A Righteous Smackdown

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

Revenge is a dish best served cold or at least sarcastically as Richard Kluger hands the execrable Richard Brookhiser his head here. My favorite part? This:

It was an honor to be so subtly awakened from my self-deception by Mr. Brookhiser, who has honed his own skills by laboring for 30 years on the staff of National Review, a beacon of insightful commentary as well as fair and balanced judgment. Thanks, too, to your staff for selecting him. As we say out here in Berkeley, that iniquitous den of bluest liberalism, have a nice day.

Ouch!

Adventures In Wingnuttery

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

Let me be clear. I really can't stand Charles Krauthammer, but my heart goes out to him for the fact that he is confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life due to a diving accident. I couldn't stand Ronald Reagan, but I feel for him and his family for enduring the ravages of Alzheimer's disease. I detested Michael Kelly, but I feel for his survivors for losing someone they loved so young.

That being said, one can only wonder what sort of twisted, demented, scabrous soul would refer to Max Cleland as "Stumpy," simply because they disagreed with his politics.

I wish this person would call Cleland that to his face and perhaps in front of his own (the demented one's) children. One wonders what limits of common decency some people avoid putting on themselves.

To Fight For The Right Without Question Or Pause

[litbrit says Good Morning!]

Ah, Monday fun.  I can't imagine how Max Blumenthal of The Nation was able to get himself and his cameraman into the CPAC to-do this weekend, but they managed to secure some excellent footage, including a little smackdown of Ann Coulter and a meet-'n-greet with Flipper, the anti-Romney dolphin. The pièce de résistance, though, was Blumenthal approaching Michelle Malkin and asking her to autograph a black-and-white photograph--one showing dozens of Japanese Americans standing behind a tall, barbed-wire fence  in an internment camp--along with her notorious book, In Defense of Internment.  Malkin bristles, becomes unhinged--saying she was "all for honest, intellectual debate" and had published an errata page afterwards--and then, when asked if she's admitting she'd made mistakes, says Yes, I made a lot of errors, and storms off into the crowd, abandoning her Hot Air booth and ignoring questions about whether she'd learned anything journalistically.  It's interesting that her blog post describes the incident somewhat differently:

Two punks from The Nation with a camera stopped by my book signing to ambush me about In Defense of Internment. Have they bothered to read the book? No. I look forward to their butchering of my comments and the predictable unhinged reaction.

Heh heh. Blumenthal clearly introduces himself, but is referred to as a punk who hasn't read her book (I'm uncertain how she'd know what he has and hasn't read).  And of course, there's no mention of that heart-wrenching photograph.  But the film clearly shows that the only butchering going on is Malkin's time-honored treatment of the, er, facts.

Perhaps she'll issue another erratum.

John McCain, Just Another Politician (Part 2 in an Unending Series)

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Sometimes life is just good to you. As if on cue, responding to our discussion of the numerous flip-flops he'll make to win the Republican nomination, John McCain traveled to Iowa and said that ethanol was "worthy of another look" (via The Carpetbagger Report). Over the past two weeks, between the reader comments and idle pondering, here are some new issues that would make life difficult for McCain:

• Arizona has a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage. Do you support or oppose this initiative? (Via Neil)
• Should gay men and women be allowed to serve openly in the military?
• Should Donald Rumsfeld resign?

Add new McCain Wedge Issues in the comments.

Republicans Are Fun!

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Michelle Malkin occasionally plays a triage-surgeon role among right-wing bloggers -- when infamous Republicans are so heavily damaged that it's not worth expending any resources to save their reputations, she publicly declares that it's time to give them up.  It happened with Michael Brown and Jack Abramoff, and the latest embarrassment to be left dying on the battlefield is Ben Domenech. 

Decisions like that can earn you enemies among the friends of the fallen, and now there are no less than three diaries on the RedState recommended list bashing Malkin for giving up on Ben, who was long a beloved figure in the RedState community.  As someone who savors internecine warfare on the right, I like the title "Michelle Malkin: Dead to Me", and the diary it links to is pretty nice too.  It's not nearly as great as RedState was in the Harriet Miers days (How can you top a comment that says "Bush is a gutless, abortionist liar. I spit on him"?) but you take what you can get. 

What's the Point of Unparalleled Corruption?

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

This list of Duke Cunningham's offenses (and it's far from complete) just boggles my mind.  It appears that Duke kept on seeing things he wanted, and asking defense contractor buddies to buy them for him.  A Chevy Suburban.  A used Rolls-Royce.  A boat.  And then there's the scheme to have millions funneled to him through above- and below-market real estate transactions.  He even had a menu for how much you'd have to pay him to get a certain amount in contracts.  (Buying the boat got you $16 million in contracts.)  But it's the little things that really strike me.  I picked a random page and found Cunningham getting a guy to buy something called a Laser Shot Shooting Simulator for his office.  It cost a few thousand dollars. 

Corruption on this level is sort of beyond me.  It can't just be that he wanted to score the most points in the money game -- lots of the things he got don't have that much resale value.  Did Cunningham really want all this stuff for its own sake?  Did he get off on being powerful enough to make people buy these things for him?  Did he have some kind of Bond-villian plan to assemble all this stuff into a gigantic robot and use it to take over the world? 

The Democrats must not allow a biography gap

By Lance Mannion.

Accidents will happen, but as any Freudian will tell you, there are accidents, and then there are self-destructive moments when you unconsciously conspire with Fate, circumstance, a few beers, and a shot gun to reveal the whole of your twisted inner psyche to the world as if seized by a heavenly desire to stand on the Salem scaffold, confess it all, and show the assembled congregation the great big scarlet A on your chest.

A for Asshole.

Dick Cheney appears to have had one of those accidents.  Over the last week everything rotten, seamy, dangerous, and threatening in his character seems to have summed itself up in one perfect, symbolic story.   The fable of his life has been written and you'd think that from here on out, wherever he goes, he will be held in the universal contempt he's so determinedly earned.  But probably not.  I think he may get away with it.

The story is just too good a story.

,As I said, everything rotten about Cheney has been on display all week.  His arrogance, his hypocrisy, his innate dishonesty, his sense of entitlement, his swaggering certainty that the laws as written do not apply to him, he can obey them to whatever degree he feels like, and the police as his personal flunkeys will bow and scrape and follow his orders.  His carelessness about others, his placing of his self-regard and reputation above another man's life.  The circumstances that set up the accident show up the material corruption of the man.  Canned hunts are the most childish, wasteful, and brutal way for a spoiled rich man to indulge himself.  My god, if you can't think of a better method for throwing away your money, then just keep it in the vault and go down and count it in the dark every night, at least that's a form of avarice that pays homage to the virtue of thrift.

It's all perfect, in the way perfect stories are perfect.  Chekhov couldn't have written one more revealing, although he came spookily close.

But that's the trouble.  People love good stories and they react to the true ones with the same excitement and sympathy with which we react to the made up ones.   We love stories for the way they entertain us, but we also love them for the lessons we learn from them, and the best stories all teach the same thing, that human beings are flawed and weak and deserve understanding and pity.  They encourage tolerance and foregiveness.

