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• 06 Sep ' 11:37

  TIME KEEPS MARCHING ON! In a thrilling societal change, we move to a new location: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2011 Time keeps marching on: We’ve moved to a new location! THE DAILY HOWLER will still appear as usual. But we’ll be at a leafy new site! This “classic” site will remain as is, unsullied by the passage time. This will include our existing archives, dating to March 1998. But all new posts will appear at the new site. (But what about Marc? you may be asking. Details at the new site!) Our new address: www.dailyhowler.blogspot.com Or why not just click here.

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• 02 Sep ' 10:19

  HEY RUBES! The professors took our society’s saddest song and made it that much worse: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2011 The two Krugmans/the two Chris Matthews: “One day won’t make a difference,” the New York Times editors say today, referring to Obama’s jobs speech. But first, they devote their featured editorial to the one day they say doesn’t matter. Just click here. Does it matter if Obama speaks next Wednesday, as opposed to next Thursday? At this point no, not really—though Wednesday would have been better. After all, Obama has literally had two years to devise and advance jobs proposals. But today, the editors screech and yell about that one day—about the one day they say doesn’t matter—because it gives them a chance to yell about the vile John Boehner. So it goes when weak-minded elites devolve into tribal warfare. And uh-oh! We had a similar reaction to Paul Krugman’s new column! Krugman is a giant when he writes about policy; he isn’t as strong about politics. Today, he’s in a bit of a tribal fury himself. But for our money, something basic is missing KRUGMAN (9/2/11): “Have you left no sense of decency?” That’s the question Joseph Welch famously asked Joseph McCarthy, as the red-baiting demagogue tried to ruin yet another innocent citizen. And these days, it’s the question I find myself wanting to ask Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who has done more than anyone else to make policy blackmail—using innocent Americans as hostages—standard operating procedure for the G.O.P. A few weeks ago, Mr. Cantor was the hard man in the confrontation over the debt ceiling; he was willing to endanger America’s financial credibility, putting our whole economy at risk, in order to extract budget concessions from President Obama. Now he’s doing it again, this time over disaster relief, making headlines by insisting that any federal aid to the victims of Hurricane Irene be offset by cuts in other spending. In effect, he is threatening to take Irene’s victims hostage. Throughout the column, Krugman suggests that Cantor is “threatening to take Irene’s victims hostage,” engaging in “blackmail.” But he offers no quotation in which Cantor has made such a threat. Cantor has said that federal aid to victims of Irene should be offset by cuts in other spending. We think that’s a dumb idea—but has he threatened to withhold disaster funding until his demand is met? For ourselves, we haven’t seen such a demand—and Krugman doesn’t provide one. When the Times reported this topic on Wednesday, it reported no such demand. “In an appearance on Fox News this week, Mr. Cantor promised to find the money for the storm aid,” Carl Hulse reported. Has Cantor really made that threat? If he has, shouldn’t it be in this column? Doggone it! The progressive world loses its MVP when Krugman gets tribally overheated—when the policy Krugman makes way for his tribal twin. That policy writer is valuable. With that in mind, we’ll suggest that you recall what Krugman wrote about Obama and Social Security back in 2007. A bit of background: After reading this recent blog post, we went back to review what Krugman said about Obama in 2007. We came upon a painful column from November 2007. In that column, Krugman criticized Obama for the way he was pimping the “crisis” in Social Security. At the time, Obama was bashing Hillary Clinton because she wouldn’t make the same bogus statements. Krugman was right on the money that day. But the part of the column we thought you should see concerned a current rhetorical matter. Rick Perry called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” in his fiery book last year, and he’s getting semi-pounded for it. But other people got there first. Just consider this gruesome part of Krugman’s painful column KRUGMAN (11/16/07): To understand the nature of Mr. Obama's mistake, you need to know something about the special role of Social Security in American political discourse. Inside the Beltway, doomsaying about Social Security—declaring that the program as we know it can't survive the onslaught of retiring baby boomers—is regarded as a sort of badge of seriousness, a way of showing how statesmanlike and tough-minded you are. Consider, for example, this exchange about Social Security between Chris Matthews of MSNBC and Tim Russert of NBC, on a recent edition of Mr. Matthews's program ''Hardball.'' Mr. Russert: ''Everyone knows Social Security, as it's constructed, is not going to be in the same place it's going to be for the next generation, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives.'' Mr. Matthews: ''It's a bad Ponzi scheme, at this point.'' Mr. Russert: ''Yes.'' But the ''everyone'' who knows that Social Security is doomed doesn't include anyone who actually understands the numbers. In fact, the whole Beltway obsession with the fiscal burden of an aging population is misguided. Awful! Last year, in his book, Perry called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. But so did the high-ranking Matthews and Russert, back in 2007. Today, Matthews is a liberal hero. He’s been repurposed by the suits. He plays you every night of the week, sending race thrills up your leg. Joan comes on to praise his greatness. The profits and pay-checks roll in. Ain’t life in a failing culture grand? For ourselves, we think progressives need the just-the-facts Krugman, not his less helpful twin. By the way, has Cantor made that threat? Like other readers of Krugman’s column, we still aren’t sure. EPILOGUE—HEY RUBESHow many tea party supporters are actually snarling racists? (Oh sorry: How many tea party supporters “had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and still do?” In our emerging liberal culture, euphemism must be served!) How many tea party people are racists? Here at THE DAILY HOWLER, we aren’t really sure. According to recent surveys, there are perhaps forty million such people in all. We still haven’t spoken to most of them. Of course, it’s easy to get an answer if you simply imagine all the people in the tea party clan. That’s what Kevin Drum’s commenters did (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/31/11). Their technique led to analyses like this: COMMENT: "Jon Fasman joins the throngs of people wondering just what it is that older white conservatives are really nostalgic for." That's easy. They miss the times when they could treat everyone who wasn't a white man like crap, when they could kill gay people without consequence, when they could rape women and force them to bear their rape babies, when they could openly discriminate against anyone/everyone that was as @#?!ed in the head as they are. Still, we weren’t entirely sure. Do all tea party supporters want to treat everyone who isn't a white man like crap? Or is it just a very high percentage? Determined to answer such questions, we turned back to that pair of professors! On August 17, Professors Putnam and Campbell published their op-ed piece in the New York Times—a piece which helped us answer these questions through the use of highly rigorous academic technique. The professors don’t imagine all the people; they go out and interview samples, using all their skills and powers. Imagination can hang—this is science! As you may recall, the professors ended up offering this assessment of the folk in the tea party movement PUTNAM AND CAMPBELL (8/17/11): So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do. More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006—opposing abortion, for example—and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. As they tried to define the tea party, the professors went directly to race—even though they said that other factors were “more important.” But once again, we were a bit puzzled. How many tea party supporters “have a low regard for immigrants and blacks?” Is it all the tea party folk, or just a very large number? How many people have that low regard? The professors did tell us that tea party folk have a low regard for immigrants and blacks “compared to other white Republicans.” In this way, they managed to slime “other white Republicans” too. But still, they never quite got around to explaining how many people in these vile groups hold that low regard. Alas! In a piece which was highly disrespectful of the killing role race has played in our society, the lofty professors failed to define their sweeping claims—their insinuations. Nor have they bothered, right to this day, to release their alleged presumed data—data which would let us see the degree to which tea party responses to racial questions differ from responses given by other groups. So you see, it isn’t just commenters to web sites who play it fast and loose with race claims—with the most serious claims a person can make in our culture. Even our loftiest professors play such games—with the permission of the New York Times op-ed page, of course. What did Professors Putnam and Campbell learn about tea party views about race? There is still no way to know. In response to complaints, the lofty fellows did let a minion release the text of the questions they posed to their respondents (click here). For example, this is the text of the one lonely question they asked about immigrants or immigration: PUTNAM/CAMPBELL SURVEY QUESTION: Do you think the number of immigrants from foreign countries who are permitted to come to the United States to live should be increased a lot, increased a little, left the same as it is now, decreased a little or decreased a lot? -Increased a lot -Increased a little -Left the same as it is now -Decreased a little -Decreased a lot Does the word “permitted” mean that this question refers to legal immigration? Just a guess—different respondents will understand this question in different ways. (For ourselves, we wouldn’t answer a full-of-air question like that.) But at any rate, that is the only question respondents were asked about immigrants or immigration. But so what? On the basis of responses to that one airy question, the professors were able to tell us that tea party members “have a low regard for immigrants,” to some undisclosed degree. This leads to a second question, of course: How many non-tea party people gave the “wrong” answer to this question? How many Democrats gave the “wrong” answer, for example? Here too, there is no way to know, because the data have not been released. For that reason, there is no way to measure the degree to which the tea party people differ from other groups. Discussing our nation’s most serious topic, these professors have done lazy, careless, inexcusable work. Were we in charge of Harvard/Notre Dame, we would kick them onto the street before they returned from sabbatical! And yes, the response rates really do matter, if you want to know what tea party people are actually like. Let’s recall an earlier survey by an associate professor. In April 2010, Christopher Parker (University of Washington) released the results from his own survey. Parker’s work was almost pitifully poor. Here is a fair-enough summary from someone at Newsweek, via the Daily Beast NEWSWEEK (4/9/10): So a new poll by researchers at the University of Washington caught my eye. The findings are sure to fan the flames further. "People who approve of the Tea Party, more than those who don't approve, have more racist attitudes," says Christopher Parker, a University of Washington professor who directed the survey. "And not only that, but more homophobic and xenophobic attitudes." For instance, respondents were asked whether they agreed with various characterizations of different racial groups. Only 35 percent of those who strongly approve of the tea party agreed that blacks are hardworking, compared with 55 percent of those who strongly disapprove of the tea party. On whether blacks were intelligent, 45 percent of the tea-party supporters agreed, compared with 59 percent of the tea-party opponents. And on the issue of whether blacks were trustworthy, 41 percent of the tea-party supporters agreed, compared with 57 percent of the tea-party opponents. To his credit, Parker managed to say that tea party people were only more racist, homophobic and xenophobic than members of other groups. (Apparently, the others were very bad too!) But please note what that distinction means: Even though many tea party people gave the “wrong” answers to Parker’s questions, quite a few tea party detractors gave the “wrong” answers too! (Parker compared responses by tea party supporters to responses by folk who oppose the tea party.) This helps us see that the differences here are differences of degree, even if we accept Parker’s view about which answers are wrong. But uh-oh! In this case, a closer look at Parker’s questions undermined his findings even further. After some of her standard screeching and yelling about all the “racists” with whom she’s surrounded, Joan Walsh calmed down long enough to respond to an informed critique by Cathy Young: WALSH (5/3/10): On one point, Young is right.It's true that white Tea Party skeptics are more likely than white Tea Party supporters to say black people are trustworthy (57 percent to 41 percent), Young acknowledges. But then she compares the two groups' opinions of white trustworthiness, and finds that while only 49 percent of Tea Partiers say whites are trustworthy, 72 percent of Tea Party skeptics do. So when you compare white Tea Party skeptics' views of black and white trustworthiness, you find that more (72 percent) think whites are trustworthy than think blacks are (57 percent). Young's right, that is a little weird, and depressing. But it's also noteworthy that Tea Partiers don't seem to have a lot of trust in black or white people. Uh-oh! Tea party supporters gave lower ratings to blacks on these measures—but they also gave lower ratings to whites! What happened to all their racism? Joan might not have found this outcome so “weird and depressing” had she simply considered the actual question respondents were actually asked. Young gave an incomplete description, but it took us well beyond the cursory description found in Newsweek: YOUNG (4/25/10): The respondents in the UW poll were asked to rate on a 1-7 scale how intelligent, hardworking, and trustworthy they perceived "almost all" blacks (and, in separate questions, whites, Latinos, and Asians) to be. Whether the findings expose Tea Party bigotry hinges on two things: how the “Tea Partiers” opinions of blacks compare to their views of other groups, and how their answers compare to those of other, non-Tea-Partying Americans. Respondents weren’t asked if they think black people (or white people) are intelligent or trustworthy. They were asked if they think almost all people in those groups can be so described; they had to rate that likelihood along a seven-point scale. This is a long-standing, standard type of question in social science research—but by accepted academic procedure, you’re supposed to compare the way a respondent rates his own demographic group to the way he rates other such groups. Parker didn’t do that, and people like Walsh started yelling about all the racists—but only about all the racists in the other tribe, of course. That said, if you interpret the data in standard ways, the tea party responses betrayed no more racial suspicion than those of tea party opponents. Can we talk? As she screeched, cavorted and yelled, this pretty much made its way over Joan’s name-calling head. Tea party supporters gave lower ratings to all groups. That said, they favored their own demographic group by roughly the same proportion as tea party opponents did. By the way, how would you answer the question they were asked? Would you say that “almost all” blacks (or almost all whites) are intelligent? Trustworthy? Where would you rate those groups on that seven-point scale? For ourselves, we wouldn’t answer that question. It’s too full of air. Back to the latest professors. We think they have behaved very badly in this current episode. Based on their column and their TV appearances, we’d make a second, heretical claim—we’d suggest that these professors just may not be all that sharp. We know, we know! They’re from the best schools! Wand we liberals love it when such professors let us shout our favorite claims at the folk in the other tribe. How can something that feels so good possibly be so bad? Sorry. Our professors are often rather weak-minded. Have we really not noticed this yet? Hey rubes, we hear the professors saying. Take our society’s saddest song and make it that much worse. The plutocrats cheer when this piffle gets spewed. Helter skelter, they craftily say. Helter skelter! Divide and conquer!

