Brooks exposes “left” supporters of Obama plan

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/brks-s12.shtml

Times columnist David Brooks exposes “left” supporters of Obama health plan
By Joe Kishore
12 September 2009

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, a fairly conscious representative of his class, is among the more perceptive commentators in the bourgeois media. Writing primarily for the benefit of the political and corporate elite, Brooks often attempts to cut through the fog of lies used by politicians to sell their reactionary agendas to the public in order to explain what is really going on to those who need to know.

Brooks’ column on Friday (“The Dime Standard”) is a case in point. It is full of praise for Obama’s health care speech on Wednesday, correctly analyzing its right-wing character. As such, it is a devastating exposure of Obama’s “left” supporters in publications such as the Nation, which are doing their part to sell Obama’s proposals to the American people.

“Obama delivered the finest speech of his presidency,” Brooks begins. “Best of all for those who admire the political craft,” he continues, “was the speech’s seductive nature and careful ambiguity. Obama threw out enough rhetorical chum to keep the liberals happy, yet he subtly staked out ground in the center on nearly every substantive issue in order to win over the moderates needed to get anything passed.”

In other words, Obama’s speech was bookended by lies and phony concern for the uninsured and the elderly, while the substance was thoroughly right-wing.

“First, Obama rested the credibility of his presidency on what you might call the Dime Standard. He was flexible about many things, but not this: ‘I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits—either now or in the future. Period.’”

As Brooks correctly concludes, this means that the more right-wing bill being worked out in the Senate will be the basis of negotiations, since the House bill does not satisfy the criterion of deficit neutrality.

More significantly, Obama’s speech sets in motion a process that will lead to a raft of right-wing amendments and deeper cost-cutting measures. “Since the Congressional Budget Office is the universally accepted arbiter in such matters, the Democrats will have to produce a bill that the CBO says is deficit-neutral, now and forever,” Brooks writes. “That means there will be a seller’s market for any member of Congress, Republican or Democrat, who has a credible amendment to cut costs. It also means the Democrats will have to scale back coverage and subsidy levels to reach the fiscal targets.”

Thus, more people will be left without any form of insurance and those compelled by law to buy insurance from private companies will have to pay more out-of-pocket.

“Second, the president accepted the principle of capping the tax exemption on employer-provided health benefits,” Brooks continues. Here Brooks refers to Obama’s call in his Wednesday speech for an excise tax on higher-cost plans that would be levied on insurers. As everyone involved in drafting the health care overhaul knows, such fees would be passed on to companies, which would, in turn, either force their employees to pay higher premiums or reduce their coverage.

It is, Brooks notes, “a backdoor and indirect version of the cap… Soon moderates and Republicans will produce amendments to impose a cap directly. These amendments will credibly raise revenue and reduce costs. The administration will now have no principled argument against them.”

The column continues: “Third, the president accepted the principle of tort reform to reduce the cost of defensive medicine.” This “reform” has long been a demand of the right wing, aimed at crippling the ability of people to seek compensation for medical mistakes and fraud.

“Fourth, the president introduced the public option to its own exclusive Death Panel… On Wednesday, the president praised it, then effectively buried it. White House officials no longer mask their exasperation with the liberal obsession on this issue.”

While the public option was a toothless measure, intended as a benchmark for substandard care, the insurance companies were opposed to it, effectively sealing its fate.

“Fifth, the president also buried the soak-the-rich approach,” i.e., the idea of raising taxes on the wealthy to help pay for health insurance. Instead, Obama will dramatically slash spending on Medicare and Medicaid.

Brooks has particular praise for this aspect of Obama’s speech. “The president underlined his resolve to cut $500 billion from Medicare and Medicaid. This is a courageous move that moderates appreciate,” he writes.

“Finally,” Brooks concludes, “people in the administration and moderates in Congress would like to beef up ‘game changers.’ These are the wonky but important ideas like bundling hospital payments and increasing price transparency that might lead to a more efficient system down the road.”

These “game changers” are intended to move away from the “fee-for-service” system currently in place, where doctors bill for each service they provide for a patient. Instead, the aim is to pay doctors and hospitals a set fee for a given condition, thereby forcing them to cut back on care.

Here in summary fashion is laid out the right-wing character of the Obama administration’s “reform.” Brooks’ main criticism is that Obama does not go far enough in transforming the health care system. “He has decided to expand the current system, not fix it,” Brooks writes.

