New Twist on an Old Joke: What Do You Call a Liberal Who’s Been Mugged?

The old joke goes like this: What do you call a liberal who’s been mugged?

A conservative.

After seven years of big-spending government and eroding civil liberties under allegedly conservative Republicans, the joke needs an update: What do you call a conservative who’s been mugged by government?

A libertarian.

Independent voters tend to decide national elections, and the largest bloc of independents are libertarian in outlook: fiscally conservative and socially liberal, in effect straddling the two major parties—which leaves them vulnerable to getting kicked in the crotch no matter whom they vote for.

This country was founded on libertarian principles—limited government, property rights, civil liberties, individual responsibility—that have been significantly eroded under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The designers of our democracy wouldn’t recognize what’s become of their experiment today; somehow a design intended to limit government has been twisted into a government with no intention of limiting its designs.

Up until the turn of the millenium, it was Democrats who considered the Constitution a “quaint document.” Now the Republican Party has betrayed its most fundamental animating principle. It is no longer a conservative party.

PJ O’Rourke puts it like this: “It’s going to be hard to do a worse job running America than the Republicans have, but if anybody can do it, it’s the Democrats.”

With a socialist Hillary Clinton or a very liberal Barack Obama set to face off against a big government Republican like John McCain, McCain would seem to be the lesser of two evils. Maybe the late great Molly Ivans had it right: for the third presidential election in a row, we’re faced with “the evil of two lessers.” The only genuine libertarian in the race is Ron Paul, and he’s way too principled, too shrill, too rough around the edges, and too ugly to win the American Idol contest we call a presidential election.

At the end of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of nation had been created. His answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Newsprism

FoxNews Fails History Lesson

Mistakes are inevitable in the 24-hour pressure cooker of cable news. Misspelled words, mispronounced names, technical glitches—these are to be expected.

But confusing Stephen Douglas and Frederick Douglass in a story about the Lincoln-Douglas debates?

That’s exactly what happened this morning when FoxNews mistakenly aired a graphic showing President Lincoln and former slave Frederick Douglass (video).

The fact that three news personalities didn’t catch the mistake is bad enough. News broadcasts involve more than on-air talent, however. Editors, directors, fact checkers, technicians, and graphic artists all have a hand in what goes out over the air.

No one at FoxNews managed to figure out that an African-American like Frederick Douglass was unlikely to have been running for office in 1858, when African-Americans couldn’t even vote.

As HL Mencken noted, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Certainly not FoxNews’s owner, billionaire Rupert Murdoch.

Newsprism

FoxNews’s vapid cheerleading for the worst president in American history reminds Newsprism of another quote from Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You—Ask What Your Press Agent Can Do for You

Barack Obama’s now infamous pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, is milking his fifteen-minute flash of fame for all it’s worth. This weekend he spoke with Bill Moyers in a televised interview, delivered a televised sermon in Dallas, gave a televised speech to the NAACP, and this morning he’s speaking (you guessed it—televised!) to the National Press Club.

The Reverend understands the mass media marketplace at least as well as he understands racial division. Controversy sells. Give the media controversy, and you can expect significant media coverage. If that controversy is timely, so much the better, and if it fits into the ideological template of the journalistic pack, you’re as good as gold.

No issue generates as much controversy in the US as race. Liberals in the media love to shine a spotlight on racism, real or imagined, in order to bask in the afterglow of their moral superiority. Conservatives in the media love to shine a spotlight on reverse racism, real or imagined, in order to further their political agenda.

 During his speech to the NAACP on Sunday, Reverend Wright invoked John Kennedy’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” and mocked JFK’s pronunciation of “ahsk.” The idea was to “ahsk” why it’s okay for JFK to pronounce a word so oddly, but not for black children to pronounce it, “aks.” That’s a valid, if utterly petty, point.

What should be clear to all is that Wright is no longer furthering a philosophy. He’s furthering his career; a book deal is surely in the works. Mocking a liberal icon like Kennedy is straight out of the playbook of Ann Coulter, who says outrageous things just to keep herself in the media spotlight. A similar dynamic drives Britney Spears and Paris Hilton to do outrageous things. (Paris’s favorite fashion accessory, her chihuahua Tinkerbell, actually had a book published. Ka-ching!)

Give the media something to cover, no matter how trivial, perverse, or cynically self-serving, and they will. Give the publishing industry a low-risk title, and they’ll publish it. With cable news, talk radio, and the Internet lowering editorial standards, and with the demands of a 24-hour news cycle, a critical institution in our society has been dragged down into the cultural gutter alongside Jerry Springer and Geraldo Rivera.

Jeremiah Wright may have some important ideas to contribute to our national discourse. He holds two master’s degrees and a doctorate, and he served this country in the Marine Corps and the Navy. The cartoon version of the Reverend that’s being bandied about in the media doesn’t do him justice.

The fact that he’s so hard at work capitalizing on that cartoon doesn’t do the rest of us justice.

Newsprism

America’s Dangerous Mis-Spellings of “Ignorance”

How many Americans can correctly spell “ignorance”? How many teachers and bureaucrats?

Two excellent columns by Bob Herbert and George Will came out this week bemoaning the declining state of American education.

At least three root causes account for the sad decline in education in this country.

First, parents have abdicated responsibility for their children’s education to cold, monolithic government institutions that facilitate mediocrity and stifle innovation. Take President “childrens do learn” Bush’s failed No Child Left Behind program. Administered by the pathetically underqualified Secretary of Education, Bush croney Margaret Spellings, NCLB imposes an asinine amount of testing on schools without addressing the underlying problems—as if measuring academic failure enough will turn it into academic success. Heckuva job, Spellie.

