Where Things Stand

For some reason, I just got an email alert from Adam at Net Right Nation. I know there are people out there who like to get emails from groups that they hate just to have something to mock and point at. My friend Tyler is fond of reading the letters to the editor of the Newark Advocate, which makes me want to bash my brains out with a claw hammer. At any rate, I don’t know how I ended up on the NRN mailing list, but here we are, so let’s see what they have to say!

Here is a must watch video of Missouri Senator Kit Bond discussing the November election results. Not only is his answer stunning, it is very telling of where the conservative movement is today.

Senator Bond was responding to a question about Obama's support for Global Warming when he said, "that's why I campaigned for Sarah Palin and her running mate."

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Friday

Doesn’t seem to be much going on requiring my wholly unique perspective. Torture, the Minnesota election continues to drag on interminably, the Republicans are doing what they do best: obstructing the appointments of people with wholly mainstream views aided and abetted by their fellow traveler’s among the Democrats. I do not understand how a minority, after losing two consecutive election cycles, including a pretty stinging presidential defeat, continues to think that burrowing deeper into the conservative catechism is the way back on top.

But hey, it’s Friday, and you can even speed on the highway.

Learning From Past Mistakes

New RNC Chair Michael Steele did the talk show circuit this morning, and has presented the nation with his new vision for the Republican Party...except that it's the same as the current vision of the Republican Party.

I can't say this astonishes me. But does anyone out there feel like the reason the Republicans were just handed their electoral heads has a lot to do with their "failure to lead," Steele's stated reason?

It seems to me like they did rather too much leading, and most of it in direction I would categorize as "very wrong." No need to learn anything from that NYT map showing you with 5 states still in the Republican column, or the voices even from within the party suggesting you're in danger of becoming a regional rather than a national organization. Haven't you noticed how much your delegation has appreciated being included in governing decisions by President Obama this past week?

Enjoy your time in the wilderness. You might want to start getting comfortable.

More on the Republican Quagmire

The New Republic offers this thorough exploration of the multiple, mutually exclusive, critiques of the Bush administration and efforts to extrapolate lessons for the future of the Republican party.

Probably the best line is the entirety of the third page:

"What part of "overwhelming electoral defeat" does the GOP not understand?"

Then in the NYT, we have a story in which a group of Republicans decide that, “The moderate wing of the Republican Party is dead.”

I am not a member of any political party, but any regular reader of this blog has probably divined my not particularly concealed sympathies for the Left. That said, conservatism does have valuable contributions to make to American political discourse: fiscal restraint, self-reliance, local solutions to local problems, and personal freedom are all the traditional foundations of the conservative movement, at least as I understand it.

People calling for a party grounded on the model of the last 10 years, which so far as I can tell include: tax policies that enrich billionaires, rejection of science and a related unwillingness to acknowledge, let alone confront, a number of global crisis, a desire to cater to a coded "values" agenda, and a rejection of education and nuance at the expense of flag-waving mindless patriotism, may have strong partisans, but cannot command a majority- in short, the vision of the party espoused in the NYT article, seem determined to craft a party that cannot hope to command national office. The article today in which card-holding Republicans overwhelmingly support Palin in 2012 have a lot of ground to cover before we get around to another election, so should be taken with a good sized rock of salt.

While Palin et al lead the Republicans further and further away from electability, the nation suffers from a lack of people espousing the best traditions of conservatism, and producing the tension in policy-making that maintains moderate outcomes. Conservatives of the United States: there is still a place in the public forum for you. In fact, we need you. Let the moose hunters go their own way. They're going to anyway.

Welcome Back, My Friends, to the Show That Never Ends

A Democrat wins a presidential election, and the media begins the usual chorus for governing from the center. How many times do we have to sit through this same old song and dance? Obama doesn’t need to work with Republicans to win the public’s trust if “working with Republicans” means “giving up on a progressive agenda.” He just needs to make sure that the progressive policies he implements work. After the last eight years, it’ll be such a nice change of pace to see government that can walk and chew gum at the same time, I don’t think people will much mind if Republican backbenchers are complaining.

The Hunt for the Illusive Real American

Hilzoy over at the Washington Monthly drops some science on Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. You may have seen the clip of her on Hardball from last night. It’s a pretty thorough fisking of the first term congresswoman, so if you were as disgusted with her comments as I was, you might want to go over and check it out. Can schadenfreude kill you? And if you haven’t seen the clip, it’s worth checking out just to see what lies underneath all those conservative rocks. It’s not pretty.

