Sunday, August 09, 2015 4:36:01 AM
How The Republican Debate Undercut Jon Stewart’s Final Message
CREDIT: Charles Sykes/AP
by Andrew Breiner
Aug 8, 2015 9:00am
Jon Stewart’s final episode of The Daily Show closed with a meditation on “bullshit”: The methods politicians and corporations use to conceal reality and further their own interests against the interests of the public. He struck a hopeful note, noting that the bullshitters have gotten lazier, making the lies easier to spot, and called vigilance “the best defense against bullshit.”
But the Republican Presidential primary debate that took place minutes earlier undercut his argument. Even friendly conservative assessments of the debate accepted it as a given [ http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-2016-political-report-carly-dominates-rubio-shines-jeb-stumbles/article/2569770 ] that the whole thing was theater, that policy would have no role in this election. Candidates were mostly eager to take up space, to project confidence and hatred of the things conservatives are supposed to hate right now (Iran, taxes, abortion), and to never ever answer a question about what exactly they would do as president.
The candidates got away with talking about Iran and Iraq sans substance. All agreed the Iran deal was bad, because Obama wasn’t tough enough, and that they’d be tougher, turn down the bad deal, and get a better deal. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s only proposals [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW48yryodh0 (next below)]
One of the most common responses to a question about how a candidate would fix a specific problem was to spend the allotted time restating the problem and how serious it is, then state their firm resolve to fix the problem in the vaguest terms possible.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich responded to a question about “police and the difficulty in communities,” saying “we’ve got to listen to other people’s voices, respect them,” with no mention of race, which is the heart of the issue, or any specifics at all. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker also managed to answer a question about the Black Lives Matter movement without making a single mention [ http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/08/06/3689058/gop-debate-spends-less-than-a-minute-on-police-violence-and-black-lives-matter/ ] of the existence of race in America.
Kasich laid out a very clear vision for how to combat poverty, and it made no sense. “Economic growth is key,” he said (it isn’t [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/upshot/growth-has-been-good-for-decades-so-why-hasnt-poverty-declined.html ]). He said that balancing budgets and cutting taxes (two objectives that are opposed to each other) would achieve economic growth (nope [ http://www.businessinsider.com/george-wills-terribly-ignorant-argument-for-a-balanced-budget-amendment-2013-2 ]). Only after all that’s accomplished, Kasich said, we can start thinking about people “who don’t seem to ever think they get a fair deal,” like minorities. He offered no solutions for them besides lip service.
Bush was asked what specific policies would bring about four percent growth if he was president, something that he has promised despite the fact that it’s considered virtually impossible [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/upshot/economists-advise-us-not-to-hold-our-breath-on-jeb-bushs-growth-target.html ] by economists. His proposal: “Fix a convoluted tax code, you get in and change every aspect of regulations that are job-killers, you get rid of Obamacare and replace it with something that doesn’t suppress wages and kill jobs,” plus embracing fossil fuels and “fixing” the immigration system. No one who is being honest would say that this plan has any hope of achieving four percent growth. That doesn’t seem to affect his argument.
Some conservatives, desperate to anoint someone [ http://www.nationaljournal.com/2016-elections/donald-trump-gop-debate-20150806 ] to take the reins from Trump, decided on former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. Byron York’s reasoning [ http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/two-gop-debates-one-winner/article/2569774 ]? He argues it’s because she said all the same things the others did, “she is the only one tough enough” to beat Hillary Clinton in the general election, and “her fellow candidates don’t have the stuff to fight 24/7.” It is hazy reasoning that’s impossible to pin down in any way.
It is a sign of democracy in total crisis that any of the candidates on stage Thursday have a real chance of becoming president. They are experts at posturing, encouraging unfounded fears, and yes, bullshit. For nearly every problem they identify, their proposed policy to fix it either doesn’t exist, has nothing to do with the problem, or will make the problem worse. It is no coincidence that the most specific policies the candidates do propose would help the wealthy people and corporations who fund their campaigns at the expense of lower and middle-class people [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/08/07/3689124/debate-santorum-welfare/ ]. These policies unsurprisingly receive nearly uniform support [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/08/07/3689272/social-security-republican-debate/ ] from all the GOP candidates, and are even sold as aid to working people.
As former President Jimmy Carter said [ http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/07/31/3686949/jimmy-carter-says-united-states-is-now-an-oligarchy-with-unlimited-bribery/ ] last week, the United States is an oligarchy, not a democracy. And like Jon Stewart said, the oligarchs seem increasingly willing to drop the pretense and mislead us openly even as they are repeatedly called out for their bullshit. Without democracy, even the most scathing, righteous condemnation of elite manipulation has little effect.
