As we know, there is nothing that upsets the wingnuts more than the government bailing out the auto companies. It’s a socialistic, fascistic takeover of the economy and signals the end of the American way of life as we know it. The proper course is for the companies to go bankrupt (and break that union that has ruined everything for everyone.)
However, when an auto company is allowed to go bankrupt and is forced to close many of its dealerships (also known as small businesses) they scream like stuck pigs, claiming that the administration is forcing the poor company to divest itself of jobs against its will and targeting Republicans to boot. (It’s ok to fire the people who make the cars, you see, but firing people who sell them is a betrayal of capitalism.)
Anyway, the facts are just a little bit less scandalous than the wingnuts will admit. They looked at the list of auto dealers being shut and determined that most of them were Republican donors. And that could only mean that Republicans were being targeted to the advantage of Democratic donors. But FiveThirtyEight looked at the donor lists and found out that 88% of car dealers are Republicans. So unless the company targets Democrats very specifically, it’s pretty much shooting fish in a barrel that more Republicans will lose their franchises.
I guess they assume that all politicians are as crude and corrupt as Karl Rove and Dick Cheney when they operated the Department of Justice like a cheap partisan whore house. But I actually think the Obama administration has a few bigger things on its mind than punishing used car dealers for being Republican. They’ve got their hands full trying to clean up the epic pile of garbage that was left behind after Bush’s eight year long frat party.
I have to believe that many Republican senators will seize the opportunity Obama has provided and prove they are not as narrow-minded as their most extreme backers. And then hope that, like some mirror image of Souter, Sotomayor will surprise the world with some of her votes.
Naturally, these Republican Senators will be “proving” they aren’t as narrow minded as Rush Limbaugh, not simply reading polls and tea leaves and recognizing that insulting the first Hispanic Supreme Court nominee by calling her a racist is political suicide. And gosh, let’s hope she’s the mirror image of Souter and will be much more conservative than anyone thinks she is, because that would be the best of all possible worlds.
I’m sure Broder’s most cherished fantasy is that Sotomayor will make her mark as a great Supreme Court justice by being the deciding vote to reverse Roe vs Wade. That Villager wet-dream can only be truly fulfilled with liberal apostasy. As Andrea Mitchell noted on MSNBC this morning, Sotomayor’s chances are greatly helped by the fact that pro-choice groups are a bit concerned that her record is opaque on abortion issues and that Obama went out of his way not to probe her about it. Their hopes are obviously very high that liberals are going to be very disappointed. What could be better than that?
Update: Gibbs sent some pretty clear signals today that Sotomayor assured the president that she agreed that Roe was settled law. (I don’t know why we have to always talk in riddles about this issue but apparently we do.) Anyway, I’m sure this greatly disappoints the Villagers, but their hope will undoubtedly remain undiminished that she is either being purposefully obtuse about her beliefs or will have an epiphany that will make her change her mind. Nothing would thrill them more than to have Sotomayor turn out to be a conservative.
If we’re going to get meaningful health care reform in this country, it will be because people talked to their neighbors, rebutted the smears and advocated so loudly that they became impossible to ignore. There are some small stories that can make us hopeful but much work to be done. When Blue Cross of North Carolina started readying Harry and Louise-style attack ads to scaremonger Americans on a public option, the outcry was sufficiently loud that the White House forced the insurer to back down and scrap their plans. When compromisers tried to create a trigger mechanism that would introduce a public option only if insurance companies don’t voluntarily reduce costs and expand coverage, health care advocates widely disparaged the idea, arguing that the trigger has already been met, and the talk cooled.
But the forces protecting the status quo won’t stop. A brand-new conservative group with links to none other than the teabaggers will launch an ad campaign comparing the US system to (horrors!) Canada’s. According to their ad, government bureaucrats in Canada make decisions on coverage and treatment. Good thing we live here in America, where only private insurance bureaucrats get to make those decisions!
