Salon news editor attacks media's false narrative on tax cut compromise and replaces it with one of his own

Standard vanilla beltway hack

Salon’s news editor, Steve Kornacki, has published a truly remarkable exercise in establishment liberal-centrist sophistry concerning Barack Obama’s tax cut compromise. To this point, the preferred media narrative about this is that by agreeing in principle to a temporary extension of all the Bush tax cuts, Obama has alienated his “liberal base.” The problem with that assessment, as I pointed out the other day, is that it completely ignores the fact that according to a CBS poll, a majority of Americans wanted the cuts to be extended only for those making less than $250,000 a year, and that 67% do not want the cuts extended for those making more than that. Since that post, Bloomberg—obviously a news organization that caters to wealthier readers—confirmed these results with a poll of its own which “shows that only a third of Americans support keeping the lower rates for the highest earners.”

Ignoring this data, Kornacki wrote a bizarrely titled apologia for the Obama administration, “Obama’s Silent Majority,” in which he attacks the media’s portrayal of the deal as a sellout of his liberal base. According to Kornacki, it turns out that not only did Obama not sell out the base, Obama didn’t really sell out anybody! Apparently, the only ones who are feeling left out in the cold after this compromise are “[l]iberal commentators and activists and interest group leaders.”

How does he know this? Because, “their rage has not trickled down to the Democratic voters (and, in particular, the Democratic voters who identify themselves as liberals), even though they’ve been venting their grief for the better part of two years.”

Kornacki then goes out to note how Obama’s approval rating among Democrats has remained static throughout 2010 before concluding:

Obama, in other words, seems to have developed his own silent majority. Rank-and-file liberal Democrats may not agree with everything he has done, but they do not share the sense of abandonment and betrayal that has defined liberal commentary throughout so much of his presidency. The party’s liberal base still very much likes him; it’s the elites who have turned on him.

The only poll numbers Kornacki cites are the president’s approval ratings among Democrats. He says nothing of the polls which demonstrate that a two-thirds majority of Americans—not just Democrats—do not want the tax cuts to be extended for those making over $250,000 a year. Given this fact, where exactly is Kornacki finding this silent majority? Or do two-thirds of Americans comprise those elites he was talking about?

Citing polls showing how Democrats have continued to support Obama even after he’s wussed out on a myriad of occasions—including closing Gitmo, caving on the public option, and extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich, among other capitulations and failed promises—does not impress me in the least. Democrats overwhelmingly favor closing Gitmo, favored the public option, and want the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire. On these latter two issues, Democratic opinion is in step with a majority of Americans in general. That Obama’s approval rating has remained steady among liberals suggests that either liberals aren’t paying enough attention to see the gap that exists between their ideas and the president’s policies, or, what is a more likely explanation, that liberals see no viable alternative. As such, they are often disappointed by Obama, but in the context of the American left/right paradigm, he looks good by comparison. At a time when the right is led by the likes of wackdoos Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, it’s easy for Obama to seem like the last, best hope for American liberalism. He is after all, the president. But looking like a liberal compared to say, Mitch McConnell, is a hardly a noteworthy achievement. So Kornacki can point to Obama’s approval ratings among his “base,” but it doesn’t change the fact that more often than not, on major issues Obama has gone against them. Apparently, for Kornacki this is not relevant. What’s relevant is that Democrats endure one disappointment after another, only to keep coming back to Obama like an emotionally scarred woman who always goes back to her abusive husband because she’s convinced that he’s the only one who could possibly love her.

- Max Canning

max.canning@gmail.com

Obama capitulates on tax cuts and the media creates a predictably false narrative about it

Apparently, support of 67% of the American public doesn’t get you what it used to.

Today I watched Barack Obama’s quasi-impromptu press conference where he made a few canned remarks about his compromise in principle with Republicans on extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone for two years. Before I get into the media’s reaction, I want to highlight a CBS poll conducted a week ago. A whopping 67% of Americans say that the Bush tax cuts should either be allowed to expire for everyone, or expire just for those making more than $250,000 a year. Below is the exact breakdown. I have added the data in the bottom row which shows what percentage of Republicans, Democrats, and independents want (at the very least) the tax cuts for the $250,000-plus crowd to expire. This is done simply by adding rows three and four:

CBS Poll conducted 11/29-12/01	All	REPS	DEMS	INDS
Continue for all	26%	46	10	25
Continue for households <$250K	53	41	70	47
Expire for all	14	11	14	17
Expire for >$250K (at very least)	67	52	84	64

Most amazing of all, notice how a majority (52%) of self-identified Republicans think the tax cuts for those making over $250,000 should expire.

