We Fight Low Information
Julie Driscoll: Although it’s not really necessary to “know the enemy” (since our enemies have already outed themselves as idiots and numbskulls hugging their guns and building underground bunkers), it’s on sites like teaparty.org where true radical right-wingers are born, bottle-fed, nurtured and set free to wreak havoc.
Steve Hochstadt: Many Americans might say, “Nobody.” What they mean is that they don’t trust any “official” sources of information. They listen attentively, however, to the crackpots of alarm.
Julie Driscoll: When Fox ran out of ways to protect the golden boy Ryan, after they’d media-mauled, after they’d gloated about their poll showing a clear Ryan win, Fox launched the smear that Biden was drunk at the debate:
Zili Danto: Maybe George Will intended to make the point that the US empire’s control of Haiti and other little republics’ vote at the UN is not new.
Charley James: Justice John Roberts has refused to corral his equally conservative Associate Justices from selling their integrity to right-wing political groups and causes.
Julie Driscoll: Five of the six kids involved in holding this young man down so Romney could whack off his blond locks with scissors feel badly about it to this day. Only Romney doesn’t remember.
Steven Mikulan: Conservatives have put aside the boring tasks of creating jobs, loosening credit and saving people’s homes in order to follow their true passion – kicking the ladder away from Americans who are trying to climb up to better lives.
Berry Craig: Beck will doubtless keep on spewing hate into his microphone. But he couldn’t get elected dog catcher, and he knows it. I trust the citizens of Norway know it, too.
Walter Brasch: The truth is that the politics of hate, combined with media complicity and Internet access, has led not to a discussion of critical issues but to character assassination, with racism and bigotry as its pillars.
Carl Matthes: So how big a surprise is it that muscle-bound Arnie was sleeping with the hired help? That he was a liar and a cheater during his 25 year marriage to Maria Shriver?
Andrea Nill: While there will undoubtedly be at least a handful of right-wingers who accuse the Obama administration of pandering to minorities, helping Latinos raise their educational achievement should be a national priority.
Berry Craig: Tea Party types are cool with Bachmann because she loves what they love — guns and the Good Lord, for instance. And she disdains what they disdain — immigrants, gay people and the “Kenyan” “Muslim Marxist” in the White House whose “plan” is “white slavery” come to mind.
Bill Londrigan: We can look back and see the carnage that the corporate war on workers and their unions has wrought: a decline in wages, benefits, unions and jobs–while corporations and the wealthiest one-percent have amassed the largest concentrations of wealth in history.
Paul Hogarth: My prediction is that the Ninth Circuit will grant standing to Prop 8 supporters – despite clear legal precedent from the U.S. Supreme Court in Arizonans for English Only that gay marriage opponents must prove they have a “direct stake” in the outcome that affects them on more than mere ideological grounds.
Robert Reich: In reality, the lousy economy is due to insufficient demand – the result of the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income at the top.
Tom Hayden: As a result of the Republican takeover of the House, hard-line right-wingers like Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Connie Mack will lead key committees and sub-committees for the next two years. Any hopes to improve US relations with the new nationalist and democratic regimes of Latin America have dimmed sharply.
Robert Illes: Christine O’Donnell; Her idiocy, past and present, has made her a national figure, with millions of dollars flowing into her campaign.
Paul Hogarth: Despite all the ranting right-wingers make about “terrorists” and how much they accuse liberals of being “un-American,” their worldview has far more in common with Islamic fundamentalism – from a violent jingoism, to the treatment of gays and women, to a rejection of science. American Taliban is a much-needed dose of reality for the upcoming election, as Republicans magnify the non-issue of a proposed Islamic community center in Manhattan.
Michaelangelo Price: And what about O’Reilly’s “alone time” fantasy, fake writer Ann Coulter? Can you imagine her piggish self-interest in social climbing the dregs of Long Island society has anything at all to do with genuine patriotism?
Jim Fuller: On Jan. 21, 2010, the day the Supreme (now Extreme) Court under John Roberts declared that corporations and the very rich had a right to speak louder than the rest of us during campaigns, it was immediately clear that representative democracy in this country would be a thing of the past. The rich, already enormously powerful, were going to own the system outright.
Mark Bowen: Kentucky does appear to be a state red enough that Rand Paul, no matter how many times he slips up and tells his constituents how he really feels, is still likely to be their next Senator. But in many ways Republicans will be hurt more nationally if he is, making it a minimum of six more years, rather than six more months, that he’ll be their problem.
Tina Dupuy: Going largely underreported, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke at the Eisenhower Library (name for the president who coined the term “military-industrial complex”), last week calling for cuts in the Pentagon’s budget. Gates asked, “Does the number of warships we have and are building really put America at risk when the U.S. battle fleet is larger than the next 13 navies combined, 11 of which belong to allies and partners? “
Natalie Davis: Progressives and right-wingers don’t speak the same language (and the Right insists that everyone speak theirs and live under its rules and worldview). When I resist that, I AM THE BAD ONE. If I get angry at inequality, something obviously is wrong with ME. Of course, I reject that notion wholesale: Each of the two sides sees the other’s view as completely immoral, not merely as “misguided” or “wrong.”
Andrea Christina Nill: Perhaps for the sake of sense of consistency, Beck has essentially drawn a line in the sand between immigrants who emigrate to the U.S. legally, and those who do not. Yet, what Beck either ignores or doesn’t realize is that the “front door” is slammed in the face of most people who would like to live and work in the U.S.
Andrea Nill: Last week, the Denver Westward News Blog reported that Tom Tancredo got the idea for requiring voters to pass a civics literacy test from “a black guy” driving a limo in Detroit who was studying for his citizenship test.
At a Christmas party a couple weeks ago, back when it looked as if the Senate bill’s compromise would include the Medicare buy-in, a friend of mine told me that he predicted Harry Reid was gong to go down in history as the next LBJ. When I reminded him that the deal was not yet [...]
As long as the Democratic leadership insists on being directed by the supposed wisdom of this advice, they will continue down their present path to an electoral train wreck next November as bad or worse than the one they suffered in 1994, when they played their cards the same way.
Rather than safeguarding their reelection bids, these Democrats are more likely shooting themselves in the foot by deliberately sidestepping issues like immigration reform and climate change which helped Obama win the White House and put many of them in office.
Michael Sigman: For many old-media types I talked to, there was more resignation than outrage this time around, as though a cherished institution were already gone.
Julie Driscoll: Students and their parents’ only hope is Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown, two Democratic Senators who have the cojones to take on big banks, Wall Street, and the powers that be.
Berry Craig: Called the “Ride for Respect,” the demonstration at Walmart corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, will be modeled on civil rights volunteers who rode buses into the South in the 1960s to protest Jim Crow racial injustice.
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Wisconsinites Determined, Obama AWOL
Jim Fuller: Wherever organized labor and the middle class are under serious attack, that’s where Obama (aka The Artful Dodger) isn’t. Not only won’t he go to where the fights are, he won’t even talk about them.
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