Why do they hate President Obama?

Talk to a lot of Republican voters, and you'll hear them describing Obama using amazing language. They tell me--who they know as a Democrat--that he's a Fascist, a Communist. Literally. They'll tell me how much they dislike him personally. Since by any rational standards he has governed as a moderate, pragmatic center-left Democrat, it's hard to understand them talking about him as if he were Hugo Chavez. 

Here's one possible explanation--though they'll never admit it (often not even to themselves):

On with the Republican debates

http://www.motifake.com/136409

Today's NYTimes editorial speaks in favor of the Republican debates continuing, because it's good for President Obama. They've got a point, but they also erred in the way that people who only speak to people who already agree with them err.


This editorial seems to assume that Republican voters share Democratic voters' values. And they do, to some extent, but in a different order.

Democrats are most terrified of being thought insensitive.
Republicans are most terrified of being thought weak.

The debating points the editorial cites shows how far apart the parties are. To the NYT it's self-evident that these points are wrong.

But take "Ending multilingual ballots (disenfranchising millions)." ---i.e. being insensitive. Quelle domage.

But a Republican reading it would say "First, that's Democrats being disenfranchised, second they're not--they're just being asked to learn this country's language so they understand the national discussion about the issues before they vote. Otherwise they'll vote tribally, for whatever group they belong to, instead of voting as Americans"

Ditto the NYT's horror of "making [illegal aliens'] lives miserable" in order to get them to self-deport. Again, that assumes that Republican voters fear being seen as insensitive to illegal aliens' feelings.

Seriously? Republicans could care less. it also hurts bank robbers' feelings to arrest them. And wife-beaters. So? Republicans would say it probably is "insensitive" for our nation to only accept people who we want to come here, instead of telling the world "step right up. Mi casa es su casa."

As if happens I'll be voting for Obama because of the GOP's voodoo economics. Not because it's "sensitive" to do so.

Should the Constitution be read aloud at the beginning of every session of Congress?

The House's new Republican majority decided to honor the Constitution by mandating that it be read aloud, beginning to end, as the first order of business of the session.

The Left generally derided this as idolatry, as well as pointing out that it cost taxpayers over a million dollars to do so while more and more Americans unwillingly joined the "99 week" club in which your unemployment payments run out after 99 weeks.

They also pointed out that the reading was of a sanitized version of the Constitution, with all the parts revised or deleted later through amendment deleted.

The Right claimed this was pragmatically obvious--that the purpose of the reading was to remind congressmen of the parts that are still germane, to keep in mind as they craft new legislation.

The Left replied that we also needed to remind congressmen that the Founding Fathers weren't perfect, and that omitting the parts later amended/deleted contributed to the presumption that every word they wrote is sacred and no future amendments should be considered.

Centrists like me note that there are a number of features of the Constitution that the Right want changed--such as the use of the 14th Amendment to give citizenship to babies born here even when their parents are here illegally. Doing so wasn't the intent of the 14 Amendment's framers--they were just trying to keep Southern states from disenfranchising ex-slaves and their offspring.

I say that they should have read the whole thing. The parts still extant are useful to guide legislation--and so are the deleted parts, reminding us to treat the Founding Fathers with respect but not reverence.


But here's the kicker. All those flagwaving Republicans who insisted on this public display of conspicuous patriotism? Most of them left the chambers long before this reading was over. By the end only 42 Representatives were left--and that proves what a hollow exercise this was.

I would have been impressed if they'd all stuck around 'till the last dog was hung, so to speak. But they split instead, thus validating the Democrats' contention that this was just another waste of taxpayer money and a diversion from the Republicans' stated goal of focusing like a laser on getting Americans employed again.

Instead it showed that they have a laserlike focus, all right, but it's not on helping Americans who are out of work--it's on bringing back the Bush years of Republican control of all three branches and the fiscal responsibility that ensued.

Not.

The GOP is not pro-business.

The GOP is not pro-business. It's pro-CEO.

Just as Wall Street morphed from a capital funding service industry for American manufacturing into a fiscal manipulation operation benefiting only itself, America's CEO class have morphed from business leaders into board of directors manipulators intent on lining their own pockets at the expense of shareholders, employees and customers--and America.

Business don't make political contributions. CEOs and Wall Street insiders do--mainly to Republican politicians. And the payback they want is whatever helps them in their decades-long campaign to redistribute America's wealth from the middle class into their own pockets.

This has been hugely successful. CEOs made 20X what their low-level employees made back in the 1950s. Now it's more like 400X. And I don't see their business decisions and leadership being 20X better than CEOs' decisions were in the 1950s.

