Impeachment Now: Obama Deserves It

And it's the only way Democrats can take back Congress in November.

Steve M:

The benghazi inquisition might be a bigger deal than a lot of non-Fox viewers think because it's starting to get buy-in from the so-called liberal media. Yes, non-Republican journalists still think there's no crime involved and therefore no cover-up that should be actionable ... but, really, the White House committed a political error, didn't he? So, really, he had it coming, right? Therefore, if the GOP is going to paralyze the country with a phony constitutional crisis for the rest of this year --or the next two and a half years, or onward into infinity if Hillary Clinton is elected president but Congress is still Republican-controlled -- then it's as much Obama's fault as the Republicans', isn't it? Wasn't Obama asking for it?

SNIP

Yes, but this line of thought easily morphs into the sort of "just world" thinking that partly absolves Republicans of responsibility for the fraud they're committing. It's as if these reporters are watching a kid get bullied in the junior high cafeteria and telling themselves that, after all, he does all those weird things, so of course he gets picked on. They lose perspective on what should be the unacceptability of what's being done.

SNIP 

A nasty cafeteria beatdown is now inevitable, and reporters and pundits are making themselves comfortable with the idea that it's going to happen, because acknowledging that sociopaths control half our government is too much to ask of them.

Don't despair; Steve Benen reminds us of how repug bullshit attacks on a Democratic president backfired.

Go on, repugs: impeach the kenyanmuslinterristni**er.  Do it now.

No, Ezra Klein: You Are Not Worthy

Eager Villager Elf Ezra Fucking Klein hosted the Rachel Maddow show Thursday night, which just pissed me off no end.

I've never liked the supercilious little brat, especially since he seems to specialize in pretending just enough journalism to fool real liberals into thinking he's one of us.

HA! As evidenced by the unbelievable patronizing Ezra piece highlighted on Tuesday by Kevin Drum:

Ezra Klein says it's not the protests themselves that have caused him to take Occupy Wall Street seriously. It's a Tumblr called, “We Are The 99 Percent,” full of personal stories of people who have, seemingly, done everything right but are still struggling with debt, unemployment, and a stagnant future:

This is why I’m taking Occupy Wall Street — or, perhaps more specifically, the ‘We Are The 99 Percent’ movement — seriously. There are a lot of people who are getting an unusually raw deal right now. There is a small group of people who are getting an unusually good deal right now. That doesn’t sound to me like a stable equilibrium.

The organizers of Occupy Wall Street are fighting to upend the system. But what gives their movement the potential for power and potency is the masses who just want the system to work the way they were promised it would work. It’s not that 99 percent of Americans are really struggling. It’s not that 99 percent of Americans want a revolution. It’s that 99 percent of Americans sense that the fundamental bargain of our economy — work hard, play by the rules, get ahead — has been broken, and they want to see it restored.

I cannot do that one justice. Fortunately, Wonkette nails the annoying little fucker right to the wall:

Middle-aged yuppie child Ezra Klein is exactly the sort of youth welcomed at the dying Washington Post. Permanently cautious and nervously polite, quick to distance himself from ancient youthful indiscretion of a couple of years ago, inherently middle of the road and steeped in the meaningless bullshit policy/punditry circle jerk of the era, Klein can be counted on to write in that special way nobody really uses to communicate, because it’s writing that is only written to please his elders at think tanks and in the Kaplan/WaPo board room. “Look at the little feller,” you might hear Richard Cohen mumbling to a wastebasket. “Why, he’s not so different from me, in the 1960s, when I was no doubt on the meekly impotent side of everything happening around me.” And now Ezra Klein has bravely (cautiously) made it clear that he very vaguely supports the concept of the masses being upset about something, even if they haven’t FedExed their position papers and enclosures via the proper channels. The kids are all right!

It’s not the arrests that convinced me that “Occupy Wall Street” was worth covering seriously.