©2015 CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS ACTION FUND
http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2015/08/08/3689170/the-republican-debate-and-the-limited-impact-of-recognizing-bullshit/ [with comments]
--
From Trump on Down, the Republicans Can’t Be Serious
By Paul Krugman
AUG. 7, 2015
This was, according to many commentators, going to be the election cycle Republicans got to show off their “deep bench.” The race for the nomination would include experienced governors like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, fresh thinkers like Rand Paul, and attractive new players like Marco Rubio. Instead, however, Donald Trump leads the field by a wide margin. What happened?
The answer, according to many of those who didn’t see it coming, is gullibility: People can’t tell the difference between someone who sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about and someone who is actually serious about the issues. And for sure there’s a lot of gullibility out there. But if you ask me, the pundits have been at least as gullible as the public, and still are.
For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.
For example, Mr. Trump’s economic views, a sort of mishmash of standard conservative talking points and protectionism, are definitely confused. But is that any worse than Jeb Bush’s deep voodoo, his claim that he could double the underlying growth rate of the American economy? And Mr. Bush’s credibility isn’t helped by his evidence for that claim: the relatively rapid growth Florida experienced during the immense housing bubble [ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/15/bubble/ ] that coincided with his time as governor.
Mr. Trump, famously, is a “birther [ http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/donald-trump-birther-obama-119945.html ]” — someone who has questioned whether President Obama was born in the United States. But is that any worse than Scott Walker’s declaration that he isn’t sure [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/08/03/why-wont-scott-walker-say-that-president-obama-is-a-christian/ ] whether the president is a Christian?
Mr. Trump’s declared intention to deport all illegal immigrants is definitely extreme, and would require deep violations of civil liberties. But are there any defenders of civil liberties in the modern G.O.P.? Notice how eagerly Rand Paul, self-described libertarian, has joined in the witch hunt [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/opinion/the-campaign-of-deception-against-planned-parenthood.html ] against Planned Parenthood.
And while Mr. Trump is definitely appealing to know-nothingism, Marco Rubio, climate change denier, has made “I’m not a scientist” his signature line [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/us/politics/marco-rubio-on-the-issues.html ]. (Memo to Mr. Rubio: Presidents don’t have to be experts on everything, but they do need to listen to experts, and decide which ones to believe.)
The point is that while media puff pieces have portrayed Mr. Trump’s rivals as serious men — Jeb the moderate, Rand the original thinker, Marco the face of a new generation — their supposed seriousness is all surface. Judge them by positions as opposed to image, and what you have is a lineup of cranks. And as I said, this is no accident.
It has long been obvious that the conventions of political reporting and political commentary make it almost impossible to say the obvious — namely, that one of our two major parties has gone off the deep end. Or as the political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks [ http://www.basicbooks.com/full-details?isbn=9780465074730 , http://www.amazon.com/Even-Worse-Than-Looks-Constitutional/dp/0465031331 ],” the G.O.P. has become an “insurgent outlier … unpersuaded [ http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/excerpt-thomas-mann-norman ] by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science.” It’s a party that has no room for rational positions on many major issues.
Or to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious — not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume.
Until now, however, leading Republicans have generally tried to preserve a facade of respectability, helping the news media to maintain the pretense that it was dealing with a normal political party. What distinguishes Mr. Trump is not so much his positions as it is his lack of interest in maintaining appearances. And it turns out that the party’s base, which demands extremist positions, also prefers those positions delivered straight. Why is anyone surprised?
Remember how Mr. Trump was supposed to implode after his attack on John McCain? Mr. McCain epitomizes the strategy of sounding moderate while taking extreme positions, and is much loved by the press corps, which puts him on TV all the time. But Republican voters, it turns out, couldn’t care less about him.
Can Mr. Trump actually win the nomination? I have no idea. But even if he is eventually pushed aside, pay no attention to all the analyses you will read declaring a return to normal politics. That’s not going to happen; normal politics left the G.O.P. a long time ago. At most, we’ll see a return to normal hypocrisy, the kind that cloaks radical policies and contempt for evidence in conventional-sounding rhetoric. And that won’t be an improvement.
