Category Archives: Politics Not as Usual

Right-Wing Blogosphere Tries to Break My Kneecaps

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On Sunday, February 14, I wrote an article for the Huffington Post entitled “Obama Better Start Breaking Kneecaps.” You can read it here, but the premise of the piece was that the White House, and Obama in particular, must start playing hardball when it comes to dealing with the do-nothing Republican Party, a.k.a the Party of No. I was hardly the first one to suggest this. In a speech in upstate New York, Georgetown University professor Michael E. Dyson said this about Barack Obama:

Get on your job!…Stop trying to kiss the Republicans. I’m not mad, but you have to know who you are and what you stand for [if any significant change is to be made].

On Monday there was an article in the Washington Post saying the White House is in fact revamping its communication strategy. So what does all this have to do with the right-wing crazies? Well…nothing really, because many in the right-wing blogosphere failed to read my article (perhaps reading is a challenge to some of them). All they saw was my headline: “Obama Better Start Breaking Kneecaps” and the photo that accompanied it (more on that later).

The right sent out their attack dogs. Most prominent was some guy named Kristinn Taylor (at least I think that person is a guy) who shills for one of Andrew Breitbart’s ludicrous right-wing sites, Biggovernment.com—a site that would have been apt under George W. Bush’s administration.

Mr. Taylor zeroed in on me and CNN’s Roland Martin. He said:

CNN and Huffington Post have each published op-eds this past week by regular contributors with headlines that explicitly call for Obama to use violent gangland tactics against his political opponents.

Martin, a sharp-tongued CNN commentator, had written a piece titled “Time for Obama to go ‘gangsta’ on GOP.” Like me, Martin was pressing the administration to take a tougher stand on the knuckle-dragging Republicans in Congress. Clearly he used the term “gangsta” tongue-in-cheek. Even those with Sarah Palin–level I.Q.s would be able to see that. Who would really think Martin meant that Obama should grab his gat and take out the Republican Party? Um…Mr. Taylor it seems.

For my post, Taylor highlighted my entreaty to the White House, where I said:

You’ve given it your best shot, you’ve tried numerous times to talk with the Republicans, to negotiate, to meet them halfway on every single matter before the American people. But they hate you for many reasons. It’s time you break kneecaps. It’s time to destroy the Republican Party. They don’t deserve a seat at the table when all they want to do is score political points by being the Party of No.

“In case the message wasn’t clear,” Taylor says, “Huffington Post illustrated the call to violence with a wooden baseball bat with Obama’s first name on it in large letters.” First off, Huffington had nothing to do with the baseball bat image. Give credit where credit is due. I, sir, made the photo myself. As a blogger for biggovernment.com, perhaps Mr. Breitbart gets you coffee and donuts and maybe he even writes the posts for you, but at Huffington, we writers are responsible for our own graphics. I e-mailed Taylor several times asking him to remove my awesome baseball bat photo but got no response.

Taylor’s post generated about 600 comments, mainly from Crazy Town, that were by and large incredibly incendiary. His post spread through the right-wing blogosphere like a cancer. It finally reached the Twitter page of Fox News neanderthal Glenn Beck, who even mentioned my baseball bat on his radio show—but didn’t give me attribution, which after an e-mail I received this morning proved merciful.

In my inbox this morning from a potential serial killer was this super-nice e-mail:

Want to try and bust my kneecaps?  WANT TO TRY?
A bullet to your head would stop you REAL quick.
We have a 2nd amendment for a reason.

It’s funny (or sad) how my original post, which had nothing to do with violence but had everything to do with strategy, was looked on as a call to violence. And the right wingers excoriated me, saying how awful I am to call for “gangland violence.” (?) So to make their point the right-wingers…called for actual violence against me.

Speaking of violence…the Hill reported that at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, which begins Thursday February 18, attendees will be WHACKING (i.e., beating to death) a pinata of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They will also get a chance to beat to death a Harry Reid punching bag. Is there outrage on right? Of course not. An actual beating in effigy of a Democrat is okay, but using a metaphor about strategy is tantamount to calling for war.

Obama Better Start Breaking Kneecaps

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Barack's Baseball BatBy now most Americans would agree the ascendancy of Barack Obama to President was due in large part to his promise of obliterating the petty Washington-politics-as-usual mentality when it comes to governing.

