Political Irony

© Joel Pett

This is a question that has been bugging me for some time. I love the Internet, I make my living from it, and even if I didn’t I couldn’t imagine living without it now. But at the same time, I wonder if on balance, has the Internet has been a good thing for our democracy?

You would think that the free flow of information, including removing the government and corporate gatekeepers to information, would be nothing but good. But instead we suffer from information overload, and there are so many choices of information it is difficult to separate the good information from the lies and propaganda. With so many choices, people seem to mainly view information that reinforces their existing beliefs, leading to further polarization. I suspect that it was no coincidence that the rise in partisanship in Washington was simultaneous with the widespread adoption of the Internet.

This isn’t just true of the Internet. Does anyone believe that cable news networks (and the resulting 24-hour news cycle) provide better information? Before that, did network TV news provide better information than newspapers? Several studies even claim that watching Fox News even makes you less well informed, and yet it is the most popular new source in our country. Is too much information making us stupid?

Even worse, I have no idea what could possibly be done to solve this problem.

The ironic thing about all this birther nonsense is that it applies just as much to Romney as it does to Obama (which is to say, it really doesn’t apply to either of them).

People argue that Obama’s father was born in Kenya. But Mitt Romney’s father, George Romney, was born in Mexico.

So what.

Even more ironic, George Romney ran for president during the 1968 election. At the time, some people questioned whether Romney was qualified to be president, because the constitution requires that the president has to be a “natural born citizen”. Mitt Romney’s father argued:

I am a natural born citizen. My parents were American citizens. I was a citizen at birth.

Indeed, the Congressional Research Service (the arm of the Library of Congress that does research for Congress) researched the issue and declared that “natural born citizen” would “most likely include” not only anyone born on US soil, but also anyone born elsewhere of at least one parent who was a US citizen. Under that definition, even if Obama was born in Kenya, he would still be qualified to be president because his mother was a US citizen.

As for George Romney, he lost the primary to Richard Nixon, so the question was never tested.

The same issue came up with John McCain, who was born in Panama (his parents were stationed in the canal zone with the military).

Of course, these are just facts (stubborn things, those). I think the real purpose of the birther noise is to promote the mistrustful feeling of “other” about Obama (i.e., he can’t be president because he doesn’t look like me and has a funny name). Yes, I’m playing the racism card. But I’m just calling a spade a spade (oops).

I’m more and more impressed by Eclectablog, whose plain-speaking posts are like a breath of fresh air during this election season.

A good example is the recent post there by LOLGOP “The GOP is Threatening Your Job“, which is about Republican efforts to sabotage the economy. The GOP figured out that if the economy is bad, it makes it more likely for the party out of power to win elections. If the economy is doing just fine for big corporations and the top 1% (their donors), and the economic hit is being taken by the poor and middle class, even better!

How are Republicans sabotaging the economy? Let’s look at one particularly obvious example:

last summer, the House GOP did something unprecedented in American history. During a jobs crisis they helped create and did nothing to end, the GOP decided that they would not approve an increase in the debt limit without trillions in deficit cuts. They added to the insanity by saying that they would not approve one dollar in tax increases, even on the richest Americans.

The last time the Republicans took the country to the edge of default was during the Clinton administration, and it cost them control of Congress (forcing Newt Gingrich to resign in disgrace).

But they did it again in 2010. As a result, our credit rating was downgraded and the recovery stalled. At the last minute the GOP blinked, making a complex debt deal (which not surprisingly they now refuse to honor).

Incredibly, they are now doing it a third time! On May 15, House Speaker John Boehner announced that he would (again) force a government default. That statement alone cost many Americans their jobs.

The real question is how do they get away with it? Why haven’t we thrown them out like we did the first time? The answer:

the GOP has enough message discipline and sympathetic media to help them avoid the blame.

I love the phrase “message discipline”. I guess it means when a group lies in unison and repeats them often enough that people start to believe them. That, plus millions of dollars spent on misleading television ads by Karl Rove and the Koch brothers.

So what the Republicans learned from their failure during the Clinton administration was that they needed Faux News, Citizen’s United, the Tea Party, and more message discipline. Unfortunately, it seems to be working.

The Republicans have even managed to convince many Americans that the Stimulus didn’t work, when there is plenty of evidence that it was the most successful economic revival since World War II.

The most damming evidence that the GOP is sabotaging the economy is that — other than opposing everything Obama and the Democrats try to do to improve the economy — what are their own proposals for fixing the economy? Even more tax cuts for the wealthy (on top of Bush’s tax cuts, which should be left to expire), and huge increases in military spending. That’s right, they are doubling down on the exact same economic policies that got us into the worst economic mess since the Great Depression.