Tags: bitch please the caveman wins handily, bob dole, nader nader nader, politics

(217 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

Tags: politics, weasels

(27 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

A child can win any argument with other children with just two words. It’s such a powerful debate strategy that even tiny younglings pull back instinctively from using it, since they know that it will destroy their opponents so thoroughly that it’s hardly worth fighting any more.

Witness the power in action:

“I went to see an R-rated movie the other night.”

“Nuh uh!”

The brilliance of the “Nuh uh” approach is that it immediately strips all facts from the equation. The “Nuh uh” does not attempt to dismiss the issues one by one – no, the “Nuh uh” is a global strike that calls the speaker a liar and calls everything he says into question.

The details are irrelevant. There’s nothing to debate, because the speaker hasn’t actually told you why you’re wrong. You just are.

There are only two ways of countering the “Nuh uh,” and neither usually works:

• The emphatic “Yuh huh!” Sometimes this works, but it depends entirely on your status in the community (are you someone who has something to be gained by lying?) and how complicated an issue it is (can you be believed?).
• A detailing of the facts (“No! Dude! Ask my mom, if you want!”), which only works if you have slam-dunk physical evidence right at hand. Otherwise, listing the reasons why you’re not a liar makes you sound defensive and whiny.

The brilliance of the Bush administration, of course, is that they have fully harnessed the power of the “Nuh uh.”

You’d think someone would have caught on to the power of the flat-out denial before, of course, but most politicians until now have broken down by at least acknowledging reality. “All right,” they sigh. “Things are looking bad for the economy, but we think we have a plan.”

But the Bush administration? It’s brilliant. No matter what happens, it’s a straight “Nuh uh!” to the heart.

“Mister President, the Iraq situation seems to be devolving into a civil war…”

“Nuh uh!”

“The economy seems to be slowing down by some indicators….”

“Nuh uh!”

“Studies show that terrorism seems to be increasing…”

“Nuh uh!”

It’s impossible to debate with the man, because he steadfastly refuses that there is anything to debate. Things are fine. Our plans are working. We’ve always thought this way. Where’d you hear that study, it’s from people who are clearly biased!

In the Bush world, nothing is wrong. Most arguments involve finding at least some scrap of common ground, a crack in which to thrust a piton so you can haul yourself upwards, but Bush never relinquishes one inch. It doesn’t matter how bad things are, he’ll tell you that the facts don’t actually exist.

Now, keep in mind that this is simply a discussion of Bush’s tactics; I’m not dismissing the whole of conservative thought. I’ve heard some well-thought-out arguments from righties discussing why Iraq isn’t as bad as it seems, and why the economic indicators are better than you think, and how terrorism really is being held in check slowly.

But those arguments do not come from Bush.

The Democrats, those poor intellectual bastards, don’t know how to deal with the “Nuh uh.” They keep throwing up walls of facts, which as I said rarely works because things are complicated and then Republican mouthpieces can muddy the waters by arguing every last detail. And when things are hard to understand, people tend to go with the person who sounds the most confident.

The other approach doesn’t work either, because the Democrats don’t have a unified plan on what to do in Iraq yet. You need a big reputation to unleash the “Yuh huh!” and make it stick, and thus far nobody’s got that kind of emotional currency.

I myself am not sure how to beat the Bush “Nuh uh” strategy. It’s a powerful one, because it allows you to shape reality to your will. People are pretty sure that Bush has some stuff wrong, but by not allowing any room for debate he’s not giving the Democrats space to air alternatives.

Sadly, I’m pretty sure the “Nuh uh” method, compared with rampant gerrymandering and the fact that anger at Bush does not translate into anger at the home-town hero, will be why the Republicans will barely retain power in the next election (barring the unearthing of a smoking gun linking the Republican Powers What Be to an active quashing of the homosexual child seduction going on, of course).

But however they do it, Democrats have to develop a “Yuh huh” for 2008. And fast.

