An overarching backdrop

By Carl 

The Teabagger-infused acrimony over things domestic has implications beyond our borders. Perhaps this is by design: 

In one swoop, Britain has recognized Libya's rebel government, expelled the remaining London diplomatic staff of the Tripoli-based regime, and freed up millions in assets that can now be funneled to the cash-strapped rebel troops.

Amid a weeks-long stalemate, diplomatic activity seems to have stepped up. This is likely partially because Ramadan begins next week, which will force NATO forces to scale down the fighting as most of Libya begins the month-long daily fast. The US and France have already recognized the rebel government.

"This decision reflects the national transitional council's increasing legitimacy, competence and success in reaching out to Libyans across the country," Foreign Secretary William Hague said Wednesday, according to the Guardian. 

As the title of the article states, the U.K. is really taking the lead on the withdrawal from Libya.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. It's true, the U.S. participation in this NATO exercise has been about as non-existent as a sasquatch (which is real, by the way), and again, my suspicion is that's by design on the part of the Teabaggers.

Three wars, even with one on a limited scale like Libya and one in a draw-down phase like Iraq, is three wars too many for a peacenik like me and two wars too many for an armed force to fight. So it's a good thing the Teabaggers have played the role of Shadow Ministry for Commiepinkohippiefags this time around. I'm glad for that.

And House Weaker Boehner has grasped the Prime Minister for War Opponents like it was a goose for Christmas dinner, rattling the President's cage over the War Powers Act violations, and essentially going nowhere with that tactic. Again, failure is an option for the GOP. Me likey.

It worries me, too. All this fussin' and fightin' over debt limits and War Powers Acts and birth certificates and Messicans has created one overarching backdrop against which any President for the foreseeable future (but in particular, Scary Black Man) will have to contend. The fucking loons of the right wing have managed to turn the once-great America into a joke.

I'm not sure when it started. I mean, you can go all the way back to Joe McCarthy, I suppose. Certainly, Barry Goldwater is worth a look. Ronald Reagan, too.

But somewhere along the thread here, the American right morphed from a set of reasonable people with radical goals into a set of radical asshats with goals best left to Robert Heinlein novels.

In some regards, they fulfill one of the last remaining holes in my theory that Republicans run about a generation behind Democrats.

It goes like this: What Democrats endured as a party in the '60s and '70s, the Republicans only began to experience in the '90s and '00s. And now in the Teens. Party divisions? Democrats saw those flourish in the aftermath of Watergate when it looked like Democrats could maintain a permanent Democratic majority in perpetuity, and everyone wanted a piece of the prize and the squabbling allowed a stealth conservative movement the opportunity to undermine the good works and progress done to that point.

A gradual loss of relevance as a political party, turning into massive jokes during some Presidential campaigns? Look no further than the 1984 Reagan re-election for Dems. Look no further than the 2008 McCain/Palin campaign for the GOP.

A wresting of the party's center with a jerk to the wing? The Dems in 1968. The Republicans in... well, I'd say 1994, but Newt Gingrich's "revolution" looks moderate and centrist by comparison to today's kamikaze. 

All these growing pains -- and we must keep in mind that we are but a stranger in a strange land still, this novel experiment in democracy -- have taken our focus away from what was our purview for decades: our place in international affairs.

Some see this as a good thing and I might concur, but it's the way that we went about it that troubles me. We didn't gracefully exit the world stage, as President Obama put it in his address on Afghanistan, for "nation-building at home." We were dragged away like a mother in a supermarket trying to placate a panicked and tired toddler who demands attention. Or at the very least, candy.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

More on my hate-hate relationship with Tim Pawlenty

By Richard K. Barry

If you have been reading this blog at all, you may know that I really dislike Tim Pawlenty. I don't know what it is. I just have a thing about him.

While all politicians calculate what they can say and do and what they should not say and do if they are to have electoral success, some simply give up their souls without much of a fight. They are so quick to calculate every move that they no longer, if they ever did, have a center. They stand for nothing.

Okay, that would be way too harsh a characterization of anyone, but if you imagine politics as being conducted on a continuum, Pawlenty is, for me, so far to the side where the calculation for success trumps integrity that I can't stand it.

As you might imagine, I am having a rather good time watching his campaign fail to take off in any appreciable way. And this week I have particularly enjoyed watching him screw up as the indicators mount that he is going nowhere in a hurry.

