The difference between MSNBC and Fox News

Whereas Fox News’ bread-and-butter is criticizing President Obama, the liberals at MSNBC … criticize President Obama:

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.”

While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about health care, civil liberties and other issues.

“I don’t think our audience is looking for unequivocal ‘rah-rah,’ ” said Ms. Maddow, who calls herself a liberal but not a Democrat.

Truth be told, I can barely watch Keith Olbermann. I find Maddow more palatable, but not enough to catch her show every night. But MSNBC isn’t just the leftward version of Fox News; it has conservative hosts on its air, and its liberals are more willing to go after one of their own.

What did tea partiers accomplish in NY-23?

That’s the topic of my column this week with Ben Boychuk. To recap: “tea party” conservatives in that New York congressional district managed to drive a moderate Republican out of the race — and ended up handing the seat to a Democrat in a district that has long sent the GOP to congress. As I write in the column, we’ve seen this story before:

For a good idea of what tea party activism might accomplish, take a good look at Kansas.

It’s about as Republican a state as they come. It last went for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1964. And the GOP has 300,000 more registered voters than its Democratic rivals. But the state’s governor is a Democrat. So is the attorney general.

How in the heck did that happen? Easy. The Republican Party in Kansas tore itself in two, between center-right “moderates” and conservative true believers. The infighting has been going on for more than a decade, leaving voters alienated and giving Democrats opportunities for electoral wins in a state they have no business contesting.

That looks similar to events in New York. The district there had sent moderate Republicans to Congress forever — its last congressman, John McHugh , crossed party lines to work as President Obama’s Secretary of the Army. But when the GOP establishment picked a similarly centrist Republican to run for office, the tea party folks rebelled and backed a different candidate. Who lost.

The tea party movement started as the biggest expression of sore loserdom in America’s recent political history. George W. Bush had expanded “socialized medicine” — in the form of the new Medicare drug benefit — and turned a budget surplus into a deep deficit. Yet the tea partiers only took to the streets when a Democrat was elected president. It’s not difficult to figure out what motivated them.

So the fact that tea partiers are now holding Republicans to account is refreshing. But parties that insist on ideological purity are usually losers at the ballot box; Democrats began their recent comeback when centrists like Sens. Jim Webb and Bob Casey joined their cause. Tea partiers should heed the lesson if they want to win.

More of Victor Davis Hanson’s highfalutin’ neener-neenerism (And yes: He’s still a conservative Maureen Dowd)

Some commenters were mad that I equated National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson with the execrable Maureen Dowd. Only problem is: He keeps making my case for me.

Here he is today, posting at The Corner:

Since January 2009, we have seen plenty of radical Islamists apprehended in the United States while planning mayhem on a massive scale, and even more violence committed by Islamic terrorists abroad in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been a) serially assuring the Muslim world (often literally amid explosions going off nearby) that we are atoning for and hitting the reset button on the insensitive and cowboyish Bush administration that fostered unnecessary tensions, b) making the case that a kinder and gentler United States is apologizing for 200 years of assorted sins, and c) assuring Americans that the days of unnecessary, Constitution-shredding anti-terrorism policies are over (albeit while quietly keeping intact the Patriot Act, intercepts, wiretaps, renditions, tribunals, etc.). Why, then, are these darn terrorists, whether domestic or foreign, not getting the new “hope and change” message? (Or are they?)

I might not’ve noticed the post if Mike Potemra, another Corner poster, hadn’t commented:

Imagine if someone wrote in October of 2001, “The Republicans promised us that they would be better at keeping the nation safe. But we just lost 3,000 innocent lives to the terrorists — why are the terrorists not getting the ‘tough on national security’ message?” We conservatives would quite correctly have denounced this criticism as both simplistic and opportunistic – but at least it would have been criticism of an actual, you know, failure. The U.S. under Obama, in Victor’s own telling, has been busting the radical Islamists and breaking up the terrorist plots. I congratulate the president and all the federal, state, and local law-enforcement officials involved, and wish them continued success in doing so. There are legitimate questions to be raised about our current anti-terrorism policy; this approach, I think, is wrong-headed and counterproductive.

Right. Hanson has so committed himself to his arch satire of Obama that he’s satirizing success. At least he didn’t use Latin this time.

National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson is just Maureen Dowd with a better knowledge of Latin

If you’ve never heard of Hanson, here’s an excellent and representative example of his writing for National Review’s blog:

Morituri te salutant [Victor Davis Hanson]

The Victory Column and vero possumus megalomania of 2008 have now led to the deification of Obama as our new Caesar, man of letters (who, in the ancient tradition, enslaved a million in Gaul), and to his communications czar’s praising the embattled Mao (her favorite “political philosopher”) for leading China’s Communist legions to glorious victory over those running-dog Nationalists. Add in the classical-column props at the convention and the Moses-like talk about the seas’ receding and the planet’s cooling, and I think this administration assumes we have a Holy Man in the White House. And when you consider the depiction of Fox News as heresy, Rush as the anti-Christ, and the NEA as the medieval church, it all gets, well, sort of creepy.

