Election Sanity: A Proposal for Reform
October 26, 2010
Our legislators have become so focused on holding office after they are elected that legislation has become a series of campaign-oriented posturings rather than free exercises of rationally conscience-driven policy initiatives. This is a societal blight that has been created by an unintended collusion of the political parties, the media, and the electorate. Only a radical restructuring of our electoral process can bring sanity and responsibility into campaigning for office and office-holding.
Such a restructuring should involve a sweeping simplification of the electoral process, according to the following outline:
(1) Define the campaign season narrowly and strictly as the time period between Labor Day and the Saturday preceding Election Day.
(2) Designate the calendar week preceding Labor Day as Candidacy Declaration Week. Prohibit any declaration of candidacy before that time period, and make any announcement of candidacy outside that time period a disqualification for candidacy.
(3) Designate the calendar week preceding Election Day as Debate Week. Require that all debates between candidates be inclusive of all candidates and freely open to the public.
(4) Prohibit all political advertising, either by candidates or their surrogates, during Debate Week.
(5) Prohibit all media subject to federal regulation from projecting winners on Election Night until the last polling place in the last state is closed.
This restructuring would drastically reduce the funds that a person would need to run for office, thereby opening the electoral field to less affluent qualified candidates. That would produce a desirable democratization of the electoral field.
Finally, we should impose term limits on congressional service, say, five terms for representatives and two terms for senators. No office outside the Supreme Court should be susceptible of being a lifetime sinecure.
The restructuring suggested above would effect an electoral process that is more egalitarian and a legislature that is—of necessity—more responsive and efficient.
Stop the Texification of Our Texts!
March 11, 2010
Texas may not be seceding from the union politically, but it is doing everything that it can to do so educationally. As the New York Times’s James McKinley reported (www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/us/politics/11texas.html?ref=education), just as the nation is at last on the cusp of crafting something like uniform national curriculum standards, the Texas State Board of Education is revising its social studies curriculum to tilt it in an extremist right wing direction, elevating Jefferson Davis to a stature equal to Abraham Lincoln, watering down the New Deal and the Great society and civil rights history, elevating the groundless claim of the centrality of Christianity in the founding of the republic, even mentioning the Tea Party movement as legitimate, to name just a few.
Why is this important? It is important because the sheer size of Texas makes it one of the prime purchasers of textbooks in the nation. Consequently, when Texas speaks, textbook publishers listen. This could lead to a decade of textbooks skewed to a malformed rightist view of our civil life and history.
It is time for publishers to stand firm and to act in a principled way to resist the textbook bullying of Texas.
The national standards being formulated may not be all that some of us would wish in the way of rigor and comprehensiveness and coherence, but they will be preferable to anything that the Texan right wingers can cook up.
Stop the Texification of our texts!
Our Latinate Political Scene (A Political Vocabulary Exercise)
March 8, 2010
Students of politics should refresh the Latin that they learned in high school, because it would provide them with some insight into our current universe of political discourse and action.
The Republic Party is the “ob” party, the party of the Latin preposition “ob,” which means “against/regarding.” This preposition conveys a sense of in-your-face againstness. Two English nouns that have this as a root are: obstacle and obloquy. The English adjectives derived from it include: obdurate, obfuscatory, objectionable, objurgating, obliterative, oblivious, obnoxious, obscene, obscurantist, obsequious, obsessive, obsolescent, obstinate, obstreperous, obstructionist, obtrusive, obtundent, obturating, and obtuse.
The Democratic Party is the “si” party, the party of the Latin conjunction “si,” which means “if.” The iffiness of the Democratic Party has made it seem like a cadre of temporizing bumblers, the party of unfulfilled conditionality. Some of its mottoes could be: “if we had the courage of our convictions,” “if we had the principled certainty to act decisively,” or “if we valued the truth enough to confront proliferated lies directly.”
This is only the tip of the iceberg of what Latin has to teach us about our current political stagnation.
Abort Tort Reform
September 4, 2009
Tort reform is irrelevant and unimportant in the immediate future. Anyone who has had to deal with the current health care system and its corrupt insurers (even those who are most vociferous for tort reform) will run to the nearest attorney as the only resort in dealing with an unresponsive monolith that is insensitive and irresponsible.