In fact, as Brooks’ own column makes clear, Obama’s proposals pave the way for a fundamental attack on health care for the working class, in line with the needs of the financial aristocracy that Obama represents.

Brooks’ column exposes the lies and distortions promoted by the Nation magazine and similar publications, which are working to present Obama’s health care proposals as some sort of progressive social reform.

In a column published the day after Obama’s speech, Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote, under the headline “Obama Shows His Progressive Spine”: “[I]t was when Obama spoke of Senator Kennedy and the larger moral imperative of healthcare reform that this became a great speech. One for the history books, in fact… In many ways, it was Obama’s fullest, most eloquent and formal defense of liberalism and the clearest exposition of his view of government’s role.”

Outfits like the Nation happily swallow what Brooks refers to as Obama’s “chum” (i.e., ground up raw fish used to attract game). Not only do they feed on it; they attempt to repackage it and pass it off to the public as haute cuisine. This is their role, and one they perform quite consciously.

A similar function was performed by the Nation earlier this year when it worked to promote the “Green Revolution” of Mir Hossein Moussavi in Iran. In that case, it was working on behalf of the interests of American imperialism abroad. With the health care debate, it is doing the same thing for the reactionary social agenda of the American ruling class at home.

Jonah Goldberg: Media Putz

http://mediaputz.com/08/03/putz0313.html

Honoring reporters who just can't handle the truth!
March 13, 2008
Jonah Goldberg
For reporting that is an embarrassment to the profession of journalism, and for being beholden to corporate paymasters rather than the citizens of America.

Too bad Lucianne Goldberg reached her zenith of infamy during the Clinton impeachment, because she would make a terrific BuzzFlash Media Putz recipient. But we can rectify that by recognizing the ongoing and significant contributions to the degradation of journalism made by her son, Jonah Goldberg.

His pedigree of Putzdom is unchallengeable. Just consider his recollection of his role in the pass-off of dirty linen from Monica Lewinsky to Linda Tripp to his Mom to Drudge to Ken Starr:

My mother was the one who advised Linda Tripp to record her conversations with Monica Lewinsky and to save the dress. I was privy to some of that stuff, and when the administration set about to destroy Lewinsky, Tripp, and my mom, I defended my mom and by extension Tripp... I have zero desire to have those arguments again. I did my bit in the trenches of Clinton's trousers.

Employed by the National Review Online, Jonah is one of those right-wing media shills who resides somewhere between Ann Coulter and David Brooks. You just don't know which side of him is going to show up at any given time when he regularly appears on the television "news analysis" programs or in his writings.

Take, for instance, his recent book whose title owes much to the Coulter school of sensational language: "Liberal Fascism." Its subtitle is "The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning." There's one of those annoying smiley faces on the bright red front cover, except this one has a Hitler moustache. Okay, was Jonah tripping when he came up with this book, or just drunk?

Because it just doesn't make any sense. I don't think anyone ever heard the words liberal and fascism attached before, let alone Mussolini included in a secret leftist history of America. That must have been some blotter acid Jonah, eh?

As a right-winger, you know that you have a problem on your hand when the "American Conservative" pans your tome: "Liberal Fascism reads less like an extended argument than as a catalogue of conservative intellectual clichés, often irrelevant to the supposed point of the book."

In the American Conservative article from January 28, 2007, the first paragraph gets to the heart of the absurdity of Goldberg's concept of "liberal fascism": "Not without reason was Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism widely expected to be a bad book. As many predicted from the title, Goldberg does not content himself with rebuking those who call anyone who disagrees with them a fascist. Instead, he invents reasons of his own for calling anyone who disagrees with Jonah Goldberg a fascist. Liberal Fascism confirms anew George Orwell's remark -- cited by Goldberg without irony -- that fascism has no meaning today other than 'something not desirable.'"

Robert Morse of Indianapolis, Indiana, nominated Jonah Goldberg as the BuzzFlash Media Putz of the Week for connecting Hitler to liberals. In fact, Goldberg contends Hitler was a liberal.

Next time you see Jonah peddling his "views" on television, remember that he's living proof that the more you don't make sense, the higher your value rises in the right-wing punditsphere. "Right-Wing Fascism" would have made too much sense as a title, but then again Goldberg appears to specialize in fiction.

