Well, this is interesting. Remember that "Why are liberals so condescending" piece by Gerard Alexander the Washington Post published last week? Turns out, the author didn't submit the piece the the Post -- the Post sought him out:
Bethesda, Md.: I thought that "Why are Liberals So Condescending" was the most intelligent article I've read in the Post in some time.
Do you think that this is the result of a decision by your editors to be more fair and balanced?
Also, I would appreciate your comments on the "All serious scientists agree that Global Warming is an enormous problem" school of thought. This matter has been positioned in exactly the same condescending manner.
Gerard Alexander: I can only tell you that the Post editor I dealt with searched me out, and were as encouraging as any editor could conceivably be.
I wonder when we'll find out that a Washington Post staffer is actively seeking out a similarly disparaging column about conservatives?
He didn't even have to submit it, they went chasing after him, anxious to tell us all just how patronising left wingers are. And, on-line, he argued that Republicans rarely accuse Democrats of being "un-American."
Chevy Chase, Md.: As a center-left liberal, I found your article very interesting and informative, and I agree with many of your insights. However, I believe an identical article could be written on the condescending nature of political arguments coming from the right. Particularly, you argue that conservatives only accuse liberals of being "systematically mistaken in their worldviews" when attacking a "narrow slice of the left" or when attacking "specific individuals". How does this fit with the conservative portrayal of wine-and-cheese New Englanders or with Sarah Palin's assertions regarding the "real America"? From my perspective, extremists on the right and left are equally guilty of the dismissive behavior you identify. I would be interested to hear you expand further on your views.
Gerard Alexander: The "real America" meme properly matters to many people. Part of me hates to open this conversational can of worms, but I think the notion that conservatives routinely call liberals "un-American" is exaggerated.
Meghan McCain is about to be attacked by the lunatic right for her comments regarding the Tea Party Conference. She started by talking about Tom Tancredo's dreadful opening speech, when he stated that voters elected Obama because they couldn't spell "vote" in English and called for literacy tests before voters were allowed to vote.
It's innate racism, and I think it's why young people are turned off by this movement," McCain retorted on The View.
"I'm sorry, but revolutions start with young people, not 65 year old people talking about literacy tests and people who can't say the word 'vote' in English," McCain added.
McCain, a self-described "progressive Republican," criticized Palin's assertion that President Obama could get himself re-elected to a second term if he launched a war against Iran.
"You should never go to war unless its the absolute last circumstance," McCain said.
As for Palin's defense of Rush Limbaugh for using the word "retard" after calling for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's resignation over the same word last week, McCain said it was a symbol of "exactly what is wrong with politics today.
"We can't placate and say Democrats can say one thing and Republicans can say another thing," she said.
McCain added that the rhetoric coming from the Tea Party movement and from Republicans like Palin "will continue to turn off young voters, and anybody who says different is smoking something."
She is bang on the money, but they will turn on her just as they turned on her dad.
Sarah Palin didn’t give a tea party speech last night. She gave a partisan Republican address. It was a purely political speech designed to position her for a presidential run in 2012 or 2016. Period. She wasn’t there to celebrate the organic nature of a movement she had nothing to do with creating. She was there to co-opt the name and claim the brand as hers. And she did.
The movement, that came to be officially recognized almost a year ago but whose roots go back further than that, has been snuffed out and replaced in the public mind. The movement that began as a people’s movement of angry independent, libertarians and conservatives will now be thought as the movement of people like Palin, Dick Armey, Judson Phillips, Mark Skoda, etc. Essentially, a wholly owned subsidiary of the “Official Conservative Movement” and the Republican Party.
There was nothing in Palin's speech which would have appeared out of sorts in any speech by George W. Bush; indeed, in many ways, her speech was a call for the same kind of policies which the US explicitly rejected at the last election.
There's nothing new here. If anything, it represents a demand for even greater allegiance to the Bush/Cheney mindset, for a more purist and even less restrained version of the national security insanity, civil liberties assaults, massive increases in the rich-poor gap, control of Americans' lives through "social issues," and endless wars which the Republican Party has long rhetorically claimed to embody. Other than a Medicare prescription plan here and an immigration reform plan there, from what Bush/Cheney orthodoxies do they dissent? None.