In no particular order, here are some fun facts:

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted from July 14 to 17 had him at 2 per cent. That's behind Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, and New Gingrich, and, obviously, well behind Mitt Romney (30 percent) and Michele Bachmann (16 percent). It is also behind Rick Perry, who hasn't even announced, though he got 11 percent, which is relevant for the next fun fact.

As Daily Kos reports:

In a sign that former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty's campaign is still struggling, Public Policy Polling announced Monday night that Texas Gov. Rick Perry will replace Pawlenty in general election polling match-ups against President Barack Obama.

Pawlenty will still be included in the organization's Republican primary polls but his removal from this company's general election poll match-ups bodes badly for Pawlenty, who has faltered in recent polls, leading some observers to speculate that his campaign is sinking.

The point is that a major polling company has made a decision to pay less attention to Pawlenty. That's never good when it happens.

As if to drive the point home, Pawlenty's team seems to be lowering expectations for the Iowa caucuses, despite the fact that he had earlier hoped to do quite well there. Recently, campaign spokesperson Alex Conant said that "[W]e want to show progress in Ames, do better than sixth or seventh." Sixth or seventh? Wow.

But the icing on the cake for me is the fact that he is not only doing poorly, but he is beginning to climb into the gutter, hoping that something, anything, might work. Such was, no doubt, the calculation when he challenged Michele Bachmann's fitness to lead by implying that she might need to take too much time off due to her migraines. As he said:

All the candidates I think are going to have to be able to demonstrate they can do all the job all the time... there's no real time off in that job.

I am certainly no fan of Michele Bachmann, but this kind of thing by Pawlenty just creeps me out and shows some serious desperation.

And then, true to form, when pressed, he backed off the claim that the migraines would be a problem by calling the whole thing a "side show." First you sling the mud and then you claim that's not what you meant at all. What a backbone.

Maybe failure in Iowa will mean a quick and merciful end to his campaign. Maybe he gets out earlier, but that's unlikely, although 2 percent in current polling isn't much to work with.

As I said, I just don't like the guy and it's not even a Republican vs. Democrat thing. I swear.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Republican governors are all crazy extremists

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Okay, that's an oversimplification -- but it's not far from the truth. As Nate Silver shows, crunching data, there just aren't any moderate Republican governors anymore:

Unlike for the Democrats, there is almost no ideological diversity within the group: essentially all of the current Republican governors are quite conservative, taking moderate positions on at most one or two issues. Also unlike the Democrats, there is no correlation between the ideology of the governors and the ideology of the states. Whether you have a Republican governor in a fairly liberal state like Maine, a moderate state like Ohio, or a conservative one like Idaho, his agenda is likely to be highly conservative.

*****

This is unusual behavior. Politics 101 would suggest that you need to be at least somewhat responsive to voters in your state. And American political parties in particular are traditionally broad-based coalitions that tolerate a fair amount of intellectual and ideological diversity, especially at the state level. Republicans, of course, are going to try to push policy toward the right and Democrats to the left. But you can go only so far before you get a ticket out of office, so electoral and policy goals remain in some degree of balance.

The new breed of Republican governors run counter to this principle in a way that wasn’t true as recently as a year ago.

The principle no longer really holds for today's Republican Party, which has embraced the far right and seems to be getting more and more extreme all the time, with the extreme now the party's mainstream, a mainstream that, judging by these governors, is deeply unpopular:

So just a year ago, there were plenty of moderate Republican governors — most of them in liberal or moderate states, where they were often quite popular. Now there are almost none...

The unsurprising result is that Republicans now have a group of extremely unpopular governors -- particularly [Rick] Scott of Florida, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John R. Kasich of Ohio and Paul R. LePage of Maine, all of whom have disapproval ratings exceeding 50 percent. Other Republican governors in crucial swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania also have below-average ratings.

What does it all mean? Well, we'll have to see. Perhaps voters will reject this extremism, and perhaps defeat will bring state Republicans back to the center.

What is clear, though, is that what is happening at the state level is a reflection of what is happening nationally, namely, the right-wing radicalization of the Republican Party.

And it's only getting worse.

Republicans aren't normal, says David Brooks, who can't see just how deranged and dangerous they really are

By Michael J.W. Stickings

David Brooks is getting some credit for writing, in his July 4 column in the Times, that the GOP "may no longer be a normal party":

Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.

The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation's honor.

The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name. Economists have identified many factors that contribute to economic growth, ranging from the productivity of the work force to the share of private savings that is available for private investment. Tax levels matter, but they are far from the only or even the most important factor.

