Frozen Punditry
by digby
Jane Hamsher says I have a monkey named Chris Matthews on my back and I need serious help. Yes, my name is digby and I am a Hardball addict.
There’s a reason for it. Chris Matthews, to me, is the perfect embodiment of the delusional, millionaire DC courtier who thinks he is channeling the common man. The beltway is full of those guys apparently, but Tweety has a very special perch from which he dispenses all kinds of what he thinks are folksy observations about “Real Americans” but which are actually 50’s cartoon characters along the lines of Fred and Wilma Flintstone. He’s a fascinating case study in how the dysfunctional DC political media are completely immersed in rightwing bias and don’t even know it.
Here’s an exchange between Matthews and Howard Fineman today. Fineman runs down a list of various “deadly” poll ratings for Republicans in this week’s Newsweek poll:
Matthews: You didn’t give us the deadliest which is that Democrats are now trusted more on moral values
Fineman: I thought that was the next question
Matthews: (incredulous) I mean that is a stunning … the Democrats are the big city party, the tolerance party the … in many ways libertarian on social issues and moral issues and now they’re perceived to be more priestly, more honorable on moral questions … I guess that includes sexual questions … than the Republicans.
Fineman: In fairness to the Democratic … to everybody, that’s kind of a race to the bottom on that question, but it is a remarkable, it’s a turnaround. I think it’s about two or three months ago it was slightly in the Republicans’ favor, not overwhelmingly, because I think the accumulation, sort of the aura, of the money scandals on the hill, no one of which made a big impression, but overall they kind of did. The notion of government spending being out of control which, by the way, a lot of people view as a moral issue. The border’s not being protected …
Matthews: That’s something the Democrats don’t get and better damn get someday, which is, to Republicans having budget deficits is…
Fineman: it’s immoral.
Where do I begin? First, let’s take a look at Matthews’ incredulity that Democrats could possibly be considered more moral than Republicans. The definition of “moral values” is so vague that one could certainly call the Iraq war a matter of moral values and yet he seems to believe that the word applies only to sexual matters and that democrats are perceived to be less moral. (Indeed, he seems to think that tolerance itself is immoral, which would come as something of a surprise to Jesus Christ.) This idea about “moral values” is rightwing frame that goes completely unchallenged virtually all the time.
Fineman actually begins to spell out how the “moral values” issue might extend to corruption and greed and then makes the debatable point that government spending being out of control is also considered a “moral issue.” Let’s assume for the sake of argument that people do believe that. Why in the world would Chris Matthews then imperiously lecture the Democrats and say they’d “better damn get someday” that for Republicans having budget deficits is immoral?
O’Neill, fired in a shakeup of Bush’s economic team in December 2002, raised objections to a new round of tax cuts and said the president balked at his more aggressive plan to combat corporate crime after a string of accounting scandals because of opposition from “the corporate crowd,” a key constituency.
O’Neill said he tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney that growing budget deficits-expected to top $500 billion this fiscal year alone-posed a threat to the economy. Cheney cut him off. “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said, according to excerpts. Cheney continued: “We won the midterms. This is our due.” A month later, Cheney told the Treasury secretary he was fired.
Are Matthews and Fineman so infused with GOP propaganda that after six years of Republican rule, the total consumption of a large budget surplus accumulated by a Democratic president, and now the biggest deficits in the nation’s history that they still believe that the Democrats are feckless with the economy while the Republicans are the good stewards? Still???
What does it take to shake these people out of their torpor? Cheney admitted it outright. The evidence is irrefutable. Republicans don’t give a damn about deficits except as a weapon with which to hit Democrats over the head when they are in the majority. Every time the GOP gets into power they loot the treasury like drunken pirates and run up huge debts for somebody else to pay. The record for the past 26 years is clear.
Democrats believe that budget deficits are sometimes necessary when an economy needs a boost or to fund long term projects that require borrowing money. It’s straight up Keynesian economics, nothing fancy. Otherwise, they believe in paying as you go. Republicans believe that deficits are “their due” and that “bridges to nowhere” are the spoils.
The 1994 revolution that gave Republicans control of the House produced a seismic shift in federal spending, moving tens of billions of dollars from Democratic to GOP districts, an Associated Press analysis shows.
Rather than pork-barrel projects for new GOP districts, the change was driven mostly by Republican policies that moved spending from poor rural and urban areas to the more affluent suburbs and GOP-leaning farm country, the computer analysis showed.
The result was an average of $612 million more in federal spending last year for congressional districts represented by Republicans than for those represented by Democrats, the analysis found. That translates into more business loans and farm subsidies, and fewer public housing grants and food stamps.
“There is an old adage,” said House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.). “To the victor goes the spoils.”
Yet, if Democrats ever gain control of the political system, guys like Matthews and Fineman will be out there tut-tutting and nit-picking, falling back on same the fetid, moldy slogans about Democratic “taxing and spending.” And I’m sure they’ll call them immoral even as they try to put the fiscal house back in order after the GOP criminal gang came through and destroyed the place. These deficits will not disappear like magic — and the punditocrisy will help the Republicans fight the necessary hard decisions every step of the way.
If the pundits can’t even get this one right, after all we’ve seen, then they are truly hopeless. Their knee-jerk criticism of Democrats under all circumstances is a major impediment to decent, competent governance and our democracy is in danger because of it. The Republicans would never have been able to get away with what they’ve done without the so-called liberal media regurgitating GOP platitudes and calling it analysis for the last six years. It’s only been in the face of such jarring cognitive dissonance as we’ve seen with Iraq and Katrina that that they’ve adjusted their robo-rhetoric at all.
If Democrats win in November, look for an immediate return to the standard critique of Democrats and an almost instant nostalgia for the “non-partisan” days of total GOP rule. They haven’t questioned their assumptions in decades and they aren’t going to start now.
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