I’m assuming there are games today.
More Up Is Downerism
Ed Morissey is pushing a video of Obama stumbling over words for a second, and apparently it was not exciting enough as is that they had to loop it several times to make it feel more awkward. At any rate, this is all part of a delightful little push by the right the last few weeks to inform us that Obama can’t communicate very well.
The first I remember of this nonsense is with Dean Barnett during the campaign (with a willing assist from serious reporter Jake Tapper), but in the past few weeks I have seen a concerted push. There was this piece by Alex Conant in the Politico about the myths of Obama:
2. Obama is a great communicator. Cut away the soaring rhetoric in his speeches, and the resulting policy statements are often vague, lawyerly and confusing. He is not plain-spoken: He parses his language so much that a casual listener will miss important caveats. That’s in part why he uses teleprompters for routine policy statements: He chooses his words carefully, relying heavily on ill-defined terms like “deficit reduction” (which means tax increases, rather than actual “savings”) and “combat troops” (as opposed to “all troops in harm’s way”).
Who is Alex Conant? Why, he is “a communications consultant who served as the Republican National Committee’s national press secretary during the 2008 presidential campaign.” An impartial source, no doubt.
Always eager to help a meme, the folks at the Politico chimed in again (remember the #1 rule for the schoolgirls at the Politico– will this get linked a lot?):
Of all the pitfalls Barack Obama might face in the presidency, here is one not many people predicted: He is struggling as a public communicator.
You can do your own search for Obama + teleprompter, but you shouldn’t be surprised. This is little more than the Rove strategy of attacking the strength of your opponent. One of Obama’s great skills is that he is a good communicator, so much so that the Republicans spent the previous year running around saying things like “just words” and trying to paint him as a celebrity.
So just realize what they are doing. And then get a laugh that the party who gave us eight years of a stammering George Bush and then followed it up with the rambling idiocy of Sarah Palin is seriously trying to pretend that Obama is a bad communicator. And if all else fails, watch this:
That, my friends, is a failure to communicate.
*** Update ***
I had forgotten how much fun that video was. I love that it starts with his ode to Hillary, in which he laments the media was too hard on her, as that was at the time part of their coordinated (and laughable) effort to woo the PUMA crowd. Also, at about 5 minutes in, the crowd “erupts” into a cheer and they give a crowd shot of about 20 people shouting “Go John McCain!” and waving one pathetic hand made sign that said “Mac Attack.” Good times. Also, this Toobin reaction was priceless:
Heh.
Conservatism as Urine
It isn’t just DougJ. I simply can not take any more of this narcissistic self-referential babble about the nature of conservatism:
Conservatism is “formless” like water: it takes the shape of its conditions, but always remains the same. This is why Russell Kirk calls conservatism the “negation of ideology” in The Politics of Prudence. It is precisely the formlessness of conservatism which gives it its vitality. Left alone, the spirit of conservatism is essentially what T.S. Eliot calls the “stillness between two waves of the sea” in “Little Gidding” of his Four Quartets. Conservatism is both like water and the stillness between the waves—the waves are not the water acting, but being acted upon; stillness is the default state of conservatism:
I am so sick and tired of these “esoteric” discussions about the flawless, formless, and timeless beauty of conservatism. It is utter nonsense. We got unchecked “conservatism” the past eight years, and instead of water, it felt more like urine, as they pissed all over us. Conservatism brought us an expanded surveillance state, intervention into a man’s marriage, unchecked budgets, war of aggression, torture, a rejection and mockery of both science and the rule of law, the unchecked executive branch, and on and on and on. The conservative standard bearers are now Sarah Palin and Eric Cantor and Rush Limbaugh and Joe the Plumber.
After getting hammered in two national elections, the rehabilitation of conservatism takes the form of these flowery paeans about the timeless wisdom of an ideology that is the “negation of ideology.” What a load of gibberish. At what point will these clowns realize that they sound like the Soviet apologists in the late 80’s and 90’s who wanted to tell us that communism didn’t fail, it just wasn’t properly implemented?
And for extra comedy, this bit of dribble comes by way of Sullivan, who found it from Rod Dreher. Rod Dreher. You remember him, right:
For all my excitement over Sarah Palin, there is a part of me that can’t commit to voting McCain-Palin yet. Last week at this time I was almost certainly not going to vote for McCain. Now I’m likely to do it. But what holds me back is what Clark Stooksbury speaks to in this post:
Dreher is free to vote for McCain to spite the Kos Kretins; but he will also be voting for war with Iran and pointless brinksmanship with Russia, funded by another mountain range of debt. A McCain vote also gives a ringing endorsement to the last eight years of unnecessary war, torture and incompetence. In other words, it is a vote to cut off his nose in order to spite his face.
