Extortion? Blackmail? Or the normal political process?

So, I've seen someone suggest that Harry Reid and the Democrats in the US Senate¹ are guilty of extortion or blackmail, because they won't agree to take up any government funding bills from the House that don't also completely fund the "Affordable Care Act."  I just want to say that, whether or not you agree with what they're doing, that characterization is obviously preposterous. 

Just as the House has the power of the purse, the Congress as a whole has to agree on all appropriations.  If Senate Democrats really think that immediate and full funding of that particular law, despite the fact that the infrastructure is clearly not ready for, and despite the fact that the President has already unilaterally (and almost certainly unconstitutionally) suspended parts of it for a year, is the way to go, they've got the right to use that as a negotiating position. 

And it is uncivil to call the Senate Democrats and their supporters, "economic terrorists" or "blackmailers" just because they are taking a position that they feel is in the best interest of the country, regardless of whether or not I agree with them.  Obviously, that goes for the President (against whom there has also been a lot of name-calling by people who simply have a different opinion on what the best course of action for the country is) as well.  (Of course, nothing he's said is really relevant yet anyway, because the Senate hasn't actually taken up any of the spending bills that the House has passed, so there's nothing for him to sign or veto yet.)




¹ - OK,  I'm pretty sure that this person was actually talking about the Republicans in the House.  Which changes exactly nothing, about this commentary, other than whose Ox is being gored...

"Mitt Humiliates The Mainstream Media..."

John Nolte

[T]his morning the American people trust the media even less than they did the night before -- and for one very simple reason: they were lied to … again. Where was the bumbling, elitist, out of touch, awkward, wife-killing, gay-hating, corporate vulture who tortures dogs and stumbles through Europe like Chevy Chase in a "Vacation" sequel?

Well, he didn’t show up last night because that's not who Mitt Romney is. That Mitt Romney is a media creation manufactured out of lies and desperation by those who spend 24 hours a day crafting trip wires, fabricating gaffes, and standing before the elephant of Barack Obama's failures and asking, "What elephant?"

Yup. As some of us have noted. Lord knows that I had problems with Mitt Romney as a Governor, I've got problems with Mitt Romney as a candidate, and I'll have problems with Mitt Romney as a President. But there's not a hint of any reason to have problems with Mitt Romney as a man, and that's where the Obama campaign, with its willing accomplices in the press, has been trying to win this election. They've created a caricature of Mitt Romney to attack, and attack it they have.

The real Mitt, as opposed to the straw Mitt, is tougher for them to deal with...

This is rich...

President "I won" disparaging Romney as divisive...

Twitter / BarackObama: Being President of the United ...

And I know he said much the same thing on David Letterman last night.

I don't really expect the fact checkers to call him on it. But he is the most divisive man who has held that office in my lifetime, possibly ever.

Truth

This is obviously true, which makes it shocking to see someone actually writing it...

Verdict is in: Obama levels more personal attacks

A crabby, negative campaign that has been more about misleading and marginal controversies than the major challenges facing the country? Barack Obama and Mitt Romney can both claim parenthood of this ugly child.

But there is a particular category of the 2012 race to the low road in which the two sides are not competing on equal terms: Obama and his top campaign aides have engaged far more frequently in character attacks and personal insults than the Romney campaign.

With a few exceptions, Romney has maintained that Obama is a bad president who has turned to desperate tactics to try to save himself. But Romney has not made the case that Obama is a bad person, nor made a sustained critique of his morality a central feature of his campaign.

Obama, who first sprang to national attention with an appeal to civility, has made these kind of attacks central to his strategy. The argument, by implication from Obama and directly from his surrogates, is not merely that Romney is the wrong choice for president but that there is something fundamentally wrong with him.

As noted. Repeatedly.

Well, yeah...

Glenn Reynolds:

Let me be clear: All you people who were playing the have-you-no-decency card under Bush, but who aren’t screaming just as loud now — which is pretty much all of you people who were playing the have-you-no-decency card under Bush — were and are miserable lying hacks. And I thank Obama for making that perfectly clear, at least.