Rick Scott will likely continue to mislead viewers about the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, a newly-created entity by the economic recovery package signed into law by President Obama in February. Mr. Scott will likely make a specific claim: “not only could a government board deny your choice in doctors, but it can control life and death for some patients.” This statement is demonstrably false. In reality, the powers of this so-called “government board” are clearly defined and cannot do what Mr. Scott claims. The statutory authority of the Council specifically excludes the power “to mandate coverage, reimbursement, or other policies for any public or private payer.” It is worth noting that even under President Bush, the National Institutes of Health already had an annual budget of $355 million to conduct precisely this type of research. Plainly, this has not led to the sort of catastrophic consequences in America that Mr. Scott warns against.
The advertisement will likely deceive viewers by blatantly misrepresenting the positions of two physicians. While the advertisement paints both as opponents of any role for government in health care reform, in reality, just the opposite is true. Both physicians are in fact supporters of universal health care. What they are opposed to is the U.S. ‘two-tiered’ system that already rations health care based on the ability to pay. In fact, Mr. Scott misrepresented Dr. Day’s comments, and Dr. Day openly mocked the ineffectiveness of the U.S. health care system. What Dr. Day is opposed to is Canada’s outdated funding model, not Canada’s healthcare system. Dr. Day actually advocates reform of the funding structure to preserve Canada’s healthcare system, not dismantle it […]
If Scott’s 30-minute “documentary” contains any falsehoods, NBC will be liable for an FCC violation. Furthermore, Meet the Press needs to know that they’re being used by Rick Scott, and will be tarnished by his swiftboating.
In addition, groups are going after the real source of where any downfall in health care reform will lie, President Nelson and the ConservaDems, who will try their best to please their contributors and friends (Ben Nelson ran an insurance company, incidentally) by stopping anything meaningful.
Centrist Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.) is under attack from an advertising campaign that criticizes his opposition to President Obama’s healthcare plan.
The Web and direct-mail ads specifically take on Nelson for opposing Obama’s proposal to create a public health insurance program consumers could choose instead of private plans. The $10,000 ad campaign is paid for by Change Congress, an advocacy group that is calling for publicly financed elections.
The Change Congress ads charge that Nelson’s opposition to a public health insurance plan is linked to campaign funds he has received from health insurance groups. Citing data from the Center for Responsive Politics, the ads say Nelson has accepted $2 million from health insurance companies over three Senate campaigns.
Taken alone, a $10,000 ad buy, even in Nebraska, won’t do much. In combination, only a sustained assault on the status quo from all advocacy groups will get reform of this type done. That’s just an historical fact. And while it’s welcome that the President will deploy the Organizing for America email list for health care, it’s going to take progressives concerned about the policy details to drive the discussion.
Earlier this month, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) declared that he was against including a public option in health care reform, calling it a “deal breaker.” But Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim reports that in a meeting with health care advocates in Nebraska yesterday, Nelson said that he was open to including a public plan:
Nelson, according to two people in the room, told the group that he was open to a public option, the primary Democratic goal of reform and anathema to conservatives.
“The good news for all sides involved is that he’s open mined,” said Barry Rubin, the former Executive Director for the Nebraska Democratic Party, who was in the meeting. “He’s not closed minded about a public option.”
Nelson’s afraid of his constituents. Good place for progressives to have him.
These are tough times and there’s a lot of need out there. It’s sadly ironic that when the economy tanks, those who are getting by on the economic overspill to do good work are the first to experience the contraction and the last to feel an uptick. I think everyone involved in the netroots and the progressive movement, just like most of you out there, are really feeling the pinch. In fact, it’s becoming something of a crisis.
Open Left is an essential component of the liberal blogosphere. If you have a couple of bucks to spare to keep this important blog going, click here. I did.
I think everyone’s been assuming that Cheney was out there defending the torture and reckless invasion regime in order to protect the administration’s legacy (and possibly avoid prosecution) because he really believes his policies kept the nation safe. There’s even been speculation that he’s been nobly trying to protect the little guys unlike the traitors of the Reagan administration who let them hang out to dry.
But it’s looking more and more like he’s some other agenda:
Cheney said he disagreed with President Bush’s decision to provide a short term loan to General Motors, which the former Vice President said was intended to keep GM solvent until then-President-elect Obama could take the reins.
