Cato’s David Boaz asks penetrating questions.
Congress Failed to….
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It is a “failure” for Congressional leadership, in the sense that they would be failing to achieve their ends.
It is sad the Congress’s failures are citizens’ successes.
Boaz is being naive. The media have a “possibly unconscious bias toward government action”?!? Come on. I take it he hasn’t seen Lawrence O’Donnell’s interview of Peter Schiff, or any episode of “The West Wing.”
The basic thing that I don’t get is that Medicare is a reasonably well run program. It’s much more cost effective than private insurance, and that’s without wholesale bargaining power.
Does all this argue that we should get rid of Medicare? What program would replace it?
Ooh… The headline to this post was a big missed opportunity. I would have preferred “Congress Fail.”
Am I missing something, or is Howard Kurtz as much a citizen as David Boaz? Ya – I’m pretty sure he is. Look, Boaz (like Kurtz) has an idea of certain “ends of Congress”, which if they don’t achieve he would consider a “failure” – free trade, for example. Howard Kurtz has other “ends of Congress” he’s interseted in that if they don’t achieve he would consider a “failure”.
Neither of them are saying “if Congressmen don’t get what they want it’s a failure”.
Now, why does Howard Kurtz seem to have his idea of “success” and “failure” more in line with Congress than David Boaz? Probably because there are more voters that think like Kurtz than that think like Boaz. But Kurtz is no more enthralled to Congress than Boaz is for that. It’s the same with the accusation of Obama-worship. Consider the possibility a lot of people are happy not because they buy into everything he says by virtue of him saying it – rather, they like him so much because he seems to buy into everything we’re saying, and everything we’ve been saying for years.
It’s fine for Boaz to say “for many of us, that [a failure of the bill] would be a success for health care”. That statement is true enough. We all have different opinions. But it doesn’t follow that Kurtz’s decision to call it a failure is any more of a “bias” than Boaz.
Imagine a trade liberalization that failed in Congress. Wouldn’t Boaz – wouldn’t almost all of us – call that a “failure”. Does that mean we all worship the ground that Congress walks on?
Of course it doesn’t.
No Disingenuous Kuehn, I don’t think you’re missing anything, you’re just being your usual self and disingenuously trying to twist the point Boaz makes.
But don’t bother going back to read it, I’ll quote it for you:
David Boaz,
“Just a few minutes ago on the washingtonpost.com homepage, there was an example of one of my pet peeves about bias — possibly unconscious bias — in the way the major media cover issues. A homepage headline read “Price of Failure on Health Care,” and the Howard Kurtz article itself is titled “The Price of Failure.” Kurtz explores what would happen if “health care reform [goes] down in flames.”
So what does he mean by “Failure on Health Care”? He means President Obama not getting the sweeping new government programs that he seeks. But to many of us Post readers, that would actually be “Success on Health Care.” It would mean that American health care would not get worse under the burden of government regulations and restrictions.”
As you can see, Boaz made the point about media bias, and everything else he wrote in that piece justified his conclusion that media has an agenda and that agenda is support of socialist government.
As all of us can see the point Boaz makes is that there is media bias in their presentation of things, he says “maybe unconscious bias” but I maintain it is very conscious….the MSM knows exactly what it is doing by writing a headline like this “Price of failure on health care.” The MSM knows quite well it is presenting the issue in a manner to create, in the reading public, the idea that Obama not getting his way is a failure to healthcare, presented in that way the vast unwashed ignorant (socialist or socialist sympathizers) of our land will clamor for “success” as it is interpreted by the MSM, which is Obama and his ilk having their way with America.
Like Boaz, I see media bias in the way they present things, and my own conclusion goes back to the JFK years. It is primarily why the American public, that great unwashed, ignorant, unthinking, mass does not get excited about the hypocrisy of direct contradictions in the public life of America.
Direct contradictions: Black people who practice exclusionary tactics in names or memberships of organizations are simple, “Claiming their heritage”, where whites are merely racist. Think Black Mrs. America, Black Entertainer of the Year, Black Athlete of the Year, hate crime legislation that seems to only apply in one direction, etc. etc. the list is endless. The MSM is very culpable in the creation and maintenance of this distortion. “Homophobic” instead of “Homodisgustia” used to describe straight people’s aversion to queers. “Starwars” instead of Strategic Space Initiative to describe the developing of a defense shield against missile attack. “Concerned citizens” to describe leftwing mobs disrupting meetings or events; “unamerican” “Stupid” “Redneck” mob to describe conservatives who disrupt meetings. The examples are endless but all point back to the MSM willingness to adopt, use, and perpetuate any demeaning term used by the left to describe actions or beliefs of we who oppose the left.
I think, Disingenuous Kuehn, that you know this as well, and your only presence here on this thread is to attempt to muddy the waters, again.
Yes, that’s what Boaz was trying to say. My point is simply that what Kurtz defines as a “failure” or a “success” is based on Kurtz’s understanding of what “failure” or “success” entails, just like when Boaz uses those words.
Boaz takes the fact that Kurtz and the many in Congress agree on what constitutes “success” and leaps to the conclusion that Kurtz applauds “government programs” in general.
Save yourself the trouble of typing next time, vidyohs. I understood Boaz quite easily. I’m just saying I disagree with him. I think he confuses two objective people disagreeing on something with one person being biased and the other not. It’s really unfortunate that he can’t just see the situation as being that they’re both unbiased, they’re both objective, neither are enthralled to government, and they disagree.
Yes you say you understand and then demonstrate you still don’t.
