Glenn “Geppetto” Kessler In Repose

Poor Glenn Kessler. Ever since the last Presidential election (and probably before), it’s been clear he imagines himself some sort of fanciful righter of wrongs, some ultimate arbiter of not just truth but also human intention – what he, Glenn, has divined that people really meant to do, in their heart of hearts.

Simultaneously, it’s been equally clear that what Kessler is often in reality doing is simply substituting what he, in his own heart of hearts, wishes the subjects who come under his analysis, had done or said. Like more recently, when Kessler awarded President Obama his most-ignominious brickbat (the dreaded “Four Pinocchios,” essentially a cutesy way for saying Kessler thinks something a flat-out lie) for Obama having committed the crime of claiming he’d called the Benghazi attack an act of terrorism, when Obama had actually said “act of terror.” The Horror™.

That last bit of (possibly mendacious?) dada from Kessler concerned the ongoing Republican silliness-fest that is the now eight-plus month series of hearings into the Benghazi attack. And – what do you know! – just today, we have the specter of yet another Benghazi-related ignominy from Kessler. This time, the Obama administration avoids the lowest rung; Kessler awards only three Pinocchios – though, given his willingness to award four for leaving “-ism” off a word, you’d think Kessler wouldn’t have had any problem assigning this “lie” the full four Pinocchios.

What has the Obama administration lied and deceived about this time, according to ol’ Gepppetto Kessler? This time, it’s concerning the recent dust-up over Republicans having provided inaccurate summaries to reporters of White House emails regarding the “messaging” over Benghazi that took place in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. If you’re not familiar with this bit of inside baseball…I don’t blame you. You can get a good overview of it here, from Jay Rosen, leading media critic/analyst.

Kessler, in his piece, takes issue with White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer having said several times after the altering of the summaries was revealed, that Republicans “doctored” them. Kessler, after reviewing all the facts he thinks pertinent, comes to the following conclusion:

But the reporters involved have indicated they were told by their sources that these were summaries, taken from notes of e-mails that could not be kept. The fact that slightly different versions of the e-mails were reported by different journalists suggests there were different note-takers as well. (emphasis added)

Yes. Each reporter present took slightly different notes. Yet the essential substance remains both remarkably clear and also consistent between reporters’ descriptions of what they were told the emails said. So, while the fact that reporters’ notes aren’t identical does prove that they were given summaries instead of verbatim text, what it does not, however, prove, is that the person giving those summaries was not both A) a Republican and B) giving inaccurate summaries that were intended to make the White House look complicit and culpable, when the actual text reveals it was not.

Yet that’s the very conclusion Kessler draws: that because the reporters who heard the summaries had what even Kessler called “slight differences” (note: not substantive differences) in how they characterized them, it proves that Pfeiffer’s claim that the emails were “doctored” is false – and possibly, Kessler subtly suggests, an attempt to smear Republicans and distract from….something? Kessler continues, extrapolating without basis that “Republicans would have been foolish to seriously doctor e-mails that the White House at any moment could have released.”

Yes, Glenn, that would indeed have been foolish. Yet politicians and elected officials often do foolish things, and merely observing that something would be foolish is also not evidence it isn’t exactly what happened. In fact, it is Walter Mitty-like fantasy to assume or suggest that it does constitute such evidence.

Kessler follows up this last piece of specious reasoning and non-evidence with this absolute corker:

Clearly, of course, Republicans would put their own spin on what the e-mails meant, as they did in the House report.

Right. Their own spin. Glenn Kessler is certainly old enough to remember (though he appears either not to care, or to have forgotten) that the concept of “spin” was originally introduced into the political lexicon with the phrase “spin doctor.” Someone who is spinning the news has always been assumed to have been “doctoring” it to best effect. On that basis alone, Kessler’s argument falls apart.

Rather than rest on what amounts to little more than argumentum ad dictionarium, though, the larger question Kessler’s words beg (and which he apparently misses) is that the entire concept of spin involves a spectrum of gray that goes all the way from simply stating things in the best possible light, through things like selectively choosing portions of quotes and leaving others out which would cause a reasonable person to change their mind about the substance, and all the way up to outright altering the facts of an issue in order to either avoid looking bad or to make an opponent look bad.

