“Misleading Others And Lying To Themselves”: Why John Boehner Has To Keep Making Crazy Threats
You probably read yesterday about the efforts of John Boehner and the Republican leadership in the House to convince the rank-and-file members that shutting down the government until Obamacare is defunded is a Bad Idea, and not a Brilliant Political Maneuver. Robert Costa’s account in the National Review has the basic narrative. It looks, now, like Boehner has succeeded in defusing the shutdown threat. All he had to do was promise something worse. Now we are going to not raise the debt ceiling instead.
As Jonathan Chait points out, replacing the shutdown threat with a default threat is actually much crazier and more potentially disastrous. But Boehner couldn’t get Republicans to agree to just give up on defunding Obamacare this year. He had to promise to exchange their one crazy plan to do so with another one that will go into effect later. And when it is time for that one to go into effect, he will need to find something else to distract them for a little while, until the next crazy plan is ready to go. As Brian Beutler says, we’ve seen this play out over and over again. Boehner has to promise to let Republicans do some apocalyptic thing later in order to get them to avoid doing some apocalyptic thing now. So far we’ve avoided an apocalypse.
But the people Boehner is trying to deal with here don’t see any of these threats as particularly apocalyptic. They don’t really see anything at all that might contradict their ideological stances. The House members Boehner’s trying to walk back from the ledge don’t read the Times or the Post. They don’t care what Brookings or the CBO or CRS say. They believe every “nonpartisan” or “objective” information source to be a part of the vast liberal conspiracy, and they rely for their facts and predictions strictly on sources explicitly aligned with the conservative movement. And those sources are just telling them crazy, untrue things, all the time.
That’s Boehner’s problem: He’s trying to ease his members into the real world, where defunding Obamacare is impossible as long as Obama is in the White House, and where attempts to do so via incredibly unconventional means could have disastrous consequences. What makes his job more difficult is that this reality isn’t acknowledged by most of the conservative organizations his members, and his party’s voters, exclusively follow.
Take Heritage, for years the most influential conservative think tank (it is still in the top five, depending on how you categorize advocacy groups like FreedomWorks). Heritage has been attempting to convince Republicans that a shutdown wouldn’t be such a big deal. Polls commissioned by Heritage say a government shutdown wouldn’t cause anyone to lose their seats, so have at it! The poll, by the way, was conducted entirely in Republican or Republican-leaning House districts.
Now, the venerable Heritage Foundation isn’t saying this. The poll, and the shutdown encouragement, were issued by “Heritage Action for America,” the 501(c)(4) group founded as Heritage’s sister organization in 2010, to take advantage of the new post-Citizens United “almost anything goes” rules for supposed “social welfare” organizations. “Think of it as the Heritage Foundation with teeth,” Betsy Woodruff said in the National Review. So far Heritage Action has been using those teeth to drag the GOP into the world of right-wing fantasy, in which the Farm Bill must be rejected because it does not cut food stamps enough, and the border “surge” amendment to the immigration reform bill must be opposed because $38 billion worth of fences and agents aren’t enough.
For years, the Heritage Foundation’s mission was to craft conservative policy ideas that would both be possible to implement and be broadly popular. School vouchers and welfare reform and tax cuts are all ideas within the realm of the politically possible, and they are also all ideas that have polled quite well at various times. This was effective: Reagan and George W. Bush’s domestic agendas came largely prepackaged by Heritage. But now the organization is using its lobbying arm to just demand total fealty, damn the consequences, to the most extreme form of conservatism possible. That is something of a shift. But it’s a shift the movement has seemingly embraced in the Obama era. Now even supposedly “sober” and “grown-up” conservatives argue that breaching the debt ceiling wouldn’t be so bad — may even indeed be pretty good depending on how you look at it! — and work to convince Republicans that the way to handle demographic change is with strict immigration limits and the militarization of the border, combined with making the party even more dependent solely on white votes.
This is not a left-winger pining for the days of Republican “moderation.” Heritage and the National Review were always very conservative. They were just realistically conservative. Professional conservatives graduated some time ago from misleading others to lying to themselves.