That’s very succinctly and accurately put. If I vote McCain in the end, it will have to be in clear sight of these things, and with the faith that the risks that Clark rightly points out I’ll be taking are worth the rewards of a Palin ascendancy. In truth, as much as I like Palin, especially for the enemies she’s made, I don’t know that I can affirm the reward justifies the risk of a McCain presidency.
Anyone who gets excited by the idea of rule by Palin isn’t fit to drive a motor vehicle, let alone be at the forefront of a political movement. Don’t be fooled by the reformation efforts by Frum and Dreher and Douthat and the rest of the crowd of snake oil salesmen, because when the chips were down in November 2008, they still all saddled up and went to battle for a know-nothing ignoramus from Alaska and her geriatric side-kick. The country was in a tailspin, brought on by their party and their ideology (and formerly mine), both of which had been proven by that point to be bereft of ideas and solutions, and yet they still went to the voting booth and chose more of the same.
They chose to go down with the ship. Can’t they stay drowned?
*** Update ***
From the comments:
The “conservatism” that Sullivan is always going on about is a philosophical construct, not necessarily a political one. A philosophical construct that he has carefully crafted after many years of introspection and study*, and one that has little to offer in purely political terms; at least, not nowadays. If anything, Sullivan’s now more of a “libertarian” in his specific policy recommendations, after having disavowed his deranged love affair with militaristic big-government imperialism**.
The philosophical ideal of “Burkean conservatism” [Reliance on monotheism and other traditional institutions for social stability while very, very gradually modifying the existing system is preferable to any “radical” popular change based on ideology, due to a prudent fear of societal collapse and the blood of innocent people running in the streets] is not the same thing as the political ideal of American “conservatism” [which seems to me to be a bizarre amalgamation of anti-tax sentiment, frontier individualism, nationalism, corporate interest, anachronistic cultural sentiments (e.g., racism, sexism), and biblical fundamentalism].
Note well that there may be policies that one would support based on one’s philosophical conservatism that align with one’s political “conservatism” (e.g., voting against “redistributive” progressive income taxation, maybe), but the two are uneasy partners at best. In fact, the past eight years have shown the more honest philosophical conservatives that the Republican party under W. Bush was tremendously radical (in the philosophical sense) and sacrificed most notions of Burkean prudence for the sake of their political ideology.
That would be great if they (Sullivan excluded) didn’t keep trying to find excuses to marry philosophical conservatism with movement conservatism and modern brain-dead Republicanism.
*** Update ***
For the record, I’m not “mad” at Sullivan at all. I’m mad at the people who keep wanting to pretend that there is some sort of connection between the discussion above and the current Republican party and what is “conservative.” Sullivan has done an admirable job pointing out the distinctions. Others have not.
Most of all I’m mad at myself for all the stupid political decisions I supported and for supporting the GOP far longer than I should have. I’m mad at myself for denigrating the people who repeatedly said the war in Iraq was a bad idea and I dismissed them and mocked them.
I’m mad at the current messes we are in and my part in getting us there. I’m mad at my own stupidity. Hell, I open my archives from anywhere from the start of this blog until 2005-2006 and I am mad at what I read.
Also, Dreher apparently jumped off the Palin bandwagon late in the game:
The best case that can be made for John McCain is that he would serve as something of a brake on runaway liberalism. But the country would be at significantly greater risk of war with the intemperate and bellicose McCain in the White House. That was clear months ago, but his conduct during the fall campaign—especially contrasted with Obama’s steadiness—has made me even more uneasy. His selection of Sarah Palin, while initially heartening to populist-minded social conservatives, has proved disastrous. Though plainly a politician of real talent, the parochial Palin is stunningly ill-suited for high office, and that’s a terrible mark against McCain’s judgment.
As both a conservative and a Republican, I confess that we deserve to lose this year. We have governed badly and have earned the wrath of voters, who will learn in due course how inadequate the nostrums of liberal Democrats are to the crisis of our times. If I cannot in good faith cast a vote against the Bush years by voting for Obama, I can at least do so by withholding my vote from McCain.
