BUT WE PRIDE OURSELVES ON OUR INABILITY TO PAY

I haven't read Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Case for Reparations" yet, but it's hard to imagine a positive response in America to a call for new payments to any group when we now routinely default on payments we've already promised to make, such as legally required payouts to former city and state workers who are now pensioners.

But that's just an extension of what's been our national state of mind for some time -- at least since George H.W. Bush, in his 1989 inaugural address, said, "We have more will than wallet." Since then -- or, more likely, since Reagan -- we've prided ourselves on the notion that we're broke, that we can't afford to fix the roads and bridges, that we need a Simpson-Bowles commission to free us from our future Medicare and Social Security obligations, that our private businesses can't afford an increase in the minimum wage and our billionaires can't endure a tax hike.

This is now part of the American zeitgeist. Call it "national weakness conservatism" -- although it's not limited to conservatives, especially the Simpson-Bowles part.

Yes, we find money for wars and bank bailouts. Yes, we agreed to compensate the survivors of the 9/11 dead -- though a bill to compensate sick 9/11 first responders passed only because Republicans were shamed into the ending their opposition. And yes, we do compensate victims of natural disasters -- although that's often a battle, too, and I wonder what we'd do if tornadoes and hurricanes were largely a problem in blue states.

There are a lot of obvious reasons why we can't possibly have an adult conversation about reparations for African-Americans -- but our recent tendency to wallow in America's alleged poverty is a less obvious reason. We like thinking we're broke. It explains away our empathy fatigue.

ADAM SCHIFF IS TIRED OF TRYING TO REASON WITH YOU PEOPLE

Regarding Nancy Pelosi's decision to name five Democrats to the Benghazi committee instead of boycotting it, I agree with Charlie Pierce:

The idea of a Democratic boycott of the committee was politically maladroit and pragmatically stupid. It is going to be of paramount importance to have someone in there, the way Barney Frank and Robert Wexler were there on the Judiciary Committee when it was considering the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and the way Richard Ben-Veniste was there to demolish the entire premise of the phony Whitewater scandal a few years earlier. Without participating, the Democrats would have been conceding the development of the narrative to the Kangaroo Kaucus not only among the Beltway opinion elite, but out in the country as well. As it happens, that's where the case for impeaching Bill Clinton truly fell apart. The Democrats who participated in that particular series of charades from 1992-1998 did a lot to hijack the issue in the dim frontierland beyond Washington. In a situation like this, the Democrats have one advantage -- they can illustrate the essential absurdity of the exercise until the country gets heartily sick of it.

No, Pelosi didn't pick Alan Grayson, but she did pick Elijah Cummings, who's shown in his battles with Darrell Issa that he's Alan Grayson for grown-ups -- not a prankster, but a combatant who's thoughtful as well as relentless.

I think Tammy Duckworth is an appropriate choice -- she's an Iraq combat veteran and a double amputee. As far as I can tell, not one of the Republican members of the committee has ever seen combat. (Mike Pompeo of Kansas is the only one who's a veteran -- he's a West Point grad -- but for most of his military career, which lasted from 1986 to 1991, he "served with distinction as a cavalry officer in the U.S. Army, leading troops as they patrolled the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin wall," according to his campaign site.)

And then there's Adam Schiff, who's going to serve even though he made it clear two weeks ago, in a quiet way, that he has no patience for this:

Rep. Adam Schiff, California Democrat, said Sunday that it doesn't make sense for Democrats to give any more credibility to the newly-announced select committee on Benghazi than it deserves, "and frankly I don’t think it deserves very much."

"I think it's a colossal waste of time," Mr. Schiff said on "Fox News Sunday. "We've had four bipartisan investigations of this already."

Watch the clip. Without being Grayson-esque, Schiff does a fine job of communicating a simple message to Chris Wallace of Fox News: Enough already.





From the transcript:

WALLACE: Congressman Schiff, you have said that the Benghazi and you put it conspiracy theories are a terrible distraction from the real issue which is bringing the people who killed these four Americans to justice. Is this house committee part of that distraction? And how certain are you that Democrats will participate and put since it’s a select bipartisan committee, will put members on the committee?

REP. ADAM SCHIFF, D-CALIF., INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: Chris, I think it’s a colossal waste of time. We’ve had four bipartisan investigations of this already. And I think it's driven by a couple things. The Republican conference is so fractured, there's only two things they agree on, they don’t like ObamaCare and so, we've had 50 votes on that and they do like talking about Benghazi. So, we've had four investigations on that.

But I don't think it makes sense really for Democrats to participate. I think it's just a tremendous red herring and a waste of taxpayer resources. So, I hope the speaker will reconsider. But it looks like he has bowed again to those from the farthest right of his conference.

WALLACE: When you say you don’t think it makes sense for Democrats to participate, you’re saying that you think that the Democrats should not appoint anybody to the special committee and let it simply be Republicans holding this investigation?

SCHIFF: You know, that's what I recommend. I don't know whether leadership will ultimately decide. But I don't think it makes sense for us to give this select committee any more credibility than it deserves. Frankly, I don't think it deserves very much. We tread down this path so many times.

In terms of this Rhodes memo, if you look at this four-page Rhodes memo, there's only two sentences that pertain to Benghazi which track exactly what the CIA talking points were. So, it's very hard to use this memo as some kind of a justification.

That works for me.

RIGHT-WINGERS: WHO CARES IF WELFARE CAN SUCCEED IN PRACTICE? IT ALWAYS FAILS IN OUR THEORIES!

Fox Nation highlights a post from the wingnut blog BizPac Review about Ben Carson's recent appearance on The View.

Carson -- who's probably not really running for president, but is pretending he might run in order to promote a book -- launched into a lecture on welfare during the View appearance. Please note that one of his questioners, Whoopi Goldberg, was on welfare herself at one time.

Here's how BizPac's Joe Saunders describes the discussion:

Carson concluded the eight-minute appearance with a simple statement that demolished the premise of the American welfare state -- and the Obamacare leviathan emerging from it.

"When you rob someone of their incentive to go out there and improve themselves, you are not doing them any favors," Carson said, both drawing applause and causing visible discomfort on the panel led by star and former welfare mother Whoopi Goldberg.

There it is in two paragraphs -- the perfectly mixed toxic cocktail of modern conservatism. Saunders delights in Carson's declaration that welfare deprives its recipients of their initiative, even though this assertion was made to a panel led by a woman who became highly successful after being on welfare. Goldberg had a solo show on Broadway when she was 28 years old. She won an Oscar six and a half years later. Shes' won two Emmies, two Golden Globes, four People's Choice awards. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her career has spanned three decades.

But I guess welfare sapped her will to succeed. If she'd never been on welfare, she might have really had a thriving career!

