Posts Tagged ‘Journolist’

The Magic of Self-Delusion (or Why Nancy Pelosi Would Rather Die Than Let You Keep Your Own Money)

Monday, December 13th, 2010

The deal Obama struck to extended all the Bush tax cuts is good for America, and also good for the Republican Party. When it was struck, however, the liberal howls of outrage made me think of one other outcome which, while not as good for the nation, would be even better for Republicans: If Nancy Pelosi blocked the deal, the Bush tax cuts (and long-term unemployment) temporarily lapse until the new Republican House takes over in January, at which point they pass a tax cut extension at least as strong as the Obama deal, and probably stronger. So in order to make the point how opposed Democrats are to letting rich people (or “rich” people) keep their own money, they’re willing to let the long-term unemployed stop getting checks for a month (and probably longer), delay economic recovery at least that long, let Republicans pick up an even bigger victory and take all the credit for the deal, make Obama look weaker and make the Democratic Party in general, and Pelosi’s House Democrats in particular, look even more petulant, shrill, and extreme.

That appears to be exactly what’s going to happen. It’s like some perfect storm of liberal fail.

The reasons why House Democrats are undertaking such counterproductive and self-destructive behavior probably requires the insights of a psychiatrist more than a political scientist. In the 2010 elections, voters rejected the liberal agenda about as thoroughly as any domestic political agenda has been rejected in our lifetimes. After two years of trying to push the most liberal agenda since LBJ’s “Great Society” expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s, Democrats suffered massive losses, most dramatically in the House, for a switch of 63 seats. For a graphic depiction of how thoroughly liberalism has been rejected, take a look at this Real Clear Politics map of incoming House seats:

Not only are liberals unwilling to consider why their agenda was rejected by voters, they’re unwilling to even consider that their agenda was rejected. Rather than face up to that unpleasant fact, the nutroots have embraced a far more psychologically satisfying (if political suicidal) explanation for their tidal wave of defeats: Democrats lost the 2010 Election because they just weren’t liberal enough:

I’m sure I could come up with 10-15 other examples. It’s like that episode of The Critic where Jay Sherman remembers being rejected by a woman he was trying to pick up: “Eww, I don’t like that memory at all! Let’s look at it again through the magic of self-delusion!” All those congressmen lost because they just weren’t as awesomely liberal as I am! High five! Inside the liberal reality bubble, the Democratic Party’s biggest mistake was getting Blue Dog Democrats to run in marginal districts in the first place, and if they had just run people with positions closer to Nancy Pelosi or Alan Grayson in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania, they would have done better.

Of course, outside the liberal reality bubble, this idea is a laughably naive exercise in vainglorious wish fulfillment. It’s also easily disproven. Take a look at the contrasting fates of Tom Perriello and Jason Altmire.

Perriello was the golden boy Democratic freshman Representative from Virginia who was not only the darling of liberals, but also loftily declared that he would rather vote for ObamaCare and be defeated than vote against it and be re-elected. Democrats pulled out all the stops to save his seat, sending him $1.6 million over a 10-day period and having Obama appear personally on his behalf. If the nutroots theory that liberals just needed a candidate worth fighting for to lure them to the polls to assure victory were correct, Perriello should have been a shoe-in. He lost.

Altmire, by contrast, was one of those loathsome “Blue Dog Democrats” that so many liberals feel are merely Republicans in disguise. He voted against ObamaCare. If liberal theories were correct, disheartened liberals should have assured his defeat. He won in a year that fellow Blue Dogs who voted for ObamaCare were being slaughtered.

So the current Pelosi-lead liberal temper tantrum is impossible to explain given the objective political needs of the Democratic Party. However, it’s all too easy to explain given the psychological needs of liberals.