Second, the erosion of the nuclear family has left more and more of our children adrift without adequate supervision or an understanding of the value of education. The best predictor of academic performance isn’t social class or school quality; it’s the presence of a solid family structure that inculcates the right values and enforces their pursuit. No amount of government intervention can fix the decline of the American family, though government intervention has surely been a major factor in causing it.

Third, we’re increasingly mesmerized by electronic media, which force us into the role of passive, isolated consumers of what nowadays passes for culture. Today’s American child is lost in an amoral popular culture that priviliges physical beauty over mental acuity and appetite over intellect. Reading is becoming a lost art, one that requires thoughtful deliberation as opposed to passive consumption. Market considerations have all but replaced moral ones, and all too often, mind-numbing gadgets take the place of parenting.

Education is ultimately and essentially the responsibility of each individual citizen, and that requires citizens raised in strong families that value knowledge and wisdom. No teacher, school or government program can provide that.

Henry David Thoreau, America’s philosopher laureate, wrote, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” Two organizations hacking at the root of our education woes are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the America’s Promise Alliance, run by Colin and Alma Powell (not coincidentally, two devoted couples presiding over strong nuclear families.)

The gravest threat to American democracy isn’t terrorism or global warming. It’s ignorance.

And ignorance can only be cured from within.

Newsprism

Contestants in Cable News Race Run in Opposite Directions, Voters Lose

As three major cable news networks—CNN, MSNBC, and FoxNews—compete for shares of the cable news audience, the result may be further polarization of the American voter. So says a new study by University of Georgia Professor Barry Hollander.

Hollander studied the news consumption of self-identified Democrats and Republicans using data from the non-partisan Pew Research Center. His findings: people gravitate towards news sources that reinforce their existing beliefs—liberals to CNN and MSNBC, and conservatives to FoxNews.

While this result is no surprise, combined with other trends in voting and media consumption it may portend further polarization among a less informed electorate.

For example, the more voters are exposed exclusively to opinions they already agree with, the more extreme their views are likely to become. In addition, the less news people watch, the less likely they are to vote. Voters who don’t identify strongly with either party are increasingly less likely to consume news, and therefore, to vote.

The trend is towards polarization and extremism in both red and blue states, while moderates give up on the political process and vote in fewer and fewer numbers.

Our democracy risks significant erosion of participation in, and faith in, the electoral process among voters in the center as two polarized, vacuous ideological camps face off over an ever-widening and increasingly empty ideological schism.

Like Nature, politics abhors a vacuum. What will fill the vacuum resulting from these trends is anybody’s guess.

Newsprism

Why Some Democrats and Republicans Should Be Barred from Voting

Have you ever wondered why some people seem impossible to reason with when conversations turn to politics?

A study conducted at Atlanta’s Emory University used sophisticated brain scans to analyze the political reasoning—or lack thereof—of voters strongly attached to one political party or the other.

The results: when faced with information that threatens their pre-existing beliefs, both staunch Democrats and Republicans turn off the rational centers in the brain and turn on the emotional ones.

According to LiveScience.com,

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making … Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate.

Emory University’s Director of Clinical Psychology, Drew Weston, put it this way:

The result (of the study) is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data.

The study might go far in explaining the popularity of conservative talk radio and the liberal blogosphere, where reason and evidence are as rare as an honest politician.

The old admonition may hold true that some people—the party faithful, as it turns out—just shouldn’t discuss politics.

Maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to vote, either.

Newsprism

Democracy, Republic, and Superdelegates—A Party Paradox

The so-called “superdelegates” in the Democratic Party’s nomination process account for about one-fifth of the delegates who will choose the party’s standardbearer. Made up of elected officials, former office holders, and appointees these 796 party apparatchiks are in no way beholden to the voters of their respective states.

The question on many lips: is the superdelegate system undemocratic?

The easy answer is, clearly, yes, at least a little bit. Superdelegates take power away from the people and concentrate it in the party hierarchy.

But in historical terms, our presidential electoral process is far more democratic now than it was when the Founders designed our democratic republic. (Benjamin Franklin, asked as he left the Constitutional Convention what kind of government had been created there, quipped, “A republic, if you can keep it.”)

We temper the passions and shortsightedness of the mass by keeping a fine balance between pure democracy, which Plato called “mob rule,” and republicanism, in which the rule of law insures the rights of all of the people despite the worst inclinations of the majority of the people. Slavery was as undemocratic an institution as could be imagined, but was supported by a majority of the people until Abraham Lincoln resolved to “form a more perfect union.”

Neither democracy nor the Constitution is infallible. Both should be subject to enlightened revision. The question concerning the superdelegate system should not be, “is this undemocratic,” but rather, “is it good for the party and the country?”

The Founders saw fit to leave the election of both the President and the Senate in the hands of the state legislatures, not the people, though all 50 states have ceded that power to the people. The Electoral College and the party system still act as more or less elitist buffers between the people and the highest offices in the land.

The superdelegate system is more democratic than what the Founders envisioned, but less democratic than the direct popular election of the president proposed by many Democrats.

Is there such thing as a system that is too democratic? Democrats would generally say, “Of course not.” Republicans would generally say, “Of course.”

The irony is that the Republican Party uses a process that’s far more democratic than the process used by the Democratic Party.

If anything needs to change, maybe it’s this: the advocates of a purer democracy should adopt a system that more accurately reflects their Democratic philosophy, not that of the patrician protectors of the Republican elite.

Newsprism

Follow the superdelegates nationally and in your state at the Superdelegate Transparency Project.