The Left is making a big mistake here. What they're offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul.
-- Paul Ryan at CPAC, 3-6-2014
No Sift March 17
I'll be spending the week working on the talk "Recovery From Privilege" that I'm giving Sunday at First Parish Church in Billerica, MA, and preparing to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary on Tuesday.
In other Sift news, "What Should Racism Mean?" became the third Weekly Sift post to get more than 25,000 page views. (And started another run yesterday. My thanks to the unknown Facebook bellwether who got it started.) Largely because of the new readers that post attracted, the number of people who subscribe to the Sift via WordPress went over 1,000 for the first time.
The next set of articles will appear March 24.
This week everybody was talking about Ukraine
Russia appears set to annex Crimea, and may get away with it. On Sunday, Crimeans will vote on a referendum to join Russia. Crimea has an ethnic-Russian majority and was part of Russia until 1954. Russian and/or pro-Russian troops currently control the country, including Crimean television stations, and access to Ukrainian TV has been blocked. So the join-Russia side has a distinct advantage.
Ukraine says the referendum is illegal. Russia counters that the ouster of Ukrainian President Yanukovych (currently in Russia) and the election to replace him on May 25 are also illegal, so claims based on the Ukrainian Constitution are specious.
Some political observers are portraying this as some kind of masterstroke for Russian President Putin, but those who take a more economic view are skeptical: The Russian stock market has plunged, the ruble is down 10%, and the Russian central bank has had to raise interest rates to 7% (from and already-high 5.5%) to keep Russian currency from devaluing further. The Russian economy was not in great shape to begin with, so an interest-rate spike is likely to cause a serious recession. All that is prior to any economic sanctions that might come from the EU or the United States.
So one of the things being tested here is how much economic pain Putin is willing and able to impose on the Russian people. Maybe the surge of nationalistic pride in regaining Crimea balances that, or maybe it doesn't.
Another consequence of Crimea leaving Ukraine would be to take a bunch of pro-Russian voters out of the Ukrainian political system, thereby guaranteeing that the remainder of Ukraine will shift towards the European Union.
I've occasionally channel-scanned through the RT (Russia Today) network, and I think I've probably even linked to it sometime or other. Most days, it looks like just any other cable news network, and not the government-funded vehicle it is. But apparently RT has been laying it on a bit thick as the Ukrainian crisis developed, leading this American reporter to resign on the air.
You've got to think somebody in the production booth could have pulled the plug and didn't. I wonder how his or her career is going.
With the propaganda flying as thick as it is, everyone is looking for their own authentic sources on the ground. I got a comment last week from Fedor Manin, author of the Fourteen Flowers and a Manatee blog. He has translated a post "On the Brink of War" from the blog of a Russian-speaking Crimean woman, Svetlana Panina.
Please, everyone who loves Crimea, everyone who loves Russians in Crimea. Help me carry this thought through to every heart. The Russians in Crimea didn't ask Russian soldiers to come to our homes! No one attacked us! We were living quietly and well! We were waiting for our summer guests from Russia and Ukraine, and from other countries all over the world, after all, Crimea is a gem that belongs to the whole planet.
She takes a train (with what appear to be a bunch of Ukrainian women and children escaping Crimea) from Crimea to Kiev, and reports the wild rumors flying around each place about what is happening (or about to happen) in the other.
Someone from my church has a friend in Yalta, and forwarded an email he had gotten from her. She reports that Crimean Russians, especially the older generation, are eager to join Russia and believe that the new Ukrainian government contains a neo-Nazi element that wants "to exterminate all Russians living in Ukraine". If I believed extermination was a possibility, I'd see Putin as the Russians' protector and support the referendum too.
All this makes me wonder about the timing of the Crimean referendum: Maybe Putin needs it to happen before the panic has a chance to settle down.
and CPAC
One media mystery is why the annual Conservative Political Action Conference gets so much national coverage, while gatherings of liberal activists (like, say, Netroots Nation) don't. I suspect it's that far-right activists have much more influence in the Republican Party than far-left activists have among the Democrats, but Josh Marshall offers another reason:
In recent years, especially since Obama became President, CPAC's wild press popularity and attention has been driven by what we might call a tacit conspiracy of derp between the event organizers and the people who cover it. You be outrageous; we'll be outraged. And everyone will be happy. (After all, crap like this doesn't happen by accident.) This has become even more the case as the contemporary Conservative Movement has become less a matter of ideology than a sort of performance art.
Rand Paul won the CPAC presidential straw poll, getting 31% to Ted Cruz' 11%. Paul's vote was up from the 25% he got last year. Marco Rubio's support collapsed from 23% last year to 6%. (Rubio made the mistake of trying to pass a law rather than just posture about ideology. His subsequent decision to oppose his own immigration bill didn't win back his CPAC fans.) Chris Christie's support was up to 8% (from 7% in 2013) because he's having such a good year.
To understand the significance of Paul's victory, I looked up the 2010 CPAC straw poll: Rand's Dad Ron Paul also got 31% (to Mitt Romney's 22%), and as we all know, went on to win the 2012 Republican nomination and become president.
