SmartRemarks

David Brooks, throughout his long history as a pundit, consistently seems to love drawing sweeping generalizations from just a handful of anecdotal examples. Sometimes even just one. In his latest column, he’s resorted to using an imaginary one.

Brooks retells the fable of the ant and the grasshopper through an imaginary middle-American voter he calls “Ben.” Ben is the ant. Ben came from a broken home, but “worked hard” and got “decent grades” and went to a couple of mediocre colleges to study hotel management, in which field he’s worked for the past 20 years, only to find himself increasingly disenchanted with America’s political culture… in a fashion, Brooks imagines, that’s manifested in last Tuesday’s primary results, in which incumbents of both parties got a drubbing. (IMHO a well-deserved one; I was delighted to see Joe Sestak take down Arlen Specter, to see Bill Halter force Blanche Lincoln into a runoff. Even Rand Paul’s victory in Kentucky bodes well from certain angles. And the victory in PA-12’s special election, where Mark Critz (D) defeated Tim Burns (R) in a district that actually swung for McCain in ‘08, was a pleasant surprise that confounded lots of pundits.)

But since Brooks is making up the example to suit his predetermined thesis, he gets to ignore inconvenient realities. His little fable elides quiet a few along the way, some of them rather significant…

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Tags: centrism, conservatism, David Brooks, media, voting

Yesterday’s inbox contained a political e-mail message forwarded by my girlfriend’s parents. They’re not especially political people; their sensibilities (to the extent they’ll even discuss them) tend toward a somewhat mushy moderate conservatism, the kind of folks who instinctively vote Republican, even though the party’s center of gravity has moved far away from them. Indeed, they even said as much in the forwarded message—”you’re much more interested in politics than either of us”—yet they invited a response, practically asking for an informed rebuttal even as they implicitly treated the viral message as credible and worthy of attention.

Which, once I read it, was really hard to believe.

This is the message they forwarded, word for word:
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Tags: Congress, conservatism, Constitution, e-mail, government, health care, insurance, Medicare, Michael Connelly, Supreme Court

In the midst of the cesspool of paranoia and paralogia into which the ranting right is dragging so much of our political discourse these days… the latest iterations thereof being the Fox-driven hypocritical demagoguery about ACORN, and (even worse) the WSJ’s incredible suggestion that this(!) of all things somehow merits a special prosecutor…

…a reader comment about the latter on John Cole’s blog put it all into perspective in a way that can’t help but provoke a grin, and that definitely merits sharing:

…does anyone else think that its great that Obama can have all these Czars and communists in the same administration without them trying to kill each other? Team of Rivals, Fuck Yeah! The man’s a diplomatic genius. After this, solving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict should be a cakewalk.

Really, what more can be said?

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Tags: ACORN, conservatism, Obama

I have no idea who the original author of this piece is. It’s flying all over the internet, though, so presumably I’m not the only one who thinks it’s a thing of beauty that deserves to be shared. Next time you run across some halfwit opposing health insurance reform (or anything else) because he insists that “the government can’t do anything right,” just turn to this:

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I Am An American Conservative Shitheel

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

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Tags: conservatism, government, health care, humor

Just a quickie here. I had to share DougJ’s wonderfully pithy comparison/contrast at Balloon Juice between last week’s news (the Henry Louis Gates incident) and this week’s news (the angry teabaggers):

When someone talks back to a cop in his own house, that’s disorderly conduct.

When people make death threats and start fights in public, that’s exercising their First Amendment rights.

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Tags: conservatism, fascism

Where did we leave off? 

I was writing about the difficulty of finding something meaningful to say in the wake of all the full-time, professional political bloggers out there. Too often I feel like I’m just offering a synthesis of what others have said, rather than any new insight.

