The Democrats Gloat Thread

The Democratic Party ahead on crime and immigration; on abortion, morality and homosexuality; on the economy. And 15 points ahead on taxes.

Man.

Who would have believed it three years ago? Who could even have imagined it anno Michael Dukakis?

It sure tells volumes about the sheer monumentality of the mess the Bush admin has made of the opportunity the voters had given it.

But Bush got that 2 point jump during the 9/11 anniversary exploitation fest, don't you know that means things are looking up?

Well, they might still be (for them) - it's too early to cry victory. It's more than just the 2 points for 9/11, after all, I'm afraid.

In ten polls completed between September 1 and September 14, Charles Franklin notes at Pollster.com, Bush's job approval has averaged 39.9%. "Approval around 40% is not particularly good news for any President, but this represents a considerable improvement since earlier in the year," he writes.

Franklin maintains the excellent Political Arithmetik blog where he wrote last Wednesday after the last NBC/WSJ poll:


That trend estimate of a job approval slightly over 40% is not just the best for Bush since last February, it also compares with how it was around 37% for most of the summer - and down at 34% at its lowest point, back in May:



Graph:

From that Pew poll:

It's very interesting what they are doing here, nimh. By having Bush do a daily speech on terrorism and nothing but, they are filling up the news vaccum with what they want to fill it up with and the media complies, covering his speeches as if they deserved such daily attention. And, importantly, they are having Bush really push the macho cowboy swagger thing, the essential component forwarded (and you'll see versions of this verbalized in the rightwing commentary in case the base doesn't get it) "I'm tough and goddamn it, I'm confident, and goddamniter even, I'm right."

It's the institutionalization of Mussolini-style populism for the authoritarian-demanding.

The difference is that Mussolini had to sack Italy's free press, while Bush doesn't have to. Did you watch the whole Rosegarden pressconference on c-span.org? Half of the reporters ask softball questions. The other half does ask hardball questions, which is to their credit. But when Bush doesn't answer a hardball question -- which he scarcely does -- the next reporter will never back up his predecessor. Can't the White House press corps unionize or something?

Nice play at Al Franken's Stuart Smalley by the way. Was that on purpose?

Unions offer a peril to national safety.

No they don't.

That was a quote from Ronald Reagan.

Specifically,he was talking about PATCO and their illegal and dangerous strike that shut down air traffic.

First, re Franken, unintentional similarity.

Re press...I didn't see the whole thing. Probably wouldn't have been able to without putting an axe into the tv. I've got Boehlert's "lapdogs" but haven't read it yet for similar reasons.

What incentive do these people have to get tough? They (the big news organization employees) are well paid and if they push too hard, the hammer will come down on their employer or that employer will do the hammering on their own. It's to everyone's benefit (not ours, though) if the boat doesn't get rocked much. The political industry and the news industry are symbiotic now. I don't have a lot of hope the republic will correct itself short of some significant catastrophe. But in that case, it seems just as likely the consequences would head in the opposite direction.

nimh

Sorry to take so long on your question. Lola has been in Dallas for a jewelry designer show at a gallery there and I've been running things here. (We've done very well there, by the by, outselling the other designers whose work is represented all over the place including Lola's own jewelry cabinet).



Inability/refusal to admit error appears a public matter while inability/refusal to recognize it appears to be a private matter. But I suspect that is rather deceptive. It is hard to imagine a situation where someone would remain steadfast in an opinion - regardless of conflicting information - outside of a community environment.

Let's begin by noting how tico, in the last sentence of the last paragraph (on that page where we discussed this earlier) does something which finn does in his post at the top of the page (and which foxfyre did even more explicitly in a post last week)...they boast, they're quite open in their pridefulness about it, regarding how they will not change their minds. That's really a fairly odd thing to be boasting of. Of course, we also have our contingent of people here who appear to be equally prideful in their resistance to change of opinion regarding the Bush/Cheney oil crowd as the conspiratorial source of jets hitting the Trade Center.

Colbert's "truthiness" satirization of the position, "I don't much like facts. Facts change. But my opinion will never change" is precisely to the point. Facts aren't adequately "dependable", even if credible in themselves. There's some larger story which tells the truth of things and it is what's dependable. Little 'factoids" or bits of "evidence" which don't align with that larger story will inevitably, because this functions as an axiom, be false. Or insignificant. Or biased. Or inappropriately contexted. Or cleverly and seductively spawned by Satan to delude. Etc.

That larger story (or "world view") could be any of the ones we are familiar with; the literal truth of Genesis or of the Koran, the superior moral purity of one's nation or group, the traitorous rot within one's own group, the hidden manipulations of a few who control international banking, the gay agenda, the decline of civiliztion from 'liberalism', the perfection or sacredness of Mother Nature, the pre-historical switch from matriarchy to patriarchy after which all went to hell, etc. It is really a thesis which "explains" how the world works and why things are the way they are (bad, unfair, painful, cruel or the converse of those) and what levers we might trip to make things better.

That's important stuff, emotionally or psychologically. We all try to make sense of the world and we toss up these over-arching theses as explanatory devices.

But pretty clearly, there is a lot of variation, individual to individual (or even case to case in a single individual) regarding how tightly we hold onto these theses and how threatened we might become in the face of conflicting information. Anti-Darwinians seem the paradigm example here. And many of them are very proud indeed of not changing their ideas.

