Did Anyone Actually See David Broder’s Body?

David Broder is dead, or so they say.

I’m telling you he’s undead, and like the Jack the Ripper figure in that Star Trek episode, seems to be infecting the previously sane.

Exhibit A:

Here’s Josh Marshall, Josh Freaking Marshall, earlier today:

As a more general matter it’s important to recognize that torture could easily have produced the key information. It just seems not to have in this case. You can be doctrinaire in opposing torture without being doctrinaire in assuming that it can’t produce any good intelligence, which would be foolish. More »

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Is genocide good for your 401K?

The liberal Jacob Weisberg makes the case for Paul Ryan:

Ryan’s proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher provides an easy political target. But it’s hard to make a principled liberal case for the program in its current form. To do so, you have to argue that government-paid health care should be a right only for people over the age of 65, and for no one else. Medicare covers doctor and hospital bills at 100 percent, regardless of income. This gives doctors and patients an incentive to maximize their use of the system and waste public resources.

This would all make sense…if private insurance functioned effectively in this country. But it doesn’t. We pay nearly twice as much as countries with single payer models and receive worse care by almost any measure. Why does some wankerly rhapsodizing about the hypothetical inefficiencies of single payer systems enter into the discussion?

One possible answer is that Weisberg enjoys playing the contrarian. Why work at trying to understand a proposal when you can just put a catchy, thought-experimentesque contrarian spin on the whole issue and call it a day? The composure class members who read Slate don’t want to get into the weeds either. They’re titillated by “is genocide good for your 401k” type edginess, and the fact that Weisberg spent Michaelmas term as All Souls with Niall Ferguson proves that he is credible on this and all other issues.

I promised myself I wouldn’t let this devolve into another discussion of how we’re facing another example of the shock doctrine here, so I’ll close on a happier note with what reader E sent me about this:

thank god the american people don’t give a fuck what jacob weisberg thinks and would rather not see grandma die because she can’t afford a dialysis treatment in paul ryan’s galtian paradise

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Like We’ve Been Saying

The National Review has a piece up examining ten liberals and their reaction to the Bradley Manning treatment. A snippet:

Yesterday, P. J. Crowley was forced to an early resignation from his post as State Department spokesman. His blunder? At an event at MIT last Thursday, he said that “what is being done to Bradley Manning is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid on the part of the Department of Defense,” and that Manning was being mistreated. President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s State Department evidently thought those comments went beyond the pale and eagerly accepted his resignation.

Afterwards, Obama publicly stated that he had “asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of [Manning’s] confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards.” He concluded, “They assured me that they are” (click here for the Defense Department’s statement on Manning).

But liberal intellectuals and activists have gone much farther than Crowley. Here are ten perspectives on Bradley Manning, taken from mainstream liberal writers, activists, and publications:

1. By far the most outspoken, well-known, and influential defender is journalist Glenn Greenwald, who first came to prominence as a critic of George W. Bush’s national-security measures. Now, his Salon.com archive resembles a Google News feed for Bradley Manning. Greenwald is passionate on the subject. He has said that “Manning clearly believed that he was a whistle-blower acting with the noblest of motives, and probably was exactly that.” Manning is for him a “national hero,” whose treatments “constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture,” which will “create long-term psychological injuries.”

It goes on from there, listing a bunch of other liberals and things they have said. My personal favorite, for obvious reasons, is #10:

10. Finally, there’s a notable (though not surprising) exception: The New Republic, though not endorsing the treatment of Bradley Manning or Crowley’s ouster, has devoted most of the ink it’s used on Manning to emphasizing the threat posed to national security, and America’s formerly covert friends overseas, by his alleged leaks.

This doesn’t include other, non-political groups that have sprung to Manning’s defense, like WikiLeaks and legal-defense funds. The above are the mainstream, influential liberal outlets that help refine the Left’s policy consensus. Many of the same were apoplectic about George W. Bush’s origination of the PATRIOT Act, the detention centers at Guantanamo Bay, and the prosecution of its residents by military tribunal. But Obama has extended W.’s policies on all three — and now he’s accepted the treatment of Bradley Manning, and ousted its critics, to their dismay.

