On the Contrary

John McCain took a stand against earmarks last week and pointed out the hypocrisy of the Obama administration’s latest budget that by all accounts has about 3% in earmarks ($12.7 billion versus $407 billion budget).  It is hypocritical to say you are going to end them and then look the other way.  On the other hand accepting a 3% surcharge to avoid a major war with Congress right now might be smart tactics.  Note that Senate voted 63 to 32 to defeat an amendment by McCain to strip these earmarks out.  The vote and those adding these earmarks was evenly split among Democrats and Republicans.  But John McCain called these earmarks pork and I question that description.

First of all let’s define earmarks.  Wikipedia defines an earmark “as a congressional provision that directs approved funds to be spent on specific projects or that directs specific exemptions from taxes or mandated fees.”  Most Americans have seen these used behind closed doors and without debate to add spending for pet projects in a particular Congressman’s district.  First, lets consider whether they are pork.

I think we could all agree that some earmark spending is pure pork.  The bridge to nowhere comes to mind, along with special tax breaks for individuals or businesses to pay off political debts.  On the other hand much of the spending is for special, but important projects to individual states.  Note that many of these earmarks result from lawmaker’s impulse “to finance local priorities and protect the interests that they firmly believe they were sent to Washington to serve” (New York Times).  In this “pork” spending is $278 million for a new subway in New York, $210 million for plans to connect the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal on the East Side of Manhattan, $92 million for a light-rail line in Phoenix, $110 million for a courthouse in San Diego, and $92 million to help restore the everglades in Florida.  I don’t know about you, but I think these are worthy projects and add to the stimulus package.  This is not pork.

Sure you can find projects that are probably not worthy of funding and are real pork, but earmarks are how many important projects get funded in our country.  It is what we reward our representatives for when we re-elected them.  The only problem with earmarks is their visibility.

From my simple mind the only real test is that we need to make the process completely transparent.  If there are bridges to nowhere, then we will take care of it with our next vote.  Making rules to prevent bad things from happening, like outlawing earmarks, will have the unintended consequence of limiting our ability to get projects quickly authorized and funded.  Let’s not make a bunch of stupid rules that makes our Congress even more ineffective.  If you have to have a rule, just cap them.  The 3% we see today is reasonable.  Let’s just make sure we can see and understand what they are doing and then let the electorate decide about their judgment instead of tying our legislator’s hands to get our business done.

There are going to be three narratives coming out of the Democratic Convention, the one by the media, the one by the Republicans, and the one by the Democrats.  Which one you think reflects reality is probably a function of your political persuasion.  The media usually comes up with a narrative feed by the Republicans, because the Republicans are better at framing an issue than the Democrats, which will emphasize high drama and conflict.  In a perfect world the media would simply reflect events as they happen, but they are so infused with “the best political team on television”, that their coverage pings back and forth from one biased political philosophy to the other.  John Stewart did the nation a great service by showing the narrative of Democratic dissent the media has set up, and then made fun of how, when they couldn’t find it, tried to create it.

MSNBC, which of the three Media News outlets is my favorite, was showing the strain of dissent.  Joe Scarborough, who thinks he is an unbiased Republican, was waxing elegant on how the Republican political machine was staying on message, and Keith Olbermann who thought he was off mike was heard mumbling, “Why don’t you get a shovel Joe.”  Keith himself can be over the top in his liberal beliefs, but he is a breath of fresh air in that he is not a tool of Republican talking points.  Chris Mathews showed some anger at Keith for suggesting maybe he had talked on too long, which of course is what Chris Mathews does as the master of blovation.   Meanwhile David Gregory, he who still claims they asked all the right questions before the invasion of Iraq (to all the wrong people), was showing his distain as he questioned Democrats on the floor of the convention and could not shake them from their message of unity.  They just were not cooperating with his narrative of internecine strife.  Too bad he couldn’t have shown the same distain when he asked “all the right questions” before we invaded Iraq. Meanwhile over at FOX news they were busy reinterpreting reality to fit their own narrative and I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone.  These people did not listen to the same speeches the rest of us did.  The problem here is that we now have a media that is too tied into the process and its entertainment value. Except in the print media, we have lost an independent media.  Thank goodness for CSPAN so I could just hear the speeches and judge for myself what the meaning was.

Now the Republican narrative is going to be very simple.  Barack Obama does not have the experience to be President.  The world is a scary place with bad guys waiting to blow us up so you need an experienced warrior like John McCain to protect us from all the evil doers out there.  They will use both Hillary’s and Joe Biden’s primary statements about the young upstart Obama.  They will hammer home that the world is a scary place (be afraid, be afraid) and we need experience in the White House to face down these threats.  They will leverage the Russian threat to Georgia as the 3 am call that Hillary made so famous.   There are some major flaws in this narrative, but it will appeal to those who hold their “guns and religion close”.  First question the Demos might ask is just what experience does John McCain have that applies to the 21st century and do old approaches really work.  The Republicans have this huge problem in that they have had total unfettered control of the government for the last eight years controlling both the Congress and the White House and the mess we are living in is the result.  They will claim that Ron Reagan defeated the Russians and now John McCain will do the same.  The problem is that this is not 1980 and the only country going broke is us.  But their narrative must keep the focus off the economy or the disasters they have created elsewhere and keep the focus personal.  The media will love this because they won’t have to talk about real issues and can focus once again on the soap opera.