He does this kind of thing regularly. He’s supposedly an intellectual because he’s written a book about military history (which was hilariously and devastatingly debunked by an actual military historian) but this stuff is really more his stock in trade these days: Every few days, he writes 200 words or so mocking Obama as a “messiah” — and ask yourself when, despite the missteps, anybody in Obama’s crew has ever referred to Fox News, Limbaugh or the NEA in anything approaching religious terms — collects his National Review paycheck and returns a few days later to do the same thing.

It’s all rather Dowdian, his obsession with issues of personality and symbology instead of using his classics education to actually illuminate his readers on the issues of the day. It makes for rather flamboyant reading experience, but I don’t come away feeling like I’ve learned something or heard an argument that I have to carefully consider or respond to. It’s highfalutin’ neener-neenerism masquerading as something deeper.

Bill Kristol believes insiders like Newt Gingrich are outsiders

Bill Kristol in today’s WaPo:

In a recent Rasmussen poll, the only candidates with double-digit support among Republicans were Mike Huckabee (at 29 percent), Mitt Romney (24 percent), Sarah Palin (18 percent) and Newt Gingrich (14 percent). These four are running way ahead of various senatorial and gubernatorial possibilities. So a party that has over the past two decades nominated a vice president (George H.W. Bush), a senator (Bob Dole), a governor (George W. Bush) and another senator (John McCain), now has as its front-runners four public figures who are, to one degree or another, outsiders.

This is a bit of dishonest framing on Kristol’s part. He surely knows that every president since Jimmy Carter — with the exception of the first George Bush — has won office by running as an “outsider” pledging to bring change of some sort to Washington. Even Al Gore, the sitting vice president, tried to fashion himself as an insurgent with the “people versus the powerful” theme of his 2000 campaign.

But it kind of defies common sense that two governors — one of whom has his own show on Fox News — a vice presidential candidate and a former speaker of the House can in any rational sense be judged as “outsiders.” As always with Kristol, the question is whether he’s lying or dumb. I don’t see why we have to choose.

Republicans have to police their side’s extremism

Garry Wills was hanging out with William F. Buckley back when Buckley marginalized the Birchers out of the conservative movement. Wills doesn’t really hang with the National Review crowd anymore, but he makes an important point at the new blog of the New York Review of Books:

In the past, extremism was checked by people who were partly or nominally on the side of the extremists. Barry Goldwater dissociated his 1964 campaign from the John Birch Society. William F. Buckley rebuked the anti-Semites on the right. On the other side, there were plenty of liberals who denounced the Weather Underground or the Black Panthers.

But now supposedly responsible Republican leaders, commentators, and congressmen—Iowa Senator Charles Grassley and Arizona Representative Trent Franks—encourage the citizenship and euthanasia screamers. A recent vice-presidential nominee endorses the death panels myth. There is little or no determination to dissociate the right in general from the right-wing fringes….

This situation cannot be reversed until and unless the Republican Party begins to recognize that keeping these people in the camp will destroy the camp, that the party cannot pretend to respect and responsibility before the electorate so long as they coddle the crazies. Barry Goldwater was considered an extremist in his day, but his movement went on to prevail for a time because he did not temporize with Birchers, anti-Semites, or religious fanatics.

The party of spite

I think Krugman gets this right:

But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.

I try — more often than I succeed — to give the benefit of the doubt to my ideological rivals. They want what’s good for America; they just have a different way of getting there. Their glee over Chicago losing the Olympics was dispiriting, though. It’s hard to see it in terms other than spite.

On the culture of grievance

Ta-Nehisi:

The notion of being besieged–the idea that Obama is a threat to gun-owners, that the gays somehow want something more than to just live out their lives in peace–is essential to justifying the fear-mongering. Much like no one says “Me and my friends are going to kick your ass, because we feel like it,” no one ever comes out and says, “I hate fags” or “I hate niggers.” What they say is that the feminist are attacking our military, or the president “hates white people,” or the president is giving out reparations disguised as health-care.

Very few bullies like to think of themselves as bullies. So they craft narratives in which they’re the victims. Happens all the time.

The Death of Conservatism

Three thoughts about The Death of Conservatism by Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review.

