Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers

My beloved right-wing correspondent continues to forward pieces to me, of varying quality. It's always instructive to see how the other side thinks, and what shapes their thinking. I get Erick Erickson's RedState Briefings every morning for just that reason.

I've been busier than a one-legged Riverdancer so I haven't had the time to comment on the torrent of right-wing propaganda in my Inbox, even though I wanted to. I'm up early now so I'll give it a whirl:

This Michael Reagan piece is ridiculously easy to swat down; it's ludicrous. His claim that the Demos has a "death grip" on the Congress during Bush's last years ignores the six years when the Congress gave him nearly everything he wanted in the way of tax cuts and deregulation, the principal causes (along with the housing bubble) of the crisis we're in now. As I've noted several times earlier, Bush's spending spree was far more egregious than Obama's (which is largely driven by automatic stabilizers).

Please note that when the Ds control Congress, they impose "pay-go" rules requiring new programs to be offset by comparable spending reductions or new revenues. When Rs take over the Congress, they repeal those rules.

Several of these article writers suffer from the delusion that Obama's health insurance reforms are a huge drain on the treasury. No, that would be GW Bush's Medicare "reforms," which were not paid for, and represent huge subsidies to Big Pharma and Big Insurance. Obamacare not only pays for itself, but reduces the deficit - by trillions when fully implemented. Repealing it would increase the deficit, as the CBO has repeatedly found.

Bernie Goldberg's sophistry about the tax code is a longtime rightwing trope, often debunked and never abandoned. It involves citing statistics from the income tax alone and ignoring the rest of the tax burden - or lack of same - on Americans of disparate income groups. To pick just a few examples, poor people pay far higher percentages of their income in payroll taxes, and rich people whose income derive largely from investments are paying extremely low capital gains taxes, enjoying much lower tax rates than wage-earners. This is lying with statistics, pure and simple.

Thomas Sowell seriously misstates the causes of the crisis, seemingly believing there was no financial crash at all before Obama took over and started spending like mad:

Why was there a financial crisis in the first place? Because of runaway spending that sent the national debt up against the legal limit. But when all the big spending bills were being rushed through Congress, the Democrats had such an overwhelming majority in both houses of Congress that nothing the Republicans could do made the slightest difference.

The crash came on Bush's watch, because Greenspan ignored the housing bubble and deregulated banks passed junk bonds based on inflated mortgages around the world. Obama's (partially) successful stimulus spending came later. But he and the Dems never enjoyed an "overwhelming majority" in the Senate, thanks to Ted Kennedy's brain cancer, the litigation over Al Franken's seat, and Mitch McConnell's constitutional hardball. They managed to scrape 60 votes together a few times during the few weeks after Franken was finally seated, before Kennedy was completely incapacitated. The refusal of Republicans to extend the longtime courtesy of canceling out a dying Senator's absence by having one of their own abstain (as Dems did for Strom Thurmond) is part of the hardball I refer to.

This piece by the "Fact-Checker", Glenn Kessler, is the kind of thinking I like to read, whether from the right or the left: fact-based and substantive. He quotes the president speaking to well-heeled donors at a fundraiser, then dissects the claims:

“And by the way, these choices are not radical. When it comes to getting a sustainable debt level, if we went back to the rates that existed when Bill Clinton was president and we made some modest adjustments to Medicare that preserved the integrity of the system, our long-term debt and deficit problems would go away. And most people here wouldn’t notice those changes.”
— President Obama, August 8, 2011

I don't have time to fact-check all his fact-checking myself, but I will say this: I assume that Obama's audience at that fundraiser understood, as I do, that simply allowing Bush tax cuts to sunset in their entirety - as the original law passed by the GOP Congress (with help from Dems) and signed by Bush was designed to do - would, indeed, almost completely erase our projected long-term deficit.

