Of Bitches and Dog Whistles

Why this election is a choice, not a referendum

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Tuesday, January 24, 10:27 AM

At the “heart of this campaign,” Newt Gingrich told his adoring followers in his South Carolina victory speech on Saturday night, is the fundamental choice between “American exceptionalism” and “the radicalism of Saul Alinsky.” America has a choice, he argued, between the vision of the founders and that of radical organizer Saul Alinsky, between a paycheck president and a food stamp president.

For a man of serial corruptions,

As far as ethics violations go, he was found guilty of one violation, which compares very favorably against Charlie Rangel and Tim Geitner.

it is ironic

I’m revoking previous laudation for accurately identifying irony. (http://www.embracethedivide.blogspot.com/2012/01/after-little-bit-of-the-primary-season.html) A professional writer and editor misusing irony? Also not ironic. Still tragic, though.

that character assassination is Gingrich’s true craft.

Whose character is he assassinating? Alinsky’s?

Dog-whistle racism — Obama as the “food stamp president”

Oh the irony—yes, actual irony—of dog-whistle racism. The thrust of the analogy is that a speaker uses language that is only able to be identified and interpreted by a racist, in much the same way as a dog whistle is only able to be heard by a dog (and other animals with broader audible ranges, but they don’t really have a place in this analogy). Of course, the tacit admission is that the outraged listener accusing the speaker of using “dog whistle racism” can hear the metaphorical dog whistle. Hence, the outraged are, by definition, dogs and/or racists. Either that or it’s all in their heads.

—    provided him his initial lift in South Carolina.

Even on the internet, I defy you to find a more stunningly inept (and succinct) misinterpretation of the South Carolina results. It assumes both that South Carolina Republicans are all racists and that Newt Gingrich tapped into that implicit racism with a single accusation—against the President, not against his rivals—in a single debate.

Few at Gingrich’s victory speech knew who Alinsky was,

[citation needed]

but they could tell from the name that he was surely unsavory and probably un-American.

Ironically—yes, actual irony—just one sentence after flubbing the interpretation of the results so badly, Katrina has perfectly exemplified why Gingrich struck a chord with South Carolina Republicans. We’re sick of being talked down to by monstrous buffoons who think fumbling their way through Kierkegard during their sophomore year at Princeton qualifies them to snivel about imagined racism or anti-Semitism while accusing us of ignorance to a question we were never given the opportunity to answer. We’re sick of the seething disdain that the media has for us, and we love Gingrich for resisting questions with logical fallacies, for not succumbing to the temptation for contrition, for giving us something to be excited about. Most of all, we wanted to reward Newt Gingrich for treating us like intelligent and sober-minded adults, for forcefully articulating his beliefs, and for refusing to apologize to sniveling piss-ants like John King.

But the Gingrich dichotomy is neither original nor unique. It is simply the gutter version of the standard Republican frame for this election.

It must be exhausting to hear dog whistles everywhere while explaining that you’re not actually a dog.

In the more tempered words of Mitt Romney, Obama is accused of trying to transform America from an “Opportunity Society” to a “European-style Entitlement Society.”

Barack Obama is the only President since Lyndon Johnson to sign a brand new entitlement into law. When the shoe fits…

No matter who wins the nomination, this will be a theme pounded on over the next months.

Only if our nominee is as aggressive as Newt Gingrich has been.

What’s odd about this frame is that it makes Republicans the defenders of the past.

That’s generally the position that opposes “fundamental [sic] transformation.”

To keep America the “shining city on the hill,” Romney and Gingrich and Rick Santorum agree, requires reaffirming the policies of . . . well . . . of George W. Bush.

Take a look at Bush’s domestic policy and that of the current Republican crop. With the exception of tax cuts, there’s not a whole lot of similarity there. This is, of course, because George W. Bush felt the need to qualify conservatism, largely in response to logical fallacies from clueless talking heads like Katrina here.

They would sustain the Bush tax cuts and add further top-end and corporate tax reductions.

Damn right. It’s a far cry from the consumption-based tax that we should have, but it’s a good start.

They would repeal financial reform and health-care reform, return to “drill, baby, drill” energy policies, sustain the military budget and lay waste to the domestic budget

Seriously, this sentence is exactly what I’m looking for from the government.

that supports everything from schools

Which is inherently a state/local issue.

to clean air

Environmental regulations should be able to pay for their own enforcement.

to the FBI.

