THE WISDOM OF COLONEL SHERBURN! Twain’s bumptious colonel killed poor Boggs—then described us modern liberals: // link // print // previous // next //

How big are Ryan’s tax cuts/We’ve seen this movie before: Incredibly, your DAILY HOWLER just keeps getting results!

It happened again in the Outlook section of Sunday’s Washington Post. Fortified by our earlier post (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/14/11), Walter Mondale swallowed a snootful and talked some serious smack:

MONDALE (4/17/11): Many have described my 1984 presidential campaign promise to raise taxes as exemplifying the folly of proposing tax hikes during an election. Although the rebounding economy and improving job picture that year probably had more to do with President Ronald Reagan’s reelection than my pledge did, there are certainly political lessons for anyone considering tax increases today. In particular, avoid generalities, and clearly link taxes to addressing concrete national needs.

[…]

I told the truth in 1984. “The American people will have to pay Mr. Reagan’s bills,” I said in my acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. “The budget will be squeezed. Taxes will go up. . . . It must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”

I lost the election, but I won the debate. Reagan ended up increasing taxes in 1984, 1985, 1986 and 1987 to mend the budget and tax systems.

On-line, the headline says this: “As in 1984, we need the courage to raise taxes.” Unfortunately, some of that ancient courage is lacking, proving again that the liberal world has lost the debate about taxes.

If you read Mondale’s entire piece, he discusses raising taxes on upper-end earners only. He doesn’t just “avoid generalities.” He avoids discussing middle-class tax increases, the kind of tax hikes a wave of liberal analysts, including Paul Krugman, have said will be required.

Did Mondale “lose the election, but win the debate?” We don’t mean to criticize Mondale, but we think that’s just wrong. In the days since Mondale told the truth, career liberals and Democrats have utterly failed to construct a vision which can compete with the “drown the government” vision driving the bulk of our public discussions.

Our career liberal leaders have utterly failed—but we rubes still cheer them on. After all, they’re part of our tribe—they’re on our side! Or so we persistently think.

Speaking of taxes, does anybody understand the size of Paul Ryan’s proposed tax cuts? We don’t understand, but we have an excuse:

We read the New York Times.

How big are Ryan’s tax cuts? An array of accounts has appeared in the Times since the Badger State boy with the bedroom eyes unveiled his budget proposal. For starters, here’s what Krugman wrote in last Friday’s column:

KRUGMAN (4/15/11): On Wednesday, as I said, the president called Mr. Ryan's bluff: after offering a spirited (and reassuring) defense of social insurance, he declared, ''There's nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don't think there's anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don't have any clout on Capitol Hill.'' Actually, the Ryan plan calls for $2.9 trillion in tax cuts, but who's counting?

According to Krugman, the Ryan plan calls for $2.9 trillion in tax cuts, presumably over ten years. But this may have surprised the average Times reader. On that very same day, in a front-page piece, reporter Landon Thomas wrote this:

THOMAS (4/15/11): Mr. Ryan, on the other hand, proposes to slash spending by $5.8 trillion but—in contrast to the British approach—would allow most of the spending reductions to be offset by $4.2 trillion in tax cuts, rather than applied to closing the deficit gap. In other words, while Mr. Ryan would lean heavily on spending cuts to close the deficit, he also hopes to spur the sort of supply-side economic growth most often discussed when Ronald Reagan was in the White House.

Thomas reported from London on the British economy, but his account seemed to be taken from other Times dispatches. Four days earlier, Jackie Calmes had offered this in a front-page news report:

CALMES (4/11/11): The Republican plan includes a shrinking of Medicare and Medicaid and trillions of dollars in tax cuts, while sparing defense spending.

[…]

Mr. Ryan said it would cut $6 trillion in the coming decade, though budget analysts questioned some of the claimed savings. The plan would turn Medicare into a voucher program for future generations and slash spending for the need-based Medicaid program and other domestic initiatives, while largely sparing the Pentagon and cutting $4 trillion more in corporate and high-income taxes.

