Jonathan Weiler2013-05-25T19:33:33-04:00Jonathan Weilerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=jonathan-weilerCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Jonathan WeilerGood old fashioned elbow grease.Rush Limbaugh, Gays, Christians, Tebow and a World Turned Upside Downtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31944702013-05-01T14:23:13-04:002013-05-01T14:23:32-04:00Jonathan Weilerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/
Limbaugh, the one-time ESPN commentator, didn't comment on Tebow's performance on the field or whether he is fit to play quarterback in the NFL since that is, evidently, beside the point. Instead, he used Jason Collins' announcement on Monday that he is gay as an opportunity to feel sorry for himself and stoke resentment among his followers that Christians are somehow persecuted in a country that has among the very highest rates of church-going and Christian religious affiliation of any wealthy country in the world and in which every single President in American history (and most Supreme Court Justices, Senators and so on) has been Christian (idiocy from some about the current President's religiosity notwithstanding). I know, I know -- sometimes, during the Christmas season, people are greeted with a "happy holidays" rather than "merry Christmas," which is, admittedly, tantamount to Christians being thrown to the lions in ancient Rome.
So Tebow yesterday was the vehicle for Limbaugh to blabber on how about how hard it is to be Christian in a Christian-dominated culture and society and to lament that an historically persecuted group somehow holds all the power in society -- in this case gays.
This is, of course, not new territory for Limbaugh. His Tebo comments brought back memories of his short-lived stint at ESPN in 2003, which ended after Limbaugh claimed that then Eagles' quarterback Donovan McNabb was getting the benefit of the media's "social concern" for a black quarterback and was receiving undue praise as a result of his race.
In light of Limbaugh's antics yesterday, here's a friendly reminder about how Limbaugh goes about bathing himself in self-pity by inverting reality. I wrote this in early 2005 about the McNabb episode, on the eve of Super Bowl XXXIX, when McNabb's Eagles were getting ready to play the Patriots:
According to Media Matters, Rush recently fielded a phone call in which he acknowledged that McNabb had had a great 2004 season, but stood by his comments, made early in the 2003 season. Here's what Limbaugh said in 2003:
"He's overrated...I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well...There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team."
A firestorm erupted after this comment, prompting ESPN to end the short-lived Limbaugh experiment. ESPN's cravenness aside (what did they expect him to do on the program?), the implication of Limbaugh's claim is this: that white quarterbacks have not gotten undue credit for the play of their team's defenses....that unlike blacks, white men sink or swim on their merits. Is this true with regard to quarterbacks?
Let's start by talking about John Shaffer. Shaffer was the quarterback at Penn State University in 1986 when that school won its second national championship, after upsetting the University of Miami in the Fiesta Bowl on New Year's night, 1987. Shaffer was lionized (sorry for the pun) for his grit and his winning ways, and it was common to hear people refer to the great won-loss records of his teams going back to the seventh grade. But, here's the dirty little secret about Shaffer: he sucked. Big time. For his college career, he completed fewer than half his passes and threw more interceptions than touchdowns. That's a frankly pathetic record for a quarterback at an elite school surrounded by future NFL players. In the championship game itself, Shaffer threw for 53 yards, a laughably low total. The reason that Penn State won was their defense, which was great all season and intercepted Miami's Heisman trophy winning quarterback, Vinny Testaverde, five times in the championship game. Shaffer, by the way, is white.
How about a couple of other examples? Tom Brady, now deified as the second coming of Joe Montana, won the most valuable player three years ago in Super Bowl XXXVI, the Patriots' first championship. Why? Well, Brady threw for 145 yards in that game. That's one of the lowest totals in Super Bowl history for a winning quarterback, and the second lowest in the last thirty years. True, Brady led the Patriots on a nice game-winning field goal drive in the final minute. But, the real story of the game was the Patriots' defense, which held the high-scoring St. Louis Rams to just 17 points. Brady, by the way, is also white. So is Jim McMahon, a good, tough QB who happened to lead the offense of the 1985 Chicago Bears, a team that had perhaps the most ferocious defense in football history; McMahon got credit as a "winner," of course, and as the heart, soul and leader of that team, though his statistical performances never put him among the NFL's elite quarterbacks. Let me assure you, there are many more examples to choose from.
Here's the point: quarterbacks have always gotten credit even when their performances were mediocre or worse but they happened to play on teams with great defenses.
For guys like Limbaugh, it's not slavery or Jim Crow that constitute among the greatest crimes in American history. No, it's the liberal response to those crimes that really imperils our civilization. From this warped historical perspective, it often follows that ill-informed, frankly cowardly race-baiting is dressed up as a courageous rejection of political correctness. The fact is that McNabb was a good quarterback when Limbaugh made his comments. Actually, as Salon.com's great sports columnist King Kaufman pointed out at the time, according to Football Prospectus, McNabb was the best QB in the NFL in 2002, using a purely statistical analysis that did not consider skin-color. But, the larger issue is that because of the nature of the sport, quarterbacks have often gotten credit for team performances that had little or nothing to do with their own talents. Limbaugh's fantasy quarterback meritocracy, like the larger white meritocracy he's certain existed before 1965 or so, is a canard. The only reason McNabb got singled out for the same treatment that white quarterbacks have always gotten is that he's Black. This isn't a "media" issue, as Limbaugh has maintained. It's a Limbaugh issue.
A couple of codas here. First, Brady has, of course, gone on to become one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time. That doesn't change the silliness of having awarded him the MVP in Super Bowl XXXVI (his MVP award for SB XXXVIII was well deserved). By the way, McNabb's last season in the NFL was 2011. He started six games for a terrible team that finished the year at 3-13 and was replaced mid-season by Christian Ponder. Had he qualified, McNabb would have finished in the middle of the pack in terms of quarterback rating, ahead of Joe Flacco and Andy Dalton. In other words, he was still a decent quarterback when, at age 35, no team in the NFL thought him good enough to play another down. This in a league in which there is a constant complaint about a lack of depth at the position. There are a lot of quarterbacks still drawing paychecks in the NFL whose performance is clearly inferior to McNabb's. My guess is that, were McNabb white and avowedly religious, Limbaugh would be using this as exhibit A for the unfair treatment of him and his kind.
It is true that we've come a long way as a society in rejecting the mindless prejudices that have long relegated gays to the closet, legally and socially. But it's a joke to argue, as Limbaugh does, that the Tim Tebows of the world are unfairly persecuted in comparison with the Jason Collins of the world. Yes, it's true that citing the bible as justification for spouting prejudice is far more likely these days to draw intense criticism. Get over it. If that's your biggest grievance -- that people might be mean to you when you say ignorant or hateful things -- you really don't have much to complain about.]]>President Obama -- Dancing With Himselftag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30860002013-04-15T14:31:52-04:002013-04-15T14:32:04-04:00Jonathan Weilerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/
Many critics have noted, however, that chained CPI is not a more accurate measure of changes in prices, particularly as the elderly experience them. Of course, if it weren't a cut in benefits, proposing it in the context of reducing government deficits would be nonsensical. And the administration's avowal that it would protect the most vulnerable recipients from the effects of the new measure would also be pointless if the new measure weren't actually hurting people in the first place. Finally, Social Security (the main target of the new CPI measure) -- and its current multi-trillion dollar surplus -- has no effect on the deficit. This surplus (the money in the trust fund in excess of current outlays) will disappear in a couple of decades. But when it does, Congress will either act to amend the funding structure of the program (if it doesn't sooner), or it will allow people's benefits to rise more slowly than they are currently set to rise, and those benefits will, in all cases, continue to rise faster than the rate of inflation.
There are issues to address here, but they have nothing to do with deficits. The impact of these cuts will, unsurprisingly, fall on the least well off. Dean Baker calculates that seniors who rely primarily on Social Security for their retirement income will experience a cut in their benefits three times larger in relative terms than the hit that wealthy Americans will take from the New Year's Day deal that allowed the top income tax rates to rise for those making more than $400,00 per year (another perverse effect of the new CPI measure is that it would push many Americans into higher tax brackets, disproportionately hurting middle class earners).