This movement is nothing more than the Republican Party masquerading as a grass-roots phenomenon. In 2000, the GOP found a cowboy-hat-wearing, swaggering, "likable" Regular Guy spouting "compassion" in domestic policy and "humility" in foreign policy to re-brand itself in the wake of the Gingrich-led branding disaster. Sarah Palin and the "tea party movement" are just the updated versions of that, the re-branding in the wake of the Bush/Cheney-led image disaster. They're every bit as extremist, radical and dangerous as the last decade revealed standard right-wing Republicans to be, but the one thing they're not is new or innovative.
Palin has hijacked the Tea Party movement and exposed it as nothing other than a bunch of very sore losers who are greatly annoyed that Obama is in the White House.
They are, as Meghan McCain states, engaging in "innate racism" as Tancredo's comments inarguably proved.
Fox News can fall over themselves supporting this movement, but then, they supported the Bush regime, which is why they find the Tea Party movement so appealing.
This is the video which Richard Curtis has put out on You Tube to promote a Robin Hood tax which would force bankers - the people who tax payers have bailed out to the tune of billions, whilst still paying themselves massive bonuses - to donate 0.05% levied on each bank trade ranging from shares to foreign exchange and derivatives, creating a cash pile to be spent on measures to combat domestic and international poverty as well as fight climate change.
A slick advertising campaign by Empire Design features slogans such as: "This is the first tax you'll be in favour of" and "Small change for the banks, huge changes for the world".
"As a result of the financial crisis there are suggestions there's no money to fight climate change, there's talk about cuts to schools and there's concern where the money will come from to meet the Millennium Development goals," Curtis said. "There is money in the banking system. There has been a huge expansion in banking activities. And yet we may all have to pay more VAT on everything we buy.
"I understand it is complicated and contentious and there are other ideas on the table, but what we are trying to create is an instinctive link between fixing banks and the huge challenges facing people on this planet. Do we drop promises on child poverty or do we tax the British public? Or do we work with banks to find a solution?"
The tax has long been demanded by campaigners but brushed aside by politicians and bankers as an impossible dream. Buoyed by the support of the UN, Gordon Brown last year became the first global leader to publicly call for its introduction as a way for banks to compensate society for causing the global financial crisis.
It's a tiny amount to ask the banks to pay and it could generate as much as $700 billion worldwide to be spent on worthwhile causes.
I am glad that Curtis has put his weight behind this. It is not unreasonable that we ask the banks to give something back. After all, if they can afford to give themselves bonuses, they can afford to give 0.05% of their dealings to good causes.
I didn't comment on Sarah Palin reading from her hand during the question and answer session following her speech to the tea party convention because I really didn't think it a big deal.
I did point out the irony of her attacking Obama for reading off a teleprompter whilst wondering whether or not "around the world, people who are seeking freedom from oppressive regimes wonder if Alaska is still that beacon of hope for their cause." I thought that a valid thing to highlight. It's a boob that she would, perhaps, not have made had she availed herself of a teleprompter.
However, it really is amusing to watch the people of Fox News rush to defend their heroine for using crib notes so shortly after attacking Obama for using a teleprompter.
Gretchen Carlson replied, "I think she did it on purpose. Yeah, because I think it's an exact opposite of reading off the teleprompter. Reading off a complete script written for you with every word in a sentence, and here she's just taking crib notes on her hand. It makes it look as if she can just talk off the cuff and that she just jotted down a few couple notes before she went off to give a big, long speech." Later, co-host Brian Kilmeade called it "folksy," and "down to earth."
Very few politicians give speeches without a script, whether it be written in front of them or on a teleprompter, which is what makes the Republican attack on Obama so very, very lame.
But to watch the way they defend one of their own for doing the very thing which they have attacked Obama for is simply hysterical. They leap through hoops of hypocrisy rather than simply state the obvious: ALL politicians use prompters. We should limit our argument to the points which they are making, not the method by which they remember those points.
