Tantrums And The SuperNanny

by digby

David Sirota has written an interesting column today about America's addiction to fake outrage, citing the Michael Phelps case. I think he's right, but I would add that this phenomenon is also what defines the right wing hissy fit and keeps their Overton Window wide open. It shuts down any kind of sane response to problems by forcing everyone to constantly tip toe on eggshells worrying whether whether the hysterical Republicans will stage one of their tantrums.( And then they blame the victim, saying they shouldn't have provoked them doing whatever it was that caused them to hold their breath until they turned blue.)

As Sirota points out our drug policy is completely absurd. It's driven almost entirely by the fake outrage police into counterproductive policies that actually do more harm than good. Take this, for example:

Two days after President Obama's inauguration, the DEA raided a medical marijuana dispensary in South Lake Tahoe, California. Yesterday, on the same day Eric Holder took office as Obama's attorney general, the DEA raided two Los Angeles dispensaries. Obama deserves a certain amount of transitional slack in delivering on his promise to respect state laws regarding the medical use of marijuana, but with drug warriors operating on auto pilot in this area he needs to step in soon and let them know the federal policy has changed. Stephen Gutwillig, California director of the Drug Policy Alliance, worries that Obama might pull a Bush:

When President Bush was on the campaign trail in 2000 he promised not to interfere in state medical marijuana laws, but that turned out to be a lie as the DEA proceeded to terrorize medical marijuana patients and providers by raiding dozens of dispensaries across California. President Obama said on the campaign trail that these raids would end under his administration, and millions believed him. We hope these recent raids don't represent official Administration policy and that Obama will order federal agencies in no uncertain terms to stop harassing medical marijuana patients and providers in California.



I don't doubt that the reason the DEA did this was to provoke fake controversy and try to force Obama to back off his promise. (The Phelps matter probably helped them do that.) They know that the last thing Obama wants is a confrontation with the rightwing freak show over pot so they forced his hand. This stuff happens all the time.

We saw it with the ridiculous General Betrayus meltdown which caused the Democrats to pretty much give up Iraq as a political issue. From Whitewater to Monica Madness to Sore Lieberman to drone planes to Schiavo to amnesty and on and on. This is the most powerful weapon in their arsenal. They tie the Democrats up in knots, making them cautious and frightened, just like the exhausted mothers you see on the TV show "The Supernanny" who are completely at the mercy of the miscreant children who have total control over the household by threatening tantrums if they don't get their way.

We just saw it with the shrieking case of the vapors over the stimulus bill, which I suspect is coming down exactly as the Republicans wanted it to come down --- watered down by their hissy fit, passing with only three Republicans and setting them up with talking points for the next five years. But it passed because they wanted it to pass while inflicting as much damage as possible to the new president. (I have no doubt they could have held back Specter and peeled off a couple of Dems if they'd had the Big Boyz put the screws to them.)After all, if Obama effectively guides the country through the crisis, they are dead anyway. If he doesn't, they can say they had no part of it.

America has always loved witch hunts, which is perhaps the ultimate fake outrage. They like to ritually punish a designated flouter of some moral or ethical value. They particularly like to do it when it is a common, human transgression so that they can hide their own hypocrisy. It's a remnant of our puritan roots (which are also part of our conservative heritage.) But I don't know that anyone has been as successful at marketing and selling this propensity for fake outrage as the modern Republican Party. It's their operational principle.

Indeed, you can see that they are getting ready to roll-out a whole new campaign:

One feature of the GOP resistance to the stimulus bill is a renewed conservative populism—it is anti-big business as well as anti-big government. To some it's an ill fit, but Gingrich welcomes what he sees as a return to Reaganism and small government. Reagan "represented grassroots America reforming Washington; he did not represent the elites telling the American people what to do,” he says. “Over the last eight years the Republican Party became the right wing of the party of big government, and forgot that its grassroots was with the American people. I'm delighted that they're going back. There are simple tests: is it better or worse for small business? Is it better or worse for the self-employed, for entrepreneurial start-ups, for your local synagogue, for your local community? If in fact it's terrific for Citibank and GM, but bad for small business, then it's an elite bill—it's not a populist bill."

[...]

These days, Gingrich is busy pitching policy prescriptions on his AmericanSolutions.com website. He thinks he may have found the basis for a new Contract with America: "12 American Solutions for Jobs and Prosperity." It builds on the framing first laid down in his book Real Change, picking issues which can gain the support of 80-plus percent of the American people, in what he calls a "red, white and blue" coalition.


This will be the usual demagoguery and lies, of course. But it's going to happen on the back of their latest fake outrage against government spending. This is obviously ridiculous, considering their behavior as a majority party, but being ridiculous is part of the reason why this stuff works. They nearly drive the other side mad with their hypocrisy and shamelessness and force them to either continuously relitigate the past or ignore them, neither of which are very effective.

Fake outrage is an American pastime. People love to gossip and they love to judge others for sins they themselves commit. But the Republican Party has been as successful at using that for political purposes as any group in history. It remains to be seen when, if ever, the American people are going to step in like the nanny
and force the Democrats to put these monsters into a time-out chair and leave them there until they stop destroying the country with their tantrums.



*You really should read Newtie's whole interview. He's such an ass. He pretty much says outright that the only bipartisanship possible is for Democrats to pass Republican policies because the majority of Americans are conservatives. At some point, somebody is going to have to challenge that. They know it isn't true, but they are very successful at manipulating people into believing it's true --- and the Democrats very often help them by using their propaganda and voting with them..

One of the things that Obama's failed bipartisan outreach has obscured is that some progress actually was made. Only 7 Democrats defected using conservative arguments. I don't know when I've seen that on something this big. Baby steps --- we know the Blue Dogs are pulling hard on their chains and Gawd only knows what Rahm has promised them besides what we've heard.


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