Democrats

MSNBC Goes To Flint, Learns Nothing

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Flint Michigan - Chris Hayes - Michael Moore

 

The Establishment Left’s strangely non-diminishing sense of entitlement was on full display in Flint, Michigan

Today, Chris Hayes of MSNBC broadcast a special live town hall from Flint, Michigan, the place made famous by the poisoning of its water supply and the near-criminal incompetence of some of the people responsible for the public’s safety. Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore has also made the Flint story a personal cause of his, and today both he and Chris Hayes were together, live before a local audience, to talk about national politics viewed through the prism of this beleaguered town.

At one point in the panel discussion, Hayes introduced a number of local people who were non-voters; people who either did not vote at all in the 2016 general election or who voted for down-ballot candidates but refused to cast a vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton for president.

Almost to a person, these non-voters talked about the fact that despite having been Obama voters in 2008 and 2012, they could not bring themselves to vote in 2016 when the Democrats offered no “inspiring” candidate. One got the sense that many of them may have gladly voted for Bernie Sanders, had the Clinton and Democratic Party machines not unfairly muscled the Vermont senator out of the race, though this was not explicitly stated by anyone during the segment.

For the life of him, Chris Hayes simply could not understand this position. It did not compute. At one point, he told one of the non-voting interviewees that MSNBC viewers were likely “throwing things at their televisions” in reaction to what he was saying. Hayes interrogated each guest as to how they could possibly have abstained from voting for Hillary Clinton when a Republican governor had presided over the poisoning of their town’s water supply. He implied that their desire for an “inspirational” presidential candidate was childish and irrational, and that the obvious choice would have been to swallow any misgivings and vote for the Democratic Party presidential nominee.

This exchange highlighted as clearly as anything else the divide within the American Left – the establishment, coastal Left and the once solid-Democrat heartland left-behinds, if you will. The likes of Chris Hayes (and that mainstream brand of left-wing thinking for which he is a mouthpiece) simply cannot understand why a rational voter would spurn the boring, uninspiring technocrat put forward by the Democrats when the consequence of not voting was the election of Donald Trump. Despite having heard testimony from many people about the long-standing issues and decline facing the town – issues which ate away at the community throughout President Obama’s two terms – Hayes was seemingly unable to understand that another continuity technocrat offering more of the same was the last thing that this community wanted or needed.

Michael Moore cut to the heart of the issue:

Why did people stay home knowing that the result was going to be possibly Donald J. Trump? That’s some serious anger at what the system has done to fail this city.

 

Like most people, I have my issues with Michael Moore. But credit where it is due – Moore was warning about the dangerous complacency of the Democrats and the visceral anger against the status quo in many communities at a time when establishment leftists were rolling out the grand coronation of Hillary Clinton, oblivious of (or unconcerned by) her utter lack of popularity among people who were sufficiently left-wing and non-racist to cast their prior votes for Barack Obama.

Nobody of any significance on the mainstream Left heeded Michael Moore’s warning to take the Donald Trump threat seriously before the election, and the past two years have been their reward. And even now, in the middle of a pilgrimage to a part of middle America which shrugged its shoulders and abandoned the Democratic Party in 2016, still the chief attitude is one of incredulity that people could have been so stupid / naive / selfish / childish / utopian (delete as applicable) as to demand a Democratic candidate in possession of a clear set of guiding principles and an understanding that globalization has been eating away at towns like Flint as surely as is their contaminated water.

Technocracy is not always a bad thing – at a time when regulations and systems of government are infinitely more complex through necessity, experts are needed to administer the system and keep the machinery of state running effectively. However, technocracy is not well-suited to navigating through periods of disruptive change or crisis. What works well when the economy is in steady-state and there are no significant changes afoot in society or industry does not work well when the economy is in difficulty or when huge realignments are taking place on the national and international level.