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• 01 Sep ' 09:09

  WE’D SAY YOU GOT A REVOLUTION! A new world in which we liberals are dumb emerged in Drum’s comment thread: THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2011 Krugman revisits that global failure: Most likely, you don’t know what “the basic IS-LM model” is. Neither do we—but you don’t have to worry! For current purposes, it doesn’t matter! Following Digby, we think it’s worth reviewing this recent post , in which Paul Krugman returned to a very important topic. He mentions “the basic IS-LM model.” But you don’t have to know what it is. The actual topic of Krugman’s post is the “global intellectual failure” he described a few weeks ago. Increasingly, we live in a very dumb world, from the upper-end on down. Once again, Krugman describes the way the world’s academic elites have massively, globally failed: KRUGMAN (8/31/11):The basic IS-LM model, with its possibility of a liquidity trap, has been a very good guide in these troubled times…It’s your basic, minimal, compelling model. It should come as no surprise that it gets at a lot of what’s going on. Yet people don’t know this model—which is to say, they don’t have any simple framework for thinking about how money, interest rates, and the real economy interact. Which people am I talking about? Money managers, obviously; they may know a lot about individual markets and companies, they may have lots of experience, but now that we’re talking about macro issues of a kind not seen since the 1930s, those talents are a lot less relevant than usual. Pimco used to have Paul McCulley, who was very good on the macro, but with him gone, they seem to be making up theories on the fly. And whatever model Paulson is using, it’s not IS-LM. But economists also don’t know this stuff. We’re living in a dark age of macroeconomics, in which much of the profession has turned its back on past knowledge. There’s also a contingent of economists who have read Hicks, or at least claim to have read him, but seem to have come out of the experience with nothing more than misleading catchphrases and the strange conviction that they have transcended something they actually don’t understand. According to Krugman, our economists no longer know basic stuff! Quite correctly, Digby was struck by the oddness of this assertion DIGBY (8/31/11): So, in this case it's a failure of experts, some of whom just don't know what they need to know and others who have inexplicably decided to ignore what they do know and pretend that they've discovered something more relevant. The first is just simply human failure…the second is a little bit less understandable. How does that happen, and why? On its face, Krugman’s claim is highly counterintuitive. How could the world’s leading economists be so dumb? How could we be in “a dark age of economics?” We weren’t thrilled with Digby’s path from there, although we’ll suggest you peruse it. This would be our suggestion: We live in an age of massive dumbness among a wide range of elites. We aren’t equipped to judge Krugman’s claim about the world’s economists. But for decades, we’ve been struck by the uselessness of our “educational experts”—and by the general absence from the scene of our professoriate. When the professors do show up, they often have little to offer. Krugman is the exception. Beyond that, our higher-end journalists just aren’t smart at all. Their basic skills are virtually non-existent, and it’s been that way for decades. The situation is quite amazing, but we tend to talk about their “bias,” not about their remarkable dumbness. We must learn to discuss The Dumb—and our duty as citizens. Why are modern elites so inept? To some extent, they’re paid to be, directly and indirectly. They may know what their funding agencies or their editors want, and they may function accordingly. But beyond that, the global intellectual failure almost surely reflects a world in which the basic rewards and incentives are simply much too high. It’s inevitable: When we pay our elites way too much, we produce a fatuous world of foppish, pampered know-nothings. That world is currently all around us, drowning us in its dumbness. For our money, it reveals its foppish values most reliably on the New York Times op-ed page. But we’ll guess that its foppish soul is also displayed in the work Krugman is discussing. To some extent, modern elites are paid to fail; some climate deniers are on the dole, for example. But the dumbness is all around. In part, it simply reflects a spreading, upper-class elite culture. When you pay elites too much, you guarantee that they’ll fail. We have a citizen’s duty not to be dumb—and to challenge the spread of The Dumb. Quite correctly, Digby was struck by Krugman’s post. But that massive upper-end dumbness is truly all around. We need to identify it—to call it by name. Why not start with Bruni , since we’re too cowed to tag Dowd? PART 4—WE’D SAY YOU GOT A REVOLUTIONWe thought Kevin Drum was right to be “irked” by what Jon Fasman said. Heroically, Fasman had tried to imagine what those people in the tea party are like. Judging by recent survey results, he was talking about forty million people. But by the time Fasman was done, “those people” were pretty much all alike—and they weren’t very nice. He found it hard to imagine a range of motives for their very bad conduct and views : FASMAN (8/23/11): Like Matthew Yglesias, I also find it hard not to think that when older white conservatives lament the loss of "the America they grew up in", they are lamenting the loss of their own social privilege. It's true that America today is in some ways profoundly different from the one into which John Boehner was born in 1949. And I am willing to concede that life may well have been better for Mr Boehner, and for many other white, Christian heterosexual Americans back then (although I wonder what chance a 60-year-old Catholic son of a bartender from Reading, Ohio would have had at becoming Speaker of the House in 1949). Quotas kept immigration from Asia, Latin America and Africa low, and of course blacks, Jews, Catholics, women and gays knew their place. Is that what older white conservatives miss? And if not, what, exactly, do they want their politicians to "champion"? Fasman’s imagination was faulty; he failed to imagine John McCormack, the 60-year-old Catholic son of a hod carrier who became Speaker during that era. (As early as 1940, he was majority leader.) But then, Fasman’s imagination may not be especially fertile. He could imagine that all “those people” just want to keep blacks and Jews in their place. But he couldn’t seem to imagine much of anything else. Drum said he was irked by this, and we largely agree with his judgment. But darn it! As he started his response to Fasman, we thought he missed a step : DRUM (8/23/11): There's something about this conversation that irks me. You want to know what older white conservatives miss about the America of half a century ago? It's just not that hard... We thought we knew what Drum would say next! We thought he was going to say, “It’s just not that hard. You have to sit down and ask them!” People won’t always tell you the truth when you ask them such questions, of course. But it’s an obvious place to start. We think Drum wrote a very good post, but he didn’t take that route. Instead, he began imagining too—though for our money, he has a more fertile imagination than Fasman. Drum imagined a lot of things “those people” might miss about the past. “None of this is really my cup of tea,” he said as he ended. But he also said this: “As you'll note, lots of it is indeed bound up with racial, ethnic, and gender fears. But then again, lots of it isn't.” (To Kevin’s credit, he can talk about “racial fears” without going straight to “racism.”) What do “those people” miss about the past? For ourselves, we have no idea; if we cared about that question, we’d be inclined to ask them. That’s what Professors Putnam and Campbell recently did with some tea party folk, as part of their recent alleged study; tomorrow, we’ll take a second look at their reported findings. But many of Drum’s commenters seemed to see no need to ask any questions. They knew, from their imaginations, what those forty million are like. It just has to be race, they cried, imagining forty million people in one fell swoop. We thought their comments were quite unintelligent. But then, the liberal world had been drifting this way ever since we stopped our decades-long nap in the woods. Increasingly, we’re developing our own partisan “news orgs,” news orgs which hand us silly shit too—the kind of news orgs pseudo-conservatives developed decades ago. The Richard Wolffes get hustled onto TV, as happened just last night; they teach us to be dumb-asses too. This is good for the corporate bottom line, but bad for our group IQ. At long last, we liberals are being played for fools too, right on the TV machine thingy! (And elsewhere.) This has produced a striking new situation—almost a revolution. It has produced a world in which the conservative commenters will sometimes make more sense than we liberals manage to do! For decades, that was hard to imagine. As the revolution takes hold, it increasingly occurs. Consider a comment which appeared about one hour after Drum offered his post. Many liberals had been sounding off about the way they imagined “those people”—about all the unattractive things for which they were plainly nostalgic. Our side was having a good ole time—but uh-oh! A commenter from Connecticut now appeared, asking awkward questions: COMMENT FROM CONNECTICUT: Wow. How many older white conservatives did you interview for your list? And why do you take it as a hypothesis that older white conservatives are nostalgic for the America of a half century ago, rather than opposed to some specific things they see today? Oof! It’s true. Fasman had built his post around the idea that “those people” are full of nostalgia. Drum may have seemed to extend the premise—but no one had shown that the premise is true! No matter! We liberals just kept imagining all the bad things the “baggers” long for. But as we did, the Connecticut commenter began to challenge the various things we were saying! A few minutes after his original comment, he asked this question of a fiery liberal commenter: COMMENT FROM CONNECTICUT: Why do you assume that Kevin has any legitimate basis for his long list of conservatives' nostalgia? Oof! That was a good question too! Unfortunately, when the fiery liberal gave his reply, it didn’t exactly make sense—and the Connecticut fellow noticed! For ourselves, we wouldn’t criticize Drum in the way this commenter seemed to do. We thought he made a good, basic point in his post: People can be nostalgic for many things which aren’t connected to race. That said, his post would have been even better if he had noted an obvious fact—Fasman never established that “those people” in the tea party are motivated by nostalgia. Presumably, some of those people may be so driven—but surely, some others are not. Such distinctions didn’t trouble the liberal lynch mob. But then, down through the annals of time, distinctions like that have very rarely gained purchase. We recommend the comment thread to Drum’s post because it represents a new kind of critter—a critter we increasingly see. It represents a type of debate which rarely existed in recent decades—a debate in which the liberals keep making the dumb-ass remarks, while the conservatives make much clearer sense. We liberals! As the corporations hire the millionaire “talents” to serve us our own plates of comfort food, we are getting dumber and dumber. We are getting dumb in way only the right used to be. For decades, we laughed at “those people,” the ditto-heads. You say you want a revolution? Increasingly, “those people” are us! Imagine the professors Types of comments to look for: If you read the Drum comment thread, we’ll recommend two types of comments. Some commenters offered remarks like this: COMMENT: Hey, here's an idea: if you want to know "what exactly do these voters want" then ask them! Radical, I know! Problem is, this doesn't produce the desired result (calling them racist). So instead, it is necessary to sit on one's ass and impute motives to them (racism) from a position of ignorance. Oof. In fairness, there’s a great deal of merit to this this type of comment. And by the way: As we liberals become more promiscuous in our (highly disrespectful) use of race cards, we make it increasingly easy for conservatives to win debates among the wider electorate. Many others can see that we’re dumb! Beyond that, you might look for comments which note that there are plenty of things a sensible person might miss about the past. Many of Drum’s less intelligent commenters seemed to think this was impossible. Anyone who fondly recalls the past must be a snarling racist! We were saddened by this manifest liberal dumbness. Wisely, we thought of the opening paragraph of Paul Krugman’s essential book, The Conscience of a Liberal: KRUGMAN: I was born in 1953. Like the rest of my generation, I took the America I grew up in for granted—in fact, like many in my generation, I railed against the very real injustices of our society, marched against the bombing in Cambodia, went door to door for liberal political candidates. It’s only in retrospect that the political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional episode in our nation’s history. It’s much as Drum said: To the extent that “those people” may long for the past, they may have real things to long for. In fact, many significant things were better when John McCormack was speaker, though many other things were much worse. Krugman explains that “paradise” in his book. Some of “those people” may be remembering similar things, perhaps without understanding the social forces which have destroyed that “political and economic environment.” We tend to agree with Krugman’s analysis of the mid-century. Once in a while, it wouldn’t hurt to try to persuade “those people” that Krugman’s view of the past is right. Or is it beneath the dignity of we who are increasingly dumb to speak to those people, whom we dramatically loathe? If you want a revolution, we think you must talk to those folk.

