A New Big Lie

I have written about what I called The Big Lie several times (see here, here, and here). The Big Lie I wrote about in 2011 concerned the financial crisis and the attempt by conservatives to blame it on the government "forcing" financial institutions to lend to unworthy borrowers. It was a lie because no coercion was needed. GSEs, banks, and private mortgage brokers wrote a massive number of unsound sub-prime loans, Wall Street bundled them and sold them as mortgage bonds, and the ratings agencies gave them phony AAA ratings all because they they made a lot--a whole lot--of money doing it and nearly destroyed the financial system as a result. The crisis was caused by private greed and incompetence, not government policy.

Conservatives have to lie about this because it undercuts one of the essential raison d'etres of conservatism, which is the unsullied virtue of private institutions operating under capitalist principles free from government regulation. The financial crisis of 2008/2009 offers a direct contradiction of this conservative catechism.

In recent years a new big lie has emerged. It goes something like this: Obama and a Democratic Congress rammed through Obamacare in a purely partisan fashion that eschewed bipartisan cooperation. This has been one of the primary attacks against Obamacare from the hard Right, but interestingly it has also been a constant theme espoused by more moderate elements in attempting to explain why they opposed the recent attempt of the GOP to repeal and replace Obamacare with only GOP votes.

This view is based on the fact that Obamacare was passed in the Senate using reconciliation with only Democratic votes. However, the process that led to this was strikingly different from what we saw with recent GOP efforts to repeal and replace the ACA. As Glenn Kessler points out in a Washington Post fact checking column:

Republicans have skipped the lengthy, open process of hearings and markups of legislation that characterized the Democrats’ march to passage of the ACA. Instead, they moved directly to floor votes. Moreover, Democrats at first tried to enlist some Republican support, while Republicans have not reached out to Democrats.

The part of the ACA legislative history that Republicans unanimously ignore is that Max Baucus, then chairman of the Senate Finance committee, worked diligently to try and gain the support of Olympia Snowe for the bill (Snowe voted for the bill in committee and later against the bill on the floor during the final vote). There was a serious and sustained effort to pass at least a minimally bipartisan bill. Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress did not want to pass a health care bill with only Democratic votes. The fact is that there was no GOP support for Obamacare not because Democrats wanted to ram through a partisan bill, but because Republicans had decided in advance to withhold cooperation on any major Obama initiative. This scorched earth policy of noncooperation was hatched even before Obama was inaugurated.

Comparing THIS process with the recent GOP votes on Obamacare repeal and replace is absurd. The Democrats tried to obtain GOP support and failed because the word had gone out that they were to obstruct major Obama initiatives, such as the stimulus and health care reform. Given this, the ONLY reason that Obamacare passed the Senate using reconciliation was that Scott Walker won Ted Kennedy's seat after he died of brain cancer and the Democrats lost their 60th vote. Reconciliation was a desperate last-minute fallback position after attempts at bipartisan cooperation failed. (It is worth noting that the major changes that Obamacare underwent during it path through Congress moved it closer to--not further from--the GOP position. In particular, the public option and an expansion of Medicare to those 55 and older were dropped.) Contrast this with the GOP efforts on repeal and replace. Reconciliation with a purely partisan bill was the ONLY option ever tried. It was the first choice (and so far only choice) of the Republican Congress. It wasn't forced on them. It was their preference.

Anatomy of a Bad Movie

Actually, the title of this blog post is somewhat misleading. Perhaps insufferable movie would be better. Or maybe, pretentious. Or perhaps self-indulgent. Or maybe incomprehensible.

I was one of the unfortunates this weekend who shelled out 9 bucks to see Mother!. It stars Jennifer Lawrence, whose last three non-franchise X-Men or Hunger Games films* have flopped I am counting Mother! in this list. I have never been so sure that a film would die at the box office.

There are a couple of things that are interesting about Mother! One of these is how out of touch movie critics can sometimes be. I refuse to believe that the 69% Rotten Tomatoes score or the 75% Metacritc rating is based on anything other than technical prowess or sheer audacity of the film-maker. Mother's! CinemaScore (a score that rates the responses of audiences) is a quite rare F. Movie goers are generally forgiving about the films they've seen. Not with Mother! I understand completely. Many critics have compared Mother! to Rosemary's Baby and another Roman Polanski film The Tenant. This libels these films. Rosemary's Baby is a classic 1968 thriller in which Mia Farrow's character Rosemary gradually comes to learn that her husband and neighbors are in league with Mephistopheles, who also turns out to be the real father of her unborn child--a fact that is not revealed until the shocking ending. The Tenant, which at least is a little reminiscent of Mother!, concerns a Parisian tenant of an undistinguished apartment building who starts witnessing increasingly bizarre events unfold in his building. In this film the ending reveals that the tenant was hallucinating all along, because he is crazy.

The thing is that both of these films tell comprehensible stories. The Tenant does not seem comprehensible for much of its running time, but all is explained in the end. Not so with Mother! SPOILER ALERT! Mother!'s ending does nothing to explain the events that occur during the film beyond revealing that, whatever they were, they were part of a cycle of events that have apparently repeated over and over. The cause of these events, their meaning, or even their physical possibility is never broached. The only real similarity to Rosemary's Baby is that the female lead gives birth near the end of the film, and the father is definitely holding something back from his wife. However, in the case of Mother! I challenge anyone to reveal just what that is. Perhaps a better comparison would be Groundhog Day, but not really. (I'll ignore the religious symbolism in Mother! because it is not particularly coherent or clearly suggestive of Satanism.)

The other aspect of this film that struck me is how dishonest its marketing has been to the public. The trailer suggests that it is perhaps a weird family-based comedy, something along the lines of the 1981 Belushi/Ackroyd film Neighbors. I haven't quite decided what Mother! is, but whatever it is, it is not a comedy, at least not intentionally.

* Mother!, Passengers, and Joy