Scenes from the class war
Joe Nocera — not usually one of my favorites. But his latest piece is a must read; or at least it will be for future Americans who wonder just how it is that their once remarkably placid society became so horribly riven:
On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party. The firm, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a “foreclosure mill” firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. Steven J. Baum is, in fact, the largest such firm in New York; it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
The party is the firm’s big annual bash. Employees wear Halloween costumes to the office, where they party until around noon, and then return to work, still in costume. I can’t tell you how people dressed for this year’s party, but I can tell you about last year’s.
That’s because a former employee of Steven J. Baum recently sent me snapshots of last year’s party. In an e-mail, she said that she wanted me to see them because they showed an appalling lack of compassion toward the homeowners — invariably poor and down on their luck — that the Baum firm had brought foreclosure proceedings against.
When we spoke later, she added that the snapshots are an accurate representation of the firm’s mind-set. “There is this really cavalier attitude,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that people are going to lose their homes.” Nor does the firm try to help people get mortgage modifications; the pressure, always, is to foreclose. I told her I wanted to post the photos on The Times’s Web site so that readers could see them. She agreed, but asked to remain anonymous because she said she fears retaliation…
My source told me that not every Baum department used the party to make fun of the troubled homeowners they made their living suing. But some clearly did. The adjective she’d used when she sent them to me — “appalling” — struck me as exactly right.
One imagines this to be the consequence of the hideous lies and rationalizations these people have to tell themselves in order to get up and go to work every day — that every single person on Steven J. Baum’s chopping block is deserving, that the reason they’re soon to find themselves parked in a noble friend’s basement (or worse) is because they’re lazy, stupid, undeserving; they’re bad. Once you buy that lie, it must not seem callous, heartless, or at all inhuman to poke fun at the miserable wretches whose misery you sustain your bank account. You work damn hard, after all. You are the 53%.
Keep On Keepin’ On
This blog done moved! I’ve now the honor and privilege to be a participant at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, where this blog has now found itself a nice little home.
Hope you follow and join me at the new digs – http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/eliasisquith/
The Arrest Of Ratko Mladic
Yesterday was a rather big day in the world of human rights, in case you missed it,
Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb general accused of war crimes including masterminding the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, has been captured in Serbia after more than 15 years as one of the world’s most wanted fugitives.
President Boris Tadic of Serbia announced the arrest in Belgrade on Thursday, giving few details.
Serbian news reports said that Mr. Mladic had been living under the name of Milorad Komadic and that he was captured in the small farming town of Lazarevo in Vojvodina, the Serbian province north of Belgrade, after authorities received a tip that the man known as Komadic resembled Mr. Mladic and had identification documents with that name. Witnesses said he was not wearing a beard or any disguise, and had aged considerably, appearing older and thinner than the stout self-assured professional soldier who had last been seen in public in 2006.
[...]
According to B92, the independent Serb broadcasting company, residents in Lazarevo said they were unaware that Mr. Mladic was living among them, but had spotted police early Thursday morning at a house reportedly belonging to Mr. Mladic’s relatives. Serbian analysts said Lazarevo had had a large population of Bosnian Serbs dating back to World War II , some of whom would have been sympathetic to Mr. Mladic or regarded him as a patriot. They said Mr. Mladic lived in the village for the past two months.
The massacre at Srebrenica was the worst ethnically motivated mass murder on the Continent since World War II.
President Tadic said that Mr. Mladic would be turned over to the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague. “Extradition is happening,” he said. “This is the end of the search for Mladic. It’s not the end of the search for all those who helped Mladic and others to hide and whether people from the government were involved.”
I don’t know an especially large amount about the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, which are enormously opaque and complicated — even for the nominal experts. So I can’t tell you much about what this means for Serbia or Bosnia or the area in general in the near future.
The article linked above says that the arrest should be seen as a major symbolic event for many Europeans, equivalent to what the killing of bin Laden meant to many Americans. More prosaically, the arrest of Mladic — and the previous arrest of his superior, Kardazic — may signal to the EU that Serbia is truly coming to terms with its ugly recent past, something it’s been accused of avoiding, and is thus ready to join the union.
