Waiting for the Fairness Doctrine
One of the “promises” of the recent campaign has been the threat that the overwhelming nature of the Democrats’ victory would allow them to push their long-held dream of imposing (re-imposing, that is) the Fairness Doctrine.
And now it may indeed come to pass. The idea that it would be a good thing to require every political program that espouses a certain viewpoint to also offer an equal and opposite viewpoint could sound “fair”—if you don’t think it should be left to the marketplace to decide.
It would be different if freedom of speech were involved here—or rather, infringements on it. But that is most definitely not involved. No one is censoring liberal speech, for example, by listening to Rush Limbaugh and deciding that Air America is more boring.
The proposed Fairness Doctrine would function as an extremely muscular and forceful affirmative action (on steroids) for liberal thought, which has not been the subject of discrimination in the first place. Rather, it has had trouble competing for viewers in the radio marketplace against the more lucrative and popular conservative programs.
How “progressive” is this?:
A senior advisor to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told one magazine last year, “Conservative radio is a huge threat and political advantage for Republicans and we have had to find a way to limit it.”
Well, at least it’s honest. Will it be successful? Tune in to see—and hear.
Or not hear, as the case may be.
Congress is full of teh stupid – people trying to ban flag burning, people wanting to post the ten commandments in the House and Senate, people passing discriminatory laws against marriage. This is just more of the same.
Eshoo is particularly stupid, since the FCC can’t tell cable services what to do – they can walk their jackboots over broadcast media because of the fiction that the airways belong to the public and therefore the government should be able to license and control them.
Anyway, I doubt this will actually get anywhere, but if it does come up, I can finally get back to my Libertarian, anti-Democratic whining, and send a few bucks over to the ACLU besides.
Why do I keep feeling like I’m living in an Ayn Rand novel?
I don’t get it. The idea that for every viewpoint there is one that is “equal and opposite” is ridiculous. Ask anyone whose ideas were espoused by neither the Democrats nor their “equal and opposite” Republican brethren. What a doctrine such as this must do to avoid the chaos of infinite ideas is enforce two viewpoints, accepted as “equal and opposite” by the moguls of media, to the exclusion of all other shades and slants of meaning. In practical terms, they will allow the market to choose (or manipulate the market into choosing) two viewpoints on each issue. Not three or five or seven, but two and only two, And who decides how to define and state each supposed issue? They will turn the marketplace of ideas into a tightly controlled horse race, the horses and the stands and the finish line all owned by a consortium of politicians and media. At least, that’s how it looks to me at first glance.
Hyman: Exactly how would sending money to the ACLU help? They’re liable to favor this Orwellian scheme!
Don — Hint: the Fairness Doctrine is not about fairness or commonsense.
I guess that the old adage about the law may also be relevant in the marketplace of ideas. Needless to say, today’s democrats have only option #3 at their disposal.
Corruption is not sustainable without oppression. Positions are bought and sold, elections are stolen (for real, a la Washington governor & Minnesota senator, etc.), the “free press” is actually the rump of one political party, Obama the Messiah drafts his Schutzstaffeln, capitalism is strangled by national socialist dimwits, democracy dies with the Golden Goose and the labor camps will then commence. Can it all be avoided? I strongly doubt it.
Like Huxley says – it’s not about fairness. Isn’t it funny how they name these things to be misleading – because they know most people will hear the name – not research it – and think it is a good thing. Shame on them and shame on the populace. In an economy that is already in bad shape they are going to hurt another industry. Talk is the mainstay of AM radio. In most markets if they want to carry Limbaugh and Hannity they are going to have to carry 6 hours of Air America (or some other such tripe) and they won’t be able to sell commercial time (or very little of it) for those hours because Air America is already in the markets where it can get enough listeners to be even marginally profitable to the stations that carry it. So basically the stations in most markets will have to carry it at a loss which most of them can’t afford to do. They can try to change formats, but AM just isn’t going to be able to compete with the FM stations playing music.
When it come to TV how are they going to determine what is equitable. I mean all the libs vilify Fox News, but surveys show it has the most balanced audience of anyone.
They are going back to antiquated laws that might have had some relevance when there were only a few broadcast networks and a couple of radio stations in any given geographic area. It can still amaze me that people who will decry stopping pornography from being filtered at public library computers in the name of free speech can try to do this with a straight face. Oh I forgot they have a second face they can use when talking about the Fairness Doctrine.
Just like prepending “People’s Democratic Republic” to a country’s name is a tacit admission that the country is neither the people’s, nor democratic, nor a republic.
Beware. Once they have the airwaves, they will come for the blogosphere.
Any bets on where the “centrist” Obama will come down on this idea? I’m betting he won’t rule it out in advance, and he would sign a bill re-establishing the Fairness Doctrine.
Here’s an interesting cite from a 1987 NYTs article.
That was then. This is now.
Well, I was trying to post part of that article, but it disapeared.
Oblio Says:
December 19th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
That was then. This is now.
Huh, I don’t know if this was in response to my post, but i suppose I could also say, “Founding fathers and the Constitution , that was then, this is now” if you think that’s an important point.
I wouldn’t really care if Dan Rather brought Rush Limbaugh on the CBS news to comment (if such were the case, and of course, not possible any longer).
Although, it all sounds rather tiresome.
“Why do I keep feeling like I’m living in an Ayn Rand novel?”
Because you’re really gullible and have a very limited imagination.
Re-establishment of the Fairness Doctrine would be the best thing that ever happened to right-wing talk radio and Fox News.
Resentment is the staple fuel of talk-radio’s retrograde bonfire of banality and the practitioners’ stock-in-trade is manufacturing it from the slightest of slights.
Any attempt by the federal government to make programming decisions would deliver to the conservative media the one thing it most lacks: a legitimate complaint.
Type “Fairness doctrine” into Google and you’ll get a gazillion blogs coughing out end-is-nigh rants about broadcast liberal fascism. Somewhere down on page 32, you might find some liberal wingnuts cheering for it, but I couldn’t be bother to scroll down that far.
I AM taking wagers and, indeed, giving odds.
The Fairness Doctrine has a snowball’s chance in Baghdad of resurrection.
Although, I do think Oblio’s correct that Obama is likely to try to ignore the issue, as he well should, given the far more important things on his to-do list at the moment. I would expect as well that Obama would not veto such a law were it to pass congress, but that’s a highly unlikely hypothetical.
A lot of liberals, like myself, look at the 2006 and 2008 elections as very strong evidence that the conservative media is failing to deliver and is even at some levels counterproductive to its own cause. Talk-radio and the blogosphere are the key elements in that disability and, really, a gift that keeps on giving to liberals and Democrats.
Because conservative talk-radio and blogs are almost exclusively unopposed commentary, by design they push the discussion away from the center of conservatism into the fringe. That’s how the conservative consensus ends up at the comically exaggerated view that Obama is some kind of secret Marxist Muslim with a plan to destroy America from within. Talkradio and the blogosphere are the essential means by which the Republicans repel swing voters by appearing to be far more resentful and unglued than they really are.
The Democrats who make a difference know this and have no intention of spoiling the fun.
” I would expect as well that Obama would not veto such a law were it to pass congress, but that’s a highly unlikely hypothetical.”
Last time I heard, they wouldn’t need a new law to do this, because the FCC already has the Unconstitutional power to do this. The repeal of the “Fairness doctrine” was bureaucratic, or perhaps executive in nature. It never reached full law status because the FCC was never stripped of the power to re-instate it. Hence the push by conservatives for the “Broadcast Freedom Act”. The Democrats resistance to this bill is evidence they favor the “fairness doctrine” and intend to re-instate it.
Thanks for enlightening me on that, Jon.
I was compelled as well to read up a little more on the doctrine. Try as I might, I could not find any Google link to supporters of reinstating the fairness doctrine. Indeed I find that Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) did at one point some years ago, when the GOP still ruled Congress, write a bill aimed at media regulatory reform, including a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine. It went nowhere, was dropped.