Conservative scaremongering about her supposed extreme socialism aside, Hillary Clinton was the quintessential technocratic candidate at a time when the people of Michigan and elsewhere needed a candidate who recognized that for them, the status quo was not something to celebrate and build upon; that the structural changes which had delivered nothing but good things for the likes of Chris Hayes and many of us “coastal elites” were not necessarily anything to celebrate in places like Flint.

More than one of the people interviewed on MSNBC who did not vote in the 2016 presidential election have themselves run for public office in the months since. There is no crisis of political engagement or motivation here. There was only a crisis of ignorance and arrogance among a party hierarchy which believed it could impose their preferred candidate and have people like the inhabitants of Flint, Michigan swallow their distaste and offer up their vote.

And after spending a day in Flint in the company of Michael Moore, I am not sure that Chris Hayes, his core audience or anyone within the Democratic Party leadership are any closer to grasping this essential fact.

 

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Nancy Pelosi’s DACA ‘Filibuster’ And The Dishonest, Manipulative Illegal Immigration Debate

Samuel Hooper10 Comments

Nancy Pelosi illegal immigration filibuster - DACA - Dreamers - House of Representatives

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When lawbreaking is openly celebrated and any efforts at immigration enforcement painted as racist by the Left, Democrats are stoking social division and political gridlock nearly as much as Donald Trump

From both Democrats and Trumpian Republicans, all we get is a stream of dishonesty on the subject of immigration.

Conservative anti-amnesty extremists live in a fantasy world where millions of people without legal status can be summarily removed from the United States without a seriously disruptive effect on both society and the economy, and where building an expensive and functionally questionable fortified border wall will prevent future illegal immigration when they know full well that even a hundred foot wall would do nothing to prevent visa overstays and other methods of subverting immigration law.

Meanwhile in the space of a decade, the bulk of the Democratic Party, cheered on by its most ideological activists, seems to have moved toward a de facto Open Borders position, refusing to countenance any additional immigration enforcement measures and regarding those already in existence as openly racist. Using Donald Trump’s often ignorant and xenophobic rhetoric as a cover, Democratic Party leaders have preposterously suggested that any effort to implement a skills-based immigration policy is by its very nature part of an immoral plan to “Make America White Again” (ironically failing to realise that their assumption that non-white people lack marketable skills is itself racist).

This is not the kind of political posturing from either side which is conducive to the kind of comprehensive deal on immigration reform which everybody knows is not only needed, but by far the most sensitive way to address an intractable situation in a way that allows both Left and Right to gain something that they desperately want.

But while much is made in the media of Donald Trump’s xenophobic boorishness and the lack of nuance to his border wall policy, virtually no scrutiny has been given to the Democrats’ new maximalist position – and certainly no Democratic politicians have been put on the spot by the media as to their actual stance on immigration enforcement (assuming they still believe in any such laws). Republicans are frequently put on the spot and made to squirm over their support (or lack of denunciation) of Donald Trump’s “leadership” on the issue, and rightly so. Meanwhile, senior Democratic politicians who for all intents and purposes have repudiated the need for any kind of immigration control are seemingly immune from the slightest scrutiny. The fact that the media take such a position without any self-awareness is itself evidence of their soft but deeply ingrained bias on the issue.

The latest example of left-wing intractability on the issue came yesterday evening when Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi staged an eight-hour filibuster-style speech in favour of unilaterally granting legal status to DACA recipients. From the New York Times’ misty-eyed account:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi staged a record-breaking, eight-hour speech in hopes of pressuring Republicans to allow a vote on protecting “Dreamer” immigrants — and to demonstrate to increasingly angry progressives and Democratic activists that she has done all she could.

Wearing four-inch heels and forgoing any breaks, Pelosi, 77, spent much of the rare talkathon Wednesday reading personal letters from the young immigrants whose temporary protection from deportation is set to expire next month. The California Democrat quoted from the Bible and Pope Francis, as Democrats took turns sitting behind her in support. The Office of the House Historian said it was the longest continuous speech in the chamber on record.