Buckley, longtime propagandist for US ultra-right

http://wsws.org/articles/2008/mar2008/buck-m05.shtml

William F. Buckley, longtime propagandist for US ultra-right, dies at 82
By Patrick Martin
5 March 2008

The death of William F. Buckley, founder of the National Review magazine and long-time media publicist for the American political right, has prompted an outpouring of tributes and praise in the American press, out of all proportion to the significance and stature of its subject.

The encomiums for Buckley from the likes of William Kristol, David Brooks and George Will are predictable, but they seem unaware that in proclaiming Buckley their political mentor and forerunner, they demonstrate their own intellectual and political poverty.

If one examines Buckley’s biography dispassionately, it is clear that he was a talented promoter of noxious, reactionary and anti-democratic ideas. He took the initiative to refurbish American conservatism in the early 1950s, at a time when the political right had been completely discredited by its ties to Nazism, fascism and the Great Depression.

For some 30 years, from the founding of National Review in 1955 to the rise of right-wing talk radio in the 1980s, Buckley was the most prominent advocate for what would become the dominant position within the American ruling class: opposition to any government effort to alleviate social distress; hostility to popular movements of the oppressed, whether in the United States or internationally; and a repudiation of the compromises made on both these fronts by the New Deal of the 1930s.

Buckley was put in a position to play this role because of his family’s wealth and connections. His father, William F. Buckley, Sr., was a wealthy oilman with holdings in Mexico and Venezuela, who reportedly played a role in financing the Cristero rebellion in Mexico—a right-wing, Catholic Church-inspired revolt in reaction to the Mexican Revolution of 1911-1919.

These two themes—conservative Catholicism and hostility to social revolution—became the axis of Buckley’s political life. After graduation from Yale in 1950, he enlisted in the Central Intelligence Agency, working as an undercover agent in Mexico reporting on left-wing student groups. His supervisor was E. Howard Hunt, then CIA station chief in Mexico City, later one of the organizers of the Watergate burglary that brought down the Nixon administration.

Buckley decided against a CIA career after his first book, God and Man at Yale, a memoir attacking the liberal proclivities of the university faculty, found a wide reception in right-wing circles and became a best-seller. He and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, published a 1954 polemic, McCarthy and His Enemies, which declared, “As long as McCarthyism fixes its goals with its present precision, it is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.”

In 1955, Buckley launched National Review, a magazine bankrolled by his own money and that of other wealthy supporters, and enlisting such figures as the ex-Stalinist Whittaker Chambers and the ex-Trotskyist Professor James Burnham.

The standpoint adopted by the magazine, as the founder declared it, was “to stand athwart history, yelling, ‘Stop!’” By this he meant not only opposition to then-dominant American liberalism, and to the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, but hostility to the growth of progressive and revolutionary movements throughout the world.

Buckley packaged his ferocious anti-communism as the defense of the “free world” against totalitarian rule in Russia and China, making full use of the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy to discredit socialism. But his outlook was rooted in a class opposition to all genuine struggles for freedom and democratic rights on the part of the oppressed workers and peasants in the capitalist countries.

Thus, Buckley was an adamant opponent of the civil rights struggles in the American South, declaring, in a National Review editorial in 1957:

“The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”

Answering the charge that the Southern segregationists were defying the will of the majority of the American people, expressed in civil rights laws, executive orders by elected presidents, and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Buckley argued in favor of resistance:

“National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way; and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence” (This whole passage was cited by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in his recent book, The Conscience of a Liberal).

This apologia for violence against demands for the abolition of Jim Crow came at the opening of an increasingly bloody decade that included the beating of Freedom Riders, the murders of Medgar Evers, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, Viola Liuzzo, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and dozens of others. Buckley’s only concession to criticism of this defense of racial oppression was to suggest that uneducated whites as well as blacks could be denied the vote.

Despite—or perhaps because of—this identification with the last-ditch defenders of Southern segregation, Buckley enjoyed increasing prominence as the media spokesman for the American right, beginning a syndicated newspaper column, “On the Right,” in 1962, and a weekly television interview program, “Firing Line,” in 1966, which ran for 33 years. He enthusiastically backed the campaign of Senator Barry Goldwater, who won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 only to lose in a landslide to Democrat Lyndon Johnson.

