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I’m voting for “they don’t know what they’re doing”












Revising my hypothesis about Democratic messaging

I’ve thought about Ira Glass’s question about Democratic messaging and I’m revising my hypothesis about why Democrats seem to SUCK at it so badly.  Here’s what I’ve been toying with:

1.) Let’s talk about the Republican party.  It’s not really a party anymore.  It’s really a frenzied, irrational mob that is being lead by a small evil group of manipulative conmen who have access to more money than God. That goes for the former Democrats who fled to the Tea Party after 2008 as well.  You’ve been had.

2.) If I were evil geniuses with more money than God, how would I take down my opponents?  Well, there are the obvious ways through traditional media and Fox News and propaganda.  But you’ve got to keep refighting those battles every 2-4 years.  That gets old and there’s a danger that the public will eventually catch on.

3.) Well off people who make a lot of money but aren’t generationally rich are vulnerable. They might not be socially reactionary but greed is a powerful force. Hold that thought.

4.) I might turn the thoughts of the well off but not generationally rich to taking over the party of my enemy.  It’s a good possibility that they’ve already decided to do this independently.

5.) Money pours into the coffers of the enemy.  The enemy bites.  (It hasn’t been fed in several election cycles)  Then, like a retrovirus, that money starts turning the mechanism of the party against itself.

6.) Money is a powerful substance for highjacking the messaging of the party.  The party itself changes.  The party no longer functions as it used to.

Ira’s mistake is in assuming that the messaging sucks unintentionally because the party is incompetent.  This is the wrong way to look at it.  The messaging is supposed to suck.  The people who have taken over the party have made sure that the party itself remains fragmented.  The base is no longer cohesive.  The party infiltrators intentionally broke it apart in 2008 in order to pit African Americans against women, “creative class” {{cough, cough}} against working class, “educated” {{rolling eyes}} against everyone without an ivy league degree.

The new message system keeps getting propagated through a new generation of bought political journalists.  The demographics of this new breed are strikingly similar to the people who bought the party.  We have Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Josh Marshall, people like that.  They’re young, relatively well-educated, white, male.  Are there any women here?  The Democratic infiltrators know what they’re doing.  Why should they give any voice to the powerless, the people who might actually want them to do something?

And every time there is a possibility that the gang will have a “Hey, we’ve been eating grass!” moment and start comparing notes, the infiltrators quickly disseminate poison throughout the system. I think we could prove this with a Lexus-Nexis search.  I’m betting there is a correlation between Obama’s public opinion surveys and negative journalism about more liberal or successful Democrats. If there isn’t one, I’ll eat my blog.  That negative messaging permeates throughout the blogosphere and social networking apparatus.  We know how it’s done because we’ve seen it.   They take the most powerful politician in the party and use him as a target at which every grievance of the activist base can hurl their insults and nurse their injuries.  It’s a three minute hate in neat little packages.  This continues to separate the party into creative class, men with privileged backgrounds and everyone else.

The people who are most hurt by the three minute hate against successful Democratic politicians who aren’t pure are the same people who were most inclined to vote for the hated Democratic politician, that is working and middle class people, the poor, African Americans, women, and immigrants.  The activist base keeps telling them they should be angry with the last successful and powerful Democratic politician but they’re not.  It’s all designed to keep the parts of the party from talking to one another.

Now, you have to wonder how it is that this money retrovirus was able to accomplish so much.  It seems to me that it’s easier to do when the Republicans go to the extreme right.  The more right they go, the more likely that socially moderate rich people will look for alternatives.  Arianna Huffington is poster girl for this kind of movement to the Democrats.  And the crazier the right gets, the more the socially moderate monied class flees to the Democrats, diluting the strength of the 99% with all of that money.  So, it shouldn’t be any wonder that the right is really going for the gusto and becoming as radical as it possibly can.  Don’t expect it to get better before the election.  Republicans are going to push it right as far as it will go so that the Democratic party gets further diluted.  The vast majority of voters feel they have nowhere to go.  They’re trapped because there is a void to the left of the Democrats where they used to feel comfortable.  In the meantime, because the right has pushed sooooo far right, it’s hard to tell what’s the center anymore.  Average Americans get the idea that the most important thing is to cut the legs off of other Americans.  They know there’s something wrong with the picture but all of the solutions that are presented to them are the same.

What we have here is the Karl Rovian forces taking over both parties and pushing working people and the 99% out.  The Democrats are not our people anymore.  The activists won’t accept this but unless they have more money than the people who have highjacked the party mechanism, they’re not going to get control of the messaging anymore, until they back the only other center of power left within the party.  They could choose to embrace the last successful Democratic politician who defied both parties’ expectations and who has the support of the working class, women, poor, middle class, immigrants, and *used* to have African Americans until the 2008 character assasination.  But the people who run the Democratic party are going to continue to poison those thoughts the minute they start to bubble up.  The activist base is just too full of themselves and too prone to blame someone else than actually get a fucking clue.  They’d rather go for purity than actual power.

(Odd that they haven’t considered that the other center of power may decide to go left in order to differentiate itself from the highjackers…)

So, there you have it, Ira.  Democratic messaging is working fine.  It’s doing exactly what it’s been paid to do.  If you want a return to left of center politics, you’ve got to be willing to clean out the infection.  So far, I see no indication that the activist base wants to rid themselves of doing it even though much of the base realizes it jumped in bed with someone they didn’t know and caught something nasty.  To do so would mean they have to overcome powerful conditioning and toxicity.

