Tag Archives: Republicans

Livin’ Large

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The_Sims_-_Livin'_Large_CoverartIf I never hear the phrase “live within our means” in the context of the federal budget again, it will be too soon. The great myth that drives both the Village and the media narrative—a myth easy enough to buy into for a bunch of privileged goons who would still have a comfortable retirement to look forward to if Social Security evaporated entirely—is that Americans have been living large, that we’ve come to expect too much from our government.

Come to expect too much? What have we been getting? One of the worst qualities of life in the developed world, gun violence and incarceration rates that even Russia would consider ridiculous, crumbling infrastructure, expensive and inefficient profit-driven healthcare, ballooning costs for increasingly ineffective higher education… if this is living large by modern standards, the people of Northern Europe must be living on the set of Star Trek.

The truth is that America has been living large, but Americans have not, with the obvious few exceptions. We’re an empire with military force projected all over the globe, after all, and empires project their military force to gain tangible material and cultural benefits. Instead of tea and spices, of course, our main import is economic and military acquiescence, which may not sound tangible, but I assure you it has the power to make Dick Cheney rock hard. (We get the tea and spices, too, of course, but that’s a secondary perk at this point.)

Just to fill in the gaps a little, let me remind you that despite conservatives generally being big fans of hard currency, it was Nixon who finally detached the US Dollar from gold, and also add as a hint that one of Saddam Hussein’s last acts as a sovereign leader was to make some offhand comments about maybe starting to sell his oil in euros instead of dollars. America’s great imperial project, one apparently so subtle that modern gold-obsessed libertarians are too dense to notice it, has been to transform the US Dollar into the world economy’s new gold, because as the sovereign issuer of said US Dollar, that gives the US government some enormous advantages.

If these things seem rather high-level, that’s sort of the point: as Americans, we certainly benefit greatly from them—it would be grossly disingenuous to pretend that we do not—but they’re not for us. We might generally prefer the peace of mind of affordable healthcare that doesn’t constantly threaten to bankrupt us, or financial systems that don’t put us at the mercy of Mitt Romney’s colleagues, rather than the more profitable adventures in supplying terrorists and drug runners with guns so that we can later bomb them and any children who happen to be in their vicinity, but nobody cares what we prefer. At any rate, while we’re certainly in the top tier of quality of life in the world, we’re scraping against the very bottom of that tier. We know what a modern industrialized society is capable of providing for its citizens, and we’re not getting it.

So this persistent myth that we’re demanding too much of our government and living large off of it is irritating and infuriating. If the fat trimmed from America’s exorbitant lifestyle must come from our pantry rather than from our imperial playroom, we’re looking at a banana republic quality of life, because there’s not as much buffer between that and where we are now as Obama seems to imagine. My only question is this: why is it becoming conventional wisdom that we don’t have a right to expect anything better?

This is what conservatives want for our children

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As usual, the world that “pro-family” conservatives want to build for our children is markedly disturbing:

Israeli-SchoolchildrenFor the sake of conversation, we’ll assume that a) this picture is real, and b) it depicts what it’s being touted as depicting, which is an armed Israeli schoolteacher. From what I’m given to understand, this scenario is common in Israel, so the picture isn’t unbelievable by any means.

If you’re a decent human being, this picture should depress you. The necessity of carrying a rifle around while teaching children is tragic. The “necessity” is also arguable (guns have never proven effective as a means of defense), but we’ll leave that aside for now, because even to the extent that it is necessary, it’s a deplorable and regrettable situation. It represents a failure on the part of the state of Israel to conduct its foreign affairs in a manner that doesn’t endanger its own children.

Conservatives, of course, will never see it that way, because they view Israel as being surrounded by a horde of Muslim barbarians. They view violence against Israel by those Muslim “barbarians” as inevitable. I, by contrast, view Israel as a bully and an imperialistic wannabe that regularly abuses and starves the people whose land it stole, and then acts victimized when those people retaliate.

If that teacher is herself a decent human being, she is hopefully unhappy that she must carry a rifle around in the course of doing her job, a job that is not supposed to be in any way militarized.