To preserve his role as the “respectable” right-wing alternative in official political circles, Buckley was careful to distance himself from the more deranged segments of the ultra-right. National Review conducted a public campaign against the John Birch Society, whose founder accused President Eisenhower, General George Marshall, and other pillars of the US political establishment of being conscious agents of a world communist conspiracy.

Buckley also insisted, at least in public, on a break with anti-Semitism, which discredited the ultra-right in the wake of the Holocaust. He was not so careful about fascism, at least in its less populist form as espoused in Spain by Generalissimo Francisco Franco, whom Buckley repeatedly championed.

“General Franco is an authentic national hero,” he wrote in a “Letter from Spain,” published in his magazine, and widely quoted in press obituaries last week. “It is generally conceded that he above others had the combination of talents, the perseverance, and the sense of righteousness of his cause, that were required to wrest Spain from the hands of the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists that were imposing on her, in the thirties, a regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul, to deny, even Spain’s historical identity.”

Buckley defended other right-wing dictators whose regimes were aligned with US foreign policy, including Augusto Pinochet of Chile. He criticized the 1998 effort to bring criminal charges against Pinochet in Spain as “an act of ideological malice” and praised the military dictator for ousting Salvador Allende, “a president who was defiling the Chilean constitution and waving proudly the banner of his friend and idol, Fidel Castro.”

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Buckley served more as a right-wing gadfly than an actual influencer of policy. He ran for mayor of New York City in 1965, winning 13 percent of the vote as the Conservative Party candidate. He participated in frequent debates with liberals on college campuses and was a diehard defender of the Vietnam War. In one notorious live appearance on ABC television during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he was paired with liberal author Gore Vidal, whose verbal sallies so infuriated Buckley that he threatened violence, shouting, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face.”

Only the swing to the right in the American ruling elite, from the mid-1970s on, brought Buckley from the fringes of official politics into its center. Ronald Reagan was an admirer of Buckley and longtime reader of National Review, and with the Reagan administration, a whole layer of right-wing advocates trained in the Buckley school entered political office and rose to top positions in the media as well.

Buckley was not, however, entirely in step with some elements of the “Reagan coalition,” including the Christian fundamentalists who were, in many cases, virulently anti-Catholic, and the neo-conservatives, many of them Jews and former liberals who had supported the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

His orientation was always towards the worldwide struggle against social revolution, which he identified with the Soviet Union, and after the collapse of the USSR he evinced less interest in a militaristic foreign policy and more sympathy for the isolationism once traditional in the American right. He expressed regret that the conservative coalition was no longer held together by “the galvanizing thread that the Soviet Union provided. And for that reason I think conservatism has become a little bit slothful. It could be very decisive when the alternative was the apocalyptic reordering presented by the Soviet Union.”

Buckley eventually disavowed the longstanding blockade of Cuba after the collapse of Castro’s Soviet sponsor, on the grounds that the island nation no longer represented a security threat to the United States. He showed little enthusiasm for the Bush administration’s invasion and conquest of Iraq, observing that the “insurrectionists in Iraq can’t be defeated by any means that we would consent to use.”

The tributes from the right-wing pundits give a glimpse of the social milieu which produced Buckley and which remained a powerful source of attraction for corrupt elements of the aspiring middle class. David Brooks, now a New York Times columnist, gushes: “To enter Buckley’s world was to enter the world of yachts, limousines, finger bowls at dinner, celebrities like David Niven and tales of skiing at Gstaad ... He showered affection on his friends, and he had an endless stream of them, old and young. He took me sailing, invited me to concerts and included me at dinners with the great and the good.”

Apparently there were limits to this affection, however. According to Timothy Noah, columnist for the online magazine Slate, “Christian piety and anti-communism were Buckley’s twin pillars, the former to such an extent that Buckley ruled out David Brooks, his onetime protégé, as a possible editor of National Review on the grounds that Brooks was Jewish. Buckley wasn’t willing to sacrifice National Review's identity as a publication whose mission was at least partly theological.”

The depth of Buckley’s embrace of reaction is summed up in another widely quoted remark in which he defined his conservative political philosophy as “tacit acknowledgment that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us.” It would be difficult to find a pithier summation of the obscurantism and hostility to the development of science, technology and human culture which characterize the right-wing world view.