Category: Rants

Imagine yourself one of the small number of Americans who have political power – real power.

Say you wanted to browbeat Americans into accepting some truly awful aspect of their lives without complaint. It would be in your interest to have this awful thing happen so regularly that people would become resigned to it, aided by saturation news coverage emphasizing that it is inevitable and nothing can be done about it.
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After a sufficient amount of time you would most likely achieve your goal; people will just shrug their shoulders, accept it as part of life, and go about their miserable days.

With our latest public spree killing at the Navy Yards in Washington, the NRA appears to have accomplished its goal at long last. They have achieved their dream of an America in which an armed gunman can murder 12 people in public and no one will give it a second thought. It isn't shocking, it isn't a cause for outrage. It's just a thing that is going to happen a couple of times per year indefinitely because really, what can be done about it? Lacking an especially gruesome angle – in Newtown, for instance, the victims were all tiny children – we hardly even pay attention.

It feels as if no one has the energy to go through the motions, to take to their soapboxes and yell that America has either too many guns or too few. After Newtown, Americans have finally gotten the message: the gun industry owns the NRA, the NRA owns Congress, and Congress owns nothing but the votes it sells to the highest bidder. Nothing is going to change, ever, unless it involves arming more people in more places. So really, what is the point? Why bother? Why try to make changes that will never happen? People may not be smart but they are rational; most of us recognize a lost cause when we see it. We're left with no option beyond retreating into the fantasy that we can somehow protect ourselves with more guns and bigger locks on the doors.

Getting policies enacted is not a rare accomplishment for an interest group. Getting the public to accept their position as the status quo is harder but not unheard of. The NRA alone, it seems, has succeeded in reducing its opposition to total resignation.
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They are going to win every time. The only solution is more guns and the occasional killing spree is just a fact of American life now. Despite the saturation media coverage of these once-shocking events, they're treated essentially like the weather: it's just a thing that happens that nobody can control or predict, and it sure is sad when some people end up dead.

Lyndon Johnson once said that real power is getting someone to kiss your ass in a Macy's window and then announce that it tasted great. He wasn't wrong, but today real power is getting an entire nation to react to something that should be jarring with, "Just twelve? Regular adults? Oh how terrible. What's for dinner?"

The impending US military response to recent events in Syria (Hint: When they spend the massive amounts of money required to move the big military hardware halfway around the world, the decision to use force has already been made) is the perfect example of everything that is wrong with the current one-sided hyperpartisan political climate in Washington. Every commentator, excepting the few hardcore isolationists and the ones who have hard-ons for starting new wars, has reached consensus on two points. One is that Obama has several options in Syria. The other is that all of the options are terrible. They are terrible politically, strategically, and practically for everyone involved.

He can rest assured, though, that whatever he does, the right will howl like cats in heat and trip over themselves to criticize him. It is a mistake to idealize the past, but there was in fact a time in American history where something approaching consensus could be reached between the parties on matters of foreign policy. This usually took the form of Democrats, forever afraid of being perceived as soft, adopting a more aggressive Republican position. We saw this most recently in 2002, with disastrous results.
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Currently the Republican strategy simply is to sit back, wait for Obama to choose a response, and then go ballistic.
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Anyone want to start a pool on the impeachment chatter?

If Obama makes no military response, Republicans will call him a pussy, accuse him of complicity in the nerve gassing of innocent civilians at the hands of a madman, and declare military intervention the only acceptable response.

If Obama attempts a diplomatic approach, Republicans will once again call him a pussy along with a bunch of overwrought analogies about Hitler and Neville Chamberlain. References to his secret Muslimness will re-emerge.

If Obama does the traditional American post-Cold War response – lob some bombs and cruise missiles from a safe distance – Republicans will explode with rage over the needless slaughter of innocents in Syria.
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They will note correctly that blowing some stuff up with cruise missiles is pointless in terms of ending the civil war in Syria, but they will neglect to mention the part about shitting their pants if he chose not to use force (see above).

If Obama opts for the Full Monty military response and sends in the ground forces, Republicans will stand before cameras with straight faces and decry the costs of opening a third theater of conflict in the Middle East in yet another country in which the prospects for a positive outcome are poor. Many references to the overstretched and underfunded military heroes will be made.

He literally cannot win, not only because all of his choices are bad but also because the political attacks on him will be relentless under any circumstances. That's the logical end of a Republican strategy that amounts to little more than oppose, oppose, oppose, because the Kenyan usurper cannot be allowed to succeed ever.