For years liberals have believed that majority status (like The New York Times and black voters) was their unquestioned birthright. Never mind that between 1968 and 2004, a Democratic Presidential candidate had topped 50% of the popular vote exactly once (the post-Watergate Jimmy Carter, who managed to garner a whopping 50.08% of the popular vote in 1976). For them, Republican victories were aberrations from the supposed norm. They truly believed that America was a “center-left” nation, despite polls consistently showing twice as many Americans identified themselves as conservatives rather than liberals. They believed people like John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira who assured them Democrats were the natural majority party, and would take over their natural role as lords of the earth any day now.

And then the 2006 and 2008 election seemed to confirm the theory. Yes! This was it! This was their moment! Finally all of their dreams would come true! Obama was one of them, and with the House and Senate firmly in Democratic control, he would completely replace all the intolerable policies of his predecessor, “that idiot Bush.” He would end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, close down Guantanamo Bay, legalize gay marriage, use Keynesian economics to fix the economy, and nationalize health care. The liberal moment had arrived at last. It was so close they could taste it.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the liberal nirvana. What the rest of us call “real life,” and what liberals attributed to an ever-expanding cast of villains (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Rasmussen Reports) they lumped together as “the right-wing noise machine” inexplicably rose up to thwart their righteous will. The economy stayed broke, and if the Stimulus did anything it made it worse. The Tea Party happened. Cap-and-Trade went down in flames. Obama figured out that Bush’s anti-terror policies weren’t bad at all now that he was the one who had to deal with the problems. Democrats managed to pull the Zombie ObamaCare over the finish-line despite widespread opposition, but it was a far cry from the glorious platonic idea of a fully nationalized, single-payer system that existed in their mind’s eye (and nowhere else). Then the voters, the same voters liberals believed in their heart of hearts was naturally liberal, rejected them. They were like a football team a mere quarter away from winning the Superbowl, only to have the opposing team rack up three touchdowns on them in the last five minutes. How can this be happening? What did I do to deserve this?

When a party gets walloped in an election, usually it takes time to reflect on why voters might have rejected its message, and what parts of that message (and the party) need to be changed. If you’ve seen All That Jazz (and if you haven’t, you should; it’s a great movie), then you’re probably familiar with the Kubler-Ross grief cycle: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Obama has moved on to at least the third stage, but House Democrats and the nutroots can’t get past the first two.

Conservatives have many interests that might supersede politics: Family, jobs, religion. But for many liberals, the political is personal. As far as they’re concerned, there’s Good (represented by Big Government run by liberals and doing the things liberals want it to do), and there’s Evil (big business (unless its unionized), rich people (unless they went to the right schools), Fox News, etc.). They believe the same things all their Facebook friends and newspapers and TV shows and NPR agree with! It’s inconceivable to them that people of good will might disagree with them.

After all, they’re Good! The other side is Evil! That’s why they write books with names like What’s Wrong With Kansas? rather than Why Can’t We Convince Kansas To Embrace Higher Taxes and Bigger Government? They’ve spent the last 20-years believing that voters are liberals, so it’s impossible that voters rejected liberalism itself. That would be tantamount to voters saying they rejected them personally. That’s unpossible! After all, they’re awesome! No, this could only have been happened because the voters have been tricked. Liberalism didn’t lose, liberalism was stabbed in the back. Hence the hunt for traitors and scapegoats that snatched away their prize at the last moment.

To actually listen to what voters were telling them would mean abandoning the worldview that they’ve clung to so fervently for so long. Thus every bit of cognitive dissonance only makes them cling more fervently to the belief that voters haven’t, didn’t, couldn’t reject liberalism itself. After all, they’re awesome, aren’t they? Aren’t they? Voters sent them a message good and hard, but they have to deny it, because their denial is all they have left. Liberalism can never fail, because whenever it appears to, then ipso facto it wasn’t really liberalism that was failing, just like Communist apologists claim that all those failed Communist states weren’t really Communist, because communism never fails inside the platonic fantasyland of their Marxist imaginations.

And into this seething cauldron of anger and denial comes Obama, blithely announcing the deal to extend the Bush Tax Cuts. After all, Obama still has to govern the nation for the next two years. Clearly the economy is isn’t responding to Obamanomics, so something else needs to be done. And if the Bush Tax Cuts expire, Obama knows that Democrats are the ones that will get the blame for the biggest tax hike in history. So he cut the best deal he thought he could, knowing he would have even less leverage after the Republican House took over in January.