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• 31 Aug ' 08:04

  N THEIR LIVES, THEY’VE LOATHED THEM ALL! Drum’s readers responded with rage, as people always have done: WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 31, 2011 Is it time for Kornacki to go: The culture of the useless professor was on display in yesterday’s Times. You see, one of them perfesser fellers had spotted some “bogus quotations”—from the 1850s or so! You’ve read the column a thousand times. The New York Times let you read it again! In the process, you received your latest dose of lofty Times op-ed culture. That’s right, people! Someone had misquoted Thoreau—and one bold professor was there to fight back! For ourselves, we had a particular reaction to one part of his column. When we saw him use the term “bogus quotation,” we were brought up short—because of the way we’ve been whiling away our afternoon hours. In the afternoons, we’ve been finishing chapter 6 of How He Got There, our book about the gruesome, history-changing press coverage of Campaign 2000. That chapter deals with the press corps’ conduct in December 1999 (and thereafter), when they pretended that Candidate Gore had told a big LIE about the Love Canal toxic waste problem of the late 1970s. The coverage of Candidate Gore in Campaign 2000 teemed with “bogus quotations;” we’ve typed that phrase a good many times in the past several weeks. The invention of the bogus Love Canal quotations (plural) set the GORE LIAR theme into stone; rather plainly, that journalistic theme, built from a series of bogus quotations, decided Campaign 2000. But sure enough! The professors didn’t notice the problem back then, even as it led to Candidate Gore’s defeat. The coverage teemed with bogus quotations, as we noted from March 1999 on. We don’t recall hearing the professors say so, then or now, even though those bogus quotations led to Bush’s ascension. Then and now, we’ve heard from none of this fellow’s colleagues—although in fairness, they may have been in France at the time. Yesterday’s column was hackneyed, pointless, lofty—a perfect expression of Times op-ed culture. But then, with few exceptions, the professors have failed you down through the years. So have the career liberal “journalists.” This raises an obvious question: Is it time for Kornacki to go? Salon has been an embarrassment of late—a primer in the haplessness of liberal intellectual culture. Kornacki made a fool of himself with his piece about Mitt Romney, sexist—a piece which occasioned much complaining from his intelligent readers (see ). But good God! Yesterday, Kornacki topped himself with a second groaner—another piece which correctly produced a great deal of reader pushback. The background is largely pathetic. Two lamebrain mainstream news orgs asked a few rather dumb survey questions. Kornacki, a career player who will move on some day, of course said this made perfect sense: KORNACKI (8/30/11): The tenth anniversary of 9/11 is almost upon us and the commemorations are well underway. So it’s probably not surprising that someone would commission a poll asking Americans how different they think world would now be if their country’s response had been guided not by George W. Bush but by Al Gore. What is surprising is what the poll, conducted by "60 Minutes" and Vanity Fair, found: A clear majority of Americans—56 percent—don t really think anything would be different. This includes 62 percent of independents, 57 percent of Republicans and 48 percent of Democrats. Even among Democrats, only 44 percent say they thought the world would be a better place now if Gore had been in the White House back then. The question or questions seem dumb enough, though Kornacki never quite explains what the questions were. (It seems there were at least two.) But Kornacki took the questions and ran! His headline may be the dumbest ever, on the politics and on the merits: “Why President Gore might have gone into Iraq after 9/11, too” Good god, but our liberal intellectual leaders are dumb! On the politics and on the merits, this is one of the dumbest pieces we have ever read. On the merits, Kornacki makes a sad attempt to reason his way through his topic. As he continues, he notes a fairly significant fact, but quickly cuffs it aside: KORNACKI (continuing directly): If the numbers seem startling, it's because the "global war on terror" that Bush chose launch in the wake of 9/11 has long seemed like an especially vivid affirmation of the truism that elections have consequences. You could argue that virtually any president would have signed off on the invasion of Afghanistan immediately after 9/11, but Iraq was a war of choice, and as Bush was making his case for it in the fall of 2002, Gore’s was perhaps the loudest voice in American politics saying, "No!" The question of whether the world would be much different today has President Gore been in power seems like an open and shut matter. How could it not be? And yet, there actually is a strong case for the public’s skepticism. In the run-up to war, Gore was loudly saying no. But so what? In a hapless piece, Kornacki tells us that he might have waged war on Iraq anyhoo—and he even seems to suggest that this is the question the public was asked. On the merits, Kornacki’s analysis is just sad, a fact you’ll have to confirm for yourselves. On the politics, his judgment is astounding. Gore is a major liberal leader—and he got it right on Iraq! But why wait for Fox to tear him down, as they’re constantly trying to do? In a hopeless bit of counterfactual reasoning, Kornacki performs that task for them! What did Americans ever do to merit this sort of punishment from God? (Don’t answer that!) What did we do to deserve a political culture in which people this foolish get enshrined as our leading “liberal” journalists? In our low-IQ political culture, Gore has been a big target for twenty years, dating to Earth in the Balance. Plainly, he always will be. It’s pathetic enough when Rush and Sean gin up these silly brain-dead discussions. Yesterday, Kornacki jumped in to help them. There is one bit of good news here. As with Kornacki’s piece about Romney, so too with this groaning effort: Salon readers responded in force, trashing him for his miserable judgment and his weak analytical skills. If you want to restore your faith in the world, we’ll suggest that you read those comments, many of which are quite sharp. The comments are sharp; Kornacki isn’t. What explains a “liberal” world which displays this balance of power? PART 3—IN THEIR LIVES, THEY’VE LOATHED THEM ALLFor our money, Kevin Drum made perfect sense as he tried to imagine all the people—all the people in the tea party movement, that is. Jon Fasman had tried to imagine why the tea party folk are so darned nostalgic. Try though he might, Fasman simply couldn’t stop thinking that it was all about race. We humans have always imagined the worst when we imagine the souls of “those people”—the souls of those in the other tribe. But Drum said he was “irked” by Fasman’s approach—and we think his reaction made sense. He listed many things for which tea party folk might be nostalgic (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/30/11). Sensibly enough, he said this after compiling his list DRUM: Again: the world is a complicated place. People have lots of motivations for the things they do, some of them shabby, some of them honorable, some of them merely personal preferences or products of self-interest. Focusing only on the shabby motivations is as unfair as pretending that they're mere inventions of your opponents' febrile imaginations. It's all there, it's all always been there, and it's all open for discussion. Drum broke every rule in the book. Thinking about the other tribe, he said their motivations might not all be shabby. Why, some of their motivations might even by “honorable!” No, really—that’s what he said!   Is the world that “complicated?” Within the ugly, crabbed tribal mind, such thoughts have never been permitted. Quickly, Drum’s commenters swung into action, correcting his obvious error. Some of the comments were snide. Some of the comments were harsher than that—and they went to all-race-all-the-time as the only possible explanation for the behavior and views of “those people.” But we can make one general statement: The world in which these commenters live is “a complicated place.” In their brilliance, they are able to limn the world’s souls forty million at a time. The commenters’ world is really quite simple. Just as it has always been, “those people” are all alike: COMMENT: They're nostalgic for their infancy, to the degree they're really nostalgic for anything at all. I think it's mostly just generalized malice dressed up in nostalgia, a nostalgia of what they thought was when everything was just perfect, just before potty training. COMMENT: Conservatives, it seems to me, are terrified of change and see it as a threat. Liberals embrace change and see it as an opportunity. Our differences are basic, rooted in our fundamental world-views and our emotional responses to them. COMMENT: …Look, older Americans: I'm sorry you can't hide your head in the sand anymore and pretend everything is hunky dory and America is the greatest and everything fits in its neat little box. I'm sorry the internet and television and cell phones have brought the ickyness of the world right to your front door. Oh, the horrah. Maybe instead of acting like everything was so much better back in the day you can acknowledge that life is messy, nothing is perfect, America is flawed despite its greatness, and maybe we all need to roll up our sleeves and work on making the nation better instead of pretending it all went haywire when X happened. Cripes I'm SO sick of this. I hear from older people that everything was fine until we startled using taxpayer $$ to buy schoolbooks for kids ... that happened in what, the 1940s? Get over it, people. Thing were not wonderful 30 or 40 years ago and got sucky when a black man entered the White House. There's always been good and bad. Change is what we're made of. Deal with it. COMMENT: back then the teabaggers were young and sheltered from the harsh realities of the world. They want their youth back. In the oldest analysis known to the race, the second commenter said that we in our tribe are smart, wise and good—and sadly, they in their tribe are not. In a harsher vein, the third commenter was able to see that it’s simply all about race. Drum’s readers weren’t reading the world as he did—at least, not when it comes to “those people.” Other commenters stood in line, eager to testify to the fact that the world isn’t a complicated place: COMMENT: Hey Kevin, I hate to burst your bubble, but: "Every American" never attended church every Sunday (with the exception of Catholics- who, as you mentioned were a tiny minority during Boehner's childhood) Old people have also been complaining about the content on TV since it was invented. (And new forms of entertainment—in this case, video games—have always been met with terrified yowling from the older generation. Remember the Pool Hall song from Music Man? Pool halls!) Your "put up a shed" and "take away our guns" arguments are both utter utter straw men. So the only complaint that is even somewhat legitimate and not based on racial or gender resentment is "The Big Three were the Big Three" and "kids should have to pray in school”—which is really just resentment and hatred of the wrong types of believers and/or atheists. Face facts, these people are bigots or they're pining for ways of life that never existed (or both). Let's not pretend there is any legitimate nostalgia here. The nostalgia isn’t “legitimate!” And the nostalgia which isn’t based on race is still of course based on hatred! Before too long, it had to happen, as it always does—as it always has. As the commenters’ anger rose, Drum came under suspicion: COMMENT: I think Kevin was/is granting far too much good faith to right wingers by offering up this list of grievances. I'm pointing out that despite going out of his way to portray these particular assholes in the most flattering light possible, that most of the complaints he has devised are STILL either fantastical, or the byproduct of gender or racial animosity. That commenter can spot assholes forty million at a time! For a mind of this prehistoric type, it was only natural to wonder why Drum wouldn’t do the same. As the comments continued to flow, the world became less and less complicated. Comments like the two which follow are actually drawn from the high-complexity camp: COMMENT: Kevin's point isn't that conservatives are pining for real things necessarily, just that what they're pining for isn't as monstrous as all that. Perhaps it's all fantasy, but it isn't, or it need not be, specifically a fantasy about keeping non-whites down, just a fantasy about having a nice white life free of care. COMMENT: Interesting you don't mention the older white conservative women. I think they're pining for a lot of the same things you listed. I agree that this isn't necessarily about bringing back slavery or segregation. To me, it certainly seems as if they're afraid that the time is very near when whites no longer automatically hold a majority in government. I think that, to the greatest extent, is the biggest fear - more so than gays having full rights. When we liberals are thoughtful and generous, we concede that it isn’t necessarily about bringing slavery back! But when we get ourselves a snootful, we pen remarks like the ones which follow. We make it a point to tell the tribe that this whole thing isn’t complex: COMMENT: "None of this is really my cup of tea, and as you'll note, lots of it is indeed bound up with racial, ethnic, and gender fears. But then again, lots of it isn't. ... The world is a complicated place." Not really. Even the better part of the "nostalgia" which, at first glance, appears not to be "bound up with racial, ethnic, and gender fears" really is. This is so because old white male conservatives invariably blame its loss on those factors. For example, not being able to send your kids to college is blamed on all the aid going to minorities. Virtually every part of the old white male conservative dream has been stolen by those pushing a "racial, ethnic, or gender" agenda. It's really not complicated. COMMENT: "Jon Fasman joins the throngs of people wondering just what it is that older white conservatives are really nostalgic for:" That's easy. They miss the times when they could treat everyone who wasn't a white man like crap, when they could kill gay people without consequence, when they could rape women and force them to bear their rape babies, when they could openly discriminate against anyone/everyone that was as @#?!ed in the head as they are. COMMENT: "The world is a complicated place." There I think you hit the nub of the problem really for conservatives; they don't WANT it to be a complicated place. Everything just needs to have a simple solution. Bad economy? Just cut taxes! Schools in trouble? Just get prayer and faith "back" in the classroom, and dump all that complicated evolution stuff. Maybe it's a result of them being too young at those times to recognize the complexity back then, but they long for this mythic time of "simple solutions" supposedly in the past. Problem is because reality IS a complicated place, they want to cram it (and everyone) until they fit into that simplistic mold, no matter what harm they do. They want a childish world, so they act childish (which of course tends to mean "sociopath" in adults). “That’s easy,” the second commenter said, as bigots have done through the ages. He or she explained that the tea party folk simply long for the days when they could rape women and such! Bringing the unintentional comedy in, the third commenter helped us see that “those people” want simple solutions! As always, we liberals are the nuanced ones, even as we make the world’s most sweeping generalizations. The people are the ones who want everything in a “simplistic mold!” The ugly souls of Kevin’s readers spilled out in their ugly remarks—remarks which were amazingly dumb by any sane calculation. Alas! As we liberals run through the streets of the web, behaving as people always have done, we make a joke of intellectual culture—and we make it amazingly easy for “those people” to be the bright ones. Drum did get some very sharp comments from some of his readers this day—but most of the plainly intelligent comments came from the other tribe! Indeed, he himself disappointed us a bit early on, accepting a premise or two from heaven knows where. Tomorrow, we’ll review Kevin’s small error. Also: Is Krugman nostalgic? There went the sun! Friday: Professor Putnam’s lonely hearts club band