In fact, what Kessler is describing in the above quote is, roughly, what his own job concerns – or is supposed to, at any rate. Of course politicians and their spokespeople try to put their own actions and words in the best possible light, and those of their opponents in the worst. The entire reason for the existence of the job of fact-checker is to determine whether in doing so, said politicians and spokespeople have altered the facts to suit their agenda. That’s the line between mere PR and outright mendacity. The way Kessler frames it in this piece, it’s as if he considers that task – the one that literally defines his job description – unimportant or at least secondary to the question of whether reporters were honest about having received summaries. That is a separate question, and – at least in Jonathan Karl’s case, it’s clear he wasn’t honest (or at least wasn’t accurate) about whether what he wrote were verbatim from emails or from summaries.

However, if what Glenn Kessler wishes to do is render judgment on whether it’s fair for the White House to state the emails were “doctored” by Republicans, then he needs to address the question directly of whether that happened, and not simply  point out that reporters’ summaries were consistent with one another. The question is: were they consistent with the actual facts, with the emails themselves? And that question has already been answered in the negative. They were not. Kessler himself even admits in his piece that “[i]ndeed, for all the accusations that the White House deliberately changed the talking points, this e-mail comment from a CIA official would greatly undercut that claim: ‘The White House cleared quickly, but State has major concerns’.” (emphasis added)

Exactly. The emails show exactly what most reporters covering this mini-scandal show they do: that the White House attempted to coordinate so various spokespeople would be on the same page, but stayed out of the bureaucratic knife fight between State and the CIA, and certainly did not attempt to do what the GOP-provided summaries of portions of those emails tried to suggest: favor the concerns of State over other concerns.

So it’s anyone’s guess why Kessler could print such a thing in his own piece, then avoid any significant examination of or pronouncement about whether the summaries provided by Republicans were intentionally wrong, yet still come to the conclusion that Pfeiffer (and by extension, the entire Obama administration) deserve to be declared liars for saying the GOP provided inaccurate summaries that make the White House look bad. Kessler focuses on Pfeiffer’s use of the word “doctored,” yet he provides no evidence that – nor even any examination  of whether – the summaries were intentionally altered or merely an “oopsie” on the part of the GOP. Kessler’s “ruling” against Pfeiffer suggests that he believes the latter: that the GOP summaries just happened to result in the White House looking bad. Yet Kessler never examines the likelihood of this, nor presents any evidence to support this view. Readers are just supposed to take Kessler’s ruling on faith. Kessler concludes with:

The burden of proof lies with the accuser. Despite Pfeiffer’s claim of political skullduggery, we see little evidence that much was at play here besides imprecise wordsmithing…

It’s true enough that in a court of law, the burden of proof lies with the accuser. Yet even in a court of law, there are different standards of proof. In a capital case, the burden is indeed “beyond reasonable doubt,” but in almost all civil cases, it’s “preponderance of the evidence.” And despite the high-falutin’ language, Kessler’s column is not a court of law. Kessler also seems not to recognize his admonition regarding the burden of proof extends to himself as well.

In this case, the facts are that Republicans did indeed provide inaccurate summaries of White House emails to reporters, and those summaries did indeed make the White House look culpable for things they had not in fact done. That is, in fact, the very essence of “doctoring.” Unless you’re Glenn Kessler, apparently. But because Kessler apparently doesn’t like that most correct and most obvious conclusion, he wants to shift the burden of proof on Pfeiffer to holding him accountable for proving beyond reasonable doubt that Republicans wrote summaries of those emails which were intended to paint the White House in a bad light.

We rate Kessler’s “fact checking” four out of four Walter Mittys for obliviousness and substituting what he’d like to see happen for what did happen, while assiduously avoiding the actual facts.

We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate.