Watching the news, you would never know that two-thirds of Americans are in favor of not extending the tax cuts for these wealthier Americans. Meanwhile, a straight 53% say the tax cuts should be extended just for those making under $250,000. And you wouldn’t know this because every media outlet I have seen report on this tax cut compromise—whether CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and so on—has presented this as an instance of Obama defying his “liberal base” and nothing more. See for yourself:

But it’s just the newest chapter of an old fight, and despite the liberal base’s fury, it’s evidence that Obama is trying to re-center himself before the 2012 elections.

CNN

He made clear he was willing to alienate his liberal base in the interest of compromise, more interested in crafting measures that can pass to the benefit of the middle class than waging battle to the end over principle.

New York Times

Even as liberals complain, White House officials believe independent voters will reward him if he’s seen as leading Washington to results.

Wall Street Journal

By cutting the deal they have, the White House has likely concluded that it is more important to cozy up to the middle than it is to keep it’s left-leaning base happy, probably believing that it has no where else to go and will, therefore, stick with Obama through 2012.

US News & World Report

As we just saw in the CBS poll, which merely confirmed similar results in previous polling on this issue (see here and here), two-thirds of Americans do not want tax cuts extended for anyone making over $250,000. And yet the American media would have us believe that in striking this deal, Obama dealt a cold serving of mainstream political reality to his überliberal critics. Except that unless Obama’s “liberal base” is that aforementioned two-thirds of the American population who are against extending the tax cuts for the wealthy, this analysis makes no sense whatsoever.

What this sorry episode shows is that our media is incapable of or unwilling to present serious political and economic issues in a way that goes beyond a convenient, narrow, and usually false left-right dichotomy. This narrative reminds me of the health care debate—based on the media coverage of which, you’d never know that 60% of Americans wanted a government health insurance option to compete with private coverage. Now once again, we are being told that the political realities being what they are, there’s just no possible way to extend tax cuts for the middle class while allowing them to lapse for the wealthy because only a majority of the American population favors it.

Perhaps this really does mean that a majority of Americans are in that “liberal base” the media keeps talking about.

- Max Canning

Glenn Beck Is A Repressed Fascist

I hear that quantum physicists are doing wonderful things in the field of string theory these days. One hypothesis that has gained momentum over the last several years is that there exist parallel universes alongside our own on other planes of reality. If this is the case, and scientists ever find what they believe to be a wormhole leading to these unknown places, allow me to volunteer to be the world’s first inter-universe traveler. My reasoning is simple: I do not want to live in a universe where Glenn Beck makes $32 million a year doing whatever it is that he does.

Over the last thirty years or so, conservative thought in the United States has undergone a remarkable devolution. Whereas the conservatives of the 1950s, sixties, and seventies were ably and articulately represented by the likes of William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and others, today’s right wing relies on the ostentatious Beck and the forever self-aggrandizing Sarah Palin to champion modern conservative values. Palin’s style differs from Beck in that her rhetoric is heavily platitudinous—even for a modern conservative. Palin manages to give lengthy speeches about politics without saying anything. Beck’s shtick on the other hand is fueled by personal mania combined with a gross misinterpretation of American and world history. As bad as Palin is, as a speaker and rhetorician she will never be as dangerous as Glenn Beck is.

Take this line from Beck speaking on his radio show last week. He was criticizing remarks by Simon Greer, who is head of the Jewish Funds for Justice (whatever that is) for saying,

“The government is you, me, and 300 million whom we share with our nation. Government is one way which we care for our neighbors, and tradition tells me to care for my neighbor as I care for myself. Here's what we do for each other as Americans: We grow food, we create jobs, we build homes, pave roads, teach our children, care for our grandparents, secure our neighborhoods. Government makes our country function. To put God first is to put humankind first. To put humankind first is to put the common good first.”

To you or me, this may seem like a pretty uncontroversial statement. But thank god we have Glenn Beck to set us straight. He tells us:

“This leads to death camps. A Jew, of all people, should know that. This is exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany. Put humankind and the common good first.”

Beck went on to say that this Greer’s line of thinking leads to death camps because old or disabled would be regarded as harming the common good and therefore they would have to be “liquidated.”