Like bin Laden, and as was true for Karadzic, it appears that Mladic hid in plain sight. Though it’s heartening to see the increased frequency with which war criminals are being sought by and delivered to organs of international human rights law, I think it tells us something — this hiding in plain sight — about how far the discipline still has to go towards being truly accepted by the global community. What’s more, when one examines the circumstances of Mladic’s arrest, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that old-fashioned cold, hard realpolitik had much to do with this apprehension than any fealty to human rights,
Serge Brammertz, the chief prosecutor of the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, was expected to release a report in the next few days saying that Serbia was not cooperating with the international effort to apprehend Mr. Mladic. Such a report would have further complicated Serbia’s attempt to become an official candidate for membership in the European Union. The Netherlands, whose peacekeepers were overrun by Mr. Mladic’s troops at Srebrenica, has said that it would veto Serbia’s candidacy if Mr. Mladic remained at large.
Ms. Smajlovic said that the fact that Ms. Ashton was in Serbia for meetings on Thursday would “lead to suspicion that the arrest was timed to honor her and also to underline Serbia now has high expectations of rapid E.U. integration.”
ln this regard, then, Mladic’s story is not unlike Gaddafi’s in that both men were unfortunate enough to not only be wanted by those with a real interest in international human rights law, but were also either loathed or deemed expendable by less idealistic politicians: in Gaddafi’s case, the Arab League’s willingness to seek outside help signaled just how deeply hated he was by other despots in the region; for Mladic, nothing he could provide in continued freedom was comparable to the economic benefits of EU membership.
Still, I imagine that despots prone to indiscriminate bloodletting are taking notice of not only this arrest but the recent indictment of Gaddafi and his top two advisers; and I don’t think this is empty rhetoric,
“After nearly two decades on the run, justice has finally caught up with the man who personified the brutality of the Balkan wars,” said Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch. “His arrest today is a clear message to accused like Omar al-Bashir and potential accused like Muammar al-Qaddafi that justice never forgets.”
At the very least, in those instances wherein justice and expedience can work together, the international community will indeed remember.
The Best And The Brightest?
I was thinking of this infamous video when I came across the latest column from the New York Times’ David Leonhardt (who might be my favorite MSM pundit working today). One response I heard from some people was something along the lines of, “How could someone who got into UCLA be so stupid?” Generally, my response would be something along the lines of, “Because elite colleges have little to nothing to do with merit and are basically just feeder-systems for the upper-classes.”
According to Leonhardt and those he’s spoken with, even though I had no real data to back up my claim and was kind of just being grumpy, I was right.
The last four presidents of the United States each attended a highly selective college. All nine Supreme Court justices did, too, as did the chief executives of General Electric (Dartmouth), Goldman Sachs (Harvard), Wal-Mart (Georgia Tech), Exxon Mobil (Texas) and Google (Michigan).
Like it or not, these colleges have outsize influence on American society. So their admissions policies don’t matter just to high school seniors; they’re a matter of national interest.
[...]
For all of the other ways that top colleges had become diverse, their student bodies remained shockingly affluent. At the University of Michigan, more entering freshmen in 2003 came from families earning at least $200,000 a year than came from the entire bottom half of the income distribution. At some private colleges, the numbers were even more extreme.
[...]
The truth is that many of the most capable low- and middle-income students attend community colleges or less selective four-year colleges close to their home. Doing so makes them less likely to graduate from college at all, research has shown. Incredibly, only 44 percent of low-income high school seniors with high standardized test scores enroll in a four-year college, according to a Century Foundation report — compared with about 50 percent of high-income seniors who have average test scores. Several years ago, William Bowen, a former president of Princeton, and two other researchers found that top colleges gave no admissions advantage to low-income students, despite claims to the contrary. Children of alumni received an advantage. Minorities (except Asians) and athletes received an even bigger advantage. But all else equal, a low-income applicant was no more likely to get in than a high-income applicant with the same SAT score. It’s pretty hard to call that meritocracy.
Sympathy From The Devil
It appears that Rep. Paul Ryan has got himself a new biggest fan,
Former Vice President Dick Cheney heaped praise on House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, the architect of the GOP Medicare plan.
“I worship the ground that Paul Ryan walks on,” Cheney said, according to the Houston Chronicle.
This is kind of like having Dominique Strauss-Kahn call you a great feminist, or Richard Nixon (another of Cheney’s heroes) a straight-shooter.
You’d think that a man who, at this point, can see the light at the end of the tunnel a little more clearly than most of the rest of us, might want to occupy his time doing something perhaps a bit more noble and substantive than lauding a DOA policy founded upon the principles of that great moral thinker, Ayn Rand.
But then again you’d probably also think that torturing people — some to death — is wrong. And that’s why you ain’t Dick Cheney.
