Thursday’s Majority Report was really good. It provided a great contrast. Seder had on the reclusive Digby for about an hour and that was fun. I’ve embedded the video below, so you can check it out if you are so inclined. But what is really interesting is what happened in the second hour. He had a debate with Matt DiGeronimo, who is a libertarian radio talk show host in Hawaii. I was just overwhelmed with the segment because DiGeronimo is yet another conservative affirmative action recipient. This guy is a professional. He gets paid to do his show. He’s aired on AM 760, the “Wall Street Business Network.” That doesn’t sound like a some fly-by-night operation with a bunch of volunteers to me.

As soon as his appearance was announced, I checked out his website, The Matt DiGeronimo Show. I’m always amazed at the websites people put together. What do they do, have their unemployed uncles put together websites for them? I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t even want to talk to potential clients about websites. The truth is that you can get something that is at least not embarrassing for $500. And if you want to have a blog, well, you’re gonna have to pony up at least a grand. His website? I could knock it out in a couple of hours, including images. A half hour without the images. It’s just a really ugly Word Press skin after all.

That doesn’t really matter. I’ve known a lot of people who do good work who have horrible websites. But DiGeronimo is the “Managing Director of Hawaii’s largest and most prominent Mergers & Acquisitions company, ‘Smith Floyd Hawaii’.” So you would think he would be willing to pony up a bit of cash for his website. You would think he would deal with a lot of other people who understand that having a website that looks like it crawled out of 1995, is a bad thing. But whatever. The website did not bode well for the man.

The conversation he had with Sam Seder started right out the gate with an absurd discussion of the difference between a gay person coming out of the closet and German grunts during World War II being afraid to speak out against the Nazi regime. But he didn’t put it that way. He said, “Nazi grunts.” What he was trying say is the same thing Tolstoy said (although not in English), “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” He was trying to argue that a lot (I would argue most) of the German people didn’t like what the Nazis were doing at all, but they were afraid to say anything. And as with gay people coming out of the closet, if all the good Germans had spoken up, they could have won. But they didn’t, because it’s hard when you assume you are alone. I could tell that was what he meant to say.

But he never did. He talked in circles and ended up sounding like a Nazi apologist. Eventually, Sam Seder took pity on him and they moved onto the whether Christians are under attack. Well, there’s something you should know about the “Managing Director of Hawaii’s largest blah blah blah”: he’s also a Christian. But he’s apparently a non-judgmental one. He thinks he shouldn’t say anything against homosexuality, because it’s God’s place to make them burn in hell, not his. But he did have a problem with people who have a problem with a Ten Commandments monument on government property. Again: vague and confused about what he thinks and why.

They went on to talk about the minimum wage which I thought would be a slam dunk. It’s a classic: “I am against the minimum wage because it hurts workers since businesses won’t hire people if they have to pay more.” But that isn’t really the argument he makes. He says, more or less, “A $15 minimum wage would hurt people because they would just go to work at Burger King instead of maybe taking a job at IBM for $3 where they could gain skills.” I swear, that’s what he said. His thinking is totally a mess. He really hasn’t thought about any of this stuff other than perhaps reading Reason Magazine from time to time. And the big bad leftist Sam Seder clearly understands the libertarian arguments better than DiGeronimo does.

It’s interest to contrast with Digby. Seder mentioned that if Digby were a conservative, some foundation would by now have set something up for her to get millions of dollars per year to do what she does. Instead, she is dependent upon reader donations. And here is the other side of that. Matt DiGeronimo is a mushy-headed libertarian who can’t think his way out of a folded paper towel. Yet he is paid to host an hour-long radio show every weekday. It boggles my mind.

Having been a libertarian, I know I can outdo these people. If all I wanted to do was to make money, I’d start a libertarian blog and start arguing everything from that perspective. I even own the URL FlamingRhetoric.com. So it wouldn’t be hard and before long some of the gobs of conservative money would come rolling in. Unfortunately for my bank account, even when I was a libertarian, I thought the system would work better for everyone—I wasn’t an apologist for the rich. So explicitly selling my soul isn’t what I do. But this fool with a radio show doesn’t even understand the basics. Perhaps some day I will set myself a task to write the best libertarian argument for the minimum wage. It isn’t hard. Libertarianism is a ridiculously simple (and simplistic) ideology. Of course, I’d also write the counter argument, because the libertarian argument against the minimum wage is (as always) fine in theory, terrible in practice.

But it really bugs me that the left has all the good ideas, all the best writers, and none of the money. It’s December and every reasonable sized blog has been begging the whole month for donations. You don’t see that on Red State or the other conservative blogs. It’s part of what’s wrong with this nation. Relatively stupid and ignorant conservatives get huge piles of cash to come up with ideas that support the power elite, and another group of relatively stupid and ignorant conservatives gets huge piles of money to market those “ideas.” It isn’t that there aren’t rich liberals, but when it comes to economic ideas, they too are mostly conservative. As for me, I’m happy if a couple of people buy something from Amazon through this site every month.