Slaughter’s bill was never heard from again, but opposition to the ill-fated measure has boomed continuously. I tried Google again and this time set my preferences to return 100 links at a time. I got through 4 pages without any finding links to supporters and/or arguments in support of reinstate the doctrine.
I did find this, though:
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=68d07041-7dbc-451d-a18a-752567145610
Now I get it.
Turns out, the move to reinstate the doctrine is mostly a figment of conservative paranoia. As the TNR link above demonstrates, time after time, talkradio blowhards blew Democrats comments on the matter way out of proportion and, in some cases, simply fabricated them.
The sweetest irony is that this issue demonstrates exactly how and why talkradio and the blogosphere have destroyed the Republican’s credibility with swing voters.
All those THOUSANDS of blog links to rants claiming, to varying degrees, that liberals are plotting a media takeover, yet virtually no evidence of said plot. And zero action. No bills, no votes and Obama has made clear he opposes it.
Read the link. And weep for the Republicans.
Even though Obama has publicly stated that he will not back a “Fairness” Doctrine renewal, when have we ever heard him not lie about just about anything under the sun? He’s a prolific liar. If Pelosi, Reid, Kennedy, Chuckie Schumer, and the rest of the kit and kaboodle want this, then Oobonga will sign it. Bet the farm on it.
But America wants these scoundrels in office, and got them they did.
If our republic is dying, don’t blame the politicians for it. It’s the people who have signed it over to the buzzards.
Back in the days when I read, and believed in the New York Times, I was given to understand Rush was a pinhead. The carpenters renovating my home had a radio on, which I heard on midday checks of their progress. I was startled at how much sense the man made, how well informed he was, also startled that these hypoeducated carpenters were listening to constitutional issues. Well, that was Rush, one of my earliest stops on the ride into neo-neoland.
Bogey’s slamming of conservative talk radio would seem to include Limbaugh. But to quote NPR as a (reliable) source, well really now, Bogey!
Anyway, I doubt this will actually get anywhere, but if it does come up, I can finally get back to my Libertarian, anti-Democratic whining, and send a few bucks over to the ACLU besides.
It’s amazing how people can say they are independent of either side and think their support of the ACLU will not be noticed. They even broadcast their support to the world.
Because you’re really gullible and have a very limited imagination.
Bogey starts with the ad hominem attacks and will probably end with them as well. So predictable.
Talk-radio and the blogosphere are the key elements in that disability and, really, a gift that keeps on giving to liberals and Democrats.
Have you not realized that Democrat slanders and lies over the years concerning Bush have made us very resistant to your demoralizing propaganda? Yet you pretend it still has some merit for people like you to come here and spread such excrement.
The Democrats who make a difference know this and have no intention of spoiling the fun.
Then by definition you are not an adult nor a Democrat who can make a difference. Does it feel good to know that your actions and words have no real consequence, allowing you to watch the world burn?
Btw, just in case Bogey wants to distract us from Ayn Rand, for whatever reason, here are the important clips of the speeches in her novels.
All links in the post
Hyman Rosen Says:
“people passing discriminatory laws against marriage.”
Having left wingers use the state to redefine it is discrimination against marriage… true.
Stopped clocks and all I guess…
Logern, you misunderstand my point. I don’t think the NYT was principled in its argument in 1987; when their interests change, so do their arguments. Your link was a good one, and an amusing trip down memory lane. In 1987, the Times wanted the broadcast media to bash Reagan without danger of rebuttal.
I will defer to those with greater knowledge who say that re-instituting the Fairness Doctrine is a matter for regulatory rule-making and not statutory changes. Either way, I’m willing to bet that Obama will not do anything to prevent it, no matter what he has said to date. (I’m with FredHjr, naturally.)
Old Boggy, I think you need to clarify your basic positioning. I thought you said that you are a libertarian elsewhere. Are you including yourself as a “liberal” now? Are you really a progressive? If not, why not?
I would love to impose a rule that makes the news media have to offer equal time to:
1) national security
2) lower tax rates
3) lower government spending
4) individual rights
Where’s my counter point bean counter?? I want Sarah Palin as the news media counter point bean counter !
“One of the “promises” of the recent campaign has been the threat that the overwhelming nature of the Democrats’ victory would allow them to push their long-held dream of imposing (re-imposing, that is) the Fairness Doctrine.” Neo
This is sorta like the “promise” to take away everyone’s guns. Myth. Bullshit. Making it up in order to be afraid. Rush will take himself down. It just gets old and worn out after a while. It doesn’t resonate anymore. People move on.
Democrats dislike talk radio. (Paste in Rush Limbaugh’s picture here.) Let’s take that as a given.
Is handicapping talk radio in the political interest of the Democrats? If not, why not?
IF it is in the Democrats’ interest to hamper talk radio, why will they fail to do anything about it?
Perhaps there are very good reasons why the Democrats don’t care all that much.
The Fairness Doctrine would do to talk radio what modern political systems have done to political parties.
In other words, rather than the infinite variety of viewpoints available you would end up with the officially approved TWO viewpoints they wish you to be exposed to – and those two viewpoints would be irredeemably obliged to the powers that be for their existence.
Freedom of speech would die a little more, and you can forget the freedom of the press to report on it – they whored themselves out too obviously this past year to really count as anything resembling an unbiased opinion or source of truth.
scottie, you seem to be leading James M. Buchanan onto the stage:
http://www.gmu.edu/jbc/aboutpubchoic.html
People in institutions make decisions that are good for their interests. The relevant institutions in this case are the legislators, the regulators, the MSM, New Media, the parties, the incumbents, the party voters, etc. etc.
Let’s implement an economic Fairness Doctrine while we are at it.
Let’s have some bean counters IMPOSING one American product of equal value for every foreign product purchased!
For every Toyota a GM product must be purchased….
Of course I, Baklava, am being absurd but it illustrates the point.
This is about freedom of choice. You don’t like it you don’t purchase it or listen to it.
That’s what I do with ABCCBSNBCCNN
Neo,
As I provide IT services to the state of CA, this is interesting to me
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/12/20/document-drop-the-story-behind-changegov/
I think it’s very interesting that those people who ridicule this post because of course, the idea that anyone on the left supports the Fairness Doctrine is a Republican myth, ignore the quote (in italics) in the post itself.
Nancy Pelosi came out a while back as being in favor of it. I personally don’t think there is anywhere near enough support even among Democrats to pass it. But there is some, and leader Pelosi seems to be among the supporters.
Neo, I hope it is clear to you that am I NOT ridiculing this post.
I am interested in why more Democrats don’t support efforts to suppress Republican or conservative advantages in New Media. If they have an interest in doing so, but they won’t either support it or oppose it, it makes me wonder what they are really thinking.
Do Democrats have some kind of internal governor that determines they will go so far, and no farther? I have never seen any evidence of that, but perhaps other people have.
Bogey Man-
You said, “re-establishment of the fairness doctrine would be the best th ing that ever happened to right wing talk radio and Fox News”.
Now, I’m not so sure about that. But I’d prefer to think I’m right in assuming it just might be the best thing thats happened to conservatism in a long time.
In terms of lighting the proverbial “fire under the conservative arse” it could be just what the doc ordered.
Conservatives, content, if not complacent, have always wanted to be left alone in their pursuit of excellence and happiness, never the types to be whining and demonstrating just might decide that this is th e final straw.
This could lead to a resurgence in Neo-Conservative activism.
Making it up in order to be afraid.
Like the Dems making up the fiction that the Patriot Act would take away people’s civil liberties in order to weaken Bush’s attempt to secure the nation?
Democrats are masters at this type of fabrication: after all, they learned it from the contemporary masters, the Soviets themselves.
Oblio,
I suspect Neo is referring to troglaman and Bog here.
Orwelian NewSpeak in the naming of laws and rules is nothing new.