I also understand, as his audience no doubt did, that Obama's stated policy and campaign promise was to raise taxes back to Clinton-era rates only for those making over a quarter million a year, and allowing the rest of us to stay at our current marginal rates. This move would only eliminate about 40% of projected long-term deficits, which is still far more than any GOP-proposed spending cuts.

But Obama was saying, correctly, that if we "do nothing" and no additional tax legislation is passed and signed, our deficit (not our debt) will more or less disappear - even without any spending cuts (which Obama is also calling for).

Finally, this Walter Williams piece was both dishonest and despicable. More on that later.

Masters of Projection

Paul Krugman is exasperated:

I’m not the first person to notice this, but whenever you read conservatives trying to critique what they think the other side believes, you find them assuming that their opponents must be mirror images of themselves. The right believes that less government spending is always good, regardless of circumstances, so it assumes that the other side must always favor more government spending. The right says that deficits are always evil (unless they’re caused by tax cuts), so they assume that the center-left must favor deficits in all conditions.

Yes, I've noticed this as well. It seems like whatever the right-wing power/looting/propaganda apparatus is up to that in any way twinges what's left of their conscience, they make sure to accuse the left of doing that very same thing. Election fraud, racism, gross incompetence, you name it. But Krugman's post is actually about something different: the utter failure to understand Keynesian economics.

The way this overlaps our projection problem though, is this: they basically assume that whatever the left is in favor of, it must be Keynesianism. And contrariwise, if Keynes advocated some policy, it must be a leftist plot to enslave the poor with chains of dependency and punish the successful for their advantageous accident of birth business acumen. Richard Nixon's proclamation that "we're all Keynsians now" is so 20th century.

 So that's not actually how to go about debating and solving the problems we face as a nation, but it seems to be working out okay for them so far. For actual intelligent discussion of Keynes and the relevance of his theories to the current crisis, try, oh, I dunno, a Nobel laureate in economics.

UPDATE: Poor Krugman today: "Sometimes I really do wonder whether it’s even worth trying to make rational arguments."

Letter to a Right-Winger

Hey, thanks so much for sending me that article. I'm always happy to read anything you'd like to forward to me.

However, I'd be happier if the articles were more fact-based than this one. I have little use for this kind of piece when it comes from the left: "Look at all the mean/outrageous things right-wingers say about us!" I could find an equal number of nasty quotes from the right, compile them, and send them to you, but it'd be a waste of both our time. If you listen to Mark Levin, read Ann Coulter, or watch Bill O'Reilly, then you get no shortage of them on a daily basis.

I'm happy to stipulate that civility is a virtue, one practiced imperfectly on both sides of our political culture, each of whom feels themselves to be the more aggrieved. Moreover, I'll agree that one needs to be careful with one's metaphors, though I also don't want to live in a world where colorful language is suppressed.

But it also seems to me that if Republicans take genuine, rather than feigned, offense at being called or compared to terrorists - you know, the way Sarah Palin and her acolytes referred to Barack Obama in 2008 - then they ought to forswear tactics such as those Mitch McConnell describes here:

"I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. Most of us didn't think that. What we did learn is this—it's a hostage that's worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done."

The political culture in DC is more toxic than ever, and anger at both parties, and within both parties, is at fever pitch. Part of the reason is that the GOP is, more or less unilaterally, playing a game called constitutional hardball, in which tactics not explicitly prohibited by the Constitution, but prohibited by generations of established political norms, are embraced to gain maximum leverage.

Republicans are clearly within their rights to do things like mid-decade redistricting, routine filibustering, blocking executive appointments at unprecedented levels, requiring voter ID and then closing down the offices necessary to obtain them only in Democratic districts, or threatening to shut down the government if they don't get their way. But such tactics do come at a certain price, and diminished civility is part of it.

And I'd argue that part of the reason our political culture has become so feverish is that the Democratic Party has been much more reluctant to play constitutional hardball when it's to their advantage - as in the failure to reform the filibuster, advance DC statehood, mitigate the Citizens United decision, or any number of things they (once) had the power to do. This is is part because the liberal outlook is by nature more conciliatory, and in part because the Democratic coalition is more heterogenous.

