Political Irony

Who says bipartisanship isn’t alive?

Last week Congresscritter Steve Scalise (R-LA) admitted that in 2002 he spoke at a white supremacist organization founded by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

Not overly surprising. Heck, not that long ago Louisiana was as racist as they get. David Duke himself had served in the state legislature and was the Republican candidate for governor in 1991, even though he was not only the former grand wizard of the KKK, but was also a convicted felon. Duke had defrauded supporters by falsely claiming to have no money and being in danger of losing his home, in order to solicit emergency donations (he was actually financially secure and had used the donations for recreational gambling).

Scalise doesn’t deny that he spoke to the white nationalist organization but claims that he doesn’t remember doing so, which is pretty hard to believe as David Duke was both a fellow Louisiana politician and in the news frequently. In an interview back in 1999 about Duke, Scalise even claimed that he embraces many of the same “conservative” views as Duke, saying:

The novelty of David Duke has worn off. The voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected. Duke has proven that he can’t get elected, and that’s the first and most important thing.

But it gets even more ironic. Among Scalise’s defenders is black Democrat Rep. Cedric Richmond, who says that he doesn’t “think Steve has a racist bone in his body” and that the Scalise is being used as a “scapegoat to score political points”. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, whose parents are from India, defended Scalise as being “fair-minded and kindhearted”. Jewish friends said that it is “unthinkable” that Scalise has racist views.

But conservative Erick Erickson attacked Scalise, saying:

How the hell does somebody show up at a David Duke organized event in 2002 and claim ignorance? How do you not investigate?… [Sen.] Trent Lott was driven from the field in 2001 for something less than this.

I personally think people should be forgiven for ugly views that they may have held in the past, when those views were more common (as long as there is good evidence that they no longer hold them). Besides, my guess was that Scalise was really just pandering for votes. If we held that against politicians, there would be nobody left to elect.

UPDATE: David Duke claims he has ties to many legislators, both Republican and Democrat, and threatens to release a list of them if people don’t lay off of Steve Scalise. Duke says “If Scalise is going to be crucified — if Republicans want to throw Steve Scalise to the woods — then a lot of them better be looking over their shoulders.”

© Keith Knight

If there is one thing I believe, it is that we need to have balance. We need to listen to people willing to have serious conversations, no matter their political leanings. If we learned one thing from the midterm elections this year, it is that even though people voted for conservative candidates, they also voted for very progressive ballot measures. Of course, even I’m not sure what we actually learned by that, other than that balance is important.

America is Awesome!

The U.S. economy grew at a rollicking 5 percent rate in the third quarter. Oh, and it added 320,000 jobs in November, the best of its unprecedented 57 straight months of private-sector employment growth. Just in time for Christmas, the Dow just hit an all-time high and the uninsured rate is approaching an all-time low. Consumer confidence is soaring, inflation is low, gas prices are plunging, and the budget deficit is shrinking. You no longer hear much about the Ebola crisis that dominated the headlines in the fall, much less the border crisis that dominated the headlines over the summer.

Obama outperformed the Republicans!

Mitt Romney promised to bring unemployment down to 6 percent in his first term; it’s already down to 5.8 percent, half the struggling eurozone’s rate. Newt Gingrich promised $2.50 gas; it’s down to $2.38. Crime, abortion, teen pregnancy and oil imports are also way down, while renewable power is way up and the American auto industry is booming again. You don’t have to give credit to President Barack Obama for “America’s resurgence”, as he has started calling it, but there’s overwhelming evidence the resurgence is real. The Chicken Littles who predicted a double-dip recession, runaway interest rates, Zimbabwe-style inflation, a Greece-style debt crisis, skyrocketing energy prices, health insurance “death spirals” and other horrors have been reliably wrong.

But Americans haven’t gotten the news!

Come to think of it, the 62 percent of Americans who described the economy as “poor” in a CNN poll a week before the Republican landslide in the midterm elections were also wrong. I guess that sounds elitist. Second-guessing the wisdom of the public may be the last bastion of political correctness; if ordinary people don’t feel good about the economy, then the recovery isn’t supposed to be real. But aren’t the 11 million Americans who have landed new jobs since 2010 and the 10 million Americans who have gotten health insurance since 2013 ordinary Americans? It’s true that wage growth has remained slow, but the overall economic trends don’t jibe with the public’s lousy mood. And the public definitely does get stuff wrong. A Bloomberg poll this month found that 73 percent of Americans think the deficit is getting bigger, while 21 percent think it’s getting smaller and 6 percent aren’t sure. In fact, the deficit has dwindled from about $1.2 trillion in 2009 to less than $500 billion in 2014. My favorite part is the mere 6 percent who admitted ignorance; 73 percent are definitely sure the shrinking deficit is actually growing.

