Below The Fold

Jamison Foser does some digging, and finds that not only did the media not think budget reconcilliation was some great evil when Republicans used them to pass Bush’s 2003 tax cuts on a 50-50 vote, they basically didn’t even realize the process existed, even though they’re pretty much obsessed with it now, and largely convinced that if Democrats use it, it will damage the legitimacy of their legislative agenda. Kevin Drum says this is a failing on the part of Democrats:

In fairness, though, part of the problem here is the Democrats didn’t complain about reconciliation back in 2003. There’s no reason for the media to make a fuss if the opposition party hasn’t bothered to bring it up, after all.This doesn’t excuse the fact that they keep getting basic facts wrong this time around, like the fact that Dems aren’t planning to pass the entire healthcare package through reconciliation, only a small package of amendments. And it doesn’t change the fact that the conservative noise machine is way more effective than anything liberals have. Even if congressional Democrats had tried to make an issue out of reconciliation in 2003, they probably wouldn’t have gotten much traction.

Still, you have to try. Republicans figure they can get some attention for this kind of nonsense if they yell loud enough, and they’re right. Democrats don’t even think of it.

I wouldn’t really say I think Kevin is wrong in this analysis, I just think he’s got it backwards. The reconcilliation process is part of the law governing the process of passing budget related legislation in the Congress, and it’s a perfectly legitimate tool for Congressional majorities to use when it’s allowable. There simply wasn’t any reason for Democrats to complain about Republicans using reconcilliation, because there was nothing wrong with that. One thing I think we really have learned beyond any shadow of a doubt from the past two weeks is that, as a whole, the Republican Party really is nothing but a collection of pure hacks at the moment. Republican Senators are well aware of how reconcilliation has been used in the past, what reconcilliation bills they’ve voted for, and that this is a rather mundane procedural move given the landscape. And yet they’re pretty much united in painting the process as controversial and illegitimate. It’s just shameless. Another problem, the one that Foser nails down, is that our elite media institutions and major “journalists” are just completely clueless. Not only do they not have the nerve to resist whatever meme it is the right-wing noise machine is peddling on any given day, they don’t even seem to have the inclination to try to do even a little legwork to learn about Congress, its rules, or even recent legislative history. I haven’t heard any Republicans who are complaining about reconcilliation be asked about the tactics House GOP leaders used to get Medicare Part D passed.

One thing that’s often hard to get across in writing, and even to speaking to people, is just how far out of the mainstream the conservative movement is, even on taxes. After all, no one likes paying taxes, or fees, or fines, to the government, but when you can actually strip away the emotion and the cognitive dissonance a lot of people have about these things, you generally can come away with an understanding that they’re necessary for things people like. No one likes paying the fees to register a motor vehicle, for example, but if you really try, you can get them to acknowledge that maintaining roads costs money, and that that money has to come from somewhere. Ditto for traffic fines; no one likes getting caught or having to pay the fine, but no one wants people driving down highways at 90 MPH or speeding through neighborhoods, so some sort of punishment that actually stings has to be put in place to ensure compliance with the rules (although that’s not counting for people who simply think it’s different when they do it, obviously). Now though, Eric Felten actually makes the case for making dealing with government fees as difficult and inconvenient as possible. He starts out by excoriating red-light cameras, a topic that’s probably best left for another post (for the life of me I can’t understand how the notion that people have a right to go through intersections after the light turns red without getting caught for it became so widespread), but goes on to complain about…parking meters:

Take Montgomery County, Md. Last month it started a new program that lets motorists pay at parking meters with their cellphones. How easy! How convenient! How civilized! No more digging around the ashtray for dimes and quarters. No more pestering passersby to change a dollar. Of course, when you have to scrounge for coins to feed the meter, you’re painfully aware of just how much the parking regime is costing you. Not so with the mobile-phone parking app. According to a demonstration on the Web site of the company powering the service, you just key in how long you’d like to leave your car, and you’re on your way. The pesky question of how much you’ve just paid doesn’t come up.No doubt you can find out later from your online statement, and surely there are some savvy and well-organized folks who do. Yet for most of us the cost fades toward invisibility, and that’s when fees go to town. Policymakers have long understood that the less visible—or “salient,” to use the economist’s term of art—a tax is, the easier it is to raise. Which is why Milton Friedman, looking for ways the federal government could collect more money during World War II, recommended the creation of income tax withholding (an innovation he was not proud of). It’s also why “value-added taxes” act like steroids when it comes to bulking up government.