To me, this is one of the clearest examples we have of Glenn Beck engaged in an active psychological projection, which is the denial of one’s own unconscious characteristics or inclinations by outwardly accusing others of having those same attributes. Sane people who are not fascistically inclined regard “common good” as an ideal to be striven for. Conservatives and liberals alike laud this goal, although they have different ideas on how to get there. Beck, however, attacks the very notion itself because he says this will inevitably involve rounding up certain undesirable elements of the population and exterminating them. “Death camps,” as he said. But how in the world do you get from phrases like “common good” and “put humankind first” to the Nazi-esque extermination of people? You don’t. Only Beck does. Many conservative commentators have at some point played the Nazi card over the last year and a half, but Beck invokes them regularly to ascribe Hitlerian characteristics to a wide variety of political phenomena and ideas—from the work of community organizations such as ACORN or Americorps to “social justice,” Beck sees Bormann-type boogeymen everywhere. It could be that he’s doing it just for show and to rile people up, but on the few occasions I have watched this piece of work operate, I get the feeling that he genuinely believes what he’s saying.

Ironically, Beck has accused liberalism/progressivism of being a cancer that embodies fascist philosophies. On the Right, it is becoming increasingly popular to describe the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini as being rooted in progressivism. (See Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”) But as any schoolchild knows, fascism is an inherently conservative and reactionary doctrine. Fascism is not about putting humankind first as Beck seems to think, but about putting the nation-state first, whose glory depends on the social cohesion of the general population which is preferably comprised of a single uniform ethnicity. Every fascist state in history has invariably invoked the superiority of the people of that state to all outside groups. Sound familiar? How many times have we heard Beck and other conservatives espouse the tired mantra that America is an “exceptional” nation with a special place in world history? All the time. It’s their m.o. Criticize U.S. foreign policy in front of them and see what happens. Just recall the Bush years. Anyone who wasn’t 100% on board the war train for Iraq was deemed a terrorist sympathizer or at the very least a pussy by Beck, Hannity, et al. These men decry the purported rise of “big government” under the current president, but remember that no matter how much authority the Bush administration usurped for the federal government, they were behind it all the way. The decision by the Obama administration that conservatives have approved the most of is his decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan. A close second is his sending 1,500 troops to the border to keep out Mexicans from a territory that less than 200 years ago belonged to Mexico. That illegal immigration has come to the forefront of the political landscape at a time when the American economy is in the doldrums and American workers are getting the red-headed stepchild treatment speaks volumes about the political culture. It says that Americans—like the Weimar Germans before them—are looking for a scapegoat, a reason for why their livelihoods are fucked.

And Glenn Beck is giving them one.

- Max

The Hypocrisy Of The Teabaggers

Obama a black Nazi? In Tea Party Land, anything is possible.

As the enlightened followers of this site already know, the teabaggers are an extremely hypocritical group of people who are “fed up” with the government. Although they were nowhere to be found while George W. Bush was turning a surplus into record deficits, all the while shitting on the U.S. Constitution, they took to the streets less than two months after Barack Obama’s inauguration. Today, when a teabagger complained to Matt Taibbi in the comments section of his blog that the latter was not giving the movement its due respect, Taibbi responded with guns blazing:

What happened at the END of the Bush administration? What about before that, I wonder?

That’s why the Teabag movement has no credibility — none, zero. Bush, having inherited a budget surplus, added $5 trillion to the national debt, not only with his two idiotic wars but with massive giveaways to his campaign donors like the Prescription Drug Benefit Bill, which in spirit and in execution was basically no different from Obama’s health care plan.

Bush was a rampant spender and the only reason the Teabagger crowd didn’t perceive him as such until the end was because you always saw Tom Delay pushing for “cuts” in things like food stamps and heating oil whenever they needed to find money to pay for this or that asinine pork program.

I remember sitting in congress and watching in the months after Katrina and listening to Republican congressmen one after another patting themselves on the back for making the “tough” decision to pass the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which sliced $70 billion in food stamps, college tuition aid and Medicaid.

But of course this wasn’t a net cut overall — they passed it in order to pay for a tax cut that primarily impacted top-bracket taxpayers, a tax cut that was pushed through despite the fact that the federal government was going to take a huge bath on Katrina emergency relief and unexpectedly high Iraq expenditures.

So the entire maneuver was deficit-neutral at best, and in reality added to the deficit, because all the “cuts” did was offset a blatant giveaway in the middle of a gigantic budget disaster.

