Tuesday Politics Minute

* GOP governors bailing on the war on unions. With good reason. Related: GOP Governors Shift Burden To Poor, Middle Class To Pay For Tax Breaks For Rich, Corporations.

* Digby vs. Jon Stewart. It’s no contest.

Calls for”civility”are usually just a way to shut people up and sadly, I’m fairly sure that the only people who listen to Stewart are liberals who are getting the idea that it’s wrong to get in the streets or call out the other side in rough language. Conservatives just think he’s a useful idiot. I find this attitude very perplexing coming from a comedian, especially one who commonly does things which could be perceived as unfair, silly and undignified. 

This is why Colbert’s satire is so much more effective and, frankly, much braver. His satire is firmly aimed at the right, so he cannot take both sides. That’s why it works — it takes a position. By contrast, I’m increasingly not finding Jon’s church-lady finger wagging all that funny, much less cool, and I fast forward though his opening segments more often than not. If I wanted a nightly lecture on proper behavior I’d consult Miss Manners or go to church.

* And we warned you: here comes the shutdown.

Maddow v. Stewart

Jon Stewart explains to Rachel Maddow that he did the Rally to discredit himself. At least I think that’s what he was trying to say.

Big Monday Links

* Lost Back to the Future audition tapes. You win this round, SNL.

* Then and Now with Goofus and Gallant.

* zunguzungu has some final thoughts on the Rally to Restore Sanity taking Andrew Sullivan’s glowing endorsement as his departure point.

Americans who want to emphasize that “politics isn’t all there is to life” are people who don’t feel very keenly the sting of injustice or the anxiety of uncertainty or the horror of what this country does in our name. When you lose your job because of politics, or can’t afford to go to school because of politics, or are denied full citizenship because of politics, or die because of politics, the idea that “politics isn’t all there is to life” will be cold comfort to you.

…

But what if, for example, you look out into the world and see not a basic normality of everyday justice and brotherhood and comity and happy cookies but, rather, a massively inequitable system getting both steadily worse and more deeply enmeshed into our everyday reality? An America which has, for example, rendered it normal to be conducting military operations in multiple theatres for no publicly acknowledged or agreed upon purpose? Where 10% unemployment is normal? Where immigrants are presumed guilty until documented innocent? What if you think things actually are completely fucked up?

* On not being obliged to vote Democrat. We voted last Thursday, straight ticket as always, but I confess I didn’t take much pleasure in it.

* What happens after Republicans win tomorrow? For one thing, Virginia’s climate witch-hunts will go national. Via Boing Boing.

* What happens after Republicans win tomorrow, Nevada edition: Angle victory means return of Yucca nuclear waste dump.

* Should the left try to use our democracy’s systemic biases towards military spending to drive a progressive spending agenda? Ezra and Matt take aff and neg. I give the decision to Ezra—let’s take our victories where we can get them.

* Corporate synergy, the Fox News way.

* UN Convention on Biodiversity: Climate-related geo-engineering activities [should not] take place until there is an adequate scientific basis on which to justify such activities and appropriate consideration of the associated risks for the environment and biodiversity and associated social, economic and cultural impacts.

* Cornell President David Skorton wants to save the humanities.

* How can this many colleges charge over $50,000 a year for tuition? That’s completely insane.

* From the campus newspaper: What’s Duke’s policy towards undocumented immigrants?

* Another great Strange Map: an alternate New York City with a filled-in East River where Manhattan and Brooklyn merge. Via Kottke.

* And rest in peace, Ginny Sack.

Rally to Restore Rally to Restore Sanity Sanity

…it’s self-defeating and even delusional to think progressive policies are going to be achieved just by agitating nobly for a more positive style in politics. It isn’t enough to have a few laughs or wring your hands over the fact that those mean people in the tea party and at Fox News get too angry and yell too much.

You Lose, You Lose, You Lose, You Lose, They Give Up

Naked Capitalism remembers when protest wasn’t a joke. Via Vu.

Sir, You Have Fooled Me Twice – 2

But Jon Stewart is a media story unto himself, the anti-pundit turned unnecessary pugilist. And it’s gotten to the point where he has blurred the line to the point of failure — where pundits are somehow, at least in election season, more rewarding, if more annoying. For someone interested in going beyond the fray, Stewart hasn’t done much to seize his two million viewers a night for much more than bombast and boring. Where there could be lengthy explanations of health-care policy, there is a bizarre Glenn Beck impersonation; where there could be a real usurping of the television media, there is a dick-measuring match with Rick Sanchez. And this matters: Stewart’s disdain for pundits who abuse the responsibility vested in them as a veritable fourth branch now apply as much to Bill O’Reilly as they do to Stewart. If all he’s going to do when face-to-face with the president of the United States is ask the same old questions, I’m not sure why anyone sees Jon Stewart as a success while everyone follows him down the rabbit hole in casting the rest of the bloviators as a undeniable failure.