Obama super-donor calls black Republican "Ape"

Loathsome "comedian" Bill Maher:

...the idea that the blame for our government’s dysfunction is equally shared by the parties just is a giant, steaming mound of horse**** and anyone who has paid attention to politics over the last 20 years knows it. Or as I like to call it, “The Rise of the Party of the Apes.”
...

Or take Allen West. Seriously, take him to the padded cell and give him 20 CCs of the high test. Ornstein and Mann start off their Post op-ed by noting that recently Rep. Allen West said that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. And not one Republican said, “Allen, come on. You’re making us look dumb.”

Allen West is a black man.

Bill Maher, "comedian" and million-dollar donor to the Obama re-election SuperPAC, says that this black man belongs to the "Party of the Apes."  This black man is one of three members of the "Party of the Apes" that is mentioned by name. Think about that for a moment. Consider what might the media firestorm might look like if a conservative were to call the Democrats the "Party of the Apes" and then make a similar comment about Barack Obama. That person would be lucky to have the damage limited to losing his or her career.

Not long ago, there was an article in some leftist publication or other about Donald Trump's birtherism, and slamming Mitt Romney for refusing to get into the "denounce your supporters" game. This call was echoed all over twitter and facebook by the members of the "civil discourse" (from Republicans) and bipartisanship (from Republicans) brigade.  I expect no such media pressure on Obama to repudiate Bill Maher.



(For the record, I do not believe that Maher is making a racist statement here [even though he supports many explicitly racist policies]. I think it's a wrong statement, an idiotic and offensive statement, but not a racist one. I don't think he's explicitly calling out West as an ape because he's black. But by the rules of interpretation foisted upon us by the American political left and its media wing, a Republican making a similar comment would be pilloried.)

More civility from the left

I repeat myself here, but calls for "civil discourse" from Democrats and the media (OK, redundant) are "not a general principle, but a political weapon that the left can use to cudgel the right."

Well, here's more civil discourse from the left.

Teamsters President James Hoffa said there's been a war on workers.

"We've got a bunch of people there that don't want the president to succeed, and they're called the tea party," he said.

"Let's take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong," he said.

Of course, the President will take the earliest possible moment to encourage everyone to speak in a civil manner, to "make sure that we're talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds."

Ha ha ha...

Ok, what actually happened is that the President took the same stage and told everyone how happy he was to be there with the great labor leaders, and questioned whether Republicans in Congress "will put country before party" (which they would do, apparently, by passing whatever jobs bill the President puts forward.)

More civil discourse

If we all think back eight months, to those grim January days that followed the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, the foremost political virtue that anyone on the left could name was "civil discourse." The media immediately and publicly linked the shooting to a map of "targeted districts" on Sarah Palin's facebook page, and began a drumbeat, echoed and amplified by Democratic officials, on the dangers of "political violence" resulting from "violent rhetoric." The fact that there was no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the shooter, a clearly mentally disturbed individual whose antipathy to Giffords long predated Palin's map, was even aware of Palin, her map, or anything else related to electoral politics, made no difference. The story line was the rhetoric of the right.

Some of us pointed out, at the time, that this cry for civility was both one-sided and hypocritical.

I noted that

I'm also tired of [political incivility] becoming an issue only when those on the right do it. I'd take the complaints of liberals a lot more seriously if there were a demonstrated consistency in their opposition to crude political discourse, not just using it as another partisan tool to bash conservatives.

And

In actuality, the objection to "legislating morality" turns out to be, much like the current call for "civil discourse," not a general principle, but a political weapon that the left can use to cudgel the right.

So now, having lost (or at least having the perception that they've lost) another political battle, what are we seeing and hearing from the left?

Elected Democrats:

Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit, according to several sources in the room.

Biden was agreeing with a line of argument made by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) at a two-hour, closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting.

“We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

The New York Times' Joe Nocera:

You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.

The New York Times' Maureen Dowd:

Tea Party budget-slashers didn’t sport the black capes with blood-red lining beloved by the campy Vincent Price or wield the tinglers deployed by William Castle. But in their feral attack on Washington, in their talent for raising goose bumps from Wall Street to Westminster, this strange, compelling and uncompromising new force epitomized “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and evoked comparisons to our most mythic creatures of the night...the Tea Party slashers roaming the corridors of the Capitol have feasted without resistance on delicious victims and will only grow bolder.