And before you throw out the reflexive yet embarrassing "Both Sides Do It" argument perhaps a quick review of voting on the Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Iraq is in order, not to mention certain other pieces of "War on Terror"-related legislation.

Excuse me for going into Professor Mode today; I've covered this in every class I've ever taught, and I'll continue to do so until They won't let me in a classroom anymore.

This is the best thing The Onion has ever done. That seems like a tenuous claim given the thousands of different gags and stories they've done over the past two decades, but "Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus' VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning" cloaks in humor a lesson that I think everyone in America – and increasingly the rest of the world – needs to get through their head.

People like to talk about media bias. Everyone thinks the media is biased, despite being unable to agree on a direction (liberals think it's too conservative, conservatives think it's all liberal claptrap). This sort of partisan political bias is a distracting sideshow from the much more prevalent and influential "commercial" bias. Commercial bias is the idea that the news is chosen, framed, and otherwise manipulated not to grind a partisan ax but to accommodate the reality that the media is a business. Like any other business, the media need to make money. They get money by getting people to read, listen, and watch. This translates to the rates they can charge their advertisers. That's why the news looks like it does today.

Even Fox News, perhaps the champions of pure political bias, is motivated by profit more than ideology. Rupert Murdoch identified a market niche and filled it with a product tailored to certain viewers. It has succeeded. Does Fox News employ people who are politically biased? Certainly. But they work there because it brings in ratings. If hardcore communism was twice as popular in the U.S. as the Fox brand of conservatism, there's a good chance that Murdoch would fill his media outlets with a product reflecting that reality.

You are, as the Onion piece states, just a pair of eyeballs. It's useful to remember that if something is "free", you're what's being sold. TV and internet news sites cost nothing to watch, and the companies that produce it have nothing to sell but your attention. This reality has far more of an influence on the news we see than anyone's political agenda. When Glenn Beck's ratings were high, Fox paid him handsomely. When they tanked, he was fired. It's just a business that operates no differently than a non-news TV network.

The internet is hailed as the most important advance in media/communication since television. In terms of news content, though, the advent of cable TV (and 24-hour news networks with the debut of CNN) was more consequential. Simply put, before CNN and cable there simply wasn't much news on TV. Each network ran a half hour of local and a half hour of national into the 1980s. More importantly, the three major networks (which were essentially all that was on TV for most Americans) ran news in the same time slot. Check out this network TV schedule from 1962. Look at how little news there is – 30 minutes total – and it's all at 7 PM. The news, in short, competed with other news.

Today the news has vastly more time to fill and it competes 24 hours per day not just with a handful of other news networks but also with 600 other channels of entertainment. It competes with football and sitcoms and shows about cute animals and reality shows and everything else on TV. Almost all of that stuff is more interesting to American viewers than news, so there is only one way for the news – being as ratings-driven as any other network on TV – to compete: it becomes entertainment.

That is why celebrities, sports, graphic crime stories, and new Apple products are headline news these days. They are simply trying to show you things that you will find interesting enough to watch. When I was a child, there was still a sense that journalists were public watchdogs with some sort of responsibility to The News and The Truth. Of course the media have never lived up to this lofty ideal, but the pretense was maintained. But the reality is that while the media perform a public service – admittedly we would be ignorant of most things happening outside of our lives without them – they decidedly are not public servants. They are part of a ratings- and profit-driven enterprise dedicated to prying you away from everything else on TV and holding your attention long enough to show you some commercials.

Cynical? Yes. Reality can be pretty harsh. The news you see on TV is a product like any other, focus-grouped and reworked to be pleasing to its intended audience. Journalists may understand their job to include a professional obligation to tell the truth and report important stories, but the environment in which they work is structured in a way that guarantees that most of the airtime is going to be devoted to sports, Hollywood, barely-disguised advertising, and the occasional twerk.

Recently I spent an evening with some people I just met, including one gentleman of a very conservative bent.

He went on a number of fairly familiar conservative rants. I didn't engage him, as despite this I found him pretty pleasant, everyone seemed to be having a good time, and over time I've found that it's neither productive nor worth the effort to debate in these settings. It did, however, leave me puzzled the more I thought about the things he said.

