There will be enough postmortems about the Coakley loss in Massachusetts.  Wonder how many of them will actually bother to mention that Massachusetts voters had the least cause to be upset about Obamacare, since they passed Romneycare in 2006 which is pretty much the same thing and they are perfectly happy with it.  It is a distinction that Senator-elect Brown (who helped craft Romneycare) has twisted himself into knots about in trying to clarify why he conceptually opposes extending what his state has (and it is a benefit he explicitly supports) to the national level.  See link.   While this hypocrisy has been highlighted often enough on various blogs, the inept Coakley campaign failed to properly utilize this manna from heaven.

Andrew Sullivan’s rant (link here) on the subject captures my feelings on Republican nihilism and the newly found advocates of fiscal prudence who are unwilling to implement it in a meaningful way and is quoted in full below:

Since so much of the energy behind the Brown candidacy seems to be driven by anti-government sentiment, why is someone like me – who actually criticized Bush for being big government long before these late-comers – so dismayed?

Here’s why. The rage is adolescent. It did not exist when the Republicans were in power and exploded government during years of economic growth. Fox News backed Bush to the hilt through it all, as he added mounds of unfunded entitlements to the next generation’s debt, and then brought Beck in as soon as Obama inherited the mess. Scott Brown, moreover, has no plans to cut the debt or control government: none. He is running in defense of every cent in Medicare. He wants to increase the deficit by more tax cuts. He favors an all-powerful executive branch that can suspend habeas corpus and torture people. He has no intention of cutting defense. His position on the uninsured is: get your own states to help. His position on soaring healthcare costs is: stop the first attempt to control them.

We hear Karl Rove lamenting big government! We hear Dick Cheney worrying about deficits! The cynicism here is gob-smacking. And the libertarian right is just happy to go along.

There is, moreover, the incredible lie that somehow all the debt that lies ahead was created by Obama in twelve months, in a recession, when austerity would be fatal. This was a lie propagated mercilessly by the FNC/RNC and by partisan bloggers like Glenn Reynolds. And it has stuck, as Obama has pressed for centrist reform between the screamers on the left and the haters on the right.

I’m sorry but this is not an anti-government vote. It’s a hissy fit because reality has finally hit and the conservative bromides of the 1980s work as poorly as the liberal bromides of the 1970s. If Brown were urging big, structural cuts in entitlements, if he were proposing junking health insurance reform because he has a plan to balance the budget in five years, if he were pledging to vote against the wars for the deficit’s sake, if he were proposing ways to restrain private healthcare costs and Medicare’s GOP-passed Medicare D – whose fiscal impact makes the current reform look like a tightwad’s – it would be one thing. But he isn’t and they aren’t.

They merely want to kill a reform presidency. They have no alternative. They have no policy that could restrain health insurance costs and the desperate plight of the uninsured. They have no plans for tackling climate change, when they can bring themselves to admit it exists. They have no plans to win or end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that Obama himself isn’t trying. They have no idea how to balance the budget – except more tax cuts!

There is the no substance (other than tax cuts in all scenarios) in the strategy that is supposed to revive the Republican party.    The intellectual dishonesty and the willful blindness of their recent record is also breathtaking.  Sometimes a country does deserve the people it elects.  But in the meantime blue-dog Democrats led by Evan Bayh are already preparing to run for the hills.

One question has always puzzled me.  If the blue dogs are so intent on being Republican-lite (Bayh, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu, etc. and the ever present narcissist Joe Liberman) how does it really help them against a charge that their state might as well elect the real thing.  There is a line between sensible moderation to reflect the values of your base and craven surrender at the first hint of Republican opposition, which the blue-dogs specialize in lately.  While the Democrats should not start weeding out moderates, it is past time for them to take a stand, grow a pair and identify what values are worth fighting (and if it comes to it, risking losing elections) for.  Otherwise they will by default return to their rudderless existence under George W. Bush, with a profoundly dispirited base.  It is also time for them to aggressively challenge the alternative set of facts that the Republicans have been peddling since inauguration, instead of relying on the media (which is wedded to the idea of balance for its own sake with no fact checking).

I will close with a clip by Jon Stewart a couple of days back, whose monologue directed at the Democrats at the end of the clip is very much on point.