These are America's right-wingers for you: Carson can sit in front of a highly successful former welfare recipient and declare that people like her are incapable of success, and have no qualms because he believes his Randian theories trump all inconvenient facts. And the author of this post can wallow deliciously in Goldberg's alleged shaming, and never consider the fact that, in this case in particular, the supposedly shaming argument makes absolutely no sense.

GOP ESTABLISHMENT WINS -- RALPH NADER, YOUR THOUGHTS?

As you may already know, the Republican Establishment curb-stomped the tea party yesterday:

Tuesday night was great for incumbents [and] the GOP establishment...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell defeated his GOP challenger in Kentucky by 25 percentage points.... In Georgia, a Senate Republican primary headed to a runoff with the two candidates favored by GOP establishment leaders. And in Oregon, pediatric neurosurgeon Monica Wehby fended off a more conservative challenger in her Republican primary....

After a year of threats from conservative outside groups, no GOP incumbents lost Tuesday. Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson beat back a tea partier supported by groups such as Club for Growth, with help from the business lobby and Mitt Romney. National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Greg Walden, targeted in Oregon by a national campaign called Primary My Congressman, received triple the support of his opponent with more than half the votes in. And House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster prevailed over his challenger in Pennsylvania by 18 points....

I know, I know -- in order to survive, Establishment Republicans had to become more teabaggy. But the tea party's threat to the business community -- particularly the eagerness to put the U.S. government into default -- was the line in the sand for the plutocrats.

Here's a corporatist tactic I wasn't aware of until now:

Businesses Turn Out Workers' Votes to Stomp Tea Party

Ben Tarbutton ... [is] part of a national effort by the business community to block the nominations of Tea Party-aligned contenders in Republican primaries.

Tarbutton, vice president at a railroad company in Sandersville, Georgia, is encouraging his company's 30 workers to cast ballots, and informing them that he supports U.S. Representative Jack Kingston, one of seven Republican candidates competing in today's U.S. Senate primary....

Tarbutton's get-out-the-vote push in Georgia is being mirrored inside companies in Kentucky, Idaho, Pennsylvania, Arkansas and Oregon, all states with congressional primaries....

From Kentucky construction companies helping employees take on volunteer campaign jobs to company-branded websites in Idaho that allow workers to look at side-by-side comparisons of candidates on issues important to their employers, businesses are introducing a variety of political programs to engage their workers in typically low-turnout primary races....

Eyes on the telescreens, workers.

(These efforts are "heavily regulated," according to a VP from the National Association of Manufacturers who's quoted in the story -- though I'm sure the Roberts court would be happy to look into changing that.)

****

As I was reading about all this, I was thinking about this guy:

... [In his] new book "Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State" ... longtime political activist and five-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader ... contends that ... a left-right alliance is not just the stuff of imagination but is actually emerging....

Nader expects there is going to be a growth of left-right alliances in Congress, pointing to ... bank regulatory efforts as [an area] of possibl[e] confluence....

But Nader qualified that the success of his envisioned left-right alliance is dependent on strong leaders. He said Sen. Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul, has the potential to be a leader for the alliance....

This is breathtakingly wrongheaded, in multiple ways I won't bother to enumerate. But yesterday's results reveal that both the Republican Party's backers and its rank-and-file voters are willing to jettison precisely the part of the tea party agenda that threatens business. That was the main reason fat-cat donors became alienated with the 'baggers, while voters don't seem to mind as long as folks like McConnell make 'baggy noises otherwise.

Of course, Nader's delusions notwithstanding, the tea party was never anti-business with progressive aims in mind -- tea partiers wanted a government default in order to start shrinking government and squeezing social programs. But imagine the fat-cat response if the 'baggers had really pursued a termination of Too Big to Fail or the end of corporate welfare. And what evidence is there that these are priorities for rank-and-file 'baggers?

On the one hand, as Elizabeth Warren says, the game is rigged by the rich -- even against the tea party. On the other hand, Republican voters don't care. Why wouldn't they be willing to cede control to the corporatists? The voters themselves are pro-corporatist.

So if you want change, Ralph, look elsewhere.

RIGHT-WINGERS FINALLY FIND A REASON TO CARE ABOUT THE VA SITUATION: IT'S ABOUT OBAMA, NOT VETERANS!

Jon Stewart started going after the Obama administration's management of the Veterans Administration a year ago; at around the same time, Paul Rieckhoff of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America made a number of appearances on Rachel Maddow's show to discuss the VA's problems. In the right-wing media? This was a nothingburger -- as desperate as conservatives were to find any stick to beat President Obama with, they gave this a pass. Why? Because liberals had beaten them to it? Because (as I hypothesized last week) the remedy in this case would be more government social spending, which is anathema to the right, even when it's on behalf of the troops?

Well, the right's lack of interest in this story is starting to change. The right is talking about the VA now. No, let me correct that: the right is talking about President Obama in relation to the VA. That's the hook. This isn't a scandal about mistreatment of veterans -- it's a scandal about Obama.

Here's the headline at Hot Air:

ABC, National Journal: White House fumbling VA scandal

Oh, perfect. (Veterans? What veterans?)

Meanwhile, David Martosko, the former Daily Caller editor hired by England's Daily Mail a while back to write conservative linkbait for U.S. readers, is going with this:

White House says Obama only learned of VA wait-list scandal on TV (just like the IRS, Fast and Furious and reporter snooping scandals)

And at The Washington Times?

He KNEW! Obama told of Veterans Affairs health care debacle as far back as 2008

Right-wingers don't give a damn about veterans who've been mistreated, any more than they give a damn about "four dead Americans" in Benghazi.

Jonah Goldberg is one of the rare right-wingers not to make this all about Obama -- but that's because, as Roy Edroso notes, Goldberg uses the VA's problems as an excuse to bash liberalism in the abstract, and to call for more privatization of government services.

(Says Roy of the VA's responsibilities: "Who's going to take them over, the guys who run the outsourced prison industry? As I've said before, normal people can easily imagine what a for-profit medical corporation would do with uninsured veterans -- shove their gurneys in the general direction of a county hospital, probably, or secretly grind them down into pet food.")

Modern conservatism has two aims: maximizing the amount of hate white voters have for all Democrats and liberals, and decreasing the amount of government rich people have to pay for. Fixing the VA, or otherwise ensuring the proper execution of any government function, will never be on this list.

RIGHT-WINGERS HAVE A PROBLEM IF YOU TELL YOUR UNCLE THAT HIS RACIST JOKE IS RACIST

Michelle Obama gave a speech on race over the weekend to a group of high school seniors in Topeka, Kansas, in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. She said something you might have thought would be non-controversial in 2014:

As you go forth, when you encounter folks who still hold the old prejudices because they've only been around folks like themselves, when you meet folks who think they know all the answers because they’ve never heard any other viewpoints, it’s up to you to help them see things differently.

And the good news is that you probably won’t have to bring a lawsuit or go all the way to the Supreme Court to do that. You all can make a difference every day in your own lives simply by teaching others the lessons you've learned here in Topeka.