(via)
Grumpy Old Man Rants About Free-Loaders And Hippies
Former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) demanded cuts in Social Security Wednesday while lashing out at Republican strategist Grover Norquist, the AARP, “the cat food commission cats” and “sharpshooters” at The Huffington Post. [...]
“The AARP, I mean, come come,” Simpson said to an audience of Washington insiders. “If you can’t understand that when I was a freshman at the University of Wyoming, there were 17 people paying into the system and one taking out, and today there are three people paying into the system and one taking out — if you can’t understand that it was never set up as a retirement program, it was an income supplement which became a retirement, if you can’t understand it was never structured to handle disability insurance, it couldn’t exist with that burden on it. If you can’t understand it didn’t take care of kids at 22 going to college, we can’t make it.”
Simpson went on to reference a recent interview with Huffington Post reporter Ryan Grim, who presented Simpson with evidence that one of the statistics he deployed in his Social Security arguments was misleading.
“Now the great sharpshooters are out there and the cat food commission cats and all those guys using these distorted figures,” Simpson told the crowd. “And I always say, look, if you torture statistics long enough, eventually they’ll confess.” In truth, Social Security was indeed established as a retirement program. [...]
“I was talking about the guy who called me and went through this exercise of sharpshooting,” Simpson told HuffPost. “And if he can’t understand a couple or three things then there’s no help. Forget all the crap he’s going through and know that if you — if 17 people were paying into this system in 1950 and one taking out, today there are three paying in and one taking out. I’d like you to refute that.”
The ratio Simpson referred to is grossly misleading. According to the Social Security Administration, in 1950, 16.5 people paid into the program for every beneficiary. But that number was only high because the program’s architects realized that there had been a baby boom, and Social Security would need more funding in the future. [...]
Simpson also insisted again to HuffPost that upon Social Security’s implementation, “the average age of mortality was 63.”
When HuffPost suggested that this statistic was misleading due to the higher childhood mortality rate, Simpson responded, “I know all the stuff [Ryan Grim] goes through. Its like gymnastics! Yes and we’ve done distributional analysis. Ask him if he knows what that is! Ask the wizard if he knows what distributional analysis is! We did that. And then ask him what we did for the seniors, for the older old and the people who are in poverty. Ask the wizard all that and then get back to me.”
He then shouted, “I’m through!” and walked away.
Talk about making John McCain look calm and lucid.
In response, Digby writes,
I think that many people believed that George W. Bush and Sarah Palin were members of a new breed of conservative politicians who were mean as snakes, dumb as posts and spoke gibberish instead of English. Not true.
[...]
Finally, please, someone tell Simpson to pipe down and take his nitro glycerin before he has a heart attack from all the gibberish.
I’m on the other side on this. I think we should give Simpson ever more opportunities to make his “case” before the public — as long as a “sharpshooter” punk kid reporter is around to respond.
The case in favor of dismantling the key American policy of the 20th century has always been remarkably weak and founded upon distortions, so who better than Alan Simpson to represent it in as many high-profile locales as possible? If more sentient righties like Pete Peterson or [insert your libertarian hotshot of choice here] don’t step in soon, Simpson may end up getting us that single-payer health care system we’ve been hoping for!
More Than A Failure Of Vision
Under the title “Third Depression Watch,” Paul Krugman writes,
Brad DeLong points us to Macro Advisers, which has now downgraded its estimates for second-quarter growth. As Brad says, these estimates now suggest that we have now gone through a year and a half of “recovery” that has failed to make any progress toward closing the gap between what the economy should be producing and what it’s actually producing.
And nobody in power cares!
Just to clarify for those not especially familiar with Krugman’s recent work:by “third depression,” he means,
As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-31.
Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.
We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.
In the column quoted above, Krugman writes that this third depression, if it comes to pass, will be born from a “failure of policy.”
That’s true, to a significant degree. As Steve Benen wrote yesterday,we know what the problem is and how to solve, yet no one with the means to do anything is willing or able to make it happen,
The recovery is fragile and weak — and apparently getting weaker. The European debt crisis is once again growing more serious. The U.S. unemployment rate is 9%. Under sane circumstances, one would expect American policymakers to respond to developments like these with a renewed focus on improving the economy, giving it a much-needed boost.
But thanks to the 2010 midterms, a dysfunctional political system, and a stunted discourse, the current circumstances are anything but sane.
Republicans have responded to the weak economy by declaring, “Austerity for everyone!” The GOP is convinced we’ll all be better off after they’ve taken money out of the economy, made unemployment worse, and pursued a monetary policy that makes it harder for the world to buy American products. Democratswould like to respond to the weak economy with an ambitious economic agenda, but they don’t bother because they know it wouldn’t pass.
