In last night’s debate — a frightened, desperate Mitt Romney sought to slow down Newt Gingrich’s “ass” momentum, and the former House Speaker tried on a new role — front-runner. Here are POLITICO’s six takeaways from the NBC/National Journal debate: [ READ MORE ] [ SEE VIDEOS BELOW ]
——————————————————————–
The esteemed Richard Cohen Notes: “I do not mean that Newt Gingrich — the one who is a virtual Michelin Man of grandiosity, pneumatically overstuffed with self-references and appeals to the political gutter. I do not mean the man whose public life has been as chaotic as his private one (and vice versa) and who is capable of the most sinister simplicities, such as the time he suggested that Susan Smith would not have murdered her two children had Republicans been in power. This Gingrich is a Rorschach test: If you don’t think he’s nuts, you are. [ READ MORE ]
Dana Milbankwrites: At last, the president hasn’t conceded the race before the starter’s gun, hasn’t opened the bidding with his bottom line, hasn’t begun a game of strip poker in his boxer shorts. Whichever metaphor you choose, it was refreshing to see the president in the Rose Garden on Monday morning delivering a speech that, for once, appealed to the heart rather than the cerebrum.
“It is wrong that in the United States of America a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay higher tax rates than somebody pulling in $50 million,” the newly populist Obama declared.
The president welcomed the charge. “I reject the idea that asking a hedge fund manager to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or teacher is class warfare,” he told the Rose Garden crowd of 200. “I think it’s just the right thing to do.”
“Either we ask the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share in taxes, or we’re going to have to ask seniors to pay more for Medicare. .?.?. Either we gut education and medical research, or we’ve got to reform the tax code so that the most profitable corporations have to give up tax loopholes that other companies don’t get. We can’t afford to do both. This is not class warfare. It’s math.”
————————————– The Hyena Howls From The Right-Wing
————————————–
Right-Wing Media Defend The Rich Unless The Rich Person Is Named Warren Buffett– Following President Obama’s introduction of a plan for “economic growth and deficit reduction,” the right-wing media have rushed to defend the rich from the proposed tax increases. However, the one rich person they are not defending is Warren Buffett, a billionaire who has argued that the country’s wealthiest individuals should no longer be “coddled” by a “billionaire-friendly Congress” and should instead pay higher taxes. [ READ MORE ]
Fox Again Cries “Class Warfare” — Fox has once again accused President Obama of engaging in “class warfare,” this time in response to Obama’s deficit-reduction plan, which reportedly calls for increasing taxes on the wealthy. [ READ MORE ]
Rush FAT Limbaugh: Obama’s Tax Plan Is “Specifically And Purposely Class Warfare”
In The Face Of Historically Low Taxes, Osama Bin O’Reilly Claims Taxation Is “Strangling The U.S. Economy” [ READ MORE ]
Brit Hume: “If [Income] Inequality Is At A Very Much Higher Level Who Cares?”
O’Reilly Says He May “Pack It In” If Obama Raises Taxes On Him Too Much
Majority Of Fox Panel Agrees That Poor, Middle Class Should Be The Ones Paying More Of Their Fair Share
———————————————–
Ari Rabin-Havt On Current TV’s Countdown: News Corp. Is “A News Company That Exists To Lie To Its Viewers”
———————————————–
Meanwhile, mis-information “connoisseur,” the big FAT charlatan Andrew Breitbart — while speaking to the ‘Red Mass Group’ at a Tea Party event in Lexington, Massachusetts on September 16, assured his audience that “we have the guns” and that he sometimes wants to “fire the first shot.” [ READ MORE ]
Eric Boehlert On MSNBC’s Ed Show: Breitbart’s “We Have The Guns” Comment Is “Right-Wing Paranoid Fantasy At Its Worst”
Will Perry’s Similarities To Bush Work in His Favor?
NyTimes: Rick Perry is suddenly looming large on the national stage, after entering the presidential race last weekend. He looks like a formidable candidate in part because of his skill at raising money through “bundlers,” leading to inevitable comparisons to George W. Bush in 1999 as he began his first presidential campaign: a Republican governor of Texas, popular with a base of evangelical Christians, adept at raising millions of dollars rapidly.
Will Perry’s similarities to Bush work in his favor? How can he differentiate himself, to woo the swing voters who, in the end, were disillusioned with the Bush administration? [ READ MORE ]
Stephen Colbert To ‘Super PACs’: ‘Back Off, Bitches. I Saw Rick Perry First!’ | Colbert Super PAC – Rick Perry for President. Stephen already licked the Rick Perry for President donut, so all the other Super PAC bitches better back off.