I'm trying not to obsess about 2016 already, but I will say this: Rand Paul is not a threat. Put him on a debate stage and Ted Cruz will eat his lunch. Rand just isn't as smart as he thinks he is, or as his Dad was. He hasn't really thought through the implications of his libertarian beliefs. And that gets him sidetracked into arguments he can't win, like defending a restauranteur's right to run a segregated lunch counter.
Paul Ryan only managed 3% in the straw poll, but he was responsible for the video clip liberals most love to hate, which has got to count for something.
What [the Left is] offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. ... This reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson. ... She once met a young boy from a very poor family. And every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. He told Eloise he didn't want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown paper bag, just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the Left doesn't understand. ... People don't just want a life of comfort, they want a life of dignity.
Never mind that the story is mis-attributed. (Chris Hayes interviews the woman who really played the Eloise role.) Or that key elements have been fudged. (The government wasn't involved.) That's in the fine tradition of Ronald Reagan and John McCain. Expecting politicians to check their touching anecdotes is like expecting Bostonians to stop at red lights when there's no traffic.
Liberals around the country objected to an implication that may or may not have been there: that poor kids don't have parents who care about them.
A better objection is that this is the usual conservative sleight-of-hand: It makes the Best the enemy of the Good, as if the Best will appear by magic as soon as the Good is eliminated. Specifically, how is emptying stomachs going to fill souls?
If that imagined child doesn't already have a caring parent, how is taking away his lunch going to give him one? It's like when Newt Gingrich said "the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps." Taking away someone's food stamps isn't going to get her a job. So yes, people want lives of dignity -- liberals understand that quite well. But we also understand that inflicting discomfort on them is not going to help them get it.
Ryan is also performing a second standard conservative sleight-of-hand: severing the moral connection between the people who pay taxes and the people who receive benefits. Free school lunches exist because Americans do care about poor kids. The government isn't some soulless black hole that sucks up taxes in one universe and regurgitates benefits in another. The government is a structure through which We the People manifest our desire to help each other.
So if Eloise actually had met such a boy, here's what she should have said: "You have this lunch because people do care about you. All over the country, people have pictured kids like you going without a lunch and decided they want to pay taxes so that you won't have to be hungry. I pay taxes, and let me tell you, this is exactly what I had in mind."
and you also might be interested in ...
Edwin Lyngar posted a touching article "I Lost My Dad to Fox News" on Salon.
My father sincerely believes that science is a political plot, Christians are America’s most persecuted minority and Barack Obama is a full-blown communist. He supports the use of force without question, as long as it’s aimed at foreigners. He thinks liberals are all stupid, ignorant fucks who hate America.
I don’t recall my father being so hostile when I was growing up. He was conservative, to be sure, but conventionally and thoughtfully so. He is a kind and generous man and a good father, but over the past five or 10 years, he’s become so conservative that I can’t even find a label for it.
What has changed? He consumes a daily diet of nothing except Fox News. ... I do not blame or condemn my father for his opinions. If you consumed a daily diet of right-wing fury, erroneously labeled “news,” you could very likely end up in the same place. ... To some people the idea of retirees yelling at the television all day may seem funny, but this isn’t a joke. We’re losing the nation’s grandparents, and it’s an American tragedy.
A less extreme version of the same thing happened to my parents in their 80s. They continued to identify as New Deal Democrats and knew Fox was slanted, but for some reason they watched anyway. CNN bored them, MSNBC wasn't part of basic cable, and they found hosts like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity reassuring and comfortable. I think even if MSNBC had been an option, Chris Hayes and Steve Kornacki would have seemed like smart-alec kids to them, and I doubt they'd have gotten past their surface impressions of an intense black woman like Melissa Harris-Perry or an unrepentant lesbian like Rachel Maddow.
If you are old and white, Fox News may produce long-term anxiety, but it sneaks up on you. The immediate optics of MSNBC are far more challenging, and my parents watched cable news for companionship, not challenge.
Fox never changed my parents' philosophy, but little-by-little it shaped their perceptions. They wondered why the Democrats couldn't find any good leaders -- not realizing that everything they saw about Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or Joe Biden was selected and edited to make them look silly and unappealing. They wondered why President Obama always emphasized the wrong issues and couldn't come up with any persuasive messages -- never able to compensate for the fact that they only saw Obama through the eyes of his enemies. The important issues -- the ACORN videos, the Tea Party protests, ObamaCare's death panels -- left Democrats with nothing much to say. And what made today's liberals so hostile to Christianity?
The New Hampshire's Republican-majority Senate finally accepted a plan to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. According to The Concord Monitor:
The bill goes next to the House Finance Committee on Monday. The Democratic majority there is supportive of the bill, as is Gov. Maggie Hassan
I'm sure our minimum-wage workers and our hospital administrators are breathing easier. If we get this done, and if the plan of Pennsylvania's Republican Gov. Tom Corbett passes, then Maine will be the only holdout in the Northeast. Campaign on that, Gov. LePage.
It will soon no longer be a felony for married couples to have oral or anal sex in Virginia.
The Daily Show's Aasiv Mandvi destroys the claim that "America has the best health care system in the world."
Not everyone who agrees with Ayn Rand's politics is a sociopath, but the underlying worldview is sociopathic.
For those of you waiting for Game of Thrones to get going again, here's where the Dothraki language came from.
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