But however angry we get at Republicans for changing the rules mid-game (as in Calvinball), it's also true that the increasing polarization of our parties is a natural outgrowth of the successes of the civil rights movement. Pro-segregation politics made for strange bedfellows in both parties, and over the decades since, we've seen liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats migrating to the party that best matches their ideology. We still have more of the latter than the former, adding to the friction, but this is a process that will continue. Constitutional hardball is a part of this process, but the danger is that if pushed too far, it will lead to a constitutional crisis.

What happened last month unprecedented, but it was only the latest unprecedented outrage. The GOP went well beyond threatening to, or succeeding in, shutting down the government. They were playing chicken with the full faith and credit of our government. If the default had occurred and our credit ratings downgraded, our interest payments would have gone up, adding billions more to the deficit. But beyond that it would have created shock waves in our national and global economy, and in fact, the use of the tactic has already spooked both markets and consumers. Moreover, the success of the tactic, in cutting spending during a recession, will demonstrably slow down growth, at a time when the economy seems to already be slowing. This may well spark a double-dip recession.

Under the circumstances, it seems like the epithets Mr. Goldberg quoted were relatively mild, but in any case, a waste of everybody's time. Both sides should be concentrating their minds on the grim economic data unfolding before us and fashioning adult, responsible solutions, rather than manufactured crises that address the budgets of 2013 and beyond.

However, I will say this: any party that has employed Karl Rove as their chief political operative has forfeited the right to complain about civility for at least a generation to come.

Barney Frank is a National Treasure

How diminished our national discourse would be without him. He's a one-man quote factory. This is my favorite since the "dining room table" quip. Via Crooks and Liars:

I've already voted to raise the debt limit. I voted to raise it earlier this year straight forward. And by the way, it's not my debt limit. I voted against the war in Iraq and I voted against the Bush tax cuts. On my debt limit, I got a couple trillion left to go. I was very generous. I voted to raise the other people's debt.

What Digby Sez

Everything Digby writes is a JGRTWT, but she's at the top of her game here. She's built up a righteous head of steam today (which isn't hard to do) on Obama's negotiating strategies:

It's not that people don't understand that he has to compromise. It's that he puts the defining issues of the Democratic Party on the table in exchange for gimmicks and promises from the other side. It would be as if George W. Bush had offered to tax evangelical churches and ban private ownership of handguns in exchange for Democrats agreeing to raise the cap on Social Security. When you do something like that, you should expect some blowback.  

She ties this in to Krugman's recent post on what Obama was willing to be seen as willing to give away. Even if he knew that Republicans were going to turn him down no matter what, laying out these kinds of cards can't help but make it harder for the president's party to win back the House and hold the Senate next year.

However much slack one is willing to cut Barack Obama, it's getting hard to keep giving him the benefit of the doubt. BooMan runs down what may have been going through John Boehner's mind:

I don't know what Boehner may have thought was possible or what he truly wanted. Alcoholics don't think straight and are hard to decipher. But I don't think he wanted to be in the history books as making a deal with the Kenyan, Muslim, socialist president. He certainly wanted to leave the impression with his caucus that he was only humoring the president.

Referring back to my earlier post, "No, Our Side Sucks More," it's a huge mistake to assume that Republicans are willing to negotiate in good faith anymore. They've made it clear that damaging the president is their top priority – even above the national interest. Playing chicken with them, or even calling their bluff, has such enormous consequences for non-rich Americans that it's excruciating to watch.

I'd love to wrong about this, but I just want it to be over. Please let it end soon.

Congratulations, Arizona

Our state easily defeated all other contenders for the top spot in AlterNet's list of the "Ten Craziest State Legislatures in America." This is especially impressive when you consider that the competition included Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan and Texas. But in the end, it wasn't even close.