Finally we have the Democrat’s narrative.  This one is also quite simple.  We have been under Republican Control for eight years and it hasn’t worked.  We need to change directions and restore America’s leadership in the world.  As the Republican narrative is based on fear, the Democratic narrative is based on hope and optimism for the future.  There is a wonderful strength in this argument in that the litany of Republican failures from Enron to Katrina goes on forever so there is a wealth of data to show their failures.  The weakness is that people are resistant and fearful of change.  It scares them and that feeds into the Republican narrative of be afraid.  But I think enough things have gone wrong that most people see we must change.  You know, it is that old saw, you must be face down in the gutter before you recognize you have a problem.  The Democrats leveraged that idea when many of the speakers in Wednesday’s convention were ex-Republicans.  They also utilized quite a few military personnel to counter the “warrior” image of John McCain.  If they can keep the focus on the failures of the Republicans and that John McCain just brings the same old people back into power, they may be able to overcome the fear of a young Obama leading this country.

The Democrats have gotten smarter than they use to be and they are ready for a fight.  The media will be putty in the Republican’s hands because they will want to focus on the personal mud slinging, not the crux of the issues or the validity of the arguments.  As long as we have two shouting partisans, the advantage is to the status quo.  But I think this time the Democrats are ready.  I think Americans may really understand that it is now or never.  We are face down in the gutter.  I know I am ready for a new approach to our future and our only hope is Barack Obama.

What I saw in the Democratic Convention was a true cross section of America with hope for the future, an America I want to be part of.  What we will see next week in the Republican Convention is a bunch of fat old white men (don’t worry they will strategically place the eight people of color they could find in camera range) whose whole existence is based on cronyism, fight for the status quo with fear.  They will do everything they can to distract Americans from their failures.  Which America do you want to belong to?

I was watching John McCain (McMean) last night out at some drilling site promoting his drill, drill, drill  message.  It was a great political theater and all the media outlets covered it, John with his yellow hardhat lecturing, “Barack Obama is against drilling, but the American people know better.”  Great political theater, but a totally bogus message.  But did the media present any of the data showing that drilling would have no impact?  Did they investigate what are the risks to the environment that the Republicans say are non-existent?  No, like mission accomplished, they are no longer about information and truth, only political theater.  Sadly it works.

What really brought this to my attention was watching MSNBC’s Hardball, hosted by David Shuster.  He and his guest were discussing the totally bogus book, “Obama Nation” by Jerome Corsi.  They all agreed that it was a total fabrication, but then David asked if it mattered.  That is the question of the hour.  How is it in this day and age that a book that is lie and fabrication gets so much media coverage and because of that, makes an impact on the voters who hear it enough and start to believe it?

So there are two questions here and I will start with the first.  The 24/7 news monster needs to be fed, so even lies make good filler.  Then if the lie is sensational, it makes even a better story so it gets a lead.  When the lies get better ratings than the truth, focus on the lie.  Corsi, in the media’s view, is interesting because he is saying outrageous things about Barack.   So they keep emphasizing his message even though they add little footnotes about the outrageousness of the claims.  If you don’t believe me log into Media Matters each day and look at the press’s unchallenged claims by both sides.  The Republican’s have learned this lesson well and they don’t care about the truth anymore, because lies play well if not better than truth.  The question you have to ask is why a media would cover these stories.  The answer is its entertainment value and ratings.  Money dumbs us all down.

The second question is why do lies that are obvious and have been debunked live on?  If you didn’t read my blog, “Stupid is as Stupid Does”, I suggest you go back and read it now.  At least 50% of my fellow Americans are stupid.  They chose what they want to believe and they don’t listen to anything else.  That’s why repeating an untruth enough times make it believable to this sad 50%.  But now I have the more important question for you.  If it doesn’t matter if your claims are true because the media plays into your game, and a goodly portion of the population are easily manipulated by these lies, does running an “above board” campaign make sense?

McCain has been out making untrue statements about Barack Obama, questioning his patriotism, and mischaracterizing his stand on Iraq, and the media is lapping it up because it plays well and is entertaining.  And what they are doing is reinforcing his message and lending it credibility.  So can Barack stay above this kind of name calling and character assassination?   The answer in the real world is no.  He has to go on the attack.  But he doesn’t need fiction to fuel his attack.  He wanted to have an adult conversation about the issues.  The problem is the majority of Americans are not adults and the media is still in kindergarten, unable to tell the difference between entertaining distraction and important issues.  So he is going to have to get confrontational.  (As a side note, isn’t it sad that the media doesn’t attack these misinformation campaigns and shame them?  It would end them, but they think it is just part of the game and it is funny.)