What’s disturbing about the American conservatives who are passing this photograph around in response to the Newtown massacre is that it excites them. They want a world in which we must tote rifles around while attempting to teach our children. This is the world they want our children to live in.

That’s fucked up. It’s fucked up that they so zealously attempt to defend the “innocence” of children against the knowledge that people have breasts, penises, and vaginas, but want just as zealously to teach their children that people maim and murder each other for the shittiest reasons, and that Real Amuricans are always prepared to maim and murder as well.

(h/t Roy Edroso)

And the Hanseatic League is responsible for Greece’s economic woes

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I haven’t seen ACORN tossed around as a bogeyman among the right-wing commentariat in a while, so maybe I haven’t been paying attention. Because apparently they’re still fresh in the mind of the right-wing voting base, half of which believes that ACORN stole the 2012 election for Obama. Now, the root feeling underneath all of this is that a black man couldn’t possibly have won the election legitimately, and as such the specific mechanism by which they choose to believe that Obama stole the White House is irrelevant, but still, ACORN? Seriously? They might as well have blamed it on Reptillians or the Illuminati.

ACORN logo

Activities conservatives erroneously associate with ACORN: voter fraud, existing.

But then, I suppose it fits the pattern. Like “communists” or “socialists” or “Christianity,” ACORN is just a cypher for whatever conservatives want it to be. Just as many conservatives, no matter how vocal their opposition to communism, couldn’t actually coherently describe communism if asked (or capitalism, for that matter), many if not most of them never actually knew what ACORN was. It’s important to its role as bogeyman that they don’t, because what it was—a lower-income community advocacy group—was fairly mundane. Incredibly important, and its demise is a travesty, but my point is they didn’t exactly have the world by the marionette strings.

The crucial point, however, is that those conservatives who did know what it was still had reason—racist, despicable reason—to be opposed to it. They just aren’t the kind of reasons they’re able to say out loud as much as they’d like (because racist, despicable, etc.). Part of ACORN’s efforts were devoted to making it easier for people in lower-income neighborhoods to vote. Most of those people were racial minorities. And if there’s one group conservatives hate more than poor people, it’s poor non-white people.

But you can’t just come out and say, “These people want to ensure that black people have equal access to our democratic institutions, and I have a problem with that,” even if that happens to be true. But don’t worry, conservatives. You don’t have to say a word. Your despicable racism speaks for itself.

We can all be capitalists! and other fuckwitted ideas

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A couple weeks ago, Wonkette covered the wingnut antitruth, popular among the various faux-intellectual right-wing think tanks, that Thanksgiving is a celebration of the triumph of capitalism over socialism. As the story goes, the Pilgrims tried the whole socialism thing, nearly starved, then realized the folly of their ways and finally got their invisible hand out of their pants and got to work like good capitalists.

It’s probably obvious enough why this whole notion is fuckheaded, but you should read the article either way because it’s great. But what strikes me most about this whole revisionist history is that, as an anarcho-socialist linked to in the Wonkette piece points out, the glorious free market utopia the Pilgrims build in the wingnut tale isn’t actually capitalist.

Let’s look at the setup again: each family has its own farm and each family keeps the fruits of its labor. And that’s basically it. Now, if that sounds like capitalism to you because of all the mumble mumble bootstraps mumble mumble, ask yourself this question: who, in this scenario, are the capitalists?

Syndrome

“And when everyone’s a capitalist… no one will be.”

If you answered, “Everyone,” congratulations! That’s a really dumb answer! Such an arrangement cannot, by definition, be capitalistic. Just as you can’t be a predator without prey, and you can’t be a salesperson without a customer, you can’t be a capitalist without laborers. Capitalism is, by definition, a system wherein the means of production are owned by somebody other than the people who do the actual labor of production.

“But wait,” you might say. “Couldn’t that also describe feudalism?” Yes, yes it could. Congratulations, you’ve just spotted the man who’s been behind the curtain for the past 600 years. You know, the one who hides his uselessness by handing out worthless facades of fulfillment.

