Walks Like A Duck, Talks Like A Duck...Ain't A Duck

Shorter Klein: Thomas Frank, I banish you to the Sphere of Deviance.

[...] found from my blog crush leaving time its that there have been more posts from joe klein. today he targets thomas frank: Thomas Frank, a man of many bellows, bellows yet again in the Wall Street Journal [...]

FlownOver: We'd all be better off without the speculative condemnation OR praise of an administration yet to take office.
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Yeah, well, that's not how life works. The fact is that Obama is constantly being concern-trolled by the "centrist" Villagers. Not too much spending! We need some torture wiggle room! We need to keep spying on Americans! No backward-looking investigations of Bush! Don't scare Wall Street!
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Unilaterally disengaging from the discussion at the time that the policies are being formulated is naive in the extreme.

Enjoyed the column, Thanks for the link.
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I only wish he could have laid out Aristotle`s real definition of a moderate, rather than focusing on what a joke the concept has become, in the DC based centrist cult.

OUT: Dumb spending.

IN: Really dumb spending.

If these flaming financial fornicators really want to help the nation, at home and abroad?

1. BUILD 50 NEW NUKE PLANTS WITHIN THE NEXT 10 YEARS

THAT would have the greatest group impact for the better, than all the make work bogus brain dead bridges, barges, boat ramps, and bailouts combined. We free ourselves from foreign oil (Russia, Venezuela, Arabia) AND we help clean up the air too -- even if the eventual loss of the metallic umbrella now protecting earth people leads to massive new cases of skin cancer, but nothing's perfect.

2. EXPAND THE REGULAR ARMED FORCES, AND DE-COMMISSION THE GUARD & RESERVES

This has been a better idea since the days of George Washington (i.e., locally and regionally based units are vulnerable to a host of problems, versus broadly mixed and diverse commands). This change would be better for morale, performance, logistics, economy, and combat -- and it would get the idiot gubners out of the way when it comes to projects like storm reclamation (lacking a legit civil engineering and rescue entity, which is the case now).

3. A FEDERAL LANGUAGE ACADEMY FOR INTEL CAREERISTS

We need a West Point for the intelligence professionals, that combines cultural and langwich skills with police training. You might even make the case to expand this within the Coast Guard Academy (say triple their enrollment) and then split the grads off into their respective choices based on grades and merit, with 20% to FBI, 20% to CIA, 20% to NSA, so on. Long, long, long overdue -- and it takes the politics right out of the campus recruiting obstacles thrown up by the anarchists posing as tenured instructors in the Ivy and Berzerkley realms.

4. TERM LIMITS

Federal, state, local. Say 12 years tops per contestant, in any elected mode, inclusive. Then get a real job. That means you, Lerch.

5. LAND MINE THE BORDERS, NORTH & SOUTH

No illegal entry, period. You do it Ellis Island style, or you go home (or worse). Call it the Democracy DMZ or something snappy, but DO IT and get a grip on this imported mess, NOW.

= JEB 2012 =

Seriously OT, but Joe Klein last week asked us to keep track of "... the number of television appearances I make this week to promote this sexy "war crimes" column." Did anyone keep track?

Like a breed of canebrake rattlesnakes, liberals save their most poisonous venom for their own. I can't wait for Michelle to get caught cracking a gay joke.

Obama will govern from the left, with eyes clearly set on a left agenda. As a former Democrat, I'm not fooled. Key to the left agenda of the Obama administration will be the cultivation of a false centrist image. Minor squabbling among liberals and Democrats will be shadow-boxing, and columns such as this by David Ignatius are window dressing.

The projection of a centrist veneer is very important for the success of Obama's left agenda - watch the battles over the next four years over judicial appointments, pro-life issues, expansion of government, heavy taxation for government health care, heavy taxes for counter-productive environmental initiatives, card check to boost union power, "fairness doctrine," benefits for illegal aliens, and retreat in the war against Islamic terrorism.

