Progressives Unfamiliar with Meaning of Progress; Party Like It's 1917

Get yourself some Tylenol. This might be a little painful to read.

Obama needs a budget to match his progressive ideals

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Tuesday, April 19, 10:53 AM

For perhaps the first time since being sworn into office, President Obama has articulated, in eloquent terms,

I truly don’t understand the myth of Obama’s eloquence. He says “let me be clear” and follows it up with platitudes and nonsensical contradictions. “Let me be clear: the United States will always stand firm with our NATO allies so long as it’s done third phase of the new moon and so long as we don’t seek input from nations in the general North Atlantic region.”

what it means to be a progressive.

There will never be an eloquent defense of what it means to be a progressive because it’s a manufactured catchall term for a political philosophy of expediency in the furtherance of state-controlled society. Publicly acknowledging and supporting the true nature of progressivism, a euphemism for liberalism, would have ordinary Americans running in horror. This is because at its heart, it always devolves into communism.

In his budget speech last week, he spoke of our obligation to the broader community

So we owe ourselves, basically. Doesn’t this kind of sound like a trophy wife whose friends tell her that she owes it to herself to spend two weeks in an Icelandic spa?

to provide a basic level of security

What’s that old saying? Those who are willing to sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither.

and dignity.

No free good in the history of mankind has ever engendered dignity. All it does is create dependency, which is ugly, brutal, and destabilizing.

Speaking of programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, he said what every good progressive believes: “We would not be a great country without those commitments.”

This is too destructive to be snarky about. The idea that America didn’t become great until 1965 is so insulting that it reframes the entire trajectory of American history away from the accumulation of liberty and towards the accumulation of entitlements. It is so antithetical to the American identity that it’s no small wonder that people believe Obama isn’t really an American; he has never actually understood America.

He fused a defense of progressive governance with a scathing critique of Paul Ryan’s cruel budget,

How is raising already confiscatory tax rates on a small portion of the population less cruel than returning spending to 2008 levels?

which all but four Republican House members have now voted for. And he demanded that the rich finally pay their fair share,

Sigh. How many times does it have to be said? The rich already pay most of the taxes. Raising the rates on the rich is simply designed as a mechanism for class warfare, not as a serious attempt to raise revenues. By this point, even a mongoloid chimp understands that lowering tax rates increases the tax base enough to keep revenues roughly level.

vowing to let the Bush tax cuts expire.

Why is that claim taken any more seriously than Republicans’ claims that they would repeal Obamacare? Of course they can’t; they only have one house of congress. Similarly, Obama would personally have to hold about 200 House members’ children hostage to get that tax increase.

It was a powerful speech,

This is getting beyond the point of verbal fellatio.

in many ways reassuring to progressives who have been demoralized by a president who appeared missing in action.

*was* missing in action.

But rhetoric and policy are not the same thing.

And yet you continue to let this jackass skate on rhetoric alone.

And in this case, as in far too many, the policy agenda the president has laid out is not worthy of, in his words, “the America we believe in.”

But not an America that the Standard & Poors’ credit raters believe in. Just saying.

To begin with, the president continues to let Republicans define the playing field in almost every instance. Why is the debate we are having not about whether to cut, but how much to cut?

Is that really a question that you need someone to answer? Because the American people collectively shrieked in horror about three months after electing Obama and scrambled to sweep Republicans back into government en masse about six months ago.

Why isn’t it about the urgency of joblessness instead of the perils of deficits?

The two aren’t connected?

The budget the president proposed is clearly influenced by a discredited conservative economic worldview.

Discredited by whom? Paul Krugman doesn’t count.

It shouldn’t be accepted as the “progressive” alternative in the negotiations soon to come.

The President’s plan may have been influenced by conservatives in the same way that Allied military strategy was influenced by German troop movements in WWII. It is by no means conservative, and it is not accepted by anyone at all.

What’s worse is that, even on this narrow playing field, the president isn’t fighting harder for those who need government’s support the most.

Military families?

He has jettisoned the Keynesian thinking this era demands,

Oh Jesus. She might as well start quoting Marx.

prematurely embracing what might be described an austerity-lite policy, one that all but guarantees mass unemployment as the new normal.

Please elaborate on such an outlandish claim. Seriously. How do tax cuts hurt the economy? It truly baffles me that liberals are somehow allowed to believe (allowed in the sense that they’re not laughed out of every serious economic forum in existence) that adding a quarter of a point to the cost of debt via Fed open market operations can cripple an economy, yet adding about 5% to every tax bracket is completely painless.

