Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Wednesday Evening

On the whole matter of protests about taxation, I think I agree with Andrew Sullivan. Here's most of what he had to say. (The reference to "Reynolds" is to Glenn Reynolds, a popular Conservative blogmeister.)

...it seems odd to describe this as anything but a first stab at creating opposition to the Obama administration's spending plans, manned by people who made no serious objections to George W. Bush's. The tea-parties are as post-partisan as Reynolds, one of the most relentlessly partisan bloggers on the web. When you see them holding up effigies of Bush, who was, unlike Obama, supposed to be the fiscal conservative, let me know.

But the substantive critique must remain the primary one. Protesting government spending is meaningless unless you say what you'd cut.

If you favor no bailouts, then say so. If you want to see the banking system collapse, then say so. If you think the recession demands no fiscal stimulus, then say so. If you favor big cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, social security and defense, then say so. I keep waiting for Reynolds to tell us what these protests are for; and he can only spin what they are against.

All protests against spending that do not tell us how to reduce it are fatuous pieces of theater, not constructive acts of politics. And until the right is able to make a constructive and specific argument about how they intend to reduce spending and debt and borrowing, they deserve to be dismissed as performance artists in a desperate search for coherence in an age that has left them bewilderingly behind.

One of the ten-or-so things that caused me to lose respect for John McCain was his repeated promise that he could slash zillions from the budget...but his refusal to say what would go. That attitude leads to only two possible conclusions, as I see it: That he had no idea where to cut...or did and knew that too much of the nation wouldn't like losing whatever he'd kill. Instead, he kept saying, "This is not a good time to raise taxes on anyone," as if he ever thought there was a good time for that. If that's what someone means when they say that, I wish they'd say that, too.

• Posted at 11:30 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Fred Kaplan on what can be done about piracy on the high seas.

I don't have any particular opinions about any of this but I find it intriguing that issues can come out of nowhere like this. A week ago, if someone asked you to list your worries and concerns for the world, you might have mentioned the economy, the war, floods, the cost of health care, unemployment or any of about three dozen other topics. How many of us were fretting about pirates?

• Posted at 9:24 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Matt Taibbi on the "peasant mentality" that we see in our country today. Near as I can figure out, a lot of people are being fooled into thinking that when the Obama administration raises military spending, they're actually slashing it, and that when taxes are lowered for the lower and middle class, they're actually skyrocketing.

• Posted at 11:29 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Marc Cooper explains the inane premise of today's "Teabagging" protests. Personally, I think all that's happening is that a lot of folks who are furious they lost an election are working out their frustration and pretending that they have a chance of snatching "their country" back right away from all those evil people who cheated by getting more votes.

• Posted at 9:44 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Let's flashback to the ABC prime time schedule from 1978...a year when that network was doing pretty good. This promo, narrated by the late Ernie Anderson, runs nine and a half minutes. If you're not going to watch the whole thing, zip ahead to the last minute or so when they gathered together as many ABC stars as were willing to show up to mouth the words to the network's promotional theme for that year. Ricardo Montalban and a few of the others don't look all that happy about it...

• Posted at 1:18 AM · LINK