If you want evidence, look at the rapturous praise that greeted the publication of “American Betrayal” by Diana West, a book that argues that … McCarthy was right about everything and that the FDR administration was a puppet regime for Stalin, and that we purposely delayed winning World War II so that the Soviets could have more of Europe when it was finished. The book is just untrue, start to finish. Conservative historian Ronald Radosh — writing in the online publication of David Horowitz, a man who is not unfriendly to wild conspiracy theories about leftists — patiently and at length knocked down nearly every single one of its claims in a review. The book is so silly that Radosh planned to ignore it, but he couldn’t once he saw how the movement had fallen for it:
But I changed my mind after seeing the reckless endorsements of its unhinged theories by a number of conservative individuals and organizations. These included the Heritage Foundation which has hosted her for book promotions at a lunchtime speech and a dinner; Breitbart.com which is serializing America Betrayed; PJ Media which has already run three favorable features on West; Amity Shlaes, who writes unnervingly that West’s book, “masterfully reminds us what history is for: to suggest action for the present”; and by conservative political scientist and media commentator Monica Crowley, who called West’s book “A monumental achievement.”
Hey, there’s Heritage again! And Amity Shlaes, who wrote a book about how FDR made the Depression worse with liberalism. That book didn’t really coherently build an economic case against Keynesianism but because it had a thesis conservatives liked it quickly became popular, and she has been writing for Forbes and the Wall Street Journal ever since. (And Bloomberg View, for some reason.) This West book is just another step away from reality, into the sweet embrace of fantasy. FDR didn’t just make the Depression worse, he also surrounded himself with Stalinists! The far right has been pushing this shit for decades, obviously. It used to be the mainstream right’s job to make sure it only traveled as far as was politically expedient. Now they lap it up themselves.
This is why Boehner is having so much trouble. He can’t live entirely in this wonderful fantasy world. He has to actually raise the debt ceiling and make sure essential government services get funded. All the institutions designed to make his life easier, to corral the voters, activists and even legislators into supporting the agenda and ensuring the future success of the Republican Party, are all too busy make-believing about the 1930s and convincing themselves that they can defeat Obamacare if they simply want to bad enough, to be of any assistance.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, August 15, 2013
“Adolescent Nihilism”: The GOP’s True Believers Risk Nothing By Threatening Economic Catastrophe
So what’s it going to be for GOP hotheads in Congress this fall?
A soul-satisfying episode of adolescent nihilism culminating in a government shutdown and yet another debt/default scare? Or an abject capitulation to political (and fiscal) reality and an acceptance of the Republican Party’s role as the loyal opposition?
As I write, there’s just no telling. It’s partly a contest between the GOP’s electronic infotainment/Tea Party wing and the party establishment. Talk-radio shouters and cable TV entrepreneurs thrive on melodrama, and a substantial proportion of the Tea Party base follows excitedly along. Defund Obamacare! Shut it down! To those of us of a certain age, this has a ring of nostalgia, like Abbie Hoffman’s 1967 vow to levitate the Pentagon. I don’t know what they’re smoking down at RNC headquarters, but on CNN’s State of the Union, party chairman Reince Priebus made a lame attempt to blame President Obama.
“I think all Republicans are unified on one thing and that is defunding, delaying, getting rid of, eliminating Obamacare,” Priebus said. “So we have total unanimity on that issue and the question is what are the tactics?…So Mr. President, if you want to shut the government down because you want to continue to fund this monstrosity…then go ahead.”
Nice try. No cigar.
Having wasted countless hours on 40 — count ’em, 40 — votes to defund Obamacare, you’d think House Republicans might be getting the message. Their scheme’s DOA in the Senate, and even if it weren’t, the White House holds veto power. The GOP’s last constitutional chance to prevent 30 million Americans from buying affordable health insurance coverage expired with Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy. End of story.
True, rising Republican celebrities like Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rand Paul (R-KY), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mike Lee (R-UT), and rising star Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR) are breathing smoke and fire. However, it’s also true that none of these worthies hold leadership positions. Until very recently nobody knew who they were. They risk nothing by enrolling in a purely symbolic resistance.
Quite the opposite: True Believers in utopian right-wing crusades evaluate politicians according to their fervor, not their coherence. Did Ronald Reagan ever pay a political price for describing Medicare as the death knell of freedom? He did not.
Indeed, the best possible outcome for Senatorial rabble-rousers would be what now appears likely: A minority of GOP House moderates voting with Democrats to pass a continuing resolution, avoiding a party-line government shutdown that could doom the Republican Party’s national electoral chances. Speaker Boehner won’t have much choice but to allow it.
See, there’s nothing the Southern wing of the GOP loves more than a heroic defense of a lost cause. Save your Confederate dollars, boys, because…
Well, you know the rest.