In his speech, he spoke eloquently of how there was “nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.”

Small businesses?

Nothing courageous, indeed. And yet it is President Obama who has said that for every $1 in tax increases, we should create $2 in spending cuts.

Which itself is asinine, because you can’t assume that rate changes, which is the only thing the government adjusts when altering income taxes, corresponds to nominal dollar figures. This is because tax rates have a dynamic and sometimes uneven effect on economic growth.

Faced with the choice between new cuts to the social safety net and new taxes for the richest few, it is not just Paul Ryan but President Obama whose acceptance of the way this choice is framed leaves the poor shouldering most of the burden.

The poor don’t shoulder ANY of the burden. They haven’t for years. Put simply, the poor don’t pay income taxes. At all. None. Zero. 0.00%; $0.00.

The most progressive president since Lyndon Johnson

Hilariously, she means this as a compliment.

should be willing to embrace a bolder opening gambit.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this issue didn’t just begin when Paul Ryan proposed a budget. You guys had two years to shove a healthy dose of John Maynard Keynes down our throats. It didn’t work, and the American people have taken notice. Your turn is over.

He should not be so willing to compromise on principle, even when ultimate compromise may be necessary.

No. Just no. He shouldn’t compromise even though he has to compromise? Fuck off, Katrina.

Real leadership might require compromise, but it cannot be defined by compromise.

So…he should play hardball, but with the understanding that he’ll eventually cave?

It must instead be defined by a clear vision for the future,

Despite saying “let me be clear” about three times a speech, President Obama has never shown clarity of thought on any issue of public importance.

and most important, a willingness to defend it. It should be focused not on what is possible, but instead, on the most that is possible; not the path of least resistance, but the path of maximum potential benefit.

Seriously, it’s like the woman is discovering negotiation for the first time. It’ kind of like watching a child’s groping attempts at cursive. (Which, for the record, is a worthless “skill.”)

Failing to do so is what can produce a Tea Party budget, such as the one adopted last week. As Paul Krugman put it in his column this week,

I’m sure the Times appreciates the Post’s support. Also, did I call that she’d cite Krugman or what? Damn I’m good.

the two parties “don’t just live in different moral universes, they also live in different intellectual universes.”

In other words: not only are Republicans terrible people, they’re idiots too! This from the people who lectured us on civility.

Any embrace or acceptance of that Republican universe by the White House is a retreat from the reforms this country desperately needs — and was promised.

What a rallying cry.

“No surrender! Except when you have to surrender! But really, only kind of surrender, because surrendering is necessary but unpleasant! And we really really don’t want to surrender. Until we do.”

Yet the president has again telegraphed his willingness to compromise, admitting in his speech that he did not “expect the details in any final agreement to look exactly like the approach” he laid out. What, then, does he expect it will look like?

Probably something sane.

The further right this process moves

I.e. the further towards the American people this process moves.

—    whether as a result of a political system warped and broken by corporate interests

It was an electoral trouncing in November, but blame corporations if you must.

protecting their privilege,

The privilege is to compete against the other privileged, a group which literally anyone can join. Apparently you’re privileged to squeeze out a profit by busting your ass to do things better, faster, and cheaper than everyone else. That’s how liberals define privilege.

or lobbyists actively gutting reform

Lobbyists spend most of their time actively pushing for reform. That’s why virtually everything passed in the last two years has been a legislative disaster jam-packed with special interest sweetheart deals.

 — the more disheartening the definition of victory becomes. Is merely preventing Republicans from ending Medicare what victory looks like now?

Republicans have proposed a market-based voucher system, not dismantling all spending to Medicare.

Yes, we need a defensive opposition, but while Democrats control the Senate and the White House, they cannot act merely as a minority party.

No worries. It won’t be an issue much longer.

Shouldn’t they be laying out a clear vision of a sustainable and fair economy?

They don’t have one. And what the hell does sustainable mean in this context? It’s as if she views the economy solely as a vehicle to financing non-market programs.

As the extremists take over the GOP, is the Democratic Party really going to be content to define success so modestly?

Look, I get that you’re pissed that conservatives had so much success painting Obama as an extremist. They were helped by that fact that he was actually (and still is) an extremist. That doesn’t mean it’ll work for you. This is a center-right country. Don’t forget it.

There are at least 83 Democratic members of the House who believe that we cannot exclude alternatives that would solve this economic challenge more justly and fairly.

