Moses Kagan's Aurora Borealis

Paul Krugman's piece in the Times today argues that the Republican Party is "the party of stupid". By this, he means that:

"... know-nothingism - the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there's something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise - has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party's de facto slogan has become: 'Real men don't think things through.'"

Krugman's wrong, and what's going on is worse than stupid.

The election and governing strategies of Bush the Younger were / are predicated on a simple, stunning insight into American politics: The great mass of people are so uninformed that it is possible to lie to them without being caught.

By "caught", I don't mean that lies go undiscovered. The media, the mainstream and the blogs, do a pretty good job of ferreting out the truth in most cases. They dutifully report that, for example, offshore drilling won't affect gas prices, or that Iraq was not connected in any meaningful way to Al Qaeda. But their reporting doesn't matter. Why?

The media is fragmented, so that there is no one media institution capable of reaching a truly mass audience. We are functionally illiterate, reading fewer newspapers (with in-depth commentary) and playing more video-games and watching more movies, etc. The right wing has embarked on a long and successful campaign to discredit the media by arguing that it is biased in favor of the left. The list of theories goes on and on.

Whatever the reason, the media is no longer an effective watchdog. It can scream and yell about lies politicians tell, but we aren't listening. Maybe it has been like this all along, maybe not. But it seems to me that there was a tacit agreement for a long time among politicians of both parties to refrain from telling direct lies to the people. You could fib or stretch the truth, but you didn't lie about big things.

George Bush changed all of that. He rejected the tacit bargain and lied and got away with it. McCain and the rest of the Republicans have learned the lesson. Politics isn't a debate contest. The public isn't a tenure review committee or the editorial board of a scientific publication.

The American public is effectively asleep at the switch. Lying to us, unfortunately, seems to work. It's a sad, sad state of affairs. But, again unfortunately, we get the politics we deserve.

Labels: lying, politics, Republicans

Now that we have further proof that Monica Goodling, Alberto Gonzelez's aide, subverted the civil service laws designed to protect the jobs of career government workers from political interference, I have a few questions:

1. Will Goodling and the other guilty parties be punished? Is there any doubt that what they did (perverting the hiring process in the Justice Department such that non-partisan or Democratic leaning candidates could not be hired or promoted) was worse for the country than, say, some crackhead robbing a liquor store? At the very least, these people ought to be disbarred, convicted in court, and run out of Washington D.C. on a rail.
   
2. What about the political hacks they hired? Do the civil service laws that Goodling ignored now protect these incompetents from a thorough house-cleaning after the election?

This is most assuredly NOT an isolated incident. The Republican Party has gone beyond mere disagreement with the laws and regulations it dislikes. Instead, under President Bush, the GOP has been relentless in subverting the power and credibility of those parts of the Executive Branch tasked with enforcing rules it finds disagreeable, the Justice Department being just one example.

We Americans have endured the consequences in ways large and small: the response to Katrina by the cronies running FEMA, the bungling of the Iraq occupation after the Administration transferred authority from the "unfriendly" State Department to the more pliable Defense Department, the lack of enforcement of voting rights protections for minorities during recent elections by the Voting Rights office of the Justice Deparment, and the un-ending stream of recalls of unsafe food and toys by the under-staffed and under-funded FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection (whose Bush-appointed leader actually testified to Congress that she did not want more power and money to police toy companies), to name a few.

These were not accidents. They were the foreseeable outcomes of policies cooked up by an Administration staffed by people who believe that government, all government, is bad.

Labels: Bush, Monica Goodling, Republicans

Take a quick look at the people charged with shaping the Republican Party Platform. Does that look like the America you live in? Four old, white dudes? Really?

Labels: Republicans

Jay-Z is out there talking about Katrina.



Leaving aside torture, our government's handling of Katrina has to be the most shameful episode of the last eight years. I don't know why the Dems aren't running that footage on TV again.

Do Americans not remember how painful and awful those few days were? Does anyone need four more years of that?

Labels: campaign, Jay-Z, Republicans