CE Volume 4

[chrisfan]

If John Kerry has discovered these boards, and reads them in his spare time to find out what the pulse of America is, then he's in luck, because I'm going to give him some campaign advice.

Based on what he's been SAYING about himself throughout this campaign (and what his daughters have said as well), his response today (or his campaign's response today) to the bashing he took last night on his record has been all wrong. The overall theme of what John Edwards said on just about every morning show was "They're being mean. They're going negative. They shouldn't do that". With a little "Yeah, well Cheney voted that way too" for good measure. But John KErry has told us that he has great instincts. His daughters told us taht he leads by his gut, and that's why he's such a strong leader. Therefore, he should be confident that the votes he made on weapons systems, intelligence funding, and wars, were the right thing to do. So why, rather than saying "Teacher, tell him to stop being mean to me" today, did he not say "Yes, that's how I voted. And I'd vote that way again. It was and is the right thing to do, and here are five reasons why". When he plays the "stop hitting me" game, rather than deflecting the criticism by turning them around to a strength, he's just adding fuel to the fire, and giving more reason for the slams to continue.

On a totally unrelated and more humourous note, I heard on the radio today my absolute most favorite name yet for the Democratic ticket ... The Hairclub for Men.

[Mary]

Melon1 said:

What I can't understand is how Mary Blaney can consider dubya to be "ultra-conservative". It doesn't surprise me but I simply can't understand it. How much does the guy have to spend before you realize he's closer to a socially conservative and fiscally liberal Democrat than a Republican? And don't for a minute charge at me with this notion that Republicans spend as much or more than Democrats. When Bush gave his State of the Union Address in 2003, he proposed to spend more money than just about any president has ever proposed while the Democrats complained because he didn't propose to spend as much as they thought necessary! He signed the "No Child Left Behind Act", he called on Congress to act on prescription drugs, he sent $300 Billion to Africa to tend to the AIDS crisis among other things. "Ultra-conservative"? I'm trying not to laugh.

Oh, it's certianly true that neoconservatism is not the same thing as an older brand of economic conservatism. Because it's so anti-isolationist and aggressively outward-looking, it demands massive funding for military adventures abroad - and that's far and away where the vast bulk of Bush's spending is coming from - not AIDS in Africa - indeed, the ludicrous $300 Billion figure you list is pulled completely out of thin air. But the idea that massive funding of economic neocolonialism is somehow "economically liberal" is beyond laughable.

In 2003, Bush asked Congress for $15 billion over a period of 5 years ($3 billion a year) for fighting AIDS in Africa. Which means by the most idealistic possible estimate, you're off by $285 billion. But then, as we've been over a thousand times on the old rs.com, Bush only asked for $450 million - less than half a billion - of the promised $3 billion. Which means you're actually off by about $299 billion. Moreover, Bush later clarified that the $15 billion wasn't specifically for fighting AIDS in Africa, but for all U.S. efforts against AIDS globally, period - which in fact barely changes the budget for AIDS from previous administrations already piddling commitments. I dunno, maybe you want to argue that spending any money whatsoever on the global AIDS battle is somehow dangerously liberal, but shit, if that's your claim, then you conservatives look like a real lot of shitheads, don't you?! So that can't be your claim.

I'll give you education, insofar as Bush actually has increased federal funding on education (although ftr, it's not exactly accurate to say, as chrisfan does, that education is now so well-funded that some states have to send money back to the feds - several states have chosen to send money back to the feds not because they don't want it but because they don't want to be obligated by the rules of No Child Left Behind) So I suppose Bush is not uniformly ultraconservative. Although it's hardly as if spending increases are funding liberal causes - certainly not poor aid and welfare. I mean, is funding abstinence education and marriage training really liberal??

On all the following matters, though, Bush is governing from the far right:

-- the judicial branch - he has appointed, or tried to appoint, a host of ultraright federal judges across the judiciary:miguel estrada, carolyn kuhl, priscilla owen, charles pickering, james leon holmes (who charmingly wrote in a newspaper editorial: "the woman is to place herself under the authority of the man."

-- his foreign policy is very obviously a neoconservative wet dream - pre-emptive wars, capitalist reshaping of the middle east, scorning international institutions, dropping out of treaties, even appoitning administration lawyers to argue that bush is exempted from both internatioanl and domestic laws banning torture!!! this approach to foreign policy could not be more right-wing. that's not to say it's the only right-wing foreign policy imaginable - because isolationalists like pat buchanan reject the neoconservative view of the world. but it's as right-wing neoconservative as could be.

-- he wants to privatize part of social security

-- he stands by trickle-down economics, the conservative economic vision par excellence, and stands by his tax cuts even as our deficit soars and he proclaims himself a war president

-- his welfare reauthorization policy increases all the conservative tendencies of the welfare reform act, requiring higher percentages of working recipients and more hours worked per week (and this was in the middle of a recession!) and, as with all conservative welfare policies, the focus is on decreasing welfare caseloads rather than decreasing poverty.