Maybe that starts simply in your own family, when grandpa tells that off-colored joke at Thanksgiving, or you've got an aunt talks about "those people." Well, you can politely inform them that they're talking about your friends. (Applause.)

At Glenn Beck's Blaze, this comes out as follows:

Michelle Obama Would Like Students to Monitor Family Members for Racial Insensitivity

This has the right on liberal fascism high alert. Here's "veteran White House reporter" Keith Koffler at White House Dossier:

Michelle to Students: Police Grandpa's Speech

First Lady Michelle Obama Saturday counseled graduating seniors in Topeka, Kansas to tell their closest relatives to put a sock in it if they hear something they don't like....

That's the problem with big government liberals like Michelle. Ultimately, they think your business is their business.

And so they make policies that reflect this. They want to run your healthcare, decide what type of moral principles you must support, and so forth. And it won't be long before they'll tell you what grandpa can say to you over checkers.

Here's Jim Treacher at the Daily Caller:

Michelle Obama To High-School Grads: Monitor Your Parents For Thoughtcrime

There can be no aspect of your daily life that's removed from politics. Now you will be monitored by your own children for expressing unapproved opinions. You'd better watch what you say at the dinner table, Mom and Dad....

And then there's this from Clash Daily, a blog run by Doug Giles, the religious-right preacher daddy of James O'Keefe collaborator Hannah Giles:

MORE HELL FROM MICHELLE: MO Wants Students to Monitor Their Family for 'Racism'

Y'know, when it initially appeared that Donald Sterling was a Democrat, right-wingers were falling all over themselves to proclaim that the GOP is the Party of Lincoln and liberals and Democrats have cornered the market on racism, which all True Conservatives find utterly abhorrent.

But let Michelle Obama suggest that you chide a racist relative privately -- privately, without involving TMZ or the Justice Department or some other wing of the liberal Gestapo -- and right-wingers are appalled. Hey, I thought you were the guys who single-handedly passed the Civil Rights Act! Why, if I didn't know better, I'd think you were actually somewhat tolerant of racism!

Rev. Giles can't even bring himself to acknowledge that the First Lady's scenario could happen -- note that he puts "racism" in scare quotes, as if just claiming that it exists is one of those sinister ways libs try to deceive you.

And oddly, the original Blaze article that set all this in motion is fairly even-handed -- except for the title, which is shameless wingnut linkbait. But right-wingers can be set to frothing at the mouth even by a headline that's self-evidently misleading. Rage addiction will do that to you.

MAYBE THE DIFFERENCE IS THAT ELITES IN CHINA AND SINGAPORE AREN'T TRYING TO DESTROY THEIR OWN COUNTRIES

In today's column, David Brooks laments the decline of democracies in the West, while looking wistfully eastward and saying, Man, those guys may be autocrats, but they sure get their trains to run on time:

... In the U.S., Washington is polarized, stagnant and dysfunctional; a pathetic 26 percent of Americans trust their government to do the right thing. In Europe, elected officials have grown remote from voters, responding poorly to the euro crisis and contributing to massive unemployment.

... A new charismatic rival is gaining strength: the Guardian State.... In some ways, these governments look more progressive than the Western model; in some ways, more conservative.

In places like Singapore and China, the best students are ruthlessly culled for government service. The technocratic elites play a bigger role in designing economic life....

These Guardian States have some disadvantages compared with Western democracies. They are more corrupt. Because the systems are top-down, local government tends to be worse. But they have advantages. They are better at long-range thinking and can move fast because they limit democratic feedback and don't face NIMBY-style impediments....

It's never particularly surprising when Tories living in democracies find their hearts racing a bit faster as they gaze admiringly at an authoritarian state -- it's sort of like the good girl from a wealthy family daydreaming about a greaser on a motorbike.

But if you take Brooks's argument seriously, what's the difference here? He complains about the sclerosis in "democracy," but I'm not sure that word means what he thinks it means:

At the national level, American politics has become neurotically democratic. Politicians are campaigning all the time and can scarcely think beyond the news cycle. Legislators are terrified of offending this or that industry lobby, activist group or donor faction. Unrepresentative groups have disproportionate power in primary elections.

That's not democracy; that's corruption. Politicians aren't really "campaigning all the time" -- what they're really doing all the time is fund-raising. And I'm sure Brooks thinks the Sierra Club is as responsible for the long-term decline of Western democracies as Koch Industries, but I beg to differ.

Brooks laments American influence-group politics -- but he says countries like Singapore and China are corrupt, too. So what difference does it make how palms get greased?

I think the difference is that, in Singapore and China, what powerful interest groups want isn't allowed to trump the best interests of the nation. It seems to me that there's more of a sense that the powerful forces in business and government are trying to row in the same direction.

In America, by contrast, we'd benefit from more spending on education, more investment in infrastructure, a shift to a post-fossil-fuels energy mix, and the revival of our middle class. But our elite class doesn't want to take its foot off the necks of consumers, the fossil-fuel giants want to spread the mass delusion that climate change isn't happening, and the typical America fat cat doesn't care if the kids are stupid and the bridges are crumbling as long as his profits are secure. In short, our elites don't care if this country is destroyed -- and European central bankers seem to feel the same way about their countries.

Maybe I'm naive or poorly informed, but I don't see this in China and Singapore to the same extent. I don't know if it's patriotism exactly, but it certainly isn't the anti-patriotism of our elites. Our elites could demand that trains run on time, but they'd rather secure only what suits their own interests. The rest, as far as they're concerned, can rot.

NEWT GINGRICH IS ROOTING FOR EUROSOCIALIST COUNTRIES AND THE U.N.

A tweet from Newt:

European push could mean that driverless cars will hit the road sooner than expected. http://t.co/aDT3oFRqYz

— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) May 19, 2014

If you've followed Gingrich's career, you know he looks upon this development with eager anticipation, not alarm -- under that helmet of white hair lies the mind of a technophile 11-year-old.

But wait -- Gingrich is praising European countries? Those socialist warhorses?

Yup -- and not just European countries, but European countries working in conjunction with the United Nations:

Cars could be driving themselves down the world's streets far sooner than expected, thanks to a change in a global treaty backed by European countries.

A little-noticed amendment to the United Nations Convention on Road Traffic agreed last month would let drivers take their hands off the wheel of self-driving cars. It was pushed by Germany, Italy and France, whose high-end carmakers believe they are ready to zoom past American tech pioneers and bring the first "autonomous vehicles" to market.

... as the technology becomes more affordable, Europe's luxury automakers say they are well placed to take advantage of it because of their deeper experience in engineering, manufacturing, marketing and sales. There is no point in waiting while California upstarts catch up.

... moving from test drives to marketable products was held back by Article 8 of the 1968 Convention on Road Traffic, which stipulates: "Every driver shall at all times be able to control his vehicle or to guide his animals."