Lately the party’s adult leadership has also taken to signaling the need for restraint regarding the National Debt. According to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, congressional Democrats scrutinize Wall Street Journal columnist Stephen Moore for signs of Republican establishment thinking.
Recently, Moore informed readers that “[t]he biggest underreported story out of Washington this year is that the federal budget is shrinking and much more than anyone in either party expected.”
Overall federal spending that peaked at $3.598 trillion in FY2011 due largely to recession-related costs will drop to $3.45 trillion by the end of FY2013. “The $150 billion budget decline of 4 percent,” Moore writes “is the first time federal expenditures have fallen for two consecutive years since the end of the Korean War.”
Also dropping is the annual federal budget deficit. Projections by the Congressional Budget Office show a $642 billion shortfall this year—less than half of the $1.3 trillion shortfall the Obama White House inherited from George W. Bush. It’s forecast to drop to $560 billion next year, and $378 billion in 2015.
Moore: “Already the deficit has fallen from its Mount Everest peak of 10.2 percent of gross domestic product in 2009, to about 4 percent this year. That’s a bullish six percentage points less of the GDP of new federal debt each year.”
In short, informed conservatives understand that there is no need whatsoever for a melodramatic standoff over raising the federal debt limit. No need to risk “the full faith and credit of the United States” by threatening default. Hostages need not be taken.
As in the Obamacare charade, Republican posturing on the debt would only risk catastrophe for the sake of certain defeat.
Alas, but herein lies the rub: The great majority of GOP voters out in the wilderness beyond the Hudson and the Potomac not only don’t know these facts, they’re constitutionally incapable of accepting them.
To followers of politicians like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, fears of fiscal collapse, runaway inflation and social chaos aren’t political ideas, but fixed beliefs scarcely amenable to arithmetic or reason.
And their Antichrist is Barack Obama.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, August 14, 2013
“Rodeo Of Racism”: GOP Content To Play To An Increasingly Shrill And Xenophobic Primary Base
It’s been quite a week for anti-Obama racism. At the Missouri State Fair Sunday, rodeo fans cheered to see a “clown” in an Obama mask get run down by a bull. On Friday in Florida the president faced a gaggle of protesters on the way to address a disabled veterans’ group; one carried a sign reading “Kenyan Go Home.” Three days earlier, Arizonans protested Obama’s visit by singing “Bye Bye Black Sheep.” One man mocked him by calling him “47 percent Negro;” another held a sign that read, “Impeach the Half-White Muslim!”
Also on Sunday, the same day as the Missouri State Fair incident, ABC’s “This Week” hosted the birther-in-chief, Donald Trump, who was fresh from a visit to the right-wing Family Leadership Summit in Iowa and a golf outing with GOP House Speaker John Boehner. When Jon Karl asked him, “You don’t still question [Barack Obama] was born in the United States, do you?” Trump let loose his tiresome birther spew. “I have no idea,” Trump replied. “Was there a birth certificate? You tell me. You know, some people say that was not his birth certificate. I’m saying I don’t know. Nobody knows and you don’t know either, Jonathan.”
With Republicans like Boehner and Iowa’s Family Leader embracing Trump as a loyal and treasured party figure, and mainstream media figures like Karl treating him like a legitimate newsmaker, it’s clear that the party, and some of the media, learned nothing from its 2012 drubbing. Reince Priebus’ infamous “autopsy” has itself gone wherever it is that fraudulent ideas go to die. Calling for more “inclusion,” the report didn’t outline policy change but rather better communication strategies to avoid repelling young voters, women, African-Americans and Latinos. “Our policies are sound, but I think in many ways the way we communicate can be a real problem,” Priebus said in March.
But now they’ve given up even on changing the way they communicate.
It’s not just Trump; one candidate after another in Iowa demonized Obama, and/or his electoral coalition. Rep. Steve King, he of the “calves the size of cantaloupes” remark, told the audience to ignore guidelines on what churches can do politically and “go ahead and defy the IRS.” King is said to be mulling his own 2016 presidential run; we can only dream. Sen. Ted Cruz got big ovations for advocating the repeal of not just Obamacare but the IRS.
