Towards the end of George W's second term, going into the presidential campaign season of 2008, the Republicon Party had dealt the Democrats an unbeatable hand; a Royal Flush.
Stunningly, the Democrats never played that hand. They couldn't even recognize that they were holding an Ace, King, Queen, Jack and 10, let alone that they all happened to be in the same suit.
Four years later, with the Dems still holding the same cards while going into the ‘fiscal-cliff’ negotiations over the budget, they were given a second opportunity to play that hand when the Republicons went full-bore far-right-lunatic-fringe Kenyan-birther community-organizer hip-hop-barbeque apologizing-for-America terrorist-sympathizing-appeaser Muslim-infiltrating black-helicopter death-panel Hitler-socialist second-amendment-remedy mooching- 47% legitimate-rape Acorn-stole-the-election Obama-is-the-Anti-Christ nuts and blew their chance to take over Government. (See my previous post for an elaboration)
However, in one of the most disgusting displays of political ineptitude in American history, Obama and the Dems decided to discard their Ace, King and Queen in order to play a pair of fucking Jacks!
My card playing example may not be a perfect metaphor for the game of negotiating – in the game of poker the players keep their cards hidden before playing their hands. But only a terrible negotiator keeps his cards hidden before negotiating.
The strategy of poker is to keep your cards hidden until the final wager so that you can bluff the other players. Keeping your cards hidden is what makes your position stronger.
The strategy of negotiating is to put all of your cards on the table before you start negotiating. Exposing your cards beforehand is what makes your position stronger.
I do think, however, that my metaphor works pretty well as far as illustrating how utterly inept Obama and the Dems are at the game of negotiating. The best example of this is President Obama’s obsessive compulsion in making the compromise position his starting position. He seems to do this all the time. And then from that point he concedes more than half way to the outrageously unreasonable ultra-far-right position! This is infuriating.
Then, to add insult to injury, Obama gets called a Stalinist dictator by the right-wingers.
Here are some perfect examples.
During the healthcare reform negotiations we had a situation where, due to the huge gaping inadequacies of the free-market model of health insurance, millions of Americans were uninsured, resulting in the premature deaths of thousands of people every single year. You’d think this should be a cause of concern for everyone, regardless of whether or not they had adequate insurance themselves. Yet at the time the Republiconservatives were telling us that the USA had the best and greatest healthcare system in the world and nothing needed to be changed -- except for the money we were spending on the uninsured poor. That needed to be cut drastically.
Now there was a very simple and very proven solution to this problem. It’s called single-payer universal healthcare. Every other civilized country in the world has it. They cover all their citizens at about half the cost we do for only covering some. This solution would not only have solved the uninsured problem, it would have solved our Medicaid and Medicare problem too. It would have solved the problem of preexisting illnesses and losing your insurance if you lost your job. It would have covered every American young, old, poor or sick. It would have been the equivalent of a humongous tax cut for businesses and corporations by relieving them from the burden of providing health insurance to their employees. (Just imagine what a boon this would have been to small businesses) It would have solved the deficit/debt problem in one fell swoop. How? By cutting our medical costs – the biggest driver of future federal spending -- in half!
How the fuck do you lose an argument like this with those facts on your side?
Well, the most surefire way is to not even make the argument in the first place.
Instead of making single-payer his starting position, like he should have, Obama made what should have been the compromise position, the Public Option, his opening bid. Then he caved on that and settled for a convoluted mess that subsidizes private companies with tax-payer money, forces Americans to purchase a defective product and does nothing to lower healthcare costs. And here’s the kicker. This monstrosity was concocted by that bastion of conservatism, The Heritage Foundation. (That’s the think tank where the notorious ultra-right-wing reactionary Jim DeMint left his Senate seat to head) Even though ‘Obamacare’ maintained the conservalibertarian preference of putting a money-hungry private company between you and your doctor, the right called it socialism.
Another perfect example is the Royal Flush which sixteen years (Reagan and Bush Jr.) of supply-side/starve-the-beast economics handed the Dems.
These policies caused most of the problems that we face today and that fact should have been enough to totally discredit the Republicon Party. But the Dems were unable to fully explain to the American people the implications of these policies, including the damage they caused. This failure allowed the Recons to actually put the Dems on the defensive by blaming these problems on out of control big government spending, the ‘welfare state’ and ‘the entitlement culture.’
The Recons have used this narrative very effectively for a long time to brow beat Dems and libs with. They have convinced most people that this is true. We’ve heard it so many times it must be true. But the facts, which are borne out by the statistics, show that supply-side/starve-the-beast policies are to blame.
