The Daily Gouge Cover Story Archive, Monday, April 7th, 2014

On April 9, 2014, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

And in today’s Cover Story, writing at Best of the Web, James Taranto explains why each and every policy or position Progressives have ever promulgated seems long on feelings and woefully short on facts:

‘Shut Up’ Is No Argument

The illiberal left lacks confidence in its ideas.

“The debate over repealing this law is over,” President Obama declared last Tuesday in reference to ObamaCare. April Fool! By the end of the week some of Obama’s most loyal media supporters were proving him wrong–by repeating his arguments.

“Is there any accountability in American politics for being completely wrong?” demanded the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne in his Thursday column. “Is there any cost to those who say things that turn out not to be true and then, when their fabrications or false predictions are exposed, calmly move on to concocting new claims as if they had never made the old ones?”

It won’t surprise you to learn that Dionne did not demand accountability from Obama and the other politicians who sold ObamaCare on the fraudulent promise “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” Rather, he asserted that the administration’s claim of having “hit its original goal . . . of signing up more than 7 million people through its insurance exchanges” was a definitive refutation of any notion that ObamaCare is “doomed.”

What about insurance cancellations, narrow networks, high deductibles, blown deadlines, work disincentives, adverse selection and the law’s continuing political unpopularity? Dionne dispenses with all these problems in one sentence: “To be sure, the law could still face other problems, blah, blah, blah.”

The next day it was former Enron adviser Paul Krugman’s turn. He too asserted that “7.1 million and counting signups is a huge victory for reform.” And not just a huge victory but a definitive one: “The nightmare is over. It has long been clear, to anyone willing to study the issue, that the overall structure of Obamacare made sense given the political constraints. Now we know that the technical details can be managed, too. This thing is going to work. (Yeah…in the GOP’s favor!) And, yes, it’s also a big political victory for Democrats.”

“My advice to reform supporters,” Krugman continued, “is, go ahead and celebrate. Oh, and feel free to ridicule right-wingers who confidently predicted doom.”

What’s this all about? It seems to us the main political salience of Obama’s mission-accomplished speech is to constrain Democratic officeholders who have substantive or political doubts about ObamaCare. He made clear that support for ObamaCare remains a test of loyalty for Democrats; those who deviate will be punished by the party’s leadership and its political base. Even the Senate’s most vulnerable incumbent fell into line, as The Weekly Standard’s Michael Warren notes:

Arkansas senator Mark Pryor, a Democrat up for reelection this year, told local [Little Rock] station KARK-TV he would have still voted for Obamacare despite all the law’s problems.

“A lot of our premiums have really shot up, those of us who have had to pay these premiums,” said the KARK host. “Knowing now what you know now, would you have voted for this back then?”

“You know, I would have,” Pryor responded. “Of course, I would want to see some changes back then, but I think on something like this, it’s big, it’s complicated, it’s difficult. If you get 80 percent of this right, you’ve really done something. We probably did get 80 percent of it right.”

Pryor’s assertion that “I would want to see some changes back then” is belied by his own voting record. In March 2010 Pryor was one of only three Democrats to vote against the reconciliation bill that made such changes to the original Senate bill, passed in December 2009 on a 60-40 party-line vote. (The other two were Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, who did not seek re-election in 2012, and fellow Arkansan Blanche Lincoln, who was trounced in her 2010 re-election bid.)

So the Democrats are stuck with ObamaCare. But as long as we have a two-party system, the debate will go on. What’s striking is that the quality of the pro-ObamaCare arguments is so abysmally poor. “Blah, blah, blah.” “Feel free to ridicule right-wingers.” “This thing is going to work.”

Most of all: “The debate . . . is over.” A demand for silence is not a sign of intellectual self-confidence. And this is not the only subject on which the left is demanding that it’s opponents just shut up. For years we’ve been hearing that the debate about global warming–or “climate change” or whatever they’re calling it this week–is settled. Early in the 2000s some news organizations declared they would banish dissenting points of view from their pages. The debate goes on.

Last month Adam Weinstein wrote a piece for Gawker.com called “Arrest the Climate-Change Deniers.” “Man-made climate change kills a lot of people,” he claimed, offering no evidence. “It’s going to kill a lot more. We have laws on the books to punish anyone whose lies contribute to people’s deaths. It’s time to punish the climate-change liars.”

He stipulates that “I’m not talking about the man on the street,” who is a mere “idiot . . . too stupid to do anything other than choke the earth’s atmosphere a little more with his Mr. Pibb burps and his F-150’s gassy exhaust”:

I’m talking about Rush [Limbaugh] and his multi-million-dollar ilk in the disinformation business. I’m talking about Americans for Prosperity and the businesses and billionaires who back its obfuscatory propaganda. I’m talking about public persons and organizations and corporations for whom denying a fundamental scientific fact is profitable, who encourage the acceleration of an anti-environment course of unregulated consumption and production that, frankly, will screw my son and your children and whatever progeny they manage to have.

