Where I agree with the tea partiers

[bigbadwolf]

Good essay and sums up my outlook as well:

At a time when the Obama administration is endorsing one horrendous Bush policy after another, from targeted killings to state secrets to indefinite detention to endless war, it is time to recognize how the “conventional wisdom” has led Americans to the political slaughterhouse time and again. Pervasive confusion over the nature of government and freedom has opened the gates to perhaps the most sweeping increase in political power in history. Changing the name of the president is almost pointless unless Americans radically change their attitude toward government.

The great political issue of our time is not liberalism versus conservatism, or capitalism versus socialism, but Statism - the belief that government is inherently superior to the citizenry, that progress consists of extending the realm of compulsion, that vesting arbitrary power in government officials will make the people happy - eventually. This was the source of many of Bush’s worst abuses, and it is rapidly become Obama’s Pandora’s Box as well.

Nowadays, “democracy” serves mainly as a sheepskin for Leviathan, as a label to delude people into thinking that government’s big teeth will never bite them. Voting has changed from a process by which the citizen controls the government to a process that consecrates the government’s control of the people. Elections have become largely futile exercises to reveal comparative popular contempt for competing professional politicians. The question of who nominally holds the leash has become far more important than whether government is actually leashed.

Modern democracy is now largely an over-glorified choice of caretakers and cage-keepers. Are citizens still free after they vote to make themselves wards of the State? Supposedly, as long as citizens are permitted to push the first domino, they are still self-governing - regardless of how many other government dominos subsequently fall on their heads. Democracy is further corrupted by a demagogy that portrays a right to vote as a license to steal.

Public policy today is a vast maze of payoffs and kickbacks, tangling everything that the State touches in political intrigue and bureaucratic dependence. Modern societies are increasingly dominated by political money laundering - by politicians commandeering scores of billions of dollars from one group to foist on another group, from one generation to another, or from the general populace to specific occupational groups (such as farmers).

Modern political philosophy largely consists of glorifying poorly functioning political machinery — the threats, bribes, and legislative cattle prods by which some people are made to submit to other people. It is a delusion to think of the State as something loftier than all the edicts, penalties, prison sentences, and taxes that it imposes.

 

[darmanad]

http://rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com/p...ance_becomes_a_movement_the_rise_of_snookiism


" In just the past couple of weeks since the election we have seen half a dozen examples of this next generation know-nothingism, this translation of a dumbed-down zeitgeist into a new movement that might be called Snookiism.

• On the foreign policy front we have Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona blocking prompt consideration of the new START deal with Russia -- despite the fact that without it we have no way of regaining on-the-ground inspection of Russian nuclear facilities, despite the fact that if it fails it will strengthen anti-American elements in the Russian government, despite the fact that there is broad bi-partisan support among the leadership of the policy community for the deal-because the Sarah Palin wing of his party sees foot dragging as a way to win political points and a few concessions on nuclear modernization here in the U.S. Palin has counseled against "hasty consideration" of the treaty. Sarah Palin is offering foreign policy advice? And people are taking it? Shouldn't it matter that she has no experience in this area? No credentials? No credibility?
• The battle for the House Energy and Commerce chairmanship has illustrated well how truly demented this debate has become. In order to promote his own candidacy to be chairman, Texas Representative Joe Barton has circulated a Rush Limbaugh authored commentary on the front runner for the position, Rep. Fred Upton, in which an attempt is made to discredit Upton due to the fact that he actually appears to believe in (at least some of) the science surrounding climate change. The implication: you can't be a true Republican and believe in science. This impression is only amplified in light of the argument from another contender, Rep. John Shimkus who has offered his belief in the literal interpretation of the Bible as his reason for not believing in climate change. (After the flood, God said it wouldn't happen again.) I've got nothing against the Bible, believe me. But do we really want to use it to predict the weather?
• On the economic front, we have a couple of recent examples where representatives of the political party that gave the United States the biggest budget deficits in its history are now arguing for policies that turn on a balanced blend of bad arithmetic and bad faith. For example, as Steven Pearlstein notes in yesterday's Washington Post, the argument that tax cuts ought to be preserved for those making over $250,000 because they are primarily small business owners who are busy creating jobs is "largely bogus." The fact is only a tiny percentage of small business owners make over $250,000 a year and of those most are big hedge funds and law firms. In the same vein, while Mitch McConnell undergoes a battlefield conversion to the cause of banning earmarks, few who pushed him there want to focus on the fact that earmarks account for only a fraction of one percent of the federal budget and are in fact, as issues go, not largely but totally bogus, essentially irrelevant. (The fact that Tea Party favorites from Rand Paul to Michelle Bachman can't quite give them up is indicative of how these leaders are counting on their constituents disregard of the facts to give them a free pass when it comes to bald-faced hypocrisy.)
• And back to Representative Inglis, as part of blowing off steam after his defeat he has confided in several folks that as the extremists were beating up on him, he was offered absolution of sorts by one particularly prominent champion of the religious right who told him he could regain support if only he would support the view that President Obama was actually born in another country. Inglis, to his credit, has denounced the birther nonsense and gone on to call other completely fabricated, fact-free positions like the "death panels" promoted by Half-Term Governor Palin and her flock, "just the lowest form of political leadership. It's not leadership. It's demagoguery."

Some Republicans take comfort in the fact that the Tea Party isn't really a party and had no real hierarchic organization or unified platform in the last election. They see it more as an emotional spasm, the Perot Party Version 2010, and that it will pass. But the 110 newly elected representatives on Capitol Hill who were elected with some Tea Party affiliation are now starting to coalesce into a driving force. If they can effectively form and maintain the discipline of a caucus then they have a chance at further institutionalizing and preserving their movement.
In some respects this might be seen as democracy at work. The problem is we are taking an affliction of democracy -- ignorance -- and turning it into a political movement. This may be disturbing to all those who have a passing interest in the facts, but it creates a special burden for those who must oppose the movement, because those on the other side are actually immune to rational argument, by definition allergic to it.
It now falls to the mainstream Republican leadership, especially to presumptive Speaker John Boehner, to control this group and limit its worst traits. And all spirited Americans who can read and write ought to be pulling for him. Because if he fails, America will face the threat of the spread of a strain of reckless demagoguery unprecedented in our history, a Snookidemic that threatens to effectively lobotomize the body politic."

 

[darmanad]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/opinion/21rich.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a212
"... But logic doesn’t apply to Palin. What might bring down other politicians only seems to make her stronger: the malapropisms and gaffes, the cut-and-run half-term governorship, family scandals, shameless lying and rapacious self-merchandising. In an angry time when America’s experts and elites all seem to have failed, her amateurism and liabilities are badges of honor. She has turned fallibility into a formula for success."

"...With Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity on her side, Palin hardly needs the grandees of the so-called Republican establishment. They know it and flail at her constantly. Politico reported just before Election Day that unnamed “party elders” were nearly united in wanting to stop her, out of fear that she’d win the nomination and then be crushed by Obama. Their complaints are seconded daily by Bush White House alumni like Karl Rove, Michael Gerson, and Mark McKinnon, who said recently that Palin’s “stock is falling and pretty rapidly now” and that “if she’s smart, she does not run.”
This is either denial or wishful thinking. The same criticisms that the Bushies fling at Palin were those once aimed at Bush: a slender résumé, a lack of intellectual curiosity and foreign travel, a lazy inclination to favor from-the-gut improvisation over cracking the briefing books. These spitballs are no more likely to derail Palin within the G.O.P. than they did him."