The Conservative Welfare State
Shikha Dalmia:
The welfare state suits conservatives just fine. Its existence gives them an excuse to regulate individual choices. And it’s their trump card for stopping liberty-oriented reforms they dislike.
Refusing to end the drug war is one example. But conservatives also have used the welfare state to rally public sentiment against immigration reforms, portraying poor Latino workers as welfare queens. And in the name of stopping abuse of taxpayer dollars, Republicans have enthusiastically backed invasive drug testing of welfare recipients and prohibited them from using cash assistance to buy morally dubious goods such as alcohol and lottery tickets.
The liberal welfare state and the conservative anti-sin state are two arms of the same statist pincer, squeezing out individual liberty.
The IRS Scandal, Explained by Liberal Partisans
The root cause of the problem is, simultaneously, that government is too big — and too small:
Former Obama adviser David Axelrod:
Part of being president is there’s so much underneath you because the government is so vast. You go through these [controversies] all because of this stuff that is impossible to know if you’re the president or working in the White House, and yet you’re responsible for it and it’s a difficult situation.
Noam Scheiber, The New Republic:
The more we learn about the IRS vetting of conservative groups, the less it looks like an abuse of power than something much more mundane—a beleaguered agency with too few resources to handle its work-load.
Obama campaign petitioned IRS to investigate conservative groups
Well, well! Lookie here!
Obama’s use of the IRS to bully his enemies started before he even became the President. In 2008, during his first Presidential campaign, his campaign wrote letters to the IRS demanding that they investigate Obama’s political opponents.
from Wall Street Journal:
On Aug. 21, 2008, the conservative American Issues Project ran an ad highlighting ties between candidate Obama and Bill Ayers, formerly of the Weather Underground. The Obama campaign and supporters were furious, and they pressured TV stations to pull the ad—a common-enough tactic in such ad spats.
What came next was not common. Bob Bauer, general counsel for the campaign (and later general counsel for the White House), on the same day wrote to the criminal division of the Justice Department, demanding an investigation into AIP, “its officers and directors,” and its “anonymous donors.” Mr. Bauer claimed that the nonprofit, as a 501(c)(4), was committing a “knowing and willful violation” of election law, and wanted “action to enforce against criminal violations.”
AIP gave Justice a full explanation as to why it was not in violation. It said that it operated exactly as liberal groups like Naral Pro-Choice did. It noted that it had disclosed its donor, Texas businessman Harold Simmons. Mr. Bauer’s response was a second letter to Justice calling for the prosecution of Mr. Simmons. He sent a third letter on Sept. 8, again smearing the “sham” AIP’s “illegal electoral purpose.”
Also on Sept. 8, Mr. Bauer complained to the Federal Election Commission about AIP and Mr. Simmons. He demanded that AIP turn over certain tax documents to his campaign (his right under IRS law), then sent a letter to AIP further hounding it for confidential information (to which he had no legal right).
The Bauer onslaught was a big part of a new liberal strategy to thwart the rise of conservative groups. In early August 2008, the New York Times trumpeted the creation of a left-wing group (a 501(c)4) called Accountable America. Founded by Obama supporter and liberal activist Tom Mattzie, the group—as the story explained—would start by sending “warning” letters to 10,000 GOP donors, “hoping to create a chilling effect that will dry up contributions.” The letters would alert “right-wing groups to a variety of potential dangers, including legal trouble, public exposure and watchdog groups digging through their lives.” As Mr. Mattzie told Mother Jones: “We’re going to put them at risk.”
The Wall Street Journal describes Obama as the “pioneer” of using the IRS to bully political opponents. And somehow we’re supposed to believe that the IRS targeting didn’t start with Obama himself?
We know for a fact that Obama met with the head of the Treasury Employees Union in the White House the day before the IRS targeting started in the Exempt Organizations branch. Now we can see that was just a continuation of a deliberate strategy that Obama set out using in the campaign.
It’s time for a special prosecutor. It’s time to subpoena all communications between the White House and the IRS. And it’s time to start deposing everybody who worked at the White House and Obama’s campaign since day one.
Letters show top IRS official knew of targeting
A top Internal Revenue Service official knew last year that the Richmond Tea Party was the target of extra scrutiny and reminded the Richmond organization to comply with requests for information, according to IRS letters.
