Tea Party Bloggers, the Boston Bombing, and the Cult of Perpetual Victimhood

It's a shocking and terrible crime. A blast that was almost certainly terrorism (run of the mill mass murder can't be ruled out yet) rocked the finish line at the Boston Marathon, followed quickly by another. The brutal carnage has resulted in the death of three, with the real possibility of that number rising still -- many of the injuries were horrific.

The smoke had barely cleared before the speculation began -- and with it, the idiocy. Reports were confused, unclear, sometimes contradictory. But one group of Americans felt they had a firm grasp one the true story in Boston. And that story was that they -- the rightwing, Tea Party, wingnut bloggers -- were the real victims in the day's tragedy.

Leading the charge was the blog "Fire Andrea Mitchell," claiming that CNN's Wolf Blitzer had blamed the Tea Party for the bombing. The right went insane on Twitter, which is where the right goes to go insane these days, and the story spread like widlfire. "CNN's Wolf Blitzer just speculated if anti-tax groups were behind the bombing WITH ZERO EVIDENCE," one tweeted -- which turned out to be a massively hypocritical statement.

Blitzer's supposed "blaming" of the Tea Party right consisted of one sentence, "It is a state holiday in Massachusetts today called Patriots' Day and, uh, who knows if that had anything at all to do with these explosions." The only way you to take that as an attack on the right is if you wanted so badly to wear the mantle of victimhood that you'd twist anything anyone said in order to take offense. If you were so self-absorbed as to be able to do that, then the victims weren't those people bleeding on the streets of Boston, the real victims were the wingnut bloggers and their audience.

Meanwhile, gun nut and professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones decided the story "stinks to high heaven" and he thought it was a "false flag." Later on his radio show, he claimed that this was all connected somehow to the massive drop in gold prices the same day. Of course, none of that makes any sense at all, but that's never stopped Jones before. The one consistent, underlying theory rattling around in Jones' head was familiar, though: the "false flag operation" was carried out by the government to create an excuse to crack down on the Tea Party.

This particular brand of idiocy found it's way into a press conference held by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, where a "reporter" for Jones' Infowars website asked the governor about a "false flag staged attack." Patrick gave him all the attention he deserved, immediately blowing him off.

When the bombs went off in Boston, the right immediately politicized the event and made themselves the real victims in this tragedy. But that's what they always do. If you've ever had the misfortune to visit Michelle Malkin's site, the lasting impression you take away is one of unending whininess. The right is in perpetual search of some reason to play the victim. When they find it, they go all echo chamber, announcing their victimhood to the world in the most strident tones possible.

And the strangest part about it is that nobody cares. Their little daily freakouts accomplish nothing, they change the political landscape in no way. There's a desperate pointlessness to it all, reinforced by the fact that on your average day, no one else is paying any attention to it. They're locked in perpetual outrage -- mostly over things they've taken completely out of context and proportion. That is, when the source of the outrage isn't just some BS of their own invention.

Yesterday was really no different from any other daily in Wingnutistan. Every day is Victim Day and everything -- every goddam thing that happens to anyone, anywhere -- is all about them. Because they're the most important people in the entire world.

And if you don't recognize that, they'll whine endlessly until you do.

-Wisco

[photo by jaredeberhardt]

War on Women May Be More Wide-Ranging Than the GOP Realizes

I'm not a big fan of the headline Mother Jones chose for Kate Sheppard's piece on the GOP's ongoing attacks on reproductive freedom. "Progressives Advise GOP: Back Off On the War on Women" has the distinct flavor of concern trolling. But it turns out to be accurate; two progressive groups have advised the Republican Party to knock off the War on Women, because it's losing them elections.


It was clear in both the lead up to and the aftermath of the November 2012 election that Republican candidates are not faring well among women voters. From Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin to Mitt Romney's 11-point loss among women voters, it became painfully clear that the GOP has a lady problem. A new memo from a pair of liberal groups that pulls together some of the polling figures makes a strong case for paying more attention to this divide.

