Action – Reaction
by digby
Corey Robin and the Reactionaries (featuring Amanda Marcotte). No it’s not a band, it’s a conversation. And a good one:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Buy the book
.
There’s a lot of chatter about Ron Paul among lefties these days, some of which I’ve addressed here, here and here. Apparently there are quite a few liberals and progressives who normally vote Democratic who are going to vote for Ron Paul instead. Many have decided to support him based upon Obama’s national security and civil liberties apostasies. Others are hoping to hasten what they see as the inevitable destruction of the political system in order to get on with it. (What “it” is remains a bit vague.)
Rep. Ron Paul, in a tight race for first place in Iowa with Mitt Romney, is perhaps the most likely to benefit from Democratic crossovers. His campaign is distributing information sheets advising Iowans that they can register Republican “for a day” on caucus night, then switch their registration back afterward if they want.
“It’s easy. You can register on your way in the door,” David Fischer, co-chairman of Paul’s Iowa organization, told voters Thursday at a campaign stop in Atlantic.
John Long, a registered Democrat, said that “last time, unfortunately, I believed a lot of the rhetoric” and voted for Obama, after going to a Democratic caucus as a Joe Biden supporter. Long feels that job-crushing regulations have gotten worse under President Obama, who he said had failed to end the “embarrassing” political spectacle in Washington, in part because he was too weak to stand up to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the Democratic leaders in Congress.
The 65-year-old semi-retired accountant plans to vote for Paul at a Republican caucus in West Des Moines. “Ron Paul has a lot going for him, particularly in the economic area,” he said. Long doesn’t care for the Texas congressman’s isolationist foreign policy but says that no candidate is perfect and that Paul “is principled enough not to say stuff just to get elected.”
[…]Cheryl Hout, an Obama voter from Osceola, Iowa, said she “fell for” Obama in 2008 “because he’s such a good speaker,” but now calls the president “a liar.” The 54-year-old special-education teacher is very unhappy that he didn’t deliver on the change he promised, especially with a healthcare plan whose implementation has been much too slow to meet her family’s medical needs. She and her husband, Terry, 63, an independent who says his Obama vote was “a mistake” and who has never attended a caucus before, plan to vote for Paul.
“We’re looking for something new to revive the country,” she said. “We’re so close to losing our whole country. China owns us. They could just walk right in and take us. It’s scary.”
Ooookay.
.
Teens react to Rick Perry’s “Strong”
by David Atkins
This is almost like beating a dead horse at this point given Rick Perry’s irrelevance to the GOP race, but this video posted a few days ago is priceless:
Republicans are screwed with the younger generation, particularly on the social conservative front. Libertarianism is making some dangerous ideological inroads, as the only people unafraid to be against insane foreign interventions and insane drug policies also happen to be in favor of insane Objectivist domestic spending policy. If Democrats don’t figure out that the future lies in taking more progressive stances on social issues, foreign policy and drug policy, they’re going to get flanked by libertarian nutcases who will implement objectively horrible domestic spending cut policies.
But the traditional conservative base is dying and it isn’t coming back. The kids are all right.
.
The failure to prosecute bankers leads to revolutionary, divisive politics
by David Atkins
There has been some conversation among liberal bloggers about the Occupy protests and the recent moves even by liberal mayors to remove the campsites. Many like myself have argued that America is supposed to be a nation of laws, after all, and a representative democracy. Constitutional democracy depends on rule of law. The people vote on representatives who make laws. If the representatives don’t make the right laws, they get replaced in elections. Judges make sure the rights of minorities are protected from the rule of the majority mob. Executives are supposed to enforce those laws–which gets tricky, of course, when it’s the executive who is allegedly breaking the law, but let’s bypass that special case for a moment because it’s not the point of this post, nor the lawbreaking most Americans are really concerned about.
If the people’s representatives continue to refuse to make the laws, the people can engage in civil disobedience and get arrested to highlight the issues, again to shame elected officials into passing or enforcing the right laws. But it’s still about the laws and the people who make them, democratically elected by the people. It’s one thing to engage in civil disobedience with the expectation of being arrested as part of the visibility of the protest. It’s another thing to expect that authorities will simply ignore the flagrant legal violations and allow indefinite encampments without arrests.
Still, elected officials have more moral authority than mobs of people by virtue of their being elected. That’s the whole point of representative democracy which, as Winston Churchill dryly noted, is the worst form of government–except for the others that have been tried from time to time.