Boaz did not “try to say it”, he said it, and very well. Boaz was not talking about Kurtz’z beliefs, he was talking about the knee-jerk reaction of the MSM, to automatically label as failures any action government attempts, but can not get done. That, DK, is the simple point, which you will still attempt to twist, I know.
Are you really naive enough, DK, to believe that Kurtz writes his own headlines? Very unlikely. Kurtz wrote the article, the editor(s) wrote the headline, that’s the way it typically works and in this case I bet it was as well.
My apologies for the lack of clarity. I know you’re a stickler for that. By “try to say” I meant “tried to justify”, which I’m simply arguing he did a poor job at.
Nobody defines failure as “any action government attempts, but can not get done”. It’s an absurd claim on his part. I know he’s claiming it. I know he is saying it. I’m still saying it’s a poor argument.
As for that second to last paragraph – I really hope you’re not under the impression the left is the only one that uses demeaning terms to isolate and a attack people.
I hate hearing all these criticisms coming form people like Pelosi, etc. But let’s be honest: it comes from both sides, it’s all around unfortunate, and honestly it comes from libertarians too who accuse people who disagree with them of being socialists or fascists.
I agree with you that the “willingness to adopt, use, and perpetuate any demeaning term” – the sad fact is it goes way deeper and wider than the left. If ONLY it were just the left. Then it would be easier to call them out on it and silence that tendancy.
Demeaning terms to describe political opponents are no longer the exclusive property of the left, to be certain. Conservatives began to fight back, finally in the early 1990s, because they got tired of being targets and being nice guys, and trying to hold an honest honorable intellectual debate with what amounted to close-minded emotional children.
Go back and look at the Schiff interview(?) in one of the previous threads, watch it again and ask which of the two there is the mature one and which the emotional fool out of control. Left or right, DK. It is now and always has been the favorite tactic of the left to shout down opposition.
For the life of me I can not understand why people like aren’t aware they are walking into a possible ambush and make agreements before hand to level the playing field. If I had been Schiff, I would have stood up, slapped the table hard, and told that asshole that it was obvious that this was no interview and that he could preach his bias to an empty chair, and then I would have walked out. At least the people would know they were dealing with a man and not another political tool.
Oh wow – you think it just started in the 1990s? That’s rich. I thought you had mountains of experience to instruct me with. Is that really as far back as you would date it?
Try “ever since there were politicians of either the right or the left”.
As for Schiff – he does keep his cool, but he plays the same demeaning game that the rest of them do.
Daniel, headlines are usually created by someone other than the authors of articles.
In fact, headline creators often only make a brief perusal of the article which they a charged with titling.
Of course. Does that change the underlying argument? Boaz himself refers to Kurtz personally, even though I’m sure he knows Kurtz didn’t title it either.
The point is that just because Kurtz or even Washington Post editors disagree with Boaz and agree with many Congressmen in this particular case, that doesn’t mean they define “success” as “Congress getting what it wants”.
Think of it this way – Boaz declares that a he thinks a success would be the failure of the bill. However, if the bill fails then (since they’re passing health reform on budget reconciliation rules apparently) obviously a majority of Congressemen agree it should fail. That means that it’s BOAZ and not Kurtz that agrees with Congress. Does that mean that Boaz think that whatever Congress wants is right, because he agreed with the majority of Congress?
As I said above – of course it doesn’t mean that.
Boaz concludes the article with this parenthetical remark:
(Kurtz’s article actually focuses on the political consequences to Obama of not passing his signature issue, and I have no quarrel with the article. But the headlines convey the sense that it would be a “failure” for Congress not to pass a government health-care plan.)
Emphasis mine.
Right – but I still think he misinterprets it. They don’t convey that sense – he infers it. Wrongly. Well, wrongly if you take the entire Boaz response into account – the instinct that they define as a success what Congress considers a success is what he’s got wrong.
Boaz and vids are right of course, DK’s protestations notwithstanding, but I think that it might be better to look at the entire headline rather than just the word “failure.” The headline Boaz reacted to was:
“Price of Failure on Health Care”
Of course headlines are abbreviations meant to be eye-catching, but the article was not about “Health Care”, but about democratically sponsored and presidentially endorsed health care legislation. If I were I headline writer I could boil that down into something more accurate than “Health Care.” Here is my admittedly amateurish attempt at an UNBIASED headline:
“Price of Failure of Socialized Medicine”
OK Daniel, call ME biased here, but in my mind keeping the words “Price of Failure” juxtaposed with “Socialized Medicine” balances the biases in the way that a double negative works in the common parlance.
Of course the words “Socialized Medicine” could just as easily to my thinking be replaced in this approach with the following:
1) “Hillary Care II”
2) “ObamaCare”
3) “Placating Pelosi”
Etc., etc.
:>)
3) Replace “Health Care” with “Pelosi
“OK Daniel, call ME biased here, but in my mind keeping the words “Price of Failure” juxtaposed with “Socialized Medicine” balances the biases in the way that a double negative works in the common parlance.”
I’m the one saying that no one is biased, that objective differences aren’t the same as “bias”. Ugh… I hate when this sort of thing descends into semantics. I’m just saying give Boaz, Kurtz, and Post editors the benefit of the doubt that they’re independent thinkers
“I’m just saying give Boaz, Kurtz, and Post editors the benefit of the doubt that they’re independent thinkers
”
Boaz we don’t have to give the benefit of doubt to, his performance is testimony to his bona-fides.
Kurtz and the Post editors, no. They have shown their loyalty over the years and it is knee jerk to the leftwing ideology, no thinking just reaction.
Much like yourself Disingenuous Kuehn, you try so hard to present yourself a middle of the roader, and we all recognize the road you’re in the middle of, runs right through the heart of the socialist church.