What I find interesting about this isn’t so much the comical level to which Felton takes his anti-government beliefs (the parking regime? Seriously man?), bu rather, how the examples he cites and the effect thereof mostly take apart his arguments themselves. What Felten has basically discovered is that people don’t so much hate cost as they hate hassle. It’s true that people hate dealing with parking meters, or waiting in line at toll booths, but it’s not so much the cost of a parking space they mind so much as it’s the inconvenience factor. Whether it’s the inconvenience of having to find spare change to pay parking meters or the burden of looking at/paying a bill as a whole, as opposed to splitting it into increments, the basic takeaway is that people are perfectly willing to pay more for parking spaces, or tolls, or whatever, so long as it’s more convenient. Indeed, it’s odd to see someone who I imagine probably fancies himself a free-market champion complaining that people are willing to pay more in exchange for something, in this case, convenience.

What this really is is an example of how exactly conservatives are very much out of the mainstream. Conservatives like Felten hate government, don’t much care for public services, but to the extent they do, really don’t like paying for them. I very much doubt that Felten objects to having public roads, or places to park, for example, he just doesn’t think he should have to pay the cost of providing those roads or parking spaces, or pick up any of the opportunity cost that goes along with him occupying a parking space. To that end, he imagines that a lot of people are like him, but it turns out they’re not. They’re more or less ok with paying for parking spaces, they just don’t like how inconvenient it is to pay a parking meter. Make it more convenient, and they’re perfectly fine with it. So fine, in fact, they’re willing to pay higher fees. And people who can pay a bill in increments find it more manageable than paying in one larger lump sum. But conservatives like Felten hate government, have built an entire political movement around hating government, and think other people should hate government too. But it turns out that most people don’t really hate government, so long as their routine interactions with it are convenient and at least somewhat pleasent. To that end, Felten thinks we ought to deliberately make routine interaction with government as inconvenient as possible, simply so that more people will hate government. It’s like that old joke that Republicans spend their time complaining that government doesn’t work, and when they elected they get straight to proving themselves right. Only this is an actual conservative really writing that government should be deliberately inconvenient so that more people will agree with him.

Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponuru, in a tribute to American exceptionalism/identity, explain how mass transit is evil:

The Left’s search for a foreign template to graft onto America grew more desperate. Why couldn’t we be more like them — like the French, like the Swedes, like the Danes? Like any people with a larger and busier government overawing the private sector and civil society? You can see it in Sicko, wherein Michael Moore extols the British national health-care system, the French way of life, and even the munificence of Cuba; you can hear it in all the admonitions from left-wing commentators that every other advanced society has government child care, or gun control, or mass transit, or whatever socialistic program or other infringement on our liberty we have had the wisdom to reject for decades.

Matthew Schmitz points out that calling mass transit “socialistic” is stupid, given that highways and roads are also provided and maintained through government spending and taxation, but I think Yglesias’s critique of this as simply another instance of conservatives demarcating what does and does not count as “American,” as dismissing anything outside of that narrow conception subversively pro-European, is more accurate.

For my part I’ll just note that this yet again proves that the critiques you hear from conservatives from time to time about how liberals want to use public policy to force changes in peoples’ lifestyle is complete bullshit. It’s not so much that liberals don’t want to do this (basically any change to public policy, or lack of change for that matter, is going to effect lifestyle decisions at the margins), but rather that conservatives want to do this to. Yglesias points out that you never really hear conservatives or libertarians complain about local regulations designed to maintain the low-density, car-centric nature of suburbs. I would add that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movement conservative complain that things like the federal tax preference for homeowners over renters induces people to live in suburban or exurban areas over urban areas, or that the lack of quality mass transit systems in most American cities basically forces the people who live their into car-centric lifestyles, whether they like it or not. Which again, isn’t to say that using public policy to drive lifestyle patterns is bad, per se, it’s just to point out that conservatives who talk about ”small government,” individual choice, etc. are usually full of crap, and that they’re just as comfortable, or even moreso, with using government policy to influence the decisions people make.

