(no subject)

[fpb]

The worst feature of the American right is its astonishing, almost unbelievable ability to rewrite its memory - both individually and collectively.

Take for instance the last presidential election. You can hardly read a conservative blog without finding, at least every third day, some vituperative attack on John McCain, in terms that would suggest that he had given away a certain victory. You would think that the 2008 campaign was some sort of conservative triumph, thrown away by an incompetent candidate; rather than an election in which the Republicans were so unpopular that the Democrats could have run the yellow dog of the old joke and won by a comfortable majority. You would think that McCain was not running against the whole establishment, national and foreign, and against the unspoken but greedy desire to have a black President. You would never think that, against all the odds, he had not run the most successful Republican campaign of the year, infinitely more successful than the congressional and state campaigns, capped with the star-making discovery of Sarah Palin (of whom the same blogs speak as though she were the sworn enemy of John McCain - and never mind who had called her to national and international prominence); as if the numbers did not prove that, until the collapse of Lehmann Brothers holed his campaign below the waterline, he had managed, against all the odds, to come even against Barack Obama and with a real chance of victory!

Even worse is the delusion that is feeding the fires of conservative revolt - that the reform of healthcare is some sort of nefarious plot sprung in secret by plotting Democrats. Anyone who had followed the campaign of 2008 should remember that if there was a mandate for anything, it was health reform. The pressure for it was so obvious that the Republicans had to present a set of alternative proposals of their own. But the yelling Republican mobs all act as though there was nothing wrong with American health care, as though the Democratic President and two-house majority had not been returned with a clear mandate for reform, and as though the whole thing were a violation of the popular will! People who actually voted for candidates who clearly had offered varieties of health care reform turn out in their hundreds of thousands to shout their rage at this undesired surprise.

Of course people who can so easily revise their past do not always show a grip of reality in other ways. Who do the same blogs think would have made a better candidate than McCain? My impression is - and please, hold on tight, because I know that this is an enormity - Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee! The very mention of two such names in one bracket shows a considerable degree of confusion. Huckabee, while unelectable because of his Creationism and bizarre ideas of taxation, certainly does represent a strong section of the Republican grass roots; but Romney is not just a RINO, but a man with no principles of any kind. Governing Massachusetts, he showed nothing but hostility to pro-life forces and conservatives of every kind; having barely stepped out of that very liberal post and posture, straightaway he proceeded to discover in himself a number of pro-life and pro-family feelings that were not, to say the least, evident as governor barely six months earlier! Does such a man not deserve the description I bestowed on him two years ago: "sleazy dealmaker"? And yet - what is really breathtaking - his name occurs again and again in the list of favoured and approved "conservative" candidates promoted by big-name conservative columnists such as Ann Coulter; whereas the only people who should be glad of a Romney candidacy - and who did everything in their power to promote one - would be the Karl Rove, deal-making party leadership that hates real conservatism like the plague.

Many things may be said against liberals and allied forces; and I have said one or two. But faced with this amazing ability to forget and rewrite one's own most recent past - an ability that escapes the charge of mendacity only because most of the people who share it so obviously believe what they say - can anyone really blame them for the famous insult that conservatives are "ignorant and easily led"?

Comments

[capnflynn.livejournal.com]

Refusing to face facts and deluding oneself into believing things that simply aren't true are popular American pastimes, unfortunately. >__

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

It's not limited to Americans. We just do it more loudly than some others.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

Such selective memory apparently helps people sleep at night.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

True. And you don't necessarily even do it louder - you should see what passes for politics in Italy about now! - so much as that you are naturally heard more widely.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

True, sir.

[bookwrm17.livejournal.com]

Re: health care, I have not met a single person who thinks that the current system is not in need of reform. In my experience, the source of the anger and suspicion is not simply the fact that the Democrats are trying to reform health care, but that they are trying to do so by rushing through a major, far-reaching piece of legislation full of flaws and uncertainties that none of them have even bothered to read, and that they are resorting to possibly illegal methods of bribery and arm-twisting to gain votes, such as exempting Senator Nelson's home state of Nebraska from paying for the expansion of Medicare in order to get his support. The mandate for health care reform means that they need to pass something, but the current Congress seems to have taken it to mean that they can pass anything.

Re: criticism of McCain, his campaign was not run flawlessly, but anyone who honestly thinks that he threw away the election is a fool.