The amendment agreed last month by the U.N. Working Party on Road Traffic Safety would allow a car to drive itself, as long as the system "can be overridden or switched off by the driver"....

Germany! Italy! France! How is this possible when everyone knows that socialism crushes the will to innovate, as well as all other aspects of the human spirit?

Back in 2012, when he was running for president, Gingrich sneered at Europe for its, um, driving choices:

Gingrich ... lampooned the fuel-efficient Chevy Volt, and the prospect of generating energy from algae -- calling Obama "President Algae" and "President Food Stamps" -- and claimed that the 44th president is seeking "total power" to shape Americans' consumption habits.

"The President would like to force all of us into small vehicles," Gingrich alleged. "The President would like to force all of to do what he wants. He's president of the wrong country. ... He needs to move to Europe."

Apparently the driving in Europe is going to be more to Newt's taste soon.

RIGHT-WINGERS STILL THINK GODWIN'S LAW MEANS NAZI COMPARISONS ARE MANDATORY

* Ken Langone:

It turns out Ken Langone is not actually that sorry for comparing the fight against income inequality to the tactics employed by Nazis in the 1930s.

The billionaire founder of Home Depot had apologized shortly after making the comparison in March. But in an interview published Monday, Langone instead tried his best to defend those remarks.

“I pointed to the election in Germany in 1933 that brought Hitler to power," Langone told Capital New York. "He came to power through a totally democratic process. So I simply said that just because we’re a democracy that doesn’t mean we can't do bad things!" ...

* AFDI, a group run by Pam Geller and Robert Spencer:

A controversial anti-Islamic ad campaign will appear on the side of buses in Washington D.C. featuring the face of Adolf Hitler.

The advert will be on 20 metro buses and depict a meeting between the leader of Nazi Germany and anti-Jewish Islamic leader Haj Amin al -Husseini during World War II....

* Rush Limbaugh:

RUSH: Reuters also has a story here: "Top Aide Says Obama 'Madder Than Hell' About Veterans Allegations," and it's a story quoting what you just heard -- the chief of staff, Denis McDonough -- on Slay the Nation yesterday. (paraphrased) "We're gonna get to the bottom of this! We're gonna get to the bottom of this and we're gonna fix it, and we're gonna ensure that it doesn't happen again!"

Now, this is classic. This is exactly how stuff like this gets spun ("spinned," for those of you in Rio Linda) in dictatorships and in totalitarian states since time immemorial. For example, "Gosh, if Lenin only knew all these people are dying in Ukraine! God, if Lenin only knew, he'd be so mad that he wouldn't let this happen! If Stalin only knew!"

He was the genocidal dictator.

"If Stalin only knew! If Hitler only knew what was being done on his watch? Oh, my! Oh, gee! What if he only knew? If Castro finds out, oh, no! Who's gonna have to tell Castro that this is not working? Oh, no!" And then when the problem becomes too big to ignore, we hear, "Boy, is Stalin mad now! Boy, is Castro really mad now!" (Transcript from RushLimbaugh.com)

This is defining totalitarianism down. Do right-wingers believe that everything they hate is the moral equivalent of Hitler, or is almost like Hitler, or has the potential to be like Hitler? Geller probably does; the rest, in all likelihood, not.

They don't care. It gets the rubes riled up, and it gets up our noses. And the gatekeepers in the mainstream press would rather wring their hands over a few canceled commencement speeches than over routine group slander directed leftward.

SHOCK POLL: VOTERS IN MOSTLY REPUBLICAN STATES AND DISTRICTS LEAN REPUBLICAN

This is being reported as horrible news for Democrats:

... Republicans have captured a lead in the areas home to the year’s most competitive races, according to a new POLITICO poll.

In the congressional districts and states where the 2014 elections will actually be decided, likely voters said they would prefer to vote for a Republican over a Democrat by 7 points, 41 percent to 34 percent. A quarter of voters said they were unsure of their preference....

While this isn't good news for Democrats, I question how dire it is. Go to the fine print of the poll data and you learn that 68 House districts were surveyed. Of those, a majority -- 36 -- are already represented by Republicans.





So in a sample of districts that's 6% more Republican than Democratic -- 53% Republican, 47% Democrat -- Republicans have, um, a 7-point lead. Forgive me if I'm not horrified.

The Senate battleground states are a lot more problematic for Democrats -- in 14 of the 16 races, the current senator is a Democrat.





But it's long been known that this would be a challenging year in the Senate, because Democrats are defending seats in red states (Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota, West Virginia) and a couple of purple states (North Carolina, Virginia). You'd have to be really naive to think that Democrats won't lose seats. They just have to avoid losing six or more to hold the Senate.

But why ask a generic ballot question about a Senate race anyway? Despite party sentiment, a lot of Democrats are surprisingly competitive in red states -- Mark Begich in Alaska, Mark Pryor in Arkansas, Michelle Nunn in Georgia, Alison Grimes in Kentucky, Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, Kay Hagan in North Carolina. Don't voters already know the candidates in these races? If so, why ask about unnamed Democrat vs. unnamed Republican?

So the poll is bad. But it's not as awful as it appears on the surface.

CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION -- AND IF IT'S NOT CONSPICUOUS ENOUGH, THEY'LL RUB YOUR FACE IN IT

In New York City, developers who want to put up luxury apartment buildings sometimes reserve a certain number of units for middle-income tenants paying lower, stabilized rents, which can rise only a set amount each year. The developers do this not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because it entitles them to a sweet tax break.

And then, as The New York Times notes, this often happens:

When a playroom opened in Michael Reilly's Upper West Side building two years ago, he asked the concierge for a key to the space so his toddler could play there. The concierge's answer stunned him: It was out of bounds to him and his child.

Mr. Reilly's building, the Windermere West End, a luxury rental, is one of several in the city that prohibit rent-regulated tenants from using new services like gyms, playrooms and rooftop gardens. Some co-op and condo buildings have similar restrictions.

Developers say amenities are a marketing tool to lure high-paying tenants....

In recent years, developers who have earned tax credits by promising to provide affordable housing have built luxury condos with separate entrances and lobbies for the affordable rental units. The so-called "poor door" makes it easier to restrict who gets access to amenities....

At the Windermere, tenants living in the nearly 140 rent-regulated apartments have been barred from using the new spa with a pool, yoga studio and gym. As part of a $10 million renovation, Stellar Management is also adding a sky lounge, a bar and planters to the roof. Rent-regulated tenants, who pay about $1,000 a month for a one-bedroom, had socialized on the roof for years, but will no longer be allowed to use it when construction is complete....

I don't know where this falls on your injustice scale. The separate-entrances thing strikes me as the creepiest -- it's not quite Jim Crow, but it's as if these developers want it to be.

Over at The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson notices something similar going on in air travel. At one end of the income spectrum, you've got this:

According to a New York Times story on business travel that ran earlier this month, "the average seat pitch -- the industry standard for the space between two seats, currently about 31 inches -- has been reduced by about 10 percent over the last decade. Airlines are also using slimmer economy seats that allow them to add more rows and passengers on their planes."