In essence, Obama was saying that voters had indeed rejected liberalism. He was ruining their denial! Here was their traitor at last: Obama the secret Republican.

So the House, under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi, decided to stand and fight on the only issue that seems to unite their base: Their hatred of the wealthy, and their love of other people’s money. The idea that money might belong to the people that actually earned it, rather than the federal government, fills them with rage. Here was their line in the sand: We have to screw the rich, even if it means screwing the poor and the middle class in the process! Even if it makes them more unpopular. Even if the Republicans will just pass a deal even less to their liking in January. So they have to oppose extending the Bush tax cuts, even though it will make the rest of the nation think they’re even more petty, vindictive, and out-of-touch than they already did. When it comes to preserving their wounded egos, rationality goes out the window. If it comes down to voters rejecting liberalism, or liberals rejecting reality, then to hell with reality. It’s no longer about policy, it’s about pride.

And pride goeth before a fall.

More JournoList Fallout

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

This piece by John Hayward (AKA Doc Zero) over at Hot Air on the unfolding JournoList scandal is so chock-full of quotable goodness that I’m going to excerpt some here:

Taylor Marsh grins through the flop-sweat to assure us conspiracy to defraud the dwindling audience of the dinosaur media, and slander innocent people as racists, is no big deal when “avowed and openly progressive reporters” do it. I guess we’re supposed to take it as a given that all progressives are liars and smear artists, so we’ve got no right to complain when they’re caught lying and smearing people. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, progressives gotta try throwing a white sheet over Fred Barnes to save Obama from a scandal that should have finished off his campaign.

[snip]

Anyone who has studied the tao of Breitbart knows the first revelations are not the worst. The way to turn the Left’s control of media against itself is to save the really devastating material for later, and release it on a timetable that keeps the story sizzling. The Blatant Beast is defeated by feeding it a story it cannot help repeating. The dark cloud forming over the absurd defenses deployed by liberal reporters today is the shadow of incoming rounds from the second volley.

[snip]

For independents who don’t follow politics closely, the JournoList scandal provides a simple, blatantly obvious narrative about fraud and propaganda. A sizable segment of the “journalist” population stands revealed as sputtering extremists, who talk about killing stories and destroying people’s lives to protect their favored political candidate. Yes, these people are self-professed liberals – they’re not pretending to be “objective” reporters or news anchors – but the cross-pollination between “liberal” and “objective” journalists is a blindingly obvious matter of public knowledge, and the things they’re talking about doing are vile, underhanded, and conspiratorial.

The general public will be able to digest this story, and they won’t like the taste. They’ve already got a low opinion of journalists. It will plummet even further once they get a few bites of JournoList. No magazine, newspaper, or network that continues to employ any of the people quoted in the Daily Caller story can be trusted by any fair-minded person as a reliable news source. Period.

The discussion of false racism charges is an outrage. The American public is growing very tired of being pummeled with the racism club. The cynical plan to pick a random conservative – “who cares?” – and slander them as racists will mix with disgust at the NAACP for trying the same wretched tactic on the Tea Party movement. The once-feared Race Card is looking rather tattered around the edges. The Left has been putting a lot of effort into shuffling those cards into the deck for the 2010 and 2012 campaigns. The nitwits at JournoList just made them much more difficult to play.

Read the whole thing.

Journalists Against the First Amendment

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Journalists used to say things like “I disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say them.” In fact, they still do. The problem is that they no longer believe them.

Daily Caller has put up more JournoList posts, and they show that a significant number of liberal journalists would be happy to see the government shut down Fox News. Jonathan Zasloff asks “is their any reason why the FCC couldn’t simply pull their broadcasting permit when it expires?”

Who knew that, despite all their posturing, liberal journalists cared as little about the first amendment (or at least letting their ideological opponents exercise it) than the second? How dare anyone have a different view of consensus reality than them?