More specifically, Thomas seemed to be using a figure which had appeared in a Times editorial. Unfortunately, the editorial board can’t seem to make up its mind about the size of those cuts. Consider these dueling banjos:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (4/6/11): The plan…envisions lower taxes for the wealthy than even George W. Bush imagined: a permanent extension for his tax cuts, plus large permanent estate-tax cuts, a new business tax cut and a lower top income tax rate for the richest taxpayers.

Compared to current projections, spending on government programs would be cut by $4.3 trillion over 10 years, while tax revenues would go down by $4.2 trillion. So spending would be eviscerated, mainly to make room for continued tax cuts.

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (4/14/11): House Republicans and many of their party's presidential candidates are trying to terminate that promise, [Obama] said, leaving seniors on their own and abandoning 50 million uninsured Americans. They are saying no to rebuilding bridges, sending students to college, to investing in research while giving the rich $1 trillion in tax cuts.

How big are Ryan’s tax cuts? If you’ve been reading our greatest newspaper, you have a wide array of choices from which you can make your selection.

More remarkably, if you read the Washington Post’s news reports and editorials, you may not think that Ryan has proposed tax cuts at all. Consider:

On the Post’s op-ed page, a string of columnists have battered Ryan, sometimes describing the size of his alleged tax cuts. (Dana Milbank, April 6: “The GOP plan reduces the government's revenues by $4 trillion over 10 years because of tax cuts.” E. J. Dionne, April 7: “Note that this $4.3 trillion [in spending cuts] almost exactly matches the $4.2 trillion he proposes in tax cuts.”) But in the Post’s reporting, in its editorials, the notion that Ryan has offered tax cuts has tended to appear in brilliant disguise when it has appeared at all. On April 6, the editors were willing to say only this: “Mr. Ryan proposes a long-overdue overhaul of the tax code. But he balks at the notion…that additional revenue is needed to underwrite the needs of an aging society.” That pretty much makes it sound like Ryan’s plan is revenue-neutral. In that same day’s front-page news report, Lori Montgomery took a similar tack. She did note that Ryan’s plan would “offer sharply lower tax rates to corporations and the wealthy.” But she explained the whole shebang like this:

MONTGOMERY (4/6/11): Ryan also proposes to overhaul the tax code, lowering the top rate for individuals and corporations from 35 percent to 25 percent, while eliminating an array of loopholes and deductions that his budget does not identify. GOP aides said they would leave the details to the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, which is crafting a tax reform plan. But that effort is not intended to help reduce the deficit.

“Not intended to help reduce the deficit?” Again, this makes it sound like the tax “overhaul” might just be revenue neutral.

In the Post’s reporting and editorials, we can find few statements that Ryan has proposed “tax cuts” at all—and no attempts to quantify the size of any such cuts. On Saturday, Paul Kane did report that the House GOP plan would “lower taxes on individuals and corporations” (click here). He later referred to the plan’s “tax cuts for corporations and other tax reforms”—but he made no attempt to account for the size of such cuts. Post reporting and editorials have tended to trumpet the size of the Ryan spending cuts while downplaying talk of tax cuts.

How big are Ryan’s tax cuts? If you read the Times, you’ve been offered a wide array of accounts. If you read the Post, you may not be sure that the sleepy-eyed solon has proposed any tax cuts at all.

We’ve seen this horrible movie before: Truly gruesome things can occur when the harlequins known as America’s “press corps” spill from their tiny VW bug, attempting to discuss the size of Republican tax cut proposals. Consider what happened in August 2000 when the gang tried to discuss Candidate Bush’s proposed tax cuts.

Bush’s plan had been released in December 1999. (Cokie Roberts bungled it instantly, with George Stephanopoulos covering for her.) By the spring of 2000, the plan had been thoroughly “scored;” the Bush and Gore campaigns agreed on the numbers, though they tended to present the numbers in different ways. (The Bush campaign was trying to downplay the size of the cuts.) But after the Democratic convention, Candidate Gore began attacking the cuts, and reporters began attempting to describe their size. At the Washington Post alone, an array of contradictory accounts appeared. Ceci Connolly changed her account about as often as normal folk change their socks:

CONNOLLY (8/22/00): $1.6 trillion over nine years

CONNOLLY (8/23/00): $1.3 trillion (presumably, over ten years)

CONNOLLY (8/24): $1.3 trillion over nine years

Contradictory accounts appeared at the New York Times, sometimes on the very same page of the very same paper. And the AP filed an array of accounts, including this claim by reporter Sandra Sobieraj: “Bush wants to reduce income tax rates to a tune of $1 trillion over 10 years.” At the time, we thought that account was just flat wrong (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 9/8/00). Today, we can see that it was technically accurate but grossly misleading. For whatever reason, Sobieraj’s account advanced the Bush’s campaign’s attempt to downplay the size of the cuts.