One can argue that the system is so hopelessly corrupted by money that the laws are inherently unjust and the officials not worth dealing with, but that is the logic of revolution, of systemic collapse. And that goes to some very uncomfortable places, especially when you consider that the extremists on the Right are perfectly capable of making similar arguments and putting them into action. If it’s revolution we’re talking about, it’s going to take a lot more than public camping to bring about the movement’s goals. In a nation as bitterly divided as this one, a revolution against the current system in a more progressive direction would almost certainly by a very bloody, bitter battle–not an Aquarian change of utopian consciousness. The change could probably happen peacefully over a couple of decades through the buildup of grassroots political pressure and electing progressively better people into office. But to accomplish the goals quickly would take guns and lots of them, not protest signs–which is partly why Candidate Obama’s promises to “change our politics” fell so drastically short once he became President Obama. Nobody can change this economic system on a dime without making some serious political systemic changes, including especially to the filibuster. That in turn takes not an executive, but an adequate number of progressive legislators who see the problem and are willing to make the changes in spite of being labeled “divisive.”
Even so, it’s awfully hard even for folks like me to argue that mayors have an obligation to enforce the rule of law, when the rule of law so obviously only applies to the little people. In case you missed the 60 Minutes segment from last week, it’s clear that the laws are only being enforced against regular people, even as the billionaire criminals skate free.
The failure to hold any of these egregious thieves accountable is fraying the social contract. It legitimizes the revolutionary worldview.
Part of the decision not to prosecute them has undoubtedly been (apart from pure corruption and the difficulty and expense involved in the prosecutions) the desire not to do anything too divisive. But the fact is that not prosecuting them has led to increasing political division in this country, as groups on both the left and the right believe the system incapable of dispensing justice. That in turn leads to a revolutionary theory of change, which (each in their own characteristic way) is what binds Tea Partiers with guns at congressional rallies promising “second Amendment remedies,” and Occupiers illegally shutting down ports, declaring basic city zoning laws unconstitutional, and demanding the right to pitch tents on public property for years on end if need be to accomplish undefined goals.
Don’t blame the Tea Partiers or the Occupiers for this state of affairs. Blame the elected officials who have refused to the prosecute the people responsible for the economic crisis. If people thought the system was working the way it should be and prosecuting the right people, it would do a lot to pull the release on the political pressure valve.
.
“In the absence of passion we are tender of our persons”
by digby
Looking back over the past year, it seems like a good day to reprise this post by Caleb Crain from some years back about asymmetric political warfare:
William Hazlitt explained the nature of it in his 1820 essay, “On the Spirit of Partisanship.”
Conservatives and liberals play the game of politics differently, Hazlitt wrote, because they have different motivations. Liberals are motivated by principles and tend to believe that personal honor can be spared in political combat. They may, in fact, become vain about their highmindedness. Hazlitt condemns the mildness as a mistake, both in moral reasoning and in political strategy. “They betray the cause by not defending it as it is attacked, tooth and nail, might and main, without exception and without remorse.”
The conservatives, on the other hand, start with a personal interest in the conflict. Not wishing to lose their hold on power, they are fiercer. “We”—i.e., the liberals, or the “popular cause,” in Hazlitt’s terminology—“stand in awe of their threats, because in the absence of passion we are tender of our persons.
They beat us in courage and in intellect, because we have nothing but the common good to sharpen our faculties or goad our will; they have no less an alternative in view than to be uncontrolled masters of mankind or to be hurled from high—
“To grinning scorn a sacrifice,
And endless infamy!”They do not celebrate the triumphs of their enemies as their own: it is with them a more feeling disputation. They never give an inch of ground that they can keep; they keep all that they can get; they make no concessions that can redound to their own discredit; they assume all that makes for them; if they pause it is to gain time; if they offer terms it is to break them: they keep no faith with enemies: if you relax in your exertions, they persevere the more: if you make new efforts, they redouble theirs.
While they give no quarter, you stand upon mere ceremony. While they are cutting your throat, or putting the gag in your mouth, you talk of nothing but liberality, freedom of inquiry, and douce humanit…. Their object is to destroy you, your object is to spare them—to treat them according to your own fancied dignity.
They have sense and spirit enough to take all advantages that will further their cause: you have pedantry and pusillanimity enough to undertake the defence of yours, in order to defeat it. It is the difference between the efficient and the inefficient; and this again resolves itself into the difference between a speculative proposition and a practical interest.
