Three Sneers for the Establishment!

I'll keep the prelude brief: the visual representation that evokes Dana Milbank to me is a little girl with a skinned knee wailing that his pain is the result of an unjust world. Now, of course, there is no justice for a dude being named Dana, but we all have our hurdles. Sack up, sir. Sack up.

Michele Bachmann's alternate universe

By Dana Milbank

Tuesday, January 25, 2011; 11:15 PM

The president was lofty.

Generally it’s not good to start a column with political wood.  I’m telling you, he’s going to shoot his wad early and flounder for a couple paragraphs at the end there. Only you would sexualize a Dana Milbank column. Oh Jesus, you’re back again?

"We will move forward together, or not at all - for the challenges we face are bigger than party, and bigger than politics," he said in hisState of the Union address.

Is he seriously citing platitudes as though they have meaning?

The official Republican response, too, aimed high.

Admiral Ackbar says: “It’s a trap!” Dana Milbank doesn’t compliment conservatives except to insult other conservatives.

"Americans are skeptical of both political parties, and that skepticism is justified - especially when it comes to spending," said Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. "So hold all of us accountable."

And then there was Michele Bachmann.

Told ya so. It’s hardly an impressive feat to predict something you’ve already read. I needed to inflate my ego, alright. You really don’t get Freudian psychology. I AM your ego. I’ve been feeding you for so many years, it was bound to happen.

As the leader of the Tea Party Caucus in the House, the Minnesota Republican gave her own, unauthorized response to the State of the Union,

Jesus, you make it sound like the Never Say Never Again of the State of the Union responses. She was solicited to give the response by the Tea Party Express.

live from the National Press Club, filmed by Fox News, broadcast live on CNN and telecast by the Tea Party Express. It had all the altitude of a punch to the gut.

What an absolutely terrible metaphor. Let’s deconstruct this one. First, altitude is a strange objective for a political speech. Politicians with “altitude” usually come off as detached, a universally acknowledged negative attribute for politicians. Secondly, a punch in the gut says absolutely nothing about altitude. The idiomatic basis for this rhetorical turd lies only in the idea of a “low blow.” Every toddler who’s ever seen a fight knows that “low blows” refer to hits below the beltline. Unless you’re 83 and living in Boca Raton, a punch to the gut is considerably above the belt line.

I’ve mired myself in specificity. I was wondering how deep you’d dig into your own pontificating bullshit. The point is that by avoiding an easy metaphor—as an example, “it had the altitude of the bunny slopes”—Milbank has, in effect, rendered the idea of altitude meaningless. God you love to hear yourself speak. I’m writing, jackass.

"After the $700 billion bailout,

Fact.

the trillion-dollar stimulus,

Fact.

and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks,

Fact.

many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money we don't have,"

Universally acknowledged interpretation of the Tea Party’s rise.

Bachmann said. "But, instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt,

Fact.

unlike anything we have seen in the history of our country."

Widely held conclusion of most of the right. None of this is extreme, belligerent, argumentative, or otherwise unseemly.

Armed with charts and photographs,

First Glenn Beck’s blackboard and now this…they’ve discovered PowerPoint! Are you mocking him there? Of course I’m mocking Dana Milbank. Well maybe you should be more clear to the reader(s) Doesn’t this little back and forth serve the purpose? Well yeah, if you want to rely on cheap little interludes like this. I’m good with it.

but not a word of fellowship,

Bachman’s address was 841 words due to time constraints. By contrast, Ryan used 1,669 and Obama’s address tallied 6803. When you have the constraints Bachman had, you tend to cut out the platitudes and get to the point. Even with half the content of Ryan and a little over a tenth of the content of President Obama, Bachman still managed to do the thing that Milbank criticized her for not doing:

“… but we still need all of us to pull together. We can do ths" –Michelle Bachman’s response to the State of the Union.

she railed against "a bureaucracy that tells us which light bulbs to buy, and which may put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's health care bill."

Uh huh…

The State of the Nation was conciliatory Tuesday night, as each side made gestures to the other, and lawmakers for the first time crossed the aisle to sit - and applaud - together.