The rundown of major embarrassments and flights from sanity that have caught national attention is, of necessity, abbreviated. Left out, for instance, is the absurd refusal to accept federal funds to extend unemployment benefits, a bonehead move that costs the state millions of dollars a week.

Moreover, of strictly regional interest is the irrational hostility to Tucson and Tucsonans. The attack on our local ethnic studies program is part and parcel of that. This hostility is also manifest in the move to usurp local control over our redevelopment district and place it in the hands of appointees from the Governor and the Republican legislative leadership. This tyranny from Maricopa County has led to an active secession movement to found the state of Baja Arizona.

It's hard to pick which is the craziest law considered on the floor of of our state capitol (now leased from its private ownership). Guns in barrooms? Bans on teachers with foreign accents? ID requirements for presidential candidates? The ban on human-animal hybrids? There's no shortage, and you can be assured of future outrages in the next session.

But less amusing is the way this impacts ordinary peoples' lives - or ends them prematurely. It's a dubious honor, to be sure, but it helps to have outside confirmation that we're not imagining the extent of our nightmare here. My state is crazier than your state.

October Surprise Redux

Robert Parry 's reporting continues to make mincemeat out of apologists for Bush the Elder. In a new article he runs down more evidence conveniently overlooked and/or covered up:

In November 1991, as Newsweek and The New Republic were ridiculing the idea that Ronald Reagan's campaign chief William Casey might have made a secret trip to meet Iranians in Madrid in 1980, a senior State Department official was informing George H.W. Bush's White House that Casey indeed had gone to Spain on a mysterious visit...

Casey’s family grudgingly turned over his personal records to congressional investigators, but Casey's 1980 passport was missing along with several pages from his personal calendar for that year... From the Bush library files, there's no indication that the White House told investigators about Williamson's information regarding a Casey trip to Madrid. Nor did anyone in power do anything to stop the Washington press corps' rush to judgment, which condemned Jamshid Hashemi as a liar and a perjurer.

It helps to keep these sorts of things in mind, apropos the kind of folks we're dealing with in Washington, and the extent to which they are capable of not just obfuscating, but obliterating, reality.

Blogging Leftovers

It's always a pleasure to visit my parents, and one of the side benefits is the sheer bulk of the right-wing propaganda my dad has lying around. I do my best to keep in touch with the loyal opposition, but I can really get an immersion in the conservative milieu when I'm there. So, for instance, I got to thumb through Ann Coulter's latest hate literature, Demonic. Therein I learned that righties still can't get over the French Revolution, for one thing.

And a lot of Coulter's schtick consists of "nyah, nyah, you guys do it, too." So I was amused to see her chapter equating the fever dreams of the birthers with the left's "obsession" with the October Surprise. If only. Most lefties, like everyone else, have too many more recent scandals to keep up with. But one reporter who's never let go of the story is Robert Parry. He's long since demolished the tissue of lies that "vindicated" Poppy Bush. And tonight I see that he's used a FOIA request to examine how the tissue of lies was constructed in the first place. Very illuminating reading.

It was also amusing to watch a bit of Fox News, and see Bill O'Reilly and Dick Morris treat each other like serious thinkers. That about made my day. They both seem to think that Obama is really going to take the heat for his intransigence on the debt ceiling talks. Ask Mitch McConnell how that's working out , fellas. Over at the news division I learned that a testy Obama walked out of the talks today, and I had a feeling that there was a bit more to the story than they were letting on. Ya think ?

At a dinner party tonight the topic of the Shaggs came up - well, because I brought them up. For some reason I was reminded that a stage adaptation of their singular story has been unleashed on the world . If you don't know them, this 1999 New Yorker profile is a good intro . If you do know their strangely compelling outsider music, then you want to stop by their official site. I always thought those girls' story would make a great movie, and maybe that's just a matter of time, now. But you still have a chance to say you were into them before they were cool.

The Yglesias blog is always a fecund source of wonkery, but today his intern, Matthew Cameron, delivered some useful thinking on agricultural policy.

