Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. Today’s edition is a special UI is traveling edition of your open thread so you’ll have to entertain yourselves. Behave! (Wait – who am I talking to? I know you won’t.)
Digby digs up this gem of Pat Robertson giving marriage advice:
Ladies, just so you know, if your man is stepping out it’s because you’re a bitch and you’re just not attractive enough.
TERRY MEEUWSEN (co-host): Pat, this is from Anne who says, “My husband has always been a flirt and loves to talk with other women he finds attractive. He says he would never cheat on me but his actions are starting to get to me. What should I do?
PAT ROBERTSON: Anne, first thing is you need to make yourself as attractive as possible and don’t hassle him about it. And why is he doing this? Well, he’s doing it because he wants affirmation that he is still a man, that he is attractive — and he gets an affirmation of himself. That means he’s got an inferiority complex that’s coming out. And he’s not gonna cheat on you. He’s just playing.
But you need to not drive him away or start hassling and hounding on him, but make yourself as beautiful as you can, as fun as you can, and say “let’s go out here, let’s go there, let’s go to the other thing.”
Yes, it’s always the woman’s fault. I’m really not sure how to be a proper woman in the conservative world. You can’t look too pretty because then that means that the uncontrolled lusts of childish men will want to attack you. But also don’t not look pretty because then these childish men will find another woman with the proper amount of prettiness.
Michael Tomansky wrote a really interesting piece about liberal disappointment with Obama. Tomansky talks about how liberals have tended to romanticize their own history, including the New Deal. Matt Yglesias picks out a key passage:
From Mike Tomasky’s excellent article on trying to mitigate progressive disgruntlement by understanding the messiness of real history, a slice of the Secret History of the New Deal:
It’s worth noting, for example, that the second act to become law under the New Deal, after the Emergency Banking Act, which was a progressive piece of legislation, was a conservative bill, the Economy Act. It cut salaries of government employees and benefits to veterans, the latter by 15 percent. Arthur Schlesinger, in The Coming of the New Deal, writes that literally an hour after signing the banking act, Roosevelt outlined this bill to congressional leaders, saying the next day and sounding more than a little like some Robert Rubin progenitor had been whispering in his ear: “For three long years, the federal government has been on the road toward bankruptcy.” (And maybe one had: Schlesinger notes that Roosevelt’s budget director, Lewis Douglas, was certainly no Keynesian.) Just imagine Obama having tried something like that, alienating both veterans and AFSCME within a week of taking office. The Economy Act was opposed by many liberals in the House, so FDR turned to conservative Democrats and Republicans, who passed it.
I wonder if FDR had his allies turning on him within months?