“Vainly Trying To Rewrite History”: Deranged By Obama, Republicans Are Spouting Nonsense
Republicans had better divert some of their campaign cash toward finding a cure for Obama Derangement Syndrome. If they don’t, their nemesis will beat them in a third consecutive presidential contest — without, of course, actually being on the ballot.
GOP power brokers and potential candidates surely realize that President Obama is ineligible to run in 2016. Yet they seem unable to get over the fact that he won in 2008 and 2012. It’s as if they are more interested in vainly trying to rewrite history than attempting to lay out a vision for the future.
Obama Derangement Syndrome is characterized by feverish delirium. The Republican Party suffered an episode last week when former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani began speaking in tongues about Obama’s patriotism.
“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of this country.”
This is obviously a nonsensical thing to say about a man who was elected president twice and has served as commander in chief for more than six years. Pressed to explain himself, Giuliani ranted and raved for several days about Obama’s upbringing, made demonstrably false claims about the president’s supposed denial of American exceptionalism, insisted that “I said exactly what I wanted to say” — and then finally issued a non-retraction retraction in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
“My blunt language suggesting that the president doesn’t love America notwithstanding, I didn’t intend to question President Obama’s motives or the content of his heart,” Giuliani wrote. But of course he did intend to question Obama’s motives, heart, patriotism and legitimacy, albeit in a self-destructive, laughingstock kind of way.
I speak as a sufferer from Bush Derangement Syndrome eight years ago who recovered by facing reality.
Giuliani can perhaps be dismissed; his future in presidential politics is as bleak as his past, which consists of one spectacularly unsuccessful run for the GOP nomination. But if he was speaking as the party’s id, surely Republicans who consider themselves in the mix for 2016 would play the role of superego and tamp down such baser instincts. Right?
Wrong. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — a guest at the dinner where Giuliani had his eruption — refused to repudiate the offending remarks. “The mayor can speak for himself,” he said. “I’m not going to comment on whether, what the president thinks or not. . . . I’ll tell you I love America, and I think there are plenty of people, Democrat, Republican, independent and everyone in between, who love this country.”
Walker, who is on a roll lately in terms of self-embarrassment, wasn’t finished. Asked if he believes Obama is a Christian, Walker responded, “I don’t know.” A spokeswoman later clarified that what the governor meant to say was yes, of course he knows the president is a Christian; Walker declined to respond because it was a “gotcha” question. Which it wouldn’t have been, if Walker had given that answer in the first place.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, another 2016 hopeful, volunteered that “the gist” of what Giuliani said “is true.” Later, Jindal went further and declared: “I hate to say this, but we have a president right now who is not qualified to be our commander in chief.”
It’s true that Generalissimo Jindal is a long shot to win the nomination. But most other potential GOP candidates were either silent or didn’t give a direct answer. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and former Florida governor Jeb Bush said it was a mistake to question Obama’s motives. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee offered no opinion. Former Texas governor Rick Perry said, “I think the president, in his mind, loves this country.”
Only Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) was bold enough to say there is “no doubt” that the president of the United States does, in fact, love the United States. Good for him.
Giuliani’s burst of nonsense is important because it speaks to the Republican Party’s mind-set. If the party is going to contend for the White House, it first has to fully acknowledge and accept that it lost the last two presidential elections. The nation voted twice for Obama and his policies. Deal with it.
Republicans need to abandon the fantasy that there’s some sort of grand deception underlying the Obama presidency. They’re only deceiving themselves.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 23, 2015
“Clowns, Stunts, And Acrobatics”: The ‘Traveling Circus’ The RNC Can’t Stop
Nearly two years ago, with his party still licking its wounds after a rough 2012 cycle, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus looked ahead to the 2016 presidential race and focused on a specific goal: far fewer debates.
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said Friday he was trying to stop the party’s primary process from transforming into a “traveling circus.”
“Quite frankly, I’m someone – I don’t think having our candidates running around in a traveling circus and doing 23 debates, slicing and dicing each other is in the best interests of our party,” Priebus said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
There’s little doubt that Priebus’ concerns were rooted in fact. The 2012 debates for the Republican presidential candidates were often entertaining, but they didn’t do any favors for the aspirants themselves. When the Republican National Committee sharply curtailed the total number of debates for the 2016 race – and prioritized events on Fox – it didn’t come as a surprise.
