Let me first say that I don't blame my parents, they're just about perfect! ;-) I see some qualify Boomers as '46-'64, but my 'rents are slightly older, and very responsible. Don't worry, the author gives each generation their due.
To me, it's shocking that one generation could be so blatantly irresponsible as to leave such a broken system to its children. It's one thing to exploit other people, and - as much as I loathe racism or sexism or colonialism - it's a little easier for me as a social scientist to wrap my head around the idea of abusing others whom we first take care to differentiate, objectify and demonize on the basis of some arbitrary primordialist factor. But our own kids? Wow. And, actually, it's far worse than that. Using the term ‘irresponsible' here to describe what has happened is far, far too generous. This is not a case of negligence. This was a knowing theft, and our own children were the victims. While they slept, late at night, we crept into their rooms, stole the piggy bank, smashed it to pieces, then used the proceeds to buy some leisure time for sipping beer and watching "American Idol", or some bullets to destroy the lives of an innocent Iraqi family somewhere. Yep. No doubt about it. It's the feel-good story of the century, my friends.
What is most astonishing about the whole thing is that I detect almost nothing in the way of anger from the victims. When I try to talk to my students about how my generation is ripping off their generation, somehow I'm always the angriest guy in the classroom, by far. Probably I should just keep my mouth shut, eh? I mean, I've paid into Social Security since I was sixteen years old, and I'd like it to be there when I'm an old geezer, unable any longer to fool some hapless university into paying me to scandalize yet another generation with my Maoist, anticlerical, sexually deviant, radical environmentalist revolutionary dogma. I'm okay with their generosity, but, to be totally truthful, I wouldn't exactly blame the next generations for saying "Screw you, pal. You guys had your party already, and we're not paying for it twice. Fund your own freakin' retirement." God knows we have that coming.
...there is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn't begin with Goldwater and doesn't celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party's past electoral fortunes and its future. In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn't run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn't likely to be expunged any time soon.
The basic problem with the Goldwater tale is that it focuses on ideology and movement building, which few voters have ever really cared about, while the McCarthy tale focuses on electoral strategy, which is where Republicans have excelled.
...
Reagan's sunny disposition and his willingness to compromise masked the McCarthyite elements of his appeal, but Reaganism as an electoral device was unique to Reagan and essentially died with the end of his presidency. McCarthyism, on the other hand, which could be deployed by anyone, thrived. McCarthyism was how Republicans won. George H.W. Bush used it to get himself elected, terrifying voters with Willie Horton. And his son, under the tutelage of strategist Karl Rove, not only got himself reelected by convincing voters that John Kerry was a coward and a liar and would hand the nation over to terrorists, which was pure McCarthyism, he governed by rousing McCarthyite resentments among his base.
Republicans continue to push the idea that this is a center-right country and that Americans have swooned for GOP anti-government posturing all these years, but the real electoral bait has been anger, recrimination and scapegoating. That's why John McCain kept describing Barack Obama as some sort of alien and why Palin, taking a page right out of the McCarthy playbook, kept pushing Obama's relationship with onetime radical William Ayers.
And that is also why the Republican Party, despite the recent failure of McCarthyism, is likely to keep moving rightward, appeasing its more extreme elements and stoking their grievances for some time to come. There may be assorted intellectuals and ideologues in the party, maybe even a few centrists, but there is no longer an intellectual or even ideological wing. The party belongs to McCarthy and his heirs -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Palin. It's in the genes.
I don't agree with every sentiment in this article, but my Republican friends might want to perk their ears up for this one. I always liked the intellectual conservatives like William F. Buckley and to a lesser extent George Will, but voices like those have disappeared from the Republican Party altogether. I used to think of Republicans as smart folks, economic intellectuals even. Now I have a hard time arguing with responses to the article like this one from voxclamantis:
I have begun to suggest to my Republican friends that they might be happier if they would buy some bib overalls and move to Mississippi, the spiritual center and demographic redoubt of paranoid conservatism in America. In our southern swamplands you don't have to make subtle racist jokes or defend preposterous tales about how liberals are to blame for the Bush disaster or try to convince everybody that Mexican immigration is polluting our culture. Down there in GOP Hollow you can relax, get yourself some spider web tattoos, shave your head, marry your sister, set crosses afire and drink homemade whiskey with like minded people.Friends, this article offended me too.... I have often considered myself a Reagan Democrat, and Gabler put me in my place, too. I do think he makes many valid points, and I think the good Republican Party is doomed if they continue down the McCarthy/Palin route. Maybe this will be the way to get to a 3 party system? If so, it will be SO worth it. I encourage the intellectual wing of the Republican Party to stand up, do something, lest snake handlers take control.
