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I see that Sean Hannity had a special show last night documenting the alleged “history of the liberal media”. This is a key element in the Republican story of recent history. In fact, I think it is something of a deus ex machina in that story.

Television news–excluding Fox News, obviously–is dominated by liberals. I’m willing to admit that, actually. But note that I say “dominated by”, not “biased in favor of”. This may seem somewhat strange, but I think that while most individual journalists lean towards liberalism, particularly social liberalism, they try to keep their biases in check. (I suspect that that’s the first thing they teach you in journalism school.)

It is my belief that, rather than creating a liberal bias in the media, this concentration of liberalism has the effect of making a conservatives a type of entity which the media covers with uncomprehending interest. If “familiarity breeds contempt”, as the old line goes, then unfamiliarity has bred a kind of fascination.

The press in general tends to display their liberalism not, as you might expect, by always deriding or marginalizing conservatives, but by treating them as if they are some exotic type of creature they have never seen before. They react, not with outrage, but with surprise and curiosity when they hear a conservative spout some standard talking point.

For example, last year then-Senate Candidate Rand Paul said that he liked the 1964 Civil Rights Act insofar as it desegregated public places, but was uncomfortable with it desegregating private ones. This is a fairly typical libertarian position, but the press reacted like they’d never heard it. They did not smear Paul as a racist, however, despite what some people might say.

They reacted with a general lack of understanding and a realization that this was controversial. They knew this wasn’t what they all believed about the Civil Rights Act, and so they were just sort of puzzled.

This process repeats itself on issue after issue. Liberal journalists simply do not know that much about Conservatives, and so always cover them with a curiosity and, oftentimes, interest. In fact, while their coverage is not always glowing, I believe it may provide the Conservatives with an advantage in terms of getting their issues covered.

Incidentally, Eric Alterman wrote a very interesting book called What Liberal Media? that examined some of these issues. The book has a lot of flaws, particularly in just how broadly Alterman is willing to define “bias”, and obviously he’s a liberal himself; but it’s still one of the better books I’ve read on the topic.

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The Week has a summary of the reaction to President Obama filling out a bracket for the NCAA basketball tournament, and notes that, predictably, the Republicans think it’s just awful that he would do such a thing with the terrible disaster in Japan and the unrest in the Middle East going on.

It’s similar to the situation back in June, when people were upset at Obama for playing golf and BP CEO Tony Hayward for attending a yacht race when the oil spill was going on. At the time, I wrote:

“The fact is, there is nothing that either Hayward or Obama need to do that they cannot do from a yacht race or a golf course. I suspect that at their level, almost all of their “oversight” can be done using cell phones.”

Same logic applies here. There’s probably not much Obama can do about these things other than put the right people in charge of those areas and perhaps make some calls.

But, as we all know, it is as much how they are perceived as what they actually do that matters for a President–or any high-ranking leader. (Republican strategist Lee Atwater supposedly said that “perception is reality”, though I think that quote–and I know that sentiment–predate him by quite a bit.)

I suspect, of course, that a politician’s charisma is what really determines the contemporary consensus on whether whatever they choose to do in a crisis is judged “good crisis handling” or “bad crisis handling’. But it might just be differences in skill between different political “spin” people.

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Paul Krugman wrote on his blog yesterday on the topic of what blogs he regularly reads:

“I don’t know of any economics or politics sites on [the conservative] side that regularly provide analysis or information I need to take seriously. I know we’re supposed to pretend that both sides always have a point; but the truth is that most of the time they don’t.” 

I get that Krugman is a busy man, so I can’t blame him at all for this approach. But, personally, I enjoy reading Conservative blogs, even though I disagree with them.  Part of it is I want to try to figure out why the Conservatives think the things they do. And, moreover, I believe it’s a good way of keeping yourself honest, and of making sure that your arguments in favor of your side are sharp and well thought-out.

Nothing wrong with reading the writers you agree with–as evidenced by the fact I know what’s on Krugman’s blog–but it’s useful to keep tabs on what the other side is thinking.