This shift came out of middle class pockets. And they have the brass to claim that President Obama believes in wealth redistribution! They're the ones who do, and this is simple fact, easily verified from nonpartisan sources.

The Republican Party leadership comprises the nimble and devoted servants of these billionaires, who feel no sense of allegiance to this country or even to their own businesses. They've jiggered the rules so that if their business prospers, they prosper. And if their business sags or even fails, they still prosper. Ditto the country as a whole.

Only when the fortunes of the leaders rise and fall with those of their organization do leaders lead well. Otherwise, if they've become uncoupled from their organization's fortunes, they will work for their own ends regardless of how it affects that organization. That's just human nature.

The Democrats are no saints, and I strongly oppose their efforts to help Mexican citizens living here illegally at Americans' expense, as well as their pandering to public employee unions and every ethnic/racial/religious group they can single out for special favors.

But their policies aren't driving America into the ditch.

The real problem is that in their six years of ruling all three branches of government, the Republicans did so much damage to the economy that it will take over a decade to repair it.

Yet presidents are elected every four years, and President Obama can't possibly undo the Republicans' damage in that timeframe. This is the advantage dictatorships like Communist China have over us--their solutions' timeframes can match reality.

So we'll let the foxes back into the henhouse, most likely.

After all, they are the experts on hens.

What's wrong with rank and file Republicans?

Democrats look at the shenanigans of Republicans at bondage strip clubs and ask
"Why can't decent working people see through these charlatans?"

Answer: the Democratic Party unintentionally alienated them, even though it's the natural home for working stiffs, and the Republican Party sucked them in by morphing the GOP from a political party into a tribe.

And in a tribe you defend your own and attack your tribe's enemies. Right=my tribe; Wrong=your tribe. This is a fundamental human survival trait--far deeper than simple racism.

We Democrats have to understand how we pushed them out. When the previous generation (that of Lyndon Johnson etc.) went for racial justice and equity, they had a chance to create a level playing field. Instead they tilted it from whites towards everyone else. That was affirmative action.

I'm neither affirming nor attacking affirmative action. I understand why the Democratic Party did it--it was a reaction to the total intransigence of the White South to any form of racial equality at all.

And it's also true that acting to impose any form of racial equality at all would have lost us the Southern Democrats.

But it was affirmative action and its ramifications that lost the rest. Things that seem like simple justice to today's Democrats deeply offend the average White working stiff:

* Amnesty for illegal aliens
* Ballots in dozens of languages
* Affirmative action for the sons of Black doctors, but not for the sons of White sharecroppers
* Black and Chicano and Womens studies departments at most universities
* "Press One for directions in Spanish"
* Abortion
* Gun control
* Eliminating Church stuff from public life--from Nativity scenes on courthouse lawns to school prayer

You get the idea.

Mostly Democrats dismiss people's complaints about these things as knuckle-dragging racism/nativism/fundamentalism.

It's tempting to do so. But don't you realize that this is EXACTLY what Karl Rove wants you to do?

Divide and conquer. It's how the bosses destroyed the populist movement of the late 19th century. Distract working stiffs from their real oppressor with emotion-inducing stuff (like Reagan's welfare queens) so they'll hate each other and forget the foe. And then get the foe to appear in public as if he actually cares about his working stiffs. Voila.

Imagine if the Democratic Party had adopted a race-blind rule instead of racial preference. Who's to say racial equity might not be farther along now if it had?

And so now, even today, we have cases like the white firefighters in Rhode Island who followed the rules, and then when the rules gave them the promotion instead of the black firefighters--they changed the rules.

And you wonder why the Republicans were able to pick them up? White working stiffs have seen their earning power stagnate or even go down radically. Laid off workers almost never regain their former earning power. And even those who haven't been laid off haven't seen their earning power rise for 40 years, more or less. Their lives have been hollowed out. Their wives had to go to work. Their dream of home ownership may have vanished.

Of course as a Democrat I know why--the richest .5% of the country took those people's money and put it in their own pockets. But they make sure to stay out of these guys' sight.

Unfortunately the GOP and its patrons have figured out how to do their dirty deeds in the dark. So what the white guy with the stagnant income and uncertain prospects sees is Republicans who talk like him and dress and cut their hair like him (yes, there's race, but it's more the haircut and the conservative look).

There's also the fact that you can't explain default credit swaps to a guy with a high school education. But you can point at people who don't look and talk like you and say "They're taking your job!"

