What Ezra said. Romney’s comments were so shocking – and disgusting – on their face, that it’s tempting to simply point to them or mirror the video and assume that the reader/viewer will know without thinking what’s wrong with them. Truthfully, most people probably will intuitively understand most or all of why Romney’s comments were so vile. But merely using implied assumptions to carry the day on a revelation of this magnitude is to do a disservice to the public record. In short, it’s not enough to simply point and roll our collective eyes at Romney’s despicable, divisive comments. It’s important, for the record (and even if it seems obvious), to point out exactly why Romney’s comments are so revealing about his character, his campaign, and his plans for the country.
In yesterday’s Washington Post, Ezra Klein does exactly that (so I don’t have to!). Go read it all, but here’s a taste of Ezra’s devastating takedown of Romney’s remarks and the broader implications of what they mean:
For what it’s worth, this division of “makers” and “takers” isn’t true. Among the Americans who paid no federal income taxes in 2011, 61 percent paid payroll taxes — which means they have jobs and, when you account for both sides of the payroll tax, they paid 15.3 percent of their income in taxes, which is higher than the 13.9 percent that Romney paid. Another 22 percent were elderly.
So 83 percent of those not paying federal income taxes are either working and paying payroll taxes or they’re elderly and Romney is promising to protect their benefits because they’ve earned them. The remainder, by and large, aren’t paying federal income or payroll taxes because they’re unemployed.
Ouch. And spot on. It’s devastating because it simply lays out the facts of who pays what kind of (and how much) taxes in modern America. I especially like Klein’s point that, at 15.3%, even someone who pays only payroll taxes is paying a greater percentage of his or her income than Mitt Romney himself paid in the one year we have complete data for (2011, in which Romney paid 13.9%). Romney’s surreptitiously-recorded statements, made behind closed (and presumably gold-plated) doors to a private audience of top-dollar donors when he thought nobody was listening, are in truth nothing new on the right. Their tone strongly echoes Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens, riding around in the free Cadillacs the government bought them. Such noxious nonsense wasn’t any more true in Reagan’s day than it is today when Romney says similar words.
Klein’s service in this column is reminding us of exactly how and why it’s so false. That’s worth remembering, and especially worth repeating, loudly and often, when it rears its ugly head, as it has this week. So, gratitude to Ezra for remembering this stuff doesn’t do itself. Go read the whole thing; it’s more than worth your time.
Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum writes a quick, irked post in which he takes the ever-odious Gregg Easterbrook to task for the admittedly annoying habit of always looking for perceived hypocrisy, even when it’s not there or the charge of hypocrisy isn’t relevant or accurate:
The point of laws is to provide a level playing field, and no one is a hypocrite for following existing law even if they think it should be changed. That goes for congressmen who accept earmarks even though they think earmarks should be banned, it goes for drivers who park for free on city streets even though they think parking meters should be installed, and it goes for rich people who pay taxes at the current rate even though they think that rate is too low.
No one is obligated to be a sucker. The whole point of taxation is that it’s a collective enterprise: I’m willing to pay my taxes for the common good as long as everyone else is doing it too. But until then, there’s no reason that I should impoverish myself (or my constituents) while everyone else is merrily taking full advantage of current law. Fairness matters, and that ain’t fair.
Drum’s so obviously irritated (and Easterbrook is so deservedly a target of his annoyance) that I want to just throw up my hands in the ubiquitous Limbaugh-ian “ditto” sign and move on. But I don’t think Drum’s criticism of those who bring a charge of hypocrisy against public figures who appear to be saying “do as I say, not as I do” is warranted in all cases. To be fair to Drum, he doesn’t use the phrase “do as I say, not as I do.” Instead, he talks about not metaphorically tying one’s own hand behind one’s back by following rules that don’t exist (or not taking advantage of ones that do) in comparison to everyone else who does take advantage of those rules or laws.
Congressional investigation of Muslim American radicalization is the logical response to the repeated and urgent warnings which the Obama administration has been making in recent months,” [King] said.