The story of the shooting shows up Dick Cheney as a rotten human being.  But it shows him as a human being.  He's easier to hate as an abstraction.

We can despise someone and sympathize with him.

I don't know what will come of all this.  I think that those of us to whom Cheney is a clear-cut villain might very well wind up as frustrated as the Clinton haters who were sure that Monica would be the end of Bill.  The Lewinsky Scandal was another great story---I'm still surprised there's been no good novel written about it yet.---and Monica and Bill turned out to be sympathetic characters.  Ken Starr made a convincing villain.

I don't know if Cheney will be saved by the story that should damn him, but this has me thinking about one of the problems Democrats have.  Republicans these days seem to make better stories.

I don't mean that they are better at telling stories, which they are, as many a blogger and pundit has pointed out.

I mean that their lives make for better stories.

Not because they're better people.  Just the opposite.  But flawed, weak, sinful, and vice-ridden people are more interesting characters.

I'll have to expand on this idea later.

For now, to put it simply, look at the comparative biographies of George Bush and John Kerry.

George Bush's biography makes a great story---with a terrible moral.  It's still a fascinating story, full of chills, thrills, and suspense---How much more harm can the man do?

But after his days leading the Vietnam Vets against the War, when he settled down to his career as a lawyer and politician, John Kerry's biography makes...

A great resume.

Cross-posted at my place.

 

Confused Republicans and Condi Rice

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Polls consistently show that you can get double-digit percentages of Republicans to endorse Condi Rice for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination.  However, she usually does worse than other Republicans in head-to-head matchups against Democrats.  It's an interesting phenomenon, not so much for 2008 primary reasons (Condi's chances of getting the nomination would be very low even if she were running) but because it lets you analyze some Republicans' attitudes towards race, gender, and politics. 

Suppose you -- like a number of white Republicans today -- think that racism and sexism pretty much ended in the 1960s.  Any remaining racism and sexism holding back blacks and women, you think, are outweighed by the benefits of racial/gender solidarity within supposedly oppressed groups and the diversity-babble of white liberals.  You'll probably end up thinking that a black female Republican would be the most electable candidate ever.  You'll fantasize about how you could win the identity-politics obsessed black vote, and a lot of women, for the next couple decades, by having the first black and female president carry the GOP flag.

As it turns out, there is plenty of racism and sexism out there.  I don't think it's quite enough to prevent any possible black candidate from winning a Republican primary.  You get examples on lower levels like Lynn Swann in Pennsylvania, Michael Steele in Maryland, and JC Watts a while ago in Oklahoma.  In particular, if Republicans see a highly placed black candidate who blames poor black people for their own poverty and has no real interest in helping them, most of them will respond favorably, and the electability crowd will cancel out the most intense racists.  But making white Republicans more comfortable in their racism is very important.  A black person who is willing to express negative opinions about blacks makes Republicans more comfortable with holding those negative opinions.  It's comforting be able to say, "I think blacks are mostly lazy and violent and stupid, but that doesn't make me racist -- a black person thinks so too!"  Not being stupid, black people will line up to vote against black candidates who spend their time doing this.  But Republican electability theorists don't count on that. 

While I'm on the Condi topic, there's another big blind spot here.  The major Bush Administration policy initiative that she's most associated with is the Iraq War.  If you think that things are eventually going to turn out well in Iraq, and that the only people who deeply oppose it are hippie peaceniks and their media allies, you'll probably imagine Condi the Conqueror parlaying her foreign policy fame into electoral victory.  As it turns out, things aren't going well, most Americans (blacks being no exception) are aware of it, and that's why they don't like Condi.

Ethics Committees and Unethical Republicans

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

This came up in comments on Nicholas' post below: if Democrats were to break the "ethics truce" and launch complaints against Republicans in the GOP-controlled House Ethics Committee, would there be any chance of their complaints amounting to anything?  Or would Republicans use their power to just dismiss the complaints, launch their own trumped-up complaints against Democrats, and do serious damage?  I don't really know anything about how the process works, so somebody please fill me in. 

It's a Start

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

It's nice to know that the Republican Party has finally decided to throw DeLay overboard, but getting rid of DeLay the man does nothing to get rid of DeLay the idea. Roy Blunt (R-MO), Eric Cantor (R-VA), and John Boehner (R-OH) will most likely do nothing to stem the outsourcing of all "policy-making" functions of government to lobbying shops loyal to the Republican Party. At the moment, the only hope for reality-based Republican leadership lies in Zach Wamp's (R-TN) quixotic campaign for Majority Whip, which is not exactly a pleasant situation to be in.

What Came First, the Chickenhawk or the Egg?

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

On October 26, 1965, the military lifted its ban on drafting childless married men.

On July 28, 1966, Dick Cheney's eldest child, Elizabeth Cheney was born. That's nine months and two days after the military lifted its ban. This earned him his fifth deferment from the draft.

I'm not saying that Elizabeth Cheney should feel bad about being conceived in draft avoidance. People get conceived under embarrassing circumstances fairly often, and I'd feel pretty good about my existence preventing my Dad from having to fight in a bad war. I do wonder, though, what draft avoidance sex is like.

A Thousand Disbarments are Not Enough For Starr

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Listening to yesterday's press conference from Patrick Fitzgerald brought my unbridled contempt for Kenneth Starr to a new level. Fitzgerald's display of professionalism, discretion, and respect for the law made Starr look like the partisan hack that he is. There were many, many bad actors in Whitewater/Lewinsky investigation, but Starr takes the cake because he was supposed to be the grown-up who kept House Republicans from going on a partisan witch hunt. It's expected -- though deplorable -- that politicians, political operatives, and the hacks who fund and write for right-wing think tanks will use heated rhetoric to attack their opponents, but one would hope that the Special Prosecutor would take his job seriously. Starr did not.

Fitzgerald spent less than a million bucks pursuing his case, took great care to avoid leaks, treated the press with respect while still keeping their questions at a distance, and in general let the legal process run its course rather than turn into a media frenzy. Starr wanted a media frenzy. He spent $52 million of the taxpayer's money on a seven-year snipe-hunting trip through rural Arkansas. His office seemed to leak documents -- and of course videotapes -- as though it were going out of style. The Office of the Special Prosecutor practically invited the New York Times into the office to write smears of President Clinton and the First Lady. He indicted several of Clinton's personal and business acquaintances on unrelated charges, with the hope that they would snitch on Clinton in exchange for a lighter sentence, going so far that some of his indictments were ruled out of the scope of his investigation. If there were any justice in the world, Starr's conduct as a special prosecutor would have led to his disbarment, he would find himself  persona non grata on the lecture circuit, and his best job opportunity in Washington would be on the custodial staff of the National Review. Instead he's the Dean of Pepperdine law school.

It's rare that I wish for justice to be served in the afterlife, but I'm willing to make an exception for Ken Starr.

Tax and Spend Republicans

As the Carpetbagger notes, the tax plan floated by Bush's reform commission isn't getting half the fire from Democrats that it's getting from Republicans. It's like a level of Contra over there. And not one of those early, wimpy levels, we're talking scattershots and screen slowdown and epileptic seizures from all the tiny balls of death darting across the screen.