Well what then, what was it? What shuddering insight finally convinced the likes of EZRA KLEIN that something could finally be covered “seriously”?

Nor was it their press strategy, which largely consisted of tweeting journalists to cover a small protest that couldn’t say what, exactly, it hoped to achieve.

Channels and decorum, folks, it’s all about the proper media contact strategy using the proper channels and decorum. Mess that up, and you’ve messed up the daily calendar of the very important people not yet laid off by the Washington Post.

It was a Tumblr called, “We Are The 99 Percent,” and all it’s doing is posting grainy pictures of people holding handwritten signs telling their stories, one after the other.

Tumblr? Is that how the youths are getting their porn now, on their Blackberry? Hhmmph, and such grainy pictures! Do they not have access to a top-notch photojournalism department like we do, here at the closed-down Washington Post suburban bureau?

These are not rants against the system. They’re not anarchist manifestos. They’re not calls for a revolution.

Relax, managing editor of online news! I’m not going to Crazyland! Nothing about guillotines and lining up the motherfuckers against the wall in my corporate blog! I also apologize for using an exclamation mark, in my mind.

Let’s be clear. This isn’t really the 99 percent. If you’re in the 85th percentile, for instance, your household is making more than $100,000, and you’re probably doing okay. If you’re in the 95th percentile, your household is making more than $150,000.

Translation: “I am paid very well to paste in these statistics from various professional liberal organizations staffed by lifers who compile statistics. Let’s be quite clear that these Occupy Wall Street ruffians on the Tumblr do not have their statistics exactly correct.”

Fuck this guy.

Or, you know, don't. You know where he's been.

Here's a good OWS photo gallery to remind you of what Ezra doesn't, and never will, understand.

Not Cynics; Nihilists

Ezra Klein posts yet another Village piece defending repug terrorists as misguided patriots, and Kevin Drum and Steve Benen respond:

Kevin:

Ezra Klein rounds up a series of quotes from 2001 showing that Republicans loved the idea of fiscal stimulus back when a fellow Republican was wrestling with a recession. But now they hate the idea:

So what happened?

Some say the explanation for all this is obvious: Republicans want the economy to fail because that is how they will defeat President Obama. After all, didn’t Sen. Mitch McConnell say, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president”? How much clearer can it be?

I don’t believe this sort of behavior is quite that cynical.

Well, I think it's exactly that cynical. But not because Republicans want the economy to fail. Self-interest probably motivates them to believe they're doing the right thing when they oppose measures that might help the economy and therefore help President Obama's reelection, but that's about it. They don't literally want the economy to tank.

But the obvious thing Ezra doesn't mention is that all of those 2001 mash notes to stimulus were based on the prospect of getting an even bigger tax cut for the wealthy than they had counted on. Republicans don't really care about stimulus one way or the other. They care about upper-income tax cuts, and back in 2001, portraying them as a stimulus measure was a handy way of getting them passed. If Obama were to offer up the same deal — big, permanent cuts in the top marginal rates — they'd be happy to become Keynesians for a day if that was the price of admission.

Cynical? Sure. But this is all pretty much common knowledge. Republicans like tax cuts for the rich, and they'll adopt whatever argument comes to hand to get them. If we're in a recession, tax cuts are a short-term stimulus measure. If the economy is doing well, tax cuts are a long-term productivity enhancement. If estate taxes are at issue, they're trying to save family farms. If it's capital gains, cuts are a vital tool for energizing our manufacturing base. Any port in a storm.

Steve:

Regular readers know I tend to see the resolution of this question quite differently. Ezra believes GOP officials aren’t that cynical; I believe they’re absolutely that cynical. Indeed, I tend to agree with a different piece Ezra wrote last week, when he argued that the “fundamental fact” of American politics right now is that Republicans are principally concerned with winning in 2012, not fixing the economy. “Boehner,” he wrote, “simply will not cut off his party’s candidates at the knees, especially its presidential contenders, by handing Obama a major economic accomplishment.”