In policy terms, then, President Obama's proposal simply doesn't add up. The White House has argued that this is a political move, however. It's designed to signal the President's seriousness in tackling the country's deficit problems. As a percentage of GDP, our deficits have been declining dramatically for three years from their immediate post-crash peak in 2009 and all of the supposedly horrible effects of deficit spending, including runaway inflation and soaring interest rates, have failed to materialize. But the president's team insists that it is important to offer responsible, prudent plans going forward to bring into closer balance our revenues and expenditures. The White House has wanted to do this by a mix of spending cuts and tax increases. The Republicans, of course, adamantly oppose the latter. But the political logic of the proposal is based on faulty premises. One faulty premise is that if President Obama makes concessions, Republicans will be compelled to make some of their own. This flies in the face of everything we know about the Republican Party -- a political faction now substantially in thrall to extremists whose own base has made repeatedly clear that compromise is for weaklings. Furthermore, as has happened with Medicare since 2010, proposals by the president to rein in "entitlement" spending have not been met with equanimity by the GOP, but instead by attack ads decrying the president's willingness to throw seniors under the proverbial bus. That many of the very same people who supported those reductions in Medicare spending were also willing to attack the President for making them tells you everything you need to know about the integrity and reliability of the folks to whom Obama still insists on making concessions. And one key Republican has already begun test-driving the same arguments about Obama's proposed Social Security reductions.
Perhaps, some of the President's defenders say, he's not trying to win over Republicans at all. He knows they won't compromise. He is, therefore, trying to make the point, once and for all (because it hasn't, presumably, already been painfully obvious for years) that Republicans are unreasonable and can't be trusted to govern the country. Then the question arises: to what audience is he trying to make this pitch? Is it to independent-minded voters? If so, it strikes me as highly unlikely that, in a showdown of ads in 2014, "he tried to cut social security" is going to be less effective than "see, Obama tried to compromise and the Republicans wouldn't play along," even among such voters. Yes, polls show that people now think the deficit is an important problem (not a surprise given the endless drumbeat about this issue from elite media and the political classes more broadly including, of course, the president). Polls, however, show much more clearly that cutting social security is wildly unpopular across the political spectrum. So, if you think your proposals are actually a non-starter, why not do what Congressman Jerold Nadler and others have argued for -- propose a budget that aggressively takes up the need for job creation, argue for its merits and explain why the GOP's agenda is nothing more than willful obstruction that is harmful to ordinary Americans?
The president issued a memorandum last week concerning the sequester. It appears to take back most of the proposed military spending cuts, leaving on the chopping block primarily domestic programs that help the less well off. It's arguably a significant betrayal of the already deeply flawed logic and structure of the 2011 deficit deal. The president already threw away much of his leverage on New Year's Day when he agreed to make permanent the Bush tax cuts on individuals making between $250,000 and $400,000 a year. He has now categorically reneged on longstanding promises he'd made concerning Social Security. The putative political benefits to Democrats in all of this are exceedingly hard to discern. Laurence Lewis of Daily Kos summed up well the political illogic at play here:
When the best that can be said about the president's proposal is that it has no chance of being enacted, the truth about it is that it is an astonishing failure. When the confidence that bad policy will not be enacted is grounded in the certainty that the Republicans are too stupid and unhinged to accept "yes" for an answer, we have reached the point of political surrealism.
But if there's no coherent policy or political rationale, what explains the proposal? Maybe President Obama's target audience is the coterie of wealthy and well-connected insiders -- the very serious people from the pundit classes and high finance -- whose concerns diverge dramatically from those of ordinary Americans. Is this because he's concerned about fundraising? That seems unlikely, since he's not running for reelection. Perhaps it's become an ideological belief, a function of becoming too far removed from Americans who don't make hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars a year. Or of spending too much time listening to people who -- utterly lacking in self-reflection -- are convinced that only the middle class and the less well off need to rein in their spending and learn to live more modestly, prudently and wisely.
I have heard Obama defenders say for years that he's a really smart guy, so they trust him to do what's right -- that he's playing 12-dimensional chess and as the meme has it -- "he's got this." But can't one be a generally smart guy and still ultimately think some really dumb things? Maybe there is no clever end game. Or bigger picture. Maybe there's just a guy with a deluded notion that if so many Democrats dislike the idea, it must have some merit. Or that the government really is like a household. Or that this is what it means to stand above the partisan fray, to make good on the promise of his first moment in the national spotlight, in July of 2004. Not because this accomplishes anything. But because it's pleasing to his ear and, ultimately, he likes dancing with himself.]]>Rutgers Athletic Director Shows Little Concern for Athletes in Coach Abuse Fiascotag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30072592013-04-03T13:07:07-04:002013-04-03T13:07:14-04:00Jonathan Weilerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/
The pressing question now will be Pernetti's own future job status. In media appearances in the past 24 hours, including on WFAN in New York with Mike Francesa and with Jeremy Schaap on Outside the Lines, Pernetti spoke like someone more interested in covering his behind than in giving a forthright accounting of what happened. Most notably, Pernetti's professed concerns and priorities betrayed how low a priority he gave to the well-being of his athletes in all of this. Though it's long overdue, the sports media in general have woken up to the myriad inequities facing college athletes, especially in football and men's basketball where coaches, schools, sponsors and media make billions of dollars (and ADs at big-time programs do quite nicely as well), while the athletes themselves get relatively little in the bargain. But Pernetti's attempts to explain himself demonstrated the degree to which, when push comes to shove, the athletes are often an afterthought.
Pernetti told OTL that he knew of the allegations against Rice last July, because Eric Murdock, the former Rutgers basketball director of player development who was terminated or not renewed (depending on whose version of events you believe), told him of Rice's abuse of players at that time. However, Pernetti told OTL that he needed "proof" before he could take any action. It was in November that Pernetti was presented with the tape leading to the review resulting in Rice's suspension.
But when Pernetti spoke to Francesa yesterday afternoon, he denied what he admitted to OTL. Pernetti told Francesa, in response to a direct question, that Murdock "never came and spoke to me about any concerns he had." Later, when Francesa asked about this again, Pernetti said "he never came to complain to me about the head coach." Only the most charitable characterization of these evasions would be considered anything other than a lie. It's possible that Pernetti was saying that Murdock never complained while he was employed at the university (Murdock's employment ended there in July). But he certainly made no effort to clarify that to Francesa or his audience. He stated quite clearly that he took action as soon as "we were made aware" of the transgressions. But what Pernetti is referring to his first viewing of the tape, not the first time, he admitted to OTL, that Murdock raised the concerns.
In this matter, as in others, Pernetti appears to have been concerned, first and foremost, with minimizing the damage from the scandal, not acting in the best interests of the basketball players. Pernetti told Francesa "I am always trying to protect the interests and the reputation of the university" and later emphasized that his priority was "what gives us the ability to be effective going forward in men's basketball and more importantly what protects the university." Of course, that is part of his job. But it was revealing that at only one point in his 10-minute conversation with Francesa did he actually express specific concern for the players themselves. And that was in an obviously self-serving context near the end of the conversation. Francesa asked Pernetti whether he'd thought about releasing the tape in December, when he suspended Rice. Pernetti said: "We didn't release the tape in December because there's current and former student athletes on there, and I didn't want to create a negative situation for those guys... I was trying to protect their best interests." Francesa, who is sometimes a dogged and even incisive interviewer, was asleep at the wheel yesterday, so failed to ask basic follow-up questions, like: "how the hell does withholding the tape protect the interests of the players?"
On Mike and Mike this morning, Mike Greenberg noted that, among the problems with Rice's conduct was the relatively powerless position the players are in. They are being abused by a well-paid coach (whose actions were almost surely known to the AD already, even if he didn't see visual evidence of it until later) and their recourse is what, exactly? Transfer and sit out a year because they are trying to flee a complete jackass? Pernetti expressed disgust at Rice's conduct yesterday and insisted the coach had been held accountable, via a fine and three game suspension (here's a list, by the way, of infractions that resulted in three game suspensions for NCAA athletes, including failing to submit paperwork on time. Now that's accountability!). But Pernetti never really acknowledged that the coach had fundamentally and repeatedly abused his authority. In fact, and astonishingly, he kept referring to what Rice had done as a "first offense," as if Rice's abuses were a one-off event, rather than a repeated pattern of behavior over two years. And it's worth noting that the three games Rice sat out were against UAB, Howard and Rider, three easy home games in December against weak non-conference opponents, putting Rice back on the sidelines for the Big East opener against Syracuse in January. Not exactly a lethal blow to the program.