Yeah. It was super gay.

But Bachmann and her fellow Tea Partyers raged on.

Nope. Just Bachman.Also, you spelled ‘Partiers’ wrong.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, for one, was not pleased. "Paul Ryan is giving the official Republican response," he said when asked earlier about her dueling response. "Michele Bachmann, just as the other 534 members of the House and Senate, are going to have opinions as to the State of the Union."

Awwww  snap. Gauntlet is down, bitches. You absolutely can’t pull that off, whitey.

For Republican leaders, it's more than a one-night problem. Bachmann is bidding to become the new voice of the opposition, replacing the titular leaders of the GOP.

My leg just got trapped underneath the giant grain of salt that comes with Dana Milbank expressing concern for the Republican leadership.

In the past week alone, Bachmann visited Iowa to test the waters for a presidential campaign and scored fifth in a field of 20 presidential candidates in a New Hampshire straw poll, besting such established figures as Mitch Daniels,

Who?

Newt Gingrich,

Is this 1998?

Mike Huckabee,

As we all said when Bill Clinton was in office, Arkansas isn’t a real state.

John Thune,

Neither is South Dakota. My God, you’re an elitist.

Haley Barbour

Nothing more than meh-worthy.

and Mike Pence.

::Swoon::  Butch up, Nancy. Real men don’t dance or swoon.

Returning to Washington, she hosted Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at a gathering of her Tea Party Caucus, then went for an appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News and a keynote speech to the March for Life's annual dinner. And that was all before her Tea Party response to the State of the Union address.

Are these supposed to be character defaults or something?

Two dozen reporters chased her down a hall in the Capitol complex this week, seeking an explanation for the speech. "I never took this as a State of the Union response, necessarily," she said innocently. The title above the text of her speech her office released Tuesday night: "Bachmann's Response to State of the Union."

From the exact same interview: “I am not giving the official Republican response. This is not a competition. I’m very excited about Paul Ryan’s response, I think he’ll do a wonderful response. This was really a reaction that I was giving to people in the Tea Party.” The take-away is that she was parsing between response and reaction. The response is what Paul Ryan gave. A reaction is something that every news panelist over the next three days is going to give.

Party leaders, intimidated by the Tea Party activists,

The implication that Republicans are at war with the Tea Party is asinine. Certainly entrenched pols have something to lose from the shifting dynamic of the GOP, but anyone with a teaspoon of  common sense understands that the Tea Party is nothing new; the people attending these rallies have always been the silent base of the Republican Party, supplanted in influence for only a few frenetic years in the early 2000s by the religious right.

have little control over Bachmann. They denied her the party leadership post she sought, but when it came to her plan to upstage the authorized GOP response Tuesday night, the most House Speaker John Boehner could do was grumble that it's "a little unusual."

My God! There’s blood in the streets from the GOP insurrection!

Bachmann is more than a little unusual. Her greatest hits are now legendary: Her suggestion that President Obama and the Democrats are "anti-American,"

She’s not the only one. That’s what happens when you bow to foreign leaders, attend church with a radically anti-American preacher, and cozy up to domestic terrorists.

her caution that the census could be used to create internment camps,

Her caution was that the census has been used to populate internment camps.

"Take this into consideration. If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that's how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps ... I'm not saying that that's what the Administration is planning to do, but I am saying that private personal information that was given to the Census Bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up, in a violation of their constitutional rights, and put the Japanese in internment camps."

The larger argument was one against the government amassing databases of unnecessary information.

her accusation that Obama is running a "gangster government"

He comes from Chicago and his Chief of Staff at the time was Rahm Emmanuel. If for no other reason than Rahm, that qualified the executive branch as gangsters.

and her request that people be "armed and dangerous" to fight climate-change legislation.

We listened to all this shit with the Giffords story. Don’t you have enough pie on your face? It wasn’t a call for violence in any conceivable way.