While this is a forum for extreme sarcasm and general rudeness, I'm going to pose this question in earnest. If anyone can shed some light on this, I legitimately want to know. There are a few conditions, though. First, this is not a question for the small subset of libertarians who believe in the absolute abolition of government. The question presumes that for most people on the right, there is some acceptable level of government and some functions that are properly public. It might not be much, but when pressed very few conservatives actually believe there should be no government. If you happen to be of this school of thought, this question is not for you. Please go elsewhere and, I don't know, hand-load ammo or skin a deer or check the filter seals on your bunker's ventilation system or whatever it is you do for fun.

OK. Without recourse to "Government should be abolished" as an answer, consider this: How can "Less government!" be the solution to every problem if government is also, as conservatives consider fundamental to their beliefs, inefficient and incompetent?

If government cannot do anything right, then it is inefficient at allocating its resources. That would mean, logically, that there are some things to which the government is devoting far too many resources and others to which it devotes far too few.

There should, in other words, be some problem to which "More government!" is the answer. An incompetent or inefficient government could not get everything wrong in the exact same way – i.

e., by over-governing. There is a stochastic element to incompetence, and inefficiency in particular is a common accusation made by small government advocates.

In essence, I see this as a more sophisticated version of a problem common among the nuttier, less intelligent elements on the right – that is, the simultaneous belief that government can't do anything correctly but it somehow orchestrates massively complex conspiracies.

Barack Obama secretly controls the entire government and the Fed secretly runs the world yet the government is incapable of running a lemonade stand.

I'm perplexed. Enlighten me.

As many veteran readers know, I enjoy distracting myself with automotive news. Cars are neat. I've only owned two in my life (one of which was purchased used) so I'm not exactly a useful consumer to the auto industry. But I do like to read about the technology and the industry itself, which is in many ways a good reflection of the larger trends in the manufacturing economy.

Over the past two years there have appeared any number of stories from auto industry analysts about how elderly buyers are starting to outnumber younger ones. Whereas the primary target for auto sales in the past was the 25-55 age group – the period in which people traditionally have growing families and their peak earning potential – it has consistently shifted higher in the past two decades. The key demographic in the U.S., if you ask any industry insider off the record, is the 60+ crowd. No one wants to admit that; in fact, name brands like Lincoln and Oldsmobile (RIP) and models like the Crown Victoria / TownCar struggle specifically because they are perceived to be the domain of Old People. But the fact remains: a 65 year old man is a lot more likely to be in the market for a new car than a 25 year old one in 2013.

Annoyingly, these reports are inevitably accompanied by some sort of sociological explanation for why younger people – say, the 21-39 crowd – are not buying cars. The same is true of stories about why college grads live at home, or why younger people are renting rather than buying homes. It's usually something about different preferences, more "flexible" lifestyles, residential patterns, or some squishy hypothesis that we love Mother Nature too much to soil her with an automobile. And they all tapdance around the bleedingly obvious fact that Baby Boomers now buy more cars than their children because they have money and their children don't. I'd wager that plenty of people in their 20s and 30s would buy a new car on occasion if the opportunity arose.

But it doesn't. The labor force has been radically restructured (by the Boomers, not insignificantly) so that we work, when we can find work at all, longer hours for less money with no job security. How does one save up for a car or mortgage down payment on the kind of salaries most people who weren't born into wealth earn in their 20s? How are young people expected to make a 5 year auto loan commitment (or 30 for a mortgage) when their employment is "at will" or when people spend years working as "permanent temps"? As I've said before, even the people in my age group I know personally who are doing well – and as someone with full-time employment and health insurance, I consider myself fortunate to be in that group – have tremendous insecurity about the future. In other words, even those of us who might be able to afford a new car now refuse to buy simply because we don't know if our job will still exist (or who will be doing it) in a couple of years.

It is amusing to see how far analysts and journalists will go to avoid grappling with the relatively obvious fact that young people aren't buying what they're "supposed to" be buying because we, as an economy, are not paying them much. Or employing them at all. Or giving them any kind of long-term security necessary to induce them to make financial commitments to homes, cars, or other expensive purchases. This kind of denial of the obvious is becoming a trademark of Boomer-led journalism and financial analysis, the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the failure of consumers to rescue the economy by buying the things they're supposed to be buying. Yet rarely do they consider the simplest solution, that younger people do not make these kinds of economic commitments because this society is now structured to make doing so impossible. God help the auto industry when this wave of retirees dies out.

