Monday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said, Special Twofer the Price of One Recession Edition

Because retailers like Jos. A. Bank are offering buy one get one free sales lately, we figured we'd join the Economic Despair Party by having not one but TWO honorees. So for the same amount of time it takes to honor one blogger, today we honor two.

First honoree: John Cole, who is almost ready to become the fourth for a bridge game among the Great Curmudgeons of Blogtopia -- (™ Skippy) Driftglass, Ornery Bastard, and PhysioProf -- for pricking the "lofty" balloon of so-called theoretical conservatism.

Money quote:

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?

Second honoree: DCap, with a post I wish I'd written, but now I don't have to because he already did.

There's no real money quote here, because it all could have spilled right out of my head (except that I still watch Olbermann and Rachel Maddow because they help remind me of reality amidst the fantasy world of wingnuts and the media figures who love them). But here's a sample:

While Washington tries to play a combination of Monopoly and Mystery Date to fix this mess - the country we all know continues to fall deeper into a black hole. Everyone sees it - but it is the 800 lb elephant in the room. Tent cities are springing up - Tent cities! It seems that the only thing our "leaders" know how to do is throw money at a problem - but there never is a plan. It really appears that Congress is more concerned about keeping the status quo in the class pecking order, than trying to improve the lot of the average American.

I am not averse to spending money - but where is the f***ing plan. And even if we can manage to turn this ship around before it hits the iceberg - is it really worth it if we do not examine ourselves as a society - SO IT DOESN'T HAPPEN AGAIN.

They really are stuffing their pockets on their way out the door

In case you had any doubts that George W. Bush is going to make sure his base, the haves and the have-mores, are taken care of before he leaves office, here you go:

Congress wanted to guarantee that the $700 billion financial bailout would limit the eye-popping pay of Wall Street executives, so lawmakers included a mechanism for reviewing executive compensation and penalizing firms that break the rules.

But at the last minute, the Bush administration insisted on a one-sentence change to the provision, congressional aides said. The change stipulated that the penalty would apply only to firms that received bailout funds by selling troubled assets to the government in an auction, which was the way the Treasury Department had said it planned to use the money.

Now, however, the small change looks more like a giant loophole, according to lawmakers and legal experts. In a reversal, the Bush administration has not used auctions for any of the $335 billion committed so far from the rescue package, nor does it plan to use them in the future. Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives.

So here's how it shakes out, and this is so-called conservative economic policy in a nutshell: executives who run their companies into the ground can get huge golden parachutes using Federal bailout money. Auto workers in unions are told by United States Senators that they have to be sacrificed for wingnut anti-union ideology.

For all that my own experience with unions hasn't made me inclined to support them, or at least not the way unions are configured today, the difference between conservatives and me is that they have always been about union busting and about corporate power. Conservative ideology does not hold for the rights of workers. When we look at how U.S. manufacturing has been outsourced to low-wage countries with no worker protections, and on the rare occasions that we hear about overseas sweatshops in which women and children work long hours for little pay and are subject to the most horrific exploitation, we know that this is the conservative dream for America -- a race to the bottom in which a few people hold all the marbles and the rest scramble for scraps. I think about the women who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire nearly a century ago and I know how close we are to a return to these kinds of working conditions in a country with a shrinking job base in which ever more workers are competing for ever fewer jobs.

It may very well be that the Big Three will fold no matter what we do. And if the Republicans had only pointed out this reality -- that any bailout is only to get the workers through Christmas -- I might even see their point. But no, it isn't about reality, it's about mean-spirited corporatism. It's about putting millions of people out of work for ideology and opportunism. And that is about as reprehensible a motive as I've ever seen out of a bunch of people who've forgotten that as "public servants", working people, including auto workers, are part of that public.

Politics and Strange Bedfellows

As jarring as it was to see Larry Johnson, whom many of us held up as a hero for his defense of Valerie Plame against the criminals of the Bush Administration, holding up the likes of Catholic League head Bill Donohue as his BFF because Donohue's outrage at Father Pfleger's ranting at Trinity United were useful to his Nominate Hillary campaign, it's even more jarring to watch conservative icon Richard Viguerie tell Republicans that Barack Obama isn't the real problem for them, that they should look in the mirror:

Are we supposed to be scared of Democrats as big spenders? The Bush administration and congressional Republicans topped Democratic spending on every front. Even excluding the “War on Terror,” Republicans have busted the budget.

The Democrats are going to raise our taxes? No doubt they will, but, because of the Republicans’ massive deficits, our children and grandchildren are going to be crushed by tax hikes or hyperinflation.

The Democrats are corrupt miscreants? Compared to the Bridge to Nowhere-planning, bribe-taking, page-trolling Republicans?

How about, as Bob Dole once put it, the threat of sending our youth off to “Democrat Wars”?

Never mind.

As it becomes more and more clear that the Republicans have nothing to run on, the campaign will get nastier and more personal, centered on Obama. As the real Halloween approaches, it will get worse and then continue until Election Day.

[snip]

To be sure, Obama has to define himself in positive tones before the Republicans succeed in defining him as a secret Muslim agent who’s going to sell us to terrorists. But he has by far the best campaign organization I’ve seen this year, and if, with much of the media in his pocket, they can’t get his message out, they deserve to lose.

Negative campaigning is not the culprit. The job in any campaign, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, is to stress your positives and just as strongly stress your opponent’s negatives. We’ve had negative campaigning in America since Colonial days, and it works. That’s why it doesn’t go away despite the sermons from the “good government” crowd.

No, the culprit is not negative campaigning, but rather, campaigning without ideas that are arguably better than your opponent’s, and relying instead on bogeyman portrayals.