Maybe the liberal intellectuals are right, or maybe President Obama is. But how in good conscience can they continue to support him?

I laughed out loud.

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Even the liberal Huffington Post

I never liked Huffington Post. It always seemed like a dumber, more celebrity-obsessed version of Politico. So this doesn’t surprise me (via):

Bloggers have been coming and going very rapidly over at Huffington Post since Arianna Huffington sold out to AOL last month. There has been mounting speculation about the death of the once liberal-leaning HuffPo in light of editorial changes. Well, we can now confirm that the old HuffPo is dead and something hideous is sprouting in its place. We know this because of the revelation today that right-wing extremist Andrew Breitbart is now blogging for Huffington.

And what has Breitbart chosen to write about in is premiere post? His friend James O’Keefe.

The latest James O’Keefe success story against NPR has taken a predictable pattern — panicked press releases and firings, followed by denunciation of O’Keefe in a belated attempt to discredit him. Naturally, conservatives are crowing about it, but I wanted to give a little perspective to those Huffington Post readers — whatever your political stripe — who share my passion for free speech, honest debate, and fairness in the media.

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Beltway Liberals Are Such Scrotums

Here’s Jon Chait, all worried about Obama’s treatment of Jon Huntsman (via):

But what happens the next time Obama wants a talented Republican like Hunstman to serve in his administration? Does he really want that Republican to contend not only with being attacked by fellow partisans in his next race, but knowing that Obama will be collaborating in the attack? if there is a calculation here, it seems like an awfully short-sighted one.

This pearl clutching was sparked by Mark Halperin, who thinks that the Obama Administration is exerting a “death hug” by saying that Huntsman was an excellent ambassador to China.

Perhaps Obama is being clever, or perhaps Jon Huntsman was just a good ambassador to China. But even if Obama is playing 11 dimensional chess, why is it his fault that the rump of the Republican party is so nuts that a little well-deserved praise from Obama disqualifies Huntsman as a 2012 contender? I expect that kind of stupidity from Halperin, but Chait should know better than to blame Obama for the insanity of the far right.

The only “collaboration” I see here is Chait’s, because he’s embracing a stupid beltway double-bind that makes as much sense as any other blame-the-victim logic: “Mommy should have realized that Daddy had too much to drink, so it’s her fault that Daddy punched her in the face.”

If the Republican party rejects talented moderates for doing something as uncontroversial as serving as an ambassador, then let that party pay the price by running unelectable clowns like Palin and Huckabee. And don’t concern troll us by calling it “short sighted” for Obama to execute a strategy that will almost guarantee his election in 2012.

(“Scrotum” is the right word, by the way. It’s an insult to a tough, resilient organ like the vagina to compare it to the average New Republic writer.)

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It’s guys like you

I’ve long felt that Mickey Kaus is the perfect example of everything that is wrong with our Peretz-ridden, God-forsaken media environment. So it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that he’s just joined forces with Tucker Carlson. The good news is that two of the internet’s finest prose stylists—Tbogg and James Wolcott—have both written about this, albeit briefly.

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The masquerade is over

I probably wouldn’t have minded The New Republic so much if it hadn’t pretended to be liberal while Marty Peretz was at the helm. Eric Alterman (this excerpt is longer than usual, but it makes its point unusually well):

Well, it’s finally over. Martin Peretz, who, according to David Horowitz’s Frontpage webzine, “has been a pillar of responsible liberalism since buying The New Republic magazine in 1974 has finally been shown the door.

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[W]hile it is true that under Mike Kinsley, Rick Hertzberg, and to lesser extent, Peter Beinart and Frank Foer, TNR lived up to its reputation as a lively, contrarian read on the week’s news with a strong liberal voice, its net effect—even in its best years—was to weaken liberalism and comfort conservatives. The primary problem was the fact that unlike say, Commentary, which after a few years of claiming that it had been “mugged by reality” owned up to its conservative conversion, TNR continued to insist that it spoke for American liberalism. And people who did not pay too close attention—or had their own reasons for indulging this conceit—played along. And so the virus of liberal self-hatred infected the entire bloodstream of liberalism—particularly with regard to Israel and the Palestinians—and bore at its body from within.