Tags: bush, politics

(94 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

Tags: americana, life in these united states, politics, popular culture, responsibility

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Tags: accountability, advice, astronaut wins with ease you fools, bitch please the caveman wins handily, ferrett is great he gives us chocolate c, politics, popular culture

(176 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

Today, George Will – a long-time conservative columnist – points to a survey that shows that on the whole, conservatives are happier. In a survey, 47% of conservatives described themselves as “very happy,” whereas only 28% of liberal Democrats did.

You might think that’s because George Bush is in office, which naturally makes all Democrats miserable… But that gap has been fairly steady since the Pew Research Center started polling people in 1972.

George Will thinks that the happiness gap is due, paradoxically, to the fact that conservatives (at least as he describes them) are more pessimistic and thus expect things to go wrong, as opposed to starry-eyed liberals who believe that cupcakes will rain from the sky and get all pouty when they don’t. Calamityjake (who pointed me at this article) thinks that the cause and effect may be reversed; if you’re happy, chances are good that you’re pretty okay with things as they are now, which makes you more resistant to change. And who knows? The real answer may be as simple as “their methodology is flawed.”

I think it comes down to a core distinction between conservatives and liberals, m’self.

See, when you talk to an extreme conservative, they talk about the issues as if everyone were solely responsible for themselves. If you were a black crack baby who was abandoned in the back of a ghetto dumpster and raised by mutant cannibals, you could still grow up to be a multimillionaire and President of the United States. There are no excuses for your circumstances; all you need to get yourself out of any fix is a bit of effort and cleverness.

This is why conservatives tend to be so harsh on crime; after all, if you’re in the extreme conservative mindset, you could have founded your own business and made a thousand bucks, but instead you chose to steal a TV. No excuse for that. And when you’re paying taxes, you’re taking money from people who worked to earn it and wasting it on people who are purposefully wallowing in their own filth.

Whereas when you talk to an extreme liberal, they discuss the issues as if circumstances are the only thing that affect your success. If you don’t have a good school system and decent health care, you’re doomed. If you took the smartest, most hard-working man in the world, then dyed his skin black and dumped him in the ghetto, within minutes he would be a dope-smoking gangster. You’re only rich because you leveraged your advantages.

Hence, extreme liberals are easy on crime, because deep down they believe that the grace of a God-who-may-or-may-not-exist is the only reason they are not pimping hookers on the street. And when you’re paying taxes, all you’re doing is taking money from people who didn’t really do all that much to earn it, and redistributing it to people who will be utter trash unless you funnel money to them now.

Now, obviously neither mindset is true – there’s a balance. Yes, there is only so much you can do when you’re a minority kid in a lousy neighborhood, but you do have a good opportunity to move up in life if you’re willing to work smart and hard. (To a large extent, I view the government’s job to keep that up-and-down flow as clear as possible – if you’re a billionaire who slacks off, you should be able to go broke just as quickly as a smart kid who starts a good business gets rich.) And obviously, not all liberal or conservative thinking moves along these lines.

But on the whole, the liberal message is frequently one of powerlessness – as in, “Unless you have a good system to support you, you’re doomed!” Whereas the conservative core message is, “If you’re down on your luck, it’s your own fault” – which sounds awful, until you realize that you can change your circumstances at any time. Which is why the conservative message frequently wins even though the politicians are doing precisely the opposite of the conservative mindset (making it harder for the little guy to get ahead) it just resounds a little more.

Shoot, if I was an extreme liberal and my life wasn’t going so well, I’d be saying, “God damn, the world is fucked up and no one can help me. Life sucks.” Whereas if I was an extreme conservative, I’d be saying, “God damn, what am I doing wrong? I can fix this – I just have to figure out how.”

Which is why I do think that conservatives are probably happier on the whole, regardless of the accuracy of the poll. They may be completely deluded about their chances, but they’ve got that feeling that things are gonna get better once they work it all out.

Tags: 100+ comments, politics

(168 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

The news tells me that the President has been breaking the law by spying on Americans without a warrant….

…Or maybe he hasn’t.

In TV show, the laws are clear – the only problem is getting enough evidence to convict the guilty bastard. Unfortunately, this is real life, where the law is often a fuzzy line; even people who work with the law for a living get confused about what’s legal and what’s not. This is why lawyers get paid a lot of money to argue about where that line actually is.