Colbert Report: America’s Credit Downgrade:The credit downgrade reduces Americans to waffle-eating Kiwis who put mayonnaise on their French fries and have a serious Hobbit infestation.
Republican Idiots — Worst Persons: An Anti-Obama PAC, Beck and Lieberman — Learn why a new political action committee — the Campaign to Defeat “Barrack” Obama — and Glenn Beck made the nominees list, and why Senator Joe Lieberman is The Worst Person in the World for Aug. 3, 2011.
By: Simon Schama The Constitution’s framers were flawed like today’s politicians, so it’s high time we stop embalming them in infallibility. With adult history buffs so deluded about the reality of the American past, it’s even more alarming that the National Assessment of Educational Progress recently rated history as the subject at which students are least proficient. This wouldn’t matter if history were just some recreational stroll down memory lane. But it isn’t. In the fiery debates of Americans long dead can be discerned the lineaments of the same core issues that divide us today. Right now, the education that might inform such a debate has turned into a schoolyard shouting match.
He may have written the Declaration of Independence, but were he around today Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t have a prayer of winning the Republican nomination, much less the presidency. It wouldn’t be his liaison with the teenage daughter of one of his slaves nor the love children she bore him that would be the stumbling block. Nor would it be Jefferson’s suspicious possession of an English translation of the Quran that might doom him to fail the Newt Gingrich loyalty test. No, it would be the Jesus problem that would do him in. For Thomas Jefferson denied that Jesus was the son of God. Worse, he refused to believe that Jesus ever made any claim that he was. While he was at it, Jefferson also rejected as self-evidently absurd the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection.
Jefferson was not, as his enemies in the election of 1800 claimed, an atheist. He believed in the Creator whom he invoked in the Declaration of Independence and whom he thought had brought the natural universe into being. By his own lights he thought himself a true Christian, an admirer of the moral teachings of the Nazarene. It had been, he argued, generations of the clergy who had perverted the simple humanity of Jesus the reformer, turned him into a messiah, and invented the myth that he had died to redeem mankind’s sins.
All of which would surely mean that, notwithstanding his passion for minimal government, the Sage of Monticello would have no chance at all beside True Believers like Michele Bachmann. But Jefferson’s rationalist deism is not the idle makeover of liberal wishful thinking. It is incontrovertible historical fact, as is his absolute determination never to admit religion into any institutions of the public realm.
From Left: Paintings of Alexander Hamilton, Paul Revere, and Thomas Jefferson.
So the philosopher-president whose aversion to overbearing government makes him a Tea Party patriarch was also a man who thought the Immaculate Conception a fable. But then real history is like that?full of knotty contradictions, its cast list of heroes, especially American heroes, majestic in their complicated imperfections.
Take another of the Founders routinely canonized in the current fairy-tale version of American origins that passes muster for history by those who don’t actually read very much of it: Alexander Hamilton. Outed by the Andrew Breitbart of his day, James Thomson Callender, for having had an “amorous connection” with the married Maria Reynolds, Hamilton responded by making an unapologetic preemptive confession?insisting that since on the truly serious issue of whether he had profited from the management of public finances he was innocent, the rest was nobody’s business but his own. Callender retorted that Hamilton had owned up to the sexual impropriety as a cover for the more serious financial one.
True history is the enemy of reverence. We do the authors of American independence no favors by embalming them in infallibility, by treating the Constitution like a quasi-biblical revelation instead of the product of contention and cobbled-together compromise that it actually was. Even the collective noun “Founding-Fathers” planes smooth the unreconciled divisiveness of their bitter and acrimonious disputes. History is a book of chastening wisdom to which we ought to be looking to deepen our understanding of the legitimate nature of American government?including its revenue-raising power, an issue that deeply captivated the antagonized minds of that first generation.
But unfortunately, there is little evidence of citizens engaging in close, critical reading of The Federalist Papers, of the debates surrounding constitutional ratification, or of the dispute that pitted Hamilton and James Madison against Patrick Henry over what was at stake in Congress’s authority to make laws “necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the…Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States.”
Instead of knowledge, we have tricorn hats. Staring at a copy of the Constitution in the National Archives and making promotional pilgrimages to revolutionary New England didn’t prevent Sarah Palin from butchering the truth of Paul Revere’s ride, turning it into some sort of NRA advisory to the British to keep their gosh-darned hands off American firearms.