Jesus, you’re so deep in the euphemism you didn’t even say what it is.

They believe we must challenge the limits of our narrowing debate and expand, as President Obama once called it, “our moral imagination.”

It was a nonsensical term then, it’s a nonsensical term now. Moral imagination. Jesus Christ.

They are the members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), who last week introduced what they are calling the “People’s Budget,”

Sure. After we get done with that, let’s all pound some vodka, call each other “comrade” and stage a purge of all non-party members. Oh wait. That was the 1910s in Russia. This progressive thing is starting to sound kind of like regression.

an alternative both to President Obama’s proposal and the unconscionable Ryan Budget.

I suppose we are fortunate that we have a president to the right of outright Communism, but that’s kind of like giving thanks that you don’t have a giant metal rod lodged in your chest.

It lays out what a robust progressive agenda should look like. It protects the social safety net,

The status quo.

promotes a progressive tax policy

Also the status quo, but (without reading it) I’m assuming that they want to make American tax policy “more progressive.”

and makes significant cuts to the Pentagon by bringing our troops home from Iraq

Also the status quo. Since before Obama took office.

and Afghanistan.

Would have been the status quo, until Obama screwed things up.

It actually generates a surplus by 2021, according to Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chair of the CPC.

So, by doing nothing but raising taxes on the rich and leaving Afghanstan, they achieve surplus by 2021? I don’t even have to look at this nonsense of a plan to understand that their accounting is pure bullshit.

This is the kind of budget our president should be proposing.

He would literally get laughed out of office, so…be my guest.

This is the kind of budget the progressive community should be rallying around. One that makes millionaires, billionaires and corporations pay their fair share.

Compare that to a budget that just makes millionaires and billionaires.

It’s like they think that their own misguided, childish spite is more important than economic growth.

One that protects the poor and middle class. But it is the kind of budget that establishment Democrats and media elites are inclined to ignore and dismiss.

Yeah. Because it’s both embarrassing and crazy.

We can be, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently put it, a country “of the 1%, for the 1%, by the 1%.”

The 1% that pays for 34% of the government.

Or we can be a country that believes in — and embraces — shared sacrifice.

Which, of course, is a euphemism for shifting the sacrifice to someone else.

A country not defined by the greed of the few but by the needs of the many.

Holy shit. That communism stuff before was kind of tongue-in-cheek. This isn’t. This is flat-out, Stalin-loving, Mao-reading, beorgeois-hating, state-worshipping, gulag-populating, one party-ruling propaganda for communism. From each according to his ability; to each according to his need. Someone please get Katrina a little red star for her hat.

That’s the only kind of America really worth believing in.

America is a nation of free men. It is defined not by the “needs of the many,” but by the capability of the individuals to pursue their own fortune. This means failure and strife and hardship, but it also means wealth, production, and the overwhelming equalizing force of the dollar.

There is nothing to love about deference to need. By shackling America’s productive capacity to needs, it enslaves producers to leeches who would siphon their ability. It encourages the moderately able to instead leech. It debases the human spirit and undermines the basic dignity that America was designed to preserve. It is the purest form of evil, the urge to shame a man into subjugating himself to you and make his prowess yours.

This is more serious than my snarkiness. Katrina Vanden Heuvel has issued a call to arms for communism in the United States in one of the nation’s leading newspapers. This is what the other side looks like: a hammer and sickle swaddled in the stars and stripes.

The Workers Well-Being is Too Important to Trust to the Workers

Science, yes. But don't forget the poor

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

In a speech to the National Academy of Sciences shortly after taking office, President Obama, while faced with a teetering economy, vast numbers of unemployed and uninsured, and two seemingly endless wars, nonetheless paused to embrace a vision of the future.

This is how the left negates their failures: religion. First, they write their icons’ legacies beforehand as a prophesy…

He spoke of President Lincoln's

…Then they invoke the gods…

 commitment to science and innovation, even in the midst of great turmoil and uncertainty.

…Throw in some heroic rhetoric…

He said: "A few months after a devastating defeat at Fredericksburg, before Gettysburg would be won,

…Establish an air of inevitability…

 before Richmond would fall, before the fate of the Union would be at all certain, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law an act creating the National Academy of Sciences. . . . Lincoln refused to accept that our nation's sole purpose was mere survival."