Thus, I’m not really sure what Bush has or hasn’t done. The Republicans say he’s within his legal rights, the Democrats say he isn’t, and not being familiar with the law enough to look at it myself, I don’t really know what happened. I’m sure it’ll get argued in court eventually, and we’ll know better then.

What worries me is how people are reacting to the idea that the President may have broken the law.

A lot of people have been saying, “Who cares Bush broke the law? He’s doing it for our safety! What’s important is that he’s protecting America!” And to a certain extent, I agree with them; the priority should be protecting America.

The problem is, The President’s not just some schmuck on the street. He’s The Frickin’ President. He is one of the primary people who’s involved in making the laws.

If the laws are so poorly-made and restrictive that the President is unable to keep America safe with them, then he needs to change the laws. Period. If the guidelines that Bush has to work with suck so badly that the President has to break them in order to stop the next terrorist attack, I don’t want those same malformed laws in place when the next President comes along. What happens if Bush’s successor takes those laws seriously, and we wind up with a nuclear explosion on American soil because he’s hamstrung by arbitrary clauses in some antiquated piece of legislature?

Breaking the law is a one-shot fix, good for one President. If you’re the man who’s in charge of shaping the country’s destiny – and you are – then your goal should be to make it easier for every President to do his job. If the framework you’re working under isn’t enough to be effective, then change the framework.

It shouldn’t be too difficult, if your need is pressing. If you go before the American people – or heck, even a private session of the bigwigs in Congress – and say, “Here are four times when we couldn’t get information on known terrorist communications, and that left us wide open for attack in these areas here.” Make your case. If the evidence is serious enough, this is national security at stake – you can get it past!

Hell, right now based on past Presidential requests, from what I understand you can wiretap essentially at will, requesting a warrant after the fact from an agency that has only turned down four requests in its history. And President Bush is in charge of a Republican-dominated legislature. If he’s got a legitimate concern, it should be trivial to get it changed for all Presidents here and down the line.

Ordinary men can say, “Wow, that law sucks, I’ll break it.” But the people who make the laws are charged with the responsibility of saying, “Wow, that law sucks – it shouldn’t be there. Let’s expunge it from the books.” That’s why we elected them. Part of the process is presenting your case, and letting the people – in the form of the government – deciding whether it’s right or not.

And if you can’t get the change through – which does happen – then learning to work within the framework of the law is part of being an American. You don’t get everything you want. Hell, it’d be a lot easier for me to steal X-Box 360s from a truck or to cheat on my taxes, but part of living within the law is that you have to accept compromises. Nobody gets everything – I certainly didn’t get who I voted for in 2004, but you don’t see me refusing to acknowledge the laws that Bush enacted.

As the most visible American, the President should always work within the limits of the law, and never break them. And if it turns out that the President, any President, has been breaking the law in the name of convenience – and I’m not saying this particular President has – well, there’s a name for people who do things like that:

Criminals.

Tags: paradigm time, politics

(160 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

1)  George Bush suggesting someone for the Supreme Court who hasn't been a judge before?  Nothing that unusual, historically speaking.  There's no requirement for it, and it's not like the woman's ignorant of the law.  She's qualified for the position - even if that's more a statement about the loose qualifications needed to be a Supreme Court Judge than it is about Harriet Myers' resume.

2)  Eric "Dinosaur" Taylor has written a very good essay on Bush's management style, talking about how "Journeys With George" shows Bush's devotion and real love for his subordinates (though you'll have to scroll down a bit to get to it).  It's not, as you would expect, an indictment of the Bush administration but rather an analysis of the man and how he operates on feeling, and it's pretty thought-provoking. 

3)  Also, for all the cries of "Bush's approval numbers are sinking!  He's going down!" you would do well to read this brief article at Salon.com, which says in part:

At today's White House press briefing, a reporter was starting to say something about how these are "obviously difficult days for Republicans" when Scott McClellan jumped in and cut him off. "Not for Judge Roberts," he said.