So why do I say the IRS and Benghazi scandals are officially over? Because once the GOP trot out La Nooners and her obsidian ball, it’s a safe bet that the reverse of anything she proclaims is almost certainly true. Remember this gem, written before last fall’s election (zackpunk at DailyKos had some fun with it here)?

Is it possible this whole thing is playing out before our eyes and we’re not really noticing because we’re too busy looking at data on paper instead of what’s in front of us? Maybe that’s the real distortion of the polls this year: They left us discounting the world around us.

Umm…yeah.

That’s why when Noonan says this:

The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they’re seeing. (emphasis added)

…and yet the actual news media come up with some more of that icky “data on paper” stuff that so confounded Noonan in her pre-election Romney column, one might as well declare the scandals officially dead.

After the initial shock of three different, potentially-damaging scandals emerging virtually simultaneously (although in fairness, the GOP have been beating the Benghazi drum since last October), this come-down (for the GOP) has been in the mail for a while, as the media got a handle on what was really going on in each case. But it’s not just the disgraceful-yet-hilarious, Keystone Kops-like attempts of the GOP proper to smear and shiv (in the IRS case), and it’s not the now-certain knowledge that the GOP falsified Benghazi emails to make the administration look bad. Those things are indicators that the GOP only wishes there were more there than there is. But by themselves, they are not dispositive.

But folks, when Peggy Noonan declares you a sure thing, it means you are D-O-N-E.

Just ask this guy:

Uh, Peggy? I thought you said…

UPDATE: via bluegal, we learn that this Sunday’s guests on Meet the GOP Press will include…Peggy Noonan. Also, Don Rumsfeld, Mitch McConnell, and Bob Woodward. Yup, it’s over. Even David Gregory knows it, which is why he’s trying to give the GOP every chance they can to milk as much political juice out of these “scandals” as they can, before they dry up and blow away. Funny, because during Iraq, MTP’s guest list was…McCain, Noonan, Rumsfeld, Cheney. It’s almost as if…

Beware The Warrenator™, Scourge of Lazy Regulators & Greedy Banksters Everywhere

So today, I read this article. It’s a good article, as these things go. In fact, it’s difficult to disagree with anything in it:

How astonishing to have a public servant who actually cares to inform the public about the inner workings of the system of crony capitalism that has wedded big government with big business. This comes at the expense of the free market that corporate lobbyists delight in invoking as an ideal while they subvert it as a reality. 

Hell yes! Preach on, brother Scheer!

*ahem* Anyway, Scheer’s article echoed a lot of similar sentiments I’d been seeing around Twitter recently: how thankful liberals are to have someone like Warren in office who’s a wonderful, genuinely robust defender of the people against the power of corporations. To which I say, Amen. Warren is all of those things. And people have been noticing that she is because, since taking office in January, Warren keeps garnering press like this (“Elizabeth Warren Embarrasses Hapless Bank Regulators At First Hearing“) and this (“Elizabeth Warren Accuses Regulators Of Protecting Banks Over Homeowners“) and this (“Sen. Elizabeth Warren Questions Regulators’ Willingness To Prosecute Wall Street Banks“).

Seems like everybody on the left (including me) agrees: Elizabeth Warren’s great!

So, what’s the problem? Well, the paragraph I quoted above in the Scheer article was immediately followed by this one:

Those seeking to join Warren in taking a stand on behalf of students attempting to survive in an economy that the bankers have come close to destroying should get behind her bill. Unless Congress acts, student loan rates will automatically double in less than two months.

Yeah. They should join her. Because unless Congress acts, etc…

Unless Congress acts. But that’s kind of the nut of the whole issue, isn’t it? Unless Congress acts. Quick, what’s the one thing you can be dead-certain of regarding the current political climate? If you answered “that Congress will NOT take action, especially not on public-interest-over-corporate-interest legislation,” then congratulations: you’ve been paying attention to politics since the Democrats re-took Congress in 2006. If there’s one thing that best defines Congress since 2006 (especially the Senate), it’s that it won’t take action. Not with Mitch “Filibuster” McConnell circling over the Senate like a vulture waiting for something to die. And now, since 2010, not with a House that’s controlled by John Boehner. The GOP has simply decided “fuck all y’all” is going to be their legislative strategy for the indefinite future. Probably until they can get enough Americans so disgusted with the gridlock that they stupidly vote for a Republican, just to get the sensation that something’s getting accomplished, even if it is something bad.

