Compulsive Centrist Disorder
mikethemadbiologist | January 8, 2008Apparently, Matt Stoller, like the Mad Biologist, wants to hear a dog whistle from Obama too (italics mine):
74% of young caucus goers self-identified as Democrats, and 73% self-identified is liberals. Yeah, that's some post-partisan and post-ideological generation coming through the ranks.
This is actually one of my great frustrations with the Obama campaign and Obama supporters. Even when Obama wins a victory on the back of the liberal, creative class vote, both his campaign and his supporters--most of whom are liberals--repeat the mantra that the victory was some sort of post-partisan and…
mikethemadbiologist | January 1, 2008A lot of irrelevant, has-been politicians are making noises about the need for bipartisanship, now that there's even a remote possibility that a moderate Democratic agenda could be enacted. Just say no to Compulsive Centrist Disorder; be partisan!
From the New York Times, here's what I'm talking about:
On Sunday, the mayor will join Democratic and Republican elder statesmen at the University of Oklahoma in what the conveners are billing as an effort to pressure the major party candidates to renounce partisan gridlock.
Former Senator David L. Boren of Oklahoma, who organized the session with…
mikethemadbiologist | December 5, 2007Between my original post about how to punish creationist politicians and ScienceBlogling Greg's discussion, several readers commented that I was making this a political issue. Quite simply, I am not the only doing that: the Republican theopolitical conservative base is. The issue is, do we fight back, or lose due to their political power?
The creationists might not be able to defeat the reality of the existence of evolution, but they can defeat every effort to teach and study that reality. So, like it or not, evolution has become a political issue, and it must not only be taught in…
mikethemadbiologist | November 21, 2007I think there's a related disorder to Compulsive Centrist Disorder: Magnanimous Pundit Syndrome. It seems to have hit Kevin Drum pretty hard (italics mine):
I'm on record (several hundred times, probably) saying that Social Security is basically fine and that the best thing we can do is just leave it alone and then revisit it in a decade or so. At the same time, I don't think any of us would (or should) have any serious problem with, say, a 1983-style commission that beavered away for a year and then recommended a basket of modest tax increases and benefit reductions to keep Social Security…
mikethemadbiologist | July 20, 2007By way of Brad Delong, I stumbled across this column by Washington Post editor Ruth Marcus calling for merit pay for teachers. Centrist Democrats, particularly those who suffer from a touch of Compulsive Centrist Disorder, have been pushing this since the early 80s. And it makes no sense to me.
When I think about science education, these are the areas that I think need dramatic improvement:
1) Fully equipped science laboratories. You actually have to do some science occasionally.
2) Funding for the occasional trip to a museum, nature preserve, or science lab.
3) Smaller class sizes.…
mikethemadbiologist | July 16, 2007I was reading this fascinating article about Japan's adoption in 2009 of a jury system, when it struck me: the Pundits on the Potomac would love to have a society like this. From the NY Times:
Japan is preparing to adopt a jury-style system in its courts in 2009, the most significant change in its criminal justice system since the postwar American occupation. But for it to work, the Japanese must first overcome some deep-rooted cultural obstacles: a reluctance to express opinions in public, to argue with one another and to question authority.
To win over a skeptical public, Japan's…
mikethemadbiologist | July 15, 2007John Nichols, in an interview with Bill Moyers, clarifies a very important--and misunderstood--point about impeachment (italics mine):
JOHN NICHOLS: Bill Moyers, you are making a mistake. You are making a mistake that too many people make.
BILL MOYERS: Yes.
JOHN NICHOLS: You are seeing impeachment as a constitutional crisis. Impeachment is the cure for a constitutional crisis. Don't mistake the medicine for the disease. When you have a constitutional crisis, the founders are very clear. They said there is a way to deal with this. We don't have to have a war. We don't have to raise an army and…
mikethemadbiologist | June 24, 2007Scott LeMieux exposes the illogic of Melinda Henneberger's NY Times op-ed about abortion and Democrats. What I can't figure out is what does Henneberger want?
Once again, we have a Democratic concern troll who fails to see even the basic contours of the landscape:
Do you want abortion to be legal and safe, or illegal and unsafe?
That is the issue. Unfortunately, there is no real compromise to be had*, and even if there were, it wouldn't matter to these 'moderate' [*cough*bullshit*cough*] voters. Sympathetic noises or compromises will not satisfy those voters Henneberger describes as…
mikethemadbiologist | June 15, 2007Joe Klein was very angry last week at 'uncivil' bloggers, and in a storming fit of something that kinda looks like anger, only wimpier, came up with a list of attributes belonging to "left-wing extremists." I've gone through the list and added my own commentary.
Klein's list:
A left-wing extremist exhibits many, but not necessarily all, of the following attributes:
--believes the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world.
Nope.
--believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism.
I think it is one cause. That's why cluster is in the word…
mikethemadbiologist | June 5, 2007Inspired by this Jeffrey Feldman post, I'm putting together a post about abortion, evolution, and the dislike by some scientists of framing. Feldman argues that reframing abortion is necessary to deal with anti-abortionists like Rev. Joel C. Hunter:
Abortion continues to be one of the most hurtful and divisive facts of our nation. I come from the part of the faith community that is very strongly pro-life. I know you're pro-choice, but you have indicated that you would like to reduce the number of abortions. Could you see yourself, with millions of voters in a pro-life camp, creating a common…
mikethemadbiologist | May 21, 2007Actually, I'm not just mad at the pundit, but also at Senator Obama: he knows his position is intellectually dishonest.
