Not to pile on with the bad news, but Robert Parry has a must-read bummer at Alternet, “The Right-Wing Media Machine Has Arrived on the Internet.” The title will come as no surprise to political internet junkies, who have noticed over the last year or so a distinct increase in conservative and wingnut web pages that don’t look quite so cheesy as before.
This doesn’t mean that the right has websites as widely-read as HuffPo or Daily Kos. They don’t. And there is still a noticable gap in writing quality favoring the left, at least among the middle-brow political websites. But amplifying Jerry Markon’s WaPo post on the topic, Parry does a good job of explaining why the pro-Republican right’s superior message discipline is providing the GOP blogosphere with a growing edge:

…The Right’s Web attacks on Democrats, progressives and mainstream journalists had much greater resonance because those hostile stories got picked up and amplified by the Right’s talk-radio programs, by Fox News and by print outlets, such as Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times…the Right is now fully “wired” to disseminate a potent political message via the Internet, as demonstrated by the Tea Party assaults on President Barack Obama in his first year and by the Internet-savvy upset win by Republican Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race.

Worse, conservatives have not been shy in tapping corporate resources to nurture and support their blogosphere, in painful contrast to the woefully underfunded left, in which most bloggers work other jobs to support their postings. Parry adds,

Some right-wing bloggers have found their endeavors richly rewarded as right-wing institutes create “fellowships” for bloggers; other bloggers have become influential TV personalities, the likes of Michelle Malkin; and still others, like RedState’s Erick Erickson, wield outsized political influence because their commentaries resonate through the Right’s echo chamber.

It was a hollow conceit to assume that the progressive blogosphere would have a perpetual edge over the right. It was always a question of ‘when,’ not ‘if’ coporate resources would empower the right to level the field. But as the integration of streaming internet audio-visual content with television, telephones and even radio in cars becomes more seamless, perhaps there will be a more permanent democratization of media access. It won’t happen automatically, and it will certainly require an energetic effort from progressives to put in place. The alternative would be even more disturbing than Parry’s post.

After reading my favorite pundits’ unsurprising takes on Coakley’s MA meltdown, I thought I’d check out the Beantown rags, to see if they had any fresh angles. After all, these are the folks who saw the ad campaigns, heard the buzz in the watering holes and supermarkets and followed the story longer than those based elsewhere. Here’s the skinny from The Globe‘s Brian C. Mooney:

Brown, an obscure state senator with an unremarkable record when he entered the race four months ago, was a household name across the country by the end of the abbrevi ated campaign. Running a vigorous, smart, and error-free campaign, he became a vessel into which cranky and worried voters poured their frustrations and fears…To be sure, Brown was the beneficiary of the blundering campaign of his opponent, Coakley, who blew a 31-point lead in two months, according to one poll. But in electing Brown, a large segment of the electorate declared that there is little appetite for near-universal national health care, the chief domestic policy initiative of Obama, who carried the state by 26 percentage points only 14 months ago.
Brown skillfully made the election a referendum on the issue, nationalizing the race when he repeatedly said he would be the 41st vote in the Senate, enough for the GOP to block the Democrats’ bill. Money poured in from around the country. His campaign had an initial budget of $1.2 million but eventually spent $13 million, about $12 million of which came in via the Internet, a campaign official said last night.

So how bad was Coakley’s campaign? Mooney adds,

…Brown withstood the most blistering assault of late attack ads the state has ever seen. As Coakley began to collapse, her campaign, Democratic Party committees, outside organized labor, and environmental and abortion rights groups bankrolled a desperate multimillion-dollar carpet bombing ad campaign in an effort to halt Brown’s surge. It backfired. The ads, some of which distorted Brown’s record, created a blowback that scorched the Democrat. Coakley entered the campaign as a well-liked politician and ended with high negative poll ratings. She will probably face withering recriminations in Democratic circles, and her weakened status could produce a challenger to her reelection in the fall.