The old “even the liberal New Republic” line that dates back to the Reagan era was no joke. Kinsley and Hertzberg could write the most brilliant eviscerations of Reaganite nonsense available anywhere, but the fact that elsewhere in the magazine, these same endeavors were receiving the enthusiastic endorsements not only of Peretz, but of Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, Morton Kondracke—even on occasion, the likes of Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Perle—counted for far more in the context of contemporary debate. The sad fact of political life in Washington is that “liberals” are never so influential as when they are throwing in the towel on their own team and endorsing the arguments of the other side. (The punditocracy tends to call this “moderation.”) The New Republic “mattered” when it endorsed the contras, the US war in El Salvador, the MX missile, Charles Murray’s racist pseudo-science, Republican lies about the Clinton health-care-reform plan, the Iraq War, and pretty much everything the Israeli government has said and done for the past 37 years; other times, not so much. Liberals making liberal points, however eloquently, might make other liberals feel better. They might help to inform their arguments. But they do not make news; they do not get their authors invited on Sunday shows or invited to the White House.

I think Peretz’s corruption of liberalism within the media went even deeper. He hired a lot of TNRers when they were young, just out of some Ivy League school. I knew a lot of the type of the kids he would hire and they are the most affirmation-craving people you could possibly imagine. A few years of getting patted on the head by a millionaire for churning out contrarian Harvard-dining hall bullshit leaves its mark on such souls. I don’t think Michael Kinsley ever recovered from it, though I agree he can be very sharp when he’s not basking in the brilliance of his own counterintuitive ironies. With nearly all of these TNRers, the desire to bust out “how genocide is good for your 401K” remained long after they were no longer in Peretz’s employ.

There’s no question that prominent so-called “liberals” in the media have wanked around “spreading freedom”, bashing unions, doing triple-backwards contrarian reverses, musing about IQs and school uniforms, while the American middle-class has languished on life support. That’s not right.

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Car Workers

I wasn’t willing to make a bold prediction on the GM bail out, and I still won’t. I saw it as a difficult decision. But, I also live in the rust belt and I knew that allowing GM to go under would be devastating to this region, hurting everyone from parts suppliers to health care providers. In hindsight, I think they made the right (if politically unpopular) call.

I expected the chorus of certain doom and definitive statements from the Right, because if there’s anything Grover Norquist knows, it’s the auto industry. GM was Obama’s First Katrina. It might have been his second. I can’t keep track.

“This is somewhere in between Baghdad and fixing the flood in Louisiana,” Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said, comparing the GM decision to major stumbles by former President George W. Bush. Obama “has decided to take this over. He now owns it.”

I have to say, though, I was a flat-out pissed to see what may be my least favorite cable tv guest, even-the-liberal Robert Reich, emerge as one of the bailout’s biggest critics.

I thought his alternative proposal to the Obama solution was laughable, including as it did vague plans to “retrain” and “relocate” workers.

Cash could be used to retrain car workers, giving them extended unemployment insurance as they retrain.

Fabulous. I’m still not sure what a “car worker” is, but blithely tossing out “retraining” is easy, so I’m not surprised.

And then there’s this:

But US politicians dare not talk openly about industrial adjustment because the public does not want to hear about it.

Really? Who are these cowardly and loathsome “politicians” who dare not talk about “industrial adjustment”? Are any of them named Bill Clinton?

Would that Reich had been such a vocal critic when he actually had some power. No matter! He’s had all these bold and brilliant ideas all along, he just never implemented any of them, you know, when he was in charge of labor policy.

When conservatives needed a stick to bash unions with, they reached for Reich, so thanks for that, Robert. What we really need in this country is another fake-debate where we add up union workers hourly pay and benefits, and insist that’s their wage, although that math only applies to blue collar workers. We don’t do that addition when we talk about white collar workers. Ever.

