Laden is still at large. New Orleans is still on its knees. And so on.

Voting has consequences.

I don’t for a moment think that the Democratic Party has been free of egregious problems. But there are two things I find remarkable about the G.O.P., and especially its more conservative wing, which is now about all there is.

The first is how wrong conservative Republicans have been on so many profoundly important matters for so many years. The second is how the G.O.P. has nevertheless been able to persuade so many voters of modest means that its wrongheaded, favor-the-rich, country-be-damned approach was not only good for working Americans, but was the patriotic way to go.
Remember voodoo economics? That was the derisive term George H.W. Bush used for Ronald Reagan’s fantasy that he could simultaneously increase defense spending, cut taxes and balance the budget. After Reagan became president (with Mr. Bush as his vice president) the budget deficit — surprise, surprise — soared.

In a moment of unusual candor, Reagan’s own chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Martin Feldstein, gave three reasons for the growth of the deficit: the president’s tax cuts, the increased defense spending and the interest on the expanding national debt.

These were the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives who were behaving so profligately. The budget was balanced and a surplus realized under Bill Clinton, but soon the “fiscal conservatives” were back in the driver’s seat. “Deficits don’t matter,” said Dick Cheney, and the wildest, most reckless of economic rides was on.

Americans, including the Joe Sixpacks, soccer moms and hockey moms, were repeatedly told that the benefits lavished on the highfliers would trickle down to them. Someday.
Just as they were wrong about trickle down, conservative Republican politicians and their closest buddies in the commentariat have been wrong on one important national issue after another, from Social Security (conservatives opposed it from the start and have been trying to undermine it ever since) to Medicare (Ronald Reagan saw it as the first wave of socialism) to the environment, energy policy and global warming.

When the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the discoverers of the link between chlorofluorocarbons and ozone depletion, Tom DeLay, a Republican who would go on to wield enormous power as majority leader in the House, mocked the award as the “Nobel Appeasement Prize.”

Mr. Reagan, the ultimate political hero of so many Republicans, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In response to the historic Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation ruling, William F. Buckley, the ultimate intellectual hero of so many Republicans, asserted that whites, being superior, were well within their rights to discriminate against blacks.

“The White community is so entitled,” he wrote, “because, for the time being, it is the advanced race...” He would later repudiate that sentiment, but only after it was clear that his racist view was harmful to himself.

The G.O.P. has done a great job masking the terrible consequences of much that it has stood for over the decades. Now the mask has slipped. As we survey the wreckage of the American economy and the real-life suffering associated with the financial crackup of 2008, it would be well for voters to draw upon the lessons of history and think more seriously about the consequences of the ballots they may cast in the future.

Surprising Critics

I’m not usually a reader of, or fan of Gail Collins and David Brooks, both staunch Republican Op-Ed Columnists for the New York Times, but even they have surprisingly strong criticism of Sarah Palin and the Republicans of today, in their columns for the past two days. They are worth reading. I know I was surprised by what they had to say, but I was particularly interested in Brooks’ column.

He began by talking about the fact that there have been substantial changes in the Republican Party over the years, changes that many Republicans are not particularly happy with. Apparently, according to Brooks, conservatives, driven by a need to engage elite opinion, tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the ideal of a cultivated mind.

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had, says Brooks, many causes, but the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

He goes on to say that over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from thousands of politicians and hundreds of talk-radio jocks. Now the nation is divided between the “wholesome” Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts. Hmmm, well, I don't know about you, but I know who I would prefer.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Brooks says that Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.

According to Fred Barnes, who wrote in his book, “Rebel –in-Chief”, George Bush “reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don’t live along the East or West Coast. He’s not a sophisticate and doesn’t spend his discretionary time with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura once said, she and the president didn’t come to Washington to make new friends. And they haven’t.”

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4 to 1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. Brooks says, it took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican Convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Brooks says that while Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable – I have to question that description, but then I’m a Democrat – and her convention and debate performances were impressive -- his words, not mine. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite. Now, on that we can agree!

So, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission – because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission – by telling members of that class to go away.

A pretty sad picture, at least for Republicans, but hopefully it means a brighter day for the Democrats and this country.

Don't I Wish I Could Have Said It This Good?

GOP: it's just like high school
By Garrison Keillor In print: Wednesday, September 10, 2008


So the Republicans have decided to run against themselves. The bums have tiptoed out the back door and circled around to the front and started yelling, "Throw the bums out!" They've been running Washington like a well-oiled machine to the point of inviting lobbyists into the back rooms to write the legislation, and now they are anti-establishment reformers dedicated to delivering us from themselves.

They are coming out for Small Efficient Government the very week that the feds are taking over Fannie and Freddie, those old cash cows, and in the course of a weekend 20 or 50 or (pick a number) billion go floating out the Treasury door. Hello? We didn't just fall off the coal truck.
It is a bold move on the Republicans' part — forget about the past, it's only history, so write a new narrative and be who you want to be — and if they succeed, I think I might declare myself a 24-year-old virgin named Lance and see what that might lead to.