The memo, from Stephanie Schriock of EMILY’s List and Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, notes that even the Republican National Committee's own post-election report found that, "[Women] represent more than half the voting population in the country, and our inability to win their votes is losing us elections." But while Republicans have made some effort to soften the party's positioning on issues like immigration and LGBT rights, the party has not moderated its stance on reproductive rights or other issues of interest to many women voters.

The memo points to the unprecedented attack on access to abortion underway in states like North Dakota and Arkansas, the 160 Republicans that voted against the Violence Against Women Act at the federal level, and the ongoing fights over both contraception coverage and cuts to the federal family planning budget.

"If the GOP wants to move forward, help its image and win elections, it should halt its embrace of extreme and out-of-touch policies that attack women and their families," the memo states [pdf]. "Ending attacks on abortion rights in the states would be a start."

But the fact is that these attacks on reproductive freedom hurt more than just the shortsighted party launching them. They hurt the women in those states. Even in the best-case scenario, 2014 isn't going to be a Democratic march to victory in all 50 state legislatures and governorships, getting them to realize their folly is at least worth a shot. If we can get the GOP to stop attacking women's health, there would be a lot less misery in this country.

And the issue is killing them.

"NARAL Pro-Choice America's polling right after the election found that Romney's view on abortion was the top reason for voting against him that swing-voting women cited in their survey," Sheppard reports. "Planned Parenthood also used this issue to attack anti-choice politicians. Another post-election poll from Democracy Corps found that 33 percent of unmarried women listed the attacks on Planned Parenthood and women's preventative health services as a top reason for voting against Romney."

But it's not just reproductive rights, it's pretty much the GOP ideology in general that's hurting them with woman voters.



First Read, NBC News: Women are a key driver of support for legislation overhauling the nation's gun and immigration laws, according to new data in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, just as Congress prepares to take up major legislation on both of those issues.

Women outpace men in their support for stricter gun laws and immigration reform that provides undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship, data which becomes more salient in light of the Republican Party’s effort to regain its footing with women voters after last fall’s elections.

The gender gap is most pronounced when it comes to the issue of stricter gun controls, legislation on which the Senate voted to begin consideration this Thursday.


65% of women (including 70% of self-identified mothers) want stricter laws on gun sales, compared with 44% of men. The War on Women is spreading to gun laws; not because Republicans are choosing to attack women over the issue, but because women are the ones showing up to fight.

And still doesn't end there. Women are also more likely to be environmentalists and are more likely to support the idea of an "activist government" -- i.e., to "say that government should do more for the poor, children and the elderly."

If the GOP wants to win over more woman voters, they'll need to realize that their problems with women are a lot deeper than just traditional "women's issues" like reproductive health and freedom, equality, and education. To listen solely on choice issues and to ignore everything else would be to make the same mistake the party's currently making with Latinos -- that is, assuming that they're single issue voters and that immigration is all they care about. Each demographic has a wide range of concerns and focusing solely one is to focus all your energy on merely making a dent. It's a simpleminded 2D approach to intelligent people living in a complex 3D world.

Of course, it's always possible that the GOP has just given up on women for precisely these reasons. That they've seen the same numbers and have decided they'd have to give up too much. Or that they think listening to what women have to say is just "pandering." But this would be foolish. The Republican base is rapidly shrinking and the focus has to be on expanding that base. They're going to have to give up some of their most cherished wedge issues.

If not, then they resign themselves to becoming a party of crackpots, cranks, and anachronisms. So far, that seems to be their preferred route.

-Wisco

[photo by League of Women Voters of California]

Obama's Chained CPI Offer is Genuine

It's a rare thing these days when right and left agree in Washington, so take a moment to appreciate the bigfoot sighting. Although they both have arrived at this point of agreement for wildly different reasons, the fact remains that they are there, sharing the same space, breathing the same air. This isn't exactly a moment of blissful brother- and sisterhood, but they are joined together in common purpose -- kill the President's proposed budget.