The best — the very best — we can hope for is a president who’ll stop Republicans from making matters much worse, and maybe a reluctant Federal Reserve that might choose to play a more constructive role. But really, that’s it. The White House can’t act without Congress, and Congress doesn’t want to act at all. We’re left to simply hope the economy continues to improve on its own.
[...]
It doesn’t have to be this way, and we know what we should do. The country needs the wisdom and courage to do the right thing, but as of today, with the recovery faltering, the right thing isn’t even on the negotiating table
But I don’t think Krugman’s going far enough when he attributes the third depression, if indeed we’re in it, to failed policy. If only it were just that. Sadly, I think people may look back at this period in history and deem it largely the consequence of a profound failure of American democracy. To a degree not unprecedented, but until recently out of the norm, our politics is entirely driven by the desires and concerns of a very small number of the country’s hyper-wealthy.
In a situation where unemployment is around nine percent (and real unemployment, factoring in those who are either underemployed or have entirely given up looking for work, hovers around a far more Great Depression-like twenty percent) we are currently spending our time discussing cuts for those few programs that keep millions of peoples’ heads above-water. And rather worry about a generation of un- and underemployed people who will grow angry, bitter and distrustful of our society’s leaders and institutions, our elites preoccupy themselves with night-terrors over the prospects of a currently unforeseeable spike in inflation devastating the relative worth of their considerable wealth.
Needless to say, this is not the formula for the maintenance of a healthy, cohesive, peaceful and prosperous society. And if we don’t end up addressing the human misery that’s always the defining feature of such prolonged periods of economic dysfunction, it will be increasingly difficult for the comparatively small number of us who haven’t suffered dearly in this period to argue to those whom have that this is a system worth saving.
It’s Always Our Last Chance To “Save” Social Security
A great catch from the recent past by Digby,
August 28, 1996 CHICAGO – Sen. Bob Kerrey smells an odor coming from the Republican and Democratic stands on entitlements.
“It’s one of the cruelest things we do, when we say, Republicans or Democrats, `Oh, we can wait and reform Social Security later,’ ” the Nebraska Democrat said.
Mr. Kerrey says that without reform, entitlements will claim 100 percent of the Treasury in 2012.
“This is not caused by liberals, not caused by conservatives, but by a simple demographic fact,” Mr. Kerrey warned at a meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council.
“We [will have] converted the federal government into an ATM machine.”
I’m continually struck by how unchallenged by our media is the chicken little doomsaying by “fiscal conservatives” as to the deficit.
Politicians and businessmen and other wealthy individuals can traipse around like a bunch of white, geriatric and male Cassandras with crocodile tears, warning of impending doom and full-scale misery. But they’re almost never pushed to speak in specific terms as to how and when the end will come, and when they are, they’re allowed to slide by with bizarre and paranoid vagaries about bondsmen with vendettas and glib reminders of empire’s fallibility.
It’s no different from peak-oil fear-mongering — except it’s far less scientific or rationally expressed. And yet it dominates our political conversation as if this were all well beyond needing to be proven. If you didn’t know any better, you might think it was as if the interests of the wealthy had cruelly come to be defined as all that really matters.
A New Breed Of Politician
Marc Ambinder notes that the most likely 2012 match-up as of this writing features two candidates who struggle with appealing to the working poor,
Romney’s problem is similar to Obama’s: he doesn’t play well with downscale voters. He comes off as the manager who fired them, or who cut their wages—the “Richie Rich” know-it-all. Obama’s demerits with these voters are different, but a general election race between the two would leave a large number of those voters up for grabs.
I would imagine that we’ll see more of this in the next decade or so as our politics becomes ever more dominated by the narrow interests of a hyper-wealthy and numerically minuscule elite. As Larry Bartels’ recent book, Unequal Democracy (click here to read the Preface for free) makes clear, our politicians already pay far, far more attention to the concerns and desires of their wealthiest donors than the rest of the electorate. With the consequences of a generation of growing inequality being felt most acutely today, it’s little wonder that the top-tier candidates of either party are becoming those best suited to woo our Galtian overlords.
(via)
Austerity: Just As Unpopular When Democrats Do It
According to a set of new surveys by Public Policy Polling, voters would punish President Obama for backing cuts in either Medicare or changes to the Social Security program.
