Peter Wehner, torture enthusiast and general right-wing neo-con shit-stain, takes to the liberal NY Times to thumb his nose at the libtards:
Have Democrats Pulled Too Far Left?
AMONG liberals, it’s almost universally assumed that of the two major parties, it’s the Republicans who have become more extreme over the years. That’s a self-flattering but false narrative.
This is not to say the Republican Party hasn’t become a more conservative party. It has. But in the last two decades the Democratic Party has moved substantially further to the left than the Republican Party has shifted to the right. On most major issues the Republican Party hasn’t moved very much from where it was during the Gingrich era in the mid-1990s.
To see just how far the Democratic Party has moved to the left, compare Barack Obama with Bill Clinton. In 1992, Mr. Clinton ran as a centrist New Democrat. In several respects he governed as one as well. He endorsed a sentencing policy of “three strikes and you’re out,” and he proposed adding 100,000 police officers to the streets.
In contrast, President Obama’s former attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., criticized what he called “widespread incarceration” and championed the first decrease in the federal prison population in more than three decades. Mr. Obama, meanwhile, has chosen to focus on police abuses.
Beyond national elections, there is another way to measure these questions, and just today Gallup shows us how:
Americans Continue to Shift Left on Key Moral Issues
Americans are more likely now than in the early 2000s to find a variety of behaviors morally acceptable, including gay and lesbian relations, having a baby outside of marriage and sex between an unmarried man and woman. Moral acceptability of many of these issues is now at a record-high level.
This latest update on Americans’ views of the moral acceptability of various issues and behaviors is from Gallup’s May 6-10 Values and Beliefs survey. The complete results for each of the 19 issues tested in this year’s survey appear at the end of the article. Gallup has tracked these moral issues in this format since the early 2000s.
The upward progression in the percentage of Americans seeing these issues as morally acceptable has varied from year to year, but the overall trend clearly points toward a higher level of acceptance of a number of behaviors. In fact, the moral acceptability ratings for 10 of the issues measured since the early 2000s are at record highs.
Americans have become less likely to say that two issues are morally acceptable: the death penalty and medical testing on animals. But Americans’ decreased acceptance of these practices actually moves them in a more liberal direction.
These results reflect the same type of shift evident in the public’s self-reported ideology on “social issues.” More Americans now rate themselves as socially liberal than at any point in Gallup’s 16-year trend, and for the first time, as many say they are liberal on social issues as say they are conservative.
You can shove that narrative up your chickenhawk chairborne ass, you scumbag. Although as we know, statistics have a well-known liberal bias.
Poopyman
What’s the deal with the uptick in accepting polygamy? I didn’t even know it was still a thing.
srv
Americans may be more liberal, but they’re still sociopaths:
Downpuppy
@Poopyman: Polygamy will never happen because the tax breaks are just too big. (It was an estate tax case that killed DOMA)
Morally, though? Lotta us Do Not Care.
Matt McIrvin
I’m surprised that acceptance of abortion hasn’t decreased; I had a general sense that it did.
…Gallup’s long-term polling on abortion rights also shows fairly flat numbers, though, with maybe a weak, very long term trend toward wanting to ban abortion:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
Baud
How does he attempt to measure this except for anecdotes about Democrats?
Iowa Old Lady
I don’t get what’s in it for them in creating their own reality. Reality still operates, right? The “skewed” polls turn out to be the true ones.
I guess it allows them to legislate in ways they want–ie no background checks, less abortion access, war, war, war.
gf120581
Seems like a last ditch effort by Beltway GOPers to maintain the illusion that their party hasn’t gone completely into insanity.
Keep trying. It’s not going to work.
Cacti
@Baud:
In the last 2-decades, the Republican Party has moved so far to the right, they publicly and proudly defend torture, as well as wars of aggression, have pursued a broad expansion of corporate personhood concepts at the judicial level, and have embraced a noxious anti-immigrant strategy as a unifying political force.
The move to the right has been so extreme, you could safely call the 21st century GOP a proto-fascist political movement, that’s maybe one more 9/11 type event away from full on fascism.
Elizabelle
The only good thing about Wehner’s op ed was reading the reader comments.