The world ain’t fair, but at least we liberals know what we believe and why.

I think I have figured out why my father watches Fox News. Now, my father, like all of us, has his racial prejudices and I have seen them evolve over time. He’s certainly a better man than he once was, not that he was ever some racist asshole who thought that blacks (or whatever) were bringing down the society. But there is no doubt that he grew up during a different time when white men were supreme. And he has not read White Like Me and doesn’t fully appreciate just how privileged he is. And so, like a lot of white men, he was skeptical about the civil rights movement when it affected him. Clearly, he believed that people should be allowed to vote and all that. But things like “busing” bothered him and he still has a general attitude that racial inequality has been “fixed.”

It is perhaps important to note that my father is not exactly white. By California standards, sure; he’s been part of the racial ruling class—part of the group that effectively has no race. But when we traveled through the south, it became very clear that my father was not white. And given that my mother was quite white, there were quite a lot of stares at the interracial couple with their mulatto kids. In fact, there was much worse than stares, but it really doesn’t matter here.

I’ve noticed over the past few years that my father has gotten more and more unhappy with Fox News. I take some credit for that. But he’s come to see that they very often don’t tell him the whole story. And very much to his credit, he’s noticed that on their panels of “experts,” very often no one disagrees. That to him seems fishy because if everyone agrees, why are they discussing it. It’s like, “Motherhood: good or bad? We’ll be discussing that tonight on Big Talk.”

On the other side, he seems pretty happy watching MSNBC—surprisingly, especially Al Sharpton. But if the subject of racial matters comes up, he gets very uncomfortable. Talk of blatant acts of racism—voter fraud and things like that—he’s on board. In fact, he’s often more upset than I am. But he does not like to be told that there is still systemic racism in our society. It upsets his whole vision of the nation as being fundamentally okay. And that’s where he’ll change the channel.

Back over on Fox News, he’s pretty much given up on watching the explicit opinion shows like The Factor. But he’s comfortable with Bret Baier and he was upset when Shepard Smith went on to his new floating post. He’s happy watching these shows even though he clearly knows that they are lying to him to at least to a certain extent and that they are deliberately withholding news from him.

I believe the reason he continues to watch Fox News—and by extension the reason a lot of people do—is that it doesn’t upset their world view—ever. Regardless of what rubbish is reported on Fox News, it will never report anything that might say that there is anything wrong with the utopian worldview of those older generations. They might report about welfare fraud, but they would never report about an economic system that keeps people in poverty that might push some of them to commit welfare fraud. They might report on Bernie Madoff, but they will never report on the systemic fraud on Wall Street. They might report on some government waste, but they would never report on how the government’s primary function is to take money away from the poor and give it to the rich. These absolutely true facts about the nation that we live in are upsetting to all of us. But to the old, to even acknowledge them would require a total rethink of the life they’ve lived. That’s hard, hard medicine. And Fox News more than any other news network doesn’t do that.

Even more disturbing, is the overall narrative that Fox News provides. It isn’t explicit, at least most of the time. That narrative says that the problems that plague our country are the result of those people: the young, the minorities, the terrorists, the intellectuals and their sneaky ideas. Fox News never slips up and betrays that “us against them” and “good versus evil” narrative. The viewers are constantly told that in this world, none of the problems out there are their fault. If everyone were like them, everything would be perfect. The nation is going to hell because a surf bum is getting food stamps, not because corporations are getting billions of dollars to make aircraft that don’t work.

Fox News is a pacifier—Barney & Friends for the old.

Afterword

I want to be clear: other than how they vote against their own interests, the average Fox News viewer is not to blame for most of our society’s ills. But the whole point of Fox News is to keep the viewer focused away from where the problems truly lie: the power elite.

One of my most hated memes is “Obama’s Katrina.” Any time anything happens that is bad or at least seems bad for Obama, the Katrina analogies come out. But here’s the thing: I was glued to the radio during Hurricane Katrina. While it’s certainly true that Bush got some bad press, it wasn’t that big a deal. In the pantheon of Bush’s screw up, it hardly makes the top ten. Bush came into office with a relatively low approval rating in the mid-50s. His approval rating only spiked twice, ironically, for two of his biggest blunders: the 9/11 attack and the invasion of Iraq. Otherwise, his administration is the story of a steadily declining popularity, primarily because, you know, he was a terrible president.

But after his re-election, it did look as though Bush would muddle on for the rest of his term in the low 50s and high 40s regarding approval. But then something happened that really turned the people against him. And it was not his response to Hurricane Katrina! The American people where quite used to Bush being at best ineffectual. Anyway, there was lots of blame to go around for Katrina. No, my friends, what turned the nation against him was his push to privatize the most popular government program in American history: Social Security.

