The GOP's Real Agenda?

Tim Dickinson: "After watching voters punish the GOP in the 2012 elections, Republican elites have been talking a brave game about reforms that would make the party less repulsive to Latinos, women and gay-friendly millennials..." 

"Don't be fooled. On the ground, a very different reality is unfolding: In the Republican-led Congress, GOP-dominated statehouses and even before the nation's highest court, the reactionary impulses of the Republican Party appear unbowed. Across the nation, the GOP's severely conservative agenda - which seeks to impose job-killing austerity, to roll back voting and reproductive rights, to deprive the working poor of health care, and to destroy agencies that protect the environment from industry and consumers from predatory banks - is moving forward under full steam."

I hope he's right because that means we'll take back the House in 2014.

Good Question

Will Wall Street spurn GOP in 2014?

I say they will and it's because the Republican Party draws a good chunk of its numbers from people who are certifiably insane. When they money goes away, so will the crazy.

Two Responses?

So, Marco Rubio is going to deliver the Republican response to the the presidents SOTU speech tonight. And then Rand Paul is going to deliver the response to that response? Or the response to the president? I'm confused.

It's a good thing the GOP is united and firing on all cylinders these days.

Epistemic Closure Summary

I forgot to put this piece up by Bruce Bartlett last year but it's obviously still relevant. Bartlett used to work for Ronald Reagan as his chief economic adviser and has since sworn off of supply side economics as well as admitted how he wrong he was on many things. I wonder if this will ever be the case for some of my regulars here...

He makes several good points in this column, among them are these:

Until that moment I had not realized how closed the right-wing mind had become. Even assuming that my friends’ view of the Times’ philosophy was correct, which it most certainly was not, why would they not want to know what their enemy was thinking? This was my first exposure to what has been called “epistemic closure” among conservatives—living in their own bubble where nonsensical ideas circulate with no contradiction.

Contradiction is treason!

Among the interesting reactions to my book is that I was banned from Fox News. My publicist was told that orders had come down from on high that it was to receive no publicity whatsoever, not even attacks. Whoever gave that order was smart; attacks from the right would have sold books. Being ignored was poison for sales. I later learned that the order to ignore me extended throughout Rupert Murdoch’s empire.

That's because you were disobeying their will...oops, VILL!

The final line for me to cross in complete alienation from the right was my recognition that Obama is not a leftist. In fact, he’s barely a liberal—and only because the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today. Viewed in historical context, I see Obama as actually being on the center-right.

Huh. Now who has also said that before?

So here we are, post-election 2012. All the stupidity and closed-mindedness that right-wingers have displayed over the last 10 years has come back to haunt them. It is now widely understood that the nation may be center-left after all, not center-right as conservatives thought. Overwhelming losses by Republicans to all the nation’s nonwhite voters have created a Democratic coalition that will govern the nation for the foreseeable future.

But they don't care, Bruce. As long as the win the argument and/or make money off of rubes.

At least a few conservatives now recognize that Republicans suffer for epistemic closure. They were genuinely shocked at Romney’s loss because they ignored every poll not produced by a right-wing pollster such as Rasmussen or approved by right-wing pundits such as the perpetually wrong Dick Morris. Living in the Fox News cocoon, most Republicans had no clue that they were losing or that their ideas were both stupid and politically unpopular.

They still don't have a clue as is evidenced by my comments section. Of course, none of this could be their fault, right!?

I am disinclined to think that Republicans are yet ready for a serious questioning of their philosophy or strategy. They comfort themselves with the fact that they held the House (due to gerrymandering) and think that just improving their get-out-the-vote system and throwing a few bones to the Latino community will fix their problem. There appears to be no recognition that their defects are far, far deeper and will require serious introspection and rethinking of how Republicans can win going forward. The alternative is permanent loss of the White House and probably the Senate as well, which means they can only temporarily block Democratic initiatives and never advance their own.

Yet they still believe...

They Want A Mailing List

A nice summation of what happens when you allow hucksters to run your political party. As I have been saying, they don't want to win elections anymore. As Bill says below, if they are Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, or Bill Whittle, they just want a mailing list. Sadly, if they are your average voter, they just want to "win" arguments and flock all to willingly to these mailing lists.

Oh, and good Lord, was the montage of the same exact book being sold over and over again fucking hilarious! I wonder how much longer they will fall for it...

 

A Gift To GOP Freshmen From The Democrats

Yep. That's pretty much it.

At Least It Was A Woman This Time

I think as the rest of the country moves on without them we are going to see increasingly erratic behavior from conservatives. With this, they have taken "Do it again, only harder" to a whole new level.

New Mexico GOP Repesentative Cathrynn Brown has introduced a bill in the State’s House of Representatives that would prohibit women who have been raped from obtaining an abortion—or face a sentence of up to three years in prison as punishment for committing the offending act. The legal theory behind the proposed legislation? Tampering with evidence of a crime…seriously.

Part of me has to wonder if these people are secret Democratic plants that will the left win election after election. The alternative is that they really are this disgusting and, if that's the case, they can never be allowed to be in charge of anything significant. People that are this mentally unbalanced should simply retire quietly to Shady Meadows, be given their soup, and left alone to spout their insanity.

No wonder Bobby Jindal is calling Republicans the stupid party.

Musings and Perceptions

I went to the club to work out on Monday and ran in to my ol' buddies Reverend Ed and Doctor Sean. They couldn't wait to start screaming at me about liberals and how they are going to destroy our country. They repeated, verbatim, many of the same arguments I see in comments on here. In fact, Reverend Ed used the same style as well as theme that my regulars here deploy  (e.g. a weasel question framed in such a way that the only response is a "win" for them).

For example, Ed asked me, "Where in the Constitution does it say anything about abortion?" When I informed him that I don't answer weasel questions, he huffed and puffed and said that I couldn't answer because that would mean I would be proved wrong and Roe v Wade should be overturned. I then explained to him that if he really wanted to reduced abortions in this country, he'd stop talking about the evils of fornication and and start educating people on family planning and making more emotionally intelligent decisions with their lives. In essence, work together to reduce unwanted pregnancies and take away the demand.

Sadly, he did not agree and I realized, like everything else with the Right, they don't want to actually solve problems. They just want to argue about them, "win" said argument, and implement policy in EXACTLY the way they dictate, never wavering or compromising in any way. Of course, this is never going to happen with the abortion issue. That topic, like gay marriage and climate change, has evolved to the point where it is no longer an issue. Guns aren't far behind.

This was evident when I asked each of them about the election and why conservatives lost. "People are stupid" they both replied. "Any reflection on your own party or perhaps some things that you might want to change? Immigration policy, perhaps?"

"Nope. Nothing."
"So, do it again, only harder?" I asked, chuckling to myself of course.
"Yep."

I then asked them if they cared if they lost election after election as it's pretty clear that the country is moving on without them.

"Nope."

As long as they are ideologically pure, continue to see compromise as a weakness, are unmoved by facts, intolerant of dissent, and are undeterred by new information, all is well in wingnut land, I guess. I told them they should find some more old white guys with 2 dollar haircuts to talk about rape some more. That seemed to work out well for them last year:)

Pastor Ed informed me that he would be home schooling his child. I applauded him for taking such a proactive effort in his child's life. He then went on to say that the reasons why he was doing it were: he wants to teach his child Hebrew and Greek  so he can know what the Bible really says (out of the bubble translation: so he can win the argument by claiming superiority over those who don't know Greek and Hebrew and thus say that HIS interpretation of the Bible is the RIGHT one); he wants to teach him logic (out of the bubble translation: so he can sound intelligent while lying in order to win the argument and claim superiority); he wants to teach him science (out of the bubble translation: so he can learn how evolution and climate change are myths perpetrated by liberals who are striving to achieve world domination); and, of course, civics, meaning an "accurate" interpretation of the Constitution. I almost laughed out loud at the science remark but politeness go the better of me.

Before Ed left to go home, I noticed how every time I countered what he said, he would go and try to find someone else to back him up. The other patrons at the gym would usually laugh or shrug and say they didn't want to get involved. Like my regulars here, he couldn't stand alone and discuss a particular issue. Bullies always need a gang, I suppose.

After Ed left, the best part of my time there occurred. Doctor Sean's son was hanging out with us off and on as he had the day off as well. After a long mouth foam and stomp off that included many topics, among them how bullshit it was that Martin Luther King day is a national holiday (and people think he's prejudiced...go figure!), how we are going to become like Greece (an oldie but a goodie:)), how China was going to overtake the world, and how Barack Obama is a communist, Doctor Sean's son, a freshmen in high school, turned to me and said,

"I'm sorry."

I smiled and saw in him what I see in my students: the future. More specifically, progress. Sean's son recognized how his old man was not really well in the head, politically speaking, and felt rather embarrassed. Obviously, somewhere along the line, he had some good teachers. Of course, Sean sends all four of his kids to a prestigious private school in the area which, according to him, is really, really liberal. When I asked him why, if he and his wife were so conservative, they send their children there, he shrugged and said, "It's the best school in the Twin Cities."

Hmm...perhaps the only way to cut through that ideological blockage is the perceptual framework of "status." Cool...

They Just Can't Resist Rape

In case anyone was wondering, the Republican Party is not done talking about rape.

GOP looks for ways to stop the rape comments

First, I would be remiss in my duties if I did not remind everyone that this is not , in fact, an Onion headline. It's very real. Apparently, yet another old, white man with a two dollar haircut (Georgia Rep Phil Gingrey) felt the need to clarify a few things about Todd Akin.

“We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate,’” Gingrey said.He also said that Akin’s definition of a “non-legitimate rape” could be “a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents.” 

See, this is what happens when you believe in Republican Jesus, folks, and allow men, over the last 2,000 years, to be in charge of your sexuality. You get the American Taliban.

This was the icing on the cake...

And it may have added new urgency to a training program that’s already being launched by an anti-abortion group — the Susan B. Anthony list — to keep candidates and lawmakers from continually making the same kind of comments that may have helped ruin Republicans’ chances of winning the Senate. 

A "training" program? (sniff sniff). Sounds like a re-education camp to me. Don't do it, old white men with two dollar haircuts!! Stay true to your core beliefs!!! They's a comin'!!!!

But seriously, they have to have a training program? BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!

Still With The Deafness of Tone

It's been almost two week since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut and the Right is continuing merrily along with their complete deafness of tone. They just don't get it. This one is different and, like the last election, they're are going to learn yet another hard lesson. Even Frank Luntz thinks so.

“The public wants guns out of the schools, not in the schools,” Luntz said on CBS’s “This Morning.” “And they are not asking for a security official or someone else. I don’t think the NRA is listening. I don’t think they understand most Americans would protect the Second Amendment rights and yet agree with the idea that not every human being should own a gun, not every gun should be available at anytime, anywhere, for anyone. At gun shows, you should not be able to buy something there without any kind of check whatsoever.” 

That's right. There are plenty of people that should not own guns. I think this incident (as well as the rest of them this year) illustrate that if you increase the number of people carrying weapons, you are going to increase the chances of irresponsible gun ownership. It shouldn't simply be that people who have criminal records should not own guns. Many people with mental illness or people who live folks who have mental disabilities should not own guns either.

I don't think the gun rights folks (and many others on the Right) realize how Orwellian they sound. The irony is hilarious when you consider how much they rip the left for doublespeak. The answer to gun violence is...MORE GUNS, damnit!!

War is Peace...

What the Right really wants is to (ahem) do it again only harder. They are using this as an opportunity to see if they can gain any ground on what they view as "Slaughter Zones" (AKA Gun Free Zones). They want to be able to carry their guns wherever they want, including schools. It's a chest thumping, juvenile maneuver which serves to further their "fuck you, dad/stomp down the hallway/bedroom door slam" agenda of being pissed off at rules they don't like. Never mind the rest of us.

The only guns I want in schools are the ones carried by police officers (yet another group the Right sneer at as not "having any real training" which is basically code for insecurity and envy). Schools are public property which means that the public gets to decide what goes on in our schools. With private property, gun owners can kindly go fuck themselves if they want to beef about gun free zones. The health club I go to, for example, has a few malcontents who bitch about not being able to bring their guns in when they lift weights (how would that work, exactly?). Perhaps they should choose another place to go rather than gripe.

Doubling down is what they do lately, though, and it continues to cost them elections. This won't be any different. They underestimate the president and worse, the public, who has a growing distaste for some guns, as Mr. Luntz notices above. He's a right wing pollster so if he's saying it, they are in big fucking trouble. And it won't be because (cue high pitched shrieking) Barack Obama is going to be a "gun grabber." Actually, they're not really in "trouble" either...only the way they see it...the world (gasp!) changing and that simply won't do.

In fact, I pretty much guarantee that three things are going to come out of all of this. First, people will get to keep the guns they own (if they choose not to sell them back to the federal government, that is, for a very good price:)). Second, plenty of guns will be available for people to use to defend themselves.

And third, the Right is going to be a mouth foaming pile of apoplexis.

I Guess That Settles That

Analysis: Tax Cuts Don't Lead to Economic Growth, a New 65-Year Study Finds

The paper is a good reminder to be humble about taxes as a tool for growing the economy. They remain, above all, a tool for collecting revenue and tweaking incentives for specific economic behavior. Congress has cut tax rates repeatedly over the last 60 years, while the country and the global economy have undergone considerable changes that probably had a greater effect on growth.

Yep, pretty much. And what did the GOP do when they saw this?

Nonpartisan Tax Report Withdrawn After G.O.P. Protest

Stomped their feet and stormed down the hallway...yelling at dad the whole way!!!

Hence my frustration with the Right...

An Opposite Reality

Things are always interesting behind the scenes here at Markadelphia. Take, for instance, a discussion Nikto and I had the other day about what he called my hand wringing and doubt about the election a couple of weeks back after the first debate. He reminded me that the Right laps up shit like this like a toothless old man slurping his soup. It didn't quite hit me right away what he was talking about. until I read this piece and then thought about the quote I put up here recently from Charles Bukowski

The problem with the world is the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

You'd think after all this time of me talking about "Managing Fantasies," I wouldn't fall for their line of BS in my attempts to be thoughtful and fair. But I did. The fact is, folks, the president is the favorite in this election and this whole idea that Mitt Romney has momentum going into the last two weeks is completely false. Tomasky explains.

And yet the conventional wisdom is congealing right now—it is hardening this morning, minute by minute—that Romney is going to win the election. From Playbook, which distills the c.w.: President Obama won last night’s foreign-policy debate on substance, in snap polls and with the pundits, but Mitt Romney did well enough that for the first time in six years, Romney folks emailed, “We’re going to win.” 

 In reality, Obama is the favorite. The state maps still make him so. Nate Silver, the only person who takes every single poll into account (plus loads of other indicators), still has him so. This emerging c.w. is built more on spin and smell, which the media are starting to buy.

Ah, yes. The "liberal media." These are the same ones that love high ratings so, of course, the race has to be close and the "Mittmentum" meme plays into this quite well. Amusing, considering this concept is all about feelings, things that my friends on the right assure me have no bearing in their thought process.

One piece that Mike Allen bought this morning in that Playbook item: A Romney aide told him New Hampshire leans their way. Ridiculous. Even RCP has Obama +3 in New Hampshire. A poll yesterday had him up nine. He’s never trailed there. It’s been a fight, true, but he is clearly on course to win it. But the Romney aide just threw it out there. Not blaming him or her—it’s the kind of thing you throw out when you want to start giving an impression of inevitability. But that is what the Romney team is trying now to do. (It’s up to journalism, of course, to say when something doesn’t seem true.)

Right. So they have to start saying that it isn't true if they want to be honest.

And so, after their side’s third consecutive debate loss, conservatives are the ones feeling confident. They are creating a reality. They’re talking up Romney’s supposedly unstoppable momentum now that he’s survived the debates without making one of those Gerry Ford-style goofs (that’s the bar now for the presidency?). They’re tweeting things about Silver, sharpening their knives, contemplating his November 7 takedown. They’re not quite measuring the drapes, but they’re getting their rulers out of storage.

Creating a reality...that's just what they do. They sense doubt or worry in liberals and then they pounce. The hand wringing begins and then "not reality" becomes reality. Of course, if they end up being wrong, so what? Remember, there is no "being wrong" in their world. That whole being wrong thing is for liberals. When they are wrong, the simply harumph, make up a load of bullshit, and pretend that they were actually right...sort of like Mitt Romney has been doing since Debate #1.

The undecided voter (and even the conservative one) has to ask themselves...is this really the guy you want to vote for? At least you know what you would be getting with the president...more economic recovery, a plan to actually reduce the debt and manage the deficit, robust national security, and firm solutions to health care, education, energy, and immigration. Mitt Romney offers none of these things because he's changed his position so many times on all of them. Tomasky concurs.

Conservatives know all this. But they’re constructing an opposite reality. This is at the heart of everything going on right now, I think. It’s what they can do that liberals can’t really do. They've always done it. “Romney is going to win” in 2012 isn’t so different from “We’ll be hailed as liberators” in 2003. They say something and try to make it so, and the media go for it time and time again. 

This is what’s maddening to liberals about what Romney has done since the first debate. He’s constructed a new reality about himself and he’s gotten away with it, mostly. Specifically, it’s that he’s flip-flopped on all these things without the remotest hint of acknowledgement that the old positions even existed. 

So, for the next two weeks, people (and especially the media) have to stop falling for it. Democrats have to stop the needless worrying and get to work to get out the vote. The electoral math says the president is the favorite to win this election with feelings not entering into the equation at all. Let's make sure he does and then some. In addition...

What should Obama do? Well, Republicans want to make Democrats fearful and jittery and reactive—appear to be accepting the Republican premise. So basically, anything but that. These next two or three days will be crucial, and if the Democrats do seem fearful and reactive, they’ll help the new c.w. congeal and maybe help seal a fate that the facts don’t yet come close to foreordaining. 

Recognize their BS for what it is: the last gasp of a shrinking voting bloc.

Why Again?

Gene Lyons has a great piece on why exactly the Right hates Obama so much. It echoes some of the recent writings of Andrew Sullivan. First, of course, we have to define the problem.

To an awful lot of white Protestant evangelicals across the Deep South especially, President Obama has become no less than a secular stand-in for the Antichrist — a smooth-talking deceiver representing liberal cosmopolitanism in its most treacherous disguise. Dislike of Obama has grown to cult-like proportions across the region.

But it's not really racial because they'd vote for Allen West or Condi Rice in a minute. So what is it again?

Nor, however, are their fears entirely irrational. Because if the polls are right — and a disinterested observer would have to say that professional pollsters have grown increasingly accurate at predicting recent contests — the 2012 presidential election may not bring about “The Rapture,” but it could definitely mark the definitive end of a political era.

Hmm...do go on, Gene.

Should he prevail in most of the nine “swing states” where everybody agrees that the contest will be decided, and where Obama currently appears to lead by strong majorities, the white, GOP-accented South will find itself politically marooned. Again.Richard M. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” will have been dismantled and a new, moderately center-left Democratic coalition built by President Obama. For the first time since 1972, the Rush Limbaugh/Mike Huckabee wing of the GOP will find itself with no clear path to power.

I think this will happen even if the president loses. A GOP presidential candidate hasn't gotten above 300 electoral votes since 1988 when George HW "RINO" Bush got elected. Should Romney win, he will get nowhere near 300 EVs. But this is what happens when your party is populated by extremists.

Moreover, should Obama be successful in rebuilding the U.S. economy during a second term, and once voters grasp that “Obamacare” has liberated them from the fear of being driven into bankruptcy by medical emergencies, the new Democratic coalition could prove to have a kind of staying power not seen since FDR and Truman. Indeed, it’s been Republican anxiety over that very possibility in the wake of George W. Bush’s spectacular failures that led to the GOP’s Washington version of massive resistance during Obama’s first-term. Or, to put it another way, if President Obama can win in this economy, how could any talented Democratic candidate lose?

The economy is going to add 12 million new jobs in the next four years even by conservative estimates. So when Mitt Romney says he is going to do this, he's basically taking credit for the recovery that Obama and the Democrats implemented.

Lyons ends with why their reality has become unhinged.

The temptation for Southern Republicans would be to double down on the crazy, because “conservatism,” so-called, can never fail, only be failed. Also because religious melodrama is really what an awful lot of them are really about. That, and Koch Brothers money. They’re not actually conservatives at all, in the classical sense, but sentimental fanatics seeking to purge the nation of sin; adepts of “limited government” with their noses buried in women’s panty drawers; apostles of a lost Utopia located in a non-existent past, most often in 60s sitcoms like “The Andy Griffith Show.”

Yep.