McCain has been the victim of bogeyman campaigning himself, and I know him to be an honorable man who doesn’t want to win that way. The problem is that McCain doesn’t have a coherent set of ideas with which he can simultaneously fire up the conservative base and attract independents. He’s a part-time liberal in conservative clothing. Conservatives aren’t fooled by that, and liberals aren’t going to vote for a part-time liberal when they have a very persuasive full-time liberal to vote for.

Republicans on the Hill have no message of what they are for, what their principles are or how they would govern. They can’t even agree to oppose big-government spending through earmarks.

“The lesser of two evils” is not a governing philosophy. Yet Republicans repeatedly try to seduce conservatives with it. That strategy didn’t work in 1948, 1960, 1974, 1976, 1992 or 2006 — and it won’t work in 2008.

Obama isn’t a goblin, nor Pelosi a witch, but the Republican majority of the ‘90s and 2000s is Humpty Dumpty, prostrate and shattered.

I have no idea how I got on Viguerie's e-mail list, just as I have no idea how I got on the mailing list of that nutball who sends around e-mails that play like the K-Tel Nostalgia Version of Clinton Scandals and Conspiracies of the 1990's. But whereas the latter go in the trash where they belong, Viguerie is occasionally worth noting. That said, you'll notice that this is the first time I've ever quoted from anything he's written, because I believe that this kind of "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" politics, like the kind Larry Johnson has been practicing in this primary season, is a dangerous game that always comes back to bite you in the ass. Viguerie is no friend to progressives; what he's blasting here is the pocket-stuffing and spending and warmongering of the last eight years of Republican domination of our government. It isn't that Viguerie wants a progressive nation, he just believes conservatives in Washington have lost their way.

We can applaud this piece to the extent that it helps Barack Obama, but we can't fool ourselves -- what Viguerie writes is nothing but a warning of what we face if the right ever again succeeds in getting its act together.

In which I right a long-standing wrong

I really should have added John Cole to the blogroll a long time ago. I'm not sure John even qualifies as a conservative any longer, now that "conservatism" involves stuffing billions of dollars in taxpayer cash into the pockets of crony corporations, and when "privatization" involves replacing the accountable military with mercenaries who fire indiscriminately at civilians, and when "freedom" means agree with the president or we will destroy you.

The right's attempts to destroy the Frost family for their "crime" of pointing out that sometimes even families who play by the rules and aren't "welfare queens" cannot get health insurance on their own seem to be, for John, the last straw:

[The Frosts] are a white, lower-middle-class, committed family, who is doing EVERYTHING the GOP Kultur Kops would have you believe people should be doing. They aren’t gay. They aren’t divorced. They didn’t abort their children. They aren’t drug addicts or welfare queens. They are property owners, entrepeneurs, taxpayers, and hard-working Americans. I bet nine times out of ten in past elections, if you handed this resume to a pollster, they would think you were discussing the prototypical Republican voter. Hell, the only thing missing from this equation is membership to a church and an irrational fear of Muslims and you HAVE the prototypical Bush voter.

They are, however, not without fault. They are unable to afford insurance through normal means (and now that they have pre-existing conditions, probably couldn’t get traditional insurance anyway), and managed to get several of their family members injured in a traumatic accident. And, it appears, those are the big blind spots for compassionate conservatism. That, and the real big sin- allowing themselves to advocate for a policy that the Decider was going to veto.

[snip]

I simply can not believe this is what the Republican party has become. I just can’t. It just makes me sick to think all those years of supporting this party, and this is what it has become. Even if you don’t like the S-Chip expansion, it is hard to deny what Republicans are- a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, sneering, vicious thugs, peering through people’s windows so they can make fun of their misfortune.

Jump on over to see some of the comments that some of these bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, sneering, vicious thugs posted at Michelle Malkin's blog. John's right. This is what the Republican Party has become. Where I differ from John is in the notion that this is somehow something new; something that's just come about in the aftermath of 9/11; that it's a reptilian brain response to a genuine threat that is oozing over every other aspect of American life. One could argue that it goes back to Barry Goldwater, but I'd say it has its birth from the loins of Ronald Reagan, who voiced his "hate the poor and the different" rhetoric with a kindly,, smiling face. It was honed by Lee Atwater, who perfected the art of destroying the opposition through half-truths, innuendo, outright lies, and playing on fear. In the infamous Willie Horton ad of 1988, we saw the kind of campaign tactics that would eventually become the equivocation of a Vietnam veteran who left three limbs there with Osama Bin Laden and the Swiftboat Veterans for Lies smearing a presidential candidate based on nothing but their own bitterness.

There IS a difference between Republicans and Democrats, at least in terms of how they think. Republicans are about greed, fear, xenophobia, white supremacy, and male power. The Republican Party creed really IS "I got mine and fuck you." Democrats think about what the world could be. They believe in the essential decency of humans in general and Americans in particular. That's why it's so sad to see Democrats in Washington cave in again and again to the Republican doctrine of fear and hatred -- out of their own cowardice. The Democratic heritage IS of a better way, of a way that has for the most part had Americans living a better life with less anxiety and less rage. Republican rule seems only to result in an angry, vengeful populace. One wonders, then, why anyone wants these vile people to rule anything -- and why Democrats have allowed them to do it.

UPDATE: Unrelated, but relevant. Brandon Friedman isn't a 12-year-old, but he is an Iraq war veteran. If you think that what Rush Limbaugh says doesn't matter, check out some of the hate mail that VoteVets has received.

This is Republican America, folks -- where it's not just acceptable, but mandatory, to harass and threaten a 12-year-old and where war veterans are branded as pussies by guys too chickenshit to enlist to fight the very wars they love.