Close Readings: Gingrich on Obama’s “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading, Uncategorized 6 Comments

Reason #378 why we do not miss 1994

I don’t know about you, but I like my Republicans shrill, vaguely racist and relentlessly accusatory. I was thus terribly disappointed when Newton Leroy “Newt” Gingrich left the House of Representatives in 1998, leaving that body unable to pursue its constitutionally-mandated function of investigating the President’s real estate deals, campaign financing and extramarital affairs in an endless attempt to remove him from office. Fortunately, President Bush assumed office shortly thereafter, and the Republican Party coincidentally decided that executive privilege was extremely important. Now, though, we have Barack Obama, a man “who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.” That was Gingrich’s assessment of the President in a recent edition of the National Review, and it’s one of the least crazy things he says in the interview. The real money shot is after the jump, and it’s the subject of today’s Close Reading.

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Obama to oppose tax cuts for rich, psychic suicide of Democratic Party

By Dan Brooks in Invective 6 Comments

President Obama with various Democratic lawmakers, all poised to run out of the room and say they never met him if a scary poll comes out.

According to the Times, President Obama will officially come out against extending the Bush tax cuts for households making over $250,000 a year, offering instead to extend cuts for the 98% of Americans who earn less than that. He’s also presented a package of deductions and capital incentives for small businesses, plus infrastructure spending designed to boost the economy and encourage hiring. It’s not a stimulus, though, because people don’t like that word. That a government plan to stimulate the economy must never again be called a stimulus is one of the few things that Democratic lawmakers can agree on lately. The other is that not giving a tax cut to the the richest 2% of the country is politically risky, and maybe they should just do it anyway so Republicans will stop being mean to them.

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Close Readings: Judson Phillips’s immigration proposal

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 3 Comments

If you haven’t heard of Judson Phillips, it’s probably because you haven’t yet signed up for Tea Party Nation, the national-level organizer of Tea Party organizations that sends you a ton of emails, many of which are titled “Draft” or, once, “Do Not Send.” Judson Phillips may be an idiot. As the organizer of the first national Tea Party Unity Convention, he may also be one of the few identifiable leaders in the still-amorphous movement. The Tea Party Nation website is either the canary in the mine or one arbitrarily drawn constellation in the exploded galaxy that is the Tea Party, depending on whose side you took in the series of schisms that immediately followed its formation. I prefer the first interpretation, since A) the alternative is to have no concrete information about the Tea Party at all and B) Phillips is hilarious. Case in point: his recent screed/policy proposal regarding illegal immigration, which is the subject of today’s Close Reading. Text after the jump.

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Biden uses n-word in speech to Cub Scouts

By Dan Brooks in Plutocracy 4 Comments

Okay, I have abused your trust. Joe Biden did not say the n-word to Cub Scouts, and today’s Combat! blog is about taxes. In addition to being an unpopular topic for which no interesting visual images exist whatsoever, the federal income tax happens to be at the center of present political debate. It’s smack in the middle there on the micro level, as Congress will decide whether to extend the Bush tax cuts when it returns from its August recess. It’s also central on the macro level, since fear of deficits—whether founded or not, and I think it is—is the animating force behind the Tea Party* and pretty much all of contemporary conservative rhetoric.

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Ground Zero Mosque is perfect politics

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 7 Comments

Let the measured discourse begin!

Let’s quickly make a distinction about the word “perfect” above: I don’t mean “good politics,” so much as “politics untainted by any element of government.” The Ground Zero Mosque—located two blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center, and therefore separated from that hallowed ground only by the Ground Zero Chinese Takeout Place, the Ground Zero Strip Club and the Ground Zero Dunkin’ Donuts—will be built on private property. No governing body, from the City of New York City to the executive branch of the United States, can actually stop it. Yet politicians across the country have announced their opposition to its construction as if they could do something about it. One suspects that it’s precisely because they can’t.

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