Ahem.

We've yet to see what the official document says, and we've no idea what Bush's ultimate recommendations will be, but assuming the President remains in the neighborhood of his commission's report, we're looking at a crack-up that splits right down the center of the conservative coalition. Taxes are the lifeblood of modern conservatism, this is Howard Jarvis stuff. You can't have apostasy there. And post-Miers, if Bush tries, the disappointment and head-shaking sadness we're seeing from Kristol and Frum will give way to a primal scream and war paint from the more, uh, energetic members of the conservative coalition.

Mystery Pollster, today, argued that Bush's numbers really can't fall further till his base deserts him. On Miers, that wasn't happening. But Miers is an elite issue, a disappointment in the upper echelons of the Republican punditocracy -- the base has remained fairly trusting on her. But if the President tells them he's about to take their health and home deductions and the antitax coalition tells them they're getting screwed, that'll change real quick.

Generally, when you need your base, you pander to them. Whether it's incidental or intentional, Bush seems to have gone in the other direction. That's making for better policy, to be sure, but it's putting the Republican coalition in real danger. It's like having my cake and eating it too.

And Then, King of the World

From The Corner comes one reader's advice on how to deal with the Miers pick:

make Chaka the designated driver and go eat bbq, drink beer and watch baseball all day long. After about the third beer and second order of ribs, you'll realize that the Democrats still don't have a plan for the future, their base hates their leadership, and if Miers is only a tiny little ity bit right of O'Connor, that's not too bad a pick. And after 6 beers, remind each other that Hillary Clinton was probably on a President Kerry's short list. Say that over and over and over again. Chief Justice Hillary Clinton. We won, they lost...smile it's not so bad.

These people really think John Kerry would've nominated Hillary Clinton to Chief Justice of the United States of America. They really do! It's as if the whole Democratic party and everyone in it exists only to further propel her career, the vast left win conspiracy is really just Hillary's personal job placement service. And it's not just the readers, Kathryn Jean Lopez, a top editor at the National Review, thought this an incisive enough note to elevate onto the front page -- this one was just too good to languish in her mailbox.

These people are nuts.

DeLayism Redux

Now, with the Bugman seeming a bit squashed, self-congratulating reformers (particularly Republicans) are happily looking towards a new era of cleanliness and transparency under DeLay's deputy, protege, and close friend Roy Blunt. Said another way, it's time to make my old post on DeLayism new again.

As it stands, Democrats are dashing towards a bit of a wall here. DeLay's indictment is on conspiracy, a relatively minor charge that will, at best, link him to the wrongdoing of others. But Tom DeLay is not a bad, hated dude simply because his campaign financing tactics are questionable and his redistricting schemes are Soviet in style. Nah, the issue with DeLay is that he's the Henry Ford of modern Republican politics, and even if the man himself goes down, the assembly line he's constructed will still be manned. Because that's what he is, really, not a powerful guy, but a new way of running and keeping a majority, of integrating industry and activists and politicians annd idea peddlers into the sort of coherent whole they were never meant to be. So while the "Industry" section may no longer have Abramoff and the "Congressional" quarter may lose DeLay, by and large, the operation will remain essentially unchanged.

And that's what Democrats have to attack. DeLayism is the K Street project is corporate cronyism. It's the Sugar Valley exterminator's decision to absorb the institutional power, memory, and contacts of Washington's lobbyist corps., merge all the different causes into a coherent and partisan organization, and use them to retain control of the House. Used to be that Tobacco Lobbyists lobbied for Big Tobacco while Textile Lobbyists looked after Textiles. But now Tobacco Lobbyists are deployed to convince congressmen from Tobacco-producing states to vote for legislation wholly unrelated to Tobacco, say, the Bankruptcy Bill. And they do this because DeLay promises them, in return, that he'll support Big Tobacco's agenda. Lobbyists act as foot soldiers in return for DeLay deputizing them legislators.

This transformation of Washington Lobbyists into an effective Republican whip organization totally changes the calculus of deliberative democracy. Now that lobbyists are on the inside, they have to be of the right partisan affiliation (one of DeLay's ethical reprimands was for demanding the Electrical Industry hire a Republican as head lobbyist), they have to be loyal on all subjects, they have to be allies during the campaign and, in return, they, and not Congress, end up writing the legislation.

Roy Blunt is part and parcel of this operation, taught by DeLay to use it, groomed by him to inherit it. The fight over Dreier happened because Roy is so deep in the protocols that DeLay knows he'll never be able to wrest K Street back -- the difference between him and Blunt won't be great enough to justify the disruption. But even if this is the end of Tom, it's not the end of DeLayism, and if Democrats fail to kill that, none of this will have been worth a damn. So focus on DeLay for now, but only if the larger game is proving how DeLay is omnipresent, how Congressional Republicans are molded in his image and how that, not the man himself, is what must be destroyed.

Know Thine Enemy

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

The New Republic has an absolutely riveting account [registration and/or subscription required?] of this year's College Republican National Convention. For the first time in ages, there was a vigorous contest for the chairmanship, a 2-year, $75,000 a year salaried position (in contrast, the chair of the College Democrats is unpaid). Franklin Foer details the convention fight for the nomination, which a sort of X-treme retail politics you won't find anywhere else.

This article should be a wake-up call to anyone who thinks Democrats do enough youth outreach (while 2004 was an improvement over 2000, white voters under thirty still went for Bush by a 54-46 margin), put to rest any notion that Republicans don't have problems with infighting and pettiness, and remind everyone that winning elections has to come first.

I don't say this often, but read the whole thing. And if the article is subscription only, order the single issue online, or shell out for a subscription. Here's a sample:

Such controversy is the stuff of the organization's rich folklore. Typically, these confabs pull in a cast of characters that extends beyond a bunch of hormonally charged undergrads. Behind the scenes, in the campaign war rooms, small armies of veteran Republican operatives and congressional staffers toil. That's because there's much more at stake in the elections than a swish post-college gig. After campaign finance reform, the College Republicans reinvented themselves as a big-time 527--a group legally allowed to spend an infinite amount of its own money on campaigns--with a budget of over $17 million. They have a massive network of operatives to send into the field to bolster candidates, and they have patronage to spread among friends and through direct-mail firms. In other words, it's well worth tearing a Shermanesque path to the sea to control College Republicans, no matter the carnage--and no matter the expense. Michael Davidson said he spent an estimated $200,000--raised off high-rollers who normally sign checks to senators and presidential wannabes--trying to claim the grand prize.

But the significance of the crnc goes beyond that. The Committee is the place where Republican strategists learn their craft and acquire their knack for making their Democratic opponents look like disorganized children. Many of the biggest-brand Republican operatives--from Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, to Charlie Black and Roger Stone, to Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist--got their starts this way. Walking through the halls of the convention, it is easy to see the genesis of tactics deployed in the Florida recount and by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Republicans learn how to fight hard against Democrats by practicing on one another first. "There are no rules in a knife fight," Norquist instructed the young conventioneers in a speech. And, while Norquist described a knife fight, the Gourley-Davidson rumble transpired around him.