• The title promises more than the book really delivers (the “death” of conservatism is relegated to the last few pages) but it’s still worth a read. That’s because Tanenhaus’ real purpose is to offer the reader a primer on the history of modern conservatism – doing in 118 pages what Rick Perlstein has needed a couple of thousand (so far) in Before the Storm and Nixonland. (And don’t get me wrong: I love Rick Perlstein.) Call it Conservatism for Dummies.

Conservatism, Tanenhaus suggests, has been split between two impulses: One is dedicated to actual conservation, safeguarding societal order and stability; it even accepts when liberals and the left have created new institutions that have become part of the social order – and thus adapts with the times. (Think George H.W. Bush and all the other Episcopalian-Republicans who seem to have disappeared.) The other Tanenhaus calls “revanchist,” but which we might call simple right-wingery: it hews to an unchanging small-government orthodoxy and contains a revolutionary desire to unmake societal institutions it considers illegitimate, like Medicare and Social Security, that the rest of the nation has long accepted. (Think tea partiers, Rush Limbaugh, etc.) Tanenhaus, it seems, throws his lot in with the conservators instead of the revolutionaries.

• The “revanchist” element in conservatism has long been ascendant, and contains some of its major roots in — wait for it — McCarthyism. Tanenhaus:

(Joe) McCarthy was the author of what would become a staple of GOP politics over the next half century: the raid on government mounted from within government itself. Later practitioners included Richard Nixon (Watergate), Ronald Reagan (Iran-contra), New Gingrich (twice: the government shutdown of 1995 and then Bill Clinton’s impeachment), and George W. Bush (his dismissals of nine U.S. attorneys). Like McCarthy’s crusade, these later insurgencies were conceived in a spirit of hatred for a liberal elite who were perceived to be usurpers and hence subversives. For McCarthy’s followers the New Deal, with its mildly radical reforms administered by Ivy League graduates, was tantamount to treason.

That belief that liberals are somehow treasonous has, of course, survived to the modern era — with constant efforts by Republicans and the right to suggest that the presidencies of Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are somehow illegitimate. But though revanchist folks have dominated the conservative movement (and the GOP) the truth is that the politicians they put forth never deliver: Ronald Reagan, their hero, talked about government as the enemy of the people … but no major spending programs were actually cut during his presidency. George W. Bush actually expanded the Medicare entitlement. The conservative movement really does want to safeguard governmental and societal institutions, it seems — but only if they are the conservators. Otherwise, they evince a desire to (metaphorically) blow it all up.

• It’s not good for America that the right side of the ideological spectrum has come to be increasingly dominated by its demagogues and crazies. Tanenhaus again:

America needs a serious, rigorous opposition. Skeptics and outsiders perform a vital function in a democracy. It is they who ask the most uncomfortable questions, who gaze most critically at the existing arrangements of our politics and culture.

Agreed. Right now, though, the opposition is largely (though not entirely) composed of Glenn Beck acolytes who think Barack Obama is a Stalin-in-the-making because he wants people to have more and better health insurance. (Tanenhaus suggests Obama is actually quite classically conservative, because his seemingly extreme efforts, like TARP and the stimulus package, were aimed at holding society together instead of letting it fly apart.) There are some conservatives — notably David Frum at The New Majority (Tanenhaus’ example) and Conor Friederdorf at The American Scene (my example) — who are willing to call out the extremists on their side while making principled (and I’d argue wrong, but still) arguments against health reform. Their voices are too few, and too lonely, to make a difference. And that doesn’t bode well for the rest of us.

First: Van Jones. Next: Bill Conlin?

I doubt the venerable Daily News columnist actually has anything to fear from Glenn Beck. But the right has found something new to be outraged about, since Obama’s socialist indoctrination of kindergarteners didn’t work out the way they’d hoped: The intrusion of lefty politics into sportswriting. Jay Nordlinger:

I struck something of a nerve last week with a nerve-striking subject: the intrusion of partisan politics into sportswriting. You’ll be reading along, just as nice as you please, and bam: The writer has to stick in some anti-Bush jab, or anti-Palin, or anti-Cheney. (Funny, but the jabs never go the other way — at least in my experience.)

Many, many readers wrote in saying, “Yeah, and you know who an especially irksome offender is?” And they named a “favorite” writer.

So, do you yourself have examples of this politicization of the sports columns? Do you have writers whom you like reading, on sports, but who get your goat by (near-obligatory) injections of politics? If so, please let me know, by using the link over (is that the word?) my name, just above. Reason: I am planning to do kind of an omnium-gatherum.

I’m sure Nordlinger will find plenty of examples: Ideologues usually find what they’re searching for. But so what? Do conservatives have such fragile psyches they can’t take a Dick Cheney joke in the middle of a sports column?