It is not fair play, and Hazlitt thinks that liberals who decline to fight fire with fire are fools. “It might as well be said that a man has a right to knock me on the head on the highway, and that I am only to use mildness and persuasion in return, as best suited to the justice of my cause; as that I am not to retaliate and make reprisal on the common enemies of mankind in their own style and mode of execution.”
Last year’s legislative antics show that not much has changed.
.
Looking for a cure
Mitt’s Mammonism, Mormonism … and Mayanism?
by digby
Ok, now this is even stranger than usual. Howie discusses Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and Mammonism and then reveals a little factoid that will scare the bejeezuzs out of the Religious Right if they ever hear about it:
But back to Mammon. That isn’t the only thing Romney worships. His family fled to Mexico in the 1800s in order to preserve their polygamist way of life and lived there for generations. I’m in the Yucatan now and have been visiting Mayan sacred sites all month. I’ve heard again and again from Mayans that Mormon missionaries– they’re everywhere in Mexico, thick as fleas– tell them that the Mayan feathered-serpent god Quetzalcoatl was the resurrected Jesus Christ, who Mormons believe as a prime tenet of their “religion” visited the Americas after being crucified.
The chief Mormon after Brigham Young, John Taylor, who began the Mormon colonization of Mexico, wrote: “The story of the life of the Mexican divinity Quetzalcoatl closely resembles that of the Savior; so closely, indeed, that we can come to no other conclusion than that Quetzalcoatl and Christ are the same being.” Does Mitt Romney worship Quetzalcoatl as the resurrected Jesus? He won’t say. In fact, for a powerful Mormon bishop, he sure hates talking about his faith.
The White Bearded God – Quetzalcoatl in the Book of Mormon
Ancient American literature frequently refers to a “white, bearded god who descended out of the heavens.” Called by many names, this legendary figure is often referred to as Quetzalcoatl. “Historians of the sixteenth century recorded pre-Hispanic beliefs concerning the white, bearded god who came to the Americas long before the arrival of the Spanish conquerors” (Brewerton, 30). While this may seem to be merely a legend or an unexplainable part of history, the Book of Mormon, believed to be written by ancient American prophets, reports the visitation of Jesus Christ to the American continent following his resurrection. The congruencies between the Book of Mormon account and Native American legends are astonishing. The following paragraphs contain examples of these Native American legends:
Bernardo de Sahagun (born 1499) wrote: “Quetzalcoatl was esteemed and considered as a god, and was worshipped in older times. He had long hair and was bearded. The people worshipped only the Lord” (Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, Mexico: Editorial Porrua, S. A., 1985, pp. 195, 598).
Diego Duran (born 1537) wrote: “A great man—a person venerable and religious—bearded, tall, long hair, dignified deportment, heroic acts, miracles—I affirm he could have been one of the blessed apostles” (Historia de las Indias de Nueva España, 1867, first ed., 2 vols., Mexico: Editorial Porrua, S. A., 1967, 1:9).
Bartolomé de las Casas (born 1474) wrote that Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, was white, had a rounded beard, was tall, and came from the sea in the east, from whence he will return (see Los Indios de Mexico y Nueva España Antologiá, Mexico: Editorial Porrua, S. A., 1982, pp. 54, 218, 223).
The Tamanacos Indian tribes in Venezuela have the same legend of a white, bearded god: “[Amalivacá] had a face the color of the light fluffy clouds of the morning, and white was his long head of hair. … He said: ‘I am Amalivacá, and I come in the name of my father INA-UIKI’ ” (Arturo Hellmund Tello, Leyendas Indígenas del Bajo Orinoco, trans. Ted E. Brewerton, Buenos Aires, Argentina: Imprenta Lopez Peru 666, 1948, pp. 19–22). (Brewerton, The Book…)Although it is not a commonly told tale in the Christian world, it is possible that the congruencies in the Book of Mormon and Ancient American legends teach us that Jesus Christ Himself appeared to the people in America following His resurrection. These accounts may reveal the meaning behind Jesus Christ’s statement to his apostles in John 10:16 when he says, “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd” (King James Version). Holy Bible John 10 In the Book of Mormon, Christ explains to the ancient American people that they were the “other sheep.” Read Jesus’ words to the ancient Americans
Of course, the Mayans depict Quetzalcoatl like this, but it’s just a detail:
.
The 20 Most Important cats of 2011
The one on the right is obviously a Wall Street fatcat.
Thanks again to all who chipped in so generously to the holiday kitty and a special thanks to those who did so anonymously. You know who you are — and know also that you have my deepest gratitude.
Happy New Year everyone!
.
