Apparently There's a Cosmetics, Toiletries and Fragrance Association
And Bush Supreme Court nominee John Roberts was a lobbyist for it. (Can anyone say Caviar Conservative?)
That's not necessarily a reason to make someone unfit for service on our nation's highest judicial body.
But being an opponent of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is. As a young attorney in the Reagan Justice Department, Roberts supported watering down that landmark piece of Civil Rights legislation by requiring lawsuits brought under it prove intent to discriminate instead of just discriminatory effect. If these efforts were successfull, racial minorities in the US would have to basically find a smoking gun to prevail on claims of their disenfranchisement. Luckily today they don't have to, but unluckily today we just did.
John Roberts is unfit to surve on the Supreme Court of the United States. At best, he is ignorant and insensitive; at worst he's a damn racist.
To adapt an old prhase to modern realities, I guess elephant droppings don't fall too far from the elephant's ass.
That's not necessarily a reason to make someone unfit for service on our nation's highest judicial body.
But being an opponent of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is. As a young attorney in the Reagan Justice Department, Roberts supported watering down that landmark piece of Civil Rights legislation by requiring lawsuits brought under it prove intent to discriminate instead of just discriminatory effect. If these efforts were successfull, racial minorities in the US would have to basically find a smoking gun to prevail on claims of their disenfranchisement. Luckily today they don't have to, but unluckily today we just did.
John Roberts is unfit to surve on the Supreme Court of the United States. At best, he is ignorant and insensitive; at worst he's a damn racist.
To adapt an old prhase to modern realities, I guess elephant droppings don't fall too far from the elephant's ass.
posted by Rich at 5:08 PM
7 Comments:
Hmm... "caviar conservative." That's a good way to describe that miserable failure of a millionare from Connecticut who pretends he's a Texan. We really should jump on that wagon.
Haha, yeah- everytime I hear "limozine liberal" I want to pull my hair out because nothing compares to the selfish elites on the GOP side, espically the current occupiers of the White House. I've been trying to get that phrase into the national discourse for some time now. Has anyone bought caviarconservative.com?
'Course, the force of "limousine liberal" stems from the latent charge of hypocrisy. The idea is that the word "liberal" connotes a redistributionist attitude: steal from (er, sorry, tax) the rich and give to the poor. Thus the contrast, the hypocrisy, the insult: if Ted Kennedy wants to give to the poor, he should start with his money, not mine.
The problem with "caviar conservative" is that there's no analagous charge of hypocrisy in it. Conservatives generally favor letting people dispose of their wealth as they please. Thus, a conservative who spends money on caviar does not contradict his principles in the way that a liberal who owns a limousine does.
Naturally, all of this relies to some extent on caricature. Clearly not all self-identified "liberals" are really redistributionists. And some pols who call themselves "conservative" do advocate psuedo-redistributionist policies. But in general I think the contrast is clear, and your proposed epithet (clever-sounding though it is) less forceful than you would like it to be.
I think the cliche of "limousine liberal" has moved in current discourse (or what passes for it) so far from its original satirical meaning that it's become completely caricature now. Conservatives no longer talk about how liberals like Ted Kennedy are rich, but rather how liberals like John Kerry are effete francophiles. As if conservatives are all the same SUV-driving, baseball-playing, good 'ol boys that Dubya tries to be. It's time for liberals to truly burst the bubble on that myth.
Basically, both parties have their super-rich wings to them, but the republicans have been much more successfull in painting the entire democratic party as solely their wealthy wing- I'm just trying to even the score. While it's true that the republicans' political philosphy is more in line with keeping one's wealth (at least in the short-term), in response to your point, Brian, Ted Kennedy does want to help the poor with his money (by repealing Bush's tax cuts to the rich, i.e. himself), and not raising taxes on you.
Not to go off too tangntially, but one of the biggest misunderstanings in America today is that Bush has cut the taxes of the middle class. Bush has simply cut upper-class income tax and paid for it by 1) forcing states to pay for the things that the feds used to pay for, thus causing property and sales taxes to rise, thus increasing everyone's taxes, 2) wasted more some text money than any democrat and funded that by borrowing money from foreign countries that eventually does have to be paid back, plus interest, and in the case of China with serious geopolitical consequences, and 3) cutting programs that end up saving money in the long run.
Actually if you compare Gore's proposed tax cut to the one Bush enacted, Gore's was much more generous to the middle class. Bush gave a little of the record surplus he inherited from Bill Clinton to the middle class, but most was given back to his uber-wealthy base.
Of course, I don't think he is a hypocrite for doing this, but when observing the right-wing attack lexicon of the dreaded "media elites," "liberal elites," ex cetera, then the duplicity starts to starts to make one's head scratch. In a book I suggest everyone read, the author points out that once he saw a bumper sticker that said "a working person who votes democrat is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders."
I may be rambling a bit, so to sum up my point, Bush has not cut any middle class person's taxes (and this is even more true if you consider the price of gas as a tax, which it basically is except that instead of paying for our military it funds our jihadist enemies), and people who don't like elites should not use that as an excuse to vote for the GOP, because at the very least, they are equal to the dems in that respect.
Oh, boy. I meant no offense originally, and I ought to quit now. But I just can't stop...
Will: I think very few people use or hear the "limousine liberal" term as a measure of masculinity in the way that you describe. I could be wrong on that; I'm certainly open to the idea that the term has different meanings in different political or geographical spheres. To my mind, though, your reading of the term is exactly wrong. It's been said that in America "money is masculinity," and I think that on balance this is largely (if sadly) true. Now, there exist people who malign all wealth and success as unmanly. But those people are idiots, and there aren't that many of them.