By way of Ezra Klein, I came across a discussion at Hotline about this interview with Senator Obama:
For the first time as a presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, posed a question about entitlement reform, said that "everything was on the table," except for private accounts, and in doing so, because the first top-tier Democratic presidential candidate to acknowledge that Social Security deficits could not, and would not, be solved without pain.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You've…
mikethemadbiologist | March 19, 2007Yum. Theological conservative tastes GOOOODDD!
Full disclosure: I have never bought into the belief of the Compulsive Centrists that John McCain is a moderate. A detailed look at his voting record shows that he is often very conservative, with the occasional moment of lucidity (e.g., recognizing that global warming is actually happening). But it is truly pathetic to watch a man who clearly doesn't agree with the theological conservatives twist himself into a pretzel in an effort to placate them. He's done it with evolution. Now, he is 'confused' about condoms:
The unthinkable has…
mikethemadbiologist | February 7, 2007driftglass skewers NY Times columnist David Brooks' claim that young people don't want the politics of polarization:
Again, Brooks attempts to tack around the dead elephant in his Party's phone booth, so let me clarify this once again: Bobo, you people bred and perfected polarization as a means to your political ends.
This condition was not created by accident.
This is the world you built.
The water you poisoned.
The air you polluted.
And you are still doing it.
One GOP cadre dumps mercury into the milk, and then on-cue another begins to cry about how the milk's all done gone mysteriously…
mikethemadbiologist | January 22, 2007Today is Blog For Choice Day. So I thought I would write about why I'm for legal and safe abortion. It's rather simple: because the alternative is illegal and unsafe abortions. As long as women can get pregnant, some will not want to be pregnant. I trust their judgment that most of the time, they're doing it because it's the best moral alternative. Women can be (and obviously are) independent moral agents. They don't need James Dobson's help.
But now, I would like to turn it over to Atrios, who deals with Compulsive Centrist Disorder, abortion stylee:
As we've been through many times…
mikethemadbiologist | January 8, 2007Suppose you were a very large media corporation, and you found out that some of your radio subsidiaries were espousing specific acts of violence toward other people (last I checked, that's called terrorism). You would:
1) Fire the offending parties.
2) Offer some mealymouth bullshit explanation ("If anyone was offended...").
or...
3) File a lawsuit against the blogger who posted mp3s of the offensive clips.
Well, the Disney corporation picked option number three. Disney-owned California radio station KFSO, in its effort to capitalize on right-wing hate radio, gives a microphone to some…
mikethemadbiologist | December 28, 2006
My grandmother used to say that if you didn't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything at all. She did not say, "You should lie and make stuff up." Which leads us to one of David Broder's most inexplicable columns yet. Broder, in his column about recently deceased former President Gerald Ford, writes:
Many of those alumni who first exercised real power under Ford remained active in government. For all that he has borrowed from Ronald Reagan, President Bush owes the greatest debt to three stalwarts of economic and national security policy inherited from Ford -- Vice President…
mikethemadbiologist | December 14, 2006One is from Nicholas Kristof and one is from batshit lunatic Ron Moore (the former judge who placed a Ten Commandments megalith in the Alabama Supreme Court). First, Kristof:
Now that the Christian Right has largely retreated from the culture wars, let's hope that the Atheist Left doesn't revive them. We've suffered enough from religious intolerance that the last thing the world needs is irreligious intolerance.
Now Christopath Roy Moore:
Enough evidence exists for Congress to question [Muslim Keith] Ellison's qualifications to be a member of Congress as well as his commitment to the…
mikethemadbiologist | December 10, 2006Because said officials are even more ignorant than the Pundits of the Potomac. A few months ago, Jeff Stein published an op-ed about the many officials who are charged with anti-terrorism and who also know nothing about the Middle East--to the point where they don't know if Hezbollah is Sunni or Shiite. Stein has followed up with an interview with incoming House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes.
As far as I can tell, Reyes is marginally more informed than his Republican predecessors, which is damning with faint praise. Shakes and Ezra Klein both pile on Reyes, so I won't do that here…
mikethemadbiologist | December 3, 2006While my theological beliefs (which have very little to do with my religious observance) tend towards that 'ol time agnostic monism, Nicholas Kristof, in one of the daffiest columns he's ever written, has decided that the Christopath Right "has largely retreated from the culture wars." Therefore, any resumption of said wars must be squarely laid at the feet of "the Atheist Left."
No, Special K, the Right didn't "retreat", they were driven off the battlefield. There is a huge difference.
Kristof's column is nothing more than Compulsive Centrist Disorder rearing its head in the culture wars…
mikethemadbiologist | December 2, 2006A while ago, I defined Compulsive Centrist Disorder:
Complusive Centrist Disorder has always bothered me because a certain policy or view will mysteriously be labelled 'centrist' regardless of where it actually falls on the political spectrum, and suddenly it will be far more respectable than other policies. It's intellectual cowardice and laziness of a high order....
In this case, you might actually think my proposal is the best policy. However, the problem with Compulsive Centrist Disorder is that it short-circuits any discussion, since the compromise is automatically assumed to be a good…