One Label Fits All
By Mitch Berg
I joke, constantly, with liberal commenters and critics – the few that are worth engaging, anyway – “If a princpled conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and no liberal is there to hear it, is he/she still crazy?”
It’s a joke that covers a very serious reality; for a big chunk of the left, individually and as an institution, “insanity” is the only possible reason for dissent. You encounter is from lefties small (“Suddenly John McCain got crazy!”) to big (the Soviets considered dissent a psychiatric condition, and filled psychiatric prisons to prove it). To altogether too much of the American left, not being part of the American left is (to paraphrase Michael Savage) a mental disorder.
I saw that Dave Mindeman had written a piece entitled Bachmann has close to “Unsinkable” status” and thought briefly that perhaps Mindeman – who is one of the more estimable regional leftybloggers – was going to try something we’d not seen before; a sober, responsible, dispassionate look from the left at the success of one of the most drearily, rotely, predictably maligned figures in Minnesota politics.
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, or know anything about Minnesota politics, you already know not to take any action on that bet.
Any post that starts with a Paul Krugman quote is off to a bad start, of course:
The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.– Paul Krugman (NY Times)
So sit down with someone like Paul Krugman, a Lori Sturdevant or, I’ll take a wild flyer here, a Dave Mindemann and ask them “what would the “rational right” look like?”. If they get past the stumbling and the phumphering (I give you about one-to-four odds), they’ll describe something that looks, talks and votes indistinguishably from a Democrat.
Because, to these people, everything to the right of Dave Durenberger or Chuck Hagel is not just putatively wrong; it’s “crazy”.
Mindemann:
Outside of Bill Prendergast at MN Progressive Project (as well as some of the local 6th District bloggers like Hal Kimball and Political Muse), a lot of left leaning writers and activists (including myself) have considered Michele Bachmann to be a kook or extremist. [Really? The hell you say. I’d put it more like “every regional leftyblogger has “Bachmann is teh crazee” on a hotkey – Ed.] Someone to make a caricature of, but not somebody to accept as a spokesperson for the right on the scale that she has nurtured.
That has to change, because Michele Bachmann is beginning to remind me of someone else….someone much more sinister….
Who might that be?
Margaret Thatcher, who presaged Ronald Reagan by fighting against not only a blinkered, ossified liberal leadership with immense success, but countered countless scabrous insults about her state of mine – because the British left was no less prone to see dissent as a mental illess as our own left?
Sarah Palin, whose own struggle with media/left (pardon the redundancy) orthodoxy has so completely paralleled that of Bachman (and Thatcher!)?
Who, pray tell?
Joe McCarthy.
{{facepalm}}
Wow. Never heard that one before.
McCarthy rose to prominence because of fear. Fear of communism, the red menace. He turned those fears into an irrational paranoia. It ruined lives and paralyzed the US government. For a time, everyone had to tread carefully around the potential accusations that came out of McCarthy’s committee.
Bachmann is becoming the icon that the paranoid right is turning to now. She equates their fears into a “fight for freedom” or a “war against tyranny”. This new paranoia is not about real fears but about a loss of power that eight years of President Bush and 6 years of a Republican Congress kept in check.
Wow. Speaking of paranoia.
Mindemann’s piece is marinaded in a crock-put full of the modern left’s most durable, and durably predictable, memes:
- To a liberal, a conservative never, ever fights the culture war because they have concerns and they wanna take their shot at correcting what they see as a problem in society. It’s always about “fear”.
- No matter how carefully, even punctiliously, a cultural or social (or, these days, even a fiscal or security) conservative spells out a case, they are without exception “paranoid”.
- It is impossible for a conservative to speak on any issue, in any rhetorical terms, without it being considered “hate” on one level or another.
- Any conservative thought is assumed to immediately link to the most ludicrously extreme possible end results – and the most ludicrious fringe is inevitably concatenated with the most mainstream conservative thought. This is not just intellectual laziness (although in the case of most lefty pundits, it certainly is the path of least resistance); this is part of a concerted pattern on the part of the left to frame all disagreement as one form of depravity or amother.
This is the lens through which the left – not even the extreme left, mind you, but the mainstream left that got Barack Obama elected – sees all dissent, and into which they want to frame all dissent for everyone else. Too much of the media accepts it as the baseline; much of the American left can’t be bothered to question it.
That’s gone, and now their paranoia has a face and its quite different from the faces they have been used to.