Those malcontents must be punished and stopped.

Deniers will, of course, fuss and stomp and beat their breasts and claim this is persecution, this is a violation of free speech. (Imagine that!!!)

In reality, it is none of those things, because it is not going to happen–at least not in America, with our vigorous First Amendment tradition. It’s a fantasy–but a revealing one. What it reveals is a lack of confidence in global-warmist dogma.

The defenestration of Brendan Eich, discussed here Friday, is yet another example. Last week Slate ran three remarkable pieces on the subject. We noted one, by Will Oremus, in Friday’s column. He claimed that anyone opposed to same-sex marriage was a “bigot” and therefore unqualified “to be an effective leader of an organization like Mozilla.”

Another, by Mark Joseph Stern, was titled “The Astonishing Conservative Hypocrisy Over Mozilla and the First Amendment”:

A repeated cry in conservative and libertarian circles over anti-gay Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich’s resignation is that the company is somehow trampling Eich’s free speech rights. . . . It’s true that, because of this donation, Mozilla’s leaders and board members pressured Eich to resign. But it’s absurd and hypocritical to claim that this pressure constituted an infringement of Eich’s legal rights.

Stern is arguing against a straw man. The links go to posts by The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher and AndrewSullivan.com’s Andrew Sullivan, neither of whom argues that Eich’s ouster was an infringement of his legal rights (Sullivan notes, accurately, that Eich’s contribution to the Proposition 8 campaign was an exercise of his First Amendment Rights).

The third Slate piece, by William Saletan, is the most extreme of all. It’s titled simply “Purge the bigots”:

More than 35,000 people gave money to the campaign for Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that declared, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” You can download the entire list, via the Los Angeles Times, as a compressed spreadsheet. . . .

Some, like Eich, are probably senior executives.

Why do these bigots still have jobs? Let’s go get them.

We know Saletan and his work and realized as we were reading that he meant this facetiously. Not everyone did. One reader emailed us the link with this comment: “Pretty frightening. . . . At first, I thought it was satire. But he’s serious.”

Again, he’s not serious–or rather, he is serious, but his argument is the opposite of what it appears on its face to be. But the mistake is understandable. Especially if one reads the three pieces in the order we’ve presented them here–Oremus, then Stern, then Saletan–there’s a sort of frog-boiling effect that makes it difficult to perceive that one has crossed over into satire.

“Welcome to the Liberal Gulag,” National Review’s Kevin Williamson writes in a column citing some of the same examples we’ve cited here. “That term may be perverse, but it is not an exaggeration.” Referring to the Weinstein piece, he elaborates: “The Left is calling on people to be prosecuted for speaking their minds regarding their beliefs on an important public-policy question that is, as a political matter, the subject of hot dispute. That is the stuff of Soviet repression.” (No…just Progressive politics!)

In a recent article for the Texas Law Review, legal scholar Burt Neuborne, head of New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, links the contemporary American left’s turn against free expression to the demise of the Soviet Union:

Once the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the left’s political platform, premised on varying degrees of reliance on governmental redistribution of wealth–ranging from Marxism; to European democratic socialism; to the mild egalitarianism of the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty”–ran headlong into an increasing sense that government–even democratic government–performs poorly as the economic or social linchpin of a society. . . . Not surprisingly, many on the left, faced with a newly confident right churning out ideas at a frantic pace, and lacking a coherent alternative political model of their own, lost confidence in the inevitability of progressive change. . . .

Speaking for myself, . . . I find it hard to convince myself that speech aimed at advancing a program of formal legal (as opposed to substantive economic and social) equality is so crucial to human progress that it justifies virtually any negative fallout from an extremely powerful First Amendment. That is a very different First Amendment cost–benefit ratio than the one I perceived as a young ACLU lawyer in the 1960s.

Last week, in response to the Supreme Court’s modest expansion of free-speech rights in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, Neuborne weighed in with a bizarre, overwrought denunciation:

Help. American democracy is trapped in a sealed box built by the Supreme Court. . . . There is no ignoring the fact that American democracy is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Oligarchs, Inc. . . . As a nation, we’ve weathered bad constitutional law before. Once upon a time, the Supreme Court protected slavery. . . . Once upon a time, the Supreme Court endorsed racial segregation, denied equality to women, and jailed people for their thoughts and associations. This, too, shall pass. The real tragedy would be for people to give up on taking our democracy back from the oligarchs.

The latter Neuborne piece is as good an illustration as any that the former piece was on to something. The Democratic Party’s recent political successes masked only for a little while the left’s intellectual vacuousness.

Which is why, as we’ve often observed, facts to Liberals are like…

In a related item, Commentary Magazine‘s Jonathan Tobin highlights the hypocrisy of the Left’s lynching of Brandon Eich:

Mozilla Has Rights. Just Like Hobby Lobby.