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• 30 Aug ' 11:18

  IN HIS LIFE, HE’S IMAGINED MORE! Kevin Drum did a much better job imagining all the people: TUESDAY, AUGUST 30, 2011 Three cheers for Slate/Richard Rothstein edition: Three cheers for Slate, at least for today. The reason is Richard Rothstein. Within our “anti-knowledge” culture, you’re almost never allowed to hear the information which follows. Yesterday, thanks to Rothstein, you got to peruse it at Slate. Yesterday, Slate published Rothstein’s review of Steven Brill’s new book—his new book about “education reform.” Despite his rather obvious cluelessness, Brill fancies himself an expert on this very hot subject. Like so many amateur experts, Brill is at war with the fiendish teachers unions. Like so many amateur experts, Brill is sure that our public schools are an ungodly mess. But uh-oh! In his review, Rothstein provided the kind of information you’re almost never allowed to see in this “anti-science” land: ROTHSTEIN (8/29/11): Central to [Brill’s] argument is the claim that radical change is essential because student achievement (especially for minority and disadvantaged children) has been flat or declining for decades. This is, however, false. The only consistent data on student achievement come from a federal sample, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Though you would never know it from the state of public alarm about education, the numbers show that regular public school performance has skyrocketed in the last two decades to the point that, for example, black elementary school students now have better math skills than whites had only 20 years ago. (There has also been progress for middle schoolers, and in reading; and less, but not insubstantial, progress for high schoolers.) The reason test score gaps have barely narrowed is that white students have also improved, at least at the elementary and middle school levels. The causes of these truly spectacular gains are unknown, but they are probably inconsistent with the idea that typical inner-city teachers are content to watch students wrestle on the classroom floor instead of learning. For years, we’ve urged liberals to discuss the information to which Rothstein alludes in that passage. But we modern liberals are “anti-knowledge” when it comes to such topics—and we quit on black kids a long time ago. We liberals don’t give a flying fig if black kids go hang themselves in the yard. If you doubt that obvious fact, you simply haven’t been watching. Perhaps you’ve been busy counting the racists in the other tribe. Yesterday, we commented on Paul Krugman’s claim that modern Republicans are “anti-science”—even “anti-knowledge.” That is largely true, we said—but in many ways, we liberals are anti-knowledge too! This is one of the topics—not the only one—we had in mind when we said that. Amazing, isn’t it? For very good reasons, every educational expert and education journalist describes the NAEP as the “gold standard” of educational testing. But no one ever tells you what the NAEP data show! We liberals surely don’t tell you; rather plainly, we simply don’t care about such topics. But then, even our teachers organizations don’t tell you—even though those data fly in the face of the plutocrats’ war on their kind. We’ve told you about those NAEP data again and again. But in this anti-knowledge “liberal” culture, we might as well speak to the wind. What do the NAEP data show? In the past several decades, black students and Hispanic students are doing massively better in reading and math! White students are doing much better too; this explains why the “achievement gaps” have only been reduced a bit. In a culture which wasn’t anti-knowledge, you would have heard these basic facts a million times by now. But your culture is anti-knowledge. This fact became groaningly clear in the comments to Rothstein’s post. Many courteous, toilet-trained commenters wasted their time with scripted discussions of those wonderful test scores in Finland. (Good lord, but we’re easily scripted!) But one commenter reacted in fury to Rothstein’s ridiculous factual claims. He posted two separate comments: COMMENTER: Scores haven't "skyrocketed." Yes, the national NAEP shows that math scores have increased over the past 20 years for elementary and middle-school kids, but they are flat for high schoolers. Reading scores are up slightly for elementary and middle-school kids, but have in fact declined for high-schoolers! And since high school scores are most important (no one admits you to college based on your 4th-grade grades), there's every justification for saying that scores are flat. COMMENTER: Also, this line is wildly misleading: "...black elementary school students now have better math skills than whites had only 20 years ago". Great. Except they're still much worse than white students TODAY, and their math scores at other grade levels and all of their reading scores have NEVER surpassed white students' scores in 35 years. Talk about cherry-picking data. That commenter didn’t seem to understand what Rothstein had said. But then again, why would he? In this anti-knowledge culture, he has quite possibly never heard the basic facts about those test scores. And Rothstein didn’t go into detail in this review. Yesterday, Krugman railed against the “anti-knowledge” GOP. We agree with the general thrust of what he said. But the blinkered world of our pseudo-liberal “elites” is groaningly anti-knowledge too—and our emerging “liberal” political culture is getting dumber each day. This is only one example. But as pseudo-experts like Steven Brill churn their endless heartfelt bullroar, this example of our “anti-knowledge” culture does loom very large. The star also bungles: That said, our analysts groaned about one basic part of Rothstein’s presentation. The passage we have provided above comes late in Rothstein’s piece. Earlier, in just his third paragraph, he very unwisely wrote this: ROTHSTEIN: The case [Brill’s heroes] make for their cause by now enjoys the status of conventional wisdom. Student achievement has been stagnant or declining for decades, even as money poured into public schools to improve teacher salaries, pensions, and working conditions (reducing class sizes, or hiring aides to give teachers more free time). Teachers typically have abysmally low standards, especially for minorities and other disadvantaged students, who predictably fall to the level of their teachers' expectations. Although teachers' quality can be estimated by the annual growth of their students' scores on standardized tests of basic math and reading skills, teachers have not been held accountable for performance. Instead, they get lifetime job security even if students don't learn. Brill observes a union-protected teacher in a Harlem public school bellowing "how many days in a week?," caring little that students pay him no heed and wrestle on the floor instead. Everything said there is technically accurate. But you have to read deep into Rothstein’s piece before you learn that this “conventional wisdom” is grossly inaccurate. Just a guess: Many folk didn’t read that far. Another guess: In that third paragraph, many readers thought they saw that CW confirmed once again! Does Slate have any editors? Oh wait! Sorry we asked! PART 2— IN HIS LIFE, HE’S IMAGINED MOREDown through the annals of time, we humans have been very good at one basic task. We’re very good at imagining the worst about The Other Tribe. Beyond that, we’re good at imagining that everyone in The Other Tribe is just like everyone else. “Those people!” The words roll off our tongues today, as they rolled off the tongues of our benighted ancestors, all the way back to prehistory. Imagine all the people! We’re happy to accept that task. Andwhen we do, we’re eager to imagine the worst about the others. To his credit, Kevin Drum pushed back last week when Jon Fasman imagined all the people—when Fasman imagined what “those people” in the tea party must be like. Why are those people in the tea party so nostalgic for mid-century America? In a post at the , that’s what Fasman asked (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/29/11). Fasman largely imagined the worst, using such analytical tools as “what I find it hard not to think.” In fairness: Before he reached his thrilling conclusion, Fasman did cut those people some slack. “Nostalgia for mid-century America and racism are not synonymous,” he magnanimously said as he started. But he couldn’t help wondering if this is the thing those forty million folk miss FASMAN (8/23/11): Quotas kept immigration from Asia, Latin America and Africa low, and of course blacks, Jews, Catholics, women and gays knew their place. Is that what older white conservatives miss? What else could it possibly be? Imagining all the (other) people, Fasman was pretty much stumped. (He also couldn’t imagine the life of John McCormack, a very famous political figure. But then, when we try to imagine the people, our faculties often fail.) Fasman couldn’t imagine what all the people were so nostalgic for. To his credit, Kevin Drum thought this was unfair—and perhaps just a little bit dumb. “The World is a Complicated Place,” he correctly said in his headline. He then imagined all kinds of things for which folk might be nostalgic DRUM (8/23/11): There's something about this conversation that irks me. You want to know what older white conservatives miss about the America of half a century ago? It's just not that hard. They look back nostalgically on an era when TV was universally wholesome and family friendly. When everyone went to church. When the police kept order without having to worry about the ACLU and Miranda rights. When no one had to wear seat belts or bike helmets. When you could put up a shed in your backyard without worrying about building permits or EPA regulations. When the Big Three were really the Big Three. When universities were places that taught you to be part of the establishment. When kids said prayers every day in school. When women raised the children and didn't expect men to help around the house. When there was no such thing as a crack epidemic. When you didn't have to worry about global warming or recycling or energy conservation. When you could tell an ethnic joke without looking around nervously first. When children went outside and played stickball instead of huddling glassy-eyed around a computer monitor playing lurid video games. When immigrants didn't march on the street demanding their "rights." When pornography was carefully hidden away in brown paper wrappers. When shiny new middle-class suburbs were springing up every day, filled with affordable houses financed via GI loans. When Europe was still grateful to us for winning World War II. When you weren't faced on a weekly basis with yet another electronic gadget that you had to try to figure out. When you weren't surrounded by gays and lesbians who insisted on carrying on in public. When you didn't have to worry about the government taking away your guns. Etc. None of this is really my cup of tea, and as you'll note, lots of it is indeed bound up with racial, ethnic, and gender fears. But then again, lots of it isn't. Somehow, Drum imagined a lot of things for which “those people” might be nostalgic. Some of the things he imagined are “bound up with racial, ethnic, and gender fears,” he said. But then again, some of them aren’t. None of this is his own cup of tea, Drum alleged. But Drum’s imagination was a great deal stronger than Fasman’s this day. For ourselves, we strongly agree with the general thrust of Drum’s presentation. Like his club-wielding kin from prehistory, Fasman could only imagine the worst about the other tribe. In the current instance, that tribe is perhaps forty million strong. But it seems “they all look alike” when Fasman sits down to imagine. We think Drum was right to be “irked” by Fasman’s facile conversation—by the very limited way he imagined all the people. But in our view, even Drum wasn’t perfect this day, despite his best intentions. As we read his post, we were disappointed by a leap of logic he instantly made. And when we read the comments to his post, we found several conservative readers offering spot-on complaints. We agreed with the basic thrust of Drum’s post. We thought his reactions were spot-on. But as we liberals get dumber and dumber, we’ve begun to achieve what was once impossible. For the first time in decades, we’ve made it easy for the world’s ditto-heads to get some basic points right. Was Krugman nostalgic? Thursday and Friday: Professors Putnam and Campbell imagine all the people