Reform the system with a strong public option (preferably single payer) that will humanize, render efficient, and make responsive those who monitor health care. Then, tort reform will be unnecessary because the abuses that now prompt litigation will be minimized (which in turn will minimize litigation).
Those who mount the barricades in favor of tort reform are the haves, the wealthy, and the hidden motive behind their call for tort reform is to disenfranchise and disempower the have nots. Tort reform is nothing but upper class contempt for the lower class masquerading as social reform.
Tort reform is a silly red herring. Tackle the big fish, and this little fish will fade into relative insignificance.
Barney lives up to his name: He is frank!
August 19, 2009
Bravo to Representative Barney Frank for humiliating a shameless provocateur at his latest town hall meeting. His example should be a paradigm for all right thinking legislators.
The delightful irony is that it takes a gay man to teach the rest of us how to talk straight!
Health Care Reform and the Founders: Will Ignorance Defeat Responsible Compassion?
August 16, 2009
As the legislative vacation in Washington proceeds, the willingness of the Democratic Party, even through spokespersons for President Obama, to abandon the commitment to a public option in health care reform legislation seems to be growing.
This gutless retreat, this cowardly response, to the corrupt, mendacious, and insane rhetoric of the fringe of extremists of the right—together with its cohorts among Republic party legislators (and so-called “blue dog” Democratic party legislators) in Washington—would represent the success of a “swiftboating” of health care reform that would not augur well for the future of the President’s promised agenda. Indeed, such success—the success of what I have called fRight—would be likely to torpedo anything of substance that the President tries to do for the rest of his first term, which could disappointingly turn into his only term, in the highest office of the land.
If genuine health care reform (with a public option) is sacrificed on the altar of expediency, the electoral danger to the Democratic party is not that its voters will vote for another party in forthcoming elections, but rather that they will not vote at all.
When George W. Bush completed his tenure as president, I said that our country had nowhere to go but up. I may have been wrong. If the Democratic legislators cannot pass health care reform legislation that contains a strong public option, it will turn out that our country simply had nowhere to go, so it stayed where it was.
If the promise of our new president turns out to be empty in this way, we will discover to our shame that the assassination of a president does not require a gun, but only requires loud enough liars abetted by those who are too frightened to call their lies “lies” and too timid to vote their consciences.
The Founders believed that the virtue of republican government was that through the agency of its legislators conscience would always trump constituency and the correct majority of one would always trump the demagogically deceived majority of millions. The Founders believed that the policy of the informed electors (from whom our legislators would presumably be drawn) would prevail over the passions of the uninformed electors. In recent decades, we have been betraying that belief.
If the stentorian voices of the ignoramuses drown out the reasoned voices of the informed, not only will we be forced to accept the failure to achieve meaningful health care reform, but also we will be forced to recognize that the failure to reform education in this country may be the biggest failure of all.
Rhetorical fRight and our political discourse
June 16, 2009
It is a constant source of astonishment and irritation to me that with a Democratic Party majority in both houses of Congress under a Democratic Party executive branch, our universe of political discourse still is dominated by fear of extremists who constitute the Republic Party base. I am proposing a neologism to describe this phenomenon: “fRight” (shorthand for fear of the right).
The influence of fRight is pervasive. It echoes through the halls of Congress, dominates the broadcast media, and infects the print media. This despite the fact that the political position of these right wing extremists is weaker than it has been in a generation.
Recently, this phenomenon has been observable in the deference given to the monomaniacal remarks of former Vice President Cheney, deference that invests such remarks with a credibility that they do not deserve. Similarly, one sees it when the glorification of the buffoonish Sarah Palin by the right, who desperately invest her with a charisma that is no more than a chimera, is accepted by the left, when it treats her with a seriousness that she neither has demonstrated nor has earned.
In particular, the cowardly apologies of individuals as disparate as David Letterman (vis-à-vis Palin) and Leon Panetta (vis-à-vis Cheney) are no more than craven collapses to pressure, either genuine or imagined, from right wing extremism.
In addition, while the use of such obfuscating sophists as Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay as “analysts” by the FOX News Network is their business as usual, the similar use of them and their ilk by the other news networks is fRight incarnate. Furthermore, the giving a platform to such erstwhile luminaries as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck is distressingly fRightful.