And perhaps most tellingly:

…The unflinching Brown had much more experience in tough partisan elections than Coakley, and it showed in this campaign. In 2004, the Republican won a close special election and November rematch to capture and then hold his state Senate seat. Coakley, by contrast, won the offices of attorney general and Middlesex district attorney over token Republican opponents.
Brown’s chief consultants were battle-tested not only in bruising state elections but also at the national level. Eric Fehrnstrom, Beth Myers, and Peter Flaherty, all principals of The Shawmut Group, were veterans of Mitt Romney’s 2002 gubernatorial and 2008 presidential campaigns. They provided strategic advice, developed the communications plan, and created Brown’s distinctive and highly effective television advertisements..

Mooney goes on to describe a controversial Brown ad, which got lots of attention, featuring JFK morphing into Brown, running 5 days, with no Coakley response, apparently because of “her run-out-the-clock strategy.”
In his article “How Brown Won,” David S. Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix adds to Mooney’s point about Brown’s campaign advisors:

Give credit to the brain trust behind Brown’s campaign: Mitt Romney’s top people, bred in Massachusetts politics and trained at the top levels of presidential combat. They were assembled on the stage at Park Plaza last night: Beth Myers, Beth Lindstrom, Peter Flaherty, Eric Fehrnstrom (texting away even as Brown delivered his victory speech), and of course the former governor himself, taking a victory lap in front of a national audience of cable-watching conservatives (and potential 2012 primary voters).
Watching them, it occurred to me that the same group spent most of 2007 traipsing across Iowa, having built the Romney strategy around winning that state’s caucuses; and that during that time they may have picked up a lesson or two from watching another campaign that bet heavily on Iowa: Barack Obama’s.
As that campaign’s manager David Plouffe describes in The Audacity To Win, Obama’s strategists knew from the start that they could not beat Hillary Clinton among the people who normally participate in caucuses. Thus, they had to expand the playing field — greatly increase the number (and type) of participants, so that the people who don’t normally vote would overwhelm the regulars.
Brown faced the same dilemma. It was widely accepted that turnout for the special election would be no more than 30 percent, or 1.2 million people — and that number would include more than 600,000 who had already voted in the Democratic primary. The math isn’t difficult.
If you like poker analogies, Coakley had a winning five-card hand, so Brown decided to make it a seven-card game.
…They did their job with Brown brilliantly, turning the well-to-do political hack suburbanite into a pickup-driving man of the people. And Brown, like Romney, is an outstanding candidate: disciplined, hard-working, and malleable.

The coverage in the Boston Herald was less revealing, other than relating U.S. Rep. Barney Frank’s assessment: “Martha Coakley was a lousy candidate. She let herself get involved in a personality debate.”
Mooney also notes that “Brown worked the talk radio circuit relentlessly…” All in all, the local accounts make it sound more like Coakley was outmaneuvered and outworked, and less like a pivotal majority was all that bent out of shape about the Democrats’ health care reforms. Absent any exit poll data, however, it’s impossible to say how much voter discontent about unemployment and the bailout influenced the vote. But it appears that Dems have been bested in candidate recruitment and campaign management in MA, as we were in the VA governor’s race.

