Forget all the trends you thought defined the last year—hope, resentment of the federal government, economic insecurity, reactionary populism, the baffling and continued popularity of Uggs. Put them out of your mind. All of those are as raindrops against the windowpane, noisome in announcing their impact but evaporating with any light. No, there’s only one trend that defines the current American moment, and that’s nostalgia. In a single 5-4 stroke yesterday, the Supreme Court returned us to the age of the Robber Baron, declaring that the government cannot legally restrict spending by private corporations on political elections. It was a victory for any American who feels that large corporations don’t exercise enough influence over US politics, by which I mean direct descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt. The rest of us had best wax up our mustaches and roll up our sleeves, because the next hundred congressional and presidential candidates who imply that there should be some sort of law limiting how long we must work or how little we can be paid are going to have the sum GNP of our great nation directed against them. But a longing for the good old days of outright corporatocracy isn’t the only nostalgia sweeping the country. All week, people have been judging, arguing, organizing and reasoning using the tools available to us in the nineteenth century, by which I mean primarily racism, religion and old-fashioned stupidity. Won’t you join me in criticizing them, before the Supreme Court rules that publicly doing so constitutes an unlawful restraint of trade?
Tag Archives: fox news
Sarah Palin joins Fox News, delighting/terrifying nation
"Everything is very simple, and people who say it isn't are lying."
By now you have probably heard that Sarah Palin has joined Fox News as a contributor, and will be providing “her political commentary and analysis across all Fox News platforms,” which by 2012 will presumably include blimps and children’s mouths. This is the kind of news event that makes so much sense, once it has happened, that you feel like you were time traveling and have suddenly caught up with the actual present. Why hasn’t Sarah Palin been working for Fox News since she graduated from college? It’s like watching Joseph Goebbels fuck The Riddler: difficult to see coming, but once it starts happening you know that only circumstances kept them apart for so long. “I am thrilled to be joining the great talent and management team at Fox News,” Palin said in a press release. “It’s wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news.” And so it begins.
Stronger than reason: David Brooks on the Tea Party
Dear god, please let there be a punk rock branch of the Tea Party.
He’s been wrong before, but when David Brooks says you’re a nationwide movement, you’re either Soccer Moms in the 2004 general election or a real thing. In Monday’s New York Times, Brooks alleges that the Tea Party movement is the latter. After opening with his usual overview of the prevailing sociopolitical winds for the last thirty to 100 years, he gets to the money shot. “Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year,” he writes. For the moment, Brooks has declined to enumerate which instruments he uses to measure the popularity of ideas, but he at least sounds right. “The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise,” he says. “The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.” Those committed to responsible argument will object to Brooks’s questionable use of the word so, which makes his theory the cause of his evidence, but as and statements his list still draws an unsettling connection. When Brooks points out that the Tea Partiers are defined by what they are against, and that most of what they are against can be grouped under “the concentrated power of the educated class,” he introduces a framework as useful as it is terrifying.
War on Christmas drags into insoluble quagmire
I'm not saying his parents would have preferred another girl, but he did get stuck with the Kalashnikov.
It’s been approximately four years since Fox News declared that the media and our socio-political overlords had declared War on Christmas, and I’m frankly a little frustrated with progress on the ground. The end of December is still the most expensive time of year to fly anywhere, and the mall is even more choked with wandering zombies dripping Cinnabon on their velour sweatsuits than usual. It’s starting to look like we’ve made no progress against Christmas at all—and at the expense of billions of dollars and thousands of lives. Okay, maybe not thousands, but even one more life lost in this war of choice is too many, and frankly kind of embarrassing. We’re America, dammit. We beat the Nazis in four years, and if we can’t do away with one more cultural product of German barbarians in that time, well, maybe we need to reconsider our own preeminence. Perhaps we should withdraw from the War on Christmas entirely and leave it to the Chinese.
Colorado governor race offers glimpse of conservative future
Tea Party protestors in Greeley, CO protest the runaway taxation of the Obama administration, which taxes at exactly the same rate as the Bush administration.
There is a storm brewing across our great nation. From Spokane to Schenectady, decent, hardworking Americans who watch television at 4pm are joining together to question their federal government. “Why do you continue to exist?” they ask. “Why can’t we get back to the government we had in 1789, which apparently included Medicaid and Social Security? Have you heard that a black guy is President now?” They are the Tea Party, and they object to taxation and spending. They may also be entirely the creation of the country’s second-biggest cable news network, owned by the world’s 132nd-richest man, but that doesn’t stop them from being a legitimate political party. Sort of. And nowhere is the newly-consecrated Tea Party so influential as in Colorado, where the GOP has chosen as its candidate for governor Scott McInnis, largely because he has the Tea Party’s backing. Kinda. The important thing is, he’s winning. I guess. To hear Fox News tell it, at least, the awesome power of the Tea Party has swept Bill McInnis to certain victory in Colorado. Except maybe they made it all up.