Of course, this was immediately (and falsely) reported by much of the mainstream media as a stirring speech in defence of immigrants in general, as though there were some unprecedented new dystopian war being waged against people who correctly followed US immigration law. But so successful have leftist efforts to conflate all types of immigration (legal and illegal) as indistinguishable from one another that few people now raise an eyebrow at this continual, deliberate manipulation of language.

One surefire way to prevent bipartisan agreement on immigration reform is to inject more emotion into the fraught debate than already exists. And again, both parties are guilty of cynically and immorally attempting to manipulate the overly sentimental or credulous by personalising the debate rather than making it one about principles and processes. We saw this at work most shamefully during Donald Trump’s recent State of the Union speech, when Democrats saw fit to bring unlawful immigrants into the spectator gallery of the House chamber, rubbing the lawbreaking aspect in the face of conservatives, while Donald Trump invited bereaved family members of innocent people killed by illegal immigrants, as though to suggest that all such people represent a violent menace to society.

All that this blatant emotional manipulation can do is harden the positions of each respective activist base, eradicating any nuance and unnecessarily demonising the other side. Such behaviour is equally irresponsible coming from Republican or Democrat; both should know better. And it’s worth noting that the Democrats have form when it comes to this kind of manipulative behaviour, with “undocumented” immigrants having been featured prominently and cheered to the rafters at Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party nominating convention in 2016.

But in yesterday’s speech Nancy Pelosi actually went further, not only making an emotional case for those Dreamers brought illegally to the United States as children – a plight with which many moderate, reasonable people can sympathise – but going further and praising the parents who brought their children to America and in doing so put them at risk of future deportation (or at best a childhood and adolescence spent in the shadows).

This crosses the line into open contempt for the rule of law. Many of these parents may have had the best of intentions in doing what they did, and nobody can deny that many American citizens and legal residents, finding themselves in similar circumstances, would likely do the same thing. But ultimately if the parents decide to take up residency in a country to which they have no legal right to remain, they can not be absolved of all blame if immigration law later catches up with their family. Yes, we should absolutely look to provide amnesty to those who have built productive, law-abiding lives in the United States, particularly those brought through no fault of their own as children, but we should also be able to acknowledge that the parents took a calculated and questionable risk in exposing their children to the very real possibility of traumatic future detention or deportation.

And yet Nancy Pelosi will not even make this slight rhetorical concession. Pressured by uncompromising “immigration” activists and her increasingly extremist base to hold the parents of Dreamers in the same high regard as the Dreamers themselves (or “the original Dreamers”, as Democratic leaders have taken to calling these parents) Pelosi instead offers nothing but fawning praise and endorsement of those who knowingly violated US immigration law. From her speech in the House:

“I say to their parents: Thank you for bringing these Dreamers to America. We’re in your debt for the courage it took, for you to take the risk, physically, politically, in every way, to do so.”

Pelosi made a similar point in a recent CNN televised town hall:

“Our Dreamers, they make America dream again, they’re so lovely and we frankly owe a debt to your parents for bringing you here to be such a brilliant part of our future”.

Astonishingly, there is absolutely no nuance to this praise from Nancy Pelosi. Yes, some or even many such parents may have legitimately qualified for refugee status and faced genuine danger and persecution in their home countries. But others simply moved for economic advantage and the promise of a better life – and normalising the flouting of immigration law in case of the latter is effectively an argument for open borders, a declaration that anyone able to set foot on American soil should have the right to permanently remain and ultimately enjoy the full blessings of citizenship.

This is not to attribute the current impasse exclusively to Democrats, who deserve only half of the blame for the present polarisation. But it is worth focusing on Democrat failings, as so much of the media seems determined to give the Left an entirely free pass on the issue, unquestioningly accepting the premise that unilateral amnesty should be offered with nothing demanded in return, and failing to interrogate left-wing politicians on what (if any) immigration enforcement measures they actually still support.

