hypocrisy – Page 3 – Sheila Kennedy

Has Mitch McConnell Killed Irony?

He certainly has breathed new life into the demonstration of hypocrisy….

Example #1: Readers of this blog need not be reminded that McConnell absolutely refused to even consider a sitting President’s Supreme Court nominee –an unprecedented assault on constitutional norms. And yet, when Chuck Schumer threatened to return the favor (albeit with a caveat: the Democrats would not stonewall a moderate candidate, only a radical one), he proclaimed that “the American public” wouldn’t stand for such dastardly behavior.

Um…any mirrors in your house, Mitch?

Example #2: The Senate is preparing to schedule hearings on Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees. However, a number of them have not turned in the documentation required for the FBI’s background check, and the Office of Government Ethics has raised objections to the speed with which McConnell wants to proceed. (He is “pooh poohing” the Office’s insistence on complete documentation prior to going forward with the hearings.)

This sudden desire to accommodate a President-Elect is especially interesting in light of a letter McConnell wrote to Harry Reid prior to hearings on President Obama’s nominees. In that letter–which recently surfaced–McConnell set out a list of demands that absolutely had to be met prior to the Senate giving any consideration to those nominees.

McConnell wrote that “we expect the following standards will be met:

The FBI background check is complete and submitted to the committee in time for review prior to a hearing being noticed.
The Office of Government Ethics letter is complete and submitted to the committee in time for review and prior to a committee hearing.
Financial disclosure statements (and tax returns for applicable committees) are complete and submitted to the committee prior to a hearing being noticed.
All committee questionnaires are complete and have been returned to the committee. A reasonable opportunity for follow-up questions has been afforded committee members, and nominees have answered, with sufficient time for review prior to a committee vote.
The nominee is willing to have committee staff interviews, where that has been the practice.
The nominee has had a hearing.
The nominee agrees to courtesy visits with members when requested.
The nominee has committed to cooperate with the Ranking Member on requests for information and transparency.

There’s more, but you get the idea.

Now, I really have no objection to any of these requirements; I think they are appropriate. Evidently, Mitch McConnell (aka “turtle man”) also thought they were appropriate–when the nominations were being made by a Democratic President.

Suddenly, they are no longer necessary safeguards to protect American citizens from malfeasance or worse. (I’m sure the fact that McConnell’s wife is one of those nominees has nothing to do with this 180 degree change…)

How does this disgusting excuse for a human being sleep at night?

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If It Walks Like a Duck, Call it a Turtle

A couple of weeks ago, Catherine Rampell had a must-read column in the Washington Post, beginning with “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me. Tax that feller behind the tree!”

Rampell focused upon the rampant hypocrisy of the “no tax” ideologues:

Jonathan Gruber has been vilified for (among other things) noting the “tortured” way that sections of the Affordable Care Act were written in order to stay in the good graces of both the Congressional Budget Office and the public. But such budgetary gamesmanship has long been an open, and bipartisan, tactic in Washington. When “spending” became a dirty word, Congress phased out earmarks. In their place, it doled out treats to special interests through the tax code, now awarding more than a trillion dollars each year in federal tax breaks, carve-outs and loopholes. Arithmetically, letting someone pay less in taxes is identical to spending money on them, but voters don’t see things that way….

Voters hate taxes and will punish any politician who threatens to raise them (or, in many cases, does not accede to cutting them). But schools, roads, police forces, garbage collection, firefighters, jails and pensions still cost money, even when you cut them back as much as voters will tolerate. So instead of raising taxes, state and municipal governments have resorted to nickel-and-diming constituents through other kinds of piecemeal, non-tax revenue raisers, an outcome that is less transparent, and likely to worsen the economy, inequality and social injustice.

Examples abound. Call it a toll. Call it a fee. Finance local government with smoke and mirrors.

This “no tax” chicanery plays to our worst impulses, the “I’ve got mine, Jack, and piss on the public good” attitudes that have crippled efforts to improve our communities and build a more inclusive, robust public square. But as intellectually dishonest as the “that’s not really a tax” strategies are, they’re a subset of a larger, even more troubling phenomenon: we’ve stripped our language of content.

I’ve frequently noted–in response to overheated rhetoric from the Right–that President Obama really can’t be both a socialist and a Nazi, because those words have meanings, and they are different. (And actually, in a sane world, neither remotely applies to the President, whether you like his policies or hate them.) Science is not a system of “beliefs” equivalent to religion, because falsifiable empirical facts are not matters of “faith.” LGBT folks don’t have “lifestyles,” they have orientations. I could go on and on.

The problem with misuse and abuse of language is that we lose the ability to communicate with each other. When words no longer have generally accepted meanings, we are just making sounds–and when those words are turned into epithets and insults, intelligible conversation comes to a screeching halt.

Language is one of the most important achievements of the human race; it is fundamental to human progress. We jeopardize more than we realize when we debase it.

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Walking and Talking

In a speech last week in Washington, D.C., New Jersey Governor Chris Christie sang from the Republican playbook in criticizing President Obama’s recent economic interventions.

“We don’t have an income inequality problem,” Christie blustered. “We have an opportunity problem in this country because government’s trying to control the free market. We need to talk about the fact that we’re for a free-market society that allows your effort and your ingenuity to determine your success, not the cold, hard hand of government determining winners and losers.”

Aside from the somewhat bizarre assertion that we don’t have an inequality problem, most Americans (this one included) would agree with that basic assertion. Assuming a level regulatory playing field—a set of rules ensuring that everyone “plays fair”—the market should be the arbiter of business success and failure. We regularly quibble over the need for some of those rules, but it’s a rare politician or citizen (Republican or Democrat) who advocates government control over the economy.

