The Opinion Mill

One of the quickest ways to determine if someone is a dolt is to ask if he celebrates Tax Freedom Day. If he says “Yes,” then there is a distant possibility he may have one or two opinions or arguments worth taking seriously, but the preponderance of evidence is against him.

Since most grownups understand that a densely populated state in the 21st century can’t be run like a 16th century farming village, and that a large amount of government guidance and regulation is required simply to keep things from spinning off into chaos, the idea of government as an evil outside force that exists only to take money from people and spend it carries little force. Or it should, at any rate.

One of our New Jersey columnists tries to explain it in terms even a Republican can understand:

The notion that government taxes too much and spends too much money is hardly a unique political position. Republicans and conservative groups invented “Tax Freedom Day” to dramatize the issue.

So, you see the point. New Jersey residents spend more than four months just making enough money to pay their taxes. That means that government must be really awful. That’s what boosters of “Tax Freedom Day” want you to believe: it’s all the fault of Big Bad Government.

But the logic of all this falls apart very quickly.

First things first: as much as people hate paying taxes, the notion that people work until May just to pay the government ignores the myriad of services all of us get from government. Some of the conservative zealots out there may snicker at that, but one must assume they like driving on highways, or riding on airplanes that meet government safety standards.

It’s true that some people use more government services than others. But whether it’s municipal, state or federal, just about everyone benefits from government services every day.

Do your kids go to public school? A majority of them do, of course. Do you ride a train to work?

So, the notion that people are working for the government and no one else for more than four months a year is sheer nonsense. That very same government is providing them with needed services,

Of course, most Republicans understand this just fine, though their party affiliation requires them to pretend otherwise. These are, after all, the same people who publicly declare “government doesn’t work” while privately they work the government. They may call May 7 Tax Freedom Day, but on the Republican calendar, every day is Tax Tantrum Day.

When neocon warwhore William Kristol suggested that the New York Times be charged with treason for exposing some bit of Bush administration malfeasance, he was making himself part of a long, dishonorable line of scoundrels. Maybe he was just feeling nostalgic for the days when Eugene V. Debs (above), the firebrand Socialist leader and political candidate, was thrown into prison and his stripped of his right to vote in 1920 for the crime of criticizing the draft and America’s involvement in World War I.

That blot on America (in this case, I mean the jailing of Debs, not Kristol) is the subject of Ernest Freeberg’s new book Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent. As Freeberg points out, the uproar over the Debs case created a national coalition of labor leaders, writers and political activists that eventually gave rise to the American Civil Liberties Union. Read some of the rhetoric directed against Debs by the government and war-supporters, then compare it with the slime still being hurled at critics of the Iraq calamity, and you might feel a little chill of recognition.

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You say you don’t want to waste your time reading David Horowitz’s nonsensical wingnut books? That’s okay – turns out Horowitz himself doesn’t want to waste his time writing them.

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If you’re a parent of a young child, you’re probably having a hard time explaining the Bush administration to your kids. Fortunately, there is now a children’s book, Young Dick Cheney: Great American, will help you enlighten your kids on the origins of the biggest snake in the Bush herpetarium. The authors will be speaking to all comers June 15 at the Firedoglake Book Salon.

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In reviewing Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, George F. Will churns the old culture war buttermill while claiming that the culture wars begun in the Nixon era no longer exist. “Today a woman and an African-American are competing relatively civilly for the right to run for president against the center-right — more center than right — senator who occupies the seat once held by Goldwater,” Will sniffs. “Whoever wins will not be president of Nixonland.” As if Will’s fellow travelers on the Great Wingnut Way haven’t been doing their best to paint Barack Obama as a Sixties-style black nationalist, or Hillary as a bra-burning feminist who will sap America’s manhood!

