Required Reading

I've given him some serious grief on several occasions, but this post by Andrew Sullivan is a home run. Sums up my feelings almost exactly.

The Human Rights Campaign is a Feckless Organization

Leave it to the Human Rights Campaign to focus on what's important. This is what they had to say about Obama's decision to have bigot Rick Warren perform the invocation at Obama's inauguration:

“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans,” the president of Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solomonese, wrote Obama Wednesday. “[W]e feel a deep level of disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination.”

A "genuine blow" you say? What a "deep level of disrespect" indeed. While we're at it, let's make a list of other genuine blows and deep levels of disrespect facing the LGBT community in the United States:

1) Don't ask don't tell.
2) An inability to get married in 48 states.
3) Presence of DOMA.
4) An inability to adopt children in Florida and Arkansas.
5) No employment protection in multiple states.

Rick Warren still seem like a big deal? Maybe the HRC, for decades the biggest and wealthiest LGBT lobbying organization in the US, should get an honest to god policy success under their belt before getting hot under the collar over which pastor reads a biblical verse or two at a ceremonial event. If they want to direct anger at Obama over something consequential, maybe they should hold his feat to the fire over his reported shelving of repealing DADT (a stance he's long advocated and campaigned on...in the primaries of course, not the general).

Note number 1: I think Rick Warren is a terrible pick as well, for all the reasons everyone else has put forward. I simply think the HRC has much bigger fish to fry.

Note number 2: I've given him an extremely rough time of it recently (witness here and here), but Andrew Sullivan has done by far the best job of anyone I've read in trying to hold the HRC accountable for being such an ineffective organization. I really urge anyone interested in LGBT issues to do a search for HRC on his blog for tons of great perspective and analysis on the organization.

Sullivan Descends Into Mindless Drivel

Today Andrew Sullivan posted the 2nd part of his series entitled, “Why Libertarianism Taken to its Logical Extreme is Awful” (see my response to Part One here).

For someone that’s usually so willing to intellectually engage with ideas, his dogmatic adherence to the perfection of market capitalism is almost childlike. In his latest salvo he writes:

The point of capitalism is that actions have consequences. Once that market discipline is removed for a few of the worst, ill-managed, union-crippled companies in America, the stage is set for endless mediocrity, government-run industry (i.e. even more endless mediocrity), and a free-for-all at the government trough. A clear majority of Americans agree, in the new WaPo poll. If this intensifies the recession, so be it. Recessions are sometimes necessary for long-term economic health. And the bigger and sharper it is now the more time Obama has to recover from it. Let them die.

Again, I’ll highlight only the most ridiculous points, as going sentence by sentence would require too large a chunk of my workday. As an aside, if you don’t get a chuckle out of that 2nd sentence then you just don’t have a soul. Limbaugh should sue for copyright infringement.

Let’s start with our “clear majority of Americans” argument. A clear majority of Americans think all kinds of crazy things. I realize they’re picking up the tab, and that is important, but it’s the inconsistency of his argument that feels disingenuous. Neither in his last post on the subject nor this one, has he given any indication whatsoever that he’s inclined to put stock in public opinion. Remember, the public was far more overwhelmingly against a bailout of financial institutions, but Sullivan never mustered anywhere close to this level of opposition.

“If this intensifies the recession, so be it.” Yeah, so be it. Right on. Omelets and eggs, right? The callousness of this statement is really staggering. If you’re not going to attempt to explain why letting the auto industry fail is going to result in a net lowering of economic and personal misery (and again, I think a case could be made), then saying that just makes you sound like an insensitive asshole.

Next comes the whopper, “Recessions are sometimes necessary for long-term economic health”. Why? Because you say so? Are you even going to bother citing anyone? That may well be true, but it sure sounds counterintuitive (replace the word recessions with 'influenza' and eliminate the word 'economic'…still make sense?).

Now we get to: “And the bigger and sharper it is now the more time Obama has to recover from it.” Huh? I have no idea what this even means. Anybody want to hazard a guess? Is he saying that if it’s a really deep recession than it will take longer to recover from it? Well, right…but…

Then, finally, it’s “let them die”. Classy. Does he have some pent up anger against the auto-industry? It’s hard for me not to go back to the Chuck Todd corollary here. I won’t throw out the insinuation without asking the question: Andrew: Do you personally know a single blue-collar worker whose job would be threatened by the failure of the Big Three? Any families? Correspondingly, how many people do you know that work for financial institutions?

I wouldn’t have asked if he’d been 1/10th this hard on the rescuing of financial institutions, at the cost of 40X as much money, but the zeal with which he’s making this argument makes me wonder.

Update: One of you pointed out that after saying I wasn't going to analyze Sullivan's post sentence by sentence, I proceeded to do just that. They have a point. I guess I couldn't help myself.

The Dumbest Post I've Ever Read from Andrew Sullivan

I've read him for years. I don't agree with him on much, but he's intermittently interesting, and it's good to get a variety of ideological perspectives.