I think the Democrats are heading towards extinction.  If they lose big this fall, and it’s a distinct possibility, the ensuing hardships should shake the activists out of their torpor and make them realize they’ve been had.  I wish I could say this is all unavoidable but sometimes, you have to learn the hard way.

UVa disaster continues: One of the top 13 professors has resigned


Here’s a snippet:

Dean and Interim President Zeithaml,


 [rather impressive bio goes here]



Bill Wulf









Sunday: What to do, What to do?











In other news:


wait for it



Leopold does some calculations:
















VAT is not the same as “soaking the rich”

Barack Obama is suggesting the Value Added Tax (VAT) as a revenue option for those of us just livin’ it up on our stagnant salaries.  Yep, we just have tons and tons of disposable income, what with gas at $3.00/gallon and excise taxes on our frugal health bennies and our kids’ college funds running on empty.

How many times do we have to go through this with our cowardly and craven politicians?  We want you to SOAK THE RICH. That is what you were elected to do in 2008.  We are sick of squabbling over the shrinking slice of pie that the bonus class is throwing us.  The day after Goldman-Sachs announced it’s whopping $3+ billion quarterly profit using money that we, the taxpayers, gave it through TARP, is not a good time to bring up the idea of a VAT.  If the country is broke, Mr. Obama, perhaps you should stop asking the vast majority of rules playing and responsible taxpayers to pony up.  Stop looking down the food chain at the plankton.  Look upwards towards the sharks if you need to recover the money.

And while we’re at it, let’s talk about countries that actually have VATs, like some European countries.  In those countries, health care doesn’t mean that only consumers need to cut costs; doctors, insurance companies and hospitals share that burden too.  In those countries, the trains run on time and there are plenty of them.  In those countries, the gifted student doesn’t have to pray for a scholarship because higher education costs are a tiny fraction of what we pay here.

Listen up, Barry,  I’m not a gullible TeaPartier who is against government spending and reflexively anti-tax.  I am a middle class, well paid (but not TOO well paid), well educated, FDR Democrat in the burbs.  You know, one of the voters your party is losing at an accelerated pace these days?  I have no desire to live in GlennBeckistan where we stomp all over the poor and newly unemployed for being a burden on us.  But enough is enough with the taxes.  I’ve got a kid to put through college if I can keep her from losing her mind in a regular classroom after the devastating budget cuts New Jersey is going through right now. (Have you seen what a private school costs these days?  Of course you have, but to those of us NOT making a $400K salary every year, our gifted girls are stuck in public school)  Your job is to make government work for me, not make it worse and then take more of my money to cover your backers’ gambling debts.  Don’t piss us off.

I’m getting really sick and tired of hearing the rich whine about things like how bad our internet security is because they pay taxes and dammit, they deserve better treatment!  No, *I* pay taxes and I deserve better treatment.  I pay enough in taxes every year to keep a family of four above the poverty level.  Now, I don’t mind doing it because *someone’s* got to do it.  But my patience is wearing thin.  I can’t afford to pay for everything myself and I make too much money to qualify for any benefits.  Maybe that’s how it should be.  But if I am expected to have a social conscience, I think it’s only right to expect the same from the people pulling in millions of dollars in bonuses every year. Morality is not just for the average Joe.  If noblesse oblige doesn’t come naturally, it should be compulsory.  If I were a Democrat right now, I’d tax the living daylights out of any banker who received a bonus from Bank of America, Citibank and Goldman Sachs.  That right there will get you two more years.

So, before Obama even thinks about a VAT, he’d better go away and think harder about SOAKING THE RICH.  And don’t come back until you have a plan to do it.

Nope, don’t even go there.  Talk to the hand.

Krugman says, “We’re doomed”

Behind the Goldrush Sacks building facade

H/T  to Dhyana on the Beautiful Theories thread for this reference to a post from Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal blog.  Here’s what Obama said recently (yesterday?) during an interview to be published Friday:





Ya know, I’m a liberal and I don’t begrudge people making money either, as long as they don’t do it by electing politicians that will get rid of the rules for them so they can speculate recklessly with other peoples’ money, get in over their heads, ruin innocent citizens’ retirement plans, jobs and livelihoods and then give some of the “bonus” money they made with taxpayer bailout funds to the “Mashie Niblick Widows and Orphans Fund” of their choice so they can look like they’re being good guys while they’re applying for a tax deduction for charitable contributions.  Now, *that’s* chutzpah!  How is it that Barack Obama admires these “savvy businessmen”?  Obama is one of them.

Some of us are seeing our industries decimated and our  friends’ careers irretrievably gone to Asia, our lives ruined by these insensitive, “What’s mine is mine; what’s yours is mine” bizspeaking, short sighted, greedy, testosterone poisoned adolescents posing as men (and it’s almost exclusively men) and Obama wants us to “cut’em a break”? Compare them to a talented ballplayer who sells his body parts to wealthy men for sport?  At least major league ballplayers are ENTERTAINING!

By the way, tea partiers, this should prove to you once and for all that Obama is NOT a socialist.

As Krugman says, “Oh. My. God.”

(Didja finally wake up and smell the sulfur, Paul?)

Another take on Obama’s Gigantic Faux Pas:

The aliens are setting the terms:

“Don’t you want to elevate your career?”