The fallacy of the Republiconservative narrative was never fully dissected by the Dems. They allowed themselves to be intimidated by those arguments for many years, which allowed the Recons to go unchallenged. Only late in this recent campaign season did the libs and Dems start to present the facts that refuted the Republiconservative rhetoric.
There are many aspects to the Republicon policies that started with Reagan, each one of which requires a separate post to explain. The first one I plan to tackle is tax policy since that is the one thing that the Recons fight the hardest about as evidenced by the current budget negotiations.
The single most cherished belief of Republiconservalibertarians is the fantasy of an infallible, magically powered ability of tax cuts to cure everything from cancer to hoarseness.
The utter, miserable failure of the Bush tax cuts to produce any of the wonderful things that the Republiconservalibertarians swore that they would – except for putting tons more money in the hands of the ‘job creators’ -- is the Ace in the hand that the Recons dealt the Dems.
Stay tuned for my next post where I will give a close examination of the disparity between Republiconservalibertarian rhetoric and reality.
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Sunday, December 2, 2012
As Limbag Looks for Excuses the Truth Is Ignored
Conservatives have been telling us for a long, long time that the U.S. is a center-right country. This mantra has been repeated endlessly over the years by the number one conservative propagandist; right-wing radio blowhard, Rush Limbag. Rush’s talking points are accepted as absolute truth by the conservative community then disseminated throughout the media and the Republicon Party and then repeated at every possible opportunity.
At many times Mitt Romney seemed to be quoting Rush verbatim during his campaign and even echoed Rush’s explanation for why Obama won the election: he bribed the mooching takers with even more gifts and presents than they already suck out of the pockets of the producing makers.
Rush has now been calling Obama Santa Claus and playing Christmas song parodies of Obama telling the lazy parasites not to work because Obama Clause has a sack of free money and cell phones for them. The flat screen TV’s are already on their way. What a brilliant satirist that Mr. Limbag. No wonder why they pay him 60 million dollars a year. That only comes out to 1.5 million per song parody. What a bargain.
More proof of Rush’s brilliance is how he can ‘earn’ millions without even lifting a finger. He doesn’t even write those lame parodies himself. He gets someone else to do it for him. In other words, he ‘didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.’ Rush is kind of like a mooching parasite in that way. He takes the credit and the millions but does none of the work. Will someone please give that genius another well deserved tax cut?
There are lots of reasons to be gratefully thankful to Rush. He’s very, very rich for one. This automatically puts him in that class of special people who are owed our worship and adulation -- job creators!
Besides benevolently, just for us, creating all of the jobs all by themselves, they do all of the work and pay all of the taxes, too. But don’t cross them because they’ll fire their employees so fast your head will spin. So please give Rush and his fellow conservative job creators a tax cut fast, before they fire someone out of spite!
Never mind about that huge deficit/debt that was caused in large part by all of the previous tax cuts that failed to produce a single net job over the course of eleven years. We’ll just take it out of the freebees that the government doles out to all those Americans who are freeloading sloths.
But I digress.
As far as the U.S. being a center-right country, this is one of the many ‘untruths’ that has been repeated so often by the right that it eventually becomes a ‘truth.’ They will point to the polls that ask Americans to describe themselves as conservative/independent/moderate/liberal. More people self identify as conservative than as liberal, therefore America is center right, correct? That’s good enough proof for Mr. Dimbulb and his ditto-heads but of course that’s not at all reliable evidence considering the decades long conservative campaign to demagogue the word liberal. What’s much more telling is how people poll on the issues. And those show that, on most issues, Americans are -- and have been for a long time --to the left of center on most issues, and sometimes by large margins.
Another thing they would point to is what they imagine to be the ‘dominance’ of elected Republicon politicians. However when you examine that alleged ‘dominance’ more closely you can see that it has been more of a slight edge. This is because those periods of dominance have always been followed by a loss of their majority, something Republiconservatives conveniently forget. Here’s another interesting fact; even during the Republicon ‘landslides’ of ’94 and 2002, more total votes were cast for Democrats. Republicons won more elections because of the demographic distribution of Republicon voters. Democrat voters tend to be concentrated in cities and in the coastal states while Republicons are spread out in the less populated central states. This also explains the larger number of Republicon Governors.