McClellan had a point, of course, and it's larger than John Roberts. These may be dark days for the long list of Republicans under investigation or indictment, and the GOP may have good reason to worry about elections in 2006 and 2008. But look what's happened as partisans on the left have celebrated the travails of Tom DeLay and Karl Rove and Jack Abramoff and Michael Brown and all the rest. George W. Bush got his energy bill. Bush got his bankruptcy bill. Bush got his class-action reform bill. Bush got not just John Roberts but Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown and William Pryor confirmed to the federal bench....

Tags: 42+ comments, politics

(88 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

"We dare not allow politicians to establish the principle that senior civil servants can be removed for incompetence. We could lose dozens of our chaps." - Sir Humphrey

Here's the funny thing about "the blame game," which everyone is currently involved in. We know that something went wrong in handling Katrina, since the rescue squads were slow to arrive, the survivors were shoved into a hole that got increasingly worse, and more people died than probably should have.

Now, the first thing that happens when there is a tragedy like this is that people get mad. They start pointing fingers, and the first response of those who are blamed is to say, "Don't exploit this tragedy."

This is, of course, bullshit.

If you don't exploit the tragedy now, while it's fresh on everyone's mind, it will never be fixed. I mean, no offense, but people had been saying, "Crap, the levees are going to break some day" for years and nobody did anything because it hadn't broken yet. It was not newsworthy.

See, people can be deeply concerned about things and not do a damn thing about them. Ask any pollster, and he'll tell you that people inevitably say they're "concerned" about the environment. They don't like the idea of polluted air and decimated species, and so forth. But ask them what they're willing to do for the environment, and the answers are pretty damn shallow. Are you willing to drive less? Well, no. Are you willing to accept higher taxes? Well, no. Are you willing to spend more money to buy from environmentally-friendly companies? Well, no.

What are you willing to do?

"I'm willing to be concerned."

As a rule, humans will hem and mutter, "Yes, that is important" - but in practical terms, when it comes to fixing things Americans do precisely fuck-all until it breaks. Then we panic and fix it. If you don't exploit the panic, the problem doesn't get fixed.

Sad? Sure. True? Absolutely.

Thus, "Don't exploit this tragedy" is politician's code for "Don't make a big fuss about it now, and in six months you'll have forgotten about it." In a year, the whole "Emergency planning" issue will have subsided, and we'll all go back to being deeply concerned about it but not really doing much. Then, the next time an emergency strikes, we'll be just as fucked.

Thus, you want to complain now. It's not like you want to exploit a tragedy, but the ugly truth is that nothing gets people moving like a full-fledged fiasco filled to brimming with bodies.

Next comes the inevitable accusations of "The Blame Game." "Now, we don't want to blame people for things," the politicians will say, implying heavily that the attacks are partisan and biased.

Which is, to a certain extent, true. This is politics. Everything is partisan and biased. But the excellent Britcom show "Yes, Minister" referred to "irregular verbs" - verbs that are used differently, depending on who you're referring to. For example, I have an independent mind. You are an eccentric. He is round the twist.

The difference between "blame" and "accountability" depends strongly on who's spinning what politics. If it makes you look bad, it's blame. If it makes the other side look bad, it's accountability.

But without accountablamity, what happens is that we clean up the mess from the current problem, and then everyone decides that since nobody's to blame that things probably should be changed - but not anything specifically. And then nothing gets changed in any way that would make anyone to blame, which means that nothing gets done. You won't have fixed the core problems, nor will you have done one thing to ensure that this doesn't happen again.

You really want blame. You want people angry, and trying to figure out what went wrong. Sure, some of it's going to be partisan, but the end result will be that sweeping changes will get made, some of which will theoretically help. Saying "Don't play the blame game" is a nice way of saying, "There was nothing anyone could have done, and we in particular are not responsible."

There's a metric fuckton of things that went wrong in New Orleans, on both sides. The local Democratic leaders planned poorly, FEMA fucked it up seven ways to Sunday, the engineers who built the levees built them with a 200-year tolerance (which is basically saying, "The city'll get destroyed every two centuries? Okay!"), and President "I-don't-give-a-shit-about-red-tape-when-it-comes-to-Iraq" Bush suddenly decided to wring his hands about who had what authority instead of making decisions first and damning the consequences, as he's done elsewhere for much more debatable causes.

