Every election you hear the same old mantra: Declining civility and nasty campaigning. And it’s getting worse!
Well, if you have some knowledge of history …
You might find a lot of interesting stuff from the video source, Reason TV.
Category: ideological culture
Early reports and predictions about political spending in this election cycle claim there’s a 30 percent increase over the last mid-term election. One figure hazards that this campaign will total out to around $3.7 billion. Spending on ads is said to be up 75 percent. Traditional spending via parties and party committees shows Democrats to have an edge over Republicans by about $20 million. Republicans are making up for it, we’re told, by newly re-legalized “outside” spending.
A CBS News report relates the conventional wisdom about this. Watchdog groups “say more ads and information can be good — but voters can’t judge their credibility when donors are secret.” One expert decries this, saying “We just cannot know and we’ll never know who is ponying up the money.”
I say, “so what?”
Information cannot be judged good or bad, nor facts or argument dismissed, depending on where the money comes from to distribute the information and argumentation. The classic fallacy of the argumentum ad hominem judges conclusions by the character of the speaker rather than the truth of the facts or the validity of arguments.
Its dominance in politics is a curse, not a blessing.
Demands for full transparency of citizen activism bolster the nasty politics of a logical fallacy. When we don’t know the economic provenance of an ad or a slogan or an argument, we’ll just have to decide the issue on its own merits.
Horrors!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Potted Presence
The State of the Union Address has become political, said Justice Alito last week, so he will follow the lead of Justices Scalia and Thomas and not sit in Congress while the Commander in Chief intones his annual duty.
Last January, Alito objected to President Obama’s little stab at the Supreme Court when the prez decried the Citizens United decision. Obama said that the Court had “reversed a century of law” and would “open the floodgates of special interests … to spend without limit in our elections.” Alito mouthed the words “NOT TRUE.”
And Alito was right. The decision certainly did not overturn a century of law. Not even a teensy bit … Well, maybe a teensy-weensy bit, if we count Progressive’s wishes to run everything by bureaucracy and “experts.” (It’s worth remembering that Progressives had a populist wing, supporting initiative and referendum a century ago.) The Citizens United case was about the unfortunately successful censorship of a movie. About a Democrat, Hillary Clinton.
So you can see why politicians — especially, these days, some Democrats — might oppose free speech around election time. The better to control the opposition.
No wonder Alito won’t “be there in January.” He doesn’t want to serve as a “potted plant.”
Congress, of course, takes occasion to seem “potted” in another sense. Amidst congressional applause and shouts, there’s scant room for reason.
Our third president, Thomas Jefferson, merely sent his report to Congress. Obama should, too — and save Alito RSVP duty.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Poor Willie Brown. Ever since California slapped term limits on state lawmakers, Brown’s lacked a permanent perch in power.
For many, Brown’s 15-year reign as speaker serves as Exhibit A in the case against unlimited terms. Brown himself bragged that he had been the “Ayatollah” of the assembly — though later he seemed to repent of his support for untrammeled spending in that role.
He next lathered patronage as mayor of San Francisco. But this was another term-limited post, so he couldn’t barnacle himself there either.
It still bothers Brown how voters limited tenures. He’s always opposed term limits. And now the papers quote him telling a Republican political club that term limits are a “disaster.… We’ve allowed ourselves to become addicted to elections.” (You guessed it: He disdains citizen initiative rights too.)
Elections, an addiction? Like heroin? Of course, we’re “addicted” to everything these days. Obama says we’re “addicted” to oil (as did Bush). We’d all admit a compulsion to consume food and oxygen.
To learn what weaning ourselves off term limits might be like, check Ballotpedia, which reports that even in this roiling political year, only 19 incumbent state senators out of 1,167 running for re-election lost their primaries. Less than 40 percent — the exact number is 459 — even faced an opponent. In general elections, incumbent re-election rates typically exceed 90 percent, even in tough political times.
That’s fine with politicians like Brown, who always crave another fix — of political power.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
American democracy is uglier than necessary. We don’t have to talk so nasty about our opponents. Or their money.
The usual snipe about this process is that funders of “our side” (whichever side that happens to be) are Good and True and Selfless, while funders of the other side are Evil and Dishonest and Selfish.
So, Democrats decry — and often seek to regulate — the spending of wealthy conservatives and “major corporate lobbyists”; Republicans decry — and, perhaps less often, seek to limit — the spending of unions and billionaires such as George Soros.
Because organizations like MoveOn have been funded by Soros, they are said to be somehow less “legitimate.”
When it was discovered that the Koch brothers of Koch Industries had funded various “Tea Party” organizations to the tune of (it is said) many millions, Obama-hurrahing pundits and activists decried this, charging that it proved that there was no “grassroots” element to the movement. “Astroturf!” they cried.
All nonsense.
Now, Democrats from Obama on down claim that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is using foreign money for ads. But Democrats haven’t produced a shred of evidence. It’s simply a wild accusation.
Look: It’s not tainted money when the other side gets it and you don’t. Or vice versa. Besides, rich people should be as free as less rich folks to give to their causes.
And perhaps we’d see less money pouring into politics from billionaires were campaign contributions for the rest of us less limited.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Had we but world enough, and time … we’d read all the books on our reading lists.
Last week I contemplated the classics of political liberty and a book I hadn’t read. After that, the days of the week clicked off, as they do, and a writer I was familiar with (but had never read) won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
I wonder: Will I ever make time to read his books?
They don’t exactly look like my cup of tea. But, perusing the list of novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010 Nobel Laureate in Literature, there seems to be something for nearly everyone.
What I knew Vargas for, mostly, was his notorious move away from trendy communism and towards an appreciation of freedom. Individual freedom. Liberty. He even ran for the presidency of his country on a limited-government platform, and raised quite a lot of interest, only to be beaten by a sly, dark horse of a candidate who went on to stay in the news for quite some time.
Success or no, by standing up for constitutional limitations and private property and civil liberties as one coherent package, Vargas made an important contribution to world culture that almost deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. Too often, literary types feel (like his friend-enemy-frenemy Gabriel Garcia Márquez obviously feels) destined to ally themselves with “the Left.”
Mario Vargas Llosa broke that tradition.
So, congratulations to an eminent man of letters … and liberties.
Too bad he lacks a North American counterpart.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.