That’s why all of the “isn’t Elizabeth Warren wonderful” paeans that are being tossed out lately just make me wonder why she was stovepiped by the party into the Senate last cycle? It’s not as if any of what I just said was a secret or even some obscure minority opinion during the last election. Every progressive and Democrat knows how broken the Senate is. If what is earning Warren those rave reviews and kudos today is her willingness to hold regulators’ feet to the fire and insist they protect consumers and citizens instead of the interests of the big banks…um…wouldn’t it have been better to continue along with Plan A and actually, you know, make Warren one of those regulators, instead of sticking her into the most dysfunctional, broken governing body in the developed world – the United States Senate?

As a regulator, Warren would have had the ability to actually affect the day-to-day business of protecting consumers and/or overseeing the banks. In the Senate, she’s one of a hundred voices, barely over half of whom must line up behind Harry Reid and hope they can get stuff past McConnell’s endless filibusters. Talk about frustrating – for progressives as well as (I imagine) for Warren. While it’s great to see her tear into banksters and regulators in hearings, everyone knows hearings are merely public spectacle if they don’t lead to actual legislation — and as I already mentioned, in this climate, they don’t.

I don’t know much about state-level politics in Massachusetts, but in a state that blue, I find it very hard to believe there were truly NO other credible Democratic candidates besides Warren who could’ve beaten Scott Brown and put Ted Kennedy’s seat back in the column in which it belongs. Maybe I need to be educated on that score, but that sounds far-fetched to me. Perhaps the administration believed (not without support from the facts) that Warren might have been simply un-confirmable as head of the CFPB (though, as I’ve written about before, there’s plenty of room to doubt Warren herself would’ve fared any worse than anyone else Obama might have nominated for that role, and if Obama could recess-appoint Richard Cordray, he could’ve just as easily done so with Elizabeth Warren). Even if so, it’s not as if there weren’t other slots she could have filled. One of the Dems’ recent bêtes noire, Ed DeMarco at FHFA, could have been at this very moment being replaced not by a questionably pro-consumer guy like Mel Watt, but by the scourge of Wall Street and defender of homeowners and consumers herself, Elizabeth Warren.

Tell me THAT wouldn’t have been a win, at least in comparison to having Warren in the Senate?

Lastly, if Warren was installed (via regular process or recess appointment) at FHFA or CFPB or CFTC or any one of a number of other financial regulation agencies, and she was later thrown out in the future when a Republican or conservaDem took the White House, she could STILL run for Senate at that time. I guess I just don’t see what the loss would’ve been, nor what the rush was to get Elizabeth Warren into the Senate.

Not so since moving to the land of God, guns and Gingrich. These days, I tend to bedevil Tom Price on Twitter, and when I see tweets like this one, I feel compelled to act upon them:

So ya want my thoughts on tax reform, eh, Tom? Done…though I’m pretty sure my recommendations aren’t going to be what you were hoping for, given that the responses on Twitter to your solicitation were for idiotic things like the FairTax or banning state taxes altogether and making the corporate rate 2%. So, you’re welcome.

On Day Stock Market Sets New Record, Conservative Group Floats Impeaching Obama For ‘Wrecking The Stock Market’

(via ThinkProgress)

The sweeping, 577-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.”