For all the notoriety of the Tea Party Movement, it’s been difficult to get any reliable fix on its fundamental political objectives. Is it a “third force” in American politics that will either morph into a third party and/or burn itself out through ineffectual if incendiary protests? Or is it essentially a hard-right takeover bid aimed at turning the GOP into a mirror image of its ideological obsesssions, ranging from gun rights to anti-immigration sentiment to radical reductions in taxes and spending?
We may get a better understanding of the answer to that question next month, when a group called the Tea Party Nation puts on the first-ever national convention of tea party organizers and activists at Nashville’s Opryland.
TPM’s Christina Bellatoni says the convention’s agenda “sounds a lot like an attempt to form an official third party.” I dunno; the announced speakers list looks a lot like a prayer meeting of the right wing of the Republican Party. The big keynote speaker is Sarah Palin, with Michele Bachman speaking at lunch. Other confirmed speakers include the U.S. House GOP leadership’s resident wingnut, Marsha Blackburn (you do have to admit the Tea Party folks are very good at achieving gender parity in their panelists); Christian Right warhorses Rick Scarborough and Judge Roy Moore; and assorted conservative TV and radio gabbers.
It’s now becoming standard for hard-core conservative candidates in Republican primaries around the country to identify themselves closely with the Tea Party Movement. Nowhere is this more evident than in Florida, where Marco Rubio’s senate candidacy is a cause celebre for Tea Party folk everywhere. There’s a long profile of the Rubio-Crist race by Mark Liebovich in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine that gives the distinct impression that Crist is a goner and Rubio’s about to become a maximum national conservative celebrity. And although there will be elements of the Tea Party movement who want to remain independent, the temptation of an opportunity to conquer, or at least intimidate into submission, one of the two major parties may prove irresistable.
UPDATE: The intrepid David Wiegel reports some conservative grumbling about the cost of this event–$549 for registration, and $349 just to attend the Palin speech–and Palin’s own rumored speaking fee of somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000. Sure, big-name pols often command that much or a lot more for speeches, but it’s not what you’d want to charge to a grassroots activist group if you were thinking about running for president with their support. More generally, this kind of money-grubbing could undermine the legitimacy of the event.

Since the Civil War, only two presidents, FDR in 1934 and Bush in 2002, have seen their party gain seats in the House and Senate as a result of their first mid term elections. FDR broke the pattern with bold economic reforms that inspired confidence in his personal competence and his party, and added 9 Senate seats and 9 House seats for Democrats. Bush did it as a saber-rattling cheerleader at a time when swing voters were receptive, adding 8 House members and 2 Senators to the GOP herd.
Interesting, that these two exceptions were achieved by America’s best and worst presidents, the four-termer who lead the world to economic recovery and won two wars; and the other who gave us an economic disaster of historic magnitude and budget-busting military entanglements of dubious purpose.
One common denominator here might be that bold action, rooted in a patriotic appeal early in a first Administration, can sometimes win an upset. Another common denominator is that both made highly-effective use of the bully-pulpit, more specifically the power of the President to make news. FDR shrewdly leveraged the available media of his day (e.g. radio fireside chats, schmoozing journalists) to maximum advantage, making the New Deal a patriotic enterprise in the minds of swing voters. Both FDR and Bush were cheerleaders. Bush quite literally began honing his chops as a cheerleader for his high school’s athletic teams, and he also benefited from the rising power of conservative media – Fox News and wingnut radio in particular.
While some would say that the Iraq war was the pivotal event that gave the GOP it’s win in ’02, to give W fair credit, he worked his tail off for his Party in 2002. By October of that year, for example, he had held 8 large public rallies expressly for Republican candidates, not merely the usual fund-raisers with wealthy contributors – a lesson that might benefit Obama on Nov. 2nd.
Presidential cheer-leading is more complicated now. By 2006, Bush had squandered all of his media capital, and the six-year itch” took hold as voters gave upsets to the Democrats. Plus, the power of the internet took a quantum leap forward as a force in political communication, with Democrats benefiting most. The internet is even more potent today as a political opinion-shaper.
So the question is worth raising, is there any chance the Dems could actually pick-up seats in congress in November?
Most pundits say no, with their poll-based projections of Democratic losses in the range of 20-30 House seats and 3-6 Senate seats. In the past 17 midterm elections, the president’s party has lost an average 28 House seats, and an average loss of 4 Senate seats. Hard to find many who think Dems could flip the reality in the other direction. The DCCC has even created a “Frontline Program” to protect a designated 40 House seats believed to be in endangered by the GOP. On the other hand, the GOP’s RCCC has designated the 25 most vulnerable House seats they hold to be protected by their “Patriot Program” fund-raising initiative.
Political upsets happen, and they are never based on abandoning all hope because of polls. A favorable turn of events can help. More likely, however, they require a critical mass of pro-Democratic activists to embrace the challenge with undaunted determination. Such an activist coalition would include Democratic candidates, their staffs, Democratic party workers, blogosphere and community activists and progressive journalists, ideally working together as much as possible in harmonizing messaging and tapping the power of their formidable echo-chamber. If the GOP’s edge has been Party discipline, as seems a fair assessment, the Dems’ edge could be a more advanced echo-chamber that now reaches nearly all homes in suburban swing districts.
The stakes are enormous. Imagine what Democrats could do with a real majority of progressives in their congressional ranks, which could be a small as 3 Senate pick-ups and a dozen House seats. Unlikely, probably – but not totally out of the range of possibility given a little luck and some hard work.
On the outside chance that ‘creative visualization’ can have some political benefits, let’s entertain event scenarios in which the Democrats actually gain Senate and House seats in the 2010 midterms. In no particular order, here’s a few:

Our military captures/destroys bin Laden and al Qeda’s top leaders at the optimum moment, sometime between the end of summer and the November vote. Barring the apprehension of bin Laden, however, it’s not easy to visualize any great military victories in Afghanistan before November that could benefit the President’s party.
The economy starts to bloom more energetically than expected. This may be our best shot. There are some signs of an upturn in the making.
Democratic memes concerning health care reform take root in swing voter attitudes (Some combination of “Damn, this health reform deal is better than I thought” and “Jeez, those Republicans really have no credible alternatives). This is one of the few ways Democratic activists can have a deliberate impact. And, President Obama’s strategy of letting congress shape health care reform, without much white house involvement, now looks pretty good, in comparison to the Clinton Administration’s more ‘hands on’ strategy.
The progressive blogosphere should develop some new ways to reach out to a broader constituency, instead of preaching to already-converted liberals. Democrats in general need some creative initiatives to reach swing voters with memes and messages in key districts. Outlets like YouTube and streaming video in general open up new realms of message transmission, although they won’t be widely rooted among less than tech-savvy voters until a couple of mid-terms later. The time is ripe, however, for some creative meme propagation.
Another rash of GOP scandals kicks in. Always possible, given the greed-driven basis of many Republican campaigns, though fortuitous timing is unlikely.

In the longer term, it’s clear that Democrats have to develop a program to increase turnout in off-year elections, particularly among friendly constituencies. Some innovative ideas are urgently-needed here. We should also support a program to accelerate naturalization to increase the universe of Dem-favoring registered voters.
No doubt there are other possible events and trends that could flip to Nov 2nd outcome in Democrats’ favor. The biggest mistake would be to say, “Well, the President’s Party always loses seats in the mid-terms,” and cede unnecessary ground to the Republicans. Even given a favorable turn of events, heightened Democratic activism is needed for our optimum performance in the 2010 mid-terms. Our best possible New Year’s resolution would be to sound the knell for mid-term apathy in the Democratic Party.

This item by TDS contributor Robert Creamer is crossposted from the Huffington Post. Creamer is a political organizer and strategist, and author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win
Last Friday, the House passed critical regulatory reform legislation aimed at preventing the recurrence of the kind of financial meltdown that devastated our economy at the end of the Bush administration.
The lobbyists from Wall Street worked hand-in-glove with the Republicans, and a few Democrats, to try to kill the bill. Astoundingly, the Republicans argued that Wall Street should continue to be free to engage in the same reckless speculation that led directly to 10 percent unemployment and required the taxpayers to inject hundreds of billions into the markets so that the geniuses of private finance would not plunge us all into the abyss of another Great Depression.
With no regard for history — and here I mean the events of only 12 months ago — the Republicans and Big Banks have the audacity to contend that the creation of jobs and a growing economy requires the lowest levels of regulation and government involvement possible.
Here’s a news flash: we tried it your way for eight years. The results: the lowest level of job creation of any eight-year period since World War II; all of the country’s economic growth was siphoned off by the top 2 percent of the population and the financial sector; and the economy imploded. Sure — let’s try that again.
The Republicans even had the brazenness to convene a convocation of 100 Wall Street lobbyists last Wednesday to plot how they could completely kill financial regulatory reform. They failed, largely due to the great work of Americans for Regulatory Reform, House Speaker Pelosi, Finance Chair Barney Frank and intensive lobbying from the Obama administration.
They did manage to water down the House bill — but it still represents the most important move to re-regulate the out-of-control financial sector since the Great Depression.
Soon, Chris Dodd’s Senate Banking Committee will report out the Senate’s version of this measure and hopefully a bill will be on the president’s desk early next year.
Financial reform is terrific politics for Democrats.
Americans United for Change released a new poll conducted by Anzalone Liszt Research that found broad support for regulatory reform aimed at reining in Wall Street. Among the key findings:
Overall, 70 percent of voters believe that the country’s financial system needs either major reforms or a total overhaul.