“Well, some of us at the time wanted GM to go bankrupt, go to Chapter 11,” Cheney said in an interview with CNBC’s Larry Kudlow.
“The decision was made that, in the final analysis, since our administration was almost over and a brand-new team was about to take over, that the president wanted, in effect, not to take a step that wasn’t necessarily going to be followed by his successor,” Cheney said.
I can’t say that I’m surprised that he would be out there justifying the torture regime. It looks so bad, and he’s so closely associated with it, that anyone would want to publicly explain. But this is something different. It’s true that Cheney was the guy who said “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter — this is our due,” so his bona fides on the economic front are less than stellar. But nobody holds him personally responsible for the bail outs. And yet yet now he finds it necessary to tell everyone that he was against the GM bailout and basically throw Junior over the cliff?
If you didn’t know better you’d think this guy was running for office.
As I said before, despite the bluster, Republican Senators are considering it unlikely to mount a filibuster against Sonia Sotomayor. But there’s an entire architecture of movement conservative organizations designed to push a filibuster fight, and they will be hard to ignore. After all, this is how they make their bacon:
Organizations that have been preparing for a major confirmation battle — and that depend on such fights to raise money, motivate supporters and galvanize enthusiasm for their agendas — made it clear they don’t intend to sit out the debate, filibuster or no. The debate over Sotomayor could also lay groundwork for fights over later high court nominations the president might make.
Never mind the longer game of making Sotomayor illegitimate, calling into question all her future opinions, and rousing the base even more now that such a woman sits on the nation’s highest court ready to persecute them.
TPMDC profiles these movement actors, the same few people you’ll see quoted in every paper and appearing on every cable show in the next couple months. There’s Wendy Long of the Judicial Confirmation Network, Curt Levey of the Committee for Justice (who used Sotomayor’s taste in Puerto Rican cuisine to call into question her judicial philosophy – really, he did), Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who I heard on NPR criticize Sotomayor for her “silence” in an opinion she participated in but didn’t write, and Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice. There are more groups, like Judicial Watch, The Federalist Society, plus the usual think tanks, et al. Why you need this many overlapping judicial organizations is beyond me, but I guess the goal is to employ as many movement conservatives as possible, plus you can mix and match them in the media to give the illusion of a broad perspective. And filibuster or not, they have to be out there raising hell and raising money. A Supreme Court fight without storefront conservative judicial organizations would be like tax season without accountants.
But TPMDC missed the one individual who has certainly gained the most in the early going of this nomination – New Republic writer Jeffrey Rosen. After all, his use of gossipy talking points has driven the entire discussion in the media, and made him ubiquitous even if he hasn’t graced the camera with his presence. And though his reputation ought to be in tatters for pushing such demeaning talking points into the mainstream, as it turns out, he has the lead story in this week’s New York Times magazine.
The article sidesteps the Sotomayor controversy, preferring instead to define liberalism on the Court in the 21st century, and the term “democratic constitutionalist.” But the meta question of “why the hell is the NYT allowing Jeffrey Rosen a platform?” can never be far from the informed reader. Far from being punished or blackballed for his role in trying to destroy the reputation of a soon-to-be sitting Supreme Court Justice, Rosen has been celebrated and promoted. Of course, in the Village, Rosen is “one of us,” and Sotomayor is “one of them.”
Yesterday I dashed off this glib little bon mot, which deserves a much more serious treatment:
One can’t know for sure that the fact that Chief Justice John Roberts, who has so far voted every single time with the ruling elites, was affected by his personal experience as a privileged white male — coddled, groomed and rewarded from his earliest days by the conservative establishment he served — but it certainly isn’t unfair to think he might have been.
This idea that Sotomayor saying that she is influenced by her Latina heritage and her experiences as woman is somehow evidence that she can’t be “impartial” is absurd, of course, because every human being is a product of their own experiences. What seems to be at issue here is that Sotomayor admits that her life experiences are part of her and is, therefore, presumed to be inclined to give “her own” special treatment. That the conservative white (and one black) males who sit on the court might do the same thing is not even considered.