Do you notice a pattern here, regarding how conservatives describe political reality? Using evidence that only appears to support your biases while ignoring the evidence that refutes it? Many Republiconservatives use this same analytic technique when they examine the results of the recent election. Those of the Limbag variety have been rationalizing every excuse in the book except for the truth. Before the election Rush was saying that Romney was going to win very big with a large majority of the popular vote and over 300 electoral votes because, of course, America is a center-right country and the conservative voters were much more motivated than the libs (no doubt due to his supreme truth-telling abilities.) He justified his gut feelings by pointing to the polls which had more Republicons expressing interest, enthusiasm and commitment to vote than Dems. But after the loss he said it was because the takers now outnumber the makers (the percentage of gift-receiving takers who voted for Obama was 51%, Romney’s 47% estimate was too low [but exactly the % that voted for Romney, ha!]) But then when Rush saw the data that showed that Romney got some-odd million less votes from registered Republicans than McCain did, he blamed that on the ‘soft’ Republicans (the reasonable non-delusional ones) who tried to distance themselves from the more "severely conservative" candidates (the crazy nutbags) and were too cowed by the libs to use the same vitriolic extremist rhetoric that Rush preferred.
I shall now lay out the evidence of what I think is the truth.
Despite the growing demographic shift in favor of the Dems, the electorate is still very evenly divided. The extremist, conspiracy-laden hate-filled rhetoric that comes from the far right does motivate those with that personality trait. But it turns off more people than it turns on, including a sizable number of conservative Republicans (the reasonable non-delusional ones) who would have voted Republican, and those moderates who might have. This is the same reason that, despite his popularity, more people dislike Rush than like him. This is why Romney got less votes from registered Republicans. Those Republicans either stayed home or voted libertarian.
I think the mistake those looking at the ‘enthusiasm’ data made was to extrapolate that enthusiasm to all Republicans. They didn’t consider the Republicans who were turned off. As for the Democrat side, while enthusiasm for Obama might have been less than four years ago, revulsion for Romney and the Republicons must have been at an all-time high. This might be why Democrat turnout was higher than the Republiconservatives thought it would be.
Consider this, Rush; Obama presided over the weakest economy since the Great Depression. No President has ever won reelection (except FDR, and Obama is no FDR) with this high an unemployment rate. He should have lost.
The Recons weren't aggressively conservative enough? That's almost as ludicrous as you are fat and stupid.
Never in my lifetime have we seen so many nutty goofball candidates espousing the kind of extreme, vitriolic, conspiracy-filled rhetoric that one would think could only survive on the fringes of society. Your side has forced this point of view into the mainstream of the Republican Party. You've saturated the media with this hyperbolic nonsense. You can't turn on the radio or TV or open a newspaper or magazine without being assaulted by some hysterical warning about socialism, death panels, the theft of liberty, the destruction of the country and on and on and on. The nation has heard your message loud and clear.
So if my analysis is correct, and I feel confident that it is, Romney and the Recons lost because they were too much like you, Rush, not because they weren’t enough like you. A reasonable Republican candidate would have won and reasonable Republicans would have gained seats not lost seats. Some of the most extreme Republicon candidates lost, like Akin, Mourdock and Allen West; and Michele Bachmann almost lost.
Michele Bachmann actually won the Iowa straw poll, remember? But when faced with an electorate that was not stacked with far-right ultra-conservatives, she almost lost her own district! What does that tell you, Dimbulb? It was because of you, your rhetoric, your positions and the candidates you spawned that your side lost, you delusional shithead.
At many times Mitt Romney seemed to be quoting Rush verbatim during his campaign and even echoed Rush’s explanation for why Obama won the election: he bribed the mooching takers with even more gifts and presents than they already suck out of the pockets of the producing makers.
Rush has now been calling Obama Santa Claus and playing Christmas song parodies of Obama telling the lazy parasites not to work because Obama Clause has a sack of free money and cell phones for them. The flat screen TV’s are already on their way. What a brilliant satirist that Mr. Limbag. No wonder why they pay him 60 million dollars a year. That only comes out to 1.5 million per song parody. What a bargain.
More proof of Rush’s brilliance is how he can ‘earn’ millions without even lifting a finger. He doesn’t even write those lame parodies himself. He gets someone else to do it for him. In other words, he ‘didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.’ Rush is kind of like a mooching parasite in that way. He takes the credit and the millions but does none of the work. Will someone please give that genius another well deserved tax cut?
There are lots of reasons to be gratefully thankful to Rush. He’s very, very rich for one. This automatically puts him in that class of special people who are owed our worship and adulation -- job creators!
Besides benevolently, just for us, creating all of the jobs all by themselves, they do all of the work and pay all of the taxes, too. But don’t cross them because they’ll fire their employees so fast your head will spin. So please give Rush and his fellow conservative job creators a tax cut fast, before they fire someone out of spite!
Never mind about that huge deficit/debt that was caused in large part by all of the previous tax cuts that failed to produce a single net job over the course of eleven years. We’ll just take it out of the freebees that the government doles out to all those Americans who are freeloading sloths.
But I digress.