Just like Bobo Brooks.
Shame, shame NY Times. Shame.
MobiusKlein
So when the crime rate goes down, that guy complains that the rate of incarceration goes down too?
What the fuck does he think should happen?
jl
@Baud: I don’t remember hearing about this hack before, but he is a master of misleading BS, I’ll give him that. And precision BS. Kind of like if Brooks had majored in accounting.
And IMHO, offensive and dismissive too. What is he talking about HRCs AND Bill Clinton’s policies. IIRC, Bill Clinton was president. But I guess this guy figures that implying that the little woman has to believe every single thing her big strong man does on the job will work with the dupes he is after.
Of course he uses Clinton as the only reference point on the ideological spectrum.
Note that he does not discuss any actual substance, just enough selective facts and figs to get away with facile comparisons.
I think that in macroeconomics and international trade and finance Obama has been very Bill Clintonesque and even Dubesque in some ways,, and that is the reason that the Democrats have done poorly in the midterms, even if Obama was re-elected (I guess that is what this guy means by doing well politically). (Edit: so on a very important and leading issue over which national party had control, no real move to ‘the left’ at all).
Anyway, nice hack job, Wehner, whoever you are.
jl
@MobiusKlein: The dog whistles have become internalized?
Peale
@MobiusKlein: just like the stock market and the value of houses, it should always rise at ever increasing rates.
the Conster
The measurable effect towards liberalism is because people are talking to each other on social media and liberals are making better arguments IMHO, because conservative arguments MAKE NO FUCKING SENSE. Where is the empirical evidence that conservatism works to make life better, in the sense that “better” is understood by the average middle class person? Shouldn’t we have seen it by now in Kansas? Louisiana? Arkansas? Texas? GWB fucked up both foreign policy and domestic policy with establishment conservatives piloting the ship of state, and he was their chosen one. Literally, by SCOTUS, and they steered it into the rocks because ideology. They’ve lost the argument because conservatism died in the chaos of Iraq, and on the day that Hank Paulson darkened GWB’s door asking for a trillion dollars in taxpayer money to bail out the FIRE sector. Wehner, Kristol, and the editorial pages of WaPo and the dying legace media are all zombies looking for brains to reanimate the corpse of conservatism. Na ganna happen. The only question left is how much damage they can do before they fall, and my fear is… a lot.
PaulW
The point of his argument is “liberals are wrong,” regardless of facts. Always wrong.
Wrong.
Wrong.
The topic could be on how shoelaces are tied, and Wehrer will assume that liberals never tie their shoelaces, which puts all liberals in the wrong.
He argues about how Holder is – was – fighting mass incarceration as a problem, without noting that more than a few conservative/Republican states are debating the same problem (because the costs are starting to skyrocket beyond even what insane people can tolerate). He argues about Obama going after police brutality, as though the last 20-year uptick in excessive force against minorities is something that shouldn’t be addressed.
raven
@PaulW: An idiot buddy of mine just sent this stupid fucking email about the ACLU suing the Marine Corps to stop any prayer by chaplains. It is patently false and easily found on Snopes and other sires. I replied to the group with “Bullshit”, the text and a link. I’m getting lots of “to you too”. Stupid whiny right wing fucking assholes.
Hal
That’s a good thing? A party that is still mired in the policies and ideology of one of it’s most racist and demagogic former leaders is a party de-evolving.
sm*t cl*de
Jackboots don’t have laces.
Mike in NC
Just burn the neocon NY Times to the ground and piss on the ashes.
Mike J
@sm*t cl*de: I thought we were all loafers.
the Conster
@efgoldman:
The floods in Texas are just the beginning of the wake up call – more like it’s a cluex4 on the side of their head. This is their new normal, and they’re going to realize sooner than later that they’re not the rugged individualists they fool themselves into thinking they are. We’re in a new paradigm, and conservatives don’t adapt – can’t adapt – and guess what happens to creatures who don’t adapt.
Bobby B.
