Obama’s approach was politically necessary. On a simple calculus of benefits, his proposal would have failed. Perhaps 32 million Americans will receive insurance coverage — about 10 percent of the population. Other provisions add somewhat to total beneficiaries. Still, for most Americans, the bill won’t do much. It may impose costs: higher taxes, longer waits for appointments.
People backed it because they thought it “the right thing”; it made them feel good about themselves. What they got from the political process are what I call “psychic benefits.” Economic benefits aim to make people richer. Psychic benefits strive to make them feel morally upright and superior. But this emphasis often obscures practical realities and qualifications. For example: The uninsured already receive substantial medical care, and it’s unclear how much insurance will improve their health.
Purging moral questions from politics is both impossible and undesirable. But today’s tendency to turn every contentious issue into a moral confrontation is divisive. One way of fortifying people’s self-esteem is praising them as smart, public-spirited and virtuous. But an easier way is to portray the “other side” as scum: The more scummy “they” are, the more superior “we” are. This logic governs the political conversation of both left and right, especially talk radio, cable channels and the blogosphere.
Unlike economic benefits, psychic benefits can be dispensed without going through Congress. Mere talk does the trick. Shrillness and venom are the coin of the realm. The opposition cannot simply be mistaken. It must be evil, selfish, racist, unpatriotic, immoral or just stupid. A culture of self-righteousness reigns across the political spectrum. Stridency from one feeds the other. Political polarization deepens; compromise becomes harder. How can anyone negotiate if the other side is so extreme?
Crying racism whenever there is a legitimate policy dispute is an old, tired, and increasingly ineffective tactic. The Congressional Black Caucus would have us believe that although virulent racism is now subterranean, it’s just as dangerous and pervasive as it was 50 years ago and surfaces whenever liberals try to do good.
But more and more Americans refuse to be cowed into guilty submission by this maneuver. A majority of Americans were born after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Segregation and de jure racial discrimination are not part of their experience. Nor do they feel responsibility for it.
Leftists really think that most Americans are idiots. The term “Bush regime” was part of the left’s vocabulary for over eight years, including Matthews himself! The fact that they don’t except the American public to remember that is rather telling.
Media Matters must have missed the very civil debate between de Rugy and Silver. (They responded to each other throughout the day.)
Jonah mentioned this the other day in his column, but the tireless Andrew Breitbart returns to the theme, to devastating effect.
On March 20th, something truly extraordinary happened. On the eve of the health care vote, a group of black Democrat Congressmen (eschewing the private tunnels they usually use to cross from their offices to the Capitol) chose to walk en masse through a crowd of protesters, confident that the knuckledragging Tea Party goons they and their media pals have reviled for a year now would respond with racial epithets.
And then, when the crowd didn’t, the black Congressmen made it up anyway. Representative Andre Carson (Democrat, Indiana) insisted he heard the N-word 15 times. He’s either suffering from the same condition as that Guam-flipper from Georgia, or he’s a liar. At a scene packed not only with crews from the Dem poodle media but with a gazillion cellphone cameras, not one single N-word has been caught on audio. (By contrast, see my post yesterday for how easy it is to get it on tape when real epithets are flying.)
I disagree with John Lewis (Democrat, Georgia) politically but I have always respected him as a genuine civil rightswarrior. And I feel slightly queasy at the thought that he would dishonor both the movement and his own part in it for the cheapest of partisan points - in the same way I would be disgusted by a Holocaust survivor painting a swastika on his own door and blaming it on his next-door neighbor over a boundary dispute.
But that’s what the Democratic Party has been reduced to - faking hate crimes as pathetically as any lonely, mentally ill college student. Congressmen Carson, Lewis, Cleaver and the rest have turned themselves into the Congressional equivalent of the Duke University stripper. Except that they’re not some penniless loser but a group of important, influential lifetime legislators enjoying all the privileges and perquisites of power, and in all probability acting at the behest of the Democrat leadership.
Isn’t that what societies with functioning media used to call “a story”?
Apparently not. As they did at Duke, the brain-dead press went along with it - and so, predictably enough, did much of the Republican leadership.
(via wooliebear)
But I was assured that political violence and fascist impulses were a phenomenon confined almost entirely to the right?
Most of the indicted militia members accused of being anti-government extremists have active voting records, a check with area voter registration offices showed yesterday.One is a registered Democrat, and the party affiliations of the rest could not be determined.
Jacob J. Ward, 33, of Huron, Ohio, voted as a Democrat in the 2004 and 2008 primary elections, and in 10 other elections since 2000. Voters’ political affiliations in Ohio are determined by which party’s ballot they request during even-year primary elections.
Frank Rich of The New York Times and Colbert King of The Washington Post are among the columnists willingly checking their honesty – or their brains – at the door to throw political mud. Either these people are too ignorant to know their charges or false, or they don’t care and spit their bile anyway.
King wrote last week of looking at “angry faces” at Tea Party rallies and finding them “eerily familiar,” resembling protesters seeking to prevent a black University of Alabama enrollee in 1956.
Rich peppered his column with Third Reich imagery, eventually backing up his claim of racism with comparisons to those who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Leaving aside for the moment that much opposition to that measure came from Democrats, it cannot be said plainly enough today: These men and their numerous partners in this smear should be ashamed – if nothing else, for logical flaws beneath a fifth-grader.
Their argument is: (A) This movement is filled with vocal people displeased with the way things are going; (B) I can find examples in history of people whose vocal displeasure was fueled by racism. Hence, (C) these people must be fueled by racism.
OK, boys, let’s see how you like it: (A) You are fans of ObamaCare; (B) Castro is a fan of ObamaCare, so, (C) you are communists.
Logic and basic human decency prevent me from making that connection seriously. I would like to believe that if these craven critics actually attended a Tea Party event, their testimony would change. But I doubt it. Theirs is a screeching born of panic, the need to demonize a movement rather than debate it.