Bush would cut taxes by $1 trillion over ten years—no, by $1.6 trillion over nine! If you weren’t confused by Labor Day, you simply weren’t paying attention.

On October 3, Bush and Gore staged their first debate; the evening would change world history. A great deal of the argument turned on the wisdom of those proposed tax cuts. Indignantly, Bush accused Gore of using “fuzzy math” in his description of various budget proposals by Bush. “Look, this is a man who's got great numbers,” Bush indignantly said at one point. “He talks about numbers. I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet but he invented the calculator. (Audience laughter) It's fuzzy math! It's scaring—trying to scare people in the voting booth.” Bush’s claims were false, sometimes blatantly so; Gore’s numbers were perfectly accurate. But with very few exceptions, the press corps refused to say such things; they stuck to their pre-approved standard novel in which Gore was the world’s biggest liar.

The corps’ biggest stars rolled over and died. One night after this crucial debate, Ted Koppel spilled from a Volkswagen limousine to say this, on Larry King Live. King had just played the tape of the same Bush statement we’ve quoted:

KING (10/4/00): OK. Were you impressed with this “fuzzy math, top 1 percent, 1.3 trillion, 1.9 trillion” bit?

KOPPEL: You know, honestly, it turns my brains to mush. I can't pretend for a minute that I'm really able to follow the argument of the debates. Parts of it, yes. Parts of it, I haven't a clue what they're talking about.

It had been five months since the plan has been thoroughly “scored.” Koppel still had no idea.

In the Times, Bob Herbert trashed Gore for sighing at the debate, claiming Bush had done his best in discussing his budget proposals. On Sunday, November 5, Maureen Dowd wrote her final column of the campaign. She pictured Gore before a mirror, singing “I Feel Pretty.”

Two days later, Americans voted. In March 2003, the U.S. entered Iraq.

We’ve seen this horrible movie before. By the way: Why is Koppel still allowed out in public? To make Dowd seem less inane?

One final piece of this noxious history: Five days after that great debate, Margaret Carlson told Don Imus why the press corps was clowning so. It was “fun” trashing Gore, Margaret said. It was “greatly entertaining.”

How did George Bush reach the White House? To listen in as Margaret explains, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 1/3/03.

Special report: Mark Twain’s ineffectual mob!

PART 4—THE WISDOM OF COLONEL SHERBURN (permalink): We liberals! Let’s face it—as a group, we’re just this side of hopeless.

We’ve gotten our brains beaten out in the messaging wars of the last thirty years. Roughly speaking, this corresponds to the time in which the world of wealth and power began fighting back against the losses they had sustained in the New Deal and World War II.

With great clarity, Paul Krugman described this history in his 2007 book, The Conscience of a Liberal. Hacker and Pierson described the same pushback in last year’s book, Winner-Take-All Politics.

But do you see liberals discussing those books? Of course not! Books are hard! Yesterday, though, in the Washington Post Outlook section, you did see this call to action from “activist Sally Kohn.”

Kohn’s piece consumed the top half of Outlook’s front page. Kohn is a liberal activist who believes the following:

KOHN (4/17/11): It’s as though Democrats think we’re at a polite tea party, while Republicans are fighting an ideological war. The GOP’s budget plan for 2012 would essentially dismantle Medicaid and Medicare, end social supports for poor families and give tax breaks to business and the wealthy. Realistically, Obama seems to understand that, at least in the short term, liberals have lost control of the conversation and have to play by the rules that the extreme right has made up. That means Democrats have to do something regarding the deficit and spending.