As years go by peoples’ outrage grows, but so does our power to fix things.
pseudonymous in nc
No, it’s a post-George W. Bush party, the result of Mr Bush’s unnecessary wars and general GOP fuckwittage.
the Conster
@efgoldman:
Well, in some sense it is god’s will, if by god you mean nature, and if by will, you mean faith in something other than reason and empiricism.
Roger Moore
@MobiusKlein:
I think the plan is that once somebody has been locked up, they stay in there forever.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Downpuppy:
I care about polygamy when it’s creepy religious cults marrying 12-year-old girls off to 50-year-old men. Consenting adults? Meh. It doesn’t cause my boat to float, but I don’t really care.
Linnaeus
The Democratic Party has moved leftward, but the Republican Party has moved much further rightward. Yet that means that Democrats are “too leftist”. Rrrriiiight.
jl
@efgoldman: huh wah? Today’s GOP is not to the right of Gingrich? Why was Gingrich playing the role of non-doctrinaire thinking out-of-the-box visionary as his main schtick during the last GOP pres primary?
the Conster
@Downpuppy:
Polygamy is illegal because it’s impossible to litigate under our property, inheritance, tax, insurance and family law schemes that contemplate a marriage between two people. Gay marriage is easy, because you just have to redefine one word in the law and regs – “wife” or “husband” becomes “spouse”. The only way polygamy and polyandry could ever work under a legal framework that gives equal rights to spouses, is to have all parties to the arrangement marry each other. Imagine the complications of sorting out claims to children and property with multiple claimants who don’t have pre-nuptial contracts and who are all adverse to each other. It’s hard enough with multiple marriages, and their issue. That can go on for years and years, and there are laws in place already to govern that.
danielx
Why, yes. Don’t you remember when Rick Pe- er, Jerry Brown said California should secede from the union? Or when Tom Cott- Al Franken, Al Franken! – said any treaty made by the Bush administration could be overruled later? Or when Louie Goh- oh, I meant Alan Grayson – said John McCain is a terrorist? Or when the Democratic majority in the House refused a Bush administration request to raise the debt ceiling?
Yeah, me neither. Tell what you said again, Wehner-boy?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@the Conster:
IIRC, the way they solve the legal problems of polygamy in other countries is male dominance — the next of kin is the closest male relative, not the wives, and the wives basically have no legal relationship to each other, only to the husband. I don’t think that model would fly in the US.
Iowa Old Lady
@the Conster: There’s an ad for some sort of air freshener that says you can’t have this guy in the living room with lavender, and this one in the kitchen with mint, and this one in the bedroom with some other scent. “A man in every room is a dream” or something like that.
Every time I see it, I shudder. What a nightmare.
JPL
@efgoldman: I didn’t watch the show but from the comments below, you have to be so proud. I don’t know her and I’m proud.
the Conster
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
That model is anachronistic – women are no longer property in this country. Each party to a marriage is adjudicated as equal – the legal precedent is each party is entitled to half. Also no one ever thinks about polyandry, which blows men’s minds. But, that’s what any equal interpretation of any multiple marriage law would have to allow for.
cahuenga
Have Democrats Pulled Too Far Left?
In my experience, headlines in the form of a question are rarely worth the trouble of reading past.
Elizabelle
@cahuenga: Good advice.
jl
@efgoldman: But no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Interesting that Wehner saves the really obvious howlers for bogus analysis of foreign politics. Probably because he figures most people don’t follow it enough to know when he is talking nonsense. Supposedly Labor did poorly in the recent UK election because under Miliband it went crazy hard leftist I think it’s obvious that it slid to center of a political spectrum as conveniently defined by the Conservatives and positioned itself slightly to left of where Liberals were before they disappeared themselves into Cameron’s political fraud racket.
sparrow
Totally, shamelessly OT: A result I have coming out in Nature tomorrow is on the front page of http://www.nasa.gov! I remember when a few of you congratulated me on getting the proposed observations approved two years ago… here is the payoff!
Roger Moore
@the Conster:
And provided that the marriage survives if one spouse dies, that would also imply that same sex marriage must be possible, since a marriage with exclusively members of one sex is a possible outcome of one spouse dying.
Pogonip
@jl: “Martha! The dog ate the whistle again!”
Which explains, I guess, why farts are also called toots.