Technorati Tags: mass transit, Ramesh Ponurru, Rich Lowry

I haven’t said anything about Steve King’s remarks alluding to some sympathy for the guy who flew an airplane into an IRS office, killing an employee, because I figured that they were disgusting enough that there wasn’t any need for someone with as small a platform as me to weigh in to state the obvious. Someone who doesn’t have a small platform, on the other hand, is The Washington Post, and according to Steve Benen, they haven’t mentioned King’s comments once either. I don’t really pay much attention to the Post’s newspages anymore, and I’d like to pay less attention to the paper as a whole, so I don’t necessarily want to say they absolutely should have run it, but I will say that the lack of a mention highlights a major problem for Democratic politicians and progressive activists; you just can’t get the corporate media to build an accurate narrative about the degree to which actual Republican members of Congress are dangerous, crazy, extremists. King’s comments are downright shocking, and there’s really no way to defend them. Nor are they the first offensively crazy/hateful things King has said. He’s long been a major basher of gays and immigrants in particular. But you’ll never see King referred to regularly as “the Republican Congressman from Iowa who regularly engages in gay bashing and sympathized with the IRS attacker.” And that reluctance to accurately portray the Republican fringe in Congress significantly impacts the public’s understanding of just how out there the GOP is.

Technorati Tags: Steve King, Washington Post

Jonathan Cohn has a fairly lengthy, solid piece taking apart the premise of attacks on “backroom deals” in healthcare reform that you should read in full. For my part, I’ll just add that, once again, what you’re dealing with is a situation where Republican demagougery is furthered by the relative ignorance of the audience for the meme. “Backroom deals” in common American political imagination, most directly refer to the “smoke-filled rooms” in which party bosses used to nominate politics. As American elections moved more towards primary elections with the party rank and file voting for nominees, these were derided, and seared into the public imagination as bad, corrupt, things. In the legislative context, of course, cutting deals in private negotiations are a fundamental aspect of life.Complaining about it is akin to complaining about tacklng in football. But people aren’t really good at making these distinctions in talking points,in part because no one has ever thought to blur the lines before. So when Republicans decide to employ yet anothr misdirection argument, a lot of people wind up looking the wrong way.

by Brien Jackson

I don’t really understand what’s so hard to get about this idea:

President Barack Obama is planning to host a televised meeting with Republican and Democratic congressional leaders on health care reform.

The Feb. 25 meeting is an attempt to reach across the aisle but not a signal that the president plans to start over, as Republicans have demanded, a White House official said.

 “I want to come back [after the Presidents Day congressional recess] and have a large meeting — Republicans and Democrats — to go through, systematically, all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward,” Obama said in an interview with Katie Couric during CBS’s Super Bowl pre-game show Sunday.

The idea strikes me as pretty straight-forward; the White House is hoping to re-create the dynamic from the House GOP retreat. That is, the Republicans will throw out a lot of false, insane, claims, and Obama and healthcare experts will be right there to deftly bat them down. The goal being, to make Obama look good, and House Republicans look ridiculous, just like in Baltimore. And by announcing it so publicly, Obama has put the GOP in a bit of a bind; if they don’t show up, the White House will be further able to paint them as the ‘party of no” and point out that they aren’t offering alternative solutions. Not that any of that matters, of course, at the end of the day, it’s just an attempt to get something on C-Span, and create some political theater that generates some momentum for Democrats on the hill to pass the bill. I really don’t understand why we’re pretending not to get this.

I didn’t have the time to do a full State of the Union reaction post, though I wanted to but suffice it to say, I think it was one of the most effective speeches Obama has ever given. It wasn’t the most inspirational, nor did it have the most soaring rhetoric, but that’s not really what the situation called for. Obama needed to project confidence and strength, both to the nation and to Congress, and I thought he did that very well. The speech ran a bit long and contained the requisite laundry list of proposals, but interspersed within were digs at Republicans, both procedural and substantive. He dinged them on the filibuster and climate change denialism. He laughed, he poked fun, he was light and jovial throughout. And more importantly, you could visibly feel the spirits of Congressional Democrats lifting. By about the mid-point of the speech they were smiling, laughing, tossing amused glances at uncomfortable Republicans. As I saw someone (Chait maybe?) remark, Pelosi and Reid should have gaveled their chambers into session after the speech and passed the entire agenda right then; it certainly looked like they might have had the votes for it.