“P.A.T.R.I.O.T. ACT”
“Defense of Marriage Act”
“I thought you said that you are a libertarian elsewhere. Are you including yourself as a “liberal” now? Are you really a progressive? If not, why not?”
I oppose the liberal consensus on a few issues: affirmative action (counterproductive), unquestioning support for labor unions (case by case is better), unquestioned support for regulation of financial markets (too complex to be consistently effective enough) and, in general, the over-sensitivity to ethnic slights.
My self-assessment is that that makes me a liberal progressive. But feel free to label me as you like, as long as you use my views, and not the views of others, as the basis for it.
Make that libertarian progressive, though I don’t believe such labels carry much meaning, after all.
and if I can’t spell it right, does it mean I can’t BE it??
make that, um, liberatarian progressive.
Or how about Disraelite?
too quote the late great Benjamin Disraeli:
“I am liberal about those things that need to change and conservative about those that do not.”
Oops.
The rest should have read:
“So you agree the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ is pernicious, and you oppose its reimposition?”
Absolutely, OB.
The Fairness Doctrine would be worse than affirmative action in terms of being counterproductive. Beyond that, it’s unnecessary.
It made sense back before cable TV and the Internet, because there were so few broadcast outlets in those days. There had to be some standard for granting licenses to broadcast, since they were so extremely rare and valuable. In that case, rules about allowing responses to attacks on individual politicians — which is what the fairness doctrine was — seem appropriate and reasonable.
A lot of the comments here seem to cast the fairness doctrine demanding fairness and balance, but it was never that. A broadcaster could attack the Republican party, or conservatives or Muslims or whatever all day long without having to offer any time to a representative of the attacked. But if the station attacked, say, Richard Nixon, it would have to offer time for a Democratic response.
Interestingly, isn’t David Horowitz trying to get some kind of “Fairness Doctrine” imposed at America’s universities? If there’s a worse idea than imposing it on broadcaster, it has to be forcing universities to make what they teach “politically correct” from a conservative point of view.
Old Boggy,
I’m interested in why you think that suppressing Republican or conservative talk radio would be counterproductive for the Democrats. (I think we should leave affirmative action and questions of bias in the Academy for another day. They are not irrelevant, but the thread is getting long.)
One hypothesis: talk radio helps unify the various Democratic or liberal coalitions by giving them a common hate object. Some of the hosts are loose and irresponsible. Some of the callers are ignorant or paranoid or both. Some of their comments can be construed to be threatening or outrageous, or made to sound that way. All in all, talk radio provides enough soundbites to keep the Myth of the Mean Republican (or the Conservative Bogeyman!) alive in the minds of people who know few if any Republicans and have no exposure to Republican or conservative thinking. (If this is true, I wonder if Republicans should have taken up a collection to keep Air America afloat.)
Another hypothesis: trying to suppress talk radio would cause resistance and defections among Democrats. The First Amendment absolutists would defect and become, I don’t know, Green Party members or something. The ACLU would sue Democrats. Members of Common Cause would letters to their local papers. Hollywood would raise less money for Democrats. Maybe Democrats would feel that suppressing talk radio is Mean and Unfair, damaging their self-image as the Good, Fair, Well-meaning People.
Another hypothesis: Trying to suppress talk radio would cause a backlash from people who are neither Democrats nor Republicans (and neither liberal/progressives nor conservatives). How would that work?
There may be other hypotheses, but we need for the Liberal/Progressives to explain them.
If some combination of these turned out to be true, conservatives should understand that talk radio is safe on the basis of liberal/progressive calculations of self-interest. On the other hand, risk/reward calculations for conservatives make it dangerous to assume that this is true, and dangerous to trust liberal/progressive claims of innocence. The cost of being wrong is very high for the conservatives, not so high for the liberal/progressives. Therefore, liberal/progressives should expect the burden of proof for any of these hypotheses to be heavy– conservatives should not expect liberal/progressives to do any heavy lifting.
What I really like about Boggy’s argument is that it contains an implicit claim that Progressives will be stopped from going down a road that leads toward government control of the political discourse–the kind of soft totalitarianism that some commenters fear– because of calculations of self-interest.
“The cost of being wrong is very high for the conservatives, not so high for the liberal/progressives.”
As I said before, a Fairness Doctrine would be manna from heaven for the Republican party and for conservatives in general. And you, Oblio, do a very good job of outlining the reasons. You also nail how talkradio hurts conservatives.
There is no shortage of intelligent, thoughtful conservatives in America, but they are crowded off the airwaves by half-wits like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly.
You can hardly parody these guys, as they are parodies of themselves and, more sadly, of true conservatives. Instead of informing, enlightening or inspiring, they stoke resentment, blur crucial distinctions, foment paranoia and inculcate an outrageous claim to ideological entitlement.
And, yes, Oblio, you’re dead right. For millions of swing voters, talkradio morons do much to sully the image of what conservatives actually believe. Which, I suppose, is fair enough, isn’t it?
As for progressive calculations of self-interest, I do think that is a piece of the picture, but a small one.
Liberals or progressives and moderates of all stripe have plenty of reason to be confident these days in America’s political direction, if not its economic and geopolitical state of play.
Blaming the news media is a loser’s game and always has been. No successful political movement has ever been built at the behest of its opposition’s media image.
Conservatives stole the march in the 1980s from liberals and proceeded to build a massive complex of think tanks, media outlets and issue-based support groups on top of an evangelical Christian “base.” Their success was spectacular and, from that position of power, the Rush Limbaughs whining endlessly about the unfairness and slagging liberals with every slimey half-truth imaginable was somewhat effective in maintaining a fairly large margin of victory in one election after the other.
Bush II brought all that down by starting the war in Iraq. Without that war and the economic dislocation it eventually caused through skyrocketing oil prices, massive government borrowing (artificially keeping the dollar high) and eroded confidence in U.S. global leadership, Wall Street probably would not have melted down.
There’s a lot of talk now about what a house of cards Wall Street was of late, but that’s not quite accurate. It did take a perfect storm to bring it all crashing down. It had withstood some extremely stiff headwinds, from the Carter inflation to the Reagan near-depression to the shock freeze-up of 9/11. It took a screw up as major as the Iraq war to bring on a crash of these proportions.
Conservatives need to remember that Obama’s popularity and Bush’s unpopularity rests far less on their individual characteristics than on this backdrop of massive economic and geopolitical failure under Bush.
A side of effect of this meltdown is that the right-wing noise machine no longer works. It is utterly ineffective when the task is persuading people, rather than edifying them, fomenting their resentments or befriending their paranoia.
Karl Rove gave a serviceable overview of the task ahead for Republicans in a recent Wall Street Journal piece. He wrote of reinvigorating think tanks, rebuilding local political infrastructure and seeding new ideas that recognize the old ones have failed while still respecting the old conservative ideals.
Rove, of course, bears much responsibility for leading the Republicans into oblivion but, surprisingly, he appears to have a solid grasp on the way out of it. Or maybe it isn’t that surprising. While we can blame him for the current abysmal performance of the Republicans, he can also take credit for making George W. Bush a two-term president, which, to me, qualifies as a feat of magic or, at the very least, masterful understanding of the American psyche.
Ultimately, conservatism offers an essential critique of government but cannot provide an effective organizing principle for government itself. Until that little problem is resolved, it’s going to be a long, cold era for the American right.
“Ultimately, conservatism offers an essential critique of government but cannot provide an effective organizing principle for government itself.”
CANNOT is a very strong word, and it puts a burden of proof on you to show that you understand the range and application of conservative political theory. You seem to think that it is ONLY a critique of government. If it were, your argument–that it cannot be an effective organizing principle for government–would have some force.
I think you are over-generalizing so much as to create a straw man. As it is, there are many “conservatisms,” for example neo, paleo, classical liberal, religious, libertarian, Tory Democracy (in honor of Dizzy), and compassionate.