Finally, I never get tired of airplane rides, no matter how old I get. Last week when we flew up to Portland, I got a great view of Clear Lake, CA, which looked something like this.

Yesterday I got to visit the place on a lovely California day and even paddle around a bit on a canoe. Gives you a completely different perspective - kind of like seeing a story on Fox News  and then getting a  closer look later on.

You Know What?

Every Republican who ever made a joke comparing Obama and Osama's names, who implied or stated flat out that Democrats wanted the terrorists to win, who drew cartoons about leftists who wanted to ignore the threat, who created TV ads morphing the faces of Democrats into bin Laden's, who hinted around that the president was a traitorous "Muslim" or a "Kenyan" or somehow not one of us, who claimed that he hated America because of statements by a pastor at his church, who stood up at Sarah Palin rallies and called him a terrorist – it's time for a little humility.

I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for a round of "Oh, guess I was wrong" statements from that crowd, though. Instead, I'll be looking out for who comes out with the most churlish, classless commentary. Place your bets: Rush? Beck? Coulter? Hannity?

I'm guessing "All of the above." Stay classy, guys.

UPDATE: So far, the prize goes to Joe Scarborough. Top that, Limbaugh.
UPUPDATE: Looks like he did. How could I have doubted him?

Civility Update

Not an incitement to violence.

Erick Erickson of RedState helpfully passes this along:

...back in January, Paul Krugman was one of many drooling idiot leftists devoid of any moral compass who tried to pin the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords on a lack of Republican civility. Even though, by the time Krugman’s column ran, it was clear that Giffords’ shooter was a mentally disturbed individual whose assassination plot was not motivated by coherent political theory of any stripe, Krugman was not about to let facts get in the way of a good partisan narrative.

And so, following this logic, since Krugman wrote a column about the Ryan budget plan entitled "Let's Not Be Civil," then, ipso facto, Krugman is calling for "the assassination of Paul Ryan." Nice.

2006: Hate Sketch

Five years later, and I don't think I've seen another political cartoon that pissed me off as much as this one...so congratulations, McKee!

After 17 years in the political cartoon business, I thought I’d seen it all. But I can’t remember seeing as disgraceful a cartoon in an American newspaper as Rick McKee’s depiction of “The Left” choosing to pretend there is no terrorist threat (see above). Okay, I can think of some that were equally disgraceful, but none that were more so.

Look, I understand how political cartoons work. They’re supposed to provoke, anger, exaggerate. Many times I’ve found myself ticked off when some cartoonist deftly skewers my point of view–and then I have to catch myself and smile. But this is different, and I think I can explain why I think McKee’s cartoon crosses the line.

1995: Democrats for Dornan

Hey, I don't know if you remember "B-1 Bob" Dornan, but he was like a sneak preview of the brand of crazy that is now the Official Personality Disorder of the Republican Party. In fact, I'm kind of surprsied he's not on the comeback trail....

You can't please everyone. Not too long ago, a reader took me to task for lampooning the Republicans exclusively, since (he felt) the Democrats were more to blame for the current mess. The other day, another reader berated me for lampooning Clinton, since (he felt) the Republicans never attack their own.

Well, I must be doing something right if I have both the weasels and the lizards pissed off at me. There are a couple of possible reactions here. The first is to note that the Democratic Party ain't what it used to be, if in fact it ever was. The last generation or so has seen such an exorbitant hike in the cost of political campaigns that there has been a corresponding rise in political prostitution amongst the party of the people.

1999: The Great Birkby

My hate mail was never of quite the caliber that Markos Moulitsas Zuniga receives, as we do operate on different planes. But the Birkby letters were some of my all-time favorites. For quite some time after this exchange, printed in issue #69 of the Tucson Comic News, my friends and I would use the world "birkby" as a synonym for clueless. So Mr. Birkby, if you're still out there, you've achieved semi-immortality.