But to members of this movement, tax levels are everything. Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation.

In other words, the GOP has been taken over by Grover Norquist and his anti-tax and essentially anti-government agenda. Rather than seek compromise, working with President Obama and the Democrats to achieve some sort of bipartisan deal on the debt ceiling and more generally on the budget, even a deal that actually gives them a lot of what they want (what with Obama playing the old-fashioned moderate Republican and Democrats unwilling (or unable) to stand firm, they dig themselves ever deeper into their extremist right-wing ideology.

Brooks is right about this.

But he is wrong -- and he writes this in the very first paragraph -- that "Republicans have changed American politics since they took control of the House of Representatives," "[putting] spending restraint and debt reduction at the top of the national agenda, "[sparking] a discussion on entitlement reform," and "[turning] a bill to raise the debt limit into an opportunity to put the U.S. on a stable fiscal course."

He's wrong on all three counts.

First, Republicans are only pretending to talk about fiscal restraint and debt reduction. They aren't serious about either, which is why they reject compromise. What they really want is to lower taxes, and specifically taxes on the wealthy, both individual and corporate. Wunderkind Paul Ryan, who has become, with the media's enabling/blessing, the voice of this supposed sanity, is actually little more than a a plutocratic libertarian, an Ayn Rand devotee who is all about tax cuts, and hence all about continued, and worsened, fiscal insanity.

Second, Republicans aren't serious about entitlement reform unless what that means is chopping entitlement programs into oblivion. Ryan isn't proposing Medicare reform, he's proposing the end of Medicare as we know it, the end of Medicare as the American people want it to be. Americans clearly reject Social Security privatization, another key item on the Republican agenda, and they reject Ryan's Medicare plan as well.

Third, Republicans aren't using the debt ceiling debate, such as there is one, to put the country on the path to fiscal stability, they're essentially holding the American economy hostage in order to get what they want. There is no debate about the debt ceiling. It must be raised. If not, we might just as well sit back and watch the apocalypse unfold. Much of the economy would collapse, as the country would no longer be able to pay off its debts. It would be incredibly irresponsible, but Republicans prefer to play political chicken. And they're not serious about fiscal stability, which requires bipartisan effort. We know this because they don't even want to be at the bargaining table.

So, yes, fine, Republicans aren't normal anymore. Most of us knew that a long, long time ago -- Brooks is hardly saying anything new. But Brooks himself refuses to see or just can't see Republicans for what they really are. They're not just abnormal, they're deranged and dangerous, descending deeper and deeper into madness. And they're trying to take America down with them.

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If Republicans are looking for another Ronald Reagan, perhaps they should look no further than Barack Obama

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Steve Benen, as many others have, makes the connection. Basically, Obama is very much in the mold of Reagan, policy-wise, particularly with respect to taxes and the economy (though also, I would add, with respect to foreign policy):

Mike Huckabee recently said, "Ronald Reagan would have a very difficult, if not impossible, time being nominated in this atmosphere of the Republican Party." Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had a nearly identical take last year, arguing Reagan "would have a hard time getting elected as a Republican today."

I agree, but what does that tell contemporary GOP officials? What should Republicans take away from the fact that, by 2011 standards, their party would dismiss their demigod as a tax-raising, amnesty-loving, pro-bailout, cut-and-run, big-government Democrat?

Or more to the point, doesn't it bother Republicans, just a little, that Barack Obama is more in line with the Reagan legacy than they are?

Given their utter lack of self-awareness, I doubt it does. Besides, their hagiography of Reagan is based largely on myth, on what they think Reagan was all about. Which is to say, they generally project themselves and their agenda onto Reagan and then revere him. It's not clear if they would revere the real Reagan, but probably not. After all, with their increasingly extremist ideology, they make him look like something of a moderate. 

So, yes, Obama is a lot like Reagan. But let's not overstate it. In terms of policy, Obama is very much a centrist who would have sought compromise with Reagan, just as he continues to seek compromise with Republicans (even if they clearly have no interest in compromise). And there would undoubtedly have been room for agreement between the two. (Who knows, Reagan may have supported Obama's health-care reform, not to mention the stimulus and bailouts, and may also have supported Obama's diplomatic-hawkish foreign/military policy. Surely Reagan would have agreed with Obama's conduct of the "war on terror," not to mention the Afghan War.)

