QOTD, Frank Rich:
Coburn’s implicit rationalization for far-right fanatics bearing arms at presidential events — the government makes them do it! — cannot stand. He’s not a radio or Fox News bloviator paid a fortune to be outrageous; he’s a card-carrying member of the United States Senate.Atrios on Texas Education
I guess what bugs me most of all isn't that they're trying ram through a conservative-only version of history, it's that they're all obviously really fucking stupid.Steve Benen: THE PROBLEM WITH THE NIHILIST PARTY.
I didn't agree with every observation in the piece, but Time's Joe Klein raises a very reasonable question this week.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? [...] 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. [...]
This may tell us something about the actual state of play on health care: the nutters are a tiny minority; the Republicans are curling themselves into a tight, white, extremist bubble -- but there may be enough of them raising dust to render creative public policy impossible. Some righteous anger seems called for, but that's not Obama's style. He will have to come up with something, though -- and he will have to do it without the tiniest scintilla of help from the Republican Party.
Right. A lot of this may seem obvious, but given Klein's background, I'm pleased to see it anyway. As Michelle Cottle recently wrote, "I have given up hope for a loyal opposition. I'd settle for a sane one." Regrettably, the opposition seems neither loyal nor sane, and conditions seem to be deteriorating.
Kevin Drum had an interesting response on Klein's piece.
Both parties have their extreme wings, but the GOP's is not only way deeper into crazy land ("death panels" for them vs a public option for the most liberal Dems), but it's virtually all they have left. Michele Bachman is pretty much the modal Republican now, not just a fringe nutball. Conversely, Dennis Kucinich, who's far to the left but perfectly sane and coherent, barely gets the time of day from the mainstream core of the Democratic Party.
I don't actually mind if most or all Republicans vote against healthcare reform. They're Republicans! They're opposed to expanded government programs and private sector regulation and new entitlements. But the death panels and the home nursing inanity and the "healthcare racism" and the town hall screeching and all the rest are the mark of a party that's gone completely off the rails. They're doomed until they figure out a way to extricate themselves from the Beck/Limbaugh/Fox News axis of hysteria.
That last observation is the only part of the argument that concerns me.
I'd argue that the Republican Party started losing its institutional mind and soul somewhere around 1993, but at the time, there were still some moderates in the party. Sixteen years later, the proverbial inmates are running the asylum, and the "axis of hysteria" has become the norm.
The Republican "mainstream" is so far to the right, it would have been hard to imagine what's become of the party, say, two decades ago. The median GOP House member in 2003 was 73% more conservative than the median GOP member of the early '70s -- and Republicans have gotten more conservative since 2003.
Klein mentioned that it was a Republican lawyer who "delivered the coup de grace to Senator [Joe] McCarthy when he said, 'Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?' Where is the Republican who would dare say that to Rush Limbaugh, who has compared the President of the United States to Adolf Hitler?"
This is only part of a very long list worthy of Joseph Welch moments. This year, Republicans have become the party of "birthers." And unfounded fears of "death panels," "enemies lists," and the "Fairness Doctrine." We've heard wild-eyed nonsense about ACORN, "re-education camps," Gestapo-like security forces, and Census-related conspiracy theories. Rage and paranoia are not an attractive combination, but they're driving the GOP talking points and the larger political discourse.
And then there are the policy positions. This is a party that honestly thought a five-year spending freeze was a wise approach to the economic crisis. The same party proceeded to make truly ridiculous arguments about everything from taxes to energy policy, Iran to health care. In each instance, GOP claims were proven false, only to be repeated anyway.
When a member of the Republican leadership talked about the GOP emulating the Taliban, no one in the party deemed this controversial. Republicans compare U.S. leaders to Germany in the 1930s with some regularity, and the party mainstream barely bats an eye. Prominent GOP lawmakers this week openly discussed the prospect of state nullification of federal laws, and no one in the Republican ranks stepped up to say, "Good Lord, these people are mad."
The question of how our democracy is supposed to function when of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists is not at all rhetorical.
But to Kevin's point, are Republicans doomed until party leaders throw some water on their face and rejoin reality? I wish I could say I'm as confident about this. I'm not. GOP poll numbers aren't improving, at least not yet, but if enough motivated voters are just angry enough about the status quo, and the left is disillusioned and feeling let down, the "axis of hysteria" may not be enough to prevent significant Republican gains in 2010 and 2012. GOP lawmakers can act like confused children while embracing the exact same policies that forced them into the minority in the first place, and it won't make any difference.