When voters learn about President Obama’s plan, support for specific changes increases dramatically. Once voters hear a description of the president’s financial reform plan that focuses on increasing oversight over big banks, protecting consumers, and cracking down on corporate abuses, support rises by 25 points to 60 percent.
Independents are particularly receptive to the plan. Among independents, the increase in support for the plan following the description was particularly large (31 points), leading them to support the plan by a 19-point margin (56 percent to 37 percent).
But financial regulatory reform, while necessary, is not sufficient to end the domination of the outsized financial sector on the American economy. The next step requires breaking up the giant Wall Street Banks that dominate our economy. Nothing less will do in order to create an even modestly competitive financial market place.

Read more…

This book review is cross-posted from Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, where it first appeared in the Winter 2010 issue.
A Review of:
Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right By Jennifer Burns • Oxford University Press • 2009 • 384 pages • $27.95
Ayn Rand and the World She Made By Anne C. Heller • Nan A. Talese • 2009 • 592 pages • $35
When the novelist, philosopher, and social critic Ayn Rand died in New York in 1982, her world had been reduced to a small group of sycophantic disciples, ironically dubbed “The Collective.” Twenty-plus years later, though, the circle of Rand’s influence is arguably wider than ever. While Rand has never lacked for book sales–the nature of her fiction virtually guarantees a self-renewing audience of underappreciated adolescents and self-righteous business executives–at present, her work is exerting far more political influence than it has enjoyed since the earliest days of American libertarianism. As Jonathan Chait of The New Republic and others have explained, Rand’s denunciations of government taxation and regulation as “looting” and her moral defense of capitalism are crucial to conservative rhetoric these days, especially within the militant “Tea Party” movement.
What a coincidence, then, that two well-researched, serious books on Rand should appear this year. Jennifer Burns, a University of Virginia historian, has penned a fine account of Rand’s life that particularly focuses on her place in the pantheon of the American Right, while veteran magazine editor Anne C. Heller (her resume ranges from The Antioch Review to Lear’s) has written a more conventional biography that thoroughly explores the heretofore darker corners of Rand’s life, including her childhood and adolescence in revolutionary Russia. While neither are Rand disciples (although Burns, unlike Heller, was given access to Rand’s private papers, zealously guarded by her institutional monument, the Ayn Rand Institute), both defend her philosophical originality and her literary talent, and both view her as a tragic figure whose greatness was spoiled by her intolerance for dissent and her abusive private behavior toward her closest associates and potential allies. They also think she has been vindicated by her posthumous impact on the libertarian movement and a variety of writers and entrepreneurs, including the founders of Wikipedia and Craigslist.
But much as Rand craved appreciation for her work (as sadly reflected in the worshipful eyes of The Collective and her bitterness about every negative book review she ever received), it’s hard to imagine that she would have been terribly happy about its current appropriation by a motley assortment of conservative populists, who mix quotes from The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged with Christian Scripture and the less-than-cerebral perspectives of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. In her own view, Rand was nothing if not a systematic philosopher whose ideas demanded an unconditional acceptance of her approach to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, psychology, literature, and politics.
Rand’s famous intolerance should not be dismissed as simply the psychological aberration of a flawed genius. She feared, for good reason, what lesser minds might do with the intellectual dynamite of her work when divorced from its philosophical context. The prophetess of “the virtue of selfishness” made rigorous demands of herself and all her followers to live self-consciously “heroic” lives under a virtual tyranny of reason and self-mastery, and to reject every imaginable natural and supernatural limitation on personal responsibility for every action and its consequences. Take all that away–take everything away that Rand actually cared about–and her fictional work represents little more than soft porn for middle-brow reactionaries who seek to rationalize their resentment of the great unwashed. This is why Rand was so precise about the moral obligations and absolute consistency demanded both of her fictional “heroes” and her acolytes. She hated “second-handers,” people who borrowed others’ philosophies without understanding or following them.