But of course Obama is progressive in ways that Reagan never was. They may be somewhat similar in policy terms, but they are vastly different in style, image, and temperament, not to mention in broader historical terms. Both men can inspire, but Obama is more of a technocrat than Reagan ever was. And even if we grant that Obama is generally progressive, his policies are centrist and generally dismissive of progressivism, while Reagan was a movement conservative who played to the right and united the Republican Party as a party of ideological conservatism (even as his own policies often reflected a more conciliatory approach to politics, much like Obama's do).

Anyway, the point, I suppose, is that the Republican Party is really no longer the party of Reagan. As with so much else, Republicans can't grasp that basic reality.

Mitt Romney calls for action on global warming, further disqualifying himself from the Republican presidential nomination

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Why won't Mitt Romney win the Republican presidential nomination? Oh, where to begin?

A lot of it has to do with his lack of credibility with conservatives. They just don't think he's one of them, and he isn't. He's conservative, but in a 1990s sort of way, or at least in a pre-2008 sort of way.

And then there's his Obamacare-like health-care reform in Massachusetts. That alone disqualifies him, but in broader terms he's simply behind the Republican times. What was right-wing ideological orthodoxy just a few years ago is now heresy. His health-care reform in Massachusetts was once acceptable, and not so long ago, as a market-based alternative to, say, a single-payer system.

Now? Yeah, not so much.

While it's Romney who is accused of opportunistically flip-flopping in order to pander to the right -- and he certainly has done that, to some degree -- it's the Republican Party (and conservative orthodoxy more broadly) that has changed, moving further and further to the right and becoming more and more extreme, shedding what was once mainstream and acceptable.

And Romney, well, he just can't keep up.

But maybe he doesn't want to. Maybe he realizes that it just won't work. Maybe he now thinks that the only way he'll win the nomination, as remote as that seems, is to make a point of distinguishing himself as the only relatively sane candidate in a field of rampant insanity. He'll never be forgiven for supporting health-care reform, nor for supporting Obama's economic stimulus, nor for so much else that mars his record in the eyes of the right.

Or maybe he's just caught between his real views and the need to embrace the views of the far right if he is to get anywhere in today's GOP. Or maybe he's trying to say different things to different people, hoping no one will notice the inconsistencies.

Whatever the case, it's unclear how this helps his chances:

"I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that," he told a crowd of about 200 at a town hall meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney broke with Republican orthodoxy on Friday by saying he believes that humans are responsible, at least to some extent, for climate change.

"It's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors."

This would have been fine just a few years ago, when relatively sensible Republicans like John McCain and Lindsey Graham were advocating action to combat climate change (and even supporting cap and trade, a market-based approach that was widely popular among conservatives as an alternative to, say, a carbon tax, but it's reached a point now where even acknowledging the reality of climate change is a no-go for Republicans. Recognizing the new orthodoxy, Tim Pawlenty has even apologized for making a "mistake" on climate change. He once thought it was real and that something needed to be done about it. Now he's a denialist, or so we are led to believe, because anything else is heresy.

There's a group of relatively sane (and relatively moderate) Republicans who are just too old-school to win in 2012 (which is no doubt partly why most of them are staying away), with the party where it is and where it will be for the forseeable future: Romney, Jon Huntsman, Mitch Daniels, Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki, and Jeb Bush, to name some of the more prominent.

Romney is the leader of this group at the moment, the only one to put himself out there, the frontrunner in a terribly weak field. He could beat Pawlenty (if Pawlenty fails to catch on with the right), but if Sarah Palin gets in the race (however unlikely), or Michele Bachmann, or Paul Ryan, he's in trouble. He's got way too much baggage and is way too much of a heretic on any number of issues. 2012 will be a litmus-test election for Republicans, and Romney, in that regard (if to his credit), is an utter failure. He has his supporters, of course, particularly with the business class and the old-school establishment, but Republicans will do what they have to do to defeat him. As Jon Chait explains:

Romney is evidence that Obama's policies -- on economic stimulus, health care, the auto bailout, and pretty much everything -- are anything but the extreme socialism they now portray them as. His nomination would undercut their claims daily, and demonstrate it is the GOP, not Obama, that is proposing a radical new direction for the country. That's why they can't nominate him. Now, Republicans don't process the thought that way. In their minds, Obama's policies are truly radical, and their party somehow failed to grasp this radicalism until Obama took office. But that is the dynamic at work.