Anyway, this seems to me as if it should be fairly obvious, but it’s not. So, Adam Serwer has gone to the trouble to spell out how the conservative Justices of the Supreme Court routinely show empathy to “their own:”
In recent weeks, conservatives have turned “empathy” into a talking-points staple in order to preemptively cast doubt on whomever Obama picked to replace Souter. They characterize liberal justices as bleeding hearts intent on reading ephemeral rights into the Constitution while conservative jurists are merely content to interpret the law.
But the conservative justices on the court — Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas are not emotionless robots able to interpret the law without bias or personal experience coloring their rulings. They don’t lack empathy; they simply don’t empathize with the people Obama or liberals might like them to. Conservatives want their justices to empathize with the religious, the unborn, and powerful corporate interests. Liberals want their justices to empathize with women and minorities, workers and the downtrodden.
For all the pearl-clutching horror coming from the right, the conservative legal movement has picked its plaintiffs carefully, with an eye toward catching the winds of public opinion through sympathetic plaintiffs such as Frank Ricci, the white firefighter who was denied a promotion, or Terri Schiavo’s parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, who sought to keep Schiavo on life support despite her husband’s claim that she expressed a desire not to be kept alive in a persistent vegetative state. Empathy is an important element of the conservative legal movement on both sides of the bench. Most recently, it’s been conservatives who have been arguing for empathy for the architects and perpetrators of torture on the grounds that they broke the law ostensibly in the interest of the country, while liberals have called for rigidity in upholding laws against torture.
While some conservative justices, such as Kennedy, have been more emotive than others, emotion and perspective have always shaped the Supreme Court’s opinions, particularly in cases involving the issues conservatives care most about, such as abortion, gay rights, and affirmative action. In his opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart, the case that upheld bans on partial birth abortion, Justice Kennedy memorably wrote, “While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.” While Kennedy cited precedent in his opinion, it was nonetheless clearly guided by his paternalistic “empathy” for the hypothetical mother whom he felt needed protection from decisions she might regret, despite the lack of evidence to support that notion.
Likewise, Justice Alito, as a judge on the 3rd Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals, was the lone dissenter in the 1991 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey. He argued for upholding a law that would compel wives to inform their husbands if they were going to have an abortion. The original law was intended to protect women who might be subject to violence or abuse from their spouses. Alito cited previous rulings, including a 1976 dissenting opinion from Justice Byron White, (“A father’s interest in having a child — perhaps his only child — may be unmatched by any other interest in his life”) in order to make the case that a father had a “legitimate interest” in the life of his child that stopped short of a husband being able to forcibly prevent his wife from having an abortion but gave him a right to be notified in advance. Of course, forcing women to notify their husbands might lead to that exact outcome. Alito and his pro-life predecessor were empathizing with the potential father, and that empathy informed their opinions.
Justice Scalia’s dissenting opinion in the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case that struck down anti-sodomy laws laments the plight of those “protected” by laws criminalizing homosexuality. “Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home,” Scalia wrote. “They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.”
On issues of race, both Justice Thomas and Justice Roberts have shown a degree of empathy, but for different reasons. In a 2002 case involving school vouchers, Thomas didn’t merely argue that the voucher law in question was constitutional; he likened black pursuit of education to the struggle for emancipation, quoting Frederick Douglass at the beginning of his opinion. “Today many of our inner-city public schools deny emancipation to urban minority students,” he wrote. This is not a dispassionate reading of the law. In general, Thomas’ rulings on race-related issues are deeply influenced by his belief that affirmative measures taken to address racial discrimination hurt blacks rather than help them. In his writing, Thomas empathizes deeply with other black folks — he just disagrees with them on a significant number of issues, such as affirmative action, which most black folks support.
Roberts is probably the most reserved of the justices when it comes to letting his feelings creep into his legal reasoning. But as Jeffrey Toobin noted in The New Yorker last week, on issues of race, Roberts has let the mask slip most recently in oral arguments involving the Voting Rights Act and the Frank Ricci affirmative action case. While Thomas asserts that laws addressing discrimination harm blacks rather than help them, Roberts’ view appears to be that such laws discriminate against white people.