That’s pretty cynical, and I think it’s entirely correct: Boehner is willing to hold back the economy, on purpose, as part of an election strategy.

It’s unlikely Republicans want the country to suffer, per se, but it seems plausible to me that they see this as a temporary approach — they’ll undermine the economy and abandon their previous principles for just a little while, and then see what they can do to help Americans in 2013. They can’t act sooner, though, because it might help Obama.

And they can’t have that.

They're both wrong. The repugs do, indeed, want the economy to crash and the country to fall to its knees. Because only then can they get what they really want: a pure lords-and-serfs economy that will free them forever from even pretending to care about anyone who is not rich, white, straight male Xians like themselves.

Yes, of course, many millions of repugs will find themselves on the serfs end of that deal, but it will come as a huge surprise to them. They all think they're going to be among the one thousand or so lords who will own the rest of us.

No Virtue, Only Lots of Danger in Centrism

Nothin’ in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.

- Jim Hightower

That was true 30 years ago when Hightower first made the saying famous, and the "middle of the road" represented the halfway point between liberals and conservatives.

And it's even more true today when "middle of the road" represents the halfway point between safety-net-destroying conservadems and crazier-than-a-shithouse-rat repugs.

Krugman on The Cult That Is Destroying America:

Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence on a cult that has really poisoned our political system.

And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.

No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.

Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook.

What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.

You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won’t do it, nothing will.

And yes, I think this is a moral issue. The “both sides are at fault” people have to know better; if they refuse to say it, it’s out of some combination of fear and ego, of being unwilling to sacrifice their treasured pose of being above the fray.

It’s a terrible thing to watch, and our nation will pay the price.

Later, Krugman on "The Centrist Cop-out":

The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

As I said, it’s not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can’t bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality. News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.” But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?

The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

SNIP

Many pundits view taking a position in the middle of the political spectrum as a virtue in itself. I don’t. Wisdom doesn’t necessarily reside in the middle of the road, and I want leaders who do the right thing, not the centrist thing.

But for those who insist that the center is always the place to be, I have an important piece of information: We already have a centrist president. Indeed, Bruce Bartlett, who served as a policy analyst in the Reagan administration, argues that Mr. Obama is in practice a moderate conservative.

Mr. Bartlett has a point. The president, as we’ve seen, was willing, even eager, to strike a budget deal that strongly favored conservative priorities.

SNIP

So what’s with the buzz about a centrist uprising? As I see it, it’s coming from people who recognize the dysfunctional nature of modern American politics, but refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge the one-sided role of Republican extremists in making our system dysfunctional. And it’s not hard to guess at their motivation. After all, pointing out the obvious truth gets you labeled as a shrill partisan, not just from the right, but from the ranks of self-proclaimed centrists.

But making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

Steve M disagrees:

I agree that these people bear a great deal of the responsibility for our plight, but I don't really think they're a cult of centrism per se. If Barack Obama had taken office and pursued a genuine left agenda -- large tax hikes on the wealthy, nationalization of failing banks, a return to Glass-Steagall, single-payer health care -- I can guarantee you that any continued economic weakness wouldn't be blamed on "everyone." It would be blamed on liberalism. And the same would go for a debt crisis.

The cult only says that "everyone's at fault" when Republican extremism is at fault. That's because the cult's real problem isn't a lust for centrism -- it's an aversion to acknowledging that Daddy GOP beats us. It's the kind of denial that takes place in households where there's domestic abuse.

The anti-'60s backlash (which has now gone on about four times as long as the period to which it's a reaction), combined with GOP ref-working of the "liberal media," has left us with a political culture that really can't bear the thought that Republicans are consciously acting in ways that are detrimental to the country. If this culture isn't "wired for the GOP" (as Josh Marshall says), it's certainly wired to be in denial of what's wrong with the GOP.