If your opponent is burning too easily, there’s a good chance you’re fighting straw men. Not even Ron Paul is talking about cutting the FBI.

And they are busily inflating Iran as a mythical menace

Facepalm.

as threatening as Iraq was in the run-up to that misbegotten invasion.

Actually, the more appropriate analogy if you believe that Iran isn’t a threat is Kosovo. If there is any action on Iran, it will almost certainly be as a distraction from domestic problems for an irrationally dovish commander in chief.

Recycling the policies that blew up the economy is possible only because none of the Republican candidates — other than Ron Paul — bothers to offer a theory of what went wrong.

I don’t do research to support these write-ups because Googling is boring, but the Republican consensus is that the housing crisis hit because of the Democratic policies of Bill Clinton and Barny Frank. State-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed initiatives to give home loans to unqualified borrowers, massively inflating housing prices and injecting risk into the system. It took about a decade and a system-wide failure to adequately price derivative risks to inject enough bad assets in the financial system to make major banks unstable. The economy will recover when the system is purged of these bad assets and prices hit bottom.

Obama’s explanation? Something about evil bankers and greed. It’s all pretty incomprehensible.

The crash was apparently an immaculate conception. The candidates simply blame Obama for the deficits,

Deficits can be controlled by controlling spending. When you’re spending 24% of GDP, there is simply no amount of taxation that can generate that revenue.

unemployment,

His policies certainly haven’t helped. He’s economically illiterate; he doesn’t know how to help.

spreading poverty and, yes, rising reliance on food stamps that followed in its wake.

Well that’s not simply a function of rising unemployment (which is still largely his fault). Food stamp reliance is a function of both cultural normalization for dependency and dogged governmental efforts to increase food stamp participation.

Tuesday night, in his State of the Union address, President Obama will also define the election as a choice — a choice between those who would go back to the policies that drove us off the cliff

Bush, like Obama, inherited a terrible economy. The dot-com bust was widely thought to be economically disastrous. The 9/11 attacks came at a time when the economy was still very frail. And yet, until 2008, the Bush economy added kicked ass and took names. Is it so unreasonable to have the same expectations for Obama?

and those who would build a new foundation for the economy.

It’s a cute shtick, but the idea that this man knows how to build a new foundation for the economy is laughable. He put all his eggs in the green energy basket and reality is currently in the process of kicking his ass.

The administration has made it clear that it plans to warn against the extreme and unsustainable inequality that is corrupting our democracy

We don’t have a democracy. We have a Republic.

and has crippled our economy.

[citation needed]

The president does this in tempered language, but the case is inescapable.

Like a black hole of inanity.

The wealthiest Americans captured essentially all of the rewards of growth over the decade before the collapse.

Oh no! She’s passed the event horizon! (Which, fortunately, means that she’ll never be able to emit inanity that will reach me. We can all rest easy.)

This wasn’t an act of nature. They used their resources to rig

Oh you pitiable little dullard…

the rules — deregulating finance, demanding lower taxes,

The case that modest deregulation and marginally lower taxes lead to economic collapse flies in the face of every hard-and-fast rule of macroeconomic theory in existence. She couldn’t have pointed to a more inaccurate diagnosis if she were blind-folded and lobotomized.

defending subsidies and privileges,

Katrina spends her life fighting tooth and nail against conservatives to preserve a bloated bureaucratic government. She believes in social spending based on specific criteria to promote certain businesses. I wonder what, exactly, she thinks subsidies are. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, WOMAN!?!

trampling on worker rights.

I must have missed the trials against Citigroup for violations of child labor laws. What the fuck is she even talking about?

Middle class families worked longer hours, had more jobs, and took on debt to make up for incomes that weren’t keeping up with costs.

“Middle class families” negotiate the terms of their employment with their employers. This includes wages and hours worked. No one was exploited or trampled on, even if the results weren’t what they wanted. That’s why it’s a negotiation and that’s why we have at-will employment.

Wall Street speculators went on a wilding that eventually blew out the economy.

This sentence is also mildly retarded. Speculation is an incredibly crass and simplistic description of the financial sector. This is the financial sector that makes markets that value corporations that employ millions and set interest rates, which allow for retirement planning for millions more. They also buy and sell the bonds that allow the federal government to continue to function.

