×
- Like I was saying the other day, the main force driving the hatred of health-care reform seems to be the fear that there's a shift afoot which will make the rich slightly less rich, and the poor slightly less impoverished. David Leonhardt gets at this in his great article on wealth inequality in today's Times, and observes that the Affordable Care Act is the first serious effort to reverse the Dickensian course America undertook beginning with Ronald Reagan. This is why wonkish conservatives like Paul Ryan are suddenly talking about first principles instead of public policy: The public doesn't want government policy that says if bad luck befalls you, tough shit -- you're on your own.
- As Tea Party thugs go on a rampage around the country threatening, targeting (literally), and vandalizing Democrats, this is a good time to ask, once again, who these people are and what they want. Quinnipiac has the unsurprising polling results: white and Republican. More interesting is the evidence that the organizers behind the most activist Tea Party groups are veterans of past conservative mobilization efforts, mostly to the benefit of the Republican Party. It remains to be seen whether this will have an impact on the November elections, although I still think it adds a variable of uncertainty, particularly in contested Republican primaries.
- After teetering on the brink of irrelevance for years, the Republican Party (1860-2010) finally ceased to exist late Tuesday, leaving its former members to aimlessly shuffle about the Capitol, incoherently mumbling about socialism and procedural rules. It isn't clear yet whether the elected officials, once members of an alleged "Grand Old Party," were aware that they no longer knew how to govern. Retired members of the former GOP went on record to promise that their currently unnamed political coalition, should it win majorities in the November elections, would use that victory to shut down the federal government. A particularly dazed-looking Mitch McConnell, formerly the minority leader of the extinct political party, was last seen wandering the Hart Senate Office Building, complaining when reached for comment about working past 2 PM.
- It is ironic that the real insight of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism is not the book's porous thesis but rather its power of foretelling the devolution of "conservative" thought into mindless diatribes about our impending totalitarian nightmare. Here's the latest contribution to that devolution, which the editors of National Review presumably fully endorse: "I expect that the Battle of the Electorate is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of a nonsocialist America. Upon it depends our own American way of life and the long continuity of our institutions and our history." That's what I call a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.
- Remainders: This business of conservative hero Scott Brown thinking that Rachel Maddow will challenge him for re-election because of a tweet from a state Democratic Party chairman is a reminder that the belief that elections can be won through technology holds a great deal of sway in the Republican Party; Lindsey Graham remains an enigma; and Chuck Grassley is a national treasure.
--Mori Dinauer