William-Sonoma Republicans: The Exotic Other

April 10, 2012 2 Comments

I’ve been reading Yahoo! News for years.  Once upon a time, they relayed to the net denizen a spartan diet of AP and Reuters articles.  Now, they’ve cultivated their own crop of value-added content.  The term “value” must be used advisedly here.

You’d think that when it comes to presidential campaigns, journalists should be delving deep into the issues.  But the currents of today’s media markets dictate other priorities.  Take Mitt Romney for instance.  Instead of scrutinizing his policy positions, Yahoo!’s The Ticket blog has waged a systematic campaign of making Romney and his wife Ann look bumbling, aloof, and inscrutable.

Every time the Yahoo! bloggers post, the news spin is so swirly and the story so inconsequential.  In the hope of highlighting his awkwardness, one January post was dedicated in large part to Romney’s hurling bags of Cheetos to unfriendly journalists on his campaign plane.  When the primary came to Arizona, the fact that Romney’s supporters’ signs appeared to be hastily printed on resume paper figured prominently in another post.

And then there were multiple reports on Ann Romney’s Pinterest account.  First, that she followed no other Pinterest members.  Should we really expect more tech savvy from a grandmother in her sixties?  I don’t even have a Pinterest account.  Then, one Viriginia Heffernan took up a wordy post to scrutinize why Mrs. Romney would pin Anna Karenina on her Pinterest board.  Seriously, do we have a misallocation of journalistic resources here?  In magnifying and dragging out these silly details, this crack team of liberal bloggers is hoping to quash Romney’s chances by a death of a thousand embarrassing paper cuts.  The all-too-cool President Obama certainly doesn’t get the same treatment on The Ticket.

To top it all off, one of Heffernan’s latest contributions catalogs for us the traits of what she calls “William-Sonoma Republicans.”  She cites an old story by the Los Angeles Times to launch her own confused musing on The Other: in her case, middle and upper-middle class Republicans who support Mitt Romney.  You can’t help but suspect a bit of journalistic retaliation when she tries to cast this Other as a counterpart to the “sushi-eating, Volvo-driving” latte liberal.  How exotic is this strange group of people who would support Mitt Romney?  Among their most salient traits: they live in large suburan houses, take pride in their living spaces, and–most shocking of all–cook food in their own kitchens!

The nadir of this journalistic exposé comes when the author consults the William-Sonoma website. Noting that it prominently features an Easter sale, she concludes erroneously and with lament that the clientele is meant to be exclusively Christian.  She plays up an ad that suggests W-S customers might like to eat leg of lamb with sea salt and shallot butter.  I’m sure lots of Jews, Muslims, and atheists wouldn’t mind a bite of leg of lamb in April either.  And if having an Easter sale signifies some sort of oppressive exclusion, Heffernan had better not look at the transcript for the White House Easter prayer breakfast.  How far overboard can a liberal blogger go with her disdain for traditional lifestyle and faith?

We shouldn’t blame the media for their failure to cover the substance of the 2012 Presidential campaign.  After all, they have to pay the bills somehow.  Just remember to do your homework before you go the polls in November.  Hint: Yahoo! News won’t help.

Filed under All posts, Political Cartoons Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

A workable green energy solution

March 22, 2012 1 Comment

We all know the things we’re supposed to spurn the Republican contenders for: vomiting on hearing JFK talk about church and state, offering statehood to a yet-unfounded lunar colony.  The litany against front-runner Mitt Romney is long, if insubstantial: having buddies who are NASCAR team owners, driving two Cadillacs (not Porches or even Mercedes, mind you), being an Etch-a-Sketch candidate.  Since there is no major scandal or outrageous hair-flaming position the man takes, mainstream media must squeeze every ounce it can get out of the latest Romney gaff.  It’s getting old for anyone with half a brain, and fortunately those are the people who tend to show up at the polls.

Republicans have been scrutinized intensely, but what has been coming out of mouths in the Democratic corner?  You wouldn’t know watching NBC or reading Yahoo! News.  Sure, Maxine Waters called Eric Cantor and John Boehner demons.  Nonetheless, it’s the recent speeches of household-name White House officials that are worth looking at.

President Obama kicked things off earlier this month, comparing himself to Ghandi and Nelson Mandela.  He claimed that, as with those men in their noble struggles, the fight is hard and it takes time.  But how is the Democratic agenda in 2012 comparable to the effort for Indian independence or the campaign to end Apartheid?  Does this mean the GOP is as brutal as the British Raj or as unjust as the old South African regime?  This sloppy pandering is reminiscent of the racially-tinged “dollar bill” accusation Obama hurled at McCain and Republicans in his 2008 campaign.  But these remarks get scant media scrutiny when they come from this president.

Next, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spiced things up at the 2012 Women in the World Summit.  She equated more ardent American conservatives with the more egregious human rights abusers in the Muslim world, slapping them both with the common label of “extremists.”  Opposing compulsory contraception coverage is nothing akin to what women deal with every day in Afghanistan, or Egypt for that matter.  Secretary Clinton scores bonus points for lugging domestic politics into foreign affairs.

Finally, Joe Biden rounds out the good times with a speech given to the UAW in Toledo last week.  The Vice President branded his ticket as one offering a “fair shot and a fair shake.”  With this language we might as well have entered a time warp and come out in FDR’s bad old New Deal.  This is the kind of sloganeering given to those who think capitalism is wrong, broken, or dead.  In its place comes Uncle Sam who “takes care of things” for you.  Just like when you need Vito Corleone to get your landlord off your back.  More like fair shakedowns than fair shake.  This rhetoric values shameless deal-making over the rule of law.