-- his energy bill was the wet dream of oil companies, just as is his environmental policy more generally. i'm not sure if he's done one single thing environmentally that didn't directly appease some corporate interest. (though yes if you live in that fantasy world where oil industries do not necessarily have interests hostile to environmental protection, then you won't see any problem with this)

-- you already grant that he's socially conservative so we hardly need to go here - pro-life, wants a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, pushes faith-based charities, marriage education for poor women, opposes affirmative action across the board, earmarks U.S. money in global AIDS battle for abstinence education, etc etc etc etc.

and on and on it goes. Some of these things might seem great to you, of course, if you are yourself conservative. I'm not offering any detailed analysis of any of these ideas here, though obviously i think they're virtually all misguided. All I'm trying to do is establish that Bush is no moderate.

M

[chrisfan]

Mary said:

(although ftr, it's not exactly accurate to say, as chrisfan does, that education is now so well-funded that some states have to send money back to the feds - several states have chosen to send money back to the feds not because they don't want it but because they don't want to be obligated by the rules of No Child Left Behind)

I'm going to have to correct you here Mary, as words are being (inadvertently I would assume) put into my mouth. I stated that millions are returned to the federal treasury by states that don't use the money they are given for education. YOU are the one who added the "reasons". I never said that they send it back because it's so well-funded. In fact, I never gave reasons why they send it back ... other than that they can't figure out how to spend it. Perhaps I should have clarified that to say that they're not organized enough to use the money as they can ... not that they don't NEED it, and can't find surplus ways to use it. Irregardless, the point I was making is that John Kerry's claims that nCLB is an unfunded mandate are false, and they are.

[Mary]

RocDoc said:

I think that you’re missing that much of the non-Muslim world’s ‘principled opposition’ came AFTER the UN resolutions were quashed by by ‘The Troika’, lending validation to the notion that the USA was simply going too far…and having what THEN were convincing bits of UK/U.S. intel which world opinion DEMANDED be exposed for all to see.

Wow, you just really won't give a bloody inch here. Putting principled opposition in quotation marks - what, you don't think there's any principled opposition to the war?! You think the hundreds of mllions of people who protested the war are all dupes of The Troika?!

This is just untrue. There was building leftist opposition to a possible war in Iraq before France ever uttered the dreaded word 'veto'. Indeed, there has been a long history of principled leftist dissent from the neoconservative view of the Middle East long before George W. Bush ever set foot in office.

It’s your right to place the blame where you think you see fit, but this ‘brilliant’ Naomi Klein article from which you quoted, had plenty of plausible holes in it…things like the need for quality control required to put up sound buildings and roads, quickly.

Right except the whole point was that tons of money has been earmarked to various companies for reconstruction who haven't done a bloody thing. You act as though the U.S. just swooped into some kind of prehistoric universe where Iraqis were running around with clubs and living in caves - you do realize Iraq was already industrialized, right? That factories already existed? That Iraq was one of the largest manufacturers of concrete in the world before the U.S. invaded? This isn't a case of some woefully backward nation lacking any indigenous skills whatsoever, wholly at the mercy of their beneficent occupiers. Surely you don't think there are no construction "EXPERTS" anywhere in Iraq?!

As for "ol' Naomi"'s research - she went to Iraq and visited dozens of factories, both newly operating and old and disused, spoke to hundreds of employees - both newly hired and newly laid-off. I would have to imagine she's certianly more familiar with the economic conditions in Iraq than, say, you. Or me.

And you know, even if thousands of Iraqi employees needed to be laid off in the interest of rebuilding for some obscure reason I'm not fully grasping here, the U.S. should be clued in enough to recognize the potential security problem this creates and thus consider pensions and severance pay. You complain that these people are dreadfully impatient. One wonders how patient you would be if you had to raise your new baby with no income, no prospects, no water, no electricity, and sewage running through the streets for more than a year.

But would you really deny that a single one of the contracts given to non-Iraqi companies were given for any self-interested reason? Come on, you ask liberals to take the blinders off all the time but this is just implausible. I'm not saying that the postwar reconstruction is guided only by some boundless profit motive, and to hell with the iraqi people. Again, mixed motives - the profit motive is a significant component of postwar Iraq. You think it's just a coincidence that Bremer's orders in Iraq were exactly the rules that multinational corporations have been lobbying the IMF for for decades? All I'm saying is the U.S. is not pure and beneficent in Iraq, and the economic ideology of our administration has blinded it to many of the problems on the ground in Iraq. And you can't blame France for that.

M

[Mary]

What I meant was that states sending back money to the feds does not prove that No Child Left Behind isn't underfunded - it depends why they're sending the money back.