The notion that even ordinary Joes and Janes like you and me can be capitalists too is merely the latest con job used to keep the laborers from noticing that they’re being screwed. 401(k)s, the widespread availability of credit, and the push for universal home ownership are all Reaganomics-era innovations designed to give you the illusion of control over your financial life while, hilariously, actually serving as yet more vectors by which to transform you into a serf. You may also recognize these things as being major factors in the recent economic crisis.

Anyway, it’s that particular con that the narrative of Pilgrims as Noble Capitalists was designed to serve. The fact that it’s incoherent and ahistorical, not to mention the fact that you’ll never see Warren Buffet subsisting entirely on the produce of his own two hands, is irrelevant. The fact that these supposed champions of capitalism don’t even seem to understand what capitalism is is also irrelevant, because what they’re actually championing is class inequality and the suppression of labor rights. So yeah.

Wingnut history: The anti-sex revolution

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Like a high schooler blathering about Nietzsche, right-wingers who attempt to appeal to feminism will invariably get it wrong:

The Obama campaign has repeatedly appealed to women as if the feminist movement never happened – that is, as a monolith who can’t get sex and reproduction off the brain.

Yes, remember how, before feminism, women were constantly flaunting their sexuality? And how the greatest achievement of feminism was to teach them to be more modest and ladylike?

The ultimate absurdity here, of course, is that if feminism had never happened, Obama wouldn’t bother appealing to women at all, what with their not being able to vote and all that. But now they can, and if they feel compelled to vote based, in part or whole, on policies that will affect their uteruses (uteri?), that makes them responsible, not retrograde.

I’d sure as hell vote against a party that wanted to impede my ability to get healthcare for my dong, but nobody’s threatening to do that because I’m a dude.

Give me your tired, your poor, so they can scrub toilets for $7 an hour

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Perhaps the key difference between Republicans and Democrats at the moment is that Republicans want to make America even shittier for people who aren’t rich white straight Christian males, while Democrats feel that we’re at about the right level of shittiness right here. The notion that America could perhaps be made not shitty for the majority of Americans is an idea that appears to have died sometime in the 70s. “A chicken in every pot” has transformed into “well, sorry you weren’t born rich, but we really do admire all the backbreaking work you do for less than a living wage!”

This is what passes for Democratic rhetoric in 2012:

The bad news is that as emotionally compelling as many of the speeches were tonight, the key themes almost all centered around equal access to opportunity. Over and over again, the theme was that success should be available to those who work hard. Michelle Obama celebrated her father who went to work every day despite physically devastating illness just to pay for her college education, and even took out loans to make it happen. She said that it mattered less how much you made, and more how hard you worked.
And all I could do at certain points was sigh and shake my head.

And this:

Last night at the Democratic convention, Michelle Obama defined “the very best of the American spirit” as “teachers in a near-bankrupt school district who vowed to keep teaching without pay.”

Why are we celebrating that teachers are willing to work without pay in a near-bankrupt school district, instead of questioning why a school district in a nation with a GDP of $15 trillion has been allowed to descend to the brink of bankruptcy? Why are we praising a state of affairs in which employees, with no alternatives left to them, will allow their employers to run roughshod over them? Why are megabanks deemed so essential to our country that hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money is handed to them when they nearly destroy themselves, but school districts are left floundering? And why isn’t Michelle Obama asking these questions instead of praising the teachers who are being asked to work without pay while Jamie Dimon takes home a $23 million paycheck as CEO of a bank that is posting record profits a mere five years after nearly destroying the economy?

Obama is spitting all over the Wisconsin teachers who were willing to stand up against this plutocratic arrangement—teachers who received no assistance from the national Dems even as Republican money poured in to support Governor Walker’s campaign of suppression—when she ignores them and instead praises the teachers who keep their heads down in the face of such injustice.

This is the party workers and disadvantaged people used to look to to protect their interests, and now the best they can muster for workers is, “We know you’re working longer hours for worse benefits, if you’re lucky enough to have a job at all. Keep it up!”

The real message coming from the Democrats this year is: get used to this. It’s not going to get better. And if they have their way, it certainly isn’t.

Wait, I thought Obama was the out-of-touch elitist

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Kroger-brand Dijon mustardYou may recall that a few years ago, some among the right-wing punditry took great offense at Obama’s attempt to order a burger with Dijon mustard, because it indicates what an out-of-touch, ivory tower elitist he is. Because if your palette appreciates anything fancier than a Big Mac, you just don’t understand Americans well enough to be their leader, or something.