But that pales in comparison to what Obama did today. Going to House Republicans at their retreat in Baltimore, Obama fielded questions from the most vehement of his opposition, the House Republican caucus, and he ran circles around them. One thing I don’t think conservatives realize is what talk radio has done to their attachment with reality. You can toss something around the echo chamber, unchallenged, and it starts to sound pretty good. When someone a lot smarter than you is handling the nonsense in real time, to your face, well, that makes you look quite a bit dumber (and it doesn’t help that House Republicans are really dumb to begin with). When you couple this with the address Wednesday night, it’s been a very good couple of days for the White House. They’re clearly back on top of the political world, at least for now.

What does it mean on a substantive level? It’s hard to say, but something has clearly had an impact on Congressional Democrats. Nancy Pelosi is absolutely determined to pass healthcare reform, and even Kent Conrad and Ben Nelson are holding out the possibility of going to reconcilliation to pass a bill.  A lot of Democrats clearly understand that they have to do healthcare reform, for political, policy, and moral reasons, and the momentum seems to be back, at least somewhat. Is that because of the White House? Maybe not, but something has lit a fire under very key players in the caucus to make this happen.

There’s hope yet.

Apparently Tom Coburn is so interested in delaying healthcare reform he’s willing to risk the temporary defunding of the Defense Department to do so:

Way back on December 2nd, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) filed a single-payer amendment to the Senate health care bill, which was supposed to come up for a vote this afternoon. But at the last moment, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), at the behest Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), demanded that the entire 700-plus page amendment be read aloud on the floor. That’s happening now.

Under normal circumstances, this would be a 10 or 12 hour dilatory tactic. But not today. Today, Democrats were planning to file for cloture on the Defense Appropriations bill, in order to get it passed by Friday before midnight when department funding runs out. If the entire amendment is read aloud, it’s likely that the Senate won’t be able to pass the defense bill until Saturday at the earliest, and would have to pass a short-term continuing resolution to keep money flowing.

“The only thing that Sen. Coburn’s stunt achieves is to stop us from moving to the DoD appropriations bill that funds our troops – not exactly the kind of Christmas gift that our troops were expecting from Dr. No,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Sigh. On the one hand, it’s easy to read stories like this and perk up. Hypocrites!, you think. If Democrats had done this to stop, say, Social Security privatization the entire Republican Party would have been anywhere they could get their face declaring that Democrats were traitors who didn’t care about the troops! And you’d be right, of course, but then you stop and think and, well, what does that get you?

This is a great example of how Republican mendacity and media stupidity intersect to fundamentally tilt the field against progressives. On the one hand, the opposing party is made up of completely amoral sociopaths who have no problem being brazenly hypocritical or opening lying to advance their goals. Hell, look at all of the talk radio show hosts hawking gold merchant scams. That’s how they treat their own audience! You think they give a damn about telling the truth to anyone else if it costs them a marginal dollar? So what do you do, call them out on it? Well there’s no harm in trying, but it’s just not going to permeate the noise unless it takes hold as part of the larger media narrative, but that’s never going to happen because everyone knows Republicans love the troops and would never ever do something like that right? Or if it does get mentioned, no one would put two and two together and point out that that meme is total bullshit, and that Republicans are shameless opportunists first, last, and always. And no, you can’t return the favor when they’re in the majority, because the media will have a field day with that, because Democrats Hate the Military.

So the next time you’re ready to piss in somebody’s cornflakes because Democrats are bitches, take a second and consider what they’re playing against. After all, the Detroit Lions could hang with the 2007 Patriots if the referees let them get away with pass interference on every play too.

Technorati Tags: Rotted Journalism

by Brien Jackson

I don’t know about you, but I’m still trying to make sense of Sarah Palin’s announcement that she’s resigning the governorship of Alaska barely halfway into her first term. A lot of other people have tried parsing the text of the speech, which I’m not going to do, in part because it was totally incoherent, but also because the reason for the resignation probably won’t be found in the speech. But if you want to, well, I warned you:

Ouch.

Anyway, a couple of points. From a political standpoint, this is pretty much the end of Sarah Palin. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying too hard. Plenty of Governors have declined to run for re-election to seek another office (Charlie Crist is doing it now), but, so far as I know, none of them have actually resigned the office to do so, at least not successfully. Also, if this was the intention of the speech, I imagine Palin would have announced her candidacy. It’s too early for that, of course, but it’s also hard to get credit for something you’re not really doing. Palin’s political advisers might be amateurs, but I don’t think even they could make such a silly mistake.

