Joe the Plumber will make an appearance in New Jersey to endorse Steve Lonegan for governor.
What I find amazing about this is that John McCain’s campaign mascot — a man discredited with the vast majority of sentient beings — remains a part of conservative discourse, that Joe the Plumber is viewed by people like Lonegan as someone who can sway voters.
And what is funny is that Lonegan, in an e-mail to members of “Team Lonegan” that somehow found its way to my inbox (I’m on his mailing list for some reason), refers to Joe as “America’s Taxpayer Hero.” Hero? Only if taking full advantage of your brush with fame qualifies one to be a hero.
This is a good and important post — and one that should remind us that the eight-year Clinton administration has a lot to answer for in terms of our current national plight.
Long story short: The Student Loan Marketing Association (Sallie Mae) was established as a government-sponsored enterprise in 1972, and was privatized as part the bipartisan neoliberalism of Clinton’s second term, starting in 1997, and concluding with full privatization in 2004, and whopping bonuses all around. It’s a perfect example of how a program conceived within the liberal welfare state model was repurposed to serve conservative welfare state ends.
But it wasn’t just he loans. You need to go back to the early days of the Reagan administration to understand the full breadth of the conservative antipathy toward broad access to college. It was under Reagan that federal aid for students was first slashed, forcing more students to seek loans.
There was an interesting — if misguided — comment on this week’s Dispatches that I want to comment on. Here is the comment:
Those of us who were skeptical of Obama before he became president knew that he was an empty suit just wanting to get elected first and then promote socialist policies once he got there. His supporters of course were blinded by the Hope and Change mantra.
The only things that were somewhat documented about Obama before the election were his socialist beginnings through his parents, friends, and mentors like Saul Alynski etc. This part of him is coming out clearly in his policies trying to ram down all these social programs, bigger government, nationalization of this and that. Many of us suspected this but what we got was actually worse. The stock market and business is dropping like a rock and he couldn’t care less as long as he gets his agenda rammed down out throats. Wealth transfer and bash the rich.
Personally I don’t think he could care less about the war. To win the election he jumped on the left wing moveon.org bandwagon to bash the war and gain support. So now you are upset not getting what you wanted. But ask yourself, what did you expect? You had no history, just one vote in the Illinois senate against the war that had meaningless consequences. Most other votes were “Present”. What was the basis for your believing what he stood for, he had no record, except for rhetoric. People do not become chief executives of major companies without an extensive resume with years of prior work experience. What did Obama present to you for review? College records are not available, professor of little consequence, community organizer, Illinois Senator who voted “Present”!
Obama wants to be remembered for his Change to Socialism in the country and not the potential bloodshed in Iraq if he pulled all the troops out. This is a price you are paying for history, his history to be sure.
Of course I am upset at what this joker is doing to the economy and the country. At times I would just love to raise a middle finger or honk my horn in disgust to a driver sporting an Obama sticker. But, Frankly My Dear, people seem to be removing these stickers faster than they were put on before the election.
That is called Buyers Remorse!
Reading this, it is difficult to know where to start. But the key to understanding what we have here is that this commenter was never just skeptical of Barack Obama. He was downride hostile to him, which is fine, but he should say that.
More importantly — and this is something that exists in the mindset of too many on the right (and the fringes of the left) — is the idea that to criticize is to oppose, that for me or anyone else to question an Obama policy is to have buyer’s remorse. (There also is the great self-deception at base here that assumes that the echo chamber in which this person lives — the anti-Obama fringe, that 30 percent who think he’s doing a poor job, is actually the majority.)
It is the same way of thinking that underpinned the Bush/Cheney manner of framing of dissent as unpatriotic.
I think the president has done a pretty good job so far; at the same time, I think he could have been more aggressive at the beginning of the stimulus debate and should be more aggressive in getting us out of Iraq and winding down the brewing disaster that Afghanistan has become.