The liberal media elite has a heavy investment in the success of the left agenda, and therefore are deeply committed to promoting the false centrist image. From a mathematical point of view, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid don't need Republican votes in congress. They can pass anything they want. But from a political point of view, they seek to benefit from frightened and weak-knee Republicans just enough to stamp "bipartisan" and "moderate" and "centrist" on the key planks of the left agenda.

Steve Beren - Seattle
http://www.steveberen.com

Obama will govern from the left, with eyes clearly set on a left agenda. As a former Democrat, I'm not fooled. Key to the left agenda of the Obama administration will be the cultivation of a false centrist image. Minor squabbling among liberals and Democrats will be shadow-boxing, and columns such as this by Joe Klein, and a similar recent column by David Ignatius, are just window dressing.

The projection of a centrist veneer is very important for the success of Obama's left agenda - watch the battles over the next four years over judicial appointments, pro-life issues, expansion of government, heavy taxation for government health care, heavy taxes for counter-productive environmental initiatives, card check to boost union power, "fairness doctrine," benefits for illegal aliens, and retreat in the war against Islamic terrorism.

The liberal media elite has a heavy investment in the success of the left agenda, and therefore are deeply committed to promoting the false centrist image. From a mathematical point of view, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid don't need Republican votes in congress. They can pass anything they want. But from a political point of view, they seek to benefit from frightened and weak-knee Republicans just enough to stamp "bipartisan" and "moderate" and "centrist" on the key planks of the left agenda.

Steve Beren - Seattle
http://www.steveberen.com

am I the crazy one to suggest that centrism is not a political orientation like being on the right or on the left but a way of governing? you can only force radical developments over the will of many through breaking the law Cheney style or through lying WMD style. I guess many a raging liberal would rather see that than observe all too pragmatic O's approach. If you consider Republicans' opinions at all, you'll have to meet them closer to the center than where your original motivation was. Centrism is not about wishy washingness but a somber desire to have anything at all done in the all sucking-in bureaucracy of Washington. And I agree with JK that Obama's agenda is quite liberal. To those that think it's not I advise to imagine a hypothetical 8 years of a Republican succeeding Bush and how far universal health care and climate change recognition would have gotten then.

QH is mired in sexual fantasies about the Clintons, I'm thinking.
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Why else would he keep beating that really, really, really, dead horse?
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As for his inananites, I would venture that he's safely in the minority. The issues of the insane are no longer on the American People's agenda (the real American people), and FOX will completely and totally drop out of the loop on January 20th.
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At which point, FOX will devolve into the National Enquirer.
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With fangs...

As for steveberen's rants:
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Too bad. Live with it and get a life.
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And stop being so divisive!

Keep on fighting Beren...because that conservative agenda has served this country and its citizens so very, very well. Good job.

heheh.

I'm with Joe on this one. I like Frank's writing, but there all kinds of problems with his basic thesis. The problem in Kansas is that the wealthy there all vote Republican whereas they are more split in the northeast. See Andy Gelman's work for more details about this.

That damn Liberal Media Elite and their heavy investment in the success of the left agenda. They keep clamoring for indictments of the Bush admin, touting universal health care, condemning Israel for their actions against Hamas, exposing faulty intelligence, campaigning for environmental regulations, ignoring speculation, backing unions, shouting down the religious-right, advocating for the immediate withdrawal from Iraq, focusing on the Iraqi refugees (4.7 mil), pushing diplomatic resolutions, cheering Federal oversight of business and shutting conservatives out of their bully-pulpits. Those huge media conglomerations just love liberals! Can't we please hear the voice of the right for a change?

Amen, brother Joe. Amen.

"Considering that Frank's thesis was essentially that the people of Kansas should be voting for Democrats based on Democrats' existing policies and that they weren't because of "the body language", I find it odd that you would criticize him for failing to suggest a policy that the Dems should pursue."
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I caught that too, sqr1. The Villager arguing the policy instead of the political angle must have caught my eye (though Joe does that from time to time). Shorter Frank: Kansans don't vote on policy.
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Tom @14, I think you nailed it.