Speaker Pelosi was recently talking to some children visiting Capitol Hill, and one youngster asked why Pelosi joined "them" (Democrats), instead of "us" (Republicans). The Speaker replied, "I'm delighted that you associate yourself with a political party. I wish more people would, and I hope that the next generation will take back the Republican Party for the grand old party that it used to be. It is important for us to have a strong Republican Party,"
I agree, but I'm not sure we can wait that long for the GOP to grow up.
Peggy Noonan argued in July that we're in an era in which the nation needs "conservative leaders who know how to think" and a Republican Party that is "serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party -- a party that deserves to lead -- would do."
We're waiting.
Benen: CALIFORNIA REP CALLS REFORM A 'THREAT TO DEMOCRACY'...
Ideally, in the face on enraged right-wing activists, acting on little but misinformation and paranoia, we'd see responsible members of Congress trying to lower the temperature a bit. Even opponents of health care reform could, in theory, make substantive arguments against Democratic proposals, rather than hand torches to angry mobs.
Rep. Wally Herger (R) of California prefers a different tack.
Republican Congressman Wally Herger held a health care town hall meeting Aug. 18 at Simpson University in Redding, where a partisan crowd of over 2,000 people loudly cheered Herger's position that a public option was "unacceptable." [...]
"Our democracy has never been threatened as much as it is today," Herger said to a loud standing ovation.
Asked about cap-and-trade policy, Herger added, "Health care is not the only threat to our democracy."
One of the attendees, who claimed he could trace his ancestors back to the Mayflower, declared to Herger, "I am a proud right-wing terrorist."
The Republican congressman said with a broad smile, "Amen, God bless you. There is a great American."
The Party of Nihilists strikes again.
Frank Rich (NYT): The Guns of August
“IT is time to water the tree of liberty” said the sign carried by a gun-toting protester milling outside President Obama’s town-hall meeting in New Hampshire two weeks ago. The Thomas Jefferson quote that inspired this message, of course, said nothing about water: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” That’s the beauty of a gun — you don’t have to spell out the “blood.”
The protester was a nut. America has never had a shortage of them. But what’s Tom Coburn’s excuse? Coburn is a Republican senator from Oklahoma, where 168 people were murdered by right-wing psychopaths who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Their leader, Timothy McVeigh, had the Jefferson quote on his T-shirt when he committed this act of mass murder. Yet last Sunday, when asked by David Gregory on “Meet the Press” if he was troubled by current threats of “violence against the government,” Coburn blamed not the nuts but the government.
“Well, I’m troubled any time when we stop having confidence in our government,” the senator said, “but we’ve earned it.”
Coburn is nothing if not consistent. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, he was part of a House contingent that helped delay and soften an antiterrorism bill. This cohort even tried to strip out a provision blocking domestic fund-raising by foreign terrorist organizations like Hamas. Why? The far right, in league with the National Rifle Association, was angry at the federal government for aggressively policing America’s self-appointed militias. In a 1996 floor speech, Coburn conceded that “terrorism obviously poses a serious threat,” but then went on to explain that the nation had worse threats to worry about: “There is a far greater fear that is present in this country, and that is fear of our own government.” As his remarks on “Meet the Press” last week demonstrated, the subsequent intervention of 9/11 has not changed his worldview.
I have been writing about the simmering undertone of violence in our politics since October, when Sarah Palin, the vice-presidential candidate of a major political party, said nothing to condemn Obama haters shrieking “Treason!,” “Terrorist!” and “Off with his head!” at her rallies. As vacation beckons, I’d like to drop the subject, but the atmosphere keeps getting darker.
Coburn’s implicit rationalization for far-right fanatics bearing arms at presidential events — the government makes them do it! — cannot stand. He’s not a radio or Fox News bloviator paid a fortune to be outrageous; he’s a card-carrying member of the United States Senate. On Monday — the day after he gave a pass to those threatening violence — a dozen provocateurs with guns, at least two of them bearing assault weapons, showed up for Obama’s V.F.W. speech in Phoenix. Within hours, another member of Congress — Phil Gingrey of Georgia — was telling Chris Matthews on MSNBC that as long as brandishing guns is legal, he, too, saw no reason to discourage Americans from showing up armed at public meetings.
In April the Department of Homeland Security issued a report, originally commissioned by the Bush administration, on the rising threat of violent right-wing extremism. It was ridiculed by conservatives, including the Republican chairman, Michael Steele, who called it “the height of insult.” Since then, a neo-Nazi who subscribed to the anti-Obama “birther” movement has murdered a guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington, and an anti-abortion zealot has gunned down a doctor in a church in Wichita, Kan.
This month the Southern Poverty Law Center, the same organization that warned of the alarming rise in extremist groups before the Oklahoma City bombing, issued its own report. A federal law enforcement agent told the center that he hadn’t seen growth this steep among such groups in 10 to 12 years. “All it’s lacking is a spark,” he said.