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• 29 Aug ' 09:59

  HE COULDN’T IMAGINE MCCORMACK! Jon Fasman tried to imagine what Tea Party people are like: MONDAY, AUGUST 29, 2011 A professor and a support group/Higher re-education: Paul Krugman is basically right today, though we’d say his perspective is somewhat limited. Increasingly, the Republican Party is “anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge,” he writes. We wouldn’t put it precisely that way ourselves, but his points are all well-taken, especially at the leadership/policy/pandering level. Just for the record: In a December 2010 Gallup survey, 34 percent of agreed with this statement: “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” This compared with 52 percent of Republicans. Failure to believe in evolution is one of the two “anti-science” views Krugman discusses today. It’s worth remembering that many Democratic voters believe in creation.) Republican leadership is now anti-science. But then, the liberal world increasingly strikes us as being a bit “anti-knowledge” itself. Before the week is done, we’ll speak again about the work done by Professors Putnam and Campbell in their recent New York Times op-ed column. And did you read the hopeless work at Salon last week, in which Tracy Clark-Flory and Steve Kornacki imposed absurd dogmatic belief on the things of the world? (As many commenters noted, Kornacki’s attempt to expose Mitt Romney as a sexist was just pathetically silly. In this piece, Clark-Flory reversed herself on the DSK case, explaining why she took her initial, prosecute-him-anyway stand. Good lord: Clark-Flory said she took her original position because she “felt guilty” about saying what she actually thought!) It’s hard for a blinkered, dogmatic liberal world to gain traction with the wider electorate. For the latest example of “liberal” dogmatics, we have the puzzling column which sits next to Krugman’s piece today. The column was written by Patricia Turner, a professor of African American studies and the vice provost for undergraduate studies at Cal Davis. Turner’s column extends the puzzling critique of the movie, The Help, which has emanated from parts of the white liberal world and from parts of the black professoriate. By the time we reached Turner’s third paragraph, we were already semi-kerflubbled. But her fourth paragraph is astounding TURNER (8/29/11): Not all blacks are unmoved by “The Help.” Indeed, among my friends, relatives and colleagues a wide range of views have been shared, including comments that some of us might want to establish a support group for strong black women who liked “The Help.” Perhaps the professor is speaking tongue in cheek. In context, that isn’t real obvious. Turner goes on to present a bewildering account of this film. As we have read “liberal” attacks on the film, we have often wondered if the writer actually saw it. So it was by the time we reached the highlighted juncture: TURNER: It is unfair to the filmmakers and cast to expect a work of fiction to adhere to the standards of authenticity we would want for a documentary. But we also recognize that precious few works of art tackle the Civil Rights era, and what people coming of age in the 21st century learn about this era often stems from fictive rather than nonfictive sources. Forty-eight years after Martin Luther King Jr. was accompanied by tens of thousands of black domestic workers to the National Mall in Washington to demand economic justice, it is not all that difficult to render black fictional characters with appealing attributes and praiseworthy talents. What is more difficult to accomplish is a verisimilar rendering of the white characters. This movie deploys the standard formula. With one possible exception, the white women are remarkably unlikable, and not just because of their racism. Like the housewives portrayed in reality television shows, the housewives of Jackson treat each other, their parents and their husbands with total callousness. In short, they are bad people, therefore they are racists. There’s a problem, though, with that message. To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not. We’ll let you puzzle out the professor’s logic. (Can “good people” be “racist?” She doesn’t seem to see the problem lodged in this recurrent construct.) But how about that highlighted sentence? “With one possible exception, the white women are remarkably unlikable?” Presumably, the possible exception to which Turner refers is the Emma Stone character—a character which is meant to be massively likable, of course. (Elsewhere, that’s one of the basic complaints.) But is that character’s mother “remarkably unlikable?” Is the Sissy Spacek character “remarkably unlikable?” As the column rumbles along, it gets harder and harder to believe that Turner has seen the film: TURNER: Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud. It’s the fallacy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a movie that never fails to move me but that advances a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals. But that wasn’t the case. The White Citizens Councils, the thinking man’s Ku Klux Klan, were made up of white middle-class people, people whose company you would enjoy. An analogue can be seen in the way popular culture treats Germans up to and during World War II. Good people were never anti-Semites; only detestable people participated in Hitler’s cause. Cultures function and persist by consensus. In Jackson and other bastions of the Jim Crow South, the pervasive notion, among poor whites and rich, that blacks were unworthy of full citizenship was as unquestioned as the sanctity of church on Sunday. “The Help” tells a compelling and gripping story, but it fails to tell that one. What the heck is Turner talking about? It’s true—in To Kill a Mockingbird, we pretty much never see upstanding, upper-middle-class people expressing racist sentiments. But The Help is crawling with such portrayals; it specifically shows you upper-class white Jackson behaving in various unlovely ways. As with other critiques of this film, it’s rather hard to figure what Turner is talking about. Alas! Our professors and our “liberal journalists” are often full of dogmatic notions—ideas they are prepared to impose on all manner of outside reality. For an example of what we mean, consider what happened when another professor, Ida Jones, appeared on NPR’s Talk of the Nation to help us pitiful rubes understand what’s so wrong with The Help. To read the transcript, just click here. (You can also listen to the program.) As with Turner, Professor Jones was expounding about all that is wrong with the troubling film—until black viewers started to call. The first caller disagreed with Jones’ basic outlook. This was the second call: ROBERTS (8/18/11): Let's hear from Lisa in Oakland. Lisa, welcome to Talk of the Nation. LISA: Hi there. I'm a black woman who spent my summers down in the Jim Crow South, went back in the '60s. So I didn't live there, but I experienced enough of the segregated beaches and everything else to leave a real nasty taste in my mouth. My grandmother was a live-in seamstress. She wasn't a maid. She did all the sewing for a white family. And some of her stories were mirrored in the movie. I loved this movie. I walked to the theater, and when I walked home, I was grinning from ear to ear. It was so uplifting to finally hear these stories. It doesn't matter from whose voice they came. The fact that the stories were told, that we got to see that these women, despite everything, they kept their dignity, they kept their families intact, they did what they had to do, was inspiring to me. And what was most interesting, though, as I was leaving the theater, all the white women were crying, and all the black women were smiling, uplifted. I have never seen a movie that cut like that. The experiences were so markedly different as those reactions as I saw to The Help. It blew me away. Apparently, Lisa had failed to get the memo from the nation’s professors. But then, so had the next caller, who discussed the book on which the movie is based: ROBERTS: This is Toni in Cincinnati on the line. Toni, welcome to Talk of the Nation. TONI: Hi. I just wanted to say that I am a 41-year-old African-American woman. And I read the book and I loved it. I think the book was a great book. And my grandmother was a maid for many years down South. And the stories she told me mirror the stories that were similar to some of the stories in the book. I think the big discrepancy is, I think that—and I can say this as a black person. I think that sometimes we, as people, we feel that white people telling our story just can't simply relate. And I know. I used to be one of those black people. But I feel, through education, I feel differently. I feel that there are so many white people out there that educate themselves, that they study and they study black history and they can relate to us. So I don't feel that this white woman writing this book, I really feel that she was dead-on. The book was a great. I haven't seen the movie. I will love to see the movie, but I have to give credit to the author. The stories were dead-on. And I just really enjoyed the book. Toni is floundering too! Presumably, Turner’s support group will help these women with their re-education. We’ll restate our personal experience. We saw the film in a jam-packed theater full of black Baltimoreans. The audience loved the movie. Professor Turner will have to raise a lot of dough if she hopes to brainwash this many people into accepting her claims. Campbell, Putnam, Fiore, Kornacki, Turner, Jones? As the liberal world re-emerges from decades of sleep, it is often crawling with dogma, dogma it likes to impose on the world. As liberals express these dogmatic views, they make it harder for progressive values to gain purchase among the wider electorate. And they help us understand a sad fact—dogmatic cluelessness is found all over, not just in the other tribe. “Not all blacks are unmoved by The Help!” So the professor instructs us today, showing the power of understatement. Meanwhile, planning for that support group is underway—helping us see the way the professors, and the Times itself, teach average people to scorn us. Special report: Imagine all the people! PART 1—HE COULDN’T IMAGINE MCCORMACK(We humans tend to get in trouble when we imagine all the people—more precisely, when we try to imagine what “those people” in the other tribe must be like. Consider what happened when Jon Fasman tried to imagine what those tea party people are like. Fasman engaged in his large-scale musing for the Economist. As he started, he acknowledged that conservatives don’t have to be slobbering racists. He even noted one of Ed Schultz’s latest racism-pimping blunders, an absurd group attack for which Big Ed apologized the next night. Still and all, Fasman just couldn’t help wondering: What the heck are those people like? What do those people think and feel? Pondering forty million people, Fasman imagined them thusly: FASMAN (8/23/11): Nostalgia for mid-century America and racism are not synonymous. But what exactly do these voters want? Do older white conservatives miss the high taxes and powerful unions of mid-century America? Dismissing Soviet power is easy today; then it was not. The threat of global nuclear war was real. Would they prefer a nuclear-armed foe that controls much of Europe? Like Matthew Yglesias, I also find it hard not to think that when older white conservatives lament the loss of "the America they grew up in", they are lamenting the loss of their own social privilege. It's true that America today is in some ways profoundly different from the one into which John Boehner was born in 1949. And I am willing to concede that life may well have been better for Mr Boehner, and for many other white, Christian heterosexual Americans back then (although I wonder what chance a 60-year-old Catholic son of a bartender from Reading, Ohio would have had at becoming Speaker of the House in 1949). Quotas kept immigration from Asia, Latin America and Africa low, and of course blacks, Jews, Catholics, women and gays knew their place. Is that what older white conservatives miss? And if not, what, exactly, do they want their politicians to "champion"? Frankly, Fasman was puzzled. He wondered about what “these voters” want—but instead of attempting to ask some voters, he simply began to imagine. He found one possibility “hard not to think;” soon he was imagining the worst about those people. (Do they want to keep blacks, Jews, Catholics, women and gays in their place?) But by the time his rumination was through, he was still deeply puzzled: “If not, what, exactly, do they want their politicians to ‘champion?’ ” Fasman had tried to imagine all the people. It seemed that he had struck out. Alas! When we start imagining things, we tend to get in trouble. Just consider one of the things Fasman couldn’t seem to imagine. Magnanimously, Fasman was willing to concede that life may well have been better for John Boehner, and for many other white, Christian heterosexual Americans, back in 1949. (Boehner was a newborn then, but you get the idea.) At the same time, he “wondered what chance a 60-year-old Catholic son of a bartender from Reading, Ohio would have had at becoming Speaker of the House” in that benighted year. Fasman knew that the American people were slobbering racists back then. He also seemed to imagine that they would never have tolerated a Catholic son of the working class in a position of high respect. Fasman was imagining grandly know, stroking his inner thigh as he did. Here at THE HOWLER, we looked up the bio of Boston’s own, Speaker John McCormack. It’s true—McCormack didn’t become speaker of the House until 1962. But he was House majority leader as early as 1940, and this is the way Wikipedia describes his religion and class background: WIKIPEDIA: McCormack was born to Joseph H. McCormack, a hod carrier, and Ellen (n�e O'Brien) McCormack. His parents were both the children of Irish immigrants who had arrived during the Irish potato famine in 1848. There were 12 children, of whom three survived to adulthood. McCormack was 13 when his father died; he quit school after the eighth grade to help support his widowed mother and family as a $3-a-week errand boy for a brokerage firm. His career began when he shifted to a law firm for a 50-cent raise and studied law on the side. Attending law school at night, he passed the Massachusetts bar exam in 1913 at age 21 without having completed high school. In 1920, McCormack married Harriet Joyce, a former singer; the couple had no children. While Congress was in session, they lived at the Washington Hotel. Their devotion to each other was legendary; it was said that they never spent a night apart until she died. If the Speaker was kept late on business, his wife always went up to have dinner with him. She died in December 1971, aged 87. For more than a year, he had spent every night in an adjoining hospital room. He then went home to Boston the following month, after his retirement. McCormack had few hobbies except politics. In earlier days, he was known as a good high stakes poker player. He had never flown in an airplane until 1961, when he attended Rayburn's funeral. He drove the 450 miles from Washington to Boston or went up on the night sleeper train. The Speaker and his wife were devout Roman Catholics. Both were honored by the Vatican. He was the first Catholic to be elected Speaker, and some critics complained that this religion sometimes showed in his leadership qualities. An example cited was the 1961 school aid debacle when McCormack insisted that church schools should share in a federal aid program. The bill died on this issue. But in 1963 McCormack helped push through the largest education program in history, much of which went to public institutions only. For the record, those “12 children, of whom three survived to adulthood,” were in fact McCormack and his siblings. According to newspaper reports at the time he died, McCormack was one of twelve kids, three of whom survived. Is there some distinction we’re missing here? As Fasman imagined the world of the past, it seems he couldn’t imagine McCormack. But then, when we let ourselves start to imagine, we often find ourselves painting pictures which don’t correspond to real life. Kevin Drum took a bit of offense to Fasman’s post (just click here). We agree with the basic thrust of Drum’s reaction, though we thought he took a few liberties too, doing a bit of imagining. But so it goes when we, The Good and True Tribe, decide to imagine all the people, forty million at a time. What are “those people” actually like? Bigots have always been able to imagine the answer, down through the annals of time. Tomorrow: Kevin’s reaction

