Media Declares GOP Winners in Stimulus Debate

Declaring GOP winner in "stimulus message war," media oblivious to their cohort's role in skewing debate
Many in the media have proclaimed the GOP the winner in the "stimulus message war" over President Obama and congressional Democrats. But they often do so with no self-reflection or acknowledgment of their cohort's role in advancing the Republicans' side of the debate through the credulous repetition of falsehoods and other Republican talking points.

Jeanne Cummings, the Politico's chief lobbying and money correspondent, wrote that Obama is "losing [the] stimulus message war." She is far from alone:

* In a February 4 news analysis in The Los Angeles Times, Peter Wallsten asserted that "[a] surprisingly unified GOP has taken control of the debate" about the stimulus plan.
* The Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Weisman and Naftali Bendavid referenced in a February 6 article "Republicans' remarkable success during the past two weeks ... shaping a public image of the bill as pork-laden and ineffective."
* Newsweek senior editor Michael Hirsh wrote in a February 4 piece that Obama "has allowed the GOP to turn the haggling over the stimulus package into a decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending." Hirsh continued: "Team Obama and his party are losing the debate" about the stimulus plan.
* On the February 5 broadcast of MSNBC's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Newsweek senior White House correspondent Richard Wolffe claimed the Democrats' "messaging has not worked." Wolffe also stated of the administration: "What they haven't done is say, hey, it's not just about spending. It's about mitigating, softening the blow of this recession for regular, working Americans. That's the bit they've failed on. They've let it be hijacked by all this extraneous spending programs."
* On the February 5 edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, congressional correspondent Jessica Yellin asserted that "official Washington has decided Obama is losing the PR war on the stimulus." She went on to air a clip of Stuart Rothenberg, editor of The Rothenberg Political Report, asserting, "The Republicans have successfully defined the stimulus bill as too much pork."

Yet in declaring the Republicans the victors of the stimulus debate, and in some cases attributing that victory to Republican achievements or Democratic failures, none of the above media figures acknowledged the role their colleagues played in promoting the GOP's often-skewed representations of the bill.

Indeed, Media Matters for America has documented numerous examples of media echoing, repeating, or advancing variations of Republican talking points

Calling Out the Conservative Lies on Stimulus

Calling Out the Conservative Lies on Stimulus
Conservative Lie #1: It's not the economy their protecting. It's the ideology.

Republicans in Congress will claim that they are working to improve the stimulus plan in order to bolster the economy. This claim is false. The truth is that they are grasping at straws in a time when most Americans clearly see the need for government intervention. They know that a successful economic recovery plan that comes from the government will undermine public endorsement of their ideology. They don't want this to happen.

Their tactic is not simply "politics as usual," a code phrase for the meme that government cannot be trusted (conservative ideology again!). It is part of what my former colleague George Lakoff and I call cognitive policy. By cognitive policy we mean strategies for getting high-level ideas-values, frames and principles-to dominate public discourse and shape public understanding so that future material policies will be natural and win public support with ease. Conservatives want Americans to think like they do. And they're willing to let cities drown, as we saw with Katrina, to demonstrate their idea that government doesn't work.

Conservative Lie #2: Government isn't bad. Conservative government is bad.

They'll claim that "government is the problem" and point to failures that happened on their watch. Of course, this sleight-of-hand maneuver only works if people don't remember our history. The truth is that conservatives intend for government to fail. And they'll do whatever it takes to insure that it does. An example George and I laid out in a past article, Why Voters Aren't Motivated by a Laundry List of Positions on Issues, was the covert policy of undermining public education so that it could be privatized:

For example, take No Child Left Behind. Its stated purpose is to improve public education, but its covert purpose has been to undermine it so that public schools can be replaced by charter schools, private schools, and religious schools. This would increase conservative control over what is taught and further inculcate conservative ideas. It would institute a two-tier educational system to maintain and reproduce the two-tier economic system in the country, so that children of the elite can get an elite education subsidized by the public through vouchers, while children of the uneducated poor remain educated just enough to continue to provide a source of cheap unskilled or low-skilled labor. This agenda is hidden, but it is justified and advanced via cognitive policy.