It’s certainly possible that there will be cases where Sotomayor’s personal experience gives her some particular empathy. But the same is obviously true of the other Justices as well. The problem is that the other Justices speak for the status quo, which generally defaults to the interests of the powerful and is therefore not seen as one of those pernicious “special interest groups” which seeks to press for their own advancement at the expense of others.
I must say that this reminds me so much of the arguments we had during the election, when it was presumed by the conservatives and Villagers that any appeal to voters on the basis of race, ethnicity or gender was illegitimate, as if pleas to the “disaffected white male” hadn’t been a staple of electoral politics for the past several decades, replete with codpieces, guns and NASCAR. But that isn’t considered special interest pandering because these voters are “normal Americans.”
If you care about having a genuinely pluralistic and democratic society, it’s clear that Court (and every other institution) benefits from a wider range of experiences, as Obama rightly asserts. For instance, Justice Ginsberg recently lamented the fact that she was the only woman on the court:
Her status as the court’s lone woman was especially poignant during a recent case involving a 13-year-old girl who had been strip-searched by Arizona school officials looking for drugs. During oral arguments, some other justices minimized the girl’s lasting humiliation, but Ginsburg stood out in her concern for the teenager.
“They have never been a 13-year-old girl,” she told USA TODAY later when asked about her colleagues’ comments during the arguments. “It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.”
Her comments probably didn’t change the outcome — the questioning indicated that the decision will probably be that schools have a perfect right to strip search little girls whenever they want to — but at least somebody said it. Maybe someday there will be a few more who actually care.
Update: Greenwald has more on this, and highlights this piece of video from Samuel Alito’s hearings, courtesy DailyKosTV.
Of course, after he thinks about it he concludes that his family succeeded in American because they were all superior individuals while others who suffered from discrimination are losers. But let nobody say his experiences don’t shape his worldview.
Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) is privately telling supporters that he intends to run for Senate, TPMDC has confirmed.
“He intends to get in the race,” says Meg Infantino, the Congressman’s sister, who works at Sestak for Congress. “In the not too distant future, he will sit down with his wife and daughter to make the final decision.”
The move would constitute a primary challenge to Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA), who intends to run for re-election in 2010, after having switched parties earlier this year.
Earlier today, a Sestak volunteer and contributor received a handwritten note from Sestak himself, announcing his intent to run and asking for a contribution. The source provided TPMDC a scan of the letter.
I think this is a very healthy development. If Specter wants to win as a Democrat, at least this way he’ll have to prove he is one. I understand why the Party made promises, but they were promises they weren’t empowered to make, so Sestak has every right to run and if he can raise the necessary money and win good for him. He would be an improvement over Specter in every way.
Brooksley Born And The Financial-Political Complex
by dday
I almost missed this one yesterday, but the WaPo had a profile of Brooksley Born, the lawyer who, while the Clinton Administration’s Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, foresaw the coming crisis in unregulated derivatives, including credit default swaps, and staged an ultimately futile campaign to rein them in. Within this article are some of the most fascinating and unbelievable quotes from the men who led our financial efforts then – and some who continue to do so now.
You expect a house organ like the Wall Street Journal to respond to Born’s concern over derivatives by saying, “the nation’s top financial regulators wish Brooksley Born would just shut up.” But this line just absolutely floored me:
Born’s baptism as a new agency head in 1996 came in the form of an invitation. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan — routinely hailed as a “genius,” the “maestro,” the “Oracle” — wanted her to come over for lunch.
Greenspan had an unusual take on market fraud, Born recounted: “He explained there wasn’t a need for a law against fraud because if a floor broker was committing fraud, the customer would figure it out and stop doing business with him.”
This is the Randian mindset of the perfection of the market that has caused so much pain for so many millions of people. Greenspan either was literally so in thrall to the Masters of the Universe and his perfect little system that he found greed written out of the program, or so clever that he used transparently idiotic theories to simply allow legalized theft. Either way, everyone should know that this is the philosophy under which the United States, and really the world, financial system operated for three decades, directly from the mouth of its most powerful practitioner. Andrea Mitchell should resign in shame.