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• 26 Aug ' 11:11

  RISKING THEIR HOUSES! Our scribes like to frisk their makeup and clothes—and their big massive houses: FRIDAY, AUGUST 26, 2011 The swells must be crazy: Complaining a bit about slow news weeks, Kevin Drum has done some ruminative posts of late. We’ve found these posts quite worthwhile. Yesterday, he quoted CJR's Erika Fry. In essence, Fry had complained about the types of swells the New York Times keeps using as outside contributors on its op-ed page. Fry complained about the way the Times keeps publishing high academics, office-holders, think tank presidents and the like. She wondered why the Times can’t print a few columns by “the other half.” Drum said he wasn’t sure the Times could find oodles of great work by “actual people with actual lives.” But he said they should give it a try. We were intrigued by Fry’s analysis, though we’ve had a different reaction in the past few months to the outside submissions the Times keeps printing. Yes, those pieces tend to come from high academics and the like. But increasingly, we’ve been struck by the fatuous nature of the work these high-ranking swells are providing. Could the Times get good stuff from the great unwashed? We don’t know—but the paper is printing tons of useless crap by people from very high stations. In the past few months, it has seemed to us that the situation is getting much worse—that the outside columns are getting odder, are increasingly worthless. Consider three recent columns: Last Friday, the Times published this worthless piece by Brian Schweitzer, Montana’s governor. In part, the piece was a comical song to himself; in its basic form, the column constituted a plea to start running the government more like a ranch. (Yes, that was the explicit advice.) At best, this column was worthless. (At worst, it extended a very dumb meme.) It’s amazing that the Times even considered publication. On August 9, the Times published this rather typical piece by David Clay Large, a professor. The piece was designed to let us know what Adolf Hitler really thought about Jesse Owens winning all those medals. As such, it represents a type of piece the Times seems to love publishing. It thrashed out minor details about a piece of essentially ancient history—an important event which has been beaten to death long before this point. Advantage: The subject matter let the Times advertise its own lofty greatness. On June 2, the Times published this groaner by (who else?) Joseph Califano. It described the way Lyndon Johnson handled a debt limit fight in June 1967. In June of year, the country badly needed to read explanations of what was at stake in the debt limit fight currently unfolding in Congress. Califano’s piece was completely unhelpful. But Times readers were given the impression that they were being presented with some lofty historical stuff. We’ve been amazed in the past few months by the steady parade of outside dreck the Times arranges to locate. Today, the Times has published a piece by Cornel West, who is willing to let us know, from his headline on down, what Dr. King would be thinking today. As he closes, the professor suggests that we get our “cemetery clothes” on. Though we like some aspects of West’s work a lot, we’d be inclined to include this piece in our list of recent horribles. But to Fry, we’d make this suggestion: Look past the by-lines found in the Times. Instead, describe the lousy work this long list of swells is producing. Full disclosure: In 2006, we had a brush with greatness involving Governor Schweitzer (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 10/23/06). Schweitzer seemed like a thoroughly decent fellow, as most people pretty much are. We will say this: We’ve never met anyone who shared his new “favorable” ratings quite so quickly. The governor’s column in last Friday’s Times made us recall that event. Special report: Two days of The Dumb! PART 2—FRISKING THEIR HOUSESThis morning, for the second straight day, the New York Times builds its political coverage straight from the culture of Dumb. Yesterday, the Times presented a detailed report about Candidate Bachmann’s makeup and wardrobe. Today, the Times follows with a detailed report about Candidate Romney’s “fashion sense and manner.” As the Times continues to “report” on these topics, the sheer stupidity of our “journalistic” life-forms becomes increasingly clear. For what it’s worth, today’s report, by Ashley Parker, is a clone of the work this newspaper did about Candidate Gore in 1999. All the basic memes are present, but we’ll recommend one photo caption: “Mitt Romney in N.H. Voters say he appears relaxed, but some stiffness is still apparent.” Some stiffness is still apparent! Even though the voters can’t spot it! This template littered the coverage in 1999. Parker samples that gruesome old coverage in her report today. Your nation is dying from this culture of Dumb—had been for a rather long time. Example: The New York Times barely tried to explain the nature of the recent debt ceiling fight. But as always, it’s proving to be a tiger on issues of stiffness and makeup. What is the shape of our terminal dumbness? We cover the candidates’ makeup and hair—and we cover the size of their houses! As the brains of our post-journalistic press cohort have melted away in the past dozen years, the size of those houses has weighed on their minds. Four recent examples: Problems with the size of their houses: Candidate Edwards’ house in Chapel Hill was too large. Candidate Kerry’s various houses were too large—and one was on Nantucket! In several cases, this complaint was passed along by journalists with multi-million dollar Nantucket houses. After Candidate Gore left the political world, he bought two houses. Each of these houses was too large. Candidate McCain owned too many houses. For the record, this wasn’t a problem in Campaign 2000, when he was still a press favorite. Our “journalists” like to frisk their makeup and hair—and their body language, and the size of their houses! The spectacular dumbness of this “journalism” has now spread to the liberal world, where silly children have been having a good time with Mitt Romney. His proposed house is too large. Let’s give credit where credit is due. When she did a segment on this topic, guest host Melissa Harris-Perry did at least cop to her conduct. She introduced a silly guest child—and she explained what was coming: HARRIS-PERRY (8/22/11): Romney’s campaign confirmed today he plans to bulldoze his $12 million beach house in California and build an 11,000 square foot beach house in its place. In addition to the California house, he also owns a townhouse outside Boston and a $10 million vacation home in New Hampshire. […] Joining me now is Jonathan Capehart, Washington Post editorial writer and MSNBC contributor. Hi, Jonathan! CAPEHART: How are you? HARRIS-PERRY: I always feel like we always bring you in to do the snark thing with me on the GOP. CAPEHART: It’s just too much fun! HARRIS-PERRY: I know—it is. But is it legitimate? Thank God a child like Capehart is allowed to have “fun” as he shovels wads of cash in his pants for advancing the ratings-pimping agenda of his corporate owners. (Has anyone ever gone down the drain as fast as this formerly sensible person?) And thank God we liberals can get entertained by this network’s “cone of snark!” That said, Harris-Perry was spreading The Dumb as she pushed this new, snarky topic. To her excellent question (“Is it legitimate?”), we will add these: Is it good politics for liberals and progressives? Isn’t it monster-class dumb? We would guess that this isn’t good politics, but explaining that would involve us in thought. Regarding our second question, the dumbness quickly came rolling in as Capehart entertained us rubes with the advertised snark. Before he ballooned with high pundit pride, Capehart was once a sane, balanced pundit. On this occasion, he rushed ahead to impress us with dumbness. Who would think this was the way to advance our progressive agenda? HARRIS-PERRY: So is this really just timing? I mean, [Romney] is a millionaire. He can build as many homes as he wants. CAPEHART: Sure. HARRIS-PERRY: You have Vanity Fair talking about the big things that could fit inside his house. The entire Memphis Area Enterprise Rent-A-Car facility, Jennifer Aniston’s entire old house, apparently the world’s largest whale. CAPEHART: I have some others too. HARRIS-PERRY: What do you have? CAPEHART: Well, you could fit three times the area of Air Force One in that space. It’s 4,000 square feet. And just for comparison’s sake, President Jefferson`s Monticello—President Jefferson’s estate is just a little bit, they are about the same size at 12,000 square feet. And then both of Al Gore’s homes that he was made fun of, you know, the mansion in Tennessee and the villa in California—the villa is twice the, half the size of Romney’s new compound. And the Tennessee house is just 1,000 square feet smaller than Romney’s. We don’t know if Capehart’s numbers are right. But how dumb does a liberal have to be to bring in the snark in that manner? Or to offer us the following. This was Capehart’s response when Harris-Perry asked if this shit is legitimate: HARRIS-PERRY: I know—it is. But is it legitimate? Look, presidents are wealthy people. They have Ivy League degrees. Is it OK for us to make fun of Mitt Romney for bulldozing his gigantic beach mansion and then building another one in the same spot? CAPEHART: When you put it like that, of course it is. No, of course it is. Look, I think this plays into the narrative that unfortunately Mitt Romney unwittingly plays into. He’s smart. He’s handsome. He’s rich. And on top of it, he`s changed his policy positions on a whole host of things that sort of feed into—sort of makes you not want to like him in that way. Remember in the—yes, 2008 campaign, there were stories going around how none of his Republican opponents even liked him. Of course it’s legitimate! You see, it plays into a narrative! It makes you not want to like him! Beyond that, Capehart’s response struck us as tragically dumb—never more so than when we were told that “there were stories going around how none of his Republican opponents even liked him.” The other Republicans didn’t like Mitt! Somehow, this means Mitt is bad! Let’s face it—Romney pretty much doesn’t count a whole lot any more. He has been eaten alive by Candidate Perry. But if Romney became the GOP nominee, would his large proposed house help defeat him? We don’t know, but we do know this—in a plutocratic society, The Dumb will always work, on balance, to help the plutocrat cause. We could explain that, but that would take thought. Instead, let’s see the way two other children played with this very dumb theme. One of the children was Rachel Maddow, one of the least perceptive political observers we’ve ever seen on the planet. She rarely seems to have any idea how the average bloke might think. And she loves to run with this ignorance. One night after Harris-Perry’s snark, Maddow set out to top it. In two segments totaling thirteen-plus minutes, she and another grinning performer spent their time like this: MADDOW (8/23/11): Joining us now is Eugene Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post and MSNBC political analyst. Willard, thank you for being here tonight. Mind if I all call you Willard? ROBINSON: Yes, I do mind, absolutely, Rachel. MADDOW: I take it back. ROBINSON: But, listen, here, before we start, I have a question: OK. So, Mitt Romney is Thurston Howell III, right? MADDOW: Yes. ROBINSON: So does that mean Jon Huntsman is The Professor, even though he has a lot of money, because he believes in global warming and he believes in evolution? Then Michele Bachmann could be Mary Ann. Sarah Palin, of course, is Ginger. MADDOW: Wait, wait, wait! You’ve got Ginger and Mary Ann backwards! ROBINSON: Do you think so? I’m going with Bachmann as Mary Ann and Palin as Ginger. MADDOW: Oh, I totally see Bachmann as Ginger. But, OK, keep going. ROBINSON: No, but there it ends. Who’s the captain? Who’s Gilligan? MADDOW: Well, the skipper is hard to say, because the skipper is an unusual—the thing is that if you think, if you’re thinking about this in terms of pure impression, Ron Paul is the skipper, don’t you think? ROBINSON: Yes, I was thinking Ron Paul for Gilligan and Newt Gingrich for skipper. MADDOW: Gingrich is a little skipper. All right. Then Gilligan—I mean, that does put Rick Perry in the position of being Gilligan. I’d prefer for Gilligan to be Rick Santorum, but I’m afraid Rick Santorum will sue me for even saying that of some obscure of what I`ve said that he’ll reveal as religiously offensive. ROBINSON: That’s a given, so we won’t go there. MADDOW: A three-hour tour. Now we’ve done it. It seemed like a three-hour tour to us! But then, who’s keeping score? Rachel had introduced the “Gilligan’s Island” theme in her previous segment; that explains Robinson’s comment. From this point, she and Robinson discussed her latest “political theory”—the theory that the Romney campaign has decided to “turn a rich guy caricature into a strength by embracing the heartless rich guy caricature.” We’ve never seen anyone who seems to understand average voters quite so poorly. In this particular segment, she clipped a quote from the Romney campaign in a thoroughly typical way, giving us liberals a chance to snark but disguising the likely way the actual quote would likely strike many voters. That said, Romney may be a goner by now, but The Dumb will be with us forever—especially now that The Liberal Channel is increasingly seeking the fun. As a minor personal aside, we learned about “Gilligan’s Island” humor during our years in the nation’s comedy clubs. Even there, people roll their eyes at this descent to the LCD. We’d never have dreamed that Our Own Rhodes Scholar would one day be serving us this pap, with a Pulitzer-winning journalist helping her Bring In the Dumb. The Dumb and the Snark will always be with us because (just a guess) they help build cable ratings. We’ll close with a small piece of theory: Those who oppose plutocrat power should probably oppose The Dumb and The Snark. The plutocrats will always wield disproportionate power; to the extent that we loosen the rules, this loosening favors their interests. When you let corporate journalists talk about makeup, wardrobe, body language, hair, they will disproportionately use this power to run down the more liberal candidates. In the past twenty years (or more), it’s Democrats who have been most harmed by this rapidly spreading bullshit. On balance, that is the way it will always work, as long as we run with this culture. Just a fantasy: As Capehart and Harris-Perry spoke about much-too-rich Romney, we dreamed of a day when chyrons would show the annual incomes of the pundits engaged in this stupid clowning. Harris-Perry took some time during this segment to let us know how committed she is to the problems of the poor. Instinctively, we wonder about such claims—especially when these losers and shakers are pushing the culture of The Dumb, as they did those two nights. Romney is probably out of the race. But would he be hurt by this kind of talk? We will guess that the answer is no. And by the way: Who has been hurt most up till now? Which party has paid the big price as The Dumb has become the new normal?