In March 2012, the Richmond group received two letters signed by Lois G. Lerner, the agency’s director of exempt organizations, following up on the status of their applications for tax-exempt status.
Lerner’s letters to the Richmond Tea Party contradict claims in a recent inspector general’s report that the improper targeting was just a low-level effort and that she attempted to avert it… .
Voices of Moderation Dept.: Radio Host Laura Ingraham pushes for an end to all Muslim immigration | The Raw Story
(FYI, “Voices of Moderation Dept.” is meant sarcastically, not literally.)
Teen-Agers, Sex, and Crime
The debate over whether to sell Plan Be contraception to teen-age girls exposes, once again, Americans’ schizophrenic attitudes about teen-agers, sex, and crime.
As far as most conservatives are concerned, young people lack the maturing and judgment to make sensible decisions about contraception and abortion. Yet many of those same conservatives will turn around and insist that a 14-year-old who commits a homicide should be tried as an adult.
For example, Texas sets the age of consent for sexual activity at 17. But it tries children as young as 13 as adults for certain criminal offenses.
Texas also requires both parental notification and consent before a minor can have an abortion. So in the state’s eyes, some 14-year-olds who commit crimes have the maturity and judgment of fully grown adults, but no 17-year-old has the maturity and judgment to make a medical decision for herself. Those two positions cannot be reconciled.
Texas isn’t alone. Virginia law takes the same two positions. In Mississippi, children as young as 13 can be tried as adults not only for violent felonies, but for any criminal offenses whatsoever – and they must be tried as adults for some felonies, including capital crimes. But both parents must agree before a Mississippi girl just shy of her 18th birthday can have an abortion. In Kansas, the discrepancy is even more stark: 17-year-olds must obtain consent from both parents for an abortion, and the age of sexual consent is 16 – but children can be charged as adults for any sort of crime starting at age 10.
This is simply incoherent.
The orthodox liberal opinion is just as incoherent, but in reverse. Progressives maintain that teen-agers who are too young to drive are mature enough to buy contraception and obtain abortions without parental consent or even parental notification. Yet most also argue that young people who commit crimes should not be held fully responsible because their brains have not developed enough to think through the long-range consequences of their often impulsive behavior.
Public policy has to draw lines somewhere, and those lines often will be set arbitrarily. But they should not be set so arbitrarily that they end up being mutually contradictory.
Hinkle: For some liberals, courage = agreeing with them
The reaction to Wednesdays defeat of gun-control legislation in the Senate reveals the high degree to which, for some, contemporary liberalism has become an ideology of self-congratulation.
It was “a pretty shameful day for Washington,” President Obama declared. Shame does not apply to someone who makes an honest mistake, or who reaches the wrong conclusions despite his good intentions. Shame applies to those who do wrong willfully. “Shame on you” is a lecture delivered from the mountaintop to those in the moral gutter.
Obama was not the only one castigating others for their shortcomings. The Chicago Tribune also called the vote “shameful.” The Los Angeles Times took a shot at the “shameful failure” of what writer David Horsey called “our cowardly Congress.” The Washington Post blamed “a cowardly minority of senators” who betrayed “the will of the American people.” The paper’s Dana Milbank agreed: “Courage was in short supply at the Capitol,” he declared. CNN’s Piers Morgan went further: “What a pathetic, gutless bunch of cowards,” he tweeted.
Over and over again that theme appeared: Ex-congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords blasted the “cowardice” of senators who acted out of “political fear.” “The cowards defied the will of most Americans,” said an editorial writer for the Dallas Morning News. USA Today agreed that “Senators’ votes on gun proposals reflect profiles in cowardice. … Opinion polls showed [universal background checks] had the backing of up to 90 percent of Americans, including 74 percent of NRA members.“
So there’s your headline: Craven Senate Cowards Defy Public Opinion.
Got it. Funny thing, though. In other circumstances, politicians who flout public opinion receive hosannas for their bravery.
When Obama suggested raising the gasoline tax in 2008, The Washington Post praised his “political courage.” Three years later, Walter Mondale wrote in the same paper that, “We Need the Courage to Raise Taxes.” Last year the paper’s metro columnist, Robert McCartney, wrote that Marylanders should “Give [Gov. Robert] O’Malley Credit for Courage on Taxes.” O’Malley proposed to raise them.