Kohn believes that liberals have lost control of the conversation “at least in the short term.” She seems to believe that Democrats “have to do something regarding the deficit” for this reason alone. Why then did even the liberal Paul Krugman say this in Friday’s New York Times?

“My own view is that while the spending controls on Medicare [Obama] proposed are exactly the right way to go, he's probably expecting too much payoff in the near term. And over the longer run, I believe that we'll need modestly higher taxes on the middle class as well as the rich to pay for the kind of society we want.”

Why does Krugman favor spending controls on Medicare and modestly higher taxes on the middle class? Does he favor those things because “at least in the short term, liberals have lost control of the conversation and have to play by the rules that the extreme right has made up?” To all appearances, that’s what activist Sally Kohn thinks. But then, Kohn’s piece is littered with the type of foolishness with which we liberals flatter ourselves. She starts with a list of liberal laments—Obama bailed on the public option!—then turns to a standard account of why we have failed through the years:

KOHN: What is the problem here? Is it a lack of leadership from the White House, a failure to out-mobilize the tea party or not enough long-term investment from liberal donors?

The real problem isn’t a liberal weakness. It’s something liberals have proudly seen as a strength—our deep-seated dedication to tolerance.

We liberals are simply too tolerant! This resembles the joke about the candidate who is asked to describe his own character flaws. “My biggest problem is that I’m sometimes too honest,” the pol forthrightly says.

Kohn goes on to say that our “dedication to tolerance” has turned us into a gang of “suckers.” But she never so much as considers the possibility that Obama bailed on the public option because he couldn’t get it passed. (For the record, we don’t know why he bailed.) And soon, she’s citing the kinds of brain research phrenologists and racial cleansers have applauded down through the ages. This is completely foolish:

KOHN: Social science research has long dissected the differences between liberals and conservatives. Liberals supposedly have better sex, but conservatives are happier. Liberals are more creative; conservatives more trustworthy. And, since the 1930s, political psychologists have argued that liberals are more tolerant. Specifically, those who hold liberal political views are more likely to be open-minded, flexible and interested in new ideas and experiences, while those who hold conservative political views are more likely to be closed-minded, conformist and resistant to change. As recently as 2008, New York University political psychologist John Jost and his colleagues confirmed statistically significant personality differences connected to political leanings. Brain-imaging studies have even suggested that conservative brains are hard-wired for fear, while the part of the brain that tolerates uncertainty is bigger in liberal heads.

To Kohn, size matters, at least when it comes to the amygdala, “the part of the brain that tolerates uncertainty!”

Question: Do you think Kohn has the first clue on earth concerning these “social science research” issues? Almost surely, she does not. (Most recently, the amygdala research tracks to British actor Colin Firth, who said, “I took this on as a fairly frivolous exercise: I just decided to find out what was biologically wrong with people who don't agree with me.” The resulting study was conducted on 90 British students.) But so what? From a very important media platform, Kohn dithers about who has better sex. (We do!) Inevitably, she presents an overall view which largely favors her own gloried tribe, which is “more likely to be open-minded, flexible and interested in new ideas and experiences.” By the way: Do you really think that conservatives are more trustworthy? Absent a very detailed study of the research, why would anyone with an ounce of sense sign up for that belief?

So it goes when a liberal activist get her chance, on a very large stage, to argue for her own tribe.

Kohn, of course, is only one person. But over the past decade or so, we liberals have persistently vouched for our own superior smarts and goodness, even as we get eaten alive in the political wars. We have dragged our numbskulls out on the stage to discuss conservatives’ limbic brain structure; in our comment sections, we persistently rage about the obvious dumbness of those who are kicking our keisters in the public debate. We have swallowed such patent nonsense, even at our high amateur levels.

Have we liberals “lost control of the conversation in the short term?” Please! We lost control of the conversation long ago, in virtually every major area. Sadly, we haven’t turned out to be smart enough—or honest enough—to see how our failure works. Read this Digby post from last month if you want to understand your side’s thirty-year failure to construct winning responses to the other side’s disinformation campaigns.

Digby’s post concerned the status of the Social Security trust fund. She reprinted an accurate but technical explanation from Paul Krugman, the liberal world’s MVP—but even at this very late date, Digby doesn’t see how useless Krugman’s (accurate) explanation is within the public debate. Digby is good at spotting the racists—but she still doesn’t understand why “people are confused about Social Security.”