In their latest desperate ploy for attention, CNN had medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta (who, in case you didn't know, still does neurosurgery in Atlanta when he's not on the air) "change his mind about pot" after studying the medical and legal implications of the War on Marijuana. Dr. Gupta even admitted that he has tried some himself in the past. What a shocking revelation! In a more sober vein, the doctor declared that he found the warnings about the effects of marijuana to be "overstated."

Since every remotely objective observer has reached the same conclusion, there is nothing to see here beyond the cachet of Gupta's medical credentials and public profile. Polling shows that barely 1/3 of the public (presumably old people) supports continued marijuana prohibition. It would appear that decriminalization at the federal level could happen in our lifetimes. And the best part about it is never again being cornered at a party by That Guy who lacks the ability to talk about anything other than legalizing pot.
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While no one this side of Bill Bennett or James Dobson takes the Dangers of Marijuana horror stories seriously, I still find "medical marijuana" ballot initiatives to be a half-assed and ultimately pointless approach. Legalization advocates tend to be rationalists, people who are repulsed by the dishonesty and bullshitting inherent to the Just Say No/War on Drugs movement. For that very reason I find it particularly hard to people talk about legalization based on the medical uses of marijuana.
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I mean, come on. I support legalization, but let's just call it what it is: you want to smoke lots of weed and purchasing it legally would make your life easier. That's OK. Own it.

What percentage of people who have "cards" in Colorado or California (here's a great take on how it's nearly impossible to get denied when applying in LA) have a real, legitimate medical need to be prescribed marijuana? Certainly it must be dwarfed by the number who have bullshitted their way into it with the help, perhaps, of a particularly sympathetic physician – if that is even necessary. Perhaps this is a point that isn't worth making, but I don't see much difference between Bill Bennett trying to scare people with a bunch of lies about marijuana and some White Guy With Dreadlocks pretending that glaucoma is an important issue for him. These excuses and games grow tiresome. Let's just say what we mean. Conservatives love the War on Drugs because it lets them imprison black and Hispanic males, and marijuana is the volume seller of the drug trade. They hide behind their cheap "Someone think of the children!" rhetoric that fools fewer Americans by the minute. Liberals support legalization because they see the War on Drugs for what it is. And libertarian types who are single-issue fanatics about legalization usually smoke enough weed to sedate a rhino and decriminalization it would be advantageous. Cool? Let's all get comfortable in our own skin.

If you're going to make a farce out of a law, then there is no point in having the law and enforcing it haphazardly. There are no doubt some people out there who derive real benefits from Medical Marijuana laws, but for the public at large these laws are just a convenient way to get the good shit without the risk of arrest. I'm open minded to the possibility that legalization advocates are that passionate about treating glaucoma, but I have my doubts. We should stop treating the symptoms – coming up with ways to flank bad laws – and root out the useless laws at the core of this issue. Alternatively, we can continue to pretend that it makes sense to live in a country where Bacardi 151 is legal (Drink Responsibly!
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) and marijuana is not.

On account of what I do for a living and what I do for fun (namely this), people ask me questions about politics on occasion. Not often, mind you, because politics is a subject on which everyone is automatically an expert. But it happens here and there. Recently one of my friends asked me what should have been a very easy question; unfortunately it stumped me. So as people with my personality type tend to do, I obsessed over it mentally for a few hours until I satisfied myself with an answer.

The question, which came at the tail end of a lengthy discussion of how far to the right American politics and public policy have lurched, was: What was the starting point on the road to Teabaggistan? What one single event or point in time, if we could go back and change it, might have avoided (or at least delayed) the ideological and practical mess in which we find ourselves today?

"Stumped" was a poor word choice. Rather, I had an answer but I figured it was too obvious and therefore the real answer must be something deep and convoluted that only a true Doctor of Thinking such as myself could elucidate.
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After much thought, though, the best answers I can concoct are far from obscure historical events.

The first and most obvious one that came to mind was the election of Reagan. That is the moment in which the official policy of the government became "Government is the problem; government is the enemy.

" This began 30 years of Wrecking Crew governance, where the sole purpose of governing was to govern so badly that people would agree that government can do no good and should be done away with. It was the point at which one could say things like "Government should be drowned in a bathtub" in public discourse without being considered an insane person.

