“Conservative Intellectual Bankruptcy”: Where The Right’s Gun Logic Falls Apart
The “Obama administration” and “gun registry.” Put those words together in a sentence and its guaranteed to trigger conservative apoplexy. But now the Obama administration really is about to start cataloging guns, and it’s eliciting little more than approving head nods from the right. How can that be? Here’s how.
For as long as anyone can remember, the right’s fought tooth and nail against any effort to limit access to just about any kind of firearm. Handgun, AK-47, bazooka — if it fires something at killing speed, you should be able to have it.
And for just about the same timeframe, they’ve fought just as hard to prevent the federal government from trying to keep track of who owns weapons in the United States. Their position (boiled down): Everyone should have guns, and no one should know who has guns. Suggest even the most incremental steps towards regulating gun possession and, to hear the right tell it, it’s as if the redcoats are back on the march in Lexington and Concord. A more fundamental threat to our liberties can hardly be imagined.
Now the Department of Justice has announced that it’s going to catalog how many guns the federal government has in its possession and, one imagines, exactly who has them. Red alert! DEFCON 5! (Or 1, whichever is worse!) It’s a gun registry! Confiscation is right around the corner! All is lost! Right? Right?
Actually, if I’m reading my right-wing websites correctly, apparently not. In fact, they seem to think it’s a move that’s long overdue.
How, you may ask, can this be? If knowing who has guns is a bad thing, how can we be OK with the government finding out more about who has guns? Let’s think this through.
What would be the purpose of finding out more about who in the general population owns guns? To help us have a greater understanding of gun violence, and to solve gun crimes when they happen. Why do people on the right oppose a gun registry? Because they see a greater threat in the possibility that the federal government will try to restrict their use of guns or even take them away.
Now, let’s turn the analysis around. What’s the purpose of drilling down on the amount of guns in the federal government? Maybe it has to do with something as mundane as budgeting. Or perhaps its part of an effort to ensure that we are narrowly tailoring the distribution of firearms across the federal bureaucracy to those who actually need them.
If that’s the reason, the hard right should be going nuts. Why? Because it opens the door to the notion that there ought to be an analytical screen between guns and those who seek to carry them, and that there are good reasons to restrict access to guns even among law abiding, mentally competent people. Acknowledging the utility of doing that on the federal level makes it harder to argue against doing it elsewhere.
But the right doesn’t oppose. They support. And again, it has to do with their perception of threat. In this case, it’s apparently the idea that the federal government might be arming itself as part of a plan to subject the general population to the tyranny of the state. Yup. That’s what they’re afraid of.
Now, if you can get past the silliness of that notion, you might say a federal government that has the United States Army at its disposal (to say nothing of the other branches of the military) doesn’t much need to arm anyone else to take over just about anything. And if the federal government is preparing to crack down on average citizens, you might think that tanks, attack helicopters and bunker busting bombs would do the trick. But to admit that would also be admitting that arming citizens really isn’t a hedge against tyranny at all. And of course, it isn’t. But that kind of thinking — call it “logic” — doesn’t feature prominently in the right’s postulations about these kinds of things.
It would be easy to dismiss the right’s ideas about things like this if they weren’t having such an impact on public policy. The people who think the government is on the verge of tyranny are, not infrequently, the same people driving a much larger agenda in the GOP. You can see the push to mainstream their far out ideas everywhere from health care to the environment to tax policy to, yes, guns. And it means that we are increasingly memorializing into law policies that reflect a fantasyland view of America rather than the America most of us live in. That’s not good.
So I say: Bring on the gun count! If for no other reason than this seems to be one of those cases where one brand of right-wing nuttiness (Government tyranny!) is running headlong into another (Bazookas for all!). And if that helps put the brakes on either, then we’ll all be better off.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, May 29, 2014
“Rand Paul Is A Deeply Cynical Politician”: It’s Hard To Spot The Conviction But The Hypocrisy Is Evident
When Washingtonians refer to Rand Paul as a different breed of politician than his father, they generally mean it in a good way. The implication is that he is more pragmatic and tactical (probably more tactful, too); that his worldview has broader appeal. Whereas Ron Paul is way too much of a crank to ever have a shot of winning the GOP presidential nomination, Rand increasingly looks like a contender.
But whatever you might think about the elder Paul, you can say this for him: He is not cynical. He is a conviction politician, however repugnant some of us may find his convictions. The younger Paul? Well, he certainly styles himself a man of conviction. But at this point in his presidential quest, it’s getting hard to say for sure.