Will himself fluffs up a bit of Vietnam resentment by taking Perlstein’s dismissal of the South Vietnamese Army: “Calling South Vietnam’s army ‘a joke’ is not historical analysis, it is an unworthy dismissal of men who fought and died for more than a decade.” For anyone who remembers the way the ARVN turned tail and ran, trampling civilians in their haste to get out of the country, as soon as American support was withdrawn may just conclude that Perlstein was being too kind.

But Will knows the old knife-in-the-back myth remains as potent as ever on the right, and by evoking it during the course of his review, he scores a winger hat trick: he subtly links Perlstein to those legendary hippies who disdained and slandered the military during the Vietnam War, he distorts the nature of the corruption-sodden South Vietnamese regime, and he provides a talking point that the likes of Sean Hannity can use to dismiss Nixonland, to the extent that they notice it at all. That might seem like a lot of manure to stuff into a single sentence, but where there’s a Will, there’s a way.

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Larry Bartels will be talking up his new book Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age at the TPM Cafe Book Club.

Brendan Nyhan and Josh Patashnik are pondering the question of what happens to Joe Lieberman if the Democrats expand their Senate majority. Let him continue caucusing with the Democrats? Tell him to flake off and see if he stomps off to join the Republicans? I’m still trying to decide if Patashnik’s argument for keeping Holy Joe in the caucus should be filed under Thinks Too Much or Not Enough:

The question that needs to be asked, though, is this: Is Joe Lieberman the type of vindictive, thin-skinned individual who would be likely to cast aside his longstanding moderate-to-liberal record on most domestic issues in order to join Republican filibusters and make life miserable for Democrats in retaliation for their snubbing him? I think the answer is quite possibly yes, and that’s a very good reason for biting the bullet and putting up with his shenanigans until 2012.

Lieberman has endorsed John McCain and called Barack Obama a Marxist. If he does go over to the dark side in name as well as deed, that’ll just make it easier to evict him from the Senate in a few years. If the party leadership had any sense, it would be looking into the possibility of a recall movement in Connecticut.

This Sunday, HBO is showing Recount, a docudrama about the hijacking of the presidency in 2000. Laura Dern plays Congresswoman Ring-a-Ding Ding:

Director Jay Roach (previously known for Meet the Parents and Austin Powers films) says Democrats who hear about the film “always” ask him, “Can’t you change the ending?”

Despite his prankish film background, he says Recount is “not a comedy at all” and does not feature any new catch-phrases such as “yeah, baby, yeah.”

As far as he knows, Al Gore has not seen the film yet but one of the key characters, Ron Klain, a lawyer for the Democrats has, and he “likes it,” even though it’s “kind of painful for the real people to relive it,” Roach observes.

Deborah Solomon, the interviewer, claims that the film is “very fair, except, perhaps” in its casting. The Dems are more appealing than the Republicans, she asserts, but Roach challenges her by saying that Tom Wilkinson, who plays James Baker, “is a very handsome man.”

Laura Dern gets the plum part - playing Florida “decider” Katherine Harris, smothered in makeup. Roach explains: “There was a rumor that someone told Harris that when you’re on TV, your makeup washes out so don’t be shy with those eyelashes and with that lip color.”

It ain’t just Democrats who wish the Crime of the New Century had been foiled, but that’s all blood under the bridge now — Iraqi blood, to be precise. Nevertheless, we at The Opinion Mill hope that future Republican sleazeballs can approximate the whole Joan Collins in Dynasty thing that Congresswoman Ring-a-Ding Ding worked so well.

This snap of Josh Brolin as George W. Bush in the upcoming Dubya biopic from Oliver Stone is worthy of study. The big question about the film is whether it will portray Bush as basically evil or basically stupid. There is a whole spectrum of shadings between those two poles, and I’m afraid that Stone doesn’t have the savvy to capture them.

This image, for example, suggests stupidity will prevail: this version of Dubya looks like a guy who’s just taken a dump and can’t decide if he should wipe himself or start shining his shoes. That’s all wrong. The current occupant of the White House — not the president, never call him that around me — is a dolt in many ways, but he’s also got loads of low animal cunning and a bottomless sense of entitlement.

