"Now, I Hate The Left, Believe Me. But..."

I just listened to a good bit of Barack Obama's OFA session, and I think I can now pinpoint what has been irking me lately. He got up there and tried to rebut all the misinformation about what the bill would do. In fact, he said exactly what Matt Yglesias pre-butted this morning:

I think that if someone gets sick in the United States, that person ought to be treated without being subject to a citizenship test. I think that abortion is a legitimate medical procedure. And ultimately I think health insurance should be directly provided by the government. Interestingly, the one thing that doesn’t get a majority is the thing that’s actually a bad idea—killing grandma.

This reminds me of something that’s bothered me throughout the health care debate. The president’s only real allies and advocates are, you know, serious liberals. People who think that people born in Mexico are human beings but fetuses are not. And most of all, people who believe in government-provided health insurance. But when we man the barricades for the president’s plan, we’re in a weird situation. Obama gets accused of wanting a single-payer system. Then I have to say “no! no! he doesn’t! that’s a slander . . . not there’s anything wrong with single-payer.” It’s a damn dirty lie to say that the government will fund abortion services, but really the government should fund abortion services.

This just deflates a lot of people, the same people who could be counted on to rally for a policy they support. We knew all along that the right would fearmonger and scare people and make up whatever lies served their purpose regardless of the reality. Pre-compromising bills to shield oneself from those charges makes absolutely no sense.

There's this inherent, reflexive self-loathing among establishment "liberals" that turns off people who unabashedly call themselves liberal. Take a look at this article by Joe Klein, an article whose subject is that Republicans have become a nihilist party, and how long he takes punching hippies before getting to his point:

Given the heinous dust that's been raised, it seems likely that end-of-life counseling will be dropped from the health-reform legislation. But that's a small point, compared with the larger issue that has clouded this summer: How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? And another question: How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark?

I'm not going to try. I've written countless "Democrats in Disarray" stories over the years and been critical of the left on numerous issues in the past. This year, the liberal insistence on a marginally relevant public option has been a tactical mistake that has enabled the right's "government takeover" disinformation jihad. There have been times when Democrats have run demagogic scare campaigns on issues like Social Security and Medicare. There are more than a few Democrats who believe, in practice, that government should be run for the benefit of government employees' unions. There are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection. There are others who mistrust the use of military power under almost any circumstances. But these are policy differences, matters of substance. The most liberal members of the Democratic caucus — Senator Russ Feingold in the Senate, Representative Dennis Kucinich in the House, to name two — are honorable public servants who make their arguments based on facts. They don't retail outright lies. Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party.

It is a very different story among Republicans.

He goes on, of course, but Klein clearly felt he could not get away with a strident article about Republican insanity without saying "Hey, look, I think liberals are the scum of the earth too, don't get me wrong, but..." It's like a facial tic.

I saw the President today call those who believe government should not be involved in anything at all "reasonable people" with whom we could have a principled argument. Unless we're arguing about whether or not they should use roads, police, fire departments, libraries, and the judicial system, then no, that is not a reasonable line of argument. Here's a reasonable line of argument, from Jesse Jackson Jr., and it's so bitterly partisan, I know, but in the absence of this argument you have the President of the United States giving anti-government cranks a legitimacy they simply don't deserve.

Reverend Jackson and I were talking this morning about health insurance reform. He said ‘“Jesse, sum up this public option thing for me.’ I heard the President give an analysis that I think appropriate: Federal Express, UPS, DHL, the private option. The public option: email, the post office. If you want to pay your bill, sending it overnight for $30, choose the private option. But if you want to mail your mail like most of us do, WITH A STAMP (applause and laughter) use the public option…. The post office offers competitive overnight mail options. And those of us who are not interested in overnight mail can go the slow route, 2-3 days. That’s just fine for me. The post office is universal. It reaches the rural areas. It reaches the urban areas. It reaches where DHL, and UPS, and Fedex will not go. And so in the barrios and the ghettos and the trailor parks of our nation, for the uninsured in our nation, in order for us to save our health care system, we need a legitimate, real public option! (Cheering and applause.)

Instead of this message, we have a President talking about working constructively with people who have said out loud they want to deny any health care bill.

Now some would say that the nation as a whole is not all that liberal, and we have to find common ground because legislation is the art of the compromise, etc., etc. ad nauseum. What never gets discussed is the role of long-term messaging. People are falling for right-wing lies about government-run health care because they're been told for decades that government is evil, with no countervailing message from the other side. Those who resist these lies, the most strident supporters of a health care overhaul in the abstract, are being told to accept half a loaf, that doing reasonable things, like allowing a public option to provide the same medical services that 90% of all private insurance companies provide, is a damn dirty lie, are told to compromise and compromise, are actually told that we cannot have a government insurance option because it would be too popular. You really don't have to get very far from that to a statement like "You don't matter, go away, we don't want you." It's happened before.