Take this story on Rand Paul’s “evolving” foreign policy views in Saturday’s New York Times. The premise of the piece is that Paul is being somewhat unfairly attacked by the hawkish wing of his party, whose members often fail to see the distinction between his father’s isolationism and his more nuanced brand of non-interventionism. As evidence, the piece adduces this rather eye-catching data point:
Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America and a close associate of [GOP mega-donor Sheldon] Adelson’s, said that when he pressed Mr. Paul to explain his position on aid to Israel in a recent meeting in the senator’s Washington office, Mr. Klein left reassured. “He said if there was a vote and for any reason it seemed like it was actually going to be close, he would vote for it,” Mr. Klein said.
So, if Klein’s account is correct (and the Times presumably ran it by Senator Paul), what we have is as follows: Paul’s public position is that we should cut off all foreign aid, including aid to Israel, which he dubbed “welfare” back in 2011. But if Paul were ever in a position to end aid to Israel—which is to say, the only time his personal position would really matter—he would abandon that position, and instead vote to ensure that the aid continues.
I’m not sure I can think of a more irresponsible position. If Rand Paul thinks aid to Israel is truly important, then it’s deeply cynical to badmouth that aid simply because bad-mouthing appeals to the type of voter he’s courting. And if he thinks aid to Israel is irredeemably wasteful, then it’s deeply cynical to fink out when given the opportunity to roll it back. Either way, it’s hard to spot the conviction here.
In fairness, Paul did try to resolve this tension at another event, telling the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition that, in the Times’ paraphrasing, “while he would eventually like to terminate all foreign aid, he knew that would not be realistic now.” The most charitable interpretation of this riff is that Paul would like to cut off aid as soon as possible, but realizes you can’t do it abruptly without triggering major blowback among U.S. allies that would damage our standing around the world. That would indeed speak to his pragmatism.
But this interpretation seems like a stretch given that Paul’s comments appear to have been a lot less coherent than that, or at least less specific. “You could see he was a work in progress,” former George W. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer, who attended the meeting, told the Times. Instead, it’s hard to avoid the impression that Paul is simply trying to reassure neoconservatives that he’ll be with them on the issue they care about most, but without junking a big source of his political appeal. That’s not an “evolution.” It’s hypocrisy.
By: Norm Scheiber, The New Republic, May 26, 2014
“Koch Cadre Billionaire Defends Nazi Comments”: For The Continued Success Of The Richest Americans
Ken Langone, the billionaire Home Depot founder, GOP donor and an ally of Charles and David Koch, clumsily defended his March 2014 comments comparing populist criticism of the 1% with the rise of Nazi Germany, in an interview with Capital New York published this week.
Langone, a regular attendee of the twice-yearly secret strategy sessions for the mega rich organized by Charles and David Koch, has been speaking publicly of his concerns for the continued success of the richest Americans.
“We’re being strangled by regulation,” Langone told a conference of hedge fund managers in Las Vegas in mid May, as reported by CNN. “You’re in the 1%, there’s nothing wrong with that,” he continued. “You can do so much more with money than pay your taxes.”
The Top One Percent as Victims
Now, Langone has spoken to defend his past Nazi comparison, despite having somewhat backtracked just two months earlier.
From Huff Post:
Billionaire Kenneth Langone is still defending his comparison of income inequality talking points to rhetoric in Nazi Germany, after apologizing two months ago for the comments.
In a Capital New York interview published Monday morning, the Home Depot co-founder and Republican megadonor said it was a fair analogy to illustrate how democratic elections can yield results he finds terrifying.
“I simply said just because we’re a democracy doesn’t mean you can’t have bad results,” he said. “That’s all! I stand on what I said.”
Huff Post continued:
In a March interview with Politico, which owns Capital, Langone said a GOP pivot toward the economic populism championed by progressives and by such Tea Party candidates as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz would mirror the rise of Adolf Hitler.
“I hope it’s not working,” Langone said of the political appeals at the time. “Because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany.”
Koch “Cadre”
The Kochs have been building their politcal network for more than forty years.
Nicholas Confessore, wrote about the history of the Koch brothers political activities in a front page New York Times story on May 18, 2014, detailing the origins of the present day Koch political operation.
According to Confessore, in a speech given to business leaders and others in 1974, Charles Koch outlined that vision saying: “The development of a well-financed cadre of sound proponents of the free enterprise philosophy is the most critical need facing us today.”
The Koch brothers are not the only billionaires using their wealth to push for radical deregulation. They now have a whole cadre.