Rice was a goner as soon as the tape emerged. The fact that this was such a no-brainer is already strikes one and two against Pernetti's own judgment. But strike three was his own conduct yesterday. As people tried to make sense of why he thought it was OK for a documented serial abuser to keep coaching young athletes at Rutgers, Pernetti dissembled, side-stepped and evaded both responsibility and the truth. If the interests of the university include everything but the well-being of the athletes under the coach's charge, then maybe Pernetti's actions in December and subsequent attempts to explain them make sense. But if athletes well-being is anything more than an afterthought, Pernetti's conduct throughout and his performance yesterday were a disgrace.]]>The Sheer Folly of Trying to Compromise With Today's Republican Partytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29009722013-03-18T12:18:06-04:002013-05-18T05:12:01-04:00Jonathan Weilerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/
There is no plausible compromise in the offing now, because the Republican party is incapable of it.
I leave aside for now the wisdom of a compromise. The premise of all the grand bargain talk is that we need to do something dramaticnow about deficits or else. But the grand bargain devotees -- an assortment of wealthy deficit scolds, increasingly hysterical and incoherent pundits like Robert Samuelson and Beltway bloviators more broadly for whom the deficit issue is the one policy position that they can advocate for without compromising their own sense of political balance and neutrality -- have simply failed to explain clearly, despite endless opportunities, why we need to act on deficits now.
As Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, et al. have pointed out repeatedly, the pressing economic problems facing us are a sluggish economy and high unemployment. And reducing deficits will only exacerbate those problems. The presumed perils of more deficit spending -- rising interest rates and runaway inflation -- have simply not materialized.
But the president has seemed determined to strike a deal, including one that Alex Pareene has aptly described as "a compromise in which conservative policy is being offered in exchange for conservative support for a conservative policy." Because the Beltway punditocracy has failed, with few exceptions, to report on one of the central political developments of the past generation -- the GOP's transformation from a conservative party with extremist elements into an extremist party full stop -- it remains stuck in an increasingly irrelevant and destructive paradigm of "both sidesism." And because it is so stuck, it finds itself in the absurd position of blaming the highly malleable Obama for not being willing enough to capitulate to that extremism. That failed media paradigm also leaves DC political commentators unable to acknowledge and integrate into their thinking the fact that public opinion is evermore clearly opposed to the GOP's extremism on issue after issue (remember the amazing attempt by Politico's Dave Catanese to blame the furor over Todd Akin's unbelievable rape comments on... liberals?!)
I was about to write that Ryan's latest budget -- which, in defiance of all laws of ideological probability -- is even more extreme, out of touch, delusional and so forth than his previous budgets -- should have put to bed once and for all any plausible assertion that the GOP is capable of acting seriously or in good faith about such matters. But of course, the same could have been said about the Ryan budget of 2011 or 2012, or the utter absurdity of the Romney campaign's position on Medicare, in which it bashed Obama for precisely the "cuts" that Ryan budgets themselves endorse (or countless other examples). In a party replete with climate denialism, polling denialism, statistical denialism and so forth, why would anyone expect anything else? As I've noted before, in this era of polarization, the Republicans have moved dramatically farther to the right than the Democratic Party has to the left and a cavalcade of ideological fanatics and crackpot theories continues to hold sway at the highest reaches of the GOP.
Nothing has changed since the election on this front because the key sources of Republican intransigence remain in place. A decades long process of policy and demographic driven changes have left the party in the hands of a predominantly authoritarian base, which has intersected with structural political dynamics to ensure that while the party's national political fortunes continue to deteriorate, its ability to exploit its political advantages in the states and in House districts remains. The political, intellectual, ideological and policy consequences of these developments mean that the party is likely only to become more extreme, not less, for at least the next couple of political cycles. No amount of charm, or compromise, or whatever is going to change these dynamics.]]>Alan Dershowitz, Defender of Academic Freedom - Heal Thyself!tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26308052013-02-06T12:43:04-05:002013-04-08T05:12:01-04:00Jonathan Weilerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/
Dershowitz has written that he does not oppose the student-organized event itself (though he did describe it as an impending "propaganda hate orgy".) Instead, the world-renowned attorney says he opposes the decision of Brooklyn College's political science department to "endorse" and "co-sponsor" the event. In an email exchange with Glenn Greenwald, Dershowitz insisted that no academic department should be allowed to co-sponsor or endorse "one sided political events that are not academic in nature ." Dershowitz argued that "any other approach denies academic freedom to students who disagree with the official political line of the department ." To make the point as clear as he could, Dershowitz also said that he would "oppose a pro-Israel event being sponsored by a department." It's worth noting that while the political science department at BC did agree to sponsor the event, it declined to endorse it. In other words, despite Dershowitz's conflation, the clear implication is that sponsorship does not imply endorsement.
In any event, Dershowitz has directly contravened his own principle. Last year, in response to a BDS event at the University of Pennsylvania, groups identifying themselves as "pro-Israel" organized an event titled, "Why Israel Matters to You, Me and Penn: A Conversation with Alan Dershowitz." Though the Penn political science department refused to sponsor the BDS event, it did co-host Dershowitz's lecture. According to the plain meaning of Dershowitz' own standard, therefore, any political science student at the University of Pennsylvania who disagrees with Dershowitz about Israel is at odds with the "official political line of that department" and is being denied her or his "academic freedom," thereby running the "risk" of "being downgraded or otherwise discriminated against for deviating from the "party line." Elsewhere Dershowitz has argued that he would "not major in political science at Brooklyn College for fear that my support for Israel and my opposition to BDS might prejudice me in the eyes of professors whose department has endorsed BDS, thus discriminating against my viewpoint in the marketplace of ideas." Leaving aside the apparently erroneous claim that BC's political science department did endorse BDS, Dershowitz must believe, according to his own standards that anyone who disagrees with his views on Israel should not major in political science at Penn because its political science professors have discriminated against those who disagree with Dershowitz in the marketplace of ideas .
This apparent double standard calls to mind Dershowitz's long-running war with the former De Paul political science professor Norman Finkelstein. While their feud is too involved to fully consider here, the key flashpoint in the so-called Dershowitz-Finkelstein affair is deeply revealing about the "principles" that Dershowitz is so insistent upon.
In 2003, Dershowitz wrote a widely read book, The Case for Israel. Two years later, Finkelstein, a long-time critic of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians (though a critic of BDS), wrote Beyond Chutzpah, essentially a book-length rejoinder to The Case for Israel. In it, Finkelstein revealed the Harvard don's book to be riddled with factual errors. Finkelstein showed in detail, for example, that Dershowitz frequently misused the writings of the revisionist Israeli historian Benny Morris to present a sanitized view of Israel's conduct toward Palestinians, especially during the conflict that accompanied the founding of Israel. Most sensationally, Finkelstein documented Dershowitz's (unacknowledged) use of a long-since discredited work on the Israel/Palestine conflict, Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial (Finkelstein's earlier scholarship was pivotal in exposing the fraudulent nature of Peters' book, so he was intimately familiar with its contents). Dershowitz has acknowledged that Peters' work is flawed and claimed that he only used it very selectively. He has also said that he checked all of the original source material that Peters relied upon.
According to Frank Menetrez, who exhaustively reviewed the contretemps between Dershowitz and Finkelstein, this cannot be so, because Dershowitz repeatedly made errors identical to those that appeared in Peters' book some two decades earlier without citing her in those instances. Specifically, Peters relied extensively on a memoir by Mark Twain of his travels in Palestine in the late 19th century, The Innocents Abroad. Peters frequently mangled quotes by Twain to "prove" that very few Arabs lived in Palestine when Twain traveled there.
Finkelstein had earlier accused Dershowitz of plagiarism, in fact, because Dershowitz mis-cited Twain in precisely the manner Peters had, though the plagiarism charge itself was dropped from Beyond Chutzpah. Menetrez investigated one lengthy passage from Twain that both Peters and Dershowitz quoted. In quoting that passage, according to Menetrez, Peters made twenty errors, some egregious. In one instance, for example, two sentences in Peters' version of the Twain passage appear consecutively at the end of one paragraph and the beginning of the following paragraph. But in the original Twain, the two sentences are separated by 87 pages.