Neither is the Democratic Party’s commitment to the Dreamers proven beyond all doubt. Already they have rejected a deal which would have granted legal status to nearly two million DACA recipients (at significant political cost to the Republicans) because the deal also included measures to tighten future immigration enforcement. If the welfare of the Dreamers really is the top priority for Democratic leaders, why did they spurn an opportunity to secure their status?

Of course there can only be one answer to this question – because it is no longer enough for the Democrats to legalise everybody currently illegally present in the United States. They want to secure this prize while also doing nothing to make it harder for more people to illegally gain entry into the United States in the future, so that they can wheel out these same emotionally manipulative arguments in two decades’ time and cynically repeat the entire process. Having already mentally “banked” the legalisation of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, the Democrats seemingly want to ensure an endless, uninterrupted stream of future arrivals. Certainly no prominent Democrat has spoken convincingly about the need for more robust border protection since the 2016 presidential election.

At a time when much of the focus is (rightly) on the often xenophobic and discomforting language emanating from the Oval Office, it is also worth reminding ourselves of just how far Democrats have shifted to the Left on the subject of illegal immigration in a very short space of time.

Twelve years ago, this is what then-Senator Barack Obama had to say on the subject:

“When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”

Yes, Obama went on in his book The Audacity of Hope to emphasise that Americans should not act negatively on such feelings, but rather look positively on illegal immigrants seeking to become American. But to even make such a statement today would see any Democrat hounded out of the party and summarily labelled a racist or (at best) an unwitting tool of white supremacy.

In his 2017 essay in the Atlantic, “How The Democrats Lost Their Way On Immigration“, Peter Beinart hammered home the same point about this radical shift:

In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”

The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.

That is an extraordinary shift in the space of a decade, yet the Democrats are going into immigration negotiations with the Republican leadership as though the country is in lockstep with them in their leftward lurch toward de facto open borders when there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case. And while the Republicans (thanks to Donald Trump) doubtless win the prize for ugliest turn in rhetoric on the subject of immigration, the Democrats by far and away win the award for most radical policy shift in a short space of time. This is an incredibly significant fact which still attracts far too little media scrutiny.

Ultimately, this debate is characterised by exaggeration, character smears and base emotional manipulation of the worst kind – and the excesses of one side only encourage the other to behave even more outrageously and irresponsibly in pursuit of their own goals.

For many years there was an eminently practical and workable compromise almost within reach, based on compassion for those illegal immigrants who have built model lives in America but tempered with a resolve to improve border security, immigration enforcement and to reduce both the push and pull factors which drive future unlawful immigration. But thanks to extremists on both sides – frankly childish activists who demand nothing less than 100 percent of their wishlist from a deeply divided country – and spineless political leaders of both parties too afraid to stand up to those voices of unreason, instead we find ourselves in this dismal position.

It is easy to pin all of the blame on President Trump; he certainly makes a large and inviting target. But when it comes to immigration, Donald Trump does not have a monopoly on irrational, uncompromising behaviour. And a more honest media would do a better job of reporting as much.

 

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Will All Those In Favour Of Open Borders Please Stand Up?

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

No Borders No Nations Stop Deportations protest banner

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Will the Left’s unspoken, newly-extremist position on immigration and open borders be their political undoing?

Using Brexit and Trump as a smokescreen, many leftists have quietly moved towards a de facto “open borders” position on immigration without ever actually uttering the words or having the courage to declare their intentions in public.

Whether it is members of the anti-Trump “resistance” in America or bitter defenders of the European Union in Britain, opposition to what they see as an ongoing regressive right-wing coup is prompting many on the Left to adopt an uncompromising, extremely permissive stance on immigration which previously existed only on the libertarian fringes and which many leftists themselves once opposed.