Here's another really interesting bit. It certainly seems that this stance or posture of pridefulness is heightened in the face of contests to the thesis. Note Bush's present posture on his policies...David Brooks is writing about it now and has brought it up on PBS News, "I've never seen him so confident, so certain" etc. And that obviously applies to tico, fox, finn and others here. Partly, they are likely mirroring the community story (their community) in the manner of modern anti-darwinists dropping creationism rhetoric and replacing it with ID terms/ideas. But it is in the context of perceptions that their worldview is facing acute contest in the present.

I'll share an anecdote. This incident happened in the late sixties in a friend's university classroom. The prof was up at the front speaking with all the students listening except for one who was intermittently throwing half-volume jibes and sarcasms at the prof. This was ignored for a while, but then the prof walked directly over to the fellow and standing over him looking him in the eye said, "You are playing a winner/loser game with me. Can you tell what side you are on right now?" The student left.

Tico, finn and foxfyre - precisely like Bush - are playing a power game here. That's the explanation for their pridefulness on not changing their minds. It's a public assertion or insistence that they are "not losing".

Clearly, that has an internal component as well and "cognitive dissonance" is the term we'll probably find the most explanatory. It is upsetting to have one's worldview challenged to the point of having it threatened as a means to establish one's place in the community or within existence. People commit suicide and murder plus a million lesser "evils" in such circumstances. If suddenly this afternoon the clouds parted, and an angry face with a long white beard descended, I'd be in some serious psychic unsettlement.

Nothing really new in any of that. But it seems to me it presents a couple of really significant dilemmas. First, trying to tease apart how this entirely human tendency hurts us versus how it helps us. And second, how might we, as individuals and in community, minimize the ways in which negative consequences follow. These reflect the political issues.

Briefly, on the first, communities become communities and then go forward to co-operate and get things done for everyone's survival through agreements. This is important, that other thing is not. This is good, that is bad. Because we humans tend to overlay much of our thinking on a framework of binary opposites (Claude Levi-Strauss' epiphany) our language and ideas and worldviews are littered with these oppositional structures. This is so deep in us that you'll find, if you try, there doesn't seem to be any other way to begin thinking about something. And communities or groups need to agree on where things sit on this good/bad, black/white etc scale. If they don't, on things that appear important, they really lose the cohesion that makes them into a group.

Cohesion works. Agreement works. Tossing dissidents to the wolves works. Tradition works. And threats, as we know, work. That is, they "work" in an important way but they aren't the whole story. There's a point where they become destructive. They disallow or resist change. There was a wonderful Doonesbury cartoon a few months back in the heat of the ID vs darwinian court cases/contest where the ID-believing patient was informed that the anti-biotic he needed to survive was an evolved entity.

So (doesn't blatham love to yak) we have two factors which seem to be working against our mutual well-being. The tendency of some to REALLY resist change and the things that facilitate change (eg education - as in the recent demand by the president of Iran to purge their universities of "liberals" and "secularists", or the mirror derogations from tico, fox and finn) and the variation in how tightly any individual maintains control over threats to their worldview. Pretty much, these seem to be the same people because the pathology (sorry, guys) is really the same. Had David Horowitz or Danial Pipes or Bill Bennet been born in Afghanistan, they'd be Ayatollahs. Had foxfyre been born in china, she'd have been an ethusiastic Red Guard. Had Bush been born in Northern Canada, he'd still be just a drunk and a boor and a bully who wouldn't be able to admit mistakes.

I'm not sure I agree with that. Bob Woodward started his long and prosperous career with a major act of boat-rocking. He worked as an employee for a major news organization when he exposed Watergate. Wouldn't this serve as an incentive at least for at least some journalists?

Thats a long time ago though, Thomas. The media universe has changed drastically since the early 70s.

Congrats, Blatham, to you and Lola on the designer success. I'm going to have to come back later to read your post.

By the by, as an indicator of the present political climate in the US, the following seems rather poignant. It's from the NYRB, June 8 2006 in a review by Anthony Lewis of Tom Wicker's "Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy"

He certainly does.

I wouldn't propose that there is NO incentives of the sort you point to. There are independent voices available and who are supported. But far moreso than in Watergate days, they are working for relatively small outlets (Hersch at the New yorker, the reporters at Knight Ridder, etc) which don't have much reach into the broad community.

With the big papers, and even much moreso with the network news shows, reporting has become seriously emasculated. I watched CNNs Blitzer interview Hadley on Sunday. It was simply pathetic. He didn't press or query with any vigor, instead merely handing out softball questions and providing a platform for the repeated and repeated talking points. THAT is the model for present network news.

And, of course, there is now the Fox network which is designed specifically to forward propaganda while making dough.

You've read Brock's book, so you have a good notion of the genesis of much of this, and of the intent of the individuals formative in this new dynamic. Add in the concentration of these media in the hands of some five HUGE corporations with interests often directly opposed to serious investigative reporting or serious contestation with powers that be, and you've arrived at a media world which tends too often to be merely a facilitator of existing power structures and agendas.

thomas

As an absolutely telling example, you can take the new Couric show on CBS. She has a segment entitled, irony dripping in buckets, "Free Speech". Political guests so far have been Rush Limbaugh, Michael Gerson (Bush staff and previous speechwriter) and Rudy Guiliani.

That's it for political voices in the Free Speech segment after thirteen days.

Well, in this case let's hope viewers catch up to it, and that the 20-50 good blogs you have in America grow to become serious competition for the current TV oligopoly.