classicliberal2's blog

From Left Hook! Sunday:

"Mainstream" journalism--that which emanates from what our conservative friends insist is the "liberal media"--has many damnable practices. Its obsessed with trivialities--endless acres of trees die and barrels of ink are wasted on tales of the private lives of celebrities, countless hours of airtime are devoted to so-called "human interest" stories like the current one about the rescue of the Chilean miners (which, with a national congressional election looming, has been the top news story for weeks). Such stories, which don't affect anyone on earth other than those few directly involved, are used to replace hard news about real subjects that really matter and that affect everyone. Then, there's "he said/she said" reporting, wherein news reports only showcase conflicting claims, while making no effort to ascertain the truth behind them. This leaves the news consumer with the (usually false) impression that either claim may be true, and lets him choose what he wants to believe based on his own biases, rather than on facts. Our press also gives us regular doses of false equivalence. This is a con-game wherein Subject A lies like a rug about everything, but, in reporting his lies, the journalist feels the need to "balance" his story by including a lie or two from Subject B, his opponent. Subject B's few, usually minor, sometimes imaginary lies are thus made the equivalent of Subject A's real, massive, ongoing, comprehensive lies, leaving the impression that "they all do it," and that it's all just the same.

Just yesterday, I was writing/ranting about a story that has gotten far too little coverage in the press. This election cycle has seen an unprecedented influx of money being funneled through outside groups, many of which don't publicly disclose the source of these funds. There have been allegations that some of this money may be coming from foreign sources. Whatever the sources, though, it's a matter of inherent (and grave) concern for everyone with any sense of responsible citizenship that there's this historically unprecedented influx of cash from utterly unknown sources aimed at manipulating the outcome of a federal congressional election. It's a documented fact that Republicans are the overwhelming beneficiaries of this secret money this year. In that sense, the story does have a partisan character, but it gets that character because that's who is benefiting from the money, not because some partisan decreed it. Republican elected officials willingly made themselves accomplices to this by standing, as a monolith, against changing the law in such a way as to force these shadowy groups to disclose the source of their funds (as everyone else must do).

As I was writing here yesterday, it has been almost impossible to get the "mainstream" press to cover any of this, and when it has, it's handling of it has often been horrendous. Today offered up another specimen of that sort of horrendous reporting, a textbook example of That Damnable False Equivalence that seemed worthy of showcasing. It comes to us from the Hill, an article by Michael O'Brien and Hayleigh Colombo under the heading "Democrats Have Raised $1 Million From Foreign-Affiliated PACs." If the title doesn't give away the character of the piece, the lead paragraph settles the matter:

"Democratic leaders in the House and Senate criticizing GOP groups for allegedly funneling foreign money into campaign ads have seen their party raise more than $1 million from political action committees affiliated with foreign companies."

They all do it, you see?

Except that, if you read the article, the utter inappropriateness of framing the story in this way becomes immediately apparent:

"The PACS are funded entirely by contributions from U.S. employees of subsidiaries of foreign companies. All of the contributions are made public under Federal Elections Commission rules, and the PACs affiliated with the subsidiaries of foreign corporations are governed by the same rules that American firms' PACs or other PACs would face."

Whoops! It seems these aren't "foreign contributions" at all. They come, instead, from Americans who work in Toyota plants. Unlike with the outside groups, the donors are all publicly identified; unlike with the outside groups, all of the money is openly disclosed; unlike with the outside groups, all of it is subject to finance rules.

In other words, this has absolutely nothing to do with the story of these outside groups and their shadowy benefactors, yet O'Brien and Colombo have chosen to explicitly offer this as a counter to that story. That's how they framed their entire article. They even give a spokesman for American Crossroads--a group backed by Karl Rove that has poured millions into congressional elections without disclosing where a penny of it came from--a platform for an unrebutted rant against Democrats for their "hypocrisy."

The only "story" O'Brien and Colombo really have is that Americans citizens legally donated to legally-constituted PACs that fully disclose those donations, and the PACs then made legal campaign contributions, also fully disclosed.[1] Not that this is unimportant--money given to campaigns in large amounts is always offered as a means of buying influence, and that's never unimportant, and desperately needs much more coverage--but O'Brien and Colombo don't offer it as a story concerned with money in politics. It's structured only as a counter to the story of the outside groups, and, so presented, it has no real reason for even existing, and amounts to nothing more than the journalistic equivalent of squid's ink, something squirted into the water only to muddy it so the squid that has been caught can escape.[2]

That this kind of story isn't at all unusual doesn't render it any less disgraceful.

--classicliberal2

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[1] And, of course, both parties draw from these PACs, with Democrats getting slightly less than twice what Republicans get.

[2] I post, from time to time, over at the conservative site "The Next Right," and the Hill story has already been thrown at me, by one of the conservative posters, as a counter to my rant from yesterday. The comments section of the original story at the Hill site is packed with dozens of similar responses. The article's target audience perfectly understood its purpose.

From Left Hook!:

Money in American politics isn't just the most important story in American politics; it's the only one. To quote myself on the point, "U.S. politics are all about money. It overwhelms every other consideration. A lack of understanding of this basic fact precludes any understanding of U.S. politics."

You wouldn't know this from the coverage money gets in much of the "mainstream" corporate press. The stories do get reported from time to time, it's true, but they're inevitably offered in a vacuum, without any proper foundation. It's never a subject covered in the comprehensive fashion that would be necessary to give it the proper context. Given the weight it merits, it would lead the news nearly every night. As it stands, stories of money in politics are treated as man-bites-dog tales, while we get intense, detailed, around-the-clock coverage of things like the rescue of the Chilean miners--"human interest" stories that don't affect anyone beyond those directly involved.

The big Money story at the moment is how Big Money is purchasing the November elections. In the wake of the grotesque Citizens United decision foisted on us, earlier this year, by our Supreme Court, "independent" expenditures in many of the congressional races around the country are actually outpacing the money spent by the candidates themselves. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that

"Business associations, unions and ideological groups have more than doubled their spending on political advertisements and messaging when compared to the entire 2006 federal midterm, a Center for Responsive Politics analysis indicates."

CRP also notes that spending by corporate-sponsored PACs has already more than tripled over the previous mid-term elections.

Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming beneficiaries of this are the Republicans, whose shameless pro-corporate, pro-wealthy, pro-Big-Money politics are offered without the threatening (but empty) populist rhetoric sometimes served up by the Democrats when they're trolling for votes. In the first three weeks of September, Republican-leaning groups outspent Democratic-leaning groups 7-to-1. A week ago, the CRP reported that

"Eight of the top 10 [outside] groups are conservative with one bi-partisan and one liberal group. Since September 1, identifiably conservative groups have spent $25.8 million, liberal groups $5.6 million, and bipartisan or nonpartisan groups $4.1 million."

The Political Correction project of Media Matters For America has documented that only 10 conservative groups have, between Aug. 1st and Oct. 11th, financed an incredible 60,052 attack ads aimed at liberal candidates--almost all Democrats--on behalf of their conservative opponents.

One of the major players in this orgy of spending is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Among other things, it has financed over 8,000 attack ads on behalf of Republican Senate candidates this year, and has promised to spend $75 million against liberal candidates around the country. Earlier this month, a ThinkProgress investigation revealed that the Chamber is financing this operation out of its general fund, a fund which solicits and accepts significant contributions from foreign sources. One would think this would set off some alarms in a press corps that always proves itself an enthusiastic conduit for any xenophobic (and generally baseless) allegation about sinister foreign influence on Democratic politicians, but, when the shoe was on the other foot (or, more to the point, on the other party), the matter actually received no significant coverage until the Obama and his underlings raised this issue. It briefly cracked the news cycle at that point, but only long enough for much of the press to dismiss it as baseless and irrelevant, and to characterize it as a last-minute desperation tactic.

That was certainly the case when CBS's Bob Schieffer asked White House adviser David Axelrod if he had any evidence that the Chamber was using foreign money to finance its campaign activity. Axelrod's reply was, "Well, do you have any evidence that it’s not, Bob?" Schieffer was unimpressed. "Is that all you've got?"

On the surface, Axelrod's reply sounds rather lame--it's always incumbent upon someone making an allegation to offer evidence of it--but it actually gets to the heart of an important part of the Chamber story, a part Schieffer was sidestepping with his withering retort: the Chamber's fat $75 million wad to attack Democrats has been collected from sources that aren't publicly disclosed. That much money is involved, and the donors are entirely secret. We know foreign sources give to the fund from which the Chamber drew that money. We don't know how much they give. More importantly, we don't know how much anyone has given, or even who has given.

While it's no small matter that China, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and other foreign concerns may be using outfits like the Chamber to pour money into U.S. elections, the narrow focus, by the White House, on "foreign" contributions was unfortunate, in that it allowed that much larger point to be missed. Nearly half of all the very Big Money presently being poured, by outside groups, into the elections on behalf of Republicans come from groups that don't even publicly disclose the source of that money. What we have, then, is a mind-bogglingly huge wad of cash, intended to manipulate the outcome of U.S. elections, and we, the public, don't know where a dime of it came from. Politico reports that

"Never in modern political history has there been so much secret money gushing into an American election. By Election Day, independent groups will have aired more than $200 million worth of campaign ads using cash that can't be traced back to its original source."

That's important. No formulation of Responsible Citizenship would allow one to dismiss it.

Responsible Citizenship doesn't guide everyone, though. This summer, before this deluge, a Democratic initiative that would have at least made these groups disclose their donors was blocked when all 41 Republicans in the Senate--who are, of course, the beneficiaries of the current state of things--voted to filibuster it. An effort to revive it last month was similarly killed.

So there you have it. Is that all I've got? I'd say that was quite enough.

--classicliberal2

Alas, we have yet another poll purporting to survey the Tea Party "movement" that, in reality, does no such thing.

Gallup, its source, is a repeat offender on this matter. Its pollsters went down this same road back in March. It's a much-traveled road that leads only to a dead end, yet Gallup and every other major polling organization that has purported to survey the teabagger "movement" has insisted on this same trip to nowhere.

The critical flaw in all of this polling is that all of it is based on samples that don't reflect the actual "movement." This time around, Gallup's pollsters determined their sample by asking respondents if they were "Tea Party supporters." Back in March, they'd asked people if they were "supporters of the Tea Party movement." Pollsters have used variations on this wording to build their samples every time they've set out to survey the teabaggers.

Back in April, I outlined the many reasons why this is a problem, one that renders nearly all of the polling on this matter worthless. If you want to survey the opinions of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, you would build your sample by asking respondents if they, in fact, played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. If, instead, you asked respondents if they were "supporters of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers," it's obvious that the resulting sample is going to be much larger, and the results of the questions asked of that sample will not be representative of the views of the actual Bucs. Why this logic has so doggedly escaped the allegedly professional pollsters who have made such a show of surveying the teabaggers is becoming an enduring mystery.

When Gallup asked for "Tea Party supporters," they got yet another ludicrously high number: 30% of the population. The biggest sample yet. If those at Gallup hadn't given any thought to their methodology before, that result alone should have given them serious pause, as the teabagger "movement" has never shown itself to have anything even remotely approximating those kind of numbers. Obviously, a huge chunk of that sample is made up of people identifying themselves with the "movement" who, in fact, aren't a part of it in any meaningful way, yet they're the ones being surveyed, the data they provide that which is being presented as representative of the "movement."

As I noted at the time, CBS News--seemingly inadvertently--identified this problem in one of the teabagger polls conducted in April, but utterly failed to understand its significance:

"More than three in four Tea Party supporters (78 percent) have never attended a rally or donated to a group; most have also not visited a Tea Party Web site."

In other words, they aren't a part of the Tea Party "movement" at all. Of those who identified themselves as "Tea Party supporters" in that CBS survey, only 20% said they'd actually given money to a Tea Party org and/or attended a Tea Party event. That equals 4% of the general public. That's a number that's also wildly inflated, but it's a lot closer to reality than 30%. But it's the demographics and views of that larger sample that is being persistently surveyed by pollsters and presented as representative of the "movement."

In reality, the "movement" is exactly as I described it back in April; "an astroturf project, a tiny group of more-angry-than-thoughtful conservatives whipped into a persistent lather by a well-financed campaign of misinformation and sent into the street to provide the appearance of a mass movement." If it really commanded the allegiance of 30% of the population--or of even half that--it would be able (depending on dispersion) to dictate, at will, the outcome of the ongoing Republican primaries across the country. In reality, this year's teabagger candidates have been noteworthy primarily for their inability to unseat Republican incumbents in open elections. Even in a teabagger stronghold like Texas, incumbents managed a complete shut-out against them. In contested primaries without a party incumbent in the mix, the teabagger candidates who have succeeded--Rand Paul in Kentucky, Sharon Angle in Nevada, etc.--have quickly become national embarrassments, as the spotlight falls on their nutty, fringe views.