And here's the thing -- in every single instance in the passage in question, Dershowitz misquoted Twain in the identical fashion that Peters had. What are the odds that this was sheer coincidence? To Menetrez, the conclusion was obvious and irrefutable, as it had been to Finkelstein -- Dershowitz had plagiarized Peters (a Harvard investigation subsequently cleared Dershowitz of the charge, though Menetrez says they refused to divulge whether they investigated the identical errors claim). More broadly, Finkelstein's book demonstrated that Dershowitz had shown a consistent willingness either to misuse reputable sources or to rely upon a badly and demonstrably tainted one in order to provide a one-sided view of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Dershowitz responded to this dissection of his work by trying to stop its publication. When the University of California press was preparing to publish Beyond Chutzpah, the great advocate of academic freedom appealed directly to then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to stop the press from doing so. According to the historian Jon Wiener, Dershowitz next retained counsel to
"send threatening letters to the counsel to the university regents, to the university provost, to seventeen directors of the press and to nineteen members of the press's faculty editorial committee. A typical letter, from Dershowitz's attorney Rory Millson of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, describes "the press's decision to publish this book" as "wholly illegitimate" and "part of a conspiracy to defame" Dershowitz. It concludes, "The only way to extricate yourself is immediately to terminate all professional contact with this full-time malicious defamer."
Dershowitz subsequently insisted that he never intended to stop the book from being published, because he wanted its scurrilous ideas to be exposed to the light of day. But it's hard to square this professed wish with the paper trail his attorneys created.
Having failed to stop the publication of Beyond Chutzpah, Dershowitz took the extraordinary step, in 2006, of trying to intervene directly in Finkelstein's tenure case at De Paul. According to Menetrez, Dershowitz provided detailed and unsolicited materials to the chair of De Paul's political science department, as well as a "larger packet of materials to a large but unknown number of members of DePaul's faculty and administration, including every professor at the law school."
Disturbingly, Menetrez found, the materials included obvious and egregious misrepresentations of statements by Finkelstein, likely to prejudice those evaluating Finkelstein's tenure case. Though Finkelstein's department voted to approve tenure, he was ultimately denied by a larger university committee .
Just this week, Dershowitz claimed that the BC political science department's decision to co-sponsor a BDS event was "reminiscent" of the "Soviet Union." This is a particularly amazing parallel to draw in light of the fact that the department is facing a barrage of threats from government officials to cut the school's funding because of the department's and university's supposedly biased and unfair promotion of the event. This raises the question: what sounds to you like a better parallel with the Soviet monolith, government officials threatening an academic institution because they disapprove of the ideological content of an event being held there, or a department agreeing to sponsor that event as part of a general policy to encourage student endeavors?
While trumpeting himself as a defender of academic freedom, Dershowitz's actual record calls that self-approbation into doubt. A true defender of academic freedom could certainly resort to strong, even harsh language to denounce those whose views he finds abhorrent. But Dershowitz's history demonstrates a willingness to go far beyond words in order to influence the "marketplace of ideas."]]>The GOP at War With Itself -- and Ustag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.25991462013-02-01T15:03:16-05:002013-04-03T05:12:01-04:00Jonathan Weilerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, Americans have increasingly sorted themselves into the Democratic or Republican party based on what we call worldview differences -- basic differences in how people think about information, hierarchy, diversity and change. More authoritarian-minded individuals who tend, in general, to think in black and white terms about a world of good and evil, are more likely to reject empiricism in formulating opinions and who are less comfortable with out groups and cultural change have gravitated to the Republican Party. Less authoritarian-minded folks who are, on average, more comfortable with nuance and ambiguity and less inclined to be disdainful of traditional minorities, have substantially made their way into the Democratic camp. The result, we've argued, and the political landscape in recent years has amply illustrated, is intense acrimony and seemingly irreconcilable differences between two warring camps, as political differences become so intense and personal that there appears to be no common ground for agreement.
In reality, of course, the picture is a little more complicated. Though conflict and dysfunction seem to be the order of the day on Capitol Hill, congressional negotiators and the president have managed to build jerry-rigged compromises on a range of issues. Furthermore, while rhetorical and ideological differences between partisans seem worse than ever, plenty of critics have rightly pointed to underlying consensus on a host of important issues -- including the ever-expanding national security state and the bailout of Wall Street.
Still, though, the nature contemporary polarization is not a mere mirage -- it is a reality that has had profound consequences for ordinary Americans. The decision by a number of right-wing governors to reject Medicaid expansion (and their need to rely on bogus data to claim that they are doing so for reasons of fiscal prudence) -- is one example of how ideological extremism and what appears to be spite and contempt will adversely affect significant numbers of Americans.
But this sorting process is beginning to run headlong into another reality. Demographic changes pose a growing challenge to a Republican electoral approach increasingly predicated on winning as many white votes as possible. A political party that has, partly by accident, cultivated an increasingly monochromatic and angry base resentful of significant cultural change is poorly equipped to compete nationally in a country that is becoming more diverse by the day.
Obama's victory in November has not, contrary to the wishful thinking of many, broken this authoritarian-inspired fever. But it has prompted intensified hand-wringing among some elements of the party about the GOP's future prospects. Lindsey Graham -- remarkably now regarded as a "moderate" in the current GOP -- said just before the election, "If I hear anybody say it was because Romney wasn't conservative enough I'm going to go nuts... We're not losing 95 percent of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics and voters under 30 because we're not being hard-ass enough." Of course, arrayed against those occasional bouts of reality recognition, are countless statements and actions -- especially by the increasingly extreme House GOP delegation and by state-level politicians -- from bizarre and offensive "theories" about women and rape, science rejectionism, a growing movement to abolish income taxes in service of a retrograde fantasy about how we were all (read propertied white men) better off before the cursed New Deal.
Nowhere are these tensions more evident than in the current debate over immigration reform. A range of GOP leaders, particularly in the Senate, has come to grips with the impossibility of remaining nationally viable while continuing to antagonize and demonize rapidly growing minority populations. That recognition has helped jump-start long-stalled proposals aimed at providing a path to citizenship for the millions of individuals, predominantly Latino, who reside in the country illegally. On other hand, however, the party's base is only growing more hostile to people who look different than they do. Standard measures of racial resentment show a sharp uptick among self-identified Republicans in recent years. And key party opinion-makers, including Rush Limbaugh, are adamantly opposed to any reform that involves amnesty, reflecting a Tea Party base broadly hostile to immigrants (including legal ones). While many opponents of immigration reform cite pragmatic considerations -- they say immigrants will be a drain on the economy, for instance -- reality tends not to support such arguments. It is quite apparent, that the hostility of much of the right to immigration reform is, in fact, "cultural." At the Daily Caller last week, Mickey Kaus articulated six reasons to be skeptical of reform. About one such issue, assimilation, Kaus wrote:
Yes, American culture is powerful. But now there is an entrenched lobby for bilingual education, and identity politics curricula that teach young people they're right to resist assimilation. Formal and informal race preferences reward Americans for maintaining separate ethnic identities. And then there's Univision, which would go out of business if too many people spoke the common language.
Kaus, it should be noted, is far from the extreme end of the spectrum on these issues. But here he embodies the visceral discomfort of many on the right to the idea of reform -- that it threatens our "way of life," whatever the authoritarian right imagines that to be. The pragmatic considerations of party leaders concerned with hunting where the ducks are exist in clear tension with a party built increasingly on a narrow view of what American culture is and who should be invited to share in the opportunity to pursue its just rewards.
If you've run out of people to recruit -- as many GOP strategists have themselves acknowledged is the case -- and there are fewer moderating forces to temper your increasingly extreme worldview, the likely outcome is not stasis. Instead, for current and aspiring GOP leaders, it's a choice between being seen as a traitorous compromiser or embrace of further extremism (and for reasons I and others have previously noted, this dynamic is not symmetrical among the two parties). These tensions have also been on stark display evident in the extraordinary debate about guns that has unfolded since the Newtown massacre in December. The vast majority of majority of Americans have come to embrace some restrictions on the availability of certain kinds of weapons and almost universally support expanded background checks.
But the NRA has doubled, tripled and then quadrupled down on its intransigence. Prominent conservative commentators routinely insist that the Second Amendment means what no credible jurist believes -- that there are no constitutionally acceptable limits on what kinds weaponry individuals may possess. Ronald Reagan is mocked as senile for his support for some of these common sense policies. Repeated warnings are issued that any form of gun control is tantamount to the imposition of a Third Reich in America. In an ecosystem like this, staking out an increasingly extreme niche becomes a viable path to political survival and relevance, including in a growing number of House districts that reward such behavior.