“We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry,” Mr. King told a pro-I.R.A. rally on Long Island, where he was serving as Nassau County comptroller, in 1982. Three years later he declared, “If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it.”
This goes way beyond “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” territory, and well into Newt-Gingrich-cheating-on-ailing-wife-#2-with-future-wife-#3-WHILE-publicly-lambasting-Bill-Clinton-for-cheating-on-Hillary territory.
Ladies and gents, I give you Rep. Peter King of New York, hypocritical religious bigot. Or did you already suspect as much because of the (R) after his name?
Normally, I wouldn’t bother re-posting this, if it were merely a (decidedly delicious) case of “gotcha.” By pretending to be billionaire conservative puppet-master Koch, however, and by succeeding in having a 20-minute conversation with Walker in which Walker was convinced he was actually speaking to Koch, a great deal of interesting information about Walker’s mindset and intentions and other inside information is revealed. Go listen to the audio at TPMMuckraker, since the brilliant blog who dreamed up and successfully executed the plan, Buffalobeast, appears to be down right now. To whet your appetite, here’s just a small sample of the tidbits of Walker-”wisdom” you’ll hear:
Walker: Oh yeah, but who watches that? I went on “Morning Joe” this morning. I like it because I just like being combative with those guys, but, uh. You know they’re off the deep end.
“Koch”: Joe—Joe’s a good guy. He’s one of us.
Walker: Yeah, he’s all right. He was fair to me…[bashes NY Senator Chuck Schumer, who was also on the program.]
“Koch”: Beautiful; beautiful. You gotta love that Mika Brzezinski; she’s a real piece of ass.
Made you look. ;o) — Not THOSE kind of “adult conversations.”
I’m talking about the kind of adult conversations the GOP both ran on last fall, and came into power in the House last week claiming they wanted to have. Here’s Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) using the phrase referring to Medicare “reform” last November, just before the election. Here’s newly-minted chair of the House Budget Committee and fiscal scold Paul Ryan, chiding Florida Democrat Debbie Wasserman-Schultz for not having an adult conversation last September, in a joint TV interview on CNN. And, of course, perhaps the reason for the start of all this repetition of the phrase “adult conversation,” here’s the guy who chose a GOP cocktail party fundraiser over accepting a seat on Air Force One to accompany the President to pay his respects publicly to the victims of last week’s shooting, John Boehner, leaking to the press last fall that he, if elected Speaker, would begin an “adult conversation” about debt and fiscal responsiblity, blah blah blah…
After the shootings last week in Arizona, a lot of people have been reassessing their priorities, as well as taking another look over the landscape of political interaction in light of this tragedy. Even if we conclude that there’s no demonstrably provable link between, say, Sarah Palin’s crosshairs or Rush Limbaugh’s bitter and frequently violent bombast and the uptick in political violence, many are concluding that a return to greater civility, indeed – as the President so eloquently pointed out Wednesday night – greater caring about each other and remembering we are all Americans, might be exactly what’s needed to turn things around, in many senses. You know, an adult conversation, with a sober assessment of the problems and a reduction or elimination of vitriol, name-calling and ad hominem attacks. Almost sounds like the GOP might have been ahead of the curve on this one, if they play their cards right.
Except, of course, not so much – as you probably already guessed. Ezra Klein points out in today’s Washington Post, that HR 2 – literally, only the second bill the new congress takes up (in the House), is STILL called “The Repealing The Job-Killing Health-Care Law Act.” Really. This, even after the CBO stated that repealing last year’s health care bill would increase the deficit dramatically, costing us more money. Ezra runs down exactly why the GOP came up with their term “job-killing,” but let’s just say you won’t be surprised to learn that it twists the truth almost beyond recognition to take what the CBO actually said about employment and end up referring to that as “job-killing.” Read Klein’s piece yourself if you want the details. But, as Klein points out in a broader context: “job-killing” health care bill? Really, GOP? What was that you were saying about “adult conversations,” GOP? Was that somehow in the grand tradition of all previous house bills with the word “killing” in the title? Hmm?