And don't you dare, ever, add anything like morality into the individual actions of lawmakers.

It would be, for instance, very uncouth to say that a coal-state senator who opposed climate change legislation was literally consigning thousands of people to death in order to protect hometown interests. That's a very mean thing to say. Senator so-and-so doesn't want to kill people, he just wants to be reelected. But that's what he's doing. He has constituents and polls and pressures. Similarly, a lot of the congressmen who are opposing health-care reform are, again, ensuring that tens of thousands of people will die from inadequate access to health care. But you're not supposed to say that [...]

...no one ever has to make those arguments directly because these debates take place at a high level of abstraction. That's how you get weird situations wherein a congressman who has spent two decades enriching industry and voting to cut Medicaid and welfare can be run out of office because he crossed an ethical line and had an affair or took a kickback. The moral dimension is entirely absent in discussions of policy, as if we've all signed some agreement admitting that the cost to civility would be too great if we took the implications of each vote seriously.

Apparently Obama made something of a moral argument yesterday, calling health care "a a core ethical and moral obligation," saying that “These struggles always boil down to a contest between hope and fear,” and likening back to when FDR was called a socialist, and JFK and LBJ the same for trying to pass Medicare. But that's coming a bit late, and little of that was on display today.

The bottom line is that, until progressives rallied behind the public option this week, the air was out of the balloon. The base of supporters are energizing this debate, and they will reward any lawmaker that reflects their values and actually seeks to follow through on their promises. They now represent the last, best hope for real health care reform. And they won't cotton to being kicked around, dragged through the mud, or played as pawns any longer. 2012 lies in the balance.

Moral Superiority

Given the Sanford affair today, for some reason I view this standing ovation for John Ensign in a new context. Again, his personal life is none of my concern, but the same people who stand on a soapbox made out of Bibles really look like ridiculous moralizers right now. Everyone shut up about everyone else's sex life and get your nose out of my bedroom.

Wright on Right (and Wrong)

I actually did catch most of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's interview with Bill Moyers over the weekend, and I found him to be articulate, with a deep knowledge of history and Scripture, whose message is really not as it is has been caricatured in the media (of course). Moyers took the time to give full context to the snippets of his sermons we were treated to for weeks on end, and it revealed some interesting results. For example, that "America's chickens are coming home to roost" line was not Wright's, but him quoting some "ambassador" on Fox News a few days after the 9-11 attacks. He was describing someone else's viewpoint, and it was ascribed to him, as if that were his immediate reaction to the fall of the Twin Towers. Wright also has as many harsh words to say about African-American men who fail to live up to their responsibilities as he does for selected actions of the government. He understands that when you love someone, you want them to do the right thing, and when they don't you express your disappointment or frustration to nudge them in the right direction. It's as true with a person as it is with a country, and that value of dissent is one value on which this country was built. So yes, Mr. Stephanopoulos, I think Rev. Wright loves this country as much as I do. And I think we both love it more than you.

Here is a very difficult but enlightening concept discussed on the program:

BILL MOYERS: Hermeneutic?

REVEREND WRIGHT: Hermeneutic is an interpretation, it's the window from which you're looking is your hermeneutic. And when you don't realize that I've been framed- this whole thing has been framed through this window, there's another world out here that I'm not looking at or taking into account, it gives you a perspective that-- that is-- that is informed by and limited by your hermeneutic. Dr. James Cone put it this way. The God of the people who riding on the decks of the slave ship is not the God of the people who are riding underneath the decks as slaves in chains. If the God you're praying to, "Bless our slavery" is not the God to whom these people are praying, saying, "God, get us out of slavery." And it's not like Notre Dame playing Michigan. You're saying flip a coin; hope God blesses the winning team, no. That the perception of God who allows slavery, who allows rape, who allows misogyny, who allows sodomy, who allows murder of a people, lynching, that's not the God of the people being lynched and sodomized and raped, and carried away into a foreign country. Same thing you find in Psalm 137. That those people who are carried away into slavery have a very different concept of what it means to be the people of God than the ones who carried them away.

BILL MOYERS: And they say, "How can we sing the song of the Lord of a foreign land?"

REVEREND WRIGHT: Correct.

BILL MOYERS: That chapter ends up with some very brutal words.