Polling done in Ohio, Missouri, Minnesota and Montana shows significant resistance to cuts in benefits in these swing states. 58% of Ohio voters said they were less likely to vote for President Obama if he backed or signed cuts to Medicare, and 53% said they were less likely to vote for him if he altered the retirement age. Similar results were obtained in the other three states.
This should be compelling enough data to convince the White House and Congressional Democrats that they’re much better off talking about austerity and belt-tightening and fiscal conservatism and all such other Frank Luntz-y newspeak nonsense than they are actually implementing such policies.
Even if voters say they want to reduce spending, it’s become a well-known truth that when faced with specific choices on what to cut, voters determine they’d rather not cut anything at all. The fetishization of governmental thriftiness on the part of the electorate stems from a profound misunderstanding of macroeconomics mixed with an understandable but unscientific sense that the government wastes a lot of money.
And, it has to be said, racial politics certainly comes into play, too, with a depressingly large number of respondents seeming to believe that the reason the economy is in the tank is because of young bucks and welfare queens buying Cadillacs and t-bone steaks.
So, by all means, let Democrats engage in time-wasting and unnecessary negotiations over a “grand bargain” with a GOP that will nix any and all proposals that raise taxes on our Galtian overlords by one dime. What’s the harm in looking like you’re engaging in a good faith effort — especially when you know the other side is not, and will inevitably sabotage the deal well before it reaches the President’s desk.
But if the White House actually signs off on any of these wildly unpopular changes, then they’ll be as much a victim of the DC pundit bubble as Rep. Paul Ryan and the rest of his Republican brethren. And just look at how that’s turned out.
Dangerous DNA
Kevin Drum doesn’t get why more liberals aren’t biological determinists and vice versa,
I’ve never been either a hardcore blank slater or a hardcore biological determinist, but there’s no question that I have a pretty healthy belief in the power of genes and biology. [...] [T]his belief tends to be associated with conservatives more than liberals, but that’s really very odd. After all, it’s pretty easy to fool ourselves into dismissing the benefits of being raised in a rich, stable culture and assuming that everything we’ve accomplished has actually been the result of hard work and personal rectitude. But what if you believe, say, that (a) IQ has a strong biological component and (b) high IQ is really important for getting ahead in the world? If you believe this and also happen to be blessed with a high IQ, how can you possibly convince yourself that this is anything other than the blind luck of the genetic lottery?
[...] [T]o the extent that you really do believe that cognitive abilities are (a) important, and (b) strongly biologically determined, shouldn’t you also believe that the poor are more unlucky than anything else, and haven’t done anything to deserve hunger, lousy housing, poor medical care, or crappy educations? If genetic luck plays a big role in making us who we are, then support for income redistribution from the rich to the poor is almost a logical necessity for anyone with a moral sense more highly developed than a five-year-old’s.
I’m more than a little surprised that Drum finds his views to be so heterodox on this issue. Without engaging in too much rhetorical hyperbole, I’d just say that the darker corners of the Progressive movement of the early 20th century offer ample evidence as to the dangers of embracing the kind of scientism Drum’s advocating here.
I understand how he believes that “anyone with a moral sense more highly developed than a five-year-old’s” is compelled to support a robust welfare state in response to biological determinism’s impact on persistent inequality. But I don’t think he’s being creative enough in imagining the many ways human beings can convince themselves that something they don’t want to do for amoral reasons is really undergirded by ethical concerns.
If people don’t want to use their income to hold up the “unlucky” ones among us, it won’t be hard at all for a politician to start presenting to them arguments thinly cloaked in ethical language but at heart focused towards this essential selfishness. After all, some people are born shorter than others. And there’s ample evidence that being tall will be much better for someone’s potential earning power — among sundry other social benefits — than being short. This is manifestly unfair; no one can be blamed for their height.
But do we spend public monies towards establishing a society without egregious height disparities? No. (Perhaps some public health initiatives will have impact in that regard, but not solely or explicitly so.) We all chalk this up to an unfortunate but essentially blameless fact of the universe, and we keep on keepin’ on.
An argument founded upon some kind of essentialist superiority of the wealthy to the less unfortunate is going to fall sooner or later to the same kind of argument as mine about height. It might seem an absurd and immoral leap, but it’ll be made and rather quickly at that.