To contrast him with Richard Nixon (the last subject of one of Stone’s historical fantasias), I would say that Nixon acted like a man who wanted to get even with the world, while Dubya acts like a man who wants to use the world like a ten-dollar hooker and then swagger off to church.

It’s tempting and maybe even cathartic for people to write Bush off as the world’s luckiest village idiot, but the last eight years have not been the work of such a fool. Remember, folks, he took America’s measure, gauged its weaknesses and then went to work. George W. Bush decided to play directly to everything that was crappy, lazy and ugly about America, and it paid off for him in every important way. He lied us into a war, corrupted the Constitution and looted the treasury, all the while smirking in the knowledge that the corporate-lobotomized press wouldn’t even raise its voice. At the end of his term, George W. Bush is going home instead of going to jail. He wins.

We are now in the position of a mugging victim who must wait for his head to clear while hoping the injuries won’t be permanent, and then try to figure out how to avoid similar victimization in the future. Making a movie about a drawling dummy with daddy issues might be temporarily satisfying, but it won’t help us in the real task of recovering from the Great Bush Bust-Out.

Spencer Ackerman takes in the baffling ways of the Iraqis, which so confound conservative analysts:

If an unaccountable band of politically-connected soldiers-of-fortune shot my mother as she was trying to flee from a traffic circle, and the State Department offered me $5,000 in order to make the incident go away, I would not only be angry, I would be exploring my options for revenge. You don’t have to be an Iraqi to understand this.

Matt Yglesias does his bit to help:

It’s really bizarre how, in the context of war, totally normal attributes of human behavior become transformed into into mysterious cultural quirks of the elusive Arab. I recall having read in the past that because Arabs are horrified of shame, it’s not a good idea to humiliate an innocent man by breaking down his door at night and handcuffing him in front of his wife and children before hauling him off to jail. Now it seems that Arabs are also so invested in honor that they don’t like it when mercenaries kill their relatives.

Of course, nobody could have anticipated that Iraqis would be upset about such things.

David Horowitz vies with Dick Morris for the title of most prolific wingnut author nobody bothers to read. Now it appears that Horowitz has taken it a step further: He doesn’t even bother to write the books nobody bothers to read.

As Lance Mannion points out, the biggest problem with a floor fight at the Democratic National Convention would be the media twinkies assigned to — how do they put it? — “cover” the story. Wide-open conventions used to be familiar things back in the day, but nowadays the likes of Tim Russert expect and prefer national party conventions to be quadrennial pageants with the spontaneity of Noh plays. Kind of like the Miss American competition, only with hairy legs.

What would look like democracy in all its glory in action to political junkies like me would look to most normal people like a great big sleep-depriving mess.  And the convention is not going to be covered on TV by the likes of Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley, who would have enjoyed the fun and been careful and smart about explaining what was going on down there on the floor and backstage.  It’s going to be covered by Tim Russert and Brian Williams and Charles Gibson and the gasbags from Fox News and MSNBC, all of whom will gleefully tell us how bad all this looks and how it shows the Democrats at their divided, divisive, disorganized, discombobulated, indecisive, internecine worst.

A week later they’ll be up in Minneapolis “reporting” on how orderly and united the Republicans are and how the smooth running of their convention shows that the GOP is still the party of the stern daddies who know how to keep their kids in line while those indulgent mommies in the Democratic party let their spoiled brats run wild and how it proves that the Maverick and Commander is in COMMAND.

It’s too bad that the conventions have become nothing more than a week-long free campaign ad for the candidates, but that’s the way it is and it’s not going to change.  I want our Obama ad to be every bit as pretty as their McCain ad will be.

The messy outbreak of democracy now going on with the Democrats is exactly the kind of thing that frightens and confuses media twinkies. All that procedural stuff to master! All those names to remember! And no guarantee of good visuals! How can the networks expect to keep people in their seats, ready to see the next Kaopectate commercial, if the party can’t provide good visuals at the top of each news cycle?    