I debated for quite a while whether to make the last letter of my previous sentence an S or a D, whether torture is something we did, or something we might still do. In the end, I chose the D, even though it’s always possible future events may reveal me as having been not cynical enough. Because when it comes to something as detestable and immoral as torture, I have to be able to hope that this thorough, damning review from the Constitution Project will allow the debate to be refocused from whether what we did was torture onto a recognition that yes, we did torture — and are we really (or do we want to be) the kind of country that does such things, openly? I say that despite the miscalculation, overreach and perhaps even ill intent revealed in this report of a few of the decision-makers in the recent past, we are not that kind of country, and we do not want to be. We are better than that. I am. You are. We all are. For a long time in America, we used to think that two oceans, the longest undefended border with a friendly country in the world, and the biggest, baddest military in history made us immune from what is sadly a too-common experience in the rest of the world. 9/11 shattered that sense, and because it was new and unfamiliar and frightening to us, we allowed some of our leaders to make part of the deliberate national reaction to it an abhorrent set of acts: torture. Sadly, yesterday in Boston reminded us again, as nothing I can think of since 9/11 has, that even if our old sense of immunity from the world’s ills was ever true (which I doubt), it no longer is. Terrorism happens. Yet it seems to me that this time, something is different. Yesterday in Boston, as that now-familiar sense of surprise, confusion and sudden tragedy we all remember from 9/11 instantly overcame the crowd nearly as quickly as the smoke from the bombs themselves, we saw (as Patton Oswalt observed in his now-famous viral facebook post) dozens of people running toward - not away from – the carnage and destruction. To help. To bind wounds and stop bleeding and offer comfort and help find lost loved ones. Earlier finishers of the marathon who were suffering dehydration and were in the medical tents receiving intravenous fluids ripped the IVs out of their own arms to make room for the much more-grievously wounded from the bomb blasts. Heroism during tragedy isn’t new, nor is it uniquely American. There are plenty of stories of heroism and generosity from 9/11. But in the immediate aftermath of yesterday’s bombings, there seemed to be less of the 9/11 sense of panicky disbelief (both at the scene and in the general population watching via the media), of “how could this possibly happen,” and more of a sense of “oh my God, this happened — let’s go help.” Because we’re better than that. The change from post-9/11 to yesterday wasn’t limited to those in Boston, either. All over the Internet, notorious for its extreme, ill-considered and anonymous bashing, there was a sense of tension and loss…but also of restraint. Not everywhere, but it was noticeable, widespread. John Cole at Balloon Juice, a former conservative pseudo-warblogger in the wake of 9/11, urged his readers:

I refuse to be scared. You should too. I am going to sit here in my house and watch a show or two, then go to bed, and while I can commiserate with the wounded and dead and the horrible grief their loved ones must be experiencing, I am not going to spend the next couple weeks freaking out, because that is what the bombers and the war pigs want.

When President Obama addressed the nation and his speech did not contain the word “terrorism,” and some of his usual enemies started up with the talk that the President was weak, even as wounds were still being tended in Boston, that reaction was repudiated and shunned. Even amongst many of the people who continue to be among Obama’s most vocal opponents, it wasn’t business-as-usual. RedState’s founder Erick Erickson tweeted:

Sorry folks, I’m not interesting in beating up the President today. God bless him. He’s got his work cut out for him.

We’re learning. We’re remembering that we’re better than that. We’re better than the despicable means employed by violent cowards like Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Mohammed Atta and whoever did this yesterday to make us afraid or divide us or force us to do something they want…or maybe just make us like them. Here’s the thing, though: we’re also better than the worst of our own instincts and reactions, and that means we’re better than the equally despicable (not to mention ineffective) means of preventing future attack through authorizing the use of torture. If any good can come out of the confluence of such a tragedy as yesterday’s bombing and the revelation that the country we all love so much engaged in some of the worst acts possible, let it be that we continue to learn how to respond to such tragedies without losing our bearings, our sense of what makes us human — our souls, if you wish. As much despair as yesterday provided us all, much like 9/11 did, it also provided me that hope. I have to believe that as the findings of this report from the Constitution Project become conventional wisdom – that what the Bush Administration’s carefully-crafted legal rationalizations after 9/11 enabled (no, compelled) representatives of the United States of America to do on our behalf in both Iraq and Afghanistan falls within the definition of torture – that the debate we’ve had on whether “enhanced interrogation” was legal, or was torture, or was justifiable, will be over. I have to believe we have all learned enough since 9/11 that the next time one of our leaders or influential figures says something like this:

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

…their words will find no purchase. Their suggestions will be shunned and repudiated across the board, because enough people will remember, will have learned, that what such words really mean will end up here (from the Times’ story on the Constitution Project’s report):

The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable, the report says.