One could make the argument that the teabaggers are of so little consequence that it doesn't really matter that we have so little real polling, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that reasoning, but this polling that so radically inflates their numbers plays their astroturf game of making them look like a great deal more than what they are, and to the extent that it's believed, that can only have a negative effect on our politics.

---

And here's the earlier piece from April, referenced in what I've just written above:

To put the matter bluntly, the polling on the teabagger "movement" is a complete mess.

The demographics and the views of the "movement" have been the subjects of a number of surveys so far this year. In late February, there was a report from the Winston Group (a Republican firm), followed, in March, by the USA Today/Gallup poll and the Quinnipiac poll. A CBS News/New York Times poll out this week raised the issue again, and has provoked new conversation on the matter. The general consensus of the polling is that the "movement" is, from a demographic standpoint, not that different from America, while its views are often a good deal more conservative than those of the public.

The problem, underscored by a so-far-entirely-overlooked portion of the newest poll, is that none of these have actually surveyed the teabagger "movement."

They've purported to do so, of course, and the findings have been used by commentators of all political stripes as a basis for analysis of that "movement." I've even used them myself in a few postings to various boards. A closer look at the accumulated data, however, suggests that nearly all of it is essentially worthless insofar as providing a portrait of the actual "movement" is concerned.

Here's why: None of the pollsters bother to use a proper working definition of a member of the "movement." It seems like an obvious first step, if you want to survey those involved. What does it mean to be a part of it? What defines a "Tea Partier?" Obvious though this may be, no one sets any reasonable guidelines, and without them, it's impossible to get meaningful results--all one gets is garbage.

Here's how each of the pollsters who have worked the question went about establishing their sample: Quinnipiac asks respondents if they are "part of the Tea Party movement," without further elaboration. This is the same wording reported by the Winston Group. Their results were, respectively, 13% and 17%. USA Today/Gallup settled the matter by asking if respondents considered themselves "supporters of the Tea Party movement," wording that ropes in a potentially much broader group of people, and they get a much broader answer; 28% so identify themselves. The CBS News/New York Times poll picked their representative group by asking respondents if they were "Tea Party supporters," the same sort of broader wording, but this time, it drew a much narrower response; 18% so identified themselves.

All of the reported information on the demographics and views of the "movement" were derived from these samples. Even the smallest of them, though--13% from Quinnipiac, nearly 1 in every 8 Americans--is obviously wildly inflated (and the largest--28%--ludicrous). The teabagger "movement" has never demonstrated anything remotely approximating that sort of muscle.

In other words, a lot of people are clearly identifying themselves with the "movement" who aren't a part of it in any meaningful way, and it's information on their views and demographics, rather than those of the actual teabaggers, that is reflected in the polls that use them as a sample.

Part of this identification problem is no doubt a consequence of the continuing fall-out from the disintegration of the Republican party in 2008. As this hit rock-bottom last year, large numbers of Republicans had stopped calling themselves "Republicans"--identification with the party hit its lowest point in the history of polling. Those people didn't disappear from the face of the earth. They just started calling themselves "independents." The ranks of the "independents" swelled, and, in last year's elections, all the talk was about how "independents" had suddenly shifted rightward in their politics. They hadn't. There were just a lot of Republicans who'd taken to calling themselves "independents."Like "independent," the "Tea Party" label has, to an extent, become a substitute for "Republican" by Republicans who don't like to call themselves that at the moment.

The actual teabagger "movement" is, as it has always been, an astroturf project, a tiny group of more-angry-than-thoughtful conservatives whipped into a persistent lather by a well-financed campaign of misinformation and sent into the street to provide the appearance of a mass movement. The wildly inflated numbers are both a part of this project's goal, and a mark of its success.

A part of the new CBS News/New York Times poll that has received no notice gets to the heart of the matter: Of those who identified themselves as "Tea Party supporters," only 20% said they'd actually given money to a Tea Party org or attended a Tea Party event, or both. That equals 4% of the general public (a number that is almost certainly also wildly inflated, but I'll set that aside for now). This wording has to be quoted to be believed: "More than three in four Tea Party supporters (78 percent) have never attended a rally or donated to a group; most have also not visited a Tea Party Web site."

In other words, they aren't a part of the Tea Party "movement" at all. Their "participation" amounts to something like nodding their heads in agreement when some Fox News host praises the teabaggers.

The poll had another noteworthy element: it asked some questions of that small group who were actual teabaggers, somewhat cluelessly identifying them as "Tea Party activists," to differentiate them from "Tea Party supporters." Unfortunately, the pollsters treated the entire exercise as if it was a sidebar. In a move that gives new meaning to "missing the forest for the trees," their questions of the "activists" were only aimed at providing a contrast to the "supporters" who were the central focus. Actual teabaggers, the questions reveal, are angrier and gloomier than the already-angry-and-gloomy "supporters," they think even more highly of cretinous clowns like Sarah Palin and Glenn Back, even more of them think the taxes they pay are "unfair," and even more of them get most of their political information from Fox News.

It seems incredible that, after all this time and all the noise the teabaggers have made, this slim set of facts appears to represents the first real polling data we've gotten on those who comprise the actual "movement." It includes no demographic information, precious little systematic documentation of the teabaggers' views, and is nothing more than a sidebar to the farcical sideshow that is the larger poll. The larger poll that gets the headlines, the one that is mischaracterized as a snapshot of the "movement." Pollsters need to seriously work on improving the shoddy product they've been offering on this matter, and commentators need to stop presenting the teabagger "movement" as accurately represented by it.

This is a portion of a book I once wrote about Rush Limbaugh, about 15 years ago. It was never published, and, in fact, a lot of it was lost via a computer horror story too ridiculous to describe with a straight face. I still have large portions of it. This is a rough of one portion of a chapter on Limbaugh's "skills" as a political analyst. There are no footnotes, unfortunately--the cleaned-up, completed version is lost forever--but, fortunately, most of the time-and-place data for the Limbaugh comments are cited in the text. Don't know if anyone will care--I just thought I'd post it here and see if anyone had anything to say:

[A note: "TWTOTB", below, refers to Limbaugh's ghost-writer's first book, "The Way Things Ought To Be", and "SITYS" to his second, "See, I Told You So."]

Given the extent to which Limbaugh's views are dictated by class interests, most observers could be forgiven if they mistook him for a Marxist caricature of a conservative capitalist. To draw an audience, he poses as a populist, but, because his populist leanings are nothing more than a pose, he shows no consistency in them. They are whatever he needs them to be at the moment to rally support behind some element of his class-dictated politics. Limbaugh views the Republicans as the best vehicle for seeing those policies enacted, and, as a consequence, he's a die-hard Republican party man.