Time to hunt around for my VHS copy of The Best Man, based on Gore Vidal’s play about two candidates, one slithering (Cliff Robertson), the other dithering (Henry Fonda), duking it out for the party’s presidential nomination. Maybe MoveOn should organize a mass DVD burning drive to get copies of the flick into the hands of TV journalists, if only to remind them of those halcyon days when newscasters weren’t judged by the quality of their haircuts, but by the quality of the brains under those haircuts.   

This Greg Anrig article about the rise and fall of school voucher programs, one of the winger movement’s most cherished hobbyhorses, is a must-read. As Anrig says, vouchers were the brainchild of libertarian economist Milton Friedman and it appears they will not long outlive him:

. . . in recent months, almost unnoticed by the mainstream media, the school voucher movement has abruptly stalled. Some stalwart advocates of vouchers have either repudiated the idea entirely or considerably tempered their enthusiasm for it. Exhibit A is “School Choice Isn’t Enough,” an article in the winter 2008 City Journal (the quarterly published by the conservative Manhattan Institute) written by the former voucher proponent Sol Stern. Acknowledging that voucher programs for poor children had “hit a wall,” Stern concluded: “Education reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories, derived from the study of economic activity, that don’t produce verifiable results in the classroom.” His conversion has triggered an intense debate in conservative circles. The center-right education scholar Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a longtime critic of public school bureaucracies and teachers unions, told the New York Sun that he was sympathetic to Stern’s argument. In his newly published memoirs, Finn also writes of his increasing skepticism that “the market’s invisible hand” produces improved performance on its own. Howard Fuller, an African American who was the superintendent of schools in Milwaukee when the voucher program was launched there, and who received substantial support from the Bradley Foundation and other conservative institutions over the years, has conceded, “It hasn’t worked like we thought it would in theory.”

School vouchers always made more sense as a union-busting tactic, and a blow to the teachers unions that are loyal supporters of Democratic candidates, than as any meaningful attempt at educational reform. Anrig documents that while voucher advocates were able to win publicity points by claiming they could work miracles with downtrodden urban school districts, they found themselves faced with resentment and resistance when they peddled their snake-oil outside the cities:

In 1997, the conservative writer Michael Gerson (who would go on to be George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter) took a tour of small-town Indiana when the state was considering a voucher program. He found that its predominantly conservative population prized its public schools (mostly because of their proud basketball tradition) and resented the suggestion that these institutions were failing their students. Over the years, various proposals for vouchers in Indiana have never progressed very far. “Conservative politicians running in this state quickly find that criticizing public education—or suggesting that some people might want to opt out—is like spitting on the school colors,” Gerson wrote in U.S. News & World Report, noting that in 1997, support for voucher programs was higher in the liberal Northeast than the more conservative Midwest.

I’ll say this much for the voucher pushers: unlike the backwater theocrats and frauds who continue to push abstinence-only curricula despite abundant evidence of its failure, many voucher proponents seem to have recognized the failure of the inherently bad idea and have moved on to charter schools — an approach with its owen set of problems. Not every conservative belongs to the “clap-louder-for-Tinkerbell” school. That’s a slender ray of hope for the future.

A substitue teacher in Land’O Lakes, Florida, has been fired because a magic trick he performed for his students led to a charge of wizardry. Yep, wizardry.

Down in Jesus-Whooper land, nothing is more frightening than a teacher who tries to keep his students entertained and attentive. If he’d just stood at the head of the class and droned along with the lesson plan, most likely he’d be considered tenure-track material.

If this village witch doctor stuff is the basis for decision making in Land’O Lakes, I suggest the teacher wait for the next solar eclipse, then storm into the school administration building and threaten to extinguish the sun with his magic unless they reinstate him as a full-time teacher. These rubes deserve to be taken for everything they’ve got.