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• 25 Aug ' 10:05

  FRISKING HER WARDROBE AND MAKEUP! As your nation slides toward the sea, the Times frisks Bachmann’s makeup: THURSDAY, AUGUST 25, 2011 The Washington Post gets it right: We think Trip Gabriel’s “news report” deserves full attention today (see below). That said, we were struck by the Washington Post’s editorial in support of Warren Buffett’s tax proposals. We recommend that you read the whole thing. But the editors ended with these proposals. Shouldn’t libs bruit this around? WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (8/24/11): The 1986 tax reform closed the gap between capital gains and ordinary income, taxing both at a top rate of 28 percent. But subsequent legislation under both Republican and Democratic administrations, culminating in the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush, reopened it. This is one reason that the effective tax rate on the top 400 earners in the United States fell from 29.2 percent in 1992 to 21.5 percent in 2008, even as their income more than quintupled. For Mr. Buffett, the solution is higher rates on both ordinary and investment income for all those earning $1 million a year, with an extra boost in rates for those making $10 million and up. That seems reasonable; but he isn’t precisely clear about how to do it. Unless you equalize the ordinary income and capital-gains rates, there would still be myriad ways for the rich to avoid taxes. Congress should follow the precedent set by the 1986 reform: Tax all income at the same top rate. Wiping out other special breaks would yield even greater gains in revenue and equity. Indeed, expanding the tax base could yield more revenue at a relatively modest top rate. It might not have to be much more than the 29.2 percent top earners paid back in 1992. A fair, efficient system that raises more revenue than the current one is something all Americans—from plutocrats to the poverty-stricken—could support. Wow! They even used that “plutocrats” lingo! As we liberals clowned and played this week (more tomorrow), this editorial got little attention. Our question: How can progressives establish forums in which such topics are explored by a range of average citizens? Very few people have ever heard a serious discussion of tax fairness. But on all sides of the tribal divide, everyone is being ripped off, in various ways, as the plutocrats extend their agendas. Everyone hears the disinformation; it gets churned every day by a range of talk hosts. How can progressives establish forums which gain citizens’ trust and extend a fuller discussion? We know, we know! As good liberals, we shouldn’t even imagine such things! We should be railing against Those People—about how very bad we can imagine they are. That said, Alert! Tonight’s must-see TV! One of the professors who wrote this Times op-ed piece will be on the Maddow Show tonight. We plan to discuss that column again next week, in conjunction with the fascinating blog post by Kevin Drum which we recommended yesterday. (Read all the comments and links.)Special report: Two days of the dumb! PART 1—FRISKING HER WARDROBE AND MAKEUPIn large part, it’s the dumbness of our upper-end culture which is bringing our nation down. As part of the general mega-dumbness, we liberals can only see the dumbness in the other tribe. Often, we imagine this dumbness and bruit it around when it isn’t even there. But the dumbness of the mainstream press corps has been a monster problem for years. The liberal world has never identified this problem, in part because our intellectual leaders are too dumb (and conflicted) to care. Just how dumb is the upper-end mainstream press corps? This morning, Trip Gabriel teaches a lesson in The Culture of Dumb in the New York Times. Gabriel reports today on Michele Bachmann’s makeup and clothes. To read his “news report,” just click this. Just to save a lot of time, let’s explain the obvious background: The punishment factor: As is obvious from Gabriel’s report, the mainstream press corps is unhappy with the treatment and access they’re getting from Bachmann. When this type of situation develops with a disfavored candidate, low-brow, entitled news orgs like the Times will look for ways to fight back. Past example: By February 2000, it was obvious that the mainstream press corps had gone to war with Candidate Gore. Obviously, the candidate knew it. Ranking members of the “liberal” “intellectual elite” were sworn to silence, of course. In reaction, the Gore campaign limited the press corps’ access to the candidate. (In reaction to the swoon for McCain, the Bush campaign was doing the same thing at this juncture.) On March 2, the New York Times fought back against Gore. The punishment was dished by the paper’s always astounding “reporter,” the ludicrous Katharine “Kit” Seelye. No, we’re not making this up. What follows appeared in a “news report” about the hated candidate: SEELYE (3/2/00): But just as Mr. Gore was warming up to voters, he was clamming up to the press. The campaign wanted to ensure that he was delivering only the rehearsed message of the day, not random comments that were "off-message." To see just how focused Mr. Gore has become on this task, go back to the scene in the hotel lobby here on Tuesday night. The escort finally arrived and the traveling horde of perhaps two dozen journalists took the elevator to the vice president's suite. When everyone was assembled, Mr. Gore said nothing—this was supposed to be a "photo op" only—until a reporter asked, "How you feeling?" "I'm grateful to the people of Washington State because, based on the projections, it looks like a big win, but I'm not taking anything for granted," Mr. Gore said. He was then asked what message he had for Mr. Bradley. "Uh, well, I don't, uh, have any, uh, message, uh, for, uh, for Senator Bradley," he responded slowly. "Uh, I, I, my message is for the, the voters of the country. Uh, I ask for their support. I'm not taking a single vote for, for granted." Another question came. When would it be time for him to start unifying the Democratic Party? At this point, Gore aides started trying to remove reporters from the room. Mr. Gore answered, "I, I am not taking a single vote for granted." Much cross-talk ensued as the aides continued trying to hustle reporters out and Mr. Gore asserted, with the same rote-like repetition with which he famously said that there was "no controlling legal authority" over his fund-raising techniques, that he was not taking a single vote for granted. Gore was punished as Seelye crammed in a reference to those fund-raising matters—and as she transcribed his “uhs.” At a later date, Seelye told writer Michael Erard that the Times had been experimenting with a new way of transcribing spoken speech when she penned this ridiculous passage. Seelye’s claim may have been true, of course. In much the same way, gargoyles on major American buildings may fly away late tonight. Gore was punished in Seelye’s “news report” for failing to provide enough access—and for the fact that the press was at war. Rather plainly, the same dynamic is displayed in Gabriel’s “news report.” The phoniness factor: Gabriel complains in various ways about the lack of access to Bachmann. In this case, the means of punishment is a report about her makeup and wardrobe. Needless to say, the Times must conjure up an excuse for doing such brain-dead, baldly sexist “reporting.” Result? Of course! Gabriel pretends he’s discussing these topics because he’s concerned about the way female candidates are subjected to this type of scrutiny. Why is the Times reporting on wardrobe and makeup? Of course! Because it’s a problem when so many others report on wardrobe and makeup! Citizens should feel massive contempt for “journalists” reptilian enough to play this game, dumb enough to think that their conduct isn’t transparent. For “journalists” who punish disfavored candidates with low-IQ bullshit like this: GABRIEL (8/25/11): Unlike other candidates who let reporters fire questions after a public appearance for 5 or 10 minutes in a scrum, known as a “press avail,” Mrs. Bachmann takes questions in a well-mannered way at a microphone stand in front of her bus—but only from reporters whose names she calls from a list, like a substitute teacher. “Like a substitute teacher!” What have Americans ever done to have life-forms like Gabriel, and his editors, arrayed in such high places? The reinvention of obvious history factor: As fools like Gabriel play these games, they will naturally say and do anything to keep their bullshit alive. In the following passage, we learn that Gabriel is the world’s dumbest man—or perhaps just the least honest: GABRIEL: The campaign seems determined to play down the subtle makeover that Mrs. Bachmann has undergone since she entered the presidential race in mid-June. In the following two weeks, she spent $4,700 on a hair and makeup stylist, according to campaign finance reports. Analysts said this was unsurprising—in fact, the campaign would be derelict if it did not anticipate how female candidates’ appearances are more intensely judged. “Women are scrutinized in a much more personal way,” said Tiffany Dufu, president of the White House Project, a nonpartisan group that advances women in politics. A study it did of Elizabeth Dole’s run for president in 1999 found she received more news coverage of her personality and clothing than the men in the race, and less of her positions on issues. Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, said female candidates still faced such scrutiny, citing an unflattering photo feature on The Huffington Post comparing Mrs. Bachmann’s long eyelashes, apparently false, to Tammy Faye Bakker’s. “I’m assuming that the people handling Michele Bachmann are studying what happened to Hillary Clinton closely in the last campaign,” Ms. Walsh said. “There was tremendous focus on what she wore and how her hair looked and whether her blouse was showing cleavage. I would think that would lead them to being overly cautious and careful.” Exhibiting more of the dogged reporting that makes the Times an utter embarrassment, Gabriel reports that Bachmann may have false eyelashes—and he compares her to Tammy Faye Bakker, but only to show us how wrong it was when the Huffington Post did the same! He also tells us that the campaign “seems determined to play down” Bachmann’s “makeover.” But he doesn’t explain how the campaign is playing the makeover down at all, or why you’d have to “play it down” if the “makeover” is so minor. Obvious translation: Plainly, that paragraph was devised to let Gabriel use the word “makeover,” a classic term of press corps punishment. But the highlighted passage about Elizabeth Dole is really this article’s highlight. It may be true that Dole “received more news coverage of her personality and clothing” than the men in the Republican race that year; we haven’t seen the study in question. But all through the fall of 1999, a Democratic candidate, Candidate Gore, was savaged for his personality and clothing—for his boots, his suits, his polo shirts, the number of buttons on his suit jackets (three). For the color of the clothing he wore. For the identity of the person who allegedly told him to wear certain clothing. For the psychiatric tendencies displayed in his wardrobe choices. This garbage was pimped by the New York Times and all across the mainstream press, as the career liberal world’s “intellectual leaders” agreed not to notice. But the attention paid to this candidate’s wardrobe dwarfed the attention paid to Dole’s. In fairness, Gabriel and his editors may be so dumb that they really don’t know this. Much more likely, they are simply being dishonest—again. The sheer stupidity of Gabriel’s report is a thing to behold. He writes at the very top end of your nation’s post-journalistic “press corps.” But good God! Note the way he reasons in this pitiful passage: GABRIEL: Unlike other candidates who let reporters fire questions after a public appearance for 5 or 10 minutes in a scrum, known as a “press avail,” Mrs. Bachmann takes questions in a well-mannered way at a microphone stand in front of her bus—but only from reporters whose names she calls from a list, like a substitute teacher. The list is compiled by Alice Stewart, Mrs. Bachmann’s press secretary, and whether she prescreens reporters and their questions to control the candidate’s message is an open issue. Ms. Stewart insisted that she did not. The list, she said, is to exclude “Obama trackers” looking to provoke a gaffe, and to ensure that local reporters are not crowded out by the national news media. Local reporters’ questions often are less pointed. Brandon Herring, a reporter for WMBF television in Myrtle Beach, said Ms. Stewart had approached him while Mrs. Bachmann spoke and asked if he wanted to ask a question. He said he did. “She said, ‘You want to ask about Myrtle Beach, I imagine,’ ” Mr. Herring said. “I was like, yeah, I guess I do.” In that passage, Gabriel floats the idea that Bachmann’s press secretary is somehow “prescreening” reporters’ questions. Pitifully, that reported exchange with Herring represents the only “evidence” of this practice. Today’s report is offensive and deeply dishonest—and it’s amazingly dumb. A few basic points in closing: First, Gabriel normally serves as an education reporter. Do you begin to see why you learn so little about this topic from this pitiful newspaper? Second, this pathetic paper kills trees today to report on Bachmann’s makeup. But as best we can tell, it has never reported what would have happened on August 3 if Bachmann’s absurd advice about the debt limit had been taken. Simply put, the Times is too dumb to tackle such questions. It does know how to frisk hair. Your culture is currently dying from dumbness. The dumbness suffuses your upper-end press corps—and we even thought we spotted The Dumb on Our Own Liberal Channel this week! Tomorrow: Frisking their oversized houses

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• 24 Aug ' 09:20

  QUISLING CULTURE! Jonathan Chait doesn’t mess up the chaise, just as Norquist once said: WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24, 2011 Thomas L. Friedman and Jesse B. Semple: Wow! For an interesting time, just read this post by Kevin Drum—and be sure to read the comments. (And the link from which Drum works.) We’ll discuss the post in the next few days. But we think it’s quite a read, taken as a package. Today, Thomas L. Friedman is jess being semple as he discusses Barack Obama. After a peculiar claim—the GOP may yet unveil its “more serious candidates”—Friedman lets us know what Obama should do now/should have just done all along FRIEDMAN (8/24/11): Obama surprised everyone by broaching the idea during the debt negotiations of a “Grand Bargain”—roughly $3 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade and $1 trillion in tax increases—as a signal to the markets that we’re getting our fiscal house in order. It was absolutely the right idea—as long as it is coupled with investments in infrastructure, education and research—but House Speaker John Boehner could not deliver his Tea Party-led G.O.P. caucus. Yet rather than flesh out his Grand Bargain in detail and take it on the road—and let every American everywhere understand and hear every day that he had a plan but the Republicans wouldn’t rise to it—Obama dropped it. Did he ever try to explain the specifics of his Grand Bargain and why it was the only way to go? No. This left his allies wondering whether he was committed to it—and really did have his own party on board for it. And it left his opponents thrilled and setting the agenda themselves. It is why Obama’s recent bus tour fell flat. People don’t want to cheer just the man anymore. They want to cheer the man and his plan—a real plan, not just generalities and tactics to get him re-elected with 50.0001 percent and no real mandate to do what’s needed to fix the country now. Without his own Grand Bargain on the table—imprinted on the mind of every American—Obama has been left playing defense, playing to get the least-bad deal, or playing not to lose. That’s what’s producing all the “What happened to Obama?” talk and its silly variants. Thomas L. Friedman goes on to proclaim that Obama should rent the movie Tin Cup. Beyond that, he seems to say that Obama should build his re-election campaign around a highly specific “Grand Bargain” plan—“as long as it is coupled with investments in infrastructure, education and research.” We don’t agree with Friedman’s basic focus, but that wasn’t our main reaction to this column. Mainly, we were struck by how simple-minded and ahistorical Friedman’s piece is. Here’s why: After the failure of the Clinton health plan, a consensus formed among the nation’s pundits: Clinton erred by presenting a detailed plan which could be picked apart by opponents. This consensus was widely cited in 2000 and 2005, when Candidate Bush, and then President Bush, pursued the goal of private accounts within Social Security. Bush never presented a specific plan for private accounts, as major figures in Congress had done as early as 1999. He simply presented his “principles” regarding private accounts—first as a candidate, then in 2005. During that period, the consensus said this was the smart play—though in the end, the approach didn’t work. For the record, Obama took this same approach to his pursuit of health care—and he got a bill passed. Now we’re back to the pre-Clinton stance. This morning, one of our leading savants says Obama should have presented a detailed budget plan right from the start. He acts as if this is fairly obvious. He offers none of the nuance provided by events of the last twenty years. Who knows? Thomas L. Friedman may even be right! Perhaps Obama would have done better if he’d offered a detailed plan all along. But there is no way to know such a thing—and Friedman shows no earthly sign of understanding this bone-simple fact. Nor does he seem to know that he is mouthing a standard attack-point which is now being widely recited on Fox. Where is the president’s plan! We don’t know. Where was Bush’s? It isn’t obvious that either president just should have presented a plan. Reading Thomas L. Friedman today, our thoughts drifted off to Jesse B. Semple. One distinction: Semple was a fictional character, dreamed up by Langston Hughes to offer some gentle comic relief. Thomas L. Friedman’s role in this game becomes more obscure by the week. EPILOGUE—QUISLING CULTUREIs Texas enjoying an economic miracle? Obviously no, it is not. The state has 8.4 percent unemployment. Ten percent of those jobs pay minimum wage or below; that ties Texas with Mississippi for the highest percentage of such jobs in any state. And there are fifty states in all! Forty-eight have a better percentage! Anyone with an ounce of sense would understand what facts like these mean: Whatever else one might say about Texas, it isn’t enjoying a miracle. That doesn’t mean that the state is a basket case. It doesn’t make Texas a third-world country; it doesn’t mean that its governor, or even its legislature, should be thrown into jail. It simply means that Texas is not enjoying a miracle—or even a jobs boom. Texas isn’t enjoying a miracle! But how do you know that, the skeptics will cry. We recall the justifiably famous answer by Senator Ervin in the Watergate hearings: “Because I speak the English language. It’s my mother tongue.” Texas is not enjoying a miracle. Any damn fool can see that, of course—until the quislings come along, playing their role in the sprawling fraud still known as our “public discourse.” As careerists, they know the rules. One such rule, in place since around 1990: They know they be truthful about potent narratives which blow in from the right. And so, perhaps by instinct, they have approached the Texas miracle as Evan Smith did in Sunday’s Washington Post. Writing in the Outlook section, Smith was discussing “5 Myths about Rick Perry.” When he reached his final myth, he just couldn’t help himself SMITH (8/21/11): Myth 5. He has presided over an unqualified economic miracle. When Perry says Texas has less than 10 percent of the nation’s population but has created more than 40 percent of its jobs in the past two years, or that more jobs have been created in Texas in the past decade—that is, on his watch—than in all 49 other states combined, he’s not exaggerating. In an election that’s likely to be about jobs and the economy first and foremost, he has quite a record to run on. But there’s more to the story than those top-line statistics. The unemployment rate in Texas, for instance, was 8.4 percent as of Friday—less than the federal unemployment rate but worse than that of 25 other states, and it could move up a tick or two after Sept. 1, when budget cuts passed during the most recent legislative session will reduce the public employee rolls. Texas has more minimum-wage jobs than every state other than Mississippi, a superlative you brag about if you don’t care about what kind of jobs you create and are only trying to run up the numbers. And growth in public sector (i.e., government) jobs in Texas has been 19 percent over the past 10 years, vs. just 9 percent growth in private-sector jobs. That doesn’t diminish the feat that Perry can say he accomplished: The state he has led weathered the terrible recession better than just about any other. But, as in some of the better movies we’ve seen, the plot thickens. If you speak the English language, that second paragraph tells you that Texas isn’t enjoying a miracle (full stop). But Smith couldn’t bring himself to make that blindingly obvious statement. Instead, he told us that Texas isn’t enjoying an unqualified miracle—and he said that all those unfortunate facts “don’t diminish the feat that Perry can say he accomplished.” Perry “has quite a record to run on,” Smith obligingly said. Texas isn’t enjoying an unqualified miracle! Last Friday, the truly horrible Annie Lowrey played the same rhetorical card: She told us that the state of Texas isn’t enjoying an miracle (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/23/11). Then too there’s Jonathan Chait, skillfully working to keep his nose clean at the New Republic. Let’s start with an obvious contrast: Paul Krugman has managed to keep speaking English as he has discussed this new script—the potent new narrative Candidate Perry wants all girls and boys to recite. In this recent blog post, Krugman restated an obvious fact: Texas is not enjoying a miracle. But then, that was the theme of Krugman’s original column on this topic. That column bore the headline, “The Texas Unmiracle.” In this context, “Un” rather clearly meant “not.” Whatever else one may say for the state, Texas is not enjoying a miracle. For those who speak the English language, how hard can this possibly be? Answer: Very hard. Lowrie only managed to say that there is no “outright” miracle. Two days later, Smith said this: There is no “unqualified” miracle. Decades of serfdom were telling this pair that they mustn’t speak the bone-simple truth about this candidate’s silly script. But so too with the timorous Chait, typing this recent headline: CHAIT (8/22/11): Rick Perry’s Kinda-Sorta Texas Miracle: The Consensus Forms Last week I argued that Texas really has had a pretty impressive economic performance under Rick Perry, but there's just no evidence that his story of why that happened is true… According to Chait, the state of Texas is enjoying a “kinda-sorta” miracle. He went on to describe a growing “consensus” about this claim—a consensus built on two examples, one of which he seems to have imagined. But let’s be clear: When Chait pretends that Dean Baker has signed on to a view that lets the word “miracle” stay in the picture, he is throwing Paul Krugman under the bus. He is making Krugman shrill. How dare he say there is no miracle, when we serfs have all agreed to let that word stay in the air? Go ahead! Read the very tiny posts in which Chait pretends to spot that consensus! Examine the flimsy basis on which he pretends that Baker has backed the claim that Texas has experienced “a pretty impressive economic performance” under Perry. (Question: When did “pretty impressive performance” get linked in our language with the word “miracle?”) As you do so, ask yourself this: Why do so many “center-left” pundits strain for ways to keep script alive, if the script has blown in from the right? In this case, why do they struggle for rhetorical hooks that let a silly word linger in their headlines and their basic formulations? Why are these quislings so goddamned eager to play along with this “miracle” claim? We can’t exactly tell you that, but they’ve done this sort of thing before. In every election, the narratives form—the narratives which will shape the way the campaign is discussed. In recent elections, as these narratives have blown in from the right, children like Chait have struggled and strained for ways to avoid confrontation. Was Candidate Gore a big liar, just like President Clinton? Chait worked hard, for two solid years, to avoid tackling that noxious claim. And his type did little, in 2004, when central themes were quickly ginned up around Candidate Kerry. These children seem to know their role in the game which poses as a “national discourse.” As Grover Norquist once observed: “Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don't go around peeing on the furniture and such.” Contented children of the “center-left” do little peeing on the chaises. In the past week, they have stepped forward to give you the news: The state of Texas has not enjoyed an unqualified or an outright miracle. It has enjoyed a kinda-sorta miracle, as the consensus now says. This leaves Krugman out in the cold. Chait has now called Krugman shrill! In these ways, a script takes hold. It worms its way into everyone’s head, just as Candidate Perry directed. The process started above the fold on the front page of the great New York Times (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/16/11). Now, the process has spread and grown. As the last twenty years have shown, there will be no surviving this culture. Chait’s initial submission: Is Texas enjoying a miracle? Here’s the start of Chait’s original post on the subject: CHAIT (8/17/11): The initial liberal reaction to Rick Perry's "Texas miracle" has been to dispute that any such miracle has occurred. The instinct here was understandable—for reasons I'll explain below, Perry's story doesn't make a lot of sense—but it doesn't seem to be correct. Matthias Shapiro persuasively argues, in a lengthy blog post that's hard to summarize, that Texas has indeed enjoyed very impressive growth under Perry. Dean Baker, after initially reaching the opposite conclusion due to spreadsheet error, reaches the same conclusion. So Texas has done great under Perry. What does this mean? In paragraph one, Chait’s language is clear. Yes, a miracle has occurred. According to Chait, the instinct to dispute this claim doesn’t seem correct. The children have been doing this for a very long time. They are contented, cheerful, sedate. You can let them on the good furniture. Then again, on the other hand, there’s no surviving this culture.