Sadly, however, it doesn’t stop there.
That was just the beginning. By early 1998, Born had also tangled with Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, his deputy, Summers, and Securities and Exchange Commission head Arthur Levitt, not to mention members of Congress, financial industry heavyweights and business columnists. She wanted to release a “concept paper” — essentially a set of questions — that explored whether there should be regulation of over-the-counter derivatives. (Derivatives are so-named because they derive their value from something else, such as currency or bond rates.)
They warned that if she did so, the market would implode and predicted tidal waves of lawsuits. On top of that, Rubin told her, she didn’t have legal authority to regulate the derivatives anyway […]
In early 1998, Born’s plan to release her concept paper was turning into a showdown. Financial industry executives howled, streaming into her office to try to talk her out of it. Summers, then the deputy Treasury secretary, mounted a campaign against it, CFTC officials recalled.
“Larry Summers expressed himself several times, very strongly, that this was something we should back down from,” Waldman recalled.
In one call, Summers said, “I have 13 bankers in my office and they say if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II,” recounted Greenberger, a University of Maryland law school professor who was Born’s director of the Division of Trading and Markets. Summers declined to comment for this article.
The discordant notes crescendoed in April 1998 during a tension-filled meeting of the President’s Working Group, a gathering of top financial regulators that periodically met behind closed doors at the Treasury Department. At that meeting, Greenspan and Rubin forcefully opposed Born’s plans, Waldman said.
“Greenspan was saying we shouldn’t do it,” Waldman recalled. “Rubin was saying we couldn’t do it.”
The rest of it reads like a Hollywood potboiler, with Born trying to outmaneuver her more powerful counterparts, ultimately falling short even after being partially vindicated by the failure of Long Term Capital Management, and finally resigning. We’re living with the consequences.
But surely you recognize some of the Democratic named involved in shutting Born down. Now let that color your impressions of this report (subs. req.):
Some banks are prodding the government to let them use public money to help buy troubled assets from the banks themselves.
Banking trade groups are lobbying the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for permission to bid on the same assets that the banks would put up for sale as part of the government’s Public Private Investment Program.
The lobbying push is aimed at the Legacy Loans Program, which will use about half of the government’s overall PPIP infusion to facilitate the sale of whole loans such as residential and commercial mortgages […]
Some critics see the proposal as an example of banks trying to profit through financial engineering at taxpayer expense, because the government would subsidize the asset purchases.
Surely, Larry Summers would follow the refrain of the Maestro, that there couldn’t possibly be any fraud because the customer would figure it out and stop doing the business. Of course, in this case, the “customer” and the vendor are… the same people.
James Kwak has more on this plan, which I pretty much expected (what’s to stop the banks from using shell companies to buy up their own assets at the right price, with government guarantees, even if the Feds break precedent and reject this?). Kwak has a good short version of this: “It allows a bank to sell half of its toxic loans to Treasury – at a price set by the bank.”
And he wants Tim Geithner and Sheila Bair to reject this. But the experience of Brooksley Born suggests that the problem with the incestuous political-financial complex is one of mindset. They view the goals of the banksters as superior to the goals of the country, or at best relatively aligned. And thus, regulating those complex financial instruments, or blocking clear giveaways of public money, somehow equals hurting the greater economy. Whether through dime-store philosophy or simply looking out for the interests of the wealthy – and themselves – we’ve become completely subservient to oligarchs who clearly value their success over that of the country. Which is fine for them – but there’s nobody advocating for the greater public, warning of the dangers of runaway capitalism, arguing for a return to the core mission of finance, to smoothly flow capital to those who need it, rather than the Wild West show we still see today. In other words, there are no more Brooksley Borns. And even if there were, the system is so rotted that not even someone of her talent and determination can get the message through. Despite the worst financial crisis since the Depression. I am happy to be surprised, but I don’t think anyone in Washington has gotten this message.
Because we have “green shoots.”