In 2007, Fox News launched what the station said would be the conservative answer to The Daily Show. The 1/2 Hour News Hour debuted in Ffebruary and was canceled by August, a victim of its own lack of wit and overheated commitment to ideology.
The critics noticed. Hal Boedeker, who writes the TV Guy column in The Orlando Sentinel, summed up the show’s failures rather succinctly:
Jon Stewart knows how to do slashing comical commentary. He weighs in on what’s happening, such as the media’s bizarre coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death.
David Letterman knows how to do slashing comical commentary. He takes President Bush’s awkward speeches and contrasts them with the lasting words of John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt.
Fox News Channel does not know how to do slashing comical commentary. The channel debuts “The 1/2 Hour News Hour” at 10 p.m. Sunday and repeats it at 10 p.m. Feb. 25. This show was meant to be a conservative version of “The Daily Show.” It is a botch.
“The 1/2 Hour News Hour” does not comment on what is happening; it simply takes swipes at people. These people include Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama and Ed Begley Jr. Other joke topics are the ACLU, Time magazine, children’s books and global warming.
Laughter, of an awfully canned variety, greets all the gags. Nothing happening on screen justifies these outbursts.
Hey, I’m all for a good dig at the high and the mighty. But these satirists fall short of hitting their targets with wit, timeliness or punch.
So, why am I writing about a show that disappeared into rightful obscurity 18 months ago? For an answer, I’ll quote a press release I received earlier today from Richard Viguerie, a pioneer of the conservative movement:
ConservativeHQ.com is launching a new daily comic strip that is the conservatives’ answer to political comics like “Doonesbury” and the strip-turned-animated-cartoon “The Boondocks.”
“Liberal comedians and cartoonists have expressed great anguish at the rise of Barack Obama to the presidency, because having a perfect president makes it impossible to make fun of Washington,” says Richard Viguerie, chairman of ConservativeHQ.com. “‘The Gentleman from Lickskillet’ is conservatives’ response.”
“The strip is for people who can’t help but laugh at the politicians in Washington,” says Viguerie.
“The Gentleman from Lickskillet” is the first conservative comic strip to interweave humor and satire with continuing storylines and a large cast of characters. The strip runs daily, Monday through Saturday. A Sunday version is set to launch next month.
The strip stars Randall Dill, a member of Congress; his family, including his wife (an assistant district attorney) and their young daughter; his congressional staff; his friends and constituents back home; and the politicians, bureaucrats, and politically correct people that they encounter in the course of their adventures.
The strip, which appears at ConservativeHQ.com, began unofficially three weeks ago with a sequence satirizing the inauguration of the new President. The current week, with a link to the complete archive, can be found at http://conservativehq.com/lickskillet/.
Seems fair. Except that the strip — like the 1/2 Hour News Hour — just isn’t funny.
Here is a sample from the conservativehq Web site, though I’d suggest giving the entire run a quick read to get the full flavor of Lickskillet and its awful aftertaste: Given the evidence — and Dennis Miller’s steep descent into utterly humorless irrelevence — one has to wonder if conservatives lack the humor gene.
Should John McCain lose — as it appears he will — it will be for a long list of reasons. But one of the biggest is the implosion of the right-wing coalition that allowed economic conservatives, social conservatives, neo-cons and the intelligensia to co-exist. This is the point that E.J. Dionne Jr. makes in today’s column.
McCain’s campaign is both the logical conclusion to this implosion and the conservative movement’s final death knell, uncovering an emptiness at its core created by an unbridgable gulf between its two major camps.
For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against “liberal elitists” and “leftist intellectuals.” Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.
The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity — and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.
In the end, Dionne writes,
There is no unified “right” or “center-right,” which is why we are no longer a conservative country, if we ever were.
Conservatism has finally crashed on problems for which its doctrines offered no solutions (the economic crisis foremost among them, thus Bush’s apostasy) and on its refusal to acknowledge that the “real America” is more diverse, pragmatic and culturally moderate than the place described in Palin’s speeches or imagined by the right-wing talk show hosts.
Hank Kalet 