Michele Bachmann has become the rallying point for this new paranoia. She listens to them…she understands them….she IS one of them. When she calls them to Washington to stand against health care, they come. Never mind that a lot of that crowd was paid for by astroturf front groups. The fact that deep pocket astroturf groups are willing to bankroll a Bachmann rally makes her all the more dangerous.
Mindemann is shocked, shocked, that right-leaning groups spend money to get across right-leaning messages and support right-leaning causes. Because goodness knows the entire left-wing slander machine is funded through bake sales.
She has an entire news channel (Fox News) at her disposal.
Because goodness knows the left gets short shrift on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, the NYTimes, WaPo, LATimes, the AP, Reuters…
Her message can reach the people it needs to anytime she chooses. She is also recognized as an “official” opposition voice by other media as well. And she loves the attention, doesn’t care about “facts”, and makes it all personal.
Tangent alert: I was at a town hall meeting in Saint Paul before the ’08 election featuring Elwyn “E-Tink” Tinklenberg and Bachmann. E-Tink spoke in vague blandishments, and seemed about as sincere and connected to the moment as the moaning in a porn video. Bachmann, on the other hand, did something I’ve never seen a pol do; she grabbed a whiteboard and a marker, and she started putting up the numbers; the amount of Porkulus; the morgage bailout; the upcoming, inevitable bailouts of other industries; the amount this’d add to our per-capita deficit figure, and what that meant not only to our paychecks, but to our children’s futures…
…in short, the facts. She not only waded through the numbers, but she made them – the facts – accessible to everyone in the room. It was the most affecting explanation of the gravity of our current fiscal situation that I had seen to date, and just about the most effective I’ve ever seen, period. From anyone, in or out of politics. Ever.
As to anyone on the left – the party of Saul Alinski – carping about a politician “making it personal?” I’ll hold my tongue, so that my contempt doesn’t overtake me.
And dare I say it, she has a certain charisma that convinces her supporters she can do no wrong.
No. She has a charisma that convinces her supporters – and even a few intellectually honest detractors – that she’s right.
The Democrats chance to defeat her was in 2008. They had the right candidate [um, no – E-Tink was a disaster – Ed.] and the right opportunity [True – Ed.] — it just all came together too late.
(Also incorrect, if you’ll indulge the tangent; “it”, in the form of a Keith Olbermann interview about not much that got its context carefully doctored and blown up into a much-ado-about-not-much-ado event by an uncritical all-too-compliant media – “came together” too early; Bachmann was able to get The Real Michele back in front of the voters in enough time to stanch the bleeding. Thank God.
Tarryl Clark is an excellent candidate [Hah! – Ed.]. So is Maureen Reed. Clark could be a consistent winner for the DFL…..just not in the 6th District. I doubt Reed or Clark is prepared for the type of war they are about to embark on. The DFL candidate, whomever it is, is taking on an incumbant that now has an unlimited national war chest of funding…An incumbant who can call on high profile names to support her campaign.
Which is apparently only a bad thing when the “high profile names” don’t come from Hollywood and the “unlimited war chest” isn’t from George Soros.
An incumbant who will be protected by a national party that has become dependent on her followers.
Which is a pejorative way of saying “found its conservative voice and unifying principles” – the only voice and principles since the Great Depression that has led the party to any sustained success and impact on politics, in 1980 and 1994.
Which, frankly, terrifies the crap out of the Democrat establishment. This is why the left and media (pardon the redundancy) push the meme of the “responsble” (inevitably “moderate”) Republican – in their world, Dede Scozzafava and Arne Carlson are the voice of the GOP! – to divide and then to conquer the party, to marginalize conservatism and conservatives.
Because we not only win, but we win against all odds and conventional wisdom.
Mindemann comes oh-so-close to an answer…
Is the state DFL prepared to meet that kind of challenge? I have my doubts. They can treat MB as a buffoon, but it will only enhance her appeal. Their candidates have shown an ability to raise some money but nowhere near the amounts needed to compete with Bachmann.
I hope I’m wrong. I hope that the 6th District has enough discerning voters that she can be defeated.
…but swerves away.
The worst thing you can do in any form of public life is to “believe your own press”. Likewise with memes about ones opponents. When conservatives start to write their opponents off as a bunch of gutless entitlement symps and lumpen government employees – and all too many conservatives fall into that trap, too – then it takes ones’ edge off. You should never underestimate your opponent.
But the only real arrow in the left’s quiver in the Sixth District is underestimation to the point of collective slander, not only of Representative Bachmann. The left’s entire point of view about Rep. Bachmann is framed by a years-long propaganda campaign waged by some of her most, let’s just say, “focused” destractors, people who find her social conservatism anathema to the point they lose their faculties of reasoning. This has framed the entire 6th CD DFL’s thought on Rep. Bachmann – a myopia that can only have helped send Rep. Bachmann to Washington twice now.