REVEREND WRIGHT: It does. And--

BILL MOYERS: You used them in one of your sermons--

REVEREND WRIGHT: Yes, I did. I was trying to show how people- how the anger- and we felt anger. I felt anger. I felt hurt. I felt pain. In fact, September 11th, I was in Newark. September 11th, I was trapped in Newark 'cause when they shut down the air system I couldn't get back to Chicago. September 11th, I looked out the window and saw the second plane hit from my hotel window. Alright, I had members who lost loved ones both at the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center. So, I know the pain. And I had to preach to them Sunday. I had to preach. They came to church wanting to know where is God in this. And so, I had to show them using that Psalm 137, how the people who were carried away into slavery were very angry, very bitter, moved and in their anger from wanting revenge against the armies that had carried them away to slavery, to the babies. That Psalm ends up sayin' "Let's kill the baby-let's bash their heads against the stone." So, now you move from revolt and revulsion as to what has happened to you, to you want revenge. You move from anger with the military to taking it out on the innocents. You wanna kill babies. That's what's going on in Psalm 137. And that's exactly where we are. We want revenge. They wanted revenge. God doesn't wanna leave you there, however. God wants redemption. God wants wholeness. And that's the context, the biblical context I used to try to get people sitting again, in that sanctuary on that Sunday following 9/11, who wanted to know where is God in this? What is God saying? What is God saying? Because I want revenge.

REVEREND WRIGHT: The people of faith have moved from the hatred of armed enemies, these soldiers who captured the king, those soldiers who slaughtered his son and put his eyes out, the soldiers who sacked the city, burned the towns, burned the temples, burned the towers, and moved from the hatred for armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents, the babies, the babies . "Blessed are they who dash your baby's brains against a rock." And that my beloved is a dangerous place to be. Yet, that is where the people of faith are in 551 BC and that is where far too many people of faith are in 2001 AD. We have moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents. We want revenge. We want paybacks and we don't care who gets hurt in the process.

This of course is why a Fox News anchor said on Sunday "I fell asleep midway through, Moyers blew it!" As Pastor Dan says, this is a stunning level of discourse for the soundbite culture to grasp, and one that's easy to rip from context. He's basically saying that we must pause at responding to a cycle of violence with more violence and try to determine the moral course, the one that offers redemption and wholeness, while acknowledging our imperfections and rushes of emotion. If you want Rev. Wright to stand in for Barack Obama, I would say this speaks extremely WELL of him. Pastor Dan gets this right:

One of the best things to happen to the media in the past twenty-five years was the emergence of conservative advocates who condensed the Christian faith to two simple talking points: abortion and homosexuality. It gave them a nice handle on the Christian story: churches comforted their flocks and sang nice songs on Christmas and Easter, and to the extent that they were political, they cared about these two issues and only these two issues. Everybody else was a dangerous radical.

It's the same story we keep hearing about any number of issues today. The corporate media has drawn the boundaries for acceptable discourse on religion with a decidedly conservative tilt. You can be against abortion and homosexuality, or you can be quiet about your political applications of your faith. Otherwise, you're part of the "fringe," and therefore suspect.

Wright threatens that consensus. He knows that the Bible has plenty to say about today's headlines, and he's not afraid to articulate it. As if that weren't bad enough, he's had the bad taste to teach the next president of the United States that Christianity might be relevant.

I'm not a Christian but I accept and embrace any religion that has a moral obligation to connect the faith to the issues of the day, to man's inhumanity to man, to the constant struggle for survival, to hope and justice and human rights. The Dobsons of the world use religion as a spear; Wright uses it as a clarion call. It's easily misunderstood.

Wright continued his public appearances by speaking at the Detroit NAACP and this morning at the National Press Club on the "invisibility" of black church traditions in mainstream American life. He could have been talking about the moral and spiritual center of religion.

People are going to continue to attack Obama on this issue, even, I see today, John McCain, who used some favorable interpretation of an Obama comment to get his licks in.

But McCain noted that Obama said on Sunday on Fox News that Wright was an issue, seemingly opening a door for McCain to connect the Democrat to his former pastor.

"I saw yesterday some additional comments that have been revealed by Pastor Wright, one of them comparing the United States Marine Corps with Roman Legionnaires who were responsible for the death of our Savior, I mean being involved in that. It's beyond belief..." McCain said.

"I can understand why Americans, when viewing these kinds of comments, are angry and upset," McCain said.

Jeremiah Wright was a Marine. His comment had nothing to do with the crucifixion and everything to do with America's role as a world superpower.

These are intentional misundertandings and discolorations. I'd like to believe that there is a simple power in Wright's point of view that can transcend his first impression created by the media but we all know that's not true. And yes this will be an issue until November. However, having heard his pastor I believe Obama has more wisdom and sense of justice than I previously thought possible in a Presidential candidate. In other words I found it to be a dog whistle for me.