... Spirit [Air] charges its benumbed passengers a fee for their carry-on bags, $3 for water and $10 for printing out boarding passes, and has seats that, by design, don't recline.... And yet Spirit thrives as the 99-cent store of air travel, because it's an airline that the downsized working class can afford.

And at the other end, there's this:

A first-class ticket on Emirates Air from Los Angeles to Dubai entitles you to a private compartment -- complete with a sliding door, a lie-flat seat and mattress, a vanity, a minibar, a flat-screen TV and luxury bathroom with shower -- for a tidy $32,840. Korean Air has installed what the New York Times describes as a "spacious lounge" with fully equipped bar in the first-class sections of its planes. Delta will provide flat-beds for their first-class and business passengers on all their New York to L.A. flights starting this summer. Virgin Atlantic provides private limousine service to and fro airports for their first-class passengers. Not to be outdone, Lufthansa has built an entire separate terminal for its first-classers at the Frankfurt airport, from which they are carried by limousine across the tarmac to their planes. Delta and United whisk their first-class passengers to connecting flights in Porsches and Mercedes, respectively.

Even the air within the plane is apportioned by class. In its first-class cabins, Lufthansa has installed humidifiers that increase the humidity to 25 percent, while in coach, it ranges from 5 to 10 percent.

Are these First World problems? Sure. But still, they're a sign that business is abandoning any expectation of making money in the future from a broad middle class. And clearly no one in the upper brackets cares any more about the conspicuousness of their own consumption. The middle class is expected to feel deprived. That seems to be the point.

TRIGGER WARNING: AMBIVALENCE ON TRIGGER WARNINGS

Trigger Warning: all human experience.

— Darinstrauss (@Darinstrauss) May 18, 2014

The New York Times has a story today about campus activists who are pressing colleges for trigger warnings:

Should students about to read "The Great Gatsby" be forewarned about "a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence," as one Rutgers student proposed? Would any book that addresses racism -- like "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" or "Things Fall Apart" -- have to be preceded by a note of caution? Do sexual images from Greek mythology need to come with a viewer-beware label?

Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as "trigger warnings," explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans.

The warnings, which have their ideological roots in feminist thought, have gained the most traction at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where the student government formally called for them. But there have been similar requests from students at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, George Washington University and other schools....

This issue splits the left: on Twitter there's a lot of liberal scorn, as well as equal scorn for the scornful (the pro-warning argument is that the notifications are small and easily ignored by people who don't need them).

My gut reaction to trigger warnings is negative -- and yet I see the appropriateness of being sensitive to survivors of war, sexual violence, childhood abuse, and so on.

I think I'm resistant because of the way trigger warnings are often done. Online, a trigger warning tends to precede content in a way that stops the presentation of that content dead in its tracks for a moment. It's a HERE BE MONSTERS sign everyone has to pass under before getting to the content.

And where trigger warnings are in place, there often seems to be a sort of mission creep. After a while, the warnings aren't just about the sort of material that might recall violent trauma a reader might have experienced; they're about, well, everything bad in the world.

This is why I avoid Melissa McEwan's Shakesville, which I used to read regularly. Go there and you'll see trigger warnings like this:





Seriously? For a post titled "Brown v. Board of Ed" you need a warning that it's going to discuss racism and segregation? And are these, and class warfare, actual psychological triggers likely to induce post-traumatic stress? Graphic depictions or descriptions of civil-rights-era violence, sure -- those might benefit from a warning. But there's nothing of the sort in the linked post. Why is a warning appropriate?

Ultimately, I think the prominent display of this sort of thing runs the risk of turning traumatization into the new gluten sensitivity. Yes, some people actually suffer post-traumatic reactions to certain content, just as some people actually have celiac disease and need to avoid gluten to safeguard their physical health. But gluten avoidance has become a food fad -- and putting a HERE BE MONSTERS frame around writing and art may become an academic fad, as more and more people express sensitivities they don't really have, or assume sensitivities in people who haven't actually expressed them.

My solution: generate the warnings and make them available on request and online. Make them easy to find for anyone who needs them -- but underplay them. I think it's good that people with nut allergies can find allergen notices by reading side-panel labels on packaged foods. I think it's also good when the rest of us find them easy to ignore. That's the right balance.

YES, FOX IS STILL FLOGGING PRESCRIPTION GLASSES-GATE

No, Fox isn't dropping this -- you didn't think anyone there was capable of shame, did you?





It's at Fox Nation, too, of course.

From the story:

A New York ophthalmologist told FoxNews.com that special glasses former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was seen wearing last year are used to treat double vision, which is sometimes caused by severe head trauma.

Dr. Marc Werner explained the purpose of the Fresnel prism eyeglasses, like the ones Clinton wore, amid questions about the potential presidential candidate's health....

"Any issue which raises intracranial pressure can damage one of the nerves which moves the eye around, and if it damages one of the nerves, your eyes will be misaligned -- maybe temporarily, maybe more permanently," Werner said....

When asked what he might look for given the chance to see Clinton's medical records, Dr. Werner said he would want to examine imaging studies.

"I would like to know what the results of any imaging studies were and the cause of why someone needed Fresnel," Werner said. "There are lots of different causes, anything from Myasthenia to Multiple Sclerosis to maybe a blood clot, these are all possible causes, but all we know is that she was using a Fresnel prism and therefore had double vision."

Jesus -- multiple sclerosis. Hope you got a sweet paycheck for that bit of insinuation, Doc. "Maybe more permanently" was choice, too.

(Well, it beats the American Thinker, which is asking whether Hillary suffered a stroke.)

Steven Galetta, a neuro-ophthalmologist interviewed by The Washington Post this past week, said concussion victims generally recover quickly, though some show symptoms even after a year.

But, um, Hillary isn't wearing the glasses anymore in public appearances. However, the people who won't let go of Benghazi sure as hell aren't going to let go of this, even if they propaganda goes over equally poorly with non-wingnuts.

THIS IS WHAT THE TEA PARTY WOULD HAVE BEEN LIKE WITHOUT FOX AND THE KOCH BROTHERS (PART II)

The utter failure of Operation American Spring -- which drew a tiny crowd in D.C. yesterday instead of the 10 million or 30 million or however-the-hell-many million its organizers hoped to draw for a demonstration intended to purge the U.S. government of all its insufficiently wingnutty leaders (McConnell and Boehner as well as Obama, Pelosi, Holder, et al.) -- can be explained a lot of ways, but I think danps at Corrente is right about this:

... it looks like the only way the Tea Party gets real numbers in DC is if the Koch brothers charter buses for the event. Not very grassrootsy!