A Vast, America-Transcending Conspiracy?

I want Jeff Session to elaborate on this:

“I think it is shocking that Democrats would treat [Soros] as a mainstream force of Democratic politics,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). “He has an agenda that transcends American interests.”

Is Sessions picking back up on Hastert's implication that Soros is a drug dealer? Is he calling the world's most generous and committed financier of democracy projects in post-Soviet states a Communist? Is he calling him a Nazi, a one-worlder, a fascist, a founding member of the Bilderberg Group, an Annunaki lizard from the fourth-dimension? What does "transcends American interests" even mean?

I'm giving Sessions' office a call to find out. When they give me an answer, I'll let you know.

Now How'd That Happen?

This is pretty funny. From Operation Offset, the Republican attempt to solve Katrina by cutting government waste:

The recently passed FY06 Highway Bill, also known as TEA-LU, contained more than 6,000 earmarks, worth nearly $25 billion. Some of the most egregious examples include $200 million for the “bridge to nowhere,” a bridge in Alaska that would serve an island with 50 residents, $75 million for metro extension in Washington, D.C., $15 million to purchase three ferries and establish a ferry system from Rockaway Peninsula to Manhattan, New York, and $2.5 million for the Blue Ridge Music Center. For comparison, the 1998 transportation bill was considered a major budget buster at the time with 1,850 earmarks and a veto threat from President Clinton. In just seven years, Congress has added over 4,000 earmarks to the bill. Savings: $25 billion over ten years.

And since the 1998 transportation bill, we've had a Republican take control of the executive branch, increased Republican entrenchment in the Senate, and a strengthened Republican majority in the House. How that Highway Bill got so porky is really anybody's guess -- you sure won't find any blame in Operation Offset! And bully for it; this isn't a time for blame. This is a time to be thankful we've got responsible congressional Republicans ready to step in and clean up this government they control!

Redefining Waste

Matt notes that an absurdly large proportion of the Republican Conference's waste-cutting ideas involve slicing big chunks out of Medicaid because, apparently, health care for the needy is waste. Yeah, yeah, par for the course. Unfortunately, the Republican majority clearly hasn't checked with Health and Human Services to figure out how they're providing the displaced with medical care. Hint: It's Medicaid:

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has acted to assure that the Medicare, Medicaid and State Children’s Health Insurance Programs will flex to accommodate the emergency health care needs of beneficiaries and medical providers in the Hurricane Katrina devastated states.

Many of the programs’ normal operating procedures will be relaxed to speed provision of health care services to the elderly, children and persons with disabilities who depend upon them.

Because of hurricane damage to local health care facilities, many beneficiaries have been evacuated to neighboring states where receiving hospitals and nursing homes have no health care records, information on current health status or even verification of the person’s status as a Medicare or Medicaid beneficiary. CMS is assuring those facilities that in this circumstance the normal burden of documentation will be waived and that the presumption of eligibility should be made.

Or, to put it another way, we've got this from HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt:

Pursuant to Section 1135(b) of the Social Security Act (the Act) (42 U.S.C. ' 1320b-5), I hereby waive the following requirements of titles XVIII, XIX, or XXI of the Act or regulations thereunder, and the following requirements of Title XI of the Act, and regulations thereunder, insofar as they relate to Titles XVIII, XIX, or XXI of the Act, but in each case, only to the extent necessary to ensure that sufficient health care items and services are available to meet the needs of individuals enrolled in the Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIP programs and to ensure that health care providers that furnish such items and services in good faith, but are unable to comply with one or more of these requirements as a result of the effects of Hurricane Katrina, may be reimbursed for such items and services and exempted from sanctions for such noncompliance, absent any determination of fraud and abuse:

Said simply, hospitals who treat folks without insurance will now be reimbursed no matter the status of their patients under the assumption that they're all on Medicaid, Medicare, or SCHIP -- no proof required. So take three wild guesses on how they're going to categorize the rush of displaced, uninsured patients hitting their waiting rooms. The Republican response to this? A proposal to chop up the program that's providing the bulk of post-Katrina health care. What's not to love?

Big Government Conservatism

Stephen Moore, former Club for Growth head and all-around nutty tax-cutter, penned an op-ed in the WSJ that you can just tell had him sobbing tears of frustration by the last line. Nevertheless, it's fairly good stuff, if only for the minty-cool refreshing feeling that comes from seeing at least one conservative flip out at Bush for betraying everything he believes in. To wit:

Alas, in the world of compassionate conservatism, the quaint notion of limited federal power has fallen to the wayside in favor of an ethic that has Uncle Sam as first, second and third responder to crisis. FEMA, despite its woeful performance, will grow in size and stature. So will the welfare state. Welcome to the new New Dealism of the GOP.

Both political parties are now willing and eager to spend tax dollars as if they were passing out goody-bags to grabby four-year-olds at a birthday party. The Democrats are already forging their 2006 and 2008 message: We will spend just as many trillions of dollars as Republicans, but we will spend them better than they do. After witnessing the first few Republican misappropriations for Hurricane Katrina, the Democrats may very well be right.

Moore's framing of compassionate conservatism as an out-and-out loss for actual conservatism is well-conceived. Bush has, during his tenure in office, greatly strengthened the American consensus on government spending and activity. From Medicare to education to foreign affairs, there's not a single area in which Bush's federal incarnation could be safely called a more humble, cautious, conservative institution than its predecessor. For small-government Republicans who voted for Bush to curb Clinton's Big Government liberalism, once the heat of partisanship wears off, they're going to realize they sent the federal government to rehab only to watch the white-hatted nurses let it do lines off their funny hats. The whole thing reminds me of something Melissa wrote in response to Kevin's piece on the surprising progressivism of Bush's accomplishments:

I’m not convinced that a list of bills, wars, and judicial appointments really encompasses everything they’ve done. Some of their accomplishments are not “wins” by the same kind of horserace definition. Failing to adequately fund and enforce existing liberal programs and legislation isn’t something they’ll put on a record of success, but if the hard-fought protections for civil rights, labor rights, and the environment aren’t adequately enforced, that’s a blow to liberalism, and a “win” for Bush-brand conservatism.

In the end, though, that's the point: the few conservative victories Bush has put on the scoreboard were sneaky, quiet, silent coups. They came through gaming the appropriations process or appointing incompetent but highly-ideological heads of organizations. They came through every backdoor, but they never entered through the front, because all Rove let the voting neighbors see was one smiling liberal achievement after another.

That's not to say Bush has been good for the country, he hasn't. But, in the end, he might end up being good its liberal consensus. After him, a traditional Republican with an appetite for entitlement-slicing is going to find himself far, far out of the American mainstream, because for all Bush has done to pull the Democrats right on foreign policy, his political advisor has spurred him to blitz left on economic issues. Granted, he's combined that with a disastrous series of tax cuts, but American history tends to prove folks prefer tax increases -- particularly on the rich -- to deep spending cuts. Some have argued that the defunding of government at the exact moment it gets larger is a covert plan to choke it in the future. Maybe. But I think it much more likely to create a wave of populist resentment and tax policy in this country.