Rich: I did get a Bush tax cut, you know. And I am most decidedly not wealthy. So the charge that Bush's tax cuts were exclusively for the wealthy is counterfactual.
Lastly, on the subject of the epithetical use of "liberal elites": this term has a different meaning than the "limousine liberal" tag Will was talking about. Again, I think y'all are mistaken with respect to the way we're using the term. It's not that we think the John Kerrys of the world actually are elites (on account of their money or education or whatever) and we resent them for it. Rather, we're saying that these guys think of themselves as elites, and that this mode of thinking pervades their policy proposals. On this I think we are correct; liberal politics and the "nanny state" are very closely intertwined. Like it or not, much of the liberal agenda has a "trust us, we know better than you" feel about it that a lot of people find very, very irritating.
Now, a case could be made that many social conservatives' attitudes are similarly condescending. On that front I will not defend them, because by no measure am I the president of Dr. Dobson's fan club. But in the way that "elites" is used as an epithet by people with libertarian sensibilities, I think it is accurate.
I yield the last word to the home team...
Ok, good top of the ninth Brian- I guess the best way to convince you that the middle class didn't get a Bush tax cut is to illustrate my personal situation at the time. I'm in school now, but I was a "beneficiary" of Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. I was working as a social worker, getting a middle class income, and I got about 500 dollars more back from the IRS because of the cut. But at the same time, Bush's cuts to mass transit funding forced the cost of the New York subway to increase by 10 dollars a month for the monthly pass, so that subtracts $120, so we're down to $380. Then his shortchanging New York on homeland security money and underfunding No Child Left Behind forced both New York State and New York City to raise their income and sales taxes, as it did in many other states and cities, so that took me down another 100 own to 280. Plus they raised property taxes a lot, which caused rents to rise, and that put me down about another 300 per year, so at this point I've lost 20 dollars overall. And that's not even counting what our generation has to pay on our massive national debt that Bush has run up throuh spending, which is really the important stat as opposed to taxing, because all spending will have to be taxed eventually, but Bush just gets to push it on the next democratic administration so we will get blamed while we are saving the country again. And last I checked, our national debt was running about 33 thou per person. Now not all of that is from Bush, but a good portion of it is- let's say 5,000. So in effect, Bush has raised my taxes by about $5,020- and that's not counting the personal or public economic losses I might suffer if there's another attack on NYC, which Bush's policies have made more likely by not cutting oil consumption, or a war with China, which is also more likely because of their control of our massive debt and competition for oil, among other things. And Bush's policy towards a weak dollar has cost me more when I have been on international travel. And Bush's weakening of environmental regulations might have been resposible for bronchitis I got last year, where the treatment cost me another 60 bucks (there is now way to know if that actually is the case, but studies have shown that air and water pollution regulation actually saves public health money for obvious reasons.)
Now regarding your reference to a "nanny state," I couldn't agree with you more. I think the patriarchal, elite (as you accurately define it in one sense) way of government in the european social model is completely rediculous. Europe, at least the social models of France and Germany, is having zero economic growth and unemployment between 10 and 15 percent. In France, you're not allowed to work more than 35 hours in a week even if you want to and the government takes about 70% of the income in the highest tax bracket. I think that's rediculous, and a terrible way to run society. At the same time, I also don't think Laissez-faire is any way to run society either, because all that does is create economic fluctution that is too great and scares investment away and basically duplicates the dizzying highs of the 1920's and the horrible lows of the 1930's, which have been known to also create political instibility of epic proportions. As with anything, a moderate solution is the best. Tax the rich at 39% and have a middle ground of economic regulation, because that optimizes both economic freedom and infrastructure maintenance and we have decades like the 90's where the economy is free enough to boom and yet education, infrastructure, and the military can all be adequately funded.
And finally, I like to think I'm a libertarian at heart, and every libertarian I know (who don't like democratic policies) also hate Bush. What kind of libertarian goes around opposing a woman's right to chose and putting policies like marriage in the business of the federal government? To say the democrats are anti-libertarian is to say that they want to make their political agenda into law and impose it on the country- and the republicans are exactly the same, which I credit you for acknowleging. The difference is that the democrats just want to take a little bit more money from the people who make so much they won't miss it and put it towards important national goals, while the republicans want to legislate taste. Bill Maher has a funny line in his stand-up routiene where he says something like "on the topic of hairy-ass man-sex, I agree with the conservatives- it's fucking disgusting. But the difference between me and them is that I'm not trying to make my opinion the law of the land." If that's not patriarchal, I don't know what is- it's only the ends of the partiarchism that are different between the two parties, and personally I think that fighting terrorism, educating our kids, and sound stewardship of our economy are more pressing national needs than stopping nasty hairy-ass man-sex.
Finally, when people compain about the government making all our decisions, I think people are forgetting that we live in a democracy- if the government is making decisions, they are usually the decisions that the people want them to make. It's really the same idea as a corproation, with the executives taking the stockholders' money and using it and making decisions to get the stockholders more money. I want intelligent congressmen and senators to make obscure policy decisions that I don't know anything about- that is why we have a government and why we delegate responsibility to it. Basically, so sum it up, I believe government only has a duty to persue important national strategy, and I think the republicans are failing in that duty while they are still taking more of my money to give tax cuts to caviar conservatives- it's really the worst of both worlds, at least in my opinion. If you have any thoughts, I'd be happy to go into extra innings...
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