John McCain has decided to run as a former POW and a maverick, a maverick's maverick, rather than George W. Bush's best friend, and that's understandable, but how can he not address the $3-trillion that got burned up in Iraq so far? It's real money, it could've paid for a lot of windmills, a high-speed rail line in Ohio, some serious R&D. The Chinese, who have avoided foreign wars for 50 years, are taking enormous leaps forward, investing in their economy, and we are falling behind. We're wasting our chances. The Republican culture of corruption in Washington hasn't helped.

And a former mayor of a town of 7,000 who hired a lobbyist to get $26-million in federal earmarks is now running against the old-boy network in Washington who gave her that money to build the teen rec center and other good things so she could keep taxes low in Wasilla. Stunning. And if you question her qualifications to be the leader of the free world, you are an elitist. This is a beautiful maneuver. I wish I had thought of it back in school when I was forced to subject myself to a final exam in higher algebra. I could have told Miss Mortenson, "I am a Christian and when you gave me a D, you only showed your contempt for the Lord and for the godly hard-working people from whom I have sprung, you elitist battleaxe you."

In school, you couldn't get away with that garbage because the taxpayers know that if we don't uphold scholastic standards, we will wind up driving on badly designed bridges and go in for a tonsillectomy and come out missing our left lung, so we flunk the losers lest they gain power and hurt us, but in politics we bring forth phonies and love them to death.

I must say, it was fun having the Republicans in St. Paul and to see it all up close and firsthand. Security was, as one might expect, thin-lipped and gimlet-eyed, but once you got through it, you found the folks you went to high school with — farm kids, jocks, the townies who ran the student council, the cheerleaders, some of the bullies — and they are as cohesive now as they were back then, dedicated to school spirit, intolerant of outsiders, able to jump up and down and holler for something they don't actually believe. But oh, Lord, what they brought forth this year. When you check the actuarial tables on a 72-year-old guy who's had three bouts with cancer, you guess you may be looking at the first woman president, a hustling evangelical with ethics issues and a chip on her shoulder who, not counting Canada, has set foot outside the country once — a trip to Germany, Iraq and Kuwait in 2007 to visit Alaskans in the armed service. And who listed a refueling stop in Ireland as a fourth country visited. She's like the Current Occupant but with big hair. If you want inexperience, there were better choices.
© Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved.

A Matter of Urgency

As hard as I try to find uplifting and beautiful things to post -- and I do post some of those, too -- I end up coming back to the nightmare of politics because I hate to see our country heading down the tube and if, "we the people" lose this election, that is exactly where we're headed.

The New York Times Op-Ed Section had an insightful and scary picture of the politics of today written by Frank Rich and I think his insights into this election are all too true – chillingly true. America had better wake up. NOW! Last week people were asking if Palin is qualified to be so very close to, not just the vice-presidency, the presidency itself. Now it seems a more likely question is, what kind of president would Palin be?

Rich says, and I couldn’t agree more, “It’s an urgent matter, because if we’ve learned anything from the G.O.P. convention and its aftermath, it’s that the 2008 edition of John McCain is too weak to serve as America’s chief executive. This unmentionable truth, more than race, is now the real elephant in the room of this election.

No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia, McCain stands revealed as a guy who can be easily rolled by anyone who sells him a plan for “victory”, whether in Iraq or in Michigan. A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man, an even weaker Bush to her Cheney.

The ambitious Palin, who lies with ease about her own record, and the ruthless forces she represents know it, too. You can almost see them smacking their lips in anticipation, whether they’re wearing lipstick or not.”

Even though I was too young to be actively engaged in the politics of the late 1940s, I do remember the fear mongering of Joe McCarthy and how we were all told to see our enemies everywhere. Guess what? That’s the same pitch Republicans, McCain and Palin are using all over again. The same old game to pit the good, patriotic real Americans against those subversive, probably gay, urbanites, not to mention blacks, who threaten to take away everything small-town folks hold dear. Well, guess what “small-town folks”? They are using you and they do not share your values. They are after power and control and this country cannot afford another eight years with them in the White House and more of the same.

As Rich says, “This election is still about the fierce urgency of change before it’s too late. But in framing this debate, it isn’t enough for Obama to keep presenting McCain as simply a third Bush term. Any invocation of the despised president – like Iraq – invites voters to stop listening. Meanwhile, before our eyes, McCain is turning over the keys to his administration to ideologues and a running mate to Bush’s right.

As Republicans know best, fear does work. If Obama is to convey just what’s at stake, he must slice through the campaign’s lipstick jungle and show Americans the real perils that lie around the bend.”

In other words, people, wake up, pull you head out of the sand, pay attention to what is happening in this election! We only have 127 days to move our country towards real change – change that matters, desperately.

More False Claims

These are some of the false comments the McCain campaign is making that were passed on to me by a visitor to my site, I thought they were worth posting so more people will be able to read them.