But the scary demagogue award has to go to Cruz’s father, Rafael, an immigrant from Cuba who accused Obama of trying to eliminate God and impose socialism on the U.S. After all, he’d seen it happen before. “A young charismatic leader rose up, talking about ‘hope’ and ‘change,’” Cruz yelled, as the crowd booed. “His name was Fidel Castro.” Got it? Obama = Castro. Cruz doesn’t mention that he actually supported Fidel Castro’s revolution against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, then turned against him. Now we know where the Texas senator got his penchant for demagoguery and distortion. (Imagine replacing Marion Robinson in the White House with Rafael Cruz.)
Although the Iowa convening didn’t feature anyone in an Obama mask being chased by bulls, or “Kenyan Go Home” signs, and nobody sang “Bye Bye Black Sheep” to the president, it made clear that the GOP project of inclusion is a farce. Judging from Iowa, the 2016 primary field is set to be every bit as extreme as in 2012 but without even the patina of diversity provided by Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann. And it will play to an increasingly shrill and xenophobic primary base where three nasty racist anti-Obama events can take place in one week, with near-complete silence from Republican leaders.
I should note that the Missouri State Fair rodeo was so sickening that Republican Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder had to denounce it as “disrespectful” to the president, adding, “We are better than this.” Fairgoer Perry Beam told the Associated Press that “everybody screamed” and “just went wild” when an announcer asked if they’d like to see “Obama run down by a bull.”
“It was at that point I began to feel a sense of fear. It was that level of enthusiasm,” the 48-year-old white musician said. Another clown approached and began to play with the lips of the Obama mask. “There would have been no reason to play with his lips if he were a white president,” Beam said. “They mentioned the president’s name, I don’t know, 100 times. It was sickening. It was feeling like some kind of Klan rally you’d see on TV. I’ve never seen anything so blatantly racist in my life,” he added. “If an old country boy picks up on something like that, imagine what a person of color would think.”
Meanwhile, John Boehner golfs with birther-in-chief Trump, while he headlines ABC’s respected Sunday news show. The GOP seems content to live on the fumes of Obama-hatred. It’s not a strategy for a post-Obama politics, but they seem to reckon there are enough rodeo clowns out there to get them through 2014.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, August 12, 2013
“Unnerving To Watch”: Could Mitch McConnell’s Senate Fight Take Down The Country?
TPM Reader TW thinks back to 2008 and 2011 …
Saw your editor’s blog post on McConnell and it’s something I have been thinking about all week. I work in the investment industry and I am watching the town hall meetings, this thing with McConnell and it’s bringing flashbacks to 2011. I don’t think most people understand just how close we were to a real meltdown that summer. Without Biden and McConnell, there would have been a default and that would have dwarfed 2008.
Now normally, the country would be able to count on the fact that they averted disaster last time, so therefore, they will find a way to avert it again this time. But as I’ve thought about it all week (and for some time before this week), I’ve had a nagging thought that this is all wrong. But, I couldn’t put a finger on it either.
But after seeing the coverage of the town halls this week and listening to the right wing turn on their own, little by little, I guess I get it now. These people really are nihilistic and the only thing that will satisfy them is a total breakdown of government. Only then, they believe, can we have our “freedoms” and our “rights”. I don’t pretend to understand how you mentally get to that point, but that’s where they are.
Now, I know that there have always been crazy people in this country throughout our history, but there has also always been rational people who think first about the country and act accordingly. But that’s not where we are today. Rational people have been voted out or left and in their place are the Lee’s, Cruz’s, Rubio’s, etc. And while they claim to be capitalists and free market proponents, they couldn’t negotiate themselves out of a paper bag in the real world, and they have no understanding of practical economics. You can spout Ludwig von Mises all you want, but it has no practical application to the real world.
Which brings me back to McConnell. For all of the issues I disagree with him on, at least he was rational and would cut the deal to keep us from going over the big cliff. If he’s gone over to Crazyland and Boehner has abdicated any remaining parts of his speakership, then what’s left?
And all this comes as economically, our world is getting better. I realize that there is a ways to go with unemployment/underemployment, housing, etc. but this economy is still getting better. The market is up because of that fact. I know there’s a lot of noise around what’s driving the market, but at the end of the day, professional investors would not be pushing money into the market if they didn’t think the overall economy was headed the right direction.
So, yes, I am worried. A government shutdown can be dealt with, that won’t kill the economy, but the debt ceiling/default will. And without someone who can/will cut a deal, it’s unnerving to watch. At this point, I think we are in a more dangerous position than 2011.
I apologize for the length, but you guys are on the right track here with your reporting. This is the story of the fall, and very few people are talking about it yet.
By: Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, August 10, 2013
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