Dave Mindemann – do you honestly think that Rep. Bachmman’s successive victories, in two of the most anti-Republican elections in 35 years, was the result of “undiscerning voters”?
Voters of the Sixth – to Dave Mindemann (oh, I’ll be fair – to the Institutional Left), you are nothing but half-trained lab animals in a pavlovian experiment designed by that most devious mind-warper, Karl Rove.
Not people who arrive at intelligent conclusions for reasons of your own.
Hold that thought for another year.
But at this moment, that seems nearly impossible.
And one is torn between hoping Mindemann, and the rest of the state and 6CD DFL, do and/or do not figure why.
November 10th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Mitch, you left out one of “the modern left’s most durable, and durably predictable, memes”:
That liberals invariably claim that conservatives always speak about them in sweeping absolutes.
November 10th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
So charlie, how does your view of Bachmann differ from Mitch’s sweeping absolute description of the left’s view?
November 10th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Ask any number of left-of-center to Che or Mao fans what they think of Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, and so on…
Try it. Go in to any news room in the Twin Cities… or if you don’t know the directions, use the next best thing: a junior news room (City Pages and The Rake). Just ask them.
The words “crazy” jump out before you finish the question.
Troll around on left-of-center blogs in the comment sections, MySpace, Facebook, and so on.
You’ll get a high ratio of “crazy” (with the words “bat-shit” frequently thrown in).
No explainations of course… but Peeve should sue for infringement of copywritten material. (I would have said “intelectual property”, in his case it would be a contradiction in terms.)
November 10th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
“To a liberal, a conservative never, ever fights the culture war because they have concerns and they wanna take their shot at correcting what they see as a problem in society. It’s always about “fear”.”
Liberals hold that many conservative arguments perpetuate or stem from false appeals to emotion (such as “fear” and “anger”). Not all conservative arguments, but many of them do.
“Any conservative thought is assumed to immediately link to the most ludicrously extreme possible end results” Again, to say that we accuse ALL arguments of this is falsly representing our views. Conservatives bring this on themselves by embracing slippery slopes as if its proof instead of a deviation from logic. They often use slippery slope as appeals to emotion to create misleading rhetoric.
[Democrats tend to avoid the slippery slope fallacy. However, they are also guilty of false appeals to emotion, but they appeal to different emotions so they earn themselves a different reputation.]
November 10th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Liberals hold that many conservative arguments perpetuate or stem from false appeals to emotion (such as “fear” and “anger”).
‘False appeal to emotion?. What did you come up with that, apathy boy?
Lemme guess: first you wanted to say ‘appeal to emotion’. Then you realized that many of the appeals liberals make are ‘to emotion’. Can’t have that equivalence. You needed to make conservative appeals to emotion sound illegitimate or at least insincere, so you sacrificed a ohrase that might make sense on the altar of your ideology.
Are you so far gone that you don’t think liberal arguments appeal to anger or fear?
November 10th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Riiiight, them cunservertives are always fear-mongering; their favorite is “Do it for the children!”
Bwwwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahaha
November 10th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
“Are you so far gone that you don’t think liberal arguments appeal to anger or fear?”
Okay, my turn to guess. You wrote your response after reading half my post and originally wrote “Are you so far gone that you don’t think that liberal arguments appeal to emotion?” and then finished my post and realized that you were 100% wrong, so you changed it to “anger or “fear?” so you wouldn’t look like a complete idiot.
No? Well, it was as good a guess as any. (As good as yours, anway.)
I’m flattered that out of my entire comment you only took issue with one word of it. I’ll assume you agree with the rest of it.
November 10th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Last week’s rally was astro-turfed? Does that mean that my daughter can submit her gas receipts from two 20-hour drives in 4 days for reimbursement? And if so, who does she send them to?
Oh wait, I know: she can send them to Soros and the lefty-money-machine. After all, she was heeding their emotional, all-justifying, plea to do something “For the Children”. That’s why she went to Washington: for the children, and the children’s children, and the children of the children’s children.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
You need to do a better job of writing, apathy boy. What the heck does this sentence mean?
Liberals hold that many conservative arguments perpetuate or stem from false appeals to emotion (such as “fear” and “anger”).
In what way are conservatives’ arguments appeal to emotions false? How is it possible for an appeal to an emotion to be false? Or “false”, as you write?
Why are “fear” and “anger” in quotation marks? Are they actual quotes from a relevant source? Are you using the words in a unique or special way?