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• 23 Aug ' 10:36

  KEEP SCRIPT ALIVE! Slate’s Annie Lowrey spanned the globe keeping Rick’s script alive: TUESDAY, AUGUST 23, 2011 We’ve just met a pimp named Maria: All in all, Rick Perry has cuffed Michele Bachmann to the curb since he entered the White House race. That said, it’s worth reviewing the way major journalists have reacted to recent ludicrous claims by the plu-horrible Bachman. First: Congratulations to the Washington Post editorial board for their aggressive editorial in Saturday’s paper. Bachman had invented a stupid new claim explaining her (perfectly honorable) career as an IRS lawyer. In the process, she called the IRS “the enemy.” In response to this massive bad judgment, the editors did the sort of thing journalists should do: WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (8/21/11): [O]ur objection to her statement goes beyond the fact that it may not be true and beyond the bellicose language. We find it disturbing that someone seeking to lead this country and become its government’s CEO would view any of its agencies as the enemy… Respecting the IRS isn’t the same as loving the tax code. If Ms. Bachmann thinks that this country has an irrational, confusing, loophole-laden tax law, well, join the party. Who doesn’t? If she thinks the nation is overtaxed, she is entitled to that opinion, too. But the Internal Revenue Service and the 107,621 (as of fiscal 2010) people who work there aren’t responsible for the law or the level of taxation. For those, you can thank Ms. Bachmann and her fellow members of Congress. There was more. But the editors’ effort was good. Second: Congratulation to the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler for his fact-check of a different Bachmann groaner, concerning allegedly massive spending under the crazy Obama. We’ll only disagree with Kessler’s ultimate rating; he gave Bachmann just two Pinocchios for her groaning, repeated misstatement. According to Kessler, “her statistic, while technically correct, [was] deliberately misleading.” In the end, technical accuracy should be no defense when the public is misled deliberately. That said, Kessler did what a journalist should. His piece should have run on page one. Sadly, this brings us to our third example. It involves CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo, who ate away at the nation’s brains on Sunday’s Meet the Press Bachmann had made a ludicrous claim about the price of gas. But uh-oh! When guest host Savannah Guthrie asked Bartiromo about the claim, Bartiromo tried hard not to answer GUTHRIE (8/21/11): Well, there are big promises happening on the Republican side too, Maria, and I wanted to ask you to give us a reality check on one of them. Michele Bachmann is saying that she can bring back, in a Bachmann administration, $2 a gallon gasoline. She also said within one quarter her policies would effect a turnaround in the economy. What would you say? BARTIROMO: Well, I mean, I think it is extraordinary that the country does not have an energy policy. I mean, how long have we been talking about the fact that we are so reliant on international oil? I don't know. Probably the silver lining in this whole economic slowdown, recession, whatever you want to call it, is the fact that oil prices have come down. Guthrie had asked a double question. That’s always a bad idea; it helps people like Bartiromo avoid answering either one. In this case, Bartiromo bafflegabbed hard, avoiding response to the ludicrous claim that Bachmann could restore $2 gas. But uh-oh! Guthrie noticed the lack of an answer, then came back with a follow-up question. This produced Bartiromo’s second straight non-response: GUTHRIE (continuing directly): But can one president effectuate that much change in these commodities markets? I mean, is that an over-promise? BARTIROMO: One president can exhibit leadership, set the tone to where we're going, and that's really what we need. Whether or not she can do that, bring gasoline down to $2—but at a minimum we need a plan. People need to know where they’re going. They want a vision. And, at this point, we're continually reliant on international oil, which is a major issue. “Well, let's talk about leadership and the president,” Guthrie then said, accepting her defeat. Can we talk? CNBC pays Bartiromo to do two things. She is paid to look amazingly good and to support the corporatist notions which please the financial audience. Bachmann had made the world’s dumbest claim. Bartiromo had no plan to say so. In a real journalistic culture, some Meet the Press “suit” would have done the following, perhaps at Betsy Fischer’s direction: He would have siezed Bartriromo by the scruff of her neck; he would have booted her down the stairs, out the door, across the sidewalk and into the street. He would have told her never to come within a hundred miles of an NBC camera. You don’t live in that kind of culture. Maria will be back. And Harold made two: The Potemkins were posing hard on this program. Moments later, Harold Ford pretended to throw his own two cents on the pile: FORD: I would have to think if you are—we're fortunate around this table to be dutifully employed, some people with more than one job. The reality is, if you have a jobs plan, put it out. The same as I would say for Michele Bachmann. If she has a plan to get gas prices down to $2, she ought to give it to President Obama and let him implement it now so Americans can be spared the agony. Two, I hope the president does what E.J. said. I hope he's bold. E.J. and I may define bold differently, but he's got to come out, I think, with a plan to create certainty around regulations… “If she has a plan!” The Potemkins are very skillful. Surely, Dionne spoke up, you say. Readers! Will we ever learn? EPILOGUE—KEEP SCRIPT ALIVEWashington journalists live to recite. More specifically: When an important new script arrives—a script with plenty of powerful backing—the eager young journalist works very hard to get herself in line with its scripted notions. Above all else, the young “liberal” journalist mustn’t seem shrill. Nothing can fuck her career up faster than getting labeled that way. This may explain the way Annie Lowrey began her recent piece at Slate—the report in which she made her peace with the capital’s hottest new narrative. Is the state of Texas—Rick Perry’s state—involved in an economic “miracle?” Look how far Lowrey went in her opening paragraphs, struggling to keep script alive: LOWREY (8/19/11): On the campaign trail, Texas governor and Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry has repeatedly boasted about the so-called “Texas miracle,” the state's impressive economic performance in the last five years. This has set the chattering classes off, debating both whether the miracle is real and, if it is, whether the awesomely coiffed politico should be taking credit for it. The data under contention are these: Texas has created 40 percent of the nation's new jobs since the recession ended, far more than any other state. It entered the recession later than other states and got out of it faster. Its economy is growing twice as fast as the country's as a whole. Its unemployment rate is high, at 8.2 percent, but lower than it is in the nearby "sand states," like Nevada (12.4 percent) and Arizona (9.3 percent). Judging by those statistics, it is fair to call it a lone star in a fairly depressed region, if not an outright miracle. Lowrey is a professional writer. As such, she knows how to fuzzy up her words to keep a preferred claim alive. Observe: In her opening paragraph, Lowrey leaves open the possibility that the “miracle” is “real.” (A debate is on about that, she says.) At the very least, she asserts that Texas has enjoyed an “impressive economic performance in the last five years.” In her second paragraph, she fuzzies things up even further. Texas may not be enjoying an outright miracle, she suggests or says, using an impressively imprecise construct. At the very least, this leaves open the clear possibility that some lesser type of “miracle” has occurred. But good lord! Look again at how far this hustler went in her quest to keep script alive: LOWREY: Its unemployment rate is high, at 8.2 percent, but lower than it is in the nearby "sand states," like Nevada (12.4 percent) and Arizona (9.3 percent). Judging by those statistics, it is fair to call it a lone star in a fairly depressed region, if not an outright miracle. Lowrey didn’t tell Slate readers that the unemployment rate in Texas is higher than in all four states which border it. Instead, she chose to span the globe! She wandered off to two “nearby” states—states with higher unemployment than Texas. Having cherry-picked these states, she used them to tell Slate readers that Texas is a “star” performer—“a lone star in a fairly depressed region.” Is Texas a star in its region? Once again, here are the figures Lowrey chose to exclude: Unemployment rate, June 2011, Texas and neighboring states: Texas: 8.2 percent Oklahoma: 5.3 percent New Mexico: 6.8 percent Louisiana: 7.8 percent Arkansas: 8.1 percent When it comes to unemployment, is Texas a star in its region? (In the new figures for July, Texas bumped up to 8.4 percent. Lowrey’s piece had already been published.) Back to Lowrey, spanning the globe in search of someone, anyone, with higher unemployment than Texas: We’ve rarely seen anyone wh*re this hard or sell her soul quite so visibly. But this is truly the heart and soul of the gruesome young breed who pose as your modern “journalists,” especially at publications of the alleged “center left.” It’s the way of the world for such career-level hustlers: When a potent new narrative blows in from the right, they must avoid getting branded as “shrill.” In the current case, hustlers like Lowrey have picked a safe route: They will leave the “miracle” claim alive, choosing instead to argue that Perry may not deserve the full credit. They’ll even please readers with stupid-ass snark about the governor’s comical hair (see above). Clueless readers may thus imagine that they are reading a real critique—even as a stupid new narrative gains additional traction. Lowrey’s piece was so striking that we’ll let it stand alone today. Tomorrow, we’ll look at the way Jonathan Chait has handled this potent new narrative. That said, we’ll recommend this new Krugman post, in which he makes the same basic point we made in yesterday’s HOWLER: KRUGMAN (8/22/11): [T]he debate over the alleged Texas miracle is not over whether Texas is in fact a miserable failure. All the critics need to show is that Texas is not in fact the miracle Perry claims. And it isn’t. […] Again, the point is not that Texas is a hellhole. It is that there is no miracle—and Texas experience offers no role model for getting out of the national slump. Texas is an unusual state. Just by virtue of its size and its history, it’s hard to pair it with any other state. That said, Texas isn’t an economic hellhole or a miserable failure—although it starts to come close if you look at certain measures. But it would take a blithering idiot to think that Texas has enjoyed an “economic miracle” in recent years—even to think that it’s enjoying a “jobs boom.” That claim represents a self-serving new script—a potent new narrative invented by a highly ambitious White House candidate. Anyone but a blithering fool would see that claim for what it is. Anyone but a blithering fool—or a “journalistic” wh*re of the type which has done so much harm over the past twenty years. The Lowreys have been at this game for decades; more on their exploits tomorrow. They sat and said nothing in 1999 and 2000 when potent new scripts sent George Bush to the White House. Today, the career liberal world sits silently by as these hustlers go at it again.

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