That does not mean he has to become John McMean.  But it does mean that he has to get passionate about John McMean’s prevarications and get the media to focus on his counterattacks, albeit, counterattacks backed up by fact.  Even better he needs to go on the offensive and attack John McMean’s false image identified in yesterday’s  blog.  If Barack wants this thing, he has to show the world who John McMean really is.  He has to show them that he is passionate about the truth and willing to fight for it.  It might not hurt to also start counter attacking the media and their coverage of these missrepresentations. Instead of tolerating their inane questions, go after them for distracting the American public.

Okay, I have been beating up on the press’s unbelievably poor job of covering of the news and separating fact from innuendo and outright prevarications, but what about us.  What does it say about a nation who favors offshore drilling when there is no gain, puts our environment at risk, and keeps us addicted to the very substance that is causing all of our problems?  What does it say about a nation that thinks lower gas prices is a fix for our addiction to oil or warming climate?  It is the rise of gas and oil prices that just may be our salvation.  These higher prices are forcing us to reduce our use and consider alternate energy.  We are so stupid that we preach marketplace economics, and then when it starts to work, we beg our elected leaders to lower prices, negating the marketplace forces.  Of course the real indication of our stupidity is that there is any kind of quick fix to this problem.  I don’t think we are stupid, I think we are blithering idiots.

Of course the Republican’s have been selling us this snake oil for years telling us that if we just cut taxes, have less regulation, and reduce government, better known as a free ride America, their will be no consequences and the economy will soar.  Working swimmingly isn’t it?  Now their quick fix is drill, drill, drill, and once again you lemmings out there are racing to find some easy painless solution to your self-absorbed life unable to think about your children’s future.  Of course the Democrats will also stoop to feeding the pigeons with their “let’s pump out the Strategic Oil Reserve and go after speculators”.  It is all snake oil and the fact that we don’t demand better says so much about how dumbed down and self absorbed we are.

A just released study by the GAO shows that the majority of firms in the United States paid zero taxes (Most Firms Paid Zero Taxes from 1998-2005).   Are you starting to figure out how dumb you are yet?  John McMean and the free ride Republicans have been telling you that taxes have to be low for the economy to thrive, and oh, don’t forget we are taxed too much.  Well maybe WE are because businesses are getting a free ride and are they doing just hunky dory?  But let’s just continue the Republican economic strategies with John McMean and expect something different to happen.  That was Albert  Einstein’s purported definition of stupidity, keeping doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.

John McMeans reaction to the Gerogia crisis again feeds our impulses, but doesn’t address any long-term consequences.  Russia invaded Georgia with a brutal assault and our initial reaction is to punish the bastards, so the tougher the better.  But first impulses are what are driving our descent into a second class nation.  There is a long history there and it is not a case of a single bad guy and some very complex historical roots.  But we in stupidville like easy answers and simple villains.  The hypocrisy of the United States scolding another country for invading a sovereign nation and causing wonton destruction shows you we can’t remember that we are still occupying Iraq.  Not only are we stupid, but we have memory deficit which really helps us with our reasoning skills.  John McMean wants to take a cold war approach to the Soviets and I guess that makes American feel warm and cuddly with that approach.  The problem is that it is a different world and if anybody is going to go broke this time, it is us. Our military solution to every problem is one of our greatest problems.  But stupid is as stupid does so we are really unhappy with George Bush and we are going to vote for a man who is still in the 1980’s and voted for almost everything President Moron wanted, a man who wants to fight the cold war again?

Healthcare is a case in point.  American’s hate socialized medicine, but love Medicare.  What do they think it is?  The Republican answer and to some extent the Democratic pander is to have a combined system of private and government insurers.  How many studies have to tell you the major problem with our cost of healthcare is for-profit insures who skim the healthy off the top and deny coverage to the sick.   The Republican pander is that more competition will get these prices down.  Never has and when the profit is in denying care, why should it.  They will be just better skimmers while the government absorbs the major cost of the really sick.  The rest of the industrialized world has figured this out and we are still terrified of socialized medicine.  The rest of the world has many models to choose from that are working well, and we still think we have the best system in the world, until we get sick or lose our job.  Just how stupid are we?

Bottom line:  we get what we sow or stupid is as stupid does and we have really done stupid well.  The press is terrible because we don’t hold them accountable.  The government is terrible because we put the people in place who reflect our moron views.  Then we say they all ought to work together when we are not even willing to realize there is no free ride and we put those bickering morons in office.  No, America is not a place to be proud of.  I know, that is the end of my political career.  But I am ashamed of my country because its people are so poorly informed that they can be led around by promises of easy fixes and free rides.  They are so self absorbed and selfish that they ignore our future trying to recover our past.  If we do this same stupid thinking one more election cycle it will be over for us.