But as the Republicans’ presidential field takes shape, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the “traveling circus” is not wholly dependent on debates – a circus needs clowns, stunts, and acrobatics, and the likely 2016 candidates are already providing plenty of antics for our viewing pleasure.
* The entire party is facing a curious new litmus test about whether President Obama is a patriot and a Christian. It’s a test Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) is failing badly.
* This comes on the heels of a vaccinations litmus test that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) failed – one of many key issues the senator doesn’t seem to understand.
* Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) is desperate to prove he’s his “own man” by hiring his brother’s and his father’s team of advisers, and advancing his ambitions with his brother’s and his father’s team of donors.
* New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) operation appears to be moving backwards – his vaccinations flub didn’t help – as his popularity falls quickly in his home state.
* Right-wing neurosurgeon Ben Carson (R) has positioned himself as a rare candidate who supports war crimes.
* The closer Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) gets to launching his campaign, the more some party officials plead with him not to run.
* Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) wants states to pursue nullification if the Supreme Court endorses marriage equality.
* Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) seems eager to say and/or do anything to get attention.
* A variety of GOP candidates have set up private meetings with Donald Trump.
The Greatest Show on Earth? Probably not, though it’s clear the “traveling circus” is well underway, and there’s very little Reince Priebus can do about it.
The problem isn’t the debates, per se. Rather, it’s the candidates themselves who run the risk of embarrassing themselves and their party. As the last few weeks have reminded us, they don’t need a debate platform to cause trouble.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 23, 2015
“The Plutocrat Politburo”: The Koch Brothers Don’t Care If You Care About Their Plans To Buy 2016 Election
The Koch brothers are done being shy. That’s the conclusion one would have to draw from the fact that they just announced that they hope to spend $889 million on the 2016 election, an unprecedented amount of outside money. It won’t all be theirs — they’re assembling a kind of Plutocrat Politburo, a group of billionaires and zillionaires who will contribute to the cause — but with a combined worth of over $80 billion, they’ll surely be the ones opening their ample wallets the widest and determining the strategy and the agenda.
But unlike some previous reporting on Charles and David’s political efforts, this revelation — which comes from a gathering in beautiful Rancho Mirage of Freedom Partners, the organization through which the Kochs and their allies will distribute all these millions — didn’t require any secret meetings with anonymous sources to unearth. They just told everyone. Here’s the Post’s story on it, here’s the New York Times’ story on it, and here’s Politico’s story on it, all complete with ample details and on-the-record quotes. Reporters may not have been invited into the private meetings at the gathering, but they were allowed to hang around and talk to the participants. And no fewer than four potential GOP presidential candidates (Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz) showed up as well, obviously unconcerned about any charge that they’re kowtowing to the uber-rich.
So the Kochs appear to have concluded that the efforts by Democrats (especially Harry Reid) to turn the Koch name into a symbol of everything that’s wrong in American politics have failed. No longer must they cower in their mansions and take pains to conceal their political spending, fearful of the piercing barbs aimed by liberal politicians and commentators, when all they want is for Americans to fully appreciate the majesty of laissez-faire economics. Free at last, free at last, thank Citizens United, they’re free at last.
If you were expecting journalists to express much consternation at the idea that a group of the super-wealthy are openly announcing their intention to buy the next election, you’ll be disappointed. Instead, the news is being reported more like that of a record-breaking contract for a professional athlete: wonder at the sums involved, but precious little moral outrage. That’s mostly because political reporters tend to believe that election campaigns are already nothing but a parade of deception and manipulation, an enterprise that’s inherently corrupt. So what’s a little more corruption?
There’s no doubt that the behind-the-scenes machinations are fascinating to anyone interested in politics. By putting themselves on par with or even above the parties, the Kochs will make the conflict within the Republican Party even more complex, and potentially vicious, than it already was. Ken Vogel of Politico described the move as “a show of dominance to rival factions on the right, including the Republican National Committee.” What happens when the insurgents are even better funded than what we’ve taken to calling the establishment? It will certainly be interesting to find out.
In any case, the Kochs are probably right that they have little to lose by being public about their plans. Yes, they’ll have to absorb some stern editorials, and maybe even some ads from the DNC criticizing Republican politicians for associating with them. But weighed against what they have to gain by putting nearly a billion dollars into the next presidential campaign — more than the two parties spent, combined, in 2012 — that’s a price so small it’s barely worth worrying about.
