<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" You may have noticed that, with the rise in influence of Senator Professor Warren, and the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, and the organized opposition to the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, some serious ratfcking is being undertaken as a campaign of pushback against this wing of the party and its champions. SPW has been a conspicuous target. First, there was this completely vacant story about her in Tiger Beat On The Potomac, in which she was vaguely charged with something-something hypocrisy regarding trade based on something she did eight years before anyone ever heard of her, and 12 years before she ever ran for anything.  (Buried in the story, of course, was this comment from a trade-policy dude from the late Avignon Presidency: &amp;quot;I really don&amp;#039;t see any connection between her provision of expert advice to the government in Loewen and her position on ISDS in her current capacity as a U.S. senator. The advice she gave in Loewen was in her capacity as an expert on U.S. bankruptcy law. She was not acting as an expert on ISDS.&amp;quot; Oh.) This was followed by a report in the National Review that, as Steve M pointed out yesterday , was merely recycled swill from the 2012 campaign regarding SPW&amp;#039;s real-estate dealings two decades ago. (Really, NR. Warmed-over stuff from Scott Brown&amp;#039;s local fanzine, the Boston Herald? Buckley is spinning even faster.) The more recent analogue to this came during the campaign when Brown went after SPW over her involvement in a bankruptcy case involving Kaiser Aluminum. This worked brilliantly, as did so many things about McDreamy&amp;#039;s campaign, until the people who SPW was alleged to have hosed on the deal kept showing up in Massachusetts to talk about how happy they were with the way things worked out. But she is not alone. Sanders hardly had begun his campaign when a genuinely weird -- and barely semi-literate -- story popped up about an essay he&amp;#039;d written in a Vermont literary magazine in 1972. This, of course, set the flying monkeys aloft almost immediately. (Read the original piece to discover how opposing the Vietnam War was a &amp;quot;radical position&amp;quot; the year Nixon ended it.) Yes, if a Republican candidate had written or said something this it would have been big news. They&amp;#039;re just more likely to have written or said something like this in this century. Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, come on down! But none of this is about anything more than the reaction of the money power in this country to a perceived threat, and the way you know that is not to wade around in the fever swamps of laundered oppo research. The way you know that is because, in more respectable ratfcking circles, they&amp;#039;re more honest about it, and the effort is wholly bipartisan. For an example, let&amp;#039;s drop by Fred Hiatt&amp;#039;s Home Depot For Bad Ideas and meet John Delaney, a Democratic congresscritter from Maryland who is deeply concerned about his party&amp;#039;s turn toward Trotskyism.  But I am worried about where some of the loudest voices in the room could take the Democratic Party.   Stay home. Lay in canned goods. Lock the doors.  Rejecting a trade agreement with Asia, expanding entitlement programs that crowd out other priorities and a desire to relitigate the financial crisis are becoming dominant positions among Democrats. Although these subjects may make for good partisan talking points, they do not provide the building blocks for a positive and bold agenda to create jobs and improve the lives of Americans.  Whereupon Delaney gets positive and bold, stepping off into the wilderness to hunt for unicorns.  First, we should rebuild the United States through a national job-creating infrastructure program that would allow us to invest in transportation, expand our ports and create a new electric grid. Our infrastructure, once the envy of the world, is crumbling before our eyes, hurting Democratic and Republican districts alike. Both parties want to do something about it...  Jesus H. Christ on an earth-mover. No, they don&amp;#039;t. The Republicans have been intransigent on the subject ever since the first fight over the stimulus package in 2009. Do continue.  ... but we need a realistic way to pay for it. The answer is bipartisan tax reform that would free up the trillions of dollars of trapped overseas cash and allocate it to investments in the United States.  Because the commitment of America&amp;#039;s one-percent to improving the roads and bridges of, say, rural Mississippi has been so thoroughgoing over the past three decades. That money comes home and goes right into a hedge fund, dude.  Smart infrastructure investment can create jobs now and into the future, raise overall living standards and improve U.S. competitiveness.   Which is something about which the Scary Democrats never shut up.  Second, we should create ways for the next generation to access education, which is the ultimate equalizer. The solution is to ask high-income Americans to help pay for it, which I believe they would be happy to do if they knew that 100 percent of the new money would be targeted at proven educational strategies with high levels of accountability...  I&amp;#039;m sorry. I can&amp;#039;t even block-quote this without spluttering with laughter at Delaney&amp;#039;s charming faith in the essential good citizenship of the country&amp;#039;s plutocrats. So far, most of the attempts by &amp;quot;high-income&amp;quot; Americans to meddle in public education have been aimed at destroying the very concept of it, and they have been festivals of griftitude besides. Delaney then goes on to propose that we confront the crisis of global climate change through a &amp;quot;market-based solution tied to broad tax reform.&amp;quot; Granted, the U.S. tax code is thick enough that, if you pile up enough copies of it, you could probably keep the ocean out of your den for an hour or so, but I don&amp;#039;t think that&amp;#039;s what Delaney has in mind here. And, of course, he declines to mention that one-half of our existing political system professes not to believe that the fcking crisis even exists. Undaunted, he then comes thundering to his big conclusion, shouting from under the bed.  But instead of being used to voice an agenda that can bring the country together, the party microphone has been hijacked by people more interested in scoring points than in solving problems. They propose expanding Social Security rather than prioritizing serious efforts to preserve the program \u2014 even though it will be unable to provide full benefits as soon as 2032, the Congressional Budget Office has made clear. The only way a large-scale expansion could work is by allocating new revenue away from needed investments in the next generation or by shifting the financial burden to workers or our children.  Look in vain for the phrase &amp;quot;lifting the cap.&amp;quot;  Likewise, as if the global economy will wait for us, protectionists demonize President Obama&amp;#039;s unfinished \u00ADTrans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. A fair trade deal is a crucial step in bolstering the U.S. manufacturing renaissance, boosting U.S. exports and growing our economy. If done right \u2014 something much more likely to happen if the negotiations are directed by this sitting Democratic president \u2014 the agreement could create middle-class jobs and allow the United States to set the rules in Asia. Unfortunately, Democratic recalcitrance is increasing the chance that the deal could be done instead by a Republican president.  That &amp;quot;if&amp;quot; is little more than cutting up a goat to appease the gods.     Lastly, some in our party continue to engage in time-consuming rhetoric attacking banks that has little chance of producing more financial reform and distracts from far more consequential areas of economic risk, such as climate change, chronic underinvestment in the next generation and our broken immigration and housing finance systems.        Oh, good god. What SPW and others are proposing is nothing more than a return to a regulatory regime that worked splendidly for over 60 years. None of the problems that so concern Delaney will be solved if most of the country&amp;#039;s money is tied up in exotic financial instruments that produce nothing, and that leave the economy subject to the kind of boom-and-bust roller-coaster ride from which a few people profit while the rest of us sink. (And perhaps here is where we should be uncivil and note that the five largest contributors to Congressman Delaney&amp;#039;s campaign treasury at the moment include the securities and investment community -- $249,300 -- and commercial banks, who chipped in over 100 large.) There is nothing radical about any of what so frightens Delaney. Most of it is drawn from an era of political consensus that served us all well -- an era, Delaney would do well to remember, with his consuming interest in infrastructure, out of which we got the Interstate Highway System. That, alas, was before we handed the economy of the country over to thieves, and before one of our two political parties became utterly demented. What this multi-pronged counterattack makes plain, however, is that the right people are running a little bit scared in this country at the moment. This is what we used to call democracy.            "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35331/the-pushback-is-getting-nasty/>