What___Said
Ed at Gin and Tacos on how our politicians’ choices tell us a lot about who they really work for,
You can learn a lot about someone when you force them to make choices, eliminating the natural tendency of individuals to take the path of least resistance and please everyone. If I have four cats and I tell you I love them all equally, that doesn’t tell you much. If the house is on fire and I can only save one of them, you’re about to find out which one I actually love the most. In flush times our elected officials will gladly appease us – doing so is good politics and the path of least resistance. If the money is there to pay for everyone’s wants (see: 1950-1970), why not just pay for it all? When reality demands selectivity, we quickly discover what and who really matter.
Our elites are slowly discovering that they need to touch one of the untouchables: raising taxes, cutting the Dept. of Defense, or cutting SS/Medicare. Faced with three politically unappealing choices, it’s quite revealing to see which one people like Paul Ryan and Obama’s catfood commission decided to bite the bullet and endorse.
Bobo’s Country For An Elite
Sometimes, I think David Brooks is trolling us all,
Britain is also blessed with a functioning political culture. It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school. This makes it gossipy and often incestuous.
But the plusses outweigh the minuses. The big newspapers still set the agenda, not cable TV or talk radio. If the quintessential American pol is standing in his sandbox screaming affirmations to members of his own tribe, the quintessential British pol is standing across a table arguing face to face with his opponents.
British leaders and pundits know their counterparts better. They are less likely to get away with distortions and factual howlers. They are less likely to believe the other party is homogenously evil. They are more likely to learn from a wide range of people. When they do hate, their hatreds are more likely to be personal and less likely to take on the tenor of a holy war.
Since Brooks is a neocon — and since a foundational principle of neoconservatism is a hyper-elitist contempt, in varying degrees, for anyone not deemed to be a member of the philosopher-king class — it’s hardly surprising that Bobo would get a thrill up his leg upon immersion into Britain’s enduring aristocracy.
But you’d think (unless you’d followed his work and thus knew better) that the man would have enough self-awareness to conceal this fact even a bit.
Fortunately for his more mean-spirited critics, like yours truly, self-awareness is not and has never been David Brooks’ specialty. He can do vapid platitudes that work in service of exalting the powerful regardless of what they do. And he can obfuscate and warmonger. And absolutely no one is better able to translate the intellectual depth and rigor of a college dorm room post-bong session colloquium to the page.
But self-awareness? Not so much.
And so as a moth to a flame or as a bullet to a fish in a barrel comes Glenn Greenwald — a dedicated Bobo hater — to fisk this most recent drivel from Every Liberal’s Favorite Conservative,
It has long been the supreme fantasy of establishment guardians in general, and David Brooks in particular, that American politics would be dominated by an incestuous, culturally homogeneous, superior elite “who live in [Washington] and who have often known each other since prep school.” And while these establishment guardians love to endlessly masquerade as spokespeople for the Ordinary American, what they most loathe is the interference by the dirty rabble in what should be their exclusive, harmonious club of political stewardship, where conflicts are amicably resolved by ladies and gentlemen of the highest breeding without any messy public conflict.
Even if you don’t derive as much satisfaction in belittling Bobo as I do (a real pity, if so), here’s why his pro-aristocrat agenda matters,
[W]hat Brooks so envies about British political culture — a small, incestuous, aristocratic, homogenized group of trans-ideological elites harmoniously resolving their differences — is exactly what already drives American policy and politics. And that is what establishment spokespeople like Brooks always mean when they yearn for “bipartisanship“: wise old men getting together in secret and reaching agreements that exclude democratic debate and render irrelevant genuine differences among the citizenry.
(Photo via driftglass)
This Is Why The Republican Party Can’t Have Nice Things
And by “nice things” I mean “even marginally non-wingnut members,”
Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) scolded the senator for opposing the House GOP budget from Rep. Paul Ryan.
An Illinois Republican on Monday said Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) should be “ashamed of himself” for opposing Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget plan.
“Respectfully, Scott Brown ought to be ashamed of himself,” Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) told Neil Cavuto on the Fox Business Network. “This is the defining moment of this generation. We have got to be bold. We know these entitlements have to be reformed to be saved. He knows that.”
Walsh added that any Republican opposed to the plan was motivated by “political reasons.”
Walsh is a new member who rode into the House by trumpeting his intimate connection to the local Tea Party “movement.” That is to say, the dude is pure wingnut.
But I’ll be interested to see if Walsh either walks this back or is publicly chastised by a Republican leadership that knows you don’t win governing majorities by alienating representatives in ideologically hostile states. My gut tells me no, because Speaker Boehner’s the dog being wagged by the Tea Party caucus tail.
But you gotta think Sen. Snowe and Sen. Collins are watching this with trepidation.