But the Teabag crowd was happy because what they saw was a cut for “entitlements” — in other words, you cut $10 billion in food stamps for Mexicans, no one cares if you add $20 billion in drug subsidies and corporate tax breaks and outmoded weapons programs and the supremely idiotic occupation of Iraq, where private companies were getting paid thousands of dollars a minute to drive phantom truckloads of gas across the desert (what Halliburton called “delivering sailboat fuel”).

In the course of covering two presidential campaigns I never once heard any of you people talking about Bush’s spending. It was always liberals this, liberals that, gay marriage, welfare and socialism, and cheering whenever someone like Ann Coulter said something daring and witty, like how “compassionate conservative” carries the same connotations as “articulate black.”

And when people like Jeremy Scahill did a pretty excellent job proving that the Bush administration was practically setting fire to billions of taxpayer dollars in Iraq, you folks didn’t want to hear about it back then. All you wanted to do was cuddle up in your idiotic fantasies about how people like me were socialist traitors plotting to turn the state over to Hamas and single Dominican moms.

So forgive me if I feel like laughing whenever you complain about how you’re not taken seriously. If over the last eight years you’d spent a little more time reading and a little less time impugning the patriotism of honest Americas like me, I might be inclined to listen to you now. But your basic problem is that you only hear what you want to hear and don’t even consider learning about anything else, and all you want to hear about is how Those People are to blame for your problems.

Last time I was in DC, there was a teabagger rally on the mall and not one of the dozens of you people I interviewed even cared that there were House hearings on financial regulatory reform going on. You all had plenty of things to say about how Obama was going to steal the next election with an immigration amnesty, but not one of you even knew what a derivative is or what the proposed new laws governing them were.

And give me a break about how much it hurts your feelings when I use the word “teabagger.” You love it when slick overeducated northerners like me call you names, because it validates your amazingly overdeveloped sense of victimhood/political martyrdom, which you love to wallow in above all things. You think we don’t listen to Rush and Hannity and hear you calling in whining all day long about how you’re not being taken seriously?

From Taibblog

Ouch.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we should talk about the teabaggers. On one hand, like all non-wealthy Americans, these are people who have gotten clobbered financially by thirty years of Reaganomics and neoliberalism, and so perhaps some sympathy is warranted. Noam Chomsky, for one, identified the tea partiers as people with “real grievances” who are getting crazy answers from the right wing media as to the cause of their problems. Chomsky says that it is incumbent upon the Left to provide better—i.e., reality-based—answers to them. That is all well and good; but it is a sad fact that no matter how coherent and truthful our answers may be, many—probably most—of the teabaggers are going to continue to believe that the biggest problems facing America today are illegal immigrants, gays, unions, community organizing groups such as ACORN (which commits the reprehensible crime of giving a voice to the voiceless poor), and government spending on “entitlements.” But as Taibbi pointed out, the only entitlement programs that they ever attack are ones that help others: Medicaid, food stamps, etc. You won’t hear too many middle-aged teabaggers decrying Medicare or Social Security for the plain fact that they fully expect to reap all the benefits of those entitlement programs. And cutting the military budget is out of the question for them because they favor a “strong national defense,” which is a euphemism for unchallenged U.S. hegemony in the international arena. Also out of the question for the teabaggers is eliminating pharmaceutical and agribusiness subsidies because most of them don’t know they exist.

Judging by the coverage of the tea party rallies, it seems to be that a good chunk of the teabaggers are baby boomers, who, despite the constant trashing of younger Americans in the media, collectively make up the most selfish generation in American history. As a result of the hard work and sacrifice of their parents who persevered through the Great Depression and World War II, the boomers had exponentially better lives than their parents. As George Carlin said of the boomers, “They had a free ride, and they took it all.” Their philosophy was, and still can be, summed up thus: “Gimme it, it’s mine! Gimme that, it’s mine!”

A generalization? Obviously. But perhaps there is more than a kernel of truth in this. I hear a lot of teabaggers bemoaning government spending and deficits, but what I’m not hearing are any offers to forgo their own entitlements. They rail against socialism, but fully expect to get their Social Security checks and Medicare when they turn sixty-five. But for the teabaggers, neither Social Security nor Medicare seems to constitute “socialism,” which they love to scream about and condemn. No, “socialism” describes entitlement programs for other people. This way, socialism can continue being a dirty word. After all, no red-blooded American could possibly be in favor of, or benefit from, socialism, so those entitlement programs don’t count. But something like Medicaid, which far fewer Americans have than Medicare, is socialism because it benefits poor people and minorities, and not teabaggers. Are you starting to see how this works?