The New York Times' Thomas Friedman:

If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission.

(Friedman, if you recall, is the one that laments the fact that Obama doesn't have the same powers in America as the "reasonably enlightened" Chinese dictators do in China...)

Anyway, it's all par for the course. I'm going to let Jonah Goldberg finish this one up...

The Today Show even had Debbie Wasserman Schultz on this morning for five minutes talking about Giffords. No one thought to ask her what she thought of Biden’s comments? It’s not like she’s the Democratic party’s national spokesperson or anything. Oh, wait. She is!

Instead, after the full ten minutes on Giffords, we get an update about the debt-limit situation (which is supposedly an Armageddon-level issue) and Kelly O’Donnell basically carries water for Biden on the issue by completely muddying whether he said anything of the sort at all. (His office says, no, no the vice president didn’t call them terrorists, he just politely agreed with all the Democratic congressmen in the room that they “acted like terrorists.” Ah, this is a distinction a team of a million Jesuits working around the clock would have a hard time slicing.)

And yet you know the next time there’s the slightest, remotely exploitable tragedy or hint of violence, the same reporters, editors, producers, and politicians are going to insist that blood was spilled because of the right wing’s rhetoric.

Well, go to Hell. All of you.

Open-minded (as long as you agree...)

There's an interesting - and telling - comment inside this Slate piece. (H/T Instapundit)

Inside Match.com:

As a result, Match began "weighting" variables differently, according to how users behaved. For example, if conservative users were actually looking at profiles of liberals, the algorithm would learn from that and recommend more liberal users to them. Indeed, says Thombre, "the politics one is quite interesting. Conservatives are far more open to reaching out to someone with a different point of view than a liberal is." That is, when it comes to looking for love, conservatives are more open-minded than liberals.

I find this not surprising in the least. And it's based on something that I noticed years ago, and it seems to play out in almost all political discussions. In short form, it's this:

Conservatives think Liberals are wrong. Liberals think Conservatives are evil.

Is that a generalization? An overstatement? Sure.

But there's a lot of truth there, too. Look at any of the "hot-button" issues over which there's a partisan divide, and you'll see a tendency for Liberals to disparage the Conservatives as "greedy" or "sexist" or "racist" or "fascist" or "homophobic." Are there legitimate arguments to be made against the minimum wage or higher tax rates or AFDC or WIC or universal health care? No, opponents are greedy, selfish, "they've got theirs and don't want to help anyone else." Are there legitimate arguments to be made against affirmative action? "Sexists! Racists!" Are there legitimate arguments to be made against government recognition of gay marriages? "Homophobes!" Are there legitimate police powers that the Federal government should exercise in combating terrorists? "Fascists!"

Am I saying that Conservatives do not engage in name-calling? Not at all. But the labels are qualitatively different. There's a difference between the labels "knee-jerk bleeding heart tree-hugger" and "sexist racist fascist." The former might describe someone who, as cliche might put it, "cares too much."¹ The latter just describes a bad person.

Again, this doesn't describe everyone. It's a generalization. But it's a generalization that describes a lot of political interactions...





¹ - And none of this is surprising when you look at the actual policy discussions. The Liberal point-of-view is always aimed at specific happy outcomes. Unfortunately, the prescriptions tend to assume that intending the specific happy outcomes is good enough. "Everyone should get a first-rate education" means "spend more money on education" and "government loans for college." "It's hard financially to be a teenage mother" translates into "give money to teenage girls who get pregnant." "It's not fair that some people have more than others," so we institute graduated tax rates. Whether the proposed solutions actually address the problems, never mind actually fix them without making anything worse, is rarely addressed.