Which is yet another reason why he won't get the nomination. Whether he likes it or not, he exposes the Republican Party for what it is, or rather for what it has become. He's not just too "moderate" for conservatives, for the new conservative orthodoxy, he's everything the GOP used to be but has now rejected.

Actually, he's a lot like Obama, or at least used to be, and it would be awfully hard for Republicans to keep up their insane assault on Obama, their ridiculous claim that Obama is a dangerous anti-American radical, with Romney and his record proving that Obama is nothing of the kind.

Progressives are right to criticize the president for being a Republican-friendly centrist, but one of the consequences of Obama's embrace of the center is that Republicans have had to move ever further to the right to differentiate themselves from him. They were moving that way anyway, to be sure, but he has made it even more difficult for them to embrace anything of their old-school, pre-2008 past. And that includes Mitt Romney.

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Why the GOP is f***ed in 2012

By Nicholas Wilbur 

The future of the Republican Party rests on the shoulders of one candidate. Unfortunately, not even the Republican Party has any idea who that candidate will be. 

The long list of potential, possible, likely and too-stupid-to-calculate-basic odds second-string presidential hopefuls include: a flip-flopping Mormon with a soft spot for government-run health care; a libertarian advocate of legalizing heroin and prostitution; a perpetually stoned former governor from a state most Americans don’t know is part of the union; another Mormon (this one who worked for a socialist as ambassador to communists), a paranoid Constitutionalist whose followers have threatened to rape a high school girl who challenged their candidate’s knowledge of America’s founding documents; an evangelic whose last name has come to mean “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter”; a hopelessly unattractive Minnesotan with no redeeming qualities other than his own self-awareness in admitting publicly that he’s boring; and a pizza maker.

Romney is ready to take on
supporters of Medicare. Other
potential GOP candidates,
 order your red man suits online today

With such a pathetic roster of uninspiring candidates, the Republican Party was more than happy to leave the media spotlight for a weekend as the perpetually campaigning Mama Grizzly from the Upper One state launched a Memorial Day “Rolling Thunder Magical Mystery Bus Tour” along the east coast. Riding into DC on an all-American hog and dressed in full leathers, the still unpopular, still unqualified former half-term governor of the Great Frontier, who sold her soul to Rupert Murdoch in order to prolong her short-lived 2008 Mama Grizzly publicity tour, kept the limelight burning for one last-ditch effort to sell some books and boost her public image before the media finally catches on and permanently turns the cameras away from the publicity hound and onto the real, equally hopeless but nonetheless inarguably “legitimate” candidates for the presidency. The most that will come of this magical bus tour is a Fox News segment on patriotism and motorcycles – and possibly a sequel to Hustler’s 2008 porn flick “Nailin’ Paylin.” (“Nailin’ Paylin Part II: The Bang Bus Tour,” or maybe “Paylin Does Pennsylvania.”) 

Whomever the GOP trots out as the next “savior of the party” better come equipped with a red man suit, a dog-eared copy of “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” and either Scott Brown’s Cosmopolitan centerpiece photographer, Brad Pitt’s personal trainer or Bristol Palin’s cosmetic surgeon – because he’s going to have a lot of heartened hearts to soften before Election Day. 

Between near-riotous town hall meetings prompted by Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to “voucherize” Medicare, the party’s backing of anti-union laws, and the continuous state- and federal-level efforts to defund family planning services and undermine women’s right to choose, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee will face the seemingly impossible feat of convincing retirees, women and laborers – not to mention the unemployed, the LGBTQ community and college students fighting for grants and scholarships – that the GOP cares about more than securing the votes of the Tea Party base. 

Then, of course, there’s the question of party’s post-primary strategy: how will he (or, less likely, she) go toe to toe with the supercandidate (and popular incumbent) Barack Obama, who enters the race with the political equivalent of a Seal Team 6 campaign apparatus? President Obama – the Commander in Chief who captured and killed Public Enemy No. 1, the international uniter, the eloqutionist and the level-headed pragmatist – is already salivating at the prospect of debating a presidential challenger about the fiscal ramifications and social consequences of continuing tax cuts for millionaires, abolishing the health care reforms that stopped insurance companies from dropping coverage on a whim and bankrupting families without mercy, eviscerating the social safety net for seniors and the poor through radical changes to Medicare and Medicaid, holding hostage federal funds for disaster relief to ravaged states until Democrats embrace more budget cuts and every other radically unpopular policy the GOP has pushed since 2010. 