I could make a case for the effective principles of government arising from “conservative” thought, in great detail and supported with examples, but that really misses the point.
Which is, If you want to persuade people, you need to get them to listen; and people do not listen well until they have been listened to. Therefore, one should leave off name-calling and wild exaggeration, and show that one understands the concerns and the best case of the person one wishes to influence.
Damn. We agree 100%.
Fair enough. Change conservatism cannot provide an organizing principle for government to conservatism has not provided an organizing principle for governing effectively in America.
There surely are many types of conservatism, but for the purpose of forming fact-based assessments, we really only have the Reagan and Bush administration’s style of conservatism. Other places and other times can shed light on that, by comparison, but drag us needlessly into the hypothetical.
The burden of proof is indeed large, but so is the evidence. For that, I would turn to Alan Wolfe, a professor of political science at Boston College.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0607.wolfe.html
Best to read the whole thing, but if you’re in a hurry, here’s a taste of his essay: “Why Conservatives Can’t Govern:”
“With the election of George W. Bush in 2000, anti-government conservatism won control of both elected branches. This was something new.
“Conservatives hadn’t held both Congress and the White House for a full term since 1932, before the creation of big government as we know it. For the first time in U.S history, conservatives had total control of the agencies of superpower government.
“If government is necessary, bad government, at least for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have been exceptionally good at showing just how bad it can be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad government–indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government–is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.
“Three examples–FEMA, Medicare, and Iraq– should be sufficient to make this point. Because liberals have historically welcomed government while conservatives have resisted it, it should come as no surprise that the Federal Emergency Management Agency worked so well under Bill Clinton and so poorly under Bush I and II. True to a long tradition of disinterested public management, Clinton, in the wake of Hurricane Andrew, appointed James Lee Witt to head FEMA. Witt refocused FEMA away from civil-defense efforts to increasingly predictable national disasters, fought for greater federal funding, achieved cabinet status for his agency, and worked closely with state and local officials. For all the efforts by Republicans to attack their enemies, no one has ever put a dent in Witt’s reputation. Government under him was as good as government gets.
“Upon assuming office, George W. Bush turned to former Texas campaign aide Joe Allbaugh to run FEMA and then shifted it into the new Department of Homeland Security (whose creation he had opposed). Allbaugh, and his hand-picked successor Michael Brown, like so many Bush appointees, were afflicted with what we might call “learned incompetence.” They did not fail merely out of ignorance and inexperience. Their ineptness, rather, was active rather than passive, the end result of a deliberate determination to prove that the federal government simply should not be in the business of disaster management. “Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective state and local risk management,” Allbaugh had testified before a Senate appropriations subcommittee in May, 2001. “Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level.” There was the conservative dilemma in a nutshell: a man put in charge of a mission in which he did not believe.
“Long before Katrina destroyed New Orleans, Allbaugh and Brown were busy destroying FEMA: privatizing many of the agency’s programs, shifting attention away from disaster management, and shedding no tears as scores of agency staff left in dismay. Human beings cannot prevent natural disasters, but they can prevent man-made ones. Not the Bush administration. Its ideological hostility toward government all but guaranteed that the physical damage inflicted by a hurricane would be exacerbated by the human damage caused by incompetence.
“The question of whether Medicare reform will prove politically fruitful for Republicans is still open. But the question of whether it has proven to be an administrative nightmare is not. There were two paths open to Republicans if they had been interested in creating an administratively coherent system of paying for the prescription drugs of the elderly. One was to give the elderly nothing and insist that every person assume the full cost of his or her medication. The other was to have government assume responsibility for the costs of those drugs.
“It is significant that in America’s recent debates over prescription drugs, no one, not even the Cato Institute, argued that government should simply not be in the business at all. As a society, we accept–indeed, we celebrate–the fact that older people can live longer and better lives thanks to radically improved medical technology as well as awe-inspiring advances in pharmacology. A political party which consigned to death anyone who could not afford to participate in this medical revolution would die an early death itself.
“But Republicans were just as unwilling to design a sensible program as they were unable to eliminate the existing one. To prove their faith in the market, they gave people choices, when what they wanted was predictability. To pay off the pharmaceutical industry, they refused to allow government to negotiate drug prices downward, thereby vastly inflating the program’s costs. To make sure government agencies didn’t administer the benefit, they lured in insurance companies with massive subsidies and imposed almost no rules on what benefits they could and could not offer. The lack of rules led to a frustrating chaos of choices. And the extra costs had to be made up by carving out a so-called “doughnut hole” in which the elderly, after having their drug purchases subsidized up to a certain point, would suddenly find themselves without federal assistance at all, only to have their drugs subsidized once again at a later point. Caught between the market and the state, Republicans picked the worst features of each. No single human being could have designed a program as unwieldy as this one. It took the combined efforts of every faction in today’s conservative movement to produce a public policy so removed from common sense.
“The failure of the Bush administration to plan for the aftermath of the Iraq invasion was just one more, albeit the most serious, consequence of the conservative ambivalence toward government. Neoconservatives were all for ambitious adventures abroad, and, in the aftermath of September 11, they won the president’s support. But they never captured his pocketbook, which was tenaciously guarded by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
“Neocons wanted the Republican Party to live in the shadow of Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Rumsfeld insisted that military adventures be funded in the spirit of Robert A. Taft.
“So long as conservatives denigrate government while relying on government to achieve their objectives, Rumsfeld’s vision of how to fight wars is the only kind of conservative foreign policy one can have. His low-balling of troop estimates in Iraq was the foreign policy equivalent of libertarian economics: relying on government while refusing to pay for it. His hostility toward Iraqi reconstruction resonated with those skeptical of rebuilding New Orleans. His disdain for Colin Powell’s State Department mirrored Joe McCarthy’s for Dean Acheson’s. Only a tried-and-true conservative could ever have come up with the idea of turning the management of Iraqi police forces over to private firms to the extent that Rumsfeld did, with catastrophic results for the Iraqis themselves. While it is difficult to label someone who plans a war an isolationist, Rumsfeld’s hostility toward America’s historic allies represented a contemporary version of unilateralism, which has always been isolationism’s first cousin. The neoconservatives wanted to draft hugely expensive undertakings onto a party with an isolationist past. The Secretary of Defense wanted to draft on to the same political party a distant war, but with the promise of being cheap and avoiding the loss of American lives. It is not difficult to conclude which one would win in today’s conservative environment.
“For Pat Buchanan to blame the neocons for the failure in Iraq ignores the fact that the man most responsible for the failure, Donald Rumsfeld, has more in common with Buchanan than he does with Bill Kristol. (One prominent neoconservative, however, Paul Wolfowitz, did sign on enthusiastically to Rumsfeld’s agenda.) Iraq failed for the same reasons that all conservative public policy efforts fail. Refusing to acknowledge the importance of government while relying on it to achieve your objectives causes the same kind of chaos in foreign policy that it does in matters closer to home.
Snip.
There is much more to Wolfe’s argument than just that, but there must be some kind of word limit here and I’m surely well beyond it already, so I would leave you to read the entire piece at the link.
Interestingly, isn’t David Horowitz trying to get some kind of “Fairness Doctrine” imposed at America’s universities? If there’s a worse idea than imposing it on broadcaster, it has to be forcing universities to make what they teach “politically correct” from a conservative point of view.
Just goes to show you, just cause someone from Left of afield agrees with you, doesn’t mean he is in the same planet with the same world view as you.
Damn. We agree 100%.
Don’t worry, it won’t last.
Ymarsakar, you’re right. It’s gone already.
The ptifall into which you’ve fallen, BM, is equating conservatism with an anti-government viewpoint.
That’s surprisingly simple-minded for someone with your intellect and ability to discern subtle distinctions.
Wolfe, a second-rate academic at a third-rate university in a fourth-rate field, is burnishing the already gleaming reputation of poli sci types as intellectual lightweights by setting up a straw man. He equates conservatives with opposition to government qua government, and proceeds from there. God grant me life long enough to see Wolfe tossed out onto the street to actually make a living, instead of writing such sophomoric drivel.