That's a point I made in one of the most-read posts ever on this blog -- or, to be accurate, most hate-read. The post, from last August, was titled "This Is What the Tea Party Would Have Been Like Without Fox and the Koch Brothers"; it discussed, um, a sparsely attended demonstration at which many embarrassing arguments and assertions were made. Why weren't the crowds at that demonstration bigger? Why were the messages so embarrassing? (Then it was racism; at OAS it was chemtrails and rumored FEMA roundups.) I said that it was because deep-pocketed pros weren't helping out with message guidance or money or publicity; in the absence of that, the fearsomely large, allegedly grassroots tea party was just an absurdly small collection of haters and cranks.

This didn't go over well with the 'baggers, as you'll see if you scroll through the 619 comments at that post, or the 171 comments at a follow-up post. (I'm not sure how they found what I'd written, but I was the hottest thing on wingnut Facebook for a while.)

The demonstration I was writing about was sponsored by a group then known as Overpasses for Obama's Impeachment, and now known as Overpasses for America. To state the obvious, the group focuses on hanging signs over overpasses demanding the president's removal from office. And, well, what do you know: Overpasses and Operation American Spring are allies:

Overpasses for America is teaming up with Operation American Spring to deliver "Articles of Impeachment" to the House and Senate on April 22, before a planned rally in Washington D.C. on May 16, Overpasses for America founder James Neighbors told the Examiner....

Failure loves company, I guess.

Here's the horrible, Journey-esque music video posted at the Overpasses site in honor of Operation American Spring. (UPDATE: Sorry, folks -- as the only person on the planet who hasn't yet embraced the nerd/sci-fi/ComicCon culture onslaught of the past few decades, I didn't realize that this is the theme to Star Trek: Enterprise. It's still horrible and Journey-esque.)

RACIST NEW HAMPSHIRE POLICE COMMISSIONER -- MITT ROMNEY, YOUR THOUGHTS?
(updated with Romney's response)

I'm still waiting for Mitt Romney to get asked about this:

WOLFEBORO, N.H. -- A police commissioner in a predominantly white New Hampshire town said he won't apologize for calling President Barack Obama the N-word, and he sat with his arms crossed while angry residents at a meeting called for his resignation on Thursday....

Wolfeboro Police Commissioner Robert Copeland, who's 82 and white, has acknowledged in an email to his fellow police commissioners he used the racial slur in describing Obama.

Town resident Jane O'Toole, who moved to Wolfeboro four months ago, said she overheard Copeland say the slur at a restaurant in March and wrote to the town manager about it. Copeland, in an email to her, acknowledged using the slur in referring to the president and said he will not apologize....

Mitt Romney's been going to Wolfeboro since his father brought him there when he was a child. Mitt and his wife have owned a summer home there since 1997.

Now, you know that if anything happens anywhere in America that involves black people, Barack Obama gets asked about it. He was asked about Donald Sterling in Malaysia, where he was meeting with the prime minister. So why can't somebody get a comment out of Romney about this situation, given the fact that it's happening in a town where Romney actually pays property taxes?

(I assume Romney pays property taxes there. Who knows? Quite possibly he's found a clever way to avoid doing that.)

It's not as if Romney has gone reclusive on us since 2012 -- he can certainly find his way to a microphone or a camera when he wants to flog his documentary (here he is making a surprise appearance at Sundance), or when he wants to troll President Obama regarding Russia policy, or when he decides to needle Harry Reid childishly by pretending he had to stand in line at the post office in order to pay his taxes. So why can't the news media get a comment from him about this?

If you care, here's Romney chatting with Jimmy Fallon this past January about the swell time they're going to have eating burgers together in Wolfeboro this summer. This was during the publicity tour for the documentary. (Fallon also spends time in Wolfeboro -- hey, Jimmy, what are your thoughts?)





****

UPDATE: OK, good for Mitt:

The Wolfeboro, N.H., police commissioner who has stood by his comment calling President Obama a racial slur is facing a growing cascade of calls to step down, including from the tiny lakeside town’s most famous summer resident — one-time Obama opponent Mitt Romney.

"The vile epithet used and confirmed by the commissioner has no place in our community," the former Bay State governor, who owns a home in the popular Granite State vacation spot, said in a statement to the Herald. "He should apologize and resign."

HEY, KIDS, LET'S WATERBOARD TIMOTHY EGAN

New York Times columnist Timothy Egan certainly shouldn't object too harshly to being waterboarded because, in his zeal to defend Condoleezza Rice's inalienable right to earn $35,000 for a commencement speech over any and all objections from the graduating class being addressed, he writes this:

The foreign policy that Rice guided for George W. Bush -- two wars on the credit card, making torture a word associated with the United States -- was clearly a debacle. Contemporary assessments were not kind, and history will be brutal.

But if every speaker has to pass a test for benign mediocrity and politically correct sensitivity, commencement stages will be home to nothing but milquetoasts. You want torture? Try listening to the Stanford speech of 2009, when Justice Anthony M. Kennedy gave an interminable address on the intricacies of international law, under a broiling sun, with almost no mention of the graduates.

So go ahead and waterboard Egan, because he thinks it would be less painful than sitting in the California sun listening to a dull speech.

This appears in Egan's column -- titled "The Commencement Bigots" -- a few paragraphs after the following masterpiece of false equivalence:

Near as I can tell, the forces of intolerance objected to [Rice's] role in the Iraq war. O.K. And by shutting her down, the point is ... what? That extremism, whether in the climate-denial echo chamber of Republican Party elites or in the fragile zone of college faculty lounges, is the worst enemy of free speech.

Right -- objectors who prevented Rice from delivering one speech are analogous to Republicans who, on an ongoing basis, are blocking virtually all federal efforts to address a world-historic climate crisis. Yup, that makes sense.

Egan's remedy for all this commencement fascism?

Give me a brisk, strong, witty defense of something I disagree with over a tired replay of platitudes. It matters little if the speaker is a convict or a seminarian, a statesman or a comedian.

Yeah, there you go. Enough of this intellectual pabulum -- let's mix it up! Let's get some commencement speakers who'll really challenge these overprivileged snotnoses! Send Ted Nugent to Virginia Tech! Dispatch Donald Sterling to Howard University, or maybe George Zimmerman! And at Brandeis, in place of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, why not see if we can bail out Frazier Glenn Miller? It would be better than (ick! ptui!) political correctness, right?

SHOCKINGLY, KIRSTEN POWERS OMITS A FEW FACTS

It's a day ending in "-day," so pseudo-Democrat and professional concern troll Kirsten Powers is denouncing liberals for intolerance again, this time in USA Today:

Welcome to the Dark Ages, Part II. We have slipped into an age of un-enlightenment where you fall in line behind the mob or face the consequences.

How ironic that the persecutors this time around are the so-called intellectuals. They claim to be liberal while behaving as anything but. The touchstone of liberalism is tolerance of differing ideas. Yet this mob exists to enforce conformity of thought and to delegitimize any dissent from its sanctioned worldview. Intolerance is its calling card.