All of this is to say that the candidate Republicans nominate to face off against Obama in 2012 won’t be a candidate who is capable of actually winning. There is no such candidate. Not even in the party’s wildest, homoerotic political wet dream does such a candidate exist. But that isn’t what the 2012 race is all about. If Republicans are smart (a rhetorical question if there ever was one), they’ll take advantage of the free publicity, use the opportunity to train a future leader in the art of presidential campaigns, save the estimated $1 billion they’ll have to spend in order to make a dent in the Obama incumbency, and use 2012 as a primer for the only election race in which they have a fighting chance: 2016.

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)

Update on Nevada's 2nd Congressional district featuring court rulings and a note on Sharron Angle's potential future

By Richard K. Barry

I was away for a few days and noticed upon my return that a Nevada District Court judge in Carson City sided late last week with the state Republican Party over ballot rules to determine who can run to fill the now vacant Nevada 2nd Congressional District seat.

I wrote about the original sequence of events a little while ago.

Initially, the Democratic Secretary of State, Ross Miller, decided that any candidate who qualified to run in the September 13th special election would be allowed to do so. This meant that in theory there could be several Republican and several Democratic candidates on the ballot.

Given that the Nevada 2nd is a safer Republican seat, splitting the vote amongst conservatives was seen as the Democrats' best chance of stealing one.

Republicans successfully took it to court to overturn Miller's decision, thus turning the job over to party committees as to which single Republican and which single Democrat would run to represent their respective parties.

If that ruling stands, it will be good news for Republicans, though there is concern within the GOP that failed Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle, who has her eye on this Congressional seat, will run whether or not she gets her party's nod. Since it seems highly unlikely that she would be handed the Republican nomination, vote splitting on the right continues to be a concern should she run as an independent. 

Late breaking news is that lawyers for the Nevada attorney general plan to file court papers with the state Supreme Court appealing the Carson City judge's ruling limiting who can run.

You'll recall that Dean Heller held the seat for the Republicans before being appointed to the Senate to fill a vacancy created by Republican John Ensign's resignation when he was forced to step down after what the Las Vegas Review-Journal called "marital infidelities." Nice term that.

It's not clear where this will land in the courts, but I must say that I had no idea Republican Congressional politics in Nevada could be so much fun.

It seems also to be the case that we still may not have seen the end of Tea Party darling Sharron Angle, undoubtedly one of the conservative movement's dimmer lights, which has to be good news for Democrats everywhere. Please stick around a while longer, Sharron. Please.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Elephant Dung #30: Majority of Republicans, including even more Tea Partiers, support new third party

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

There may be something to be said for a third party in American politics, or even for the American system to become a multi-party system, but the reality is that it's a two-party system (i.e., a system with two dominant parties and some tiny ones that never win anything) and that third parties have generally failed to capture the public's attention.

In the recent past, there has been talk of a third party emerging in the center to capture independent voters -- and, in generally, those who are economically conservative and socially liberal/libertarian. Think back to Ross Perot, for example. It was never clear to me how such a centrist party would survive, but the frustration with the two-party status quo that drive those movements was certainly real.

But what about a third party on the left or right, a third party that could actually challenge the dominance of the two parties while taking a significant chunk of support away from one of them? Given how conservatives tend to unify around the Republican Party, it seemed that a third party of this kind would most likely emerge on the left, a party of progressives and disgruntled ex-Democrats, a party that was fed up with the centrist and even GOP-leaning inclinations of the Democratic Party establishment, a party that would promote both social justice and something other than the barely-regulated capitalism that is embraced by both of the main parties.

But maybe not.

A new Gallup poll shows that support for the establishment of a competitive third party is particularly strong on the right, among Republicans and more significantly with the Tea Party:

A majority of Republicans said for the first time that a third party was needed in American politics, according to a Gallup poll released Monday.

Fifty-two percent of Republicans, and an even stronger number of Tea Party supporters, support the creation of a major, third political party, underscoring the occasional tensions between grassroots conservatives and the GOP establishment.

An overall majority of Americans, 52 percent, said that a third political party was needed; the most profound shift has come among Republicans.

The number of Republicans who said that a third political party was necessary was at an all-time high since Gallup first began tracking opinion on the issue in 2003. And while support for a third party has crept steadily upward in the GOP, for the first time, it represents a majority opinion.

Supporters of the Tea Party are even more likely to back a third party, the poll found. Sixty percent of Tea Party supporters back a third party, while 32 percent say the existing two parties are adequate. By contrast, 47 percent of Tea Party opponents said the bipartisan system is adequate, and 44 percent favored a third party. 

