From: [email protected] http://www.thenation.com/article/155222/barbarians-gate
Barbarians at the Gate By Eric Alterman The Nation: October 6, 2010 It's no secret that American conservatism has run itself off the rails just as it is poised to come to (legislative) power. Merely to list or categorize the self- evidently idiotic contentions one routinely hears from its most esteemed representatives could fill this magazine. And we all know about the role that talk-radio, cable television and the many-tentacled Murdoch empire have played in spreading hate and purposeful misinformation. What has frequently gone unremarked, however, is the mainstream media's role in empowering this bizarre barrage of BS. Let's look at a few examples. On October 3 Washington Post pundit "dean" David Broder attempted to apply a fresh coat of varnish to the reputation of House Republican minority leader John Boehner. In decided contrast to Speaker Nancy Pelosi's "reflexive partisanship," which "voters are understandably sick of," Broder insists that "Boehner should be taken seriously," for-like a Boy Scout-he is "honest," "polite" and a "serious legislator." These virtues are apparently embodied by a man who, when asked on Chris Wallace's Sunday morning show whether he was aware that "a number of top economists say what we need is more economic stimulus," replied, "Well, I don't need to see GDP numbers or to listen to economists. All I need to do is listen to the American people, because they've been asking the question now for eighteen months, Where are the jobs?" In response to Democrats' willingness to use comedian Stephen Colbert to publicize the plight of farmworkers-almost entirely ignored by Congress despite rampant child labor exploitation and other violations of basic human dignity-the sage legislator replied that he found it odd that Democrats have "time to bring a comedian to Washington, DC, but they don't have time to eliminate the uncertainty by extending all of the current tax rates." Just try and make sense out of that sentence, Dean Broder. I dare you. Of course, Boehner at least occupies an official position of influence in our government, however moronically he may choose to manifest it. When he says something of significance, it's fair enough to call it news. Newt Gingrich has no such position and continues to mouth off in a manner that makes Boehner sound like Maimonides. I never tire of pointing out that Gingrich was the most-booked guest on NBC's Meet the Press during the first year of Barack Obama's presidency, despite being the only ex-House speaker ever to be invited and despite a grand total of zero appearances by actually existing Speaker Pelosi, and despite both houses of Congress being controlled by the opposing party. And yet one would think that a private citizen who professes to believe that America requires a set of laws to prevent the imposition of Sharia law on its citizens, and who also claims to detect a danger from "a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us," should be carted off to a rubber rather than a green room. Gingrich was recently reinvited to tout the work of Dinesh D'Souza, who is president of something called The King's College, which "teaches a compelling worldview rooted in the Bible," and who recently published a cover story in Forbes magazine in which he argued (wait for it) that, yes, "the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son." As the conservative writer Heather Mac Donald observed, the fact that this "fever dream of paranoia and irrationality" would appear in, much less on the cover of, a putatively respectable business magazine is "all too representative of the hysteria that now runs through a significant portion of the right-wing media establishment." And yet according to the man on Meet the Press, it offers "the most accurate, predictive model for [President Obama's] behavior." Such talk is not merely crazy but also deeply dangerous. If what these guys say is true, what measures would not be justified in rescuing our country from this terrifying threat? It also inadvertently demonstrates the limitations of the MSM in playing their old-fashioned role as the gatekeepers of sanity, at the very least. The New York Times ran a story on the D'Souza article in which Forbes was given a chance to defend itself against the claim of factual errors. The problem, however, is not with the putative "facts" D'Souza uses but the poisonous context in which they are placed; something the rules of objectivity do not allow a reporter to state in a forthright manner. A similar limitation was on display a few days later when the Newspaper of Record published an obituary for the right-wing Jew-baiter and friend to Holocaust denial Joseph Sobran. The obit observed that the "witty, thoughtful" Sobran merely "took a skeptical line on the Holocaust." Skeptical? Seriously? I'm sorry, but for this to appear in the Times, of all places, is inexplicably weird. In 2002 Sobran gave a speech to the pro-Nazi Institute of Historical Review, modestly admitting that he was "incompetent to judge whether the Holocaust did happen." He had also argued that "Jews have been brilliantly subversive of the cultures of the natives they have lived amongst.... [Jews have supported] communism, socialism, liberalism, and secularism; the agenda of major Jewish groups is the de-Christianization of America.... Overwhelming Jewish support for legal abortion illustrates that many Jews hate Christian morality more than they revere Jewish tradition itself." Holocaust denial, I'll admit, is not exactly relevant to the current right-wing agenda being whitewashed in the MSM. But it should serve as a warning of how bad things can get without a vigorous, self-confident press to demand accountability from demagogues who prey on the ignorance of the uninformed. *** http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/opinion/11krugman.html?