Jonathan Chait discusses this briefly in a very good article about a more recent, but no less absurd, Obama meme, Barack Obama Is Not George W Bush. He point out that Bush’s approval rating started going down fast in 2005—before Katrina. I was glued to my radio at that time too, and I remember. It wasn’t just that Bush was trying to cram the Holy Grail of conservatism down the mouths of Americans. It wasn’t even that his PR campaign was so heavy handed and hyper-aggressive. It was that it was so hypocritical.

Bush campaigned primarily on keeping America safe from terrorists. (You know: the ones he hadn’t managed to keep us safe from?) And there was lots of Karl Rove work getting anti-gay-rights issues on the ballots of various states to get the Christians to come out. Bush certainly did not campaign on privatizing Social Security. And regardless, at least half the people who did vote for him did not vote for him thinking he would do so. People felt tricked. And that was especially fatal to Bush who was supposedly authentic. But here was clear proof: he wasn’t an earnest Christian who might thus have some unfortunate opinions; he was just a hack fronting for the rich and powerful.

Remember what conservatives said about Obama in 2012? Sure, he’s reasonable now. But just wait until he’s re-elected and then you’ll see the Kenyan socialist we’ve been telling you about! It’s called projection. Conservatives do it a lot: assuming liberals must be behaving some way because that’s how conservatives behave. And that’s exactly what Bush did. Suddenly “compassionate conservatism” was gone and in was “crony conservatism.” This was really helped by the widespread (and accurate) reporting that privatizing Social Security—while having unknown consequences for retirees—was going to be a huge windfall to Wall Street brokers.

Now, I understand. “Obama’s Social Security Privatization Scheme and Roadshow” doesn’t have the zing of “Obama’s Katrina.” But “Obama’s Iraq” might work. It at least has a little relevance. But I don’t even understand why anyone would seriously compare Obama to Bush. There are presidential comparisons that could be made: FDR, Johnson, Nixon, even Reagan. But Bush? You’ve got to be a very disappointed conservative to be thinking that Obama’s legacy will be anything nearly as bad as Bush’s. As I’ve written before, I don’t think history will be that kind to Obama. They’ll throw him in the middle. But Bush is like Hoover. Even after 5 years out of office, his approval numbers are under water. And this is before the historians really go after him.

The main thing is to stop using Hurricane Katrina as an analogy. It was not a major event[1] in the eight dark years that Bush was president. It is not the primary reason we think so little of the man. And the only way that Obama becomes Bush is if extraterrestrial pods start showing up around the White House. (Actually, even that would be an improvement on Bush.)

[1] Let me be clear: Hurricane Katrina was a major and unnecessary tragedy. But when we are talking about Bush the junior, his administration’s incompetent reaction to it was about par for the course. But killing well over 100,000 people and starting a civil war in Iraq for no real reason is worse. In the case of Katrina, Bush mostly did nothing. Doing nothing was what he excelled at. And we saw the tragic consequences over and over. But when he actually did something was when things went really wrong.

Yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote something that allows me to discuss a long held theory of mine. He was writing about how the United Kingdom’s economy is finally starting to improve, The Three Stooges Do Westminster. This is in reference to a Three Stooges routine where Moe asks Curly why he is banging his head against the wall and Curly replies, “Because it feels so good when I stop!” Krugman’s argument is that the Cameron government for the last two years have imposed harsh austerity and now that they’ve pulled back, the economy is doing better. But rather than think that economies simply mend themselves if allowed, they think like Curly: their modest growth was due to the austerity (head banging).

Then Krugman gets to something that has greatly concerned me for years:

He is no doubt right. But the most important point is that this happens in the United States all the time and it works to the advantage of conservatives.

Here is the mechanism. Conservative economic policies are bad—or at least they have been for the last 30 years. Presidents have their greatest power in the first two years of their administrations. So they get to enact their bad economic policies early on. These are usually squeezing the poor (taking money away from them that they would spend) and gifting the rich (giving them tax cuts that they mostly will not spend). Thus, for the first two years we get Curly banging his head against the wall. But over time, the economy heals. So by the time that the Republican is up for re-election, the economy is finally starting to improve as it adjusts to the new bad conservative economic policies.

It is the opposite for liberals (or moderates as the case has been for the last 30 years). They actually have good economic policy ideas. In general, things get better when they enter office. But by the time they come around to re-election, the economy is stagnant or at least not improving as much as it adjusts to the new good liberal economic policies. Under Obama, it didn’t even take that long. It’s all complicated by other factors, but the overall framework is correct.

So our system benefits presidents who have bad economic policy ideas. Think about that. What can we do about it? Well, for one thing, we could have a better informed public. But it’s hard. I work very hard in my personal relationships to get people to stop fretting over little things (eg welfare fraud) and start focusing on big things (eg corporate fraud). But they don’t want to, because it is easier to despise that stuff they hear about every night on the news than the systemic corruption that the wealthy benefit from every day and that costs all of us poor people far more. Because if corporate fraud (and much else) is with us always, it ain’t news.