Iowa Old Lady
@sparrow: Oh wow, how cool!
El Caganer
If Democrats were really as far left as this yoyo claims, they’d be running Zombie Leon Trotsky in ’16.
dmsilev
@sparrow:
Bravo! That’s wonderful!
JPL
@sparrow: Just WOW…
Roger Moore
@El Caganer:
I think he’s sufficiently out of touch with reality that he’s incapable of distinguishing Bernie Sanders from Zombie Leon Trotsky.
jl
@sparrow: You are the one behind the cool new pics of Pluto? That is great. I eagerly wait for each one. Congratulations and thanks.
Fake Irishman
Hacker and Pierson (http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300108705) actually have data on this subject. I believe their comment is that “Democrats have moved down the block, Republicans have moved to a whole new zip code”
joel hanes
@sparrow:
Publishing in Nature is a very big deal. I’m sure you’re proud, and you should be.
However, you didn’t mention which of the NASA front-page articles has your work.
New Horizons ?
Black hole jet shock ?
Omnes Omnibus
@sparrow: Good for you, Congrats. Awesome. And so on. What I mean to say is… Well done, you. Or something like that. I’ll just stop now and be over there in the corner.
JPL
@Omnes Omnibus: Best comment ever. I wish I said that.
the Conster
@efgoldman:
Now imagine if there were multiple parties who were all legally entitled to be beneficiaries to a retirement account earned by one of the parties to the marriage, an insurance policy held by another of the parties, a Social Security payment due to be paid to a different party who subsequently dies, a property deed in the name of another party who executed the deed before entering the multiple marriage, a child support decree from the first marriage of one of the parties, a bankruptcy judgment or a settlement from the first spouse of one of the parties to the marriage, and all the parties to the marriage disagreed about what their own personal benefit or liability was to that particular legal situation. It’s impossible to adjudicate, hence, illegal.
Valdivia
@Elizabelle:
they keep publishing the worst kind of propaganda for the GOP, I guess they need to maintain the both sides do it narrative.
@sparrow: a hearty yay for you. Impressive!
Jeffro
@Cacti:The move to the right has been so extreme, you could safely call the 21st century GOP a proto-fascist political movement, that’s maybe one more 9/11 type event away from full on fascism.
Absolutely. They were almost all the way there with Ari “Watch What You Say” Fleischer and Rod “Teachers’ Unions Are Terrorist Organizations” Paige, among other luminaries of the W administration.
jl
@joel hanes: Black hole jet shock is cool too. I want to know what Pluto looks like, so I was attracted to that one, maybe jumped to conclusions.
Omnes Omnibus
@JPL: I’ve been re-reading Wodehouse lately.
@efgoldman: How can you cheer for the Ducks against an Original Six team?
sparrow
@joel hanes: While tempting to keep a shred of anonymity, there’s little point, so… it’s the black hole jet result. Pretty cool to basically use Hubble like a movie camera!
jl
@Elizabelle:
I like this comment, featured next to the text of the column:
Tom S. Scottsdale, AZ 4 hours ago
I am a moderate, and registered as an independent. I read both the NYT and the WSJ. This is one of those times when the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if the NYT picks out particularly stupid conservative editorials to publish so as to further their own political agenda.
Mr. Wehner’s statement, “He is the first president to essentially nationalize health care” displays a failure to grasp of even the simplest fundamentals of the ACA. This sort of false, empty rhetoric invalidates anything else he has to say.
Edit: though I disagree with Tom S’s conclusion. Wehner’s other points surely deserve to invalidate themselves on their own lack of merit.
SiubhanDuinne
@sparrow:
FanfrigginTAStic!! Also, wow!
Another Holocene Human
@Poopyman: Hopefully they mean polyamory and not that patriarchal polygyny bullshit. If Gallup called me up, I’d ask them which one they were talking about.
Polyamory/polyfidelity where all the participants are adults and considered legally and morally equal (note: that doesn’t mean they all have the same relationship with each party), cool.
Polygyny where men have more rights than women (a la Mormonland, or some Saudi Arabian style shit): hell to the naw, I don’t approve of that.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: There are reasons why I have tried to avoid every association with family law like the plague, and there are reasons that Botsplainer (a family lawyer) is a cranky bastard.