"Republicans vs. Democrats" becomes, in Limbaugh's universe, good vs. evil. The only time Republicans are less than good is when, in his view, they're not conservative enough; the only time Democrats are less than evil is when they're conservative. He molds his political commentary around these basic axioms; they're the only consistent elements at work in his efforts at political analysis, which makes that analysis a case study in contradiction.

Limbaugh had spent a good deal of time in TWTOTB writing about the nature of politics and elections. For example, he asserted:

"The real debate about where this country should be headed takes place every four years when we vote for president."

Of the Democratic-controlled congress, he says in the same book:

"They have ignored the people's will on countless occasions and dismissed the fact that the voters have endorsed conservative policies in three presidential elections. People are not fools when it comes to electing a President. People know that election is a defining one. They study the candidates and they care about their decisions. They don't do that very often with elections for Congress."

Events subsequent to the publication of TWTOTB led Limbaugh to consign the whole of this analysis to a memory hole, and to advance a new one that contradicted the discarded one in almost every particular.

The first of these events was, of course, the election of Democrat Bill Clinton as president. Suddenly the idea that voters decided the direction they wanted to send the country via their choice for president didn't sound so appealing to Limbaugh.

The second event was the seizure of both houses of congress by the Republicans in 1994. Suddenly, Limbaugh decided this was one of those occasions when the decision about what direction the government should take WAS made in a congressional election.

Clinton was, of course, elected by a significantly larger number of Americans than later elected the Republican majority in congress, but, for two years after the Clinton election, Limbaugh began each episode of his program by describing the Clinton presidency as "America Held Hostage." When the Republicans gained control of congress in a sparsely attended off-year election, he dubbed the campaign "Operation Restore Democracy" and claimed it to be a success. Then, as the "Republican Revolution" began in earnest, he began opening his program with "America: The Way It Ought To Be."

Limbaugh had problems deciding why the Republicans won in 1994. At first, he was clear on what had happened. On his television show the day after the election, Limbaugh said, of the results, "It was a total repudiation of one man--Bill Clinton--a total repudiation of his policies and where he wants to take this country…. The Clinton agenda is dead. The people didn't want it." Such a view, that the vote was wholly a negative reaction against the much-demonized Clinton administration, served Limbaugh's purposes at the time. This changed almost immediately, and, with it, his analysis. Very soon, he was saying the public hadn't voted negatively after all. Indeed, he maintained, it had given Republicans that most mythical of all political beasts: a Mandate For Change. On his radio show in May 1995, Limbaugh said of the Republicans running in '94:

"They had plenty of negatives on Clinton, and they could've just run against the President, but they didn't do that. They came up with an agenda of things that they said defined them. 'This is who we are. This is what we believe. This is what we're for. This is what we're going to do.' It's called the Contract with America. It gave people a reason to vote in the affirmative, and I firmly believe people want to vote for ideas, for people, not against."

On his TV show (1-17-95), he said: "Go back to the campaign. The Republicans campaigned expressly and exclusively on substantive issues, the Contract with America." He added that Republicans could have gone negative but didn't: "[They] took the high road and stuck straight to issues."

This portrait of principled conservative Republicans boldly eschewing readily available sleaze in favor of real issues bore, of course, no resemblance to the actual 1994 congressional campaign, where the most popular RNC canned ad, used by Republican candidates all over the country, was one in which the face of their Democratic opponent morphed into that of Bill Clinton. Nor, more importantly, is it a fact that voters cast their ballots in any number of significant relevance to the election in response to the Contract With America, either pro or con. Exit polling showed that fewer than 12% of voters from either side had ever even heard of the Contract. As a caller on his own program pointed out to Limbaugh in March 1995, even as late as five months after the election, 47% of the public, in a poll in USA TODAY, were still saying they had never heard of it. A TIME/CNN poll taken immediately after the election asked "Which is most responsible for the Republican victories in Congress?" Half the respondents chose "voter disapproval of Clinton's job as President"--only 12% cited "voter support for Republican programs."

At this point, a further word about the 1994 elections seems appropriate. In the Republican takeover of congress, consistently described by Limbaugh and other commentators of the right as a "revolution," fully 92% of incumbents were reelected. Turnout was low, and exit polling showed that nearly half of those voting Republican were simply voting against the incumbent. As often happens in mid-term elections, a small but well-organized, heavily financed, and active minority was, due to low voter turnout, able to exert a sufficiently disproportionate influence to swing the overall outcome. As Limbaugh pointed out on his radio program only weeks before the "revolution," (on September 26, 1994), "Out-year elections, the party in power always loses."

Limbaugh knew this before the election. After, he consigned it to a memory hole, and embraced the notion that those elections represented a public mandate for the reactionary policies of the newly-minted Republican majority. He quickly began using this as a bludgeon against opponents of those policies, portraying any dissent as an attack on the public and on the notion of democracy itself. On his radio program on March 2, 1995, he said "That's what the election last year was all about; the people having a say in what happens to them." Responding to Democratic criticism that the Republican agenda in congress was extremist, Limbaugh said on his radio program in February 1995:

"...these people are telling the American people--they're not just talking about Republicans in Washington in Congress--when they talk about those Republicans in Washington in Congress, they're talking about the people that the American people voted for and elected, so Algore, whether he knows it or not, is insulting everybody when he says these people [Republicans in Congress] are extremists. And most people are not extremists, and they don't take kindly to being called extremists."

On his radio program on September 25, 1995, Limbaugh was still stating that liberal congressmen, by opposing Republican policies in the 104th Congress, "are also insulting the people who voted for them, which is far more people than voted for the Democrats the last time around. They are engaging in a very risky strategy here by insulting the very people who made all this happen--the voters--which is what liberals have always done. They've just gotten away with it up until now." This concern for democracy was, of course, never in evidence during the previous Democratic-controlled congresses, which, though they were elected by larger (and usually significantly larger) margins than the 104th Congress, were nevertheless subjected to unrelenting criticism on his program. It certainly wasn't there when Limbaugh characterized the rule of the president and congress elected two years earlier as "America Held Hostage."