At a time colleagues have toned down their words, Bachmann went to Iowa and proclaimed: "If we want to kill Obamacare and we want to end socialized medicine, it must be done in the next election!"

Do you in any way disagree?

"It is my firm belief that America is under greater attack now . . . than at any time," she warned, voicing "grave doubt" about the nation's survival.

The Obama agenda has been ambitious in its deviation from politics as usual. Of course those that believe that the country was too liberal three years ago--and those constituents are legion—now believe that this is a dire time for the protection of the liberties that we hold dear. I would certainly quibble with her over the severity of some of our historical threats, but I certainly don’t disagree with her that vast swaths of American liberties are in jeopardy. If we lose them, then what’s the point of paying lip service to freedom?

She presented to the assembled Iowans a novel view of American history in which the "founders . . . worked tirelessly until slavery was no more." In Bachmann's version, "It didn't matter the color of their skin. . . . Once you got here, we were all the same."

Most of the founders did work to eliminate slavery from the United States. They determined that cohesion with the Southern states in the short-term—without which the Revolution would have been lost--was an asset that outweighed the moral blight of slavery. That work was not insignificant, nor was . The idea that Bachman, who evoked obscure historical tidbits like the Muskego Manifesto and quoted Lincoln, didn’t understand the basic historical chronology of the Emancipation Proclamation is an asinine game of gotcha. I could just as easily say that Barack Obama believed that there were 57 states. The arch of the speech—and it’s 1:30 in the morning so I listened to maybe two of fifty seven minutes—was the significance of American Exceptionalism. It’s a doctrine from which Milbank recoils in horror.

She was at it again Tuesday night. She ignored the bipartisan seating plan and placed herself between two other Tea Party House Republicans. Soon after, she was on air herself, reading out choice slogans: "failed stimulus . . . repeal Obamacare . . . government-run coverage . . . voted out the big-spending politicians."

So we disapprove of buzzwords now? Did you even listen to the State of the Union?

It was angry,

I, for one, am glad she didn’t try to blow sunshine up my ass.

and at times wrong, but Bachmann has gone far with that formula.

Backhanded compliments are far classier than rhetorical haymakers. I’ve had enough of Milbank’s prissy sermonizing about the crassness of Bachman’s earnest opposition. Good conservatives can not be afraid of being “gauche” in the eyes of Dana Milbank and his ilk. They’re children who can’t play games with established rules, so they make them up as they go along. This year the State of the Union is all about being conciliatory. But the next time the President or a prominent liberal gets feisty, you can be certain you’ll find Milbank in his corner. 

Paul Ryan: Man, Legend, Lumberjack.

It's been a while. My reader(s) might have thought that I got out of the game. I can assure you, I'm on it. Sadly, the post-Giffords opinion world has been a wasteland of semi-rational thought and unmockable drivel. That is, until Katrina vanden Heuvel came along. Oh, I brought along my friend. I call him the Heckler Inside My Head. Now you get three concurrent voices, two of which just happen to be me. I fear that shrinks will look back on this post when they commit me and say to themselves "So that's where it started."

Paul Ryan's State of the Union response

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Republicans have chosen Rep. Paul Ryan, the new chairman of the House Budget Committee, to respond to the president's State of the Union address tonight.

A good choice. Ryan is widely considered the leading expert in all things budgetary on Capitol Hill and took President Obama to task during the health care debate. While Ryan maintains his credibility as a deficit hawk, he did also give a yes vote to TARP and the auto bailout. Did he think these votes would ingratiate him with the left? If so, shame on him and his Chief of Staff, both of whom should know better. I generally mancrush pretty hard over Paul Ryan, so I’m willing to give him a pass since he appears to have found Reagan. (See what I did there? It’s a play on finding Jesus. Blasphemer. No, heckler inside my head, it’s not sacrilegious. There’s nothing sacred about syntax.)

Also this whole sordid circus isn’t about the State of the Union anymore. It’s “Date Night.” Great! I love Tina Fey. Stop it, HIMH. The imagery of Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk sharing a Coke with two straws is not an invitation for your hip pop-culture references or snide jabs, no matter how apt and hilarious they may be. It just makes me queasy. Plus Tina Fey is adorable. Lay off.