At all times, the system accepts the notion that Republicans are good and decent and well-meaning, even in failure (see, e.g., George W. Bush). At all times, it accepts the notion that what Republicans are advocating is within the pale. If Republican extremism becomes so blatantly obvious that it must be acknowledged, extremism on the other side must be found (or invented, or blown up out of proportion), so Daddy GOP won't be charged with abuse -- the story we agree on is that "everyone" was fighting. And we just go on living that way.

Liberals know that centrism for the sake of centrism is a trap, because only conservatives ever win that game.

The Budget-Balancing Plan Everyone is Ignoring

Yes, it's Rachel Maddow Day here at Blue in the Bluegrass - you got a problem with that?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Dean Broder Can Retire; His Centrism-At-All-Costs Legacy is Secure

Yes, your new Village propagandist is none other than WaPo enfant terrible Ezra "Tax Cuts Will Stimulate the Economy" Klein.

In the immortal words of D. Aristophanes at Sadly, No!:

So the White House and GOP leaders have worked out a deal to make sure they still get historically low taxes on their millions while the working people of this country struggle to make ends meet and all of us keep trundling along towards the cliffs of fiscal doom. Hooray!

But for all the efforts Obama is making to pretty himself up to be John Boehner and Mitch McConnell’s prison bitch, has anyone told the Dems in Congress about this ‘compromise’ on the Bush tax cuts? They’re the ones who’d have to sign off on this giveaway to the wealthy if it’s going to pass before the New Year. So tell your Congress critter not to go for it.

Meanwhile, Ezra discovers that shit sandwiches don’t taste nearly as bad as he thought!

Can a fat Fox contract be far behind?

Teach the Village a Lesson: Support Alan Grayson

I don't usually make political contributions to candidates who don't need my help. As huge a fan of Alan Grayson as I am, I know he can get re-elected without my couple of bucks.

But now The Village, represented by filthy whore Politico, has decided that Alan Grayson must be taught a lesson. Alan Grayson does not perform proper obeisance to the Village biddies and must be punished.

But Alan Grayson isn't passively accepting Village correction. He's fighting back. And on this, he does need my help. And yours.

Digby:

Oh my Goodness. It looks like Alan Grayson has ruffled the Politico's feathers:

Dear Friend,

The media follows the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.

With that in mind, let's ask a question. What do Boeing, AT&T, America's Natural Gas Alliance, CTIA, McDonald's, and Goldman Sachs have in common?

They are all advertisers in Friday's issue of the Politico, the insider political magazine that controls much of the dialogue in Washington, DC. And that's just one day's issue. In fact, for the last year, the back page of the Politico has been occupied by a full-page Goldman Sachs advertisement. That's a direct revenue flow of thousands of dollars from Goldman Sachs to the magazine most politicians in DC rely on for political gossip.

Interestingly enough, here are the last six headlines from the Politico on me.

Dems accused of tea party tampering
GOP foe sues Grayson over DVD
Kelly: Grayson may want troops to die
Who's not on the DCCC list
The Age of Rage
No repeat blockbuster for Grayson

Every single headline is meant to damage me, to gin up pseudo-scandals or keep them going. We recognize this. It's what the media did to Bill Clinton, to Barack Obama, to Al Gore, to Michael Moore, and really, to anyone who is either a Democrat or puts forward the concept that America should be run for the benefit of the people and not the corporations.

On August 23, we're going to show them what people power can do -- my campaign is launching a moneybomb, and I need you to be a part of it.

Please contribute $25 or more now for the moneybomb.

Truth,

Alan Grayson

I don't know if Politico is working on behalf of its advertisers, but it certainly works on behalf of the Village, which lives on corporate largess and always loathes anyone who comes in and "trashes the place."

This is not just about Grayson. The Village and its wealth/power/repug mindset is responsible for the mainstream media's acceptance of anti-Democratic republican tropes. Wonder why Main Street reality is never reflected in national news, legislation or policy? The Village hates Main Street, and makes sure Wall Street always prevails.