That doesn’t make Digby a bad person—far from it. It does help explain why your side has lost so many debates—has given so much political ground in the past thirty years. The other side had good clear disinformation. Despite our obvious well-known brilliance, we still don’t have good clear replies.

Krugman has been our side’s MVP. But for the most part, our liberal “career leaders” are part of the press and political Money Culture—and they endlessly act like it. We amateurs haven’t been able to see the way we get played in the process. We stumble, fumble, flounder and fail—and we keep following the lead of very weak leaders. We also keep insulting the citizens whose help we will need to turn the tide against plutocrat power.

For these and other reasons, we often find ourselves thinking about Mark Twain’s ineffectual mob.

Mark Twain’s ineffectual mob assembles itself in chapter 21 of Huckleberry Finn, a well-known American novel. (For the full text of what follows, just click here.) In an Arkansas river town, a loud but harmless fellow named Boggs has arrived from the hinterland “for his little old monthly drunk.” (How harmless is Boggs? “I wisht old Boggs 'd threaten me, 'cuz then I'd know I warn't gwyne to die for a thousan' year,” one wag jests as Boggs roars up the street.) On this occasion, Boggs declares that he’s come to town to kill Colonel Sherburn, by whom Boggs says he’s been “swindled.” Calmly, Colonel Sherburn tells Boggs that he must stop his insults by 1 P.M. When Boggs absent-mindedly fails to comply, the colonel shoots him dead as Boggs’ daughter looks on. (A nastified variant of this tale occurs in Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider.)

And that’s where the mob comes in! After the town entertains itself by reciting the tale and viewing the body, a fiery lynch mob assembles itself, apparently inspired by a fellow named Buck Harkness. The mob swarms up toward Sherburn's house; once there, they visit their fury on the colonel’s fence. “Then there was a racket of ripping and tearing and smashing, and down she goes, and the front wall of the crowd begins to roll in like a wave,” Huck explains. But uh-oh! “Just then Sherburn steps out on to the roof of his little front porch, with a double-barrel gun in his hand, and takes his stand, perfectly ca'm and deliberate, not saying a word.”

What follows is one of the most comical portraits ever set to parchment. Colonel Sherburn mocks the mob, informing them they’re a gang of cowards. And sure enough! Soon, the mob turns tail and runs, fleeing back toward town:

TWAIN: Just then Sherburn steps out on to the roof of his little front porch, with a double-barrel gun in his hand, and takes his stand, perfectly ca'm and deliberate, not saying a word. The racket stopped, and the wave sucked back.

Sherburn never said a word—just stood there, looking down. The stillness was awful creepy and uncomfortable. Sherburn run his eye slow along the crowd; and wherever it struck the people tried a little to out-gaze him, but they couldn't; they dropped their eyes and looked sneaky. Then pretty soon Sherburn sort of laughed; not the pleasant kind, but the kind that makes you feel like when you are eating bread that's got sand in it.

Then he says, slow and scornful:

"The idea of YOU lynching anybody! It's amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a MAN! Because you're brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a MAN? Why, a MAN'S safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind—as long as it's daytime and you're not behind him.”

You’ll have to admit—it’s hard not to think of the way we liberals flatter ourselves on our fiery blogs, calling the roll of the nation’s racists and saying how stupid the other side is. But let’s get back to the colonel’s remarks. As it turns out, Sherburn has lived in the north and the south. He knows how people are:

TWAIN (continuing directly): "Do I know you? I know you clear through was born and raised in the South, and I've lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man's a coward. In the North he lets anybody walk over him that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it. In the South one man all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men in the daytime, and robbed the lot. Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people—whereas you're just AS brave, and no braver. Why don't your juries hang murderers? Because they're afraid the man's friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark—and it's just what they WOULD do.