Facts, as John Adams insisted when defending British redcoats after the Boston Massacre, “are stubborn things.” He would be horrified by the regularity with which American history is mangled in the interests of confirming prejudices. It matters when Glenn Beck‘s guest Andrew Napolitano pins the responsibility for the 17th Amendment, instituting direct election of senators, on a Wilsonian plot against American liberties, rather than the proposal of a Republican senator in 1911 that was approved by Congress before Wilson ever set foot in the White House. It matters when Bachmann mischaracterizes the Founding Fathers as working “tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” What made the Constitution acceptable throughout the Union was a Faustian bargain that counted slaves as three fifths of a citizen, thus artificially bloating the political representation of the slaveholding South.
‘Founding Fathers’ Owned Slaves; The ‘Evils of Slavery‘ & Michele Bachmann’s Lies
With adult history buffs so deluded about the reality of the American past, it’s even more alarming that the National Assessment of Educational Progress recently rated history as the subject at which students are least proficient. This wouldn’t matter if history were just some recreational stroll down memory lane. But it isn’t. In the fiery debates of Americans long dead can be discerned the lineaments of the same core issues that divide us today. Right now, the education that might inform such a debate has turned into a schoolyard shouting match.
The Anti-Obama Racist, Bigoted Tea-Partiers — Have Made Anti-Intellectualism Their Rallying Cry.
As the electioneering rises to a din, those who dare to read history for its chastening wisdom will be fatuously accused of “declinism.” But it is those who reduce history’s hard and honest reckonings to exceptionalist chest-thumping who will be the true agents of degeneration. As one of Jefferson’s favorite books, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, so luminously argued, there is no surer sign of a country’s cultural and political decay than an obtuse blindness to its unmistakable beginnings.
4.The Federalist PapersConstitutions Books).The priceless document of two mighty intellects, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, united in common cause of creating an enduring American government.
About The Author: Simon Schama — is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University in New York. Since 1990, he has also written and presented more than 30 documentaries on art and history for the BBC. He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series A History of Britain. Other works on history and art include The Embarrassment of Riches, Landscape And Memory, Dead Certainties, Rembrandt’s Eyes, and his history of the French Revolution, Citizens. Schama is an art and cultural critic for The New Yorker.
MMFA: Right-Wing Media Revive Medicare Rationing Falsehood Following GOP’s NY-26 Loss — Right-wing media have recently attempted to renew the falsehood that the health care reform bill will create an advisory panel for the purpose of rationing care, in part in response to an upset Democratic victory in a special congressional election in New York state. In fact, experts have dismissed the claim that the Independent Payment Advisory Board will ration care, and the legislation specifically prohibits the panel from rationing. [ READ MORE ]
Voice Of The Opposition: Fox News Adopts GOP’s “Mediscare” Talking Point To Defend Ryan Budget [ READ MORE ]
Limbaugh Puts A Twist On An Old Falsehood: Without Medicare Reform, Seniors Will “Be Subject To Death Panels“
Osama Bin O’Reilly Tells GOP How To Craft Its Medicare Messaging For 2012
[ TALK-LUNATIC ] Rush Limbaugh: “It’ll Be Really, Really Difficult To Get The Country Back If There’s Four More Years Of Obamaism”
On Hannity To Comment On “Smear Factories,” Breitbart[Andrew BreitFART] Equates Progressive Media Operations To “Totalitarian” Regimes
The Constitution’s framers were flawed like today’s politicians, so it’s high time we stop embalming them in infallibility. With adult history buffs so deluded about the reality of the American past, it’s even more alarming that the National Assessment of Educational Progress recently rated history as the subject at which students are least proficient. This wouldn’t matter if history were just some recreational stroll down memory lane. But it isn’t. In the fiery debates of Americans long dead can be discerned the lineaments of the same core issues that divide us today. Right now, the education that might inform such a debate has turned into a schoolyard shouting match.
by Jack Rakove. — Compulsive and compulsory reading on the Revolution and forging of the Constitution.
by Benjamin L. Carp. — A wise and illuminating study of the original tea party.
by Pauline Maier. — The definitive book, and a thrilling read, on the writing of the Declaration.
. The priceless document of two mighty intellects, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, united in common cause of creating an enduring American government.
. Other works on history and art include 
, 
, 
, 
, and his history of the French Revolution, 
. Schama is an art and cultural critic for The New Yorker.