Nor does it help that often that foreign guy is taking your job. Not mine. I'm an educated professional. But if you're a roofer--yeah, the foreign guy is taking your job. It's just the tone-deafness of so many ideological Democrats that makes them not get that.

Obama does get that, and he's making so many concessions to Republicans less to get Congressional votes than to connect with all those independent voters--mainly white guys--who have the sense that both parties have shafted them.

Because it's possible to pursue Democratic Party ideals without making regular mainstream (mostly white) Americans feel like you disdain and dismiss them.

So we all need to emulate Obama and try to get these angry white guys to simmer down and talk sense. They may be wrong about Obamacare and a lot else, but their sense of grievance--well, they came by that honestly. They should have a sense of grievance.

So before you give in to Tea Party provocations, ask yourself "What does Karl Rove want me to do?" and do the other thing instead. OK?

Healthcare reform under the hood

The press talks about the healthcare reform effort in Congress as being a contest between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

But another way to look at it would be to see it as a contest between the healthcare insurance industry and the voters. From this viewpoint you could say that the healthcare insurance industry owns nearly all of the GOP congressmen and enough of the Democratic ones to prevent the most meaningful aspects of reform from passing.

GOP congressmen and pundits deny this hotly of course, and point to public opinion polls supporting their opposition to healthcare reform.

But what they never mention is the $1.4 million a day the healthcare insurance industry has been spending for months and month on shaping public opinion--just as they did the last time this was tried.

And that opinion-shaping takes the form of scaremongering lies that have been thoroughly debunked by nonpartisann factchecking organizations like www.factcheck.org and www.politifact.com.

They also have as a partner in crime the Angry Billionaires' Club--America's richest 1/2 of 1%, none of whom need any social services, and who want to preserve the Third World income distribution profile America now has. They have invested countless millions of dollars in a PR campaign to make Americans fear and distrust government in toto, and to voluntarily abandon the only things that protect individual Americans from being exploited the way workers were in the England of Charles Dickens.

So whenever government tries to regulate any business sector, the industries involved can tap into this free-floating government distrust that has been inculcated by the minions of the Angry Billionaires' Club for decades.

Listen to congressional opponents to healthcare reform and you'll see how they invoke this general distrust of government--reaping the harvest created by this careful cultivation of the American foundational attitude towards a distant and uncaring government on the other side of the Atlantic back in the 18th century.

Healthcare reform woes partly the Demos' fault

Across America many millions of Republicans await anxiously to see whether their champions in Congress can defeat what they see as the foreigner in the White House and his European Socialist cohorts in Congress trying to bankrupt them and then kill them when they're old and useless.

It's such an irony that it's their heroes who want to bankrupt them and then kill them (when they can't pay their premiums any more).

But it's not just the $1.4M/day the healthcare denial industry is spending to defeat any kind of reform that might reduce their profits. It's not just the Republican partisans whose loyalty is more tribal than principled.

It's also Obama's fault, and the Democratic Congress--they've let the other convince a majority of Americans of one central point: that the Democrats plan to transfer some of their healthcare to others--bums and foreigners mainly. They've allowed this to happen by harping on the need to help those without insurance. Yet most voters have insurance, which they'll have until they actually need it. And then they won't. But that's not now. Now they need to hear about what Obama is going to do for them. And how what most pay for their insurance has zoomed up, but mostly out of sight.

Time after time the Democratic Party manages to sound like it cares about every ethnicity on Earth except for European-Americans, to use a phrase they never use.

I voted for Obama to get healthcare reform, even though, like most Americans, I'm concerned about illegal immigration--especially since I live in the part of America that's being overrun, far from the Beltway.

What happened to the realistic Democrats who knew how to win back Congress and the White House? Did they think the Republican Party's paymasters would just go away quietly? There's waaay too much profit involved. And Democrats must remember that the Blue Dog Democrats are blue dogs because more liberal demos couldn't have gotten elected, and without them the Demos couldn't have taken back Congress, and if the Blue Dogs appear to lose faith with their constituents they won't get re-elected, and then the GOP (Greed Over Principle) party will regain Congress. Do you want that to happen?

You can't get in the ring wearing gloves and talking about altruism when the other guy's stepping in wearing brass knucks and talking about what the majority of Americans most care about--their own healthcare.

Whining about how dirty the Republican leadership fights won't help either. Of course they fight dirty. They've been fighting dirty at least since Reagan painted the government as all bad all the time--a long-term investment in deregulation that has paid off handsomely for the Angry Billionaire's Club. If they fought fair they'd lose. So they don't (see my definition of G.O.P.).