Speaking of which, Limbaugh can't get Clinton straight twice running. He has repeatedly expressed his outrage with Clinton for governing against the popular will. On his radio show (2-1-95), he said:

"To say he [Clinton] went against the tide is nothing new. He's always done that, from his first initiative--gays in the military--to that massive health care plan. He's always been at odds with the American people. Don't forget. I was one of the first to point out to you that I have never seen an administration which is attempting to govern against the will of the people as much as this one has. In my lifetime, I've never seen an administration which is so hell-bent on going against the will of the American people, but this one is."

Later that year, public discontent with the policies of the congressional Republicans quickly grew into a festering hatred. Polling information from all the major news outlets was pouring in showing that huge majorities were opposed to every major Republican policy initiative. An ABC News/Washington Post poll less than three months after Republicans assumed control of congress asked, "Are Republicans doing what you want?" Only 35% said yes, while an overwhelming 62% said no. The same poll showed similar majorities, from 57%-77%, in opposition to what Republicans were putting forward in terms of tax policy and welfare reform. Nowhere, though, was public opposition to these policies stronger than in the area of environmental protection. A Harris poll from August is typical of public reaction. Only tiny minorities favored less strict regulation of toxic waste disposal (2%), water pollution (4%), air pollution (7%), and wetlands (15%). Republicans had tried to weaken protection in each of these areas, but between 52% and 80% of respondents said they actually favored stricter regulation in regard to each. And 60% said they opposed the efforts of the Republicans to limit the powers of the EPA. At this point, Limbaugh's outrage against those attempting to govern against the will of the public not only disappeared; he did a complete back-flip on the subject, and began to urge the Republicans to ignore the public. In October, he advised "It's time to stay bold. It's time to ignore the polls."

And when it comes to this sort of thing, Clinton just can't win. On his radio show (164), Limbaugh commented on an article he had read about an excessive amount of money spent by the Clinton administration on polling:

"You, me, most of us…have principles, and it is their principles that guide their beliefs, and it is those beliefs that guide their desires. Those beliefs and desires guide the way people go about achieving what they want, and when a person is firmly rooted in principle, it's easy to spot. They're consistent. You know exactly what they stand for. You know exactly what their objectives are--they tell you. Rudolph Giuliani is a name who comes to mind, a recent politician… You can see that Rudolph Giuliani is a man firmly rooted to his principles. You could say that about Reagan. Now, you might disagree with them, as I know some people did, but you knew what Reagan stood for… You may disagree with it all day long, but you knew what he stood for."

He recalls that during the 1992 campaign, he implored Clinton's supporters to call and "name one thing for me that this man has stated that you want him in the White House to do. They couldn't. Nobody could… All this time, nobody could specify what Bill Clinton stood for. To this day, you can't really specify what Bill Clinton stands for." He continued:

"This has bugged me. It's bugged me that so few people cared, so few people seemed to notice that there were no guiding principles here. Well, this story explains why: there are no guiding principles. There are only focus groups."

This analysis, which Limbaugh has offered repeatedly, boldly contradicts most of his other commentary about Clinton. Limbaugh spends most of his time before the public portraying Clinton as a hard-core ideologue, albeit one with which he completely disagrees. On hundreds of occasions, he has used phrases like "hard-nosed ultra-liberal" and even "socialist" to describe Clinton, and spent hour upon hour detailing why he thinks they're appropriate. He gives the impression that Clinton has shown a stone-like dedication to his alleged liberal principles.

At the same time, he argues that Clinton has "NO guiding principles." [emphasis his]

He condemns Clinton for ruling against the will of the public, while also condemning him for ruling by polls, in accordance with the will of the public. He praises congressional Republicans (who come to power during the off-year elections he had earlier dismissed) for ruling in accordance with the will of the people, and goes so far as to say criticizing them amounts to an attack on the public, then, as the public clearly opposes their agenda, urges those same Republicans to be "bold" by ignoring the will of the public. He says the public makes the real decision about where it wants the country to go during presidential elections, then, when the public chooses Clinton, marks it off as "America Held Hostage." Clinton stands condemned both for being solid in his convictions and for not having any convictions.

This is what passes for political analysis in Limbaugh-World, a place where the sky must be a very different color indeed.

Some of the earliest commentary has centered on the overreach of the court in issuing their appalling rulling on what began as a campaign finance reform case, the fact that the ruling went so far beyond the scope of what was before the court, the blatant activism of it, but few seem to grasp the full implications. This is an historical decision, and an historically bad one, belonging, at birth, in the same dustbin of history as Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Bush v. Gore (the latter the work of some of the clowns responsible for today's decision).

To put the matter in its proper perspective, the court has very likely just brought down the curtain on the last vestige of democracy that existed in the U.S. The right-wing majority empowered by too many years of ultra-conservative and quasi-fascist infestation of the White House has, in one fell swoop, just removed all impediments to corporate interference in U.S. elections. Building on the dual fiction that money equals speech and that corporations are "persons" (an abomination imposed on U.S. law by a right-wing court of a previous era), the court held that these corporate "persons" can now endorse candidates. They can spend as much as they want promoting them. Restraints on their activities in the political arena imposed by campaign finance laws have all been swept aside.

And woe is us, indeed.

An August Gallup poll yielded up an intriguing result: self-identified conservatives outnumbered self-identified liberals in all 50 states. This led to much back-slapping in conservative circles in the weeks after its release. Conservatives are on the ropes; it was a handy way to bolster morale, and there wasn't a great deal of focus on what the poll really meant. It went hand-in-glove with many conservative commentaries in recent years about America being a conservative nation.

The hard, cold political reality, though--the one that's still there after the back-slapping--is that America isn't a conservative nation, and never has been. On issue after issues, Americans are  not only with the liberals, but with them overwhelmingly. A few Google searches offer a glimpse of the polling this year:

--An AP/Roper poll just a few days ago showed that 64% of Americans oppose the war in Iraq. 67% told the CBS/New York Times poll in September that the was wasn't even worth fighting.

--On the matter of health care, Americans have favored a single-payer plan, wherein the government provides health insurance for all, by about 60%, a number which has been stable for years. This is well to the left of any of the healh care "reform" measures presently being debated in congress.

--66% told the CBS/New York Times poll in June they favored either gay marriage or gay civil unions. More importantly, opposition is centered on older adults (those over 40) and heavily concentrated in the elderly (those over 65)--the younger generations have adopted the more liberal views.

--A solid majority of Americans favor abortion rights, and have for decades. The Republican party platform position--a blanket ban on abortions without exception--polls around 6%.

--The polling on global warming has shown huge majorities (over 60%) concerned about the problem for the last 11 years (and probably further back--that's the info I was able to track down with a Google search). The number, as measured by Gallup in May, had dropped from the year before (down to 57%), but it has briefly gone down before, and the long-term polling is very clear on the point.