Which is why, maybe, he’s doing the whole rally thing. Not that anyone knows what’s going down on Saturday, exactly. Is it just some elaborate parody of Glenn Beck’s sermon on the mount? A fanboy convention? An actual political event? And then there’s the lefty from PETA and the Huffington Post, while even some campaign volunteers seem to be attending the rally as a semi-official event. Stewart himself seems unclear on exactly what’s going on. All we know right now is that it exists, and not to bring coolers. The contention by David Brooks that this could be “a ‘jump-the-shark’ moment” for the show may be a bit overblown, but if health care was almost Obama’s Waterloo, this could at least be Stewart’s Stonehenge. Maybe.

Michael Barthel on Jon Stewart. Via zunguzungu’s Rally to Restore Sanity roundup.

Sir, You Have Fooled Me Twice

People following me on Twitter and Flickr could undoubtedly tell that cell phone networks were not working very well at the Mall yesterday—my group was unable to make calls or use the Web at all, with only very spotty text service. Making matters worse, my phone, trooper that it is, kept trying to upload a handful photos to Flickr through its nonexistent data connection until the battery was completely run-down about halfway through the afternoon. So my plan to document what was happening was completely hamstrung by technology, for which I apologize. The Huffington Post has photos you’ve probably already seen.

My group managed to make it about five blocks into the throng from the Smithsonian to 7th Street before we realized that (1) we still couldn’t hear or see anything (2) we were never getting any closer than this. So we peeled off into the side streets, wandered through the bizarre but sort of wonderful street festival happening adjacent to the Mall, and finally went to go get lunch.

When we got back to Shankar’s apartment that night we watched vide of the rally on C-SPAN.org, prompting the tweet you may have seen last night: “Having watched the rally I nearly attended on C-SPAN, I can confirm it was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. What was that supposed to be?” I stand by this assessment, which has gone woefully underremarked in commentary on the event: aggressively and at times painfully unfunny, Jon Stewart convinced a quarter of a million people to come to Washington for the single worst live comedy performance I’ve ever seen. Colbert managed to get in a few laughs here and there, but this was bad, and even the performers seemed to know it.

That essentially no one on the Internet was talking about the rally even a few hours after it happened demonstrates how badly this all went off, though Stewart tries to put on a good face:

“We’re proud of ourselves. We’re proud of the show we did,” Stewart told reporters at a press conference after the rally. “For us, the success of it was the execution of the idea and the intention.”

Okay then.

Putting the entertainment angle aside, the end of a rally was, as you know if you’ve seen it, a too-long if fairly heartfelt plea for civility and compromise in the public sphere, smartly targeted at the recipients of that incivility rather than its perpetrators and fetishizing form over content, as Pharyngula writes:

So I’m at a loss about what we’re supposed to do in the world according to Jon Stewart. Hey, all you people working for gay and lesbian equality, all you women asking for equal pay, all you workers trying to unionize, all you peaceniks trying to end the war in Afghanistan, all you nurses and doctors and clinic workers trying to maintain reproductive freedom and keep women alive, all you teachers trying to teach science and history without censorship, all you citizens trying to build a rational health care policy, all you scientists and doctors who want our country to progress in medical research, all you damned secularists who want to keep religion out of our schools and government, hey, hey, HEY, you! Tone it down. Quit making such a fuss. You’re too loud. Shush. You’re as crazy as the teabaggers if you think your principles are worth fighting for.

Civility in our day-to-day lives is good, but completely irrelevant to the political sphere where struggle is actually happening; Matt Yglesias of all people debunked Jon Stewart’s thesis weeks in advance when he wrote that the reason legislators can’t “put aside their differences” and “agree to disagree” in the way that spouses, co-workers, and drivers at the Lincoln Tunnel can is because they understand their political disagreements have actual consequences for control of government. A view of politics like the one Stewart espouses reduces politics to a mere question of taste, about as important as Coke vs. Pepsi—a conversation starter, maybe, but certainly nothing worth fighting over.

As with other spectacular failures of this sort—and it was, I think, a pretty spectacular failure, given the use to which the media spotlight and huge numbers of attendees were put—it’s useful to think about what the people who attended this rally were after and what they got.

From my place in the crowd it seemed to me that what many people in the crowd wanted was recognition that they too are a collective, that they too constitute a “movement,” that there are other people in the country who think like they do and want what they want and that all such people might get together and work to make things happen. They’re people who believe alternatives to what exists are possible and necessary, and want someone to show them where to go to start to get it. But Stewart’s supposed call for civility and “reasonableness” is completely orthogonal to that drive, if not actively destructive of it—and the Rally to Restore Sanity a basically pointless, poorly executed exercise in self-promotion that is already completely forgotten.

It’s as if the entire Obama campaign and presidency happened again, only in miniature, in the span of a single afternoon.

These crowds are still waiting for some leaders.

I’m glad I came to DC this weekend because I was able to see friends I haven’t seen in too long (with many others I unfortunately wasn’t able to meet up with this time, sorry guys)—but the Daily Show Rally for Daily Show Ratings was as muddled and empty as I feared it would be. Too bad! Of course I saw it coming—but there’s more pleasure, sometimes, in being wrong.