Obama doesn't have to lose his cool. But he does have to deal with the Republican Party he's got instead of the one he wants. And he has to face the fact that this is only going to work if doctors get paid salaries instead of for piecework (procedures); and if the insurance industry profits get scaled back to those of ordinary businesses--and if the pharmaceutical industry's profits go likewise.

Obama's getting the poked hornet's nest attack anyway, no matter what he does. Might as well try to actually accomplish something.

--As long as he keeps making it clear that his beef is with the Republican leadership and their padrones--not the Republican rank and file.

Heart vs. Mind

Some say the Democrats are mindless, while the Republicans are heartless.

Nonsense. Both parties overflow with empathy.

They just differ in the targets of that empathy.

The Republican Party weeps for the oppression suffered by helpless billionaires, CEOs, officials in positions of great power; of oppression of the religion that over 2/3 of the nation belongs to; of the threat to institutions like Christmas that are only celebrated today by over 80% of Americans.

The Democratic Party weeps for the oppression suffered by public employee union members who make more than comparable private sectors employees and also enjoy lifetime security via lavish pension benefits; for the oppression of poor people (unless they're White); for the voting rights of American citizens who neglected to learn the language spoken by this country; for the rights of citizens of other countries who moved here illegally, even though their presence has resulted in wages for unskilled labor dropping 5-25%, thus pushing American lower-class workers into poverty--and the fact that they're here mainly because Mexico's population has exploded from 20 million in 1940 to over 100 million in 2000, and now it's exporting its overpopulation to America. Lastly, the Democratic Party weeps for everyone who's a citizen of this country who regards themselves as something else above being American--African, Latin, -of color-ed, or any other hyphenation that can be sliced off the body politic and granted special ethnic or racial favors for their group in exchange for their vote.

I'm so pleased to live in a country so overflowing with empathy on the part of both major parties. Just because a majority of Americans are left out of both parties' span of empathy shouldn't bother us. It's our job to give, just as it is theirs to take. Or so both parties' seem to think.

Yay.

Immigration: different issue for left & right

When you study foreign languages, sometimes you run into words that sound like English words--only they mean something else. These are called false cognates. "Immigration" is a false cognate when it comes to discussions between left wingers and right wingers.

To left wingers, "immigration" is an aspect of the issue of government-supplied social services. So when they discuss "immigration" they mean "how can we provide these people with the social services they need?"

To right wingers, "immigration" is an aspect of security and rule of law. So when they discuss "immigration" they mean "How can we regain control of who's here, so we can obey the prime directive of any state--to protect its citizens?"

This also means that to left wingers, the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants is meaningless, since it has no bearing on whether someone needs social services or not. But to right wingers it's a crucial distinction, for rule of law/security purposes.

I came to this insight courtesy of Washington Post columnist A.J. Dionne, who got the Pew Research Center to re-analyze a recent national political survey in order to highlight differences between Democrats and Republicans. Later he validated his results against other reputable national policy polls and got similar results.

Some highlights:
.................Democrats Republicans
Iraq is #1 issue ......40%.........29%
--in deciding which presidential candidate to vote for
Healthcare is #1.......13%..........2%
Terrorism/Security......5%.........17%
Education..............12%..........5%
Abortion................1%..........8%
Immigration.............1%.........12%
Immigration or Abortion.2%.........20%
Domestic issues........42%.........20%
(economy, healthcare or education)

That is, overall, for Democrats Iraq is the #1 issue, with the economy #2.
For Republicans Iraq is the #1 issue, with terrorism #2 and the economy #2.

So when Republicans and Democrats try to discuss immigration, each is coming to the table with different assumptions. The Republican talks about controlling the borders, halting illegals' ID theft, catching terrorists entering the country along with the economic migrants. But what the Democrat hears is paranoid crazy talk (apparently 9/11 didn't happen) coupled to a despicable lack of concern for human rights and needs.

Then the Democrats talks about amnesty for illegals, along with giving them free medical and educational services, helping each one bring over his or her entire clan, make sure they can vote in their native language so they don't have to bear the burden of learning English, and that any children born in America continue to receive automatic citizenship. What the Republican hears is crazy talk (apparently all playing fields are already level), coupled to a despicable lack of concern for the most fundamental requirements of a nation: rule of law and the safety of its citizens.

No wonder we can't discuss immigration without it all devolving into a shouting match. Our premises differ, and we have to resolve those premises before we can really discuss immigration with each other.

One last item--many issues have become "Republican" or "Democrat" issues, with people pressured to hew to the party line across the board. This is why so many Americans consider themselves "Independent." Their priorities do not line up with the priorities of either party.