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So, Congressman Steve Cohen said of the Republicans:

“They say it’s a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels…You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it.”

One of the countless reasons I find the Nazi-comparisons that are used so much in political debate to be so damned irritating is that often, in order to make them, people like to draw upon true, but purely superficial, similarities between whoever they are attacking and the Nazis.

Goebbels was not the first guy to ever use propaganda. The only reason to pick Goebbels, out of all of the other propagandists throughout history, seems to me to be to evoke a subtle association in people’s minds with the horrible atrocities he and the Nazi government he spoke for committed.

If Congressman Cohen had substituted “Bernays” for “Goebbels” in his claim, he would’ve been about as accurate, less disrespectful, and shown himself to be a man of learning beyond what we generally expect of our elected officials, besides.

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“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”–Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

I like this line, but unfortunately it’s the sort of thing that one says sadly, to no one in particular, rather than the sort of thing that can help you win a debate.

It falls into the category of things that are true, but useless. Because each side is capable of presenting some “facts”–numbers, figures, anecdotes–that sound good enough to the layman.

And, of course, they can deride all attempts at fact-checking these claims. For example, anyone who tries to show that the Laffer curve idea is not really supported by data can be dismissed as “liberally biased”.

I was reading a column by Leonard Pitts Jr. from about a year ago that examined this phenomenon in detail. (And introduced me to the Moynihan quote above.) Pitts wrote that he could remember:

 “…a time when facts settled arguments. This is before everything became a partisan shouting match, before it was permissible to ignore or deride as “biased” anything that didn’t support your worldview.

If you and I had an argument and I produced facts from an authoritative source to back me up, you couldn’t just blow that off. You might try to undermine my facts, might counter with facts of your own, but you couldn’t just pretend my facts had no weight or meaning.

But that’s the intellectual state of the union these days.”

I’ve heard other people, older than myself, assert that things used to be as Mr. Pitts describes as well. I’m not sure I believe it. I’m not accusing Mr. Pitts or like-minded people of lying, but I wonder if it’s simple nostalgia on their part.

And if they are right, I wonder what it was that caused the change.

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Krugman notes that the health-care debate is being rewritten to paint the “centrists” in a flattering light:

“The real story, of pretend moderates stalling action by pretending to be persuadable, has been rewritten as a story of how those DF hippies got in the way, until the centrists saved the day.”

I have never liked how the mainstream political reporters tend to use “centrist” as a synonym for “good”. As I’ve said, I dislike the Left-Center-Right model of politics that everybody uses, though it’s virtually impossible to avoid falling back on it to make generalizations and I have done so myself many times.

The first and most obvious problem is figuring out where this supposed center is. The geometry metaphor collapses in view of the fact there is no means of precisely measuring where one mixture of political views lies from another.

Truly, though, this does not matter that much. The center is not so much a place on the political spectrum as it is a state of mind about the political spectrum. It is, in fact, the one which permits of the existence of a political spectrum.

I think what gives the “centrist” concept its popularity is the fact that most people feel instinctively that is unlikely the platform of one party could be perfectly correct, and the other totally incorrect. The obvious resolution to this is to take some mixture between the two parties and call it the center and look for someone who fits in it.

Now, this isn’t a bad idea, really; and I can see how people thought it up. “Politics is the art of the possible,” as Bismarck is supposed to have said, and Western-European and American democracies are such that what is “possible” requires the agreement of two parties who disagree on everything. Hence, a candidate from one party ought to have something that appeals to people in the other.

But the problem is that eventually, people–and by that I mean the Washington Press Corps–internalize the concept of centrism to such an extent that they begin to lose the ability to think in any other terms, and centrism becomes an end in itself. At that point, it no longer matters what the two parties want, only that politicians govern from the center of it.

As you’ve probably guessed, my dislike for this left-center-right trichotomy is what prompted me to begin to use terms like “Nationalism”, “Cosmopolitanism” and “Materialism” instead. While they don’t totally eliminate the need for the old terms–you could use a sentence like “The Left is increasingly Cosmopolitan”–I’d like to they believe that they focus more on what the parties actually do, as opposed to defining them solely in terms of their relation to the other parties.