© 2015 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/07/opinion/paul-krugman-from-trump-on-down-the-republicans-cant-be-serious.html [with comments]
CREDIT: Charles Sykes/AP
by Andrew Breiner
Aug 8, 2015 9:00am
Jon Stewart’s final episode of The Daily Show closed with a meditation on “bullshit”: The methods politicians and corporations use to conceal reality and further their own interests against the interests of the public. He struck a hopeful note, noting that the bullshitters have gotten lazier, making the lies easier to spot, and called vigilance “the best defense against bullshit.”
But the Republican Presidential primary debate that took place minutes earlier undercut his argument. Even friendly conservative assessments of the debate accepted it as a given [ http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-2016-political-report-carly-dominates-rubio-shines-jeb-stumbles/article/2569770 ] that the whole thing was theater, that policy would have no role in this election. Candidates were mostly eager to take up space, to project confidence and hatred of the things conservatives are supposed to hate right now (Iran, taxes, abortion), and to never ever answer a question about what exactly they would do as president.
The candidates got away with talking about Iran and Iraq sans substance. All agreed the Iran deal was bad, because Obama wasn’t tough enough, and that they’d be tougher, turn down the bad deal, and get a better deal. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s only proposals [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW48yryodh0 (next below)]
for dealing with ISIS in Iraq were to stop the Iran nuclear deal and to “take out ISIS with every tool at our disposal.”
One of the most common responses to a question about how a candidate would fix a specific problem was to spend the allotted time restating the problem and how serious it is, then state their firm resolve to fix the problem in the vaguest terms possible.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich responded to a question about “police and the difficulty in communities,” saying “we’ve got to listen to other people’s voices, respect them,” with no mention of race, which is the heart of the issue, or any specifics at all. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker also managed to answer a question about the Black Lives Matter movement without making a single mention [ http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/08/06/3689058/gop-debate-spends-less-than-a-minute-on-police-violence-and-black-lives-matter/ ] of the existence of race in America.
Kasich laid out a very clear vision for how to combat poverty, and it made no sense. “Economic growth is key,” he said (it isn’t [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/upshot/growth-has-been-good-for-decades-so-why-hasnt-poverty-declined.html ]). He said that balancing budgets and cutting taxes (two objectives that are opposed to each other) would achieve economic growth (nope [ http://www.businessinsider.com/george-wills-terribly-ignorant-argument-for-a-balanced-budget-amendment-2013-2 ]). Only after all that’s accomplished, Kasich said, we can start thinking about people “who don’t seem to ever think they get a fair deal,” like minorities. He offered no solutions for them besides lip service.
Bush was asked what specific policies would bring about four percent growth if he was president, something that he has promised despite the fact that it’s considered virtually impossible [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/upshot/economists-advise-us-not-to-hold-our-breath-on-jeb-bushs-growth-target.html ] by economists. His proposal: “Fix a convoluted tax code, you get in and change every aspect of regulations that are job-killers, you get rid of Obamacare and replace it with something that doesn’t suppress wages and kill jobs,” plus embracing fossil fuels and “fixing” the immigration system. No one who is being honest would say that this plan has any hope of achieving four percent growth. That doesn’t seem to affect his argument.
Some conservatives, desperate to anoint someone [ http://www.nationaljournal.com/2016-elections/donald-trump-gop-debate-20150806 ] to take the reins from Trump, decided on former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. Byron York’s reasoning [ http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/two-gop-debates-one-winner/article/2569774 ]? He argues it’s because she said all the same things the others did, “she is the only one tough enough” to beat Hillary Clinton in the general election, and “her fellow candidates don’t have the stuff to fight 24/7.” It is hazy reasoning that’s impossible to pin down in any way.
It is a sign of democracy in total crisis that any of the candidates on stage Thursday have a real chance of becoming president. They are experts at posturing, encouraging unfounded fears, and yes, bullshit. For nearly every problem they identify, their proposed policy to fix it either doesn’t exist, has nothing to do with the problem, or will make the problem worse. It is no coincidence that the most specific policies the candidates do propose would help the wealthy people and corporations who fund their campaigns at the expense of lower and middle-class people [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/08/07/3689124/debate-santorum-welfare/ ]. These policies unsurprisingly receive nearly uniform support [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/08/07/3689272/social-security-republican-debate/ ] from all the GOP candidates, and are even sold as aid to working people.
As former President Jimmy Carter said [ http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/07/31/3686949/jimmy-carter-says-united-states-is-now-an-oligarchy-with-unlimited-bribery/ ] last week, the United States is an oligarchy, not a democracy. And like Jon Stewart said, the oligarchs seem increasingly willing to drop the pretense and mislead us openly even as they are repeatedly called out for their bullshit. Without democracy, even the most scathing, righteous condemnation of elite manipulation has little effect.