Can I put Reich in the George Will category of credibility if he doesn’t revisit this issue?

Will sneers at “the automotive engineers in Congress,” though apparently his own automotive engineering sensibility towers above Motor Trend. Why has he been been denying us his expert automobile criticism?

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Paradox My Ass

Here’s Ed Kilgore’s latest, Will Republicans Cut Medicare? A Paradox. I’ll save you the pain of reading the piece: After many strokes, Kilgore concludes that no, the Republicans will cut Medicaid instead.

Why is this even up for debate? The core of Republican support in this country is old, and they love Medicare. And every Republican politician at the state and county level has been bitching about Medicaid for years. Rick Perry even wants to drop out of Medicaid entirely.

To anyone who’s been paying attention to what Republicans actually say, there’s no paradox here. Cutting even an obvious waste like Medicare Advantage is impossible for today’s Republicans, who are completely beholden to their aging, white base. It’s only when you buy into a villager notion of the Republican party as stalwarts of fiscal restraint—a notion that a trillion dollars of deficit has yet to dispel—that you can gin up a paradox.

Speaking of paradoxes, Kilgore blogs at another site called “The Democratic Strategist”, a term that’s on the verge of being an oxymoron, or at least an anachronism.

(via Sully, of course)

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No Truckling to Trickling

The most unlikely people are outing themselves as DFHs. Steven Pearlstein, business columnist for the Washington Post, dissects “The costs of rising economic inequality“:

... If you asked Americans how much of the nation’s pretax income goes to the top 10 percent of households, it is unlikely they would come anywhere close to 50 percent, which is where it was just before the bubble burst in 2007… Even within that top “decile,” the distribution is remarkably skewed. By 2007, the top 1 percent of households took home 23 percent of the national income after a 15-year run in which they captured more than half – yes, you read that right, more than half – of the country’s economic growth. As Tim Noah noted recently in a wonderful series of articles in Slate, that’s the kind of income distribution you’d associate with a banana republic or a sub-Saharan kleptocracy, not the world’s oldest democracy and wealthiest market economy.
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There are moral and political reasons for caring about this dramatic skewing of income, which in the real world leads to a similar skewing of opportunity, social standing and political power. But there is also an important economic reason: Too much inequality, just like too little, appears to reduce global competitiveness and long-term growth, at least in developed countries like ours.
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People don’t work hard, take risks and make sacrifices if they think the rewards will all flow to others. Conservative Republicans use this argument all the time in trying to justify lower tax rates for wealthy earners and investors, but they chose to ignore it when it comes to the incomes of everyone else.

It’s no coincidence that polarization of income distribution in the United States coincides with a polarization of the political process. Just as income inequality has eroded any sense that we are all in this together, it has also eroded the political consensus necessary for effective government. There can be no better proof of that proposition than the current election cycle, in which the last of the moderates are being driven from the political process and the most likely prospect is for years of ideological warfare and political gridlock.

Political candidates may not be talking about income inequality during this election, but it is the unspoken issue that underlies all the others. Without a sense of shared prosperity, there can be no prosperity. And given the realities of global capitalism, with its booms and busts and winner-take-all dynamic, that will require more government involvement in the economy, not less.

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Stupid Goddamned Centrists

Like I said, we know how this is going to play out:

A split has opened between Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) over whether to hold a vote before the midterm elections on extending the George W. Bush-era tax cuts for the middle class.

In closed-door leadership meetings this week, Pelosi has pushed for the House to act on the middle-income tax cuts before lawmakers bolt Washington for the campaign trail, while Hoyer wants the House to wait for the Senate to act first, according to Democratic aides.

The disagreement between the two party leaders reflects a broader divide in the Democratic Caucus. Centrist and vulnerable Democrats want to push a vote on the tax cuts until after the election, and many want a temporary extension on rates for the wealthy in addition to a permanent extension of the current rates for the middle class. Liberal Democrats want an immediate vote on extending the middle-class cuts, arguing that the move would give incumbents an act to tout on the campaign trail and would force Republicans into a political corner.