But then I come across this post today. He writes:

Every time the government protects someone or some company from the consequences of their own economic profligacy, the chances of future profligacy increase. It's vital that the government let the Big Three automakers go down, and vital that only minimal help be given for those so greedy or so stupid that they took on loans they had no way to pay off.

We're in the middle of the greatest economic downturn in 75 years and Sullivan's version of keeping his eye on the ball is to point out a moral hazard? This is dogmatic allegiance to principle at its most reckless and stupid. It's hard to even know where to start.

The first sentence is nonsense. You could use this rationale to attack the merits of TANF funds, unemployment, or bankruptcy for that matter. Why not bring back debtors prison? That'll teach those damned bankrupt individuals and companies "the consequences of their own economic profligacy".

Secondly, it's "vital" that we let the Big Three fail? Why? Presumably (and we must presume because Sullivan provides zero rationale or analysis) so that we can teach companies what happens when they're run poorly. A fine lesson in the abstract to be sure. But this is no abstract situation. There are millions of jobs at stake. Millions of families and foreclosed homes.

His argument boils down to this: We need to increase unemployment and foreclosure rates by 50%, further depress housing prices, and drastically decrease domestic spending (we'll ignore the increased crime and host of other peripheral externalities) so that future companies and individuals can learn from all this misery and be less inclined to do it in the future. What noble adherence to principle.

Every time new medical advances are made to treat STI's (such as anti-retrovirals or HPV vaccine) I hear religious fundamentalists make a similar argument. If we treat the consequences of risky sex, oh how shall I put it....the chances of future profligacy increase. High risk sex is something to be discouraged right (just like risky borrowing)? So, if no effective treatments for HIV exist then people will be less likely to engage in behavior that makes contracting it possible. So, why doesn't Sullivan's argument hold here? Cause it's all about principle, right?.

Well, no actually. That would be silly, shortsighted, and cruel. If Sullivan wants to object to the auto-bailout, by all means make a case. Hell, I'm not totally sure I'm sold on the idea. But don't offer up some bullshit quote from an Economics 101 textbook and make it a substitute for an educated opinion, particularly when it concerns a complex issue that viscerally effects tens of millions of people.

Sullivan Links to a Stupid Equivalency

Sullivan, via someones book review, includes the following excerpt:

If you're like me, you grew up worrying about people starving in other countries. Your mom would tell you things like, "Eat your food. There are kids going hungry tonight." But hunger, as a global threat, is now dwarfed by overweight. According to Popkin, the population of obese and overweight people worldwide—1.6 billion—is now twice as large as the population of malnourished people.

Well that might be true in a literal sense, but it's ridiculous in a practical one. Comparing obese populations to malnourished ones overlooks the fact that malnourishment is comparatively much more problematic and detrimental. I'm not a nutritionist, but I'd wager that indicators such as life expectancy would be much shorter in malnourished verses obese populations. Not to mention that obesity often (though I realize not exclusively) stems from lifestyle choices. I don't think malnourished folks in rural Appalachia or Sub-Sahara Africa are sitting around, watching TV, deciding to forgo sustenance.

Fighting One

When I started reading Andrew Sullivan years ago, I never thought we'd eventually find ourselves on the same page.

Sullivan's New Contest

Andrew Sullivan has an interesting proposal over on his blog. He’s creating a contest to see who can make the most cynical, manipulative, distorting ad they can post to YouTube. The idea is to make sure that political hatchetmen like Karl Rove and Steve Schmidt don’t have any material left to work with – this way, they’ll have to deal with substantive issues, as all the nastiness is already out in the open.

I can see a couple of problems with this idea. The first is that this kind of contest implies that there is a kind of parity in the types of campaigns that Obama and McCain are running. From what I’ve seen, this simply isn’t true. Obama, in the primary and now in the general, has gone out of his way to be as evenhanded as possible, to try to not attack, and when he does, attack on issues and not on character. Part of this, of course, is the fact that he has to campaign this way. The media would never let him get away with attacks the likes of which McCain has been running.

In fact, part of what’s so appealing (as Sullivan has extensively noted) is that Obama is above (or at least too smart to engage in, not quite the same thing) the kind of campaigning that McCain has been reduced to: comparisons to disgraced pop singers, stunts with tire pressure gauges, flat out lying about Obama’s relations to the troops. This is precisely why so many committed Democrats wanted to see Clinton running against McCain – because she could get down in the mud with him and duke it out.

But despite that, Obama won the primary. He’s run a campaign that has largely avoided the pitfalls that McCain’s hacks are waiting with salivating jaws to spring. The recent gas ad that the Obama campaign ran was an order of magnitude classier than the stuff the McCain camp has run.

The second problem I have with the idea is the implication that when presented with the facts, the American public will make a reasoned, rational decision based on facts and a clearheaded reasoning. I don’t want to be cynical about it, but I don’t think this accurately reflects the way people make these decisions. I think that there’s no way to know what this kind of experiment would do to the campaign, but I’m pretty sure that “improving the tone” is not a likely outcome.