...thrust misrepresentations and shoddy analysis into historical context…

Lincoln was a believer in science,

Is there really anyone out there that’s not a believer in science? The notion of being a believer is rooted in the necessity of blind faith. Science is, by definition, replicable and therefore observable. Fire still burns you even if you don’t believe it’s hot. You want to know how I know that? Science. Plus I was a two year old once, and I learned that one wicked fast because of my enormous brain.

a believer in our capacity for innovation

Well that’s certainly not the same thing as being a believer in science. The first is a prerequisite for sanity; the second is an assertion that the products of our minds are gifts to the collective (aka, the liberal God) from the masses (aka, people who need to pay more taxes).

and the possibilities it represented.

Innovation isn’t about possibility. It’s about actuality. The possible is not an innovation; it’s an invention. Taking the possible and making it an actuality—that’s innovation. So really, she’s promoting invention.

He saw our future prosperity tied to our ability, as a nation, to create. So does Obama.

Mostly our ability to create new guns. I dare say that sounds more like Reagan than Obama.

In many areas, the president has matched the rhetoric of his (and Lincoln's) speech with concrete action.

In April 2009, Obama created a President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which he has turned to nearly every month since to ask hard questions

Journalists always seem to think that asking hard questions is meritorious. It’s astounding they never do it.

and demand science-based answers. He has fought for - and in a number of cases succeeded in - increasing science and new technology funding.

So you would agree that he is a big spender, no? Follow-up question…what makes Barack Obama better able to decide which technologies to invest in than the individual investor? Does he not believe in the efficiency of the market, or does he believe that the profit motive is not an effective motivator?

(Ms. Vanden Heuvel, feel free to take notes. I’m doing your job for you here.)

He has appointed highly credentialed, public-spirited

Public spirited? Jesus Christ, what the hell does that mean? Avowed communists?

 scientists to key agencies.

Seriously, we need Joe McCarthy back. There are Communists in the State Department!

So it came as no surprise, then, that a central theme of President Obama's State of the Union address last week was the modern extension of Lincoln's commitment to science and innovation and of his insistence that we add "the fuel of interest to the fire of genius."

It’s kind of disrespectful to override the President’s chosen hero to compare himself to. Just a random aside: being assassinated does not make a President worthy of praise. I have nothing but contempt for William McKinley. (If you can spell his assassin’s name by heart, you may have had a kick ass 7^th grade history teacher like me. Yes, I’ll take 20^th Century Assassin spelling for $800, Alex.  Leon Czolgosz, bitches.)

Cars that can run on sunlight and water.

Clouds that rain vegan cookies and jetpacks that run on pixy-dust.

A million electric cars on the road by 2015.

Simultaneously a pipe dream and something that isn’t worth aspiring to. Also, what happens if there aren’t a million people in the United States who want electric cars? How do we remedy that once we’ve made it the espoused goal of the federal government?

 High-speed rail.

Don’t we alredy have railroad companies?

 A faster, more accessible Internet.

Don’t we already have internet service providers?

Renewable technologies paid for by eliminating subsidies to oil and gas companies.

Shouldn’t we just remove subsidies to all companies? Isn’t that “equal protection under the law?” If we selectively give subsidies—federal revenue is known in flyover country as “our money”—or if we give tax breaks and credits to those who purchase what the government suggests, then how are we living our lives free from the yoke of government tyranny? What have we done with our birthright of liberty?

These, all mentioned by the president in his address, are just a small sampling of what awaits an America that rededicates itself to scientific pursuit over the next decade.

An inefficient, market-free energy policy, a rapidly depreciating transit infrastructure that no one uses, and a taxed and regulated internet…the future sure is bright.

The goal - "to win the future" as the president put it

That line was outright stolen from about 5 people, including Newt Gingrich.

 - is, indeed, a worthy one,

Keep in mind that these are the people who objected to “War on Terror” because it was ambiguous and murky.

 especially when you consider how poorly we have handled the recent past. Largely because of trade policies that place profits ahead of working people, more than 40,000 factories have been shuttered in less than a decade.

I’m at a complete loss. Democrats used to pretend like they believed in free trade, until they decided that advocating that demanding that firms remain unprofitable to maintain jobs was sound fiscal policy with 10% unemployment.

Meanwhile, American 15-year-olds rank 25th in the world in math, and 21st in science,

In high school. High schoolers would suck even if they were great at math and science.

and we are haunted by a skills shortage that makes it harder to compete.

