The Glade 4.0

Yeah I wouldn't go that for but the hair-tearing is getting pretty bad.

http://m.newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-grah ... government


PBS Dem Pundit Mark Shields: If Obamacare Fails, 'This Is The End...of Liberal Government'
By Tim Graham | November 16, 2013 | 19:09

Tim Graham's picture
Barack Obama being clear that his team messed up Obamacare made it hard for liberal PBS NewsHour pundit Mark Shields to try Democrat Happy Talk.

Instead, Shields joined the liberal gloomfest: “If this goes down, if the Obama -- if health care, the Affordable Care Act is deemed a failure, this is the end -- I really mean it -- of liberal government.” He even acknowledged Obama lied about Keeping Your Plan:

MARK SHIELDS: That is -- wasn't a true statement. And you're driven to one of two conclusions. Either the president was almost -- almost negligently uncurious in not asking about what the answer was, or he made the choice to trade his considerable reputation and record of integrity for short-term political gain. That's why they had to come and that's why there was such consternation in the ranks.

JUDY WOODRUFF: How do you explain it, David, what happened, with the president acknowledging yesterday that he wasn't on top of it?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I think it is politics. They knew that they -- getting this thing passed -- we were there -- it was hard. And so they were pulling out every political stop in the book. And a lot of those political stops have made it harder now. The first early one was, they were really late in issuing the regulations because they didn't want them to come out during the campaign so Romney could attack them.

As a result, the whole implementation got pushed back, and that's part of the reason the Web site is such a mess. And then they made this political calculation. Then they made the -- that they weren't going to tell you there will be losers here. And they made the political calculation there would be no deficit effects. They made a whole series of political calculations.

Shields didn’t think Obama made enough of a personal apology, like John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and it looks grim:

SHIELDS: It wasn't this is mine and I'm going to make sure that it never happens again. I mean, this has got to work. Judy, this is beyond the Obama administration. If this goes down, if the Obama -- if health care, the Affordable Care Act is deemed a failure, this is the end -- I really mean it -- of liberal government, in the sense of any sense that government as an instrument of social justice, an engine of economic progress, which is what divides Democrats from Republicans -- that's what Democrats believe.

And that's what Democrats believe. Time and again, social programs have made the difference in this country. The public confidence in that will be so depleted, so diminished, that I really think the change -- the equation of American politics changes.

WOODRUFF: Is your view that dire?

BROOKS: I agree with that. I think it's -- I don't know if it's permanent, but it will be a severe blow to the idea of expanded liberal governments. My big thought is, are we no longer the kind of country in which you can pass this sort of thing? And by that, I mean, when you were passing the New Deal or the Great Society, there were winners and losers.

But the losers felt part of a larger collective and they said, OK, I'm going to take a hit for the team. We may no longer have that sense of being part of a larger collective, so when you're a loser, you just say, I'm a loser. And, as a result, you're just not willing to be part of the group.
And the penalty for being part of the loser just makes you want to hit whoever made you the loser.

Shields then turned back to those awful Republicans:

SHIELDS: The we-ness of our society, the we, that we're all in it together, has really been diminished. Now, the one thing that could save the Democrats, having given that apocalyptic assessment, is the Republicans. I mean, nobody in his right mind or her right mind looks at a hearing, a statement, an investigation, a press release given by any Republican and comes to the conclusion that they're really interested in covering people who aren't covered.