The McCain-Palin campaign has released a new TV ad that distorts quotes from the Obama campaign. It takes words out of context to make it sound as though the Democratic ticket is belittling Palin:The ad says "they said she was doing 'what she was told.' " But the Obama adviser who's being quoted didn't accuse Palin of meekly following orders. What he actually said is that she made a false claim about Obama's legislative record and added, "maybe that's what she was told."

It says "they lashed out at Sarah Palin; dismissed her as 'good looking,' " But "they" didn't lash out at all. Obama – who is the one pictured – didn't say anything like that. The only one the McCain campaign quotes is Obama's running mate, Biden, and he actually offered the remark as a compliment. Biden said the "obvious" difference between Palin and himself is "she's good looking."

The ad says Obama was "disrespectful" when he accused Palin of "lying" about her record. But the truth is Palin's claim to have "said no" to the "bridge to nowhere" is indeed a dubious one, as we and many have pointed out.

The Real McCain

I received this message from the son of a very dear friend of mine who has been doing everything they can to find out the truth and help others find the truth regarding McCain. They are good people who love their country and like me and so many of us, are trying desperately to uncover the lies the McCain campaign just keeps rolling out.

The Real McCain 2 reached an astonishing 4 million views last week, just as the McCain campaign was trotting out lie after lie at the Republican National Convention. Coincidence? We don't think so. To us, this unprecedented number suggests that the public is desperately seeking the truth about John McCain -- a truth the corporate press still isn't providing. We're hearing reports of a lot of hand-wringing from people who are scared and don't know what to do.

So we came up with a way to put that nervous energy to good use! Join the McCain Truth Squad and a couple of times a week we will send you McCain videos for you to forward on with a personal note to your friends, colleagues and family members. Join the McCain Truth Squad: http://www.blogger.com/

To get you started, below are five videos that present the Real McCain: an elitist out of touch with hard-working Americans; a double talker who supports a costly war in Iraq but won't support our veterans. Forward this email on. This is the McCain everyone should know.

1. The Real McCain 2: Watch as McCain's YouTube problem became his nightmare in the video that received over 4 million views. http://www.blogger.com/

2. Less Jobs. More Wars: What is this 'Iraq war' charge on my bill? http://www.blogger.com/

3. John McCain vs. John McCain: Tell McCain to get off the Double Talk Express. http://www.blogger.com/

4. McCain's Spiritual Guide: The video that caused McCain to renounce Rev. Rod Parsley's bigoted endorsement. http://www.blogger.com/

5. Why Won't McCain Sign the GI Bill? Presenting the most blatant hypocrisy of the McCain campaign. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK_9sI7hzAc

Imagine how differently people would regard McCain if they saw all five of these videos and learned the truth. That's why we want you to forward this e-mail to everyone and anyone with a personal note at the top from you. Why send these videos individually when you can send them all at once? Also, get them on all the blogs and traditional news sites you can. Make sure you're doing everything you can to educate the public about the Real McCain.

Yours,
Robert Greenwald and the Brave New team

Time To Step Back -- Again

I know, I've said I was going to do this step back thing several days ago and I've truly tried to step back and look at things with a wide angle view, but I'm afraid I've failed miserably. All I can see is the mayhem and madness of politics in general and I know that the Republicans look at the Democrats and say the same things. And where does any of it get us. The protestors, the riots -- let's admit though, there are more protesting the Republicans than Democrats. But it all just brings back the nightmare of the 60s, when there was another unpopular war and an enormous upheaval in our society. Looking at both then and now from the perspective of my seventy-five years, I can see the similarities, but I can also see major differences.

Vietnam was an unpopular war, too, being fought for all the wrong reasons, just like this one and there were as many against it as there are against the war in Iraq. Our whole society was moving out and away from the slow moving days of the fifties and everything seemed to be changing. And yet there wasn't the problem with the economy then that there is today and that is what I see as adding a large helping of desperation to the mess we're facing now. The war in Iraq needs to end and our over-taxed military need to come home. But then what are they coming home to? Fewer jobs, lower pay, broken school systems, the economy in tatters, the infrastructure badly in need of repair, the reality of climate change and global warming. None of which the Republicans see as any kind of major problem. For them the only problem is their favorite prop -- terrorism! I'm sorry, but at this point, that is not the major problem in this country and looking for other wars to jump into is not going to make our country more stable or more safe.

I don't have the answers, maybe no one does, but I know for sure the Republicans don't have a workable plan to fix any of our problems and just a bandaid is not going to fix the massive wounds we are suffering right now. And for people to say that they don't care what happens as long as we're all pro-life! Do they want to bring more innocent children into this mess? What possible kind of thinking is that? Somewhere along the line our core values have been badly screwed.

I have no wise person to quote tonight, I'm not sure I believe in a new day tomorrow, but I do know for sure that more of the same is not going to work. All I can do is hope that people with courage and wisdom and the ability to see a broader horizon will win this election. Someone who can see the way to a new day for our country, for our people, for our place in the world as a leader. A leader that sets an example of how hopes and dreams can be realized, both here and around the world. I believe there is such a person and that person is Barack Obama.