Reagan & W.

Big Brother's blogette:

Remember about three weeks ago when commentators across the political spectrum were all abuzz about George W. Bush's being identifed with Ronald Reagan? What happened to all that speculation? Hmm. I guess he didn't measure up after all.

Come to think of it, when was the last time you heard somebody sincerely describe Bush as a straight talker?

Why I'm Glad I'm a Liberal

Big Brother:

The other evening, Barney Frank spoke to the lesbian and gay network at the investment bank where I work. One of the things he said that has stuck with me is that when the courts make decisions regarding social policy, those decisions will never stick if they do not work. He was using the example of gay marriage in Massachusetts. Gay weddings have been held there for seven weeks now and really nothing has happened. Life in the Commonwealth goes on much as it has these many years.

This got me to thinking as I lay awake last night.

Conservatives are always predicting dire results that rarely, if ever, come to pass. Did women voting destroy our government? Did integration destroy the South? Did welfare lead to communism, or even make the rich or the middle class poorer? Did interracial weddings destroy the institution of marriage? Did Clinton's stupid affair destroy the dignity of the presidency? Did the abolition of sodomy laws a year ago have any adverse effect on anything? Help me out here. I'm honestly trying to think of something conservatives have been right about. Ah! Here's one: legalized divorce has led to high divorce rates. But even this is a mixed bag, as some marriages need to end for the wellbeing of one or both spouses. Well, okay, and legalized abortion has led to women having legal abortions. But in the bad old days of unsafe, illegal abortions, women had abortions anyway and many women died from them (and, no, they did not deserve it.) That's a pretty slim and flimsy list by my reckoning.

But, on the other hand, liberals have been so right in their dire warnings so much of the time. Even though it was Kennedy who got us into Vietnam and Johnson who accelerated the war, liberals warned that the war was turning into disaster. Turns out it was a disaster. Liberals said that Nixon was committing crimes that violated his oath to preserve and protect the constitution. Turns out he was. Liberals warned that Reagan's decimation of funding for federal housing would lead to homelessness. Sure enough, homelessness became an epidemic during his presidency. And his arming and financing of "anticommunists" in Latin America actually did, as liberals feared, result in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. And his war on drugs has led to the highest level of imprisonment of citizens in the industrialized world. And his utter disregard of AIDS for seven years resulted in over 100,000 untimely deaths in this country. Bush's tax cuts have led to record deficits and a marked shift of the tax burden to the middle class. His invasion of Iraq has created chaos in that country, increased terrorism in the world, given extremists a recruiting tool that cannot be rivaled, stretched our armed forces to dangerously thin levels, left our country vulnerable to attack, strained our traditional alliances and wrecked our nation's standing in the world. I don't need any help here. I just have to stop, as I can't see an end to this list.

I remember when I was a young, conservative (let's make that reactionary) Republican, I used to think how appropriate it was that we were "the right" because we WERE right. Boy, was I wrong. Just as conservatives have been wrong, again and again and again. While liberals have right. Again. And again. And again. Why on God's good earth would I want to be a conservative, only to be proven wrong again and again? I'm glad to be a liberal. My heart says it is right. My reason says it is right. And history says it is right.

Fahrenheit 9/11

Fahrenheit 9/11 was far more powerful for me than I expected it to be. Knowing a lot of the material he was going to cover, and knowing his proclivities, I guess I assumed I already knew what the movie was going to be like before going in to see it. But the force with which he connects the dots in the first section, and the way in which he depicts one of the primary absurdities of mind control that is the administration's use of the "War on Terror" - namely, what possibly Middle Americans have to fear from the real threat of terrorist attacks - was handled wonderfully. I had my problems of course, almost always coming down to the fact that Moore tends to use images of politicians that are really not all that shocking or condemning, and making them out to be more than they are - and wasting time in the process when he could be asking more pointed and pertinent questions. But even there, however, there are things that at first blush seem completely banal - for example Bush's comments at a gathering of the, as he puts it, "haves and have-mores" - that on closer examination really do spell out what this administration is all about. When Bush tells them, "Some people call you the elite. I call you my base," one suddenly realizes that a)Bush is blithely mouthing a simple truth, and that b)this simple truth is what needs to get drummed into the average American head as much as humanly possible: Bush is not in power to help middle class America, he is in power to help exactly this base of "elites".

But for me all criticisms fade in light of this fact: no one else is doing what Moore is doing and achieving the kind of exposure that he is achieving. A lot of obsessed lefties have already come to the conclusions that he has with the facts that he's laid out, or similar facts, but this is a small, tiny handful of people. Moore is putting it out there in a huge way, and whether he's right or he's wrong, he's going to have people asking questions about issues that they should have been asking for the past four years. We can factcheck and blog until the sun goes cold but even the most accurate and/or most read blogs and commentators in the land reach a fingernail paring of people compared to the amount of people Moore reaches, with his sometimes brilliant, occasionally painfully propagandist, but undeniably effective work.

Finally though, the real question on a lot of liberals' minds is this: will the movie, as so many predict, just be preaching to the choir? Will it even alienate conservatives and even moderates, or will it actually manage to swing some folks left? Certainly the conservative camp is hauling out a major offensive. Reading Andrew Sullivan, who dismisses the movie as a bore, I'd swear I had seen a different movie entirely, possibly in an alternative universe (apparently that would be the alternative universes inside each of our respective minds). Christopher Hitchens is honestly not someone I would want to take on in debate over the movie; while the inconsistencies and downright absurdities present in his own response to the film are readily apparent, the colossal extent of his distaste for the movie (a distaste which one could boil down to a prudish, overweening intellectual's distaste for populist reduction), coupled with his apparent willingness to hypothesize absurdities (for example, the idea that Moore of all people senses that Fahrenheit 9/11 lacks "gravitas") to make non-points (anyone who doesn't think that the Bush administration's manipulation of the war on terror doesn't exactly match the Orwellian model for "continuous war" must be willfully self-blinding) would make such a debate unbearable. (Still I would recommend reading the Hitchens article just to cut your teeth on it.)

But of course both of these British ex-pats supported the Iraq war (though Sully has cooled on it of late) so no doubt it's like a Scientologist, even one who has become lukewarm on Scientology "for their own reasons", watching an anti-Scientology screed - the suggestion that they've been duped (especially these two, who would be in tough competition for the overwhelming amount of pride they each take in their respective intellectual facilities) makes them want to kill the messenger. Isn't that the exact nature of cognitive dissonance?