And so on. This is the case on issue after issue. One is, in fact, hard pressed to find a single major public policy issue on which the liberals don't hold an overwhelming advantage in public sentiment. Conservatism is overrepresented in just about every major institution, a consequence (primarily) of vastly superior monetary resources, but the people are with the liberals. It's a significant mountain for conservatives to climb.

Money isn’t "an issue" in U.S. politics. It’s virtually the only issue. If given even half the weight it merited, it would lead the news almost every night. Instead, it's something on which the press simply doesn't report at all. Stray stories, here and there. It's sometimes scandalized, but the very little reporting that does appear occurs in a vacuum. No consistent narrative. No follow-up. Certainly never anything remotely approximating the sort of feeding frenzy that regularly accompanies stories about sex, crime, or, more recently, dead pop stars.[1]

Without the money angle, most political stories become inexplicable. The “mainstream” corporate press largely portrayed the teabagger phenomenon, to name one of the prominent recent examples, as a genuine “movement,” instead of what it actually is, a 100% corporate-invented astroturf campaign fueled by nonsense spread by right-wing media outlets (themselves huge corporate interests). The facts about the actual forces behind the "movement" are readily available. On the internet, they're literally only a quick Google search away. But someone who stuck to most “mainstream” corporate press outlets would know virtually nothing about it, except that there was this sudden, loud uprising of angry, anti-Obama mobs. The goal of astroturf is to give the impression of a genuine grassroots campaign--when, as has happened here, the press treats it as one, the campaign has succeeded.

The Center for Responsive Politics calls their website opensecrets.org. The information they collect isn't really "secret." It's all publicly available. It's "secret" because, among other things, the press, which is supposed to be a watchdog about such things, won’t, as a rule, touch such information with a 10-foot pole. Common Cause issued one of their "Legislating While Under the Influence" reports on health care industry contributions to congress, and you’ll learn more about health care reform by reading its relatively few pages than you’d learn from the combination of every report of every network newscast on the subject.

One "secret" kept by the press is that Sen. Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is the top recipient of health-care industry donations in the congress.

An even better-kept secret is that Baucus allowed the former Vice President of Wellpoint to write "his" bill. Everywhere in the press, it's just "the Baucus bill." And, since it's the most conservative health care bill in congress (and the one that offers no real reform), it's more often than not being treated, by the press, as the only one. There are actually four others that long ago passed out of the relevant committees of both houses--the ones dealing with health care--whereas the Wellpoint bill is being hashed out in the Finance Committee.

The health care industry spent a fortune getting politicians (including the Obama) to support provisions mandating that everyone carry health insurance. Wellpoi… er… Baucus included a provision making health coverage mandatory, and imposing a tax penalty on anyone who fails to comply.[2] This sets up a dynamic one would think our watchdog press would find interesting: The Wellpoint plan publicly subsidizes Americans' purchase of health care. It also creates, at the point of a gun, millions of mandatory new clients for the current nightmare of a health insurance industry. The government subsidies to those new clients go, of course, to those insurance companies, who, in turn, spend millions of dollars purchasing politicians like Max Baucus.

What a deal!

If the press would report ANY of this, the “Baucus” bill would have been dead before it ever began, but that would require abandoning the fairy-tale narrative of American politics as a battle of competing ideologies and dealing with what actually makes the trains run on time.

--classicliberal2

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[1] The reasons for this are many and varied. Among a great many other things, the media orgs are, themselves, huge corporate interests with their own chunk invested in the process Their even-bigger-money ownership has even more money in it.

[2] That wasn't strong enough for the industry, which wanted criminal penalties--jail time--for those who failed to carry health insurance. The failure of the bill to include this is largely responsible for the last-minute industry push against reform which has so befuddled the corporate press this week--again, if you don't follow the money, the story is inexplicable.

http://lefthooktheblog.blogspot.com/

It's been a little over four years since the Terri Schiavo matter very publicly played itself out. As an "issue," it's an interesting one, because it seems to cut across every possible line that usually divides us, which sort of gets to why its appropriate to put "issue" in quotes. Terri's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, did their best to turn the affair into a public war against Terri's husband Micheal, and to wrest control over the fate of the permanently vegetative remains of their daughter from him. They enlisted elements of the nut right in a massively financed campaign of defamation and slander aimed at Michael, and of disinformation aimed at rallying public support for their cause. Congressional Republicans, sensing a great issue, attempted to exploit the situation, passing legislation aimed at interfering in the matter, legislation "President" Bush cut short one of his seemingly infinite vacations in order to sign. The public just didn't bite, though. In spite of these efforts, Americans--even majorities of conservatives--remained with the husband.

I'm interested in what the conservatives here--at least the more thoughtful ones--thought about the matter, and what they think about it now. Have your views changed? Are they more firm than ever? The extent of the lies and misinformation the Schindlers and their allies used to pollute the discourse on the subject is staggering; how much of that still hangs around?

Comments?

Back in the 1990s, I wrote a book about Rush Limbaugh. It was never entirely finished, and, of course, never published. In later years, a lot of it was lost via a computer horror story too ridiculous to describe with a straight face. I still have large portions of it, though, mostly just rough drafts of some chapters or portions of chapters, sometimes just the notes for them. A great deal of research went into it.

Saturday, I dusted off and made available a portion of that project, because it dovetailed rather well with some things I'd written on a little blog I run about how the right uses wedge issues to keep the public fighting among itself as a means of precluding its combining into a force that could threaten the prerogatives of the U.S. money elite that dominates and controls government in the U.S. at the expense of that public.

Nearly every "issue" that has made conservatism a mass movement in the U.S. is of this nature. Some enemy is identified, usually something or someone of no real consequence, and the full venom of the right is unleashed against it. We're told the real problem with America is illegal immigrants with brown skin and a different language, baby-killing abortionists, pointy-headed intellectuals at colleges, hedonistic homosexuals, welfare recipients, godless heathens who remove prayer from schools, socialist would-be dictators,  environmentalist "extremists," liberals, and the Hollywood "elite." At this rhetoric's most extreme, we're told there is, being waged against the U.S., a "culture war."

The effectiveness of those who respond to this sort of rhetoric--lots of "true believers"--is usually minimal, insofar as the phony "issues" they've adopted are concerned. Abortion remains legal, government continues to stay out of the business of endorsing religion, homosexuals are not officially condemned by the State, etc.

