We talked yesterday afternoon about Mark Halperin drawing a parallel between two controversial campaign ads: a Priorities USA Action ad showing a widowed steel worker and a Mitt Romney ad on welfare policy. Halperin suggested both are equally problematic, while I argued this is misleading -- one ad is blatantly dishonest and the other isn't.
To his credit, Halperin elaborated in a subsequent piece. Unfortunately, however, Time's senior political analyst is moving in the wrong direction.
Here's the thing: both sides already have made ads that, unfortunately and undeniably, stretch the truth on various matters of policy. Pinocchios have been given out left and right like speeding tickets on the Connecticut Turnpike. [...]
This new super PAC spot, called "Understands," which the White House and the Obama campaign decline to repudiate, is a horse of a different color. It really isn't about policy (although some Democrats will claim otherwise). It is meant to use the emotion of a tragic story told by a bereaved widower to make voters think Governor Romney is callous and indifferent, and even is accountable for a woman's death.
Responsible journalists will continue to do their best in the Freak Show environment to truth squad every ad, video, and communication. But when lines of decency are crossed, more strenuous efforts are required.
In other words, I expressed concerns about a false equivalence, and Halperin's response, in effect, is, "Fine, there is no equivalence; the Democratic ad is worse."
But it's really not. The super PAC's ad is obviously provocative, but a detailed analysis shows that it's clearly defensible. Jonathan Cohn and Michael Kinsley published thoughtful pieces on the substance of the commercial overnight, and both make compelling cases that the Priorities USA Action ad is based on fact, even if the ad makers took some liberties. It's probably fair to say the Democrats are close to the line on this one, but didn't quite cross it -- the super PAC could have been fairer, but it didn't lie.
Indeed, Halperin appears disgusted by the Democratic spot, but he doesn't point to any inaccuracies. Rather, he's concerned about the "use" of "emotion" that crosses "lines of decency."
But at the root of Halperin's argument is a flawed premise: he sees an emotional inference from an independent group as being far more offensive than a racially-charged, unambiguous lie from a man who may soon be the leader of the free world. I think that's backwards.
What's more, Halperin is inclined to overlook Romney's welfare lie as par for the course. It's upsetting, the argument goes, but nothing out of the ordinary.
I strongly disagree. Romney, desperate to change the subject away from his still-secret tax returns, has made up policy claims out of whole cloth. It is as demonstrably dishonest as any ad ever aired by a major-party presidential candidate -- it's not spinning details; it'd not hiding in gray areas; it's just lying to the public. The racial subtext of the disgusting smear only adds insult to injury, raising questions anew about the character of the man who would put this garbage on the air, and say "I approve this message" at the end.
If media professionals treat this as routine, we encourage more dishonesty. If politicians knew they'd be confronted with headlines that read, "Candidate A caught lying about B," they'd be far more deliberate about telling the truth.
For Halperin, some fact-checking websites can scrutinize the mendacity, but the political world should reserve it's true outrage for emotional inferences from an independent group that aired a defensible ad that's largely based on fact.
This is a mistake.
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Mark Halperin
Congratulations to the world's laziest dispenser of conventional wisdom
# 1 Hack @ Salon http://www.salon.com/topic/salon_hack_list_2011/
That's all you need to know
Doesn't that kind of depend on what Halperin wanted to accomplish?
Correct. If his real intention is to promote the Republican Party, then he's not making a mistake. I suspect that a lot of the suppositious objectivity among his class of media person is actually crafted to slyly advance the right-wing cause.
We are currently living in Sarajevo, 1993, with both sides firing artillery at each other. The shells whistle overhead, while we go about our daily lives, drawing water, baking bread, getting the kids off to school.
In another month the fighting will be street to street, with opposing signs sprouting in front yards.
The it gets really dire, with house to house combat for each and every vote.
Come November 7th one side will surrender, and the winner will celebrate. Then we will go back to drawing water and baking bread, and getting the kids off to school.
To quote The Bard, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
I suspect that, as in 2008, only one side is prepared to surrender. The other is prepared to continue a guerrilla war by sabotage and other unconventional means.
But that is the whole attitude with the rich they don’t care about other people, except to make more profit. And the end result is these rich people end up killing people. Anything Romney did at Bain capital was only to make huge profits at the cost of others. Calling Romney a murderer is just putting it too lightly, when you see what these rich people have done in this world, it is an atrocity beyond comparison. Romney is no different than the other rich bums that are doing the same thing even today. Romney is just the typical example of what others are also doing.
Perhaps I am wrong but I did not get that the ad was calling Romney a murderer. This is my take on the ad, Bain's business decision cost this man his job and therefore he lost his health insurance and after that his wife lost her job and her insurance. He got a job as a janitor - no health coverage and made half of what he use to earn. Later (they should say 6 years later) when she got really sick with pneumonia that is when they learned she had cancer. He felt that if his wife were feeling ill earlier she would not have said anything because they could not afford to go to the doctor. What I get out of this - if there were an Affordable Care Act at that time when he lost his job, they would have had medical insurance. His wife could have gone to the doctors earlier and the cancer detected sooner and perhaps the outcome would have been different. That is not accusing Romney of murder - that is showing why we need healthcare for everyone.