They are rooting for failure. I mean, it's so transparent, and so obvious, whether it's Darrell Issa, whether it's Reince Priebus, the chairman. They're just cheering for failure. There's not a sense of what we can do to make this work, or this isn't going to work, but we're going to come up with something better. There just isn't.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Man, that's a stupid statement from a Democrat perspective. It's not like people needed yet another reason to oppose Obamacare.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

When, within your life, the "we-ness" of society has only ever been used to erode your rights and chip away at your own welfare ... what the hell did you expect? Or to put it more simply:

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Just for the record: Please remember all these Democratic/liberal media figures excoriating the Administration over Obamacare the next time we get into a debate about whether left-leaning and right-leaning media are equally partisan. I don't recall many instances of Fox News pundits lambasting the Bush Administration's incompetence, calling Bush out for lying about the intel, and predicting the "end of conservative government" over the disastrous mismanagement of Iraq and Afghanistan circa 2005, and there certainly wasn't anything like the near-universal "WTF, people!? Get your **** together!" that we're seeing from liberal pundits over Obamacare.

@RD

I could swear that Fox News, Limbaugh and Glenn Beck (and their whole crew) all called out the GWB administration over their gross over-spending. Stepping over the line with immigration reform, the Patriot Act going too far, the expansion of Medicare/Medicaid (Part D?), etc.

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To help jog your memory:



http://newsbusters.org/blogs/lachlan-markay/2010/11/15/maddow-recycles-absurd-claim-fnc-never-criticized-george-w-bush-anyt

Beck couldn't stand Bush at least in the last four years (could have been more but I didn't have a commute I could listen to then).

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Obamacare is near-universally **** up, being recognized for what it is should be near-universal. It's got bipartisan recognition of it's abysmal nature!

Goes to show, both sides can agree on something.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Nor do you see many instances of MSNBC pundits lambasting Obama over the Benghazi debacle and subsequent campaign of lies, the NSA recording our lives, the IRS subjecting right-leaning groups to extraordinary scrutiny or calling out Obama for lying about Gitmo, and taxes.

As for predicting the "end of the conservative movement", the liberals took care of that for themselves:
http://www.amazon.com/40-More-Years-Dem ... 1416596283
http://www.amazon.com/The-Party-Over-Re ... im_sbs_b_1

Good effort slipping in Bush "lying about the intel" as if it were a fact. I assume you meant the WMD intel that was submitted by global intelligence agencies and universally accepted as truth by global leaders (including those in the Democrat party). It's not lying when the intel tells you that the WMDs are there, and you say "The intel tells us the WMDs are there."



Just because Dems are jumping off a sinking ship that everyone who used their brain instead of their guilt saw leaking in port doesn't mean they're not partisan, it means they're short sighted, and belatedly trying to save their own skin. Yet, when everyone to the right of Chris Matthews was warning that just what is happening with Obamacare would happen, they were called racist and obstructionist.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

That's because the matter of Iraq (about which there was no "lying" about intel anyhow) was one where opinions differed along party lines. All you're doing is assuming the left's opinion was correct, then complaining the right didn't agree with it enough.

In this case it's pretty much objectively unarguable that Obamacare does not work. People cannot keep their plans; the plans are gone. The website does not work. It doesn't matter where you lie on the spectrum, those are the facts. The left is lambasting Obama because they're afraid all the moderates that favored Obamacare are never going to buy into the promise of social welfare again after having seen that yes, it does have direct costs that people other than "the rich" and "corporations" feel.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with leftist outfits being less partisan, and everything to do with them being backed into a corner. If they want to retain even a modicum of credibility, they have to get angry at Obama. He has just demonstrated unequivocally that massive social welfare programs really do hurt the public. All the European models they have been praising only work becuase those countries are small, homogenous, and shove responsibility for defense off onto the U.S.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The American Liberal has this fantastic delusion that the United States can be governed like a European nation. We could govern any individual state that way; we cannot govern the entire Union that way.

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Maybe they shouldn't have let the insurance industry write it, and then pass it, unread.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Look on the bright side, we had our first black president and he won reelection.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

True! Now they can't use that angle any more.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

"First Female" is next...

I think people are overly optimistic. Barry isn't going anywhere for 3 more years no matter where his approval rating goes or what happens in nov 2014 (a veritable lifetime away in voter attention terms). Also I don't see very many people offering up a real alternative.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Watch them. If Obama is remembered as a failure it will be because the white racists never gave him a fair shake.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

DFK! likes this post.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

The republicans could always try to beat them there...