Unfortunately, this is how humanity operates. We remember things the way that suits us.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Yes, the Democrats have done themselves no favours by the way they have gone about this. With a majority in both houses and an evident mandate for reform, they did not have to indulge secrecy or seek confrontation. I will add that in my view this was motivated chiefly by the itch to use this reform as a Trojan Horse to force abortion as a right into the American legal system, and possibly euthanasia as well; I think that when federal financing of abortion came to the surface, the excrement really hit the fan. But the Republicans, especially the genuine conservatives, are at fault in that they allowed themselves to use language and attitudes that suggest that the whole subject of health care reform is simply illegitimate (e.g. claims of unconstitutionality, etc,), and indeed the start of tyranny. One recent entry by johncwright managed to start with a downright implication that to have universal State-directed healthcare was equivalent to the mass murder of citizens in the street and demanded a national insurrection in response. Faced with this kind of lunacy, I would say that I have been, if anything, mild and moderate in my criticism. And this goes back in part to Sarah Palin's "death panels" nonsense; that outburst may have been effective politics, but it is the most hypocritical criticism of a proposed law I have heard in 47 and a half years of life. First, because we know that if panels to control expenditure were not in place, the Republicans would yell to the heavens about Democrat pork and waste - "not even an instrument of accounting control!"; and second, because death panels in the most literal sense of the word are already in activity in the American system, and everyone who ever had a relative, friend or acquaintance stop their payments because they were costing the company too much. And unlike public authorities, you have no elected representatives to direct them and no chance to change your cover when it is too late. In fact, the fact that a company has withdrawn cover from you is an evident sign to all the others that you are a bad risk and not to be taken on as a customer.

(I tried to make this point, along with some others, on Sarah Palin's website, but it is not accessible for comments to people outside the USA. That is another thing she should change. And mind you, I find Palin a very impressive and significant politician; the more important to underline my dissent with her when I do dissent.)

As for McCain, his campaign was a masterpiece - except for the last three months. You have to remember where he came from: the oldest candidate almost in history, with a history of humiliating defeat (by Bush II in 2000), the violent hostitlity both of the Republican establishment and of most movement conservatives, and virtually no money, he managed to sqish all the establishment candidates and become a credible candidate against Obama - in a situation where the media, and public disgust with Republican government, would have seen to it that any other Republican in the race would have been nothing more than a punching ball for Obama, like the unlucky opponents of FD Roosevelt and Ike Eisenhower long ago. Having said that, he was responsible for his own final defeat: when the Lehmann Brothers disaster came, it was seen all too clearly that he had no clear strategy, and that, even worse, he was not at home with business and economics. Obama not only had the better advisers - beginning with Warren Buffett - but managed to give a much more presidential performance. McCain's dash to Washington DC was the right thing to do - for a Senator. And in an election in which the economic situation was going to be the central issue (as Matt Towery, one of McCain's few genuine and devoted supporters, had been warning for years), many people simply did not feel they could trust the nation to someone who did not have clear ideas about it. It was then that, after being neck and neck for weeks, McCain lost those fatal three points to Obama that he never recovered and that cost him the popular vote on the day.

[capnflynn.livejournal.com]

Haha, true that. Dementia is sort of a hallmark of the current age.

[sun-stealer.livejournal.com]

We absolutely despised John McCain, he was actually booed at his own rallies. McCain was an authoritarian junker who would say whatever he believed would get him elected, and everyone knew it, and we despised him for it. The man's career was a history of backstabbing with the exception of the Surge. He was an uncharismatic, sneering autocrat who believed himself entitled to the Presidency because he was the oldest republican in Congress. We all knew he would break his promises if he ever got into office. He only won the nomination because many democrats went republican for a day.

The election was not a referendum on healthcare, it was a referendum on how the people did not trust the Republican party because they had betrayed their principles.

[sun-stealer.livejournal.com]

"evident mandate for reform"

In Europe maybe. In America, over 60% of the people are opposed to this.

Also, a universal heathcare system is completely unworkable on the scale of 300 million spread out across 50 states. Combine that with an economy as bad as it is, and a debt approaching critical mass, it will kill us.

"One recent entry by johncwright managed to start with a downright implication that to have universal State-directed healthcare was equivalent to the mass murder of citizens in the street and demanded a national insurrection in response."

They called me mad when I quoted Jefferson's more revolutionary thoughts.

"As for McCain, his campaign was a masterpiece - except for the last three months."

He rose to the top because he was the Democrat's house republican and he fell when he became a liability and the media dutifully turned on him. I can say with absolute certainty that 99 out of every 100 republicans loathed McCain like the Humphrey of the right hew as

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Your hatred, which you admit, nevertheless blinds you. In a year when the Democrats could (and did) have run the worst possible candidate, McCain got to within an inch of victory, until he was wrong-footed by the collapse of Lehmann Brothers. No other Republican could have done anything like that; if Romney or Giuliani had got the nomination, they would have ended like Hoover in 1931 or Adlai Stevenson in the fifties - as punching bags. If you cannot grant him any personal value, grant him at least an exceptional campaign.