But what is murder really? When these companies like Bain Capital strip another business clean leaving that business in huge debt, peoples lost pensions, peoples jobs and benefits gone, and eventually the business going bankrupt as Bain Capital makes huge profits. And on top of it to ship jobs overseas where again the workers there get very little wages and/or benefits that work in extreme conditions in addition to a polluted environment. These places like Bain Capital are only about making money with no concern of how it will eventually affect other people. Look at all the pollution in China, how much of that pollution has and will kill people? look at the deregulation of the EPA here and how many have or will die from the result of that? How many have and will die from the fracking that is going on now? Who says these companies are not killing people, when everything they are doing can and will make you sick or die from the after effects? And the list goes on.
Mark Halperin is another out of touch Washington insider who is paid well to dispense false equivalences. In this case, his employers, including NBC, need for the Romney train wreck to continue down the tracks a couple of more months so they can soak up their shares of the Citizens United money.
Don't rag on Halperin. He is just doing what he is paid to do. It is hard work to turn a blind eye to the truth, but if anyone can count on Mark Halperin.
Oops, I had to move the comment because it appeared in the wrong place. Don't know why these blogs can't find better software.
This is just another reason to ignore the left. Defending an ad that so blatantly blames Romney for disease, and then deems him callous of a woman's death, just tells us there is no standard of decency in the Obama campaign. The shark has offically been jumped, and there is no reason to believe anything Obama's campaign puts out.
Shooter, he is callous to the poor womans death. His spox told the assembled press that she would have received timely and appropriate healthcare if she had lived in Massachusetts under Romneycare, but Romney has announced that because he wants to be elected President more than anything he is going to repeal Obamacare and all of us people are going to have to suffer.
I know a lot of hardworking business owners who would rather loose an arm that see an employee suffer, but Romney isn't one of them. He is one of those guys who give capitalism a bad name.
Then why the hell are you here, blanks?
Don't come to this site. Ignore us. Because all you are doing is making a right wing ass of yourself.
You know good and damn well that Obama is not blaming Robme for "the disease." And if you don't, you are either just plain dumb or are carrying water for Robme. And guess what? Robme's bucket has alot of holes in it, a fact that you are all too willing to overlook.
People like you are either stupid or willfully ignorant and will vote for an orange because you want a black man out of the White House.
Shooter to make things a little clearer for you. The Ad doesn't blatantly blame Romney for the man's wife's illness. But it does point fingers at him. Because he took over the plant and fired everyone. Cutting the families health insurance out. Thus she couldn't get the treatment she needed and died. Now should the ad blame Romney for the woman's death, no it shouldn't. But like it or not, Romney did play a part in her death. And even his own response from his campaign suggested that the family should have moved to Mass. Because she could have gotten health care because of Romney Care. So him being Callous. Isn't a stretch of the truth. That's just a blatantly obvious fact of his public life.
Please Shooter - do as you say, not as you do. Ignore us. It's fun to point out the serious flaws in your thinkg, but like everything else that's easy, it gets boring before too long. Buh-bye.
Mr. Mitty is here to remind us that the right-wing of this country really is as amoral and obnoxiously bad as they seem despite how hard it is to believe. When you look at history and its outrages and wonder why, think of Mr. Mitty and how insufferably bad he is and you can understand how things can happen.
Our little amoral libertarian can't change a single mind and he knows it. Somewhere along the line he is bitter that he didn't have a say and he couldn't do anything about it. In school and other traditional meeting places, the dumbest kid in the class doesn't have a chance to keep insisting he got the correct answer. Society has natural time, physical, and social conventions for ending discussions. But here even though Mr. Mitty's can't convince anyone, he can continue to act out when he's gotten the wrong answer because those natural restrictions are gone.
I guess the sad thing is that this is the way he spends his time. The government is taking care of Mr. Mitty and yet Mr. Mitty despises it. Somewhere Mr. Mitty has been hurt and he feels wronged, and this is his sad, ineffectual way of lashing out.
as helpfully posted to the MaddowBlog on a number of occasions by Rollo-5302374 (and big thanks to Rollo for tracking this down):
And that is the only reason needed to ignore Shooter.
I realize the websites you go to to tell you what to think have instructed you to be outraged, and that the reason you're supposed to be outraged is that the ad "blames Romney for disease," but, as usual, you are receiving your marching orders from people who think making sense is a weakness.
The ad makes the point that the kind of capitalism Romney practiced and exalts has real consequences for real people. You and Halperin are both just in thrall to the idea that market forces are so deterministic and inexorable that it absolves those who profit from them of any moral responsibility for the consequences of their actions to anyone except their shareholders or investors.
Bain took over this guy's company with mostly borrowed money which they put onto the company's books. It then proceeded to underfund the company's pension fund and health benefits and make "improvements" to its management that increased accidents and reduced productivity. When they finally realized they didn't know jack about running a steel company and had screwed the company up six ways from Sunday, increasing losses 300% in two years, they changed strategies. First they loaded the company up with an insane amount of additional debt, then they used the borrowed money to pay themselves and their investors "dividends" and then theyput the company into bankruptcy where it was dissolved.