Read more…

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
In case you missed it, once-and-maybe-future presidential candidate Mike Huckabee traveled to Calgary, Alberta, Canada the other day and delivered himself of an address (according to his own pre-speech account, reported in the local press) focused on the terrible temptation of conservatives in the United States to tolerate diverse points of view, under the shorthand of a “Big Tent.”
That would be bad, said Huck, struggling from afar against the vast forces calling for ideological heterodoxy within the Republican Party.
As someone who adores our Neighbors to the North, and has made speeches there on occasion, I was struck by how odd it was for Huckabee to be sending this particular message in this particular place. It is customary for Americans speaking in Canada to express a great deal of interest in, you know, Canada. Maybe Huck did that in his actual speech, but he sure did seem to make it clear to the S.E. Calgary News that he wanted to inform Canadian conservatives of the threat of creeping liberalism among their counterparts down south.
To be sure, Huck’s on a long-term mission to make his image among conservatives match his actually extremist views. He outraged most of the Right’s chattering classes in 2008 by suggesting there were grounds for resentment of economic inequality in George W. Bush’s America. And his many detractors on the talk radio circuit have just been handed a big hammer, via the Maurice Clemmons story, to crush his presidential ambitions.
So maybe Huck’s just exhibiting message discipline. But you have to wonder if in Calgary he went over the brink into an assault on those godless socialists in the U.S. who contemplate a pale imitation of the notoriously totalitarian Canadian system of publicly provided health insurance (which most Tories in Canada would not even think to repeal). And you also have to wonder if U.S. conservatives generally will ever stop beating the dead horse of Republican “moderation.”

If you know anyone who is buying the wingnut snake oil being termed “climategate,’ direct them post-haste to Lee Fang’s post, “A Case Of Classic SwiftBoating: How The Right-Wing Noise Machine Manufactured ‘Climategate’ ” in ‘The Wonk Room’ at Think Progress web pages. Fang not only demolishes the allegation that global warming is a myth; he also shows quite clearly how the wingnuts distort and manipulate facts to smear scientists and policy makers who are raising concerns about global warming. An excerpt:

…Polluter-funded climate skeptics, along with their allies in conservative media and the Republican Party, sifted through the e-mails, and quickly cherry picked quotes to falsely accuse climate scientists of concocting climate change science out of whole cloth. The skeptics also propelled the story, dubbed “Climategate,” to the cover of the New York Times and newspapers across the globe. According to a Nexis news search, the Climategate story has been reported at least 325 times in the American press alone.
…As the right attempts to use the Climategate story to derail the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference this week, arctic sea ice is still at historically low levels, Australia is still on fire, the northern United Kingdom is still underwater, the world’s glaciers are still disappearing and today NOAA confirmed that not only is it the hottest decade in history, but 2009 was one of the hottest years in history. But how did the right-wing noise machine hijack the debate?