Each week seems to bring another incident. Last week it was David and Jason Benham, whose pending HGTV show was canceled after the mob unearthed old remarks the brothers made about their Christian beliefs on homosexuality. People can't have a house-flipping show unless they believe and say the "right" things in their life off the set?

First of all, I love the reference to "old remarks," as if these were comments from the distant past that no longer reflect the brothers' beliefs. The remarks were from ... 2012. And when they were brought to light, the brothers -- or at least David Benham, who is the real ideological combatant of the two -- went on a right-wing media tour and said that, hell yes, he stands by those "old remarks."

Oh, and David Benham's "Christian beliefs on homosexuality" include the belief that homosexuality is analogous to Nazism. He's not very fond of Muslims, either, or particularly tolerant himself, if you're pro-choice.
Right Wing Watch quoted this 2012 blog post by David Benham:

... if evil is being accepted and appreciated at the national level, aggressive Christian men must lead the charge against it. In the late 1940's England realized this truth with Neville Chamberlain's Policy of Appeasement and the Nazi regime. Chamberlain thought he could somehow "appease" the fuehrer, yet Winston Churchill aggressively stood against this policy and proclaimed that they must kill Hitler and destroy the regime in its entirety. It wasn't long before Chamberlain's "politically correct" policy fell flat on its face, and Churchill -- the more aggressive man -- took the reins and joined America in defeating the beast called, Naziism [sic].

Also:

David also leads protests outside of abortion clinics where he praises demonstrators for taking a stand at "the gates of hell" and confronting the "altars of Moloch."

And Right Watch Watch refers us to this report by the ADL (yes, the ADL is part of the "liberal mob"):

David Benham, Flip Benham's son and an OSA spokesman, called the [proposed Park51] Islamic center [in lower Manhattan] a "den of iniquity," and referred to Muslims as "the enemy attacking" America. Benham, portraying the United States as a Christian nation, also drew this distinction: "The difference between Islam and Christianity: Islam takes life and enslaves it. Christianity lays its life down and sets you free." The day prior to the demonstration, OSA released a statement asserting that seeks to convert Muslims who are "enslaved in the tyrannical bondage of Islam" to Christianity.

Benham has defended his remarks in the right-wing media since they were revealed, asserting that his anti-gay sentiments are merely his attempt to fight "the evil that's enslaving people," which, as the brothers assert, is the work of Satan.

But liberals who have a problem with all this are the intolerant ones.

*****

Powers goes on to offer a rather selective reading of the worldview of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose honorary degree from Brandeis has been withdrawn:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is persona non grata at Brandeis University for attacking the prophet Mohammed. But Richard Dawkins describes the Old Testament God as "a misogynistic ... sadomasochistic ... malevolent bully" and the mob yawns. Bill Maher calls the same God a "psychotic mass murderer" and there are no boycott demands of the high-profile liberals who traffic his HBO show.

Well, of course, there are quite a few folks out there who've called for a boycott of Bill Maher -- but they're not liberals, so, to Powers, they can't be intolerant.

But let's go back to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Were progressives at Brandeis upset because she "attack[s] the prophet Mohammed"? No. They're upset because she calls for a war with Islam -- all of it:

David Cohen quotes Ms. Hirsi Ali as saying: "Violence is inherent in Islam -- it's a destructive, nihilistic cult of death. It legitimates murder. The police may foil plots and freeze bank accounts in the short term, but the battle against terrorism will ultimately be lost unless we realise that it's not just with extremist elements within Islam, but the ideology of Islam itself....Islam is the new fascism" (London Evening Standard, 2-7-07).... Van Bakel notes religions' ability to bring about change for good: "Do you think Islam could bring about similar social and political changes?" Ms. Hirsi Ali responds, "Only if Islam is defeated." Van Bakel asks, "Don't you mean defeating radical Islam?" To that she responds, "No. Islam, period." (Reason, 11-07)

Every Muslim on earth is the enemy -- but to Powers, if you have a problem with that viewpoint, you're intolerant.

*****

One final Powers quote:

In March, University of California-Santa Barbara women's studies professor Mireille Miller-Young attacked a 16-year-old holding an anti-abortion sign in the campus' "free speech zone" (formerly known as America). Though she was charged with theft, battery and vandalism, Miller-Young remains unrepentant and still has her job.

Odd that Powers would somehow neglect to mention that the "anti-abortion sign" in question was a large, graphic photograph of an aborted fetus, clearly designed to provoke. That doesn't justify Professor Miller-Young's decision to walk off with the poster -- but she is up on charges. Is everyone who responds in a similar way to graphic aborted-fetus pictures a thuggish fascist? Facebook banned ex-Saturday Night Live star Victoria Jackson for posting a similar picture. TV stations are required to air political ads featuring aborted fetuses if they're from legitimate candidates for office, but if not, the ads can be blocked. Is that intolerance, too?

Y'know, if I didn't know better, I'd think Kirsten Powers was deliberately omitting this information in order to make the moral balance seem one-sided. Oh, but she wouldn't really do that, would she?

IN WHICH I DISAGREE WITH A WHEELCHAIR-BOUND GUN CONTROL ADVOCATE WHO'S REGULARLY HARASSED BY GUN EXTREMISTS

Mark Follman of Mother Jones has written a post about advocates of loose gun laws who harass female gun control advocates. They stalk. They make death threats. They threaten rape.

Here's what Follman tells us about one victim of these men:

AS JENNIFER LONGDON STEERED her wheelchair through the Indianapolis airport on April 25, she thought the roughest part of her trip was over. Earlier that day she'd participated in an emotional press conference with the new group Everytown for Gun Safety, against the backdrop of the National Rifle Association's annual meeting. A mom, gun owner, and Second Amendment supporter, Longdon was paralyzed in 2004 after being shot in her car by unknown assailants, and has since been a vocal advocate for comprehensive background checks and other gun reforms.

As Longdon sat waiting for her flight, a screen in the concourse showed footage of the press conference. A tall, thin man standing nearby stared at Longdon, then back at the screen. Then he walked up to Longdon and spat in her face....

Longdon is no stranger to such attacks. Last May in her hometown of Phoenix, she helped coordinate a gun buyback program with local police over three weekends. On the first Saturday, a group of men assembled across the street from the church parking lot where Longdon was set up....

Some of them approached Longdon. "You know what was wrong with your shooting?" one said. "They didn't aim better." Another man came up, looked Longdon up and down and said, "I know who you are." Then he recited her home address....

After a fundraiser one night during the program, Longdon returned home around 10 p.m., parked her ramp-equipped van and began unloading herself. As she wheeled up to her house, a man stepped out of the shadows. He was dressed in black and had a rifle, "like something out of a commando movie," Longdon told me. He took aim at her and pulled the trigger. Longdon was hit with a stream of water. "Don't you wish you had a gun now, bitch?" he scoffed before taking off.