This extremist new position is red meat for many left-wing activists, particularly certain elements of the Hispanic voting bloc whom Democrats need to fire up and turn out on election days (as well as for self-proclaimed “citizens of the world” living in newly-fascist Britain). But is the Left’s closed information loop of outrage causing them to diverge from popular opinion at a time when conservatism is otherwise discredited and electoral gains are there for the taking? By tying themselves so closely and unapologetically to people who came to and live in the country illegally, have left-wing parties put themselves on a collision course with the electorate?

Vox’s Dara Lind chronicles the strange journey on which the Democrats have embarked:

The thing is, about 10 years ago, many Democrats — including, notably, Schumer — would have championed many of the Trump administration’s enforcement proposals, from increased local cooperation with immigration enforcement to a physical barrier on the US/Mexico border, even if they weren’t part of a deal to legalize unauthorized immigrants. And they’d certainly accept them, happily, alongside legalization.

Absolutely. Applying the Left’s contemporary standards, only a decade ago the likes of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi were supporters of an oppressive, white nationalist agenda – as, in fact, was Hillary Clinton, who once voted to strengthen and expand border fencing between the US and Mexico. This is how far the Left has come on the subject of immigration, in a very short space of time.

More:

But it’s certainly true that Democrats in 2017, in general, tend to criticize the use of immigration enforcement, and tend to side with those accused of violating immigration law, as a broad matter of principle beyond opposing the particular actions of the administration.

This goes beyond simply representing members of their own communities (and potential electoral constituencies). The activist defense of immigrants caught crossing the border, especially the Central American children and families that now make up a large share of people entering the US without papers, has led Democrats to take a much firmer stance in defending them as humanitarian victims who deserve the chance to seek and receive asylum in the US.

In fact, you would be hard pressed to get a Democratic politician to name a single category of illegal immigrant whom they do not consider worthy of amnesty and eventual citizenship. Accusations of racism and oppression come easily to them, yet they are suddenly struck dumb when asked what kind of border security or immigration enforcement measures they would actually support.

And sometimes this leads the Democrats to new heights of extremism:

More broadly, Democrats are no longer as willing to attack “illegal immigration” as a fundamental problem anymore.

That rhetoric, too, came in part from DREAMers, who didn’t like being talked about as victims of their parents’ crimes who came to the US “through no fault of their own.” Instead they’ve portrayed their parents as “the original DREAMers” — a line that Nancy Pelosi followed in September when she said that DACA recipients’ parents “did a great thing” in bringing their children to the US.

Violating US immigration law is now “a great thing”, in the words of the Democratic Party Minority Leader. It is one thing to turn a blind eye to the abuse of the rule of law, as many on the Left have done for some time regarding immigration. But it is quite another thing altogether to praise that lawbreaking and hold it up as a paragon of civic virtue. This position totally undermines any remaining protestations that the Left are interested in any kind of immigration enforcement, and shows that their idea of “immigration reform” basically means unconditional amnesty with not even a token gesture for conservatives.

Lind’s article is worth reading in full, since she delves into some of the structural reasons why immigration activist voices now carry so much more weight within the Democratic Party, particularly the trade union shift from opposing illegal immigration to protect their dwindling memberships to supporting illegal immigration to boost their enrolment. But whatever the cause, the degree to which Democrats have lurched to the Left on immigration is alarming, and of concern to anybody who would like to see comprehensive reform in which amnesty is given only in exchange for a serious boost to future enforcement.

Andrew Sullivan thinks that the Left are marching off a cliff with their newfound extremism on immigration, and says as much in his weekly column for New York Magazine:

This is, to be blunt, political suicide. The Democrats’ current position seems to be that the Dreamer parents who broke the law are near heroes, indistinguishable from the children they brought with them; and their rhetoric is very hard to distinguish, certainly for most swing voters, from a belief in open borders. In fact, the Democrats increasingly seem to suggest that any kind of distinction between citizens and noncitizens is somehow racist. You could see this at the last convention, when an entire evening was dedicated to Latinos, illegal and legal, as if the rule of law were largely irrelevant. Hence the euphemism “undocumented” rather than “illegal.” So the stage was built, lit, and set for Trump.