In the civility intermission that has followed the assassination attempt against Rep. Gabby Giffords just outside Tucson, Ryan will no doubt be respectful,

Of course, now two weeks after the fact, the paper foot soldiers of the left have given up the overt attempts to link the right to the shooting, and instead settled for the innuendo of association.

and sorrowful that he must dissent from the president's course.

Messaging note for the left: when supporting a guy that plays as much golf as Obama, veer away from words and phrases like “course,” “stroke,” and “tee up.”

Don't be fooled.

Ryan is an Ayn Rand-quoting zealot,

Is it possible to be a zealot of an ideology based on the elevation of the individual and the glorification of an ideal called “egoism?” If so, it would appear to be missing the point.

one of the Republican Party's self-styled "Young Guns."

More of the rhetoric that nearly killed Gabrielle Giffords. You bastards.

He's spent his adult life inside the Beltway,

Which puts him in the company of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Joe Biden, every Kennedy born since 1930, the entire staff of the Washington Post…

on the political right, with no experience in the world of business, labor, the executive branch or the private sector

Which puts him in the company of Barack Obama.

Incubated in a right-wing think tank,

Interesting tact: dehumanizing the opponent. I’m pretty sure it’s not civil though.

writing speeches for Jack Kemp and William Bennett, he was elected to Congress at age 28. Ryan became the most loyal of loyal foot soldiers

Remember: civility. We don’t want our language to evoke hatred or martial concepts.

in the Congress presided over by Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert, a fact Ryan now glosses over as he describes those Congresses as "corrupt."

Which they indisputably were, at least when you don’t look at them compared to the 110^th and 111^th Congresses. That’s a fragment. I know, okay. I’m trying to cultivate a casual and conversant writing style when interrupting someone else’s work. It helps the flow for the reader for my intermissions to actually sound like vocalized objections. This really impugns your moral authority to correct grammar, you know. I hate you.

Ryan has been dubbed a Republican "thinker" by national reporters desperate to find someone they can praise in a party that was extreme before the Tea Partyers came to town.

...This is the party that ran John McCain in 2008. The Republican Party never operated in the fringes. In fact, the reason that Bush’s late-presidency poll numbers were so low is because he lost his conservative base.

But, in fact, his rhetoric is a barely varnished echo of the ravings of Glenn Beck.

I’ve never been able to understand the glaring like of omission perpetuated by the left with regards to conservative commentators. If Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and numerous other right-wing voices are extremist ravings, then how are they so much more successful than their liberal counterparts?

He accuses Obama of a "treacherous plan,"

Boy some context would be both helpful and accepted journalistic practice.

saying that Democrats have a "hardcore-left agenda,"

Again, without context those three words are completely meaningless.

and claims that Democrats are steering the country "very far left, very fast"

Kimono. Missouri. Potpourri.

- a direction he describes as "completely antithetical to what this country is about."

Which is undeniably true. Obama has been very successful in enacting his agenda, but the reason for the massive conservative resurgence last year was the discomfort of that lurch to the left. From a purely nonpartisan position, if Ryan didn’t believe that the President’s agenda was wrong, then why would he oppose it? Political ideology is not a dirty and bitter thing. It represents our attempts to synthesize the lessons of economics, history, and philosophy in a universal compact between men. In short, if Ryan didn’t believe that Obama had overstepped the limited role of government as envisioned by the Founders, he wouldn’t be a conservative.

This sort of rhetoric, once scorned as sophomoric at best,

Only by the miserable dullards of left that were busy trying to smear the Tea Party. Another fragment. Shove it. Don’t think that by using poor sentence construction and invoking an implied subject that your grammar isn’t any less ghastly. You just used another implied subject yourself! Touche. Another Fragment!

::Error: Infinite Loop::

is now common currency

Rhetoric is not currency. No wonder the left always botches monetary policy.

on the Republican right. While Ryan will be careful to avoid such language in the GOP response to the State of the Union, he'll reveal his ideological zealotry

That’s the second time already you’ve used that word. Technically she used the form “zealot” before.

in the policies he will propose.