This is a pattern we're likely to see for a while -- a haphazard, unpredictable toggling back and forth among GOP leaders. Occasionally, they will capitulate to the reality of actually governing a large, complex society, in which their views are, on most issues, increasingly unpopular. But key elements in the party, particularly in the House and at the state level will continue to push an extreme agenda. They will continue to carry water for the super wealthy while trying to burnish their "populist" credentials in the only way they know how -- by obstructing voting, undermining economic recovery and standing in the way of a more inclusive citizenry, the better to foment the resentment and fear of change that remain the party's cornerstones.]]>Manti Te'o, ESPN and Character Porntag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24973382013-01-17T14:22:00-05:002013-03-19T05:12:01-04:00Jonathan Weilerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/
In that context, with the explosion of cheating scandals related to performance-enhancing drugs, and the emergence of a vast sports media-industrial complex anchored by ESPN, sports media have become seemingly more desperate to find the lone heroic figure who stands out in a sea of selfishness and depravity.
Demonization and lionization -- two sides of a media coin impelled by a breathless insistence on turning sports into something more than a contest of athletic greatness. The ESPNs of the world have made "character" an attribute of athletic worthiness every bit as important as how fast someone runs the 40, or how far one can hit a baseball. In the process, the sports media complex has appropriated for itself the mantle of moral arbiter, premised on the belief that because athletic directors, coaches and athletes will return your texts and because you spend a lot of time hanging around players in a locker room, you have unique insight into the character of the athletes you cover and, presumably, the human soul more broadly.
The extraordinary Deadspin story detailing the non-existence of the girlfriend of Manti Te'o has utterly demolished this most recent effort at myth-making. There is still a lot we don't know about the story. But the only remaining shock about this story ought to be our ongoing power to be shocked that someone we thought we knew turned out to be otherwise. Public figures, athletes or otherwise, are not our friends. We don't know them. We have created cartoon character representations of them -- villains and heroes -- in order to tell ourselves depressingly simplistic stories of right and wrong. But public figures, whether movie stars, politicians or athletes are in the public eye not because of their unique and virtuous characters, but because, generally, they are really good at doing one thing really well in endeavors which happen to bring a lot of fame and (usually) fortune. Out of this larger group of public figures, we've chosen to go beyond evaluating some of them with respect to their particular field of endeavor. Instead, within this especially favored circle, we've chosen to confer on them the qualities of extraordinary valor, courage, selflessness -- as embodiments of all of the good qualities lacking in ordinary people and especially in so many of their peers. Joe Paterno, Lance Armstrong, Pete Rose, to name a few. There is a cultural immaturity, it seems, at the heart of this complex -- a need to see humans in black and white, as purely good or bad. Of course, how well and ably you ingratiate yourself with the media goes a depressingly long way in assuring that you will be deemed an individual of exceptional character. (On the flip side, there are plenty of athletes who have done a lot of good but because they failed to play the media game, found their characters regularly questioned. Stephon Marbury is one such example).
There remains a pretense among major sports media outlets -- ESPN first and foremost among them -- that they are journalistic enterprises, concerned first and foremost with reporting the truth without fear or favor. In reality, of course, ESPN is beset by endlessly entangled conflicts of interests and remains, above all else, an extraordinarily profitable entertainment enterprise. In that light, it's no surprise that Deadspin played Harlem Globetrotters to the Network's (and every other sports media outlet) Washington Generals on the court of real journalism in the Te'o story.
The deeper problem revealed by the Te'o story, however, is not even really the credulousness of these self-appointed arbiters of good character. Unlike in the Armstrong and Paterno cases, Te'o appears only to have hurt himself, whatever his level of involvement in the hoax. In that regard, the young man probably needs some help. But I'd be very happy if ESPN stood down from its watch as judge and jury in the matter of character. Despite their countless hours of bleating about who's a good guy and who's a bad guy and in spite of all their access, the Network has not, in the end, gained any special insight into the human soul nor served any larger public good. They should stick to what they really know -- broadcasting about sports. As for moral education, how about hanging up the cleats and letting us figure that out for ourselves.]]>Attacks on Chuck Hagel Show Political Correctness At Its Worsttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24328042013-01-08T12:21:34-05:002013-03-10T05:12:01-04:00Jonathan Weilerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/Wall Street Journal, said that remarks Hagel made a few years ago had the "odor" of antisemitism.
Hagel, in all likelihood, is eventually going to be confirmed. But the brouhaha over his nomination reflects poorly on how little room for debate there is in the United States on critical foreign policy matters.
- Hagel's support for negotiations with Iran and reluctance to go to war with that country are a) consistent with the president's own stated views; b) consistent with that of the vast majority of Israel's major security officials; c) in line with American public opinion. Hagel has, by the way, voiced strong public support for sanctions against Iran.
- Hagel's suggestion several years ago that Israel negotiate with Hamas is also well within the acceptable boundaries of Israeli political discourse (which, as has been pointed out innumerable times, includes more wide-ranging and critical views about Israel's conduct than is true in US discussions about Israel). Israeli President Shimon Peres and other senior security officials there have said essentially the same thing.
As for those charges of antisemitism -- they largely boil down to comments he made in an interview a few years ago, in which he said that a lot of members of Congress were afraid of the "Jewish Lobby." This was the focus of Stephens' smear, for example. Elsewhere in the interview, Hagel referred to the "Israel lobby" and has since apologized for those comments. But whether or not Hagel spoke inartfully, who can deny that in general, if you are running for Congress, it's far safer politically to be "pro-Israel" than to publicly question its security prerogatives?
Hagel was in the mainstream of the Republican Party on security matters until just a few years ago, before the remaining elements of temperance more or less left the GOP for good. The attacks on him today from the likes of John McCain and Eric Cantor reflect little more than partisan politics and the by now almost complete intransigence of the Republican Party even on matters about which there is no substantive controversy.
Hagel's views align more or less seamlessly with conventional wisdom among American and Israeli military officials. More to the point, if Chuck Hagel is Secretary of Defense, there is no plausible argument that US foreign policy toward Israel specifically or more broadly will change notably. Though it seems likely that significant cuts are coming to the Pentagon in any event, we will continue to maintain a vast global military presence, will continue to spend more than any other country on our armed forces and will continue to leverage our economic and military might to push our interests in all corners of the globe. America is not going to stand down because Chuck Hagel is SecDef. Nor is it going to cease treating Israel as a uniquely favored ally. His most vocal critics are not, by and large, engaging in a substantive attack on his likely conduct as Secretary of Defense because they cannot plausibly argue that his appointment would change meaningfully any of these realities.
Instead, some have resorted to dark insinuation, a key goal of which is to continue to police the boundaries of acceptable discourse in the United States about our foreign policy in general and about Israel, in particular. The attacks on Hagel represent an egregious case of political correctness -- attempting to use the pretext of a stray phrase to ensure that no meaningful dialogue about vitally important issues can take place. There are proper grounds to debate Hagel's nomination -- including his ties to the energy lobby and the security implications of those for our policies in that arena. But these will receive scarcely any attention at all, given how narrow is the respectable ideological spectrum in the US when it comes to our overseas conduct. The charges against Hagel that have received a hearing do little more than perpetuate our inability to debate seriously issues of vital national concern.]]>The Pro-Gun Lobby and Political Correctnesstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23036512012-12-14T18:12:34-05:002013-02-13T05:12:01-05:00Jonathan Weilerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/die by guns each year. Of course, people die in other ways, too. But that's no reason not to focus on one particularly significant source of preventable death in America. The number of people killed on 9/11 is dwarfed *every* year by flu fatalities. That's not a reason to scream "flu" every time someone invokes the horror and tragedy of 9/11, any more than it's a sensible or good faith argument to counter "what about swimming pools and accidental drownings?!" every time there is a shooting massacre, such as the one today in Connecticut, in which, at last count, twenty young children were among 27 people killed at a school in Newtown.
America stands alone among wealthy societies in the level of gun availability and violence and the vast majority of Americans support a range of stricter gun laws. And yet, despite the idiotic rantings of the gun lobby and its media minions that, any minute now, President Obama is going to take away all of our firearms -- there is no serious public policy debate about how to deal with this carnage, let alone any action. One important reason why that is so is that the gun lobby -- which has made it their solemn cause to ensure that automatic weapons, high-capacity magazines and the like are readily available -- has worked overtime to try to stifle debate and to insist that there is never a good time to talk about gun violence. For all the hand-wringing over the past two decades about political correctness, and how horribly stultifying it's been to public discourse for people to have to dodge charges of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., what about the political correctness deployed by the gun lobby, which screams "too soon" whenever there's a massacre involving a gun?