Conservatives aren’t necessarily anti-government, but rather at the margin would rather that the government not be the court of first appeal, because government in general does not work well, or efficiently.
The latter proposition is undeniably true, as anyone waiting in line at a DMV office will attest.
To illustrate my point, consider the corresponding straw man re liberals. It would specify that liberals think that all problems can be solved by government intervention, that people need all their decisions made for them by the government, and that they only need decide what perversions best suit them. It would then go on to point to all of the failed social programs (take your pick, there’s lot to choose from: e.g., welfare, the destruction of the black family, the erosion of the white family, and the mortgage industry collapse) or problems (e.g., rampant AIDS and STDs) have directly followed as a result.
Now, how seriously would you take that?
Old Boggy,
I read the Wolfe piece quickly. It doesn’t actually contain much in the way of evidence; it is a polemic constructed out of opinions. I get the same feeling when I read many articles in Foreign Affairs.
Wolfe would have done better to focus on one case, whether FEMA or drug benefits. As it is, he doesn’t prove; he merely asserts. A real analysis of how ideology wrecked FEMA–if it did–would be of tremendous interest. Perhaps that isn’t Wolfe’s gig– he seems to be mainly interested in the role of religion in public life, in the sense that he is against it.
But a scholar should have footnoted someone who does know something about it.
You should re-read the article, putting yourself in the frame of mind who doesn’t agree ex ante with the conclusions, and try to identify the critical parts of Wolfe’s argument. Then assess whether he is cherry-picking anecdotes to support his beliefs. Does he set up hypotheses that could be falsified by contrary data? Does he exaggerate?
And ask yourself why he doesn’t explicate the thinking of any conservative theoreticians and show why they CANNOT be effective. On paper, Wolfe should be up to the task.
None of these people are truly interested in reforming government or improving the efficiency of bureaucracy. All they ever wanted was to get more funding for their own pet projects, ensure that their own patrons and patronized factions get goodies, and to cut off at the knees their competitors.
Bogey,
You are essentially almost illiterate. Sorry about the attack here.
But there is NOBODY who would call Bush conservative except for those without any reading comprehension and an HONEST assessment of what conservative means.
Instead of debating the merits of conservative (or any issue) you go into identity politics.
If you are making the case that conservatives morphed to Bushism when Bush took over you are stating an opinion that doesn’t hold water. Leaks galore in that argument.,…
One last point……
Conservatism hasn’t been tried for a lomg time (except for tax rate decreases – a single issue).
Lefties cannot argue that conservatism brought us the mess – this larger and larger government has grown and grown relegating every lefties argument pointless as there have been NO cuts in regulatory agencies, help for the needy, environment, health or anything. ALL programs have ahd huge increases during Bush.
The votersincluding you Bogey have had a leftist govt for a LONG time.
Reading comprehension skills aside – it’d be wise for you to understand what conservative means instead of continuing to glom onto identity politics. It doesn’t do YOU any good to keep with that forced ignorance on yourself…..
nobody here is ‘defending Bush conservatism’ whatever that means.
Bush has governed to the left (except for some centrist judges and tas rate decreases) It’s hard at this point in history to argue that we need more govt and more leftism.
Complaining about the Bush government not being truly Conservative sounds a lot like complaining that Soviet Russia was not truly Communist.
Hyman, a more precise analogy would be complaining that the PRC’s government is not truly communist.
The PRC is nominally communist, but has adopted a lot of capitalist policies. In effect, except for, e.g., the PLA owning some factories and such, the PRC is effectively a capitalist country.
The parallel is close; conservatives (on this issue I don’t count as one) criticize Bush for, inter alia, his spending and now nationalization of companies, policies that are more typical of socialist countries. That’s the basis of the point.
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/12/22/next-in-the-bailout-line/
Hyman, words mean things. If an apple is not an orange then it isn’t.
If Bush did not shrink or keep govt the same size then he didn’t. I realize it is ALL you have to cling to because in the face of ideas and solutions you can ONLY go identity politics and stay away from actual ideas… but IT DOES NOT MAKE YOU persuasuve.. 🙂
at all….
I for a long long time have evolved from identity politics (I shifted from liberalism in 1991).
When will you evolve?
Regulations decreased? http://betsyspage.blogspot.com/2008/12/targeting-supervision-of-unions.html
Lberals should give more
http://betsyspage.blogspot.com/2008/12/in-this-season-of-charity.html
Competition free market style
http://lawhawk.blogspot.com/2008/12/fords-big-bet.html
Hello Neo-Neocon,
Could you please provide a source for your Nancy Pelosi quote – I would love to publish it and of course I will be happy to publish a link to you for the hat-tip. By the way thanks for the link to my article debunking the Palin rape kit lie in your October 6th article.
Chuck Norton
Editor, IUSB Vision Web Log
“A real analysis of how ideology wrecked FEMA—if it did—would be of tremendous interest.”
Bush appointed college pals and campaign organizers to key posts, sending the message that loyalty, not competence, would be the coin of FEMA’s realm.
He did so not so much as a matter of patronage but because his stated views, the ideology on which he’d based his political life, was that organizations like FEMA don’t work and what they do should be left to individuals.
As OB might opine, do you want the DMV in charge of managing a response to a natural disaster? This is the conservative mindset that hobbled FEMA.
That’s the case Wolfe makes about FEMA and he tracks it through to Iraq and prescription drug entitlements as well. If you want to challenge his arguments, Oblio, you have to address them.
Yes, Wolfe does exaggerate how deeply anti-government conservatism is flawed as an organizing principle for government. He also omits any mention of the salutary effects conservative ideas have when operating OUTSIDE the government as a critique of the powers that be.
For me, as a libertarian progressive, conservatism offers an essential, principled critique of government power. We need those ideas as a bulwark against excessive state power. Unfortunately, that critique amounts to a dis-organizing principle, and what government needs as its basis, is an organizing principle.
As a result of that conflict, we end up with people like Reagan and Bush who, while they achieve great ideological victories, in the end must rely on increasing government power, rather than diminishing it, to achieve their practical goals.
Baklava: clearly you haven’t read Wolfe’s essay. He addresses the exact points you bring up. I’d be interested to know what you response to him would be.
And Nagin and Blanco? What role, if any, did they play? (And if “none,” precisely what is their function as local officials?)
Still with the tired identity politics. Bogey is predictable.
Bogey knows no reading comprehension.
Issues escape Bogey.
I read Wolfe’s essay.
I keep reading your posts which waste my time.
You and Wolfe are all about misunderstanding conservatism, libertarianism and for that matter progressive.
A long long sabatical would be wise where you read read and read.
Continuing to misrepresent what a conservative or what conservative principles are does YOU NO GOOD.
And…
…. it’s not persuasive as I said.
OB: Nagin and Blanco have nothing to do with FEMA.
FEMA was created because it was agreed that major disasters required the greater resources available at the federal level. Sure, Nagin and Blanco may have been every bit as incompetent at emergency management as “heckuva job” Brownie turned out to be.
But the point is, they were not appointed to manage emergencies. They were elected to represent the public on a wide range of issues from who picks up dog poop on the sidewalk to who pays for the 10 Commandments urinal screens at the courthouse and whether to let Home Depot or Sears name the taxpayer subsidized football stadium.
Maybe Nagin and Blanco made it harder for FEMA to do its job. But the bottom line is, FEMA didn’t get it done.
There’s a pattern here. A certain type of American conservative has an excuse for every failure. There is never, ever, a sense of responsibility for results. It’s as if the entire point of the ideology is that no bad result could possibly come from it, so there’s always someone else to blame.
Depressed economy? The Democrats fault, of course, even though Republicans ruled Congress and the Supreme Court for 12 of the past 13 years and the White House for the past eight.
Iraq? The liberal media weakened our resolve.