Most of those policies will come from Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future," a budget manifesto published last year that The Post's Ezra Klein

AKA: the left-wing hack that was responsible for “JournoList” and a former Dean campaign worker. Also of note, Klein vindictively stated that Senator Joe Lieberman’s opposition to the Health Care bill meant that "willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score." Hey, you just got all of that off of Wikipedia. What can I say; I’m a lazy researcher.

aptly described as "nothing short of violent."

Careful now; we all want to be civil.

In a nation where the top 1 percent already captures 25 percent of the nation's income and possesses more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, the roadmap would give the richest households a new round of staggering tax cuts. It would reduce tax rates, eliminate taxes on capital gains, dividends and interest, and abolish the corporate tax, the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax.

The respected Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, drawing on estimates of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, concluded that the average tax cut for the top 1 percent of the population (with incomes over $633,000) would be $280,000. The richest one-tenth of one percent, who had incomes over $2.9 million in 2009, would pocket a handsome $1.7 million a year in tax breaks.

Okay, I just let her rant for two paragraphs. Let’s all catch our breath. … You can’t simulate breathing with an ellipsis. It’s a literary device to assist the pacing of the reader. Tell yourself whatever you want, Chief. To me it just looks like sloppy writing.

Anyways, I reject the premise that income parity should be a stated goal of the United States government. I reject the notion that the United States government should have the apparatus to shift income amongst its citizenry in an effort to meet these goals. Furthermore, the idea that tax cuts—whether in the form of rate reductions or code simplifications—injure the poor is both asinine and morally vacuous. Simultaneously, it inaccurately implies that the poor will have to lift a heavier burden—which is the simple immorality of a lie—and it establishes the rights of the poor to decide how the wealth of the affluent is apportioned—which is the dire depravity of a government-sponsored mugging.

Some of this revenue would be replaced by a value-added tax

Booooo VAT Tax! BOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Booooo!

that would raise the cost of every good Americans buy, ensuring that middle-income people would pay far more in taxes than they do now.

Actually, consumption-based taxes like the VAT disproportionately impact high-income consumers, you illiterate hag.

Some would be made up by drastic cuts in health-care spending. Ryan's giveaway to the rich would also drive up federal deficits and debt.

You can’t simultaneously criticize Ryan for wanting spending reductions and make a deficit-related objection to tax cuts in a stagnant economy. I don’t care what Paul Krugman says. Did I just say something? No, that italicization was only for emphasis.

Understanding the purpose of the "roadmap" is key to understanding Ryan.

So you’re telling me you understand Ryan? Great. This should be some very insightful commentary.

When he speaks of "fiscal responsibility," what he really means is that middle-class and working Americans will shoulder the responsibility of tackling debts and deficits, while multinational corporations and financial institutions will reap the benefits of favorable government policies and taxpayer-funded bailouts.

…

I believe you said something earlier about echoes and ravings? This is pure insanity. Paul Ryan is from Wisconsin. They don’t have any multinationals in Wisconsin. They barely even have nationals in Wisconsin, and most of those are still just dairy farms. So your theory—basted on your vast and unique understanding of Paul Ryan—is that he has a dastardly plan to spurn his entire constituency so that he can ingratiate scores of out-of-state multinationals to…have a laugh? Get re-elected? Because he secretly hates America? It seems like there’s a missing step in here.

His plan would unravel employer-based health care by ending the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance.

Under this plan, health insurance providers would be forced to sell insurance like car insurance providers. Consumers would naturally rearrange themselves into plans through market-based mechanisms, thereby providing a larger risk pool for insurers to draw from. This, in turn, would reduce costs and give consumers more control over their plans. This is a bad thing?

It would eliminate traditional Medicare, eviscerate Medicaid, and terminate the Children's Health Insurance Program. These would be replaced by a voucher system designed to lose value over time.

This is called weaning.