UPDATE: I'm assuming that Atrios is referring to Wright:

There's this guy on my teevee talking about how our government supported Apartheid and the peasant-killing Contras using money gained by selling arms to Iran. Oh and 4000+ US troops died in Iraq over a lie.

What can be said about Wright is that he has a memory and he doesn't repaint our national picture by touching up the edges. His portrait is real and honest and informs the future. That's much too gray and shaded for the black-and-white robotic Republicans.

Politicians Are People

This is an object lesson into why you should not invest yourself so heavily into politicians.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning.

Mr. Spitzer, who was huddled with his top aides early this afternoon, had hours earlier abruptly canceled his scheduled public events for the day. He is set to make an announcement about 2:15 this afternoon at his Manhattan office.

Mr. Spitzer, a first-term Democrat who pledged to bring ethics reform and end the often seamy ways of Albany, is married with three children.

Just last week, federal prosecutors arrested four people in connection with an expensive prostitution operation. Administration officials would not say that this was the ring with which the governor had become involved.

I really, really liked Eliot Spitzer when he was a reformist Attorney General, and his campaign for Governor was first-rate. I could probably dig up my "Spitzer 2008" blog post from a couple years back. His first term in Albany was tumultuous but he's proven himself a partisan fighter. But he's a person, and people have their own issues and peccadilloes, and nobody should be particularly shocked. Democrats have pretty much voided their ability to say this kind of thing doesn't matter, after relentlessly focusing on Republican sexual deviancy over the years. And that's sad, because it really doesn't matter all that much in the big picture. In the case of many Republicans, there is an issue of hypocrisy at work, as the ones most vocal about family values typically become the ones most likely to be involved in these scandals. And that's fair game. There is a kind of hypocrisy issue at work here considering that Spitzer ran as a crime fighter and a reformer, and he's broken the law if he's involved in a prostitution ring.

The larger point is that politicians are not demigods. They should not be seen as if they walk on water. They're people and they've been given tremendous power and that can have a negative influence. In the current primary fight, we should consider this and try to keep an even keel.

...What didn't become clear in the Sen. David Vitter case, for some insane reason, is that this behavior is against the law in the states where these officials are alleged to have engaged in it. Somehow Vitter avoided that and kept his job. There may be a double standard, but that wouldn't make it right for Spitzer, just more wrong for Vitter. The standard should not be set by David Vitter. If anything, this should increase pressure on him to resign, too. I can't see Spitzer keeping his job, so why should Vitter?

... Spitzer's comment was vague and noncommital. Maybe he's doing the Vitter/Larry Craig strategy and just waiting around for everyone to forget about this.

Here Are Some Good Ads

This should whet everyone's appetite for the campaign ad wars to come. First from the DCCC, mocking the "moral high ground" that Republicans find themselves on these days:



Next, from Public Campaign Action Fund, recounting a sordid story where Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rewarded a former staffer-turned-lobbyist who raised $120,000 for his campaign, by providing his firm with an $8.3 million dollar contract to provide iPods for Afghani tribesmen. That was not devised in a Hollywood writer's room.



Progressive organizations big and small are hitting McConnell, and I think the suits in Washington see it as payback for Republicans going after then-Minority Leader Tom Daschle. His re-elect numbers have been dropping, and there's an opponent who's won a statewide race, Attorney General Greg Stumbo. This should be a fun one next year.

American Taliban

A state senator in Montana lets his slip show, along with the slip of his party:

As a Republican state senator in Montana and as a human being, I am offended by Senator Craig's existence. Why oh why are most of the perverts that get caught Republicans? Are there more of them or are they just stupid? The thought of a US Senator chasing love in all the wrong places makes me think longingly of the Ayotollahs in Iran. They would just kill the turkey.

Those happy days where men are murdered for their sexual orientation. Ah, those halcyon days...

Just looking at the left-right chart, it is clear that the conservatives are moving to the same kind of authoritarianism that we have in fundamentalist theocracies around the world. Far from being libertarian, they want to be in everyone's bedroom, legislating morality and physically harming those who aren't as morally pure as they are. This is the real face of the Republican Party in the 21st century. And if the GOP wants to survive, they need to purge their party of this strain of fundamentalism and theocratic impulses, or they will never be anything but a minority party as the long arm of history bends toward justice and liberalism. I thank this state senator for peeling back the curtain.

UPDATE: Well, the American Taliban has succeeded in pushing WideStance Craig out of their party. Not to defend Craig, whose inability to understand the law disqualifies him to be a lawmaker IMO. But clearly there is a major, major problem in the Republican Party with their demand for absolute fealty with a fundamentalist agenda.