"It was like a mock execution," Longdon says....

The fact that Longdon soldiers on after abuse like this puts me in awe of her bravery.

But I have a disagreement with her.

The majority of gun owners in America are good people, she adds. "I wish that more responsible gun owners would step into this conversation and say 'Look, those guys don't speak for us.'"

No, she's wrong. The majority of gun owners in America are not good people, and she just told us why. They don't speak out about this. They don't distance themselves from people like this.

Now, I understand that a lot of ordinary gun owners don't know that this kind of intimidation is taking place. But there's been plenty of publicity lately for acts of garden-variety intimidation -- the guy who defiantly waved a gun near a Little League field, or people having a brandish-in at a Starbucks in Newtown, Connecticut. When are supposedly decent, well-meaning gun owners going to put some distance between themselves and people who do things like that?

Follman's article quotes a couple of gun advocates who seem to have a problem with all this, but the problem they have is that they don't think it's good for them strategically:

Some staunch advocates of expansive gun rights recognize that this kind of bullying is bad for the movement. In March, a talk radio host and self-described gun enthusiast in Wisconsin called the "in your face open-carry playbook" tactics "perfectly legal, and perfectly stupid." After the Arlington restaurant incident, the editor of BearingArms.com wrote that Open Carry Texas had achieved "a public relations disaster."

The latter is a reference to an incident in which forty members of Open Carry Texas "armed with assault rifles showed up outside an Arlington, Texas, restaurant where four women from Moms Demand Action were having lunch." That's not a "public relations disaster" -- that's thuggery. If members of the gun community won't say so -- if they continue to look the other way -- then, no, they're not good people.

THE VA'S PROBLEMS REALLY ARE A SCANDAL. WHY HASN'T THE GOP MADE THE VA THE NEW BENGHAZI/IRS/OBAMACARE?

The right-wing noise machine has spent the Obama years flooding the zone with angry talk about so-called scandals. Three have gotten the most attention by far: Obamacare and its real or imagined shortcomings, the IRS and its real or imagined persecution of right-wiong groups, and, of course, Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!

Meanwhile, the Veterans Administration really has been falling down on the job -- yet the VA's problems have never become the obsession of the right the way Obamacare, the IRS, and Benghazi have.

Why? Why aren't Republican candidates in the midterms making huge ad buys to run commercials about the VA's failings? Why aren't there multiple House committees staging endless investigations of the VA's problems, with documents gleefully leaked to friendly news operations every time there's a lull in the news cycle? Why isn't Fox running several segments on the VA every night? Why hasn't Eric Shinseki become Public Enemy No. 1, like Lois Lerner or Kathleen Sebelius?

Is it because the problems didn't originate with the Obama administration? Well, the economic collapse of 2008 happened on George W. Bush's watch, and Republicans have gotten very good at arguing that Obama is a whiner who blames Bush for everything.

Is it because it's a reminder that many of the servicemembers in need got to where they are because of unpopular Bush wars? But Benghazi is an indirect reminder that America's relations with the Arab-Muslim world worsened as a result of Bush's bungled wars -- and of the fact that Bush failed to focus on Al Qaeda after 9/11.

I think Cui bono? applies here.

Who would benefit if the right-wing "wins" the IRS scandal? Obviously, the victors would be billionaire political movers and shakers, who would be even freer than they are now to manipulate elections. Most of these billionaires would be Republican, of course.

Who benefits if the right triumphs on Obamacare? Either we go back to the status quo ante -- no guaranteed coverage for those with expensive preexisting conditions and so on -- or we shift to the GOP's wish list: tort reform that effectively makes it impossible for ordinary citizens to file medical lawsuits; insurance sold across state lines (which will all be sold out of one or two states that pass extremely industry-friendly laws); medical savings accounts and voucherized Medicare (which will shift more of the health care burden to individuals, who'll be told it's their fault if they can't cover their expenses). In other words, a big win for Big Medicine.

Who would benefit from a GOP triumph on Benghazi? The message would be that Obama is weak and Republicans stand up for America when it's threatened by evil brown people. That's music to the ears of neocons and defense contractors.

Now: who'd be the beneficiaries if Republicans went wall-to-wall on the VA's failings and the resulting scandal actually led to improvements in how the VA does business?

Well, veterans, obviously -- and you'd think right-wingers would want to play to veterans, and to others who are pro-military. But fixing the VA would cost money -- and while it might be argued that the VA's problems can't be solved just by throwing money at them, they certainly can't be solved without money. Lots of it.

And that would be social spending -- social spending on veterans, to be sure, but social spending nonetheless. The billionaires who fund the GOP don't want that. The chickenhawk neocons who dominate Republican foreign policy thinking want to fight wars, but they don't give a crap about the people who actually do that fighting.

And, ultimately, the right isn't going to go Full Metal VA because right-wingers don't really want any government social-service agency to function properly. Heaven forbid that Americans start believing in the ability of government to solve problems, not just create them.

So here's a scandal handed to the right on a silver platter. And the right doesn't really care. Yes, Shinseki is on the hot seat today. But wake me when every D.C. news story is described by the right as an attempt to distract us from the VA scandal.

IT'S ALWAYS OUR FAULT

I don't really have a fresh take on this New York Times/Jill Abramson story. The claim by Ken Auletta of The New Yorker that she got rosswise with top management in part because she was perceived as "pushy," and especially because she complained the discrepancy between her pay and that of her male predecessor, seems significant, especially when statements from a Times spokesperson's account of those discrepancies kept changing (we were told that Abramson's compensation "was not less" than Bill Keller's, then that it "was not meaningfully less," then that it was "directly comparable," whatever the hell that means. The Times itslf says she was trying to hire a co-managing editor to work alongside Dean Baquet, the subordinate who'll now succeed her, and didn't Baquet. Is consultthat "pushy"? Yeah -- the way a lot of male bosses are.

I've seen nothing but scorn for the Times from online liberals. But I think Adam Serwer nailed it:

Preview of the next week of writing on this: Liberals say sexism is real, conservatives say liberals are the real sexists.

— AdamSerwer (@AdamSerwer) May 14, 2014

Yup -- looky here, it's Allahpundit at Hot Air:

... if you've been wondering what that mysterious smell is this afternoon, there's your answer: It's a Category Five sh*tstorm on the horizon, moving at ferocious speed towards America's most famous liberal newspaper.

No need to pop the popcorn. I've made plenty. Behold the war on women....

In the interest of making this as miserable as possible for the Times, I'm calling it sexism. Straight up.

... deliciously schadenfreudean....

Right -- the Times falling short on liberal ideals is so disillusioning to us because we've never, ever had reason to criticize the paper until now. Oh, and the fact that an institution we find more or less compatible with our principles could be run by suits who violate those principles? It never occurred to us before!

Fortunately, the right won't spend much time on this -- there are new IRS and Benghazi non-stories to flog! So this moment will pass.