The bottom half of Americans only own 2.5 percent of American wealth and other “shocking” facts of American life.
US politics
Isolated incidents
Democratic representatives and senators are threatened for voting yes on Obamacare:
WASHINGTON — Democratic lawmakers have received death threats and been the victims of vandalism because of their votes in favor of the health care bill, lawmakers and law enforcement officials said Wednesday, as the Congressional debate over the issue headed toward a bitter and divisive conclusion.
Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader, said at least 10 House members had raised concerns about their personal security since Sunday’s climactic vote, and Mr. Hoyer characterized the cases as serious.
At least two Congressional district offices were vandalized and Representative Louise M. Slaughter, a senior Democrat from New York, received a phone message threatening sniper attacks against lawmakers and their families.
I’m sure these are all isolated incidents and have nothing to do with the overblown and violent rhetoric coming from the rightwing media and politicians…
CotD: do not be too proud of Obamacare
HTML Mencken provides a reality check:
I’m feeling a replay of the 90’s in the sense that, then, many liberals made the mistake of claiming Bill Clinton was an awesome president because he was victim of constant, retarded right-wing attacks. This attitude soon morphed, in practice, to lumping all the attackers together, left and right, on the ultimately Stalinist grounds that leftwing critics of Clinton gave “ammo†or “cover†to the enemy. This is immoral and stupid from a liberal perspective in itself, but what’s more it completely ignores that strategery thing liberals (eleventy-dimensional chess!) like to think they are good at. It’s true that unlike Obama, Clinton lacked a mandate for serious reforms. Similarly, the only thing FDR lacked a mandate for, until Pearl Harbor, was involvement in WWII (he had a huge mandate for the New Deal and unlike Obama, proceeded to use it forcefully). Both Clinton and FDR told leaders to their left the same thing regarding policies they all wanted, but public opinion was against — “you have to force me to do this, even though I want to do it anywayâ€. Remember Clinton’s exasperated “where the hell were you?†comment to David Obey? Obama had and has a mandate for the public option; he didn’t need to be forced to combat public opinion because public opinion was with him all the way. Yet he still fucking dithered. So, correctly, he was attacked from the left in order to force him to do what the American people wanted and what liberal fans claim Obama personally wanted all along. But the left — FDL, Corrente, “Chomskyitesâ€, DFHs, pro-choicers, you know, the democratic base — are, somehow, the assholes in all this! So here’s Pelosi to save his bacon, Obama is rapidly accruing all the credit for HCR, and the Sensible Liberals are even more convinced they were right all along. I’m glad HCR passed but this center-left coalition can’t hold when it’s all center and no left.
Reasoned argument considered harmful
People used to say that the media weren’t really right wing, but were just sucking up to Bush because they worship power and success. But if that were true, we should be seeing them sucking up to Obama and the Democrats now. They aren’t. Instead, what we’re seeing on TV these days is more of the same: President McCain, and President Boehner, and President Lindsey Graham, and President Snowe, and President Gingrich, and a couple of dozen other Republican Presidents. The slant has scarcely changed at all.
One of the reasons I gave up on America is the feebleness of the Democratic and liberal response to the increasingly conservative slant of the media. We’re long past the time when it made sense to be surprised by anything they do, and we should understand by now that they know what they’re doing and are going to keep on doing it. Squeals of rage about their egregious dishonesty, incompetence, and nastiness just make them laugh.
Coincidently, over at SEK’s place, Rich Puchalsky says something similar about engaging winguts:
What really tires me out about these posts is how strenuously you argue against whatever nonsense you’re writing about. Look, you say, I will painstakingly trace back through the process and show that it is constitutional at every stage! It’s like a rigorous, logical proof, following from simple first principles, that a shit-throwing monkey should not in fact throw shit at people.
John says liberals should stop being surprised at the media being rightwing, Rich says they should stop being surprised about lying wingnuts. Both have a point. The liberal blogosphere has long had a problem with realising that rightwing bias and wingnut lying are not abberations that can be corrected through reasoned debate, that they continue to occur because they’re profitable. Wingnut makes for good copy, while rightwing commentary is rewarded by advertisers where leftwing commentary is not. This is not a new development and those who object to Chomsky teaching them this, should take a look at A. J. Liebling, showing the same influences at work twenty years earlier. Hell, the same dynamics were already at work in the original yellow press.
Both socialists and anarchists have long known that you cannot ask for change, you need to force change on your opponents one way or another. Liberals, unlike rightwingers have failed to internalise this message because they’ve been in charge for so long and had had teh real left to fight their battles for them. Now that they find themselves cast out as well, it’s high time they learned it.
Just a middle class drudge with a grudge
Last thursday a man flew his plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas and the worst part about it is that it didn’t come as a surprise or shock. I’ve been expecting something like this to happen for some years now and my first thought was that this is what you get when you have an rightwing Democrat in the White House more interested in buying off bankers than getting health care for ordinary Americans and an opposition movement driven by emotion and barely sublimated racial hatred. That the first target would be an IRS building is not surprising either — few people like a visit from the taxman and taxation has been a bugbear of wingnuts as long as the US has existed. It seemed likely this was some raged-up teabagger made mad by repeated exposure to Glenn Beck
But it turned out Joe Stack was somebody much more dangerous. His suicide note was of course selfserving, but far from loony. His lifestory as presented there could be the story of millions of struggling middleclass people, grown up with the belief that hard work and smarts would make him rich, only to be knocked down time and again by circumstances outside his control, as well as the simple fact that he wasn’t as smart or crafty as he thought he was. He saw how the big boys behaved and thought he could do the same, only to be smacked down because he couldn’t. His was the rage of the little man, the one who can never catch a break, always gets caught when he tries to cut a corner yet sees others get away with murder.
The resentment he felt is on clear display in passages like this “Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours“. The sheer dichotomy between his own experiences and what he sees on the news each evening is what fuelled his rage, something surely we’ve all shared at one point or another. I certainly have. In Stack’s case, this rage finally metamorphosed into action. Sadly, if fittingly, this action was against the wrong target killing the wrong people. He gets angry at multibillionaires and ends up murdering the same people as him just because they work for the IRS.
Joe Stack won’t be the last angry middleclass white dude going for a spot of self destructive terrorism. The economic crisis and the blatant way in which the system is being gamed will see to that. Wall Street may think the recession is over or almost over, but for millions of middle class families barely holding on it is just beginning. They are the ones who have the most to lose from it, they are the ones whose anger and rage will stoke more of these atrocities, is stoking the teabagger movement and which will make sure shit will be burned down if better alternatives will not emerge.