In 2000 when running for president, George W. Bush trotted out a nifty campaign slogan: “compassionate conservatism.” He didn’t coin the term; it was first used in a speech given in 1979 by right-wing presidential adviser Doug Wead. But Bush owned it in the 2000 election in an effort to pander to moderate voters. Compassionate conservatism, he argued, would be his guiding principle should he win the presidency. (He probably didn’t realize when he used that term he was implying conservatism at its core is inherently uncompassionate. After all, if conservatism was truly compassionate he wouldn’t have needed a qualifier.) He also boasted that when he was governor of Texas he worked across party lines, though the state’s elected Democrats are often considerably more conservative than Northeastern Republicans.

For myriad reasons, the American people bought Bush’s blatant lies; even the most ardent Bush supporters now readily admit that he neither practiced compassionate conservatism nor did he ever have any intent of working “across party lines.” His presidential administration was perhaps the most partisan and blatantly conservative of any in American history.

So what does this have to do with President Obama?

Most Americans want at least some sort of harmony among government entities (especially within the intelligence communities). The only way America moves—forward or backward—is when legislation and agendas are advanced. Now historically speaking, the advancement of legislation and agendas can have detrimental effects on society (see particularly Ronald Reagan’s fuck-the-poor decade and Newt Gingrich’s Contract with on America). But nonetheless agendas were advanced, and many politicians followed the cliché: “Let the chips fall where they may.” Pass legislation that you believe in and fuck the voters come November. For all of Gingrich’s repulsiveness, he pushed through his agenda—the people’s will be damned. And yeah, the people didn’t forget; they loathed him, and he was eventually driven out of office.

President Obama, on the other hand, has spent an entire year desperately attempting to win over the hearts and minds of the Republican establishment. While Obama could have rammed his will down the throats of the American people by going overboard in issuing executive orders, he only passed 39 executive orders in his first year in office. By contrast George W. Bush passed 54 executive orders.

Obama’s entire first year in office can be summed up this way: Pandering, placating, and pussy-footing around the Republican Party. He offered his hand to the Republicans, and they gave him a firm backhand. Look at the health care reform bill. For God’s sake, it’s a giveaway to Republicans: It has no public option, it allows for interstate insurance shopping, and if passed will add millions of customers to the oligarchical insurance companies. How much more Republican-friendly could the bill be? If you ask the Republicans they’d say, “The only good health care reform bill is a dead health care reform bill.” (Poor choice of words deliberate.)

Clearly, Obama has a distaste for political hardball. By his actions, he doesn’t want to become simply a liberal version of George W. Bush, ramming liberal policies down the throats of Congress—much to my chagrin. He needs to rethink that.

Here’s what I’d say to Obama, and I believe many of his advisers are saying these sorts of things as well:

You’ve given it your best shot, you’ve tried numerous times to talk with the Republicans, to negotiate, to meet them halfway on every single matter before the American people. But they hate you for many reasons. It’s time you break kneecaps. It’s time to destroy the Republican Party. They don’t deserve a seat at the table when all they want to do is score political points by being the Party of No.

It’s looking like Obama may be getting the message. Just yesterday he threatened to bypass Republican foot-dragging on his stalled nominations by using the recess-appointment process—a procedure Bush 43 used on numerous occasions (with nefarious results—remember John Bolton).

As expected, after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was shown weeping on the Senate floor he said the potential recess appointments would undermine the President’s efforts to reach out to Republicans. Seriously!? According to McConnell “reaching out to Republicans” means giving them everything they ask for, all the time.

Elections have consequences. After Bush’s narrow reelection in 2004, he had the temerity to address the press and say, “I earned political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” Why can’t Barack Obama, whose victory was far more impressive and more decisive, say the same thing?

Myths About the Massachusetts Senate Race

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By reading news accounts on Massachusetts voters electing Republican Scott Brown to the Senate, it appears as if the world has just experienced a tectonic shift. In fact, theday.com labeled the victory as such.

But even mainstream news outlets couldn’t resist the Level 11 News Alert. For them, Brown’s victory was a seminal news-making event: equal to the ending of World War II and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Newspaper headlines were certainly grave: “GOP Victory Upends Senate,” screamed the Wall Street Journal. In the New York Post, Charles Hurt (we get it) wrote a column, “Bam, wake up & smell the disaster,” (really classy headline, Charles, considering what’s going on in Haiti).

CNN, MSNBC, and Fox (of course) were playing along as well. The morning shows treated the election as perhaps the biggest news story since… well… since Barack Obama won the presidency. No, sorry. For them, it was BIGGER.