By: Nick Surgey, The Center For Media and Democracy, May 19, 2014
“Why Republicans Love Taxing The Poor”: This Hurts Us More Than It Hurts You
The reformist wing of the Republican Party, which has a new book of policy essays out today, is a coterie of right-leaning intellectuals engaged in the Lord’s work of reimagining a non-plutocratic agenda for the party. The eternal problem with the reformists, however, is that they’re all playing an inside game, vying for influence within the party and seeking the ear of its leading figures. The need to maintain the good graces of the powers-that-be causes them to couch their advice with a delicacy that routinely veers into outright fantasy.
Ramesh Ponnuru, one of the contributors to the new volume, provides a case in point. In his Bloomberg View column, Ponnuru argues that Republicans should counter the Democrats’ campaign to lift the minimum wage by proposing instead to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit, which “would give Republicans a way to show that they want to help the poor — and that their stated objections to raising the minimum wage are sincere.”
One problem with this plan to get Republicans to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit is that, as Ezra Klein points out, they’re currently fighting extremely hard to cut the Earned Income Tax Credit. Ponnuru’s column doesn’t mention this highly relevant detail.
What’s more, one of the main reasons the Earned Income Tax Credit exists is to cushion the impact of state taxes, which often force workers on the bottom half of the income spectrum to pay higher rates than the rich. And why are state taxes so regressive? Well, a main reason is that Republicans want it this way. The states that raise the highest proportion of their taxes from the poor are Republican states. The EITC is in large part a way of using the federal tax code to cancel out Republican-led policies of taking money from poor people, so naturally Republicans at the national level oppose it, too.
Should Republicans start endorsing plans to give poor people more money? Well, sure, that would be great. It would also be great if Boko Haram came up with some new policies to help educate girls. In the meantime, a more realistic goal might be to just stop hurting the poor.
Obviously, Ponnuru’s policy goal here is admirable. It would be lovely to have a Republican Party that was not monomaniacally focused on redistributing income upward. (How such a reform could be pulled off without upsetting the basic parameters of the party — no new taxes, high military spending, no cuts for current retirees — is a problem none of the reformists have answered and that probably has no answer.)
I can see why Ponnuru needs to present his idea, which is a 180-degree reversal of the Republican agenda, as “a way to show that they want to help the poor.” The trouble is they don’t want to help the poor, if you define “help” as “letting them have more money,” as opposed to “giving them the kick in the ass they need to stop being lazy moochers.”
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, May 22, 2014
“Issa’s Latest Benghazi Stunt Backfires”: The New Story Is The Same As The Old Story
There’s a usual pattern to House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s (R-Calif.) media game: he’ll quietly leak misleading information to a news outlet; the outlet will run with the exclusive; then the story will be entirely discredited, leaving everyone involved looking rather foolish. It’s happened more than a few times.
Today, Issa tried to play a similar game, but it backfired much quicker than usual.
The California Republican appears to have sought out a reporter he hoped would be sympathetic – in this case, ABC News’ Jon Karl – with Issa’s new Benghazi scoop.
A still-classified State Department e-mail says that one of the first responses from the White House to the Benghazi attack was to contact YouTube to warn of the “ramifications” of allowing the posting of an anti-Islamic video, according to Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Issa, in a perpetual state of high dudgeon, issued a statement describing the White House’s message to YouTube as evidence of … something nefarious. It’s not entirely clear what.
But the trouble, as Karl, to his credit, was quick to note in his report, is that Issa’s revelation actually undermines Issa’s preferred narrative.
The memo suggests that even as the attack was still underway – and before the CIA began the process of compiling talking points on its analysis of what happened – the White House believed it was in retaliation for a controversial video. […]
Asked about the document, a senior White House official told ABC News it demonstrates that the White House genuinely believed the video sparked the attack all along, a belief that turned out to be incorrect.
“We actually think this proves what we’ve said. We were concerned about the video, given all the protests in region,” the official said. And the intelligence community “was also concerned about the video.”
In other words, Issa has uncovered a document, intended to discredit the White House’s argument, which actually bolsters the White House’s argument.
So, here’s the larger question to consider: did Issa just not understand his own story, or, as Eddie Vale suggested, did he release this to undercut the select committee Issa is so opposed to?
Either way, when coming to terms with House Speaker John Boehner’s 180-degree turn on creating the new committee, keep today’s story in mind – GOP leaders long ago lost confidence in Issa’s ability to deal with the investigation competently.
Update: Hannah Groch-Begley discovered that today’s “new” story from Issa to ABC is practically identical to news we already learned – from, among others, ABC – in 2012.
By: Steve Benen, the Maddow Blog, May 22, 2014
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