Organization around these issues is, however, remarkably effective at implementing policies that are to the benefit of the, broadly speaking, money elite in the U.S.. Which is, of course, the point of the exercise. Vote for a candidate who promises to ban abortion, all you get is an elected official who votes for trade policies that deindustrialize the country to the benefit of that elite. Vote for someone who promises to keep the homos in line, all you get is an elected official who votes for tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. Vote for the candidate who promises to ban flag burning, all you get is an elected official who votes to take away your right to sue your doctor when he goes into surgery drunk and leaves you a quadriplegic. And so on. Often the populations affected the worst by these policies are the very ones that react most strongly to the wedge issues, and empower these policies' implementation.

The Limbaugh work sort of dovetails with this, and, while it doesn't really "fit" most of what usually goes on in this little corner of the internet, I thought I'd throw it out to the conservatives here for reaction:

RUSH LIMBAUGH: AN ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION

[A note: "TWTOTB", below, refers to Limbaugh's ghost-writer's first book, "The Way Things Ought To Be", and "SITYS" to his second, "See, I Told You So."]

Limbaugh's views most closely approximate those of an old-school 19th century social Darwinist, with a strong authoritarian streak. His politics can, for the most part, effectively be boiled down to a few simple axioms (with a little shading here and there). The most basic are:

The rich = good

The less-than-rich = bad (or, at least, less than good)

He holds that a public needs a strong government to herd it around, keep it in line, be its "moral teacher." When he employs "anti-government" rhetoric[1], it's almost always aimed at government "interference," by progressive reform efforts, with the prerogatives of the wealthy and the powerful (who apparently don’t need that strong authoritarian hand).

This brand of naked elitism isn't the sort of thing that generally draws a great deal of admiration from most people, much less a mass audience for a media personality, so Limbaugh adopts a populist pose to woo listeners, which has become a standard technique of those on the right. Being a mere pose, though, it has no substance. It doesn't represent his real point of view. Because of this, and because he's just making it up as he goes, his comments become very inconsistent, often hilariously so. Monitoring his program for any extended period reveals a commentator who is forever becoming entangled in positions he's taken that are a complete contradiction to those he'd taken earlier. Usually, he just plows right ahead anyway, and if many of his listeners seem to notice, they certainly aren't allowed to point it out on his tightly controlled show.

That isn't to say he's entirely lacking in consistency. He gets snagged by contradiction when he's trying to play the populist. He is, however, rigorously consistent in the social Darwinist-like views outlined above. They are, in fact, the only things on which he shows that degree of consistency.[2]

Limbaugh continually sings the praises of the wealthy and the powerful, referring to them as the "successful," the "achievers," the "producers," those who work harder than anyone. He will have no part of any suggestion that these individuals are anything less than the most virtuous citizens in the country, representing the best in society, those who should be studied, emulated, all-but-worshiped. At the same time, there is, in his commentary, an ugly undercurrent of the inverse--that the poor, the unemployed, the minority, the powerless are lazy, shiftless, amoral parasites on the successful, the personification of all that is bad.

In TWTOTB, he can write that he would be "just as opposed to rich people getting subsidies from the government as poor people." It was an easy, populist-appealing thing to write at the time; no one was making much noise in opposition to government subsidies for the wealthy. But in Nov. 1994, when Clinton's Labor Secretary Robert Reich suggested cutting back on corporate welfare, Limbaugh, who has been quite enthusiastic about any opportunity to cut off aid to the needy, became absolutely enraged--ranted about it for three days. On his tv show he said "Secretary Reich, how dare you, sir" equate giveaways to corporations "to having welfare moms having to now play by the rules" and compare corporate welfare to "a free lunch." On his radio program, he was positively indignant that Reich would dare "equate giveaway payments to people who are not productive," which he called "real welfare payments" (emphasis his) with corporate welfare. "To call that welfare is, I think, real arrogance and condescension and ought to show you exactly what these people think."

In fact, Limbaugh has actually insisted that the wealthy should receive more government services than those less well-off. On his radio program (April 4, 1995), Limbaugh said "the people paying a greater percentage of what they earn, if they earn a lot, then they ought to have more access to services… Now, I know that's going to aggravate a lot of you people, but deal with it because it's true." On his radio program (April 3, 1995), he decided the ideal tax "would be where each citizen pays the same amount. Pick a number, everybody pays the same number is the fairest of all. The fairest of all is the same dollar amount." Such a scheme would find a significant number of Americans at the lower end of the scale owing their entire annual income to the government. How this would be "fair," he never explained. Three years earlier, in April 1992, he'd offered a long monologue with this as its theme:

"It's time to get serious about raising taxes on the poor…Tax them. Let's balance the budget on the backs of the poor."

He wasn't serious, of course, but he wasn't entirely kidding, either. Referring to that particular show in TWTOTB, Limbaugh said this was merely an example of his "demonstrating absurdity by being absurd," but that "I meant everything I said, save for the bit about actually taxing the poor. Other than that, I was dead serious and honest." With this in mind, some of the other things he said in that monologue are illuminating. A few examples:

"The poor and the lower classes of this country have gotten a free ride since the Great Depression when it became noble to be poor."

"The poor in this country are the biggest piglets at the mother pig and her nipples. They're the ones who get all the benefits in this country."

"…do the poor pay anything back? Do they pay any taxes? No. They don't pay a thing. They contribute nothing to this country. They do nothing but take from it."

Quite a contrast with his adoring comments about the wealthy.

Limbaugh hates the guarantee of a basic wage for those at the bottom of the income scale. The minimum wage is one of his long-running targets, and he has argued forcefully and at length for getting rid of it entirely ("I think it ought to be abolished." radio 1/24/96). When, however, a congressional initiative appeared that would have limited to $1 million/year the amount corporations can write off as compensation for their executives, Limbaugh exploded: "They [the government] have no right to determine what's enough. It's none of their business what a company… pays an individual. They shouldn't set limits on it of any kind. It's none of their damn business what people earn, and we're headed down a dangerous road if we're going to let a bunch of people in Washington define 'enough'… That is unacceptable to me, totally unacceptable."[3]

Limbaugh despises the graduated income tax, and forcefully rejects the notion of taxing proportionately more from those who are able to more easily absorb the burden in order to tax less from those who can't afford it. "Why punish achievement? Why punish people who work hard?" (Limbaugh on Donahue) On his radio program (April 1992), he decided "we can't continue to rob the rich. We have been punitive against the rich in this country."[4] From whence is government revenue to come, then? When various regressive tax "reform" schemes (the "flat tax," the national sales tax, etc.) became all the rage among Republicans, Limbaugh became an enthusiast of them. The common element of these schemes is that they sought to shift the tax burden further away--and in a radical way--from those who can afford it and on to those who can't. Limbaugh became enamored of them all. When it was pointed out to him that this would mean a big tax cut for the wealthy and a big tax hike for everyone else, he argued that such considerations are inappropriate, because it's no one's business what anyone else earns!