We. Are. Better. Than. That.

Man In Pickup Truck Freedoms Self To Death In The Head At NRA-Sponsored NASCAR Race.

Because it’s quite clear from the details of the piece that this is exactly
what occurred. Just sayin’.

Pew Research is out with another poll, this time focused on budgetary and financial issues, given the upcoming sequester, and the results are depressingly predictable. The title alone gives away the findings almost completely: As Sequester Deadline Looms, Little Support for Cutting Most Programs (pdf). The key graph is here:

Spending Cuts? Not In MY Backyard!

This is the quandary American politics – no, American policymaking – has found itself in for at least a couple of decades now. We on the left like to chuckle when Republican lawmakers are caught live on air being unable to name any specific projects they’d cut, but one can hardly blame the politicos. Their main job, in our money-driven political system, is to know what it takes to get re-elected. It takes money and it takes votes, in that order. Without money, you can’t attract enough votes, but – as people like Meg Whitman and Mitt Romney prove – without enough support from ordinary voters, no amount of money will get you elected.

What you’re seeing when you see a GOP politician caught stammering on TV, bereft of any answer at all to the question of which specific cuts to which specific programs they’d make is what happens when the interests of those two groups – the high-dollar funders and the voters who have to pull the actual levers to get the politicians elected – collide. It doesn’t happen often; usually the two groups interests are at least not in opposition, if not actually simpatico.

Even in the case of spending cuts, those groups’ interests seem at first to be at least superficially aligned. Starting in the early 1970s, forty-plus years of concerted faux-populist anti-tax rhetoric from a well-funded right wing determined to rise above the nearly permanent minority status it had enjoyed since the Great Depression have rendered the average American conservative certain that cuts must be made because spending is out of control and taxes are too damn high.

Yet ask these same Americans which particular programs they’d like to cut, as Pew did – and by how much, and the graph above shows what happens when well-funded, agenda-driven political propaganda collides with people’s own self-interest. I’m actually strangely heartened by the fact that not even most Republicans, apparently, feel like it’s a good idea to start cutting the benefits they or their loved ones or friends receive. Why? Because, to a greater or lesser degree, they know these programs work. They help pay medical bills and drug costs. They make the food budget go a little farther every month. They keep the bridges safe and the children well-educated. They do lots of things that are vital to the communities in which these poll respondents live. These things are called entitlements because voters – even Republican voters, apparently – feel entitled to them. These things are part of the social contract, what each of us is told our tax money goes to, what we agree to provide for ourselves and each other through the medium of government. Our civilization, in other words. And yes, even most GOP voters feel entitled to these things we’ve agreed upon.

That’s why, when you ask even most Republicans to really think about applying the rhetoric being discussed on their televisions by the pundits and the politicians to their OWN lives – when you ask them to think specifically about which programs they, the voters themselves, would cut, support drops away like support for Larry Craig dropped away among Senate Republicans after the “wide stance” issue.

I call this Fiscal NIMBYism because it represents the direct collision of those forty-plus years of well-funded GOP rhetoric about lower taxes and cutting spending and drowning government in a bathtub with the actual reality of what the lower spending parts mean. These same GOP voters who balk at naming any specific cuts they’d be willing to make were only too eager to accept the lower tax lollipop portion of the GOP rhetoric. They took the Bush tax cuts without hesitation, spent or saved it, and never looked back. It’s only when those same GOP agenda-setters come back to them and say “OK, now it’s time for the spending cuts” that people begin to say “hey, wait a minute…” when they begin to really think about what that’s going to mean in practice. A large deficit sounds bad in the abstract, but the scariness of an outsized debt-to-GDP ratio that Politician X is discussing on TV pales in comparison to the serious consideration of cutting one’s own benefits to bring that deficit down.