It’s no surprise the highest officials in the land get the soft treatment; they’re liberal and progressive after all.  Their rhetoric should have generated some push back from the mainstream media.  If only we could harness all their hot air, we could generate electricity instead.  Then they could deliver on their green energy solutions promises.

Filed under All posts, Political Cartoons Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Of sheeple and super PACs

March 5, 2012 1 Comment

Just the other week, the charmingly hateful Bill Maher announced he was giving $1 million to a super PAC working to re-elect President Obama.  Despite his past harangues against the Roberts Supreme Court, Mr. Obama has resigned himself to the reality of unlimited campaign spending for now.

The Citizens United decision that ushered in that reality is deeply unpopular with the public. But what is the alternative?  Restrictions on political advertising are inextricably at odds with America’s free speech tradition.  Contrary to popular belief, the first amendment does not aim to protect lap dances, the pitching of tents on university quads, or school children’s ability to endorse “bong hits for Jesus.”  If nothing else, free speech exists so we may amply criticize our incumbent political leaders.  Anyone who remembers Tienanmen square ought to have a natural appreciation for this necessity.

Yet, Americans fear the pernicious effects of too much political speech.  Some are concerned for the quality of the speech, but most trepidation is reserved for the idea that rich people and wealthy corporations will have too much power.  In reality, there is a healthy split between rich Democrats who want to raise their own taxes and rich Republicans who understand the importance of keeping taxes low.  Even from the class war perspective, there is no need to worry that big donors will team up and categorically dominate everyone else.  President Obama’s ample 2012 war chest attests to that.

What of the quality of political speech?  This election cycle, news media consumers cannot help but be acutely aware of the Republican tit-for-tat.  Recall the sensational, anti-capitalist dross that Gingrich supporter Sheldon Adelson financed earlier this year.  But in what past golden era were political campaigns not ugly?  More to the point, the desire to suppress distasteful or distorted speech through legislated, bureaucratic discernment is chillingly Orwellian.

As the unattributable maxim goes, fight bad speech with good speech.  True democrats (lowercase “d”) have nothing to fear, as long we believe our fellow citizens aren’t dumb.  But for some reason this pervasive mentality prevails: that millions of dollars of campaign money automatically translate into bought votes, as if people were uncritical voting robots.  This is classic “sheeple” thinking, a presumptuous judgement that your fellow countrymen are mere followers who are too blind to apprehend the truth you happen to perceive.

We must appreciate our democracy as a marketplace of ideas, where we test confidently a faith that our fellow citizens are endowed with true decision-making ability and are not bought-and-sold sheeple.  To do otherwise would be to shrink into the clutches of tyranny.

Filed under All posts, Cogitduck Comic Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Get smart on social issues

February 23, 2012 Leave a comment

Social issues have been on a role lately.  Even though conservatives have the winning logic, the Left has the tailwind of popular outrage that comes with the liberal fear of an “American Taliban.”  From Komen’s forced Planned Parenthood backtrack, to the weak Obamacare contraceptive mandate reshuffle, to Rick Santorum’s unnecessary utterances on prenatal tests, neither the media nor the White House have missed a chance to cast a troglodyte pall on any Republican within firing range.

Liberals have the tactical advantage as long as the policy discourse is defined by the paradoxical presumption that government should run citizens’ lives while maximizing their “privacy.”  Rather than get mired in the house-to-house fighting of the culture wars, Republican presidential contenders ought to turn the tables and insist that privacy is best preserved by getting government out of the healthcare business.  Gutting mandates is the real “pro-choice” position.

Winning the presidency requires a positive, sunny disposition, and delivering bad news about people’s personal conduct is the job of elders in robes: pastors and judges.  If you win the presidency, you get a bully pulpit, but more importantly, you can appoint clear-thinking judges who can stem the progressive march to positive-rights oblivion.  The problem is you need to win the presidency first.  Let’s get smarter on how we talk about social issues.

Filed under All posts, Political Cartoons Tagged with , , , , , , ,

HSRA: Get stuck in traffic?

November 11, 2011 Leave a comment

California HSRA hopes you get stuck in traffic?

 

The Sacramento Bee has offered us a strange, new angle on California’s budget-busting high-speed rail project.  Having interviewed the HSRA’s chair this week, they inform us that the Authority’s latest business plan hinges on a friendly Washington budget environment in the years ahead.  Basically, HSRA is betting its chips on President Obama’s re-election.  With forecasters putting his odds somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-50, isn’t this plan a little reckless?

As it is, Jerry Brown’s gimmicky budget for the current fiscal year is  well on track to trigger further cuts.  And we all know the long line of agencies begging for fiscal mercy: education, prisons, parks, sundry social services, and so on.  Given these dire straits, where will the money come from?

The global track record for high speed rail is abysmal.  These extremely capital- and labor-intensive projects don’t recoup their start-up costs, and there is no reason to believe the latest projected ridership numbers, given the stubbornness of the American Love Affair and the high level of competition airlines will bring to bear.  Train passengers might not need to stand in security lines, but the door-to-door times will be comparable, and at the end of it all they will still need to get picked up or rent a car anyway.

The funny thing about the article though is the last bit about getting stuck in traffic.  It’s not clear whether the Bee is trying to be cute, or imply something more sinister about the Rail Authority.  Even then, local traffic patterns only have partial bearing on the need for a high speed train.  When was the last time you were caught in traffic outside of Harris Ranch?

Filed under All posts, Political Cartoons Tagged with , , , , ,

Newer posts →