Duck, And Something That Rhymes With It

Says O'Reilly:

O'REILLY: The secular progressive movement would like to have marriage abolished, in my opinion. They don't want it, because it is not diverse enough. You know, that's what this gay marriage thing is all about. But now, you know, the poly-amorphous marriage, whatever they call it, you can marry 18 people, you can marry a duck, I mean --

LIS WIEHL (co-host): A duck? Quack, quack.
O'REILLY: Well, why, you know, if you're in love with the duck, who is the society to tell you you can't do that?

I think Bill is spending too much time in front of the VCR.  He seems to have mixed up support for civil rights with a Woody Allen flick:

In any case, this strikes me as a good time to link to the article I wrote, or at least collected, on O'Reilly.  Awhile back I went through his court records to collect the, err, juicy parts.  And for someone scared of duck sex, Bill has some fun kinks of his own.  So here you are: Bill Gone Wild.

Privatizing FEMA

Of all the attempts by conservatives to regain some post-Katrina balance, the most pernicious has to be the growing effort to use FEMA's failure to delegitimize the government's role in disaster-relief. Man, that's chutzpah. The car broke because Bush slashed its tires and now his allies are trying to convince us that the real problem lies with the whole "car" concept.

You should all use planes.

Planes fueled by tax cuts and personal responsibility.

It's a larger-scale, and significantly more cynical, deployment of the classic starve-the-beast strategy. If government has no tax revenues, it'll do a bad job. If it does a bad job, people won't like it. If people don't like government, they'll vote Republican. Replace "no tax revenues" with "incompetent leaders appointed through political patronage" and you've got this slimy little bastard.

Follow the ooze and you'll find the argument in its natural habitat -- Tony Snow's head. Snow, of course, has built a career dressing viciously dishonest statements in a fine Italian suit of exasperated sanity. Here he lauds the private sector's remarkable mobilization against Katrina and blasts FEMA's fatally flawed response, ending in a call for the complete privatization of disaster relief. In better times, this can all be dismissed, but add in the fact that some corporations really were impressive -- how often, after all, do I praise Wal-Mart? -- and the point begins to carry a certain amount of force.

You know, until you think about it a bit. Back to that Wal-Mart example, here's H. Lee Scott:

"We can't do any more than our own part. We are not the federal government. There is a portion we can do, and we can do it darn well."

So he's got a sense of a private company's limits, why don't we? Well, mostly because we figure we can just outsource the whole of disaster relief efforts. If FEMA's become sclerotic and unwieldy, give it to Halliburton. Hire a private company that doesn't do this for charitable reasons but profit. Profit means efficiency, especially when it comes to government contracts.

Of course, the evidence doesn't quite support the policy. The success of Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and others had everything to do with their preexisting retail structures and almost nothing to do with the mere fact that they have bottom lines. Having already implemented highly routinized methods for delivering goods to these areas, replacing DVD players with aid packages was a relatively minor matter. But we're not talking about deputizing a big box retailer to handle disaster relief in this country. We're talking about the creation of a private FEMA, a coordinating agency that draws up plans, directs emergency response, provides aid, and does so only when disasters hit, not through a series of preexisting, otherwise active distribution networks. Instead, their mandate is to coordinate offers of aid from Big Box Retailers, NGO's, charities, and the public sector.

So shaving off that bit of Wal-Mart-will-save-us-all fiction, what we're left with is the argument that private FEMA would be better than public FEMA. Fair enough, particularly considering public-FEMA's performance. But FEMA hasn't followed some preset evolutionary pathway to incompetence, it's been destroyed by a series of bad decisions by identifiable leaders. And that's not some Mercury-in-retrograde happenstance, we know who did it, we know why they did it, and we know how they did it. If this were a game of Clue, the winning formula would be Mr. Bush in the Oval Office with the campaign contributor. And we want to let this guy completely overhaul the way we run disaster response in this country? Brilliant! Next up, Michael Jackson is deputized to make your child's daycare more like Neverland!

What, you're not against ferris wheels, are you?

This is a pretty constant conservative fallacy when it comes to privatization. The market may encourage efficiency, but only if it works like a market. When politicians run the bidding, that's never assured. If you let corrupt pols privatize, the privatization will be corrupt. And if they have a tendency to install campaign cronies in positions of power, there's no reason to expect they won't award contracts in exactly the same manner. So forgive me if I don't quite see the efficiency gain in trading an incompetent individual who helped on the campaign for an unqualified corporation that donated to the campaign. Halliburton's "misplaced" how many billions in Iraq now?

Moreover, nothing, nothing is inherently inefficient about the public sector. Some corporations turn out to be corrupt, like Enron, or inefficient, like any number of bankrupted, bloated brands, and some government agencies do the same. But some don't. Here's Bush talking about one of them:

You know, as governor, one of the things you have to deal with is catastrophe. I can remember the fires that swept Parker County, Texas. I remember the floods that swept our state. I remember going down to Del Rio, Texas. I have to pay the administration a compliment. James Lee Witt of FEMA has done a really good job of working with governors during times of crisis.

FEMA did not set a self-directed course towards disaster. A career professional who made it a model agency was replaced with a political crony who rendered it a useless mess. Now conservatives are crying out that Katrina has proved the public sector inefficient, and we should give the same leader who weakened FEMA the opportunity to award private contracts for future disaster-relief. We should trade political patronage for crony capitalism.

Bush's decisions transformed a remarkably efficient government agency into a fatally incompetent one, so conservatives want to let him do it a second time. It's completely insane. This isn't a private vs. public debate -- contrast Clinton's FEMA with Bush's version to see that. But the right would much prefer that it was. Democrats should make sure voters understand that Bush took a superb organization and destroyed it by handing control to a politically-connected incompetent. Republicans who demand we let him do it a second time in a less reversible manner should be laughed out of the room.

When Life Gives You Lemons, Throw Them at Republicans

Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Shakes and Ezra are talking about impeachment, and there are a couple things I'd like liberals thinking in this vein to keep in mind. The first is that Bush has only 3 1/2 years left as an elected official. Certainly, there are benefits to damaging him personally, especially insofar as this makes it hard for him to enact the right-wing agenda over the next 40+ months. But the causes we care about will reap much more benefit from long-term damage to voter perceptions of the Republican party than from damage to Bush's personal reputation. Those two things are definitely linked, but right now the biggest focus shouldn't be on going after Bush himself, it should be about eroding positive stereotypes of Republicans and deepening negative ones. For example, the point needs to be made that Republicans aren't interested in fiscal responsibility or cutting spending -- really, they just want to borrow lots of money and hand it over to big corporations. That's a fiscal agenda that nobody in America is willing to defend.

Thinking into a happy 2006 where Democrats win one or the other chamber of Congress, the I-word I like a lot more than "impeachment" is "investigation". We still haven't had an investigation into Iraq intelligence failures that issued from the White House, and we could make Bush regret not letting his own Republican Congress investigate those. I'd be quite happy to see the GOP recognized as the party of foreign policy incompetence that it is. All the administration's Halliburton giveaways could be investigated, shedding light on Republican corruption. To push the fiscal mismanagement issue, we could -- after watching the cost of the 2003 Medicare Bill run out of control -- investigate why the White House tried to cover up the actual cost of the program by threatening to fire the actuary who wanted Congress to know the truth. It'll be the most awesome silver lining ever if Bush's misdeeds allow us to destroy the GOP's reputation, permitting resurgent Democrats to institute a smart foreign policy and higher taxes on the rich and free preschool for everyone and single-payer healthcare.