With that in mind, the other thing I’ll note is that this was obviously not a well thought out, highly planned, decision. The speech was clearly not written by a professional, the delivery was rushed, hectic, and uncertain. If I had to guess, I’d venture that the decision to resign was made no sooner than 36 hours or so before the press conference. This raises the rather tantalizing question as to what exactly is going on, and perhaps we’ll never know that. There’s been speculation that another major scandal may be about to break, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If there’s an ethical, or even legal, problem coming down the pike, resigning the office won’t stop it from breaking, and being out of office puts you in a weaker position, politically, than being in office. Now it’s certainly possible that Palin and her team are just too dumb to realize that, but given that mch of Palin’s political persona revolves around “fighting enemies,” it just seems unlikely that such a potential issue would be met with resignation.

Doing a two dollar examination from afar, with the perspective of an ex-political operative, my best guess is that someone has dug up some embarrassing personal information about Palin and has used it to get her out of the way. What could do that? It’s hard to say. Something that would destroy her credibility with the Republican base would be especially damaging, because not only would it wreck her political ambitions, it would erode her ability to cash in on her political celebrity by depriving her of a fanbase. So that’s what I would bet on.

In any event, somewhere Mitt Romney and Haley Barbour are smiling.

Technorati Tags: Sarah Palin

by Brien Jackson

Apparently the wingnut outrage of the day is Obama “taking over the programming of ABC.” Drudge was all over it, calling it an “ethical firestorm” that ABC was going to broadcast the news from inside the White House, because obviously the secret service will be standing behind the cameras waiting to kill the child of anyone who says something mean about the President from inside the White House. Or something.

Anyway, as I understand it, Diane Sawyer will interview the President for Good Morning America, the evening news will be broadcast from the White House, and then Sawyer and Charlie Gibson will moderate a townhall meeting with the President taking questions from a live audience about healthcare. Which actually seems like selling yourself short from the White House. After all, if he was taking questions from the White House press corps, instead of non-journalisty people, he’d get to be on every network. We could call it something like a “primetime press conference.” It would be awesome! (Ok, I made that part up)

Anyway, the RNC is apparently mad that there won’t be any “opposition.” You know, that damn liberal media and all, giving the President a platform to speak to the people without any Congressional Republicans there to provide a counterpoint. There’s a lot of ways you could slice that up, but the question that immediately comes to mind for me is; when is the President ever directly confronted by the political opposition on television? I’m coming up with campaign debates, and that’s pretty much it. Indeed, senior administration officials are almost always solo when they appear on television. Can anyone point me to a Sunday morning interview with Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, or Powell that weren’t one-on-ones? Anyone remember Bush doing joint press conferences in primetime with Nancy Pelosi? For better or worse, this is just standard protocol for dealing with the executive branch.

I’m old enough to remember when accusations of liberal bias made some superficial sense.

by Brien Jackson

You’ve really got to love that the Roberts-Scalia-Thomas-Alito wing of the Supreme Court is so insulated from any sort of reprisal that they can actually cast a vote declaring, in effect, that buying a vote on a state supreme court to influence a pending case isn’t a problem. At least not if it’s a corporation doing it.

What’s really galling here is how obvious the case is; even if you don’t assume there was anything nefarious going on, that one of the parties in a case gave one of the justices a $3 million contribution is a conflict of interest any way you slice it, and the justice in question should have recused himself. There’s no credible argument against that, and obvisouly, none of the court’s conservatives made any.

by Brien Jackson

This really says it all doesn’t it?

Now obviously I’m not the first person to write about this, so I’m hardly the first to notice that National Review made the odd decision to caricature Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” remark with a caricature of Asian stereotypes, but in a way, I think that’s sort of the least interesting, or telling anyway, aspect of the story so far. Yeah, it’s kind of funny that no one at the editorial meeting apparently knows their stereotypes, but then, this post from Rich Lowry does sort of tell us that they knew what they were doing, so the most obvious conclusion to draw from that is that National Review is simply looking to bait attention from this, and they’re perfectly happy to use racist imagery to do that Hell, it seems that may even be the point. Seeing conservatives toe the racist line isn’t anything new, nor is it new to see them whine about being called on it when they do step over said line, but this is pretty brazen even by those standards. Lowry goes on to call critics “humorless” because, you know, all those liberals just don’t get teh funneh inherent in making fun of racial minorities based on other group stereotypes. They’re worse than feminists and rape jokes! And then along comes Jonah, because there’s never been anyone worse at making connections in human history, to tell us that “real” racially offensive imagery is a black magazine using well known references to selling out people like you to get ahead. I mean, it’s just like how they all walk around calling each other “nigger” but get pissed off when Jonah calls them a nigger. Why won’t they just get with the program of the well known human tradition that if one person can say it to another? What’s that you say? Context? Personal relationships? Shared experiences? What the hell is that?