I know a lot of U2 fans that did this....once Rattle & Hum came out, U2 was crap. Too bad they didn't stay tuned, what a great ride it's been in the U2 camp since then.
At some point, the left will have to relinquish its love affair with marginalization. We'll have to stop behaving like those people who have a favorite band they love, and even damn near worship, until that day when the band actually begins to sell a lot of records and gain a measure of popularity, at which point they now suck and have obviously sold out: the idea being that if people like you, you must not be doing anything important, and that obscurity is the true measure of integrity. Deconstructing the psychological issues at the root of such a pose is well above my pay grade, but I'm sure would prove fascinating.
The simple fact is, people are inspired by Obama not because they view him as especially progressive per se (except in relation to some of the more retrograde policies of the current president, and in relation to where they feel, rightly, McCain/Palin would have led us), but because most folks respond to optimism, however ill-defined it may be. This is what the Reaganites understood, and for that matter it's what Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement knew too. It wasn't anger and pessimism that broke the back of formal apartheid in the south, but rather, hope, and a belief in the fundamental decency of people to make a change if confronted by the yawning chasm between their professed national ideals and the bleak national reality.
In other words, what the 60s freedom struggle took for granted, but which the cynical barbiturate left refuses to concede, is the basic goodness of the people of this nation, and the ability of the nation, for all of its faults (and they are legion) to change.
Oh, he goes on from there. Republicans owe it to themselves to read this one.An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble."
"Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone--gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.
I'm not sure that I've actually come out and said these words, but I heartily endorse Barack Obama for President of the United States.
I encourage everyone to vote for Obama.
If you insist that you simply could not vote for him for one reason or another -a-hem-, then I politely suggest you don't vote this time. McCain's time has come and gone, my right-leaning conservative friends. Wish y'all had nominated him in 2000 though, he would have won a landslide and handled 9/11 better than W.
It's too late now. You've seen him. You've heard him go back on most of his maverick principles. You saw how he wanted to handle the bailout... you know we could do better with Obama. Or at least let the Dems screw themselves and y'all can run better in '12. ;-)
David Corn has a really interesting article over at Mother Jones about Alan Greenspan's testimony before Congress last week. I don't think it got enough attention from the media. The economic Godfather of the past 40 years was wrong. Majorly wrong. And, he admitted it. As bad as the news is, at least it is refreshing to hear a decision-maker take some of the blame. Anyway, here's a quote from the article for ya:With members of the House oversight and government reform committee blasting Greenspan for his past decisions that helped pave the way for the current financial crisis, he acknowledged that his libertarian view of markets and the financial world had not worked out so well. "You know," he told the legislators, "that's precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well." While Greenspan did defend his various decisions, he admitted that his faith in the ability of free and loosely-regulated markets to produce the best outcomes had been shaken: "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms."
In other words, whoops—there goes decades of Ayn Rand down the drain.
Billions here, billions there.... you know what they say.On Wednesday, September 24th, right in the middle of the fight over billions of taxpayer dollars slated to bail out Wall Street, the House of Representatives passed a $612 billion defense authorization bill for 2009 without a murmur of public protest or any meaningful press comment at all. (The New York Times gave the matter only three short paragraphs buried in a story about another appropriations measure.)
The defense bill includes $68.6 billion to pursue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is only a down-payment on the full yearly cost of these wars. (The rest will be raised through future supplementary bills.) It also included a 3.9% pay raise for military personnel, and $5 billion in pork-barrel projects not even requested by the administration or the secretary of defense. It also fully funds the Pentagon's request for a radar site in the Czech Republic, a hare-brained scheme sure to infuriate the Russians just as much as a Russian missile base in Cuba once infuriated us. The whole bill passed by a vote of 392-39 and will fly through the Senate, where a similar bill has already been approved. And no one will even think to mention it in the same breath with the discussion of bailout funds for dying investment banks and the like.