On the question of how possible future impeachment proceedings would be publicly received, I'm a bit more sanguine than Ezra. One thing that turned people against the Republicans back in the Clinton times was the sheer absurdity of impeaching a president over post-blowjob issues. As evidenced by the polling reaction to the Terri Schaivo spectacle, Americans occasionally recognize bullshit for what it is. We've got a lot bigger stuff to pin on Bush than the deceptions involved in covering up a bit of illicit fellatio. But I really don't see how much we have to gain in doing this, and impeaching a president is a lot harder than launching a fruitful and damaging investigation.

Explaining Michael Brown

Neil the Ethical Werewolf

The idea that someone like Michael Brown could possibly get a job as director of FEMA belongs in parody. We're talking about a guy who had spent a decade running horse shows before being fired for supervision failures in 2001, when Bush crony Joe Allbaugh was hired as FEMA director. Brown had never managed a natural disaster, but his experience as Allbaugh's old college roommate got him the deputy director's job. After Allbaugh left to consult for companies seeking contracts in Iraq, Brown took over the agency. When Katrina hit, Brown spent his time denying the facts about what was going on in New Orleans, in a transparent attempt to fool people into thinking the situation was under control. Now Brown's FEMA is expending lots of effort in blocking incoming aid. Even Michelle Malkin wants Brown fired.

The difference between this and the stellar performance of James Lee Witt's FEMA during the Clinton administration is like night and day. When the manager of the Des Moines Water Works called local officials shortly after midnight on July 11, 1993 to say that flooding was going to shut down the city's water supply, FEMA set up 29 water distribution points in town by that evening. While floods rendered the Water Works inoperable for two and a half weeks, the city had all the water it needed. Five hours and three minutes after the Oklahoma city bombing -- an event that occurred with no warning whatsoever -- FEMA's advance team was on the scene to assess the damage, and James Lee Witt himself had arrived within 12 hours.

Why did James Lee Witt and the disaster-relief commandos of the Clinton Administration suddenly give way to Michael Brown and the incompetents of the Bush Administration? It would seem that there would be plenty for an administration to gain in hiring effective disaster-relief people, given the political fallout that accompanies mismanaged disasters.

A look at Kevin Drum's timeline suggests one answer. The Allbaugh/Brown regime saw FEMA chopped apart and folded into the Department of Homeland Security. One of the benefits of hiring clueless but loyal hacks to head government agencies is that they won't complain when you dismember their agencies or privatize essential functions in order to satisfy your anti-government preferences. If you actually hire somebody with genuine competence in doing things that the agency is supposed to do, you might get some angry complaints and defense of turf when mission-critical functions are compromised by your agenda.

There's also a reason that lies deeper in Republican psychology. Republicans don't really want to see government succeed in doing things right. Sure, when they're running the country, they want to get the political advantages of success, if such advantages are to be had. But this desire is in tension with a desire to see government fail, to see it held up to public scorn for its incompetence and ineffectiveness. So they're not going to go all-out to hire the absolute best people, especially if their buddies just got fired from the horse show business and need new jobs.

Anti-Government Governance

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Robert Farely points out the fundamental contradiction in Republican governance:

The Republicans have managed a nifty trick over the last twenty-five years. They have worked ceaselessly to make government less effective, while at the same time deriving political benefit from inadequate government.

It is a nifty trick, but it's starting to run out of steam. Even in the 2000 election, the GOP had started to tone down it's anti-government rhetoric; essentially, he promised the public the same government as the Clinton Era, only smaller and with a bigger tax cut . Yes, in the debates, he railed against the specter of big government medicine, but not with the vitriol of Reagan in the late 1980s. By 2004, Bush had stopped using the word "bureaucrat" and started talking about all the "hard work" of the government employees  in Iraq.

That said, this is a point Democrats ought to make more forcefully: there's no reason for a party that doesn't trust government to be responsible for it. And it's their job to point out that "don't trust government" now means "don't trust the Republican Party".

The Business Judge

Nathan's completely right on this. I was talking with someone the other day about why Bush, with Rove running the demographics, hadn't nominated a Hispanic, a woman, or a Hispanic woman to the seat. It wasn't like this President wanted to go with a white male. He likes to think he's deeply connected to the Hispanic community, he's proud of his poor quality Spanish (which is, to be fair, better than my non-existent Spanish), his first choice was named Gonzales, and his political advisor wants to build a majority among Hispanics. So why the the Norman Rockwell nominee?

Simple. Business.

Dobson's so loud, Robertson's so entertaining, and Falwell's so grotesque that they and the movement they lead often obscures all other Republican constituencies from view. Why watch the National Association of Manufacturers when Focus on the Family is comparing Democrats to Hitler? But Business remains the GOP's single most important constituency, and they've not been particularly pleased that Terry Schiavo, abortion and all the rest have eclipsed their agenda and left them rather embarrassed by the Party they support. It was time they got something. And a Supreme Court nominee whose spent his adult life quietly conspiring with them over at the defendant's table was just the thing. Roberts is an easy confirmation, an appealing judge, and a huge boon for business. He's the diamond ring the distracted, adulterous husband, gives to his long-suffering wife; a gift impressive enough that leeway and trust are completely restored.

This business/Christian Right thing is actually an important cleavage to think about, not because they're going to split anytime soon, but because the rise of the theocrats has really taken the spotlight off the plutocrats. I'm reading Chris Mooney's new book The Republican War on Science and have been delighted to see him delving into that. We focus mostly on the Christian Right's delegitimization of evolution which, while bad, doesn't have too many public policy consequences, save for a population that's rather less well-versed in Darwinist theory. But the Industry's manipulation of global warming reports and atmospheric data? That's a fair bit likelier to destroy our world.

Radio Wonders

Last night, driving back to LA from a quick jaunt below the Orange Curtain, I decided to do as the Romans do (and as the billboards command) and listen to talk radio. First I went to 1150's Air America where Garofalo and Seder were doing the majority report. I really hate to say this, as I love Garofalo's comedy and acting, but I find her totally unlistenable on The Majority Report. She's shrill, mean to her callers (and here I'm talking the liberal ones, conservative interlopers get called "douches"), and just grates on me. On the bright side, she's well informed and good at staying on point, but I'm just not able to listen for more than ten minutes at a time.

So off I go to 640, "More stimulating talk radio!" It's some white guy named Ron filling in for some white guy named Z-Man. They're bashing the Nation of Islam, which is a bit like me sticking rhetorical knives into the Ku Klux Klan, but whatever. Very good caller choice, the host is a talented talker, and the opinions are fairly unobjectionable (black men calling in to say black men shouldn't commit crimes is the basic structure), so I turn my attention back to the asshole who's been tailgating me since Long Beach.

But then Ron -- the pinch-hitting white guy's name, or so I think -- goes over to gas prices. The interesting thing about conservative radio is that they constantly pretend they're shattering your biases, telling you what you don't want to hear. Ron promises that he'll tell us who's responsible for high gas prices, and it's not who we think!

According to him, we think it's the oil companies, though I don't actually know anyone who thinks that. Whatever. In any case, those straw men are wrong! The culprit for exorbitant rates at the pump over the last year?

Taxes and regulation. The one element of oil exploration, extraction, and delivery that hasn't changed in the past 365 days. So Ron spends a little while calmly, slowly, logically attacking Gray Davis for misusing oil taxes in the past and telling his listeners how angry they should be that they're paying for government services at the pump. Also, government regulation has left the oil companies unable to refine, explore, work, whatever, It's all the government's fault, in any case. Then we went to a KFI-640 NEWS BREAK!!!! where a Glendale city councilwoman was smoking crack, Bush was defending his policies, some crimes were committed, and a government agency had screwed up.

If you ever get some time in the car, I highly recommend you listen to these folks. NPR may be more informative and Air America more ideologically compatible, but turn on conservative talk once in awhile: the Republican worldview is perfectly understandable when you hear what they're beaming into their brains during every car ride. The news is full of addicts, criminals, and steadfast Presidents while the opinions are rational, calm, authoritative explanations of why everything wrong in your world is the government's fault, even if it didn't seem that way on first glance.

But He Tries So Hard!

This, from conservative-against-the-war Andy McCarthy, is really weird:

I support what is called the “war on terror.” I will continue to support it no matter what the Iraqi constitution says. I will also continue to support the President’s stewardship of it because he is determined to fight it, however much I may disagree with some of what is being done.

I come across this fairly often and it never fails to strike me as completely bizarre. It was an omnipresent claim during the election that, as Iraq's gotten worse, has been brought out of retirement to defend the president. But why?

1) Doesn't its mere utterance kind of give up the ghost? I mean, if you thought Bush was doing a good job, wouldn't you say "I continue to support the President's stewardship of the war because he's doing a kickass job banishing terrorists to graveyards, jail cells and torture chambers"? Seems to me that'd make for a much more convincing appeal and, given the hackery of those generally making this claim, that they can't bring themselves to go for the gold in Bush's defense really says a lot.

2) Who cares how much conviction, obsession, or attention Bush lavishes on the War on Terror? Do you know of any conservatives who are all about Lyndon Johnson because, say what you will, but the guy really wanted to defeat poverty? I can't think of another instance in modern politics where sane partisans earnestly insist that the real question isn't the results they've gotten but the effort they've put in. Andy supports Bush because, outcomes aside, the guy's really determined. Imagine if you fucked up on a major initiative than told your boss that, if he could stop thinking about the disastrous drop in your stock prices, he'd realize how committed you were and understand that that's what really matters.

And to think, the GOP is the Party of Business.

More Frist Fumbles

Poor Bill Frist's inept constituency-chasin' only gets worse. After sticking a dagger in his medical dignity by offering a (totally wrong) telediagnosis of Terry Schiavo, he tried to walk the damage back by supporting stem cell research. Criticism from his friends on the Christian Right, however, shivered the poor doctor's spine, and in a vain attempt to be asked back to Dobson's pulpit, he's loudly, futilely proclaiming his support for Intelligent Design in schools.

The first response is that the supposedly moderate leader of the Senate is taking a position so nutty that even Rick Santorum won't endorse it. "Bill Frist: Crazier Than Santorum!" just isn't the sort of reputation one wants to have. The second, though, is pity. Bill Frist wants to be President. He's not going to be. He's no titan of the Senate whose entrance will clear the field, no national figure whose very name gets independents nodding in coffee shops, no regional hero who'll have a clear set of primaries to dominate. His hope, then, was to finally be the leader able to actualize the Christian Right's agenda. If their years of frustration could be ended by Bill Frist, they'd have to support him!

So he went with them on judges and Schiavo, abortion and ID. But instead of looking like their hero, he just seemed their slave. He made an ass of himself on Schiavo, lost, at least in their eyes, on judges, and was never quite out front on abortion. And all this came at the expense of his professional reputation and public dignity (kowtowing to neanderthals never helps the self-esteem). So he tried to use stem cells to reassert independence. Turns out, Dobson doesn't like independence. So now he's back, trying to heal the breach and make amends. And once again, he just looks weak.

Poor Bill Frist. Nobody, not even Christians, really want the weak and easily steamrolled sitting in the Oval Office. And so he'll never get there. The Bible says the meek shall inherit the earth, but it doesn't command that the devout vote them the deed. Bill Frist has managed to keep himself from being the Christian Right's enemy, but his obvious calculation and transparent political ineptitude will keep him from ever getting their respect. And since he's got no one else to turn to, Frist's bid is, basically, DOA.

More Newt

So long as I'm talking Gingrich (see next post), I love this quote from his former press secretary Lee Howell:

There is the Newt Gingrich who is intellectual, appealing, and fun to be with. And there is the Newt Gingrich who's a bloodthirsty partisan who'd just as soon cut your guts out as look at you. And who, very candidly, is mean, mean as hell.

Newt nostalgia mostly turns on memories of the first guy, the eccentric ideologue who loved dinosaurs, wrote alternative history novels, thought we should blast handicapped folks into space, lived for technology, and was a general cross between a batty poli-sci professor and a 10-year-old. That's the Newt who's been on display since 1998 (save for a mostly-forgotten moment when he basically accused Colin Powell of treason). The other guy, the guy who said the Republican party's problem was a lack of nastiness, who said "Democrats were the enemy of normal people everywhere", who said that following the Democratic foreign policy would mean "tyranny everywhere, and we in America could experience the joys of Soviet-style brutality and murdering of women and children", we've kinda forgotten about him.

That Newt is in there. And the moment he's elected to something again, that Newt will return. Studying up on the old him has given me a lot of respect for the public relations turnaround he's engineered, a store of esteem I can add to my respect for his brilliance and tactical savvy. But all that aside, the guy is fairly horrible when he gets into power and we should try not to forget that.

The Party of Gingrich

The fun thing about writing articles is you get to bury into a topic you never thought much about before. I'm penning a piece on Gingrich, and so I'm deep into everything the guy's written, said, or had written or said about him. Interesting stuff. And some quotes are just too good to pass on, so here's one for you. This comes from Newt's apologetic, post-fall memoir, Lessons Learned the Hard Way:

For us Republicans in Congress, one of the most impressive aspects of this assault was the way Democratic activists in the House and Senate could be counted on to march in lockstep with it. The Democratic Party, of course, is much more of a political machine than the Republican Party. Those members of the House who had switched from the Democratic Caucus to the Republican Congress -- there have been something like a dozen of them -- kept remarking how surprising they found the lack of groupthink and intimidation [to be].

This, of course, was right after hundreds of Democrats had bailed on the President's health care plan, right after Clinton had had to reach across the aisle to pass NAFTA, right after he'd had to twist arms and break legs to pass his budget, right after fellow Democrats like Kerrey and Moynihan had called for investigation into Whitewater, right after, well, the most stunning show of party incompetence in a generation, all of which aided and abetted 1994's Republican Revolution.

But whatever Newt's historical omissions, the fact that Republicans saw themselves that way is something worth marveling at. The modern, DeLay run Republican party is less conference and more cult. Last week, Rep. Joel Hefley responded to questions about his possible retirement by saying:

"I think I'll wake up some morning and say, 'Enough is enough. I'm tired of Tom DeLay telling me when to go to bed at night.' I'm not there now."

The Party of Newt is not the Party of Tom. Maybe it never was. Newt's been known to look down on the gang of power hungry dolts who currently crack the whips even while he respects their ability to force members in line. But it's interesting to think that the Republican party of a decade ago conceived of itself in an entirely different fashion than its modern incarnation. Back then it was a response to a calcified, tired, brain-dead majority party that ran less on ideas than machine politics. This is no new conclusion, but the degree to which the Republican party has become what it despised is really quite astounding.

The Gildered Age

PZ Meyers hears a debate between techoguru George Gilder and Richard Dawkins and says:

Ashbrook recapped the last half hour by calling Gilder a "prominent American thinker". I am so embarrassed.

But Gilder is a thinker in the way kids with ADD are renaissance men, it's the number of topics that impresses, not the quality of thought that goes into them. Before he became an ID advocate, before he began rhapsodizing over high-bandwidth utopias, before he wrote on three or four other subjects he had no business pontificating over, he was a gender theorist attempting to rationalize traditional gender roles as essential to our natures.

His book began with a long and incoherent parable about a courageous knight saving a helpless princess from a dragon, then living happily ever after. Pages later, he contrasted this with a self-sufficient princess who does the job herself, shakes off the prince's attempts to help, and becomes a lonely shrew. A couple chapters later, he attempted to attack Title IX (or maybe just female encroachment on male sports -- I forget) by arguing that men, though physically able to do gymnastics and ballet, simply looked wrong when they tried. He brandished no poll numbers or aesthetic theories to buttress this; it was just that George Gilder, when eating chips and watching ice skating, preferred to stare at chicks than dudes, and thus an essential component of male and female natures was revealed, and the newly-enlightened Gilder could confidently pronounce gender equity in sports unnatural. The guy's got pundits' fallacy encoded into his DNA, and yet we keep publishing his books and allowing him on our media.

So Ashbrook is right. George Gilder is a prominent American thinker, but only because Americans don't think very hard.

James Dobson is Bad For My Soul

What does it say that every time Dobson opens his mouth, I begin to blaspheme? Whenever he appears on my television or computer screen, I take the Lord's name in vain. This can't be good.

Or can it? If James Dobson knew he was driving, say, half the country to sin, you think he'd stop? Anyway, this isn't just a random Dobson rants. John Cole noticed he's put out the warning signs of a child becoming one of the gays. and they're fairly funny. So if you're son is "different" from other boys, cries constantly, pretends he's female, only hangs out with girls, gets teased by other boys (particularly called "queer" -- 10-year olds have very perceptive "gaydars"), walks/talks/dresses like a homo, and insists he's a girl, he might be gay.

Well, yeah, that does seem possible. But by the time I got to the end of his list, I was totally distracted by the uber-hot, multiracial women exhorting me to join "Focus on Your Child". So now I was lusting in my heart.

That settles it. James Dobson is bad for my eternal soul.

Via Brad.

Say "No" to Newt Nostalgia

Posted by Nick Beaudrot

To respond to some comments in the Huckabee thread, let me say that in no way am I endorsing the nascent Huckabee '08 campaign. But given the non-McCain, non-Giuliani alternatives (since, let's face it, neither of those guys will get through the primary), I'd rather roll the dice with Huckabee than with Brownback, Frist, Romney, or any other oft-mentioned potential Republican candidates.

A commenter writes on another potential Grown-Up Republican, "I'm alright with occasionally reminiscing about soft spots for Newt Gingrich, but Huckabee is much worse." At the risk of piling on, the burgeoning "Newt wasn't that bad" meme is highly dangerous, because he really was that bad. The are three good things about Newt: he's a significantly more honest conservative than the current bunch; he's learned enough political lessons from the Clinton years that he wouldn't try to dismantle the federal government completely; and he does a lot of reviews at Amazon.com [full disclosure: Amazon.com is my employer]. But it ends there; Newt advocates a completely deregulated market for everything, very few controls on federal spending, would still like to shutter large portions of the government if he could. Whether he would be willing and able to wage war with the likes of Tom DeLay is unclear. Let's not take that chance, please.

Modern Newt

Since bloggers (Mark, Kevin, Matt) are talking about Newt Gingrich today, here are some highlights from GQ's spread on the guy. Newt, while bright and ideologically consistent, is also batshit crazy, a real radical. Like lots of young liberals weaned on the current Bush administration's deceptiveness, I have a certain affection for Gingrich's essential honesty in advocating rightwing nuttery as a governing platform. But that doesn't make him a better president than the others, just more respectable (and defeatable). Some of these quotes will explain why. The first shows why Newt is the candidate of crazy conservative comic-book artists. He echoes their powerlessness and amplifies it, giving it volume and a rationale. He takes their paranoia and tells them it's principle. Newt, you have to realize, perfected the "whine of the oppressed white-man" long before it was on Thomas Frank's radar. It's how he won Congress in 1994:

Didn't the 2004 election demonstrate that the secular lefties are on the ropes?

"No, they're not on the ropes," Newt says. "They're out of power, but they're not out of control. They control the unversities. They have control of the Senate, the staffs of bureaucracies. They have control of the language we use.

Uh, isn't the majority party in the Senate...Republican?

"You can't pass anything genuinely radical. You can't get it through the Senate."

So there's your first tip on Newt. He's a radical. A committed one. Even now, at the pinnacle of right-wing ascendance, he thinks, or at least argues, that the left is in control. We control the language(???), the colleges, the staff. Reality would ask, Who cares? So some English professors vote Kerry? So some nameless bureaucrats who get ignored by the high-value donors Bush appoints to be their boss want gay marriage? That trumps control of the courts, the congress, and the White House? And if we control the language, why do we let Gingrich talk like that? Whichever inefficient government bureaucrats we appointed to the position should be summarily fired! If only we hadn't given them that union...

Newt on the Clintons:

"Total admiration," Newt says of Hillary. "You have to respect her. This is a first-class professional. And if Bill is first spouse, it'll be one of the great moments. A new TV show! The East Wing!

The Clintons are never far from Newt's mind. They're like the Kennedys were to Nixon: glamorous, charismatic, brazen power-grabbing elitist amoral lying dream killers. Wrong on health care, wrong on the budget, wrong on them military...and so damned clever! Newt's class of 94 had seen it time and again: every time Speaker Gingrich galloped into the Oval Office with his musket loaded for Slick Willie, he shuffled out holding his gonads. "It got to the point where Republican freshmen were afraid to send him in there alone," remembers Newt's archivist and friend, Mel Stelley. "By the time Newt would get back to his office, Clinton's press secretary had already announced the opposite of what they'd agreed on. I'd sa