Ultimately the game here is pretty simple; you do something that you know will get people to call you a racist, because it is racist, and you use that to stoke the resentiment of the aspects of your white-male coalition that haven’t quite come to grips with this racial/gender equality stuff yet, or are convinced that white males are the new oppressed minority, or whatever the hell the talking point is today. You tell them this is proof that white guys can’t even tell a joke anymore (even though this obviously isn’t a joke), that you can’t criticize a minority without being called a racist (even though you’re not being called out for criticism, but for using racial caricatures), and of course the ever present “I know you are but what am I” retorts Jonah traffics in. Because ultimately, the only thing that matters is pissing off liberals. But I don’t think it pisses anyone off anymore, it’s just embarrassing to watch. Like a 6 year old throwing a tantrum in a grocery store; you feel terrible for staring, but damnitt, you just can’t help yourself.

Technorati Tags: National Review, racism

by Brien Jackson

There’s a lot to agree with in this post from Larison, but I want to take issue with this:

As for the other point, it is true that refraining from making baseless charges of racism against Sotomayor will not stop other baseless attacks against conservatives from being made. However, it does seem all but certain that making such baseless charges one of the main lines of attack against Sotomayor will make it far more likely that even those conservative arguments that were once given the benefit of the doubt will be willfully misread in just the same way that critics seem to have been misreading Sotomayor’s statements.

“Willful misreading” is one way to put it, I suppose, but it seems to me that a much more logical way to look at it is that once you develop a track record of playing to racist sentiments or employing racial tropes, you lose the right to be given the benefit of the doubt in the future, because you have a track record. If John Bolton or some other neoconservative hawk writes a column employing hardline rhetoric against, say, North Korea, but without explicitly calling for military action, it’s probably still pretty fair to assume they would be in favor of such a course, because they’ve got a track record of supporting military action against states who take courses they don’t approve of. All of which basically says two things; first, as Yglesias is fond of pointing out, conservatives are much more concerned about accusations of racism than they are with actual instances of racism and, secondly, if you don’t want people to think that you’re a racist, or that you’re comfortable making appeals to racialist sentiment, then maybe you shouldn’t traffic in the sort of rhetoric that calls a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton the recipient of “preferential treatment” based on their race and gender or disparage a Supreme Court nominee with more prior judicial experience than anyone currently sitting on the court an “affirmative action hire.”

Just a suggestion.

Technorati Tags: racism, Sonia Sotomayor

by Brien Jackson

I, and just about everyone else, made note of Mark Krikorian’s racist/stupid argument yesterday that ethnic names should be anglicized in their pronunciation as a rule, regardless of how the individual prefers their name be pronounced. Rather than slink away hoping the incident recedes from memory sometime in the next decade, Krikorian’s back today with more, and he’s joined by Derbyshire. First, Krikorian:

Lots of the responses focused on my various bodily orifices and what should be done with them, but for those actually interested in the point, here’s what I was trying to get across: While in the past there may well have been too much social pressure for what sociologists call Anglo-conformity, now there isn’t enough. I think that’s a concern that most Americans share at some level, which is the root of the angst over excessive immigration, bilingual education, official English, etc.

Well, no. Stephen “Cole-Bear” seems like a pretty popular television show host to me, and I don’t see any outraged revolt over his refusal to call himself Stephen Cole-Bert. Similarly, the fucking President of the United States pronounces his name Ba-Rock O-Bah-Mah, as opposed to Bare-rack O-bama (as in Alabama). So this outrage is apparently limited to Krikorian’s imagination, or people who are as hyper ethnocentric as he is. What’s particularly odd though, is one of the examples Krikorian uses to back up his argument:

Some years ago when, rather late in his career, the baseball player Jorge Orta became an American citizen, he made a point of asking announcers, reporters and fans to change the pronunciation of his first name from “Hor-Hay” to “George”, as in Washington.  He said something to the effect of, I’m an American now, I should have an American name.  While I thought it a bit of overkill, I also found it very moving.

