Political Irony

During the Republican presidential debate tonight, Michele Bachmann said “After the debates that we had last week, PolitiFact came out and said that everything that I said was true.”

As PolitiFact puts it, that statement “jolted us out of our seats”, and they declared her new statement a “Pants on Fire” lie. The truth is, last week they evaluated two of her statements, giving one a “Mostly True” and the other as “Pants on Fire”.

Sheesh, Bachmann even lies about lying. 59% of her statements have been rated as either “False” or “Pants on Fire” by the non-partisan PolitiFact.

© Barry Deutsch

I’ve even seen one of these objections voiced in here.

I think the biggest cause of confusion over the OWS movement is that we only understand hierarchical power structures in this country. Every movement not only has to have “an official media spokesperson” but they have to have someone who is in charge. Just like we always blame the president for everything bad that happens, even though by our constitution the president has very limited powers.

The Tea Party movement ran into the same problem, but only for a moment until the Republican Party and Fox News took it over.

But hierarchical power structures are becoming quaint in the age of the Internet. The first time I saw this in action was during the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, which was largely organized by decentralized word of mouth over the internet and cell phones.

Indeed, most of the current revolutions in the Middle East are following the same pattern. The problem is that when a decentralized movement overcomes a centralized power structure like a government, it leaves a power vacuum, like we are seeing now in Egypt and Libya.

British newspaper The Guardian has an excellent article on how Fox News is basically running the Republican primary, and as a result is helping Obama’s reelection bid, maybe even giving Obama a landslide victory.

You don’t believe that Fox News is running the Republican primary? After all, Fox hasn’t endorsed any candidates. But it is more subtle than that. What Fox does is suddenly give a lot of attention to a specific candidate (for example by giving them more appearances) and then starts feeding them softball questions (like when Bill O’Reilly asked Rick Perry on his Nov 18 show “Do you believe that Barack Obama — the person, not the President, the person because a lot of conservatives do believe this — doesn’t like America?”), and their poll numbers go magically up.

This has been carefully documented by Media Matters (they call it the “Fox Primary”). Indeed, just days before Newt Gingrich surged in the Republican polls, Media Matters shows that he was suddenly given the most appearances on Fox News. Not bad for a candidate who has little cash and whose campaign staff all quit back in June. Who needs a campaign when you have Fox News on your side?

Republican political operative Dick Morris (ironically while appearing on Fox and Friends) noted that Newt Gingrich didn’t have to actually, you know, campaign in Iowa in order to win the Iowa caucus. As Morris explained “This is a phenomenon of this year’s election. You don’t win Iowa in Iowa. you win it on this couch. You win it on Fox News.” As a result of Gingrich’s multiple appearances on Fox News, as Fox host Brian Kilmeade put it “With only one office in Iowa, he’s running away with the state! It’s almost unheard of!” Funny, that.

But the real problem is that as a corporation, Fox News doesn’t care about winning elections, they only care about ratings and making money. You don’t get high ratings by promoting candidates who have sensible, workable policies. You get high ratings from sensationalism, by serving up continuous outrage and fear to your viewers. Fox News promotes candidates who make for good TV, not who make for good politics. This explains why Fox virtually ignores candidates like Jon Huntsman or even Mitt Romney, both former state governors with impressive records.

Conservative Andew Sullivan calls this the “Media Industrial Complex“. As he explains, Fox News needs “provocative, polarising media stars” to guarantee high ratings. When there is so much money to be made from politics-as-entertainment” they need “talk-show hosts as president, not governors or legislators.”

As David Frum, the former Dubya speechwriter said “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us – and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.”

By adopting positions acceptable to Fox News, candidates push themselves into positions that make them less appealing to the national electorate. So Fox News makes lots of money, but the Republican Party crumbles. For example, Fox cheered Republicans to raise the debt ceiling in November, prompting the downgrading of America’s credit rating. Ouch! The Arizona official who pioneered their draconian anti-immigration measures (with heavy support from Fox News) was recalled. The Ohio law prohibiting collective bargaining rights for public sector workers went down in a landslide.

Even more interesting is that Florida Governor Rick Scott, heavily promoted to a big victory by Fox, is now the least popular governor in the US with a dismal 26% approval rating. What’s ironic is that Scott’s low popularity is because he is doing exactly what he promised to do in the campaign: cut the budget and cut government expenses. It turns out that while people claim they want smaller government, they don’t want to lose any program that benefits them (hence the “Government keep your hands off my Medicare” signs).

So Fox News candidates have hurt the GOP in key electoral states like Florida and Ohio. That can only help Obama get reelected.

© Tom Toles

When Newt Gingrich called the Palestinians an “invented people” who had never had their own homeland I was flummoxed. After all, we “Americans” are an invented people, as are almost all modern Arab nations (with the exception of Egypt and Morocco). And while it may be technically true that no Arabs called themselves Palestinians until the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in 1920, the same thing was true of Syria, Lebanon, and even Iraq. When Israel was created at the end of WWII, there were plenty of people there who called themselves Palestinians.

But I really like the fact that this comic points out our most recent “invented people” — corporations.

The point is not whether Gingrich’s inflammatory statement is technically true or not. The real question is why did he say it. What point is he trying to make? That Palestinians have no rights?

When the USA became a real country (and we became a suddenly non-invented people), it did it through bloody revolution against England. Is Gingrich saying that the same process is the only way for Palestinians to gain legitimacy as a people?

© Ben Sargent

The American dream is that anyone can become successful if they try, that you can leave your children with a better life than the one you have, that hard work is rewarded. It is what made our country great — the land of opportunity.

But now you are just supposed to work hard for your corporate masters. For what? So they can cut your pay or your job, while giving themselves obscene bonuses? So you can buy a house that will be worth less money than you paid for it? So you can build a nest egg for your retirement that will go up in smoke when the company you worked for goes bankrupt or the stock market tanks? So your life crumbles around you if you become seriously ill or disabled?

People complain about the young not working hard enough. Well, why the hell should they work hard? Talk about disincentives!

The American Dream has become a nightmare for most Americans. And the pundits and politicians play the blame game — it is all the fault of immigrants, or Muslims, or gays. They think they can give you a scapegoat so you don’t look too closely at the real problems.