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Having apparently gotten bored of attacking Woodrow Wilson–or perhaps surprised by Wilson’s unresponsiveness–Glenn Beck has decided to turn his attention to George Soros, a wealthy businessman who funds various left-leaning activism groups.

Beck’s much-hyped two-part report supposedly “reveals” that Soros has a five-step plan for destroying countries. It is as follows, in Beck’s own words with my comments in [brackets]:

  1. “Form a shadow government using humanitarian aid as cover.”
  2. “Control the airwaves. Fund existing radio and TV outlets and take control over them or start your own outlets.” [Beck apparently believes that funding Media Matters, NPR and Huffington Post constitutes “controlling the airwaves”.]
  3. “Destabilize the state, weaken the government and build an anti-government kind of feeling in this country. You exploit an economic crisis or take advantage of existing crisis — pressure from the top and the bottom. This will allow you to weaken the government and build anti- government public sentiment.” [An old saying about pots and kettles occurs to me.]
  4. “You provoke an election crisis. You wait for an election. And during the election, you cry voter fraud.”
  5. “Take power. You stage massive demonstrations, civil disobedience, sit-ins, general strike, you encourage activism. You promote voter fraud and tell followers what to do through your radio and television stations.”

The first thing one can do with this is to ask just how much of it describes what the Conservatives do, but apart from that there is also the fact that all the other governments Soros has taken on in the past have been communist governments. That Beck, the man who fears that President Obama is a Marxist, conveniently  fails to mention that reveals–as if there were any revealing to be done–the dishonest nature of his whole operation.

Most of the criticism of Beck’s piece, however, has revolved around allegations that it is anti-semitic. Beck’s use of words such as “puppet-master” and  “blood sucker” to describe Soros, they say, call to mind Nazi propaganda.

The terminology is similar, there’s no doubt, as is the unbelievable and convoluted conspiracy theory. Still, it must be admitted that Beck never said Soros did the things Beck alleges because he is Jewish. Beck’s story is one of a supposedly evil man who happens to be Jewish, and I never felt like Beck was trying to insinuate anything else.

As Beck himself pointed out at the outset of his show, he [Beck] is a more hard-line supporter of Israel than is George Soros himself. For once, I think he’s not lying; this does indeed seem to me to argue against the charge that Beck is anti-semitic. Indeed, the vast majority of Conservatives/Republicans are fervent supporters of Israel, and more to the point, hard-line opponents of the Palestinians. There are exceptions, such as Pat Buchanan, but for the most part this is the case. So, why would Beck even want to encourage anti-Jewish feeling among his Conservative viewers? It appears to be inconsistent with practically everything else that goes on on Fox.

(One possible explanation is that Beck really is as insane as he acts. However, I doubt this because it’s hard to imagine he would even show up at the studio reliably were that the case.)

Frankly, I think that Beck’s problem with Soros isn’t that he’s Jewish, it’s that he funds Democratic-leaning stuff, and Democrats, of whatever religion, ethnicity, sex, and so forth, are viewed by Beck and most of the Fox news crowd as illegitimate, evil and generally undeserving of representation.

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Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh uttered the priceless line: “The American people have just rejected liberalism. They need to be told that’s what they did.”

That is everything you need to know about the Republican media right there.

I wonder how many people really think that this past election marks some sort of seismic shift against Democrats for any meaningful period of time. I think most people are smart enough to notice that one major party rarely stays down for very long in American politics.

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Via Andrew Sullivan, a brutally good review of Dinesh D’Souza’s book The Roots of Obama’s Rage, by Andrew Ferguson, who writes:

“Throughout the nineties I heard mainstream Republicans describe the president as a shameless womanizer and a closeted homosexual, a cokehead and a drunk, a wife beater and a wimp, a hick and a Machiavel, a committed pacifist and a reckless militarist who launched unnecessary airstrikes in faraway lands to distract the public’s attention from all of the above. 

How did the left-wing, coke-snorting Manchurian candidate become the fondly remembered Democrat-you-could-do-business-with—“good old Bill,” in Sean Hannity’s phrase?