As for unfunded - yes that's plainly false. It is funded. Whether it's funded enough to meet its own aspirations - that seems like it's open to fair debate, I'd think. Personally I don't know enough about the program to have an opinion as to how much funding it needs.

[Mary]

Chrisfan said:

Bottom line -- like I said, I think it's great journalism totake apart claims made by politicians like this. I wish that they'd do it all the time, and do it to both sides. I was taught in journalism school that doing just that is what covering politics is all about.

I might be misreading the comment I bolded, and then teh comment about journalism school, so honest question - not trying to put words into your mouth: are you suggesting that the article I posted was too one-sided, since it focused only on Republican distortions of Kerry's record? Or that the media generally is too one-sided (which side, then?)

I agree with the statement on its face, I'm just not sure if there's a hidden sarcasm here that I'm not fully getting. I do think journalists should routinely engage in this detailed deconstruction of politicians' remarks on the campaign trail, for both sides. I don't have a problem with salon.com only doing it to Bush, because salon.com is an editorial site with an admitted liberal disposition. But it would be great for our democracy if there were conservative sites doing the same thing to Kerry's comments. (I assume there must be?!) And it would be even better if plain old journalists writing for major papers would get some balls and fact-check politicians' statements from all over the ideological spectrum.

I actually think that journalists are scared to death of doing this kind of thing because they're scared of being accused of bias and slanted reporting, so it falls to internet media and blatantly, admittedly ideological publications (salon.com, the nation, national review, american prospect, etc etc etc)

My concern is that the average American really doesn't read these publications. You said "we all know that Republicnas are mis-using Kerry's quote" but I really don't think this is true at all - I think politicos and folks who really enjoy following campaigns know. I think most Americans haven't the foggiest clue, which is why this kind of rhetoric is so effective - and why campaigns in a mass-media age are so manipulative and deceitful. Because our media is not doing its job. I watched Miller and Cheney (though I missed most of Miller cause of a phone call, dammit!) last night on PBS, and it should have been the job of the commentators to point out problems like this (same applies to Dems, yes) but no such thing happened at all. The conversation afterwrads was vague and vacuous, about whether Cheney and Miller "went on the attack" or not, and whether Cheney was as "monotone" as usual, etc etc. No fucking substance at all.

Cheers,
M

[melon1]

A dark cynicism rolls over this nation right now coming from the left. It makes me sick to my stomach nearly. Concerning Mary Blaney's post, you rightly nailed me on the $300 billion figure. But still the idea that Bush is ultra-conservative is absurd for the simple reason that things have been moving in a leftward trend for some time now and Bush still happens to be leading Kerry in the polls. I can see this leftward trend but I don't know all the terminology and figures and bills and laws etc. that you know. Yes you've admitted that Bush is not "uniformly ultra-conservative" but I don't think he's anything close to ultra-conservative in any way. Did you see Schwartzeneggar's speech the other night when he mentioned that Herbert Hoover, when a German friend translated a debate between him and Nixon, sounded to him like the socialists he was used to living under in Austria? The fact of the matter, whether or not you see it, is that today the Democratic Party wouldn't even accept Herbert Hoover into their party. He was further right than Zell Miller is today. The left has been moving further left for decades and has had a rope attached to the right pulling it closer to them. But the length of the rope stays the same. The right stays the same distance as it was from the left because the left continues to go further left and the right goes closer and closer to the center. If you ask me, despite your assertions that:

1. he has appointed, or tried to appoint, a host of ultraright federal judges across the judiciary

2. his foreign policy is very obviously a neoconservative wet dream

3. his energy bill was the wet dream of oil companies

among other things, the right now has a monopoly on just about all the issues. The left has been used to balance the right. Your idea of the center is further left than any democratic candidate up until Clinton with the exception of McGovern in '72.

[shin]

Chrisfan said:

Are you sure? You've got a Democrat giving the most impassioned speech of support for Bush at the Republican convention. You've got Ed Koch, a Democrat, endorsing Bush. you've got a Democratic mayor in Youngstown Ohio speaking nationally in support of Bush. To dissent on policy is one thing. To dissent on who to vote for for president is another thing entirely. Look, there is dissent in both parties, and it's healthy. To deny it, to claim that the Democrats are more united and free of dissent than ever before, is naive.

Well if Zell Miller, Ed Koch (who admittedly agrees with Bush on exactly zero policies), and the mayor of Youngstown Ohio don't support Kerry, then you're right, the Dems are in total disarray. Nothing's united when you can't claim Ed Koch on your rollcall.

Come on, you know the Dems are united like never before. How many times have you heard the phrase "Anybody But ____" in a campaign? Even if it's AGAINST someone as opposed to FOR someone, it's still united.