This uptick in the radical right predates the health care debate that is supposedly inspiring all the gun waving. Nor can this movement be attributed to a stepped-up attack by Democrats on this crowd’s holy Second Amendment. Since taking office, Obama has disappointed gun-control advocates by relegating his campaign pledge to reinstate the ban on assault weapons to the down-low.
No, the biggest contributor to this resurgence of radicalism remains panic in some precincts about a new era of cultural and demographic change. As the sociologist Daniel Bell put it, “What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of its own social position, the collapse of its power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world — now overwhelmingly technical and complex — that has changed so drastically within a lifetime.”
Bell’s analysis appeared in his essay “The Dispossessed,” published in 1962, between John Kennedy’s election and assassination. J.F.K., no more a leftist than Obama, was the first Roman Catholic in the White House and the tribune of a new liberal order. Bell could have also written his diagnosis in 1992, between Bill Clinton’s election and the Oklahoma City bombing. Clinton, like Kennedy and Obama, brought liberals back into power after a conservative reign and represented a generational turnover that stoked the fears of the dispossessed.
While Bell’s essay remains relevant in 2009, he could not have imagined in 1962 that major politicians, from a vice-presidential candidate down, would either enable or endorse a radical and armed fringe. Nor could he have imagined that so many conservative intellectuals would remain silent. William F. Buckley did make an effort to distance National Review from the John Birch Society. The only major conservative writer to repeatedly and forthrightly take on the radical right this year is David Frum. He ended a recent column for The Week, titled “The Reckless Right Courts Violence,” with a plea that the president “be met and bested on the field of reason,” not with guns.
Those on the right who defend the reckless radicals inevitably argue “The left does it too!” It’s certainly true that both the left and the right traffic in bogus, Holocaust-trivializing Hitler analogies, and, yes, the protesters of the antiwar group Code Pink have disrupted Congressional hearings. But this is a false equivalence. Code Pink doesn’t show up on Capitol Hill with firearms. And, as the 1960s historian Rick Perlstein pointed out on the Washington Post Web site last week, not a single Democratic politician endorsed the Weathermen in the Vietnam era.
This week the journalist Ronald Kessler’s new behind-the-scenes account of presidential security, “In the President’s Secret Service,” rose to No. 3 on The Times nonfiction best-seller list. No wonder there’s a lot of interest in the subject. We have no reason to believe that these hugely dedicated agents will fail us this time, even as threats against Obama, according to Kessler, are up 400 percent from those against his White House predecessor.
But as we learned in Oklahoma City 14 years ago — or at the well-protected Holocaust museum just over two months ago — this kind of irrational radicalism has a myriad of targets. And it is impervious to reason. Much as Coburn fought an antiterrorism bill after the carnage of Oklahoma City, so three men from Bagdad, Ariz., drove 2,500 miles in 1964 to testify against a bill tightening federal controls on firearms after the Kennedy assassination. As the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in his own famous Kennedy-era essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” these Arizona gun enthusiasts were convinced that the American government was being taken over by a “subversive power.” Sound familiar?
Even now the radicals are taking a nonviolent toll on the Obama presidency. Obama complains, not without reason, that the news media, led by cable television, exaggerate the ruckus at health care events. But why does he exaggerate the legitimacy and clout of opposition members of Congress who, whether through silence or outright endorsement, are surrendering to the nuts? Even Charles Grassley, the supposedly adult Iowa Republican who is the Senate point man for his party on health care, has now capitulated to the armed fringe by publicly parroting their “pull the plug on grandma” fear-mongering.
For all the talk of Obama’s declining poll numbers this summer, he towers over his opponents. In last week’s Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, only 21 percent approve of how Republicans in Congress are handling health care reform (as opposed to the president’s 41 percent). Should Obama fail to deliver serious reform because his administration treats the pharmaceutical and insurance industries as deferentially as it has the banks, that would be shameful. Should he fail because he in any way catered to a decimated opposition party that has sunk and shrunk to its craziest common denominator, that would be ludicrous.
The G.O.P., whose ranks have now dwindled largely to whites in Dixie and the less-populated West, is not even a paper tiger — it’s a paper muskrat. James Carville is correct when he says that if Republicans actually carried out their filibuster threats on health care, it would be a political bonanza for the Democrats.
In last year’s campaign debates, Obama liked to cite his unlikely Senate friendship with Tom Coburn, of all people, as proof that he could work with his adversaries. If the president insists that enemies like this are his friends — and that the nuts they represent can be placated by reason — he will waste his opportunity to effect real change and have no one to blame but himself.
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