Here’s the coda to the Born article, by the way:
Born keeps informed, but she has other concerns, bird-watching jaunts and trips to Antarctica to plan, mystery novels to read, four grandchildren to dote on. “I’m very happily retired,” she says. “I’ve really enjoyed getting older. You don’t have ambition. You know who you are.”
Al Hunt just told Andrea Mitchell that Obama could have picked a “more formidable intellectual force” for the court but he threaded the political needle very well. When Andrea Mitchell went on to ask if the White House was holding a conference call later to reassure people about her intellectual abilities, Hunt said that she wasn’t as bad as Alberto Gonzales.
Hunt is a villager of the highest order and his robotic drivel is the result of that nasty little gossip piece by Jeffrey Rosen in EventhelibrulNewRepublic. It is hard to over emphasize the damage that article did to Sotomayor’s reputation; it’s pretty clear that among the villagers she will always be seen as an undeserving affirmative action hire. And let’s not pretend that the complaints about Sotomayor for being a “bully” and a “hothead” and dumb as a post don’t have their roots in the usual places. A person with her exact professional background and reputation named Steven Myers would not be seen this way.
Limbaugh lays out the real right wing case in stark terms:
The fact that she uses empathy, the fact that she is a racist and a bigot is perfect because in Obama’s world it’s permitted to be a racist and bigot if you are a minority because you have been discriminated against since the founding of the country and it’s about time that that was made right. And that’s what all of this is about. That’s what all of his administration and his presidency is about, returning the nation’s wealth to its rightful owners.
I’m sure villagers like Al Hunt, who are so willing to believe that snide backstabbing about Sotomayor’s intellect despite the clear evidence to the contrary, don’t believe that they are on the same page as Limbaugh, but they are.
Limbaugh’s “slave revolt” thesis plays nicely into the emphasis on the Ricci case, which greatly offends bobble heads like Pat Buchanan, Chris Matthews and Bill O’Reilly, who despite their vast wealth and celebrity, like to pretend that they are oppressed working class white guys. Indeed, the whole phony construct of the Village is based upon the idea that these people inhabit a small middle class town in 1950s Real America, which is under seige from rapid social changes that threatens their traditional values. What they are, however, is a decadent ruling elite who inhabit the most powerful capital on earth who are under seige from social progress which is allowing members of unrepresented groups to have a seat at the table. There are certain shared characteristics between the illusion and the reality, but the results are hardly similar.
Limbaugh, who spends hours each week railing against the unions which represent both the firefighters and the autoworkers, may be down to his last quarter billion, but the idea that he’s got more in common with those firefighters than the black and Hispanic colleagues who are competing for the promotions is ludicrous. But it’s the way the aristocrats have always put down the rebellion when the folks get a little bit too uppity — they turn them on each other and set them to fighting over the scraps. Sometimes they use tribal loyalty, race or religion. Lately, it’s this phony idea of “class” as a state of mind rather than an economic status.
As always, the working class white guys Limbaugh is enlisting in his posse are being duped. The enemy is the fellow who’s telling them they should fight all the women and minorities who are coming to “return the country’s wealth to its rightful owners” instead of looking to the old boys network that pays that same blowhard hundreds of millions of dollars to misdirect their legitimate anger away from the people who are bleeding the country dry.
Right wing populism always comes down to demagoguing on race, religion or some such which always ends up serving the wealthy interests very nicely. Complaining that a Latina judge is both a racist and an “affirmative action” hire for the court is an excellent phony symbol of the change that inspires the anger and insecurity so many people feel out there — including the anger and insecurity of the villagers, who are feeling that the riff-raff are coming to town to trash the place — and it’s not their place.
And might I add, that the feeling among many women tracks the same way. Whenever a female gets into a position of power, a whole special language suddenly enters the conversation that usually includes words like “calculation,” “bullying” and “temperament.” And, of course, there’s the usual “affirmative action” argument which holds that women and minorities have a really easy time making it in America these days at the expense of all those deserving white males. Therefore, the fact that they are still hugely under represented is validation that they are so stupid and inferior that they can’t make it even when they get all the breaks.