Legal Commentary

Not A Big Deal

By Big Tent Democrat

Matt Yglesias seems to be saying that the significance of the political debate in America is overstated:

What should be avoided is the tendency to dramatically overstate the ideological stakes in our political debates. The choice between Democratic candidates and Republicans ones is important and has important consequences. But in the grand scheme of things, you’re seeing what’s basically a friendly debate between two different varieties of the liberal tradition. I think efforts to elide the difference between the religiously inflected populist nationalism of George W Bush and the religiously inflected populist nationalism of Mullah Omar are really absurd, as are the efforts by Glenn Beck to elide the difference between the progressive income tax and Joseph Stalin.

(Emphasis supplied.) Yglesias is doing two things here. The first is saying that in the "grand scheme of things," there is not much to choose from between Republicans and Democrats. I think that is absurd at this point in time. As regular readers know, I have had a lot to criticize regarding the Obama Administration, but the idea that there are not fundamental differences of governing philosophy with the Bush Administration strikes me as one of the dumber things written in some time. More . . .

Indeed, can you imagine a governing philosophy doing more damage to America than it did during the Bush Administration? Frankly, I can not.

The problem I have with the Obama Administration is its failure to seek a bigger break from the governing philosphy that permeated the Bush Administration -- to not govern in what was traditionally thought of as the Democratic governing philosophy. The fact that late 2008 seemed more like 1932 than any other period we have lived through since FDR reinforced that view for me.

The second thing Yglesias did was take a shot at Markos Moulitsas by comparing him to Glenn Beck. Oh BTW, with some complete horsesh*t. Moulitsas never said Bush was like Mullah Omar - instead he said there are influential elements of the Extreme Right that resemble the Taliban. Something that Yglesias at one point conceded.

I guess the "new civility" requires false comparisons of folks like Markos to Glenn Beck. Maybe that is the new requirement for career advancement in The Beltway Media. Personally, I find the tactic pretty despicable. YMMV.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on January 14, 2011 (boomark / email).