Dear Mr. Zep: I know from my own political research that most of the organizations in the "peace" calendar are pro-Communist (or are front groups). What is peaceful about Communism? More people have been killed under Communism than any other form of government in history. (Yes, this includes Hitler). Some of us know the truth, sir. Whether you realize it or not, you have blood on your hands by giving those groups publicity. And I'm guessing that when you finally realize it, you won't care. J.M. Birkby

Dear Mr. Birk:

Let me get this straight. Because I publish meeting times for groups like Tucson Organic Gardeners, the local food co-op and the Cosmic Peace Healing Circle, I'm responsible the the deaths of millions under Stalin?

Your letter reminded me of an old Russian joke: Under capitalism, man exploits man. But under communism, it's just the opposite.

1999: More Wonderful Hate Mail

From Tucson Comic News #76. I never get any hate mail these days, whereas I used to get some great stuff. Maybe as I return to a more public profile after years of hunkering down with my young kids, I'll attract some entertaining correspondents. After all, it's not like there's any shortage of wingnuts these days.

In any case, this exchange is kind of long, but does raise a few issues relevant to our current situation. The useful links are down in my second reply:

I saw your editorial in the News for Nov. 1999 and realized that you don't really understand what is happening in our society. I might say that many technical journal editors are in the same boat, you think that if someone only comes up with a good idea we can go back to the 3 class society that existed for about 100 years.

The two class society, Upper and Lower, is far older and longer lasting---that is the way we are going and it is happening in every developed country on the planet. I could discuss the reasons for this, it is not a right wing plot, but I don't think you would be interested.

Stuart A. Hoenig

Which Makes Them More Evolved Than Republicans

Apparently, researchers have discovered that chickens are capable of empathy.

Aside from providing the obvious, though less than civil, punchline, this story is as good a lead-in as any for this 1995 rant:

Recently, I ranted at length about sustainability as perhaps the most crucial issue of our times. Last month I provided four pages to local organizations who are working to save the planet from the power-addicted greedheads before it's too late.

This month I'm proud to provide some more ink, at or below cost, to a couple of other worthy groups. The first is the Vegetarian Resource Group of Tucson. The VRGT is sponsoring the Great American Meat-Out at Reid Park from 1 to 4pm on March 19, which, appropriately enough, also happens to be Earth Day.

The connection between the standard Western diet and the degradation of the planet has been clear to me for some time, and I finally got around to swearing off the meat habit about a month ago. I'll tell you how this works for me:

Approaching Armageddon?

Speaking of friends on the right, this fellow Ken Unger asked me to be on his radio show to talk about Egypt and the other Middle Eastern uprisings. It seems that we have fairly divergent views on a number of topics – and you can certainly hear me disagreeing with him when warranted – but Mr. Unger was a perfect gentleman and let me have my say at considerable length. So check it out if you have 30 minutes with nothing better to do. Maybe it'll help you get ready for the End Times.

Boomerang!: : How Our Covert Wars Have Created Enemies Across the Middle East and Brought Terror to America

"That Guy Just Hit Me"

Apparently our friends on the right are currently worked up over the menace of union goons and their rampaging incivility. The case in point involves the protestors who surrounded FNC reporter Mike Tobin, chanting "Fox News Lies!" Headlines across Right Blogistan proclaim that he was "punched" in the course of attempting to provide fair and balanced coverage.

As Tobin put it, "I got punched in the arm, it didn’t even leave a bruise. I don’t want to make too big a deal about it, but it did cross the line.” Not everyone, though, is reticent about making a big deal out of it. David Limbaugh, brother of talk radio's reigning king of civility, agonizes thusly:

Where are the leftist media to call out the thugs who assaulted Fox News national reporter Mike Tobin in Madison on Saturday night? Where are their reports about the alleged involvement of international socialists in similar protests, such as the rallies to "save the American dream"? Why didn't they report on the calls by union thugs for blood in the streets? And where are their fair and balanced reports that even after Gov. Scott Walker's proposed cuts, the Wisconsin state workers would do much better than private-sector and even federal workers?