These people are not serious, folks. They never were. Not about deficit reduction, not about health care, not about jobs. It’s important to point out trivial or petty-seeming points like this (the title of a bill, after all, really doesn’t affect its contents at all), because it serves to remind people of that, in a way that dull policy debates also can, but only if one has the time, the proper background, and the stomach to sit through them. Hearing the man who is third in line for the Presidency in the event of a tragedy repeatedly refer, on cue, like one of Luntz’s Pavlov’s dogs, to the first substantive bill his coalition introduces in the new legislative year as “The Job-Killing….” is one of the best ways to remind the public of the GOP’s unseriousness and deep, deep childishness and spite.
Via the Real News Network comes a visceral reminder of just how out-of-whack was our foreign policy towards other countries regarding the “war-on-terror” was during the Bush administration.
Remember how the arguments for war against Iraq evolved over time? By the time the invasion had happened – and certainly by the time that it became clear WMD were never going to be found in Iraq except for the crumbling remnants of what remained from pre-1990 days – the Bush administration and its supporters had thrown virtually any and every argument for the war against the wall that they thought was likely to stick. But in the beginning, it wasn’t just – as supporters now often like to portray – a sort of “everything, all the time” argument against Hussein and the ruling Ba’ath regime. The first argument was – as anyone alive and cognizant during that time remembers – weapons of mass destruction: WMD. Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz admitted later that this rationale had been intentionally selected from the scruffy host of other reasons to attack Iraq because it would be the most believable as well as the most likely to motivate a population (and a congress) which was otherwise leery of foreign military entanglements since Vietnam to rally in support of the administration’s war plans. The consideration of whether it was actually true was significantly further down the list of the reasons that the initial war cry of “WMD” and mushroom cloud-shaped smoking guns was chosen as the primary justification for attacking Iraq.
While this strategy succeeded in convincing the congress and the American people that going to war in Iraq (again) was a necessary step to take, it became problematic when, as many knowledgeable observers predicted prior to the war, no WMD were found in Saddam’s warehouses or his palaces or indeed anywhere in Iraq. As the months went by and the insurgency began to make the invasion of Iraq seem like a worse and worse idea in hindsight, the inconvenience of the fact that the administration’s initial rationalization for invading a sovereign nation had turned out to be flatly untrue became more and more glaring.
So, like all good stage managers, the Bush administration and their supporters returned to their motley grab-bag of assorted other reasons why it was still a good idea, in retrospect, to have invaded Iraq, spent uncounted billions of American taxpayer dollars and what would later amount to well over 4,000 American lives and (literally) uncounted Iraqi lives, both military and civilian. One can almost imagine the cabinet-level principals of the Bush administration, hunkered down in the summer of 2002 with the President and VP in the situation room, spitballing reasons for invading Iraq with a huge whiteboard and everyone just raising their hands when they came up with another one, just like any brainstorming session in any corporate meeting room across America. Once the WMD rationale began to fall apart, they dug out their notes from this spitballing session and, using their usual organs of dissemination in the popular press (Tim Russert, et. al.), began furiously insisting that there had always been many reasons for war with Iraq, not just WMD.
In the wake of the spectacular failure to find WMD, which was the next most highly-touted reason for going to war in Iraq? Well, a number of them were tried, actually, but the one most regularly returned to and stressed (because it was conclusively proven; no fear of another “oopsie”) was that Saddam was a bad man who had tortured people – even his own people – during the Iran/Iraq war and since then. Drawing themselves up to their full, haughty (if somewhat tarnished) height, the Bush administration harrumphed to the press and the rest of the world (who by now were wondering what, exactly, the hell we were doing in Iraq anymore) that if we’d only been paying attention at the time, we’d know that the real reason they’d wanted to invade Iraq was that Saddam Hussein was an evil tyrant who used torture! Against his own people! He had rape rooms! He shot people!
