“We can’t let the debate veer so far into hatred that we lose focus of our common humanity.”

It’s hard to disagree with that sentiment but, the fact is, it makes a poor yardstick by which to measure political speech. Dissent is defensible, even patriotic, inasmuch as it is legitimate. For instance, the Bush Administration’s warmongering, public lies and real subversion of the Constitution deserved strong public reaction (many would say much stronger than it was in our post-9/11 state of shock and stupor). Naked personal hatred for Bush or Cheney wasn’t appropriate or helpful but it becomes hard to tease from righteous anger at their egregious conduct.

The real trouble with Republicans’ (and other “conservative”) political rhetoric isn’t that it’s hateful, it is that it’s lying slander. If you’re going to go all torch-and-pitchfork it needs to be for a valid reason, not because secret socialists Obama, Pelosi and Reid want government to take over the health care system so it can pull the plug on Granny. That makes you a partisan crank (to the degree you fail to inform yourself of the relevant facts) or an outright traitor (to the degree you know it’s a lie).

It is the media’s rejection of empirical truth (along with liberal opinion) that has gotten us to our present dysfunctional and possibly dangerous political state, not its acquiescence to hate speech. Post-modern journalism’s ubiquitous he-said, she-said convention has simply failed to provide a grounding in reality for the vast majority of Americans who haven’t the inclination, skills or time to do the hard work of researching what is true or false out of the competing claims they happen to hear. Add to that the fact that many Americans want to believe certain lies for psychological reasons and a strong public rejection of contrived falsehood becomes even more critical. The corporate press is stuck with the two dominant political parties, just like the rest of us but until it can come to terms with the fact that one of those political entities is dishonest in nearly every expression, and communicate that fact to the public, their lies will continue to make many vulnerable Americans lose focus of our common humanity.

Smart liberals, mcjoan and BarbinMD are taking the Obama Administration’s new offshore drilling announcement as yet more evidence of Obama’s hard-headed naïveté that he’ll earn Republican support for his bi-partisan efforts. Interestingly, mcjoan quotes Chris Bowers who really seems to get it:

A compromise with Conservadems While Republicans have been particularly loud in their support for vastly expanded offshore drilling, this move is likely designed to win over mainly Democratic votes, not Republicans.

Rather than trying to placate green groups, President Obama is playing up how he is charting a unifying course of moderation in opposition to those groups.

To look at it another way, let’s figure out who Obama does not think he will reach:

1) Congressional Republicans – they have quite publicly adopted the position that they will offer unified obstruction to everything Obama attempts since the Stimulus.

2) Republican voters – they’re, well, insanely opposed to whatever they’ve been brainwashed into thinking Obama is attempting.

And who Obama has no need to reach:

3) Liberal Democrats – they’re going to make the only pragmatic choice they can, which will always be the lesser of evils; the Democrat. If we couldn’t be sure that Obama’s hippie-punching would be cost free, the health care reform saga just proved it.

Which leaves “conservative” Democrats, centrist and right-leaning Independents and centrist opinion-makers in the corporate press. Those are the people who Obama can and must persuade to succeed and those are all people who are pathologically and preposterously committed to bi-partisan centrism. And they also either don’t care about, or have much of a clue about, what makes good policy. Get it now?

” Everything that’s happened over the last five days has grown from a pattern of incitement going back almost a year…”

Really, I don’t think that he’s giving Republicans and the “conservative” movement nearly enough credit. This is the culmination of at least thirty years of fanning anti-government, anti-liberal and anti-Democrat sentiments since Ronald Reagan first started inculcating the idea that “government is the problem”. Was he listening to Rush Limbaugh through the Clinton years? It has simply gotten more extreme and outrageous, especially when Republicans are out of power, and has finally reached this new level of violent crazy with the campaign and election of the first African-American president (and the apparent abject failure of “conservative” dogma).

There has been little reason to moderate this brainwashing since it delivers an ever more loyal base of support – mostly out of hatred of the opposition – and ratings and money for propaganda outlets such as Clear Channel and FOX. They also have received very little push-back from either the Democrats in office or the mainstream press. The question now is whether we’ll see it for what it is and start to unravel this decades-old propaganda campaign designed expressly to create outright hostility, not just skepticism, toward democratically-elected, Democratic governments.

Thank you so much for the massive segment featuring constituent anger from the many Republican politicians who personally whipped that very anger with proven falsehoods and lies about health care reform, followed by the long feature on the couple angry about the signed law they knew absolutely nothing about because it was “done so clandestine”, all over the web and in nearly all print media for over a year. All in all we learn exactly nothing, except the reason why we’re one of the most ignorant people in the industrialized world. Well done, sir.

