Tag: myth

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies

Impeachments Are Forever?

Pharaoh Thutmose III, history, myth, memory,

The impeachment of President Donald J. Trump, just concluded in the Senate with an acquittal, was — so far as the Senate trial portion of the exercise is concerned — the least partisan presidential impeachment in U.S. history.

That’s because Senator Mitt Romney (R‑Utah) was the first senator ever to vote against his own party in such a proceeding.

Before we give the notorious flip-​flopper a ticker-​tape parade, or query too deeply into his personal animus against Trump, let’s acknowledge that the House impeachment, proper, was heavily partisan, and is only going to get more-so.

What? you ask.

How can a past event get more or less of anything?

Well, House Republicans, expecting a big backlash against Democrats next November, are already plotting to “expunge” the impeachment from the record. 

As if to stick it to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bizarre point that her House’s action would be “an impeachment that lasts forever.”

Sorta like Pharaoh Thutmose III chiseling his mother’s name — Hatshepsut — off the monuments of Egypt.

The Republicans’ planned “damnatio memoriae” is a good clue to the moral of this story: the impeachment process is … “not good,” to apply a Trumpian mantra.

Now, the process of impeachment has long seemed to me like a great idea — another one from those wise framers of the Constitution.

But with persistent partisanship, this constitutional recourse has not worked out very well. 

Overall. 

Historically.

Whether in 1868, with Democrat Andrew Johnson, or 1999, with Democrat Bill Clinton, or today, with Trump’s failed ouster, the impeachment process has proved (Romney notwithstanding) maddeningly partisan, and looks like it will only get more partisan — with House Democrats already talking about a second impeachment of Trump.

We need some new form of recall.

Citizen-​based, perhaps?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Pharaoh Thutmose III, history, myth, memory,

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Categories
ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

No. No. No. No.

Chuck Todd, Meet the Press, right wing, left wing, propaganda, myth, bias, MSM

“Look, I think one of the best things going in Donald Trump’s favor — we know this — is the mainstream media,” David Brody, the Christian Broadcasting Network’s White House correspondent, told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd yesterday. 

“I hate to say it. I know I’m sitting on a Meet the Press roundtable, but the truth of the matter is 62 percent think the media is biased,” added Brody. “So, in other words, if you look at the approval ratings of Donald Trump versus the approval rating of the media —” 

“The conservative echo chamber created that environment,” interjected Mr. Todd. “It’s not — no. No. No. No. It has been a tactic and a tool of the Roger Ailes created echo chamber.”

“So, let’s not pretend it’s not anything other than that,” Todd insisted. (So, it IS something other than that?)

“Well, hang on,” Brody responded. “Yes and no. Because remember, the independents are part of Donald Trump’s base.… [T]hose Independents also distrust media. This is not just Republicans. It is many Americans across —”

“Oh, no. No. No. I take your point,” Todd again interrupted. “I’m just saying it was a creation — it was a campaign tactic. It’s not based in much fact.”

Hmmm. Todd does not dispute Brody’s assertion that a supermajority of the country sees bias in the Fourth Estate. Nor does he deny that in a battle between Trump and the so-​called mainstream media, the approval-​rating-​challenged president bests the media most days.

Instead, the former Democratic Party campaign staffer-​turned-​journalist smugly maintains that one cable TV channel, talk radio and a spate of conservative websites have totally invented a fantasy of an anti-​conservative bias where absolutely none exists.

Meet the press bias.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Categories
Accountability general freedom government transparency incumbents insider corruption local leaders moral hazard national politics & policies term limits

“Dorky” Doesn’t Define It

term limits, Congress, myth, power, corruption

“Term limits,” said Daniel McCarthy, editor of The Modern Age, in a recent podcast conversation with historian Tom Woods, “was one of the dorkiest ideas of the 1994 so-​called Newt Gingrich revolution.”

He characterized it as not having really gone anywhere.

Huh?

Granted, Congress is still not term-​limited. But Americans in 15 states — including California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, and Ohio, and representing 37 percent of the nation’s population — do enjoy term-​limited state legislatures.*

And it sure wasn’t Newt Gingrich’s idea. Gingrich opposed it.

McCarthy repeats the old chestnut that what term limitation “winds up doing is actually weakening Congress and congresspeople in particular — relative to their own staff, who stay in Congress and become sort of experts and learn how to manipulate their congressman, and also relative to the executive branch who have people rotate in from time to time.”

Nifty theory — one very popular with politicians, who know that voters fear unelected influences on legislation.

The reality, however, is that Congress, designed by the Constitution’s framers to be both most powerful and closest to the people‚ is, today, the weakest branch.

And legislators are not term limited.

Ditch the “manipulation theory”; adopt a “collaboration theory”: legislators with Methuselah-​long careers learn, sans “rotation in office,” to feather their own nests and those of the interest groups that fund their re-​elections (and insider trading schemes).

Term limits remain popular with normal Americans because voters intuitively grasp the reality of such everyday corruption, which is directly tied to Congress having sloughed off so much constitutional responsibility. 

We need term limits to restore a Congress sold out by professional politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Nine of the ten largest cities in America likewise have termed-​limited their elected officeholders. For more information, see the links to the column from which this episode of Common Sense is condensed.

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Categories
ideological culture media and media people

Through a Glass, Tinted

One day last year, Slate Star Codex blogger Scott Alexander “woke up” to discover that “they had politicized Ebola.”

How?

It was, he explains, more than just a series of partisan cheap shots. Though there were plenty of those. It was something more startling, and in its own perverse way impressive. Everybody seemed awfully certain about what should be done, immediately, and along ideological lines, red and blue:

How did both major political tribes decide, within a month of the virus becoming widely known in the States, not only exactly what their position should be but what insults they should call the other tribe for not agreeing with their position?

The answer to the question?

Each tribe has its myths, er, “narratives,” and members of each concentrate on those stories that seem to demonstrate the truth of their … narratives. How you cover Ebola depends on other beliefs you already hold.

“Ideas are forces,” 19th century writer G. H. Lewes put it. “Our acceptance of one determines our reception of others.”

The result of sticking to one’s in-​group mythos can have negative consequences, however. You can end up in Silly Putty Country, “saying ISIS is not as bad as Fox News, or donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to the officer who shot Michael Brown.”

Conservative journalists see everything through red-​tinted glasses, liberal journalists refuse to look at the world through anything but blue-​tinted one. And too many people follow their lead.

Occasionally, we could try on lenses of different colors.

But perhaps I speak so confidently because I come from another tribe. Green? Orange? Purple?

What color is liberty?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.