He still tragically owns that stage. What Merkel did for the AfD, the Democrats are in danger of doing for the Trump wing of the GOP. The most powerful thing Trump said in the campaign, I’d argue, was: “If you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country.” And the Democrats had no answer, something that millions of Americans immediately saw. They still formally favor enforcement of immigration laws, but rhetorically, they keep signaling the opposite.

I was also astounded when the Democrats chose to devote a large section of their 2016 party convention to sharing their stage with confessed and unrepentant illegal immigrants. Though I cannot claim to have predicted Donald Trump’s election victory, in hindsight it is clear that moments like this just killed whatever enthusiasm existed for Hillary Clinton in the key swing states which she went on to narrowly lose.

When you refuse to condemn any form of illegal immigration, make the concerns of illegal immigrants one of your main priorities (often over and above born and naturalised citizens) and actively praise their lawbreaking, you have adopted an open borders position. You just don’t possess the courage to come out and say so, for fear of the political consequences. Apparently the Democrats are quite happy to ignore the concerns of Middle America, but are not yet quite ready to publicly give them the middle finger.

It is not unreasonable for people to ask politicians and political parties who embrace illegal immigration exactly what (if any) immigration controls they would actually accept. In fact, the only reason that Democrats are not routinely put on the spot and shamed into answering this question is because a spineless, complicit Washington DC media tacitly agrees with the new extremist position (or at least is too scared of being called “racist” by social justice activists to do their job).

To be clear: the idea of deporting all (or even most) people currently living illegally in the United States is unworkable as it is cruel – many people in this position did what anyone else would have done, given their situations and the immense pull factors of demand for labour and sporadic enforcement. Moreover, many illegal immigrants have lived most of their lives in America and are effectively Americans in pectore. Many are probably model citizens. Some would likely become the best of America.

But if the rule of law means anything at all, violating US immigration law while others endured stress, incurred expense and lost time following the legal process cannot be rewarded unconditionally. Illegal immigrants should be lifted out of the shadows and freed from a fearful half-life which does nobody any good, but only after following a similar process to legal immigrants. And there must be proper border enforcement in return, so we do not end up back in the same situation in two decade’s time. Immediately upon amnesty being granted to otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants, the Left must give up their defence of sanctuary cities which make a mockery of the law. Donald Trump’s wall is overly expensive, impractical and largely pointless, but existing fencing should be fortified and new technologies deployed to stop illegal crossings. In other words, there must be a meaningful quid pro quo.

Neither side in American politics has acquitted itself very honourably when it comes to immigration reform, but at present it is the Left who are rapidly lurching toward a more extremist position, led by their activists on a collision course with a more sceptical public.

And going into the next electoral cycle, all the shrieking about Trump’s “racist” wall will not disguise the fact that the Left have something far more radical in mind.

 

Immigration Reform

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Republicans For Big Government

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Barack Obama - Sequester - Obamaquester

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Run for your lives! The Obama Jobs Sequester is coming!

The evil President Obama sneakily – and somehow avoiding the notice of Congress – inserted into a congressionally approved bill a provision that would make large, across-the-board cuts in domestic spending if Republicans and Democrats failed to work together to reach a grand bargain on spending, tackling tax revenues and federal spending in a unified and bipartisan way.

And now that congressional leaders have failed to agree on these items, the undiscriminatingly large cuts are about to fall on the federal budget, which will result in many lost jobs, particularly in the area of national defence, which is just terrible. And all because of Obama. Right?

At least that’s how Kimberley Strassel, writing in The Wall Street Journal, sees it:

A year ago, the president demanded a $500 billion “sequester” of defense dollars as a penalty should Congress fail to cut a grand debt deal. Congress of course failed, and Mr. Obama’s sequester is now imminent. The sequester slash comes on top of the $487 billion in defense cuts Mr. Obama had already ordered in January of this year, threatening the likes of Mansfield.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has warned of the damage the sequester will do to national security. Yet the far more immediate political problem for Mr. Obama is that the cuts are compounding his domestic jobs liability—in the final stretch of the campaign.