We each have our own standards for sensitivity and appropriateness. I myself have felt at times that some folks with whom I generally agree are too quick to hurl charges of racism, sexism or homophobia, for instance. But it's worth noting that, just as there's really no male analogue for the word "slut," a linguistic imbalance that is deeply revealing about sexism in our society, the charge of political correctness is only deployed to criticize people who think it's wrong use certain kinds of language to characterize historically persecuted minorities.
So, what should we label the calls far and wide for the firing of a sportscaster on a football broadcast because he has the temerity to bring up gun proliferation a day after a murder-suicide perpetrated by an NFL player? Twenty children were slaughtered today by a guy reportedly wielding a weapon that, outside a war zone, there is no earthly reason for anyone to have access to, and it's unacceptable to talk about that. We don't have a term for what happens when proponents of unlimited access to guns insist, in the wake of another horrifying massacre, that it's deeply insensitive to discuss openly the potential consequences of their advocacy. But if political correctness is insidious because it reflexively assumes the worst motives about the speaker and has a chilling effect on important conversations, I'd say this qualifies and arguably has much greater adverse consequences than a form of PC that requires people to be a little bit more careful when they talk about gay people, for instance.
The conservative writer David Frum said today, "It's bad enough to have a gun lobby. It's the last straw when that lobby also sets up itself as the civility police." Amen.]]>The Republican Party Should Have Zero Credibility on Deficitstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22190852012-11-30T14:12:24-05:002013-01-30T05:12:01-05:00Jonathan Weilerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/prove definitively that Republicans are themselves unserious about deficits. That has been evident during periods in which they've controlled the presidency, as both Reagan and W. presided over explosions in our national debt. And we have the account of GOP insider after GOP insider revealing the true motives behind GOP fiscal policy. As far back as 1981, Reagan budget director David Stockman admitted that Republicans' professed concern with the impact of deficits and debts on our children and grandchildren was just a ruse to allow Republicans to avoid responsibility for the adverse consequences of lowering taxes on the rich. Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan treasury official has explained in detail that the right-wing's rhetorical push against deficits over the past thirty years was not the product of a sincere commitment to fiscal prudence. Rather, Bartlett has shown, the goal was to reduce taxes on the rich, which would starve the government of funds, which would require government to cut spending for the less well off. In other words, the concern was never deficits. The desire was to reduce social spending for those deemed undeserving by the Republicans, including poor children, the struggling elderly and other disfavored groups. Deficits were merely the excuse for doing so. And Vice President Dick Cheney stated as emphatically as he could that, when Republicans hold power, "deficits don't matter."
All of this is the necessary backdrop for discussions about the current budget negotiations. Remember that in 2011 (and again in 2012), House Republicans nearly unanimously approved Paul Ryan's budget, which has more or less become the foundational expression of the Republican view of government. The original budget, since modified to some degree, called for eliminating capital gains taxes and dramatically cutting income taxes on the wealthy, to be financed by gutting Medicaid and other social programs. Ryan knew that this plan was not, in fact, a deficit reduction plan, though he tried to pass it off as one to an embarrassingly credulous media. Ryan also knows his proposals would not reduce the deficit, which is why he refused to submit the entire plan to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for scoring, asking instead that the CBO score a bizarro version of his budget.
Amidst a series of bad faith proposals and arguments, none has more clearly illustrated the GOP's intentions than their approach to Medicare. Republicans have long insisted that in order to reduce our long-term spending, we must get entitlements under control. This is a bogus argument (one shared by many non-Republicans, of course) on many levels, one of which is that Social Security, as President Ronald Reagan explained clearly, does not add one cent to our deficits. Concerning Medicare, it has long been clear that the program's financial challenges are largely due to rising health care costs in general. And the GOP has repeatedly opposed serious attempts to control those costs. For example, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) included some significant cuts in Medicare spending by reducing, for example, overpayments to the Medicare privatization experiment known as Medicare Advantage. Those spending reductions, originally estimated at about half a trillion dollars over ten years, became the focal point of GOP attack ads during the 2010 mid-term election cycle. In other words, despite repeatedly insisting that entitlements must be reined in, the GOP's response to a plausible effort to do so was to pillory Democrats for supposedly attacking seniors.
The Ryan budgets have included the same reductions to Medicare included in the ACA. But the benefits of those cuts, which in the ACA were slated to help seniors by, for example, closing the prescription drug benefit doughnut hole, were re-purposed by Ryan to pay for his tax cuts for the rich. And incredibly, once he joined the Romney ticket, Ryan's Medicare cuts were forgotten, and Romney/Ryan relentlessly attacked Obama for cutting Medicare and hurting seniors. So, to sum up: 1) the GOP repeatedly insists that we cut entitlements; 2) at the same time, it bashed Democrats in 2010 when they actually took steps toward doing so; 3) it then embraced, dollar for dollar, the cuts for which it had just bashed Democrats, while approving shifting the savings from those cuts away from benefiting the seniors it claimed Democrats were hurting; 4) it then resumed bashing Democrats in 2012 for cutting Medicare, pretending it hadn't already approved the same cuts 5) and now, having lost the election, it insists that Democrats aren't serious about reducing the deficit unless they agree to cut entitlements, including Medicare.
It happens that the broad outlines of the Democrats' proposals are reasonable, if inadequate, under the circumstances. Raising taxes on incomes over $250,000 from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, while not earth-shattering, is a step toward reducing long-term deficits. Preserving tax cuts on lower incomes, when those extra savings are much more likely to be spent, is clearly economically logical given our sluggish economy and the stagnant incomes of most non-wealthy Americans. Some money for stimulus also makes compelling sense, given weak economic growth, as does extension of unemployment benefits (we should, of course, be spending much more than a pittance on stimulus, but that's a political impossibility currently). What the GOP will counter-propose instead will make far less sense - keeping tax cuts for the rich, despite the relatively weak bang for the buck that those yield for the economy; cutting desperately needed social spending for the less well-off, which is both immoral under the circumstances and economically counter-productive; and insisting on entitlement cuts, when Social Security contributes not at all to the deficit and the GOP's credibility on Medicare is beyond laughable. And the GOP's proposed health care cuts, including to Medicaid, will do nothing more than shift the costs of that care from government onto beleaguered families.
Among the real problems perpetuated by the mainstream media's focus on "both-sides-do-it" and an insistence on bi-partisanship is the inaccurate perception that our problems would be resolvable if each side were equally committed to finding real solutions. In fact, one side has, insufficient though it is, a credible and empirically valid conception of how the mix of spending and taxing might help us in the current circumstances. By contrast, the other side maintains a rigid and ultimately incoherent insistence both that the only kinds of savings that accomplish anything are those that hurt the less well off and that asking the rich to pay a little more is a dagger aimed at the heart of American capitalism.
Beware any deal (*cough* Simpson-Bowles) that tries earnestly to find a middle ground between these two poles.]]>Lee Atwater and the GOP's Race Problemtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.21320292012-11-14T18:14:20-05:002013-01-14T05:12:01-05:00Jonathan Weilerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/
Now the full interview, 42 minutes long, has been unearthed by James Carter IV, who dug up the Romney 47 percent tape. As Rick Perlstein wrote over in The Nation today in describing the release of the tape, since first being highlighted in a column by Bob Herbert in the New York Times in 2005, Atwater's "n-gger, n-gger, n-gger" quote has emerged as a kind of Rosetta Stone for unlocking the political language the American right has been using for decades to siphon off white voters, especially in the South, from their formerly traditional home in the Democratic Party.
One of the striking facts about the just-completed presidential campaign was the degree to which the GOP barely concerned itself with dressing up its appeals in the kinds of camouflaged terms about which Atwater spoke. These included Rick Santorum's unprompted comments about Blacks and welfare in Iowa in January (which he later tried to dodge by insisting he'd said "blah people"), the Romney campaign's baseless and ongoing insistence that the Obama administration was getting ready to end the work requirements for welfare and repeated over-the-top diatribes from high-profile surrogates, including former New Hampshire Governor and Chief of Staff to President George H. W. Bush, John Sununu (Obama's "lazy and "not that bright,") and former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Of all the racist pabulum that spewed forth this election season, one eruption stood out. In late September, Gingrich (who has arguably done as much as anyone to try to nationalize the Southern Strategy), told Fox News:
"You have to wonder what he's doing... I'm assuming that there's some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don't understand. Whether he needs large amounts of rest, whether he needs to go play basketball for a while or watch ESPN, I mean, I don't quite know what his rhythm is, but this is a guy that is a brilliant performer as an orator, who may very well get reelected at the present date, and who, frankly, he happens to be a partial, part-time president."