If you can’t think clearly, you can’t write clearly.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
“”fear”” is in quotation marks because Mitch put it in quotation marks. Ask him why he did it. I guess whether or not you consider him a relevant source is between you and him. As for anger and false I guess I just got carried away.
The world “false” generally means dishonest or not real. [I’d put those words in quotations but I wasn’t sure if you’d consider a dictionary a relevant source.]
I am NOT adding commas into sentances where the don’t belong just to compensate for your lack of reading skills. Perhaps you burned your copy of the MLA Handbook because someone told you it was communist literature.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
apathyboy said:
‘“”fear”” is in quotation marks because Mitch put it in quotation marks. Ask him why he did it.’
OK, you referred to it as if you knew what it meant, but now you don’t? You must be SMRT.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Because goodness knows the left gets short shrift on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, the NYTimes, WaPo, LATimes, the AP, Reuters…
Mitch, let’s not forget that the left gets short shrift on NPR & MPR, too. (We’re trying to be fair, right???)
November 10th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
“how does your view of Bachmann differ from Mitch’s sweeping absolute description of the left’s view?”
A fair question. It differs in that I try to deal with conservatives as individuals rather than as a monolithic group, and focus on differences of policy and interpretation of facts.
That individual approach also leaves me room to ridicule Bachmann as a special and deserving case.
November 10th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
“as a special and deserving case.”
Come on Charlie, you can say it. What kind of case?
November 10th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
I’ve already said it:
• publicity hound
• a complete non-factor at Capitol
• golden girl for people who don’t want government to do anything, anyway.
• going to the Heritage-addled mind of Rep. Bachmann for energy policy ideas is like going to McDonald’s to buy bread
• a far inferior candidate — imagine being inferior to a borderline candidate!
November 10th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Charlie,
We used to say some of the same things about Bill Proxmire when I was growing up in Wisconsin. Especially the first two.
November 10th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Apathy Boy, no amount of reading skill can decipher poor or unclear writing.
You wrote that you put the words “fear” and “anger” in quotes because that’s the way Mitch wrote them. Good, answers my question. A direct quote & relevant (because what you wrote was in response to Mitch’s post).
You still aren’t lucid (meaning ‘clear’) because you say that “false” generally means dishonest or not real. I am sure that you are aware that the first meaning of false is something that is not true. If you meant “unreal” or “dishonest” why did you use the word “false”? Liberals hold that many conservative arguments perpetuate or stem from unreal appeals to emotion (such as “fear” and “anger”). doesn’t make sense. What would be dishonest about such an appeal? That the persons making the appeal are being cynical and manipulative? All of them? Some of them? Or is it the nature of the appeal itself that is “dishonest” or “unreal”?
If a conservative says that he’s worried and upset about because obamacare may mean the end of his company-supplied health insurance and that he will be forced into a ‘public option’ of lesser value, how can his “fear” and “anger” be considered “false”, “dishonest” or “unreal”?
November 10th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
And anyway, what`s wrong with “fear and anger”? Normal human emotions that serve to keep us safe and sound. Have you pro free speech liberals deemed these off limits in politics?
November 10th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
JimF, liberals have deemed all sorts of speech to be off limits. It’s all part of the effort to frame the narrative. You can do that when 90% or so of professional journalists agree with your POV.
You can make the Hasan shooting about whether Hasan was mentally ill rather than about how many other radicalized muslims are wearing American uniforms, for example. You can even try to make the Hasan story about a the dangers to muslims from a hypothetical ‘backlash’ when a plain reading of the facts tells you that, so far, the score is victims of Hasan=13 & victims of ‘backlash’=0.
November 10th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
So much of this depends on point of view, of course:
• publicity hound – Kinda like Paul Wellstone and Keith Ellison?
• a complete non-factor at Capitol The very definition of Wellstone.
• golden girl for people who don’t want government to do anything, anyway. This’d be that “Most absurd possible extreme thing” I mentioned above. Just because we want government limited and held accountable doesn’t mean we want NO government. But I bet you knew that.
• going to the Heritage-addled mind of Rep. Bachmann for energy policy ideas is like going to McDonald’s to buy bread – Is there such a thing as an “Ad Feminam” argument?
• a far inferior candidate — imagine being inferior to a borderline candidate! The GOP could use more “borderline candidates” who not only win by eight points in bad GOP years AND stand for good solid conservative principle. Bachmann does. Which is why the left hates her.l
November 10th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Kinda like Paul Wellstone and Keith Ellison? — Wellstone was a friend, and yet occasionally, I wished he cool it, but Proxmire was a better comparison. However, Bachmann has no peers. Not Rangel, Waxman, Frank or Little Richard.