After the debt supercommittee collapsed, The New York Times lamented that Republicans would not take the “courageous step” of supporting higher taxes. The New Republic considered Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on hedge-fund managers “truly courageous.” Time magazine once dubbed Alabama Gov. Bob Riley “America’s most courageous politician” after he reversed his anti-tax stand. And so on.
Why is it considered courageous to support higher taxes? Because higher taxes are politically unpopular. Courage, in this telling, consists of defying public sentiment. Yet now we are told that by defeating a bill supported by the vast majority of Americans, the Senate acted like a bunch of gutless cowards. What gives?
No great mystery. What everyone really means is that courage consists of taking the more liberal position on a given issue.
The Nation’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel illustrated this neatly in a 2011 piece. “Real political courage,” she wrote, “means bucking party orthodoxy” for the sake of principle. She cited several examples, including Sen. Russ Feingold’s “vocal opposition to the Patriot Act,” Sen. John McCain’s critique of “those in his party who advocate torture,” and Rep. Barbara Lee’s “sole vote against the far-reaching Authorization for the Use of Military Force” after 9/11
In each case, the courageous move is toward the left, no matter where the politician starts from. But if bucking party orthodoxy qualifies as courageous, then consider Pennsylvania Gov. Bob Casey — who stuck to his pro-life views even after being shut out of the 1992 Democratic National Convention. Wasn’t he a brave fellow? Apparently not.
Calling your opponents cowardly serves several purposes. First, it lets you avoid engaging the merits of the argument. (Would background checks or an assault weapons ban have stopped the massacre at Sandy Hook? Probably not.) Second, it introduces an ad hominem argument that can’t easily be refuted. Statistics and philosophy can be debated. Motives can’t.
Third, it delegitimizes the opposition. Policy positions are not simply opinions, but questions of character. Those on the other side are not good people who happen to be wrong, they are wrong because they are bad people. No point in trying to reason with them.
This certainly seems to be President Obama’s feeling. On Wednesday he said “there were no coherent arguments” for not taking his side on gun control. None at all? Nonsense – unless you sit inside the hermetically sealed circle of logic that to be liberal is to be virtuous, and to be virtuous is to be right, and to be right is to hold the liberal view on guns and taxes — whether the public agrees with you or not.
Tea Party Test Case
Republicans win when they stay true to conservative principles, conservatives claim after every Republican defeat. (examples here, here, and here ). As Texas Gov. Rick Perry said at this year’s CPAC, “”You need to nominate conservatives if you’re going to win elections. You can’t do it with moderates or even moderate conservatives. Americans want the real thing.”
We’ll soon see. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the real thing: Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.
Cuccinelli not only disputes climate change. He has challenged the EPA’s endangerment finding in court and hounded climatologist Michael Mann over emails.
Cuccinelli not only opposes gay marriage, he considers homosexuality “intrinsically wrong.”
He not only opposes tax hikes, he has challenged Virginia’s new transporation funding plan, which was championed by the state’s Republican governor, Bob McDonnell.
He not only opposes abortion, he equates it with slavery. He not only dislikes Obamacare, he was the first AG to file suit against it.
And the tea party movement treats him like a rock star.
In short, you can’t get much more purely orthodox than Cuccinelli on the big conservative hot-button issues. There is not the slightest chance that he will risk losing by moving too far to the center. So, as political analyst Robert Holsworth told the Washington Post, that makes him “almost a test case of the argument that Republicans win when they don’t trim their beliefs.”
The only flaw in the experiment may be Cuccinelli’s opponent: Democrat Terry McAuliffe. In Virginia’s last gubernatorial election, McAuliffe came in a distant second in the Democratic primary. He is not, to put it gently, the most formidable candidate the Democrats could field. So if Cuccinelli wins, he may owe part of his victory not to his strong views but to his weak opponent.
ThinkProgress: Proving Ronald Bailey’s observation that
People reason chiefly to persuade others that they are right, not to find out what is true.
Stupid Defense Spending (and More)
PolticalProf has two great posts today. First, he asks,
Why do conservatives think that you can’t solve problems by throwing money at them …. for absolutely every issue except defense, where even the slightest suggestion that spending godawful amounts of money on weapons systems like Star Wars or the F-22, which both don’t work and don’t have anyone to fight, means that you’re a terrorist-loving America hater?\
Second, he points to the folly of the F-22, a
$400,000,000 airplane with nothing to do that can’t even do that successfully.
Nice turn of phrase there.
I’m on board with both of those points, and in fact have written about how cuts to national defense are not exactly the end of the world:
It’s a little rich to hear conservative Republicans treat national security as if it were a federal jobs program. For decades, conservatives have denounced government as inherently bloated, bureaucratic, inefficient, and wasteful – a parasite that sucks the lifeblood out of the private sector… .
[A]sk yourself if either Virginia or the nation was economically or militarily prostrate in 2007. No? Of course they weren’t. Yet if sequestration occurs, military spending will be cut less than 12 percent – reverting to 2007 levels.
What’s more, defense spending has no relation to general economic well-being:
And I’d also like to turn the question around a bit. Many progressives decry the horrendous waste and misallocation of resources in the Defense Department, and rightly so. But why don’t they apply the same level of scrutiny to, say, the TANF (food stamp) program, or Medicare, or Medicaid?
After all, perverse political incentives such as bureaucratic empire-building, turf protection, legislative demosclerosis, the opaque churning of benefits, and so on are not program- or agency-specific. They obtain in government generally.
So, just as it’s foolish to assume that spending trillions on Cold War-era defense systems will make us safe from asymmetric threats from non-state actors, it’s also foolish to assume that spending trillions on Cold War-era poverty programs will in any way reduce poverty.
…
Slander, Based in Ignorance
Via Truth Has a Liberal Bias, reblogging recall-all-republicans, we get this tired old trope:
It would be nice if Republicans were “pro-life” after birth.
This is based in nothing other than utter ignorance:
“Who Really Cares” by Arthur C. Brooks examines the actual behavior of liberals and conservatives when it comes to donating their own time, money, or blood for the benefit of others. It is remarkable that beliefs on this subject should have become conventional, if not set in concrete, for decades before anyone bothered to check these beliefs against facts.
What are those facts?
People who identify themselves as conservatives donate money to charity more often than people who identify themselves as liberals. They donate more money and a higher percentage of their incomes.
It is not that conservatives have more money. Liberal families average 6 percent higher incomes than conservative families…
Conservatives not only donate more money to charity than liberals do, conservatives volunteer more time as well. More conservatives than liberals also donate blood.
According to Professor Brooks: “If liberals and moderates gave blood at the same rate as conservatives, the blood supply of the United States would jump about 45 percent.”
Professor Brooks admits that the facts he uncovered were the opposite of what he expected to find — so much so that he went back and checked these facts again, to make sure there was no mistake.
P.S. - Also, this:
The Catholic Church—perhaps the single most influential pro-life institution in the United States—makes the largest financial, institutional and personnel commitments to charitable causes of any private source in the United States. These include AIDS ministry, health care, education, housing services, and care for the elderly, disabled, and immigrants. In 2004 alone, 562 Catholic hospitals treated over 85 million patients; Catholic elementary and high schools educated over 2 million students; Catholic colleges educated nearly 800,000 students; Catholic Charities served over eight-and-a-half million different individuals. In 2007, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development awarded nine million dollars in grants to reduce poverty. And in 2009, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network spent nearly five million dollars in services for impoverished immigrants.The Catholic Church is far from the only pro-life religious group that assists the needy. At the Manhattan Bible Church, a pro-life church in New York since 1973, Pastor Bill Devlin and his congregation run a soup kitchen that has served over a million people and a K-8 school that has educated 90,000 needy students. Pastor Devlin and other church families have adopted scores of babies, and taken in scores of pregnant women, including some who were both drug-addicted and HIV positive. The church runs a one-hundred-and-fifty bed residential drug rehabilitation center and a prison ministry at Rikers Island. All told, the church runs some forty ministries, and all without a government dime…
And this:
Rick Warren devoted this year’s Saddleback Civil Forum to orphans and adoption, joining popular conferences like Together for Adoption, the Christian Alliance for Orphans Summit (which will be posted next week), and Moore’s own Adopting for Life.