Let's look, for a shining recent example, at the banking/housing/mortgage industry. If we start with the position that "everyone should be able to afford a home of their own," then it makes all kinds of sense to start pushing banks to give mortgages to pretty much anyone who wants one, regardless of qualifications. So we did. What results from that? Well, more people buy houses, that's true. And, as we increase the number of people that can afford a mortgage to buy a house, we increase the "quantity demanded" of housing. Which pushes up the price. But the government, in the form of Fannie and Freddie, step in and continue to push money into the housing market, and you end up with a) an enormous bubble of b) overpriced housing held by c) people who really shouldn't have qualified for the mortgages. And what happens when the bubble bursts, and the people who couldn't afford the mortgages can't make the payments? Why, the quantity demanded drops, the price drops, and now even people who legitimately qualified for the mortgages they got are underwater.

Sometimes, the short-term "compassionate" thing to do is not in the long-term best interest of the one on the receiving end. And many times, there are negative externalities, so that not only are the intended beneficiaries harmed, but many others who had nothing directly to do with the transaction. As we've all witnessed over the last few years.

Helpful discussion

One of the think-tanks that I pay some attention to is the Cato Institute, a libertarian group. While I'm culturally and by temperament conservative, I tend towards the libertarian position politically. And Cato is not only taking the position that "marriage" should be extended to include same-sex couples (which I understand), they're actively pushing it (which I don't). So they keep posting pro-same-sex marriage videos on their facebook page and long "discussions" ensue, with 50 people that don't know each other repeating the same arguments that don't change anyone's minds.

I'm not going to talk about same-sex marriage today. But there are a couple of repeated arguments that are particularly tiresome, particularly pointless, so I've got a couple of pieces of advice, one for each side, for people who want to discuss these issues in facebook length pieces.

• First, for the people who are opposed to same-sex marriage - stop quoting Leviticus. Unless you're actively working to get the government to stop Burger King from selling the bacon double-cheeseburger because it contains pork and combines meat and dairy, you're not really all that interested in enshrining the Levitical laws as public policy. So don't make that your argument of first resort. Or even your argument of last resort. Everyone already knows that the Old Testament explicitly condemns homosexuality. You know it, I know it, the people that you're arguing with know it. They know it and they don't care. You're not changing their position, you're hardening it. The people for whom Leviticus is relevant to this discussion are already on your side.
  
  And the Bible is not the source of civil authority in the United States. So it's an appeal to authority, but an authority without appeal to many of those against whom you're making the appeal. It's a waste of time and an irritant. And when you use that argument, it implies that you don't have another one. If that's all you've got, if that's the argument, then it actively encourages the pro- side to assume that there's no real argument to be made. So just stop it.
• And secondly, for those on the pro-same-sex marriage side - stop throwing out the word "equality" as if it's a magical talisman that justifies everything. As is the case with the Leviticus argument, the people on the other side have all heard it and don't agree.
  
  The reason that they don't agree is that the discussion is about two fundamentally different things. You may see them as equal, but clearly, others do not. The appeal to "equality" is a moral appeal, an appeal that works only for a shared moral framework and outlook, and that doesn't exist here. I know it make you feel as if you've got the moral high ground, but you're actually just on totally different ground. Logically, the "equality" argument requires that the following be true:
  

  Relationships between man and man, and relationships between woman and woman, differ in no fundamental ways relevant to the institution of marriage from relationships between man and woman.

  That is clearly, obviously, patently not true. It's not even "debateably true." It is clearly false. The only conceivable way to get to anything like that is to define marriage as something like "an institution which exists solely to create government-sanctioned sexual partnerships." That's not how it's developed, and it's not what people believe it to be. Therefore, the "equality" argument is no more relevant than the Leviticus argument. What you are seeking isn't "marriage equality," it is a redefinition of the institution of marriage. Failure to acknowledge that is failure to argue in good faith.

Throw Grandma From the Train

As I've noted before, the cries for "civility" in politics tend to be nothing but a cudgel for the left (and the media [but I repeat myself]) to use against any intemperate remark from a Republican, however mild. But Jake Tapper's identified a classic example from this President.

President Obama at the GOP House retreat, January 2010:

“We're not going to be able to do anything about any of these entitlements if what we do is characterize whatever proposals are put out there as, ‘Well, you know, that's -- the other party's being irresponsible. The other party is trying to hurt our senior citizens. That the other party is doing X, Y, Z.”

President Obama [yesterday]:

“One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates…This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. And who are those 50 million Americans? Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.”