Yes. Skills like welding, carpentry, electric wiring, and masonry. Instead of sending the dullards of society to vocational schools, where they would learn an effective career, recent administrations have poured billions of dollars into the notion that everyone in America should have a college education, regardless of whether it confers any more economic earning power on its graduates. Meanwhile, we have thousands upon thousands of aspiring writer who can’t figure out how to use a semicolon to save their lives, but we have a dearth of employable workers doing jobs that don’t even require an 80 IQ.

All the while, we spent the better part of a decade with a president who scorned science,

This is a veiled reference to fetal stem-cell research. There is a difference between scorning science and having principled ethical objections to methodologies. There’s a reason Tuskegee doesn’t happen anymore, and it’s not because the experiment didn’t yield results. It’s because it’s morally atrocious. Saying so doesn’t make anyone scornful of science.

 and a federal government that always let politics trump scientific progress.

Three questions would need to be resolved before I could get on board with this:

1)     From where does the federal government derive its authority to regulate and monitor “scientific progress?”

2)     Does any non-military department in the federal bureaucracy have a history of developing marketable ideas or products?

3)     Assuming that the federal government has both the right to regulate and a history of effectively regulating scientific progress, does this government function make us more or less prosperous and free?

But while Lincoln was committing himself to the advancement of science and innovation, he remained focused on ending the nation's more immediate and immobilizing crises.

One might say he was “focused like a laser beam” on preserving the Union.

President Obama must do the same; it is today's job market, not tomorrow's, and the victims of our historic chasm between great wealth and deep poverty, that deserve his primary focus now.

Are you seriously putting income inequality up as a national tragedy equivalent to centuries of slavery and the atrocities of one of the dead and wounded in what is still to date our nation’s bloodiest war?

We live in a country with nearly 15 million unemployed, and many millions more underemployed.

This was supposed to be a column on science, no?

 A country where job creation can barely keep pace with population growth, where for a staggering number of people, the pain of recession continues without any real relief. These are people who cannot wait for a decade-long economic transformation; they need relief - and jobs - now.

No argument here.

And yet, with more Americans now mired in poverty than at any time in the last 40 years -a record 47 million - the president did not include a single mention of poverty or the plight of the poor in his speech.

Do the poor need to be reminded that their lives are desolate and empty?

Ironically,

Seriously, I haven’t read the end of this sentence. Scout’s honor. I’m willing to bet ten dollars that there is absolutely no irony in this sentence. No one ever got rich betting on the competence of the American media.

 Republican Paul Ryan's response did acknowledge that government still has the responsibility "to help provide a safety net for those who cannot provide for themselves."

You owe me $10.

Of course, the programs that the most vulnerable

I’m not allowing this euphemism to continue. Poverty and vulnerability are not interchangeable. You’re talking about the poor. Say so.

depend on are the very ones that Ryan, new chairman of the House Budget Committee, has committed to defund and dismantle.

I knew there was a reason I mancrush on that dude.

That Obama was silent on poverty is troubling. But the real challenge for Obama, who through his work as a community organizer has seen poverty as close up as any president,

Washing their feet, perhaps?

 will come when Ryan and his reactionary colleagues pass a budget in the House. It will be in that moment that the president will have to stand and fight to preserve the safety net,

Lincoln fought to preserve the Union; Obama fights to preserve the safety net. See what she’s doing there by using the same verbiage?

 to defend those who may never see the benefit of a retooled economy.

Have you ever heard the expression “a rising tide lifts all boats?” Everyone sees the benefits of a strong economy.

Obama could bury the word "stimulus"

I bet Lincoln knew when a word didn’t do well in focus groups too.

but still find innovative initiatives (such as a National Infrastructure Bank or large-scale public-private partnerships) to prop up cities and states and frugal pension funds.

Is that frugal used as a pejorative?

 And he could push for a 21st-century Works Progress Administration-style program, one that would give those able and willing to work the stability - and dignity - of employment.

And yet, provide absolutely no economic benefit to the economy. Brilliant.

Lincoln said that "the legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves - in their separate, and individual capacities."

In other words, Lincoln didn’t recognize the limitations on government put in place by the Constitution, so we can throw it away too.

Even if this were the standard by which the government derived its authority, provide an argument that the government can run a train line better than private industry. Provide an argument that the government can provide heathcare better than the private sector. Provide an argument that the government can produce new goods and services with the frantic energy of a free economy. I dare you to make the argument that statism and central planning through government is the most efficient economic model. I triple dog dare you.

The president must remember that there are some things that need to be done now, things that no leap of science of technological innovation can cure.

Herpes?

Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of The Nation. She writes a weekly online column for The Post.

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.