But the ubiquitous right-wing assumption that working in academia makes you out of touch with ordinary Americans, while having assloads of money totally doesn’t, is difficult to maintain in the face of things like this:

A taskmaster, Mr. Ebeling pushed Mrs. Romney to excel in high-level amateur shows. He escorted her on horse-buying expeditions to Europe. She shares ownership of the Oldenburg mare he dreams of riding in the Olympic Games this summer. Mrs. Romney and her husband, Mitt, even floated a loan — $250,000 to $500,000, according to financial records — to Mr. Ebeling and his wife for the horse farm they run in California, where the Romneys use a Mediterranean-style guesthouse as a getaway.

Come on. I can go to Kroger and get a bottle of Dijon, but doing so would make me less of a Real Amurikan than a woman who can afford to go on “horse-buying expeditions to Europe?” How does that make any sense?

Personally, I think it’s a serviceable rule of thumb that anything that can be bought in Kroger’s store brand is by no means too fancy for ordinary folk.

E-race-er

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I think my favorite thing about this new faux-controversy over the 1991 press material that mistakenly identifies Obama as being “born in Kenya” is that it demonstrates the wingnut power to spin revisionist histories even about oneself. For those unaware, the right-wing blogosphere is utterly convinced that this constitutes irrefutable proof that Obama was deliberately portraying himself as African-born in order to collect all that sweet, sweet affirmative action, and bone all those African-born-law-student groupies, I guess.

But returning to my point about revisionist histories, some in the right-wing blogosphere appear to be taking the opportunity to prove that their reflexive disbelief in the American-ness of America’s thus far only black president is totes not racist:

“So it looks like the main source of the idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya was: Barack Obama?” asked Yes But However. “So the source of the confusion is Obama and his promoters themselves,” declared My Pet Jawa.

Look, no. You didn’t get the idea that Obama was born in Kenya from some 1991 press booklet that you weren’t aware of until five minutes ago. You got it from your own racist brain. But I’m sure in their own minds, those eldritch realms shaped by bitterness and cognitive dissonance, they truly believe that back in 2008 they heard about that time in 1991 when Obama was going around telling everybody he was Kenyan. (Not that, y’know, he was, but there are many layers of self-delusion at work in the average wingnut controversy.)

And so it’s actually Obama’s fault that they’re racist! How convenient.

I’m beginning to suspect that Baron Munchausen wasn’t being entirely upfront

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Roy Edroso covers the latest wingnut-manufactured faux-scandal about Obama, in this case that his memoir Dreams From My Father contains characters that are composites of several people Obama knew. Despite the fact that this information only “leaked” because Obama stated it in the introduction of the book, this apparently qualifies as yet another in a long line of lies and betrayals from our freedom-hating Jihadist-in-Chief.

But the “argument” that most stood out to me (if only because most of the wingnuts are just repeating the same old boring stories about how Bill Ayers totally wrote Obama’s books) is this one, from Wall Street Journal Columnist James Taranto:

For that matter, if disclosing the use of a fictional narrative device is sufficient to meet the standards of nonfiction, isn’t every fiction book a nonfiction one, so long as it has FICTION stamped on the cover?

Whoa, wait, you mean nonfiction books might contain some altered details here and there?! If this is news to Taranto, let me suggest his next big scoop: Often, when Hollywood uses the phrase “based on a true story,” they aren’t being entirely honest.

The Amityville Horror

What?! But it seemed so plausible!

Right-wing Mythology #1 and #2

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Contrary to the implication of the title of the game (to which I would like to see a sequel, hint hint Ensemble Studios… oh wait, Ensemble Studios doesn’t exist anymore), the age of mythology isn’t in the distant past. Mythology just takes a different form these days. Republican mythology is a particular brand of mythology in which socialists are a genuine threat rather than a largely ignored smattering of academics, and Newt Gingrich is a towering intellectual giant rather than a complete dumbass.