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Britt Hume reacted to criticism for his pompous proselytizing on Fox News (see previous blog post here) by playing the victim card and making the tiresome accusation that this is part of the war against Christianity.  Most of this stems from a grouse that the law and the Constitution require equal treatment of Christianity with other faiths (Oh the horror!!!) with little grounding in fact.  Ask Congressman Keith Ellson who was savaged by parts of the right for having the temerity to take his oath of office on the book of his faith – the Quran.

I will outsource the  further exposure of Britt Hume’s ridiculousness to the satirist most often linked on this blog:

From January 4, 2010:

Follow up from From January 5, 2010:

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Jon Stewart starts  off the year strong with a wonderful skewering of the performance of the intelligence agencies and the predictable chest thumping partisan response from Republicans (clip at end of post).

The Republican response has been particularly distressing: from banging the war drums to enter the Yemeni quagmire, repeating calls to bring back torture and attacking the rule of law by trying to push what will be an open and shut case into military tribunals (somehow the court system worked just fine for the shoe bomber Richard Reid).  All of this is a part of a strategy to play the Democrats are weak on terror card with little attention to whether any of this posturing actually works or makes America safer.  The father of the underpants bomber was calling the United States to turn his kid in.  Would this happen if the United States followed Pat Buchanan’s barbaric call to deny medical aid or the calls to torture him for information he probably does not have?  The right still does not understand just how potent a recruiting tool Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were for Al Qaeda.  And so far nobody has pointed to any useful information the willful law breaking produced that was not being obtained from other legal sources.  It also appears that some of the torture occurred because the prisoners were not giving the answers Dick Cheney and his acolytes wanted to hear.

This blinkered world-view ignores just how much Al Qaeda’s nihilistic philosophy and willingness to shed Muslim blood have cost them support in the Arab world.  Pakistan (while not Arab) is a good example of this.  While Pakistanis remain deeply in denial about the origins of extremism in their country, the vicious attacks on civilians have turned public opinion against these thugs.  An overreaction of the sort counseled by George Bush’s homeland security advisor Frances Fargos Townsend vaguely threatening an invasion of Yemen would be just what Al Qaeda wants.  Have the United States invade yet another Muslim country (in the Arab peninsula no less) that would make it easier for them to claim that the United States is an enemy of Islam.

Then there is the call to engage in racist profiling.  As George Bush’s CIA Director and Homeland Security Secretary note how profiling can be easily sidestepped.  After all the underpants bomber as a Nigerian would not have shown up on typical terrorist profiles.

It is understandable to tighten up security procedures to prevent attacks.  But the ugly reality is that it is impossible to prevent all attacks from a group that probably numbers about a 1,000 people world wide.  If fear of Al Qaeda starts a downward slide to a police state, Al Qaeda will have won.  Using a hammer to swat a fly will leave a gaping hole in the fabric of the idea and values of America.  This long piece from the New York Times is a good read on how the administration struggles to find a balance between the values and the security while avoiding the pointless and probably harmful chest thumping that Dick Cheney would like.

Meanwhile the people calling for draconian police action continue to compare health care reform to tyranny and a Republican Congressional candidate in Minnesota says defeating liberals is a bigger battle than defeating terrorism.  The mind reels.

Enjoy the clip.

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Our beloved tea-baggers (aka Republicans, Fox News Anchors and other mostly white folk still upset about the result of the 2008 elections) had another gathering in Washington to protest the horrors that would happen if health care access was expanded to people who do not have it (even with this flawed bill) and to make yet another brilliant comparison on how health care equates to the holocaust.  I must have missed all the midnight round-ups that seem to occur in the rest of the Western World that has universal health care.  And these are the same patriots fighting tyranny who remained silent when the previous administration asserted a right to detain American citizens indefinitely without trial, to wiretap phones without warrants and claimed that they could choose what laws and constitutional provisions they wanted to follow.  My rant done, I will let Jon Stewart continue his usual brilliant skewering of the hyperbolic nonsense that has enthralled the Republican base.

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In the last decade it has become fashionable for politicians to disclaim any academic knowledge or broader understanding of the world beyond to assure voters that they are just like them.  It came to the forefront in 2000 when two silver spoon ivy league graduates with mediocre college grades faced off for the presidency.  The difference was that one almost reveled in his ignorance and the other over the years had developed a wonkish reputation on the environment and technology matters.  The pattern was repeated in 2004 when another silver spoon ivy leaguer challenged George W. Bush for the presidency and where his grasp of foreign languages was deemed a liability, Karl Rove infamously telling the media that John Kerry looked French.