Time for a rundown of myth versus reality.

Myth: The election of Scott Brown proves the power of the Tea Bag Movement. An editorial in the Christian Science Monitor blared “Scott Brown: the tea party’s first electoral victory.”
Reality: The tea baggers, who boast their movement is directionless and rudderless, had absolutely no effect in the Massachusetts Senate race. In fact, if anything, their antics likely turned off Republican voters and could have given Martha Coakley a few more votes than expected.

Myth: The Democratic Party has lost its way with voters.
Reality: Let’s see, by last count there are 57 Democratic Senators, one Reliable Independent (Bernie Sanders), one Total Asshole (Joe Lieberman), and now, with the election of Brown, 41 Republicans. Come November more Republicans, six, are stepping down or retiring than Democrats. No matter how hard Republicans try to spin it, they have zero chance of winning back the House or Senate (even loose cannon Michael Steel, RNC chairman, admits as much). The Democratic Party, while clearly in need of a shakeup, is still firmly in control of the legislative agenda.

Myth: Due to Brown’s victory, it’ll be almost impossible for Democrats to pass legislation in the Senate.
Reality: See “Total Asshole” above. Joe “I’m as Needy as Kim Jong-il” Lieberman has been veering hard right for the last few years, and as we all know campaigned vigorously against Obama. To assume Lieberman will vote lock step with Democrats is nonsense. He openly loathes the Democratic Party, and flirts with becoming a Republican. Thus, Brown’s victory doesn’t move the needle. The Democrats barely got 60 votes on the health care bill; even had the Democratic candidate won last night in Massachusetts, reaching 60 votes with Connecticut’s Senator Numnuts was pretty much impossible.

Myth: The stock market would rise on the election of Scott Brown. Investors would be cheering that the health care bill is dead!
Fact: The Dow, S&P, and the NASDAQ all dropped over 1 percent the day after Brown’s victory, their worst one-day decline in month. And the financial markets continue to tank.

Myth: Brown’s victory is proof that Democratic Party domination in Massachusetts is over.
Reality: Scott Brown is a conservative. He’s opposed to health care reform; he’s positively James Inhofe-like in his dismissal of man-made global warming. Let’s not forget that Brown is up for reelection in 2012. And assuming that Obama turns the economy around (which is likely), Brown is going to have an awfully hard time running as a Mitch McConnell conservative in a liberal state. Either Brown does a one-eighty and awakens his inner liberal or he loses.

Also, let’s not give Martha Coakley a pass. She was a dreadful candidate: Almost a Democratic, female version of John McCain, oozing boredom and status quo. She assumed the seat would be handed to her with little or no campaigning needed. In a “blue” state, shouldn’t it have been possible to come up with a dynamic Democratic candidate? Brown’s victory is due mostly in part to Coakley’s incompetence (see the Fells Acres Day Care Center case that she badly handled as a prosecutor).

Myth: The Republican Party is back (baby)!
Reality: Again, the Republicans nominated a candidate whose platform was “no, no, no.” Brown has no ideas and no serious plans for fixing the economy—other than tax cuts for the rich. (And we all remember how well that worked under George W. Bush.) His victory only further proves the Republican Party is shiftless and bereft of ideas.

Myth: The election is a referendum on President Obama and proves he’s unpopular.
Reality: Rasmussen has Obama’s favorable rate in Massachusetts at 57 percent. Nationally, Obama’s favorables hover north of 50 percent—amazing considering the flaming economic turd pie handed him by George W. Bush.

Are voters angry? Yes, that’s not in dispute. To whom should their anger be directed? Paul Krugman has it right when he argues the Obama administration has been far too timid in explaining how we got in this economic mess in the first place. Blame lays squarely at the feet of George W. Bush; Obama is simply trying to dig us out.

Apparently, the vast electorate demands instant action from Obama: By now, they argue, the economy should be humming along and the eight years of economic misery should be but a memory. People who think that shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Grow up, douchebags voters.

In 1980 when the country was facing a punishing economic climate, Ronald Reagan verbally pummeled Jimmy Carter. And guess what? The American people bought it. Why can’t Obama do them same and insulate himself and his administration from the brunt of the criticism? The Blame Game is one to be played, not shunned.

Yawn… So Scott Brown won in Massachusetts. Come November, when the Democrats retain control of Congress, I don’t suspect many people will give a hoot.