Political Irony

As if it weren’t bad enough that Republicans were deliberately blocking bills that would help the economy, in order to win elections. We almost expect that of them.

But this is the height of cynicism and hypocrisy.

Ohio’s Senate race is neck-and-neck, with progressive Sherrod Brown pitted against Republican Josh Mandel. Mandel vocally opposed raising the debt ceiling last year, and has indicated that he would vote against it if elected to the Senate. If the government is not able to meet it’s financial obligations it will cause a default and likely financial chaos.

But Mandel won’t feel the pain. Both he and his wife have invested in financial instruments that “short” US Treasury bills. If the government defaults, the value of Treasury bills would go down dramatically, and this investment — which bets against Treasury bills — would shoot up in value.

Seriously. Not only is Mandel voting against the US economy, he’s betting against it.

Should we be surprised? Last year, it was discovered that Eric Cantor — the Republican’s chief debt ceiling negotiator — had an investment in the same financial instruments.

This may be the ultimate in cynical insider trading, but despite a new law that explicitly bans members of Congress from insider trading, that law only applies to trading using confidential information they receive as lawmakers. In addition, that law was weakened by Republicans before it was passed, and according to the New York Times “prosecutions would still be difficult”. For now, the best way to stop politicians who bet against the country they are sworn to protect is to vote them out of office.

© Clay Bennett

Republicans have repeated the lie that Obama is a big spender so often, that even some democrats believe it. But the fact is that federal spending under Obama has increased at the lowest rate since Eisenhower wound down the Korean war. Adjusted for inflation, federal spending under Obama has gone down. Even not adjusted for inflation, in Obama’s first budget (for fiscal year 2010), spending in raw numbers went down 1.8%. And in his budget for 2013 spending is scheduled to fall 1.3%. How does this compare to other presidents?

It goes back even further. Indeed, the poster boy for cutting government spending is Herbert Hoover, but even Hoover increased spending by 12.3% a year.

So how have Republicans convinced people that Obama is a big spender? Part of it is by repeating it so often that people start to believe it. As Mitt Romney recently put it “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.” The other part is from blaming the 2009 budget on Obama. Forbes magazine explains:

So, how have the Republicans managed to persuade Americans to buy into the whole “Obama as big spender” narrative?

It might have something to do with the first year of the Obama presidency where the federal budget increased a whopping 17.9% — going from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. I’ll bet you think that this is the result of the Obama sponsored stimulus plan that is so frequently vilified by the conservatives… but you would be wrong.

The first year of any incoming president term is saddled — for better or for worse — with the budget set by the president whom immediately precedes the new occupant of the White House. Indeed, not only was the 2009 budget the property of George W. Bush — and passed by the 2008 Congress — it was in effect four months before Barack Obama took the oath of office.

Even if you attribute the stimulus spending in 2009 to Obama, along with spending for the children’s health care program and other bills passed in 2009, spending under Obama still increased only 1.4% a year.

Making this even more ironic, the Heritage Foundation fights back by blaming the entire 2009 budget on Obama, and then hypocritically use as an example of big spending by Obama the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), which was not only their idea in the first place, but which the CBO says will reduce the deficit. Also, they continue to condemn any efforts to rein in our out-of-control military spending. And where were they when Cheney was claiming that deficits don’t matter, and Dubya was spending like a drunken sailor with a pocket full of credit cards?

As someone who has been working with the Internet since close to the beginning, I almost blew a gasket yesterday when I read an article in the Wall Street Journal by Gordon Crovitz claiming that “Contrary to legend, it wasn’t the federal government” who invented the Internet. The article was meant as a slap against Obama, who in a speech said “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet.”

It isn’t just that the premise of the article is wrong. It is so full of misinformation, ignorance, and baldfaced lies, it doesn’t make any sense at all. The article even gets simple facts wrong, like the location of the headquarters of Xerox. Or it claims that the Internet was born when Xerox PARC developed the Ethernet protocol to link different computer networks. Idiots! Ethernet is a computer network, not a way to link networks. Or that Apple took this technology because Xerox “had no idea what they had”. Indeed, Apple did borrow technology from Xerox PARC, but that technology was the graphical user interface, not anything related to networking or the Internet.

Luckily, the response from the tech community was swift. For example, Crovitz quotes Michael Hiltzik’s book about Xerox PARC, but Hiltzik shot back:

And while I’m gratified in a sense that he cites my book about Xerox PARC, “Dealers of Lightning,” to support his case, it’s my duty to point out that he’s wrong. My book bolsters, not contradicts, the argument that the Internet had its roots in the ARPANet, a government project.

Hiltzik flatly says that without the government, the Internet “could not have come into existence”:

Private enterprise had no interest in something so visionary and complex, with questionable commercial opportunities. Indeed, the private corporation that then owned monopoly control over America’s communications network, AT&T, fought tooth and nail against the ARPANet. Luckily for us, a far-sighted government agency prevailed.

Other tech media was even more damning. According to an article in Salon:

The accepted wisdom is correct. The government created the Internet. But because the Wall Street Journal is devoted to printing plausible-sounding lies designed to appeal to its anti-government readership, they printed a column by Gordon Crovitz this week claiming that the government did not invent the Internet, because governments can’t invent anything useful, ever, and it was the wonderful private sector that did all the work.

An article in Slate agrees:

Crovitz’s entire yarn is almost hysterically false. He gets basic history wrong, he gets the Internet’s defining technologies wrong, and, most importantly, he misses the important interplay between public and private funds that has been necessary for all great modern technological advances.

Slate also points out that Crovitz is lying:

Other times, Crovitz strays into what seems like intentional intellectual dishonesty. He mentions offhandedly that “Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol,” but he skips over both the gravity of this development and the government’s role in it. TCP/IP is the Internet’s defining language, the only reason that any two computers, anywhere, can send a message to one another. In this way, TCP/IP is the Internet. What’s more, Crovitz neglects to mention that when Cerf created TCP/IP, he did so with Robert Kahn, who was an employee of the Defense Department, and that both of them were working under funding from the government.

Even the normally staid Scientific American says “Crovitz’s story is based on a profound misunderstanding of not only history, but technology.”

But as we now know, facts don’t seem to matter any more. Fox News is repeating the lie made by their sister publication (Murdoch’s News Corp owns both the Wall Street Journal and Fox News). I’m sure the lie that the private sector invented the Internet will be repeated ad nauseam by conservative outlets, just like they repeated the lie that Al Gore said he invented the Internet, until people believed he said it.