Further Adventures of Pot and Kettle

While we’re on the subject of the Wall Street Journal editorial page disposing of its last shreds of credibility . . . .

James Taranto, the Journal’s most venomous columnist, specializes in lambasting the mainstream media for ostensible liberal bias, all while conveniently ignoring that he is himself an employee of the most mainstream — #1 in circulation, ahead of USA Today and the New York Times — newspaper in the country. He pretends he’s caught the AP, the commie outfit that supplies wire articles to papers in the reddest states of Middle America, revealing its anti-Romney sentiments:

The Associated Press’s Steve Peoples seems to think he’s caught Mitt Romney in another gaffe:

Romney is promising to reduce taxes on middle-income Americans.

But how does he define “middle-income”? The Republican presidential nominee defined it as income of $200,000 to $250,000 a year.

Romney commented during an interview broadcast Friday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

The Census Bureau reported this week that the median household income–the midpoint for the nation–is just over $50,000.

Taranto claims that, because the AP didn’t quote Romney directly — the candidate said “middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less” — the wire service “misrepresents the facts in order to score a partisan point against Romney.”

Romney was in fact attempting to defend his tax plan, which he has claimed (implausibly) does not raise taxes on the middle class. The problem is, the study by Martin Feldstein Romney cites to support this contention demonstrates that the only way to cut tax rates for the rich without hitting the middle class is to define “middle class” as anyone earning less than $100,000. For those making between $100,000 and $250,000, the loss of deductions and credits would lead to massive tax hikes. In that context, Romney’s remark is less an out-of-touch elitist assumption than an awkward error forced by his mathematically impossible tax plan. In the debate over taxes, $250,000 is defined by both Republicans and Democrats as the dividing line between middle class and upper income. Bizarrely, Taranto also faults reporter Steve Peoples thus:

Oh, and how does President Obama answer the question? Peoples again: “President Barack Obama has defined ‘middle class’ as income up to $250,000 a year.”

The problem with the AP is that it points out that, if Romney is an elitist, the president is, too? Hypocrisy would be painting Obama as a champion of the middle class while poking Romney for holding an identical position. The line quoted by Taranto is in fact the opposite of hypocrisy.

So is the AP attempting to “score a partisan point” by reporting the candidate’s own words? If so, the Wall Street Journal itself is in the tank for Obama. It seems Taranto doesn’t read his own paper (or perhaps he considers Journal owner Rupert Murdoch just another anti-colonial foreigner). The Journal’s Washington Wire blog posts, “Romney: Middle-Income Reaches to $250,000.”

For Mr. Romney, whose net worth could be as much as $250 million, it was a potentially awkward moment, one that could underscore perceptions among some that he’s a bit out of touch with average families’ kitchen-table concerns.

Median household income in the U.S. is just over $50,000 these days.

That’s an even more direct indictment of Romney than the AP article. Can we expect Monday’s Taranto column to blast his employer for engaging in class warfare?

Ironically, it’s a liberal blogger, not the conservative paper of record, who comes to Romney’s defense. New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait — who, if he merited inclusion in a Taranto column, would certainly be demeaned as “someone named Jon Chait” — nips the latest Mitt-the-elitist narrative in the bud. Chait’s post begins with a characteristic barb, but he goes on to offer a fairly lengthy defense of the Republican candidate:

Let’s stop this meme before it gets started. Mitt Romney did not say that a salary between $200,000 and $250,000 a year counts as “middle income.” I suppose you could say he asserted that if you used the truth standards of the Romney campaign — which allow you to clip phrases to change their meanings or even to present a person quoting something he disagrees with as his own position — but those aren’t truth standards I’d care to live by. What Romney actually said, in his interview with George Stephanopolous, was that he would not raise taxes on people earning below that level.

Oh, those biased lefties.

Of course, it would be a bit uncomfortable for Taranto to accuse the Journal of not being conservative enough — sort of like the far right jumping on Karl Rove, of all people, for insufficient ideological purity when it was revealed that he had urged the Komen Foundation to restore funding to Planned Parenthood. (As RedState’s Eric Erickson tweeted, “Ever had concerns about Karl Rove? Add this to the list.”) Maybe Taranto should take a break from media criticism and just stick to his usual tirades against Muslims, teachers and feminists. You know, all those people who — along with the AP, apparently — are bringing about the decline of Western civilization.

Last Thoughts Before Health Care Götterdämmerung

Update: My own hasty (and as a disclaimer, possibly inaccurate!) take on what just happened. The scenario that everyone thought least likely — #4 on the Post’s list of 4 Possibilities, I think — in fact came to pass. Scotusblog: “Essentially, a majority of the Court has accepted the Administration’s backup argument that, as Roberts put it, “the mandate can be regarded as establishing a condition — not owning health insurance — that triggers a tax — the required payment to IRS.” Actually, this was the Administration’s second backup argument: first argument was Commerce Clause, second was Necessary and Proper Clause, and third was as a tax. The third argument won.”

Individual mandate stands, but as a tax, not an exercise of the Commerce Clause. Medicaid expansion allowed but cannot be required; state can reject the new funds without putting the rest of their Medicaid dollars at risk. At first glance, it looks like the majority (with Roberts, not Kennedy, as the swing vote) bought the broccoli argument but found a way around it. For all the debate, this does seem to be “judicial restraint” — it certainly doesn’t seem like the opinion of an activist court bent on undoing legislation, as liberals have claimed recently and conservatives have claimed historically. The decision seems to place major limits on federal power, but in the matter directly at hand — the Affordable Care Act — those limits are superseded by the fact that, no matter what the administration said in public about the mandate not being a tax, the mandate is indeed a tax. Takeaway: conservatives won on federal power, liberals won the battle but perhaps not the war. After the Doomsday atmosphere of the past few months, I’m even OK with half a battle at this point. Or maybe the correct metaphor is “half a loaf.” Half a loaf is better than opening up the wrapper and finding green mold growing all over your sandwich bread.

