Getting Out of the Gutter.

Amidst a climate of war, global warming, skyrocketing deficits, whopping trade imbalances, gas gouging, corporate corruption, a burst housing market bubble, illegal government spying, rampant corruption, torture, war atrocities, racism, marriage inequality a crumbling infrastructure, Bin Laden, failing schools, loss of competitiveness, war profiteering, a shrinking middle class, health care crisis and more... some Republicans have more than lost their way. They have gone so far astray that it may too late to turn back.



In light of recent events, Paul Krugman notes that right-wing hate has become a serious threat:

But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.

There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.

Stoked by bigotry, religious intolerance, willful ignorance, and belligerent nationalism have turned many on the right into mean and hateful ideologues. The cultural and intellectual 'wars' are furthered by demagogues ranting about the evils of liberalism, the welfare state and those who would seek to remove god from their society. Michael Rowe observes the party-split in, "Death at the Holocaust Museum and the Degradation of the American Dialogue."

The difference between John McCain and Sarah Palin became clearest to me in the middle of the campaign last summer.

At a town hall meeting, McCain was confronted by an elderly woman who told McCain that she was a supporter of his because Obama was "an Arab." McCain was clearly uncomfortable, and it was patently obvious why. It had nothing to do with McCain's feelings about Arabs. It had to do with an old-school Republican accidentally moving the rock, and coming face to face with what actually lived beneath it. He recognized that the woman was making an unambiguously racist statement about his opponent, and he was mortified to be asked to answer it. Even though McCain famously and horribly bungled his answer ("No ma'am, he isn't. He's a decent family man.") I knew when he meant. He was addressing the intended racial slur and disavowing it, however badly.

In that moment, I felt deeply for my Republican friends who, on some level, must also be experiencing the embarrassment and discontent of recognizing that their party had been hijacked by racists and religious fanatics who derided education and achievement as "elitist."

But the alarms about just how bad things are even being rung by some 'conservatives.' Joe Scarborough, former Replubican Member of Congress and talk-show host on the Today Show:

I don't know if it was the death of the old Republican party. Maybe the next election will be the death of the old Republican party. Are Republicans going to wake up? Are they going to realize that not only do they need Dick Cheneys in the party, but they need Colin Powells in the party? They need to expand--I mean we should want everybody in the party that we can get and not have a harsh ideological test. That's what I talk about in the book. We all run around talking about Reagan, Reagan, we've got to be more like Reagan. Well, we've got Reagan's ideology down, smaller government, less taxes, but we forget Reagan's temperament. We have to have a better temperament. We can't be shrill. We can find the middle of America. Ronald Reagan, everybody's quoting Ronald Reagan. Palin was quoting Ronald Reagan --

Rowe explains just how poisoned the discourse has become:

There was a time when intellectual honesty was not considered unpatriotic; when compassion for, and understanding of, your fellow man was a sign of strength, not weakness. There was a time when the phrase Have you no shame? meant something, and the First Amendment was not used as toilet paper to wipe up the excremental verbal degradation of vulnerable segments of the American population. A time when it was expected that citizens would understand the difference between free speech and irresponsible speech. Somewhere along the line, a cancerous segment of American popular culture and media cunningly exploited the long-standing, honorable American "cowboy" motif and mentality. They grafted cruelty, divisiveness, and ignorance to it, making the two appear indistinguishable, and natural allies. And they are neither, or at least ought not to be.

There is no Environmental Protection Agency to measure hate pollution in national dialogue, and no mechanism in place to warn us when the poisonous rage spewed into the national consciousness by shock-jocks, poisonous television pundits, megachurch leaders, and oh-so-subtle politicians, has reached dangerously toxic levels.

Much like the other crazed political parties of the historic past, many Republicans seem determined to assign subhuman status to a large group of their own citizenry. Perhaps a starting point for the 'conservatives' wanting to get out of the gutter would be to stop casting your lot once and for all with the same ignorant, racist fools whose complete lack of ability to think either critically or rationally, have damned near turned your party in the crumbling and dangerous ruin that it has become.

What Makes People Vote Republican?

Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia, examines why. With the seemingly return of the culture wars and general hate being flung from across both sides of the aisle in recent days, this essay might be intriguing to some.

For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can't find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed. Only one group—college students at Penn—consistently exemplified Turiel's definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong. (A few even praised the efficiency of recycling the flag and the dog).

This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like "it's wrong because… um…eating dog meat would make you sick" or "it's wrong to use the flag because… um… the rags might clog the toilet." These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume's dictum that reason is "the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them." This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.