Fang then describes how the media was manipulated to serve the wingnut scam:

The methods for the right-wing political hit machine were honed during the Clinton years. Columnist and language-guru William Safire, a former aide to actual Watergate crook President Nixon, attached “-gate” to any minor post-Nixon incident as a “rhetorical legerdemain” intended “to establish moral equivalence.” (See phony manufactured scandals “Travelgate,” “Whitewatergate,” etc.) A right-wing echo chamber — including the Rev. Moon-funded Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, talk radio, and the constellation of various conservative front groups and think tanks — would then blare the scandal incessantly, regardless of the truth. But the more troubling aspect of this gimmick is the increasing willingness for traditional media outlets, from the Evening News to the Washington Post, to largely reprint unfounded right-wing smears without context or critical reporting.
One of the most successful coups for right-wing hit men was the “SwiftBoat” campaign, a well financed effort orchestrated by lobbyists and Bush allies to smear Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) war record. But “Climategate” is no different, with many of the same conservatives actors playing their respective roles…

The rest of Fang’s post is a richly-linked, detailed chronology of the media campaign to puff up “climategate” and discredit scientists who are doing serious work on the issue — required reading for anyone who cares about the crisis of global warming.

Republicans’ favorite polling outfit, Rasmussen, sure gave the GOP a toxic little gift this week, in the form of a “generic ballot” for Congress listing the Tea Party Movement (hypothetically organized as a political party) as an option. The Tea Party brand outperformed the GOP 23% to 18% (Democrats lead the pack with 36%).
The Tea Party movement has been around for roughly ten months, compared to 156 years for the Republican Party.
Unsurprisingly, another political parvenu is being closely linked to this third-party talk. On Friday, Sarah Palin was pressed by a conservative talk radio host to rule a third-party presidential run in 2012 out or in. She responded: “If the Republican party gets back to that [conservative] base, I think our party is going to be stronger and there’s not going to be a need for a third party, but I’ll play that by ear in these coming months, coming years.”
Palin nicely sums up the real meaning of the Tea Party threat. It is exceptionally unusual, not to mention counter-intuitive, for a major party to move away from what is general perceived to be the political “center” and become self-obsessed with ideological purity immediately after two crushing general election defeats. But the Republican Party has been doing just that; it is a far more conservative party, in terms of its overall message, than it was going into the 2008 election cycle. But it’s not conservative enough just yet for a lot of activists, and for those Tea Party participants who really do think “looters” and “loafers” elected Barack Obama and are busily constructing a totalitarian society. Palin’s telling the world the rightward trend needs to continue, or she’ll be pleased to act out the GOP’s worst nightmare in 2012.

Last night I hung out with my father for a few hours, and as we chatted cable news was on the tube in the background (CNN, as it happens). I don’t watch as much cable news as I probably should to stay in touch with the zeitgeist, but the experience helps explain why the stuff makes me crazy.
On a day when the Senate was beginning a momentous debate on health care reform, and on the eve of the President’s big speech on Afghanistan, what were the gabbers gabbing about? Mainly the White House “party crashers” and Tiger Woods. In other words, two “stories” where nobody currently knows the facts, and everybody probably will know most if not all of the facts in a few days. Even the guests being beamed across the planet to discuss these weighty matters seemed to run out of anything to say within minutes.
There was, on Larry King, a brief discussion of Afghanistan, but only in the context of an “interview” with Jesse Ventura, who bellowed at the camera on this subject along with the Big Two of the party crashers and Tiger.
The only other story I noticed was the death watch for Mike Huckabee’s presidential ambitions in the wake of the killing spree apparently undertaken by the man whose sentence for burglary was commuted by Huck back in the day.
But it got worse. Driving away from my father’s house late last night, I twirled the AM radio guide in search of something innocuous, only to discover that virtually every station I could pick up was sporting right-wing talk. The main subject on Wingnut Radio was Huck, whom nobody defended, though the burial ceremony was made less interesting by the admission of each and every one of these firebreathers that they hated Huckabee as a “bleeding heart” long before this incident (typically because he doesn’t profess to hate immigrants, and because he criticized other Republicans last year for not admitting the economy was in trouble–you know, the same economy that’s now proof that Obama needs to be driven out of office). And to think: before yesterday the Arkansan’s main political problem were the lbs. he’s been putting on, and the distant thunder of a possible Palin run for the White House.
Next time I’m in the car, I’ll just listen to the hockey broadcast. It’s totally inscrutable to me, but far less offensive.