Katrina? Local officials, of course. They’re Democrats.
Baklava even takes it to the point of denying that Bush is a conservative. Which is quite spectacular in its unwitting confession that the president’s rule has been an utter failure, but an attempt at denial nonetheless.
Always a shameless sense that no matter what goes wrong when you’re in charge, you can always blame it on someone else.
Bogey wrote, “If you want to challenge his arguments”
If somebody says to you, “when did you stop beating your wife”, how do you address the premis of the argument….
… the premises are flawed from the core, tying conservatism with Bush and then dismantling conservatism.
THAT is what I’m telling you Bogey.
It would be like me making a long essay on why free market health care is not the answer displaying example after example during the last 10 years as to why free market health care has failed and even tying it to an identity.
It is a failure of an argument, a failure of an essay, a failure of posts on your part. It isn’t persuasive and it only shows your ignorance as well as Wolfe’s.
Go to the root of conservatism and find conservative thinkers and look at their ideas.
Remove identities.
Talk about the ideas, issues and solutions that are put forth.
I haven’t seen ONE post where you have talked exclusively about an idea, issue or solution. It has always had identity politics within.
For instance, can you stick to a succinct argument proving that government can help the economy with tax rate increases?
Or can you actually agree with conservatives in the understanding that corporate tax rate decreases, capital gains tax rate decreases and income tax rate decreases would help the economy?
Go!
Boggy, I’m only one man. I don’t have time to fisk Wolfe’s whole piece by myself, and no one would thank me if I did. I don’t even have time to fisk everything you say.
But, to humor you, let’s stick to FEMA, . You write, “Bush appointed college pals and campaign organizers to key posts, sending the message that loyalty, not competence, would be the coin of FEMA’s realm.”
Occam’s Beard says, correctly, that you can’t place the entire burden for poor response to Katrina (in New Orleans!) on FEMA.
I go farther, to say that even if you could, you haven’t begun to connect Bush’s appointments and ideology to this particular failure, much less to any generalized decline in FEMA’s capabilities. Conjuring up a “message” can’t carry the analytical weight. In the absence of such a careful analysis, you don’t have an argument, but only an assertion, and a partisan one at that.
Wolfe doesn’t make the case, either.
The problem with FEMA was that there were unintended consequences with putting FEMA, which was near the top of the authority chain, under Homeland Security, which made it bureaucratically impotent.
Bogey wrote, “Baklava even takes it to the point of denying that Bush is a conservative.”
Bush isn’t Bogey. BDS can make you despise conservatism but Bush hasn’t governed conservative except ONE major issue (tax rate decreases).
This is not about blame as your last failure of a post says…
This is about trying to move you away from identity politics and actually TRYING to understand what conservatism, libertarianism and liberalism is.
You fail to understand. I predict you will continue to fail….
Oblio and Chuck,
He will continue with the identity politics if you feed it.
His misunderstanding of conservatism is the root cause.
Every sentence he writes makes no case against conservatism, does not stick to the issues, and does not address conservative solutions or proposals.
Conservative solutions and proposals is the key to discussion here. It’s what converted me from liberalism in 1991.
If nobody hears conservative ideas, solutions and proposals they’ll continue to hear only bicker bicker bicker. Bogey fails simple reading comprehension in my book until he addresses ONE conservative idea or solution.
And…. on that one major conservative solution Bogey… after the tax rate decreases there WERE huge revenue increases into the government for 5 years dismantling every liberals claim that tax rate decreases led to the deficits.
Checkmate.
Baklava: Again, Wolfe addresses your point, if you would only read his essay.
Here’s what he says:
“Eager to salvage conservatism from the wreckage of conservative rule, right-wing pundits are furiously blaming right-wing politicians for failing to adhere to right-wing convictions. Libertarians such as Bruce Bartlett fret that under Republican control, government has not shrunk, as conservatives prescribe, but has grown. Insiders like Peggy Noonan complain that Republicans have become–well, insiders; they are too focused on retaining power and too disconnected from the base whose anger pushed them into power. Idealistic younger conservatives bewail the care and feeding of the K Street beast. Paleocons Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak blame neocons William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer for the debacle that is Iraq. Through all these laments there pulsates a sense of desperation: A conservative president and an even more conservative Congress must be repudiated to enable genuine conservatism to survive. Sure, the Bush administration has failed, all these voices proclaim. But that is because Bush and his Republican allies in Congress borrowed big government and foreign-policy idealism from the left. The ideas of Woodrow Wilson and John Maynard Keynes, from their point of view, have always been flawed. George W. Bush and Tom DeLay just prove it one more time.
“Conservative dissidents seem to have done an admirable job of persuading each other of the truth of their claims. Of course, many of these dissidents extolled the president’s conservative leadership when he was riding high in the polls. But the real flaw in their argument is akin to that of Trotskyites who, when confronted with the failures of communism in Cuba, China and the Soviet Union, would claim that real communism had never been tried.
“If leaders consistently depart in disastrous ways from their underlying political ideology, there comes a point where one has to stop just blaming the leaders and start questioning the ideology.
“The collapse of the Bush presidency, in other words, is not just due to Bush’s incompetence (although his administration has been incompetent beyond belief). Nor is it a response to the president’s principled lack of intellectual curiosity and pitbull refusal to admit mistakes (although those character flaws are certainly real enough). And the orgy of bribery and special-interest dispensation in Congress is not the result of Tom DeLay’s ruthlessness, as impressive a bully as he was. This conservative presidency and Congress imploded, not despite their conservatism, but because of it.”
Oblio: What would it take? What sort of facts are you looking for about FEMA? You’ve failed to identify specific weaknesses in Wolfe’s argument. You simply keep repeating that neither he, nor I, make a strong enough case to persuade you.
Specifically, what evidence or logic are you looking for?
Do you doubt that FEMA failed or that Bush caused FEMA to fail or that Bush’s conservatism is what caused it to fail? Or all the above?
I’m not suggesting Wolfe’s case is any kind of scripture. I found it very persuasive, and I’m interested to know specifically why you didn’t.
At some point, you have to make a counter-case. You claim that Bush appointing pals and signaling that competence is less relevant than it used to be is not persuasive to the case. Why isn’t it? What sort of final proof do you need?
I can be very clear what sort of evidence I’d be looking for in a counter case. Where are examples of how Bush implemented conservative ideas to improve FEMA’s function?
Or, I could find a libertarian morality angle persuasive, e.g. FEMA doesn’t need to be effective. People need to learn to fend for themselves in a disaster. If you live in a flood zone, you need to know to store you own food and that, before you buy so much as a television, invest instead in a rubber raft and a diesel generator.
But you’ve gotta have something, Oblio. Remember, it’s not just me trying to persaude you, you’re also trying to persuade me.
Maybe their’s some conservative essayist out there who has rebutted or “fisked” as you put it, Wolfe. If not, why not?
Again with the identity politics.
You are a failure.
His point, “A conservative president and an even more conservative Congress must be repudiated to enable genuine conservatism to survive.”
Is FALSE.
When did you stop beating your wife Bogey? And… why must the identity politics continue.. What actions of the presidents (removing Iraq and taxes) were conservative solutions? If you want to continue with identity politics you will continue to LOSE arguments as you are not addressing conservative ideas and solutions and are only deflecting and blaming and misunderstanding… It’s YOUR perogative to continue failing.
Bogey with no move away from identity politics wrote, “Maybe their’s some conservative essayist out there who has rebutted or “fisked” as you put it, Wolfe. If not, why not?”
Because you and Wolfe beat your wives…
Now… address it Bogey!!! Why didn’t you address it? Why? Why? Address the premise Bogey.
Negligence and laziness is not an option…. or will you will continue to fail…. I’m out. I predict continued laziness and failure for you.. I’ll come back hours later and see it. Want to wager anybody??? 🙂
Baklava: I agree with the idea that lowering tax rates can increase revenue. But note the word “can.” It isn’t magic, it’s math. If you cut the rate to zero, revenue goes to zero.