The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures. Turiel's description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups—the working-class people in both countries who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about respect, duty, and family roles. ("Your dog is family, and you just don't eat family.") From this study I concluded that the anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right in a 1987 critique of Turiel in which he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder's ideas, I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.

When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label "elitist." But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?

In today's New York Times, In No Laughing Matter Judith Warner adds:

Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view. “Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger,” he told me in a phone interview.

Haidt also explores the meaning of morality and describes his experiences in a Hindu community in the early 90's, in which a he witnessed a hierarchical society with clearly defined gender and class roles. This gave him insight into why some in his own country might be attracted to similarly ordered social structures.

It really is a good read and I think helpful to framing the conversation in the upcoming weeks.

What The Hell Is Going On?

A new Gallup poll suggests the RNC post-convention bump may now be affecting down ticket congressional races.

Today's released USA Today/Gallup poll posting generic Democratic or Republican candidates, show a Democrats’ double-digit ballot lead shrinking to just 48% to 45%, within the 3% margin of error.



That is a dramatic shift from a consistently shown a strong advantage for Democrats throughout most of the year (actually Democrats have led in the Gallup generic ballot measure since early 2004)

More startling is the Republicans’ new advantage among likely voters. While the Democrats lead by 3 among registered voters, likely voters say they will vote for a generic Republican candidate over a generic Democrat by a 50-45 margin. Prior to the DNC convention, this number favoured the Democrats by a 51-42 margin.

A CNN/Opinion Research poll conducted over the same span also showed a 3% gap, 49-46, while other polls from this week have seen the generic ballot narrowing but still clearly favouring Democrats by 7 or 8...

Now while these results come from a September 5-7 survey conducted immediately after the Republican National Convention - what the hell is going on?

Of Tents and Partisanship.

Yesterday there was a diary posted on MyDD that made the Recommended List entitled 'What if Obama was a Republican?' In it, the diarist - a self-described Republican - outlined his/her support for Obama. But after reading the diary and following rah-rah comments, I got to thinking about the complexities of partisanship, progressivism, PUMA's and the General Election.

Seeing this diary both annoyed and perplexed me. I asked myself, is MyDD viewed by some as a personal advertisement for a particular candidate or rather a champion for progressive values? I think that it is safe to say that people who believe in liberal values and agenda to governance have very little in common with Republicans. So save for wanting the democratic nominee to win. Do we agree on much?

And while I share the 'big tent' philosophy, I also believe in liberal ideology and Obama's will to govern with these principles.

As well, I have seen PUMA's (save for the bunch that have really gone off the deep end) be criticized for not supporting Obama. Many of which are life-long Democrats and state that they aren't voting for McCain but leaving the ballot spot blank in protest.

This is the paradox.

I shared my confusion with some close friends today and got some interesting answers - but the following stands out the most to me.

I find it counter-intuitive to turn against Democrats who don't like the nominee while welcoming Republicans who are angry with their party. The former shares are values and beliefs while the latter do not. I don't see why we can't just welcome both. Why has expressing enthusiastic support (as grudging support does not seem to be enough these days) for a single candidate become a litmus test for MyDD?

So I'll throw it the following out there to the community:

If a Republican supports Obama but not the Democratic party ideals and/or downticket races - then how are they any better/different than PUMA who will not support Obama but assuredly the Democratic downticket races?

A Brat Who Hasn’t Been Told To Cut The Act Out.

As if we needed more evidence that the right is completely whacked...

Yesterday on his radio show, right winger Michael Savage said that autism is “a fraud” and “a racket” and that “in 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out.” Savage then asserted that all these “brat[s]” need as a father to tell them to “stop acting like a putz“:

That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’” Savage concluded, “[I]f I behaved like a fool, my father called me a fool. And he said to me, ‘Don’t behave like a fool.’ The worst thing he said — ‘Don’t behave like a fool. Don’t be anybody’s dummy. Don’t sound like an idiot. Don’t act like a girl. Don’t cry.’ That’s what I was raised with. That’s what you should raise your children with. Stop with the sensitivity training. You’re turning your son into a girl, and you’re turning your nation into a nation of losers and beaten men. That’s why we have the politicians we have.”

Savage later claimed that there was “an asthma epidemic amongst minority children” because “the children got extra welfare if they were disabled.”

Listen and vomit a little:


Where do they find these guys?

Fear, Fear and more Fear.

In case anyone was wondering what an exercise in fear-mongering looks like. Here you go:



The above represents a billboard in Orange County, Florida. The local ABC News affiliate reports that the person responsible is a local musician “trying to help Republicans” but that “officials with both political parties are calling the billboard inappropriate.”

Betcha we'll see more of this as we get closer to the GE. Ya think?