Again, it’s hard not to think of the way our blogs and cable shows tell us we’re brave moral giants—brave moral giants who are very smart. But the colonel wasn’t finished yet—and by now, the mob was nervous:

TWAIN (continuing directly): "So they always acquit; and then a MAN goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back and lynches the rascal. Your mistake is, that you didn't bring a man with you; that's one mistake, and the other is that you didn't come in the dark and fetch your masks. You brought PART of a man—Buck Harkness, there—and if you hadn't had him to start you, you'd a taken it out in blowing.

"You didn't want to come. The average man don't like trouble and danger. YOU don't like trouble and danger. But if only HALF a man—like Buck Harkness, there—shouts 'Lynch him! lynch him!' you're afraid to back down—afraid you'll be found out to be what you are—COWARDS—and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves on to that half-a-man's coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you're going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is—a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness. Now the thing for YOU to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching's going to be done it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they'll bring their masks, and fetch a MAN along. Now LEAVE—and take your half-a-man with you"—tossing his gun up across his left arm and cocking it when he says this.

The crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all apart, and went tearing off every which way, and Buck Harkness he heeled it after them, looking tolerable cheap. I could a stayed if I wanted to, but I didn't want to.

“I could a stayed if I wanted to?” In short, Huck “broke all apart and went tearing off” too, though he knew how to put a good face on it.

One hundred years later, Harper Lee created a similar scene, in which a single man talked down a whole mob. (Helped by the innocence of his adorable daughter.) But in Lee’s scene, that lone man was Atticus Finch, the most moral white man in the whole town. And the lynch mob was wrong in every way—wrong on the facts; wrong in their motives; wrong in their preferred procedure. Lee’s famous book has helped millions of people think through the meaning of race in America. That said, Twain’s scene is a bit more complex and perhaps a bit more evocative. In his case, the mob is basically right on the merits of the case—and the lone man who talks them down has just killed a defenseless man, before his daughter, for no better reason than that he needed killin’.

Clicking around on line this weekend, we think we learned this:

As Twain originally wrote that scene, Colonel Sherburn’s friends had to help him escape from town. Twain then put the book aside; at some point he added a note suggesting that Sherburn should end up getting lynched. But after three years, he returned to the book, creating the scene as it now exists. Just a guess: It may have taken a while for Twain to see that in this case, as in most such matters, a humorist is better off letting his scenes go with the joke. Three years later, he removed the traces of his own moral disapprobation and gave us a wondrously comical scene in which the standard lynch mob gets turned on its ear—a scene which lets us ponder the ways real people actually act.

In the very next paragraph, Huck is suddenly at the circus, where people from the same town show a different side of their character. They suspend disbelief in a different way; soon, Huck describes a scene in which “everybody clapped their hands and went just about wild.” (With “everybody just a-howling with pleasure and astonishment.”) Even here, Huck misunderstands what is happening several times. But he does display his good moral sense. Huck feels pity for the ringmaster, mistakenly thinking that he has been humiliated.

Despite his earlier misconduct, Colonel Sherburn had good sound advice for that ineffectual mob. “Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people,” he told them—“whereas you're just AS brave, and no braver.” That same advice might just as well be handed to us liberals. We’ve been tooken about a million times over the course of the past thirty years; we’ve been tooken by our career intellectual leaders and by our own failures to comprehend. But have you ever seen even one liberal leader ask Frank Rich why he pimped Candidate Bush the way he did, trashing Candidate Gore in the process? And do you recall what you brave liberal leaders did when they saw Keith Olbermann “spout[ing] misogynist garbage?”

Of course! They broke all apart and went tearing off every which way! See THE DAILY HOWLER, 1/28/11, to recall how brave your side is.

In our view, the liberal world would be well advised to learn from the colonel’s vast knowledge. We are no better than all the rest—and in the long run, we will need a bunch of of their votes to affect real change in this country. We liberals might actually get some things done if we’d stop believing in our own greatness. If we’d kick the keisters of people like Kohn, who can’t stop playing phrenologist with everyone else’s noggins.

We’ve had our keisters kicked for forty years—and we still think we’re the cocks of the walk! So smart! So moral! So tolerant! So open-minded, flexible and interested in new ideas and experiences!

Mark Twain knew all about us! Tomorrow, a brand-new special report concerning our vast racial greatness.

Starting tomorrow: Ed Schultz’s well-hidden hour