It seems unlikely that a Tea Party-ish third party would ever emerge on the right to challenge the GOP, and to divide conservatives, not least given that the GOP itself has moved steadily to the right in recent years and has come to embrace the Tea Party with open arms. And yet the Tea Party, or rather the multitude of groups that together make up the loosely-linked Tea Party, continues to wage war against insufficiently conservative (that non-Tea Party) Republicans. Targets include John Boehner, Richard Lugar, and Orrin Hatch, long-time solid conservatives and loyal Republicans who, despite their electoral success and political standing, have failed to embrace the new Tea Party GOP agenda with the fervent absolutism the Tea Party (and, more and more, the new GOP establishment) demands. And, indeed, the Tea Party has shown again and again that it is prepared to suffer at the polls for its absolutism, helping to select unelectable Republican nominees (like Sharron Angle) and, where they fail, throwing up their own candidates to divide the conservative vote. It's better to be "right," it would seem, than to win.

And so I wouldn't put it past the Tea Party, or some elements of it, to break from the GOP and create some right-wing party that adopts an extremist agenda, carves off a significant chunk of the conservative vote, and leaves the Republican Party unable to win even relatively safe seats.

Maybe that's more my hope than a prediction, but it's telling that the Tea Party, which helped the GOP take back the House last year, is increasingly prepared to go it alone.

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Elephant Dung #27: Rand Paul takes aim at Donald Trump's questionable Republican cred

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

I'm not exactly a fan of Rand Paul, the Tea Party Republican senator from Kentucky. But I've got to hand it to him, he's a funny guy and he's got a knack for hilarious one-line swipes at fellow Republicans. Earlier this month, he took aim at Newt Gingrich. Yesterday, his target was Donald Trump:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Thursday took a swipe at billionaire businessman Donald Trump, demanding to see his "Republican registration."

While speaking at a breakfast with New Hampshire Republicans one day after "The Donald" visited the Granite State, Paul riffed off the potential GOP presidential candidate's "birther" questions.

"I've come to New Hampshire today because I'm very concerned," said Paul, according to The New York Times. "I want to see the original long-form certificate of Donald Trump's Republican registration."

Paul's comments follow up on some GOP-aligned groups' effort to discredit Trump as a conservative. The free-market Club for Growth has accused Trump of being a liberal for his previous support of universal healthcare and his desire to raise tariffs on China.

It's hard to be a successful Republican when you've got both the Tea Party (via Rand Paul) and the Club for Growth aligned against you. Which is no doubt partly why Trump has so enthusiastically embraced the whole Birther thing and is now channelling his racism (what else is it?) into suggesting that Obama is an affirmative action case.

Now, is Trump a Republican? Yes, no doubt. His wealth-based sense of entitlement and megalomania would seem to indicate that he leans to the right, as would his pro-business (or, to be more precise, pro-Trump business) views. But his own political history is mixed. He has espoused various liberal positions over the years, and he was a registered Democrat for years. As he himself has acknowledged, if prior to his current courting of the Republican base, he's an independent, and he has voted for and financially supported both Democrats and Republicans.

None of this should disqualify Trump from being a Republican today, but of course the Republican Party, and in particular its powerful Tea Party wing, is all about party purification. They're the new Bolsheviks. If you're not Republican enough, Republican as they define it, they'll purge you from the party. We're seeing this happen again and again, with the Tea Party and others on the right challenging even established conservatives like Orrin Hatch, Richard Lugar, and John Boehner. The Republican Party is descending into madness, as I've said many times, and all this ongoing purge is accelerating that descent.

Trump has the media platform, not to mention the temperament, to fight back against those who would challenge him, including Paul. But Paul's onto something. Birtherism aside, Trump just isn't the sort of Republican, if truly Republican at all, to win over enough of the grassroots base to win the nomination, even if he manages to lure some of the party establishment (like Ralph Reed). He's got the anti-Obama attack going, and that's sustaining his popularity in the party, but were he to run that popularity would likely fracture once he was actually subjected to any sort of sustained scrutiny of his record. In that sense, he's got a Romney problem, and it's the sort of problem that's virtually insurmountable. Just ask Mitt.

And just ask Rand, who threw a pile of dung at the upstart Trump. If The Donald insists on remaining in the Republican spotlight, there will no doubt be much more to come.