More than one million lost private-sector jobs, to get down to it, as estimated by groups ranging from the National Association of Manufacturers to the Aerospace Industries Association. Military jobs are on the block, but the bulk of the pink slips will come from private businesses—from giant defense companies on down to smaller businesses that are the economic mainstays of their communities. They’ll come from states crucial for President Obama’s re-election: Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, and more.

So apparently, according to the Kimberley Strassel school of thought, what we should be doing in this recession is cutting government spending, because government doesn’t create jobs, entrepreneurs do. Unless that government spending is supporting jobs in the defence sector, of course, in which case we should be increasing it, dramatically!

Some more “moderate” Republicans argue that while they support cuts in principle, they are appalled by these looming defence cuts in particular because they are across-the-board and arbitrary, and pay little heed to particular defence programs or areas that could be more reasonably targetted for cutting. That’s the point of the sequester that they and their Democratic colleagues agreed to. It inflicts blind, undisciminating pain on areas of government spending precious to both sides of the political aisle, with the intention of presenting such an unthinkably draconian package of cuts that leaders would get together to forge a compromise.

If you don’t like the idea of a scythe being taken to defence spending or to welfare programmes without regard to their individual merit, get together, in the name of patriotism and bipartisanship, and for the sake of the people who elected you, and hammer out a compromise that cuts the welfare state while raising tax revenues to help close the massive hole in America’s federal budget.

Interestingly, you never hear Republicans making the same arguments against across-the-board cuts to welfare programmes, or social security, or food stamps. In those cases, apparently, it is fine to slash away at the budget with little regard for the people who were led to believe by their government (Republicans as much as Democrats) that certain benefits would be available to them, and who planned their lives accordingly, often with little left in reserve.

We can argue the rights and wrongs of this – personally I find the welfare state too generous, and politicians of all sides too cowardly in failing to tell voters the truth about the unsustainability of current levels of provision over the past recent decades – but surely we can all agree that just as you cannot rip a bandage from an open wound and expect the patient to be unharmed, so you cannot remove anticipated benefits or support from citizens overnight, at a time of economic hardship, and expect their lives, or the social fabric, to remain stable.

In fact, there is only one other area of government spending besides national defence that I can think of where Republicans have come out in outraged horror at the mere talk of blanket cutbacks – I’m speaking, of course, about Medicare. Those lofty words about scaling back federal spending and shrinking the size of government sure do fly out of the window awfully fast when one of their core constituencies (in this case, the grey vote) is in the firing line.

But Kimberley A. Strassel is not troubled by any of these arguments or contradictions, content instead to bob gently in the vast ocean of her own ignorance, wilful self-deception and cynically fiscally irresponsible propaganda.

No, for her it is the Obama Jobs Sequester, the Machiavellian outcome that he desired all along in order to gut his own nation’s capacity to defend itself. It’s the only plausible explanation for how we find ourselves in this situation. Unless it isn’t.

Bad Journalism Award

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

You know how it is when you read an article that is just so weak, so clearly living in a hermetically-sealed bubble of similar opinions, so insulated from opposing viewpoints, so grandiose in its self-righteous assuredness and yet so utterly wrong that it makes you just want to issue a point-by-point rebuttal of every stupid thing that the author committed to print (hopefully at this point you are not nodding and thinking “yes, that would be the last article I read here…)?
Well, Charles Hurt, writing in The Washington Times, stepped up to the challenge and magnificently managed to push all of my buttons with his piece entitled “Obama’s South Side Chicago Thuggery” (yes). So here you are, Charles: this is why you are wrong. From the top:

Now that we know just what President Obama thinks of people who succeed in business, it is no wonder that the economy is so much in the crapper. In his desperation to avoid any discussion of his own disastrous handling of the economy, Mr. Obama announced last week what he thinks of the struggling spark plugs of commerce: They are a bunch of felons.