"am I the crazy one to suggest that centrism is not a political orientation like being on the right or on the left but a way of governing?"
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I don't know about the first but you obviously don't understand the nature of left-right politics and government. Only "centrism" and "the left" are concerned with governing - you could say that is what defines and animates them. What defines and animates "the right" is undermining government's ability to tax (particularly progressively) and regulate corporate industry, especially if taxpayer monies can also be re-distributed to certain private sector industries. Inasmuch as "centrism" represents a corruption of liberal governing philosophy by "conservative" non or anti-governing ideology, it is generally an inferior "way of governing".

I should add that what also animates the right is defeating or otherwise obstructing liberal policy-making or any policy-making that might make government successful at making people's lives better. That undermines their entire argument for being.

Joe Klein:
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Do you consider yourself a centrist who is opposed to liberalism?
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It's not really fair or honest to criticize Thomas Frank's column for Clinton-bashing, because he's really centrist-bashing. He's merely pointing out in mainstream print what we liberals online have been noting for some time:
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Centrism is something of a cult here in Washington, D.C., and a more specious superstition you never saw. Its adherents pretend to worship at the altar of the great American middle, but in fact they stick closely to a very particular view of events regardless of what the public says it wants.
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And through it all, centrism bills itself as the most transgressive sort of exercise imaginable. Its partisans are "New Democrats," "Radical Centrists," clear-eyed believers in a "Third Way." The red-hot tepids, we might call them -- the jellybeans of steel.
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The reason centrism finds an enthusiastic audience in Washington, I think, is because it appeals naturally to the Beltway journalistic mindset, with its professional prohibition against coming down solidly on one side or the other of any question. Splitting the difference is a way of life in this cynical town. To hear politicians insist that it is also the way of the statesman, I suspect, gives journalists a secret thrill.
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Yet what the Beltway centrist characteristically longs for is not so much to transcend politics but to close off debate on the grounds that he -- and the vast silent middle for which he stands -- knows beyond question what is to be done.

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Thomas Frank apparently believes (like many of us) that the ideology of centrism has also failed as a set of principles by which successful governance can thrive. His issue is with the ideology of centrism, not ideological moderation (vs extremism). He points out that radical, extreme centrism has a history of failure (examples of which one can readily find examining the record of the Clinton presidency) that, while not as awful as the past eight years of reigning movement conservatism, will probably similarly fail to sufficiently correct the damage done by rightist rule.
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I don't believe that you're so obtuse as to have completely missed Frank's point, which is not at all about the Clintons, which is not about moderation as opposed to extremism, and which is certainly not about polemicist ranting, Joe Klein.
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But that leaves us with the impression that you're somehow unwilling to honestly tell the public where you stand. If you're not left or right, but center, then tell us so, Joe. Tell us that you're attacking Frank because he's attacking centrists --which means you.
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Are you willing to honestly tell the public that you are or are not a proponent of the ideology of Centrism (for which Thomas Frank takes you to task personally in his observer article Joe Klein's Turnip Day), Joe Klein?

We could use some bellowing now and then. We're recovering from the Alan Colmes era of liberal advocacy. I'll agree that Thomas Frank is more an essayist than wonk. He's a good one though. Be we need these kinds of voices after the past few years. And his latest book isn't half bad either--it's not all that different from Jon Chait's latest book, really.

That may be bad news for polemicists like Frank; I suspect it will be very good news for the working people he says he cares about, but whose lives--both religious and economic--seem entirely foreign to him.

Leave the pseudo-anti-intellectualism to the movement conservatives. Frank can hang with the locals fine. Washington seems to be full of eggheads trying desperately not to look egghead, and accusing each other of being eggheads (while the worst eggheads in the worst tradition are never called on it. Even George Will does it, which is absurd. You should give it up.

Um, That didn't turn out as well as I hoped. Let's try again: <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6898186586680860143&ei=d6BuSYP-BILorgLKr53EBQ&q=thomas+frank&hl=enFrank can hang with the locals fine.

OK, One last time: Link to Frank talking to local dudes in Kansas.

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