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Matthew Yglesias » Beyond “Bias”

Dialectic lives in the blogosphere.

Below Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum discuss the perils and shortfalls of "objective" journalism:

Matthew Yglesias » Beyond “Bias”: "I don’t, for example, think I ever saw a television network or mass-media publication provide a cogent explanation of the differences between Barack Obama’s climate change proposal and John McCain’s climate change proposal even though the proposals contained some important differences. I have no idea whether this was attributable to “bias” or even how I would know. Nor am I sure which candidate would benefit from exploring this question. I am, however, sure that I’ve several times seen their plans described as being the same on the grounds that they’re both “cap and trade” plans. That’s false. Does the habit of saying it reflect bias? And bias toward whom? Who knows and who cares? What matters is the information — accurate information about important topics should be conveyed in a clear manner."

Kevin Drum - Mother Jones Blog: Cap and Fade: "The biggest difference between the two cap-and-trade plans, of course, is that Obama seems to actually believe in his proposal whereas McCain pretty plainly doesn't. For him, it's just window dressing that would almost certainly have been forgotten as soon as he got in office.

But how do you get that across? I'm pretty sure I'm right about this, but I certainly can't prove it. And any straight news reporters who took my line would (rightfully) be accused of massive bias."

Matthew Yglesias » Beyond “Bias”: "Simply put, it’s not possible for working journalists to purge themselves of bias, nor is it possible for readers or critics to adduce definitive proof of bias. Making spurious claims of bias in order to try to get journalists to pursue the impossible task of eliminating their mental biases is impossibility squared. It’s an intellectually bankrupt dead-end."

Yes, it is Matthew. "Just the facts" is not a real option. The facts, as the joke has it, have a well-known liberal bias. And, the campaign against the "liberal bias" in the Media is part of an effort to make of the corporate Media, a reliable right-wing propaganda operation -- a largely successful operation, by the way.

Hullabaloo

digby at Hullabaloo comments on Greenspan's reckoning with consequences: "This is the fundamental problem with Randian thinking. They really do believe that capitalism is a moral system in which the people become wealthy because they are morally and intellectually superior to those who don't. Why, it would be wrong for them to not self-regulate and endanger the whole economy, right? It wouldn't make any sense."

Except, well, there's this:

"Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters," wrote [an analyst] in an email obtained by Waxman's committee.

Being able to pass on all your risk to someone else while personally coming out on top is a pretty glaring and obvious flaw in the system unless you think that wealthy people are too wise and moral to ever do such a thing. The only people who believe that are Randians and Joe the Plumber. Everybody on Wall Street certainly seemed to know the score and acted accordingly.

Our Whole Industrial and Financial Class

Michael O'Hare watches Frontline's Heat: "I kept saying to myself as I watched this show, and watched the lords of Wall Street amid their own wreckage the last few weeks, is that these guys seem to absolutely suck at what they do! Without a Niagara of public welfare payments and public protection from the marketplace they profess to worship, they can't make a dime on a long-term basis nor build enduring enterprises. What a bunch of overpaid jerks. It wasn't just the government being trashed by smirking, self-satisfied incompetents prating ideological nonsense these last couple of decades, it was our whole industrial and financial leadership class."

The (re)Birth of the Conservative

Tony Blankley - Townhall.com:

"With the rise to enduring power of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in 1933, a new type of Republican emerged in reaction to FDR's attractive and overawing power: the me-too Republican. Until the election of President Reagan five decades later, these me-too Republicans supported, rather than opposed, Democratic Party policies but claimed they would administer them better. Of course, this led to a half-century of Democratic dominance of American government and politics."

I cannot vouch for the genuineness of Blankeley's quoting of FDR, below, but it is among the best summaries I've ever seen of Nixon's politics, shorn of its anti-communist hysteria and Southern Strategy racism.

"FDR himself cruelly mocked this pathetic breed of spineless, protect-your-career-at-any-cost Republican politicians:

'Let me warn the nation against the smooth evasion which says: 'Of course we believe all these things. We believe in Social Security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them; we will do more of them; we will do them better; and best of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.''

"

Here's the good part, though -- the projection forward of the Republican politics of the next few years.

Sarah Palin . . . will be among the leaders of the about-to-be-reborn conservative movement. I suspect that the conservative movement we start rebuilding on the ashes of Nov. 4 . . . will have little use for overwritten, over-delicate commentary. The new movement will be plain-spoken and socially networked up from the Interneted streets, suburbs and small towns of America. It certainly will not listen very attentively to those conservatives who idolatrize Obama and collaborate in heralding his arrival. . . .