Utterly loathsome. Despicable.

Well, yeah - what did you think it meant?

Ace notes Obama praising Reagan, and he's not buying it. As he shouldn't. Because, as he correctly observes,

...[P]raising the dead is pretty cheap theater, because the dead cannot run for election nor campaign for candidates nor write op-eds in response. (Reagan, were he alive, might have mentioned to Obama that it wasn't all about his messaging, but rather the substance of his policies, which generally worked and worked well.)

This is of a piece with liberals' dishonest comparison of all living, active politicians to the previous generation's dead or inactive ones -- and of course the current crop is always the worst ever. Praising the dead is simply a rhetorical gimmick to purchase some unearned credibility -- see, I can praise my opponents, so that means I'm objective and fair-minded and should be listened to in my other judgments.

And then finishes by asking "So is this 'civility' then? Dishonesty and hypocrisy and manipulation, and all of a cheap and shabby sort besides?" Which I answer in the post title. Or, as I put it last week, calls for civility are "not a general principle, but a political weapon that the left can use to cudgel the right." That's the sort of thing that happens when the nominal referees (the media) are actually playing for one of the teams...

Whose reality is this, anyway?

The NY Times editorial this morning, Poverty and Recovery, is interesting in its utter and complete disconnectedness from the reality of the world in which I live.

In 2008, the first year of the Great Recession, the number of Americans living in poverty rose by 1.7 million to nearly 47.5 million. While hugely painful, that rise wasn’t surprising given the unraveling economy. What is surprising is that recent census data show that those poverty numbers held steady in 2009, even though job loss worsened significantly that year.

Clearly, the sheer scale of poverty — 15.7 percent of the country’s population — is unacceptable. But to keep millions more Americans from falling into poverty during a deep recession is a genuine accomplishment that holds a vital lesson: the safety net, fortified by stimulus, staved off an even more damaging crisis.

Congress should take a good look at those numbers, and consider that lesson carefully, before it commits to any more slashing and burning.

A couple of things...

• "the safety net, fortified by stimulus, staved off an even more damaging crisis" - Contrary to "staving off an even more damaging crisis," in the world in which I live, the stimulus was a key component of, and contributor to, the crisis that took place.
• "slashing and burning..." - In exactly which universe has "slashing and burning" taken place? Or even been proposed? The Federal government spent an estimated 35% more in 2010 than it did in 2007. The Federal government is spending, as it has nearly every year since the early 40's, about one of every five dollars of wealth that Americans produce. Speaking as someone who would LOVE to see some "slashing and burning" in the Federal budget, I ask, again, where the heck is it?

Oh, one more thing on that "slashing and burning." Has not the NY Times been among the outlets that has spent the last week and a half chastising Americans for un civil language in our political discourse? Isn't "slashing and burning" a little harsh as rhetoric coming from those with the language sensitivity of the discourse nannies at the New York Times?

House Set to Launch Health Law Challenge

Remember how the Democrats reached across the aisle during the health care debate? Remember how every Republican objection was respected? How they sought for a bipartisan compromise and avoided any hint of partisanship? Remember the high "tone" of the debate, the respect for those that disagreed, from President "I won" Obama all the way down to Rep. "Republicans want you to just die quickly" Grayson?

Yeah, me neither. But they're all for it now...

Democratic Rep. James Clyburn told Fox News he welcomes the upcoming debate. "The question is, what will be the tone?" he added, urging Republicans to stop describing the bill as "job-killing." [LB: "because that makes it harder for us to get re-elected when we support it."]

Clyburn predicted that an all-out repeal would go nowhere. But he indicated a willingness to "modify" parts of the legislation that could be improved.

"I believe that we all remember that when we passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we had to modify three or four times -- it was done in a bipartisan way. Same thing with the Voting Rights Act. So let us modify the health care law in a bipartisan way. But this whole stuff of repealing it, throwing it out and starting all over, that's not going to happen," the South Carolina congressman said.

I actually had a fairly strong reaction to this. But I'm watching my words now, trying to elevate and maintain a "civil" level of discourse. So let me just say this:

Dear Representative Clyburn,

Go to hell.

Sincerely...