Limbaugh also goes on to accuse the Left of planting racist signs at Tea Party rallies. What's next, curbstomping? Still...

Regarding point one, punching anybody, for any reason, has no place in our political discourse. Not only that, but shouting people down - no matter how much their network serves as a conduit for corporate lies - is unlikely to win you any converts. The actions of the people in that crowd were contemptible, and both unworthy and unrepresentative of the larger body of peaceful protestors.

However, not to make too much of a big deal out of this, but take a look at the video of that event. About 50 seconds in, Tobin says "that guy just hit me," indicating someone on his left. It's hard to see what's happening, but the old guy in red is holding up a sign with his his right hand. You can't see the arms of the bearded guy in the brown cap. But neither one of those guys moves his torso in any way consistent with throwing a punch at anybody.

What you can see, at about 44 seconds, is the old guy in the Santa cap attempt to place a sign in front of the camera. He gets pushed away, then apparently taps Tobin on the shoulder in response, after which he is pulled away by a couple of other protestors. By the next day, this was being called an "unwanted touching."

As far as I'm concerned, right-wingers are within their rights to complain about this even without the unwanted touch. And complain they will, being generally averse to removing the plank. Apparently this latest incident is of a pattern with the hate-fest at the Wellstone funeral, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

So all right then. I denounce the Socialist International for sending out shoulder-tapping goons and phony racists. After all, our friends on the right would never intentionally disrupt our public events. Would they?

SOTU $.02

I don't think his heart was in it. He didn't have any fire in the belly, not like he did in Tucson. He's been giving great speeches since he was a teenager, and it was like homework to him. So it was, yawn, I've gotta give another great Barack Obama speech. But is was a dispirited affair. And of course, what's really disappointing isn't the vague, centrist agenda he offered, but last November's election, which precludes him from offering anything more ambitious.

My nine-year-old daughter wanted to hear something about global warming. I wanted to hear how he expected to create any more jobs, given the GOP stranglehold on Congress. Both of us were disappointed.

But we weren't the target audience. Obama was trying in vain to recapture that air of "I've got this." He was speaking to swing voters, the ones who swung towards him in 2008 and swung away in 2010. Aside from how maddening it is that the direction of our country's policy agenda is in the hands of people who can't make up their fucking minds ...sorry, gotta stay civil. In any case, that's why we were all reduced to hearing a laundry list of previously tossed bones like tort reform and spending freezes.

The president's core message, once again, was that he could be trusted to be a bipartisan conciliator, which is presumably what swing voters liked about him in the first place. The problem is, he's also given the impression that he's a weak negotiator who can be easily rolled - possibly one reason so many swung back. And that's why the meaningless, arbitrary discretionary spending freeze sent the wrong message in the first place - and he just doubled down on it! Thank you for the umpteenth example of unilateral, unrewarded preemptive concessions.

There was a way the president could have fired up himself and his audience, helped to emphasize the more admirable parts of his speech, and come across as both someone willing to work with the opposition and someone who will fight for his core values. And that would have been to talk about global warming, and talk about our jobs crisis.

Why does it matter that the Chinese have lapped us in green tech and infrastructure development? Because global warming is a threat to our civilization! Why should we end wasteful subsidies to oil and coal companies? Because they're heating up our damn planet! Why should we save money by eliminating redundant agencies and obsolete weapons systems? So we can spend it creating jobs in green tech and infrastructure - and help save the damn planet!

See, I'm getting fired up already. And as someone who got pink-slipped out of a public sector job, and with two kids who are going to inherit a seriously warmed-up world, I can't understand why the president isn't fired up about this, too. With fifteen million people out of work, he should be running around with his hair on fire every day.

He really missed the opportunity to make a distinction between cutting the deficit in the long term - which we obviously need to do - and cutting spending right now, at the local, state, and federal level, which is an, excuse me, "job-killing" anti-stimulus, right in the middle of our fragile recovery.