The pension obligation was thereby dumped onto the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (a/k/a the U.S. taxpayers) and all other employee benefits, such as retirement health plans, were dissolved, and the company was shut down.
Bain and its investors made $9,000,000 by siphoning borrowed money out of the company and into their own pockets. The bond holders got screwed, the employees lost their jobs and their benefits, got their pensions slashed, the taxpayers got stuck with the cost of paying the difference between the reduced pension benefits and the amount available in the underfunded pension, and the city and state got a hit to their property tax bases.
But like Hymen Roth, Bain made money for its partners, so let us sing paeans of praise to untrammeled capitalism and unregulated the free market. All hail the free market. Yay.
Because according to Shooter and the new, improved GOP, all the bad consequnces of Bain's actions are really just the work of the Mighty Invisible Hand of the Market and thus no mere mortals bear any moral responsibly for the consequences to the workers or, for that matter, the people who, perhaps naively, lent money to a Bain-controlled company in good faith. Indeed, it's reprehensible to suggest that anyone bears any moral responsibility whatsoever for the human cost of Bain's parasitic machinations.
And that's the real problem we have in this country. We've given vast power to people who believe that anything that makes someone, somewhere, money is inherently good and right and moral. People who think economic systems are ordained by God and/or controlled by socioeconomic forces beyond all the control of mortal men and that it's thus immoral or impossible to try to make the economy work for everyone.
People like Shooter and Romney and the vast majority of our Galtian Overlords on Wall Street who think that any attempt to try to make the economy work in a way that benefits more than just the top 1% is actually immoral. Immoral because their economic dogma--infallible and unalterable by any empirical evidence to the contrary--generates and nourishes the conscience-soothing platitude that all such attempts are doomed to backfire and cause even worse consequences for the little people than just letting the Invisible Hand of the Market grind them down to quasi-peonage.
This is just one reason why I haven't read Time Magazine in ten years.
And don't watch Morning Joe (OK, only one of the reasons, but still).
Halperin like some other's on morning joe are nothing but Scarborough lap dog's.If they say anything off que they get hollered at.I ca'nt understand why any of the other show's on MSNBC have him on as a contributor.He's getting to be just another spokesman for Bain Capital and the 1%.
Just another incident where you wonder why, with all the intelligent, good-faith people in the world, the forums with the biggest voice gets handed to the mediocre, cynical, and bad-faith. I honestly have a hard time believing Halperin is so dumb he could come forth with that reasoning. What he has to be doing is assuming it behooves him to come out on the side that is ethically and morally wrong. And that's the sort of person who's been given a Voice in American society. Weep for America.
the more these ads hare-lip the likes of halperin, kessler, and politifact, the happier i am. what better proof could there be of their essential accuracy and more importantly, their effectiveness. no doubt halperin and his ilk long for the days when democrats were afraid to fight.
Whatever you might think of this ad, yesterday after the Romney campaign brought up health care reform, the ad now works perfectly as an issue ad as well. Sometimes people die from lack of health insurance. After health care reform in MA, the unemployed and sick can move to MA. Unless of course Romney becomes president and makes universal coverage impossible by forcing sales of health insurance across state lines, destroying the risk pools. CEO Romney took away this guys health insurance. Governer Romney threw the people in his state a lifeline and the President extended that lifeline to everyone. President Romney wants to cut the President's lifeline and even cut the lifeline he himself threw out.
This is why the Romney campaign continues to do it. They were counting on the press to behave this way. I believe it was part of their strategy. If the press called them out on every single lie, they then go to plan B:
"the entire liberal media is against us", "they're giving Obama a pass", etc.
The MSM has been a crutch for this terrible candidate and his terrible campaign.
It cannot be overstated how the failure of the fourth estate is hurting our democracy.
This is the same guy that called the President of the United States a "dick" into a hot mic. The question should be, "Why is Mark Halperin's opinion still solicited?"
The answer is in your first sentence.
Halperin is to journalism what garbage is to food.
Get ready to get sick. Here's the latest Corporate Media Wisdom from the NYT:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/09/the-2012-cycle-attack-feign-outrage-repeat/?hp
You know, a point that's being missed in all the furor about the ad, too, is that the ad legitimately points to what Romney is promising to do right now. His repeated mantra that he will "repeal/kill dead Obamacare," will mean the suffering of many Americans from the same sequence of lost job/lost insurance events that led to that poor woman's death. So, for the Romney camp to stand around huffing-and-puffing about the ad is absolutely ridiculous and without a shred of credibility. Romney daily assures Americans that if elected, his overreaching priority will be to kick people who have health insurance now by way of the ACA off of it, and to ensure that insurance companies can immediately get back to f*cking people over. (Excuse my French). Romneyshambles is a disgrace. No one with a brain should be letting him or his camp get away with their faux-rage du jour.
Maybe Halperin is just...I don't know...acting like a dick? What a hack.