This is where progressives have our work cut out for us. Not only do we need to promote policies that reflect our values. Unlike conservatives, we have the additional challenge of making sure government programs work! We have to be sure that quality jobs are created that deliver a living wage. We have to provide for the health security of citizens to keep our communities safe from the ravages of disease. We have to nurture the minds of our children to be sure they are prepared for the challenges that lay ahead. And we have to transcend outdated relationships with Old World powers, like those in the Middle East, by generating local, clean energy in our own cities and towns.

Conservative Lie #3: They're not against the stimulus plan. They're against the function of government itself.

The narrow reporting on current Congressional politicking would lead one to believe that conservatives simply want a different bill to be passed. By now it should be clear that this just isn't the case. The truth is that conservatives want to be sure Obama and his progressive colleagues at all levels of government are not able to do their jobs. Imagine what would happen if Obama succeeded at delivering money to state and city officials to build mass transit, generate renewable energy, and provide affordable health care to the populace. This would be the fulfillment of government's moral mission - to protect and empower our citizens.

Conservatives will do everything they can to stand in the way of this progress. They are doing more than obstructing a vital infusion of resources to save our economy. That would be sin enough to drive them from public office if their agenda were widely know. The truth is much more disturbing. They are obstructing the capacity of people to come together and solve our problems through the one mechanism that makes this possible - a functioning government.

Christian Women and Domestic Violence

Christian Women and Domestic Violence
What is a good enough reason for divorce? Well, according to Rick Warren’s Saddleback church, divorce is only permitted in cases of adultery or abandonment -- as these are the only cases permitted in the Bible -- and never for abuse.

As teaching pastor Tom Holladay explains, spousal abuse should be dealt with by temporary separation and church marriage counseling designed to bring about reconciliation between the couple. But to qualify for that separation, your spouse must be in the “habit of beating you regularly,” and not be simply someone who “grabbed you once.”

“How many beatings would have to take place in order to qualify as regularly?” asks Jocelyn Andersen, a Christian domestic violence survivor and advocate, author of the 2007 book Woman Submit! Christians and Domestic Violence, an indictment of church teachings of wifely submission and male headship. As she sees it, by convincing women that leaving their relationships is not an option, these teachings have laid the ground for a domestic violence epidemic within the church.

Andersen writes from personal experience, describing an episode of being held hostage by her husband -- an associate pastor in their Kansas Baptist church -- for close to twenty hours after he’d nearly fractured her skull. Andersen was raised in the Southern Baptist Convention, where she heard an unremitting message of “submission, submission, submission.” She saw this continual focus reflected in her ex-husband’s denunciations, while he detained her, of women who wanted to “rule over men.” Though Andersen was rescued by her church’s pastor, who had his assistant pastor arrested himself, she says other churchwomen aren’t so lucky, particularly when churches tell couples to attend joint marriage counseling under lay ministry leaders with no specific training for abuse survivors, who instead offer an unswerving prescription of submission and headship, often telling women to learn to submit “better.”

Pastor Holladay takes care in the taped sessions to explain that enduring abuse is not a part of a wife’s call to submit to her husband -- a principle that Warren and Saddleback espouse. “There’s nowhere in the Bible that says it’s an attitude of submission to let someone abuse you,” he says in the audio clips. Nonetheless, Andersen finds it telling that the issue of submission always arises in church discussions of domestic violence, “subtly reminding women of their duty to maintain a submissive attitude toward their husbands.”

That this occurs even in Warren’s church, which is derided by more conservative Southern Baptists for its purported cultural liberalism. Andersen sees this as proof of the centrality of male authority throughout mainstream evangelical culture, “which can still be maintained in a controlled separation but is seriously threatened when a woman is given leeway of any kind, for whatever reason, in ceasing to submit to an abusive husband by divorcing him.”

There are more blatant examples of excusing abusive male authority among stricter proponents of complementarianism and submission theology. In June 2007, professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Bruce Ware told a Texas church that women often bring abuse on themselves by refusing to submit. And Debi Pearl, half of a husband-and-wife fundamentalist child-training ministry as well as author of the bestselling submission manual, Created to Be His Help Meet, writes that submission is so essential to God’s plan that it must be followed even to the point of allowing abuse. “When God puts you in subjection to a man whom he knows is going to cause you to suffer,” she writes, “it is with the understanding that you are obeying God by enduring the wrongful suffering.”