The second candidate was the passage of NAFTA with the support of congressional Republicans and a Democratic president. The enactment of NAFTA was the beginning of the end of the American economy; at that moment, the death of manufacturing jobs and labor unions became inevitable, a matter of when and not if. This event is a good choice because it signaled the end of the Democratic Party as a legitimate liberal party and the beginning of the New Democrat (i.e., Republican Lite) economic policy. Out with the New Deal and Great Society, in with welfare reform and globalization. From this point forward, we have had one party on economic policy. The two major parties differ only in how they wish to implement the neoliberal Wall Street agenda.

To give myself a few Cred Points for avoiding obvious answers, I also considered the Dixiecrat separatist movement of 1948 with the presidential candidacy of Strom Thurmond. At this point, the collapse of the New Deal Democratic coalition around the issue of race became inevitable, although the process took nearly thirty years to play out. It presaged the Civil Rights movements, the GOP Southern Strategy, and the unified conservatism – social, foreign policy, and economic – that Reagan was able to bring to his party.
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Because this unfolded over such a long period of time, I don't consider it to be a great answer to a question seeking one pivotal event.

I'd rank my three answers in the order given. Reagan was the catalyst for our current ideological condition. NAFTA ushered in our current economic condition. And the southern white exodus from the Democratic Party made possible the polarized social/moral politics of the last few decades. One could make an argument that the 1-2 punch of the Vietnam War and Watergate initiated Americans' distrust of government, but it took an effective leader to make it an ideology rather than an undercurrent.

Reagan and NAFTA. Those are the best starting points for a 90-second version of the how and why of America 2013.

John Mulaney's new stand-up album has a terrific bit about the New York Post, which is by consensus the worst newspaper in the U.S. if not the world. While Fox News and other right-wing tabloid media outlets have their defenders, they rarely waste any time trying to stick up for the Post. Written at a third-grade level and mostly full of things that aren't true, the Post is written by and for complete idiots with no real pretense of journalistic integrity.

As bad as its "news" is, nothing holds a candle to the Post opinion page. I've college dailies with fewer ass-headed screeds than what is supposedly a major newspaper from America's cultural metropolis. If some braying fratboy can type it, the Post will print it. And that's how we ended up being alternately entertained and horrified last week when they saw fit to publish some "Do you know who my dad is?" tool's love letter to the "greatest food in human history", the McDonald's double.

This is old news by now and most of what can be said about this idiocy has already been said. Two things stuck out to me but haven't attracted much attention.

First, this is loaded to the gunwales with every cheap, tired, cliche "liberal" joke in the right wing arsenal – the only things missing are Jane Fonda, hairy armpits, and "limousine liberals". Since this got past an editor, we can assume that hackneyed, predictable tripe is not a bug in this case but a major feature of the paper. This kind of cheap write-to-the-stereotypes nonsense is precisely what passes for opinion and commentary among college freshmen, and their views only get published when the editor and publisher want to stir up some "controversy" and bask in the attention that follows. The Post prints the same kind of crap just because that's what the Post prints.

Second, the kind of economics on which he bases this claim are inappropriate. We know the price of the sandwich, but do we know if it's a loss leader? McDonald's might very well be selling it below cost just to get people through the door (the real profit maker for most fast food restaurants is the soft drink dispenser, where one cent worth of syrup mixes with one cent worth of water to make a $1.49 regular drink). Does the production of the components of the sandwich benefit from government subsidies? If so, it seems that we would have to account for 1) subsidies and 2) a retailer willing to sell the product below cost before we could make a meaningful comparison between a fast food burger and those frou frou vegetables.

There might be a silver lining to his stupidity, though. This piece has attracted such wide attention that more people might start paying attention to the fundamental problem with our food system: the inverse relationship between cost and calories. Rather than celebrating, we should be alarmed that $5 at a grocery store can buy 3000 calories of complete shit of no nutritional value whatsoever. What the poor can afford barely counts as food in many cases, and the McDouble is a perfect example. Make a hamburger on your grill. Take a bite. Then take a bite of a McDouble. Notice how they taste nothing alike. That's because one is made of ground beef and the other is made of inert gray matter sprayed with beef flavoring, dyed caramel brown, and fried before being enveloped in several variants of processed corn. It may be calories – as are Faygo, potato chips, gummy bears, and the other detritus available for 1000 calories per dollar at your grocery store – but it isn't food. There's a difference, and it would be foolish to expect the crack staff of the New York Post to appreciate it.