Pundit Country

Nice to see members of the Obama administration engaging in it. They’ll need to get some practice because the GOP is only goinig to keep pushing harder and harder in the coming months as they try and take seats in the House and Senate.

While I don’t usually watch Meet the Press, I think this may be not to miss.

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Call me old fashioned, but I like it when smart people call out craven fools for incendiary rhetoric. Having said, that, I really wish he’d stop referring to the health care reform legislation in the past tense.

Brent Budowsky, an aide for former Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen, writes today in The Hill what many progressives have been saying for quite some time; that the Progressive Caucus in Congress is probably the last thing standing in the way of what is looking to be a significant electoral loss for Democrats later this year.

Budowsky correctly points out that voters who wanted change in how politics are conducted at the national level are not getting what they paid and worked hard for. What they are seeing are the same money changing hands to get legislation passed between corporations and politicians, it’s just that the letter after the name is a “D” rather than an “R”.

People will not stand for it, when after two years in office, they discover the jobs they lost aren’t coming back anytime soon, while a federal bailout of some of the largest financial industries are permitted to give the money out as bonuses with no accountability. When people discover there could have been a real comprehensive way to address the health insurance shortfalls in this country got traded away for a solution that a) doesn’t really address the real problem and b) mandates that everyone now buy into the broken system, they are going to be angry and will start looking for someone to blame. And the GOP will only be too happy to point out that Democrats control all three branches of government. Budowsky puts it more succinctly:

Here is a great truth that remains unspoken in official Washington today: On issue after issue it is the Progressive Caucus that speaks for the majority of political independents, not the president who gives in too easily, not the Republicans who oppose any change, and not the Casablanca Democrats who exploit the 60-vote rule for petty cash, petty pork or petty vanities.

He goes on to point out the four key things Democrats can still do to stem the tide, as long as they can get the rest of the party to follow suit. You should go over and take a read through. Very smart and very easy to grasp.

Related articles

• Senior sources: Democrats set to exclude GOP from final health care deliberations (cnn.com)
• Negotiations Will Occur on Health Bill, Progressives Have Opportunity to Make Them Fruitful (news.firedoglake.com)
• What’s negotiable in the non-conference conference? (And how do we get in?) (dailykos.com)
• “Bundling” Activity By Lobbyists Goes Unreported (huffingtonpost.com)
• Peter Daou: Ethics and Believability in Politics: On Sifry’s Theory of an ‘Obama Disconnect’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• Blue Dogs Can’t Find a Bone? PAC Donations Plummet (news.firedoglake.com)

John Cole over at Balloon Juice writes about his amazement at a recently published article concerning how the Republican health insurance reform plan received no real media analysis while the Democrats plan was not only vetted by several committees, it was torn apart every which way by every corporate media pundit in America, and yet the GOP plan was treated as if it had been vetted and given careful consideration.

I seriously do not get this country. The subservience to the Republicans by the media at least made sense when they were in the majority and held the Presidency in 2001. But this is 2009, the Republicans have been routed electorally for the past few years, everything the Republican party believed in failed miserably the last eight years and they have been exposed as total frauds, they released a budget with no numbers on April Fools day, they have been whipping up teabaggers and gun nuts into a froth for months and screaming about death panels because they have no ideas or solutions, and when they finally do release their health care “plan,” it totally and completely sucks. It is nothing but fail, fail, fail, from the GOP, they just lost two more seats in the house, they are going through a horrible (yet delicious) civil war, yet according to the media, everything is bad news for Democrats.

Sadly, it’s been this way for years due in some part to the near monopoly conservatives have had on beltway media outlets since the 1970’s. I’m afraid that absent constant pressure from groups concerned with media accuracy and transparency coupled with a political class that refuses to do business with outlets that traffic in hyperbole and rumor, this will continue to be the norm rather than the exception.

The whole piece is here.

Related articles

• The Right And The Tinderbox (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
• An overview of mean-spirited, partisan statements (dailykos.com)
• Political Culture: Still Two Americas (popdose.com)

I have to admit that I never really considered this before as I’ve always thought of tribalism in it’s political context as a purely partisan frame of mind, but Henry at Crooked Timber makes an argument for the middle as partisan that makes one stand up and take notice.

I would say that this mindset is apparently quite pervasive in D.C. It shows up all the time in both the statements of politicians and the media pundits who cover them. Some have referred to it as “the bubble”, but I think tribalism is a far more accurate term. Henry (who is specifically critiquing a Financial Times journalist) notes:

In the meantime, I have a theory (it’s no more than that) of what is going on here. Mr. Crook clearly considers himself to be an independent mind, floating above the political fray and pronouncing judgments upon it. But given his past form, he is quite obviously wrong. His particular attitude to the online left suggests that his tribal loyalties are every bit as strong as those of the partisans whom he deplores – he is demonstrably happy to engage in rage-filled, irrational and delegitimizing rhetoric when it is aimed against the enemies of the “We” who “approve of consensual politics.” His tribalism is one of the center rather than the partisan left or right, but it is perhaps more pernicious for being completely unselfconscious.

The whole post is here.

Related articles

• What does it mean to be non-partisan? (themoderatevoice.com)