The real question, as it applies to conservatives, is spending.
You seem to want to say Bush is a conservative when he cuts taxes, but a liberal when he increases spending. From a voter’s point of view, that’s a moot point.
Where are the conservative leaders who cut spending?
Cutting taxes is easy and, even, doing so in a way that increases overall revenue. But it’s pointless if you, at the same time, increase spending. That’s Reaganomics in a nutshell and Bush just aped it, only with Greenspan’s artificially low interest rates as steroids…
Boggy,
I am not trying to be difficult.
What would convince me that FEMA “failed” during Katrina–and even specifically in New Orleans during Katrina–would be an even-handed analysis of what FEMA achieved and when it achieved it in the context of the specific problems of logistics, intelligence, and coordination it faced, balanced against the evidence of mistakes, confusion, and ineffectiveness.
Then I would want to see some root cause and systems analysis of the failures. I would want to see what counsel the relevant decision-makers were receiving at the time, and the information available to them. I would want to understand if the FEMA systems performed differently under different circumstances, and if they did, why.
Then, to make your case, I would want to see the specific mistakes connected to institutional strategies specifically adopted by the Bush administration and to then to see that these decisions were ONLY explainable as an outcome of “conservative principle” applied to the circumstances.
Perhaps this analysis is readily available and everyone should have seen it by now. If so, please provide the link so that I will not remain in ignorance. Google has not been friendly enough to turn it up so far. In any event, Wolfe doesn’t make this case or refer to this analysis–which was my point.
I heard and have seen a lot of complaints about FEMA. I have Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge bouncing around somewhere, so I will go back and look again. Brinkley names some mistakes Brown made, mainly by trying to establish excessive control and coordination in a chaotic situation. A New Orleans native and historian, Brinkley doesn’t seem to lay primary responsibility for a system failure at FEMA’s door.
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=gxNlbTCdr5kC&dq=Brinkley+Katrina&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=cyVmw5VLWN&sig=DqQcbCS0rV7hP-skXT73FveWofQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=9&ct=result#PPA247,M1
I will agree that FEMA suffered a major political and public relations failure.
Reference to IG report from April 2006.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/04/14/fema.ig/index.html
Here’s the IG’s report
http://www.npr.org/documents/2006/apr/katrina/dhsreport.pdf
Well Oblio, I have to say your skepticism is substantive. I can see exactly why you remain unpersuaded on the specific issue of whether FEMA failed.
I can also see that you have confined your position to skepticism. You don’t really oppose Wolfe, you just demonstrate that his case is incomplete.
I’ve heard a lot about FEMA’s failures under the Bush administration, though not as much about how that links up with conservative ideology. Usually, the blame is put on incompetence and patronage.
Harry Shearer’s “Le Show” podcast and radio show has devoted numerous editions to the subject of what went wrong in New Orleans and he has a regular feature in the weekly broadcast about goings on at the federal agency.
I will see what I can dig up to answer your questions, I think you’re well on the way to being persuaded.
I am persuadable, if the facts and logic are strong. Mere repeated assertions won’t do. Self-serving recriminations are not, in and of themselves, great evidence either. Satire and obvious propaganda are right out.
I just read the IG’s report, and there is a disconnect between its findings and “what everybody knows.” The IG finds fault, but that is an IG’s job: to counsel perfection after the fact.
I also believe that the political/pr failure created the conditions for a cascade of administrative failure (waste, fraud, and abuse) that continued for many months. This is completely predictable bureaucratic behavior in the face of political hysteria: to lurch from not enough response to way too much.
Boge Man wrote, “Where are the conservative leaders who cut spending? ”
Again with the identity politics….
There are rankings if you must know. As obstinate as you are you know where to find them.
1) CAGW
2) TU
3) Cato
Above are acronyms for some organizations.
Let’s take Citizens against government waste for example… They consistently show there are quite a few “CONSERVATIVES” in Congress. There aren’t ENOUGH. If you add up all of the appropriations they vote for versus a Maxine Waters or Barney Frank – you see WHO is the disaster for the budget.
Conservatives (those who actually legislate and govern conservatives – not those who you want to paint as such when they AREN’T) vote for much less appropriations than liberals. It is a staggering difference.
Unfortunately we have not had a working majority of conservatives in Congress in either of our lifetimes.
so you can call conservatism a failure with a negligent wife beating strawman argument. Keep setting up the straw men and it only reflects on YOU.
Or you can learn what conservatism is about and debate on the issues – not identity politics as I’ve been saying.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/2315076.html
Truth has to be on your side.
Re-writing history doesn’t help.
Katrina was a monumentally huge natural catastrophe.
Excerpt from the Popular Mechanics article (page 2):
REALITY: Bumbling by top disaster-management officials fueled a perception of general inaction, one that was compounded by impassioned news anchors. In fact, the response to Hurricane Katrina was by far the largest–and fastest-rescue effort in U.S. history, with nearly 100,000 emergency personnel arriving on the scene within three days of the storm’s landfall.
Dozens of National Guard and Coast Guard helicopters flew rescue operations that first day–some just 2 hours after Katrina hit the coast. Hoistless Army helicopters improvised rescues, carefully hovering on rooftops to pick up survivors. On the ground, “guardsmen had to chop their way through, moving trees and recreating roadways,” says Jack Harrison of the National Guard. By the end of the week, 50,000 National Guard troops in the Gulf Coast region had saved 17,000 people; 4000 Coast Guard personnel saved more than 33,000.
These units had help from local, state and national responders, including five helicopters from the Navy ship Bataan and choppers from the Air Force and police. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries dispatched 250 agents in boats. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), state police and sheriffs’ departments launched rescue flotillas. By Wednesday morning, volunteers and national teams joined the effort, including eight units from California’s Swift Water Rescue. By Sept. 8, the waterborne operation had rescued 20,000.
While the press focused on FEMA’s shortcomings, this broad array of local, state and national responders pulled off an extraordinary success–especially given the huge area devastated by the storm.
You can continue Bogey to make bogus arguments linking you to wifebeating… I mean conservatism to FEMA or Katrina relief or whatever really (insert adjective here) argument you are making. But it is sooooooo un-persuasive. You are not making logical sense and your premises are wild.
As you continue the descent each post into the land of identity politics linking conservatism with people who do not govern or legislate conservatively.. remember this… you continue to fail – or recognize facts
Baklava: all you’ve done is relocate conservatism’s failure from the conceptual framework to the ballot box.
What is it about conservative ideas that are so unappealing to American voters that they have consistently failed to win enough support to be effective? Why haven’t conservatives been smart enough to market their policies in a way that’s attractive? McDonald’s sells BILLIONS of half-crappy burgers, so it’s a bit hard to believe that an effective, moral ideology cannot be sold to the average American voter. Yet that, Baklava is exactly what you are suggesting.
If, as you suggest, conservatives have consistently failed throughout our lifetimes to get elected in sufficient quantities to achieve their goals, why should we believe that they will anytime soon?
Oblio’s argument about FEMA overlaps some of that territory as well.
He seems to be saying that Bush’s failure in Katrina was essentially in the realm of politics and public relations.
But again, how relevant is that to the New Orleans resident who’s home was looted because there was no one available to patrol his deserted neighborhood after the deluge?
We elect presidents to get it done. If they don’t, there needs to be consequences. Blaming it on ”poor PR” may make the blow to the president’s ideology less direct, but it really does nothing to diminish the reality of the failure itself.
I disagree entirely with this. Their job is to look out for the best interests of the electorate. Cutting ribbons is nice, but there is no higher function than taking steps to mitigate the impact of an emergency. Saying “feets do yo’ stuff,” and leaving buses underwater while citizens cannot find transportation out of the city, as Nagin did, was criminal neglect.