Er, yeah.
Now watch this drive, as President Bush himself used to say. The video below is a speech by former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, back in October of last year. Uzbekistan? Most people still are pretty fuzzy about where that even IS (as ambassador Murray himself admits even he was, when called personally by Prince Charles to be appointed ambassador to the place) let alone what relationship the country might have to the Iraq war debacle. The answer, in strategic terms relative to Iraq, is “not a lot.” But in terms of ideological consistency, the answer would be “a great deal.” While Uzbekistan isn’t near Iraq and had little to do with that disastrous war, it is quite close to Afghanistan, and in the wake of 9/11, it became seen within the Bush administration as a key country, both geographically (militarily) and regional-influence-wise, to America’s anti-terror efforts in southwest Asia. Shortly after 9/11, from Uzbekistan’s leader, dictator Islam Karimov, the United States secured a key goal: an airbase called K2 in the country to use as a hub to refuel airplanes, and to transport materiel into the Afghanistan theater of operations. In 2005, the Uzbek government rescinded the offer of use of their airbase at K2, ordering the Americans out within 180 days. Although no official reason was given by the Uzbeks, the Bush administration immediately began to claim that the eviction notice had stemmed from the Bush administration’s rather tepid but still noticeable push-back against the Uzbek government over the news of the regime having intentionally gunned down at least 170 dissidents at a rally in Andijan in August, 2005.
While undeniably awful – and proof that the Uzbek regime was a ham-handed, thuggish state whose methods were Stalinist at best – the reality of the matter is that it was the Uzbeks – not the Bush administration – who chose to scale back relations and rescind the use of the K2 airbase. Had they not done so, it seems entirely likely (based upon the Bush administration’s own chiding, wrist-slapping response to the massacre) that Washington would have simply kept the agreement – beneficial as it was for their Afghanistan war efforts – in place, using diplomatic channels only to express their (mild) displeasure with such internal atrocities within Uzbekistan. Since the Uzbek government did decided to expel the Americans – likely due to their conclusion that they could achieve greater regional influence through realignment with Russia – we’ll never know what steps the Bush administration might have taken with respect to Tashkent and Karimov in the wake of the Andijan massacre.
But if the administration and their supporters’ howlings about Hussein’s tyrannical regime of torture in Iraq can be used as any guide – and it should be thusly used – the Bush administration should have immediately severed ties with Uzbekistan. Would they have? Watch UK diplomat Craig Murray’s speech below, and you decide. On the day the Andjian massacre happened, the Bush administration already knew that the Karimov regime was a) communist, b) had literally boiled dissidents alive (do not click that link unless you are strong of stomach; extremely graphic photos), and c) had been listed by various international organizations (and even our own State Department) as a severe violator of human rights. Using the Bush administration’s own reasoning for not just the censure of, but the expenditure of billions of dollars and thousands of lives worth of US blood and treasure to actually INVADE and occupy Iraq, it’s quite clear what the Bush administration’s response to the dictatorial and tyrannical regime of Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan should have been. Of course, it wasn’t. Watch Craig Murray run it down:
In public, opinions on the appropriateness of Mr. Rangel’s punishment were varied, ranging from hard-right NY Republican Peter King’s urging that “his colleagues to ‘step back’ and reconsider. ‘Let us apply the same standard of justice to Charlie Rangel that has been applied to everyone else, and that all of us would want applied to ourselves’,” to the NY Times own, somewhat stuffy endorsement of Rangel’s fate on its editorial pages. But even though Peter King’s surprising defense of Rangel is probably best read not as a high-minded vote of support for a colleague with whom he certainly disagrees on political issues more often than not, but rather as a craven appeal to colleagues to remember that they, too, may be in that same dock one day…and wouldn’t they want to be let off easy, not even King was (publicly, anyway) calling for the OCE to be dismantled or weakened.