Whither Birtherism?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Conservative renegade David Frum may describe Birtherism as a "disgrace" and a "phony controversy," as an issue that effectively ended with yesterday's release of President Obama's long-form birth certificate, and I credit Frum for asking how "this poisonous and not very subtly racist allegation [got] such a grip on our conservative movement and our Republican party" (that would be, his movement and his party) and for denouncing "these racialized attacks on Obama" (not just the Birther allegation but the new allegation, via Donald Trump, that Obama is basically a product of affirmative action, undeserving of his Ivy League education), but actually Birtherism and its various offshoots, however convincingly refuted, aren't going anywhere.

James Fallows explains why: "[Tuesday], about half of all Republicans thought Obama was foreign born, and therefore an illegal occupant of the White House. How many Republicans will think the same thing one week from now? My guess is: about half. We've reached that stage on just about everything. It's probably been true of human beings throughout time, but is more obviously significant in politics now, that generally people don't act like scientific investigators, or judges in moot-court competitions, when parsing the logic and evidence behind competing arguments to come up with political views. They go on loyalty, and tradition, and hope, and fear, and self-interest, and generosity, and all the rest."

Quite true, but I think Fallows is too generous, and too universal in applying his theory. While I acknowledge that ignorance, willful or otherwise, has been a facet of the human condition forever, or almost forever, this isn't so much about "human beings throughout time" as it is about the current state of one of America's two dominant political parties, a party that to a great extent has rejected science in favour of a far-right ideology, mixed with a similarly far-right theology, that wants nothing to do with "logic and evidence" and everything to do with trickle-down economics and "Intelligent Design." Yes, much of this has to do with loyalty, tradition, fear, self-interest, etc., but a lot of it has to do with sheer madness -- and, as I have remarked a number of times, what I find to be one of the defining aspects of our time, politically speaking, is the Republican Party's descent into madness, or rather its ongoing descent into ever deeper levels of madness.

Many Republicans, needless to say, still aren't convinced. Some of them are crazies like Leo Berman, but the issue, in one form or another, will be kept alive by more mainstream Republicans like Trump, Newt Gingrich, and everyone else who, sincerely or not, is trying to appeal to the grassroots base of the party. And of course it will be kept alive on Fox News, on talk radio, and throughout Frum's "conservative movement."

It's ignorance, it's racism, it's madness. And the facts don't matter one bit.

Rise against the Republican plutocratic agenda

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Republican Party is, when you get right down to it, a party of greed and cruelty wrapped up in theocratic moralizing. (It's hardly any wonder that Donald Trump is doing so well, nor that Franklin Graham, one of the party's chief theocrats, is saying such nice things about him.) And perhaps the core of the Republican agenda, more important than the social conservatism, is tax policy that benefits the rich, both individual and corporate, at the expense of everyone else, that punishes everyone else, and especially the poor and others most in need of help, for not being rich.

This has been the case for a long time, but increasingly, it seems, in these difficult economic times and with the American economy (and American hegemony) in such dire straits, likely never to recover, let alone to be what it once was, Americans are waking up to what Republicans are all about and expressing their opposition. The Tea Party expresses the rage of the right, anti-government rage that complements the Republican agenda. This new opposition, garnering less media attention, expresses not the counter-rage of the left, nor even rage at all, but a genuine concern for fairness, compassion, and fiscal sanity in American politics.

Here's Think Progress:

All across America, a Main Street Movement has broken out to defend the middle class against right-wing attacks on labor rights and basic public services. In recent days, this movement has turned on GOP House members who voted to effectively end Medicare and turn seniors over to private insurance companies when they approved Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) radical budget bill.

On Tuesday, Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) was the latest congressman to face the ire of Main Street America during a town hall event with constituents who stopped being polite and started getting real.

First, constituents explained they were upset that Ryan's plan would cut off people under the age of 55 from Medicare. Then, others directly challenged Duffy about defending tax breaks for the wealthy for voting to effectively replace Medicare with a voucher system.

Ryan himself, supposedly a courageous advocate for fiscal sanity but really just a right-wing extremist whose focus is on tax cuts for the wealthy and spending cuts to programs for the poor, was challenged by his own constituents the other day. And Republicans are facing significant criticism over their support for Ryan's Medicare-slashing plan.

I suspect we'll see more and more of this. Or, at least, I hope we do. It's time for Americans to say enough is enough to the greed and cruelty of the GOP.

Here's the Duffy clip: