Some Things

From the NY Times:

"Fresh off their sweeping victories in the midterm elections, Congressional Republican leaders on Wednesday said that they would use their new majority in the House and bolstered ranks in the Senate to pursue a vision of smaller government and lower spending, as well as the continuation of the Bush-era tax cuts, which are due to expire at the end of the year.

"At a news conference at the Capitol, the likely House speaker, Representative John A. Boehner, and the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, invitedPresident Obama to work with them on these and other goals. But they also quickly adopted an aggressive posture on some issues certain to antagonize Democrats, including a vow to repeal the big new health care law."

So these are some things you can now expect to become real issues. It will be interesting at least to see how Republicans try to sell the Bush tax cuts as good for the deficit, which seems to be the main thing they have conditioned their supporters to care about. It'll probably go something like "Trickle down economics blah blah entrepreneurs blah blah what makes this country great blah." Probably. Although, remember that President Obama still has that nice big veto pen, which hopefully he will make copious use of, and the Democrats still control the Senate. However, you do hear an alarming amount of rhetoric coming from people like Michele Bachmann, who is expected to challenge for the newly vacated Speaker of the House position, about investigating Obama for "un-American activities," with the goal of an eventual impeachment. Ludicrous? Absolutely. More ludicrous than impeaching a President for getting an extra-marital blow job? Nah, brah. Also, comments from Evan Bayh, also in today's NYT, which illustrates how all Democrats, are missing the point of yesterday's election results:

"And we were too deferential to our most zealous supporters. During election season, Congress sought to placate those on the extreme left and motivate the base — but that meant that our final efforts before the election focused on trying to allow gays in the military, change our immigration system and repeal the George W. Bush-era tax cuts. These are legitimate issues but unlikely to resonate with moderate swing voters in a season of economic discontent."

The truth is exactly the opposite of this. Remember all that talk of an "enthusiasm gap"? It's not conservative, or, as Bayh would have it, "moderate" Democrats who were unenthused. It's precisely these "zealous" supporters who were so disappointed with the lack of progressive action by people who call themselves progressives that have been turning against the Democrats. This is obvious when you simply look at the stats of which Democrats lost their seats. Half of the Democrats who bids for re-election failed were among the "Blue Dog" conservative Democrats, while many more liberal Democrats who were expected to be beaten, such as barney Frank, retained their seats. It seems pretty clear that the message delivered here is that the Democratic base wants less pandering to moderates and conservatives and more of what the party purports to stand for. If you were watching MSNBC last night you noticed this misreading of signals all over the place. Also, just to be clear, Democrats aren't trying to repeal the Bush tax cuts. They are about to expire. There is no need for repeal. They are done. What they want is for them not to be renewed, and for the roughly $700 billion dollars of revenue that regularly taxing the rich would generate to go back to the government.

Finally, pour some 40 out for our fallen homie, King of Comedy on the floor, Alan Grayson, who was defeated yesterday. We will miss treats like these:

Your BFFF Tonight

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Bertolt Brecht remarked in his crucial text "Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties" that "it will not do to grant that goodness must be weak as rain must be wet. It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak." In that spirit, Paul Jay has brought some devastating analysis to bear on what will most likely be a failure of the Democratic Party in tomorrow's election, enumerating six ways in which the Democrats have aided in the resurgence of the Republican Party and disappointed the majority of their base. Lest the alternative courses of action implicit in his criticisms seem utopian, we ought to remember that we live in a democracy, and that as such it is our province as citizens to demand things of our government, which is nominally representative, and it is the province of this government to enact our demands. The objection that is always raised that there are procedural obstacles to realizing these demands should be flatly rejected. If the Bush administration could find any number of legal loopholes to enact completely heinous policies that a majority of Americans did not support (even such Americans as John Ashcroft, Lindsey Graham and Richard Armitage), then certainly the present administration could find some way to enact policies that reflect the demands of most American citizens (e.g., a public option in health care*). If they do not do this, we can only assume that they have no interest in doing it, and the fact that Liz Fowler, "a former executive for a private health insurer," was a chief contributor to the health care bill is but one bit of evidence that could be adduced to support this claim. (As Bill Moyers notes in the linked video, "Movers and shakers rotate between government and the lucrative private sector at a speed so dizzying they forget who they're working for," going on to point out that there are six private health insurance lobbyists for every member of congress, and that more than five hundred of these are former congressional staff members.) So if Barack Obama in his Daily Show interview makes Jon Stewart look at all foolish, he himself comes off as glib and patronizing when he says, “If [your] point is that overnight, we did not transform the health care system, that point is true.”

In that connection Jay, at the end of his remarks about the Democrats, makes an implicit riposte to Stewart's plea for "sanity" in popular political discourse (and to the recent, rather embarrassing rally organized around this theme), as well as the sort of appeals made at the earlier "One Nation" rally:

But perhaps it’s way past time we realize that we are not one nation, there really are two Americas. That the lack of civil discourse and extremes of competing ideology is not the underlying problem but a symptom of an objective difference of interest. That what’s rational for most billionaires may not be so sane for the rest of us.Yes, we would like everyone to be in the same rowboat, all working hard to “get things done”, to solve the grave problems facing us. But the problem is some are sailing around in yachts, and the harder the rest of us row, the bigger those yachts get. The real division in America is not between the Democratic and Republican parties, its between the people who day after day, are out their pushing those oars and those that are just taking a cruise.

Jay here identifies the critical blind-spot of the calls for a coming together of people whose "values and principles form the foundation that sustains us while we get things done, not the barriers that prevent us from getting things done": namely the assumption that these "values and principles" somehow play no role in determining notions of the "things" that need to "get done." The very vagueness of this prescription - "working together to get things done"- is an index of its emptiness. The idea of the "non-ideological moderate" is basically a false one. Ideology is at work precisely in decisions about which goals are worth pursuing, and what means can be acceptably applied in pursuing them. For someone who truly believes in improving the lot of those whom some in the media label "ordinary and working people," the Libertarian-Tea Party-Republican program of cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans while eliminating all or most forms of social spending is unacceptable, and there can really be no common cause with anyone who advocates such a program.** The lines in some cases are perhaps not so clearly drawn, like with those Tea Partiers who recognize the stagnation of wages over the last 40 years as a problem, but put the blame on illegal immigrants rather than corporate CEOs and Nixon-Reagan. But on the whole Jay is right to affirm the existence of "an objective difference of interest" among different classes of Americans, and a corresponding ideological difference that can't really be papered over with liberal platitudes about working together.

*It should be mentioned here that one Washington Post/ABC-conducted poll found that 80 percent of Americans "believed that universal health care was 'more important than holding down taxes.'"

**This position is less and less restricted to Republicans and their ilk, and has been since the Reagan administration. New York Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo, for example, has made it his goal to wage a "permanent 
political campaign to counter the well-financed labor unions he believes have bullied previous governors and lawmakers into making bad decisions. He will seek to transform the state's weak business lobby into a more formidable ally, believing that corporate leaders in New York have virtually surrendered the field to big labor." It seems like a crass joke that a member of the Democratic Party, the supposed opponent of the neoliberal austerity that is the ongoing program of the Republican Party, should run on such a platform, which is more or less identical to the platform Meg Whitman is running on in California.

It's Not TV, It's HBO, and on HBO Zach Galifianakis Smokes Weed on Real Time With Bill Maher

Oh, and then he offered the joint to some Fox News lady. Proof:




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