Yes, ethics trials and votes like Rangel’s bring out some of the worst displays of behavior among congresspeople: hypocrisy (attacking someone on the other side for something you’d work to excuse someone on your own side) and sanctimony (adopting a “we’re a righteously, ethical body here, and I’m shocked, SHOCKED to see…”) being two of the worst examples. But the spectacle of the nearly unanimously Democratic CBC hinting openly about working with the incoming Republican House majority to gut or destroy a good-government panel is beyond the pale even by the low expectations we have of congressional behavior during such ethics trials.
Quick, what’s the one thing that’s been almost entirely lacking over the past two years (other than the perennial answer: Democrats’ spine, LOL)? I’ll give you a hint: it’s also the one thing the President has inexplicably been spending ever-more of his political capital attempting to capture, each time the GOP, Lucy-like, pulls the football away from in front of his outstretched foot yet again. Got it now? It’s bipartisanship, of course. What with Republican obstructionism and filibustering, there has been virtually no genuine bipartisanship since Barack Obama took office. Five separate Republican former Secretaries of State took to the nation’s editorial pages over the past few days, urging Jon Kyl to stop playing tax-cut obstructionist politics with the new START treaty…yet still the GOP obstructs and there is no bipartisanship.
Just let one of the exalted members of the elite, privileged club known as congress get their wrist slapped, though (censure, while it may be personally humiliating, does not in any way remove privileges from the congressperson being thusly punished), and suddenly we see the disgusting spectacle of liberal black Democrats reaching across the aisle in a grand, oily, eagerly returned kumbaya-hug with hard-right Republicans like Peter King and John Boehner. When it’s one of their own “distinguished colleagues” who might get his wings clipped a little bit (no matter how well-justified said clipping might be), boy howdy! Just sit back and watch the bipartisanship fly! Mother Jones:
Until recently, the most vocal opponents of such ethics reforms were Republicans, who argued that the new procedures were onerous and vindictive (my note: after the Delay/Abramoff/Ney/Cunningham/Safavian/etc ethical scandals of the previous administration, go figure, LOL). But some of the OCE’s fiercest Democratic critics now suggest that their colleagues shouldn’t be afraid to stand with the GOP to oppose the office. “I don’t think it’s a partisan issue, it’s an institutional one,” said Clay. “It’s an issue that you need to be courageous on.” Another CBC member, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), also acknowledged that Republicans had reasonable criticisms of the panel. “It’s not just the black caucus that is concerned about the investigatory power of this committee,” he said. “It’s a number of others, including Republicans… CBC members have been the victims of it, but others understand that they too can be victimized. It’s not just a CBC problem.”
(emphasis mine) – Like how it’s an issue that they need to be courageous on, NOT in the “we need to courageously prosecute ethics violations, even of our friends, and let the chips fall where they may” kind of way, but in the “we congresspeople need to ‘courageously’ band together to destroy this threat to our continued graft” kind of way? Yeah, me neither.
On the plus side, I guess it’s good to know that there ARE still issues on which genuine bipartisan consensus between oft-fractious, warring Democrats and Republicans is still possible. I’m just revolted at the thought that this is the issue that’s important enough to these solons to cause them to set aside petty partisan squabbling. If this is as good as it gets in congress, we’re in more trouble than we thought.
At least, not to me. After the long-ish post regarding Tom Delay below, I realized that it’s been some time since he was in the forefront of (or in fact anywhere near) the national political conversation, while someone who is very much still a part of it undergoes his own ethics trial right now, unfolding as we speak. Of course, I’m talking about Charlie Rangel, the 21-term(!) congressman from New York (Harlem), who’s been in the crosshairs of an ethics investigation for nearly two years now. I don’t bring Rangel’s ethics violations up to draw a false dichotomy of “everybody does it equally.” They don’t. Tom Delay’s violations, while farther back in time and thus less immediately interesting, were almost certainly of a more serious degree than anything Rangel was just convicted of, primarily because of Delay’s leadership position in the house, but also due to the nature of the accusations against Delay.
