Conservatives – Hank Kalet

We love smaller government — except when we don’t

ABC this morning discussed a poll that shows some difficulties facing Democrats as they head into the November elections. The numbers show a real anger at incumbents, meaning we could see some seats flip, though it still appears unlikely that either house will flip parties.

Something else caught my eye, however. It was this bit of information:

In another vulnerability for the president, Americans by 56-40 percent said they preferred smaller government with fewer services — almost exactly the average the past 26 years — but by a vast 77-15 percent thought Obama prefers the opposite, larger government with more services. That, plus concerns about the deficit, seem ripe for a 2010 campaign theme for the Republican Party.

People say they want/prefer smaller government. As ABC points out, the numbers have remained pretty consistent since the Reagan administration.

This is not news, nor is it particularly enlightening. Americans are inundated with anti-government rhetoric, and not just from Fox News. They get it from the mainstream stations, as well, it seems anticlimactic that Americans would say they dislike government. As always, the definition of small government is left unstated, as is the impact that shrinking government and cutting services would have on the lives they live.

People want smaller government, but what they really mean is they want it for others and not necessarily for themselves.

Middle class taxpayers want welfare curtailed but yell when their mortgage deductions are cut.

We hate regulations, but when the government fails to ensure that hte hamburger bought at the local store is tainted with e coli, we should loudly and demand action.

We want good schools, well-stocked libraries, police departments with enough manpower to keep us safe. We want roads without potholes, bridges that do not collapse, working traffic lights. We want a safety net when we fall on tough times (though we prefer that it not stretch too far or cover too many people we don’t like).

The Tea Party right now lives the contradiction. This motley collection of angry white folks has been protesting the alleged growth of government under the Obama administration, calling the president a socialist, a communist, a fascist, Stalin, Hitler (as if these terms were interchangeable). But think about what they also say: “Keep government out of my Medicare.”

Just as interestingly, we have the Arizona immigration law, which has support from the Tea Partiers (or most of them), even though it expands police power in the state — and they support harsh restrictions on the border, another expansion of police power.

But that expansion is OK, because the people at the target end of the expansion, are the dark ones, the ones who do not speak English.

As I said, Americans want smaller government — but only on our terms.

Send me an e-mail.

Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Skewing the debate with disingenuous rhetoric

I teach a developmental level English class at Middlesex County College twice a week and I’ve spent the last couple of classes talking about logical fallacies.

The issue is that the students tend to fall into these errant patterns as they make their arguments in their writing — writing around the debate or mistakenly allowing a single person to stand in for a group.

One of the errors we’ve talked about is called the straw-man fallacy — or one in which a proposition is criticized by distorting the original proposition so that it seems outrageous, weak or dangerous and then knocking down the distortion.

An example — which I included on a quiz today — is this (phrased a bit differently):

Actual argument: We should legalize marijuana for medical purposes.

Distorted argument: Allowing unrestricted access to drugs will lead to crime and drug dependency. Therefore, legalizing medical marijuana is wrong.

The problem here is simple. The argument being disputed is not the argument being offere; it is proposing a far more extensive legalization than the original proposition offers. However, the critic uses the more extreme distortion to win debate points.

I have The Dylan Ratigan Show on in the background as I’m working this afternoon, and he had as guests Jonathan Capehart of The Washingon Post and Mark Tapscott of The Washington Examiner. Capehart echoed something that both former President Bill Clinton and Post columnist E.J. Dionne have said — that the ratcheting up of harsh rhetoric and the use of violent metaphors will create a climate for actual violence.

Tapscott responded with the classic straw-man, accusing Capehart — and Dionne and Clinton and liberals in general — of calling for government to step in to ban speech, asking who would be making the decision on what speech should be permitted.

While I think we have to be careful when we confuse speech with action — we fight the toxic rhetoric of lock-and-load Sarah Palin and the Tea Party crowd with better, more effective speech — it is pretty clear when you listen to Capehart or Clinton or read Dionne that they are not talking about restrictions. They are talking about pushing back against the ugliness and finding ways to tone down the rhetoric, to cool it so that a rational, if not polite political debate can move forward.

Tapscott, however, would have none of that. He’s erected his straw man and felt perfectly comfortable (with what I would characterize as a smug half smile on his face — am I engaging in an ad hominem attack?) in distorting what Capehart had to say so that he could look like the defender of the First Amendment. (The actual video is not yet available; I’ll post as soon as it is.) And Ratigan called it a good back and forth, even though it was anything but.

How can I teach students — and new journalists, for that matter — that they should avoid these logical fallacies if the people running the nation’s editorial pages (Tapscott is the Examiner’s editorial page editor) view them as perfectly legitimate debate tools?

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Off their wing

This can’t be serious, right? It can’t. But it is. Just another example of how the rightwing fringe has fallen off the edge of the wingnut cliff.

Conason offers voice of sanity on ACORN

You have to hand to the right wing. It certainly gets worked up over the most bizarre things.

Take its fascination with ACORN, with an organization of volunteers that works in the nation’s poorest neighborhoods teaching its residents to help themselves and stand up for themselves. It certainly borders on the psychotic.

Does ACORN have problems? Yes. But as Joe Conason writes on Salon,

To claim that the stupid behavior of a half-dozen employees should discredit a national group with offices in more than 75 cities staffed by many thousands of employees and volunteers is like saying that Mark Sanford or John Ensign have discredited every Republican governor or senator.

The uproar over the hidden-camera fiasco — like the wing-nuttery of death panels and the tea-baggers — does nothing more than divert our attention from what really matters. After all, if we’re talking about ACORN, we’re not talking about the nearly 50 million Americans without health coverage, the spiking unemployment rate, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, torture and all of the other things about which we should be talking.

Wrong thinking on the right

You knew this was going to happen — the right-wing can’t abide a Democratic success, especially when Bill Clinton is involved. When all is said and done, Rush Limbaugh, John Bolton and the rest are more concerned about their own political advantage than they ever were about the two American journalists who were facing long sentences in North Korea. They should be ashamed.