Americans should cheer up!

Six years ago, the economy was contracting at an 8 percent annual rate and shedding 800,000 jobs a month. Those were Great Depression-type numbers. The government was pouring billions of dollars into busted banks, and experts like MIT’s Simon Johnson were predicting that the bailouts would cost taxpayers as much as $2 trillion. In reality, the bailouts not only quelled the worst financial panic since the Depression, they made money for taxpayers.

Why aren’t we happier?

Let’s face it: The press has a problem reporting good news. Two Americans died of Ebola and cable TV flipped out; now we’re Ebola-free and no one seems to care. The same thing happened with the flood of migrant children across the Mexican border, which was a horrific crisis until it suddenly wasn’t. Nobody’s going to win a Pulitzer Prize for recognizing that we’re smoking less, driving less, wasting less electricity and committing less crime. Police are killing fewer civilians, and fewer police are getting killed, but understandably, after the tragedies in Ferguson and Brooklyn, nobody’s thinking about that these days. The media keep us in a perpetual state of panic about spectacular threats to our safety — Ebola, sharks, terrorism — but we’re much likelier to die in a car accident. Although, it ought to be said, much less likely than we used to be; highway fatalities are down 25 percent in a decade.

Still think we have a liberal media? What a joke. The media are only interested in money. They (and I include Fox News) would say almost anything to make a profit.

© Tom Tomorrow

The Irony. New survey polls done by The Washington Post, ABC, and CBS show that either Americans have mixed feelings about our use of torture, or else that they really don’t want to think about it.

For example, 69% of Americans consider waterboarding to be torture, but despite this, 59% think the use of torture against suspected terrorists was justified in the wake of 9/11.

And while 54% believes that the CIA intentionally misled the White House, Congress, and the American people about its use of torture and whether or not it produced valid intelligence, the vast majority of Americans still claims that our torture produced useful intelligence. This despite the Senate report that concluded that torture did not produce any actionable intelligence.

Intelligence officials continue to claim that torture (or “enhanced interrogation techniques” as they like to put it) provided valuable intelligence, and I just realized the disconnect. Study after study shows that people being tortured will tell their tormentors anything they think they want to hear to get the torture to stop. And what the Bush administration wanted to hear was that there was a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. So torture produced “intelligence” that was “valuable” to them (even if it was completely fabricated), allowing them to justify attacking a country that we now know had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. Mission Accomplished!

It gets even more interesting if you look at the responses by group. It seems like the more religious you profess to be, the more you support torture. For example, 69% of white evangelical protestants said that torture was justified, while only 40% of people with no religion said that torture was justified. That’s the Christmas spirit!

Of course, the group who supports the use of torture the most are conservative Republicans at 72%. The least are liberal Democrats at 38%.

Bottom line to me. How can anyone who claims to be an American believe that it was acceptable to sodomize children in front of their mothers (while cameras were rolling)? Are we really that depraved? Does anyone sincerely believe that made us safer?

The mainstream media is continuing its descent into mediocrity. I mean, we are told by the mainstream media that they have fact checkers, editors, and all that other stuff that means that we can trust them, right? But then something like this happens.

Greta Van Susteren of Fox News found confirmation of her suspicions that North Korea thought they were attacking Japan and not the US when they hacked Sony Pictures. Her proof came straight from the “North Korea state-owned news twitter feed” (@DPRK_News).

The only problem is that the @DPRK_News is a parody, written by a blogger.

Now comes the ironic part. Despite multiple comments to the story on her own site warning Van Susteren that her source was a parody site, and even the parody site’s author notifying her that her source was not true, she refuses to admit that she was fooled by the joke. She does admit that “some say” the feed is a hoax, but doesn’t admit that she was taken in.

Meanwhile, other major media outlets (including Slate, the Washington Post, and Newsweek), fall for the same parody twitter feed. Where are all those editors and fact checkers now? At least the others retract their stories.