Valdivia
Speaking of those who create their own reality, behold the brain trust at The National Review.
No. Words.
Baud
@sparrow:
Anonymity is for the little people. Revel in your greatness.
jl
Also should note that Wehner uses a common trick of reactionaries, and empty pundits, which is to label policies and positions as conservative or leftist or whatever, on their own, outside any conceptual framework or context. This extends to attitudes towards science, since several opinions about scientific fact are crammed into a simplistic ideological spectrum. Like climate change. I guess he will issue a crazed diatribe, in blandly passive aggressive coat of phlegm, on the wild lefty Arnold Schwarzenegger next, since he holds a leftist position.
Baud
@Valdivia:
Sen. Sanders line of thinking aggravated my sciatica.
Brachiator
What a do of us article. I don’t remember reading in the Bible, “Verily, the Lord smote Hezekiah down for cloning his sheep.” And support for doctor assisted suicide could reflect the conservative notion that it ain’t the gummint’s business. In any event, it seems that the country is more liberal and that the Democrats are more in sync with the national mood. But this doesn’t get you anywhere near the idea that Democrats are “too far left.” Did this dope get paid for writing this junk?
Another Holocene Human
@Mike J: Boom!
Valdivia
@Brachiator:
he gets paid for writing terrible junk every day at various outlets. Sadly the way of the Village.
The Monkey Cage people (poli sci nerds) debunked this bs with data, either at their blog at WaPo of with links on twitter. Have to hunt it down if anyone is interested.
@Baud:
his way of thinking has been responsible for so many things!
SiubhanDuinne
@efgoldman:
Yay. Chicago up 3-1.
/Chicago grrl
Brachiator
@jl: No, Labour did not lose because they veered from true left. Labour and the Link Dems were both trounced because they failed to convince voters that they were competent. Miliband fell over backwards to avoid giving any clear and simple answer to the question of what he had to offer or how he would govern. Scotland is more liberal than conservative, and their thunderous vote for the Scottish party was a clear acclamation of nationalism over political ideology.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@sparrow: Good news!
Omnes Omnibus
@Brachiator: OTOH you could have read and responded to jl’s actual comment.
schrodinger's cat
@sparrow: Congratulations, that’s awesome! Can you give us a gist of your results?
Brachiator
@sparrow: Very cool. Congratulations.
gene108
Violent crime was at an all time high, in 1992, and had been steadily escalating for a generation with no end in sight. In 2015, crime is at an all-time low, lower than the fucking Happy Days-Era.
Clinton also raised taxes, in 1993, which had more to do with creating a surplus than anything else.
Oil and natural gas production are at record highs, under the Obama administration. Despite portrayals to the Obama being an impediment to the energy sector.
This is not an opinion piece. This is a bad high school essay that cherry picks facts to back-up a flimsy thesis, because thinking of a coherent thesis is too much work because you’ve already picked out a bunch of quotes to for the body of your essay.
Brachiator
@Omnes Omnibus: I read his comments and think he is dead wrong about the British elections, and said that he was wrong. Pretty simple stuff.
jl
@Brachiator: I understand your comment to be that Miliband is a bad leader. I think my comment explains in part why he was a bad leader. Which includes, as I pointed out, seeming to cede policy narratives to the Conservatives, and going along with their framing of issues, which is something apart from position on a simple ideological spectrum. I think that Miliband’s mishandling of how he would deal with SNP MPs had something to do with the disaster for Labor in Scotland.
You over interpreted my comment. Disagreeing with what Wehner asserted is not the same thing as asserting the opposite.
Zinsky
When is the last time a major TV news network had on a guest from the American Communist Party (there is such a group) to counterbalance the extreme right-wing fascists like Ted Cruz? I didn’t think you could remember one…..
Yeah, America has really “moved too far left”. What a dumb fuck….
