What Chait said.
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Conservative PC
19 Apr 2008 05:11 pm
Comments (14)
Clearly Chait was inspired by the classic SNL skit "George F. Will's Sports Machine."
GFW (Dana Carvey): "In 1954, Willie Mays, in an emphatic stroke of Byzantine whimsy, made his over-the-shoulder catch off of Vic Wertz. What was it not unlike?" Take it? Anyone?
Mike Schmidt (Corbin Bernsen): The.. uh.. the catch in Cincinnati that..
GFW Sorry. "It was not unlike watching Atlantis rise again from the sea, the bones of its kings new-covered with flesh." Well, gentlemen, no score as of yet, but the night is young.
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/89/89qsportsmachine.phtml
Slams can't be turned against the people who initiate them.
That's Rove's Law.
Chait is on to something when he says it's just cultural pandering. Huckabee made it more explicit than usual in his campaign, with his statement that southerners need to know that you care about SEC football before they will vote for you. Someone like me, your basic latte-sipper, couldn't care less if my next president liked lattes or not.
Don't even get me started on the double standard that says San Francisco and Massachusetts are fair game for criticism, even from the man who is supposed to be the president of all the people, and yet small towns can't even be tweaked in the abstract.
Fine article. What seems to have gone missing in the broader discussion of Obama's "condescension" is that leading elements of the Republican party obviously despise the people who vote for them. The endless lying about Iraq, about Iran, about taxes and so on, and the constant effort to displace attention from real issues to bogus ones, like Terry Schiavo, to cite one conspicuous example, only make sense on this assumption.
Fine article. What seems to have gone missing in the broader discussion of Obama's "condescension" is that leading elements of the Republican party obviously despise the people who vote for them. The endless lying about Iraq, about Iran, about taxes and so on, and the constant effort to displace attention from real issues to bogus ones, like Terry Schiavo, to cite one conspicuous example, only make sense on this assumption.
Isn't there something wrong in a country when the largest plurality of voters apparently need someone to interpret their fears and aspirations and no one seems to do so well?
Insulting people for their opinions is rarely a good first step to convincing them to change those opinions.
Chait, like many others in this discussion, seems to take for granted that Obama was talking about why the people in question vote Republican in general elections. But it seems he was talking about why they would vote for Clinton over himself in the Democratic primary.
It seems to me that Obama was trying to excuse his poor performance with a certain demographic, by attributing it to characteristics of that demographic that his audience consider disreputable. He didn't try to make a case for why these issues distinguish him from Clinton, except for his race and his name.
I'm having trouble finding the article at Slate, but the polling of Pennsylvanians specifically over the comments showed that around 60% of Pennsylvanians agreed more with Obama's "bitter" comment than with Clinton's argument against it. This controversy is mostly bow-tie wearers trying to gain street cred.
David Tomlin makes a good point--who cares what the real subject was when we can hold George Will up to ridicule and take another shot with the vapid "What's the Matter with Kansas?" whining.
It may come as a shock, but a lot of working people don't really buy the current class struggle line as dispensed by Vanguard of the Proletariat types like Chait and Yglesias.
It is always all about projection with the right. The right thus pretends to denounce "political correctness" but is the primary enforcer of it. The right claims that liberal elitists condescend to the working class, but again--projection.
"It is always all about projection with the right. The right thus pretends to denounce "political correctness" but is the primary enforcer of it. The right claims that liberal elitists condescend to the working class, but again--projection.
Posted by rea | April 20, 2008 9:37 AM"
It's really funny when you also look at how right-wing elites also think it's decadent that not everyone is familiar with the Western canon to the extent a Columbia undergrad who has gone through the core curriculum there has. David Brooks had a really weird column (called something like "From Joe Strauss to Joe Six-Pack") a few years ago about how people no long have standards for self-improvement like being in book clubs and being well-read, which basically sounded like the problem with working-class whites was that they didn't behave enough like liberal elites. It always cracked me up whenever Jesse Helms referred to liberal elites as the "literary class." So we're evil because we read books? The right doesn't celebrate the white middle class. Instead, it puts up the weirdest caricature of it possible and acts like everything wrong with the caricature is beautiful. It's like a guy praising how beautiful the grotesque exaggerated forehead on a caricature of his girlfriend is when she just has a normal forehead while she's wondering what the hell is wrong with this guy.
Not a bad article, but it would be more persuasive if Chait didn't have to resort to lies when it comes to liberals, God, and guns. For example, the D.C. legislation currently before the Supreme Court goes well beyond "trigger locks and assault weapons." Similarly, the New Mexico Human Rights Commission has made it clear that they don't care about your religious beliefs: you will endorse the gay lifestyle or you will be punished, and God damn the First Amendment.
It's almost like Chait, Yglesias and the rest think that their readers are too stupid or lazy to read actual statutes and cases.
Conservative PC = Patriotically Correct
Comments closed May 03, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Very good article.
Posted by blah | April 19, 2008 5:25 PM