Wednesday, January 27, 2010

When will they learn?

From today's New York Times:


The issue [of debt reduction] will be a major theme of Mr. Obama’s nationally televised speech Wednesday night, as he seeks to respond to the public’s concern about the budget deficit.

But his responses so far, including the debt commission and a proposed three-year freeze on domestic programs, drew howls of anger on Tuesday from his party’s left, which objected to his exempting defense spending while putting Medicare and Medicaid on the chopping block. At the same time, he earned mainly derision from Republicans.

One wonders if Democrats will ever realize that running to the right gains them only derision from all quarters? The decision to exempt our bloated military budget from needed spending curbs is a cowardly bow to Republicans who have never been serious about reducing the national debt, even as they present themselves as the "party of fiscal responsibility." Indeed, the GOP is the only one of the two major parties with a significant faction that has expressed a desire to bankrupt the Federal government (as a means of killing social spending).

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

What Plays in Massachusetts...

Who'd have thought we'd see the day that Republicans (for whom Massachusetts and San Francisco have always vied for the title of 'most detestable place in America') decided that the results of a special election in Massachusetts should govern the policies that apply to the nation as a whole:

...on Monday, the House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, issued a statement accusing Mr. Obama of defying the will of the American people by saying that he would continue to press for a broad overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

“Less than a week after the Massachusetts special election, the Obama Administration is vowing to ‘stay the course’ and double down on the same costly, job-killing policies that are leaving America’s middle-class families and small businesses high and dry,” Mr. Boehner said.

The GOP is also rejecting middle class tax cuts because, in their opinion, they spur job growth. This is probably the only time in history the GOP has made the argument that a tax cut... any tax cut... doesn't spur job growth.



NY Times: G.O.P. Lawmakers Reject Obama’s Latest Tax-Break Plans

Sunday, January 24, 2010

GOP Logic

South Carolina's Lt. Governor Andre Bauer has discovered an amazing correlation between school lunch programs and test scores:

.."I can show you a bar graph where free and reduced lunch has the worst test scores in the state of South Carolina," adding, "You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I'll show you the worst test scores, folks. It's there, period.
Now the bleeding hearts will probably tell you that poorer areas have higher percentages of students receiving free lunches and that poverty has always correlated closely with poor test scores. But Andre Bauer knows better: it's the free lunches that cause poor test scores... period.

And oh yeah... 58% of South Carolina students receive free of reduced cost lunches. Sadly, this guy's probably a hero in South Carolina for saying this (I speak from personal experience, having lived there on various occasions).

(Hat tip to Stinque commenter al203cr)

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

I'm famous... again!

Wow, I turn my back for a a spell and look what happens: 1400 hits in just three days! Apparently I touched a nerve with my latest post. One Jonah Goldberg at some obscure communal blog called "the corner" (as in: "put on the 'dunce' cap, young man, and go sit in the corner") is none too pleased with something I wrote about... let's see.... oh yeah... about Jonah Goldberg:

...this blogger at "The Patriot's Quill" writes:

That a conservative Jew feels the need to pander to his conservative audience by proselytizing for Christianity is a quite remarkable testament to the failure of American conservatism to speak to an audience beyond the Christian pulpit. It should also dishearten those conservatives who cling to the improbable belief that Jews will soon begin deserting the Democratic party in large numbers for the GOP, and those who fear that the GOP is becoming a largely insular, regional party. No, Christianity is not a "regional" religion per se, but this brand of fundamentalist Christianity is largely relegated to the American South and has little hope of establishing itself in the more urban, industrialized, more culturally diverse and better educated regions of the nation.

Where this isn't clichéd, it's just dopey. There's no proselytizing in that column and if you think there is, it's a sign of your own insecurities not of my need to pander, never mind proselytize, to anyone.

Once again, this is what Goldberg wrote in his column:
Ross Douthat in the New York Times, [criticizes the film Avatar] as an “apologia for pantheism.” Douthat’s criticisms hit the mark, but the most relevant point was raised by John Podhoretz in The Weekly Standard. Cameron wrote Avatar, says Podhoretz, “not to be controversial, but quite the opposite: He was making something he thought would be most pleasing to the greatest number of people.”

What would have been controversial is if — somehow — Cameron had made a movie in which the good guys accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts.
Now, Goldberg thinks it "clichéd" and "dopey" that I'm taken aback by the extent to which he is willing to regurgitate the truly clichéd and dopey memes of evangelical Christian victimology --this wholly idiotic notion that Christians are the one group that is truly persecuted in contemporary American culture-- even though he is a member of an ethnic and religious group that has a far greater historical claim to victimization and marginalization in U.S. society. Indeed, Goldberg promotes this laughable notion with rhetoric that is virtually indistinguishable from Christian evangelism, as evidenced by the quoted paragraph: "What would have been controversial is if — somehow — Cameron had made a movie in which the good guys accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts."