Perhaps I’m holding myself to an arbitrarily high standard. Posting seems easier on political discussion forums, where I can just spout off some quick impressions of the issue of the day without necessarily worrying about providing proper background and context for everything, and where the ebb and flow of responses from other posters guides the structure and flow of the discussion, rather than having to organize it entirely on my own. Nonetheless, I ramble on… 

Thus:  I was also writing about the political environment in which the Obama administration operates, and the political pressures that have led the president to make some decisions that are very disappointing in the eyes of civil libertarians, and indeed of concerned citizens in general. Which, in the wake of events this past week relating to the disposition of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere, leads us to the perplexing questions:

Why has Barack Obama backtracked so quickly from so many of the progressive policy expectations of his supporters?

and, moreover,

WHY does the mass media keep treating Dick Cheney as a credible public figure?

One of these questions may seem deeply relevant, the other facile… but the answers are connected at a deep level.

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Tags: blogging, climate, Congress, conservatism, Constitution, Dick Cheney, energy, Guantanamo, health care, international, journalism, libertarianism, media, Obama, Reid, Republicans, torture

My immediate reaction yesterday when I heard the news report that Sen. Arlen Specter had changed his party affiliation from (R) to (D):  a shouted “Yes!” and a fist pump. 

Beyond that, almost everything has already been said in the media whirlwind of the last 24 hours, but I thought I’d share a little personal perspective anyway.

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Tags: Al Franken, Arlen Specter, Biden, conservatism, Republicans, Senate, voting

I don’t necessarily buy the notion that public discontent with the recent AIG retention bonuses, or with Wall Street’s role in the economic meltdown overall, is a signpost of resurgent populist feeling. (It takes more than fleeting moods to swing public sentiment in lasting ways.) Nevertheless, a lot of people apparently do, across the political spectrum… or at least find it convenient to say they do. The right wing, in particular, has familiar anti-populist memes ready and waiting.

This week’s Newsweek attempts to cover every possible point of view on the subject in nine separate essays, but they’re all wrapped in a cover that frames things in terms of “POPULIST RAGE,” in a big scary headline. In the conservative American Thinker, Richard Baehr expresses things more baldly, in a piece entitled “Class War In America”:
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Tags: conservatism, economy, Obama, populism

There’s been a lot of interesting political commentary going on this past week (just check out the industrious writers on my blogroll), but I admit that I haven’t felt inspired to chime in on it. Sometimes the weight of public affairs just seems overwhelming, and it helps to step back and focus on personal matters. However, there is one political meme that keeps recurring lately, in the public discourse and thus, also, in the back of my mind. It’s ubiquitous in the establishment press and on the internet; it came up repeatedly last week in Obama’s second press conference, and again today on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. And it’s certainly prominent in Congress.

Here’s the meme:  that Obama’s budget is too ambitious, since it dramatically increases the national debt (by what the CBO projects to be $9.3 trillion over ten years, as has been widely reported). That we’re all “fiscal conservatives” who naturally agree that deficit spending is A Bad Thing, and therefore that Congress clearly needs to scale spending back from what Obama has proposed.

There’s a simple question going unasked here:  why? Nothing about this meme is as self-evident as those who echo it seem to assume. 

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Tags: conservatism, Depression, economy, FDR, federal budget, financial crisis, Galbraith, history, Obama

Reviews of the movie Watchmen have been mixed: 65% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, for instance, and 56% positive on Metacritic. That’s not as uniformly negative as the secondhand buzz might indicate, but this is perhaps because the most prominent “establishment media” reviews have leaned toward the negative side:  e.g., Anthony Lane’s in The New Yorker, wherein he demonstrates his usual sarcastic derision for anything pop-culture-related, or A.O. Scott’s disdainful take in the New York Times. Many quite simply seem not to “get it”; they betray preconceived expectations of what a “super-hero movie” ought to be that obstruct appreciation of what this one actually is.

Reactions in”new media” seem generally more positive—e.g., Andre O’Hehir’s piece at Salon (“Dense, intense, tragic and visionary, this is the kind of movie that keeps setting off bombs in your brain hours after you’ve seen it”), or Keith Phipps’ in The Onion (“[it] keeps moving so assuredly, it’s nearly impossible not to get swept along… the film’s ambitious drive to create a dread-soaked alternate America and people it with flawed, recognizable heroes carries it along”).

However, by far the most interesting and informative opportunity to study the reactions to this film, both pro and con, inverts that pattern. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: conservatism, movies, super-heroes, Watchmen