Nonetheless, the happenstance of having a relatively high-profile, long-time Democratic congressman going down on ethics charges at the same time as things seem to be moving more rapidly in the Delay case underscores that obviously, ethics violations are not strictly the province of any one party, group or person. Even more to the point, the juxtaposition underscores that ethics is not (in reality) and should not be thought of nor dealt with as a partisan issue. Good government, transparent government, is something we all should want, whether it’s you and I out here in relatively-backwater blogistan, or the people who actually do hold and wield real power in the halls of congress. It’s clearly time for Charlie Rangel to go, just as it was clear to me years ago – well before his actual indictment – that it was time for Tom Delay to go as well…for very similar reasons. Let’s hope that in the future, we can set aside the urge to circle the wagons and make excuses when it’s one of our own (which, to their credit, the Democratic-run house ethics committee seems not to be doing with Rangel), or go into simple “attack mode” when it’s one of the “other team’s” guys caught in the ethical dragnet. Maybe that way, we’ll get more of what everyone – at least in the abstract – claims to want: more honest and ethical government. And, for crying out loud, let’s press congress to put some actual teeth into punishments for conviction on ethics violations?
The committee has finished its public meeting and will go behind closed doors. Staff counsel has recommended Rangel be censured for breaking ethics rules.
Censure? Please.
(updated to add):
The other thing I forgot to mention here is that while Tom Delay’s violations quite likely had more of an impact and were “worse,” comparatively, one of the jaw-dropping things about the Rangel case is that, in the midst of all this, while things were coming to a head, Rangel was reelected this month in what was (both before and after the election) widely considered a Republican “wave” year by 80% of his constituents in his Harlem district. That’s disgusting, but far from unique, and it’s possibly the most-important piece of information to mull in this whole ethics issue. If you polled a random sample of voters with only one question: are you in favor of ethical behavior in the nation’s elected leaders, the results would likely be in the 90%+ range.
Put that abstractly, almost no one will admit to being in favor of UNethical behavior. And yet popular politicians, again and again, are re-elected by their constituents even after their convictions on serious ethics violations. I don’t know if I think that’s just a product of the electorate’s cynicism (“they all do it, so what’s the difference”) or hometown favoritism (“he may be a scumbag, but he’s our scumbag, by golly!”), or possibly even a lack of awareness on the part of many voters. But whatever the reason or reasons, I’d suggest that if we – that 90%+ of us who would answer abstractly that sure, we’d like to see ethical politicians – don’t stop rewarding unethical behavior by returning the violators/criminals to office as if nothing had happened, then we might as well be dropping pennies in a fountain and merely wishing for ethical politicians, for all the good it’s going to do us. Only when each of us can look to our OWN hometown favorites dispassionately enough to recognize that if we don’t like bad behavior in other people’s politicians, we have to have the guts and the wisdom to give our own the boot if they get convicted of the same, will we be able to begin to stop the rot. Only then might it sink in to the average congresscritter’s head that if (s)he screws around with the public trust (s)he’s been given, it’s curtains for him/her. Without that as a starting point, there’s simply no real pressure on our elected officials to behave ethically.
A blog dedicated to the notion that, when it comes to politics, it's just got to be better to light one small candle than to keep shooting in the dark.
This blog consists of the personal political maunderings of, well, me. The term Post Tenebras Lux is Latin, meaning "after darkness, light." It was originally the motto of the Protestant Reformation*. And although this blog is not in any way based in or concerning either Christianity or religion in general, I shamelessly horked the Calvinists' motto because I love the notion of progress being akin to the collective struggle to awaken from a great darkness...
* Update: Apparently, as of April, 2013, Post Tenebras Lux is now also the title of a reasonably well-received movie).
Hey, #GOP - call your reps and Senators and tell them to put our money where their mouths are on embassy security: nyti.ms/19bf8zh • written 16 hours ago