The 193-page ruling itself, which I’ll probably muddle through intermittently throughout the day (not exactly single-sitting Nora Roberts reading, this one) can be found here.

Original Post:

Well, it’s T-5 hours. We’re about one double-feature (may I suggest Titanic and Armageddon?) away from the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act. On the assumption that writing anything at all about health care will be intolerable for the next few days — heck, just reading anything from the conservative end of the spectrum will almost certainly be insufferable — I thought I’d take the chance to highlight a recent post by New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who manages to distill the differences between Democrats and Republicans into a few paragraphs. It’s partisan, to be sure, but not any more so than the “death panel” lies that Sarah Palin continues to insist — in 2012! — have merit. While I don’t believe conservatives harbor some evil, deep-seated desire to throw Granny off a cliff, I do think there is an unbridgeable gap between those who see health care as a human right and those who regard it as just another aspect of the amoral free market. Chait writes that “there has not been any open moral debate over . . . whether access to basic medical care ought to be considered a right or something that is earned.” He cites several news stories from the last few days about the human impact of the President’s health care reform — and the dismal, perhaps devastating, impact of its potential repeal. The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis wrote one of the better stories about the real people affected by the reforms, and countless other (mostly left-leaning) outlets have observed that even if SCOTUS limits itself to invalidating the individual mandate, 10 to 20 million fewer people will have access to health insurance than under Obama’s plan; if the court tosses out the Medicaid expansion as well, that number balloons to 30 million. Chait writes that “[m]aybe these stories sound like cheap emotional manipulation. They are actually a clarifying tool to cut through the rhetorical fog surrounding the health-care debate and define the question in the most precise terms.”

But I should let Chait’s post speak for itself:

Opponents of the law have endlessly invoked “socialism.” Nothing in the Affordable Care Act or any part of President Obama’s challenges the basic dynamics of market capitalism. All sides accept that some of us should continue to enjoy vastly greater comforts and pleasures than others. If you don’t work as hard as Mitt Romney has, or were born less smart, or to worse parents, or enjoyed worse schools, or invested your skills in an industry that collapsed, or suffered any other misfortune, then you will be punished for this. Your television may be low-definition, or you might not be able to heat or cool your home as comfortably as you would like; you may clothe your children in discarded garments from the Salvation Army.

This is not in dispute. What is being disputed is whether the punishments to the losers in the market system should include, in addition to these other things, a denial of access to non-emergency medical treatment. The Republican position is that it should. They may not want a woman to have to suffer an untreated broken ankle for lack of affordable treatment. Likewise, I don’t want people to be denied nice televisions or other luxuries. I just don’t think high-definition television or nice clothing are goods that society owes to one and all. That is how Republicans think about health care.

This is why it’s vital to bring yourself face-to face with the implications of mass uninsurance — not as emotional manipulation, but to force you to decide what forms of material deprivation ought to be morally acceptable. This question has become, at least at the moment, the primary philosophical divide between the parties. Democrats will confine the unfortunate to many forms of deprivation, but not deprivation of basic medical care. Republicans will. The GOP is the only mainstream political party in the advanced world to hold this stance.

The maddening thing is that Republicans refuse to advocate the position openly. The more ideologically stringent ones couch their belief in euphemisms, like describing health care as a matter of “personal responsibility.” But even such glancing defenses are too straightforward for most Republican leaders. Instead they simply rail against the specifics of Obamacare and promise to “replace” it, without committing themselves to an alternative path to universal coverage. It is to maintain this pretense of wanting some different solution that John Boehner warns Republicans to hide the unadulterated joy they will feel if the Supreme Court does their work for them.

The maintenance of mass lack of access to medical care is their cause. That is why the Republicans never offered an alternative universal-health-care plan and why the Paul Ryan–authored budget they have embraced repeals Obama’s coverage subsidies and throws millions more off their Medicaid, without any replacement.

Their reason for failing to defend their actual principles is obvious enough: That tens of millions of Americans deservedly lack a right to basic medical treatment is a politically difficult proposition. Thus, they oppose Obamacare without defending the indefensible conditions they actually favor. Their tactic of adding vague gestures toward unspecified future reforms has been so successful that news reports almost uniformly describe the Republican health-care stance as yet-to-be-determined, rather than an outright defense of maintaining health care as an earned privilege rather than a right.

Chait has a few more paragraphs on the political and logical reasoning behind the GOP’s opposition to health care, but in the end he is angry that conservatives are able to dodge the moral implications of their position. They squawk about the “murder” of millions of “unborn children” (an oxymoron if I ever heard one), yet they can’t muster outrage at a system in which real, live children are kicked off Medicaid (because that’s what happens when you eviscerate and block-grant the program) or denied coverage based on pre-existing conditions. Chait concludes with the observation that “the Republican politicians, the conservative pundits and philosophers, are all perfectly happy at the prospect that they can win politically without making the case for what they genuinely believe.”

So, now that the clock has ticked down to T-minus-4-hours, I’ll leave you with this tweet from the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent: “So any chance we can include a mention of the uninsured in our ‘winners and losers’ stories on SCOTUS and Obamacare tomorrow?”

I hope so. And who knows — maybe we (i.e. liberals) will be pleasantly surprised. Stranger things have happened, I suppose, though it’s hard to recall many off the top of my head. A dash of black humor: Perhaps the best recommendation comes in the classic exhortation, “My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.” Of course, given that the Supreme Court will hand down its ruling around 7:30 a.m. PST, a better prescription might be for a little Lyle and a lot of Valium.