But what, exactly, does this prove. If Orta chose to start pronouncing the name in an Anglicized way, then where, exactly, is the point of this? To the extent that the main criticism of Krikorian’s point, from an etiquette standpoint, is that you should pronounce a person’s name however they prefer, there isn’t anything to disagree with here. It’s also has nothing to do with Krikorian’s original argument, which was, essentially, that sportscasters should have been calling him “George” even if he preferred “Hor-Hay.” Which, I suppose, is an indication that Krikorian realizes, on some level, what an idiot he sounds like, and is trying to walk this back. Which brings me to Derbyshire who, in trying to defend Krikorian, winds up proving far too much:

Each language has its own repertoire of sounds, that cannot be matched up exactly with those of any other language. The human vocal tract — throat, nose, tongue, teeth, lips, cheeks — can make sounds in an infinity of ways; or if not an infinity, certainly a much larger number than any one language needs. Each language picks a selection from all possible sounds, and builds its spoken words around that selection. No two languages use the same selection. A French “t” is by no means the same as an English “t.”

But, of course, what goes unsaid here is that, with regards to proper names, Americans use the French pronunciation all the time. I very much doubt that Derbyshire has ever discussed the French impressionist Mon-net with anyone, or that he makes an exaggerated effort to pronounce the Cole-burt Report. It’s true, of course, that most people wouldn’t affect a French accent for these sounds, and it’s also true that East Asian sounds are extremely difficult for Anglicans to pronounce but, again, this proves too much. The reason it’s hard to pronounce Asian names is because the alphabets are different, and in many cases there simply are no phonetic equivalents in the basics of the language. But the various Western languages don’t really have problem. All of the phonetics involved in the pronunciation of Mo-Nay or So-To-My-Or exist within te English language. It’s not hard to pronounce at all. Which means thi is just more ethnocentric hackery, arguably even worse than Krikorian’s.

On a more general note, is this really what the supposed flagship of conservative intellectualism has come to?

by Brien Jackson

One great thing about the nomination of a Hispanic to the Supreme Court is that Mark Krikorian’s head was more or less guaranteed to explode, and that’s exactly what happened. He started by wondering how we should pronounce her name, and then doubled down on that today with a full throated defense of unilateral Anglinizing of the pronunciation of names, whether or not the individual likes it:

Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English (which is why the president stopped doing it after the first time at his press conference), unlike my correspondent’s simple preference for a monophthong over a diphthong, and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.

For instance, in Armenian, the emphasis is on the second syllable in my surname, just as in English, but it has three syllables, not four (the “ian” is one syllable) — but that’s not how you’d say it in English (the “ian” means the same thing as in English — think Washingtonian or Jeffersonian). Likewise in Russian, you put the emphasis in my name on the final syllable and turn the “o” into a schwa, and they’re free to do so because that’s the way it works in their language. And should we put Asian surnames first in English just because that’s the way they do it in Asia? When speaking of people in Asia, okay, but not people of Asian origin here, where Mao Tse-tung would properly have been changed to Tse-tung Mao. Likewise with the Mexican practice of including your mother’s maiden name as your last name, after your father’s surname.

This may seem like carping, but it’s not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that’s not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there’s a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.

This is, of course, completely fucking ridiculous. For one thing, Sonia Sotomayor is not a “newcomer,” she was born and raised in The Bronx, which is in New York City, which is in the United States of America. But she has an ethnic name, and she, and her family, prefers to pronounce it based on the rules of its original language. Any decent person ought to respect that, but Krikorian is obviously not a decent person. He’s a shameless hack who heads an anti-immigration special interest group, and opposes all forms of immigration, including legal immigration, and has a particular problem with Hispanics. He is, in other words, a pretty blatant racist (or at the least, an extreme ethnocentrist), who is extremely bothered by the correct pronunciation of ethnic words, like Senator Geary, insisting on calling the Corleone family the “Cor-lee-ons.” 

Because obviously that is the most important issue facing America today.

Technorati Tags: Mark Krikorian, Racist Wankers, Sonia Sotomayor