Is there ANYTHING that centrists and moderates will not do to hurt themselves? Anything? The public is livid about jobs, centrists oppose job creation efforts. The public wants the middle class tax cuts extended while the taxes on the rich ended, the centrists oppose that. And on and on and on.

And who is it that is going to get wiped out in the upcoming election? The centrists. Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to lose her seat. Maxine Waters ain’t going anywhere.

Are they just masochists? Could we just get all the centrists to wear a cilice? Would that be enough self-inflicted pain that maybe they would go along with some decent legislation that might save them?

Just idiots.

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Even the liberal New Republic

Maybe it’s because I just watched “Mad Men”, but I wonder if Marty Peretz was drunk when he wrote this:

The State of New York has no need for more mosques, since there are plenty of them. Furthermore, Muslims living in New York do not frequent their mosques on a daily basis; usually they go to them either on Saturdays or on Sundays, due to the nature of their work. Therefore, there is no real need for the building of the Cordoba Mosque; especially as the project has already provoked the sentiments of Americans, by reminding them of the attacks on 11 September, 2001, the Islamic conquest of Spain, as well as the tragic consequences of Islamic imperialism in general

The New Republic is not now an awful magazine. I like a lot of what I read there. I do wonder how Jon Chait and Jon Cohn and the rest feel about being this crackpot’s bitch, though. It can’t feel good.

Update. Peretz seems to have excerpted this from elsewhere. I was thrown by the length of the excerpt and the lack of punctuation at the end. And Peretz does describe the source as “phenomenon in Arab-Muslim society in its independence, honesty, unpredictability”.

Update update. Anyway, this is dumber than the excerpt:

In my view, the really modest struggle against the mosque is probably the closest thing we’ve had to a genuinely grass roots effort against the casual and elitist First Amendment fundamentalists.

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A commodity to be bought and sold

This weekend, if you visited the Daily Dish, you were greeted with a video ad brought to you “from the Mercedes-Benz inspiration lounge at the Aspen Ideas Festival.” That probably tells you everything you need to know about the Aspen Ideas Festival. But it’s not as bad as this:

Each weekday morning, Politico sends out an e-mail digest of energy news. And it has been sponsored, since its launch in May, by America’s Natural Gas Alliance.

“One solution for more abundant domestic energy is staring us in the face. . . . Today, the U.S. has more natural gas than Saudi Arabia has oil,” the blurb reads in part.

Is there a problem with one sponsor so heavily underwriting a journalistic product involving its industry?

“We don’t see any conflict at all,” says Kim Kingsley, a spokeswoman for Politico, which also offers tip sheets on such topics as technology (sponsored last week by Google), finances (GE Capital) and defense (EADS North America’s KC-45 tanker). “The newsroom produces the content for all of our morning products, and the sales side sells it.” She adds that “advertisers know they don’t buy any influence with Politico or any other media company when they buy an ad.” Some clients buy weeks at a time, but “no one can own a morning product indefinitely.”

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Why is establishment media neo-Hooverist?

Paul Krugman predicts, accurately, that establishment media will blame any Democratic losses this fall on “liberal overreach”. This criticism generally takes two forms: (1) accusations of unAmerican soshulism (sometimes more politely phrased) by right-wing pundits and (2) hand-wringing about the debt from center and “left-center” pundits.

I understand (1) perfectly well, but why (2)? Why has establishment media generally decided that debt is the worst problem ever? Where does this come from?

I honestly don’t know.

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Left behind

I tend to agree with Jon Chait’s answer to WHY DOES THE LEFT HATE OBAMA:

The interesting thing here is that the administration is paying attention to the left at all. During the Clinton administration, liberal complaints were almost totally off the national radar. The internet has given the left a stronger voice, and while that voice is often unreasonable, it’s valuable to have a political dialogue that doesn’t range from the unhinged right to the very moderate center-left, as we did in the 1990s and early Bush years.

Within establishment media, the dialogue still does range from the unhinged right to the very moderate center-left, but there is a slightly broader range within the blogosphere, and that should be seen as progress, not as further evidence of “Dems in disarray”.

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