The right doesn't like it simply because it's from Obama. They'd reject renaming Washington "The Ronald Reagan Memorial Gun Refuge" if Obama proposed it. Their opposition is a given. These are not serious or honest people, they're spoiled children holding their breath until they get exactly what they want. And what they want is a nuclear strike on our recovering economy; no new revenues, only deep, deep cuts to spending -- which means hacking off demand at the knees. They'd practically guarantee a second recession. Luckily for us, if they can't do this then they don't want to do anything -- including pass the president's budget.

Which is where right meets left. The President's chained CPI proposal is a smoke-and-mirrors cut to Social Security benefits. And Obama proposes cuts to other entitlements as well. Lefty dems say there are quite enough gaps in the social safety net already, thank you very much. We don't need to take a scissors to it and start cutting more. Centrist and moderate Democrats, seeing that right and left hate Obama's budget, are keeping their opinions to themselves -- probably wisely.

The question is why would Barack Obama, a Democratic president, attack Social Security -- one of his party's greatest and most lasting achievements -- in a budget proposal. What gives?

Some of what I'm seeing is an argument that Obama's playing poker. He offers what should be a compromise they can live with to the Republicans, only to have them slap his hand away and reject the offer. This, the theory goes, proves that Republicans aren't serious and will simply oppose anything Obama proposes for the simple fact that Obama proposed it. It's supposed to be the final act in an episode of Scooby Doo, where Pres. Barack Fred tears the mask off the Phantom Prospector and shows it was just old man Boehner all along. With Republicans revealed as obstructionists, President Obama can turn to the American people and say, "Give me someone else to work with here."

The problem with this theory is that it relies on an overly complicated plan and some inside baseball. This is the sort of explanation a beltway insider would come up with, because they don't seem to realize that the average person doesn't pay much attention to Washington at all. They're not going to follow this whole roundabout good faith/bad faith stuff, they've got better things to do with their lives than stay glued to CNN to watch this whole drama unfold.

No, if you wanted to demonstrate GOP obstructionism, you'd do some polling, find the very most popular things in America, bundle them all up into a "free ice cream" budget, and let Republicans oppose that. Nobody knows what the hell chained CPI is, but they know what increased funding for schools, police, and firefighters is. They're familiar with a raise in the minimum wage. They'd understand job creation programs. If you wanted to get Republicans on record as opposing something, you'd get them on the record as opposing things like these -- not some arcane bit of bookkeeping mumbo-jumbo designed to hide cuts to entitlement benefits.

Barack Obama chose to make chained CPI the opening bid in budget negotiations because he's cool with it, not because he wants to embarrass Republicans with it. Obama's budget is exactly what it seems to be: a betrayal of the core Democratic principles of protecting the most vulnerable in America and providing at least some modest guarantee that seniors won't go hungry when they can no longer work.

When the President formally unveiled his budget proposal, he told reporters, "There's not a lot of smoke and mirrors in here." That's BS. Chained CPI is the very definition of smoke and mirrors. You don't try to hide a cut when the plan is to bring it out in the open to show up Republicans as obstructionist. This is the President once again beginning negotiations by undercutting his own position -- i.e., negotiating with himself and negotiating away protecting entitlements. He's ready to do this, for real.

Thank goodness this budget is pretty much DOA. It hasn't exposed Republicans as unserious, but it has exposed Barack Obama as untrustworthy. I'm afraid any other take is wishful thinking. That's a shame, but that's a reality. It's up to congressional Democrats to protect Social Security, because the White House has completely dropped the ball.

-Wisco

[photo by faul]

It's All Just a Game: How the Political Media Make Heroes Out of Jerks

Hey, want to see some journalistic malpractice? Then head over to Buzzfeed and take a look at Evan McMorris-Santoro's latest steaming pile of fly food.


Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell put on a clinic in crisis communications Tuesday, turning a potentially explosive secret recording of his campaign's strategy session into a political bludgeon to beat  Democrats — and the campaign cash bushes.

"Last week they were  attacking my wife's ethnicity and apparently also bugging my  headquarters, much like Nixon and Watergate," McConnell told reporters on Capitol Hill. "That's what the political left does these days."

If the press conference were an episode of the camp-era "Batman" that's where the "biff!" titlecard would show up. McConnell had gone from a man on his heels after a recording of an oppo research session on Ashley Judd was published by Mother Jones to the master politician driving the story to his own benefit.


It doesn't get any better. But you don't have to trust me on that, Buzzfeed left it right out there in the open, like they're not ashamed of it at all. Mitch McConnell was planning on attacking a woman for speaking openly about depression, thoughts of suicide, and her religious beliefs. But instead of manning up and taking responsibility for his actions when they were made public, McConnell released a blizzard of whining over likely-imaginary wiretaps. Suddenly, the villain is the victim and McMorris-Santoro responds with wild applause. "Masterful politics! Brilliant dishonesty! Behold the amazing shamelessness!"

Pieces like this are a big reason why our political discourse is broken in America. It's a symptom of what journalism critic Jay Rosen calls "the cult of savviness." Political journalism in America isn't about good policy or solid numbers or proven facts. It's not about right or wrong, ethical or unethical. American journalism sees politics not as democracy's method for serving the nation, but as a season of Game of Thrones. Who comes out on top is more important than the pile of bodies it took to come out on top -- or the policy the the person who "won the day" was advancing in the first place.

In American journalism, politics isn't about the nation or you, it's some arcane sport journalists pride themselves on being able to understand and explain.

"In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere, thoughtful or humane.  Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.)," Rosen said in 2011. "Savviness is that quality of being shrewd, practical, hyper-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political. And what is the truest mark of savviness? Winning, of course! Or knowing who the winners are."

In other words, savviness is an appreciation and understanding of hopelessly cynical gamesmanship. And, by that measure, Mitch McConnell -- in managing to weasel out of a damning exposure as a real prize prick -- is a hero. Because politics is an amoral enterprise and winning is all that matters. Who they crushed, why they crushed them, what lies they told, what the facts actually are, etc., are all unimportant trivia, because the whole thing is just a game and if it winds up ruining lives... Well, that's just the way things are. If you want another example of this, think back to how Paul Ryan was hailed as "courageous" by the political media for having the guts to attack entitlements -- despite the fact that almost everyone who looked at his budget plans concluded they were muddled nonsense. Ryan was openly plotting to screw millions of Americans for no good reason and the press put him on a pedestal.

And so our political discourse gets coarsened daily, because people like Evan McMorris-Santoro gives that coarseness a standing ovation. It's a good thing these people don't work the crime beat or they'd be making heroes of the criminals who evade capture.

-Wisco

[photo by sourabhmassey]

GOP Loser-Heroes and the Conservative Cult of Victimhood

One of the more overlooked hurdles to the big Republican Party rebranding project is the fact that the base loves victims. Sarah Palin perfected cashing in on this tendency, making a career out of being a victim of the "lamestream media." And their love of victims necessarily makes them lovers of losers. Anyone who can play the victim card while saying, "I just might've won if it wasn't for..." is a hero. As is the case with Mike Huckabee, you can even get a show on Fox News. This isn't universally true, of course -- neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney are too beloved by the base these days -- but that's more a case of taking their losses with a measure of dignity and grace than anything. To be a rightwing loser-hero, you have to complain and gripe and whine and basically throw a child's "It's not fair!" sort of tantrum. For whatever reason, poor losers are winners in wingnuts' eyes. Graceful losers are RINOs.