Oddly, it appears that Katrina is more upset that the market eventually reverted to the intrinsic value of housing instead of perpetuating the bubble. In short, Katrina isn’t arguing against speculators or Republicans. She’s arguing against the rude imposition of reality that most of us dealt with sometime before adolescence.

The entitlement of the rich is undermining the opportunity of the many.

Funny how this disdain for entitlements doesn’t extend to things that are actually called “entitlements.” Instead, Katrina has concocted a narrative of colossal ignorance to appeal to the lowest common denominator of class envy.

Romney and Gingrich, the “vulture capitalist”

That term still doesn’t actually exist, which is again why you have to put it in quotes.

and the lavishly rewarded Washington insider,

Something about corporate greed and such and…if she’s going to phone this in then so am I.

personify not success, but the corruptions that brought us to where we are,

I actually don’t think Katrina knows where she is, let alone where the economy is.

even as they champion the same policies that took us there.

The only thing she’s actually expressed outrage over are lower taxes, deregulation, and some as-yet undefined sort of corruption.

The president should be pleased that his Republican challengers are making the race into a choice rather than just a referendum on the economy.

The referendum already happened in 2010. It was pretty ugly for the president.

Most Americans will readily agree that returning to the Bush policies doesn’t offer a way out.

Bush was only staunchly conservative on foreign policy. Domestically, he kind of had to be dragged to the table, and didn’t have a major conservative domestic policy win of his second term

Yet it’s not enough to argue that everyone should play by the same set of rules, that the wealthy should pay their fair share.

An argument necessarily voided by the tiered income tax structure she advocates further stratifying. Playing by the same set of rules and the wealthy paying their fair share are necessarily contradictory ideas in the liberal parlance.

The president’s task is to show how greater fairness — and government action —

Does she seriously equate the two of those?

is essential to getting the economy going in the short term

I suppose it would sound ridiculous to say that the engine of the economy should be hope and change and fairy dust.

as well as putting it on sound footing for the long run.

It’s both a short-term and long-term solution? And all we have to do is tax other people? What a convenient diagnosis?

Katrina, please. Grown ups are talking.

He could take forceful steps to require the banks to renegotiate underwater mortgages.

Is this some weird hybrid between nationalization of banks and post-Constitutional Chicago-style thuggishness? By what precedent does the President of the United States have authority to force the renegotiation of private contracts?

(Alternatively, if he pushes the state attorneys general to cut a sweetheart deal bailing the banks out of their mortgage frauds,

[citation needed. AGAIN]

it will sure undermine his credibility.)

Banks don’t need bailouts and there was remarkably little actual fraud that led to the 2008 crash.

He’s begun to make that case for a fair-share economy with his jobs bill that would tax the wealthy

Naturally. Is it just me, or are Democrats even more obsessed with tax rates than Republicans?

to pay for investments in infrastructure

This was the ostensible purpose of the $750B stimulus, which failed spectacularly at doing any economic benefit.

and provide help for states to protect teachers and police.

States can get their own houses in order. Look to Wisconsin for a road map.

The Republicans in Congress have made themselves less popular than communism in fighting against the jobs bill.

Congressional popularity is an asinine metric; Republicans think about the congressional Democrats and Democrats think about congressional Republicans. And for the record, congressional ratings were rock-bottom under Nancy Pelosi, too.

The Republican primaries are just a preview of what will be an ugly election.

Not based on anything the Republicans are doing. The President started telegraphing his attacks a year ago (I suspect to dissuade prominent Republicans from entering the race.)

Americans are fearful about their economic future and seeking tangible solutions.

This might be the first sentence I’ve agreed with yet.

Instead, voters are being swamped with negative ads from the two campaigns.

Is she talking about the primary? This has been the most substantive primary season in my lifetime. This is why we always seem to have two debates a week.

Republicans offer only more of what created the mess.

It would help if your diagnosis for the economy weren’t based on the ramblings of an economic illiterate.

The president offers positive initiatives, yet they don’t deal with the scale of the problem. That’s why the movement that began in Wisconsin a year ago, occupied Wall Street and spread across the country will continue to grow.

Actually, the reason for Occupy was Big Labor money, retired hippies, and a culture tolerant of shameless attention-whoring. There is no worse standard-bearer for America than the miscreant who leads these vagabonds.