An Ugly Unwanted Stray

Jonah Goldberg defends tea-bagging from liberals. And comedy ensues, not least because Jonah for rather obvious reasons chooses to invent liberal reactions to the tea-bagging as opposed to looking stuff up. He cleverly avoids any accusations of straw-man argument, however, through the deft use of italics. Because if you stuff straw man argument into italics, it magically becomes not a load of straw-man shit, but the purest home-shat gold. 

Shazam! See, I just turned you into a chicken. Through the magic of italics. Zap! Now I have restored you to your familiar red-snouted disgrace of a carcass. No need to thank me, this was merely a demonstration. But behave, dammit. Squawk!

Moving on. Observe that Jonah omits the most common liberal response to the tea-bagging, namely, laughter. Why does he do this? Because he's a fucking moron, that's why. Christ, even with the italics, the guy decisively loses his straw man tussles. For openers:

1. All of this tyranny talk is overheated and idiotic.

So, there is a lot of "tyranny talk," and it's stupid. What "tyranny talk," Jonah, and how was it rebutted? Oh, who gives a rat's ass. The man isn't being paid for research, but for farting up field-methane.

According to that Reason video I posted below, Americans work an average of 103 days a year just to pay their taxes. If you had to work 365 days a year to pay your taxes, that would be a kind of slavery or indentured servitude, because all of your productive labor would be going to the government. You would have no resources of your own to provide for the life you wanted. Instead the government would provide you not with what you want, but what the government decides you need.

This actually gets us someplace important. Weasel it any way one likes, but Obama decisively won an election as open and honest as our nation can manage to put together. Also, the Democratic party won a very significant number of seats in both legislative bodies: all the Republicans have going for them is an ability to use a counter-majoritarian parliamentary maneuver in what is clearly our least democratic electoral body, the ridiculous Senate.

And Obama won the election with what is really unprecedented grassroots support -- and that support and activity mattered a lot. And still does. A LOT of Americans feel a sense of ownership in Obama's win. Sneer at that if you must, but (1) these people vastly outnumber the tea-baggers, and (2) they quite rightly believe that they have meaningfully participated in our democracy. And they have!

Goldberg's claim only makes sense if you have an a priori concept of the American governent as utterly incapable of reflecting the will of the majority. There is no room in this tiny little smelly ill-lit garret for the idea that maybe a majority of Americans have decided, on the merits, to go with a particular guy and his clearly stated policies. However, that is what happened, and most Americans are cool with it so far. And are they morons? Not any more than they were in the 1980s, frankly. I think less so, but then, I would.

L'etat, c'est nous. I'm not ready to surrender that, but Goldberg is. Now that his team lost, anyhow. Raise your hand if you think Jonah Goldberg-class thinkers would ever be able to accept, say, a majority of the nation deciding that taxes could maybe go a little bit higher. What a wacky scenario! Does this point even need more flogging...?

2. The original tea parties were about taxation without representation, today's spending is the result of Democrats winning elections, so it's taxation with representation.

This is self-evidently stupid: observe the lamest wriggle ever.

today's spending is being achieved under false pretenses. Obama says he's spending this money to fix a crisis, but much of his spending has nothing to do with the crisis but with shopworn liberal action items. However, since Obama campaigned on many of these items, I don't think it amounts to taxation without representation. But it does seem like the sort of duplicity worth a protest or two.

HI-KEEBA! Non-duplicitous duplicity is the very worst kind of duplicity. At this point the flinging of garbage ought to commence...

3. These protests are unpatriotic astroturfing by plutocrats.

Oh Lord, garbage!

I find it sort of amazing that when groups like ANSWER, a Mos Eisley cantina of America-hating nut cases, take to the streets it's a full-flowering of democracy in action. When ACORN pays their ragamuffins to protest, or when Rainbow/PUSH shakes down businesses through racial extortion, it's the sort of direct democratic action Thomas Paine dreamed of. And when labor unions pay people to protest, it's populist. But when a bunch of independent Americans, talk-show hosts, and email campaigners organize hundreds of protests around the country, it's astroturfing.

ANSWER organized the 2002-3 anti-war rallies. So? Only a very small percentage of the marchers at those rallies knew, or cared, who ANSWER was. It was anyhow a ludicrously smaller percentage than the number of teabaggers who could identify, say, Sean Hannity. ANSWER is going to get that many people on the streets now, how, exactly? They have no constituency, while loads of Americans have always hated the stupid Bushite Iraq war.

Goldberg is free to deny that a major TV "news" network did not go all out to support the teabagging, and he is free to pretend that the opposite somehow pertained to the anti-war stuff. He is free to be stupid. But those peace marches really did represent Americans with stifled voices and heralded an incipient national consensus; the tea-parties represent the loony rumblings of a defeated and deeply confused rump. And that's all she wrote.

4. Republicans are hypocrites for suddenly caring about deficits.

The actual complaint from our side is that Republicans are deluded schmucks or total liars. "I don't get it. Republicans didn't care enough about the deficit when it went up a 'little' under Bush (to pay for a war), therefore they can't complain when Obama sends it through the stratosphere (to pay for socialized medicine)? How does that work?"

Gah. The "a little" is fun enough. But the rest is good too. If you thought, correctly, the war was a rotten idea, that was all pissed-away money. And even if you liked the war, how much of that money was deftly spent? And was "the war" the only reason for the ballooning deficit? What about the preposterous tax package? 

And the deficit spending now is in response to a financial crisis caused by conservatives. That's how it works! Not hard to grasp, actually.

5. The populist anger out there is the real face of America's homegrown fascism.

This is much fun -- he just made this up! But to field the fungo:

Sigh. While I think Rick Perry's secession talk is idiotic and unfortunate (even accounting for Texas's unique history), I am at a loss as to how any of this stuff smacks of fascism. Even Perry is talking in the context of the federal government doing too much, taking away too much liberty, getting too involved in local communities, and interfering too much with the individual.

How do I say this so people will understand? Fascism isn't a libertarian doctrine! It just isn't, never will be, and it can't be cast as one. Anarchism, secessionism, extreme localism, or rampant individualism may be bad, evil, wrong, stupid, selfish, and all sorts of other things (though not by my lights). But they have nothing to do with a totalitarian vision of the state where individuals and institutions alike must march in step and take orders from the government.

Fascism flourishes when "intellectuals" preach about the pointlessness of ordinary democratic modalities, figure duly elected officials as illegitimate, nurse inexplicable grievances, encourage xenophobia, appeal to a "nation" supernal to a political system, exploit economic crises, cheer on the crazies, apologize for stuff like state-sanctioned torture, deliberately fuck with established law, and generally make shit up and fart around with accountability-free shitheaded opinionizing.

But if you think you'd be more "free" under a Liberated Texas under President Perry, say, well, that's a fate you richly deserve, and I almost feel bad you won't ever get your wish, you crazy fucks.