So yeah, obviously, the 112th Congress isn't going to do jack about global warming or creating jobs, and they're going to cut as much spending as they can negotiate away from the White House. But bringing up these things would not only have provided some passion, it would have shown his audience what he would fight for, and fight against. It might even have imposed some political costs on his adversaries. But I guess it wouldn't have been very conciliatory.

The Nazi Analogy Nazis

This morning in my local daily, I see that Kathleen Parker invokes Godwin's Law without actually mentioning it:

For my two cents, anyone who invokes Hitler or Nazis should be disqualified from public debate for muddled thinking and lack of originality.

This is in response to Rep. Steve Cohen's rhetorical, er, overkill, which may or may not be a case of overreach, depending on what side of the aisle your guys have to cross over from to show some civility tonight.

And for my tuppence, Cohen could have left Mr. Goebbels out of it and still made his point. Whether he's disqualified from public discourse is another question, but even he probably has noticed that the Nazi analogy attracted more attention than his actual point. Still, it also seems to me that accusing people - in this case, not without foundation - of employing the "Big Lie Technique" is not exactly the same as calling someone a Nazi.

It's hard to get too outraged at Tea Party placards of Obama with a toothbrush moustache, since all our recent GOP presidents routinely received the same treatment (except maybe Jerry Ford, who just didn't fit the part). At the same time, it's a bit amusing to hear such objections from the party that used actual Nazis as campaign aides.

The last word on this topic should come from our national treasure, Jon Stewart, who reduces right-wingers' credibility on this topic to confetti. I was going to say "takes the only leg they have to stand on here and roasts it on a spit," but I think you could make the case that that's somewhat disturbing imagery.

Ask a Rightwinger

Before our national Civility Moment completely fades away. I want to take some time for self-reflection. Come on, join in, it'll be fun. Your homework is to find a rightwing friend, colleague or relative, and ask them what drives them crazy about the left. No, let me rephrase that; what annoys them most about the left. Being civil here.

As I go back over my past writings, looking for articles to post here, I see a lot of hostility towards the right. I showed a lot of hostility to some Democrats, too, but whatever metaphors I used to illustrate my opposition, I never advocated violence. I've always been uncomfortable with anyone on our side who did, whether it was jokingly, like Alec Baldwin, or lyrically, like M.I.A.

Listening to rightwing radio over the last ten days, I hear a lot of claims of equivalence, that Democrats do it, too. I've heard them cite President Obama's line about "if they bring a knife to the fight, I'll bring a gun." They offer plenty of examples, many of them well-taken.

We're a competitive species, and our language is dense with metaphors of war and battle. I wouldn't want the speech police to censure every instance, but at the same time I think people in public life, in positions of leadership, need to choose their words carefully. Maybe that's one thing we can take from this moment.

But if you look at data instead of rhetoric, there's a pretty obvious imbalance. Threats against the president quadrupled as soon as the guy whose name ends in a vowel took over. Actionable threats against members of Congress are overwhelmingly directed at Democrats. And new polling results show 13% of teabaggers - sorry, Tea Party members - believe that violence against the government is justified. That's one in eight.

What drives me crazy about rightwingers is eliminationist rhetoric. I condemn it on the left, but I hear it on the right all the time. The core message of people like Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, and their leader, Rush, is that liberals are not just mistaken on policy but actually subversive. Illegitimate. Dedicated to bringing tyranny, imposing socialism, consfiscating firearms. Motivated to expand government in order to create a dependent class and amass power unto themselves. Bent on destroying the republic and the constitution. Vermin who must be stamped out.

I hear this All. The. Time.

So I ask my rightwing friends, where is the leftwing equivalent of Coulter, Savage and Levin? I know that Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann may hurt your feelings, but have they called for your elimination? I don't just mean this as a gotcha question (though if it works out that way, fine). But I really do want to know.

Friends on the right: do we threaten you? Do our words make you fear for your safety? Let us know, and we'll take it up at the next Central Committee meeting to see if we can issue a directive to tone it down.