In his 2003 novel Jennifer Government, Max Barry imagines a future in which the penetration of capitalism and marketing has become so total that people take the names of their corporate employers as their own last names; characters are called things like John Nike, Nathaniel ExxonMobil, and Calvin McDonalds.
We may not have gotten quite that far yet, but the next Republican president — whether that person is elected in 2016 or after — will have been sponsored, supported, elevated, and outfitted by the Koch brothers and their friends. Should a Republican candidate they don’t like show promise in the primaries, he will surely be crushed by the awesome machine they’re building. The winner may not take their name (Scott Walker-Koch, perhaps?), but he or she will be in their debt to a degree we have not previously contemplated. And the consensus will be that that’s just how things work now.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 27, 2015
“Republicans’ Little Act’s Of Vandalism”: The Secret Swipe At Obamacare — And You
Underscoring how much mischief can result when Congress acts in haste and in secret, hidden away in the year-end omnibus spending bill being acted on this week is an attack on a key provision of the Affordable Care Act long targeted by the GOP.
The provision involves risk corridors, which are designed to stabilize insurance premiums in the first few years of the law. The year-end spending bill quietly erodes funding for the provision.
Republicans have chosen to label the provision a “bailout” for insurance companies. I’ve labeled that position the most cynical attack on Obamacare, because those who advance it — notably Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) — obviously know it’s a lie. They know it’s actually a consumer protection feature, so calling it “corporate welfare,” as Timothy P. Carney did this week in the Washington Examiner, is a neat bit of disinformation. Adding to the cynicism, the same provision is an essential part of Medicare Part D, which the GOP enacted in 2003.
Here’s another sick irony: One of the raps on the risk corridor provision is that it was “buried deep” in administration explanations of the bill, as Rubio put it. But in fact, the ACA was extensively debated and available for scrutiny by any legislator who chose. The attack on the provision, however, actually is “buried deep” in the year-end spending bill: it’s on page 892 of the 1,603-page bill, which has barely been debated at all.
Let’s see how risk corridors work, and how they’re undermined by the spending bill.
It was well understood that health insurers would have difficulty pricing their plans in the individual market in the first years of the ACA, starting in 2014. Not only would some insurers be entering that market in volume for the first time, but the market itself would be dramatically altered by the flood of new customers and such ACA rules as the prohibition on exclusions for pre-existing conditions. Some insurers will end up setting their premiums too low, and therefore will have to pay out benefits higher than they expected; others will set their rates too high, and will capture a windfall.
Without a safety valve, these miscalculations could have an impact on premiums the following year, as insurers tried to adjust. So insurers that set prices more than 3 percent below a set target get a reimbursement from the government, and those that overprice by the same margin have to pay some of the windfall to the government. Importantly, the arrangement is temporary: it expires after 2016, by which time it’s assumed that insurers will know what they’re doing.
Obviously, this isn’t a “bailout,” since it protects underpricing insurers only on the margins, while also providing a check on profiteering. The Congressional Budget Office, moreover, has projected that over time, the risk-corridor program will produce an $8-billion profit for the government, because overpricing insurers will be paying back more than underpricing insurers collect.
Some smart conservatives acknowledge that risk corridors are a good idea. As Yevgeniy Feyman of the Manhattan Institute informed Forbes readers in January, “Any conservative reform plan for universal coverage will have to use similar methods of risk adjustment. … If you want insurers to participate more broadly in the individual market, you’ll need to offer a carrot to offset the unavoidable uncertainties.”
Nevertheless, Congressional Republicans couldn’t resist taking a swipe at this little-understood provision in the ACA, and Democrats weren’t sufficiently attentive, or caring, to call them out on it. The year-end spending bill forbids the Dept. of Health and Human Services to use any outside government funds to pay out adjustments to insurers. On the face of it, the government can only use surplus coming in from overcharging insurers for that purpose. (That’s the interpretation healthcare expert Tim Jost gives to Dylan Scott of Talking Points Memo.)
For the moment, that makes the provision little more than a symbolic swipe at Obamacare. But that could change, and the CBO projections could be wrong. In that event, the Republicans’ little act of vandalism could end up costing ordinary citizens money. Nice work, GOP. Extra points for pulling it off in the dark.
By: Michael Hiltzik, The Los Angeles Times (TNS); The National Memo, December 16, 2014
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