As far as the U.S. being a center-right country, this is one of the many ‘untruths’ that has been repeated so often by the right that it eventually becomes a ‘truth.’ They will point to the polls that ask Americans to describe themselves as conservative/independent/moderate/liberal. More people self identify as conservative than as liberal, therefore America is center right, correct? That’s good enough proof for Mr. Dimbulb and his ditto-heads but of course that’s not at all reliable evidence considering the decades long conservative campaign to demagogue the word liberal. What’s much more telling is how people poll on the issues. And those show that, on most issues, Americans are -- and have been for a long time --to the left of center on most issues, and sometimes by large margins.
Another thing they would point to is what they imagine to be the ‘dominance’ of elected Republicon politicians. However when you examine that alleged ‘dominance’ more closely you can see that it has been more of a slight edge. This is because those periods of dominance have always been followed by a loss of their majority, something Republiconservatives conveniently forget. Here’s another interesting fact; even during the Republicon ‘landslides’ of ’94 and 2002, more total votes were cast for Democrats. Republicons won more elections because of the demographic distribution of Republicon voters. Democrat voters tend to be concentrated in cities and in the coastal states while Republicons are spread out in the less populated central states. This also explains the larger number of Republicon Governors.
Do you notice a pattern here, regarding how conservatives describe political reality? Using evidence that only appears to support your biases while ignoring the evidence that refutes it? Many Republiconservatives use this same analytic technique when they examine the results of the recent election. Those of the Limbag variety have been rationalizing every excuse in the book except for the truth. Before the election Rush was saying that Romney was going to win very big with a large majority of the popular vote and over 300 electoral votes because, of course, America is a center-right country and the conservative voters were much more motivated than the libs (no doubt due to his supreme truth-telling abilities.) He justified his gut feelings by pointing to the polls which had more Republicons expressing interest, enthusiasm and commitment to vote than Dems. But after the loss he said it was because the takers now outnumber the makers (the percentage of gift-receiving takers who voted for Obama was 51%, Romney’s 47% estimate was too low [but exactly the % that voted for Romney, ha!]) But then when Rush saw the data that showed that Romney got some-odd million less votes from registered Republicans than McCain did, he blamed that on the ‘soft’ Republicans (the reasonable non-delusional ones) who tried to distance themselves from the more "severely conservative" candidates (the crazy nutbags) and were too cowed by the libs to use the same vitriolic extremist rhetoric that Rush preferred.
I shall now lay out the evidence of what I think is the truth.
Despite the growing demographic shift in favor of the Dems, the electorate is still very evenly divided. The extremist, conspiracy-laden hate-filled rhetoric that comes from the far right does motivate those with that personality trait. But it turns off more people than it turns on, including a sizable number of conservative Republicans (the reasonable non-delusional ones) who would have voted Republican, and those moderates who might have. This is the same reason that, despite his popularity, more people dislike Rush than like him. This is why Romney got less votes from registered Republicans. Those Republicans either stayed home or voted libertarian.
I think the mistake those looking at the ‘enthusiasm’ data made was to extrapolate that enthusiasm to all Republicans. They didn’t consider the Republicans who were turned off. As for the Democrat side, while enthusiasm for Obama might have been less than four years ago, revulsion for Romney and the Republicons must have been at an all-time high. This might be why Democrat turnout was higher than the Republiconservatives thought it would be.
Consider this, Rush; Obama presided over the weakest economy since the Great Depression. No President has ever won reelection (except FDR, and Obama is no FDR) with this high an unemployment rate. He should have lost.
The Recons weren't aggressively conservative enough? That's almost as ludicrous as you are fat and stupid.
Never in my lifetime have we seen so many nutty goofball candidates espousing the kind of extreme, vitriolic, conspiracy-filled rhetoric that one would think could only survive on the fringes of society. Your side has forced this point of view into the mainstream of the Republican Party. You've saturated the media with this hyperbolic nonsense. You can't turn on the radio or TV or open a newspaper or magazine without being assaulted by some hysterical warning about socialism, death panels, the theft of liberty, the destruction of the country and on and on and on. The nation has heard your message loud and clear.
So if my analysis is correct, and I feel confident that it is, Romney and the Recons lost because they were too much like you, Rush, not because they weren’t enough like you. A reasonable Republican candidate would have won and reasonable Republicans would have gained seats not lost seats. Some of the most extreme Republicon candidates lost, like Akin, Mourdock and Allen West; and Michele Bachmann almost lost.
Michele Bachmann actually won the Iowa straw poll, remember? But when faced with an electorate that was not stacked with far-right ultra-conservatives, she almost lost her own district! What does that tell you, Dimbulb? It was because of you, your rhetoric, your positions and the candidates you spawned that your side lost, you delusional shithead.
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