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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Arthur Radley who wrote (70567)	3/27/2009 12:48:10 PM
From: J.B.C.	2 Recommendations Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 90947

I've never believed any of your data, after I've seen some of your creative math experiments. AND especially when you provide no data links Just picked 2 data points: Carter unemployment rate when he took office, unemployment rate = 7.5%, when he left office unemployment rate 7.5%. When was the workforce population higher? January 1977, or January 1981, my intelligent guess would be the latter, so in fact actual unemployement figures went up under Carter. Under Reagan, when he took office, unemployment rate = 7.5%, when he left the rate was 5.4%. Both points are contrary to your supposed facts. So none of your "facts" should be taken seriously. miseryindex.us Are you an *sshole in real life, or do you just play one virtually?

To: Arthur Radley who wrote (70567)	3/27/2009 12:57:39 PM
From: J.B.C.	2 Recommendations Respond to of 90947

PS: What brand of kool-aid do you drink?, and do you use your tin-foil cap as a drinking goblet?

To: Arthur Radley who wrote (70567)	3/27/2009 5:42:19 PM
From: Sully-	2 Recommendations Respond to of 90947

Paranoid Style for Thee But Not For Me Jonah Goldberg The Corner Over at The New Yorker, George Packer, echoing many, rehashes the usual talking points about how conservatives are particularly prone to paranoia and populist hysteria. He trots out Richard Hofstadter and Hofstadter's cribbing of the incredibly flawed work by Adorno. I respect Packer, but I find this all so deeply tiresome. Look, I think there are examples of conservative or right-wing rhetoric getting out of hand vis a vis Obama. I listened to a video clip of Alan Keyes talking about Obama the other day and he might as well have been talking about Pol Pot. But I think most of the rhetoric has been perfectly legitimate given the times we're in and what Obama is trying to do. In particular, as I noted the other day, I love how liberals — who have been pushing to Europeanize American social policy for generations — are suddenly aghast and contemptuous when conservatives complain that liberals want to Europeanize American social policy, just as the liberal effort starts to succeed. But I just have a hard time listening to liberals grow suddenly high-brow and Ivy League serious about the paranoid style of the American Right. Where were these people for the last eight years when abject paranoid hysteria consumed the left flank of liberalism and threatened to capsize the entire enterprise? There are certainly elements on the Right that are prone to such things, but there are also elements on the Left that are just as prone to it. I will stack Naomi Wolfe up against any John Bircher. Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, the folks at ANSWER, Ward Churchill, are no less conspiratorial than your typical right-wing conspiracy theorist and some of them are not only worse, but far more accepted by the liberal establishment than their opposite numbers are by the conservative establishment. Why do the Tim McVeigh types count against the Right, but the Black Panthers never against the Left? Why aren't liberals troubled by Rosie "Steel Never Melted Before Before Bush" O'Donnell but wigged out by Michael Savage? When Spike Lee floated the idea that the Bush administration blew up the levees to flood New Orleans, where was Packer & Co's hand-wringing then? When Randall Robinson proclaimed at the Huffington Post that blacks — and only blacks — were being forced to eat the flesh of the dead in the wake of Katrina, why did no one dust off their Hofstadter? Where was The New Yorker when a Greek Chorus of dunderheads claimed that a cabal of perfidious bagel-snarfing neocons were, like the Elders of Zion of yore, scheming to undo all that is good in the world? Where were they when Hollywood buffoons were producing Broadway plays depicting the very same neocons shouting "Hail Leo Strauss!" The real problem is that the liberal establishment, starting with Hofstadter and Adorno, have perfected the art of proclaiming paranoia or populism they don't like as "right-wing" when — often, but not always — there's nothing right-wing about it. Adorno was particularly reprehensible on this score. And when, for whatever reason, they can't excommunicate left-wing populists and conspiracy nuts, they usually — though, again, not always — defend it as valuable speech in the hurlyburly of American democracy or make apologies for the "legitimate anger" that drives folks like Wolfe and Spike Lee to say demonstrably idiotic and crazy things. So again, by all means, dust off your dog-eared copies of the Paranoid Style. But spare me the lectures if you can only find things to worry about to your right. corner.nationalreview.com

To: Arthur Radley who wrote (70567)	3/27/2009 5:48:16 PM
From: Sully-	2 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 90947

Re: Paranoia for Thee But Not For Me Jonah Goldberg The Corner Man, a lot of liberal readers didn't like my earlier post about liberalism and the paranoid style. Most aren't being jerks about it, but they simply have a really hard time coming to grips with the fact that the paranoid style isn't necessarily a right-wing phenomenon. Among the complaints: They nitpick my examples, as if I was trying to be exhaustive. They say Republicans have conspiracy theorists as public officials while my examples of liberals are simply activists and celebrities. They say that conservative conspiracy-nuts are embraced by Republican officials, but no Democrat embraces paranoid style types of the Left. It's all a bit exhausting. But here's the problem. I conceded up front that conservatives can be conspiracy theorists and paranoid. So about 85% of this tu quoque stuff is gratuitous. The point wasn't that the Right is immune to this stuff, it was that liberals are blind from similar — and often more prevalent — stuff on their own side. So they end up, like Packer, thumbsucking about the supposedly scary paranoia of the Right while ignoring the paranoia of their own side. But if it's examples you people want, I was barely scratching the surface. Cynthia McKinney? Does no one remember her? It's worth noting that she recently said — as a matter of fact — that the National Guard rounded up blacks in New Orleans and massacred them in the woods. In fairness, she's not in office anymore, but she wasn't much less of a whackjob when she was in Congress. Meanwhile, Maxine Waters is still in Congress and she's hardly immune to the paranoid style. If my interlocutors do not want to stipulate this point, I could have a grand time entering exhibits AAA through ZZZ to butress the assertion. Michael Moore? He thought OJ was innocent and that George Bush was keeping Osama Bin Laden on ice for an October surprise or something. He sat in Jimmy Carter's box at the 2004 Democratic Convention and was wildly embraced by the Democratic leadership when his Fahrenheit 9/11 movie came out. Jim Moran? I suppose his blame-the-Jews stuff would have been just as quickly forgiven from a Republican. Don't even get me started on Walt and Meersheimer. Charles Rangel and Major Owens routinely said Newt Gingrich was "worse than Hitler" (Owens's words) and that the Contract with America was part of a "genocidal" campaign. Meanwhile, a huge swath of economic liberalism for decades has been dedicated to the idea that a coalition of cartoonish big businessmen — Mr. Monopoly, Mr. Peanut, Thurston Howell III, Col. Sanders and the rest of the Pentavirate, Joe the Camel — conspire to ruin the environment, poison food, and exploit the downtrodden. Then there's the whole phrase "the vast right-wing conspiracy" which was not coined with a sense of playful irony. Al Gore's "people vs. the powerful" spiel crossed the line more than once into populist nonsense, if you ask me. And are people really going to make me look up every nutcase theory about Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Haliburton, and the rest? I mean do I really have to keep going? Because I can. I mean we can rev-up the Way Back machine and start talking about what the Kennedy Assassination did to liberalism, for starters. The point is that when liberals and leftists spout conspiracy theories and paranoid delusions — as they have for generations now — it's written off by the liberal establishment as either an isolated incident, or an understandable exaggeration or, simply, the truth and therefore not a conspiracy theory. And: It Is Annoying. corner.nationalreview.com