The punchline to all of this is that Limbaugh, while offering this running commentary dictated, root-and-branch, by elite class interests, poses as the staunchest opponent of "class warfare." On his radio program (1995), he offered up a typical rant against liberals, who, he said, are "encouraging class hatred. They are encouraging class resentment. They are dividing a wedge between income groups in this country… It does not promote a nation of unity in spirit, togetherness--however you want to call it. It promotes a nation of resentment and class hatred. On purpose!" (emphasis his) This is probably the single subject about which he speaks more than any other, how lefties divide up the nation by class, how they attempt to turn everyone against the rich, how this is such a damnable practice. "Liberals need to stop preaching class hatred," he tells us in SITYS. Nothing--and that "nothing" should be heavily stressed--NOTHING elicits more vituperative invective from Limbaugh than "redistributionists", "socialists," those who "engage in class warfare." While he does it every day.

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[1] It isn't true "anti-government" rhetoric, as would come from an anarchist; it's rhetoric aimed at government by liberal democrats, and liberal Democrats.

[2] His close attachment to the Republican party is an extension of this, and he's remarkably consistent in pimping for what he sees as the interests of it and of his pet candidates, those whom he feels will more closely approximate the policies he favors.

[3] Under the policy he was discussing, companies can still pay their executives whatever they wanted--they just wouldn't have been able to write off over $1 million a year.

[4] Comments which suggest ignorance that dwarfs mountains, mendacity that rivals planets, or outright psychosis. The "punishment" meted out to the wealthy in the U.S. has resulted in income inequality and a concentration of wealth that are both approaching record levels.

http://lefthooktheblog.blogspot.com/

I'm a liberal.

Being a liberal, I'm not the target audience for a project like Next Right, and the conservatives who do form that target audience would, in fact, do well to weigh what I say in light of that. I'll admit, very forthrightly, that I don't want the conservatives to rule. I do, however, want them to be credible and effective, so the liberals will be forced to be the same. The American right has, instead, been progressively disintegrating for years, now, becoming little more than the home of assorted kooks and crackpots.

That's not good for conservatism, but, more importantly, that's not good for the country. When one's ideas never face serious challenge, they become stagnant. An intellectual laziness and decadence sets in. The level of public discourse sinks. Real choices simply stop being offered. It's the worst of all worlds.

I initially came here because I was intrigued by the efforts to separate the WorldNutDaily loonies from the larger conservative movement. I think that's a positive step, though the approval of those of my particular political bent isn't necessarily the kind that's being sought, or, I imagine, is even desired. Some of the conservatives who post here dislike the anti-WND talk, which is unfortunate.

It's also emblematic of the same problems faced by conservatism that WND represents. The fact that the three words with which I began this post will lead many reading them to dismiss anything that comes after them is an example of these problems, as well.

Conspiracist crackpots--those whose contributions to the public discourse are "ideas" like Obama is a Muslim, Obama isn't a U.S. citizen, Obama has death panels in his health care bill, addressing school children is  a problem, death books, czars, etc.--aren't the problem, themselves. They're also symptoms. The reason conservatism is, today, overrun by conspiracist crackpots is an ideological sickness that infects the movement and allows germs like that to run free and grow almost entirely unchecked. One of D.P. Moynihan's most quoted remarks is that you have a the right to your own opinion, but you don't all have the right to your own facts. A large segment of conservatism believes it does, indeed, have a right to its own "facts," though, and has insisted that truth, itself, is subject to partisan consideration. There are reasons why this is the case, but it isn't really my purpose to get into them, with this post.

I have a strong sense of right and wrong. I always strive for intellectual honesty. I always try to keep my facts straight. I don't always succeed--I'm only human--but I have no interest whatsoever in asserting, as "facts," things that aren't, nor do I cling to things I've been shown aren't true. I take such things seriously.

None of this can be said for far too much of the conservative movement today. Pop conservative icons like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity aren't just politically backwards (which is my view); they're fundamentally dishonest (which is demonstrable). The more extreme elements are even worse, on both counts. The likes of Michael Savage, Pat Robertson, Cal Thomas pimp for politics that are outright fascist, and, in doing so, there isn't an honest bone in their bodies. Because of rampant anti-intellectualism, there's a high tolerance, on the right, for outright idiocy, totally divorced from the truth in every meaningful way (Bill O'Reilly, Thomas Sowell, everyone I just named, and more others than can be easily listed), and, conversely, a striking absence of much in the way of intellectual discourse. A few of my liberal brethren have advanced the notion that this is because conservatism is inherently anti-intellectual, and, as tempting a view as that may seem when faced with such a mountain of nonsense as is presented by contemporary conservatism, I've always resisted it. I think it's one of those signs of creeping intellectual laziness. I do have a lot of trouble refuting it, given the evidence, and I admit I have toyed with it myself at times.

The reason I started writing this is because I'm curious about what the conservatives here, who can identify WND as a clearly poisonous entity, think about all of this. How far to you think this poison extends? There is some solid evidence of it being as widespread as I portray it. Polling over the summer showed that 58%-62% of Republicans have adopted "birther" views, and comparable numbers believe in "death panels." This sort of thing is regularly invented,  credulously accepted, met with enthusiasm, and allowed to spread like wildfire on the right because of this poison I've been describing, another aspect of which is an almost complete lack of any corrective mechanism. The body of conservatism hasn't just been stripped of its immune system, when it comes to fighting off nonsense--it has had that system replaced with a sort of anti-immune system that nurtures, instead of battles, poison and disease. Those among the conservatives who resist nonsense won't make much of an effort to correct it (and when they do, they're accused of acting on behalf of the other side), while those who try to correct it but aren't of the right are dismissed out of hand. And, of course, many conservatives who DO know better choose to spread the poison anyway, because they think it's in their interest to do so (witness Grassley and the death panels, and Joe Wilson and the illegal immigrants).

What say you, conservatives? In your view, how far into conservatism does this extend?

(And if you made it this far, thank you for your time--hopefully, I haven't give you any cooties!)

http://lefthooktheblog.blogspot.com/