Of course, there’s talking the talk and there’s walking the walk.

After his speech, Christie returned to New Jersey and signed off on a government regulation that blocks Tesla from selling its cars in the state. According to Slate Magazine,

The rule change prohibits automakers from selling directly to consumers, as Tesla does. Instead, it requires them to go through franchised, third-party dealerships, as the big, traditional car companies do. In other words, it requires that the middle-men get their cut. The Christie Administration made the move unilaterally, via the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission. It was urged on by lobbyists for the state’s existing car dealerships, which fear the competition. The upshot is that Tesla will be forced to stop selling cars at its two existing dealerships in the state, and drop its plans to build more. It’s unclear what will happen to the employees of those dealerships.

There’s socialism, and then there’s corporatism and crony capitalism.

There’s rhetoric, and then there’s reality.

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Hard to Argue with This

You can hardly pick up a newspaper or magazine, or log onto a website these days without encountering an article that advises the Republicans party on ways to address the party’s current dilemma. Some are well-reasoned and thoughtful, many are nothing more than thinly-disguised apologetics. Commentary magazine has recently published one of the better analyses. Among their prescriptions: an admonition to be intellectually honest.

The article made clear that the author agreed with conservative economic approaches. But as it noted, the likelihood of anyone listening to the GOP on these issues “requires changing an image that the GOP is engaged in class warfare on behalf of the upper class. Republicans could begin by becoming visible and persistent critics of corporate welfare: the vast network of subsidies and tax breaks extended by Democratic and Republican administrations alike to wealthy and well-connected corporations. Such benefits undermine free markets and undercut the public’s confidence in American capitalism. They also increase federal spending. The conservative case against this high-level form of the dole is obvious, and so is the appropriate agenda: cutting off the patent cronyism that infects federal policy toward energy, health care, and the automobile and financial-services industries, resulting in a pernicious and corrupting system of interdependency. “Ending corporate welfare as we know it”: For a pro-market party, this should be a rich vein to mine.”

No kidding. The hypocrisy on this issue–defending corporatism while marginalizing the poor and opposing any effort to help them–has been widely mocked. This preference for corporate welfare has made the general public view all GOP economic prescriptions with suspicion.

Perhaps the most penetrating observation in the article, however, was this one:

Republicans need to express and demonstrate a commitment to the common good, a powerful and deeply conservative concept. There is an impression—exaggerated but not wholly without merit—that the GOP is hyper-individualistic. During the Republican convention, for example, we repeatedly heard about the virtues of individual liberty but almost nothing about the importance of community or social solidarity, and of the obligations and attachments we have to each other. Even Republican figures who espouse relatively moderate policy prescriptions often sound like libertarians run amok.

This may be the area where current Republican rhetoric is most out of sync with the culture. America is experiencing a still-nascent but growing return to balance, to a renewed recognition of the importance of community and the common good. “I’ve got mine” is an unattractive motto for a political party at any time, but it is extremely off-putting to people looking for ways to forge a caring polity.

The article makes several other points worth pondering, not the least of which is that the country desperately needs two mature, responsible political parties. And right now, we don’t have them.

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Mirror Images

There must be a special blind spot that allows people to engage in precisely the same behavior that they (correctly) criticize in others.

In one particularly distasteful example, the Anti-Defamation League, an organization founded to counter religious prejudice, recently opposed locating a mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero. Evidently, the ADL’s commitment to civil rights doesn’t extend to Muslims.

Closer to home, a number of local Democrats have savagely attacked three Democratic City-County Counselors for voting to sell the water company to Citizens Gas. They have been especially harsh in their criticisms of Jackie Nytes, one of the most thoughtful, productive and hardworking members of the Council.

These are members of the same party that has complained—justifiably—about the Party of No in Washington. Democrats criticize the GOP for its sustained and uniform opposition to anything the Obama Administration proposes; in just the past few weeks, Republicans have blocked votes on the DISCLOSE Act (increasing disclosure and reporting requirements in the wake of the Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to make direct campaign contributions), a bill to provide medical aid and compensation for 9-11 first responders, and a bill to expand credit to small businesses. The Party of No has also blocked votes on at least twenty judicial nominees who received bipartisan support in committee.

What is appalling about this behavior is its transparent motivation to deny the Administration any credit for getting anything done, even when the measures being proposed have previously been supported by Republicans.

Local Democrats have been among those who have strongly criticized this conduct, and it is ironic—to put it mildly—that they are now engaging in it by suggesting that a vote for a plan put forward by a Republican mayor is an act of disloyalty.

If I were on the Council, I don’t know how I would vote on the water company sale. I think the transfer itself makes sense; what I don’t like is that we are getting money to fix our decaying infrastructure by shifting the tax burden to ratepayers. We are pandering to the purveyors of the fiction that we can run a city on the cheap, and our cowardice will inevitably come back to bite us in the future. That said, the infrastructure needs are critical, and a direct tax increase is politically untenable.

Councilor Nytes has a well-deserved reputation for integrity and responsiveness to her constituents, and the accusations of betrayal by more partisan members of her party do not reflect poorly on her—such accusations diminish her critics, and reduce the effectiveness of their justifiable criticisms of the Party of No.

We elect people to the Council to make decisions on our behalf in the exercise of their best judgment, not to play politics. It is one thing to disagree with a colleague’s vote on the merits—that’s fair enough. It is another thing altogether to insist on lockstep partisan voting.

It’s wrong to be the Party of No in Washington—or in Indianapolis.