Liasson: ...don't forget Richard Reid, the shoe bomber was also mirandized and I don't remember a hue or a cry about that at the time either. This is I think really unfortunate all around if you think that politics should stop at the water's edge, it should also stop at national security matters and alleged terrorists attacks.
Why are the Republicans allowed to spout this hypocritical nonsense and never get pulled on it?
This video is the moment when Alastair Campbell - Tony Blair's right hand PR man during the build up to the Iraq war - is said to have broken down on TV. He doesn't actually break down, but he appears flustered by Andrew Marr's question which is: If the intelligence does not show that the evidence about Iraq's WMD's was "beyond doubt", as Blair claimed it did, has Tony Blair mislead parliament?
Campbell's answer is that a decision was made and that Blair is an honourable man. It's clearly not an answer to the question.
Blair appeared recently on Fox News and attacked the hunt for a "conspiracy" and a "scandal" over his decision to commit British troops to the war.
On Fox news today, asked why the UK had had a succession of such probes into the invasion, Blair said: "Partly because we have this curious habit – I don't think this is confined to Britain actually – where people find it hard to come to the point where they say: we disagree; you're a reasonable person, I'm a reasonable person but we disagree.
"There's always got to be a scandal as to why you hold your view. There's got to be some conspiracy behind it, some great deceit that's gone on, and people just find it hard to understand that it's possible for people to have different points of view and hold them … for genuine reasons. There's a continual desire to sort of uncover some great conspiracy, when actually there's a decision at the heart of it."
That's what Blair and Campbell's defences have now come down to: "you're a reasonable person, I'm a reasonable person, but we disagree". Blair made "a difficult decision" - and from Blair's world view difficult decisions are always to be applauded - and that's where we have a fundamental disagreement. Blair is now arguing that we are being unreasonable to even question the logic of his decision and to question whether or not he was telling parliament the truth when he made statements, some of which we now know to be false, in order to persuade parliament to vote in favour of the war Blair was proposing.
Blair now sees even asking these questions as "a continual desire to sort of uncover some great conspiracy", rather than what they actually are. An attempt to discover whether or not Blair over played his hand when trying to get the country to agree to the Iraq war. An attempt to clarify whether or not Blair "sexed up" - to use Gilligan's famously disputed phrase - his case for war.
Blair now objects even to that question being asked. One gets the distinct feeling - when one looks at both Blair and Campbell's reactions - that they are starting to circle the wagons.
Straw told the inquiry that the cabinet included a number of "strong-minded people", among them Gordon Brown, John Prescott, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and Margaret Beckett: "None of them were wilting violets; their judgment was that it was not necessary to go into the process by which Peter Goldsmith came to his view. I don't recall cabinet as a whole receiving legal advice on the matter," Straw told the inquiry. "All [the cabinet] wanted to know was: is it lawful or is it not lawful?" What was required in the end was "essentially a yes or no decision" from the attorney general, he added.
The inquiry has heard how Sir Michael Wood, the FO's legal adviser, and his deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, said an attack was unlawful without a fresh UN resolution. In a memo, Wood warned Straw: "Force without security council authority would amount to a crime of aggression." Straw, now justice secretary, replied: "I note your advice but I do not accept it."
The fact that the questionable legality of the proposed war was kept from the cabinet only strengthens the appearance that Blair was intent on war at all costs, if that was what Bush decided upon.
It is easy to see why Blair wants this entire escapade to be viewed as merely "a difficult decision" which he had to take, for that's the only way to look at it which casts him in a honourable light.
My problem with Blair in the run up to the Iraq war was that I found it impossible to believe - as he often claimed at the time - that he looked at evidence and made "a difficult decision". I got the distinct impression that he was doing the very opposite. He had made a decision to stand beside Bush no matter what, and he then started looking for evidence to back that decision.
The entire process was back to front. And that's why Blair and Campbell and others are so outraged at the current line of questioning.