©2015 CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS ACTION FUND
http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2015/08/08/3689170/the-republican-debate-and-the-limited-impact-of-recognizing-bullshit/ [with comments]
--
From Trump on Down, the Republicans Can’t Be Serious
By Paul Krugman
AUG. 7, 2015
This was, according to many commentators, going to be the election cycle Republicans got to show off their “deep bench.” The race for the nomination would include experienced governors like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, fresh thinkers like Rand Paul, and attractive new players like Marco Rubio. Instead, however, Donald Trump leads the field by a wide margin. What happened?
The answer, according to many of those who didn’t see it coming, is gullibility: People can’t tell the difference between someone who sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about and someone who is actually serious about the issues. And for sure there’s a lot of gullibility out there. But if you ask me, the pundits have been at least as gullible as the public, and still are.
For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.
For example, Mr. Trump’s economic views, a sort of mishmash of standard conservative talking points and protectionism, are definitely confused. But is that any worse than Jeb Bush’s deep voodoo, his claim that he could double the underlying growth rate of the American economy? And Mr. Bush’s credibility isn’t helped by his evidence for that claim: the relatively rapid growth Florida experienced during the immense housing bubble [ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/15/bubble/ ] that coincided with his time as governor.
Mr. Trump, famously, is a “birther [ http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/donald-trump-birther-obama-119945.html ]” — someone who has questioned whether President Obama was born in the United States. But is that any worse than Scott Walker’s declaration that he isn’t sure [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/08/03/why-wont-scott-walker-say-that-president-obama-is-a-christian/ ] whether the president is a Christian?
Mr. Trump’s declared intention to deport all illegal immigrants is definitely extreme, and would require deep violations of civil liberties. But are there any defenders of civil liberties in the modern G.O.P.? Notice how eagerly Rand Paul, self-described libertarian, has joined in the witch hunt [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/opinion/the-campaign-of-deception-against-planned-parenthood.html ] against Planned Parenthood.
And while Mr. Trump is definitely appealing to know-nothingism, Marco Rubio, climate change denier, has made “I’m not a scientist” his signature line [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/us/politics/marco-rubio-on-the-issues.html ]. (Memo to Mr. Rubio: Presidents don’t have to be experts on everything, but they do need to listen to experts, and decide which ones to believe.)
The point is that while media puff pieces have portrayed Mr. Trump’s rivals as serious men — Jeb the moderate, Rand the original thinker, Marco the face of a new generation — their supposed seriousness is all surface. Judge them by positions as opposed to image, and what you have is a lineup of cranks. And as I said, this is no accident.
It has long been obvious that the conventions of political reporting and political commentary make it almost impossible to say the obvious — namely, that one of our two major parties has gone off the deep end. Or as the political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks [ http://www.basicbooks.com/full-details?isbn=9780465074730 , http://www.amazon.com/Even-Worse-Than-Looks-Constitutional/dp/0465031331 ],” the G.O.P. has become an “insurgent outlier … unpersuaded [ http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/excerpt-thomas-mann-norman ] by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science.” It’s a party that has no room for rational positions on many major issues.
Or to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious — not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume.
Until now, however, leading Republicans have generally tried to preserve a facade of respectability, helping the news media to maintain the pretense that it was dealing with a normal political party. What distinguishes Mr. Trump is not so much his positions as it is his lack of interest in maintaining appearances. And it turns out that the party’s base, which demands extremist positions, also prefers those positions delivered straight. Why is anyone surprised?
Remember how Mr. Trump was supposed to implode after his attack on John McCain? Mr. McCain epitomizes the strategy of sounding moderate while taking extreme positions, and is much loved by the press corps, which puts him on TV all the time. But Republican voters, it turns out, couldn’t care less about him.
Can Mr. Trump actually win the nomination? I have no idea. But even if he is eventually pushed aside, pay no attention to all the analyses you will read declaring a return to normal politics. That’s not going to happen; normal politics left the G.O.P. a long time ago. At most, we’ll see a return to normal hypocrisy, the kind that cloaks radical policies and contempt for evidence in conventional-sounding rhetoric. And that won’t be an improvement.
© 2015 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/07/opinion/paul-krugman-from-trump-on-down-the-republicans-cant-be-serious.html [with comments]
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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