You want a lot of anger, and investigation as to how this got fucked, because it might be you the next time. Maybe Al-Qaeda drops a nuclear bomb in your state, and sluggishness and incompetence get you killed after you've survived the bomb itself. Or maybe it's just some other natural disaster, and gee, who could have done this better?

Your government deserves to be blamed, because the core principle of the government is to protect its people, and not just "The rich people who can take care of themselves." A lot of those 200,000 didn't have cars or transportation out of the city, and nobody was providing them with other options. It's not like they deserved to die for being poor. If we're not paying taxes to ensure that our citizens fucking survive, then what are we paying taxes for? Studies in owl preservation?

Yes, it was a complex operation with practically no lead time, and things were destined to go wrong - an operation of this scale is going to be riddled with horrific botches no matter what - but just because it's difficult is no reason to grade ourselves with an "A for effort" and say, well, we did the best we could, and that's good enough. It's not. We need to be analyzing what went badly, so we can be ready the next time we have to evacuate a major city in case of a disaster. It's not gonna happen often, but when it does we should know what the hell we're doing.

We could have done a lot better, and that's because there were failures on every level of government and yes, in the media. Now let's figure out what we should have done to make sure this doesn't happen again - and do it now, before we forget.

Spread the love. Spread the blame.

Tags: accountability, criticism, katrina, politics

(209 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

throwingstardna

Tags: politics

(82 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

"The Democrats have become a party of obstructionists," their detractors say. "All they do is block the Republicans, without providing solutions of their own."

I hate to say it, but I'm a Democrat and I agree with 'em.

The Democrats have become paralyzed, after having watched their solutions get torn to shreds, so they're making the mistake of playing the holding game; don't do anything, and watch Bush trip over his own feet. They're even emboldened by how this apparently worked with the Terry Schiavo case, which backfired nastily for the Republicans. The problem is, of course, is that Bush can't keep tripping up forever, and when he finally starts getting things right then you're absolutely nowhere.

"The Democrats have ideas!" I hear. "They're a valid party!"

Well, not really. If the Democrats were a real party, they'd be coming up with an alternative to Bush's privatized Social Security plans… but they're not. In fact, Robert Wexler, the one guy who did come up with an alternate Social Security plan got roundly criticized by the Democrats for daring to break party ranks.* Many Democratic advisors are saying, "Don't show Bush any details, or he'll criticize it!"

Their terror is understandable, because the Republican PR machine is terrifyingly effective. They've been phenomenally successful at making Democrats look like fools. But the solution is not to sit back and do nothing, because then you look as out of touch as Bush. People around America know that Social Security's fucked; they want to hear a way to fix it. For the first time in a long time, someone is saying "This needs to be handled" and making a troublesome issue front-page news. Your focus should be on coming up with a workable party line that attacks Bush's plan and presents a salable alternative, not standing in the rafters and booing.

I myself was flabbergasted when the Terry Schiavo thing hit, and no new legislation hit Congress. The minute it became apparent that Terry was going to be a huge issue, I kept expecting the Democrats to hit the Congressional floor and say something like this:

"Our esteemed opposition believes Terry Schiavo should be kept alive at all costs. If they agree with that, then surely they must understand that insurance companies routinely disconnect coma victims whose policies have run out of money. Babies have died. In order to ensure that all people are protected, as the Republicans say they are concerned with, we are introducing The Terry Schiavo bill, mandating that insurance companies must provide coverage for the helpless people in comatose states for as long as the family desires it."

Overblown? Of course. Accurate? Well, at least as accurate as Bill Frist's diagnosis. But alas, the idea of actually using Terry Schiavo to ju-jitsu the Republicans under their own morality never seems to have occurred to them. Which is a shame.

I know what Bush is trying to do. I can't say the same for the Democrats. Part of that is the way that Bush gets better PR because he's the President — that's always been the case — but part of that is because the Democrats are playing defense. "Winning the argument" doesn't consist of shooting the other guy down; it consists of proving you're right. That's much tougher, but that's where the real wins lie.

* - Admittedly, it wasn't the greatest solution ever. But it was, at least, an attempt.

Tags: lj tags = pure evil, politics

(233 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)