The new conservative movement will be facing a political opponent that will reveal itself soon to be both multiculturalist and Eurosocialist. We will be engaged in a struggle to the political death for the soul of the country. As I did at the beginning of and throughout the Buckley/Goldwater/Reagan/Gingrich conservative movement, I will try to lend my hand. I certainly will do what I can to make it a big-tent conservative movement. But just as it does in every great cause, one question has to be answered correctly: Whose side are you on, comrade?

Obama's campaign, from its very beginnings, has played a strategically brilliant game, targeting that slice of rational, reality-based, secular conservatives, who were most repulsed by Bush, and by the descent of the Republican Party into the hands of religious reactionaries. The Party of Gerald Ford and Bob Dole, of Kevin Phillips and Colin Powell, has been alienated from the GOP. And, that is a major reason that Obama will win, and the Democrats will win Congress, where Gore and Kerry could not win, and the Democrats could not achieve a working majority in Congress after 1994.

And, it is a major reason, why the swing away from the Democrats after Nov 4 will be slow and muted. Tony Blankeley tells us why the secular Republicans will not be rejoining their Party any time soon: they will not be welcome.

The Republicans, after Nov 4, should be blaming Sarah Palin and "the base" of religious reactionaries, who required McCain to ruin his own brand in a series of awkward flip-flops and betrayals. That's what the polls will show. But, mostly, they won't. They will be busily "forgetting" that George W. Bush ever existed, or was ever their wetdream come alive, of a decisive President. And, they will blame McCain, who represents Republican moderation, to the Republican Right. The Republican Party that was ruthlessly pursuing a "permanent majority" will busy itself pursuing "permanent minority" status. The internal dynamics of collapse and defeat will make it difficult to rebuild the Republican brand and coalition.

The secularists will want to go back, but will do so, only if they are handed control. And, they won't. On the other side -- the right-wing reactionary side -- the Republican Right will have largely lost in this election the decisive asset built by Rove and talk radio: the base of authoritarian voters, who didn't vote before, but who turned out in 2000 and 2004 in record numbers. They are not voting this time, Palin notwithstanding. This is obvious in the early voting in Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado. (Obama is up only 5% in Colorado in the public opinion polls, a State with a large number of these authoritarian, religious-right voters, but McCain's campaign is already giving up; early voting is telling the tale.)

The Republican coalition has broken.

Tribune endorsement: Barack Obama for president -- chicagotribune.com

One of the more interesting aspects of the political campaign for me has been the way that Barack Obama has masterfully co-opted the secular conservative wing of the Republican Party. The key to the overwhelming election victory now in prospect for the Democratic Presidential Candidate and his Party has been the shift of a small, but vital slice of the Republican electorate out of the Republican Party and into support of the Democrats. Today, the Chicago Tribune endorsed a Democrat for the first time, since its founding in 1847.

chicagotribune.com: "We are proud to add Barack Obama's name to Lincoln's in the list of people the Tribune has endorsed for president of the United States."

In its way, this is just stunning, and a measure of the completeness of the political storm that is sweeping the country in this election.

"The liberals were right."

Ezra Klein on the latest bailout:

. . . my take on this will make David Broder cry: The liberals were right. Not the Democrats. The liberals. They were right that deregulation had gone too far. They were right when they spent the last few years offering unpopular predictions that the Housing Bubble would pop. They were right that a liquidity problem had become a solvency problem. They were right that government intervention on a massive scale was needed to stabilize the capitalist system. They were so right, in fact, that Hank Paulson and George W. Bush couldn't hold the line, and will now sign into law the most profoundly socialist measure this country has seen since the 1930s.

I make this point not to wrap myself in a warm blanket of Schadenfreude -- there's little joy in seeing your allies proven perspicacious by a catastrophe -- but because it's actually important. The liberal understanding of the economy and its problems has been, in recent months and years, superior to the conservative understanding of the country and its problems. And this has only sharpened in recent weeks, as the Republican Party has spun off into the Gamma Quadrant with laughable theories about ACORN and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Their argument isn't wrong in the sense that it's a serious engagement with the situation that happens to be less empirically sound than competing theories. It's just nonsense. And this isn't a time when we can afford governance powered by nonsense. We need governance by people who understood the magnitude and nature of the problem, and have some idea how to go forward fixing it.