Even Chain Emails Have Authors

The New York Times has a short profile of the man largely responsible for the anti-Obama emails that you may have had forwarded to you by uncles and cousins this year. His name is Andy Martin, and he sounds like a real piece of work.

In some ways, I feel like it’s unfair to lambaste conservatives for Martin. He’s clearly a man with a lot of psychiatric problems. But the fact of the matter is, when you pick up the rock, these are the kinds of people you find underneath it. I’m sure that Daily Kos and Democratic Underground have more than their fair share of paranoids, schizophrenics and general crazies.

But I’m going to do it anyways.

Martin and this kind of lunacy has a cache and a solid place in the rightwing message machine that simply isn’t comparable with anything going on in progressive politics. Martin himself may be a sadly sick man with too much money and time on his hands, but the people at Fox News and Sean Hannity know what they’re doing when they have him on. Martin is useful for them. They can bemoan and decry Martin later, once he’s not on the show. But they’ve succeeded in doing what they set out: they helped Martin and his ilk disseminate the lies and slander a bit further, they’ve scared another old woman from voting her interest. That’s how it works. If it wasn’t Martin, it’d be another crazy. He just happens to be the one the deadenders need to put enough distance between themselves and the lies they need to get elected.

The Escalating Downhill Slide

Eve Fairbanks has an article in the Washington Post today discussing the developing core of the Republican Party in the house: committed to ideology over practicality, this group of new young movement conservatives prefer to be philosophically consistent rather than getting down to the hard business of compromise and, you know, governing.

It’s been a fair long while since the Republican Party (especially in the House, but with a handful of nutters in the Senate) have been interested in actually running the government. When reality contradicts what they believe (trickle-down economics works, having solid first principles is more important than experience, education or knowledge), they simply ignore reality. The end result of this is a group of people in deep red seats that are committed to their own version of the world, no matter what happens. This is the logical endgame of the Republican Party, who for going on forty years now have believed that if reality contradicts them (in the form, especially, of the media) it’s best to simply ignore and slander it.

Talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity (ironic spell check suggestions: Sanity) and the rest of the Fox News crew have based their whole program on ignoring and dismissing what their “enemies” (and “enemy” here should be read as “people who disagree and/or point out that they’re wrong”) contradict them, they are either to be ignored, marginalized or demonized, whichever is most convenient. This has certainly been a successful tactic up until now and has reached its fullest flower in Sarah Palin. Instead of learning from their legislative defeats in 2006 and what looks like an upcoming electoral slaughterhouse in 2008, these delightful conservative lawmakers are adapating a new version of the Tinkerbell Theory of Electorial Politics: if you lose, it’s not because voters have dismissed your arguments – it’s just that you didn’t lay out your arguments forcefully enough.

All of this is certainly fine with me. The Republican Party’s headlong rush to religious, racist regionalism can only be of benefit to the rest of the Union. I’d like to say it’s been nice knowing you, fellas, but I don’t want to lie.

A Tale of Two (or Three) Plans

It’s incredible to look at the text of the deal that Dodd and Frank hashed out, that was broadly agreed upon, and that apparently John McCain helped scuttle, () and contrast it with the “plans” that House Republicans presented as an alternative. The Democrat plan is not without flaws, I’m sure, but it has most of the things that progressives have been saying it needs to have: homeowner relief, equity stakes for the government, oversight mechanisms, and a handle on the money spigot. This is about as different from the original Paulson plan as it’s possible to get. It was never going to be everything that progressives wanted, but it seems far better than it could have been.

Contrast that with the Republican plans, of which there seem to be two. The first is little more than a joke: a two year suspension in the capital gains tax – despite the fact that the problem is that the assets these mortgages are backing are worth less now than the mortgages themselves. They don’t need to suspend the capital gains tax, because these assets aren’t going to be making any capital gains. The other is slightly less idiotic, and seems to come down to an elaborate, just as expensive plan that avoids more regulation or Congressional oversight.

These Republicans are fundamentally unserious. They’re trapped by rigid, ossified orthodoxies that prevent them from actually engaging the real world on anything other than the most basic, tactical, political level. They aren’t fit to govern and are simply another example of the idea that when you send people who don’t believe government works to run the government, you just get government that doesn’t work.

Is McCain throwing his weight behind them, or is he trapped in a mavericky labyrinth of his own making? My guess is the later. I can’t imagine anyone who seriously expected to be able to compete in the upcoming election to swing from “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” to “We need more regulation!” to a total abandonment of any sort of regulation. It’s entirely possible that McCain is simply this clueless about what’s going on. After all, it takes the kind of interest in detail, patience and willingness to learn that McCain has never possessed to follow this crisis and come up with a reasonable response.