The very definition of Wellstone. You can have your moral compass, I’ll take mine.
Yep, I knew that. But can’t I have a little hyperbole, given the company?
I stand on the McD comparison.
The GOP could use more opponents like Patty Wetterling, to whom I referred in the original post.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
Patty Wetterling? Are you serious, Quimby? Her only qualification is was being the bereaved mother of a kidnapped child. Which, in retrospect seems to be par for the the DFL course, considering such luminaries as Mark Dayton.
I totally agree. Please field as many Patty Wetterlings and Mark Daytons as possible.
November 11th, 2009 at 12:11 am
I’m willing to look away from “let’s slit our wrists” comment. Not the best way to put it, but the message itself, that she opposes health care reform, not surprising or hypocritical.
Mailing pamplets out of state: illegal. So is Rybak’s campaigning methods. Give them their slap on the wrist.
Asking her constituents to break the law by not answering the census. This goes beyond civil disobediance (Terry, can you check that spelling for me? It’s easier for you to do it than for me to open a new browser to check M-W), but since I don’t particularly care one way or another whether people are counted for the census, I’ll give that a pass.
But what gets me is that her district is going to be the first on the chopping block once the census comes out. So by asking her supporters not to fill out the census she is putting her own political life at greater risk. I respect her fortitude, but if the Dems gain by attrition (she’ll be gone by 2012 even if she does win re-election) she’ll have only herself to blame (though I’m sure she’ll find someone else).
But the danger in calling her “crazy” is that it marginalizes her constituents, which is neither fair nor productive. She is not serving her supporters as well as she could because the voice she is giving their real concerns is not very palatable.
November 11th, 2009 at 2:42 am
“But what gets me is that her district is going to be the first on the chopping block once the census comes out. So by asking her supporters not to fill out the census she is putting her own political life at greater risk.”
Bachmann has never asked her supporters not to fill out the the census form.
Don’t like to let reality influence your ideology, do you, apathy boy?
November 11th, 2009 at 8:19 am
They could be marginalized, or they could have no representative at all, like me in the MN 5th.
November 11th, 2009 at 8:31 am
It seems that some of us believe what ever we are told about Representative Bachmann. Some of us even believe we know the mind of Representative Bachmann. Could it be that some of us want to believe bad things about Representative Bachmann? I think so. Delude yourselves or let others do it for you, but when you distribute your “Bachmann Facts” you ally yourselves with the folks at dumpbachmann. You know, the folks who will make up and believe anything that makes Representative Bachmann look bad?
November 11th, 2009 at 8:51 am
I heard she wants to ban people from using CFLs.
November 11th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
“But the danger in calling her “crazy” is that it…”
…it is “hate speech” and might get PatheticBoy in trouble with the law.
The libs really are obsessed with Bachmann.
….
*fade to scene… It’s a wonderful life*
“Teacher says, every time “Bachmann” is uttered a liberal pees its pants.”
November 11th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
They could be marginalized, or they could have no representative at all, like me in the MN 5th.
Or me in the 4th.
November 11th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
If the DFL does manage to remove the 6th CD the voters won’t just disappear uncaringtot. They could merge us into 8,7,4,5,2. However, I believe 8,7,4,and 5 are all losing population 2,6 and 3 seem to be gaining.
I agree the DFL will attempt to gerrymander districts to suit their wishes but that may very well backfire upon them.
November 12th, 2009 at 11:29 am
“Teacher says, every time “Bachmann” is uttered a liberal pees its pants.”
Everytime Bachmann speaks a liberals hair is set on fire 🙂
November 12th, 2009 at 11:53 am
JPMN – you’re correct about the populations. But if the DFL controls the Legislature, they will gerrymander so that the increasing population in the Six is either parceled out into dime lots that won’t affect the votes in, say, 4, 5, 7 and 8, or add extra GOP votes to districts they realize they can’t win (like the 2 – I think 2 and 6 meet at some point, right?)
November 12th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
I am intelligent. I am well-intentioned and compassionate. I see a person with a problem and I want to help her solve it. I thought of a solution that seems right to me and I want to implement that solution.
You disagree with my proposed solution, to the point of actively trying to stop me from implementing my solution. There are only two possible explanations for your actions:
1. You are evil. You want this person to continue to suffer for your own sick amusement.
2. You are crazy.
I am a liberal. You are a conservative. What other possible explanations could there be?
.