That’s why the only item on Pew’s list of potential funding cuts that even reached plurality support was cutting  aid to the world’s needy. That’s the perfect expression of the ambivalence and NIMBYism I’m referring to: cut someone ELSE’S benefits, but keep your stinkin’ government hands off my Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security/school funding/veteran’s benefits/etc…

To be fair, even cutting aid to the world’s needy didn’t reach actual majority support, probably because enough people realized just how heartless that sounded, as they checked the “don’t cut” box on all their own pet projects. All this may sound like a call for despair, that GOP or perhaps even just regular rank-and-file voters are too hopelessly selfish for redemption of any kind, but I see it as just the opposite. I think the fact that even most GOP voters can still at least recognize what their own self-interest is, is an unqualified good. It means they’re not completely delusional. It means that despite forty-plus years of Ayn Randian “you’re on your own” rhetoric and Reaganite “government IS the problem” rhetoric, not even most Republicans think government is so worthless that they’d be willing to throw away what it provides for them.

And that means there’s a potential wedge there for Democrats to break the lockstep voting of ordinary Republicans for austerity, against their own self-interest.

***UPDATE***

I just got an email from a group whose mailing list I’m on, Operation Homefront. You may already know them; they’re one of the higher-profile groups that provides assistance to military families, especially (but not exclusively) the deployed. They’re a great group doing work that shouldn’t be left to outside organizations but instead should be a part of what our nation guarantees to those men and women who put their lives at risk to defend our country. Nevertheless, due to already-existing shortages in everything from VA benefits to simple cash-flow issues, groups like Operation Homefront have to exist, and they do vital work very well.

This email is titled “Sequestration and Our Military Families,” and the reason I’m mentioning it is not because – or not only because – it’s an example of how the recent failure of congress to act to avoid the blunt instrument of the sequester affects real people in the real economy. The email is certainly that, but it’s also an example of what I just got done talking about in this post: fiscal NIMBYism. The author, OH’s President & CEO Jim Knotts, begins by talking about what sequestration is and how it will negatively affect military families, but then in paragraph four, he gets around to this:

Personally, I fully understand and even support the notion that we need to cut our federal budget to get our national fiscal house in order. What you may not know is that the Department of Defense will bear more than 20% of the total budget cuts under sequestration.

[...]

Many military spouses have jobs as DoD civilians at local installations, which means the budgets of many military families just got a significant cut. Programs on the installations that support families and kids will be cut or curtailed due to staffing gaps. Schools for military kids on the installations have to figure out how they’ll complete the school year.

Knotts goes on to detail numerous other ways in which sequestration’s cutbacks will impact military families, none of which I’m trying to brush aside or take lightly by pointing this out. But it’s a bit of a nutshell summary of the ridiculousness of federal policy as well as current conventional wisdom that even a man in the position Knotts is in, who knows better than most just what kinds of harm funding cuts at this time will do in real terms still believes and agrees with the notion that we need to make cuts.

He’d just prefer they not be in HIS backyard, if at all possible.

During his keynote speech at the Republican Party of Iowa’s Celebrate Life event on Saturday, Fox News host Mike Huckabee compared abortion in the United States to the systematic elimination of the Jewish population by the Nazis.

If you absolutely must watch Huckabee’s execrable comments in their entirety, here you go (barf bag not included):

Mike Huckabee has managed to remain even somewhat relevant in US politics for as long as he has due to two main factors. The first is that this kind of awful, lunkheaded horseshit is exactly what a large swath of today’s GOP base wants to hear. That gives him a built-in constituency. But there are plenty of others with as much or more hate to spew. Why has Huckabee succeeded – to the extent he has – where others have failed?

The second main factor in whatever success Huckabee has had is that the man sounds reasonable. And by “sounds,” I mean the actual sound of his voice. It’s also generally known – if you’re familiar with Mike Huckabee at all – that he is not just a former governor of Arkansas, but also a preacher. A man of God. That knowledge, coupled with the soothing and quite pleasant tone of his voice, almost serve to mask the hateful garbage that comes out of his mouth. Someone like Rush Limbaugh sounds and has the mannerisms of a nasty, brutish schoolyard bully: simultaneously full of fear and loathing at anyone he perceives as “the enemy™.” By contrast, Huckabee sounds like a kindly father figure – or if “father” is a bit much for you to stomach, maybe scout leader or youth group advisor. He sounds nice, even though he isn’t, and it’s what’s allowed Huckabee’s voice to be heard where people with very similar views get (rightly) marginalized for those views.

But when you get a dose of The Full Huckabee, from a setting in which he’s more-relaxed and feels he’s speaking exclusively to an audience of like-minded people (like he apparently did at the Iowa GOP’s “Celebrate Life” event), that’s when the ugliness shines forth so brightly that not even the folksy charm and soft-spoken demeanor can conceal it.

Aside from the generic awful inappropriateness of likening much of anything to the Holocaust, it struck me as interesting that Huckabee would choose to use the Schindler story as his touchstone for the comparison. Huckabee made it a point to mention that Schindler was a “bad guy” initially, highlighting that he made much of his fortune from the forced free labor of the Jews in pre-war Germany.

As I sat there seething, listening to this hateful garbage drop from Huckabee’s lips in that charming folksy voice, it occurred to me that he shouldn’t be complaining about it, he should be organizing! I mean: the GOP isn’t pro-life, they’re simply pro-birth. They’re not interested in funding Head Start or increasing funding for education, they don’t favor providing health care to expectant mothers, any of a host of other pro-ACTUAL life (not just birth) measures are anathema to the modern GOP. So why not use that indifference to the actual lives of others? Why not take Oskar Schindler’s whole example, since Huckabee was holding him up as an example anyway? Why not just go the full monty and advocate not only the eradication of legal abortion, but push for a companion law that allows the actual children who are the products of state-mandated births to poor mothers who would’ve chosen otherwise to be shipped as soon as they’re old enough right to America’s factories, to live lives of indentured servitude as a neverending repayment for their upbringing at someone else’s expense?

It’s genius! It’s clear large chunks of the south are still angry about and have not gotten over the loss of the Civil War. Shipping the human products of universal anti-abortion laws off to factories helps solve that by bringing back slavery, and it increases industrial production at virtually NO cost, since you don’t need to PAY slaves! Think about it! The wingnut trifecta: outlaw abortion, bring back slavery and increase private wealth!

Oy. This is what happens to me when I’m unwise enough to watch Huckabee speak for any length of time.

Rubio’s speech itself was.

It was tired, it was off-base (which wasn’t really Rubio’s fault, since he or his speechwriters had the unenviable task of trying to rebut the President’s speech without seeing what was in it first, which necessarily entailed some guesswork – much of which turned out to be quite wrong). Most of all, though, it felt familiar. Commentators from Rachel Maddow to Jon Stewart almost immediately noticed that, other than the person who was actually mouthing the words, the speech itself sounded like it could have been given by Mitt Romney on the campaign trail, circa last October. In fact, large chunks of Rubio’s speech sounded like they would have been at home in the Reagan era.

The GOP has spent a lot of hand-wringing time over the past few months since Romney’s trouncing in November speaking of “rebranding.” Americans, however, are still waiting to see any tangible results of all this collective rumination on the conservative side of the political aisle. Tuesday night, what started to dawn on not just the pundits but the people, is that when the GOP says “rebranding,” all they mean in practice is putting old wine – excuse me, water – in a new bottle. Marco Rubio’s PAC, Reclaim America, immediately began to attempt to capitalize on their leader’s awful, sweaty, fidgety performance by issuing a “Marco Rubio water bottle” (no, really!) to those who were “thirsty for conservative leadership.” Just take a look at the image from their donations page:

Dripping With Irony

Given how at home Rubio’s listless, twitchy speech would have sounded coming out of Mitt Romney’s mouth, or Ronald Reagan’s, or nearly any Republican in between those two, it seemed fitting (not to mention more accurate) to re-do Reclaim America PAC’s fundraising effort with the water bottle:

What Reclaim America SHOULD’VE Said