I don’t know what will happen in the November midterm elections, but suffice it to say the Democrats are in rough shape. While there was no way they or anyone else could’ve turned the economy around by now, they haven’t exactly given the public a reason to reelect them. When Obama took office and Americans were calling for the heads of the Wall Street titans partly responsible for sending the economy into a terminal nosedive, the president sat on his hands, did nothing, and then went to Lower Manhattan last summer to politely ask that Wall Street reform itself. This sorry episode shows just how beholden even the Democratic Party—the supposed party of the working class—is to the business interests of the country, particularly the financial services sector.

Having said that, I find it incredibly disturbing that more Americans are starting to believe that the answer to what ails the country is to put the Republicans back in power. One would think that the havoc wrought by the GOP on this country in both domestic and foreign affairs during the last decade would have left an indelible impression on the American mind. Apparently not. The teabaggers and their sympathizers do not seem to remember anything that occurred before January 20th, 2009.

This just goes to show what horrible choices Americans are faced with at the ballot box. It has been said that the backlash against the Democrats is actually part of a wider anti-incumbency sentiment. And maybe there’s some truth to that. But while I find it almost impossible to make a good case for keeping the Democrats in power, I find totally impossible to make any case for bringing back the Republicans.

- Max Canning

9/11 Was Not An Inside Job

Seriously.

Recently I had the displeasure of conversing with a 9/11 “truther”—a person who believes that the September 11^th attacks were an inside job perpetrated by the Bush administration to use as a pretext for the so-called war on terror. His syllogism went something like this:

Bush wanted to invade Iraq (and presumably Afghanistan).

Bush could not invade without a good reason.

Therefore, 9/11 was orchestrated by Bush to provide the reason.

Now, I think George W. Bush is one of the worst presidents ever, and his invasion of Iraq was a textbook war crime. But if the Bush administration was going to go through the trouble of somehow getting planes (or missiles as some truthers claim) to fly into the World Trade Center, planting explosives in the buildings beforehand so they could be detonated after impact, fabricating the identities of the hijackers, covering up all government involvement after the fact, then I have just one question: Why wouldn’t the Bush administration just forge some Iraqi passports for the phony hijackers in order to make an airtight case for war against Iraq? I mean, if 9/11 was one big ingenious theatrical production by the government, why would Bush and company make the hijackers out to be from Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally? Instead, none of the nineteen hijackers were Iraqi, while fifteen of them were Saudi.

This question has never been coherently answered by any truther. When I posited this to a conspiracy nut once, he replied, “Because that would’ve been too obvious.”

Ha. So what he was saying was that the Bushies, instead of cooking up some fake Iraqi identities to create a slam-dunk justification for invading Iraq, decided to choose the path of most resistance by implicating a bunch of Saudis in the attacks so they’d have to jump through all kinds of hoops to explain to the American public that it wasn’t Saudi Arabia that needed to be invaded, but Afghanistan where the “terrorists” had trained, and then Iraq, which they had nothing to do with.

This does not make sense on any level. The fact that most of the hijackers were Saudi was extremely inconvenient for the Bush administration, and this needed to be overcome for propaganda purposes.

Another problem with the truther hypothesis is that if the government was able to orchestrate 9/11 and cover it up, fooling most Americans, why couldn’t it fabricate some evidence linking Iraq and 9/11? Or, why couldn’t it fabricate evidence proving beyond all doubt that Saddam was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction? Indeed, if the Bush administration had the will and the ability to orchestrate the 9/11 attacks, why didn’t it have the will and the ability to plant some WMDs in Iraq after the invasion so they could “find” them and tell the American people, “Aha! See, we were right!”? But this didn’t happen. Not even a single drum of nerve gas. And when no WMDs were found, Bush looked like a total asshole. So again, this makes no sense.

Also, what about the fact that in a conspiracy of this magnitude, hundreds, probably thousands of people would have to be involved in the attacks and the subsequent cover up? If 9/11 were an inside job, you’d think somebody would’ve leaked something. How can a secret like that be kept when hundreds of people know it? It’s impossible, especially with over eight years having passed.

But if you’re a truther, why bother trying to explain any of this? It’s much easier to take a condescending tone with people and tell them, as truthers love to do, “Wake up, people!” In using this kind of rhetoric, truthers are telling us that they are part of an “enlightened” minority, a small group of critical thinkers who are “in-the-know” about 9/11. They assume the guise of teachers who want others to see the light, but in reality they want stay small in number so they can continue to feel smarter than everyone else. The only problem is, their theory of what happened is totally fucking stupid.

- Max