Of course, he did not come right out and directly say that himself, because that would risk drawing renewed questions about whether he is actually an American with the slightest whiff of respect for private industry and ingenuity that defines America.

The economy being “in the crapper”, of course, is all Obama’s fault. Nothing to do with the huge credit crisis and other systemic and structural flaws developed under the previous eight years of Republican oversight.

And what’s this? “…that would risk drawing renewed questions about whether he is actually an American with the slightest whiff of respect for…” Actually an American, what an interesting turn of phrase. Almost as though the author were trying to subconsciously plant the idea that the president is, in fact, actually not an American. But we’ll say no more about that.

So he did what gangsters from the South Side of Chicago have always done. He dispatched one of his bloodthirsty capos to handle his dirty work. Then he strolls up onto the scene all clean and innocent-looking in his fancy, pressed duds and shiny spats and plays the wise guy.

Oh really? Valerie Plame. Scooter Libby. Dick Cheney. George W. Bush floating serenely above the fray. That is all I have to say to that.

As Mr. Obama misquoted Harry S. Truman the other day: “The buck stops with you.” Obviously he was confusing Truman with his real hero, Al Capone.

This political thuggery straight off the streets of Chicago signals desperation in the Obama campaign and a level of deception unrivaled in recent presidential politics.

Yeah, I don’t know what he is talking about either. But will someone please explain to me the American right’s frequent use of of the terms “thug” or “thuggish” in describing left-wing activism? You read or hear it all the time, on any right-wing blog. Why thugs? Is this a remnant from the Jimmy Hoffa days, or something else? Why is a left-wing person who uses strident language and occasional overstatement a “thug”, while a right-wing person is just understandably carried away because of their deep and abiding love for America, and should be given a free pass? Huh?

And most decent people would not suggest that the president’s hero is a murdering gangster. You can say it, Charles, that is totally within your constitutionally guaranteed rights, but I’m going to call you a low-life, slanderous, sanctimonious moron for having said it.

Democrats howled when John Kerry got “swift-boated” during the 2004 election with questions about his deservedness of medals he won during Vietnam — medals that he later threw away in protest of America and the military.

Okay, this one really annoys me. “…threw away in protest of America and the military”? Charles Hurt, could you be any more of a stereotypical US conservative? All about institutions and paternalism and respect for authority, and livid whenever anyone questions any of these. John Kerry loves his country, I’m sure, having served it in so many ways throughout his career, and it is disrespectful in the extreme for you to suggest otherwise. I would venture to say that Kerry threw away his medals in protest at the US foreign policy of the time, as conducted by the US military, and not at the idea of America and the US military in themselves. Many people, patriots also, would defend the right to burn the flag as a protest, but then I’m sure you would consider them traitors and anti-Americans too. Because anything but total, blind, unswerving allegiance to the government policy of the day is treason, of course. Oh, wait – unless there a Democratic administration that you disagree with in power, in which case you exercise your patriotism by making warm noises about armed uprisings and overthrowing the government.

And it’s just so much easier to win an argument when you grossly mischaracterise someone else’s actions and arguments, isn’t it, Charles?

Okay, I’m not going to spend any more time on Charles Hurt. I should not have risen to the bait. But the thought of him sitting there, reading the daily papers and getting outraged about all of the terrible policies that liberals are enacting, and the dirty processes by which they operate, whilst wilfully forgetting everything bad that happened under the previous Republican administration, was too much for me.

So I’m calling you on this one, Mr. Hurt.

Your article sucks, and you are the first winner of my Bad Journalism Award. Not that what you do – based on this example, at least – can really be called journalism as such.

In case you are wondering, your prize was the fact that I called you a low-life, slanderous, sanctimonious moron on my blog.