_r=1 Hey, Small Spender By Paul Krugman Here's the narrative you hear everywhere: President Obama has presided over a huge expansion of government, but unemployment has remained high. And this proves that government spending can't create jobs. Here's what you need to know: The whole story is a myth. There never was a big expansion of government spending. In fact, that has been the key problem with economic policy in the Obama years: we never had the kind of fiscal expansion that might have created the millions of jobs we need. Ask yourself: What major new federal programs have started up since Mr. Obama took office? Health care reform, for the most part, hasn't kicked in yet, so that can't be it. So are there giant infrastructure projects under way? No. Are there huge new benefits for low-income workers or the poor? No. Where's all that spending we keep hearing about? It never happened. To be fair, spending on safety-net programs, mainly unemployment insurance and Medicaid, has risen - because, in case you haven't noticed, there has been a surge in the number of Americans without jobs and badly in need of help. And there were also substantial outlays to rescue troubled financial institutions, although it appears that the government will get most of its money back. But when people denounce big government, they usually have in mind the creation of big bureaucracies and major new programs. And that just hasn't taken place. Consider, in particular, one fact that might surprise you: The total number of government workers in America has been falling, not rising, under Mr. Obama. A small increase in federal employment was swamped by sharp declines at the state and local level - most notably, by layoffs of schoolteachers. Total government payrolls have fallen by more than 350,000 since January 2009. Now, direct employment isn't a perfect measure of the government's size, since the government also employs workers indirectly when it buys goods and services from the private sector. And government purchases of goods and services have gone up. But adjusted for inflation, they rose only 3 percent over the last two years - a pace slower than that of the previous two years, and slower than the economy's normal rate of growth. So as I said, the big government expansion everyone talks about never happened. This fact, however, raises two questions. First, we know that Congress enacted a stimulus bill in early 2009; why didn't that translate into a big rise in government spending? Second, if the expansion never happened, why does everyone think it did? Part of the answer to the first question is that the stimulus wasn't actually all that big compared with the size of the economy. Furthermore, it wasn't mainly focused on increasing government spending. Of the roughly $600 billion cost of the Recovery Act in 2009 and 2010, more than 40 percent came from tax cuts, while another large chunk consisted of aid to state and local governments. Only the remainder involved direct federal spending. And federal aid to state and local governments wasn't enough to make up for plunging tax receipts in the face of the economic slump. So states and cities, which can't run large deficits, were forced into drastic spending cuts, more than offsetting the modest increase at the federal level. The answer to the second question - why there's a widespread perception that government spending has surged, when it hasn't - is that there has been a disinformation campaign from the right, based on the usual combination of fact-free assertions and cooked numbers. And this campaign has been effective in part because the Obama administration hasn't offered an effective reply. Actually, the administration has had a messaging problem on economic policy ever since its first months in office, when it went for a stimulus plan that many of us warned from the beginning was inadequate given the size of the economy's troubles. You can argue that Mr. Obama got all he could - that a larger plan wouldn't have made it through Congress (which is questionable), and that an inadequate stimulus was much better than none at all (which it was). But that's not an argument the administration ever made. Instead, it has insisted throughout that its original plan was just right, a position that has become increasingly awkward as the recovery stalls. And a side consequence of this awkward positioning is that officials can't easily offer the obvious rebuttal to claims that big spending failed to fix the economy - namely, that thanks to the inadequate scale of the Recovery Act, big spending never happened in the first place. But if they won't say it, I will: if job-creating government spending has failed to bring down unemployment in the Obama era, it's not because it doesn't work; it's because it wasn't tried. ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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