In 2008 Barack Obama’s double ivy league education was used to classify him has an out of touch elitist.  All of this conveniently ignored the fact that unlike Messers Gore, Bush and Kerry (and for that matter even John McCain whose lineage of admirals likely eased his path into the naval academy over mediocre grades) Obama (like Bill Clinton before him) was a self made man (and for those crying affirmative action he did not disclose his race on his law school application).  And then came the Sarah Palin phenomenon where the Republican candidate for Vice President almost gloried in her ignorance of world affairs beyond the canned talking points.  (See previous blog post here).

Anti-intellectualism is not unknown in American history.  Adlai Stevenson was infamously dismissed as an egghead.  And book knowledge is also not a guarantee of good governance.  But taken too far it can have disturbing results where politicians cannot grasp the difference between faith and science (case in point the ridiculous attempts to term creationism as science).  It is also disturbing in a country that desperately needs to maintain its technological edge but has had to import its scientists for many decades.

This matter came to mind when I watched the Jon Stewart clip below yesterday.  It is bad enough that Fox seems to insist that its women anchors wear skirts with high hemlines, possibly to distract the audience from the factual liberties that happen there by “accident” from time to time.  But having a host (in Stewart’s words) “dumb herself down to connect with an audience who sees intellect as an elitist flaw” (or perhaps to connect with the dim-bulbs who are her co-hosts) seems a bit much.

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Previous post here.  Now Jon Stewart’s turn to engage in mockery with an amusing sequence at the end regarding Swiss neutrality.

UPDATE: Particularly amusing is the portion when Oliver raises the issue of Nazi gold to be met with stony silence.  The ambassador is a good sport though on the litmus test.  Meanwhile a Swiss politician puts his foot in his mouth raising the hackles of the Jewish community as well.

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• Obama donors are feeling left out as they lose some of the traditional access perks of fund raisers.  Fits with a populist theme of the campaign, but am not sure why giving freebies to donors that soothe their ego as opposed to rewriting legislation to suit their needs is all that bad.  A string of unhappy donors could bite the Obama campaign fund raising machine in the butt in 2012.
• Yglesias highlights the continuing struggles and hypocrisy of main stream media in dealing with Internet based rivals. It is bad enough that Rupert Murdoch whines that Google and blogs like this one (well maybe not this one) who link to his sites are parasites, but now they complain when the sites do the actual journalistic legwork.  While complaining about the websites being ideologically slanted, the same main stream media rallied around Fox as a legitimate news operation.  This Jon Stewart video link in a  previous blog post is worth watching.
• Daniel Gross thinks the markets overreacted to the Dubai debt crisis last week.  Maybe someone can recommend an expert from the Chicago school to explain to him how our efficient markets are composed of rational actors instead of a bunch of traumatized lemmings.
• China tries to rescue the story of Mulan from the Disney interpretation.  Must be galling to see the “definitive” interpretation of a historic/legendary icon be a foreign version with the Disney formula of communicative animals and a klutzy dragon. Reminds me of the controversy in India about Peter Brook’s version of the Mahābhārat.

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Jon Stewart catches Sean Hannity using footage of another rally to make the Bachmann intimidation rally seem bigger.

Of course this is not the first time Stewart has had fun at the expense of Fox News. See here.  This is also not the first time Fox has spliced video feeds, though they did apologize in that instance.

To be fair to the employees of Fox News, not everybody parrots the company line.  From earlier this summer watch as the Fox News anchor (who does not appear to be one of their opinion talking heads), desperately tries to bring Liz Trotta back on the liberal media bashing meme he was trying to create.  Instead she eviscerates Sarah Palin’s credentials and gets rapidly cut off as she mentions this Vanity Fair article.

Then an honorable mention to Shepard Smith who does try to live up to the Fox news motto.

Previously posted on the administration calling out Fox.  Its been amazing to see the mainstream media rally to Fox’s defense and pretend that what the Obama administration is doing something new…except that the Bush administration did the same thing to MSNBC this last year.  But the reason for this post is the absolutely brilliant, must see video from Jon Stewart skewering Fox.  Enjoy!