FEMA expects localities to take care of themselves for the first four days after a disaster. They’re not the first responders. It takes time to mobilize resources on the requisite scale and transport them to wherever they’re needed. In addition to which, transportation infrastructure was adversely affected as well.
I hold no brief for FEMA, but I think that at least to some extent it’s been demonized by the left to cover for their own bungling, incompetence, and corruption, aka New Orleans and Louisiana Democratic politics as usual.
Let’s examine that interesting thought a bit further. Why was no one available to patrol? (Patrolling the streets is a local civic responsibility, not a Federal one. Or did you expect Bush to pound a beat? Surely the chief of the NOPD had some small responsibility for that, or was his job also concerned with dog poop and the Ten Commandments and such?)
Reason: the NOPD, notoriously corrupt, had in response to Democratic pressure hired a lot of unqualified people and indeed, ex-criminals. One-third of the NOPD left, never to be seen again.
That’s why no one was patrolling.
And let’s look further at looting. Who was looting, exactly? Any reports of looting from where Katrina actually hit full on, as opposed to where Katrina grazed (N.O.)?
No. Those areas were white, and Republican. New Orleans was Democratic, and black, and so looting was very much on the agenda.
And to pursue this thought still further, why did many residents refuse to evacuate? Because they knew looting was going to take place as soon as order broke down.
So we see the fruits of Democratic philosophy come to blossom. The sense of entitlement, the abrogation of personal and civic responsiblity, the reflexive defense of minorities, regardless of their conduct.
In all, a good day’s work for the left.
Boggy, I am NOT arguing that the only FEMA failures were PR.
I am stating that, whatever other failures there were in FEMA’s early response to the post-Katrina flood in New Orleans, the agency unquestionably suffered a PR debacle, and this debacle had political implications for Bush. Furthermore, I suppose the political impact of bad publicity, a leadership crisis, and the air of hysteria in the weeks after Katrina contributed to more failures.
I AM arguing that Wolfe’s case is still unproven. I believe that whether FEMA deserved its reputation for failure based on its immediate response to the flooding in New Orleans is open for debate until we get the kind of analysis I outlined above.
Occam’s Beard does a good job of showing how FEMA has been blamed for problems that were not its responsibility. OB is right to point to the logistical difficulties inherent in getting materials staged and delivered to New Orleans and the breakdown of local government as contributing difficulties.
OB is probably right to suggest a process of transference or projection in the way the narrative was created and is sustained to this day.
Bogey’s mindset is the problem. I’ve been there. I’ve evolved from the mindset.
Most Americans do not pay attention to economics 101, issues or ideas.
As Bogey continues with the identity politics, he does make one clear point and that is that conservatives have not won in large enough numbers to be a majority in Congress during our lifetimes.
There are so many factors for this:
1) America wants crap and thus is the reason for a billion hamburgers sold by McD’s
2) America’s believe crap and thus is the reason for journalism being dead and yet so many people believe journalists – Neo had the evidence post showing how many Obama voters knew anything about anything
3) Bogey knows almost nothing himself and is a reflection on many people’s take on politics however valid his points are or aren’t.
You want the reasons? There!
Take them with the humorous grain of salt that I intend them. But it is no reflection on whether conservative ideas are BETTER or not just because we haven’t had a working majority in our lifetimes.
Take this for instance…
Women a lot of times like the bad boy. To go for the dedicated, loyal, hard working, good man would not be her inclination.
My woman bucks that trend! 🙂 She found a man with a good heart. I found that she has such a good heart. It is possible to go against conventional wisdom and actually wise…
When everybody kept purchasing houses no matter what the price was – did that reflect on skeptics as a failure? No. Their opinion was better and based on the fact that prices WERE too high.
So… Bogey… as you keep avoiding the REAL problem, it is liberalism and big government and more and more government spending and action and regulation that caused these messes we are in now.
You will avoid that point. You will continue with identity politics and keep failing. I’m sorry that you will. 🙂
Occam,
It is obvious about what you wrote.
FEMA’s website clearly states they do not respond to catastrophe’s within the first 72 hours and that isn’t their charge.
Journalism is dead and journalists couldn’t take the time to read.
It is to me a digression to have to play Bogey’s identity politics game. He marks conservatism as a failure because of Katrina and Iraq, yet in both instances their have been historic and monumental leaps forward.
As Popular Mechanics pointed out with Katrina there was the largest rescue operation mounted in U.S. history. Yet it was a failure. What was the failure? Looting. Who were the looters Bogey? Was it those despised God fearing Christian moral men and women who give more to charity than the secularists?
We have seen an unprecedented amount of spewing in this information age which I have taken part in myself. But the left simply makes up things and makes strawmen wife beating arguments with no particular interest in real statistics, data or facts.
In Bogey’s last post, the post before that and the post before that there are no references to statistics, numbers, issues or solutions. Only spewing. 🙂
We continue to pummel our keyboards showing detail, facts, and statistics to which little due dligence is given by Bogey.
I’m thinking we have wandered too far afield, and it is time to go home.
Baklava: I’m disappointed that you’re so down on America and Americans. It’s a great country. If we’re so dumb, why do the elite from all over the world send their children to be educated.
If we know so little about economics, why is New York still the biggest financial market in the world and still the functioning capital of the global economy?
What I’d really love to here, though, is where your conservative utopia exists. You say Americans are too dumb to vote for conservatives, but surely, somewhere on the face of the earth at some time there were people smart enough to do so?
I’m just curious as to what country you believe has actually implemented what you consider conservative policies. Singapore? Baluchistan?
And if no country has implemented the policies that you insist define conservatism, isn’t that case-closing evidence that the philosophy must contain a fatal flaw where democracies are concerned?
I’m not down on Americans Bogey. I clearly said I was joking. Your reading comprehension skills are sooooo very poor. It’s the only thing I can count on is that you misunderstand and do not comprehend.
You are the one who thinks that conservatives must have such a poor message that they can’t have a working majority. Then in the same breath you relate it to the fact that McDonalds can attract billions. So I played your game with humor.
Yes, Obama won. But what was the message that had him winning when it IS TRUE that those who voted for him KNOW SO LITTLE.
No, that does not relate to how I think about America. While I do wish the Obama voters would educate themselves and not expect so much cradle to grave government nanny statism, I know so many very good Americans who understand PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY and who GIVE just like me.
This Christmas, I am thankful. I have given and I’ve involved my daughters as I do every year so they can learn the tradition of giving.
Bogey wrote, “What I’d really love to here, though, is where your conservative utopia exists. ”
There is data all over the place that show the differences between states in America. Comparisons between economic policies and the growth over the last couple decades. It is an overwhelming trend that states with lower tax burdens have a much better off population. Less misery. Better economic conditions. More self-reliant people displaying lots of personal responsibility. I can give you links or you can prove that you aren’t negligent and lazy for once. 🙂 kidding. love to rib you because I was you before 1991.
We have a perfect labaratory and your question HAS AN ANSWER. 🙂
Conservatism is the solution if you look at state budgets, economic conditions, schools, public services health, etc. No matter how you slice or dice you see the overwhelming trend proves that a more lean government that is less burdensome IS THE ANSWER.
And Bogey, guess what is the problem?
You guessed it!!! Big government.
Here in CA where I am – guess what the problem is?
Big government.
You can continue with the wife beating, strawmen, identity politics and be proud of yourself. Your last paragraph I can tell you really are soooo proud of yourself. But you keep missing the points that everyone is making here and keep failing to comprehend what we are writing.
It’s about the policies, solutions, ideas. Who cares about the personalities? So many people have their hope in one man right now. So many people will learn the lesson I learned long ago. It’s about the ideas, solutions and policies. It’s about what is best for America.
I hope Obama CHOOSES good economic policy. Policies that states around this nation have shown for decades works ! 🙂
Back to the fairness doctrine. Why don’t the negligent journalists in America report on the differences between the states?
This ongoing expirement is so conclusive..
Journalism is dead and they want to shut conservatives up?? Big govt is the prob.