Omnes Omnibus
@Brachiator: See this. Sanctimony is unattractive.
sparrow
@schrodinger’s cat: Yup! Here’s what I posted about the video on facebook: What your are looking at is a jet of plasma (charged particles) streaming out from a black hole. In the beginning of the video you actually see the light from the galaxy, and a face on “dust ring” (that’s the circular darker part) but this fades to the time-lapse movie where we subtracted that part off so that we could focus on what the jet was doing. The jet shows blobs of plasma that were “spit out” from the black hole at very high speeds — almost the speed of light. And this is so fast that with Hubble we actually see the thing evolve over the past 20 years. What we have learned is that these blobs can sometimes collide with each other in the jet, which creates something called shocks, where particles gain energy. This is important because we didn’t understand where these particles were getting energized exactly. In the big picture it helps us understand how energy is reprocessed from a black hole out in to the wider environment. Oh and for reference, the jet is about 1300 light years long, so more than 300 times the distance from here to the nearest star!
Tripod
In twenty years they’ll be floating the same bullshit about how they all loved Obama.
The politics of appropriation.
Brachiator
@jl: The voters rejected Labour in two elections. They rejected both liberal parties in this most recent election. Even if Labour had a better narrative, Miliband wasn’t prime minister material. Scottish voters didn’t just reject Labour, they rejected England. They didn’t care about the narratives of any of the other parties.
joel hanes
@sparrow:
Your secret is safe with us.
Is your nym “sparrow” by any chance related to the Mary Doria Russell novel ?
Omnes Omnibus
@Brachiator: The SNP is old school Labour in its policies as much as it is nationalist. Which predominated?
the Conster
@Tripod:
They’ll also claim that
Obamacarethe ACA was their idea using Romney and Heritage’s history as documentation, and any “problems” they had with it was to ensure that it was vetted so that it had its proper sound Constitutional foundation. At least 47% of the voting public will believe them.Chris
@the Conster:
I continue to think (as you noted in the first few words) that the way they’ll approach it will simply be to discuss “the ACA” and “Obamacare” as two completely different things. “The ACA” will be all the things they like and want to take credit for, “Obamacare” will be the vaguely defined beast that’s sucking the life out of the health care system and destroying jobs and opportunities.
mike in dc
@the Conster:
This needs some asterisks, methinks. It’s impossible to adjudicate…under existing statutory law, and absent any meaningful caselaw precedents. But one could certainly cobble together some principles for equitable distribution of assets following either the dissolution of the marital partnership, or the departure of one or more partners(perhaps drawing from the principles used in the dissolution of business partnerships). “The best interests of the child” standard could remain, albeit perhaps requiring a more complicated assessment. That leaves inheritance/succession-in-interest/beneficiary issues, all of which already come up in the context of multiple beneficiary/heir/successor cases(.e.g., children fighting over a will, or children fighting the remaining parent/spouse, et al.). I’m pretty sure you could throw some family law profs, divorce attorneys, judges and social workers in a room for a few weeks and they could emerge with a workable set of principles.
Omnes Omnibus
@mike in dc: No. You could not.
sparrow
@joel hanes: No, but I am now very curious to read the book! I am not sure but I think I picked it around the time I was reading Hamlet… odd, I know.
Aleta
@sparrow: @sparrow: NATURE ! NGC 3862 ! Wild, wonderful. Thanks for doing something amazing in this world.
Linnaeus
@Omnes Omnibus:
While I am no fan of the Ducks, when that Original Six team is the Chicago Blackhawks, cheering for them becomes very, very difficult.
Of course, like efgoldman, I’ll watch playoff hockey no matter who’s in it.
Sherparick
@srv: No, just typical tribal humans and they are following the examples of our leaders. By the way, this is one of the problems about not prosecuting people for torture and other crimes committed the last 14 years other then some enlisted people at Abu Ghraib (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jan/11/iraq.usa and again, no surprise that the only people held accountable were some working class stiffs at the bottom of the social pile. The Village is now populated by people like Tom and Daisy Buchanan. From the Great Gatsby: “… They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made…”
Bill
@the Conster:
They will never realize this. The feds will bail them out (as they should), and two months from now when some blue state need emergency funds Ted Cruz and his fellow Texans will be bleating about “fiscal responsibility.” Part of being conservative is never facing reality.