Now, in his riposte to my blog post, Goldberg proudly wears the label of "defender of the poor oppressed Christians of America" while rejecting the notion that he could possibly be perceived as engaging in Christian proselytism in the above passage:
If this guy wanted to whine about how I was buying into the standard conservative narrative about "Christophobia" and Christians being the only permissible victims in pop culture, that would be fair game. Many — but by no means all — liberals disagree with that line of argument, and that's fine. But I think that the complaint is largely true — and that was the obvious point of that line.

The notion that I'm hawking Christianity here is just stupid, revealingly stupid. It's almost as if saying anything in defense of Christians or even saying anything about Christians that isn't objectively criticial counts as "proselytizing." After all, plainly read, my comments in that column are neither in fact pro- nor anti-Christian.

But Goldberg's claims are disingenuous at best. The phrase "accept Jesus Christ into your heart" is so evocative, so tied up in the rhetoric of evangelical Christianity as to be indistinguishable from from its promotion. He might as well have slapped a Jesus fish on the bumper of his car and replaced his doorbell with a chime that plays "Amazing Grace" with that one. After all, Goldberg could just as easily have written "What would have been controversial is if — somehow — Cameron had made a movie in which the good guys Converted to Christianity." In so doing, he would have effectively made the point he claims to have been making in neutral and objective language. But instead Goldberg feels compelled to echo the rhetoric of born again Christianity and in so doing comes off sounding much more like the president of the local chapter of Jews for Jesus than a supposedly serious political opinion columnist.

Now, is Goldberg genuinely and honestly proselytizing in the offending Los Angeles Times piece I've been quoting from? Probably about as much as Ann Coulter is genuinely and honestly expressing firmly held beliefs every time she opens that disingenuous piehole of hers and starts mouthing off on the scientific inadequacy of the theory of Evolution. Which is to say: not at all. Hell, I doubt that even a miniscule minority of the legions of Pharisees that comprise the Republican, Holier than Thou, God Squad give a tinker's damned about Christianity or even of spirituality broadly speaking. Wedge issues are the only thing the Right knows... divide and conquer is their motto: whether it be God, gays, or racial politics, wherever a GOP strategist sees and opening to carve out the 51% majority needed to secure the next tax break for the needy top 1% the Republican machine will start working that angle. The promotion of evangelical Christianity is just one such device, as it helps drive a wedge between those who view it as their mission in life to convert the entire planet to their religious viewpoint and those who want to send their children to school without worrying about whether their history teacher will leverage his position of authority to try and convert them to their own peculiar brand of religious enthusiasm.

Does it surprise me that Goldberg is all too happy and eager to whore himself out to the Christian right in so obvious and vulgar a fashion just to ensure that our nation remains a top-heavy plutocracy in which those people who have more money than they could spend in 1000 lifetimes aren't called upon to relieve some of the suffering of those who spend their miserable lives in a daily struggle to avoid complete dispossession? It surprises me no more than that Goldberg and those like him are all to happy to savagely demonize a group of people whose only crime is the desire to be afforded the same right and privileges to love a person of the same sex that society confers upon those who wish to spend their lives with a member of the opposite sex. 51% is their ultimate goal, and it matters little whose ox is gored or who gets trampled in getting there.

Conservative columnists are at at their core, mere whores, and I for one, expect nothing from whores but whoring.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Conservatism's Christian Solipsism

I've pretty much exclusively been posting blog items to Stinque these days but since the subject I want to write about has already been posted, and since I have a few things I'd like to say about it, I think I'll come back to this blog for another post. It concerns this astonishing comment by Fox News commenter Brit Hume during a Fox round table discussion on the Tiger Woods affair.





Here's the relevant text:
“The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith,” said Hume. “He is said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of redemption and forgiveness offered by the Christian faith. My message to Tiger is, ‘Tiger turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.”
What's astonishing is that this is supposedly a mainstream news network serving a secular purpose and a general audience. Yet it is quickly becoming indistinguishable from Pat Robertson's 700 Club. This clip highlights the extent to which conservatism and fundamentalist Christianity have collapsed into one another in America. There really is no secular conservative ideology in this country any more. That's probably the reason why Bill Kristol, who is Jewish, does not challenge Hume's inappropriate proselytizing when it is his turn to comment on the Tiger Woods affair, even though we can plainly sense a hint of unease when it is his turn to comment.

A similar situation was highlighted recently by the blog Wonkette, who noticed in a Los Angeles Times editorial by conservative Jew Jonah Goldberg the following peculiar statement regarding the New Agey, environmentalist beliefs that infuse the film Avatar:
What would have been controversial is if — somehow — Cameron had made a movie in which the good guys accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts.
That a conservative Jew feels the need to pander to his conservative audience by proselytizing for Christianity is a quite remarkable testament to the failure of American conservatism to speak to an audience beyond the Christian pulpit. It should also dishearten those conservatives who cling to the improbable belief that Jews will soon begin deserting the Democratic party in large numbers for the GOP, and those who fear that the GOP is becoming a largely insular, regional party. No, Christianity is not a "regional" religion per se, but this brand of fundamentalist Christianity is largely relegated to the American South and has little hope of establishing itself in the more urban, industrialized, more culturally diverse and better educated regions of the nation.