It is a rare commentator, for example, Ed Schultz on MSNBC, who has the nerve to expose this pandemic pusillanimity.
Nonetheless, the paradox is that the politically moribund status of the extremist right has not lessened its hold on the political discourse that colors so much of what we read and see (in newsprint, on the news airwaves, and on the world-wide web).
I do not know whether our commentators and “pundits” are so intellectually limited that they do not realize that they are victims of this linguistic disease or they are so blinded by the fRight itself that they believe that the phantasmagoric bête noires of the right are substantial and actual entities.
The result of all this is a societal myopia that keeps us from examining issues in a cogent, coherent, and dispassionate way. Hence, our information sources have become little more than institutionalized cadres of the blind leading the blind. [The same could be said of our legislators and the educational system that does not immunize us against this.]
It is time to cease being embarrassed by clear-sighted truth-telling. When the emperor has no clothes on, one must not shrink from saying so.
Bravo Ed Schultz and Donny Deutsch: The Letterman-Palin controversy requiescat in pace
June 12, 2009
As I was about to sound off about the silliness of the Letterman-Palin brouhaha, I was watching “The Ed Show” on MSNBC. His first guest today (June 12) was Donny Deutsch. Mr. Deutsch’s comments were like a breath of fresh air in a murk of myopic persiflage. The question is not whether Letterman’s joke about Palin’s daughter was or was not in bad taste, but whether Palin herself is far more guilty of exploiting her own children than any late night talk show comedian/host. Palin has no one to blame for putting her children (and their liaisons) into the limelight but herself. Her crocodile tears over the alleged line overstepping by Letterman are the rankest pretense: they are a mask for another pallid attempt on her part to make herself a credible political candidate. Donny Deutsch ripped that mask off effectively, exposing Palin’s poverty when it comes to issues that matter and her hypocrisy when it comes to issues that are trivial. Her continued crusade against Letterman will do no more than diminish her stature even further, revealing her inarticulateness, her linguistic and cultural illiteracy, and her willingness to exploit the details of her private life in whatever way seems to be advantageous to herself without forcing her to discuss substantive issues with cogency and coherence.
As far as Letterman’s joke is concerned, if anyone is owed an apology, it is Alex Rodriguez.
Sotomayor and Cultural Bias in Standardized Testing
June 12, 2009
Sonia Sotomayor’s comment about the cultural bias of standardized testing raises a specter that needs to be eradicated. Nowadays, when someone calls a standardized test culturally biased, it is taken as a pejorative remark. In actuality, it should be taken as no more than a neutral description of the way that things are and cannot help being.
If someone says to me, “Standardized tests are biased,” my response is, “Of course; so what?” By that I mean that it is right and proper that American standardized tests be permeated by assumptions rooted in dominant American culture. No one would complain about tests in France that they are biased toward dominant French culture, or tests in India that they are biased toward dominant Indian culture, or tests in any country that they are biased toward the dominant culture of that country. The tests are standardizable precisely because there is a standard, whether it be standard English or a standard body of basic historico-cultural knowledge.
If someone scores lower on a standardized test because he or she lacks the fundamentals of that standard historico-cultural knowledge, the fault is not the test’s. Rather, the fault is the educational system’s because it has not maintained its standards in a way that effectively inculcates such knowledge.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our tests, but in our educators, that we are knowledge-deficient.
Judge Sotomayor, the GOP, and Judicial Activism
May 26, 2009
Although Sonia Sotomayor is a fine choice to fill Justice Souter’s seat on the Supreme Court, the Republican die-hards are bound to raise the red herring of her being dangerous because she is an “activist” judge. It is past time that this canard were put to rest. The truth is that all judges are activist judges. If the law were crystal clear in its application to concrete cases, we would not need judges to interpret it. The Republicans’ use of the term “activist” in a pejorative sense is of a piece with their tendency (which has succeeded with a gullible public and press) to take a designation that should be laudatory and make it seem disreputable.
When they call a judge activist, they mean no more than that the judge ruled in a way of which they do not approve. They do not call the equally activist right wing judges activist, because theirs is an activism with which the GOP agrees.
That anyone still gives credence to the sophistic rhetoric of the Republicans is astonishing.