Or whenever The Left deems it necessary, appropriate…or simply feels like it!

The forced resignation of Mozilla CEO Brandon Eich over his support for an anti-gay marriage referendum continued to provoke bitter debate over the weekend. After an initial burst of revulsion even from liberal pundits like Andrew Sullivan over the purge of a businessman from a company over his political beliefs by pro-gay thought police, many on the left have recovered their bearings and are reminding themselves that freedom of speech for me but not for thee has always been their guiding principle. Though some are a bit shame-faced to do so, some liberals have decided that punishing individuals for their personal politics is OK because those who hold opinions contrary to their own are not only wrong but so hateful that their mere presence undermines the efforts of those associated with them.

That this is rank hypocrisy is so obvious that it barely needs to be said. If, say, a liberal business executive were to be ousted from a similar position at a Fortune 500 company because a lot of the shareholders or executives at the business didn’t like the fact that he or she was a supporter of gay marriage or had donated to prominent liberal candidates for office, you can bet your stock portfolio and your mortgage payment that the mainstream media and every left-wing pundit in creation would be anointing such a person for sainthood rather than twisting themselves into pretzels in order to justify Eich’s defenestration, as so many have already done.

But in doing so, some on the left have, albeit unwittingly, stumbled into some truths about First Amendment rights that undermine their positions on an important case under consideration at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Some, like the Guardian’s Mary Hamilton, rightly point out that the First Amendment doesn’t entitle Eich to a job at Mozilla. That is true, and I don’t believe any serious conservative critic of the Mozilla lynch mob has said any different. Mozilla and any other company have a perfect right to hire or fire anyone they like. Anti-discrimination laws don’t require liberals to hire conservatives or vice versa even though injecting political litmus tests into job searches are not conducive to hiring the best people. But when New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote that Eich had to be ousted from his position because Mozilla isn’t an ordinary company, that should have unsettled some on the left who have been mocking the idea that corporations have First Amendment rights. If Mozilla should be able to fire Eich because of his politics, how can liberals also argue with a straight face that Hobby Lobby should have to pay for abortion drugs?

The upshot of Manjoo’s piece was to say that rather than a soulless instrument of the technology business, Mozilla is a unique sort of company with a raison d’être that rises above mere commerce and must be nurtured by an individual who shares a vision of inclusiveness that excludes defenders of traditional marriage and other non-liberal concepts. By refusing to “recant,” as Farhad put it, he had demonstrated his inability to lead the company. As Michelangelo Signorile, the editor-at-large of the HuffPost’s Gay Voices wrote, “It’s about a company based in Northern California that has many progressive employees, as well as a lot of progressives and young people among the user base of its Firefox browser, realizing its CEO’s worldview is completely out of touch with the company’s — and America’s — values and vision for the future.”

That Mozilla’s employees and board members actually think it is consistent with American values or even “freedom of speech” (in the words of the company’s disingenuous announcement of Eich’s departure) to hound out of their midst someone who, though a supporter of gay rights in other respects, may disagree with them about marriage or support conservative candidates says something awful about such a group. But if that’s how they feel, then it’s their right to do so even as many on the outside of their cozy left-wing bubble enclave jeer at a version of “inclusiveness” that demands ideological conformity.

Ironically, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern thinks conservatives are the hypocrites to complain about this because of the Hobby Lobby case. He thinks conservatives are only for protecting the First Amendment rights of companies when they allow people like the religious owners of the Hobby Lobby chain to oppose the Health and Human Services mandate that would force them to pay for abortion drugs for their employees but not for Mozilla to burn Eich at the stake. Wrong.

Conservatives have been consistent about the rights of corporations. It is the left that has always mocked the notion of First Amendment rights applying to corporations, principally in campaign finance law cases. Conservatives have correctly argued that individuals do not give up their right to political speech when they incorporate or engage in commerce. By claiming, as they now do, that the special culture of Mozilla requires it to root out all unbelievers in gay marriage or supporters of conservatives, but deny that Hobby Lobby has the right to protect its particular culture or the beliefs of its owners, liberals are the ones that are engaging in hypocrisy.

It would be nice if liberals were sufficiently self-aware of their inconsistency to cause them to “recant” and grant Hobby Lobby—which has an individual business culture just as special as the one at Mozilla—the same respect it demands for the Torquemadas who rule the roost in the high-tech sector. But I’m not expecting that to happen. The real problem here isn’t hypocrisy but a liberal mindset that views conservatives as not merely wrong, but evil. Eich’s fate shows that the decline of civility in our political culture may have become irreversible. But that makes it all the more important for the courts to defend the Constitution against the left’s crusade against the First Amendment with respect to political speech and faith.

Which is why Plank #1 of an honest Progressive Party platform would be: “Free speech for me, not for thee!

Next up, yet another reason, as if one were needed, we’ll never support another Bush: