“A Phony Civil War”: Nobody Here But Us Conservatives
Speaker John Boehner’s serial criticisms (yesterday in an NBC interview, today in a press conference) of conservative “outside groups” and their harassment of his own self and of House Republicans who do his bidding is getting massive media attention at the moment. Any minute now someone in the MSM is going to go over the brink and toast the Ohioan as the bravest man in American politics, a veritable colossus of strength and wisdom.
That’s all well and good; best I can tell Boehner got through both outbursts without weeping, and it is nice to see him not crawling on his belly like a reptile when it comes to Heritage Action and other right-wing bully boys. You kinda get the feeling, moreover, that Boehner was behind the firing of Republican Study Committee staff director Paul Teller, which has people in the “outside” groups and the allied blogospheric precincts freaking out.
But the Teller brouhaha is a reminder that this whole “war” between Boehner and “the groups” is pretty much inside baseball, and about Boehner’s role as Republican tactician rather than any deep matter of ideology or principle. And anyone who wants to lionize Boehner as some sort of “moderate” or even “pragmatist” free of ideological fervor should heed his own words in today’s press conference:
Asked if he was officially saying “no” to the tea party, Boehner emphasized the deficit reduction achieved under the budget deal and said there was no reason to oppose it.
“I came here to cut the size of government,” he said. “That’s exactly what this bill does, and why conservatives wouldn’t vote for this or criticize the bill is beyond any recognition I could come up with.”
Boehner also defended his own commitment to conservative principles, which has repeatedly come under fire. This criticism has at times threatened his speakership when he has attempted to negotiate with President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats.
“I say what I mean and I mean what I say,” he said. “I’m as conservative as anybody around this place.”
Can you imagine Harry Reid, who occasionally gets criticized by the left, saying “I’m as liberal as anybody around this place”? No, you can’t.
So even this “act of war” between Boehner and “the groups” needs to be understood for what it is: an argument over strategy and tactics and operational control rather than goals and ideology. So progressives shouldn’t go too far in celebrating another battle in what I think is a phony “civil war,” or in exaggerating its effects.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 12, 2013
“Told You So, Obamacare’s Back”: By Next Fall, HealthCare.gov Is Going To Be A Net Plus For President Obama And Democrats
If one looks just at the raw, bottom-line number the Department of Health and Human Services released Wednesday—365,000 citizens enrolled since October 1—one might be inclined to think it’s not so hot. And it isn’t. That’s 180,000 or so a month, and if you post that number against the stated goal of 7 million by next spring, the stated goal looks awfully chimerical, and the thing seems a disaster (180,000 times six months, the enrollment period, is just 1.08 million).
Dig a little deeper and things look considerably better. If we could graph it, the bar line of enrollment would make for a pretty impressive ski slope: After just 27,000 people signed up in the whole of October, The New York Times reported over the weekend, about 100,000 people signed up in November, and then, in the first week of December alone, 112,000 chose plans. The Los Angeles Times put out slightly different numbers Wednesday but agreed on the trend. From an obviously atrocious starting place, enrollment is essentially quadrupling. If that pace were to continue, the 7 million figure would be cleared in March.
I still wouldn’t quite bet on that. But I would definitely and unflinchingly bet on the central proposition I argued last week: By next fall, HealthCare.gov is going to be a net plus for Obama and the Democrats.
Wishful thinking? You can call it that if you want to. But I warn you I’m not usually a wishful thinker. Like most partisans on either side, I tend to expect the worst. It’s usually a wise insurance policy; you’re rarely disappointed. I write such things only when I really think them, like the time in August 2012 when I wrote a column suggesting that Obama could very well win about 330 electoral votes. He won 332, which most anyone else would have said when I wrote that piece was crazy.
I had a hunch then, and I have one now. And my bet is based on a lot more than enrollment numbers. It’s based on the numbers of people who are benefiting and will benefit from aspects of the law. These aren’t in the thousands. They’re in the millions. About 70 million citizens will enjoy free—free—preventive care for a range of services that typically weren’t covered at all before or at best were covered and required a co-pay. About half of them are Medicare recipients (= old people = voters). Preventive care, as you may know, is something our system hasn’t been doing very well. Now it will.
More than 100 million Americans live with what the insurance companies would define as pre-existing conditions. Over these next few months, as their symptoms flare up or especially if they worsen, requiring lengthy hospital stays and intense treatment, they’re going to be seeing that they don’t have to fret about money or whether they’re going to continue to be covered anymore. Mental-health coverage is going to be improved dramatically for up to 60 million Americans. Nearly 7 million senior citizens are going to find in the coming months that they’re no longer screwed by the doughnut-hole prescription-drug problem that was created by the Bush Medicare Part D law of 2003 and corrected by Obamacare. It is saving these 7 million seniors an average of $1,000 a year, which for many of these folks is probably a reasonable chunk of their income.
I could go on. The thing is that all this isn’t going to make the papers and the cable channels much. There isn’t a lot of inherent news value in a free cervical-cancer screening or a prescription-drug refill. But these millions of people live real lives, not on TV, and they and their families and friends will know what has happened.
You see that I’m not making a Beltway/political argument. Washington, D.C., will, I can promise you, be the last city in the United States to change its mind about Obamacare. Once a notion becomes conventional wisdom in this town and rocks a president’s poll numbers the way the disastrous rollout so clearly has, it takes a typhoon to dislodge it. Or a hurricane—remember how Karl Rove was making the United States a conservative country until Katrina came along and sent Bush’s approval numbers down there in the range of curdled milk?
The rollout won’t be a hurricane. It will be a calm rain, a steady shower of reality across the country that may never achieve quite enough force to trump inside-the-Beltway perception but will be strong enough to change many people’s minds around the country.
Fixes still need to be made. But now, as opposed to a month ago, one can feel as if they will be made. And without excusing the bollixing up of the rollout, of which I’ve written very critically, one can also say now that in historical context, this is all happening pretty fast. Remember, the original Social Security legislation was passed in 1935. And when did the first check go out? Not until 1940. Can you imagine a five-year lag in today’s media world? Roosevelt, and more important the program itself, would have been torn to pieces. I think in two more years’ time, and indeed less than that, many millions of Americans will see that what they thought was decent health insurance before the Affordable Care Act was like gaslight before electricity. If that’s wishful thinking, it’s for their sake, not the president’s.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 12, 2013
“From Their Cold Dead Hands”: When You’re In The Business Of Arming Murderers, Murder Is Good For Business
This Saturday is the one-year anniversary of the Newtown shooting, and it’s remarkable where we’ve come in that time. In the weeks that followed, everyone said that now we could finally pass some sensible measures to stem the river of blood and death and misery that is the price we pay for America’s love of firearms. President Obama proposed some extraordinarily modest measures: enhanced background checks, limits on the kind of large-capacity magazines mass murderers find so useful, perhaps even a new ban on new sales to civilians of certain military-style weapons. Not a single thing that would keep a single law-abiding citizen from owning as many guns as he wants.
So here we are, a year later, and what has happened? First of all, at least 30,000 more Americans have had their lives cut short by guns; tens of thousands more were shot but survived. Around 200 children have been shot to death in that time—another 10 Newtowns. There was no federal legislation on guns. It died, because there are a sufficient number of Republicans (and a couple of Democrats) who, quite frankly, looked on one hand at a child getting murdered, and on the other hand at some armchair Rambo having to go a whole mile to the police station to get a background check before buying an AR-15 from his neighbor, and decided that the latter would be a greater moral outrage than the former.
And in the states, 109 new gun laws have passed, 39 of which restricted gun ownership in some way, and 70 of which expanded gun rights. While it’s true that the restrictive laws tended to be passed in larger states, no one could plausibly argue that the result of this seemingly once-in-a-generation moment for a new approach to guns was anything more than the same old approach to guns.
There’s a lengthy new report out from the American Psychological Association with lots of recommendations for what we can do to reduce the death toll, things like early interventions for those at risk of committing acts of violence and some modest (of course) policies restricting people with violent histories or certain kinds of mental illness from buying guns. All the recommendations are sensible, and if we did them all we’d certainly reduce the level of gun violence. By how much? It’s hard to say—maybe 5 percent, maybe 10 percent, maybe, if we’re being absurdly optimistic, 20 percent. Which would still mean tens of thousands of Americans killed every year with guns.
So it’s hard not to be cynical, to believe that there’s just nothing that can be done. I know that a lot of people I admire don’t like to hear that, but it’s how I’m feeling at the moment. If 20 elementary school kids getting mowed down wasn’t enough to make half of the country take a look at its insistence that everyone be armed to the teeth and say this is crazy, what would it take? A hundred kids murdered at one time? A thousand?
Not even that, I suspect. It’s their “culture” and they’re sticking to it. My dad took me hunting, and we bonded! And obviously, there’s no other way for a father and son to bond. I guess the majority of American fathers that don’t shoot with their kids aren’t bonding. Pity the fathers and sons in every other industrialized country in the world (all of which have more restrictive gun laws than we do), unable to bond at all.
So it’s hard to see when things are ever going to change except in tiny ways that don’t make much of an impact at all. Maybe I’m wrong, and real change could still happen. After all, rates of gun ownership are on a steady decline. Gun deaths have declined somewhat too, simply because there’s been an overall decline in crime over the last two decades.
But they’re still selling them as fast as they can make them. In fact, if you’re a gun manufacturer, you probably look back at Newtown as one of the best things that ever happened to your business. Sure, there’s some bad publicity, but what else follows a horrific mass shooting? Some futile talk of gun control, which makes it easy to convince your customers that owning four or five guns just isn’t enough—they need ten or twenty or thirty, because they could be outlawed any day! Sales go through the roof, but no meaningful legislation passes, and you pocket the profits. When you’re in the business of arming murderers, murder is good for business.
Again, maybe I’m wrong about the future. But with the Second Amendment—the Founders’ second-worst mistake, behind only the constitutional enshrinement of slavery—under no threat, nothing will change the fact that there’s a gun for every man, woman, and child in America. And the bodies will continue to pile up by the thousands, year after year after year.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 12, 2013
“There’s Only So Far You Can Follow Your Extremists”: Conservative Anger Over Budget Deal Now Purely To Save Face
Have we finally reached a point where the perpetual anger of Washington conservatives is no longer a threat to the republic? The budget deal announced yesterday suggests that it may well be, at least for the moment. It isn’t that conservatives aren’t raising a stink about it—they’re displeased that it doesn’t repeal the Affordable Care Act, slash Social Security and Medicare, and do more to punish food-stamp recipients, among other things—because they certainly are. Indeed, they were decrying it even before it was announced, which tells you how concerned they are about the details. But they seem to be just going through the motions. Send the press releases, say you’ll vote against it, tell Fox News why it doesn’t get to the real problems … and then we’ll all move on. The budget will pass, mostly because it averts the possibility of a government shutdown (at least over the budget, though not over the debt ceiling) for two more years. And even the most conservative Republican knows that’s a good thing for their party.
Just look at how John Boehner is acting. Boehner, who spent the entire period of the shutdown (and the weeks leading up to it) stepping gingerly around his party’s right wing as though it were a Bengal tiger that could rip his throat out with a single swipe if angered, now feels free to attack the likes of Heritage Action, obviously without concern that they can make him pay for his insolence:
At a press conference Wednesday, a visibly angry Boehner said conservative groups who oppose the two-year budget deal struck by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) are “using our members and they’re using the American people for their own goals. This is ridiculous.” Moments earlier, during a closed-door meeting, Boehner told House Republicans that the well-funded and influential organizations “aren’t acting out of principle, and they’re not trying to enact conservative policies. They’re using you to raise money and expand their own organization,” he said, according to a source in the room.
Those are some pretty strong words. Meanwhile, primary challenges to Republicans who have sinned against purity aren’t exactly looking formidable at the moment. Steve Stockman, who could well be the single nuttiest Republican in the House (and that’s saying something), is mounting a challenge to already extremely conservative Texas senator John Cornyn, one that will produce some moments of comedy but is almost certainly doomed. There are other primary challenges in progress to high-profile Republicans like Lindsey Graham, but most of those will probably fail as well.
That doesn’t mean that the Tea Party is irrelevant, or that events couldn’t conspire to renew their power and influence over the Republican party. For the moment, however, it does appear that the shutdown provided everyone in the GOP a valuable lesson: there’s only so far you can follow your extremists before they lead you off the cliff, and once you’ve plunged to the bottom, you don’t much want to climb back up and hurl yourself off again.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 11, 2013
“A Wall That Protects Us All”: Sarah Palin Can’t Tear Down The Wall Between Church And State
“We have just enough religion to make us hate,” wrote Jonathan Swift, “but not enough to make us love one another.” A lifelong religious controversialist, the 18th-century Irish satirist definitely knew whereof he wrote. After all, it’s fewer than 20 years since Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland quit dynamiting each other’s gathering places.
Even here in the United States, it often seems that picking fights over religion increases during the Christmas season. If anything, claiming to be persecuted while expressing contempt for others’ belief appears on the rise.
And, no, I’m not talking only about the annual invocation of paranoid triumphalism Fox News calls the “War on Christmas.” Nor even about noted theologian Rush Limbaugh assailing Pope Francis as a “Marxist” for criticizing the tyranny of markets and the worship of money. Because Jesus was all about capital formation and tax cuts for the wealthy.
Everywhere you look, somebody’s insulting somebody else’s religion.
To me, the cultural left’s only marginally better than the right. I recently witnessed a remarkable online colloquy concerning a Catholic organization’s shipping 3,000 rosaries to the Philippines to victims of Typhoon Haiyan, “so that they can thank God” as one cynic wrote.
“Do these people ever use their minds for one second?” one person asked. “Hearing this is thoroughly depressing. It shows how ignorant and warped so many people are and how daunting is the amount of education there needs to be to cure the world.”
Cure it of what, I wondered. Of typhoons? Of charity? Or merely of belief? Almost needless to say, Roman Catholic churches worldwide were taking up special collections for storm victims in that largely Catholic nation—along with religious and humanitarian organizations worldwide.
“They are vultures sweeping down on those in need to shove more control down their throats,” wrote another. “I have nothing but contempt for the Catholic church and religion as a whole.”
News flash: The world will never be cured.
Meanwhile, how this kind of free-floating rage differs from Bible-beating preachers who blame earthquakes and tornadoes on other people’s sexual sins escapes me. The main characteristic of the fundamentalist mind is an inability to refrain from expressing contempt for beliefs different from one’s own—whether one’s spiritual leader is Pat Robertson or Christopher Hitchens.
Which brings us back to Sarah Palin’s remarkable appearance at the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University last week—the last stop on a tour publicizing her book Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas.
“I say in a very jolly Christmasy way,” the Alaskan babbler claims, “that, ‘Enough is enough.’ Say enough is enough with this politically correct police out there that is acting to erode our freedom to celebrate and exercise our faith. Some Scrooge wants to force Christ out of Christmas and wants to ban Jesus out of the reason for the season?”
To hear Palin tell it, there’s a veritable army of “angry atheists armed with an attorney” who “want to try to abort Christ from Christmas” by filing lawsuits “when they see a plastic Jewish family on somebody’s lawn—a nativity scene, that’s basically what it is, right?”
Actually, no.
But never mind theology, here’s the deal: If Palin or anybody else can provide a single, verifiable instance of somebody being successfully sued for exhibiting a crèche, a cross or any religious symbol on private property anywhere in the U.S., they’d have something to complain about.
They’d also have the certain support of the American Civil Liberties Union in defense of their First Amendment rights.
But of course that’s not what these (to my mind overblown) fights over nativity scenes at courthouses, city halls and state capitols around the country are about. Instead, they’re about an “establishment of religion” which the same First Amendment categorically forbids.
In typical scattershot fashion, Palin even invoked Virginia’s own Thomas Jefferson, a conventionally pious Founding Father in her mind, who would, like, totally object to the persecution of people like her who can’t make everybody admit that their God is America’s God:
“I think Thomas Jefferson would certainly recognize it and stand up and he wouldn’t let anybody tell him to sit down and shut up.”
Now it’s definitely true that Jefferson was rarely shy about his religious views. Courtesy of Martin Longman in Washington Monthly, here’s his opinion about what Palin calls “the reason for the season” from an 1823 letter to John Adams: “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter.”
Like Swift, Jefferson recognized the dangers of religious strife. That’s precisely why, he assured Connecticut Baptists in 1802, the First Amendment decreed “a wall of separation between church and State.”
A wall that protects us still.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, December 11, 2013
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