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

They could, but women hate Sarah Palin for not being enough of a feminist.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Everyone knows Republican women aren't real women durrrrr.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

2014 is normally a lifetime away in voter terms because people don't see policies affecting them directly. People that lost their healthcare policies will definitely remember that. You can still find people that won't vote Republican because Reagan fire the air traffic controllers back in the 1980s - and I don't mean them, I mean their parents.

Voter memory is plenty good on issue that affect them visibly, or that they care about.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

None of those are analogous to the situation with PPACA, though. Over-spending, immigration reform and Medicare Part D were all policies that the right opposed anyway because they were perceived as liberal. Liberal pundits actually support PPACA and yet are (a) criticizing Obama for screwing it up and (b) freaking out about possible failings in the design of the policy itself. In addition, none of those policies were the signature policy of the Bush Administration that largely defined the partisan divide during the 2004 election. Complaining about Bush over-spending didn't concede anything to the Dems, because obviously the Dems wanted to spend even more. PPACA, on the other hand, is the signature policy of the Obama Administration and it did largely define the partisan divide during the 2012 election. Criticizing Obama for **** it up now absolutely is conceding a point (or at least electorally beneficial) to the Reps. Really, the only comparable policy from the Bush years was Iraq - the right supported it, and it was the key issue in the 2004 election - and the right (at least media on the right, which is what I'm talking about) stayed pretty close to lockstep behind Bush on that one.

As for the Patriot Act, yes, there were some voices of conservative opposition in the press, but honestly, not much and mostly from outlets like Reason and Cato, at least as far as I recall. I don't think anyone getting most of their info from Fox News and talk radio would come away with the impression that Bush was being widely panned by the right over the Patriot Act. And again, it wasn't the signature policy of the Bush Administration the way that Iraq was.


As I noted above, criticisms that Bush wasn't being conservative enough (e.g., all the quotes about immigration) and related to politically secondary policies (e.g. environmental policy) aren't really comparable to criticisms of Obama over PPACA, so all but the one quote about the K report from O'Reilly and maybe the Gitmo quote from Shep Smith fall away. In addition, I'd point out that the quotes from Alan Colmes and Bob Beckel aren't relevant because those guys are (supposedly) liberal commentators themselves. Napolitano's comments on the Patriot Act and domestic spying generally were solid critiques that conceded points to the left, but again, the Patriot Act just wasn't in the same league as Iraq and PPACA, and it had a ton of bipartisan cover anyway.

In short, what we're seeing with PPACA is a Democratic Administration being lambasted, by liberal media figures, for screwing up the signature policy over which the last election (and quite possibly the next election) was fought and which those liberal media figures themselves support. The only comparable policy from the Bush years was Iraq, and there was no widespread criticism of Bush on that from media on the right at the time; certainly nothing like the near-universal WTFery from the left over PPACA now.

*Edit: Edited to clarify that when I say "right" and "left", I'm talking about media/pundits on the right and left, not regular voters and grassroots activists. I think the analysis changes somewhat when we move away from establishment media figures and look at voters and activists.

RangerDave:

Your confirmation bias is showing again. Pew debunked the Fox bias thing during Obama's first run at election; Fox ran more negative media about Bush and McCain than they did Obama during that election cycle; and they ran more negative press about Palin than even MSNBC.

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Did the Pew study differentiate between criticism from the left and criticism from the right or between criticism on secondary issues and criticism on politically significant issues? Per my comments above, Fox criticizing Bush/McCain from the right is not equivalent to criticizing Obama from the right. Complaining that Bush was a big spender doesn't really demonstrate balance because everyone knows Obama wants to spend even more. Criticizing McCain for being a closet liberal on the environment isn't balance either, since again, everyone knows Obama is openly more liberal on the issue, and environmental issues are almost never major factors in determining how people vote.