Barack Obama is what happened. The partisan mind—left-wing or right-wing, Republican or Democrat—is incapable of maintaining more than one oversized object of irrational contempt at a time…. 

We should probably be grateful for this psychological limitation. Without it the negativity of our politics would be relentless. Like Ronald Reagan before him, George W. Bush was reviled for eight years by Democrats driven mad by a sputtering rage—the “most right-wing president in history”!—but it’s only a matter of time until they rediscover him…” 

It’s worth reading his review in full, but this passage is the most illuminating.

I do have to disagree with his assertion that “we should be grateful for this”, though. The phenomenon makes it incredibly difficult to tell what the hell the actual truth is.

I am sure that some liberals have experienced a little bit of nostalgia for George W. Bush and his crew, not as President, of course, but as leader of the Republican party. I myself feel that Bush was much less hostile to liberal values than, say, Sarah Palin. And I can recall Bush making many statements which the current GOP leaders would no doubt condemn in a heartbeat were they uttered by President Obama. So, I don’t think it’s entirely partisan rage.

I would also argue, therefore, that this is, at least partially, strategically sound thinking. Bush is retired; he’s not going to screw things up any more for liberals. Similarly, Clinton may make a few speeches, but he’s not going to do anything substantive to fight the Republicans agenda again. (Some would argue that he never did)

Nevertheless, Ferguson has touched on a disturbing truth in modern politics.

One of the most fascinating ideas in George Orwell’s novel 1984 was the Two Minutes’ Hate, which is an activity where all the Party members go every day to vent their fury at the enemies of the Party. Orwell describes it as “a hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness…turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”

In 1984, when the Two Minutes’ Hate is over, everyone goes back to their duties. The fact that it is so readily turned on and off, and so easily transfered, is what is really insidious about it; it demonstrates the way that people are manipulated by the totalitarian government of Orwell’s novel.

Therefore, I  think that the temporary nature of this fury that Ferguson describes is what is most disturbing about it–it suggests that people are being manipulated to feel it.

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With the furor over the Islamic community center dying down slightly, it is apparently necessary to find some new front on which to facilitate Samuel P. Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations“. This arrived in the person of Pastor Terry Jones, who plans to burn Qurans in order to “send a message to radical Islam.”

General David Petraeus has said that this is a bad idea, as it will be used by Muslim extremists to justify more attacks.

On the one hand, you could make the argument, as made over at Private Buffoon, that Pastor Jones has the right to burn Qurans under the First Amendment, and that a government official like Petraeus condemning it is rather disturbing. The comparison with the old “the anti-war demonstrators encourage the enemy” argument is an interesting one.

To make matters worse, I see that Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of State Clinton have both weighed in on the issue. While their hearts are in the right place, I fear that this is, strategically speaking, a bad idea. The reason is that it now gives the Republicans the chance to complain that government officials are pressuring the guy; and make it into a First Amendment thing, as opposed to a open-and-shut case of radicalism run amok.

However, I don’t think the Republicans would dare say that to General Petraeus, because he is by far our most accomplished General, he salvaged something out of the Iraq invasion, and I think he might actually be a Republican. It wasn’t that long ago they were clamoring for him to run against President Obama in 2012, at any rate.

None of this, however, should distract us from the issue at hand, which is the sheer stupidity of Pastor Jones’s absurd plan.

Got some news for you, Pastor: radical Islam already hates us. That is why they commit acts of terrorism against us. Radical Islamists probably think that every child in America burns a Quran a day, if I know how propaganda works.

Therefore, the only possible outcome of this behavior will be to alienate other, non–radical Muslims. This cannot possibly be considered a good thing. It all goes back to what me and thingy (whose post on this matter you should definitely read) discussed on this post: “many Republicans, at some level, seem to equate ‘being Muslim’ with ‘being a terrorist’.” (Perhaps it would be more accurate to say “Conservatives” instead of “Republicans”.)

It may not be conscious, even, but it’s hard to explain this sort of behavior any other way.