Get it?
Since election day, the standard explanation for the Republican Party's defeat is that they could not overcome their growing demographic problem. In a country that is becoming increasingly non-white, you cannot afford to virtually disqualify yourself among those growing groups of voters and remain viable in presidential elections. One key take-away from Atwater's comments has long been to highlight what Tali Mendelberg, in The Race Card, observed was the power of implicit appeals to people's prejudices. She argued that when confronted with direct expressions of racism, most folks would recoil at the notion that they themselves were susceptible to such messaging. But if racially charged arguments could be concealed in some way, they would be much more powerful and effective in winning votes.
The apotheosis of this approach was the Atwater-run Bush campaign of 1988, when Atwater tried to make a convicted killer, Willie Horton, Michael Dukakis' "running mate." Since then, though, Democrats have won the popular vote five times in the past six presidential elections. For the past four years, significant swaths of the American right went well beyond aggressively attacking the president's policy agenda, convinced that Obama was an implacable enemy of America, a foreign-born, anti-colonial socialist, a Muslim or terrorist sympathizer, or all of the above. This feeding frenzy did not go unnoticed. In too many ways, the GOP of 2012 could not plausibly deny that which has become too plain to ignore -- that it is the party of antipathy to difference and social change. And it will take more than clever insights into the ways in which people can delude themselves about their own prejudices to overcome that brand.]]>The Fiscal Cliff and America's Schizophreniatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.21231102012-11-13T15:23:44-05:002013-01-13T05:12:01-05:00Jonathan Weilerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/Speaker Boehner bragged at the time that he got 98 percent of what he wanted -- a deal skewed primarily to spending reductions including, by the by, cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. (And not for nothing, anyone who tries to sneak "entitlements," including Social Security into the current discussion, when Social Security contributes not a dime to our deficits, ought to be disqualified as a credible participant in these debates. None other than St. Ronnie himself explained as clearly as one can why this is so).
That deal, however, was killed by Republicans in Congress since, contrary to their "principles," it included some tax increases (these facts are rarely noted in typical accounts of both sides' allegedly equal aversion to compromise). Because that bargain collapsed, the two sides jerry-rigged an agreement involving sequestration -- automatically triggered spending reductions --alongside expiration of the Bush tax cuts and other more recent tax reductions, like the payroll tax cut negotiated by the president and Congress at the end of 2010. To sum up, a year ago virtually all political elites, including our punditocracy, agreed that we had to reduce our deficits as an urgent matter of national well-being. Having failed to do so by explicit agreement, the two sides agreed to force themselves to swallow deficit reduction by default.
Of course, there were always some folks who believed that deficit reduction was not and should not be the economic priority for this country during what was and remains a sluggish recovery in which millions of Americans are jobless or are otherwise struggling. These people, including Nobel Prize winning economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, insisted that, consistent with Keynesian economic principles, the time for reducing deficits was not during an economic bust. Krugman has argued repeatedly that given the nature of the 2008-09 financial crisis and the United States' unique position, we did not have to worry about runaway inflation or soaring interests rates if we continued to borrow lots of money, assertions so far born out by empirical reality. In fact, Krugman and like-minded economists argued, deficit-reduction under such circumstances was clearly counter-productive, likely as it was to lead to an economic slowdown, increased joblessness and further erosion of our fiscal position, given the prospect of reduced revenues to the Treasury.
These views, if not fringe -- since Krugman and Stiglitz have high-profile platforms -- were marginalized during the 2011 debates. So, why, then do the same political elites who so insisted a year ago that deficit reduction was the necessary and urgent task of economic policy now regard the coming "cliff" with dread? Is it because we are worse off economically than we were a year ago? Obviously not. At the time of the budget impasse last year, the national unemployment rate was 9.1 percent. Now it is 7.9 percent. In the meantime, our supposedly perilous national debt has only grown. So, if the rationale for cutting deficits made sense in the summer of 2011 it makes, if anything, more sense now.
Of course, the truth is that while most economists (though not all), including Krugman, believe that deficits are a long-term issue, there is no coherent way to argue that we urgently needed a deficit-reduction deal last year but now face a catastrophe if deficit reduction actually kicks in. Yes, we can argue about the shape of deficit reduction -- whether the mix of spending cuts and tax increases should be different from that which now prevails. But those sorts of fine-grained analyses do not plausibly explain why so many of the same people now panicking about the fiscal cliff were adamantly in favor of substantial deficit reduction 15 months ago. The truth is that, as every Republican president in the modern era has acknowledged de facto, when times are tough, it's better for the government to engage in deficit spending than to choke off a recovery. In other words, ideology aside, when it comes to governing, the famous Milton Friedman phrase attributed to President Nixon 40 years ago remains true -- 'we're all Keynesians now.'
The public would have a clearer understanding of all this if those tasked with communicating these things to the public would spend less time playing stenographer to political elites whose policy incoherence they regurgitate without comment and more time actually explaining that, in fact, government spending in times like these provides a clear economic boost. Expiring tax cuts for the wealthy, the only piece of the current fiscal picture that Republicans seem to care about provides, by almost all accounts, the least bang for our deficit-spending buck. But whether it's preserving tax cuts for the less well-off -- who will spend virtually all of their increased out-of-pocket money -- or direct government spending, which in addition to creating jobs directly achieves, by the multiplier effect, substantial indirect benefits for the economy, more government spending now is better than less. In fact, virtually every credible independent analysis confirms as much, particularly when the economy is operating below full capacity. In light of these realities, it'd be nice if our hand-wringing and concern trolling pundits and political elites (which includes lots of Democrats) acknowledged that which their current concerns make plain -- now is not the time to reduce our deficits. That most of these same folks wanted to do so last year, under even more dire circumstances than we now face, is just another reminder of the bizarre schizophrenia that characterizes our national discourse about fiscal matters.]]>The Last Refuge of Scoundrels -- Republicans and Voter Suppressiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.20799412012-11-05T19:21:00-05:002013-01-05T05:12:01-05:00Jonathan Weilerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/Steve Schmidt said just this morning that GOP insistence that there is widespread voter fraud is "bogus" and part of the party's "mythology," undercutting the only fig leaf of a valid rationale for these execrable practices.
While in-person voter fraud is virtually non-existent, what is all too real is the GOP's unconscionable effort to stop people with the wrong complexion from voting.
As has been well-documented, Republicans have stepped up efforts across the country to restrict early voting, as in Ohio and Florida, which disproportionately affect African-Americans and others with less job flexibility. Similarly, at least a dozen states have tried, with varying success, to impose new voter ID requirements, the effect of which is to make it disproportionately harder for African-Americans, Hispanics, students and the poor elderly to vote. At least some officials, like those in Pennsylvania, openly bragged that the goal of these laws was to ensure Republican victories.
And then there are the myriad instances across the country, for which there is simply no Democratic equivalent, of sending out misinformation to voters. For example, a mailer was sent out by GOP election officials in Ohio informing voters that election day was November 8. A similar mailing, targeting Spanish language voters in Arizona, also said that election day was November 8. In Cleveland, Clear Channel Communications had sponsored billboards threatening those convicted of voter fraud with felony arrest and significant jail time. Unsurprisingly, these billboards were placed in predominantly Hispanic and Black neighborhoods. After a significant outcry, Clear Channel did agree to take down the billboards, which were paid for by an anonymous donor that refused to disclose itself.
In Virginia, a man working for the Republican Party was caught and charged after having dumped voter registration forms.
North Carolina's state board of elections chief Gary Bartlett recently said that there was more misinformation, voter intimidation and other efforts at voter suppression in the state than he's ever seen. Though many of these efforts have been carried out by nefarious third parry groups that are hard to pin down, it is known that some of the voter intimidation and misinformation has come from an organization called Americans for Limited Government, a group with apparent ties to the Koch brothers.
Even in places where restrictive voter ID laws have been blocked by courts because of their obviously discriminatory intent, as in Texas, there are credible reports that officials are still demanding to see ID.
Of course, these sorts of tactics are not new to this cycle. Most famously, in 2000, Florida improperly disenfranchised thousands of voters by wrongly identifying them as felons who'd lost their voting rights. This work was carried out by a firm hired by then Secretary of State Katherine Harris, under the direction of then governor Jeb Bush, whose brother, of course, won the presidency on the basis of this wrongful voter purge.