So I’m starting a new series called Right-Wing Mythology, in which I debunk a particular tenet of right-wing belief in the US. (Speaking of serieseses, I’ll probably do more Emphases on Twit here and there, but I don’t pay nearly as much attention to Twitter as I did back when I was unemployed, so, y’know.) Now, the focus here will be very specific: I won’t challenge every single untrue thing some wingnut commentator says. And I won’t address patently obvious things like “Obama is a Muslim,” because a) duh, he’s not, and b) even if he were it would influence my opinion of Obama to a slightly lesser degree than his preferred brand of soap.

No, the focus will be on “facts” that pretty much every conservative takes for granted, things that seem like common sense to them, if only because they’ve been living in the Fox News bubble for too long. Things like “the government is inefficient at everything ever” (to be addressed in a future entry) or “the Chinese are about to plunge their hands into our chests a la Temple of Doom and pull out all the money we owe them” (already addressed that, try to keep up). Other future topics will include Social Security, taxation, and maybe Ayn Rand or something, who knows.

Today, to start off, I’ll address two myths. The second one’s on the house. As is the first one.

Right-Wing Myth #1: Obama has massively expanded the federal government

How do you measure the size of the federal government? For simplicity’s sake let’s go with the two most obvious: federal budget and number of federal employees.

Conservatives do love to talk about Obama’s alleged fiscal irresponsibility. And indeed, the federal budget increased by about $452 billion between 2008 and 2011. That proves it! Well, not really.

Suppose a year ago it cost you $20 to fill up the gas tank of your car. Now it costs you $35 to fill up the gas tank of that same car. Is that because you expanded your gas tank? Of course not. It’s because the cost of gas increased.

Similarly, one of the biggest drivers of the budget increase since 2007—before Obama took office, one should note—has been the increasing cost of existing government programs, most significantly welfare and other need-based programs. And the reason those costs are rising is because more people need welfare. You may recall that we’re in a recession. How you feel about whether or not they deserve that welfare is irrelevant; despite Gingrich’s bloviations, Obama didn’t initiate or even grow those programs. They simply serve more people now, because more people live in poverty. Let’s look at the breakdown:

But whoa thar! you might say. Why is the “Other” category so enormous in 2009? Well, because of the stimulus, of course. But not so fast—it’s not Obama’s stimulus, it’s Bush’s. It’s the TARP program initiated under President Bush in 2008. It gets factored into the 2009 budget because the 2008 budget was passed back in 2007. You know how it is. In fact, the entire 2009 budget was passed back in 2008, when Bush was President, and as you can see, the budget did not suddenly balloon as soon as Obama signed his first budget for 2010. That’s all that really needs to be said about that.

But what about federal employees? Well, let’s look at dat chart too.

I guess you could say so, but Obama isn’t presiding over a government any larger than the one Reagan and H.W. Bush did. Incidentally, the vast majority of the increase in employees went to two departments: Health and Human Services (thus implying that the hirings there are the result of the same increase in welfare needs brought on by the recession and not by any deliberate action on Obama’s part), and Homeland Security. Say, that reminds me, who was the last president to add an entire executive department to the federal government? (Hint: it wasn’t Obama.)

Right-Wing Myth #2: The US government oppressively over-regulates business and stifles competitiveness on the global market

This is an easy one. The conservative trope, as you probably know, is that business regulation in the US is just redonkulous, and it’s totally punishing our valiant Galts, and that’s totally why they can’t hire more people, and also it makes America less competitive and it’s probably also why we, unlike Iran, have gays in our country.

Let me introduce you to something called the Ease of Doing Business Index, measured by the World Bank. This index ranks the countries of the world (except the ones where you can’t really do business, so North Korea’s out) in order of how “business-friendly” their regulations are. The US is fourth. Fourth most business-friendly. In the world. Only Singapore, Hong Kong, and New Zealand outrank us.

Those countries that are supposedly welcoming business with open arms, thereby just forcing US corporations to fire a bunch of Americans and hire a bunch of outsourced workers? Well, China is 91st in the world. India is 132nd.

Yeah, the US is ridiculously lax on business. Businesses get away with a lot, in case you haven’t noticed, such as bringing the economy to the brink of collapse and then facing absolutely no consequences for it.