Glenn consistently mocks the 11-dimensional chess when Obama’s defenders use it deflect blame when the Obama team has made mistakes… More than likely, I’d bet these stories are coming from Rahm’s buddies who think they are doing him a favor.

Cole was referring to the update by Greenwald concerning the recent “Obama would do better following Rahm’s more centrist policy advice” stories in a post about how anonymous sources still dominate beltway journalism, in spite of reform claims by the papers-of-record NYT and WaPo:

One related point about the spate of “Obama-should-have-followed-Rahm’s-centrist-advice” articles that have appeared of late: if you really think about it, it’s quite extraordinary to watch a Chief of Staff openly undermine the President by spawning numerous stories claiming that the President is failing because he’s been repeatedly rejecting his Chief of Staff’s advice. It seems to me there’s one of two possible explanations for this episode: (1) Rahm wants to protect his reputation at Obama’s expense by making clear he’s been opposed all along to Obama’s decisions, a treacherous act that ought to infuriate Obama to the point of firing him; or (2) these stories are being disseminated with Obama’s consent as a means of apologizing to official Washington for not having been centrist enough and vowing to be even more centrist in the future by listening more to Rahm (we know that what we did wrong was not listen enough to Rahm). One can only speculate about which it is, but if I had to bet, my money would be on (2) (because of things like this and because these “Rahm-Was-Right” stories went on for weeks and Rahm is still very much around).

I’m afraid that both Greenwald and Cole – along with the rest of the media and most liberals – are being punked again by both Obama and Emanuel. Cole asks:“Obama is ok with spreading stories that appear to have his Chief of Staff undercutting him?”

I say yes and the reason is neither of the ones Greenwald offers. Most likely, Rahm is “liberal-washing” Obama. Rahm is continuing his role as the perceived force of darkness in the White House while pretending that he’s inhibiting Obama’s more liberal desires. It may make Obama look a little weak but that’s better than losing the liberal base entirely now that Obama has proved that his Third-way Centrist “ideals” are all his and that he’s no liberal, in spite of playing one at times on the campaign trail. At least, the White House trying to put the stink on Emanuel for the centrist policies the dirty hippies hate is a better theory than Rahm is trying to burnish his reputation by being fired for disloyalty to the President or that Rahm’s Beltway buddies are giving Rahm an unauthorized reach-around.

But I think the Republicans deserve more credit. If the legislation passes, it’s fair to say that Republicans made it happen. By lying and demagoguing “Obamacare” they rallied liberals, centrists and Congressional Democrats to push policies that had only lukewarm support at best and generated outright anger on the left. They may have made it absolutely necessary and possible for Democrats to pass this legislation.

UPDATE: Just in case you didn’t believe in the benefits of Republican obstructionism.

Let’s see:

1) Hasn’t inherited peace and prosperity and turned them into wars and deficits as far as the eye can see.

2) Hasn’t let terrorists destroy landmark buildings and kill thousands of people in New York and Washington after being warned of a gathering threat.

3) Hasn’t launched two unwinnable wars and occupations, costing trillions of taxpayer dollars, thousands of American soldiers’ lives and destroyed the lives of millions of innocent non-combatants.

Considering that he inherited all of that as well as a near global financial collapse and depression, and we still have groceries and electricity, I give him a B+.

“The coup was what many of you wish would happen here, without the military.”

AP: Honduras’ coup-installed government silenced two key dissident broadcasters on Monday just hours after it suspended civil liberties to prevent an uprising by backers of ousted President Manuel Zelaya. Dozens of soldiers raided the offices of Radio Globo. Officials also shut down Channel 36 television station, leaving it broadcasting only a test pattern.

Rene Zepeda, a spokesman for the interim government, said the two outlets had been taken off the air in accordance with a government emergency decree announced late Sunday that limits civil liberties and allows authorities to close news media that “attack peace and public order.”

Hmmmm, now what broadcasters right here might be fairly described as fomenting anti-government anger to “attack peace and public order”? Anybody?

By far the most controversial detail is who would participate in these exchanges. Both the House and Senate plans would restrict access to small businesses and individuals not eligible for employer-sponsored plans that meet a set of minimum standards for coverage. Plus, while the House plan would at least start with one national exchange, a Senate proposal would allow states to set up their own, and that could create problems from the outset; not only could they take longer to set up, but there is doubt about whether state or regional exchanges would be able to attract enough enrollees to leverage for lower premiums. Alain Enthoven, a leading health-care economist at Stanford University, says these conditions would make it impossible for the exchanges to reach the “critical mass” of pooled enrollees necessary to leverage insurers to offer lower premiums. Enthoven says exchanges need at least 20% of the privately insured population to be viable, far more than would participate under the House and Senate plans. He is among a community of health-policy experts who advocated for the exchange to be open to everyone at the outset, an idea that has been ignored thanks to President Obama’s promise that “if you like what you have, you can keep it.” An exchange offering more transparency and lower premiums could attract many large employers, destabilizing the current employer-based health-insurance system, from which more than half of Americans get coverage.
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Then there’s the problem of adverse selection. Under the House plan, the exchange would be the only place private insurers would be allowed to market and sell individual insurance policies. But under the plan from the one Senate committee that has released legislation, insurers could still sell insurance outside the exchanges. This is a recipe for failure, according to Karen Pollitz, a health-policy researcher at Georgetown University. “Anytime you’ve got competing markets, there is an opportunity for risks to get shifted,” she says. (Both the House and Senate plans would allow, but not require, small businesses to participate, with the House plan opening the door to larger and larger companies over time.)