Ryan would also use "price indexing" to slash average Social Security benefits by 16 percent for those retiring in 2050

Just in case you’re 23 years old and still dumb enough to believe that you’ll actually draw from Social Security.

 and 28 percent in 2080.

Just in case you’re 23 years old and want to have a baby dumb enough to believe that it will actually draw from Social Security. That’s the great part about believing that the unborn still deserve human dignity; you get to insult and mock fetuses. You’re sick.

As head of the House Budget Committee - accorded what House Speaker John Boehner calls "stunning and unprecedented" power to shape the budget - Ryan is leading the GOP's charge to cut $100 billion out of "non-security discretionary spending" this year - requiring cuts of 20 percent in everything from the FBI to cancer research, Pell grants for students, Head Start and grants to public school districts.

Even a cadre of ill-placed dashes to avoid a comma splice can’t make this sentence readable. You’ve got some stones to bring up grammar. Let’s count: three dashes, two commas, and a stunning 67 words. Katrina vanden Heuvel, this sentence is a glittering monument to your colossal ineptitude as a writer.

Oh, and besides being a grammatical clusterfuck, it’s also politically shallow. What ever happened to “elections have consequences?” Republicans campaigned on fiscal responsibility and won in a landslide. Far from being fringe, these cuts are an electoral mandate.

This is a recipe, given the country's faltering growth, for increasing unemployment and misery.

Please, PLEASE stop reading Paul Krugman. I can’t deal with refuting his particular brand of economic nonsense more than once a week.

Ryan, of course, refuses to identify which programs would be cut,

Does it really matter? Let’s start with the ones that you thought would be disasterous to cut: the FBI, cancer research, Pell Grants, and Head Start. The FBI’s mandate has been slashed with the emergence of DHS, so its budget should also be cut. Cancer research should be entirely private-sector. No one needs Pell Grants when student loans are universally available and the country faces a shortage of technically skilled workers (like welders or electricians). Finally, Head Start is little more than a Kindergarten class for disengaged parents. Have you managed to piss everyone off yet? I haven’t insulted midgets yet.

or how deep the damage would be.

When sane people say “what’s the damage,” the damage refers to a high cost. When liberals say “what’s the damage” the damager refers to lower cost. Yet another way that the left’s entire world view is skewed so far it’s backwards.

 "I'm a budgeteer," Ryan says. "I just bring down the cap" - an utterly irresponsible description of budgeting, which is entirely a question of choosing priorities.

No, budgeting is entirely a question of scope and necessity. Cutting a program doesn’t mean that its goals are not a priority. We could make Ryan’s $100B of cuts simply by scaling back programs that have failed.

As a career politician steeped in the art of "framing" a poll-tested, focus-grouped message to make it palatable,

Read: he’s plastic and fake. He’s playing you. He wants your money. Project much, KVH? Don’t start giving Katrina vanden Heuvel cute little nicknames. Sorry.

Ryan will no doubt sound reasonable,

That nerve of this Ryan guy!

invoking basic American values,

That bastard!

promising that jobs,

That crosses the line.

growth and opportunity will result if only we adopt his priorities.

Son of a bitch!

But don't just listen to State of the Union platitudes. Consider the record and the proposed policies. Beneath that shock of unruly hair

Because we all know that the quality of the hair is the true measure of the quality of the politician.

is an ideologue with extreme notions

Again, this horse-faced trollop believed that the party that nominated John McCain was ideological and extreme.

that, if adopted, would endanger our future, and leave most Americans far worse off.

Her choice of words fascinates me. By denouncing Rand, vanden Heuvel is establishing herself as the voice for the collective. Yet here, when she makes her summation, she uses the language of rand. Instead of saying that the American People would be worse off, KVH…Ugh…instead opts to talk about American people individually. “Most Americans would be worse off” instead of “the American People would be worse off.” The difference is that vanden Heuvel regards this as a divided country. She appears to believe that the ties of nationhood are less binding than the ties of social class.

This, Ms. Vanden Heuvel, is why the American people call liberals socialists. This is why we know you to be extreme.