While it is foolish to look forward to a decisive electoral defeat for one’s side, I can’t say that the coming rout will be a bad thing. The Right desperately needs to repent, rethink, and rebuild—and only the pain of a shattering loss will force conservatives to confront reality. Not only must there be a renewal of our political vision and message—and this time, dissenters from within the Right must be heard—but there must also be a realization at the grassroots that we have long given too much importance to politics and not enough to building cultural institutions at the local level.
Maybe I’m just being completely unfair and lashing out foolishly like I am prone to do, but at the same time I hardly think it is a profile in courage to oppose Palin after she has “proved disastrous.”
At the same time, maybe this is precisely the conversation conservatives need to have. I keep saying they should regroup and rethink, and then when they do it, I jump all over them, make all sorts of hot-headed proclamations and bad faith accusations and act like a total jerk. Most of all, though, I’m just depressed about the current state of the GOP. Even if there is merit to these conversations, the base isn’t listening.
Face The Nation
I don’t know who it is filling in for Bob Schieffer, and maybe it was the two guests (Grassley and Barney Frank), but it just seemed to be a completely different show and much better than the usual nonsense. I will have to read the transcript (I was cleaning and only sort of paying attention), but I don’t remember getting chest pains once.
If only the bankers knew about our great national mission
He should have gone on national TV and had the fireside chat with the country that is long overdue. That’s a talk where he lays out exactly how deep the crisis we are in is, exactly how much sacrifice we’re all going to have to make to get out of it, and then calls on those A.I.G. brokers — and everyone else who, in our rush to heal our banking system, may have gotten bonuses they did not deserve — and tells them that their president is asking them to return their bonuses “for the sake of the country.”
Had Mr. Obama given A.I.G.’s American brokers a reputation to live up to, a great national mission to join, I’d bet anything we’d have gotten most of our money back voluntarily. Inspiring conduct has so much more of an impact than coercing it. And it would have elevated the president to where he belongs — above the angry gaggle in Congress.
Leaving aside the fact that I don’t think that would have made anyone give back their money, it reminds me of this from David Broder about Bush:
But I listened in vain for any admission of what I and others consider the greatest moral failing of the Bush presidency — his refusal to ask any sacrifice from most of the American people when he put the nation on a wartime footing after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Bush authorized torture, used every sort of trick to violate the constitution, literally fiddled while New Orleans flooded, and left the country in a shambles. How on earth could not asking for sacrifice be his greatest moral failure? Obama is facing a catastrophic banking crisis and the Geithner plan has been found wanting in many influential quarters. How can a fireside chat be job number one?
Don’t get me wrong: if by “asked for sacrifice,” Broder means “rolled back his tax cuts,” then this was a great failing on Bush’s part (though it is still nowhere near his greatest failing and it’s not clear that’s what Broder means at all). And I agree that Obama could do a better job of describing the financial crisis to the public.
But to suggest over and over again that the main duty of the government is to tell the population what to do and how to feel is hopelessly naive, the sort of thing no one over the age of 12 should believe. It’s the same kind of thinking that makes our punditocracy hail an idiot like Mikheil Saakashvili as a hero of democracy because he likes to talk about freedom, the same kind that caused the media man-crushes on Huckabee and McCain (and, yes, it’s also part of the reason they liked Obama better than Hillary).
The president of the United States oversees a multi-trillion dollar budget, a vast foreign policy apparatus, countless scientific and judicial issues. The decisions a president makes about these things have profound effects, not just on the U.S. economy but possibly on the future of human civilization (see climate change and nuclear proliferation). How on earth can a few fireside chats and calls for sacrifice be the primary thing by which they are judged?
If only the bankers knew about our great national missionPost + Comments (64)
Tournament Open Thread
WVU is out so my interest has waned. Got the bed put together, mapped out the garden plot and planned a preliminary course of action, and now am going to watch some crappy movies. I have Body of Lies, Twilight, and W. to watch.
*** Update ***
I would like to take a moment and inform all of the people on this blog and elsewhere in my life who recommended Twilight to me that at some point, when you least expect it, I will punch you in the neck.
A Word of Caution
I just spent an hour trying to figure out how to get a five piece queen-size metal bed frame together and still ended up with an extra piece. Anyone who thinks I have any idea what I am talking about regarding the financial crisis should keep that in mind. I am clueless and frustrated and just trying to figure things out, which is harder and harder to do because nothing stays still long enough to get a feel for things and as soon as you think you have an idea as to what is going on, things change dramatically.
Unlike the bed frame, which was stationary, and I managed to make a hash of that anyway. I really hope this extra piece was optional.