Joe Klein went all over the airwaves and in print to sell us on the idea that insurance exchanges, this completely untried system fraught with implementation problems (like national co-ops), “are crucial to health reform…[c]an’t get there without them.”

Compared to these mythical exchanges, some form of “public option”, which has kept health care costs in check by half in every industrialized nation on earth and should reduce insurance costs for consumers on day one , is “something of a sideshow”. Once again, Klein is sinking real progressive policy while playing (and being accepted as) the earnest liberal on TV.

Who sold you this bill-of-goods anyway, Joe? Hoekstra still got your ear?

Digby: “I actually suspect that many in the Obama White House believed the hype about changing Washington…”

The question I have for them is, if they were so sure from the outset that Obama would never get that support, why do they think Obama thought so. Do they think they’ve got the political smarts over the skinny, big-eared, bi-racial son of a single mother, the “liberal”, outsider, black Democrat, who beat the DNC/Clinton machine and media-beloved, straight-talker war hero to get himself elected president in “conservative” insider-elite, white-dominated, inside-the-beltway Washington?

It’s pretty obvious to me that Obama would have to be a political idiot to look at the past 30-years of “conservative” Republican rule and conclude that they would ever support any Democrat on issues like health care reform or global warming (not to mention the fact that he had a few years in the Senate to experience Republican partisanship and obstructionism first hand). Of course, looking at that same history teaches us another important lesson: you can only govern with the popular support of the people – not campaign promises, not election landslide, not party dominance.

Unfortunately, public opinion, in the land of the politically-detached, pathologically partisan and/or generally ignorant, relies on the picture of what is true and important provided by a corporate press corps and collection of “centrist” gasbags who seem preternaturally committed to everything that is superficial and political, and wouldn’t know empirical truth if it proved they had failed their public journalistic duty for decades (oh, right). Having sold their souls and our future for the acceptance of “conservatives” and their well-paying careers, the corporate press institutionalized their vacuousness and failure to perform real journalism, replaced instead with he-said, she-said political-based-characterizations of policy and a cult-like worship of “bi-partisanship”.

So Obama set about framing every negotiation or policy approach with the “centrist”-pabulum of “bi-partisan outreach to Republicans” purely for the sake of that narrative and that narrative alone because Obama knew that the label “liberal partisan”, within The Village, would likely doom his presidency from the beginning. I find it a bit shocking that liberals, who almost alone understand the workings of the establishment press, their fetish for the “bi-partisan” and “centrist”, as well as their dreadful effects on public knowledge, consistently fail to see Obama’s game and its wisdom.

Meanwhile, do you suppose that the black, “socialist”, community-organizer who “palled around with terrorists” didn’t know that a big chunk of the Republican base would lose their collective minds at the reality of his ascendance to the White House or that professional hate-mongers like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly would continue to demonize him and race-bait their ever-aggrieved audience into near apoplexy, driving a wedge between Republican (self-perceived) intellectuals and the ever-loonier core base, as well as reveal their shocking delusion, ignorance, racism and authoritarian thuggery to the public at large?

At such suggestions I’ve repeatedly been told that I must surely be an Obamaphile, dreamily believing in Obama’s Kage Ninja Karate and 11-dimensional chess. The fact is, I wasn’t an early Obama supporter and had a serious falling out over his broken promises on FISA and abuse of executive power and I still harbor doubts about his intentions. But, otherwise, this is all rather simple political stuff really, things any liberal who’s been paying attention to domestic politics knows well. We’ve been complaining about it since the 1980s.

In other words, Obama is merely playing a good game of regular 3-move-ahead chess strategy. The trouble is, all our brains have been addled a bit by a generation of aggressive, lying, cheating, very effective “conservative” checkers. Liberals have never gotten the hang of that game, thank god (I think) but living in it for so long may have dulled our senses to the more elegant. Let’s not lose sight of the possibilities of and Obama’s mastery at the more strategic political game (Bill Clinton also knew how to play it, if not always in grandmaster fashion) just because we’ve been crowned a few too many times by “conservatives” in the recent past.