My reaction to the Bloggingheads.tv diavlog between Eve Fairbanks of The New Republic and Matthew Continetti of The Weekly Standard, originally posted in the BH.tv forums, cross-posted here just because I felt like it.
An admirable effort by Matthew to put a positive spin on the antics of the House Republicans vis a vis the stimulus bill, but I wasn't sold. I grant that, in the abstract, there is something to be said about voting one's conscience and sticking to one's principles. And yes, it's true that for any given Republican, the bill was going to pass irrespective of his or her vote.
Still, that does not change the way the House GOP has been spinning things themselves. To my eye, they showed extremely bad faith by raising a stink about various provisions of the bill, getting them removed, and then chortling over their unanimous "No" vote. The provisions were removed in large part because Obama put pressure on his own side, which irritated some in his base, which means that the GOP's earlier objections appear now to have been just another instance of Republicans looking for every opportunity to drive wedges. This past week has only more firmly convinced me that the Republican Party, or at least the ones in office, do not care a whit about the country, but only about their party's political fortunes.
There is certainly a case to be made about shortcomings in the stimulus bill, and Matthew did usefully touch on a couple of them in this diavlog, but I heard virtually nothing like this -- i.e., in the way of adult discussion -- from any Republican politician trotted out to talk about it. Instead, it was all demonizing and demagoguery (Condoms! Condoms! Condoms!) -- a bunch of fifth-graders dispensing Jolt and Skittles to their kindergartner base.
On a related note, Matthew completely missed the point when he attempted to belittle Frank Rich's column from this past Sunday. Rich articulated very well the irritation many of us feel about the Republican Party. Matthew is also wrong to say that "Republicans don't matter" when it comes to voting on important pieces of legislation. This is nothing but laying the groundwork for their plan in 2010 to disavow all responsibility for whatever happened during the past two years. This is not responsible governance in a time when we have serious problems to deal with. Rich was right to point this out.
Matthew's oily little bit at the end crystallized for me the insincerity of his entire affect. His mischaracterization of what Obama said* about the Us magazine cover reminded me of Byron York, who never misses a chance to get something just a little bit wrong -- about an absurd triviality, to boot -- and always in the direction of making his target look worse. It is nothing but an ongoing rightwing effort to sling mud while smirking disingenuously. Give me Rush Limbaugh any day; at least he's honest about where he's coming from.
Finally, I have to say that Eve let Matthew get away with too much in his pushing of these little digs. This pairing is a carbon copy of the Jonah Goldberg/Peter Beinart routine -- the faux-thoughtful conservative and the centrist wannabe Villager who is liberal only by contrast, who does nothing but murmur politely every time the conservative gets something wrong. This sort of diavlog is nothing so much as prep school for the Sunday talk shows. When George Will and Cokie Roberts are finally put out to pasture, I'm sure these two will be at the head of the line to be plopped in their seats.
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* See the clip, here on Rumproast, for example, to see what Obama actually said.
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[Added] Shoutout to Jyminee for catching Matthew's mischaracterization, too.
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