And Republican officials carried out an illegal phone-jamming scheme in New Hampshire in 2002, in order to tie up the phone lines of Democratic Get Out the Vote efforts there.
This is only the smallest sampling. For more, here's Rick Perlstein and, separately, Adam Serwer on the GOP's repeated election-related skullduggery.
To repeat, there is no Democratic equivalent of the repeated Republican efforts to block people they don't like from voting. Voter ID laws, flyers with false information, threats of criminal charges, restriction of early voting, deliberately misleading and disgusting robocalls, "poll watchers" who are deliberately slowing down voting and using misinformation to challenge valid voters - -all of these are vintage Republican tactics. These typically, though not exclusively, targets minorities and they happen over and over and over again, in election after election. By contrast, Republican voting complaints boil down to transparently bogus claims about ACORN and voter fraud.
That one party goes to such lengths to keep people from voting should be a major national scandal and it's disgraceful that it's part of the landscape in which people vote in this country.]]>For Romney and the GOP, Lying Is a Feature, Not a Bugtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.20656872012-11-02T12:54:36-04:002013-01-02T05:12:01-05:00Jonathan Weilerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/a recent essay, Perlstein traces the origins of modern movement conservatism to the direct mail and grass roots work of such right-wing icons as Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, who cracked the code of how to reach and solicit die-hard opponents of social transformation in America and mobilize them to form the foundation of the modern right-wing backlash. Perlstein argues that the endless hocking of bogus cures and other products that happen to be a central feature of these right-wing fundraising operations reveals a mindset particular to the right - a susceptibility to a fantasy, "childlike" version of reality that allows its progenitors to move seamlessly from flogging Obama-is-a-Kenyan-Muslim-socialist to "reversing crippling arthritis in two days."
In that context, Mitt Romney is something other than a "compromise" candidate whose questionable conservative bona fides make him a second-best alternative for the American right. He's a personification of a snake-oil worldview in which taking people for suckers and telling them whatever they want to hear is second nature. As Romney began his rhetorical pivot to the center beginning with the first debate, many wondered whether diehard conservatives would balk at his new found moderation on abortion, regulation and so on. But the Limbaughs and Hannitys of the world, con men themselves, knew full well that Romney didn't mean a word of what he said. In all likelihood, the brazenness of his lying made them respect him in a way they had not previously.
All of this is consistent with a reality of our political divide that still hasn't received sufficient attention - the degree to which people with different personality types have sorted themselves clearly into our two major political camps. The most noteworthy aspect of this sorting process has been the coalescing of authoritarian-minded individuals in the base of the Republican Party. Those folks are more likely to see the world in simple, clear, black and white terms, to balk at complexity, nuance and social change and to disdain people who look different from themselves. As I have repeated many times before, not all Republicans share this mindset and plenty of Democrats do. But by and large, the bases of the two parties now see the world very differently in these gut-level, pre-political terms. And as these worldviews translate themselves into political loyalties and stances on issues, they yield an especially acrimonious and unbridgeable-seeming political divide.
Most people, to one degree or another, seek out sources of information that confirm their understanding of the world. And most of us are likely to lapse back into seeking out the familiar and the comforting when they are under stress. But among the great failings of our political media is its ongoing insistence on false equivalency between the two major political camps. Among the ways in which this is most apparent is in characterizing the two sides' relationship to facts and data. We have clear evidence that authoritarian-minded individuals are significantly more likely to only seek out information that confirms what they already believe; that they are far more likely to reject sources of information that have been independently verified as factually accurate when it upsets their worldview; and they are much less troubled by learning that sources they relied upon to form their outlook are inaccurate than are less authoritarian-minded individuals. Stephen Colbert famously said in 2006 that "reality has a well-known liberal bias."
Whether it's climate change, the realities of rape and impregnation, polling data, bureau of labor statistics or countless other examples, the core of the Republican Party has become irretrievably hostile to basic facts and certain of a dark conspiracy whenever science and data contradict their understanding of the world (Congressional Republicans' angry insistence on the withdrawal of a recent Congressional Research Service report on taxes that debunked their long-held faith on the subject is a perfect illustration). Consistent with that worldview, and convinced that they are facing an almost other-worldly evil in liberals in general and Obama in particular, any means necessary to displace that evil is undoubtedly acceptable to them. Romney's repeated lies on issue after issue and his brazen willingness to change his position fundamentally seemingly by the day, will be easier to swallow from a political party whose core constituents are already disposed toward a much more tenuous connection to truth and reality. Of course, partisans of all stripes are willing to countenance ideological apostasy from their own kind that they would never tolerate in political opponents. Widespread Democratic acceptance of Obama's abject reversals on civil liberties issues is a clear case in point for the blue team.
But these are not symmetrical phenomena. There is a demonstrable disposition among base voters on the Republican side, including large numbers of authoritarian-minded folks who see the world as a fight between good and evil in which fact and truth only matter insofar as they reaffirm these folks' view of reality. It's evident in their rejection of compromise and in their resort to sources and arguments on matters of basic science that simply fail any objective test. And Mitt Romney, if not in ideological purity, is an almost perfect vessel for a political party so constituted. The words that came out of his mouth yesterday mean nothing today. The realities of his opponents' record and policies are irrelevant outside of whatever characterization he wants to make of them. Truth, facts, the stubborn complexities of reality - these are meaningless to Romney. In this sense, Romney is, indeed, a man for this election season.]]>Yes He Did - Romney Opposed Federal Disaster Relieftag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.20457602012-10-30T17:18:19-04:002012-12-30T05:12:01-05:00Jonathan Weilerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/killing at least 124 people. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was running out of money at the time and House Republicans, led by Eric Cantor, were insisting that they would not authorize additional funds for FEMA unless there were spending cuts elsewhere (because remember -- no matter how much we cut taxes, we never have a revenue problem. We only have a spending problem). So moderator John King asked Governor Romney whether it would be better to devolve disaster relief to the states. Romney said, "absolutely" and then further added that it would be even better if those responsibilities were left to the private sector, because it's ALWAYS better for the private sector to do anything.
King followed up to clarify that Romney's view of devolving as much as possible from the federal governments to the states and the private sector really did include disaster relief.
We cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we'll all be dead and gone before it's paid off. It makes no sense at all.
When it comes to multi-state disasters, it's simply not possible to manage relief on an ad hoc, local basis. National resources and national coordination are absolutely essential and our increasingly cash-strapped states are simply not in the position to take on such massive interventions. But Republicans have now declared war on FEMA. The Ryan budget, not surprisingly, has called for significant cuts to the agency. And, of course, the party denies that there is such a thing as human-induced climate change, including such effects as significant sea-level rise. In fact, Romney mocked the idea of climate change and the threat of rising sea levels just two months ago during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.
But when push comes to shove, the proof is in the pudding. When such disasters do strike -- like Sandy, whose devastation was undoubtedly connected to changing water temperatures and sea level rise -- no governor, Republican or otherwise, would ever actually turn down federal disaster relief. Just ask Romney supporter, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie this morning.
As if any more evidence were needed, Romney's response to disaster relief and his evasiveness and dishonesty on climate change demonstrates powerfully his lack of conscience and his abject moral cravenness. The Republican Party has become so utterly insane that it actually thinks it's principled to oppose federal disaster relief. Its patently insincere professions of concern about the "children" -- because gutting education spending, Medicaid, etc., has no consequences for kids -- is nothing more than an attempt to convey moral purpose when its worldview is, in fact, morally denuded. And Romney is the most craven of all, because there's good reason to believe that he doesn't actually believe this utter nonsense, but in order to win the presidency, will say absolutely anything, no matter how ridiculous and no matter how contrary it might be to something he said a year ago, a week ago, or yesterday. And if anyone believes that this moral cravenness and cowardice would end once he were elected -- please. He will be beholden to a Party that has simply plunged off the deep end and since he has no discernible principles of his own -- other than ensuring that wealthy people like himself benefit from every tax break imaginable -- there would simply be no reason for him to meaningfully stem the tide of the House Republicans who are now the heart and soul of the party.
Romney's comments on disaster relief, a week after the Joplin disaster, and his refusal today to answer any questions about FEMA and federal efforts in the wake of the devastation caused by Sandy, are useful bookends -- providing as clear a window into the man's conscience as we're likely to have.]]>