Free speech for me, but not for thee.

The JournoList Debate: Breitbart 1, Chiat/Klein 0

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

As more of the JournoList archives come out, it becomes obvious that they’re a lot closer to Andrew Breitbart’s description of them as part of the “Democrat-Media Complex” than Jonathan Chait’s innocuous description of them as “too mundane” to be of interest.

Or, as Maimon Schwarzschild put it:

What we have is One-Party Media: newspapers, broadcast networks, newsmagazines which represent the views and preoccupations of the Democratic Party and the political left, and consistently denigrate or ignore the views and preoccupations of the political right or centre-right; and which very often systematically ignore any news or information which might reflect badly on the one party, or reflect well on the policies, proposals, or values of the other.

What continues to amaze is the stupid arrogance of it all. Did they actually believe that, here in the 21st century, anything in a digital format seen by more than a tiny handful of people wouldn’t come out sooner or later? “Three can keep a secret, if two or dead.” And somehow they expected more than 200 journalists to keep their mouths zipped?

This is what being in the liberal “reality bubble” 24/7 does to your judgment: It makes you stupid and complacent.

Look for more revelations from Ezra Klein’s liberal listserve in the coming days.

More Wiegel Fallout and the Coming Exposure of JournoList

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

I wanted to avoid doing more than one post on the Dave Wiegel flap, but there’s just been too much news to ignore it.

Here’s Wiegel’s quasi-semi-demi apology. An excerpt:

“Why did I want these people to like me so much? Why did I assume that I needed to crack wise and rant about people who, usually for no more than five minutes were getting on my nerves? Because I was stupid and arrogant, and needlessly mean.”

Anytime someone issues one of these “I was being stupid and that wasn’t the real me” apologies, my automatic assumption is that they’re lying. They’re not sorry, they’re just sorry they got caught. Despite having, like Wiegel, contributed to Reason magazine, and despite Andrew Breitbart’s assertion that Wiegel was “outed” for being insufficiently left-wing, I see no particular reason to modify that assumption in Wiegel’s case.

The Washington Post still doesn’t get it. “The problem is that conservative views are the mainstream views–but not in Washington, D.C. or New York City or San Francisco. The problem is that only 20% of America self-identifies as liberal, so if the news organizations were politically correct and representative, they’d have 80% of their staff that is either moderate or conservative. Instead, 97% of journalists vote and filter their news through the liberal ideology.”

And what does admitting your naked bias against conservatives get you these days? Hired by MSNBC. I’m sure all 20 of MSNBC’s regular viewers will appreciate his insightful commentary.

Then again, they did beat CNN (but not CNN + Headline News) over the first six months of this year, which I think says more about how badly CNN is sucking than how well MSBNC is doing. And Fox News is basically slaughtering all of them in Prime Time.

I was going to say that if Wiegel really wanted us to trust him, he should put EVERYTHING in the JournoList archives up online. However, Andrew Breitbart has beaten me to the punch with his $100,000 offer for anyone willing to send him the complete archive. So I look forward to perusing the complete JournoList contents online later this week. Or better yet, watching Breitbart roll them out a few at a time over several months, letting the participants wonder how much of the archive he has, and who will be the next among them to be exposed, promises edification, amusement and a demonstration of “The Prisoner’s Dilemma” for months to come. I think Breitbart could probably keep dribbling out tidbits well into, say, mid-October…

Updated: Iowahawk weighs in with his usual pith.

News Flash: It’s a Bad Idea to Hire Liberals to Cover the Conservative Movement

Friday, June 25th, 2010

Too bad it took The Washington Post so long to figure that out.

I’m also amazed that anyone, anywhere (even Dave Weigel) would think something they wrote on an email mailing list wouldn’t come back to haunt them. (Especially since emails from Journolist had already made it out into the wild.) Attention people: You have to assume than anything you email, post, or say in a public place is being recorded at all times. That’s simply the world we live in. Deal with it.