[shin]

I believe you mean 'Hubert Humphrey", Melon. Herbert Hoover was our President at least 75 years ago and was most certainly dead by the time Nixon was President.

[pissin2]

Bush drives a hard bargain. He's a great speaker I must admit. But as the saying goes, talk is cheap, shut up and dance. Sorry Mr. Bush, I'm still not buying it.

[JesusLooksLikeMe]

Melon, I hate to break this to you, since I admire your unfeasibly big balls... but just because someone is to the left of you, that doesn't necessarily preclude them from being hard right.

[Dr. Drum]

LOL.

[Dr. Drum]

Thought the first part of this piece was interesting…

Chomsky and Black moments

By Rick Salutin
The Globe and Mail
Friday, September 3, 2004

Just the facts: "How can they think that way?" moaned Graz, the owner of Dooney's café on Bloor Street, after watching the Republican convention. Polls say most Americans disapprove of the Bush policies but are still ready to re-elect him, while many think weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, which also played a role in 9/11. It's their media, said Lynn, a regular who grew up in the U.S. People don't get to hear what's really going on.

"But," sputtered Graz, "The New York Times, the network news . . ." Lynn shook her head. "Those are elite media. They never reach most people." It was a Chomsky moment.

Noam Chomsky pioneered this approach: that the facts are kept from Americans by the media, blighting their views. It can be addictive. There are people who don't bother with the news, they wait for the next Chomsky critique. It is hard to find a trenchant critique of him, as opposed to glib dismissals. Those who attack him on specifics usually wind up being handed their heads, studded with footnotes. But here's a comment by Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek, interviewed in Left Business Observer: "I partially disagree with him. It's an underlying premise of his work that you . . . just tell all the facts to the people. The way ideology works today is much more mysterious. . . . There's an active refusal to know. . . . The question isn't of any real link between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime. . . . Both Saddam and al-Qaeda hate the U.S. That's enough of a link. You cannot really help by making factual refutations. The key factor is not that people are duped -- there's an active will not to know."

This put us in Freudian country. What people seek is not truth but reassurance. They want to feel: Our leaders are wise; our enemies are crazed; our hands are clean; we are being told the truth etc. In private life, they seek similar comfort. In neither realm are facts crucial. There was a theatre group of the 1970s that called itself 7:84, based on the fact that 7 per cent of the world's people control 84 per cent of its resources. They were so knocked out by this stat that they behaved as if publicizing it would change the world. But change is indeed more "mysterious." It's the context of human need and self-deception that decides what facts get through, or don't.

I'm glad Slavoj Zizek says he only "partially" disagrees, since Noam Chomsky never claims Americans are utterly duped by the media. He often expresses admiration for their ability to see through the smoke. But the results are at best murky and contradictory: skepticism on those Bush policies, for instance, combined with a willingness to vote for him. None of this can be fully explained by a simple media curtain over "the facts."

Let me give a final word to Freud, who pointed out that irrational needs often override facts. He wasn't just a scientist; he was a doctor trying to "cure" patients by fighting through their "resistance" toward truths they might "know" but managed to ignore. He was modest enough to often admit the unlikelihood of a cure. But he also wrote, "Surely infantilism" -- including the refusal to see what is there -- "was meant to be overcome." That shows an almost Chomskyite persistence in continuing to lay out the truth in the hope that people will some day seize it, despite their reluctance. His "surely" is the most powerful word in that sentence. It's more like a prayer than a prediction.

Conrad's quest: I want to register the claim that Conrad Black's motive was not greed. If he has written lovingly on greed, then his purpose was to put people off the scent. If greed were the motive, he'd have been more circumspect about his tactics, and especially his bravado. Why on earth publicly denounce the "fad" for corporate governance while taking risks with it? Greed can be done in private. I'm not saying he was trying to get into trouble. But the point seems to have been to be seen. Adler wins over Freud and Jung. It's about ego, and recognition. Like a pitcher or boxer who is not satisfied to win, but must humiliate the opposition. Rosebud, rosebud, it always comes down to rosebud.

[Galactus]

Having now seen Zell Miller's keynote speech I can now confortably say...holy shit what a whack job! I also saw when he flipped the fuck out on Hardball afterwards, that nutjob challenged Chris Mattews to duel. I don't know how that can veiwed as anything other then a gigantic black eye on the conventions, though I imagine someone will pull out "well, he says what he thinks" or "at least you know where he stands"...that doesn't make him any less crazy.

[chrisfan]

From John Kerry's speech in Springfield, OH last night: "The Vice President called me unfit for office last night. Well, I'll leave it up to the voters to decide whether five deferments makes someone more qualified to defend this nation than two tours of duty."

I am now SO CONFUSED. Isn't this the guy who said last week we need to get off of the issue of Vietnam and focus on the issues? WHAT DOES HE WANT??