The trend goes beyond dedicated gatherings, however: Nearly every conference we’ve attended recently devoted attention to orphans, adoption, the fatherless, and so on. Church leadership conference Catalyst gave a major push to adoption at its main gathering in October and continues to highlight it at regional meetings. The keynote presentation at Q (a conference for Christian culture leaders) focused on fatherlessness, with calls to establish foster-care ministries, support adoptive families, and build orphanages abroad…
And — ah, never mind. Confirmation bias is immune to facts.
Look Who's Mocking Fascist Fear-Mongering Now
One of the arguments we’re hearing in the current debate about gun control might be called the anti-anti-tyranny argument. Coming from liberals, it’s a little rich.
Some gun-rights supporters say the Second Amendment’s purpose is not merely to protect the right to hunt or defend yourself, but to guard against oppression. “The purpose of having citizens armed with paramilitary weapons,” writes Kevin Williamson in National Review, “is to allow them to engage in paramilitary actions.” Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano likewise argues that the Second Amendment protects “your right to shoot tyrants if they take over the government.”
The history of the Founding and the language of the rest of the Bill of Rights suggest they have a point. (Though not the whole point. One reason the Founders wanted people to be armed is so they could put down insurrections, not just start them.)
But many progressives say this is just plain nuts. To Charles Blow of The New York Times, the rise of “so-called patriot groups” who think such things is evidence of “paranoia by people who have lost their grip on the reins of power, and reality.” To Josh Horwitz of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, it’s part of a dangerously radical “insurrectionist” movement. To Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, the idea that Americans might need weapons to fight a “war with the government” is one of conservatives’ “paranoid fantasies.”
Paul Waldman of the American Prospect agrees. In a piece for CNN on how “The NRA’s Paranoid Fantasy Flouts Democracy,” he says the conservative media encourage listeners to view the Obama as “the very definition of dictatorship… . [M]any would say that their ‘right’ to own any and every kind of firearm they please is the only thing that guarantees that tyranny won’t come to the United States. Well, guess what: They’re wrong.”
No doubt the gun-rights group has a fringe element, exemplified by those who think the Sandy Hook massacre was orchestrated as part of a plot to disarm America. But it’s worth pausing to ask: Is it really so outrageous to believe the government of the United States is capable of tyranny?
Not to Naomi Wolf, it isn’t. Back in 2007, the author and political activist wrote an essay on “Fascism in 10 Easy Steps.” She noted that the leaders of a recent military coup in Thailand had followed certain clear procedures – and she insisted the Bush administration was following those very same procedures. “Beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society,” Wolf warned. “It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable.”
The essay was widely circulated, and its popularity led Wolf to expand it into a book, titled “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot.” (That young patriot presumably is the good kind of patriot – not the kind who joins “so-called patriot groups.”)
Wolf had lots of company. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann dedicated a “special comment” to calling Bush a fascist: “You’re a fascist!” he bellowed in his usual understated style. “Get them to print you a T-shirt with ‘fascist’ on it!”
Not everyone was so emphatic. Robert Paxton, a history professor at Columbia and the author of “Fascism in Action,” conceded during Bush’s first term that “Obviously, the … administration is not a fully fascist regime with a single party, an end to elections and the setting aside of rule of law.” But, he continued, “you can make up a list of similarities and differences.” How very nuanced.
This sort of talk continued even after Bush left office. In a 2009 piece for the Los Angeles Times, columnist Tim Rutten called for a citizen commission to investigate the administration. “Just how close to the brink of executive tyranny did the United States come in the panic that swept George W. Bush’s administration after 9/11?” he asked. “The answer, it now seems clear, is that we came far closer than even staunch critics of the White House believed.”
These are not basement conspiracy theorists scribbling in the dark corners of the Internet. They are famous and highly regarded thinkers speaking from respected institutional platforms. And their views were echoed by countless thousands of lesser-known liberals sporting “Bushitler” protest signs and bumper stickers.
All of which permits only two possible conclusions. The first is that progressives knew even then, deep down, they were peddling wildly implausible paranoid fantasies – just as they accuse right-wing “insurrectionists” of doing now. If so, then they should admit as much.
The second possibility? Many progressives genuinely believed, only a few years ago, that the United States really did stand in the dusky shadow of a totalitarian nightmare. Yet now they insist that Americans who want to arm against that eventuality are paranoid nutjobs. That might be politically convenient – but it doesn’t make much sense.