But how constructive is it to continually refight the last battle? No matter how much she complains and whines, the 2008 election isn't going to be overturned somehow and Sarah Palin made vice president. Nursing grievances serves no useful purpose -- especially when you seem completely unwilling to learn a damned thing from your loss. At heart, the rightwing loser-hero represents as big a hindrance to the GOP as their runaway racism, sexism, homophobia, and Christian supremacism. When you're trying to win elections, it probably is a good idea to listen to losers -- provided the purpose is to learn from mistakes. But it's a bad idea to listen to losers who blame everyone in the world but themselves. The belief that your campaign was perfect and the media, voters, and opposition was flawed is no way to get ahead in politics. Which means this tendency among Republican voters to idolize losers is a tendency Democrats should applaud.

Behold the stupid:


[[NationalJournal:]

Since Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus introduced the “Growth and Opportunity Project” in mid-March, the party has proven over and over and over again that it just isn’t ready to change.

The latest example of the GOP being intellectually and politically stuck in the 2012 presidential primaries comes courtesy of one of the stars of those disastrous contests: former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. According to Santorum, the Republican Party’s path to revitalization is not a new round of engagement with women, young voters, and other groups that delivered an electoral landslide to President Barack Obama in November. No, Santorum has a different plan for saving the GOP: defunding Planned Parenthood.

The Raw Story reports that Santorum presented his three-point plan to save the party in a fundraising email over the weekend: mobilizing “pro-family conservatives,” “refuting the lies and half-truths that our detractors in the GOP are spreading about us,” and attacking the women’s’ health care provider.


Yes, let's go with Rick Santorum's ideas, seeing as how they worked so well the last time. He's got the plan to win over those lady voters.

Also joining in on the fun is former GOP Rep. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, who announced with much fanfare that he was starting a SuperPAC called Restore Our Republic. ROR will, according to Politico, "give conservatives aligned with the GOP’s activist base the same outside support that establishment-side Republicans get from independent expenditure groups." Without saying so explicitly, Landry makes it clear that his group is basically a RINO hunting safari, with establishment incumbents as the prey.

"Incumbents who are out there who are conservatives will never have to worry about us," Landry said. "And if you’re a Republican, you’re supposed to be conservative." Landry's effort will be co-helmed by Republican strategist Nachama Soloveichik, a former spokesperson for the Club For Growth, another RINO hunting camp. The end effect of all of this is that ROR would promote the sort of candidates that makes rebranding impossible.

Did I mention that Landry lost reelection n 2012? Yeah, the guy who just lost an election has the magic formula for winning elections. And people take these guys seriously.

Maybe the conservative movement shouldn't have been so accepting of the "help" offered by self-serving grifters like Sarah Palin. Because somewhere along the line, they've taught their base to believe that it's the losers who hold the keys to winning elections. This reasoning has it that -- for example -- immigrant bashing isn't the problem, the problem is that they aren't bashing immigrants enough. And it's the same on down the line: the War on Women, scapegoating minorities, the homophobia, the Islamophobia, etc. The problem isn't that there's too much of this in the GOP -- the problem is that there isn't enough. Turn on talk radio or Fox News and you'll hear it over and over and over -- people didn't vote Republican because they didn't see "true" conservatism. The old Republican rule comes back: if what you're doing isn't working, you just need to do more of it. You need to hate more and smear more and scapegoat more, because that's what voters really like.

If the GOP rebranding effort is going to work, they're going to need to take these regressive loser-heroes head on. They need to realize that, by pushing incredibly unpopular stances in the name of "true conservatism," these victimhood-mongers are actively working against the party. Because these people practice the politics of exclusion -- and they've excluded so many voters that they can't possibly win national office. Exclusion and alienation are, after all, practically the same thing.

Their big advice for winning more election is basically to actively drive more voters away. If they had any brains at all, Republican leadership would treat these fools like political lepers. Instead, they put them in their Hall of Heroes.

-Wisco

[photo by Gage Skidmore]